between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Gym stuff: climbing proved an improvement over Tuesday, though I repent most heartily my loss of conditioning.

Links of interest:

Aliette de Bodard's fantastic short story "Immersion" at Clarkesworld. (And I say this as someone who rarely reads shorts.)

Amal El-Mohtar on The Sandbaggers and Female Exceptionalism.

jennygadget has some thoughts after reading the first chapter of How To Suppress Women's Writing.

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What you might call a grand soft day today. Never got brighter than twilight, really. A rain like mist occasionally spattered into greater vigour. Crossing the Liffey between Connolly Station and the arse-end of college, the Jeannie Johnston down the river almost obscured by the mist: docklands disappearing in the rain. River high and swollen with the tide, lapping less than a meter or so from the bridge arches, the green weed-scent of river water at war with the faintest tang of brine.

If it's like this tomorrow, I don't think I want to leave the house. It makes my joints ache. I am too young to creak in the damp.

Being sick, I got nothing done this weekend except a bit of baking.

Saturday, got home from town - wherein I missed the library opening times - to the experiece of an Inexplicable Fever. After that disappeared yesterday, I'm left with an annoying wheezy cough and a persistent feeling of weakness. To which I say, bugger, damn it.

Also, it's snowing again. Like bloody Fimbulwinter. The Frost Giants have come here on holiday, to see the sights while they wait for the doom of the gods, or something.

Snow, by god. Snow in November.

This hasn't happened in a donkey's age.

(I can't hardly remember if it happened in my lifetime.)

400 words on the thesis. If I get another 350 tonight, I'll have 8K, which means I could have a draft in as little as eight more days. *is optimist*

It's been snowing here. Big fluffy sticky flakes. There is snow on the cricket field. And I was crazy enough to come into college today: well, I guess I won't be doing any window-shopping after I go to the gym, that's for sure.

Listen, guys, do you think Cananda would be so kind as to take back its weather now, please? I'm starting to worry about fluctuations in the Gulf Stream and the possibility that this is only the harbinger of worse things to come.

Right, enough whining about the weather. Time to go get a chocolate bar to stave off starvation, go to the gym (no climbing, alas, since I'll probably be too early to actually see people there) and flee home in time to get a lift up from the station.

After six months of shagginess, I finally have a haircut. It makes me look about six years younger. I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing, but, well, no one takes me seriously anyway, so it won't hurt to look a goofy seventeen.

(Yes, I have two bibles on my shelves in that picture. I also own an interlinear Greek New Testament, but it's not my fault, honest. They made me study bibles. Critically.)

I also took pictures. Here is the harbour: it was a brisk day, and the water was coming over the back wall in an arc of white every so often. (Sadly, this happened too fast for me to take a proper picture of it.) There was also the occasional out-of-control crow zipping past on its back, due to the wind.

I'm a wee bit out of it at the moment. I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it's the holiday season making me all anxious. But! We shall overcome.

It has been very strange here, this week. There is snow: so much snow, in fact, that this week the first known mountain rescue requiring the use of skis in this country took place in Wicklow. So much snow, in fact, that this afternoon we had a snowball fight in front of the Old Library, at least a dozen people, out there on the grass for half an hour, throwing snowballs.

This much snow only happens once every dozen years, if that. The last time we had serious snow was in the eighties.

It's making me sleepy and hungry. And strangely thrilled.

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So I was sitting there for a long while this afternoon, waiting for a lecture on the crucifixion. Trying not to fall asleep, and trying work on my essay. I have three short pages of notes, now, concerning identity and assimilation in Roman Britain: my plan is to assess first Iron Age identities and Roman-British contact after Caesar; then military, urban, and rural identities post-conquest, paying attention to the decline of urbanism in the fourth century. The interesting thing about identity is how little of it we can actually reconstruct: we can reconstruct responses to imperial power, but not, necessarily, the reasons those responses occurred. There, we're limited to supposition, in the absence of literary evidence.

Speaking of literary evidence...

In the end, the lecture on the crucifixion was by a scholar from Edinburgh, one Helen Bond. Despite the title ("Why Was Jesus Crucified?") it was a historically-oriented presentation, centering around what we know of Josephus Caiaphas, the high priest at the time, and the prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, and how and why the trial and execution recounted differently in the different gospel sources took place.

It was extremely interesting, in fact, although not ground-breaking in terms of serious scholarship: it's rather been a tenet of (non-Biblical-scholarship) historical treatments of the death of Jesus of Nazareth that he was executed by the Romans for being a (potential) trouble-maker: Bond's presentation was a cogent summary of how that conclusion is arrived at.

Alas, the question period brought the theologicals out of the woodwork, with one woman accusing Bond of ignoring the 'big picture' of the theological significance of the Christ event (so not what the lecture was about), and one bloke trying, in a very confused way, to represent her as accusing the gospel-writers of conspiring
to lie to their audiences (so not what she said). And after I asked a question and the next person to ask a question referred to me as a 'gentleman' (yeah what?), I left.

Because theology and history, they need to be separate things. Theological types can get rather... crazy when you do not say what they want (expect) to hear, and that is inimical to the critical method. Seriously.

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Last night at lead climbing was fun. Up on the horizontal, no toprope, just me and the clip - I didn't send the route, or even figure out how to get from the horizontal overhang back onto the vertical, but man, that was fun.

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( Random poetry )

It is snowing somewhat here. I suspect that in the morning, half the country will have shut down, and the other half will be dead jealous.

*curls up under blanket with a videogame and a hot water bottle*

Wake me up in the springtime, okay?

Shortest day. Longest night. Happy Solstice, and roll on spring.

The weather is mild, though the daylight was fleeting: 11 degrees Celsius, rain, and lowering grey clouds that lifted just enough when I went out for a walk on the beach earlier to do the scudding storm-cloud thing and show a tiny strip of blue.

It was a long walk. I managed five minutes worth of jogging, despite the wheeze in my throat and this tired cough. I don't get out enough, nor spend enough time under the sky. It improves many things, including my mood.

Dinner was melt-in-the-mouth ham, mash potatoes and carrots and parsnips. I have a coal fire and a stoned cat, if he'll ever come back inside. Now I must dig motivation out from somewhere and file college paper, if I want to get on track, ever.

-1 degrees Celsius, freezing fog, and windchill to -6 degrees. Also, internets intermittent.

This is not the best day of the year.

Somewhere outside, someone is a)mistreating a very squeaky puppy, or b)pissing off a very squeaky bird.

Achievements:

1.5 hours of Latin, ~30 pages of Breeze and Dobson's Hadrian's Wall, two chapters of Martin Goodman's The Roman World: 44BC - AD180.

Writing: .9K

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Decent walk today, when the sun made an appearance between the rain. There's definitely a strongly autumnal feel to the air the last couple of days, but that could merely be an artefact of the amount of water around.

Yesterday evening's thunder-and-lightning extravaganza was pretty impressive, too.

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Between walking and running, I've covered at least ten miles this week. Maybe 3.5K on duellist. Two college books, three chapters of Greek vocabulary, and a chunk of groundwork on Latin.

What do you think? Am I sufficiently justifying my continued existence? :P