The West Wing

Speaking of making a good start on some new year’s resolutions, I thought I’d break myself easy with the re-read/re-watch project with something fairly short.

I was, for reasons, re-reading a bunch of raven’s fic the other night and came across and re-read their Piranesi fic from yuletide (I think?) a few years back. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the book and made me want to re-read it. In a remarkably sensible move, given that I was just sitting at my computer reading fic and chilling to classical music, I got up and grabbed it from the shelf, sat back down and started reading it, planning just to read the first chapter before bed to get me started on the project. I read half the book that night and the rest of it the following morning. (I pretty much only didn’t just stay up stupid late because I got uncomfortable in my desk chair and in getting up to decant to the sofa realised the time and reluctantly made the sensible choice to go to bed.

( Here be Spoilers )

Ooooh fandom_trees got revealed, I went looking for a needy tree over the holidays, found one looking for Edge of Tomorrow and thought ‘oh I have that, I should rewatch it’ and wrote this. It was my last watched film of last year and my first finished fic of this year which is pleasing to me. A nice end to my film rewatch project from last year where I pretty much wrote a fic for each film I re-watched.

Possibly/Probably (The Best Friend You've Never Met) (1599 words) by Glinda
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: William Cage/Rita Vrataski, William Cage & Rita Vrataski
Characters: William Cage, Rita Vrataski, Dr. Carter (Edge of Tomorrow)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Friendship, final 'first' meeting
Summary: It’s a cliche often repeated, that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Cage tries all the same.

This week I've been working on making a good start to one of my resolutions, to start a new recipe notebook. (When I first started learning to cook in an organised fashion, while I was going my post-grad, I took a nice notebook I had and wrote down all my succesful recipes in it. It's a multi-coloured decade's worth of recipes that I refer to regularly even now that I'm a vegetarian and many of the recipes aren't one's I'd ever cook now.) I've been meaning to start a new one for a few years now, but never got round to it, because, well I had my tablet and most recipes I was cooking that weren't in actual cookbooks were on the internet and it was just easier to look them up, but it's really come home to me in the last year when I've gone to look something up and it's just gone. (Not even random people's food blogs, but places I'd expect things to be like the guardian or the good food magazine page.) So I've started in on recipes from my 'cook new recipes' challenges from the past few years, and a significant percentage of them are lost to link rot and paywalls.

But the other thing I've noticed - and part of what makes me want to keep the project up - is that my handwriting is really rusty. I've had to make fairly heavy usage of my tippex mouse because I keep missing letters out of words, not even in the analogue version of typos just I'm so out of practice of writing by hand that I'm half-forgetting how to form the letters properly. I used to have a problem with missing out letters when I wrote essays because I was writing so fast to keep up with my brain - the main reason I switched to typing, as it's much easier to keep up with the speed of thought/ideas that way - but I'm just copying out recipes here. Though on the plus-side, forcing myself to slow down, to form the letters properly is making it a more meditive experience than I expected it to be.

I've always prided myself on having nice handwriting. Ever since we did a unit on the Victorians and spent that whole term perfecting copperplate script I've written a minorly adapted version of that. (I adjusted some letters to be more easily read by modern eyes, so I wouldn't get marked down for mis-spelling words because my teachers that didn't recognise my old-fashioned letters.) All through secondary and university my preferred method of studying was to make notes and the rewrite my notes and I still have piles of notebooks about the place in neat multi-coloured copperplate. So it's both weird and minorly upsetting when my handwriting isn't neat despite my best efforts. No doubt with regular practice it'll improve but at the moment I'm falling a low way short of my own high standards for my handwriting.

It's a ridiculous thing to be having feelings about, I am aware, but nonetheless, I am having them. My handwriting isn't as nice as it used to be - less smooth, more effort for less pleasing results - and it annoys me. I'm feeling a little rusty here, it's a thing.