As is probably obvious, I've not been around much for the last little while.

Part of the reason I've not been around much is evidenced by the fact that I just got paid £250 in overtime. Yeah, my work went bananas, but hey, they paid me moneys!

Which I promptly blew on a PS3 and a couple of games.

...so I probably won't be around for another little while.

And while voting I found that the BNP are standing in my area. Ugh.

Speaking of the BNP, it is rather awesome that this got caught on tape. BNP candidate being filmed telling a couple of Asian men "there's more of us than there are of you" and throwing the first hit in a punch-up? Fabulous. Please continue to expose your bigotry in a public and embarrassing manner.

(And it shouldn't need saying, but just in case: I did not vote for the BNP. I nearly voted for the Pirate Party, though...)

I have flu. Not just a cold, flu. Temperature, sweating, oh-god-someone-cut-my-head-off-my-sinuses-are-killing-me flu. And this is my fifth day of being ill despite being at home mainlining orange juice.

...This is my excuse for why I just bought the PS1 versions of FF7 and FF8 off Amazon.

(I also have the Dragon Age expansion pack, which will be released tomorrow, on preorder. And the next "Gentlemen Bastards" book by Scott Lynch on preorder, although that's not going to be released until May. Shh.)

I hate my metabolism. On average, when I'm sitting on my arse doing nothing, I last maybe two or three hours before I need to eat something.

I am one of those people who can eat anything and everything and not put on weight. I'm constantly told, "Oh, you're so lucky!" What the people saying that don't realise, however, is that I have to eat that amount to stop myself from feeling horribly unwell.

I have to have three large meals per day and I have to eat at least one snack in between each meal, or else I get joint aches, headaches, can't concentrate and end up sleeping twelve or fourteen hours a night because I'm so exhausted. Since glucose levels also affect the serotonin system, if I don't get enough to eat I can easily have a depressive episode and stop thinking rationally on top of all that.

The "not thinking rationally" part really does not help, because I have before ended up trapped in a cycle where I've concluded that I will feel better about myself if I lose weight, so I eat even less, so I get more depressed and more irrational and - the phrase "downward spiral" is rather apt.

The point of all this is that I have a date tomorrow, with a girl who is bubbly and weird and wholly herself and generally awesome, but who is also a model and a natural size six (UK size - US size two, I think) and doesn't understand my pain. I know from experience that she can function perfectly well for 72 hours on one meal - that one weekend I had to do the same, and I was so unwell as a result that it took me a full week to recover.

And. Um. I'm not sure there are any food places where we're going. Oops.

1. It's snowing outside.

2. I may have swine flu.

3. ( Now for the TMI. )

Dear Nose,

We've been together a long time. You may have a tendency to itch at the most embarrassing moments, and you may be unable to decide whether you want to be straight or snubbed, but generally speaking, you've done your job and I have no complaints.

Right now, however, you and my sinuses are ganging up on me to make my life hell. I am a snotty mess and my bin is overflowing with tissues. My head is pounding and my cheekbones feel like they're going to explode. Just remember, if they do, they're taking you with them.

I would quite like to be able to breathe again and maybe actually taste what I'm eating. I'd appreciate it if you'd cooperate.

Best wishes,

Your body.

My interview? Was seven minutes long. It started at five to two. I got back home at half past two.

I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF THAT'S GOOD OR BAD.

Not-edit: Okay, apparently it is, because I just got offered the job as I was writing this. Woohoo!

I HAVE AN INTERVIEW ON WEDNESDAY. AHHHH.

*huff*huff*huff*

I PASSED MY DRIVING TEST!

And I just babysat for two young boys and convinced them that they were no longer allowed to ride their bikes until they passed a second cycling proficiency test.

I did tell them the truth eventually. XD

I think my nipple piercing is growing out. Fuuuuuuck.

Edit: ...it's the end of an era. If it's started growing out, it's going to keep growing out, and that can only lead to bad things. So I have removed my nipple piercing and I will now let it heal, rather than fight fruitlessly to keep it.

:(

My mother is in the rather bad habit of volunteering me to babysit for two young boys on our road without asking me first if I'm free to do so. Most of the time I am, purely because the boys' parents ask far enough in advance that I don't have anything planned.

This time, however, they organised it with my mother and my mother then a) forgot to tell me and b) forgot when it was. So I went over to their house today and discovered that they wanted me to babysit today.

There went my evening.

As much as I detest children in general, I have to admit that these two boys are lovely. Really sweet, really polite. The younger one has clearly been well-trained by his parents - he hasn't quite worked out yet that I watch TV after sending them to bed, so when they go up to bed he switches off the TV and makes sure it's turned off at the wall as well. He did it again today - it's so cute I've not enlightened him yet. :D

I've been distracted somewhat recently by the Rurouni Kenshin manga, though - I took it with me today. I watched a lot of the fansubbed anime back, oooh, some six of seven years now, but never finished it - and I have a preference for manga over anime anyway. I picked up the Vizbig vol 1 of Rurouni Kenshin (vols 1-3 of the manga in the one volume) at the London Film and Comic Con last weekend out of sheer nostalgia, and then pretty much fell in love with the series all over again. Kenshin's "Oro?" is just as funny in print as it is in motion, thankfully - and the Vizbig edition has some sections in colour in every edition so far.

