Things Done
Feb. 26th, 2012 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunn1) Mowed the tiny front lawnlets
(??? in February ??? It was so hot today!)
Search and destroy mission on brambles lurking darkly around the beech hedge moderately successful
Laid loads of hazel hedge. Too hot to wear a jumper!
Primroses, daffodils and azaleas in bloom. Snowdrops already finishing in sunnier spots.
2) Went for a walk from Bere Ferrers down to the Tamar with my mother and her dogs. Very muddy fields, tiny baby calves, falling sun reflecting across the river. Saw an egret.
3) Tried to paint another Derbyshire landscape for Eagle BB.
Didn't go well even though I haven't even tried to put a Marcus in the foreground yet. :-( Need to decide whether to give up and try again or plug on & hope it will come together. Am inclined to think that paintings where you get that 'Uuurgh I hate this' feeling rarely turn out really well in the end.
4) Sent in enquiry about a couple of lurchers, hoping that one of them may be suitable for me to adopt.
5) Bills. Car service, car insurance, vet bills, arrrg. :-(
6) Watched Top Gear about the end of the Saab car manufacturer.
Made me feel cheerful about owning Helga Saab. Apparently only awesome people own Saabs? (in honesty I must admit this seems an unlikely proposition...) Good to hear that people are still making the parts, that 's a relief. Helga is 10 and well over 120,000 miles but seems quite happy to keep on going so far. Good girl Helga!
7) Watched Being Human. Just a bit too depressing. May give up watching. Annie is so bloody naive suddenly, and it's just a bit irritating. Surely she wasn't quite this thick always? And the casual killing without any real regret to it is a bit icky, it now seems that from being aspirational, ordinary humanity is just unimportant collateral damage.
8) Finished reading Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber, mother of Ursula Le Guin.
About a North American Indian man who turned up in California in 1911, having lived his whole life in hiding until finally being found starving, as the last survivor of a series of atrocities that wiped out his tribe (the Yahi, a subgroup of the Yana). He was taken to a museum where he lived until he died a few years later of TB. Tragically sad, and full of questions such as:
a) what did he really think of the white people who 'befriended' him and took him to a museum to demonstrate his 'native skills' to an audience of over 1000 people a day (he never told them his real name...)
b) was he really 'the last'? What happened to the women of his tribe who were 'given to a rancher' !!!???
c) what gives with Batwi, the 'halfbreed' who translated for Ishi to begin with when nobody else could speak his language? Why is he described with such contempt (NB by 'halfbreed' the writer means he was half Yana, half Maidu Indian - the next-door tribe!)
d) what on earth can one think of people who accidentally find a 'hidden village' and promptly steal the inhabitants' subsistence-level tools and supplies, leaving them unable to survive, *as souvenirs*
e) is it correct to call someone who crafted arrowheads from discarded glass bottles stolen from rubbish heaps, roofed his house with wagon canvas and screwed it all together with scavenged metal screws 'Stone Age'? And if not, how do you describe that?
On the whole, left me feeling incredibly lucky in my lot in life. The history of the USA : SO GRIM.
(??? in February ??? It was so hot today!)
Search and destroy mission on brambles lurking darkly around the beech hedge moderately successful
Laid loads of hazel hedge. Too hot to wear a jumper!
Primroses, daffodils and azaleas in bloom. Snowdrops already finishing in sunnier spots.
2) Went for a walk from Bere Ferrers down to the Tamar with my mother and her dogs. Very muddy fields, tiny baby calves, falling sun reflecting across the river. Saw an egret.
3) Tried to paint another Derbyshire landscape for Eagle BB.
Didn't go well even though I haven't even tried to put a Marcus in the foreground yet. :-( Need to decide whether to give up and try again or plug on & hope it will come together. Am inclined to think that paintings where you get that 'Uuurgh I hate this' feeling rarely turn out really well in the end.
4) Sent in enquiry about a couple of lurchers, hoping that one of them may be suitable for me to adopt.
5) Bills. Car service, car insurance, vet bills, arrrg. :-(
6) Watched Top Gear about the end of the Saab car manufacturer.
Made me feel cheerful about owning Helga Saab. Apparently only awesome people own Saabs? (in honesty I must admit this seems an unlikely proposition...) Good to hear that people are still making the parts, that 's a relief. Helga is 10 and well over 120,000 miles but seems quite happy to keep on going so far. Good girl Helga!
7) Watched Being Human. Just a bit too depressing. May give up watching. Annie is so bloody naive suddenly, and it's just a bit irritating. Surely she wasn't quite this thick always? And the casual killing without any real regret to it is a bit icky, it now seems that from being aspirational, ordinary humanity is just unimportant collateral damage.
8) Finished reading Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber, mother of Ursula Le Guin.
About a North American Indian man who turned up in California in 1911, having lived his whole life in hiding until finally being found starving, as the last survivor of a series of atrocities that wiped out his tribe (the Yahi, a subgroup of the Yana). He was taken to a museum where he lived until he died a few years later of TB. Tragically sad, and full of questions such as:
a) what did he really think of the white people who 'befriended' him and took him to a museum to demonstrate his 'native skills' to an audience of over 1000 people a day (he never told them his real name...)
b) was he really 'the last'? What happened to the women of his tribe who were 'given to a rancher' !!!???
c) what gives with Batwi, the 'halfbreed' who translated for Ishi to begin with when nobody else could speak his language? Why is he described with such contempt (NB by 'halfbreed' the writer means he was half Yana, half Maidu Indian - the next-door tribe!)
d) what on earth can one think of people who accidentally find a 'hidden village' and promptly steal the inhabitants' subsistence-level tools and supplies, leaving them unable to survive, *as souvenirs*
e) is it correct to call someone who crafted arrowheads from discarded glass bottles stolen from rubbish heaps, roofed his house with wagon canvas and screwed it all together with scavenged metal screws 'Stone Age'? And if not, how do you describe that?
On the whole, left me feeling incredibly lucky in my lot in life. The history of the USA : SO GRIM.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 11:04 am (UTC)They took the poor chap back to his 'homeland' for a holiday - even though he said he didn't want to go - and spent a summer cheerily camping and hunting with him, in the country where *everyone who spoke his language or who he had ever met before the age of about 55 had been horrifically exterminated* and he'd almost starved to death himself. Just a little too much like running a summer camp at Belsen. :-/
It does sound like the Yahi were anthropologically interesting though : apparently they had a women's language and a men's language - everyone understood both languages, but women never spoke the men's language, and men only spoke the women's language when talking to women.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 12:59 pm (UTC)Although I am intrigued by the men's and women's languages among the Yahi. There is a little of that in Japanese, with men's and women's vocab differing, but not to the extent that they're completely different, I don't think.
Maybe I can find an interesting and not completely heartbreaking book about Yahi language and report back.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 02:02 pm (UTC)