In what can only be described as a minor miracle, I have fitted all my stuff into my suitcase. Although I realised later that I have packed my travel alarm clock somewhere. But it could be anywhere. So Saturday morning I will probably be getting up with the aid of a phone call from the hotel, unless it turns out to be somewhere easy to get to.

Watching Doctor Who and Confidential when I get back is going to be fun as I can't tell what time they'll be on three Saturdays from now, so I have taped them both for three hours. So I should definitely get them in there somewhere. But my fast forwarding options are 2x, 4x, 6x and skip 3 mins, 1 min, 30 secs. It would be so much easier if the BBC had started up their player then I needn't have bothered taping anything.

This is my last post before I go - it is not too late to donate money though!

(it would be so nice if LJ would just accept this rather than making me go back and edit it before the crossposter works properly)

I have finally watched the whole series (all three episodes of them) of Lewis, which was show at the end of February/start of March. I might be a bit behind. Although now I only have four episodes of Midsomer Murders to go. There'll be a whole lot more when I get back though.

The adverts in it were 4 minutes and 20 second long. I imagine the extra 20 seconds (The Last Detective has 4 minute advert breaks) are the Sainsburys things. Now I have a handy thing on my PVR for skipping forward (3 mins, 1 min, 30 secs, 10 secs back) I can tell these sort of things. I does mean that although The Last Detective starts at 9pm and finishes at 10.30, it actually only takes an hour to watch. Which annoys me. The beginning credits in Doctor Who are 30 seconds long exactly, which is handy.

I saw Spiderman 3 at the new cinema in Didcot last night. It was nice and empty because everyone else was going to see POTC3. Handily, it does films at £4 on a Tuesday, as opposed to £6.50, which is a much more reasonable price. However, the toilets are too high for my feet to reach the floor and the seats are too big so that I can't sit back in them. But they're also really wide, so I did curl up in it and it was quite comfy.

It's been so nice to have a three day weekend. I've cleaned the house, packed (I'm not looking forward to fitting everything in come Friday evening because it's not looking good already), gone swimming (which involved driving through rather a lot of rain and was quite scary) and watched rather a lot of Doctor Who.

There was Saturday night's episode of course. I quite liked it but I think I prefer the book better, if only because it takes longer over everything and has Benny in it.

Most of the Doctor Who I watched was First Doctor-era with Ian and Barbara in. Friday night I was about up to Susan's last episode. I finished Ian & Barbara's last episode last night. There were some late nights in there, partly because The Romans was great, so I couldn't go to bed until I finished it.
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I don't get Facebook. Every time I think I understand bits of it I find I don't. You have to sign up with your real name, although you could make something up, thinking about it. But then there's more than one person with each name. So when you try to find someone you have no idea whether they're the right one unless they have a photo which you recognise them in. It won't let you see people's profiles unless you're their friend.

Or you're in the same network. But you can only change networks once a month, which isn't terribly helpful for stalker potential. Neither is if they're not in a network. People have told me it's like Friends Reunited only better, in terms of getting in touch with people you went to school with. I use Friends Reunited to find out what the people I hated at school are up to. And generally they're living sad little lives. I can't keep up with them all on Facebook - I don't want them to know I'm stalking them and can't change my network enough.

So I'm kind of thinking of it like a list of people I know and interests. There's no point writing anything on it because that's what this is for. There's no point uploading photos to it because that's what flickr is for. And my website is for anything else. And the wall is like email only requiring more effort.

I've joined groups, mostly when Emma invites me and I just agree to anything on that front. And then I discovered that all sorts of conversations go on on these. You have a news page that gives you all sorts of useless information but not when one of the discussions you're interested in has updated. So it's more useless than RSS Feeds, Message Boards and email.

So I don't just get it. Apart from just agreeing to when anyone friends/requests confirmation/invites me to a group what am I supposed to do with it?

Our local post office is closing at the end of July. There are four others in a six mile radius but only one of those is walking distance away and that's only small. The post office is town always has a queue - it's impossible to get in and out of there within five minutes at lunchtimes. In December the wait is about 30 minutes. So posting anything funny-sized in the future and getting dollars & euros is going to be so much more difficult since it'll involve going further and taking longer. Why someone thought that was a good post office to close, I don't know. Perhaps they're running the country a bit like NationStates and making decisions because they're funny.

I got a letter yesterday complaining that I hadn't paid my council tax bill this month. Back in March they sent through a thing to say how much I had to pay for the year and told me therefore how much I had to pay for each month. I then expected them to send me something to demand money each month. But apparently not. They only give you seven days within receipt of the letter or they'll take you to court. So it was just as well it turned up before I went to Romania then. I have now set up my bank account online to pay it on the first of each month till January (for some strange reason you only pay council tax for ninth months of the year). The only other way of doing it is by direct debit and I object to having money taken out of my account without me doing something to make that happen.

I could tell it was quite hot today because when I got up the house wasn't freezing. Which is a good thing as it shouldn't get too hot in the summer therefore. But I did have to open some windows when I got in. It took me ten minutes to manage two. Whoever thought that was a good window design was mistaken.

