What I’ve done on this:

• Wash my hair – Although the depressing thing about having put this on here is that I need to do it again on Tuesday
• Tidy
• Clean the flat
• Deal with things I’ve uncovered while tidying – might just be pay credit card bill, do finances and call Toyota to fix my car (which isn’t broken) – I mostly did this, but the Toyota service department weren’t in at the weekend, so they wouldn’t book my car in. Helpful.
• Make muffins, biscuits and flapjacks
• Read/reply to/do something with all the RSS feeds I have marked as unread in RSS Bandit I did do this, but now I have more
• Do some writing. I have about three things to write before the end of the month, so I should get on with it, really I wrote quite a bit last night and this morning
• Sort out what I’m going to say at our Rotaract talk on 18th – I have two minutes on the club non-fundraising stuff and one minute on me
• Only watch stuff on my PVR taped while I watched nothing but Olympics and also lovefilm DVD I finished the DVD and am down to just three episodes of Being Human out of all the stuff I taped while watching Olympics
• Do a load of washing today and another tomorrow
• Do monthly backup
• Get LibraryThing book list up to date

I would have managed all of it, except that I went for a walk in the afternoon. I felt great while I was doing it and for about five minutes after I got back, but despite lying down for two hours afterwards I just feel increasingly more terrible the longer I spend not lying down. So the rest will have to wait and I’ll get started on the Being Human instead.

Things I should do this weekend:

• Wash my hair (I know that’s something I’m hardly likely to forget, but at least this way I’ll get to cross something off)
• Tidy
• Clean the flat
• Deal with things I’ve uncovered while tidying – might just be pay credit card bill, do finances and call Toyota to fix my car (which isn’t broken)
• Make muffins, biscuits and flapjacks
• Read/reply to/do something with all the RSS feeds I have marked as unread in RSS Bandit
• Do some writing. I have about three things to write before the end of the month, so I should get on with it, really
• Sort out what I’m going to say at our Rotaract talk on 18th – I have two minutes on the club non-fundraising stuff and one minute on me
• Only watch stuff on my PVR taped while I watched nothing but Olympics and also lovefilm DVD
• Do a load of washing today and another tomorrow
• Do monthly backup
• Get LibraryThing book list up to date

I think that’s probably everything…

This weekend I have:

• Tidied
• Cleaned
• Done my finances – and discovered the electricity bill I thought I’d paid on Christmas Eve I actually hadn’t
• Sorted out some paperwork – and found a two month old letter from the doctors inviting me for an asthma review
• Baked chocolate chip cookies, fairy cakes (with purple icing), chocolate chip biscuits, flapjacks and chocolate sponge puddings

And if that wasn’t enough, I have uploaded a load of stories to A03. These are some of the stories I have on Harry’s journal that are written for weekly prompt comms. It’s useful to have them in order, but these are essentially quick things that I dashed off. They’re not the greatest things I’ve written ever, but they’ve been useful for getting me writing – and sometimes it’s useful to just get something over and done with without spending weeks on it. Think of them as flashfic if you will.

I thought it’s entirely possible that some people might be vaguely interested in them, so they are:
Harry’s childhood
Harry’s present

The latter starts where the Sarah Jane Smith audios stop and run concurrently with New Who, Torchwood and SJA and I did work out what went where at one point, but I have since forgotten.

And now I am tired and fifteen minutes late with Being Human.

Which I’ve been meaning to write for the past week…
Read more…

I am so busy at the moment, it’s crazy. Yesterday at work was terrible – I worked straight through lunch and didn’t leave till late. Today I didn’t think it would be quite so busy. I did get a lunch break, but didn’t quite manage to start on today’s work until 4pm and then left late. Tomorrow I have so much to do I can’t see how I’m going to start on tomorrow’s work. Then I’m off on Friday and Monday and going to the Balance Clinic on Tuesday afternoon. Which means the only way I can get tomorrow’s work done in time is going to be to do it at the weekend, I think. Everyone else is busy at work too. The only good thing is that at least there are only two weeks left after this one.

I’m still catching up with stuff I need to do at home after spending my week off ill. I got really anxious about Yuletide and wrote the first draft while I had a really bad cold and felt awful. Which is something I’ve learnt to do from being ill for so long, it’s just something I’d rather not do until I have to. And then I had to work hard to get it into something vaguely readable. Tonight I managed v3 – of 5500 words! I should just have to read it through a couple more times, then it can go to beta. Which is good because I need to get it out of the way so I can do betaing, treats and my TR secret santa. And maybe catch up on my viewing.

