Was I Visited By Some Kind Of Evil Snow Genie?

Ye gods, just because I said the snow was pretty, that didn't mean I wanted all the snow forever. Seriously, it can stop now.

So, That Was Christmas

I hope everyone who celebrates it had a very, very merry Christmas, and that all of you are keeping well through the dark of the winter.

My Christmas was nothing terribly exciting, but there were lovely presents, much turkey was eaten, and much Doctor Who watched, all of which made it entirely my kind of holiday. We even came very close to having a white Christmas: when I got up this morning there was just a little snow on the ground, and the mountain had that pretty dusted-in-powdered-sugar look.

I only wish I didn't have to haul my butt into work so early this morning. It'd have been awfully nice to have had a four-day weekend like a normal person. Ah, well. Guess I gotta pay for all that turkey somehow.

Better Not Pout

I've gotten really bad about updating this blog again, haven't I? Well, let's see what's going on at the moment...

First, Christmas is coming! Although not fast enough for me. I always find this week before Christmas weirdly frustrating. All my presents are bought, all the presents from other people have arrived, everything is ready, and there's nothing to do but wait. And, meanwhile, so much of life is just on hold. I find myself thinking things like, "I want to buy Thing X, but I guess I'd better not, in case someone got it for me for Christmas." And, "I'll have to wait and make that appointment after the holidays." And, "I really need some new jeans and a new pair of shoes, but there's no way I'm braving the mall at this time of year. Better wait. And wait on everything else I need to do in the city, too, since I might as well get it all done in one trip." I'm looking forward to Christmas as much because it means I finally get to unpress the pause button on my life as because of all the nice Christmassy things that go with it. Ah, well. Maybe that's the difference between Christmas as an adult and Christmas as a kid?

Meanwhile, the big news where I live is that they're closing down the Smith's supermarket. This is a huge blow to the town. 66 people out of work -- a significant number in a town this size. And god only knows where most of them are going to go. We've already had enough businesses closing that the place is starting to look frighteningly ghost town-ish. The store isn't actually closing until January, but they're already not replacing their stock. I was in there a couple of weeks ago, and the depleted, denuded shelves made me feel like I'd suddenly stepped into some kind of zombie apocalypse scenario. Just in time for Christmas! Classy, Smith's. Classy. They've got a big banner out front now advertising stuff as much as 75% off. I've been a bit torn between going to to see what I can pick up cheap, and never wanting to set foot in there again because, god, is it depressing, and, also, fuck Smith's, I don't want to give them any more of my money. So far, that second impulse is winning.

December Currentlies

This time out, I'm finally following advice I gave myself ages ago and removing "current worry" from this monthly meme, because, really, the last thing I need is encouragement to dwell even more on the stupid crap I'm inclined to worry about. I am open to suggestions for what to replace it with.

Current clothes: Red sweatpants. Venture Bros. Guild of Calamitous Intent t-shirt. White socks.

Current mood: Kind of restless, in that way that never lets you quite settle down and be productive at anything.

Current music: Nothing at the moment. I'm working on catching up on podcasts again. So many podcasts.

Current annoyance: I may have spoken too soon when I said I was happy with the upgrade to Windows 10. In the week or so since I switched it over, my PC has completely hung up on me twice, which is not something it was inclined to do while running Windows 8.

Current thing: I'm not 100% sure how I felt about everything in the season finale, but in generally, I've been all flappy-hands excited about Doctor Who lately.

Current desktop picture: Speaking of, it's this promo picture for aforementioned season finale. Warning: spoilery. So very spoilery.

Current book: Explorer, book six in C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series, which I am still making my way through, very slowly.

Current song in head: Nothing at the moment, which is a relief, considering some of the stuff that's gotten stuck in my skull recently.

Current refreshment: Mint tea.

Current DVD in player: Nothing in the player. I have season 10 of Supernatural from Netflix, but I can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to watch it, so I've started streaming season 4 of Bob's Burgers instead.

