at least somebody's happy

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I think my desktop pretty accurately reflects the general idea of my life right now.

clicks for bigs

    yuz, indeed

any day I get my head showered by someone else is a good day

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    whoa

    whoa

    hey

    like when did I get so self-absorbed?

    (Been reading over email correspondences from last summer and then my blog as it stands now.)

    I suppose when one is changing and growing, one has to keep an eye on the directions of one's growth.

    And my life is really seriously interesting right now. To me.

Here is a picture that is a picture of you and not a picture of me. Although I'm off-campus and so can only screencap from youtube and not my dvds.

     In other news, that was an extremely different Thanksgiving day. An excellent one. Never been apart from my family on Thanksgiving before. I am learning so much from hanging out with juniors. Today was full of card games and turkey and sparkling cider and lounging about reading J. Peterman catalogs and playing with dogs and and hair dye and sugar cookies and confessions under blankets and drawing and listening to my ladies express frustrations about frustrating Boys. Everything is interesting.

i hate drawing on lined paper anyway

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Here is a picture I drew in a notebook. I decided to draw a picture of Dr Mac in a spare moment between classes and ended up with a unicorn dripping with blood.

     Not a very close likeness, all in all.

bullet lists are totally a substitute for coherence

     Dear Harriet Walter,

     THINGS:

• I have overcome my deathly fear of people I know in real life reading my writing enough to give the url of this blog to my Auntlet today. Hello, Auntlet L.!

• I am super super excited about this Saturday. I think I mentioned it before. Several of us students are getting taken on a hike up to the Hollywood sign, out to lunch at In-N-Out and then to Amoeba Records and possibly to a coffeeshop. Apparently it's annual, although my school only moved to its Pasadena location at the beginning of last year. Most of my favorite people are going, and because it's Professor Mine Enemy's thing I am going to get to meet Mrs Professor Mine Enemy, who is coming along and who is somebody I have wondered about.

•  Dr Mac has learned how to tie a bowtie recently. It looked quite nice on him, although he said he felt naked with no necktie and with his buttons exposed like that.

• I bought pink-and-white animal cookies at the shops today. I am content.

• I love Pasadena and Los Angeles. Why on earth did I ever consider going to college in Iowa? I mean I'm sure Dordt College is a perfectly excellent and unimpeachable college itself - both of Best Friend's parents graduated from there, and they turned out ok - but Iowa versus Los Angeles? The Midwest versus SoCal? Cows and cornfields versus one of the major cultural and economic centers of the world? Yeah, I think I made the right choice. (The third college-option was too expensive. And also not far enough from home.)

Pasadena City Hall, which I see regularly. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

• It rained all day yesterday. It was awesome.

• My grades are ok so far. They may plummet after my history midterm next week.

•  My parents have finally set up Skype, so we video-called each other on Monday night when I was supposed to be doing math homework. Skyping is a good thing.

• I can do the basic steps and turns for the two-step and the waltz now. Education!

• I need to start studying somewhere I don't have access to the toys and thingums my Auntlet has sent to me.

• My mother has started up another blog. Two more, actually, but right now I'm going to link to the first. (No she has not written more in the very first blog she started up. I am hoping that with the less-structured style she's taken up for her newest 'un she will feel more free to piffle and thus write more.) I asked her if I could link to it, because I love my mumsy's writing, and she said yes so here is the link: Patter From Lavender Flat. It's written for an audience of her close friends and family so certain names, locations and situations will not be explained. If she writes in it, it will be Quality Stuff!

• One of the least awesome things about college is the fact that I don't have time to hunt down and watch things with you in them. I always intended to make this blog at least vaguely Harriet Walter-relevant (Walterelevant?), but now everything is all about me all the time. Blah. (At least I got my fix while I could watch Law & Order UK.) So, for the sake of cheerings-up and bright green dresses, let's have a couple of screencaps from one of my favorite movies.

    Speaking of watching L&O:UK, I never saw the episode after the one which ended with a certain person getting shot (fatally?) in a drive-by. I wonder how that turned out.

    Now I am going to do a bit of math and watch Merlin because Merlin is back and I need me some campy goodness.

he would.

