They predicted four to five inches of snow would fall on Thursday night. But when we got up on Friday morning: big fat nothing! There was a very light dusting of snow on the lawn but no more than that. I was a bit disappointed, but not too much since we were going to the Royal Albert Hall to see Handel's Messiah. A couple of concerts were cancelled in London because musicians couldn't get in from outlying areas which had been badly affected, but our event went ahead so we bundled up and got there on time. The Tube was running better than usual if anything.

It was performed by a combination of three London choirs with five hundred voices singing. At first, my enjoyment was seriously hampered by an incredibly bright stage light beaming straight into our seating area. I thought it was just me being oversensitive, but then I noticed everyone around me squinting and holding their hands over their eyes. A few people hadn't turned up so we moved a few seats down, which was slightly better but not by much. During the interval a string of people, including TJ, got up to harangue one of the ushers and the light was duly turned off. That was lucky since people arrived to claim the seats we had moved to, so we went back to our original places to listen to the second half. Quite a few people came in after the interval, so either they had been delayed by the snow or they only wanted to hear the really good bit (the Hallelujah Chorus). That was the highlight, of course, but the whole work was beautifully sung, and I'm pretty sure everybody's retinas recovered eventually.

We were driving back from the park today and someone on the radio quoted Hugh Hefner as saying 'The only surprise [about Tiger Woods' affairs] is that people are surprised; marriage is just a convenience, blah blah blah...' We were just yelling 'eff off! Grow up!' (admittedly unlikely at this point in Hugh Hefner's life, but still) the whole way home. Then some sexist oaf came on (it was a phone-in show), boasting about all the affairs he had had because 'he was a man' and therefore 'he just couldn't control himself'. Growl. Okay, people have affairs. Lots of our friends have and it's not shocking to me, but there's no point in pretending there are no consequences or that men have some God-given right to cheat. I haven't got the patience for these selfish idiots right now; it must be the lack of sunlight. They said on the weather that it had rained every day for the last fifty days.

I'm trying to cheer myself up with a Christmas detox. It involves lots of boring things like yogurt and broccoli and a huge amount of salmon because the guy who devised it thinks salmon is some magical substance that prevents disease. It's also supposed to make you look better and younger, which is fine in theory but if I wake up on Saturday looking like a seven-year-old I won't be happy.

TJ had a golf day, which meant a day of freedom for me. I'd take him along on my outings but he doesn't like exhibitions and is very vocal when he gets bored, but then he doesn't want me to go off on my own either. :/ Both he and the dog look at me as though I'm deserting them forever. Bah.

Since he wasn't around, I went to the V&A to see the Maharajah exhibition. They had some magnificent clothes on display - gowns and saris from the mid-1800s that looked almost new; and of course a ton of necklaces and rings and jewelled swords and belts. It's incredible to think they used rock-sized emeralds and rubies so casually.

I also had a peek at the new Medieval galleries. I saw a lot of statues and pictures I didn't recognise, so either they've given a lot of things a good clean or they have taken a lot out of storage. I know from my days as a volunteer there that the V&A, like all big museums, keeps tonnes of things piled up in storerooms which never see the light of day because they haven't got the room or the right conditions to display them, so it's good they're showing off some of their treasures.

I gave up once I realised how much there was to see - they have built a whole new extension to the museum, and my cultural stamina really seems to be lacking these days. I can always go back - the redisplay cost them so much they probably won't change it for another fifty years.

51,173 words, to be exact, according to the NaNo verification thingy. That was almost two hundred more than Word told me I had, so that was nice but it didn't really matter. The point is that I won, even though I'm going to have to completely start over and actually do some research if I'm ever going to make this story work. Every single word of it was a struggle. Most of that was my fault because I kept procrastinating but I had underestimated how hard it would be now that I'm not alone in the house during the day. Those quiet afternoons I enjoyed last year were gone, and I get weirdly self-conscious when someone else is lurking.

I'm still not quite sure what to do with myself now. I have a ton of DVDs to watch and loads of books to read, not to mention that I haven't even begun buying Christmas presents or choosing things I'd like people to buy me. Maybe I'll even leave the house tomorrow.

They let the guy who killed his wife during a dream go. I think the judge was right to free him, since he obviously was ill and isn't likely to pose a danger to others.

