| (no subject) |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|10:21 pm] |
In case you, like my mother, thought I was dying because I haven't posted in a while:
Hi.
(Also, plz to be v. v. careful of TW spoilers? I'm not naming names, but there's a reason I'm temp. defriending ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) torchwood_three. I can only torrent so quickly!) |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|11:11 am] |
Am back at Site for a day, hoping to catch those last few pesky HFs before Aitjamal gets here. Lucy appreciates the company and I appreciate the slightly lower temperatures today. (Yesterday it was 40C in the sun. Suck.) I get a day off today from the workshop, so I decided to come home early and have some me time.
What I really need is just one week to myself when nothing breaks, leaks, falls or needs a meeting. Is that so much to ask?
Also, PCV drama timez! S, one of the girls I trained with, was supposed to come to the workshop for the first week but canceled at the last minute. At first we were really kind of pissed, but it's started to become clear that she was without internet for long periods and people were changing dates for things on her with no warning, so it's pretty understandable what happened. Now she's stranded in central KZ for several weeks because a camp got pushed back, and since she lives in Kostenai oblast it's too expensive for her to go home and then back out to something. So I offered her my couch for a while. It'll be nice to hang out for a while, if a little expensive. I figure my budget's shot to shit for this month and next anyway, so it's no big deal. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|04:43 pm] |
|
Wanted: beta reader for ridiculously long SGA gen fic. (12k words ridiculous, just to be clear.) Must be familiar with Cthulhu Mythos. Knowledge of marine biology not required. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 4th, 2009|09:46 am] |
Happy 4th of July, Americans! We will be celebrating with watermelon, rotisserie chicken (no really!) and peach pie. Last night's adventure involved toasted ravioli, only instead of ravioli we used potato pelmeni. CLOSE ENOUGH NOM NOM NOM.
Also, A and L from the EKO are here, prompting exchanges like this:
a: "When do you COS?"
me: "November 5th. 'Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot...'"
a: "I liked that movie, but not enough to memorize it."
me: "...you do realize that's a real holiday, right?"
a: "What's a real holiday?"
Time for bazaar! |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 3rd, 2009|06:52 am] |
Guys.
MY HOT WATER HEATER JUST FELL OFF THE WALL.
WHAT.
::surrenders to entropy:: |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|07:05 pm] |
THINGS I'VE SEEN RECENTLY:
1. Old men (and one woman) gathered in the courtyard of a building in the waning hours of daylight, having set up all manner of ragged, splintery old furniture on which to play very public games of chess and checkers. The checkers people were being left alone; the two chess games had about half a dozen kibbitzers.
2. A broken refridgerator full of clothing.
3. A city bus (#70) rear-ending a trolley (#7). The bus had part of its front end caved in, including a cracked windshield and a crushed wiper. The ladder got knocked off the back of the trolley, and the entire back window exploded into grains of safety glass. The trolley conductor got all up in the bus driver's face, demanding to know how the hell you fail to notice a bright yellow trolley, which only moves at about a mile per hour anyway. MA opined that this is probably the same crazy #70 driver who nearly ran over some of her students a few months ago and did, in fact, close the doors on one of them.
4. Tuna! I don't know how long Ramstor has been stocking it, because it's all imported from Turkey and is thus labeled "ton" rather that "тунец" or, you know, something we might recognize. It's ridiculously expensive (150 tenge for a can the size of a tin of Fancy Feast) but as a sometimes food? Oh, yeah, so worth it. Lucy likes it, too.
5. Apricots for 190/kg. Monday night is, potentially, jam night (part II). |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|06:09 pm] |
So apparently I have been silent enough that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lofro felt the need to call me while addressing a vindaloo-related emergency.
I am currently running myself ragged doing a teacher training workshop in Karaganda and probably won't be on El Jay until circa the 10th. At which point I'll be too tired to recap all the insanity that's included interactive boards, graduations, marshmallows, and host families. Am still reachable via email if you think something is relevant to my interests.
