| (no subject) |
[Aug. 27th, 2009|08:08 pm] |
"But every time I get up there, my adrenaline gets pumping, like I'm backed into the corner and I'm ready to get into a fist-fight. The bottom line is, I can talk my way out of a situation, or I can eat them, and if it comes down, and if it comes down to having to eat somebody, I'll eat somebody."
"You see," he told the archbishop, "I have a spear in my hand and I'm chasing an animal called peace. I want to spear peace so people can eat it. But as I chase peace, there is a lion called the ICC chasing me. So I'm caught between these two. Should I fight the lion, or go on chasing the peace animal?"
Sometimes the world just hands me these things, and all I can do is say... Thanks for all the inspiration! And, between bouts of people feeding my ears with filthy, filthy dubstep, that's where my head's been this week. As some of you can likely imagine, it's been a very happy week indeed.
(Both real quotes, from Project Runway and an article on the LRA. You can figure out which one's which, right? *g* Truth puts my fiction to shame. |
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| Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc. |
[Aug. 19th, 2009|07:44 am] |
Nothing feels quite so pretentious as attaching latin mottos to a livejournal entry. But damn it, I've been meaning for weeks now to thrust myself headlong back into horror, and I think about half of you know how terribly inspiring I'd find this one. *g*
We have ants. I remind myself that we have ants because this is Hot Springs and ants are endemic to the area. We've never had a home without ants and we've never known anyone living here who could say differently themselves; there are coyotes and deer and forest and this is just fifteen minutes from the city center. As much as I miss skyscrapers and crowds and city, this has its appeals.
But we have ants. Also, children. So you already know where this is going.
Zander likes monstering (we don't call him Totzilla for nothing). And the other day he monstered his way right onto an ant mound in the backyard, determined to give them a bit of what-for and send them all packing. This was how we discovered precisely how quickly I can strip off his shoes and socks and every piece of clothing a three-year-old is wearing, shoes flung outside, boy swept inside, and in a few days we'll cheer when pest-control annihilates that little colony. But there are other things too, and this morning we sat on the front step for a quarter hour admiring huge dragonflies in the early morning light. We both agreed it was a decent trade-off.
So this morning we'll be writing ants and ghosts.
And cannibalism, yes.
And this morning, you should go here, where amazing people are committing wicked and wonderful acts of art. Just go. Trust me. *beams* |
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| In super-brief: |
[Dec. 31st, 2008|03:51 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
Still alive.
No, really!
In the wake of a few very, very bad months; I hadn't realised quite how draining December had been until we reached Christmastime, arrived at the point at which the children would go to the grandparents for Christmas and we would not, and I exhaled for what seemed like the first time in weeks. Not because we'd be without the kids for a half-week, but because for several days, nothing at all would be happening.
I think I lost most of the first one to sleep.
This has been a challenging year. And I firmly believe that you go down, and you go all the way through, and you come out shining on the other side - so for this and many other reasons, I have no complaints whatsoever. The year's been challenging, but full of blessings, and 'come out shining' is the thing I would wish for all of you for next year - unnecessarily, I think! *g*
And I should be writing a lot more here (like the awesomeness of Snowzilla, for instance) - but that'll have to wait for a bit. Instead - did I ever mention that by unhappy coincidence, ArianeEmory became the name that I sell sparkly crap under? So I'll leave you with this beautiful, horrible little moment of zen:
Yeah, that'd be my sales page. And my abject guilt.
Oh, what have I done.... |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 10th, 2008|02:30 pm] |
Current theory: every time I cough, I loosen braincells and they come out with everything else. This explains my current level of stellar fucking idiocy, and justifies me slogging around the house wearing PJs and kleenex boxes for the better part of a week. Stupid cough. Stupid head. Took it all out in croaky snark on unfortunate telemarketers until my voice died completely. Drowned my sorrows in Australia's Next Top Model binges. Getting a flu shot once I get over the flu, haha.
