Good things

[radegund]

The life of the Radzer has improved greatly since the Bad Wednesday of ill memory. Factors influencing this upturn in wellbeing include:

1. Oisín! He's great. He has a beautiful, slow, confiding smile that just whomps my heart whenever it's directed at me. He can wave bye-bye (although not always on cue); he can walk along the furniture; he can give you what he's holding when you ask him for it (and he's now even remembering to let go of it most of the time). He's fascinated by balls. They roll! They hit off each other and go in unexpected directions! He gives out this deep gut-chuckle when you blow raspberries on his neck or beep his nose or eat his fingers, and he loves playing frog-on-the-head (you'd have to be there ... maybe I should take some pictures). Also, alleluia, he's eating vegetables again (thanks, ailbhe - your suggestion about consistency seems to have been the key: he doesn't like lumps). He'll be ten months old tomorrow, and I love him more fiercely than I would have believed possible.

2. niallm! He's also great. We've had a fairly ropey week, sleep-wise, and he's been a rock and a pillar and a tower and ... maybe some other less phallic images of strength. On Saturday and Sunday he took the morning shift, allowing me to sleep on. There's nothing quite so stonkingly cool as the grin he sometimes gets from Oisín when he comes into view.

3. Delightful phone call with glitzfrau on Thursday, in two phases, punctuated by an unheralded visit from a friend I hadn't seen in ages. It's good to talk to my old friends. I miss having people around who've known me for years - who remember what I was like when I was twenty - who get my in-jokes. niallm has many excellent friends, with whom I love spending time, but nearly all of my crew have moved away from Dublin now, and I feel the lack of them. I went to bed on Thursday all happy and relaxed.

4. Denis Cotter, proprietor of Ireland's best vegetarian restaurant, the Café Paradiso in Cork city. More specifically, his recipe for lemon-chickpea pasta, from Paradiso Seasons. For two people, assemble 250g ribbony pasta, some cooked chickpeas (about half a 400g can, if you're using canned, which I did on Thursday), a bunch of flat parsley: tear off the leaves and finely chop any stalks that you consider tender enough, the rind of a lemon and the juice of half thereof, and a chunk of pecorino cheese (or other hard cheese, I suppose, but pecorino is DIVINE in this dish) - maybe about as much as you could comfortably close your fist around. Put lots of olive oil (like, 60ml) in a saucepan big enough to hold the cooked pasta. Add the chickpeas, parsley, lemon rind and lemon juice, and heat for a few minutes while you cook the pasta in another saucepan. Grate the cheese. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Mix in half of the grated cheese and some salt and pepper. Serve with the rest of the cheese on top. Die of the delish.

5. Doctor Whooooooooooooo! (We have our curmudgeonly reservations, but in general, eeeeeeeeeeee!)

6. My application to move to a four-day week has been approved! I'll start in July, for six months initially. The hope is that Oisín will be sleeping longer by then, but we'll see how it goes. Even better, the latest increases under Benchmarking and Sustaining Progress mean that the cut in my net salary is substantially less drastic than I'd feared.

7. pleidhce's novel has arrived in the post! An actual, real-life, walking, talking, dancing book by one of my best friends! It can be done! (I'm crawling through the second draft of my front runner at the moment, and I need all the encouragement I can get...)

On a completely different note, why do I have the following rhyme prancing through the wastes of my sleep-deprived brain?

On old Olympus's torrid top,
A Finn and German picked some hops.

Is it real or did I make it up? A Google search has proved fruitless. Anyone?

Comments

[kulfuldi.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad things are going better for you, and I hope the four day week will allow you not only a decent amount of sleep, but some time to do things you like doing as well, such as working on the novel. Also, July - it can't rain all July, even in Ireland. Can it?

I'm sorry we've all moved away - every time I go home to Dublin, I think I know fewer and fewer people there, and it's kind of sad. (Hence, my recent trips to London, and plans to gallivant around the US in Sept, because those places now seem to be where all the people I know live). But Ms. Glitz will be back in September. And no doubt I'll be dropping in on you sometime around the end of August too.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

On my day off per week, I will in fact be doing Everything In The World^tm. This is a danger, of course, and I'll have to watch it.

You do know fewer and fewer people in Dublin. I'm greatly looking forward to the return of the Glitz. Also to your August visit. Yay flesh-and-blood friends!

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Yay for good things!

It's a mnemonic:
Cranial nerves:
On Old Olympus Towering Tops, A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops
Olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, acoustic, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory, hypoglossal

from http://www.audiblox2000.com/learning_disabilities/arcostics.htm

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Oh-kayyyyyyyy. Thanks.

I have absolutely no idea how that got into my head. Weird.

