SO. BORED. I'm reading this cranky wanker's book on academic archives. I still have another 125 pages or so to go to finish it. SO. BORED. And my head hurts.

Back in my 1960s history class, we had a resource book called Takin' it to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, that was pretty awesome. All kinds of primary source material for the civil rights, New Left, counterculture, Black Power, anti-war movements, you name it. It also included this article by Lucian Truscott IV from the Village Voice concerning the Stonewall riots. The thing that struck me, reading this article originally, was how free it felt. The tone is so...happy.

Oh man, you guys. You guys. I totally want to dominate the world with y'all. (My evol plan, since I suppose I should mention it? Backrubs. I shall make everyone succumb to me, one by one. With backrubs. I once started an entire row of people sitting on the steps down the house in our mainstage, giving the person sitting in front of them a backrub. It was glorious.)

Also? I ATE A STRAWBERRY LAST NIGHT & HAVEN'T DIED YET. I've been allergic to strawberries for about twenty years. If I'm still not dead, I consider this a minor victory. I don't think I'll eat more than one strawberry at a time though. Color me paranoid. Or just hive-y. (I was a bit itchy last night. But I think it was bug bites, not hives. I hope.)

Mmm. Strawberries.

So, speaking of things that I love, and gakking from loads of people on my flist--

I love

giving backrubs. Blueberries. Cheesecake. Pineapple pizza from Papa John's. Plosives and clickatives. Alliteration. Weskits. Rolled-up shirtsleeves. Acoustic guitars. Harmonies. Green trees and blue skies and horizons stretching out as far as the eye can see while driving on the interstate. The breeze. Fireflies. The changing of the seasons. Baking with my mom. Walking arm-in-arm with my friends. Visiting with old friends. Snuggling. Illya Kuryakin doing gymnastics. The cast of Barney Miller. Big Finish audios. Parker and Hardison. Builds and undercuts. People who know their shit. Water. Underwater archaeology. The 1830s. Words. Sunlight. Going underground by myself in a hoist in solid dark while singing Sinead O'Conner songs. Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, and Dean Martin's voice, and the Smother Brothers singing "Chocolate," and the intense comfort of happy memories. My nephew. My new car. My old car. Roses. Puppies. Cats. Making babies giggle. Making other people giggle. Giggling. Connections. The network of people that I know across this small world. The Indiana Dunes. Gage Park. Forest Park. Lake Storey. Fireworks. County roads. New experiences.

Poll #1421681 inquiring minds
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Do you like cheese?

So. Those nuclear wessels.

What are *your* plans for world domination? (It's good to compare notes.)

Pie or death?

Sunday afternoons.

Oh gods, it's true, it's all true, you can't change your patterns. I went to a thing after work that the division director was holding at her house, a TGIF little get-together for staff, and I know for a fact I was the youngest person there because the third project archivist on our grant didn't show. So I sat down in one of the dining room chairs with my Fat Tire beer, and then I noticed that some of my co-workers were sitting down on the carpet, including a couple very definitely at least twenty years older than me, and I felt horrifically guilty. So then when one of my co-workers was saying she needed more crackers to go with her leftover cheese, and another one asked for more chips to go with her salsa, I sprang up to fetch it for them. Because that's what I *always* do at family get-togethers because I'm always Young Legs (as my dear Aunt June used to call me).

Actually, the thing I finally realized a couple weeks ago when I held the Family Extravaganza, and maybe it's something I would not have been old enough to realize or appreciate any earlier than now--I come from a family of know-it-alls. This explains a lot. Including why I feel like I'll never catch up.

***

I don't remember Hyvee being a particularly high-end or classy grocery store, but the one here in town--well, I think this one's run and staffed by pod people. Seriously, they're all constantly bright and cheery and enthusiastically helpful. I was wandering past the deli looking for veggie dip when I heard the man behind the counter pontificating, "If you're looking for something low in salt, than you should try this." I was in the health food section picking up veggie burgers when I found somebody restocking and talking to another customer. "We just ran a promotional thing to find out what people really wanted, so we'll be making some changes here shortly." It was unnatural. And yet, I can't stop going, it's all so shiny.

***

Pushing Daisies is over. :( I finally got around to watching the last episode last night, not really having had time before now. It was such an awesome, awesome show. I want my characters back.

