Random Confessions

[ines42575]

I am sooo hapy, I got a 95% on my undergraduate thesis! My degree is almost finished, at last!

 

[ladyjane]

I am sooo hapy, I got a 95% on my undergraduate thesis! My degree is almost finished, at last!

Congratulations!

 

[iluvtodd]

Awesome, ines42575!

 

[ines42575]

Congratulations!

Awesome, ines42575!

for your kind messages!

 

[anonymoose_au]

I burnt my tongue on hot chocolate the other day and it still hurts.

Most unpleasant.

 

[iluvtodd]

^ Hope you feel better ASAP!

 

[anonymoose_au]

^ Hope you feel better ASAP!

Well the good news is that it feels a loooot better.

The bad news is I now have a cold and I've had to call in sick to work and now I have to get a COVID test.

Apparently they're not so bad with the nose swab, but the throat swab kills me

 

[anonymoose_au]

Good news I got my COVID test back (already!) and it's negative.

However, the burn on my tongue is still highly irritating though. Grumble grumble.

 

[iluvtodd]

^ We need an icon for "mixed feelings."

 

[anonymoose_au]

^ We need an icon for "mixed feelings."

We do!

Although the cold is striking back! It's day 3 now and still no work for me. I really enjoy my job so this is a bummer.

Also I think fighting off the cold is why my poor tongue is taking so long to heal At least I assume so. Maybe I should drag myself to the doctor's (you don't need to go to a doctor to get the COVID test here). Of course then I have to go outside and it's cold and raining today!

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

My latest confession is that I have been watching The Horror Channel every weekday for the past 5 weeks.

Those that have read my posts will know that I am squeemish at blood and gore and things like that. So, you are probably wondering why on Earth I would be watching The Horror Channel. Well, due of the watershed rules, they aren't able to show real horror shows and films during the day. So, they fill up their daytime schedules with sci-fi shows.

The reason I am watching The Horror Channel is that they started showing "Star Trek: Enterprise" from the start!!!




Nearly 20 years after it was first broadcast, I am now finally catching up on what I still tend to refer to as "the new series"!!!

Series 1 will finish on Monday night / Tuesday morning, with Series 2 starting straight away on Tuesday night / Wednesday morning.

So far, I have been enjoying teh series. Admittedly, it is bothering me how wooden Captain Archer is. But I think it is the case that the character is deliberately written that way, rather than Scott Bakula not being able to act (hey, if he couldn't act, he wouldn't have gone on to get the main role in "NCIS: New Orleans" as well!) So, I am quietly hopeful that he will lighten up as time goes on.

As somebody whose favourite character in the original series was Spock, I just love the way the series is developing the back-story of the Vulcans. And that we have a Vulcan as part of the main crew! I liked the way that the series was written in a way that you weren't sure for a long time whether to turst T'Pol or not. I was constantly changing my mind!

I realise it is all part of playing a Vulcan, but Jolene Blalock really does not suit short hair. There was one episode where she had long hair as part of a disguise, and that suited her a lot better!

One thing I was disappointed with is that the writers seem to have gone full-on with the British stereotype for Malcolm. Come on, not everybody from the UK is "stiff upper lip" and all that!

Oh, and can I just add, I hope they develop Hoshi into a bigger character. Because Linda Park is just

I wonder if they are going to show all 5 series in a row, or whether they are going to break it up with something else. I hope they do show them all at once!

And maybe then go straight onto "Discovery" when they have completed showing "Enterprise"!

Live long and prosper!

CaroLiza_fan

Well, they did show all 4 series of "Enterprise" (not 5 series, as I thought there was) back to back. I have just watched the final episode and, I have to I admit, I did well up when it reached the end. Not so much because of how it ended (2 main characters - who I will not name to avoid spoiling the plot of the final episode for those who haven't seen it - walking away from camera), but because it was The End.

On the whole, I enjoyed "Enterprise". But, it took a while to get to a storyline format that I thought worked. The first 2 series were mostly stand alone episodes. I realise that this is how the Original Series was done, but nowadays we are used to watching programmes where there are overarching storylines in which we get to know the characters as people. For the third series, they went to the other extreme - a single storyline for the whole series. And it was too much of the one story. In the fourth series, I felt they got the balance right - storylines that lasted 2 or 3 episodes.

One thing I really did not like was the way that the whole atmosphere of the programme changed after Series 2. It became more violent, and we regularly had people getting killed. That's not Star Trek. When the Series 3 storyline was finished, I hoped that it would go back to the "nicer" stories we had before. But, whilst the violence did decrease in Series 4, there was still more of it than I would have liked.

