insert somewhat witty / self-depreciating / informative title here

oh my god. i totally have to not break promises i make to myself. i stopped drinking vodka last year, because it makes me totally depressed the next day. so for a good long time i've managed to stay away from it, even though it is quite versatile and you can get it everywhere, and it's not bad when you mix it with any of a number of various non-alcoholic substances. but last night a bunch of us were out and the pub didn't have kaluha (my new drink of choice) so i reverted to vodka. and sure enough, right now i feel like crying. and i was crying earlier today. i really hate it. please remind me never to drink vodka - it totally messes up the delicate chemical balance in my brain.

apart from all that, last night was quite good. it was a friend of lordkilljoy's birthday and we went along, as did a number of other people (some of whom were jaarius, mytholder and mulkabu) and we talked and messed about comics and movies and random people, and it was great because everyone was having a good time. then this morning (technically it was afternoon) most of the same bunch went for breakfast in hardwood (yes, it is a really wierd name for a restaurant).
buh - if this sounds uninspired it's because i'm a little tired and a little depressed, but hopefully nothing that a good movie or time spent in cyrodill or with the prince can't cure.

i'm heading to co. kildare on tuesday evening. i totally can't wait for that. you know what's even funnier, is that i always thought kildare was the second nicest county in ireland, after cork. i mean, kerry and donegal have a lot to offer, but i'm a city girl at heart and i'm really not happy if there's not a bustling metropolis within a few miles.

directions of life

woah, madness. i just applied for a job with google. my heart is kinda pounding right now... i'm such a scardy-cat. you'd think a year around the world would have cured me, but no. anyway, the job is administrative assistant, doing fun and scary sounding things like dealing with high-up execs and organizing projects and things. i think i'm insane, but i always wanted to work for google, so there you go.

in other news: not really much. i moped about yesterday for a lot and then got to reading old livejournal posts. i came across one amazingly motivational one (which actually was the reason i applied for google today). and just cause it helped me so much, i think i should put a link to it here: a motivational post.
i can't actually believe i wrote that... it seems quite profound. moments of profundity have been sparse in recent years - i guess because i've been happy with my life and with writing and travelling around the world and stuff. but seriously, that post put me in the best mood. and it's the start of summer, a lovely day, and i have someone who makes me incredibly happy :)

the prince is so cool

penelope_stone and i went for a cycle yesterday afternoon, to the powdermills. good fun. then we came home, watched some old star trek episodes (the next generation - all i can think of is the drinking game). i got bored and went and played prince of persia sands of time. it's such a good game. i love the way the prince does stuff, like talks to himself and drinks water and goes all trippy at magical fountains and kind of faints away when he dies. he's so cool. so i played that today as well.

hmmm, i really can't think of anything to say.

my novel is finally typed up

so it's been over a year since i stopped typing up my novel. not really my fault, because most of that was spent around the world.

but today i sat down at 10am, with the aim of writing up the last 3,000 words. at about 1pm i was at 3,600 words and about half way there. the final count for the day was 5,600, and the final count for my novel is a few hundred less than 120,000. sweet. i had 15 and a half thousand words to type up left since i got home. it's really not that much, i just wasn't in a mood for it.
i wonder will i have the motivation to begin editing tomorrow, or will i take a day off? not sure. right now, i'm wrecked though. my wrist started getting a bit sore towards the end.

right. that's really all i wanted to say.

planescape sundays

yeay, writing procrastination / break time.

yesterday at dave's game none of us had really eaten dinner (me, dave and claire had had sandwiches at about 2pm) so by 7 we were all a little hungry. in a fit of starvation, claire suggested doing a munchie run, so her and dave (the other dave, not the dm) went to the shop and came back with crisps and biscuits. pringles (ok), chocolate fingers (yum) and jaffa cakes (can't stop eating...). so by 8 i was totally hyper and by 11:30 i couldn't sit still anymore and was whipping the strap of my bag around. then i got home and couldn't sleep, so stayed up reading (scott pilgrim - he rocks) until 2am. ahhhhhhh. oh well.
the game was fun. we jumped a portal to an extreme logical world, asked a bunch of questions, snuck into a prison, snuck out again, asked a tonne more questions, then headed to pandemonium. there we were met by a group of magic-wielding skeletons, who we dispatched easily - my character's favourite method of killing is to go etheral, drag her enemy into the etheral with her, shove them into a solid object and phase them back into the physical world. it works like a charm. and while she's etheral she can't be hit by physical things. wonderful wonderful stuff.

