video games live

over the last few weeks, whenever i looked at the calendar on the fridge i felt a tingle of excitement. video games live was coming up and i couldn't wait for it. so last night was the big night. we were off to the national concert hall, lordkilljoy in dr. who stylings of a suit and cons and me wearing my lolita dress.
the concert was brilliant, between the orchestra, the choir, the visuals from the games and the light show that went along with it. the music was great (even though i didn't really know any of it), the showmanship was entertaining (and totally over the top) and the venue was perfect.
we hung around after to get signatures and gush at jack wall.

saturday night was lainey316's birthday. we went to a lebanese restaurant and then on to a pub. the food was good - it's always nice to try something different. it was a good night, but i was a little too tired and full to really enjoy it. the others went mad dancing - i danced in my chair :)

in other news:
today, for the first time ever, i used rubber gloves to wash the dishes. and the reason? i didn't want to take my gloves off. it's been really cold all weekend - the kitchen got down to 9degrees yesterday afternoon.
i'm a bit worried about nymph. he's kind of stopped eating and i wonder is he a little too cold. but he doesn't look very skinny, so i think he's all right.

dreams of pets

i had an exceptionally wierd dream last night. all my dreams are wierd, but this one was especially strange.

me and lordkilljoy or possibly penelope_stone were at a market kind of thing and this guy was selling lizards that looked like dinosaurs (a brachiosaurus but with diamond-shaped plates along its back) it was cute, yellow and we bought it straight away. but there was something you had to do to it before you put it in a tank. you had to bite its neck. so i did, but i bit too hard and ripped off a bit of skin, leaving a huge hole near its collarbone (do dinosaurs have collarbones?). so we got it home and put it in the tank with yoshi, who was not at all impressed with this newcomer. he attacked the dino-lizard, aiming for the hole in its neck, and somehow managed to pull its heart out. dino-lizard, looking shocked, keeled over and died right then and there.
me and lordkilljoy were equally stunned, unable to believe that our scardy little yoshi had just killed something three times bigger than him.
so, later, i had to clean the corpse out of the tank and nymph was lying on it, happy as anything. i had a job to get him off and the dino-lizard was all stiff and tangled around the branches in the tank.
yea - it was really wierd.


went to see la roux last night - spur of the moment (people couldn't go and gave their tickets to lordkilljoy). it was fun - up on the balcony of the academy. it was strange going to a non-rock gig, though. no rock-out bits and the crowd was very well behaved.

nymph-newtonious has been hanging out in the filter again. i don't know is it the flow of water or the tiny bit of extra heat, or just that it's hidy, but he really seems to love it in there. i think, one of these days, i'll stop taking him out of there. but then i'm afraid that he'll find a way out of the tank altogether. hmmm.

right. enough with the procrastination.

hello

my 16 (aka 20) week plan is going well. i'm finished everything i had set myself 'til friday to do. it's good to be ahead at the start. i guess i had no idea how fast or slow things would go, but the prologue was pretty much ok, anyway.

apparently it's 20.7 degrees in here, but even with 4 layers on i'm only luke-warm. today, while cleaning nymph's water i spilled a load of it on the counter, the cupboard, the floor, me. i should get overalls or something. but it was so cute - i put my hand into the tank to pick nymph out and he crawled up onto my finger all by himself. i think he trusts me - that's so great. not like yoshi who still flinches away if you go up to his tank too quickly. silly scardy.

i don't really have much news. lordkilljoy and me are probably going to see surrogates tonight. i'm kind of looking forward to seeing it.

i think i'm tired or something. my concentration waned at about 2 o' clock today and hasn't come back.

Sacred 2

rob, mulkabu and lordkilljoy went to ac/dc on sunday night. on that same night, i played 6.5 hours of sacred2. that game has the worst premise ever, but it's totally addictive. how is this? why does it take over you brain and run riot with suggestions of "just one more quest!" and "just get to the next village!" It makes no sense. The story is paper thin and the world is held together with cobwebs, yet I am totally addicted. hmmmm.

I got a magnetic aquarium glass cleaner for Nymph yesterday and cleaned away all the algae this morning. Yeay for clean glass. now i need to water-vacuum the gravel, because a lot of the algae fell off the glass onto the gravel.

