Eeep! It's snowing! It's probably going to get washed away by morning, but we're looking pretty nasty out there right now. Also, teh Interwebz ate my LJ comments, so I got a bit of a surprise when I looked at my message box a couple of minutes ago. Anyway...

It is a little over two weeks until Christmas, and the yarn I ordered for making a couple of presents has only just arrived. Good thing I chose quite small projects, but I may still be working hard to finish on time. Must remember to pack my blocking T pins - there's no way these will be done before I leave and blocking does help the lace to pop.

I cast on for a new pair of socks on Saturday. They're quite exciting, to me, anyway. Firstly, it's my first time using Malabrigo Sock and I'm in love. Seriously, this stuff is gorgeous. I'm already thinking seriously about using it in a sweater, it's that soft and lovely.

Secondly, I'm adapting a cuff-down pattern to use my favourite toe-up construction. The main detail is a lace panel going up the side of the foot, so it's slightly more complex to work than my usual plain socks. I ended up going from the top left corner of the lace chart rather than the bottom right and hoping for the best. Last night I finished the heel on the first one, so I just have the leg to work and I was able to try it on to see exactly how well it fitted.

I had a good feeling from previous tries, but it was still nice to have confirmation that they're a perfect fit. My purple stripy socks from a couple of months ago are also a beautiful fit so this is reassurance that they were not a fluke. I can indeed, finally, knit socks that fit my feet just right. As the lace on these ones could have made them a slightly looser fit, I'm doubly happy to have them right. Most importantly, the length is nice and snug (without squishing) so shoes will fit over them without issue, unlike my first couple of pairs!

My current projects are also teaching me that while I love Mal Sock, I'm not so keen on Worsted. It's nice, it's soft, and the colours are gorgeous, but I'm glad that I only bought one skein as a trial to make a hat rather than diving in with a sweater. It's not a plied yarn - it's one thick strand that feels more felted than anything else. Rather like the Mal Silky, in face, but without the gloss of the silky so I'm finding it harder to work. I think that it would be a nightmare to frog and I can see just from the nature of the single ply that this is a yarn that will have issues with growing over time.

I'm going to love the hat I'm making, but I may not be using the Worsted for anything bigger.

The Sock, though, would make a gorgeous cowl necked sweater. In fact, it would make the beautiful cowl necked sweater that I love from Knit So Fine which gmul gave me for my birthday. I've already got my eye on a colour way. Hmm...

Plotting and planning new projects is almost as fun as knitting them!

So, in a little over a week I fly to England for Christmas, weather permitting. (No storms between here, Boston, and England, please)

The funniest thing about this process is everyone's impression of Christmas in England. I'm quite happy to say that I lived in the south of England and things are different up north and in Scotland. Everyone that I talk to (even people who have visited the UK) have this strange impression that Christmas where I lived is cold and snowy and pretty, rather like one of the Victorian paintings.

Er.

A hundred years ago, probably even sixty years ago, this wasn't too far from the truth. Now?

Not so much.

Christmas in my little corner of England is usually warm (5C+ - sometimes low teens) and the precipitation we get is in the form of rain. Bright, sunny Christmases aren't something that I really remember, although I'm sure we've had them. They're usually damp or raining. There's a lot of mud. Winter in my corner of England might get snow for one day in February, but that's it. Last year's snow was such a big deal purely because we don't normally get weather like that and the country isn't prepared.

I blame Hollywood.

Seriously, when is the last time you saw a festive movie set in London (it's always London or the surrounds - never Bognor or Cardiff or York or some other non-South East location) that didn't have convenient snow on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? As much as I enjoyed watching the move Holiday at the weekend, I kept cringing from all the exceedingly unlikely snow in Sussex. If it's a location that people where people can commute to London for work, there is unlikely to be snow on the ground in December.

I am not saying that Christmas isn't lovely over there. A crisp, cold, bright winter's morning can't be beaten and there are a lot of absolutely beautiful places that I'll be visiting. That Victorian Christmas that everyone is imagining me having, though, is about as probable as a Labour win in the next general election.

I'm thinking that, to counter-act all this crazy talk about beautiful snowy London, I'm going to take a photo journal while I'm away and try to upload to Flickr each evening. Sound good?

I've just jinxed it to snow from the moment I land, haven't I?

