amand_r

Hello all, it's been a while, so I shall UPDATE BY NUMBERS.

1. Cookies have been awesome. I am taking a break. I have many new things that I want to try, but they aren't going to ship well in this heat. That said, if you ever want some cookies, feel free to drop me a line. I am now making shit on demand. Except the chocolate caramel shortbread. They are a pain in the ass.

2. Kidlet is done with preschool! Well, for this year at least. I have embarrassing video, but I am too lazy to upload it.

3. My computer died recently! It was horrible. I was trying to log on, and it kept telling me my user profile couldn't load properly. After shedding bitter tears, I managed to save all my files from safe mode onto an external drive, and then I had to reinstall the OS from factory settings. Strange how everything runs now. On the other hand, there's something cleansing about getting a fresh start.

4. I have been reading a great deal. You can find my reading on Goodreads. Right now I'm reading about the monster of Florence.

5. I MADE PASTA FROM SCRATCH. IT WAS AWESOME.

6. YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE IS AWESOME? HOT DOGS.

7. Here is the story of how I am bitter:

One day I started watching Wire in the Blood. I watched 2 eps and then forgot. Then a month later I was all, “I should check out Wire in the Blood”, and lo, I already had. I resumed my watching. BY THE WAY the special with Tony in Texas was the best thing ever. I lolled so hard. Anyway, I got to the end of season 6 when [spoiler] and it ends with [spoiler] and Then I click ed the “Next” button on the Netflix streaming screen.

Nothing happened. I looked and saw they only had up to season six. Never mind, I will download the torrent somewhere.

That's right, in my head I had convinced myself that there are 8 seasons.

Oh wait, no, that's Waking the Dead.

It became increasingly difficult to locate the season seven torrent No one had it. I was going to do a shot out to my flist. Then I decided to see when it was released. So I checked wikipedia.

Boy, am I bitter. WHAT A FUCKING WAY TO END. NOT TWIN PEAKS EPIC, BUT JESUS.

8. I read the new Sookie Stackhouse. Yeah.

9. I had so many things to say! I have no idea where they went.

10. Lastly, I have a novella/thing coming out in October, and the publisher, Candlemark and Gleam was nice enough to send me promo postcard things to distribute. I was thinking of handwriting some short short stories and offering to send them to people for postage. Would anyone be interested? Want one? I guess if you sent me five bucks, I could send you the card and a half a dozen cookies. Or something.

Postage has gone up package wise, by the way. That's how they get ya.

Off to read more about excising vaginas.

1. What's with Family Guy's Conway Twitty thing? It started with short clips, and now 7.13 had a whole performance of "I See The 'Want To' In Your Eyes". Not that I didn't LOL, but what up with this? Did Seth MacFarlane get the rights to all Conway Twitty's music or something?

2. The drawback to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS in my house is that I don't want to write. Why does this happen? It happens when I have a shitload of things to do, that's for damn sure. Wholas, kinky krimmas, the twfemfic fest, about six original fic things to do, plus that charity book thing (NO I HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN, TWITTER PEOPLE). I need something to jumpstart my ass. OH AND ALSO I HAVE THAT SEASON OF TORCHWOOD WOT I BE DOING. JESUS.

SOMEONE KICK ME IN THE ARSE.

3. My fried egg fu is sufficiently warmed up, so tonight it's stout and cheddar rarebit with fried eggs and the old stand-by, carrots and leeks. Oh carrots and leeks, why can't I quit you? I am using balsamic vinegar again instead of red wine vinegar.

4. My kid is in preschool! She started Monday, and so far so good.

5. This year she wants to be Snow White for Halloween. See Mander drive from one store to another.

6. I SEE THE 'WANT TO' IN YOUR EYES.

7. Ever look at all your junk and become filled with the urge to see how much of it you can sell? Because I think that might be my new hobby.

8. Writing a short story about a unicorn showing up on a midwest farm, and it's not going to have a happy ending. But all this urban or modern fantasy, I have no idea who takes it. My horror is not going over well with the horror markets. All my rejections are like, "This is good, but it's not us. Do you have anything more us?" It's enough to make a girl turn to poetry. Which, oh hai quiet passion.

9. I keep all my books that I'm currently reading stashed about the house in places. I have, at any given time, about 8 of them, and sometimes I substitute more when I get in a new pulp crap thing that I'll do in three days (or hours). So I finished Wharton, and picked up The Abridged Tale of Genji, like a responsible reader. Then I got waylaid by The Murder of Biggie Smalls. BUT THEN I GOT WAYLAID BY LKH'S NEW ANITA BLAKE BOOK. OH MY GOD IF MY READING HABITS WERE A NASDAQ CHART, IT WOULD LOOK LIKE BLACK MONDAY. With any luck I can skim my way through LKH and back into Biggie and then into Genji and the Burroughs I cracked the other day.

10. Okay, I just want to state for the record that I find it humourous, given the general attitude that the lyrics of Death Row records used to have re: the police, that they would only hire off-duty cops for their security. On one hand it's heartening, because it shows that it's possible to believe in the corruption of some of the police dept and still believe in their abilities or that some of them are good. On the other hand it's lol.

11. I have a mental image of Jack teaching Lois, Maggie and Robert how to lindy hop after hours in the atrium, to this song. They all have their shoes off, and they're goofing off in their stocking feet in the atrium. Gwen and Dee are in their offices pretending they don't hear. But they do. Gwen gives in, but Dee puts her head phones in and listens to Barry Manilow. BEANS AND CORNBREAD.