i havn't much else to say. i think my body has decided that 6 hours is enough sleep for me. after falling asleep at 2 last night, i woke at 8:30 and was completely wide awake. i think the problem is that my waking chemical is seriously strong. i wake up and that's it - i have to get up and get out of bed. if i try to fall back to sleep i can't. ah well. it could be worse.

we're minding my aunt's cat for 2 weeks. she's a cute little thing, but she's spent her first day hiding behind the couch. awh. and now she's lost somewhere in the clutter of the sitting room. i need a detect life spell or something. sometimes it would be so cool to be able to cast spells in reality.

ooh, so much news

gosh, i just don't even know where to start. the week since thursday has been so good and action-packed. lordkilljoy and i went to see indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull on thursday, to kinsale and garretstown on friday, followed by mulkabu's party (his birthday is next week) and we went to the park today. wonderful stuff.

i quite enjoyed indy, while different to the last 3, it had all the elements of a good movie, fun capers, good action, a slew of entertaining characters. and while there were one or two bits that annoyed me for their utter stupidity (can anyone say tarzan??) and the ending was a bit of a surprise (not in the way it unfolded, but in what appeared on screen), i enjoyed it tremendously.
we went for mexican (yummy) and watched grosse pointe blank. i hadn't seen it in ages. that is one of my favourite films, and i don't own it. shocking! and what was great was the fact that i remembered it as being the coolest movie, and sometimes your memory can warp things into being better than they really are, but it lived up to my expectations.

friday, we went to the beach for a walk. always a brilliant thing to do. we went all the way out to the blowhole in garretstown. i think lordkilljoy was pretty tired by the time we got back to the car (sorry!!). friday night was a laugh too. the guys are so amusing to just sit back and watch. it was good to talk to jaarius again too. we ended up in the everyman (funk disco, yea :/) at that stage i ran to the bar in desperation and had a swift drink and all of a sudden everything was so much better. the music didn't sound quite as frightening! some dancing ensued, then long island ice teas (which were way too bitter) and then we ran away from a strange woman who invaded our personal space and wouldn't go away.

then this morning, lordkilljoy asked if i'd like to go see radiohead in dublin in 2 weeks. do you even need to ask the question? i kinda had a girly spas-out-excitement moment. radiohead. live. wooooooo! i had kind of random moments of excitement today, expressed by saying "radiohead" and smiling. it should be really good. radiohead :)

i listened to in rainbows for the first time today and all but 2 songs have gone to 3 stars (in itunes) already and nude has gone to 4 stars. i love radiohead.

yeay.

sometimes my writing really sucks

ah. livejournal. how i love your procrastination ability. i get annoyed with my lack of ability to make sentences sound good so i turn to you and write something different, something normal, that sounds like speech, not like some 12 year old trying desperately to sound like a published fantasy writer.

i watched the mummy last night. it's such a good film. and i watched it on my computer. the last time i tried to play a dvd my dvd drive refused to cooperate. i wonder was it just trying to remember how to work after a year of not doing anything. but i'm happy that i know i can watch dvds in my room again.

i really have absolutely nothing to say, i'm just writing here, because it's one of the only forms of procrastination that dosn't make me feel guilty about abandoning my novel.

god, i wish i could hate the internet

what an evil sink-hole of mindless time-wasting is the internet. if i had some lyrical ability i would be inspired to write an ode to it's brain-sucking tendencies. but i don't so i will just have to suffice with an explanation. i came on to update my livejournal and i ended up looking at friend's pages and their friend's pages and reading totally random things and then i remembered that i had just come on to update my journal, not faff about for half an hour (wow, faff is an actual word - it didn't come up underlinedy in red. cool) doing randomness. anyway.