My recent lack of blogging can largely be summed up as "where the hell did November go and why is it December 6th already?". Sorry about that. ETA: As it is actually December 7th, it's even worse than I thought!

I'd try to catch you all up with everything, but November and early December has disappeared with me only really aware of two events:

( Cut for length )

So, yes, six weeks went by with only two really outstanding events (apart from new Doctor Who, obviously).

I'm not quite sure why my ability to write, blog or really think went so badly AWOL over the last few weeks. I'm blaming books, though.

I've been on a bit of a murder mystery kick for the last two months. As entertaining as it's been, mystery fiction doesn't really get my thinky side going. It tends more to get me being lazy about thinkiness. I had a brief break while I read the source for my Yuletide fic, then I was back to mysteries with "The Killings at Badgers' Drift". I enjoyed that hugely (it confirmed that Midsomer really is a set of villages inserted into and/or based on the area I grew up in) and finished it on Saturday morning. I'm going to England in less than two weeks (!!) and I can't borrow anything new from the library because I may not have time to return it before I leave. So I wandered down to the office/library to look for something new to read.

Why haven't I re-read The Dark Is Rising sequence since I was a teenager? I remember loving it and yet I've not picked it up since. I accidentally brought my Dad's copies to Canada with me and it appealed as a nice break from crime fiction so I grabbed the first one on Saturday.

I finished Over Sea, Under Stone yesterday. The only reason that I haven't finished The Dark Is Rising is because I had to work today. They're really very compelling. And they're making me think and imagine again, although I'm not sure that I can put much of it into words.

Reading The Dark Is Rising is reminding me a lot of the feeling I get when watching The Box of Delights. I think it's the mixture of Christmas setting, older wise mentor (I'm sorry, Merriman Lyon looks rather like Cole Hawlings in my head), magical snow storms and a young boy coming of age and having adventures filled with magic and time travel. They're very different stories, really, but the surface elements are there.

It's rather a good time of year to be reading that kind of thing.

Going back to the non-blogging thing, I'm hoping that I won't be taking this kind of break again any time soon. I need to remember that, as good as a good crime novel is, it doesn't stimulate my imagination or my mind in quite the same way that a good dose of fantasy or children's literature does. I miss my imagination when it's not working properly.

I have one paragraph of my Yuletide fic. I'm reasonably sure this isn't enough.

I have been hit with both a lot of socialising and a sense of ennui about blogging all of it. I'm not quite sure what has happened to me. Hopefully I'll be back to normal soon.

It's a little over two weeks until I fly to England for Christmas. This fact hasn't really hit me properly yet. I'm sure that I'm supposed to be making lists or something now.

Annie spent half an hour trying to find a comfy way to perch herself across my hands so that I couldn't type, getting shifted back to the sofa every time she got to invasive. She's now curled up against my leg, warm and snuggly, with her ears twitching to tell me that she's not really asleep. I should really get some writing done while she's not in the way.

But I want to read "The Killings at Badger's Drift" and that won't get me a Yuletide fic.

Seriously, someone needs to crack a whip and force me to write. Perhaps I should set a goal. 500 words minimum before I'm allowed to goof off and watch House. That's doable, right?

So, I've got myself an account on Archive of Our Own as Selenay. Right now, I'm slowly copying my Doctor Who and miscellaneous fiction over (OMG, the upload interface is lovely) and then I'll think about whether to copy everything else over.

I'm slightly embarrassed to, because I know that the older stuff is not great and I don't feel that it represents what I'm capable of now. Although some may argue that I haven't actually improved at all for the last few years ;-)

The reason that I'm conflicted is that one of the goals of the entire Organisation for Transformative Works move is to ensure that, if an author goes off-line for some reason, their work is preserved if they want it to be. At the moment, if I died tomorrow then my website would go off-line in a couple months. Most of the fiction is mirrored in the major archives for the relevant fandoms, but I know that the Buffy stuff isn't and one thing we've all learned over the last few years is how easily even those major archives can disappear.

Hell, an archive disappearing is the reason I built my website in the first place!

So, while I'd quite like to not transfer everything over and I'm slightly embarrassed by some of it, I suspect that I will be gradually copying everything. There's just rather a lot of it so it may take quite a while.

( Cut for spoilers )

No exclamation marks were harmed in the making of this post. One or two may have been slightly creased, though.

