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"Great grey-green greasy Toronto, all set about with headache trees..."
...the Ike is not
As long as we can say, This is the Ike.
Meaning that yesterday afternoon's bloated lowering cloud-cover that removed the CN Tower and Bloor St. past Yonge, and the subsequent deluge that caught![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nekonexus and kintail and me as we emerged from BMW books, was not the tail end of Ike. It was just heavy rain. Ike comes through tonight, presumably with repetitions of the same.
It's been all of-- good heavens, seven years since I met any online acquaintances for the first time (2001, second Shoujocon, TTG and Sabina, yes.) Come to that, it's the first time I've met any of my made-through-lj friends. It's always an odd moment when I see what a voice I know very well looks like: or rather, what the body looks like that surrounds the voice I know. This goes double when all the photos I've seen have that person under a quarter inch of white facepaint or in a shoulder-length brown wig. Mh, yes. So, Kiro, Tav- nice to see your faces at last.
Tav and Kiro also discovered an utterly unsuspected aisle in Seeker's Books, the one with the Eng.lit stuff. Given the cramped shoebox *size* of Seeker's this shouldn't have been possible. It was like one of those dreams where you find there's a whole other annex to the house you live in, one with long corridors and large conference rooms. L-space. Does it to you.
So do the language sections. I emerged with Bernhard Karlgren's Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese, Dover reprint of a 1923 work, before either Chairman Mao or Whoever in Japan had the least notion of imposing simplified characters on an already burdened world. Spent a happy hour or so with it last night after I emerged from my impromptu headache-dope nap, and am very pleased with it. Karlgren does what I've often attempted to do for myself-- lists characters with common elements, infinitely confusible thereby; gives their root meanings so I can keep them separate in English if not in Japanese; and, a more recent exercise of mine, says when the Chinese and Japanese root meanings differ. No one else to date has done this; the assumption is that you're either trying to learn Japanese or you're trying to learn Chinese and never that you're wanting to go from one to the other.
Other books also assume, not unreasonably, that you want to know how the characters are read, and concentrate on that. Analysis has readings too, but it's 1923, so the Chinese is Wade Giles and the Japanese is I-forget-what-it's-called, that phoneticizes the Japanese way. Tio rather than cho, for instance. Logical when you know the reason or if you think in Italian; otherwise unintuitive.
And the happiest of birthdays toincandescens. Sunday birthdays mean cake on Monday as well.
As long as we can say, This is the Ike.
Meaning that yesterday afternoon's bloated lowering cloud-cover that removed the CN Tower and Bloor St. past Yonge, and the subsequent deluge that caught
nekonexus and kintail and me as we emerged from BMW books, was not the tail end of Ike. It was just heavy rain. Ike comes through tonight, presumably with repetitions of the same.It's been all of-- good heavens, seven years since I met any online acquaintances for the first time (2001, second Shoujocon, TTG and Sabina, yes.) Come to that, it's the first time I've met any of my made-through-lj friends. It's always an odd moment when I see what a voice I know very well looks like: or rather, what the body looks like that surrounds the voice I know. This goes double when all the photos I've seen have that person under a quarter inch of white facepaint or in a shoulder-length brown wig. Mh, yes. So, Kiro, Tav- nice to see your faces at last.
Tav and Kiro also discovered an utterly unsuspected aisle in Seeker's Books, the one with the Eng.lit stuff. Given the cramped shoebox *size* of Seeker's this shouldn't have been possible. It was like one of those dreams where you find there's a whole other annex to the house you live in, one with long corridors and large conference rooms. L-space. Does it to you.
So do the language sections. I emerged with Bernhard Karlgren's Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese, Dover reprint of a 1923 work, before either Chairman Mao or Whoever in Japan had the least notion of imposing simplified characters on an already burdened world. Spent a happy hour or so with it last night after I emerged from my impromptu headache-dope nap, and am very pleased with it. Karlgren does what I've often attempted to do for myself-- lists characters with common elements, infinitely confusible thereby; gives their root meanings so I can keep them separate in English if not in Japanese; and, a more recent exercise of mine, says when the Chinese and Japanese root meanings differ. No one else to date has done this; the assumption is that you're either trying to learn Japanese or you're trying to learn Chinese and never that you're wanting to go from one to the other.
Other books also assume, not unreasonably, that you want to know how the characters are read, and concentrate on that. Analysis has readings too, but it's 1923, so the Chinese is Wade Giles and the Japanese is I-forget-what-it's-called, that phoneticizes the Japanese way. Tio rather than cho, for instance. Logical when you know the reason or if you think in Italian; otherwise unintuitive.
And the happiest of birthdays to
incandescens. Sunday birthdays mean cake on Monday as well.
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It's always an odd moment when I see what a voice I know very well looks like: or rather, what the body looks like that surrounds the voice I know.
It is isn't it? It's an all at once a meeting of someone familiar yet in that way (for me) a slight apprehensive 'first date' what will they be really like andwill they really like me n will we get a long still kind of feeling. ^__^ But so far I have had wonderful memories of first meetings with various lj-ers. ^__^
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I have some cakes to take into work tomorrow, and a small plastic airtight box for a friend who I know is observing Ramadan and who won't be able to have any till after sunset, but who I'd like to be able to take some cake home with her.
And, well, some cake here too.
(L-space is one of those concepts which is so obvious, once invented and described. All hail Pratchett.)
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Given the architecture of library buildings from the 17th through 19th centuries as shown in those pics you linked a ways back, you'd think someone would have figured L-space before this. Some of those German ones look like they warp physical space, never mind any other kind.
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On the pragmatic side, this does result in a fairly even distribution of people bringing cakes in through the year. :)
This is different from the standard Birthday Cake, which alas I have no family with me to give me at the moment, and which therefore involved a private purchase of a chocolate fudge cake that is going down slice by slice.
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Not that I recall, but then I was busy babbling myself. ^_^ First meeting jitters and all.
I want to see the four dragons mosaic! Yes, definitely. After the wedding and attendant exhaustion I'll take you up on your kind offer. Late October's a great time for a trip north to see the beautiful autumn colours. (/downtowner's hubris)
And I have to say, you two are the calmest 'less than a month to wedding' couple I've ever met. Bar the ones who just collected their best friends and went down to City Hall.