A window into Enismirdal's mind

Good things: Ran second of 2 online workshops for little Scoping Project. Generally went well, met some good people and had some good discussions. Hopefully it will lead to collaborations and projects.

Bad things: Banku has died. She was making the odd peepy noise for a couple of weeks, but initially this seemed to be a response to seeing us - she'd be silent, then see us, run over and start squeaking while begging for treats. Earlier this week, she had stopped peeping but was visibly panting, looked rather bloated and a bit sad. So took her to the vet (and of course, once an appointment was booked, she looked 10x better and stopped panting and looking bloated and looking sad...). Vet suspected URI, prescribed antibiotics and painkillers. I popped her back in the cage and I think she must have gone underground and died from the stress of it all on top of whatever was up with her already. Obviously upset because I was looking forward to the meds helping and her getting back to her usual self. At approximately 10 months, she was the youngest of my three. (Crumpet is about 16 months and Kookoo is about 22 months old, so both of them are mature-to-elderly.)

Looking forward to having a simple and peaceful weekend...

I love how once a household has pets, it seems to evolve terminology, grammar, in-jokes and a sort of internal culture that only makes sense in the context of the pet.

Examples:

"Meeple one? Meeple one?"

Translation: "Meeple, would you like a sunflower seed? Can you remember what one even is or how to get one?" (He gets five sunflower seeds each time if he can stay on task for that long.)

 

"What's Kookoo up to?"

"In sphincter."

Translation: "Kookoo is sitting inside the large woven grass hide that has a normal arched front opening, but a side opening that has a vaguely puckered circular appearance." She likes to go in there and think. And judge.

 

"Crumpet, crackee?"

Translation: "Crumpet, would you like a sunflower seed?" Sunflower seeds are basically like a drug to dwarf hamsters, and they will sell their soul for more.

 

How amazing are animals, that they get us basically talking nonsense with them at the centre of our universe?

It has been a good year. Maybe I should do one of those end of year meme questionnaire thingybits. For some reason I associate them with naath and chess?

The world has sucked but my little corner of it has done well and that is comforting.

I have enjoyed reconnecting with Dreamwidth, and with various humans I know.

I read your posts, I just don't always have a meaningful response. But I like reading about what is happening in your worlds.

For me:
- things are OK
- I like our house and at the moment the neighbours don't stress me out, so home is a sanctuary
- there are 3 hamsters, and they are all good. Meeple is getting old now, and so is Bao but Robos don't show age as much. Kookoo is not old yet but is lazy and needs to exercise more
- CRI remains wonderful and I guess after 13 years "current romantic interest" probably needs upgrading to a new rank
- changing jobs was probably the best decision I made in the last 5 years and has improved my mental health and life satisfaction greatly
- I am enjoying the journey of exploring and embracing neurodiversity, and particularly enjoy the realisation that I was never a crap duckling, I was an entirely adequate swan all along, and this has helped me be kinder to myself, understand my limits better, and set some better boundaries, yay!

Just realised I updated Facebook but not here...

Lupanine was a real champion. After the whole pyometra thing over July and August, she bounced back amazingly. For a while, it was like she was a hamster 6 months younger, zooming around and doing all sorts of projects in her cage. I was grateful for every single day, because each one was a gift I didn't expect to have. I'd never seen a hamster actually recover from pyo and have a good quality of life before.

But time went on and age started to creep up. Hamsters don't live a long time, and ones born from random breeding with a large congenital hernia even less so. She was still perky and friendly when she was awake, but she slept more. She got more picky about her food. She lost some weight. We started to supplement the food with hamster-safe baby foods as she'd devour them and hey, it kept her weight up.

( And it seemed like she ran out of gifts to give. :( )

It's been hard. Especially for CRI, who isn't used to hamsters and their little, intense lives, but for both of us, because Lupanine-Bob was both of ours really.

It's been harder because the cage has sat there all week, huge and empty, staring at us, without a little orange loon bouncing around it.

It's been harder because we are about to move house, and then later we have a holiday, so it's not sensible for us to have another hamster till nearly Christmas. So I have to be hamsterless for over a month.

But I suppose it's better to go all of a sudden like that than spend weeks feeling rotten.

I have a big packet of love that I will give a hamster when the time is right, but for now it is sitting inside me ready to burst.

