I just got a spam with the subject line "For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide". I... yep, it's definitely Monday.

( Random update. Cut for length (work, weekend, and general stuff). )

And (lj)lonescorpion just left me an email with hints on how to do the fourth mission in DoW, so I think that's my evening sorted, then!

So. How/what/who is everyone else doing today? ^_^

Laters,
Rath

Yo, deepbluesquee, you remember when we were laughing last night about me putting clear tape over the address of that parcel in case it got wet in the mail, and saying how only an Englishman would send a waterproof parcel? Well, just guess what happened to it this morning while I was hauling it to town in the snow. *rotfl*

Why the hell I am in work in the first place is a whole nother matter (possibly some vague residual guilt for not making it on Monday) but at least the fens were absolutely beautiful when I was walking across them; I came in the back way so as to avoid the cars and general public assholery on the main road. Snow has this odd effect of making me hate the human race, because the buggers all stomp around in it making slush and noise and mess and snowballs and they won't just shut up, sit down and let me enjoy it. And they all complain like crazy. FFS! It's beautiful, it's wild, it gives you a perfect excuse to stay in bed and not go to work, now get out of my way and let me stalk around the place in peace dammit! </black metal>

Anyway, here's hoping I make it home in one piece, since it's not looking like to get any better out there... *peers out of window* How are you guys?

Laters,
Rath

I didn't post this when I got in last night in the end because it was late and I was exhausted. So Friday's six, first:

1. Finishing work for the holidays! This is very important, obviously.
2. Getting a pack of the bracelet-type glowsticks on our table at the Downing Christmas dinner! And being very amused that all my colleagues were too, ah, mainstream to know what they were and how to make them work. *g* I stole two green ones in honour of DX, and a pink and a blue one just for the hell of it.
3. The fact that the puddings at said Christmas dinner CAME UP THROUGH THE FLOOR. Murray Edwards College (aka New Hall), where we were eating, has a servery area that can be raised through the middle of the dining hall floor, and they used this to bring up the dessert plates! Dimmed lights, sparkthrowers on the corners of the counters, and the James Bond theme as an accompaniment (O_O) - it was a fantastic piece of spectacle. Whoever came up with that one deserves a bonus.
4. Managing, early in the evening, to hit the DJ with one of those long balloons that you blow up and let go of and they go flying across the room. SCORE! (I wasn't even aiming for him, but don't tell anyone.)
5. Playing air guitar to Status Quo in front of all my colleagues. Admittedly that was the only thing they played at the disco that called for air guitar at all, but still. And the video was up on the screens (Rockin' All Over The World, for the record) and my gods, the Quo boys were adorable when they were young. ^_^
6. Stopping off on the way home to lie on the grass out on the fens, just basking in the knowledge that I was free for the next two weeks. I love the night, and the sky, and being alone just sometimes.

Admittedly (lj)naranek stood me up for said dinner, but you can't have everything. *pokes and grins*

And today, ie Saturday:

1. Being on holiday, which is still making me happy!
2. The epic success that was the Triad early-Christmas-dinner. I made a full roast dinner with all the trimmings and ate until I can currently barely move. No fewer than FOUR kinds of pudding were involved. I rock.
3. Getting awesome Christmas presents from my friends, the absolute pinnacle of which has to be the pageful of chibis that deepbluesquee drew for me. There are no words for how thrilled I am with this.
4. Decorating the Christmas tree(s) and getting tinsel all over everything and everywhere, including on my own head (where it still is).
5. Spending the evening belting out Twisted Sister, Lordi, Zodiac Mindwarp, Blue Oyster Cult and Whitesnake. I fucking love proper hard rock. I love feeling my heart lift and my feet tap and not being able to do a damn thing to stop it. And I love how easy it is to do anything from cooking to dishes to cleaning when I've got something to sing along with, too. Best of the night had to be Whitesnake's Saints and Sinners, which was one of the first rock albums I ever owned (taped for me by my cousin when I was only about fourteen) and I always love to hear again. I'm such a sucker for good memories. ^_^
6. The simple delight of hanging out with people I love... and who can reduce me to laughing until I think I'm going to turn inside out. Never underestimate the joys of daft, perverted, and completely deranged friends.