I keep meaning to update more often but I’m just so unmotivated by everything at the moment. I think all that time reading and watching videos and not doing a lot else and I’ve got used to it. But there isn’t nothing on tonight (I’m most upset that The Bill’s off for Celebrity nonsense), so I am determined to do something constructive with my evening.

In Yuletide news I am currently reviewing the source material in the hopes that I might manage a plot at the end of it. I’m quite excited about what I’m writing and it helps that my recipient likes a lot of the same things that I do. I’m hoping that writing that will help remind me about the whole doing something constructive thing.

It’s Children in Need tomorrow, so it’s guaranteed to rain, since it’s not that cold. Normally I’d be running around in the road with a bucket before work, but I’m not well enough to do that, so I am counting money after work instead. I don’t think I can quite cope with the idea of not doing something for Children in Need any more.

I’m having a week off work next week, which I will mostly be spending listening to the tennis, since the BBC aren’t showing much. I was very excited by a twitter post of Andy Murray’s today because he revealed that he’s playing Sunday afternoon and that’s when I’m going. We’re further back than we were for the gymnastics, so expect pictures of ant-sized people.

I am most distressed my today’s paper when they announced they are discontinuing the Technology section in the Guardian. I liked it best when it was the Online section with the Science section inside, but it’s still been worth buying the paper once a week for it. Without it there’ll be no reason to buy the paper any more – and I don’t like reading the paper online, it’s not the same. These days I tend to get my news from Radio 5 on the way home from work.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for ages, but wanted to wait until I had the complete story first.

Back in January, once I’d settled in, I remembered that the last time I moved the water company insisted on installing a water meter, on the basis that I’d just moved in. I didn’t get as far as ringing them up about it before they sent me a letter. So that was all good because it costs a whole lot less to have a water meter.

So a man came round, handily the day I had off before I went to Redemption. He told me there was already a meter there, it just needed connecting. It all went a bit downhill from there… Read more…

I didn’t have anything on this weekend and I didn’t have to go anywhere, so I thought I’d get a few things done, housework and writing and so on. Well, I managed the first. I thought I was doing well for getting all my washing done, until I thought “that’s making a bit more of a watery noise than usual”, opened the kitchen door and found water on the floor. Which is just what you want from your washing machine. It was just the waste water pipe from the washing machine that had come out of the pipe that takes it to the drain, so it was at least easily fixed.

Recently I discovered Pidgin, which is the messenger program I use on my netbook, doesn’t belief AIM exists any more. Since I was awake annoyingly early this morning I thought I’d get up and see if anyone was in any of the RPG related chats. Which they weren’t, but I discovered that Trillian in your browser doesn’t do chat. After lots of searching on the forums I uninstalled Pidgin then reinstalled it. At which point it refused to open. But I did discover why it refused to open links in Firefox and just did nothing. In the end I installed Kopete, which I’ve decided I like far more than Pidgin anyway, but not as much as Astra.

Just because it seems to be that sort of weekend, the netbook keeps randomly disconnecting from the network (it just seems to be a common bug with it, which is unhelpful, but at least I know how to get it back on without restarting). And I watched a DVD using my computer as a DVD player and the wireless keyboard as a remote and twice the computer decided that every keystroke was actually me right clicking and wouldn’t acknowledge me left clicking. Why it decided it didn’t like the wireless keyboard today when it’s been fine up till now, I don’t know.

On the plus side, since Azureus kept disconnecting my computer from the internet (which also seems to be a common problem with Vista) and there’s something clearly not right with it, I thought I’d install μTorrent, which seems to work perfectly and looks pretty much the same.

So that was my weekend of trials and tribulations. Next week I have an MRI, a flu jab and a trip to the dentist and the week after is a trip to the balance clinic. So it’ll all be a bit medical.

Today, or yesterday depending on how you count it, I’ve been ill for seven months.

Things I have been doing:

Watched Generation Kill, which turned out to be surprisingly good. After seven episodes I can name seven characters, which is pretty good going (Ray, Trombley, Reporter, Brad, LT, Captain America (who I recognise from somewhere but can’t work out where), Godfather). Plus there’s also the bloke that wears glasses who lost his helmet. There may or may not have been other speaking characters, I got a bit confused – they all dress the same, it doesn’t help!

I finished v2 of my Sarah and Harry ficathon story. So I have a draft or two to go and it will be about 5000 words. Handily, the SG Rare Pairings ficathon starts up once that’s done and I’m hoping there will be some Jack/Elizabeth prompts for me to write (and I’ll be leaving some, just as soon as I work out what). Then there’ll be Yuletide and I so want to add Teachers to the list of fandoms. And after one episode of Merlin I want to request Gaius & Merlin again.

I’m meeting Avon on Sunday, yay!

