hmpf

Well, some of them, anyway.

Will wonders never cease.

oh, everything. Damn.

I just spent two full days working on jewellery, actually finishing or near-finishing four pieces, which reduces my To Do list in that area quite a bit. It feels good, but there's still so much old stuff I never finished... most frustratingly, a pair of earrings I promised my mother for Christmas... years ago. I gave her the design and promised I'd make two pairs of earrings from it, one pair from silver and one from gold. (I really liked that design, and she's always having trouble deciding what to wear with what, so I figured making two pairs, in different materials so she could wear them with everything, would be nifty.) Well, and I started on the silver pair, and they turned into a nightmare. And now, years later, they're still a nightmare, still far from finished - in fact, they're so ruined by now, from my repeated attempts to fix some problem or another, that I will have to start over from scratch. Only, the problem that caused them to turn into such a nightmare persists, and so the next attempt will probably end up a nightmare, too. Maybe I should start on the gold pair instead - gold is said to be easier to work with, especially in cases like this (pieces that require lots of very precise soldering), and I actually bought the gold back when I gave my mother the design for Christmas. Maybe I should give up on the silver pair altogether, and make something different from silver for her instead.

But I really *love* that design. Especially in silver!

I'm just not sure I have the patience and persistence to embark on that trip through hell once more. I just spent some twenty minutes just *looking* at the ruined pair, and arrrgh, so much frustration!

**

Here's one thing I need to push to the top of my To Do list for 2010:

*Really* get back in touch with people.

... but making progress (and boy isn't it great to finally be busy with something that allows you to see actual, daily progress!)

Since reviving my social life will probably take even more energy and time than sorting out the paper stacks and data that have accumulated in the last two years does, I've decided to start with the former only after I've finished the latter. But, as I said, I'm making noticeable progress, so I *will* get around to catching up with you guys *soon*. I promise.

I need to have the feeling, for once, that my life is not a giant, overwhelming mess piling up all around me. I can't start tackling the new, important tasks in front of me while still surrounded by all the debris of the past.

So, bear with me for a couple more weeks or so.

And my 'caught up' flist, i.e. the list I'm up to date with (up to the day before Christmas) consists of only twenty or so people and comms. What will it be like when I have all the 100-something LJs I have friended on there again and have to be offline for a couple of weeks???

Unfortunately I can't even do the catch up today, as I'm off to join my parents and uncle and aunt again, for another couple of days of - mostly - working for uni, and doing Family Stuff.

PS: Did end up doing some writing yesterday, after all - minor revisions on How to Love a Madman, which is approaching postability now, though parts of it are still weaker than I like.

Up to date with 5 people now.

And I still seem to be posting from the future - just one day now, instead of one month. Just had to go back and edit the date on several recent entries - again. Either there's something veeeeery weird going on in my flat (maybe my flat *is* in the future?), or my computer's system time and date are more frelled up than I realised. Will have to check that when I'm back home.

beccadg reports that she saw me in a featurette about the Leeds con that is apparently included on the HL anime DVD. (The anime's supposed to be quite good, btw, from all I've read - I'm not going to say that it's better than any of the movies the franchise has produced in years, because that practically goes without saying. Maybe I should ask my anime-savy friend about it; he may even have it, for all I know.)

It feels decidedly weird to know that my (moving) image is 'immortalised' on a HL DVD, though, seeing as how I'm such a decidedly lukewarm HL 'fan'.

Well. At least it's not on the DVD of 'HL : The SauceSource'.

***

I've been mostly absent here in the last few days because uni is a bit frantic at the moment. It's just occurred to me, too, that maybe I should explain my extended absence from LJ this past summer/beginning of autumn (or have I already done that?). I've actually been offline a fair bit of time, something like nine weeks total. And I was already behind on LJ before that; in fact, I hadn't really finished my *last* attempt to catch up, which was sometime around April/May, I think. So, yeah.

***

I have the meta from hell brewing in my brain. It's already cost me several nights' sleep, and for once, I'm treating it like an essay instead ofsimple, off-the-cuff rambling. I've got pages of notes already, and will take more, and then take some time to organise them into something coherent. If this goes well, it will be my final word on angst and sexeroticism and writing. Well, okay, probably not. But at least it will unify everything I've said on the subject in a variety of places, and everything I've been thinking about it. (Be afraid!)

***

I just noticed that my two most recent entries were apparently written in the future. The date says they're from late November. I've changed the date back to October now, but of course that means that the entries will have flown completely under everybody's radar, being first from the future, and now from the past. Since one of them is a - possibly interesting to some - meta thingie and the other concerns my catching up 'method', you may want to go directly to my journal main page and check them out there. Or not, as you wish. *g*

( new layout, wheeee! )

( f-list reading strategy... and a question )

( catching up with fic )

( walking, writing )

( and uni )

( I know this shouldn't bother me so much... )

Reading "L'origine" by Marc-Antoine Mathieu, a comic about a comic book character who's beginning to receive pages from the comic he's appearing in (and the reader is reading) in the mail. Weird enough to win my love even without the marvelous elevator scene... but the elevater scene is so, so perfectly in tune with my subconscious, it could be straight out of one of my frequent 'absurd architecture' dreams. Those involve strange elevators rather often, in fact. So, the scene:

The hero is visiting two friends/colleagues who are living in a cramped one-room apartment. They are talking about the mysterious pages from the hero's life. Throughout the conversation, the friends pause to listen very attentively for... something. Finally, one of them shouts 'Here it comes!' and they all burst into frenzied activity - folding up the chairs and table, stowing them away under the bathtub in a corner of the room, and, finally, removing the floorboards. The floor gone, we see that the apartment is one of a number of such rooms, one on top of the other, and the people in those rooms have all removed their floorboards (which, of course, constitute their respective downstairs neighbours' ceilings) at the same time so we can look down a vertical shaft of literally eviscerated flats, their occupants flattening themselves against the walls. And through that shaft - an elevator descends.

Brilliance.


***

Making great progress with the LJ catch-up, btw. Still not *quite* done, though. I've deliberately postponed catching up with some of the more voluminous LJs because I assume that that will take a little longer than catching up with most of the other LJs. My apologies if yours is one of the ones I haven't reached yet... but in the end you really have only yourselves to blame, being so frelling prolific! *g* Apart from those few, particularly long journals, I'm probably about 85 % done. Of course, as I catch up with individual LJs (using the friends page is no use for catching up after a two-month absence if your flist is around 100 people) time moves on and new posts are being made and so it follows that I am already not quite up to date anymore with the LJs where I began my catch-up round...