Five Things Make a Post

[netgirl_y2k]

1. My Mum has taken herself off on a three month cruise, as a retirement present to herself. On her own, otherwise, she said, it'd be just like home, only on a boat, which is strange yet oddly unassailable logic.

She sent an e-mail the other day with the subject line Help!!!, we opened it and it turned out to be about how the memory card on her camera was full. Unnecessarily alarmist, that's my Mother. I mean, three exclamation marks, that's what you use when you've accidentally angered the Sea God Poseidon.

Before she went she made me, Dad, and my sister promise that we'd have dinner together as a family at least twice a week. Tonight's family meal was poppadoms and spiced onions consumed standing up over the kitchen sink. Despite both being mature, self-suficient women in our late twenties and early thirties my sister and I have quickly regressed to teenagers who have been left with the less strict parent.

2. My weird anxiety thing has been getting better, the last full blown panic attack I had was in May, I think. I have a system for dealing with them now, 1) I went to the doctor and got beta blockers for the heart palpitations (god bless the NHS and all who sail in her) 2) once I believe that I'm not actually going to die right this instant I can usually rationalise the brain weasels into stopping the spiral of panicky thoughts, and failing that, 3) singing, which sounds mad, I know, but singing out loud seems to stop my breathing freaking out too much and trying to remember the words distracts me. So if you're ever in a car park or train station somewhere in Scotland and you see a pale, nervous young woman singing Sex on Fire by the Kings of Leon (the most successful song for this purpose; believe me, I've experimented) that's quite possibly me, and that's why I'm doing it.

That said, yesterday was the most anxious I've been in ages, a result of watching and reading too much about George Osborne's speech at the Tory party conference. The only possible upshot that I can find is that I'm no longer being facetious when I saw George Osborne's politics, and indeed face, make me feel ill.

3. It's October already, how on earth did that happen? Later this month I've got to go and get fitted for a kilt etc. for Tequila Boy's wedding. And no offence to traditional femininity, but, dude, rented formalwear is the way of the future!

I've also started thinking about writing my best man person girl man speech, which I will probably run by the ye olde f-list for a humour check closer to the time. My Dad was the best man at his brother's wedding thirty odd years ago, and his tip for delivering the speech was, and I quote, "know what you're going to say before you stand up at the wedding." Thanks, Dad, very helpful.

Right now, I think I'm going to keep to the traditional theme of best man speeches, namely that it's difficult to believe that Tequila Boy has convinced such a lovely and seemingly intelligent young woman to commit to him for life, especially when compared to such self-evident things as the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot. Although, I can't be too horrible about him, I mean, single and wondering how one goes about becoming a cat person though I am, there's still an outside chance he may get to retaliate some day.

4. Elementary and Once Upon a Time started again this week (yippee!) I haven't watched either of them (anti-yippee) not because I haven't wanted to but because I don't think watching things hunched over a laptop is doing my back a world of good. For goodness sake, somebody get onto Help the Aged. Instead I've been trying to watch things that are actually on tv here.

I watched Agents of SHIELD which was a bit like if early Torchwood had a budget, and no I don't mean that in a good way. But it's very shiny and impressive looking, and as I don't come from comics or MCU fandom it's entirely possible that the lack is with me rather than the show.

I watched Atlantis too, a show that's mostly impressive for the sheer failure of creativity or imagination that's gone into it. It's like the BBC brief was: we want a show so like Merlin that casual viewers won't notice that Merlin's been cancelled. Again, not a good thing.

You know what, somewhere around here must be the means to connect the laptop to the telly; Elementary and Once it is.

5. My femslashex assignment arrived, and is smack bang in the middle of my comfort zone and I feel pretty good about what I'm planning to write, so that's good. Especially as I dropped out of a couple of multi-fandom exchanges earlier in the year by either misjudging what my comfort zone is or my ability to write outside it.

I don't know, I'm finding fic writing a bit weird at the moment, like, I want to write and there's things I want to write, but mostly I'm just staring at a blinking cursor and getting frustrated. Anyway, here is an incomplete list of fics I would like to write should I someday get my mojo back:

- GoT; Sansa/Margaery modern university AU, where Sansa's flatmates are Shae and Brienne, and Jaime Lannister is living on their sofa in some sort of protracted attempt to either annoy or woo Brienne.
-ASOIAF; the Sisterhood of the Night's Watch, where Lyanna Stark was sent to the Wall as a sort of a scapegoat after the Rebellion, Arya begs her aunt to let her join the Watch, and Castle Black is populated by assorted women of various degrees of unsuitability for life on the Wall.
-Merlin/Temeraire fusion; where Merlin is Kilgarrah's captain, and Morgana is Aithusa's.
-OUAT; Ruby and Belle as a version of Beauty and the Beast.
-DS9; Jadzia Dax/Lenara Kahn fixit where Lenara doesn't leave at the end of Rejoined.