Selenay's Ramblings

I was doing so well at regular updating in December, then Christmas hit and the updating stopped happening. BUT! I have noticed with only a month's break, rather than my usual six months, so that's almost like updating regularly, right?

When I last posted, I had the cold from hell. So did Mum. We hung onto those colds until well into January, unfortunately, and Mum's turned into a chest infection. She's recovering well now that she's been stuck on antibiotics. Poor Mum. We did feel a lot better and thought the colds were actually ending on Christmas Eve, but then they roared back on December 27th. At least we were feeling semi-human for the big bits of Christmas and a lot of the family stuff. Phew.

( More Christmas details )

This was one of the reasons I moved: getting to spend time with family.

One of the other reasons was getting to spend time with friends, and I just had a weekend doing that by going to Redemption convention.

( A sort of con report )

It was good to get a break over Christmas, but I'm also still loving my job so I'm not sad about being back. There's a lot of interesting projects coming up and it feels good to have my efforts regularly recognised. It's such a contrast to my last job!

This year is already shaping up to be another busy one. I've got various trips planned, including two more conventions (Eastercon and Worldcon), and I'm planning to look for a home to buy later in the year. Probably another two bed flat, but ground floor so that it's wheelchair accessible. It looks like I can afford one in the village I grew up in, so keep your fingers crossed. I'll probably start applying for mortgages and looking for something to buy in May or June, although a lot depends on how much chaos is going on due to Brexit. Argh.

We had snow on Tuesday. My train almost didn't make it due to ice on the tracks, but it got to the station eventually. I only fell over once on my walk home and I really regretted not wearing my snow boots! It took Dad 3.5 hours to get home and Mum was sending me increasingly worried texts until he got there. Some of it melted off yesterday and then froze hard, so walking to choir last night was...interesting. There was an ice-skating moment. Thankfully I was almost there when it happened and I didn't actually fall. A couple of friends gave me a lift home. I was really glad I was working from home yesterday and today. The temps should get rid of the ice and snow today. Phew!

I'll still take this tiny bit of snow and temporary chaos over Canadian winters every time.

Today my work team is off for lunch at a local pub, which is rather exciting (for me) because I haven't done the Christmas pub lunch thing for over a decade. Literally. So this should be fun.

My Yuletide draft is...happening. I've got most of it. I just need to write the final scene and decide on how I want to end this, which is actually quite difficult because this is a canon where neat endings don't happen and I am unsure about my recipient's feelings on happy vs unresolved endings (I am not doing tragedy here). Hopefully my beta will point out if the ending won't work for my recipient.

I'm happy with what I've got so far, though, and I'm feeling confident there will be no defaulting, so that's always a win in my book. I'd been hoping to have time to write treats, but that may have been an ambitious aim. I'll see how I'm doing next week. I haven't rattled my presents and I probably won't, because it's nice to have a surprise.

Note to self: post your femslashex fic.

Also post a link to the fic you got for femslash, because it was awesome and that's what happens when you somehow luck into netgirl_y2k being your writer :-D

I'm choosing not to look at how many days it is until Christmas, but it is starting to feel a bit Christmassy now. We've decorated at my office. I've started my advent calendar.

I'm trying to figure out how many Christmas-themed books I can read in three weeks. I'm feeling a need for a Dark is Rising reread and I've got a stack of cozy comfort books with Christmas in the title. I'm trying to resist the temptation to add The Domesday Book to the stack because I read it last year and it's not exactly cheerful.

And I'm halfway through the annual Box of Delights rewatch, which always makes me feel festive.

At church, we're embracing the advent season and it's lovely. I hadn't realised how much I missed the Anglican traditions around seasons until I spent a few years in a Baptist church that did its best to ignore all of the festivals except for Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. It's such a relief to be back in a congregation where I feel like I fit--all of me, not just the Baptist-appropriate parts.

Yuletide is starting to come together, too. My main fic is in its second draft and I'm well into writing a treat, which is most unusual for December 6th! Over the last few years, I've been doing NaNo and ending up feeling totally burnt out in December, so Yuletide has been a struggle. This year I'm excited about Yuletide again!

I chose not to do NaNo due to the horrific work deadlines and trying to get my Marvel Bang fic edited on time, but it's turned out to be a blessing in disguise. By the time I was through the worst of the post-work-and-Marvel-Bang burn out and starting to itch to write something, I still had loads of time until the Yuletide deadline. Maybe this is a signal that NaNo just isn't the right timing for me.

Provided this week doesn't go to hell, I'm on vacation on Friday until December 19th, which will be fantastic. Lots of time to finish recovering, to read books, to do Christmas baking, to veg out with the telly...I'm excited to have a vacation, even though we're forecasted to get out first big snow on Monday!

