What I’ve done on this:

• Wash my hair – Although the depressing thing about having put this on here is that I need to do it again on Tuesday
• Tidy
• Clean the flat
• Deal with things I’ve uncovered while tidying – might just be pay credit card bill, do finances and call Toyota to fix my car (which isn’t broken) – I mostly did this, but the Toyota service department weren’t in at the weekend, so they wouldn’t book my car in. Helpful.
• Make muffins, biscuits and flapjacks
• Read/reply to/do something with all the RSS feeds I have marked as unread in RSS Bandit I did do this, but now I have more
• Do some writing. I have about three things to write before the end of the month, so I should get on with it, really I wrote quite a bit last night and this morning
• Sort out what I’m going to say at our Rotaract talk on 18th – I have two minutes on the club non-fundraising stuff and one minute on me
• Only watch stuff on my PVR taped while I watched nothing but Olympics and also lovefilm DVD I finished the DVD and am down to just three episodes of Being Human out of all the stuff I taped while watching Olympics
• Do a load of washing today and another tomorrow
• Do monthly backup
• Get LibraryThing book list up to date

I would have managed all of it, except that I went for a walk in the afternoon. I felt great while I was doing it and for about five minutes after I got back, but despite lying down for two hours afterwards I just feel increasingly more terrible the longer I spend not lying down. So the rest will have to wait and I’ll get started on the Being Human instead.

Things I should do this weekend:

• Wash my hair (I know that’s something I’m hardly likely to forget, but at least this way I’ll get to cross something off)
• Tidy
• Clean the flat
• Deal with things I’ve uncovered while tidying – might just be pay credit card bill, do finances and call Toyota to fix my car (which isn’t broken)
• Make muffins, biscuits and flapjacks
• Read/reply to/do something with all the RSS feeds I have marked as unread in RSS Bandit
• Do some writing. I have about three things to write before the end of the month, so I should get on with it, really
• Sort out what I’m going to say at our Rotaract talk on 18th – I have two minutes on the club non-fundraising stuff and one minute on me
• Only watch stuff on my PVR taped while I watched nothing but Olympics and also lovefilm DVD
• Do a load of washing today and another tomorrow
• Do monthly backup
• Get LibraryThing book list up to date

I think that’s probably everything…

I started in January 2008, so it’s taken two years (I’ve been too distracted by curling to post this for the past couple of weeks).

50.22 / 50kg (100%)

There is no more curling and I am sad. I watched about six games at the weekend and we lost most of them which was depressing. Especially as we didn’t get to the semis, despite the men being the top team in the world and two of them being full time curlers. Rubbish. There’ll be no more curling for four years now – I can’t imagine the BBC will show the wheelchair curling at the Paralympics. If there’s some International curling in Scotland at some point in the future I make go on holiday and watch some curling while I’m there, though.

On the plus side, I now have time to do things other than watch curling and ice skating. I just have two weeks worth of TV to watch instead. Which actually won’t take me a week – there’s not really much on at the moment.

Saturday night I helped run the bar at the annual Welsh evening (it being St David’s Day today). It consisted of quite a bit of singing in Welsh… We had a whole load of beer left over that we couldn’t take back to Tescos, so I took it into work because I know people there would go mad for free beer. And, I brought it all home again. The reason: they’d have to get it out of my boot. Despite my car being parked a whole two minutes walk away, it was a sunny day and I was parked in the same place everyone else parks. I knew people at work were apathetic, but not being able to get off your arse for free beer is something else. So I’ll be throwing that away now.

Yesterday is the one year anniversary of me being ill. But since it was Rotaract last night I didn’t get the time to post here between that and the skating and the curling (only 8 round robin matches to go!). I’m a lot better than I was a year ago, but then I had labyrinthitis and couldn’t move without feeling like I was on a Waltzer. Now I’m just recovering from it.

