bunn

Bit tough to eat so we took it back to its spawning-ground at Asda.

I had to climb over the rocks to reach it, and I did wonder if it would come out of the mud, but it did, and the wheels still turned though it was rather seaweedy. I suspect someone decided it would be fun to push (or ride?) it down the slipway when the tide was a bit higher.

Theo wasn't all that impressed with it, but I am very proud of him waiting dutifully for me while I extricated it.

So we DID go to the village show, which after migrating from field to field around the village for some years, now seems to have settled conveniently in a field just up the road from us so it's easy to walk to. It is tradition that our village show should occur on the one really wet weekend in July, but not this time. The sun shone, the sky was dotted with small attractive clouds, and there was a pleasant cool breeze. Perfect Village Show weather.

( Read more... )

I forgot to mention that while on holiday, I met this magnificent hornet. It retreated to begin with, but then came out to be photographed in a sunbeam.

Then I opened the door and it flew away making a rich deep buzzing noise, like a small propeller driven aeroplane.
( Cut for photos )

Quenta Narquelion otherwise known as the story of Ghost Feanor and the War of Wrath is finally complete! I think I started writing it in October 2016, blimey.

It's 119547 words, and a lot more tragic and epic than I had originally envisaged. I'm very proud of the final battle with Ancalagon the Black and the Winged dragons, which I'd always had difficulty imagining in detail. I was stuck on that for ages till Pp suggested thinking of it as a sort of Battle of Britain analogue, with the Dragons as huge bomber type things, range limited, and the birds and Earendil as small and fast - though sort of flipped, since the dragons are defending and the birds are attacking.

I never thought I could write a story that long and on that kind of scale, and now I have, so I am rather pleased with myself.

I wrote a couple of other things too:

The Eldar That Were Faithful : About what Nerdanel & the women of the Noldor were up to while the Silmarillion was going on. This is a direct response to one of the last chapters of Quenta Narquelion, where Maglor wonders what their mother has been doing.

and in a different world to QN: Seashell Songs : A few scenes of Maglor after the death of Maedhros, written for B2MEM 2018. Maglor threw the Silmaril into the Sea, but that wasn't the end of it. Maglor makes soup, counts spoons, makes songs and finds a way.

(I don't know when I became such a Maglor enthusiast. I had no firm opinions on him until I wrote a couple of scenes where he appeared in QN, and suddenly he took on a life of his own! )

I *still* haven't quite quite finished off Quenta Narquelion, previously known provisionally as Dead Feanor Zooming About Invisible and the War of Wrath.

I need to do a bit more development on Chapter 18 : The Struggle for East Beleriand and Chapter 19: Sauron & the Winged Dragons. (these are not the last chapters. The last chapter is 22: Lindon, and that is complete. )

But I could use a push of motivation to get those last two chapters polished off, and it seems unlikely that many people will want to sit down and read 100,000 words of my witterings in one go, so I've posted Chapter 1 and I'm going to go on posting a couple chapters a week, and hope that gives me the final push I need to get this Balrog sorted out and deal with Sauron and the Winged Dragons properly.

Sometimes I listen to random music on Youtube in another tab and just see where the Youtube auto-feed thing takes me (weirdly often it takes me to Lou Reed, although often from wildly different starting points.)

Often my background music is interrupted by ads with music of wildly WRONG matching with the video, such as the awful, awful ad for Google's latest phone, and the ad for that awful Youtuber who believes in aliens. I am very fast at swapping tabs to zap out of those ads.

But today I was served an ad of such consummate beauty that my tab-zapping was arrested, and I froze, mouth open, to watch it. I seriously regret that I can't actually buy anything as a result of seeing it. It fitted beautifully with the LOTR soundtrack I was vaguely listening to.

Here is the website it took me too. It's a travel site for a place I'd never heard of in Japan. : https://tohoku-japan.jp/ Should I ever go to Japan, I now want to go to Tohuku.

