nishatalitha

I have been in Christchurch since Tuesday; thesane gets married on Saturday. maudlinrose came down on Wednesday and she and I are minions. It's good to be here.

As a minion, my primary job has been handsewing assorted things for thesane while she does other trickier pieces of sewing, such as our bridesmaid dresses. She got me to do some of the crystal beading on the lace on the hem of her wedding dress, and to sew a fine cord top and bottom around the embroidered band at her neckline (which was much trickier). This is all well within my capabilities, but was rather terrifying and immensely flattering at the same time. The dress is officially finished now, which is awesome.

We had the hair/make-up trial run today. It's rather strange to see my face in the mirror and this beautifully made up person who looks something like me, but not really, looks back. It does look lovely and stunning with the dress, though.

Anyhow, I think it's time to go see if the shower is free and get rid of it all so I can go to bed. Rehearsal tomorrow at the ungodly hour of 9.30am.

After the disaster that was Thursday, Friday turned out quite well. Had lunch with a friend (sushi and edamame - does anyone know where I can buy fresh soy beans in Wellington other than a sushi restauarant?), and then a fandom dinner at Istanbul with maudlinrose, tamarillow, deepbluemermaid and a bunch of fandom people who we met as fellow fandom people for the first time: astolat, china_shop, aworldinside, morebliss and arysteia.

astolat was the reason, since she was visiting from the US and it was lovely to meet her. However, it looks like there will be more general hanging out in future, which will be cool. Who knew there were fandom people in Wellington?

This being Wellington, there was the normal run of do-you-know-X questions until we had satisfactorily established how many people we knew in common/how many of us went to the same school/worked at the same place. Turns out that china_shop and I have probably met before at one of atomicsusan's parties and it's entirely possible that arysteia tutored me in Classics at Vic, but I don't recall any of my tutors enough to confirm this.

The belly dancer came out (not nearly as good as dryadwoman) and we decamped to Olive, a cafe a couple of places up Cuba St for hot chocolate and dessert. The soy hot chocolate is supposed to be the best in town, but the standard hot chocolate was only acceptable (I'm spoiled by the fact that the hot chocolate in our cupboards is made of half cocoa and half castor sugar). The gingerbread pudding was excellent, though. china_shop and I split one and that was plenty.

deepbluemermaid stayed with us for the night and slept in the lounge, since we still don't have curtains up in the sunroom and there was washing drying in it anyway. Freezing cold this morning - definately autumn now, although the day turned out to be quite nice, if cool in the breeze. You have to love those southerlies!

I was wide awake around 8.00am, but it was cold, so I made a cup of tea, fed the cats, emptied and refilled the dishwasher, put a load of washing on and went back to bed with a book. Eventually I bestirred myself enough to clean the bathroom and put on a third load of laudnry. Seems I've spent most of my day doing laundry and reshelving books. Still, the books are now done and I only have to catalogue the pile beside my bed and work out where I'm going to put them and they will be all shelved to my satisfaction.

jessikast is here tonight, a roast is cooking in the oven and I'm debating putting my heater on, going to watch something and do more cross stitch. Still have to decide on the wedding sampler for my friend, and I'm considering doing a Sopwith Camel and Fokker Triplane for Dad for Christmas - they could go on the bookcase with his Biggles Books.

I rather like domesticity, and this house responds well to it. That being said, when I sat down at my computer and read some fic at 4.00pm, I was more than ready for some time doing nothing.

If I can be bothered tomorrow, I will make Italian Parsley pesto in an attempt to prevent said italian parsley from taking over the garden. And make a cake for Monday night. I should do homework before all of this though.

Oh, I've set up a Dreamwidth account - I'm nishatalitha there as well. It's too much effort coming up with yet another internet identity.

Have had an awesome weekend so far: Confusion yesterday was lots of fun and even though I was late, I still got to play first round. Why do I always forget there's no such thing as an 8.30am Mairangi on a Saturday morning? I think I was slightly hungover yesterday morning and ended up spending most of the day on a caffeine high, compounding it with sugar in the last round.

At cons, I've noticed that I tend towards the high-energy silly games. I've been gaming more this year than I did last year and I miss being in a long epic campaign, but I don't have the mental or physical energy at the moment. After class finishes this year, I might see if I can find a short term game through November and January but I don't know how likely that will be. Another year and a half until I'm done and I can be in a long campaign.

Played in N's Demon Hunters game - played a supersoldier, the last of 5,000. That was fun and suprisingly, we all survived! Second rought I played in house_monkey's game. It was crack and there were lots of silly acronyms. Last round played G's Shadowrun 4 official mission, really enjoyed it and might have to play more Shadowrun in the future.

Talked with some people about Kapcon, the Kapcon LARP and the tabletop game I've promised for it. I've never run tabletop before, so I need to start putting things together for it. Not that I'm going to use the Earthdawn system - it's too complicated for a con game if the people don't know the system.

Finally got home - the bus was twenty minutes late - got changed and went on down to the Burning Bedlam party. Much fun with the dancing and talking and flirting. I crashed out around 3.00am. I'm only just in these last couple of hours starting to wind down, energy wise. Legs ache and I while I don't feel like a nap, I don't feel like doing much. Not hungover which is not unexpected but still quite nice.

After a busy weekend, I am experimenting with embroidery stitches. I have borrowed tamarillow's A-Z of embroidery stitches and I have a scrap piece of linen, which I suppose, technically, is a sampler and am trying out a few stitches before I start bl9_knt and purplesparkler's wedding present. I'll get the linen for that next week.

