Life, stuff, playing catch-up
29 August 2008 01:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3rdragonThere were many things that I intended to write about on here, and I don't want to write about all of them because it would take all afternoon, so I'm going to just mix and match and give you anecdotes as takes my fancy.
My grandparents are here. It's nice to see them, and I appreciate that they came to see me, rather than asking me to try to make a time in these two weeks I'm home to get out and see them (which is what my other grandparents did . . . although while I was at their house, my grandmother mentioned that they had decided that if I couldn't get out to the country to see them, they would come to the city to see me - VERY unusual; my grandpa R hates Philadelphia and I can count on one hand the number of times they've visited us that I recall). Mom is at work so I'm sort-of playing hostess, only we decided that there wasn't anything we particularly wanted to do today and we're just hanging out here. Right now grandma is napping in the living room and grandpa has disappeared upstairs, and is quite probably also napping.
I have discovered that three or four teacups of caffeinated tea in the afternoon are enough to keep me up all night. Also, I have managed to shift my sleep schedule two hours later than it has been all summer, which is something I was really hoping not to do because I'll be timechanging the other way when I go to Spain. I'm trying to move it in the other direction again, but it's hard - especially since they were mosquito-dusting two nights this week so we had all the windows shut, and the room felt stuffy, even with the ceiling fan. I suspect that that was as much imagination as actual discomfort, though, since the room wasn't that warm. One thing that makes it more difficult is that mom is always gone for work by 7:15 in the morning, if not earlier, so even if I were to get up at seven I'd only barely see her, and there's less incentive to get up. I probably should have asked her to wake me at six if I wanted to reasonably anticipate the coming jet lag.
Yesterday mom rented a red Mazda Miata convertible from Philly Car Share (like Zipcar, only for Philadelphia) for three hours in the afternoon. We had lots of fun, although it was tiny, and we felt like our behinds must surely be dragging on the asphalt. The one difficulty is that it would have been nice to fit three people (mom, Isaac, and I) into the car, mom only checked the seating for two out of the three available convertibles, and the Miata was the one she didn't check - and the only one that only seated two. We also couldn't figure out how to open the trunk, so after a shopping expedition we stuck all of the parcels in my leg room, and I had one leg piled on boxes and the other leg folded up oddly. I did manage to find a fairly comfortable position, though. I had to drive our usual car downtown so that we would have transport after we returned to convertible to the "pod." (There are pods near our house, but none with convertibles, and we wanted to be downtown anyway.) As for that, suffice it to say that I'm not sure that I can ever be convinced again to follow my mother in a car. I'm sure that there are worse people to follow, but she was pretty bad. After three blocks, I did at least manage to convey that my job would be a lot easier if she could be troubled to use turn signals . . .
She was in a bit of a fey mood, which I'm sure didn't help. And I don't blame her for taking me on West River Drive, which is a road I'm not really familiar with and had never driven on; she lived near there when she first moved to Philly, but we tend to use the other side of the river more often these days. I did have a moment there, though, where I'd lost them because they'd made it through a light that I hadn't, where I was driving at 45mph along a road that I didn't know (and, more importantly, wasn't acquainted with where it wound up/how to get off of it), towards a part of the city that I'm only sort-of familiar with, to a pod that I only vaguely knew the location of. And that was a charming realization. And, y'know, a two-seater convertible is tiny; you can be three normal-sized cars behind it, and not only unsure that the car in that space is the one you want, but unsure that there's a car in that space at all. But it did work out, and I enjoyed it enough to put aside the nerve-wrecking-ness of the drive into the city.
We had dinner at an Indian restaurant downtown; I tried goat (it tastes a bit like lamb, but has less of the flavor that I think of as distinctively lamb and more of a general meat taste. And while I didn't think of it as tough, it didn't fall apart in one's mouth the way my brother's lamb dish did). And then we went to Spamalot. I don't have much to say on this subject, actually, but I had a good time (my mother had a good time, which was something I was a little dubious about, but my brother suggested it, and mom has been trying to get him to go on an outing with her, and if she took us neither of us would have to pay for our own tickets, and I did want to see it), and I thought that it should be mentioned.