I'm finding it hard to get out of the house right now. There are a lot of things I want to see and do but I just don't make enough time for them. I did manage to go to the British Museum to see a display of ancient Japanese sculptures yesterday, which was lucky since it closes this weekend. I should gone to the Moctezuma exhibition they're having at the same time but I don't seem to have the stamina for too much culture any more. Besides, that one goes on until the end of January, so once you-know-what is over I should be able to go.

I was looking forward to their new bookshop but it was a huge disappointment. It was full of dry texts about various ancient civilisations but none of the odd books about social history or food or Bollywood that they used to carry. The other gift shop just sold a few things relating to the current exhibitions and some touristy stuff about London. I suppose they won't stock books that don't sell, and there's always Amazon, but that's not the same. I miss being able to browse for ages and find something I'd never heard of.

As 'compensation' I bought myself a skull necklace, since it wasn't very expensive and it will go well with my skull earrings. It certainly looks a lot better than the hideous 'butt necklace' I saw on Etsy the other day, which the seller chose to display on a bare and very hairy bottom. O_o

My strange dreams have continued this week. In addition to the one about Kevin Bacon, I've also dreamed of short bearded men desperately trying to buy orange puffa jackets and about a barge full of prawns the size of cows sailing majestically down the Thames. I'm convinced it's because I'm writing about dreams, and so almost always thinking about them. I've also been noticing a lot of news stories about hypnosis and dreams. There was a terrible case of a man who accidentally killed his partner of forty years while he was sleepwalking - he mistook her for an intruder and attacked her.

It worries me how much time I spend procrastinating. A whole day can go by with me having written almost nothing. It takes me a long time before I even feel 'brave' enough to produce some words. Silly I know, but I'm very inhibited. Still, if all goes well I will finish NaNo by next Saturday. Yay!

I had the weirdest, most WTF dream about the actor Kevin Bacon last night. He was in a burns unit and his skin was peeling off. I won't go into more detail than that because it soon became really creepy - one of those dreams that make you feel strange and uncomfortable when you wake up.

What woke me was the sound of water dripping inside the bedroom. :/ We had a lot of rain overnight, and for a while I tried to convince myself the dripping was outside. We had the windows replaced this summer, which cost a fortune, and then we spent more money and a huge amount of effort repainting and wallpapering the room a few weeks ago. Surely the new windows weren't leaking - oh, but they were. Just a little drip in one corner that didn't hit the wall but which did make a pretty big wet spot on the carpet. Grr. We're calling the window people on Monday.

On to the good news: I got a lot of writing done today. Well, a lot for this project anyway - over 3,000 words, and I quite enjoyed it. I like dialogue a lot better than exposition so I'm going to concentrate on that to get my word count up. Later on I'll decide if I want to whip it into a recognisable story. I never finished last year's NaNo even though I won and I feel a bit bad about that. Maybe I'll get my writing mojo back.

It's been a bit of a frustrating week.

We're probably not going to buy the house next door. They're asking a fortune for it, which they will probably get, and it would cost about £100,000 to modernise it. So we'll just have to hope someone nice buys the place.

We had a good Bonfire Night though. We huddled round the chimnea and watched fireworks over the back fence because we're too cheap to go down to the local park and pay £7 to attend their shindig. We went once. They have a funfair with a few rides, some hot dog vans, and a couple of huge bonfires which leave black marks on the grass for the rest of the year. It's okay but not really worth the money. A few years ago we went to one in a village in Surrey that was actually quite spooky, with locals approaching the bonfire with flaming torches and a very realistic 'guy', complete with a wig and suit of clothes. It was like something out of The Wicker Man. I always tell TJ I find this holiday offensive, since I'm Catholic. ;)

My NaNoWriMo hasn't really taken off yet. I wrote two thousand words on the first day, then nothing for three or four days after that.  Yesterday was pretty productive, though. I need to pound out a couple of thousand in the next hour or so because we''re going out to dinner with some of TJ's ex-workmates in glamorous Hemel Hempstead. Woo!

