off to glastonbury

whee!! off to glastonbury. heading to the airport in less than an hour. my bad weighs 10kgs less than it did the last time i brought it somewhere (that being home from america). it was wierd lifting it, just there. i was prepared for 20kgs and when it was only 10, it was a bit of a surprise. but a nice one. so now i can buy 5kgs of stuff and still be ok for the flight home. rock on!!!
i woke at 8:30 this morning and my first thought was: yeay! today is glastonbury-go day! it's nice to wake up and be excited.

some facts

this time one year ago i was arriving into new zealand, passing through immigration, getting a stamp on my passport. that stamp expires today. awh!

tomorrow i'm flying off for glastonbury for six days of chaos, queues, music, rain, mud, excellent food, sunny spells, acrobatics, bewildering sights, inspiring sights, smells and all the insanity and brilliance and emotion of europe's largest festival.

i called into cit today. i have a bit of work there when i get back from glasters. it should be a bit of fun - doing animation for a training application.

gosh. i just realized how long it's been since i posted last. i had a great end-of-week in dublin. it was emmett's girlfriend (claudia)'s birthday, and a group of us went out to balzac (which is incredibly fancy, but nice - good food).
and i showed lordkilljoy the basics of HDR photography.
we've been watching a lot of avatar: the last airbender. it's so good. we're up to season 2, and all the characters are being developed really well.

i watched stardust last night withpenelope_stone. it is a brilliant film. there was one scene and the two of us were smiling watching it; it's just such a romantic adventure. it's wonderful. actually, i got very little done yesterday - i played fallout for most of the day. i'm really enjoying it. the plot is getting nicely entwined, and now i want to find out how certain stuff came about and how everything will work out. i'm also getting very excited about fallout3, which is probably a bad thing. i need a job, so i can get a new pc!

yea... i was considering doing a masters in dublin. but i think i've missed the application enrty deadline. oh well. i'll just try desperately to start a career when the unemployment level is rising. hmm... see, i'm not even sure if i want to start a "career" or if i just want to get a job that will feed me and give me somewhere to live. i think i want a career in writing. in fact, i know this. but it's a lot of time with no income and that's not really so great, so in the meantime i'm considering starting a "career" in something else, which i will ditch when my book gets picked up by an editor (which could be years from now). i do feel a little bad about faking an honest career just for the money, but well.

yea. that's all i have to say today. i'll try to check in tomorrow and then it will be a post-glasters orgy of happiness and tiredness and stories from the festival.

firefox3

i have firefox 3. woo! the people at mozilla are great. by them making a big fuss about everything, i got rather excited about the release and it made my life so much more interesting for a few moments on a dull tuesday afternoon.
and it has one amazing feature: a big back button. i love it, no more hitting forward by accident for me! woo! apart from that it seems pretty similar to 2, google reader looks a little different, but that's all i've noticed. actually, i should go and see if deviantArt still works. it was being finicky with 2, so maybe by some miracle of the internet, it will work properly with 3.

memories of travel

i'm listening to the lord of the rings soundtrack right now and it reminds me of the last time i listened to it. that was back in november, in new zealand, travelling from te anau to queenstown - prime lotr country. you may think us silly for doing that, and i would tell you that you are just jealous, because it was great. you could really imagine great battles and huge armies on the move, terrifying creatures, and heroics so selfless that even the gods would have to stand up and take heed.

so once again, here i am writing in my Lj and not getting editing done. i'm at a bit where i have to describe a tower and i'm looking for a better word for length. ah, i love the way my brain works - i just had to frame the query and it came up with an answer: span. yeay.

i got my hair cut yesterday. it's nice enough. my fringe seems kind of short or something, but i havn't washed it yet, so we'll see.

it's a long one full of news

i finally fixed the squeal that had been plaguing my bed, and contrary to usual logic, i fixed it by loosening a screw. anyway, i'm just happy not to be woken up every time i turn over, and not to be suffering paranoia every night getting into bed that i'll wake penelope_stone with all the squealing of strained metal.

i'm playing fallout at the moment, and really enjoying it. funnily - it was what reminded me to write this post. i saw it on my oft-used-programs list and felt a vague twinge to play it, and not go editing my novel. but since it was only a vague twinge i ignored it and decided to write about it here, instead. woo! at least i know when i've reached the end of the post i'll have to stop, with fallout i may not stop until this afternoon.

