The Blog to Nowhere

One last post for the year:

- Finished 59 books this year, one short from last year. Going downtown to visit with my sister and my niece really helped. The best book series I picked up this year was The Expanse series. It's a space opera at its finest. I need to get cracking on book three, but I have so many other books to read from my book club. Second best series I picked up this year was the Thursday Next series. I love the alternative 1985 England that Thursday lives in. Third best series I picked up this year was the Russell Quant series. Russell is a gay P.I. who works in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and he has such breezy and geeky attitude that's fun to read.

Last book I finished this year was Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond. It's written by a local author; one of the book club ladies picked it up at the literary con that's held here every August. It has a fun steampunk setting and a plucky journalist as the main character. The weird thing about the book, though, is that it reads like the second book in a series. There's all this backstory and references to past events, but as far as I can tell, this is the first book. Maybe the author didn't want to do an origin story. There are some witty character names, too. Colonel Muster, Professor Plumb, nods to Clue of course; Windsor "Windy" Jones, professor as Indiana University; a take on Indiana "Indy" Jones; and Hercule Hornblower, a Belgian detective who uses his "little grey cells" to solve crimes but mostly falls asleep; Hercule Poirot, if Poirot was narcoleptic.

- Completed 13 knitting projects. I say that's pretty good, considering I only picked up knitting at the beginning of the year. Best project, hands down, has to be my Fourth Doctor scarf. It wasn't the most complicated project (that honour goes to the Mass Effect scarf I knitted for my sister), but I ended up with something that is so iconic. Plus, thanks to that project, I'm getting paid to knit two more. :-)

My sister keeps bugging me to learn sock knitting, but I don't know when I would get around to that. I want to learn how to read charts and do more colour work first. I also want to knit Amy's scarf and fingerless gloves combo from "The Pandorica Opens". Why do I want to keep knitting scarves? You'd think I would be sick of them by now.

- Got laid off this year, but let's not dwell on that.

- Had a fun vacation cruising around the Mediterranean. Venice was the best port; so much history and culture there. Pompeii was the best excursion, but visiting Trogir is a close second, if only because it was a filming location on Doctor Who.

- The comic book expo was crazy busy and fun this year. Meeting Ming-Na and Hayley Atwell was the best part of the weekend. I don't see the expo getting a lot of big name guests next year. The Canadian dollar is super crappy right now. Though, who knows. The expo team has pulled off huge last minute surprises before so I wouldn't put it past them to do it again.

Things to look forward to next year:
- Cruise around the British Isles in May with Amsterdam and Paris thrown in. Sadly, the cruise is no longer stopping in Wales, which makes me very sad. The port would have been in Northern Wales, presenting me with an opportunity to visit Portmeirion, the filming location of The Prisoner. I may need to head back to Wales in 2017.
- 50th anniversary Star Trek convention in Las Vegas in August. I attended this con a few years ago and the company that runs it really knows their stuff, so this one should be a blast. I expect Paramount and CBS to do a ton of stuff for the anniversary next year. And man, Star Trek Beyond better not suck. This is their last chance to get it right.
- Plus other miscellanea, like superhero movies and TV shows.

As usual, nothing extremely exciting, but there's nothing wrong with that.

- Well, I'm officially unemployed now, but what are you going to do.

- At least now I have time to knit and read. I've been visiting my sister and my niece a lot over the past couple of weeks and I once again I get in an hour of reading while taking the train in and out of downtown. Maybe I can finish off the pile of books I got from my book club. I am definitely grateful for the knitting time. In my enthusiasm to make things, I decided to knit all of my Christmas gift. I've finished two but I still have two more to finish. Fingers crossed that I get them done on time.

- Speaking of knitting, I've been watching Jessica Jones and I can't stop staring at her grey scarf. It's an infinity scarf, but I can't make out the pattern on it. Hell, it might not even be knitted. But that's how my brain works now. I look at knitted items and I obsess over how they were made. I think Jessica's scarf may be a seed stitch pattern, but who knows.

- I'm only three episodes in to Jessica Jones, but I like it. Similar to Daredevil, they really down play her powers and so the show feels more like a detective show rather than a super hero show. I'm surprised they haven't referenced Daredevil yet, but maybe there's something later in the season. And damn, David Tennant's English accent is so slick; I'm so used to his rougher Tenth Doctor accent. I know Kilgrave is crazy and sadistic, but I would totally listen to anything he has to say with that accent. ;-)

- And Happy 52nd Whoniversay! It was two years ago that I got to tour the TARDIS set. Man, I really need to get back to Cardiff at some point. I didn't see enough of the city when I was there.

