Daily Adventures

I've been binging on anime lately, mostly because I'm in the midst of my fifth cold of this winter season.

I ended up getting a premium account on Crunchyroll. I've been watching Yowamushi Pedal, first and second series, all of Brave 10, both series of Sword Arts Online, Jet and I are still going with Fairy Tail, and now I'm watching Log Horizon. Jet and I have a few months to catch up on One Piece, still, and are about two-thirds through Naruto Shippenden, which is pretty amazing to me. I finished the Naruto manga and loved it thoroughly.

( Cut for short reviews, no spoilers, and the curry.... )

Jet and I finally finished watching all the episodes of One Piece, the pirate anime that follows 16-year-old Luffy (who doesn't drink) through the gathering of his nakama and into their adventures through the past and present.

We started the 500+ episode saga when he was eight, he's now eleven, and we're going through them again, starting at episode #1 and rolling through them at a very rapid rate (we're already at 60 again in about a week and a half). incandescens did an amazing job of encouraging him with a lovely art book and trading cards. And there's something about the series that both Jet and I keep coming back to with respect to Luffy and his crew.

There's lot of gems throughout. The art in the manga is even more over the top than the art in the anime, but it all kind of goes with the storylines as well. I know a lot of people who just hate the series, but it tells me something when someone loves it, too. Jet and I definitely love it. *laughs*

And if I do fanfiction it'll definitely be Gen and capture some of the essence of what I truly love about the themes of courage, redemption (so MANY of the "bad guys" become "good"), companionship, and what it really means to put your life on the line.

Hell, I'm a little crazy anyway. If anyone wants to give me people and a prompt for One Piece in the comments here, I'll write a 100-1000 word drabble for you. And it can be anywhere up and down the anime line. I haven't read the manga past Book 13, so I know about the differences with Red Leg Zeff, but other than that....

( Some favorites moments that are also spoilers, cut for those who don't want to be spoiled. )

Tokyopop is closing their doors.

I never knew they were in THAT much trouble. Whew.

Though I probably should be doing more of it, but John had meetings all day and Jet really, really wanted to go sledding and play with some other kids for just a little while. He's much better now, even as I think I've bottomed out. We walked out to the sledding hill and stayed until I couldn't anymore, and Jet was great about coming back then and working on his costume for tomorrow and for Halloween.

The snow is nearly a foot deep, fluffy and white, but it got warm enough today that it started to pack pretty well, so Jet had a fun time throwing snowballs and making snow angels, and it really was just too beautiful to stay inside all day. But I was very tired after that little outing, so I am definitely not all well, yet. Lungs still seem to be clear, even though the upper respiratory tract is pretty gummed up.

Jet has decided to call all the stuff he coughs and sneezes up, "Gack." I don't blame him. *laughs*

John gave me a little time yesterday, and I read books 2-8 of After School Nightnare, and finally finished the second Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex series. Mixed in with all the Avatar: The Last Airbender that Jet and I have been watching, and I've been having interesting dreams.

( Random natterings about the inputs and a tiny bit about the last chapter of Bleach. )

Yesterday it was 60° outside, today there's 10" of snow and the fluffy white stuff is still falling down. DIA is flailing, so folks flying through Colorado are having lots of problems. Jet's school didn't close this morning, but he's still on the mend, so we decided not to let him go to school. He's still got a little fever, and it's better to be safe than to infect a lot of other kids, too; though, given that he succumbed to it after the Kids Night Out, he may well have exposed dozens of other kids that night. Oops.

I'm sick. I definitely have Jet's thing, and it went right for my lungs. I'm now very, very grateful for my asthma medications as I'm breathing with very little trouble. Jet's better. His temperature went down from 102 to about 99, now, and it seems to be stable. He's doing homework and getting things out of the way and really, really, really wants to go out in the snow. I think that would have been unthinkable just a day or so ago, so I think he's definitely on the mend.

So I'm mostly doing the hot liquids and lying down a lot. The last season of Avatar was really, really, really good. Both Jet and I really enjoyed it all at once, really, and it kept our minds off of being sick, so that was really fun.

( Cut for spoilers, but the series is so old.... )

I've mostly been in input mode lately.

( Bits of Avatar, Whistle, Ghost in the Shell Stand Along Complex 2, and Tsubasa RC. )

I am... uhm... officially functional, so far as my lung capacity goes. I finally went over the 70% mark today, which isn't as good as fully-functional lungs in an adult female human being my size and weight, but it is much better than I was a year and a half ago, when I started my whole allergy thing. It has the additional feature of being classified as "functional" again, which I wasn't before. Dunno if that'll be of any help with respect to insurance, but that's life. I'm still on all my meds and shots and stuff, but there's more indications that I can win back more breathing space for the long run, and the exercise is good for me anyway.

( Details of doctor stuff, finishing FMA anime, and other manga reading, including Bleach spoilers for 375. )

I've been gradually recovering, mostly just taking it easy around the house and catching up with some computer things, but avoiding some of the overuse problems I was having for the last few months. Having a whole week off was nice enough that I'm finding more time to do other things each day, and it's really fun to be able to just play with Jet when he comes home and do stuff with him.

But it was a bit of a shock to the system coming from 80° weather to a sunny day here, and then suddenly snow on Tuesday morning. It is still in all the shadowed areas around here today, though the sunny bits are warmed up enough to have melted it all off. But it was 12° when I got up this morning, early enough to go with John and Jet to get Isabel and George off on the bus for the airport and 17 by the time we got to Jet's bus.

( Cut for knitting babble, a _Mushi-shi_ anime review (5 of 5), lemon bars with Jet, and jambalaya makings. )

Yesterday was Jet's birthday. He's having a party this coming Saturday, but he decided that he just wanted two friends to do a lot of things for most of a day rather than the usual one or two hour party with lots of kids doing one thing and getting sugared up on cake and stuff. We also had him decide how he actually wanted to spend his birthday, and he started the night before by setting his alarm for 6:30 a.m. "So I can get an early start."

( Jet's b-day in detail. Writing stuff. Watching more Escaflowne. )

Read down another 100 chapters of Naruto. Read the recent chapters of Tsubasa RC, xxxHolic, and Bleach. All interesting continuations of the story. It's hard to get much from a single chapter of any of those anymore, sometimes it's more fun to go back a few chapters and take a rush at it again.

I got a chance to watch the first four chapters of Escalflowne and really enjoyed it. It's simpler and sweeter than Samurai Champloo and Mushi-shi and Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex. But what's not to like about an arrogant prince with a kitty girl pet, and a high school girl with a crush on her sempai? Not to mention the Giant Fighty Robots!!

I keep tending to compare it to Twelve Kingdoms, though, and it's an unfair comparison. Escalflowne is very straightforward, so far, and nice. And I kind of like that the high school girl is just kind of taking it and her visions mostly in stride. Thanks, ross_teneyck, for the chance to get to see this!

I got to see the rebirth episode of Mushi-shi and had to rewatch the episode Sea of Writing several times. *laughs* It was so good, about a calligrapher, writing down stories of how mushi are destroyed in order to bind her own mushi away; but what was best about it was her relationship with Ginko.

I also got to see Paprika and I really, really liked it, especially after all the dream work I did last year and in the terms of some research that was done, recently, on dreams.

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