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I suppose I've been quiet lately. Not commenting as much as I should. Sorry about that. I'm still around, just feeling distracted.

( Blah blah boring real life stuff )

On a much more interesting and much lighter note, I managed to go downtown today, and (unexpectedly) picked up some books. I normally don't buy books in person, because they're less expensive online, but... well. No matter. The first is a graphic novel; Scott Chantler's Two Generals, which takes place during WWII. The art style looks familiar but I can't place the author's name. Anyhow, lately I've been good at resisting new books, especially expensive ones, but this one looked so good that I couldn't resist. Nice art and a beautiful cover besides, and... well, the author is Canadian, and it's written from a Canadian perspective, and that's the kind of thing that really attracts me. So.

The second book, though... An edition of Beowulf. In Old English. It's very, very heavily glossed (verso is the text, while recto is completely glosses) but hooo boy. Uh. Whether I will be able to read it is questionable. On the other hand, it's very possible that once I get rolling, I'll get the hang of it. ... Still. Considering I haven't read Beowulf in a few years, and I've never studied Old English, and I haven't read anything in even Middle English in a good while... this should be challenging. But, well. It was only two dollars. :V

I think my desire to attempt to read it in Old English is tangentially related to an internal conflict I have been having lately. That conflict relates to Middle English. See, I've been considering giving up with struggling to learn unfamiliar languages (and giving up very quickly every time I try) and instead concentrate on learning Middle English, which I do know somewhat. I don't need to "study" it in the traditional sense of learning vocabulary and grammar rules and blah blah blah; I can already read it. So, it would just be a matter of reading things in the original texts to grow and improve. Sounds good.

( Language angst )

Today was the last day of winter. Tomorrow, the first day of spring - that's cause for celebration, I say. I'm going to go out with my camera during the day. I think I'll head down to the river and try to get some photos there, then maybe make my way through the residential areas, with their narrow streets and thick trees. I hope the sun will be shining; photos are always nicer on sunny days. The air, too, feels different. Even so, it'll be a while before things really feel like spring - certainly tomorrow won't feel like the following --

Lenten ys come wiþ loue to toune,
wiþ blosmen ant wiþ briddes roune,
þat al þis blisse bryngeþ.
Dayeseȝes in þis dales,
notes suete of nyhtengales,
vch foul song singeþ.

Or, in translation,

Lent has come with love to town,
with blossoms and with birds round,
that all this bliss bringeth.
Daisies in the dales,
notes sweet of nightingales,
each bird a song singeth.

I've been working on translations of short Middle English poems recently. I probably shouldn't be doing it. On the one hand, translating them does help me understand them a bit better. On the other hand, this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing for my homework! Heavy glossing and commentary and authorial notes, yes, but not translating. ... Oh, well. Since I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use my translations for my final assignment, I might put some up in here later.

And since Ari is doing it, too -- "Ask me something you think you should know about me, something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about, or something you've always been curious about but have never asked, or something completely silly that you'd like me to answer for kicks. No limits on the range of questions, either: ask me anything you want to know about, whether it's a fannish opinion or a question about a fic of mine or trivia about my real life or my thoughts on events in the offline world."

... Because clearly, I want to do anything BUT homework today. And tomorrow, too.

If you don't care about hockey, here, have something awesome:
China and Kenya to search for medieval Chinese ships on the Kenyan coast

....Anyway.

HELL YEAH FINLAND


YOU GO

YOU GET THAT BRONZE

YEAHHHHHHHH

Man, that was SUCH a good game, oh my gods, that Slovakian team played like hell, jesus.


I'm so happy, what the hell, it doesn't make any sense, ahhhh but still, it's good.

And tomorrow.

SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY.

I can't wait. 8)

(Yeah, I didn't do anything today, either)

Skull of medieval pirate stolen from German museum

"It wasn't clear how the exhibit was stolen, or why."

