Locus Classicus

	20,017
18 hours
lab.drwicked.com

How am I crazy, let me count the ways. Okay, no, let's concentrate on the one way for now.

I signed up for Supernatural Big Bang x number of months ago. It seemed like a great way to give myself a kick in the ass. Inflexible deadline, *and* the extrinsic motivator of a reward in the form of art. Genius. The non-evil kind, even.

About a week later someone sent me an email exhorting me to consider the Smallville Big Bang. God fucking damn it, I said out loud, to the consternation of the students sitting closest to me. *This* is the one I *really* want to do. Huh. So I signed up for that too.

Naturally, because Spn was due May 1, and SV June 25, I attacked the SV first. What? It totally makes sense in Bizarro World.

Which brought me to last weekend, and the knowledge that I had a week to go, a plot outline, and exactly zero words. Well, I thought, There Is No Try.

So I sat down every night for four nights and wrote four thousand words each time, at a mad clip. It was unlike anything I've ever done before. I didn't stop for typos, or even *shudder* missed punctuation. It hurt, but there was no time to look back.

There was a minor panic yesterday when I suddenly found myself mouthing, Thirty days hath November, April, June... and realised I had a day less even than I thought. Pshaw. Forced myself to write another two thousand words in bed with the laptop, and the lunch hour today put me over the top.

All of which makes the eighteen hours I sometimes spend to write two thousand words seem ridiculous. I'm a compulsive, terminal editor, I now realise. Write a hundred words, delete thirty. Write another hundred, delete another thirty. Oh, and another ten from the first bit. This was an amazingly freeing experience, not ever *allowing* myself to stop and second guess. I'm not suddenly going to become a writing *machine* but if I could keep just a little of the momentum that'd be great.

Oh, and Write or Die helped a lot. Hearing that freakin' baby cry every time I stopped typing... Yikes. If you're a procrastinator, check it out.

talitha78 arrived safely and in good spirits from Chicago this morning. The hour was not entirely ungodly, but it seemed it, given I'd spent almost the entire night cleaning up the shambles my apartment had become in the lead up to, and aftermath of, the wedding. We went for a quick spin round the coast and up to the Mount Victoria lookout, before coming home and crashing. Then lunch at the pub, where "fries" -- suspicious immediately that, in the land of chips -- with cheese and gravy claimed to be a local specialty. Sounded oddly like poutine to me, but Talitha enjoyed it in any case.

Speaking of the wedding, it went perfectly. All my fears regarding the dress were for naught, and I'm told by observers both biased and un that I scrubbed up pretty well. Personally, I counted it a win that the bodice stayed up the entire twelve hours, and guests were treated to a pleasing rather than shocking amount of cleavage. I must say though, by the end of the night I felt like a cross between a Victorian lady with a fit of the vapours, and a footbound Chinese princess. The boning in the bodice was so tight I could barely breathe after the ingestion of a sumptuous repast, and a collapsed lung on the dancefloor seemed imminent. Likewise, my four inch stilettos looked extremely glamorous, but I couldn't feel my toes by midnight. Il faut souffrir d'etre beau. I went back home after with M's parents, and they were all: "Sit down, have a cup of tea" and I shrieked, "No! Unzip me!" and they did, both of them at the same time pulling zips and laces and hooks, and it was like a scene from sci fi, Structural Integrity Lost, as I collapsed back to my natural form.

My best woman's speech also went very well, despite the minor hiccup where I discovered I'd lost it somewhere in the gardens when we were having photos taken. I managed to recreate it during the cocktail hour, and M never knew the difference, which was just as well given my life had been ruled by a Bridezilla clipboard broken down into thirty minute slots for the previous three days. She really did feel she'd had the day of her dreams though, and H too was completely beside himself the entire day, I've never seen him so besotted. So my work here is done. It seems only fair after all my moaning that I should share pictures, so I will when we get them sometime next week or so.

I think I just put my back out baking a twelve kilo ham. That's twenty-five pounds if you're wondering. It didn't seem that heavy in the store... I guess the pineapple and the sherry and whatnot made it heavier. Now I'm lying pain-wracked and exhausted in bed, trying to make up my mind how long it will take beef fillets to defrost, and whether I should go back upstairs and get them out, or if tomorrow will do.

I'M TURNING THIRTY ON SUNDAY.

I decided to embrace it, rather than shy away, hence the vast quantitities of food and drink occupying every available surface in my house.

But after getting off to a flying start, I'm faltering on the home stretch. The house is still a bombsite, and I've been working on my reel_sga fic instead of cleaning it. And I haven't decided what to wear...

Maybe I *am* having a crisis after all. I think it just kicked in.

Yes, 3scoremiles10, it *is* kinda like the time I sprained my elbow baking. See if you're laughing when you're eating it on Saturday.

There's a special bread you have to make for Orthodox Easter that my grandmother has made every year since the dawn of time. Approximately *thrice* others - interlopers, poor fools - have tried their hands. The result has always been loaf upon loaf of uneaten bread, and much scorn and derision. Cooking at our place, you see, is a competition. An Olympic standard competition. And my grandmother is the all-time champion, unchallenged and undefeated.

She maintains this supremacy by various means, both fair and foul.

Firstly, the recipes are secret. She tells noone. NOONE! I remember watching her make soup as a six year old, and being told that I was never to tell anyone what I saw her doing.

Secondly, the recipes are incomprehensible. Even if you make it into the inner circle - the rule of two, whereby *one* other person has to know the ingredients, if only so you can be a packhorse and carry the shopping, or a labourer and chop the onions - you can't make head or tail of them. They're inevitably in three different languages, and contain no instructions or quantities.