That said, Zander's dodged it because of his steroids, presumably, and Vallory was eight times sicker than I've been. For two days she was on-and-off running an absolutely terrifying fever, and the good doctor's given her the strongest dose of antibiotics he can prescribe to a kid her size.
There are two notes of good news. One, she's doing a fair bit better now.
And two: Bester's "The Deceivers" is one of the most astonishingly beautiful pieces of writing I've ever come across. Or possibly I was feeling so sorry for myself this morning that it seemed better than it was, but fifty pages in... I know that there are fifty pages worth of text that I could happily paint all over my walls, just so that every time I turned around I'd catch sight of a bit of it. WOW.
Back to being a croaky coughy snarky hermit now.
With one more bit of happy. Overheard the day after the election, when our cable went down Yet Again:
"Goddammit, I thought he promised us Change!" |
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) the_new_build's explanation for Why Lex Isn't Allowed To Vote Today. |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|05:58 pm] |
"HEY LADY PLS VOTE FOR OBAMA/BIDEN"
"oi roit mate kangaroo wot wot"
"oh shit she ain't american leave her be, leave her be"
teh end. |
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| The votes are in! |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|03:58 pm] |
In our local k-12 school, that is. Latest numbers show Obama enjoying a substantial lead; his votes include our daughter's, who was very enthusiastic about the man.
We asked her why: "Because I like him!"
Okay. So we asked her what was good about him: "Because he's got a nice face and really good hair."
This made it a little easier to explain to her, later, why children aren't allowed to really vote. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 27th, 2008|04:53 pm] |
First parent-teacher interview today, which we'd been looking forward to for ages; Vallory's teacher wasn't present for meet-the-teacher day at the beginning of the year, and we'd wanted to meet her.
We'd also wanted to ask her how Vallory's reading was doing: she's a voracious reader, and we knew that her teacher had let her loose on the 'older kids' section of the school library, which had delighted us - and her, lord knows. So we asked, and what she said was that as usual, the first-graders were tested at the beginning of the year; math, problem-solving, literacy. She had a bit of a problem testing Vallory's reading, however. They got through the kinder stuff, and the first-grade stuff, but by the time they'd finished the fourth-grade pieces they'd run out of time, and Vallory was showing no signs of slowing down.
So they had to stop there.
"Oh," we said, and she nodded. "Well, that explains - " And she grinned.
So today I'm ordering the Chronicles of Prydain series for her, and we'll see how she does with that.
.. her teacher also suggested that maybe we'd like her to audition for Jeopardy? And we all three of us about died laughing, and we've decided that we like this teacher very much. |
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| Big long musical ramble. Flee! Flee! |
[Oct. 22nd, 2008|09:30 am] |
Following yesterday's ridiculous lazing about post-winter-shopping, this morning has been refreshingly productive. Work has gotten done, writing is percolating, products are flowing and the lounge room is looking sparkly, baby. Mister Zander must still be slightly bribed in order to eat a healthy breakfast early in the day (a twelfth of a cookie next to the cereal-bowl does the trick), but he's been a contented little boy since, and it turns out that he loves listening to Varèse's crazy-cool percussion works.
This is kind of astounding: usually his tastes run more towards Debussy and Britney. Yes, Britney Spears. Yes, I am shuddering as I write that.
Anyway... this is mostly K's fault for mentioning tuba-students, see? Because comparitively, Varèse's Ionisation is probably the loudest piece I've ever been involved with. And I was so surprised to find more than one performance of it on youtube that Zander and I have been watching them all morning. The only reason I mention this here (other than pimping the piece: seriously, it changed the face of music forever, it's absolutely amazing, it's got chicks hitting pipes with hammers) is that two of the videos really demonstrate how a conductor's sensitivities can completely transform the performance of a piece. So if you've got a quarter hour to spare:
This is Pierre Boulez conducting, and the man is inarguably brilliant; it's a very well-regarded performance, and I enjoyed it immensely. It's also almost stunningly restrained: this is Ionisation as creation, rather than conflagration, subtle almost to the point of aural minimalism.
