A bad mood can be much-improved by a bitchin' game of Off-Road Demolition Derby at the arcade I'm just sayin'.

In other news, I dreamt about ( Harmony )

First snow! I love snow. However, I am renting a car to drive to Vancouver for Christmas, and you know, it didn't occur to me until today, that it might well snow at some point during Christmas week. And you know what? I lived in Orlando for most of my driving life, and there's no snow there. Which means, naturally, that I've never, ever driven in snow.

Good times.

Any tips, flist of mine?

Oh, so last night, I dreamt it snowed, and that I had a huge field behind my apartment, hip-deep in snow, and that it was brilliantly sunny and kids were having snowball fights. Then, today, it snowed? Coincidence? I think not, my young friends, I think not!

The night before last, ( I had a very charming dream about Elizabeth and Radek. )

Anyway, it was very nice.

( My snowy day! ) At least SGA gives me something to live for!

( Plot? What Plot? Wherein I jabber on and on and on about Miller's Crossing. )

First of all, happy birthday to the delightful thisisbone!

Second, I had very ( sweet SGA dreams )

Thirdly, read minnow1212's exquisite birthday story for the extra-fancy minim_calibre (happy b-day, to you as well!).

I was up far too late reading yuletide stories, as one does, but I got ten solid hours of sleep. (I dreamt that I'd sleep until 3 PM and was a bit worried about that, but man, I love sleep.) I also dreamt that ( I went to visit runpunkrun )

I dreamt that Miko and I were on a tour bus with the rest of the science team and debchan. ( Dream on. )

In other news, I went to the Aquarium yesterday and I saw seals and otters and cowfish and an octopus and seahorses and cuttlefish. Sea otters are HUGE, seriously, I had no idea they were so big, probably five feet in length. Also, they use tools, which I already knew, but what I didn't know is that they have an otter + rock = OTP thing going on. They find the rock that they've always dreamed of and then they keep it for the rest of their lives, tucked away under their arm when they're not using it. FYI, cuttlefish look like spaceships and cowfish look like tiny disembodied alien heads. In the tidepool section, I touched a sunflower starfish and some sea anemone-looking things and a purple sea urchin. I didn't get my face painted, but I gave it some serious thought. Woo, aquarium!

Oh and also, I am currently slathered with this green mint julep mask by Queen Helene which I got for a buck fifty at Bartell Drugs. It sucks out all manner of evil and makes your pores so! tiny! Seriously, this stuff is like magic beans! For your face!

I don't really know how that metaphor would apply, but the thing is: I am beautemous!

Apparently, I liked Welcome Back, Kotter more than I'd realized. Last night, I dreamt that Mr. Kotter took all the Sweathoggs out to lunch.

What a guy, that Mr. Kotter.

Yes, I am old. Shut up.

I dreamt I was in a giant blue SUV with John and Rodney. John was driving and Rodney was huddled up in the back with a briefcase balanced on his knees. We pulled over so that he could get out for the conference he was going to, the one he clearly didn't really wish to attend. He leaned over and said to John: "Imply that you have the bullwhip." John, who knew that the bullwhip (Rodney had gotten it from an Indiana Jones prop sale and it had never been used for anything even slightly kinky) was back at Rodney's place, nodded gamely and said, "I have the bullwhip." And Rodney crept out of the SUV.

Here's a little snippet I wrote for our delightful resonant8's birthday. May she live forever!

( he doesn't inhale! )

I woke up from a long, mournful dream about being in a train station, sitting on a bench. I noticed that Daniel Radcliffe was coming down the stairs. He stopped and sat down on the bench next to me. He was maybe thirteen or fourteen, and he looked vaguely spooked. It became apparent in the dream that all his caretakers and tutors and chaperones were being taken from him and there was an elaborate plot afoot to kidnap him, and he sort of attached himself to me and we had to hide out in various places while I tried to call cops who weren't in on the scheme, and at the end of it, when all the perps had been rounded up and it turned out that a fair number of his caretakers and tutors and chaperones had been in on the take, as it were, I tried to reassure him, and they wanted to hire me to be his new chaperone, and for some reason I turned them down. Meanwhile, Daniel Radcliffe was giving me the Bambi eyes and I was trying to assure him that he could always call me if he had to, and I tried to give him this crack-spined copy of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Strangely, this was the most emotionally fraught part of the dream, because I couldn't find an excerpt to read to him from the book that would really sell him on it.

