The sea.

It's said that you don't realise how much things mean to you until they are gone. I found that not entirely true. I grew up by the seaside. And, even though I didn't go very often, the smell and the sound of the seagulls and when I was close enough, the sound of the sea were sounds I was more than used to. Then I moved up north to the middle of the country. The smell was wrong, although at first I was too excited to finally be at uni to pay that much heed, and there are no seagulls. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive fan of the seagull. They've stolen my fish and chips before now, and the birds up here don't half make a racket, but it's not the same.

Anyway, last Thursday I went to the beach. We parked in a car park right on the coast, overlooking the sea, and walked up the sand towards the town. Only when I was there and the smell and the sounds and the wind- not even the wind is the same inland, and as for being able to read the weather? I wish.- It just took me right back home and right back to my childhood. People say that smell is the most vivid aide-memoir to the memory, and it made me relax truly and completely for the first time in a long while. I guess, once a child of the coast, always a child of the coast. It's like a child brought up in a city, they will never be truly at ease in the quiet of the countryside where nothing is really going on. I hadn't realised before now just how much of a sea person I am.

And this begs the question: Can I really settle here in Huddersfield, in the middle of the country? Or will I eventually have to move to the coast? It's funny really. Out of all the universities I looked at, Huddersfield was the only one not on the coast, and I chose this one in the end by closing my eyes and stabbing a finger at the screen. And yet, I've been so very happy here, except, I now realize, for the lack of the sea.

The sea is an amazing creature. It has moods and feelings, and the sheer variety of life it holds in all of its waters from the hottest to the coldest is simply amazing. If you go to the seaside in the middle of summer when the wind is barely stirring, then it can seem like it is sleeping, waiting. In a light wind, enough to make the water a little choppy, on a sunny day, if you stand on a pier and look down into it, it can seem like there is light trapped just below the surface, like a school of fish, and if only you can get down there, you can capture that light and save in a bottle. And in a storm...

I was taken to Newhaven marina one time during a big thunderstorm, and we sat there in the car and watched as the waters came crashing over the arm of the marina, grey and sullen with so much energy it was almost breathtaking. I went back the next day, and the waters had calmed down again, but there was still a fair chop, moderate rather than good and the white horses were out in force.

When you get the crest of a wave and it breaks, and the white foam moves outwards from the point of the break and spreads along the rest of the wave, people see horses. I see one. Just one for every broken crest. And then I see a heard of them galloping towards the beach. And sometimes, it's not horses at all. Sometimes, it's wolves. When the wind picks up that little bit more, the horses take on a meaner edge, race a little bit faster, and to my mind, take on a little bit of that pack mentality of the wolves.

There is always something new about the sea. every time you go, it is different, a different face, a different piece of water is there. And as you watch that water bows out and lets the next principle take it's place on the surf.

I spoke of the shipping forecast earlier. One of these days I will go into greater depth about it, because I like the shipping forecast. It is like poetry as much as the sea is.

Let there be cake. Let there be jelly. Let there be... jellypig?

I am a fairly geeky person. At least, I have been told I am a fairly geeky person. I do, and enjoy doing things that are so far into the realms of geekdom you can't even see the border to normality. Things like roleplaying, Live Action Role Playing(LARP), Science, 'specially biology. And this doesn't bother me.

It does however have a point. Last time I was LARPing, before Time in (when I was effectively Hanna and not a Sergeant in the militia (another story... maybe forthcoming)) some other people, equally as geeky as I am, who have been doing it for a lot longer than I have discovered my equal geekiness when it comes to biology. And more specifically, Genetics. At the same time another conversation was going on about pigs and the yummyness that is pig meat. And I mentioned that you can get glow in the dark pigs. Well, their trotter and teeth glow in the dark.

Cue disbelieving silence.

And my insistence. and, bless her, that of my friend also on my course and also a LARPer. Soon we had won them round. "but how can you have a fluorescent pig?!?" they asked.

Well, I replied, you see, Jellyfish have this gene called green fluorescent protein(GFP). This makes them glow in the dark (incidentally, I found out today in my lecture that you can get yellow GFP and red GFP. How fun, multi-colours!), so scientists managed to put the GFP in the pig so that the trotters and the teeth glowed in the dark.

And now, I have a commission. I am to make jellypig. Strike that, I, we, have two commissions to make jellypig. For two people. It's a pity really. I wanted to make my hair glow in the dark. Still I guess it will have to wait for a bit. For the funding. and the Permission. and the lab space. then though, then Thunderbirds Are Go!

