It’s that time of year again… Well, it’s a new time of year. This is the first year the ATP tour final (formerly known as the Masters series final) has been held in London. So, we went yesterday afternoon. As a result I feel terrible today while not lying down, but I have the week off, and anyway, it was worth it.

We saw Nestor and Zimonjic play a Polish pair I’ve never heard of, can’t spell and certainly can’t pronounce. They’re ranked 8, so they’re the lowest ranked pair in there. It was a bit odd because they played a variation, so when it got to deuce whoever won the next point won. And if they won a set each they’d play a tie-break, but to 10 points. It made it very quick, but it felt like it all turned on those deuce points because the Polish pair broke once per set on those points. But it was a good match and now I’m reduced to seeing the rest of the doubles matches online.

We had half an hour’s break after that and then there were a lot fewer empty seats for Murray’s match. This was back to usual point scoring and because they spend a lot more time than the doubles per point, made it seem really slow. The doubles match was an hour long, this one was two and a half. But it was a battle and Del Potro played well, apart from in the middle of the first set and towards the end of the third. That was a good match too, but we really wanted it to end because the seats just go so uncomfortable after sitting in them for the best part of five hours, I was really dizzy and it was really hot in there, which didn’t help.

But we had a good view, even though we were near the back. People at work were trying to tell me we wouldn’t be able to see a thing, but it was no different from being at the back of Centre Court.

And there are photos, some of which are a bit blurry because they’re all taken with the flash off and the lighting was terrible (really bright on the court and we couldn’t see a thing, which made eating lunch interesting).

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 should totally be working on my remix fics on this tennis-less (but not Glastonbury-less) day, but I heard them talking about this on Radio 5 and have only just seen the list on Andy Murray’s twitter now.

He has a tennis player snack name game going on, where you alter tennis players names slightly to match up with names of snacks. Where snack is a loose definition. His list includes:

Lleyton chewit, james flake, boris doubledecker, dorito starace. #

Juan martin del popcorn, vania kingsize mars bar, gilles muller fruit corner. Novak Yorkie-ovic #

John MacEnrolo, Cod woodbridge, mardy fishcakes, prawn borg, martina haggis, mince spadea, egg rusedski, spotted dick norman. #

Nicholas Tiramassu, ernests gulbiscuit. Jesse levino? Juan carlos ferrero rocher. #

Ryvita gerulaitis. #

They were coming up with these on Radio 5 on Thursday for the tennis players on the commentary team, but the only one I can remember is Michael Stichy Toffee Pudding.

With useful headers and everything. Read more…

Dear BBC

Why is it that the closest I’ve come to seeing either of Andy Murray’s doubles matches at Queens is seeing him walk out on court this evening before you stopped broadcasting for no good reason and despite saying you’d broadcast till 8pm?

Oh, hang on, I know the answer. It’s because you’re a load of useless tossers who don’t deserve the licence fee I have to pay every year.

You’d better have a bloody good answer to my complaint.

No love,
Me.

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.

I had a good weekend – well, half a good weekend. I went to High Wycombe to drop off some knickers and other stuff for Knickers 4 Africa and go to selenay936‘s ex-local bookshop. Where I saw her parents and spent £17 on books – that was being restrained. I’m still working through the books I got from my mum and grandmother for my birthday yet.

It was a good day and we somehow managed to avoid the worst of the weather. I was really tired when I got home, which I expected. What I didn’t expect was how dizzy I felt Sunday. All I ended up doing on Sunday is lying on the sofa reading and watching tennis because I wasn’t capable of doing anything else. Fortunately, there was tennis on – exhibition matches under the new Centre Court roof at Wimbledon and I enjoyed them, although I could have done without the camera moving so much. I didn’t even feel like I’d done that much either. I’m less dizzy now but back to going to bed at 10pm.

But on Friday I’m going to see if I feel well enough after work to go and see In the Loop, which wasn’t at the cinema walking distance from where I live now. But it is at the cinema walking distance from work on Friday and Saturday. Then it is at least a three day weekend, although I plan to do things with it – not least find a place for all these books to live…

Also, in the unlikely event that there’s anyone left who doesn’t have a Dreamwidth account that wants one, I have four invites. And, it turns out, Trillian Astra invites, since it’s now in beta. And probably has been for a while, I’ve just failed to notice, just gave them money…

My trouble when I’m ill is I tend not to want to talk to people, mostly because I have to be polite and I don’t have the energy for that extra thinking. So it’s usually better just to shut up and ignore everyone. Which has extended to me not wanting to post in here either, although I do have things I want to blog about.

