Trying isn't cool.

April's phone had rung through a full verse and a half of the German death reggae song that was her ringtone before she managed to roll over in bed and grab the phone. "What?"

The voice on the other end of the line was chipper. "Hi, is this Miss Ludgate?"

"Uh, yes," April said. She didn't get a lot of calls on her cell phone from people she didn't know, and no one who called her ever sounded that upbeat.

"Hi, April, I'm Laura! I'm calling from Bloomington Veterinary School. We received your application and everything looks great, so I'm calling to welcome you to the class of 2018!"

It was a little too early to digest that sentence fully. Once April sorted it through in her head, a sort-of smile flickered over her face, but she was quick to reply, "Uh, I don't really know what I'm doing yet."

"Oh, sure, I'm sure you have tons of other options!" Chipper chirped. "We're holding a pre-orientation tour for new accepted students this week if you'd like to come check it out!"

"...I could do that." April said after a slight pause. "Can you email me the address? I'm, like, half-awake, so I just want to make sure I remember."

Chipper laughed. "Sure! We'll see you at orientation, April!"

In the ninety seconds before April fell back asleep, she smirked to herself. She would make a good vet.

[[establishy!]]

Buying the gun was, really and truly, an honest mistake.

Well, maybe not a mistake in the sense that April genuinely regretted it, or felt bad that it had happened. She was actually pretty ambivalent about it. But she had definitely learned a valuable lesson about texting and walking at the same time (living on an island without cars had really made her quite cocky in that regard), and more importantly, about texting and making purchases. Because when you didn't look up or pay attention as you keyed your request into a new but much-appreciated vending machine, sometimes instead of getting a random snack, you got a weapon instead.

April crouched down to pick up whatever had fallen out of the dispenser slot and, well, it wasn't chips. It wasn't even chewing gum.

"What the hell?" she muttered, holding the gun in both hands and only now noticing the word "GUNS" in giant print across the front of the machine. "This isn't a lunch."

Unless she brought it into the preserve and really got pretty good with it, no, it wasn't.

[[open!]]

This is just a heads-up that I won't be around probably at all between tomorrow and Sunday, on account of heading out for a few days of exploring Strasbourg, Freiburg and maaaybe Frankfurt. (Though I've already been to that last one so it's up in the air.) I'm probs not going to bring my laptop and I don't anticipate having much time to fight with hotel wifi on my phone, so expect me to be pretty invisible. I am also going to be doing some hiking, so if I never come back, you know what killed me.

(Sigh. Every time I go somewhere. Every time.)

Catch you guys later!

Yes, April had lugged her drum set onto the roof. You know why? Because reasons.

Actually it had all been a part of a very music video-esque dance routine, but the point was that there was a drum set up there as well as an April, a three-legged pitbull and a cat, and the April and the drum set were collaborating while Joni and Cliff curled up to watch, or something.

"There are beads that wrap
Around your knees that crackle into the dark
Like a walk in the park, like a hole in your head
Like the feeling you get when you realize you're dead
This time we ride roller coasters into the ocean
We feel no emotion as we spiral down to the world
And I guess it's worth your time
Because there's some lives you live
And some you leave behind
It gets hard to explain
The gardenhead knows my name..."

She was getting a little... loud. Cliff was barking by the end of it.

[[open!]]

All things considered, that had been a pretty fun weekend.

Okay, so sans gremlin bite, it was unlikely that April would have made those same choices: bondage kind of seemed like a lot of work as a precursor to sex, and if she was going to hook up with someone, she'd rather just skip the middle step and get right to the good part. But it had still been pretty fun, especially as her gremlin-bitten self hadn't really cared about issues of laziness and exerting effort, and hooking up with Eric always made for a good time, so she had no complaints.

Also, she was keeping the leather outfit. Because there was always a chance that she'd get in a mood and want to do that again. So right now, it lay draped over an armchair in her living room, because... well, April didn't know how to wash leather, and anyway, she was kind of comfy on the floor watching Spanish soap operas with her back to the couch, and she didn't want to get up.

