Train Wreck

Tags

NTS, Confessions, The Internets

BRID You know train wrecks, right?

NTS I may have a passing familiarity with the concept.

BRID I can’t decide whether this is my new favorite hobby, or whether I should run as fast as I can in the other direction.

NTS looks concerned

BRID I’m looking through the results for “free kindle books” on amazon.

NTS Yep. Train wreck.

o O o

Here’s a nice selection.

The Keeping (Sequel to The Mating)

Carpe DiEmily (Part 1)

10 Shades of Sexy

Bonded (Prequel to The Mating)

Blue-Collar Boys – Service Calls

The best bit about that one is really its subtitle. That’s the part that broke my husband: Blue-Collar Boys – Service Calls (Book 1: Alpha Male Contemporary Sex Stories).

Girls’ Night Out (Visits to Petal)

“The Finding (Law of the Lycans #3).” NTS shoots me a quizzical look. “I can only assume they turn into wolves or something hairy.” “Ah,” says my fungus-minded husband. “I thought you said LICHENS.”

In Too Deep (Hidden Cove Series)

And in a sad and turn of irony: Free Books for Your Kindle | $0.99 Kindle Purchase. There were quite a few of these on various subjects, none of them free.

The best irony on my computer this week, though, comes not from amazon, but courtesy of my anti-virus software. The program likes to send a little message in the corner once or twice a day to tell me that my definitions have been updated (which doesn’t sound at all like something a cyberman would say). This week it’s popped up with a new message.

I think I may have identified the scam.

Also, my uncle, the prime minister of Nigeria, has some money he’d like to give you and your long-lost step-nephew’s great grandfather once removed has just died, leaving you sole heir to his estate. Just sayin’.

Also, the only reason this post isn’t titled Book 1: Alpha Male Contemporary Sex Stories is that this post is going to ruin my SEO (search engine optimazion) enough already, and I’m slightly afraid of the pop-up ads I’m going to be getting.

Let the Summer Begin

Tags

Acadaemia, Friends, Thesis, University

On Wednesday I finished the last of my coursework. Ever. (Unless I get another MSc sometime, which is theoretically not impossible, but is not highly likely.) I would feel a lot more poignant about this if I hadn’t would up my studies with an exam and a paper deadline on the same day. For the same class.

Now it’s just my little (MSc) dissertation, which will take 3 months, and my big (doctoral) dissertation, which will take three years.

Those, however, are next week’s problems. So far, I’ve celebrated in traditional geek fashion by watching almost the entire first season of Warehouse 13–I was so tired that day that watching TV was about all I could manage–sewn a comfortable yet stylish pair of pants while watching Disney movies, and taken a wonderful walk across the Meadows in the sun with my wonderful husband.

Dunvegan Castle, September 2012

Tomorrow the real fun begins: a ceilidh Saturday night and on Sunday a barbecue on the beach. We’ve been told to bring our swim togswhatever the weather, and I think I will. The question is, will the water be colder in Scotland than in Maine, or warmer?

Happy weekend!

Brid

Spring is Relative: More Notes From the Front

Tags

Acadaemia, Linguistics, Scotland, Spring, Writing

You know you’ve been writing too long when the hedgehog pencil holder prompts puns involving medieval writer Precopius and a porcupine.

We really need to stage an intervention with the APA to stop them using so much punctuation. Does the date really require parens and a period?

Seriously, someone has way too much time on their hands. And by someone, I mean the APA. You need a decoder manual just to figure out what all of the numbers in the bibliography mean, yet they don’t consider first names important enough to include. (Clearly they never had to write a paper where all of the contributors were from the same small country and have the same last name. Yes, Netherlands, I’m looking at you.)

Cut from my paper: “Two new runes, neither of which I can easily render in this document, appear around this time…”

Hail. Honestly, it’s hailed about once a week here since spring* set in. At the moment the sun gleams on the fresh green maple leaves and dark ivy of the garden as the hail bounces cheerfully against my window.

