Gah. For all the awesomeness of my new laptop, it appears Halo 2 won't run on it. Something about the Windows Experience Index being too low, which, hello, this computer is brand new, it should work. Alas, seems that further adventures with the Master Chief might have to wait until I can get an Xbox. *sadface* Here's hoping that Neverwinter Nights 2 will play…

OTOH, I found an online version of Tank Wars. Heee!

We didn't quite get the 10cm of snow the Weather Network promised, but we did get some. Everything looks really pretty, actually, even though the mountains are still completely covered with clouds. What little of them is visible is covered with snow, although given that today is supposed to be quite sunny, that could all change by the afternoon.

It's actually quite nice outside, hovering just above the freezing point, but not too horribly oh-my-god-it's-so-cold-I-can't-breathe kind of cold.

One of my roommates is from Australia, and she was quite excited to hear that it was supposed to snow. So other roommate and I made her a little present:

::

Isn't he cute?

And in a bit of bad news, my parents' cat, Bella, is missing. She's been gone for two days, and they're both looking seriously worried. The damned cat likes to go outside and climb off their balcony onto the roof adjacent to their condo, so it's possible someone picked her up, or maybe she got too far out and can't find her way back or something. My dad is going to put up posters today, hopefully someone found her and will return her. *crosses fingers, tries not to worry*

From Thursday Overnight to Friday Evening we expect close to 10cm of snow and 5-10mm of rain.

What the hell is that, hunh? Ten centimeters of snow? I mean, I know this is pretty much regular weather for this time of year, being in the mountains as we are and all that, but still. Ten centimeters?

And it was such a lovely day today, too. I biked to work, because it was so nice. *sigh* Five more days till I go to Calgary, maybe I'll luck out and find a nice winter jacket this time around. My stepmom is going to Calgary tomorrow, and offered to take me with her, but I said I'd pass. If I'd known it was going to snow tomorrow, I might have done otherwise, but with $70 in my jacket fund, I don't know if I can find anything that's functional and yet still stylish, you know?

I've been thinking a lot about characterizations lately. I'm still fighting a rather nasty case of writer's block, but I'm not entirely blocked. Characters are developing backstories, and despite the fact that trying to write the stories down in any form other than a point form outline is like beating my head against a brick wall, I think the worlbuilding that's getting done is more than enough to make up for the lack of actual story writing. Tonight, I figured I'd take a break from one universe and play in another, and am rereading some of the Wizard's Chronicles stories that my co-writer and I have written over the years. Some of them have good concepts, even if they somewhat lack in execution. Most of the stories were written when we were still playing in the X-Ville playground over at alt.tv.x-files.x-ville on Usenet, and… OMG I just found old X-Files fanfic I wrote. Jebus, this is a Highlander crossover. *facepalm* And aw, look, the first posts I made in X-Ville! Hehe.

Oh god. 17,534 files in the screencaps-to-be-sorted folder on my desktop. That's the seven Doctor Who episodes I haven't capped yet. I think I'm going to put on some music, and get to work on these babies.

I would really like to hit someone right now. A specific someone, actually.

However. I am a grown, mature woman, capable of resolving problems without resorting to violence.

*installs Max Payne and plays on god mode*

See?

It's sad that the only thing stopping me from educating two of my downstairs roommates on just how misguided they are about being overprivileged princesses is the possibility that if I'm even remotely "mean" to them (where "mean" is any degree of actually pointing out that they're living on their own, in a situation where having their whims seen to by their parents or families or friends just isn't going to happen), they might go crying to the boss that I'm being a mean bitch to them. Sadly, they've already done that once, for no real apparent reason, other than they didn't like being asked to clean up after themselves and pitch in on cleaning the house. Sad as it may be, I'm actually hoping that the boss doesn't get the basement taken care of completely, so maybe they'll leave and then we can have peace and quiet, and I won't be woken up constantly by someone TALKING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS right outside my door, when she knows very well I work nights, and therefore sleep during the day.

Although even if I wasn't refraining from saying something to them, I doubt any of it would actually penetrate their thick skulls. I went down today and said, "since roommate M and I cleaned the whole basement yesterday, could you guys please take out the garbage that's in the laundry room and on the back stairs to the bin," and was greeted by a face devoid of understanding, highlighted by a wide gaping mouth and a shrug in response. I think I will just skip trying to be sociable today and hide out in my room for the rest of the day, otherwise the likelyhood of me losing my cool is very high, and I'd rather not blow a gasket.

Reactions like this are fairly often in my life, especially when dealing with the various 19 and 20-year-olds that work in our hotel. Every time this happens, I have to rethink this whole possibly having kids in the future thing, because, god, I don't think my kids would turn out this annoying, but Cthulhu help me (and them!) if they did.

So today was going to be a day of vegging and doing absolutely nothing. But seeing as I can't seem to be able to force my brain to turn off, I'm getting increasingly bored with doing nothing. And there are things I can do: I could take a shower, I could get dressed and go to the post office and see if my yarn is here yet (I'm not even going to try relying on the Canada Post website to tell me where it is, since the status hasn't changed in four days), I could do laundry, I could get up and have something to eat, etc. Unfortunately, while I'm bored by just sitting here and doing nothing, I'm also feeling too lazy to do anything else but sit here and do nothing. *sigh*

Watched the pre-air copy of the pilot for The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and I actually quite like it. Of course, given that it's on FOX, I give it about, oh, ten or twelve episodes (aired out of order and pre-empted by various other bullshit), before it gets cancelled. Pity, that.