This is...
Well, I don't even know who's conducting, let alone who's performing. And I'll add immediately that it's a flawed performance: there are mistakes of timing all over the place, and one choice of instrument was bizarre and enormously inappropriate. But there is an incredible energy to this: they've injected the piece with nitro, they've flung it out the door and set it on fire to see it run, and oh, it does that. It's a stompy, end-of-the-world Ionisation, and despite its flaws, it's my preferred performance.
If nothing else, fast-forward that second one to 3.17 or so: at around 3.24 you'll see a beautiful close-up of the kind of hasty scramble that is pretty typical of a performance like this, and in fact pretty much characterised by entire third year of college. I'll put it this way: we performed on a polished stage, and I always wore socks so that I could slide the length of it very quickly. *g* |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 15th, 2008|11:21 pm] |
Have had my very first hurricane! ... okay, perhaps it was just a tropical storm. All those times I've mentioned how the cable endures bad weather well, only to crumple at the first hint of light drizzle, were finally proven out: it lasted solidly through the entire storm, so that we were actually watching the huge curves on radar as they slowly scourged their way across Hot Springs.
Power went out for a few minutes. Then out for a few seconds. Then a few minutes again, over and over and over, until finally giving out a little after everything had quieted down. A few days later we found out why: a felled power pole a few blocks away. Every time the wind hit it, the poor splintered thing would sink a little further, power flickering..
The good: Ike was spawning tornadoes, and none of them hit within 15 miles of us.
The bad: they sure did a number on at least one of the local power sub-stations, and the winds took care of the rest.
The ugly: people selling generators on the side of the street. $700+, for a model of indeterminate age, out of the back of a stranger's truck. On general principles, I'd have rather sat in the dark.
The really ugly: it could've been a long dark; as of yesterday evening, the best estimate was 2-6 days. Both freezers emptied of their thawed contents, we hauled ourselves to Kev's folks' place, which by some miracle had electricity. Another miracle: this evening our neighbours phoned to let us know that we did, too.
Epilogue: driving back home after a two-day power outage, flanked by the sweet music of a neighbourhood filled with $700 generators. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 13th, 2008|10:29 am] |
Super-quick update:
We're all over the stupid flu. Win!
Hurricane's settled down to a Cat 1, and will hopefully hit us only as a tropical storm. Win!
Same can't be said for Galveston; a friend of mine is waiting to hear from his grandfather, who he couldn't drag away from the family home, and our prayers are with everyone ... well, everyone pretty much south of us. Some 40,000 people on Galveston alone chose not to evacuate. That's a little more than the population of our city. So .. yeah. Prayers and a lot of hope.
We're settled in with candles and canned stuff here, just in case. The last hurricane-remnants a week or so ago blew out power around most of the town and lightly flooded a fair portion of it. We expect it to be a little worse this time: we're already feeling some wind here, and the sky's all bands of grey. Fortunately, we live on a hill with a storm drain on the bottom. *g* |
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| A truly beautiful moment in the separation of church and state. |
[Aug. 12th, 2008|11:32 pm] |
Okay. I'll type this up properly tomorrow, but it's too vividly wonderful not to share. At least the synopsis, okay? So:
A few months ago, Texas passed a rule dictating (amongst other things) that Texas schools could not forbid their students from speaking about their religion in a public forum. They then defined such things as school assemblies and sports games as public forums.
Can you guess what happened?
But wait, there's more: while students were attending these assemblies, games etc, they were not allowed to leave while a fellow student picked up a microphone and spoke.
Can you guess now?
So it goes something like this: Christian stands up, says all gays and Muslims are going to hell. Muslim stands up, says more or less the reverse. Wiccan stands up, thanks the Goddess for her blessings. Satanist gets up -
Right.
All religions. Every religion. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was reportedly well-represented. All of a sudden, football games were running overtime. Way overtime. And meanwhile, every single student was seething over something they'd heard, atheists were seething over everything that they'd heard, and no-one could escape any of it.
