Monday, January 28, 2013

Seni Crines

Kinda like this, I think.



Before I start rambling, you might like to check out Cari's awesome Snapshots from a Sunday timeline, now also with a weird photo by yours truly.

Recently - well, recently-ish, anyway - Melanie posted a collection of interesting links, including a story about recreating the seni crines, the hairstyle worn by the ancient Roman Vestal Virgins (and some other people). Which looked kind of cool. And a bunch of people commented saying, amongst other things, that they would've liked to try it, if they could. Which made me think, perhaps belatedly, "Hmm. I could probably do that." Probably a true classics geek would've thought of it earlier, but hey, I got there eventually.

Pictured here is my willing victim, complete with period-appropriate magenta nylon ribbon, er, structural vitta, I mean. Also period-appropriate plastic-coated bobby pins, because her hair was too short to go all the way around her head. (I think it hits more-or-less on her shoulder blades.) I think rolling the hair worked quite nicely (wish I'd got better pictures), although I didn't have enough hair in the end-of-rollings plait to do much so I . . . kinda just ignored it. It seemed to work out okay anyway.

 I was kind of amazed at how so much plaiting disappeared under the smooth part that's pulled over the back. The beginnings of four plaits just disappear. Presto! and they're gone. At that point I was on a bit of a roll, so I thought I'd try it with my hip length hair. The plaits were more than long enough, although thinner than my sister's, I think. This is probably because a bunch of my hair is cut into a straight-across fringe which really didn't want to cooperate with the whole rolling thing. I s'pect that would improve with practice, though. I bobby pinned the front knot in place, because I couldn't figure out how else to make it stay.


 And lo, it was awesome. Apparently those Roman priestesses were tough, though, because both of us enjoyed the fancy hair for a few hours and then took it out because it was getting headachey. A few well-placed bobby pins might help with that, though. And while it wasn't the trickiest plait I've ever done, it's certainly a special occasion kind of style. A fun one, though, about which I've no doubt written more than anyone really wanted to know. Herewith, The End!

Savo 'lass a lalaith.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Friday Five

1. I made a thing! A highly age-appropriate book bag that clearly indicates my new and august status as a postgraduate student of computational space physics. I'm kinda pleased that I managed to do it without an actual pattern and pretty much for free, since I found all the fabric in my mom's scrap box. (I'm totally enjoying this dependency thing while I have it.) And then I took an awkward photo with it.

2. I may or may not have taken a photo in the mirror, seen that the letters on the bag were reversed and panicked for a moment that I'd somehow left everything inside out. Then I flipped the photo and my brain was much happier. The End.

3. I sent my acceptance forms to the university this morning and I'm in the process of sorting out funding admin (and mostly being grateful that I have funding to which all the paperwork applies) and I'm going back to Maritzburg in less than a week and whoa, how did everything start happening again?

4. Part of me wants to squeeze another sewing project into the last few days before I go and part of me thinks I should make sure I remember handy things like Schrรถdinger's equation before starting Quantum Mechanics N (where N is an integer greater than 1, the exact value of which I'm not sure how to determine.) The part of me that wants to take advantage of WiFi and exotic foods like tomato sauce from a bottle while I still have them is probably going to win in the aftermath of the stalemate. Oh well.

5. I have this scheme about not over-committing this year, so that I can do fun projects even during semester. Also this scheme about maybe dropping one of the easier/less critical physics courses so I can pick  up Advanced Differential Equations from the Maths department. And a few other schemes which are probably definitely not all compatible. It's just as well I don't have to do everything, because I can't do everything. Now to remember that.

In honour of rereading The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time, may I sign off in Elvish (Sindarin, to be precise)? Thanks.

Savo 'lass a lalaith.
Have joy and laughter.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Book Log: Shakespeare's The Tempest

We read The Tempest over the Christmas holidays. It was a lot of fun. I've read it before - a couple of times, in fact, since I wrote a high school final on it - but Shakespeare can usually stand a reread. A bunch of the fun, though, was due to that pronoun at the beginning of the post: we read the play as a family, assigning parts as we went along and mostly avoiding having to converse with ourselves. (In fact, the only case where that happened was where we'd tried to assign parts at the beginning rather than on-the-fly.)

Two of us are somewhat inclined towards Shakespeare nerdery, had read the play before, expected to thoroughly enjoy it with the added bonus of fun family times and certainly did. Two of us are somewhat inclined towards general nerdery, don't generally read Shakespeare for fun, while approving of it in principle and enjoyed it enough to be keen to do it again (sadly we ran out of time - maybe next holidays, since it does take several hours to get through). Two of us are somewhat inclined to general nerdery, but seemed slightly surprised at how understandable the bard could actually be and enjoyed it enough to think it'd be nice to read one/some of the other famous plays. I think the first two of us found this somewhat satisfying. In general, a good time was had by all.

