Warhead On Legs

( Gaeilge )

That was not the early bedtime I was aiming for. Goddammit. And now I'm exhausted and I woke up wheezing again.

So, short Irish lesson today, though I did get a few more minutes done on Person of Interest. And a few exercises, and I'm starting out with poached egg eyes already, yum. At least this weekend was productive? I got things cleaned up quite a bit in the house, only to have things now full of weird stuff on every available surface because Aunt and Elf Lord brought things back from DC. Including some more of grandma's jewelry which I swear must have gotten mended at some point. I think. Also a bunch of old little knickknacks I loved, Grandpa's old Russian leader matryoshka dolls, which must have been duty free kitsch at the time but which I loved as a kid. And Grandpa's black fur Russian style hat. I absolutely adored that hat as a kid. The boy thinks Mom must have remembered me always wanting to wear it and play with it and put it in the box; maybe so. It's one of those things that's both poignant and delightful all at once. Helped, though, by the fact that this isn't disbursing things after a death, this is disbursing things after Grandpa decided screw material goods going off to live simply in a smaller apartment.

I also seem to have inherited grandma's linens, and great grandma's. Somehow I'd forgotten that along with all our eccentricities, that we're the type of family who has linens. I suppose I'd better get a suitable table for it now.

So, that happened. I'm not even going to try to start cleaning that stuff OFF all available surfaces till next weekend. Thursday I'll take pictures so people can see. Till then it's just surviving through another installment of Gods and Monsters and another blog entry that I completely forgot was mine to do this week, so ended up not doing it on the weekend like I should have. Oops.

I also did manage to go clothes shopping and escape with my self esteem intact. Amazingly. And four new pair of pants! At least two of which need to be hemmed, so I started that last night and depending on how soon I finish the blog entry, may finish that Wed or Thursday night. We shall see. I cleaned the house over the weekend, the boy mowed the back lawn, I didn't get weeding done but I didn't kill any plants and the second amaryllis is about to bloom, yay. I feel sure I did something else, but too tired to think of what that might be. Off to drag myself through work again, today, then. Woo.

ETA: Among the other things found in Grandpa's apartment are apparently land grants signed by Ulysses S Grant from the 1800s. My family, ladies and gentlemen.

( 日本語 )

( Gaeilge )

Something to remember that I learned on the way home last night. When my aunt and mother's family lived in Spain they had a family staying with them, sort of in that nebulous social status that's more intimate than a servant is here, I think? But still, there was someone who did the gardening and someone who helped out in the home, because I get the impression my grandmother was often alone with five children. And they, this family, had two children of their own, a boy and a girl, and when the girl was very young she was also very ill. And the family promised, because Spain is incredibly religious and mostly Catholic, that if she got better they would make a pilgrimage to Fatima. But the family didn't have the wherewithal to go. So one day when my grandfather was away in Angola, my grandmother packed both whole families (one mother, five children, one set of parents, two children) and some aunts apparently, into a Volkswagen minibus, and took off caravanning with some football/soccer team players (this part was kind of hazy) to Fatima to make the pilgrimage.

And this is the woman who helped raise me. My grandmother. Oh my grandmother.

Fucking brr, too. It was in the sixties two days ago, now we're lucky if we get above 45 during the day. It's not even really the cold that I mind, it's the rapid temperature changes that are no doubt going to sock my immune system right in the sweet spot. Also I need to lay in a store of hot cocoa and actually make myself convert to tea or something. And still brr. I have double layers of socks on, I'm probably going to have at least three layers on above. Ah well. Winter, and all that.

Getting back to Nano after focusing on OBB for a bit was, in fact, way easier than I expected. And not counting today's writing since today's barely begun, I'm not actually behind. Just barely not behind, but still not actually behind. And it's the weekend, so I have all weekend to bash that out, possibly bash out an entire draft of the mecha story for BigBang Mixup over the weekend. Given the minimum requirement is 10k, that is entirely doable over the weekend now that I have the basic structure. Go go vengeance porn! And then there's boy-witches if I ever figure out where the hell that one was going, and SPN fic, and I got a fair amount of mental floss shorts done yesterday! Which, I hope, did pretty nicely to kick me back into the writing groove. Today, Mecha stuff while I'm at work, and then more Black Ice when I get home. SPN fic wherever I end up cramming it in, probably at home so I can rewatch stuff, and then ... you know, since the original prompt only spanned the first season, I'm not sure where to take it once I've done that. Although suddenly I have this urge to write John Winchester (adult, JDM-shaped) fic again. I take this as a good sign since I have to edit JDM-shaped protagonist stuff in the new secular year. On the other hand, this also means I will be viewing everything with the dirty mind of a fourteen year old boy, sigh.

Right right. Ugh, don' wanna go to work. Don't want to go anywhere that involves setting foot outside in the fucking freezing weather. Ah well. Suck it up, buttercup. You have places to go, things to label, boxes to ship, and people to see.