My mood is totally affected by the weather - today is warm and sunny and spring-like (if only because a temperature above freezing feels warm) and I'm happy. Also, fandom_stocking went live today, so I had lots of nice things in it this morning:

An Ian and Barbara icon from lindenharp

Hush-hush: A Harry Potter fic featuring Sirius from trovia

Rainy Day Tales (part 2 & part 3): a DW/Press Gang fic from lost_spook

A sweet Luke-centred fic from cosmic_llin

A graphic of my choice from arenee1999

An IOU from carawj

A Harry (Sullivan) picspam from livii

And happy new years from dbskyler and eponymous_rose

Next year I will make my request list better - having read lots of other people's with an eye to writing something I have a much better idea of what's useful to put in there.

I will post up what I wrote at some point, but I want to wait until people have seen their own first. And I wrote 15 ficlets between 100 and 1100 words, so they'll take a little while to upload.

I thought this last week would be quite quiet, I'd get lots of things done... I don't know why I thought that. It didn't help that I kept waking up at 6am - except on Friday when I woke up at 5am. Monday it snowed during the day, and I was sick of waiting in the freezing cold for a freezing cold bus and getting home half an hour later than I would have if I'd driven, so I drove to work on Monday. I contemplated leaving my car at work, but decided to drive home. It was the scariest thing I'd ever done - not helped by two police cars and two ambulances going past me in the opposite direction with their blue lights flashing. They couldn't go above 20mph the same as the rest of us, though, so the blue flashing lights didn't exactly do them much good.

But now I know what it's like, I won't be driving in the snow again. But I'd only ever seen it snow and settle during the day once before, so I assumed it was a freak event and it would just go back to snowing in the night again. But I also live further North than I grew up, and there it snows every year, which I find utterly ridiculous weather, but moving back South would mean I was living far from anywhere, so I supposed I'm stuck with it. If the Gulf Stream ever goes away, we're seriously buggered.

On the plus side, I have a week off work and it is now Boxing Day, which is miles better than Christmas Day. Except that for some strange reason all the good TV is on on New Years Day.

And I have a Yuletide fic! The site's really slow, so it's best visited in the mornings before the Americans get up, but it's a Quantum Leap fic: Returning Home and Meeting Memories for the First Time. Reading through the rest of the archive is taking time, not just because of the slowness, but also because I find the contrast between the text and the background gives me a headache. But fortunately, the other week I came across a site called Readability, where you can decide what you want the page to look like, then create a bookmarklet. So all I have to do, once the fic is loaded, is press on the bookmark, then hey, presto, I can read it! And to think that when I found it I never thought it would be useful...

Which I've been meaning to write for the past week...
Read more...

I am freezing. But then I am only wearing one jumper. I have stupid heating that comes in on or off and as it's so warm during the day I have it off, otherwise I wake up boiling. Because it's still really cold at night, it means it's quite cold in the mornings and evenings, plus my body clock seems to have decided it's BST a bit early.

I'm definitely still ill. I put on a New Who episode and the beginning credits are the worst thing ever. Definitely not recommended if you're dizzy. I have until Wednesday to get better, then I go back to the doctors, who are pretty much incapable of diagnosing anything I can't work out for myself, so I'm not hopeful, but I just want to get better. I want my life back again.

I am going to decide what car I want this weekend, which'll probably knock me out for the weekend with the half hour drive each way. But I definitely need a car that's less effort to drive, because part of the reason I didn't for so long while I was ill was because I didn't have the energy to turn the wheel. The trouble is that they don't make custom cars and what I really want is a Toyota Yaris at the front and a Honda Jazz at the back. And no, I don't want James May to make me one.

I have discovered the source of one of the funny noises my car makes! I currently have four: one is something rattling in the dashboard, one is a squeaking noise when I break, two are squeaking noises when I'm going along. The squeaking noises are all louder with the window open, which hasn't really been improving my drive home in a stuffy car with the sun right in my eyes. But while I was backing my car up after I'd turned it off, by the method of sticking my foot out of the door and giving it a push, as it's on a slight slope, I discovered that when I move the car, it creaks. I'm quite looking forward to owning a quieter car.

