Black Doggerel

Spike is doing awesome well. I had this great long mental list of Things I Was Worried he Might Not Be Able To Do After His Surgery and he has now cleared the list completely. He can eat whole raw chicken quarters, albeit more slowly than before, and he does require them to be handed to him because he has trouble picking them up without his front canines, but once I do that he's good to go. He can gnaw on recreational beef bones, though he has voluntarily ceased his annoying habit of running round the room carrying one when he's very excited or wants to piss Squish off. He can play tug, although he needs to go carefully getting his initial grip right and his back teeth are far more destructive on the tug object than his front teeth were. He can catch tennis balls in midair. He can pick up and carry a football (soccer ball to you Colonials) although it does need to be a bit flabby for him to get a grip - I doubt he could do a fully inflated one any more. He can play the I'M A BIG HARD PROTECTION DOG BITING YOU game with me and he still drops my sleeve the moment I tell him.

My heart thumps every time I look at him. You didn't die, I say to myself in wonder. I got to keep you.

I have not forgotten gratitude or the list of people I am making art for. I love all of you.

I've been having a bad brain week, or more accurately few weeks, hence the lack of updateage. I sort of wanted to write a great long post about panic attacks, drugs, fear and mental illness but ...I don't think I can get any of that out right now. It's too loud and tangled and I doubt my ability to make sense about it. It'll go away and maybe I'll try and write it then. I don't know.


meanwhile, it is my niece Maya's fourth birthday today. FOUR. Holy crap.

oh yes - you know that TV meme that's been going the rounds? I'm too weltschmerzy and low energy to do it myself but my thanks to whoever it was that recommended Fringe. TOTALLY IN LOVE. Am also, as a direct result of said meme, in love with Justified, but I remember who recommended that and she isn't on my list. ANYWAY THANK YOU.

HOLY CRAP SPOOKS IS THE BEST SPY SHOW OF ALL TIME. I've missed it so hard.

Ros - I love you. So gloriously cold and badass and passionate and dead fucking serious. You are my new all-time favourite character and I'm terrified that means you won't reach the end of season eight.

Lucas - It's the quiet ones you've got to watch. You little beauty.

Malcolm - YOU MADE ME CRY. YOU BIG DAMN FUCKING QUIET HERO.

Also, ( spoiler for first episode )

In other words, SQUEEEEEEE! Also I will be needing icons.

everyone on my f-list is posting lyrics lately. i want to post to prove i'm not dead but I feel sick with nerves, inadequacy and self-loathing at the thought of actually writing anything.

( so i am falling on the bandwagon. )

The Drive-By Truckers are my best discovery of 2008, and I need to lick slave2tehtink's face for introducing us.

Here they are playing it.

I am blown away. I am still shivering inside with the thrill of him. His voice, his musicians, his presence - the power, passion, precision, joy and virtuosity of all of them. They were magnificent. He was magnificent.

I can't tell you. I'll do my best to show you.



First we Take Manhattan - Glastonbury - He did this one better last night than he is here - stronger and fiercer.

Anthem - Wroclaw, September

Famous Blue Raincoat - Helsinki, October

and this person has a whole load more clips.

so damn good. So good I can't even begin to tell you.

-6 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

...I wonder if ticking the "reacts to marital congress with enthusiasm and delight" box scored me Good Wife or Bad Wife points? And if it rated more importantly than wearing red nail polish or doing the cooking in my pyjamas?

I am reminded of my grandmother, an actual 1930s Wife, doing the cooking in her dressing gown with a cigarette dangling from her lips, dropping ash in the food. Fuck it, they were happy together, more or less. And my grandmother rocked, hardass mathematical bitch that she was.

In other news, I'm still blown away from Forest of the Dead. I have a friend who reminds me so very strongly of the Doctor, and David Tennant's Doctor* in particular, that it's just not funny and it's never struck me more strongly than it has in this episode.

( Not really spoilery quote, but it's under the cut just in case. )

*Not you, if you're reading this. You're Tom Baker's Doctor, and a little of Sylvester McCoy's. (Edited to add: Almost forgot Jon Pertwee. You're the only man I know who could carry off that opera cape thing.) And you both know who you are. Don't try and tell me you don't.

Went out to get Throne Of Jade - and I forgot that our shopping mall does this Farmer's Market thing on Sundays, where local farm shops come and set up stalls in the car park. I resisted Dorset honey and handmade Dorset Blue Vinney and leek pasties, but several of the meat stalls had little grills and were handing out free tastes of freshly-cooked local sausage. I couldn't resist that, and the Cumberlands in particular gave me a When Harry Met Sally moment right there.

So I have a lot of sausages: chicken and mushroom, minted venison, Cumberland, pork and apple, pork and stilton. And Dorset apple cake. And now I have no monies left. But sausages, dragons and cake, OH MY!

The triumph of hope over experience: me, walking into a bookshop simply to savour the mingled scents of new books, thick carpet and coffee, and imagining I could come out without buying a book.

The book was naominovik's Temeraire, which has been on my "must get round to reading sometime" list for ages. The blurb on the back made it sound like Anne McCaffrey and Patrick O'Brian's love child - and if it had only been that, I still would have had fun reading it. But it was a lot more interesting and original than that, and with much better dragons, and it made me cry twice. It was really bloody good.

I am now deciding if I need groceries more than I need to walk down to Waterstone's and buy the next one tomorrow. I suspect the book will win. I've got enough coffee and pet food to last the fortnight, anyway.

Foot is still painful and magenta-coloured, but improved to the point where I now doubt it was broken. Just very deeply bruised and a bit punctured.

Right wrist is now giving trouble but that's perennial and regular. It'll be fine by this time tomorrow.

In the meantime, I give you ( a music dump. )

In other news: I loved Torchwood from Day One, but the last episode is the first one I can't pick holes in. It made me sniffle and that doesn't happen easily. Also, I have discovered, while rewatching Firefly for what must be the several hundredth time, that my favourite episode by far is Out Of Gas.