Or, you know, hot. That works too. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 27th, 2009|10:23 am] |
So I think we need a new reality television show. It can be called "The Honest Life." It'll follow the wacky hijinks of former Gov. Elliot Spitzer, former Gov. Rob Blagojevich and soon-to-be-former Gov. Mark Sanford as they attempt to do jobs that require a modicum of personal ethics, responsibility, and keeping one's hands to one self. For example, bus driver, cashier, mail carrier. Hilarity ensues.
C'mon, you know you'd watch it. And Blago at least would be willing to give it a shot. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|11:43 pm] |
Supreme Court: No, it is not okay to strip-search kids for their contraband Advil. THANK YOU. "Zero-Tolerance" sounds lovely in theory, but when put into practice it becomes they very definition of reductio ad absurdum. What happened to Tinker v. Des Moines School District, when kids didn't leave their rights at the schoolhouse door?
And Clarence Thomas, are you having some sort of contest with Scalia now? "It was eminently reasonable to conclude the backpack was empty because Redding was secreting the pills in a place she thought no one would look...[this case] announces the safest place to secrete contraband in school."
Am I the only one who sees a problem with this this line of reasoning? Anyone? Bueller?
...huh. I guess there was a reason LJ let me keep this icon when I went unpaid. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|11:04 am] |
YOU GUYS YOU GUYS THE T_BB IS LIVE!
The Tardis Big Bang, Round Two
And my story is up there! It is called Sunset!
LOOKIT THAT WORD COUNT, YO!
(Confession: it's posted as 102,000. OpenOffice gave me 101,090. When I stripped out the header, chapter titles and epigrams, it was more like 100,600. WHATEVS. I WIN A CAKE.)
And I got a fabulous cover art from medley, and five great sketches from blackbearblue. To further commend those two--when I submitting my "draft" for them to use back in April, it was only 22k and the vast majority of it was still in outline format. They were working off absolute minimum input, and this was still the awesome result. :-D
This was, as you can probably guess, a long, laborious story. (Hi! Longest thing I've ever let someone else read!) It's also one of the more personal things I've ever written, in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of technical aspects of it that I'm proud of. Endless gratitude for beta-reading, hand-holding, and cheerleading goes to marginaliana, who I don't think I've called awesome yet today. She owes me a cake now, too. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 24th, 2009|07:29 pm] |
WHAT.
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sandford disappeared for almost a week. He didn't tell anyone where he was going. He only told his immediate staff that he was going, somewhere, because the legislature made him take the stimulus money and that was so hard. His wife did not know where he was, over Father's Day. Nobody could get in touch with him.
"It's all right!" his staff said. "We think he's hiking the Appalachian Trail! Alone! Um!"
And then today, he came back. FROM BUENOS FUCKING AIRES.
He went to Argentina alone without telling anybody.
I just...WHAT. WHAT THE HELL.
<lj user="ceilidh", I am SO SORRY that this man is your governor. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|08:15 pm] |
And the SINK IS FIXED! Mostly. Apparently there's now a separate leak coming from the faucet, but since it's not of the bucket-a-day variety, I can turn my water back on! Woohoo! Natasha came and put on a whole new elbow joint with a cool little PVC-melting device (that PVC the plastic, not PCV the me) and it took like five seconds. Turns out that when Oleg tried to fix it, he ended up FILING THE THREADS off the old joint, which is why there was sprayage even after Natasha did her thing on Sunday. Just don't ask. I don't even know.
I HAVE WATER AGAIN! ::dances:: |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|06:18 pm] |
First, via the conlangs: An Illustrated Guide to Positional Preposition. Which is AWESOME. I remember my German teacher in high school drawing something like these to illustrate the two-way prepositions (or whatever they're called; they take either a dative or accusative object depending on what they denote) and it was dead useful. And memorable, even if I don't remember it now. (C'mon! It was six years ago!
