chandri

1. Get up. Shower. Eat a bagel and some yogurt.
2. Stare despairingly at unfinished homework. Hate my reference prof a little.
3. Go to yarn shop. Find out that the yarn I need is out of stock. Put my name down to be called when it comes in (which should be "within the next two weeks," argh).
4. Meet a friend for tea. Yay!
5. Get on a bus to trek out to the new location for our local post office, 30 blocks south of my apartment (32 minutes).
6. Wait in line at the post office with seven other people, all of whom are as puzzled as I am by there being only one person working the counter who doesn't seem to actually know where anything is.
6a. Insist to postal worker that no, in fact, this package is not mine. This package is for someone named Eunice Li. Do I look like a Eunice?
6b. No, really. That's not my name. This is why you asked for my ID. The ID you didn't really read.
6b. Receive package which, apparently, could totally have fit in the mailbox at my building, so really my mail carrier is a bastard and there was NO REASON for this ridiculous trek.
7. Go to catch the bus back to my apartment.
7a. Wait 17 minutes for bus.
7b. Watch nearly-empty bus sail past me without stopping.
7c. Wait another 12 minutes. Board bus.
7d. Take roundabout route back to my stop (26 minutes).
8. HOME. NEVER LEAVING AGAIN.

Basically, Translink and Canada Post are conspiring to ruin my day today. Also Twitter banned my Twitter app, so I keep having to logout and log back in if I want to see all my accounts. Also, since the last firmware update, my camera keeps crashing.

HOWEVER, artemisiabrisol will be here tomorrow! Yay! \o/

Okay, now I really do need to do my homework. o.O

2010 sucked, didn't it? But that's okay! It's dead and we can dance on its grave!

This evening was spent in a tea party and watching episodes of Star Trek that involved time travel - specifically ones where the crew had to travel back in time and wear costumes, because mik100 and I couldn't decide if we wanted sci-fi or period drama, so we compromised! We only made it through Time's Arrow, because Kim and I kept pausing it to explain Enormously Complicated Next-Gen Backstory for the benefit of maelie, who then fled the scene to catch the last SkyTrain (and also escape the crazed Trekkies).

Also, as a welcome-to-2011 present if you are in the northern hemisphere, have a gander to the southwest - that bright red-blue-white twinkly thing is a conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus, here for a limited time until January 3rd. We thought it might be the ISS, but we pulled up the tracker and apparently right now it's somewhere over South America. Instead, it is a pretty, twinkly conjunction, so bright we thought it had to be something manmade, but no! I dragged out my old kiddie telescope (either a 9th- or 10th-birthday present which has stayed with me all these years) and got a proper look at it. SO. COOL. I was a massive space-geek as a kid, a geekiness that lay dormant for a long time until this summer's visit to Cape Canaveral. Some day I will have a proper telescope that is bigger than a foot long and I will have a crazy-person calendar documenting all the exciting pretty things visible in the sky on any given day. It will be AWESOME.

On January 4th, for example, we will be able to see the Quadrantid Meteor Shower during the New Moon. I may actually remember to watch it and everything!

Anyway. Dishes are done, Kim is sacked out on the couch - time to sleep. Hi there, 2011. Everyone is watching you. Don't fuck it up, huh?

OKAY.



Two knitting projects done. Middlesis's stripy scarf is now damp and blocking and taking up much of the living room floor, and no matter how much you process it wet wool still smells like wet wool, if you were wondering. Also I have alpaca fuzz on everything I own. Alpaca fuzz is fucking insidious. It's like a green alpaca exploded all over everything.

Have used up every last one of my pins. Next order of crafting business: GET SOME GODDAMN BLOCKING WIRES. That way it won't take us twenty minutes to pin things down for blocking.

Anyway. Mum's cardigan to finish (oh god) and one more scarf. As soon as I figure out what scarf I actually want to knit. It's with chunky yarn, and there is a serious dearth of nice reversible lace patterns that don't look stupid with chunky yarn.