Current thought: I think my washer just stopped. Guess I better go put my laundry in the dryer. At least then I will have accomplished something useful today.

Like The Cybermen, I Have Been Upgraded.

I just upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 10. I hadn't actually intended to do that just yet, but I found out the hard way that when you click on "Upgrade Later," that doesn't mean, as I had assumed, "download the files and be ready to upgrade later, whenever I feel like telling you to," but rather, "you must now schedule your upgrade for sometime in the next few days, and then you will be irrevocably committed to it, bwahahaha!" Oh, well. Except for the fact that I was sure I'd scheduled it for 2 AM and it instead happened at 8 AM when I was actually trying to use the computer, it seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. And I no longer need those third-party apps I had installed on Windows 8 to bring the Start menu back and enable me to use the "modern GUI" apps in resizable windows.

All of which mostly just means that I'm still waiting nervously to find out which part of it I'm going to hate. But, hey, so far, so good!

I Hope It's A Good Book.

I just took this Do You Have A Book Hoarding Problem? quiz. It told me "SEEK HELP NOW. You are becoming a book."

Is that bad?

I Do Have To Wonder What The Questions Were.

Somebody just sent me a link to this Tweet showing Steven Moffat, Peter Capaldi, and Mark Gatiss losing a Doctor Who trivia contest at an Australian convention. Do you know what this means? (Other than that they are hilariously adorable losers?) It means that I am a better Who fan than the people who actually make the show! Yes! On account of how my team won a Doctor Who trivia contest, and theirs lost! That is clearly the only logical conclusion to draw. (Why, no, I'm not ever going to stop crowing about that accomplishment. You gotta take your victories where you can get them, I say.)

Three Things Make A Post

Because I haven't been updating much lately, and I should post something:

1. I spent this morning resealing the gutters on my house. Well, the ones in the front. The ones in the back of the house still need to be done, but I think I about reached the limit of how much of that job I'm willing to do in one day. Scraping off the old stuff is tedious, and the silicone sealant I bought turns out to be way worse to work with than the caulk I used in the bathroom, especially when you're holding the caulk gun upside-down and at odd angles. As a result, my gutters are now kind of a goopy, silicone-y mess. Sigh. Well, at least it's clear, so maybe it won't be too obvious? Honestly, I'm not sure I care much, as long as it's watertight. Man, I really hope it's watertight. Of course, I won't be able to test it until it dries.

This has been yet another installment of Ways It Sucks to Be an Adult. Hey, when you're a kid, if you have to do a big, annoying chore like that, at least you'll probably get a word of praise and maybe a little extra allowance. As an adult, all you get is the dull, practical outcome of not having leaking gutters, if you're lucky, and the responsibility of being the one to do it over, if you're not.

2. A not-good-news update on Nova-kitty: He's continuing to lose weight. The vet now thinks it is very likely due to heart problems. (I hadn't realized heart disease could cause weight loss, but it turns out it totally can. You learn something new every day.) He can't say for sure, though, because he doesn't have the equipment to do a proper echocardiogram, and I'd have to see a specialist for that. Which... At Nova's age, honestly, the stress of diagnosing and treating the problem might not be worth the small amount of extra time they might be able to buy him. For one thing, seeing a specialist would almost certainly mean a long, long car trip into the city -- probably more than one -- and he freaks out terribly just on the ten-minute ride to the local vet. Not long ago, he got so agitated about it, he peed all over himself in the carrier on the way. It's not a happy thing to do to the poor animal.

For right now, at least, we've switched him from the slightly-higher-calorie-than-his-previous-food cat food to special extra-high-calorie canned cat food, in hopes of curbing the weight loss some. The good news is, he loves the stuff, and can't seem to get enough of it. The bad news is, it's given him diarrhea. I'm really, really hoping that'll go away as he adjusts to the new stuff. Well, hey, at least it meant I didn't have to give him his laxative last night.

