So, it is party time again, folks!

[wiseheart]

Each year this time, we launch my virtual birthday party, which starts on October 1 and ends on October 9 at midnight, sharp. The goals of the party are to post as many comments and collapse as many threads as possible, on as many new pages as we can. It is always great fun, as you can see if you check out the similar entries of the last few years.

This year, I'll also throw the real party at mid-time - and post the recipes of all the food that will be there for you, so that you can all participate if you want to. Virtual food has no calories.

Fandom-related discussions are as welcome as the ones about coffee or chocolate (just to name a few favourites from previous years), and, of course, pictures and recipes of birthday cakes. ;)

So, drop by, tell your story, post your pics or silly poems, ask questions you always wanted to ask and have a good time!

Soledad, in excited expectation




Oh, and by the way, to provide birthday gifts hobbit-style, I've got a revived story and a Kansas 2 update for you.

Enjoy!

Comments

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Which Bujold series do you like?

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

We're being so chatty I'm getting left bahind!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering what other purpose they could have...

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

They have already started collapsing - go us!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling. Getting home late today, I was positively overwhelmed.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Don't feel you have to respond to everything! It's supposed to be fun!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. That is why I kept out of the gardening discussion - i've got the dead thumb an am happy if I can see the difference between spinach and an apple tree. ;)

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

It's something I feel strongly about too, as you may have noticed.

I hadn't thought about the effect on the syllabus of not requiring maths. Certainly the subject I took was off-puttingly noddy: by far the easiest of the four A'levels I took. Is 16-18 year level physics more interesting in Sweden?

I'd agree that almost everyone would do better with more mathematical understanding.

A lot of maths is just a compact way of expressing complex ideas, and being able to understand it allows you to see the underlying principles more clearly.

Hmm. I'm not sure I agree 100% with this. I think there are several ways of understanding systems, and reducing complex behaviour to equations is, I think, sometimes a substitute for, rather than an aid to, understanding the actual mechanism(s) involved.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

My dream is still to write & publish a mainstream novel. Unfortunately I'm no further along than I was nearly a decade ago; it's been a bad decade for creativity!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty dead-thumbed too, whch is one reason all this gardening is so hard!

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

When I was quite a little girl, I decided I wanted to work on Jacques Cousteau's ship, Calypso. I also imagined myself as the navigator of both ocean-going and space-faring vessels for years. But somewhere amongst our moving internationally, my maths fell apart, and a neither oceanographer nor ship's pilot (sea- or space-faring) was a viable choice by the time I was choosing a college major, so it was political science.

Since early in this century, I've been a qualitative researcher in public health at a university, but another shift is due. I'm trying to get into work around local/regional resilience and readiness in response to the impacts of climate change. I live in a harbor city, and the storm surge map projections show me living on waterfront property, at least temporarily, within the next 10 years. Sobering... I have research background in climate change work (back when people still said "possible" or "hypothetical" in front of "climate change"), and I can get almost anybody to talk to me, and I feel like this is the area where I can be useful. I have a few contacts, and now my health is settling down, it's time to get off my butt and start actively networking, etc.

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

Yes, please! I'm assuming virtual chocolate won't keep me awake at night.

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

I talked for a bit on the phone night before last with the guy who mentored me on my fieldwork up in Canada. He's a wonderful person, and the conversation and revisiting my thesis fieldwork reminded me of strengths I forget because I've used them so little in my current job.

Isn't it funny how things come to remind us when we forget something important about our lives?

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

I've not said anything about our new home, which we moved into in February. We're still getting settled -- 10 years in the last place was the longest I'd lived anywhere in my life, so moving, particularly in between snowstorms, was a challenge at many levels. But it's beginning to have that feel of "home" for me as I nudge myself to go sit in the front room to drink my tea and read, rather than hunkering here at my work table in the bedroom in the back.

The 2 bedroom flat itself is a bit rough in spots, and we're still finding places to put things away, but it's getting to be cozy. I like the relative quiet of our one-block, one-way street, compared to the busy two-way street we lived on before. The back porch is a generous size, and our dog, Mac, is very fond of it. He goes up to the back door, sits, and makes the most pitiful sounds until he is let out. Even in rain or cold, he needs at least a brief visit to survey his domain!

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

I don't really have fandoms in TV, but 10 favorite shows in my past (haven't had a TV for years now)
1) Anything Jacques Cousteau
2) Sealab 2020, a cartoon about an underwater colony of scientists -- that's what I wanted to be as a little geek girl
3) Star Trek -- most of the iterations, except Janeway never did it for me
4) Tour of Duty -- Thanks for the reminder, wiseheart. That was a special show, and for America, I think it was culturally an important marker: we could actually have a show on commercial TV about Vietnam that showed a lot of the ambiguities
5) Stargate - original -- don't think I've seen more than an episode or two of the later ones
6) Cadfael series (seen on public television in the US)
7) Arthur of the Britons -- saw it as a kid in NZ. As I've described it elsewhere, a young, grubby Arthur and his grubby companions -- Saxon Kai and his adoptive Welsh father, Llud -- all riding around a grubby, not-at-all-great Britain
8) Early St. Elsewhere which, I discovered when I moved here, was modeled on the medical facility that houses my current academic employer

Haven't read for fun enough to have favorites in books, but I have enjoyed the odd Cadfael novel and remember being enchanted by the ecology of the magic system in the Earthsea trilogy. I also must have bought and read just about every paperback spinoff from the Space: 1999 series in my teens. No accounting for my "tastes"!

[sammydragoncat]

so do I

[rcfinch.livejournal.com]

In fact, I am - I was good at translating while still at school, and everyone told me to pick it for a job. It seemed a good idea, so I did. What I didn't know is that translating doesn't pay very well... So I'm doing work I'm good at and which I like, sometimes even a lot, but at a price, so to speak.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I've read most of them in translation when I was young, but when I started writing Sherlock fanfic and needed references to the original, I discovered what riches are hidden there, and now I'm hunting down every single story, either in hard copy or on the Internet - one day I might even find the time to read them.

Miss Marple, I've read all in Hungarian, but it's so very different in original as if they weren't the same books at all!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I must admit that it's for research purposes, but I still enjoy them.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

The really annoying part is that the new version has nothing in common with the original, save for a few names. There's, however, a lot of gratutious violence, character rape and idiocy.

[rcfinch.livejournal.com]

Fandoms: I'm not really into them anymore, but what I still watch on TV occasionally is Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Sherlock Holmes (new version), Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Scandinavian thrillers and The Borgia's. Oh yes, and Isabel, a Spanish series about Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Sounds nice, good to know you are settling in well.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I feel like that too, but so many interesting discussions. :)

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I feel like I've got a 10-day-party hangover...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

A fellow Earthsea fan! The magical system is so much more intuitive than many more popular series. Have you read the later books? If so, what do you think?

I love Cadfael too, though I felt the television adaptations did a relatively poor job, despite Jacobi. It didn't help that they kept recasting Beringar; I preferred the first one, despite his acanonical blond hair.