Home sick from work today. It's just a cold but it's probably best that I not spread my germs around. This is the thing I hate about colds. They aren't as debilitating as the flu, so you can still fuction and do work, but you're still contagious so you shouldn't be around people. I mean, I don't love work, but I hate missing it. Though, my current team is pretty self sufficient so it shouldn't be too bad, and a lot of my work is given to me so there's nothing I can work on from home.

So I can lounge around in my pajamas all day and not have to worry about anything. :-D Maybe I'll catch up on my reading or my TV.

- Yay, it's the weekend! I'm still recovering from my comic book expo weekend, in that, I'm catching up on sleep and my TV shows. I'm behind on iZombie, but I'm caught up on Orphan Black. Oh, and I still have the rest of Daredevil to watch, too. Plus there's all of my regular shows that I watch on the day. Hmm, maybe I watch too much television...

- Working on the philosophy that it's never too early to start a new cosplay, I have started assembling a Tenth Doctor suit. Initially, I was looking at the replica suits, and some looked really good, but boy, they were expensive. I'm doing my best to keep costs down on this costume. The suits were also suits, i.e.: with trousers, and I want to do a femme!Ten costume, so I've abandoned the replica suits for now. Instead, I'm attempting to piece together something from off-the-rack items, but I don't know how that will go. I did find an awesome skirt on eBay; brown with blue pinstripes. Blue pinstripes! The second I saw it, I knew I had to buy it. The only downside is, there's no matching jacket. So I either have to buy a jacket that doesn't match or hope that I can find a fabric that matches the skirt and make a matching top myself. The ultimate dream would be to find the same skirt and use that material to make a vest or something. Then I'd have a matching top and the suit would be in the spirit of Ten's actually suit, since it was pieced together from numerous pairs of trousers from the Gap. We'll see when the skirt arrives. I have a feeling that the spacing between the pinstripes is going to be narrower than what's on the actual suit, so the replica fabrics I have been looking at won't do me any good.

- I'm so behind on my reading, too. I missed out on two weeks of reading at lunch due to my stupid all-day meetings. Need to get cracking so I can return the books to my book club and get some new books in exchange. I'm going to need some reading material while flying to Venice next month.

- And my fanfics have been saved! I visited the guys at Geek Squad at the local Best Buy and they were able to transfer the data from my old hard drive from my broken computer to a new external hard drive. All is not lost! Now I just need to buy a new computer because I can't see myself doing everything on my little netbook.

- I'm slowly settling in at my new project, but my god, I hate working with contracts. I'm more used to working with purchase orders, which are much less involved. Even our huge POs were less complicated than your average service contract. Doesn't help that I feel like a glorified secretary. They have me typing up things and phoning people. I hate talking to people on the phone. So it seems doubtful I will be helping with any of the paperwork. And, my god, people need to get their act together. I had to chase people for information today, over the phone, too, and it was impossible to get anything from anyone because it's a long weekend here in Alberta. We could have avoided all of this if my manager had asked me to make the phone calls yesterday. But did he? Nope. So I'm not a happy camper right now.

- Thank goodness it is a long weekend. Hurray for fakey holidays! I'm going to spend the entire time just knitting.

- Speaking of knitting, I have 12 inches of scarf. So it's slowly coming along, but I should be able make some decent progress this weekend. I'm being very careful this time around so I don't screw up again. If I have to frog this thing, I'm going to be super sad. Oh, and I realized that I could knit something for a friend who's having a baby in August. My knitting skills are decent enough that I'm sure I could knock out some baby leg warmers or a baby hat before the baby shower. Apparently you're allowed to take knitting needles onto a plane, so I could totally knit my way over the Atlantic when I head to Italy for my cruise in May. Better than watching boring movies on a tiny screen.

