It's gotta be significant that just after the announcer told us Life on Mars would be back next year, my TV crashed...

9.7cm / 155cm (6.3%)

There's nothing quite like reading children's books that get your count up quickly. Recently I've read:

The Princess of the Chalet School - The Chalet School books seem a lot less easy to read than the two I've listed below, yet no less interesting. It's interesting to see how their society is structured, because it's written quite a long time ago and set in Austria.

Sweet Valley University (Billie's Secret) - Like everyone else at the time I read Sweet Valley High when I was younger. I think Sweet Valley University started coming out just as I stopped so I've been curious since then to see what they're like. I know this is book 18 but loads seems to have happened since then. Can't beat the original though, I won't be reading any more of them.

Cheerleaders (Feuding) - It's strange, when reading this, how much of the story comes back to me. Mind you, it's all related to their love lives so it's not exactly complicated. It's not bad, though, because the characters are actually interesting.

I seriously need to get back some proper books soon, although it's nice to get through one in a lunchtime.

I felt much more awake for a break. After scrabbling around trying to remember where I put Quantum Leap I moved some CDs and other assorted crap and came across Thought Crimes, which Sel had given me a copy of. The Andreas Katsulas tribute was on there too, and it's really good. I'd forgotten how many stirring speeches G'Kar made. It was very sad to watch.

Thought Crimes, though, I enjoyed. I did spend most of the time trying to work out where I recognised the main character from and eventually decided it must be from Angel. I was right, she was in Angel, and Roswell High. But I was recognising her from The OC. I feel so much better for knowing. As the first episode of a series I'm not certain it had anywhere to go from there, but it was really interesting seeing how she grew and changed.

Progress on the weekend's to do list:

• Sit down with my Remix fic and introduce it to a thesaurus and come out with version 4 - I have but I haven't typed it up yet because I'm not sure about it, so I'll have to come back to it another time.
• Sort out my bookmarks - Yes!
• Decrease the number of RSS posts I have in the Read folder - There are now none in there
• Do some reviews for Sel - I have two bookmarked so that should be easy given above - Well I did those two
• Review some books on amazon that I’ve bought from there - I find them quite useful, so it seems only reasonable to give something back in return - Never mind
• Buy Trillian Pro. The 15 day evaluation was a bad idea in retrospect because I like it. Also see if I can find a skin I like that tells me my status on the taskbar so I don’t accidentally spend all evening out to lunch - Never mind, no rush
• Maybe make a start on changing my website - Now this is what I've spent my time doing. Never mind start, it's nearly done. I just need to sort out my fan fic, photos and copy the new design over to the blog
• Do a whole load of Rotaract stuff - including preparing for Tuesday’s meeting before I forget what I need to bring up there - I'll do it tomorrow
• Reply to some of the emails sitting around in my inbox - Never mind, although there's still time this evening

I slept in till 10.30 this morning. Possibly it was playing with my website, and therefore working hard, that made me tired. I have a really weird Quantum Leap dream this morning. They found Sam, who was really old, due to spending lots of time leaping around, as himself. Someone makes a comment that they found him in 1699, but I think that was dream strangeness cos it doesn't make sense in the cold light of day. That was all reasonable enough but then it got into some strange stuff with Al's daughters running from something and established that his youngest was called Claire and the oldest was called River, although I kept thinking she was called Elizabeth. The Claire thing's definitely from last night's Bugs cos there was a woman in that called Claire. The rest was just the ordinary dream weirdness that I can't even put into words.

I'm feeling quite brain dead now, though, so I mgiht go and watch an episode of Bugs. Or perhaps I should watch an episode of Quantum Leap, as I need to change the Bugs CD anyway as I've got to the end of series 1.

I've managed one thing off my to-do list for this weekend: Upgrade WP to 2.0. It went nice and smoothly, and was simple, that was good. Anyone reading this at Livejournal will notice there's now a bit of text above the post linking back to the equivalent one at WP. And it now has tags! If you want to read anything with that tag you're better off looking at it in WP as I'm not going to backdate my tags on LJ, plus LJ has fewer posts than WP has.

I am now not working this weekend (yay!) so I am planning to:

• Sit down with my Remix fic and introduce it to a thesaurus and come out with version 4
• Sort out my bookmarks
• Decrease the number of RSS posts I have in the Read folder
• Do some reviews for Sel - I have two bookmarked so that should be easy given above
• Review some books on amazon that I've bought from there - I find them quite useful, so it seems only reasonable to give something back in return
• Buy Trillian Pro. The 15 day evaluation was a bad idea in retrospect because I like it. Also see if I can find a skin I like that tells me my status on the taskbar so I don't accidentally spend all evening out to lunch
• Maybe make a start on changing my website
• Do a whole load of Rotaract stuff - including preparing for Tuesday's meeting before I forget what I need to bring up there
• Reply to some of the emails sitting around in my inbox

I don't know why I'm so tired when it's not quite 10pm yet. Perhaps I will go and watch an episode of Bugs then go to bed.