I'm now halfway through Vizbig vol 3 (so roughly halfway through vol 8 of the manga, I think?), just after Kenshin's left for Kyoto. I didn't get further than this in the anime, so it's new territory. Liking Kaoru much more this time round, too - although she does need to actually remember that she can use a katana when it's useful, though. Fingers crossed the Kyoto arc will fix that.

Edited to make this post public, because you know what, fuck that shit. This stuff should be available for the world to see.

One of the officers at work was assaulted by one of her offenders today.

Luckily, the assault wasn't serious - just a punch in the arm. Unfortunately, the response the officer got from the police was, in short, "It happens. What do you want us to do about it?"

Which is completely not the point. Yes, it happens, but no, it is NOT acceptable. In any job dealing with the public - or even with other members of staff - incidents like this have to be quickly and clearly dealt with to show that they are not acceptable, because otherwise people will feel they have a licence to treat you how they wish.

I've had a month of disappointments where the police (and the law in general) are concerned, it seems.

At the end of last week the magistrates at our local court basically colluded with an offender and the offender's solicitor. This offender has several convictions and arrests for domestic violence and regularly beats up his parents. His most recent arrest involved him beating his mother with a belt and destroying part of her house. He was in breach of his community order and Probation were basically saying we can't recommend any community penalty because he just doesn't comply. We also made it as clear as we could that a curfew was NOT appropriate, because it ties him to his parents' property and therefore puts them at risk.

But the magistrates didn't want to give him custody. They didn't want to give him custody, and they decided that their desire to not give him custody was more important than the safety of his victims.

So they gave him a curfew.

His mother told the Probation Officer that she's moving out. She is so scared of her own son that she will move out of her own home rather than stay there while he's on a tag. She can't even say "Get out of my house" to him, because she is too scared of what he will then do.

One of the guys who was in court put it best: "Today I watched a mother be abused by her son, a solicitor, and three magistrates."

Sometimes in this job I feel incredibly proud of our criminal justice system and have my faith in humanity restored.

Other times I just feel sick.

At some point, I will stop playing with my DW layout. Promise.

Moving on:

( LIFE: I am an ill thing. )
( GAME: Disgaea )
( GAME: Sims 3 )

Today is father's day. Therefore, I have prepared the most appropriate and loving gift a daughter can give to her father to show her appreciation for his (lack of) parenting.

Yup, he got a coconut.

( What? You want context? )

My life is a trainwreck. I called my local police to speak to them about reporting a crime, and I mentioned that oh, by the way, my uncle is a police officer in this area, not sure which department he's in, but I don't want to talk to him about it because he's a family member and it would make things awkward for him through the conflict of interest thing. They take my details and tell me someone will call me back.

So a couple of minutes ago I get a call from the vulnerable adults unit, who asked me to confirm if it was correct that I didn't want to speak to a male officer.

Well, technically...

EDIT: End of hiatus. WTF. See this post.


::waves:: Hiya. Just a notice that I'm about to disappear off the face of the intertubes for a while. Real Life is about to hit me like a particularly unpleasant train wreck, what joy!

Normally I get through bad RL stuff by clinging ever more firmly to the fandom stuff, so the reason I'm issuing this hiatus is purely because the upcoming RL situation is not one I have ever been in before, so I've no way of knowing exactly how I'll react or whether I'll be fit for human company (either on the intertubes or in RL).

With luck, any fallout will be isolated and dealt with quickly and I'll be back posting inanities before you can blink. Buuuuuuuut I also might not, so, hiatus post!

If you want to get hold of me while I'm not about here, you can always email me at anria [AT] solelyfictional [DOT] org. More sensibly formatted, of course. :)

Okay, so I'm beginning to believe that my lack-of-being-able-to-write lately has been less to do with writer's block and more to do with having the attention span of a gnat.

This afternoon I have gone from writing more on the Penelo's Navel fic (which, since it is unfinished, I have ported over to DW) to scribbling down ideas for a rather depressing coming-of-age original story to being determined to get something written for young adults published to deciding what I really want to do is read some book reviews, and possibly write them. And then I remembered about my LibraryThing page, which I haven't touched since 2007/8.

I don't know either.

Earlier this week I had a discussion with people about deja vu, and I mentioned that I sometimes get pre-deja vu, where I know that I am going to get deja vu in the future about something that's just happened.

It's not jamais vu, which is when you feel like it's the first time something has happened despite knowing it's happened before, because I only ever get this when I know that it's not happened before, but that it will happen again.

I thought this was fairly common, but the people I was talking to at work had no idea what I was on about - does anyone else get this, or is it just another weird quirk of my brain?