lady_t_220

I am... attempting to back up my LJ to Dreamwidth. Let's see how THAT goes. Mostly for archival purposes, I hope LJ isn't going to up and vanish any time immediately, cause I'm BARELY MONTHS away from my goddamn 20th anniversary. I will be PISSED if that happens.

Aaanyhoo. If the worst does happen, I'm the same username over on Dreamwidth as I am here. [lady_t_220] I very occasionally post nonsense as ladyt220 on Tumblr, but I'm most active on Twitter, also as ladyt220. That's a locked account, but if I recognise you I'll add you back.

I'm also technically on Facebook I guess but that's generally a private account I don't use for much other than keeping tabs on some stray cousins and former work friends. You'll have to message me cause I don't friend back over there unless I know who you are.

I've also just had to quick & dirty copypasta all the OLD AS BALLS fanfic from my fic accout here, cause I never uploaded it to AO3 and the original word docs are on the hard drive before the hard drive before last, which is somewhere in my attic and I have no idea if it still works.

So that's a thing. BUT it does mean I finally did a count and there's 70 fics I have written since 2001. That's really not a massive output when you think about it, but it's also far too many to shrug off if this all goes tits up.
Oh, yeah, I'm Lady_T_220 on AO3 in case you couldn't guess my cunning naming theme.

Fingers crossed Putin doesn't turn Russia into a Really Big Really Scary North Korea any time soon but yeah, just in case. I'll be around.

And then, just as I'm complaining that there's nothing happening, Prince Phillip up and pops his cloggs out of nowhere.

Well, not out of nowhere, he was 99 and hadn't been well for a while, but still. You don't really think about it, do you? I'm fairly sure some people you just weirdly assume are probably immortal. Whether you give two shits about the monarchy or not you get used to cultural figures sort of just existing.

Feel sad for Her Maj, though I am sure she had a lot more prior warning than the rest of us did. Though my brain does immediately wander to "So, what now?" Swiftly followed by "And how long until she follows him?" There's a lot of annecdotal tales of older couples not lasting long without each other. Hopefully it'll be a while, I'm not sure as a nation we're quite ready for that particular sea-change on top of *everything else* in the last year.

Though one wonderes what they're going to do about the funeral in these Covid times? There's still technically a restriction on numbers for funeral gatherings, though I'm sure they could make an argument on changing the rules for a state event. But then, that also has to be balanced against how it would look to the hundreds of thousands of people who lost loved ones in the last year who weren't allowed to mourn properly. That's a really difficult path to navigate. And one that could really sway some harsh opinions on an already beleagured monarchy with some hectic PR probems.

Handled well and it could be humanising in a way little else could manage. Handled wrong and it could be an uncontested out-of-touch disaster.

I need a beta for a hurt/comfort friendship fic, but it's in a largely dead fandom and it's times like this I REALLY miss LJ being a functional fandom community space.
Where does one even find a beta these days?

Hey ether, do you like While Collar? Do you enjoy Neal!Whump? Do you have time to scoot through 24K words for me? (The first two are genuinely optional, just for the record.)


Well, if not, the world is just going to have to bear witness to my inability to typo-check my own work or limit the relentless abuse of run-on sentences for *artistic effect*.

Also, I am so achingly out of practice at writing anything that requires a plot. It may possibly be gibberish. I can't tell.







(Also, there are no werewolves in the fic, the subject line is monumentally unrelated.)

I have to admit, I am severely failing at *Getting To The Post Office* this year, given everything that's occurred. So to all my international friends I'm afraid there might be a severe lack of cards getting mailed out. 🤦‍♀️ Sorry about that.

(To my inland friends and family, expect cards roughly as soon as I remember to buy stamps.)


I am currently an exhausted disaster human. It's so nearly the end of term but the last week and a half have just kicked my ass work-wise so I would classify myself as "Functioning, but only barely" and that's honestly being generous. Today I smashed three glass things while washing up and jammed my finger in a door cause I wasn't paying attention. So that about sums it all up, really.

We live in weird, weird times.

So anyway, all the schools (and our college) are closing from tomorrow. It'll be open to staff on Friday in order to shut down the building properly but then we're 'working from home' until... fuck knows.
Nobody knows. GCSEs and A-Levels are all cancelled and it's all 'shut until further notice' which could be weeks, or could be months. It's all very... *handwaves*
I guess at least we're all still getting paid so it could be worse?
I definitely have enough admin shite to do for the 2 weeks until the easter break, then I have 2 weeks booked off, then probably some more admin shite for a while after that... then if all else fails another 2.5 weeks of holiday I haven't booked yet, and probably close to 4 days of TOIL accrued which takes us to at least the latter half of May. After that I have no shitting idea but if everything is still all shut at that point I think we're all going to have bigger issues on our plates.

Going to M's this weekend but it'll probably be the last time for a while and that's a horrible thought too. :(

I know M's not high-high risk but she falls into the elderly bracket, and JR's lungs are forked just in general, so...


