Street Names

So after seeing this I decided to make a list of what I would name streets if I had the chance.

TARDIS Boulevard
Hogwarts Place
Doctor Who Street
Captain Mal Avenue
Ravenclaw Way
Popcorn Lane

It occurs to me that some people might have the same opinion of me that I have of this Bieber girl.

My Morning Routine.

I've discovered that I have a new morning routine. When I wake up (after hitting the snooze button IN MY SLEEP) I look at the clock and see what time it is. Then I make a list in my head of the things I have to do, and roughly how long it takes to do them, and what requires leaving the house. Then depending on what I have to do that first requires me to leave the house I decide if I can go back to sleep and for how long, then do, or tell myself I really need to get up. Often I sleep later than I should have and justify it by skipping items on my little to do list.

For example, this morning I woke up at 7. For no reason. the alarm didn't go off for another hour or anything. My to do list was:
1. Bathroom stuff (brush teeth ect.)
2. Clothing
3. Breakfast
4. Pack lunch
5. Go to work, must be done at 9:15.
Clearly, I could go back to sleep. When my alarm went off again. I reviewed my list, and hit snooze. Anyway, I actually got up around 8:45. While I had time to get breakfast and make lunch I ended up skipping those steps.

And that's my morning. I haven't told my roommate yet about my snooze button habits. Then again, I'm getting the top bunk so presumably once I've gotten down to hit the button I'll actually be awake since that requires effort. (If you are wondering why I don't just put the alarm across my room it's very simple. I don't want to trip on something in my half asleep state and break my leg.)

Lacking inspiration

I don't know what to write about today. So, please leave suggestions for tomorrows post in comments because I probably won't have much inspiration then either.

P.S. This counts as a legitimate post. It's just also a really lame one. I don't want to write lame blog posts.

I love Ravelry

So I may not have mentioned this on here before but I'm a knitter. I also crochet but mostly I knit. I'm signed up for a knitter social network called Ravelry. Normally I've been using Ravelry to find alternative patterns, or to get inspiration. I recently picked up eight skeins of a yarn I had no plans for because it was on a fantastic sale. So I searched the yarn on Ravelry and got some ideas for things to make with it. So far I've done a few things but I still have plenty of yarn left.

Today I decided to search in patterns just out of curiosity of what there was. I quickly realized there were a lot of Harry Potter and Doctor Who patterns. A lot. So, I've been downloading free patterns this afternoon.
Harry Potter scarf bookmarks,

Photo and Pattern Credit: Ann Kingstone

TARDIS Kindle cases and so much more.

Photo and Pattern Credit: Stephanie Walls

Obviously there are fourth Doctor scarf patterns (already did it thank you very much)

Photo and Pattern Credit: Tara Wheeler

but the patterns I found most cool were these:

Photo and Pattern Credit: Holynarf

Photo and Pattern Credit: Holynarf

Photo and Pattern Credit: Marie Wright

They're dishtowels/blanket squares/coaster/pretty much anything. I love it. Normally when I have leftover yarn I make squares then sew them into blankets. The hardest part is usually trying to find unique patterns so they aren't all boring squares. Now that I've seen these cool texture pictures (easier than two color knitting) I'm excited for the next one.

Quick Disclaimer: I don't own these images or patterns. They are the property of the people who took them and made them. All images were found on Ravelry. If you own the image/pattern and would like me to remove it (or fix the credit if I miss credited it) please just let me know.

More baking time

I made brownies yesterday and they are so good guys. They're all thick and fudgey and have a home made frosting that I didn't burn myself making. But I ate to many so I feel a little sick.

Look, not all of these BEDA posts are going to be brilliant. I wrote something today. That's an achievement.

Italy Trip Part 6

Last part everybody. Yes in this installment I being my Italy trip to a close. Let's get started.

This was about a block away from the hotel. When we got lost we would ask people how to get here, then go to the hotel once we arrived. It seemed safer than telling strangers what hotel we were staying at.

We went for a lovely walk. We stopped to take pictures of many things including the Ponte Vecchio. Then the lovely walk turned into a death march up a huge hill/small mountain because there was (surprise) a church at the top. Also some great views of Florence.

 Like this.

 And this. (I think I can. I think I can.)

 After more trekking we got to this beautiful shot.

 This is me playing around with zoom. Seriously we were up high.

We made it! Anyway the next 10 or so pictures are just of my friends and I being silly. (Taking pictures of each other at the same time, extreme close-ups, shenanigans and what not). We shall continue this little photodiary...

On the way back down.

Back on... we weren't at sea so I can't say solid ground. Back on sea level ground? Whatever, we were done with the hill/mountain.

Anyway, that little hike was actually a last day in Florence activity. The next day we drove to Milan where the airport is. We didn't go straight there though. (Or maybe we did. I don't know the exact route. The point is we made a stop.)

It's Parma. I'm not sure if there are any universally recognized features to Parma equivalent to that tower in Pisa, so I put a picture of the clock tower.

We just hung out in Parma for a few hours. Looked around, got some cheese and olive oil.