- I'm debating a new cosplay for the comic book expo in April. I'm super tempted to cosplay Melinda May from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., because Ming-Na is a guest this year (and also the character is Chinese!), but I'm looking at the replica vests and I'm kind of hesitant to buy something that expensive that I will only wear like once a year. I didn't mind paying a lot for my femme!Eleven coat since I wear it in the springtime, but I don't see myself wearing this vest when I go out. With that said, I really want to dress up as Melinda. I love her character so much and I've loved Ming-Na since she played Mulan. I guess I could cosplay Mulan, but that costume would be more complicated.

- God, I'm mentally exhausted. Time for a nap...

- Thanks for all of the thoughts and opinions regarding AO3. I think I will create an account there once they open up the invitations again. Looks like the automated invitation queue is down due to spammers.

- Found $5 today. It was at the train station, just lying there on the ground. The odd thing was, a couple of people passed by it and didn't pick it up. I mean, it wasn't hard to miss. The $5 bill is blue and the ground is brown. So maybe people felt weird picking up such a large denomination? Well, I certainly didn't feel weird. ;-) It's not a bad way to start the day, that's for sure.

- Case in point: I got the last of my project packed up today and then I got some mostly good news about a potential new project for me to join. So I could be working on a new project as early as February 2, which is great, because the project I'm on is pretty much dead now. Plus, the new project is back at my old building, the one that's within walking distance from my house. Of course, that would mean no more reading on the train, which makes me sad. I got so many books finished that way.

- Oh, and Arrow's winter premiere:

( Spoilers for Arrow 3x10, "Left Behind" )

Just wanted to do one last post for the year:

- Finished 60 books this year, up from 54 last year. 60! A new record for me. I can thank the commute into work for upping my total over the past two months. The last book, which I finished this morning, was Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Mystery. A detective novel, obviously, and courtesy of my book club. It was all right. It's set in Malaysia and it has an Islamic police detective, so it's a bit different, but the writing style really put me off. The author was really fond of having the "he said" bit in front of the dialogue rather than at the end, so you would have these really long sentences describing how the person is talking before the person actually talked. As a writer, it really distracted me. And the detective doesn't do a whole lot of detecting, either. I also got back into the Outlander series; I'm officially caught up! So now I have to wait for the next book like everyone else. I only read the books because they involve time travel and the historical setting is somewhat interesting, but all of the romance bits are kind of tedious and my god, the characters keep getting into trouble. Yes, I know there wouldn't be much of a plot if everyone was happy, but all of these ridiculous obstacles and problems come up out of nowhere. And the author has added more characters than is required. It's like she's trying to pad the plot so her books end up being these huge bricks. As for any new book series, I didn't really pick up any. There is one, I guess you would call them The Shambling Guides, that sort of caught my interest but it's not like I really love them. The writing isn't exactly the greatest and the action is staged a bit stiffly, but I like the world the author has created. It's one of those "the supernatural is real but the humans don't know it" kind of worlds, but the main character is works as a writer for guide books for the supernatural community, so you get cute little excerpts from the book she's writing in each novel. So if there are more novels in the future, I'll read them, but I won't be eagerly awaiting them.

- While I can thank my new morning commute for the extended reading time, I also read some of these books on my phone, which allowed me to read at work when things were slow or when I was covering reception. I still love reading an actual book, but having ebooks on your phone is pretty handy. No huge tome to carry around and you can store as many books as you want. I'm going to use this to my advantage when I go on my cruise in May; I can carry about some of the tour books and all I need is a skinny piece of plastic and metal.

- Highlight of the year? Hmm... I suppose it was meeting Matt Smith and Karen Gillan at the comic book expo and having Matt tell me that he loved my Old!Amy armour cosplay. :-) Had a grand old time at the comic book expo this year, as always. Can't wait to see the cosplay gang in April.

- Can't think of much else that happened that's worth noting. Marked five years of official employment with my company. Whether I'll be employed in the new year? We'll see... (Stupid falling oil prices). Saw a co-worker finally quit the company after a couple of years of complaining. Can't say I'm sorry to see them go. They were nice enough, but they got on my nerves more often then not.

- Things to look forward to in 2015: a cruise around the Mediterranean in late May. I'll be visiting Italy and Croatia for the most part, so I'll get to see Rome and Venice and Dubrovnik. I can actually visit where they film King's Landing for Game of Thrones and the bits of Croatia that stood in for Venice and rural France in season five of Doctor Who. Okay, there are other things to see, too, but those are the things that will excite me. The local comic book expo will be entering their tenth year of operation, so that will be exciting, too. I hope they pull out all of the stops. And a Sherlock special at some point during the year! I saw the picture of Benedict and Martin dressed up in Victorian duds, so I hope the special is somehow set in the past.

