A Toast

This has been a very strange weekend, the normal parts of which would have made an interesting diary entry in themselves, but have rather subsumed themselves into the good news and the bad news.

The good news was visiting Ayla, the very new daughter of some friends, who is cute and sweet and very Awwwww-worthy.

The bad news is finding out that Steve Hodgson, a good friend, has suddenly died of a heart attack. Steve was one of those really neat guys that form a place in your psyche that belongs to them and them only. He was cuddly and kind, and would occasionally giggle at a particularly good joke. He was one of the most lethal people I know, all with a twinkle in his eye. He was technically very knowledgeable, and liked passing his knowledge on. He was exceptionally good at helping people overcome what they had thought were their limits, and helping them find out that their limits weren't nearly so bad after all. He looked out for people. He was one of a small group of people who knew my father, and a big link with the past feels broken. As I write this, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that he isn't around any more.

Anyway. Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses and drink to old friends gone too soon, and new friends to whom everything is new and exciting.

I Have Done A Dreadful Thing.

First off, a big Happy Birthday to Ed and Fraser who both celebrated their natal days yesterday.

On the other hand, since I gave a little music box to Fraser, and he's been playing it intermittently all day, I'm beginning to wonder about the wisdom of my actions.

Babe

My cat Babe has just died.

She'd been having a little trouble eating for a while, and a lot of trouble eating recently, and it turned out to be a cancerous growth underneath her tongue, for which the long term prognosis from treatment was virtually non-existant. The vet was very nice about it - he let me sit with her for a while alone before he put her to sleep, and after, and gave me lots of tissues and things. I know that this was the best thing for her, but I still feel really bad about it.

She was both the sweetest and most stubborn cat I've ever known. I inherited her from a flatmate about eight years ago, and through that she turned from an incommunicative scaredy-cat to one that thought that cuddles, and play, and purring was the only way to go. She's been the most constant thing in my life through three moves, a new city, a new job, and giving up that job to go to University again, and she took all that disruption in her stride. She's taken her various health problems, the most serious of which was blindness, also in her stride, and despite everything has always managed to be happy about life.

The funniest thing I ever saw her do was claw open a bag of catnip on my bed. I found her a little while later sprawled in approved Take Me Now position, with little green leaves spread all over her and the bedspread. The second funniest thing was when she fell in a fish pond - she was the most dignified bedraggled cat I've ever seen. She used to decide that it was time we went out into the garden, she used to decide that it was time we went to bed, and when she'd decided these things she'd jump up and run to the door everytime I got up, and keep on doing it until I followed her. She had the most delicate paws. Since I've been home I keep expecting her to wheeze into the room and expect a cuddle, or thump down the stairs after me because she wants me to let her out the back door.

Catherine once said of her that she was like a dreadfully polite old lady who yet managed to indicate to Cat that she was less than the chewing gum beneath her shoe. She also said this: To My Sister's Cat. She liked sitting on computer keyboards and boxes. She liked sleeping next to something warm. She liked to purr.

Repatterning.

I have this Thing about posture. Basically, I've had trouble standing up fully straight for, well, as long as I can remember, and it's been bugging me for, not as long as I can remember, but certainly since early adolescence when all that self-critical self-examination kicks in. In my case, this wasn't helped by my mother's well meaning bullying about seeing physios and doing exercises to help straighten out - basically I, and I think my sister Cat, got stronger bodies but serious emotional issues out of the experience. To the couple of people I know who have Things about eating and food, yeah, I get it. I don't give a toss about breast size, don't mind (much) if I have a stomach and bum that aren't the flat feminine ideal currently prevalent, but I really really mind having a curvy spine. I also get the whole suite of self-destructive behaviours that go along with having a Thing, in my case slouching, or sagging, or not getting any exercise, all of which would help the thing that I have a Thing about.

