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kaberett+ my mother is home from a week hiking - I'd been really missing her - and she very nearly the first thing she did after getting in the door was go rummaging through her backpack to show me the rocks she'd brought back. And damn does she have good taste - in addition to a bunch of really pretty stuff, there were three that wouldn't be out of place in the reference specimens collection for second-years in my old department. (One garnet-bearing amphibolite - seriously, the whole bloody matrix was dark amphibole needles; one specimen of a unit boundary between calcareous deposits + mudstone, all heavily metamorphosed; and one staggeringly beautiful hand specimen-scale example of garnet pressure shadows - the garnet's fairly well developed, about two inches diameter, hosted in Glimmerschiefer [sorry, I've forgotten the English, it's one up from shale], with astonishing green chlorite in the pressure shadow to either side. I cannot even. Garnet pressure shadows happen because they're Really Bloody Hard and very difficult to deform, so you get little protected areas either side where the squooshier minerals have wrapped around 'em.)
+ my baby brother ran his half-marathon and finished in - I think I remember correctly - 1h52. Between them, they've raised very nearly £13.5k for the East Anglian Air Ambulance (and at least £250 of that has come in since they finished!). One of the team came in at 1h21, 19th (out of over 500 people entered)! This resulted in me giving him a foot massage at the dinner table, after dessert - he started out Deeply Sceptical, but ended up asking me to explain how I'd done it so that he could carry on with it himself...! (I get a lot out of physical contact, within certain parameters - hurrah autism, all else aside - and being able to make people feel better is a Really Big Deal to me, in this as in cooking.)
+ Papa - my maternal grandfather - phoned up specifically to ask if I knew about the big geological news this week, and to offer me the newspaper clipping on the topic. I jumped at the chance, and also at his offer to read the article to me - because he thought of me, and he phoned me, and he loves me for all that our last phone conversation degenerated into a monologue about The Awful Queers (no, I'm not out to him), and - I hadn't actually read any of the details yet, and the fact that I'd had the paper open in tabs since it went around the facebook geologists yesterday is really neither here nor there compared to the fact that he loves me. We've seventy years and a lot of life experiences and a good deal of politics between us, and yet-- and yet.
+ I am beta-reading two novels as they get written, at the moment, and it is so much fun.alexconall is posting excerpts in their DW on a daily basis at the moment; as mentioned in yesterday's version of this, I beta'd for them also a verse retelling of Snow White (thank you, jjhunter, for hooking us up!), and I adore the way we bounce ideas and phrases and structures off each other and Make Things Better. I am seriously having so much creative fun with betaing at the moment.
+ I've done some not-insignificant work on the DW wiki today, following discussion in the latest Salon atjenett's (mentioned yesterday, too) -- e.g. Volunteering is now a much more helpful landing page, with lots more info on ways to get started.
+ had An Realisation about brains, feelings, depression etc last night, and managed to reconstruct it this morning; it's something I think I want to take to counselling, which is good. Also good: since my mum got home I have shifted from "moderate depression" to "mild depression" in symptoms, which makes me laugh at myself rather.
+ posted to facebook about The Housing Situation and actually had it go several useful places, including the slightly disconcerting one that might involve me moving in with one of my first-year supervisors... (Cambridge people, PLEASE UNDERSTAND MY CONFLICTED FEELINGS. Other people natch welcome to as well, but erm backstory and 1.30a.m...)
+ I made a cake (to my astonishment, my father requested it, in spite of it being Super Austrian); and with my mother's assistance I did the next round of freezing berries (I tend to stall on bagging up the previous tray, because I am having Feelings about correct labelling, but if it's her not sticking the years on the bag it's fine and Not My Problem!).
+ have made arrangements to See Friendpeople - CK tomorrow for lunch (whereupon I will return Borges' Labyrinths and we will hopefully discuss it), and the Oxford section of the polymer including That One Lady on Tuesday via a steampunk magic show. (Hi, That One Lady. ♥)
+ I actually managed self-care, after a fashion: I realised that part of the problem was that I was cold, so I had a very hot shower and wrapped myself up warm and did other self-care-y things. Yes. Good. Well done, me, I am proud of you.
