The Apostle

This afternoon when I ought to have been studying, I watched a Robert Duvall movie called The Apostle, which is about an evangelical preacher in the American Deep South. It's a very good movie, but the thing I found most fascinating was the language.
They had a whole bunch of Holiness Temple preachers in full bore (real ones, that is), and it sounded like a tidal wave, they had all these lovely long dipthongised vowels, and were emphasising stressed words a lot, and used extra unstressed words to manipulate where the key words would be to get the best verbal emphasis. There were also a lot of terminal -e sounds being tacked on to words, as if they needed an extra syllable to get their mouths around the next cascade of words: self-e, don-e, Jesus-uh. The whole thing made me wonder if the preachers were anything like an Old English bard in full flight. Absolutely fascinating.

Another Entry For The Suppurating Wounds Club...

Courtesy of a blood test gone wrong. (I'm not ill or anything, I was at the doctor to talk about asthma stuff and asked to have my iron count checked, is all.) Also, I'm now officially asthmatic and have a shiny new inhaler of a superior sort in case of emergencies, as well as a free flu vaccination. My arm hurts.

I also have a picture from the dancing practice at the Te Aro Fair on Sunday and a nice shot of my sister's flatmate Michael with the nice butterfly we arranged to be painted on him. :-)

Commonplace Book

I haven't posted anything lately, so here goes another random poem (selected for no particular reason other than I happen to like it.)

Raferty
I am Raferty the Poet
Full of hope and love
With eyes that have no light
With gentleness that has no misery

Going west upon my pilgramage
By the light of my heart
Feeble and tired
To the end of the world

Behold me now
And my face to the wall
A-playing music
Unto empty pockets
--Raferty (trans. Douglas Hyde)

http://www.bartleby.com/250/142.html

It's Daylight Savings Today...

EDITED due to vile hacker spawn.

Frisbee Win!

We won our game! Convincingly, even, with a final score of 6-3.
Also, lots of fun to play, the last point was a series of improbably bizarre catches, house_monkey made a spectacular point scoring dive roll, and I got to run around lots which thankfully cleared the bad temper I'd been nursing all day.
(You know that you're having a bad day when you find yourself wishing that everyone else in the world but you had died in a plague. Stupid work laptops. Stupid crowds.)
But it's all better now. :-)

In Which I Chill Out

So it's been a good weekend, and I feel that I've managed to recover some of my missing spoons from last week. (Thanks, Debbie, that's such a cool metaphor.)
Anyway, I've been doing domestic type things all day like toddling along to dancing practice, and having bacon sandwiches for lunch, and catching up on homework, and making a really nice beef casserole that turned out to be not too peppery after all, and doing minor repairs on clothes, and watching Serenity and, well, chilling out.

[Big Zen sigh] Aaaaah. Bliss. Time for sleep now, I think.

And now for the news...

1. Babe has ceased to leak, to the relief of us both. Now I can remove all the strategically placed towels that have been protecting the upholstery.
2. I've been back at Varsity for the last three days. It's good to be back, but all of a sudden I'm feeling stupid again, and I'm not loving the crowds.
3. I can now finger spell my name.
4. I got turned down as a group leader for the PASS programme. Bah! For maybe 12 hours of not-very-well-paid work, they sure do give people the run-around.
5. The frisbee game last night was much fun, albeit with an unprecedented number of collisions, falls, near-misses and plain just falling over one's feet. One of the last was me (although since I was scoring a point at the time, I ain't complaining), although the scariest part was when John ran over the girl I was marking and I had to somehow navigate over the pair of them.
6. Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday. Our frisbee team celebrated with pancakes. Is anybody in the team actually a Catholic? Anyway, the pancakes were good, thank you for the idea, John. Now, what to give up for Lent? Smoking?
7. I'm all of a sudden feeling very tired and deflated. There's been a lot of stuff happening lately, and it all seemed to catch up at once. Yesterday's late night is probably not helping any. :-(

Steph