Now that I've caught up on this week's TV, I have one thing to say: it's a sad and strange day when the start of SPN's new season blows the Who finale out of the water on my squee meter.

Someone wake me up when Moffat steps down please.

I should probably do myself a favour and stop watching the Sarah Jane Adventures before I blow a bloodvessel or break my monitor out of sheer irritation. So they should stop having fucking awesome guest stars that force me to fucking watch it. Grr, arrgh, grump, piss, moan.

I actually couldn't watch more than fifteen minutes of last season's The Gift. I could just about live with the Slitheen on Doctor Who, because there was Nine and Blon which was fucking awesome. There was serious characterisation and a genuine feeling of threat alongside the fart jokes and the not-very-subliminal "fat people are greedy liars with no table manners that make absurdly ineffectual villains you can kill with salad dressing" message. (The Gift may well have had more than that going on, but I will never know because the heavyhanded coded message was too much for even me to swallow. I still haven't gone back and watched it.)

Part of my problem is me rather than the show. I just don't like Sarah Jane. I never have. I don't find her attractive, her voice grates me like grit in the gonads, her smug middleclass sanctimony and her facial expressions make me want to punch her in the kidneys. And I watch her any-fucking-way because this is my best and oldest fandom and I don't want to miss out on any of it. I can't win and I feel like the only dissenting fan in the village, which is irksome in its own way. The only regular character I've ever liked even a little is Clyde, who in my personal headcanon is going to be a shit-hot Torchwood agent one day.

( Spoilers for part one of Death of the Doctor. I may need to get drunk before I try for part two. )

also, red berets? fucking cool.

( In which I whine about the weather some more. Includes brief chatlog extract. )

So, yeah. Not dead. Still reading my f-list, still looking at your photos, still love you. Just too fucking hot and grouchy to do anything about it.

Two things - firstly, what the fuck's the weather playing at? I spend the entire summer gleeful because it rained and I didn't keel over with heat delirium even once - and now, when it's supposed to be fucking AUTUMN, I'm unable to take the dogs for a short walk without having to dive into a cold bath and feed Spike ice cubes as soon as I come home. And I'm scared to take him for runs in the park. I did the other day and I thought he was going to collapse on the way home.

I blame cottonmanifesto. Take this fucking God-awful weather with you when you go home!

Secondly, my Mum has an AIM screenname and she's been taught how to use it. Next stop, Livejournal. Be afraid, be very afraid!

Reasons why I hate summer that have nothing to do with bitching about excess heat.

1. I can't wear my coat. This means I have to carry poo bags, lumps of sausage and rubber balls in the pockets of my trackie bottoms (Colonials: that's British for sweat pants). My coat has zippered Spike-proof pockets to keep balls in. My trackie bottoms don't. Today he pickpocketed the ball while I was busy leashing Squish, so we had the fun of walking to the park with him in I HAS A BALL mode. Spike has to have low-friction soft rubber balls because he's already worn a quarter-inch off his canines from tennis ball abrasion; so there's the added fun of him dropping the fucking thing every ten yards and having to lunge after it like a Great White after a surfboard, jerking me and Squish along behind him like forgotten fishing tackle.

The other day he attempted to pick my pocket on the way home from the park, caught his muzzle in the pocket, and dragged my trackie bottoms plus underpants down to my knees on Woodbury Avenue. That was even more amusing.

2. Squirrel season. My street is lined with huge mature oak trees and every damn squirrel for miles around arrives here in spring when the leafbuds become edible, and stays till the acorns are all eaten. First they spend a while doing happy squirrel mating chases all over the place; then they make more squirrels, and right about now is when all the stupid new young squirrels are learning what dogs are by dashing right in front of mine. If I had terriers we'd have killed many by now - as it is, they've just nearly killed me with the yanking and the barking and the 'splodey.

3. Fox season. They've been here since about February when they started fucking noisily in the dead of night and setting the dogs off. Now they're all in hunting overdrive for their newborn or almost-born cubs and they're every-fucking-where. It's rare for me to walk dogs after dark without bumping into one, and the other night there was a heavily pregnant vixen hunting moles on the lawn right underneath Spike's lookout window. They excite the dogs more than squirrels and cats put together and garnished with sausage. Every hair on Spike's back stands on end, he hurls himself at the window and barks like a ship of the line's full broadside. Squish is possibly even more disturbing; he is a hunting dog by nature and foxes make him bay. Unfortunately he bays soprano, and the noise that comes out of him sounds like a pig being tortured. The two of them going off at once has to be heard to be believed.

So yeah. Roll on winter please.