Hello world. Well, hasn't it been a long time? I have many things to update you on, but I keep starting posts and then running out of steam before I finish them. Someday I may go into all these things in detail, but for the moment, to sum up:

• Christmas was great.


• Work continues to suck.


• I saw a fabulous version of the Robin Hood legend at the RSC this January - and it was all about Marion. Robin had the "steal from the rich" bit down, but the "and give to the poor" was all Marion. Plus the staging was amazing. The whole stage, from about halfway back, was one giant, grassy slide, right up into the rafters! People slid onto stage - ouch - and had to climb back up with ropes! It's the most athletic play I've ever seen.


• Castle! I have burned through all the seasons currently available, and now impatiently await more of season 4. I have no patience for open canon shows. I want it ALL, NOW. Will they/won't they? (Oh, they totally will.)


• I finally read all the Tiffany Aching / Wee Free Men books, by Pterry. *happy sigh*. In possibly related news, I've not gone to sleep before 2am for most of the nights this week. I. am. so. tired.


• I'm thinking of trying to run a 10k this year.


• Kat continues to be adorable, although I do wish she'd stop eating her toys.

ION, I'm finally conceding that I don't like some taste combinations that are generally considered delicious. Coffee and chocolate, for example. I like coffee, I love chocolate, but together? Yuck. Ditto fruit and chocolate - I just don't really like them combined. I feel that togetherness makes them less than the sum of their parts - it takes away from the freshness of the fruit, and the richness of the chocolate. And yet it always seems to be, "What could be better than fresh strawberries? How about STRAWBERRIES DIPPED IN MELTED CHOCOLATE!" Give me my strawberries unadulterated, and my melted chocolate with a big spoon, pls. Also, baked potato and baked beans is just wrong, I don't care what people say.

ETA: ( The Heart of Robin Hood. )

My current background:



AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

I thought of an excellent time-travel story name: Imminent Victorians.

No, I don't have a story to go with it. Just the title. But it's a very nice title, don't you think? *pats it*

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I'm on leave next week, hoorah! Which means this week I'm panicking slightly about getting a load of stuff done. 'Tis always the way.

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Tea and biscuits was the only sensible way to deal with today's miserable weather.

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Argh, I am a bad person: I have two fics that I said I'd beta ages ago and haven't yet (I'm sorry!), and one fic that someone kindly beta'd for me but which I haven't given a final tidy up so I can post it. And I started on the end run for Valentines, but now I've stalled again. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

On the other hand, I'm getting along awesomely (at last) with your thing, lolmac! So... nearly... finished...

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Kat has a new "lawn" (patch of wheatgrass growing in a tray), and it makes her a happy kitty. Without it, she was a sad and mopey kitty, who liked to sit and poke at her old, decrepit, dried-out lawn and then stare at us, meowing pointedly. She hid while we got rid of it, and then helped out with planting the new one, patting down the earth and supervising the watering. While it was growing, she kept running upstairs to gaze longingly at it on the windowsill, out of her reach. It took forever (five days), but finally it was ready to give to her, and once she'd pigged out on grass stalks, she was a sleepy, purry, mellow kitty all evening.

She tries to pounce on the water whenever it's being watered, and then sticks her nose right into the damp earth and sniffs and sniffs and SNIFFS.

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Hey, there are still some excellent episodes available for recapping on redial_the_gate! This is Season 10, your last chance...

Flesh & Blood, Uninvited, Counterstrike, Company of Thieves, The Quest pt 2, Family Ties (go on, you know that would be awesome to mock), Dominion (I think that and Family Ties may be partially optioned...? It's in some way negotiable? I can't see LJ at the moment to check what exactly the situation was).

ETA: Someone has claimed either Dominion or Family Ties, so I guess if you particularly want one of those, you can probably have it.

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I... have forgotten what I was going to say here.

Crap, I've just realised that the urgent telecon I was so pleased to have finally arranged for tonight at 5pm... is tonight, at 5pm. Friday night, goddammit. I had dinner in a pub planned. It wasn't a big plan, but it was mine and I liked it. *sulks*

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Me: "All the calls and emails today have caused me to turn to ice cream (as opposed to drink)."
A: "If you overdo it we may have to take you to a clinic to thaw out."

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I took some time owing this morning and came in an hour late. I spent the extra hour mostly playing with the cat. I think she appreciated it. We played Catch Mr Spider, and then we looked out of the window for a while, and then she had some cat milk, and then we played Catch Mr Green Fuzzy Thing That I* Keep Trying To Eat And Then Have To Regurgitate Because It's Nearly A Foot Long And Made Of Feathers And I Get Yelled At Before I Get More Than An Inch Or Two Down.