FIRST:

1. It is the middle of the night, and you wake from a dead sleep because you have to pee. You shuffle to the bathroom and don't even bother turning on the light because you know the way. While there you realise that you have to use feminine protection. You also notice that you run out of loo roll. You unwrap the loo roll and pull the old roll from the spool, and then sit there, half awake, holding the spool in one hand and the new roll in the other.

The spool is, I repeat, the spool is NOT the feminine protection that you have yet to retrieve. No, I stopped myself before it got that far, but I did wonder why it was so big around whilst I held it.

There's a moral (sp—is that spelled right? Moral? Morel? No that's a mushroom. Moral reminds me of sorrel, which always make me think of High Chapparal. Chapparal? Chaparale? Fuck. I'll quit before I start questioning the spelling of "the" and "chair") here, but I don't know who it is.

2. Watching season one of the Tudors again. Why does everyone give each other brooches? From now on, everyone's getting brooches from me.

Side note: OH HAI THAR, EXTREME HOTTNESS THAT IS JOHN RHYS-MYERS' ABS. HOLY FUCK.

3. In cleaning my house, I am stunned by the sheer amount of junk I have, in the form of bits and baubles and things that I cannot simply throw in a box and label. I have baskets and small boxes of little things that I simply don't know what to do with—things I no longer want and haven't needed in the past three years, not enough to unpack them from the basement boxes in which a great deal of them reside. I find myself pitching large quantities of crap. I want to be as light as possible.

Likewise, wow, half-price books, you are awesome.

Additionally, in going through my shelves and boxes of books in the basement, I am slowly filling a box of books marked, simply, "unread". So this year, I shall endeavor to empty that box. It's filled with contemporary novels, non fiction, and a bunch of classic lit I never got to. Like some Dickens and Orczy and even one or two poets whose volumes I purchased and never finished. I would promise not to buy any more books until I finish these, but that is foolhardy and something to which I can never hold myself. So I shan't lie that way. But it's a goal—read more. Read well. Read smartly.

That said, I read the latest Hamilton Merry Gentry book, Divine Misdemeanours. ( Hey, it's in my ereader. OMG SPOILERS )

4. OH HAI. RPF/RPS CARNIVALE THIS WEEKEND. RIGHT THE FUCK IN THIS LJ. cruentum IS SO EXCITED HE'S ABOUT TO VIBRATE THROUGH THE INTERNETS. THEN HE WILL BE THE GHOST IN THE SHELL, AND HE'LL HAUNT YOUR ISP AND WHEN YOU'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF WRITING YOUR THESIS, HE'LL REPLACE ALL THE IMAGES AND PIE CHARTS IN THE DOCUMENT WITH PICTURES OF JB'S ASS. YOU MIGHT BE AMUSED. YOUR THESIS ADVISOR AT THE ENTOMOLOGY DEPARTMENT PROBABLY WON'T BE. I think I already addressed this above, but whatevs.

Don't let that happen to you. Write for the Torchwood/Doctor Who RPF Carnivale.

5. So we have a little bit of snow in Pittsburgh this past month. So some mutherfuckers decide it's a great time to do some URBAN SKIING. My favorite is probably the Joe Montana bridge at about 4:00 to the end, and if you watch the credits you not only see some awesome FAIL, but you hear them make fun of Yinzertalk, which is always fun. (h/t emquilxy)

6. I'm in season two of the Sopranos again. How did I miss this gem? TONY: (frustrated and with finality) Cunnilingus and psychiatry have brought us to this.

Yes. Tony. Yes.

7. My TW season 4 file is corrupted or something, and it was my back up copy. I checked the original and it has no changes since last month. It's like Jesus doesn't want me to write TW anymore. Okay, Jesus.

I am not a serious person here that much, so I like to think that when I do get serious, it means something.

One of my greatest fears, aside from Jaws, zombies and gas station coffee, is someone telling me what I am and am not allowed to see. What my kid should be seeing. You are not my child's parent. You are not my parent. Not even my parents tell me what I can and cannot look at, because I am a grown up now, with real coffee and real debt and a brain inside my skull that is capable of higher thought processes, even when I'm wanking to porn that I got off the interwebs.

Because that's what the censorship issue in Australia is all about: kids, wanking, getting off, who does it, who's not getting any, and who gets to decide any and all of these things.

I forget sometimes, that Australia doesn't have a bill of rights, and so this is a very real thing.

And I can't really do anything about it, except direct you here, so that you can read it yourself and decide if you think it's real. I think it is. And I don't know what legal recourse Aussie citizens have if this goes through, to appeal. It makes me very grateful that we are actually capable of saying, "that's unconstitutional", because they don't.

Woah. For srs. So look. If we can do anything as non-Aussies, it's raise awareness.

This week, from the 25th to the 29th is the Great Aussie Website Blackout. If you're an Aussie, I feel for ya, and this is ridiculous.

I have a small soapbox, so: information should be unfettered by censors of this nature (I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that all information is running free through a daisy field, even as a society we often ourselves censor and each other, but that is for another day.). No one gets to decide what's appropriate for me to read/watch. You don't like spanking? Fine, DON'T LOOK FOR IT, AND WHEN YOU FIND IT BY ACCIDENT, GO AWAY. You don't remove it for everyone.

Seriously, people who thinks this is a good idea? And how much are they not getting laid? Or what? I got nothing.