Hi! So. It's been...quite awhile, actually.

I'm okay. I'm just not feeling very fannish at the moment, and trying to compartmentalize more, and separate fannish from personal and whatnot.

Long story short, the past month=craziness. My brother got sick again and had to be hospitalized -- this happened while my parents were in Italy, leaving me in charge, and coincided with finals week. Then I was out of the country traveling for a couple of weeks. Now I'm back, and working, and taking a summer class to fill a gen ed requirement.

So, yeah, hi! I'm not dead. I'm not even bad. I'm just not here much, either.

\o/

SO HAY TODAY IS MADE OF A+++++++ WOULD GET OUT OF BED AGAIN! \o/

Late last night I made cupcakes. Technically that was early this morning, actually. I made them while my brother watched Discovery Channel and came out to the kitchen occasionally to make fun of me. Basically the cupcakes were made because I had a fabulous idea and wanted to try it out, and also because my mom was having an attack of existential dread and very anxious and depressed and I wanted to cheer her up.

(The cupcakes were lemonade cupcakes! I flavored the mix with a couple of those packets of lemonade mix you put in bottles of water, and then did the same with the frosting (which was entirely from scratch, my delicious butter frosting, with another couple of those little packets added after the powdered sugar, plus a bit of actual lemonade added when it needed thinning out). They are super-yummy, but I'm a big fan of strong lemon flavor; if I were making them for other people I'd probably just make the lemonade frosting and put it on plain white cupcakes. As it was, I was close to putting a sign up on the cupcakes that said "WARNING: THESE CUPCAKES ARE ~INTENSE~". Those cupcakes: srs bzns.)

And then I woke up earlier than I expected to, so I went up to campus a couple hours early because my Astronomy lab professor had invited me to this Women in Scientific Domains lunch. Where everyone was mega-nice, and I got delicious salad (srsly, this salad was so awesome! I don't even know what it was, but it was fabulous) and free pizza. My professor ran over and hugged me, she was so excited to see that I'd come to it.

AND remember how I said I'd never got an A+ in any class ever, but I got one in hers? She pulled me aside as I was leaving and said she wanted to tell me what a joy I'd been (the last class is this coming Monday), because not only was my work incredibly impressive, I'd stayed a) calm and -- apparently this was even more impressive to her -- b) enthusiastic all throughout.

Also, apparently GMU has the highest ratio of female to male faculty in their Physics department of any school in the country. AWESOME. This, combined with a few names I noticed in my lab notes, gave me a really awesome idea for a non-fiction book, so yay.

Then I went to work. Where it was someone's birthday, or retirement, or promotion, or something, but the point is, there was FREE CAKE.

Baked goods! Scientific kickassery! General awesomosity!

\o/

So I have basically fallen in love with The Romance of Adventure by Brian Taves, and have already run off to Amazon to buy it, because it is fabulous and so incredibly helpful for me in figuring out the stories I like, both in terms of reading and writing. I sat down in a study carrell with the intention of skimming, then writing, and suddenly I looked up and it had been an hour and a half of me giggling over this book and going 'omg YES yay'.

The fact that it helped me figure out a lot about my own tastes is probably what it makes it so much fun for me to read, because it's pretty academic (though very readable as academic film studies books go), as a warning to anyone who may be placing any value on my recommendations. And it's also making me happy that there's been a resurgence of adventure in the past five or ten years, and I have, like, five million essays a-brewing now (like how the biggest reason Braveheart fails is because the story is actually a swashbuckling adventure but Mel thought it was Srs Bzns Drama, whereas if he'd just embraced the former it would've been brilliant, because historical accuracy really isn't a major concern in adventure...ditto Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, though this isn't made of quite as much PURE FAIL as Braveheart). Because seriously, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World fits Taves's description of "sea adventure" so perfectly that it's hard to believe the book was written almost ten years before the movie was made, because he could be writing about it.

(Ooh, ooh, and also BtVS! Which while it has elements of horror is really adventure with a smack of teen drama, and this is probably why I am so excited about the comic -- without the constraints of budget, Joss will be able to tell the adventure story that I think Buffy is at heart. Hell, the simple background info Joss is giving us on where Buffy is in relation to the rest of the world -- the maddening vagueness is so I don't have to do a spoiler-cut and clutter everything up -- it is 100% adventure, with only the historical setting being missing, and I think the presence of fantastic/horror elements takes the place of that instead.)

DAMN YOU TAVES I WAS GOING TO GET SOME WRITING DONE TODAY SRSLY.

sink_or_swim has decided that when she grows up, she either wants to be Vesper Lynd or Kobe beef. I have informed her that this fact needs to be in her userinfo, but alas, she is not logged in permanently, so I cannot be in her lj changin' her userinfo, or causing other hijinks for that matter.

