I need to tidy my room

I need to do many things, after yet another reasonably unproductive day. But tidying my room would produce the most visible results whilst taking the least time, so I'll probably do that.

The length of this post speaks volumes. What couldn't she type?

Dailybooth

I follow a few people on twitter who have Dailybooth, so I've taken a look at threads and profiles over the last few months, but I finally got round to taking my first picture today. Who knows how long I'll keep it up before I get bored, but for now it seems like a fairly harmless way to procrastinate, and a bit more creative than a lot of the things I waste my time on.

Purple

I have a new laptop, and it's purple. I'm sure there has never been a laptop of such purple beauty (except all those other laptops from the same section of the Dell website). It has cool games, an in-built camera with great microphones, a huge memory, and powerful speakers. It is also so frustrating to type on that it's already had me near tears twice.

This is the third time I've tried to type this blog post. The words disappeared without warning twice. The screen size has changed twice, 17 new tabbed browsers have appeared, and it has asked me if I want to search the internet on three occasions. On Word, the margin lines kept moving of their own accord. Often all these things happen at once. And I really don't know what I'm pressing to make this happen. The keyboard is bigger than I'm used to, but I can't be hitting buttons that make such changes that frequently can I? It's a great looking computer with fab features, but looks like the old typing will be suffering for the forseeable future :-s

To-Do Lists

As ever, I wrote myself a to-do list today, did the interesting tasks and ignored the less exciting. So the silk scarf is finished (and, whilst far from perfect, is a lot better than I feared it would be), geography quizzes have been taken (I'm trying to improve my terrible lack of general knowledge), and Radio 4 has been listened to (just discovered a three-part adaptation of 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' up on the iplayer. One of my all-time favourite books. Omg, I love the BBC :D). And the work is not :-s Oh well, still a few hours to go I guess.

Being creative

Oooops . . . very near to another BlogFail there.

Today was fairly lazy and uneventful. I slept in late, watched 'Starsky and Hutch' with Mum (who I think enjoyed it, despite her initial horror that it was a comedy and not a 'proper remake'), spent too long on the internet, watched some more DS9. Then I watched 'On Thin Ice' - they finally made it to the South Pole, but only just in one piece. The friendship between olympian James Cracknell and tv star Ben Fogle continues to confuse me, and once you'd thrown doctor Eddy it gets even stranger. It's amazing that they didn't die. What bizzare group dynamics. Mainly because two of them are both so intimidated by James that they can't do the necessary thing - rugby tackle him and force him to slow down - and his crazy behaviour puts him at risk time and again. When Eddy did take charge things seemed to get better. I did feel bad for James after his breakdown though - one that seemed about 30years in the making. Here's hoping that the James/Ben relationship will be less hero/worshipper and a bit more a balance of equals in the future. Made for great TV though! :)

And I've been working on painting a silk scarf for most of this evening. Pretending to be creative is very stressful. The pack that it came in provided many cardboard stands which have to be stuck to the table, with the scarf secured to them with pins, so it doesn't touch the table-top. But these cardboard stands are fairly useless, and keep unfolding themselves, so have to be readjusted every couple of minutes. And I've got 5 or 6 splodges where the colour has run to somewhere it should not be . . . nightmare! I think it's meant to be relaxing, but it really isn't. This is why I don't do the artsy/crafty stuff very often. Ah well. Hopefully it'll look ok-ish in the end.

BlogFAIL

So . . . I forgot to post anything yesterday. Oooops. I ended up being out for most of the day - Dad was travelling a couple of hours away for work, so me and Mum caught a lift with him and looked round some shops. When I got back I ended up watching trashy TV for most of the evening . . . and me and Paul watched the whole of the computer animated series about the duck and the alligator (Sitting Ducks?). So much funnier when you're older, lots of sentences can be taken diferently . . . we reckon it's all about being gay in small town America.

