DIY day

it's my birthday and i've gotten hardly any writing done. first thing this morning, i walked to the shop to cash the lotto tickets mammy and daddy had gotten me (i got €40). then i sat down for a bit of writing. then i looked up diy book binding. i found a very cool article:
http://www.persistenceunlimited.com/2006/03/fun-and-easy-how-to-guide-to-binding-your-own-paperback-books-at-homefast/
and then i spent the rest of the day making the 'jig.' That involved a trip to barrett's to buy gorilla glue. i was very surprised they had it. and now i'm thinking of going back to get wingnuts and carriage bolts. and possibly a bit of wood for the clamping bar. i couldn't be bothered sawing out two lengths. sawing with a pen-knife-tool thing is really hard.
yea... it's possibly a bit premature, considering i've not finished draft 3.1 yet, but i hope to have copies to the people of taleweavers on the weekend. it's no big deal if i don't get it done by this weekend, though. i'll be around the next weekend as well.

and because this is a day of procrastination: here are some photos i've taken of stuff over the last few weeks.




i made banana bread in the slow cooker (aka crockpot). it turned out yummy.

the book binding devise. half finished. i couldn't wait to paint it - perhaps i should have waited. anyway.

my tomato is taller than me.

the pepper a few weeks ago.

this is not zoomed in - this is them grown.

tomato flower.

my beef with bioware

yet another procrastination post. i'm rewriting the end of my novel, again. what is it with beginnings and endings with me? the whole middle is fine, but i'm not happy with chapter 1 or chapters 33 to 36. hhuuuuuum.

to plants:
the pepper grows about a centimetre a day. it's gotten huge - it's about 2 feet high now. my tomatoes are also growing madly, one of them is really getting big - it's about 12cm tall with 5 leaves. no sign of the strawberries yet. the sun vanished just after i planted them, so i expect they will be a while. the kale isn't doing so well since i thinned it. i have four plants left. one seems to be wilting. two are ok, but don't seem to be growing. the last one seems to be growing ok, but it's the smallest of the lot.

to games:
i finished jade empire. it was fun enough. i figured out a neat fighting style that meant the bad guys couldn't get a hit on me. i don't know what that games problem is, but it seemed horribly unbalanced. the regular enemies could be taken down in about 5 seconds; if they hit you it wasn't a problem - their couldn't do much damage. they were pretty easy to beat. the bosses, on the other hand, were impossible. two hits from a boss and my character was dead. and it took about 5 minutes to beat a boss (that's 60times longer than a regular guy - that seems a bit extreme to me). anyway, i did finish the game, but i won't be rushing back to play it any time soon.
i played through dr ned and got half way through general knoxx in borderlands before i started playing mass effect. it's a fun enough game. for some reason, it seems to lack something. like, i'm kind of just playing it to see what it will present me with. i don't really feel much for any of the characters (my girl is pretty looking - that's about it) and i don't care much for the story so far. in fact, i don't really know what the story is yet. and i'm about 6 hours in... maybe. so i'll stick with it to see where it goes. jade empire was kind of similar - really slow to start and then it got going towards the end. but they spent too long on set-up and by the time the story got going i hadn't fallen in love with the characters. and then it was too late - i was too worried about staying alive.

in fact, i had another gripe with jade empire. it was supposed to be an rpg, but only the first two chapters had quests and stuff. after that, it was all fighting. there weren't even any puzzles or stuff, it was just, 'go here and kill this guy, then kill that mob of assassins, then kill this boss, then kill this mob of ghosts, then kill...' yea - you get the point. yea - schizophrenic game.

so, i kind of hope the bioware guys learned thier lesson from jade empire, and mass effect is better, but so far i'm not seeing it.

penelope_stone is up for the week (or two). it's fun having her around. we're thinking of going to sheila's for dinner some night - we really need to tell sheila about this.

right - it's ten past ten, i really need to get down to writing.