i did have something rational to say.
but for the life of me i can't remember it.
it had something to do with writing, because i've been typing up the end of my novel all morning. it probably had something to do with my love affair with zachery. he is the coolest person living in my head at the moment, some of the things he does are just so incredibly cool. and i came up with these things. but i probably am totally biased, much the way a mother will unconditionally love her son, no matter what sort of stupid things he does. "oh, you held up a bank and are wanted in 35 states. you excellent boy, i'm so proud of you, why couldn't your father have been more like you." not that zachery is a bank robber, but you know.

yea, i'm quite certain that's not what i wanted to say, but it will do.

p.s. the lies of locke lamora is one of the coolest books i've read in a long time.

a morning in the countryside

i just had a wonderful cycle with penelope_stone. The sun shone for us, the countryside smelled of summer grass and summer wind. We headed for farran, through the village and out on the footpath beside the bypass. the footpath was concrete with regular divisions, the kind that are really fun to cycle over because you get a funny kind of massage. as i raced down the hill, i smiled for the joy of the wind in my face and the feeling of the footpath and i whispered to myself "i'm a train" and my smile broke into a grin of wonder. it was brilliant.
after that came the awful slog up farran hill, but it was worth it for the speed down the other side. if i hadn't been cycling, i would have closed my eyes. feeling the speed and the wind flying through you and the sun caressing you; it felt like flying.
we took a break in farran and did the obstacle course. i even managed to get most of the way across the high-bars, usually i can barely hold on to the first bar. then we headed home and i was almost dead by the time we got back. i couldn't even make it up the stairs - i had to have the bannister help me. and getting back down the stairs was just as painful. so i think i'll be really sore tomorrow, but i had fun today so it will be worth it.

dave's game last night was fun. we found out that we went totally wrong last week and that we made the adventure twice as long as it was supposed to be. ah well, we had fun interviewing / raiding the rooms of every character linked to the story.

at the taleweaver's meeting the guys made me realize that i need to make some changes to my child fiction. like the character dosn't act her age and the writing style doesn't suit the character, so i think what i'll do is tweak my character a bit and change the writing style to omnipotent narrator. i've never really done that and i've been wanting to try it for a while, so i'm not really sure how it will turn out. but it's and it's about doing things you've never done before.

i also think i'll change the way i do my location when i'm updating. i think i'll put the place the post is about, rather than my current location.

i hate being a woman

i hate my hormones. i feel so terrible today. i felt wierd yesterday too, but not as badly. i feel rather like a shattered egg today, all cracked with bits broken off and oozy clear stuff dribbling out through the holes. at least i should feel better by tomorrow or the day after.

i had a really good weekend (edit: the weekend was thursday and friday). i met up with lordkilljoy and we went to wagamama's for food. it was good, not my favourite food ever, and then we went to see ironman. it is totally the coolest film i've seen in ages. there are so many scenes in it that i absolutely love - i feel all tony stark's emotions along with him - it's a rare movie has the ability to do that.

then on sunday (edit: ok, it was friday - it felt like sunday) i got to see 300. i missed it in the cinema, much to my disappointment. i quite enjoyed it. it looked spectacular - the style and 3 tone colour scheme gave it this look that complimented the theme well. i liked it, but i wouldn't be rushing out to see it again. it was just a little too lacking in the intricate plot department.

not much happening today. i had hoped to get some writing done, but now i just think i'll sacrifice the day to mother nature and do very little of substance.

i had a wierd dream last night involving getting to an airport and not knowing the way and being convinced that i'd missed my flight but actually being a day early, because somewhere in the distant past i knew i'd have trouble getting to the airport. then there was another bit about travelling (in a car?) up hills and through forests and hoping that i came out in the right place.
yes - it was a troubled dream, cause known but not shared here.

more on typing

this is so crazy - i type better with my left hand than with my right. Is it just that the first keys i learned were asdf, so i always favoured that hand, or is it like the way i pour milk with my left hand. anyway, if you hadn't guessed, i'm practising my typing. i'm learning where all the keys actually are on the keyboard, like uiop, i never knew the exact sequence of them before and zxcv, they are ones i never knew. in fact, the whole bottom row is a stranger to me.

