Life's rich tapestry. [Welcome to my perfumed garden]

Bad news the fyrste: I've done something painful to my leg - about 20 minutes into my run last night, something went ping in the back of my calf and now I'm hobbling like Douglas Bader on a pair of peculiarly dodgy Ludlows* - which means I can't exercise; just when I was starting to get back into shape and feeling quite fit and chipper again I'm liberally slathered in Power Gel, wrapped in an Ace bandage and hoping for the best. ::sigh::

*See The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

Good news #1: I has new Palm! Yay! My old one packed in and I seem to have been waiting for-bloody-evah for the new one to arrive, but arrive it has and now I can has fic again. Yes! And so much new fic out there in all my shiny, happy, perfect fandoms.*

*Anyone looking for excellence in Doc-Master fic could do worse than a mosey over to

best_enemies where they're running an anonymous porn meme that is producing some rather lovely stuff so far...

Bad news the seconde: I'm still struggling to write (insert sad face). I finished my crappy short story - I had two days to bang it out before the deadline, which I did and posted it off, even though I know it's terrible - but since then, I've been doing a lot of staring at a blankly mocking screen. ::sigh:: I'm sure it's just a matter of poor self-discipline and not enough tea but it's a worry...

Good News #2: Morrisons have started selling Rose Pouchong tea! I no longer have to buy it online at great expense. This is excellent news.

Bad news the thyrde: I'm not going to GMOH. It hurts (oh how it hurts) but it's the only sensible decision in the circumstances.

Good News #3: At 3.22am last night, I finished reading the EDA* 'The Ancestor Cell' - a book I like, but am somewhat ambivalent about re: certain monkeying with the Faction Paradox (and I'll never forgive any of them for what they did to Fitz) - but a rollocking read nonetheless (and a far, far better Time War than anything Rusty's come up with so far). It's not only the end of the Time-War arc, but the last (for a while) of the books I've already read. I'm starting on mostly new-to-me EDAs. I've read the odd one here and there but most are new and shiny So I has new books squee! (Geez, I live a quiet life these days).

*Eighth Doctor Adventure.

Such is my life on this, the seventeenth day of April in the year of Our Lord, two thousand and eight. How about you, my lovelies? How's it going in your corner of this lovely planet?

May

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18 1
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

Ouchies!! If your leg doesn't improve within a day or so, hobble over to the doc, babe. Get his/her recommendations for how to deal with it. My mother-in-law did something similar, but didn't go to the doc right away & wound up with a very long recovery period.

LOL I had to do a double take when I was "Time War" up thee. Try to find the Time Wars series by Simon Hawke sometime. They're super-hard to find because they're out of print & people don't seem to be willing to re-sell them, but they're wunnerful!

I hope there are no typos in this. I've got the font as large as it will go in IE & it still looks to be abour 7 point, in lightlavender...

[link] [reply]

IE is the work of Lucifer, honey. I won't touch it with the veritable barge pole.

Try to find the Time Wars series by Simon Hawke
I take it this something different to the various Doctor Who time wars?

[link] [parent] [reply]

Unfortunately when I order things online, they won't let me use either Firefox or Opera, so I have to use IE. Yes, it does suck.

And yes, Simon Hawke's Time Wars are probably very different from the Doctor Who brand. *g* The premise is essentially that in the future, once time travel is developed, wars will be fought in the past rather than the present, thus eliminating property damage & civilian deaths. In the first book, The Ivanhoe Gambit", a referee who is supposed to be making sure both sides follow the rules, goes renegade & decides to change the future by taking Richard I's place & making sure that he doesn't go anywhere *near* Agincourt, and is thus never killed there, meaning no King John, no Magna Carta... It's a fun series, and the difficulty in finding used copies suggests that other people are as unwilling to part with theirs as I am with mine. ;-)

Maybe I can order one from the library.

Sounds like you'd enjoy the DW Time War too. The Time Lords have always been insistent on non-interference in alien affairs because of the dangers of paradox. They are eventually attacked by a renegade cult of their own people who use paradox as a weapon - this leads to the Last Great Time War in which time-travelling species war against each other across time.

If you ever saw the Tom Baker Doctor's episode Genesis of the Daleks (in which he's sent back in time to destroy the species at it's genesis) - this is now considered to be a part of the Time War that's become such a major feature of the latter Doctor stories.

