#4

I did all of my Christmas shopping today. I don't really do the whole present-giving thing, but one of my friends always gets really excited about buying me presents on any occasion, and I feel bad for not getting anything for her... so I'm building her a box very basic stuff. I bought the box and a bow to put on top, and some Christmas tea and candy. I'm also going to try and make her a beanie I've been supposed to knit for over a year now... not very specific or effort-requiring presents but I know it's the thought that counts. Also, her book is taking up a lot of effort so I feel like that's going to compensate a bit.

I've been looking for pictures for her book! It's very difficult to find good pictures of Ewan McGregor... he's been acting so long that a lot of the older, weirder photos tend to pop up in searches. I have about 110 pictures looked up right now, but they're very Hiddles-biased and so I'm going to need to find a lot more. We'll see if I can put them into a SkyDrive album or something, sending them ~4 at a time to my email would be horrible.

We were looking around in various shops, including the bookstore. My mom tends to buy our family books for presents - or rather, we all read a lot and buy books as gifts to one another - and she didn't know what I would want so I got to pick something from the store. I chose the lovely, big comprehensive edition of H.P. Lovecrafts "weirdest stories" - Necronomicon. I don't get to have it until actual Christmas, but still. I've never read Lovecraft even though the lore is somewhat familiar to me, because the legend of Chtulthu is used to widely as an intertextual mythological reference.

I don't know if I wrote about this last time, but I got a partner for our test in spoken Swedish. I had sort of hoped I could just go and join a pair of my classmates as a third participant, but apparently that didn't work... regardless, I have a partner now so everything is all right. I'll have to take care and try to adjust to her level of Swedish before the test.

I got into a very strange mood yesterday. Usually I only want to see overly romantic/sweet movies when I'm on my period (or with a group of friends wanting to laugh at cliché plot devices) but now they've already gone way past and I'm questioning my hormones. At any rate, I watched Pride & Prejudice! It was as good as I remembered, only I hadn't realized the sheer amount of great and currently popular actors were in it! Keira Knightley I remembered, obviously, but I hadn't even made the connection between Matthew MacFadyen and the dweeb from Death At A Funeral? I suppose the dashing Mr. Darcy was such a different character I never thought about it. Also Jena Malone was one of the Bennett sisters, and Mr. Bennett was played by Donald Sutherland. I don't think I've ever found a stranger connection in two casts - President Snow was marrying off Johanna Mason at 15, HA. It was very dramatic, too! Now I'm a bit disappointed about the fact that I don't own any more Austen-based movies on DVD. It would be rather tragic to see, say, Sense & Sensibility in choppy, pixelated online stream quality.

Since my mother paid a visit to Stockmann Delicacy we now have two types of great blue cheese and crackers, which I'll get to eat tonight if we watch something together, and I also got some sour cream & onion chips. Life is good.