Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Happiness!

Woooo!! So I'm excited!! Are you excited!! For I'm updating when I said I would update!! I'm super proud of myself for not procrastinating too much this time!! Sorry, I'm just happy! Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up!


Okay, so first up, I'm going to start a new blog channel (I know I hardly use the other ones). I was given a 5000 question survey to do, so I though that would be a fun thing to  post on the blog. Granted, I'm going to break it up into smaller parts. I was thinking about it though, and it would be weird to have those post randomly between my "normal" posts, so I thought I could do an entire different channel (I know that's what their called on YouTube, but I don't know what to call them on here). Anyways, I'll start that sometime soon. I think I'm going to come up with a schedule, like to 10 questions every Monday or something like that. Although, I should probably do more than 10 if I don't want to be filling out the survey for forever. As I was thinking though, I've posted surveys and quiz things on here before, so I thought I could just start posting all those things on my new blog. I haven't created it yet, but I'll link you to it in my next blog when I get it figured out and post for the first time!


Just another small drabble, but I finally was able to find the small index/blank flash cards that are common in Asia and used mostly for vocabulary words. They aren't whole punched, but I thought I could start using them to help supplement my Korean and Japanese vocabulary. I already have Kanji flashcards, Hiragana/Katakana flashcards, and Hangul flashcards, so I thought this would be the next step (although I haven't finished the Kanji cards)! I'm really excited to start it, so I was thinking of starting out with key words for the Korean set. So, if anyone has a list or anything to suggest, please do! I need all the help I can get to learn Korean, especially since there isn't a class offered at my school.


Moving on, my Aunt Rowie and Uncle Jerry came down from San Diego (California)!! Wooooo!! I was sad we only got to hang out a couple times and not for very long, but it was still really fun! First off, Thursday night we went to Red Robin for dinner. It wasn't just a fun dinner though, we were also celebrating my Grandmother's birthday which was on the 31st of July! It was really fun catching up! I was really excited for my sister to see Rowie though. She hasn't been able to see her as many times as I have and get as close, so it was really neat to see Rowie see how grown up Ariel has become! (UWAH! I just started tearing up! I'm such a sucker for these things! It made me really proud of my baby sister seeing how grown up she is and all her plans for life!) Anyways, it was also really neat to update her on everything that's been going on in my life too! I was thinking, and the last time she came out to Colorado was my graduation. That was four years ago! I wish she lived closer or we were richer so we could visit her more often! I just hope I get into the Grad School I want, so then I'll only be a couple hours away! But anyways, it was a lot of fun! Rowie and Jerry were surprised because I got a Peach Daiquiri and they were both exclaiming how weird it was that I was drinking! I guess the last time they saw me I wasn't even 18 yet!

My sister and I when we were young!

We didn't hang out on Friday unfortunately because my Mom and I couldn't take off work. We did get together on Saturday though! We had lunch at Qdoba and then we went to a park! Qdoba was fun, and we got to talk about more personal things like how life was and then just goof off some more!! The park was really fun. Although, at one point I got bored and slap happy at the same time, so I was just running around like a little 5 year old playing on everything. We're talking I was swinging (which I always do at parks), then on the basketball playing with an imaginary ball, then walking along the patch next to the creek only to get distracted by a squirrel, then dancing with my sister to these huge ants and leaf statue! Of the corny person I am, lied down in front of the leaf statue and waited for my aunts to come over. Once all of them were there I said "Fan me my aunts/ants!" They all just looked at me like I was weird and lame, but I was having fun laughing my butt off! The ant statues had weird faces, so when I lied down on the leaf I told my sister that they had knocked me out and I was their sacrifice and they were going to eat me alive. My sister just agreed and said they had creepy faces too, but I'm still not sure if she was just pacifying me! Anyways, we took lots of pictures with the ant statues. Then, they wanted to hear me sing some Korean and Japanese songs. I ended up doing Sorry Sorry and having my Mom and Sister do the dance with me! Although, after the chorus, I wasn't too sure of the dance, I did an imitation of Yesung dancing. Anyways, I found out afterwards my uncle video recorded it. Oh noes! I'm not sure if I'll share the video or not yet...I haven't seen it...GAH! It was sad to see them go and I hope we can get together sometime soon!

When I googled hyper person this popped up & I liked it!

So for a quick news and preview for my next post, the Drum Corps International 2011 World Championships is this week!! The fun starts on Thursday and ends Saturday. Unfortunately I won't be going to it (since it's in Indiana and a lot of money), but we can see a live broadcast of Thursday's events in the movie theater, so my family and I are heading to that! So sometime this weekend or early next week I'll update about the ending scores and my thoughts on what happened and such! I just can't wait to see how much SCV and Phantom have improved. Plus, I'm excited to see The Cavaliers finished drill and the crazy upside down tenor feature!

Crazy upside tenor feature. Credit to The Cavaliers twitter!

