Update/personal blog post :)

   Sorry for not posting for a while now,  my laptop got splashed with some water recently and has spent the last week or so drying out in a sack of rice, it has escaped unscathed thankfully and is in full working order and is what I am currently typing on. I also had some issues with my internet connection, so yeah, back on track now, I've read Hex Hall and re-read Meg Cabot's Missing You as well as a new book I read called One night for Love by Mary Balogh which was recommended to me by a friend and I'll be posting reviews for both Hex Hall and One night for Love soon. I've been delaying reading Graceling for a while now, so that'll probably be the next book I read.

  On another note, today was my first day at university! I've been itching to start for a while now and I can barely believe I've finally started! I'm starting the "Pre-Professional Program" for med students at my uni, its designed to sort us out into medicine, dentistry and pharmacy students. I'm aiming for med, hope I can make it!

I won't be too busy for the first couple of weeks so I plan on reviewing these books and testing the waters at school. To see if I'll have enough time to keep reading and reviewing or if I should take a break when it gets more challenging. Nothing for sure yet, hopefully it won't be too bad and I'll be able to post occasionally.

Well, that all for now :)

Ever Yours~

The Know-it-all

Personal Update :)

So yesterday was another orientation specific to med students, I got to see a couple of my friends from school, about 10 of my friends from various schools and summer courses were accepted (what can I say, its a small country :P) It was really fun! We got little folders with a vocab book with medical terminology and a little dangly thing that says "I'm a Dr." that you hang from the rearview mirror on a car (not that I have one, I'm hanging it on the wall facing my bed so I can stare at it before sleeping :P) I'm super excited!!!

We're a week into Ramadan, school starts a week after it ends so I'm anxiously awaiting that! I'm a nerd, yeah, but thats what 4 months of summer will do to you...we've been on vacation since the end of may and won't start school till the end of september :( too big of a gap.

Stanza for iphone is an app that lets you read your ebooks in various formats on you iphone or (as in my case) ipod touch. Most of the books I read are e-books simply because a) i'm not allowed to order books online and b) there is no other way to buy newly released books here other than online :( so I usually go for e-books wherever I can get them. I used to read them on my old PSP (years and years ago..ah, the memories), had a phase where I printed them out (4 pt font with 6 columns on landscape mode...teeny weeny font, but a whole novel on only 8 sheets of paper front and back!) Now I alternate between reading on my Blackberry and my ipod. I usually go for my BB because its easier, even though the font is horrific and the screen only fits four lines of text at a time because it was so time consuming just to upload books to my ipod and it was tricky trying to save your place if you took a break. With Stanza, however, its so much easier and more organized. You can adjust your viewing mode and change text size, screen brightness and background color with a tap of a fingertip! You can bookmark your favorite passages and annotate or comment, and even buy ebooks directly from the app! I just thought this app was awesome and wanted to share it with you guys :)

Also I've updated my shelfari to be read shelf because it had too many books that were unavailable in ebook format and are nigh on impossible for me to get in the foreseeable future :( oh, well.

On another completely unrelated note, I've been experimenting with skincare products this week, having a lot of fun :) I've always thought that I have oily skin but it turns out I have combination! Now that I know what type I am, its alot easier to get proper products and I've been getting clearer skin! Being as over-excitable as I am, I've overdone the scrubbing and soaps and now have (for the first time in my life, may I add) three dry spots on my face! But I've managed to get excited about that as well :P it beats having pimples!

Well thats all thats going on with me! Hope you guys have a great week end!

