I’m semi-bored even though I have a truckload of homework to do over Thanksgiving break. My stores of willpower have been thoroughly depleted by now, however. (By the way, if you haven’t heard this line from me yet: “You can accomplish ANYTHING with sheer willpower.” Recently I revised this to “sheer willpower and enough time”.)

The problem with humans in general: “willpower” is exactly what we lack. Figures.

So like, here’s how my Thanksgiving went in one sentence: Guests came over, turkey was horrible, I would rather have had a Cup Noodle. Actually that was a run-on; sorry.

On Black Friday my mom and dad made $125, interestingly. My mom went at 4:00am to shop for deals and spent like $100. When she came home, my dad told her to return everything she bought because it was worthless junk that we already had too much of anyways. It just so happens that the store’s sale ended at 1pm… and when we returned it, they refunded us at the non-sale price (about $200). So we made $100 there. Also, they gave us a free $25 gift card that they didn’t bother taking back. Modern retailing is interesting, but they made so much net profit from Black Friday, I doubt they really care.

My dad’s “excuse” for the money we walked off with was especially interesting: “We can’t tell them that we walked off with $125 from them! If we told the sales associate, she would surely have been fired! We’re not telling them about the money because we care about the sales associate’s welfare!”

Fast forward to Saturday: my family went with some Asian family friends to Newport Beach. The problem was, there were 6 “children under five” and only one “teenager” (along with everybody’s parents). I’m sure my dear little siblings fully enjoyed the trip — we rented a 14-person boat and drove around the harbor, and we even let each of the little children take a turn at “driving” the 5mph hunk of a boat. I, however, didn’t get much done, so I consider it a waste of a day.

Here I am, day 3/5. Mists essay: 0%. Oh, I forgot to talk about something.

I’ve ranted about AT&T before, right? Well, our 2wire modem (2701-B or whatnot) must be AT&T’s secret plan to sabotage our home networks or something. Seriously, nothing works. That damn innocent-looking white box’s “firewall” is truly a menace. It doesn’t let any of my legitimate traffic through, yet it gives AT&T and 2wire full remote control access to it. They don’t let me, the OWNER of the router/modem… more like brick… set the settings on the router… what a user-friendly design. Anyways, I spent all of Friday night messing with it because I was only getting 30kbps download on my anime, and one small attempt to fix it resulted in my whole network borking out… leading me to stay up until 3am messing with this conglomeration of bricks and wires.

Luckily my dad randomly bought a new router online on Thursday, so I’ll just set the 2wire to bridge mode and use my Linksys as our gateway — and actually have control over my home network. Sigh.

Anyways, now here I am. Reading Seitokai no Ichizon manga and pretending I know Japanese because I can read the furigana; waiting for my Railgun to finish transferring at snail-pace; and finally… blogging in place of the essay I should be writing at the moment.

600 word post. These 600 words would probably be better spent on Mists of Avalon, but when I rule the world I will ban that book from the face of the Earth. All copies shall be burnt, and anybody found in possession of it will be tortured, then killed, then tortured some more.