It's a little bit indecent how much I love...

the beginning of my HP AU. It may be the purest distillation of 'my' kind of angst I've yet achieved. For some reason Sirius and Remus work incredibly well with that. (More precisely: a pre-2003 fanon idea of Sirius and Remus works incredibly well with my kind of angst. I don't actually know canon Sirius and Remus all that well. So there's another problem with this fic: it's barely based in canon at all - and that usually means it's a bad idea...)

**

I've worked on the Sam/Maya thing. As usual, it's shorter now, and better. But I'm still stuck. Arrgh.

Awesome time of the year for the heating to go bust.

Or for the house to run out of fuel, I dunno which. Either way, the flat is cold and growing colder, and none of the radiators work. (Insulation/weatherisation is non-existent, too, this being an old house.)

Guess who's going to go to bed early tonight... It's the only warm place.

I hope this doesn't take long to fix.

(Fun fact: one of the main reasons why I'm afraid of being really poor is that I deal really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really badly with cold temperatures in my living quarters - and welfare doesn't necessarily cover adequate heating. Remember when I was in Copenhagen in December 2009 for COP 15, and had all these weird pains in my joints, and my hands stopped working properly for a few days? That's my body under conditions of constant cold. And it wasn't even *that* cold - the warehouse where we were staying was heated.

*Really* not looking forward to the point where that becomes a constant feature of my life - as it almost inevitably will, at least if I'm right about civilisation probably crashing within my lifetime, even if I should manage to avoid having to go on welfare until then.)

Maybe I should just open that café...

I've been idly dreaming about for at least twenty years.

(Except that'd probably be the single most stressful "alternative" to normal employment that I could possibly choose. And, me starting a business? Err, no, I don't think so.)

Anyway. Quite chuffed about the cream of pea soup. Third time I've made this, with some significant tweaks this time, and I'd say it's a success now. This is nice, because I like brightly coloured soups, and I was still lacking a green one. I have a firetruck-red one - beetroot, potato, wasabi - and a bright yellow/orange one - carrot, curry, ginger - already. Now I can make a traffic-light soup buffet, should I feel like it.

Main ingredients for the pea soup: peas, parsley, thyme.