I thought I'd try out a DVD in my computer this evening. It took me ages to work out which program it had installed as the DVD playing program and then I found I hate it with a passion. It's rubbish. It takes over so much that you can hardly run any other program at the same time, and it takes the taskbar away so you can't get to any other program (alt+tab refused to work). I couldn't work out how to fast forward in any useful way and there's no right click menu to tell it that actually you want subtitles/commentary. I was looking forward to getting an upgrade from WinDVD, but it turns out WinDVD was the pinnacle of DVD playing programs (and to be fair, I loved it, it's far better than a DVD player). Am I right in thinking it's the free version and PowerDVD is the paid for one that lets you take screenshots? Can I get it somewhere? Can I go back to Windows 98? (actually, since I have it on a virtual machine on this computer, the answer to the last one is yes, technically).

It snowed overnight, and during the day, so I got to the bus to work on the basis that it was warmer and I wouldn't have to walk so far. Plus my car doesn't like the cold or the rain, so I dread to think what it would think of what's essentially cold rain. It comes from a warmer climate like me, so it's not used to all this snow business.

And I didn't get a day off either. I've never had work or school closed for snow and it never snowed the whole time I was uni. Just the year before I went and the year after I left.

According to the forecasts it's supposed to do this pretty much all week, so I'll be leaving work on time every day (the buses go once an hour, which is crap). And probably not making it back to fencing, again.

It was at 4.30pm on Friday that I thought my brain might dribble out of my ears. And there was still an hour of work to go at that point. I did quite a bit of overtime last week, which has something to do with it. The weather isn't helping. At the moment it's slightly too hot for a quilt and slightly too cold for a sheet. At least, it is in the night. Once the sun rises I wake up boiling and have to put my sheet on. And consequently wake up really early.

I also seem to be allergic to something. Last night once it got dark I blew my nose every five minutes before I shut the windows and decided I'd rather be hot.

And what's really annoying me at the moment is WP keeps logging me out, even if I don't close Firefox and even though I tick the 'Remember me' box. My fanfic blog was fine, until I decided to check it this morning and it won't let me in at all.

Winter seems to have arrived. It's been cold enough the past week that I've contemplated getting my scarf out. Although that's mostly because my coat leaves a nice gap at the top for the cold to get in. I think it might be cold enough for a hat as well. The trouble is that once you give into the cold that's it, you can't go back to not wearing a hat or scarf because you get used to being warm.

Mind you, it'll all be a bit academic come Friday because I'll be dressed up warm to collect for Children in Need, although since I'm collecting from cars it does mean getting to run around, so you do get a bit warmer. And as long as it doesn't chuck it down like last year it won't be that bad.

The worst part is driving because even though I have driving gloves and I've turned the car onto winter so it takes five minutes to be merely cold rather than freezing instead of the ten minutes it takes on the summer setting, it only takes one journey for my hands to get so dry they crack.

But we have had really nice weather - blue skies and sunshine, with only a bit of wind and rain and clouds - and I like the winter when it's really cold and sunny. As long as I'm walking somewhere and not waiting for a bus. And at least I don't have to de-ice the car every morning before work.

I missed it, but half an hour ago it was 20:07 on 20-07 2007

I was woken up this morning by thunder. I then discovered it was also pouring it down with rain. My feet didn't get dry till I got home. And although it didn't seem like an unusual amount of rain, it seems to have caused loads of disruption. I'm now getting the bus to Oxford to go to the Harry Potter midnight launch as the person who offered to drive is still on a train somewhere. I don't want to drive because I'm confused about driving round Oxford, and can't drive after midnight.

There's also been a really strange creaky banging sound round here. It started up late last night and stopped after I went to bed. It had gone this morning, but was back when I got home. It's just recently stopped, about two and a half hours later, when my upstairs neighbours got home... I have no idea what it is but the two events must be connected.

Plans for tomorrow are: hoovering (did the rest of the cleaning tonight), swimming and reading Harry Potter.

It's been another frustrating day. Play started at 11am but since it didn't look like the matches were going to be that interesting, I didn't bother with the tennis till lunchtime. The minute I got myself set up to watch it, it started raining. They started playing an hour and a half later, which is not helpful. And then I spent the afternoon getting up and down a lot, so kept putting the headphones down and not putting them back on straight away. Which meant that every time I sat down to listen to the tennis it rained, and whenever I stopped for a long period, they played.

