One Hot Mess

So. We have moved! Mostly. There are still a few bits and pieces at the old house, like my curtains, but they're going to be collected at the weekend when we do the Massive Epic Clean-up of Doom. But all the important stuff is at the new house, like my books and laptop. I'm exhausted today - really wish I could have stayed in bed, but the day job called, and I left the house stupidly early because I wasn't sure how long the new trip to work would be... and as a result I was still the first person here by a good fifteen minutes, so now I know *shrug*

Anyway. The new place is brilliant! Turns out the kitchen is fully stocked with mostly new equipment, so we could get rid of a lot of our battered pots and pans and blunt knives. Turns out we also have a garden. I know! After all my bitter invective agains the old garden! But this one is tiny, and is probably going to be completely slabbed over, which suits me fine. It's actually behind the house behind us, so it's not like we could even get a lawnmower to it anyway.

We also discovered (with much rejoicing) a pizza takeaway on the high street that does curry pizzas. Curry pizzas! Lamb balti pizza FTW! Still haven't mastered the shower, however, which apparently will either be icy cold or dangerously hot, but nothing in between. And there are still lots of boxes of books sitting around waiting to be shelved, not to mention a stack of clothes, none of which I remotely recognised. I realised with some sadness that I have maybe four or five mix-and-match work outfits, and the rest of the time I either wear my Disturbed hoodie or my Run DMC t-shirt depending on the time of year, which means I have a whole wardrobe full of clothes I never, ever wear. And lot of them are too small for me at the moment, which I guess is further incentive to lose weight, as if any were needed...

Anyway. So. Yes. We can haz new house. And chaostheory  can haz new house too, so all is well! And I totally didn't wake up in the night, hear the neighbours moving around, assume it was her, and then get sad when I remembered it wasn't. Totally. In the mean time, Kyle and I are enjoying the grown-upness of having an actual house with an actual upstairs and downstairs. We were all "we have a staircase! This is really adult! Let's get a zombie shower curtain!" I'm envisioning something like this:

Is there any? The only thing that springs to mind is Talia Gryphon's godawful Gillian Key series, although Gillian is a Marine in the same sense that I'm a quantum physicist. Surely there're more?

I've got this vague idea for a story in which the protagonist is an ex-soldier now working for the British government's anti-zombie task force, and she's carrying the zombie virus. So eventually she's going to become a zombie, but in the mean time she's struggling to hide the symptoms (like, you know, hair loss, weird bodily odour, craving for raw meat, other stuff that I haven't thought up yet) and continue to work at solving Zombie Related Crimes!

My dad's an ex-soldier so I can go to him for research, but I'm sure there must be UF novels out there already with military heroes and heroines. Romancelandia is full of SEALs and Marines and so forth. I assume there's a level of cross-over somewhere?

 

Bonjour, y'all! I've just had a week off work (and therefore a week without internet access, lol) entertaining, and being entertained by, my beloved Skelly. Highlights of her stay include:

1. Cocktails! Mexican food! Cocktails! Italian food! Cocktails! Chinese food! Cocktails! Cocktails! Vodka!

2. Seeing penguins and sharks! No zombies involved, sadly, but still. Sharks!

3. Tentatively agreeing to do Nanowrimo this year. This means either finishing up Wild by the end of October or abandoning it for a month. Hopefully the former.

4. Discovering there's a loyalty card for the place that sells all the cocktails.

Also loving Jennifer Armintrout's Blood Ties series. ZOMG, how freaking wicked awesome is Ashes to Ashes? I don't buy many vampire books at the moment, but Armintrout is an auto-buy. Her plots are fascinating, her vampires are compelling and best of all, they're scary.

I also picked up Read by Dawn over the weekend, which features a story by one of my favourite bloggers, Michele Lee. Her contribution, Bloodwalker was one of the standout stories for me, although several had me thoroughly chilled and disturbed.

Anyway, how are you guys?