My arms ache. My neck ache. My legs ache. My ass aches. My hands ache.

• Plastic Duck - I found this on the floor last night on the way back from the cinema
• Superworld Unknown - A solid perfume from Lush in Covent Garden. Got it on my Londonventure.
• Train Tickets (i) - Return from Middlesbrough to Hartlepool, ie. My town to my college town.
• Ticket Stub (i) - From An Early Burly Christmas - a Burlesque pantomime
• Warheads - From Amy when she went to London with college. Oh, how I love warheads.
• Salmiakki - The strangest type of liquorice I've ever eaten. But it's lovely. And Finnish. And this box is actually from Finland. Helsinki-Vantaa airport, to be precise.
• UHU - Super glue. Because you never know when you need to stick some things. Or maybe it's from carting things to and from college.
• Nerf Darts - One of these is mine, the other two are from around the cinema in town. I do wonder who is having nerf fights out there...
• Flyer - For The Hootchy Kootchy Roadshow which is apparently 'a burlesque spectacular'. Includes a 2 for 1 ticket thing.
• Sweets - Liquorice/Aniseed lozenges. Because i am ill.
• Half A Key - Found it in the road when I decided to walk the almost 4 miles home from the Teeside University Students Union. After midnight. I thought it was cool.
• Ticket Stub (ii) - From the Headline Honeys burlesque show during Teesside Uni.'s Freshers.
• Envelope - A tiny Christmas card! It's from Kristina, a friend from college and has Princess Cinderella on it. She does not, however, have a stupid, glittering body.
• Train Tickets (ii) - Ticket from Middlesbrough to Hartlepool to see the Early Burly Christmas thing. And the receipt for said train ticket.
• Wallet - Final Fantasy VIII Griever wallet that I got at Nemacon this year. Has useful things in it like my debit card, college card, TUS card, SubCard, Unlimited Card and English money. It also has not so useful things like 50 Kronor (Swedish) and 1 Dollar (USA). Ok, they are sort of useful, but not when you're in England.
• Passport - Because I have no other form of ID, and you never know when you might want to flee the country.

A fair chunk of my spending recently, outside of college related things, has been on music. Going to gigs, buying merch, ordering a VIP ticket for an Emilie Autumn gig...
This, of course, means that I need a new Music Box post.

I'm going to call this one Things what are signed, for obvious reasons.

1. Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman 

Following seeing Abney Park on Friday night (which was amazing, if you were wondering), I found myself at a signing on Saturday afternoon. Since I'd forgotten all of my money at home on Friday, I had no merch, nothing to sign. They were selling, though, their CDs. At a loss as to which one to get, I decided on, and I quote, ALL the CDs!

As I was thinking about which one to get signed, Jody piped up with "d'you want us to sign all of them?", with a smile.
"Uhh, sure, why not?" I answered, and the Airship Pirates set off a miniature production line. And there they are. Each as signed as the others.


I have a couple of other things, like a letter from Captain Maggots (wheeeeee! ♥), but I don't think those things especially count as 'things what are signed'.
So there you go.

I've got a bunch of draft-posts that I've started writing and then gave up on for one reason or another. I'm so ashamed of myself, not managing to write anything properly in a while. But hey, life likes to get in the way of things.
The last little chunk of 'life' that separated me from the world of blogging was a spontaneous 2-day trip down to London. Six and a half hours on a coach both ways, and I'm aching now. What was I thinking?
I planned my little trip with intention of doing some research for college, like hunting down street performers and visiting museums and such...
And I did, to an extent.

The plan was to go to Covent Garden as soon as I got into London, but that failed when I found myself automatically veering off towards the Gatwick Express.
"No," I told myself, "You're not going to Finland. You're in London. Go to Camden or something."
So I did.
After a mooch around the wonderful Camden (and buying an earring and resisting the temptation to go get my ear pierced again right there and then), I went to my usual hostel. At this point, I realised that I had a lot of time to kill since I didn't have my mac with me. Oh dear. What is a girl to do?


The next day, I found myself, quite by accident, in the British Museum. Like you do. It was less than useful for my college work, so I went to go look at mummies instead. I would have gone to the V&A, but I couldn't remember which tube station was closest.
I ended up there, by the way, by again attempting to go to Covent Garden. I should probably work on my directional skills.
Then fun stuff happened.
While quite happily sitting on the floor in King's Cross, reading The Grimmerie, I got attacked so menacingly by the wonderful Marie and Gav. We ventured to Camden on a (thoroughly successful) Nerd hunt and wandered down by the canal, back along to King's Cross. Not too long after, they left me at Victoria station for my journey home.

