*sings* "My name is Talulah..."

squeaky is a bad blogger. *shame*
i haven't blogged for far, far too long, i know.  but honestly, there hasn't been much going on.  there appears to be something growing out of the silt which is, at present, about 11,000 words long.  it's coming very, very slowly.  and i keep hitting walls with "OK, smartass, what happens next, then?" scrawled all over them in dripping red paint.
but it's coming.  the working title is utterly crap, and there's already a lot that needs poking, but i still have a connection with it, and ideas for what happens later (without any idea of how i'm going to get from here to there), but it's coming.... :)

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and now, since the end appears to be in sight, the sad and terrible story of Isobel, our poor, abused camper.

Isobel has been with us for about four years.  and we love her.  she has given us much joy (and occasional frustration - like the first time her sliding door fell off, but never mind that), and has been astonishingly reliable.  she's carried hubby to work every day, and he and i all over the country to watch ravens, and wolves (the latter only in a safari park, sadly), and long, long walks in deserted woodlands, and so many other places.  she has been a true and faithful friend.  but she was getting rusty.  so we decided to give her a new set of clothes (i.e. a new paint job), and get a few things repaired and spruced up.
we took her to a local place, which shall remain nameless (insert copious and acidic swearing here), as they were VW refurbishment specialists, and the work they showed us looked pretty good.  they quoted us a price we could afford for replacing panels, getting rid of the rust, taking her back to the bare metal and respraying, and we saved hard for several months.
she was to be purple on the outside, and we were going to redo her insides in green.
she went in at the beginning of november, and was supposed to be in there for four weeks.
six weeks later (we didn't mind waiting, these things take time, after all), we finally got her back.  it was two days before christmas, and the spanking new purple paint was a fantastic christmas present.  we were thrilled!  yay! :D

five weeks later, it all went tits up.

rust started showing through the new paint.  not just a little patch, either -  all over the bloody place!  we were horrified!

we took her back and showed the guy who runs the garage, and he gave every appearance of also being horrified at the shoddy work.  apparently, the reason it had taken six weeks was that "Dave The Paint" (the sprayer who does all of their paintwork for them) had been having one or two personal problems when he did Isobel's work.  really?  no shit!
well anyway, we were very understanding - people do have problems, after all - and garage bloke said he'd get it sorted, at no extra cost to us.  too bloody right!
so off she went again.  i will leave out the description of the shitty fucking deathtrap car he loaned us, or what a nightmare we had getting temporary insurance for it, or any of the myriad other things that happened, each one sinking our spirits lower and lower.
we missed out on our first week's leave this year, and the second. 
THREE MONTHS after we took her in for the second time, the work still had not even been started.  apparrently, DTP was very angry that we had dared to complain about his dreadful, shoddy work.  go figure - we're so ungrateful.  *shrug*
we finally demanded that garage guy return Isobel, and the money we'd paid him.  the cheeky bastad tried to give us 900 quid less, saying work had been done on the body of the van.  hubby, on the verge of tears of anger, frustration and sorrow, pointed out that she was now in a worse state than when she went in.  her door locks no longer worked, the speaker cables had been carelessly cut when they removed the doors, all the interior window trims had disappeared, and the rust was even worse, with paint flaking off all over the bloody place.
he returned Isobel and, a couple of weeks later, we finally got all of the money back, but were now faced with the question: "What now?"  find somewhere else that would charge us even more and be just as likely to rip us off?
Why bother now?
i can't adequately convey the trauma of this whole story here.  she was our pride and joy, and those scumbags had fucking RUINED her.  she no longer had that spirit of joy that made us relax as soon as we sat in her.  she was, to us, a flat, dead thing.  a moving cavern of metal, and nothing more.
we decided the time had come.
we were ready. 
"we shall buy a bay window". 
one of the ones you see all over the roads of Cornwall in the summer.  a proper VW bus.  not a splitty (the really old ones with the split windscreen), since they're really, really expensive.  but we worked out that we could just about afford a bay window, with a pop top.
so we started searching the interwebz.
there's a place we found down in Oxfordshire.   they buy and sell and do up campers, and they do really, really good work, on site (bonus!).  but they were a little out of our price range.  so we started trawling through the classified ads on vwcampercrazy.com.
we saw a few we liked, and even went to look at one (which was pink! XD), but there was one ad that really caught our eye.  however, we couldn't get hold of the guy, and the ad was a couple of weeks old.  we thought it might already have gone, since the good ones tend to go really quickly, but a week later, the guy finally got back to us.  it was still for sale, and he was happy to keep it for us until we could get to see her.
yesterday, we drove all the way down to essex (three hours!), just to see it, hoping against hope that it wouldn't be a wasted 360 mile round trip.

it wasn't.

we've found her!  we've found our new baby!

