meridian_rose

So it's been about six weeks since I last posted and I am once again trying to catch up.
I finish and post a fic to AO3 last month so yay me I guess! And then IDK, falling behind.
Holiday in Bude would have been nicer with better weather. Again, along with previous holidays, maybe I should make a photo collage and write more. We got back late Saturday and did dawn vigil Easter Sunday service!

This got a bit longer than anticipated so, cut tags (I hope they work okay, advanced formatting isn't something I do much of these days!):

( Books and TV )
( Dreamwidth Communities )
( Pinterest WTF )
Lots of feelings in general, I guess.

My one shared photo this month is two; one my nephew took on my phone using a filter I didn't know I had. I'm a bull in this photo! We're at the Crooklets Beach Café in Bude. I'm informed that an episode of the TV series "Alex Rider" filmed part of an episode here. The second photo is a shot of the interior.

I'm sorry I haven't been around and missed posts and birthdays and so on.

There are various reasons for this, including I'm embroiled in something at work which I can't talk about in detail but yeah. sigh.

I am working on Yuletide fics. I do want to do as many of the final Lands of Magic challenges as possible. Photos and crafts can wait to be shared. I'm working on some crafts for the nephews.

It's dark and wet and cold and usually I'm not wanting to put up Christmas decorations until December but I can't wait to bring some more light and joy into the home this year.

I won't turn off comments but I'm so behind on reading/responding to any that I cannot promise to respond.

I don't really enjoy going into Birmingham city centre these days but we wanted to do the Bear Hunt. This previously ran as a larger event -in 2017 - The Big Sleuth ; I think I must have been mostly on Tumblr at the time because I remember I posted a pic there of a Shakespeare themed bear but no photos here that I can find.

There was also The Big Hoot owl themed trail in 2015, with a penguin parade in 2022.

Below are some collages. The first has photos of the bears. The second is other artwork I photographed during the day out. The third focuses on Ozzy the Bull because he was my favourite thing about the day.

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An update in which I feel I'm constantly repeating myself


Internet is still not fixed. We did get another engineer out who said the previous dickheads who refused to lift the slabs had marked the job as complete, which is why no follow up until we complained again. He was very apologetic and sent a note to his manager and gave his contact details in case we don't hear back so he can push it.

Whereforeart thou summer? It's sometimes temperate but frequently chilly, lots of rain, grey days. It rained yesterday (my dad's 72nd birthday which also happens to be St Swithin's Day) so legend says it'll rain for the next 40 days and the rain from last night continued well into this morning.

It's a busy last week of term so lots of end of year school admin to do. Eldest nephew's leavers assembly was today, an emotional time.

I've tried to catch up on my reading here at DW but still have a few tabs open and a whole inbox to sort at some point.

I'm behind on GYWO, not loads but a bit and that sucks too but I'm struggling to write at the moment. Maybe I'll get back to it soon. I have a load of challenges including graphics to do for lands-of-magic.
I am absolutely not signing up for anything else right now!

So one new wifi hub and pc dongle and another week of intermittent connection/outages, Virgin Media admitted there was still a problem and sent out another engineer. He traced the issue to bad connection between main line and where it enters the property.
So we're waiting 2 weeks for new cabling to be installed!

It's not all bad...when the weather is nice, there's gardening to do and reading outside. And I do need a decent balance of online/offline activity.

It has been frustrating in terms of work however, and my Dreamwidth reading has fallen by the wayside. I've been working on anything with a deadline (completed some landsofmagic challenges, posted for unconventional courtship and today posted intoabar) with everything else having to wait.

Not sure if I'm 'missing' the sunshine challenge but as for the snowflake challenge I think the prompts stay open for whenever you want them :)

Now if we could have a few more dry days it would be nice and the temperature to remain around the 17-18C we've been having that would be nice!

It has been a Weekend.

1) I've had and am still having internet issues which is frustrating. Wifi is on, then slow, and then off. Certain sites are slow to load, others won't function. There have been issues with ISP in the area but they're supposed to be fixed now. Might be router or our wifi extender. /sigh/

This means I'm struggling to keep with anything. I did manage to post the mega music mix with songs relating to colours which was good because I'd put a lot of work in and needed to make the deadline! I also discovered some new songs while making it which was good.

2) Youngest nephew came down what looks like norovirus on Friday evening. All the weekend plans went out of the window, including needing his and sis's baptism to be postponed. He's still being ill so they've called 111 and were told to get in touch with GP. Fingers crossed.

3) I did go to church and it was Pentecost and I still wore my red dress for the annual congratation pic. One of the young girls, 11ish, saved the day when Reverend Mandy's husband couldn't get his phone camera to work and the girl discovered he was using 'time lapse' and not 'timer'!

4) We've had good weather finally, though with some cloud cover and strong cooler winds so I've been able to read outside a little in lieu of doomscrolling as I'm wifi lacking, but not as much as I'd have liked.

