gnimmel

mandy_moon @ 10:19 pm: Sorry We Are Closed
Today we went to Good Time Emporium, before it gets demolished and to see if we can steal the Millipede arcade game. We took some sad pictures.

Here I am. I am forlorn.


Remember when I said the picture of the half-deflated balloon on the dirty floor of Good Times was the saddest picture in the world? The quality of this picture isn't so great, but the sadness here rivals that picture, I think. They even have a misprint in the sign (we have locked our doors for last time).


Look at that wording. Such thinly-veiled seething rage and bitter disappointment coupled with such carefully controlled language. That sign is like someone speaking in a disturbingly calm and deliberate tone through clenched teeth.

And here we found what looked like a funeral wreath:


We noticed that the neon Budweiser sign is still lit up, along with some other lights. Is someone coming back or did they just not bother to shut them off?


I remember when we went here on our last Good Times run ever, I had some interest in that carousel horse. It would be a shame if it got trapped under the rubble once this place is demolished. Oh, how I hate Ikea now.

What a sad day.

the_lady_lily @ 08:42 pm: Bibliography
( 27 - The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingslover )

( 28 - The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck )

Tags: bibliography

baratron @ 02:05 am: eeep
I am about a trillion years behind on livejournal. Don't think I've been reading it properly since the middle of May. We're now at the start of July and the oldest stuff on my friends page is from June 25th or so. Therefore, if anything important, interesting or noteworthy has happened to you recently, please leave me a message/link to your post!

I hope that more spoons will exist soon :X

Tags: livejournal meta

rathenar @ 01:41 am: Crossposted from navigatorsghost
This journal is still defunct, but since LJ have actually cleaned up their act - a little bit - and since I've realised I do actually need to be able to keep up with people over here, I've gotten a non-paid (and staying that way) replacement. Please point yourselves at faithinfire, my new band and music journal, if you're curious to see what I'm up to now. This will mostly be stuff about my band, stuff about other people's bands, reviews, and bits of day-to-day stuff such as might make interesting reading for a varied audience not all of whom know me personally. Fandom and highly personal stuff will still be on my insanejournal navigatorsghost, via the feed on navigator_ij.

Cheers everyone,
Rath

navigatorsghost @ 01:35 am: Okay, okay...
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

greygirlbeast @ 07:42 pm: Addendum: Crabbing Gulls
Yet another odd and wonderful thing we witnessed during our most recent trip to Beavertail (7/03) was an example of tool use by two Herring Gulls (Larus argentatus). It was getting dark, and we were seated on the foundation of the old 1753 lighthouse. The wind was becoming truly bone-chilling, and we were just getting ready to head back to the car, when two gulls climbing about on the rocks just a few feet below us caught our attention. While we watched, one grasped a twig in its beak, and the other a dried cluster of Irish moss. They proceeded to lurk about the ledges, sticking their heads into the crevices, and Spooky suggested that they might be "fishing." This seemed absurd to me, as I knew of no instance of gulls of any species using tools. And, I pointed out (pedantically), they would have to be crabbing, not fishing. We sat and watched, and though we never actually saw them catch anything, it began to seem very plausible to us that they were, in fact, poking about in the spaces between rocks trying to get a crab to seize the lure, at which point they could drag it into the open. Turns out, Herring Gulls do, in fact, use tools in precisely this way*, and that's what we were seeing, after all. There are two photos, behind the cut:

( Crabbing Gulls )

*See, for example, Pierre-Yves Henry and Jean-Christophe Aznar, 2006. "Tool-use in Charadrii: Active Bait-Fishing by a Herring Gull," Waterbirds The International Journal of Waterbird Biology (Volume 29, Issue 2 [June 2006]).

