angharad_gam

 Borrowing this from dirtygreatknife because a) I liked it and b) I am sick and bored and trying not to spend the whole day on the XBox for the sake of my wrists. So.

5 things you will find in my bag

1. Purse
2. Phone
3. Notebook and pen (these are the three things I will be carrying with me more or less all the time in any bag. I may also have...)
4. A large array of pharmaceuticals  (to fend off sudden allergies or attacks of "Ah, nuts! I forgot to take my medication")
5. A book

5 things you will find in my bedroom

1. A large print of "The Lady of Shallot" by J. Waterhouse
2. The desk where I work from home (bad practice to mix work and sleep areas I am given to understand, but it's a large room, and the only space I can shut myself away from the kids and their shouty friends)
3. A carved Chinese style chest that was an 18th birthday present from my parents
4. A rather plainer wooden chest used by my grandad when he was in the RAF.
5. A box of random stuff we have not yet unpacked from when we moved in 2014

5 things that make me feel happy

1. Being in  my garden in Spring when the sun is shining  (that's a hint to the weather)
2. When my kids are getting along with each other
3. Getting good news from the doctor
4. That moment that sometimes comes in savasana after a really satisfying practice when many strains are eased and the heart is very open
5. My beloved spouse

5 things I am currently into

1. It feels kind of like cheating, but there are some things I am pretty much always into: tea, textiles, poetry, yoga, gardening, books, dancing, feeding people. For the stuff that fluctuates a little more:
2. Bioware games
3. Fanfic about Bioware games
4. Crochet
5. Working from home 

5 things on my to do list

1. Write a talk I am giving at the Women in Maths conference at UniSA in about three weeks 
2. Organise a class I have just agreed to give on mediaeval cooking on Oct 2nd
3. Organise something for our 20th wedding anniversary next month
4. Weed the front garden
5. Finish the 'dog on the loom' that is currently giving me weaver's block

 Last night I dreamed that the new doctor stepped out of the TARDIS  on her first episode and said "Actually, I'm not that good at maths."

And then I dreamed that I was annoyed with Andy because he had pulled up all the parsley and nasturtiums from the herb garden. 

I would lay these at the feet of something I ate or did yesterday, except that I know my brain is perfectly capable of all this and more without any stimulus whatsoever...

As for yesterday,  I spent most of it wandering around the University of Adelaide Open Day with Erin and one of her friends, alternately beset by nostalgia and freezing half to death. The fact that I already had a cold makes me surprised I am not as sick as a dog today, but go figure. Also a professor of linguistics gave me a Toblerone, so there was that.

 Andy strained a groin muscle drying himself after a shower (no I don't know either).
And I popped my TMJ out again. I haven't done that for a while, and I forgot how much it hurts.

In other news, I  have decided to try and wean myself off Dragon Age with Mass Effect: Andromeda. I tried the first Mass Effect game when it came out, but I suck at shooting things, and after a certain point this became a barrier to making further progress. However, this newest episode in the franchise has a 'narrative' mode, which supposedly focusses more on story than combat, and I have become slightly more adept at using an Xbox controller since then, so I thought I would give it a go. It turns out I still suck at shooting things. And also I suck at driving the space tractor thing (on my first outing I drove it straight into a pond). So we'll see how long this lasts...

 Is why, in RPGs, you can usually only wear two magic rings at the same time. I wear eight rings as a matter of course, and could wear more, except I have never found any small enough to fit my pinky fingers (leaving aside plastic kiddie rings). And that's without getting into the mediaeval practice of wearing rings on the first finger joint as well as on the knuckle. Why would an adventurer not want to maximise their advantage by piling on as many magic rings as possible? A couple of reasons spring to mind:

1. Wearing rings that do not fit you very well (as would likely be the case if you had a random collection looted from various dubious sources) could make it more difficult to use a weapon properly. Speaking from experience, if a ring is too loose it pinches quite a bit if you try to get a firm grip on something,  especially something hard. Still, this shouldn't stop mages or maybe  even archers.
2. Magical interference. You might think the ring of attack and the ring of defense, and the ring of charisma, and the ring of perspicacity will work exactly as advertised, but when you put them on  together what actually happens is that you turn an unpleasant shade of green and become highly attractive to termites. 

Of course,  the real reason is that it's just a pain to keep track of...

Well, maybe only in a first world problems kind of way.