3. On a happier (and more science-y) note, I thought I'd link to this blog post celebrating NASA's Swift satellite observing its 1,000th gamma ray burst. This is relevant to my life because the VLBA is one of the "telescopes around the planet, which then (if they can) also observe the burst," as mentioned in the article. Most of the time, we're busy observing something else, but sometimes these things happen at just the right time for us to participate, and I'm always slightly tickled by the fact that I'm essentially being e-mailed by a satellite.

Time For This Again!

Current clothes: Dark gray sweatpants. T-shirt from White Sands National Monument. Not the new one I just got the last time I was there, but the older, more faded, somewhat more battered one, which has now been demoted in status to the kind of shirt I wear on weekends when I'm cleaning the house.

Current mood: Mostly okay, with a slight edge of frazzled annoyance. I don't want to be cleaning the house this weekend, you know.

Current music: The Best of Elvis Costello: The First Ten Years. Except there's something wrong with the CD, and the last two songs didn't rip properly.

Current annoyance: So many things. So many. And it seems like every time I responsible-adult one of them into submission, another, often even more annoying one pops up. Recent examples include some of the stucco suddenly falling off my house (or, more accurately, off the overhang that projects over my front door), and discovering as I went to put today's dinner into the crockpot that the onion I'd bought for the soup was rotten inside.

Current thing: Doing productive crap that needs to get done, when, really, I'd much rather just lie on the sofa and read all day.

Current desktop picture: You know what? I think last month, out of sheer habit and haste, I linked to the same wallpaper I've had for ages, when I'd actually just changed it! It's now this wallpaper featuring certain Doctor Who characters.

Current book: C. J. Cherryh's Defender, book 5 in her Foreigner series, which I am making my way through, slowly but surely.

Current song in head: "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf, because somebody requested it on the radio while I was in the car running errands the other day. The DJ didn't seem thrilled about it, but I have to admit, I have a weird fondness for Meat Loaf. His songs are so overwrought and emotionally overblown as to feel almost self-parodic in a way I can't help being amused by, and yet there does seem to be a core of something realistic and sincere to them. And sincere, awkwardly real emotion wrapped up in a ridiculously over-dramatic package seems to me like as good a representation of adolescence as there has ever been.

Current refreshment: I didn't have anything, but reading this, I realized I was thirsty, so I got up and got a diet Pepsi.

Current DVD in player: I just finished season one of The Wire, because that seemed like a giant gap in my quality-television viewing experience that needed to be addressed. And it is, indeed, an excellent show, but it suffers a bit from what I think of as "Game of Thrones Syndrome," which is to say it's got a million characters whose names I kept forgetting or, often, not even catching, and was reduced to making up nicknames for them in my head. (E.g.: Asshole #1 and Asshole #2, Surprisingly Competent Guy, Chubby Cheeks, The Chin, Lt. Where-Do-I-Know-That-Actor-From?, etc.) I did figure out most of them eventually, though. And I sort of have to admire this show's absolute commitment to its lack of a moral center. Every time I'd try to latch on to a character as someone I liked, or thought had integrity, they'd engage in some terrible act of police brutality or corruption, while characters I'd initially dismissed as criminal scum increasingly won my sympathy.

Current worry: I dunno, all the usual crap, really. Most immediately, I'm worried about a tooth that's bothering me. I need to find the time to make a dentist appointment.

Current thought: Well, I rambled a here a lot, and got distracted somewhere in the middle watching Meat Loaf, so this took me longer than I expected it to, but I think now I have to go back and finish up the damned housework. Sigh.

Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Talk

Ten years ago today, I stumbled across some service on the internet that'd let you write letters to your future self and would then send them to you years later. So, I sent some, partly because I was bored and partly because it was the closest I could get to time travel. I've gotten, I think, three of them since then, with the most recent one showing up in my inbox today. While I remember doing this, the e-mails always startle me when they come, because somehow I do not understand the passage of time and can never manage to believe it has actually been that long.

