A new bird has been recorded!
Collared dove (plucking up the courage to fly down and peck at the seed the starlings have thrown on the floor)

I have two new ones since last week, too:
Goldfinch and rook (seriously, wtf'ed at this one. A rook, on my fatball feeder? I'm... not sure you know what you're meant to do, birdie.)

The balcony has increased in popularity a bit. :) Last year, I was lucky to get starlings; this year I've had a huge variety of visitors:

Robin
Great tit
Blue tit
Dunnock / "hedge sparrow"
Wood pigeon
Pied wagtail
Blackbird
Collared dove
Goldfinch (just passing through...)
Rook
Collared dove
Magpie (hiding in the corner behind a plant pot, frightened the life out of each other when I went to put some feed out)
And there's been long-tailed tits in the trees in front of the building (I think they're limes) but not on the balcony yet.
I've heard my black redstart, but not seen him recently. I saw the baby on my balcony last year. :) I hope I get to see it some more this year.

Another chapter in less than 6 weeks! It's a miracle.

I had wanted to get this chapter finished and uploaded on the 1st, because it would have been the story’s “6-month birthday”. Happy Belated Birthday, MM?

Actually I’m not particularly happy because it means I still haven’t finished it, and I can’t edit what I haven’t finished. And I am determined to have something finished enough to self-publish by the end of 2012. Cue, end of the world?

( Fake cut to chapter 26 ) In which Sarmis manages to blow his own cover, and Tevak discovers his prize is missing (and promptly also blows up).

131523 ♥ 200000

Ever since the 1st April, the rain hasn't stopped. There's flood warnings in place across the country... and we're still (officially) in a drought, because the water-table is so low. Typical!

The roundabout near the Ravenswood estate has a big sign up this morning - "Flood!" What they mean is, after the deluge we had last night, there's a big puddle taking up half the road. It's a good job I decided not to cycle today (I was on-call last night), because I'd have had to wade across it.

They should have declared the hosepipe ban 6 months ago, then we might have got rain when we were meant to. :P

Lastly, I emailed myself some links, from home, and YET AGAIN I haven't received the email. In fact, over the course of the last few weeks, I haven't received ANY of the emails I've sent myself from my Gmail. The hospital has always blocked access TO webmail - as in, you can't log into it - but they'd not overtly blocked receiving emails FROM Gmail.

You can't save to USB sticks (unless they're encrypted), you can't email yourself stuff... I wonder how they think we're meant to take stuff home to work on? <:P My options now are: my nhs.net email (or burn stuff to CD to take it home). That's pretty much it.

It's been a really peculiar day today - veeerrry quiet on-call, hardly any charts coming down, I went home at 2:30pm*, and aside from one call at... 4pm-ish from a ward looking for a chart that we sent back in their red bag, no calls all day...

So, as I was tired, I watched "Silent Witness", and went to bed.

Within LITERALLY 30 seconds of me getting into bed, my phone rang. Argh. (It wouldn't be so bad except it's guaranteed to frighten the life out of me, and then I'm huffier than I need to be. It doesn't help my mood that the nurse I'm trying to speak to keeps saying "I can't hear you, you need to speak up" - so I'm pretty much shouting at my mobile phone, and she still can't hear me, although she's as clear as a bell for me.)

And what life-saving urgent medicine do I have to come in for?

..."Clog zapper". *headdesk* (I try the usual suspects before I come in, and they don't have any, and the out of hours cupboard is out, too. Oh well. I tried.)

(* - I would have gone home earlier, except that I'd advised a doctor on what "dry eye" preparations we had, he said "great! I'll write them up within an hour and send them down to you to dispense"... and then didn't)

Because a friend at work had been asking about my writing, I wanted to say how long my current work is compared to "Twilight" (because I know it's a book she's read). As in, "it's about as long as..." etc. I've just never read Twilight myself*, so I don't know how they'd compare, ha.

So I went off and Googled around a bit:
On 28 Aug 2010: "Stephanie Meyer said on a talk show how many words she has typed for these books, and these are the numbers for each. In Twilight- about 174,000 words."

On June 14, 2011, "according to Stepheniemeyer.com, the first Twilight book had 130,000 words."

(And these are just her figures, there's another hit that said it was only 115,362 words.)

