Zeborah

When you've got a tiny bit of touch-up painting to do, and you think, "It's not worth using a dropsheet for a job this tiny," you're wrong. Always use a dropsheet.

This was not my mistake, this was the professionals' mistake. Several times. In fact, every time they've tidied a spot where they'd dripped paint before, they've dripped a new colour of paint on something else. I foresee this taking us recursively into the new new millennium. I'm going to see if I can convince them to leave me some of the interior paint so I can just sign off on the project already and fix it myself.

After having procured a dropsheet.

ETA: When reminded to put the curtain rod back up, you don't have to interpret this too strictly; you could also put the curtain itself back up too. Except no, you couldn't, because you put the curtain rod up back to front. --I fixed this eventually, though I managed to warp one of the thingammies so one of the screws isn't really exactly holding anything, but nothing's fallen down yet so it must be good.

---

In entirely other news, one step closer to a replicator in every home. (Well, one step closer to replicator patterns in every home, the replicator itself is more expensive and thus far limited in the materials it can work with.)

First off, if you haven't seen the literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, you need to do that, it's probably the classic of the genre. Here, let me make it easy:


(In case you wondered, Sony don't understand the concept of "parody" so got the original taken down; the reframing with the cat means it's not automatically discovered so has been able to stay up longer in most countries.)

Now my fanvid:
Literal Eclipse of the Heart
Lead Vocals: PersephoneMaewyn
Lyrics / Vocals / Editing: dascottjr
Music: Jim Steinman
Video: from Doctor Who (New Who) seasons 1-6
Vidder: Zeborah
Summary: A literal fanvid of the literal video version of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. My meta, let me show you it.

Download: [New link post-MegaUpload] from Minus (83MB including subtitle files)
Streaming: at YouTube (captions available)



( Notes )

Another day, another earthquake swarm. I was trying on a tshirt in a small shop so was half naked as I grasped the hook on the wall just in case. Fortunately I didn't need to actually put any weight on it because I don't think it was designed as a safety rail. Anyway, so I bought the tshirt (phones were down but EFTPOS stayed up) and went back to my motel to sit with Twitter while Boots huddled under the couch.

Then I wandered down the road to see what traffic was like -- no gridlocks evident in my area, at least as much as I could see before we got a jolt so big I did a 180 and went back to sit with Twitter. A socially decent period of time after I heard the phones were working again, I texted my contractors to see if I should plan to stay at the motel another night. They phoned back and said they'd stayed after the quake long enough to make the place basically habitable for me. Then, having families, they scarpered; but I'm pretty impressed they hung around at all, they've been pretty fantastic. So they'll have to come back after Christmas to finish up and fix some of the damage they caused in the rush to leave, but they were going to have to come back anyway due to supply bottlenecks and other events putting them a week behind schedule. My house is therefore rather a mess, but all the utilities work (apparently we don't even need to boil water this time) and it's habitable.

Mum brought me and Boots home, and Boots promptly disappeared under the house. I located the router and hooked the wireless back up and have since been unpacking. First thing to go into its rightful place was the go-bag, by the door.

While my house is nominally being fixed (they were meant to start on the 28th; they actually started late on the 30th and did a bit more on the 1st and nothing on the 2nd; I can tell these things with my super powers of reading the sign-in sheet) Boots and I have moved into a motel.

I think Boots is actually more or less settled, though it took some time. She spent the first 30 hours hiding under furniture - no food, no water, no litterbox. Then she spent an evening hugging my ankle, and then she spent all frickin' night scritching things and jumping on things and jumping off things (onto my nose) and banging things and trying to open things and generally preventing me from getting more than an hour's sleep at a time. (The asthma attack at 4am didn't help. I ended up going outside and sitting in a deck chair which turned out to have rain in it, and then I slept on the couch for the last hour of the night, and then I went to work and blinked blearily at everyone.)