I need to sleep now. Perhaps it will have inspired me to something more specific in the morning. OR. Maybe knitting elves will do the work for me in the night (Dear knitting elves: I AM TOTALLY OKAY WITH THIS. Seriously, have at.) and I won't have to.

Oh, hey! It's Friday. Meaning tomorrow is SATURDAY. When I get to sleep past 8am. AWESOME.

...but they're still alive!



The one on the far right is being a whiny little brat, and I'm not sure why, but for the most part the tomatoes seem happy and enthusiastic about life. They're also budding. Not sure if I'm going to let any of them keep the buds this time, as I think I want them to get bigger before they try to fruit, but in theory, anyway, I will have tomatoes this winter! That I grew from seed!

In other, not-so-awesome news, our stupid Strata decided to turn off the hot water for repairs. Without telling anyone or anything, so we woke up this morning with a gurgling noise rather than hot water coming out of the taps. Consequently I am buggering off to Mum's to use her shower, eat her food, and apparently fix the Internet, which the Shaw guy may have inadvertently broken when he was out there this morning to fix something else.

One more exam. Just one.

People who know me know that I am... sporadically, aggressively tidy? Meaning that while deep down in my compulsive soul (thanks, Mum), I want things to be tidy - I NEED things to be tidy - I am also half Artist (genetically, on Dad's side, and feel free to apply all hilarious, sarcastic intonations that come with that term), which means that often that compulsiveness is turned to something that overrides the Tidy.

When I have nothing else vying for my attention, or perhaps more commonly, when there is something else I should be doing but I really, really don't want to do it, everything is clean. It is tidy. It is organized. You can find things and the dining room table is clear and there are enough forks in the drawer because they are not all in the sink or the dishwasher. Importantly, my bed is made. This last point is a crucial hallmark of my state of mental health. If the bed is made, I am awake and (probably) dressed and functioning and being an adult and Getting Things Done. The day has officially begun and I am out in it.

When there is something else going on that I have to do, and have to do now, seriously, the Tidy is overriden by the compulsive need to Do This Thing Right. So the floor doesn't get vaccuumed, the dishwasher is full of clean dishes and the sink is full of dirty dishes waiting to be put in the dishwasher, my laundry is making a bid for freedom from the closet and the bed? The bed is not made. Probably because I was awake all night and had fifteen minutes to jump out of bed, dress, brush teeth, and dash for the train to get to class or work on time, or because I have still not gone to bed because I am still up working on something that oh god I really just want to finish.

On Friday evening, I had some school people over for dinner. I made Mindy's fabulous tofu butter chicken and it was delicious and we had lovely wine and we spent twice as long as we spent eating just sitting around talking about things. Like adults. (Okay, like adults who spent a solid hour talking about knitting and Joseph Gordon Levitt's shirtsleeves and British Actor Bingo, otherwise known as Midsomer Murders.). It was awesome.

As the semester is (thank the universe) nearly over, on Friday I had two small assignments and one major project left to finish. I got one of them done that evening, leaving the major project to finish tweaking and hand in - namely, a massive Drupal website remake for a local park. It is very complicated. It had approximately 1,567 things that needed to all work together.

On Friday, the apartment was clean. My bed was made. Things were good.

My bed has not been made since Friday, until just now when I finished my project and handed it in and did a little dance. I feel enormously victorious, as I have only one more teensy assignment left to finish and then exams and then this awful, abominable semester is over forever. In a grander sense, I feel like my bed has not been made since early September.

One more assignment to go. I am so close to being properly finished that I can taste it.

And when I am done, I think I will reward myself with writing fic. And possibly vaccuuming my room.

ETA: DAMN IT NOW I AM DOWNLOADING HAWAII FIVE-O. I blame maelie, sheafrotherdon, and dogeared. ON YOUR HEADS BE IT.

Okay.

I have seen Inception.

Now I need MILLIONS OF FICS.

