The week that was roundup
Trying to sensibly ration remaining megs by compiling posts off-line (heh, lets me ramble on a lot longer) where at all possible and then do speedy copy and paste and log off before provider can register much activity at all ::sigh:: Can absolutely not upload any more graphics banners to my PB account till next month or do any software updates because they suck megs Um, except for when the marvellous Secret Seer finishes banners for Caput Mortuum and The Training Run, of course, because absolutely vital to put those up in advance of fic. Cannot send fic naked and bannerless into the world. That would just be wrong. Fic must wear best earrings when meeting people for first time. But there will definitely be no shoe pictures for a while, guys. I know that’s awful, but you’ll all just have to suck that pain up, and maybe go to your local mall and try on a few pairs that you have no intention of buying but need to wear for a few seconds, just for the fix.
Let’s get down to it. This past week I:
Spent much too long in the kitchen cooking something complicated for a work morning tea. Tasted OK. Looked like the illustration in the magazine. But took forever to make in what seemed like 8 million stages. Not doing that again in a hurry. So, last night I found a recipe that requires you to just dump only 3 million different kinds of nuts etc in a bowl, you give it one stir, throw it in a tin, whack it in the oven, and 20 minutes later you have a ton of relatively healthy slice which keeps for ages. Much easier. Though I did for a minute consider making pink cupcakes in honour of Dean. But as I now owe slazersc a B&C sequel on that very topic I’ll hold that recipe aside till I write that fic and I can take a pic for the banner at the same time. See how weirdly my fic invades my whole life? Tis a puzzlement.
Listened to my elderly hypochondriac mother moan a lot about her current affliction. Wished was deaf. Oops. Now have sore ear. Universe must have been listening. Yeah, and just try and get an appointment with your GP on a long weekend. Huh. Have to wait till Wed. Probably mysteriously be pain-free the instant after I have walked in and paid for consultation, because life is like that. Would moan to my mother about it but she’s too busy looking things up in a medical dictionary.
Did the final roundup behind the painters. Funny how it is only when you are up a ladder above the front door replacing light fixtures that you notice they didn’t paint the top edge of the door surround. Nice guys, but if they can skip a step they will damn them. Note to self: Standing on top of ladder when you have a bad ear makes your balance a little dodgy. Was very glad when those few treks up and down the ladder were over, particularly the one balancing on an upstairs balcony and I had a long way to fall (nice view of river from up there, though).
Took beloved new car (the reason why I’m sadly too broke to ditch my current poxy internet provider for a few months) in for first free check-up first thing Saturday morning. All good except for the problem I reported about it not ejecting any CDs (unless you stick a pair of tweezers in there - lost 3 CDs that way!) Still they are going to order me new unit and replace it under warranty so I’ll go back in a week or so and get that done. Lucky car has connection for my iPod so I’m not music deprived in the meantime. Also have to say that I love it that my car place has its own mini-coffee shop with its own chef! Whee! I know it’s a very yuppy thing, but sue me for liking it. Very cool guy (and totally hot if I had been shallow enough to pay attention to that, which I’m not of course) from Barbados who brought me over cute bacon and egg toasted sandwiches done up like tiny club sandwiches for breakfast, and kept me topped up with great espresso. Got 5,000 words of fic done on laptop, and was completely happy sitting at table in corner bopping away to my iPod listening to Dave Matthews, and drinking the good stuff. By time car was ready I was sad to leave. Dean would love the free food even if he’d turn his nose up at the Japanese cars that are nothing like his much cooler baby. Also had excellent conversation with another woman when went to get car. We bonded over tech (the shuffle and the laptop gave me away somehow), and talked about crispy Apple goodness and generally dissed Vista. By time we were finished she was dashing off to buy a video iPod. ::buffs nails smugly:: My work is done. Steve Jobs? Honey, I do so much unpaid PR for your company I think a little deal is in order. My choice of every new piece of Apple hardware for life? Seems only fair.
Went to book club breakfast (date changed twice because of various crises in people’s lives). Yummy breakfast. Ate too much. However, is it too much to ask that I belong to a book club where we do more than just read the book, and then we go round the circle and everyone spends literally less than two minutes saying what they liked or not about it? Can we talk themes? Characterisation? What we thought of the choice of pov? Plot development? Stylistic devices? Anything other than ‘oh I liked it because the chapters were short and I could keep picking it up and putting it down.’ I kid you not. That was the sum total of someone’s comment. And we haven’t had a challenging book yet, everyone picks airport reading stuff. Think I’m in the wrong book club. I want us to read interesting books that require us to think. My choice next, and already they hate me because I chose To Kill A Mockingbird. I thought I’d ease them in with a classic, and it’s not like it’s a hard book to read. ::sighs:: Guess I’ll never get them to read Chekhov, or a modern novel in translation like The Carpenter’s Pencil or The Parrot’s Theorem. Think this club is only an excuse to get together over food and pretend to be intellectual. Want to get together? Fine, I’m all for that. Just let’s not fake it, okay? ::gets down off box:: May have to resign from group soon before I say something irretrievable to perfectly nice people I have to work with on a daily basis.
