Apparently I'm still feeling horribly sentimental.

So I'm reading Mercedes Lackey still, this time The Dragon Jousters series. Nothing to quite make me feel like a teenager again. I went through a long phase of reading any book about dragons I could get my hands on. So, as I'm trying to only read and think about light fiction and fantasy (long story and logic). So I started think about stuff I read in high school, primary school, mum read to me as a kid etc...

When I was really little mum read me a story about a vegetarian dragon. I think he told his life adventures to a girl that made her way into his cave? Including a justification on why the dragon was vegetarian. I can remember really loving this book.

Er, looking back I suspect this may have had somewhat of an influence on my life. :P

But yeah, can't remember the author, can't remember the title or anything useful like that. So did anyone else remember reading a similar story? My mother is not exactly the most approachable woman in the world.

In any case, there needs to be more stories about vegetarian dragons, it seems like it would be much less irritating then the vegetarian vampire idea. But then I'm biased.

I'm feeling horribly sentimental.

Went down to Manji saturday, came back up today. The reason for such a short trip was Bob (my grandfather on my fathers side) turned 80. So we had all the family rock up and have morning tea in their garage. Just like Christmas except we probably won't be having Christmas this year because people will be everywhere. We have an invite to Lisa's though instead, if Chris's family decides they hate us. :P



Also thank fuck for that highway. The journey is now stupidly easy to make (even if bad planning surrounding Bunbury will make that a huge hold up in a few years). Not being sick at the end of the journey from being delayed hours in Mandurah traffic? Being able to go home for a night, a short enough time so that my mother's lies and bullshit can't be rubbed in? That's just wonderful, best thing I think that could happen for being near my family.Too close with me and anyone I suspect isn't the greatest idea, but an easy, rather than stressful 3.5hours (enough time I don't feel horrible about taking a break) is pretty neat. It is 305km to home now as the car drives. I can't remember what it was before though. Maybe when they fix Bunbury they'll do a bigger ringroad that will shave off more kilometers and hours.

Anyway enough babble for one day.

He may have retired from Gardening Australia. But Peter Cundall remains legendary.

Even if after many a big detailed study on the whole thing a few years ago, I'm not sure I agree with him. Too much of this protesting thing seems to be not in my backyard fucking oath no, shove it in a developing world someplace where noone will give a shit, rather than concerns I'd consider useful and constructive. But that is not the point of this post.

The point is. Legendary. I wish I'd gotten the guys autograph.

Went to AQWA world with some dudes today.

Put my reservations aside, and went for taking lots of photos. Most of them are pretty shit, but I have six I'm pretty happy with. No editing of course :P


This dude is just awesome



So that was the main portion of my day. I have to say Australia's Finest burgers (or whatever it's called) has pretty fucking shit burgers. The mushroom in mine was obviously old, and oh god the cheese was gross and everywhere. However pubs with cider on tap are fucking awesome.

So this weekend has been a mix of awesome and shit.

Friday we got the solar panels, I got potato curry and we loaned our spare lcd monitor to my grandmother (19" lcd >>> 15" CRT). She thinks we are gods. Which is nice. Insanely busy day though so I wound up crashing horribly, which meant I missed out on taving.

Got up early Saturday morning (after the 6.30am hungover wake up the day before) to go to Grandma's church fate thing at like 8.30am. Had to drive grandma, which is always and interesting experience. :P

Had a nice time there, when through the pretty large book collection, had a lovely conversation with one of the ladies about how much she hates book banning, which is always refreshing. Got a fair stack of books for less then $6, most in good condition though I bought all the 20cent Agatha Christies. Got really spoilt by Grandma and her friend Rita. Grandma bought me a cake to take home, Rita bought me a bottle of wine after I commented that Chris and I keep running out of white wine, and she kept buying me scones. I don't really know how to handle this kinda of attention, but it seemed to mean a lot to them, even if I didn't buy plates and stuff like grandma thought I should. I don't know. I think Rita, isn't allowed to see her grandkids much and grandma does get pretty lonely... so I think being able to spoil a grandkid, even a grumpy 23year old means a lot too them. So I guess going along with things was the right thing to do?

Oh and I got two new succulents, I bought them myself. :)

After this I went out, mulched half the orange tree with straw... came inside for some water and basically fell asleep on my boyfriends lap. Had a nap for about three hours, then wound up learning how to use my sewing machine without anyones help (Chris did fix the broken reverse lever so I don't get stuck in neutral all the time). So I now know how to sew, both repairing skirts and making shadecloth garden _things_.

Suggestions on what to sew and ideas now would be gratefully recieved. I should improve this newfound skill! But I don't know what people do with it.