The people next door may be us. The old lady who lived there finally moved into a care home a few weeks ago. She just couldn't live on her own any more so her family is going to sell the house. We're thinking of buying it - not just us but as an investment with TJ's friend and ex-boss. It would take a lot of money to do up, but house prices in our area are always pretty high because of the location, and at least it would give us some control over who we have as neighbours. It's by no means definite but we're considering it.  

I came into some money this week. Not because anyone died but because my mother reminded me of an old bank account I had - one so old she actually had to open it for me. I had more or less forgotten about it and over the years it accrued quite a lot of interest. We closed it and now I have a fresh injection in my current account. Most of it will have to go on boring stuff like bills but it gives me a bit of a cushion for Christmas and into the New Year. Still no work on the horizon. :|

Since I'm so flush with money I decided to donate £5 for every book I read during last week's Read-a-Thon, so Action For Blind People got £25 out of me. Not a completely pointless exercise then, and I did get to read some pretty interesting books.

I finished my fifth book in the last hour. In addition to the books I already mentioned I read The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Volume 1; Maison Ikkoku Volume 5; and Mr Timothy by Louis Bayard, which is a novel featuring a very grown-up Tiny Tim. That one should give me some weird dreams. I read about 1430 pages and have now been awake for over twenty-seven hours. Tiredness has sort of come and gone although it did get very touch-and-go about six or seven this morning.

Thanks to everyone who commented and congratulations to everyone who participated. See you in April...maybe. ;)

I have now progressed to the Red Bull, and I'm on my fourth and fifth books. One's a manga, so I'll try to finish that before I go back to the novel I think I've read about a thousand pages - but some of those are mostly pictures. Ugh - I have a real urge to sleep for some reason.

Just a few more hours to go.

Well, that took longer than I thought. I only just finished the Monster of Florence and my eyes are already feeling wobbly. It wasn't what I expected - more of a political thriller than a murder mystery - but I liked it. 'Enjoyed' doesn't seem quite right for such a gory book, though.

I'm going to watch the X Factor for a while tonight, but I will be reading in between ad breaks. It turns out that several of my chosen books have alarmingly small print, but I won't let that discourage me. I've got a couple of manga in reserve when I can't handle anything serious.

I've decided the next one will be Remembering Our Childhood by Karl Sabbagh, which is a critique of the recovered-memory movement. 

It's almost time for the Read-a-Thon. The next twenty-four hours should be interesting, at least. Any posts I make in the final six to eight hours (assuming I actually stay awake the whole time)  may be completely incomprehensible, though. It's perfect reading weather - dark and rainy, so there's no guilt about not being outdoors.

I'm starting with The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi, a non-fiction book about an Italian serial killer. It should keep me alert if nothing else.

I finally got out of the house today. It's very easy to just stay in most of the time and only go out to take the dog for a walk, and that's not good because then i start getting weird about going on trains and being in crowds. I need to avoid avoiding things that make me anxious, LOL.

I went to the Serpentine gallery for an exhibition. The Serpentine is easy for me to get to, not very big, and best of all, it's free, so it's impossible to feel ripped off even if you hate what you see. Right now they're showing work by this guy called Gustav Metzger, who came to England just before the Second World War, under a refugee programme for children called Kindertransport. The rest of his family stayed in Germany and were killed, so it's fair to say he hasn't got a very cheerful outlook on life. He's lived as a hobo sometimes and has occasionally destroyed all his art and then started over again. The first room contained a massive pile of plastic bags full of newspapers which was amusingly described as his archive, and there were photographs and videos of political demonstrations and a few dead trees. It's the kind of thing that bothers people who think art should consist of pictures hanging neatly in rows, but since I'm not one of those people it didn't bother me; I liked it well enough.

But I didn't know what to make of what I saw in one of the rooms. At first I thought it was some kind of living exhibit, because there was someone moving around under this enormous green sheet, really flailing like a dog stuck under a blanket. It turned out he was just a visitor, and if you wanted to see this huge picture you had to get under the sheet and crawl along the floor. Now I've done a lot of strange things at art exhibtions. I've stumbled around in pitch-black rooms; I've been confronted by all kinds of horrible images; I've trudged through tunnels made of taped-together cardboard boxes. But I've never actually got down on the ground and crawled my way across a gallery floor.

And I still haven't. It was just too weird for me, and too be honest I felt slightly embarrassed  watching the man who tried it, although I have to admire his willingness. Maybe if I'd been in a better, more adventurous mood I might have done it, but this time I gave it a miss.    