So, is everyone excited? Ready? Got their viewing plans sorted?

I'm counting down the hours, now :-D

Dear Santa,

For this year's Yuletide I found that I knew which fandoms I wanted some fic in, even which characters, but got a bit stuck on the actual prompts. This is why most of my prompts are fairly bare. All I really want for Christmas is some good, plotty fic that explores my beloved characters a bit. And plotty does not mean that I want a 32,000 word adventure: it means that I want something to happen in the fic and there to be some kind of reaction and learning from the characters. Really, I'm just trying to say that I'm not the kind of person who loves a "xx and yy go buying shoes!" kind of thing.

That said, I can probably provide some more info on my fandoms and why I love them and want more from them, although I'd really just like you to write something you enjoy and feel proud of at the end. So you can ignore my prompts entirely if you need to. But please, no death fic and no extreme violence/tragedy or non/dub-con, kthx. Those are the things I deliberately avoid in fic.

( Cut for length and irrelevance to 90% of my f-list )

(Posting via email - hence any formatting issues)

Yesterday was the most stressed that I've felt since the run-up to the
launch of the Massive Christmas Tracking Project in my old job. I don't
think I slept properly all week. There were a lot of wobbles through the
day, times when I was trying to respond to five IM conversations at once and
wanted to tell three people to go away, but thankfully it's done and 85% of
the Zombie Project went into production.

The other 15% is the bit that's not done yet and we're still trying to
figure out how we can even make it work. None of the other stuff is
dependent on it, though, so the deployment was unaffected.

We had a slight issue around security settings on a table that the DBA
managed to fix this morning. One overnight processing job blew up this
morning because an index had not been setup on a new materialised view,
which was easily fixed by smiling nicely at the DBA.

So, the stuff is actually there on our production server. Sadly, most of it
has not been tested yet so we don't know whether it's going to blow up yet.
The business analyst for the project is sick and my boss is working from
home so that she doesn't infect us with her lurgy, so the testing will not
happen until Monday at earliest.

I'm already feeling a bit more relaxed, though. After a day from hell I went
out last night with my knit group and a night of food, laughter and knitting
helped a lot. Hopefully I can catch up with some sleep over the weekend and
feel much more able to cope with everything next week. I enjoy my job a lot,
but I wish that I wasn't quite so much of a perfectionist because a lot of
my stress was pressure that I had put on myself. It always feels like the
success (or not) of a project reflects a lot on my professionalism and I
want to be bloody good at my job. Finding the middle ground between caring
about how well I do my job and getting crazy obssessed by it is something I
fail at totally.

Due to all the extra time that I put in yesterday, I'm leaving an hour early
today. I shall probably be hitting the Gap for a new pair of casual trousers
and then possibly slumping in Starbucks for a while with hot chocolate. Then
I'm conflicted.

On the one hand, I could buy some grociers and then order pizza when I get
home so that I don't need to cook.

Or I could get some takeout from my favourite sushi place, except I really
want some tempura based things with it and that doesn't transport well
because my house is so far from everywhere.

Or I could eat my sushi at the restaurant and pick up groceries on the way
home, except I'd be eating alone.

Or I could do what I usually do when faced with these options, which is to
feel guilty about not wanting to cook and therefore buy my groceries, go
home and eat toast because I have no energy to cook. Hey, at least I
prepared the toast myself!

In yet another example of my IT department's ability to communicate, there is controversy over the department Christmas outing. One of the managers decided that it would be a great idea to hire an entire screen at the local cinema so that we could all bring our families for a private showing of the new Christmas Carol movie. This idea was discussed at the team meeting for my team last week and we all firmly stated that this wasn't what we wanted to do and that none of us would actually be going.

Co-worker L toddled off to state our position to our manager. He apparently nodded and agreed that it might not be a good plan.

Thus, today, we received an email inviting us to the IT Christmas event...a private showing of A Christmas Carol. Signed by all the managers, including ours.

Gah.

Just to make it even better, the entire event (and the wording makes this clear) is aimed at families with children. Not exactly inclusive to those of us who have chosen not to spawn or who are not yet parents. Nor is it great for those with older children who have flown the nest.