I've just upgraded WP to 2.0, so this is a test of both WP and the new LJ Cross-Poster.

• Volunteer to do some data entry this weekend. I'm already busy at work anyway, so I could do with some time off. But I felt sorry for someone (bad move!) cos they're so desperate. I am going to get the same number of hours off that I work, though, that was the only condition I would do it under
• Put your oven glove in the chicken grease remnants. For it is greasy.
• Put rice milk in hot chocolate. It makes the hot chocolate taste of rice milk.

On the plus side, I pimped WP to Sel who found a LJ cross-poster that works better than the one I've currently got, and works with WP 2.0. So I will be upgrading at some point.

I currently have four short nails for guitar playing purposes. I still can't play but now I can't type either. And the nails on the fingers of my left hand look all horrid and short

...the skip of the GB men's curling team is very good looking. And is only a year older than me, which made me feel a bit better for watching large amount of men's curling, and not really being bothered about the women's. Just don't tell me if he's married, I'm quite happy in my fantasy world.

A meme about you, courtesy of Wannatee:

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I'm currently watching Curling on one of the BBC Interactive channels, which is very cool. I've only got half an eye on it because they're only on the third end but it's better than the Ice Hockey they're showing on BBC2 and the other interactive channel. Plus it's the first time I've actually used it, so that's quite exciting. I've also discovered why all our curlers are Scottish: the only rink in England is in Kent.

I visisted Sel this weekend and we went to a little second hand bookshop, that despite its size has masses of books in it. And ended up wth £7 worth of children's books that I wasn't planning on buying. Um. They'll make a nice contrast to the thick history one mum's lent me.

Reading my height in books: an update

6.2cm / 155cm (4.0%)

I've just finished British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker's Guide. I couldn't remember why I'd put it on my Amazon wish list, but bought it anyway. I discovered why, when I read the chapter list, and discovered the Blakes 7 chapter author. There were some interesting ideas in it that I hadn't considered before.

Overall I enjoyed it. I really liked the historical aspects of the Quatermass chapter. The nuclear war one is really depressing, though. I'm not entirely convinced by the parallels in the Sapphire and Steel chapter. But as I've not seen it and know very little about the state of the country & politics around 1979 I can't really comment. The only chapter I really disagreed with was the Red Dwarf one. The author talked about how it relates to gender and race. I like it because it's funny, so am admittedly uninteresting in taking it any deeper. But she did go on about the Cat acting the way he does because it's alluding to black Americans. And there was me thinking it was a parody of a cat.

Easter: I had a surf round last night at the Lake District. Which looked vaguely interesting until there was a mention of Hadrian's Wall being not far away. So I'm so going. As my last holidays were in America and Australia I had entirely forgotten the whole point of holidays is castles and bookshops. Although I did get unreasonably excited at going to a Barnes and Noble in America. I've not booked for Conference yet, and my boss was off so I couldn't book any time off. I did establish that because he has holiday I can't do the Lake District and then recover(!) at Conference, so I'll be doing Conference, then the Lake District. I'm amazed it's only a couple of hours from Birmingham, though, because it's a long way North.

Bugs: I sat down to watch Bugs with dinner and all of a sudden there was Robbie! (as in DI Robbie Ross from Taggart). Sounding decidedly un-Scottish, but very cool anyway. Possibly some other stuff happened but frankly who cares. It's Robbie.

And thingy, whatshisname from Yes Minister was on The Avengers last night, looking pretty much exactly the same.

I knew there was something really important I wanted to blog about yesterday:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/uk_politics/4714992.stm

We're getting a smoking ban for summer 2007. After all that wrangling over pubs that sell food etc, I can't believe it's gone with such a big majority. Although interestingly, only the Tories had a majority of no ban. I wish it came into effect sooner but I'm looking forward to being able to go to the pub and be able to breathe while I'm there, and not have to wash all my clothes afterwards.

I'm also undecided about what I'm going to do over Easter. We established that I basically can't eat any passover food, so there's no way I'm going to go home and watch everyone eat nice food while I eat the ordinary disgusting stuff. And I'm not staying here either.

I have had people try to convince me to go to Eastercon, which would be quite cool as I've never been to Scotland before, so I could take some extra days off and have a look round Glasgow. Or I could go to Rotaract Conference, which isn't quite as badly north as I thought - it's in Windemere. I've never been to the Lake District either, so I'd quite like to go there too. Only bad side is I have to decide by the end of the month.