A Walk in the Park

last night lordkilljoy reminded me of HDR images. After looking around a few galleries i remembered why i fell in love with HDR back in college, but back then i never did anything with it. Mostly due to a lack of accessible software. So last night i tried making one, using the HDR converter thing in photoshop cs2. my test worked out ok, so today i went down the powdermills to get some pretty shots. (at one stage i had to climb a 7 foot wall because the trail i was on ended in an impassable mess of bramble and trees.)

so, what i learned from my little experiment is that trees do not make good subjects for HDR - especially when there's a bit of a breeze. water makes an even worse subject - especially up close. but i did get a few good shots in sheltered areas.
the other thing i learned is that you have to be really careful not to shake your tripod even a tiny bit.

anyway - here's a pic of my favourite shot of the day.

the sun came out today

it was a lovely day in southern ireland today. warm and bright and i wore a skirt and string top. it was nice just lazing about in the sunshine and making faces out of the few clouds.

i took a break from my computer today - i didn't turn it on until about 9 tonight. go me. days away from my computer make me feel like i've actually achieved something, even if i've done nothing at all.

i don't have any news really - i ran around the place with mammy's camera taking random pictures, i don't really get any good ones.

sunday afternoons

I watched ocean's thirteen and blood and chocolate last night. good movies, ocean's thirteen was more of the same - still fun. blood and chocolate was a love story wrapped up as a werewolf story - nothing ground-breaking, but still fun to watch.

i'm off to taleweavers later this afternoon and then to dave's planescape game this evening. i'm looking forward to that - my character is quite cool. she's the portal expert of the group - i'm looking forward to doing funky things with portals.
and for taleweavers - we've all decided to take part in genre-challenge and do a piece of child fiction. mine involves alternate realities and wierdness. i'm not sure if it will actually tie together properly - right at the moment it feels totally disjointed. more like a collage of scenes than a coherent story. ah well. i still have a few weeks until the end of may.

not much else news - i think i've just about exhausted my stockpile of post-worthy stuff. 2 posts a day for the last few days was kind of phenomenal spurt of random chatter, though. i think i'm just happy to be home :)

new phones

both of my parents now have mobile phones. in the space of a few hours the number of mobiles in the house has doubled! cool. mammy's is a nice basic phone - does phoning and texting and not a whole lot else. daddy's is quite a cool sony ericsson, which he got second hand off a friend. it has all the fun features of a SE, even though it's a bit scratched on the outside. neither of them has had a phone before, so it's a bit funny watching them make their first calls and receive texts and stuff. it's nice knowing that i can send them texts - not that i really have any reason to, but it's fun.

i'm such a procrastinator - i've done most of a plot outline for my may genre challenge, and then i decided my livejournal needed updating. :roll eyes: oh well.

ok - i'm going back writing now.

party shuffle

today (20 days after i arrived home) i was reminded about the coolness of party shuffle, thanks to penelope_stone. i had completely forgotten about it, and i even have a playlist in itunes called "the empty playlist" and i remembered that i used to use it for something, but i couldn't remember what. but now i remember that i'd set party shuffle on the empty playlist and use it as a play area for making temporary playlists. ahhh, the joys of itunes. now i remember why i havn't switched to any other player.
oh, the forgetfulness of humans!

i went messing with my camera this morning and this was the result.
i tied up my hair in 2 pony tails today as well. it looks really cute - i took a pic of that too.


yea - kind of random morning.

the end of my phone problems

so now that my phone's all sorted out, i got to check my voicemail. and it was a message from meteor. so now i'm wondering if i've killed my chances with this 3d company. that would be so awful. this possible candidate ringing up because she things there's a slim chance someone may have called her. ah well. no job would mean i get to concentrate a lot more on my writing.

yea - as you may have guessed, i sorted out the €25 credit problem. They were fine with it. Excellent stuff. it's so nice having a working phone again. It's like when you have a cold and you can't smell anything and it's ok - you don't really realize what you're missing. It's just when the cold heals up and you can smell again that you realize how much you missed it.
i texted lordkilljoy to figure out which of the 2 numbers i had for him is his and i got a random reply from the wrong number saying "who r u?" it was a bit funny. so i deleted that number and kept the other one.
ok - that was a pretty random little story, but it's valid because it's the first text i sent since i got home. to a stranger - awh!

and since we're on random little stories - this morning i ate breakfast with a plastic spoon. one that i got in san francisco in a 7-eleven (like one that you get with take-away soup, a free one). but i was eating breakfast and it reminded me of eating breakfast in glacier national park, sitting on the bench, surrounded by snow and being freezing cold and eating cereal with warm milk to ease the cold passing into my stomach. ahh - good times.

