The Mezzanine

I have, unfortunately, failed to keep track of my flist. If you posted something important and I missed it... I'm sorry. Please let me know what it was!





This week is a very good one.

This week:
- we got a new Prime Minister!
- I finished my cancer treatment!
- I am turning 40!
- I will get to see Hamilton!

Now, if the board game I've ordered will hurry up and arrive already, it'll be the Best Week Ever.

I am playing a new D&D character that makes everyone in my group double-take and say "Wait – she isn't a rogue?"

My character is a cleric, who worships the Iron God from Ptolus (Google is your friend). So, she is fascinated by technology, traps, locks, and all things mechanical.

Our group is rogueless; they are relying on me to rogue for them. (And heal them, because, yes, I am the cleric.)

---

What my brain does at 2 am:
"Ooh! There could be a superhero who can shift her own gravity, so that she can walk up the side of skyscrapers! Cool! I could call her... SKYWALKER."

What my brain does at 3 am:
"Wait. Skywalker. Star Wars. Damn."

What my brain does at 4 am:
"So, should I change her name? Or should I have her repeatedly introduce herself as Skywalker so that she can be really pissed off when everyone thinks she's referencing Star Wars? Yeah, that would be hilarious..."

Fascinating stuff, I know...

I have seen quite a number of conversations on the internet in the last couple of years, all about people wearing shoes indoors. Inevitably, the conversation is split between two groups. Let's call them:
1) Sockpuppets (aka people who take off their shoes when they enter a dwelling)
2) Ruffians (aka people who wear shoes indoors, the barbarians)

( my observations )

Don't you hate it when you have an excellent idea for a blog post, but by the time you actually sit down to post it, you've forgotten what it was? *sighs*


So, random life update:
- Am almost finished with Latin book 5, at which point I will be a (self-described) Advanced Latin Student, ready for such majestic heights as fairytales-in-Latin, Harry-Potter-in-Latin, and short-excerpts-from-classic-Latin-texts-with-the-translation-right-there-in-case-I-get-confused. Very awesome.

- Am feeling very organised, because all my Christmas presents are wrapped.

- The boy is now walking all day, and getting rather adventurous. Fun, but slightly exhausting.

- We are between heatwaves, so having nice sunny weather. Most of my plants have survived so far.

- The husband is now halfway through season 3 of Farscape. He's enjoying it, most of the time.

My old computer having finally died, I've bought a new one. Behold, my ability to type a paragraph in less than half an hour!


The kidlet is doing well, and is semi-mobile. He's not crawling yet, but is moving enough to grab random objects before I've realised that he's now two metres away from where I left him.


I've decided that Elementary is the best show of all the shows - at least this week. Miles better than most Sherlock Holmes incarnations, at least, due to his wonderful ability to not be a total arse to everyone he encounters.


We're about to start a weekly, parent-friendly roleplaying group at our house. Haven't done this in nearly a decade, and now I suddenly have to create a session-long Firefly campaign out of thin air! Help!


I've ditched book 5 of my Latin course, and have raced back to book 1 to revise. Am now no longer feeling like a dunce, but instead marvelling at my ability to speak extremely basic Latin with such finesse.


...I totally have time to sign up for this year's Remix, right? Right?

It's supposed to be hot today. Being aware of this, I am currently sitting in my freezing cold house, shivering, and reminding myself that turning the heater on would be a boneheadedly stupid thing to do.



Saw Agents of Shield the other night. It... reminded me of Torchwood.

By which I mean that it had the central leader guy who knew exactly how to handle the other characters and did nothing wrong, and a whole bunch of other characters whose entire personality could be summed up by their jobs. There's "tech guy", "kung-fu chick", and "secret agent man" – but, so far, I know nothing else about any of them. Are they sarcastic? Do they like chocolate? Have they ever been really bored? It's a mystery.

So far? Not intrigued. Not enough to keep watching. I like investigation-of-the-week shows, but every show like that that's ever drawn me in has done so through the characters – and, so far, I haven't seen any of those.



(Yes, still planning to fic... Rather delayed by life...)

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...

Things that are awesome:

- my cat
- Easter eggs
- the boyfriend
- sewing machine cabinets
- central heating
- baby goats
- feeding lettuce to baby goats
- my cat, purring
- my cat, cuddling me
- nice warm beds

1) Cats who wake me up at 5am.

2) Internet Explorer 8, and its ludicrous system of opening sites. (When I'm reading a site and try to open a bookmarked site, it opens it in the tab I'm using - making the site I was reading go away. When I open a new tab and then hit the bookmark, it will open the bookmarked site in ANOTHER NEW TAB, and leave me with THREE tabs open instead of two. What on earth?)

3) People calling grown women "girls".

4) Whoever decided that having free Mentos at work was a good idea. I KEEP EATING THEM ALL. *has no self-control*

5) Proofreading jobs where I have to read bad writing and not comment on how bad it is.

6) Cats who wake me up at 5am. Seriously.

I came up with three utterly brilliant blog entries last night, and then woke up and realised that none of the stuff they were talking about had really happened...

Also, I'm fairly sure I also came up with another blog entry that would have been true - but now I can't remember what it was. Hmmpf.


In other news:
- Elf and Prince are fine with each other, as long as Prince doesn't violate Elf's personal space bubble with a radius of about a metre. Prince deals with this by staying exactly a metre out of reach - and looking hopefully at Elf.

- The jobs are both still really fun - but taking a lot out of me. Hence the sad lack of blogging.

- nuggan! If you're grumpy, go join!

- Sadly (care of last night's dream) my house does not include a secret lair with a funky shower. Happily, the tragic lack of secret lair also means that my hencemen are not trying to kill me over the funky shower...