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I had the theme from Lawrence of Arabia stuck in my head last night and all of today. What did I do about it?

    The scene: one of my classrooms, early this afternoon. It is time for my philosophy/theology class with Dr Mac. Professor Mine Enemy is clearing out his things after teaching the Tuesday/Thursday section of his BTS111 class (I'm in Wednesday/Friday). Dr Mac has not yet arrived. The BTS students are gathering their things to leave and chattering, the philosophy students are finding seats and chattering. Loudly. Jim is eating a late lunch from a to-go box. I go and sit near the front, and raise my hand and wave it about at Professor Mine Enemy.

    "Hey, I have a question," I call out.

    "What? You weren't in my class today, you don't get to ask me questions," he says, grinning.

    "Fine, I won't. No, seriously, one quick question."

    "Okay, but I do need to get out of here."

    "Have you ever ridden a camel?"

    "Yes. It's awkward and uncomfortable."

    "That's...that really makes me happy."

    "Why? Why do you ask?"

    "I don't know, it's just cool. And sometimes when I look at you, the theme from Lawrence of Arabia starts playing in my head."

    "...You're kidding me.That's weird!"

    "I know!"

    It's probably just because he's always teaching us about the Middle East.

What riding a camel looks like.

    (Note that the above transcription is incomplete.)

    I'm not sure why it's so much more fun to draw stick-camels than it is to write history papers, but it is.

left to our own devices

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I know I already posted today but a happy thought hit me just now.

    Everybody is off bowling tonight, dressed as either hippies or preps, an event organized by the student senate. I chose not to go because I didn't see myself going. Fellow freshmen Patrick and Jim also chose not to go.

    I finished my allotted homework earlier than expected and so treated myself to finally starting the latest Mary Russell mystery. (Fab so far.) When I was done for the time being, I went back into my room, leaving the door open, and went under my desk to put the book back on the desk-shelf.

    "Hey, who's in there?" called out the voice of Jim.

    "Just me," I said, emerging to put my travel pillow back on my desk chair and my cell phone on my desk. Jim and Patrick had been around earlier, when I was in the lounge reading and they were knocking on the doors of the empty girls' rooms for the sake of noise.

    "Oh, it's Ruby. Hey, don't go in your bathroom." A stern eye and a pointing finger were directed at me through the crack of the open door jamb.

    "But I need to wash my hands."

    "Oh, you can go in the bathroom to wash your hands, that's ok."

    "Glad to hear it."

    I finished putting my things away and walked down the hall, where I found the two boys busily drawing on the mirrors of the girls' bathroom with dry-erase markers.

    It was as I was washing my hands and looking at a doodle of a purple, mustachioed octopus wearing a top hat and monocle (and saying, "good aftermorn!") that the happy thought hit me.

    "I have a fake mustache just like that one," I said. "I took mustaches with me to college, like a sensible person." I don't think the boys heard me; they were too busy snorting over one of their new creations.

    After washing my hands, I walked back to my room, but heard the words "Does it work on here?", then stopped and half-turned before going in.

    "Don't draw on the walls," I called out.

    "We won't!" echoed back.

    "Or the stalls. Or the floors."

    "Too late!" cried Patrick cheerily.

    I went into my room, closed the door and finally opened up the long-sealed package of fake mustaches my mother had bought for me back home.

    "'Hey Ruby!'" said Jim in monotone from outside my door as he read from the post-it note stuck to the aforementioned door, "'I love you! If you need to talk, you know where I am! Love, Danielle.'"

    "Oh," I said, "have you changed your name, Jim?"

    "Yes."

    "I like it, it suits you." 

    "Thank you."

    "Hey, man, are we still gonna watch Inception?" said Patrick.

I blame sugar cones and my professor for everything

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I will have been in college for exactly one full month next Monday!

    I also run a gamut of emotions regularly. I can go from utter despondence and sitting on the floor weeping over the phone to my mom to giddy spinning in chairs to exhaustion and emotional dead zones to being high on sugar and brain-buzzingness while listening to Elvis, all within less than 24 hours.

