I have such a lot of things on my to do list that I'm determined to get as many of them done this weekend as possible because it's starting to get to me that I have so much I'm behind on.

I thought I'd get the flat tidied and cleaned this morning, but it was nearly 11am by the time I read through emails, RSS feeds and answered tags. So then I did the hall, kitchen and bathroom since those had the least to tidy and that took a hour. But they are very clean.

When I moved in it did look really grimy - partly through just not being cleaned properly for a long time and partly because it's old. Although I cleaned it before I moved in I had other things to do as well, so it was a bit of a quick clean. But there are parts of my kitchen that I never thought would ever look so shiny, now do! I'm knackered, but impressed. And that took an hour, so somehow I don't think I'll manage my lounge and bedroom in an hour...

But I do need to alternate some computer stuff with some physical activity because my right hand will drop off by the end of the day otherwise.

When I moved further away from work, so I had a ten minute drive rather than a ten minute walk, I thought that one of the effects it would have would be that I'd get more confident at driving. Which I have, I just hate it even more.

My car doesn't help. This morning it refused to go up a hill at 30mph in fourth gear because it was raining. This evening it did its thing where because I'd stopped it didn't want to go and sort of stalled and sort of moved a bit and there's nothing you can do about it (although I discovered putting the clutch back to the floor helped no end). That's what the mechanic called 'lumpy'. That was because it had rained all day.

At the weekend I drove home and back on roads full of lorries (one of the motorways had the whole left lane and half the middle lane full of them) and mostly I got stuck behind them because I can't pass lorries going uphill because I can't go faster than them.

So it's just as well really that the car industry is desperate for people to buy cars because I really want one that goes uphill, in the rain, in the cold, doesn't have choke and I can reach the pedals without needing extra cushions. Everything else optional (but I'd quite like power steering and air conditioning and electric windows, so I don't have to decide how hot it's going to be before I start driving).

I just have to get over this fear of driving strange cars that'll be so different from my nineteen and a half year old car.

This is something and I were talking about the other day. If the other day can be construed as a week, or perhaps two weeks, ago. It's about how we write.

I have to have in my head (or on paper, or both) the whole story before I start writing. It might change as I write it, but before I put finger to keyboard, I know where I'm starting and where I'm finishing, regardless of the length of the story. If it's short enough then it'll all be in my head, if it's long then I'll have to write it down. When it came to Sarah Jane of the Chalet School my notes were on a spreadsheet, it got that complicated.

When I was reading RTD's book I found he does pretty much the same thing, although he does the actual writing part far more quickly.

I'll spend days, or longer, thinking about scenes. Sometimes I can quite happily spend an hour in bed at the weekend thinking about it all and never pick up a book because I'm too preoccupied. Plus reading involves opening my eyes, putting my glasses on and admitting I'm not going to get back to sleep. The trouble comes when I have to put pen to paper and I have it all in my head, but once I start to write it all goes. Even if it's just a moment before.

For example, that short paragraph up there? I stopped and thought about what I was going to say before I wrote that, but when I came to write it that's all I could remember. It was a longer paragraph in my head.

So how do you write yours? (although it's probably a bit early for the Cadbury's Creme Egg adverts)

Recently I decided I'd try and write a blog post a day. It all fell apart this month - rather like the whole of this month really. I've put off so many things due to laziness at Christmas and then my computer dying, so now I feel like I have so much to do I don't know where to start. Whereas in reality it would probably only take an evening if I just started. But I have nothing planned for this weekend, so hopefully I will be caught up by the end of it.

I have my shiny (and it is literally shiny) new computer now. There's parts of Vista I really don't like, but I have managed to replace those parts. Like I don't use Windows Explorer and have a program that changes the Start Menu back to like XP and 98, which opens folders a lot quicker.

And that's what I spent my (long) weekend doing (I had Friday and Monday off work). I also bought a breadmaker because my bread tastes so much better when mum makes it in her breadmaker than when I make it in my oven. And the cooker in the new place is so much slower (still electric) that it would probably be just as quick.

It wasn't related to anything I said, but this weekend a friend of mine suggested I should go onto match.com to find a boyfriend. She's a bit of a serial boyfriender and I think it mainly came up because she's between boyfriends (well, as near as makes no odds) and considered it. And she knows someone that's done it.

There's part of me that thinks that would actually be quite handy for going out to the cinema and theatre more (but not to restaurants, that's too stressful) and I've only ever been on one date, I think. Which is one more than she has.