I was woken up at some godawful hour of the morning by the sound of torrential rain on the roof. I have always been a fairly precarious sleeper, so this meant I stayed awake for a while after that. Eventually I got up - sometimes a brief getting up resets the brain or something and makes it easier to get back to sleep - at which point I noticed that the power was off. I went and checked the safety switch, and sure enough, it had tripped. So I flipped it back on and it tripped again straight away. I did this a couple more times, because you know, it was 5am. Nope.

Now this is not an entirely unusual occurence in our house. This house was built by a builder for himself, so it has a lot of bells and whistles, and then the person who lived in it after that was an electrician, and he added a few more whistles, and some shiny red bows for good measure. The electrical system is a trifle over-egged to put it lightly (some of you may recall the issues we had trying to get TV reception after we moved in). And it's a bit sensitive at times. There was a period of time when we had to unplug the kettle before we went to bed each night, otherwise the safety switch would trip overnight. So the next thing I thought of was switching off some things and seeing if that helped. It didn't. After a while, I gave up and went back to bed, because 5am. I did not get back to sleep.

When the alarm went off, the power was still off. And when I say power, btw, I mean the main circuit with the power points etc on. The lights, which (as in most houses) are on a separate circuit, were ok, as was (thankfully) the heater. We went around switching off more things, to no avail. At this point I had to abandon the field and actually go into the office. I usually work from home on Wednesdays, but no power means no router means no internet means no work.

Eventually Andy had to call an electrician who, after two hours of poking around, worked out that one of the many external power points that have been installed around the house had become inundated with water during the episode of heavy rain in the night. We don't have much use for external power points, so it is now excised. Problem solved.

What does this have to do with not being able to play Dragon Age? Not a huge amount actually. The power was actually back on by the time I got home from work. However, I have a rule about not playing video games in the evening (espec on weeknights), mostly due to the aforementioned precariousness of sleep. On days when I work from home I can sometimes squeeze in an hour before dinner in the time I would normally be on a bus. Or waiting at a bus stop wondering if my bus is actually going to show up. So I missed that. And we managed to swap the defunct Dragon Age II disc for an actual working one the other day, so I am a trifle keen to get into it.

First world problems.

In other news, today my brother was struck by lightning in Estonia (to clarify - both he and the lightning were in Estonia - he is still there in fact - the lightning has moved on). He is fine. He has always been the kind of person who can get struck by lightning in Estonia and be perfectly fine. For the rest of us mere mortals, using an umbrella whilst walking in a thunderstorm is a bad idea. Especially if you are in Estonia.

I finally finished all the add-ons for DA:O yesterday, so I was going to start DA II today. However, it turned out the second hand game disc I bought was damaged and it wouldn't load. That's the only version of the game I have found (DA II was nowhere near as popular as the first and third games and us six years old now, so not entirely surprising). At least I bought it from a game shop, so I should be able to get my money back.

The cold has made a bit of a resurgence this weekend, although I may have only myself to blame. I sat up much too late reading Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (which, naturally enough, I recommend highly). As a result I have not done the front garden weeding that desperately needs to be done before the rain sets in next week. I have been doing a lot of crochet lately, however.

Finished Dragon Age: Origins on Friday night. Still getting over the feels, and playing through the post main story add-ons. But on Saturday I went out and bought the second game.

I managed to achieve a reasonably satisfactory ending to DAO, in which both the player character and her love interest both survived and stayed together. The thing is, if you do this, then in the third game you get a 'someone has to stay behind so the rest of us can escape' choice between this particular love interest character and the main character in the second game (if LI gets a different outcome in the first game you choose between MC from game 2 and some lesser NPC). So that will be fun...

Still haven't quite gotten over this rotten cold, but last night was the first in a while that I didn't wake myself up coughing. Andy claims that this is because I have perfected the art of coughing in my sleep, but it feels like progress...

Still sick. I woke up this morning croaking like a frog.

Dragon Age: Origins is quite an elderly game now, as the life span of video games goes. It came out in 2009. The game play and controls have a few interesting quirks. The one that is amusing me the most at the moment is the combination of the 'select target for interaction' control being a bit too sensitive, and the companion characters having 'next time the main character talks to me, no matter where they are' as a trigger for 'enter the next personal plotline cut scene conversation'. So you can be trying to open a chest deep in a dungeon and suddenly find yourself having a D&M about someone's terrible childhood. Or similar. The best has been accidentally triggering the next in a romantic sequence of conversations whilst trying to loot bodies in the aftermath of a battle. Especially since the conversation was basically about how rare it was to find beauty in the midst of the carnage of war. Yes, that's lovely dear. Can we get back to ransacking the corpses now?

