Lagging behind -- Sunday
Jan. 23rd, 2003 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanThis was certainly a fully spoiled-rotten weekend for me. While people with social consciences froze in DC and other cities to protest a war that I too abhor, I did birthday stuff.
Woke up with Eric on Sunday, discussed logistics, went home to shower and change and put the clean bedding on the guest-room bed for David's mother. I had worn out being nervous, but I still was. Neither of our mothers really approves of the polyamory.
Having made the bed and tossed the resident cats out (Mary let them back in again before we left, but at least it was she who decided on the level of cat hair she wanted for the next 12 hours), I discovered that Lydy and Mary had pretty much agreed that they would be happy enough squished into the back set of the Saturn with Eric, rather than letting David drive Mary's car and Eric or Lydy drive ours.
We went and collected Eric. "Look," Mary said to him, "I've saved you all this space." That made us all laugh. We talked about Gibbon and cats on the drive, as I recall, as well as various features of the drivers and the landscape.
My brother was packing when we got there, and I was so befogged in my glasses that my mother had to say, "I assume you're Eric" to my newly-presented sweetie, but it all went well enough. The house smelled wonderful from the birthday dinner in progress.
We watched birds and the sunset, and talked about various things, and snarfed nuts and goat cheese and crackers and grapes. Eventually when my mother got a break from making dinner I opened the presents, which were terrifying numerous. Prizes at the moment include a Portmeirion tureen (and Lydy just gave me a tablecloth in the same pattern for Christmas), a large sage-green fuzzy sweater with pockets, and my brother's well-used and well-loved copy of John Bates's A NORTHWOODS COMPANION, FALL AND WINTER, which has already used a theatrical analogy about phenology, thus fitting ever so neatly into what I am trying to do with my novel.
Dinner was seitan and roasted vegetables and mushrooms in red wine sauce; brown rice; red cabbage cooked in beer with caraway seeds, vinegar, and red onion; orange, pinenut, and lettuce salad; hard rolls both white and whole-wheat. My mother was justifiably pleased with herself for producing a gourmet vegan meal that everybody would eat. The cake was splendid too. The icing recipe would, after a great deal of effort, have produced a vegan version of chiffon icing, which nobody likes, so the actual icing was rather too heavy for the structure of the cake. It tasted dandy, however. Chocolate cocoanut cake, with cocoanut milk providing the mouthfeel you'd get from dairy in a cake. Whee.
The candles were the kind that spark and then light themselves again after you blow them out. There were only five, and I found that with sufficient determination they could be defeated, so I hold that I got my wishes after all. David took a great many pictures, in his usual useful fashion. In my usual non-useful fashion I forgot to take the camera and take some of him. I do that when he carves turkeys for holidays, but I don't do so well at it the rest of the time.
We played with the cat and talked about cats past and present, and about history, and a bit about each other since there was a new person present. The cat liked Eric. Lydy and Matt got into a political discussion as the rest of us were putting on our boots and so forth to go home. That probably means that if we had stayed another half hour everybody would have woken up from food somnolence, but we all felt we had a lot to do, so we parted anyway. I hugged Matt goodbye and exhorted him to keep in touch. Eric had accurately divined that what he loved about Utah, whence he is returning, is the land rather than anything about the culture, and he really has been quite homesick, as Eric is for California on more levels.
It was a lovely congenial unconstrained occasion, and I was very grateful both that my sweeties and their sweeties were of such high quality, and that both mothers were willing to overlook their objections and see the quality in question.
I got home and resumed normal life by looking at email and watching "Buffy" with Raphael and glaring at my book balefully.
Pamela
Woke up with Eric on Sunday, discussed logistics, went home to shower and change and put the clean bedding on the guest-room bed for David's mother. I had worn out being nervous, but I still was. Neither of our mothers really approves of the polyamory.