As for Skip Beat! news, the new chapter still hasn't come. It still a couple weeks away! It comes out right before the beginning of the new semester, so hopefully I won't be too distracted and not be able to read it for a bit! Thankfully there's been so much going on I've been distracted from the waiting! As I mentioned last post, they've finished the filming. There have been tweets that it should be coming soon, so I'm hopeful that it'll start airing before the end of the year! I can't wait to see it! Although, I hope it'll all be in one language. I don't know if you remember the preview, but it was half Korean and half Chinese. It was a little odd. We'll see!

Cute Skip Beat! chibis! Plus Kyoko's demon things!

Okay, and lastly (as always), fangirl time!! There isn't much Arashi things lately, so I'll just get right into Super Junior! First off, the official MV has been released!! Wooooo!!! It's so good!! I'll give you the link here! I won't post it on the blog though because I want to help increase the views! It's only been out a few days and we're already over 4 million views. There have been tweets going around and now ELFs are going to try to get the view count to be the highest ever! The current champ is Justin Bieber ( *throws up* ), so we definitely need to surpass him! Also, last weekend was Super Junior's comeback on the weekly music shows! There weren't on Mnet M!Countdown last week, but they will be this week. If you click on the names of the shows, you can watch KBS's Music Bank, MBC's Music Core, and SBS's Inkigayo comebacks!

A cap from the MV!

Okay, and for my last update, my package will be here very very soon! I got the tracking number for it, and the estimated delivery is the 11th! I've been checking it everyday, and a couple days ago it reached Alaska! I was super excited! I was telling everyone that it was on American soil! Granted it was in Alaska, but I was still super stoked! I'm just sad that I'll be gone that day. Hopefully my roommate will be home when they come to sign for it. I might have to wait a couple days before I get it and can be home otherwise. Anyways, I'm sure my twitter will be updated quickly and rapidly when I get them! I can't wait to look through everything and spaz!

I got the Leeteuk & Eunhyuk badges!

So I'll wrap up things here since I'll be posting again in a couple of days! As always, I leave you with a gif! This time I bring you the wonderful Kangin playing with the glass when DJed a radio show! I can't wait until he gets out of the military in a year! XD


Ja ne~~
Stasi

Friday, August 5, 2011

A Busy Busy Bee

*Author's Note: So I wrote this Wednesday afternoon/night. Since I'm a huge procrastinator and got distracted (majorly), I'm posting this now. So, I'm lazy and don't want to go through and re-edit everything and add more updates (I'll just do another post in a couple of days). Anyways, I just wanted to let you know to read this as if I posted this on Wednesday afternoon/night not now (Friday morning)! Sorry it took so long!

Once again it has taken me forever to post again. Things have been crazy lately, both in real life and in the fandom world. As always though, I'll start with the real life things for those that don't care about my fangirl rantings!!

 

Well, a lot of things have happened since we last spoke, but I thought I'd just focus on the most prominent happening. Last weekend, I went to my first family reunion. Granted most of the people there were my Mom's third cousins and distant relatives to us, it was still really cool to see all these people that I was related to and had never even heard their names before. It was a BBQ at Washington Park (something like that) in Denver (or Golden or one of the nearby cities, but I consider everything Denver being from Northern Colorado). Anyways, it was awkward at first because everyone was kind of separated and just sat and hang out with the people they already knew. My older aunts knew a lot more of the people than my Mom did, so I spent a lot of time just chillin' with my sister. At one point we ended up going to the nearby playground and playing on the swings. Of course, as we were bored, I kind of started serenaded the playground. I was singing mostly Korean and Japanese songs, so a lot of little Denverites were introduced to foreign music, granted it was sung horribly and with out background music. My sister would join in on the English lines she knew, but we just kept ourselves entertained! I think at some point my Aunt came over and recorded us, I'm not sure why. It was really funny though, because my swing didn't make any noise, but my sisters sounded like a baby elephant. It was hilarious. I was laughing so hard for at least 20 minutes listening to the sounds that were coming out of the swing. I was thoroughly amused. What was funny was that it was even making the same noises for the little girls that were playing on the swings after us!


Anyways, back to the reunion. After we were done playing on the swings, we went back to where everyone was still chilling. About half the  people had left at that point, but some new people had shown up. One was my Mom's third cousin. She apparently had been born and raised in Greeley and is now living in Windsor (a city that's like 20 minutes away). She brought a lot of old photos and information about the family tree that she's researched. It was really cool, and things that I've always wanted to know. There never has really been much history available about our ancestors due to our family being secretive and not wanting to talk about the past a lot. What's even cooler is that we found out we have family buried in one of the cemeteries here in Greeley. Then when my Mom was looking up the cemetery information the other, she found more family (from a different side) and I guess one of them is my Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather. I'm super psyched, and when my Mom picks me up tonight we're going to go check it out! I still can't believe that we've had family here the entire time, but we had no idea!