It was quite interesting to hear the thunder over the radio. It thundered here an hour after it did there, but that was all it did. As a result I saw, I think, one Nadal game before they went off again. And that was it for the day. Why they didn't play on Sunday I don't know, because they might not have been that far behind after Saturday, but they certainly are now - starting on all courts at 11am and using every single courts - including ones that don't have a number.

I finished The Myth Makers, which is Vicki's last episode and I'm all sad because I liked Vicki. And I am discovering Doctor Who is a bad influence - it's really hard to type doctor with a small d.

It's been a really frustrating day. It's the one day of Wimbledon you get to spend the whole day watching tennis, not just in the evening. But instead we got nearly an hour of one woman thrashing another. I could have watched a different match on 301 or 302 but frankly, it would have just been the same. I would have been quite happy watching tennis from 12 till 9ish, then watched Doctor Who, but it wasn't to be.

The only good thing about it was I got time to clean the house and make flapjacks and they decided just before Doctor Who started that there would be no more play today, so I was free to watch it live. Although I shouldn't have done because I had five minutes of Galaxy 4 part 2 to go, which was a bit surreal to listen to afterwards.

There were some things in the episode that I liked and other things that annoyed me, but I'll put them behind a more since they contain SPOILERS:
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I like thunderstorms when it's been really hot and you can stand outside, watch the lightning and go 'please rain'. It's a lot less good when it's rained every single day since I got back and isn't really very warm.

I just did my finances and I have paid myself back the money I owed myself to go to Romania! So I now have no money till I get paid on Friday, but this is an improvement on minus amounts. Now I need to save some so I can buy a new TV and have a very cheap long weekend away somewhere in Britain (possibly Cardiff, possibly somewhere else if I think of anywhere else reasonably close I want to go that's not in Dorset) in September.

I discovered that BT will give you a bill in pdf. I've had paperless bills for a while but I've always just downloaded my calls as a csv file. I don't know how long the pdfs have been there, but it doesn't help that they like to move everything on the site round on a monthly basis (or that's what it seems like - I can never find anything). Looking at it, I discovered that they're charging me £1.50 for the privilege of not paying by direct debit (so I actually pay the amount I owe them, not the amount they'd like me to owe them), which is a bit much. It doesn't help that they also charge £10 a month just for the line - which I use for my broadband connection, and occasionally for phone calls. My calls this month were particularly expensive at 71p.

I'm back from Romania. I'm really tired - I got used to going to bed when it got dark and getting up about 6.30am, and that's Romanian time too. And the travel sickness pills still haven't worn off yet - although they say on the packet 'may cause drowsiness' what they should actually say is 'will put you to sleep' - I feel asleep in Budapest airport.

Romania was a lovely place - very beautiful and all the people were very friendly. It was great to go with Habitat too, because you get to see the places tourists don't, meet the people, and see what a difference you make. We worked on houses for people with no running water, and they were so grateful for what we did. Coming back and watching the final of the Stella Artois I established I really need a new (bigger) telly because I can't see the ball properly from so far away, but that sort of thing seems so inconsequential when you've seen people who have very little and are grateful for it.

There are photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/paranoidangel/tags/romania/

I wish someone would turn the heat up on the weather though - it's colder now than at nighttime where I was. Last Tuesday my arms tanned (and nearly burnt) even through putting factor 50+ on every half an hour.

I am caught up on Doctor Who - I really liked Blink, which really scared me. It'll take me all week, if not longer, to catch up on the rest of my viewing and my RSS Feeds, though (even though I just marked most of them as read).

I also need to remember how to type, it seems so hard after two weeks without doing it.

Ugh, it snowed today. Well, overnight, although it was still snowing when I left for work this morning. So the office was empty because quite a few people decided to work from home anyway. I don't really like the snow, and what makes it worse was dad emailing me to tell me all they'd had was a bit of rain. I so much want to live back where the civilised weather is, except that it's so far from anywhere.

It's been bugging me for a bit that some of my RSS feeds don't seem to have updated, even though I can see that the feed has when I put the link to it in Firefox. I just realised that the link between them is that they're all Blogger. Apparently it's something that Blogger has changed and RSS Bandit can't cope with. I updated RSS Bandit and then found I needed to delete and re-add the feeds in question. Except I accidentally deleted a folder instead. And it refused to get it back from the OPML export I cunningly did before I started. *headdesk* Fortunately, I bookmark the site for every feed I have.