Did, finally, finally, finally (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) finish writing comments on the first part of Camille-is-here’s wonderful new book, and actually got them in an email to her days after I should have. It is amazingly cool (and funny, and sexy, and full of delicious angst), and I haven’t even read the end yet, so it can only get better. Go, Camille!
Did not succeed in getting dead door buzzer removed or replaced. Small plastic devices shouldn’t be that damned resistance to being made redundant, cos if it had kept working I would have been perfectly happy to continue the relationship for another few years. Still have to call electrician this week and book up expensive visit to get new one installed.
Didn’t get out to see a single movie. Tragic. Very, very tragic. So many French movies, so little time.
Posted a few more stories to supernaturalfic. Undoubtedly became the community’s slut of the week by asking for my very own author tag ::hangs head in temporary shame:: But - cool, huh? Oh, and noirbabalon is totally to blame for me leaping into that community. You want to smack or thank anyone, go visit her LJ ::shoos people onwards:: She does cool stuff - and the SPN staffers think so too, they loved her latest postcard to the set.
As a result of embracing inner fic slut have now met a number of wonderful LJ denizens ::waves:: who’ve dropped by, and then I went visiting. Was fun. Next time will try and stay longer, and maybe have pie with some of them. Also downloaded quite a bit of excellent fic (which I’m trying to get read a.s.a.p. - be patient with me, comments are coming for everybody) which helped pull the plug on my internet allowance. Ouch. Still was worth the loss of megs. Just from now on must learn to sample a little bit every day, and work out roughly how much I can take between uploading stories. And it was totally not their fault that I got distracted reading their great fic when I should have been finishing more of mine. Was my fault completely.
You know when you’ve stood over the stove patiently watching a pot of water boil for 3 minutes and it is only when you take it off the element when the timer goes that you realise you’d completely forgotten to put an egg in, that the time has come to stop mainlining instant coffee (because it is cheap and less bother than cleaning out a plunger) and drink the real stuff ::sigh:: I really did do that early yesterday morning. I actually watched water boil. Just water, nothing else. How dumb am I? Next time I’m in the kitchen I’ll have to take the laptop with me so I can make sensible use of the dead time. Particularly if I’m stupid enough to do that again. Or I could just go watch grass grow for an exciting change of pace.
Finally, sadly lost the lingering effect of the blow-dry I got with last week’s haircut. Really wish I had the knack to reproduce that at home. I’m more the low maintenance wash, comb, dry, pout in the mirror because I don’t look like Liv Tyler and move on kind of gal.
Did way too much work in the garden over the weekend when I’d rather have been writing. Want to know exactly why fertilizer has to smell so fertile? Tried to drown senses with application of tons of tea-tree mulch which smelled much more medicinal. Have garden centres ever considered producing a nice lemon-scented pine bark for instance? I’d buy it. But then I’d buy anything that reminded me of a citrus tart. Had planted lots of cuttings out when painters vacated the rear of the block, but damned scrub turkeys went rummaging and dug up most of what I’d planted, and had to whack them in again. Wish Bobby would come over with a gun and catch himself some turkeys for dinner. Think scrub turkeys in league with the water dragons against me.
Speaking of water dragons. Had just pulled out of my driveway on Thursday morning on my way to work when I noticed just what was ahead of me in the road. A Hummer! Second sighting in a month. Thought first sighting was a mirage. A Hummer? In Australia? Thought those things were a myth. Obviously a local guy (has to be a man, what woman would be that stupid?) has just sold his soul to the devil to buy this enormous shiny black tank thing. It had tires that were almost bigger than my car. And I swear, yes, I do, I swear blind that I saw a water dragon sitting in the back window using its tail to flip me the bird. That monster (and it’s lizard mascot) squatted at the lights ahead of me rumbling menacingly at everything in the vicinity. You know how John’s Truckzilla is a big, macho, mean thing? The Hummer is it on steroids. Steroids are bad. Still I think Truckzilla could take the Hummer if it had to. So John, wherever you are? Send your vehicle to take out this monstrosity, please? It offends me just to look at it. Owner definitely over-compensating for a lot of shortcomings.