Tags: birds, the sea

pepysdiary @ 10:00 pm: Thursday 6 July 1665

http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/07/06/

Up and forth to give order to my pretty grocer's wife's house, who, her husband tells me, is going this day for the summer into the country. I bespoke some sugar, &c., for my father, and so home to the office, where all the morning. At noon dined at home, and then by water to White Hall to Sir G. Carteret about money for the office, a sad thought, for in a little while all must go to wracke, winter coming on apace, when a great sum must be ready to pay part of the fleete, and so far we are from it that we have not enough to stop the mouths of poor people and their hands from falling about our eares here almost in the office. God give a good end to it! Sir G. Carteret told me one considerable thing: Alderman Backewell is ordered abroad upon some private score with a great sum of money; wherein I was instrumental the other day in shipping him away. It seems some of his creditors have taken notice of it, and he was like to be broke yesterday in his absence; Sir G. Carteret telling me that the King and the kingdom must as good as fall with that man at this time; and that he was forced to get 4000l. himself to answer Backewell's people's occasions, or he must have broke; but committed this to me as a great secret and which I am heartily sorry to hear. Thence, after a little merry discourse of our marrying business, I parted, and by coach to several places, among others to see my Lord Brunkerd, who is not well, but was at rest when I come. I could not see him, nor had much mind, one of the great houses within two doors of him being shut up: and, Lord! the number of houses visited, which this day I observed through the town quite round in my way by Long Lane and London Wall. So home to the office, and thence to Sir W. Batten, and spent the evening at supper; and, among other discourse, the rashness of Sir John Lawson, for breeding up his daughter so high and proud, refusing a man of great interest, Sir W. Barkeley, to match her with a melancholy fellow, Colonell Norton's son, of no interest nor good nature nor generosity at all, giving her 6000l., when the other would have taken her with two; when he himself knew that he was not worth the money himself in all the world, he did give her that portion, and is since dead, and left his wife and two daughters beggars, and the other gone away with 6000l., and no content in it, through the ill qualities of her father-in-law and husband, who, it seems, though a pretty woman, contracted for her as if he had been buying a horse; and, worst of all, is now of no use to serve the mother and two little sisters in any stead at Court, whereas the other might have done what he would for her: so here is an end of this family's pride, which, with good care, might have been what they would, and done well. Thence, weary of this discourse, as the act of the greatest rashness that ever I heard of in all my little conversation, we parted, and I home to bed. Sir W. Pen, it seems, sailed last night from Solebay with, about sixty sail of ship, and my Lord Sandwich in "The Prince" and some others, it seems, going after them to overtake them, for I am sure my Lord Sandwich will do all possible to overtake them, and will be troubled to the heart if he do it not.

feanelwa @ 11:28 pm: Exterminieren! Exterminieren!
That is going to be the only LJ post title for a long time, sorry...

I don't know why everybody is being so lukewarm about Doctor Donna, I thought she was great. That's the sort of physicist I wanted to be when I was 14. I have been googling for things like "Gallifrey" this evening, and I think I should catch up on some backstory. It's that whole lost better world thing, like with Lord of the Rings.

I am currently listening to BBC Asian Network's Punjabi show, because it's quite comforting to listen to people singing cheerfully about something but not being able to understand the words.

I was reading something interesting about Taoism the other day, and thought of a good idea. ( Windows and fires )

ewx @ 11:25 pm: Facing the light
Rather clever

Tags: links

mind_hacks @ 09:00 pm: The economics of a prisoner of war camp

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/07/the_economics_of_a_p.html

R.A. Radford was an economist taken prisoner during World War Two who later wrote about the complex cigarette-based economy that thrived in the POW camps in a fascinating 1945 article.

You can also read it online as a pdf if you want to see it in its original type-print glory, which I have to say, does rather add to the atmosphere it so wonderfully evokes.

It's a vivid insight into the social organisation of the camps, and just the descriptions of the market pressures are quite interesting in themselves.

For example, the standard currency was a cigarette, but heavy air raids meant people would smoke more, presumably owing to stress, thereby altering the value of the currency through scarcity.

The camp residents imposed trade regulations, had trading areas, and some even developed businesses:

Around D-Day, food and cigarettes were plentiful, business was brisk and the camp in an optimistic mood. Consequently the Entertainments Committee felt the moment opportune to launch a restaurant, where food and hot drinks were sold while a band and variety turns performed. Earlier experiments, both public and private, had pointed the way, and the scheme was a great success.

Food was bought at market prices to provide the meals and the small profits were devoted to a reserve fund and used to bribe Germans to provide grease-paints and other necessities for the camp theatre. Originally meals were sold for cigarettes but this meant that the whole scheme was vulnerable to the deflationary waves, and furthermore heavy smokers were unlikely to attend much. The whole success of the scheme depended on an adequate amount of food being offered for sale in the normal manner.

