Via Day Zero:

The Mission:
Complete 101 preset tasks in a period of 1001 days.

The Criteria:
Tasks must be specific (ie. no ambiguity in the wording) with a result that is either measurable or clearly defined. Tasks must also be realistic and stretching (ie. represent some amount of work on my part).

Why 1001 Days?
Many people have created lists in the past - frequently simple goals such as New Year's resolutions. The key to beating procrastination is to set a deadline that is realistic. 1001 Days (about 2.75 years) is a better period of time than a year, because it allows you several seasons to complete the tasks, which is better for organising and timing some tasks such as overseas trips or outdoor activities.

My project will last until: September 18, 2011.



My list:
Key:
Not Started
In Progress
Completed (with date)

( #1-101 )

Paris
Rating: G
Written for avantgardenism


( Read more... )

Previous chapter: One

Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Title: A Room of Her Own
Rating: T
Characters: Mai, Jun
Warnings: Violence
Summary: Mai leaves it to Zuko to end things between them. After that? The rest will be up to her. She gets a new job and a new life, somewhere far enough away where she has room to be a person of her own devising.

( Read more... )

Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Title: A Room of Her Own
Rating: PG
Characters: Mai, background Zutara
Summary: Mai leaves it to Zuko to end things between them. After that? The rest will be up to her. A Zutara story with almost no Zutara, but a lot of Mai going out into the world to be awesome.

( Chapter 1: Taking Sides )

Title: The Tall Ships
Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Rating: G
Characters: Suki, Sokka
Word count: ~2500
Summary: Sometimes the tides turn, and former lovers have to move on with their lives. But then again, sometimes we can learn to use the turning tides to our own advantage.

( Read more... )

Title: Masquerade
Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Words: ~1700
Characters: Mai, Zuko
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sometimes, Mai starts to feel as if the mask is slipping. Maybe someday she'll be able to take it off for good ... just not today.

( Read more... )

Title: Pull
Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Words: ~3900
Characters: Zuko, Katara
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Tui and La, give and take - this was the model for a good Water Tribes relationship. Somehow, Katara's marriage was never quite like that.

( Read more... )

And also YAY: Joss-tastic news!

Spring! It's all spring-y and nice out! This is so exciting. The only negative is that the backyard is now a veritable treasure-trove of thawing poopsicles, so that's ... special. Thanks, pooch.

School is good. We're getting frighteningly close to the AP Test! It is May 11 and we have TWENTY CHAPTERS to cover yet. (We are not going to get through all of them. 50 chapters in less than one full school year is just not do-able.) We are talking about animals now, which is fun - I majored in zoology after all. =) Today we talked about molluscs and annelids. My favorite part is when I sketched them a picture of how embryological torsion in gastropods works. Basically, one muscle in their body develops assymetrically, so that their digestive tract wraps around in a loop. Which means that their anus ends up on the top of their back behind their antenna. Whereupon a student raised his hand and asked me quite seriously, "Mrs. Ally, would you say, in your scientific opinion, that snails are buttheads?" :D

My Avatar exchange stories are going pretty well. It feels good to be writing again. I've even been puttering away at my novel a little - it's been stalled out at 27,000 words for a long time now. Yay? Yay.

Sleepy time now.

How great is my new icon? Oh Stains the Cupcake Dog, your tortured eyes will now haunt my dreams.

Despite my total lack of Catholicism, or indeed religion in general, I often try to give something up for Lent. Why? Because it's good to flex the old will-power, and I try to pick things that would be good for me and rather moderate. I don't give up chocolate, because it is basically insane to go without chocolate for that long. This year, I have decided to try to give up snacking between lunch and dinner. (The crucial wording here is "snacking", because it means when one of my science department co-workers has a birthday party one day after school during Lent, I still get birthday cake. This is important, because birthday cake is maybe the best thing ever.)

Are there any Avatar fans on my f-list these days? I forget. If there is, do any of them - er, of you - think you might like to beta a story? Here is the thing about this story: it is for a fic exchange, and thus, while I typically write Mai/Zuko, this story is Katara/Zuko. So, it is kind of a stretch for me? But I'm trying to make it awesome anyway.

