nor so wide as a church door

So we got about four inches of snow, which is way less than a lot of people, and yet we still somehow lost power this weekend - off and on, even, which meant I had to drag myself out of bed at like 5:00 AM yesterday to turn off lights and yet when I woke up for real there was no power. :P

But! It came back on with plenty of time for me to post one of my complements and also my fic for thelittlebang, although it looks like the fic post is still trapped somewhere in the moderation queue. I tried really hard to not write the same story again, because, let's face it, there are a lot of ways Avatar-the-movie could be improved; but I probably repeated myself at least a little. /o\

But I still feel very accomplished! Two big bangs within a week of each other! Granted, my genretwisting bingo has fallen by the wayside; one story, I'm trashing and replacing with something else, and the other grew a zombie army and is 16k and climbing, so there's no way I'm going to get that done before the deadline of ... um, today, but. I'm still planning to finish them even if it won't "count" officially because I'm a rebel.

NaNo starts tomorrow! OMG I AM EXCITE. :DDDDDDDDD I'm sure there will be angst and pain later, but right before the first of November I am always filled with joy and sunshine and puppies. I have so many things to finish, I really shouldn't be doing it; but it's a tradition! I've done NaNo every year since high school, I can't just not. I am going to be watching the homepage countdown alllllll day.

How is it Tuesday already WHAT. D: The end of last week was, like, the least relaxing Friday I have EVER had - Thursday night involved traversing a road that hates me, on foot, to find a place that would copy a document which I discovered on Friday had been missing a page, and needed to be picked up Saturday morning, only for the person who wanted them to find that, erroneously, the cover was in black-and-white instead of color. :P (Not a fatal problem, but he was not happy.)

And then I had a daemonelix for the weekend! Which was AWESOME, obvs., but not conducive to my usual relaxing sit-around-doing-nothing routine - we made brownies and took a good long walk and went kayaking. So yesterday was actually the do-nothing-iest day for me. Our school does not have "Columbus Day" off, precisely; but there was a local fair, and all the kids were there for the day, which meant I could sit in my office with the lights off and spend eight hours double-checking the parent-student directory and getting it ready for the printer. Good times.

BUT. There are still a whole bunch of things I need ( to do. )

I am buying myself so much candy for Halloween.

Ugh, long week was incredibly long, which would be why I sat around and did nothing but war on the UK this weekend. Victoria is such a beautiful, beautiful time-waster; I am the furthest I have ever gotten now that I have reached the 1870s and begun producing telephones, and I won a chunk of Canada and part of Ulster and I feel SO ACCOMPLISHED. ( Probably this is not interesting to anyone but me! ) Plus I think it's making me better at geography.

But! More importantly, my ladiesbigbang is just about ready to go, and I turned in my first draft for thelittlebang, even if it still needs editing. Both of them are at least twice as long as they were supposed to be, and I'm probably going to need at least a couple more weeks for the next chapter of LttE; but overall I feel pretty okay. Which is great, because when I signed up I was kind of figuring two big bangs at once would make my head explode. :D

Which, by the by: thelittlebang complement signups are open, and aside from my ridiculous porn-free epic, there are ten fics in ten fandoms (CW RPF! Hanna! My Little Pony! Glee! Power Rangers! ST:TNG/DS9/VOY!) that are eligible and indubitably deserving of art - if anyone happens to have time to put together a wallpaper, short vid, collage, what have you, signups are @ LJ | @ DW. I'll have to take a look around my caps folder and see whether I could pull together cover art, or maybe a wallpaper ...

Long week has been so very very long. :P Possibly exacerbated by how I'm still not really at a hundred percent. Stupid lingering sore throat. Also, if I start griping about work this is going to turn into a giant wall of hate, so I will say that I came back from Plague Week to a very full inbox and leave it at that.

On the upside, I should now be successfully signed up for ALL THE THINGS (thelittlebang and ladiesbigbang, and, of course, genretwisting is still in there), and - well. In terms of pure wordcount, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be fine; it'll be finishing the actual story plots that will be the hurdle. D:

I am getting stupidly fond of Trudy and Grace, though. Honestly, they're practically McShep, except for the part where a) they're women and b) canon is not about them and c) they both die. Which, gosh, I wonder how much a) has to do with b) and c)? (Answer: I am trying to avoid giant walls of hate today, so no comment. Except that that would make a kickass fusion AU. Teyla + Trudy = BFFS FOREVER OMG.)

But! For the next few days, I will be concentrating desperately on LttE, in the hope that I can actually get this chapter done. /o\ ugh i am so fail.

My submission to ladiesbigbang was accepted, which means my face is now stuck somewhere between :D and D: - on the one hand, I have been marked as acceptable by an objective outside source! Not that they're screening for quality (and lucky break for me there), but still. Standards were set, and I met them! :D On the other hand, I now have to actually put the fic somewhere where other people will see it. Not that they're necessarily going to, if the summary is boring enough, but the possibility will exist. DDDDDDDDDDDD: I suspect I'm going to be doing a lot of test posts before the 12th - I know what I've found useful in the past as far as navigating a multi-chapter fic goes, but I've never tried to actually code it before. Maybe if I just stick it on the AO3? So many choices!

