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THERE IS RUGBY TODAY. This is good. As you may have inferred from the use of capital letters. I am going to drink beer. Maybe in a pub. I don't know. But there will be beer and rugby and it will be good and I will forget about the fact that my week off is over tomorrow because I will be drinking and watching TV. Yes.

This morning, I caught up on Generation Kill and I just love it. At first, I wasn't too sure about it because it's so different from anything else on TV but after five or six episodes I've made my mind up (because, as the man said, it's pretty fucking ninja). It's just so beautifully shot, the dialogue is fucking awesome and the characters and their interactions are so close to perfectly done. Plus, jesus fuck they're so hot. If these guys really had been the ones that invaded Iraq, Iraq would have just rolled over in deference to their hotness. Seriously. (I may have spent a huge chunk of yesterday downloading fanmixes and reading Brad/Nate fic (which I totally didn't mean to, but they were so good and so hot and it totally overrode the whole 'this a programme that doesn't actually need homoerotic subtext to be awesome' considerations) but that is neither here nor there.)

A meme, from stillxmyxheart, because why not?

Current Books: A Matter of Death and Life - Andrey Kurkov
Current Playlist: Generation Kill fanmixes (rock! hip hop! electronica!)
Current Guilty Pleasure: Staying in bed until lunchtime
Current Colour: Um, white? Because there's still paint all over my glasses from the hallway excitement
Current Drink: BEER!!
Current Food: Pizza
Current Favourite Show: Generation Kill
Current Wishlist: Generation Kill - Evan Wright (there's a pattern here which is undeniable)
Current Needs: Shower
Current Triumphs: I PAINTED THE HALL, CLEANED UP AND PUT THE FURNITURE BACK, MOTHERFUCKER
Current Bane of My Existence: Work
Current Celebrity Crush: Alexander Skarsgård
Current Indulgence: I am eating too much, as always
Current Blessing: You know, that whole making enough money to roughly support myself and lead a decent life
Current Slang: I really just want to say 'that was pretty fucking ninja' in every possible situation
Current Outfit: Pyjama bottoms, fuzzy socks and a NIN t-shirt
Current Excitement: BEER AND RUGBY!
Current Mood: Happy and whatnot

After the horrifying nature of ending up paint-splattered and bitter yesterday, today took a turn for the better when natural light rapidly made it apparent that a third coat of evil white paint would not be necessary. Thank fuck for that. I have a problem with heights (I mean, I'm not terrified, and I have deliberately jumped off a bridge before, but I've also fallen out of an attic and I don't like being on uncertain ground at any height above about six feet) and sadly for me, my flat has stupid high ceilings that I can in no way reach which resulted in me clinging precariously to the top rung of a ladder that always seemed in danger of tipping over. It upset me. So no third coat meant no ladder clinging which, in turn, meant good times.

Which I celebrated by going shopping and spending £22 on fucking light bulbs. I don't even want to talk about the scowl I gifted the woman behind the till with when she announced the total. I also bought a Cadet McCoy action figure from TK Maxx though, so all was not lost.

And, after a nap, I caught up on the last three episodes of Supernatural and episode five of Stargate: Universe.

( Supernatural Ramblings )

( Stargate: Universe Ramblings )

All of these catch-up shenanigans have made me miss True Blood and Generation Kill, damnit.

Oh, and veraxia, I finally posted your parcel yesterday =)

EDIT: I just opened the fridge and immediately asked myself why the milk was sporting a Scottish flag only to almost simultaneously realise that I. Live. In. Scotland. Duh, Lorraine.

I've just finished watching Slings & Arrows and god, how amazing is that programme? I love, love, love it! It's so funny and so bleak. So crazy and so touching. And Paul Gross literally could not be any more endearingly wonderful. Especially with that hair. I don't understand why this didn't make it to some prime time slot on this side of the pond because it's exactly the kind of thing that someone like the BBC should be showing. SO GOOD.

Bed time now, but Happy Hallowe'en to anyone still up and about to enjoy it.

I may come back and talk more about this, I may not, but basically, dude I'm drunk (on 3 pints! So cheap! Mostly because it's been 3+ weeks since I've had a pint but whatever, it is all good)! YAY! And I worked like 13 days in a row and now I'm off for just over a week and that's good and so is alcohol and yay for stuff - woo!

Work today was work-like. I read a book and tried not to scowl at the public. Same old stuff, really. Then I came home, ate, and watched a bunch of TV.

FlashForward is still dull, ridiculous and needlessly melodramatic. And Dominic Monaghan fecking still hasn't made a proper appearance. Balancing all of that out, Joseph Fiennes is still super hot.

