Despite only going to work for three days this week, it still felt like a long week. So it's been good to have a four day weekend.

Thursday I went to London and met up with just_ann_now, munditia, jay_of_lasgalen and some other people I didn't know. I managed to find the British Museum on the first attempt, although not the statue we were meeting by - that took me ten minutes of wondering around. Then after lunch me and munditia went in search of Foyles and nearly ended up at Forbidden Planet. In my defence the street did look familiar. Fortunately I had a map and there were maps on the street which told you where you were. I ended up buying the three Chalet School books written by other people that they had there.

So then I felt awful on Friday, which was why I'd taken the day off. I watched a lot of Castle. So much so that I have on episode to go, that I'll watch tonight, and I'd only just started season 3 on Friday...

Happy birthday lost_spook.

I intended to write you some sort of short ficlet and I originally thought it should involve Lynda and Harry Sullivan. And then I thought Kenny and Harry would be better. So I wrote a couple of sentences and it turned out not to be like that at all. And then having got it down to a drabble, it needed another one to go with it. But they do star Kenny.

Read more...

Right at the end of the news on Radio 5 at 6pm on my way home, I heard that Taggart has been cancelled. The BBC report makes it sound hopeful that it will continue, but I can't tell if that's realistic or just STV trying to sound optimistic.

It's so annoying that ITV have now got rid of half the crime drama I watch. Admittedly, all the good crime drama is on ITV, but it seems like they're on a mission to get rid of all the good stuff they show, so they can show completely rubbish instead.

I really liked Taggart - it was different from the other murder mysteries. It was on after the watershed for a start, so it was always more horrid stuff. The thing that sticks in my memory was when Taggart was still alive and the victim was a man whose parachute cord had been cut. He'd fallen through a greenhouse and his head ended up on the other side of it to his body. It was the one time I remember Taggart being a bit not wanting to be near the crime scene too long, but the doctor was quite excited by the whole thing.

(Although ITV4 does show The Professionals and The Sweeney, which if I didn't have a job I'd totally be watching every day, but as it is I can't keep up. But it comes to something that you have to go and watch stuff from th$e 70s and 80s in order to get decent crime drama.)

I have finished the second draft of my Big Bang fic! I read it through and only have one plot hole now, and that should be easily fixed by adding a few lines. I have to get the word count up by 4500 words, but since it felt rushed and there are still a lot of words and sentences that need changing, that shouldn't be a problem. I just have five and a half weeks to get it done and into beta before Wimbledon. Which ought to be do-able, I'm just going to take a break to get it out of my head a bit and while I write something for inmemoryofsjs.

Ballet was cancelled for the second time this term (and it's only week 3). The arts centre just give the impression of people who don't know what they're doing. I get the impression that they moved it from Thursday to Wednesday just because, which then meant the last two terms' teacher could no longer make it, rather than the other way round. I just want to go over there and organise them. Or tell them what I think about that, but I won't manage to do it politely, so I won't. But I was really enjoying ballet and it was helping, so I'm hating not going.

Although tonight I got some Rotaract stuff done. It's just starting to feel like a long drawn out death at the moment. I used to come away from Rotaract meetings feeling all excited about Rotaract and now I come away feeling depressed. It makes it really hard to do the jobs I need to do for it because I don't want to. Partly because they're the usual things to keep it running that seem pointless when it's closing, but aren't because they still need to happen for the next month and a half. Or they're things to close the club and I don't want to.

Now that the remix authors have been revealed, I can reveal that I wrote Feels Like Home (The Green Planet Remix), which is a Stargate Atlantis Five Things fic.

Every year I want to do something different for remix. This year I expanded something short (the original author called it a drabble). And I discovered writing early Rodney, when he hates everyone, is fun.

For my birthday I got:
- A bookmark with bunnies on
- Press Gang series 1 on DVD
- A Big Finish audio with Peter Purves narrating
- A pile of Mercedes Lackey and Chalet School books
- A referendum
- Two local council elections

People at work think I should be celebrating by going out to dinner, which is always a stressful experience. I think they're odd. I did my celebrating at the weekend. And also I got to vote - not too many people get a bank holiday and an election for their birthdays.

Voting was interesting. It was at the Arts Centre and I went around the time a childrens' ballet class was about to start, so there were all these kids around in tutus and their parents. I was on the side that didn't have a queue, as usual.

First there was the referendum one, which was grey and went in one ballot box. Then there was the district council one, which was white and I got to put two crosses on and in a different ballot box. Then there was a long green cardboardy one for the parish council, where I got to put five crosses! The bloke handing out the sheets was quite amusing because when he came to the last one he said "now you've got the hang of two crosses, you get to do five" or something along those lines.

Given the news I'm not getting up my hopes for the referendum to give me a voting system where my vote might actually count in a way that's not purely tactical. The council elections were the first ones times I've ever voted and not known who to vote for. I was going to base it on who lived in the town and that turned out to be all of them. Then I looked at where exactly they lived, but then I would have ended up voting Conservative. The parish one was easy because there were ten candidates, five from two parties, one of which I refuse to vote for. But the district one had two candidates each from three parties, so I voted for the people I didn't vote for for the parish council. At least the county council wasn't in this election too...

An on the subject of voting, here's a video that explains AV for cats.