Funniest episode ever. Except possible The Romans.

Further discussion as to why contains spoilers for tonight's episode funnily enough...
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For a bit of it seemed like a good idea at the time and still hasn't seemed like a bad one, I'm running the Sarah & Harry (with optional Sarah/Harry) ficathon. Sign-ups are open till 5th July (Ladies Finals Day).

At some point I will wake up enough to post about having my tooth out and tennis, but today should have about eight hours of good tennis followed by Glastonbury and Doctor Who might have to wait till tomorrow morning when there's nothing else on.

But first a meme:

When you see this, quote from Doctor Who.

Brigadier: Naturally enough, the only country that could be trusted with such a role was Great Britain.
The Doctor: Naturally. I mean, the rest were all foreigners.

- Robot

I am alive after my tooth extraction on Friday. That's only technically alive, though, I'd be quite happy to do nothing but sleep all day and all night. Sadly, I have to be really ill before I sleep during the day, although when ten hours a night isn't making me any more awake, it's a bit academic.

The post I would have made on Monday, had I felt better, is to point out that Wimbledon has started and as such the next fortnight consists of nothing but tennis and certainly nothing more important. Except possibly sleep.

From : Read more...

Much more useful than yesterday's maps, this is one of counties visited, which shows I'm doing very well at the south of England...

(although amusingly, because I can't quite remember where I've been or what county it's in, I've lost some counties since the last time I did this)
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Today's not been a good day.

This morning the hospital rang me up. They helpfully told reception it was a personal call from Amy, which I heard as Ailie, so I wasn't sure what was going on. Once I'd established who she was, she said that the surgeon who is taking my tooth out on Friday has looked at my notes and decided she doesn't want to do it on her own in the afternoon, so wants to do it in the morning instead.

Because I'm having it done under general anaesthetic (I considered the idea of local because you don't feel so tired afterwards, but then they decided to tell me that they were going to need to break it in half to get it out and after that there was no way I was going to be awake) I have to have someone take me, someone pick me up and someone stay with me afterwards.

Fortunately, as they're all local people, they know how much the hospital are known for messing people around. In fact, when I tell them how much they've messed me around they're surprised it's been so little. So now I get to get up early on Friday then sit around a hospital all morning while they think about getting round to taking my tooth out.

Then this afternoon I couldn't get to my email and discovered I couldn't get to my entire website. After some investigating by me and dad (mostly dad, as I was really busy at work) we discovered this was because my domain name ran out in May. I hadn't renewed it because my provider hadn't quite managed to remind me to renew it.

It's all back now, but it was quite worrying when I forwarded an email to myself and it immediately bounced back saying the domain didn't exist.

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The TARDIS Big Bang archive is live and my story is Sarah Jane of the Chalet School. Not only is it the longest thing I've ever written (by about 700 words), but there's also some fabulous artwork to go with it, done by better artists than me.

The story is Sarah/Harry and a crossover with The Chalet School, but it will make sense if you haven't read any of it. Either way, it is an AU with Sarah and Harry transplanted to the 1930s.

For reasons that will become obvious when you read it, when I played around deleting scenes and moving information around I had to change the point of view of one of the scenes. Virtual gold star to anyone who guesses which scene correctly. (Clue: It's not the prologue).

Edit: Because I entirely forgot to mention the fabulous art that's with it here, here and here.

I have just added a few people to my friends list - mostly people from TR or names I've seen often in various places. Friend back, don't friend back, I don't mind. As far as I'm concerned, my LJ friends list is a copy of my RSS Feeds and is just a reading list.

I'm really disliking hayfever season. It's not helped by spending last night in a Barn in a field that was open. I'm currently on medicine, nose spray, eye drops and the maximum dose of my inhaler, but for the past week I haven't been able to lie around in bed after I wake up because I just can't breathe. It does go away a bit during the day, to come back in the evening, but I'm really looking forward to the end of the hayfever season.

I'm really looking forward to Wimbledon now, after the taster that was the Stella Artois semis and finals this weekend. Especially today's between Djokovic and Nadal, which was such a good match. The question is whether any of them can beat Federer, who won in Halle.

After having it on my rental list for months, Amazon have finally sent me the first DVD of Sapphire and Steel. I've had it for a week now and have so far watched none of it. All TV except Doctor Who has finished, but I keep not being in for that and then just don't get round to putting the telly on.

I had such a long list of things to do this weekend that I wrote them down. Then got all the more urgent things done yesterday, but I still have to clean, spring clean, make bread and do some Rotaract stuff. Today I don't seem to have managed much at all.

After the big, long post the other day about roleplaying, I have almost decided to drop Gene and Ian in favour of spending time on Harry & Jo and other non-rp things. Almost.

Although I haven't started any of them yet, I am still taking fic requests. I am already feeling guilty about not thinking about them and refusing to let myself write anything else, so it's sort of working.

I thought that since I talk about it a lot (55 times so far) I'd explain about Rotaract, what I do in and what I get up to. Specially since I don't remember the last time I did and I've definitely had more people reading this since then. Read more...

The trouble with Doctor Who at the moment is that they will persist in casting people who had been in other things. So, much as I enjoyed last night's episode this morning, it did annoy me that I couldn't remember where I recognised Lesley Sharp from (it was Second Coming).

