izzie7

Happy Birthday rosie55!

izzie7 — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:07:55 GMT

(Posting a little early, but my internet connection's a little flaky at the moment, so I'm seizing the moment). Hope you have a lovely day full of good things *g*

Happy Birthday callistosh65!

izzie7 — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:21:59 GMT

Hope you have a great day, and that the jetlag is easing at last!

And here is a pic of your hand, with a lovely ring (& quite a decent bridge in the background...)

Just because *g*

(The SPN recs were great, BTW!)

The Interview Meme

izzie7 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:53:13 GMT

After reading callistosh65's Interview, I volunteered to have a go. The idea is:

1.Leave a comment saying you would like to be interviewed.
2. I will then respond with 5 questions that quite possibly could be personal—or not, whatever mood I'm in.
3. Then update your LJ with the questions I've asked
4. Put these same rules (or something that resembles these rules) with your questions

So, my questions from callistosh65 were:
1 What was the biggest surprise about New York?
2 What is your favourite piece to sing? Why?
3 Which story of your own are you most proud of?
4 Bodie or Doyle, Starsky or Hutch? Do you have a favourite in each pairing?
5 Tell me about a show you love but cannot see the slash of in a million years.

1 What was the biggest surprise about New York?
The smell! I thought it would be full of petrol fumes, and I suppose it was, but what I really noticed was the smell of food from all the fast-food stalls. It was still fairly cold when we were there, and the fodd smells were warm and cosy!

2 What is your favourite piece to sing? Why?
Oh, this is hard. There's so much to choose from. Anything by Mozart is a joy, but I think I'll go with Rachmaninov's Vespers - it's beautiful music, a joy to sing - and that man could write for altos!

3 Which story of your own are you most proud of?
Hmmm. I have a bit of a soft spot for 'Fault Lines' in S&H, because I wasn't really expecting to write this story at all - it kind of jumped on me. In Pros, I think it would be 'Brightly Shone the Moon'.

4 Bodie or Doyle, Starsky or Hutch? Do you have a favourite in each pairing?
I do, although they're all best in a team. I'm definitely a Hutch & Doyle girl (and Blair and Daniel in my other fandoms *g*).

5 Tell me about a show you love but cannot see the slash of in a million years.
Since we have no TV, this is hard for me to answer as my viewing is fairly limited. No - wait - just thought of one. 'The West Wing'! I love it, but I cannot see slash there - just Josh & Donna all the way. I can't believe they made us wait until right near the end for the UST to become RST!

Happy Birthday arrow00!

izzie7 — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:31:17 GMT

Hope you have a lovely day filled with music and fannish things!

And because of your rec, I am now a Due South fan, so no doubt will be hitting the fanfic soon - starting with yours *g*

Book meme

izzie7 — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:58:35 GMT

Saw callistosh65's list & had to have a go...

Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish, asterisk beside the ones you own but haven't read.

Must remember to put things

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment * (I kept trying but finally gave up)
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera *
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables
66. The Corrections
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughterhouse-five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake
87. Collapse
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity’s Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

New York!

izzie7 — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:28:22 GMT

Normally, I don't post much here, but I have to share this at least a bit. The last 2 weeks were school holidays, & I finally persuaded my husband that it would be good to go to The States. We struck a deal with our 14-year old, that we got a week in New York for us, which would be followed by a week in Florida for her (yes, theme parks), and it was a huge success. We were very lucky that my brother was also in Florida over the same 2 weeks with his family, which includes 2 girls just a little younger than our daughter, & we all get on really well, so that made a big difference - the kids went on all the scary rides & I just didn't watch!

NY was amazing. I felt as if I was living in a film set half the time! The skyscrapers were so much more attractive than I had thought they would be - they are all impressive, but some are absolute works of art. My abiding memory, though, will be the smell - even above the noise (which is pretty relentless, I have to say). So many smells of so many different types of food just permeate the air the whole time. But I couldn't believe the disposal lifestyle. Apart from a couple of fairly smart (& expensive) restaurants, everywhere we ate the food came on polystyrene or card plates, with plastic cutlery. Where on earth does all this rubbish go? None of it looked biodegradable. I have to admit that I am not the greenest person on earth, although I do try, but this really shocked me.

We had a ball, though. Lots of open-top bus trips to see as much as we could, then subway rides, cab rides, a carriage ride in Central Park, the Staten Island ferry, Empire State Building at night (I didn't enjoy queuing to get up, but seriously hated having to queue to get down), Ground Zero, Fifth Avenue (we went into Tiffany's, as one of d's favourite films is 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'), Times Square, China Town, Little Italy, the Garment District - we did as much as we could. And the Met - oh wow. We spent 5 hours there before d's patience finally expired (thank god for ipods or it would have been a lot shorter) and barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to see. So tantalising.

We also managed a day trip to Washington DC. Husband & I are totally hooked on 'The West Wing', and actually watched the last 2 episodes of the last series the night before we left, so I was pathetically excited to see the real thing. We were really lucky with the weather - most of the week in NY it was pretty chilly, but the day in Washington was really warm with clear blue skies, & all the cherry blossom was out so it looked terrific The Vietnam war memorial is amazing, and it was quite weird to see the Korean War memorial after having just seen the signpost from M*A*S*H in the Air & Space Museum 'Treasures of America' section.