The meet up park had some nice police/military people. I'm pretty sure they arrested a creepy looking dude near us. Also, some people found some pigeons and followed them around for a while.

The restaurant where we has lunch provided some opera singers for us. They were really good.

So, I've mentioned being a little immature before, but bear with me, I found this hilarious.

 There was a sign in the bathroom giving directions for using the toilet. I think my favorite is the third one where the guy just dances away.

In case you don't want to have to read the directions.

Anyway, we then left Parma and went to hang out in Milan for about an hour and a half. What do you think we did while there?

Did you guess that we visited a church? Yay! 10 points! (And an extra 5 points if you knew we visited, wait for it, on Good Friday.) BTW the points don't matter. You can't exchange them for anything.

We also saw this cool statue of Da Vinci.

So that wraps up the trip pretty much. We stayed in the airport hotel that night, then flew home the next morning.

My overall summery of the places that we went is as follows.
Rome grabs you by the lapels and screams "appreciate me! I'm old!"
Siena invites you to sit down and have some gelato while it tells you facinating stories.
Florence basically lays it out, "If you promise to look around and notice all the cool old stuff here I promise to keep you safe from cars.
Lucca is adorable and wants a hug.
Pisa says, "Hey you've seen the one really famous thing, now why don't you stay and look around a little more? Please?"
Parma invites you to dinner with its cheese and olive oil and prosciutto.
And Milan basically says, "I'm an important city. If you want to look around fine, but don't blame me if you get hit with a car. I have important fashion things to do. Don't bother me."

Italy Trip Part 5

Florence was amazing. I liked Florence a lot. Much of this had to do with the fact that cars are banned from much of Florence so unlike Rome where I almost died everyday, I could walk without fear in Florence.

Also, our hotel was right next to a Disney store. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?!?!?!

Right, Italian culture time.

 It's either the Palazzo Vecchio or it's right next to the Palazzo Vecchio.

I took these pictures standing on the Ponte Vecchio on the first night of Passover when there was a full moon. These pictures are some of my favorites.

When we visited the Palazzo Vecchio one of the things we got to do was make our own fresco tile. This was one of my favorite parts of the trip because as fun as it is to go and see the different churches and museums, after a point a church is a church. It's great to get to have experiences that are hands on as part of trips, to get to live the culture as well as see it.

 More ceiling paintings. This is of the heads of the De Medici family. It is painted on the ceiling of the room where all the important meeting took place.

 Coolest thing about castles? Secret passageways!

Which in this case lead to a way to spy on the proceedings in the room where the official meetings occurred. The queen liked to spy.

We visited the grave of Beatrice (the one Dante wrote about). I knew she was a real person, but since we read about her mostly from a fictional book it's fascinating to visit her actual grave.

So we ate dinner near this spot and noticed they were setting up for something. It turned out that the TRL awards for MTV were taking place there the next night. We got permission from our teachers to go and it was so cool. And by cool I mean crowded. And in Italian. But still it was fun. Also I later found out one of my cousins was in Florence at the same time and was also there, although we didn't run into each other. *Starts humming "It's a small world after all"*

The next day we all hopped on a train to Lucca for a day trip.

 Everyone had bikes there.

 This is a church we visited. By the time we git here the churches weren't impressing me quite as much, but we'd also been seeing a bunch of them everyday.

 Another very pretty rounded town circle.

 We stopped at this cute little street market. It was pretty much the only thing open because, as Greg pointed out "[Italy] is adorable because everybody just goes home and takes a nap in the middle of the day" (Might not be the exact quote but close enough).

Guess where Pucchini is from! Did you guess Lucca? Yay, you're right. No there's no prize. So after lunch we went on another train. Guess where we went.

That's right, Pisa. (Still no prize.)

Obligatory tourist shot.

This was just something cool I saw in Florence.

So two quick things that I apparently don't have pictures for.
1. We did go and see the David and a bunch of other artwork/sculpture. However, we weren't allowed to take pictures so I don't remember quite what order we did those things in. I just want to say, of all the art we saw, the David by Michelangelo was one of the only things that I felt I couldn't really appreciate until I saw it in person. Most of the other art I found just as impressive in the pictures of it as in real life, but the David, something I'd seen images of before blew all those pictures out of the water.
2. I mentioned the whisperers before. One night in Florence a little before our going to bed curfew, (but after the be back in the hotel curfew) the teacher's started to go around telling us to meet downstairs at curfew time. They said it was serious. They seemed angry. They wouldn't really tell us what it was about. I honestly thought someone had been found drinking and was being sent home. We were told to bring our whisperers with us.

When we were all gathered, we were told that since some people kept arriving late and missing curfew they didn't believe we'd be able to do a tour they'd been planning for the morning because we'd be too tired, so we would be doing it right now at night. There was a lot of complaining at the people who were late. We walked about a block or so away from the hotel to these beautifully adorned gates and were told to get close so we could really see them.

All of a sudden, music began to blast through our whisperers. All the teachers were laughing. They were giving us a silent dance party (because we were the only ones who could hear the music). It was one of the most fun things, dancing in my PJ's in Italy, to music only my friends and I could hear.