nor so wide as a church door

The more time I have, the less I use it for anything I should be using it for. /o\

A few days ago, I finally sat down and watched ( Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010). ) So I wish I could rec it for the ladies, but it's hard to when it's oblivious and the premise is so racefail.

Would it be weird to write like four stories for my rarewomen recip? Because: great exchange assignment, or GREATEST EXCHANGE ASSIGNMENT? I am SO EXCITE.

So, wow, June. You are ... almost gone. D: Also it's going to be like a hundred degrees tomorrow, and that is barely even an exaggeration. BLEH.

There was graduation, finally, and my head did not explode; and then I took vacation and pretty much ignored EVERYTHING, and I went to Boston (and was lost for nearly three hours, but I wasn't driving) and Providence (lost for perhaps twenty minutes, and I was driving) and also a hot air balloon festival, and then I stayed up until six in the morning and almost didn't go to sleep again. (But then I gave in and did.)

And during aaaaaaall that time, things happened!

Like ( Snow White and the Huntsman! Spoilers, and, well, I sort of enjoyed it? ) I can't even tell anymore! Maybe I just shouldn't be allowed to talk about movies, I clearly have no useful critical faculties.

Books, on the other hand: I cannot turn my brain off. I am maybe a hundred pages into the second Bourne novel (I only just obtained the first), and holy crap that is some -ism bingo material right there. The writing is way too florid for my taste even if Robert Ludlum weren't apparently challenging himself to use the word "Oriental" every two pages and trying not to give any woman a name except Marie, and the way he describes Hong Kong and the residents thereof makes me want to just about weep from rage. I'm sure the movies have their issues, but I'm going to need to marathon them just to get the taste out of my mouth. Yikes.

Far less painfully, ( Korra! )

There was also Burn Notice in there somewhere, but this post is getting really long and there's another ep tomorrow, so I'll save that.

At long, long last, next chapter of LttE: 3.5k. I'm thinking this is going to be a long one.

Seriously, without OUaT, there is no structure in my life! D: Still plugging away on auction fic, and on the zombie story; and to give me something productive to switch to when blocked, I am also in the middle of a zillion Alia icons. (Okay, not a zillion, but like a hundred and fifty so far, at least, which is practically a ladiesbigbang project all by itself.) I am almost done with the first season of LFN, and have, somewhat to my surprise, devoured ( Season 1 of The Borgias. Spoilers for S1 and S2; mentions of rape, torture, and violence. ) Given all the awful shit that happens, I can't precisely rec the show, because ... well, I don't precisely enjoy it; I have to do some skipping around to get through most of the episodes without bursting into tears. And of course everything is coated with historical racism and sexism. But! If you are able to bypass or handle the triggery content, it's not a bad way to spend a few hours, particularly if you are into this recent explosion of ~edgy historical drama shows.

I also bought the e-book of Libba Bray's novel A Great and Terrible Beauty, and, uh, the only word in there that expresses how I feel so far is ( terrible. (Spoilers abound.) )

Also, finally and belatedly signed up for Pottermore. Mostly it's filling me with a sort of nostalgic fondness; I care about JKR's character notes insofar as they are historical documents, background on what she had in her head while she wrote. I mean, I'm sure there are people who consider them canon - we're going to end up with a canonicity system like the one they use for the Star Wars Holocron, if we don't have one already - but there's probably plenty of people who are going to ignore them, too. I suspect I will continue to pick and choose as I always have. The big question on my mind is less how much will be revealed re: Doris Crockford's shady past, and more how the hell I ended up in Gryffindor. I wanted Hufflepuff, dammit.

Posting fail, ugh, but I hope everybody to whom it is relevant had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that everybody more generally had a wonderful Thursday. I am thankful for so many things I could never list them all, so probably it's a good thing that I sort of missed the boat for attempting a long eloquent Thanksgiving post.

Having vacation was AWESOME, and yet, as vacations so often are, it was not long enough. But! I got a bunch of stuff done, if not everything I'd hoped to get done.

First:

50,217 / 50,000 words. 100.0% done!

\o/! I have no idea what I'm going to do with this thing, but there are WAY better odds than usual that I'm going to finish it, simply because I (still) somehow don't hate it. I mean, it's clunky and kind of awkward and there's probably continuity errors eeeeeeverywhere, but that's okay! I wrote a thing! \o/!

Second: I finished ( Infidel (Kameron Hurley). Spoilery! ) I should stop pretending I can analyze these books at all, because I really can't. I am way too invested. ♥ The third one is probably going to wreck me.

And, speaking of me crying emotional overinvestment, I also watched ( Sucker Punch. Spoilers, of course. ) Broke my heart and only stitched it about halfway back together again.

And also I should not forget: I stayed up late one night and blew through ( Changes (Dresden Files). Spoilery! ) I still want to find out what happens, so I'm hoping this was just - a blip. A, like, four-hundred-page-long blip. D:

And now I am going to prep to watch as much of The Closer as possible before going to bed early, because the last thing I need right now is to get sick.

( The OTW, the elections, and me. )

( Aaaaand the new AO3 site skin. )

Okay, now to slightly less fraught things. I am caught up on Burn Notice but have nothing to say, except TEAM, TEAM ON MY SCREEN, and also MADELINE YAY. And I watched Once Upon a Time in real time for once. ( Spoilery, of course. )

And! I finished Blackdog, but should probably hold off on the actual review until I have the book in front of me again. (Short version: I definitely enjoyed it! :D)

Uggggggggggggh my god last week. I didn't even have to work Saturday the way I did last year, and I still did nothing this weekend but lie on the couch and slowly regenerate my brainpower. (Well, and wash my car, but that was under duress.) Late chapter will be late; apologies! /o\ I'm actually really really glad thelittlebang is having an extension - I mean, I hope nothing additional goes wrong for either mod and that everything works out well, but it's a lucky break for me.