So today I read 'Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld. I bought it yesterday because it was cheap, and I remember it being really big a few years back. It's a fictionalised version of Freud's visit to New York in 1909, where the murder at the centre of the novel has been invented by the author, but a lot of the dialogue, people and other events are historically accurate. The 'notes' at the end go on for pages, as most of his research was gained from letters and newspapers and the like. Anyway, Freud appoints a follower of his teachings to help the police investigate a vicious murder and attack. I was originally a bit hesitant about reading it because I thought it might be a little boring and . . .Freudian, but it was fantastic. A total page-turner - after reading the first 50pages last night I read the remaining 450 today. It was a little grisly in places, and it was Freudian, but it did explain a lot of his theories in a way that made sense to me, and it didn't necessarily agree with them all. The mystery is incredibly complex, and weaves numerous characters, jealousies and corruption into it, but although there is almost no chance that you will solve it, it does ultimately make sense!

In other news . . . my new laptop arrives on Tuesday. I'm already excited!

I just spent the last hour or so 'following' Harry Potter actors' twitter accounts, and reading their old tweets. Beyond sad.

Paul got two things in the post today that made him very happy - the first being a Poe Bust wallet from Karen Kavett (yes, I am jealous! It is very awesome indeed :) ), and the second being Wii Sports Resort, which I think I'm gonna head downstairs to play now.

Until tomorrow! x

And onto the film . . .

I saw 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' today. To be honest, my thoughts on it are still a bit of a jumble. It didn't help that I got very little sleep last night (mainly due to the crazy brightness of the streetlamp outside my window. It's getting to the point where something must be done. Hammers at the ready!), so I was a bit confused before I got in there.

I remember really enjoying the movie whilst it was on. Largely because it looks gorgeous, everything is so well lit, some of his simplest shots are absoloutely breath-taking, characters literally glow . . . and, as anyone who knows my film taste well will tell you, I'm often won over by movies that look pretty, almost regardless of plot. It was funny too, and seeing it with the siblings meant that we all sniggered at the wrong moments, and shrieked hysterically at anything intended to be humorous. And the acting of the whole cast has improved by leaps and bounds - I think David Yates must be brilliant to work with, as even the more minor characters have lost their awkwardness. It was nice to see the girl from Basil Brush playing Katie Bell. And, as everyone has been saying, Alan Rickman was fantastic, but Tom Felton was extraordinary, giving new depth to a character who is complex enough in the book, often with no lines.

But I'm wondering if reading the book the day before the movie was a mistake. I'm very glad I watched the film aterwards and not before, but a longer gap between the two would have been a good idea. Noticing all the differences from the plot, big and little, got in the way of appreciating the film for what it was, and I left the cinema in one of those die-hard 'they got it all wrong' moods, which I've never had with Harry Potter. I think the big 3 for me were the constant references to the cabinet from a couple of scenes in, when it's meant to be a big mystery; the missing out a whole chunk of story about the Muggle world/PM/ Ministry of Magic; and the absence of large sections of Voldemort backstory (surely what this film is meant to be about). Other additions/omissions (Tonks+Lupin, Bill+Fleur, Dobby, the crazy Burrow Attack) were sad, but more understandable in terms of pace, though you wonder how much extra stuff they'll have to cram in to the final two-parter just to make it make sense. Other minor character develepment things were frustrating though - most crucially, as far as I'm concerned, the switch of 'he'll kill my family' with 'he'll kill me', which seemed to partly undermine the symapthy they'd built up for Draco. It's the pointless little word swaps that make me annoyed with the screenwriter. And, now I'm looking for it, I can see what is meant by Steve Kloves creating his own, far less believable, versions of J.K's characters, largely by reassigning lines. Oh, and I was frustrated that they kept so much teenage romantic angst in at the expense of more important parts of the book.

But that's enough complaining. As a film it is fantastic. It does everything a good family flick should, it's funny, tragic, scary, exciting, it shows teenagers in a fairly realistic light, it has characters that you care about deeply. It gleams with quality in every aspect (apart, perhaps, from the script), and it looks so good that you'll want to wrap it round you like a blanket and take a nap, or eat it or something. I'm already wanting to see it again.