To increase and facilitate trade, and to stimulate supplies and customers therefore. and secondarily to avoid the worst effects of deflation when it should come, a paper currency was organised by the Restaurant and the Shop.

It's completely readable even if you're not familiar with economics and is a captivating window into POW camp society as seen through the eyes of a monetary expert.

Link to article (via MeFi).
pdf of article.

j4 @ 10:01 pm: Love Tory
I know I shouldn't find this cute, but:

sunflowerinrain @ 11:03 pm: Energy-saving stuff
FAO cycleboy1957

http://www.cutyourcarbon.org.uk/Page.aspx?ID=18

Straw bale house, etc. I particularly like the idea of grass-roofed shipping containers.

Tags: environment

midnightmelody @ 09:16 pm: Bright Lights festival: Our God rains
I've just returned home from an amazing weekend with the Westminster diocese. Bouncing all over the place, but far too sleepy to give a coherent commentary. So have some amusing quotes.

( Yay )

So much brilliance packed into one place: it's the way that one minute you're moshing to the Magnificat, and the next you're adding Latin fillers to modern worship songs, and Satan and the BBSRC are considered equally likely culprits for the Embryology Bill passing, and all the time you're surrounded by people sharing trust and love, to the extent that you can skip all the small-talk, and none of the scary gender scripts apply, so you can offer phone numbers and e-mail addresses to near strangers without anyone assuming seduction as a motive, and have amazing conversations with men and women you've only just met. It's so wonderfully safe and free. And it occurs to me that this is home, this is community, and this is how we're meant to interact with others all the time. I hope I can keep some part of that with me over the coming weeks.

ewx @ 09:00 pm: Beasthouse
I have been enjoying reading The Beasthouse on and off for some time now.

Tags: links

mirrorshard @ 06:15 pm: Pride security

Yesterday, at the Pride rally in Trafalgar Square, transgender campaigner and journalist Roz Kaveney was told she couldn't use the women's loo, and that transwomen would have to use the disabled loo instead.

I'm not going to go into why this is so incredibly wrong on so many levels, because others have done that admirably already. On the other hand, since I reviewed the relevant security legislation on event management as part of my work for Colchester Festival (a few years back, but it's still valid) I'll just make a few points. Probably over-explaining them, but bear with me.

1. These events are absurd patchworks of overlapping and interlocking jurisdictions. The principal organisation (Pride) take main responsibility for running the event, but will generally contract out the security to another firm. This is usually a really good idea, both because security is Not Easy, and because the Private Security Act 2001 means that people performing front-line security jobs have to be licensed. Depending on the size of the event, they may or may not be subcontracting a bit. There are also quite a few other organisations with a professional interest in making things go smoothly - specifically, the police and the local council, but this also includes residents' associations and every single commercial business fronting on the area - which means there are also important and complicated liaison jobs to do.

2. This basically means that the jobs which need to be done (both for legal reasons and common-sense reasons) get done by the people who are certified and employed for the purpose, rather than the people who are dedicated to and invested in the event. In other words, you either get the security you can buy, or you spend ca. £5000 setting up your own fully-trained and -certified team^[1].

3. Communication, both beforehand and afterwards, is never as good as it "ought" to be. Someone clearly didn't have the right diversity training (or a clue, but then that's probably congenital) but that doesn't mean that either

3.1 they were carrying out an actual policy of any organisation with which they were affiliated, or

3.2 they had been stationed in that specific place in order to carry out that policy.

4. The event organisers generally never come into contact with the guys at the sharp end in the vis jackets, either on the day or beforehand. Any diversity training they have (or haven't) received is from the security firm employing them, and the quality of that varies widely. (Obviously, if I'm wrong here and they did get behaviour briefings from Pride personnel, much kudos to Pride for that.)

4.1 In fact, legally, people without SIA certification are not allowed to give specific directives to security personnel. (There are some caveats and complications, of course, but this is the basic thrust of it.)

So basically, something went very wrong, and it has to be improved for the future, but it's a systemic fault and not a personal one. There are undoubtedly a lot of people trying to work out what went wrong where, and trying to make it clear that This Isn't Them, but there are also a lot of (rightfully) enraged people boiling it down to "London Pride was transphobic".


