chesneycat

Sun, 18 May 2008 13:52:07 GMT

Weyr Life Drabbles: Prompt #95 - "New Year"

Benden’s annual Turnover festivities were in full swing, but for some reason F’lessan simply wasn’t enjoying himself. Well… if he thought about it, there were several reasons— all of them female. The ones he wanted to dance with were treating him like a tunnelsnake, while the ones he didn’t kept appearing at the most inopportune moments. Remembering an old argument, he reached out to his dragon.

Golanth, tell me Mirrim wasn’t right? Please?

About your reputation?

What else?

Dryly, Golanth reminded him that Turnover was the traditional time for turning over new leaves, and that perhaps he should consider it...

The water in Majorca don't taste like what it oughta

Sat, 17 May 2008 16:47:41 GMT

Ha!

The milk IS different here. And here I've been, blaming my pregnant tastebuds. The standard semi-skimmed 1.5% fat in the supermarkets isn't UHT, but it is homogenised. Gives it that delightful taste of being just on the verge of going sour, that my Mum can never pick up due to her childhood in sweaty foreign climes... a flavour I got rather too familiar with and hence hated all through my childhood because you didn't throw out milk until SHE could taste it was off.

But there's a good side - a creamy, Jersey-cow gold-top to the whole disgusting mess - you can buy non-homogenised milk (not of the semi-skimmed variety, mind) at Rewe and at most organic supermarkets (Al-natura, I'm looking at you!). Rewe's one tram stop further from home, and not as convenient as Edeka, Lidl or Aldi, but fuck it. If I can actually get hold of some milk that tastes like milk SHOULD taste*, I'd go a lot further than that!

*Apparently, most US shop-bought milk is almost as bad as the European varieties, so some of you wouldn't even notice. English milk OTOH is far and away the best. And maybe this explains why my sister stopped eating cereal when we lived in Italy...

Glaring at the world.

Sat, 17 May 2008 08:35:29 GMT

Okay, so part of it's my own fault. I shouldn't have stayed up so late reading erotica. Maybe the extra hour or so asleep would have been enough to stop me feeling like someone's used my eyes as tennis balls all night long, but seeing as I began the evening with every intention of being asleep by ten, perhaps not.

Oh, you want context? I'm knackered, worn out, needed a lot of sleep last night. Did I get it? Nope.

The first person going up against my hypothetical wall is the fuckwit on a bicycle who went up and down the street ringing doorbells at 3.25 in the bloody morning. I have no words. No. Words.

Then there's the builders, and the binmen. It's SATURDAY, for crying out loud! The binmen I can forgive - we had a bank holiday last Friday, so our bins have been out of sync. But other countries have bank holidays too, and they manage to keep Saturday mornings nice and quiet! So while the binmen escape my red-eyed wrath, whoever it is in the local council who organises their schedules does not. Especially as there were three different bins to be emptied by three different lorries, all of which arrived just after I'd dropped back to sleep after the previous disturbance. But the builders have no excuse. You've been given a bank holiday and you choose to make it up at the weekend? Starting at half seven in the morning? Are you insane?

Next up is the car door slammer. I don't care who you are, if your car door doesn't stay closed when you've slammed it half a dozen times, get the damned thing FIXED, don't just give it another couple of dozen tries. Hey, maybe that's why it broke in the first place? Next time you spend ten whole minutes slamming it, expect me to appear outside to give your head the same treatment.

Finally, the two angry men who chose my window to have a blazing row outside. Take it somewhere else and leave me in peace, please!

Anyway, I gave up in the end. So much for sleep, so much for a lie-in.

And I still say there's something up with German milk. It just tastes wrong.

Pickled Cucumber salad

Tue, 13 May 2008 17:31:06 GMT

This is one of my favourite summertime treats - a vaguely Danish recipe.

1 large cucumber, lightly peeled and finely sliced.

Layer slices into a collander, sprinkling salt onto each layer. Stick a plate on top and weigh it down with something heavy. This process works some of the water out of the cucumber, and has a fancy culinary name that I don't recall.

Rinse, squeeze, and dump into a bowl.

To the bowl, add equal portions of water and white vinegar (cider vinegar if you can get it), enough to cover the veg. Add plenty of pepper, and sugar to taste. Stir well. Stick it in the fridge to chill, and enjoy at your leisure.

Yum!

[And you can re-use the liquid for a second cucumber if you get through the first too fast - I'll be doing that later.]