I feel ok about it at the moment, but that’s because I’m having a good week. At the moment my aims are:

• To stay up late for the general election, if I get one for my birthday, as is being predicted (everyone I’ve told about this thinks I’m crazy, but it’s exciting! Especially at the moment when it’s not clear who’ll win).
• To go to Wimbledon on the first Thursday – when we have tickets for Centre Court! – and get through the day (it’s usually tiring…)
• To go on some days out this year, like I was planning to last year
• To go back to New York to see hhertzof’s bunnies and Flushing Meadow, and maybe go back to Canada too, since I can only cope with America for a week and that’s pushing it. This I obviously can’t do until I’m really sure I’m better, so that’s probably more likely to be next year at this rate.

In contrast to last year, I’m not planning anything at all this year because I have absolutely not idea at all when I might be better.

I am so behind on the Olympics – I have a PVR full of curling. I did discover that team GB will play 18 matches between then and that’s if they don’t get to the semis… I think it’s safe to say I’m not going to be watching all those in a week. So after spending Tuesday and Wednesday night (around pancakes in the case of Tuesday) watching the first men and women’s matches, I swapped back to skating. So now I’ve seen the pairs and the men’s short program and I’m all skated out. So this morning’s skating will just have to wait until tomorrow.

The rest of the curling will wait until after the Olympics – I’ll just wait and see if we get into the semis and watch that.

Because of this I haven’t watched any TV all week and I have a whole load of RSS feeds marked as unread that I just haven’t read/commented on. And a whole load of other things to do. And other sports I’d quite like to see some of. I really could do without having to work…

Remix is coming up again this year and I’m looking forward to it – it’s fun and it’s different and I always seem to end up writing something I never have before/never thought I would.

You’re eligible if you have at least five 500 word stories or at least seven 100 word stories in one fandom on their long list (which they are currently discussing adding to).

Since I know that there are people who are nearly eligible, but not quite, or people that are nearly eligible in one fandom but not quite, how about a little drabbleathon? All those drabble comms I used to be in, years back, are now paying dividends because I’m eligible for four fandoms, one of which I’ve only ever written drabbles in.

So, anyone who wants to write a drabble – for whatever reason, even if it has nothing to do with remix – comment here with fandoms, and characters too if you like, other people can give you prompts, then you write some drabbles.

It’s probably a good idea to link to your comment, so your friends who aren’t reading this can give you prompts – or you can post another entry on your LJ/blog. But since this post is in three places, lets keep all the prompts etc in the LJ post.

I don’t know how I’m going to watch all the Olympics. I saw bits yesterday morning in their extended highlights, which was just the right amount of all the sports that look crazy enough to watch but get samey pretty quickly.

Tonight I managed to get the pair short program into about an hour but cutting out anything that wasn’t the actual skating. But tonight’s the free program which has more skating, then tomorrow there’s a GB curling match and I’m going out for pancakes in the evening.

And there’s only so much Olympics you can watch in an evening. Fortunately I have nothing planned for the weekend, so it might involve watching a lot of ice skating and curling and a bit of other sports…

I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post that various people have been posting their TV series for the meme at isurrendered and there’s some really interesting stuff there. I think I have the smallest cast…

Copper won the prize for guessing the connection between the actors in mine: they’ve all played policemen/women:

• Peter Davison was DC ‘Dangerous’ Davies in The Last Detective
• Ben Peyton was PC Ben Haywood in The Bill
• Philip Glenister was DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes and also DCI William Bell in State of Play
• Jaye Griffiths was DI Sally Johnson in The Bill

Georgia Moffett only played a policewoman’s daughter: she was Abi Nixon, DS/DI Sam Nixon’s daughter in The Bill.

