As my boredom grows, my cooking skills flourish. It's kind of cool. My mom regularly drafts me to cook parts of meals now.

On Sunday, I went to my cousin's wedding - and this time, it was a cousin I actually knew. In fact, I've known this cousin for most of my life, which made it a much more interesting wedding than most of the ones I go to. Also, the fact that the cousin knows little Tamil and is extremely North Americanized (along with her husband) made the service much more relevant to me.

The groom was Hindi rather than Tamil, which was also intriguing. The pandit only spoke Sanskrit when necessary and translated everything he said into English as he went - and he had a sense of humour, which I've never seen in Hindu religious officials. It would have been a great wedding except for the torrential rain (it was an outdoor service) that picked up at the key moments during the wedding ritual. It was okay, though. (And it was hilarious - the bride's brother and the groom's brother-in-law spent most of the service standing over the bride and groom with large umbrellas.)

So that was good. My brother, sister and I were seated at the underage table with the other teens (and one boy who looked no more than ten, whom I felt a bit bad for.) for the reception (which was about an hour late because of the rain and an overturned car down the road from the hall.) We ended up being the quietest table, which was probably directly related to ours being the most sober table as well. We were served champagne even though we had already made it clear that we were all underage. But since we're all rather boring, unadventurous children, we left our glasses alone (for the toasts, we stood up, raised our glasses and then abruptly sat down.) My sister won the centrepiece in a misguided little game, but she didn't take it. I wonder where it is now.

Anyway, my dad hired some Italian contractors to redo our front and back patios. The jackhammers and hammer drills are disconcerting, but they're cool guys. Their boss endearingly refers to them as "the gentlemen".

Okay, I did the 20 Questions to a Better Personality test again, trying to answer the questions more accurately, and this is what I got:

You are an SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well--even those you have known a long time--because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

I don't know... I did answer the questions better this time, but that's a little scary even for me.

At the end of the last entry, my sister told me that they were showing Datalore on Space for their Canada Day Star Trek Marathon. She was totally and entirely lying to get me away from the computer, and it worked. But she's gone now, so I decided it would be a good day to change the flowers, since phlox and violets are spring flowers and it's not spring! Say hello to our new friends, delphinium and daylily.

Happy Canada Day! I'm a bit melancholy - Days is pre-empted by Wimbledon until next week. We just had a cheap but tasty barbecue, enhanced by both N64 and Xbox games - Super Smash Bros. and Prince of Persia. PoP is fun to the max - we enjoy dying and hearing the narrator say, "No, no, no, that's not how it happened. I jumped over the bridge, and then - let me start again." Once you get the Dagger of Time, though, it's a bit difficult to die, since you have to use the dagger to rewind the game.

Good personality quizzes are tough to come by these days, but here's one: 20 Questions to a Better Personality. This is what I got:

You are a WRCF--Wacky Rational Constructive Follower. This makes you Paul Begala. You are unflappable and largely unconcerned with others' reactions to you. You were not particularly interested in the results of this test, and probably took it only as a result of someone else asking you to.

You have a biting wit and intense powers of observation. No detail is lost on you, and your friends know it--relying on you to have the facts when others express only opinions. You are even-tempered, friendly, and educated. Foolish strangers may mistake your mildness for weakness--they will be surprised.

Your entire approach to life is enviable. You will raise good kids.

Some parts I'm not sure about, e.g. "biting wit", "unconcerned with others' reactions", and "Paul Begala". And the part about raising good kids... heh. Other than that it seems pretty accurate, though, so go do it and tell me what you got.

Now, I'm actually done with school until September. Thursday was a pretty good day:

• I got my report card, and even though I already knew all of my marks, it was pleasant. I finally broke ninety with my average, which I've never done. Grade nine and ten were both 89.something averages, which made me angry.
• I went home and my sister called from Stinkytown (aka Waterloo) and said she had two gmail invites. Now my brother and I have been blessed with the wondrous gmail.
• I got my hair cut, and now it's just past my shoulders. Actually it's longer than that, but it curls up. I like it. I don't like how the hairstylist invariably (like, both times) gushes over how long, thick and wavy my hair is, and then spends about five minutes trying to talk me out of cutting it.

Yesterday, I spent a delightful day in Stratford, Ontario. I may have spent more time on the bus to and from there, but I didn't time it. I digress - we saw A Midsummer Night's Dream, but we had really bad seats. The performance was good, but the interpretation was different... apparently it was set in the present, which was shown in Lysander's clothes from Sportsworld. They stuck to the script, though. Kind of like that really bad Hamlet movie set in the corporate world, but a lot better. The gift shop had Shakespeare action figures, "with removable quill pen and book!" - I might have bought one, but they were .

