Zeborah

Also aphids. I can haz lots and lots of aphids.

Being on leave I set my alarm this morning to cat o'clock. This turned out to be 8:40am today, so I showered and fed the cat and put some laundry on and trimmed a couple of branches of the neighbour's roses that were impinging on my dining room window (and going screech! screech! in heavy wind) and used them to kindasorta prop up my two-year-old grape vine, which really needs something better.

I think it was sometime during that where I missed a 4.4. Gardening is good for you! (This may have been when the cat disappeared again, leaving only half her breakfast eaten.)

Then I checked internet stuff, and then I hung the laundry out, and then I noticed there was grass growing up through my thyme, and then I weeded and accidentally pulled out one of the scragglier thyme plants (it looked dead until I discovered there was live stuff attached) so I replanted that in another spot. And I trimmed the rosemary where it was getting too tangled with a rose bush. I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a rosemary bush that isn't trying to take over the world.

Also in the department of trying to take over the world:

A short guide to growing parsley for people who don't like parsley
Step 1: Be given parsley as a housewarming gift.
Step 2: Plant parsley in the hope that, like most other things you plant, it will die.
Step 3: Watch in horror.

Fortunately my sister's rabbits adore parsley.

Then it was getting warm and I'm a fan of not getting sunburnt so I came inside and put through the payment for my new roof. (I have a new roof! It is green! And they put in a venting thingammy so my bathroom fan no longer vents into the roofspace!)

Also today seems a good day to make a new gardening icon for my DreamWidth account, so I did that too.

So I've got leave for a week so I can go to bed as late as I want and sleep in as long as I want. So last night I went to bed on time for the first night in weeks. I guess I felt like there wasn't a rush to do as much as possible before work starts again. I furthermore predict that on Sunday week I'll be going to bed really late. Brains are stupid.

Anyway, so after waking up this morning at 6:45 to the sound of my alarm clock not going off, I went back to sleep and had awesome dreams. I do keep telling myself that I get the best dreams when I'm not sleep-deprived, but it doesn't help when I'm trying to do as much as possible before work starts again.

Dream the first: I was in a museum. I was going down some stairs to the zoo, which I thought wasn't particularly nice to the animals to never see sunlight, but since they were there anyway I wanted to see the zebra. I lost my way a bit so was trying doors at random. At this point I may or may not have been the Doctor. One of the doors I tried opened out onto the street, but it wasn't the street where the museum was located so I decided it was safest not to go through. Also I was still looking for the zoo. The other doors I tried were also portals into other parts of the city. (It was kind of European with cobblestones, but also kind of... heritagey, like it was staged for tourists maybe.) The last one I tried before the dream faded, there was a woman selling strawberry tarts and strawberry slushies and so forth, and I was trying to understand the money I had (coins shaped like pink foil pea-sized balls) in order to buy some.

Dream the second: I was a Princess on the run / in rebellion against my mother the Queen. (Ie, I was dreaming about my WIP. My WIP is set in Scandinavia, but for some reason whenever I dream about it, at least about the royalty part, it's set in Korea.) I had to get some allies who'd be loyal to me and not my mother, and my Korean isn't terribly good. With some thought I said to a bunch of people something that, upon analysing the grammar while awake, actually means "Is there anybody? To love me." A bunch of people followed me around a corner, at which point I stopped and asked, "Is there anybody? To love [my] mother." There was a certain case marker that I used this time, which I think symbolises my ongoing confusion about how one is meant to use that case marker. Anyway, having narrowed down who I could trust the dream continued with me going into a Bible study class and my sister was there and it started going incoherent and anyway I can't remember any more.

Speaking of the WIP, earlier this week I wrote 549 words of Mikkel talking with the Queen, and then I deleted them. And up through yesterday I wrote 411 words of Mikkel talking with the Queen's lady-in-waiting, and now I've deleted them. I'm planning now to write some number of words of Mikkel talking with the Queen and her lady-in-waiting, and with luck I won't delete them too.

We're driving through the North Island and have stopped to visit a chemist. We have parked outside the Waikato District Library in Huntly. And so I says to myself, "Self, I wonder if Huntly has access to the Aotearoa People's Network?" And I opened my laptop, and lo, it does. Random free wireless ftw!

<waves to the world> Hi world! My sister has a sore throat (hence the chemist) but so far she hasn't given it to me. It is presently sunny, though since we've been driving a lot and also this is New Zealand we've been alternating sun and rain. Last night we visited my uncle and then drove to the family's holiday house at Tokaanu for the night.

My Interactive Fiction of Huis Clos is up to early in Scene 3. (Scene 3 is where it starts getting more complicated....) Also I wrote a bit of chapter 17 of the WIP, but I probably need to write it again.

Mum, the only one of us without a laptop, is really impressed by the super fancy public toilets in Huntly.

Hey everyone, I will be on holiday from Thursday morning until the night of Sunday week. Just in case you wonder why I've disappeared from the face of the internet.

Hey, and my fridge is now startlingly clean, due to the fact that I just threw all sorts of containers full of dubious substances into the garbage.

I still need to:
* buy a suitcase to replace the one with the zip that's corroded shut
* visit the doctor for medicaments which, in my befuddled state on Friday, I told the other doctor I had enough of (I did! Because I was planning to visit the doctor and knew I had enough to last until then...) Anyway, a check-up will probably be good.
* give my sister a key to make it easier for her to feed my cat
* do the dishes
* everything else I've forgotten

Hey everyone, while on holiday with nothing to do but nature walks and other such tortures, shall I:

a) finish this blasted novel for once and for all (quarter of an accursed novel in 10 days should be doable, right?)

b) recreate the entirety of 16th century Copenhagen in Inform 7 for an open-ended interactive fiction/game/thing where you can choose by your actions whether the story is a romance, mystery, quest, political thriller, etc etc (so far I have a few rooms in the castle; candles and oil lamps that burn until consumed; coins in various denominations and kings; and some randomly generated NPCs who'll tell you when asked what time it is and, if they're a priest in a chapel and it happens to be the change of the canonical hour, will start saying their offices)

c) make Criminal Minds fanvids (this would involve packing all my DVDs plus the old laptop because the new laptop inexplicably refuses to read my Criminal Minds DVDs, do not even *get* me started)

d) plan properly for the workshop I'll be facilitating at the library conference in a month and a half (except this probably requires the internet for research which I won't have)

e) do my overdue taxes (um, whoops)

f) read piles of books (involves packing piles of books)

g) all of the above?