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:46:15 GMT

Weyr Life Drabbles: Prompt word #90: "It"

It gets to everyone, eventually: fearful, brave, bronze, green - provided they live long enough to realise it. The lucky ones do so in weyrlinghood, while they're still young and only responsible for themselves. A good weyrlingmaster can rebuild the shattered nerves of the young.

Thread. It gets to most riders then, but not all.

It can wait. Thread doesn't care. It's indiscriminate. Unstoppable. For every spore you flame, millions remain. Just one of them's enough to kill you, maim you, steal your weyrmate, friends, family.

You can't defeat it.

Thread will fall, hungering mindlessly, for the rest of your life.

Odd dreams.

Sun, 11 May 2008 21:22:47 GMT

I have odd dreams. Seriously odd dreams.

Last night... well, I know where it came from - reading about aranel13's potential new kitten shortly before bed and a discussion with tekaranlady a few days ago somehow combined in my subconscious to produce the following.

I dreamed that I was breast-feeding a cat.

Help?

The Bluebell Post.

Sat, 10 May 2008 08:21:25 GMT

What do you do on a (more-or-less) sunny bank holiday monday? The same thing as everyone else in Redditch, judging by the overflow carpark at Coughton Court. I've been there once before, back when the National Trust first started gtting a slice of the pie... back in the days when it was the sole concern of the Throckmortons, we avoided it - my mother in law used to work as PA for the lady in question, and managed to set a long-service record that was unheard of in recent history: all of four months. Anyway, it's now fully NT run, and free to visit for us lucky members.

I'm going to miss the NT out here. And English Heritage. Germany doesn't really have anything that fills the same role, and it shows.

So. Bluebells. We had to trek through some gloriously squelchy mud to reach them, but it was worth it. [Did you know that only the most ancient woodlands have well established patches of extensive bluebells, because they're that slow to spread?] Anyway, I think I'll let them speak for themselves.

Springtime in England

Fri, 09 May 2008 16:09:52 GMT

I've finally got round to uploading some of my photos from my recent trip back home to England.

First, my cousin Andrew's wedding. I know family weddings aren't all that interesting to outsiders, but I managed to get a wonderfully, embarrassingly bad picture of the bride and groom:

And here's how they're meant to be looking!

This is also the law of conservation of [my name] in action. One of my cousins (Andrew's sister in fact) is another Kath. She just married out of the surname last year, only to have Kate marry into it! I suppose I shouldn't find it too surprising really - we're all more or less the same age, and Katherine was the most popular girls name the year I was born, and certainly high up for a few years either side as well.

Next post - Coughton Court Bluebells.

Things I never expected... part 2

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:18:30 GMT

I was a little premature with my last post.

The next [and hopefully final] addition goes thusly:

I never expected to find myself vomiting blood.

*sigh*

I've just got back from hospital, having had the full german ambulance treatment on wednesday night. A day and a half of blood tests, monitoring and an endoscopy later, I apparently don't have any bleeding in my throat or any bleeding ulcers, but I do have a minor hernia, and can add antacids to my daily menu for the foreseeable future.

Huh. This also explains all the belching.

Things I never expected from the first trimester...

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:52:10 GMT

Still being sick at 13 weeks plus. It's such a contrast to Roo - god, if I don't get sick for as long as this in any subsequent pregnancy, it's really going to prey on my mind. I expect I'll have to tattoo 'every pregnancy is different' onto my forehead or something. So yeah, I'm still vomiting. I even lost my dinner last night, and have had a few iffy spells today, but that's probably because I ditched the vomex pills in favour of the acupressure bands. Anyway, I've made my mind up now. I'm not throwing up any more, not unless I really don't have any say in the matter! On the plus side, at least post-meal sickness doesn't have the same acid-scald as first thing in the morning bile...

Round Ligament Pain. So THAT's what I've been feeling every now and then, right from day one. Huh.

Itchy, itchy nipples.

Gas. I'm really feeling for what Jez's Nanny Nora went through during her last year, because I'm doing exactly the same thing - belching for Britain. I can't figure out where it's all coming from. Am I swallowing air in my sleep? Osmosis? Or do we produce this much of it naturally? I guess I'm erring towards the latter, on the basis of one other thing - I've stopped farting. People normally fart pretty frequently (and pretty innocuously if you're lucky), and I was no exception, until now. Kath is now a fart-free zone.

Hungry days. Most of the time, I eat pretty normally, and much slower than I used to - my digestion has definitely changed pace. But every now and then, I get a hungry day, when I simply cannot stop eating.

