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.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 05:02 pm (UTC)I don't do much painting, but some of my most successful fanfics (in terms of number of comments and general enthusiasm expressed therein) are those that, halfway through, made me think "Aaargh! This just isn't working! I should probably scrap the entire thing!" I'm not sure if this means that I have no ability to judge the merit of my own work, or that my readers lack taste and judgement and are more likely to acclaim trash. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-27 10:23 pm (UTC)The writing v painting thing is a bit of a can of worms isn't it?
But I think when it comes to actual physical painting with paint, there is a limit to how much re-working you can reasonably do on the paper, because the surface you are painting on physically changes as you stick more paint onto it. Whereas you can rework digital text infinitely, and at least some of the time, make it better in the process.