Only when it came to the credits did I remember David Troughton was in it. The trouble was that he looked familiar and the only other thing I could think of that he was in was The Curse of Peladon. Until I looked at the imdb and it turned out he was Roy Merchant Jnr in Drop the Dead Donkey.

Then the other blonde woman, who was in Eastenders, so I recognise her name, was also in a couple of things I've seen. I think I recognise her more from Eastenders though, even though I don't watch it. There just are some actors who you've never seen in anything, but you can recognise anyway.

Fortunately, most of the rest of the cast haven't been in much I've seen, although nearly all of them have been in The Bill, unsurprisingly.

I'm talking about LJ roleplaying (RPing). If you haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, the roleplaying tag will have some explanations (that leads to my blog, since I've only just got an updated LJ crossposter that posts my WP tags to LJ tags, rather than my WP categories). Read more...

I've been on a first aid refresher course the past two days and because it's work-related driving insurance means you have to have a hire car. Since I went with someone else she drove, as I'm not convinced at all I can drive any other car but mine, especially as we had to drive at rush hour time.

But when we got back today I drove it around the close a little bit. It was very nice having a lighter steering wheel and when I turned the car round I was surprised when all of a sudden I'd got a full lock on the steering wheel, as it had power steering. I didn't have to have the seat all the way forward, but it's actually a bit hard to tell because it was an automatic.

I dislike automatics anyway because I don't understand them and also because I want to decide when to change gears - I want to be in control of that. But I was terribly confused by it going all on its own unless you put your foot on the brake. So you have to have your foot on the brake before you take the handbrake off and put it into D, I think it was. Then you could swap your foot to the other pedal. Although I did that, it would have been a lot simpler to have used my left foot on the brake. After all, you have two pedals and two feet so you might as well use both legs.

So I'd quite like a car that requires less effort to drive (ie power steering and automatic choke) but not an automatic. Anyway, I'm an intelligent person, I am perfectly capable of driving a manual car. And with fuel prices the way they are, an automatic is going to cost more in fuel (as well as costing more to buy in the first place).

I did look at the manual on my car. Helpfully, it's for four different cars, so I assumed mine was first on the list and found it does about 40-50 miles per gallon. Which is a completely useless measurement when you buy petrol by the litre and I only know that my petrol tank holds 42l. But it does give metric too (the car's not quite that old not too!) and it does 5-7 litres per 100km. My journey home is about 150km and that takes 2 hours. So it's an inefficient measuring system because it all depends on how fast you drive and what gear you do it in, but it means 42l should last for about 9 hours (that calculation really wasn't helped by me dividing 42 by 6 and thinking it's 9...). Which is a long way and explains why I only fill my tank up once a month.

My car also has, I think, 43bhp. So if it loses 5 horses per year then... my stables aren't looking too good. 19x5=a number far bigger than even the biggest number on the page.

A few things about this morning last night's episode because I am confused.

BEWARE SPOILERS.

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Because May was spent betaing my Big Bang fic and the other three ficathons I did at the same time are long since past, I've really got out of the habit of writing. It's not as if I don't have things I want to write either.

So, I'm asking for requests - actual prompts, not just a character or a pairing. No guarantees on length or when they'll be done, but writing something for someone else should give me an impetus to do it, much like a deadline.

The trouble with WordPress is that there are so many plugins that do so many things that you can quite easily spend all your time playing with it adding plugins and testing things out. Guess what I've been doing today?

(All the plugins I do have are listed here). Read more...

In reverse order of how near they are:

Rotaract National Conference 2009
Next year's Rotaract Conference is in Cardiff over the May Day bank holiday weekend and I know it's going to be great fun because they always are and because I'm on the committee that's organising it. Although I don't expect non-Rotaractors to come (although you're welcome!) the part that I'd love people to come to is the Gala Dinner on Saturday 2nd May. For those that can remember back a month, that's my birthday weekend, and next year I'll be turning an age ending in a 0...

The Gala Dinner is a black tie do, although really couldn't be said to be posh. Well, ok, so it's in a 4 star hotel and there'll be a few courses, so you get to grapple with cutlery etiquette. But there are always all sorts of toys on the tables, such as party poppers, bubbles, those balloons that you blow up and let go around the room and try to hit people with them.

The dinner is £36, but if you pay £99 you can stay in the nice hotel on the Saturday night too and have a weekend in Cardiff. And you can pay by standing order and spread the payments out, so you only have to pay a bit per month. There's more information on the website, including booking forms and no photo of me.

Eggheads quiz
This is a fundraiser for the Conference. The Conference itself gives its profits to charity (although we're having trouble trying to decide which of the many worthy causes to support), so in order to make the biggest profit without charging too much and making sure we are covering our expenses, we have a few fundraising things going on.

The quiz is on Saturday 12th July in Theale and costs £10 including a fish supper. I am told my sofa is very comfortable if anyone wants to stay over.

Knickers 4 Africa Launch party
This is a new charity being set up by a friend of mine who went to Sierra Leone last year and discovered that many people there have no knickers or have to wear second hand knickers. The launch party is in Marlow on 14th June. For more information and tickets see their website. The sofa offer goes for this one too.

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I finally got round to seeing Pirates of the Caribbean 3 by renting it from amazon rentals. And I have to say: what happened in it? I don't remember the second film, which doesn't help, so I was confused from the start, but even at the end I was confused by who was alive and who was dead.