If you collect hair from your cat when you groom him, you can then felt that hair together into a small pointy hat and make him wear it.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished

We really should have stayed home today, cleaned the house, sorted the garden and other similar chores sadly overdue. But the weather forecast was hopeful, and the tides were right, so we abandoned our dusty house and overgrown garden and ran away in the canoe instead.

Still haven't quite got this tide thing down. We set off up the Tamar on a rising tide, but it turned before we would ideally have liked, and we ended up paddling very slowly upriver, against the current, the wind and the tide starting to go out again.

( Read more... )

Except, at long last, it IS. Or at least it is it is for the next 12 years. After that,

r_blackcat informs me that we will be expected to bring out the second edition. I'm imagining something leather-bound and gold-embossed, for suitable gravitas. :-D

Tell me Heather, tell me,
Whether your leaves are summer-green?
Do your blooms hang lightly,
where my brother sleeps?
My beloved brother, my brother who forgives all?

Tell me, Memory, tell me,
How he threw in everything he had,
How he burned like a star?
As I foresaw, he took the dare
To risk our fate, the curse upon our lot

Finrod's Song on Ao3

(it took me literally hours to format it all in three columns on Ao3, I am not going to try to replicate the effect on LJ, particularly as I suspect everyone interested here has already read one of the many beta versions. )

Every year, Plymouth hosts the British Fireworks Championship, in which six professional firework companies compete over two days. You can go and watch for free from lots of places all around the city : a couple of times, Pp and I have sat on Plymouth Hoe to watch, which gives a pretty good view. But from the Hoe, you can't help noticing that the best vantage point of all for seeing the fireworks is from a boat on the waters of Plymouth Sound... So this year we arranged to do that. It sounded like a great idea, up to a few days beforehand, when the weather forecast for that day went to 'rain, possibly thunderstorms'.

But how wrong could it go, right?( Read more... )

The Man Engine is a monstrous Cornish Miner, created in puppet form, and riding like some vast god-figure on the back of a monstrous Volvo lorry. We went to see him unveiled in Tavistock a few weeks ago, at the start of his trek westward through Cornwall. I just unearthed some photos. We took the hounds with us: I might not have done that if I had realised how busy it would be, but Brythen feels quite safe when he has Pp to lean on, and Rosie seems untroubled by crowds (so strange. This is the dog that was terrified of a falling pencil on the other side of the room).

( Waiting for the Man Engine )

To get the Man Engine to stand up, you are supposed to sing to him : Sten Sten Sten! which is Cornish for tin, and there was quite a long song in Cornish to go with it. But this was in Tavistock, and while Tavistock is certainly the most easterly of the Mining World Heritage site, it is also quite undeniably just over the border in Devon. Nobody speaks Cornish! Some people sang (I think the town council had arranged a choir) but most of the surprisingly-huge crowd just watched, while the little orange guy you can see below told us partially-audible tales of mining past, then the choir sang and the Man Engine stood up!
( .... And here he is! )

At Halton quay, there is very little, apart from this very small chapel, which claims to commemorate St Indract and his sister St Dominica, saints and Irish royalty, who arrived in Cornwall in 689AD. Very little of note has happened since this very firm and established event, is the impression you get from the sign. Wikipedia, on the other hand, seems very reluctant to even admit St Indract was alive in 689AD, so who knows.

Supposedly, they brought Christianity to the pagan Cornish, although I'm not entirely sure why the Cornish are considered to be pagan at this point, since presumably Cornwall converted to Christianity along with the rest of the Roman Empire via the Edict of Thessalonica in 380AD. But perhaps there were backsliders. Or if St Indract has slipped through Cornish history by two or three hundred years, in the slippery manner common to obscure saints, it may be that the pagans who martyred him were Anglo Saxons and not Cornish at all. But that would mean this chapel is on the wrong bank of the Tamar, which surely cannot be true. Look at it standing there, quite convinced it is in the right place.

( Read more... )

I wasn't sure if foster Carlos would be able to manage a proper run at his age, after eleven years onlead, and a touch of arthritis. But he gave it a good go.