Ok, that's all i wanted to say really.

lighthouses and sandy shores

i left the house yesterday with the intention of getting sand everywhere and that's exactly what i did :)
well, maybe it didn't go everywhere, but i did my best to get it all over the blanket and in my bag, stuck to my skin (sun cream is sticky and sand sticks to it) and in the fold ups on my jeans. and how did i carry out my plan? i went to howth for the afternoon.
it's a nice enough place, touristy, and reminded me a lot of kinsale. i walked along the harbour, out to the lighthouse and back, then out the other side of the village looking for a way down onto the beach. it's like secret beach entrance... took me ages to find it.
the beach itself was kind of disappointing. small, no waves, too many cigarette butts... but it was warm and the sand was soft and the blue sky was perfect. i ate lunch, dibbled my feet in the sea (it was freezing), read a bit of a comic and then went home. i need to find a better beach, i think.

i don't really have a whole lot of other news. nymph's tank has an algae infestation. this is good because it means the water quality is high, but bad because the tank is going green.

i finished drakes fortune the other day (monday, i think). i enjoyed it. kinda wanted to play more after i had finished it. i'm almost to the end of assassin's creed as well. might finish that tonight if lordkilljoy doesn't have any plans.

right, going to go now.

almost a month's worth of news

lordkilljoy and i went to see star trek last night. i loved it - everything about it made me want to watch it again. it was funny, exciting, adventuresome, i liked all the characters and seeing how they all ended up together.
i want to go back and see it again this weekend; we'll see how things work out.

i finally started the rewrite of the fall. lots of things have been changed, mostly from the first half, because i was never really happy with it.

it's been almost a month since i made a proper post, gosh - that's terrible. i guess script frenzy just kept me from updating and then i was down in cork and things just got ahead of me. so this will probably be lots of short points.

in pet news, newt died. he hadn't been eating and then we went away for the weekend and he was dead when we got back. even if we'd been around, i don't think he would have survived. he just seemed to go off his food and that was that.

ooh - we got a surround sound system in the apartment. it is so cool. the sound out of it is so clear and loud and rumbly. playing games on it is fantastic. and it makes finding gargoyles in fable2 way easier.

yea, we went to see wolverine too. it wasn't nearly as good as star trek. i seemed to lack something, or the story just wasn't grand enough, or heroic enough or something. i did like gambit, though. he seemed cool.

it was lordkilljoy's birthday last week and we went for korean barbecue. the way that works is there there's a little firepot at the centre of your table and you cook the food they bring you. it was delicious. then we went for after-dinner drinks and dancing at the village. that club is way trendier than i had expected. but i still had a really good night. i got to see lordkilljoy and goblin_insane get their boogie on. it was funny to see.

so... what other news do i have? yoshi is eating voraciously these days. it's good to see. nymph isn't eating so well, but he's eating a little. i think he's turning into a nocturnal newt. he just seems to sleep until 4 or 5 in the afternoon.

i don't think i have anything else to say...

pets

more newt news... today, newt ate some tubifex worms straight from my hands and nymph ate a bit of a cricket. i don't really want nymph to get into the habit of eating crickets, because they are yoshi's food. it was so cute when newt ate from my fingers, though - and he seemed really hungry too. he was in the floating log, with his head poking out, so i just gave him the food. he retreated to eat it and them poked his head out for more. he did that twice more, and after the fourth bit of food, i decided he'd had enough. he has a cute little belly now :)

i don't really have a lot of other news. i was playing fable 2 last night and got to crucible. it's so much fun. i didn't think it would be this much fun, but having to keep the crowd entertained gives it a bit of variety.

i can think of nothing else to say.

animals and other news

i finally got newt to eat something. (newt is the small, skinny one.) he ate 5mm of morio worm yesterday and the same again today. nymph (the larger, more rounded one) didn't eat anything yesterday and just had a smidgeon of morio worm today. maybe i'll get him to eat tomorrow. but i think nymph has been scavenging around the bottom of the tank, because he's always lively and he's growing and has a bit of flesh on him - not like newt who is just skin and bone. but even compared to yesterday, newt is looking a bit fatter. so i'm happy. we're heading to galway for the weekend and i won't be nearly as worried about them as i was last weekend in cork.
it's actually amazing the lengths i go to for our animals. like, to get yoshi eating crickets i held them in my hand for ages and ages, just getting him used to the idea that they were food. and for the newts, i take them out of their tank and then cut up a live worm and feed it to them in a little tub. i do this because they aren't so fast and not so good at catching food as it swirls around their tank.
i put some activated carbon into the filter yesterday and it's made a huge difference to the water. just the sponges in the filter helped to un-cloud the water, but the carbon has made it ultra-clear. i kinda feel like i should get an ammonia test kit, but they are really expensive. and it should all be gone by june anyway. and with daily water changes, i don't think it will get that bad.

yoshi is well. lazy as ever, but eating well and doesn't seem to have any major problems.