Hmm.

I watched Woman of the Year with eliade last night. I really enjoyed the first half, because they are so palpably in love that it just radiates right off the screen. And they spend so much time nestled against each other! Katherine spends a huge amount of screen time curled up like a kitten in Spencer's lap. They can hardly stop touching each other; every scene has them in each other's pockets, practically. There's one scene, where he comes home and she says, "Hello, daddy," and stalks over to him, drapes herself all over him and bites his earlobe, and then he nips hers right back. Hachi machi!

Unfortunately, she spends the rest of the film being fairly impressively careless and suffering the appropriate humiliation any woman who thinks she's the equal of a man must experience, in order to become a true wife. So, I didn't love the second half.

Still. Tracy/Hepburn. Believe the hype!

Yowza.

There have been many stories in many fandoms about machines that make wishes come true. torch's gentle and lovely "About a lamp" comes to mind, and Cesperanza's sweet and clever "The Wheel, Atlantis, Wars and So On" and it occurs to me that in fandom, yes, yes, wish fulfillment, DIY, make it happen, we rewrite the world, etc., but honestly, the thing about fandom is that it grants wishes for us every day.

::closes eyes tight:: I wish I had a million dollars! ::peeks at world; notes tragic lack of stacks o' cash::

Well.

Someone on LJ wished for rent money (or it might have been tax dough) for some elderly neighbors. As I recall, we all put a little in the pot and there was maybe going to be enough to buy heating oil for the winter, too. And the other day I wished for info about where to look for apartments in Seattle, and I wondered if I would ever get to see Boa Vs Python and I hoped I'd be able to find SGA 2.18 and today people pointed me toward ways to shape up my icon-craft just because I asked them to.

And all those wishes came true, babies. How about that?

And when I wished for fanfic, almost all of you (all of you delightful people!) gave me some, some of it a sort of double backflip from what I thought I'd wanted, but better-- I read Daughters of Jersualem, a Three Ships story by HTH that was so-- just so beautiful that I cried all over myself, and when I wished for icons, people like runpunkrun and laurashapiro made batches of them, just for me, cesario just sweetly offered her own fine icon designing sevices, and tons of you make icons by the spoonful just to give away, to sprinkle them around like snowflakes for anyone to catch on their tongue. laurashapiro and pearl_o made covers for stories I'd written, just, you know, because! and at Christmas, I wished for new music, and resonant and miss_pryss and rosetti heaped me with riches and every day some shiny kid shows up with a brilliant songvid for all of us to admire, or shares out their webspace or their bandwidth or their web skills, mails out DVDs, recs someone's work, gives you beta on your own, or tells you a joke just when you needed one. On the internet, in fandom, we make things exist just by thinking about them.

Oh my god, I love you guys. You have no idea.

( Also, last night I dreamt in fanfic )

So last night I dreamt in anime. It was very bloody and ultraviolent and featured a small boy and a fetching young teenaged girl who had been engineered to be assassins, but had no conscious knowledge of their actions because their brains had been carefully disconnected in key places, so the girl was talking engagingly about how she was anxious about being late for her first day of work, all the while dodging bullets and throwing out these shiny little bladed explosives. The small boy had a glider that he used to sneak up on people (I was watching Spider-Man before bed last night, so that explains both the glider and the bladed explosive thingies) so he could garrote them and what not.

I woke up tired. Apparently being an assassin takes a lot out you.

So I had this dream that I attended my highschool reunion, only it was at my old elementary school, Manetuck, and all the people I wanted to see were being "disappeared" by some mystical force, right? So I make a mannequin, poppet, whatever, out of this little black glass figurine: it's an art deco style rendering of an English butler, with a widow's peak and a brushy mustache and a long jacket, and ruby chips for eyes. When I bring it to life, the eyes glow red, and he can only hop, because his legs won't separate, and I tell him to go find the monster, but to be careful to only look at it with one eye, so that if that one gets burned out, he'll have the other eye to find his way back to me.

