I was stuck at the hospital for a long time on Thursday, so I decided to finally start reading something in my Kindle backlog. I started reading the first book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I actually found the author’s style of defining terms on a regular basis annoying. Thus, I decided to start on The Hunger Games trilogy instead.

Oh. Em. Gee.

I was hooked. So hooked, that I stayed up late on Thursday night and Friday morning finishing the first book and started on the second book. Then I stayed up until 7:30am on Saturday finishing the second and the third book. I just could not stop reading. I found myself really liking the first and the second book. The third book, while providing a good finale, was the weakest in the series, and I felt it was awfully rushed and kind of confusing.

Despite that, the book’s characters and plots really grabbed me. The dystopic setting, the totalitarian nation of Panem and her districts — all of them just gripped me like one of the Capitol’s citizens watching the game. Yet the harshness of the game, the cruel fates awaiting for the Tributes, and the whole political shebang of the trilogy have left me quite horrified at the same time. The philosophy of the books reminded me of Animorphs; both series made me question the world and how it’s not always black-and-white. Really, it has been a long time since I’ve read something so impacting. I am only sorry it took me this long to read it, but at the same time, I’m glad I waited for the whole trilogy to be completed instead of waiting around with a nasty cliffhanger living in my head.

Last year, when I found out that my high school band teacher was going to retire this year, I thought about getting her a special retirement gift. I came up with the idea to have a friend design a collage of her favourite things, and I’d get the design made it into a puzzle that I’d put together and get it framed. This is the end result (with a matching mousepad). I had the gift all ready since January, and while I did not want time to fly by, I still wanted May to come so I could give this to her. This gift is finally in her hands.

I think this is the longest I’ve gone without blogging. Holy cow.

School had completely taken over my life. I always thought undergrad was bad, but grad school is even more time consuming! Arghhh. Thank goodness this is the last week for spring semester. I will have a bit of a reprieve before starting my summer semester in mid-May.

I plan to enjoy this breather with a lot of gaming and other entertainment. I need it — no, I deserve it. This semester was just really brutal because one of the classes subject matter was far too difficult for me to comprehend. I did not like learning about budgeting, management, and other programming details. I’m just glad it’s all over!

This week, my tax return came back to me. I’d already decided to stash a good chunk of it towards my grad school fund, and the remaining I could spend however I wanted. Well, after getting a PS Vita, a Kindle Paperwhite, a Nintendo 3DS XL, and a Samsung Galaxy S III . . . I pretty much realised that I did not need anything “big”. Well, I’d like a surround sound system, but that can wait. Haha, seriously, though, I did not want anything else, so I decided to donate to a charity or organisation.

So I asked my friend B. for suggestions. I told her I wanted to donate to an LGBT-related organisation. B. knows that I also am interested in youth work, so she suggested some LGBT youth organisations. One of the ones she suggested was GLSEN. I looked into them and their mission, and I decided this group was the one I wanted. I also looked into The Trevor Project, but their donation page was not using encryption (I didn’t see the “https” symbol on my browser), so I decided to just stick with GLSEN. And so I donated. In B’s honour. I wasn’t able to donate a lot, but I hope what I did donate will help them somehow.

A few days ago, my old phone basically kaputed. Well, it was fixable, more or less, but it’d require reformatting the whole phone. Even then, I’d still have trouble with it, so that made me decide to just get a new phone, with a new number, on a new carrier.

I sought out one of my cousins to help me get this phone. Through research and friends, I decided to get the Samsung Galaxy S3 in pebble blue, on SK Telecom, with the LTE 42 plan that comes with 180 minutes of phone call, 200 text messages, and 1.1 GB of data.

My verdict so far? I LOVE IT. It is so much faster than my old phone, with more available RAM memory at 700-900mb (compared to 200mb on my previous phone), and it just feels so new. I do not regret choosing to upgrade to this phone. In fact, I feel like I should have done this sooner!