For a few more days after that she spent the day (while I was out) under the bed and then crept out to hug my ankle when I got back, and then spent the night under the bed again. Nibbling a very little food here and there. But now she's eating fairly reasonably for an outdoors cat being kept indoors and is playing a bit more normally and sleeping on the bed next to my ankles as per usual.

It's weird living out of a motel in my own city, but it's all fine: I've got everything I need (including wifi and the run of the laundry) and it's comfortably lived in (so not intimidating the way I find hotels). I'll still of course be glad to go home. The date set for that is the 22nd December, and I'm determined to believe them despite all evidence to the contrary. They sound like they're determined to give excellent customer service, and I've heard from other people who've had repairs start slow but finish on time, so it's not impossible.

The other day, a friend asked where I was and when I told them they said, "Oh, that's good, there's lots of shops there." It's more that there were lots of shops there, I pointed out. Since the quakes, the fruit-and-vege shop, the two bakeries, and the supermarket (among others) are all deaded, which as far as the necessities of life go leaves the butcher, the petrol station, and a 2nd hand bookshop. I can shop at a mall on the way home instead, but.... But as I stay longer I notice there's more than I thought, because one of the bakeries is operating out of a shipping container, and the fruit-and-vege place is operating out of a tent.

Walking down the road from the motel towards my busstop in the morning, I can see straight down to a demolition crane in the CBD. I have feelings about this but they're fairly vague and unformed. They're oddly different from the feelings I feel on my normal bus route where I see the crane pulling apart the Catholic Cathedral and the crane taking the top off the Hotel Grand Chancellor and various bulldozers painting the town pink with brickdust. I think it's because it takes time for the bus to get me that far, but here I leave my motel at 7:15 in the morning and there it is.

I seem to have started writing my When the Sky Fell story again. May or may not get much further this time around, though today I reached the Ode to the Radio scene which I've never got to before. It aches to write, and there came a point this evening doing research where I had to stop reading mid-sentence. Someone was talking about the "glassy, shell-shocked look" people had after February and. I remember that, when I was walking along Bealey Ave on the 25th February; I mentioned it in a blogpost at the time, but. Words just don't. It's like looking into a black hole where a person should be.

--However, the other thing that happened on the 25th February was my friends' son was born, and yesterday when I went to visit (as I do most weeks) he crawled! Towards me! Seeing him once a week is fantastic, I get to skip the nappies and most of the teething and "I'm hungry but won't eat, tired but won't sleep" screaming fits, while still getting all the fun of playing with him and the excitement of watching him grow up. I heartily recommend being an honorary auntie.

Both of these I have days where I look at them and think they're pretty darn fine despite their flaws, and days where I look at them and think they're terribly flawed despite being otherwise fine.


Title: Just One Person
Fandom: Criminal Minds - (up to season 2 episode 15)
Music: "Just One Person" by Bernadette Peters

Downloadable from [New link post-MegaUpload] Minus (38MB .mp4) or streamed from YouTube (no captions, sorry; doing both speech and lyrics would require serious actual fiddling with timing, and it's late and I don't adore the vid quite sufficiently for the effort):



( Notes on Just One Person )

Title: Wishin' and Hopin'
Fandom: White Collar (up to season 3 episode 10)
Pairing: OT3 Elizabeth/Peter/Neal
Music: "Wishin' and Hopin'" by Ani DiFranco

Downloadable from [New link post-MegaUpload] Minus (42MB .avi) or streamed from YouTube (includes captions):



( Notes on Wishin' and Hopin' )

When I was in the Netherlands... wow, over five, six years ago now? I got a gorgeous red skirt, which has ever since been my favourite, but has unfortunately suffered fading and much fraying of the hem and embroidery. During the snowdays this year, when I was snowed in with my friend on the other side of town, I passed the time taking the hem up (it's still ankle-length; it's a wonderfully long skirt, and it took time because it's a wonderfully full skirt), but it's been sitting around for the last couple of months waiting for me to get the dye. I finally got that on Wednesday on the way to meeting undisclosed people for coffee (about something that... may come to something, I'm not certain) and have just followed all the instructions for dying the skirt red again.