Florida was quite an experience too, although in a totally different way. Our apartment was huge - we reckon probably as big in total square feet as our house, but all on one floor. This was very welcome to all of us after a week of forced proximity in one hotel room with a very small bathroom in NY! Teenager retreated to her room with her own bathroom with a huge sigh of relief, echoed by us :)

So, we did the theme parks. These are not my thing here - after you've spent 14 days flat on your back in bed, barely able to get to the bathroom & certainly unable to do so without help, because of back problems, I defy most people to relish the prospect of being jerked around & swung upside-down. I certainly don't, so I became bag-lady for those rides. But I was braver than I thought I would be, & did go on a fair number, including splash mountain where I, who hate getting wet, was the only one in our group of 7 to get drenched. Typical! We managed Islands of Adventure, Universal Studios, Magic Kingdom and Sea World - which I would have loved to have gone back to, but our stamina was wearing a bit thin by then & we all really needed a day off. I wouldn't rush to go back to theme parks, but they were much better than I thought they would be, and daughter loved them, so we were all happy.

Not so pleased to get to the airport only to discover that our overnight flight was delayed, but it did give us a chance to feel all grownup & plug the laptop into the connection provided & go online free of charge. Daughter boasted about the number of emails she had, I wasn't far behind (yes, most of mine were list digests, but hey, they still count! - & a lot of her's were YouTube comments) & husband looked enigmatic & perused serious communications from his solicitor.

Oh, & people who say the jet lag is worse coming west - all too true. We got home lunchtime on Sunday, & luckily school (& work for me) didn't resume until Tuesday, but I had a 2.5 hour rehearsal on Monday night, another on Tuesday night after being inundated at work, daughter had to be ferried somewhere yesterday evening for her Duke of Edinburgh thingy, it's my book group tomorrow night & then I have singing workshops on both Sat & Sun with different choirs, & I just want to be allowed to sleep!

But it was worth it ::happy sigh::

Happy Birthday to rosie55

izzie7 — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:43:21 GMT

Sorry I'm a bit late, but hope you've had a lovely day! ♣

Happy Birthday callistosh65!

izzie7 — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:52:21 GMT

Hope you have a lovely day :)

♥♥♥♥♥

(I'm posting this a little early, but I think it's officially the proper day where you are, even if not quite where I am yet!)

Happiness meme

izzie7 — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:37:41 GMT

OK, I have been incredibly passive since signing up to lj nearly a year ago, happily reading other people's contributions but posting nothing of my own. Since I was tagged for this by dimity_blue, I thought "what the heck. Let's see if I can get this to work." So, here goes. Ten things that have made me happy recently...

1. Finally finishing a Pros story that has been lurking on my hard drive for about 18 months! I blame it for my recent writer's block, as I suspect deep down I'd decided I wasn't going to write anything else until I'd finished it - & it was hard to work up any enthusiasm for it after so long. But now it's done and sent off to the zine editor!

2. Learning a new piece of music - I'd never heard "Israel in Egypt" (by Handel) before, let alone sung it, & it's brilliant to learn a new piece in a small, good choir.

3. My daughter settling back to school for her pre-GCSE year with a decent selection of teachers - thank goodness.

4. Said daughter coming home from school cooking lessons with white choc & cranberry muffins - yum! - & then making them again at the weekened because we all liked them so much.

5. Being the adopted parent of a neighbour's cat - all the purring & none of the bills :) (and yes, the real "owners" do know & don't mind at all!)

6. Surviving my annual conference at work - 200 people on the day, & I was responsible for it. It's done & it was a success. Such a relief.

7. Fan fic. God, I love it. I'm immersed in SG1 stories at the moment, as we're watching the dvds, but Pros & The Sentinel are still there too. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder about trying to write in TS...

8. Seaon 1 of "West Wing". We don't have a TV, but we've been watching dvds on the laptop for a couple of years now, & a month or so ago I thought I'd try this. It's terrific. Husband & I are really enjoying it, although 14 year old definitely prefers Stargate.

9. A lottery win. Yes, really! I couldn't believe it when the cheque arrived in the post. It's from a lottery for a local hospice I've been supporting for a few years. It wasn't a huge win (quite right too - after all, the money's supposed to be going to the hospice, not me), but it was enough to help towards..

10. Planning a first time trip to the US for April 08. Mind you, this is also intimidating, as I have no idea where to stay etc. I just know I want us to go to New York for a few days, & daughter would like Disneyland & husband wants to go to Cuba. Can you even go straight to Cuba from the US? No idea. And we only have 14 days (maybe plus a couple if we're lucky).

I tag:callistosh65; lolabobs; enednoviel; myrebelcat; kimberleyfdr; rosie55; probodie

but only if you want :)

izzie7 — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:57:13 GMT

I'm delighted to celebrate my major online Pros writing debut (bar a couple of drabbles) with a story for the discoveredinalj Bonfire Night challenge. The story, "With a Slow Fuse", is also archived at The Hatstand and The Circuit Archive, but is not my first Pros story.

My first is called "Pushing Out The Boundaries", and was published by Bast last month in her zine "Secret Agent Men 8". If you want to know more about the zine, visit her site at http://requiem.ravenshadow.net/pros.htm

I also write Starsky and Hutch fanfic, and all my stories in that fandom can be found under the name Izzie at the Me and Thee Archive, http://meandthee.shahrazad.net