nor so wide as a church door

Today was nerdy fun pretty much from start to finish. I got up early to feed the pets - two dogs, two cats - as promised, only to find that my mother was already awake, and had pretty much done everything. Turns out the loose dog and the more active of the cats had been waking her up intermittently for an hour or two.

So I ended up lounging around for a while reading back issues of ... Asimov's, I think it was, a little sci-fi short story magazine; there were a few disturbing stories, a few stories I'm not sure I totally understood, and a few stories I liked, which is pretty par for the course, as far as me and short stories go.

And then I got up and mixed up some sugar water for the hummingbird feeders, before putting them out. My mom put out some seedlings on the porch to get some sun before she left for work; I checked on them, and ended up putting a skirt - yes, when I say that, I actually mean a piece of clothing, this is not some kind of fancy horticultural terminology - over them, because they weren't quite used to full sun and they got a little wilty.

And then I proofread a hundred pages of text for Project Gutenberg. :D Aside from the obvious lure of proofreading in general - I got to fix typos! And formatting! It was like heaven! - the pieces of text themselves were actually really interesting. I did a few pages from a book about a young girl trying to become a dancer; another, a very sharp, dryly funny one, about cross-examination strategies in the courtroom; an old children's book about the life of Jesus, including a lavish description of the beauty of "Magdalen" and her "courtezan" lifestyle that made me think of Inara; and another one that seemed to be pretty much a collection of discussions and reviews of equipment for helping gamblers cheat at cards. And when I say reviews, I mean that some of the pages boiled down to "A+++++++++ WOULD CHEAT WITH AGAIN". That one was pretty awesome.

There was also some fail, natch - there was another relatively old children's book about some soldiers attached to an operation to lay railroad through the Rockies, and the part I proofread was the part where they get chased by those horrible savage murderous Indians, who are bloodthirstily persistent in their attempts to take the scalps of innocent white men. ... Yeah. I think it may have struck an especially unpleasant note with me because of MammothFail.

And then, after I decided that I should probably not do more than 100 pages a day, my recording thingy, the one I order because I'm going to need it for my thesis research, arrived! \o/ Whole new avenues of distraction were opened! I don't have much of a voice to speak of, but I do like to sing, so I took the opportunity and recorded some (rather terrible) renditions of songs that I know but do not actually have - ones I learned in chorus, stuff like that. Oh, and the Mingulay Boat Song; I learned that one in elementary school, and became very used to hearing it in soft, sweet, 4th-grade girls' voices, before discovering that most of the professional recordings of it are sung by big growly men. This is a very scarring situation to be in, so obviously I needed a nice high-pitched version to keep me sane.

All told, today was kind of awesome. Shiny.