only revolutions

There is this cat on my lap. It's cute and it's sleepy and it's purring and I cannot possibly get up, because that would mean disturbing it. And, I mean, it's really cute.

Things I am doing: trying to install Fedora linux on a flash drive so I can take it with me when I go to see my parents, etc; trying to write an essay about North Africa during the Roman Empire; wondering what to eat for dinner tonight; trying to fix bugs in the Wildflowers/Clover layout I made a while back; finally managing to wrangle some photographs off the SD card I took to Scotland; not writing journal entries of any interest to anyone.

Here are a few of the pictures, then, in case anyone wants to see:

A little bird nestled into a tree.

A duckling swimming in the sunshine.

The beach, towards evening.

A sheep on a rock.

Sunset through the trees.

A not-at-all-camera-shy deer.


I miss Scotland. It would be kind of nice to go back. I could use another two or three weeks of quiet and calm and walking on the beach looking for seaglass.

Happy Bastille Day to my friends in France (and anybody else who'd like to celebrate it)!

(I wish I was there today. Sad revolutions is sad.)

I keep wanting to make more serious-business entries in here, but my brain is not co-operating with this wish. (Seriously, I think right now I have just about the worst brain-fog I've had in years. It's a major effort just to formulate a sentence out loud right now; writing works a bit better since I can stop and think about it, but trying to speak just results in a near-incomphrensible babble of spoonerisms and mispronunciations and wrong words in wrong places. Coherency, I can not has it.) So instead, you get my stream-of-consciousness post-birthday babbling.

I think I'm suffering a little from post-awesomeness comedown, actually. My thirtieth birthday had been looming slightly scarily at me for so long, and now it's finished and over and I am just, you know, sitting around being thirty. And as for Stratford... well, I had been kind of waiting to go there since I was about fourteen. And now I went and came back and... well, yeah.

It was epic win, though; both the plays were so good. I think in the end I loved As You Like It just slightly a little more, which surprised me since I usually like the serious-business plays best. But it was just so damn good and argh. I loved Rosalind, I loved slightly-creepy-slightly-incesty Celia, I loved Touchstone, loved the songs, the slightly bizarre costumes and set design, the whole lot.

... I wish I was in the RSC and got to do that for a living. Or failing that, I wish I lived in Stratford. On a houseboat. Or a flat by the river. And that I could drop by any time I felt like it and watch the plays or hang around the little bookshops. Hahah, because I could afford that.

... sorry. I am such a feckin' nerd, I know. But argh, Shakespeare has been one of my long-running obsessions/perseverations ever since I was a kid, and I guess that trip has kicked it into high gear again. It was just so much win being in a place where it felt almost as if the whole town shared my obsession. Though perhaps I'd get sick of it if I lived there? (And perhaps not. When I was a little girl I used to say that I wanted to live by the seaside, but my cousin told me it wouldn't be worth it because if I lived there all the time I'd get sick of it. But I did move to the seaside, for a few years, and I never got sick of it at all - in fact I still miss it constantly. I have a pretty long attention span for things I like.)

Maybe I will go see this if I can get/afford the tickets, just to pacify my inner litgeek?

Stratford is just absolutely beautiful. And despite earlier forecasts of rain, we have the most perfect weather for it, too!

Here are things I have done so far:

• watched As You Like It, which was absolutely wonderful and (surprisingly) genuinely funny
  
• developed a tiny crush on drag!Rosalind
  
• drunk sparkling wine afterwards to celebrate the best birthday present ever
  
• called my parents about five times to say thankyou for said present
  
• spent an afternoon lazing around in the sun by the river eating baguettes and feeding swans
  
• ... been bitten by a swan
  
• failed really quite a lot at rowing a row-boat
  
• watched a cygnet paddling around the river with its mum and taken many photographs of it
  
• realised that cygnets are absolutely adorable, and "The Ugly Duckling" really needs to be renamed "The Very Large And Oddly Coloured But Nonetheless Unbelievably Cute Duckling"
  
• sunburned myself all down my right side and on my nose
  
• stared at a jewellery shop called "Iago's" in complete confusion that anyone thought that name was a good idea. ("Iago's: For that very special gift for her that says 'I'll stab you in act five'.")
  
