nor so wide as a church door

I can't have a real catch-up post until my folks come back from Italy, because I will be pretty un-caught-up until that happens; but there are a couple things that I've already finished and merely failed to post about.

( Revolution, 1.08-1.10. ) Odds are I'm going to keep watching this, but not because it's good.

( Chicago Fire, 1.01-1.08. )

( Beauty and the Beast, 1.01-1.07. )

Three other small things: I have a tumblr now (damkianna). Not because I'm making any kind of shift or am at all likely to prefer it; because lots of pretty pictures of ladies, and because I might as well have somewhere to dump the results of me screwing around in Photoshop.

In rl news, the sad and sudden death of our remaining cat was followed a day and a half later by the acquisition of two stray sibling kittens who needed a home. Currently unnamed, although siblings + one boy and one girl = Luke and Leia are strong contenders. They are tabbies, about eight weeks old now, and completely adorable. (They hide every time someone enters the bathroom we've set aside for them; but they've begun coming out to play while people are around, and relax relatively quickly when held.)

And: under my RL name, I may have actually managed to sell a short story. \o/ I'm lurching back and forth between REALLY PLEASED and terrified; but I really want the magazine to do well, and I'm glad I could contribute!

I finished my Yuletide assignment, but somehow I am still feeling BEARS. I have no idea how many times I've gone back to edit it, but if I did I probably wouldn't want to post the number. /o\

I loved you very much, and still do; I won't forget you. I hope you weren't uncomfortable, and I'm sorry I wasn't there to say goodbye.

Tiny Dog is still tiny, still THRILLED BY EVERYTHING, and still hasn't figured out that if she, say, scratched at the door or whined or something, we'd let her out and the carpet would be much happier. **hands** But I'm sure we'll get there eventually.

Went to see The Adjustment Bureau with idriya and my parents last night. ( Thoughts: mixed, but generally positive. Spoilertastic. )

So, overall: liked it very much. I question some of the abstract choices they made, and I think they made some mistakes, but I found it funny and enjoyable and sweet, and I actually enjoyed most of the romance, which does not usually happen to me.

My big project for today is a mass reorganization/update of all my ItO notes, so I can start poking at Book Two without having to worry I'll run into a big snarl later. Also, poking at a different genretwisting fic, because the one I have been working on just won't go. :P My life: so hard.

Hey, look, it's another really long annoying post. \o/

First, ( two weird/mildly interesting dreams. ) I know I'm probably getting excessive about recording these things, but some of them are really interesting, and I'm hoping I'll get better at remembering them as time goes on.

In Human Cultures last week, we watched a video about the gold rush and consequent white settlement of Papua New Guinea, about which I have ( a few thinky thoughts. ) Mostly, I ended up wondering what would have happened if the Papua New Guineans had had the chance to control their own natural resources, instead of having them essentially stolen.

I also have new gripes about B to record. For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, she came to Chicago on the trail of her father's killers rented both Princess Mononoke and Life Is Beautiful. Life Is Beautiful, she rented without knowing it was a movie about the Holocaust; along the way, there is a point at which it becomes obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that the main character's family is Jewish. B responded to this revelation with the following utterly boggling statement: "But [the main character] doesn't look Jewish."

Fortunately for my own self-respect, my mouth did not manage to get in the way of my brain this time; I said something rather acidic about how, yes, right, of course, because you could definitely tell whether people were Jewish just by looking at them. Fortunately for our continuing friendly relations, she immediately turned sheepish, and apologized.

(... For the record, B does not spend every second of every day saying offensive things; just the other day, she paid for a complete stranger's lunch because he forgot his student ID card. I have to start noting the times she makes me glad I know her, too, just so that I don't end up with a ton of bitter entries and nothing nice to balance it out. :D)

And, finally, I spent this last weekend at home. We don't get today off, but Friday was our fall recess, and today I only have - well, would have had - one class, so I skipped and spent an extra day at home. The guineas are truly enormous now; they haven't lost all of their baby feathers yet, so if you had to, you could probably tell Clary, DG, and Evey apart, but it's tough. They have also developed the adorable habit of following anyone that comes within a fifteen-foot radius, including people, the dogs, and the car. They don't like to be without the sound of human voices, so we've put a clock-radio out in the barn, and we turn it on for them to listen to.

My sister got my mother a board game - The Settlers of Catan - for her birthday; we played it about four times this weekend, and came up with at least a page of alternate rules. The most significant alteration was probably ( our set of changes to the Robber. ) Probably worrying about the meta implications of a board game makes us both complete freaks, but. I like the Reaper a lot better than the Robber. I'd worry about having erased the natives of Catan, except I don't think the game's creators intended for anybody to think of the Robber as such, or, indeed, for anybody to worry about whether Catan had a native population in the first place. Which is kind of fail in its own way, I guess.