So apparently, Twilight has shrunk by at least 4/5ths of a NaNoNovel. HMM.
(MM is currently hovering around 130,000 but only 125,000 is "published", the rest is scribble)

In other news, I have a bee-baby appeared in MM that reminds me of Flash. I'm not sure why. ¬_¬
"For his part, the baby acted like she wasn’t even there, not even when her comb tugged at the tangles, dedicatedly stuffing his tiny face with fruit and fish, wing-discs fluttering involuntarily in enjoyment."

(Tonight is my first of THREE on-calls this week. Today, Sunday and Weds. *going to be dead by Weds*)

* - I tried, but it made my brain hurt. I know I'm hardly one to talk, but it was like stumbling onto bad fanfiction on ff.net. :(

It’s been twenty two days since my last update. *le sigh* I need to be less nitpicky, less distracted, and more write-y, because I can’t edit / publish this if it’s not finished. Ragh.

My current count includes only my posted words. I have another 1600 words or so lurking on the master file (that’s getting on for 1% of story!); 170 in a prologue I’m going to put in and the remainder in the next chapters that come after what I’ve posted. I’m trying to be good and not write all the “fun” chapters first; joining everything up afterwards ends up with me throwing a lot of words away, that way.

( Fake cut to chapter 25 ) In which Blink finally makes good her escape – but where are the danata taking her? Has she maybe just climbed out of the frying pan, and got straight into the fire?

125214 ♥ 200000

Sketchbook 2013 IS HERE!

WOO. *signupped* I got the email 15:20, signed up 18:30 XD

This year, I'm going to try and NOT be rubbish. The first year, I got disillusioned by the thin-ness of the paper. The second year, I forgot about it for a while and had to rush to get it finished and posted, which made me sad.

THIS YEAR, I'm going to have a tidy flat, space to work, and I'm going to try and spread the work out a bit better, and end up with something I'm 100% please with, not 75% pleased with. ^__^

I'm not sure what my theme is going to be, this year. Last year, they had specific themes, like "prehistoric" (mine) or "road trip" or "storybook", which you chose when you signed up. This year, the options are Travelogue, Memoir, Narrative, Atlas, Almanac, Chronicle, Sketchbook, Chapbook (a what? I had to look it up), Documentation, Photo Log. Mine is a "I'll choose my category later", right now...
Edit: I'm glad I looked up "chapbook" because I might end up doing that, haha. XD Not the poetry, as such, but the writing and ephemera and stuff.

...My "Mystery Project" stuff hasn't arrived yet though. I'm still wiggling about what colour and theme I'm going to get.

First, artiness.

Halli A sort of sketchy, "working doodle" of Halli. I'm still trying to pin down the species' final look; they're even LESS birdy than they used to be. She's descended from a flightless alien bird, for want of a better description. She's of the "sanuki" race, which means she's fairly strikingly coloured - primarily reddish/russet in skin-tone, with paler areas around her eyes and on her cheeks, dark lips and a dark stripe up her nose and over her head. Aron, the little male/"drae", is clavare; he's a lot paler, with darker eyestripe. (He reminds me a little of a badger. :P)

And some more pictures of "my wildlife".

	Great tits As in, the bird. And all right, OK, it's 3 shots of the same bird - but that foils my desire to make puns.
	Hop-along You can't tell from this photograph, but this adorable little ball of fluff only has one leg. When I first saw it, one leg was dangling pathetically behind it, and it looked like a huge effort to perch on anything because the leg would catch on things. The leg looks like it's possibly dropped off altogether, now. :( It doesn't even look like it's tucked up in its fluff, just... gone. Everything is still a huge wing-flapping effort, though. I suppose it must be really hard to balance.
	Hop-along My one-legged robin lunging for a crumb that's fallen down off the fat-ball holder. I put out a whole dish of food (you can see it in my pigeon photos), but apparently the fat-balls are better.
	Hop-along "What'choo looking at, anyway? Stop taking photos, person."
	Hop-along Action shot! A fluttering lunge for another morsel. Seriously, this poor little bird goes to such a huge effort to feed itself; it must be exhausting. I've not actually seen him/her for a few days, so I'm a little worried. I keep putting food out - the pigeons aren't eating ALL of it - but I've not seen either "Hop-along" or its mate recently.
	Hop-along's friend They're either mates, or just... unnaturally pacifist. They don't fight when they're together at the feeder, at least.
	Muted Sun On one side of the flat, the sun was peeking out through a really heavy, black cloud.
	Twinkling Rain That feeble, clouded sun gave some beautiful twinkling rain...
	Evening Rainbow ...and on the other side of the flat, a full rainbow! (Although it was so much brighter and more beautiful in real life.)

