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Aug. 10th, 2009 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaI have a super thrilling pair of accounts to add to my collection of wildlife stories, both of them to do with what I'm fairly sure were great blue herons. \o/
Account #1: My mother bought some kayaks this summer - not the sleek, shiny kind, but big flat-bottomed bananas of things, open-deck. (Part of the reason why is to do with me - I have mild to moderate claustrophobia, and cannot bear the thought of a more stereotypical kayak with ... a closed deck? My kayak terminology is shaky. Suffice it to say that even the idea of sticking both of my legs into a narrow tapering tube is enough to freak me out a little.) And when I say bananas, I mean it - they are a near-blinding shade of yellow.
We live very close to where the Ompompanoosuc River empties into the Connecticut; I went down to use the kayaks for the first time with my sister about a week ago, and went with my mother on Saturday morning. We saw ducks in a particular section of the river as we were driving to the boat-launch space, and decided to pay them a quick visit while we were paddling up. I have terrible trouble paddling my kayak in a sane way - most of my recent experience with water travel comes from being on the crew team, which means I don't paddle my kayak, I row it, except insofar as I am thwarted by its lack of a seat-slide. But trying to get a good look at the ducks was a good reason for me to start trying to paddle in a quieter, more leisurely fashion - which is perhaps why the heron stuck around long enough for us to get near it.
We didn't even see it until we were most of the way to the ducks; I managed to get a little closer to it than my mother, although I tried to be careful not to crowd it so much that it would feel hugely uncomfortable. It was very stealthy, and kept stork-legging its way around a span of reeds to keep us on the further side. It was a beautiful bird, huge, white on the belly and blue-grey on the back, with dark feathers over its eyes like Vulcan eyebrows, and an impressively long beak. (Most of my prior experience with birds is on the chicken end of things, so the heron's beak seemed very long.) To keep from distressing it, I decided not to keep following it around, but to paddle on upstream, after a few more minutes of appreciation.
And then there comes Account #2, where not a day later, my sister and I are driving home from the grocery store, and what do we get stuck behind? A great blue heron - possibly the same one, as we weren't all that far from the 'Pomp at the time, but not very likely. This one was flying along, following the path of the road, and low enough that we slowed down rather than go under it - it had huge dignified wings, but I mostly got stuck on its adorable little feet, which ended up forming a kind of triangle shape from our point of view, as it flew in front of us. We must have been following it at least, oh, forty or fifty yards, and then it veered off to go over a house and into the trees. That was at enough of an angle for me to confirm that herons do indeed fly with their necks retracted (as opposed to storks, ibises, and spoonbills, who all fly with their necks outstretched), as Wikipedia had told me when I looked herons up the afternoon before, after seeing the first one.
I'm pretty sure I've seen herons around before, but at a much greater distance - sometimes we'd catch sight of one in the lagoon by the Montshire, and that kind of thing, but nothing like this. It was wonderful.
Anyway, on to slightly less interesting things - my birthday. Again. My sister's TTLY UNKNOWN present for me ended up getting sent to her old address at Clark University, which is where she graduated a little over a year ago; no word yet on whether they'll be sending it on. (I just hope they caught it in the office before it got to anybody's box; I can't imagine anybody passing on a free copy of ... uh, whatever it is.) However, this tragic news was made up for by the party my friends threw for me yesterday, which was lovely: we made cake and cupcakes and icing ourselves, before going to see Julie & Julia, and then coming back, making dinner, and nomming away. We also played games - Set, and Sequence, and way too many rounds of Spoons. (Sometimes we play things that don't start with S, I promise.)
K, who is very artistically inclined and does beautiful, rather impressionistic paintings of scenery, gave me one such painting; M gave me a lovely, barely-used copy of the fourth Harry Dresden book in French. ("Les Dossiers Dresden - Le Chevalier D'Été"! It's too bad the title puns don't work in French.) Which has had the bonus effect of broadening my library of French books to something other than the second and third Harry Potter books and Le Petit Prince. Not that I don't love reading Harry Potter in French, but it's usually less an exercise for the atrophying French parts of my brain, and more "... Oh, hey, so that's how you say that sentence - which I remember verbatim because I've read HP waaaaaaaaaaay too many times - in French!".
