Robin McKinley's Blog, page 179

Ice This

 

Okay, what is this?

             I mean, I know what it is.  It's ice.  It's a very strange ice self-sculpture as discovered in my rain gauge this morning.  I've been trying to remember if there's been any weird ice effects before this;  we've been having hard frosts pretty much every night for a week or so I think—certainly last night and the night before.    And we've had lots of hard frosts all winter long.

 

 

But yesterday was positively warm, so anything that might have happened the night ...

SHORT DRANGLEFABBING MONDAY*, OKAY?

 

What is the matter with me?  I keep saying I need to spend less time on the blog, I need to learn to write shorter, and if I can't write shorter . . . I'm going to have to disappear, and will be discovered thirty years from now on an atoll with my sixty-seven hellhounds and 1,893,712 rosebushes (very good drainage on atolls, and lots of fish mulch) happy and content and having forgotten how to type.** 

            Oh . . . well . . . I guess I have to finish PEGASUS II first.***

           ...

Unnnnh

 

Yesterday was a totally lost day.  Uggh.  From a sane, rational, grown up, mature standpoint that Cambridge at Friday tower practise which fried my eyeballs was a mistake.  You push something like ME, it pushes back.  Harder.  But I'm not sane, rational or mature (just old), and I refuse to see it as a mistake.  As I crawled around the house(s) yesterday in a grey fog of bleh I kept whispering to myself:  I ring Cambridge.*  The woman who didn't go back to ringing a decade ago, after she...

Guest post by ajlr

Learning to play the piano when one is over 50 (Part 1 of 2) 

How – and why – do people learn new things? I started learning music theory, as a total beginner, about three years ago. Ben, our next-door neighbour and a music teacher, agreed that he would take my husband and me on as pupils and so in April 2007 we started our first music lessons – for me, the first since the year I'd had at school when I was 13, for my husband, the first formal classes in the subject ever. 

I think I was – still ...

Redux, various

 

 I WANT MY WOLFGANG.  WAAAAAAH.

            The good news is that Peter got out of Scotland about thirty seconds before they closed the border.*  He came home this afternoon and instantly began reorganising my life.**  This included ringing up the garage which, to my amazement, seems to think we can have Wolfgang back tomorrow morning.  Fourteen year old cars and MOT tests are not usually a happy merger and I've been bracing myself for the conversation about the new car again.***  Even if we ...

Cambridge

 

I rang Cambridge last night.*  My first surprise method, that holy of holies and scary of scaries.

            Well.  A little bit of Cambridge.  But even that is a substantial miracle, like . . . managing to sing for Oisin tomorrow afternoon, supposing I do.  It was also an excellent example of Wild Robert at his maddest.  I think I wasn't blogging yet when he pitched me into Stedman after I'd been ringing about a year and a half and could just about struggle through bob doubles on a good...

Guest Blog by Black Bear

Frogblog Part Deux: The Return of the Terrarium

Who wants to see some pictures of tiny cute frogs?  YOU do?  Well, then I won't stand in your way!

You might remember I bought the Amazon triplets back in November at the annual reptile/amphibian show.  These are my second foray into the dart frog hobby, the first being my bumblebee frogs, Norman and Saxon.

Norm and Sax were ready to move to a larger terrarium right around the time of the show, so I cunningly planned to shift them over to a 10...

Tirra lira

 

. . . by the river, sang Sir Lancelot.*  I hope he has a better voice than I do.  Elizabeth Moon @emoontx and I have been having a little fun on Twitter about singing—those of you with long memories** may remember that it was a long comment from EMoon about having a voice lesson from her choir director that tipped me over the voice-lesson edge last summer, the difference being that she evidently has a voice worth developing and I don't.  I just have a strange lust for humiliation.  Well...

Short* NASTY Monday

 

I got up what passes in my case for betimes today because I was having an early lunch with Penelope and wanted to have hellhounds well hurtled beforehand. 

            Except that it was raining.  Not just raining:  RAINING.  Rain on a mission to dissolve planet Earth and leave a large muddy spreading splodge in the solar system.**

            While I was waiting for either a break in the downpour or the void to open at my feet when both the road and the ground underneath were washed away**...

Semi-frozen Sunday

 

 I'm doing my wha'?  Huh? on five hours' sleep today.  Sigh.  Saturday night has lately become the night I go to bed early because I have to crawl out early for service ring on Sunday . . . good so far . . . and then get overinvolved in the books that just happen to have come to bed with me.  There tend to be rather a lot of these.*  And since it's early and I'm still feeling at least half-awake and half-clever I figure I'll tackle something a bit more substantial than usual and . . . **

    ...