I started and finished a very rough first draft for my yuletide story last night.

\o/

I sort of had to do it last night as I doubt I'll be able to write anything for the next week. (And, er, I've got to finalize my muncle Down the Chimney fic by Saturday.) My mom's here! She arrived way earlier today than I expected! This entire weekend has not gone the way I planned! I should have expected that! Etc. etc. etc.

I saw a limo driving into a Taco John's yesterday. How local/regional is Taco John's? It's like a knock-off Taco Bell. (Okay, it might be better than Taco Bell for all I know; it's still cheap fast food.) At least the limo wasn't driving into a Taco Tico, which...the less said about those, the better. I wonder if the limo was going to try going through the drive-thru? I really, really hope not.

I made pumpkin streudel today. It is delicious. (I had to taste-test it before serving it to other people, you understand, having never made the recipe before.) Still have not made a casserole. That shall have to wait till after my mom's gone, I think, alas.

The Christmas movies I like to watch: Love Actually, White Christmas, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Oh yeah.

( when my fandoms go mainstream and end up on NCIS... )

I was listening to the '60s XM radio station driving home from work, and this song started, and it was classic 1960s with all the strings and a little bit of the woodwinds and then the singer starts singing about cake. In the rain. And how it made him very sad. And the song went on like this for, like, ten minutes. It was quite possibly the most unintentionally hilarious song I've heard in a good long while. It was in fact Richard Harris singing MacArthur Park. Go, listen, enjoy.

( SPN--'Changing Channels' )

In other news, there is no other news. Oh. Except that the Governor of Massachusetts is apparently thinking about shutting down the State Library, which is kinda not cool. I mean, you don't just toss out almost 200 years worth of something, just like that. (Though I'd like to see some other verification of this; the news I was seeing on Google all seemed to be about statewide budget cuts to library funding and nothing specific to the State Library.) I'm not even going to talk about my own state where that certain sneaking deathly fear has once again blown in amongst my colleagues due to all the revenue shortfall and expected budget cuts.

You know what? I'm sick of the shitty economy. I'm sick of blaming everything on the shitty economy. I'm especially sick of people using the shitty economy to cut cultural institutions. I'm sick of this being the norm, and I want some damned better resolutions. Now if only I could think of them.

Also, ABC has apparently pulled their online Eastwick episodes, which is just doubly shitty since that's the way I've been watching the show. Wah. Woe me. I need to get my priorities back in order. I also want to burn something in effigy. Hmph.

For one week, recommend/share:

Day one: a song
Day two: a picture
Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day four: a site
Day five: a youtube clip
Day six: a quote
Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy

Driving home from my aunt's house, I decided: fuck this shit, let's have some fun.

So, have Well, Did you Evah? from High Society, as sung by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

And you might as well have Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, from Spamalot, too.

And here, possibly the most random picspam ever in the history of random picspams:

( right here under this cut )

And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes this meme.

For one week, recommend/share:

Day one: a song
Day two: a picture
Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day four: a site
Day five: a youtube clip
Day six: a quote
Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy

Youtube, you say? Oh, Youtube. You terrible thing.

Dave Allen Dalek sketch

Because Dave Allen and a Dalek NEVER GETS OLD. (This should be the Dalek meme for me, shouldn't it? I just love them cropping up unexpectedly and/or in unexpected ways.)

That said, I'm on a DW kick, so have Harry Sullivan and the Doctor skipping rope:

Right here

Because you know what? THAT NEVER GETS OLD EITHER.

(Be grateful, I could have given you "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek" instead.)

Possibly not think, since thinking right now is kinda bad, but whatever.

For one week, recommend/share:

Day one: a song
Day two: a picture
Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day four: a site
Day five: a youtube clip
Day six: a quote
Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy

Instead of a single picture, I shall do a tiny spam. Of DALEKS. But not the way one typically thinks of Daleks, oh no.

( Read more... )

I talked to four people on the phone today. No, wait, five. I never talk to that many people on the phone. Granted, they were all friends & family, but I actually called three of them, of my own volition, and that almost never happens. Of course, the last conversation lasted exactly one minute and thirteen seconds and the majority of it consisted of

Me: *picking up phone* Yeeees?
J: Playtpuses!
Me: Playtpi?
J: Think of something else!
Me: Uh...
J: Platypee?
Me: Mooshee mooshee?

