Hey! It's katesti's birthday! Happy birthday, hon! WOOOOOOOO!

I don't remember how I met you. One of our mutual friends said we should be friends, or something like that. But either way, I'm glad to have you as an online friend. You're funny and cute and generous and thoughtful and silly, and I am really glad to have gotten to know you over the past few years. I hope you have a wonderful birthday, full of booze and good music and no work stress and friends and love. I hope this next year brings you no problems with your new house, lots of fulfillment on a professional level, and every happiness on a social level. Have a great birthday!

You know, I was gonna do a "Who fucked up the worst?" poll for S6...but then I thought that it would be difficult to compare the various failures going on (Especially because placing anything beside trying to end the world...kinda pales). So let's take away the competition and just look at the characters individually.

This poll uses scales. 1 to 10. 1 being "This character didn't screw up hardly at all" and 10 being "This character fucked up enough to make Satan shake his head sadly". Use whatever standard you want, and rate how badly the characters screwed up.

Cause that's what S6 is all about.

( Personally, Clem would have gotten my vote as the worst fuck-up... )

Mistaken for someone interesting, I have been interviewed at blogcritics.org. (We did it in October, so mentally replace "next month" with "this month.") In what is probably a first, I am actually asked about The Secret Life of Dolls a good bit. Also discussed: The Third Man, nineteenth-century fancrazy, and my newest "hobby."


(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)

Last night the Scientist got home from work around 10:45. Once again, the cat raced past him and out the door into the yard without being noticed. This morning I got up and thought "Where's the cat?" I wondered if she spent the night in the yard AGAIN, and when I opened the door I found a note from the neighbor taped to the storm door. It seems the neighbor's daughter came home from work around 12:30 and saw our cat on the stoop, crying. So she came over, took our cat, and kept her and their house overnight so she'd be out of the cold. I raced over there this morning (hair still wet) to retrieve the damn cat, who'd spent the night in the neighbor's laundry room hiding behind the furnace. :|

We're giving the neighbors one of the rum cakes we brought back from the Bahamas as a thank you for looking out for Sassy. But I can't believe the cat did this again. And would you believe that as soon as I got her home and she calmed down, she was back at the front door, looking to get into the yard? STUPID CAT. From now on, we're going to have to do a scan of the yard before/after leaving the house, just to make sure she hasn't broken free.

Meanwhile, the neighbors have rescued a tiny little kitten. It seems someone came to the daughter's place of work and left the kitten in a box on the counter. They told him he couldn't leave the cat, so he said "Fine, I'll just leave her in the box outside. Someone will pick her up." The neighbor's daughter couldn't let the kitten stay out in the cold, so she took it home. It's an adorable little white cat with black spots, and they've taken to calling her Elsie. (Granted, Elsie is a Guernsey and not a Friesian cow, but how many other famous cow names are there?) I can already tell the kitten is going to be a long-haired cat, as she looks very similar to how Sassy looked as a kitten. The neighbor lady told her kids they can't keep the kitten, as they already have two cats. I wish we could take it, but I already have one cat who doesn't like to share, my allergies are getting worse, and the Scientist and I have promised each other the next pet will be a dog. So in conclusion, if any of you Chicago area people are interested in an adorable white and black spotted long-haired kitten, I've got one for you.

And finally, I love Google.

Title: Home
Rating: G
Wordcount: 100
Spoilers: Set after 5.07
Summary: It hurts more than Barney can admit to, more than he ever expected.

Link to my journal

Title: What We Do Best (1/1)
Author: ocelot_summer
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Barney/Robin
Spoilers: Season 5, up to and including "The Rough Patch"
Word Count: 1,633
Disclaimer: So, so not mine. If they were, tonight wouldn't have happened. Except the end.
Summary: Post-"The Rough Patch". A meeting, a plan perfected. Everyone knows it's hotter when it's a secret.
Author's Note: This is unbetaed, just written therapy to get over tonight's episode.

Follow the fake cut!
("Think they bought it?")

I do enjoy it when folks on twitter post very similar things and they're not following each other.

person: napped for 15 hours. crimney
other person:  Had an EPIC sleep last night, like, 15 hours. It was AWESOME.

little things like that make me go "hee"

* * *

It appears there is no longer a fansite dedicated to Miss McCoy, I'm hoping that the person is revamping or maybe they haven't paid their whatever fees and it'll be back in the near future, however it it is not ... Someone really should make a page for her. I'd be willing to help supply pictures. I have a few.

I finally finished signing up for Yultide--it took FOR-E-VER. Probably because I signed up to write about fifteen or twenty different fandoms. I'm honestly more excited about the writing than than I am the receiving. There were so many fandoms listed that I never would have thought of writing for, but that I love more than words, and each time I saw a new fandom I was familiar with pop up, I got about million ideas in my head. It's so lovely! I can't wait! Yay writing!

 Barney tells Ted's kids the story of how he met their mother, except not really.