I have a tendency to go through phases of trying to help myself out, and letting it slide, and I'm currently in the upslope of the former, brought on by my mother getting bad arthritis in her feet. I tend to inherit body type stuff from her, so I went to see a podiatrist for advice on preventative measures, and instead of examining my feet (well, he did a little) he gave me this big big talking to about using my abdominal muscles to support the rest of me, and walking more softly (hey, sore ankles are linked to a tendency to stamp when walking. Go figure!), and yet a new set of exercises which he said would make the postural stuff easier.

I have to admit that the guy has a point. I had some very weird days when I was trying to start the whole suck-tummy-in-thing, walk-softly-without-losing-all-forward-acceleration-thing, sit/stand-up-straight-thing and everything else in my body was complaining about being out of wack, but things seem to have settled down and I'm noticing more flexibility and definitely more airflow, which is cool. But it's still a bother having to remind myself of what I ought to be changing all the time - some advice I was given for meditation once was that the mind is like a cat tied by a string, the cat will keep wandering, so you have to notice that it's gone walkabout and gently draw it back by the string to where you want and sit it down quietly, and then again and again and again until the cat settles down. And so my example is sitting on an hour long flight, with an hour previous in the waiting room because the plane was delayed, with my back straight and my feet well-balanced on the floor spending the entire time thinking about how much I just wanted to sag. Stupid cat. Stupid string.

Love to all.

Commonplace Book

There is an obvious danger in the business of examining a labyrinthine world such as that of the Confessions from the kind of perspective I have assumed. Any optic one chooses risks setting certain features into a prominence that may turn out to have been exaggerated; it may at the same time minimize the importance of features which, examined through a wider lens, turn out to be far more prominent than the narrower vision could allow. Every scholar fears the moment when he may have become prisoner to a point of view he has cultivated far too long than was good for his objectivity. And yet, his only therapy is to present the findings that his point of view enabled him to uncover, even at the risk of being premature. Others, then, may succeed in widening his vision before it is too late. In presenting his findings, he must (for sweet clarity's sake if for nothing else) suppress the ever-nagging temptation to resort to the subjunctive: "If my view of the matter be correct, then it would follow that Augustine means this." But the indicative mood, habitual in English exposition, tends to convey an air of greater confidence than the writer himself often enjoys: give me a scholar and he will know what I mean. My hopes are that whatever features of the Confessions' landscape I may have left in the shade were not deliberately ignored, or half-consciously excluded, because their message positively militated against the thesis propounded here, and that the Augustinian scholar will be sensitive to the number of hesitant subjuntives that still tremble behind my regular use of the indicative mood.

O'Connell, Robert J. St Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969, pp viii-xi.

Well it made me laugh. I know the feeling.

Exams all done

La la la.

Now I just have to write this Augustine essay and go to a party. Christine Franzen, who is lovely, is giving a party for her Old English students to celebrate the end of the exam. And she brought around apple and St Swithin's cream for good luck this morning before we all started.

I'm on the downhill slope gaining speed. :-)

(Oh, and pack for a work trip up to Auckland. To all the people in Auckland [waves], I'll be there for two and a half weeks from Wedensday evening, catching up would be cool.)

The Phone Is Dead. Long Live The Phone!

I am now in mobile communication again, having gone out to buy a replacement phone in my post exam celebration phase. It has a light. And takes photos. And will hopefully not forget what time it is anytime I should acidentally jar it, all of which are features which my old phone did not have. The shop assistant at Vodaphone was weird though. He had this thing about not meeting my eyes, and seemed in general not particularly interested in selling me anything. Seriously, ReptonInfinity who had come along with me did most of this guy's selling for him.

In other news, has anyone had the experience of studying really hard for an exam and then realising just before it starts that they ought to have been studying for a different exam entirely? I just have - I twigged halfway through yesterday that it wasn't Old English today, it was Latin. So Stupid! Argggh! And it isn't like people don't tell me these things anyway. In the aftermath, and despite the panic, I think I did OK. There were some bits that I didn't do as well as I'd wanted to, but I remembered a lot more of the course work than I was afraid I would. Phew. And now I'm well ahead in study for Old English on Monday. Now that's a relief.

Hang on, my new phone has just rung from the other room...

RIP Phone

My cell phone has died. Or at least it's refusing to charge despite all my efforts, and it isn't a nice enough phone to worry about repairing. (And I never liked it much anyway.)

