2001-02-19 - 15:15:30
Still sniffling, but no money worries for awhile! =)

Thank goodness for DayQuil. I never get one of those nice little 24-hour cough-and-sniffle colds, I get the full week-long run-through-all-possible-symptoms kind. Please, can I have another box of hankies?

I went and dug out my old Macintosh laptop yesterday. It's the last run they made with a black-and-white screen ... it was the college's standard in 1995, when I was a freshman, and I could never afford the buy-up price for the color models in the years after. These days, the battery no longer functions and the disk drive is broken, which makes it pretty useless except for playing a few limited games ... but it also happens to be the sole repository for a collection of short stories I wrote in my high school years.

I had to laugh when I read them again ... my early writing style was pretty juvenile. (But then, I was barely 13 when I started high school ... hard to be mature at that age). Some of the later ones, the ones I wrote my senior year, were much better. They were all fairly preposterous, though. In one, the Russians started attacking our town, and my friends and I headed for the hills, where we discovered a top-secret bunker, almost got killed by a handsome KGB agent, and then proceeded to save the world.

There were others, and all of them included my friends, places I'd been, and occasionally that same KGB agent, as either enemy or romantic interest. I had a blast writing them, and my friends had a blast reading them. It makes me nostalgic. Perhaps I should write another one. (Never mind that most of the friends I have these days are unwilling or incapable of all gathering in one place at the same time ... *grin*).

Speaking of good moods, I was in one yesterday, despite my cold. Azash and I drove down to see the parents again, and as usual we stopped in Salem to pick up some Magic cards at his favorite shop. They were selling repacks there, guaranteed to have two rares and a foil in each, plus eight or ten other cards, for $5. The guy behind the counter told us that they'd made 200 repacks, and in that lot (somewhere) they had inserted a few Mana Drains (a $40 card) and one very rare Juzam Djinn (a $180 card).

So, I asked my brother to pick me a couple of packs, and he picked a couple, and we left. He pulled a Mana Drain and a $20 foil the last time he came, so he was pretty pumped, but he got nothing special this time. Then, he opened mine for me, since I was busy driving. Nothing special in the first; nothing special in the second either, until he got 2/3 of the way through the pack. Then I heard him say, "That's just SICK. I don't BELIEVE that. This happens every time I pick out packs for some one else!"

Yup, you got it. I, the beginning player who doesn't even own 100 cards yet, had pulled the Juzam Djinn. That might not mean much to most of my readers, but I was chuckling about it all day long! *grin*

The rest of the visit was good, too. We had fun hanging with the parents, and then my Granddad came to visit ... he's getting up there in age, and I don't see him very often, so it was good to talk with him. He's my last living grandparent, and sometimes I worry that he won't live to see Azash or I marry and settle down. Then, my mother did my tax returns. (!!!!) This is the first year I've been able to claim myself on my tax returns -- I was always a dependent on my parents' while I was in school -- and instead of the usual $200 or so returns, I'm getting over a thousand bucks! Wow. Now I can pay off my credit card and some other bills, and blow a little fun money! *relieved sigh*

Okay, I think I've wasted enough time for the morning ... Back to the grindstone. =)