clo_again

I'm trying hard to be cheerful this week. Sometimes I'm getting there; sometimes I feel like hitting things with a stick. Think I'm getting to the part of being unemployed where it's not really fun anymore and the parents are getting the point where they really start nagging, and I've had a busy few weeks so I'm tired and oh, I don't know. The relentlessly depressing news this week isn't helping either. I wish someone in the know, somewhere, would let me get a sneak peak at my Life Plan so I know what to do next.

But! Until that happens, I'm mostly sleeping more than I need to and trying to catch up on some of my reading; since I'm currently trying to read The Iron King by Julie Kagawa, those two things are overlapping a bit. I'm trying to enjoy it but the main character keeps doing incredibly dumb things like chasing will'o the wisps in the middle of the night and I'm left going "YOU STUPID WOMAN HAVE YOU NEVER READ ANYTHING EVER?" Things like saying "thank you" to a faery being incredibly ill-advised are treated like revelations which er, no. There's a thousand YA books set in and around the supernatural/Faery out there right now; unless this is the very first one you read (unlikely, considering book 2 in the trilogy is marketed with a massive sticker on the front saying 'THE NEXT TWILIGHT!') none of it is surprising.

I'm wondering if I should bother finishing it, considering that I have no intention of picking up the next two books in the trilogy, and also I picked up The Lies of Locke Lamora secondhand yesterday, which is a book I've been desperate to read for ages (Robin Hood-esque hero who steals from the rich and uh, keeps it? Perhaps in a roguish and occasionally noble way? Yes please!) But I really don't like not-finishing books. Hhm. Maybe I'll make a hot chocolate and motor on through in hope that it gets better.

On a book-tangent, I found an absolutely brilliant secondhand bookshop in Morecambe today! It was a maze of ceiling-high shelves all packed with books, with bits of ceiling falling onto the floor in places and wooden ramps up and down levels and an owner with a Border Terrier that he was getting to do trcks for treats. It was amazing, like something someone would make up in a slightly eccentric novel and not like a real place at all, only it was. And the science fiction section had so many books (I picked up Dune, which I'm ashamed to admit that I've never read). Morecambe itself wasn't really anything to write home about but I'd go back for this bookshop. I wish it was in Lancaster where I go all the time, though I suspect then I'd soon be needing more bookcases. Which I don't have room for. Woe.

...That turned into rather longer of book-related thoughts than I expected. Related: would you say that reading all seven of the Harry Potter books makes you a "real fan"? I rather thought it just made me an average person, but yesterday the-post-boy-from-the-hospital-job seemed surprised that I'd read them all. I mean, it's Harry Potter; it's not as if I said I'd read all of Dickens or anything (which I haven't. The dude was paid by the word and it shows).

I guess I was just surprised he thought it surprising; maybe it's just from being in and around fandom so long but I was sort of assuming that it was more weird not to have read them.

Speaking of the post boy, he dragged me a 'small walk' around Rydal Water (a 'small' lake near Grasmere) yesterday evening. Over two hours later, I was limping back to the car thinking wistfully of the bottle of water I hadn't bothered to pack. Never be friends with anyone who runs half-marathons as a holiday; you'll either become super!fit very quickly, or die halfway up a mountain somewhere.

( That said, it was very pretty )

I mentioned that I'd like to see Wastwater at some point and he jumped on the idea of making it a daytrip. I'm packing water next time. And suncream, and food, and blister plasters, and maybe several careful hints about how, you know, I'm all for hiking in moderate doses but I have no intention of making it a lifestyle.

~

Concluding notes: scoobydumblonde, I have a post started with the answers to your meme questions but I keep getting stuck on the first one. I'm working on it.

jesse_kips, I bought tinned pineapple today ready for a second (and hopefully more successful) attempt at pineapple cupcakes. :DDDD Did you want me to have them nom-ready when you arrive or should we take time out from the Psych marathon to make them?

Everyone else...keep smiling. Hopefully next week will be better.

My paid account expired and since I'm not sure if I want to give Livejournal any more of my money at this point, I let it. Then I remembered how many pictures I had linked from Scrapbook and cursed a lot when I realised my now-vanished journal header was nowhere to be found on my computer. So, cue a very quick "find&replace" some colours in the CSS and a thrown-together header in Photoshop.

I suspect I will get fed up of the background. Very soon. I always figure I'll try one and then two days later I'm attacking the HTML with a hammer to get rid of it. In this case I think it's the wrong colour anyway but I'm so fed up of Photoshop and colours and oh, I'll just leave it.

For people who aren't on my Twitter: other than LJ fixing up today, I spent far too many hours in Photoshop making something I'd wanted to make for seven months and never got around to doing; you remember the WTF photoshoots of the eight of them standing awkwardly by a red bus and the eight of them standing awkwardly on the steps but mostly, that marvellously odd one of them all posing in front of a fireplace in their suits and looking rather like a mafia gang?



( full size under the cut )

Yeah. I made the Wanted poster. It was begging for it. You know, quietly enough for me to put it off for six months.

Today does rather illustrate my life of late, or rather, of the last few months. I keep applying for jobs (probably less than I should be but still, enough for me to really be hating writing cover letters by now) and getting turned down or worse, not hearing anything. But! Someone who saw me on Jobsite just called to offer me 3-4 weeks temp work of data-entry at a local hospital, which sounds utterly tedious but is paying £7.50ph. I'm absolutely willing to do something mindnumbing for four weeks for £7.50ph. And at least then if I get interviews I can say "Look! I have temped! Not just sat on my ass for months!" (which is basically what I have done. Except I went to Wimbledon! I should actually do a Wimbledon post sometime. Not today; I'm trying to finish Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey because my Read My Own Height 2010 is going depressingly slowly.)

So, here's a post. Hopefully tomorrow or the day after or sometime, there will be another post. I'm getting most of my hair chopped off on Tuesday because I'm sick of it taking half an hour to dry with a hairdryer, so that might be worth a post. Also, I should set up Dreamwidth crossposting. Sometime soon.

This is my life and it's not interesting right now. Tune back in next week when things will have changed! Or not but you know, I live in hope.