and that brings us nicely to my next topic: i'm getting my hair cut this afternoon. hopefully. penelope_stone tells me that hair dressers don't open on mondays. hmmmm (that was a sort of un-content sigh). ah well. i want to go into town anyway, and get a little bar for one of my piercings. i took out my vertical scaffold and replaced it with a short bar in my rook and now i want another short bar for the one on my helix. yea...

i think i had one other piece of news... i'm hoping some company will ring me today or tomorrow and invite me for an interview. i've applied to 6 places now, this is getting silly. anyone have any sympathy stories to make me feel better about the whole looking for a job thing - like "i applied to 27 companies, got one interview, which i failed." that may make me feel better - at least i'd know i'm not alone... but penelope_stone has had no luck getting a job ethier. so yea.
and while i'm fine with getting rejections from companies straight off, i hate failing interviews. me and failure don't go so well together. i need to lower my standards for myself. my new mantra should be "failing is ok" but that could get really dangerous, because i'd purposefully misinterpret it as "don't even bother trying because you are going to fail anyway." or "just put in minimal effort so that when you fail it won't come as such a shock." yea... anyway.

in happy news, we went to picnic in the park yesterday. it was fun. actually, it was relaxing - we hung out listening to this funny band do terrible covers, and we got excited about glastonbury :) we'll be flying off in a week and a day. wow!! it's going to be so cool.

a short update

today is friday the 13th - i only just noticed. feels like any other day, really.

i finally got to see pan's labyrinth last night. i enjoyed it... even though it wasn't quite what i had expected. i thought there would be a lot more fairytale stuff, but as it was, the blend of reality and fairytale worked really well together.

i also got to see high fidelity and really enjoyed it too. john cusak is such a good actor.

not much else happening. there's a possibility i'm going to see the incredible hulk with lordkilljoy. we don't have formal plans, but we kinda agreed to go see it yesterday. aether_muse tells me it's terrible, but she's been known to twist the truth in her writings - she likes to kill people's expectations. the happening is out today as well. i'd like to see it too. i like m knight shayamalan. but i didn't see lady in the water, so i don't know how bad his films have become.

yea, that's everything then, i think.

rewrites

i started my first re-write today. it's the scene where the male main character meets the lead female, and i hated the original. This new version is better, it paints azrynn as something other than a flighty girl - which she had come across as, but now she definitely seems like someone in control of her life. so i'm happy.

i cleaned my room today - took all the books off my shelves, wiped the shelves and the books and re-placed them on the shelves. comics are heavy. i lifted 11 trades together and could barely get them onto the shelf. i moved some other stuff around (games, books - i had one whole shelf that i wasn't really using at all) and now i have room for about 10 new books... it's really not that much. but i'm only interested in buying two books at the moment: the name of the wind and shadows return, and neither of them are out in small paperback yet (shadows return isn't even out yet; and while patrick rothfuss has mentioned something about tNotW paperback, i havn't seen it). i do have room left on my manga / small format comics shelf, though.

yea. i have no other news.

of cobwebs and cuckoo spit; brambles and byways

me and penelope_stone are just back from a cycle down the powdermills. it was amazing; it always is.
while the evening was hot, the sun was shining and making fun splatters of light among the dark underthings of the forest. we raced along: under branches, over roots and around puddles. this evening we took a new trail, one i'd never cycled before and had only walked once, years ago. it turned out to be unsuitably narrow and clogged with brambles, trees, nettles and other fun vegetation. i'm just glad we don't have poison ivy in ireland.

i applied for more jobs today. hopefully someone will get back to me, and if not there is always reception work. :roll eyes: who wants to be a receptionist? not me.

right at the moment i'm slightly obsessed with the ting tings' great dj. i've listened to it 16 times in two and a half days.

not much else to say. i havn't really done much since i got back from dublin. played shiverling isles last night for a bit. azrynn is totally the coolest character. she can take a knight of order down with one critical shot from her bow (called "hellfreeze"). she roams the land with hellfreeze and goldbrand, taking down her enemies like a wind of death that no one sees coming and no one can stop and anyone who has reason to lies awake at night quaking in fear.
yea. she's cool.

radiohead and other highlights

right at the moment i'm listening to the ting tings - great dj and bopping around in my chair like a mad thing. i really like this song, even though i was only introduced to it over the week - it was one of those instantly liked songs.

