4 things: movies, plants, more plants, and friends

Things I did today:

1. Saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which makes it the first movie I've seen in theaters since... Rise of the Guardians, I think. (And the only movie I saw not-in-theaters between them was the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated thingy that kicked off the TV series, because Susan and I were bored one evening during her most recent visit.) I do not watch a lot of movies. I keep thinking, "Oh, that sounds interesting," and then just never doing anything about that vague interest. *sigh*

Anyway, I enjoyed the film very much. Other people have written approximately half a million reviews and reaction posts already so I won't say anything except that yes, the end credits have some seriously awesome design work, and I was very tickled that the second post-credits teaser scene -- the one you have to wait through absolutely everything to see -- maintains continuity with the film. (In other words, the Smithsonian curators rearranged the costume-wearing mannequins because obviously one uniform is missing from the display. *grin*)

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2. Bought a couple new large and cheap plastic pots and a bag of potting soil, in preparation for a few weeks from now.

You see, I enjoyed growing peppers so much last summer that I am trying to repeat the trick. Except what I did was buy a packet of bell pepper seeds, of which I have now planted thirteen in dinky makeshift pots and am waiting to see if any of them sprout. The packet instructions advise special seed-growing soil, but I figure if plants can reproduce just fine by having a bird shit their seeds on random patches of ground, I should probably be able to get at least two or three viable sprouts with just ordinary houseplant dirt.

I may post pictures once there is anything to see.

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3. Bought a new schefflera plant, because "Buy a new houseplant" is still one of my chief go-to reactions under prolonged stress. "Buy some scented candles" and "Buy cool wrapping paper" were also options in the past, but I forbade them to myself years ago on the quite reasonable grounds that I already had more candles and wrapping paper than I could use in a decade -- and so far I've been right about that -- so houseplants are the sole remaining impulse purchase option. I like houseplants, okay? They are pretty and green and make my air fresher and my apartment feel lived-in.

But now I need to buy a couple cheap hanging pots for some of my numerous spider plants, so as to move them to my kitchen windows and free space for my new schefflera and any other plants I acquire before my work situation resolves itself one way or another.

I have such first world problems, it's ridiculous.

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4. Talked to Cat on the phone. I am really glad we've been reconnecting this year. I missed her, and while we still feel a bit like strangers in some ways -- we've been unaware of large portions of each other's lives -- we still have the knack of conversation, at least when the topics don't get too personal.

Which reminds me that I should call Susan tomorrow, actually, since it's been a couple weeks since we've talked. Yes. I will do that.

It's nice to keep in touch with friends. :-)

wherein Liz thinks about AO3 crossposting

I am, very slowly and fitfully, trying to get most of my old fanfiction crossposted to AO3. I am not sure I want to put everything up there -- there are some works that are more in the nature of random finger-twiddling than something I particularly want to share with the entire world -- but aside from the more fragmentary stuff, it would be nice to have my work available in a more public forum (and one with a less demanding feedback mechanism, aka the kudos button).

But I'm not sure how to organize everything.

An awful lot of my older work is tiny 15-minute ficlets, and those can clog up an archive really damn fast. But I don't know that I want to jam them into story collections either, because those gum up search parameters -- they give back positive results for every random character, ship, and tag attached to them, even if that element appears only glancingly in one component "chapter" out of a dozen. Which is annoying to readers.

I suspect I'm going to end up posting everything individually, with a few things organized into series (because goddamn, I love the AO3 series function), but that won't stop me from fretting in the meantime. *sigh* I am especially unsure about my Narnia fanfiction, since most of those stories are part of a single coherent timeline and thus ought to be part of a series, but I do not want the headache of trying to arrange them in chronological order. Maybe I should just post my timeline as a "fic" and put a link to it in the notes for each fic? That might work...

(This ramble is brought to you by the four old HP fics I crossposted tonight. They all contain Petunia Evans Dursley, though one of them is really a Harry fic that happens to include a peripheral Petunia cameo. Slowly my AO3 stats are becoming less wildly unrepresentative of my actual writing history, though Homestuck is still massively over-weighted in comparison to HP, Naruto, and Narnia, to say nothing of Angel Sanctuary.)