It's quite heavy and angsty in Who and all the Timey-Wimey stuff makes it deliciously challenging.

I had the nasty tiny-pink-font thing too, but I just hit the "More Options" button and it turned into dark-not-too-tiny font instead. Worth a go...?

Ouch, That's a bummer and a half, about your leg. Yay on your new palm. I've been busy podficcing while my husband is out of town, but he's coming back this weekend, so I'll be shifting back to writing again, as I've hardly done anything new for several weeks. (Still got loads of Ball and Chain, the next part in A Fair Distance to shovel over to T. for beta'ing).

We had cold,crappy weather but it's turning nice again, which means I need to see if the lawnmower will work and plant the rest of the spring garden.

Take Care and enjoy your tea,
Laurie

I will, thank you. I'm happily addicted to Rose Pouchong and it's brilliant to find it in a bog-standard supermarket at last. Their cheese bread is wonderful too. Go Morrisons. *g*

The weather's beautiful here but still chilly and such a late spring! At least it's stopped snowing. (o:

And more AFD/B&C - They can probably hear me squee in Manchester. *g*

Man...I need a copy of 'The Ancestor Cell'. Bad.

There're several on ebay right now - one's only 50p.

Well, I suspect shipping to the US would put it in the range of EDAs I can pick up locally. Anyway, I've been trying to hold off for the time being due to a combination of lack of pocket money and an extremely large backlog of unread Virgin New Adventures that can potentially keep me occupied.

I'd got it in my thick head you were in the UK for some reason, sorry.

It's good; the plot rolls along at a terrific pace and I love the intellectual exercise of trying to fit this Time-War canon into RTDs (imo inferior) Dalek-war canon - I LOVE the Doctor in this book - he's slippery as an eel in TAC. But...

Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole have monkeyed mightily with the Faction as they were in earlier books, and as for Fitz... ::sniff::

It's good, but not that good. I'm looking forward to a fresh arc now and The Burning.

And NAs huh? Gods, it's years since I read a Virgin NA. Which one are you on at the moment?

Nope! I live in the suburbs of Washington DC, which makes me pretty thorougly American. ;-)

Huh. Well, 'The Ancestor Cell' is definitely at the top of my EDA 'wish list' along with 'The Taint' and both 'Interference' books. 'The Burning' is not bad. It's not my favorite of the amnesia arc, but by no means at the bottom of the heap for EDAs either.

I'm not actually reading NAs at the moment. I'm working on a fic set during the amnesia arc so I just re-read 'The Turing Test' and part of 'Endgame' and am finishing off 'Escape Velocity' as part of it. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of 'Father Time' because I think it would help. :(

Actually, I'm just about to post to

henriettastreet with a request for continuity help.

The Taint's your average DW romp - a not-bad, plot-led story with the added advantage of Fitz. (o: Interference is a great book, though I loved part 1 a lot more than part 2, when it all gets a wee bit too clever for its own good. Frequently arsey but definitely one of my favourites and I do rec it. You'd need to read Interference before TAC I think, to really get the most out of TAC.

I've read The Turing Test and Father Time in the dim and distant but I don't remember much about either, which is good, I guess, since I'm just about to embark on the amnesia arc. I've put in a bid for Wolfsbane on ebay - have you read that? Or Fear Itself? I'm wondering how 8 works in the framework of a past Doc book?

Very much looking forward to reading your fic.

Hrm. I seem to recall that Wolfsbane triggered my 'I don't mind fantasy or myth but would prefer you keep it out of my science fiction, thankyouverymuch' tweak. Not to mention the fact that I'm not a huge fan of Jacqueline Rayner's writing.

Fear Itself is one I enjoyed quite a bit, though. It's an odd book and kind of dark so it's not everybody's cup of tea. The Doctor spends a lot of time not being very Doctor-ish and Anji's storyline is good, but doesn't quite make sense emotionally given where she is in her 'character arc'. (Too close both in time and emotion to Dave's death for some of it to ring true.) I sound like I'm being picky, but I really did think it was a good read.

Can you recommend any Eighth Doctor adventures? Do they need to be read in order? And are they suitable for reading a few pages at a time in bed (the only non-academic reading I do apart from newspapers and t'Internet)?