movies and things

i've been spending my evenings watching movies (wow, this word isn't in firefox's dictionary) recently. i watched krull first, because i have loved that film since i was little and my parents introduced me to it. so when i came back from the world and saw that we had it on dvd i was excited. it's still a great movie. i was happy from the first note of the opening music until the last credit had rolled by. and firemares: nothing more need be said.
the second movie i watched was conan the barbarian. i don't think i've ever seen it before. it was quite good. arnold is good in it - a sword suits him. i can't believe he's the governor of california. crazy.
anyway - last night's film was the final cut of bladerunner (and now i own 2 copies of that film - the quality of the final cut is better, though). i love ridley scott. bladerunner and legend are 2 of my favourite movies (and gladiator).

i booked flights for glastonbury in june the other day too. o_O, did i forget to mention that penelope_stone and me are going to glastonbury festival this year? :) we are. it's going to be cool. so we're flying to bristol and getting a bus to the festival from there. and there's still tickets left, so if anyone wants to meet up in glastonbury that could be cool.

my phone's back working, but now they are telling me that i have no credit. lies - i should have €25. so i'm going to go sort that out and then all will be well (hopefully).

there was something else i wanted to say, but i can't remember. oh well.
oh, wait. i remember. last night, i was typing and i remembered that i had a wireless keyboard and that it fits comfortably on my lap. so now my keyboard's back to it's usual position and by back can stop straining over to the left ('cause computer desks just don't leave enough room for a mouse and keyboard to fit comfortably).

learning to type properly

god - i hate typing stuff up, because i can't type properly. if i type properly, my speed drops to 13wpm; which is horribly frustrating because i can type at about 45 when i don't type properly. where's the problem, you ask. The problem is that i look down at the keyboard an awful lot when typing fast, so when i'm typing something off a sheet i have to keep stopping to read the next sentence and as you may have noticed: when my typing slows down i get annoyed at myself.
so the point of all of this is that i've found a website that will teach me how to type properly quickly. yeay. i've added a link to my quicklinks in firefox that says - do every day. and i figure in a few months i should be able to type properly and then i can face the idea of typing up the end of my novel without cringing and pretending that said dilemma does not exist. it's awful to be so torn - wanting to type up my novel because i can start editing properly and not wanting to because typing causes me such heartache and pain (much like learning to drive did, but i know i don't have to go for a test at the end of it all).

and here i am, making use of the ultimate procrastination tool, updating my Lj (and not typing properly). you see, my creativity flows at a certain speed, which is about 50 wpm, so even at my fastest typing i can't keep up with it. if i type properly, i get absolutely nowhere and my ideas speed past me on the highway of thought and i look up from the dirt, going "wait, please slow down for me, i can't keep up like this - i'm walking (no - crawling) and you've got a honda roadster. hardly fair."
anyway - when i write by hand, everything's good and square and we all get on because every part of me loves to write with a pencil and paper. yeay.

i'm getting worse

yesterday all i ate was a half a bowl of cereal and 2 trail bars. i lay in bed last night starving and trying to force myself to sleep so that the hole-pain in my stomach would go away.
it's not that i'm trying to starve myself or anything. i just didn't have an appetite all day except for last night in bed. having a sore throat always kills my appetite.

we have a new addition to the household today. penelope_stone had a baby! no!!!! she got a laptop (might as well be a new baby, except that you can hit ctrl-alt-del when stuff goes wrong). why does nobody say del-alt-ctrl, does it have to be delete that gets hit last or something? yep - alt-ctrl-del works too. amazing.
:shake head: anyway.

not much to report here. i got a missed call on my phone yesterday and what with meteor being silly i can't check my voicemail, so i have no idea who called me. i'm so worried it's the company i applied to for a job. so i rang them earlier asking if someone from the company had tried calling me. the receptionist said she'd check and get back to me, but that was over an hour ago and no call, so now i'm worried if i've screwed up my chances.
i got a letter in the door from college, letting me know that there's a flash development position available in south dublin, but just reading over the specs made me realize how much i really don't want to do flash stuff for the rest of my life. 3d modelling seems so much more fun and creative.