Questions we could usefully answer:

• Who were the security firm contracted there? In fact, was the person responsible event security, or a Council employee?
  
• What sort of diversity/awareness training do their staff get, and who provides it?
  
• Would they be open to having more provided, free of charge, under the aegis of some convenient organisation?
  
• Are there a useful number of people within the LGBT community who already have SIA certification^[2]?
  

---

[1] SIA licenses cost £245 per person, and the training can cost £150-£250 per person. Added to that, you have the infrastructure expenses and operating expenses for the day. On the other hand, once you have this, you have a very marketable asset indeed.
[2] I don't, despite having done event management, steward training, and front-line work in the past - this was (just) before the SIA licensing requirement came in, and I didn't have the money or real inclination to get trained and licensed.


[Edited to add in banner & link]

Tags: london, pride

king_laugh @ 06:58 pm: Assa exists on youtube!!!!!!
Okay, fairy nuff, the lighting's not ideal, the sound's a bit shit, and I haven't quite got the hang of sitting in the middle...

Also, the camera's a bit closer than ideal. That's because it's perched on a pile of videos on top of my dad's accordion case, which WON'T GO any further back on account of the mess (which I was far too preoccupied with the excitement of telling a story for the camera to do anything about). Also, you're looking at just about the only part of my house I could film without broadcasting the mess.

All the same... what do you think???

amuchmoreexotic @ 06:45 pm: Today I saw a seagull eating a pigeon on the high street. The pigeon corpse hadn't been there five minutes earlier, and it didn't look like it had been run over; I suspect that the seagull had actually killed the pigeon.

The food chain is breaking down. We're living in the end times, my friends.

angoel @ 06:09 pm: The rain gods have been kind this weekend, and despite forecasts of showers, refrained from dampening three of the four performances. The third, indeed, was very cleverly done, with rain stopping and sun coming out for the hour or so of the performance. The fourth, on the other hand, was very wet. There were rumbles of thunder and the rain beat down upon tent, actor and audience alike. Nonetheless, the audience was pretty full[1], and remarkably few people left. And the rain cleared up just in time for the lack-of-curtain call. All in all, successful, then.

I am now exhausted. But pleased; acting is fun. Only two more performances now. I think I'll be disappointed when they're gone.

[1] Including, apparently, the Duchess of Wessex and Princess somebody-or-other. I'll take people's word for it.

ixwin @ 05:25 pm: Daniel manual
No sign of number two's arrival yet (she was due on Tuesday). Have an appointment at the hospital on Wednesday afternoon to discuss options re: induction, but hopefully it won't come to that.

My mum will be coming to look after Daniel when things do kick off and she asked me to put together a guide to his daily routine so she can keep things as close to normal as possible, particularly if I end up needing to go into hospital. It's the longest thing I've written in a while and I thought I'd post it here for any of you who might be interested in reading about the minutiae of a toddlers life and/or wonder what I actually get up to all day.

Needless to say, if you're not particularly interested in small children this will probably make for very dull reading and you should feel free to skip it. I also want to add that this isn't all I do - for a start there's the general housework of cleaning/shopping/laundry etc. which I'm not expecting my mum to do, as well as generally cooking something a bit more complicated than the pasta with bought sauce suggested here. Also there are various activities I go to like playgroup, swimming etc. or visiting friends and family, which vary day-to-day.

( Read more... )

solitarywalker @ 11:20 am: It's all rather vague

1. Unspire. (Which now that i've written it looks as though it should mean uncoil, as though someone is twisting a spiral the wrong way in order to flatten it; or unwind, which may not be wholly inaccurate.) Quite suddenly the notion came to me that perhaps the explanation was that the address was wrong. i scurried to check, but paused midway to wonder whether i hoped that it was wrong or that it was not. The former would at least explain, but. i concluded that it was what it was. So i proceeded and looked. i looked carefully, though i would not go so far as to say that i scrutinized it. It seemed to be accurate.

