nishatalitha

I have spent most of my spare time for the last couple of weeks trying to install Alice, trying to upgrade Annabelle so that I can install Alice (possibly I need to upgrade my motherboard, dammit), reading books both physical and electronic, and editing metadata. I also woke up every workday morning over that time desperately wishing I didn't have to go to work. So I arranged to take today off.

I slept in, hung out in the lounge in the sun, was sat on a lot by Jemima (who was determined to sit on me even when she was grumpy about it), read some and finished editing H in Calibre. The book I spent most of the day reading is The Madness of Angels: Or the resurrection of Matthew Swift by Kate Griffin. I think N. K. Jemisin recommended her books at some point.

It's interesting — quite disjointed in places and for a while I wasn't sure if some of the disjointedness, particularly in terms of spacing on the page was due to coding or if it was intentional. Having read most of the book now, I think it's intentional, but I would be interested in seeing a hardcopy for comparision. Main character slips between I and We a lot, even in the same sentence, and the grammar changes depending on where he's using I or We, and this is also where the spacing tends to change. Urban fantasy and a sorta a classic one man alone against the night, but not, and in a completely different way from Rivers of London — for one thing, it's his own death that Matthew is looking into.

I need to go to sleep before 3am tonight. I bet that will help.

Boosting the signal received from sraun: the fourth book of Diane Duane's Tales of the Five.

AKA The Door into Starlight, the fourth in the series starting The Door into Fire and continuing in The Door into Shadow and The Door into Sunset - go read Diane's post on it. And then pass along the word.

Also, she just released a newly updated e-book version of the omnibus here.

I am getting used to this being on holiday thing. Unsurprisingly, the weather is not co-operating, being generally overcast, windy and rainy. Sometimes there's sun, sometimes it's ridiculously humid (like right now). I'd actually prefer going back to work a week earlier and having another week to play with sometime in the rest of the year. Mind, most of New Zealand isn't much better - there's rain and the possibility of flooding down south.

Managed to do useful things today:

• put away my suitcase (with my winter duvet packed into it);
  
• put away my jewellery;
  
• did the ironing;
  
• did the laundry, got it dried and put away;
  
• cleaned up the kitchen;
  
• cleaned the bathroom;
  
• made apple cake;
  
• made chocolate brownie; and
  
• collected up assorted mail to be mailed tomorrow (including thesane's cards that have been sitting under the tree since well before Christmas.

Go me.

I also managed to watch the Top Gear Christmas special and a two-part episode of Holmes Inspection. Both were lots of fun, particularly the Top Gear one - I mean, wtf BBC!

Gaming starts again tonight. We managed to get the magic back into the fantasy world last time... what next? Starting to take on the shadow monster? I'm lookin forward to finding out what happens next.

It has been horribly muggy all day. The temperature is actually quite pleasant, but the humidity is not. Occasionally, it pretended that it might rain, which was a relief, but then it gave up again. It was pretending to rain when I got up this morning, so I didn't walk into work. I wish I had, because it stopped raining shortly after it was too late for me to walk anymore.

Walked home from Wadestown after work instead, decided that it was too hot to cook just yet, and read for a bit instead.

Dinner, when tamarillow and I ate about an hour ago, was delicious. We had fresh sweetcorn; a small salad of baby spinach leaves, thinly sliced mushroom, avocado, and a cherry; pan-fried and roasted pork steak, lightly seasoned with pepper on a bed of kumara mash; and a red wine sauce to go over top. Mmmm, it was good.

Porterhouse steaks were on special when we did the grocery shop on Wednesday, so on Monday evening I might use the remains of the sauce on those (maybe lightly grill them on the bbq?), and keep most of the rest of the meal the same, but drop the sweetcorn. As delicious as fresh sweetcorn is, we didn't need it. I'll slice the rest off the cob and stick it in a salad, I think.

I am currently stretched out on the deck wearing a summer dress and my slippers (my feet get cold easily) with the only light coming from my laptop screen. There is a very slight breeze and thus it is almost pleasant. And hey, my cat has just turned up to keep me company.

Kapcon this weekend. I am placed for all of Saturday if I miss third round to allow me time to get ready, like I usually do. However, my costume this year is quite simple, so I might play instead. I'm quite looking forward to the LARP, especially since the faction my character belongs to has spent a bit of time discussing further details of our culture, to flesh it out a bit more.

I've been reading a mixture of LOTR and God Omens fic. No crossovers, alas... or actually. I don't think I really want to know what Crowley and Aziraphale would do to the good citizens of Minas Tirth or Rivendell or wherever the author happened to place them. Although what they would do to the entire religious structure of Middle Earth would be interesting. The Elves wouldn't know what hit them in the face.

Good Omens is a good book, and there's not nearly enough slash around based on it. Until tonight, when maudlinrose gave me a link to a Dogma/Good Omens crossover, I only knew of two fics. One of them is by Khirsah and Ailei, and those of you whom have read any of their work can probably imagine how good it is. Unfortunately, the link I have to it (and to any of their home pages) isn't working. I think I need to reread Good Omens.

Stuff about books I've been reading lately.

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I'm considering entering the mopfic challenge. I'm not sure who's going to judge it, or whether I can write badly enough. I don't like writing badly that much. For me, it feels like a waste, like it's not going to be of any use when I go to write something that is important to me. I'm not trying to put down writing badly - when done well, it's quite funny - it's just that I don't feel it's something I do well, and it's not really how I want to write. But then, I always have had a preference for long and complicated.

I've started another fic. Saved title is CourtPolitics! and it'll probably fit somewhere in the universe that Jessikast and I talked about on the train up to Auckland for the convention. I still haven't managed to mention the complicated way of finding out rank, kin, and other assorted information by the way that a string of leather or ribbon is tied around one's arm. I am going to give away the plot of everything I've written in it right now, so if you want to wait and read the story, skip over the next bit and come back when I'm writing about something else.

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Hmmm. Have I anything else to babble about. Sabbac is fun. It is a game with no rules, apparently.

I am glad that I've about stopped PMS-ing. Doing that annoys me, and the pain isn't any fun either. I managed to avoid taking any painkillers beside the anti-inflammatories that I'm supposed to be taking. I'm kinda pleased with that. Yes, I know it's stupid to not take painkillers when you're in pain, but for some reason I felt rather violently opposed to the idea of taking any. It was helped by the fact that the only time that I was tempted to give in, I couldn't find the panadol. And my hot water bottle hasn't gotten that much use, either. Cuddling is good, if not particularly effective. Going out in company, where one has to assume the mask of being pain-free, even if one is not, can be effective, but doesn't really stop the pain. At least it isn't the full moon.

I should go to bed. I probably won't, because I'm like that, and I'm awake at the moment, but I should go. I might go and see if I can find any more Good Omens fic because I like it.

Did you all see the snow on the other side of the harbour? Other side to me, Jessikast, not you. It was most pretty, and there was a fair amount of it. It'll probably all be gone by the end of tomorrow, but it's lasted a few days, which is nice. I took a couple of photos because I could. It was down way below 200m. I finally got around to putting masking tape over all the cracks in my window frames. Room is much warmer now, and not as loud when it's really windy. I figure I'll just take the tape off come summer, when I actually want to open the windows. I left tape off the two windows that I actually open. I did the lounge too, and the same goes for there. I didn't do all of the lounge, since some of the wood that I was trying to attach tape to was too wet to stick, so I'll have to do that another time. But it's working well enough. People can take it off themselves if they want to open a window, and frankly, if paint peels off when they take it off, no one is going to notice.