Wool-base layer stuff is always good for very cold weather. *nods* I'm not sure why the name "long johns" was abandoned. Over here in the Australian winter, we rarely get below 0, and even then it's very cold. I remember one morning where we got as low as -3 C (i.e. 26 F), and that was cold enough! I can't imagine how cold it would get over in the US, UK, or Canada in winter.
Actually though, aside from this winter storm, it's been a very mild winter so far. Most days it's in the 40's or maybe high 30's (well above freezing). These last few years it's been pretty mild, but we always manage to get one or two big deep-freezes. They were Polar Vortexes (Vortices I suppose) for the last two years. I'm still expecting one of those before the winter is over.
Bought some groceries, and the book Murtagh by Christopher Paolini. First physical book I bought in a long time. I'm currently trying to find and collect all the books I use to read in high school.
Finally broke down and traded my 2018 car for a 2024 model, because of a combination of advanced safety features and my advancing years. A lot of digital stuff for my analog mind to comprehend, but I'm glad I did it, things like lane-keeping, blind-spot detection, and emergency braking (among others). One near irony -- first afternoon we parked in a marked space parallel to a building because the pull-in spaces were all full. As we got into the car to leave another car backed out of a stall and came closer and closer to our spanking new vehicle, seemingly oblivious. I leaned on the horn and the backing car kept coming and finally stopped inches from our driver door, then pulled forward and backed out more sharply and dashed away. Whew.
Groceries and books. Oh and light bulbs. Daylight light bulbs for my kitchen. Where I only had about 4 out of 8 lights actually working (and those were dim) now I can see properly
I just bought the Enlightenment, but it didn't help me see any better. *cleans his glasses* Aha! There we go. Seriously, yesterday I bought a copy of the Choral Symphony by Carl Vine. (I'm performing it later this year). It is written in ancient Babylonian and Demotic Greek, transliterated into English. It is, for the present, incomprehensible -- but then, I've only had one rehearsal. I presume it will become clearer.
Got myself a copy of A Scots Dictionary of Nature by Amanda Thomson. I've just flicked through it and found a solution to a rather annoying problem I was having with my WIP. Not what bought it for, but still cool.
A Japanese light novel, which I am now translating. Goddamnit, it's hard work. Should take about a year, at the rate I'm going.
USB speakers for my laptop, and two new swimdresses. First bathing suits I've bought since 2003. I'm going on another two transatlantic crossings in May and June. Maybe I'll fit in some swimming onboard.
I got a couple of wooburning backpacking stoves and tested them out today in the back yard. The Bushbox XL for steak: And the Toaks wood stove, that I boiled water with to make mashed potatos from Potato Pearls: Oh damn, it was sooooo good!! I cut the steak up into little strips and put it right into the mashed potatos. Unfortunately the Toaks stove left a burnt crater in my tabletop. No biggie, it's an old table that was in the shed when I moved in, and has been sitting in the back yard for years. Next time I know though, if I use it on a table, put a board under it first! Yeesh!
It's actually extremely light and folds flat. Those aren't full-size steaks on it. I couldn't fit a good-sized steak on it without cutting it into quarters and cooking two quarters at a time. This video shows how it folds up. (just watch a few seconds of it—this dude likes to tell for ten minutes, then show, and then tell some more): And the Toaks collapses and packs inside the cookpot:
I read that as laptop as was like, the hell is he doing cooking on a laptop? Thought you might need a wellness check for a minute, bruh.
