girlofprey

Yesterday I woke up to pretty massive period pains, and despite getting up pretty late (3-ish), I ended up going to lie down again for a while because curling up on the couch made stomach feel like it was stabbing me, and standing up made me feel hot and like I was going to throw up. Which I did not want to do, having just taken a painkiller.

But eventually I felt much better, and last night I was rewarded with Inspector George Gently, Sugartown, and new Dragon's Den. Inspector George Gently was supposed to be about the hippie movement in England in the 60s, and Gently and Bacchus finding themselves in the middle of a social and sexual revolution. I had high hopes for the episode, and it did not disappoint. I don't really understand the lack of fandom for George Gently. One of them's a Professional, and I've heard loads of people talk about how much they love Lee Ingleby. But anyway. Whatever. The episode also featured someone who is currently in Hollyoaks, which was quite pleasant as well. Hurrah.

They didn't really explain who the new person was on Dragon's Den. Only after rewatching it a couple of times did I hear that she got rich through the haulage industry. She has weird hair and weird make-up and weird clothes/shoulder pads. But sometimes she was really lovely, and sometimes she got really angry, and she has quite a lovely gravelly voice. So I quite like her. Also I LOVE DEBORAH MEADEN. That is all.

Today turned out to not be a very much better day. Our dog is quite old now and a bit less in control of himself than he used to be, and after spending a while downstairs having a sandwich and whatever, I went to go out and found that he'd pooed all over the garage. Including one bit right between a pair of my trainers, though not on them, so I guess I was lucky in a way. Then I went out to the shop, and I had some music in, and there were about three or four young women walking the opposite way to me across the street with their kids, and I heard one of them shouting, and I turned round to look, and she was shouting at one of her kids. Pretty nastily really. But I was obviously looking for a moment too long, because she noticed me, and started shouting something about how she was shouting at her kids, did I have something I wanted to say about it? I still had my music in, so I couldn't really hear her, so I just looked away and kept walking, and that was that really. But it wasn't very pleasant. Then I went home, messed about in my bedroom for a while, my dad came home and cleared up the garage (I would have liked to clear it up for him in some ways, but I really just wasn't touching that), and then later on was watching TV, and the dog started squeaking again, so I went to let him out, and found that in the garage once again our cat had left a dead animal for us. Except not so much the outside of that animal. My dad ended up clearing up that one too. Poor dad.

But after and in between all of that, I did get the usual Monday/Friday night soap marathon. Hollyoaks, Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Eastenders, Coronation Street. Phew.

Hollyoaks was quite good, plenty of Ste/Brendan, but I might well have enjoyed it more if I hadn't, just before watching it, read a Ste/Brendan fic that I thought was just a fic, but I eventually realised was the events of the episode from Ste's point of view, which the writer had obviously seen on E4 on Friday. And didn't warn for spoilers for it, or anything. It was still good though.

( Emmerdale )

Phew. And now ( Coronation Street )

And then there was Eastenders. The Michael/Anthony corruption storyline isn't being as brilliant as I'd hoped, but there's still a little bit every episode where Anthony will specifically say something either acknowledging Michael or trying to get Michael to agree with him, and Michael largely ignores him, but sometimes he'll stick up for Anthony or look over when something Anthony has done has gone right, and smile a little bit. So I'm still watching it. I get the feeling that it might become a bigger thing later on, when the storyline progresses a bit. I have to say though, Michael isn't doing too great at manipulative incest at the moment, but he is doing pretty well at being a nutcase. Honestly. He's like the Joker. He's not as good as the Joker. But you get the idea. For a soap. It's all little twitches and funny smiles. He's very good at it. Kind of a jerk, a lot of the time, but pretty good at it all the same.

Also, I found myself slightly shipping Masood/Yusuf. Now that Yusuf is all canonically acting a bit creepy, and their tension has become slightly less about being weird around Zainab, and more about shooting each other heated looks across tables and making catty remarks at each other. I'm not interested in them, but like I say, I like it better them just hating each other than being weird with Zainab. So hurrah. I guess.

And now it's really hot, so I'm going to go change, possibly.

Mum and I and Jack went to the Medieval Day at the castle. T'was as usual slightly rubbish, being mostly arts and crafts stalls and liquorice-flavoured things. OH HOW TERRIBLE TO HATE THE SWEET MY TOWN IS FAMOUS FOR. Also it was mostly too hot, and there were too many people in my way, and Jack didn't want to move forward and didn't want to stay still, and rargh! But parts were good. A goat tried to eat my burger, and there was a princess running around riding a dragon, which was a nice shift in gender politics. Always suspected the tales about girls getting "kidnapped" all the time. Clearly knights just didn't measure up in the fearsomeness/fun stakes.