Anyway, I have a dilemma. Now that "Enterprise" has finished, they are replacing it with "Voyager". Series 1, Episode 1 will be shown tonight / tomorrow morning. I would like to watch it from the start. But, if they are going to show all 7 series, that is going to be a big commitment.

Although it is only an hour with adverts, I have found over the past few months that watching "Enterprise" in the mornings really eats into my time. (The morning showings are repreats of what was shown the evening before. But, the evening showings are not convenient for me). The mornings are when I tend to be at my best for doing things. But, losing that hour each morning has meant that I don't have enough time to do the things I would normally have done. And I have got so far behind as a result.

For the past couple of months, they have been showing "The Original Series" in it's entirity back to back with "Enterprise". And whilst I would have liked to have watched it in it's entirity, I felt that watching both series would have been taking up too much time. They are currently just over half-way through the final series (Series 3), and because The Horror Channel's website has listings that go 3 weeks into the future, I know that they will go back to the start of Series 1 the day after they show the final episode of Series 3.

The thing I don't know is whether they are planning on showing "The Original Series" in it's entirity straight after they just finished showing it in it's entirity, or whether they are just showing part of Series 1 as a stop-gap until they are ready to start showing something else.

In an ideal world, I would like to watch both "The Original Series" and "Voyager". But, if I was struggling with losing 1 hour in the mornings, what would losing 2 hours be like?! So, I will need to seriously think about what to do.

I think I will start watching "Voyager" tomorrow, and then wait until the time comes that "The Original Series" re-sets to decide how to proceed. By then, the listings will hopefully go far enough into the future to tell whether they are showing it again in it's entirity.

Anyway, gotta go and get back to trying to catch up with replying to PM's... (...the one I am currently replying to was sent over a month ago! )



CaroLiza_fan

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

I have just realised that the youngest of the Ladies skaters I have adopted is coached by a former Ice Dancer...

...and he is still Junior eligible!

It gets better - he's 4 months younger than one of his student's team-mates!

I knew he looked young, but I didn't realise he was quite that young!

You know you're getting old when... the coaches are kids.

CaroLiza_fan

 

[cheerknithanson]

I feel guilty I haven't been catching up with figure skating as much lately. Like Savchenko coming to the USA to compete for them with TJ Nyman....like WHAT. To be fair, I was working in a lab until last week (I was a COVID lab tech for 5 months. Loved it so much. Though of course with the pandemic in the USA dwindling, my lab got downsized) so I haven't been catching up as much. And other stuff.

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

I was on target to get to bed early last night. But I ended up going late, and I am wrecked now. And it's all @anonymoose_au's fault!

You see, yesterday morning, I read a story on teletext about something that had happpened in New South Wales. And I wondered if my favourite Moose had posted anything witty about it. But, I was reading those stories during the adverts in "Star Trek" and since I knew the adverts would be over by the time I got the computer switched on, I didn't look up her pages then. And then I forgot.

I remembered again when I was getting ready for bed. So, since I hadn't switched the computer off yet, I went onto her Twitter. Nope, nothing there. So, I then went onto her Instagram. And while on there, I found that she had started posting time-lapse videos of her doing jigsaws. And I watched every single one of them!!!

Great videos, Moose! I really enjoyed watching you do those two puzzles. I haven't done jigsaws for donkey's years, but it was good to see a comparative pro like you start the same way as I do, doing the edges first. But, I was so impressed with the way that even before you started, you organised all the pieces into groupings. I wouldn't have thought of doing that! And I loved your jigsaw piece shaped containers that you put them in!

One thing, though. I know doing time lapse videos was new to you and, as such, you were experimenting with camera angles. But, my favourite angles were the ones where we could more of you. Seeing the look of concentration in your face really added to the impact of the videos.

But, I have to admit, I was kinda disappointed that when you finished the Sydney Harbour Bridge jigsaw you didn't jump up and cheer! That looked hard, so you deserved to celebrate!

Keep up the good work!

CaroLiza_fan

 

[anonymoose_au]

Hooray my time-lapses have viewers. Thank you @CaroLiza_fan sorry for keeping you up though!

I think I did cheer after completing the Sydney Harbour Bridge but because of the time lapse it wasn't caught. It only takes a shot once every 30 seconds or something.