I love a good challenge/experiment/contest/whatever, and today I decided to do this one:




I'm not going to look like that, sadly. But I am going to be reading for 24 hours next weekend, starting at one pm on the 24th of October, for Dewey's Read-A-Thon. I've stayed up all night reading loads of times but I've never done it as part of a 'group' and I want to get some books under my belt before NaNoWriMo next month so it should be interesting. I just need to decide what I'm going to read. I've got this true-crime story about an Italian serial killer that  just might be creepy enough to keep me awake all night. 

http://24hourreadathon.com/

I managed to rig the computer so I could watch X Factor in one corner and muck about on the internet at the same time. It was the highlight of my day. Sigh.

I don't even know why I like watching that stupid show so much. I hate commercial pop music. I suppose I enjoy the melodrama and tears and unintentional comedy. Anyway, it gives me something to do on Saturday nights, since we're certainly not in a financial position to go out very often. But there's a possibility of a contract. The bad news is that TJ would have to live away from home during the week. Bah.

I've had some sort of  rash this week. It's not an illness, probably just dry skin, and it's going away now. It might have gone completely if I hadn't scratched it so much, but scratching is so irresistible sometimes, especially with my sharp nails. Although I did end up cutting them this afternoon once I realised I had drawn blood. O_o. But I think I enjoy scratching just because I know I'm not supposed to do it. I seem to remember chicken pox as being quite enjoyable...

I finally broke down and bought a pair of 'fat' jeans yesterday. 'They' say you shouldn't go up a size because it means you've given up on losing weight but I really haven't. I just need something to wear over the next few weeks, and spilling out of everything wasn't exactly helping my self-esteem.  They're actually a bit big, which I'm taking as a hopeful sign. And we may have some good news on the job front, so life isn't totally grim. But it's still quite itchy. 

This week marked our wedding anniversary. We didn't do anything  because we went out last week for a meal at a good Northern Italian place near us.  I had a voucher that ran out on Saturday, and I don't say no to saving money in these straightened times, so we celebrated a few days early. We parked the car next to the Thames and when we came out I said 'I want to go on a boat ride!' TJ didn't think that was such a good idea after a three course meal and a bottle of wine and the only boats leaving from that pier are early morning commuter services, so we went home to watch one of Darren Brown 'magic' shows and the first episode of Peep Show (yay).

I still want to go on a boat ride because they're surprisingly fun. You can get quite touristy ones from Westminster that go all the way down to Richmond, and you can see all sorts of sights you can't get from the road or pavements like the old Harrods warehouse that became a ridiculously expensive apartment block. And there's the Tate boat, although that's pretty expensive for such a short journey, and these commuter services which anyone can use if they get up early enough. There's something really romantic about travelling on the Thames, and these days it's so clean salmon swim in it, along with the occasional lost whale which always ends up dying. :(

I really just want to get out of the house, LOL. Lately all I do is mess about on the internet, walk the dog, and then settle in for an afternoon of TV. When they cancelled Monk today for some political conference I was actually quite depressed. Luckily there are a few teeny-tiny hints of possible jobs out there. Let's hope so, eh?

I was cleaning out a drawer the other day and I found this weird note I made two years ago. I had written down my weight and measurements over the course of a few weeks and they never changed. I was about the weight I am now, and at the bottom of the paper I had written 'I give up!!!' complete with multiple emo exclamation marks and a swear word. The funny thing is I didn't give up, because I've lost weight and then gained it back again at least twice since then. Twice. 

Every time I lose the weight I say Never Again, and every time I gain it back it's harder to lose. The worst part is that I like being heavy - well, part of me does. When I'm heavy I feel substantial and noticeable; when I'm thinner I feel as though I'm fading into insignificance. But I also feel a lot more energetic and it's nice to be able to wear whatever I want. Right now I'm down to about five outfits and most of those are too tight. :/

So with a view to losing weight  I went back to power yoga today. It's been  three months to the day since I last put on that DVD, and it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought. Once you do those exercises your body gets used to them, I suppose. But if I'm going to lose weight and get fit it has to be permanent this time. The serial dieting stuff has to stop.