Anyway. There was also a birds of prey display including a Golden Eagle, and dude! It was huge! I can see why America has it as its bird! I'd make a crack about how size doesn't matter but OMG YES IT DOES. HUGE. It wouldn't turn around and face us though. Drama queen. And I saw my first medieval swordfight. I know half-sword and murder strike and pomelling, and all the things you can do with the cross bit. Which I'm sure will come in useful one day... >:)

Also I tried some lemon curd, and no spider came and sat down beside me. Shame on the nursery rhyme authorities. Black, black shame.

I have been at grandma's, up the hill. See how I fulfill all the family obligations on my lonesome? Mostly this involved her telling me about all the things she hated and people she hated, at length, repetitively, for an hour or so, while I tried not to pass out from awkwardness. But then I got to talking about my aching feet and the Liquorice Festival next weekend, and it was all good. Also she gave me a box of chocolates, because she has too many in her fridge and doesn't eat. So all in all a decent two and a half hours, and my £40 a month is less likely to be suddenly and abruptly cut off. Hurrah.

Parents get back tomorrow. It feels slightly pathetic that in the week I had to fend for myself I managed to cripple my feet and come down with a mild cold in the middle of a heatwave. But then I still managed to get to work every day even so, and take care of the dog. So perhaps I deserve extra points. I don't know. Mostly I'm glad I didn't somehow die or get stranded in Hull somehow. But soon they will be back, and I can stop acting like a grown-up, and convince them to take me to see Pirates again. So hurrah.

Doctor Who finale in 15 minutes. Omg.

Things that happened to me yesterday:

• I got my first payslip thing. Which made me nearly tremble in excitement. No lie. The effect of money on me, folks. And contrary to my previous thoughts, it was more than I thought it would be. £914, baby! I am clearly well in with this job.



• (£100 is already somehow gone, though. Damn you, graduation robes and train fare and Neverwhere. It slightly puts the whole 'relative value of money' thing into perspective. And that whole downside to spending it, wherein you no longer have it. Hmph. Still. £914!)



• HMV shamelessly tried to seduce me with it's summer sale. And sort of succeeded. Barton Fink for £1.99! Mystery Men for £3.99! I'm only trying to debate whether its worth trying to take metal The Company of Wolves (£4.99!) back to get one without a silver scratch on the front. And whether I should get the Fifth Element too.



• jekesta sent me the BEST CARD EVER. I cannot stress this enough. Also she shamelessly and causelessly slandered her own writing abilities on the envelope, but that is beside the point. Card. It is a huge sparkly cake. It makes me slightly wobbly to look at it, and I may icon it. And with it came a postcard from pigeongirl99, who is sadly away from her internet at the moment! I did have to spend a few moments guessing who she was...while my mother grew more and more concerned about the company I keep. But it was from Brighton, and about Dr Who! I was so rich in post :)



• I found out my module results for last term - on a slightly different part of the site where I found my degree results. I still want to see my essay marks, but it's nice to know. 71 for Adaptation and Appropriation, 67 for Arthurian Literature, 67 for Creative Writing. Giving me an average of 68 for the term, and the year, and a degree result of about 66.2. Not bad :)

Things I have to watch at some point:

• The last two (terrestrial) episodes of Lost.


• This week's King-filled Emmerdale episodes. I have fan shame, yes.


• Pirates of the Caribbean again. Because I don't think I have since seeing it in the cinema. And clearly this is wrong.


• And the rest of Lost Season 1, Platoon, Withnail and I, all those DVDs I bought yesterday, and various other bought-and-left-in-a-stack efforts.

Which doesn't go well with the fact I only have five hours a day free nowadays, in which I also eat, bathe, and read Neverwhere. Ho hum.

Mostly I am worrying the Neverwhere videos won't fit through the letterbox and deciding between saving my money for frugal usage, or buying all the things. Which, what with play.com and Amazon and summer sales and all, I think I could probably actually do. Not that I will. Probably.

My flist went strangely quiet after Doctor Who on Saturday. I thought for a while I'd somehow offended them all horribly. But now I think it was probably more to do with the fact people were on the BBC, omg. Or at medieval fairs. Or whatever.

