1. Reply to this post with "ohh! shiny"" and I will pick six of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

Usual caveat of "It helps if you actually HAVE 6 or more icons to choose from" :D

d_floorlandmine chose these:-



Drawn for me by jatg, who is an amazingly talented artist/animator. I plan to keep this icon forever so when she is the lead animator on a really big Hollywood animated film, I can brag I knew her when :D





I am not sure where this came from, which suggests I found it and stole acquired it. There are many days where only the knowledge that prison would seriously cut into my internet time prevent me from reacting like this :) Used for when I get my rant on.





I wanted a "I said HUSH!" icon, so I hunted for a suitable source pic and was thrilled to find this one :) Not one I use much but when I do, it tends to be to forestall those that know me well (and still love me) from making sarcastic remarks :D




Mark from the movie Rent, wincing in anticipation. He doesn't say the line in the movie or show but the expression just said it all for me. Usually used for something work-related, when I can see the train wreck coming but also for those days when you just know things are Not Going To Go Well. Made, as far as I can recall, by my own fair hand.





Helo from B5. *swoons happily* Stolen from, and made by, the ever lovely halcyon_shift. Occasionally still use this for TV related posts or when I'm feeling swoony :D





Ahh yes, made by commoncomitatus, after we spent that particular episode of Dr Who giggling helplessly and MST'ing the whole ep. I don't use it much but it still makes me giggle :D

I have been saved of thinking of actual content for today's (leap year!) post by sabaceanbabe's timely meme :D

1. Leave a comment to this post!
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Post the names of five fictional characters whose names begin with that letter, and your thoughts on each. The characters can be from books, movies, or TV shows.

sabaceanbabe gave me the letter "P".

Now it doesn't say if the names have to be first name or surname so I'm going to cheat wildly and use a combination of both :D

( The Characters )

Edited because I can't spell "Kirsten Vangsness" to save my life. *sigh*

Meeeeeeme! kelemvor gave me age 23 to write about. That was in 1991.

I was dating:
I wasn't. I was in my last year at Sunderland Uni and hadn't had a relationship with anyone since I broke up with my boyfriend in 1989. Also, degree finals kind of dominated the first half of the year and I was a leeetle busy :P

I wanted to be:
I had no idea, actually. I was vaguely thinking about a career in marketing or advertising. I'd already abandoned ideas of being a journalist, engineer and a librarian (although I kept circling that last). Late in the final term, I applied for a post-graduate course in computing starting the following September, and was accepted.

My best friend:
I hung around with Val Kolacs and Sheryl Hopkinson, pals from my degree course. We kept each other sane during finals :) And there was the A Team, of course: Liz C, Jon P, Mike and Chris, role playing and drinking buddies since the second year. (Jon P was the ex-bf previously mentioned....)

I lived:
For the first half of the year, I was in a large, shared terraced house in Sunderland. Nice house, but my room was freezing cold. Most of my housemates were ok but we weren't close friends. I was at home for the summer and, on moving back to Sunderland to do the post-grad, I was in another smaller shared house near the campus. This place was a hole - no-one apart from me and one other guy ever washed or cleaned anything. The gas fire in my room did nothing to keep the room warm, so you had to sit in front of it all the time to feel any heat. The only advantage was, because you couldn't leave anything in the fridge in the communal kitchen because it would get nicked, the room was cool enough that I could keep milk and butter in a cooler box :P Oh and the bathroom? Had a hole in the window where an old air vent had been removed. Imagine taking a shower in there in winter. In Sunderland. With the wind whistling down directly from the Norweigian ice flows. And people wonder why I developed my lightening fast shower routine. *shivers*

Any fellow meme sheep want an age? :)

Decades meme, snurched from half my flist.

March 1981: In last year of middle school in dear old Dunstable, living with my Mum and Dad in the tiny 2 bedroom bungalow I grew up in. I remember not enjoying the first part of the academic year but things had improved drastically by March and I was doing ok. I still am very grateful to my teacher, Mrs Davis, who really opened my eyes to English Literature. Less happily, my Dad had developed a Persistant Cough - this later proved to be lung cancer which took him later in the year.

March 1991: *thinks* Wow, I had to resort to counting on fingers to work this out. I was living in Sunderland, in a flat above a pub (woot!!), with Tanya and Wendy, in the second year of my English degree. This was the year I really discovered cider. Oh dear. Oh deary deary me.