Now I'm bored, and so I shall do a survey:
( Have you seen my love? )

The list of projected budget cuts for the next two years for our school district came out this week.

The high school science department is NOT on the list. :D

Also? There was a spare SmartBoard in storage at the high school. Aaaaand I sent a nice ass-kissy email to the principal aaaand now the SmartBoard is installed in my room. SQUEEEE.

Plus my cold is better. So that's nice, too.

I have been a sloppy poster/flist reader lately. Sorry. =( I find myself under the weather and a little down in the dumps lately - really enjoyed the brief stint of 50-something-degrees weather we had, but now it's all winter-y again. It even snowed an inch again last night. BOO-URNS.

Also, my 5th hour biology class completely drains my energy and makes me want to stab things. I've got two EBD kids, 2 LD kids, and 2 kids who are just complete and total "WAHH THIS CLASS IS WORTHLESS WHY DO WE HAVE TO LEARN THIS STUFF, YOU'RE NOT ENTERTAINING ME ENOUGH" whiny asswipes. The worst part is, I have like 5 or 6 completely awesome freshmen in there, whose awesomeness I don't get to enjoy because I constantly have to sit on the other kids to keep them in line. Blargh!

In other dreary news, the school district is hurting budget-wise ... as are pretty much all school districts. A lot of jobs got cut from our local foundry, which is not optimal; we're definitely looking at staff cuts and possible building closures. Obviously the high school won't close, and it's unlikely that core classes like science will get cut if we do lose positions. But if we still need to save money after this first round of reductions ... well. I'm one of two new science teachers this year, and not only that, but the other new teacher is in the air national guard and is going on order overseas from this March until next October ... which means, legally, the school cannot get rid of his job while he's gone. So if a science job goes, I'm the first one up against the wall. :/ Blargh.

Other than that, a sadly small amount of stuff going on. Been trying to write without much success. Watching my Lost and my Burn Notice (omg Sam and Fiona on the job together and bickering = SO AWESOME) and Dollhouse now too. Yay TV?

Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Word Count: 288
Rating: PGish?

( Read more... )

Da Rulez
1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

queer_theory gave me B.

I didn't upload - links are to Youtube videos.

Bleeding Heart Show - New Pornographers
Break Your Heart - Barenaked Ladies (OMG 1995 Stephen Page!)
Baba O'Riley - The Who
Busting Up a Starbucks - Mike Doughty
Beautiful - Gordon Lightfoot

and one for luck: Broken Ship - Immaculate Machine

( Life stuff under the cut )

Dear god I am so clucky these days it is not even funny. Well, maybe it's kind of funny to other people. The rational, reasonable side of my brain knows that we won't be financially ready till after we've sold the condo (and Mr. Ally needs a car first, anyhow) - and of course I enjoy the freedom of non-parenthood. Plus I need to stockpile my sick days from work for the next couple years so that I can have enough time for an actual maternity leave. But everytime I hear people at work talking about their kids, or I see pictures of kids in newspaper articles or whatever, my brainmeats veritably throb with thoughts of OMG I WANT ONE. Maybe in 2-3 years? I hope? So there's that in Boring Heteronormative Emo Journaling for the day.

School is going well! Tomorrow is the last day of the semester; the 4th and 5th hour exams are scheduled. Excitingly for me, I have 4th hour study hall and 5th hour prep, so I have the whole goddamn day to plan my shit out for 2nd semester. I'm excited for my new biotechnology class, although having three different preps instead of just two will be ... insane might be the right word?

Made veggie broth from scratch this weekend. Turned out pretty good, and it was easy - made by boiling vegetable peels and scraps from the past week and straining through cheesecloth. Much cheaper than paying $1 per can at the store!

I got really happy today when a certain Torchwood writer's fic post was marked as the last of a eight-trillion-ish chapter series. Less excited to note that she promised to start a new series within two weeks, and post some filler in between then and now to tide us over. Joy. It makes me wish LJ had a way to filter posts from certain users. Certain users that post ten hojillion shit-tacular story chapters within nine seconds.

