Looking for a place to land

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a good holiday, if you celebrated any of the recent holidays. Mine were typical: turkey and family and gifts on Christmas, and then Chinese food and slightly less family on New Year's Day. It was nice.

My week of reception temp work ended up being very quiet, which gave me time to read some Yuletide fic. I got THREE Intelligence stories, two in the main collection from my assigned author, and a Madness ficlet from someone else. So, so awesome!

Mom Knows Best (4414 words) is a Gabriel/Riley fic that picks up where the series finale leaves off, and I Carved a Block of Wood (2342 words) is a pre-series look at Gabriel & Shen's relationship not long before Riley comes on the scene. They're both by shetiger, and they're both awesome and worth reading if you liked the show. And Dear George (332 words, gen) by misura is a cute look at some other possible uses of the chip, and very, very Nelson.

My story was Tidings of Comfort and Joy (2735 words, gen), a Believe story focusing on Tate and Bo, with appearances from Winter and Channing.

This weekend I'm working on gameofcards challenges and fandom_stocking. I'm also debating whether to sign up for shipswap. I do have a few rare pairings I like right now, but they mostly involve single-episode guest stars, which might be a bit difficult to match on. (Seriously. How did I end up shipping THREE pairings involving characters who only show up once?) So I might skip it. I haven't decided yet.

TIFF closes tomorrow, so I went down for one last film tonight: Bright Days Ahead. My TIFF movies this year have all had a romantic bent, which is a nice change from the really creepy and rather bloody Japanese serial killer movie I watched the last time I went to the festival. (I did not end up spending the day downtown the way I'd planned. When I woke up this morning and saw just how cold it was supposed to get tonight, I decided the better plan was to go home and pick up some warmer clothing, including a winter coat. Given how long I spent lined up outside, I think it was the right decision.)

Haven was back tonight! Except in Canada, where they've decided not to show it until December. Yeah, I'm not sure what they're thinking either. It's a little frustrating. But apparently we get Craig Olejnik as a guest star this season! It'll be interesting to see him in something besides The Listener. (Incidentally, the season finale The Listener aired a couple of weeks ago, thus concluding a rather disappointing season. I love the characters and I enjoyed some of the episode premises, but the writing and dialogue just weren't there for me. I'm not sure exactly what's wrong, but it's missing something.)

It's exciting to see the new television season starting up! The three shows I'm planning to pick up this fall are Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Almost Human, and Sleepy Hollow, but I'm also waiting to see if anything else gets rave reviews. (I'm also curious to see how new fandoms get incorporated among tag wranglers. And how Yuletide gets handled. Interesting times!)

Plans for this weekend: transcribe some interviews, visit with my sister and nephew, do some cleaning, and sort out some health insurance claims. Such excitement! Oh, and maybe I'll work on my Being Human US/Canada primer for tv_talk. That'll be fun!

All that, and my laptop is still broken. :(

But at least I know the problems with the DVD drive are software-based and not the hardware problem I assumed. Although I'm not really sure it's an improvement, since all of Google's suggestions seem to involved either editing the registry, which I already did, or deleting and reinstalling the drivers via Device Manager, which I can't do because Device Manager doesn't have an option for DVD drive.

(The drive works until Windows starts. I can see it in BIOS, and boot from the recovery disks. But once Windows is in play, my DVD drive disappears. It's a little puzzling, really.)

Made it home safely. Going to bed now.

Good luck to all the East Coast people!

I was out until 7am celebrating a high school friend's impending wedding via a road trip to Niagara Falls. I'm supposed to be meeting up with more friends this afternoon for Taste of the Danforth (i.e., standing in the street eating lots of Greek food, mostly meat on skewers) and again tonight for the UFC fight, assuming I can stay awake that long.

So, since I'm too awake to sleep more and too tired to actually think, I'm going to play in the meme that's going around.

Ask me my Top Five anything--fannish or non-fannish--and I'll answer in a new post.