rj_anderson is coming to see me tomorrow! And guess what else! She just got nominated for some fancypants writing award.

Just for context, previous Carnegie Medal winners have included C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve, and Walter de la Mare. So, you know, nobody important.

Not only does she have the most powerful contralto voice of any living performer I know of, I just noticed this afternoon how astonishingly beautiful her face is--the sort of face that, as writers like to say but is almost never true, looked as though it had been carved in marble.

1.) Is it just me, or is the Dorothy Sayers wiki article not exactly a hotbed of academic detachment?

2.) The older Kenneth Branagh gets, the more freakish becomes his resemblance to all of the men on my father's side of the family. Which is only part of the reason why I find it distasteful that his fangirls keep carrying on like he's the apex of male evolution.

Please tell me the name of a college or university to the north of Minneapolis and the name of the town it resides it. My Google-fu is weak tonight.

So next week I'm spending three days in Charleston, South Carolina. Any of y'all live down that way?

Has anyone ever read the Blossom Culp books by Richard Peck? I was just thinking this afternoon about The Ghost Belonged to Me, and Ghosts I Have Been, and wondering if they'd be as good and funny and creepy now as I remember them being when I was sneaking them behind my mother's back when I was nine or ten. Are there any others with her in them? As I recall, her pov was the chief reason I loved them.

Yorkshire puddings. Tell me, British flisters, are these actually staples of your national cuisine, or a gigantic joke perpetuated by your media against the unsuspecting Anglocurious of other countries? Are they actually meant to taste like anything other than oil? Should I just start avoiding the import aisles altogether?

There are things I really dislike about living in a suburban wasteland like Cary. Having delivery sushi available to me for the first time in my life is not one of them.

In the course of the last thirty-six hours, I have made a quilt top, written over twelve thousand words, finished a novel length fic, worked both my job and freelance work for cash, made a huge pot of delicious cauliflower soup from scratch, made friends with children, and assisted someone in pain. This is not to brag, this is simply to say that sometimes I need a little perspective and it would be good to remember days like this the next time I feel like I'm sucking down more oxygen than I deserve, which, knowing me, will be any day now.

Two days ago, I woke up at 7 in the evening. It was a Sunday, and I'd been asleep 13 hours. I fully expected this to bork my working Monday, but I didn't let it get me down. I wrote, I finished the quilt top for my summer quilt, I left for work early to write in the Panera across the street, putting me in an excellent position to sample the pumpkin muffins that were available for the first time. (I wait all year for the pumpkin stuff to come back out. Except for the part of the year when the pumpkin stuff is already out, at which point I'm too busy eating it.) Work was a bit strange for reasons I can't go into in an unlocked post, and then I had to pick up a friend's kids from school in Durham, so I spent the gap hours at my favorite Starbucks ever, where I got to catch up with some of the old regulars I hadn't seen in awhile and also BE ACCOSTED BY A WOMAN WHO WANTED TO PRAY FOR ME. She literally walks up to the table where I am hunched over my notebook and tells me that she had seen me and felt burdened to "lift up a prayer for me". I don't really understand why, if she felt this burden, she had to rope me into participating first, but after ten minutes of gently attempting to persuade her that I wasn't a ripe candidate for conversion, I let her do it just so she would be on her way. Afterwards I called prof_pangaea and WTF'd at him quite a lot while getting lost in downtown Durham.

Picked up the kids from the hippie school and took them back to their home, which is a private residence in the style of a hippie commune, although with way more money. The mother was my tenth grade English teacher, now a lawyer for the Durham courts, and the father does this for a living. (The Ph.D.'s totally work. There's about a million of them lying around the house and they fly faster and better than frisbees. I'm working on ways to introduce them to my autistic individuals who have trouble with motor coordination and are too afraid of being hurt to play with frisbees or other hard balls.) We took a hike down to the Eno River with a bucket, a stick, and a dog. I used the stick to smack a horsefly right out of the air. I think the girls were impressed because they immediately started looking around for another horsefly. Alas, they had all been frightened off by my leet skills.

So then I came home, a trip which took an hour because every time I come back from Hillsborough I get lost. And I had sourdough toast with Irish butter and raspberry jam (did you know I had never had raspberry jam? And then I was out of jam, and I said, "raspberry is Dumbledore's favorite!" so I tried some and now it's the only thing I want to eat.) Then I read this, which, combined with the fact that I'd just read Robert Ressler's Whoever Fights Monsters, about inventing the system of profiling that pretty much everyone uses to catch violent criminals, should have ensured lots and lots of fun dreams. Only, by the time I went to bed at 8 I'd been awake for 25 hours. If I dreamed of anything, I don't remember it.

