hawkida

Mud, mud, mud, wedding, mud, cold, mud, cold, roleplay, fun, rain, tiredness.

In days to come I will have no idea what the hell this refers to, I fail at keeping a diary to remind myself, and plead exhaustion.

I'd like you to tell me what you understand a podcast to be, please. This is a result of a recent conversation leading to intrigue on my part. Comments will be screened in the short term to avoid bias in answers caused by reading other people's responses. I'll unscreen them and do an update with explanation at a later date.

I may find I need to rephrase this later for more honed responses, but I'm hoping not.

Dinner was tomatoes. Healthy, but possibly not quite making the definition of "meal".

Eastercon was... odd. I went to bed early both nights I was there and didn't stick around for the third one.

I had brief conversations, I trawled the dealers room and got an awesome hat, and I went to some programme items. Somehow, though, I just failed to really engage and feel like a part of it. Conversations dried up easily, the hotel irritated only slightly less than last time I was there, and I spent much of Sunday wondering why I'd given money to the London Worldcon bid.

Too many people I'd expected to see were missing, and everyone seemed so busy, so I spent a lot of time feeling a bit like I was looking in on something I didn't belong to. I don't think I'll bother next year. Which is a pity, I used to really like conventions.

I really hate photos of myself. I need to stop being such a blob.

I do try. I'm getting fitter. But, yeah, still fat. And my hair insists on parting itself annoyingly at the fringe.

*hate*

Well, I was going to go to Picocon tomorrow. However, having wondered why I wasn't catching the colds all around me were carying for the past month or so, I have finally succumbed. I may still go along, but I may just lie in bed for hours instead.

Recently I:

- bought a Fitbit (http://www.fitbit.com)
- went for a walk in the snow
- semi-trained baby rats to come to the side of the cage to be fed treats

You?

After Batty died we went hunting for companions for Willow as rats don't do so great as solitary creatures. It didn't take too long. A thirteen year old in Plumstead (less than five miles from here) had a couple of baby females still available having, so far as we can tell, bred her show rats without telling mum and dad. Introductions went extraordinarily well, and after some initial insistance from Willow that the hammock was for her use only, she relented and the new girls are settling in nicely. They are TINY, at seven weeks old, and very fast. Mouse is a dark brown, known as "mink", and looks very much like a mouse at the moment. Her sister is a rex, possibly, Hayley thinks, a double rex. I am clueless. Apparantly it's all about being bred for a wiry curly coat, but if you breed two together then they can end up with bald patches. The owners talked about how rexes moult, but Hayley says that isn't normally the case, but this little one has some very thin fur around her shoulders and rump. So she might go bald, it might grow back, or she might have varied bald spots throughout her life, we'll just wait and see. Hayley thinks she looks like a frog. Personally, as she scales the cage sides I see Gollum but Hayley says we can't call her that. At the moment she's Frog, or as the auto-correct decided, Froggle. Pictures under the cut.

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Why do people say "work colleague"? What other kinds of colleague are there? I never hear people refer to a [something else] colleague, but they do talk about "someone I'm running an event with" or "someone else on the committee" or similar. Why, then, do so many people tend to qualify the word "colleague" in what amounts to nothing but tautology?

I have just raked the leaves out of our garden. There are enough to fill about four wheelie bins, which is a pity because I filled the wheelie bin meant for garden waste with the weeds that I found under the leaves. I might have felt a little bit bad about raking leaves onto the street but for two things. First of all, they're not my leaves! They fell off the three great big trees outside my property and took refuge in my garden where they escaped being cleared away by the street cleaner type ride-on machine that blew all the others away. Also, I am paying for the street-cleaner device and its driver not only through my council tax, but through an additional "estate charge" which came as a bit of a surprise to me last weekend when the bill arrived, backdated to 2009 and demanding payment in 28 days.

That's all fun and games too. I have gone through all my mortgage paperwork and read around the issue. It turns out that I have to pay council tax which would usually cover this kind of thing, but in this case it doesn't because the council don't actually own the street here and the trees and any house owner who isn't the original owner has to cough up. When the previous owners ticked the box on the mortgage paperwork saying "we don't have to pay estate covenants" they weren't lying but neglected to say I would. I have told Gallions they won't be getting the money in 28 days, and could they work out what I actually owe them, since I only moved into the property in the September of 2009. They will then sort out a monthly billing strategy of some sort. Probably. So far, we've got as far as "I can't handle this by phone, could you put the request in writing?" followed by a letter dropping through the door asking me to set up passwords and so on so they can talk to me by phone and be sure it's actually me. Fun. Not.

Meanwhile, though, work has been going okay and they're willing to fund an MSc that I can do related to my work, run by Bournemouth and Bradford universities. Also of interest, I wrote some code for our part of the site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio) which is being looked at and may be repurposed for the homepage and for iPlayer (the javascript that makes the content scroll past when you click buttons on pages like http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/stations/radio1). Yay me, I'm ace!