So some individual schools passed a new rule:
No student is permitted to speak publically at any public function.
Ever.
At all.
Get the fuck off the stage, kid.
And that was the end of that.
And that is also the kind of craziness which happens when politics and religion meet, thank you state of Texas for the exquisite example. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 10th, 2008|10:37 am] |
I promised Vallory that we'd watch the gymnastics together, but yesterday it was fencing instead. Three hours of fencing, on the NBC site, and intermittently we ended up watching the whole thing.
Talking about technique and scoring, talking about the way their suits are constructed, talking about the names and the different countries, and shouting along with the crowd while Tan Xue was competing. Talking about hundreds of people shouting her name every time she scored a touch.
We paused it now and then to look up the different countries on wikipedia, which she adores. Looking at flags and maps, talking about the differences between North and South Korea; being really impressed by KIM Keumhwa's stunningly aggressive style and the way that some of the competitors just folded in front of it, absolutely intimidated.
There's gymnastics today, but Vallory wants more fencing, please. And fencing classes. And a sabre of her own.
I know a lot of people talked about 'boycotting' the Olympics. But for her, the politics didn't matter even slightly, the competition did; seeing people use swords for real just floored her. And that was the most fun we've had together in ages.
... she really, really wanted Tan Xue to win, though. *g* |
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| Perverse |
[Aug. 3rd, 2008|08:32 am] |
Yesterday afternoon, temperatures topped 106', and our air-conditioning broke.
Our house is mostly glass, which means that our house became mostly a greenhouse.
Late into the night, things hadn't really cooled down at all; children were in their lightest pyjamas for bed, fed up on popsicles and ice-water, and with only the sheets pulled over them. But as everyone sweated and mumbled, I lay in bed in perfect comfort, despite a pang of sudden homesickness, and that night I enjoyed the best sleep I'd had in months. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 21st, 2008|08:59 am] |
Things are beginning to clear up here. Visitors are sent home (I now know more about The Young and the Restless than anyone rightly should); my girl's had a chance to spend whole mornings and evenings with her great-grandmother, which makes me happy beyond belief. They shared her room, see? And since great-grammy can't fall asleep at night without the TV on, and since her channel-of-choice is Nick Jr (pre-teen shows) ... well. You can imagine how that went, right?
Right. Not much sleep for miss Vallory, who stayed up into the wee hours watching TV with great-grammy and talking talking giggling talking with her 'til almost midnight. Again and again. They were both overjoyed about this.
( Icky sick-baby stuff )
We're finally catching up on sleep, which means that a significantly-more-coherent me is catching up on all of you. There's some website stuff to be finished, a crapload of pixel-pimping stuff to catch up on, something that looks like a genuine work-from-home opportunity that I'm flinging myself at, and .. at some point .. actual writing to be resumed.
Well. We'll see. *G* |
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| Super-fast summary: |
[Jul. 4th, 2008|11:02 pm] |
We've had a guest over for a few days and she'll be here a while longer yet. Consequently I have No Time At All, and a head full of soap opera trivia. Eldest nephew has busted his knee so badly that three days later he still can't quite walk on it; why they don't take him to the hospital for MRI or something I don't know. We hope the shakes he got today were the result of the aleve he took for the pain, his grandmother is wondering if actually an infection has set in.
Incidentally, he's eleven. This is what happens when your eleven-year old competes in wrestling, football, baseball, basketball. This kind of stupid damn injury.
Busy busy, and with a headful of thoughts: mostly striking, sometimes even interesting. Owe you mail so bad, Jer, and any day now I'll get fifteen minutes together at once, or else write episodic, a sentence sent to your inbox per day.
James, thank God for you, man. Seriously. WTFCAR.