I swear I had a resolution to post more this year, but there's a reason I tend not to make new year's resolutions...

So what happened?
Well, I may have briefly mentioned I was acting director for a while at the end of last year. I came back from holidays to a bunch of frantic phone calls saying that the guy I was filling in for was still away and could I keep doing it for another 2 weeks. And then after that two weeks, another two weeks...this went on for the next two months, basically. I didn't mind in the sense that I am angling for a position at that level, and every bit of experience helps (also they were paying me more, and not expecting me to do my job too, unlike the last time I did this), but it was a trifle frustrating to mentally tidy up the loose ends and prepare to go back to my job, only to have to change direction again when it turned out that no, the guy was not coming back just yet. Several times.

And then I had to catch up with my job, which hadn't really been filled while I was away. And then somehow it was Easter, and my parents were visiting, and then my phone died and had to be replaced, and then I made the mistake of starting to play Dragon Age: Inquisition. That game sucked me in in a way that not much has for a while, and then, being a Dragon Age game, chewed me up and spat me out. I remember Andy playing the first one when it came out (in about 2009 I think) and hearing him moan about it, and thinking 'this is not for me' even though character and story driven RPGs are totally my thing. But Andy started playing the prologue around the time I was starting to get bored all over again with Skyrim, and I thought 'that looks interesting' and that was the end of my life for the next month.

(For the uninitiated the Dragon Age games are full of ambiguous moral choices where there are often no right answers, well-drawn characters who you fall in love with and then have to make dire decisions for, and very little in the way of happy endings)

Somewhere in the middle of this, the LJ terms of service change came through and I decided I didn't really want to post there anymore, but I dithered (and was kind of busy) about moving over here for a while. I also mostly stopped even looking at LJ so I have gotten a bit out of touch. Anyway, now I have finally made the plunge. I have moved over all my old posts, so I may well get around to deleting my LJ account eventually, but I'll leave it up for now with a redirection notice. I can't say how often I'll post, because I used to mostly post LJ stuff on my phone, and there's no app for this, as far as I can tell. I should try and be a bit disciplined about doing it at the computer when I am working from home (which is a lot at the moment), but see note above about resolutions.

As for things at the moment: we currently have a Malaysian exchange student staying with us, which is a bit of a shock for a house full of introverts, and probably a shock for her too. Thankfully she seems to be more bemused than horrified by the boys antics. The garden is entering its winter phase - some kind of Thing has taken up residence in it - a Thing that comes out at night and digs through the compost and eats seedlings. I have been feeling remarkably well, for no reason I can particularly tell - all my biochemical indicators are as tepid as usual - so I am enjoying it while it lasts. I have not been doing as much crafty stuff as usual lately due to Dragon Age, but I am hoping to pick up a bit more now I have finished the game (although I should note that as I came up to the end I was thinking 'there's no way I could play this through again', and then within one day of finishing the main story I had rolled up a new character and started another play through - but there's less urgency (and angst!) with this one as I know what happens now).

So then, farewell LJ, hello Dreamwidth. 

(I was going to post a pic, but it looks like I can only do that from a URL - might have to tinker a bit...)

So the rest of this year seems to have whizzed past. I swear it was July five minutes ago. Work has kept me fairly busy, which has probably contributed. I had a couple of deadlines in October, and spent the last month of the year acting at a higher level. I managed to squeeze in a few fun things too. I made it to the Feast of Blessed Herman, and the Foundation Day Picnic, and irreparable and I hit the ABC plant fair and a local craft fair.

Now I'm on three weeks leave , which I feel like I have rather earned. We were originally going to have a fairly quiet Christmas at home, but my brother decided that he and his fiancee were going to get married on New Year's Eve instead of July as they originally were planning. So we changed plans at fairly short notice, dashed up on Christmas Eve, and we're currently in Queensland.

Most of this week I have spent lazing by the pool reading books. We had a noisy family Christmas, as you do when there are twelve for lunch, and we just got back from my brother's wedding, which was very nice. Going to sit up and see the fireworks at midnight then we have a day to recover before we get on a plane and come back to Adelaide.

Happy New Year to one and all!