On the other hand I could just bugger off somewhere else entirely. I liked mum's suggestion of Paris except I don't think I can quite deal with the food issue in a foreign language yet and Easter weekend is a really bad time to go to Europe, given that they're worse than us about Sundays.

I thought about going to America - I can only cope with the place with for a week anyway, but mum pointed out that's a long way to go. Although not as far as Australia, but that would be the one place that would require travel sickness pills and mine went out of date in May.

So I just don't know!

I gave myself a deadline of 10pm to finish my Remix first draft. It's now 10 to and I have 2500 words! Not terribly good ones, and I did find I had to rejig things because I had one character in one place when he can't possibly have been there. But at least I have something to work from now.

I was entirely unsurprised to find the whole of the Mens Curling team are Scottish. I'm enjoying all sorts of weird and wonderful sports in the evenings. The doubles luge is definitely insane, though. Hurling yourself down a track on a tea tray is mad enough, but strapped to someone else? I am looking forward to the skeleton tomorrow, though.

It's quite nice to just watch be able to admire the impressive skiing/skating/insanity/whatever, without thinking about GB getting any medals (except in the curling). It's good to see people getting excited about coming in 14th, for example, because that's still 14th in the Olympics, which is pretty amazing, when you think about it.

I had entirely forgotten about the top 5 meme a while back. Avon asked me for my top 5 senior officers in The Bill:

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I remember Bugs being really cutting edge at the time - it was the first time I'd seen a writeable CD. It was made in 1995-99 and set in the near future. So their various gadgets and gizmos still look pretty cool. It's the computers that really date it. One of the characters didn't know what a mouse was (at the time, it was funny but not so unusual). But one thing really got me with the third episode. A guy has written a top program for flying planes, that incidentally, can be controlled from elsewhere with a computer (and a mouse). It fits on a floppy. In fact he pulled a copy from a pile of floppies - I don't remember the last time I saw that many, never mind used one!

Tonight's Olympics were a bit boring, partly because they gave us a few results, showed us the men's skating, then showed some skiing, luge and curling - the results of which they'd previous told us! The commentators annoyed me a bit in the skating as well by continually repeating what their eight required elements are - despite having gone through it at the beginning. Even though it was just the short program it basically ended up being who had screwed up least.

I had a sudden fright when I looked at the calendar today and realised that the Jack/Liz fic is due in two weeks. And as I'm going to the Rotary District Conference in the middle of March, my Remix fic is actually going to be due in four weeks. Um. It has nine paragraphs. So now I'm off to force myself to write some more even though I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing with it.

I entirely confused myself this morning by glacing at my inbox. I had a message with the subject Re: Joe Flanigan and another one with the subject hot hot hot! and my mind put those together. The second one was from Emma about the weather, so what confused me is that she doesn't even know who Joe Flanigan is and certainly wouldn't be telling me he's hot because he's not her type at all. Probably.

I got entirely distracted this weekend by making myself a Life on Mars icon, and today submitting three postcards to the SGA Flashfic postcard secrets challenge.

I have got my Jack/Liz fic up to v4 but I'm still not convinced about most of it which is not good. It's not due till the 3rd, though, so I could leave it for a bit and try and work out some plot for my Remix fic (why did I decide to expand on something?)

I feel as if I've been good today because I've tidied and cleaned my room. I bought some more CD boxes and transferred some of my CDs into them from DVD boxes. And put some DVDs into those boxes. So now not only do I have space for all my DVDs, I even have room for more! I really don't have space for any more books, though.

I watched a bit of the Olympics today. It's the only time you can actually see any skating any more. They cut down so much on the BBC that it took a couple of years to notice they'd stopped showing it at all. It's also an opportunity to watch sports you don't usually see. Like Luge - otherwise known as throwing yourself down an icy track on a tea tray. It was interesting to see a view of it from the competitor - it looked scary. I'm looking forward to the Skeleton - throw yourself down an icy track on a tea tray with your chin just above the ground. I'm looking forward to seeing some skiing as well, which mum used to watch regularly when I was little. It was years before I found out the program was called Ski Sunday, though, because she called it Ski Splats.

I actually started on my Bugs DVDs last night. I bought myself a box set of all of them, which is 40 episodes. It was my first fandom and I remember watching it because Jaye Griffiths had just left The Bill when it started. I loved it at the time (although I wasn't entirely convinced by season 4) but I was a bit hesitant about rewatching in case it didn't live up to what I remembered (which is very little). I needn't have worried because I'm loving it just as much, ten years later.