Anyhoo. Yesterday I spent more money than I probably should have done, but part of it was on presents, so. And then we saw Casino Royale, and she now agrees with me that this is by a wide margin the best Bond film yet, and that Daniel Craig may in fact beat out Connery as the best Bond. Also I would like to state for the record that it was she, not I, who decided that there needed to be a Bond crossover challenge, and she, not I, was the original founder of bond_crossover. I will take a screencap of the invitation to join to prove it.

Today we will decide on how we are going to set the challenge up. And it will be good.

And today I am possibly going to see cesario, yay! Because Dommi couldn't get out of work this afternoon, so I have a few hours to just wreak havoc on my own in Raleigh. GOOD TIMES.

In light of tonight's Doctor Who Confidential, I guess I should say this.

Hi, Russell T. Davies! &waves; As you can see, my journal is flocked now, but if you want more footage of it for another confidential, just email me and we'll talk.

Cons thus far:

• Things we were told we would have and don't: eg, laundry.
  
• Things we were told we would have, paid for in the tuition, and require as part of the academic program and yet don't have: eg, reliable Internet access. Like, the first day, it was only working for two of the five of us, and the second day, it was only working for one of us consistently, and the third day, I could get it for a couple of hours if I sat in one exact spot and sat in just the right position. Today -- nothing. Am typing this on flatmate's laptop, as she's the only one who's still got it anything like consistently. I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed about this if we hadn't been told we'd have wi-fi and hadn't been, you know, charged for the wi-fi as part of the tuition.
  
• I am on a completely different continent from my girl. &tear; Someone needs to buy jennyo a ticket to come out here. Seriously.

Pros thus far:

• I adore my flatmates. Like, seriously, they are all so cool and good-natured and sensible.
  
• rozk let me tag along for a party after we had coffee (well, she had coffee and I had a bagel)! It was great. Apparently I have a natural talent for working a room, which is surprising considering that I AM SO TOTALLY BAD AT THE SOCIAL THING OMG.
  
• At aforementioned party, Roz mentioned to Colin Greenland that I was writing as well as working at the Museum. He started asking me about the novel, and loved the sound of it. And asked me whether I'd given any thought to making it a series.
  
• Oh, wait, okay now, someone I know spent the past two days hanging around in the British Museum safe, ogling jewellry which was all at least a thousand years old and usually older, peering at skulls and bone fragments from an ancient burial site in East Yorkshire, seeing a bunch of Roman tablets up close and personal, checking out Romano-British shoes found in the banks of the Thames, inspecting Romano-British floor- and ceiling-tiles, many of which still had the maker's stamps in them, and oh yeah, cutting foam and fitting it to five-thousand-year-old axes. Hang on a second, who was that, now? OH, THAT'S RIGHT, IT WAS ME, BECAUSE I AM WORKING AS AN INTERN AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM. HI AWESOME.
  
• Which is to say, my internship kicks ass.
  
• I am going to Bath this weekend to see thedivinegoat and her family! Yaaaay!

In short, yeah, things are pretty good. Still haven't got a converter -- adapters, which just change the shape of the plug, are a dime a dozen, but converters, which will change the voltage and keep appliances from getting blown out, are harder to track down. Considering, at this point, just buying a new adaptor for the laptop from the Apple store; it'll already work with the laptop and since I travel here relatively frequently I know I'll be using it again. I've not brought anything else that needs plugging in -- using the mobile for an alarm clock and I don't use a hair dryer -- so at this point I'm wondering if all the frustration of trying to find a converter might not just be worth the cost of an adapter.

ETA: Okay, so, having done a bit of research, apparently adapters are all I need with my iBook. HOLY CRAP. I can just pick one of those up from Boots at Paddington before I get on the train tomorrow. Or even see if I can just buy one of the other girls' extras from her. AWESOME.

Anyway. The good definitely outweighs the bad: I am, in general, so so SO happy here. Like, if me and Jen could have a little flat here, and she could be writing full-time and I could be working at the museum and writing/editing in the evenings, I've realized that would kind of be my dream. Really, this is applicable to pretty much anywhere and needn't just be in London, but I am in London right now and am happy here and so most of my daydreams involve it somehow. Like, I'm homesick, kind of, but in the way where I just want everyone I love to be here with me rather than my going back to them.

Anyway, yeah. I have a feeling I will be losing my connection shortly so I'm going to wrap this up. insidian, I'll try to get the thing to you Monday but since my email isn't working that's going to make it exciting. I'm so sorry about the delay!