nor so wide as a church door

Two weeks late: I AM SO DELIGHTED by my rarelywritten assignment! YES. Just like last time, it wasn't necessarily the fandom I was expecting to match on, but OMG YAY YES THIS IS GREAT. I have a complete draft of one story that fulfills my assignment and I'm really really hoping to write at least one more; we'll see how it goes. SO EXCITE.

Ahem.

Aside from that, my sister and I have been watching ( Battle Creek. Cut for spoilers. ) I'm not 1000% in love, but I'm more than willing to give this show a season to convince me.

I also watched ( the new Cinderella. )

And! Jupiter Ascending, which was EVERYTHING THE INTERNET TOLD ME IT WOULD BE. Take that as you will. :D

The weather here has been veering back and forth between abruptly balmy and degrees in the teens Fahrenheit—but it is above freezing as of this moment and is supposed to remain above freezing for the next two days! It really IS spring.

(And now I should get back to work.)

Ugh ugh ugh. Not gone, just preoccupied. :P But not preoccupied enough to have not watched OUaT!

( Last week ... )

( ... and this week. )

I also have Fairly Legal to catch up on, and I watched part of In Plain Sight but I am soooooo behind on that show that I cannot talk about anything in context. So all I have to say about that is MARY, YOU ARE SO GRUMPY AND AMAZING.

And, oh, yeah, KORRA IS COMING IN APRIL YESSSSSSSS. I almost am not sure I'll be able to watch it while it's airing; I only got to A:tLA after it was all over and I had been thoroughly spoiled, no hiatuses or anything. This is going to be SO STRESSFUL. (But I think we actually get Nickelodeon now, which we definitely did not before this year.)

The weather here is disgusting. It is fifty-seven degrees, in March, and that is a DROP from the revolting heights of yesterday. Ugh. March, look, it's okay to be yourself. You don't have to pretend to be June.

Lazy day? THE LAZIEST DAY. I did not get up until eleven, that is how much of a slug I am, and I was useless all day. Good start to 2012!

But! Before today is entirely over and I prove to be a total failboat: YULETIDE.


蒸汽 (4568 words) by Damkianna
Fandom: Imperial Steamworks Series - James Ng
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Female Character of Colour
Summary: Qinxian cannot ascend to the throne. Backstory for the Immortal Empress. [Warnings: description of chronic illness and painful body modifications/surgery, mentions of suicide.]


( More about the story! ) Also, the single guest kudo currently on the story? My mother. /o\

I am not organized enough for a proper recs post, but! I also betaed all three of ambyr's AWESOMETASTIC stories in the Bel Dame Apocrypha section; they are all great and amazing and great, but if you must narrow it down to one and you haven't read any of the source, I would suggest People of the Book.

It has been raining all evening. This is not acceptable, January. I realize this is your first day, but WINTER MORE BETTER.

I am alive! Looks like the worst of the wind missed us, possibly because we're in something of a valley, even with our house on the side of a hill; it rained from about midnight to late Sunday afternoon, with continued drizzle that evening, and we lost power for maybe seven or eight hours. The dams on the Connecticut seem to be doing their jobs, but parts of New Hampshire that I drive through to get to work were flooded this morning - I ended up having to turn around and take an alternate route at one point, and at least one mall that I passed on the interstate had a parking lot that was covered with water. (Unsettling, but not a huge surprise, given that the major shopping areas in West Lebanon are on a floodplain. Hopefully the damage is relatively minor.)

For us, it was a fairly quiet day. We watched the weather on the TV until the power went in the early afternoon, and then read until dinner, when we fled to idriya's apartment - she still had electricity. We got back and I broke out the candles to finish a book, and then the power came back just in time for me to brush my teeth.

The book was ( Guy Gavriel Kay's Song for Arbonne. ) But I did finish it! And I ordered myself three new books as a reward. :D

Here's hoping the power's still on when I get home this afternoon.

