I spoke too soon! A fuel pump went in Dad’s car, so I mightn’t get the money to go to Supanova after all. Aughhh!

And to top it off, my aunt is coming down from Newcastle on Saturday to see Mum. Normally I don’t mind visits from the rellies, but since Mum got really sick, it seems that I can’t do anything right in their eyes. Apparently if I have time to do my own thing, then I have too much time on my hands and I’m a lazy cow for not working.

At least, that’s what it feels like.

I finally get the okay for the $200 from Dad so I can go to Supanova. The problem: I can only go one day, on the Sunday. The reason: my nephew has to run at Nowra on Saturday, and my sister has decided to go along, probably to take photos.

Now normally she doesn’t go along when Tim runs, but the one day when it does matter to me that I can go out, she decides to go, and I have to look after Mum.

I shouldn’t complain. She does come over most Saturdays to help look after Mum, and I can go on the Sunday. For a while I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to go at all.

I have a question:

Why is it called “monkey sex”?

I mean, seriously. I’ve come across the term in a number of fics (and I think I’ve even used it myself) but I have no idea where the term came from.

And I don’t know why I’m stuck on that now…

Here’s hoping I can make the cut work for my meme this time.

I’ll say it again: Me bad person who hasn’t even checked LJ for ages! I have really got to learn not to do that. And yes, I know, I’ve said that before.

I’ve been trying to stabilise my life and get it into some sort of routine as now I’m an ‘assistant carer’ for my mother (and those are my sister’s words, not mine). I’m cooking dinner every night (unless I go out), and this can get complicated as nine times out of ten I have to cook something completely different for Mum than for the rest of us. She has diabetes, and there’s rather a long list of what she can and can’t have. Even my sister didn’t realise how complicated it would be. For instance, there are only one or two types of potato that Mum can have, and here I thought that a potato was a potato was a potato.

One good thing about me doing the cooking—my sister is now eating (most of) what I cook, whereas previously she wouldn’t touch my cooking, maintaining that I was trying to poison her. But now she realises that I’m the only one who can do the cooking as Mum is blind, and if she doesn’t eat it, she doesn’t eat.

On a completely different note, I found a meme on a friend’s LJ last night and decided to do it. Normally I don’t do memes, but this one I found intriguing as it involved putting your entire music list (mp3, Window’s Media Player or whatever) on shuffle and whatever song came next was attributed to a theme for a soundtrack if your life was a movie (I think I’m explaining this right). As I have quite a bit of classical music on my computer, I thought it would be interesting to see what would turn up. Here’s my soundtrack:

I’d forgotten about the Christmas songs I have on my computer as I only play them in December. I decided to do it again, just to see what would happen (and to see if I didn’t have to cheat because a Christmas song came up at an inappropriate time). Didn’t work; Bing Crosby’s ‘Mele Kalikimaka’ came up as the “Final Battle” song, and the next one was Irene Cara’s ‘Fame’ which wasn’t much better. I won’t put that ‘soundtrack’ here though.

             I'll try the soundtrack in the next entry.

Me bad person who hasn’t even checked LJ for ages! I have really got to learn not to do that. And yes, I know, I’ve said that before.

But I’ve been wondering. Having seen two later episodes of a TV show (say The West Wing), will that make me predisposed to shipping for a couple when watching the series from the beginning—in this case Josh/Donna. Or CJ/Danny.

With me, it’s hard to tell. I’m very good at picking out latent UST between couples who later end up together in shows (one exception being Jess Mastriani/Antonio from Missing, but that’s a whole other story) which means that me shipping Josh/Donna is perfectly natural, but I have this niggling feeling that it’s partly because of the two season 7 episodes I’ve seen (and they’re only up to season 3 on W).

My (now-ex) boyfriend Mick was the one who got me watching The West Wing by watching it one Saturday night when I was up at his place. The two episodes we watched were ‘Election Day part 2’ and ‘Requiem’. The only reason I remember that is because 

My niggling doubt is that I saw something in either of those eps that has predisposed me to ship Josh/Donna. But I can’t remember.

And I fully blame Mick for getting into The West Wing. It’s his fault (and if he still reads his LJ he’ll see this). But I don’t mind. I don’t hate him for this or for anything else. There are no hard feelings.

But this new TV obsession has me reading TWW fan fiction. Which is a bad sign; it usually leads me to writing fic for that particular show (there have only been two exceptions to that rule). And I don’t need anymore shows to write fics for! I don’t need to start more stories! I need to finish the ones I’ve started! But knowing that doesn’t help…

Me bad person who hasn’t even checked LJ for ages! I have really got to learn not to do that.

