Words of Wood

Yesterday:

Me: Okay, we have to be in Oxford at 1pm on Thursday to be given the keys to the new house.
Mum: Do you think we're really going to be able to be there by 1pm?
Me: It's okay, I'll have eveything packed and ready Wednesday evening.
Mum: Are you joking?
Me: I bet you £5 that I will be.
Mum: ...I'll take that bet.

In other news, I'M LEAVING HOME AND GOING BACK TO OXFORD TOMORROW. Finally.

Hello, I've decided it's about time I stopped lurking and started posting again. I've been actually doing things with my life, which has come as a surprise to me. Basically, I've decided that I want to be a primary school teacher, which will be another year of study after my degree has finished, and I'm really hoping I can do the course at Oxford Brookes, because then I can still live in Oxford, which is something I really want to do. I came to this conclusion after starting volunteering at the local primary school two days a week, which is one of the main reasons why I haven't been posting much! It's amazing and awesome and I love working with the yr 1 kids (ages 5 and 6), but it is tiring like you wouldn't believe, and completely wipes me out for at least a day afterwards. But I'm outside! Doing useful things! I'm pretty proud of myself.

I need to write some stuff about the Hay Festival which I went to last weekend, that might get done later today.

I've signed up to hc_bingo. Don't ask me why I keep signing up for challenges since I never seem to complete them. I basically have no sense, but you all knew that already. My card is below the cut. It's got lots of squares which I'd like to do, but they don't line up properly. I'd rather like to move them around a bit to get the lines I want, but that's probably not allowed!
( My hc_bingo card )

--  Someone I know from the CSI:NY fandom came to stay with me over the weekend, which was very nice, since my parents are on holiday so I've got the house to myself (with my sister in occasionally, but she's usually out). I had fun showing her some of Herefordshire, and we took part in the Malverns By Moonlight walk for Macmillian - there were several hundred women walking along Malvern ridge in the dark, and it was really cool to be part of that. I can't remember the distance in miles, but it took us about two and a half hours. We didn't bring torches because I couldn't find them, but other people had them around us, and there was also an incredibly bright full moon.

--  I aquired and watched the pilot episode for Sherlock. It was pretty interesting just for seeing the difference between a pilot and a finished product - even little things like music which you don't often notice, but makes a startling difference when there's only some very generic bits to highlight especially dramatic scenes. Sally was better in the show (and Anthea wasn't in the pilot at all), so maybe they'll contine with the upward trend in the next season. Interestingly the case was solved by Sherlock much faster, right when he's first making his "who hunts in the middle of a crowd?" speech - but of course that cut loads of the drama (although I think most of the audience guessed then too). They also cut out a bucketful of Sherlock h/c from the script, sadly.

--  I've heard some things about Bones. I'm very glad I stopped watching it last season. Same with House, and CSI:NY. The last, especially. You fire your leading lady during the break for not sitting back and taking a pay cut while none of the men were being asked to, and then don't even give her a goodbye episode, or any real mention at all? Really, CBS???

--  (**CSI spoiler**)  Why is it that leading characters on US television seem to be mortally afraid of taking painkillers even when, say, they're in the hospital having lost a kidney after being stabbed repeatedly by a psychopath using a pair of broken glasses??? I know Drugs Are Bad, yadda yadda, but so is pain imho.

--  I'm trying to decide whether and how many Christmas fic exchanges to sign up to. Since at the moment I seem incapable of writing unless I have either/or a very strict prompt or a very strict deadline, it seems to me to be a good idea (I'm looking at sga_santa , holmestice , and yuletide). So I should think about what to put in the forms, which always confuses me. I mean, in eg SGA I'll pretty much write any pairing, but my pairing-fic always seems to end up as Gen-With-Cuddles (and h/c if I'm allowed). So I feel that I can't offer to write pairings because people then probably want some relationships in which the characters don't basically act as if they're asexual. I'm just not at all sure how I would go about writing 'normal' relationships - I'm wary of writing characters feeling certain ways when I'm only guessing based on other stories I've read or something. Or maybe I need a firm kick to get me out of my comfort zone. I need to think about this.

--  Stargate Universe starts again tomorrow! Many of you may not be, but I at least am very much looking forward to it :P Bets being taken now on who's dead...

- friendshipper  wrote me a fic for avatar_minis on DW!  It's really awesome and lovely and adorable, so you should check it out.
The Art of Tea and Conversation (on DW) and on Livejournal

- schneefink  drew a picture for my chronically-unfinished sky pirate AU!  Go check that out too, because I love it.

- I'm off to Spain tomorrow with Esvan and his parents for a week, so will probably have no internet at all during that time.  Actually, no internet has almost become normal for me, that's a worrying thought!

- I need to tell you all about my EPIC CANOE ADVENTURE with baby_werewolf , but that'll have to wait until I'm back from Spain because I'm lazy.

- I plan to do lots of writing during this week.  And crochet.  It might even happen.

Just got back from Cornwall, where I've been staying with Roz-who-doesn't-go-on-LJ-enough-for-me-to-link-to-her.  Second time I've visited her now, and again I really enjoyed myself.  Proof that you can indeed make 'real' friends online, whatever the disapprovement my grandparents expressed when my mum mentioned this to them!  She also bribed me to write a CSI NY fic again, for the first time in a year.  I'm not sure I'm going back to it, though, since I really am far too fed up with that fandom.  Anyway, we went on as many walks as we could despite the rain, and went round lots of little Cornish villages, where we visited lots of charity and second-hand-book shops, from which both I came away with far more books than I'd intended buying - but books are the one thing I can always justify!