All of today I have felt horrible, like walking through sludge, and my leg really hurt all day. So I slept through the earlier pixar films, then managed to rock up at the nano write in and be in horrible distracted mood partly thanks to dumbarses on the internet. Still got 1600 words done there, and have been nibbling away at it all evening. So behind though.

Moral of the story? I need to learn to make sure I sleep a lot at the moment. Otherwise things tend to go a bit haywire. My mood goes everywhere, I can't concentrate and I start to need naps. And my leg hurts more.

Today I got up at 6.30am. With a hangover. So I'd be dressed before my boyfriends mother arrived...

The awesome upside of all this was we have now have electricity generating solar panels on our roof. The downside of this is you guys get stuck with seeing some fairly average pictures. I may try and take some better ones tomorrow, if I can get out there when its a little less cloudy.




This is the best angle you can see them. It's not very good. But that means we won't have complaints about visual pollution which is good right?



Showing off our one million electrical box _things_ we seem to be collecting. I kinda like this shot, the contrast between the old falling apart plaster and bricks with the fancy modern stuff, makes us look all whatsity. More concerned with the environment (or at least cheap bills) than outward appearances. Wanky times. :P


I also managed some work in the garden, computer fixing for grandma, visiting the lovely alias_sqbr and looking at a lot of awesome clothes that wouldn't quite fit.

This week house-wise we have gotten the old broken gas heater ripped out, added solar panels and gotten a new antennae. Less importantly I've also sorted all my wool and knitting needles out (a surprisingly large task). This is without even looking at what I've done in the garden. I'm pretty impressed with it all. :)

Piking on the tav, I need a nap looking at all that.

And the lastest edition of a household disagreement making it into an lj poll is...

Poll #1481938 Gorillas in comics
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Are gorilla's a good thing to have in a comic book?

Should I put one in my nano?

Times when I can deal with spiders fine... are when I am wearing clothes.

Times when spiders like to run towards me... while I'm in the shower.


:S

As promised, y'all get stuck with a garden post.

My proudest moment, I finally got this dude flowering and I got little babies!


( Four more photos under the cut.. )

So what do you all think? This has mostly been done in the last week. Should I be photographising anything in particular? Also sorry the photos are probably terrible.

Hm. Okay you're all lucky to escape photo posts... as I can't be arsed putting all the photos up yet. Tomorrow! Maybe.

Anyway does anyone, in the dark depths of their sheds happen to have any red or other brightly coloured paint I could use? Preferably outdoors UV tolerant stuff, but that's not overly important.

Yes, I did get sick of hitting my head on a wooden plank, why do you ask? Damn short people living here before I did.

( Talk of gardening, family and studying... )

I am completely going for burgers on Monday night. No idea where but holy christ will I be happy no matter what vegie burger I get. Damn studying keeps distracting from my gardening.

After a 3.5 year hiatus I have gone back to watching Supernatural. Yeah, I really have run out of things to do. The music is fun and the boys are hot so... o.0

kadeton's reaction when he walked into the room and realised what I was watching... brilliant. No worries about him getting distracted from study anyway. :)

Its vaguely strange watching this Sam dude. I mean he's a fucking freaky evil Irish bad guy in Veronica Mars that's very hard to forget about (especially if you've just rewatched Veronica Mars).

Got a decent start to Nano. I mean its pretty trashy badly written tripe, but that's the point. Er, it didn't wind up being fanfic by the way. Its in a cyberpunk(ish) fantasy world. Yeah, I dunno, that's just where the characters live, I"m sure I'll make something up. Maybe I'll salvage something okayish out of it, but eh.

Yeah... I ate at Utopia tonight. Completely ignoring that I'm allergic to half the food there. Feeling good right now folks. Yeah... allergic to half the fucking vegetarian food in Perth... that takes talent.

Hopefully get my lidociane patches this week. They will make a huge difference to how much gardening (and studying, and nanoing) I get done this week.

I've never been to a protest. Have just realised this, and I feel this is an experience I'm missing out on. I never really did the uni protesting thing, they always clashed with geog labs (and still usually do).

Well okay, the only protest I have been to was a logging rally when I was like 8. Not exactly the best for an environmental credit wankery, but fuck, I stand by it.*

So, how does one go about going to one of these protest thingies. And how do I find one I actually agree with, that doesn't make me angry**? Anyone want me to tag along? *grins*

This message brought to you buy 'discussions' with the house's resident socialist/greenie dude.

*Yeah, I remain the worst environmentalist ever.

** Hard. Really hard apparently. But I do dislike a lot of mining organisations working in the South West, if that helps. :P

Made cake late last night as my one million tweets, may have made people aware. It is a delicious sweet potato cake, with passionfruit cream cheese icing. I like the title, its wonderfully wanky. :)

Posted the recipe up, along with dorky pictures on vegetarian. A vegetarian community I happen to co-maintain on dreamwidth*. Dorky pictures can also be found on flickr.  I may be stupidly proud of this cake. It was delicious.

