nor so wide as a church door

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.

Not by a long shot. Today was Mother's Day - obviously, of course, but bear with me - and one thing my mother is deeply into is plants. Of pretty much any and all kinds. One thing she'd really been wanting lately was a trellis, to put in a new part of the slope garden in the yard, so my sister and I spent maybe two hours making one.

It was that particular kind of fun disaster you get when you try something and it only half-works. We did end up with a decently trellis-shaped structure eventually, but only after a lot of grappling with tree branches and a saw and measuring tape and twine. There was a lot of giggling and getting hit with sticks, and very little in the way of actual, you know, structural integrity.

But my mother was pleased - not that she's a very difficult woman to please, but it was still sweet, and I do think that she genuinely appreciated it, even if it's pretty much the Frankenstein's monster of trellises (trellii?). She is a tiny grey-haired woman with glasses and a big smile and a kind of snorty laugh, who loves talking to people, cooking, growing things, and Talk Like a Pirate Day; she likes to go around saying "ARRRRR" randomly.

( Cut for biographical details and other nattering. )

I love her more than I can possibly say, and I am very grateful that she is my mother.

... It feels sort of stupid to follow that up with a little more chatter about TV, but I'm going to anyway. :D I didn't get sucked into any movies today, but I did end up watching some A:TLA with my sister after dinner; we watched ... let's see, I think it was The Waterbending Scroll and the episode right after that one - Jet, maybe? The first I really heard of Avatar was, somewhat amusingly, the finale, since the Zutaran ragefest managed to make Fandom_Wank. I love the world, and the overall storyline, but that isn't always enough to keep me going through the occasional bouts of painfully Y-HELO-I-AM-A-KID'S-SHOW writing. Still, it's pretty good, and right now I am quite possibly more pleased with it in a wide variety of ways than I am with Supernatural, so. Also, my sister's kind of in love with it, which means I have to keep watching it if I want her to leave me alone ever again. Very motivating.