top five things that annoy me (ok, piss me off and transform my gentle kind self into a road rage machine) while driving:

5. talking on your cellphone and not paying attention to what you are doing. if you are a gifted multitaskers, by all means, proceed. but if you aren't, you're swerving all over, driving erratically, or varying your speed by 10 mph for no good reason, for the love of god, and being in one piece, pull over!
4. not signalling. no it's not obvious to me that you're going to move over a lane, i don't read minds.
3. cutting in front of me and slowing down. if you can't keep the pace, why the hell did you put yourself there? are you trying to regulate traffic?
2. staying in a car's blind spot. i don't have a problem if the car isn't there for too long, but pacing that car and remaining in the blind spot is stupid because, uhm, they can't see you. this causes problems for those who aren't wise enough to look in their blind spot (some crappy drivers do). plus this may be restricting that driver because they are waiting so that they can get over since they obviously can't merge on top of another car.
1. going slow in the fast lane. it is called the fast lane. it's not like, for the most part, there are up to 1-5 other lanes to choose from. why imped people who are going to go fast anyway. those drivers then have to swerve and weave around the other lanes in order to pass the one slow car, which is far more dangerous. get over damnit. what's the point?

i don't know why i wrote that long angry rant. it's not as if i had a trying drive either way to davis this weekend (highly unusual, but not unappreciated). more later.

4th pay day of my career here at stanford. wow. i'm about to come into more money then i've ever possessed in my life (cumulatively). what ever shall i do? spend it on a laptop of course! i really really want one! and then with christmas coming up, i'll be back into my money-less hole. but that's ok. i'm used to it.

so liz has already finished most of her christmas shopping. gosh i wish i were that industrious. in fact, she got it all done in two weeks. actually i think she bought her friends all the same thing. she's all about efficiency. i wish i were efficient. i don't even know who is getting gifts from me this year. at least i don't have to bring gifts to people in lab. i might give cards out. maybe. who knows.

this weekend my friends and i are doing mini-prep-thanksgiving dinner, but since we all have to face at least 2 more of these, we're steering clear of the turkey and just having chicken or something simple instead. so it's really just the concept of thanksgiving (being thankful for each other) rather than the traditional typical dinner. not there is one, i mean aside from turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce, what is traditional? my family (and it's huge, so don't stare when you see the list of food, it's generally eaten by the end of the day) consumes: 1 huge turkey, bread stuffing, rice stuffing, mashed sweet and regular potatoes, green and fruit salad, deviled eggs, green beans, bread and i can't even remember, but there's this memory of an overwhelming amount of food and lots of choices to make about how much of what you are going to eat. i don't think most people encounter this situation though, well, maybe a lot do, but there are still a lot of people who are celebrating thanksgiving with just their 4 person immediate family. what do they do? and what do you do if you aren't american? just take for granted the 4 day holiday to start the christmas/hanukkach/winter holiday shopping.

wj: really important and essential question: here in california have you ever had a program called 'david and golithe' or 'simon in the land of the chalk drawings'? - wow what really matters to the canadians. or i guess it all has to do with perspective or relativism when it comes down to comedy skits (figuring out who's being made fun of). maybe that's the problem with snl, there isn't enough recognition, or adversely, too much recognition and thus boredom of an overused topic/subject. that could be why southpark works. anyone see the lord of the rings spoof? crazy great!

I just got through with like.. a million and one mini preps. ok, only 24, but my hand hurts like it was a million and one. i hope they worked. i sort of f***ed it up. oh well. now that my guilt complex has been satisfied for the day, i can move on to more fun and interesting activities.

like.. learning php. well, not actually learning (again, i am no programming genius, i'm lowly lab tech, tell me what to do when... well not detailed directions, but what you want done). anyhow, you're all dying to know, why melissa? no one looks at your webpage anyway! well, this is why, everytime i want to update the links on the left, i don't want to go to all 80 something pages and type some stupid little link in or what not. and so, i thought css would fix that. nope. not really. i mean, if i were uber smart, probably, but i'm not. so i asked liz (other lab tech in my lab) and she said to use the php on her site. except she didn't really explain it and i'm sort of embarrassed admitting i have no idea what she just repeated twice. so now i'm learning it on webmonkey, can you tell i love webmonkey? it's a good place.