There's a pair of pudgy little dunnocks going crazy out there as I type this. We've just had another hailstorm - I think we've had... five or six in the last few days? - so they look rather windswept and buffetted around, like they have huge poofy skirts on.

Edit on 16/04/2012:
Panic over! Hop-along was back in the feed dish tonight. :) Phew!

This looks quite exciting! I signed up! I wonder what my colour and prompt will be. *taps lips thoughtfully*

I need to get my art groove back on. I haven't done any proper arting in forever, and I want to design some creatures to go onto Hesger, the "Memento Mori" planet. I have a few ideas - a cursorial reptile, like a dog-croc (I saw some extinct Eartly ones in a palaentology 'zine and I went "ooh awesome", and a sort of "deer-bird".

I want to get the hooting deer down on paper, particularly; I see them as somewhere between a muntjac (with the little tusks) and a klipspringer (with those little tiptoe hoofs), but with stubby little paired "trumpet" horns, shaped more like the crest on a parasaurolophus. They're actually extensions of the nostrils, used as a sounding chamber to form musical "hoots". They might again be related to birds, as they tend to roost and keep in constant contact with little calls and tweets. Their only major predators are the Blights left over after Heff decimated the Hesger population.

----------------

Work today was interesting. ¬_¬ I think I gave some poor little medical information officer at sanofi-aventis a hard time. "I've not been here very long" he says, as some bolshie MI pharmacist (me) gets onto him for his company's rubbish SPC/datasheet (which has all the info you need on how the product works, the dose, side effects etc. Supposedly).

At least he got back to me quickly, even if it wasn't very helpful. Essentially, to get the licensed dose, that the company will support... you have to manipulate the product in an unlicensed way, which they won't?

E.g.: You use 50mg/kg/day to treat some form of infantile spasm/epilepsy, which might require a 200mg dose, if you have a 4kg baby. Company agree that that is fine! They even gave dosing advice on what to use on the SPC. However, they only make 500mg doses. So you have to give a portion of the sachet... which is unlicensed and the company won't support, if you do it it's a clinical decision and you're on your own, mate. What? So... why do they even bother to advise it, if you can't actually DO it, in a licensed way?

I'm not sure how they got that past the MHRA. O_o

(I did feel sorry for the poor guy I was arguing with, but equally, why bother having a "Medicines Information" department if all they're allowed to do is parrot their SPC? I already READ that, it was the first thing I did. It didn't help.)

Edit: Oh! And exciting news. (For me, anyway). FINALLY, the broken down unroadworthy untaxed car that's been parked in my parking space for the last 6 months? IS GONE. HAAaaa. I walked around the corner when I got home from work and WHOA. Empty parking space. Nice surprise. :)

Dear world:
If your "recipe" reads: make up cake mix according to box, cook
...then it is NOT a recipe.

Either that, or the fact I can microwave "sweet and sour chicken and rice" must make me a masterchef.

Situation is: I want to make cakes for work, because a colleague is raising money for when she runs the London Marathon and people have been donating cakes to help out, and I WANT IN. Anyway.

One colleague said "Oh I just go 8884" (8 flour, 8 margarine, 8 sugar, 4 eggs) but I didn't get time to ask her for the rest of the details. So instead, I go looking for "cupcake recipes". Simple enough task, right? Google gives me a million and one results. Awesome!

...99.99999% shouldn't have the nerve to call themselves recipes, you know? It's not a "recipe" if your instructions are "make up cake batter mix as per packet, cook".

The other fraction of a percent are American, and want things like "buttermilk". Does that even still exist as a "thing" you can buy in the UK? (After Googling around a bit, I think they might have it in Sainsbury's. I'll poke my nose in on the way home from work tomorrow.)