Spent a lot of time wrapping thank-you and birthday gifts for friends, even longer trying to stuff presents into those bubble-lined envelopes, and much longer queueing at the Post Office to mail the suckers. Am considering sending a note to new Prime Minister. Post Awful needs a good reorganization, is almost as bad as the health system. Might be a selfless act of public service if I offer to step in and take them over for a few months and get their act together. I am a whiz at trouble-shooting and organizing. Bet I could lower charges, up the profit, and shorten queues in no time (and get them more elegant uniforms and Italian shoes to wear - good for morale). In tea-break will consider taking on rest of world’s problems, because I’m nothing if not public spirited and very good at multi-tasking. Heh.
Fic. Wrote a lot of fic this week. I got the last month or so’s fic output actually out there. I think (hope, beg the universe) that I’m only a day away from finishing the nun fic that I’ve been fighting with the last few weeks. Turned into a much more complicated story than I’d originally planned. Probably shouldn’t have changed my original pov from Missouri to the nun after I started the fic because that required a major re-write and a hell of a lot of unplanned research. And I’m still wondering why I spent so long writing a story where the boy’s don’t even make an appearance ::shakes head in confusion:: Doubt if this will hit anyone’s favourites list, but it was one of those stories I felt I needed to write. Muses are odd and often feisty companions.
Fell asleep last night re-reading In Clearest Night in preparation for the 2 upcoming sequels between it and And Die In Thee. Will probably cross-post it to supernaturalfic in the next few weeks so that the whole series ends up in the one place, and to make it easier for everyone to keep up. The second story (With Clouds Do Mask)looks like it will be interesting (eek, it is already longer than the first one); the change of pov from Sam to Dean along with the age difference means a major mental shift in how I view the events of the first story (finally I get to explain some of the things Sammy was puzzled by). Hope the opposing viewpoints don’t confuse the hell out of any readers that may wander by. Meanwhile I know that the only thing Camille-is-here wants to know is ‘What about Gerry?’ Left you hanging for a year didn’t I? Sorry, Camille. Hope it will be worth the wait. And you know what’s funny? In that year I was sure I was going to get Kripked, and not yet. Bet he ruins this guess in Season 4, though. Anyway, I’m running with my supposition because I’m evil.
::Gathers up notes and research material for next five fic in progress and whacks in bag with laptop before dashing out to begin what will probably not be the most exciting work week in history::
Ah, well, someday my prince Winchester will come and take me away from all this. In the meantime, I’ll just fic about it.
Let’s get down to it. This past week I:
Spent much too long in the kitchen cooking something complicated for a work morning tea. Tasted OK. Looked like the illustration in the magazine. But took forever to make in what seemed like 8 million stages. Not doing that again in a hurry. So, last night I found a recipe that requires you to just dump only 3 million different kinds of nuts etc in a bowl, you give it one stir, throw it in a tin, whack it in the oven, and 20 minutes later you have a ton of relatively healthy slice which keeps for ages. Much easier. Though I did for a minute consider making pink cupcakes in honour of Dean. But as I now owe slazersc a B&C sequel on that very topic I’ll hold that recipe aside till I write that fic and I can take a pic for the banner at the same time. See how weirdly my fic invades my whole life? Tis a puzzlement.
Listened to my elderly hypochondriac mother moan a lot about her current affliction. Wished was deaf. Oops. Now have sore ear. Universe must have been listening. Yeah, and just try and get an appointment with your GP on a long weekend. Huh. Have to wait till Wed. Probably mysteriously be pain-free the instant after I have walked in and paid for consultation, because life is like that. Would moan to my mother about it but she’s too busy looking things up in a medical dictionary.
Did the final roundup behind the painters. Funny how it is only when you are up a ladder above the front door replacing light fixtures that you notice they didn’t paint the top edge of the door surround. Nice guys, but if they can skip a step they will damn them. Note to self: Standing on top of ladder when you have a bad ear makes your balance a little dodgy. Was very glad when those few treks up and down the ladder were over, particularly the one balancing on an upstairs balcony and I had a long way to fall (nice view of river from up there, though).
