Before you start, yesterday was a bank holiday here in the UK, and I was busy riding on a motorbike and enjoying the sun too much to post. So we will have a Movie Tuesday instead…

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon is a genius, so of course I want to see this!
Gamer - mmmmmmmm Gerard Butler doing his stuff. See last week’s reasoning re pretty men and blowing shit up.
Quiet Chaos - something for a DVD I think, if only because a cinema release over here is a lot less likely, but the story really intrigues me.
Sherlock Holmes - oh, come on. Robert Downey Jr. Enough said! But it also look so, so kick-assly funny!

In other news, Meadow Palace is shortly going to become Meadow-need-a-new-name! I’m moving house in three weeks time. Eek! This whole spur of the moment stuff is turning into something of a habit for me. For someone who professes, loudly, that she wants to put down roots and hates surprises, I sure am putting myself in the way of a lot of change at the moment. Clearly the wanderlust side of me is stronger right now - it’s happy with the work side of things, so it’s meddling in the living arrangements.

All fun, though I am having serious doubts about how I am going to orchestrate the mechanics of the move. Despite being ruthless and ditching a shed load of crap when I moved up to Oxford eight months ago, I still have so much stuff, with the buggersome problem that it is all the stuff I WANT/NEED on a regular basis. Hmmmmm. When are the geeks going to perfect that site-to-site transporter beam, hey?

But I get a cat! The house has a cat!!!! She’s called Whisky and is apparently very, very grumpy, but I am sure I will win her around. And I here by promise not to post too many cat pictures. Perhaps a limit of one a week?

Till tomorrow my lovelies

I wrote most of this sitting on the train into London, whilst zooming across the country to spend the afternoon celebrating my brother’s birthday with a BBQ. Yes, we British are trying a BBQ on a May weekend – you wondered why the weather had taken a turn for the worse?

How am I writing a post if I am on a train? One of the multitude of notebooks I own? The PocketCalculator hauled out for a trip? Neither. I am typing this (with a few typos!) on my teeny-tiny new netbook, an Acer Aspire One with a 9” screen, 16GB solid state HD and running Ubuntu Linux.

I LOVE my MiniMe! It is just so, so… Dinky, to nick someone elses term. Plus it does all I need it to. Before I start my review properly, I should outline what prompted my decision to get a netbook/ultra-portable.

I have taken to doing writing during my lunch break at work, as I just never seem to get around to it in the evening. For a while I was taking in the PocketCalculator, but I never felt comfortable- it was heavy to lug around, and I was acutely aware that, if it broke or got nicked, I would need to shell out near one and a half grand to replace it. I just can’t afford that. So I started to think about netbooks. Really, really light and portable machines I could just use for writing. I wanted to avoid Windows if at all possible and all that lugging around made the thought of a solid-state hard drive appealing.

So after looking at lots of reviews online, I was leaning towards the Dell Mini 9, if only because people have successfully made them into Hackintoshes (i.e., running OSX), but they were pricy…

Which is where a recent trip back to Somerset came in very handy indeeed. Taunton is blessed with a Comet, a Curry’s, a Staples and a PCWorld all in a row. All four the main suppliers of computing technology offline. Result. I wandered around, played, asked questions, pondered, and at the end of an hour, the Acer Aspire One was the only (and best) choice.

It ran Linux. Check.
It had a solid state option. Check.
The keyboard didn’t feel too bendy when typed on. Check.
The screen was crystal clear, far more clear in fact than my PocketCalculator. Check.
It came in a colour other than black (blue). Check.
It had WiFI and a good smattering of ports (3x USB, screen, headphone, mic, sd/microsd/etc). Check.
It was light and had an approximately 3 hour battery life. Check.
The trackpad was really, really responsive. Check.
It was the cheapest of the lot. Result!

169.99 GBP (In Comet. The Windows/larger spinning hd options cost more)

So does it do all I want it to? How has the first few weeks with the MiniMe gone?

I love it. I adore it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I should point out, I have ONLY been using it for writing. I have yet to connect it to the Net, but it has done everything else so well I can only imagine that it would do that perfectly too – after all, that is what it was designed for.

You boot it up and are greeted with a customized homescreen divided into CONNECT (Mail, Firefox, address book, Messenger, RSS reader and more), WORK (the OpenOffice suite, of which the Word-clone behaves almost identically to a stripped down Microsoft Word), FUN (lots of games, but the demo versions are all crippled so tend to stop after a certain number of moves. Annoying. You can upgrade to the full versions, but they cost and I am trying to keep the distraction down) and FILES (self explanatory).

You then navigate to what you want to do et voila.

It’s not as speedy as modern PCs, but then what can you expect from a stripped down processor and Flash storage? It is perfectly fast enough if you get over the desire for instantanteous programme opening.

The screen works well in bright environments (e.g., on a train with the sun streaming through the window), but I’ve yet to try it outside on a bright, sunny day. I’ll update when I have had the joy of writing in the park.

The keyboard is perfectly responsive, if a little ‘clicky’. The spacebar doesn’t always trigger, but that is more down to getting used to the much smaller footprint of the keyboard. Your early typing WILL look like a brain-injured spider has tap danced on the keyboard, but I adapted pretty rapidly.

Here’s a tip if you are in OpenOffice and it is refusing the UK localisation of your keyboard, despite what the global settings might be: go to TOOLS > OPTIONS > LANGUAGE SETTINGS > LANGUAGE, and in the LOCAL option, choose English (UK). Your keys will behave as they should do once more. It’s amazing what you pick up whilst BBQing a cows-worth of steak at your brother’s 30th party.

Yes, my brother is now 30. Holy crap, that means I am 27 this year. That’s “late twenties” territory… Eeek.

The trackpad is hyper sensitive, and it is very easy to accidentally brush it with your thumb and *bam* you’re suddenly typing in the middle of the paragraph above. Another foible is the page up/page down keys, right next to the arrow keys and under the right hand shift. It is very, VERY easy to trigger these by mistake and again, *bam* your cursor plays a game of “where’s wally?” I’m not the only AspireOne user to note this either, but it’s just a case of getting used to it, and being careful where you place your fingers.

What else? I got a LapJack sticker to cover the lid and give it some protection – the lid shows fingermarks just as soon as you look at it. The Acer is a common enough machine that most sticker websites have a template for it. There are also several different cases on the market if you want to give your baby a little more protection when you hurl it in your bag.

I will admit, at a price less than a new iPod, I am treating it in a remarkably cavallier fashion, slinging it in my handbag with narry a thought. But that is what I brought it for at the end of the day! The same person who taught me the trick of the language settings whilst grilling a cow, also taught me the trick to get into the command prompt (notoriously tricky on the Acer) but I’ll be damned if I can remember it. I blame large amounts of Somerset Cider…

But in the end, what is my verdict on the machine? That’s easy - I love it, I adore it, it is my writing soulmate! So there are a few niggles, but they are tiny, teeny niggles. It does exactly what I want it to do, no more, no less, and I didn’t have to read a 500 page manual before I could set it up. What else can you ask from a piece of technology in this day and age?

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately browsing round Flickr. I do just love looking at pictures other people have taken - from the professional to the snap shots.

I love pictures. Pictures tell stories, often stories that the photographer didn’t notice, or had no intention of telling.

But looking through one particular set of pictures tonight, I was struck with the desire to hand this guy a camera with just one roll of film. He takes good pictures, this chap. Some of his shots are truly beautiful and yet others are gleefully funny and irreverent. But the good ones are buried between the ok ones. There’s nothing wrong with the other pictures this guy takes but they kind of crowd out the great ones.

I can’t help feel if he sat back, thought for a little while before taking a picture, they’d all be brilliant.

The problem with digital cameras (and I am just as guilty of this as anyone else) is that it becomes too easy to keep snapping simply because you don’t have to worry about running out of film (or the development costs). I spent a while trying to think of a non-violent simile but failed, so guns will have to do. Machine guns will kill you just as dead as a single rifle shot, but the rifle takes more skill. Hunters don’t use automatic weapons for just that reason (that, and it’s harder to make a pretty trophy of the dead deer when it’s peppered with bullet holes).

It used to be you looked through someone’s photo album and there were maybe 36 odd photos from a holiday or event? Now you look at their Facebook or Flickr stream, and there are 360 to wade through.

I frequently find myself wandering around places and see a view or something and go “that would make a lovely photo”. Most of the time I don’t have my camera on me so I’m the only one who will ever get to see the ’shot’, but somehow that’s okay to me. I can’t help thinking, a lot of the time, these people who photograph everything are missing out. They are so focused on looking through the lens, that they miss everything that’s going on around them.

One of my favourite John Mayer songs is 3×5. I think the lyrics say what I am trying to better:

I’m writing you to
catch you up on places I’ve been
You held this letter
probably got excited, but there’s nothing else inside it

You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes
it brought me back to life
You’ll be with me next time I go outside
no more 3×5’s
just no more 3×5’s

(ooh, this one-a-day thing is harder than I thought it would be!)

I’m feeling monumentally crappy right now and the only thing that’s keeping me from annihilating the world and it’s dog is a tasty flapjack from the local bakery. MMmmm sugar. So I thought I would do the neighbourly thing and post a trusty recipe for flapjacks. Men, take note - make a batch of these for the hormonal woman in your life, and you’ll be safe.

For a while

You will need

• 250 gms margarine
• 8 tbs golden syrup
• 500 gms porridge oats
• or
  250 gms porridge oats & 250 gms rolled oats

How to make them

1. Melt margarine in large saucepan
2. Add syrup and keep heating slowly till all dissolved and mixed in
3. Add to oats and stir
4. Press into greased and floured baking tin
5. GAS MARK 4 for 20-25 mins till golden brown
6. Cut immediately into size desired
7. Leave in tin till cool

Tips

• Don’t let the butter/sugar mixture boil as you don’t want caramel/toffee! Well, you might, but that’s a different recipe…
• Don’t use a non-stick tin. You cut the flapjacks when they are still in the pan, so you’re just gonna bugger up that fancy tin with knife cuts
• Do leave the flapjacks to cool totally before you take them from the tin. It might be tempting, but they have little-to-no structural integrity when warm, so you’ll just end up with a sticky-oaty-mess. Tasty yes, but not very nice to look at!

Oh me-oh, oh my-oh, oh Cleveland Ohio…

Man I love The West Wing, but you know what? I don’t think I love it enough to dream about it. Especially as I haven’t watched any episodes in a good year or so. Despite that, the other night, I dreamt about The West Wing. Not a particular episode of The West Wing you understand, rather the whole universe of the show. I even referenced an old episode when our political opponents pulled a particular trick, and our side was grumbling. I said “well it worked for us, so why shouldn’t they try?” to a very aggrieved Sam Seaborn.

Even in my dream, I knew I was in a television show, but it was also the real world, and that was fine. Seemed perfectly logical to me. As did the bit of the dream where I was trying to persuade a grumpy American publisher to publish my authors book by getting the author to bully him into homing a stray dog… Then humiliating him by giving the dog to a friendly homeless couple… Oh, and this was set in a bizarre amalgam of Oxford, Glastonbury and Street.

Because that all makes PERFECT sense, right?

Yeah, not really. Which gets me to my point - describing dreams is hard, almost impossibly so. Always the truth that you saw and experienced behind your eyes slips away till you only hold a bare ghost in your fingertips. And that is what writing is. You have the idea and the story shouting in your head, but whatever you finally get down on the page is the palest of reflections.

Right now I’ve got one poor characters death scene fixed, vividly in my brain. I’m trying to get it out and into the draft, but it keeps fighting me. It’s so upsetting in my head, I don’t want to keep going back into it to get the fine details. So I sketch over it, and then when I read it back I can’t tell if it is making a clear image in my mind because I am writing it well, or if the words are just an aide memoire, and my memories are filling in the blanks.

But isn’t that what all reading is? Filling in the blanks, interpreting the spaces in an authors work with your own experiences and desires?

Before you all start telling me off for falling off the post-a-day band wagon before it had even got rolling, I should have made it clear: I meant a post every week day. Part of the reasons I stopped the Roasts was that they were just taking up to much of my weekends.

So now we’ve cleared that little misunderstanding up, what to talk about today?

Well, I am feeling rather because lots of Americans have been hiding from me. I’m starting to think I smell or something! Perhaps they know if they get me on the phone I will lull them into a false sense of security with my cute British accent, then *wham*!

Or not. Still, it’s hard to stay cheerful after a week of no responses. Sob.

Now, despite the fact I haven’t written a Roast in a long, long time, I still collect links constantly. So I figured Monday could be Movie day? Lots of trailers (I know this will please Abi at least!)

Up grumpy old man, ballon, kid. Sillyness.

The Cake Eaters

Funny People - I’m on the fence about this one. Could go either way.

Public Enemies - Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Come on!

Love the Beast - Eric Bana being silly about a car. Adorable. And hot.

Gigantic

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - I must have been in an odd mood when I bookmarked this one.

Dragonball Evolution - even my love for James Marsters, which is pure and never-dying, cannot make me want to watch this movie.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - I found myself trying to defend Transformers 1 at my brothers BBQ on Saturday. That will teach me for trying to convince geeks the film was good! I just like Michael Bay, ok? Hot men, women, cars, robots, explosions… There is nothing else I NEED in my movies!

Alien Trespass - one for Moose with her B-movie obsession I think

500 days of Summer - so the synopsis doesn’t do it for me, but I enjoyed the trailer

Merry Gentelman

The Escapist - supreme cast. Let’s see if they can pull it off.

Easy Virtue

My Sister’s Keeper - not a fluffy by ANY stretch of the imagination, and stiring some emotions I’m not sure I want stirred in a public cinema. But definitely one for a DVD in the privacy of my own room with a big box of tissues!

Adam

Cheri - doesn’t Michelle Pfieffer ever AGE?

The Princess and the Frog - clearly, you’re never too old for Disney…

And I think that should keep you all going! See you tomorrow

I’ve decided I am going to take a leaf out of Lilith Saintcrow’s book (book, she’s an author, get it?! God, I should never write this early in the morning) and try for a daily blogging routine. Well, it’s that or watch Bright Meadow slowly wither and die like week-old cut flowers in a vase. The move to Oxford has been supreme on all fronts bar the blogging - I’ve simply been unable to find my groove for the past six months.

So in the light of new beginnings, fresh starts, and every other cliché my flapjack-induced-sugar-high can think of, let’s all (re)introduce ourselves. We’ve been a big and happy blogging/commenting family in the past, and I dearly wish we can get back to that.

I’ll start:

Hello, I’m Cas and I’ve been hanging around online for longer than I care to admit and have been blogging since February 2003 (go, look at the archives if you don’t believe me. We’ll wait for you to come back. There’s a handy drop-down in the top banner). By day I go by the name Claire Louise Kemp and work in a Children’s Rights department for a major publisher. This is step one in my cunning master plan to one day rule the world/become an editor. By night I am just one more in a legion of aspiring authors. I’m in the middle of writing a swords’n'magic fantasy fest which all my friends think is the best thing since bread came sliced, but we’ll see about that when it comes to the finding-an-agent time. I’m putting off thinking about that fun-and-rejection filled process for as long as I can!

What else?

Um. It’s pretty much all here on the blog. You name it, I’ve written about it in the past. The wisdom of which I have doubted on many occasion, not least when the first question I was asked at the interview for my current job was “so tell me about Bright Meadow then?”

The stalking opportunities abound in this modern connected world, and I do like to make life easy for people, so if you want to see even more of my life, you could do worse than visiting my Flickr stream or following me on Twitter.

And that’s me in a (sizeable) nutshell. Maybe a walnut? Mmmm, walnuts… How about you?

When did I become the girl in pink?

I look down at the outfit I am wearing and I see I am in top-to-toe pink, all the way down to the skin. Not baby pink, I do hasten to point out. Rather, a vibrant pink, an ironic pink, but still. Pink. And I wonder; where did the tomboy goth go? How did I become so comfortable in three inch heels? It’s happened so gradually over the recent years, I couldn’t pin my finger on the point it started, but I have become the girl in pink, perfectly happy in 3 and 4 inch heels. Certainly a few years ago, this wasn’t the case.

I have got to the point that people comment when I wear mostly black, let alone all black. To be fair, I never made a very good goth - I’m far too bubbly, and I am cursed with an English Rose complection, so I just can’t pull off pale-and-interesting - but… well, I look around at the people I spent time with at the weekend, and I am far and away the most colourful of them. Where did she come from, this girl in her mid-twenties who can pull off a creditable Miss MoneyPenny impression at the office. I like her, this person. She’s beautiful. But sometimes she scares me too.

Because on the inside I’m still not sure she real. Parents complain that children grow up too fast - hell! I’m looking round wondering how I got to be mid/late twenties all of a sudden! It’s like I sleepwalked through that transistion from child/teenager to grown-up, and I feel like a fraud in my adult clothing.

A damn cute fraud in gorgeous shoes though.

You know that it is time to start blogging again when you have dreams where you are feeling guilty for not blogging in a while… Yes, I dream about my blog. I think that my life is now officially inextricably linked with the internet.

It really has been an age since I wrote anything, hasn’t it? I’m almost not sure how to start back in. I do know that the old-style Bright Meadow where I waffle on for 2000 words at a time about something possibly isn’t sustainable much longer. The joy has been gone from the Sunday Roasts for a while, and I always said I would stop doing them when they were no longer fun…

*hides behind the sofa whilst people throw things*

I know, I know, you all like the Sunday Roasts! And I’m not saying they will never return, it is just that – for now – I need to think through how best they can be made to work. The problem with moving to a new city to get the dream job and get a life is that, well, you run risk of actually getting a life! Lots of stuff to blog about, not so much time to actually do so.

Also, I have to admit right now that I am writing this post, in part, because my father told me to. It’s like I have to do my homework before I get a cookie, which really isn’t helping the whole “fun” vibe

(Love you Dad)

Shall I catalogue my reasons/excuses for not blogging? Two instantly spring to mind: Twitter and writing. My twitter stream has taken over a lot of the things that might, once upon a time, have become blog posts. I know I am not alone in being seduced more and more by the speed, ease, and community on Twitter. I find it hard to fit in an hour to craft a blog post, but I can easily spare thirty seconds to tweet something. As for the writing… Oh, the writing. Well, we’re at 10,186 words, six chapters, and growing on a daily basis by between 300-500 words. It will be a finished manuscript, I promise you. I have totally committed to it, even going so far as to show what I have to date to a tame(ish) editor-friend and my brother. I kid you not, of the two, I was more scared about my brothers feedback! (For the record, he liked it and wanted more *sigh of relief*) What it will become once it is a finished manuscript is another matter entirely, but I will help these characters tell their story. I will.

And that’s it for my reasons. Other than that I am still, at heart, a lazy cow. And going on lots of dates does tend to take up the evenings as well. I don’t know - have three dates with three different guys in one week, and they start to think you’re a hussy at work!

Life, frankly, rocks right now. There was a small wibble back in February, but it really was a minor wibble compared to what went before. Minor wibbles are to be expected and are, perversely, a good thing. Everyone wibbles and the fact I can wibble now without falling apart is a good sign

Wow, think there’s a limit on the number of times you should use the word ‘wibble’ in a paragraph?

So what for the future of Bright Meadow? Well, if my dad has anything to say in the matter, I won’t let it die. I don’t want to let it die for the truth of it, I love it too much! I am totally split on whether a strict schedule is a good thing or a bad thing. Let’s face it though, I’ve tried the whole “blog when I feel like it” modus operandi, and it’s not been doing too hot lately. So perhaps it’s time to try a different approach? Maybe shorter daily posts?

Hang on, I’ve got to go and open the door. It’s the Blogger Police. They want a word about over-use of the word “wibble”. Assuming they don’t decide to lock me up for crimes against the Internet, I promise to be back in a few days

Cxxx

Lately I have been reading a lot of chick-lit and urban fantasy and books that, in general, could be considered the trashy side of good. Amusing considering by day I am busy making sure the children of the world have fantastic books to read! But back to my point; a lot of these books are American and there is a lot of dating in these books.

And it’s not just in literature, but in films and on the TV as well, that the characters go on fantastic or shocking adventures they call “dates”.

Boy/Girl likes Girl/Boy (or combination there-of) and he (it’s usually the guy) asks her “out” on a “date”, a bizarre ritual where they get together at some venue - bar, restaurant, cinema, countryside trail, paintball park - and spend time in each others company. Then they part company. Then the Boy/Girl does/doesn’t call after a certain time period (usually around the three day mark) and the whole thing is repeated. And repeated. And repeated. Till at some point the Boy and the Girl decide they like each other a lot and stop dating OTHER people, becoming “exclusive”, because during this whole process, they have been free to “date” other people as well.

Which leads to either marriage/permanently settling down together, or splitting up horrendously.

All of the above does, I will admit, lend itself to a fair degree of dramatic tension with a healthy potential for humour and pathos along the way. Who in America DOESN’T have a “bad date” story to tell?

But we don’t do that in Britain. We just don’t seem to have a dating culture. Most people I know went to school/college/uni/work with their significant other and invariably, they got together one night at a party or gathering of mutual friends (frequently with alcohol involved) and just started “seeing” each other. Dates where the guy picks the girl up, they do something, he walks her back to her front door, then goes away, just aren’t common. So when the British Male (and female, let’s not discriminate here) does want to go on a date because, for example, they are using this dating website, it tends to be one of four things.

1) Coffee
2) Drink (pub)
3) Cinema
4) Restaurant - though this seems to be less common, which is understandable. Just think how many fledgling relationships would have been doomed at the splitting-the-bill stage!

No ice-skating, museums, paintballing, absailing, pottery class, ice cream… No doing things. Just sitting down, face-to-face, talking (or watching a film in silence for two hours, then talking afterwards), and few things are more awkward than trying to think of something to say to a virtual stranger without coming off as 1) crazy or 2) someone who only talks of themselves.

Not that there is anything wrong with drinking coffee (as an aside, why do we say “let’s meet for coffee” when invariably we’ll drink tea?), the pub, films or food. Just… It would be easier, I think, to start out with a shared experience. Something to talk about afterwards. And just more fun! I don’t have many “bad date” stories because, well, I haven’t been on that many date-dates.

One memorable night did involve him calling me by another girl’s name and that all-important first kiss being interrupted by a cyclist with NO sense of timing, but that’s fairly par for the course as dating goes. I need me some good dating anecdotes, if only to give me something to write about on the blog!

So come on, who wants to share their dating experiences? Good stories, bad stories, both are welcome. Remind me that there is romance in this world. And then give me something to laugh about, because I do so love to laugh!