The Farmstead

So, the last couple of weeks have been slightly underblogged... It was my birthday yesterday (thank you all for the good wishes!!!), which involved a return to the parents' homestead and a nice lunch, including pudding wine, the leftovers of which is calling my name from the fridge. It was however, also an hour too short, glad as I am about the clocks going forward (light! Till 7.30 in the evening!! Even on horrible cold and gloomy days like this one!!), and also rainy. But never mind!

I also managed to graduate from my PhD last weekend, finally (after submitting last June), so I am now a Doctor! Updating the world is a pain in the arse, so I mostly haven't bothered, but I did buy a mattress last week, and when the man asked me if I was a Miss or a Mrs I got to say the immortal line of 'Erm, it's actually Dr...'. I was then told that I looked quite young for a doctor, but I don't care. The tyranny of Miss has ended and the great world of joy has begun. I must tell the bank. Not sure when.

The painting of my flat is also complete - and by the end of next week it may even be the case that there is some useful bits of furniture in it. So I am rather happy.

I have committed to Seasonal Spuffy but am not sure about my ability to come up with anything (sing me a new one, they say!). I had one idea, but I don't think it's going anywhere, and then another idea that bogwitch helped with which is very silly, and I am going to see where I get with that, though I fear I am not writing humorously enough with it at the moment. (Humour! Where did you go???) There's no reason why I can't produce a story and I want to produce a story. I shall have to figure out the Spuffy of it as I go along, like I always did when I just came up with a random premise and went with it. So there. Watch this space.

The headline link to the BBC website's magazine feature on procrastination is doing my head in... Please oh please will someone tell someone that non carpe diem is gobbledegook? I know noli carpere diem isn't a very sexy title, but they'll just have to come up with something else. I can't take it.

In other news, I've been working on the Greek Magical Papyri (which is a collection of random papyrus fragments purporting to be spells and rites etc.), and yesterday it took me about three hours to realise I should probably have been more bemused than I was to read through a list of the different Homeric verses you can use either spoken or written down as part of an amulet to beat menstrual pain or else work as a contraceptive. I've become far too jaded. (And I have such an urge to write a novel about these characters you got wandering around Egypt in the third century AD collecting magical lore and selling trinkets to people... But it would be a nightmare trying to source evidence. Must suppress.)

Grandma's House was like dreams on toast tonight. So, so good.

In other news, I really want to finish the draft of my seasonal_spuffy fic by the end of the weekend, so I can edit the first half for posting next Friday (in consultation with the bogwitch splitting it between my posting day and the free-for-all seems like the most sensible idea, rather than spamming the hell out of people). Given my rough estimate puts me at 16,000 words still to go, things could get interesting. Hopefully I'll hit the downhill slope at some point...

Lalala, fun times. I think I've discovered interesting, nay Good (TM) things about the text I'm working on, so PhD endeavours are looking up. (The answer, my friends, lies in Propertius 3.1 and 3.3, oh yes. This is why we are on a boat. /random)

Maybe there should be more stuff here...

is back on. I had a feeling it was going to be slightly tough after the summer, but it wasn't too bad, all told, especially since I was reading French. The afternoon was mostly a wash-out of me fighting sleep and feeling cold despite my massive library-cold-staving-off jumper, but I got up and out on time this morning, stayed for a non-too-shabby day, and think I did something worthwhile. Although, if I've lost this much stamina with reading, I'm slightly worried about how my stamina-stamina is going to hold up when football starts again...

Hopefully, also, this was exacerbated by my post-syringing ears, which seem to have got some fairly stubborn water bubbles stuck in them, so every time I talk to someone it sounds like we're underwater (a bit). Fingers crossed they'll have cleared up tomorrow for my ear test.

The only other amusing titbit I have is that my mum has been making noises about me getting my bike serviced before the winter, with the comment that it's really expensive in our only (not so) local bike shop, but it'll probably be cheaper out here in Bikeland, and worth doing just to make sure everything's OK. Of course, how it turns out that things are actually done here is that I go to a bike shop, get told to bring my bike in, then have a five minute chat with the bike mechanic (who looks disconcertingly like one of my cousins when he was about eighteen) about how the wheels and brakes are doing and how it otherwise looks fine for everyday use. And then I'm sent on my way, with instructions on how to properly tighten up brakes and the comment 'yeah, obviously if you pump up the tyres a few times and they keep going flat, you've got a puncture'. I was rather tickled by the way there was absolutely no attempt to rope me into buying/paying for anything at all, but I'm assuming this is because they have far too many on-going bike repairs to waste everybody's time with vanity services for panicky non-locals still getting used to having a bike as an everyday, all-purpose vehicle...