Words of Wood

It's a long time since I've started without an apology for not posting for a while, isn't it? Well, I'd hate to break the streak.

If you've seen me on twitter/instagram, you're definitely aware that I have completely and utterly fallen down the sewing hyperfixation hole. But! Making custom clothes as a business is actually working! I keep being stunned by this, but it's true. Not that I've generated any actual cash so far, since I keep immediately reinvesting in more fabric - but I can now confidently join preorders for really exciting fabric, for instance. And my order book runs into mid-January currently. And I've had several repeat orders too, which is deeply relieving!

Liongirl continues to be great. Funnily enough, she is currently HUGELY into lions. "Dear Zoo" is her favourite book and she wants to keep turning between her favourite pages of the lion, the giraffe, the snake, and the puppy. She can do all the sounds! (The giraffe is less a sound and more stretching one arm up into the air.) Aside from that, she can shout "wow!" and "hooray!", and these are all the words she feels she needs at the moment. The lion-roar is very much her favourite and is surprisingly multi-purpose. The other week she met my friend's baby, who is a few months younger than her - he was wearing a bib with a lion on, and she kept poking it and shouting "Rawr!" cheerfully in his face, to his mild concern.

Other things... my extremely focused obsession with Liu Sang continues. Writing a multichapter right now with actual plot which I'm probably pretty pleased with although I constantly have wobbles.

Not much else. My mental health is honestly not great, but these three things are life rafts. Talking to people continues really really hard - yes, I have been reading DW constantly but making zero comments. I really love the reading, though.

Maybe I should do the thing of making a DW post literally every day in December even if I have nothing to say - I keep thinking of little things to share and then deciding they're a bit long for twitter and a bit short/boring for here. But I never think that about anyone else's posts, lol.

Wow I am so tired how do I even internet. But tomorrow is the last day of term! I feel like singing ONE DAY MORE over and over except I literally have no idea of any of the other words or tune and the only reason I even know it exists is because my wife-to-be is sadly obsessed with Les Mis and reads all the weird AUs and tells me about them in detail.

You can tell I'm really tired, can't you.

I am obvs SO behind on the talky meme, but will hopefully be able to catch up, or at least keep going! I will just keep working through topics until I'm done.

Also I haven't written my Yuletide fic yet -- I'm still frantically re-reading the canon. I don't know why I said I could write for a hard sci fi canon with literally a million characters and also I forgot which book the requested character was in so I read the WRONG book. I'm so cool.

Also! My fandom stocking is here. I love fandomstocking! It's my favourite winter internet thing :D As soon as TERM ENDS and my life quietens down or at least contains 95% less small children (I've just come from our Brownie Christmas party, and they're DONE until January too). I do love all my small children, but SO EXHAUSTING.

Also also. CHRISTMAS KNITTING. This is another reason I haven't written the meme post about current projects. NO TIME, MUST KNIT.

Unrelated note: I've had to turn off anon commenting on LJ. I've been getting an enormous volume of spam, about one an hour! They're currently enabled on DW -- I'll see how this goes.

Day 04 - A song that makes you sad
Samson — Regina Spektor

This is one of the songs which no one will ever convince me is not about lesbians, because it totally is. (Note: please don't actually try to convince me.) Also I've spent the last year planning in my head how I want to do a Myka/HG vid to it, and definitely plan to make it after Warehouse 13 finishes airing.

I love the sweetness about this song, and the sadness. It's got beautiful lyrics. We couldn't bring the columns down, no we couldn't destroy a single one / and the history books forgot about us and the bible didn't mention us, not even once.

( youtube )

( lyrics )

Day 05 - A song that reminds you of someone
Pressure Suit — Aqualung

This is song which I was given by Esvan, during the period of my life when I was in 6th form and had literally no one to talk to (and he was in his first year of uni) and I was just incredibly lonely and depressed and suicidal. But he sent me a song and I played it over and over and over and just. It's such a good song. Somewhere far beneath your pointed tongue and teeth is where you really are and just the repeated it's alright was so much what I needed right then, and yeah. Esvan's song. ♥

Dammit, now I'm crying.

( youtube )

( lyrics )

Day 06 - A song that reminds of you of somewhere
Fire And Rain — James Taylor

Years ago, we went on holiday each summer to France, to the Alps and to the south. We'd drive there, and go between campsites which were all in the middle of nowhere, with all the camping stuff for three weeks wedged into one car (because apparently it cost a load to take the little trailer on the ferry). But basically there was a lot of driving. And we'd all make one or two mixtapes each to be played in the car (except my mother, who was too busy actually organising the holiday). My sister's tapes were universally hated by everyone else, being comprised of Atomic Kitten and the Sugarbabes and the like. Mine were bizarre mixtures with Steeleye Span wedged up next to Snow Patrol and the end-songs from LOTR and Death Cab for Cutie and Cat Stevens in a way that I thought was great. And dad's tended to be made of the exact same songs every year, even though he made new ones every time. (This meant that I never had to put them on mine unless I wanted a duplicate, which worked great for me!)