***HAPPYDANCE***

her name is Talulah, and she's GORGEOUS!!!

look-->

her bodywork is immaculate, without a speck of rust anywhere (apart from a teeny tiny patch on the passanger footwell - easily sorted), and her interior is fantastically well designed, hand built, and, again, immaculate.  i should probably mention that the paint job and interior were both done by the lovely guy that's selling her to us, and quite obviously with a great deal of love.

she is a dream!

now we will be on tenterhooks for two weeks until we can pick her up.

WE CAN'T WAIT!!!

and poor, abused Isobel?  she's going to a new home, where she will be loved and appreciated.  she's going to go and live with The Most Wonderful Woman In The World and her lovely chap.  this makes us happy, too.

*smile*

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insomnia, storms, little brother and powerless.

as usual for a weekend, i went to bed quite late last night.  well, it was about 1:30 this morning, actually.  but i couldn't sleep. 

for three reasons.

the first was that it was hot and muggy.  about this, i won't complain.  it's inconvenient, sure, but this country can be so effing cold and miserable at times, that i refuse to complain when it's hot, as a matter of principle.  i love the hot weather, even if it makes me dopey and listless, it's still better than being cold!  also, it's the sort of weather that produces one of my favourite things in the whole world.  we spent a good half hour last night, dangling our legs out of our bedoom window watching a storm at about seven miles distance.  *sigh*  it was the first of the year, and utter bliss.  it was perfectly still, and the clouds were lighting up in the distance with that unearthly beauty you only get on summer nights.

the second was that i had a new story idea knocking on my brain.  this, of course, pleased me.  i haven't been writing a lot, lately, as i have other things on my mind, and it's kind of hard to settle to it,  but i'm thrilled that i'm still thinking as a writer, even wen i'm not writing.  to me, it's another tiny step towards that place i want to be - someone who needs to write.  (heh - in writing that, i realised that what i'm doing is attempting to cultivate an addiction.  naughty Squeaky! *grin*)  i spent a lot of time thinking about this story, and how it might go - disconnected elements i might throw in, and i hope it will be the backbone of this year's NaNoWriMo effort, but we'll have to see.  i know little about it, just how it starts and, as i said, one or two random bits that may or may not be in the middle.  it sort of stems from the description duel i was involved in at the beginning of the year.  i had an idea there might be more to it at the time, but for some reason, it started to put some roots into the story silt last night.  but i'm not going to chase it.  with me, that doesn't seem to be the way forward.  nor planning a story arc or indeed (as i think i've mentioned before) outlining a plot.  somehow, it loses the excitement of the writing.  it makes me wonder if that's because i started writing with NaNoWriMo - that heady, exciting, headlong rush down the pathways of the story seems to have set itself as the pattern for me.  i'm not a thoughtful, introspective type of person.  and, if i'm honest, those sort of books don't generally float my boat.  what can i say?  i'm instinctive, impulsive and exciteable, and very much enjoy that kind of book, too.

which sort of brings me to the third reason that i couldn't sleep.  i'd been reading a book that filled my brain with fireworks, both good and bad.  i read half of it yesterday, and half of it today.  and i urge you, as an internet user, to do the same.  the book is called "Little Brother" by a man named Cory Doctorow.  it's about  how the surveillance culture that we live in can go horribly, horribly wrong.  it's about security, and privacy, and (most attractively for me, as i always, *always* wanted to be like this) about a bunch of geeky teenagers who take on the might of The Man.  And Kick. His. Ass.  it's *really* exciting, and explains some of the arcana of the internet in a way i could just about grasp.  and it was fascinating.

truly - geeks are the future.