And yes, I'm cutting this short as I am under orders to watch Pushing Daisies!
So, until next time....

As well as this, I have a rarely-updated dream blog, but I want to start posting in that too, 'cause
a) my dreams are damn weird
b) I occasionally get creatively inspired by stuff I dream about.

So, if anyone feels like seeing what the inside of my head looks like while I'm asleep...
Whispers in the Cosmos

ohgod. I haven't posted anything in a long while. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about, it's that I didn't have words for how amazing my summer was.

In July, I went back to Finland ♥
To the people who haven't been to Finland, go there! It is officially my favourite country. Finland is love. I've only been to Helsinki/Vantaa, but I want to go exploring. I want to see Finland in the snow. Not the snow we have here, but the proper snow that you could probably drown and/or bury yourself in if you fell over in it. I want to go running around in the woods, looking for fauns and moomins and other such probably imaginary things. I want to go and shove myself into a proper sauna and almost die because I'm English and tend not to try and cook myself for fun.
As such, I'm currently (and rather badly) trying to learn Finnish so I can go and frolic to my heart's content.

But, back to the point.
Again, I stayed with the lovely Salla, and I went to the Plague Picnic - An Emilie Autumn fan meet-up for the Finns. It was rather fun, watching them make fairy wings and scarfing down cakes, but, of course, with them being Finns, they spoke mostly in Finnish, so I just sat there and and understood every 200th word or something. Eventually, I got put in charge of a camera, so I had something to do. It was really fun, though. I loved it.
Again, I spent far too much money on sweets, but it is completely worth it. Unfortunately, I didn't come home with any Missä X as the airport shops didn't have any...

A week into my little adventure in July, me and Salla jetted off to Belgium to go to ICMU (International Chat Meet-Up for those not in the know). Now, that was a fun gathering. It was brilliant to finally meet all of these people I've been chatting with on the internet for well over a year. I'd met a few at the New Years meet up last year (Or this year. Or both...), and they'd all met each other before at various other gatherings, and now I feel like I'm properly part of the group.

The fabled 'cuddlepuddle'

Near enough straight after ICMU, another meet-up was planned - Another NYE gathering, this time in Germany. With any luck, I'll be able to go to that and see all my wonderful friends again.

In August, I went off on another little adventure, this time to see Amanda Fucking Palmer in Edinburgh. Now, that doesn't sound particularly adventurous, but when you take into account that, because it was during the Fringe and everywhere was expensive, I couldn't book anywhere to stay the night. Luckily, Amy, my shrunken elf of a friend, came along with me at the last minute. After the gig, we ended up having a wander and then stumbled across a midnight tour of the vaults, which we ended up going on because a) it was a way to kill time and b) I love going in the vaults. After that, we sat in a pub until the train station opened, then went and sat in there and waited for our ridiculously early train back home.
The gig was amazing. I've been waiting for ages for a chance to see AFP live, and she certainly didn't disappoint. I only wish that we could have been down at the front instead of sitting up on the balcony, but

• Amy is tiny and wouldn't have been able to see at all
• I managed to almost cripple myself by tripping over a chain fence and slamming myself into the floor, hitting my leg and elbows that hard that I thought I'd broken something.

By the time I'd actually had some sleep, my neck had seized up too, making me think that I'd given myself whiplash or something. But oh well. It was completely worth it.

In more recent news, it was my birthday yesterday! I'm now 22, which seems almost impossible to me since I believe that I stopped ageing at 17 or 18. There's no way I'm old enough to be 22.
I don't have much to say about my birthday, since nothing especially good happened. It was my first day back at college and that, combined with not sleeping enough all weekend, meant that I was far too tired and unwilling to do anything exciting. Ho hum.
Last week, though, me and a friend went to see Bitter Ruin as our birthday thing, as his is coming up soon too. We were quite sad that Bad Pollyanna, who were meant to be supporting, dropped out, but BR were fantastic. So fantastic that I bought all of the merch. All of it. And then some.

So there you go!
That's pretty much everything I've done since last time I posted.

Ohh, and I stopped with my film posts 'cause I didn't want a whole row of them with nothing else, but I have an account on iCheckMovies if anyone cares about that.

My entire world is turned upside down.




I recently discovered that Idina Menzel is both Maureen from Rent and Elphaba from Wicked.