*Which just goes to show that spring is relative.

I will never be too old to identify a good fort in the woods. Dunvegan Castle, September 2012

Research: Thoughts From the Front Lines

Tags

Acadaemia, Geekery, Linguistics, Writing

He translates the Dutch but not the Latin? Who does he think is reading this?

Drink every time Tolkein is cited for his scholarly work! (Bremmer 181)

Travelogues from the 17th and 18th cents must be interesting.

These 16th century scholars mention the same struggle to get copies of pivotal books that I often experience. Only theirs aren’t to be had for love or money, while mine aren’t to be had for love alone.

From NOWELE 24 p5: samwiis ‘dull, foolish’. I’m really on a surprise Tolkein kick.

It suddenly occurs to me that I have no idea how books were printed between the early nineteenth century and the advent of computer-aided “type-setting”. This, incidentally, was prompted by the somewhat rustic (as compared to what I can do on my PC given half an hour) layouts of diagrams in books by small publishers in the eighties (all of my research materials this week seem to be from the eighties. Go figure) .

Is an etymological dictionary of Welsh too much to ask for?

Waterfall at Dunvegan Castle, Skye, September 2012

Articles of Distraction

Tags

Acadaemia, Reading, The Internets

Simultaneously studying for a final and writing a paper. Wikipedia articles in my browser:

Elmet – a former Brythonic (Celtic) kingdom on the west coast of Great Britain

High German Consonant Shift – speaks for itself. If you’ve never heard of it, chances are you don’t need to know.

Sandman – a series of graphic novels by the incomparable Neil Gaiman

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas – 2nd century (AD) fanfic that never made it into the Bible. That was probably for the best. Read the “content” section; it’s hilarious.

terminal devoicing – because Auslautsverhaertnung didn’t sound ominous enough.

At least one of these is immediately relevant to my work.

Dunvegan Castle, September 2012

Swans, Bubbles and Butter Cream

Tags

NTS, Scotland, University, The Great Outdoors, Spring

The weather has gotten downright lovely these past few days, being warm(er) even when it’s cloudy. It’s a great consolation to take walks and really enjoy them, though I do snatch the time from my studying to do it. Sunday evening NTS and I had the most delightful ramble along the edge of Arthur’s Seat, down toward the Parliament building.

The only mitigating factor was the enormity of swans milling about the bottom edge of the pond. Swans are notoriously bad-tempered, but in small numbers one has a tolerably sure chance of avoiding them. There must have been some two dozen swans in this over-burdened pond, however, swimming about in tiny orbits practically on top of each other, like bees in a hive. It felt like an aristo version of Hitchcock. They may have been the queen’s swans, but this time I was not amused.

Nets in Palma Harbor

Tomorrow the cake club meets again, and it’s my turn to play Lady Bountiful. The cake club is a charming institution designed to prevent certain MSc students from losing human contact for more than a week at a time while writing our dissertations. Heaven help the woman who is absent without warning. Her fellow students will fear the worst and alert the authorities at once. I’ve not baked a cake since I’ve been in Edinburgh, being inclined to toothsome cookies myself, but I shall give it my best, with hearty helpings of cocoa and my specialty butter cream icing.

NTS, being the best husband going, went above and beyond this week by procuring a certain elusive beverage for which his wife has pined for months. Asian restaurants, sadly, tend toward certain discrepancies between menu and refrigerator, leading to repeated disappointment in the procurement of bubble tea. Much to my surprise, it does not appear to have caught on in Scotland. I suspect they don’t have much truck with drinks consumed primarily during the summer months, as they are so seldom in demand. Only fancy my surprise when my husband, having nipped out for a wee constitutional, returned brandishing that much-desired beverage! Above rubies, that one.

More Than Meets the Eye

Tags

Acadaemia, NTS, Geekery, Linguistics

11.58 am
I can control my computer from across the room! [wiggles USB mouse. Repeatedly.]