So yeah. Good day. Gooooooood day. *contented sigh* How are you guys?

Hail Slaanesh and happy Christmas,
The Navigator

[This is Thursday's post that I didn't make because the internet crashed. Friday's later on!]

More than half way! Though to be honest I don't know that I'm going to want to stop this after eight days... it's good for my mood as it makes me take a mental note of everything good that happens over the day. ^_^ So today:

1. lookingforsigns bought me a gorgeous opalite stone! Opalite is magic - in low light it's the blue-green white of winter ice, but any light shining through it comes out on the other side a deep, glowing red-orange colour. Like fire at the heart of winter... so beautiful I feel like I should have gone blind just staring into it. Thank you, sis. *s*
2. Looking at the moldavite pendants in Nomads, at sternenstaub's suggestion. I know exactly which one I want - it's a piece of rough moldavite held by silver wire, with a pink cabochon-cut stone above it. I held it in my hands for a few moments and my palms tingled for the next five minutes. Unfortunately it costs *whisper* a hundred and twenty pounds, so I will almost certainly never have it... but it made me happy to look at and touch it for a bit anyway. (Moldavite is earth that was thrown up by a meteorite impact and fell back fused into olive-green glassy stone, by the bye - it's weird and wonderful in the highest degree!)
3. Indigo's smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese bagels - awesome comfort food - and their caramel slices, which today were absolutely fantastic. Basic-style good food is one of life's most underrated luxuries.
4. Koi doing an impression of a set of bagpipes attacking somebody. This is a noise I don't think I can physically describe, but I laughed until it hurt. Koi is great at sound effects. ^_^
5. Various mental images involving attractive men, whips, and black leather. Why my brain is generating this sort of thing today I do not know but I am not about to complain.
6. Music! Within Temptation's The Silent Force is a gorgeous, gorgeous album. *sighs happily*

Laters,
Rath

I have a new bed - well, sort of a bed. It's actually a large bean bag that was given to me by deepbluesquee, and Koi took a photo of me curled up in it with my nose sticking out of the duvet, and... well, see above. ^_^

Interestingly, though, it seems to make me sleep a bit differently. More lightly, I think, to be precise. I seem to wake up in the middle of the night more often (which is cool, as the full moon has been shining straight through my window for the last couple of nights and it's absolutely magic getting to see that at five am when nobody else is awake). But the one difference I've really noticed is that I seem to be dreaming more than I was, and this is a good thing because when I don't dream, I feel wretched when I wake up and am well below optimal levels of functionality for the rest of the day.

Does anyone else notice what effect their dreams have on their wellbeing, out of curiosity? Or am I just weird? (If Freddy Krueger ever shows up, of course, I'm proper screwed...)

Meanwhile, in other news, I went in Body Shop yesterday and treated myself to some new bath things. Their Christmas range this year (amber/cranberry/vanilla) is fantastic. Especially the Vanilla Spice body lotion, as it's got gold shimmer in it and leaves you sparkling all over like some kind of demented Mary-Sue while also being incredibly good for your skin. I shall definitely be using this more.

Now, though, I'm stuck at work and miserably bored. Entertain me? Anyone? Please?

Laters,
Rath

PS And in the news today: Obama's new Secret Service codename is "Renegade". I like it. ^_^ Meanwhile, there's finally a proper sighting on a planet orbiting Fomalhaut... iä, Cthugha!

I feel really quite ill today. The muscles in my jaw and forehead are aching and I feel like I'm dragging my brain along by the scruff of its frontal lobe. Thankfully I can go home in about half an hour.

