Lots of updateness!

[enismirdal]

1. Total number of books I own: Maybe 100 overall? But a very random selection from baby names to Star Trek novels.

2. The last book I bought: Deerskin but Robin McKinley

3. The last book I read: The last one I actually finished was Immortal Blood by Barbara Hambly. Currently reading Dog Wizard, same author.

4. FiveSome books that mean a lot to me:
The Silicon Mage (Barbara Hambly) - it made me cry a lot
Dog Wizard (Barbara Hambly) - because I went to so much trouble to get the book!
Greylady (Peter Morwood) - same reason!
The Silmarillion (Tolkien) - because it's magic
Book of Lost Tales 2 (Tolkien) - has the most beautiful versions of some of his most beautiful stories
Forever Free (Joy Adamson) - it touched me for some reason
Plant Physiology (Taiz and Zeiger) - because I need a plants book in the list and this is the Plants student's bible!

5. Five people I pick to do this (if they wish to):
Can't be bothered thinking.

Cos Uli told me to.
1) Total number of films I own on DVD/Video: Films? Erm...three, I think. FOTR, TTT and the first HP.

2) The last film I bought: TTT I think. I bought a Yu-Gi-Oh DVD (don't ask), but that's not a movie...

3) The last film I watched: Kingdom of Heaven. Not half bad, all things considered.

4) Five films that I watch a lot or mean a lot to me:
LOTR trilogy (yes, that's cheating, counting three as one - bite me!)
Four Weddings and a Funeral, because it's CUTE!
Love Actually, because it's CUTE!
Forrest Gump, because it's a lovely message - that you don't have to be something amazing to have amazing things happen to you.
Galaxy Quest, because it reminds me that I deserve to be mocked when I obsess over things.

5) Which five people are you passing the baton onto?
No one. Too much effort.

Met another gay PlantSci :D Was the only girl, but we were able to geek happily about the plants and the genetics garden while the LesBiGay exec acted like squabbling children and argued about how they couldn't have a bisexual LBGT chairperson (because in order to be chair you have to sleep with a prerequisite number of same-sex partners per year, I assume? *GROAN*) and suggested a 'Heterosexual Liaison' to give their fag-hags something to do (their words, not mine). Came to the conclusion that most of LBGT is lovely but some of the exec are a bit...well...annoying.

But the plants were nice. Took photos of nice trees and things. And pretty flowers in funny colours in the glasshouses. *happy*

The chalk grasslands were really nice, actually. The weather held until the last 10 minutes (when it poured down but I was too happy to care). We saw a flower called the Pasque Flower, which is getting a bit rare, and discussed how to make it more common (which seems to mostly consist of pulling up lots of hawthorns and keeping more sheep). Met Laura, who is like Young Tim only younger and a girl, but who still knows everything. She told us stuff about Plants. Talked to David (organiser) as he is one of the people I have been interested in doing summer work with :)

Countryside pretty, plants good. We looked at Devil's Dyke, which is basically an Anglo-Saxon ditch with a big bank on one side. We were looking at plants on the bank - which was VERY steep. I decided trying to climb up the steep bit was too much effort, and spied a nice gentle part of the bank just a little way along the ditch.

So made my way along the ditch to it.

This involved wading through nettles up to my waist.

I got a couple of stings, but really not many (combat pants - wonderful things!).

We also booed and hissed at evil invasives like sycamore, wondered why the Dog's Mercury was yellowing and I squeed at silverweed for being pretty.

Practical today was interesting but annoying long considering it's too-few days to exams and really I would have preferred to have been elsewhere. Supervisors still setting essays. Grr. Thursday a lovely three-supervision day. Aah well.

The interview meme sounds kind of interesting but I am dreadful at thinking up questions to ask other people.

More thinking of anything else I planned to write about sounds too much like effort. Blehness!

Comments

[emperor]

trousers! trousers!

[senji.livejournal.com]

arse! arse! ??

[naath.livejournal.com]

Argh. Clearly bisexual people aren't 'queer enough' grr arg. Reasons not to talk to the exec...

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Interview me anyway. If you can't think of five questions to ask me trawl through your flist and ask the first question from the first time you encounter the meme, the second from the second time, and so on....I am aware this could produce some rather silly questions.

Barbara Hambly. Yet another person on my long list of authors who I should really read more books by and haven't got around to. Bah.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Barbara Hambly does write some great books. Her lead characters tend to be a lot of fun and I do find myself drawn to them :)

I could do that with the questions, I guess. OK, here were are. The first 3 are from my Flist (hence the silliness!). The last two came from my own brain!

