nor so wide as a church door

Very brisk out today, where by "brisk" I mean "five degrees below zero while I was driving to work this morning". D: But there'll be snow tomorrow, and probably at a time that will still allow me to get to work, which is nice.

I made a stupid mistake on Friday with the newsletter, but I think I managed to get the correction out okay today, so it should be fine. Aside from that, the only stupid thing I'm doing is torturing myself with The Last Airbender - I need a project for ScriptFrenzy, and clearly the only thing my brain cares about right now is rewriting things, and then this just fell in my lap! But I have to watch it at least a couple more times, because the first time I was so busy hating it I wasn't paying super close attention. Not that paying attention does anything but make the script even more glaringly terrible. D:

( Okay, I'm sorry: I must gripe. I can't hold it in any longer. ) And now I am going to cut myself off, because if I keep thinking about this I am going to blow a gasket. D:<

On the upside, I think maybe I can get on track to post the last few chapters of ItO two weeks apart, instead of four weeks apart. \o/ I might have to take a little time off before I start Book Two, but if I can drop down to a two-week posting schedule, I will be VERY HAPPY. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD Also, I am dusting off my old, unused FF.net account and trying to figure out how to post to it - not because I especially want to, but J and Ka both apparently use it, and I figure I should at least give it a try. **dubious** I am probably only saying this because I'm so much more used to it, but: the AO3's interface is so much simpler. :P

Oh, so many fantastic things all piled up - days off from work, and Christmas, and Yuletide, and a great lovely snowstorm! Granted, three of those are obviously not independent phenomena, and the fourth sort of isn't, given the season in this hemisphere; but somehow they each feel like separate glories to wallow in. :D Except for the part where I had to help shovel a foot of snow off the porch, of course.

I got my Yuletide treat done, too! I was writing right up to the wire, so it's almost definitely not as good as it really should have been; but hopefully the recipient will like it anyway. I can't stop browsing the archive - even when I get 502ed, the 502 screen is so adorable! Hearts. Also, Old Spice Guy fic is the best thing in the entire world, the end.

... I feel like I had more things I wanted to say, but I haven't eaten lunch yet, and my stomach is growling. Perhaps I will get super organized and put together a list of favorites after I get some noms.

It was pouring at 4 am when I had to wake up and separate two fighting cats; it sleeted somewhere in between then and now, coating all the delicate little branches on the bushes outside, and all the needles of the pines, with ice; and now it is snowing, giant fat flakes falling almost fast enough to look like rain. I'm supposed to go meet up with M, J, K, Ka, and Q - and possibly a friend of J's from school, the prospect of whom fills me with terror - for lunch, so I ought to hope it stops soon, but I'm willing to drive carefully as long as it keeps snowing and sticking. :D

The tablet has arrived, as have the books I ordered; I'd forgotten just how long it's been since I'd drawn anything. I have giant flashing neon failure issues, and my sister is so much better at art things than I am that I have a feeble love/hate thing going on with drawing - even when something comes out half-decent, it's never quite good enough for something off in the back of my brain. Luckily, when I show her things I write, she likes to draw for them, so the pictures I wish I could put on paper still end up there most of the time. \o/

( Monday shows. )

( NaNo and fic talk. )

( Thanksgiving. )

I would put a big poetical list of things I'm thankful for here, except I'm thankful for so many things it kind of defies belief, and making a list would just make me think of more and more. In summary, though: my family, friends, job, fandoms, and life are all more awesome than I usually give them credit for, and I am grateful for all the small sources of joy in between. ♥♥♥♥♥

A THOUSAND-POUND WEIGHT has just been lifted off my shoulders.

To recap: supervisor out Thursday and Friday, and me assigned the weighty task of getting the proofs for the fall magazine fixed up and sent out whenever they should come in. The proofs, as far as I could tell, did not come, and I spent the last few hours of Friday and most of the rest of the weekend in a stew of terror set at a low simmer - was I an idiot? Not looking in the right places? I checked the mailroom, like, four times on Friday; maybe I should have actually found the woman who sends the mail up, and asked her? DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD: I was freaked out enough that I actually dreamed last night about getting to work and being forgiven because none of it had been my fault. And then I wake up, and it is like doom outside - lots of wind, heavy clouds, and, even more ominously, it starts pouring the minute I get in my car.

And then I make it in this morning, and my supervisor's back, checking the single message on her phone - which was left on Friday afternoon, by the guy at the printing company, saying he had just Fedexed them to us, and they should be there by today. \o/! Victory is mine, and I am so totally drinking from the keg of glory.

Saturday, my mind was temporarily taken off my troubles by a trip back up to Burlington to see Br and AT; we did not make cloaks, which had apparently been the original plan for the afternoon, but we did get food and watch the OotP movie. It was great fun to watch it with Br - she hasn't read the books, so her grasp of the course of events in the Harry Potter universe is a little shaky. Also, she had totally forgotten about Sirius.