Piking on Halloween stuff, I'm really not in a people mood.

Also here is another really dorky picture of me, in my awesome cowinahat shirt. No real reason :P


*Which all vegetarians, vegans and veg*n friendly people should join, if they haven't already (I have spare invites if people would like them).

I genuinely can't remember if I've asked this before, but I'm pretty shit at remembering things in general and genre identification isn't really high on my list of priorities usually. On top of that, I've only recently started tagging posts about books, so its lost in the depths of 'oh god why would I go back and read this drivel'.

I'm not particularly well read on steampunk and cyberpunk or any other subgenres of 'punk' in SF, but for one of those projects I work on in my spare time when I can be arsed, this needs to change. I'm also fairly sure there's several people that know a lot about this stuff on my flist, so I'm begging you guys to be able to help me out.

So far what I've read of cyberpunk can basically be summed up by some limited amounts of Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age) and William Gibson (Necromancer and the Mona Lisa Overdrive) and movie wise I'm guessing the closest thing I've watched would be The Matrix.  Steampunk I'm even less well read on, I'm still not even sure if Freakangels would count. I'm not sure the lovely kadeton has read all that much more than me, but he keeps mentioning that I need to read more Tim Powers.

I basically really need to broaden this out. So suggestions of books, movies, comics I should read (and offers to loan if you have them!). Links to lists/websites/articles/reviews etc... to get me an idea of what its all about. Wikipedia is great and all, but there's only so far it can get you, and doesn't tell you what people think of the whole thing.

So help? All you wonderful, clever and awesome people... Directions where to look would be awesome if you can't be arsed with specific suggestions. :P

In other news, what is the best way to flame an 'academic' dude that wants to write about women reading comics, reading about women in comics... and defines fridging just as 'a bad character death'. I'm really really really hoping that's not how he actually views it, and just how he dumbed it down for his supervisor, because if _I_ think its more than that, then that really is saying something. :P

So basically, excluding work (this evening), I have done half of what I have planned to do today. And done twice as much as I got done yesterday because I was feeling shitty (good days, bad days, I'm not entirely sure what causes one or the other, its not always excessive tramadol).

Today has included.

Woke up stupidly early (5.30am), with a strange cat in my face. Realised I left the blind open. Realised strange cat is not strange and is infact Glory and I spent the night at the lovely nephron's house, to get around the whole, socialising at night without a boyfriend means can't get home. Had an awesome time. Bones, a good friend, stupid cats, dinner at the awesome delicious Indian place and bubble tea, really is all anyone needs. :P

Couldn't get back to sleep. Realised Skids (aka the only cat I know that I am allergic to) slept on the bed. Give up on sleep, read quite a chunk of Diamond Age* instead while waiting for either sleep or actual morning to happen.

Eventually get up when nephron does, have a little bit of tea and head off, with a book, and one million dvds to watch.

Discovered noone except me thinks loud music and boganing it up at 7am in the morning is absolutely awesome. Also discovered the only thing full of more road rage than a NSW cyclist riding illegally, is a business man in a tiny honda hatchback. Who appears to also have a tiny penis. Apparently changing lanes when the traffic is slow is a horrible offense. So he got the finger, as I slowed down to make sure there was enough room for the motorcyclist in front of me. What is it with whitecollars men in tiny hatchbacks anyway? I mean if its going to upset you that much, and remind you of your tiny penis, man up, buy a commodore (or magna if you're shit with money) and tell the greenies giving you flack to shove it. The world would be a much happier place for you and the rest of us on the roads, and its not like those hatchbacks are all that fuel efficient if you're driving like a tosser.

Got to Bunnings. Bought the right sized stakes, on my second attempt. Still the other ones I bought should do for the tomatoes when they get big enough. Started raining on the way home. This means I had to wind my window up which was sad. Loud music is less fun with the window up.

Got home. Realised its 8am and boyfriend probably pulled an alnighter (reason for me leaving the house). So rather than cleaning/laundering madly, am catching up on internets, fixing little things on my laptop (all those things I should have turned off ages ago) and either waiting for boyfriend to wake up, or waiting for sky to clear a bit so gardening doesn't feel horrible. Need to get my 'honey snap'** in at some point today, and now I have the equipment to build a climbing thing out of string and stakes for them.

Wrote a stupidly long lj post because I'm bored shitless now that I've stopped. Re-remembered I need to relearn this whole apostrophe thing at some point and stop guess. Apparently it pisses people who aren't me off. Being the uneducated git I am, I don't really care that much, but I suppose there's no point being passive aggressive about it. Will possibly be passive aggressive by not being arsed to cut this though. Oops sorry.