sadly, i think i'm possibly too old to become any kind of computer/communications geek now, and my mathematical understanding is most assuredly not up to the job.  but i have such a huge admiration for geeks of *every* stripe - not just the electronic ones.  if there's any sort of justice around, never mind the meek inheriting the earth - i think the geeks should.

speaking of books wot i haz read, i would like to bring your attention to another one whilst (or, rather, *if*) i still have your ear.  this one is the first in a YA fantasy series.  Powerless Book 1: The Synthesis is written by Jason Letts, also known as @foreverjuly .  you may have seen him wandering around on Twitter at odd hours of the day or night (he teaches English in Japan), being alternately philosophical and subversve.  he's a lovely guy, and i urge you to get online and buy the book.  i spent a short while dropping one or two reviews on amazon.com, smashwords, LibraryThing and GoodReads this afternoon.  i did it gladly and with pleasure, since i enjoyed the book, and we all like to help each other out, don't we?  best thing about the internet, i think, actually - there truly is a kind, helpful, sharing culture out there, and i'm lucky enough to know/communicate with some of the loveliest promoters of that phiosophy, who promote it simply by being themselves.  it gives me the warm fuzzies on a reguar basis.  anyway, here's what i had to say about it:

"I enjoyed this book very much. The main character is warm and giving, the supporting characters are human and three-dimensional, and the story and the world it is set in are well-thought-out, detailed, engaging, exciting and interesting. It's an excellent and thoughtful debut, and I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the series."

seriously - go buy it, and read it - it rocks!  ;o)

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there was another storm this morning, at about seven o'clock.  right over our heads.  the thunder woke me up with a jump - the only time i don't mind being woken by sudden a loud noise.  it was absolutely lovely.  the rain had cooled the air as it hammered down, the lightning was fresh and clean, and the crashing and rumbling of the thunder was just so deliciously comfortng.  it swells my heart with bliss to remember it, and it lulled me back to sleep with a smile on my face.

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Deathdream #11

She hit the ground - rolling, tumbling, sliding. Bouncing to a stop, she thought the experience really ought to hurt more than it actually did. Sitting up, her head spinning, she once more took stock of her surroundings. This time she found herself in a cobbled alley. It was twilight, and everything around her was grey and fuzzy, including the sky. Leaning back against the lumpy stone wall behind her, she regarded those on either side, stretching away into the gloom, trying to catch her breath.


Using the wall behind her to lever herself to a standing position, she dusted herself down, and shook her head to clear it. The walls extended to just above head height, with various bits of other walls and roofs visible above this.

Then it hit her. She had sat up facing in the same direction that she had been travelling, yet she had sat back to rest against a wall behind her. Purly's words returned:

"...Your mind's closing stuff off as you go. You can only go forward. If you go back, they'll have you..."

Cautiously, she leaned towards the wall that closed off the end of the alley, and placed her ear to it. Her eyes widened as she heard those same unsettling sounds she'd heard behind the wall in the room with Purly. They were quieter, sounded further away than they had, but they were still, unmistakeably, there. Straightening up, she began to think.

So. Space seemed to mean little here. She had no idea how far or how long she had travelled through that void to reach this alley. However, she had vague memories of floating there for some time. It had been utterly black, and she'd had no sense of movement, though she had certainly arrived in the alley at some speed. But perhaps there was no air in there to create wind to batter her face and tug at her clothes? She shied away from this thought, however, since that would mean that she had been travelling through a vacuum. Yet she had not suffered the effects of depressurisation. The saliva in her mouth had not boiled, and she had not blacked out. At least, she believed she had not. The blackness in that place, though, was so profound, that she wondered if she would even have been able to tell. But she seemed to recall a coherent chain of thought, even if she could no longer say what any of the links in that chain had been. Perhaps she had only been unconscious and dreaming? But she dismissed that idea, because....

The ground trembled. Just a little, but she felt it. Quickly pressing her ear back to the wall, adrenaline began to flood her system. Her heart rate and breathing increased as her fight or flight instinct kicked in. The sounds were clearer. Closer. Fighting was not an option, certainly not yet. She had no idea what "they" were, but she most certainly did not want to meet "them".

She chose flight.

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