Unsurprisingly, I missed all my TV - although on Monday that was because we went to see ( The Debt. Spoilers. )

Also, I bought myself three books the other week, as I mentioned, and one of them was ( God's War, by Kameron Hurley. ) I already ordered the second book. /o\

But! Now I should get back to work so I can finish everything I need to do and then write like a writing person this evening to get myself back on track.

So, today was super fun. My supervisor was out after 11:00, and in the afternoon all of a sudden there were two new projects that needed to get done right away, and I had only about half the InDesign knowledge necessary to complete them. Thank god for Google and the internal search function. :P

But! I got a ton of outlining done, which was great, and also I held it together reasonably well, which was pleasant in retrospect, if not at the time. \o?

Anyway, books! I finished them a couple days ago, at least, but I have not had time to sit down and be organized about it until now.

( Silver Phoenix; cut for spoilers. ) Overall, big hearts, and I'm glad I made my sister get it for me.

( Magic Under Glass; also spoilery. ) Again, mostly full of yays, I just need MOAR. **grabby hands**

I have a whole list of other books I want to buy, but I'm trying to be restrained and adult and not just get a dozen at once on a whim. :P It's just that I love them so.

I have tomorrow off because I'm working on Saturday, which means 1) I will have plenty of time to psych myself up for the ordeal my anxiety issues make out of a trip to the dentist, and 2) for most of next week, I will have no friggin' idea what day of the week it is. (Or I wouldn't, if it weren't for my watch, which I will undoubtedly have to check at least fifty times a day.)

But! Far more interestingly, ( I caught the newest episode of Warehouse 13. Spoilers. )

Also, even though I am completely sure that no one cares, I have a moderate number of thoughts about one of the books I bought the other day - ( Myst: The Book of Ti'ana. Shut up, I love Myst. ) I'll have to dig out the games again sometime. Maybe when I get a new computer. :D

I sort of can't wait 'til tomorrow; it'll be a nice break. (Except for the inevitable panic about the dentist's, of course. D:)

I have a super thrilling pair of accounts to add to my collection of wildlife stories, both of them to do with what I'm fairly sure were great blue herons. \o/

Account #1: ( My mother bought some kayaks this summer. )

And then there comes Account #2, where ( not a day, later, my sister and I are driving home from the grocery store, and what do we get stuck behind? )

I'm pretty sure I've seen herons around before, but at a much greater distance - sometimes we'd catch sight of one in the lagoon by the Montshire, and that kind of thing, but nothing like this. It was wonderful.

Anyway, on to slightly less interesting things - my birthday. Again. My sister's TTLY UNKNOWN present for me ended up getting sent to her old address at Clark University, which is where she graduated a little over a year ago; no word yet on whether they'll be sending it on. (I just hope they caught it in the office before it got to anybody's box; I can't imagine anybody passing on a free copy of ... uh, whatever it is.) However, this tragic news was made up for by the party my friends threw for me yesterday, which was lovely: we made cake and cupcakes and icing ourselves, before going to see Julie & Julia, and then coming back, making dinner, and nomming away. We also played games - Set, and Sequence, and way too many rounds of Spoons. (Sometimes we play things that don't start with S, I promise.)

K, who is very artistically inclined and does beautiful, rather impressionistic paintings of scenery, gave me one such painting; M gave me a lovely, barely-used copy of the fourth Harry Dresden book in French. ("Les Dossiers Dresden - Le Chevalier D'Été"! It's too bad the title puns don't work in French.) Which has had the bonus effect of broadening my library of French books to something other than the second and third Harry Potter books and Le Petit Prince. Not that I don't love reading Harry Potter in French, but it's usually less an exercise for the atrophying French parts of my brain, and more "... Oh, hey, so that's how you say that sentence - which I remember verbatim because I've read HP waaaaaaaaaaay too many times - in French!".

Because I have nothing better to do right now: ( Julie & Julia. ) It was good; it's not the love of my life, it doesn't reduce me to exclamation points and keyboard smashing, but it was sweet and fun to watch and it made me smile, and sometimes that's all I really want from a movie.

I had a brief argument with J while we were waiting for the movie over two things: first, RDJ as Sherlock Holmes, and second, the concept of slash. ( Explanation and further thoughts on the first. ) If somebody's going to remix me a funny, gritty, possibly wacky new take on Sherlock Holmes with RDJ and Jude Law in, I am totally okay with that, even if it does deviate from canon. I mean, obviously, I don't know; maybe it's going to be terrible and stupid and I'm going to hate it and wish I had never bothered arguing with J about it based on nothing more than a preview. But I have to say, at this point it looks exactly like my kind of movie.

The second was actually less an argument, and more a brief discussion where J said something I disagreed strongly with, I gave an audible rebuttal that was kind of half-hearted because I didn't want to blow things out of proportion, and then I spent a while poking at it in my head afterward. ( The basic context is that M said that she didn't really understand what slash was; J's response was that it was crack. ) I think J has adjusted her position somewhat since that point - going to Mount Holyoke has loosened her up a fair bit as far as issues of sexuality go - but I think I had been hoping it had been adjusted further than the baby step between "people only write slash because there's not girls enough for pairing fic" and "people only write slash because they like how crazy the whole idea is". Here's hoping that sooner or later I can maybe get her all the way to "people write slash for all kinds of different reasons, including 'because they ship it, and not as a crackship'", I guess.

And, wow, this got long. Clearly today is a wordy day for me - I should go rack up some wordcount on something, before the spirit of verbosity abandons me.

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.