Fear Death by Fanfic: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Poet

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ladysisyphus/294368.html -- T.S. Eliot meets Half-Blood Prince, with disturbing results. (Warning: not only head-breaky, but browser-breaky due to some mad bad HTML.)

http://www.petridish.net/albumview.asp?a=22183 -- "Fear Death by Fanfic" album of base photos, combining the line from above fic with the Evil Umbridge Quill concept, suitable for cutting down, shrinking, and making icons from.

Weather

For all I complain about the heat, I love the weather here. The sun is fearful and dreadful and I love it. I hide from it, I go about by night to avoid being out in the day, but I love the sun. I love the desert wind.

I love the desert sky and the way it makes me work for the sunrise, work for the sunset. In Alaska, the sunsets lie there waiting for the observer to take notice; they're an art of subtle change that take hours to develop into a final form. Here, the sunrise is brief enough to require effort to look the right way at the right time lest the morning's first cloud-pyrotechnics be missed.

The sun shines impossibly high at noon. The winds are fearsome things that rip limbs from trees and scour out the sky with ceaseless dust. Lightning ripples in spiderweb patterns across the belly of the sky, gravid with rain that may take another nine months to fall.

A day

She has never been out of the country, broken a bone, or smoked a cigarette; she plans to someday visit Japan. This is [azurelunatic]. (introductory notecard from Speech class some years ago)

I'm hoping that my currently unhappy sleep schedule normalizes some. I think I have it on the brink of behaving, but I'm never quite sure until I actually find myself in bed waking up the next morning.

Cleaning is a waltz, and I'm never sure whether I'm taking steps forward or backward, and which side I'm going. Worse, I'm the one leading, and I don't have a partner. Granted, the last time I waltzed where both of us knew what we were doing, I nearly got danced off the stage (thanks, Fuzzy) ... maybe leading without a partner is not so bad? But I do love waltzing. (Did you know that Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" is a waltz?)

The kitchen is its usual state of disaster area. I'm trying to get my coffee in shape to share with my co-workers. I almost never drink coffee at home, but I will drink coffee at work. This means that I have coffee I'll probably never touch unless I take it to work. Some of it is regular-ground, some of it is espresso-ground, and some of it is Turkish-ground. I decided to actually prepare some of the Turkish-ground. The proper method involves the stovetop, as I looked the recipe up. I was delighted by the scent, and I dropped some chocolate chips in, just on impulse, and the results are decent enough, if not exactly traditional.

If you're a barista, and your customer is supposed to be on decaf, but you give them wildly strong thoroughly caffeinated Turkish coffee ... would that be grounds for dismissal?

It's the ten-year anniversary of my last year at CTY, and the angsty CTY-deprivation posts on cty_therapy and similar communities are inspiring me -- I've been over the angst for a while, since LJ is my new CTY (sort of ... no few of the CTY folks are here) and I have enough mobility and free time to meet up with people should things really get lonely -- but the posts about canon music are making me want to compile my own personal canon playlists. So I've been working at that, which means listening to a lot of music and trying to weed out the ones that don't go on the canon list so I can narrow things down better. There are some songs that aren't official canon, but are personal canon. There are some songs that I never heard while I was there, but fit so well after the fact that they need to be included. And it doesn't do any good just as audio. There are the explanations of why each song fits, there should be photos ... all of these things I need to hunt down to do proper homage to that very pivotal point in my life. Better to celebrate it than to mourn it.

( Gratuitous Lyrics: ''Won't Give In'' )

I'm also trying to work on a caffeine icon for myself. I've been working on scraps of "A Cup of Time" here and there between the cracks. I've been working on Crossover a bit. I've been getting stuff typed up for my magicgeeking document. (That's something that dreadfully needs editing and putting together into coherent order as well as more content and focus. Geeze.) There's stuff that wants hole-punching. The Little Fayoumis still has an afghan that isn't even half-made. (I need to poke Sis for a good mailing address.) I have some fabric, some elastic, a sewing machine, thread, and scissors. I have grand ideas involving skirts, but somehow none of them have shown up on my actual "I'm doing this right now" schedule. I need to fix that.

Meanwhile, things like dishes and sorting papers and getting shoes put away are getting done. Tomorrow will be insane, but I can live with that...