So this song is France. There are actually lots that are, the ones that dad repeated every year -- James Taylor and Neal Young and Carol King and other artists I can't remember although I could still sing you their songs. But I picked this one here because it's a specific place to me -- driving through a golden evening on a high, narrow road above a long reservoir that we'd spent all day beside. Cork oaks beside the road, all glowing gold in the sunset. That's this song.

( youtube )

( lyrics )

So uh

I just handed in my notice

and I get to leave at the beginning of August

and right now I am utterly, ridiculously happy and relieved.

*bounces around offering free hugs*

I love my manager. She has told me that it's her official policy that if someone is nasty to me on the phone I should put them on hold for a while and then tell them that whoever they're trying to reach is in a meeting. (We only get about six or seven incoming calls a day, and most of them are other companies trying to sell us stuff. I spend a lot of time lying by request about people being in meetings :P)

Also, today at lunch, Awesome Manager and I were talking about TV shows, and I asked her what her favourites were. Her reply: "I don't know if you've heard of it, but there's this show called White Collar..."

:D

Meme now! As copied from quite a few people on my flist.

So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious but you have no idea about, or something obscure you just have to know. Ask away. All topics, within reason, are open for discussion.

My big bang fic now has art! It is lovely and I am so happy :D Thank you soteriophobe!

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I was informed a few days ago that GoodReads has a phone ap. Which means I may actually use it, as I pretty much always have my phone with me, so add me! :) However, don't expect any very insightful comments about books read. I get asked sometimes why I didn't do English beyond GCSE (age 16, for comparison with other school systems), and my answer is that I hate reviewing/analysing books. So I've been treating the review section on GoodReads as if I'm writing Twitter statuses.

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Lastly: following some more... interesting... communication from our landlords, in which they applaud how normal our personal possessions seem (as opposed to?) and contest all of our annotations to the inventory (the walls aren't dirty, they're just marked), we've finally decided on a house name.

There are no faults in Ba Sing Se.

Yes, I'm sorry, more house updates.

So, turns out that the landlords were probably dealing in bad faith all along when they tried to illegally threaten us with eviction, and then offered to release us from the contract. Because as soon as we took them up on the offer, they withdrew it. General opinion is that they were just trying to scare us and call our bluff.

So we're stuck here for a year. And there still isn't any internet, which automatically makes everything ten times worse (and I can't even play computer games or anything because Steam needs a connection to sign in. I need to look into how much those internet dongle things cost). But E and C have agreed that I don't have to deal with the landlords in any way, down to not even reading emails from them. Which is manageable, I think. (This sounds really quite pathetic of me.)

I'm so massively far behind on everything I should be commenting on -- I'm really sorry. Hopefully I shall eventually catch up? (I have internet this weekend, patchily, because I'm not at the house.)

Anyway. Stuff.

Hey, look, we didn't fall down a mountain and die :D And all the barns we stayed in had mattresses, so that was a nice surprise.

And there were two days without rain! :O In the Lake District, that's pretty good going.

Then we got back and immediately went to find the latest episode of White Collar. Because priorities. So I have stuff to say about that, and more about mountains, and also a lot of stuff about books (our main conversation topics were the Vorkosigan and Codex Alera books), but I'm slightly intimidated by how much has been posted on my flist during my lack-of-internet, so I think I should probably read all of those things first. (Did anything that I should Definitely Know About happen?)

(MOUNTAINS.)

Looks like I have at least one source of income over the summer! My mentor wants to hire me as a maths and science tutor for her daughter, who'll be taking GCSEs next year. I'm really excited about this! :D

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Still watching Grimm, and mostly enjoying it. It's certainly entertaining, and it has good characters. (Discounting the bee!fail, there have only been two episodes which have been rather DNW for me so far, 9 and 13. First for Nice Guy TM plot, second for embarrassment squick.) The lack of women in main and secondary roles is still incredibly glaring, but at least Parker is very awesome as the coroner and Juliet has finally begun to occasionally do more than to make out with Nick. The CGI Wesen faces and terrible German creature names continue to be hilarious.

My favourite character continues to be Captain Sam Adama Sean Renard - he is by far the most interesting to me. Followed by Monroe, who is adorable. He plays cello! And is a clockmaker! And gets all upset when his routine is interrupted! *d'awwws at him a lot* I'm not sure that I feel especially fannish about the show yet, although it strikes me that it would be quite a nice one to write fic for as you could handwave just about anything for plot convenience, since the show does :P

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Linky post, by s. e. smith: Makin' Me Crazy: The madness of Drusilla, Sierra, and River (mild spoilers for Buffy, Dollhouse, Firefly)