I thought it was only lytteltonwitch who attracts weird people, but it seems to be rubbing off on me. Last night I was in town for my ESOL class (which was really interesting – among other things we talked about cultural differences and culture shock, and had a talk from a Chinese woman who emigrated…

We decided to change the meetup schedule for this month (partly because of my ESOL classes on Tuesday nights, and partly just as an experiment to see if we’d get any newbies along), and meet on a Monday night instead of Tuesday. Unfortunately, I forgot to advertise it on Yahoo until yesterday, so the experiment…

Suddenly, the convention has gone from being weeks away to being this week. I think I’m almost ready though: both secret projects are complete, and one is on its way to Sherlockfan; the bags are sewn and lytteltonwitch has added the logos and sent them up to Wellington; I’ve sorted out which books I’m taking…

Four years ago today I joined Bookcrossing. I first heard about it through an email list I used to contribute to – people were sharing interesting web sites, and someone mentioned this cool on-line book club they’d discovered. I’d like to say I immediately went and joined, but I actually didn’t even bother to click…

I think I’ll let the photos speak for themselves (and yes, that’s me at the sewing machine, and no, I wasn’t hiding from the camera, that was actually the only way I could see what I was sewing!): [album 128913 050207secret01.jpg thumblink] [album 128913 050207secret02.jpg thumblink] [album 128913 050207secret03.jpg thumblink] [album 128913 050207secret04.jpg thumblink] [album…

Waitangi Day tomorrow, so I decided to take today off as well and turn this into a long weekend so that I can actually get myself vaguely organised for the convention. I did have good intentions of getting up at my normal weekday time this morning and start work on convention stuff right away to…

The other thing that died this week, apart from the phone, was our DVD player. No idea why, but it was a super-cheap no-brand $50 model that was just over a year old (and had a one-year warranty, what a surprise), so I suspect planned obsolescence had something to do with it. That or the…

Yayyy!!!! We’ve got the internet back again!!! Oh, and the phone, but that’s not so important. Apparently the phone line across the street was broken, but when they fixed that, the phone still didn’t work – it turned out that our phone had broken as well. Presumably when the line broke it sent a surge…

Our phone line died yesterday afternoon, so we were left without phone, and more importantly, without internet! (we have broadband, but it still uses the phone line to carry the signal) I hadn’t realised just how dependent I am on the internet until I was stuck without it last night – I kept wandering helplessly…