And some good, squeeing news that I've been putting off squeeing about. I'm going to America four weeks yesterday! I can't believe it's so soon. I have my flights and train booked and everything. All I need to do now is pack and get some more monopoly money (can't remember how much I have squirreled away from last time). I'm going to Washington DC to meet Melli, as she's a whole lot closer to me at the moment than on the other side of the world where she usually lives. Then I'm going to New York to see more of New York than I did in the previous five hours I spent there, and to see hhertzof and her bunny. No prizes for what bit I'm most excited about. Yep that would be the bunny.

The person in the flat above me has woken me up at 6am with their radio on occasion. Bearing in mind that I don't have to get up for work till 8am. And I've heard them running the bath at midnight. So I don't know if they sleep. This time it's twice in a row, though.

This morning, I had my radio on because there's only so much of other people's you can listen to and they mentioned it had snowed. And it has. Which is interesting because it's not been that cold, I didn't think. I hate living up north in winter where it snows every winter. And I work with a load of northerners who think we get less snow than we used to. Yeah, right.

I really hope it's normal snow and melted by tomorrow and that's it for the year, and not northern snow where it lasts for a week, otherwise I won't be going to Tescos on Friday and certainly won't be driving to Burns Supper on Saturday. Driving in the snow is not a skill I feel I need.

It's not that I don't like snow, I just want to live somewhere civilised where that is a every few years thing.

When I got up this morning it wasn't that light due to it being rainy outside. So instead of wearing sandals to work I thought I ought to keep my feet dry and wear shoes. Which meant wearing socks, which was just such a weird feeling, it's been weeks since I wore any socks. Mind you, it did at least help with being warm at work. The person whose desk I'm at this week is right in the path of the air conditioning and I'm sat in a cold draft all day. The office is helpfully laid out so the other end of it is still quite warm, even though I'm shivering. It's also the boys office, so they do tend to like it colder than us girls.

There was a new Armando Iannucci program on tonight - The Time Tunnel. It's set in 2031 and they're looking back at the early 2000s. So a satirical look at today by cunningly setting it in the near future. It was interesting in places, funny in others and just weird in others still. Plus they did go over the top a bit in my opinion, in pieces like Charlotte Church vomiting herself inside out. It sounds funny as a one-line thing but just gets disgusting and too unlikely once you go into it in detail. There is a real point in there but satire is best when subtle, and that's so not.

It was an entertaining way to spend half an hour, though, so I'll probably watch it next week.

I also read some Atlantis fanfic this evening and I can feel myself starting to be pulled more towards that again. I'm remembering why I like Sheppard/Weir - I must get back to the Langford U fic I do have a first draft of. And read some McShep, I'm starting to miss the banter.

I finished The Hand of Fear while my dinner was cooking, and wrote up some of the highlights at Sarah Jane Fic. I'm so feeling tempted to get her episodes on DVD, which is bad. I did the whole Ace thing last summer, I'm determined not to do the Sarah Jane thing this summer. Plus I think I prefer Jo Grant (to Sarah, not to Ace, obviously).

Yesterday it cooled down to the point where I actually felt cold yesterday (because I was sat between two windows and it was windy). I'd forgotten what that was like!

I don't quite know where this weekend has gone. There were a whole load of things I was going to do but never quite got round to. Then I thought I might watch a whole load of Third Doctor stuff that I had hanging around but only managed six episodes. I did briefly try to learn MySQL but since you can do everything in PHPMyAdmin, learning the PHP code to do it seemed a bit pointless since I don't feel the need to use it on my website.

I did actually watch Top Gear on the telly, rather than on the internet. Although I laughed so hard at their white van man challenges I couldn't breathe. Although now it's finished the only thing I'll be watching will be The Avengers and I have that on DVD. I still haven't got round to watching last Tuesday and Thursdays eps, but I have seen next Thursdays.

But, I only have a week of work left, then I have a week off to go to a windmill in Somerset, have a driving lesson, then go to a quarry in Dorset. And Monday's payday, yay!

Courtesy of the Daily Snitch (because I never go to the LJ front page - I only ver go to LJ to comment on people's journals) some cool LJ-related things.

First, how to change the colour of the navbar, which improves it no end, and LJ Talk IM, although I wish it wouldn't add all my friends to my contact list willy-nilly. Because I already have a Trillian connection through Jabber, when I connect to LJ Talk it changes my Jabber connection icon from a lightbulb to a purple trillian one.

