pebblerocker

Ginger Geoffrey stares at me in fascination when I sweep the floor. Such curiosity and puzzlement on his little cat face. I can't help feeling that he's making a point about how infrequently I enact this strange ritual, and if I did housework more often he'd not be so baffled to see it.

I'm playing Dragon Age: Origins! It's a lot of fun! (This is possibly something that takes up time I could be spending on something more constructive!) I decided to make a dwarf character. The top of her head comes up not quite as far as her companion Alistair's shoulder; I'm guessing he's meant to be on the tall side but not exceptionally so, six feet plus or minus a little, which puts my character at around four foot ten. Which is not much smaller than me in real life. So when NPCs meet me and say, "Ah! You're a dwarf!" they are making quite an assumption - she could just as well be a human at the lower range of normal height. I'm quite used to coming up to people's shoulders, or their armpits if they're unusually tall. Playing as a character who's short like me and also incredibly physically capable and skilled with an enormous two-handed sword is... rather satisfying.

1. I like my dentist, he's very cool. He's really into his subject and loves talking about it, a bit of an Adrian Anorak only more personable. After my check-up he was telling me all about different types of bacteria that exist in the mouth and why some cavities progress faster than others, and I was really interested in it, I was fascinated by fun science. If only it was fun science that didn't have Lots Of Pain as a consequence.

2. I like gaming with other women! My guild used to have lots of women when I joined, women moderating and mentoring and women just playing. With attrition the active playerbase has gone down over the years (the game's ten years old after all) and for the last couple of years I've been gaming in several overlapping groups in which I'm the only woman, and I know of one other woman playing on the same server whose sessions don't usually overlap with mine. Now, with the release of Diablo 3, there's an influx of new players; I'm playing regularly with the niece of a long-time D2 friend, I had a game with an LJ friend this week, and there are more women around in my guild which is GREAT. I want there to be even more.

3. I like Scrapheap! We're watching the first series, before it became Scrapheap Challenge and got a new format and more money for sets and a different pair of teams every week and semi-finals. In the first series Robert Llewellyn is the only presenter and there are only two teams, trying to win the most challenges by the end of the series. I love that it's low-budget and doesn't care. I love how everything is dirty and they eat lunch with greasy hands and wear grubby grey uniforms. I love Anne the hovercraft champion and I love Major Dick's moustache. I love all the welding and bashing things. I love that it doesn't try to hype everything up and make you wait two ad breaks to see anything interesting happen like some shows I could mention, it's actually exciting and doesn't need hype because everyone just wants to see which tractor is strongest and whether the trebuchet will work better than the mangonel.

4. I like not being at work. I had to work 6-day weeks for a year due to constant ongoing staff shortages and it was really hard and I was getting depressed because I never had the energy to do anything fun. They've finally managed to hire two new people and I haven't been needed to work at all for a month, which is longer than I'd normally like to be away from work but since I've been overworked for so long I'm really happy about it. I haven't exactly been an explosion of industry and making the house perfectly tidy and writing all the stories I never got around to and being organised etc, but I am doing a little gardening and reading a lot and I'm able to do fun things that also need physical effort rather than having to save up energy to get through work. And my strained wrist is recuperating nicely.

5. I like reading the same books my mother is reading, working our way through a series together and swapping books back and forth and going to the library to collect books for each other and talking about them. I'm amused when she's read a book and I'm partway through and I say I don't think things will go as well as Certain Character hopes and she just says Hmmmm.

My rapidly-expanding second favourite Sims 2 family needed to move out of their cramped two-bedroom Maxis house into something a bit bigger, preferably something with room for enough beds for everyone and more than a two-seater couch. My favourite family got a really neat blue weatherboard house I designed and built myself, but for this next building project I lacked inspiration. Making all the bits fit together can be hard.

Thank you, wonderful makers and sellers of houses, for putting your plans online for my perusal! Grand Sim matriarch Loretta will now preside over the next generation in a generously-proportioned four-bedroom home loosely based on Select Homes's "Swansea" plan (warning: floor plans in PDF). The house may not be exactly my style but it certainly is hers -- she's moving up in the world and she doesn't mind who knows it.

Woo! I've returned to the first Guitar Hero game trying to make progress in my career and tonight (after half a dozen failed attempts) I finally managed to make it through Bark at the Moon on Medium difficulty! Yay me!

(Doing the game's hardest song on Medium may seem really easy to you, in which case I am still proud because it's at the limits of my current capability, or it may seem impossibly difficult, in which case I didn't intend to imply that I'm better than you but I'm still proud.)

Also today Les Paul died, the guitar guy. He was ninety-four. I shall play my genuine imitation Les Paul copy in his honour.