Standing On Boxes

I really want to get the next part of my Buffy/Ginny story done but I can’t seem to get there from here. The whole idea of having them visit the Burrow, Ginny’s childhood home, is starting to look like a bad one. Or overly ambitious. It’s missing conflict… nothing more boring than a bunch of characters sitting around and doing small talk. And a minute by minute account of the visit would be even worse.
Can’t remember what I was thinking over a year ago when I had the idea for this side trip…
I’m really close to scrapping the whole thing…. (the Burrow visit, not the fic itself)

The T is spending her spring/April vacation here this year instead of us going to see my mother. (Usually she visits for a week or so during the summer.). So I need to do some cleaning of the apartment. It isn’t messy but things get cluttered when you live by yourself…

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an excuse to procrastinate with the doing of taxes.
This year, due to several factors, US Federal taxes are due on April 17th, NEXT Tuesday. I’ve had this years TurboTax sitting on my desk for 3 weeks now. Maybe I should install it on a computer? Before Tuesday?

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Okay. I did them. e-filed it. Forgot about the 24-48 hour delay before you find out if it actually went thru (If you use Quicken’s e-file service). Oops.

That would be the price of gas in the US creeping upward without a pause for station identification. All those excuses the oil companies give? I don’t believe them. Not sure if it is a conspiracy of the middlemen hoarding gas to keep the price high that several “energy analysts” are claiming– that sounds kind of fishy.
Filled up the buggy tonight. Right on schedule… a tank lasts me approx. 2 weeks.
When I filled it up two weeks ago (end of March), I paid $2.56/gal for the gold plated stuff my car requires (Yes, REQUIRES. If the manufacturer says, in the manual for the car, that it requires a certain kind of gas to perform the way it is supposed to, that’s what I’ll put in it. And not something cheaper just because some people believe there is no difference between different octanes of gas. Sure, if you have some Detroit or Japanese econo-box designed for the cheap stuff – putting in high octane gas isn’t going to make any difference.)
Tonight… it was $2.89/gal for the same stuff at the same gas station. So topping off the tank (13+ gallons tonight) cost me $4 tonight than it did 2 weeks ago. And it’s only the middle of April. I’m thinking $4/gal gas by August…

A box of neon green ‘Peeps’ I bought a couple weeks ago and saved for Easter.

I don’t think even Twinkies list a 2 year shelf life on the box. Doesn’t marshmallow get hard after a while?

Someone at the Disney Channel has decided to play games with the Saturday schedule for the new season 4 Kim Possible episodes. Last Saturday they put one of the Harry Potter movies on an hour earlier than advertised so… no KP. Last night they moved it to an earlier time (5:30PM Eastern on Disney East) and I missed it.
And it looks like that is the schedule for the rest of the month. Too bad they didn’t tell Comcast about this… the changes don’t show up on my cable listings so my DVR won’t automatically pick them up. The “official” channel schedule on the Disney Channel website hasn’t been updated yet either…
I guess they don’t want anyone to know… even within Disney. Very odd behavior. Of course, understanding the ways of tv channel programmers… is not for us ordinary mortals.

Someone left me a 1700+ word review (and it was a real review) of my Kim Possible story over at fanfiction.net. That’s longer than one of the chapters in that story.
The gist of the review? Things they felt lacking. A lot of good points, though my story would have been at least twice as long if I addressed everything they brought up.
To summarize what they felt was wrong —>

• KP and Ron have broken up before the story started but I don’t go into details and the reviewer felt both Ron and Kim were too unemotional about the whole thing. Even Wade was too unemotional.

  Hmm. Ron is definitely unemotional about it but he’s just barely in the story so there isn’t a whole lot of time to develop his character. Kim is busy with dealing with other things after the whole slayer becoming. But I see the point even if that isn’t the focus of this story since it occurs after the break-up after Ron at least has dealt with it (We see in the story, near the end that Kim hasn’t really dealt with it), though I won’t be addressing it any time soon.

• Bonnie isn’t snarky/mean enough

  Something I’ve commented on elsewhere. I don’t think she HAS to be so mean. It was an act. We’ll see more of Bonnie if I ever manage to write the next part of this story (in the Go City setting). I’m not sure where I’ll go with Bonnie in this… if at all.

• Shego was unbelievable in the opening scene.

  It was intentional. She was supposed to be acting strange, out of character. Kim even noticed. Some day I might have her explain what was going on. She certainly didn’t tell Kim when she asked at the end of the story.