Ever yours~

The Know-it-all

Heroes and other Summer Activities

Hey guys! I've spent the last three or four days watching the show Heroes like a maniac..finished seasons one and two now..just waiting for season three to finish downloading so that I can continue my Heroes marathon. Its such an awesome show don't you think? I had never heard of half of the actors and actresses in it but they're all amazing! I'm really into shows like House and CSI and Numbers..where there's some sort of mystery that they figure out at the end of each episode but Heroes mashes them all together and adds super powers to the mix! Plus there's a background story going on and it takes them longer to figure out each mystery. The Ultimate show in my opinion, especially with Peter Petrelli in it (Milo Ventimiglia) he is HOT! Some character just make the show, you know, I think the main characters that do that here are Claire Bennet (Hayden Pantierre) and Peter Petrelli. He's her uncle in the show but apparently they dated for two years in real life..not sure whether thats kinda weird or not especially since he's about 10 years older than her..Gonna keep watching..I heard the show got cancelled but its halfway through season four right now so I still have alot of episodes to look forward to.

Also about the HP 7 days challenge..I kinda put that on hold. I finished the first three books on time but then I just could not pick up the fourth one..I would never have thought this possible, but it does get pretty boring reading non-stop..

Anyways, i have started reading Hush, Hush which seems pretty cool so far..gonna review that soon. Going to get my Uni schedule on wednesday, which is coincidentally the first day of Ramadan, kinda looking forward to losing weight from that, esp. just before starting school. Great timing I think :)

Ever Yours~

The Know-it-all

University Orientation!

Today was my first day at university (not including going to fill out the application) in which I actually went there and got a brief little introduction the the school rules and the basics and stuff. I am still super excited and getting a kind of tomorrow's-the-first-day-of-school feeling already, even though I've got nearly two full months before I have to start. They gave us little "new student" kits with booklets and mugs and pens with the uni's logo on them, there's even a little bumper sticker (bummer, I can't drive for another year and a half). After the general intro lecture they separated us into groups in different halls depending on major. We got to talk about everything, the girls in 4th to 6th years med were there to explain, there was even one who had just graduated! Excited!!! Going there again this week and next, first for a face to face orientation-ey thing, also for questions and for helping me organize my schedule, then again next week to finalize everything and get my schedule with all the details and a full tour of the campus. So, yeah! I'm really supremely excited about everything and I'm wishing (for the first time I can remember) that summer would finish already!! I wanna get started!

Ever yours~

The Know-it-all

News

Okay, so the other day I went to my orthodontist to check about the retainer thing and he said I didnt need to force the old one in, so he made me a new one that'll move my front teethback and hurt alot less :P so I've been wearing that for a week now :)

Also, I still haven't gotten around to reading Hush, Hush yet (I'm planning to read it next), although I did read "Daughter of egypt" a romance set in rome/egypt/atlantis in the time of Cleopatra.It was nice enough I suppose but I don't like books set that far back in time..the farthest I'd go is about 1400's..no farther than that. The story is nice in its variety, I like how it isn't focused on the romance, Its got a lot of action and drama too..still my fave combination is comedy and romance for light reading so this isn't one of my favorites..

Anyways, moving on to what I've been doing :) So I had a post a couple of days ago about the art course I'm taking, I've advanced, moving through the sketches and shading all the way to oil painting. I just finished my first painting and I wanted to share! So here's a pic of my painting, It's really tiny, for a painting, about the size of a postcard, a little bigger maybe but still smaller than an a4 paper.

I just realized the camera flipped it, the apple is actually on the left. Oh, well :)

On another note, I got some very good news yesterday! After waiting, in suspense, for a whole month I have finally gotten word back from the university I applied to! I got into med school!!!!! I'm so happy! School doesn't start till the end of september so I've got another two months of summer to fill up :)

Ever yours~

The Know-it-all

I'm still alive

I know I havent posted in a loooooong time. I've just been busy with school and whatnot. I'm going to be a senior soon and I've had loads of work to do! whew I have barely had time to breathe this summer let alone time to sit around on the computer. In general I'm not a very active person, most of my favorite activities involve sitting around, but I've been forced to change all that this summer. My mom enrolled me into 5 summer-camp-like things and a part-time job so for the past two months i've been running non-stop.