Having made the bed and tossed the resident cats out (Mary let them back in again before we left, but at least it was she who decided on the level of cat hair she wanted for the next 12 hours), I discovered that Lydy and Mary had pretty much agreed that they would be happy enough squished into the back set of the Saturn with Eric, rather than letting David drive Mary's car and Eric or Lydy drive ours.
We went and collected Eric. "Look," Mary said to him, "I've saved you all this space." That made us all laugh. We talked about Gibbon and cats on the drive, as I recall, as well as various features of the drivers and the landscape.
My brother was packing when we got there, and I was so befogged in my glasses that my mother had to say, "I assume you're Eric" to my newly-presented sweetie, but it all went well enough. The house smelled wonderful from the birthday dinner in progress.
We watched birds and the sunset, and talked about various things, and snarfed nuts and goat cheese and crackers and grapes. Eventually when my mother got a break from making dinner I opened the presents, which were terrifying numerous. Prizes at the moment include a Portmeirion tureen (and Lydy just gave me a tablecloth in the same pattern for Christmas), a large sage-green fuzzy sweater with pockets, and my brother's well-used and well-loved copy of John Bates's A NORTHWOODS COMPANION, FALL AND WINTER, which has already used a theatrical analogy about phenology, thus fitting ever so neatly into what I am trying to do with my novel.
Dinner was seitan and roasted vegetables and mushrooms in red wine sauce; brown rice; red cabbage cooked in beer with caraway seeds, vinegar, and red onion; orange, pinenut, and lettuce salad; hard rolls both white and whole-wheat. My mother was justifiably pleased with herself for producing a gourmet vegan meal that everybody would eat. The cake was splendid too. The icing recipe would, after a great deal of effort, have produced a vegan version of chiffon icing, which nobody likes, so the actual icing was rather too heavy for the structure of the cake. It tasted dandy, however. Chocolate cocoanut cake, with cocoanut milk providing the mouthfeel you'd get from dairy in a cake. Whee.
The candles were the kind that spark and then light themselves again after you blow them out. There were only five, and I found that with sufficient determination they could be defeated, so I hold that I got my wishes after all. David took a great many pictures, in his usual useful fashion. In my usual non-useful fashion I forgot to take the camera and take some of him. I do that when he carves turkeys for holidays, but I don't do so well at it the rest of the time.
We played with the cat and talked about cats past and present, and about history, and a bit about each other since there was a new person present. The cat liked Eric. Lydy and Matt got into a political discussion as the rest of us were putting on our boots and so forth to go home. That probably means that if we had stayed another half hour everybody would have woken up from food somnolence, but we all felt we had a lot to do, so we parted anyway. I hugged Matt goodbye and exhorted him to keep in touch. Eric had accurately divined that what he loved about Utah, whence he is returning, is the land rather than anything about the culture, and he really has been quite homesick, as Eric is for California on more levels.
It was a lovely congenial unconstrained occasion, and I was very grateful both that my sweeties and their sweeties were of such high quality, and that both mothers were willing to overlook their objections and see the quality in question.
I got home and resumed normal life by looking at email and watching "Buffy" with Raphael and glaring at my book balefully.
Pamela
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no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 03:29 pm (UTC)Corinne
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 04:27 pm (UTC)I think it's cool that you can save noticing the prose until you already know the plot. I'm always getting my feet tangled up trying to notice both at once.
Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 05:36 pm (UTC)For what that's worth.
Cat
no subject
Date: 2003-01-24 06:09 am (UTC)(Rysmiel calls me a Classics major in an affectionate tone whenever I reveal an inability to add up or ignorance of some whole swathe of science not mentioned in SF.)
Tam Lin made me want to go to an American university, dammit, where you can do all those different things, fencing and physics and history as well as your major.
I know more Ancient History than I would if I'd gone to one. But I know less of everything else, just a little, not even enough to aspire to be extremely ignorant, as they say in Karhide. (That's the second time this week I've said that. Hmm.)
