Last week was quite good, actually. I meant to write about it here - several times, in fact - but work kept getting in the way. Work even got in the way of my video, which had to be posted on the weekend this time around.

There are good and bad sides to everything really. For instance:

Good: Work is more interesting these days and involves far fewer library-oriented tasks.
Bad: It also involves fewer actual breaks.

Good: People keep complimenting me on my (apparently) awesome taste in shoes.
Bad: This fills me with uncertainty every morning as I choose my footwear AND causes me to wonder if I should have a lot more shoes.

Good: I was complimented within an inch of my life on Friday.
Bad: I'm not quite sure if it's OK just to say "thank-you" or if I should return the compliment if at all possible.

And now I am on holidays and am being kept company by actual, real internet! Internet that's much faster before! Ironically, I spent the first day of said holidays far from this fast internet and instead in the company of people from Ober.net. (Although, as you can see here, we were all very close to mobile forms of internetness...) It was a splendid day! There was an almost-rained-out picnic, followed by unintentional spending of money in Minotaur. This required us to sit down in Borders with a beverage of some sort... followed by further unintentional spending of money.

But seriously, Borders had the "Buffy staked Edward" t-shirts! As part of a stand of Twilight merchandise! How were we supposed to resist, especially when they look this awesome?



I don't have mine on because I wanted to preserve the integrity of my gypsy outfit. *cough*lazy*cough* Oh yes, I didn't mention the gypsy outfits, did I?

We were wearing gypsy outfits.

There you go. It was part of our theme for the picnic and we didn't actually stand out too much, thanks to the fact that we were in the city on Talk Like A Pirate Day. However, according to various bystanders, we could also double as:

1. Authentically-dressed Russian villagers


2. Pirate wenches


3. Pre-Buccanneer-era pirates

Of course, the 3D glasses add considerably to our authenticity in that pic. We were just waiting to see Up in 3D, which is possibly the most gorgeous movie I've seen in ages.

And once all that was over (although none of us wanted it to be), I got right on to my delayed video. Unsurprisingly, it's writing week again and this week's theme is to do with authors we admire or who have influenced us. Since I was in a rather grateful mood all week, I decided to make my video into a thank-you to all the authors who've inspired me in one way or another. Watch to see who makes the cut!



I'd love to know which authors you guys would like to thank, even if it's for trivial reasons. Comment! Make a video! Send me a smoke signal!

So yes, I am writing this post on the actual LJ entry page on the actual LJ site on ACTUAL LJ (in case you couldn't pick up the theme there). After... quite some time of being blocked at work (I didn't want to say "years" there, because it reminds me that I've been here too long), it's now un-blocked. Sort of. It went a bit like this...

Firstly, the students and staff combined managed to exceed the school's download limit, which resulted in our being shaped yesterday. It was quite ridiculously painful, especially considering I was trying to update the website via a web interface. So our handy technician came in and changed our proxy, allowing us to use another source for the internet.

It is faster.

It is shinier.

It allows me to access LJ.

Huzzah!

On the down side, however, is the fact that I have just discovered that YouTube is blocked. Hmm.

Now that I'm home, I can safely embed this week's video for your viewing pleasure. Or something.:D



This one was inspired by the fact that I'm going to a thing at which one of my favourite authors, Isobelle Carmody, will be present. I know I don't see eye-to-eye with her on the whole editing thing, but I still love to re-read the books I devoured with such enjoyment at fourteen. Obernewtyn was the first book that I wanted to read again the very second I finished the last page; that sort of thing has an impression upon a teenager.

Anyway, thoughts of this encounter led me to wonder which other authors I'd like to meet... which led to wondering which three authors I'd go so far as to invite for dinner. And I only came up with two, although now I'd quite like to add Diana Wynne Jones to the list.

So watch on for my three two authors and please let me know which authors you'd invite for dinner and why. Please note that they do not need to be alive. I'm not sure how entertaining a dead author's corpse and/or skeleton would be, but I won't let it stand in the way of a good dinner.

Coming soon: proof of my triumph over my phone in its attempt to detain my photos without charge!

