nor so wide as a church door

Also, kind of weird and whiplashy.

The short of it is that I've decided to stop working at Cedar Circle. I wish I hadn't had to, because I loved doing the work itself - planting and weeding and thinning and hoeing, getting my hands dirty and feeling like I'd really gotten something done by the end of the day. But I have SO MUCH to do this summer: thesis research, and an online class, plus extra-curricular studying (both thesis-related and not). After a week, it became pretty obvious that I just plain can't afford to be working forty-hour weeks at a job that leaves me wrung out and unwilling to get off the couch at the end of the day. :P

So. I've found myself another job - similar, in certain ways, but I get to choose my own hours, and also it should be a little bit less physically demanding. It's weeding; weeding an enormous slope that used to be a garden, and possibly still has some garden-y plants hiding in it somewhere, for a lovely older lady who is wheelchair-bound. She can still manage a little in the lower garden, but the slope is too much - very steep, and mostly shale, so it can also be pretty slippery. I'm looking forward to it, I think it should suit much better than the other.

I've had a lot of spare time, in between the last job ending and this job starting - watched a lot of NCIS, which I am coming to deeply adore, and a fair amount of House, too. USA is rapidly becoming one of my favorite channels - and not just because BURN NOTICE IS TOTALLY COMING BACK THURSDAY OMFGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. I'm also thinking I may try out Royal Pains, which is apparently premiering right after Burn Notice, if I remember the commercials rightly; the previews look rife with potential brothercest, and also the assistant woman looks totally awesome. ("... Don't objectify me, sidekick.")

I've also written more; I added some to the official HP AU document, and also the Irrelevant Shipfic is up to twenty-five pages. **facepalm** I also keep getting hit with mildly random stuff - a bit of Cain/Glitch, and a conversation between Myers and Hellboy over dishwashing. ... Yeah. I'm still working on finishing and shining up my NaNo, but I keep getting distracted by world-building stuff; at the moment, at least, it's a lot more fun to work out the alternate history of the setting than it is to actually write in the missing bits of the actual story.

( Cut for nattering! )

In short, as always, the background is running away with me. :D It's good experience, though - and good to know that when I really want to, I actually can be moved to bother with this kind of stuff. I'm betting this NaNo won't be the last one I write in this particular universe; because of the way the world is put together, it lends itself to both steampunk and swords-and-sorcery, which, what more could you want?

Hopefully, having more time and not spending as much of it being exhausted will lend itself to an improvement in my posting record; my streak has been decimated. :D

Sadface.

Alas. It's probably for the best, I don't know whether I'll be able to keep up this rate of posting once I start work tomorrow. Farm work, outside work, which means I'll probably be dead tired for the first week or so - and sore, too, no doubt.

I hung out with M and J and K and Q again yesterday; we hung around the library again, playing games some more, and then went to EBA's for dinner - K and I split a pizza for probably something like the fourth time, it's becoming our regular order. And then we went to the high school production of Beauty and the Beast.

It was very strange, in several ways. It was a high school play, but it was in the new, and therefore very unfamiliar, auditorium, and I barely knew anybody who was in the play, which isn't how it used to work when I went to plays. At least most of the teachers were the same - Ms. Mills was on the synthesizer, and Ms. Chambers on the piano, and Ms. Woods was conducting, as always. The kid playing Gaston, I knew because he used to be in UVMC chorus after school with me, along with his sister; the kid playing the Beast, I knew because he was one of J's little brothers. And man, was that bizarre - seeing a kid whom I've watched play video games and wander around his kitchen with no shirt on go on-stage dressed up as the Beast and sing songs with titles like "If I Can't Love Her". He's my best friend's little brother, he's not supposed to be getting all romantic.

The play was actually pretty good. I always find live musical theater a little bit embarrassing to watch, somehow, but I liked it pretty well. ( There were a few ... complications, though. )

However, the singing and acting were both pretty much uniformly excellent, and the costumes were fantastic. The "Be Our Guest" number, especially, was quite good - especially considering the limitations on space and props that they had to work with.

All in all, it was quite a lot of fun. Today was much less exciting; I ended up mainlining a lot of L&O:SVU, and now I'm kind of in love with Benson and Stabler, they are SO AWESOME. Or at least they were in today's arc of episodes. I was already kind of in love with Benson, and today had a couple really good partner-y eps, plus a Stabler-centric one that was kind of wrenching. It also doesn't hurt that Christopher Meloni is crazy awesome.

And now I should go to bed, so I can get to Cedar Circle bright and early tomorrow. Awesome. :D