every five years or so i look back on my life and i have a good laugh

-- or, better: every now and then, I'll be merrily getting on with handling some "recent", "young" rocks, and then I will stop and think holy shit, this thing I am holding is sixty-five million years old. Or I'll remember the first-year lecture where JJ stood at the front of the hall, tossing a piece of rock in the air casually, before coming out with, "I'm holding a piece of the mantle in my hand - and it's green."

xkcd's not wrong.

I manage to keep the sense of awe and wonder on the occasions I'm lucky enough to be in the same room as pieces of meteorite that predate the Earth, or in rocks that actual people have actually brought back from the Moon, but it's a little harder to remember in my day-to-day dealings.

Only then I do, and my mind gets blown all over again.

(Probably some of this is because, in chemistry - I used to be a chemist - femtoseconds can be a long time, and navigating the tension between timescales when I was studying geology and chemistry in parallel was... rather interesting. And yet here I am, and here the Earth is, and I can lie down on the ground with my shoulders against the earth and I can feel - I am surrounded by - my subject of study, my love. There's a reason I've got this icon of Toph. Now I walk in beauty, indeed.)

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: commentfic fest

Leave a prompt and I'll try to write you a drabble!

Feel free to browse prompts and write in response to them. Feel free to create multiple fills. Feel free to do things that are longer than drabbles. Feel free to link around the place.

Have fun. :-)

[yes I am very proud of this multifandom icon since you ask ;)]

3W4DW: November Cakes recipe transcript

Maggie Stiefvater (m_stiefvater), author of a range of books including WOMEN DO COOKING AND THEY'RE AWESOME and WOMEN ARE MORE GENERALLY AWESOME and BECHDEL TEST PASSES and WEREWOLVES and CARNIVOROUS HORSES FROM THE SEAAAAAA and also, alas, Everyone In Canada Is White, invented a foodstuff for one of her novels, then invented the recipe as a result of popular fannish demand. It's freely available online, but only as an image, which personally I consider to be a bit of a pity.

And so! Here is a transcript of the recipe for Maggie Stiefvater's November Cakes (version II), as featured in the aforementioned flesh-eating-horses remote-Scottish-island novel The Scorpio Races (which, incidentally, I adore). Because I love you, I've looked up and included weights as well as volumes, and gas marks and degrees Celsius as well as Fahrenheit. [insert standard fannish disclaimers about This Does Not Belong To Me here!]

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