What's on the Hedgey mind today?

Well, it's Samhain, that time of year when the veil is thinnest between this life and whatever comes afterwards. My mother lives across the road from a couple of hardcore Goths and they've done their house up with gravestones and skeletons and the like, so she thinks we should be incredibly excited about it too and cover the house in cheesy immature crap like they have.

Sorry, but I grew out of that phase fifteen years ago, mother. Putting the Christmas decorations up is crazy enough.

I have bought the pumpkin though. Allison wants pumpkin pie but it needs loads of ingredients we haven't got and can't afford, so it'll have to be later. We'll be disembowelling it tonight. Photos will be taken, naturally.

* * *

Bethan's adventures in TV land are continuing. This morning Allison woke me up to tell me that Bethan had her TV on so loud it had woken her up. And indeed she had. This was 5:30am. So, I switched it off, told her off and put her to sleep.

Didn't happen. I ended up turning the TV off three times and taking her back to bed five times betwen 5:30 and 7:30. Then I had to give up because I had to get Allison's packed lunch together.

Now it's 11am and I'm beat.

* * *

I think I mentioned a while ago that we're on a diet. The rules are that we can eat as big a breakfast as we want, as big a lunch as we want and a carb and starch-less dinner. No snacking.

We've tweaked the rules slightly by having the odd takeaway, but other that that, it's been really good. We've both lost about two stones (24lb) in the last three months. Excellent!

* * *

We've been having a few problems with our new PC. I couldn't seem to get it working with any kind of stability. The monitor would flicker incessantly, occasionally so violently that it would reboot the computer. Not that's extreme!

We blamed the monitor and changed it. We blamed the extension cable that lets the monitor sit seven feet away from the PC box. We blamed the Operating System. We blamed the drivers. We blamed the pisspoor amount of memory in the box.

Nothing we did changed anything, so I eventually ripped out the graphics card and went back to relying on the onboard graphics.

Works fine now. D'oh!

* * *

More on my NaNoWriMo plans:

The song lines idea is still working for me and I've fleshed out plots for each of the eighteen stories.

I'm going to make it serialised - the seventeen chapters will concentrate on the stories of four or five different individuals. Some of it is autobiographical. I wonder if anyone will guess which bits.

I've been looking back over some of the stuff I used to write and what I see is kind of encouraging.

I have a few five or six page stories which total around 2,500 to 3,000 words which I remember only took me one night to write, so that's encouraging. I also have a story downloaded from the internet which totals something like 150,000 words. The one section - the first ten chapters - is just 50,000 words. It took me days to read it - mostly because it's actually crap, but also because it's very repetetive. It's an occasional series that was presented on a website over a few months and the recaps sometimes takeup half the chapter. But at least I have a physical representation of what I'm trying to achieve. An 85 page Word document. Phew.

And it all kicks off tomorrow. Woah. Ladies and gentlemen, sharpen your pencils.

* * *

I see the knives are out for Blunkett again.

Y'know, it makes me wonder. I can't believe he's any more crooked than any other Whitehall inhabitant, so what is it about him that makes him a permanent target for the knife in that back brigade? Maybe that he speaks his mind? Maybe that he does so well in his jobs that his replacements are variously described as ineffectual, useless and worse? Maybe his guide dog pissed up the wrong leg?

Maybe he is morally bankrupt, financially corrupt and a bit of a git, but what politician can't you say that about? So, given that it's a level playing field morality-wise, how come all these stories are coming out about him? What are all these challenges and calls for resignation all about?

Usually I hate Occam's Razor - the idea that the simplest explanation is the most likely - but in this case, the simple answer - that he's made to many powerful enemies - sounds to me like the right one.

* * *

And finally...

I need to watch Casablanca again. Not telling you why.