Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

Wood type: olive Length: 11 inches Core: Dragon Heartstring get your own wand!

I find the dragon heartstring very ironic... :: Looks in the general direction of a dragonish fellow she knows...::

In between work, trying to type up a story, and run missions on EvE, I was tempted to cancel the EvE missioning and do some mining instead, since that would give me a chance to read while I mine and my drones keep the space pirates off me, but I got to work on raising my faction rep points... Ahhh, the troubles of a geek. :: laughs::

I *did* manage to get up to chapter Six: ( Obligatory cut for spoilers )

Work has been keeping me busy, and I've been writing more lately. I'm taking up more of the 31_days challenges that I have horribly neglected, and I've been tinkering with some too-long neglected fics in progress. I recently posted the last chapter of "Along a Knife's Blade", the "A.I."/"Blade Runner" crossover I'd started a long time ago -- and oddly enough, I posted that chapter almost two years to the day since I posted the first chapter.

I'm also getting back to work on the infamous "This Shouldn't Be Happening...": I still wish someone would take up the challenge of drawing a few tastefully and sensitively rendered illustrations for it. To the chagrin of a certain headspace dweller, who's been having terrible knee-jerk reactions ever since I resumed work on it. Every time I spot a pregnant lady at work (and for some reason, there's been a bumper crop of them; wonder if it's people really wanting kids, or they're just copy-catting all the Hollywood actresses who suddenly decided to have kids...), I can sense *someone* in there getting nervous.

And I'm looking at my notes for the equally infamous "A.I."/Harry Potter crossover-fic. It's all I can do to keep from including a pair of characters loosely based on a couple of MxO player characters, including Sieges's future alter-ego, and her good friend/crush/faction commander/object of terror "Baron Samedi" (not his real name, IC or OOC.). They appear to be either some sort of Mecha-enhanced humans or human/Mecha chimaerae, can't figure out which. Looks like these two would be some sort of assassins, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they'd fit in, though it seems to have something to do with the insidious Dr. Lambert Merove's "Project Quinotaur". I'll figure it out.

*pant, pant, pant, pant...*

I already took one bath today, and I feel like I need another already.

I had some unexpected banking business to take care of -- transferring money to the checking/debit account, otherwise I might have lost my 'Net access for want of a payment; I haven't been able to put anything into that account recently -- so I nicked out this morning to take care of that. Plus, I managed to get my "Constantine" DVD; I haven't watched it yet: I had to work this afternoon, and I've gotten pretty wrapped up reading HP 6:

( Chapter of HP 6 I'm on: Just started Chapter Twenty. Some spoilers... )

Extremely quiet at work: You'd think that everyone would be coming in to do their shopping and enjoy the nice refrigerationair-conditioning. Nope, hardly anyone in the store. I mostly put away overstock and straightened out aisles.

( You know the Houseparty is feeling the heat when... )

I'm off to bed in a few minutes, since I have that infamous, *early* dental appointment at nine tomorrow morning (I usually don't get up till ten in the morning, not because I'm lazy: I'm a night owl by nature), so I'll give a run-down of what happened Sunday:

( Chapter of HP 6 I'm up to: Chapter Seven (Spolier-ish behind the Cut) )

Number of times I tried to get through The Pharoah's Tomb: Three

Number of pages I wrote in "L'Homme Fatal": Two

Number of anNOYing chatty old ladies I wanted to whack with my prayerbook because they kept talking during Mass at St. Francis's: Five

( Number of headaches the Housparty caused me: Two )

^That's how long we have till Harry Potter 6 comes out in my neck of the woods. No, I didn't reserve a copy: I'm waiting till it comes out in paperback, the way I did with Harry Potter 5; though I *MIGHT* try getting it from one of the libraries (Ha. Ha. Ha.). When 5 came out, I remember asking the librarian about reserving a copy, and she told me that wouldn't be possible, since there was a waiting list with three hundred people on it already.

Now, mind you, I enjoyed reading the series, and I think it is one of the best written things in print today, but there's a reason I'm not as wild about Harry as the majority of HP fans. No, it has nothing to do with the fact that Daniel "Wooden!Harry" Radcliffe in the movies looks like a younger male version of me. Make yourself some tea: this is gonna take a little while...

Back when I broke up with my then-fiance -- six years ago on this August 3rd (Strange... same day as Lambert Wilson's birthday, but I digress to keep the bad memories/flashback at bay...) -- I went through a really bad spell of depression: I couldn't sleep, and I could hardly eat (I lost almost fifteen pounds, and I'm certainly not heavy-set), which really worried my mother. About the same time, she read some really negative anti-HP article, which somehow made the books sound dark, miserable, and depressing, merely because they have some dark elements in them, when in fact, they're very funny. (Another popular series, namely Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events", *did* get me so depressed I had to stop reading it, but that's another story and it happened more recently...) For some inexplicable reason, she got it into her head that I was horribly depressed because I'd been reading Harry Potter books. I know what you're thinking: "Buh?!" I had the same reaction when my mother came to me and told me not to read any more HP books, when I hadn't even touched one! I think I even said something like, "I haven't even cracked the cover of one of them, mother; I'm this upset because I just broke up with the man I thought I was going to marry!"

Unfortunately, for this reason, some wierd process of association in my head has caused me to be a little less than enthusiastic with HP.

While we're on the subject of the nay-sayers, I've run across some evidence -- albeit unconfirmed at this point -- which puts a whole new slant on the reason why Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, is/was more than a bit leery of HP. I've heard that at one point, not too long after he was ordained a priest, the then Father Joseph Ratzinger was an exorcist. Now that would be enough to make someone leery of a series of fantasy novels that deal with witchcraft, albeit a highly fictionalized form of witchcraft, since one of the easiest ways for a person to accidently become possessed by demons is to mess around with black magic. Who's to say that some curious kid who reads HP might not get curious about real magic and look into it; my hope, in that case, is that they'd be disappointed to find out that modern witchcraft isn't going to give them the ability to make a pig's tail grow out of the backside of one of their annoying, piggish relatives, nor are they going to learn how to play Quidditch, and thus they'd walk away from it. I'm concerned that some kid *might* start messing with stuff that they reeeally shouldn't play with, since we're dealing with things that are more dangerous than live grenades.

I think the real problem is that some people seem to plunk their kids down in front of books the way a lot of parents plunk the kid down in front of the TV and let them watch any old thing. I think it's okay for kids to read HP, as long as their parents are either reading it with them, or are at least very aware of what they're reading and that either way they're open to talking about the books with their kids. I grew up reading stuff out loud with my mom, and if there was anything in whatever we were reading that seemed a little off, we'd talk about it.

Three more hours...

be sorted @ nimbo.net

Congratulations on making Ravenclaw!

Well you're one smart little cookie, aren't you? You're wise and clever, and just love to use your wit and learning to your advantage, and sometimes even the disadvantage of others. Well, nerd, there IS a world outside of that copy of 'Hogwarts: A History', you know.. Oh don't worry! We all know you're special. You're just a naturally good learner, right? Not too much is known about your house right now.. Wow! Not only are you intellegent, you're also an enigma!


Ravenclaws to Remember

Cho Chang

I think I did this a while back, in the days of my diaryland diary, but it doesn't hurt to repeat it!