March 2001: Living in Welwyn Garden City in a 2 bedroom flat, in a relationship with Ginger Mike, who lived in Cambridge. There was a fair bit of travelling :D Rob the Furball was 5 years old :) This was the first year of a long period of unemployment but I was all right with that at this point.

March 2011: Still in WGC in the same flat (16 years this year). Single, working for local government, mostly happier, definitely fatter, got a good solid ring of friends round me (you know who you all are) and looking ahead to a year of change.

March 2021: I have no idea where I'll be. The changes this year, all job related, will probably dictate a lot of what I do next and I don't know what they'll be as yet.

Gods, I am so bored. My choices right now are filing, more filing, or lugging archive boxes down to sort out. So I thought I'd do a lyrics meme instead :P Name the song, the musical it's from and bonus points if you identify the character singing the line!


1) Listen I hate to break up the mood/Get to the point, begin the beguine - voluta

2) New York City! Centre of the universe! - commoncomitatus

3) He's handsome, he's young!/ Alright, he's 62/ But he's a nice man, a good catch, true? True. - commoncomitatus

4) The folks atop the ladder/Are the ones the world adores/So boost me up my ladder, Kid/And I'll boost you up yours crevette

5) You can take/You can give/Let him be/Let him live - halcyon_shift

6) You must be mistaken, I'm sure that you are/There's more than one car with stickers on. - commoncomitatus

7) Why God, why this face/Why such beauty in this place/I liked my memories as they were/But now I'll leave remembering her, just her - voluta

8) They came out West and built a lot of fences/And built 'em right across our cattle ranges! (two characters here, I'll take either name :)) - voluta

9) Where a girl and a guy with a little petty cash between them/Can be sure when they deposit no-one's seen them/Oh what bliss to sign your checks as three-o-one-two-seven

10) A touch of paint, a magic nail/Can turn a kitchen chair into a Chippendale (this is a duet - I'll take either character name :)) - commoncomitatus

Ooops :)

TV Meme

Day 29 - Current TV show obsession

Hrm. I don't know that I AM currently obsessed. Signs of mousey obsession usually include gathering every item of trivia about a show ever, reading fic, writing fic or desperately re-watching episodes to get another fix. Haven't seriously done that since Xena, although I have flirted with Cold Case and Leverage (except for the writing part in the latter case). I guess Burn Notice is the closest, because it's airing right now, it's on my WAHWANNAWATCH list - no new episode tonight! Pah! - and it sucks me in every time, in ways Leverage hasn't managed this season (yet). Eureka starts again this week, maybe that'll suck me in too :)

Day 30 - Saddest character death

Oh man, I've been going back and forth on this. halcyon_shift posted one of the best ones, the death of Colonel Henry Blake on M*A*S*H (no, I'm not putting this behind a cut, it was thirty years ago!). That still makes me sniffle like a very sniffling thing. The death of Joxer on Xena was wonderfully done, although in that case it was spoiled by a large chunk of fandom going "YEEEESSS! FINALLY!" :P Hector on The Unit! That sucked but I was spoiled for that and it didn't have quite the emotional impact it should have had (the funeral scene broke me into a million pieces mind). Mrs Landingham's was brutally sad, but lead to some superb scenes and one of the best TV eps of all time (and yes, this is the last time I'll bang on about "Two Cathedrals", I promise :)) Leo's death is just horribly sad because you know the actor died and that's why they had to write that in. I don't count that, it seems, I don't know, disrepectful somehow.

In the end, I narrowed it down to two. The season finale of Blakes 7 where everyone dies. Not even kidding. That was the first time I just had to dash to the phone and ring a fellow fan up so we could flail together about it. I wouldn't call it the saddest but it's definitely right up there in the "Biggest Eff You To The Fans On Cancelling A Show, Ever".

The other one is Kate on NCIS. Now, I was never a huge, huge fan of the character, I didn't miss her when she was gone but that was at least mostly due to the fact that Cote de Pablo is fantastic in the role of Ziva David, Kate's replacement. If she hadn't been so good, and if the aftermath of Kate's death hadn't been done so well, I might have been furious as the casual loss of such a big character. But as it is, I can't watch either Twilight or Kill Ari without sniffling mightily. Fare ye well, Kate, we hardly knew ye.