(It's like when Jill posted her delicious-sounding cornbread, I had to run off to Google to work out what name we sold "cornmeal" under. Turns out it's "polenta".)

Until now, I never really thought this was TOO bad a neighbourhood to live in. It's not a cute, quaint little village in the countryside, certainly, but I wouldn't class it as a ghetto, but... there's been another stabbing.

It was only within the last... 6 months, at a guess?... that a girl at a party was stabbed in the neck for her mobile phone, close to here. Today, I found out there was another, this morning. O_o

I just wandered down Lidl to buy a few bits and pieces for work on Monday (as I'm on-call), and I noticed that there was a police car parked outside one of the houses in the old airport building, next but one to Spitfires' Nursery. My first thought was "how did he get THERE?" because the whole green is pretty much surrounded by bollards to stop cars getting on there, but there's a proper police estate car parked on the grass.

As I got closer, I noticed the police tape, all the way around the garden. Yikes. Maybe it was a burglary? Around the back of the terrace, though, on the "road" side, there's another police car and more police tape. That's a lot of police for "just" a burglary.

So, I come home and think, I'll see if the EADT has anything to say about it. I'm not holding out a lot of hope, at this point, because the East Anglian is a bit hit-and-miss. Something that well it happened on the road but maybe was important that you want to find out about? No joy, they've not covered it. The hedge fire that the fire brigade were called out at 10pm for, and it took a bucket of water to put out, and they were back at base by 10:32? They're all over that, man.

Today, for once, they came up trumps:
Ravenswood: Police granted custody extension for five arrested in connection with stabbing
Saturday, April 7, 2012 11:37 AM
POLICE have been granted an extension of the custody time limit for the five people arrested in connection with a stabbing.
The arrests came after officers were called to a disturbance at a house in Witney Close, Ravenswood, Ipswich, near to the parade of shops, just before 5am. They discovered a man had sustained serious stab wounds to his neck and chest. He was treated by paramedics who worked to stabilise his condition before taking him to Ipswich Hospital.
Five people - two 23-year-old women, a 20-year-old man, a 21-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman, all from Ipswich - were arrested on suspicion of attempted murder at the scene. They remain at Martlesham Police Investigation Centre, where police can continue to question them until about 7pm tonight.

Hope the guy is all right. :(

Just had one of the stranger dreams I've had in a while.

I think I must have still been at university, because I was working on my final-year project - well, after a fashion. In the real world, I looked at calystegines, which are "polyhydroxyl nortropane alkaloids"; We were looking at their potential as glycosidase inhibitors, I think (it's been a while since I did it). In the dream world, I was looking at... well, I'm not sure. We first had to crack some mathematical code, and once we'd done that we'd use that code in lab-work, which I think had some sort of investigatory theme, looking at the genetics of some very rare Spanish bird. My tutor (who looked suspiciously like the current consultant on my real-life ward) was getting very excited about it and saying how the work would help preserve the species, etc etc.

...aaaand I'd basically forgotten about it for six months, leaving me three months to do all the research and finish it, and I was panicking about it a bit, trying to work out what I was going to say to my tutor. I hadn't done any actual lab work at all; essentially all I'd done was some of the group work with the other people I was working with. Which involved drawing a circle, drawing a series of equidistant points around the diameter of the circle, and then joining them up with straight lines, and trying to work out how many straight lines were needed to join all the dots up.

I have no idea how this was supposed to help the rare bird (which looked rather like a thrush with an orange breast, or an overgrown robin). ¬_¬

It didn't help matters that in the non-university world, there was some kind of world-destroying threat brewing - possibly extra-terrestrial, I'm not sure - and all the richest nations in the world were trying to counter it. They were trying to work out how to destroy the threat, as they couldn't use modern fighter aircraft or missiles because it could "see" them and would destroy them. So instead, they gathered together as many working WWII aircraft as they could find, and were going to use them to drop a series of nuclear devices on "the threat" because it wouldn't be able to see them.

The rest is muddled and I can't really remember a lot, apart from some very strange artwork, and a load of women from a (very very small, there was only about 30 of them there) "Arts and Crafts" convention leaping up and down from behind a very low wall. :P

I've had a couple of dreams already about "end of the world" scenarios, recently. I hope it's not an omen. :P

Because there's a couple of senders whose emails persistently fall into my spam box, even though I've lost count of how many times I've marked them as "not spam", I try and look through my spam box once or twice a week. I guess most people do, right? Anyway. I began to notice a bit of a theme going on...