    It's still weird having a Fresh Start. None of these college people have known me very long; they all know my name, but it's still new to them when I'm being me or expressing myself in my own ways. My family will just ignore me or sometimes smile pityingly whenever I'm off doing something dumb, so I'm used to people being used to me, if that makes any sense, but here it's apparently an unusual thing to start spinning rapidly down the dorm hallway, get disoriented and smack into a wall, say "hi, wall!" and go beaming and skipping off. (I'd just gotten back from my first proper swing-dance lesson - the dance club meeting last week was just official non-dancey business - and I'd had chocolate ice cream on a sugar cone after dinner, what the frig else was I going to be doing?)

    In other news, I'm horribly behind on math, I have to write an outline for my first speech for public speaking class, Professor Mine Enemy continues to be both intimidating and to have the most exciting brain in the world, my Auntlet sent me another package and this one was full of shirts and shoes and jewelry and other odds and ends, Mother has been sending me small weekly packages full of tasty snacking-things, everything is awesome right now and in three or fours hours' time it will probably all be horrible.

    (Also, I bought the book of The Scarlet Pimpernel online. Immediately after seeing the shockingly late estimated arrival date, an idiotic little voice inside me said hey, this book is old and well loved, it is probably on Project Gutenberg, I could read the first couple of chapters online just to keep myself going. The book arrived last Tuesday, I think. I had finished reading it two weeks before.)

    (ALSO ROOMMATE COURTNEY AND R.A. AUGUST HAVE ACTUALLY BOTH READ IT WHICH MAKES ME HAPPY)

    *Edit: I forgot to add that there is absolutely no feeling in the world like being comfortably settled in one's bed and accomplishments at the end of a long day and on the far side of drifting off to sleep when it occurs to one that one did not thoroughly read one's history paper through before submitting it online and it might still have editorial comments which one might have forgotten to remove before submitting it. 
    Oh my lands it was like the floor under my bunk bed disappeared and I plunged down into a pit of ice water. That is how bad that moment was.
    Thankfully I checked the document the next day and my fears were unfounded! The paper wasn't especially good, but it had no parenthetical notes to self saying to rewrite the thesis statement, at least.

there is one grand thing

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, baked beans, damn, damn and damn.

    (Math 100. Remedial algebra class. Didn't study math enough in high school, scored badly on math bit of SAT.)

    Damn.

    Anyway, just for kicks, here is a picture of me at La Plaza in Los Angeles taken last Saturday as I was being taught the history of the city along with most of my freshman class and a few upperclassmen. I had a squinty face but I like the lighting. (Photo by Roommate Courtney, who is very good.)

L to R: Mr B the director of student activies, Freshman Luke, me.

    Cannot wait to get my own camera. Also, extra notes:

• Mother and I have begun abbreviating "The Scarlet Pimpernel" to "Spimper" for ease of texting. It amuses.
• My Auntlet sent me - wait, have I talked about my Auntlet? She's an older woman who is one of my very best friends for life, she's not an actual aunt but I've known her since I was nine years old and within the past year or two we've become very close friends, she's the most extraordinary woman and she absolutely adores me and I literally am not even sure why - anyway my Auntlet sent me a care package containing a stuffed carrot toy/pillow thing with a happy face and arms and legs and his green leafery is boxer shorts so he's kind of upside-down and so hard to describe so here's a webcam picture:

     ...and she also sent me:

• one fancy kaleidoscope with three color-stick-things which one sticks into the kaleidoscope, 
• one tiny toy bird thing which one can stick into things and 
• two wooden tops which look either like apples or acorns, I'm not sure, but probably just mutant apples because they're red and green. 
• (Mother sent me a care package full of snacks and junk food. Thanks, Mom, I love the gummy dinosaurs!)
• I believe my Auntlet is also sending me a memory-foam mattress pad, orange Christmas lights for my dorm room and new clothes, because she's just amazing like that. She's like my fairy godmother, personal Santa Claus, Daddy-Long-Legs, cheerleader, number 1 fan, antiqueing buddy and therapist rolled into a great big beautiful mess of love and support. And why does she love me so much, anyway?! She sees right through me and understands me and loves what she sees and I don't even feel like I've deliberately revealed much of my self to her but I don't need to because she gets me and it's very alarming and unsettling because I'm a very private person and thought I was more mysterious and obscure than that augh. BLESSINGS AND GREAT FORTUNE ARE WEIRD BASICALLY

    Time for class now. Between classes and interacting alllll the tiiiiiime with other students, every day I am more and more convinced that I'm a complete idiot and haven't the wits of a fish that was dropped as a baby. It's very Socratic.
 