Oh, and Agent Carter starts on Tuesday. Can't wait to see Peggy back in action. :-)

Hope everyone had a good year and here's to 2015.

... The space heater you brought in blows a fuse and that cuts power to your computer and your co-worker's computer.

Yeah, I literally blew a fuse at work yesterday. In my defense, it was 18C in my cubicle yesterday and that totally is a good reason to have the space heater going at full blast. My co-worker just next to me also has a space heater, so I guess the two of them together on the same breaker was just too much. This goes to show how old the building is.

So the two of us were without power for about an hour while we waited for the building maintanence guys to come by. While we waited, another building guy came by to take a look at the temperature problem. Turns out, the air-con wasn't even on! So the guy fiddled with some switches in the ceiling and that got the heat going. I don't think it completely fixed the problem, though. The area starts out fairly warm early in the morning, but by the time everyone else arrives at the office, there's cold air coming up from the vents. Sigh. But it was a balmy 21C in my cubicle today, so something is working. I still need the space heater to keep my feet warm, but I can put it right next to me so there's no need to have it going full blast all day.

It's not even that cold outside right now. 0C or a little bit cooler. I can't imagine how cold it's going to be inside when it's -20 or -30C outside. Maybe I should bring in a blanket to work, too.

- I ran into a skunk on the way to work today. It just walked out in front of me, about two metres away, and we both just stopped and looked each other. I've seen all sorts of animals walking to work - deer, hares, geese and goslings, ducks and ducklings, even two coyotes and a porcupine - but this was the first time that I stopped dead in my tracks. Oh sure, the coyotes could have bit me or something, but they started running the other way the second they saw me. This skunk just stood there for a second or two and I did not want to make the first move. Going into work smelling of eau de skunk would not be cool. And, for the record, skunks really stink. I caught just a whiff of it as it waddled off and pee-yew. They must exude that musk all the time.

- Alas, my time of running into random animals while on the walk to work is growing short. On Friday I found out my project is moving downtown to be closer to the client. First moves should start November 1. This really sucks. I live so close to work and I don't have to bother with transit. There's nothing wrong with taking transit, don't get me wrong, but when there are delays and power outages and whatnot, then it becomes really frustrating. We're not even going to the central part of downtown. The building is near the edge of downtown. And this building got flooded last year, too, and it's not the newest building to start with either. Sigh. Plus, I was told the cubicles have short walls. Really? I mean, come on! I don't have a lot of privacy in a cubicle to begin with. You want to take away what little privacy I do have?

- I suppose the only upside of the move is that I will have more time to read. It's a 30 minute train ride into the downtown core from where I live. So that's an hour, at least, each day of read time. I'm going to blow through books like no one's business.

- Playing more of Destiny. I still can't quite say what makes Destiny unique from the other first person shooters I've played. You shoot the bad guys, they drop loot, and you gain XP and/or money. The desolation of the setting reminds me of Borderlands and the weapons are like the ones in Halo and some of the building design reminds me of Mass Effect. I suppose the public events and the open world where you can run into other random gamers is a bit different. But Nathan Fillion voices a character in the game! And Gina Torres does, too! And if you play a female character, the voice actor is the same voice actor who played Wonder Woman on the Justice League cartoon. So I always have a good giggle when I hear Nathan issuing me a mission. :-)

- Wow, jury duty is boring. There's a lot of sitting around and waiting. I can't tell you how many times we had to get up and leave the courtroom and then come back. The whole thing kind of reminds me of university. Someone's talking and you're taking notes and you need all of this information for later to make a valid point on something. Also, this is kind of like a paid vacation. I'd be way more stressed out at work right now. Though, my opinion might change come the end of the trial.

- I found the Agent Carter one shot from the Iron Man 3 Blu-ray, and man, I'm even more excited for the TV show. I can see why the greenlit the show just on the strength of a 15 minute short. Love that Peggy can kick your ass in heels. :-)

- Have some TV finale thoughts, but I'll probably save that for another post once all of my shows are done. Just Arrow left, I think. And apparently we're getting footage from The Flash spin-off tomorrow. That should be interesting. I want to see how they handle Flash's super speed from a visual effects standpoint.