I have no idea what I'm going to do at work tomorrow. NONE. I have a single task that will probably last me at most ten minutes. Perhaps I shall wander outside and pick the wild flowers. Speaking of wild flowers

( Read more... )

"T," I said to my co-worker today as we were passing each other, "I have a confession to make. I think I might have killed Scully."

"I did find her lying down, stunned," T replied. "Somebody had put her up on top of E.T.'s head a while back. I left her where she is, for now; you know how it is with head injuries."

"Make sure her neck is stable," I agreed.

"I knew it must have been you," she added, "I saw you walking over there."

"And I had to tell you before you came up to me and demanded to know why I'd done it," I told her sadly. "I had to be the better woman. I'll make sure not to close the drawer so hard next time."

"I'm going to find them all lying on the ground dead one day, and I'll know it was you," she said.

"It's an earthquake zone!" I told her.

We were talking about the toys she has sitting on top of a filing cabinet I have to get into with some regularity. Also? I work in an office peopled by geeks. Okay, not surprising when they're all librarians & archivists, but the sci-fi geekiness comes out in really surprising ways. Like when one of the reference desk people was an Andorian for Halloween last year, or when the former admin assistant had the TARDIS as her screensaver. Or, y'know, E.T. is dangling Mulder upside down on top of a filing cabinet.

So, appropriately, I leave you on this note.

Poll #1421681 inquiring minds
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 34

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.

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.

There was a pay phone ringing at the grocery store this afternoon. I did not answer it and thereby catapult myself into a strange adventure of ransom calls, high-speed and unlikely car chases, and dark and mysterious strangers.

No, instead, I accidentally stole somebody's grocery cart. I don't know how it happened. I temporarily abandoned my own grocery cart in the fruit and veg section to investigate the loose baby spinach (purse over my shoulder because I am just that paranoid), and then I went back to what I thought was my cart. I made it all the way to the other end of the store and was perusing the cereal when I looked down and noticed an onion, a couple cucumbers, and some unrecognizable yellow vegetable thing instead of the expected grapes, bananas, and ginormous nectarine that I had picked out.

Seriously, how did I manage so carelessly to steal somebody else's unpaid-for-yet vegetables? I know I'm a bit distracted today, but come on. The worst part isn't even that, it's that I had one of my canvas totes in the cart I was using. Oh well. Maybe somebody else will use it instead of plastic bags.

This is how my week has gone:

1. Accept new job.
2. Begin apartment hunt in different state.
3. Completely bust cell phone. (It's been dying since about March or April, but I was trying to make it hold out until I got somewhere more settled. Apparently that ain't quite gonna happen.)
4. Leave purse at work, so I have to write friend a check to pay my half of the pizza. An out-of-state check, no less, because my other check book is in my purse.
5. Play The Game of Real Life with said friend. It's sort of like regular ol' Life, and it's sort of like an RPG in that you're given diary sheets in order to write up your character's life story as you go along making your moves. We played two games; both times I ended up playing a man. Henry, my first character, was a total stoner bum who went through his admittedly brief life with a happy-go-lucky air. (He got eaten in a Donner party incident. Probably by his stoner friends who had the munchies.) Walter, my second character, had an amazingly stable and well-adjusted family life considering his career was as a prostitute. (He in fact died at a respectably advanced age of a broken heart when his son George died before him.) It was a bit surreal.
6. Attempt to do more apartment hunting--via email, since the whole cell phone issue is a problem and I have no long distance on my landline. Firefox decides it doesn't feel like cooperating.

And I can't pick up one of those change-of-address packets from the post office because it's Labor Day weekend. I really only wanted it for the potential moving company coupons. Hmph. It also doesn't help that this is probably the worst time of year to be apartment-hunting and nobody has two-bedroom apartments available. Or so it feels like to me. Have I mentioned that I hate moving? I will be mentioning it. A lot.

And in the midst of all this, the attempt to wrap up work. This is the second time in less than a year that I have been left to wrap up a project as quickly and completely as possible because I know nobody else will be able to get to it anytime in the near future. IT'S GETTING OLD.