I am so bored. OMG I AM SO BORED. I would put on some clothes and go get some poutine from the late-night place, but I really don't feel like braving the crowds of bar-going drunk people to get there. Plus, it's kind of cold outside and I'm too lazy.

So maybe I will pop in a movie or something and knit some more. Halfway through the Noro Striped Scarf! It looks so purty… See? (The colors are deeper and richer in the actual scarf. Stupid flash washing it out, and I'm too lazy to fiddle with it.)

I fiddled around with the port forwarding and stuff on the wireless, and it turns out that even though uTorrent is showing me that little yellow triangle with an exclamation mark in it, having port forwarding turned off actually makes things run faster. I wonder if that's why my parents' connection is so tragically slow. Hmm, must investigate next time I'm there.

I've watched the premiere of Reaper, and will probably be watching again, but only if they tell the girl within the next few episodes. Otherwise it's kinda lame, and becomes a CW version of Brimstone. Also to be obtained, the pilot for Chuck, Bionic Woman, Private Practice, Moonlight, Dirty Sexy Money, and Big Shots. I was going to watch Life and Journeyman, at least to give them a try, but I think I will skip them. Out of the ones listed in the previous sentence, I think maybe only Chuck, Bionic Woman, and Moonlight will stay on my list after the first episodes., although if I had to pick a guilty pleasure, I-only-watch-it-because-the soaps-are-on-during-the-day-when-I'm-asleep show, it'd be a toss up between Private Practice and Big Shots (the latter only because it has a ton of eye candy to look at - mainly Michael Vartan and Michael Biehn). I wrote out all the shows that I was interested in, and there are way too many, so I might have to keep the new ones to a minimum.

Also, I have obtained HR copies of the episodes of Doctor Who I was missing, which means I can just run them through VirtualDub's "save image sequence" function and have it automatically cap them. The caps from VLC just weren't looking that good. So hopefully, assuming no further catastrophes like Tuesday's basement flood, I might have the screencaps gallery updated by, say, Thursday night? Hopefully.

After the flooding is dried out (three big industrial dryers are set up in the basement right now, so hopefully it won't take too long), and Roommate M1 moves back into her big room, we're going to measure things out and see how much space there would be in her room if we swapped out her twin bed and put in my queen. I'm perfectly happy with a smaller bed, and I'd have more floor space (an L-shaped space about two feet wide around the bed just isn't enough, y'know?).

For now, seeing as it's 2:30am and nobody is online, I think I'll just keep burning disks and knitting some more.

So you know how we had no heat in the staff house for a while? We got the heat turned back on - it was a switch that must have gotten turned off accidentally - so it was nice and warm in the house yesterday. And then this morning, I walked in, and the windows in the living room were a bit steamed up. I figured it must have been one of the girls, taking a long shower with the door not completely closed or something. I shrugged it off, and then went into my room. Where the windows were also steamed up, which was weird. And then I went downstairs to the basement, where there was an inch or so of water on the floor, over about 2/3rds of the basement. The middle of the three rooms down there was flooded, and it was still pouring out of the boiler. So I called my dad to come and take a look at it, and he turned off the water - the hot water - and then left and came back with a carpet cleaning machine thingy so we could get the water off the floor.

It took about two hours to do it, and it's still all wet as hell, but at least it's not a swamp down there. Of course with the heater not working, it's getting cold, which means the carpet is staying wet and soggy and smelly. I'm hoping the boss will get someone in to fix the boiler soon (well, at least sometime today, since it's been over two hours since my dad was here, and we haven't heard anything yet), and set up some of those big dryer things to get things on their way to getting dry. If it stops the third roommate who's off today from wailing and gnashing her teeth about mold and how it's poisonous and blah blah blah, that would be lovely. I know it's a serious danger, but really, if she's gonna complain, how about getting off her ass and helping out a bit, too, instead of sitting in her room while we vacuum up the water?

And then the cable guy showed up. So we took a break, and I sat with him while he set things up, and now I have internet at home!!!11!!eleven!

Err. Sorry about that. It's just very exciting to be able to get online while at home without having to go sit outside on the steps in hopes of catching a stray signal from the wireless across the street. I'm not sure if I've got the wireless network set up entirely right, I'll have to get other roommate with laptop to test if it's showing up and secure and everything.

Dear Windows Vista Sidebar Weather Gadget:

You are a LYING LIAR WHO LIES. It is most definitely not 16 degrees Celsius outside. I was just out there, it's more like 3, or maybe 4.

However, this pumpkin pie is delicious, and I'm in a good(ish) mood, so I will forgive you if you shape up.

In other news, tomorrow is INTERNETS HOOK UP DAY! *dances* This will make up for the fact that I slept through the Heroes premiere tonight. *weeps, covers head in shame* But tomorrow is glorious Tuesday, and I will have internets, and downloading will commence.

Halo 3 comes out tomorrow. If I had an XBox, I would consider buying it, but alas, I do not have one. Maybe I'll look into getting one, 'cuz man, I wanna shoot things again. I suppose I could always install the first Halo on the laptop and play that way. Hmm, there's an idea. And then I can get Halo 2, eventually.

Oooh, I just had what could possibly be a short story pop into my head. It's backstory for one of the characters in my novel, but man, there it is, playing out in my head like a movie. I'm going to try writing it down, hopefully something good will come of it. I needed something to do tonight, as I forgot my knitting and don't have anything to watch, really…