By Slanted Light

Up bright and early, hoping that Chappie had found the key to the storage - and although it turned out that he hadn't (because apparently they were down in Another State with my friend - doh!), it also turned out that the lock could be cut off, the storage unit opened, and another lock bought to put on - and the key given to me so that I could get sorting! So - first things first, Chappie gave me a lift to the airport (just cos he's a lovely guy!) so that I could collect my spaceship...

...I mean car. But honestly - there's no key! There's a power button to turn it on! There's... there's... well, and it's automatic obvs., cos I'm in the US! So that took a wee few moments to get used to, but then I was on my way to the storage unit.

Eeep.

Definitely more boxes than I'd been expecting - or hoping for!

On the bright side (well...), one of them turned out to be a box of food, that had been waiting patiently for me to get back! So that had to go. I mean, it might still have been okay, because it was mostly spices and tins, but probably not worth testing it out after sixteen years! And there was some water damage, including to my osteology textbook... :(

A fairly large proportion of boxes were anthropology and Alaska books, and also copies of articles. I managed to contact the current Chair of Anthropology who said they accept donations of books. I'm not sure she really understands the scale of this donation, but we'll see! She also said that students could probably get the articles more easily as pdfs, which assumes that they're not going to want to print off those pdfs to read and annotate, but hey-ho - although its a bit heartbreaking that I spent so much time and effort printing and copying the articles just for them to be recycled... But again, hey-ho...

By the end of the day the storage unit looked like this. The big pile of boxes on the right is a big pile of empty boxes, and is surrounded by recycling and rubbish. I've a big bag of clothes for donating somewhere, a pile of stuff for the transfer station (where you can leave things you don't want, and other people can take stuff they can use - eventually stuff left is taken away as rubbish, I guess), and the car boot is full of household-y type things that the hostel I'm staying in might be able to use. There's still some stuff to go through, but not too much now.

I do also have what I'm pretty sure is more than two suitcases worth of stuff I want to bring back, however, and a few things that I'm still in denial about, but we'll see... And I have tonight, for instance, spent some time taking photos out of photo albums... *g*

And it's about bedtime again, which will be disturbed a bit by my roommate leaving for his job (mining engineer) around 2am - eep again! But then I should have the room to myself for a bit, and I'm crossing fingers it might be a couple of days... *g*

Hello from the other side of the world - I made it! *g*

I left with the sunrise on Saturday morning...


Boarded an aeroplane, and went flying...


Next thing I knew, I looked down - and we were flying over Greenland, which was amazing! The gorgeous coast, and then a land scoured by glaciers - and "scoured by glaciers" made absolute sense from this angle...


Stopped in Seattle...


...saw a copper-gold half-moon, and a distant aurora borealis from the plane windows, landed, found my way to the hostel, and then the next day...

I was in proper autumn!

And now it's evening, and I must to bed...

I was thinking the other day about how I had so many icons, and yet I still seem to use the same set when I make posts. I use more when I comment, but I'm still definitely not using all 165 or so. And I love my icons! I've added every single one for a reason! Most of them were for Pros, of course, but I've got non-Pros ones too - in fact my first ever icon wasn't a Pros one (more about that below *g*)

So - I'm going to kill two birds with one stone (that must be a really old saying, I definitely don't really want to do that...!), and start a new posting project - a post for every icon I've got on lj! I'll use the icon, add it to my post, and write a bit about it and where it came from. *g* That way I use my icons, and I post to lj too - for 165 or so days, in fact!

(If anyone would care to join me, it might be kind of fun to see posts about other people's icons too... *g*)

I'm going to post the icons in the order they're listed as my user pics - in other words, the oldest ones first.



This was one of my first livejournal icons! It was the first one I made properly, anyway, and it was because all those years ago (September 2005!) when I first created an lj, I'd just got back to Alaska ready to get on with my PhD, and I thought that if an icon had my name on it, then perhaps it should also have the gorgeous northern lights on. I miss the aurora borealis! It was an actual good thing about having an outhouse for a loo - going out to use it at night meant that you were under the night sky and if you looked up, you just might see the northern lights playing in the sky...

