Hey you all!

It's been ages since I last wrote or uploaded something (sorry! ) so I thought I'd drop by with a collective "hello!" and tell you a bit of what's been going on at my end.

How is everyone? Tell me what interesting things have been going on

PUPPY
You might remember Pukki from the last journal entry [link] Well she's grown up a ton (her ears are upright now!) and she's more than tripled her weight and size now. Besides, she's more than a bit of a rascal, so she's been keeping us all busy.

QUESTION
I've been trying to identify this bug for a while now. We found it in the garden. It's about 4 inches (11cm) long. It was on a rock next to some old wood. [link] I've been considering submitting it as a deviation to see if someone can ID it, but am not too sure since it's not really an artistic picture, is it?

SHOES
I bought these pumps the other day (MEDA peeps, you've seen 'em already) and I'm totally in love with them [link] Haha I had to go and take a Bazaar-style photo of them XD I was a bit wary because I ordered them online and couldn't try them on first, but they went on sale and I'd been wanting them so much, I went ahead and ordered them. Thank God they fit well!

ART
Yeah, uhm ... Well, I had started this new pixel portrait, but now I'm not so sure I want to finish it. So I should probably start something new

GERMAN
Something very strange happened at the beginning of the summer: I suddenly (like, in one afternoon) forgot all the German I'd learned so far. I hoped it would come back the next day but it didn't. So I took a break and then started all over again. I've caught up now and have decided to do only one German course at a time - I had been doing an online course and a separate book-based course at once. So I'm doing just the book one now and when I'm done with that, I'll continue the online one.

Thank you for all your suggestions!!! Those were some great suggestions! *hugs you all*

The naming wasn't only up to me, so what I did was that I put all of your suggestions into a list, along with my own, and passed it on to the rest of the family to pick from.

The final list was 68 names long! Of the 68, they crossed out all but 4 in the first go-through. :S So then we were down to Kooza, Pukki, Noni, and Tikki. And it went to a vote; I didn't like Tikki and my dad didn't like Noni, so it was down to the first two. Pukki won out at the end.

Pukki came from Pookie, which was Garfield's teddy bear. The way that conversion happened was because I was watching a soccer game where the Finnish national team was playing, and one of the players' last name was Pukki, and I thought that was a cool spelling option. (Aura, I looked it up on google translate, and she seems to be named after a sort of dam and various animals, yes? )

new pic: [link]


A RANDOM QUESTION
This Journal skins feature... is it still just for paid members?

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OLD ENTRY
This little girl needs a name ASAP. She's a German Shepherd / Chow Chow mix.
[link] [link]

Since last night, I've been getting notes from people entitled "virus" (and one this morning titled "re: virus" from someone I neither watch nor watches me) from some of my watchers. Based on what's going on in Facebook, Myspace, etc., I haven't opened any of them. Neither have I found anything about this in the Help Desk forums. Is anyone familiar with this?

If it's the same "it's a hard-drive killer" note that supposedly you contract when you watch someone (hoax), I've seen it before.

If it's something different and anyone does happen to get any weird notes or comments from me (I just checked my Activity and it doesn't show me doing anything I didn't do, but just in case) let me know, not by replying to the note, but by posting in this journal.

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I want to thank everyone who responded to the survey last time around; the answers were very enlightening and now I know what you guys like
Thanks again!

Hey everyone! I hope you're doing alright.

LANGUAGES
I'm still doing those Italian lessons. Even though I had few lessons to go when the year started, they were significantly longer, enough so that it takes me 2-3 days to do each, and an extra day for each test at the end of a lesson. And considering I had to do other stuff as well, I'm still stuck on Italian. I have three more lessons left, so I'm hoping to be done by the end of next week at the latest. I'll work hard!

I also took a look at the introduction to the German lesson. I like that course's approach - they taught me the pronouns and the capitalization rules right on the first page, as well as the "to be" verb forms. This is unlike the Italian lesson, in which they still haven't taught me the plural pronouns (we, plural you, they). Through browsing websites in German, I can spot some words in the written language and sort of figure out the meaning, but I'm hopeless at understanding spoken German (other than catching a word here and there), so I'm hoping to get better at that with this course. So there, those are my expectations.

I'm not going to be doing the finance report anymore (the reason why is complicated, and I don't want to get into that), so I'll have more time for my lessons and hopefully figuring out how to get myself to Europe.

SURVEY
Could you guys please vote in this survey? [link] It asks what the primary reason for your watching me is. I'm curious, since I have sort of gone in phases in terms of volume of submissions in different categories. It will also help me learn what you guys like.

Thanks a bunch! And, as always, thanks for your support, whatever your reason may be for doing so

RAMBLE
I want to do another pixel doll, and I already know what it will be. But right now, I'm still really hung up on that last doll I submitted [link] Goodness gracious, I'm so proud of it that I still can't stop staring at it It was a ton of work, and even though the tattoos didn't come out that convincing, I like it

Alright, until next time. Take care!
~B~