I was up at 6:30 am this morning, and dressed and comparatively alert an hour later. By choice.

In other news: Flying pigs seen over Somerset; Rain of frogs on Easter Island; Sahara covered in 5 inches of ice;

Soooo, today I browsed YouTube a bit and watched trailers for some quirky little movies that look very interesting.

Then I made the mistake of going back to this thread on Shakesville. It’s amazing how much time can be spent hurling stuff at wobbly buildings (Seriously…try it, but be warned!!!). And some of the other thingies are great, as well. There’s a Steampunk Jump and Run, and a tricky point-and-click adventure, and riddles that I’m too stupid for, and a whole site of ridiculously beautiful and/or cute minigames that made me grin uncontrollably before they crushed me with guilt because I had just killed Bambi (*sobs*).

And then, just to come full circle with the topics of my day, I found a subway-style map of the 250 best movies as voted for by Imdb-users. Different genres are different lines. But the number of “stations” I have “visited” (73) is pretty pathetic, I’m afraid.

<snark> Oh what a productive day I’ve had! </snark>

…or does the Times of London love to hate Austria?

It’s the tone that gets to me. That sanctimonious disapproval that gets me riled up every time. They’ve done it before (the Fritzl trial was the last time I looked), and they aren’t going to stop anytime soon.

Just for the record, I think the crack about the “Austrian dream” was hilarious, because I like my humour black (unlike my coffee).
What isn’t hilarious is him spouting Nazi-bullshit that misses the mark by about a gazillion miles.
Neither is shoving his balls into somebody’s face without their consent.
And don’t even get me started on the homophobia. Urgh.

I got this new bag. It’s very, very red. It is so red, in fact, that neither my mother nor my sister managed to get past the redness of it.

But apart from the redness, there’s also the huge-osity.

Here’s what I carried in my bag on my way home today:
-  1 (obligatory) notebook A5
-  1 current calendar A6
-  1 umbrella (-ella, -ella, …)
-  2 pens
-  1 purse
-  1 bottle of water, 750ml
-  1 mp3-player
———– thus concludes what I left the house with ———

furthermore, there were the following additions during the day:
-  1 bottle of green ice tea, 500ml
-  1 soon-to-be-current calendar A6
-  2 pens
-  1 “Mister Tom” candybar
-  “Die Ameisenzählung”, Daniel Glattauer
-  “Completely Unexpected Tales”, Roald Dahl
-  “An Utterly Impartial History Of Britain”, John O’Farrell
-  3 Kornspitz
-  1 Vintschgerl
-  1 complementary chocolate-chip-cookie I received as a result of walking right into the middle of a staff training in a “Subway”-branch that isn’t even open for business, yet.

Not to mention a couple of coupons, a bus ticket and a mobile phone in the outside pocket.
And I could still close it!!!

I love my red bag of TARDIS-esque dimensions!!!

I just started to watch the first episode of “Leverage“. It’s like Old School-”Mission Impossible” meets “Spooks”, with a little Robin Hood thrown in. And it’s got Timothy Hutton.
This might just be the among the top-10 birthday presents I gave myself ^_^

I’m not sure where it falls on the official list of birthday presents. But that list is pretty awesome, in that it features a wide range of stuff from geekery to socially-approved (though possibly rooted in the Middle Ages) torture instruments…and a tick-vaccine.

Happyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappy !!!

(Look out for tomorrow’s episode, because *da dum* Needle Girl Returns)

Last night, I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I eventually drifted off to sleep after having looked at the clock about ten million times until 2:43 am.

But half an hour after that, our downstairs neighbour – let’s call him Joe, to make this easier – decided that he needed to watch TV. And he had either gone temporarily deaf, or he was too drunk to notice the volume, because it was loud. Really loud. So I lay in bed, at quarter past three in the fucking morning, tired and very cranky, while some ridiculously happy people on somebody else’s TV attempted to sell me useless crap. Seriously…it was loud enough for me to understand what they were saying, even though I didn’t want to.

I got up and did the Worst Irish Tap Dance Ever in the living room, in hopes of letting him know that I didn’t appreciate the shopping advice, but there was no reaction. Various thoughts ran through my head at that point: Doesn’t that guy have to go to work tomorrow? Why invent the ninety-seventh “totally revolutionary” piece of plastic to help slice potatoes? Could Mum go down there and kill him/make him stop?

Somebody (maybe it was Mum, I don’t know, I was back in bed, with a pillow and my blanket over my head, groaning and cursing) must have made it stop eventually, because we got some peace just before 4 am. I heaved a sigh of relief and went back to project Sleep.

And guess what? At eight o’clock this morning, another set of neighbours, a concerned couple, stood in the garden underneath by bedroom, banging on Joe’s windows and yelling “Joe? Joe!!!!!!!?” at the top of their lungs. Because Joe hadn’t come in to work.

So here I am…wide awake and in a very, very bad mood after a little less than 4 hours of sleep, with two thoughts running through my head:

1) It might be better if I didn’t see Joe today, or for the rest of the week, for that matter.
2) Was the world really waiting for an extra-special, 4-CD special edition, super special, platinum box set containing all those beloved (and special) hits by Marc Pircher?