The why is something I wonder too. It's certainly an odd thing to steal. Aside from being morbid, it isn't the sort of thing that one would be expected to steal. I can understand people stealing paintings or gold or carved boxes or whatever, as that's the sort of thing that is generally given some tangible value. It's worth something, and we know it's worth something, so even if you hide it forever, you still have bragging rights. But a skull with a nail through it? That's just strange. Well, maybe the person(s) who did it - or the individual who hired those persons - just had a thing for pirates.

Anyway. Today did not go quite the way I planned it. I ended up not sleeping well (again) due to the heat, so when I had to get up in the morning to go to my 9:30 AM doctor's appointment, needless to say I was quite a zombie. Oh, well! Who needs sleep and breakfast and a proper shower, anyway? Anyway, the appointment went well. The doc was pleased that my hand seems to be doing marginally better, and she gave me a referral for physical therapy, and another referral for further medical... stuff (more examinations etc). So, I'm going to get that taken care of on Monday, I expect.

To be perfectly honest I wish my hand would hurry up and heal already. I'm quite annoyed with having to restrict myself from both knitting and writing. It's driving me downright nuts, actually. :| Not pleased. Definitely not pleased. Mostly the knitting... I love doing it, and I was looking at gorgeous hand-spun yarn while LJ was down, and I just. Argh. Okay, so I can't afford that, sure. But I wish I could at least finish the scarf I was working on; it was nearly done. :| So not awesome.

( Cut for babbling about fragrances, wat )

In other news, I'm reading Sir Walter Scott's Waverly - actually, have been for a while, but it's taking me some time to get through because it is rather long and was written in 1814. I'm sure you all know precisely the style I'm dealing with here - needlessly thick with description and with rather meandering prose, though not as bad as the stuff put out in the 18th century. It was actually assigned to a class last semester, but nobody actually read it. Though I did read a few chapters, and I kind of enjoyed it in spite of everything, so now I'm continuing. It started out really dull, but right now I've just passed a part involving an Incident between our party and some Highlanders, and after a peace-deal with the aggressors is formed, our Hero sets off to meet with their chief. So it's starting to get rather exciting - moreso than I thought it would be, anyway.

I do hope that tomorrow will be more productive. I'm such a lazy ass. :|

Sooo-oo. Today was interesting.

( Blah blah boring school stuff )

Tl;dr Last semester sucked but I can fix it, my favourite prof is going to be my supervisor, and I have a vague idea what to do my Big Final Graduate Project on. Fixing the issue might mean I'll have to put off getting a job for about a month, but since mum gave me some money to tide me over a while, that's okay. I'll manage, no problem.

The project paper will be done over the summer. Originally I'd intended to do that sooner (... I don't know how) but it's better this way. Fortunately, it won't interfere with my plans to visit Minako, because I certainly am allowed to take a vacation, and it isn't as if I'll be gone for a month or anything. So, no worries! We'll still get to have our fun. This is something I've wanted so much, and I'm not going to let school obligations drag me down or pull me away from her.

ANYWAY. Aside from that, I did absolutely nothing all day! This is partly because I was tired and had a huge headache, haha. But it's also because I didn't have to do anything. But! Tomorrow is going to be much more productive. I'm going to make pea soup! This'll be my first time making home-made soup ever. I'll be doing it in the slowcooker, which is less effort than stovetop, but still - I'm pretty excited about it. I loooove pea soup but I don't buy it because the stuff they sell at the store is expensive ($4.50 for a can? WTF).

Also, I'll be going to the cinema, though I'm not sure if it'll be Saturday or Sunday. I promised myself that if I got all my school-stuff organized, I'd go to see Sherlock Holmes - sooo, there we are! I'm excited. I guess after that, I should get around to reading the source material. I have a cheapass paperback version that's been sitting on my shelf collecting dust for at least four years, hah. About time I read it!

Hmm-mm. Next big thing will be arrangements for x-rays on Monday; also have to go and make a followup appointment with the doc. Siiiiigh. This is all so frustrating! I don't think the situation has gotten any worse though, which is good.

Archaic Mark is a 19th-century forgery, not a medieval manuscript

On the one hand, it's a damn shame that it isn't real. On the other hand, I've always found forgeries fascinating. I like speculating about the motivations behind their creation, and the process that the creator went through to get the final product. It's just so neat.