I'll get a new one, probably next week when I don't have exams over my head, in the meantime don't try to call me except on the landline.

Cold Enough To...

So on the weekend I went up to Rotorua with ReptonInfinity and a nice American chap called Sam who hitched along for the ride so that Repton and Sam could go to the Brass Monkey frisbee tournament. It turns out that Brass Monkey is for Repton what SF conventions and NAAMAs are for me - he goes every year, hangs out with the same group of people from all over the country (with some new additions), and they all have a bunch of traditions about what they do, like always going to the same Backpackers, and counting the seconds for a new person to figure out how the lock to the hot pool works.

On Saturday, the two of us were straight out tourists and went to visit a thermal area called Waimangu, which over a hundred years ago held the eighth natural wonder of the world, the Pink and White Terraces, and now has lots of cool landmarks and features left over from the explosion of Tarawera in 1886. What I thought coolest, (well not coolest literally) was the lake that looked like someone had dug out a footpath around it. In fact, they hadn't, but the lake fluctuated in water level a lot, and the silica rich water had built up the ledge just as high as its overflow level. Also, we found out the joys of off-season tourism - a 4km walk, and no-one in sight until we got to the boat jetty. Also we did gondolas and luges at the Skyline Skyrides place, which had nice views and whizzing around fast and that.

On Sunday, I started off as a proper groupie and watched Repton being a black ninja spider out on the field for a while on a Very Cold Day before losing groupie status and buggering off to a cafe to get warm and do some study. Yes, there are people that enjoy running around all day in the cold and wet, but I'm not one of them. I think it's highly relevant that all the players got a scarf with their registrations. Last year it was wooly socks and the year before beanies. Not a co-incidence. :-)

I think we all enjoyed ourselves...

So there was this guy...

...called Sejanus. He did pretty well for himself, in 1st C AD terms, came from a poor family (with some decent breeding), was liked by his boss Tiberius (the emperor), got a lot of power and prestige, had it off with the emperor's daughter-in-law even. Good going for a small-town hick. Then it all went wrong and he crashed and burned. And everybody hated him then, if they hadn't hated him already, and lots of historians said really nasty things about him, especially a chap called Cornelius Tacitus.

Then the Middle Ages happened, and people pretty much forgot about Tacitus, and Sejanus, until some guy called Boccacio found an old manuscript and thought that old Cornelius was pretty cool. Soon, lots of people thought that Tacitus was pretty cool. Not Sejanus, though. They really really hated him. Lots. Even when they'd changed their minds from Tiberius being a shifty dissembler to being a cool and cunning planner, they still hated Sejanus. You could even go to prison for suggesting that someone, like perhaps the King of England's country-bred pretty-boy favourite, was just like Sejanus. Lots of hatred, and even more comments about the thunder of heaven's rage crashing down on those pesky social climbers. Sounds like a lot of rage. But hey, this is the Renaissance by now, and there's lots of political stuff going on that no-one can do anything about, maybe it makes people feel better to have a nice simple villain to rage at. And they can even point out how he died, horribly, so they can feel all righteous about the existing social order. Gosh.

2000 words, somewhat less eloquently expressed, all handed in. Yay! (I am such a hack.)

Another project to hand in tomorrow, another due in two weeks which I've...kind of started, and then all I have to worry about is exams. Phew. It's not so much that I'm on the downhill stretch as that I can see the top of the hill. To all the students who have made it to the end of the semester in somewhat better order: I hate you I hate you I hate you.* That's the favourite phrase of my Latin teacher. Clearly, I'm learning something here. :-)

(*) The fact that many of my woes are entirely self-inflicted is entirely beside the point.

EDITED TO ADD: The Old English project is now done and being printed. My, it's a wonderful view from the top of the hill...

Now I Have A Bicycle. Ho. Ho. Ho.

So for my birthday, Mum gave me a certain sum of money and told me to buy something I wanted with it. Directly I repaired to Pennyfarthings the Bike Shop, with ReptonInfinity as technical advisor, and got myself a bike.