1. Comment to this post with “I surrender!” and I’ll assign you the basis of some TV show idea. (Science fiction show, medical drama, criminal procedure, etc…)
2. Create a cast of characters, including the actors who’d play them.
3. Add in any actor photos, character bios and show synopsis that you want.
4. Post to your own journal.

lost_spook gave me:

Detective drama set in the 90s/80s/70s/60s/50s (take your pick; you can sell the resulting soundtrack album even if the show doesn’t take) around a disgraced ex-spy and his 17 year old daughter who’s had to leave her posh boarding school. They’re forced to form a detective agency to fight crime and avoid poverty (because working in Tescos is less dramatic). With supporting cast as large or small as you like.

Which I thought would take a while, but it turned out it didn’t…
Read more…

I feel like I should post something, but have nothing exciting to say. It’s Wednesday – I don’t like Wednesdays.

So have a TV meme instead: Read more…

This weekend I have:

• Tidied
• Cleaned
• Done my finances – and discovered the electricity bill I thought I’d paid on Christmas Eve I actually hadn’t
• Sorted out some paperwork – and found a two month old letter from the doctors inviting me for an asthma review
• Baked chocolate chip cookies, fairy cakes (with purple icing), chocolate chip biscuits, flapjacks and chocolate sponge puddings

And if that wasn’t enough, I have uploaded a load of stories to A03. These are some of the stories I have on Harry’s journal that are written for weekly prompt comms. It’s useful to have them in order, but these are essentially quick things that I dashed off. They’re not the greatest things I’ve written ever, but they’ve been useful for getting me writing – and sometimes it’s useful to just get something over and done with without spending weeks on it. Think of them as flashfic if you will.

I thought it’s entirely possible that some people might be vaguely interested in them, so they are:
Harry’s childhood
Harry’s present

The latter starts where the Sarah Jane Smith audios stop and run concurrently with New Who, Torchwood and SJA and I did work out what went where at one point, but I have since forgotten.

And now I am tired and fifteen minutes late with Being Human.

I asked a couple of posts ago if anyone wanted drabbles and lost_spook asked for:

anything to do with Press Gang, Kenny and wrong numbers

so I wrote:

Wrong number, right thing to do

“Lynda?” Kenny frowned upon hearing the voice on the other end of the phone. “I didn’t call you.”

“I know.” Her tone was smug. “I had the line re-routed.”

He sighed. “Lynda, you can’t stop me from going to Australia.”

“Oh, can’t I?”

He had to admit it was hard to stop Lynda doing anything she didn’t want to, but he hated to leave it like this. “Come and see me off at the airport.” When she said nothing he added, “Please?”

“I’ll think about it.” She slammed the phone down.

Kenny hoped she would forgive him for leaving.

I am trying to make more of an effort to post to Twitter and not just reply to people’s comments. And post here too, but that requires fewer words, although not necessarily less effort. The number of drafts I’ve gone through in the past to get down to 140 characters…

Last night’s The Bill was good as usual, and amazingly didn’t make me feel really dizzy halfway through. And I think I’ve learnt the names of two of the PCs and I quite like Sgt Stone. I thought he was going to be dodgy, but perhaps not.

Anyway, last night there was a character on it playing the main character’s brother, and I recognised his voice from somewhere, but couldn’t for the life of me work out where. I thought that maybe he sort of looked familiar too, but couldn’t pin it down and eventually decided I must be imagining it.

Except that then I realised where I recognised the voice – he was Colin in Press Gang. At which point he wasn’t in a scene for absolutely ages, but the next one he was in, someone called his name, he looked up and the expression was pure Colin and I knew I was right, even before checking on the credits.

It was very surreal – out of the last four episodes of The Bill we’ve had Luke from SJA, Ianto from Torchwood and Colin from Press Gang. There is sadly no picture on the official website, and nor is there a video clip with him talking, but I managed to find a clip with him in. It’s in this one at 00.00.48 where. And I have taken a handy screencap and annotated it: Read more…

This week was starting out as a good week – I felt great on Monday morning. Then I stayed late to help someone else on a project and the week has gone downhill from there. Although I did have a very nice cod with tomato sauce in one of the Italian restaurants last night.