Then there are the things you read about, but don't give all that much credence to. My skin is wonderfully soft and glowy - it gave me away at my cousin's wedding this weekend. Dad had mentioned my pregnancy to his brothers after the ceremony, but hadn't got round to all the nephews and nieces yet, when one of them mentioned to our mutual uncle how, well, glowy I was looking. "There's a good reason for that!"

Ah well. It's all going well, as far as I can tell. I've got a couple more appointments tomorrow, one with the haematology professor, and the other for a nuchal translucency scan. Fingers crossed...

Fri, 02 May 2008 06:48:00 GMT

"Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish."

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Iliad
The Time Traveler's Wife
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

48. Not bad. There's a dozen more on Mum's bookshelf at home (which she has read, but I haven't got round to yet) so it ought to go up a bit more next time I visit.

Futuristic!

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:35:13 GMT

Man regrows severed fingertip. <--BBC news article is thataway down the link.

Read it, watch the videos, or just look out for the story in your preferred news media outlet. This is truly a phenomenal piece of medical technology, straight out of SF.

Wow.

[OTOH, it's probably all just bollocks...]

This time last year...

Thu, 01 May 2008 09:49:55 GMT

... I was lying in a bed in the Hallamshire, just down the road from here.

Today, I'm a little over twelve weeks with number four, and I've got a hell of a lot to be thankful for aside from the obvious. Looking back, a few things stand out. How amazing everyone around me was, how compassionate and supportive. My friends around the world who kept me in their thoughts, my family, and those I know who've been through the same thing and reached out to me, some of whom were in the middle of their own dark hours at the time.

This is Roo's legacy. A helluva lot of love. We were deepened by what we went through, Jez and I, and given such a great gift alongside the pain. Everything wonderful in the world was thrown into bright relief, our selves included. It broke our lives apart, a crucible or a chrysalis, and it fucking hurt. That's change, I guess. Change and growth, and the fact that nothing truly worthwhile ever comes easy. Growing and healing took time, and it was undeniably hard, and I won't pretend we're anywhere near finished with it. I don't think I want to. Coming of age, growing up... you set yourself all these landmarks as a child and as an adult, and they really mean nothing. What use are they, except as walls to hem yourself in? Life is a continuum, in every way. We're analogue, unquantised, the butterflies of chaos.

So. I'm not just thankful for current little one, though that does take an immeasurably large part of it. Nor my own strengths, the parts that were lent or given and the parts I always had unfound within me, though they were certainly invaluable when we faced the same pain again and again, and through all the crises we've been through in the last three months. I certainly don't pretend that it's all going to be plain sailing from here onwards either; it'd be nice if these experiences gave you a kind of get out of jail free card for life, but it doesn't work that way. And it doesn't matter, because we've been gifted, all of us, with the scope to keep going and to keep living, to see those crumbs of hope, the lights in the darkness, the people we love or who love us that keep us living. I think Yoda said it best.

Luminous beings are we.

Hell, YEAH!

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:34:26 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7373940.stm

The UK has been left looking like an "unreliable" and "incompetent" partner for international science, according to a committee of MPs.

...

The study pins much of the blame on the head of the main funding body, and says "urgent changes must be made".

...

"We are at a loss to understand how Professor Mason could think that secretive reviews would have anything other than a divisive effect on the community and undermine confidence in any of his future decisions."

They also condemned "lamentable" communications, which had ultimately cost the STFC the "trust of the community".

"We conclude that STFC's communications are inadequate, particularly its internal communications," the report said.

"This raises serious questions about the role and performance of the chief executive, especially his ability to retain the confidence of the scientific community as well as to carry through the necessary changes."

Some suggest this is a thinly-veiled call for Professor Mason's resignation."

Abso-bloody-Word.

SQUEEEEEEEE!!!!

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:12:45 GMT

Del Toro's going to direct The Hobbit. I'm not too sure about the whole concept of the purported 'sequel', and I imagine that some of the hardcore fans will be spitting furiously... but perhaps if they concentrate on The White Council vs. The Necromancer it might not be totally irredeemable.

Ah well.

Del Toro!

Yay!

[Of course, this means I have to add tOR.n back to my daily reading list as well.]

Chesney, again.

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:06:21 GMT

Jeremy from the cattery is making his way over to the vets right now, to be with Chesney at the end. He loves Chesney to bits, nearly as much as we do. The vet really doesn't see any hope for him at all, and it'd be very, very cruel to force him to hang on at this stage.

