Friday Five

1. I made substantial progress in sorting out the direction of my honours project this week. It's really nice to have something worthwhile to direct my energy at, instead of worritting about admin. And the admin is slowly diminishing. Hurrah!

2. We played Settlers of Catan for the first time (except for one of the group) tonight. It was pretty awesome. I suspect some of the appeal is just in the newness of the system, but there's quite a bit of scope. I really enjoyed playing a strategy game that doesn't require attacking people. (Although the cutting off of other people's roads can get surprisingly intense.)

3. I think board games like Catan can be considered kind of nerdy, but do you know what would be even nerdier? Getting really frustrated that nine gets rolled more often than seven, which is not what the maths says should happen. Not that anyone I know did this. And it certainly didn't cause more upset than pretty much anything else in the whole game. Because we're not that nerdy. Oh, no!

4. My lectures start on Monday, except they don't, which is confusing. Depending on electives, we can end up with whole days free for project work (if you're disciplined) and other things (probably regardless). I don't have a timetable for my elective yet, so my actual first lecture is currently set for Wednesday. I'm finding that kind of weird.

5. The varsity notices today included a FameLab flyer. Now I'm wondering if coming up with a three minute talky thing about physics for the general public (and videoing it or driving a fair bit to actually speak in front of people) constitutes unnecessary stress. I think it's probably worth a shot, because it seems like there should be more fun than complicated, if there's some of both.

Savo 'lass a lalaith.

Wordless Wednesday: Bubbles

Savo 'lass a lalaith.

Book Log: Griffin's Castle by Jenny Nimmo

I first read Griffin's Castle in primary school for the Battle of the Books competition. It was an awesome source of good new titles and I read loads of books from those reading lists for years after I was eligible to enter. When I found my only slightly battered copy in a second hand bookshop for less than the price of a chocolate bar, I -- well, I would've jumped at the opportunity, but by the time I left that shop I was carrying too many books to make that wise.

Griffin's Castle is a bleaker story than I remembered. Dinah Jones is a tall, serious eleven-year-old who is very nearly both unloved and unwanted. Her young, single mother hopes she isn't a genius or something similarly horrid. Things might've been looking up when Dinah and her mother move into a proper house for the first time ever. But the house is falling apart and the landlord, Dinah's stepfather-to-be, perhaps, can't stand the strange girl, so unlike her mother, who hangs a handmade "Griffin's Castle" sign on the gate after finding a stone griffin in the garden and wants to visit his elderly mother.

That's what's so awfully attractive about Dinah. One could understand if she were sullen and sorry for herself, but instead she's fiercely independent. She papers her dingy attic room with cut out pictures and poetry. If she refuses to be friends with the children at school, she pushes them into friendship with each other. And then there's a little bit of magic that makes Dinah's independence scarily concrete. I think her not-quite-a-friend Jacob puts it best. [Fair warning: this might be very mildly spoilerish.]

"Dinah Jones is different. She's seen things, been in places that are horrible. But she'll never, never tell. They've got right into her, like, right deep into her and she can't get away. And the animals are the same. They can't talk about what it's like to be hunted and chained and to have your claws and teeth pulled out, or to starve very slowly. So she's invited them into her garden, where they'll be safe together. Safety in numbers. But Griffin's Castle is falling down. And supposing all the animals come. Maybe she'll never get out again. [. . .] Perhaps a desperate person, like Dinah, can make things happen. Things that could never normally happen, in real life, I mean. D'you think that's possible?"

At first Dinah welcomes the fantastical animals. She doesn't want to leave Griffin's Castle, which is, she persists in believing, going to be a beautiful family home. But soon she finds she can't escape them - she very nearly dies trying. I don't think words like "depression" or "suicide" ever occured to me when I read the book about ten years ago, but they do now. I think I'm glad; the animals were freaky enough then as it was, but seeing more of the symbolism now makes the book well worth rereading.

Dinah can't escape the animals on her own, but fortunately, in the end, she doesn't have to. And then she cries. Which, oddly enough, might be the happiest moment in the book.

I said at the beginning that the book was bleak, but I didn't find it depressing. It's a story about light in darkness, not about darkness. About a spark that, just as it seems about to be snuffed out, is kindled into flame. I expected to enjoy it and it surpassed my expectations.

Friday Five

1. It turns out that running around varsity trying to perform multitudinous administrative tasks is more tiring than sitting at home doing interesting projects. In consequence I'm going to borrow some things other people have said (as well as I remember them) to make five.

2. While discussing shapes of trees that are good to climb: "a melting candle, which is like a squid."

3. Talking (initially) about time zones:
"I always get my pluses and minuses mixed up."
"Always? What's three minus four?"
"Seven."
"And four minus three?"
"Seven."
"So subtraction commutes! Is addition distributive then?"
"Yes."
"And multiplication."
"Yes, it's normal."
"Wait, the integers aren't a ring then."
"Nope, they're a helix."

4. Trying to work out if I can take PDEs as an elective:
"The lectures aren't timetabled; the students and lecturers will negotiate the times."
"Clashes shouldn't be a problem then."
"Well, that depends on your negotiating skills."

5. "Can I quote you on that?"
"Yes. In or out of context."

Wordless Wednesday: View from Above

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 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 Schrödinger'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.