between the rock and the cold, cold sea

The plan for tomorrow is:

1. Make sponges for pear sponge cake.

2. Make (highly experimental) treacle gingerbread for the care and feeding of friends.

3. Hope like hell the treacle gingerbread is edible. Successfully not blackened mess!

4. Translate two more pages of the French Article From Hell.

5. Finish one of the two non-fic pieces I have ongoing.

6. Turn one of the two drafts I already have into a finished piece.

7. Stack piles of books-to-research more neatly. (Followed, most likely, by 7a: explain to other residents of this house that yes, this is as good as it gets unless I get a Tardis or a magic wardrobe.)

8. Wrap the things-to-be-wrapped.

9. Try not to freeze.

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This is enough to be going on with, right?

Snow is really quite baffling.

Hopefully there will be sufficiently little of it tomorrow that I can pop into town and collect a last couple of books from the library before the Christmas closure. (I tried yesterday. Spent 2.5 hours not getting anywhere, due to SNOW which had COMPLETELY SCREWED our public transport system. The bus turned around and went back, eventually.)

If I can get that done, and this sneezy schnoz/icky cold clears up soonish, I'll have clear decks for making a productive go of the season of joy and good cheer. It seems to be a good way to spend the darkest part of the year: settle in with a stack of academic books and try to produce a workable Chapter 1 by mid February.

I also have a bunch of Greek to do, a couple of articles that hopefully someone will pay me for (money situation: not getting better, but I am not panicking yet, because something will turn up (it damn well better)) and some fiction to write so I can pretend I still think of myself as a writer. Which I do, damnit.

And the gym reopens over the holiday period, so just as soon as I get this cold gone, I can start reclaiming the (very large) stretch of ground I've lost.

We're supposed to get a thaw for Christmas. I'm looking forward to not shivering my socks off. I do not have the clothing for constant sub-zero temperatures. (And can't afford to buy new clothes till the end of February. So not yay.)

Anyway.

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.

Books 2010: 147-150


147. Laura Bickle, Sparks.

Second book starring Anya Kalinczyk, medium and arson investigator with the Detroit Fire Department. Neat little mystery, with some untidy asides and personal complications. I enjoyed it a lot.


148. Patricia Briggs, Wolfsbane.

Enjoyable modest fantasy with a faked murder, some intrigue, and unquiet ghosts. Also a mercenary and her wolf.


nonfiction


149. James McMurdo, McMurdo's Account of Sind. Oxford In Asia Historical Reprints, Oxford Unversity Press, Oxford, 2007. With an introduction by Sarah Ansari.

A very, very short historical and geographical account of the area along the Indus river then known as Sindh or Sind, by a little-known British officer in the 1830s. For a small piece of historical context, it's interesting, and in a way, somewhat horrifying.

But then. British imperialism. So judgemental.


150. Shaun Tougher, Julian the Apostate. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007.

A short but comprehensive overview of the life of the fourth-century emperor Julian, who attempted with limited success (which may be due as much to the brevity of his reign as anything else) to disentangle the Christian churches from the apparatus of Roman governance. A Hellenophile, a lover of philosophy, and a convinced pagan, his death during a campaign against the Persians remains one of the more interesting "what would have happened if he'd survived?" questions of late Antiquity.

This book's value is greatly enhanced by the fact that its second half comprises a large selection of contemporary or near-contemporary (well, within a couple of centuries at the outside, in the case f the historian Zosimus) writings by and about Julian.

I recommend it.

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Today's morning temperatures were -5 degrees Celsius when I went to catch the train at ten to nine. Having thawed up to maybe plus one, tonight we are back at zero, with fluffy, powdery snow six centimeters deep. Or maybe deeper, where it hasn't been disturbed. I cannot recall walking through powdery snow ever before. Nor a sight like this morning's hoarfrost, which turned to dust at a touch: dry, so cold and dry, and riming the branches like weird white glass.

I don't think I was alive the last time we had weather like this.

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Snow continues, with a disgusting local partial thaw. For the third time in as many days, I've had to scrape ice off the pavement so that the parent can get the car in and out of our narrow gate (slightly more) safely.

Being bloody freezing all the time is killing my motivation to do anything other than drink hot chocolate and poke at the fire. I want more insulation in this house, damnit.

New updates from the COO at college come complete with illustrations:

1. The snow, she is still falling. It thawed a little bit today, which means tomorrow will be more dangerous after tonight's ice. College has cancelled teaching through to Monday, and will take decisions regarding Monday over the weekend.

We are so not set up for even moderate amounts of snow. And you should see the idiots who think they can drive on iced-over roads.


2. I am supposed to be taking these enforced house-time to work on my research. Do not want.


3. I watched Kickass and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief last night. Kickass is a respectable entertaining film, and Hit Girl stole the show entirely. Percy Jackson is shallow but entertaining, although it could have done with more Sean Bean and Pierce Brosnan.


4. December's Ideomancer has gone live. I have a poem and a book review in it, and I encourage you to go read the pretty stories. (And donate, if the spirit moves you.)


5. I shovelled the path clear yesterday and today, so that the parent could get the car in and out without too much skidding. I'd forgotten how many muscles spadework actually uses.

Due to the UNPRECEDENTED AMOUNT OF SNOW, my university has cancelled teaching tomorrow. And will make a decision tomorrow for Friday.

My decision to take the rest of the week off (from going in) is looking downright prescient.

( Read more... )


IT IS VERY COLD STOP EXPECTING POLAR BEARS COMMA ICEFLOES COMMA GREENLAND WHALES STOP IF ALL COMMUNICATION CEASES SEND HELP THE FROST GIANTS ARE COMING THE DRUMS THE DRUMS IN THE DEEP --

--

Today I woke up at 0800, looked out at all the snow lying round about, and went right back to bed until noon.

At which point I took brush and shovel, and cleared the inch of melty slush and ice from the entrance to the house so that the parent could drive in and out without skidding and spinning wheels. I say thee, verily, WTF, weather? (Fireplace ash has been spread on the entryway. We've had a fire burning for the last three weeks, so there's plenty to spread around.) Filled the coal bucket from the sack outside the back door (and twenty kilos is an awkward weight to lift and pour. Not terribly heavy, but awkward) and made motions towards laundry.

What else did I do today? Visited the grandmother, who said, "While you're here, you can do the dishes," without so much as a please or thank you, and said, "But you haven't done the drying up!" upon departure. (Reader, I fled. Not that I mind doing stuff for the grandmother, but, well. There is a difference between doing stuff for the grandmother because it is a good or necessary thing to do, and the grandmother asserting her entitlement to have one do stuff for her. I feel this distinction is important.)

Also, apocalypse levels of shopping. Well, I exaggerate, but we never have more than three to five days' worth of food in the house, if that, and now we have nine. Winter veg! Winter veg on special offer!

In all this, there has yet to be thesis, and I begin to believe I will take the day off entirely. This cold weather, it makes me so sleepy and so hungry. Perhaps tonight I'll have pizza and play videogames, or write. Although the sleepiness is of the order where the videogame is much more probable, in that it requires far less thought.

What was I saying? Oh, yes. I still have another poem to write from prompts, but that's not going to happen tonight. I'm sure I'll think of something to do, though, even if that means going to bed early to hug my hot water bottle and my new duckdown pillows and sleep more.

Good running day. Mile in 9:40, mile point five in 16:00, thirty minutes and 2.5 miles in total.

I sucked at climbing afterwards, though. Take a month off, pay in pain and weakness and suffering. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.



Parliament Square, TCD

College status: still frozen. And more snow on the way, too.