For the past month and a half I've been working at the local scientific research centre as an assistant sort of thing. Its almost like school, theres a bunch of us high-schoolers going there and we spend our lunch whining and talking and gossiping about the proffessors there. Most of the time though, we're running around the lab trying to get everything up to par for the guy in charge of us.

I'm also doing a Crocheting course, its nice to learn new things. So mornings i'm at the research centre and afternoons I'm at the crochet course and nights I'm reading or baking or something..usually i fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow...I don't know exactly when I'll be able to blog steadily but I hope its sometime soon!

Ever yours ~

The Know-it-all

A Treatise on Magic and the Occult

Here's the "Treatise" I promised..I know that my writing can sometimes be positively boring but I'm hoping that this is an exception:

Magic, the paranormal, that which cannot be explained. During the 90's interest in magic and the occult flourished. While it had been viewed as a sadistic and harmful interest previously, it now became the most popular hobby to have. This sudden change in society’s view of magic is, in my opinion, due to a great number of factors which appeared at the time.

Books and other written materials were one of the greatest factors to affect the idea of magic. This was when J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came out and when the T.V. show “Sabrina the teenage witch” became very popular. The publishing of the Harry Potter series and other magic related books increased interest in magic and wizardry. In my opinion this was the pivotal point in time after which interest in magic became more acceptable in society.

People interested in magic began forming groups or cults and when no one objected they kept growing in numbers and strength. Today, more and more magic practicing cults are around and still very few people notice or care whereas in the pre-90’s a single event would have been all over the news. Nowadays it is common knowledge that groups of self-proclaimed witches, ghost-whisperers and fortune tellers are around, taking advantage of those who actually believe them for charging for “services rendered.”

Since magic was first introduced over a thousand years ago, all religious organizations were very opposed to it. In all religions, the Christian church, the Muslim mosque, or the Jewish synagogue would be the place in which the most resistance towards magic could be found. This is because in most religions magic, both in practice or knowledge of it, is seen as a sin and while that fact remains unchanged, less people care – they are interested in it anyways.If you look backa couple of hundred years ago and compare the way they found and treated people interested in magic to the way they are treated today you would see a very big difference. One of the most famous incidents involving magic in the old days is the Salem Witch Trials. A lot of people they charged were just mistrusted or suspected and yet they were convicted and killed nonetheless. Nowadays people who practice magic are everywhere and are usually quite public about their abnormal activities and yet, while sme may think that they are weird and avoid them, no real action is taken.

Magic is something that is becoming more and more acceptable in society and while it is not considered a very good thing it is considered a very small, if at all existent, threat. |Magic is a curious thing, it is the embodiment of one of the biggest temptations of mankind, the ability to control the uncontrollable, effortless influence. If you think about it, magic takes advantage of mankind’s Achilles heel, our greatest weakness: the thirst for power.

I know i tend to drone on a bit..hope it wasn't too bad though. I get so absorbed in the subject, especially when i get to choose, I get all excited and don't notice when it starts to all blur together.

Ever yours ~

The Know-it-all

The Devil wears Jeans.

This isn't particularly useful or , just me wondering why some people go out of their way to be bitchy...

My old english teacher was a real pain in the you-know-where so everyone in the whole school used to call her devil-spawn. She's a really "save-the-whales" kind of person, generally I have nothing against saving whales and you know feeding people in Zimbabwe but its not something you talk about everyday right? Once she failed this girl on a pop-quiz on "Comparisons using "as" and "like" (actual title of the pop-quiz) The girl answered a question in what the teacher dubbed a racist comment. I would totally understand if it was Ms.Devils race we're talking about and she was insulted, the thing is that the girl wasn't saying anything degrading, actually she was comparing the beauty of something or other to the beauty of a japanese eye. Our teacher isn't Japanese, or even asian. The poor girl was just trying to get through the pop-quiz and technically her grammar was spot on in the sentence she used but that doesn't matter to devil-spawn...