2. Friday. At the end of the meeting they were trying to schedule the next meeting. This is the part that seems like a sort of popularity contest, because How about next week at the same time? and No I can't make it and 2:00 then? No that's not good for me, maybe Monday? I won't be here that day, but Thursday's good. No, I have meetings all day on Thursday. Not until someone mentioned Friday did i have anything to say, which was: i hope i won't be here on Friday. i didn't know quite how else to put it really; the situation was this: i hoped to take Friday off, but having not yet officially cleared it, i couldn't rightly declare that i wouldn't be in that day. Granted i've never asked for a day off and not gotten it, but still. i didn't want to presume.

3. Book. If i feel as though i have written this before it is only because i have, and it is waiting by the door. It said that i made a book and i read it and it was, i believe the words were, charming and sometimes humorous. But of course i don't know whether that will be of interest. The text was written in 1916: the narration is formal, well-educated, and courteous; and the characters speak with a lot of apostrophes. It seems this is no longer done. It's all sort of flattened out, so that narration and dialog are more or less the same, even in third-person tales. If someone says an apostrophe you can be fairly sure that a posessive or a contraction is nearby, and that the contraction ain't... well, you know. (Seventeen by Booth Tarkington is a very good book, by the way.)

greygirlbeast @ 10:53 am: "Embrace the void even closer still..."
It would seem that the local pyromaniacs shot their wad (so to speak) Friday night and Saturday morning, as last night was quiet. Thank gods. My nerves were not up to Night #2 of the rockets' red glare.

As for yesterday, no library, because they were all closed. So I made do with the internet, which was barely making do at all. However, there was a significant plot breakthrough, the sort of thing that never occurs to me when I'm actually writing. Also, Spooky had unearthed a rather dubious nugget regarding Lovecraft's paternal grandfather (and the man who was, essentially, the closest thing HPL ever had to an actual father), Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833-1904). There was a bit of something posted to a UFO-related website, describing WVBP as "a notorious New England occultist." While intriguing and grist for the novel, this seemed, to me, just a bit unlikely, and I emailed Joshi about it. He agrees there's nothing to it, that it may all stem from a tongue-in-cheek introduction that Colin Wilson wrote for George Hay's Necronomicon (1977) hoax. Yes, Phillips was a Freemason, but then so were half the men in my family (okay, that's an exaggeration). Yes, Phillips fostered HPL's childhood fascination with the Weird, but my mother did the same with me, and she's a fairly conservative Xtian. In other words, dead end. However, HPL does have ties to the Moosup Valley region of Rhode Island which I may play off of in The Red Tree. Spooky and I went through a great deal of Rhode Island history yesterday, the Colonial Era through the 18th Century, and then she read me everything that has so far been written on Chapter Two, which, maybe, I'll be able to finish today. The more I learn of Rhode Island's early history, the more I think the state motto should be "Biggest Little Troublemaker."

Not much else to yesterday that's fit for public consumption. I did get some pretty good SL roleplay late last night (thanks to Joah, Cerdwin, and Bellatrix), and yes, that call that went out to the nascent "Sirenia Players" group is still good. Come to Toxia and play a rabid lunatic devotee to Labyrinth. IM me for details, or just show up, because confusion is appropriate when answering the call of Eris Discordia. blu_muse got some nice screencaps from last night, which you may see here. Labyrinth's new exoskeleton is coming along nicely....

Something I've not done in a while, which I'll do now, is post links to all those books of mine currently in print, the particular editions that need to sell for my publishers to continue to publish books by me. Please grab one or two (or three). And, no, sadly buying "used" copies doesn't help. Thanks:

Daughter of Hounds

Silk

Threshold

Low Red Moon

Murder of Angels

Tales of Pain and Wonder

And, of course, there's always Sirenia Digest.

One more thing for now, apparently some very kind and generous individual purchased the complete Angel DVD collection for Spooky, from her Amazon wish list (it vanished from the list), but it has yet to appear, and she's worried that this kindly, generous someone might have spent their money for naught, if the package has been lost in the mail. So, if you're reading this, and you were the giver, you might want to look into it. She says thanks.

Postscript (5:23 p.m.): I have just learned from ellen_datlow of Thomas M. Disch's suicide on the 4th. She writes, "I'm shocked, saddened, but not very surprised. Tom had been depressed for several years and was especially hit by the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor. He also was very worried about being evicted from the rent controlled apartment he lived in for decades."

