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1. Today is the last day of the Snowflake Challenge, which has been all kinds of fun. It's got me back into the habit of posting here, even when I don't really feel I have anything to say, and I've got out and met a whole host of new people, which is definitely good for me. Yesterday's posts were especially good, with a bunch of people posting challenges, and me thinking "Huh, that's a good idea". I need to clear my desk this morning, but once I've done that, I think I'm going to take some time to approach my work year in the way I've approached my personal and fannish one. It's been useful for clearing out the cobwebs!

2. In fairness, my head feels mostly full of cobwebs this morning. J and I are both still ill, and while we slept better last night*, I've got a lot of catching up to do. *snore*

3. Today I'm having another run at a Whole 30 month. While it didn't feel like it was doing me much good in November, once I stopped doing it, I realised it had, in fact, been doing me a whole lot of good. I'm not thinking it of 'not eating a bunch of stuff' but more as 'going back to eating the good stuff.' Having done it before, it doesn't feel like as much of a hard reset as last time. This time around, it's more like acknowledging that what I eat affects how I feel (I'm slow on the uptake, okay?) and that maybe eating things that are good for me would be a good plan. But unlike a lot of people, I have no instincts about this, and need a framework to help me work it out. It'll get harder in the middle of the month, but at the moment, I'm feeling pretty determined.

4. Despite previous flake-outs, I went ahead and signed up for a genprompt_bingo card, this time with the express purpose of combining it with my "Prompts I want to write" spreadsheet. I write better with more restrictions, and making me put the two things together is, I hope, going to help. Also, if I write a long enough story, I can probably get a line just with one fic!

( Card, for reference )

5. I grew something!



For Christmas this year, I bought mushroom growing kits for James' Mum and Aunt, and since they were on 3 for 2, I saved one for myself. I'm not noted for my ability to grow anything but chillis, so this was fun to attempt, and I got the shiitake kit, as they're more expensive to buy.

This is the first harvest! We got about 250g of mushrooms, and the substrate now has a rest in a dark place, before coming out for the next round in a week or two. We should get 3 harvests altogether. They weren't exactly hard to grow - put on windowsil, occasionally water - but it's still very satisfying to have mushrooms for breakfast that you grew yourself.

Snowflake Day 15

Day 15

In your own space, write a love letter to Fandom in general, to a particular fandom, to a trope, a relationship, a character, or to your flist/circle/followers. Share your love and squee as loud as you want to.

Without wanting to get all gushy at you,* my most-loved and most-consistent fandom has always been my Friends-list. I arrived on LJ looking for the House fandom, found it. Then I found the Torchwood fandom. And the SGA fandom. And the Merlin fandom. Through all of those, my interests waxed and waned. I got interested in other media without getting stuck into the fandom - White Collar, MCU - but I kept up my Flist. I added people whose interests coincided with mine, and those whose didn't because they sounded interesting. We ended up talking about everything from deep character motivations to terrible writers to missing scenes to how I was going to run away to Morroco (it was decided more camles were required). I screwed up, and people explained to me why without shouting at me, so I got a chance to apologise and put things right. I got Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr accounts, but none of them really hit the spot that LJ did. While I'm not someone who believes you can just turn the clock back, I am an eternal optimist, and I'm hopeful of putting something new together.

Because fandom isn't the canon, it's the people.

Okay, we all update less often these days, and I'm slowly learning how to Tumblr (and building a new Flist there, which is kind of awesome too), but there are names that have been there from the start that I look out for each morning. There are people I've met in person after knowing for years online, so I can hear their voices when I read their posts. There are some folks I met in person before adding them here. And there are people with long-deleted journals that I'm still close friends with.

We always used to say that you get the Friends List you deserve, but I have never really felt that's true, because I don't know what I did to deserve you lot. The Snowflake Challenge has been wonderful for bringing me into the orbit of a bunch of new people, and I'm genuinely excited to get to know you over the coming months. I've added so many people to my Circle, and every time, I've thought "but should I?" Then I think how it makes me smile when people have added me, and I click anyway.

So hello, people. Old and New. It's been a fun fortnight, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

*I'm definitely going to get gushy at you.