Done with school! Since last entry, I've done exams for Computers, Religion, Physics and Anthropology.

Computers: boring and easy.

Religion: I was five minutes late! It wasn't my fault, the bus has abandoned all pretense of following the schedule. It was easy, though, and I got to use some major cheese I had up my sleeve - "Our city is home to a unique (and difficult to replicate) balance of freedom, diversity, and equality." I'm cracking up just thinking about it.

Physics: a lot of the questions came right off the practice exam. I spent an hour writing out a cheat sheet for that?

Anthropology: A one-hour exam, which was a strange concept to me. So strange, that I ignored it and began writing it like it was a 90 minute exam, and at the end I had to cram everything in. I had four more words to write when she said the exam was over, and I managed to get two of them in, but then she started watching me so there are two words missing from it - "experimented on."

Now, I don't know what I should do. Unlike everyone else, I rarely make plans for summer. I enjoy lounging around doing nothing, see. I am entertaining the idea of volunteering at the campaign office of the NDP candidate in my riding, though. Poor guy, his flyers are black and white photocopies on cheap printer paper. The only trouble is that his office is bus rides away, and the Conservative office is a ten-minute walk - and it's in the air-conditioned mall. I have no idea where the Liberal office is. I suspect there isn't one, because that guy's been in office since the year after I was born and barely has to lift a finger to get votes. Well, my parents' votes, at least.

I've taken to watching the Ontario Parliament channel when I'm bored... it's better than Will and Grace reruns. Hampton yells a lot, man. A few days ago, one of the Conservatives mentioned "the reduction of debt under the Harris government" and the place went crazy. The speaker and the pages were laughing. You know, those pages are great. I just watch them. Sometimes it looks like they want to laugh really badly, but they can't, and it's hilarious.

Chemistry exam was easy. Frighteningly so. Two down, four left, and summer is almost here. I plan to a) do very little and b) when I am doing something, practise driving. Well, get my G-1 first, and then practise driving.

I have this unshakeable assumption that driving is a piece of cake. I know that I'll probably run away screaming after putting the car in neutral and rolling down the driveway the first time, but for now, how hard can it be? I also have an unshakeable and incredibly arrogant "anything you can do, I can do better" feeling towards the majority of people out there, which I also suspect will get me majorly burned.

Many's the day I envied the drivers - even the ones that sped through yellow lights on purpose and believed they had the right of way turning from side streets into main ones - for their power. Most of those days were miserable, snowy, windy, -20 degrees celsius schooldays when I waited fifteen minutes for the bus. Now, I'm not sure where I was going with this paragraph, but there it is.

Someday, I will be the master of the parallel park, the three point turn, possibly even the quick 180 (I can only dream... I'd probably flip the car). Also, someday, I'll learn exactly where to put the period when there are parentheses at the end of a sentence. Someday...

Sorry for that half-structured, half-stream-of-consciousness entry. Ooh, I found a use for Civics: I got myself into a political discussion with a Poli. Sci. graduate on the soap opera message board about electoral systems. I'm all, "Mixed-member proportional representation is the way to go," and he's all, "Yeah, first-past-the-post is majorly flawed." And everyone else is all, "WTH are they talking about?" I think my lack of actual education on the subject is going to make me look like an idiot in the near future, but looking like a highly articulate and learned sixteen-year-old is a lot of fun.

My attempts to not skip any class this year have been quashed. I did periods one and two in their entirety, but I was accosted in period two by legions of people having me sign their yearbook and stealing mine to sign it. For some reason, I'm not as used to the yearbook signing party as others are.

Because of that, I was late to go to period three, but when I got there there wasn't anyone I knew in the classroom. I walked up and down and all around the school, but I didn't see anything really interesting. Then the bell rang and it was suddenly period four.

I made a conscious effort to find my class for period four. There were a bunch of students I didn't know in my classroom again, and this time they were writing a test. I looked for my teacher, but he had disappeared. Giving up, I tried to go to Philosophy where all the gifties were, but the teacher didn't let me stay, so I went straight to the bus stop and went home.

On the bus, I actually read the yearbook (as opposed to getting people to sign it.) I found that the stuff in it is not incredibly funny, like I thought it would be, but funny enough. However, the combined effects of reading on the bus and the chemicals coming from the freshly-printed book made me very nauseous.

