My Soul Hath Elbow Room!

NaNo is coming. I will try not to fail so spectacularly this year.

Unless something incredibly inspirational happens between now and November, I guess I'm doing the first draft for asexual_fandom's upcoming bang? There are vampires in it. Asexual ones! Because literary metaphor swings both ways, or in some cases, doesn't swing at all.

I'm sure I should provide some kind of update on my life, but there kind of isn't one? Life is being rather dull. I may be getting the keys to the house on the 28th (provisional on paperwork, lack of natural disasters, etc) and then maybe there will be things to do, but until then not much.

Also, SJA S05 has started, which makes me excited, sad and apprehensive all at once.

Actual conversation with a project manager today:

Me: "Who's going to buy this over-expensive product anyway?"
Her: "Perverts. But we're marketing it at birdwatchers."

Company and product name omitted to protect my job the innocent.

Made an offer on the rather perfect house yesterday, having sorted out mortgage shenanigans. (I have a mortgage agreed. That's terrifying enough in itself.)

And I have had the opening theme from The Poddington Peas stuck in my head since I walked into the bank.

I have no idea in what way these two facts are related, but there you have it. Buying houses = pea-based cartoons from my earliest childhood memories.

Now we just have to see if they'll accept.

The police contacted them about my card being compromised, so they've stopped it.

That's fine.

I found out that something was up when I tried to move money into my savings account, held with another bank, and NatWest declined the transfer. That's fine.

Of course, it's a bank holiday weekend, so my only recourse is the 24-hour helpline. That's fine.

First person: "Okay, you need to tell the operator that your savings account is with another bank, this is the wrong department." Dumps me back into the queue.

That's irritating, but OK.

Second person: "You can't make a transfer out of NatWest with any other website, ever."
Me: "Yes, I can."
Him: "No, you can't."
Me: "Yes, I can. I've done it dozens of times before and I can do it right now while you're listening to me."
Him: Okay, I'll pass you over to someone else.
New person: Okay, you still can't do that.
Me: Yes, I can, and I'd rather do it via [other bank] than NatWest because I hate your card-reader thingummywhatsit.
Her: *hangs up*
Me: *curses*

Third person, after going through thew queue AGAIN: "Okay, you're using the right card, you've got enough money in the account... oh, it's the fraud squad. I'll pass you over."
Me: Hallelujah.

I go downstairs, and what's on the doormat but a letter of apology from the bank for the débacle that ensued last time I tried to get them to do anything.

I mean. Hanging up on me. Customer service at its finest, y'all.

IN HAPPIER NEWS, I may have found a rather perfect house, if I can only scrape a slightly higher mortgage together.

Huh, apparently I stopped posting for a month there. Catch-up time, I guess.

- Book reviews: one day. Honestly, I'm in a really bad habit right now of trying to read two or three and then review en masse, which doesn't work because I forget what the first one was about before I have time to post it. No duds in this batch, anyway.

- Everyday stuff: still looking for a house. Thought I'd found one, but then the owners decided to sell to someone else through another agency, so I'm back to looking again. C'est la vie. I've signed up for a proofreading course with the Society for Editors and Publishers, whose training looks fairly intensive: they even do a mentoring scheme for aspiring freelancers. (Not that I'm saying I will freelance. Feels like every time I make a plan for my life at the moment it gets torn down, so I shall attempt to exist in a state of flux and thus outfox it. This also keeps Alice Cullen at bay.)

- Went down to my mum's on the royal wedding weekend and met some of the people from the homeless centre that she volunteers at, who are all lovely.

- The various results of Nick Clegg's Black Thursday make me sad. I'm glad to see the Lib Dems finally getting their political act together; I do worry that it's too late for the country as a whole, though. (This is the first time in my life that I've been genuinely worried about our political future, I think. Things are starting to feel less like 'minor buffets that are fundamentally really boring for history students' and more 'Big Things are happening'.)

- Have started playing The Sims: Medieval using the characters from our most recent DnD campaign, who mostly fit its hero roles perfectly. Doing this has made me appreciate Sims 2 all the more for storytelling: I can usually get a couple of decent pictures in TS2, but the Sims 3 graphics are so... muted. And puddingfacey. I've caught two humorous moments in all my play time so far, and I didn't even get one of them on camera: I unpaused to try to get one Sim into a slightly better part of his animation cycle and the other two wandered off. (Relatedly, I really miss the 'boolprop testingcheatsenabled true' cheat.)

- Glee makes me happy. No particular reason, it just does. (There won't be fic, though, ever. A large part of why it makes me happy is that it's completely cracktastic. I am incapable of taking it seriously.)

- Started Regan and Meredith, for reals this time. I have a plot arc and everything! And everything is mostly working. I'm writing at a snail's pace, but eh.

- I haven't forgotten that review of the 8DA finale, but it seems to have morphed into a fairly involved piece of meta, so give me a bit more time to think through what I want to say...

Friday before last: Office break-in at work. Most laptops, some Macs stolen.

This Monday: New laptops arrive, spend all day setting them up. Everything's working fine except they won't connect to the office WiFi. I am baffled. So is my boss.

Tuesday: More ineffectual prodding at the WiFi. Spend two hours on the phone with Dell's tech support. They are also baffled.

Today: Boss gives up, gets another router out of storage and I spend all morning* setting up a temporary connection for just these six laptops.

*Mostly due to my own lack of knowledge about how to set up WiFi, as I've never done it before. At least one of those hours was spent trying to debug 'Your Ethernet cables are in the wrong holes'.

This evening: get home, boot Oblivion. Oblivion bluescreens twice: UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP 0x0000007f. Most likely cause is corrupt RAM, according to Google.