Earlier this week I wandered back to my highschool. It was odd. In many ways, it looked exactly the same (despite the new science center that they're building where there used to be a parking lot), but it was empty, whereas my memories of it are filled with chattering people and backpacks spilling onto the floor even though the school says it's a fire hazard. Most of the teachers weren't there either, but I saw a few people I know (if perhaps not those I would have hoped to see): my field hockey coach who has now become Girls' Athletics Director (and who was able to fill me in on the doings of my former teammates, at least a bit), and the math teacher I never had, but who taught violaclaire geometry, and who violaclaire did not like, who took a shine to me for no reason that I could ever determine.
On the theme of visiting my past, when we visited my grandparents R we stopped by the Amish bakery, and in the course of doing so drove past the campground my grandparents owned when I was a child. The roads had been redone so thoroughly I almost didn't recognise the place. There was something else on the theme of revisting the past, but at this particular moment I can't think of it.
I've read a great many books. I really enjoyed Hilari Bell's The Farsala Trilogy and thought of posting about it, but really only one of you would care, so I think I'll just call the one, instead, and recommend to the rest of you that you read them at some point that you want to read some well-written fantasy with the securities of genre fiction written for young people. And I will comment, again, that honor is a theme Bell is fond of, and note that she seems to be very good at dealing with war and other conflicts between large groups of people.
A also read A Companion to Wolves. It was not what I was expecting it to be, considering that it was a recommendation from my children's librarian, but I enjoyed it. For a quick sense of it, think Dragonriders of Pern, only with wolves instead of dragons (and, having read this, I can see some logic in the ridiculous apostrophied names of the dragonriders - beyond the core group of characters, I tended to lose track of who the people and wolves were, and I couldn't always even tell from context if we were talking about a person or a wolf). Those of you who appreciate Teh Man-Gay may want to consider reading it. Not being an expert, I don't know if it's good Man-Gay, but there's certainly a lot of it - well, just think what Dragonriders would be if almost all of the characters were male.
That's enough to be getting on with, I think.
My grandparents are here. It's nice to see them, and I appreciate that they came to see me, rather than asking me to try to make a time in these two weeks I'm home to get out and see them (which is what my other grandparents did . . . although while I was at their house, my grandmother mentioned that they had decided that if I couldn't get out to the country to see them, they would come to the city to see me - VERY unusual; my grandpa R hates Philadelphia and I can count on one hand the number of times they've visited us that I recall). Mom is at work so I'm sort-of playing hostess, only we decided that there wasn't anything we particularly wanted to do today and we're just hanging out here. Right now grandma is napping in the living room and grandpa has disappeared upstairs, and is quite probably also napping.
I have discovered that three or four teacups of caffeinated tea in the afternoon are enough to keep me up all night. Also, I have managed to shift my sleep schedule two hours later than it has been all summer, which is something I was really hoping not to do because I'll be timechanging the other way when I go to Spain. I'm trying to move it in the other direction again, but it's hard - especially since they were mosquito-dusting two nights this week so we had all the windows shut, and the room felt stuffy, even with the ceiling fan. I suspect that that was as much imagination as actual discomfort, though, since the room wasn't that warm. One thing that makes it more difficult is that mom is always gone for work by 7:15 in the morning, if not earlier, so even if I were to get up at seven I'd only barely see her, and there's less incentive to get up. I probably should have asked her to wake me at six if I wanted to reasonably anticipate the coming jet lag.