• Ron getting caught in Drakken’s escape balloon was unrealistic.

  Okay. Maybe I should have used something else besides a balloon or expanded on it BUT the first part wouldn’t have worked if he was there. (I’d originally planned on a role for Rufus in the opening scene but it didn’t work out.

• I didn’t pay enough attention to the whole Mystical Monkey Power that Ron has. And trivialized the whole thing. Or magic in general.

  Guilty – sort of. That’s more part of the lack of Ron-ness in the story than anything else. I also don’t want to have to do the magic-two-step by mixing Buffy-verse magic with KP magic. (I didn’t realize that Ron’s mystical power has a color? I used yellow for the whole monkey thing)) Ron isn’t going to become a Willow caliber magic user. It isn’t appropriate for my story. But his mystical powers might come up in future stories. It really depends on what is appropriate to the story.

• Why is Ron going out with Yori at the end of the story even though Ron barely looks at her at the beginning of the story?

  Okay. Maybe more details/attention here would help. In a future story (It’s already planned – I have an idea for a Ron/Yori centric story set during much of the time of this story. Not sure when / if I’ll ever write it. I have a vague outline of it laid out but I haven’ started working on it yet.

Like all good reviews… it had me thinking about how to improve my story (It’s also the only review from a self professed Kim/Ron shipper — a lot of the comments are really about the perceived unbalanced nature of some elements of the fic (ie. Lack of equal fic time for Ron)). So… I’ll probably address some of this in a revision of this story before delving in any Ron-centric stories. Though I don’t know when that’ll happen. Too many other fics to work on.

Okay… the Kim Possible fic is done… and before the plot bunny strikes and I start working on a sequel.. (before which – I really need to get a better grip on the way KP speaks. Sure, she didn’t say that much in the story but still…)
I need to decide what of my current fics to start working on.
The whole point of the KP fic was to get back into heavy fic writing… and gear up to finish “The Two” but I’m not in the mood for that particular fic just yet… and I don’t want to stop writing… so maybe I should finish another fic or work on one of my other ones that hasn’t had recent attention?
Right now I have two thoughts –>

Finish the next section of “The Other Girl” (The whole Burrow visit section that is currently half done)

or

finish up “The Apprentice” (2 chapters to go and then that character joins the “Red Raider” ensemble duty roster.)
Hmm…

(Working from home today… hence the afternoon blogging)
Emptied a few boxes at lunch… desk stuff from the last time I moved a couple years ago (We all have boxes like that… don’t we?)
Lots of things…
Found a couple Apple window static cling decals – the old rainbow ones… wonder how much they are worth on eBay? I see only the white ones. No big – I needed to replace the one on my car – it sort of melted after 3 years of TN sun.
A bunch of swag from computer companies/show (Mostly Digital/DEC)
The ALL-IN-1[tm] label from the first ALL-IN-1 system I managed (It was an integrated e-mail/word processing office tool running on VMS – mini-computer based. there are probably systems still out there running it – I think the White House even used it in the late 80′s – very customizable – I wrote a Call tracking system in it in about 2 weeks.)
Some Lego characters/figures (pirates, Harry Potter, etc) and similar things…
Now I need to DO something with it… can’t leave it out on the floor.

The UT Women’s basketball team (aka Lady Vols) is in the NCAA final. Every time someone makes a shot or misses… I can hear one of my neighbors yelling.

I’ve have a number of major dental things done in the past few months. Today was getting an implant to replace a broken tooth I had to have pulled last fall. Not a fast process. That’ll take 4+ months to heal…
And not cheap… my dental insurance hasn’t covered much of it so far… it’s wiping out what little I have in the bank for emergencies… 2 months pay… more or less.
Had to sign off on a long list of warnings… of things that could go wrong. Yikes! Fortunately, it’s looking good so far though I had a headache before the whole thing started this morning… so my head… not doing too great…
It took approximately an hour, if you include the drugs needed to numb my jaw. The only pain during was actually where my mouth had to stretch open more than normal. And, there were the sounds… the implant is basically a hollow screw and the dentist used something that sounded like a ratchet wrench to screw it in.

My KP fic is mostly done. Hopefully I caught everything and the last couple paragraphs won’t be too surprising..
Just needs to be posted to ff.net. Tomorrow some time…

Didn’t get as much done with the final part of my KP fic as I’d planned. And THEN I had to split it up and and add a separate (short) epilogue. Oops.
Hopefully I’ll have it all done tomorrow…