Title: Somebody Else’s Conventional
Author: aces
Warnings: It’s ridiculously Hollywood Blockbuster Summer Romance. I honestly don’t know what came over me.
Rating: PG, mostly for adult language
Word count: around 7500 words
A/N: Second fic for livii for the EDA ficathon on henriettastreet, from the Fitz/Anji possibly-post-Time-War prompt. Er, basically ignores Timeless, so consider it a slight AU.

( Read more... )

Title: Three Time Travelers in a Boat
Author: aces
Warnings: This is so fluffy you might find yourself floating away from your computer screen.
Rating: G
Word count: approx. 2400 words
Prompt: for livii, from the prompt for getting some proper time off and having some fun.
A/N: I know there’s more involved than just rowing. This is a special planet where the normal rules of boating don’t apply, alright? Also, I make no claim to even begin to be as awesome as Jerome K. Jerome. I just really, really couldn’t resist the title. (And there is no dog. K9 did not feel obliged to come along.)


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If you look at it from a certain angle, under a certain light, the Man from UNCLE's episode "Foxes & Hounds Affair" could potentially be porntastic.

( Here, have some photographic proof. )


A couple random Illya shots that I might as well share because they are priceless:


( I know how you feel, mate. )


( Illya 'I broke my nail' Kuryakin, at your service. )

My aunt's 75th birthday is coming up in, oh, a week and a half. My mom and I are organizing a sort-of party for her, only neither of us do parties, so it's been an...interesting experience.

Anyway, one of my *other* aunts (I have...six now. Yes, six, only one of them I haven't seen since I was eight) is also having her birthday a couple days later, and she'll still be in town that day. So I ran to Barnes & Noble to find her a card and possibly a small gift. And I picked up one of those tiny little kit things--you know, there's the zen garden, and the slinky, and the tarot, and all those. So I picked up the four-leaf clover kit. (I know, I'm random. I'm thinking I'll look for something at work in the gift shop tomorrow. At least then it will be historic'n'shit.)

So. Two cards (I also got one for my dad for Father's Day, since I was there), this little kit, it should be about $8-10 altogether. The dude rings up my purchases, I use my aunt's B&N member discount, and the total he gives me is about $5. Okay, I think, really good discount.

No. I looked at the receipt when I got home, and he gave me the kit for free. He must have done it deliberately; I mean, how could you not notice? Maybe he was like "She's so lame she's going to give this to somebody, isn't she. It's not even worth paying for."

So, that was random.

...My mom and I are both freaking out about this party. We are ridiculous.

I too saw Star Trek this past weekend. I'd had no intention to see it in the movie theater except that EVERYONE kept saying how awesome it was, including people who'd I never associated Trek with before, and, dude, I *have* been watching Trek movies in theater since I was, uh, young. So this is my concise and non-spoilery reaction:

BONES! KIRK! SULU! UHURA! BONES! CHEKOV! SPOCK! SCOTTY! BOOOOOOONES!

( One not-so-spoilery thing, but )

Now I really want to reread Kobayashi Maru.

And because I have to share the insanity.

The Natural History Museum whale in New York twitters. Apparently, all the staff denies any of them are doing it. It's the most philosophical whale I've seen since that one that fell through the sky with the bowl of petunias. You know which whale I'm talking about. (My favorite tweet so far: In water, you can spin and twirl and dive and climb. Here, I just hang, with y'all.) (Found via the Museum Audience Insight blog, by the by.) (Also, when even a whale in a museum is twittering and I'm not? There's something wrong here.) (Also also, STOP USING THE PARENTHESES.)

Digitization is going to save civilization as we haven't known it in centuries! Or something. I...you know? I'm still ambivalent about digitization. It is awesome the stuff we can find online now and make available to researchers and blah blah blah, but this idea that it's going to make every single scrap of paper/parchment/vellum/papyrus/sheepskin/etc EVAH available is the same idea people had about microfilm, and the printing press, and other technologies in the past. I was just reading a bunch of writings by Sir frickin' Hilary Jenkinson (OMG, after reading Margaret Cross Norton a couple weeks ago, I want to shoot myself, or at least read an archivist whose writing style is not over fifty years old), and he discussed the issues with attempting to print primary sources from the medieval period. And the arguments he was making--too little time, too much money, not enough staff, never going to be able to tap fully into the huge breadth of sources available--still ring true today. Digitization might mean we can access more information than we ever could before on the document itself, and it might even make some things more efficient, but you're still dealing with historic documents that require extra care and energy, and not everybody has that kind of time and money. At my place of work, our digitization project has so far put I think about 8,000 items--individual items--on the web. Out of how many millions of pieces of paper that we have lurking about in unexpected corners? (No, actually, some of them really are lurking about in unexpected corners. It's very trying.) Not to mention the the thousands of photos and objects and other miscellaneous bits and bobs?

