Michelle Taylor

I keep slipping behind on LJ. There are bits of your LJs that I am probably never going to read now. There are posts on your LJs that I wanted to reply to but have been lost in the mists of time. I would like to apologise for this, but I feel that apologising for it would mean that I wouldn't do it again and would try and repair it, and I *could* read everything and reply to everything, but then I would never get my head back.

I kept quite a comprehensive diary of most of Spring Harvest, but I don't have my Psion cable so I can't post that right now. It was entertaining but not necessarily very useful. I seem to be just drifting through life at the moment, but this is probably due to a combination of holiday-itis and my period being due for the first time in two months. I do seem to have lost touch with God to a slightly worrying extent, though.

There was a week between Word Alive and JemCon, but I have no idea what happened to it. In the middle of it there was a Data Connection interview, which was fun. Unfortunately I'd neglected to inform my dad that it would take 4-5 hours, and so he sat in the car the whole time, which had the additional entertaining effect of making the battery flat, causing us to have to call up the AA and sit around in the car for an additional hour. (With no music, because the car battery was dead.) The 'On-Time Repairs' franchise that was doing AA in the area took rather a while and many frantic phone calls to find where we were parked, and then took about thirty seconds with some jump leads to get us going again. Then I ate food which I remembered as nice and edible but which turned out to be full of onions.

JemCon was entertaining. The first night was taken up with playing Munchkin until everyone lost the will to live (and a rather sick and twisted little game called Lunch Money which was the card game of playground fights, although I still maintain it would have been much better if everyone had actually read out the card text in creepy-little-kid voices), and the girls went to the funfair on the way to get food (we went on the carousel and the waltzer, and got whiplash because surprisingly enough the car full of screaming girls got much more attention than the one other that had a little black kid and his dad, meaning we had four guys spinning us around, and were hugely disappointed because they had no bouncy castle and the trampolines were swarming with very small children). The Saturday contained two games (well, four, but running in parallel); I chose the 'conspiricy theories' game (over Deadlands) and the Vampire game (over 'action movies').

The Conspiricy Theories game was a little slow in places, and my hacker character required more thinking than I really felt like doing, but did manage to get beaten up by the party and almost crawl away in time to be the only survivor but then failed their 'get past the bad guy' roll. The Deadlands game looked more interesting, but I don't know if it was. The Vampire game was great fun, as our party consisted of a diablerist, a hippie, a Lasombra and my character, a gangrel-caitiff sociopath. There was lots of killing, in which we discovered that ghouls are much harder opponents than vampires and my character fell into torpor for a couple of months but was rescued by the hippie (the other party members having cut and run).

On Sunday I ran a cut-down version of London Below; the party had the standard introduction, then 'time passes' to level up a couple of times, then had to rescue the fairy girl (which they weren't related to in this case) from the goblins, having been sent by the druids. They insisted on trying to wander up and down the tube tracks a few times trying to rescue the girl, which meant they had to be rescued by Darkhunters once and took down a patrol of Drow despite only being 2nd level characters *but then just went back to Keshton and lost all their progress down the track rather than carrying on*. Um. I was quite astounded by the stupidity of that last move, but it did let me give them some Bardic Knowledge and Gather Information to get them on the track I thought they'd take after they got vampired. I'd invited dr_vannacutt along but he decided to play Lunch Money instead of a game he'd already seen the first bit of.

That went on slightly later than I was planning, so it was really quite late by the time I set out across London to attempt to get home. I'd carefully planned out a route on the map beforehand, but unfortunately was scuppered by the A10 having inconvenient one-way bits, and ended up wandering around until I found the A1 and got out onto the M25 a couple of junctions down.

For the last couple of days I have mostly been sleeping, prodding my email, and playing computer games.

Today I walked to lectures through a blizzard. It was, however, a very short-lived blizzard; just enough to damp-ify my new fluffy hat. The hat seems to have survived quite well, though. Insert rant here about how many hats I lose and how they're quite expensive.

I also managed to drag myself into town in the slightly warmer part of the day just after lunch, and bought myself nice pate and nice bread and nice fruit (cherries and 'tropical fruit' and figs; the tropical fruit was very nice and I wish I'd paid more attention to what it actually *was*). I like food, which is something of a shame because I am still rather oversized for a Chessypig. I think I might invest in some new size 14 jeans and admit I'm just going to be roundy again. The fat might insulate me against the cold, after all, because it is Very Freezing.

Currently I'm still kind of suffering from depression; I meant to do stuff this afternoon and spodded and ate fruit instead. At least I am now snacking on fruit rather than chocolate, which seems like an improvement. Church last night mostly made me cry because I was in a 'woe, I shall never be happy again and there are lots of happy people here' kind of mood, but eventually I calmed down. Now I'm reasonably content, just prone to hermitting, which is why I'm here writing long LJ posts rather than out at Ark. (Well, that and the freezing cold, which meant that it was easier to run to Hall than to walk.)

I started working on an Ars Magica character generator, but got snarled up in the vast quantity of data entry required. Also, I swear this chair is going to kill me if I sit in my room and code too much.

The dreaded Group Project has begun; so far we have a Real Manager (Part II General, did some management courses, doesn't know the difference between Java and Javascript or that someone has to install and maintain things which are on the web instead of them magically appearing), two mathmos, two coders and a web monkey, oh and me, who has managed to get herself volunteered for 'Documenter' and 'Programming Manager', which apparently means I get to maintain the Vast UML Diagram of Doom and try and munge together the code that the others write. Why is it that I can never just let people be incompetent? In case you're interested, we're doing the Lottery Server project, which is actually a web interface for university societies to run raffles.
( TT on Saturday. It good. )
Now, if only I could actually be as interested in my Ars Magica characters...

My head is made of lead. Also I forgot to pick up my prescriptions whilst in town. I am terrified that I shall never see my poor little car again, because they were meant to be looking at it for an hour starting from 9:30am and then ringing me, and they haven't. I checked the phone number several times but I can't help but worry that I transposed a digit or something; but I don't want to be pushy (and I don't want to have to walk back across town and collect it right now because I feel very dead).

I haven't felt properly alive since the weekend; I'm not sure whether I actually have some kind of illness or whether it is just the crushing weight of stress. At the weekend I ran a Nobilis game which I think should be the last RPG I ever run because they're not worth the stress; I lost points for running away and going to sleep for a couple of hours in the middle of Sunday. Then on Monday because I had lost my Psion I spent an hour in a doctors' waiting room (I'd got the time of my appointment wrong). Yesterday I attempted to take my car to the nice Cambridge Vehicle Services people and failed because I had an address which was seven years out of date for them (yet still the top hit on Google).

Hence today I had to get up really early to get my car to them, and the freezing cold wind almost killed me on the way back (I also forgot to get a hat; I need a hat so I don't get such awful headaches from the wind, and I left my hat in a church in Lincolnshire). I have also lost another glove and possibly another two on top of that, leaving me with one mismatched pair with a hole in the side of one.

I am not very good at life and suspect I am going to fail it. I hope I have some kind of illness which will go away, because currently I am good for nothing.