Happy birthday, Nico-girl. Always and always. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|06:59 pm] |
In the car, now. We've got the laptop with us, and the moment we hit a good wi-fi spot I'll hit Send, and that'll be that. All she wrote. Fat lady singing. That.
littlegoth's gone. Saw that just before we headed out; the_seraph to follow shortly, I guess. I'd drink a beer to you guys and your last stand at the end of the world, but .. Well, I guess you can understand why we aren't pulling over 'til we hit coastline.
It's funny. We always kept emergency cash stashed in the house, in case of ... well, emergency. Y'know, nuclear attack, terrorist attack, some kind of .. attack. Bribe money, gun money, get-out-of-jail money. We figured there'd be something eventually, but never something like this. I'm well aware that we've had it easy over here, though. The reason Hot Springs is a good place to be at a time like this is that it's a few thousand people in a pretty big area. The roads are good and wide. The neighbours aren't too near. All those men with guns? They managed to hold it off a good long time. They still are, really.
That's why we're running like hell. Now.
They can't hold it forever, after all. We've got a morgue in town here, just like everyone else. We've also got the lake a few miles away, the lake where bootleggers used to run booze, back in The Day, and cops used to gun 'em down in the act.
Yeah, you see our problem. Part of it.
The rest of the problem is the solution. It's a lot of guys out there. They're not letting anything in. They're not letting anything out, either. We've been watching them get slowly jumpier. We've been watching them getting righteously fucking tense -- and who wouldn't?
It's just a matter of time before it all falls apart.
So we're heading out. We figure the coastline's the best of a lot of bad choices. We chuckle about sailing up to Iceland. We chuckle about living at all. We tell the kids that Everything's Okay, and thank god that they weren't in school like the ones chaoticasylum's found. We're all together. One way or another, we'll stay that way.
I'd like to close by making some joke about how they always said the South would rise again... |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|04:49 pm] |
It's still quiet here. Now that an idea of what's going on is starting to come in, that kind of makes sense. Hot Springs is a big place, see? But there's only 40,000 people living here - at the height of tourist season, which it almost is.
I guess they picked a good place to visit, this year. I mean, if Good is even the right word to use anymore
Christ, I'm rambling.
Okay. I always joke about how the internet dies here during drizzles and stays up during thunderstorms, right? I shouldn't joke about that anymore: it's stayed solid through all of this, and that's more than we can say for the regular phone lines. I wanted to call mom in Tasmania to see if there's problems down there, or at least to let her know we're getting the hell out of here, but I pick up the phone and it's dead.
Pardon the pun.
We're thinking of calling the folks here, they're all in OK right now, but god only knows what it's like there; they're right near Oklahoma City, and from what the_seraph describes -
Well, we just hope they saw it fast and drived faster.
Drove. God, I can't think -
I'm going to post that now. There's something at the door, and if it's --
I'd like to get it written, that's all. In case.
Kev always said glass doors was a bad damn idea... |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|02:41 pm] |
You remember I said a few weeks ago that I had a story about men with guns on our lawns? I never did get around to telling it, and now it's a bit too late for that, I guess, because they're back again.
This time they're all the way down the cul de sac, all the way down to the road (we border the highway); we ventured on down early this morning, like a few of our other neighbours. Unlike last time, we couldn't get through to the sheriff's office. We'll give it another go in a little while, I guess; it can't stay that way forever.
It's kind of funny; chaoticasylum wrote about how her neighbourhood was unusually noisy today, but ours is just dead quiet. It trips all my everyone's-dead-and-we're-the-last-to-know paranoias, but it only takes a glance out the front door to put that to rest.
It's a lot of guys out there. |
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| This was really eye-opening. Mostly. |
[May. 26th, 2008|01:45 pm] |
From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.
Bold the true statements.
1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children's books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18. ((By scholarship tho. I worked hard to have my bassoon lessons))
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them. (My Gee did for my 19th birthday)
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.
24. Your parents owned their own house or apartment before you left home..
25. You had your own room as a child.
26. You had a phone in your room before you were 18
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school (My senior year)
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.
( Some explanation. ) |
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