katiefoolery

OK, so technically I promised that this would be photos of the new house.

It isn’t.

I do have photos of the new house. The difficulty in bringing them to you all lies in the fact that a) I am lazy, and, b) uploading the photos involves overcoming said laziness. But I shall.

In the meantime, please accept this list of best ofs served up by my week.

Best moron of the week
This one seems like a contradiction in terms, but oh well. The award goes to the guy who walked up to my bus-stop this afternoon and proceeded to sit down and smoke, despite the fact that it’s illegal to do so in a bus shelter and that, thanks, but I don’t want to die of lung cancer.

So cue me walking away to stand up and wait for my bus after a long day of work in which precious few breaks were to be found. The main reason for their scarcity probably lies in the fact that they were cunningly disguised as more work.

And then, this lovely gentleman GETS UP AND CONTINUES ON HIS WALK.

*swears at length*

Strangely enough, bus shelters aren’t actually your personal under-cover smoking seats - they’re BUS SHELTERS. People might want to, I don’t know, shelter under them in air that isn’t carcinogenic.

Thank-you so much.

I need to swear some more...

*does so*

Best achievement of the week
Actually waking up when my alarm went off. Once. I had it set for 6:45am (although it’s actually 6:30am, since I follow in the age-old tradition of putting one’s alarm clock ahead in order to encourage timely efficiency... when all it really does is assure me I can safely sleep in for fifteen minutes longer). So, as I was saying before that ridiculously long parenthesis interrupted me, I had it set for 6:45am, which only resulted in my sleeping in ’til seven. Aha! I thought to myself. If I set it for six thirty, then I’ll only sleep in ’til quarter to seven!

Which was a fantastic theory.

In reality, I woke up at six thirty and just slept in for half an hour instead.

But not this morning! This morning I was up and stumbling about in the miserable darkness mere minutes after the alarm had gone off. So huzzah for me and my timely rising.

Best catastrophe
This is an odd one and I apologise in advance for it, but the world’s going to end and it’s all my fault. I’ll probably expand on this at a later date.

And finally...
Best quote of the week
This one goes to Bindi, although it’s mostly for randomness. The quote in question? “I try not to look at my sister-in-law’s ass.”

Yeah.

I don’t know whether to be relieved or offended.

Current Mood: content

That Timothy of mine brought up the fact that it’s been well over a week since I last posted here and I discovered I have no real explanation for this. No explanation, but plenty of excuses.

Perhaps I could blame Bleach for being so addictive that I spent several days simply re-reading it and falling even more in love with it than before. I’m now equipped with several quite cracktastic theories, too. And characters I didn’t care for before have suddenly endeared themselves to me without my evening noticing it. I just have one question: if you haven’t read it yet, what’s stopping you? Look, I’ll make it easy for you all: go to Bleach Exile and download the first volume. If you’re not one hundred percent addicted after reading that, there’s no hope for you. Mind you, there’s no hope for you if you do become addicted... so there’s nothing to lose really, is there?

What else can I blame? Perhaps the iTunes store - that’s a good one. I seem to go on little adventures there, leaping from song to song until I find something I like. And thank goodness you can buy single songs there or I’d be completely destitute my now. Cursèd addictive thing that it is.

Or I could blame the onset of colder weather, ’cause that’s been making me rather cranky of late. I don’t remember any sort of transition: one minute, it was warm and Summery, the next, it was cold and miserable. Although I suppose that’s rather relative when it comes to me. As far as I’m concerned, “cold” applies to anything below about twenty degrees celsius. On the up side, the new position of my desk has me sitting right next to one of the central heating vents. That should keep me nice and warm once the cold weather really sets in.

And tomorrow, I am off to Beechworth for almost four whole days. Four whole days without the internet... Don’t do anything too exciting whilst I'm gone. :D

Current Mood: indifferent

I’m having one of those strange days where I just like typing. It doesn’t matter what it is - I could be writing the greatest novel even known to humankind or a list of reasons why I shouldn’t stay up long past midnight on a work night - as long as I’m typing something, my brain and fingers are happy.

Actually, now that I think of it, I probably should write that list of reasons why I shouldn’t stay up long past midnight on a work night. I really do need more than five hours’ sleep, especially if my cursed cat is going to insist on waking me up half an hour before the alarm. If she wasn’t so damn cute she’d be right out on the streets. Although I did feel slightly bad when I accidentally kicked her in the head. I wasn’t trying to! She was trying to rub on my legs (universal cat-speak for “FEED ME NOW FOR I AM CUTE BUT ALSO STARVING TO DEATH!”) and I was trying to prevent it as I was still sulking over her waking me up at an unearthly hour... and this resulted in my kicking her slightly. She didn’t mind but then, she was rather focussed on getting some food out of me. If she had to put up with a small kick to the head to get her breakfast, then so be it.

And then she knocked half of her biscuits onto the floor and refused to pick them up when I told her to. She’s such a disobedient cat.