1. What is your fondest memory as a child?
2. What trivial thing irritates you most in life?
3. Tell me about the part of Canada you live in.
4. If you could choose the number of hours in a day, how many would you opt for and why?
5. What originally motivated you to get a LiveJournal?

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Mm, questions. You will be unsuprised to know that 3 was the one I found hardest to answer.

1. What is your fondest memory as a child?
Well, if one defines "child" to be under 16 years of age then one of the happiest times of my life happened when I was fifteen, but I suspect you wanted something longer than five years ago. The thing is, I have very few specific childhood memories; and even fewer happy ones. My fondest memories are probably those of football games both official and otherwise - I was a very good footballer until a series of injuries around the age of ten, and being picked first (which I generally was, or if not first then second or third...) is a rather special feeling.

2. What trivial thing irritates you most in life?

Spelling and grammatical errors, followed closely by technically correct but exceedingly poor use of English. Most especially spelling errors from people who know better because they've been corrected on scores of occasions already. It is fortunate that the question said "trivial" or else this would have got a very long screed about people who not only annoy me, but it annoys me that they annoy me.

3. Tell me about the part of Canada that you live in.

I considered a variety of approaches to this question; including taking my location of 53 degrees N and 52 minutes W and mapping this onto Canada as if it were the entire would, which came up with a small mostly Inuit mining town in Nunavut, but in the end I went with the obvious:

Cambridge is a fairly small city - about the same size as the one in the UK actually - in southern Ontario, about two-thirds of the way between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, sixty miles WSW of Toronto. Like most of Ontario and indeed most of Canada it is bloody freezing in winter and not all that warm in summer, but it is rather pretty.

(Yes, this is true...although I've never been there, but there was some work required to do to manage a bit of Canada to live in: http://www.city.cambridge.on.ca/visit.php)

4. If you could choose the number of hours in a day, how many would you opt for and why?

Oo er. I suspect if I changed the number of hours of daylight and the planet's rotational speed and stuff it would cause untold havoc both in terms of plants and so on and general disruption to human social and economic behaviour, so I think I would be best leaving it at 24, however insufficient this frequently proves to be.

5. What originally motivated you to get a LiveJournal?

atreic nagging me, and my suspicion that I was missing out on whole swathes of friends' lives which they never bothered to mention to anybody as a result of having written it down on lj and thus not told anybody else assuming they all knew. I was at least half-right. That and I do think that keeping a diary is a vaguely useful activity, although mine always seem to be far more depressed than I actually am.

[keiliss.livejournal.com]

Interesting. We like the same movies :)
And I think you would do scarily interesting interviews. If you change your mind, I'm on the list.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Well, since you suggested it:
1. Tell me a bit about South Africa, because the extent of my knowledge about your country really does come from the movie Cry Freedom. How hot is it? What kind of plants grow there? Do people still speak so many different languages there, and if so, what language does everything 'happen' in, if you like? What languages do you learn at school as 'foreign' languages? (OK, that's several questions in one, but I am curious and rather ignorant!)

2. How did you discover slash?

3. What is your favourite item of jewellery (if any) and why?

4. What is your favourite kind of fluffy animal?

5. What would you say the strangest thing you have ever eaten is?

And for bonus points:
6. How many more times can Uli get away with nearly killing Fingon before I would be justified in sending her a dozen packets of Jaffa Cakes through the post to get revenge?

[ford-of-bruinen.livejournal.com]

*rotfl* manymanymany times!

[keiliss.livejournal.com]

1. Oh you don't want much, do you? Okay, you asked for this :) My country - the tourist logo says 'A world in one country' We have mountains, semi desert, coastal areas, some semi tropical areas... I live in Cape Town, which is a port city. We have Table Mountain - it's the one that goes on all the postcards - a temperature average in the low to mid twenties, Robben Island is across the bay, we have great beaches, the wine's good......

We have a combined first world/third world economy (we can never do things the easy way) and, in the cities, an essentially Western culture.

In school we have to take two local languages, and it's usual for these to reflect the languages used in the area because, yes, we really do have 11 official languages. Choices offered for 'foreign' languages are usually German and French.

Correctly all local languages are equal but English tends to be more equal than others, it's the language of business and to quite a surprising extent, of government. . Afrikaans also will get you quite a distance, because the previous government made darn sure we all learned it, and I think isiZulu is the most widely understood indigenous language. Where I live you need English, Afrikaans and Xhosa.

Plants? You would love it here in the Cape - the world's smallest floral kingdom. We have proteas and ericas and......I found you quite a nice website because I am not clued up enough to answer that properly - http://www.calflora.net/southafrica/capeflora.html

I never thought I would be writing a short essay on 'Life in S.A.' as part of a lj post - lol.