(post-class PS: the title of this post is from my notes on the word "monists", which I learned today in my philosophy/theology class)

college/ugh i just love his hat so much

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    This is how long I have been at college.

    I would write more - there's certainly plenty to talk about - but right now I need to study like an angry badger.

lemon sorbet for dinner

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So yesterday I was in the parking lot of a grocery store with my parents, and when I got out of the car I saw a tiny rubbery rhino toy lying on its side in the empty parking space next to us.

    "Mom!" I said. "C'mere! Rhino!"

    She looked where I was pointing. "Oh! Rhino! I think we should rescue it."

    "Yes."

    We put it in our car and went shopping. (Planning, of course, to thoroughly clean it off later.)

    I am now regretting the rescue of this rhino. Because...

 

    This is the creepiest damn rhino you have ever seen. Pictures don't do it justice. My mother says we can paint its eyes to make them all black instead of black with white in the middle, but for now it stares. Wherever one is in the room, it stares at one. Leering.

    The strange horizontal scars don't help anything, either. My sister and I agree that someone must have left it in a parking lot for a reason. (Sister wonders if there used to be a car in that space before suddenly! there was only rhino. However, I was there and saw that the parking space was empty because it was right in front of the store and had potted baby arbor vitae things lined up in it. Perhaps car with rhino in before suddenly! only arbor vitae and rhino?)

maybe I'm racist against gingers

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Firstly I would like to note that this is the first blog post I am writing from my new specially-for-college laptop. It is meant to be a little boys' laptop but I do not care. (The one downside to the little-boys thing was that when my sister and I were setting it up at first, we had to spend about half an hour battling the virtual nanny installation which wanted to rob me of my liberties.) It's awesome, being smaller than most laptops (just like I wanted), having lime green detailing and squishy rubbery ("wipeable keyboard!") keys, and, best of all, pre-installed Lego Batman. Awww yeeeeeaah.

    Secondly, I've finished reading Dear Enemy by Jean Webster and holy cow that book has enough discussion of eugenics to choke a camel. An unfit-for-breeding camel. That's ok, though, as it's a fascinating subject.
    Anyway so in it there was this one bit where Sallie, heroine of the book and superintendent of this orphanage thing, has had to hire a new cook for the orphanage, and the new cook is this black lady named Sallie. Sallie the superintendent is miffed that someone else has her name and is like "but I'm the Sallie around here can you change your name?" and Sallie the new cook respectfully says no ma'am, she, cook-Sally, has had this name longer than superintendent Sallie has and also couldn't get used to being called something else. The issue is dropped.
    I was disgusted with superintendent Sallie, of course. Asking someone to alter one of the fundamental points of their identity for her own convenience. Major points lost. She was probably being racist, too; it was the early twentieth century, after all.
    BUT THEN.
    For the past couple of years up until the past couple of weeks I've been working part-time in the bakery section of a local cafe. It's a fairly small business. Anyway BUT THEN I remembered that several months ago this cafe hired a new cook to work in the kitchen, mostly for weekend brunches, and she happened to have the same name as the owner of the cafe (who is an old friend of my parents', known her all my life). So to avoid confusion we all actually ended up calling the new cook Sam instead of her rightful name. I think Sam was short for her middle name or something. (She's not black, but she is ginger.)

    Guess what the new cook and the owner are both named.

    Guess.

    Guess guess guess guess.

    ...

    Sally.


    (yes I know I am too easily amused. time to go do some laundry.)

just look at those eyes

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Listening to Schubert's "Serenade" and playing spider solitaire (on the computer) while worrying about which family in my community might be willing to adopt my dog like yeah.

    Also, can I take a moment to appreciate this picture of Mr Peth? eet ees soh beautimous. eet ees so smoky i may soon be diagnosed with lung cancer. eet overheats mi computer. we are flutterbellied.

face/lehtarss

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So, like....

 

    Dude.