Anyway. Back to TV.

( Rizzoli & Isles. Spoilers, but still no especially deep thoughts. )

( Covert Affairs; a few spoilers, but not big ones, since I didn't see the most recent ep. )

( Burn Notice. Spoilers, I guess, but it's been a while. )

The Closer, I am still watching, but I have no thoughts, because ... I don't remember what it was, but there was something going on - oh, it might have been B messaging me, now that I think about it - that prevented me from paying full attention. :P So I'm going to need to rewatch this week's over the weekend.

The LJ/FB/Twitter thing kind of makes me lol at the same time I shake my head. I barely use Facebook, and I only have an account at LJ for crossposting and because maybe I might want to sign up for a challenge there, but I pretty definitely would not want those two things linked together. I could handle some of my RL friends finding me in fandom, particularly the ones who already know I'm into it but just don't know where to look for me; but not all of them, and I also would like to keep fandom way far away from my workplace. D: But I am moved to lol by the reaction - particularly the poll about it - and by how clear it is that LJ wasn't expecting people to mind. Oh, LJ.

Had a terrible morning but a very good day yesterday, which was an interesting combination. I was asked to stiltwalk for a candidate for state governor in the Pride Parade in Burlington, so I broke out the stilts and replaced the rubber on the bottoms - which took a fair bit of work; it's tough to cut the right shape out of bike tires, and prying the nails out to put new ones in took ages. I started late enough that I had to finish putting duct tape over them in the car. Which may have been a contributing factor to the motion sickness that hit immediately after. :P Also, I think I'm cursed when it comes to taking 89 north of home. When I go south, from Burlington to home, I meet interesting people; when I go north, I faint and/or hurl.

Honestly, I was hoping this would be a faint; my faints and near-faints tend to be preceded by intense nausea that has inevitably and wonderfully vanished by the time I come to, so it's easy to confuse a fainting day with a hurling day. But I wasn't so lucky, and about halfway there, my mother pulled over so that I could give the shoulder of the interstate the stomach acid it had been missing. After, though, I felt much, much better, and by the time we were actually in Burlington, I was totally up for the Pride Parade.

Which was pretty sweet. I love bright colors and people enjoying themselves, and both of those were definitely in supply. :D However, it was also disgustingly hot, which made it not the best day to stiltwalk up Church Street; lucky there's a Ben & Jerry's on Church Street, too, or I might well have gotten to faint, too.

It all worked out in the end, is the point, and everybody was awesome - it was Burlington, so there were throngs of people cheering for us, and, like, two grumpy out-of-staters who had apparently come to stand around and cluck their tongues. And I think I managed to give somebody who was complaining about the flamboyance of the Pride Parade something to think about, without being too rude. \o/

Fannishly, I had to miss the second ep of Covert Affairs so that I could wake up on Wednesday morning in time to get to Manchester; after I finish this post, I shall have to hunt it down and give it a watch. As for Rizzoli & Isles: ( some spoilers. ) I can't, like, rec it unconditionally or anything, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep sticking with it.

Also, I don't know whether it's exhaustion or stress or what, but I reread some chunks of my ladiesbigbang fic today, and ... I kind of like it. It's not a spectacular work of genius or anything, but I am used to wincing my way through rereads of my own work, and there was not a huge amount of wincing this time. Of course, that could be partly because I've been torturing myself off and on with badfic from the A:TLA wiki's fanon side - I haven't gone through every fic there, but most of the ones I've looked at? Could use some heavy betaing. D:

I just ran over one of the scariest bugs I have ever seen in my life while mowing. It was like a fly, except a fly the size of a Junebug. This is cruel of me to say, but I am really glad it was dead, because, eep. EEP. D:

Anyway. The A:TLA movie continues to get bad reviews, which is joymaking, although I wish some of them focused more on the, you know, giant racism thing (or at least didn't dismiss it). I am also given to understand, via jedifreac's review, that there is also a good helping of genderfail, and possibly that Suki got cut from the movie entirely? I mean, not that I needed any more reasons to avoid this movie, but if I had, well. That would make for a pretty friggin' big one. (I'll admit that a tiny part of me is drawn to it in a very oh-god-a-car-crash-I-can't-look-away sense. Just how many things did they screw up, anyway?)

I will say that it makes working on my LBB fic all the sweeter. :D

This is going to be a really random amalgamation of stuff that's happened over the last week. My life refuses to pick a theme.

My father's birthday was last weekend - the same day as Father's Day, which is probably a bit of a bummer for him, but is very handy for me, since I only have to remember one date. :D We got him the entirety of The West Wing, which I think made him pretty happy. He annoys me a lot - a lot, at times - but I do love him, and as fathers go, he really is pretty excellent.