Sometimes, she outright lies. In fairness, she has never lied to *me*, and I don't think she has really lied to my mother, though my mother swears she has. But those outside the family? Oh the webs she weaves. And yet so sweetly. She lets them lead *themselves* astray, with only a gentle nudge to send them in the right - wrong - direction.

Sometimes she assumes *you*, the recipient of her wisdom, are more intelligent than you are. Or at least that you grew up in the Soviet Union and know various related tricks.

Sometimes she just forgets. She is eighty-five, after all.

And she has finally announced her retirement.

She gave me the recipe yesterday. Well. She gave me a small scrap of brown paper covered in cocoa and oil stains, with about twelve words on it. She then sat on a stool and watched me suffer for approximately ten hours.

The flour was in kilos. The sugar was in cups. The butter was in pounds. The oil was by the glass. "What kind of glass?" I asked in depair. There were apparently 36 eggs.

"Are there really 36 eggs?" I asked.

"Thehrty tou if you can't affohrd," she replied. "Moy fada hed won tousand chickens."

"No wonder Stalin sent you to Siberia," I snapped.

"Vat?"

"Nothing!"

The only reference to butter was: "Put in pot. Dip hands. Knead two hours."

"Do I really need two pounds if it's just for dipping?" I asked. "Can't I just oil my hands?"

The butter actually went in the dough, though of course you couldn't tell by reading. The oil did too. You needed *extra* for your hands.

I kneaded for two hours. I knew that bit. I've done it for her a couple of times before, though the dough has always been pre-mixed in the past.

I left it to rise. I kneaded another two hours. I didn't know about that.

It rose more. It looked like it was going to take over the house. I kneaded another two hours. She didn't warn me about that either.

It went in the oven.

"You very lazzy gehrl, rehly," she pronounced. "Luk da mess on da flohr!"

I flung my arm out to better encompass the mammoth amount of work I'd done. An already overtaxed muscle inside my elbow gave up the ghost.

"Oh god," I whimpered. The RSI in my mouse hand was already kicking in. My lower back was in spasms.

"I yuss to mak vit *sixty* eggs. And den I scrup da flohr."

"Every. Body. Else. Is sitting in the lounge watching tv." I gritted out. "I didn't make thirty loaves for myself."

"And vile I did, you grandfada was playing vit bitches."

"Oh."

"At lest you dontt got dat."

"No. Okay."

She smiled. "You moy best frayend."

"Oh!"

"I gonn to shoh you evryting."

"Everything?"

"Evryting. But you donnt tell you mada."

"Okay."

Apparently my bread was perfect. I have succeeded where all others have previously failed. I'm also now the proud owner of a whole wooden box full of soiled scraps of paper. None of them make sense, we're going to have to go through them one by one so I can translate them... But they are *mine*.

I'm also nursing a taped up arm and have no appetite to actually *eat* today.

And suddenly I understand. My answers to polite enquiry from three sisters and thirty-six cousins are a whole new measure of cryptic.

Happy Easter, one and all.

I got the job!!!

Not that, y'know, I told you all I was applying or anything. But that's because I'm superstitious, and paranoid, and convinced that if I even so much as think about a thing in a positive/confident fashion, it will all collapse like a house of cards.

But I did!

I got the shock of my life after not sleeping a wink all night (truly, I stared at the ceiling and mentally wrote my next clex fic), to find all three of us on the short list were there to interview at the same time. I had to eat morning tea and make small talk with my rivals. I was dying inside. And one commented that I was evidently nervous because I had the most closed body language he'd ever seen. Actually I was just freezing in my good suit. And also nervous.

But I got the call on my cellphone on the bus on my way home! The boss said I was, quote, "so far ahead of the field there was no need for discussion".

*ego runs rampant for a few minutes*

I've been feeling kinda low for a while, so this has just picked me up no end. Words can't really describe. I shall now spend the rest of my holiday writing fic to demonstrate my gratitude.

A moment of pure self-indulgence...

Lexalot's wonderful review of my work:

arysteia

And the entire feedback challenge list:

the team

Yep, finally sober and awake enough to report. If you're already sick of the Oscars don't read on. But on the off chance anyone is still interested...

Wellington was definitely the place to be on Monday. Our time. Having wangled an invitation to the Weta Oscar party, it remained only for me to get the day off work. Rehearsed various lies, but in the end went with the truth: Oscars, PJ, once in a lifetime, far more important than work, how about it?

Arrived to find that, as is often the case with Weta functions, I was far and away one of the best dressed people there. And this with little or no effort. These people are talented, but boy, do they lack style.

Ate, drank, became steadily more nervous as the witching hour approached. Because God, could it possibly have sucked more than to be there if they'd lost?

Began to feel complacent as the technical awards piled up. "Are they giving us *everything*?" I asked a friend. Then immediately regretted it as we both realised the terrible price to be paid for hubris.

The raucous din gave way to deathly silence as the nominees for Best Director were read out. Tom Cruise's pause after "Oscar goes to..." seemed to last a thousand years. I mentally planned my escape route. Didn't actually hear more than "Pe..." before being deafened by the screams. Screamed a little myself. Yeah, I admit it.

Best picture was kind of an anti-climax after that. I guess because I'd felt more confident of that, but I'd worried about poor PJ. Or because noone had any voice left.

The orgies continued all night, but somehow almost everyone made it to work the next day. Though we've all been mindless automatons for days since.

Gotta say, I love love love the Tourist Board ad, "Best Supporting Country in a Motion Picture".

But what's up with the New York Times calling PJ a "bespectacled Australian"? I. Think. Not. Was New Zealand not mentioned quite often enough? We're fairly modest people in our natural habitat, but this is not the seventh state.

And on a purely local and parochial note, sucks to be you, doesn't it Auckland? LotR is *sooooo* much cooler than the America's Cup. Wellington forever.