Defying Gravity is a programme I've seen mentions of here and there. The vague opinion I'd picked up on seemed to be that it was somewhat overrated, so that added to the ASTRONAUTS! part made me curious to see it. I was actually going to download it but, happily, BBC showed the first two episodes last week and I caught up with them on iPlayer today. And it was shit. Complete and utter shit. Jesus. (I miss The Cape. Now that was a proper astronaut goodness.)

Last night, like a good, conscientious girl, I changed the time on my phone to take account of the time change and set my alarm. I, I thought rather smugly at the time, was not going to be one of those people who flailed around on Sunday morning, early for work because I had thought ahead and taken things into account. Only my phone took things into account too and, at some unknown time through the night (3am? I thought the time change happened at 2am, but 3am probably makes more sense because of licensing laws and whatnot.), pushed the time back another hour, with the result that I was late for work.

Plus, when I woke up, my right eye had tried to glue itself shut throughout the night and continued the attempt throughout the day. Which was not fun. But, on the upside, I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so that was nice.

ALSO, I HAVE NOW WATCHED THE WIL WHEATON EPISODE OF THE BIG BANG THEORY AND IT IS AWESOME SQUARED! HOW IS WIL WHEATON SO COOL?!?

And, last but not least, I'm enjoying Grey's Anatomy so far this season, especially because MITCH FUCKING PILEGGI keeps showing up!!!

I've just read a discussion in comments to a fic where people are maintaining that "if you think [insert topic here], you've got another think coming" is both correct and widely-used. In Britain. (And America.)

Seriously? I don't even know where this has come from because it clearly makes no sense. I have never, ever heard anyone threaten someone with the words "you've got another think coming!". I mean, that doesn't make any sort of grammatical sense, never mind the fact that it sounds ridiculous.

Anyway, moving on. I've been sick in this really annoying, low-grade way for a week or so. Sick enough to be annoyed but not sick enough for it to actually matter. Only, I think I'm graduating into actually properly sick and balls to that, people, balls to that.

This is an incoherent post because I'm tired and still boggled by the "another think coming" thing. I AM SO INTERESTING!

After a lot of dithering, my flights home for Christmas have been booked (courtesy of the parents because fuck knows I can't afford flights over Christmas) and I have successfully avoided flying with Ryanair after their horrendous decision to charge me £70 excess last Christmas and then have the gall to refuse payment in Euros. For some reason, this visit is turning out to be inexcusably complicated and the original plan was to fly into Belfast, spend a night or two there, get the bus to Donegal and spend a night or two there seeing family before getting the bus to Letterkenny and spending a night with my brother and then heading down to Sligo. Now, I'm flying into Donegal, doing the family thing, then going to my brother and then to Belfast, before going to Sligo. Which has me travelling in the wrong fucking direction for the vast majority of my travel time. And it's fuck hard to get from Belfast to anywhere that's not Dublin (not to mention getting from Donegal to Belfast), so I may have to go to Sligo via Dublin which is really out of the way. AND, I'm going to have to keep swapping fecking currencies as I jaunt back and forth across the border. But these are things that I can worry about later.

The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

I kind of forgot that I was in the middle of a trouble check over at TFL... So my update has come a few days late, but it's done so I feel like I've achieved something. And to further this paltry sense of achievement, let's talk about the books I've read recently (I'm still mostly waaaay behind on TV).

230. Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
231. Big in Japan: A Ghost Story - M. Thomas Gammaring
232. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Devil in the Sky - Greg Cox & John Gregory Betancourt
233. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Laertian Gamble - Robert Sheckley
234. Stories We Could Tell - Tony Parsons
235. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Objective: Bajor - John Peel
236. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Heart of the Warrior - John Gregory Betancourt
237. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Wrath of the Prophets - Peter David, Michael Jan Friendman & Robert Greenberger
238. The Host - Stephenie Meyer
239. Broken Angels - Richard Morgan
240. The Snow - Adam Roberts
241. Berlin Blues - Sven Regener
242. Budapest - Chico Buarque
243. The Final Solution - Michael Chabon

( Some musings and whatnot )

Since the expenses scandal is the scandal that refuses to fucking die, I have some thoughts to share. Be thankful you're getting these via the internet because when I run through them in real life, my voice escalates and I gesticulate a lot.

The politicians have been instructed to pay money back. In some cases a lot, in others not so much and then there are honest souls who don't have to pay anything back. Unquestionably, the whole designating your primary residence hoo-hah was completely immoral and they should pay the money back. The problem is that it wasn't actually illegal. Making the rule changes retrospective on the other hand... that strikes me as ever so slightly actionable. Don't get me wrong, I think they're absolute bastards. We're talking about a group of people making a good wage and getting all sorts of perks and yet they continued to wring every penny they could out of the system. That sucks. But it wasn't illegal. This is important to remember.