Certain books, anyway.  My sister's just been trying to tell me that Twilight is a really good book, and if I vehmently disagree, that's 'only my opinion', and 'it's just a story'.  Not quite sure how to verbalise my burning disagreement properly, I withdrew.

Much to my surprise, while in Cornwall I actually managed to get my sgahcchallenges  story in on time, and also to reply to most comments (about to reply to the rest), although I haven't really used the internet for much else -- I haven't been ignoring everyone who's posted things, honest!  Oh, I also signed up for the atlantisbigbang as a writer -- although I have the feeling that I may live to regret this!!  (On this note, baby_werewolf , you said you'd sign up as an artist.  You aren't going to disappoint me, are you? ;P)  There're also the sticksandsnark  stories for me to read -- this is great!  :D

Oh, there's revision too.  Tomorrow I'll have passed the halfway point through my incredibly long and boring textbook, and then I can feel proud :)

Chevron con tomorrow!  *bounces up and down*

I've still got to pack and stuff, but decided my time was better spent by making badges for Esvandiary and myself.  And then I thought it would be a good idea to post them here, to facilitate the whole meeting-up-plans.


(Yes, the picture on Esvan's is supposed to be a PuddleJumper.  He asked for it, but hasn't seen it yet.  It looks slightly better in the handdrawn one, but I never pretended to be an artist!)

So I'll be the one wearing the badge with a picture of a tree.  Possibly writing in a pad of file paper.  Or reading a book about evolutionary selection pressures, in the (very) likely event that I don't manage to finish it tonight.

Also, I've discovered Criminal Minds, and am rapidly working my way through the four-and-a-half seasons of it.  Why did it take me this long to start watching it?!

 Esvandiary and I have just realised that we've yet to book for Chevron 7.4.  Oops.  Fortunately, it seems that there are still tickets - unfortunately, it's the accommodation that's not looking so lovely for two students on a student budget.  Certainly, although staying at the official venue would be lovely, we can't really stretch to £74 a night, for three nights.

We have now started looking seriously for other options, so hopefully we'll find somewhere...

In fact, we'd better, because the guy on my icon has now also been announced as a guest!  David Hewlett and Ryan Robbins...  I do not want to pass this opportunity up!

To my relief and surprise, I have finally finished my sga_santa story. And I'm happy with it. I can now only hope that my receipient likes it too! I would like to say to myself that I'll never push deadlines again, since it stresses me so much, but I know that's something impossible...

In regard to more happy things, I've finally got round to getting a paid account, so that I can have more icons. Because I really like icons. However, when I relabelled all my current icons so that they were named more sensibly, this apparently confused LJ, and so everything I've posted anywhere now has a default icon on, which is slightly annoying, but ah well.

Now I can get on with all the other stories I'm supposed to be writing people!

:-)

Dividing this up, since one half of my flist is from real life and the other half from fandom. My brain told me this makes sense, but it went into winter hibernation before I could ask it any follow-up questions.

Life
Thought I'd make a random post, since I haven't done one of those for a while. And it's a new month, which I'm still surprised about, and I get to go home for Christmas on Saturday, which is even more surprising as it does NOT feel that I've just gone through an entire term. The weeks have disappeared, which is odd, considering how long the individual lectures lasted, but I suppose that's relativity, unless the Zoology department has a black hole hidden in one of its lower levels. This thought does not feel as unlikely as it should.

Weekend was good, since Boyfriend came to visit for our 4-year-anniversary, on which I dragged him to the Taruithorn mathom party (by prior arrangement!). I've run out of ways to describe mathom parties to people who aren't Tolkein-obsessed, so suffice it to say it's a party which involves giving away things you don't want to people who make the best bid for *not* needing them. I got a plant, since I've managed to kill by neglect the one I got last year (although I then gave it to someone else who properly wanted it), and Boyfriend got a sombrero. I really wanted the foam dart, but it got given to Laurence of Arabia (or the archive), and I got to play with it anyway. Then we had a nice weekend of not doing much, and went to a small Christmas party on Sunday, for which I made mince pies and brandy truffles, and felt very Christmassy. That was also fun.

Oh, I also had a Waterstones splurge on Friday. They were doing 3 for 2 on non-discounted books. So naturally I had to get three. And there were two discounted books I wanted too. I'm quite sad that I've already finished them all.

Fandom
I think my sga_santa fic hates me. Things refuse to stop happening in it, and it just keeps on getting longer! At this point I'm very glad I'd assumed that I'd get most of it done after term was over, because it means I'm on schedule, with certainly over half of it written. Now I can just worry that my receipient won't like it, that I'll have interpreted what they want in a different way from what they *actually* want, etc. I guess I need to wait until I'm home, and then just solidly attack it and bend it to my will. Or something approaching my will. Certain characters just refuse to do what they're told.

Actually, I'm currently feeling quite guilty about this comm, as I went back and read a load of the requests a couple of days ago. I signed up pretty near the start, and it's my first fic exchange, so I completely failed to realise then how bad my request was. I thought that only setting vague parameters would be the helpful thing to do, but I've since realised that's really not the case, and probably whoever's writing for me really hates me. I basically set a rating limit, and said that anything under that would be fine, when it's detailed requests that actually seem to be the most helpful... so, person who's writing for me, if you ever end up reading this, I'm REALLY sorry for being a pain.