The Mezzanine

Quiet evening at home. Hurrah! Haven't had one of those in quite a while.


TV I am watching
Recently, I have been re-watching episodes of:
- Sarah Connor Chronicles
- the Lizzie Bennet Diaries
- Once Upon A Time
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- Leverage
- Yes Minister

All of them are very awesome, but in very different ways.


Lent...
...will start in about a week. In previous years, I have done many different things, including giving up chocolate, television, and unnecessary spending. The unnecessary spending worked well; the chocolate less so. It's not that I can't give up chocolate - but instead of making me focus on God, or on how little I need possessions, or on more spiritual things, it just makes me focus on how much I love chocolate. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing.

This year, I'm being a bit restrictive: I'm sticking to only fair trade tea and chocolate. Inconvenient? Focusing on other people in financial difficulty? A good discipline? Yep, yep, and yep. We'll see how it goes.

(One year, I'm so going to give up electric lighting. But that will not be this year.)


My washing
I just did it. For the first time in a month.

I can tell this, because my clothes-horse is now holding 25 pairs of undies. I didn't even realise I had 25 pairs of undies...


iPad Apps
There are so many.

Just about anything you could ever think of trying to plan - seriously, anything - will have an app already waiting, with in-built checklists ready to go. Very helpful. (Except that the app will be totally convinced that no-one could ever colonise Mars without inventing faster-than-light travel first, and will keep putting little "remember to install your FTL drives!" reminders in your to-do list, even though you have no intention of doing anything of the sort. Kind of irritating - and makes me feel like I'm terribly untrendy because I'm not fixated on conquering hyperspace and just want to get to the fun part of the Mars colonisation project*.)

* This, for the record, is the bit where we discover the ruins of the ancient Martian civilisation underground, and decipher the codes for creating wormholes using Martian technology...

My life this week seems to have consisted of several HUGE MASSIVE PROBLEMS, followed by wonderfully simple solutions. As follows...

Huge Problem #1: My "daybed" (spare bed / couch), which I ordered back in September, arrived with a rather important part missing. I rang up and complained, and they assured me that they'd take care of it, and I'd definitely have the missing part by January 10th. (FOUR MONTHS, people.)

Solution: I responsed to their "January 10th" idea with a simple LOL, WHUT????, and the next day, the missing parts were on my doorstep. I now have a very nice piece of furniture! Woo!



Huge Problem #2: Elf got into a cat-fight! Somehow I failed to notice this momentous event, until yesterday, when I suddenly realised that there were huge chunks of my cat MISSING. Raced round to the vet, in a total panic, wondering how many stitches he'd need, and how long it took for blood poisoning to kill pets...

Solution: According to the vet, the type of injury he's received usually ends up with lots of pus trapped under the skin and needing to be drained - so, the fact that Elf has a massive gaping wound is actually good, since it allows the pus to drain away naturally. I just have to feed him antibiotics for a few weeks to prevent infection. PHEW.



Huge Problem #1: Lilac's latest nervous breakdown. Which was apparently caused by a logic-board failure, and would be so expensive to repair that all and sundry advised me to just buy a new computer instead. Despite the fact that it would devastate my bank account, I stubbornly cuddled Lilac (metaphorically) and informed aforesaid all and sundry that they CAN'T TAKE MY COMPUTER, BITCAS.

Solution: Computer guys dove into Lilac's system to try and fix the oh-so-expensive logic board, and discovered that the entire problem was a SINGLE CABLE. Which suddenly makes the repairs $70 in total. Woo!

Are you checking my tagged entries?

Everything's cross-posted from here to LJ, these days. But my earlier stuff wasn't.

If you're looking for a tagged entry from my LJ-only days, please look here.