Click to enbiggen. I don't know about you, but Kayla the very pretty 25 year old blonde is starting to look more and more desperate. And as for SP Casino - does that stand for SPAM Casino? Why are they wishing me "Seasons Greetings" in mid March?

I got the last one of these "from the FBI" today, though, which is really why I decided to post this. XD

	OK, so, first of all, I've won some money! With the help of their newly developed technology (International Monitoring Network System) wthe FBI have discovered that my e-mail address was automatically selected by an Online Balloting System, this has legally won me the sum of $2.4million USD from a Lottery Company outside the United States of America! But because the funds have been deposited with IMF, I am required to settle the following bills directly to the Lottery Agent in-charge of this transaction whom is (conveniently) located in Cotonou, Benin Republic (read: next door neighbours to Nigeria. They must be talking to those Nigerian princes). But it's only $96, and who cares, because I'll be a millionaire soon!
	Four days later... Whoops! Wait, no. "The FBI" have changed their mind, they only want to pay me $850,000, and I have to send them a whole $450 for the privilege. The cheek! But conveniently, the funds have been deposited with a Bank in America, which is more reassuring than just "IMF" I guess, and I am be required to settle the bill directly to the Lottery Agent in-charge of this transaction, who is now located in currently in London, United Kingdom on a "special assignment" (wee-woo, wee-woo). WELL< LET ME JUST EMAIL THEM ALL MY DETAILS! :D
	OK, so they clearly don't like me taking time answering their emails. GOSH DARN IT, someone has stolen my money! They discovered that the sum of $10.5M was transferred from CBN to BOA in MY name without legal documents! And I will be ARRESTED if I don't reply back! To... a "rmrobertmueller69@gmail.com". Funny, he's the guy who told me I'd won 2.4 million! So all this time, he was planning on sneaking the other 8 million away from me! Those FBI types sure are tricky, they don't want anyone knowing their REAL email addresses...

...does ANYONE fall for these any more? XD And for "FBI agents", their English ain't so hot. What's With all the Random Capitalisation of words, Too?

Optimism, thy name is "spammer".

Well, I WAS going to upload some photographs to my Flickr, this lunch time - they've started to demolish the old Crane foundry near where I live - but the hospital internet connection is misbehaving and I imagine I'll have to just wait until I go home tonight. :(

At least I can post some other photographs on here. :)

A different kind of flying doom. Not content with troughing all the food itself, my pigeon has now started bringing a little friend along.

	Pigeons, part deux Oh, there's two of you? Great. I'll just make plans to spend even MORE money on food for you to throw all over the place.
	Posessive pigeon I'm not sure if he's making a point to me, by standing IN the food tray. THIS IS MY FOOD, GO AWAY. Is that really necessary? :P
	Pigeons, part deux, 3
	Pigeons, part deux, 4 That bird has REALLY BIG, creepy pupils. ¬_¬

And a little more of the garden!

	More daffodils in bloom! I was so pleased to see more were coming out and NOT DYING that I took another photo, haha. And see in the top corner? I interrupted someone's supper, s/he didn't realise I was there - and I didn't realise HE was there until after he'd already flown away.
	Robin! "Hmm, I'm sure there was a brown blob in that last photo, but it's gone." *flick through photos on camera* "OH, it was a bird!" I'm sure he was somewhat disgruntled by the fact I was in his way.
	Clematis The resurrected clematis. It spent all winter as a dry brown mostly-snapped-off stick and I was just preparing to dig it out and put a new one in... and it must have heard me, because it's gone crazy over the last couple of weeks. I need to secure it to the fence with some wire, because it blows a gale across here and it'll only get snapped off again.

And finally... at last, after years of not having a camera with me at the right time, I caught her on camera.

	Dauntless! Seeing my little space-ship in bus form always amuses me, in an "I went home on Dauntless today! XD" kind of way. The same way it's not JUST a blue Subaru Impreza, when I see one, it's Slipstream.
	Dauntless, closeup "Oh, you're not a bus geek are you?" one of my colleagues says, when I get on after her. Authors are such misunderstood creatures. *melodramatic swoon*

Edit: Rrgh, why does LJ make it so hard to find the pics/galleries management page?