Oh yeah, lots - sorry, this is going to be a long post...

There are 73 Eight Doc books . You can start from book 2 , the excellent Vampire Science (avoid book 1, The Eight Doctors, at all costs; it's written for ten year olds and adds nothing to Eight's history, imo) but they tend to divide into arcs so you can choose an arc and go with that.

The earliest books, with a few notable exceptions, are on the lighter side - and they have a teenage girl, Sam, for the companion who I'm not overly fond of (this is not an unusual pov *g*).

- Book 19 'The Taint' introduces Fitz, who I think is the best companion ever (again, not a controversial pov) . That's a good place to start.

- Book 25, Interference, is a great place to begin if you like a heavier, meatier, more tragic kind of story. This arc has Faction Paradox and ends with the time war in book 36, The Ancestor Cell.

Then there's a short arc where the doc spends a century alone on Earth, with no memory of who he is or why he's there, recovering from the war (37, The Burning up to 41, Father Time).

In 42, Escape Velocity, he's reunited with Fitz, and gets a new companion, a futures trader, Anji Kapoor.

In book 51, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, a new arc begins with a new villain, the paradoxical (snerk) Sabbath (tho tAoHS is probably not a great place to start as the book has a strange style; written like a history text, with no pov. I find it heavy going).

OTOH, you could just pick up any of them and start reading - some of them might seem hard going if you're not party to the arcs though. I wouldn't rec starting with The Ancestor Cell, for example, or Henrietta Street, or The Burning. Personally, I love Fitz'. I really like Iris Wildthyme, too (another Time Lord; a large, elderly lady in layers of cardis and a TARDIS in the form of a bus (the #22 to Putney Common) - she first appears in book #15, The Scarlet Empress and reappears regenerated (and very different) in my favourite EDA of all (so far, I haven't read them all, nothing like) #27 The Blue Angel.

There's an excellent Wiki page on the EDAs. The Eighth Doc Wiki pages are all really good, probably a good deal more coherent and helpful that me, tbh.

Wow - that's great! Thank you so much. ::goes to check local libraries::

... I sympathise about GMOH. I probably wouldn't have gone anyway because I'm more interested in hanging out with fen than meeting GM, and the cost is a bit high for that, really. But now I have to fund my Masters myself, it's definitely out the winder...

::sighs and tries to remember what life was like with disposable income. ANY disposable income. Any INCOME, come to think of it::

GM is a joy, really, I just adored him and was looking forward to going again - it's a heck of a lot of £££ but I would have bitten it and paid up, till I found out most of me mates weren't going, and it changed from the wonderful laugh-a-minute of 2006 to just a really expensive con.

I loved every minute of the last one, but I don't think you can recapture magic and I just didn't want to try when hardly any of my friends weren't going to be there.

But now I have to fund my Masters myself...
Been there, done that; know how that feels. *g*

He sounded like a great guy, from what I've been told about the last one.

I know what you mean about things changing. It's impossible to recreate something like that, I think - cons are one thing, but an actor-focused gathering (for want of a better word) isn't something that can be as good again. IMO, obviously.

Been there, done that
So many people have - it's quite reassuring. Though I think most people did it at a sensible age, and weren't planning to start repaying their vast student debt at 40... !!

Meep! No...

That's all long, long ago for me (tho the MA + the never-finished PhD left me deeply in debt for years so I do know how it feels - not that that helps at all. I'm rambling, aren't I?)

the MA + the never-finished PhD left me deeply in debt for years so I do know how it feels - not that that helps at all. I'm rambling, aren't I?)

Not rambling. Not helping either... *g* The PhD won't be happening unless I get funding. In which case I have no idea what I'm going to end up doing. Apart from repaying debt, of course...

Ouch! Sounds very, very, painful. If it doesn't improve in a day or so, do go to the doctor and see what can be done to help. (If it's THE DOCTOR, things may very well improve, you never know.)

Look after yourself, enjoy your palmfic and Rose Pouchong tea.
We'll miss you at GMOH.

::Sending lots of healing vibes for your leg.::

*Hugs*

Thanks hon! It's feeling a little better now. I'm staying off it as much as I can and I'm sure it'll be fine in a day or two.

