I woke up early and couldn't find anything much to watch on telly, so I settled for an old version of Little Women that was playing on a channel I didn't even know we had.

Five minutes in, I realised it had William Shatner in it as Professor Bhaer. It made it weird to watch, but strangely entertaining to hear him do a German accent.

Then, a few minutes ago I was watching a scene where Amy is in Europe and finds out that back home Beth is sick, and Fred Vaughan is comforting her, and then I was just like... "Is that... Q?! What the hell is Q doing in Little Women?!"

Sure enough, John de Lancie is Fred Vaughan.

It's like a Star Trek / Little Women crossover. At least in my head, anyway! Just waiting for Laurie to turn out to be Spock or something now...

I quite like Optical Illusions, and since I'm stockpiling crazy things like that for school next year (it will entertain me, not sure about the kids), I've been saving some to my laptop. And I came across the Spinning Dancer illusion which I'd never seen before.

The idea is, you stare at it and see it spinning either clockwise or counterclockwise, supposedly based on which half of your brain is dominant (I think). It's strangely hypnotic. Eventually, you see it start to turn the other way. I found staring at the outstretched foot helped.

Takes awhile to work, but if you've got five minutes to kill and want to be vaguely entertained, go here and enjoy!

Bit random, but I thought it was quite cool :)

I've just been rewatching one of my favourite DS9 episodes, The Way Of The Warrior.

I haven't seen it since I was about fifteen, if that.

I STILL know the words to the Klingon drinking song.

Oh dear...

I figured some of you Voyager fans might get a kick out of this! I was randomly searching on Ancestry (family tree website which has UK births registered on it) and as I've been on a Voyager kick lately I decided to see if anyone has named their kids after Voyager characters.

In the birth section between 1982-2006 I found that...

There are 37 Chakotays. This includes a 'Riker Chakotay' and a 'Chakotay Marquis' ... I am not even joking.

There are also 37 B'Elanna's. Most with the apostrophe. And one Kathryn B'Elanna.

There are no Tuvok's.

There are 15 Neelix's.

There is a Kathryn Janeway (as in Janeway is the middle name - different surname which I won't include for obvious privacy reasons).

After howling with laughter, I then moved onto the other series:

There are 101 Kira Nerys's.

There are 191 Jadzias.

There is a Jadzia Dax (again, Dax was the middle name).

There are two Worfs.

There are 19 Deanna Trois (all where Troi is the middle name).

There are 23 James Tiberius's.

There are 3 Benjamin Siskos (all where Sisko is the middle name).

There is an Ezri Dax (where Dax is again the middle name!).

And sadly, there are NO Spocks. This did surprise me somewhat!

ETA: And I just laughed my ass off again when I posted this, flicked back to the search screen on Ancestry and read "The Search For Spock returned zero good matches". Oh dear...!

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed the productivity that has been an evening of no marking :)

So, when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

As anyone who's lived with me can verify, I have an incredibly bad habit of having a major shopping spree whenever things are going particularly badly. For some reason, I always feel that things won't be quite so scary if I have exactly the right outfit.

So as you can imagine, the propect of dental surgery (combined with the excuse of 'I'm-starting-work-in-a-few-weeks-obviously-I-need-new-clothes') has pretty much led to an entirely new wardrobe. Including bags, shoes and jewellery. I have EVEN bought clothes specifically for the teacher training days (I think this is a tad excessive, even for me). It's now reached the point where I enter Debenhams and spontaneously sing a bit of Franz Ferdinand to the money in my bank account: "I know I won't be leaving here, with you".

Anyway, this morning I went shopping - I'm catching the train to Mum's in a few hours. And I bought a new handbag (despite the fact I own several), matching shoes, a bag to carry my marking in (purely because it had an Owl pattern on, and I cannot resist things with Owls on - but seriously, how funky is the bag?!), and many, many sparkly things from Accessorize, on the basis that they are Sparkly and this is Good.

Basically, I am quite stressed. I think my bank account probably is too now, so at least I'm not alone!

Meh. Not looking forward to tomorrow at all. I've got 4mg of Valium from the doctors - he said to take 2mg and see how that affected me, whereas I'm quite tempted to knock back the lot half an hour before the appointment. We'll see. The doctor I saw was lovely and so understanding... I was expecting to have to really argue my case to get the prescription, but once he saw how worked up I was he was really sympathetic. So that was good, at least. And I am quite looking forward to trying Valium!

And on the positive side, I'll get to see all my friends this weekend which will be fab :) And then when I get back I'll be starting work, which I really am quite looking forward to now!

Right, suppose I should go pack since I'm leaving the house in 50 mins. See you on the other side!