Not Medeous at all :)
Date: 2003-01-24 10:39 am (UTC)But Tam Lin made me want to learn Greek. And considering that the classical world is where my interests lie, and I took and loved Latin in high school...that made me want to be a Classics major, and thus I am. :)
Despite the fact that my family background is very scientific (Dad is a retired microbiologist, Mom enforces the Clean Water Act), there are certain areas of the sciences (like chemistry) that I Just Don't Do. When people ask, I point out that for most of the time I'm interested in, there were only four elements, so don't ask me anything about chemistry.
Cat
Re: Not Medeous at all :)
Date: 2003-01-25 12:13 pm (UTC)P.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-25 12:17 pm (UTC)Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-01-25 12:08 pm (UTC)What was the topic of your term paper? If you don't mind saying.
Pamela
Term papers
Date: 2003-01-25 12:40 pm (UTC)I was reading a passage from the end of the fourth book of the Odyssey, the bit about Proteus, and it suddenly struck me that it was the end of Tam Lin. So I looked at the ballad of Tam Lin, and the harder I looked at it, the closer the parallels were. So I floated it to my professor as a term paper subject--to explore the parallels and differences between the Odyssey passage and the Tam Lin ballad as expressed in two modern novels: your Tam Lin and Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock. He was all over it, it's just the kind of thing he likes, and I absolutely loved writing it.
From sad experience in that class (reading the originals and then looking at modern references and realizing just how degraded the stories have become in modern culture, despite the ready availability of some originals) I had expected to find some parallels between the Proteus passage and Tam Lin, and then a few degraded parallels in the novels. Instead, both Tam Lin and Fire and Hemlock came back to what I feel is the original Greek provenance of the story. Tam Lin, of course, shows this more strongly than Fire and Hemlock, but I see the return to the classical themes in both. The title, if it tells you anything at all, was "Classical Metafiction: Borrowed Transformation in Two Modern Novels".
Dr Rydberg-Cox now has me reading Ovid--I'm in a 5th century BCE Athens course right now, but he said we'll figure out some way to make it relate--and looking for information on how much classical literature was available around the time the ballad of Tam Lin was recorded. Apparently I'm going to write another term paper on transformations. :)
So, thank you. :)
Cat
ps: there's also a little Sleeping Beauty in Herodotus--this could be a lifetime of study. Woo hoo!!
Re: Term papers
Date: 2003-01-27 04:08 pm (UTC)I have read the ODYSSEY repeatedly, and in the original more than once, but I had not consciously realized the relation of Proteus to the transformation scene in TAM LIN. I'd cop to an unconscious influence, though. That bit of the novel took forever to get right and something about it was nagging at me all along.
Pamela
Re: Term papers
Date: 2003-01-27 05:36 pm (UTC)I would ask this, though--I just got the paper back, and for my own satisfaction, I was planning on doing a little more work on it, a little revision and some expansion now that I don't have to stay under a word limit. Are you interested enough to not mind waiting for a bit while I gather my thoughts and revise? I don't think I could get to it this week.
If you think that you'd still want to see it, I would certainly be honored to have you read it.
Cat
Re: Term papers
Date: 2003-01-27 05:42 pm (UTC)Pamela
Re: Term papers
Date: 2003-01-27 06:19 pm (UTC)Cat
no subject
Date: 2003-01-25 12:12 pm (UTC)I tried for a double major, but I ended up with a choice of going to London for fall term my senior year, or staying at Carleton and taking the Latin courses I'd need for a Greek major, since I already had more Greek courses than were necessary but you can't get out with a Greek major unless you take a couple of terms of Latin, and vice versa for a Latin major and Greek. I had to go to London. I never really regretted the decision.
I'm glad my love of Greek came through so well, though.
Pamela
Re:
Date: 2003-01-24 07:08 am (UTC)Corinne
no subject
Date: 2003-01-25 12:10 pm (UTC)Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 05:01 pm (UTC)I want these recipes! They sound wonderful.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 05:14 pm (UTC)Pamela
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 05:28 pm (UTC)hail seitan!