Chaos: A Blog

You know what, though? I was Listening to 'Red Roses and Dead Things' last night while I did the dishes, and I so really love 'Dear Gina'.

And speaking of filk, I remembered an interesting little idea I had involving re-lyricing parts of 'reflections', ie that song from Mulan. I should. When I get the time. *rolls eyes*

I have finished reading Daughter of Smoke and Bone. It didn't have that thing where a book will move inside my brain and demand to be thought about long after it has been put away, but it did everything else right. Though it initially worried me in how lithe and beautiful the main character is depicted as being, and that she has this outwardly exotic, beautiful life (she's a student at an art school in Prague), and that her big problem at that moment is that... her life is missing meaning. The worldbuild has gotten to me more than the characters.


I wonder if what bugs me about romance in novels is that whenever the couple are driven apart, it's because of uncertainty about whether one of them should be with the other, and I have no patience for it.

Also, I want horns. Not permanently, but I have an inner aesthetic in which I want to have animal ears or a tail or a something, to be someone who couldn't possibly exist.

Lupa had a birthday last week and asked to have her birthday post reposted as a birthday present. She's a Pagan author, an artist who uses dead-animal-parts in her artwork, and has recently completed a Masters in Psychology.

Lupa at Livejournal

Lupa at Dreamwidth

That some of the write-ins on Good Game: SP say that if they don't get help they'll turn into a n00b (or a n000000000000b)

That I've seen enough of Good Game: SP to know that.

That this unit has sort of become the ABC3* unit, and it's mostly my fault. Mostly as in, my sister mostly hasn't objected to it so far.

*It's kind of the kiddy channel. But it had the Iron Man cartoon on, I couldn't help it!

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I've been asked to do an interview for a business admin traineeship. My current thoughts on that are- if there's money, I'd like it if they want me, if there's not... I'm less sure. I've done admin as a volunteer; I don't know whether it would be worth giving up the conservation and land management for it. Even for job prospects, if the market is that competitive, though I guess I won't pass the interview if they didn't think I could work in the industry.

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I'm currently on school holidays. And waiting for us to get some furniture delivered. We're getting a futon couch and a kitchen table with chairs, as well as each of us getting a bookshelf and me getting a set of drawers.

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I have been writing, sort of. I've been editing Chained and being not-entirely-happy at it because it- you know. It's not as good as I think it should be. It's not even finished- I planned to edit through to where I was up to, but now I think it starts too quickly and this other bit could be better, and all.

Short stories are so much easier than all of that.

Yesterday everyone who was at class was asked to take some seeds home to soak for a experimental planting at Limeburners' bay, at the boardwalk site. We have five or six different species of saltmarsh plants, and I got a Tecticornia species, either grey or blackseed glasswort.

The saltmarsh plants grow slowly and take years to recover areas that have been compacted by having people walking on them or riding bikes on them. The seeds of these plants need the area to be flooded before they germinate naturally, so we were asked to soak them and change the water a couple of times (or put them in a stocking in the top of the toilet, which I did because I have a pair of ankle ones), and then we put a couple of buckets of water on the areas we were going to plant in, after having raked them up to give the seeds more space to germinate in.

Having the seeds felt a bit like having flecks of gold- I didn't want to lose a single one, because any seed I lost could be one of the seeds that would germinate. And the seeds are tiny, about the size of poppy seeds.

So yeah, today maybe we helped accelerate the spread of the saltmarsh plants into these compacted areas. A good few hours' work.



*I like the name samphire, even if we haven't used it in class much. It's like a cross between the words sapphire and vampire. But not a sapphire vampire. That would just be weird.