i also just ate a mars bar to get me through the rest of the afternoon. i don't think i'll repeat the experience anytime soon. i was originally after a twix, but apparently jerron ate the last one last week unbeknowst to us. and thus, all that was left were the mars bars and the almond joys. i don't like coconut so that eliminates the almond joy. oh joy.

this weekend i am headed up to davis again. i actually don't mind so much. i mean, i mind a lot more when i'm actually stuck in the traffic going nowhere, but conceptually speaking i've no problem actually going there. i don't get to see those friends that often, though, since my going to davis schedule as been a bit skewed, i see less of my friends down here than i do up there. i know, very odd.

but odd is as odd does.

quote of the day:
XY: it's not breathing anymore
WM: that has to do with it's head not being attached

sometimes i wonder, why don't we have chocolate flavored gum? i mean, think about how big of a product this would be with women who are all into the flavor of chocolate (and maybe the endorphins and caffeine you get with it too i guess) but down on actually ingesting it due to fat content or allergies or any other reason. and then i thought, hey i could get rich off making chocolate gum kind of like mit or harvard or where ever it was that discovered nutrisweet from some chemistry lab accident (i believe organic chemistry at that, anyone remember orgo? me neither). except then stanford would get rich and not me. so sad. *sniff* liz mentionned that it might be because of the breakdown of aromatic rings in chocolate. sort of like the flavor of fruit flavored gums never really last long, no matter how true to the actual fruit it is.

days seem to move slower when you have nothing to do. well i could try and call the xerox guy but then i realized that vicki took his number, extension and our account number back after i called last time. i had the wrong fax number i guess perhaps? who knows. either way we're running low on paper. i guess i'll put a post it on my monitor to try and remember to do it.

wow, my life is so boring i'm blogging my work. that's just.. pathetic. so i went to see harry potter this weekend. it was pretty good. actually there's a great back story on this whole tale. robin sent out an email 'who wants to go see harry potter opening night' and i figure what the hell why not. well, here's why for next time. after eating dinner and finishing early (who doesn't want high turn over at a restaurant? more customers, more money), we drove over to the mercado. and normally it takes like 30 minutes of circling the parking lot to park, so when we found a spot within the first 3-5 minutes, we were somewhat elated. but what to do? we were like 4.5 hour early for the showing! so i decided i wanted to go to the microcenter or whatever that computer store is over there. but robin insists on checking on what line we'll be in when we get done shopping for computer junk. but the line was empty and she desperately wanted to be the first in the theatre. i didn't think it was such a big deal, but i didn't want to argue with the still motion sick (from a long bad boat ride the previous day) girl. so we sat and played cards a bit, got walked all over and essentially chilled out in line. i had to get a mocha frappacino to keep myself awake. i know what you're thinking, it's 50 degrees outside, what do you need an iced drink for? because i can! and it's sweeter. anyway, we finally get let into the theatre, and so we're walking in and these people come running past us. jeez, it's just a movie, plus you're not going to get the absolute best seats, i mean no seat is defined as such. i don't know, it seemed kind of lame and i'd say immature but a lot of people seeing that movie were. (i don't need to tell you how many times i personally was stepped on by people over the age of 14 while in line). we had to save tons of seats (apparently 14 of our best friends came to this showing). but it was good and almost worth it (it would have been worth it if i didn't have to sit in line for 3.5 hours). we went to a pretty late showing, so the kiddies were pretty quiet - either they were really tired or there weren't that many kids at the 10:40 showing of it. anyhow, after the usual run for the w/c after the movie, standing around and shooting the breeze as well, i dropped off robin at her house and made it home before 2:30am. not bad. *yawn*. and i know you're thinking, 2:30am, you can always sleep in, but i couldn't b/c i promised to call greg at 8am and then i couldn't go back to sleep. oh well.

mike's birthday was last week as well. i got him a cool shirt from thinkgeek. it says w00t! he's highly impressed and happy with it. christmas present shopping needs to start soon. i think that by this time of year, date wise, most people have begun already, but because, at least in the us, thanksgiving is so late a lot of people haven't even though about it. that or i'm not really prepared for the real world from my collegiate one. i mean, i used to cram for finals and then when that was done, sleep for an entire day and then commence the non-stop christmas shopping. can you tell that i'm all for the completely immersed last minute procrastinator? i'm so far behind that i'll never get caught up, much less ahead.

i'm going to go see if there's any other duties i can do at work (aside from organize the freezer, that's just too cold!).