I have a new shower. It’s cunningly fitted into the corner of the bath so if you want to stand under it you have to stand on the bit of the bath that starts going upwards. So I take it down – which required me to take the shower head off so I could get it out from the middle of the soap dish so it would actually stretch far enough to shower with, and to rinse the bath with.

There really isn’t anything else at all going on in my life at the moment. Just lots of things I want to do.

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…

Usually, when Remix happens, I try and read everything in the fandoms I know and get a recs list about before the reveal. But since that clearly wasn’t going to happen anyway, never mind that I only had four days to do it in, I’m still working my way through it. But some recs will find their way to Sel’s site.

I wrote my first ever Harry Potter fic: Sirius Black, Specialising in Sexual Education (The Master Becomes the Apprentice Remix). I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t one of the fandoms I put down that I’d write, but I couldn’t get it out of my head as I read the others.

The one that was remixed of mine was Suddenly a Small Fish (The Great Big Pond Remix) and as what happened with the TARDIS Big Bang, people seem unable to understand that the name I write under is not the same as my LJ name, but in this case it’s in a tag, so I can’t get them to change it.

I’ve got lots of things done this weekend, which was good. And then this afternoon the washing machine smoked… And this is where I’m very glad I rent because the landlord has come round and looked at it and it’s his problem, not mine.

This weekend I’ve watched lots of tennis. Which was good, but I wish they’d just stick to showing us the court in such a way that they don’t have to move the camera, and not show us a picture from behind one of the players where you can’t see anything and the camera moves too much. I also could do with them not showing us an aerial view of the court and then spiralling round and in. But at least we get six days of French Open viewing (at the weekends) whereas for Wimbledon we only get three.

I saw Sports Island 2 for the Wii and I want it – it looks good. Not that I can play on the Wii at the moment, mind you. Or cross stitch, which is really quite frustrating.

All of a sudden remix is happening, so I’m going to be writing two at the same time.

I need to do a reading my weight in books update – it might be in a while when there’s no tennis.

My hayfever’s gone from practically nothing to me spending the afternoon blowing my nose, last night with itchy eyes and sudden asthma when it got dark Friday and today. At least it’s quite late, so hopefully it’ll only be a month and half – which I calculated should only cost me about £30 in drugs.

This weekend couldn’t be more of a contrast to last weekend: Last Sunday I spent freezing and wishing I could go back in time to the day before to turn the heating on. This Sunday was boiling and I had all the windows open. Today at least there’s more of a breeze and no sun. But I do have to close the windows in the lounge to hear the telly over the trains…

I tidied and my lounge feels so much bigger, even though pretty much all I did was sort out all the piles of paper I had on my dining room table and coffee table. I also rearranged it a bit. I realised, after coming back from being at home, that the telly wasn’t really in the best place to see it from the sofa. And because I’d pulled it out of the corner a bit, there was a whole load of wasted space in the corner. So I rearranged my desks and telly a bit. And even took photos: Before 1, Before 2, After 1, After 2. Spot the magically moving pictures above my desk and amazing disappearing balloon!

Friday I saw In the Loop, which was really good. It was nicer to see it on a smaller screen than the one I saw Star Trek on. But I did spend the whole thing trying to work out where I recognised Simon Foster from and it was only when I looked it up that I discovered he was Guy Burgess in Cambridge Spies. One of the funny bits in it was when Malcolm Tucker (who’s Scottish) told the American General not to call him English, and the General just look bewildered as to why! In an interview with Armando Iannucci he says that he’s doing a second series of The Thick of It, which will be good.

I’ve also signed up for who_remix, partly on the basis that if I don’t have to write anything I never will while I’m still ill.

According to my radio controlled clock in the kitchen today is Friday 1st May. I did have to look at it for quite a while to work out whether it was trying to tell me if it was the 1st, 5th or 15th and if any of them were right. Sadly, it’s not Friday.

I have an amusing saga of my council tax to tell. For anyone reading not in this country, everyone who’s not a student has to pay council tax based on the size of the house they live in. Well, ish, but let’s not over complicate the matter.

They have a strange system where they work out how much you owe for the year and then divide it by ten – so you pay council tax every month for ten months of the year and not at all for two. Which presumably made sense to someone at the time, but certainly not to me.

When I first moved away from home and wasn’t a student council tax was included in my rent. So I didn’t start paying it until I moved into a flat two a half years ago. When I moved in December I still had two months of council tax to pay. Since I was moving to a similar sized flat I knew the council tax was likely to be the same, and since I would still be paying it to the same council, I just kept paying it.

