the carnival of you and me

Yesterday was sunny and glorious. In Year Two of China's Adventures in Gardening, we planted courgettes, eggplant, celery, strawberries, lettuces and a cherry tomato. Today is grey and drizzly, good for bedding in the plants but less fun for the humans.


boy: Can you take your slash goggles off or are they welded on?
me: Ingrained. They're like the gas masks in that scary episode of Doctor Who.¹
boy: "Are you my pairing? Are you my pairing?"

¹ The Empty Child.


I also spent a ridiculous amount of yesterday tinkering with Avidemux, trying to tweak some AVI files so that the sound as well as the picture would come through in Sony Vegas. Technical stuff is not my forte, but vidding has made me much more likely to persevere with these kinds of problems, bless it, so I soldiered on through numerous aspect-ratio disasters and finally succeeded. [Insert twirly dance of triumph here.]


Day 17 – Titles – Do you try to use something different than the song? Why or why not?

( I almost always use the song title. )

Get/together attendees, if you want to nominate any "must see" shows or films, please go and comment here ASAP. Thanks. (Five weeks to go!)

tahi. Platinum tampons. o.O What were they thinking?

rua. On Friday, we went to the opening of the White Cloud Worlds exhibition at the Dowse. I got a little jolt of cognitive dissonance just from seeing fantasy and sci-fi art hanging in a gallery, and it was all the more cool for that. Some lovely stuff there.

toru. That tangentially reminded me that I want to start referring to this country as "Aotearoa New Zealand" here in cyberspace. ("Aotearoa" is the Maori name for this country, and means "land of the long white cloud".) I've hesitated up till now because a) the acronym ANZ makes me think "Australia/New Zealand", and b) I suspected non-Kiwis wouldn't know what I was talking about. So I keep saying "NZ" instead. Any locals got a solution for this? Do I need to spell it out every time? I can do that.

wha. I wrote a Leverage crossover! Which means I wrote outside my fandom. *waits for the shock to pass* Lookit me growing as a person! (And then I woke up at 5.30am and realised I hadn't warned for a teeny tiny spoiler and had to get up and edit the posts, doh! But I managed to get back to sleep again afterwards.) Thank goodness for awesome betas who, among other things, fixed my Eliot characterisation. ♥

rima. And speaking of growing as a person, I've decided to dabble in the arcane and mysterious art of gardening, in a concerted effort to stop filling my house with pavlova and other treats. So yesterday I bought some seedlings, and the boy and I spent the afternoon clubbing weeds into submission and digging dirt out of the bottom of the compost bin. ( A few pics. )

ono. I just read this in an older post by troyswann:

I'm at that awful point when you're learning something new and suddenly everything just goes to hell. You know that point, right? It's when you can see what's possible, but you don't know yet how to actually get there. I see this all the time with students who are on the brink of a grade-changing shift in their work. Suddenly students who could write a decent sentence become incoherent because their brains are having insights on a new level and they're wrestling with that and so everything else just turns into spaghetti.

I think that's where I'm at with vidding. :-/

whitu. ( That music meme. )