So this is goodbye.

Shit.

Chesney

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:41:54 GMT

Chesney's at the vets.

It's not looking good.

Mugabe's on the way out!?

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:13:18 GMT

Wahey! About bloody time, too.

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:05:04 GMT

I've just had a rather interesting review for this drabble over on the Pit of Voles.

The review goes thusly:
Most of these stories are very believable. This one, chap 79, is not. Hatchlings don't attack those they don't choose unless that person stands in their way while searching for or making their way to their rider. The little queen would lock eyes with the candidate and then, upon not finding what she was looking for, ignore the girl and continue to search for her lifemate. She wouldn't take time to attack the girl. These babies hatch *hungry* and want to find their food provider as quick as possible.

Oh. Dear.

That particular drabble? Describes the hatching of probably the most famous queen dragon on Pern.

*attempts to smother giggles*

*fails*

Tell it to Anne, dearie. But you'd better hurry, because the failboat leaves in the next five minutes....

I can haz apartment photos?

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:06:22 GMT

It's photo-dump time!

This is Kirchheim. We'll be living about 5mins walk from the town centre, which looks like this. It's rather pleasant, really.

Our landlord was waiting for me outside the house, so I didn't get a chance to take any external shots, but nevermind.

This is the lounge. Yes, those are ceiling tiles, yes the lights are a little dated, but I think we can live with that. As for the building site over the road that you can see through the window, it's almost finished with. Not a problem.

The bathroom - no smaller than the one we have in Sheffield.

Main bedroom, south facing window, more dodgy lampshades. But at least it's big!

The hallway, looking westwards towards our front door. It has built in shoe/coat cupboards...

The smaller bedroom, still south facing

The dining room, looking towards the smaller bedroom. Doors to the hall and kitchen are to the right. We'd possibly need some storage units in here for things like the dinner service, maybe...

The 'Wintergarten', or sun-room as we Brits would probably call it. N&W windows over the garden, curved wooden seating, looking in the opposite direction to the photo above. What a lovely reading room, eh?

The kitchen. Small, but it's got all you really need. The yellow door is into a pantry.

The garden! With umpteen different fruit trees, tame brambles, raspberries, rhubarb, beetroot and all sorts of other goodies. Lower maintenance than our current garden...

Not bad!

Lost in translation #1

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:08:37 GMT

As seen on the door to our canteen, explaining the recent price rises for some food items:

After 4 years of consistency, we apologise for your understanding.

I know, I know, if the boot were on the other foot I'd do a hell of a lot worse. But that doesn't stop these things being funny (or if not funny, mildly amusing at the least) does it? [And at least a brief giggle keeps my mind off tomorrow.]

Anyway, if you want to come up with a more literal explanation for that sentence, be my guest. I'm just too tired to quite wrap my head around the un-meant meanings yet...

spam

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 08:19:18 GMT

No, not AMCF spam. REAL spam!

Dear email recipient,

Our random generator has JUST selected your email address [address removed] from 500.000 newsletter recipients as a possible winner
of an Audi A3!!!

500-point-zero zero zero? I've heard of someone only being half a man, but that level of precision is sheer lunacy! And why, why, why would I ever want to be an Audi Driver? Or be so excited about it I'd stick that many exclamation marks in there???

SELECTED EMAIL RECIPIENTS ALSO RECEIVE:
1. further additional prizes (Camcorder, Sony PSP, .)

...membership in SpamBot Central's list of the gullible, a cuddly toy, a cheque book and pen

2. even a chance of winning 2 Audis

Because when you've won an Audi, all you want is to win another couple more...

Nope. I think not.

Guess what?

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:45:29 GMT

I HAVE THE APARTMENT I WANT!!

Yay!

It's in the suburb of Kirchheim, well connected to public transport, good shops nearby (including a bakery/cafe next door. Mmmmm!), a decent size with a large garden and a small sunroom. Oh, and the garden has fruit trees, and rhubarb, and beetroot and all sorts of other goodies.

And I don't have to pay a deposit of 2 months rent, or a fee of 2.38 months rent...

SO much yay!

Of course, I'm going to spend the first week eating re-heated bolognese and sleeping on an air mattress, but that's not too bad.

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:54:17 GMT

Just spotted this on Scalzi's Whatever...

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:53:33 GMT

77
Time was the biggest factor here, and the amount wasted on figuring out how to enter the UK, the US and the Netherlands. It also wouldn't accept the people's democratic republic of congo - I'm sure thats the new name for Zaire.