my illness has improved vastly from the weekend - now i have a dry-sort-of-cough and a bit of a sniffle and that's it. yeay.

last night was more conventional

no coughing fits last night - wooo! i did have a kinda wierd dream that featured my red boots (the ones with the stars on them:
)
i was on an island (that islands 2 nights in a row) getting on a boat back to the mainland and i had to take my boots off. but i ended up leaving them on the boat and we were outside the terminal (there was some trouble getting out of the terminal - swirly roads and unhelpful-turning-helpful security guards) when i noticed them on the boat's deck. so i ran back and jumped onto the boat and rode back to the island happily with my boots. i woke up before we got there, but my intention wasn't to go back to the island, it was to go out and come back.

i started reading the legend of nightfall last night. it's a good book. i'd tried to buy lynn flewelling's nightrunner series off amazon, but they don't accept irish maestro cards. oh well. apparently play.com does. so i made a basket there with the lies of locke lamora in it. (yes - i am obsessed with books about thieves / assassins). i'm waiting for the price of the name of the wind to come down a bit, but once it does i'm totally buying it.

so yea. i havn't much other news - i think i'll start typing up my travel journal today - it may be a challenge; my typing is bad today - my fingers are a bit shaky. the reason: all i ate was a yoghurt and some toast yesterday. i've lost my appetite - it happens with a sore throat.

right then, bye.

liam's party and other fun things

the weekend was great. i did so much + should have been updating on a daily basis, but i didn't have the time. when i wasn't out i was sleeping and pretending that i'm not sick.
anyway - the weekend began on saturday night with lordkilljoy's birthday. 70s theme party featuring big hair, big glasses and big flares. it was a fabulous night of dancing and meeting people i'd not seen in years. it was so good to see lordkilljoy again. he's someone i definitely don't get to see enough of.
so then sunday was taleweavers meet and the start of dave's planescape game - nothing happened - we spent the evening making characters and watching spaced (the best geek-soap tv show ever).
monday was more gaming - only this time with barry, adrian and craig. we're trying to find the 13 lost shards of aphrodite and we got all the way to 12 on monday - so close to the end. we finished early (5ish) and that gave me a chance to go to gavindillon and jerry's barbeque. good food, a nice fire and mostly good company.

i did spend the whole weekend with a painful swollen throat and possibly a mild fever - last night was the worst. i was half asleep, having a bad coughing fit and in my delirium, i was cataloguing the time between coughs, the intensity of cough, the predicted length and intensity of the next one and it was all flashing in my brain as some kind of wierd dark skewed spreadsheet of doom. it was a bit scary, and it felt like i was coughing for about half an hour (but time is messed up during the night).

then i had this crazy dream about a construct-woman with special abilities who had been cast out of the corporation who made her. she was exiled to a deadly island and as she walked around she saw all sorts of evil looking humanoids who felt nothing but evil towards her. they didn't attack, though - just stared menacingly until it drove her insane. she got back to the town of the island and fell, begging, into the arms of her maker - crying and sobbing about the monsters. then all the monsters leapt to the attack and even though she was this wonder-woman fighting expert amazing construct, she was powerless. but then everything stopped and her maker eased her to the ground and she realized that she's been hallucinating.
it was a bit crazy.

my brain goes totally insane when i'm sick.

i went to a gig last night and it was brilliant

happy may - better yet, happy summer :)

charlie don't surf and ten past seven played in the quad last night and it was the best gig i've been to in ages. both bands were in a fabulous mood - just having fun and rocking out - they didn't seem worried about anything. the energy they put into their music was palpable - it filled the pub like a haze of excitement, like the potential of a lightening storm, and built until the last note was played.
unfortunately it will be the last gig they play for a while. colm (of charlie don't surf) is moving to italy in june and they probably won't be playing between now and then. i don't know what the deal with ten past seven is, but they said this was it for a while.

it's great being home - getting to see people i know again, going out to gigs and having a good time and stuff. but one of the best things is being at 52degrees north. the evenings are so long in this counrty. it was something i really missed travelling (christchurch is only at 43degrees). it's amazing to be able to look out my window at 9pm and still have so much light playing across the sky. yea - this country has a lot going for it.