As I learn more, I'll be sure to update the more exciting things. Although one thing I learned from my Mom's cousin, is that far along our line is a Scottish rebel. I guess he tried to overthrow the king way back when, but it's hard to find hard information. I guess he ended up changing his name and fleeing, so everything is a little sketchy and hard to dig up. I find that really cool and fascinating though. My Mom also found out that a few (like 5) generations ago, one of our ancestors immigrated from Russia and his wife from Germany. We also found some Cherokee Indian in the mix too. So one thing has been cemented for me, I'm a mutt. I knew before that I had mixes of different countries, but after finding all this information there's a lot more different lines of blood in me than I thought!


To continue on with family events, my Aunt and Uncle from California are flying out today! My Aunt has her high school reunion, so she's coming! I'm so excited! I haven't seen them since my high school graduation! That was four or five years ago, something like that! Anyways, we are doing dinner tomorrow night and then a brunch type thing on Saturday morning. I'm excited to see them and sad that we won't have too much time to hang out together. Anyways, I'll update again in a few days to share all the hilarity that will ensue!

Aunt Rowie & Uncle Jerry when they were on vacation in Australia!

Okay, so before I get too heavy into fangirl stuff, I first would like to do a small update about Skip Beat! The latest chapter still hasn't come out, but the Taiwanese drama has officially finished recording. They had the celebratory party like last week, so hopefully it'll start airing. They haven't released the official date it'll start airing, but hopefully they'll start releasing news!


Okay, so a small Arashi update! I promised on my last post that I would post my favorite songs of the album and the ones to check out! There hasn't been too big of news otherwise though. So as I mentioned before, my favorite solo song is Sakurai Sho-san's このままもっと (Konomama Motto). I have to say though, that my favorite song is まだ見ぬ世界へ (Mada Minu Sekai e), the one they released a music video before (I posted it a while ago). Just as a side note, I'm not going to consider the songs that were previously released as singles (like Lotus and To Be Free). So my other favorite songs are morning light, negai, always, 虹のカケラ~no rain, no rainbow~!! If you have a chance, definitely check out the album or at the very least the songs I've mentioned. Honestly though, I love all the songs! It was hard to narrow it down and not list them all!

I love they're all in sync and in time, but doing the move differently!

Okay, and onto the biggest fangirlisms in a little over a year and some very exciting news!! Super Junior's 5th album "Mr. Simple" is out! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! I can't tell you how much I love this album. I looooooove all the songs so much. I can't wait to see them perform Mr. Simple (the title track) live! Also, the MV hasn't been released yet. It gets released tomorrow (or today in Korea), so there will be those fangirl rants once that comes out! SM has posted two teasers (Teaser 1 & Teaser 2). I would post them here, but I want to try to help with views, so I'd rather you go to their page! Anyways, enjoy! I've been so excited for a while. They've been releasing teaser pics for over a week and the other day the album was released on Korean digital sites. Please if your going to download, do it legally. You can buy it at itunes, but if possible please buy from one of the Korean sites so we can get Super Junior the awards they deserve!!

Leeteuk cap from the MV teasers!! XD

As for the album itself, they are coming out with 10 different types. Each album will have a front cover that is of one member with back cover having all 10 members. The album itself is really big, so I'm hoping that the photobook itself is big. Anyways, I've ordered two through SJ-World and one through AngeLeeteuk. That means I'll be getting two random members and then for sure Leeteuk! I can't wait to get them. As for the album itself, gold. I love all the songs so much. My favorites are constantly changing every time I listen to a different song, but I've finally been able to narrow it down to three. My top three favorite songs off of "Mr. Simple" are Mr. Simple, 라라라라 (Be My Girl), and My Love, My Kiss, My Heart!! There is one song composed and written by Donghae and Chance. That's really good too! I just hope there will be a repackaged version, because I remember hearing somewhere that Leeteuk composed another song. I hope that it comes out!


Anyways, I don't want to spaz too much about 5 jib right now, since I haven't even gotten my copy and there are no live performances or music videos to share. My last exciting news is that my Photobooks and other Super Junior items I ordered have been shipped! I'm so excited! I can't wait to get them! This is my first time being able to afford the fanclub goods, so I can't wait to look through both Leeteuk photobooks!! Also, I'm getting a couple posters, a couple buttons, and a Super Show bag!! I'm sure I'll be tweeting and spazzing a lot when I get that package. It should come here in a week or so, so I'm sure that will be included sometime soon in another of my blog posts!!


Okay, so I'll stop here for today!! Since I've been waking up early every morning to watch Sukira (Super Junior's Kiss the Radio) I've been kind of exhausted (stupid time difference). That will get a lot worse though, especially with this upcoming debut! Ah, the  point of this rant, is I'll leave you with a cute gif of a sleepy Leeteuk!


Ja ne~~
Stasi