script frenzy is going well. i'm going to catch up on the advised word count today - yeay. after a very slow start and speed writing to catch up, i can now relax a bit. i've kinda been at nanowrimo writing levels for the last few days, and even with that scriptwriting goes way faster.

the weekend+ in cork was good. we went over to frosthearted and my_name_is_fiki's place to watch wrestlemania. i bought a pair of jeans too - i love them. i imagine they won't come off for a month, as happened with the last pair of pants i got. that's kind of the way jeans go with me. i get a pair and then wear them until they wear out and then angst over having to get a new pair. but then i eventually find a pair i love and do the same to them. and usually at this point i go: i never really liked my old jeans anyway, and never wear them again.

i think that's all my news. enough procrastination. now i write.

animals

so i'm off to cork for the weekend (yes, i'm aware that it is only wednesday).
script frenzy starts today.
the newts are still alive, still not eating.
yoshi ate 4 crickets this morning. i'm so proud of him :) it's kind of silly being proud of a lizard for eating. i mean, everyone has to eat. now if only the newts could understand this.
did i mention that i figured out what species the newts are? they are chinese warty newts (paramesotriton chinensis)(i can't believe i know the latin name off the top of my head). not that it makes a whole tonne of difference, but it's nice to know.
i really have no news at all. i had serious anxiety dreams last night. when we went to bed newt was lying on the bit of wood we have for them out of the water. it's usually not a good sign at all, so i guess my dreams were worrying for me. but he's ok today. i think he was just shedding - i found skin in the water today. it's a pity yoshi dosen't shed so easily. he's still got old skin clinking to his head, arms and his whole lower half.
yea, so i hope everyone is still alive and well when i get back.

newt names

the other name was nymph. newt and nymph. i think they go really well together.
the fish died this morning. i think i caught its last few struggles. it was floating when i went into the kitchen, then swam away when i went to get it out of the tank. but it kinda flopped on its side and drifted around the tank for a bit and didn't struggle when i went to take it out the second time. i put in a bowl of water for a while - but it was just floating on its side. not knowing anything better to do, i put it in a zip-lock back and threw it in the bin. flushing fish down the loo is way too traumatic.
in other newt news - they havn't eaten anything yet. we are just cursed by pets who won't eat. well - i got yoshi to eat three crickets this morning. he likes to be hand fed in his tank and if that's what it takes to get him to eat, then that's what it takes.

we got newts

We tried yoshi on feeder fish the other day; wandered down to the pet shop and picked up 3 cheap, small goldfish. but yoshi, being the picky eater he is, ate none of them. so we left them in his bowl, thinking they looked nice in there - swimming around and being all colourful and fish-like. off we went to bed that night hoping he'd eat one in the morning (we are very naiive when it comes to thinking yoshi will actually eat exotic foods). unfortunately, next morning two of them were floating belly-up in the bowl (the smallest and largest). possibly died of too high water temperature.
so anyway - we were left with one goldfish who we rapidly took out of yoshi's tank and put into a jug of cold water. but we couldn't leave him there. he needed a tank or something while we wait for yoshi to get big enough to eat him. so off we went to the pet shop again, in search of a suitable tank. now, i should mention that while we were there picking up the goldfish the day before we noticed some exceptionally cute newts. that night we did a bit of research into what sort of tank they need, food, co-habiting status and things. did i mention that they are the most adorable little frog/lizard looking dudes? and that i've wanted a newt since i learned that you can keep them as pets?
yea - we came home with two newts, a tank, decorations and food. :)










in other news: we're watching battlestar galactica at the moment. i'm really enjoying it. the characters are very believable and the plot is well written, with enough high points to keep every episode interesting. we're about half way through season 2 at the moment.

i've had a really busy weekend actually - on friday i went to the cinema (twice). the first show was bolt with goblin_insane. i enjoyed it just as much as the first time seeing it. then goblin_insane and i went for lunch in the porterhouse (they make delicious wings) where we met up with lordkilljoy. from there we went around town for a bit (goblin_insane headed off to meet claudia) and lordkilljoy and i wandered around until we randomly bumped into ildanach, adain and rob. plans were made for dinner and we wasted time until then by going to going to the cinema for the second time - this time to see genova, which was terribly dull. dinner in yamamori noodles (yummy) and plans to go to the zoo.
sunday = zoo day - lots of animals. they have amazing tigers. we saw some sealions being fed, and just had fun looking around. yea - and elephants are ginormous.
today lordkilljoy had off as a holiday. we got used to the newts - i named them, newt and something else which i forgot almost straight away. it was a really cool name too. ah well.

right - this is a really long post. i'm going to go now.