...also, I swear I'm going to EAT my colleague for that awful eight-bit-style classical piece she's got as her cellphone ring. I did not need that right now. *whines and clutches head* Everything seems to be so nuts at the moment. I just want to go outside and curl up on a bit of abandoned blacktop somewhere and sleep in the sun for about a week. At least my sis deepbluesquee is back on Monday, I've missed her. :/

In other news, does anyone not have, and want, a copy of Lordi's The Arockalypse? I... might just have kinda sorta cracked and bought the special edition yesterday, so my old copy is now free to a good home. >.>

Argh. Ow. Brain. Sod this, I'm leaving work early. *splat*

Laters,
The Navigator

I had a dream last night that I was in the middle of nowhere with a few people I know, and we were looking up at the sky and I saw what must have been a million million shooting stars all at once. It was as though the whole sky had always been one great dome of clear glass, and someone had smashed it and all the pieces were falling at once. I don't know why I dreamed that, but I'm just posting it because it's the kind of image you want to remember.

Having mentioned that... the rest of this post will now consist of stuff I want to show to everyone. In no particular order:

I've just discovered Tiny Ghosts. This is a strange little photocomic that isn't really "comic", but a sequence of little thought-provoking two-sentence stories. Mental jumping points, if you will. Some of it is a little too sentimental for my taste (the anti-war ones and the more mawkish romantic ones in particular sometimes cross the line) but the more macabre, weird or just plain leftfield ones are great. This one in particular struck me with some nameless sense of realisation, and left me looking round like I'd just seen the world slip sideways an inch; this one feels awfully believable; this one is sheer poetry.

I think my absolute favourite has, though, to be this one.

Meanwhile, also in the department of visual arts, I was talking to Koi while it was sitting with its graphics tablet the other night, and asked "draw me something Black Metal?" The result? This, which is absolutely awesome though you may have to adjust your screen brightness a bit to actually see it, looking at how it's come out on the work monitor. ¬.¬ Thank you Koi!

Finally, I've been haunted of late by a piece of music. I was in the cinema and caught the trailer for Babylon AD, and my ears instantly pricked up and I went "I know that piece, where do I know it from?" My brain distantly pinged a flag that said Sunshine, and, yes, it's the same piece of music that was on the trailer for that! It turns out to be called Lux Aeterna, and has appeared in about a million different guises on various movie soundtracks/trailers including Requiem for a Dream and, apparently, a trailer for The Two Towers. It's also on Youtube, where it's been used as a songvid piece for every remotely heroic/depressing fandom you can think of. Seriously, have a listen to a few of the versions. It's a gorgeous, spectral piece with a refrain that makes me think for some reason of the mirror scene at the end of Prince of Darkness - it sounds to me like a key, like a song that if played in the right place at the right moment could unlock our reality and create a gateway to another one. One where there's something that really, really wants to be on our side of the gate... and that we really, really don't want here, even if we don't know about it yet. I have no idea why this song affects me like this, but...

Okay, post long enough for now...

Laters,
The Navigator

I'm sitting on a Saturday morning, installing software on my laptop, downloading old Vond albums from Rapidshare, and listening to Mortiis's The Grudge while I wait for Koi to get up and watch Hellraiser: Hell on Earth with me. (Yes, downloading is the root of all evil; no, my chances of picking up proper copies of the albums in question are fuck-all and they'll be second-hand anyway if I do. I will if I can.) I'm decidedly unused to this kind of mixture of privacy and free time. Usually, these days, I'm either with someone else, working, or trying to sleep. Frequently all three at once. >.>

*muses* Late-era Mortiis is actually quite uneasy listening. It's always difficult to listen to something that raw when it's got that much pain and honesty screaming through it... it's like Nine Inch Nails or Type O Negative only a lot worse because I've always genuinely cared about Mortiis. There's not much more lame, I know, than wishing you could reach out to someone who's got far more fans and fame than you have, because you know you'd never get close to them without them thinking you're just another fan - but that doesn't stop me, however cliched it be, from poring over Secrets Of My Kingdom and the lyrics of the albums and thinking "yes, that, and I wish I could tell you to your face that I know it's all true!"

In other news, Koi has discovered to its amusement that I can be rendered absolutely harmless and turned into a ball of fluff by the simple process of picking up my plushie skeleton and animating it in my general direction. Try it yourself next time you visit me and watch the result, I gather it's extremely entertaining.

[Update: Koi has come down, flopped next to me, and glomped my arm. Typing this left handed. Laters...]

The Navigator