nor so wide as a church door

( The OTW, the elections, and me. )

( Aaaaand the new AO3 site skin. )

Okay, now to slightly less fraught things. I am caught up on Burn Notice but have nothing to say, except TEAM, TEAM ON MY SCREEN, and also MADELINE YAY. And I watched Once Upon a Time in real time for once. ( Spoilery, of course. )

And! I finished Blackdog, but should probably hold off on the actual review until I have the book in front of me again. (Short version: I definitely enjoyed it! :D)

So, okay, I missed a bunch of episodes, but I actually remembered to tune in for Burn Notice last night, and ( I am so glad I did! Spoilers, natch; no particularly insightful thoughts. ) Next week could be either totally awesome or incredibly disappointing. It can be such a strain, being fannish about open canon. I don't know how people do this on a regular basis. DDDDDD:

I'm really glad this weekend coming up is going to be a long one, because I have SO MUCH to write, homg. And next weekend is the start of school, which means work is going to abruptly shift a gear or two up. At least I don't have homework anymore?

YAY IT'S UNDER 90F. \o/

Also, in case someone has managed not to see it, KORRA TRAILER OMGYESSSSSSSSS.

Ahem. Also, I went and saw HPDH2 on Sunday, with my family. ( Spoilers, of course. ) I enjoyed it very much; like GoF, which also makes me cry, I may not watch it repeatedly, but it is Harry Potter, and it's going to be a bit of me forever no matter what. Harry Potter is the reason I found fandom in middle school, which means I owe it more than I probably even realize. Someday I will finish that AU, dammit.

Also, I watched Burn Notice. ( Only a few things. )

And now I should get back to work. :D

I was so tired this weekend, for what seemed to be no good reason at all - maybe it's a time-of-the-month thing, I don't know. :P

But! I did manage to catch up on Burn Notice. ( Yay show! ) I just wish this show had more ladies. Besides Fi and Maddie, I think there was one on the CIA team, and she didn't have any lines. I don't think there were any in the shadow network montage. :P

Also watched Suits, and I am not sure what I think. On the one hand, YAY GINA TORRES YAY. On the other hand, a show about really smart rude white dudes and how smart they are? Gosh, I have never seen that before. :/ I'll probably catch it sometimes if it happens to be on, because the dialogue seemed pretty sharp and also GINA TORRES, but I don't know that I'll be diligent.

It was pouring at 4 am when I had to wake up and separate two fighting cats; it sleeted somewhere in between then and now, coating all the delicate little branches on the bushes outside, and all the needles of the pines, with ice; and now it is snowing, giant fat flakes falling almost fast enough to look like rain. I'm supposed to go meet up with M, J, K, Ka, and Q - and possibly a friend of J's from school, the prospect of whom fills me with terror - for lunch, so I ought to hope it stops soon, but I'm willing to drive carefully as long as it keeps snowing and sticking. :D

The tablet has arrived, as have the books I ordered; I'd forgotten just how long it's been since I'd drawn anything. I have giant flashing neon failure issues, and my sister is so much better at art things than I am that I have a feeble love/hate thing going on with drawing - even when something comes out half-decent, it's never quite good enough for something off in the back of my brain. Luckily, when I show her things I write, she likes to draw for them, so the pictures I wish I could put on paper still end up there most of the time. \o/

( Monday shows. )

( NaNo and fic talk. )

( Thanksgiving. )

I would put a big poetical list of things I'm thankful for here, except I'm thankful for so many things it kind of defies belief, and making a list would just make me think of more and more. In summary, though: my family, friends, job, fandoms, and life are all more awesome than I usually give them credit for, and I am grateful for all the small sources of joy in between. ♥♥♥♥♥

The TV retained its brokenness long enough to make me miss Burn Notice last week, which is wretched; and I really ought not to watch it online, because we keep exceeding our bandwidth allotment even without me watching TV online. But I'm guessing it'll be showing again this Thursday, before the next ep, so. I'll just sit here twitching 'til then.