The final nail in the coffin is that our manager's budget has been put into this, leaving nothing for an alternative event, and none of my team will be going. We'll still be doing something - probably going out for a nice lunch - but we'll be picking up the tab ourselves. Unlike last year, when our manager's budget was used to buy us a rather nice meal at a very nice restaurant one evening and we all got to be grown-ups and enjoy each other's company.

I am perfectly fine with my decision not to have children and most of the time it isn't a problem. Then there are things like this where I am made to feel like an excluded, second-class citizen because I don't have children and it makes me angry.

I do understand that we're trying to do more things as a department, rather than splitting into our little teams for everything, but that really only works when joint activities have half a chance of being enjoyable for the majority. Probably less than a quarter of the department have children under 10 and the only adult in my team that wants to see this movie has already seen it with his girlfriend. The only person in my team with kids under 10 has them in activities that are ramping up for Christmas displays so she can't pull them out for a Saturday morning (yes, Saturday morning!) event like this.

On the one hand, I'm glad that I've got a bridal shower to use as an excuse not to go (rather than having to confess my hatred for Jim Carey to my manager). OTOH, I'm pretty peeved that my team's budget will be going to support an event that none of us will actually be attending and we'll be having to fork out for our own thing instead.

I haven't blogged the last couple of experimental Mondays - I went on a bit of a soup binge and I can report that roasted sweet potato soup is yummy. Last week I was feeling totally uninspired and cooked easy, familiar comfort food.

But fear not! During the week I got a craving for cannelloni and did a bit of Googling for recipes. I'm trying to cut down on my meat intake (twice a week is plenty, I think) so spinach and ricotta was the obvious choice. I suspected that just mixing some spinach with ricotta wasn't going to work and I was right. I ended up using the filling from one recipe, the construction/cooking principle from a couple of others and substituting homemade tomato sauce with store bought pasta sauce.

It was so good. Really, so good. Must write it up so that I have for the next time. I divided the cannelloni and sauce between one glass dish and three foil dishes. Topped the glass dish with a bit of cheese and baked it, the three foil dishes have been covered and put into the freezer. So I now have three portions of home cooked yumminess for another day. Yay!

With all the cheese, I suspect that it's not the lowest calorie thing ever but I thoroughly enjoyed it and it's wonderful comfort food while tasting nicely fresh from the spinach. Plus, it's vegetarian!

Now I must go and cuddle a cat. Annie is rather determined that I need to pay her lots of attention and give her lots of cuddles pronto. Pushy little annoyance :-)

I thought long and hard and got my Yuletide sign-up today while I waited for some files to copy over to my shiny new toy. Yay!

It was actually easier to think of things I could offer than request. I knew which fandoms I wanted to request, but actual prompts were hard to think of. I tried to offer for fandoms with low offer take-ups and that I knew the source well. I don't have immediate access to the final two seasons of Press Gang, but can get access, and the other things that I offered are fandoms that I definitely have access to.

Now to see what I get! I'm kind of hoping for a particular fandom, where only two people (including me) have offered/requested but I'll be quite happy with whichever one I get. My Santa note will go up in a couple of days.

Supper is in the slow cooker (mmm, ribs...) and now I'm just waiting for files to copy over to my new drive before I make some lunch and talk to the parents. Should be quite a nice, relaxed Sunday.

Did I mention that I have 150 words of the Doctor and Donna having a Christmas adventure?

Only one week until new Doctor Who!

My day out was lovely, although I did get home with a sore back (er, so nothing new there) and a bit of a headache. Feeling much better now due to the consumption of rather fine sushi. Yay.

But...

I have toys! I have a Western Digital My Passport 400GB hard drive that is tiny and beautiful. That will be played with extensively tomorrow.

I also have a teeny little optical mouse that attaches to the compy by USB and the little USB stick actually fits into the mouse when it's packed away. It is awesome. And it will make using my lappy so much easier. Shall no longer be knocking the cats off my lap each time I need to access another video file, for a start.

I love toys.

Also, Tubey has been bound off and the ends woven in. I tried it on and feel very happy with it. Best of all, I got to ceremonially add it to my sweater shelf. That's one of my favourite moments, when something turns from something I've been working on to something that's a part of my wardrobe. I'm planning to debut it at knit night :-D

And now for Strictly Come Dancing and a sock, I think.