Because I have nothing better to do right now: Julie & Julia. I liked it quite a bit; I don't think I'll ever consider it a real favorite, and it didn't give me the same kind of squeezy-chested squee I got from Slumdog Millionaire, or Iron Man, or Up. But I liked almost everything about it; I liked the story, and the characters, and the way everything turned out. It was the kind of real-lives-of-people movie that I sometimes feel like watching - not as incoherent as some movies like that can be, but not with everything tied up neat as a bow with a carefully spelt-out life lesson, either. There were snatches of life lessonry, don't get me wrong, but I didn't feel like I was getting smashed over the head with it. It was good; it's not the love of my life, it doesn't reduce me to exclamation points and keyboard smashing, but it was sweet and fun to watch and it made me smile, and sometimes that's all I really want from a movie.
I had a brief argument with J while we were waiting for the movie over two things: first, RDJ as Sherlock Holmes, and second, the concept of slash. I freely admit that I have absolutely no objectivity at all when it comes to RDJ; I had never heard of him before in my life, and then I saw Iron Man and loved it, and found the Captain America/Iron Man fandom because of it. I know very little about him except that he seems to be very good at playing snarky, incredibly smart people, and that he looks particularly hot when he's got schmutz on his face. Since the preview of the Sherlock Holmes movie seemed to promise that he would be playing such a person, and also getting dirty - with bonus Jude Law (!!!) and what may prove to be epic levels of slashiness - I am ALL OVER IT.
J is somewhat more ambivalent, as she feels that he does not exude true Holmesiness. And she may well be right about that - I have snatched up every bit of good Holmes/Watson fic I could find, but I have not read any of the canon in quite a long time. However, from what I saw in the preview, this Holmes movie strikes me as something of a fanwork - something more transformative, less an attempt to take the books and adapt them perfectly to the screen, and more an attempt to have fun with ... with a canon remix, almost. If somebody's going to remix me a funny, gritty, possibly wacky new take on Sherlock Holmes with RDJ and Jude Law in, I am totally okay with that, even if it does deviate from canon. I mean, obviously, I don't know; maybe it's going to be terrible and stupid and I'm going to hate it and wish I had never bothered arguing with J about it based on nothing more than a preview. But I have to say, at this point it looks exactly like my kind of movie.
The second was actually less an argument, and more a brief discussion where J said something I disagreed strongly with, I gave an audible rebuttal that was kind of half-hearted because I didn't want to blow things out of proportion, and then I spent a while poking at it in my head afterward. The basic context is that M said that she didn't really understand what slash was; J's response was that it was crack. My half-hearted response was that it was not all crack, and some of it was quite good, which I was immediately annoyed with myself for saying on a number of different levels. Some slash is crackfic - or perhaps I should say that some crackfic is slash - but the two categories are not related in any way; it is not crackfic just because it contains slash. And quality has nothing to do with anything - I have read some very good crackfic, I don't know what I was thinking saying "good" like it was the counter-position to "cracky". **facepalm**
This is not the first time J and I have discussed slash and I have ended up biting my tongue; the first time was during a conversation about Prince of Tennis fandom, where J complained about all that crazy fic that sticks the boys together because there aren't enough girls in the canon, and how she was planning a fic with a lot of OFCs to fix that. I don't remember what I said, but, knowing me, it was extremely neutral; however, I remember feeling very boggled. I think J has adjusted her position somewhat since that point - going to Mount Holyoke has loosened her up a fair bit as far as issues of sexuality go - but I think I had been hoping it had been adjusted further than the baby step between "people only write slash because there's not girls enough for pairing fic" and "people only write slash because they like how crazy the whole idea is". Here's hoping that sooner or later I can maybe get her all the way to "people write slash for all kinds of different reasons, including 'because they ship it, and not as a crackship'", I guess.