    (do you ever?)

    Also, while sorting through my books today (keep-take-to-college, keep-make-parents-store, chuck outright), I found the first letters I wrote to you inside one of my notebooks. They were written on paper with a dullish pencil and they were over a year old, like dude.

hands hands

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    can i just take a moment to appreciate the fact that your hands are the sexiest hands of all the sexy hands

(taken from Dame Harriet Walter Appreciation)

i couldn't get this without the play button but i still wuv it

LOOK AT THEM LADYPAWS

    in semi-related news, Dame Harriet Walter Appreciation continues be my favorite thing of all the things. (I want to talk to them sometime. I need to know what the eff this is, I mean seriously.)

and that burnt-orange sky

     Dear Harriet Walter,

    Hrrrrrrg. Have you ever been in a situation where you're suffocating and you desperately need to breathe but you're being held back by your sister who is like "no, I don't want to breathe, I'm bored of breathing, I want to go off and do this other thing instead" and you're like "WOMAN I MUST BREEEEEATHE OR ELSE I MUST DIIIIIIIIIIIEE"?

    And then she's like "pff whatevs" and then you only get to breathe for, like, 40 or (if you're lucky) 80 minutes every day.

    Of course, in this case I could go off and breathe on my own but it would be so much lonelier and less fun.

    (I'm metaphoring about watching Doctor Who. Can you guest-star on it? Please? In fact, you should just be the next companion. For a few seasons. That would be paradise to a brain-'sploding degree.)

This would be my face when I woke up every morning.

I want to be a Bond villain when I grow up

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I have just been reminded by my right-hand man that the Telegraph article about you getting married at 60 (which I read and linked to before) clearly states that you got married (were getting married, at that time) in "the Minneapolis church where [fiance Guy Paul's] father was a Lutheran minister". Therefore not in England. Unless there's an original, hundreds-and-hundreds-of-years-old Minneapolis in England that I haven't heard of that was the fave haunt of the Druids and the one in Minnesota really ought to be called New Minneapolis or something.

    Obviously I need to be able to track you with a super high-tech GPS tracking device thing, because of course I cannot possibly expect myself to actually remember extremely important details about things I care about. No, indeed.

    Also, can we take a moment to appreciate how totally rad this photo of you is? I so cannot get over it.

taken from fyeahharrietwalter, again, because I love them so

totally worth it, though

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Ohmigosh I got so wet and muddy today. Not like normal wet and muddy that one gets from stepping outside on an average spring day in the northwest but like wet and muddy wet and muddy. Like, I have to write about it to put it in its proper place in the past wet and muddy.

    So this is because Best Friend invited me over to her house this afternoon after church to go have a nice tramp-about in the massive creek-ravine-foresty place that serves as her backyard. (After making me try a piece of her mother's homemade crispy-crust gluten-free pizza with no tomato sauce and pear and chicken and curry for toppings. My horizons have just been Salvador Dali'd.)

   So we had a long hike. Got involved in a couple of beaver dams. (One of them had this awesome backwater mini-cave thing.) It started to rain after a while - spring in the Northwest, again - so Best Friend decided she wanted to practice her survival skills. She's a dyed-in-the-wool tomboy and also kind of a Boy Scout.

    We barely survived the survival.

    There was attempted fire-starting involved. A lot of it. On the creek-bank. In the rain. It involved three boxes of waterproof matches, one emergency blanket, one machete, three pencils used as kindling, one battery and one piece of steel wool, and, eventually, one tiny pan of oatmeal cooked with the water from the water bottles, having no salt or sugar and a handful of raisins mixed in. The oatmeal, being the culmination of Best Friend's two-hour struggle to keep a fire going in the rain, was so disgusting that we took a bite or two each and then chucked it into the creek for the benefit of the fish, in favor of chocolate energy-bars which we found in her backpack. (Don't worry, it was all-natural and I don't think it could hurt anything. Literally just oats, raisins and water.)