(Posting this because I'm sure I'll end up losing it if I don't.)

I've been doing a little work on how the laima species functions, socially, and realised that I hadn't really thought about how their naming system works - I was just giving them first names and nothing else. This caused me 2 problems:

Firstly, for a society with three genders, you can't easily use Mr and Mrs. Mr and Mrs and... Mrs? No, that's not going to work.

Secondly, for a society that puts such a heavy emphasis on an individual's social standing and political importance, it would be strange for them to NOT have any system of indicating whose family you're part of, particularly if it's an important family.

So! I finally sat down and worked out how it should be structured.

Basic structure:
First name (capitalised), prefix’ (not capitalised), family name (capitalised)
The prefix is the determiner of whether an individual is married or not.

For unmarried laima:
Name su’MName - unmarried medusi (this is relatively unusual) - e.g., Pabishka su’Ventni
Name a’Name - unmarried spur or fessine - e.g., Valdis a’Verdi, Liega a’Salvon

For married laima:
Name si’MName - married medusi, head of family. - e.g., Pabishka si’Ventni
(si and su are intentionally similar. Most medusi like you to THINK they’re married and accumulating a big harem, even if they aren't, yet)
Name si’MName-name - married spur, takes the medusi’s family name and hyphenates it in front of his own - e.g., Valdis si’Ventni-verdi
Name ro’MName - married fessine, just takes the medusi’s family name. - e.g., Liega ro’Ventni

Notes
No medusi have hyphenated names; it is considered to lessen their social standing to take the spur’s family name in addition to her own.
Most medusi tend to be referred to as "Madame Firstname", e.g. Madame Pabishka; they only use "Madame si’Surname" in official documentation.
All children take the medusi’s surname.

Look, I got another chapter finished!

APRIL FOOLS

Oh, wait. No, I DID actually get another chapter finished. I'm not sure why this one took so long, I started it when I was on annual leave back on the... 12th of March, or thereabouts? It just didn't seem to want to be written. :( Maybe Blink likes it in the basement or something.

( Fake cut to chapter 24 ) In which Halli spots someone sneaking somewhere he shouldn't be (alliteration intentional), Tevak lays down an ultimatum - as does Odati - and three of the smallest sapient creatures in the known universe hold out a very BIG hand in a gesture of kindness.

118695 ♥ 200000

I was thinking, on my way home the other night - if/when Blink gets switched back to her normal self, what would happen if Halli got caught in the fallout and "changed" with her? At least I have the perfect alt-mode for her - she could be a Halli-copter. HAHA *fallsover*

------------

Avatar was on again, last night. They only premiere'd it last sunday, so that makes two showings in one week. It does lose something on the small screen (especially when the sound on your TV periodically cuts out), and the storyline isn't exactly the most taxing on the brain, but I still enjoyed it. :)

My inner biologist does go WHAT about a lot of it - why does every animal on Pandora have six limbs, four eyes, and breathe through spiracles on their chest... except the Na'vi? Did they evolve in absolute isolation, or something? (OK, I know why, we have no six-armed people to motion-capture from.)

I wonder where the birdies is?

Oh yeah, wait, no, I know where the birdies is - the pigeons, at least. ON MY BALCONY, TROUGHING THROUGH THE FOOD DISH. Hurr.

( Remember This? )

( Well... :3 (photos under cut) )

...this is all before the snow returns, of course. The weather is clearly gearing up to be rubbish just in time for the school Easter holidays.

So for those not in the know, there's a fuel tanker strike impending.

The government says "please don't panic buy", which I imagine a lot of people interpret as "OH GOD IT'S GOING TO BE TERRIBLE WHY ELSE WOULD THEY MENTION PANIC BUYING??!"

It's barely a quarter to eight in the morning when the bus gets to Sainsbury's, and there's already a queue of cars coming out from the petrol station and all the way down to the roundabout (ok, so only about 10 or 11 cars, but it's still a queue).

Never have I been so glad I have Whites for when I need him. ¬_¬ I myself am considering doing a few emergency purchases, but mostly just of long-life milk in case the lorries can't get to the supermarkets with fresh if it does all kick off.