In the meantime, I shall have to stick to my other hobby. Cooking. I am going to have to figure this one out, but I'm thinking jellypig, giant jaffa cake style. they will get their pig. alternatively, get some pork and encase it in jelly the shape of a fish. a little less edible however, I think on the whole, I like the cake idea better.

So there shall be cake. And it shall be good cake. And people shall eat and enjoy their cake and all will be well.

Erudication

I have some nights when I just can't sleep. Just can't for one reason or another. So, a couple of late nights ago, I re-wondered across dictionary.com . And fell across the word of the day. And decided that I was going to take that word of the day and make a blog entry out of it. The last time I had a look, the word was Ellipsis:

el⋅lip⋅sis 

Grammer.
1. a. The omission from a sentence or other construction of one or more words that would complete or clarify the construction, as the omission of who are, while I am, or while we are from I like to interview people sitting down.
b. The omission of one or more items from a construction in order to avoid repeating the identical or equivalent items that are in a preceding or following construction, as the omission of been to Paris from the second clause of I've been to Paris, but they haven't.
2. Printing. A mark or marks as--, ..., or ***, to indicate an omission or supression of letters or words.

/ɪˈlɪpsɪs/ Show Spelled Pronunciation

Now, it is beautiful sounding word that slithers off the tongue. It makes me smile in the same way the word susurrus does. As I have indicated in a previous post, I read a lot. And a lot of what I read is fantasy. And a lot of fantasy delineates the need for precision when performing magics. So I got thinking, what if... The thinking stopped there on that occaision, because I got a healthy ker-thud across the back of my head with a foam zwihandler. It sometimes doesn't do to think in the midst of a LARP fight.

But, after falling into an exhausted sleep that night, I woke up nice and early the next day and continued the thought. What if there was an ellipsis in Magic. In a spell or something of the like. And a story was born. Mostly born. The sketchy outline of the twinkle in a father's eye was born. On a side note, I have just twigged what that means. And I am sat here shaking my head at my obtuseness.

Because, every time I see an ellipsis in some writing, I a) get distracted by thinking: that's an ellipsis, pretty word! and b) start thinking of something completely random. I believe last time the song ten little speckled frogs started playing in my head, only it started at the number three. And just for the record, it's PIE dammit! There ain't no grubs to be seen. So the story has come across it's challenges. But it is being written. But I have a feeling that It'll be a touch too long for a blog, which was it's original intention. So I'll either have to publish it in stages, providing it is fit to be read by the public, or there is going to be one very long post. I can't make any promises, but it may be appearing soon-ish. Mark the ish. It will be very ish.

In the meantime, Nose back to the grindstone. Work work work... oranges and sea-salt don't go together. See what I mean. now that song'll be stuck in my head for ages.

Books, books, books.

They say that a person's bookshelf can tell a lot about them. I'm kind of curious to know what mine would say. Because I do have, and read often classics like Jane Eyre, and they sit next to some scifi/fantasy that most people I know haven't even heard of. And that's sat right next to a whole load of pop-sci books. Not quite enough to rival my father's collection yet, but give it time.

In a way. I can actually blame this on my genes. On both Nature and Nurture. My father is a big big reader, and his siblings, the only ones I see of a regularity, also love to read. It became understood that when we went to see my uncle, we would raid his bookcase. Now he doesn't have wallpaper in his bedroom. He has bookcases. And books. Lots and lots of books.

All of this has combined to the point that I am a BIG reader, and by big, I mean that, in certain portions of my life, people literally never saw me without a book in my hands. Recently, I have become a fairly big facebooker as well, and I found this whilst browsing (or facebook stalking and certain of my friends call it). So, curious, I pulled it off and followed most of the instructions. All bar step six, in fact.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '#' to the ones you didn't like.
4) Star '*' those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x+
10 Great Epectations - Charles Dickens (I keep trying. I'm two thirds of the way through now. It's not that I don't like it, but I keep getting distracted)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy* (sitting on my shelf, looking at me disapprovingly)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x+ (clever. very clever)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier * (possibly one of the most famous first lines ever... now to read the rest)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x+
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (I think I started this. then got distracted. by that annoying work thing.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Apparantly better than the film, but the film put me off. The French Leftenent's Woman, however, is a cracking read.)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x+
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x+
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons*
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (ish. I had to give it back to the library half way through)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck*
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie*
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville*
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses - James Joyce x
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell x
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton x+
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute x+++(if I had a favourite, this would be a hot contender)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (I've heard the song summery by Martin Carthy, does that count? Oor Hamlet, if you want to find it)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Meant to have read 6 out of these? Is the fact that I have read more like 35 a sign of a misspent youth? Now a few years ago, the BBC did something called The Big Read. I followed this with interest, and now have a copy of that list on my board, because I am determined to read through it. That list is different from this list, although a lot of the titles are the same. Which is why, in part, I have actually read so many on this list. For example, A Town Like Alice which is one of my ALL time favourite reads, (I must find that copy, I know it is hanging around somewhere) I only read because it was on the list and it was the first one I found in my father's bookcase.