It's been a slow week (except for monday, boy was i busy on monday.. and i guess tuesday). i've been the gym every night this week so far, but i'm skipping tonight to go see harry potter with robin, freesh, char and char's stanford friends. i have to say, i have a lot of contempt for stanford people. i'm not sure why. i guess not a lot of contempt, but a lot of... dumb questions? stanford seems to be the extremely organized and structured atmosphere. and that's all i can say for it. and while i like structure and organization, i don't like it that much. then greg is coming down this weekend. i had to pull his arm, but damn it, i'm worth it! (see, i could be a l'oreal advertisement person).

i've been playing with my blog and learning css, well easy css. i'm not sure if i really really know css, but i know how to apply it.. in theory. i guess. i'll put the exercises i did from the webmonkey tutorial site up on my webpage sometime. other than that, i guess i could go buy the book on it. it's not that i don't have the money, but i appreciate having it and thus am somewhat unwilling to let it go.

i'm looking forward to going hiking this weekend instead of to the gym. it's nicer, well scenery wise. plus i go to the gym so much i sort of know the 'usuals', espeically the people who work there, and i don't think i could stand to have them thinking 'wow, she's so dedicated to her health' or 'wow, she has no life'. it just might crack the code to melissa stopping visiting the gym. and melissa feels that with the more weight she loses, she is fatter. law of inverse fat proportions? you be the judge.

so it's been awhile. there was a point last week where i was really bored. and now there's a point where i'm really busy. but then, what's normal, right? it just seemed really busy today in comparison to the last couple of days last week. anyway.

i had a good weekend. i went to davis. i was really worried about driving, since last weeks storms were still sort of headed through (though the worst was past, i still can't believe 70 mph winds! and i drove in that! that's 4 mph less than a hurricane, for those who are trivial pursuit fact inclined), but the drive up wasn't too bad. it sucked going through mountain view, milpitas, and fremont, but once i got onto 680, it cleared up and stayed pretty clear until danville, where the roads were dry all the way to davis. weird, considering how horrible the weather in my area was. things still don't look quite right anywhere around me. maybe it's the road work crews and drainage things work better on the other side of the bay. anyway, saturday i did some shopping (looking for a birthday present for mike but ended up with various other people's christmas presents), visited greg's parents (is quietness genetic or environmentally influenced? perhaps we will never know) and then went out for dinner at a place called la boheme. it was really good food, but our waiter was crappy. we were sort of miffed at him, but there wasn't much that could dim the elation of our celebration, so we said screw him!

sunday, we lazed about, went to the grocery store, bought ingredients for homemade pizza to make with allison and then proceeded to make the pizza. then alli and i went and rented clueless and realized how scarily bad the movie actually was. and then on top of that evil-ness, we realized that that's going to be the movie that our kids point to when they say how lame our generation was, like we point at grease (though i'm sure that all movies and reality was precisely like grease ;o) ). horrible movie. and then we watched friends and i sent alli home, greg and i had dinner and i drove home. i again got lucky with traffic, because it's a three day weekend for most people (except me =( ). i was kind of scared because there was this crappy driver who would pass me going like 90 mph, then cut in front of me, start going 55 mph and i'd go around him, not see him for a couple of miles and the process was repeated. i got freaked out and got off the freeway for a while and then started driving again. but i got home safe and unfollowed. then i baked cookies, watched alias and gilmore girls and talked with art while i cleaned my room. i also wrote notes to see if someone else could pick up my diploma and deposit on my keys for briggs (i gave them the keys too).

and that was my weekend.

other things: i've been learning css (cascading stylesheets), not a lot of people know about them, it's sort of just a different kind of html, which is neat and kind of less capitalized, which i sort of like ;o). next i have my eye on java, and then c, and then c++. who knows, maybe i was in the wrong major, or i'll just have a very diverse skill set. i'm not terribly good at coding, so i'll never get a coding job. but it's sort of fun to know at the same time.

i've resisted buying the new pratchett book (nightwatch), but it's killing me. i just don't need another hardback book in my shelf, it's too full! i might cave yet though.

why oh why?

because i can

another day another random quiz. i think that i've taken so many recently, it's time to start putting them on the side. so here goes.