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]

We are awesome!

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, buying books is fantastic! Luckily all my nieces and nephews are book lovers. My oldest nephew famously asked his second or third Christmas "When are we going to open the books?" meaning the presents under the tree. :-)

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I think you got 1000 and I got page 6!

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I think I may have met her through spotting that she had a "Lilla My" icon, who is a character out of Tove Janson's Moomin books, which I think you call "Little Mymble" in English. I wasn't very fond of the character when I read the books as a kid, but now I love her tough attitude!

Then I was fortunate enough to meet altariel in the non-virtual world, when wiseheart and her Mum visited London.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

At the rate we are going we may break 1100 comments before the party finishes tomorrow night!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Books were always my favourite presents, particularly when my pocket money was so small it took me weeks to save up for a single paperback.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

And the rest, I think!

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Cool! :)

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

No, I don't thing I stole anyone else's job! Though listening to some of the discussions on immigration here in the UK, sometimes I wonder if the politicians might not think I did...

I suppose my guilt has to do with the fact that if they paid me less they could pay people having thankless/boring/what-have-you jobs more. On the other hand, knowing employers, I think they would just pay me less, and the other people less as well, so I usually don't let it get to me (too much).

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I first met her at a Blake's 7 meet-up in Manchester, which must have been in 1999; I had relatively recently moved up here from Cambridge, and was feeling homesick, so I think I gabbled about Cambridge a lot...

I have to admit, the Moomin books drove me wild as a child, and I've never tried them as an adult. They were read to us in primary school, and I did hate being read aloud to, which didn't help.

I've never met Soledad's mum, but Mr EA and I were lucky enough to spend some time with S in her home city, when she was gracious enough to show us round -- and feed us espresso/cakes!

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, my Mum gave my two brothers, my sister and I books from two different series: the first one we would get another book from for our own birthday; the second one we would get another book from on our own birthday and everybody else's as well! On top of that, books were definitely to be shared, so that I got to five new books to read for every birthday. :-)

The nearest book shop was 100 kilometers away, so buying books ourselves wasn't really something we could do very often. On the other hand we did get taken to the library by the school once a week for half of each semester; that was where most of my reading material came from!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

You run tutorials in fives! I wonder you don't pray for them to be quiet & shy.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

The way the tutorials work, is that the students get a sheet of problems set each week by the person lecturing the first year physics module (there are three different people doing that each semester; I am one of the ones in the spring semester). They have to hand in their solutions for marking on Monday afternoon, and then we have the tutorials either at noon (which mine is) or at 2pm on the Tuesday. I think the students will get much more out of the tutorials if they have to show how they solved the problems, than if I talk at them for half-an-hour about how I would have gone about it. Of course, that only works if the students are actually willing to come to the board and show the others how they did it...

In some ways, I think it would be easier to go the 'instructor' route of me doing most of the talking. It certainly would mean I had more control, but I think it is more interesting for both me and the students if they talk. That way, it is also easier for me to see if there are things they have managed to do correctly without understanding, which does occasionally happen.

Some of my colleagues apparently have six (6!) tutees this year; that is one student too far to my thinking. My preferred size of a tutor group is four, I think, with enough students for discussions to be viable, but not some many that some of them might get lost (or hide) in the crowd. There is also the restriction that I don't think I could sensibly fit six students in my office...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately my late brother never liked books -- we realised much later he had dyslexia but it was before the days in which that was diagnosed & treated, so he never learned to enjoy curling up with a book.

The nearby library was a bit useless; at one point I started madly reading ballet books -- my mother asked me whether I wanted to learn, and I pointed out I'd read the entire children's section from end to end, apart from the ballet books. So the librarian was persuaded to give me an adult ticket, aged about 10. My mother also had an extensive book collection (she used to teach English & history) and she only banned Enid Blyton, so I read Solzhenitsyn & Lolita instead. (She put the less suitable books on the top shelf, but I was wise to that!)

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Well done indeed! Here is some birthday chocolate.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Well done all around!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Galumphs the virtual chocolate!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I knew a lot of people who read maths & they're a diverse bunch, though they did tend to share a certain pedantry of speech.

I was very upset by the end of HP; it didn't completely throw me out of the fandom, but it stopped me rereading canon.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

We didn't seem to have different library cards for children and adults, when I was a kid. There was certainly a children's section of the library, but I was allowed to borrow books from other parts of it as well, such as Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey stories.

My parents had an extensive book collection, too, but not that much in the way of fiction actually. Dad had a couple of Enid Blyton books in Swedish from when he was a kid, which we did all read several times over.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Grattis på födelsedagen, Soledad! (which is Swedish for 'Happy Birthday!') I hope you have a lovely day, and that the year ahead may bring you joy and pleasant company, both on-line and off!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Being a bit of a rebel even then I think I must have read some Blyton, but I don't recall liking it. I suppose Blyton must have been my era's Rowling.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

In Cambridge where I supervised, questions were generally set by the supervisors, not the lecturers. The usual group size in Nat Sci was two, though I supervised groups of medical students up to four, as I recall. Four male boaties could be fairly bumptious. Five feels more like a mini-lecture.

I did have an unfortunate tendency to talk and test their comprehension via essays, rather than attempt to assay it by questions. I don't think I was cut out to be a teacher.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

So you have a Denethor & Thorongil story! [Is intrigued]

Are you planning to participate in the Autumn (in the northern hemisphere) Pico this year? I seem to recall you were working on Firiel ?last year.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I was hoping to make more progress on my Earthsea novel Jade Dragon, but the only thing I managed to do was to relocate some of my paper notes after the builders made my bedroom into a waste ground. After the [expletive deleted] Windows XP computer debacle, I still don't have a computer connected to both the internet & my printer, nor any likelihood of one in future. Though we have purchased an uninterruptable power supply to stop lightning storms from deleting my files while I'm working on them remotely.

Given how busy I am between now and the end of the year, I probably need to restrict my energies to Yuletide, and even that is beginning to feel a bit goey, what with the moving 'n all...

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I think the Moomin books are much more adult fiction, though they are usually marketed as for children. It is my theory that this is because they are illustrated, which would be rather silly, but we humans do have a tendency to stereotype things. As I said, I wasn't very fond of the books as a child, but find them really deep and beautiful when I read them as an adult.

Getting shown around any city by a native is usually the best way to see it, I think! That you also got to meet wiseheart makes it sound like an even better experience!