nor so wide as a church door

So, ha, I fail. /o\ I hope everyone, with or without a holiday to celebrate during this part of the year, has an excellent time - and enjoys the VAST BOUNTY OF YULETIDE. :D

The bad: I did not in fact finish that next chapter of LttE by Christmas. The auxiliary good: I do have nearly 7k words of it! I am still working on it! /o\

The bad: I only finished one of the stories I planned for Yuletide. :( The auxiliary good: my recipient seems wonderfully pleased with the one I managed to get finished! (The slight wrinkle in the AO3 makes it BLATANTLY OBVIOUS which story I wrote, if you make even a little effort to figure it out, so if you want to preserve the spirit of author reveals, don't make any effort!) So I have once again failed to ruin Yuletide forever. \o/ I posted the story at like two in the morning on Christmas, and then spent the next three hours staring at the ceiling in my bedroom and accidentally thinking of things I really ought to edit before story reveals. The resultant lack of sleep was actually a really good thing, because at one of the places my father and I went caroling in the morning, I was the only soprano, and I could never in a million years have sung aloud alone if I had been firing on all cylinders. \o?

But enough nattering, there are Yuletide stories to read!

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.

Omgggggg weather stop it. Early last week, I woke up to a massive rolling clap of thunder; Saturday (yes, that last one right before Easter), by contrast, it was SNOWING. And sticking. D: And now it's thunderstorming again.

Easter was awesome - my family is not particularly religious, so, while we did watch The Ten Commandments Saturday night, Easter itself was mostly about how much sugar we could cram into ourselves in a day. :D And, for me, how much fic I could write, because I reeeeeeeally wanted to get Chapter 2 out on time. Also, I managed to pound another full-length chapter outline out of my Book Two notes, and I am mentally braving the wilds of Book Three. \o/

But! More interestingly, idriya gave me more art, and I finally got around to uploading it to my LJ Scrapbook, because she is too lazy to post anything herself. :P

( Captain Ming-Li of the Yu Yan Archers! )

( And Yi Lun taking her sweet time painting over the Blue Spirit graffiti. )

Hearts FOREVER. I mean, she painted the wood grain on the shutters, for god's sake. If she weren't doing these for me, I would hate her. :D (Tagging these with the ItO tag, because they are for Book One, and also I need to remember to embed them later. And! Not crossposting, because, 3W4DW.)

Oh, I am SO USELESS. D: I was pretty crabby and tired for most of the week that my parents were gone - you have to do so much more stuff when nobody else is around to help out. :P And since then I've just been marking time until I was done with work.

Which was Tuesday. Monday, I took a tin of fudge in to the office - a bit embarrassing, as our tins seem to have kind of a cowboy-Christmas theme going, but everybody liked the fudge, and over half of it was gone by the time I took the container back home Tuesday afternoon. (I ... may have helped demolish it, just a little.) And Tuesday was apparently bring-your-dog-to-work day, so it was very relaxed; I spent about a quarter of it rubbing dogs' bellies, and three-quarters reading a book on graphic design, in preparation for complex things I may soon have to do.

As noted, I am all caught up on Burn Notice. I have nothing in particular to say, except TEAM IS HEARTS FOREVER, and also MADELINE. ( Well, okay, maybe a couple quick things. )

I finished ordering presents for family members yesterday, which means they will all be here by tomorrow. Friends, I do not yet have sorted, but it's looking like it'll be a bit longer before I see them, so I still have time. I just have to not leave it 'til the last minute again. ... Not good odds, but you never know. :D

That thing I didn't really mean to start writing that I might upload for Yuletide - or, more likely, as an NYR - has ballooned from 3k to 12k. One day, I will write something short. ItO is chugging along, although I was slow last week and I'll admit I spent today and yesterday doing essentially nothing at all. :/ But I still have a couple of weeks before my internal deadline comes due, so. Should be all right. I have a vague itch to start something new, but I'm doing my best to repress it properly.

And now back to Prince Caspian. How do you always snag me, Syfy? :P

The TV is working again! I think I'm getting whiplash or something, this is ridiculous. In a good way, because we got it going in time to watch Prince Caspian again. :D

I now know more than I ever have before about exorcism and how to make holy water - my mother, a lapsed Catholic but usually the authority I go to about these things, didn't know it, but there is apparently at least some salt in holy water. The things you learn when you are trying to write Newsies fic based on a "possession" prompt. **hands** I also realized, as part of the same learning process, that I seem to have lost my book on angel magic; so I ordered a new copy, which means I'll find the old one any minute now. Also, splurged on a tablet. /o\

That experience also reminded me that I need to get cracking on Christmas. I am pants at gifts unless I start brainstorming reeeeeeeally early, and I feel like I should get something for my supervisor, too. Nothing super personalized, I really don't know her that well, but candy or something.

Also, went to see ( Deathly Hallows Part I. ) Looking forward to the second half, and expecting MOAR NEVILLE, PLS.

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.