Today I got to go file on the fourth floor, for the Geotechnical people. The scoffs of horror I met with whenever anyone mentioned that job should have given me some warning about it (though it was still better than the alternative of putting hundreds of almost identical A0 drawings in the right order). The man in charge said there would probably only be about 15 job numbers/piles to sort documents into. He lied. I think I can justifiably refer to him as the Prince of Lies, in fact. And now I have to put it all in date order, and do the actual filing. Which is apparently "slightly different" to the downstairs system. My fear. The reminder of my paycheck in two weeks is all that keeps me going, I think.

Also, melata_fic said she'd jump on the Hook-Handed Man/Violet bandwagon if I wrote some fic. So I dug up one of my old plotbunnies. Voila.


Title: Whisper.
Fandom: A Series of Unfortunate Events
Pairing: Violet, the Hook-Handed Man
Notes: Sort of a vignette/pre-fic. Set during 'A Bad Beginning', probably partly inspired by some of the visuals from the movie. Slightly dark. PG-13.
Disclaimer: I don't own them. I just play with them. I am not Lemony Snicket. Honest.
Feedback: Appreciated. Believable characterisation would be nice.

( Whisper )


Editing still gives me a headache.

I have learned the new and exciting torture of being on your period at work. FUN. I took two paracetamol an hour before I was supposed to, spent an hour in the bathroom with my shirt off (without passing out!), before deciding I felt well enough to get to the bus station. Given my recent lack of sleep and how badly I've been eating, I really shouldn't be suprised it was so bad. And somewhat as expected, I feel completely fine now, except tired. But blah. I'd finished all the bloody filing, anyway.

My dad thinks he might be fired from his job. Again. To lose one job is accidental, to lose two begins to look like carelessness. I joke because it's actually slightly scary. It sounds like it was completely nothing to do with him - someone (else) made a huge and basic error when designing something that's now started to be built, on a job he's only vaguely involved in. But it's a big error, which could apparently cost a million pounds to deal with; and it's student accomodation, so it really needs to be finished next September, which it looks like it might not be now. So my dad thinks anyone even slightly involved in the job that allowed it to happen might get the sack. Including his (and my) boss. He even went so far as to tell me money wasn't everything, you should get a job you enjoy, because it just wasn't worth it otherwise - if you know my dad at all, you know this is a VERY STRANGE THING for him to say. He did then take me on a tour of his area pointing out all the rich solicitors though, and telling me how great it is to be a judge. I don't know. He's a bit of a pessimist, but it all does sound very serious. I don't know what he'll do if he leaves his second job in a year, under a black cloud. And they are crying out for engineers in Dubai, after all...

I'm mostly trying not to think about it. It might all come to nothing, after all. The poppies are out in the fields and that pleases me. Also I decided that even though I'm not allowed to buy any more books, poetry clearly doesn't count, and got 'Sonnets to Orpheus' by Rilke, which is - beautiful, at least in this translation.

Ahem:

'Keep ahead of all parting, as if it were behind
you, like the winter that is just now passed.
In winters you are so endlessly winter, you find
that, getting through the winter, your heart on the whole will last.

Be ever dead in Eurydice - arise singing
with greater praise, rise again to the pure relation.
Among the fleeting, in the realm of declination,
be a resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing.

Be - at the same time, know the terms of negation,
the infinite basis of your fervent vibration,
that you may completely complete it this one time.

To teeming nature's store of used, as of dumb
and moldy things, to that uncountable count,
Add yourself joyously, and annul the amount.'


Possibly I'm just over-emotional today, but I started to cry in the bus station. Then felt really, really guilty about not being at work.

My nephew weed on my carpet. Can you feel my joy?

Still obsessed with Toby, The Beast, and Toby/anyone. Have come to the conclusion that Beast!Jefferson/Toby? Would be hot like burning. Writing is still as painful and slow to start as ever, though, so I've decided to instead take advantage of 24-hour Broadband, and indulge in some picspam :D

( Vintage Kingcest (i.e. the bits from the DVD) )


Work tomorrow. Results (probably) on Friday, hence more train journeys on Thursday. Hopefully some fic, once I find an acceptable routine. Or just go crazy and write it all one day. Hopefully not all over a pile of filing.

Hello. I'm back in Yorkshire, probably for keeps. Shocked? Yes, well so was I when, casually slobbing it in Nottingham yesterday morning, looking forward to another day of sea, sun and Sawyer, my dad called to ask me if I wanted a job filing at his engineering company in Leeds. And given that I've been complaining about money, ooh, forever, the answer was yes. Which made my housemates cry slightly, since we had about 3 hours to celebrate the end of all our exams. But 40 hours a week at £6 an hour beckoned, and I could not deny that call. So I'm a working girl now. My feet hurt.

