quid pro quo

I've got myself a dreamwidth account now, just in case. This post is mostly just a test to see if I set up the cross-posting thing correctly. I'm really not sure I have the patience to learn a new blogsite. And FOR SOME REASON it seems as if the emails from dreamwidth are a lot slower than LJ, because I still haven't gotten the generic email-verification thing yet.

Looks like it could be fun. I'm not sure I like the idea of receiving only one prompt that I have to write, but the sign-ups last two weeks-ish so I'm hoping enough people will sign up to create PROMPT DIVERSITY and I'll get something decent. I filled out my request on par with what all the exchanges I've done in the past have required. A variety of pairings and situations so that the writer doesn't get HORRIBLY STUCK in writing to my odd tastes. Yes, I know they are odd and I am UNREPENTANT even though it probably makes it way harder to match me to writers.

At the moment, there are only seven sign-ups and I am one of them, and judging from the other requests not only is there no one to write a fic for me, there are also no prompts I would touch with a ten foot pole. Well. Maybe there is one but only as a last resort.

You know that post last week where I said I had to replace a hose in my car? Yeah, well, when it rains, it pours, and this seems doubly true in Florida where it fucking monsoons. Ever since I've owned my car, it has tended to lurch a little when it shifts gears. (It's an automatic, but it's also my first car, and I didn't really do much driving before I bought it, so I wasn't sure that they all didn't lurch a little.) Hell, maybe they are supposed to do that, but the point remains, when your automatic transmission is shifting from third to fourth gear, it should actually shift, and not make an awful angry growling sound before oh-so-reluctantly shifting (with a giant, obvious lurch-of-doom for good measure). I was about a mile from my house yesterday morning when I realized that YES, THIS IS A FUCKING PROBLEM. So I turned around and lurched home, and called in to work because I didn't think it was a good idea to be driving my car around if my transmission had the potential of falling the fuck out. And then I slept in for a few hours, because it was only 6 am and I had nowhere to be, and the garages in town wouldn't be open yet anyway.

So at about 9:30 I get back up, and take my ass into town to the Ford dealership and ask them to see if it's a tiny little problem or the end of my life. Sadly, it turns out to be closer to the latter. My overdrive is shot. (This is what they told me, and I am assuming that, in my little 4 cylinder car, 4th gear and overdrive are much the same thing.) They tell me that I would have to rebuild the transmission, or buy a new one. This would cost anywhere from $2000-3000, depending upon whether I got one new or used. I paid $2500 for my car. Needless to say, I'm not going to spend as much as I paid for the car to fix it when it has 180,000 miles and could have another crisis at any time. Even if I had a random $2000-3000 to spend.

So then I look around the dealership, and find a nice 2005 Ford Focus with something like 8k miles (if I remember correctly) and a standard transmission. I wouldn't mind learning to drive stick, if I had the $7000 they wanted for it. And apparently my credit is pretty crap, so I can't get financing with the dealership without a cosigner.

So after hearing all of this fantastic news, I lurch my poor broken car home, and go tell my mother. Because she needed to know, even if I didn't want to share my misery. Because in my personal case, I do not like company in my misery. If I'm having a bad day, the last thing I want to do is bring anyone down with me. But I tell her, because I am a fucking good girl.

And then I get to listen to her bitch for the next hour about how much my stepfather is going to bitch, and how she doesn't want to hear it and about how miserable he makes her. This is her perennial rant. I hear it all the time. She and my stepfather fight like cats and dogs, especially now that he doesn't have a job and hangs around their house all fucking day. But honestly, when I'm already having a bad day, about the last thing I want to hear about is how my awful misfortune is going to make her day worse. Does that make me selfish? I honestly can't tell. Not that it would change anything even if it does make me selfish, because right now I don't care.

I tend to listen to the news as I get ready for work in the morning. It's not like, important world news, but mostly local stuff that isn't really news to anyone. It's really awful that people leave their dogs and babies in their cars in 90-100 degree heat, but it's not exactly going to start a nuclear war for me to be concerned about. The oil spill is about the only really relevant thing they ever talk about, and recently it's been more of the same thing. "OH HAY WE MIGHT FINALLY BE ABLE TO PLUG IT UP."

But this morning there was a little story about a guy that owns a plant nursery that's located near a wildlife sanctuary. Apparently deer like to wander onto his property and eat valuable merchandise. And according to whatever laws we have down here, he's well within his rights to shoot them if they come onto his property. He's not even using a gun. Apparently they found a deer with an arrow through its neck. (Considering how small the deer are down here, I consider this a pretty good shot, personally.) But the sanctuary is all upset, even though deer are not even close to being an endangered species. Maybe they watched Bambi too many times as children. But the thing is. They suggested that the nursery owner put up a fence.

I'll admit it. That made me laugh my ass off. Deer may be quadruped herbivores, but that doesn't mean they're anything like cows or horses. Deer can jump fucking high. Why would this nursery owner pay to put up a six- or seven-foot fence (because it would need to be that high in order to deter them if they really wanted at those plants) when he can just shoot a few deer at no cost to him? I will admit, I don't necessarily condone the killing of animals if you're not going to do something with them, hell, give away the meat if you don't like venison (because I know I sure don't). But if the sanctuary is so worried about their precious deer, maybe they should foot the bill for a fence. This nursery owner has already lost money because of the animals.