Now just to wait for it to dry. I'm not sure if it's a bit more cherry red than when I bought it or if it had just faded that much but I'm pretty certain it's going to look fantastic either way.

Must be time for an earthquake update:

• at work they're knocking down the buildings on either side of the building I worked in. We should be able to move back in early next year. Current plan is to then in another year's time cram us into the main library and randomly give the space away to other departments, which makes me furious, but I'm resigned to being made furious by decisions there. (They're hurting financially due to earthquake costs and lost revenue from students going elsewhere; but I'm convinced many of the proposed decisions are false economies.) Plus a key person has recently resigned so who knows?
• the cordons around town have shrunk a bit more and there's a new bus exchange. (Since February, there've been two bus exchanges which each consisted of a bus parked on the side of the road for shelter and some portaloos. They were great, but y'know?) It consists of driveways, electronic signage, outdoor seating, and some prefabs with toilets and indoor seating, and it looks fantastic. It abuts demolition sites and cordons. At night everything beyond it is pitch black. In the day, you can see machines pouring asphalt on a space that used to be something, and beyond that the hole in the wall of an upper floor of the pre-February bus exchange building; and the bus coming in goes past the demolition of the Salvation Army outlet store that yesterday was merely abandoned and unhappy, and the the bus going out comes past the vertical blinds fluttering in the broken windows of the City Council building.
• reservoirs and other components of the water system are still so damaged we're already being given summer water restrictions (which many years we never need, but if we did it'd be at least January before they started) - no unattended outdoor watering, and handheld watering only on three days a week (Tues/Thurs/Sat for even-numbered houses, Wed/Fri/Sun for odd-numbered, Monday entirely banned).
• apparently City Mall is opening soon (this weekend? or Show Weekend, which is in two weeks?) in box containers. (There are already box container shops operating in scattered locations, eg a dairy aka corner store which has recently sprouted a "Coffee coming soon" sign.) The newspaper claims that some place in the UK is threatening to sue for us stealing their idea, which outraged me until I remembered that the business of newspapers is to recount the truth in such a way as to mislead people into being outraged enough to buy the newspaper, and I'm not sufficiently interested to investigate what's actually going on in this case (quite possibly all they said was "Please don't use our brand name"). They're getting pwned on their Facebook page in either case.
• the public libraries that had been still closed - eg space taken over for council work and such - have been slowly reopening; and there's a new small one on the edge of town; and my local relocated one is opening for another hour in the day which'll make it possible for me to get there during the week. Also the local mall continues to open new shops.
• CEISMIC has launched - a portal for earthquake stories and other information about the events.
• my choir's singing a tribute song which is gorgeous music but truly appallingly sappy-wappy words, I cannot express.
• state of the Zeborah: I don't like sirens from emergency response vehicles. I especially don't like sirens from more than one emergency response vehicle at a time. I'm mostly okay with helicopters, though sometimes they're disconcerting (this one for instance; must be the fourth time it's passed). I'm also mostly okay with aftershocks, as much as one can be of course, but unidentified rumbles hold my attention until I've identified exactly what they are even if I know that whatever it was it wasn't an earthquake. In an unfamiliar place I'll often (but not always) do a quick "If there was a big earthquake right now I would..." spotcheck; sometimes I'll then get a wee "There could be a big earthquake right now" gutkick, but a breath or two fixes that, whereas sirens require more breathing and often blinking too. I empathise more closely, tear up more easily, with stories of disaster or personal loss or communities coming together. In other words, all perfectly normal and of no concern.

Title: Living Doll
Fandom: Doctor Who - spoilers for most of season 6
Music: "Living Doll" by Cliff Richard

Downloadable from [New link post-MegaUpload] Minus (57MB .avi) or streamed from YouTube:



( Notes )