That said, a lot of the focus has been on the money people have been ordered to pay back for gardening expenses. GARDENING EXPENSES. John Snow pointed out that the amount of money MPs are now allowed to claim for gardening would result in them paying their gardeners less than minimum wage. Which they're not allowed to do. He brought it up several times. Which, fair point, EXCEPT FOR WHERE I SHOULDN'T BE PAYING FOR AN MP'S GARDENING EXPENSES AT ALL! OH MY FUCKING GOD! A garden is a fucking luxury and keeping it in 'good order' is your own fucking responsibility. STOP TAKING MY MONEY TO DO IT.

Politics, man, it enrages me.

(Unrelatedly, I just watched Pan's Labyrinth. Why didn't anyone tell me how depressing the end of that film is?)

I slept for twelve hours last night, which I'm quite impressed with. It does mean that I managed to sleep through FlashForward but never mind (I'm really only watching at this point for Joseph Fiennes and John Cho).

The woman who is publicising her book on Today FM is so boring. So, so boring. I want some music to wake me up and give me the energy to actually leave the flat for work, radio!

As you can see, I have nothing worthwhile to blog about. OH WELL!

So, I'm not entirely sure why I haven't been posting lately. I think I've fallen into a vicious cycle of working and then when I'm not working, bitching about how I have to go to work in a mere matter of hours. And I've more or less fallen out of the habit of yammering away on LJ. Which is stupid. Because I like LJ and I've had so many things that I should have been rambling about.

Like the near incoherent levels of rage I've sustained over the past few weeks in relation to politics. The party conferences have had me yelling at my television (DAMN YOU, QUESTION TIME!), calling entire groups of people cunts (seriously, could the Conservatives be a bigger shower of cunts if they tried? UNLIKELY!) and crumpling the defenceless Guardian when the rage causes hand spasms.

The anger has reached such epic levels at times that I have actually gotten angry at the fucking sports section of The Guardian. The SPORTS section... (But seriously, the British and Irish Lions is NOT the same thing as a rugby team GB and fuck you for saying so, British rugby union.)

Absolute confusion as to why Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Price. Did he bring peace to the Middle East when I was mired in one of my fits of self-indulgence?

There's also been all the television watching (Stargate: Universe - this is seriously what the cancelled SGA for? Wow. The deep urge to indulge in physical violence when confronted with the new adaptation of Emma (it's a good adaptation, I just fucking hate Emma). The vast inappropriateness of outing someone on The X-Factor (and wtf? He's totally likable you jackasses) and the piss-poor apology that was made after the fact.)

Then there's the recent reading in which I have inadvertently stumbled across the best science-fiction book EVAR. And, it turns out, it was written by a Glaswegian. Aces.

My continuing poverty and the bludgeoning myself over the head with the fact that it's no one's fault but my own that my loan repayments are sneaking closer and closer to £400 every month. (Well, I can also blame the fucking Euro and the motherfucking UK for their continued EuroScepticism (SO MUCH RAGE) and refusal to join the Euro for reasons which THEY CANNOT ARTICULATE.)

The dawning realisation that I undervalue myself, my skills and my experiences and fuck if that isn't a depressing thing to slowly worm its way into your consciousness.

So, yeah, you know... stuff!

Okay, so Ireland has ratified the Lisbon Treaty. Which, generally, I am in favour though I have a few doubts. The main one being that Tony fucking Blair is apparently poised to be the first president. Fuck off Blair. Fuck right off. And, really, I liked the rotating membership we had before. It was... egalitarian. And then there's the whole thing that the government were going to keep making us vote until they got the answer they wanted (man, did my mother bitch about that on the phone to me the other day). But, all doubts aside, when the Czech president said "Because after today's Irish referendum there will never be another referendum in Europe" he was wrong. Wrong. Because that was one of the things that Ireland insisted be clarified before the second referendum took place. Oh, and David Cameron? You can fuck off too. Ireland was smart enough to ask for the ability to hold referendums for certain issues when it joined the EU and the UK wasn't, so get over it. And stop fucking me off by constantly being on my TV being smug and fucking vague.

Oh, politics, you're so much fun!

EDIT: Saying that "adult smokers should be able to see what they buy" is a really weak argument for getting rid of the ban on cigarette displays in shops. Come on now, you go 'hello, shopkeeper. Can I please see a pack of *insert name here*' and they hand it to you, you look at it and then you decide whether or not to buy. The annoying thing about the changes in licensing laws, the smoking ban, the smoking advertising ban etc. is that we have to suffer through them in Ireland and then, a few years later, Scotland or the wider UK gets in on the act and I have to sit through all the shit these issues churn up all over again. It's really very annoying.