Gorgeous evening, and of course I had not bothered to bring my proper camera, as it had been so grey most of the day. But I took a few phonepics.

( Read more... )

We bought tickets ages ago to see a Fleetwood Mac tribute band (Fleetwood Bac by name) down at the Minack Theatre, which is a cliff-side theatre down at the far West end of Cornwall. Yesterday lunchtime, as the cold rain sleeted down and the wind wailed, this felt like a really bad idea. But the Minack seemed to think that things were not quite so awful at their end of the county, although the rain splodges on the webcam were not encouraging. So, we (chainmailmaiden, pwibethran, pp and me) gritted our teeth, resolved to be British and Not Put Off By a Spot of Rain, and set off.( Read more... )

At some point recently, Rosie Roo got to the point where she would no longer flee in terror if you dropped a pen, pencil, mouse, etc etc. This was very welcome.

We have now progressed to the next stage, where Rosie Roo is no longer really scared of much at all. This stage involves a lot of bouncing, increasing amounts of toy-flinging, and, should I do something she disapproves of, such as eating toast without giving her some, she stares at me, barking randomly, and progresses through barking, to bouncing and yodelling into full Saluki Song.

Obviously it is impossible to stop this, since a dog that demands toast, cuddles, kisses on her pink nosy and endless supplies of dried black pudding sticks through the medium of interpretative dance and song is vastly preferable to a dog that is randomly terrified of falling cushions. So we have opted to join in. Life in our house at the moment seems to involve a lot of sing-a-longa-Roo.

I am hoping the progress may eventually lead to her actually coming when called reliably, but I'm not counting on it. At the moment, I'm trying to make a point of only letting her offlead if it's not a problem if it takes several hours to get her back again. Right now, I feel quite positive about things, because she has not taken off or done anything random and chaotic for several weeks. But we've been here before on a number of occasions....

He is coming back because I whistled him.
He is coming back, despite the fact that there was a red deer.
He is coming back even though he was in hot pursuit on the heels of the red deer and there were miles of woods ahead.
He did this twice today, having spotted two different deer running.
Each time he came back and said 'I am a good dog!'
I love my dog.

Went to visit some otters today, at the Tamar Otter Centre. The main job of this place is taking in young otters that have been orphaned and looking after them until they are old enough to release, so most of the otters we saw were British otters. Apparently female British otters are terribly fierce, and specialise in beating up all the male otters, even though the males are much bigger. And orphan baby otters are surprisingly tame and will stay close to their human while they are growing up. And they hate learning to swim!

I think this was my favorite photo I took of an otter.

( Read more... )

The hounds and I went to Calstock regatta today. We parked at the National Trust carpark at Cotehele house, just in case it was busy, and walked along the river to get there - but in the end, it was fairly quiet, for an event. Good for Rosie's social skills.

We got there just in time to see the second race coming through the pillars of Calstock Viaduct. I hoped the train would go over while the boats were underneath, but no luck! That's the safety boat painted white on the left. It waved at me cheerfully when it saw I had a camera. I waved back.

( With an excitable number of photos of boats )

This week we ended up going on a Tamar Valley Tourism Association outing. The idea of these is really that people who run accommodation go out to local attractions and see what is available locally so they can recommend it to guests. We don't have any guests, but we kind of fancied a boat trip anyway, and we are Tamar Valley Tourism members, so we labelled it 'networking' and went to Plymouth.
( Read more... )

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Entries tagged with yay

Caught a whopper

Still no spiderbaby

A hornet

I finished the thing!

Quenta Narquelion

Ad done right

The Cat in the Hat

Hurray a weekend!

The trouble is the song was never finished...

Fireworks!

We went to See the Man Engine

Halton Quay

Paddling his own canoe

Mad runnings & some views

Unexpectedly awesome thing is awesome

Roo-ro-ro-ro-roooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Here is my awesome dog

Otters and things

Calstock regatta

Plymuff

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January 2026

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