    We were a sight by the time we got back to her house. Not normal levels of wet and muddy. Wet and muddy like we instantly chucked our clothes into the wash and found the thickest bathrobes in the house.* Wet and muddy like mud up to our faces. Wet and muddy like completely soaked hoodies. Wet and muddy like sloshy rainboots containing as much water as they contained feet. Wet and muddy like muddy underpants.**


*(And then cooked and ate crepes with butter and raspberry jam and drank tea and watched an episode of "The Avengers".)
** To be fair, this might have had something to do with the fact that clambering down a large, slippery-from-rain log in order to cross the creek tore a sizable hole in the bum of my jeans, but I don't think that makes the situation any better.

bendaniel(s)craig

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Have you ever noticed how Ben Daniels and Daniel Craig are kinda the same person?

Ben Daniels.

Daniel Craig.

Ben Daniels.

Daniel Craig.

Ben Daniels.

Daniel Craig.

 
    CONSPIRACY

Wimsey covers: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

     Dear Harriet Walter,

    Hurgh blugh I so do not feel like myself today. Partly because I've been drinking a fruit smoothie all day instead of, you know, actually eating. But I haven't felt like myself for over a week! It's disconcerting! Feeling like me isn't always the best thing, but by golly it's usually better than feeling like a great lumpish sack of gah.

    Anyway it's been, like, a month since I was rambling about Wimsey book covers, so we're going to see if doing that makes me feel better about things.

    The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)

    With this story, we have the premise of a stiff in an armchair. Specifically an old dude. Is this a charming image? Absolutely. Hell, I want to end up as a dead old man in an armchair myself someday. The real horror of the plot (well, for me) comes when we find out that the man didn't actually die in the armchair in which he is found dead (read: murderalert! murderalert!). I mean, it's just so sad. He should have died peacefully in the armchair. Cruel universe!
(as always, captions refer to the image which comes before them)

    I rather like this cover. The colors are bold and straightforward, although the fern-things make things a little awkward as the one on the left rather looks like it's growing out of General Fentiman's head. Also I like that it looks like he was smothered with a newspaper. Actually, the newspaper rings bells in my mind that remind me of the sorts of white blankety things official people cover corpses with, which is appropriate. This one's just a little small. Like the baby-blanket version of a corpse blanket. Do people make corpse blankets for babies? Oh gosh.

    I'm pretty sure the Bellona Club wouldn't look like that, but let's say it's a depiction of the solitude of death or something. Again, the colors are nice. I like that it's rather subtler than the corpse-in-your-face versions of these mystery covers you get sometimes. Hey, let's look at those.

    Corpse with a fabulous mustache!

    Skeletal green corpse! (Love this.)

    Tasteful, quiet black-and-white Elizabeth George corpse!

    Um okay that doesn't make me uncomfortable at all...

      UM HI

    okay let's take a break from corpses now

    This, now, is super fabulous. Clean and pretty and simple.

    This is...not so fabulous. The spatial relations are really weird and keeping paint and alcohol in such close quarters makes me uncomfortable.

    Holy cow it's one of the covers in that series of covers which I've never seen a good picture of but I can actually see this one! It looks like...somebody taking a photo of a desk.

    I'm not...this is a little...well, er...um. Wow.

    Okay, that's much more soothing.

    wow that's tiny why did I even save that

 
    Hi, Ian Carmichael! I see you have the monocle in today. You almost never do in the miniseries. (This totally isn't a book cover but whatever.)

    Goodness, that's lovely! Totally unrelated to the story but lovely! Will it win the honor of being the best cover on this list?

     No. No it will not. Why not? Because there is still this:

    HOW BADASS IS THAT

so, like

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Lately I have totally

    -knitted 5 tiny piggies and started on a kiwi bird

    -finished I, Claudius and started on Claudius the God and read all of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

    -watched War and Peace (1956), Superman (1978), Jane Eyre (2011) and a ton of "Doctor Who"

    -finally found a song for and started work on my LPW/HV video (huzz-freaking-ZAH)

    -had my sister fall asleep on me while I was reading Clouds of Witness to her, twice

    -closed a car door on my ankle really hard (by accident)

    -experienced strawberry-rhubarb crepes with  warm mascarpone inside and handmade whipped cream on top

    -procrastinated and avoided writing a scholarship essay by writing in my useless blog instead

    (watching Jane Eyre movies, especially really good ones, on five hours of sleep after a long day is not a good idea)