It is all blustery and puff-cloud-y today, which I love. I loved yesterday's massive thunderstorms somewhat less, because apparently the sound of wood cracking is enough to make me sprint out of my own bedroom like my carpet's on fire. (I blame this on the time a tree came down on our porch while I was sitting in the next room over - I saw it falling through the window, it made it look for a second like the house was moving instead. Which was an awesome optical illusion! And then it landed and pulverized the porch railing and our clothes rack was out there and has never stopped looking a little drunken even after we reassembled it, and oh hey it would have come down on my bedroom if it had fallen maybe fifteen feet to the left. DDDDDDDDDDDDDD:)

But! I finished one of my genretwisting bingo stories and a draft of my ladiesbigbang story, which is only twice as long as it needed to be! I am proud of myself for being so restrained. :D

Now if only I weren't moving to a new office tomorrow, everything would be great. :P My desk has acquired sooooo much crap in a year, this is not going to be easy.

omg SO HOT. My tolerance for heat is so unbelievably low; it's not supposed to break 100F in my county, but 95 IS PRETTY BAD OKAY. D:

Also: this is belated because yesterday's post was already way long, but if I get one more nail in my tires this summer, I absolutely quit everything. Is someone strewing them along my route to work or something? whyyyyyyyyyy. Why do I get all the flats. (Nail #2, I am now keeping stashed in my cupholder, in the hope that other nails will sense that my car already has one and leave me alone.)

It has been raining for like four days. OKAY, WEATHER, YOU GOT ME. **weeps** Now give me back the suuuuuuuun. (Okay, so there was sunshine for about half an hour this afternoon. INSUFFICIENT.)

Yesterday's Netflix: The Snow Queen (2002). ( Spoilers for a nearly decade-old three-hour-long Hallmark movie no one cares about. ) So that had, like, a plot outline and twenty minutes from an awesome movie, and then there was the rest of it. **hands**

In ficcier news, I tripped and wrote 3k of Trudy/Grace vaguely based off one of ashen_key's prompts from such_heights's female character trope fest, so ... maybe I really will be okay signing up for thelittlebang and working on LttE at the same time. (Although it isn't really meeting the minimum that worries me; it's actually managing to wrap up the story by the deadline. :P) I still have some time before signups close, so. We'll see.

Why does everything I write end up so long?!

I know it does awful things to the roads, but god help me, I love freezing rain. I drove home last night and in this morning through a forest of trees silvered over with ice, curved like dancers with the weight of it. And, of course, since it's been sunny the past couple days, everything is sparkling! It is like Edward Cullen out there. THESE ARE THE TWIGS OF A KILLER, BELLA.

I celebrated International Women's Day by watching that M and James Bond video like fifteen times. Bandwidth well spent. Also, spent some time on Al Jazeera: Ivorian women protest over shootings of female protestors. (Possibly triggering for violence, but the picture with the article is kind of awesome.) And their liveblogging about Libya has been excellent.

I need to buy some more books. If I'm going to keep failing at keeping up with my TV shows, I need something else to occupy my brain. Also, idriya's birthday is coming up. TIME TO SHOP.

Really, really not looking forward to driving home today. It was okay coming in - a little sketchy in a couple spots, but okay - but I'm betting it's going to be pretty horrible on the way back. Time to start taking the interstate again, instead of the back roads.

Chapter 13 of ItO is essentially DONE; I just about fainted when I scrolled through and realized I'd actually filled in all the spots where I left a "[stuff happens]". :D Now I just need to reread and make edits, and then it will be good to go. I can even post Book One to white_lotus without feeling guilty, now, because it will be complete! Which means it's time to finish the outline of Book Two, clearly! \o/ And maybe I can get away with a long self-indulgent post about my ~thoughts~, aka all the griping and plot-wrangling I've besieged idriya with for the last, oh, year.

Speaking of thoughts: I have caps upon caps and even the text of a post for moar picspams, I have just been too faily to get them set up. Partly, this is not my fault - the internet at home is worse than usual because my dad's separate hotspot died and he is a bandwidth hog, so uploading dozens of caps to my LJ Scrapbook would probably crash and burn right now. BUT. Someday I will get around to those. **shakes fist**

( Fannish To-Do List, cut for boring! )

Here's hoping I can leave a little early today; maybe I can get out before the worst of the snow and get some of these things done!

I cannot brain, I has the tired. :P

Seriously, today was utterly ridiculous. I spent nearly the entire thing working on the stupid auction catalog. ( Cut for the dulls! )

But it's warmer out, which is great - I think it might have gotten over freezing today, so I didn't have to spend ten minutes wrapping myself in coats this morning. My first genretwisting prompt is now almost 9k; Chapter 11 of Ito is definitely on track for this Sunday, which is EXCELLENT; and I will also have new art from idriya to post at the same time. \o/ So all is not lost, I suppose.

I'm still going to be really happy when my supervisor comes back from her conference, though.