I went back and looked at the blog entry I made the day I sent them. It says, "I just sent some e-mails to the me of the future. I bet she doesn't answer them, though. The jerk." Which... Hey! Screw you, past self! I am damned well going to answer this one, right here, right now!

Thus:

Hello, 2015!

Hello, 2005!

This is the Betty of 2005, after a somewhat longer lapse this time. It's getting iffier whether the e-mail address on this thing will still be valid, though it won't surprise me terribly if it is. Heck, I wouldn't put it past you to remember this letter and keep the address just so you'd get it. Did you?

You know, I don't think it has honestly ever even occurred to me to change the Gmail address this was sent to. I think what I was thinking here is that maybe Gmail wouldn't even be around in ten years' time. Ha! Google is our eternal overlord, Past Me, and Gmail ain't going nowhere.

Anyway... how's the future?

A lot like the past, to be honest. Your life certainly hasn't changed very much. You're boring and predictable, Past Self. You're going to have to fully accept that one day. I'll try to let you know when it happens.

Do we have flying cars and robot housekeepers yet? (We've only managed electric-hyrbid cars and robot vacuum cleaners now, in case you don't remember.)

Well, I guess we've got some fully electric cars, and maybe slightly better robot vacuums? Neither of which I own. I do have a pretty bitchin' smartphone, though.

It's a beautiful fall day here in 2005, though I'm stuck at work without even anything much to do.

Whereas I have today off, but I've got a lot of crap to do. And yet, I am taking the time to answer your e-mail, Past Self, even though I have lots of other unanswered e-mails in my inbox. So who you callin' a jerk, jerk?

I am in pretty good health, though I occasionally suffer from bouts of mild hypochondria. Apparently once you hit your 30s, you start worrying about the ol' body falling apart. I hope yours hasn't.

It honestly startled me to realize that particular "Oh, noes, my body may fall apart at any moment!" thing goes back quite that far, although now that I think about it, I guess I do remember feeling that once I passed 30. Well, Past Self, despite some medical adventures, the ol' corporeal form is still quite functional, but the effects of entropy are becoming increasingly noticeable, and that annoying "mild hypochondria" is going to find more things to feed on. I'm trying to let this be a reminder to myself to enjoy that functionality while I've still got it.

And I have a cute 'lil seven-week-old kitten, who, if he's still around, will qualify for senior citizenship by the time you read this. If he is, give him a cuddle for me.

He's ten! That's not really quite feline senior citizen status yet. But, geez, you should see him now, Past Me. He's huuuuuuuuuuuuuge! And not at all grateful for all that work you put into him, but I will cuddle him for you, anyway.

I hope there's some good TV in the future.

Yes. Yes, there is. Oh, Past Self. Your priorities are... well, not going to change any, really.

With any luck, maybe Doctor Who is currently in the middle of another 25-year run.

It does very much look that way! Even if the ratings, from what I've heard, have dropped a bit this year. But, oh, man, the things that little Whovian you has ahead of her! If I told you what some of them were, you'd look at me like I was nuts. But it's going to be a fun ride! Mostly.

See ya in another ten!

I am honestly nervous about that letter. I think I wrote it with some sense of it being completely impossible to predict what my life would be like that far out, and I more than half suspect that nothing much will have actually changed. Although I'm not at all sure why that feels like a bad thing.

Love,
you

Back atcha, Past Self. Take care of yourself for me.

Stuff And Things

I feel like I should really talk about things other than Doctor Who here once in a while. Like an update on what's going on in my own life. It's just that the answer is "not much." Well, let's see what I've got:

Had kind of a bad night last night, due to some... let's say "gastric distress." I woke up about 3 AM, threw up, and immediately felt a lot better, so it was almost certainly something I ate. But, man, it's a bad thing not to feel well when you've been reading about nasty diseases. (I'm most of the way through David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.) One headache or abdominal twinge, and some completely irrational part of your brain wants to diagnose yourself with Marburg. (Marburg is, of course, a much cooler thing to diagnose yourself with than Ebola, because fewer people have heard of it.)

