Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

This computer is dying a slow and painful death. The internet connection is erratic at best, I can only access facebook for about an hour before it collapses into pages of html, and now I have no sound either.
*is cross*
Brammers, you win, I'm going to buy a laptop out of my tax return.

So, I've been a bit distracted lately, and I blame my better-late-than-never discovery of Torchwood, and loveliness that is Ianto Jones (the suits! The accent! The snogging with Jack!). Ahem.
In actual news, we have piggies! I am not naming them. *is resolute* They are small and grunty and live in what will be the vegetable garden, and are currently sharing their scraps with an assortment of chooks and a peahen (lulling the fowl into a false sense of security before the fowl become the piggies' dinner, I suspect).
I am feeling much less tired and sick now that the horribleness of the first trimestre is over (yay!).
Work makes my  feet hurt, and my back ache, but it's worth it when a resident holds my hand and tells me that I'm the only one who remembers that she likes a slice of toast for afternoon tea instead of cake or biscuits.
The small girl continues to be made of win and awesomeness. Her fixations this week are the Young Ones, her purple party dress, snuggles, and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat (to be sung at bedtime every night until further notice).
And, because I have a thing for lying in bed listening to Welshmen talking (I blame a childhood spent listening to Dyolan Thomas's Under Milk Wood on cassette at bedtime), my Christmas list consists of:
This

And this

And maybe this

Well, okay, anything narrated by Gareth David-Lloyd would be fine, but honestly? GDL reading HP Lovecraft? I'm starting to believe in mind-reading technology, and if someone ever decides to re-record Under Milk Wood with GDL narrating, I shall make myself a little tinfoil hat.

*sigh*
not_an_elf has gone to Melbourne for work again, and won't be back until Friday. While this does mean I'll have lots of time to devote to certain  LJ-based activities of which he does not approve, it does mean sleeping in an empty bed for four nights and just generally being lonely. However, we're heading to Hobart for the weekend, and it will be nice to see my family and have a very civilised lunch with friends, and go to real shops and such like.
The new fruit trees and shrubs are springing nicely. The apricot trees have recovered from the shock of transplantation and have fat flower buds all over them, the pear tree is being a bit slower but still showing signs of life, and my blackcurrant and gooseberry plants, which hitherto looked very much like dead twigs stuck in the ground, now look as though someone has snuck around in the night gluing little bits of scrunched-up green tissue paper to them.
I asked the small girl this evening what movie she wanted to watch after dinner (come on, there have to be some perks to the girls being home alone!), and she announced that she wanted to watch the one with the beautiful music again. The one with the beautiful music is Milos Foreman's Amadeus. I must be doing something right, my girl haz teh culture!

Tomorrow I intend to:

Dig up the garden beds on the sunny side of the house and transplant my languishin lemon trees.
Dig up the raised beds under the oak tree and sow strawberry seeds.
Clean and vacuum the livnig room so I an spread out my houppelande and work out where the hell I got to wih the sewing last year.
Do all the everyday household stuff as well, like feed the animals, unpack and restack the dishwasher, hang out the washing if my back's not so sore, and walk the small girl down to the park.

*snorts*

I'll let you know how it works out.

What a difference it makes, taking one to the supermaket! It was amazing; I wrote a list of all the stuff we needed, went to the shop, and bought the stuff on the list (plus a packet of gingersnap biscuits). Now we have enough food to last the fortnight! Hurrah for mad organisational skillz!
I also bought the last two Moorpark apricot trees at the nursery, plus a Buerre Bosc pear (it looked so lonely, all by itself, I couldn't leave it there!) and three blackcurrants to replace the ones that didn't survive the winter (yes, alright, didn't survive my neglect, shut up). This afternoon they are being planted down one side of teh path that leads from the house down to the lower driveway. Next year, because we were too slack to do it this year, we'll denude the other side of the path and put in plums and apples. I was very enamoured with the idea of planting a quince tree, especially since the nursery in Launceston had some Smyrnas, but then I remembered the day 200kg of the bloody thigns came home from a house on the other side of the hill, and realised that actually, we have access to enough quinces without going to the trouble of growing them ourselves.
So, this year we've got gooseberries, blackcurrants, pears, and apricots, and we're hopefully going to start turning over some beds in the vegie garden soon so we can get some more food crops in. The bees are beeing, and the kid we're raising for meat is growing, and the chooks are laying again (in the chook house, no less, which makes collecting eggs so much less of an ordeal!). Tonight we're making a big batch of lasagne noodles to use up the egg surplus.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and chase a chook out of the kitchen!