(...
(HOLY CRAP HIGHSCHOOL WAS SIX YEARS AGO. ::feels mature::)
Second, I got cordelia_v to tag me in a meme: Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.
She gave me: ( Peace Corps, linguistics, Ron/Draco, shopping, Russian. Warning: tl;dr ahead. )
Last, two questions for Russophones on my flist: I've been reading about ways to derive nicknames from Russian names, and I think I've got it, only...not. The Internets, they don't help here. So could you tell if the following are all acceptable diminutives of "Pavel," and maybe give a hint on when they're acceptable?
Pasha
Pashka
Pashinka
Pavlusha
And also: I sometimes here people here address or refer to others by their patronymic only. What's up with that? |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 21st, 2009|10:53 am] |
YAY: the waste lands by vanitashaze, the best Doctor Who/SGA crossover I've ever seen. Featuring the woman who will one day be River Song. Just. Yes.
BOO: Bacardi says: get an ugly friend! WHAT.
YAY: I talked to E today, to wish him happy birthday, and apparently Skyping to the US is way cheaper than Skyping to KZ--we talked for 45 minutes and it didn't even cost me a dollar. And tonight I get to talk to my folks for Father's Day. And my sink might even get fixed!
BOO: I have intelligence that my aunt is preparing a "bash" for when I get home. Um. do not want? It's not that I don't want to see people, but I would rather not see EVERYONE AT ONCE and be the center of their attention. I don't know if this is a form of social anxiety or if I'm just that introverted, but, yeah. Must start psyching myself up 4.5 months in advance. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 20th, 2009|02:48 pm] |
Good luck to lofro, who submitted "DEMON" to a publisher for the first time! May your rejection slip be gentle and personal!
Also, after several days of futzing, including at one point applying caulk with a butter knife, the leak in the kitchen is still worse than before Oleg touched it. I turned on water today so I could bathe and do laundry, and once the floors are mopped I'm going to call Galina and ask her to pretty pretty please send a plumber. I have never been so frustrated with my inability to express myself in Russian--last time I talked to her on the phone she asked me a question, and I tried to answer, but between when she said goodbye and when she hung up I heard a faint, disgusted "Ne ponyala." And granted, she could've been talking about herself. But I don't think she was.
Remember, sink - rakovina. Leak - tech. Worse - xuzhe. Plumber - vodoprovodchik. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|10:36 pm] |
So E posted some thought about discrimination embedded in language and how it hangs on--in lexical items like to gyp and welsh on a deal and one I hadn't heard before, nigger rich. I spent most of high school trying to get people to stop using gay as a generic slur, and but I still catch myself throwing around retarded and variants at times--it slips out, it has a shape in the language, and no, I don't have anything against people who are developmentally different--I just can't break myself of using that word. One of my grandmothers died before I was born, and of the tidbits of information about her that my mother has chosen to bestow on me over the years, one is that she always referred to cashews as "nigger toes"--this was passed on to me as if it was a harmless bit of trivia. I remember [Bad username: schiarire</i> posting recently about <a href=]sweets with names like "filipinos" and "Moor's heads,"</i> and I recently had a brain hurty moment when I realized that the game called "Telephone" in the US is also known as "Chinese whispers" in some other English-speaking countries and that's probably not nice.
All these little bits of stereotypes and turns of phrase that snuck in during another age and are now outstaying their welcome.
( So how do we teach these to second-language learners? Or do we? ) |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|08:50 pm] |
|
So for people who were interested in a Remix Robin, I has a comm: remix_robin Check out the first post if you'd interested in signing up for the first round trial run--I'm just trying to gauge interest at this point, and see what fandoms people are interesting in writing. Feel free to pimp this around if you think other people might be interested! |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|05:29 pm] |
You guys! YOU GUYS!