5) Talking with melagan, re the question she answered about "what have you got in your pockets"? /obligatory gollum reference/

Having had kids she's learned that one approaches with extreme care, what's in those little pockets before going into the laundry. Hopefully, it's nothing that moves.

My response: "My brother in law is just as much a culprit for putting things in wash without emptying pockets. Loose change more than once and one time a screw from doing DIY.
Speaking of things that move: amazingly one time sis had washed a throw so a quick, half-load job. I opened the washing machine to help her put the throw on the line and there was a butterfly, still alive clinging to the door. We put it outside on a plant and it flew away. It must have been above the water level, an incredibly lucky escape."

6) I'm still editing the unconventional courtship fic. I don't need wifi for that. I'm on the text-to-speech part, with Balabolka reading to me I'm more likely to catch mistakes and clumsy sentence construction that I'd skim over when reading it for myself.

7) A cute OFMD merman love drawing "Don't Die" by mific at drawesome or directly at AO3

Five things make a post, I've seen others say. And while I have photos to share at a later time, I'll make a quick personal post here and now.

1. Still working on my unconventional courtship fic. The first draft is technically finished but there's a fair amount of detail I need to add during the first edit. Fandom is Ghost Whisperer

2. Found a bargain second hand red dress for next month; my church encourages everyone to wear red for Pentecost and takes a group photo. Plus my sister and younger nephew are getting baptised so it's a big day and I wanted something special to wear.
I'll try and get a photo when I wear it as it doesn't look so great just on a hangar. Also, I just googled the brand (Phase Eight) and I would never be able to afford a new one of these, prices being in the three figure bracket. The two most similar currently on their website are £150.
It was reduced to £6 at the charity store and then on the sale rail for the grand total of £2.

Last year I got a bargain for my baptism dress at a different charity store, a dark blue FCUK dress which again, retails for £100-200 and which I got for £15. Both of these I put on and they felt 'right', comfortable, which doesn't always happen with dresses especially as I'm petite so shorter in the body than some dresses are designed for. When you have that comfort and they look good, it gives a little confidence boost.

3. Also, please forgive another mention of church but our minister, Reverend Mandy finally got installed at 2 local churches, so made official vicar for them after a long period of being in the post on an interim measure. The evening service was lovely, overseen by our new Birmingham Bishop Michael, and attended by the Solihull mayor (the ceremonial mayor not the West Midlands mayor).
Mandy asked me to a reading and I didn't realise I was the only one doing a reading. (Mandy wisely didn't tell me, knowing I'd probably not have done it!) I got to wear the aforementioned blue dress again too.
She sent me the passage (Colossians 3:12-17) and I read it a few times and aloud once before the service, and I focussed on the words in front of me not the congregation in front nor the amassed clergy behind me at the lectern.
Afterwards people gave me a lot of praise which was nice, because I'm not a public speaker and again, this wasn't something I ever saw myself doing!

4. Nephews were both part of the scout parade for St George's Day in Dorridge. Big turn out from many local scout groups and people coming out to enjoy the band and the parade. Will try and add photos later. We were blessed with sunny weather - next day, Monday, was rain almost the entire day!

5. I'm trying to catch up on DW posts and my inbox (55 notifications!)

There was one DW notification in the posts and comments section I've never seen before, "you are not authorized to view this comment"
My inner critic prone to paranoia said maybe it was something someone had commented and then blocked me from a journal/community. It's probably more likely that it's a comment at something like the Snowflake Mods where I had temporary access prior to this year's challenge to post the pre-post and poll, but access was revoked during end of challenge housekeeping.

Still, weird.

I'm both relieved and not that it's February.
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Challenge #4 IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.
To begin, I'm going to borrow tellshannon815's idea of posting the image made for a lands_of_magic challenge on the same theme:


Me with my nephews, pub lunch (that particular one is fish with red wine :D), and lots of photos of animals some past and current pets and animals I like. A pile of books because I used to read a lot and still dabble in books, ebooks, and read fanfic, and a sunflower because it is one of my fave flowers.
That challenge was to describe yourself in on-fannish terms but I'll add to that here. I'm multifannish and mostly involved in TV fandoms but sometimes I surprise myself by getting into a movie fandom and when that happens it hits pretty hard. I read, write, make icons and sometimes famixes and less often currently fanvids. Writer is a key part of who I feel I am.

( more personal stuff under the cut )

We visited Gloucester for the first time. The historic docks (and waterways museum), some of the retail outlet centre, and the cathedral. There wasn't time to visit everything and I needed much longer at the cathedral (and more money and time to do some of the tours); we didn't get near the main museum, barely touched the main shopping area, and didn't go on a boat trip or go into the Soldiers Museum.
The cathedral has a long history as a place of worship, has the tomb of King Edward II, and featured in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
I'd love to visit the city again. It was a pleasant visit, overall clean and welcoming, with some great sights to see including some public art such as The Candle image, info. We parked near the docks and it was a very short walk to the Waterways Museum, and only 10 minutes to the city centre, 15 or so to the cathedral.

I took a lot of photos and here's just a few made into a collage.
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