Zimena

It's been a very busy day. Mostly in a good way, but still busy and with little time between things. Let's see:

* I had a friend visiting in the morning. He brought breakfast and sat here for a couple of hours. We talked and had a nice time together. When he was supposed to go back home, he didn't really want to leave, so I ended up going with him back to his place. We said goodbye outside his door rather than mine, which was nice.

* While I was already out, I decided to finally go to the hairdresser. I've been saying I need a haircut for a few weeks already, but more recently I also started thinking about dyeing my hair again. Now I have black hair... and a haircut I'm not 100% sure I like, but I'll probably like it more once I've washed and styled the new hair by myself a couple of times.

* In the evening, we went to celebrate my cousin's birthday in a restaurant. The food was delicious, and getting to spend a few hours with him and his wife was good, too.

* In other news, I'm about to go on my first flight on my own. In a few days' time, I'm off to the UK for the second time this year. I'm flying to London, and then I'm going to get on a train and go to Leicester to see the snooker shoot-out. Which, if all goes well, should also mean that I'll get to see a certain Mark Selby play in person. Well, he's the most important one, but Iulian Boiko is playing as well. And Michael Holt. And Thepchaiya Un-Nooh, though he needs to win a match first, if I'm going to be able to see him - I didn't buy a ticket for the first day of the tournament, as my biggest favourites don't play until Day 2 anyway.

This weekend has been so nice!

Yesterday (Saturday), I had a friend for visit for a couple of hours. I had not seen her for a good while, so it was nice to just have her here and sit and talk for a while. In fact, we agreed that she'd come over a couple of days ago, and I wasn't sure then that I had made the right choice because I was also going somewhere in the evening. But I'm so, so glad she were here, and she's one of those people I'm grateful that I get to have in my life. She has a beautiful Border Collie dog, too, and I always love to be around animals. Well, cats and dogs, at least - not sure about every other kind of animal that I have no experience with.

Anyway, we had a lovely few hours together.

Then, in the evening I went to see my favourite Norwegian band live! They're called Hellbillies, and this link goes to a clip from their current tour, though not from the exact concert I've been to. The song here is one of their most famous ones, and it's actually a cover version, though I suspect the majority of Norwegians don't know that. We're very familiar with this song, but not really with the original (Hal Ketchum: "Past The Point Of Rescue").

Anyway, the concert was absolutely fantastic! They're amazing live, and they have so much great music! I've actually wanted to see them live for several years, but somehow it never worked out when they've played in my town before. I'm still on a sort of emotional high from having seen them, finally... and I'll be honest and admit that I also have a sort of eternal crush on the lead singer, Aslag Haugen. He's getting older now, of course, but to me he was always beautiful in a rough kind of way that I very much like.

I got shy during their signing session after the show, though, so I ended up not buying any merchandise or getting his signature. I feel a bit silly for that now, but in that moment it felt right to just not try. Maybe next time. Because there will be a next time, I'm certain of that!

Anyway, I went to the concert with my cousin and his wife, and they came home with me for a couple of hours after it, too. We had pizza and talked about the music and the show for a bit, and it was really nice. But especially after the other visit earlier in the day, too, I was well and truly peopled out when I went to bed yesterday.

Then, today has been nice, too. One friend came by just to talk, but she was tired and didn't want to come inside. We stood for a good while talking just outside, though. The fact that I suddenly have friends who come by randomly, just for a chat, will never stop feeling completely surreal to me. For most of my life, all the important people in my life have been either family, or friends living too far away for this type of "quick hellos" to be a thing we could even do. I never really had good friends in my immediate surroundings, but now I do, and it's something that makes me very, very happy.

Other than that, I've also managed to sell an old mobile phone that was in a drawer here. I cleaned it up and reset it, and put it up for sale a few days ago. The guy who eventually bought it turned out to be someone I vaguely know, too, so he was suddenly willing to pay nearly the price I had asked, instead of bargaining endlessly. That made me happy, as I had initially set the asking price a bit higher than what I had expected to get. A lot of people buying used stuff like to bargain, so... :)

Snooker also came with a very beautiful surprise this weekend: Ding Junhui won his first tournament since 2019, and I might have blinked away tears for him at the end there. He defeated Chris Wakelin 10-7 in the International Championship final, and he had his family around him for the trophy presentation. There were some very adorable moments with his daughter especially. Maybe he used to mean more to me than he does now, but I still really like him, and this was such a fantastic moment!

Finally, something a bit unexpected: I've finally started reading my tarot books. I got two different ones some time ago - one of them was a Christmas gift last year, the other one I bought for myself. Along with that, I also somehow ended up reading a bit about witchcraft (though not so much about Wicca, yet) online, and I'm finding that I want to know more. I found a whole list of resources via some subreddits, so I have a lot of stuff to read. Some part of me definitely struggles with the interest in this as I grew up Christian, and always had that as a natural foundation in life. I've never been very active with religious-related things, but still, it's always been there, always been part of how I think about things. While I don't find the interest in tarot to be directly at odds with it, the topics I'm now researching by extension might be, and that makes my interest in them challenging to some extent. For now I've decided to keep reading, though, and I'll see how it feels from there. Knowledge, in itself, isn't a bad thing, I think.

