due South fanworks

Today was a very exciting landmark: I went to the TIP. Miss H agreed to take me, because she is a wonderful person. We are now I think fourteen months into our bin strike, and while various people have very kindly taken my recycling for me during that period, my usual volunteer has been busy lately and I've accumulated rather a lot (mostly cardboard - the packaging for the new IKEA bookcase was particularly bulky) since mid-November. I also keep a box of "things to take to the tip" that aren't the standard recycling - electrical cables, lightbulbs, hard plastic, etc, which are a bit unfair to dump on other people, so that was a year or more of accumulation. My spare room is so nice now!!

One of my university friends used to celebrate "Bins Clear Eve", which was the day before the first rubbish collection after New Year, and it feels rather like that.

Otherwise there seems to be rather a lot of terrible things happening to my acquaintances; in the last week, deaths include one friend's brother, a second friend's stepmother, and the very unexpected death of an distant internet acquaintance. Also a swimming friend has had a bad prognosis for a while but now sounds to be likely in his last few weeks. I would like it if someone I know had a sudden and unexpected nice thing happen next week, please.

I keep trying to play computer games and then getting bored and wandering off. On the other hand, I have read a lot of books (most of them very frivolous). Partly it may be because it's so much nicer in bed than anywhere else, what with the cold spells so far this year. I did manage twenty minutes of Dave the Diver today; isis, I don't know if you ever did play it after you recced it to me, but so far it's both quite fun and making me feeling very concerned that he's being exploited by his "friend" Cobra *g* (the set-up is that he's on holiday when his friend calls him up with promises of fancy sushi that turn out to be an "opportunity" for him to spend his days diving for fish to turn into sushi and nights serving the sushi to customers... his "profits" go into repairing the bar, which appears to be co-owned by Cobra and the sushi chef). However, I am only one day in, so it could all change.

This has been a fantastically expensive month so far. Aside from purely frivolous expenditures (my 99p ebook habit does add up!! but not all that quickly) I renewed my passport on Thursday (they already sent me two emails to tell me to send the old one in! cool your beans, people, it was less than 24 hours! I posted it on Friday anyway!) and then bought a bunch of clothes today - hopefully replacements for things which are getting rather tatty. I wanted to get a hoodie from the Florence gig but I couldn't try it on and I wasn't sure it would fit, and £85 was too much to gamble on! So now I have ordered a less cool one from M&S but on the other hand it wasn't nearly as expensive. And if it's too small, I can return it.

Oh, but what is nice: I've been given the keys to my new garage! I should go and check I can actually open it (after first looking up the deeds to check which one it is, now I can't identify it by the combination of hardware around the lock...) before I get swept up in next week's choir-all-the-time and next weekend's exciting visit from shreena and quizcustodet. Today would have been a good time to do it, since it's actually not raining for once, but, well.