It looks like the city finally fixed the leaking fire hydrant in my front yard, after at least five phone calls, and it worsening to the point that it was threatening to turn the rest of the street into muddy swampland and not just my yard. Yay.

After years of taking a small amount of hormone for my mildly underactive thyroid, the latest doctor in the local clinic's revolving stable of doctors is insisting I should have an ultrasound done of it. "What do you think that's likely to tell us?" I asked. "Probably nothing," she said. OK, then, doc. At least we'll have another pretty picture of my insides!

I've given up trying to weigh Nova at home. To say that he is uncooperative is putting it mildly. I think I'm going to take him back to the vet in a couple of weeks and let them re-weigh him. He tends to go very still and quiet when he's there, possibly under the belief that veterinarians hunt by seeing movement.

I just checked the weather report to see if we can finally declare the rainy season over, thus removing my excuse for not going out and re-sealing my gutters. (Hey, I don't want to take the chance that it might rain before the caulk dries!) It looks like the answer to that might be "no," but in the course of checking I also discovered that it's supposed to get down below freezing on Thursday. Nooooo! I am not ready for winter! I mean, I don't want to be caulking the gutters out in the cold, do I?

Yeah, that's probably about it for now. Whee, what an exciting life I lead!

The Rest Is...

Happy Halloween! I'm about to head off to a Halloween party soon. Having zero time or energy to devote to coming up with a costume, I decided to go with the lazy Doctor Who fan's solution:




All the points to you if you get the reference!

(But, man, I had not realized quite how difficult it is to take a picture of one's own arm.)

Clearly This Is Just What I Needed For My Stress

(Seriously, what does it say about me that I actually did sort of feel more relaxed after watching that?)

Skinny Kitty Update

Just got Nova back from the vet after having him checked out for his weight loss (as mentioned last time in the currently meme), and... they basically couldn't find anything wrong with him. His thyroid levels were good (which reminds me, I'm overdue to have mine checked). His creatinine levels and white cell counts were outside normal range, but only the eensy-weensiest smidge, so the vet thinks that's probably noise rather than signal, meaning his kidneys are probably fine and he probably doesn't have an infection. They also x-rayed him and didn't see any tumors. Which doesn't necessarily mean there aren't any cleverly hidden ones, but, OK, he probably doesn't have cancer, either. The vet thinks mostly likely it's a gastrointestinal problem, and he's not getting full value out of his food. So they just gave him a vitamin B shot and switched him over to a higher-calorie food. I'm going to keep an eye on his weight -- I actually own a pet scale I originally bought to monitor the fat cat -- and take him back in in a few weeks if he keeps losing weight.

So, for the moment... No news is good news, I guess?

No, I Didn't Forget.

It's much later in the month than usual, thanks to all that vacationy stuff, but, no, I didn't forget the usual state-of-me "currently" meme.

Current clothes: Red sweatpants. Doctor Who t-shirt. White socks.

Current mood: Still kind of tired. Still a bit overwhelmed by the to-do list.

Current music: Nothing at the moment. I'm working on catching up on all the podcasts I didn't listen to while I was traipsing around New Mexico.

Current annoyance: The way taking a break makes you feel so behind on everything once it's over.

Current thing: Books, Doctor Who, the usual. (Man, this is making for a very boring iteration of this meme, isn't it? Sorry about that. Maybe I should have waited until I was more capable of coherent thought.)

Current desktop picture: Still this one.

Current book: I'm almost finished with Firestarter by Stephen King. Apparently I've decided that Stephen King is my default vacation reading now.

Current song in head: Given my current book, what else could it possibly be?

