Virtue and Comfort
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Fernanda's LiveJournal:
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| Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | | 1:05 am |
Poem of the day, and a massive appropriate-quotation fail
SongHow sweet I roam'd from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide! He shew'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; He led me through his gardens fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow. With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage; He caught me in his silkern net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty. - William Blake The fail comes in the site where I found that poem when I was googling for the whole thing. You see, even though a poem can be romantic and may talk about the prince of love, it isn't necessarily a good poem to put on Weddings.co.uk. I think I'm amused because I have a small collection of Cynical Wedding Readings, from "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife" to "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion," which is especially great because it's just a few chapters before "Love is patient, love is kind..." | | Friday, November 13th, 2009 | | 10:16 pm |
| | Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | | 2:25 am |
Thought for the day
You can’t stop a bad workman blaming his tools. All you can do is agree that yup, there’s clearly a fundamental mismatch between workman and tools, and then snap up a boxful of perfectly good tools at a bargain price. | | Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | | 4:16 pm |
Silliness
Sometimes you just have to figure out who you are, accept that, and be that person. Maybe you're a woman, despite what your birth certificate and family have always said. Maybe you're never really going to go to medical school and marry a Nice Jewish Girl and provide enough grandchildren for a platoon of the IDF. And maybe you're the sort of person who has an idea for a knitting-oriented parody of Cocaine Blues, and it's been bopping around in your head so long that you should admit defeat and just write the thing. ( Long enough to go behind the cut ) | | Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 | | 5:42 pm |
| | Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | | 12:45 pm |
Holiday FAIL
I'm meant to be on a plane to Sicily right now. Things all started so well - we packed the night before, got up early and got to the airport in good time. To see that all flights from Sky Europe have been cancelled as of today because the airline went bankrupt this morning. We'd known that they'd been in financial difficulties for some time now, and we didn't think they'd last until the end of the year. And at least we're not stranded in Sicily trying to get home. But I wish they could have held on for just two more weeks. I was looking forward to Sicily so much. In answer to the obvious questions: we probably can't get any money back because we booked with a debit card rather than a credit card, but it's an internet-only card that may have some protection, so we're going to talk to the bank. The deposit for the accommodation is obviously lost, but it was only 10 euros. We're going to find out if there are any good train fares going, maybe to Split or Krakow, seeing as we've already booked time off work. Extremely pissed off. | | Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | | 12:04 pm |
| | Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | | 4:52 pm |
| | Friday, July 17th, 2009 | | 2:32 am |
| | Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 | | 1:53 am |
Today's xkcd is one that made me wonder if Randall has seekritly looked up my browsing history. Those are the EXACT two sites that I get stuck on for hours. Fans of Tinycat will be pleased to know that I spotted her happily lazing around on a pleasantly lukewarm tin roof this afternoon. It appears that the diet of leftover Yugoslavian Grilled Food, and rodents tempted by the smell of Yugoslavian Grilled Food, seems to suit her. | | Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | | 12:16 am |
GODDAMN FUCKING SON-OF-A-BITCH COMPUTER
Sending the machine to the shop for 2 weeks and $80 worth of servicing, and being told that the problem was a blown capacitor, did not fix the mysterious crashes. On the upside, the first post-servicing crash was a blue screen of death as opposed to a black one, and I was able to jot down the problem file. Unfortunately, googling "ati2dvag" produced a lot of results along the lines of "the dreaded ati2dvag bug" and "after a year, I still haven't been able to fix the ati2dvag issue" and "this is a REALLY annoying problem that does not have a sure solution or cure". Reinstalling the ATI driver failed, so far deleting the ATI driver seems to have worked. After all, it's not like we really play games on the stupid thing anyway. | | Friday, July 3rd, 2009 | | 3:52 pm |
This won't interest ANYONE but I think it's nifty.
Last week I got back into origami and for some reason I've been making lots of Sonobe units. Today I learnt that you can't make a 3-colour stella octangula and have every vertex comprise all three colours, but you can make one with every vertex having 3 colours or 1 colour, and this looks really cool because it has these nifty triskelions on it. Now experimenting to see if I can make a <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_dodecahedron">great dodecahedron</a> by turning the Sonobes inside-out. | | Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | | 4:40 pm |
I wonder what Elizabeth David would have thought of crockpots?
Today in the Guardian there was a nice little article about cookbooks that Elizabeth David owned and annotated. The one that amused me most was "The kind of pretentious rubbish that has brought French cooking into disrepute as a snobs preserve", but in Ulster Fare, published in 1945 by the Belfast Women's Institute Club, she writes "Italian salad p50. Sounds just about the most revolting dish ever devised." *** Italian salad 1 pint cold cooked macaroni ½ pint cooked or tinned pears ½ pint grated raw carrot French dressing to moisten 2 heaped tablespoons minced onion ½ pint cooked or minced string beans Mix the chopped macaroni and vegetables; moisten with French dressing, flavouring with garlic if liked. Serve on a dish lined with lettuce leaves. Decorate with mayonnaise and minced pimento or chives. *** The sad thing is that I read the recipe for "the most revolting dish ever devised" and immediately though "you mean that's IT?" Seriously, where's the cup of sugar in the dressing? Why is it only decorated with mayonnaise rather than using a pint of the stuff? And where in the world is the cream of mushroom soup? The internet has really raised my hideous-recipe standards. | | Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | | 4:53 pm |
I used to love making paper models. Especially those mathematical ones from Tarquin Publications. I stopped doing it because while they're great fun to make, you end up with a very elaborate and beautifully-constructed dust collector. And then I see things like these Japanese models and I really start wanting to get into it again. I think maybe I'll get some origami paper from the Japanese shop. | | Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | | 12:49 am |
| | Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | | 11:25 am |
Kitten Thought for the Day
I have decided that if I ever have a pair of kittens, I will call them Shuka and Ding, after the noises of shaking a bag of dry catfood, and banging a tin of wet catfood with a spoon. I think it's the only way to have cats that actually answer to their names. | | Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | | 5:15 pm |
Cherry Nation: a frozen moment
The market in Havelska is, of course, not what it was. Year on year the fruit-and-vegetable stalls seem to dwindle, and the tourist-kitsch stalls take their place. It is not helped by the fact that this is Central Europe, and for much of the year the local produce is, shall we say, less than thrilling. But June really is busting out all over. Bundles of baby beets scream sweet colour, punnets of strawberries are proudly emblazoned CESKY JAHODY (don't waste your money on insipid strawberries; they're only worth buying if you can smell them walking past the stall), and even the tomatoes look as if they might just taste of something. I don't buy them though. Burned too many times on tomatoes. The man with the beets also has cherries. Not the bouncing beauties from Spain and America. These are smaller, less crisp, they don't last a day after you take them home. But the taste. I can eat pounds of them at a time. And do. As I pack a flimsy plastic bag full, people surround me. Instinctively I check my satchel, keys-wallet-phone, an urban cowgirl quick on the draw. But it's only Japanese tourists. And they're thrilled by the cherries. They point at the fruit, at the bags, at the prices. Good fresh fruit costs a fortune in Japan, everyone knows that. They ask me something about the cherries, I don't really understand, but say "Sweet, good!" and they laugh. One of them's stocking up, the other pulls out a camera. I'm going to be in this shot, like it or not. I give a thumbs-up, the lady shows me the picture, we laugh some more. Cherry season is short. In a few weeks, all we'll have left is a photograph taken in a market, a handful of words. Sweet. Good. | | Monday, June 8th, 2009 | | 4:19 pm |
| | Saturday, May 30th, 2009 | | 2:56 pm |
| | Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | | 6:02 pm |
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