And, wow, this got long. Clearly today is a wordy day for me - I should go rack up some wordcount on something, before the spirit of verbosity abandons me.
Account #1: My mother bought some kayaks this summer - not the sleek, shiny kind, but big flat-bottomed bananas of things, open-deck. (Part of the reason why is to do with me - I have mild to moderate claustrophobia, and cannot bear the thought of a more stereotypical kayak with ... a closed deck? My kayak terminology is shaky. Suffice it to say that even the idea of sticking both of my legs into a narrow tapering tube is enough to freak me out a little.) And when I say bananas, I mean it - they are a near-blinding shade of yellow.
We live very close to where the Ompompanoosuc River empties into the Connecticut; I went down to use the kayaks for the first time with my sister about a week ago, and went with my mother on Saturday morning. We saw ducks in a particular section of the river as we were driving to the boat-launch space, and decided to pay them a quick visit while we were paddling up. I have terrible trouble paddling my kayak in a sane way - most of my recent experience with water travel comes from being on the crew team, which means I don't paddle my kayak, I row it, except insofar as I am thwarted by its lack of a seat-slide. But trying to get a good look at the ducks was a good reason for me to start trying to paddle in a quieter, more leisurely fashion - which is perhaps why the heron stuck around long enough for us to get near it.
We didn't even see it until we were most of the way to the ducks; I managed to get a little closer to it than my mother, although I tried to be careful not to crowd it so much that it would feel hugely uncomfortable. It was very stealthy, and kept stork-legging its way around a span of reeds to keep us on the further side. It was a beautiful bird, huge, white on the belly and blue-grey on the back, with dark feathers over its eyes like Vulcan eyebrows, and an impressively long beak. (Most of my prior experience with birds is on the chicken end of things, so the heron's beak seemed very long.) To keep from distressing it, I decided not to keep following it around, but to paddle on upstream, after a few more minutes of appreciation.
And then there comes Account #2, where not a day later, my sister and I are driving home from the grocery store, and what do we get stuck behind? A great blue heron - possibly the same one, as we weren't all that far from the 'Pomp at the time, but not very likely. This one was flying along, following the path of the road, and low enough that we slowed down rather than go under it - it had huge dignified wings, but I mostly got stuck on its adorable little feet, which ended up forming a kind of triangle shape from our point of view, as it flew in front of us. We must have been following it at least, oh, forty or fifty yards, and then it veered off to go over a house and into the trees. That was at enough of an angle for me to confirm that herons do indeed fly with their necks retracted (as opposed to storks, ibises, and spoonbills, who all fly with their necks outstretched), as Wikipedia had told me when I looked herons up the afternoon before, after seeing the first one.
I'm pretty sure I've seen herons around before, but at a much greater distance - sometimes we'd catch sight of one in the lagoon by the Montshire, and that kind of thing, but nothing like this. It was wonderful.
Anyway, on to slightly less interesting things - my birthday. Again. My sister's TTLY UNKNOWN present for me ended up getting sent to her old address at Clark University, which is where she graduated a little over a year ago; no word yet on whether they'll be sending it on. (I just hope they caught it in the office before it got to anybody's box; I can't imagine anybody passing on a free copy of ... uh, whatever it is.) However, this tragic news was made up for by the party my friends threw for me yesterday, which was lovely: we made cake and cupcakes and icing ourselves, before going to see Julie & Julia, and then coming back, making dinner, and nomming away. We also played games - Set, and Sequence, and way too many rounds of Spoons. (Sometimes we play things that don't start with S, I promise.)
K, who is very artistically inclined and does beautiful, rather impressionistic paintings of scenery, gave me one such painting; M gave me a lovely, barely-used copy of the fourth Harry Dresden book in French. ("Les Dossiers Dresden - Le Chevalier D'Été"! It's too bad the title puns don't work in French.) Which has had the bonus effect of broadening my library of French books to something other than the second and third Harry Potter books and Le Petit Prince. Not that I don't love reading Harry Potter in French, but it's usually less an exercise for the atrophying French parts of my brain, and more "... Oh, hey, so that's how you say that sentence - which I remember verbatim because I've read HP waaaaaaaaaaay too many times - in French!".