Now this gives me an idea for a song. (To the tune of "Singing in the Rain") I'm cookin' on me lap, I'm lost without a map, I'll incinerate somethin' and beat the arson rap... (Of course, No-one is recommending such behaviour. But hey, it's fun -- if somewhat bizarre -- to imagine)
The book I've been waiting impatiently for just came in today (after a crazy post office kerfuffle I wrote about on the Not Happy thread)—Witches of the Mind by Bruce Byfield. It's a critical appraisal of the works of Fritz Lieber, famous mainly for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series plus some more fantasy and some very highly acclaimed science fiction. The print is unbelievably small, I had to bust out my lighted magnifying glass to read it at all. I didn't mention this book in here until it came in, because this was the only copy available on Amazon (for $100.00! )—I wanted to make sure I had it in my hot little hands before I let anybody know about it. Apparently eBay has one for $75, wish I had checked there first. The book is an expansion of a university thesis Byfield wrote, focusing on Lieber's four literary phases— Lovecraftian Gravesian Early Jungian Late Jungian I wasn't aware of it, but apparently Lieber's writing (in the later periods anyway) was rife with archetypes—women representing Anima figures; wizards, opponents or monsters as Shadow figures, and the like. Very intriguing. The title of the book comes from Shakespeare, which is very fitting, as he(?) was one of Lieber's most foundational influences. And now, through the book, I've just discovered an essay Lieber wrote for the Riverside Quarterly—Vol 4, No. 3, June 1970. The essay is called A Utopia for Poets and Witches, and is his own critial appraisal of the Robert Graves book Watch the North Wind Rise: For nearly sixty years Robert Graves has thought of himself as primarily a poet; for nearly thirty years, he has publicly identified himself as a poet-servant of the eternal Muse, the White Goddess worshipped under many names in antiquity. But Graves is more familiar to the reading public as the author of historical novels like I, Claudius (1934) and of the classic autobiography of World War I, Good-bye to All That (1929). Some critics have argued that Graves' prose works deserve as much serious consideration as his poetry, but little has been done; especially surprising is the general neglect of Watch the North Wind Rise (1949), a utopian novel about a future society which has returned to the worship of the Goddess.1 I would like to suggest that the framework of this novel exhibits a duality characteristic of the genre of the "fantastic," that it provides an example of the way in which similar dualities may be found in utopian works, and that it is the very existence of such dualities which makes this novel a satisfactory vehicle for Graves's reflections on the nature of poetry, the Muse, and the women in whom she is seen incarnate. Source I have now ordered a copy of the Quarterly containing this essay—awaiting its arrival.
Oh damn! And now I've just bought the Kindle version of Graves' The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. The intersection of psychology and myth—I mean, this is exactly my main area of interest. The thought just occurred to me—I wonder if I was unconsciously led in this direction long ago by Lieber as I read the fabulous tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? Could be...
I got the last loaf of sliced bread from a local bakery. Tried yesterday and they were out. Tried again today. Today was rainy so maybe the bad weather was juuust enough of a deterrence to prevent that one bread customer from going in.
Just unboxed my new keyboard. I finally decided to shell out and get (what I once would have considered) an expensive gaming keyboard. Turns out these are the really good ones. Doubleshot keycaps, so the letters will never wear off. I finally looked into what red, blue and brown switches are. They're underneath the keys, and determine how they behave when you press them down. The brown ones are for typing, red are for gaming. I forget what the blue is for. Oh, blue are the 'clicky' ones, so it makes noise each time you press a key. Nah, forget that. This thing has colored lights under the keys—it's not as distracting as I thought it would be, I can get used to it. Lol, the keys are really tall and there's more space in between them at the top than I'm used to—right now I have to look at it constantly as I type, but I'm getting used to it pretty fast. Partly because I'm just writing with it a bunch, like now. That Neo2 was going kaput—it was getting harder and harder to make it put spaces in between words. I had to hit the space bar really hard, and then it likes to drop random periods. I had a keyboard that came in two days ago, but I couldn't get it to work. I tried everything I could think of, started looking into it, and discovered just about everybody has the same problem with that model. Weird nobody on Amazon said so.
Oh nice! It has a switch on the bottom to change from Windows layout to Mac. Now that I switched it I can make an em-dash the way I'm used to. Now I want to see if I can get the few keys I need to make it look Mac-compliant. I might not do it, I've had both kinds of keyboards before, and I've learned to use both. It doesn't really matter what it says on the key, I know which ones to hit.
Mechanical keyboards are so much better than membrane ones. You will love it. I use a keyboard from 1997—a Dell AT101W. It's got black-coloured ALPS switches and its sturdy as all hell just as many electronics of that era were. It's also how I flex on people. They show me rainbow-colored gaming keyboards, I show them a relic from the 90s! But my dream keyboard is an IBM Model M from the 1980s.
Lol, these colored lights that keep shifting hues remind me of sports cars with fluorescent lighting under the wheel wells. I'm kinda starting to like it.