So Friday sucked a bit, but thankfully my week is now over :-D When your day starts with unexpected snow (!!! It's only early November) you know things aren't going to go well. I like snow, except when I've got to drive through it and I'm the only person in the province with winter tires.

Anyway, today is going to be a day of awesome. I have chores to do first, but then I'm off to do fun things. I'm going into Staples to buy a portable external hard drive. This year I'm doing a Christmas box for a child somewhere overseas, so I'm also going to pick up lots of paper, pens, pencils and stuff.

Then it's off to the mall for some more things for the box - hat/mittens set, possibly, and a small toy or two. Must remember to buy a shower cap while I'm out because mine is dying. I may pop into Starbucks for hot chocolate action :-D

After that, I'm popping into my local yarn shop. I need to drop off some DVDs and possibly spend a bit of time knitting and gossiping. Then I shall pick up the odds and ends I couldn't get at the store last night (spinach and ricotta cannelloni requires, er, spinach) before picking up some sushi and heading home to watch SJA and Spooks.

If all this actually works as planned, I'm going to have an awesome day.

Everyone can skip on by this post in which I reveal the depth of my Strictly Come Dancing shameful addiction.

( Cut for shame shame shame )

In other news, apparently Spooks started airing last night. Guess I know what I'll be watching this weekend :-D Yay Spooks!

I have the first episode of V on my DVR. V/Spooks double bill?

My release has been pushed back to Tuesday. At the earliest. We're starting to get worryingly close to the date that our server is being upgraded to an Oracle 11g box and we still need to test that none of this blows up on the new box. Eeep! And since writing this, we had determined that changes we need to make are going to ensure that we won't even hit Tuesday. This year sometime, maybe?

My Tubey sweater is coming along fabulously. Only a few more inches (maybe four or five) and then I can bind off. I've been weaving in ends as I go, mostly, so there is not much finishing to do on it - I may be wearing it this weekend! Or, er, finding a good day to debut my new knit. I'm feeling really pleased with how it's turned out, though.

There is a tiny part of me that's panicking about not having another big project lined up ready to go when I bind off, but actually this is a good thing. I've got a number of small projects that I've been intending to do: a baby jacket for a friend, a couple of cowls, a couple of Christmas gifts and, of course, some socks for myself. I've got more than enough to keep my occupied until the end of the year and I intend to buy a sweater's worth of something in the John Lewis sale while I'm over so that will be my next big project. 2009 has definitely been my most productive year of knitting.

For this first time in my life, I'm seriously considering a work out video. It's not that I need to lose weight, but I need to improve my overall fitness levels and the treadmill is so dull that it's hard to keep myself going, I could go out and spend a few hundred on another type of fancy equipment, or I could see whether a dance work-out video or two would work better for me. I'd be getting a work-out and also concentrating on learning the moves (I've got my eye on a Bollywood one and a Latin dance) which would hopefully keep me interested. Even watching TV while on the treadmill is failing to keep me motivated. Reading while walking on a treadmill is not exactly safe and I suspect that, even then, I'd be struggling. So I'll think about it and probably order at the weekend.

I used to have a tradition of writing something for Christmas. Last year I did Yuletide instead (and with my lack of power during Christmas week, I'm glad that I didn't try to have something posted on Christmas Eve) but I have usually tried to do something. I'm doing Yuletide again this year and I'll be in England, but I think that maybe I'll give Donna and the Doctor a Christmas adventure. Or something. Anyone going to be free in December for a quick beta if I pull this off?

Only ten days to new Doctor Who! Not that I'm counting or anything...

Yuletide sign ups are open: http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/signup_page1.cgi

Eep! It's going to be a really tough choice this year. Made even worse by the fact that B5 is eligible this year. At first I was "WTF?" about that, until I remembered how frustrated I've been about the fact that I found the Internet too late to join in the B5 ficcing. Most of the websites that hosted B5 fic have gone, there is only a smattering on the big archives, and very little new stuff is coming out. So, er, B5 actually does qualify as a rare fandom now.

*sigh*

I've only got four request slots available and, including B5, seven that I'd love to request. So I need to sit down and think carefully, not just about which fandoms I want fic from but also what fandoms I can think of good prompts for. Last year I got really luck with two lovely Bend It Like Beckham Jess/Jules stories (after three years of not getting BILB at all even in femslash challenges) but I'm greedy and want more. Then again, there's Press Gang. And my beloved Holby City. And Chalet School. And Casualty 1909 is already up as requested/offered, so there's a possibility. And Young Wizards seems to get some lovely stuff written.