Also, wtf why is she nominated for a Children of Time award? Boring cookie-cutter Jack/Ianto TWOO WUV in four hundred word chunks, with a tenuous grip on grammar? Partly I am disgusted that some people actually consider this High Literature and partially I am just moronically jealous. This is why I have trouble sticking around in fandoms - I slave away on fics, agonize over characterization and plot and editing, and for the most part get a general "meh", whereas she can trot out a fucking 300-word mess three times a day and gets slobbered over. Meh.

...

Making slow progress on my 101 Goals. Winter makes me feel grumpy and blah, which makes it harder to get off my ass and Do Stuff. Plus I need to go yarn shopping if I'm going to start this theoretical new afghan. Probably I should worry about finishing painting the basement first - it looks a bit shit halfway done, as it is now. I've also been jotting down some ideas for how to plant my garden this spring, too; very excited for that. One of my coworkers has also promised me some cuttings for raspberry plants, too, which will be great to put along the shadier side of our house, because I FUCKING LOVE ME SOME GODDAMN RASPBERRIES, MOTHERFUCKERS. I hope the rhubarb in our front beds comes back this spring, too, or I'll be sad. And buy a new one. Making rhubarb pie in the summertime is crucial.

Rachel Maddow just made a Princess Bride joke. That is so hot.

Today I graded a stack of papers 2 inches thick ... and I am still not done. Sigh. There's only one assignment left to grade (that I've collected - there's still 2 more things due before the end of the semester, sigh). So that's fun. BUT LUCKILY, I'll have all day tomorrow to do that too - and fine-tune the exams that I wrote today. That's right, another day of -40 wind chills means another day of huddling at home with the pooch. Today I worked my butt off and ate like a pig. (And drank like a pig, too ... grading papers was much easier by the time I finished a beer.)

Plus, I really, really, really, really wanted to submit a story for the contest for free admission to Odyssey Con (OddCon) this spring - it's being judge by JOE. HALDERMAN. But I didn't have more than a flash of inspiration, and no time to refine it from a jotted scrap to an actual tale.

And then there's that thing where my brand-new biotech class starts the week after next and I haven't written a syllabus yet, let alone a first week of lesson plans. Intellectually, I'm wondering where I'm going to find enough time for all my shit next semester. Somewhere under the intellectual level, there is a voice in my head yelling "FUCK FUCK OH FUCK JESUS SHIT ASS FUCK". Like, this past semester I've been writing one course (AP Bio) completely from scratch since the guy who taught it for half a year last year before flaking out and quitting the district left me jack shit - and I write about 3/4 of my regular biology stuff from scratch because I mostly don't care for how the other teachers teach it. Next semester, I will have those, AND biotech which has never even been taught here before. Oh, and there's no textbook for it, so on a shitty day I can't even say "OKAY TAKE OUT YOUR BOOKS AND READ CHAPTER 12 AND JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP TODAY, OKAY". So ... yeah. Excitement. (Why did I propose ANOTHER new course for next year? I am going to have to buy Office Max out of binders in order to have enough for all my course plans.)

omg omg omg, etc.

edit: measured stack of papers. It is actually 3 and 1/4 inches high.

Pretty much every town in the state has already canceled school for tomorrow, including the one where I work. This means I will actually be able to finish grading papers and writing my final exam before the end of the semester. :does a happy dance:

Of course, this means I will be locked in my home tomorrow, along with the dog, as a -40 degree Fahreinheit wind-chill roars outside. Actually I mostly feel bad for the dog: at least I don't have to go outside to poop. Or for any reason at all tomorrow. The whole state is painted light purple on the weather map on the news, which, if I look at the key, stands for "HOLY HELL ASS BALLS, WATCH OUT FOR POLAR BEARS AND REINDEER DROPPINGS, YOU POOR BASTARDS".

edit: Mercifully, I did remember to buy beer last night before my cold-induced exile began. This should make grading copious reams of inane student answers MUCH more tolerable. <3