I keep not updating this much because I have nothing much to talk about. At least not in the sense of what I've been up to. This month I've mostly gone to work and made bookcases. It's not been helped by work being busy. I've had some really crazy days. I'm just hoping that it'll calm down in November therefore. I can't hope for December being calm, it never is.

I have one bookcase left to make. At some point once I've made them all and got all my books on them I will take a photo (well, it'll take a few photos) to show how many there are. LibraryThing tells me I have 430 books, but there are some I could get rid of.

I have started reading A Game of Thrones. I'd been putting it off because it's 800 pages in a small font, but it turns out that the chapters are only about 10 pages each. So it's easy to just read a chapter before bed. I am enjoying it - the TV series followed the plot well and the book is explaining more of the background. So I will watch the next series before reading the second book.

Before I read A Game of Thrones I read Snuff. Which I was never not going to like.

My copy of Mylo Xyloto (Coldplay's new album) arrived on Monday. And I finally managed to listen to it today. I got through the whole of it on my journey to work and back. But since I was busy driving and navigating the fog and making sure my windows stayed de-misted and talking, I can't say that I listened to it that closely. But not as closely as I did X&Y - I had that in my car when I moved house the time before last and my sister had it in her car too. Given there was a 10 minute journey between my old flat and the new, we both got sick of the album. I couldn't listen to it for ages after that.

I have almost finished playing Lego Harry Potter. I would have finished it ages ago but I came across a bug, so I was forever stuck at 98%. Once my sister's finished Lego Pirates of the Caribbean then I can play that and she can play Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7. And then I can play it once she's finished. I have bought games for my Wii, but only three and only because I'd played them and liked them (and in two cases because they came with nunchuck/extra bit to make the remote more sensitive).

I don't generally talk about Spooks much here because I know various people are behind or haven't seen earlier series and I hate to spoil people, or offer up temptation. The latter I discovered before series 8, so I read forums and therefore knew things I'd rather have waited for the episode to find out. But the last ever episode (sob!) made me want to talk about it. But I will endeavour to do so without spoilers. Read more...

In a couple of places in this week's The Week it mentions about staying on BST all year round and people have been claiming that everyone wants it, except the Scottish. Well, I don't want it.

At the moment it's dark enough when I leave work to need the headlights on. It's definitely dark enough to need the lights on inside when I get home. Even without changing the clocks next weekend, that's going to carry on getting worse until it's completely dark when I leave work long before 21st December.

Since the days are getting shorter, sunrise is about the time I get up. It's light by the time I leave for work and it's only so dark I need to put the lights on if it's cloudy, but that's definitely encroaching.

If we stayed on BST, by 21st December it would be dark when I went to work and dark when I left home. I would only see the light out of the office window. Personally, on balance, I'd like lighter evenings. And an extra hour next weekend, even if it's required for putting all the clocks back.

Spoilers for this week's (last ever) episode.
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Last week was ridiculously busy at work, so I was looking forward to a weekend with nothing planned, getting on with a few jobs. Sadly my immune system had other ideas and I had a sore throat and a cold instead. Although I did sleep for twelve hours on Saturday night, which made me feel so much less tired.

So I spent the week feeling rubbish and improved towards the end of the week. Which is the opposite of how I usually feel when a week goes by.

This weekend I spent getting the jobs done that I should have been doing last week. Oh, and spending the whole of this morning fixing my computer. Theoretically it was an easy fix, if only my Ubuntu installation pen drive. But I have now added to my list of Linux distros I've used with Puppy Linux. Which looks like the Windows sort of environment with Linux icons. And barks when it starts up, which frightened the life out of me because I wasn't expecting it.

I did finish a fic a couple of weeks ago and then didn't want to post at the same time as the other one, otherwise I'd look far more prolific than I really am. But I have now: John Chesterton: Time Lord (spoilers for When a Good Man Goes to War and Let's Kill Hitler). When I first had the idea, at the end of the first half of the series, I was intending to write something serious. But by the time I came up with a plot it ended up being not terribly serious at all.

Spoilers for this week's SJA.

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This week has felt so long. After not being very busy at work for months, this week I was suddenly really busy. I was definitely ready for it to be the weekend on Wednesday, after I'd worked late on Tuesday, then come home and did some more work. But I still made it to ballet on Wednesday, which did make me less tense.

The crazy part is that I can't quite believe it's gone from being hot enough to need the windows open all evening to being so cold the heating needs to be on in the space of a week. This time last week I was at home, trying to take photos of the cat (who really doesn't pose). But he did recognise me, even though I hadn't been home since Easter, which is good.

Before work got busy I finished off my girlsavesboyfic fic, and have now managed to get the time to post it: Winds of Time (When Ian is lost on a cold, empty planet, it's up to Barbara to save him.)

Spoilers for this week's SJA.

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I don't have a reading challenge, but I thought I'd post what I'd read each month. So, in September I read:

Stargate: Atlantis: Homecoming by Jo Graham and Melissa Scott.
I was saving this one until after I'd finished my Big Bang story, because they start in similar places, after the last episode of Atlantis. I enjoyed this book to start with, seeing all the characters and what they were getting up to. But then it went over to standard Atlantis stuff and although I liked it when I saw it, I wasn't so keen on reading it for some reason. Perhaps because we had so much from Todd's point of view which was just weird. I wasn't so sure about seeing the Wraith humanised like that, even though they are partly human. I was also surprised to see obvious John/Teyla shipping. I'm not used to seeing that sort of thing in published books so it was a bit strange. The book ended on a cliffhanger, but I can't say that I'm that desperate to find out how it's resolved.

Arrow's Fall by Mercedes Lackey
I've read a few Mercedes Lackey books and I find them hard going until about halfway in and then you have to read big chunks in one go to actually enjoy it. Which means I don't get many books read in a month when I read one of these. But the first in this trilogy actually got going right from the start and I liked all the way through. However, this is book three and it did start going downhill a bit in book two. This one was alright, but I can't tell you what happened in it now, except for a lifebond and Ancar. The lifebond part I hated with a passion. I've been there and done that in fanfiction (reading, not writing) and it's just so cliched and sickly, frankly. The Ancar stuff was more interesting because I realised that I'd read stuff about him in future trilogies (I seem to be going backwards with Mercedes Lackey trilogies). Which did make me want to read another Mercedes Lackey.

Winds of Fury by Mercedes Lackey
I read the first two of this trilogy ages ago, and then read the trilogy that came after, so I had a good idea of how this ended. And then forgot about it because it was ages ago. I actually enjoyed this one. I felt like I was starting to get a grip on the characters and the magic and the land. Some of it still baffles me - I could do with a glossary I think - but given that they only just explained what a Heartstone is in this book, after it being an important thing in the previous two, perhaps that's on purpose. I'm feeling all excited about reading more Mercedes Lackey now. And thinking that perhaps I need to go back and re-read some sometime.