The (Doctor Who) Sarah & Harry ficathon sign-ups close tomorrow! (Well, they’ll be closed once I get up on Saturday).

All it involves is writing a story of min 750 words featuring Sarah and Harry by mid-October. How hard can it be?

Currently I only have four sign-ups. I can, and will, run it with only four people but I am greedy and want more stories to read than that.

So if you write Sarah and Harry, why have you not signed up? And don’t think I won’t be asking people on my friends list for a good excuse if they haven’t signed up by tomorrow evening.

I am doing better this week. Sunday morning I went out to the community project and mostly stood around and looked at it because they’d all worked hard on Saturday to get most of it done. But at least I got out of the house and a bit of sunshine. Then I spent the afternoon lying down.

So far this week at work’s been alright, although I haven’t managed to leave early any day. This morning was particularly interesting as we all moved offices. I knew it was going to be this week, just didn’t realise it would be this morning! I was ok, sitting down packing stuff up until I realised I was really dizzy. So stopped packing and did some work until I realised I was so dizzy I felt sick. Just walking to the toilet I couldn’t do without holding onto something! So then I spent some time lying on a hard, dusty desk directing other people to move my stuff. Who then got to unpack it at the other end, since I clearly wasn’t up to it.

On the plus side, the new office has sofas in the staff room, so I can lie down at lunchtimes! And any other times I need to, as long as no one’s having a confidential meeting in there.

So I am feeling a lot better than last week and am hoping to move on to exercise 3 this week, maybe… And go up to Banbury on Sunday where there’s the other big Rotaract event of the year – a camping rally. Although I’ll just be going up for the day, since I need sleep and can’t walk in the dark.

At the moment, with being ill, doing a normal five day week is really hard going, and that’s 37.5 hours. This week I’ve done about 40. I managed to be able to go home an hour early on Thursday, and it was really good to be able to have a lie down before cooking dinner at a reasonable time without having to resort to eating a pot potato. Then Friday was ok, and if it had stayed like that I might have been ok. Except that I was stupidly busy from 3.30 to 6.30.

I was so tired Friday night. I wasn’t too bad this morning, but I’ve mostly felt terrible since then. But tomorrow I am determined to be well enough to go to our community project because it will take my mind off it and maybe some fresh air will help a bit. Plus there is going to be a barbecue in the cul-de-sac tomorrow afternoon (they put a note through my door after I’d gone to bed last night!), so if I was in I’d have to close the windows against the smell, and I have no intention of going to a barbecue with people I don’t know where I’d have to explain why I can’t eat anything and why I can’t stand up without holding onto something. I really don’t have the energy for that.

But today I have watched two more episodes of Teachers (I have five to go until the point where I definitely started watching it) and I’ve been reading Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, which is big and heavy, but really interesting.

And my new mp3 player arrived, which is better and brighter pink than the old one. I just have to use Windows Explorer to transfer files, and I loathe Explorer in Vista, it’s designed so you can never find anything. On my netbook I have to use Amarok, which took me ages to work out how to get it to recognise my mp3 player and transfer files to it, but that was mostly because I was looking in the wrong place.

Also, sign-ups have started for the second Sarah & Harry ficathon. There clearly needs to be a Harry ficathon too, but not till next year because this one won’t finish till October and then Yuletide will be starting up. And I’ll have a working internet connection for it this time!

I’m so tired I could cry. Not lack of sleep tired, lack of energy tired. I’m typing this slowly while lying down – slowly because I can’t do anything quickly, plus don’t have the energy to press the keys very much.

I’m still getting over my cold and sore throat – I think the sore throat’s gone, but the blocked up nose and asthma are still lingering. On Monday I did an hour and a half extra and that was working as quickly as I could. Monday night all I could do was lie down because I didn’t have the energy to get up.

Then Tuesday wasn’t so bad, but I didn’t get the opportunity to take some overtime and knock off early. I thought I might today, but then I had a really busy afternoon. I should have stayed a bit longer, but I was reaching the stage where walking in a straight line was looking unlikely. It took me 15 minutes to do the 5 minute walk to my car.

So tonight I don’t have the energy to do anything at all. I know I’m going to be busy tomorrow morning, but hopefully I’ll get to take some time off this week, otherwise all I’ll do all week and all weekend is lie down recovering.