Schools have rules about appropriate and inappropriate comments and behavior, most teachers follow these rules in their classrooms and manage to still be considered a nice teacher, a teacher who doesn't go out of their way to count the seconds after the bell rings just to hand out tardies to everyone. Then there are the teachers that are considered evil, the ones everyone knows wont give you a second chance, who is supremely strict and make the exam longer just because you complain that 18 pages is too long. There are also chameleon teachers, those who morph from one to the other as easily as changing clothes. They practically change personalities in front of your eyes. I have met two of these teachers so far, and one of them simply morphed from a regular strict teacher (to the tenth graders) into a friendly chatty doesnt-require-any-work-whatsoever to us! It wasn't a bad change from where i was sitting so i'm not complaining. But isnt it just the slightest bit weird for them to do that? Switch from being strict and a stickler for the rules to being about as strict as a substitute? I suppose you get used to it, depending on the faces you see and the attitudes that go with them. I'm not really concerned her because a) Its an elective class and b) She's going from bad to good so thats a pro for me. No complaints here.

The other teacher with what i've decided to call the teacher chameleon syndrome wasn't quite as harmless as the previous one. This teacher taught me both this year and the last. Last year she was a new teacher, she had taught all over the world and told us that in her other schools she didn't give tests because she was allowed to forgo them and because she "doesn't believe in tests." Our school has a minimum number of tests, quizzes and chapters we have to cover each quarter, so she couldn't do whatever she wanted about testing without permission from the principal (which was not granted by the way) So instead of canceling tests altogether she gave us the answers beforehand so the test was more like a worksheet than a test. This was her way of "getting back at the system" and teaching in her own unique way. I'm not one of those students who try to steal the exam or buy it, but i'm no rat either. I wasn't complaining about the circumstances but i can't say i've ever been through that before and to be completely honest I wouldn't want to repeat the experience. We went through the entire year like this, including the final exam without the principal or anyone else realizing anything was off. This past year however, she turned over a completely new leaf, apparently she now fears the system too much to be normal. I mean she didn't just stop being a give-away-the-answers teacher, she became a full-on monster, she had a timer on her desk for tardies and would take every opportunity to chop off a bit of your grade that she could, complete about-face! To say that we were all shocked would be an understatement. This went on all year, with her getting stricter and stricter...i just dont get how someone who is giving away answers one minute can flip 360 degrees so easily!

Ever yours ~

The Know-it-all

New Kid on the Block...Yet Again.

Today was my first day at my new school.

All I have to say is: Oh My God!! I mean the girls are scary! I know two of them from my school in sixth grade, they moved here in grade eight and one of them turned scary! It amazes me, the girl was one of those cheerleader types who is constantly cheerful and really diplomatic about the way she talks even though you can totally tell that she hates your guts. She totally ignored me even though I could sooo tell that she recognized me, my other friend, on the other hand, came over and hugged me right away.

It was the worst first day I have ever had.

The teachers are so damn LAX! The girls were just ignoring the teacher and chatting for the whole hour. I understand the fact that you don't pay attention to the teacher, it's like an unspoken rule, but that was too much! Then this other teacher gave us TWENTY-FIVE minutes of free time!! I haven't had twenty-five minutes of free time since the fourth grade!!! And what did the girls do during that time??? The were talking so seriously about the properties of..wait guess...Redbull!!!!!! One of them was like Redbull gives you more energy when its hot not cold, another one said that Redbull light had more flavor than normal Redbull. And yet another girl claimed that Blue Redbull gave more energy than all the rest AND had the best taste. I mean they fit the bill completely for those airheaded girls who can think of nothing but clothes and parties! They're against everything I believe in. Those who were not discussing the virtues of Redbull light were sleeping of the desks! I concluded that all the girls were either extremely stupid, extremely bored or extremely good actresses.

I don't know how I'm going to get through next year. The only good thing about the school is that they have pretty good electives, not what I wanted per se but good, the counselor says she might let me change...I am doubtful.

Ever yours ~

The Know-it-all