The light of ancient mistakes

Whatever you feel, whatever you hide,
Whatever you carry deep inside."

I am less close to death this morning, which is good. However, I have to babysit tonight. Maybe I've mentioned before how much I loathe kids, and how mutual a feeling it is, but somehow, I got talked into this. It's babysitting for Helen's daughters, Laura and Rebecca, aged one and three. According to Helen they'll be asleep before I get there, and I'll be extremely unlucky if they wake up, and I can only hope. My mother had one piece of advice: "Don't shake the baby!"
Bittersweet. But true. If anything untoward happens I will retreat to the other side of the room and call chanandlerbong. "Becca! What the hell do I do! Waaaah!"

That's not until this evening, though. There's a whole day of general lunacy to be got through first. For example... the first thing that happened today was my mother's stealing my dogtags. I didn't see her, but I know she did. I was lying in bed awake but with my eyes closed, and I heard her come in.
rustle, rustle - that was her picking up my jeans.
clinkclink thunk - that was the dogtags dropping out of the pocket onto the floor.
groan, clinkclink - that was her leaning down and picking them up.
silence, clink - that was her trying to read what's written on them without her glasses, and failing.
clink, thud, clinkclink, thud, clinkclink - that was her leaving, still holding them.

I haven't found them yet. They will no doubt turn up, as my spiked pair of bracelets turned up in the drawer where we keep the clingfilm.

In the meantime, I have done a few things. I have removed "Buy 'H' and get brain" from the whiteboard, and written, "There is always something to remember."
And there is. I have decided to take my History paper 2 file with me tonight. If the kids are asleep, I may as well start revising Roosevelt's New Deal, and I can then do the questions at some point before Thursday. I also might print off my English notes. This talk is proving quite... well, odd. Yesterday, Yusra informed me she'd been trying to get hold of me all day. She knew what she had decided to do her talk on, but she couldn't remember what it was called and therefore couldn't google for it. It took me quite a few minutes to realise she was looking for the word "narcolepsy." The girl is nothing if not original.

The only other talk I have any advance knowledge of is Frankie's. She's doing it on John Lennon, because, as she says, if all else fails she can just whip out her guitar.

What else have I done? Yes, I have added "dogtags" to Microsoft Word's internal spellchecker, because it wasn't there already for some reason. I do use the spellcheck, and I like the thesaurus. It gives me words like "shambolic" when I need them, and then tells me they don't exist by way of the spellchecker.

Food shopping came next. Oh, yes, how much fun. I was bored out of my mind, and so, I picked up the nearest magazine that wasn't wrapped up in cellophane, and opened it to a random page. The magazine proved to be Mizz, staple of first-year schoolbags everywhere, but what came next really, really bit muchly. Who was on their new music page, but....
... Something Corporate.
I am officially having a Daniel Jackson Hissy Fit™. Something Corporate? No. Please, no. My favourite fucking indie band of all time. The only band ever to get away with a ten-minute piano epic about a girl called Konstantine. The band who I am going to see live in a week from today.
Something Corporate, reduced to teenybopper status. Argle.

Stockholm syndrome

Thunder crash, and lightning flash, and the weather outside the window matches my mood. Pine branches are beating against the glass.

In the five minutes that have passed since I wrote that, a shower of hailstones have fallen that are the size of peas.

Thunder. Crash. Lightning flash.

I had a reasonable argument with my mother. It escalated into heavy acrimony, but I don't care and I find it liberating.

Crash. Now it's raining. Looks like someone up there is overturning buckets.

Hannah wants to kidnap me. I think if she tried it this afternoon, I'd immediately succumb to Stockholm syndrome. It's so cosy in my room. Thinking about her, I wish she was here.

Anyway. Fanfic is the next thing on my to-do list.

*waves hand in welcome*

Yes, folks, update no. 4275943593.

It's important, though. My beloved Colleen has now finally arrived on livejournal. After being constantly bugged about it by myself and snowdrop24, she finally succumbed and accepted a code.

Say hello to hathy_col - Stargate-y person, has an odd-but-nice elf fetish, and is all-around Good Person.

Must go, myself. Got to ring Helen and tell her I'm still babysitting for her little holy terrorsdarlings...

[Edit - Issued five-minute challenge on mash-slash, and even did it myself. Astonishing, ne?]

(no subject)

They were little angels. I'm serious. They were asleep when I got there, and they were asleep when I left, with nothing in between. Not a word/cough/sniffle out of either of them. And I like kids when they're asleep. Parents were all panicky, got home by ten fifteen, frightened something had happened, but nothing did. And they paid me £10 when I would have worked for free, and besides, I didn't work. I did absolutely nothing.

No, not nothing. I read the newspaper, made some notes for those New Deal questions, even started learning it. I texted chanandlerbong, who is going to Cardiff tomorrow, and then I flicked on the television, heard the opening notes of Danse Macabre, and suddenly started feeling very happy. I'm sure that wasn't the effect Saint-Saens was going for with that piece, not with Death and his violin and all, but no, it meant I got to watch Jonathan Creek tonight. I love the show. There's alwaysa grisly murder, and a surreal subplot. The subplot tonight involved an old lady, choked by a crustacean on a date with Adam Klaus, followed by a streaker at the magic show, who is so successful they sign him so he'll do it every night, and then Jonathan gets pissed off and throws him out, so he streaks at the old lady's funeral. Oddly, there were no conviently placed chairs/lampshades/planks when the guy was streaking. Ewww. And the main mystery was good too.

And now I'm home. Productive night, all told.