Time-blind

I swear I'm doing things in my corner.  Not all of them are writing or particularly creative. . . unless you want to include work that means I get to purchase foodstuffs which means I get to bake or cook. . . 

In which case, I suppose I sort of am being creative.

I'm also being creative with my packing.  You see, I'm traveling halfway across the world in less than a week to participate in a wedding.  This takes a fair bit of energy, both the preparations for travel and sorting my workload so my office partner/boss doesn't drown while I am away.  I have a nice boss.  I don't want her to drown in invoices.

What I'm getting to is this: I will soon be a number of timezones away from where I currently am and may not get an opportunity to update in as regular a fashion as I might wish.  I will try, that is certain (Oh god, there are so many little drafts running around here).  But I'm also going to be all over my home state for 2.5 weeks.  In this time, I will probably be able to mostly adjust to the timezone.

Aaaaand then I will leave and go back to Australia, thereby starting the sleep disturbance process all over again.  

I will effectively be time-blind for the next few weeks.

Here.  Have a draft image related to something Justin is working on!

. . . oh god.  This was forever ago.  I'm so sorry.  Please, please don't gouge out your eyes.  There are so many delicious books to read.

Looking Back is Always Strange

When I was younger, I spent many Saturday mornings on the floor of the living room, watching the TV.  This was a normal enough pasttime for kids in my age group (somewhere between 7 and 13 years).  But this is me and this is specifically me looking back at my childhood and being more than a little puzzled.

I spent Saturday mornings watching QVC or the Home Shopping Network (Clearly I was not the one in control of the TV).

But more than this, I got excited about it.  "Only three hundred left!  A limited quantity!" and it was this amazing thing.  You'd watch the numbers climb and think, deep down that it wasn't likely, it was an underdog sort of chance, but that they could do it.  They could sell out.

. . . Oh my god, what the hell was I so excited about?

Maybe this is why I don't often recall my childhood.  Because I recall at strange times (like at work today) and there's this moment of ". . . what?"  Surely there's no way I was ever so excited over so strange a thing!  But no.  I know that I remember rightly.  I must have used up so much of my excitement when I was a kid because I don't get that riveted now.

Unless you want me to talk about Brandon Sanderson and his ability to world build.

. . . You don't want that.  I sound like a girl having a massive crush.  Just of the literary sort.

So.  Maybe I do still get excited about things.  My strangeness hasn't decreased; just changed.

Little Lambs

Mary may have had a little lamb, but not all lambs are white.  Some are mottled like Blue Heelers (a point of irony if you know what heelers are for.  Sort of a reversal of the wolf in sheep's clothing), some are tawny like wheat ready for thrushing.

Some are like soot, set to grow into black sheep.

Here we have just such a one.  Either willfully or unwillfully abandoned by the mother, the result is still the same.  We had a young lamb without a mother.  Alyce and Suzie call him 'Woolie.'

Peachy McCrockPot: The Early Days

I call him 'Peachy McCrockPot.' 

It's mostly because I wholly believe we should all have at least a rough idea of where we're going in life. 

The other lamb kept on premises is a plain, nondescript white among sheep-kind.  This is probably just a ruse, to be quite honest.  The nondescript sheep had been unfortunately singled out some weeks ago from the same herd as Peachy McCrockPot by an excitable dog.  You see, when dogs get excited about sheep, they tend to bark. . . or to want to hug the sheep.  

With their teeth.

Obviously, the older lamb survived the experience, probably because whatever canine exercising his wiles had no idea what to do with a sheep once he caught it around the throat (how we managed to transport and keep the animal alive is something of a story in itself).  End result?  Two sheep on premises.  Yet again we have a naming inconsistency between the Alyce/Suzie faction and myself.  They call him 'Lucky' which is true enough.  I call him Colonel WoolyBritches on account of the expression that he had when he realised we had finally effectively fenced him (for the time being).

There's scientific evidence suggesting that sheep can feel rage.  Seeing that expression as we walked away?  I can believe it.  So never quite believe that lambs are docile and sweet.  Just because they don't have much in the way of defense capability doesn't mean that they aren't capable of more than meekness.

We might just be harboring the ruminant incarnation of Hitler.

And as for Peachy?  Don't worry about him.  He's growing into a bona fide bruiser of a ram.  All the better for my crock pot.