It's very shiny, and has front suspension, and lots of gears, and lights, and a pannier rack, and a Cool Helmet as opposed to a plain old boring one. It's all good, in fact, except for getting home up Brooklyn Hill. I needed lots of rest stops, and in fact, just after Brooklyn walked part of the way because my legs had given out, my lungs had given out, and my arms were pretty shaky as well. Zooming down the lesser hills up around the Ridgeway was lots of fun to make up for it, though, and Repton says that the distance up Brooklyn I can get without a break is a good measure of how fit I am, so I'll keep plugging away at it.

To harp on a theme, in case anyone hasn't gotten the news that I'm having a birthday party tomorrow, you're invited, assuming that you know me well enough to know my address (or my email address to ask what the physical one is. :->) It's from 7pm until whenever.

Cheers all,

Stephanie

The 48

So the reason I've been mostly incommunicado this weekend is my excursion into the 48 Hour Film Competition, with my team the Flying Monkeys. We had to make a movie in 48 hours with the following random elements:

Character : Jerry/Gerri Reed, a hypochondriac
Prop: A rope
Dialogue : "What do you call that?"

We made a serious War movie, with serious issues, in Lego. Will load it into YouTube after the whole business with heats and finals and stuff is done.

Medieval Manuscripts

The National Library of New Zealand has a medieval manuscript collection. Most of them are gifts plus the odd rare purchase, and sadly the library isn't really sure what to do with them - they don't have enough volumes in any one area to form a decent research library, so often they're stored away in a climate controlled room or occasionally brought out for display.

On the other hand, if you're lucky, one of your lecturers will arrange a class visit and you can go in and drool over them, admire the pictures, and even read them. (They're actually unrestricted books, so anyone can go in and read them, usually visiting scholars or people from Vic.)

The stars of the collection are both by Boethius, De Consolationes Philosophiae and De Musica, the first of which is very famous, and the second of which has ancient musical theory combined with a work by Guido of Arezzo who invented the current musical notation system. Very cool.

Things to be surprised about:
1. Exactly how small and how neatly scribes can write when they put their minds to it.
2. What good nick the manuscripts are in. Vellum is really tough and it holds its edges well. Interestingly, this is why some fragments have survived, they were cut up and used in the binding for printed volumes.

Never trust anyone over thirty...

Happy birthday to me!
Happy birthday to me!
Happy birthday to me-eeeee (and Cat)
Happy birthday to me!

(Ahem. Moving right along.)

I have discovered...

That my mother, at the tender age of sixteen, once dated a Dutchman named Arnaut Groenevelt, whom she met at a ballroom dancing class. As the days and weeks passed in her pursuit of the Foxtrot and the Maxina, the length of her skirt migrated upwards from a demure knee length to the heady heights of the 60s undie-huggers. My grandmother no doubt noticed but, to the immense gratitude of my mother, did not comment.

That I should have a relative who dated someone with such an interesting name is, I feel, an instant source of family prestige. I have been to Palmerston and back this weekend for a family dinner, which was fun, but I'm fair exhausted from hanging out on buses so much. I should really go to bed now. G'night.

I Feel Really Awful

Take your pick as to what's a cause and what's a symptom:
- crashing with a cold yesterday afternoon, right when I thought I'd finally gotten rid of it.
- not enough sleep for the third night running, along with the joys of the Mysterious 1am Impossible To Sleep Through Beep that nevertheless took me 40 minutes to track down
- crying all the time
- being angry all the time
- picking fights with a friend and even when I know I ought to be sorry, somehow I can't make myself feel that way
- bursting into tears when Mum called to see how I was
- bursting into tears when Cat called to cheer me up
- thanking whatever powers may exist that I have a cat that likes company and emergency cuddly toys

Catherine has just suggested hiring myself out as a zombie or vampire. The idea has some merit. And now my nose has started running and my room is out of tissues. @#^$$#

Alter Egos

Well not actually. Just that I got a random message from someone living in Michigan who happens to have the same name, and happens to have a daughter called Catherine (actually Kathryn, but close enough for government work.) [Waves]

Babe

My cat's new favourite spot to perch is a box of books in my room. I have no idea why: it isn't the nearest she can get to the heater, there is no sun beam handily situated there, and I challenge any feline bum to find books more comfortable than carpet or a cushion. Go figure.

