So what exactly is this YouTube thing?

hello and welcome to Polly's Updates about the vidcon, day 2.

apparently my shift key does not work as well as i would like it to.

i am blogging to you from my phone, live in my hotel room, waiting for melerdy to get out of the shower and for my muffin tops to thaw.

that is a sentence that makes less sense out of context. aparently there is this weird LA thing where you can buy the top half of a muffin.

so i did. i bought four. they are defrosting now and then, breakfast.

goodbye, bloggiepeople.

Comic-con

So you remember how I was going to blog about comic-con and the preparations therein?

Yeah. Didn't happen.

At some point I'll stop and think about what exactly happened on each day, but for now I'm just kind of like, BRAIN I CAN'T DO!


Tomorrow I leave for VidCon. Yep.

I'm going to be SO burned out by the time that I finish this weekend.

But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about pie.

So near where I live, a lot of Himalayan Blackberries grow. This is, by all accounts, not a good thing as they're not native to this area and crowd out other plants and disrupt ecosystems but you know what they ARE good for?
Pie.
Himalayan Blackberries are the big blackberries that have crazy intense thorns and hurt like a mothafucka when they stab you and they make AWESOME pie.
And cobbler.
And jelly.

However, there's something worth noting about piecrusts:
You need to keep the fat REALLY cold when you make them, or they don't flake and if they aren't flaky then what good are they? I mean, you intentionally make them with the perfect balance of flaky and tender and that's EXACTLY what pie is about, right? Right?
So this is tough when you don't air-condition your house and your kitchen is about 80 degrees F (that's 27 c for you non-USers) and you need to keep the butter REALLY cold.
This means many, many bowls of ice water that other bowls sit on top of.

Uh, yeah, that wasn't really relevant to anything else.
My brain is still all dead.

We are ninjas from the dead.

Times have changed and so have I

So this year I'm doing the 50 book challenge, in which you read 50 books in a year or roughly one book a week.
I have finished 14 books.
For those of you wondering, I am only 10 books behind.
Yeah.
But one of my rules is that they have to be books that I haven't read before. I make one exception to these rules.

You see, when I was little (Read: from the time I was born until my senior year of high school) my parents would read bedtime stories to me. When I was really little, they were picture books, and as I got older they progressed to chapter books. They'd alternate nights reading, and we'd usually have two books going on at once. When I was in third grade, my dad bought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and that changed my life. We ended up reading the first three together until I decided that I wasn't happy with the one-chapter-every-other-night pace and I think I got through Goblet of Fire in a day and a half.
Back to bedtime stories.
So as my sister and I got older, the books that we'd choose of my parents would choose got more mature, and in some cases the books were a bit more mature than I was ready for (I think I was in 4th grade when we read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and after re-reading it I realize exactly how much I missed*).
So now, as an alleged adult, I'm rereading a lot of the books that we read together.

It's interesting to see how much more I'm getting out of these books that I heard so long ago.

I think I'm really lucky that my parents encouraged me to love reading so much. Until I was in 6th grade, we didn't have internet or video games in the house** and whenever I was bored or we had to wait somewhere we would always read books. My mom and I got through a lot of books when I was in 5th grade, because my sister's school started a half hour before mine did and the other kids in my class were kind of mean to me, so instead of playing on the playground before school we'd just sit in the car and read. Good for my reading skills. Not as good for my social skills.

____
*All of it. I missed all of it.
**We had computer games, though. I have memories of playing Zork and Doom and Quake with my father. Doom was "Big Bad Guy Game." I was pretty young back then, and the one thing I really remember is that I wouldn't watch him play unless he'd enabled Godmode, which I called "White Eyes" because the eyes of the sprite that represented the damage you'd taken glowed. By the time he'd gotten Quake, I was a bit older, and we used to always say, "The only good type of Skraag is a dead Skraag," because both of us hated those flying monsters.

I wish I understood

Here's just an angsty thing that I've been feeling.

I don't know what it is, but I feel like the angst is contagious.
Like we get stressed out and then we take it out on other people, who then get stressed out and the cycle repeats itself.

And you may think that you're breaking the cycle by not taking it out on someone else, but the stress has to go somewhere and if you aren't taking it out on someone else, you're taking it out on yourself.
And then that means that you're making others worry about you.
Which, trust me, they are.
And then they get stressed.

Anyway, that's all I have to say.

Today, is Thursday, right?

I have a really, REALLY good reason for why I didn't do a blog post last night.

REALLY GOOD.

I'm just not going to tell you what it was*.

But there ya go, that's my blog for yesterday.


And now it's July, meaning that it's time for the SDCC PREPARATION BLOG.

Yup. That it is.

But I'll do that later. Just saying. A little bit later.



____
*It may have been called "Farscape party with Beth"