Took beloved new car (the reason why I’m sadly too broke to ditch my current poxy internet provider for a few months) in for first free check-up first thing Saturday morning. All good except for the problem I reported about it not ejecting any CDs (unless you stick a pair of tweezers in there - lost 3 CDs that way!) Still they are going to order me new unit and replace it under warranty so I’ll go back in a week or so and get that done. Lucky car has connection for my iPod so I’m not music deprived in the meantime. Also have to say that I love it that my car place has its own mini-coffee shop with its own chef! Whee! I know it’s a very yuppy thing, but sue me for liking it. Very cool guy (and totally hot if I had been shallow enough to pay attention to that, which I’m not of course) from Barbados who brought me over cute bacon and egg toasted sandwiches done up like tiny club sandwiches for breakfast, and kept me topped up with great espresso. Got 5,000 words of fic done on laptop, and was completely happy sitting at table in corner bopping away to my iPod listening to Dave Matthews, and drinking the good stuff. By time car was ready I was sad to leave. Dean would love the free food even if he’d turn his nose up at the Japanese cars that are nothing like his much cooler baby. Also had excellent conversation with another woman when went to get car. We bonded over tech (the shuffle and the laptop gave me away somehow), and talked about crispy Apple goodness and generally dissed Vista. By time we were finished she was dashing off to buy a video iPod. ::buffs nails smugly:: My work is done. Steve Jobs? Honey, I do so much unpaid PR for your company I think a little deal is in order. My choice of every new piece of Apple hardware for life? Seems only fair.
Went to book club breakfast (date changed twice because of various crises in people’s lives). Yummy breakfast. Ate too much. However, is it too much to ask that I belong to a book club where we do more than just read the book, and then we go round the circle and everyone spends literally less than two minutes saying what they liked or not about it? Can we talk themes? Characterisation? What we thought of the choice of pov? Plot development? Stylistic devices? Anything other than ‘oh I liked it because the chapters were short and I could keep picking it up and putting it down.’ I kid you not. That was the sum total of someone’s comment. And we haven’t had a challenging book yet, everyone picks airport reading stuff. Think I’m in the wrong book club. I want us to read interesting books that require us to think. My choice next, and already they hate me because I chose To Kill A Mockingbird. I thought I’d ease them in with a classic, and it’s not like it’s a hard book to read. ::sighs:: Guess I’ll never get them to read Chekhov, or a modern novel in translation like The Carpenter’s Pencil or The Parrot’s Theorem. Think this club is only an excuse to get together over food and pretend to be intellectual. Want to get together? Fine, I’m all for that. Just let’s not fake it, okay? ::gets down off box:: May have to resign from group soon before I say something irretrievable to perfectly nice people I have to work with on a daily basis.
Did, finally, finally, finally (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) finish writing comments on the first part of Camille-is-here’s wonderful new book, and actually got them in an email to her days after I should have. It is amazingly cool (and funny, and sexy, and full of delicious angst), and I haven’t even read the end yet, so it can only get better. Go, Camille!
Did not succeed in getting dead door buzzer removed or replaced. Small plastic devices shouldn’t be that damned resistance to being made redundant, cos if it had kept working I would have been perfectly happy to continue the relationship for another few years. Still have to call electrician this week and book up expensive visit to get new one installed.
Didn’t get out to see a single movie. Tragic. Very, very tragic. So many French movies, so little time.
Posted a few more stories to supernaturalfic. Undoubtedly became the community’s slut of the week by asking for my very own author tag ::hangs head in temporary shame:: But - cool, huh? Oh, and noirbabalon is totally to blame for me leaping into that community. You want to smack or thank anyone, go visit her LJ ::shoos people onwards:: She does cool stuff - and the SPN staffers think so too, they loved her latest postcard to the set.
As a result of embracing inner fic slut have now met a number of wonderful LJ denizens ::waves:: who’ve dropped by, and then I went visiting. Was fun. Next time will try and stay longer, and maybe have pie with some of them. Also downloaded quite a bit of excellent fic (which I’m trying to get read a.s.a.p. - be patient with me, comments are coming for everybody) which helped pull the plug on my internet allowance. Ouch. Still was worth the loss of megs. Just from now on must learn to sample a little bit every day, and work out roughly how much I can take between uploading stories. And it was totally not their fault that I got distracted reading their great fic when I should have been finishing more of mine. Was my fault completely.
You know when you’ve stood over the stove patiently watching a pot of water boil for 3 minutes and it is only when you take it off the element when the timer goes that you realise you’d completely forgotten to put an egg in, that the time has come to stop mainlining instant coffee (because it is cheap and less bother than cleaning out a plunger) and drink the real stuff ::sigh:: I really did do that early yesterday morning. I actually watched water boil. Just water, nothing else. How dumb am I? Next time I’m in the kitchen I’ll have to take the laptop with me so I can make sensible use of the dead time. Particularly if I’m stupid enough to do that again. Or I could just go watch grass grow for an exciting change of pace.