Um. I really hadn't planned to rant like that.

I overheard the most fabulous conversation between two birds today. It started with the weather, progressed to politics, and eventually got to sex. Oh yes. The male bird was very persuasive. The female bird fluttered. It was beautiful.

I might be making this all up. But I think not.

In other TERRIBLY EXCITING news, act_three, a comm for Fitz, now exists. I don't know why I never thought of doing something like that, considering my abiding and terrifying love for the character, so I'm glad cosmic_celery did. FIIIIIITZ. (You have to say his name that way sometimes. It just types itself out like that. Can't be helped.)

I also kinda want to sign up for a multiverse5000 prompt. Have I not killed myself enough already this year with ficathons? And it's not even June yet? *headdesks*

Actually, I really do feel sorry for the pig.

And then there's this. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the above, as it's actually about preserving electronic records, but...uh...you kinda have to see it to believe it. And then possibly see it again because I still don't believe it.

Actually, the first session I attended at that conference last week was about video preservation. It was presented by a vendor, a very well-spoken man in a lovely suit, but as he got deeper into some of the lingo and some of the issues involved in preserving it (dude, I didn't even know there was such a thing as digital betacam; this is so far out of my scope), I could just see him hanging out at work in jeans, tinkering with his stuff to make it work right. He was such a geek. It was awesome.

Okay, and I am a sheep and am on dreamwidth. So, uh, if I haven't friended you over there yet, could you find me? (I have no plans to move. I'm just, y'know, a sheep. And as Digiman would no doubt tell you, backups are always a good thing. Uh-huh.)

I get to sleep in tomorrow. I think that might be the only thing that sustained me through a lot of this week.

I'm still alive. Barely. I was at a conference for, er, 2.5 days and then I was wandering across the state visiting friends and I waited till my wanderings to actually drink alcohol (vodka, WHY IS IT ALWAYS VODKA) and did not get home till the wee small's and now today I mostly want to die temporarily in a corner so I can really wake up refreshed and human again tomorrow. Just in time for work.

It probably is a good thing I made it home last night instead of this morning. Probably.

I'd never noticed my travel curse until I started flying regularly a few years ago. But no, I have always had a travel curse. It's just that when I'm driving instead of flying, the travel curse manifests itself in rainstorms that make it impossible to see two feet in front of the car when driving through major city traffic. I have come far in accepting my travel curse though because I handled it this time with barely any ruffling to my dignity and good humor. (Which probably means on my next road trip there will be an earthquake in an area where no faultlines had previously been detected. I'm sorry, future road trip destination, whatever you are, I DON'T MEAN IT.)

But, oh yes, it was awesome. Caught up with a bunch of friends in and out of the profession, attended good sessions, met new people, and only occasionally acted like an incompetent un-social ass. I call that a win. (Considering how I usually behave at conferences? Definite win. It helped that I had a friend from grad school there.) I also got to wander around one of my favorite cities (if only for the intense nostalgia) in neighborhoods I hadn't seen for probably ten years and bits I'd never seen before, so it was all very yay.

Also, I went WHOLE DAYS WITHOUT THE INTERNET. It was an experiment to see how bad my addiction was. It would have been useful to have access a few times, and I was a bit twitchy without it, but I survived. So there, internets addiction. SO THERE.

Now I'm going to go watch telly. Online. Ho hum.

I saw a wild turkey today at work! Not actually in work, but outside on the trails by the creek. (I wrote creek. I did not write crick, though it was sorely tempting.) It started running away and kept looking back at me like "Oh god, she's stalking me." I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. Poor thing.

And I finally put my lawnchairs back outside this evening. So it shall no doubt rain all weekend. At least I got to sit outside and read for a few minutes tonight?

So, I wrote The Inestimable Value of a Good Pair of Shoes for paranoidangel42 for tardis_gen. HARRY. And a distinct lack of shoes. Seriously, when you get a prompt like I did, the fic writes itself. (That said, it appears I am physically incapable of writing any DW story without involving someone or something from Middle Skool Who. Excellent.)