And yes I heard about grouping the puzzle pieces online and even bought the jigsaw shaped tubs to put them in. It's really helped, before the pieces were just all scattered on the table.

What were you looking for about NSW? We've got a bit to choose from right now...there's a mouse plague in the rural areas, huge spiderwebs due to floods and an outbreak of the Delta strain in Sydney!

If it's non-figure skating sports related news I'd know nothing.

 

[CaroLiza_fan]

Hooray my time-lapses have viewers. Thank you @CaroLiza_fan sorry for keeping you up though!

Don't worry, I enjoyed watching them. Watching somebody else doing a jigsaw is not something I would have imagined would be interesting as a spectator, but it was. Even though I wasn't doing it myself, there was that same feeling of satisfaction at seeing it progress well, and then at seeing it completed.

I think I did cheer after completing the Sydney Harbour Bridge but because of the time lapse it wasn't caught. It only takes a shot once every 30 seconds or something.

Aha! It looked so smooth that I just assumed that it was a continuous video whose playback had just been speeded up. It wasn't anything like the jerky type of picture that you normally get on time lapse videos.

Good to know that you did celebrate!

And yes I heard about grouping the puzzle pieces online and even bought the jigsaw shaped tubs to put them in. It's really helped, before the pieces were just all scattered on the table.

That is a problem I had too when I was doing jigsaws as a youngster. But then we got a 30in x 24in board with raised edging around it that you could do the jigsaw on and have the loose pieces on without them falling off. And it was also handy in that you could put it on the kitchen table when doing the jigsaw, and then move it to somewhere out of the way when not doing the jigsaw. Unfortunately, when I was at Uni, my Dad pinched it and put it up on the wall of the garage to act as a mount for a poster of my hero. So, I can't use it for the purpose it was intended any more.

What were you looking for about NSW? We've got a bit to choose from right now...there's a mouse plague in the rural areas, huge spiderwebs due to floods and an outbreak of the Delta strain in Sydney!

It was the mice. And specifically the story about the prison that had to be evacuated because of them. That story was just perfect for some great one-liners!

I had seen the story about the spider webs earlier in the week. But, that story wasn't as detailed.

Just to explain. I don't bother looking up news on the internet. Instead, I get most of my news from reading teletext while having my breakfast and during the adverts in "Star Trek" straight afterwards. With living in Northern Ireland, I have access to two teletext services.

The BBC's teletext service (which I still tend to call "Ceefax", even though that name was specifically for the BBC's analogue text service) is useless nowadays. It is basically stories from the BBC website, which have been cut down to just the first 4 paragraphs, so as to fit on 2 pages. So, you don't get any details. In fact, quite often the stories have been cut down so much that they don't even get to what is mentioned in the title! And sometimes the stories have been cut down so much that they don't actually make sense. Due to cutbacks, the BBC doesn't update the selection of stories as often as they used to.

RTÉ's teletext service (which still uses the same "Aertel" name that was used int he analogue teletext days) uses the same principle of taking stories from their website. The difference is that their service is much more detailed, with stories running to as long as 10 pages (that said, even with more pages, some stories still end up being cut off mid-sentence). And it gets updated VERY regularly. You could go on at breakfast time and find one set of stories, and then come back 2 hours later to find ALL the stories that were there the last time you were on are gone, and have been replaced with newer selection of stories. And then come back again at dinner time and find yet another set of stories.

I read about the mice and the current COVID-19 situation on both services. For the spider webs, I only saw it on Ceefax. I suspect it had appeared and then disappeared from Aertel in between my visits.

If it's non-figure skating sports related news I'd know nothing.

Don't worry, I wouldn't know any Aussie sports news either.

On that point, have you heard of anything interesting happening lately in Aussie skating? I haven't heard anything about Aussie skating for what seems like years! I know the rinks are open to the public now, as I saw a picture of you on the ice the previous time I visited your Instagram. But, what about the elite skaters? Did they have their training interrupted for long?

Anyway, all the best with your Pusheen jigsaw.

CaroLiza_fan

 

[decafjava]

Not sure if this is the right thread but does anyone here have experience with lucid dreams?

 

[dorispulaski]

Only twice in my life- very unnerving.

 

[iluvtodd]

Happy Canada Day to all of the Canadians here!

 

[elbkup]

Not sure if this is the right thread but does anyone here have experience with lucid dreams?

Yes, often…. Usually just before waking, content varies, can be scary or beautiful but almost always relates to waking life activities. Solved a real life problem once or twice!