Tomorrow I will do some writing. Although I found a Kakuro book, so I'm distracted with that and the Hanjie, now I've finished the last Sudoku in the Christmas G2 puzzles.

I now have a working right shift key, with thanks to my friend and some superglue. And then I used it to bring my Jack/Liz fic up to version 3. I seem to get to v5 pre-beta these days, so one of the things on my big list of things to do this weekend is to print it out and get it to v4 at least. I got overexcited and started my remix fic as well. Although by started I mean wrote four paragraphs and got stuck.

I squeed at The Avengers last night. It was all set on trains and in stations, and at the start we saw a man running between a whole load of stationary trains. There was a lovely long shot from above and they all looked like the type of trains we had in our electric train set. Which was very exciting. At the time they seemed more like real trains should be than real trains. It's almost disappointing now that you can get ones that look like Virgin trains - why would you want to?

If I hadn't left work late I was intending to watch Quantum Leap, which I had just discovered was on ITV3 at 6pm. It was only after I realised I wasn't going to make it on time that I realised this meant it would have adverts in and I just can't cope with that. It was only later that, given I'd have to pause it anyway to deal with dinner that I realised it doesn't matter cos I'd fast forward through them. It's a bit academic anyway cos I have them all on CD but there's just something different about watching them on real TV.

The one nice thing...one of the nice things...about my boss being off sick last week is that I had a nice-smelling office. Now he's definitely back, and definitely smoking, and definitely coming back in and making me feel sick. So, I need something to make the office smell nicer.

There's no point getting in some pot pourri or some smelly thing that just sits there because that won't be strong enough. I can't use a spray because those set off my asthma.

Is there anything anyone can think of that might work? Extra points if they do it in white musk

It's quite handy having space for 6 LJ icons because it means I can get my appropriate bad day one out.

As we're so busy at work at the moment I decided to go in early, as I didn't want to be staying late, so I set my alarm. But, as I discovered at 8.30 this morning, failed to actually turn it on.

I thought that as my landlady's radio was on, and at that time she's usually getting dressed (with her radio on) that I'd wait a bit till she left, and in the meantime had breakfast and checked my email. I turned out, at 9.05, that she was actually still in bed and at that point got up and ran a bath. At which stage I gave up on being able to wash my hair, and went in. Needless to say, I still had to work late.

The most annoying thing at the moment is that because I was off last week I don't really know what's going on, so I don't know what I need to do tomorrow, or the rest of the week. I'm guessing it's going to be busy though.

I haven't had a chance to go to Tescos for a couple of weeks, so my fruit and veg collection consists of two grapefruit and an apple. Waitrose might be able to provide me with another apple, if I scrabble about, but I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be eating before I can go shopping on Saturday.

I managed to rip off my right shift key on Monday night. I really didn't want to spend hours on the phone to India, so I thought I'd email them. It took me two days to get the website to do anything when I clicked on the relevant link. Now it tells you you can email them. Hmm, helpful.

So instead I chatted with them - which took two days as well (the first time it refused to believe I was a home customer). After ten minutes spent proving I really am me as who knows what phone number/address/email address/name they have on their system. How you're supposed to guess I do not know.

The Indian I spoke to (it was blindingly obvious) tried to tell me it was under warranty, then told me it wasn't, you can't replace one key only a whole keyboard, you can't get them online only through an expensive phone number, and he couldn't tell me how much they'd cost. I'm not entirely convinced I believe one word he(?) said.

Halfway through the chat I was suddenly typing in the dark - the electricty ran out of money. Who ever thought a source of electricty that randomly runs out is a good idea, I don't know.

Luckily, I have a friend who knows about computers, and where to get spare parts, so he might be more helpful. I don't know why I put a might in that sentence. Handily, I only use the right shift for ?. I am confusing myself completely by typing | a lot instead, as my brain associates typing ? with pressing the key next to shift.

On the plus side I am halfway through The OC (perfect when you have no brain), I have large amounts of chocolate in the fridge, 100 mp3s set up to play in Winamp and Jack/Liz to get from version 1 to 2.

I went to an Atlantis convention at the weekend - which was made more interesting by having the flu. I've done a quick page with a few photos http://www.paranoidangel.me.uk/peg1pics.html - I should point out that the text is for my dad's benefit and the photos together come to 328k.

Edit: Dad has just reminded me I have a flickr account! So all my photos of the guests (apart from the blurry ones) are there, unedited (sorry Saz).

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My brain is obviously flu-addled because I decided to sign up for Remix IV. Due 20th March. In my defense my pill had run out and I had forgotten and I'd been up for a while and really needed a lie-down.