Tags: doh, lovecraft, lrm, moa, rhode island, second life, silk, the red tree, threshold, topaw

perlmonger @ 04:37 pm: Telling the bastards who they work for
I'm assuming (I hope with justification) that any EU citizen reading this has already been in touch with their MEPs about the impending amendments to the Telecoms Package.

FWIW, here's my base email (I amended it slightly depending on to whom it was addressed):

I am writing to you as a constituent asking you to exert whatever influence you have with members of the IMCO and IMTR committees of the European Parliament to vote against amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 that have been introduced into the Telecoms package.

These amendments were introduced under the influence of industry lobbyists whose interests are in the attempted maintenance of obsolete business models that have become unsustainable; they are a stealth attempt to subvert earlier rejection by Parliament of explicit legislation to the same ends. The proposed measures are disproportionate, unworkable in practice, violate privacy and personal data security and would lead to entire families being denied access to the internet through the presumed guilt of one member.

The committees are scheduled to vote on this package tomorrow, 7th July, and I urge you to do what you can to have these amendments rejected and, failing that, to vote against the package yourself should it be presented for a vote by the Parliament as a whole.

I apologise for the lateness of this communication, but I only found out about this today myself: please do what you can to prevent these egregious measures being codified into European law and to ensure that the European Parliament continues to represent the interests of its electors, even where those conflict with the short-term advantage of multinational corporations and their lobbyists.

Tags: eu, european parliament, politics, privacy, society, teh intarweb

officialgaiman @ 12:47 pm: Then, tomorrow was another day...

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/07/then-tomorrow-was-another-day.html

Yesterday I did a panel with Richard Price, and then I signed for (according to the newspapers)about six hundred people for five and a half hours. Normally I try very hard to be as nice to the people who've been waiting for hours as I was to the people at the beginning, but I think I may have been ordering the people at the back of the line around a bit just to make sure I finished before the Tom Stoppard talk started at seven. (I finished with 25 minutes to spare.)

The crowd was lovely, and all amazingly good-humoured given how long they were standing around.

Anyway. Five and half hours, which is about five hours and ten minutes longer than anyone else here, which meant that I was suddenly peered at suspiciously, as if revealed as some kind of odd alien being, by other writers with whom only that morning I was sharing jokes and food. I think they have now forgiven me.

[Edit to add, that was a joke, and the other authors were remarkably nice about it all. Tom Stoppard, who stopped in during the signing, thought it hilarious.]

After the Stoppard panel, which was marvellous, like a master class, (I'm typing this on the computer in the hotel lobby, and was just tapped on the shoulder by a Newspaper photographer who wanted me to come and pose for some shots, and seemed a bit baffled when I pointed out that I was working) -- one of my favourite moments was when asked how he would direct a Hamlet, and he took the (odd) question and talked about what he wants from actors, "Clarity of utterance." Then I went to dinner with one of my Brazilian publishers. I hadn't really eaten since breakfast over twelve hours earlier, and I discovered that when you are given a very large passionfruit caipirinha after a five and a half hour signing and on an empty stomach, you know it's working because your feet go numb. Possibly the feet simply went away. Luckily, my feet returned before I had to walk back to the hotel, but it was extremely odd.

Today it's the end of FLIP and the Desert Island Books panel, and I will read a bit from James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks.

mandy_moon @ 11:05 am: On the fourth of July we went to see the fireworks at Jamestown, by an abandoned fort. I liked that the fort bore a sign that essentially said "Hey, it's really dangerous here at this abandoned fort, but we can't stop you from coming here so please be careful."

The sign would not have liked this weenie goth kid we saw there.



Prior to me snapping his picture, which he could do absolutely nothing about, he was walking on the railing. Probably some World of Greyhawk deity was keeping him aloft.

Because of our location and the presence of a few too many trees, we could only see the tops of the fireworks. I tried to cheer about American things that I like: Eastern Tiger Salamanders! American Bullfrogs! NASA! Devo! Raccoons! Edward Scissorhands! Buddy Holly! America rules!

The best part about the abandoned fort was the graffiti, which seemed like it was applied specifically to please me and only me. I took some pictures of it:


Kind of says it all, doesn't it?

Also there was this one, which sent me into raptures-


But the real prize was beyond our belief...


