nor so wide as a church door

Home sick today - I'd be annoyed, but I'm too tired, and I suppose it's for the best. I mean, if I'd gotten sick last week, it would have been kind of a disaster, so. It's not so bad this week. ^^

Obviously, it's messed with my writing pace, being asleep until about three hours ago; but I still have a few days, so hopefully that'll still work out okay. The first genretwisting fic is literally a scene away from being done, and then one last editing runthrough, and it should be all set. \o/

Now it's time to sleep more. :D

The TV retained its brokenness long enough to make me miss Burn Notice last week, which is wretched; and I really ought not to watch it online, because we keep exceeding our bandwidth allotment even without me watching TV online. But I'm guessing it'll be showing again this Thursday, before the next ep, so. I'll just sit here twitching 'til then.

But! It's fixed now, has been since Sunday, which means I got to watch last night's shows, at least.

( The Event. )

( H5000000000. )

Also, my sister and I went contradancing on Saturday, after I sawed some small trees down and gave myself a weird bruise on the shoulder; Sunday, I went over to her apartment for dinner, and made her watch Newsies despite her best efforts to escape. :D To be honest, I was half in love with that movie without ever having seen it, just because of all the stuff I read when I stumbled through the fandom back in the day, so she was pretty much doomed.

But now I should get back to pounding the outline of the next chapter of ItO into shape working on my NaNo filling some more cliché bingo prompts with Newsies work.

Finals feel like they are iiiiiiiiinching closer, as slowly as possible. :P I'm going to be so fried by the time they actually get here, just from the stress of anticipation.

Also, half as a reminder to myself: I'm going to try to remember not to crosspost to LJ, as a kind of symbolic gesture towards the three_weeks_for_dw event - this is not going to be three weeks of riveting! creative! content, or even three weeks of lame banal content that anyone is going to care about. But DW is my primary home, I crosspost from it to LJ instead of the other way around, and ... idk, even a little bit counts?

It snowed like mad today - today, in late April, which even in Vermont is not a common thing to have to say, though I don't think it's the absolute summeriest snow I've ever seen. Oh, weather.

Also today: the final CCC exam. And man, is it a relief to have that over with - not because I was stressing about the exam itself so much as because the CCC exams have a take-home pre-exam essay portion that is absolutely awful. Not challenging; relentlessly tedious. It was relentlessly tedious to write it for the midterm, and it was relentlessly tedious this time, too. :P Seriously, it was like pulling teeth, except even pulling teeth has some interesting, if sharply painful, moments. I know I should be grateful that it was take-home, and that it was easy and tedious, not difficult and tedious, but yikes.

After that, though, it was all smooth sailing and my progressively-less-tentative ladiesbigbang story, which is seriously filling up my fic notebook. I ... might actually sign up. D: I'm frightened of doing that because it means a visible contract to actually put my writing where other people besides my sister can read it, which is deeply terrifying to me; but I'm already only a thousand words away from the minimum, so it's not like I have to worry about having nothing by the deadline, even if what I have is 15k of crap. **hands** idk, I still have, like, two days to think about it.

Oh - and I also broke my record for consecutive hours of consciousness. \o? B had to print out her thesis: three copies, one for each of her defense committee members, and the whole thing with cover and bibliography and all was close to eighty pages. A lot, but not bad, except that she doesn't have a printer. So we used mine, which is a creaky old all-in-one ink printer - I am very fond of it, but it's not going to be setting speed records any time soon. Plus, I had to edit B's thesis before she could print it. I mean, because she asked me to, but secretly, I was just dying to - I've edited B's papers before, and she is just WRETCHED at sentence structure. Like, really abysmal. So that took a while, and then printing out about two hundred and forty pages with my printer was at least a couple hours more. So, in the end, we were up until about 4:00 AM printing.

4:00 AM being past the point where my brain says, "Fuck it," and stops asking me to go to sleep, even getting into bed and lying down and closing my eyes wasn't enough to knock me out. I wobbled and giggled my way through class the next day - apparently sleep deprivation makes me happy - and went to bed early, for a grand total of about thirty-eight hours awake. Good times.

I've also been amusing myself by going back through the the_hms_stfu archives and enjoying the lolariousness - not that I don't love the stuff that's posted in the comm now, but it's fun to go back to the old days sometimes. Plus, I happened upon a Ron!hate essay that I have been greatly enjoying tearing apart in spare moments.

And now, back to the fic. To sign up, or not to sign up ...

So, it's been two weeks since last time, and man, what a two weeks it's been.

For starters, B did something incredibly stupid, which she has done at least three times before and which has never failed to make a mess of her personal life, yet which she has also apparently somehow not learned to stop doing. I, of course, was the happy receptacle for her problem-wrangling, which is something she tends to do aloud whenever possible; I feel like maybe I should become a diplomat or something, because living with her has taught me SO WELL to not let on when I feel like people are being morons/jackasses/pick your poison. RRGH.