Ah, well. At least stage 1 of this debug is 'Play Sims 2 to thrash the memory, then try to find some way to thrash it on Linux as well', as I'm not convinced it is a hardware problem. (And if it is, I'm reasonably certain the computer's still under warranty as it's only a month old.)

ETA: Oh, goody, Sims 2 crashed while unloading from memory. This is the sound of me not being a happy bunny. I'll test through Mint tomorrow...

I bought a new computer a couple of weeks ago, out of a combination of 'I'd really like to play Dragon Age some time this decade' and a slight worry that if I move out this year (hopefully...) then by the time I'll next be able to afford an upgrade my current one will be eight or nine years old and dead on its feet. (It's already four or five years old, hence the Dragon Age problem.)

But of course I'm me, so rather than 'buy new computer, transfer data, plug in monitor, go', it's:

• Buy new computer
• Buy disk caddies and spare hard drive for new computer
• Set up Linux boot in secondary caddy (ultimately to be primary caddy)
• Transfer data: Linux to Linux
• Transfer data: Windoze to Windoze
• Realise that vital data got lost somewhere. Repeat previous two steps until done
• Back up old Linux home directory, just to be sure (can't do this with Windoze XP, because it strews files all over the place)
• Attach monitor
• Go

Well, last night the caddies arrived (but no disk yet), so I finally got to have the case off my new pet and look at its insides.

I'm still a bit surprised at how smoothly it went. In particular, I've never known a desktop case open and close so smoothly. No awkwardly-placed hooks to line up, no putting all your weight on it to get the top to slide back in properly, no 'you know what, I think I'll just leave the case off, it'll be easier for next time'. The only time I had a problem was when, being lazy, I tried to put the second side panel on without moving round to its side of the case. The second I was correctly positioned, it slotted back in very nicely indeed.

I am, however, still giggling slightly at the way my new caddy drive arrived with the keys locked inside the drawer. It's just as well I bought the same model as I had on my old tower, otherwise I'd never have got them out.

This time next week, I'll hopefully have the new hard drive and two(!) 64-bit Linux discs, because my dad objects to me torrenting large amounts of data and I want to make a proper decision between Ubuntu and Mint. Ubuntu seems to be trying to mimic the OSX GUI of late, and I'm not terribly fond of the results.

Amazing, the parental dichotomy here.

I spend Saturday with my mother. She's exhausted and it's pissing it down all day, but we still contrive to have a good natter, accidentally go to three shopping malls* and just possibly find me a house.


*Had lunch in one, got lost in another, looked at furniture in a third, bought nothing... it's a long story. Her long-standing feud with the sat-nav was briefly involved.

I spend two hours on Sunday with my father. I alternate between being ignored and talked at. It's apparently a massive gift on his part to not cook my vegetables (seriously, it's less work on your part, what is the problem). I have to explain everything five times because he won't bloody listen. And now I'm on the verge of tears. Again.

One to ensure I know I'm special, one to ensure I know I'm worthless. Is this what well-balanced parenting is meant to mean? And why can't I be living with the good cop?

Still! Houses and mortgages and grown-up stuff, oh my.

( Good cop, bad cop episode 2: banks and estate agents! )

Okay, that's not entirely fair on him, the reason I'm taking him along is that he's an engineer and he'll be able to tell me how much really needs doing to it. But that does basically boil down to YOU, PLEASE NITPICK MY LIFE SOME MORE, so...

I have book reviews piling up. I should do something about those.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm doing a course on set design for film and TV. There are several reasons:

• I'm determined to get out of the house more. Not because I'm lonely - I'm not - but because I'm fed up being the awkward shy one who hovers around gatherings never saying a word, and the only way to develop social confidence is to get out and meet people.


• I'm still vaguely considering trying to get a job in the industry, and I have no practical experience whatsoever.


• Even if I never do anything about getting that job, knowing how to design a set for atmosphere and character would be a useful skill to have as a writer of any stripe. Also, model-making could be handy for more complex scenes.


• I'm interested.

And here are the problems I knew I had going in:

• Drawing? Hah! I laugh in the face of visual representation! And straight lines, and scale, and people who are not the shape of potatoes with mittens for hands!


• Very little practical experience, and none of it more recent than AS level. Unless you count drawing up groundplans for stories so the rooms don't all move around, that is.

Unsurprisingly, I have more problems than just those. I'm not much good at composition (though I'm better at it than I am at drawing, due to understanding some basic photography principles), and the project we're doing is for a chat show: none of my relevant writing skills apply. Still, I knew it was a steep learning curve when I signed up. I wonder how much of a curve it'll be for everyone else though...

( Ramblings: Fine Art, suspension of disbelief, and patronising teachers )

Just fell off my swing. Still in shock a bit. Dad's gone back to sleep, so I'm mostly typing this to keep myself awake for another half hour or so in case of concussion. (It's one a.m. here. Yes, I have odd garden habits.)

Rope broke at the top: I think it was that loose joint that's been bothering me for ages. I was fairly high up and I'm pretty sure I flew right out and landed in the middle of the garden.

I'll have a full injury tally in the morning, I'm sure, but so far: nothing's broken. Any concussion is probably mild, but I'm not risking it. Shock's fading, apparently I function quite well through shock (odd, since I freeze in an actual crisis). One swelling eyelid, which'll probably be a proper shiner by morning. The same eyelid is grazed, that's an interesting experience. I can see fine out of it, though, which is just as well since it's my good eye...

Bit of a headache, bruised shoulder, whiplashed spine/neck. Could be much, much worse.

But hey! Only recently, I was bemoaning my lack of first-hand experience for writing characters in pain. That scene's going to be awesome now.