nor so wide as a church door

Very brisk out today, where by "brisk" I mean "five degrees below zero while I was driving to work this morning". D: But there'll be snow tomorrow, and probably at a time that will still allow me to get to work, which is nice.

I made a stupid mistake on Friday with the newsletter, but I think I managed to get the correction out okay today, so it should be fine. Aside from that, the only stupid thing I'm doing is torturing myself with The Last Airbender - I need a project for ScriptFrenzy, and clearly the only thing my brain cares about right now is rewriting things, and then this just fell in my lap! But I have to watch it at least a couple more times, because the first time I was so busy hating it I wasn't paying super close attention. Not that paying attention does anything but make the script even more glaringly terrible. D:

( Okay, I'm sorry: I must gripe. I can't hold it in any longer. ) And now I am going to cut myself off, because if I keep thinking about this I am going to blow a gasket. D:<

On the upside, I think maybe I can get on track to post the last few chapters of ItO two weeks apart, instead of four weeks apart. \o/ I might have to take a little time off before I start Book Two, but if I can drop down to a two-week posting schedule, I will be VERY HAPPY. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD Also, I am dusting off my old, unused FF.net account and trying to figure out how to post to it - not because I especially want to, but J and Ka both apparently use it, and I figure I should at least give it a try. **dubious** I am probably only saying this because I'm so much more used to it, but: the AO3's interface is so much simpler. :P

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 ...

So I was mowing the lawn, like you do, because my mother said I had to and also it looked and still looks like it's going to rain this afternoon, which meant I couldn't put it off much. It was cool enough that I didn't have to change into shorts, but I didn't want to sweat through my shirt if I could possibly help it, so I took it off, and stuck with just a sports bra - not my usual, but nice our house is surrounded by trees, nobody could see me and it really was pretty muggy, if not all that hot. And I was listening to music, which meant I ended up doing a kind of hybrid dancing-mowing-mouthing-the-words thing; very dorky, and always cause for me to be glad that most of the time nobody else is home when I mow the lawn.

Another thing on my list of tasks was to trim the kiwi - possibly I have mentioned this, I don't know, but we have a kiwi ... bush? IDEK, that started out as just a little thing next to the south side of the porch, and has now grown into an enormous monster that covers the entirety of the porch railing on the south and east sides, and has only been prevented from swallowing the north end of the porch, too, by some aggressive pruning. (There's another one across the lawn from the first that grew up the fence and ate it; it gets far less trimming, so it's sort of a mass of greenery with great long tendrils winding out into the air, searching for something else to strangle. I like to call that one Cthulhu.)

Anyway, I was taking the kiwi bits down to the compost, still with the music on, and that was ( when I noticed some blackberries that were pretty much ripe. Less a story than an attempt to preserve a set of moments in my memory. ) Then I climbed up the slope around the side of the patch and onto the driveway proper, and picked a few last handfuls, and then carried the cat and a bowl full of blackberries back up to the house, with my feet coming down on the beat and Regina Spektor in my ears.

So. Today has pretty much managed to get itself categorized as a good day.