Review: The Company

Easter has just been and, in the dollop of free time preserved by my assiduous refusal to go to things, I did a certain amount of movie watching. My local video shop is the estimable Aro Video Shop, and so there was a wide selection of 'thinky' movies available, and I ended up with the serious art world's answer to Center Stage: The Company.

Happy escapism, this is not. It's about the Joffrey Ballet Company of Chicago, except it isn't set inside the company, it's starring the company. It shows glimpses of the working and personal lives of the company members over a period of time, roughly the amount of time it takes to produce a new ballet from the first meeting with the choreographer to the first night, with frequent interspersements of the performances that the company is working on in the meantime. It's not at all linear - the fragile threads of story that you end up seeing are built out of a mosaic of small private moments, often of people you don't know the name of, and will never know the endings of. The mosaic style of movie (or book), I confess I find quite tiring to watch, all the information comes out of small details and you need to pay constant attention to keep track of what's happening. It was also filmed in an uncomfortable manner. There were lots of long and medium shots with very few closeups, often dark lighting, or shots looking straight at the stage lights, the view was frequently obscured by other people and various furniture, and I realised after a while that we never got to see anyone's eyes or feel that the people filmed were looking at us, which added to the uncomfortableness of it. As with other works that are built as a mosaic, somewhere between a third and two thirds of the movie I found I was wondering why I was still watching.

In this movie, the answer is the dancing. It's absolutely gorgeous. There are no body doubles or camera tricks to make people look better than they are, this is pure unadulterated magical movement, and the nett result of the camera and lighting weirdness is the closest experience to actually being at a live performance that I've seen. The company has a wide repertoire, from the opening (to an electronic soundtrack) of dancers in a weirdly abstract sequence with the rustle of long ribbons and the pat of the dancers' feet as the main sounds heard, to the excursions into classical ballet, exquisite solo pieces, and the final production number of the Giant's Mouth, it's all wonderful. Often the dancing pieces appear without comment or explanation, simply as the performance that the company is working on just then, often we are shown the progression from rehearsal into final performance.

Just lovely.

Walking the Skyline

Ooooooooow.

I just got back from walking the Skyline track with John. We didn't do the whole track, just the part from the Northland Cemetary to Mt Kau Kau then down to the train station in Khandallah, so there's a section around Karori and Makara that I haven't seen yet. I had a good time, but I'm rather tired now.

Statistics:
Length of full track: 12km
Length we walked: Dunno, exactly. 9ish? 10?
Time: Four and a quarter hours.
Hardest part: Walking up onto the track from the cemetary to Johnston Hill. There weren't any horrendously steep bits, it just kept on going and going and going. The section after that was a nice undulating amble over the top ridge of someone's farm, though, so it helped for getting my breath back.
Steepest gradient: Near Mt Kau Kau, but we were going down hill for those bits.
Difference in fitness between John and me: Lots.
Easter egg encounters: A victory egg at the top of Mt Kau Kau, and an egg encountered in passing that someone had left on a survey marker at the top of Mt Johnston. A libation for Easter, maybe?
New Foodstuffs 1: Kellog's All-Bran Baked Bars. Yummy, filling, and full of things that are actually good for you! (Bran and molasses, and things like that.)
New Foodstuffs 2: Nashis. A kind of fruit with a flavour and texture sort of like a cross between an apple and a pear. First bite was sweet and kinda bland, but with interesting tart flavours coming through near the centre of the nashi.
Highest point: Mt Kau Kau at 445m.
Second highest point: Johnston Hill at 360m.
View: Absolutely stunning. It's another reminder, actually, of how compact Wellington is. I don't know of many capital cities where you could stand in sight of the port on one side, and someone's farm on t'other, all at the same time.
The bacon sandwiches we had when we staggered home: Priceless