So at some point, I will be getting a Deltamethrin-Bob, or a Tithonia-Bob, or a Quercetin-Bob, or a Rooibos-Bob. I will find a hamster nobody else wants, and love it very much.

For now, I will remember my brave little orange hamster, with very much love.

...I just remembered takeaways exist and can deliver to houses.

Longish day at work (stayed late as popular colleague was giving an evening public lecture), CRI away, don't fancy cooking and didn't really want to divert to one of the big supermarkets on the way home and go through shopping faff.

But if I want to, I can use the power of the internet to furnish me with curry and I don't even have to talk to humans!

Like many others, moving to DW. Not comfortable with having my Stuff held under Russian law for longer than is necessary to import the old LJ stuff into DW, sorry.

Same username. Currently importing entries.

Once all the archive is moved across I'll probably delete this fairly quickly. We had some good times, LJ, but you are not the same site that the orignal inventors had in mind back in the day.

OK, so thought experiment...

A magic portal opens up between you and a magical parallel universe that's pre-industrial (or near-as) - think Narnia, Arda, Damar, Valdemar, pick your poison - and you get to control what influence from our collective Earth culture goes through. What do you introduce, and what do you intentionally deny/spare them?

I mean, we need to make a few assumptions: do they have polio? Is it the same as our polio? If the new world has preventable diseases that are like ours, and we have vaccines/treatments, I couldn't in good faith hold them back. I mean, could you really say, "Sorry, we want to keep your culture and world pure, so your daughter is just going to have to get polio, oh well"?

And I guess if they grow, say, potatoes, and we grow potatoes, and we have better yielding varieties, I'd want to introduce the new varieties, because how can you really refuse a community the option of increasing their yields by 200% or something? But you'd have to do it without introducing all the associated pests and diseases.

But they probably have their own crop pests and diseases. So do you introduce pesticides? If I met a culture and I wanted to help, could I, in good conscience, say, "Look, here's lambda-cyhalothrin, I'll sell it to you"?

Of course, then it gets more complicated. If they had massive reserves of a trace metal, like vanadium or something and an unnamed other Earth government approached them, bypassing you, saying, "Look, if you let us mine your vanadium, we'll build you nice roads and sell you cheap cars and cool gizmos," how hard do you argue with the hypothetical magic Queen that no, she really doesn't want that to happen to her country and the road-building will involve introduction of invasive plants, the quarrying will rip out sections of forest and grassland and they won't be the same for millennia, etc.

Makes me want to write a novel. I guess the Sparrow and Children of God touched on some of the ideas, but were really about other matters.

Perhaps I'll doodle some scenes about it...

Today I was scheduled to lecture both in the morning and the afternoon.

Oh, did I mention that at our university, a "lecture" is normally a 3 hour session?

Finished both of them early, but am still wiped out. *keels over*

I imagine some other writery types on LJ can relate to this...

World-building is jolly good fun when you're shaping an original world - or even fleshing out one someone else made. But I've been finding lately it's very easy to get a bit carried away, especially if you have areas of personal academic interest or expertise. Unfortunately for me, a combined interest in the history of Normal People, and a job that is as much international development as it is research means I have had time to do a fair bit of musing about how a pre- or non-industrial village in a fictional fantasy pre-industrial (with or without magic) country might or might not work.

So you start with your character and their village. You decide the country will be temperate, perhaps cold end of Cfb climate, similar to the coldest and rainiest bits of the UK. Great. The character lives on the coast, in a small village. After some musing, you decide it's a limestone bedrock.

Fine, what does the village do to support itself? Well, it's coastal, so there's probably a fair bit of marine economy - fishing? OK, who goes fishing - everyone? Just the men? All the men, or just some? What do they catch - deep sea fish? Shallow water fish? Flatfish from the bottom? Do they just catch shellfish of some description? What do the women/non fisherfolk do - can they collect anything from the shore?