After re-discovering my lads when I was living in Somerset (a bit further south than I am now), I spent all my first years with them in Alaska. Just me, a cabin in the snow, isotopes classes, and a thousand thousand pages of Pros fic to read... So lush! I miss those days too - *vbg*

Oh - and this kind of tells the story of my lj user name too. I'd tried all kinds of names, but the ones I wanted had all been taken, so I resorted to flipping through the books I had on a shelf for inspiration. Anyway, one of them was poetry, and I came across some Emily Dickinson:
There is a certain slant of light...
And I thought yes! The "slant" is like the slash in B/D, and I'm looking at our lads in that certain kind of light because I'm writing stories about them, and it's like the slanted auroral lights, because there I was in Alaska - perfect! Only, of course, "slantedlight" was already taken (and really annoyingly that person stopped posting to it in December 2005, and it's been just sitting there ever since. Why won't you purge it, lj?!!! Oh well.) So I figured that I was writing "by" a slant of light, and that also that would refer to my stories being by Slantedlight, so I went with that. Byslantedlight. *g*

So that's me, and the story of my first lj icon... *g*

So... I finished this session's marking - huzzah! Very odd it is too - didn't know what to do with myself last night, not having to sit in front of the computer and decipher panicked handwriting for a couple of hours, so I watched some more Northern Exposure - one of my favourite ones, First Snow, which made me just a wee bit more homesick for Alaska... NE's pretty close in alot of ways (though the trees are way to tall for where I was... *g*)

Oh, and hmmmn - this is what my world looked like in February 2007!


( A little more 2007... )

But this is what my world looked like on Saturday, when I went off for an adventure somewhere new, which turned out to be the noisiest forest in the whole world...

There was mist, and a lake, and ancient, ancient trees...

( Hatfield Forest, hear it roar... )

Except that stoopid roaring world also has Remakes, Reboots and Re-imaginings on at the BFI at Southbank tonight and I'm going! I'm going to see the lads on the big screen! Wheeeee! I suppose it's too much to hope that there'll be movie posters, but... *sighs happily* And there'll be an ep of The New Professionals too, which I've never seen, and which agentxpndble very cleverly and timelyly posted about last night...

And now I suppose I'd better go to work for - whee, three hours! - so that I can hit the road and brave the cold and get meself to the big smoke... *vbg*

First of all, a big hooray cos I finished marking in time - although they've already given me extra, and we're not even at the bonus deadline yet, never mind the regular one... *g* But yeay, officially finished!

Second of all - they missed out the whole Northwest Passage thing from Empire of the Seas, which waah, but still it was kind of a decent series, and the first one I've watched like that for ages, so... *g* It's all about the water... Thames Barges next... *vbg*

Third of all, I don't often watch Jonathan Ross, but it turned out John Barrowman was on tonight, and since I missed him doing all his talk shows when I was in Alaska, I thought I'd leave him on, and... heee! I was kind of watching through squinted eyes, but he just always seems to be having the best time - and heee for him pretending to faint when Shahrukh Khan kissed him, and hee for him singing Copacabana, and being excited about the whole Desperate Housewives thing, and talking about TW and DW, and... yeah. Some people just do make you feel happy just by being. *g*

And fourthly of all... greengerbil gave me these five icons to talk about, so...

( ...I will... *g* )

Well, this is it - half an hour left, which means that it's probably time to pack up the computer! *sniffs* Not sure when I'll hit the internet next, but I will be back... Washington DC, here I come (slashfic and memory stick of Pros stuff safely packed). Hee - I've got my Prosvids on, and it's now Recycled Media's "Where Are You Now?" ... I miss talking with you... *is maudlin*. *But not really*. *Makes fuss when the internet is everywhere*. *Stops being silly*.

So, I hope everyone's having a fab weekend, and I shall see y'all from another part of the world anon *g*

Well, been less than inspired over the past few days, and am now not sure which ramblings to start with.
( So lets start here )

I'm calm now. At the time I may have been somewhat - terse - with both the woman in human resources, and the one in the college who decided to send me the information two days before christmas. I slammed the door. I kicked the file cabinet (steel-toed boots). My lovely sister-in-starbucks, the gorgeous Stepheeee (*waves*) did an admirable job in a 90 minute international phone conversation in preventing me from rushing downstairs and bloodying the lovely carpet. I've taken out all my aggression on random shoppers at the supermarket - don't worry, only with glares, and none that were intercepted. And finally, I've watched Judge John Deed who is calming, right? So it's okay now.
( Here be gritted teeth )

Ooh, stretch-yawn-wriggle. Nice to be back home in my little cabin, after five days housesitting. Back with my own gorgeous computer, full of the Boys and other joys... Although to be fair its been a beautiful weekend, the sky has been clear, the sun has been out ... which means that its been -37C according to the gauge down the hill. But I've also been car-sitting, keeping my bum warm on heated leather and being way too excited about using the autostart.
( Further )
Anyway, I borrowed a digital camera from the library this weekend, and thought I'd share some of the results. I give you - my world today:

( In The Pink )

And in other news... well, there isn't any really. But I'm planning on either JJD or a Pros ep, so be prepared for further rambling.