Grass and Sky

First off, before I forget,

Happy Birthday, nickeyb!

I hope you've had a wonderful day full of all the things you love most.

And also,

Happy Birthday, fellbeast02!

Welcome to your tweens! I hope they will be filled with fun and new experiences.

As you know, I've been doing some gardening this week. Today went much better than yesterday, probably due in part to the lack of running and then taking the dog for a walk before doing heavy work with the weed-whacker, etc. Today there was no run and no weed-whacker. Just lots of kneeling in the dirt pulling weeds, and being swarmed with biting black flies.

Which leads to the hobbity question. How do you think Sam Gamgee and the Gaffer managed to not get eaten alive, without Deet and other terribly toxic and environmentally unfriendly but seriously bug-deterrant sprays? Did they just get used to having itchy bumps all over their skin during the season for various bugs, or did they have more natural solutions to the problem? Are there foods they might have eaten which would have caused them to smell bad to bugs, or plant oils they might have rubbed into their clothing? I'm curious about this, because even with all the bug spray I had on yesterday (admittedly not strong enough and only sprayed on my skin, not my clothes) I got bit three times by the black flies, through my clothing. Let me tell you, sooooooo itchy right now. Even today, with stronger bug spray, all over me and my clothes and my hat, there was still a swarm around me, making it uncomfortable.

I know that when the hobbits went through the Midgewater Marsh, they were greatly bothered by the kneeker-breekers, but was that because those were an unfamiliar type of bug that they weren't prepared for, because they simply couldn't do anything about bugs in general, or because they didn't have time to be fussing around with creating bug repellant concoctions?

Discuss.

Grrr! When did using PayPal become so complicated?

I used to have an account with Paypal, several years ago, but I've since moved and don't remember my password, etc. I didn't realize this was going to be a problem. The last time I used Paypal, I simply created an account and was off.

So, I was on ebay this afternoon, searching for a Pippin to come keep Merry company. I found a lovely little speciman, clicked on buy, and then saw that the seller only accepts PayPal, checks and money orders. No problem, I naively think to myself. I click on the PayPal button, go through the rigamarole of starting an account, and run into the proverbial brick wall. They won't let me send money until I give them my bank account information and then I have to wait 2-3 business days, call the bank, get some info from them which has to be entered into my account before I can actually use it.

So instead of paying for Pippin today and getting him maybe the end of the week or the beginning of next week, I'll have to wait until probably Wednesday at the earliest, call the bank to get the information I need, and then finish verifying my account before I can actually pay for my purchase. I hope I haven't just been scammed. :(

I knew there was a reason I didn't shop on ebay, and now I know what it is. It's a pain in the ass! And on top of that, it turns out that I don't have a 'pissed off' icon of any sort. I need to get myself one of those.

Argghh! Writer's block is evil! Evil I say, evil!

Oi! I think I'm going to let someone ghost write the rest of 'Courage.' Either that or go back to the plan I had this morning and kill off all the characters. I actually wrote it out and posted it, but took it down again almost immediately. It was quite funny. Aragorn had to amputate Pippin's leg due to an infected wound he'd somehow forgotten about, which had turned gangrenous. The amputation went dreadfully awry and poor Pippin died of blood loss. Then Merry, in shock and needing cousin comfort, went to see Sam and Frodo only to find that they had accidently been given far too strong a sleep medicine, by Aragorn, and their hearts had stopped. In a towering rage, Merry confronted Aragorn. "Hello. My name is Merry Brandybuck. You killed my cousins. Prepare to die." He killed Aragorn (who was huddled up on the floor in shock that he'd let Pip die) and then the guards killed Merry.

See, at this point a ghost writer is probably a pretty good idea. Although, hm, filling the chapter up with random movie lines, appropriately altered of course, might work just as well. Do you think anyone would notice?

Well, I've started a new livejournal community, hobbit_ficathon. The idea is that a challenge will be posted there each week (probably sometime Friday afternoon or evening) and responses to the challenge will be accepted for twenty-four hours.

These aren't meant to be perfectly polished fics, as 24 hours is not a lot of time. I'm thinking it might be possible to have a second stage to the challenge, wherein everyone who participates is given one of the fics to beta and then has 24 hours to do the betaing. Or maybe until the following Wednesday or something. It's all in flux and I would be glad of any suggestions anyone has to offer.

Please come play with me. It'll be lots of fun. *bg*

Well, I now have a new place to put all the little ficlets and other things that I randomly write. My other journal was started more for the purpose of Farscape related stuff, which was kind of getting drowned out by my sudden headlong plunge into LotR fanfiction. Now, it can be happy in it's Farscapiness and I can have a separate home for all this other stuff. I may forget and occasionally post something hobbity over there, but probably not too often.