It's kind of a disgusting object, by now, but she loves it.




* Kat, that is - not me. Hopefully that was obvious.

It's Kat's first birthday today. Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! There are things in my fridge older than her. We got her a motorised dangle toy thing that she finds TERRIFYING, so that's just great. It probably didn't help that, the moment we switched it on, the motorised arm lashed out and swung the spider dangle thing right at her head.

Hopefully she'll get used to it.

I also made her some Marmite cheesecake, from my cat recipe book. She liked that a little more. Yes, my cat is spoiled. *g*

Speaking of birthdays...

Title: Best Not To Think About It
Author: Pepper
Fandom(s): Stargate SG-1
Rating: PG
Wordcount:
Featured Character(s): Jack, Sam
Pairing(s): Jack/Sam
Summary: In his defence, he hadn't intended to propose to Carter in a storage closet.
A/N: For holdouttrout, a belated birthday gift. Another in the Storage Closet series.

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( In his defence, he hadn't intended to propose to Carter in a storage closet. )

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END.

Poor little Kat was unwell last night. Not sure why, but we think it's probably because she bolts her food sometimes, particularly the dry bits (we give her a wet/dry mix), and then has problems digesting the unchewed lumps - I know, because I had the delight of cleaning it off the carpet. Half an hour later, she was complaining she was staaaaaaaaaaaaaarving - but I didn't want to repeat the cycle. Aha! I thought. I have a book on cooking for cats (yes, yes, mock all you like). There's a recipe in there that would suit.

Sure enough, there was: the 'white mix' for upset tummies. 50g of boiled rice, one hardboiled egg, mashed together with a dessertspoon of cottage cheese and a dessertspoon of plain, live yoghurt. Kat loves cheese, I said to myself. And she goes crazy for yoghurt - she will, in fact, climb up onto my lap and try to pull the spoon with which I am eating right out of my hand. That'll be perfect.

You can already see where this is going, can't you?

We didn't have the last two ingredients, but I popped down to the shop to get them because I am a soft touch. I boiled the rice and the egg, mashed them together with the cottage cheese and yoghurt. Kat hung around my feet, clearly understanding that there was Something For Her in all this noise and smell. I put it in her bowl. Offered it to Kat.

Of course she wouldn't touch it. Wouldn't even go near it, in fact. She backed away and gave me a hurt, betrayed look every time I tried to persuade her to try it. "What is this pale, lumpy crap? Why are you trying to make me eat it? WHY DO YOU WANT TO POISON ME?"

I left it out for her, but she didn't go near it all evening, preferring to go hungry. Nor would she try just the cottage cheese, and even seemed to feel that a spoonful of yoghurt on its own had been tainted by association (at least for a while). Just before bedtime, I gave her a little bit of her normal wet food, which she kept down with no problems. Oh well. At least she's okay.

Next time, I'll try the chicken soup recipe. She'll love that, right?

Right...?

I am sad to report that Katana's dinnertime manners are not very good. In fact, they are ( distinctly bad. )

( I just can't help talking about Katana, SHE'S JUST SO CUTE. )

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( C25K )

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Another SG-1 fic I'll never get around to writing: 'Life in the Upper Pleistocene', an elderly Sam and Daniel stranded far back in prehistory, sat on a hill overlooking their village, with the sun burning off the mist of a brand new day, contemplating the evolution of apples. Inspired by this picture and article.

So, what am I up to, these days? Well. Mostly, work has eaten my brain, but I think I'm beginning to see a way through, or at least... a way to arrange the tunnel lights so I can keep going, I guess?

( C25K )

( Katana. )

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I rewatched Solitudes, the end of Singularity, Point of View, and the end of Learning Curve yesterday, thanks to holdouttrout and her rewatching from the start. I realised that I'd accidentally put together the Sam Cries A Lot, Jack Calls Her 'Sam', They Stand In For Each Other's Spouse, And Then They Rescue A Little Girl viewlist. I think watching all those in succession would give someone a misleading idea about the show. I love Solitudes. See Trout's post for more coherent comments.

I think the characters in my head are veering away from the characters in the show. If I want to write more fic - which I don't have time to do at the moment, anyhow - I need to watch some eps again. It's funnny how that happens, isn't it? Although I guess the ones in my head are closer to how they are in the later seasons, because I've been more aware of them through redial_the_gate - but I still feel like I've kind of lost their voices and bodylanguage.

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Okay, that's what's in my head right now.

According to Freekibble Kat (click to donate free kibble to cat shelters, there's also one for dogs), just as no two humans have the same fingerprint, no two cats have the same noseprint. HOW CUTE IS THAT OMG?!