And there's part of me that wonders what (if anything) I'm missing by not having a boyfriend. I've never had a serious boyfriend - I've never felt the need, can never really be bothered and I'm not sure they're worth the effort anyway.

The practical part of me can't work out when I'd have the time to fit one in anyway, since I can quite easily eliminate every day of the week and most weekends and boyfriends tend to want to see you more often than once a month. Even once a week would be a struggle.

The last part of me thinks that would be horribly grown up and I keep doing grown up things. I'm planning to buy a car this year and I want to buy a house in the future (entirely because I don't want to have to move again and I want to be able to put up shelves and not have to cook on electric cookers) and that's all very grown up. I used to think when I was little that 30 was grown up and now I'm worried that I'm right. (not that you can't be childish too, as the Doctor says) but I don't think I want to be grown up and boring. I just don't know how much I can stop myself.

I now have a wardrobe in my bedroom. And right across my right hand hurts from screwing screws into wood where there were no holes. The pack had 80 screws in them and we used... more than 20. So it's quite shoddy but not really quite shoddy. I've filled it up and it hasn't fallen over or fallen apart anyway. I still have more unpacking to do, five weeks after I've moved. The trouble is I have too much stuff for the space - I need a two bedroom house to fit it in. Although then I'd have to bring up all my books and videos and other stuff from home and goodness knows how I'd have the space for everything...

I'm still feeling a bit temporary and like everything is on hold until I get my main laptop sorted and get my flat sorted of piles of crap. So in the meantime, have a couple of long Doctor Who fic recs with Harry in:

Saving Horse Feathers by Weimlady. It's unfinished, but there's another long one to read first. They're both Ten, Sarah and Harry and although I started off not sure about them, I still couldn't put them down.

The Trouble with Harry by Azar. It's a crossover with NCIS starring Ten, Martha, some Harry and some NCIS characters that I vaguely recognise the names of. But even not knowing anything about NCIS, I still liked it.

On the whole, this has been a bad week. But it did have some good things in it:

• I found Sainsburys did lasagne sheets made without soya flour, so I can eat soya again
• I now have a sofa and a wardrobe (even if the latter is currently in the kitchen, since that's the only space for it) and a coffee table
• I have some friends coming tonight to go to our Cheese and Wine quiz and see my new flat
• I found some white dairy free chocolate. I haven't tried it yet, since I ought to finish my current bar first, but I'm very excited about actually seeing some

And the bad:

• Friday last week the graphics card on my computer died. Friday, yesterday, my laptop keeps fusing, for reasons we're not 100% sure of yet. It's just as well I'd brought my work laptop home. You'd think two computers would be enough, but no...
• I haven't had any emails since Thursday - turns out that actually I've had 34, including the test one I sent to myself. Now it's sorted and I have them, but it would have been nice to have had them at the time...
• I worked ridiculously hard and late Tuesday and Thursday - the only days I had something on in the evening. So Thursday I didn't get to go back to fencing again and Tuesday I got in long enough to have a pot noodle before going out, then only had the energy to go to bed when I got back in. Although part of that was because I had yesterday off.

Ok, so there aren't any more bad things than that, but those are bad enough, I think.

I was in the vicinity of Slough twice this weekend, but on Monday it was to see Lis Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith) in panto along with a group of people from . She was only in a scene at the start and the end as Mrs Darling and one in the middle as a mermaid. The panto being Peter Pan.

Now, I don't know if I ever knew the story of Peter Pan because I feel like I knew bits and not other bits. But now I understand why people say Wendy had a crap deal - who in their right mind would want to be mother to a load of Lost Boys when still a child herself? That's the sort of thing children don't really notice, but given they can get the credit crunch into the panto you'd think they'd update that bit too.

There were some other famous people in it, but I'd never heard of them.

In general, it wasn't a great panto. I think the local amateur one is better. Peter Pan was played by a man, not a girl, which I'm sure isn't right. There was a scene with Ice the Dog and some girl doing tricks, although I don't think anyone had told the dog that. Lis's mermaid scene mostly involved her waving her arms around and looking like a bit of a prat, frankly. Her last scene as Mrs Darling mostly seemed to involve making sure the kids were in the right place. But she was great, obviously.

But the highlight of the whole thing was the pantomime Dame and the comedy bloke and two pirates doing an alternative 12 days of Christmas, which mostly involved them throwing each other's props around. They had to hold their props up when they sang the words, for every fourth present for each of them. Buy the end they were scrambling round the stage and having to get the audience to throw them back to them!