I'll miss Garett but as I told epistrophia, I don't think you can recapture magic and it's an *awful* lot of cash. I'm sure you'll all share the joy in the form of pix and reports. have fun, babes - say hi to Garett for us.

Yikes! I hope your leg heals up really fast!!!

Boo to the bad news! =<{

Yay for the good news! *g*

::hugs::

The leg is still sore, alas. I think it's something with the achilles tendon. Just needs rest but it's very frustrating and restricting. ::sigh::

Ouch! Those things really hurt. Hope you get the chance to really rest it so that it heals quickly!

::hugs::

Oh honeypie - I'm whittling you a spare wooden leg right now. Hope it (the real one) recovers quickly. I hate odd pinging noises in my body... ::ponders on the great mysteries::

Hey - I knew Morrisons had to be good for something other than hairy green lemons ::bleh:: I'll rummage through the tea section tomorrow, and find if the rose pouchong has made it this far south *g*

Does pirate impression; acquires parrot.

Hairy green lemons...?

Hairy green lemons...?

It was the Morrisons Christmas special... yum!

Ooo..kay. Remind me to stay away from your branch old Bill Morrison's otherwise-admirable emporium. *g*

I'm enjoying the wooden leg enormously. The eye patch I could live without and the parrot is getting bloody annoying. ::Glares. Looks for someone to blame or something to kick::

I did something like that once to my leg, just crossing the street to my car... something in my calf went pop and it was just the most painful thing. I was terrified for a moment that I'd snapped my Achilles tendon. But I wrapped it up and treated it with heat and cold, and it did get better eventually.

And I'll forgive you for not coming to GMOH only if I can come up and visit you afterwards... :o). It is UP, isn't it? ::needs a map of England::

The leg be still sore, arrrrr - but I has this here wooden leg (called Smith?) that I took from Snailbones, scurvy dog that I am to be sure.

It is UP, isn't it? ::needs a map of England::
Sort of sideways and up a bit. Google maps do maps, sugar. There's Google earth too - I'm hoping you can come up to Lancaster while we're all gathered at Bev's(?) If you find yourself a map, I'm at Brinscall, near Chorley, in Lancashire - about an hour's drive east of Liverpool; 30 minutes or so south of Bev.

Ouch! Take care of that leg, you don't need to be hobbling around.
Yay for all the good news, though.
You've been quiet lately, I guess it's because your recent enforced absence showed you that there is, indeed, Life After Internet and you've found other things to do!

I am hobbling though; very frustrating it is, too. Damn you, ageing body ::shakes fist at shins::
'there is, indeed, Life After Internet'
LOL; have you seen the latest South Park? The one where the internet goes off? That really spoke to me. *g*

No, I haven't seen that - haven't watched South Park for years although I used to love it.
Have you had that leg looked-at? That's a worry if you're still hobbling three days later.

It's worse than ever today - i think I'm going to have to have it looked at, dammit. I was really hoping to avoid the tedium of a doctor's visit; I doubt if they can do anything other than tell me to rest it, anyway. )o:

Maybe I shopuld replace it with some of those spanky, bendy numbers used by that legless-runner-whose-name-I've-regrettably-forgotten.

Ow! I hope your leg improves quickly.
Yeah, it's a bit poo about GMOH, and it wouldn't be the same without the gang as you say.
::hugs you lots::

is really annoying me; it's so restricting.

But we'll have fun chez-Bev, won't we? Are you bringing your balls?

Do you mean the Garett's balls? The ones they are trying desperately to copy? Yep, can do!
Chez-Bev - The TS Boys, balls, bad films, good nosh and great company - we will a brilliant time!

Just catching up with everyone this weekend. (Darn real life!)
Sorry to hear about your leg and hope it's feeling a bit better!
Yay for your new tech. A friend just got an iTouch and now I have a new toy to lust for!
Finally, the writer's ~~block~~ slow down is normal. Worry not! I'm sure tea (and a bit of time) are just what you need!
My corner of the world? Warm (hey, it's Florida!) and more busy with nonfan things than I'd like to admit. Overall? Very good. Thanks for asking!

I've given up on the writing for now to concentrate on selling what I've already written, with about the same level of success. What can I say? I'm so hopeless it's not true.

Enjoy your warm. I wish I could enjoy our cool but the gallons of icy water falling out of the sky is making that hard. (o: