Title: Christmas Quartet: "Christmas Spirit" (Part 2)
Author: awanderingbard
Rating: G
Length: 1376 words
Book or TV verse: TV, with a few bookish moments
Characters: Harry, Murphy, Anna (Murphy's daughter), Bob
Summary: After Murphy makes a Christmas Eve visit to Harry, he opens his present. (Harry's POV)
Author's Notes: The second part of the series, following Simple Gifts, by request. This time from Harry's POV. There will be another with Murphy opening her present too. :-)

( Harry, you're gaping. )

Title: Christmas Quartet: "Simple Gifts" (Part 1)
Characters: Harry, Murphy, Anna (Murphy's daughter)
Spoilers: None.
Rating: G
Summary: Murphy makes a Christmas Eve visit to Harry.
Author's Notes: I started writing this for one of the prompts at dresdenflashfic but it ended up moving away from the theme more than I wanted. I decided to go with something else instead, but figured I should finish this one up as well. Out of season, but what the heck? Murphy's POV and a bit of Murphy/Harry.

( She has your mouth. )

Title: Blind Spot
Characters: Harry, Murphy
Spoilers: None in specific, I picture it set sometime after 'Second City'
Rating: PG
Summary: Head injuries can be enlightening.
Author's Note: Done for the 3rd challenge @ dresdenflashfic. The prompt word was 'darkness'.

( Ka-thunk! )

Title: Her Kind of Magic
Characters: Harry
Spoilers: Miniscule for "Things that Go Bump"
Rating: G
Length: Oneshot
Summary: There are different kinds of magic in the world.
Author's Note: Done for dresdenflashfic's first challenge. The theme word was 'magic'.

( I'm pretty sure it's magic. )

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Honestly, there are probably a few people I'd like to replace, but the one who immediately popped into mind is Katie Holmes in Batman Begins. I haven't seen her in a lot of things, so I can't say that she is a bad actress in general, but I really didn't feel like she suited the role of Rachel very well. Rachel is a tough sell at best, she's sort of a Mary Sue (Batman loves her! She's sassy! She is single handedly fighting crime! She maces assailants! She is incredibly young yet somehow the Asst. DA! She's Bruce Wayne's childhood friend!) and I don't think Katie had the chops to make her likeable. The character wasn't in The Dark Knight long enough for me to decide whether I would have preferred Maggie in the first movie, but I was quite glad when Katie decided not to do the sequel. With Christian Bale's perpetual (and in character) dull surprise, I think we needed someone a bit more playful and smiley. Which Maggie handled nicely.

I managed to get my writer in gear a little for Happy Fest. My little ficlets:

Another World (SG-1, G, 267 words, Mitchell 'constellation' prompt)
Uncle Meredith (SGA, G, 637 words, Rodney 'baby-sitting' prompt)
First Aid (Eleventh Hour, PG, 406 words, Rachel/Hood 'healing' prompt)
Valentine's Day (Lie to Me, G, 192 words, Gillian 'chocoholism' prompt)

Happy Fest closes on Sunday, so there's still time to write if you feel the urge. bringthehappy

Happy Fest is on!

Hundreds of prompts in over a hundred fandoms have been suggested and all you need do is chose one and write a happy fic with it. You can also comment on other's stories and tell them why it made you happy. Come join us,we have cake it's fun! Click on the banner to go to the posting post.

Okay, so on the season finales of So You Think You Can Dance we've seen the Australian SYTYCD champion and the UK SYTYCD champion. Where my Canadians at? We have two exceptional champions who are much closer to fly in. It reminds of me our first Canadian Idol who was asked to perform on the American Christmas Special and was then cut out in the American broadcast. His bit was only shown in Canada. Is it too much to ask to get a little love from our Southern neighbours?

So, I am rectifying this, immediately. Here are Nico (Season 1 Champion) and Tara-Jean (Season 2 champion):

Nico [w/ runner up Allie, Contemporary, Stacey Tookey choreography]
Tara-Jean [w/ her partner Vincent, Contemporary, Stacey Tookey choregraphy] (dancing starts around 1:00)

On and off I had being attempting to decipher the ribbons on Major Davis of SG-1 fame's dress blues. I'd found most of them, but couldn't suss out the last few, so I asked little_details to help out and managed to figure out the rest. In the comments, someone mentioned wanting to do this for the rest of the main characters and I thought 'what the hell?' and did so. Behind the cut are the ribbons on the uniforms of Sam, Jack, John, Cam and Davis. Because, yes, I am that geeky.

ETA: Over at the little_details post, someone linked me this site which is chock full of detaily goodness. She has done the medals for Jack, Sam, Hammond and Jacob. You can see them here. Her Jack and Sam stuff agrees with mine in terms of the ribbons, but not the devices (clusters/stars), in some cases. Which is fine, because I had trouble figuring them out anyway. :-D

( Short answer: they have a lot of medals. )

As I wandered through my links the other day, I thought about how often I use various sites and thought I might share them with others. Some of them are uber specific to certain stories I've written, but I've included them in case they are useful to someone else.

( Character Names )

( Languages )

( Dialects and Slang )

( Facts & Info )

( Generators, Tools & References )

For those who watch Lie to Me: whenever they show the establishing shot of the Lightman Group, they show a really tall, windowy building. I doubt the Lightman Group has the whole building, but I've never seen anyone get out of elevator, IIRC, so does mean they're on the first floor? Thoughts, ideas, theories?

Why is always the little details that trip you up in writing?

Yes, I have returned from a week of sunniness, swimming and watching of tiny satellite tvs (Lie to Me does not work well on tiny TVs, btw). It was a very good week, apart from Wednesday, when the cottage attempted to kill me.

( How I narrowly escaped with my life...* )

Now I'm home and I've been on my computer and I'm going to have a bath in my bathtub and sleep in my bed and it will be awesome.

*this may be an exaggeration.

I'm going to the cottage today (Saturday) will stay there until next Saturday. So, if you don't see me around, that's where I am. Please know that if anything important happens to you during this time, I will be squeeing, consoling, or shaking my fist in spirit.

Have a good week, everyone!

Stolen from a person who commented on my icon journal:
Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

JUNE 1ST

FACTS
1533 – Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England.
1956 – First international flight (to Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport - YUL) from the Atlanta Municipal Airport (ATL); now Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and currently the world's busiest airport)
1974 – The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims is published in the journal Emergency Medicine.

BIRTHS
1801 – Brigham Young, American colonizer and religious leader (d. 1877)
1937 – Morgan Freeman, American actor

DEATHS
1968 – Helen Keller, American humanitarian (b. 1880)

Today was my birthday party! My actual birthday was last Tuesday, but I still wasn't feeling very hot, so we decided to postpone it until today in hopes of giving me more of a chance to recover. We think we've figured out the cause of the headaches (a new medication I was on that had side effects no one bothered to tell me about) and I've stopped taking it and it seems to have helped. But now I'm exhausted.

Anyway, today was party day. Adam and Amalie came over and there was spaghetti and pumpkin cheescake (seperately, not a spaghetti and pumpkin cheesecake). They were both delicious. I got phat loots - a gorgeous, huge jewelry box, lots of books I wanted, thingimies for my embroidery floss and a blinged out new journal with blinged out pens. Adam and Ama gave me Merlin Series 1 and Avatar on DVD. Plus bubbles and the most inadvertently hilarious card I have ever seen.

I hadn't seen Avatar yet (my eyes don't do 3d and no one would go with me to the 2D). We watched that tonight. Thoughts under the cut.

( Avatar thoughts. )

PBS is doing its summer drive, so Mum and I caught Masterpiece Classic tonight after Adam and Ama left, which was David Copperfield with wee Daniel Radcliffe in it. Part one is excellent and I'm looking forward to part two next week.

Great day, great gifts and great food. Hope that bodes well for my 24th year.

I'm still alive. Mostly. Sorry I've been absent of late, for about three weeks now I've had pretty much chronic migraines. So I've been doing a lot of sleeping, because, what can you do? In between sleeping I've been doing a lot of icon making and watching of movies and British panel shows, since those are somewhat mindless and my mind hurts. I know I've missed commenting on important events in my f-listers' lives, so I apologize for that.

If anyone is curious, here is how I would rate the numerous movies I've seen lately:

Sherlock Holmes - awesomesauce
Leap Year - started off sort of meh, but got really good
Nine - musical numbers were good, but I still have no idea what the plot was about
New York, I Love You - nowhere near as good as Paris, Je T'aime
The Young Victoria - very good
Pirate Radio - waaay better than I expected it to be. I quite enjoyed it.
An Education - good, but sad and vaguely creepy
The Princess and the Frog - not the princess movies of my youth, but highly enjoyable.
Did you hear about the Morgans? - lame. I love a romantic comedy, but lame.
Up in the Air - We all watched it and enjoyed it, even my Dad, who doesn't like anything.

Title: Old and Well-Connected
Characters: Harry Dresden and Kevin Ryan, with cameos by Richard Castle and Carlos Ramirez
Rating: G
Spoilers: none
Word count: 1,931
Summary: When a case takes him to New York, Harry knows just who to call for help.
Author's notes: Written for A Ficathon Walks into a Bar with the prompt "Harry Dresden walks into a bar and meets...Kevin Ryan".

( I got kicked by a unicorn. )

The Quebecoise channel was the only one showing the figure skating earlier. There is nothing funnier than hearing a Quebecois commentator saying 'Smack my Bitch'. That is all.

P.S It was a skater's music choice.

Comment and I'll pick one (unless you want more) of your fandoms, post the answers to your journal and so on and so forth.

donutsweeper gave me The Dresden Files (bookverse)

( The Questions. )