Since I installed Windows 7, my printer doesn’t work with it. I had a complete arse with it in XP, but it was perfect in Vista. In theory it should just have been a case of downloading the drivers, but in practice that had no effect. So I browsed a lot of forums and tried various things, none of which had any effect.

I ended up asking HP support who told me to do lots of things I’d already done (despite telling them I’d done it), were complete idiots and treated me like an idiot and didn’t read my emails properly. And now they’ve given up. They’ve concluded that the problem must be my computer and I should contact the computer’s manufacturer and get them to format it. Beyond the obvious question of why on earth would I get Acer to format my computer, my answer to that is not just no, it’s hell, no.

So now I need a new printer that definitely, definitely works with Windows 7. So one that’s come out this year, probably. And ideally works with my current cartridges too, since I have one of each spare… I hate being printerless as well. I don’t use it that often but now I keep needing to use it!

I can nearly breathe out of my nose. This wouldn’t normally be an achievement but it is the first time in a week. My mouth and throat were so dry that I was drinking 1.5l of water a day, which is ridiculous. I know you’re supposed to drink 2l a day, but I was going to the toilet every hour and only really drink about half a litre a day usually. I just don’t have the capacity for large amounts of liquid.

And a drabble meme from lost_spook I’ve been waiting to put up until I’m feeling well enough to think:

The first TEN people to comment in this post get to request that I write a drabble of any pairing/character with a prompt. In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their ability level.

Although feel free to ignore that last sentence – it’s not like I’m going to be checking. By first ten people, I mean first ten notifications in my inbox regardless of whether they come from my blog, LJ or DW.

There’s a list of fandoms I’ve written in on the left of my fanfic archive, but feel free to request anything I know. If I really can’t write it I’ll just get you to pick something else.

It’s just one thing after another at the moment. Last week I was doing really well, felt really good and consequently overdid it. So this week I’ve felt terrible and been busy, which hasn’t helped. I’m just at the point of starting to feel a bit better again and now I have a cold.

Why can’t I just sleep until I’m better? Or more to the point, why is it that whenever I put 301 on there’s either no Australian Open or they’re just finishing? And why do we always have to listen to Sam Smith rabbiting on annoyingly?

Considering that I don’t like driving and given the option would far rather not, I can’t quite believe I’m going to say this but… I really want to be able to drive to work.

I’d be warmer, I could leave later, so get up later, so get more sleep, I could listen to the radio (I haven’t heard Chris Evans at breakfast yet and I’m missing the Five Live guys with the news on my way home). It wouldn’t matter if I left a few minutes late, I would have to slide over so much snow, I would spend ages waiting for a bus and I could leave work whatever time I liked (well, after 5.30pm obviously).

I can’t drive at the moment because although the main roads are fine, I’d have to park down a side road, which aren’t so great. My road isn’t great and to make it worse, I’d have to turn my car round 180 degrees, it’s currently on a slight slope and there’s a pile of snow behind it because it’s been parked there ever since we had the heavy snow Tuesday night last week. And most importantly, having experienced driving on snow once I’m not desperate to try it again.

It’s supposed to be a lot warmer from tomorrow (where a lot warmer means above freezing) so hopefully there’ll be lots of melting going on. But I am so sick of the snow.

I’m going for a theme with my LJ icons. Also, it makes them multi-use. I did one a while ago with Harry Sullivan, Harry Pearce and Harry Potter:

Now I’ve done Jack Meadows, Jack O’Neill and Jack Harkness:

and Sam Carter, Sam Gamgee and Sam Beckett:

I had a really surreal moment at the end of The Bill last night when, in the trailer for next week, I could have sworn I saw Tommy Knight (Luke in SJA, although I was too tired to remember the actor’s name at the time). I contemplated rewinding – I don’t watch live because I refuse to watch adverts. I’ve been on The Bill website a lot recently to try and learn some of the names because I don’t recognise most of the regulars any more, so I know they don’t have credits or tell you about the guest stars (not when they’re not that big, anyway). But what I did find were more trailers and clear evidence that it is Tommy Knight 30 seconds into this video and a photo that tells me he’s playing Greg. Although I am more excited that Terry was in it – I hadn’t seen him yet, so I didn’t quite believe the website when they said he was still in it.