I think I should noseprint Kat, so I can investigate her involvement in the Mysterious Affair Of The Toppled Bin And The Chewed Cat Food Sachets.

In similar news, in the same way that normal people might rub lotion into their legs, I now rub antiseptic cream. Kat, you see, likes to hare around after Mr Spider, her favourite toy. She loves it when I sit in the middle of the floor and make her chase him round and round and round me - but sometimes she takes a shortcut across my legs. And the latest attempt to trim her claws wasn't as successful. Yowch.

Oh well, shorts weather is still a while away.

If she could stop with the ninja attacks on my ankles, too, that would be great.

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Week 5, Day 2 of C35K today. I'm supposedly running 20 minutes non-stop this Saturday. *contemplates dubiously* They've not been wrong so far about what I can do, I suppose. I can't believe I'm nearly halfway through this thing. Where does the time go?

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I will talk about something other than my cat and C25K again someday, I promise.

Having a quieter day today. Not that I'm not busy, but m'colleagues are away / in meetings for a large part of the day, so I can put on some music and work my way steadily through stuff. It's kind of pleasant.

( Yet more wittering about my kitty. )

Done 2/3rds of Week 3 of C25K. Last one tomorrow (schedule got thrown by a late telecon on Weds). I'm enjoying it. Keep picturing this scene from Past The Bleachers, and all those fanfics where Sam goes for a run to shake off her problems, when my legs threaten to fall off.

Rewatch of Avalon pts 1&2 tonight. I'm trying to think of how I'm going to do my own recap (for Babylon). Hm... *eyes The Art Of War*...

p.s. Buy me, help_japan.

It's a hard life, bein' a kitty.

( First there is the sleeping, then the troublemaking, then the eating, then the sleeping again... it just never ends. )

Katana has the sniffles this week (awwww), and due to her FIV status I'm hovering like a worried mother hen, just a little. I think it's just allergies - A bought me flowers for Valentines (unprecedented!), and every time she goes near them, she screws up her nose and starts sneezing. We've been keeping them in the bathroom with the door closed (thank you, Katana, I'll probably never get flowers again), and they're nearly dead now, so once they're gone, things should get back to normal. I tried to wipe her nose with a damp cloth a couple of times, but the situation threatened to go straight to stage three of Administering Medication To Cats, as described in Terry Pratchett and Gray Jolliffe's The Unadulterated Cat:

( I've quoted this before, but I just love it. )

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Someone at work has me so angry. I don't generally do angry.

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ETA: Am at work, can't reply to comments right now, but a) yes, there were lilies involved - and red roses, aw. I knew about cats and lilies, but unfortunately A didn't. He does now! And b) The Unadulterated Cat is awesome and here is another excerpt:

It's an interesting fact that fewer than 17% of Real cats end their lives with the same name they started with. Much family effort goes into selecting one at the start ("She looks like a Winifred to me"), and then as the years roll by it suddenly finds itself being called Meepo or Ratbag.

...

The chosen name should also be selected for maximum carrying power across a busy kitchen when, e.g., a bag full of prime steak starts moving stealthily towards the edge of the table. You need a word with a cutting edge. Zut! is pretty good. The Egyptians had a catheaded goddess called Bast. Now you know why.

We selected Katana in the full knowledge that 'Kat!' is what we'll probably remember/yell in moments of crisis. *g*

This fairly standard recipe for fruit and nut fudge looks perfectly innocuous until you realise... it's for cats. Why would anyone do that? I mean, I can understand occasionally feeding them little bits of what you're eating - so far, Katana likes to attack and tear rocket (arugula), is interested in tomatoes only insofar as they roll, is bizarrely keen to dip her paw into our water glasses if she can, and sulked under the sofa all evening when we wouldn't give her any of our dinner. But to make an entire pan of fudge for your pet? It's insane.

In other news, Katana remains ADORABLE. She's all curious ears and big eyes, and sharp claws and teeth. Every cord or thread or string needs to be stalked and pounced on and bitten, so tying one's shoelaces is exciting, and knitting is impossible. Every plastic packet that crinkles must By Law be a kitty treat, because why else would we need crinkly plastic? She's started exploring upstairs, and I sometimes see her face pop up over the edge of the bed, like a little meerkat. We're still trialling whether to leave the bedroom door open at night. So far, she's not been (very) disturbing - she's so small and light and soft-footed - but she won't sit still for longer than a few minutes. Unless she's sulking because she didn't get a frankfurter.

Yes, I am going to talk about her in most of my posts at present. :)

Because what is the internet for, if not for posting pictures of your cat...

( Let me present Katana no Kimi... )