nor so wide as a church door

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.

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 don't know whether I'm imagining these things, or it's getting close enough to the end of the school year that I'm just sick of everything, or what, but watching these cochlear implant videos in Hearing Rehab is starting to seriously make me angry.

( Cut for moderate amounts of rage. )

There was also a girl near the front of the room who asked a question about something being different for the deaf/Deaf versus "normal people"; I'm hoping she just wasn't thinking about her wording, but I still wanted to smack her.

Anyway. The biology exam took less than half an hour, and a lot of that was just because I'm not especially quick when I write by hand, so the question at the end that was meant to be answered in a paragraph or two took me a bit. I almost feel guilty, in a weird way; I spent the last however-many classes listening to music and paying not even a tiny bit of attention, and kind of half-assed my way through studying yesterday, and I still left kind of early.

CCC was kind of interesting, just because I always get curious when people start talking about Mean Girls-type relational aggression. That kind of thing has pretty much never happened to me, and either I'm ridiculously oblivious, or there wasn't much of it going around my high school; so it always draws me in a little to hear people talking about it IRL, because the only place I've really seen it is in movies and TV shows.

Mostly, though, the big milestone for today was that - despite my aforementioned slowness at hand-writing things - I somehow got over a thousand words of what may become my ladiesbigbang fic down in my notebook. /o\ This would never have happened in high school, man.