But! It's fixed now, has been since Sunday, which means I got to watch last night's shows, at least.

( The Event. )

( H5000000000. )

Also, my sister and I went contradancing on Saturday, after I sawed some small trees down and gave myself a weird bruise on the shoulder; Sunday, I went over to her apartment for dinner, and made her watch Newsies despite her best efforts to escape. :D To be honest, I was half in love with that movie without ever having seen it, just because of all the stuff I read when I stumbled through the fandom back in the day, so she was pretty much doomed.

But now I should get back to pounding the outline of the next chapter of ItO into shape working on my NaNo filling some more cliché bingo prompts with Newsies work.

Man, it feels like even longer than it's actually been since the last time I posted. I don't even have a good excuse, really, except that I'm even lazier than I thought I was. :P

The job's going well, though it still hasn't picked up much; about a quarter of the time there's nothing for me to do, and another quarter of the time there's stuff I ought to and/or want to be doing, but I don't know how to do it, or whether I should. The remaining half is split between stuff I find really satisfying, like taking the godawful and practically unnavigable page for the athletic handbook and filling it with internal links, and the stuff I find incredibly tedious, like adding new students to the website database by hand because the place that does our data processing is ridiculously slow. (To be fair, it is August, so I assume they're getting a lot of new student processing requests right now. But still.) I've also started daydreaming about being able to make my own database and fill it with minor characters and details from the great HP AU. Seriously, you could do great and hilarious multimedia fannish/RP things for Harry Potter, with a fully functional school website. (Teacher pages! Grades and comments! Schedules! Quidditch games on the athletic calendar! ... I am totally losing my sense of perspective.)

Anyway. Fannishly, I finally got off my butt - and the weather was good enough for long enough - for me to get mostly caught up on Burn Notice, Covert Affairs, and The Closer. I'm not caught up a hundred percent on Rizzoli & Isles, but I'm working on it. Now I just need to catch up on Warehouse 13, and I'll be all set. ( A little nattering, mild spoilers. ) Mostly, though, I really do not have any deep thoughts.

Which is possibly because the part of my brain responsible for deep thoughts is too busy buzzing around Arabic. Now that I have actualfax money, and - at least for the moment - no regular bills except gas to spend it on, I splurged a bit on a Rosetta Stone. I'm pretty sure it's Modern Standard Arabic; there are times when some of the speakers are a little difficult to understand, and I think it's partly because of dialectical differences that aren't being covered in the program in general. Anyway, it is, of course, fascinating. I'm only on the fourth lesson, so I haven't gotten a lot further than, you know, "The girls have bikes. The girls do not have bikes. There are three yellow bikes." And the phonetics are tripping me up a little, which I was expecting; I can't always hear the difference between emphatic and non-emphatic stops, or between the velar fricatives and the pharyngeal fricatives. And I definitely can't produce them very well. :P But I'm sure practice will help, at least, even if I'm too old to really get good at it.

Mostly, it's just a ridiculous amount of fun to do. There's nothing I like better than learning languages, and with a computer program, I don't have to do skits or dialogues or worksheets or any of the other stuff that I don't like about regular intro language classes. But I haven't gotten far enough to say for certain whether it works, either. ^^ (If it does, though, I ... may have already composed a prioritized and weighted list of the languages I want to get next. :D)

I'll conclude my wall of text by saying that I have never listened to so much NPR in my life as I have commuting to and from work - which is part of the reason I'm experimenting with taking my pretentious post titles from the Writer's Almanac poem of the day, instead of songs. I could seriously listen to Garrison Keillor talk all day.

Man, I definitely should not have waited as long as I did to start fixing my pants when they began developing holes; good thing I had barely anything else to do, or I could never have blown through multiple patches on each of four pairs in just a few days. I actually like sewing pretty well - it's pinning the patches in place beforehand that I don't care for, because it usually takes me quite a while to get it just right. :P (Of course, my inclinations toward perfectionism probably don't help.)