The angst over that is actually still going on, a little - it was much diminished by the news that B's long-distance boyfriend will be coming to the States for Christmas to see her, though, which was a relief for me.

My computer is still mostly kaput. Because I'm running Knoppix from a CD, it can't retain anything - whenever I turn my computer off, and then turn it on again, no files I saved when it was on the first time will still be there. I knew this going in, so there was no catastrophic loss or anything, but since my computer no longer believes it has a battery, every time I knock the cord out, it's like starting from a blank slate. Not hugely troubling, just annoying.

However, those two things put aside, being on vacation is great. I know it was wrong of me to skip classes on Monday and Tuesday in order to give myself a week instead of three days, but. TOTALLY WORTH IT. I got to hang out with my sister at the treehouse (her apartment), and mainline three or four episodes of NCIS:LA, whose smarmy glory is truly blinding. :D I also ordered myself the second season of Burn Notice; I'm trying to get Br and AT properly addicted to it, and we're almost through the first season, so. Obviously I can't get it from the post office today, but it should have arrived by now, which means there is a pleasant moment of actually getting hold of it that is waiting for me somewhere in the future. \o/

And, of course, today is Thanksgiving, which probably means I shouldn't have started this post out with a bunch of complaining. ^^ And I am thankful, for all kinds of things; for every part of my life that has led me to end up where I am, even the ones that seemed unpleasant at the time, because, despite my woes, I'm in a pretty darn good place; and, of course, for my friends and family, for past friends who have drifted away and future friends I haven't met yet, for fandom, for ... everything. For life, for the world, for the inestimable beauty and wonder intrinsic to the universe.

That turned peculiarly existential. ^^ Anyway. I shall create a new tag for entries where I gripe about B, purely for purposes of statistics, and then I shall watch The Closer and help my mother cook and have a marvelous day, and I hope everyone else has a marvelous day, too.

I am just feeling all kinds of rambly today, and I haven't posted in a bit, so this is just going to be a kind of random collection of things that have been happening and thoughts I have been having.

So.

To start with: sometimes, I hate plants. I don't think whatever I have is poison ivy, but it's poison something, because there are welts and bumps and LOTS OF ITCHING. After a few days of the welts and the bumps, but not very much itching, I woke up early this morning with the new and thrilling urge to chew my own arm off, if only it would stop the itching. I slathered it with anti-itch gel, and have been periodically coating it with calamine lotion in the hours since; so far, it's working decently well, if not perfectly, and some of the worse bump-welts have diminished. (I would like to make a joke here about how they will soon be sailing to the West, except it seems so wrong to compare my favorite summertime curse to Galadriel.)

However, weeding recently has not been all bad. The cat who was the antagonist in that chipmunk drama a while ago has forgiven me for thwarting her plans for chipmunk murder, and warmed up to me; she came climbing up the slope to visit me on Friday, and graciously allowed me to pet her into a near-coma. A small, silvery, extremely soft-looking creature whom I have since tentatively identified as a mole came bumbling along to within arm's reach - part of the reason I have identified it so is because it appeared to be totally unable to see us, but as soon as I had the cat properly secured and got a hand free to bump the plants near it, it ran like hell.

Or, okay, it was (most likely) a mole, it trundled like hell.

In a similar vein (that vein being nature! yays!), after basically dipping my arm in calamine this morning, I took a walk with my sister and my dad, up the road to the top of the hill and then over and down. The whole thing took about an hour. And my god, it was absolutely beautiful out; it has been horrid and rainy and damp all week, and then today, it was sunny and very breezy and the sky was fantastically blue. I spent a good portion of the walk staring up at the patterns the leaves made against the sky, and against each other, in lovely sunlit shades of green that varied depending on the amount of overlap. Gorgeous.

There have also been fannish pursuits, though, as per usual, none that are going to end up anywhere where anybody but my sister can see them. Cliché bingo has taken my soul and run with it, despite the fact that I did not actually sign up for a card. I took the masterlist of clichés and have started typing out fics - not whole ones, just paragraphs, moments of things that could become fics if I filled in the spaces. So far I have a set for Hellboy (mostly Hellboy/Myers) and a set for Harry Dresden (more on the gen side, I don't ship anybody in those books super hard), and I keep coming up with more things I want to do.

( A little bibbling about that. )

Also, I kind of want to try a batch for Harry Potter. But I should save the energies of the HP sector of my brain for the massive AU, and the accompanying Irrelevant Shipfic.

I haven't fiddled with my conlang in a while; maybe I'll work on that this afternoon.