I am managing to mostly keep up with SPN through reaction posts; I really, really don't want to spend time and energy watching the show until I know how S5 is going to end. Which I know is wimpy, and possibly even kind of wanky/entitled, but I need to be happy, okay. Unless the ending is in the general vicinity of what I want to have happen, I don't want to get myself super invested, because then I will cry like a baby. A hungry, angry baby. And be sad.

The same kind of goes for Merlin, except without the worry - that's just because I don't have access to the show at the moment.

I spent pretty much the entire trip back on the bus making hypothetical mental vids to the songs that came up on my playlist. Peculiarly enough, the fandom that comes most readily to my mind when I hear Stroke 9's Do It Again is due South, solely because of the "you're a freak" part; every time I hear that, there's, like, a ghost "... understood" that follows it in my brain, and I spend the rest of the song picturing RayK and Fraser.

... Someday, I should actually watch that show.

Also, I did not throw up on the bus, or pass out. \o/

We have been joined by Evey (V For Vendetta - and Eve, from Wall-E, for short). She's the triplet in the set including Clarissa and Dorothea; Clary and DG, you could tell apart by their beaks, but Evey's looks about the same as Clary's. So we've had to look at their actual feathers: right behind the eye, where their stripes get squeezed as they twist down their heads, Clary has a spot, DG has a line, and Evey has kind of a question mark/hook shape.

They actually are taking after their namesakes a little, if we pretend that Abby was named for NCIS Abby - she is dark-feathered and sweet and bold, and likes to climb things and bolt around with her wings out. Bella has a particular tone of cheep just for griping, and likes to nap when everybody else is running around. Clary's much better-tempered and calmer, as is DG. Evey, sadly, has not had very much time since she hatched at 10:30 last night to show personality, but I'm sure she will.

Abby has now been joined by Bella - yes, really; she's even more ungainly than Abby, and very pale-colored, to boot - and Clarissa.

Yes, for the lack of any real naming scheme aside from nerdery, we are going with the alphabet. (The reasoning is as follows: Abigail is also the name of my sister's coworker's very new daughter, who was also a couple days early; Bella is ... yeah; and Clarissa is the first name of one of my favorite characters, Saunders, from Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Only the latter two are truly nerdy.)

Bella hatched quite excitingly during The Daily Show last night; my dad was the only one who stayed upstairs with the TV, and even he came down once Bella had finally finished kicking her shell off. She dried out relatively quickly, and made friends with Abby almost immediately - it probably helped that they were both very tired, and thus perfectly content to have somebody to nap with.

Clarissa hatched overnight. My mother happened to be up at about three or four in the morning, and decided to check on the eggs, and there was Clarissa, freshly-hatched and about to dunk herself in the water bowl.

All three of them are fluffy, now, and wrestling for the best position on my collarbone, where I am storing them temporarily so that I can use both hands to type. Guineas are relatively easy to tame if you handle them a lot from the very first day; I just can't seem to stop handling them. They just make such sad noises when I put them away in their cage! DDDDDDDD:

Yes, I will probably keep spamming with guinea updates until they're all hatched. Possibly when I get up for lunch, I'll take the opportunity to grab the camera and post pictures. :D

... and taking a second to be frivolous, here: this week has been pretty toadtastic, so far. I was mowing some super-high grass (it gets mowed maybe - maybe - once a year, tops) with the electric mower, with my sister doing the cord wrangling, and almost stepped on a pretty gigantic toad, who was quite possibly mad at me for ruining its lovely jungle home and leaped at me in toady rage, causing me to throw up my hands and flail around and just generally make my sister think I'd managed to mow my own foot off.

This morning, I was mowing again - and you may think there's a pattern here and I just saw the same toad twice, but no, because this sighting was after I was finished. I clumped up to the little mini front porch, intent on claiming a cup of cold juice and a fan as my own, and saw a sudden burst of movement in my peripheral vision, going from under the mini porch to somewhere beneath a nearby bush. I thought it might be a chipmunk or something, and lowered myself down to see, and, omg, another toad. Definitely a different individual, because this one was smaller, and also in a completely different place.

I'm a little worried, actually - I mean, Little One must be a pretty smart toad if it's managed to avoid death by psychotic killer cat so far, but it's still probably bad that Little One is apparently living so close to the house - how long can it continue to avoid psychotic killer cat??? I'm not worried at all about Big One, because Big One seems to be living quite a bit further away, and also I'm a little more confident in Big One's ability to kick the cat in the head and run.

(The cat I refer to here is, amusingly, named Calvin; we were considering naming him Hobbes, but we must've divined that he would be crazy and weird even at an early age, and went with Calvin instead. He is big, orange, and deeply annoying when it's rainy and he can't go out; also, he likes to kill things. He does not get along at all well with the other cat, Thomasina, who is ... sixteen? seventeen? certainly getting up there, and likes to reign over the house from the couch, where she graciously allows me to be her cushion. And no, we did not name her Thomas and then realize she was a girl; we named her after the cat Thomasina from the book by Paul Gallico.)