+ my baby brother ran his half-marathon and finished in - I think I remember correctly - 1h52. Between them, they've raised very nearly £13.5k for the East Anglian Air Ambulance (and at least £250 of that has come in since they finished!). One of the team came in at 1h21, 19th (out of over 500 people entered)! This resulted in me giving him a foot massage at the dinner table, after dessert - he started out Deeply Sceptical, but ended up asking me to explain how I'd done it so that he could carry on with it himself...! (I get a lot out of physical contact, within certain parameters - hurrah autism, all else aside - and being able to make people feel better is a Really Big Deal to me, in this as in cooking.)
+ Papa - my maternal grandfather - phoned up specifically to ask if I knew about the big geological news this week, and to offer me the newspaper clipping on the topic. I jumped at the chance, and also at his offer to read the article to me - because he thought of me, and he phoned me, and he loves me for all that our last phone conversation degenerated into a monologue about The Awful Queers (no, I'm not out to him), and - I hadn't actually read any of the details yet, and the fact that I'd had the paper open in tabs since it went around the facebook geologists yesterday is really neither here nor there compared to the fact that he loves me. We've seventy years and a lot of life experiences and a good deal of politics between us, and yet-- and yet.
+ I am beta-reading two novels as they get written, at the moment, and it is so much fun.
alexconall is posting excerpts in their DW on a daily basis at the moment; as mentioned in yesterday's version of this, I beta'd for them also a verse retelling of Snow White (thank you, jjhunter, for hooking us up!), and I adore the way we bounce ideas and phrases and structures off each other and Make Things Better. I am seriously having so much creative fun with betaing at the moment.+ I've done some not-insignificant work on the DW wiki today, following discussion in the latest Salon at
jenett's (mentioned yesterday, too) -- e.g. Volunteering is now a much more helpful landing page, with lots more info on ways to get started.+ had An Realisation about brains, feelings, depression etc last night, and managed to reconstruct it this morning; it's something I think I want to take to counselling, which is good. Also good: since my mum got home I have shifted from "moderate depression" to "mild depression" in symptoms, which makes me laugh at myself rather.
+ posted to facebook about The Housing Situation and actually had it go several useful places, including the slightly disconcerting one that might involve me moving in with one of my first-year supervisors... (Cambridge people, PLEASE UNDERSTAND MY CONFLICTED FEELINGS. Other people natch welcome to as well, but erm backstory and 1.30a.m...)
+ I made a cake (to my astonishment, my father requested it, in spite of it being Super Austrian); and with my mother's assistance I did the next round of freezing berries (I tend to stall on bagging up the previous tray, because I am having Feelings about correct labelling, but if it's her not sticking the years on the bag it's fine and Not My Problem!).
+ have made arrangements to See Friendpeople - CK tomorrow for lunch (whereupon I will return Borges' Labyrinths and we will hopefully discuss it), and the Oxford section of the polymer including That One Lady on Tuesday via a steampunk magic show. (Hi, That One Lady. ♥)
+ I actually managed self-care, after a fashion: I realised that part of the problem was that I was cold, so I had a very hot shower and wrapped myself up warm and did other self-care-y things. Yes. Good. Well done, me, I am proud of you.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 12:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 01:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 01:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 01:29 am (UTC):)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 01:47 am (UTC)You living with a first year supervisor sounds sub-optimal. Am I reading that right? What a tangle your housing situation is! I hope it gets resolved soon!
Also, yay for making other people happy as well as good self-care. So important, both things.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 09:23 am (UTC)Ditto hope on the housing sitch...
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 04:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 02:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 09:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 03:21 am (UTC)It highlights the several ways of sharing things with family -- fr'example, one, you share actual interests and tastes, and another, you don't, but you still keep a mental category of "things that might interest so-and-so that we can have a conversation around." With my own mother it's almost always the former, and with my father a bit of both. They're both nice.
(And with my Gran and linguistics I did sometimes have the experience that she'd share something I already knew, or that was not really accurate, about linguistics, because she knew I was into that. Like you, I took it as intended.)
Glimmerschiefer sounds like mica.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 09:21 am (UTC)Yes! Someone elsewhere tells me that it's mica schist in English (via Google translate, heh, I'd have used Leo but I was feeling lazy). I'm kind of amused that in spite of five years of undergrad geology [I took a year out because of the Mad], I'm enough of a volcanologist that I'm more likely to be able to remember the German than the English for Random Metamorphic Shit, as most of where I interact with RMS is in fact in German-speaking countries...
(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 12:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-09-09 03:49 pm (UTC)