We had tamarillow's mum and brother up for a birthday lunch yesterday and as part of her birthday present, tamaraillow got plants and transport to and from the Mitre10 Garden Croften Downs. We then weeded the bank and chopped down one of the hydrangas and planted our garden. But first, we composted. We made compost, rather haparzardly, but we made usable compost! It feels very good. There are a few herbs to replace - primarily tarragon and italian parsley, but we're rather pleased with how it looks. The garden is clearly marked off, so if the moron with the weedeater chops down our garden again, I think they should replace the plants!

Today we had three people from church up for lunch. One of them had to hurry off early, since it turned out she was working this afternoon, but the other two, a lovely older couple tamarillow and I have had lunch with before at their place a couple of times, stayed until about three. It turns out that he'd gone to school with maudlinrose's grandfather. Small world.

There was lots of gardening talk and they had a look at our section and were very glad they didn't have to deal with ours, with its steep banks and lack of topsoil. Not much they could recommend that would plant well, save for three things I refuse to plant - gorse, convuvulis and oxalis. The best thing would be to stick a lot more top soil and compost up on the bank and dig it in thoroughly, which is too much effort here.

I am drunk and am seriously thinking about writing a small (ten - fifteen people) LARP based off the Amber Chronicles with one of the people I wrote Once Upon A Time with.

I think I'm probably crazy.

Had a really good time at the engagement party, though. Lovely to see everyone again.

And I have pink and speckled M&Ms and when did those colours become normal? Still tastes the same but looks weird.

I'm thinking of calling the two degrees of connections/it's a small world after all/Wellington moments bl9_knt moments, since most of mine seem to involve him and I've had two in the past three days. There was his father consulting at my work on Wednesday and then there was today. I was chatting to one of my workmates about Newtown stores, mentioned I used to work at Mr Thank You and she mentioned her sister used to be friends with a guy who work there as they went to high school together or something. That guy, unsurprisingly, is bl9_knt.

Went to the library after work today and got out half a dozen CDs with 1930s music on them. I decided that having just Benny Goodman and various classical wasn't enough and got some out. I reconnected my CD player on my computer and the break clearly did it good, since it's only crashing with Marlene Dietrich so far.

Had dinner at the Flying Burrito Brothers for tofulope's birthday. The company was good, tofulope and darthsappho were suitably aghast at the Axis of Evil II fingerpuppet/fridgemagnets (Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfield) that we got her and one of the other guests there was someone Alessan would have been at uni at the same time as.

We went to Our Bar for a drink afterwards and then came home. I needed to finish packing and was suddenly unsociable. So have been sorting my desk a little and tidying a little (putting things away) and might even dust and clean the bathroom tonight before the start of the weekend of sleep deprivation and sugar highs. I will, however, leave the giant bug on the carpet on the carpet. I'm not sure if it's a gift from the cat or if it came in for the light, but since it's there the cat can just eat it. She ate the others, after all.

I've been accused of being obsessive about books before. I suppose I can see how things can be construed that way and sometimes I even care. However, when it comes to purchasing the correct, hard-to-find edition of a fairly common book over trademe and that book is in the best condition of the three of them and it completes two sets (trilogy and universe by author) then I really don't care.

Hmmm. This is why I wear glasses because then I don't see one and a half of each letter that I type. It's also a clue that I should be in bed now.

Watched 1.06 of Eureka with C. and maudlinrose and we spent almost half the show laughing too hard to hear what was being said. It was fantastic. I love that show.

Had a weird Wellington moment at work today. I was working as normal and one of the IT people had a consultant in who looked vaguely familar. He came over, we chatted and I eventually worked out that it was bl9_knt's dad. Kinda surreal.

I made a small double batch of pesto this afternoon. We'll be doing well if it lasts a week. Still, we have some pine nuts and lots of italian parsley but no oil so we can make some more soonish.

( SF Meme )

Since today has been nice and sunny and since C and I skipped church, we did stuff around the house today.

By which I mean we did some housework and some of the dishes and laundry and then maudlinrose and C hacked at the gorse with secataurs and a trowel. The pile I had left tripled in size and we could see more of the hill behind the house.

Then I made lunch and bl9_knt and purplesparkler came around, followed shortly by thesane and P. and they had a hatchet in the back of their van, since they were up here for a medieval camping thing and bl9_knt took the hatchet and chopped at the gorse and the pile is huge and we can see a house through the trees which was utterly invisible to us before!

We'll trim down the big pieces of gorse trees with the secataurs and buy a hatchet ourselves and chop down the trunks into firewood. Then we need to let our landlords know what we've done.

But C. is the queen of chopping with a hatchet - it was very impressive.

And after there was roast and potatoes and ice-cream and good conversation and I think I'm ready for bed now.

It's been a good day.

I'm talking with maudlinrose and cohr at the moment. It's nice to be talking to both at once. I am also avoiding doing readings for my history essay, which I will get down to at some stage.

Had a nice talk with maudlinrose last night. We were both a bit silly, and tired, so we made sense to each other, but I doubt it would now. Everything seemed to be sparkly or shiny. Much fun was involved.

I also found the Star Trek: Enterprise fic that I was looking for. It's het, and stuff, but it's also the only Enterprise fic that I have read - and I think it's the only one I want to. I don't like Enterprise that much.

Not really reading that much. I'm mainly transfering emails from my main account to another one. This is giving me much more room in the account, which is a good thing. I'm also vaguely trying to get back to my CourtPolitics! fic, but I don't really feel like writing smut just now.

Almost finished my mum's birthday present - I'm now doing the bottom border edge. That will leave the centres of the flowers, a few random stitches that I accidentally missed out (well, one) and the pretty things on the inside of the border corners. I'm looking forward to having it done. It is very pretty.