General Update
I've been fine and also fairly fannish, just not getting as far as posting to LJ. In a burst of enthusiasm, I took on another extra accounting job to do from home, one that didn't involve a strict deadline and was a bit out of my area of expertise. The result was that I eyed it off for a long time before starting, occasionally poked at it, finally got stuck into it while rewatching Sharpe episodes because I couldn't stand it on its own, took it with me to my mother's house on three separate occasions with the intention of finishing it there, thought day after day, "I must finish those tax returns today" which is a very tedious thought, and generally let it interfere with my life for weeks out of all proportion to what I'll earn for it. I haven't quite mastered working from home, at least not without a deadline! That's the end of my extra work until next year and I now have my quietest two months ahead of me.
I've rewatched all of Rome and been amazed at how wonderful the second season is. I watched it every week while it was airing, but somehow its full brilliance didn't quite hit me at the time and some of the best scenes - Pullo trying to comfort Vorenus after Niobe's death, Pullo's "I'm your friend. I love you. I would never betray you" during their fight, and their scenes together in the final episode - didn't permanently etch themselves in my mind the way they should have been etched. Now, they're etched.
I finally found a copy of Warriors, a 1999 BBC mini-series about British peacekeepers in Bosnia starring Damian Lewis and Ioan Gruffudd (whose name I will never be able to spell without looking it up). If you want to watch a no-happy-ending story about what it does to people to have to stand by and watch ethnic cleansing, by all means borrow it from me.
I'm also enjoying White Collar, after seeing the first two episodes with cricketk and sarren last weekend. I'm not naturally inclined towards OT3 situations, but we'll see how it goes. The male leads have plenty of chemistry and I think Peter finds Neal far more fascinating than he does his wife!
Other than that, I've been whippersnippering, pullling what Paterson's Curse remains on my property (not much) and removing the seed pods from the cape tulip that lived to form them despite my spraying efforts. Plant by plant, combing over every inch of my 29 acres, day after day. This is going to be a good year in the ongoing me vs weeds battle and I'm already looking forward to seeing the payoff next year. I'm trying to manage my paddocks so 1) they feed the animals for as long as possible into the summer without me having to buy horse feed, 2) the horses don't get dangerously heavy on the spring grass, 3) the grass doesn't get so long anywhere that it's a real fire risk, and 4) no areas get so bare I get dust and erosion. I won't manage all of that, but that's the goal. Right now the horses are just this side of too fat and shiny in my smallest paddock, only one little area near the water trough is bare thanks to some temporary fencing keeping them out of other areas, everything is drying off but there looks to be plenty of feed for the summer, and I haven't spent a cent on horse feed since July and probably won't until February. No one believes me when I say this, but if you have some land and manage it right, it's cheaper to keep two horses than to feed a cat.
I think I'm irredeemably behind on New Things. Maybe I'll change my plan and aim to do 26 new things in the first six months of next year, like I did this year, rather than trying to fit my outstanding 22 things into the remaining 8 weeks of this year. Now that I finally have some free time, I mostly want to just relax and do the things I normally do.
I've rewatched all of Rome and been amazed at how wonderful the second season is. I watched it every week while it was airing, but somehow its full brilliance didn't quite hit me at the time and some of the best scenes - Pullo trying to comfort Vorenus after Niobe's death, Pullo's "I'm your friend. I love you. I would never betray you" during their fight, and their scenes together in the final episode - didn't permanently etch themselves in my mind the way they should have been etched. Now, they're etched.
I finally found a copy of Warriors, a 1999 BBC mini-series about British peacekeepers in Bosnia starring Damian Lewis and Ioan Gruffudd (whose name I will never be able to spell without looking it up). If you want to watch a no-happy-ending story about what it does to people to have to stand by and watch ethnic cleansing, by all means borrow it from me.
I'm also enjoying White Collar, after seeing the first two episodes with cricketk and sarren last weekend. I'm not naturally inclined towards OT3 situations, but we'll see how it goes. The male leads have plenty of chemistry and I think Peter finds Neal far more fascinating than he does his wife!
Other than that, I've been whippersnippering, pullling what Paterson's Curse remains on my property (not much) and removing the seed pods from the cape tulip that lived to form them despite my spraying efforts. Plant by plant, combing over every inch of my 29 acres, day after day. This is going to be a good year in the ongoing me vs weeds battle and I'm already looking forward to seeing the payoff next year. I'm trying to manage my paddocks so 1) they feed the animals for as long as possible into the summer without me having to buy horse feed, 2) the horses don't get dangerously heavy on the spring grass, 3) the grass doesn't get so long anywhere that it's a real fire risk, and 4) no areas get so bare I get dust and erosion. I won't manage all of that, but that's the goal. Right now the horses are just this side of too fat and shiny in my smallest paddock, only one little area near the water trough is bare thanks to some temporary fencing keeping them out of other areas, everything is drying off but there looks to be plenty of feed for the summer, and I haven't spent a cent on horse feed since July and probably won't until February. No one believes me when I say this, but if you have some land and manage it right, it's cheaper to keep two horses than to feed a cat.
I think I'm irredeemably behind on New Things. Maybe I'll change my plan and aim to do 26 new things in the first six months of next year, like I did this year, rather than trying to fit my outstanding 22 things into the remaining 8 weeks of this year. Now that I finally have some free time, I mostly want to just relax and do the things I normally do.