I have been without a TV for three weeks! It was still under warrantee when it went on the fritz, but because my uncle was here at the time, it was only yesterday that it was taken to the repairman. I have been watching A Country Practice re-runs on the Hallmark Channel on Mum’s TV, but been missing Supernatural, Bionic Woman, and Heroes. Yet I’m proof positive that it is possible to live without a TV.

Speaking of A Country Practice I have discovered that the first TV couple I ever shipped was Jo/Michael at the ripe old age of 11-12. I’ve been loving these re-runs ‘cos it’s from that era. However, it did lead me to do something rather… odd. I wrote an A Country Practice fanfic. I still can’t believe I did that, but I did. It led me to look for other fanfics of that show, but I couldn’t find any. Either I’ve written the first (which I rather doubt) or anything else that’s been written has disappeared off the face of the Earth.

I’ve been swimming the last couple of days in the local tidal rock pools to do some physio on my bad ankle. The water is rather cold this time of year (16 degrees C) for all that it’s coming up on summer, and I swear that me turning blue has turned others off coming in the water; but today took the cake. I go down there as usual (high tide in a tidal rock pool—fun!), get in the water, and not five minutes later I see a bluebottle. Needless to say, I got out of the water smartly. As I had no money or phone with me (I never take anything valuable with me to a public swimming area) I had to sit on my towel and wait until my Dad came to pick me up. Consequently, I’m rather sunburned. My fault for going swimming in the hottest part of the day.

But there is no way I’m going to swim early in the morning. The water’s even colder then.

You know, I really think that if I had watched The Sixth Sense *before* I found out the twist at the end, I would have found the movie more creepy. Don’t get me wrong, I found it interesting and even compelling; but because I knew what the twist was, there was no mystery to it. Not fair!

I was watching ‘Unending’ again last night, this time with the commentary (after watching that scene a few times). And Amanda Tapping said something about the episode that I had not noticed. I’ll put the rest under a cut so I don’t spoil anyone who hasn’t seen it.

Here’s a question for SGA fans out there. If the puddle jumpers require someone with the ATA gene to fly them (and this is a point that has been made in several SGA episodes), then how did Ford manage to fly one through the Gate when he escaped in Siege pt 3?

It’s a point that completely escaped me (like the fact that Crichton could understand and talk to the people of a completely insular planet with no space travel they landed on in the second episode of Farscape, but that’s a whole other issue). The only reason I even thought of it is because the point was mentioned in the Fandemonium SG-1 novel Roswell which I’m currently reading.

So, can anyone answer the question? Or, as fans, we aren’t supposed to notice inconsistencies like that?

I am completely losing it! I keep thinking that today is Sunday, when it’s not. It’s Saturday, which means that it’s tomorrow that I update my website, not today. And I can’t even blame my confusion on a long weekend, ‘cos I haven’t had any!

Speaking of websites, I’m going to start posting my artwork here as I have no idea when I’ll get around to doing that website.

First up is the first John/Elizabeth wallpaper I made:

Lord Cutler Beckett is a smarmy git! (sorry, watched PotC: Dead Man’s Chest the other night)

I’ve had so many nightmares with this computer the last week. First it was trying to back everything up before I installed the new modem, which was more time consuming than anything else. When I final got that done (you know, it takes 6-8 minutes to burn a disk, but about ½ an hour to wipe a CD-RW disk. And sometimes then the disk wouldn’t work), I was ready to install the new modem. And then it didn’t work. It kept saying there was no sim card, which I found rattling around inside it. But even reinserting the sim card, the modem was busted. So after waiting about ½ an hour on hold a Telstra technician in India finally said they would get a new modem to me in about 3 working days. Then I had to reinstall the old modem if I wanted to get any TAFE work done.

When I finally got the new modem and installed it, it wouldn’t connect. I had to ring Telstra again to sort it out. It’s been working fine so far, but I have to turn it off and on every now and then, because it won’t find servers when I’m surfing the web.

Whew! Now that I have that rant out of the way, I’ll get to the purpose of this entry. I’ve decided to do detailed links to stories on my webpage in case they’re for a fandom that people want to read. And I thought I’d start with the ones posted since I last mentioned an update rather than the most recent.

Title:               I Knew I Loved You

Author:           mahlia

Fandom:          The Sentinel

Rating:            At least R (it’s a slash—m/m—story)

Summary:       A reflective story about a beautiful love, written to the Savage Garden song ‘I Knew I Loved You’.

Disclaimer:      The Sentinel belongs to UPN, PetFly productions and/or Paramount. No copyright infringement is intended.

I Knew I Loved You

Title:               Hesitation Costs

Author:           Allison K. East (me)

Fandom:          Pirates of the Caribbean

Rating:            PG (or the international equivalent)

Summary:       Jack’s thoughts during a critical moment in PotC: At World’s End. Warning, does contain spoilers for that movie.