I've been listening to some music by Chappell Roan this evening. It's some sort of modern and mainstream pop music, so it's not quite my style. But: there's also this ballad, which is absolutely beautiful. I might have listened to it some 12 times in a row already, so it just feels right to share it here:



I hope embedding the video works this way.

Also, I feel like I've been seeing various photos of her around the net for some time, and she is just SO BEAUTIFUL, too.

I have a fic I wanted to finish this weekend. For some annoying reason I also have a headache now, so I can't manage to be up like I wanted to.

Snooker starts again tomorrow, too. Not that I'm going to watch everything, but I'll probably keep it on all day. If I can write during it, then it should be possible to get things done before Mark's match in the evening.

Do you think that could work as motivation?

I got my cloak and dagger
In a bar room brawl
See the local loves a fighter
Loves a winner to fall

------ Excerpt from Kasabian: "Underdog"

I'm absolutely loving this bit of the lyrics right now. I don't know why, but these lines are sort of darkly fascinating to me.

There is, of course, also the fact that this song is heavily associated with someone else I like. It was his walk-on music during the British Open last week (which he eventually won, yay!). I believe he also used it during the World Championship in the past, but I don't remember exactly which year, because he also often uses another song by the same band.

(Yes, I can talk about snooker even when I'm just posting a song. This is about a certain Mark Selby, again.)

Many years ago, I was reading an original vampire story online. I don't remember where it was hosted, but the writing was amazing and the story was long - like a book.

I think it was called "Black Widow" or something to that effect? And I seem to remember that the main character was called Angelo? And that if vampires in this verse didn't feed for some time, they could sustain themselves on something called rotgut, which I don't remember the contents of at all.

That's pretty much it. I've been looking for this for some time, since I started thinking about it again. I guess it's really little to go on, though, unless there's someone out there with the same memories as me.

Did anyone else read this? Or better yet, do you know where it eventually ended up? Did it ever make it into a published book? Or is it still out there in the vast world of the Internet, somewhere?

I'm so incredibly insecure about my fic again. I'm looking at a challenge, and I want to do something for it because the prompt for this week is right up my alley. I might even have some half-formed idea for it. But: I cannot physically make myself get started on it, because I feel like I'm somehow not "going to do it right" or that I'm "not good enough."

I know that's nonsense, and that writing is supposed to be for me, and not a thing to be self-conscious and insecure about, but I can't stop myself.

I found these high-quality photos during the Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters tournament last week. Unfortunately, the tournament itself didn't go well for Mark - he lost in his first match, which obviously made me rather upset. But... I'm not going to go into a match-related ramble here. Instead, let me just show you the photos, because these are very beautiful.



I admit, I love this one especially much. He looks dark and dangerous here,
and that's one of my favourite images of him as far as inspirational thoughts go.

( Three more behind the cut )

I've been really tired today. I suppose it's mostly my own fault, though, because I didn't fall asleep until past 4am last night... and I was up again at 7:30am. That's obviously way too little sleep, so I slept a bit in the (early) daytime, too.

Other than that, I went for weight training today. Normally I try to do that on Tuesdays, but because of the snooker tomorrow, I decided to go today instead. Believe me, it took quite some convincing myself to even go there, because I would much rather have stayed hope sleeping and resting.

I've been out with a friend in the evening as well. We went for a walk around an island a bit off of the town centre. There's a nice view towards the sea from the topmost point on the island, but the last time I had tried to go up there, I failed because the road was just too steep. However, it turned out that we had simply tried to go up the more complex and steep route, and there's another one that's a bit better, so today we actually went all the way up there. I've lived my whole life in this town, and there are still so many little things I haven't done yet. This, though? It was nice, and also nice to experience it with the friend, as we stood there talking for quite a while.

Finally, the Saudi Arabia snooker tournament does my head in. Maybe I'll go into the whole rant about what's wrong with it in another post, but today's problem is that they redid the draw for the Last 32 round, because it was incorrect before. How the heck do they mess up the DRAW?! I mean... it's such a stupid error. The result, of course, is that everyone now has new opponents compared to what they had been preparing for. Not that I'm sure the new matchups are any better for my boys than the old ones. We'll see tomorrow, then. The matches that matter to me are these ones:

1pm: Mark Selby vs Neil Robertson
7pm: Ronnie O'Sullivan vs Lei Peifan

Okay, so Mark vs Neil is obviously an amazing match-up, objectively speaking. I like both, too... but I'm also quite nervous about it, because I really, really want Mark to win. I watched most of Neil's match tonight as well (he won 5-1 vs Gong Chenzhi), and he did a lot of good things there. Neil doing good things is normally a good thing... but not necessarily so when it's Mark on the other side of the table tomorrow. Let's see what happens, though. But I admit, I'm far more nervous about this match than about the evening one. I have a lot of faith in Ronnie to get through his match without too much trouble, but we'll see.

I'm not sure if DW supports embedding videos in this way, but let me try it.
EDIT: It seems to work fine. If you're not seeing the video controls, you can right-click and choose to "Show Controls" - at least I could, in my Vivaldi browser.

This is such a cool shot. The absolute audacity of it makes me squee.
I'll be honest, though - when I watched him take aim for that shot, I was screaming "no, no, no, what are you doing?! Are you mad?!" in my mind. But of course I still squeed out loud when he potted it. It was such a crucial pot, too - he won that frame with it. Eventually, he also won the match in a deciding frame.