Ooooookay.

My anxiety dreams are not usually so inventive or entertaining.

Last night, I dreamt that Rodney McKay was vegetarian. Even a passionate one, snidely denigrating carnivores and etc.

He lived on cereal and soymilk, and never wanted to leave his lab. Basically, he was Twitch City's Curtis. Only, you know, a brilliant astrophysicist.

So, even though I started my Worst Case Scenario story over a week ago, I suddenly want to throw some zombies in there so it could qualify for the zombiethon, too. But that just wouldn't be right. Naturally, the only thing for it is to write one story for each challenge.

In which case, I'd better get the lead out.

Okay, I admit it: I have types. I love short girls with little hands and shy ways and dry, dry senses of humor. Yes. And I like roly poly math geeks with glasses and pretty eyes. It's totally true. I was in love with a boy named Gideon who was balding and sweaty and in love with his best friend's girlfriend since highschool... but he taught me about fractals and I would have taken a bullet for him.

So last night, my brain kissed me on the forehead and gave me a dream date...

( dream date )

Okay, there's a horror movie on right now? Featuring an 80s era werewolf/vampire? On rollerskates. McSawin! are you writing this down? It's called: Fright Night Part 2.

Best. Movie. Ever!

So, I dreamt that the Weasleys and Harry and Hermione were all staying at a grand Muggle hotel.

There are many bedrooms all adjoining one large living room, like the Gryffindor Common room only with less comfortable chairs and a lot of crisp white paint and soaring architecture. It's summer of first year, and in the dream, I'm Hermione: a tiny, bossy know-it-all in a long white nightgown, my puffy hair down past my shoulders. I dreamt I (as Hermione) was writing HP fic, in a story from George's POV. (Actually, I dreamt the fanfic she/I'd written before this part of the dream, so I was George, too, but I can't remember what happens, except that it was very gen). It seems I, as Hermione (and as me of course), feel that George is underrepresented, overshadowed by the more vigorous Fred. After all, in Goblet of Fire, Fred "drops" the Ton-Tongue Toffee so Dudley will swell, and he asks Angelina to the Ball, and it seems to me he also gets better lines. But George whomps Ron in the head with a snowball when Hermione leaves to prepare for the ball and Ron can't believe it will take her three hours to get ready... and so the story is about George. Harry and Ron are sharing a room, but Hermione and Ginny each have their own. George is out wandering the common room, also in a long white nightgown, and finds my story, handsomely formatted and carelessly sticking out of a book I'd left on the mantelpiece.

I squeak and die a thousand deaths and he catches my eye after reading a few lines (I'm peeking out my bedroom door), not sure if he should be angry yet. Before he can say anything, Mr. Weasley comes in, very reasonable but stern, prodding a guilty-looking Ron in front of him and handing him a dustpan and broom. Because we're in a Muggle hotel, Mr. Weasley has confiscated everyone's wands so there won't be any untoward magicking. George says something sympathetic, Ron looks mournful and gets to work. Mr. Weasley tells George he should get to bed, but instead, while his attention is on Ron, George slips into my room. It's supposed to be lights out, so George flops down on his belly to read the story in the light coming in under the door. Her waves me over and indicates I'm to sit beside him while he reads, and I figure it's so he can pinch me if he decides I deserve it. Of course, I have a little crush on George, and I'm also eleven, so it's a very flattering story. George is only maybe thirteen here, but he's older and I have a crush on him, so when I stretch out on the floor next to him so I can read over his shoulder, we're touching hip to hip and I'm all fluttery and thinking, "I'm lying down next to a boy! In my pajamas!"

Hee.

Fred goes first in Hal's perfectly perfect Summer Thing too, but George is sweeter.

As you know, Deco-S mostly moved out about two weeks ago, leaving the living room a shambles and seriously fucking with my feng shui. Pamcakes has offered me a nifty little dinette set for The Dollhouse, and I'm hoping to hunt up a reasonably priced loveseat somewhere... but what I really need is an end table fashioned out of three giant busts of Queen Nefertiti topped with glass.

( Doesn't everyone? )