Now it's 8 am, I woke up at 6:45, I don't have to be at work until 4. What shall I do with my day? I haven't been diurnal in what feels like months!

Well, Jeremy is in school and his mother is vanquished.

One of my ridiculously large number of lawyer friends talked to Jeremy on the phone on Thursday. She called his mother straightaway and told her she had a month to cough up the money, or they'd be taking her to court.

Sunday, Jeremy's mother called and left him a voice message. Apparently, the Lord told her to give him his money. And all the paperwork he needed for the financial aid people.

So he's waiting for the FA review committee to look over his paperwork and approve it, which is supposed to take two or three weeks but it's got to be in by this Friday so we're lighting some fires under asses to make that happen. But he's at UNC-G, in his dorm, his roommate is nice, and he's been going to classes for three days.

The money's in a stock market investment, apparently, but he'll have more details when the people get back to him tomorrow.

Thanks so much to all of you who wracked your brains and the Internet to come up with resources to help him. Let's just take a moment to savor a victory over the forces of not-insuperable-after-all stupidity.

Never Entirely Free
by Branwyn

fandom: HP
pairing: Sirius Black/Rose Potter
notes: Part of my girl!Harry AU; set during Girl in the War, five months before Twelve Hundred Hours
rating: a hard R, I'd say. If you want to get an idea what to expect, see the Year Five section of "Girl in the War".
warnings: no actual sex, but themes of dubcon, indecent liberties with a minor, and the confused, burbling morass of teenage female sexuality that is the main character.

summary: Every relationship in Rose's life is more complicated than it ought to be.

*
( here )

here.

Top five favorite things about dollmaking? // infiniteviking

1. Making the clothes.
2. Styling the hair.
3. Drawing/painting/stitching the face on.
4. Finding the perfect accessories.
5. Turning very unlikely characters and people into tiny adorable felt facsimiles of themselves.

Top Five erm... *thinks* Top Five Romana outfits? // nostalgia_lj

1. The green and purple Androids of Tara ensemble. Mary Tamm designed it herself, you know, and was proud enough to own up to it twenty years later on the DVD commentary. It's grown on me, in the manner of fungus.
2. The Edwardian swimsuit from The Leisure Hive.
3. The school uniform from City of Death. I don't even have a fetish, I just think Lalla is adorable.
4. The baby!Doctor outfit--pink coat, white scarf.
5. The fluttery white hankerchief hem dress from The Armageddon Factor. Mary Tamm is amazing in white.

Your top five angsty songs. // dreamermarie

1. "You Did A Good Thing" by Sleepthief ft. Nicola Hitchcock
2. "Gravity" by Vienna Teng
3. "Uninhabited Man" by Richard Thompson
4. "Swans" by Unkle Bob
5. "Samson" by Regina Spektor

Top 5 traits that put you off a fictional character. // lizbee

1. Selfishness
2. Stupidity
3. Lack of self-awareness
4. Other characters are defined primarily by how much they love him/her
5. Excusing bad behavior in the name of luuuuurrrrve.

Top five unpopular Harry Potter fandom opinions. violetisblue

1. I'm fine with Jo's characterization of Slytherin House.
2. Dumbledore's homosexuality is as much a part of the text as it needs to be.
3. If you didn't love Harry on some level, you were probably wasting your time.
4. Lupin was never as gay as you made him out to be.
5. Canon Snape is more interesting than fanon Snape.

top five dumbledore moments! // prof_pangaea

1. Busting through the door to save Harry from Barty Crouch in GOF.
2. "Enjoying himself" during his interview with the Dursleys in HBP.
3. "I am with you."
4. Giving Riddle's diary back to Lucius, along with a friendly warning, at the end of COS.
5. The duel with Voldemort at the end of OOTP.

Top five Watson moments... // dolorous_ett

1. Not getting butthurt when Holmes insults him in "The Dying Detective", or letting it get in the way of doing what he thinks he needs to do to save Holmes' life.
2. Resolving never to speak of his love for Mary Morstan because he thinks she's going to be rich, only to confess his feelings when it turns out she's poor after all. ("The Sign of Four")
3. Not minding getting arrested "in a good cause" in "Charles Augustus Milverton".
4. "How can you risk such damage to the great powers with which you have been endowed?"
5. Attempting to use Holmes' methods to solve the mystery of Holmes' death in "The Final Problem".


Still open for requests, if you think of one.

So consider me open for that Top Five meme where you ask me to name my Top Five whatevers and I do it.

Foundational fabrics for my new Winter Garden quilt! And a post about my Tree of Life wall hanging, here.