Go, shoo, go read Recriprocal Quandaries, the first chapter anyway, of the fic I got for tardis_gen. Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie, and Two's stovepipe hat. (I did ask for silly hats in the prompt.) It's marvelous and deserves more comments.

Today at work I found a 1970 investigative report about unrest at college & university campuses across the state and I found an article from 1941 on how to live with your cell mate in a penitentiary newsletter. Some days, I totally love my job.

I'm sure there were loads more things I wanted to say, but I'm too tired to think of them.

The past couple weeks have been...strange. And tomorrow I'm still going to be running around not so much like a headless chicken as like one with her head effing screwed on, but tonight? Tonight I can make my chicken fajitas and peel my orange and drink my amaretto sour and listen to my Ben Harper station on Pandora and write fic and watch telly and enjoy myself. Slowly. Quietly. It's nice.

I glanced out the window a half-hour ago, and the grass was the lush green you get after a lot of rain, and there was a red car parked on the street outside my apartment building, and a red car parked in the driveway of the duplex across the street, both that candy-apple-fire-engine red at right angles to each other, and there was a purple-blossom tree across the street in the duplex's yard, and the sky was the slate-grey-blue color you sometimes get at dusk/twilight, and everything looked so solid, grounded, real that attempting to describe it or take a picture doesn't nearly do it justice.

I love spring.

Sometimes I stand very still in the middle of my kitchen, outside on the sidewalk, upstairs in my bedroom, and think I am here. And it's a little bit amazing.

I've been meaning to post this for, um, a while now, but I am slow and get distracted easily. I don't know why I would care if newspapers as a physical thing disappeared--I rarely read them, they're a pain to preserve long term due to the high acid content of newsprint, most places I've worked have had conflicted relationships with the press, blah blah blah--but that cartoon still made me sad. I should probably just be glad my dad's retired and not still working at the paper back home if even the RMN can't keep the presses going.

ETA: My mother refuses to be a Red Hat lady. My mother's a little bit wonderful.

1. I have now joined the ranks of individuals who have changed their clothes in the car. Including my bra, and holy Hannah, that was awful. (I wouldn't have done it if I could have worn the other bra with this shirt, but no, the straps would have shown.) I can now check undressing-and-dressing-in-a-car off my list. My unexpected and unknown list, on which items only seem to get added after I've already done them.

2. This week has been, to put it mildly, insane. I haven't had this insane of a week since, er, beginning of last year, I think. At least this week is officially over and I made it out relatively intact. (Note to self: things really do usually work out. So don't freak out so much next time.)

3. I also managed, in the midst of the insanity, to watch the first episode of The Unusuals. It sort of felt like Life on Mars doing "Barney Miller." Complete with the 'taches.

4. I went to Phantom of the Opera tonight--first time I've ever seen it live--and it has been so long since I've been to a theatre big enough and expensive enough that I was practically in the nosebleeds. I would have enjoyed it more I'm sure if my HEAD HADN'T BEEN KILLING ME--dehydration, lack of sleep, and a week's worth of major stress FTW!--but I managed to enjoy it quite a lot anyway. Aaaaand it felt like it was 1990 all over again, particularly with the crashing chords we all know and love at the beginning. (My sister's high school graduation! She got them to use it for the slideshow. Oh gods, it is 1990 all over again!)

5. The three rules of the road that Cam teaches Teal'c in their Epic Bromance Road Trip (it's a thing, don't ask): a) Nebraska sucks, b) there's always visitor centers at state lines except when you really need them (hence CHANGING IN THE CAR, but Cam doesn't know about that bit) and c) singing, no matter how shit your voice is, is perfectly acceptable on a road trip. Even with the windows rolled down.

6. I'm in a directing class at the local civic theatre. I haven't done any sort of stage work in, like, five years, and I have never directed before in my life. But those of us in the class were being actors last week so one of us could take a stab at directing, and then *I* was the one doing the directing, and holy crap, it's both the same and completely different from acting. Actually, it's kinda like writing. You are my puppets! Let me pull on your strings and make you dance to my mad tune! Muahahahahaha. Etc.

7. It's a good thing my vices are multitudinous, or I would be so screwed.

8. I have not seen the new Doctor Who yet, I'm saving it for tomorrow. That said, happy birthday to me. Boo-yah. (ETA: okay, it's a day or two early, but since my birthday is on a Monday this year, I appear to have made it a birthday weekend. Why not, huh?)