I also set a personal record for closeness to a deer. I was out weeding, and kept hearing a crunching of leaves, and thinking, "What is that? A dog? A cat? The wind?" Finally I turned around to actually check, and for a moment, went to WHOA MASSIVE CAT before I figured it out. I was around the corner of the house from where the deer was standing, so I crept out to see it better, and, of course, nearly set off its predator detector. I can now brag that I managed to hold still enough for long enough to make a white-tailed deer change its mind about panicking, which is no mean feat. (Seriously, it took at least ten minutes holding absolutely still.) Partly, I was just lucky; the wind was going in exactly the right direction, it couldn't smell me at all.

And today, something very thrilling happened: I got a call back after a job application. I sent my resume and everything a while ago, and got one e-mail back thanking me for sending it in, and then a second e-mail back a few days later saying they were "moving forward with other candidates" - all very nice, very polite. I sent a reply back to the second one saying that I hoped they found somebody who was a good fit, and figured that would be the end of it. And then suddenly I got a call this morning from somebody at their office, asking me to come in for a meeting, because they had, oh, refined their criteria, or somesuch thing, and I was now a candidate of interest again.

Which I guess is pretty awesome, because this job sounds like basically my ideal - getting paid to edit and post to the web; what more could I ask for? - but also means that I get to start panicking about failing all over again. It was almost better when they weren't interested enough to ask for a face-to-face interview; that meant I could tell myself they'd found somebody else quickly enough that they just hadn't looked closely at me. But if they actually look at me in-depth, and still don't want me? Cue breakdown. D: I have a meeting with them at 10:00 tomorrow morning, and the odds are against me eating breakfast beforehand; just having to make an unexpected phone call can make me hurl, never mind an interview.

But! That is tomorrow. Today, I just have to concentrate on mowing the lawn, in between bouts of rain, and pounding out more ladiesbigbang fic. (25k down, about a jillion more to go.)

ETA: Another session of mowing, and I nearly ran over what I think I must call Littlest One; Little One was a small toad, but I don't think it was that small. Amusingly, as I mowed, I was thinking about Little One, and then I paused, and bam! Littlest One hopped out of the grass and started fleeing toward the garden. Oh, toads.

I ... am so lazy I hate myself a little bit. :P I need to artificially embusy myself - make a schedule or something - because I'm caught in this weird place where I have just enough I ought to be doing that I want to avoid it, and yet so little to be doing that I feel like a COMPLETE FAILFACE for not just buckling down and getting it done. RRRGH.

But now that I've admitted it to myself, I can fix it. I can't believe I'm going to a DCOM for part of my life philosophy, but, self: skate better.

The ladiesbigbang fic has - well, the visible output in the actual fic file has stalled temporarily, because I am re-wrangling some plot things that I thought I had already wrangled. Part of the result is an increase in the AUitude of the fic, which I think is probably a good thing but also makes my notes file a touch more complicated. Still, if it will make the fic better, then I had better do it.

Also, ( BURN NOTICE. ♥♥♥♥♥! ) Conclusion: SO MUCH ♥.

I also caught a little In Plain Sight; I have seen, like, four episodes, but I LOVE that show. Mary is awesome, and I could listen to her banter with Marshall, like, ALL DAY. ALSO ♥. I need to start watching that more consistently. Oh, and speaking of awesome ladies, I have to remember to make a note of when HawthoRNe is airing - and, what is it, Rizzoli & Isles?

And I suppose this might be a good time for me to natter about Iron Man 2, which I only just saw this week. ( Squeeful thoughts with a hint of meta. ) Anyway, overall, lots of fun; I am cautiously hoping that all of the Avengers movies may actually be reasonably good. **crosses fingers** And I love Pepper and Natasha forever.

And now I probably ought to get moving. Today's a good day for my self-improvement project to kick off, because I actually have a fair amount to do: weeding this morning, picking my dad up from the bus, and stacking wood for a couple of family friends in the afternoon. \o?

That Diana Gabaldon thing that's exploded all over the place (and made F_W, of course) distracted me like whoa from studying for my Bio final this morning. Fortunately, everything I felt like saying when I first read the OP has already been said, and probably far more articulately than I would have said it.

Somewhat amusingly, I ended up in a half-fight half-discussion with M about the relative merits of original fiction vs. fanfic yesterday, too - probably not the best day for it, considering that I started out already jacked up and full of fandom pride. (For the record, I think of them as pretty much even; each one can do things the other one can't, and they are valuable in equal measure precisely because of those differences. Talking about fanfic as a stepping stone to original fic won't drive me into a frothing rage, but I don't much care for it.) I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though; M doesn't really engage with fandom on a meta level, she's still in a dragons-and-self-inserts kind of place. Which is fine, obviously, but it also makes it kind of hard for me to really have heavy discussions with her about the worth of fanfic. :P It doesn't help that her grasp of feminism is kind of shaky, that she never caught any of Racefail, and that she's not a terribly sex-positive kind of person. Sometimes I have trouble remembering that my IRL friends have not necessarily ever thought about those things.

Fortunately, the Bio final was somewhat less than taxing - it took me about twenty-five minutes to answer forty multiple choice questions and write a short answer about the immune system. And now I'm freeeeeeee. \o/ And will almost undoubtedly spend the rest of the day writing ladiesbigbang fic in my notebook.