Current refreshment: Nothing, but I'm hungry. I should maybe go and eat one of those zillion snacks my mother brought with her and then left here.

Current DVD in player: Once again: nothing. I'm busy catching up on all the stuff that's accumulated on my DVR in the past couple of weeks. (Note to self: never take vacation at the start of the TV season again.)

Current worry: Nova kitty. He's lost quite a bit of weight over the last several months, so I took him into the vet today to have him checked out. They're going to do some blood tests to check his thyroid and his kidneys, but they wanted him to be fasting overnight to do it, so I'm going to have to take him back in in the morning. He seems mostly OK, otherwise, so here's hoping there's nothing too awful wrong with him, but I am a bit worried.

Current thought: Man, I am hungry. Which is not helped by the fact that I have a pot roast cooking in the crock pot, and it's starting to smell really, really good.

What I Did On My Vacation

Well, the houseguests I mentioned in my last post here, what seems like forever ago, have now departed back to their homes. It was fun showing them around New Mexico, but, man, I now feel kind of exhausted. I blame the lingering effects of getting up at 3 AM, not once but twice, to make it up to the Balloon Fiesta before dawn. It was very cool to finally go, though. Despite having lived in NM for 25 years, this is the first time I've attended. Well, unless you count that one time in college when we drove up, stood outside the fence, and watched the balloons overhead, but didn't actually go into the park because we were too broke even to want to pay the minimal entrance fee. I will say, though, that while I might just possibly be persuaded to get up in the middle of the night and do it again sometime, I am never, ever going on opening day again. The balloons were great. The crowds were nightmarish. Fortunately, Thursday was much better, and well worth it, even if the Thursday night Glowdeo was cancelled due to winds.

We also, among other places, drove down to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. White Sands was a little disappointing this time, I fear, as it was very cloudy, and I hadn't realized just how much a lack of sunlight changes the landscape from blinding otherworldly whiteness to, well, big piles of light-colored sand. Carlsbad, on the other hand, astonishes me every time I go there. This time I was thinking, y'know, maybe I've seen it often enough, maybe it's going to start losing some of its appeal with familiarity. But, nope. It's still just as awe-inspiring the fourth or fifth time, or whatever it is for me now. I suspect I could visit it every day and never get tired of it.

I Did Find A Couple Of Hats For My Eleventh Doctor, So That Was Cool.

Aaargh. I am supposed to be spending today cleaning, in anticipation of having houseguests. What have I been doing instead? Frittering away the whole damned day playing this stupid Doctor Who-themed game on my phone. And it really is pretty stupid. I mean, it looks very nice. But the gameplay consists of nothing but endlessly attacking things by, essentially, playing Bejeweled. Which a) makes no sense, and b) hardly seems appropriate for Doctor Who. Also, I suck at Bejeweled. And yet, I cannot stop playing. I am beginning to suspect it is part of some evil plot. Possibly by the Cybermen. Send help.

To Quote The Fourth Doctor: Sleep Is For Tortoises.

In the space between two twelve-hour night shifts, I have traded an adequate amount of sleep for the opportunity to watch the season premiere of Doctor Who. I regret nothing! I probably will, late tonight, but for now, I regret nothing. Except for how long I have to wait for part 2.

Woo Who!

We won the Doctor Who trivia quiz!!!! Rather to our surprise, really. I mean, I was optimistic going in, and we started out reasonably strong, but there were a disturbing number of questions we missed due to misinterpreting the question, or picking the wrong person's guess, or, most annoyingly, writing down the correct answer and then erasing it and putting down something else instead. (Hey, Telos is almost Mondas, right?) And then there was that one question that was just plain wrong. Seriously, Prisoner Zero is an individual (well, sort of), not a species. Doggone it.