the last words that entered my head before i started posting this were: let the education commence. the education in question: lordkilljoy's favourite comics, music, games, shows, movies and other random things. all will be assimilated: professor layton (on ds, so much fun), portal (on xbox360, quite fun if somewhat frustrating), planeraty (comic, cool ideas and characters), wwe (the rock), 2 many djs (do crazy things with samples), the ting tings (the girls and the boys and the strings and the drums), sushi (norimaki at yamamori)... yea, lots.

and while radiohead should have been the highlight of the week; really, just spending time with lordkilljoy was. radiohead were really good, though. i think paranoid android was the best song they played. they also played faust arp and videotapes (my two current favourite songs from in rainbows) and loads of others... but they were the best.
as we waited for radiohead to get their stage set up it started raining and a double rainbow stretched across the sky to the left of the stage. it was pretty cool.

i got home last night to a starving kitten (i gave her a whole bowl of food and she was still meiowing). then this morning she was still starving, but we had no food left so i had to go to the shop. but that was the lead-up forget about the kitten now, this story isn't about her. on the way up to the shop this little dog passed me. he seemed a bit wary, but i shrugged it off and thought nothing more of it. then on the way back down from the shop a woman stopped me and asked if i'd seen a little dog. i felt like saying: yea, it went west towards the town centre. but i didn't. it did really make me think of prof layton looking for dahlia's cat, though. i'm so impressionable.

so i think that's about it... i'm off to taleweavers and dave's game later. that all seems so normal - it's like: back to reality now. but not in a bad way, it's just how i feel.

and then i dreamed that i died

my sleeping patterns are getting more and more erratic. this morning i woke at 4:30am. fully awake and wondering what to do for five hours until the rest of the world woke up. i pulled back my curtains and opened the window, listening to the birds greeting the lightening of the sky. i tried to fall back to sleep, but when that proved futile, i made out a packing list. (and i'm so glad i did, or i would have forgotten my pyjamas.)
eventually after 6, i managed to fall back to sleep, and as i slept i dreamed.

i was in a girl's house, trying to get home after a party or something. everyone else had left, drove home, but i had to get the bus. i was packing my stuff up and looking over the girl's hairbrushes. i showed her a pound coin from new zealand - it was all blinged out and played a music video. then her sister came into the room and said to me "come on, leave", to which i replied "one minute."
as she stood in the doorway, i looked out past her - to the sky, all orange and purple like a violent sunrise. i didn't want to leave and go out into this light.
then i was in my room at home and it was 9am, but it was so dark. i looked out my window at the same sky - purple / orange with huge clouds, thick and heavy and creamy, and looking like cauliflowers. over in the east corner of the estate it looked like a cloud had enveloped a house, but before i could register what it was, i heard a man cry out, "get down. here comes another one."
i jumped from the window and curled up on my floor as the ground shook and i heard a massive explosion. Cradling my head and balled up in the foetal position, my last thought was "this is it - i'm going to die." i didn't want to believe that i was actually about to die in a bomb blast, but at the same time i accepted it totally, no use fighting it. then i felt the heat and everything went black and i was floating and not feeling anything and i thought "this can't be death. i expected something more." and my conviction that i had died waned and i struggled to wake up. but i did wake up and my heart was pounding, but i was glad to be alive.

by that stage it was 7:15am and i figured i'd had enough of bed for today. so i got up, had a shower, got dressed and packed (using my handy list that i'd made earlier).

inside writing on a lovely summer's day

yeay, procrastination time again. wooo!

today has been somewhat routine, read a bit, edit a bit, add a new paragraph or two to a scene, go online and see has anyone updated. yea...

[edit, a bit later: i found 2 plot holes today. this isn't good.]

yesterday was good though. i went to the taleweavers meeting, which was definitely more random than normal - everyone seemed in a good mood. and after the meet we just happened to catch the cork gay pride parade. i hadn't even known it was on. the costumes were very colourful.
yesterday evening claire introduced me to some mmos: mirror online and talisman online. i have a problem with online games in that they just arn't varied enough. you run around and talk to people and kill things and that's about it. i think maybe it's because it takes the main story so long to get going (if there even is a main story).

it's a lovely day today, though. hot, sunny, blue sky with just a hint of cloud. i took out my poi and spun for a bit - relearning flowers and seeing how fast and how long i can maintain a 5-beat weave for... not long apparently.

so that's my news, not a whole tonne, really.