It has not actually struck again (yet), but I did have a dream the other morning that involved missing my flight due to the APOCALYPSE. So if the aliens land or there's a plague of locusts tomorrow morning, I apologize in advance. SORRY, EVERYONE.

On a different surreal note, you must all go listen to these audios: The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. These things are hilarious, which I already knew, but I did not know how hilarious until I got to listen to the completed products. I'm listening to the fourth episode now and Carstairs the butler is the best butler since Tim Curry, honest.

And, uh, I should be doing more significant things than goofing off online right now. Dammit.

You know what? I'm a fucking pop culture philistine. (Is that oxymoronic? I fear that might be oxymoronic.) I haven't seen any of the Star Wars movies, I categorically refuse to read The Da Vinci Code even if you point a gun to my head, and I don't watch Miracle on 34th Street at Christmas time.

Sorry. I just felt a need to state that. I get sick of people staring at me in shock when I say I haven't seen or read something. GET OVER IT ALREADY.

Also? Airports are strange no-man's-land places with the stupidest sculpture art ever. Denver's got that daft purple and blue shiny horse in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE that they must have just put up in the past couple years because I don't remember seeing it before, and KC has metal Gumby figurines in various poses. "Here is Gumby standing! Here is Gumby doing modern dance! Here is Gumby falling on his drunken ass!"

Oh. OH. KC also had cows by the runway. COWS. BY THE RUNWAY. ROAMING FREELY. Thankfully they were gone by the time my plane was ready to take off.

There are so many more productive things I could be doing right now.

I downloaded an updated version of RealPlayer a few days ago, in order to make it shut up & stop whining at me that it wanted to update, and it gave me Annabelle the Sheep. Who is a really badly-done animated figure in a cartoon world who bobs her head in time to the music and occasionally brings friends along, like the flock of birds or the mole (I think it's a mole--it burrows through the ground and occasionally pops up to bop its own head in time to the music) and kinda freaks my shit out.

I get freaked out easily. Or, well, the world seems to be getting crackier/more absurd/more surreal/MORE INSANE on me every day. Maybe I just can't handle it anymore.

OMG the sheep just had a DISCO BALL spinning over it. WTF???

Today is just not a good technological day. The flash drive we use at work to save EVERYTHING has been acting up on me the past couple days (no, people, we don't have an easily accessible share network; if I want to update people's files I have to run around from computer to computer and hope for the best), and since I've become the tech guru I was the one freaking out about consolidating all our various files and saving them somewhere safe (since, hey, we're all leaving in the next couple days). And then I came home for lunch and managed to spill my entire Coke--all 21 ounces of it--all over my laptop, external hard drive, and the cable box thingy. FAIL, technology. Massive FAIL. If I go back to work in the next five minutes and find a blue screen of death anywhere I might just have to quit early and go get drunk.

nap hangover, (n.): the inability to sleep during the day without afterwards feeling like utter shite

Poll #1188046 A poll of great scientific significance
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

Do you get nap hangover?

I left work at two this afternoon, a) due to an inability to hold myself up without clutching to a wall or some other fairly stable surface and b) due to an inability to put with anybody else's bullshit anymore. Oh gods, I look forward to unemployment. This is a bad, bad thing.

And so I shall end this post with a link, in lieu of yet another link to the American LoM trailer, concerning cats and tread mills (gakked from livii):

which can be found here.

(The second kitten totally looks like "Fuck this, I'm bored now" at the end, which just makes it all even more awesome.)

Somebody please explain to me why I have "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" stuck in my head right now.

In other news, it's a sunny day in beautiful downtown Burbank. Ha.

Work was really quite lovely today. I kept walking back and forth between the various offices, thereby catching all snorts of snippets of conversations, and most of the conversations I overheard were nicely surreal. (I shall not discuss the rubber penis incident, though it does give me yet one more reason to think about Lysistrata phalluses while singing Messiah. Oh gods, oh gods, I shall not be able to keep a straight face at all during the Hallelujah Chorus, which means I need to get taller STAT so I don't have to stand in the front row anymore.) And then the chief curator and I discussed the old woman catfight that would no doubt happen in the research room next Friday afternoon if we weren't careful. (Tact and diplomacy, that's what it's all about, tact and diplomacy.)