Fortunately, it wasn't nearly as dull as it could have been, because there was a Burn Notice marathon before the new episode on Thursday. :D And then the new ep! ( Much ♥, as always. Spoilers! ) Point is: HEARTS IN MY EYES. I am so far from objective about this show, it's a little ridonk. /o\

M came over a couple times; it's probably a good thing that we haven't sunk into another three-hour sexism-and-racism chat. As important as that conversation obviously is, I think it's best to space these things out a little, give yourself a chance to think things over in between long talks.

Relatedly, my feelings about the A:TLA movie are stronger than I think I had previously realized. The screencaps I've seen, and the previews that are starting to show up more and more often on my TV, just ... make me kind of ill. I was never planning to see the movie when it came out in theaters, but I was expecting it to feel like a wrench to have to skip it, and right now? It really is not feeling that way at all. I don't feel angry so much as frustrated - and, okay, I need to stop talking about this, because there are warning signs that I'm about to make myself cry. Just, blergh.

I'm slowly revving up again on my ladiesbigbang; this one conversation is slowing me down, I have to make sure all the pieces make sense, but once I get through this scene, it should pick up a bit. (Also, I need to remind myself to let it go a little - if it's not perfect, I can always fix it later, self!) It's funny; I've spent so much time with Yue in various little fic-bits that I actually have trouble remembering how little time we spend with her in canon. Also, of course, I need to actually finish the show; helpful as the wiki is, it'll be good to get the last couple DVDs from Netflix. :D

And now I should really stop posting and pay attention to the World Cup. I'm not intense about soccer, but I like it well enough - and, hey, maybe watching the Cup will turn me into a fan.

The night before last, I had a dream about which I remember nothing except that it included a whole lot of Sarah Shahi and her perfect face (undoubtedly a consequence of too much Life); last night, I dreamed that I was trying to show somebody that Holmes Tik-Tok vid, except I couldn't find it without playing all this other stuff I had first. I was just about to get to it ... and then I woke up. It was weirdly frustrating. Oh, subconscious. Sometimes you vex me.

Also, randomly: in a certain sense, I think it's a good thing Burn Notice didn't start until after I got back to school - and thus lost my control of the TV. If I had been able to watch a few eps and then had the TV bent to B's whims, I might have cried a little. (At least the internet here is good; maybe I can catch up online, if USA leaves the eps up long enough.)

There was mass yesterday, which was interesting; the sermon was structured around a box metaphor where the box stood for two totally different things at different times, and the transition between the two was not especially graceful, so that was a little confusing. It was also interesting because it held certain tinges of "omg oppression!" that got my back up a little. Christianity is not exactly an oppressed or marginalized faith, although I grant that Catholicism possibly gets a little more shit in the US than it does elsewhere. I remember being incredibly pleased when Obama mentioned non-believers in his inauguration speech, because it was the first time I could remember hearing anyone include atheism in a list of religious alignments that needed to learn to work together. I don't think Christianity is under attack in the ways the sermon sometimes implied.

Still, the music was lovely; and again, I found myself enjoying the readings from the Bible more than I expected to. I just have such a thing for antiquated text, archaic word choice and phrasing - it gets me every time.

ETA, for future reference: vid post with download link.

So, M, J, K, Ka, and Q came up for a visit; we ended up spending it finishing the first season of Burn Notice, which we'd been watching together at the end of the summer.

One of the eps we watched was False Flag, and I was ( surprised by their reaction to Evelyn. Spoilers (?) for Burn Notice 1.10. ) So. That was an interesting time.

The rest of the visit was a lot of fun, though, and I was sorry when they had to leave. Hopefully I'll get to see them all during winter vacation, though.

I'm still fighting my way through the HP AU; I keep letting myself get distracted by things that are not even anywhere near relevant yet, which is not helping. Hopefully I can finish another few chapters this weekend, though, since I won't have much else to do. And I want to do a couple more cliché-bingo-based snippets. Those are almost embarrassingly fun.