Whatever temperature it is here it looks like it's going to be ten degrees hotter in Europe. Lovely. So looking forward to that, especially given that I don't like the heat. At least coming home will feel nice and cool.

I suddenly realised the other day that the reason I've been having asthma for no reason might be because my inhaler has run out. And it had. I wish there was some way of knowing other than waiting till the neighbours are quiet, holding it up to my ear and shaking it.

Sainsburys don't seem to understand what a pink grapefruit is. It's the second time now I've bought some from there. When you cut them open they're a yellow colour. They don't taste as horrid as yellow but don't taste as nice as pink either. I will have to make sure to always get them from Tescos in the future.

Work is busy at the moment. I am completely brain dead from it and the sun waking me up in the morning (it's been raining so long I've got used to it being quite dark in the mornings).

LJ's tag system that means if you type it in the box it'll randomly delete it for you. I am definitely refusing to do that in the future. Editing the entry afterwards and selecting the tags from a list is a far better option and I don't understand why LJ doesn't do that already.

Teaspoon randomly changing my era and character list when I update a chapter. I also hate the way its selection boxes are so small you can't read the character or genre text very well and have to guess. And when you edit a story/chapter there's no update button, it's called 'add story' which always worries me. But for all that it's miles better than ff.net. I refuse to upload my stories there any more because I lost the will to live fighting with it.

Remember I was getting people to send me postcards and guess how many to raise money for my trip to Romania? No, well, the original post is here.

Some postcard statistics:

• outside of this country I had postcards from Dublin, Madrid, Geneva, America, Japan and Australia
• I had two from the town I live in
• Six were from Eastbourne (see here for the reason why)
• Others I had were from The Cotswalds, Devon, Newbury, Dorset, Dartford and Paddington

The total number I received is 21. So the winner is Andy, who guessed 22. Emma came second, twice, with guesses of 14 and 28. I laid them out on the floor and took a photo of all of them.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who sponsored me. I've raised about £600, which is over the minimum of £350, which is great. It's not too late to donate still at my justgiving page. In theory it sends me an email when people donate but in practice it seems to take around two weeks, or when it gets round to it. You'd almost think it was a person.

I sorted out my bookmarks the other day and realised there's some cool stuff I've seen linked elsewhere and I haven't mentioned here. So now I will. Although I can't remember where I saw them all.

They Fight Crime! - crazy they fight crime duos. Such as:

He's an oversexed gay hairdresser with a passion for fast cars. She's a mistrustful tomboy mermaid with a song in her heart and a spring in her step. They fight crime!

1-click Award - shows you what really moves your mouse around

Star Wars toys that never made it - such as the smouldering corpses of Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen.

And a couple of useful ones from tonight's Doctor Who:
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Even though I had the 'turning up at the airport only to find I've forgotten my travel sickness pills' nightmare last night, I am getting quite excited about Romania. Although scared it's only two weeks away - it was months away not so long ago!

We have to buy certain bits of safety gear, so I got mine off ebay which was nice and cheap. And all new stuff as well. My hard hat is red. They come in one size fits all and you adjust the band inside. In my case, you adjust it as small as it goes. I have a small head.

Steel cap toe boots generally come in black and occasionally tan, based on my ebay searches. Except that I found a pink pair. And they're fab! They fit as well, which is good, I just need to wear them in a bit so they're more comfortable. They'll clash horribly with the hard hat, but go with the t-shirt, which is still pink. I might just leave it that way - it'll be unique.

(oh, how much can that title be misconstrued?)

I got a comment spam on LJ and decided to forestall the inevitable. So if you want to comment now you need an LJ account and need to be logged into it. If you don't have one, then you can comment on the blog as long as you can answer a simple maths question.

Having watched four First Doctor stories, I really like Ian. And I've discovered there's a story where they go to the French Revolution, which I definitely have to see. My next amazon DVD is The Aztecs, which is apparently where Barbara is great, so I am looking forward to that.

I have also started posting Doctor Who: The Soap Opera: The Sequel (yes, it's a sillier title than the original) on sarahjane_fic with a new chapter daily.

And a meme, stolen from a few people:
Name a character and I'll tell you three (or more) facts about them from my own personal pseudo-canon.

I asked if anyone had any drabble requests for my (hobbit) birthday and Tanaqui asked for more of John Sheppard and Kate Heightmeyer's backstory. I tried really hard but couldn't get it down to 100 words, so it's a double drabble instead:
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I've had a relaxing and productive weekend. Probably because Sel was coming over I got up and got on on Saturday, so I had tidied and cleaned by 11am. We went out for Chinese for dinner and managed to make it during a time when it wasn't raining! I discovered there's a shop in town that sells Really Useful Boxes and looks like it has more than Staples in Oxford, who are a bit crap for them (Staples in Poole are much better) and we met a cat in the castle gardens. My chocolate mousse turned out nice again, which was good.