I'm starting to count the days until my Christmas break. Due to my compressed work schedule and the plethora of federal and company holidays, I've managed to get a Christmas break that runs from 20th December to January 5th while only using five vacation days. In other words, I'm off work for nearly two and a half weeks over Christmas.

*flail arms*

So, I'm now counting the days until December 19th when I skip out of the office singing silly carols and relishing the idea of not returning for a very long time.

Not that I don't enjoy my job, I do, but it's been a long time since I had a break that didn't involve travelling or dealing with parents and parental expectations of what a 'vacation' is. Often both. My mother's idea of a good vacation usually involves getting lots of DIY jobs done around the house and travelling places to get administrative stuff done or shop for curtains. If I take a staycation when she's here, there's usually no chance that I'll get time to sit around reading books and fic or writing for hours on end or marathoning entire TV series.

Take a wild guess at what I've got planned for Christmas :-D

So, yes, countdown to vacation is started. Nine days to go!

I'm feeling ambivalent about my preparedness for Christmas. On the one hand, I've got the turkey (stuffed turkey breast, actually) ordered at the butcher's and the Christmas pud is in the freezer. On the other hand, I got as far as mixing up pastry and mincemeat but haven't actually made and frozen the mince pies yet. Nor have I ordered the Christmas presents.

I got three quarters of my Christmas shopping done tonight. Tomorrow I make mince pies and finish the shopping. When those things are done, I'll feel much happier about the entire thing.

Shockingly, my Yuletide fic may be the only thing I feel relatively calm about. I finished it last night leaving me with well over a week for editing, beta-ing, and re-editing. I'm even feeling fairly happy with it. Huh.

And I still have two weeks to get the big crackfic C/C fic edited for Christmas Eve posting :-D

Last night, despite the pouring rain and general foul weather, I bought a Christmas tree :-D This is my first time buying my own tree so I'm very proud of my baby. It's five feet tall (if it stands on its tip toes and thinks really hard about being tall) and it's bushy and beautiful.

The tree, which I think needs a name, is currently hibernating in the shed. I'll bring it in tomorrow when my cousin can give me a hand putting it up. And then on Friday there will be Decorating. My little tree is going to have so many shiny things :-D

Also, I may possibly have printed off Flatbear's wonderful Avengers ornaments with the intention of sticking them up around my rec room to bring some festive cheer and smiles to that room :-D

My house will be a mixture of Christmas explosion and festive geekery by the Friday evening.

Friday is going to be crazy busy. So far, I've worked out that I need to go to the following:

- Bank
- French patisserie (what? I'll be in the city, it's wrong not to go)
- Comic shop (time to admit I'm hooked and set up some subscriptions)
- Tea shop
- Craft store
- Canadian Tire (need more lights and garland)
- Superstore
- Fancy pants superstore

And when I finally get home from all that, there will be the decorating. Followed, probably, by collapsing quietly somewhere and forgetting all about my plans to be sensible and good and ordering pizza for supper.

Everyone's doing it, so I'll join the bandwagon.

2011 basically sucked for me. I won't lie. Any year that has an emergency hospital admission in the first month and the diagnosis of a severe chronic illness is never going to go well. I've spent most of the year on steroids and now take a ton of pills and injections to keep things at bay.

While the UC diagnosis did at least finally give me access to lots of help and doctors who are eager (and wonderful) carers for me, it did also make my life a bit more complicated and I ended up cancelling most of the trips and fun plans for the year due to flare-ups. When you add in all the things that I couldn't do due to my back, you end up with a year that did not have many trips or fun days out and consisted of a lot of hospital trips, tests, needles and bad news.

Thankfully the last six weeks has been better: I'm in remission (I hope, we need to discuss the recent stomach cramps in the new year) and my back has eased off a lot since late November.

I've written a bit during December, for the first time in months, and my Christmas has been so much better than last Christmas.

All of this gives me hope that 2012 is going to be a lot better than 2011. So here's to the end of a sucky year and the start of what will hopefully be a fantastic year!

So, it's Christmas Eve Eve and I'm working from home due to snow. Hope the boss still lets me sneak off early...

Pro tip: if you go outside for a protracted period of time during a snow storm (say, to get an early start on the shovelling) be very careful about taking your coat off when you get inside. Snow down the back of your sweater is vile!

I did my regular grocery shopping yesterday rather than today, in anticipation that I might not get out due to snow, so I'm quite prepared for a day huddling indoors with the cats. Tomorrow is going to be insanely cold but not snowy so I'll be heading to the nice grocery store for veggies, fruit and maybe something nice from the butcher for supper.

Er, I think that I may be verging on being sort of prepared for Christmas. How did that happen?

