I keep thinking I should update, but then I have nothing to say. I feel like my life has nothing going on it at the moment. Or at least nothing interesting. Which I’ve just realised is a terrible lead in to this post, which is a summary of what I’m up to… Read more…

1. Upon seeing a small tent-like thing by the side of the road you automatically assume there’s a dead body underneath. Whereas it is in fact a BT tent to keep the rain off the engineers/hole. In hindsight, why I thought there was a tent concealing a dead body without any police cars or police officers around, I don’t know.

I just went away and now can’t be bothered with ordinary boring things. So in short:

• Work is not currently too busy! Although in saying that I’m sure I’ve jinxed it
• Yesterday it rained only while I was out. I do so enjoy shopping in the pouring rain and driving down the dual carriageway in rain so hard you can’t see anything and not all cars put their lights on. Still, the last time I did that I had sunglasses on, so not having them on was a step up. And I did see a rainbow.
• I can’t remember how many years ago it was that I bought my swimming costume, so it’s not a surprise that it’s wearing out. It was a surprise that it was so hard to find a new one. Everywhere sells bikinis and swimming costumes with shaped bits at the front, but if you actually want one to swim in, you have to go to the sports shop. Who had about three that were under 40″ chest size.
• I have photos from Cheddar Gorge
• After telling people how none of my friends that I’m close enough to to be invited get married, I have been invited to a wedding. Which is a bit strange to me because I don’t quite see the point of getting married, I refuse to set foot in a church again without a book to read to stop me from getting bored, and I was friends with them both before they got together. And I think that other people might be all sappy, saying how whatever they look together etc, etc, and I’ll be thinking ‘pass me the sick bucket’. I don’t do sap. Fortunately it’s in October, as both my dresses are black.

I’ve been enjoying Victorian Pharmacy because it’s interesting to see what people thought of diseases, how they coped with them, how healthcare was dealt with etc. The Victorian era was really interesting because so much changed.

But it also makes me think about what people in the future will think of how we lived. We look back at how people lived 150 years ago and it seems so primitive: no cars, no TV, no welfare state etc. So in 150 years time people will look back at how we lived and think it’s so primitive and they couldn’t have lived in the early 21st century.

The trouble with living in it at the moment is I can’t imagine how people’s lives will change. There are plenty of people predicting how technology will change etc, but it’s more a question of how all the new inventions and discoveries in the next 150 years will affect the people living then.

They’ll look back and wonder how we didn’t know that and how we survived without this, but who knows what this and that might be? I think I’d like to go to the future and have a look. Although would it make the present seem primitive and unliveable in?

This weekend I’ve been quite productive. I have:

• Defrosted the fridge (it was desperate – but now my back and legs ache from it
• Wrote 10 drabbles for the 100 drabbles – I’m now up to 51, so over halfway there!
• Watched all of The Chase commentary, which was really interesting. My lovefilm rental list now consists of The Avengers, Ewan MacGregor films and a whole load of stuff they won’t give me
• Watched two episodes of The Prisoner – I have four left on my PVR, although there’s another one on tomorrow

Friday I went to the pub at lunch and then to a different pub after work. I was really dizzy after all that pubbing and not enough relaxing. Even though I sat with my back to most of the room, so I couldn’t see much movement. The reason for going after work was to see someone who left in December to go travelling and she’d come back to visit for the afternoon.

I have sometimes wondered if I’ve missed out by not going travelling, but I wouldn’t want to give up my job (especially during a recession) and before I got it I wouldn’t have been confident enough to go. Now I can say that I haven’t missed out at all. Most of the places she went to I’ve either been to or don’t want to go to. With the exception of New Zealand, which is a hard place to get to, partly because it is the furthest away from here you can go, and also because there are too many people to see in Australia. So I’m happy just seeing the world a couple of weeks at a time – which is generally plenty because I need to go home for a rest after that.

Today has been one of those days. I woke up to find three fire engines and a police car at the end of the road… By the time I left for work it was two police cars and a fireman van type thing and a fire engine that tried to get into the road as I was going out. Except that it’s just not wide enough for that…

Then I thought work would be relatively quiet so I could get some stuff done, but it was ridiculous instead. I needed to start on a new project, thought I could do it in the morning, then thought I could do it at 4pm, then 5pm and eventually started ten minutes after home time…

But on the plus side, our Rotaract handover/16th charter celebration last night was good, especially to see some old friends. And I got home to find altariel1‘s Doctor Who book on my mat, which I am saving for my train journey to London on Sunday.

I haven’t updated a while. First I didn’t have time and then I didn’t want to catch up and then I got dizzy… But these are all the things I might have posted about had I got round to it sometime in the last couple of weeks: Read more…

Today was the sort of day when everything went wrong. It started quite well when I woke up about 10 minutes before my alarm went off – for the past week and a half I’ve been giving up on going back to sleep half an hour before it went off. So I got up, felt a bit less tired – and then remembered I was going to the doctors and had to be there ten minutes before I usually left the house.

So I rushed around, which made me nice and dizzy and had five minutes to spare, so I had a lie down, which wasn’t really long enough. Once I got outside I discovered the windscreen was more icy than it looked and did need a bit of scraping – only on the drivers side, the passenger side was fine.

Last night when I got back I’d been to Tescos and bought 12 litres of orange juice, among other things and my car felt too heavy to back into my space as I usually did. So because I left early this morning all the cars were still parked and it took me a while to get out.

So then I was running late, but would have been fine if I hadn’t had that lie down. But never mind, I knew the roads would be fairly empty and I merrily went along at 2mph above the speed limit because I was in a rush. Until I came across blue flashing lights and the main road closed, that is…

So after taking the back way there I decided I was only going to be a few minute late, if that. So I parked at work and walked quickly – and arrived five minutes late. The computer refused to admit that I had an appointment, so I had a slight panic and stood in a queue for five minutes to talk to a receptionist.

For some reason the surgery have decided that an asthma review requires a twenty minute appointment. It took five minutes, not unsurprisingly, given that my asthma hasn’t changed at all.

I made it into work five minutes early and thought that maybe my luck would change. No, turns out I cocked up the launch of a project the previous day in a rush.

It did improve from then on, but I am no less tired. I want to sleep for 100 days. Or 12 hours, I’m not fussed.

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.