I came home from class today with two chocolate lilly seedlings from a planting we were doing today, and a punnet of beetroot seedlings from the supermarket (and stuff for pizza*- the power of beetroot did not compel me enough to go there only for seedlings). I planted out all the seedlings, and now I have thirty six seedlings all in their own little pots. (I got a heap of pots off one of my classmates, and I am so glad I got so many little square ones now). The chocolate lillies are pretty cool- they're indigenous, and edible- they have edible tubers. And the flowers smell like chocolate (apparently- I couldn't smell much from the ones at the bush food garden at Whittington last monday)

So now I have; the chocolate lillies and the beetroot, one each of ruby saltbush, nodding saltbush, berry saltbush, murnong/ yam daisy (all indigenous, the yam daisy also has edible tubers); round carrot seedlings, mint, the mint-baby lavender, red lettuce that's looking a bit manky and cos lettuce and two pots of red russian kale (I had no idea what it was apart from 'mystery brassica' until I brought a leaf into horticulture last friday). And some pumpkin seeds and some cucumber seeds and other things that were potted last friday, and the friday before. And I think there was a bell pepper seedling or two somewhere.

And the garlic, and the pea-straw peas. Seventeen. Assuming I haven't forgotten anything.

No wonder I'm starting to feel slightly overwhelmed with the plant thing. The natives will pretty much look after themselves (I have seen nodding saltbush growing through blanketweed- the little plants are tough), but I worry about whether I'm watering the veggies enough or too much or not enough- I think I've killed some of the garlic with overwatering, and some of the carrots were looking really droopy. On the other hand, the kale and the lettuces were watered really sporadically, and they're mostly really good.

Also, I had cauliflower on pizza. It wasn't bad.

I moved out of home last friday.

We're kind of living with half of what a normal household has, and we're getting by easily. The only problem is food, pretty much. and so many little things, like that had my sister not reminded me to take the mince out of the freezer yesterday afternoon, we would not have been able to have spaghetti for dinner. We had a can opener saga which would have been averted if I'd gone to Corio Village after class and bought one instead of going to a classmate's house to get some of her old pots. I had no preventative medication for a couple of days (but I dropped off at the doctors' office after class, and got the doctor to bandage up the blister on my heel), and discovered the hard way that my sister's workboots are far too big for me, and too big boots are bad news in the heathland in Anglesea (low shrubby plants tripping hazard + uneven, low visibility ground ground tripping hazard + clown boots = not good. Also see above, re blister). (man, I'm lame.)

And just, much running around. But it's slowly getting all sorted.

Moving day has been moved to tuesday because my sister applied for bond assistance and that hasn't come through yet. We are still in need of a fridge.

Nearly every book I own is in boxes, and all of my dvds are too. I own an awful lot of books.

I scored five spearmint plants today, and one of them has a baby lavender. Now I just need to figure out what to do with them...

Indoor classwork day today, some of which was catchup and some of which was rather boring, but involved tangents on the hypocracy in animal welfare being only concerned with hurting vertabrates and not caring about invertebrates, and then that plants react when you cut them too...

Yesterday I was weeding with my gloves because I wanted to pull out the thistles that have started to grow in the garden. Because they're not good to touch or anything. And one of them bit me through my glove. I wasn't happy. And I shouted a more profane version of the post title at it. But I was going to kill it, so I guess all's fair in biology and war.

There were also some mushrooms behind a huge patch of weedy grass. They will probably die once the grass has been pulled out, though :(

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Total wordcount for JulNoWriMoThingie stands at 39k plus some. I skipped about five days and didn't hit word count on a handful more. I think I could keep up that pace most of the time if I could figure out how to turn off the part of my brain that zones out/ goes on tangents every so often- first couple of days were pretty good for both wordcount and time because I was just focused on getting words out, after then it would take 3 or 4 hours to do around 2000 words, and while I could make that time while going out and doing other things, I wouldn't have enough time to be doing anything else.

Next up for Chained will probably be research and doing up character sheets for all the main characters. And it wants a soundtrack. As in 'oooh, this song really fits the story thematically, and so does this one, and this one fits with those and was associated with a scene in the old draft...'

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I'm gong to have a massive bruise on my thigh tomorrow from climbing over a gate today (it was locked and our teacher didn't have the key) and not getting my leg high enough over the fence to not hurt myself.

I took some pretty pictures of the saltmarsh and the plants.

Also, I am not dreadfully tired. It is a miracle!

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My birthday's in about a week, and I'm still figuring out what I want to do. Apart from being a bit epic, in the 'stuff I can make happen with a couple of days of work'. I have some ideas.

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Here, have some dalek-related amusement- the dalek game

And this is just plain amusing, even though I've never played Portal Warning- Cracked article