In the meantime, she had an untoasted Pop-Tart to eat and was tossing a broken TV remote around for Cliff to catch. This was a good morning.

[[open!]]

It wasn't like April to wake up before two PM if she didn't have to, but her sleep schedule was all off right now, so today she did. She'd actually first woken up around sunrise after falling back asleep in the Preserve, then moved to her apartment to walk Cliff and then sleep some more, and it was almost nine by the time she woke up after that.

That was when she made her way up to the roof with Cliff at her side. April didn't actually mind the smell of motor oil or the hum of woodworking stations that were so pervasive up here; those things combined with the rain and the crisp air (which she wasn't completely dressed for, in a light hoodie and jeans) were just welcome reminders that she was away from the dungeon, she was safe, and she was human. Even if the bite on her neck was still healing, when she had thought that it might have just wiped itself away like it had never been there at all.

Being a vampire had been nothing like April had thought. Disillusionment was a bitch.

[[open to MCA residents or roof-dwellers!]]

I thought really hard about titling this post something like "Availability Barricade" for the torturetainment of brat_inslayage and hawkeye_too, etc., but then I thought of an actual dance to use so that got thrown out the window.

Anyway. I'm going to Paris tonight for a week and a half of learning about media and networking at firms and scrunch-facing (see icon) while prancing around dorkily with fewerexplosions. (See what I did there? I mean, you know, there might be SOME explosions.) The hotel website says nothing about its Wi-Fi capabilities, suggesting that this hotel is possibly located in the past, so I might not be the most connected while I'm away. Thus I have pawned off my radio shifts on some spectacular volunteers and my kids have been animal-transformed. Topher is a gopher in the hands of ultron_junior, Gert is a purple chameleon being watched by justbeingbay, April is a mouse with apocalipped, and Alec is a panther cub in myownface's tender care. Please don't feed them to teal deer or rafts full of hungry students.

There may or may not be tweeting. I shall return on the 31st with jet-lag and croissants, yo.

Christmas, in April's book, was a day for lounging around in one's pajamas, drinking eggnog, and making unimpressed faces when her parents gifted her things like brightly-colored sweaters with bunnies on them. In other words, it was boring.

It did bear mentioning, however, that this particular Christmas had been a bit more interesting than those of previous years, and that was because April had a guest. Her parents found this unbelievably exciting, Rita doting over Jono while Larry asked him friendly questions about what life was like in England and whether it was true that they didn't have french fries there. Meanwhile, April's younger sister Natalie had chosen a different tactic: leaning up close to Jono and very quietly telling him details about herself.

If that was a form of flirting, April didn't want to know.

The day after Christmas, however, the rest of her family was already out shopping, which meant Jono got a break from all of that. On this chilly Wednesday morning, April could be found on the living room couch in her pajamas with her dog Cliff curled up beside her, drinking spiked hot chocolate as the snow tumbled down outside. She was also sending moddable nonsensical text messages to random contacts in her phone, because... when was that not fun?

[[for the visitor, and any recipients of texts if you please!]]

April had had an interesting morning.

It began with accidentally horrifying some guy in a park who had looked appropriately sketchy but in actuality was just supervising his kids playing with a Frisbee. Then she'd gotten followed around by a cop for a little bit -- unfortunately it seemed like her talent of being able to attract suspicion from the police was difficult to turn off -- and had ducked into some random store for a bit, where she'd been all but attacked by overzealous perfume sales reps who seemed hell-bent on making her smell like the backstage of a beauty pageant. Naturally, she'd had to combat that by stopping for a lunch of buffalo wings to get rid of the creepy flowery smell, and while enjoying those while wandering around the streets, she finally succeeded in her actual goal for the day, and managed to make a very important purchase.

She was sort of proud of that, truth be told. Not that she hadn't thought she could do it, but the confirmation was nice.

So, stuffing the bag into her pocket, she set off back toward the causeway, still eating the last of her wings and plotting out what to text Jono as soon as she had a free hand to do it with. Something about her impressive success, no doubt. But low-key. Like she didn't care.

Obviously.

[[largely establishy, but open as well!]]