"Jyn. Jinian, are you being a pain in the butt? I fear that there is considerable evidence in support of the theory that you're being a pain in the butt." (She's on the desk in front of me, headbutting my chest as I try to type). "Jinian, I wish to suggest that this is not socially acceptable behaviour, and is merely building more evidence in the ( Read more... )

For no adequately defined reason, radio announcer auditions, courtesy Wikipedia. This is enormous fun to read out loud, particularly since the Parade's End Effect has been replaced by the Granada Sherlock Holmes Effect and I'm still enunciating with bell-like British clarity. Go on, try it. The sacred, secret crypts of Egypt and a marked propensity ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I seem to be going through a stage of oh-god-I'm-tired-and-I-hate-work. The important thing with this, I've realised, is the focus on "going through a stage". This is a phase. It too shall pass: the brain chemistry or the hormones or the sleep cycle will re-synch, motivation will wake up from its cave, and life will be liveable again. It will ( Read more... )

The ceiling in the foyer outside my campus office randomly fell in the other day. This is both ironic and inevitable, as the building has been rendered hideous for most of this year by the merry crash of scaffolding being erected, the merry crash of scaffolding being dismantled, the thumps and joyous cries of builders chipping plaster off walls, ( Read more... )

I have acquired, by some mystic process over the last year or two, a taste for fruit teas. I've always mentally classified them, along with rooibos, as "disgusting pseudo-tea", but then my erstwhile MA student Stacey gave me a bag of something with pomegranate and apple and I was hooked. This is terribly useful: these days if I have a milk drink of ( Read more... )

Britain still does that thing to me where a random piece of landscape is like an unexpected blade to the heart: a combination of a sharp, intimate sort of realisation with a sense of slightly deadened loss. I suppose it's the legacy of a colonial upbringing with a highly British-centred experience of children's literature, so that the land itself ( Read more... )

I am not entirely enamoured of the feline tribe, right now. Not my feline tribe - or, at least, only my feline tribe by extension and adoption. Jo&stv are away bestmanning a wedding in the UK, and I've drawn catsit duty owing to the unaccountable whims of their previous steady catsitter, who went and got herself her own house. The duty entails ( Read more... )

Of all the ways of spending a Friday afternoon, that wasn't my favourite. Shortly before 1pm this very day, while in the grip of only moderate orientation panic, I executed a sharp right turn somewhere between my computer and the kettle and caused my right kneecap to exit its socket with a merry shout of "Sproing!" (This is not to be confused with ( Read more... )