There is a lengthy (nearly an hour long) podcast interview with Derek Landy on the Near FM website, for either listening in the browser or downloading.

The description says:

Paula Wiseman presents a special book show to celebrate the writing of renowned Dublin author, Derek Landy and talk about the newest installment in his ‘Skullduggery Pleasant’ series of books.
“Skullduggery Pleasant: Kingdom Of The Wicked” is the seventh and newest of Derek’s books, and Derek joined Paula on the phone for an interview to talk about the book and all things ‘Skullduggery Pleasant’.

Let's see if I can also post... I think I'll leave making a picspam post to whenever LJ is working properly again, especially as I haven't got any picspam prepared yet. So here's just a short(ish) overview of what I've been up to. (Erm, yes, depending on one's definition of short(ish).)

DiaCon Alley: great fun! Met up with ayerf at the Liverpool Street train station upon my arrival to London; we headed straight over to St Pancras from there and off to Canterbury.

( Cut to spare the f-list from all the blabbering. )

The trip was absolutely wonderful, but now I'm exhausted. Didn't do anything yesterday, and now it seems I've picked up a cold somewhere - very sore throat today and slight fever - so I don't think I'll want to go out today, either.

At least I do have stuff to do at home - will have to start betaing ayerf's sshg_exchange fic, the first chapter of which is already in my greedy paws. I'm so glad I got mine handed in before the trip - don't think I'd have the energy to deal with it now. (Also, that meant that I didn't have to be too scared of Shiv when meeting her. The Eye of Shiv is intimidating enough when turned at Other People.)

Right, glad I've saved this as the dozens of attempts at posting all day long haven't worked... *eyes LJ threateningly*

(Note: posting this to DW now instead, just so I wouldn't lose it. I doubt the crossposting to LJ will work either, but we'll see.)

A very happy birthday to dreamy_dragon73! I hope it's a wonderful day for you.

Looks like I'm here, too.

*looks around, scratches head*

Not that I know what I'm going to do with this account... probably just keep it as is for now.

I'm back from a three hour walk. Very tired!

Was feeling absolutely awful to start with - was nauseuous and dizzy for almost all day (we only managed to finally get out by 5 pm or so), and the first half an hour I constantly felt something between wanting to throw up and just falling over and fainting, and I was too hot (but it wasn't warm enough to take the jacket off either), and just really feeling awful all over, but then eventually it started getting better. I think mint chewing gum and getting to the shade helped. And after that, I was feeling pretty good already, just really achy in the legs by the time we got home. So it was definitely worth the initial crap feeling.

Anyway, ( here's more picspam from earlier this week! )

Hmm. Should try and catch up with some more fic now.

Just spent about an hour crawling around on all fours under mum's desk, untangling the awful mess of cables and reconnecting everything (and finding about five loose ones belonging to things we don't have any more) and removing a huge pile of dust while at it... I did try and not breathe too much, so I'm hoping it won't trigger a sneeze and cough fest. My poor knees are rather annoyed with me though.

On the plus side, mum now has a working computer and a new monitor - ordered it yesterday, arrived today. A lovely (I hope, it got good reviews) 22'' Dell 2009WA. It looks very sleek and shiny and all black. For some reason, it came with a wrong power cable (three-pronged; we only use two-pronged ones) but it seems that whatever the old monitor's fault was, it wasn't with its power cable, so we could just use that.

Tired now. If there's any configuring needed, it'll have to wait until tomorrow, together with whatever updates mum's computer needs after having been offline for a couple of weeks. Did about 6000+ words of work earlier, and also went out for a two hour walk by the river - found a surprisingly large amount of different spring flowers blooming, although they're hard to spot among all the old grey grass. Busy day!

A Very Happy Birthday to shiv5468!

I hope the day is lovely. And possibly filled with pretty blonds.

I can finally has Internets again! *jumps around in glee*

Internet withdrawal for several days is an evil, evil thing. ;-) Although it was mostly the mornings that were the worst - nothing on TV on weekend mornings (not worth watching anyway). Took the bus to Pärnu on Saturday, which was nice, if very exhausting, and spent most of yesterday helping mum tidy up her room a bit. So at least it was useful time.

Let me know if there's anything I have missed and definitely should know about - I've had to skip 120 on my f-list and can only skim it at best, no chance to catch up properly, with work and all.

At least there is Internet again. Took the technician nearly two hours all in all, I think, and he had to go get a second modem/router as the first one seemed to be faulty and kept restarting every two minutes. The new one seems to hold so far. And it comes with digital TV (won't give up the old cable before we're certain this thing works well!) and I finally also have WiFi at home, so no need to drag a network cable around if I want to use a laptop.

Right, back to work... working at home today.

First, happy birthday to evieeros!

Second, a day late but I finally managed to upload the second batch of pics from the other day's walk... have been lazy today and done about nothing whatsoever. It's nice to just laze around for a bit.

( Snow and sea and winter picspam. )

I seem to have a thing for diagonals. I wonder if it's because I like diagonals, or because I'd like a wider field of view... suspect it's a bit of both.

Am incredibly tired. Once again. Still.

At least I got my work done. And was reminded that I had noted down end of March / beginning of April as my first two weeks of holiday this year, and that we're to get the next big batch of work on 18 March, so if I could perhaps be somewhat flexible about the holiday... well, I don't have any plans made, apart from wanting to rest, so I figured I could be flexible.

Thus I somewhat unexpectedly find myself having a week off starting tomorrow. Which is nice, I suppose.

The last week's been quite awful. I've been in pain most of the time - my back's not in a good state at all, and I'm getting seriously fed up with my right leg, which has been sort of achy for a few years now but more insistent in recent months. It's not a strong pain but a more or less constant one, going all the way from the hip to the ankle, but mostly staying in the outer thigh. Most annoying. I suppose I'll need to go see a doctor about it some day, but so far, it's been so... vague, that I've not been sure what to complain about.

I did decide to actually start doing something about this awful state of unfitness and stuff last week though, and am determined to go out for a walk daily. Have done so for six days now. Not long walks, staying out for an hour perhaps, and hardly power-walking, but it's enough to exhaust me quite properly for now - my legs start aching far too quickly and I have zero stamina. But it's bound to start having an effect (preferably a positive one) some day. I hope. And today was pretty nice, climbing around in the fresh falling snow and stuff.

Just finished reading Wishing Well, a Ten & Martha book... not very impressed. Most new Doctor Who books have been good fanfic level, this one seemed weakish. And I spotted several things I'd have pointed out as a beta.