• been excessively amused by "Romeo and Juliet's Adult Toy Store"
  
• lol'd at esque critiquing the Stratford Waterstones' display window
  
• completely failed to find the "Shakespearience" that I wanted to go to, but never mind
  
• tired myself out so completely that today I cannot leave my hotel room. Am now conserving my energy because...
  
• I am seeing The Winter's Tale tonight, which I am so excited about because it's... probably in my top five Shakespeare plays?
  
• ... realised that the fact that I have a top five list of Shakespeare plays makes me a huge, irredeemable litgeek forever
  
• (in case you were wondering, it's probably Othello, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and Much Ado About Nothing. Although maybe Anthony and Cleopatra should be in there, I don't know.)
  
• in any case, I really love The Winter's Tale and its wonderfully odd Gainax Ending
  
• (also, am very curious to see how they'll do the famous "Exit, pursued by a bear" direction)
  

In conclusion, absolutely awesome thirtieth birthday present is absolutely awesome. Completely worth turning thirty for. And now, I am going to try to eat something and maybe nap so I will be awake enough for the play tonight. <3

( things you should know about me if you read my journal )

I am now fretting that everybody is just going to go "whatever, freakshow. DE-ADD!" when they read this. Heh.

Lilac-ish layout for the Glorious 25th of May. It is apparently also Towel Day, and, appropriately given the other two, Geek Pride Day (which I'd never heard of before).

I really haven't been writing anything in here and I need to change that, but... I've just been too sleepy and spacey most of the time lately. Melatonin is helping me sleep, but making it very hard for me to wake up again; I stay sleepy and dreamy and distant for the whole day. Just writing this much has taken a huge effort. I think I need to find something else for my sleep issues, unfortunately.

You guys. It's a tuxedo kitty in a tuxedo.

( description for screen readers etc )

1. Remember how I said I had a "pretty unthreatening" bug of some sort? It mutated into full-on flu so violent that my mother has spent the last few days fretting about H1N1. However, I am now able to perform complicated tasks like getting up and drinking a cup of tea, so presumably I'm on the mend.

2. This is one of the best flash-game style things I've ever found via StumbleUpon. It's very very pretty, and fun in a logic-puzzle sort of way too. And once you get into the later levels, it's almost as much fun just to play around with the patterns of light and music as it is to try to solve it. If I ever have any money again, I might even buy the full version.

(... I keep finding myself thinking about Braid when I play it. I don't know why. It is absolutely nothing like Braid. It isn't a platform game, it doesn't have a weird twisty storyline - or any storyline - and it is not even remotely the same genre. It's not even comparing apples to oranges, it's like comparing apples to... fish and chips, or something. The only connection I can make is the pretty classical-esque music, and the fact that on some levels it seems to require similar sort of lateral thinking, in a way.)

3. As long as I'm talking about Braid: it's good! Play it!

4. I wonder if trying to eat breakfast would be too ambitious...? I feel sick, but dammit I am so hungry.

... so, I sort of made a layout? I'm not going to post it to dreamwidthlayouts, because a) the CSS is really, really messy, and b) I figured out a lot of it from looking at boo's CSS file for the layout I'm using, so it'd feel kind of like I was taking credit for her work. But still, I am kind of going "ooh, awesome" at myself for having managed to wrap my head round the Dreamwidth layouts enough to design anything for them. Especially since it's about three or four years since I did anything like that for LJ, even.

There was a lot more stuff I was going to write about but I cannot has brain today, so for now I will just say: hey, this blog is really interesting! (Mind Hacks: it's about odd psychological/neuroscience brain stuff and effects and illusions and things.)

I've just gone through my circle and given access to everyone. This is just so that if I want to lock something that mentions specific details of where I live/work/etc., I can do that without it becoming invisible. :) I want to try being pretty open on this journal rather than keeping to myself, so I don't expect to access-lock many posts at all - and if I do find I want to write about deeply personal stuff, there's always filters - so it seemed to make sense. So. Hello everyone. :)

I would write more, but... there's a 2000-word essay about Romans and Pompeii with my name on it. Also, I am extremely tired; today was a bank holiday, and it was raining, and I was running the dinosaur table at the museum. I have no idea how many kids I met today. A LOT. Including one little girl who attempted to steal a trilobite by sticking it down her pants. (After 430 million years of existence, I suppose that trilobite has seen a lot. But I'm willing to bet that was a first for it.)