Is anybody out there familiar with Drupal? I'm supposed to be doing a lab for my computer science class, except Drupal hates me, and I am remembering all over again why I tried to use Drupal for a site a year ago and gave up in bitter frustration. How does one make Stories appear on Pages? The Stories are arranged under their proper Pages in the file structure - i.e. they have the proper Parent Items - but they do not seem to be interested in automatically appearing where they are pointed. This is extremely frustrating. I have for the time being created direct links on the Pages to point to the Stories, but I get the feeling that this should be more tidy and automatic than it currently appears to be.

Tomorrow we get to do this shit with PHP and third-party plugins. Bog save me. *quails*

I just had a brilliant idea and I didn't want to forget having it. I want to create a website that allows people to rate the day. A day would be available for voting for a 24-hour period, during which the current votes would be averaged in real-time to show what kind of day the average voter was having. Numbers on the scale would be associated with hilarious graphics a la Hyperbole and a Half, and the image would change to match the reigning rating. Mostly this would be for my own amusement, but does anyone know of a good open-source web application that could be used to realize this vision? Today has been rather shitty and I feel like sharing it with the world.

In other news, there are kilted pipers wandering up and down Granville, piping. What the hell?

ETA: WHY ARE ALL THE ANDROID LJ APPS SO TERRIBLE. Dear LJ, build me a native Android app RIGHT THE HELL NOW, please and thank you. And a Blackberry one too, while you're at it.

Yes, it's all still alive. Well, mostly. Just after I dug up all the potatoes a while back, my plot was beset by a mildew infestation - one of the neighbouring plots had it, left it untreated, and then it spread to the entire garden. Before going to Florida, I hadn't had time to do much beyond cut out dead leaves from the affected squash and zucchini plants, and when I got back, I found it had attacked the pumpkin vines. So tonight I finally had time to march down there with a pair of clippers and gloves to protect me from the spiky squash vines and do something about it.

As both treatment and preventative measure, I sprayed the leaves of the beleaguered plants with a milk/water solution that the other gardeners have had a lot of luck with. This actually seemed to work almost immediately, so hopefully the bits and pieces left of zucchini and squash plants will revive enough to give me a few more edibles before it gets too cold.

I forgot to photograph my only surviving pumpkin of meaningful size - the two that had made it to fist-size before I went on vacation succumbed to rot while I was gone, despite maelie's no-doubt heroic efforts. But I've got at least one, and it's not rotting! It's big! It's orange! I perched it on a brick to keep it from the damp and watered all the squashes very, very carefully, not wanting to wash off the milk solution. I hope I get at least one pumpkin out of the plot, or I shall be very disappointed.

And I forgot to check the garlic. Damn. Need to do that very soon, I think, since their leaves have by now been entirely shaded to death by the rhubarb and pumpkin leaves.



Speaking of the rhubarb, its time finally came, and I pulled it all up tonight. I put about six armfuls of various gigantic rhubarb and squash leaves into the compost tonight - the worms should be very happy. I also pulled up most of the beets, which are of substantial size, I think; most about the size of my fist, which I admit isn't very big, but isn't bad for vegetables I planted out of boredom and largely ignored all summer.

I feel much better and less neglectful, though there's still some dead flowers and a lot of weeding I didn't get done tonight, and I need to transplant my indoor tomato seedlings to bigger pots (I only have pots for about half of them - have to figure out where I'm going to get more!), and I need to find someplace indoors for the big healthy ones currently fruiting on the balcony. But there's always next weekend, I guess.

Running Tally | G | ~9,300 | for mcshep_match 2010, prompt: close to the mark.

The reveals and the results are out, so I can finally share my mcshep_match story with those of you who (and seriously, what's wrong with you, there are dozens of delicious stories, get over there!) haven't been keeping track of this year's posts. My entry was Running Tally, in which Atlantis is stuck on Earth, Rodney has broken up with his girlfriend, and yet John Sheppard is in a weirdly good mood. Rodney wants to know what's up.

("Have you noticed anything weird about Sheppard?"

Ronon regards Rodney thoughtfully. "He's happy. That's weird."

And trust Ronon to get right to the point.)