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.

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.