2. How did you discover slash?
Um - it seemed a natural idea .... no really, when I found it my first thought was "Other people write this? I'm normal?????"

How did I find lotr slash? I was looking for pictures of Hugo Weaving and ended up on Elf on a Shelf and laughed solidly for two evenings - after which I was hooked. The nicest introduction to elf slash anyone could ever hope to have.

3. What is your favourite item of jewellery (if any) and why?

Jewellery - I wear a silver ankh and a little rune amulet round my neck all the time, but my favourite - you know, I have a couple of rings I'm really fond of, but I just realised while trying to answer this honestly that I'm no longer a big jewellery person.

4. What is your favourite kind of fluffy animal?
My dog says I have to say 'dog' - quietly so the cats don't hear. Also rather partial to cheetahs. *stamps foot* Cheetahs are, too, fluffy. Sort of. Small ones.

5. What would you say the strangest thing you have ever eaten is?
Crocodile. It tastes a bit like pork. Very tasty, surprisingly.

6. How many more times can Uli get away with nearly killing Fingon before I would be justified in sending her a dozen packets of Jaffa Cakes through the post to get revenge?

Soon, I would think. Possibly you should send just one packet by way of a warning....? I think that next time something happens to his leg should be the point of no return.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Wow! You could work for the South African tourist board. I am now desperate to go there and see it all! *ogles website pictures* It sounds...breathtaking. And fascinating. Like somewhere I'd never forget. *wonders when she will be able to afford a trip there!*

Wonderful essay, thank you! *bounces appreciatively*

Ooh. Crocodile sounds yummy actually :) And yeah, baby cheetahs are adorably fluffy :)

*prepares boxes of jaffa cakes for post*

[ford-of-bruinen.livejournal.com]

HEY! Interview me tooooooo!

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

OK, let's give this a go...

1. Describe your perfect meal.
2. What's the silliest thing you can remember doing?
3. Which would you rather have over to stay for the weekend, Fingon or Maedhros, and why?
4. Do you like to write with music on in the background? If you do, what kind of music most often?
5. What colour is your crockery set?
6. Do you have a favourite mug for drinking out of?
7. What thing from Sweden do you miss most?
8. This (http://www.rossequip.com/serv01%20Pictures/apt%20rock%20drill.jpg) is a pneumatic drill. Give him/her/it a name.
9. When are you going to stop being nasty to Fingon's leg?

[ford-of-bruinen.livejournal.com]

1. What to pick... hmmmm. As long as it is well cooked I will eat anything alsmost but lets start with what I feel like right now.

Starters - Deep fried brie cheese with raspberry coulis... wonderful creamy nummy starter (may me exchanged for deep fried mushrooms with garlic sauce... or melon with fresh berries or or..)

Main meal - Rostie potatoes (or hasselback potatoes) with a medium rare steak, mushrooms cooked in butter a thyme, brussel sprouts, and a nice, probably whiskey, sauce. (Or somethign simpler like a reindeer roast beef, slowly cooked on low heat until it is medium rare and only spiced with salt and pepper... ooooh yes)

Dessert - tricky... right now I think a nice, chilled, creamy vanilla custard tarte (the hotel i worked in used to do a perfect one) or possibly something simpleler like Cranachan with raspberries... or swedish waffles with ice cream and cloudberries/ artic bramble mmmmmmmm)

2. On my own? potentially studpidest and most dangerous was going on my own and meeting shaun the first time *lol* Silliest thing I participated in was in dramaschool where we had a live drama thing on in town which had us all dressed up as hooligans, hoodies, bikers and so on.. I was a hooker :P dressed as one only I can assure you... it was fun, silly, shocking and insane :D

3. Oh God this one is tricky. Fingon though. I would like to pick his mind on exactly why he went alone into enemy lands to save a cousin most beleived dead already.

4. Rarely actually. If I do... *thinks* some of the Helen Sjoholm songs I sent you, maybe some Tori Amos... Blind Guardian.. a few different musicals... actually mostly music with angsty lyrics.. there is a suprise. usually I don;t ahve anythign else on in the background when I write though. Partly because half my composing WHAT to write is done away from the computer.

5. that is like plates and stuff? The everyday stuff is white. The good stuff is a pale green and cream.

6. Nope, I don't drink hot liquids enough for that :)

7. People, the dog, the northern lights, certain foods that are totally unavailable here, traditions, the singind, the quirky northern sense of humour... many little things actually.

8. I named her over IM but I can;t remember anymore.. Tilda? no?

9. His leg is healing nicely.. jsut a bit slow ;;)