I am getting better, if slowly (and don’t have concussion, which is good after I hit my head on the kitchen side on Thursday night) and this has been marked as unread in my emails for a while:

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your blog and elaborate on the subjects given.

tanaquilotr gave me Doctor Who, Elrond, food allergies, Davis Cup, fencing: Read more…

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…

I knew today that Andy Murray was through to the semis and Jamie Murray was into the Mixed Doubles final. And he said that maybe he’s better at mixed, which is really unhelpful given the number of opportunities he has to play mixed doubles vs doubles. Anyway, his match was due to start at 5.30pm BST. Which is really good timing as that’s when I finished work.

So I got home and went to 301 & 302 and there was… no tennis. But there was sports news, so while my computers started up I thought I’d see if there was any news of the score. Andy Murray was mentioned, Jamie Murray might well as not have existed.

As I was hungry I went and put dinner on and turned the radio on. The radio in the kitchen is permanently tuned to Radio 5, purely for Wimbledon but I found their news at 6 is handy to listen to while I cook dinner and try not to die of boredom while I do it. Jamie Murray got mentioned in the headlines.

Turned out it was on 5 Live Sports Extra, so I’ve been listening to that all evening. It’s really strange how different the US Open is to Wimbledon. When the players sit down they have the big screen picking out random people to win a George Foreman grill. They played a final on a Thursday during the day US time, which seems mad. And the commentators end up having to stay up till 3am to commentate on matches! I mean, I do like all day tennis, but there’s a limit.

And the strangest thing of all was sudden death at deuce in the doubles matches. Which made that one point so, so important. And utterly pointless, since it was only done for the TV schedules. Keeping the number of deuces in a game is going to make the match shorter, but not by much. And it isn’t going to make it any more unpredictable either. Crazy.

Dear Andy Murray,

Henman is not your hero and he’s not someone to emulate. I only have a finite number of fingernails and the edge of my seat is really uncomfortable.

Just win or lose, none of this mucking about in the middle, okay? Or at the end either, I mean, win when you have championship points, not five games later.

Love, a British tennis fan.

I have just added a few people to my friends list – mostly people from TR or names I’ve seen often in various places. Friend back, don’t friend back, I don’t mind. As far as I’m concerned, my LJ friends list is a copy of my RSS Feeds and is just a reading list.

I’m really disliking hayfever season. It’s not helped by spending last night in a Barn in a field that was open. I’m currently on medicine, nose spray, eye drops and the maximum dose of my inhaler, but for the past week I haven’t been able to lie around in bed after I wake up because I just can’t breathe. It does go away a bit during the day, to come back in the evening, but I’m really looking forward to the end of the hayfever season.

I’m really looking forward to Wimbledon now, after the taster that was the Stella Artois semis and finals this weekend. Especially today’s between Djokovic and Nadal, which was such a good match. The question is whether any of them can beat Federer, who won in Halle.

After having it on my rental list for months, Amazon have finally sent me the first DVD of Sapphire and Steel. I’ve had it for a week now and have so far watched none of it. All TV except Doctor Who has finished, but I keep not being in for that and then just don’t get round to putting the telly on.

I had such a long list of things to do this weekend that I wrote them down. Then got all the more urgent things done yesterday, but I still have to clean, spring clean, make bread and do some Rotaract stuff. Today I don’t seem to have managed much at all.

After the big, long post the other day about roleplaying, I have almost decided to drop Gene and Ian in favour of spending time on Harry & Jo and other non-rp things. Almost.

Although I haven’t started any of them yet, I am still taking fic requests. I am already feeling guilty about not thinking about them and refusing to let myself write anything else, so it’s sort of working.

I liked it, it was fun. And it had more guest stars I’ve heard of than you can shake a stick at: that guy from Hustle (who’s also apparently going to be in Life on Mars, yay!), the girl who was Moaning Myrtle and one of Bridget Jones’s friends, and Moya Brady (Robbie Cryer – it seems like forever since she left). And Peter Kay, who I’ve heard of but not seen in anything. I keep thinking I hate him but then remember I’m getting him mixed up with Johnny Vegas, whose scene in Blakes Junction 7 is fabulous but makes me cringe because it’s Johnny Vegas.