The second funniest bit was when they had some kids on stage and the comedy bloke couldn't understand that one of the girls was called Ferrari!

But it didn't really matter what the panto was like because I still had fun with , , Sasha, , , , , and her friend.

This evening I thought I'd have a relaxed evening, get some stuff done, maybe have an early night, for a change. But so far all I've managed to do is have dinner and spend £500. And dinner required me to cook the chips twice because, due to more than one thing, managed to make one side of them completely black. And I mean completely.

And after, my computer decided that I didn't really need to see the screen any more... After spending some time in Safe Mode, we established the graphics card is going. At the moment I have lots of coloured lines on the screen and I am copying my files from that computer to my little laptop.

I have a new one on order now, which will have Vista, unfortunately. I still can't find anything in XP because they changed the file system from 98, so I'm just going to be even more lost. And the resolution isn't going to be as big as on my old one.

So now I get to play on the little laptop (so glad I have two, although I can also use my work laptop), see if I can get my friend to get my stuff off my hard drive. And see if I can get a long weekend off in a couple of weeks to go home and install everything. And get all the stuff off my last backup (which, as it wasn't the instant before the screen went, isn't recent enough).

So my computer might have been slow and full of junk that I've been meaning to delete for years, but I liked it.

Tonight I should have gone back to fencing, but not only did I actually see ice, but there was fog on my way home too. Given that I have to get there and back on a road I dislike in the dark at the best of times, I've saved it for next week.

But it did mean I got to watch Hustle live and not off a DVD, as I did for the first three series to catch up. I liked it, it was slick, it was British (the Terminal 5 joke!) and none of the characters had soap operas during it. Although at one point Robert Glenister in sunglasses looked so much like his brother I wondered if it had suddenly turned into Ashes to Ashes.

Compared to Leverage... Well, I am quite liking that they're revealing a little bit of each character each week, I'm just worried it'll be too much because it should be about the con, not the characters. And it is typically American (I don't know why, Hustle just seems slicker). But it does have explosions. So they're both good in their own little ways.

But it does make me think. I do like TV shoes with all plot and not much character background. For a start, you can start wherever you like. The Bill used to be like that when it was good. The Avengers is like that. An episode of The Professionals that I saw over Christmas was like that (I liked it, but not enough to tape it). Classic Doctor Who is like that. The best episodes of Stargate and Atlantis are like that.

Which is not to say that I don't like some character stuff. You just can't beat explosions.

Since everyone else is doing it:

I'm very amused at people on LJ flailing about, assuming the site is going to be shut down, just because some people got made redundant. Funnily enough, it's a recession, that's the sort of thing that tends to happen in recessions - the news is full of it (or was before there was Gaza and cold and lack of trains).

LJ's so successful that it's unlikely to go under any time soon and if it did there'd be more warning than that, I imagine. M&S closing down some stores was more interesting news on the same lines, although in retrospect not a surprise given that people are trying to shop more cheaply.

My blog and LJ are both automatically backed up. The blog's backed up to a Gmail account every week and since I never delete any emails, just archive them, I have every comment anyone's ever posted too, in the unlikely instance I ever remember that any exist.

I now have Skype on my computers. I thought it cost somehow, although I can't remember how now. But it turns out it's free to Skype other people. It just costs to call landlines from Skype. Although it says it costs less than a normal call, since I have free evening and weekend calls, as long as they're less than an hour, that would actually cost more. So it's only actually useful for talking to people abroad. And talking to people face-to-face since my laptop has a webcam in the lid.

Which does mean it doesn't actually do anything that you can't do over messenger - Trillian does audio and video chat, you just have to use it with someone with Trillian, I think.

Tomorrow morning I have to go back home (I do have two houses I call home) and then the day after back to work for the first time in a week and a half. Very depressing

So, what I have achieved this holidays? Read more...

P1030238

Originally uploaded by paranoidangel

We finally managed to finish the Doctor Who puzzle that we started with Jonathan Creek. It has a lot more black pieces than it looks.

Apart from that I've bought myself a 4Gb pen drive. I bought a 1Gb one a couple of years ago for twice the price... And I tried to buy a bigger xD card for my camera, but the smallest you can get is 1Gb. So I bought that instead (I only really need 256Mb).

And then I got distracted by looking up the two Big Finish Companion Chronicles that are due out at the end of the month, both of which I want. And I ended up buying Benny series 2 in the Big Finish Christmas Sale. And I was doing so well avoiding that sale too...

Now that the Yuletide authors have been revealed, I can do this, and the three I wrote are under December.
Read more...