I feel like the whole town is just under a weird miasma of fundamental social upheaval and no one knows what's going to come out the other end. There's opportunity for massive changes, but will they be taken? Will they stick? Will it be a catastrophic shitheap that makes the Depression look like a wet weekend? Will BoJo get his Churchill moment and drag us into a bright new dawn? (HAHAHAHAHAH!) No one KNOWS anything and that's the thing that hurts my brain more than anything else. You just want to yell "Get on with it!" The waiting is unbearable.


Also my mobile network sent me a lovely email telling me they'd worked very hard to make sure the network was robust in these taxing times and that my data connection would definitely work because keeping everyone together was so very important... I'm like, really, if it was that important you'd give everyone unlimited data until this blows over, you stingy fucks.

But there you go. *sighs*

I'm going to have to keep taking myself for long walks in lieu of my morning slog to work, or I'm just going to sit here day after day, eating cake until I don't fit in my trousers any more.


I don't even know if there's an accurate term for my mood right now. Pensive-anxious? Penxious?

I wish I had a dog to cuddle. Typical really. The only reason I don't have a dog is that I'm never home, and now I'm home and I HAVE NO DOG.

And now this... UGLY CRIES

Beaker crochet'd me a giant eyeball cushion for my new house! It's a combination housewarming/end-of-year pressie cause today was her last day till Mid-August. She was so pleased I knew immediately it was an eyeball, not a target. 🤣



It even has a blood-red back. Lol. I said I was going to have to attach a tassle to the reverse to be a dangly optic nerve!
She said she was originally going to add red veins to the white, but thought I might prefer a stealth eyeball that would go undetected by guests. 👏💓

Also this afternoon I took M with me to measure the front bedroom of the new house, just to check whether my flippin' furniture was going to fit, cause it's a funny shape since they took a slice out of it to make the attic stairs.

I am now happily playing with scale-model cut-outs.



It's going to be tight... but then my current room is tighter so... *shrug* If it doesn't work out I can always use the back bedroom as a dressing room and just fill the bedroom with bookcases instead!

Back bedroom ceiling kind of needs re-plastering first, mind.

I have a growing list of things that require tinkering. Top of which is removing the damn dinosaur wallpaper! I can't even paint over it cause bits have been peeled off by kiddie fingers, and the flippin' T-rex skeletons are puffy!


Today, Mopsy was back at work which made it significantly harder to spend the day doing absolutely shit-all. Despite having LITERALLY nothing to do (I can't access any of my labs due to building work, I am only still AT work because I don't have enough holiday to take the week off) the weight of expectation was bizarre. I mean considering I spent Monday and Tuesday listening to Spotify and reading a book.
So today I made her listen to *really* early Aerosmith (first 2 albums,) because she only knows their 80s/90s post-wilderness Geffen-era hits so she spent a good hour with a firm "WTF?" face while I did a lot of really tedious cutting-out of science-related revision flash-cards.
Tomorrow I am making her go into town for a long-lunch, also known as 'to buy zip-lock bags for work purposes'...

I think we're also going out for afternoon tea to some place in Quorn on Thursday afternoon as well. Not 100% certain what's going on there... I'd txt Manilow and ask but SPORTSBALL is on TV apparently. And is vitally important so I am told. I have thus far watched literally none of it. If this equates to the national team's athletic success I feel obliged to continue to do so. For the good of the nation and all.

*finds a Leverage re-run on Fox*
Aaaahhh... proper ridiculous telly...

Because milly_gal wanted to see my extremely random tree again, here's some pics under the cut.

Tree-topper Cas is taking a break this year as I was in the mood for something more flamboyant.

( Snippy )

Today I am mostly doing the annual trawl of the address book for the writing of the cards, along with the traditional song and dance of "I can't quite remember who you are but I feel bad for thinking about deleting you..."

Because I fail at being a socially functional human being more often than not.

Which is the long way of saying that if I haven't mailed you anything in the past 6 months, and you would like a poorly-constructed but well-intended holiday sentiment from someone with a brain apparently made of cottage cheese, please shoot me your address. (Comments are screened, or shoot me a PM if you prefer)


As an additional note, writing addresses on sticky labels instead of envelopes has saved me SO MANY fucked up envelopes today. Thanks, Mainland Europe. Your addresses are NUTS.

JR's back from T'NORTH again, and this time brought me his mum's nigh on mint condition 50s good housekeeping cookbook. (!!!!!!!) Apparently no one else wanted it. (???!!!!) I can't even express my delight that they're all hethans.

IT'S ENTIRELY FULL OF STEAMED PUDDINGS, GELATINE AND LARD. IT'S AMAZING.

Also mock cream. There's a whole lot of whipped evaporated milk in this thing, which is not an activity I had ever consciously considered before.




Unrelatedly I am absolutely dying from the heat right now. It didn't get below 26 in my prep room at work all damn day.