Disclaimer:     Pirates of the Caribbean belongs to Disney, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Gore Verbinski. No copyright infringement is intended.

Hesitation Costs

It’s fun to sit in a class and not know what the heck is going on. This is what happened yesterday. It would have helped if I had been in TAFE last Wednesday though… But that couldn’t be helped. But still, twiddling your thumbs for 10-20 minutes while waiting for the teacher to address the class… first thing in the morning it’s a good way to fall asleep!

 The afternoon class was fun, though. We had to look for websites that demonstrate certain elements of design, and I chose an Orlando Bloom gallery page (http://www.ka-bloom.org/gallerie/index.php ). It was the first thing I thought of to look for, and it worked for the subject matter!

I was told today that my handwriting was pretty! This is something that I haven’t thought about before, as I tend to think of my handwriting as messy. Seriously. Sometimes even I can’t read it. I was reading about handwriting analysis in an encyclopaedia once (I was bored, it was towards the end of a Modern History class where we were learning about something I already knew). Anyway, as an example the entry showed various ways of crossing t’s and what each meant. Looking back over what I had written that lesson, I noticed that I crossed my t’s in every way mentioned. So what does that say about my writing?

Bought the 7^th Harry Potter book on Saturday (actually I bought 2, but one was a birthday present for my sister) and read it by 4.30 in the afternoon. And I can’t wait to read it again (after I re-read book 6). Of course, it makes my Trini Amatorius fanfic rather AU; but then again, I’ve been expecting that. Draco/Ginny was never going to be a canon pairing.

I’ve updated my webpage, Do You Like Fan Fiction at least twice since I last wrote in here. I meant to write last week, but I got caught up in returning to TAFE for the semester. I almost fell asleep in class today; reading about privacy laws is rather mind-numbing. The Australian Privacy Act (1988) is a 230-something word document and I have to summarise it in one paragraph. Help!

I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I absolutely loved it! I so need to see it again! For a movie based on the largest Harry Potter book to date, it was remarkably faithful to the book considering the amount of material that had to be condensed. There were a couple of things that I didn’t quite agree with (I won’t say exactly what unless I can successfully put it under an LJ cut—don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it yet) but I can understand why it was done that way.

 One thing I did love was that it really seemed to be cementing the Ron/Hermione ship in canon (movie canon, that is; book canon is slightly different). That is something that I’ve seen since Chamber of Secrets which is the first Harry Potter film I really watched (a friend tried showing me Philosopher’s Stone on DVD before the second film came out… I found studying 5^th century BC Ancient Greece more interesting at the time). We argue over pairings in Harry Potter (and other fandoms) as she is a slasher and I’m not (and no, I don’t hold it against her—the arguments are fun!), and you should have seen the face she pulled when I was pointing out that R/H was canon in the film.

 But then again, my ship pairings tend to be canon (except Draco/Ginny—I’m not foolish enough to think that would ever be canon). Hers, being m/m slash, tend not to be canon (except for Torchwood, which I don’t watch anyway).

My father gave me his cold! Not fair! Now I’m all stuffed up, I have a hacking cough that hurts so much that the pain lingers in my sternum long after I’ve stopped coughing, and I have to miss fSf tomorrow! Well, I don’t exactly have to, but it’s probably better if I stay in bed and not go traipsing off to Sydney. Because I really want to get better before Wednesday as I have no intention of missing the new Harry Potter movie at the IMAX. And I know that it’s just a cold and not the ‘flu, ‘cos I can still write stories at the moment; when I had the ‘flu a while back, I didn’t feel like writing, I didn’t feel like doing anything.

 Of course, my parents are blaming me for bringing the bug home in the first place ‘cos I had the ‘flu two months ago. But there are two things wrong with that theory. 1) It was two months ago when I got the flu, at the end of April. As my father got sick last week, I highly doubt that it could be the same bug. And 2) even if it was the same bug, I already have immunity to it, so I can’t be infected by it again.

Hey, this is my 30^th entry! I really need to update more often…

How does one keep a cheeky cat off a microwave? Okay, it may seem to be an odd question, but it’s a serious one! My Miss CheekyMirax has discovered a new place to sit and it’s driving my mother mad! She keeps threatening to put Cheeky in the microwave and turn it on; and while I don’t think she’d actually do it… okay, that thought does not need finishing.

 Speaking of cats, my two know when I’m supposed to be moving to feed them! First Cheeky learned that the sound of my phone alarm means I’m supposed to be getting up and she comes in to bug me until I feed her; now both cats recognise the sound of my computer speakers being turned off, correctly know it means I’m getting off the computer, and come running to be fed. Most amusing.

 Updated my webpage. Added stories to the Pirates of the Caribbean, Random thoughts page, and the Dark Angel page. I’m really intending to update once a week.