Title: play it, sam (but i forget how it goes)
Author: hyacinthian
Rating: Eh, I'd say it ranges from G to R, really
Author's Note: All previous chapters here. Unbetaed. SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY. I was so dissatisfied with this ep, there aren't even words for it. I tried to siphon my anger out through this piece. Inspired by this line from RENT ("Over the Moon", specifically): the only way out is up, elsie said
Summary: 5x07 ("Rough Patch")


( clicky. )

I realized I never posted these, so time for some pretty flowers.

July 16-24

Did I tweet today? Check the cut!

( Pick A Little, Tweet A Little )

Follow me: @brooding_soul

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Ohmigod, you guys, I finished my Influence revisions! Cause I've been sitting around, trying to figure out how to make things work, and then I had one of those lovely light bulb moments where it all makes sense!

So Chapter 8 of Influence is back out for beta! Yay!

I understand that my betas have lives outside of editing my stuff, though, so don't take this as a promise to have the next chapter out by any particular time, because it's likely that I'll have to do some more minor revisions once it comes back to me.

I don't know why I got so stuck on this one. I think it's because I was trying to think of a way to get from A to B that was completely different from the way I had used at first. And it's hard (for me) to think of another way to cover the conflict that I wanted. But I like this version much, much better, and I'm happy with what I have now.

So I went to this awesome HIV conference today in Dayton, blah blah blah whatever. On the way home, I got passed by this geezer in a red convertible with a license plate that read "MEANDME" and all I could think was, I guess "IMADOUCHEBAG" wouldn't fit, huh pal? (Or maybe it was already taken.)

Halloween has come and gone, and with little fanfare from me. Sure, we put up my light-up Halloween houses, and the pumpkin lights in the back window. And yes, I carved pumpkins with yakgirl and her boys. But it didn't feel much like the typical Halloween, what with being on the cruise at the time. Fun, yes, but not the norm. So now I'm all geared up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. As per the past two years, we're doing double-duty Thanksgiving this year, hitting up the Scientist's family Thanksgiving at noon, and then to my parents' house for dinner that evening. He and I went shopping yesterday, and it was great to see all of the autumn colors and turkeys and such on display. I think it's because Halloween was so low-key this year, I'm really gunning for Thanksgiving. We bought "fall chutney" from Harry & David yesterday, which has apples and raisins and cranberries in it. I'm really looking forward to that, and drinking the Glogg we bought a few months ago. And I want to make pumpkin pies this year, too. The Scientist hates all things pumpkin, but too bad! I want to bake.

Making me even more amped for the holidays is the fact that I put up Christmas lights yesterday. I know, I know. Normally we don't do any Christmas decorating until the weekend after Thanksgiving. However, the weather was AMAZING in Chicagoland yesterday, and I couldn't resist taking advantage of it. I mean, who wants to be on a ladder hanging lights when it's 30 degrees and you can't feel your fingers? Yesterday I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, no jacket. How could I pass up the opportunity?

So yeah, HOLIDAYS! Bring 'em on!

Ten contributors to State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and the states about which they wrote:

1. Alison Bechdel (Vermont)
2. William T. Vollmann (California)
3. Anthony Bourdain (New Jersey)
4. Ha Jin (Georgia)
5. Alexandra Fuller (Wyoming)
6. Dagoberto Gilb (Iowa)
7. Jack Hitt (South Carolina)
8. Myla Goldberg (Maryland)
9. Susan Orlean (Ohio)
10. Jacki Lyden (Missouri)

I first ran across this book in trade paperback form at a bookstore. I looked at the list of contributors on the front covers and read the back cover and decided it looked pretty interesting, so I made a note of the title and resolved to look for it at the library. I put a copy on hold at my local branch a few weeks later, and a week or so ago I picked it up, having in the interim forgotten why I had reserved it in the first place. The copy owned by the LCPL was the hardcover edition, which was designed to evoke those old state guides produced by the WPA in the 30s, and my assumption was that it was in fact a sampling of the works from that series, which didn't enthuse me. But it's not that at all. The resemblance is intentional, though; like the Federal Writers' Project before them, the editors of State by State got some of the best writers in America to contribute to the project, and while the result is not on the same epic scale as the WPA American Guide project, it is an amazing collection of essays by an amazing collection of writers. The essay about my home state of Illinois, by Dave Eggers, is hilarious and well worth the price of admission itself, but the other three I've read so far (Dagoberto Gilb on Iowa, Myla Goldberg on Maryland, and Tony Horwitz on Virginia) are as good, and I can't wait to read the rest, even the ones about loser states like South Carolina. If there's a flaw, it's that there's no essay about the District of Columbia, though there is, included as an afterword, an interview with the Washington writer Edward P. Jones about growing up in the city, which was pretty good for what it was.

Could someone who is very smart and patient and able to talk in small words who is also not biased either in favor of or against the new health care bill please explain it to me?

It is 2000 pages long and...well, I am just not that uber.

Please no arguing in comments, either. If you disagree and want to debate, take it your own LJs. :)