By the way, most of the cards are sent out. There are just three that I still have left to do, and they're all in Canada - will be sending them out soon. I know that at least one person has already received their card <3 I'm rather happy about that. Hopefully everything will get to people before Christmas.

Notifs still not working, but it looks like things are actually starting to push through the line. Good. It's kind of crazy how much I rely on them. You don't appreciate something you have until it's broken. Keeping up a conversation is difficult, and roleplaying is almost out of the question (I haven't the patience to keep f5ing).

Going to bed unusually early tonight. I have an essay due late tomorrow afternoon, but I think it will be far more productive for me to get a good night's sleep than it would be for me to stay up all night and try to pound my way through it. So, for the first time in quite a while, I'm going to go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour, and get up at a semi-reasonable hour too. Amazing. My sleeping patterns really need to re-arrange themselves before I head out to visit my parents, sigh. So for tonight, it's a cup of herbal tea, then bed. Maybe a chapter of my fantasy book before I turn out the light and call it good.

I'm leaving on the 15th. My time is going to be very limited while I'm there, and I'm not too thrilled about it. I have no idea how I'm going to get everything finished - but I'll manage, somehow. On the one hand, distractions during the evening. On the other hand, mum and dad are still working, and my brother no longer lives with them, so at least I'll have peace and quiet during the daytime. It's strange, too - that place no longer feels like my home. It's not my house, it's their house. This place in Saskatoon, this is my house. So for that reason, I feel kind of reluctant acting entirely freely when I'm there. That will help with motivation, I'm sure.

Guy came over to check out the radiator today. He was surprised at how chilly it was in my house. Apparently, there was something admiss with the rad. Well, he poked and prodded it, and it's working a bit better now. He also managed to get the one in the kitchen working, which pleases me immensely. Gods know that one has never ever worked the entire time I've lived here, so it's nice to have that done. Hopefully I won't have to use my heater much in the future.

Mnh, I've been in a strange mood for days, and it seems today was even stranger. I'm not quite sure how to describe it. I think maybe I just need to get out of this house. Part of the problem is that it's too cold out, and I have no reason to go anywhere anyway, but... ah. Well. What can a person do? I guess I'll just have to wait it out. Sigh. It doesn't help that I've been stressed out from school and such. Essays, essays, essays - not to mention that I have a ton of e-mails in my inbox that I just can't bring myself to read right now. Well, I'll get that done, maybe tomorrow evening. Sigh.

On a fanfiction-related note, don't expect anything from me until after Christmas, period. On the other hand, some other people are producing some good stuff right now. If you like the Nordics, and you like genfic, might want to read Until Someone Loses An Eye by Kainoliero, if you haven't done so already. Reading this was juuuust the de-stresser I needed today.

To those people I added recently - A hearty welcome. Let's hope you don't get tired of my long entries about What I Ate For Breakfast, and suchlike.

Christmas Card PSA: A few cards have finally been mailed out; now I'm working my way through the ones going to Northern Europe. The post office gave me airmail stickers so hopefully things will not take forever to get to their destinations, when I do send them. As before, the cardlist is here, and if you're not on the list, comments are screened on that entry if you want to give me your address. I definitely have enough cards for everyone.

Today was relatively productive, though not as much as I wanted it to be. I went to the school library and got out a bunch of books on Jean Renoir, so that'll do well enough for my essay on La Grande Illusion. Decided on topic and subject for my Medieval essay, too, and got some books on that. I'm going to be writing on medieval miscellanies and the purpose/arrangement/ordering of the physical text. I would have loved to do it on the Lincoln-Thornton manuscript (that's the one that contains the Alliterative Morte Arthur), but someone already snatched up the facsimile, and gods know I don't want to work from electronic versions. Instead I'll be working from a print facsimile of Harley 2253, which contains the "Harley lyrics" - some of them are the earliest secular poems we have in English. That should be neat. Harley 2253 is a bit more of a clusterfuck than the Lincoln-Thornton, but I guess I'll just have to deal with that.