9. I really ought to go to bed now. Before my head falls off.

10. There is no ten, but nine felt lonely.

I bought a little black dress the other day. Never before have I bought a little black dress because, really, most dresses look awful on me. Hideously awful. But this one rocks like a rocking thing, and I remain pleasantly surprised. Now I just need to come up with a good excuse to wear it somewhere.

*

I was driving home the other day on Gage and I saw the group with their signs stating such enlightening thoughts as "God hates your tears - God hates fags - God hates Obama" and other scintillating, pithy phrases, and I wanted to roll down the window and scream at them "Throw yourselves into the road, darlings, you haven't got a chance!" but they were on the wrong side of the road and I don't have electric windows. So I just screamed.

That said, too bad for you. Things are changing. Suck it.

*

And now for the Doctor Who portion of the evening:

I think when I was just a few years younger either I instantly forgot all pleasure reading I did, or I had absolutely no discernment whatsoever. (Discernment might not be the right word.) Anyway, I just finished rereading Wolfsbane and it was fabulous, and why did I not remember this? Fabulous, I tell you! Harry and Eight! Sarah and Four! Crazy nutters in the 1930s English countryside! And Jacqueline Rayner is always good at the dialogue. But for the life of me I couldn't remember much of anything about the story when I reread it, even whether I liked it or not (I assumed not, since I couldn't remember anything). Silly, silly me.

Meme: Open up your "Manage Stories" page on Teaspoon and unfold all the chapters. For the purposes of this meme, disregard first chapters of multichapter fics. [Teaspoon counts any hits on the TOC as a hit on the first chapter.]

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What I have learned from this exercise: either my writing really sucks, I don't pimp myself out enough, or I need to stop writing Middle Skool and start writing Jack/Ten and Nine/Rose if I want to up my reading and review counts.

OTOH, I really need to say thank you to the calufrax reccers because otherwise my reading and review counts would be even more in the hole. And I never say thank you, and I really bloody well ought to because, um, I have been recced far more than I deserve. So, thank you. Y'all rock and I don't actually deserve it.

So many choices! I could go with Barney Miller, he'd be very understanding and compassionate. Dalziel & Pascoe would be alternately witty and crass but they'd have my back (if they thought I deserved it, anyway). Emerson and Ned and Chuck would sort it all out, and I'd probably get pie. But I think I want to go with Albert Campion. After all, he's a universal uncle. I've always liked uncles.

*

I was just reading Dr. Seuss poetry. Which may or may not explain why I wrote the above paragraph the way I did. (At least it involved no rhymes?)

*

I spent today up to my eyeballs in microfilm. My eyeballs hurt.

I'm still getting used to the cubicle thing. I see out of the corner of my eye people walking past and get easily distracted. One of my co-workers sort of glides exactly the way a character from an animated Monty Python sketch would. (As if my headspace weren't surreal enough.)

*

I like to use my bookstore receipts for bookmarks. They're a handy way to remember where I was when I got a book, a way to ground me--Ohio when I found that Doctor Who novel, Colorado when I picked up that book on architecture with a gift card. My mom uses anything she has at hand and leaves it in the book for the next person to stumble across--I've found appointment reminder cards from the dentist or eye doctor, a note from my brother, a hall pass I had my senior year of high school because I was in NHS, even a picture of me from a play in high school. (I swiped that one; it's hanging on my wall now.) It's a bit like finding signatures or notes from people when browsing at used bookstores, glimpses of whole other lives that have been lived.

*

April may or may not kill me. It's my fault for scheduling so many things, but April may very well kill me. And if it doesn't, May and June come close behind...

The ice was a quarter-inch thick on my car this morning.

The ice. I was looking outside at some other people cleaning off their cars, and then five minutes later I looked again and they were still cleaning their cars. One youngish girl held the ice scraper in her hand like an icepick, or maybe a meat cleaver, and then her mom joined her in doing the exact same thing, and I laughed.

And then I went outside and started wielding my ice scraper like it was a pick, or maybe a meat cleaver.

It would have been fine if it were snow. I am perfectly comfortable with snow. But ice?

FUCK YOU, MARCH.

I really need to stop taking the weather so personally all the time.

And now I need to go back out there. Why oh why couldn't I have done laundry last weekend?