We watched Frontios, a Fifth Doctor story which neither of us had seen, and had Jeff Rawle (George Dent from Drop the Dead Donkey) looking really young. I had forgotten he did this over ten years before he did Drop the Dead Donkey. It turned out to be a very good story, we were gripped. It was a bit surreal when we watched Thursday's episode of The Last Detective and Jeff Rawle was in it again. The Last Detective seems to attract lots of well-known names because this one also had Celia Imrie and some bloke I recognise (he was married to Celia Imrie's character - where do I know him from?) and last week's had Jackie Tyler and Peter Davison's daughter. And of course every week it has Peter Davison, Shaun Hughes and one of the wives from the 40s thing that the bloke who played Rodney in Only Fools and Horses was in. And I've entirely forgotten the relevant names and titles now.

We also watched a couple of good episodes of The Avengers. From looking at the backs of my DVDs I think I have about three Emma Peel DVDs to go. I must get on and watch them - I leave it so long in between watching The Avengers that I'm surprised how good it is every time I do.

Now I have watched every Fifth Doctor story! (Also every Seventh and Third Doctor stories). So I feel justified in working my way through One due to loving Ian. He's so great.

I also bought some stuff for my Romania trip (and Robot on DVD to watch when I get back, along with the three episodes I'll have missed). One of the things we have to have are steel cap toe boots. I was quite impressed to find a pink pair. So they'll go with the t-shirt, which is still pink after one wash.

All done!

157.5cm / 155cm (101.6%)

My weekend, in three bits. First of all the Conference itself. Then the food:

I had discussions with the person on the team running it about what I could and couldn't eat and she'd spoken to the hotel and she said they sounded very confident.

Except when it came to lunch on Saturday they didn't have a clue what I was talking about, but as an alternative to the buffet they eventually brought me out salad and fruit. Which is not what I call a meal. After more complaining from various people they managed ham and rice, which was mostly unhelpful, specially as they did something to the rice to make it taste horrid.

But I was more confident about dinner. Till I got there. I've been to these things before, so when they came out with the starter (tomato soup, yuk!) I told them I was special and asked if it was ok. They went away, came back and told me it was. I pointed out the croutons in it weren't, they asked me if I wanted them to take them out for me.

That should have been a clue really. The main course was chicken, so I expected them to bring me it without the sauce. Specially as I later found out that someone else had had it without the sauce. But when the waitress brought it round and I told her I was having something special they tried to bring me the veggie option instead, which had a pastry thing. Eventually I got smoked haddock, rice and some runner beans, which was edible.

Then for dessert they asked me if fruit salad was ok. I said yes, despite having had fruit at every meal, because there's not a lot else they can do. They asked me if I wanted something with it, I asked them what and they didn't know. Then they asked me what I had at home, I told them I had dairy free ice cream. What a stupid question.

The people running the conference, and the people on my table got angry over this, and on Sunday we went through the menu and told them what I could have as an alternative.

Then the highlights, which included me going round a roundabout in Watford twice, remembering I'd left my radio in the car on Friday night after I'd had a shower and got into bed to read. And getting scared on the M25, but that's pretty much par for the course.

I did some washing last night and included in it was a red jumper I'd brought back from home and not worn for a while. I thought nothing of it until I took my washing out and thought my sheet looked a funny colour. And then discovered it wasn't the only thing. I now have pink tops that used to be white and pink knickers that used to be white. And very pink knickers that used to be pink.

The best part of it is that over the weekend I got my Habitat for Humanity t-shirt (which turns out to have long sleeves, so not really a t-shirt). I asked for a small and I could wear it as a dress. It was white. It's now pink. I might be washing it a few times in the next four weeks.

I will post about the weekend, I'm just working my way up to it.

It occurred to me I haven't posted in here for a bit, and I'm off this long weekend to the Rotaract National Conference to celebrate my birthday.

So a couple of memes that are both quite similar that I've seen everywhere recently:

Tell me about a story I haven't written, and I'll give you one sentence from that story.

Name three fics you think I will never, ever, ever write. In return(and if inspired), I will attempt to write a snippet of one of them.

I keep thinking of things I want to write, so I wrote a list:
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I should mention here, otherwise I'll forget, that I dug out something I wrote last summer and decided to post it, rather than leave it sitting on my hard drive: The Funeral which has Ten and Rose but is about someone else entirely who is revealed at the end.

And then I listened to some of the SJS audios again recently and ended up writing Sarah/Will Sullivan: Coffee. For which it took me longer to come up with the title than it did to write the thing. Does it show?

I saw, the other day, a site with MBTI prayers. I'm an ISTJ and mine says:

Lord help me to relax about insignificant details beginning tomorrow at 11:41.23 am

Which describes me so well. I'm currently worrying about this weekend and getting to Conference and what's going to happen when I get there, even though the latter is clearly 'have a good time', since I always have. And I'm worrying about Romania already. The trouble is wherever I am, I want to be somewhere else. I didn't want to leave here to go to America, then I didn't want to leave Washington, then when I got home I didn't want to be there either. I can't win.

I was tagged by Tanaqui

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favourite book, or the intellectual one : pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same.

There's plenty of scholars there, if that that's what you want."
"Oxford?" she cried. "That's where I come from!"

Those three incredibly enlightening sentences come from The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (very definitely American edition).

Tag anyone who wants to do this. Again.