planting procrastination

procrastination post. yeay. i haven't done one of these in ages.

i defrosted the freezer last night. it was kinda fun - going with the hair dryer, watching the ice melt away and fall into the little collecty bucket at the bottom. the freezer has significantly more space now, and you can actually see the metal bits that conduct the cold around. all the compartments open properly now. it was so bad, actually, that the ice had shoved some of the shelves off their rails. but they are fixed now, too.

the little pepper plant is still alive. the fern is also still alive. the dracaena got put out in the corner of the balcony reserved for dead plants. we can call it the plant graveyard. i put them out there in the hopes that the weather outside will bring them back to life. i suppose it's kind of a silly viewpoint, but it's always what used happen to dead plants at home. none of them ever came back to life either.
i think the bonsai might be making it way out there soon. poor plant just keeps on loosing its leaves, and when they grow back they are yellow and weedy. i took the dead bits off the other dracaena. it's looking good again. all green.
all this planty goodness has me wanting to plant the seeds from a cherry tomato. and we have black kale too. i could have a whole little garden happening on the window sill in here. it's a weeny (meaning small) windowsill, but it's the only one in the whole apartment that gets sunlight.

right so. i don't have much other news.

just to note - dinner is on (yes, before 10:30am). and all the windows and doors in the apartment are open in an effort to cool the place down. it was way too hot last night.

life moves on

i finished draft 2 on friday (at about 1pm). i printed it out and brought it down to cork and there it waits for someone to read it.

so my new task is to find a job so that i can beef up my bank account. and guess what i'm doing right now? (if you guessed procrastinating, have a gold star.) yea. i'll just check Lj and google reader and then i'll get to looking for a job.
and i have to do up my cv and write coverletters. god - there is nothing worse than this. well, except maybe the working itself. but i don't think so.

firefox updated recently and now its red wavy underlines (for wrong spelling) are very obvious.
can you tell i'm struggling for something to say, just so i can pass another few minutes?

yea.
i'll go.

random procrastination

i got 3 scenes done today, but i'm worried about the rest of the week because it's new stuff until next week and we are off to cork for the weekend, so i can't slak off on the actual writing bits. the only problem is that i don't feel at all inspired this week. editing is ok, but even the edits don't seem that great - i'm not really adding in much inspiring things, just deleting things that really don't work. see i can't even write properly - that last sentence was so inelegant.
then from next week on i'm into the stuff that hasn't been touched since my last stab at editing last year. there are quite a few chapters that need new scenes written, culminating in ch. 6, which is completely different to the original chapter 6 except for one scene.
i also now have a chapter 1.5.5. remember i mentioned that ch 1 was 10,000+ words and i cut it in half - well, ch 1.5 then blossomed, so i had to cut it in half too. it seems i will have 21 chapters in total when its all done - 19 main ones and the pro- and epilogues. still not bad. at least it's not like some books with three page chapters, but the book itself has over 80 chapters. i always find that wierd.
yep - this is not going to be a monster of a fantasy - a nice 120,000 words i think - maybe 150,000 at the very most. although, if my chapters all grow like ch 1 did, then i may have a chapter naming problem on my hands.
see, the reason i don't like books with 80-odd chapters is because i like named chapters. just numbers always seems very impersonal. and then i could be like feist with a table of contents - not really. i don't like them either, because you risk spoiling the book - as a reader you can't help flicking though the contents and wondering what's going to happen in the story to cause things like "death of a hero" and who's going to die and stuff. well - no chapter name is that explicit, but you get the idea.

i just realized that i'm procrastinating. golly - i've not done that on here in a while. it must be nano time. i cleaned out the press under the sink today too (and yes - i still got 3 scenes edited). i must be secretly petrified about writing these new scenes. hmmm...

it's miserable weather too, though. so dark and grey. dull. uninspiring. and raining too. i was going to go to lidl and get fish for dinner, but it's just too miserable out.