I can almost hear you (not) saying "Oh no! Not ANOTHER meme!" but at least these questions are a bit different from anything I've seen recently. And I have nothing else of interest to post so this is all I got. And it's behind a cut so feel free to mosey on past :D

( 65 random questions of great randomness )

Best Quote

This meme wants me dead. I spent so long on this that there are shows I never got around to checking quotes for - I know I'm missing a load of good NCIS/Numb3rs/Dr Who quotes out, so I might have to come back and revisit this one :) Anyway, because just one quote is completely impossible, have my fave quotes from some of my fave shows :)

( Cut because dear merciful _gods_, I got carried away )

Favorite series finale

*blinks* For once, I might actually be stumped. I haven't seen that many proper series finales as either shows get cancelled without enough warning to DO a proper season finale or I fall out of love with them long before the end, or most of the shows I'm fannish about are currently still running. SEASON enders, yeh, have lots of faves of those - for instance, The West Wing "Two Cathedrals" is simply a stunning hour of television that Aaron Sorkin never bettered. But SERIES enders, well, that's a puzzle. It's usually easier to point the finger at all the ones that sucked or were just meh.

So of my fave shows, what series finales HAVE I seen? Of the older shows, I don't remember Starsky and Hutch's or MacGyver's. Cagney and Lacey had time to prepare a final ep and it was good but annoyed me because it was one of those endings where they don't actually tell you what happens next. I hate that. Not everything has to be tidy (i.e. completely resolved) but I like to have a sense of what happened after we see the characters for the last time. (To be fair, there were subsequent TV movies but I haven't seen them so..). Charlie's Angels was a sobfest clip show and not one I enjoy watching - they'd lost Kate Jackson by then and I didn't like Tanya Robert's character. Umm, I seem to remember The Waltons having several post series specials that pretty much tidied everything up but I don't remember how the series proper finished off.

I saw TNG's two parter which many fans loved and it did a decent job but it never grabbed me. I have to confess to have never seen Voyager's (really MUST get S7 on DVD). DS9, Buffy and Angel I stopped watching before the shows finished. BSG - yeh, that suffered by being finished in a hurry in S4 before they found out they got an S5. I do love the last lines which make me sniffle every time (about Delenn watching the sunrise every morning for the rest of her life), but otherwise, too many annoying unresolved things that we were supposed to find out about in comics and books afterwards. Bah!

Xena's last two episodes pissed off practically everybody for one reason or another. I didn't have a problem with the idea, per se, I objected strongly to the setting. (Can't be arsed to put this under a cut so won't go further for fear of spoilers). SG-1's ending was, well, truthfully, kinda boring :P Haven't seen Highlander's, haven't seen I-Man or Mutant X's either (I'm told that the I-Man one was a decent send off). I stopped watching Without A Trace long before the final season, too, though that I may yet revist IF they ever bother releasing the DVDs. (CBS are gits about DVD releases.)

Of shows that have ended recently, I stopped watching The Unit around half way through the last season - Spear of Destiny, you are still on my list of Worst TV Episodes Ever. I still haven't seen Cold Case's last ep much to my shame, but I have seen Numb3rs and really loved it. They had time to prepare for that one and it showed, it was very well done. It might actually end up winning by default, although I should watch Voyager's and Cold Case's at the very least before I make a final judgement. Legend of the Seeker's last ep wasn't intended to BE a series finale but actually, it works ok. Enough was tied up that you can just about walk away satisfied.

Criminal Minds, Leverage, Burn Notice, Big Bang Theory, Private Practice, In Plain Sight, Justified, Eureka, White Collar, Nurse Jackie, NCIS and NCIS:LA are all still going. Of that list, I expect Criminal Minds to implode after this next season, giving me another finale to watch!

So the status of this answer is: I don't know! Will get back to you when I've seen a few more season finales!

OK, while I'm perfectly capable of being a big ol' soppy and there are "D'awwww" moments that still make me sniffle, none of them revolve around kisses. If this was a movie meme, I could prolly come up with a few but not so much for TV. But there is a moment from SG-1 that makes me gigglefit every time. It's from the hysterical episode "Window of Opportunity", which is basically SG-1's Groundhog Day. Jack and T'ealc are caught in a time loop. Eventually, they start having fun with it which leads to all sorts of shennigans. Watch the whole clip because it's hysterical but the kiss is right at the end if you want to FF :D