Yesterday mom rented a red Mazda Miata convertible from Philly Car Share (like Zipcar, only for Philadelphia) for three hours in the afternoon. We had lots of fun, although it was tiny, and we felt like our behinds must surely be dragging on the asphalt. The one difficulty is that it would have been nice to fit three people (mom, Isaac, and I) into the car, mom only checked the seating for two out of the three available convertibles, and the Miata was the one she didn't check - and the only one that only seated two. We also couldn't figure out how to open the trunk, so after a shopping expedition we stuck all of the parcels in my leg room, and I had one leg piled on boxes and the other leg folded up oddly. I did manage to find a fairly comfortable position, though. I had to drive our usual car downtown so that we would have transport after we returned to convertible to the "pod." (There are pods near our house, but none with convertibles, and we wanted to be downtown anyway.) As for that, suffice it to say that I'm not sure that I can ever be convinced again to follow my mother in a car. I'm sure that there are worse people to follow, but she was pretty bad. After three blocks, I did at least manage to convey that my job would be a lot easier if she could be troubled to use turn signals . . .
She was in a bit of a fey mood, which I'm sure didn't help. And I don't blame her for taking me on West River Drive, which is a road I'm not really familiar with and had never driven on; she lived near there when she first moved to Philly, but we tend to use the other side of the river more often these days. I did have a moment there, though, where I'd lost them because they'd made it through a light that I hadn't, where I was driving at 45mph along a road that I didn't know (and, more importantly, wasn't acquainted with where it wound up/how to get off of it), towards a part of the city that I'm only sort-of familiar with, to a pod that I only vaguely knew the location of. And that was a charming realization. And, y'know, a two-seater convertible is tiny; you can be three normal-sized cars behind it, and not only unsure that the car in that space is the one you want, but unsure that there's a car in that space at all. But it did work out, and I enjoyed it enough to put aside the nerve-wrecking-ness of the drive into the city.
We had dinner at an Indian restaurant downtown; I tried goat (it tastes a bit like lamb, but has less of the flavor that I think of as distinctively lamb and more of a general meat taste. And while I didn't think of it as tough, it didn't fall apart in one's mouth the way my brother's lamb dish did). And then we went to Spamalot. I don't have much to say on this subject, actually, but I had a good time (my mother had a good time, which was something I was a little dubious about, but my brother suggested it, and mom has been trying to get him to go on an outing with her, and if she took us neither of us would have to pay for our own tickets, and I did want to see it), and I thought that it should be mentioned.
Earlier this week I wandered back to my highschool. It was odd. In many ways, it looked exactly the same (despite the new science center that they're building where there used to be a parking lot), but it was empty, whereas my memories of it are filled with chattering people and backpacks spilling onto the floor even though the school says it's a fire hazard. Most of the teachers weren't there either, but I saw a few people I know (if perhaps not those I would have hoped to see): my field hockey coach who has now become Girls' Athletics Director (and who was able to fill me in on the doings of my former teammates, at least a bit), and the math teacher I never had, but who taught violaclaire geometry, and who violaclaire did not like, who took a shine to me for no reason that I could ever determine.
On the theme of visiting my past, when we visited my grandparents R we stopped by the Amish bakery, and in the course of doing so drove past the campground my grandparents owned when I was a child. The roads had been redone so thoroughly I almost didn't recognise the place. There was something else on the theme of revisting the past, but at this particular moment I can't think of it.
I've read a great many books. I really enjoyed Hilari Bell's The Farsala Trilogy and thought of posting about it, but really only one of you would care, so I think I'll just call the one, instead, and recommend to the rest of you that you read them at some point that you want to read some well-written fantasy with the securities of genre fiction written for young people. And I will comment, again, that honor is a theme Bell is fond of, and note that she seems to be very good at dealing with war and other conflicts between large groups of people.
A also read A Companion to Wolves. It was not what I was expecting it to be, considering that it was a recommendation from my children's librarian, but I enjoyed it. For a quick sense of it, think Dragonriders of Pern, only with wolves instead of dragons (and, having read this, I can see some logic in the ridiculous apostrophied names of the dragonriders - beyond the core group of characters, I tended to lose track of who the people and wolves were, and I couldn't always even tell from context if we were talking about a person or a wolf). Those of you who appreciate Teh Man-Gay may want to consider reading it. Not being an expert, I don't know if it's good Man-Gay, but there's certainly a lot of it - well, just think what Dragonriders would be if almost all of the characters were male.
That's enough to be getting on with, I think.