2.05 pm
Blew a fuse in the kitchen. Building time machine to go back in time to an era before circuit breakers to learn how to replace it.

6.01 pm
Reading a Frisian phrase in an English-language book is like falling through the rabbit hole: it’s familiar yet different, and I don’t realise it’s happened until I’m somewhat further down.

7.24 pm
Brid: The next time we go to a convention, we should go as Fourier Transformers!

NTS: They’re more than meets the eye!

Brid: Hm, it’s a little complicated.

NTS: We might run into difficulties with people who will want to make jokes about it.

Brid: I think I know mathematicians well enough to tell when they’re joking. We’ll be fine.

Mallorca 2013. Someday I will tell you about this trip. In hindsight, probably with lots of foreshadow. Hence the shadowy pictures.

7.44 pm
Brid: We might run into difficulties with people who have actually watched Transformers, though.

NTS: [facepalm]

Finally (Re-)Going Green

Tags

Edinburgh, Germany, House and Home, Scotland, The Great Outdoors

Let today mark the inauguration of our new green waste system! I broke a bottle of Cristal across it’s noble prow… I mean, lined it carefully with a biodegradable liner and christened it with a fresh banana peel and two tea bags.

Let me go back a bit. Growing up, we always had a separate place for green waste. We didn’t always use the decomposed soil for growing, but we kept the biodegradables out of the garbage. Paying for garbage by weight will have that effect. So will living in the woods, where leaves aren’t just things that fall on your lawn and get carried away in bags. You can’t live surrounded by trees and not think how weird it is for leaves that happen to come from food to be taken to a landfill and… sit. Just sit. More or less forever. Nothing ever growing out of them again. It’s just plain unnatural.

And by unnatural, I don’t mean a crime against Mother Nature (although it is). I mean just plain weird, like your baby sister going on dates. Weird.

Then I moved to Germany, where garbage is separated into bio-waste, packaging and actual garbage as a matter of course.

Then I went to college. I was lucky to get aluminum cans recycled. One year I set up a recycling bin in our apartment, six inches from the trash can, and my roommate still threw her drink cans in the trash. (Not you, M. dear.) But at least there were bins at school. The suburban apartment I moved to next had no bins. Not for anything. I didn’t even know that was legal. Hm. Considering the landlord, that’s actually a possibility.

In a more reputable suburb, I considered asking for urban compost bins on our wedding registry—we had lovely garden approximately the size of my six-man tent. I know because I once aired the tent in the garden.—but we were moving, so it didn’t seem worthwhile. Besides, who knows if I would have gotten any? My youngest cousins picked a set of Pyrex over the streamlined retro trash can I had listed “so that you won’t think of us when you’re taking out the trash.” I thought they had a point.

So now, through no effort of my own—short of acceptance into a foreign college and moving three thousand miles around the world—my struggles have at last been vindicated. I am the proud owner and user of a little black bio-waste bin. So much delay for what is, in the end, nothing more than a return to the ways of my parents.

Damn, that sounds profound. Sweet. And a nature post just in time for Beltane. I am on fire today. 

Though not on account of last night’s festivities.

Bosoms and a Busman’s Holiday

Tags

Acadaemia, An Alternate History, Costuming, Linguistics, SCA

The weather here keeps flashing between liquid gold sunshine and hard rain, punctuated by exciting bursts of hail that blow in on tempest winds and, spent, disappear. I blink and the room has gone dark; a cup of tea, and the sun is back, a little lower in the sky.

