A Back Post

02 October 2007

Blogging:

I have begun to find that, while walking or cooking or whatnot, I think up things to put in this blog, and then can't remember what has actually made it in. After all, I don't quite manage to make it to a library or cafe every day and even when I do, I am usually pressed to use my allotted wi-fi time as wisely as possible. Thus I end up typing up whatever comes to mind at that moment and hitting “post.” One day I got around to trying to post just two minutes too late; my internet had timed out and it would have cost another cup of coffee to post. This has at last led me to a rather obvious solution: I can type up a post in advance and simply post it when I next have a moment of wi-fi access!

It has also occurred to me as I try to write this blog, that audience becomes a very tricky thing. Between role-playing groups, SCA, prayer and church groups, friends from English or Medieval Studies, friends from other random sources, and various family members...well, many of you who may be reading this know only one or two sides of me. Some of the stuff I ramble on about here will seem quite strange—maybe in a, “oh, yeah, she mentioned she did that stuff” kind of way, and maybe in a, “what the heck is she talking about?” kind of way. And certainly I tremble wondering what my family may make of all this. But oh, well. I guess this is no reason not to try anyway. So I'll try to give a more or less even account of life in all its weirdness, though I've found myself writing to the folks at Red House (SCAers and role-players in California, the whole lot of them) as a sort of core target audience, probably because it was Amanda who got me to do this in the first place. So, whoever you are, welcome to my blog. If I don't know you, I don't know why you'd want to read any of this, but feel free. If you're friend or family, welcome to my ramblings and please don't get too concerned about the likelihood of my freezing to death. It's really quite low, honest.

Glasgow kitten weather report:

The weather here must have heard me talking earlier and rallied itself for one more push of lovely weather. For three whole days now we've had blue skies and sunshine. This has been tempered by cool to cold breezes and liberal amounts of clouds though I grant they have been of the white and fluffy variety even if they do compose more than half of the sky. The effect has been very pleasant over all and I've been seen out in nothing but a t-shirt and sweater. Ron persists in wearing sandals. Madness, I say. Still, since here it labels him as a crazy sandle-wearing hippy, I use it as proof he is well suited to relocation to sunny California should the opportunity ever (please!!) present itself.

Randomness:

It has begun to seem natural to me that the silverware and the toothbrushes are kept in the same drawer. After all, they all consist of long implements that you hold at one end and stick into your mouth. Right? Still, I thought I would comment while I still had some vague memory that this is an unusual practice. (My mother would probably be horrified simply at having all the silverware and can openers etc jumbled in one drawer without dividers or anything, let along with toothbrushes mixed in for good measure.) Why, you ask? Well, because the bathroom is scary of course. Scarier than a kitchen with the roof falling, you ask? Oh that. Well, hygienically, yes, much scarier. The bathroom is shared after all, and is usually quite disgusting. I've taken to washing my hands at the kitchen sink as well since sometimes just touching the bathroom sink will make my hands much worse off than they'd been before. Worse than any dorm I've lived in actually, but only just barely. I shower in flip-flops just like in the dorms, but I shower downstairs in the less scary bathroom anyway. It's just pointless to tromp all the way down there just to brush my teeth when there's a perfectly good kitchen sink at my disposal. It's just funny that what seemed a strange clash of the worlds of bathroom and kitchen to begin with has begun to make a certain kind of sense.

Craft projects:

Well, as most of you who know me know, I usually have some sort of craft project going or in planning. Sometimes this is as elaborate as tablet weaving or sewing garb for the SCA, sometimes it is as simple as luceting or a bit of cross-stitch. At present my craft plotting and scheming has taken a practical bent. I have two projects in the planning stages. Project Jeans involves a pair of jeans that I thought I had sufficiently mended over the summer. A first wearing over here, however, reopened most of the tears, proving me wrong. Since skirts are really only good for the rare dry days and I only have three other pairs of trousers (er, pants to the Americans) with me, it would be very nice to have that pair of jeans back in commission. Though stretchy enough to apparently fit fine, I have wondered if they are a bit too small. Along those lines I have wondered if I could simultaneously sew some supporting material along the inside of the seams that are going (inside the thighs) while letting out the seams that run along the outside of the leg, adding a strip of contrasting fabric or a wide ribbon to help let it out. I think it would look too weird to have the contrasting strip run the inside seam, but letting out the outside seams might take the pressure off the inside seams. However, if I'm wrong it would be a lot of time and a bit of material wasted. The other project, Project Sweatshirt, is less chancy but also less necessary. I got a free black sweatshirt during Fresher's Fair but I really don't like the picture. I'm not fond of the advertising slogans either, though I could certainly live with them. But it has occurred to me that perhaps I don't have to. If I can find a way to creatively decorate the sweatshirt I could cover up the offending picture and slogans. I'm working on a few ideas, most of which involve finding pretty remnants for much less money than I would spend buying another sweatshirt. I guess the question is whether to go for fabrics that won't fray and cut them out in cool patterns, or cut out squares of woven fabrics and fringe them and tack them on every which way for the patchwork look.

Life in general:

Went to Alan's birthday party last night. That was fun. There I finally tried Kopparberg which is one of several things advertised on the sweatshirt mentioned above, and it is actually quite tasty pear cider. Yum. Er, for those who don't know, Alan is one of my gaming society friends here, comes from France, and is playing Griffendore to my Slitherin in Molly's Harry Potter role playing game. Speaking of which, I made the Slitherin Quidditch team (as a first year no less) in the most Slitherin way possible: an exchange of political favors. That was quite fun. I am trying to play a non-evil Slitherin, but that doesn't mean she isn't above bending the rules now and again. I seem to be doing lots of kid-related role playing right now. The one-off I played in last week was suedo-Power Rangers and we were all teenagers. Now in Harry Potter I'm playing an eleven-year-old. I may need to intentionally seek out a game tonight in which I can play a full grown adult who knows what she is doing. If anyone is running such a game at the moment that is. People continue to ask when I'm going to run Serenity. I'm not ready yet, though, and I'm rather enjoying just being a player. Campaigns start for the term next Tuesday so I need to make some decisions this week about whether I'm going to try to run Serenity at Tuesday GUGS or whether I want to play in one of the other campaigns. Michael has offered to run a four-week campaign that could then give way to mine to give me more time (and a game to play in in the mean time). I'll have to give him an answer soon. It is very fun to be back in the midst of all this role-playing again.

It all plays off the fiction-writing impulses too. At the moment I am in the process of accessing what work would have to go into any given story to make it a novel. I plan to pick one or two (with two you can switch to the other whenever you get stuck on one) to work hard on. It looks like I have serious world-building to do on just about any of them before I can return to actual writing. I know some authors manage to write there stories without actually planning out their worlds. Ursula K. Le Guin talks about it as if she were exploring the worlds just far enough to write the story at hand. But while I certainly start writing novels that way, I seem to always hit hangups along the way, things that just don't quite make sense and I feel I have to resolve them now before they present bigger continuity issues later.