Since the script is relatively tidy and the lyrics are short, it's possible I might use one of the slightly longer poems to do for my edition assignment, but I haven't decided yet. The poems are from the early 1300s, so they're difficult for me to read as it is, and then there's the fact that they're written in gothic script, which means it's a pain in the ass to read the text from the facsimile - and I have never been good at that to begin with. Here's an excerpt from one of the Middle English poems:

When þe nyhtegale singes þe wodes waxen grene.
Lef ant gras ant blosme springes in aueryl y wene,
Ant love is to myn herte gon wiþ one spere so kene
Nyht ant day my blod hit drynkes myn herte deþ me tene.

And my loose translation:
When the nightingale sings the woods grow green.
Leaf and grass and blossoms spring in April I think,
And love is to my heart gone with one spear so keen
Night and day my blood drains, my heart to death aches.

So... yes. I really don't know. Sigh. Oh, well! I don't have to worry about the edition until next semester. Maybe over the break I'll bring the facsimile and an edition with me, and practise transcription.

Other than work on that, I did little all day, except have some very nice (though short) conversations with a few friends. <3 Ach, I can hardly wait until the break, so that I can talk to them a bit more. Time zones are such a pain in the ass; it's just so difficult when my afternoons are their nights.

Today has been exhausting. I'm not even sure why, as I didn't do anything to cause me to be so tired. Maybe it's just the day. Either way, I feel as if I could fall over at any minute. I actually did fall asleep this evening accidentally. Woke up at ten o'clock or so. It's a pain in the ass, because I was roleplaying at the time - was waiting for a reply, so I flopped on my bed and... yeah. Oops. And now I just feel dumb. Oh, well. I'll live. Mm, been roleplaying a bit these past couple days, actually. Think that Helsi triggered it by coming back again. I feel kind of nostalgic when we play together, remembering back around Eurovision. Those were good times back then, they really were.

Well. I've a cup of hot herbal tea. Going to write this entry, then sleep. Saa. 's good.

Today was just bad, I think. I woke up in a foul mood. Not a good way to start. It kind of hung over me the whole day, except for during medieval class. 'n then in the afternoon, when I was waiting for the classroom to open so I could go in, I got approached by two people doing some survey. Okay, I thought it was just some... I dunno, one of those regular surveys people end up doing for whatever. Turns out it was some spirituality survey... Thing. Urgh. Awkward.

I answered their questions anyway, but I couldn't help but get the feeling that the entire time, they weren't taking me seriously at all. It doesn't help that it's really hard to explain a form that is so general, so stripped-down. Gods that don't physically manifest. Gods that don't speak. We're not talking bright-eyed Athena, here. And when they asked things like, if I could ask the gods anything, what would I ask -- the best I could come up with was something related to climate change. Not "why is there so much pain and suffering in the world" or anything like that. Far as I'm concerned, that's an entirely human problem, and the gods have nothing to do with it. Ask a philosopher.

Rrrgh. Anyway. So, yeah, that kind of left me in a funk for the rest of the day and I still feel kind of down. Well. Nothing that can be done about that. Best put it behind me. Tomorrow will be better.

On a lighter note, medieval was amazing. We used the McIntosh dot-maps to pinpoint the dialect of various versions of a particular poem based on various words and factors like the use of o vs a in spelling. It was pretty cool. And at one point I was asked to read some Middle English out loud. Intimidating as fuck, but I managed better than I ordinarily would because, coincidentally, on the weekend I had been doing some short recordings of bits of Middle English (just snippets of the CT general prologue) for Minako. Aaa. So I didn't have too much trouble with it, though of course my pronunciation was all over the place and I have trouble with o vs a. Mmn, Minako says that Middle English sounds a bit like German (except maybe not quite as angry). I guess I can see that.

Now that I'm thinking of that - really need to get to work on my next medieval essay. Argh. I've been in a slump since Friday, and it sucks. Well, need to start climbing my way out of it again, I guess.

14th-century shipwreck found in Germany

Sorry I haven't been keeping up with my flist very well lately, guys. I've been a bit busy.