It's writing week at fivedotnerds! Again! I have no idea how it manages to roll around so quickly. How can three weeks pass by without my noticing them? It doesn't seem right.

It is also:

1. The last day of term


2. Practically the first day of my holidays


3. A dress-up day at work, therefore I am dressed up


4. Only a week until I'm in Sydney with LOOOOOOOOONS!!

More on that later. For now, please accept this video with numerous, vaguely-entertaining background noises, as well as my thoughts on world-building:



When it comes to world-building, I suffer from a sense of mis-placed achievement. If I were to sit there and map out the world and write pieces about the history and the culture, then my brain would decide that this is it. Hooray! We have done the work and the work is good.

Pity it's not a story, but you can't have everything. Or so they say.

Damn them.

Tell me all about your world-building. Or when you think it goes over-board. Or doesn't go far enough. You can throw in your plans for world-domination, if you wish - provided it's your own world you plan to dominate and not this one.

Happy new year to everyone! Quite frankly, 2008 was a little bit too sucky for my liking so I have great hopes for 2009. So far, it has gone thusly:

• Celebrated.


• Woke up at 7:30am due to cat. When staggering about, mostly asleep, to feed said cat, noticed that there was sunshine and blue sky outside and thought, Huzzah! 2009 is going to be lovely.


• Slept in ever such a tiny bit and woke up to grey clouds and rain.


• Ranted a bit about the weather. In my head, anyway. No-one ever really listens and it doesn't exactly achieve anything.


• Ate breakfast at 2pm.


• Panicked a wee about the prospect of vlogging AS EARLY AS NEXT WEEK HELP.


• Failed to come to a consensus on whether antiwpa.dll is malware or not. Also failed to understand why it's on my computer, considering I have an official Windows sticker and an official Windows authentication code and official Windows installation CDs...


• Twittered. Actually, all I did was sign up a Twitter account, but it's close enough

And then I wrote a list, apparently. Is anyone else out there Twittering? Let me know so I can stalk you in 140 words or fewer. Strangely, I'm Katiefoolery there.

The first of January also marks the start of getyourwordsout and I'm off to a slow start so far with my grand word count of zero. However, there are still some, oh, six and a half hours left of today and I'm sure I can manage a good thousand or so words by the time that's passed.

How's the new year going for everybody else?

And the promised pictures arrive!  We won't mention the fact that I had intended for them to arrive on Friday, for it is irrelevant.  Never mind my half-serious resolution to keep updating at least every Friday.

Not relevant, I say.

Anyway, without any further pointless rambling on my part, I would like to introduce you all to my new house.  Previous, standard, boring-type photos as taken by the agents can be found here.  I, however, am going the route of the slightly arty photograph.  In doing so, I run the risk of actually presenting the world with slightly pretentious and stupid photographs instead, but I'm hoping for the best.

( Let's start outside, shall we? )

So there you have it: my new place of residence which I currently adore.

I am writing to you from my new place of abode, thanks to my mobile internet which works. Although, admittedly, sometimes the software likes to pretend the modem doesn’t exist, forcing me to connect through the network centre... but we get there in the end. And the dear little modem/router that usually deals with our ADSL is very generously giving me local and internet access via the home network, although I have no idea how it’s planning on making good on the internet component of that promise.

Things, in short, are going suspiciously well. Here’s how the tally stands:

Boxes: 0 Me: 1
Furniture: 0 Me: 1
Internet: 0 Me: 1

With no defeats yet suffered, I think I can call that a victory without being premature or anything. The place feels like a home already. Just this morning, I was sitting at the table, eating my breakfast and reading the paper. If that’s not civilised, then I don't know what is. (Yes, I may no longer be living across the road from a supermarket, but I am living around the corner from a milkbar and newsagent, which is almost as good.)

There will be photos. I keep running into hurdles with them at the moment. Firstly, I forgot that I needed to run a virus check on the camera I brought home from work... so that’s not going anywhere near my computer, despite the fact that I took a whole bunch of photos on it. Secondly, I took another set of photos with my own camera... until it ran out of battery. And thirdly, I don’t actually have any graphics programmes on my laptop, so I can’t re-size and fix the photos without first running my old desktop and getting some replacement batteries for the camera.