And Sunday, of course, there was ( Sherlock. ) I do want to hang on and see the next series, if only to find out what happens next.

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 ...

I got dragged off to go shopping with my mother and sister again a few days ago, along with some other errands (including going to the dump, where I could not resist picking up the novelization of the Constantine movie and yet another of the hilarrible Rogue Angel series at the bookshed). They were the ones who actually needed clothes, but I decided that as long as I was going to be forced to go along with, I might as well buy some more man-jeans, since I've been putting the two pairs I got last time into heavy rotation.

( And I still cannot get over how much easier it is to find exactly the clothes I want in the men's section. ) I came home with four more pairs of man-jeans, and a growing determination to crossdress for the rest of my life.

I saw Little One again, which strengthens my conviction that Little One is a very smart toad, as Calvin has killed another couple squirrels and disemboweled a vole since last time, and yet Little One lives blissfully on beneath the porch and remains untouched. The guinea eggs my mother got three weeks ago are slowly nearing what we have estimated to be their likely hatching date, and I have arranged to invite all my friends over at least once before we all go off to school so that they can see the guinea chicks while they're still in their baby-tribble stage, before they get all gangly (which they will, if their growth pattern is anything like that of chickens).

The HP AU is now sixteen chapters/ninety pages/a little over forty-six thousand words (not counting the chapter headers or the footnotes as words, natch). Which is about how long it should be, given where the story's gotten to. Unfortunately, the Irrelevant Shipfic has also grown. Alas. I've also done a couple more cliché-bingo-based fics; after branching out to some Merlin and some Warehouse 13, I backed up and wrote a few more Hellboy.

( I also watched some more Jeremiah today. ) I have fic to give me Jeremiah/Kurdy, okay; you do not need to keep murdering or otherwise eliminating women on the show. They can have a strong friendship in canon even when there are women around.

I'm hoping to take a few pictures of stuff around my house - Cthulhu, maybe, and some of the views and landmarks, and maybe the house itself, so that I have something to show people at college who've never seen it. I have to remember to do that tomorrow. Also, if it keeps being this hot, I am going to melt. Please, please break, heat wave; if you do not rain like you're supposed to on Friday, weather, I am going to be very put out.

My usual strategy with research papers is to absorb all the necessary media first - read all the books and articles I've dug up, often more than once - and then let it percolate for a while. (I've discovered that if I put something on the back burner on the stove of my brain and leave it there for a while, when I come back to it, it will be much better; my mind will have put things together and made connections while I wasn't looking.) Then, I just flat-out write, and save adding citations and footnotes until after the paper's written.

I finished my paper on Saramaccan yesterday afternoon, which meant this morning was footnote/citation time! \o/ And, as noted, it was actually kind of fun. Despite what you might think if you looked at my desk, I do like being organized, especially with text; it pleases me to enforce consistency on things. That's probably part of why I like editing the formatting of things so much - making sure that every instance of a particular formatting choice is the same makes me so happy.

... That was probably the last whisper of a chance of being normal that I ever had flying out the window, right there.

Anyway. The footnotes are all done, everything's cited, the bibliography's formatted. Now I just have to review a couple things for Literature, and then I will totally be ready for the last round of Tuesday-Thursday classes this semester. Today, and gym class tomorrow morning, and then I'm FREE. (Not that there aren't classes I liked - Pidgins and Creoles! Linguistic Anthropology! ♥ ♥ ♥! - but, still. VACATION.)

Also, it had better rain today, or I'm gonna melt. *flop* QUIT PLAYING WITH MY HEART, OUTDOORS.

I appreciate it. Really, I do. Even if it was coming down hard enough to wake me up early this morning. I will forgive you almost anything, outdoors, if it can always be fifty degrees or cooler when I wake up in the morning.

Sadly, I suspect it is not to be, since the forecast says it'll be eighty-five (eighty-five! Kill me now!) tomorrow. *ded* And I have gym, too. DNW!

But I appreciate the effort, outdoors. It's the thought that counts.

Let's see. Can I think of anything else to blather about before I start doing actual work? Oh - well, yesterday, ( I saw Disney's Robin Hood for the first time ... )

... This is turning into some kind of bizarro meta review thing for a really old Disney movie that very few people probably care about, which wasn't really my intention. I was just trying to get out of doing work for a little bit! Suffice it to say that it wasn't bad; having seen it, I feel a lot of the kind of nostalgic affection for it that I do for 101 Dalmatians, or The Jungle Book, simply due to the style and the sort of innocent, old-fashioned morality it expresses. But if I had the choice between it (or either of those other movies) and, say, Beauty and the Beast? ... Yeah. I know which one I'm gonna watch.