It is still far too hot here. The air conditioning at work could definitely be colder, except that we've closed all the doors and turned it down to the lowest possible. It's nice enough in the office but a little on the warm side. I took a jumper in just in case on Monday, I didn't need to bother.

On the plus side, I've booked my flight and hostel in Belfast (I'm flying from Bristol cos it's cheaper and takes less time to get there in comparison to Gatwick) and I've even booked for Conference and am paying £20 a month, so I shouldn't notice that quite so much.

I also seem to be continually suffering from house invasions. Last week my landlady, her daughter and the daughter's boyfriend all got back from Mexico and the daughter's wedding, so they stayed for three days and had lots of people over. I got to hear the wedding video four times. Now my landlady's boyfriend's son and his girlfriend seem to have moved in - and by moved in I mean the son has been applying for jobs round here using this address. So I'm not sure what's up with that because this is only a small three bedroom house and there were four people permanently living here anyway, since my landlady moved her boyfriend in just before she went to Mexico.

Not only is it far too hot but I also have flu. For the third time this year, I think. My immune system is not good. The really annoying part is that if I was at work I'd be sitting in a cold air conditioned office, rather than lying on a hot bed, heating my computer up by watching lots of Doctor Who.

Although I have now watched lots of Jon Pertwee, who I think I actually like better than Sylvester McCoy's Doctor.

DCI Burke from Taggart was in POTC last night (lovely cold cinema) which was slightly surreal. I loved the wheel fight towards the end but overall it wasn't as good as the first one.

The part of my computer that gets hottest is helpfully the part that's under my left wrist when I type. It's starting to get a bit warm now and make my hand sweat, and I only turned it on 25 mins ago when the tennis finished.

Basically, it is too hot. Someone turn the weather down a bit.

The Radio Times covers for tomorrow, featuring Doctor Who and football, together, are quite cool (but where's the tennis?). Aussies, don't look at this for another 12 and a half weeks, though.

Speaking of Doctor Who, I finished off The Claws of Axos yesterday. It seemed to me that nothing really happened in the four episodes. And as much as I like the companions who are actually useful, I did quite enjoy watching Jo Grant being screamy and useless. It actually made a nice change from all the ones I've seen recently!

The one interesting part is that near the end the Doctor tricks the Master into fixing his TARDIS. Or so he thinks. It turns out it will only go to the one place and time anyway, but it was interesting that he would quite happily have abandoned them all. And not for the first time, as in Spearhead From Space the minute he got the TARDIS and key in one place he tried to get away. And the Brigadier knew he would, which I thought was quite impressive on his part.

I'm really liking the Third Doctor and UNIT and his enforced stay on Earth, I want to see more of it. So just as well I'm having a Third Doctor month with amazon rentals.

I've gone off this driving thing - my left leg hurts. And by hurts I mean the muscle is really painful even when I'm not using it. And what doesn't help is that because it was hot last night when I went to bed I decided to leave the window open a bit. Which turned out to be a really bad idea because not only could I not sleep because the bed didn't get cold enough but I also couldn't sleep because my eyes felt all funny and my nose was horrid. Tonight I have put the bunny in the freezer, so I can freeze my feet off instead. I really need it to rain quite a bit and do something about all this pollen.

Three people have posted their stories for the Doctor Who Fic Fest already, including Always which is for my Sarah & Harry audio request. I vaguely know how mine starts but still don't have any sort of plot yet.

The long one I'm writing (working title: Sarah Jane drinks lots of tea*), I'm still partway through version 2 of. Except that last night I added a new bit of the plot in, as when I read it through I realised I'd laid down loads of clues but not explained anything. Mostly because I still hadn't decided exactly whodunnit. But now it has added Tenth Doctor and Rose in it.

And now the sun's going down it's getting cooler - my computer's fan has even gone off! - so I might actually be able to stay in the vicinity of my computer to actually do some work on it.

I have also discovered the usefulness of Word. And by Word, I mean word processing packages that are more word processy than WordPad and are not Word. If you type teh it changes it to the! If you don't quite hit the shift key at the beginning of a sentence it capitalises it for you! And you can see how many pages you've done, which is very cool. My only trouble now is deciding whether I want to use Word Pro or Open Office. Oh, decisions, decisions.

* I counted and in the first draft she explicitly drinks six cups, in 11,000 words.