"I am the mighty Maker, and I now bequeath to you My Holy Power Tools, because I am too fucking drunk to use them anymore, and good luck to you, because when I get up tomorrow they had better be exactly where I left them, exactly, even My...no, especially My belt sander, because I am going to be so fucking hungover tomorrow, anybody who fucks with My belt sander is going to get a taste of My belt. And it won't taste good. At all."

from The Magicians by Lev Grossman


I highly recommend this book, btw. It smacks of Harry Potter and (from what I've seen of the movies) the Chronicles of Narnia, but in a more cynical way. Plus Eliot (the person quoted above) is just about the most excellent thing ever.

So I've been reading a lot. So much in fact that the Mass Effect fic I've been working on for weeks and weeks hasn't been touched in several more weeks. >_>; Which means all my other projects have been stuck on the back burner.

You see, there's a blessing and a curse to reading where everyone can see you reading. Vague acquaintances offer you things to read. I love to read a variety of things, and many people who are not me also have excellent taste in books, so I generally will at least try any book I'm offered. But I also check out three or four books per week from the library, so this fills up my schedule pretty easily. The problem is, some people who have offered me books recently have a vastly different taste in books than I do. Like the veteran who offered me a nonfiction book about tunnel fighters in Vietnam. Which sounds interesting, but not interesting enough for me to focus on it for any length of time. I read a chapter, just to make a valiant effort, but ultimately returned it without finishing. And then someone else offered me a mystery novel, and the only mysteries I truly enjoy are Sherlock Holmes, or supernatural mystery (usually shelved with fantasy/sci-fi or romance and not mystery, btw). It was okay, and I read the whole thing bc it was only about 300 pages, but I have no desire whatsoever to read the other books in the series.

Now I'm reading a probably-1000-page book, and I have no idea where it's going. It's intriguing nonetheless, but it's not fantasy, it's not sci-fi, it's not nonfiction. I think the fact that I can't classify it is part of the problem. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. It's sort of medieval, or possibly even pre-medieval. But without dragons. And lots of references to "eating knives" which makes me giggle every time. Even though I know that's what they called them.

So Saturday, I'm out feeding the cows grapefruit. (Yes, the cows on the ranch like grapefruit, though that is a different story.) And parts of the (rather extensive) lawn have not been mowed in ages. Like the part I was collecting the grapefruits from. And I wander into what must have been a huge fire ant nest because the grass is so tall I didn't see it. So my feet are now covered in probably two dozen ant bites. And I'm not sure what is worse about fire ant bites. The initial burning, stabbing pain of the bites, the fact that the bites swell up like really ripe pimples (sorry, it's really gross, I know), or the fact that once the bites break open, they itch forever. I am at the itching stage right now, and it feels like each individual bite has its own itch, and I just want to SCRATCH. SO BADLY. But that will just make them scar worse than they already will. (These are teeny, tiny bites, but they always seem to scar, at least on me. My feet already have a ton of little white circles on them.)

Title: "Epiphany Is Just Another Word for Deduction"
Author: skellywag
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes
Pairing: Holmes/Watson
Rating: R
Warnings: At least one spoiler of book canon, reference to a past character death, gay sex (though that should honestly go without saying)
A/N: Written for aviss as a part of hw09_exchange. Credit for the plot actually goes (at least partly) to Mike (who knows who he is, though none of you will), who brainstormed with me for two hours over the prompts—though his idea also included time travel and Spock (don't ask). Because I can't fully separate book and movie canon (and because my recipient didn't mind), I incorporated details from both, though the timeline is definitely movieverse. As far as can suppose, this fic probably takes place at least a year (and probably more) after the events of the film.


( Epiphany Is Just Another Word for Deduction )

Okay, so I'm behind all you folks who probably watched Avatar (the series, not the blue-cat-people) back when it was new. But honestly, I don't know how people who had to wait for episodes to come out SURVIVED THE SUSPENSE. I just finished the second book. And just. I don't even know, guys. I'm DYYYYYYYYING. And I think I have to wait until Wednesday for Netflix to save the day.

And guys? I want to marry Toph. I'm just saying, it's fucking amazing that they made a female character that I love better than EVERY OTHER CHARACTER IN THE DAMNED SERIES. Do you know how hard that is? alksdjf ;laksdjf lksdjf al;sdkjf sdlkjf And it's like Sokka is just there to feed her straight lines. I LOVE THEM SO HARD.

Had a nightmare last night, though it didn't go as far as to terrify me into waking up. (No, my stepdad woke me up before the dream could go that far, but that's another issue.)

Anyway, there were dinosaurs in my dream. Probably velociraptors, since they are the scariest. I don't know where I was or what I was doing or who I was with, but there was a group of us. And the velociraptors were going to kill everyone if...something couldn't be done. I'm not sure what our plan was, but it involved me and some other guy going out to...do something destructive, probably. This is all very vague, I know, but the strongest image I have is of me being in some sort of protective vehicle thing, and leaving without the guy I was supposed to go with, either because I would be safer without him, or because the rest of the group would be safer with him. (I'm leaning towards the more selfish option, though, because I am familiar with the way my subconscious operates, and it is a very self-interested self-conscious.)

At any rate, I'm in this vehicle, and I come across the bodies of people that the velociraptors have already killed. And I begin chopping up those bodies in hopes that I can feed the velociraptors and thus prevent them from killing me. Ignoring the logic of...if the velociraptors were actually hungry, they would have eaten the bodies already.

I think it was during the butchering of the corpses that my stepdad comes into my house at 1:30 am with a toaster that he apparently forgot to give me when I was visiting with my parents after work last night. He had apparently forgotten that I ate dinner at their house and was worried I hadn't come home. It's nice to have people concerned about me, and I'm pretty glad I didn't wake up screaming because I was being eaten by velociraptors, but I am 25 years old and really don't need an over-concerned parent waking me up in the middle of the night when I have to get up early for work the next morning.