I need to respond to comments. Isn't that the eternal woe of LJ? "I should respond to comments. But I wanna post! Screw the comments." I also feel like I should post intelligently about, I dunno, "Sports Night" and how Danny is the heart and/or the soul of the show, or why I identify more with Dean and his parental relationship than with Sam in SPN, but I don't even have the time or the energy to deal with the deep ethical dilemmas I come against at work almost everyday, so fannishness is really taking a sliding dive these days. A sliding dive? That sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Poll #955293 existential quandaries
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32

Why do you read this LJ?

Why are you reading this journal? Yes, you, there, in the back row wearing the hoodie & pretending to be asleep. Why are you still here?

I have ridiculous amounts of difficulty whenever I try to post something here that is not fic (and even that on occasion can be difficult), and...yes. Bother. I sometimes dislike being a wishy-washy, indecisive, people-pleaser. Scratch that, I often dislike it. I think too much and don't say enough and whenever I do say something, it usually comes out wrong or was simply the wrong thing to say.

You want to know why my LJ is currently called--and has been called for aaaaaages, in part because it's still suitable and perhaps in larger part because I can't be arsed to change it--"Moments taken out of context," with the subtitle "figments of other peoples' imaginations"? Because that's what this is. Bits and pieces, the flotsam of my life--how can you get anything out of that? How much can it mean, when piecing together whatever I choose to put on here in my sporadic fits and starts at attempts at postings? What sense of a person can you get from that? What sense of a person do you want from that, especially if you are only here for the random burst of fic? You could make up an entire life history for me if you wanted, based off what you get here, and who knows how close it would be to what I consider a truth?

Ye gods, this certainly isn't what I expected to post about tonight.

In entirely unrelated news--or perhaps it is exactly what this is all about--while listening to the fantastic strings section and the lovely soprano sing one of her solos in Messiah the other day (I had the best seat in the house to listen to those strings, too, being onstage behind them with the rest of the choir), while listening to all that gorgeous Baroque music, I kept thinking about giant phalluses in Lysistrata. I did not mention this at yesterday's staff meeting when asked what an atheist gets out of singing Messiah, however, as I felt it would only have confused the issue. (I'm not sure if I'd get a better response out of people in the Bible Belt if I told them I was an atheist or that I'm a card-carrying Bacchic reveler. After all, at this point, I'm not sure they're mutually exclusive.)

Yesterday, in the mine, my friend the other curator composed a brief, Carl Sandburg-like pome. It went like this:

"I love beets.
They taste like dirt."

Hey, she is from Illinois.

*

So I have mainlined every single Seven, Ace, & Hex audio there is in the past, um, week and a half (it's amazing how much you can get listened to in a fifteen-minute car ride, isn't it?), all for the sake of research for writing fic. Yes. Gods, if all history research were as much fun as this, I'd so be getting my PhD right now.

Anyway. I have thought long and hard and prepared one-sentence reviews of each audio I have listened to. (Okay, wait, I lie; I haven't listened to every one as I haven't given Night Thoughts another go yet. Must see if I have it on CD or not.)

Live34: Fantastic concept, relentlessly played out (no, seriously, doing it that way without even the usual musical credits, is awesome), but the ending's a bit of a cop-out, isn't it?

The Settling: It feels like a 280-page EDA that's been shoved into a 25-minute, four-episode format. Therefore, some stuff is rushed, particularly relationships between characters. That said? This so needs to be listened to after one knows Hex already, as it makes quite a bit of difference, character-wise (this was the first Hex audio I'd ever heard, way back in July of last year, and while it certainly piqued my interest in Hex, now I feel like I know him better and so it packs even *more* of a punch).

So that was more than one sentence. Whoops. And, come to think of it, I don't really have much to say about either The Harvest or Dreamtime, and I should probably listen to Nocturne in the car as I concentrate better there then I do wandering about my house and getting distracted by all the shiny things I have here. But: YAY, HEX. Still. If he were a real person, I would ruffle his hair and give him a bear hug.

Oh, and I relistened to The Kingmaker. That story will NEVER GET OLD. It is some of the finest crack known to humanity.

*

I think Fitz Kreiner and the Time War are finally out of my system. Took 'em long enough.