*Am up to page 375. The book has been good so far, but is really picking up. I am impressed, I didn't think he'd be able to top Snow Crash. This world is a lot more interesting

** I have no idea. Do bees help the growing process? Will they magically contain honey at the end of the process. Will they be tastier than sugar snap? We just don't know. But hopefully better tasting than sugar snap so there's a chance boyfriend will eat more green food.

Final assignment for the year handed in. With a whole 5 minutes to spare. As a bonus, I scared the bejesus out of the lady at the geography office with my hairy pits and insanely cleavage top. :D

One exam on the 9th. :D

Have to stay quiet the rest of this week, Chris has assignments due until friday. Then he'll have to stay quiet till the 9th. :(

In other news, its amazing how much more annoying your leg aching slightly and being prevented from cutting through Trinity college is when you have 15 minutes to get to geography.

Not looking forward to cleaning up the house, but I'm looking forward to being able to use my desk again (sharing study space is fail).

And now I shall go terrify Bunnings with my hair armpits methinks. I need something that is an upright vine thing, no idea if peas/snow peas are still in season. And I need stakes and gardening string.

Okay so I'm angry and have the groundwork for an assignment due tomorrow which I haven't started. So I'm attempting to rant, while listening to appropriate lectures.

@bookbuster tweeted a link this morning about to this blog about Australia post removing certain books from the shelves. That links to this blog, which links to these two articles in Crikey and smh.

I've decided since my previous post about Twilight being banned, that I am really anti censorship for both conservative or liberal* reasons, and this really does highlight why. It doesn't help that I really think the current orange covered penguin books are a brilliant move for getting people reading and exploring ideas they wouldn't. $10 for a book puts in on par with say buying a DVD, and other sorts of entertainment, making it competitive for a change, rather than being just a status thing.

( In which I rant about rural disadvantage, censorship, fuckwit lecturers and even books ... )

Hm. Back to assignment. I really don't care about Environmental Performance Indexes. Just in case any of you wondered, they are as boring as shit.

* You liberal sorts can be just as guilty of attempting censorship, please don't pretend otherwise. Hands up whose been made to feel guilty for wanting to buy a book or literature written by a racist or homophobic wanker?
**I already owned The History of Sexuality much to my surprise.
***Including the kids with no money who might have nicked it because it looked cool/naughty/whatever and might accidentally learn something. You know the type. If you don't, I can introduce you to some of the kids I went to school with.

My cat apparently only likes to come inside for me.

Cheese and tomato sauce sandwiches are totally delicious (I didn't have any walnuts). It's better when the sauce is homemade though *hopes for an awesome crop of tomatoes this year*.

What's everyone else's favourite disgusting sandwich? Chris is pretty grossed out. I need more ideas!

Can't wait till Monday. I think I'm going to need to drink heavily or something after handing my last assignment in for the year. Fuck what happens next year, I'm just looking forward to not feeling stuck anymore.

Pondering doing some volunteer work over the summer, mostly to shut centrelink the fuck up (I really don't want more hours where I am, a few boys there give me the creeps). The trouble of course is I don't think I could cope with much, and I don't know who wants a crippled volunteer for 5 or so hours a week (I can't 'work' more than 14 hours a week without things getting complicated). Gah. Complicated.

In any case I'm determined to enjoy the next few months work or no work (I have no objection to working, I just don't really feel like getting fired because my knee gets pushed too hard and I become useless). Doing all the things I kinda mean to do, but never do. This includes nanowrimo, so it should be scary. Can you write fanfic for it? Two birds with one stone and all that. Don't worry, I'll burn it afterwards.:P

So about two months ago I made this post asking you all about where I could find the awesome goodness that is trashy vampire romance. Which you are all still welcome to comment on if you find anything not on there.

Talking to alias_sqbr about romance and fantasy fiction, I realised, that for a girl with nothing else to do with her time... I can't think of all that much trashy romancey fantasy I've read/watched etc... that isn't to do with vampires. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few books. Also I can't think of any that are a heavy mix of science fiction and romance.

So suggestions people, help me improve my quality reading. TV, books, games etc... :P

Authors/Books- Fantasy
Mercedes Lackey
Anne McCaffrey (maybe?)
Tamora Pierce

Mostly good.

Waaay too many questions and assumptions about my sexuality though.

I don't know. I mean I shouldn't take it personally, I know the impression I give off and I know I do it delibrately... but still it's tiring. Also, I get the impression a lot of it is insulting to my boyfriend, which makes me cranky.

I think its better/easier when I feel like I can handle things. At the moment I just spend my time feeling kinda useless. Which is a blow to my ego I guess. I dunno, maybe it'd be nice if it was people actually hitting on me or something. Rather than just assuming.

On the upside, found time to finish Animal Farm which was nice. Well the story wasn't nice but getting around to reading it was.