Rich Morris, the same guy who did The Ten Doctors (now complete) is writing a new comic called Forever Janette! IT'S A FOREVER KNIGHT/DW CROSSOVER! Featuring Schanke and Eight!
I was a little young for the first run of FK, but I adored it in syndication--the perfect so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure show. And Rich's art is, as always, wonderful. It's six pages in now and already at least one giggle-out-loud moment.
<3! |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 13th, 2009|08:53 pm] |
So earlier this week, some of my Kazakh students invited me to a play at the Seifullin theatre in Karaganda. This is a very large, very pretty (from the outside) theatre that was just completed this winter, and shows Kazakh-language plays. (Sakan Seifullin being a prominent Kazakh poet and dramatist.) I accepted, though the girls weren't that clear on whether the play was Saturday or Sunday; I have them my cell phone number, figuring we'd work things out later.
Well, Mahabbat (probably the best speaker in the class) called me today and reminded me about the play. "We will meet in the central park at three o'clock!" she told me, but didn't specify the date. Stupidly, I assumed she was still talking about tomorrow, since that was the last thing I heard from her group.
At about 3:30, she called me back. "We are waiting you at bus station!"
"I," I had to explain, "am still in Saran. Erm."
So I threw on some theatre-going clothes (I wasn't sure what the etiquette is here, and felt better safe than sorry) and managed to run and catch the 3:45 bus. I made it to the theatre by 4:25 exactly, which gave the girls time to buy tickets (they wouldn't let me pay) and take pictures (numerous). The theatre turns out to be just as pretty inside as outside, with marble floors, pink and white chandeliers, and some really nice fresco-like paintings outside the house doors. I mean, the themes are the same ones you see everywhere (Traditional Kazakz is Traditional!) but they're really beautifully executed. The fourth floor also has a little exhibition about the history of the theater company, going all the way back to the thirties, when the Soviets decided art was safe again: they had a playbill for a production where the Kazakh portions were still written in the Latin alphabet, and one fabulous photo of a Kazakh-language production of Romeo and Juliet (apparently they spared no expense to recreate the finest in 15th-century Italian floppy hats!). I recognized some of the playwrights, if not the plays--Seifullin, Auezov, and Aitmatov, mainly--and got to look at a book of old posters before we sat down.
Now, I was slightly nervous during the play because we ended up surrounded on all sides by a group of soldiers, and I had a feeling my students weren't going to be much protection if any of these guys heard us speaking English and decided to play Poke the Foreigner with me. But it wasn't a problem at all. The play--I think we decided the English title was something like "Sensation of a Swan"--was really well done, even if I could only understand the occasional word I learned from signs and adverts. It was about an older woman with two grown sons who gets courted by a man her own age, and while the ending is kind of soap opera-y (the man turns out to be her long-lost first love and the secret father of her older son!) it was nice to see a romance between older people and a woman being at least somewhat assertive. (Actually, really assertive by Kazakh standards.) My students helped translate a few key lines for me, and I figured out on my own when to clap. They then insisted on walking to the bus with me, and my student Mensulu even tried to pay my bus fare for me. This is an aspect of Kazakhstani hospitality that I'm never going to get entirely used to; I mean, I'm a mooch by nature, but I'm not that big a mooch. They bought my ticket for me; that was more than enough.
And speaking of theatre-going clothes--well, aside from the fact I needn't have worried about dressing up because everybody around me was in jeans--I've made a new discovery recent: I can now wear a skirt for prolonged periods of time with no danger of getting a heat rash where my thighs rub together. Unfortunately, all the skirts I own are now about four inches too big in the waist. Since I didn't want to shave, I threw on my ankle-length black skirt, but as I have no black shoes that fit me anymore, I had to bring out my light-weight boots (not the furry ones, those are for winter). Then a black polo and a grey sweater, so I didn't look like I was going to a funeral. And believe it or not, I wasn't dying in this ensemble, because today and yesterday the temperature barely climbed into the sixties F. WTF, weather? |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