I didn't sleep well last night and we're doing some bullshit art team building thing at work today so I really can't be fucked to go to work...

In other news, Ireland is voting on the Lisbon Treaty again today so good luck with that people in Ireland. I wish I was allowed a postal vote =(

Man, bollocks to today.

I meant to do this yesterday, but

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, violentviolette!!

It's general catch-up time since I haven't made a proper post since that time I got totally drunk and partied like it was 1999.

Two Thursdays Ago: Upon this day I drank a lot, went to a couple of pubs I'd never been to before, got mistaken for someone's girlfriend, went to a nightclub and danced like a lunatic (mostly to music that I would not classify as 'good').

Two Fridays Ago: I had to go to work with three hours of sleep after the exciting trip to a nightclub and arrived still drunk. Which was awesome. The hangover kicked in around midday and I suffered from a gigglefit so epic that I actually cried with laughter and hurt the muscles around my ribs. It was amazing.

Two Saturdays Ago: Got yelled at by a woman who didn't 'appreciate my tone' and was accused of single-handedly ruining Doors Open weekend for her.

Two Sundays Ago: Went to the pub after work to watch Cork v. Kerry, tragically by myself. I drank my weight in Bulmers/Magners for the first time in forever and ended up sitting crosslegged on the bar and being fed snacks by the bar staff. Was disappointed by Cork's fourteen wides but, oh well, they live to fight another day.

Two Mondays Ago: Dude! My flatmate and I went to see Dave Gorman. Dave Gorman! Overall, he was hugely funny but some bits were a bit blah. It seemed like he was trying out a different type of standup than he usually does and some of it worked while some of it didn't. BUT IT'S DAVE GORMAN! He was playing in the Glasgow Pavillion and since we bought tickets at the last possible second, we sat up on the balcony. Which, you know, is completely normal. Except for the fact that The Pavillion has the most terrifying balcony ever. When I bought the tickets, the guy asked if anyone in my party had a problem with heights which should have been a give away but I didn't think anything of it. Then we got there and holy shit. The balcony seating is almost completely vertical. Even whilst sat in your seat you got the feeling that you were going to tip over and die at any second. On the upside, the sold icecream during the interval and I like icecream.

Last Wednesday: I got my haircut, finally using a voucher that my Mother bought me back in August. I hate making small talk with hairdressers. I'm so very bad at it. But, now I have hair that doesn't completely suck, so yay.

Last Friday: It was a public holiday, so I got triple time at work. Fuck yeah!

Last Sunday: The first of four consecutive days off for me. A very exciting prospect since I almost never get more than one day off at a time thanks to the overtime I do (I did 70+ in two weeks this months, 90+ overall for the month). The flatmate and I headed into town for the Merchant City Festival, browsed the various markets and listened to a bizarre T-Rex cover band. I also decided that the best way to settle and unsettled stomach was to have a pint. The flatmate and I had a conversation in which she complained about family members adding her on Facebook and I crowed that none of mine were on it, because they used Bebo instead. Got home to discover my Mum had joined and had her, an aunt, an uncle and two cousins all add me in quick succession. Karma's a bitch.

Yesterday: Also a public holiday, so even though I was off, I got paid. Awesome. I spent the day sleeping, watching SGA and reading.

Today: Still off so still with the sleeping lots. My Mum sent me £30 which I plan to go out and buy food with since I have completely overspent this month (as in, I don't actually have enough to pay my rent - oops). I'm making this exciting post of excitingness, thinking about showering and maybe working on a layout later. It truly is exciting to be me!

And that's my catch-up post. I'll be making a TV one at some point because so much TV lately. (Also, this mood theme picture is my favourite one ever.)

Oh, bullshit, Supernatural 5.03. Fucking bullshit.

(I have plans to get all caught up and comment and make posts and everything but I couldn't contain the level of annoyance I'm left with after watching that episode. I yelled at my computer screen I was so highly fucking unimpressed. WOMEN DO NOT EXIST MERELY TO MOTIVATE THE ACTIONS OF MEN. And also other annoying things.)

Where the fuck do people buy wallets? I can't find one that doesn't make me want to cry with rage and it really is time I let go of the pink, flowery Diddl wallet I have. It's been fun, Diddl wallet, and I've always enjoyed whipping you out in the pub just to see the resulting double takes, but damnit, I WANT A NEW WALLET!

I am really, really drunk.

And I have to be at work in four hours.

Which is hilarious. In a way that's not actually funny. Except for how it is.

There was drinking and night clubbing and it turns out that I feel old. I was in a club that's all about the heavy alternative music and it was painful. Like, when I was in Cardiff, we would have bitch slapped people who looked and acted like the majority of the crowd tonight. Seriously. So wrong.

Oh, well.

Drunk.

...