And this weekend we’re having a Rotaract community project tidying up the garden of a pre-school. I probably couldn’t do that much anyway, but at this rate I won’t even have the energy to go anywhere near the place. Which is beyond annoying.

Now I’m going to watch Teachers through the magic of 4oD and its entire channel back catalogue. With no adverts.

I am behind, but in my defence I went home this weekend and because it was a nice day my two hour journey on Friday took three hours. Also I still have a cold and sore throat, although it is starting to improve.

Anyway, on Friday the names went up for who_remix, so I can reveal that I wrote Scenes from a Government Project (The Italian Restaurant Remix) of hhertzof’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. Which, incidentally, she wrote for last year’s Sarah & Harry ficathon – sign ups for this years will be up soon.

In a strange and bizarre twist of events we both remixed each other’s fic, while selenay936 cackled evilly while she betaed. Or something along those lines.

The good thing about remixing someone for whom I’ve read their fic is that I didn’t have to read any of it. The one I picked I know I would have written different if I’d written it. Although the remix isn’t the way I’ve written it because I feel like I’ve written Sarah & Harry at dinner a thousand times.

It wasn’t quite as fun as remix though, so next year I’ll just be sticking to remix and not bothering with who remix.

hhertzof asked for top five bunnies (real or fictional)

Since it was supposed to be a fannish top five, I thought I ought to go for fictional ones:
1. Pancakes (The OC)
2. Anya’s bunnies (Buffy)
3. The bunny from Pulling Princes etc
4. The ones on my ruler my sister brought me back from France
5. Er, now I’ve run out. That was a hard list to do

hhertzof asked for five Chalet School characters who should have travelled with the Doctor:
1. Joey – she’d have loved the adventure
2. Jack – I think she’d have surprised the Doctor by understanding the TARDIS and knowing how to fix it
3. Jem – it would certainly open his eyes
4. Miss Annersly – the Doctor would have obeyed her every command
5. All of Joey’s children at once – because it would be funny

melliyna asked for top 5 parent and child relationship moments:
1. Jo leaving the Doctor because it’s so sad
2. Elrond giving Aragorn Anduril in the ROTK film because you don’t get many parent/child moments with those two, apart from in the Appendix. And also it’s a very beautiful sword
3. Sarah talking about her parents with Luke
4. When Mickey tells Jack about being raped
5. Qui-Gon dying and Obi-Wan being all upset because that was so sad too. Er, it’s all about the sad stuff really…

lost_spook asked for top five Harry moments (I won’t necessarily specify which Harry, that’s up to you) and I was going to do Harry Sullivan, except I realised I already have (and amazingly, managed five too). So I did Harry Pearce instead and this probably shows my lack of memory of Spooks specificness:

1. When Ruth calls him and asks him to come round to hers and he pauses, not sure what she’s actually asking
2. In the last series, taking off his tie and killing the man following him
3. I forget what actually happened now, but the start of the series before last where he orders a bombing, or something like that
4. At the end of the one with the bombing of Parliament Square where he turns out to be alright in the end and for a moment everyone would’ve cheerfully strangled him for knowingly putting him through that
5. When he knows he’s about to be pulled in, but sits quietly with his drink and his music and waits for them

I’ve just watched the latest three episodes of Midsomer Murders. They always take me a while to get round to because they’re so slow you have to do something else while they’re on. It was quite surreal because the first one had Vila from Blakes 7 in, the second had Peter Davison and the Borg Queen (and a couple of other people I recognised but couldn’t be bothered to look up) and the last had that woman from Ultraviolet – with exactly the same hairstyle. Although it says everything about my visual memory that I can’t remember if it’s the same colour and I only saw Ultraviolet a few months ago.

And now for the meme that’s been going round and I hadn’t got round to putting up yet:

Ask me my fannish Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn’t matter what, really! And I will answer them all in a new post. Possibly with pictures.*

* There won’t be pictures.

It’s been a bit of a dramatic week this week. First my landlord delivered my new washing machine last Saturday. Except when I did some washing when it spun it made loud noises and moved around – so much so that it came out from under the side and the pipe taking waste water away came out, so there was soapy horrible water all over the cupboard under the sink. I looked in the manual and on the internet about what it could be and found it must be something to do with it not being level. Read more…