Finally, sadly lost the lingering effect of the blow-dry I got with last week’s haircut. Really wish I had the knack to reproduce that at home. I’m more the low maintenance wash, comb, dry, pout in the mirror because I don’t look like Liv Tyler and move on kind of gal.
Did way too much work in the garden over the weekend when I’d rather have been writing. Want to know exactly why fertilizer has to smell so fertile? Tried to drown senses with application of tons of tea-tree mulch which smelled much more medicinal. Have garden centres ever considered producing a nice lemon-scented pine bark for instance? I’d buy it. But then I’d buy anything that reminded me of a citrus tart. Had planted lots of cuttings out when painters vacated the rear of the block, but damned scrub turkeys went rummaging and dug up most of what I’d planted, and had to whack them in again. Wish Bobby would come over with a gun and catch himself some turkeys for dinner. Think scrub turkeys in league with the water dragons against me.
Speaking of water dragons. Had just pulled out of my driveway on Thursday morning on my way to work when I noticed just what was ahead of me in the road. A Hummer! Second sighting in a month. Thought first sighting was a mirage. A Hummer? In Australia? Thought those things were a myth. Obviously a local guy (has to be a man, what woman would be that stupid?) has just sold his soul to the devil to buy this enormous shiny black tank thing. It had tires that were almost bigger than my car. And I swear, yes, I do, I swear blind that I saw a water dragon sitting in the back window using its tail to flip me the bird. That monster (and it’s lizard mascot) squatted at the lights ahead of me rumbling menacingly at everything in the vicinity. You know how John’s Truckzilla is a big, macho, mean thing? The Hummer is it on steroids. Steroids are bad. Still I think Truckzilla could take the Hummer if it had to. So John, wherever you are? Send your vehicle to take out this monstrosity, please? It offends me just to look at it. Owner definitely over-compensating for a lot of shortcomings.
Spent a lot of time wrapping thank-you and birthday gifts for friends, even longer trying to stuff presents into those bubble-lined envelopes, and much longer queueing at the Post Office to mail the suckers. Am considering sending a note to new Prime Minister. Post Awful needs a good reorganization, is almost as bad as the health system. Might be a selfless act of public service if I offer to step in and take them over for a few months and get their act together. I am a whiz at trouble-shooting and organizing. Bet I could lower charges, up the profit, and shorten queues in no time (and get them more elegant uniforms and Italian shoes to wear - good for morale). In tea-break will consider taking on rest of world’s problems, because I’m nothing if not public spirited and very good at multi-tasking. Heh.
Fic. Wrote a lot of fic this week. I got the last month or so’s fic output actually out there. I think (hope, beg the universe) that I’m only a day away from finishing the nun fic that I’ve been fighting with the last few weeks. Turned into a much more complicated story than I’d originally planned. Probably shouldn’t have changed my original pov from Missouri to the nun after I started the fic because that required a major re-write and a hell of a lot of unplanned research. And I’m still wondering why I spent so long writing a story where the boy’s don’t even make an appearance ::shakes head in confusion:: Doubt if this will hit anyone’s favourites list, but it was one of those stories I felt I needed to write. Muses are odd and often feisty companions.
Fell asleep last night re-reading In Clearest Night in preparation for the 2 upcoming sequels between it and And Die In Thee. Will probably cross-post it to supernaturalfic in the next few weeks so that the whole series ends up in the one place, and to make it easier for everyone to keep up. The second story (With Clouds Do Mask)looks like it will be interesting (eek, it is already longer than the first one); the change of pov from Sam to Dean along with the age difference means a major mental shift in how I view the events of the first story (finally I get to explain some of the things Sammy was puzzled by). Hope the opposing viewpoints don’t confuse the hell out of any readers that may wander by. Meanwhile I know that the only thing Camille-is-here wants to know is ‘What about Gerry?’ Left you hanging for a year didn’t I? Sorry, Camille. Hope it will be worth the wait. And you know what’s funny? In that year I was sure I was going to get Kripked, and not yet. Bet he ruins this guess in Season 4, though. Anyway, I’m running with my supposition because I’m evil.
::Gathers up notes and research material for next five fic in progress and whacks in bag with laptop before dashing out to begin what will probably not be the most exciting work week in history::
Ah, well, someday my prince Winchester will come and take me away from all this. In the meantime, I’ll just fic about it.