Visiting Home

This is gonna be a short one.

We're visiting Washington now! We landed in Seattle on the 21st 'o November.  The next day, it started snowing like crazy and then eventually the power went out -- and stayed out for a few days.  It was fun, really.  Husband had fun in his first snow, and last night we got to go to a family Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice. :)

We've also met our youngest nephew, Ethan. He's my brother's son, and he's absolutely adorable.

Anywho, we've been busy hanging out with the family, so until something exciting happens, there may not be any updates. :P

My Writing Bone is Rusty

I've been (attempting to) write in this blog fairly often... So far it's working (kinda!).  As a result of it, I've been typing a tad more often, and that's been making me miss the days when I would spend hours and hours a day just writing writing writing in MS Word.

Granted, most of my writing was about Sailor Moon and stuff of that sort, but hey, I was young!

Now that I'm older (kinda....!), I'd like to give a whack at writing again.  I've been thinking a lot about stories I liked to read when I was younger. I recall one author that really stood out to me, Roald Dahl.  He was the author of such gems as The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, and a few others you may remember.

Anyway, just thinking about those books I read back when I was younger made me (perhaps foolishly) begin to believe I'd do at least okay at writing something.

One nearly-all-nighter later, I've come up with an idea. And I'd like for you to read it and comment below with your suggestions. I will post what I have after the break.

Ghosts?

I know it's kind of late - you all were in the mood for Halloween/Samhain a week-ish ago, but I watched An American Haunting recently, and while the movie didn't really speak of ghosts precisely, I thought I'd wonder out loud (or..in type...) about this particular topic.

I probably have mentioned ghosts before here. I can't really remember at the moment, as it's pretty late at night for me, but I'm awake enough to not be able to sleep.

I don't know about you, interwebs, but I think I believe in ghosts.  I mean, how could something so widely mentioned or experienced not be at least partly true?  There's always a possibility.

I've had a few encounters (I think) with spirits of some sort.  One time, I was driving down into town back in Washington. It was dark, yes, but I am 100% sure of what I saw.  I was at the stop light, waiting to turn left, when suddenly I felt the urge to look behind me in the rear view mirror.

The moment I did so, a figure with blue (or green?) eyes moved his gaze to look directly at mine, and did so through the mirror.  Instinctively, like every good horror movie star, I turned around and - of course - saw nothing.

But I'm certain of what I saw. I saw a man with a slightly square ish jaw line, with short hair (perhaps a military cut?) look directly into my eyes from the right back seat of my car.  Now... the car I was driving at the time had been given to me by my uncle, who had bought it from someone else.  It was well used, and the back and front ends' interior colors did not match.  It's possible that the car could have been in an accident, or something similar to that.  It was made in '89 after all, that's a lot of time to fill with owners.

The most recent encounter I can think of was here in Australia.  I didn't see this one, rather, my husband did.  One night, I got out of bed and opened the bedroom door.  I recall looking down the hallway towards the kitchen, I think it was to check if the doors were open or not, but I can't really explain why I felt the need to look in the first place.  After looking, I started to head to the bathroom across the hall.

As I reached the bathroom, I heard a few gasps come from the bedroom. I looked over, thinking dear husband was playing around, only to find out that he had seen something. When I returned to the bedroom, I sat down next to him and he told me that he had seen someone, or something, gliding behind me. It seemed to be travelling from the kitchen to the front of the house, and its path crossed mine.  He described it as a dark green figure that seemed covered in scrap cloths of some sort.

Kinda freaky, eh?  The weirdest thing was that aside from the urge to look down at the kitchen, I felt nothing. Though right now, just thinking about it, I'm getting a little freaked out.  Haha.

Anywho, tell me what your thoughts are on ghosts.  Have you seen one? What would you do if you did?

Until next time...

Viruses SUCK

Urrrgh

Yeah.... so I decided to grab a trial of a program from a website that I'd trusted for years and years... Turns out it was a horrible, HORRIBLE idea.

I downloaded the program with ease, but when I opened it, I noticed that it had some funky symbols going on in areas.  Irritated, and clearly not paying attention, I closed it and forgot about it.

Later that evening I had some fun little things pop up. A MSN Messenger-like window popped up in the corner of my computer screen, and suddenly a bunch of warnings came up.  "Do you want to update Adobe?" "Virus alert!" etc, etc.

Freaking out, I turned the computer off and unplugged it from the network.  Seems I did that just in time.  I backed up a bunch of my photos and files and stuff on my external hard drive... Unsurprisingly, the virus jumped onto my hard drive and decided to crap all over that.  We grabbed everything we could, and Husband used some wonderful AVG virus scanner magic on it... Worked like a charm, everything is well on the external, and all my photos were saved.  Thank goodness.

We're in the process of reinstalling Windows on my computer, after completely wiping everything before... after that I'm gonna grab AVG and scan like crazy so long as I remember to from now on.

The whole thing put me in such a sour mood that it poured over into my whole day.  Trying to figure out the marriage certificate stuff, me starting stupid arguments... Stuff like that.  I'm feeling a little better emotionally, though physically I'm feeling a tad ill.

I'm not really looking forward to reinstalling all my games, either.  Oblivion, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Fallout, WoW, The Sims 3, and a few others... A few other programs as well.. Not gonna be fun.  But at least (hopefully) the virus problem will be solved.

Anyway, the point is - Be careful what you download... There are people out there who get pleasure from causing other people frustration and troubles. :/

-Manda-