Doctor Who 4.13: Journey’s End

I am still more than a little in shock, so I can only hope that what follows is coherent.

Just a quick update

More later, but I’m having a great time over here.

Last night, I got my wish and there was snow. So beautiful and quite different to my experiences in England. The bit that got me this morning is that even though we’re on a small, quiet street way off the main thoroughfares, the snowplough had already been through and the roads are clear. There simply aren’t ploughs in Britain except for the odd one or two in Scotland and even the main roads rarely get gritted or salted. The snow last night would have caused chaos today in England yet it’s business as usual over here. It makes me a bit more confident about deal with winter to know that after the snow has stopped falling, the roads will be quickly made safe.

The only bad thing? Torchwood tonight and I can’t watch it 😦 I will have to avoid all spoilers until I get back to England next week. Waah!

A little bit of re-organisation and announcement

First, the re-organisation: I’ve been sorting out and adding to the links on this blog. I’ve now separated out the blogs that I read (Blogroll) from the other links to sites I use or love. So there are now links to Girl Dislocated, Siren Voices, Nee Naw and Benefit Scrounging Scum in the blogs section and links to the HMSA, EDS Support Group, Gallifrey One and the Organisation for Transformative Works in the “Useful links section”.

There is also a link to my latest love, the BBC iPlayer. It’s amazing that a few years ago, you had to watch a grainy image 2 inches wide if you wanted to download and watch TV shows and now you can stream near broadcast quality images with barely any lag.  I love technology. I feel the need to start a campaign to allow people outside the UK to use iPlayer (hey, I’d be willing to pay a subscription for it!) so that when I eventually emigrate, I can still watch all my favourite shows.

Like Torchwood 🙂 No longer a my shiny, crappy show, it’s now my shiny, wonderful show. Three episodes in and the quality is still great, the writing is much better than before and they seem to have finally worked out that this show works best when it’s about characters rather than titillation.

Tangent. To return to the original subject:

The announcement! On Monday, I fly to Canada for a week’s holiday. I shall be spending time with family, taking care of a few legal things, eating a ton of food and generally enjoying myself. I shall attempt to blog my holiday regularly and, if I can get access to an SD card reader, maybe put a few piccies up on Flickr. It’s going to be great 🙂

What have I been up to?

The last two weeks seem to have flown by and yet I’m not quite sure what I’ve actually achieved during them.

I had a lovely weekend up in London, visiting my sister and buying pretty baubles in Liberty.

Last weekend was a quiet, not doing much of anything weekend. I didn’t even write.

This weekend has been a little fuller. I’ve done my tax return and worked out that the government owes me £10. I have done a ton of writing and I’m now willing to admit that the ‘short story’ I’ve been working on may be closer to a novella. Hopefully it’s actually a short novel because those in-between things are impossible to sell, or so I’ve been told. I’m planning to fiddle about a bit with a website later and I’ve got lots of knitting done.

Yesterday, just to get myself out and about despite the nasty weather, I wandered down to the local second hand bookshop.  No Chalet School books, sadly, but I did look in the classics section and picked up Cider With Rosie (I read excerpts at school and loved them so I hope the full book is just as good) and Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales because I’m on a Tolkien kick and I’ll want something when I’ve finished The Children of Húrin.

Torchwood finally started this week and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Last year, it didn’t really pick up until episode five and there were still at least two duds in the second half of the season. This year, despite some definite weaknesses in the actual plot, the episode was great fun and thoroughly entertaining. It seems to have been a huge hit with the fans as well. I think injecting a bit of humour and letting the characters be a bit more likeable has helped.  Last year, even Captain Jack was difficult to like and he’s one of the best things to come out of new Doctor Who! Hopefully this trend will continue and the series will be thoroughly enjoyable 🙂