When we spotted it, we said "Is that...no, it couldn't be...". But it was. That is Rajini.

I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around how Rajini could have found his way into a Rhode Island fort.

The highlight of the trip, it was.

ashfae @ 03:29 pm: *does the happy party dance*

Party was FUN! We always invite everybody in the happy certainty that only a handful will show up, because we live so damn far away. This time we actually had a double handful, and much fun was had. Games where played, fajitas were eaten, leftover Betty Crocker icing was put on whatever foodstuffs were handy (icing on tortilla chips tastes better than you might expect), backrubs were exchanged, we never did get around to karaoke (to the relief of some and the sorrow of others), and (surprisingly) above all, paper balloons were punched¹. Yay. I like our parties. They're pretty low-key "let's all hang out and make each other laugh a lot" affairs, which is how I like to spend time with people. =)

( For the benefit of those who were there: )

Several people stayed the night, so this afternoon found deralte, lucyjin and fyrie finally succeeding in what many have tried to do before: getting Chris and I to watch Avatar: the Last Airbender. I am happily smitten, which will surprise no one. So is Chris, bwhahahahaa. =)

I have so many pictures of the past several weeks. I should look into getting a larger flickr account so I can job lob them all on there. But I want space-out time very much at the moment: to the Playstation!

¹ deralte brought these awesome Japanese paper balloons. You blow them up, bat them about, they make a fabulous thwapping sound when you hit them, you can hold them in the air with your breath for just long enough to be awesome, they take surprising amounts of abuse, everyone should have some!

pussinboots @ 06:30 am: KoL icons


Despite thjorska urging me to play this game for years, I didn't start until fairly recently. As I progress to better monsters and cooler locations, I imagine I'll probably have more of these.

momooshka, we are totally playing this next time I'm over there. I think you'll love it, but I'm not sure you can figure it out on your own. It's kind of counter-intuitive. (You can always try, though! Prove me wrong.)

feanelwa @ 01:47 pm: Best Doctor Who EVAR.

On Friday I helped at an open day, on Saturday I went to Waddington air show with Cat and Duncan and after it stopped peeing it down it was great.

sunflowerinrain @ 02:41 pm: Brocante by Broomstick
I missed the town party last night (15 euros for a sardine supper was too much), although the music was audible over here. The band sounded good.

This morning the summer brocante on the picnic area/motorcaravan park next to the little supermarket was rather quiet, as one non-local person remarked in puzzlement. I went down on Broomstick with only 7 euros so as to avoid temptation, and bought only vegetables from the smallholding's stall. Some people asked about Broomstick, especially one man using crutches; I should investigate ways of obtaining a Powertrike or similar in France.

Travelling by Broomstick means seeing much more of the hedgerows, which are full of flowers. I've noticed the middle of the road into Mirambeau town centre is a long strip of wildflower meadow, and most of the hedgerows around the village (except next to the vines) are beautiful with all the usual plants plus orchids and brightly-coloured vetches. The route into St Dizant du Gua goes past vines, wheat, and sunflowers, though only a few early ones are in flower; then barley (I love the colour of ripe barley) and maize. And I discovered a small lake in La Petite Motte.

It began to rain on the way back, so I stopped at English neighbours' and had coffee and chatted about cabbages and k^W^W^Wthings, including robberies from gardens. There haven't been many, but someone in Morisset had most of their ducks stolen, and the mayor came out to investigate. It seems there is a gang which goes round villages nicking plants and anything left out. They did this area in the spring, so we should be ok for a couple of years.

The rain lasted about 4 minutes. I'll have to water the tomato plants this evening.

Tags: rivalard life

king_laugh @ 09:18 am: ashfae and randomchris's Board Games Party was boingsomer than a hedgehog on stilts!

There was good food, laughter, silliness, Apples to Apples, beach-ball shaped paper balloons (seriously, these are the best toys in the world ever!) more Apples to Apples, and much stroking of strokey people.

So thanks, guys! You rock!

mirabehn @ 09:11 am: Also...
Just wanted to wish every conceivable pile of luck to borusa, the_alchemist and strongtrousers for Henry V.


Break all the right limbs and none of the wrong ones. And have a fantastic week. I look forward to seeing it on Saturday! :-D