But people can't just live on fish, so what forms the staple diet? You've established it's pretty windswept, and limestone soil means alkaline, so anything acid-loving is out. The soils, you decide, are rubbish - along with the cold and wet climate, that probably means large-scale wheat cultivation may be tricky. So what's the main starch? Potatoes? Well, then you have to take into account that potatoes are introduced to Europe, so you're shifting the available botanical diversity and have to consider why potatoes and not quinoa/tarwi/tomatoes and so on... Maize won't grow (too cold), cassava likewise (same reason). Barley might - if your character is eating a lot of barley bread, does she cook it at home - can all the households afford a bread oven and the fuel to run it? Perhaps you should invent another sort of starchy root, like a temperate cassava, that works on poor soils?

What are they using to fuel their cooking fires? If you've got a windswept landscape and poor soils and have already decided there isn't a lot of woodland, firewood will be expensive, right? But it's alkaline soils so there won't be peat or heather to burn (indeed, Ericaceae in general probably won't be an option). Dung? Driftwood? Invent a plant that grows like heather, but on alkaline soil?

Do the people keep livestock? If so, how many, and where? If timber is expensive, what are houses made of? Where do people get cooking utensils - is there a smith or a wood-turner in the village, or must they trade? If so, what do they trade? How do they get new clothes - can they grow flax for linen? Are there are enough sheep to provide wool? Do they have access to milk, cheese, butter in any quantity? What do they eat over winter? What do they do for vitamin C? Do they drink water, small beer, tea or something else? Is anyone in the village literate?

Where else do they travel to - nearby towns? Do they have a road? Who else travels that road? Where is the next nearest village? Do they talk to the people there? Do they intermarry a lot, a little? Does the character have extended family in those other villages, or in her own village? In pre-industrial societies with large families, I guess it's pretty normal for families to be large - how far, in this one, would her parents siblings' or grandparents' siblings have moved away? How many family members would she associate with growing up - cousins? Second cousins?

...yeah, it all gets quite intense.

I'm starting to realise not all these things necessarily have to be dealt with in the text of a story. Perhaps I need to make a personal Wiki-style set of backing documents that deal with this stuff and then I can draw on it as needed where it's actually critical to the story to know whether or not they would realistically own an oak table or stuff their mattresses with heather, straw, grass or something else!

On Friday I got an e-mail from the hamster lady saying, "You can visit on Sunday if you like? There are three hamsters that might suit you."

So we dashed down to Pets at Home on Saturday to get the last few bits and bobs (litter, some more toys, etc.) and I got a train to the hamster lady's house on Sunday morning.

There were three hamsters. A 6 month old dark golden satin female, very bold and friendly and busy. Would happily have homed her. A 12 week old chocolate satin female, with enormous Dumbo ears, still a little jumpy but friendly and sweet. Would happily have homed her too. A 6 month old cream female, friendly and active, but with a large hernia that probably won't ever cause her problems but needs watching just in case. "The fact that she's 6 months old and hasn't had any issues yet means she probably never will and whatever she dies of will probably be unrelated," said the hamster lady. Apparently while surgery is possible, the success rate is abysmal - there's so little tissue on a hamster that if you stitch one bit, another bit can tear and it just ends up awful. "She's nice but doesn't get handled as much because most people aren't interested in her," said the hamster lady.

And because I am a soft-hearted sucker, that was what decided me. Any of the hamsters would clearly be lovely pets. But the young chocolate would be snapped up within a week or two. The other mature hamster likewise shouldn't take too long to find a forever home, as she's utterly lovely. But if hernia-hamster is going to struggle to find the right owner, I will be that right owner, I decided.

So I went home with a pretty cream hamster with a reasonably large but unproblematic hernia. She settled in well, spent an hour or so exploring her new giant!cage, and then slept for the rest of the evening.

I called her Lupanine, but we call her Bob to her face.

Things Lupanine likes:
- broccoli
- raspberries
- salad burnet
- tunnels
- wheels
- new smells
- new sounds
- digging holes

Things Lupanine dislikes:
- nothing? She's not that excited by lentil and chickpea sprouts but still eats them. And she thinks hamster food is boring but OK.

Things Lupanine loves like Class A drugs and would do pretty much anything to get more of:
- sunflower seeds
If you feed her sunflower seeds she climbs all over the cage looking and begging for more and makes a complete spectacle of herself until she figures out that she's not getting any more. This is handy in helping her get more tame and settled and will later be handy if I decide to teach her entertaining tricks.

I think she is happy. So am I. She has a forever home. And I have a small furball who I will love and cuddle and call Bob.

( Lupanine the hamster )