But the photos will come in time.

Pickle has settled in just as quickly, although she did throw a hissy fit when she discovered the lack of window-sills. The ones in the old house were perfect for a cat to sit on and watch the world outside. Not so with these ones. At present, she’s half on a window-sill and half on the couch. No, I tell a lie, now she's sitting on the frame... which can’t be comfortable at all.

And I’m sure I’ll get used to this strange silence eventually. It’s quite a novelty to be hearing bird sounds instead of six lanes of traffic, including bonus buses.

Oh, and the sound of rain falling on a tin roof takes me right back to my childhood. ’Tis lovely. :D

First, before I get to the true point of this post, I would like to glare meaningfully at Vista.

*does so*

I do not like its overwhelming need to cache fail. Yes, you did decide to take away my wireless internet access for five minutes (for no good reason, I'd like to add). Yes, I was logged into msn at the time. But hey, the internet came back, so you can stop living in the past and LET ME LOG BACK IN.

Now that this unpleasantness is behind us, let's move on.

As promised, I abandoned the world of the internet for Canberra from the twenty-ninth of December until the fourth of January. 'Twas splendid. I met rigel_7 and emerald85 at Melbourne airport at an insanely early hour of the morning. After very little sleep, I might add. The bad thing about constantly staying up 'til one and two am is that it can be difficult to feel sleepy at midnight... even when you know you should really get more than five hours' sleep before going away.

And we were away on a jet plane to Canberra, where we were met by Dr. crazedturkey and got to play tetris with our luggage and her car boot again. Splendid fun! We headed off to ambush flippyfrog at her work and then meet the_kaytinator and bathmat for pancakes at Pancake Parlour. To which restaurant we are apparently not to return, according to the good bathmat. And rightly so, too, considering they simultaneously put up their prices and reduced their serving sizes.

But huzzah, for the LorFers were together again for the first time in a year! Much fun was had, along with many card games and so much cheating. So very much. You'd think flippyfrog would learn, but no. We could deal her as many cards as we liked for uno and she would never count them.

Flit: *fanning out cards* How many cards are we meant to have?
Me: *looking completely innocent, despite having dealt at least eleven cards to the Flitness* How many do you have?
Rigel: *attempting to stifle laughter*

Later...

Flit: *fans out eleven cards again, completely oblivious*

We quickly learnt never to leave the room whilst cards were being dealt, lest you end up with all of your good cards mysterioulsy kidnapped, leaving you with a hand full of rubbish.

Here, have some photographic proof that I was in Canberra:

That would be me in the bright pink, for some reason. I'm well and truly over my pink phase... and yet I'm still wearing the cursed colour. Only the one time, I swear!

(There's a rigel_7 in black next to me and in the front are emerald85, the_kaytinator, bathmat and flippfrog.)

ETA: Further proof! This one comes with a bonus parliament house in the background, just to prove it really was Canberra.



Many of us boarded the failboat in Canberra. Barely ten minutes would go by without a chorus of "FAILBOAT!" being directed at an unfortunate one of us. Often accompanied by singing. Actually, a great deal of things are accompanied by singing when we're together.

The main reason we were there was for the new years eve party, of course, since flippyfrog and emerald85 are insisting on leaving us in the belief that Europe will be more interesting than hanging around here. Poor, deluded ones. And the good crazedturkey is off to be a doctor in the middle of nowhere on top of that... so we had to say goodbye to them. It was a splendid party, accompanied by sneezing dogs and lots of beetles.

Random scene:
All: Waaah, it's only ten o' clock!
All LorFers except the good doctor: *dance like loons*
Em: *squishes a beetle while in bare feet*
All: *continue to dance like loons... whilst keeping a look-out for beetles*
Five minutes: *pass*
Time: *is now half past eleven*
Me: Well that went too quickly.

And the seven days went just as quickly. It seemed like we'd only just arrived and all of a sudden we were packing up and rigel_7 was kneeling bodily on her suitcase to squish it shut again. Fun was had by all, many museums and interesting places were visited and far too much time was spent crawling in and out of crazedturkey's adorable little car. You couldn't ask for more, really.