So, we were falling behind quite a lot in the middle, but managed to pull a turn-around in the end. I think it helped, oddly, that the last round turned out to be all about behind-the-scenes and non-canon stuff. We weren't expecting that, but probably neither was anybody else, and some of us happened to have the right kind of random knowledge there. So we ended up tied for first! Which led to a five-question sudden death round... Which we tied again! Apparently both teams got the same question wrong. (Stupid Torchwood.) The tie-breaking tie-breaker was then a ridiculous arithmetic question. Something like: take the total screen time of the 9th, 10th and 11th doctors according to io9, multiply by the number of years Rose traveled into the future in "The End of the World," and divide by the number of letters in "Raxacoricofallapatorius." Though I think there were more terms than that; it's all become something of a blur now. Interestingly enough, both team's answers were pretty close to each other but we were closest to the actual answer. Thus, VICTORY! (Not of the Daleks).

Ha! Take that everybody who ever shook their head over me remembering "useless" things. MY KNOWLEDGE OF DOCTOR WHO IS WORTH ACTUAL MONEY! I feel as if my whole life has been vindicated. Heh.

September Currentlies

Here it is, September, and suddenly it's obvious that we're on the descending arc of the year. It's still summer here, no question, but there's something in the air that makes you think the world is finally remembering the idea of winter.

But enough waxing poetic about the weather. Here's the usual meme thingy.

Current clothes: Red sweatpants. Black t-shirt from LibraryThing ("LibraryThing.com: What's on your bookshelf?"), because LibraryThing is freaking awesome. Black socks. Brown boots.

Current mood: OK. A teensy bit tired or groggy, as I've just switched off night shifts, and my circadian rhythms are currently less traditionally rhythmic and more like one of those weird avant-garde modern compositions.

Current music: In addition to the usual whatever-random-stuff-my-iPod-decides-to-give-me, I've also been listening to a lot of actual albums lately, while doing various things around the house. Most recently Warren Zevon's My Ride's Here and Chameleon Circuit by Chameleon Circuit. That second one being a manifestation of my excited anticipation for the new season of Doctor Who.

Current annoyance: Mosquitos. I have a mosquito bite on my hand. On the palm. How the hell does that even happen?

Current thing: Yeah, I have definitely been in a state of Who-fannish excitement lately. Not only am I very much looking forward to the season premiere, but I'm also going to be participating in this nationwide Doctor Who trivia quiz. We did really well on the Star Trek one, so, hey, maybe we can take home the prize this time!

Current desktop picture: Still this. I have been vaguely thinking about changing it again, but we'll see whether I ever actually do it.

Current book: Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, which is an omnibus compilation of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. Very weird and interesting, but it's kind of slow-going. I'm thinking I really shouldn't have started it while I was on nights; it's not a good book for tired brains.

Current song in head: All kinds of odd stuff has been drifting in and out, but it's pretty quiet now. I think most recently was "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons, which I am now going to try not to think about too much, lest it come back, ridiculously sticky tune that it is.

Current refreshment: Nothing, but I'm thinking of going out for a bacon cheeseburger soon.

Current DVD in player: Disk one of season 3 of The Legend of Korra. It's not as good as Avatar: The Last Airbender -- which sets an extremely high bar -- but I am enjoying it. And season 3, so far, actually does feel like it has more of the sensibility of the original show, in ways that I can't quite pin down yet.

Current worry: I've got the crack where water was coming into my house all sealed up, in such a way that I really can't see how there could be more problems with it, but I nevertheless can't shake the worry that my bedroom will somehow get wet again the next time we have a good-sized rainstorm. And then I won't know what to do.

Current thought: I could have gone with a different "current thing," which is that I am slowly but surely making improvements to my material environment by replacing old, worn-out, or non-existent furniture and appliances. I just bought a new headboard for my bed, because the old one finally fell apart completely. I'm much happier with this one, in part because it actually bolts to my bedframe -- the old one was the wrong size -- and thus does not immediately fall over whenever you move the mattress away. (This was, needless to say, one of the reasons why the old one was in bad shape.)