Today was incredibly exhausting. I pulled an all-nighter for my presentation on Middle English dialects. It was... not a good situation, partly because I didn't have access to all the materials that I needed. The books were checked out, and though I had recalled them, they hadn't been returned, so I had to make do. I would have liked to pull from more sources directly from the medieval studies side of things, but I was working more from things published in the linguistics field. Nothing wrong with that really, but it's always more challenging when you cross disciplines.

I missed the bus this morning because my printer was being an ass (what do you mean there's no paper? I JUST PUT SOME IN), so I had to walk to school. It takes around 20 minutes to get there, so I had to move pretty fast. While that was inconvenient and a pain in the ass, I think that the cold air woke me up quite a bit, which is good because I was exhausted and hadn't had breakfast. In the end, I did get to school on time and the presentation actually went really well. Though it was brief, I covered all the main important points, and the discussion afterward was pretty engaging. Mostly, I'm just glad that it went down well.

Came home. Found another letter from Minako in my mailbox. It seems that whenever I have a bad day, I come home to mail from her. I'm not sure how that happens, but I'm certainly not going to complain about that. It warms my heart, it really does. Anyway, went to bed shortly after lunch. Slept. Ughhhh. I had to skip my afternoon class but you know, I just wasn't up to it. I feel a little bad, but not much. Speaking of which, tomorrow is Remembrance Day, and I have class that day which is just... it doesn't sit right with me. We did move the class time to the afternoon, but even so, it's still the 11th. Considering the day, and the fact that I missed the screening for that class, I'm tempted to not go, but on the other hand I probably should. Argh.

On a completely unrelated note, I made black beans last night and it turned out really well. This was my first time cooking dry beans, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it was really no big deal. I did it in the slow cooker. Soaked for a night, then cooked it six hours, no problem. I'm just kind of proud of myself because it isn't often that I try to make something new. After I figure out how to do something, I keep doing that and don't try anything else. So, since I really like black beans I'll probably be doing this more often. Mum thinks it's weird that I'm eating all sorts of stuff that I never used to eat back home - lentils, beans, couscous... Just the way she says it, it's almost as if she thinks it's a bad thing. But there's nothing wrong with trying something new. Besides, lentils and beans are inexpensive. Money has been tight lately, so that's something I need to consider.

"Mummified" trees found in Norway date back to the 13th century

Note: I still have a lot of blank cards, if there is someone who wants a Christmas Card from me but has not yet given me their address.

Today was mildly productive. I went to the library far later than I intended, but I still managed to get quite a lot of work done as far as gathering materials goes. My project for Medieval is due this Tuesday, but fortunately it isn't worth a whole lot of the grade, and it's just the usual "talk for 20 minutes and pass around a 500-word handout + bibliography" thing. Still, considering the absolute failure of a paper that I handed in last week, I want to do a good job on this one, to prove to professor Liu that I'm not a complete airhead.

I've been looking for things to do for my textual editing assignment, too. Right now I'm kind of considering "The Owl and the Nightingale", because part of my project will be on that (at least, on its dialect, as I am still working on the subject of Middle English dialects), and I found a good source of information on this one. I'm not sure about it, though. I would really prefer a poem with one source, and furthermore this one is from the 12th or 13th century - I really have a much easier time with work from the 14th and 15th centuries... for obvious reasons. On the other hand, this particular one would give me a lot to write about, and I would be able to do a large amount of glosses... Hmm. We'll see.

Aside from school, I haven't really done anything. It's that time of year. Busy busy busy. I don't predict any more creative works getting finished until all my essays are through, though now that the short giftfic is finished I can type that up and edit it and then after it's received that can be posted... but that won't be for a while yet. Sigh. Ah, well. At least I can take the occasional moment to talk to certain people. A friend and I have been exchanging recordings back and forth, and it's fun - just, you know, talking for a minute or two about nothing in particular. I don't speak much in a day, except when my mother calls me, so it's good to actually say something. And as for her, well, it's neat to hear her just say any old thing. Creating a sort of familiarity. Getting used to the sound of her voice. Preparation for later, really. The summer, I mean.