This was definitely a case where ereading devices were awesomely useful. Everybody had their own copy of the play, downloaded (for free!) from Project Gutenberg or Many Books or other ebook source of choice. (Some of us paid to get notes at the back, but I'm not sure how much those were used.) This was mostly on Android apps, but also a Kindle and a lone hard copy. It could probably be got to work using laptops too, although mobile devices are really convenient. This was way more effective than times we've tried to share hard copies, although there were a few educational moments when we discovered that different editions of the play may attribute the same lines to different people, so everybody is waiting for someone else to speak! I think it'd be worth trying to get the same edition across the board if we do it again, but the mix-ups were not the end of the world.

The play, of course, was good. The acting was frabjous. The entire exercise was loads of fun, less effort than slogging through reading it oneself and more doable than going to see a live performance in several dimensions (although I still want to do that, one day). I'd certainly like to do it again; and if you can find a handful of people willing to read Shakespeare out loud, I think you should do it too.

Wordless Wednesday: Roses


Monday, January 21, 2013

Book Log: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

So many other people wrote so little about The Night Circus when it was first published, many moons ago, that I'm a little uncertain when it comes to saying much myself. However, the desire of inflicting my opinions upon the world at large seems to have overcome the uncertainty and here we are.

Many descriptions of The Night Circus have been along the lines of "It's otherwordly and wonderful and you have to read it yourself to understand." I would guess that a large chunk of that is because the book is written in present tense. And parts of it are even in second person. It's weird. It definitely gives an immersive effect, but it did feel a bit gimmicky at times. The confusion of time is definitely part of the circus itself, though. That confusion is enhanced by the three interwoven but distinct plot threads which progress at different speeds. It's quite possible to follow, but it does mess with your sense of time - which is the nature of le cirque des reves.

Morgenstern does, in my opinion, a fantastic job of conveying atmosphere. Le cirque des reves is, as the name suggests, whimsical and wondrous. It's as if a dream you didn't want to wake up from has somehow been committed to paper. Despite that, I don't think the novel is about its setting in the way that something like Gulliver's Travels is. The circus is a medium through which various characters can express themselves - particularly Celia Bowen. Celia has a love interest, but the novel isn't a romance. Likewise, she has a life's work, but if the novel were about the circus in itself, it would need a quite different frame. We meet little Miss Bowen very early in the novel and by the end - well, you wouldn't want me to ruin that for you.

The novel follows Celia Bowen's life in a bildungsroman fashion that I tend to associate with Dickens, although it's certainly been used by any number of authors. Celia's growth and the development of her interactions with the world - although it almost seems more apt to say the world's interactions with Celia - form the substance of the book. When one of those interactions is le cirque des reves, that's fairly substantial.

I very much enjoyed The Night Circus. The characters were vivid (or strikingly not so) and fascinating, I found the plot compelling and the themes of atmosphere and illusion thought-provoking as well as beautiful. This is definitely a book I would recommend.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Friday Five

1. We (the family) watched Part I of The Lord of the Rings tonight. For the first time. Not because we live under a rock (though I sometimes wonder about that), but because the movie can't live up to the book, a.k.a. the actual (possibly historical?) events. It was fun nonetheless and may push me into actually rereading the book for the umpteenth time, but the first in several years, for which: hurrah!

2. I miss having a really good public library close to where I live, as when growing up. I think I need to join the okay library in town and figure out some not-too-heavy public domain books to put on my Kindle app to combat this.

3. "But Charlotte," you say, "a soft copy book has no mass, so it can't be heavy." Or perhaps you don't, because you're strange. (That means "not like me," right?) I'm pretty sure there's some kind of literary field, akin to the Higgs, that means books can be heavy even when they aren't massive. That's how it works. Happy now? (Oh, you weren't unhappy to begin with? Strange.)

4. Hmm, I wonder if that field applies to bookbags too. I'm trying to sew one, but having a little trouble with the machine. I'm told I need to adjust the tension, but even when I get really tense, it doesn't work like I expect. Perhaps tomorrow I'll try twiddling the dial on the side of the machine.

5. It's great fun to have time for so many holiday projects. Hopefully a few can linger on into termtime, but even if they don't, hurrah for the chance to have such a thorough break before throwing myself back into the crazy, delightful whirlpool of the new semester.