In other news, I’ve been trying to get back to my habit of writing a list of tasks to accomplish each day. The only down-side is I usually end up laughing at said list by the end of the day, amused by my absolute inability to complete even the simplest of tasks. So far, I’ve failed to: write several emails, write one hundred words, complete a drabble, make a new banner for my LJ and finish beta-ing one chapter. On the up side, I have written (and read) several rather long PMs, created havoc in the Survivor game I’m running with

linnet_101, made two and a half banners (although NOT for my LJ) and found the time to curse my iriver at length for failing to have a proper shuffle songs function.

I am achieving things; they just happen to be the wrong things.

Current Mood: wordy

When people ask me what it’s like in Beechworth (and it happens more often than you might think), I usually tell them it’s the most quiet place I’ve ever been to. And that’s saying something, considering I work in a library. This is part where we gloss over the fact that it’s a school library and it’s only ever quiet when the doors are shut, the lights are out and everybody’s gone home for the night. Because teachers can be even noisier than students, if they put a little effort into it.

But to return to Beechworth - it really is quiet. Even when I lived in a side street in Watsonia, I thought it was quiet. Now, living on a major, six land road near a minor intersection and a bus stop, I think it’s an oasis of calm. At any given time, I can stop and hear nothing but the occasional car whisking past, one or two birds and a silly little insect that that seems to believe that its mission in life is to shriek “jeeka-jeeka-jeeka” all day long right outside the window. It’s as though the town takes any extraneous sound and just buries it deep in the honey-coloured granite on which it’s built.

Mind you, this quiet I’m referring to only exists at my parents’ place. Go into the centre of town at any time after about nine of the morning and you’ll find it to be very far from a haven of silence. But I don’t have to do that. I can just sit inside and gaze out at lovely country scenes whilst listening to the sort of silence that isn’t provided by six lanes of traffic and a bus pulling to a noisy stop every five minutes or so.

I probably haven’t achieved as much as I wanted to on my stay in Beechworth, mostly because just lazing about reading a book or playing crib with the Ma is more attractive than actually doing anything. I also lay some blame squarely at the feet of the fact that five days in Beechworth passed a lot quicker than I expected them to. And although I experienced withdrawal symptoms from my Timothy, Pickle and the internet, I managed to cope. Just.

In fact, I’ve even picked out the house we want to buy. It’s on the Beechworth road, about ten minutes from my parents’ place and even though it’s green, it has the most plendiferous views over the mountains leading up to the Victorian alps and Mount Buffalo. I’d never get any writing done, because I’d spent all my time starting at the view, but that’s beside the point. And so is the fact that we’re not actually going to be buying any houses at any point in the immediate future.

It does look quite nice, though.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that I even dream differently when I’m at my parents’ place. I can’t explain it, but there’s some difference there. For a start, I actually remember more dreams than I do normally. I can’t remember them very well now, but I do recall a dream in which many cats were swapped around, until I ended up with Pickle again and another dream in which some fellow LorFers and I misbehaved in some sort of school class, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Which is often the day of dreams, I suppose.

Ah well - here we are, back to normal. I shall miss the peace and beauty of the country but hopefully, they’ll serve as a reminder of what I’m trying to aim for with my writing. One day... One day, I’ll be there in my country house, with my Timothy. One day.

P.S. I missed you all.

Current Mood: relaxed

I'm feeling weirdly organised these days and I think it has a lot to do with this:

I bought it ages ago and had to wait impatiently until the new year arrived so I could finally use it. And it works. Look at all those ticks, indicating completed items! Well, squint your eyes in the general direction, at least. I seem to work best when I write out my tasks for the day and tick them off with glee once they're done. It gives me a sense of direction and, most importantly, it works.

The most significant items for today were up the top and are un-ticked in this photo. They're ticked now. Essentially, they mean that Postcards is finally at a point where it's ready to be sent out into the wide world. At last. Tomorrow's writing task reads: Submit Postcards. The item under it should read: panic madly, but I've left that off in the hopes that I'll procrastinate and not do it if it's not written down.

One of my other tasks for today was to do some weeding and cleaning up of the porch area. Despite my habit of killing plants simply by looking at them, I have this wildly ambitious plan to eventually have our garden looking spiffy and neat. Luckily, I'm being sensible and taking it a step at a time. I didn't take a before picture of the porch, so you'll just have to imagine the weeds and the accumulated leaves and grunge before looking at this after picture.

And since I was outside taking photos anyway, I thought I'd take some more of the front of our house.

Here, you can see the front corner of our house. Items of interest include Pickle's favourite window, known in our house as "Cat TV". She also likes to climb up the flyscreen here, which results in us yelling at her and her getting all sulky.

( Ye photo of same )

This is the rest of the house-front, where you can see my nicely cleaned-up porch, Bindi's bedroom window and our bedroom window. Rivetting! You can also see my Timothy's garage right at the back, to which he likes to escape from time to time. Oh yes, and the rubbish bin.

( How could I forget the rubbish bin? )

It would seem to be time to think of some writing goals for tomorrow. Once I've sent Postcards off and panicked about it, I should probably get to work on my Nunnery story. It has been subjected to some rather helpful critiques over at the Ober.net messageboards. This has been an incredibly productive experience, as many of the comments on the story have caused me to think more seriously about its structure. I knew beforehand that the structure of the story was its weakest point and it has been helpful to have other readers point out why this is so.

All in all, I'm feeling very positive about this story and I'm looking forward to getting to grips with it.