I don't know if I will ever finish these lists.I can hope, but equally, I also hope I won't, or at least that they get added to by a new big read list. Because that means that there will always be books out there to read. Not that there wouldn't be, but, the lists make it more realizable somehow.

I think I have run out of steam just about. So I'll go back to my book. Not one on the list, but a wonderful take of the beauty and the beast fairytail. The Fire Rose it is called. By Mercedes Lackey. Try it. Consider it the start of my list for you. Whoever you may be. Enjoy.

Fish

This week has been a fishy week. First, there has been a want that has been growing all week - so far unsatisfied - for fish and chips. Then I end up watching Big Fish (Tim Burton, good film), eating mackerel for lunch and having conversations about the follies of making fish wear jumpers. (The jumper would get wet, so they'd just be colder. So don't take a fish for a walk in winter.) And then I go to make myself a cuppa, and discover Darwin in the tea cupboard. I'd forgotten I was meant to be fish sitting. And this time around, she isn't playing dead.

This week I have also been trying out contact lenses. The most bizarre feeling in the world, after nearly 18 years of wearing glasses, is to be able to look around, and realise that there is no wire rim around my sight, above which everything is blurry. Although, looking at the little booklet that has a list of do's and don'ts, I wasn't aware that people had a desire to lick their contact lenses. I certainly don't.

The trying of the contact lenses shows just how much a creature of habit I really am. After putting in the lenses the other day, I saw my glasses. And thought, hang on, I'm not wearing any glasses. So I put them on. Everything, of course, went very blurry, so I decided that I hadn't got my glasses on, and went looking for them. It was only when I found my spare pair, and went to put them on as well did I realise. I think that leaving the lenses for hitty-hitty LARP fun in the future is a good idea.

Chocolate has also featured. One birthday cake, and one birthday, well, you can't rightly call it a cake. Or anything other than rich-gooey-chocolatey-maltezery-mess. 335 weight watchers points for the whole thing. Ouch. but ummm. It's a good thing birthdays aren't everyday.

Speaking of chocolate, it is time to feed the fish. And the sister. And decide what is for tea.

The three modes of me.

I have three modes of action. Thinking, doing, and apathetic.

If I am thinking about doing something, I tend to become blond in all other aspects of my life, and everything I'm doing sort of, well, grinds to a halt. I still say someone forgot to tell me where the on/off switch was for the rest of my mind. Thinking also seems to kick in after doing something. Often something silly. It's funny how these are sort of joined. Like on a boat on tow on a very long rope. Sometimes the swell and such will bring the thinking closer to the doing. And then, indeed, I can seem almost normal. Post-doing thinking is often triggered with a 'Hannnnnnnnaa! what have you done?!' or such similar words.

Heh. I've just realised I have compared my brain to a sea. Big and wide and wet. I am...wet, and apparantly bigheaded. Hmmm. not entirely sure how well that one worked out.

Then there is the doing. Doing usually involves little thinking, either during or beforehand. I am often quite blond then as well. There's nothing more I can really say about the doing, except that it has produced some epic fail, but some equally epic win at times, so overall, it is a neutral mode. And then there is apathy.

Apathy is something we all experience from time to time. Even the most energetic of us. Times when our Get-up-and-go Gets-up-and-goes. When you just can't be bothered to do anything. Anything at all. (Truly, and amusingly, I have had that paragraph sitting on my computer for about three months before I could be bothered to do anything with it.)

Obviously, as a member of Homo sapiens I have other emotions and modes and ways of being. But to my mind, they all seem to click into these three categories. (it's amazing how simple we really are when we get down to it.) Like now. I am in blog mode, whilst also desperately tired. but the doing mode has taken over and I will finish this blog entry. Which I think I may have. it does seem to have come back to the beginning.

So, ah, well. Goodbye.

pology

I meant to add at the bottom of the last post, it came from a cartoon that should be found at www.nearingzero.net I've lost it but I'm sure it is still there. If it isn't, there are plenty that are.