Because I have nothing better to do right now: Julie & Julia. I liked it quite a bit; I don't think I'll ever consider it a real favorite, and it didn't give me the same kind of squeezy-chested squee I got from Slumdog Millionaire, or Iron Man, or Up. But I liked almost everything about it; I liked the story, and the characters, and the way everything turned out. It was the kind of real-lives-of-people movie that I sometimes feel like watching - not as incoherent as some movies like that can be, but not with everything tied up neat as a bow with a carefully spelt-out life lesson, either. There were snatches of life lessonry, don't get me wrong, but I didn't feel like I was getting smashed over the head with it. It was good; it's not the love of my life, it doesn't reduce me to exclamation points and keyboard smashing, but it was sweet and fun to watch and it made me smile, and sometimes that's all I really want from a movie.
I had a brief argument with J while we were waiting for the movie over two things: first, RDJ as Sherlock Holmes, and second, the concept of slash. I freely admit that I have absolutely no objectivity at all when it comes to RDJ; I had never heard of him before in my life, and then I saw Iron Man and loved it, and found the Captain America/Iron Man fandom because of it. I know very little about him except that he seems to be very good at playing snarky, incredibly smart people, and that he looks particularly hot when he's got schmutz on his face. Since the preview of the Sherlock Holmes movie seemed to promise that he would be playing such a person, and also getting dirty - with bonus Jude Law (!!!) and what may prove to be epic levels of slashiness - I am ALL OVER IT.
J is somewhat more ambivalent, as she feels that he does not exude true Holmesiness. And she may well be right about that - I have snatched up every bit of good Holmes/Watson fic I could find, but I have not read any of the canon in quite a long time. However, from what I saw in the preview, this Holmes movie strikes me as something of a fanwork - something more transformative, less an attempt to take the books and adapt them perfectly to the screen, and more an attempt to have fun with ... with a canon remix, almost. If somebody's going to remix me a funny, gritty, possibly wacky new take on Sherlock Holmes with RDJ and Jude Law in, I am totally okay with that, even if it does deviate from canon. I mean, obviously, I don't know; maybe it's going to be terrible and stupid and I'm going to hate it and wish I had never bothered arguing with J about it based on nothing more than a preview. But I have to say, at this point it looks exactly like my kind of movie.
The second was actually less an argument, and more a brief discussion where J said something I disagreed strongly with, I gave an audible rebuttal that was kind of half-hearted because I didn't want to blow things out of proportion, and then I spent a while poking at it in my head afterward. The basic context is that M said that she didn't really understand what slash was; J's response was that it was crack. My half-hearted response was that it was not all crack, and some of it was quite good, which I was immediately annoyed with myself for saying on a number of different levels. Some slash is crackfic - or perhaps I should say that some crackfic is slash - but the two categories are not related in any way; it is not crackfic just because it contains slash. And quality has nothing to do with anything - I have read some very good crackfic, I don't know what I was thinking saying "good" like it was the counter-position to "cracky". **facepalm**
This is not the first time J and I have discussed slash and I have ended up biting my tongue; the first time was during a conversation about Prince of Tennis fandom, where J complained about all that crazy fic that sticks the boys together because there aren't enough girls in the canon, and how she was planning a fic with a lot of OFCs to fix that. I don't remember what I said, but, knowing me, it was extremely neutral; however, I remember feeling very boggled. I think J has adjusted her position somewhat since that point - going to Mount Holyoke has loosened her up a fair bit as far as issues of sexuality go - but I think I had been hoping it had been adjusted further than the baby step between "people only write slash because there's not girls enough for pairing fic" and "people only write slash because they like how crazy the whole idea is". Here's hoping that sooner or later I can maybe get her all the way to "people write slash for all kinds of different reasons, including 'because they ship it, and not as a crackship'", I guess.
And, wow, this got long. Clearly today is a wordy day for me - I should go rack up some wordcount on something, before the spirit of verbosity abandons me.