So, on balance I haven’t had enough sleep.

In today’s driving lesson I only stalled the car twice, which is an improvement on last week. I also failed to find fifth gear on all but one occasion (the first one, bizarrely). And I still can’t do junctions. So, as long as I don’t have to drive anywhere that involves changing roads, I’ll be fine.

There was also tennis today, yay! Two good matches, hopefully tomorrow’s final will be good too. Only a week till Wimbledon, and three weeks till I go there.

I have been good and updated my website. Including music video recs that have been sitting around on my hard drive since January…

I was supposed to be playing tennis tonight but I stil hurt too much for that – but I can move a lot more than yesterday. So I’m not actually out a single night this week, so I am trying to be good and get things done. It’s working so far but there’s still plenty of time for it to go downhil…

I was followed home by a dog today who was very nice and just sat and wagged its tail while I stroked it. Which was more pleasant than next doors dog who is a bit enthusiastic – which is hard work in a big dog.

Superset tennis on Sunday was mostly good. We did have to queue outside in the rain, and it was really busy with people inside. They also took everyone’s bottle caps (except mine because they don’t search bags properly) but no-one would tell us why. Which did mean we spent the whole afternoon thinking up reasons. The only one we could come up with was that we’d throw them at the players but we could think of far better things to throw. I found out when I got home, from my landlady’s boyfriend, is that they do that at football matches to stop people throwing full bottles. Cos I totally see tennis fans doing that [/sarcasm]

Apart from that, we saw Greg Rusedski with very girly hair and a hairband, who dragged his match with Boris Becker out to a tie-break (at 10-10!) but did make it to the final. I spotted John McEnroe commentating on this match – he disappeared after that.

Next up was Goran Ivanisevic (forever known as Gobby Goran in our house for his nasty habit of spitting on the court). He also had a hairband but his hair was its normal longish length, so looked a bit less girly. He played around, as per usual, but didn’t put up much of a fight against Tommy Robredo.

The eventual winner Mario Ancic played Robbie Ginepri and then we saw John McEnroe who easily outplayed Andy Murray – a seventeen year old Brit, who is apparently someone to watch out for. Although we’ve heard that one before.

Tim Henman had pulled out after the Davis Cup, with injury and had apparently been commentating. Which would have been, um, interesting, to, er, listen to.

It was a weird experience. I was still recovering from the flu, so the flashing lights didn’t do me much good. And I don’t know whether it was the lights or the colour of the court, but it was really hard to see the ball sometimes. I did like the players appealing to Hawkeye though. It’s always interesting to see whether the linesmen have got it right and for it to count.

The thing I can’t decide is whether I’d go again if they did another one. Wimbledon, on the other hand, is great for the experience (and a bit of tennis) and Davis Cup is great for the atmosphere (and both are good for getting to see doubles, which is much more interesting).

Edit: those photos looked much better when they were four times the size and about 700k (instead of ~20k)!

I tried to post this at 8.25pm on 2nd Sept, but blogger was being a bugger and didn’t post it:

Didn’t have a terribly good weekend, then today was really shite. I pretty much spent the day working on one project, on which everything that could go wrong did go wrong. And its still not finished. Will be nice to get it out of the way though. Discovered my landlady’s cats have fleas because I’ve been bitten and also because I’ve seen them. Looking forward to going home this weekend as it’ll be relaxing (yeah, right). Will have to go to Tescos, so might as well go to the cinema while I’m there as I still haven’t seen Minority Report and The Importance of Being Earnest comes out on Friday, which I really want to see. Plus if I don’t take my computer home I’ll only get bored anyway.

Managed to miss Hywel this weekend, which was pretty much the reason for going to The Bill studios. Hopefully though I’ll be able to get the day off for the next one, which will be before he leaves. I still have about 10 photos left on my film as well, which I’ll need to use up at the Davis Cup match. Almost getting excited about that as well, not that much because I haven’t really seen any of the US Open because BBC2 only show the semi-finals onwards, if that, which isn’t much help as non of our guys are left in by that stage. And the year that Rusedski got to the final they didn’t show it at all! I remember listening to it on the radio at 11 o’clock at night, in the dark, lying in bed, trying not to fall asleep. Have at least managed to find some good fic at the SG1 2002 Awards site, which is something.