I am enjoying The Bill at the moment, despite its lack of theme tune and pullover, and I am getting used to the incidental music. I can even name some of the new characters. Not that I can necessarily recognise them first off, mind you, even though they have their names on their uniforms these days…

I stopped watching in June 2005, I discovered from looking through my blog. And started again in October 2009. Thanks to the magic of YouTube I’ve been watching some old stuff and I can honestly that what I’ve missed has been utter rubbish, for the most part. And it’s obvious from the synopses too, which consist of a lot of sentences about the character’s personal lives back then. These days it’s a couple of sentences about the crime, which is what I’m watching for. I don’t mind them having personal lives, as long as it’s a background to the crime and isn’t the main focus.

Now I might go and put on an early half hour episode from the Volume Two DVD I got for Christmas and see who I recognise…

There is currently snow about. You’d be hard pressed not to miss it – even my parents have had snow. But it’s quite amusing.

First, the background. I grew up on the south coast of England where it snowed every three years or so. Although it did, however, completely fail to snow while I was at uni – except in the Christmas of my first year where it snowed at home and nowhere else. Until last winter I’d never seen the snow stay around for more than a day. Until this winter and one a few years ago, I’d never seen it start to snow and settle during the day. So I was a bit startled before Christmas when it did just that, it was really slippery and I vowed never to drive in snow again.

Cut to this winter. There are quite a lot of people at work who, at the mention of snow, get all excited. They were rather less excited after the sudden snow we had before Christmas, mind you, but they’re back to being yay about snow again.

Yesterday it started snowing about 5pm, so although I did drive home in it, it wasn’t really any different from driving in rain. It was forecast to get heavier and it did. We cancelled our Rotaract cheese and wine planning meeting for the second time for the same reason. So everywhere was a bit white this morning.

But it is just ordinary snow. Walking to the station this morning to get the bus was pretty easy because people had already walked along the pavements and flattened all the snow. So I reckon, looking at the height of the bits people have walked on and comparing it to the bits people haven’t, that we’ve got about two inches. The most snow I’ve ever seen was last January, which was more than that.

The main roads are fine, just slushy at the edges. The minor roads are snowy, but really slushy where enough people have driven. So understandably the bus was 35mins late. And then he didn’t drive that fast because the slush isn’t great to drive on. The route does go through a village and coming out of that onto the main road the bus did go sideways. I was just glad I wasn’t driving.

So I got to work 45mins late to find that no one else in my office was there. One of them lives not far from me and hadn’t come in because she reckoned the roads were impassable. Someone else hadn’t come in because they didn’t believe the bus company’s website when they said they were running the buses until 7pm and she thought they’d leave her stranded. (Amusingly, the bus that runs between home and work stops at 6.53 usually…)

Given that I’m the one least used to snow, I can’t believe how wet they’re all being. I left early because I had loads of overtime to take and had failed to take any of it on Monday or Tuesday. The roads were much better and because there was no traffic and the bus was on time, I had the fastest bus journey home I’ve ever had. I’m waiting to see how many people bother to make it tomorrow now.

The best part is that I bought some really big, thick gloves from Primark at Christmas (for a whole £3) and although I can’t do a thing with my hands while I’m wearing them, they do keep my hands lovely and warm. I was also wearing my fencing socks on top of my usual socks, my walking boots (waterproof and good grip), my tracksuit bottoms on top of my work trousers, three jumpers and two hoods and a hat on my head. The only part of me that was cold was my feet and part of that was because they were really stuffed into my shoes so I couldn’t really feel them anyway.