So, TV here won't be airing A Christmas Carol on Christmas Day.

Instead, they're airing it on Boxing Day.

The the one hand, grr argh!

On the other hand, Space is airing all the specials in a massive marathon on Boxing Day culminating in A Christmas Carol at 10pm AST (9pm EST). Most importantly, A Christmas Carol is scheduled for 90 minutes so they'll be showing it uncut.

W00t!

I shall be able to legally watch it uncut only 24 hours after my UK friends and family. Whether I 'acquire' it on Christmas Day will depend entirely on how long I spent at my aunt's that day. But it's not quite so urgent as it usually is to get my paws on it. Yay!

( Cut for back whinging )

In other news...

I went to a carol concert last night. It was at the local Anglican church in aid of the local foodbank and I really enjoyed it. There were lots of lovely old traditional carols (although I may never get the hang of the different tunes that a couple of them use) and quite a few modern Christmas songs. Good fun and my voice was a little hoarse afterwards. It's starting to feel rather seasonal.

The cats have decided that the tree is much less interesting now that it's not covered in a sheet. They only bother it when I'm in the room with the tree and not paying attention to them. Crazy animals. As it's an attention thing, I've taken to putting whichever of them commits persistant tree infractions (usually Kate) into the craft room for a time-out. That seems to work a little better than shouting and water spraying, probably because it's counter-productive for what they want!

It's the team Christmas lunch tomorrow, cleverly timed so that we can go home whenever we finished :-) As we did last year, we're hitting a local Greek restaurant and I'm totally committed to getting my paws on some deep-fried zucchini for my appetizer. That stuff is like heaven on a plate. A calorie-laden, artery-clogging heaven, but still heaven on a plate. Om nom nom.

My department likes eating. We prefer all our social events to have an element of food. This week there has been a pot luck and tomorrow's meal. Next week there is another pot luck and my Monday afternoon status meeting will be at the local really awesome coffee shop. I can't imagine why I enjoy working here :-)

Note to self: when you are running well ahead of time in the morning, that doesn't mean you will be at work early. It means that the universe will work even harder to mess with your morning. My twenty minute commute took me forty minutes today. No, I really don't know why. I also lost five minutes looking for the source of the voices, convinced that the cats had turned on the TV or radio, only to realise that my neighbour across the street had his car door open while he scraped the ice and it was so loud that I could hear it in the kitchen. Argh.

As tomorrow is 1st December and we will be starting the annual count-down to Christmas, let me tell you about my plans.

My office is lovely and gives us Christmas Eve off as well as the Monday and Tuesday following as our lieu days for Christmas being on a weekend. This means that I will have five glorious days off work. Then I'm back at work for three days before getting a three day weekend. This alone is enough to get me thoroughly excited.

My parents and I decided that it would be much less stressful for everyone if we all stayed in our respective countries this year. Therefore I shall be here in Canada and they will be in England. Skype will come to our rescue (hopefully) for keeping in contact. Most importantly, nobody will be worrying about flying and the travel expenses and the risks of airports being closed due to snow etc. Also, nobody will have to fly through the USA to get affordable flights.

I am never, ever doing that again.

Over the years, I have read about people having these lovely Christmas staycations where they eat lots of food, watch DVDs and veg out with no need to run around to various family celebrations. As much as I love my family and enjoy a family Christmas, I have also sometimes felt slightly jealous of those people who get to sleep whenever they want, have DVD marathons of Lord of the Rings and eat themselves silly.

So this year, that will be my Christmas.

No, I won't be completely alone. I'm spending Christmas Day with my aunt (so I don't have to sort out the turkey, phew) and there is often a gathering of knitters at a coffee shop on Boxing Day. But other than that, my Christmas break will be filled with food, DVDs, cuddling of cats and generally doing whatever I want to my own timetable.

I am possibly disproportionately excited about this.

For this extravaganza of self-indulgence, there shall be planning. Menu planning, to ensure that I have the scrummiest food imaginable every day. Slowly buying nice treats for myself (a bag of Liebekuchen and a box of shortbread fell in my basket this week, oops). Buying in a few DVDs so that I have things just in case my Christmas presents all prove to be book-oriented rather than DVD-oriented.

There may also be a book day. I haven't decided yet. But a whole day of reading does have its appeal.

The only thing that may upset me will be if friends or family decide that they can't bear to think of me alone and 'volunteer' me into attending events every day. Christmas Day and the possible knitterly coffee date are going to be lovely and exactly what I need. Much more than that cuts into my completely selfish indulgence time and I shall have a tantrum.

I'm almost afraid to tell people my plans in case they try to kidnap me. That's a bit sad, isn't it?