So that was my day. Now, I should probably either write my Religion essay that's due tomorrow, or study for my Chemistry exam that takes place tomorrow. But I'm going to check the soap opera message boards first.

P.S. Robyn, the video was "If She Knew What She Wants". That spinning room was cool.

I may as well get right into it: as I walked out of the theatre today, the main thought running through my head was, "That could have been 53 times better." I liked that Ron and Hermione are really cute, and that there are some funny moments in the movie, but not too much else.

First of all, check out this logic: the first two movies were both over two and a half hours long. HP3 the book was longer than HP1 and HP2. HP3 the movie is shorter than HP1 and HP2. And considering the messed up, explosion-after-explosion feeling of the first two movies, you get an even stronger messed up, explosion-after-explosion feeling with this movie. The thing is, HP3 the book doesn't have many explosions in it until the end. The result is a movie that manages to painfully sprint and trudge at the same time.

Acting critiques: Radcliffe is better, but still does that thing where he just looks confused all the time. Watson is also better, and has a lot more presence than Radcliffe, but still sometimes delivers her lines... strangely. I liked Grint the most, but even his comedic stylings get old after a while. Felton should stop spitting his lines out as quickly as he can, but he's good at whimpering like a little girl.

My nitpicks mostly have to do with the amount of plot and context that was cut out. For example, when Harry arrived at the Leaky Cauldron, Ron and Hermione were already there, arguing about Crookshanks and Scabbers. In fact, the whole subplot with Crookshanks and Scabbers is only briefly mentioned here and there. Harry and Ron shunning Hermione and ignoring her? Not in the movie. Another example is Snape, who's actually given reasons for acting insane in the book; in the movie, he looks pretty stupid.

Other big plot points are left out too: the shape of Harry's patronus, the explanation of "Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs" (in fact, the scene in Hogsmeade where the teachers and Fudge talk about Sirius and James is condensed to about twenty seconds.) And the payoff of the entire story, the showdown in the Shrieking Shack, was degraded to - I don't even know what that was. The whole discussion was deleted, and Sirius instantly went from the villain of the story to Harry's new best friend, with almost no explanation for it.

A few more things: the plot is totally driven by Hermione in the movie. I don't know what's up with that. There were a lot of "smart moments" she had that were originally Harry's or easily could have been given to Harry. And the final shot in the movie was really cheesy, and that just turned me off of the whole thing, whatever good moments it may have had.

Everyone will probably see the movie and think it was brilliant, though. That always happens.

I found a super cool meme. I think this'll cheer me up a bit.

* EXOTIC FOREIGNER ALIAS = Favorite Spice + Last Foreign Vacation Spot
Fennel Yucatan. Yeah, I haven't gone anywhere else since grade seven.

* SOCIALITE ALIAS = Silliest Childhood Nickname + Town Where You First Partied
Gifted Girl ... um... Toronto? This one doesn't work. :(

* "FLY GIRL" ALIAS (a la J. Lo) = First Initial + First 2 or 3 Letters of Your Last Name
K. Su ... This one also doesn't work.

* ROCK STAR ALIAS = Any Liquid on the Bar + Last Name of Bad-Ass Celeb
Champagne Ryder. Winona Ryder's bad-ass.

* DIVA ALIAS = Something Sweet Within Sight + Any Liquid in Kitchen
Iced Tea Palmolive. Maybe I'm just not good at this.

* GIRL DETECTIVE ALIAS = Favorite Baby Animal + Where You Last Went To School
Fawn Churchill... ooh, that one kind of worked.

* BARFLY ALIAS = Last Snack Food You Ate + Your Favorite Drink
Chocolate Tea.

* SOAP OPERA ALIAS = Middle Name + Elementary School
Now we're getting somewhere. I don't have a middle name, so I'll use a random one. Mira Inglewood... I like that one.

* PORN STAR ALIAS = First Pet's Name + Street You Grew Up On
This one never works out for me. Mercury Kerwood.

My Jedi Name:
First name: First three letters of your first name, first two letters of your last name
Last name: first two letters of mother's maiden name, first three letters from city of birth
Title: last three letters of last name, backwards, first three letters of make of first car, OF, last medication taken.
Kalsu Sasca, Najcav of Tylenol. :D

That was great. HARRY POTTER opens tomorrow! But I have to wait until Sunday. Sunday, Sunday, someday.