Being as how I'm on leave for three weeks, we (me and jo&stv) just had four days up the West Coast in Riebeek Kasteel, which is a one-horse town whose notional horse is exceptionally beautiful, and is generally pleasingly empty and non-touristy. And very Afrikaans. I had a slightly surreal experience buying inordinate amounts of olive products in ( Read more... )

I have achieved Relative Feline Harmony! in that Pandora, who is a grumpy old thing but quite sweet and affectionate really, has more or less accepted Jyn as a member of the family, submits with commendable grace to being pounced on at intervals (they have amazing chase games thundering up and down the house) and has been known to hold her down and ( Read more... )

Apparently taking selfies makes me look grumpy and suspicious. I suspect, actually, that this job is making me grumpy and suspicious. I'm developing this pronounced frown line between my eyebrows, I shall have to practice looking more cheerful. Anyway, this is off centre because I am a complete neophyte selfie-taker and all the centred ones made me ( Read more... )

This picture came over my Tumblr feed today, and is making me subtly happy. The artist is Brenoch Adams, whose site repays a browse, lots of lovely and slightly quirky sf and computer game concept art. I love that the tall, gangling, slightly threatening robot in this portrait is so utterly subordinated to the little black girl. And I love that she ( Read more... )

I have just found three CDs in the side pocket of my Ipad case. They are unmarked, save for a small, cryptic barcode sticker. They do not play when put into a normal drive. I have absolutely no recollection of these - where they came from, who gave them to me, what they're for. I have been reading enough dodgy fanfic that I am half convinced they' ( Read more... )

I went in to the framing place in Claremont this morning, to drop off a complicated framing job. They're lovely people, and have done good work for me in the past, but they always look at me a bit funny owing to the fact that it's a slightly classic, pedestrian sort of shop, filled with fine art reproductions and local paintings, and I usually want ( Read more... )

I am not, alas, of the cellphone generation. My phone is not a prosthetic limb, it's an occasionally useful communication device on which I probably receive more spam/sales calls than social ones. I am capable of, as I did this weekend, turning it off for a meeting on Friday morning, and suddenly and vaguely recollecting its existence on Sunday ( Read more... )

There's a piece of Harry Potter fanfic I read lo, these many moons ago, about which I can remember nothing except that it featured Draco Malfoy on the run through Muggle England by train. (It may, on mature reflection, have been an A. J. Hall). At some point his train stops in the middle of nowhere, and a soothing voice on the public address ( Read more... )

I am a sad fangirl. I still get an unholy kick out of sharing a birthday with Joss, who is 50 this year and still comfortingly older than I am, and who moreover validates my fangirling utterly not only by intelligently being born on the same date I was, but by producing things like The Avengers, thus neatly conflating several of my personal ( Read more... )

Scotland is beautiful. Cold, and bleak, and windswept, and beautiful. Apparently these are the sands from the race in Chariots of Fire. The local industries appear to consist of education, golf and Chariots of Fire jokes.


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