The thing that's not going to be as difficult this year, I think, is working out what I can offer. I made notes of which fandoms I was considering at nomination stage and even in the ones that I didn't nom, there are several that I feel I can offer. I'm trying to make sure that this year I only offer for things that I have easy access to source material for :-) So that I don't get asked to write fic for one of the Chalet Schools that I don't have...

I think that I need to have a good, long think about this and do my sign up at the weekend.

Now, is there any kind of Doctor Who Santa type thing out there? After all, two deadlines is better than one. Um.

I'm feeling much better about everything today. My back is feeling much better (the extra anti-inflammatories and the hour with a cold pack last night might have something to do with it), my stomach is behaving again and thus I can cope with the insanity at work. Hey, I'm even feeling quite sanguine about the possibility of missing my release.

It should be noted that this was written at 9am, even if I'm not actually posting it until later.

So, yes. Life is much looking much better today.

I'm even feeling quite calm about the prospect of snow at the moment. My winter tyres are on, my freezer is stocked and it's not a disaster if I can't do my groceries on Friday because I'll be able to do them on Saturday and I'm not scarily low on anything important. Must remember to call my plough guy tonight and check that he's still up for clearing my drive this winter. Not that I expect to get *that* much snow, but I need to be prepared for when I do get that much snow.

I keep having the thought that there is something important happening on November 15th. Sometimes I remember immediately, other times it takes me quite a while and there's this nagging "WTF?" feeling at the back of my mind. I've blocked the time into my calendar now in hopes that I'll keep remembering that it's new Doctor Who night rather than feeling slightly confused all the time. And, y'know, so that I don't book myself to be somewhere else that night.

Moffat, please never let there be a year under your reign where we don't get DW series.

Today has been a Bad Day.

My back has been hurting a fair bit for the last couple of weeks and I've been waking up a lot through the night, finding myself lying flat on my back which only makes it worse. I'm suspecting that part of the reason for my back being so sore and stiff when I first get up is the sleep position issue. Last night I tried sleeping with a cushion to prop me a bit and another to cuddle-ish and it seemed to work. Or at least, I slept pretty well and wasn't lying on my back or front when I woke up! And wasn't *quite* as stiff as I'd been other mornings.

Unfortunately, shortly after work I started to get really bad stomach cramps and nausea, which didn't make me feel amazing and my back then kicked in. Yay. Took several hours with herbal tea, heat pads and anti-spasmodics to get it under control and quell the urge to just double over and wish for death.

In the middle of this, we discovered a big issue with the project that I'm working on. That wouldn't have normally got me massively upset, but the project is suppose to go for release on Thursday and the issue could mean that I miss my release. It's that size of issue.

Plus, I haven't got the first clue how to fix it because it was one of the few bits of the software that actually appeared to be working correctly. It's all about which code gets assigned to data for which dates (yes, it's a load for some huge, complicated database tables) and it's wrong for some data. Gah.

We discovered this and my boss announced that it needed fixing just as I was feeling particularly ill. I didn't take it well.

And that is why I nearly ended up in tears at work today.

Thankfully my stomach is settled and feeling fine now. So fine that I've got a huge craving for fish and chips or possibly sushi, but I'm playing it safe and having baked salmon with steamed veg instead. My back is...um...yes. And although I'm home, I'll be spending the evening working because a whole bunch of data needs to be re-loaded for validation first thing tomorrow morning.

Really, this week can stop sucking. I'm serious. Why is food my first thought when things are going badly?

I was seriously considering doing NaNoWriMo this year. Honest.

Except that November is filling up (again) and I am struggling to write at all, never mind getting 50,000 words out in one month.

So instead, I'm challenging myself to write something this month. Anything. Even if it's just two pages of the Bambera fic and a chapter outline for the novel. If I get to December 1st and I've done some actual writing, I shall be happy with myself.

Then it will be Yuletide time and I'll have an interesting (or possibly scary) challenge to fulfil. After that, I may take a stab at TARDIS Big Bang if it runs again and I have some ideas.

But really, if I can write more than 500 words of actual fiction this month, I'll feel good.

There. Now I feel less guilty.