After a couple of months they wrote to me to tell me that I’d paid too much and they wanted to give it back to me. So I thought I’d let them, since that money might as well sit in my bank account until they ask for it back. For some inexplicable reason you have to send the stuff to Kent, despite me not living anywhere near Kent.

Eventually I get a letter back to say they can’t give me the money, they have to write a cheque. I don’t really care at this point, so I let them do what they like.

Then I get a letter back to say they’ve just worked out that I told them I moved in December (and in fact I told them a week before I moved) and they haven’t asked me for any council tax in the new place. They want me to tell them if I’m still living on my own so they can work out how much I owe (you get 25% off for living on your own).

The next day I ring them, can’t get through to anyone useful, but do get through to someone who tells me to email them. When I get home I find three council tax bills. One to say I’ve paid up for my last flat, one to say I owe them money for the end of the last council tax year for this flat and one to tell me how much I owe them this year.

So I email them to point out that I do still live on my own.

A month later I get two bills. One to say that not only have I paid for the last council tax year, but I’ve paid £1.29 too much, and one to tell me how much I owe for this year. Which is slightly more than last year and therefore probably right.

I’m so looking forward to the next time I move…

I’ve been trying to think all morning about what I can do with my time. For the whole of May I have three things planned and two of those are Rotaract meetings. It’s a bit tricky at the moment with how far I can go and how much I can do and people going away.

But what would be good is to actually talk to people – in addition to blogging and emailing. I have msn, google talk, aim and skype and I can use all those from my netbook, so I can lie on the sofa at the same time (because I can only sit up at the computer for a finite amount of time).

I don’t tend to open up Pidgen or Skype on my netbook, though, so I could do with being organised about it really (and my emails could have delays on them of an hour, which is not that helpful).

So is there anyone who would like to chat at some point in the next few weeks? And if so, what medium and what time?

Because I haven’t got the energy for anything more substantial.
Read more…

Last night I had nightmares about Conference and driving – two things I can’t do much of while I’m still ill. But Boots are ordering me some medicine that’ll make me feel better (but not make me better, as it’s a virus). The doctor who’s not my usual doctor was quite good at liaising directly with Boots to find something I could take that didn’t have lactose in, and would therefore make me more ill.

Today I seem to have decided to have some existential angst about my age, even though my birthday’s not for another two months. I think it’s Miles Vorkorsigan’s fault, as I’m re-reading those books and he’s thirty where I’m up to at the moment.

My jeans all seem to be getting holey, so yesterday, when I went out for some apples and an armchair, I thought I’d look in a couple of shops to see what they had. Bearing in mind that I can’t wear flared trousers because I need them to stop at my shoes to keep me from walking on them and I can’t wear hipsters because I have no hips.

I started with New Look because I know their size 8 trousers fit me and they do trousers with short leg lengths. And indeed, they have average (30′), short (28′), long (32′) and extra long (34′). Short is only slightly too long on me, so they’re fine. They do all sorts of different jeans, but if you want size 8 you’re supposed to be tall, because I could only find 32′ and 34′ leg lengths. Which is unhelpful. Their 915 (ie kids) section only does flared hipsters.

So I went next door to QS, who had cheaper jeans. Except they don’t go smaller than a size 10. So I thought I’d try them anyway. I wasn’t terribly impressed to find that they were the same leg length as an age 13/14 because I could tell without trying them on that they were too long. Age 13 fits me usually, but not when they pair it with age 14 and therefore design it for tall people.

You could get two of me in the size 10 waist and when I held it up to my current jeans I found out why: they’re hipsters. They just come up to my waist. There’s too much material there to wear with a belt because it’s really uncomfortable having your entire trouser round the front.

So at some point I am going to need to find some ordinary, straight-legged, non-hipster jeans designed for short people. Admittedly I need to go somewhere with more shop I’m not at all convinced such a thing exists. (I also get bored after one shop and give up and go to the bookshop instead, which doesn’t help.) I also want decent sized pockets and not to spend more than about £10, but I suspect I might be onto a loser with those requirements.

I now have a clean and tidy flat for the first time since I moved in. I made loads of space by throwing out stuff, which includes a bag of books to take to Redemption, three boxes of floppy disks (mostly blank) and backups of my last but one computer on eight CDs. But not only can I now get to things but I also have space for more things! Which is great. Well, it will be till I fill the space up again.

My lengthy to-do list did all get put on hold this morning for the Australian Open final, which was great, although did mean I had a late lunch. I can’t believe what sort of times they play till over there. But I really, really enjoyed the match. No matter what happens I can’t stop thinking of Federer as the No 1 and champion and Nadal as his adversary. Despite the fact that it’s pretty much been the other way round recently.

Next big thing is the Davis Cup, which we ought to win…