Palm trees at night. Mallorca 2013

Ladies, I am bound by the bonds of sisterhood to show you this post about bra sizing. Gentlemen, you can skip to the next paragraph if you like; there are no pictures. In short, it turns out that when you bend over and scoop all of the soft tissue on your chest–the breast tissue–into your bra, there’s a lot more than you might expect or be containing in your current bra. I wasn’t able to get to the shop for a few days after I tried it because I was writing a paper, and it drove me crazy knowing I could be so much more comfortable. Once I finally did make it in, as a reward for finishing up my paper, it was amazing. I have never had particularly much up top, but once I changed sizes, it was like a weight had been taken off. I could tell the weight distribution was finally right. Long story short: 34A –> 32C. Read the article, and just for kicks, try it out some time when you’re in the mall. It might be really worth it. I’m not saying big breasts are necessary for a woman, but being fully supported is so much more comfortable. Now I just need to build up a new collection of brightly colored bras.

Tomorrow we’re off to our first [hopefully] outdoor reenactment* of the season. Hooray! I will be smart this time and wear my new flannel kirtle instead of the thin one-hour houppelande I made the morning of our very first UK event last fall. I’m probably going to move from a half-developed Anglo-Saxon persona and costume to a more Scandinavian one, maybe Icelandic or Danelaw, but we’ll see. Sewing costumes has not been high on my priority list lately, though I’ve been exploring some great Viking reenactment sites. Vikingsnitt is my favorite; it’s in Norwegian, but has great pictures. I just have to be careful not to apply any of the linguistic phenomena on the site to my test involving Old Norse! That’s the danger of linguistics. You can’t escape it. Every holiday is a busman’s holiday.

We spent a lot of time walking around at night, since Palma is so well lit. Although to be fair, we also spent a lot of time walking around by day.

* Some people object to the term reenactment in reference to SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) events, since we don’t replicate any particular historical event, and the time periods represented cover most of the middle ages and renaissance. I’m not sure I agree, but semantics isn’t my primary motivation in using the term. I like it because it’s immediately understood by non-initiates without derailing the conversation, which as I get older seems more and more worth a little ambiguity in terms. 

Springtime… When a Young Woman’s Fancy Turns to Love

Tags

Acadaemia, Pictures, University, What Brings Us Together Today, Writing

Last Monday, I stayed up until three in the morning to finish off a paper. I could have finished it up in the morning, but having found my rhythm, it made more sense just to write until it was done and have an end of it. I even got up hours before the deadline to make sure it printed on time. Which it did, but the amount of time it took to make this process work reflects poorly on us all. It’s embarrassing. (Spoiler: the printer randomly doesn’t print PDFs. Nor does it tell you it’s not going to. They just disappear. This came up tangentially in conversation with the tech guy after I’d been trying to install drivers etc. for an hour. Moral of the story: don’t be embarrassed to go to IT, because if you can’t figure it out in the first ten minutes, it’s probably more complicated than you think.)

Uninterested in going back to sleep that afternoon–I haven’t napped much since freshman year, when I found 2 am a logical time to do homework–I took a ramble instead. Looking for nothing in particular, and thinking of nothing in particular, I enjoyed a most delightful afternoon. Naturally, after several days of sun, I chose the rainy one for prowls and photography, but as the rain was a spring sort of weather and not the wintery chill of the week before, my spirits remained un-dampened.

o O o

In other news, hearty congratulations to my best friend and my sister-in-law, who are both getting married! to different people! I was just getting back into my wedding series with posts like Enter the Dress, thinking that it was just about time to start planning another wedding, when two of my favorite ladies broke the news! Happily, their future husbands are also awesome. Congrats and hugs all around.

Needless to say, my wedding series will be picking up after this. I’ve got to codify this generation’s collective family wedding knowledge before it slips out of our heads. As one of the future brides puts it, it’s my job to write the wedding manual for the rest of the much-extended family. I wonder how that happened.

This brick yard is maybe ten, fifteen minutes’ walk from the university, but it feels like something you’d stumble across in a rural village.

In still more news, I have learned to make popcorn. Spring has blown in on the wildest winds I’ve ever experienced. Twilight stretches until 9 pm. I now own a (very small) hairbrush.

Three cheers for the happy couples!