We're still waiting for the arrival of Buttons's kids. The weather has been pretty foul for the last few days, and we're assuming that she's going to drop the kids at about 5pm, in failing light and driving rain, as is traditional.
Today the small girl and I are going to buy some seeds and starting thinking about getting the vegie garden up and running. The new greenhouse (or blue tent, as she insists on calling it), is just about ready, so we'll be able to raise some seeds in there, but I'm going to try and get as much done with direct seeding this year, since I don't seem to have a very deft hand for transplanting. The tomatoes can stay in the greenhouse, though.
The small girl's purple garb was a great success at the event on the weekend, although the event itself was a bit of a shambles. Our fault, really, for pulling out of running it.
The weather is cold and wet and thoroughly miserable. 
The small girl was very sick last night but her fever has broken and she's on the mend.
I'm running out of time to get a fest fic submitted (in my defence, it is the longest one I've ever written and has been painstakingly beta-ed by the marvellous blamebrampton  (and pootling about here is not speeding the editing up one bit!).
I've got an enormous teetering stack of books waiting to be read, but i'm woefully behind on that as well. And there's a new Joe R Lansdale book out. *wants it!*
Tomorrow is a fun day full of appointments and meetings, oh yayz. *sigh*

I have cut out an actual piece of actual garb-type sewing!  Alas, it is for the small girl, and its historical accuracy has been compromised by her determination to have a purple princess dress with sparkly ribbon and big bell sleeves.  It is made out of fine wool (and the colour is not an ugly modern bubblegum purple, I promise), however, and it is really just a long, elaborately sleeved t-tunic.  As for the sparkly ribbon, it is burgundy, purple, and gold braidy-type ribbon, and there will probably be enough left over from trimming the hem and sleeves of the dress to make a girdle, too. 
The cuteness, it burns!

Slacker Violet is slack!  It was the small girl's fourth birthday yesterday, and it was lovely!  We had a picnic lunch in the living room, with party pies and fairy bread and sparling apple/raspberry juice (as close as she's getting to fizzy cordial!), and a bright pink birthday cake (she bumped my elbow as I was dripping the food dye in, so it was..pinker...than I intended) festooned with sugar flowers.  I gave her a pile of new tshirts (size 5, because she's so tall!), some books (one with monsters, one collection of 'trickster' tales, and 'The Complete Flower Fairy Book', oh, and last week I bought her Neil Gaiman's 'Dangerous Alphabet, which she loves!), a sparkly fairy mermaid outfit, a new doll, and (trumpety fanfair, please)  a bubble-blowing machine!  She was very pleased with it all, but is now trying to convince me to let her go to day care in her pyjama/fairy dress combination.  Mean mummy says no!
It is the divine Miss K's birthday tomorrow, and I gave her a basket filled with homemade yummies from the preseres shelf:  crabapple/rosehip jelly, quince jelly, fejoa jelly, spicy plum sauce, and quince paste.
Work is still really good.  We even have lockers now, very civilised!
not_an_elf  has been very busy, and as built a deck and stairs so we can feed the birds and get down to the goats without risking life and limb.  It is a truly fantastic development!  Also, progress has been made in bathroom-land!  The topcoat is on the walls, so now the beautiful beautiful cornice needs to up and then we can start painting!  So exciting! 
*squishes elf-boy to bits for being so wonderful*
The small girl and I are heading to Hobart this weekend for more birthday shenanigans at my mum's house.  I'm trying to stir up some people to come to see HP6 wth me, because I need another excuse! 
It is so cold here this morning that my hands are starting hurt, so I shall stop typing, and make a cup of tea to warm them up with.