Words. I am full of them.

Guess who is an inch and a half away from switching to red for a heel? Here's a hint: ME!

I picked up a game yesterday for my DS called Cooking Mama. The entire point of it is to follow the instructions for various recipes and complete your tasks within a certain time limit. The faster you are, the better your score and the better your food comes out. You couldn't really follow the recipes in real life without some cooking experience I think, but most of them are pretty easy to figure out. It's a strangely addicting game, even Yami wants to steal it from me. We happened to download the demo of Cooking Mama 2 the other day and got hooked on making an apple pie. Yes, I know I'm strange.

At the same time I got the game I also got an anime movie called Origin ~Spirits of the Past~ which is so much better than I was hoping for. The basic premise is that in the vaguely outlined future, scientists are trying to figure out a way to enhance plant growth so that they can...grow...plants faster? Something about starting an atmosphere in the moon or whatever. I don't know why, they never really say much about it. Well, one of the seeds that just happened to be on the moon and grow wildly out of control. SO out of control, in fact, that it destroys the moon with its roots and attacks earth.
So, further ahead in an even more vaguely outlined future, most of mankind has been wiped out by the Forest, which controls all of the water in our setting. Enter Agito, the hero, who saves Tula, the heroine, from her chryogenic sleep (she's from the past) and then exit Tula to the bad guys so she can help them find her dad's project-program-thing that will return the world to the way it used to be.
I know it sounds weird, and it is, but if you suspend disbelief like most people do for movies of this nature, it's really good. The animation reminds me somewhat of Hayao Miyazaki's style, but not enough to really compare. I'm normally not a fan of dubs (the English version of foreign movies) and generally watch the subs (subtitled versions) but the dub of this was pretty good. And I'm critical of them. The music in the movie--I love it. Of course, as soon as I decide that the music is amazing and I want it, I search for the soundtrack only to discover that it does not exist. Which sucks. So I got the two most prominent songs, the opening and ending vocals (Chouwa [Harmony] and Ai no MERODI [Melody of Love] by Kokia) and have them pretty much on repeat right now. They're some really epic songs.

Well, on the knitting front, I've been watching movies to get myself out of my jobless-depression slump and while watching I'm knitting and I am now about an inch and a half away from starting the heel of the first of four HPsocks. I'm so proud of them you have no idea. They're soft and squishy and I'll have pictures as soon as I've started the gusset. I've found that this forced project-monogamy is getting the work done a lot faster than I usually work, but part of that is that the entire sock is a really simple 4x2 rib. The other part is that I have four of these socks to make and I don't want to be turning the heel on the ride down to Otakon.
Also, Em, if you buy the yarn, send me some measurements, and find a simple pattern (or I can just rib them) I'll make you a pair of knee high black socks. However, I must warn you that these socks come first.

Someone asked me once (one of my coworkers at the daycare center) why I liked hiking and driving through the woods. This was after I mentioned my dad and I riding down to the nearest ranger station on our bikes one day for the fun of it. I then (apparently) painted a glowing picture of the pine barrens and the beauty they show me, because I had this woman and one of the two men working there who came in in the middle entranced by my description of it. I was reminded of this incident recently by a conversation with my penpal where she asked me what I loved most about new jersey. This was my (abbreviated, I left a bunch of stuff out) response:
What do I love most? I'd have to say the local forest. It's part of a place we call the Pinelands. The Pinelands are a series of massive forests that stretch across 2/3 of the lower half of South Jersey. It's mostly pine trees, which is where it got its name, but there are also oak and cedar, and a few others. Lots of undergrowth, too, like wild blueberries and various ferns. The pinelands are famous for a very unique ecology and they're also home to these rare pygmy pine trees. Their full grown height is only about three feet! Isn't that amazing? I like this place the best because it is like returning home for me. Driving through the woods is always a way for me to recharge. The area is always so green, with trees and plants and animals everywhere. If you stand still and quiet, you can hear wisps of wind shaking the branches above you, hundreds of birds singing, frogs and toads making noise by the water, animals rustling in the undergrowth, and the creaking of trees and they bend and sway. In the fall, everything changes color. The pine trees stay green, but the oak turns brown. The blueberry bushes go yellow, orange, and red, and everything starts to settle down for winter. When it snows, everything is silent and white, like the snow just sucked all the noise out. But then in the spring, everything starts becoming green again. It's truly beautiful there, and we're lucky to have a place like that near us.
From there, since it was getting so long, I went on to apologize for being so wordy. She sent me back an email thanking me for being so descriptive and then she proceeded to ask me to explain a few words to her, ahaha.

"Now I see the secret to making the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and eat and sleep with the earth."
Walt Whitman