( Some spazzing about that )

Mostly I'm pleased because if I keep it up I can totally buy all those DVDs I've been coveting, and pay off my Connotations deposit. And apparently they won't mind me taking days off to get my results and go a-fanning in London - though I might need to rearrange meeting places and times, if I change my ticket. And, yes, I'll have temping experience and something to put on my CV. But mostly MONEY! And the wearing of 'professional' shirts.

So...that was my day. Also, I'm going to see kittens later. And I watched the 'Mickey is LOVE!' episode of Dr Who, and can reward myself with a nostalgia_lj screencap re-cap. But how are you guys? 24-hour internet and MSN Messenger, baby!

Emmerdale! Oh how I love it. ( Spoileriness for the omnibus )

Anyway. I have been mostly spending money since FINISHING MY DEGREE. Partly on a flexible ticket to London on the 8th of June. The Midland Mainline will apparently get me there in two hours, but the adverts that say tickets are £6? THEY LIE. Also I'm apparently going to St Pancras station, so I'll have to find a friendly man to direct me to Waterloo. Or possibly get another train. And oh, does 'space on the floor' mean I need a sleeping bag? If so, I may possibly need to stash it somewhere before the show. It does not fit in a small bag, no.

(You may have noticed I'm still not entirely keeping up with the flist since gaining my freedom. I probably won't until I get back to 24-hour access at home. I'm still keeping a sporadic eye on things, but important and relevant events might warrant a post to my journal just to be sure.)

Anyway. I've been frequenting the cinema as well. Tragically I missed Confetti's run, but I saw Brick again, which is STILL fabulous. It's a high-school murder mystery, in the style of the old detective novels, and has Claire from Lost in it. I don't want to say too much, because you really need to see it "clean", and I'd like to be all cool and low-key about it's greatness. But I have a new OTP from it, and new cabin boys for Fantasy Pirate League. And YOU SHOULD ALL GO SEE IT.

Also I've seen X-Men 3, before the weekend rush.

( General impressions )

See how I make up for my recent absence with posts of randomness and huge.

Also:

• There should be Life on Mars icons with Futurama quotes on them. Particularly one of crazy!Sam saying 'Oh, how I wish I could believe or understand that!'. And Gene was pretty much made for 'The time for touchy-feely communication is past'. Also one of Ray saying 'Damn you old man!'. And ANY OF A HUNDRED OTHERS.



• I love Sheenagh Pugh's fanfiction book.



• The new "Empire" reviews Aquamarine, teen girl mermaid film of the summer, but has no time for the 'lesbian subtext'. VINDICATION!

I now go back from whence I came. To squee about Emmerdale some more, probably.

I just wrote the last essay of my degree. Dudes.

I wrote it yesterday. And I'm slightly worried about the fact none of my fellow Arthurians were around at the time of deadline. And possibly it was just ALL NO GOOD, but it is done, and they're all done, and I'd like to do something to celebrate but I'm actually too tired to move. Yet here I am back at the computer. Ah well.

This means that my degree is practically OVER, except for my exam on Monday, which is only for two hours - and you can revise all you want, because you never know what will come up, but you're actually only going to use two hour's worth of stuff. This is how I feel now, post-essays, knowing that there NO MORE WRITING to be done. Probably I'll start freaking out more tonight.

Exam is also after the Green Wing finale, omg. I'm sort of hoping for a huge cliffhanger until Christmas, because I'm not ready for it to be over, and especially not if they go the way I think they're going to go. Oh. Guy. Mon cher Guillame. If they end with Guy/Caroline, I will love them excessively, mainly for flying in the face of most of fandom. If they end with the OT3 I will LOVE THEM FOREVER, and first-born children may be involved. Omg. Tomorrow.

Also there will be Part 2 of Mickeytastic Dr Who on Saturday. About which I choose to have no feelings one way or the other, to avoid hurt.

I hope he gets a gun.

I sent off my Connotations form, and have a space in a room (of great!), so that is all going swell. And I have money which will probably be ALL GONE a few days after my exam. And I can finally watch those DVDs that got delivered to my door EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND, while I was trying to work. And I need to renew my paid time and extra icons soon. Yes.

My housemate does not like Sawyer, and is ruining my appreciation of new Lost. Woe.

Not enough of you have been to see Brick and brought me back a fandom.

I go sleep now perhaps.