[ailbhe]

Peg Bracken. Same place I got it.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

*big smile*

Of course. Thank you.

[niallm.livejournal.com]

You are our newest friends, and as you say, have only met the gestalt.

We don't tend to make friends easily as a group, so you are all the more precious as a result...

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed! And as Niall says, greatly valued in your own right :-) But it's the shared history I was missing (without realising it until I happened to talk to two such people in the one evening).

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Oh hurray hurray hurray! And possibly hurray! I'm so glad you're feeling good and also have time to tell everyone about it. Four-day weeks are the civilised ideal that we should all aim towards, I think. A much more human-respectful pace of life. Plus of course, you can do Everything In The World^TM, because weekdays not at work are made of Magic Time.

Also, Oisín is clearly a very talented boy. Happy ten-month-versary to him.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Thank you! (Actually, I don't have time. I'm thieving it. But hey.) I'm so looking forward to the four-day week, and I'm happy to see corroboration of my belief in Magic Time. I'd hate to think I was just making it up.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Aww! I cannot wait to come home and partake of the happiness. Do I thereby become a group in my own right?

[radegund.livejournal.com]

I will be skipping with glee when you do come home - and although there'll be hellish aspects to being back, there will also be the magic September-Start-Again vibe.

You and I will form the nucleus of a new and vibrant group. All will flock to marvel at our peerless grace, or I'll want to know why.

Dr. Who SPOILERS for those who haven't seen the episode

[stephencass.livejournal.com]

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

That episode was a great topper to a great (perhaps TEH BEST EVAR) season of Dr. Who (although Niall may disagree :)). The scariest bit was watching the Daleks rise up outside the window, and then blink their headlights in silence (but you knew they were saying EXTERMINATE!) I wasn't thrilled about the zillion-year-in-the-future game shows being suspicious clones of of current British game shows, but actually it made more sense once you realise who the Bad Wolf is. Also: Jack: awesome. Female Program Director's "Tough"-but-with-a-wink: awesome. God Emperor of the Daleks "This is the Truth of God!": awesome. The Doctor's fake out of Rose: Yowsa. I also loved how they bothered, with a few deft moments, to set up the tension between Rose and Lynda-with-a-Y, given the latter's brief existence.

Re: Dr. Who SPOILERS for those who haven't seen the episode

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Niall remains uneasy about the direction in which the Doctor's character has been taken, but concedes that this series was more consistently good than the older ones. But he's just a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, as we know.

I was a little bit annoyed by the way Rose forgot her greatness - I was hoping she'd be permanently transformed by it. (Although who knows? Maybe she was...)

But otherwise, as you say, awesome.

Re: Dr. Who SPOILERS for those who haven't seen the episode

[stephencass.livejournal.com]

I was hoping she'd be permanently transformed by it.

I think she was, because after all, the Bad Wolf created herself along the entire timeline, from (at least) 1841 to 5 billion AD. Remember that when The Psychic Patsy from the Gelph/Rift episode looked into Rose, she saw the Bad Wolf. And the Lone Dalek found her DNA especially tasty because it was "time traveller DNA," which at the time I put down to an effect wrought by the TARDIS, but now I suspect to be at least partially related to the Bad Wolf, because of the dramatic effect it had on the Dalek's world view: "such darkness," he laments.

So, if Pre-Dalek Crisis Rose was Bad Wolfed to some degree, then we can safely assume that there's something of that in Post-Crisis Rose, even if she's past the inflection point where she actually had the power to set all this up. Note also how, during the Crisis, the Doctor recognized in her exactly that which he had described as what it was like to be a Time Lord in the first episode. Also, note that shortly after the comment about Rose's neato DNA, the Dalek stated that the Doctor would make "a good dalek", which at the time read as purely psychological, but may have been partly physiological as well. I think Rose was, and perhaps still is, the first non-Gallifrian Time Lord. This would also explain the Doctor's unprecendented degree of emotional connectivity with Rose as compared to other companions (as he explained to the tree descendant, the Doctor knows he's the last Time Lord, because he'd know in his mind if he wasn't, implying a telepathic connection of sorts between Time Lords), as he subconciously responds to her proto-Time Lord nature.

Dear God, it's almost like having Buffy back!

Re: Dr. Who SPOILERS for those who haven't seen the episode

[stephencass.livejournal.com]

Dear God, it's almost like having Buffy back!

By that I mean "TV shows which permit viewers to engage in extreme analysis" not that Rose = Buffy :)

Re: Dr. Who SPOILERS for those who haven't seen the episode

[niallm.livejournal.com]

Thanks to that analysis, I now have visions of the Doctor and Rose starting off the Time Lord race again with the pitter patter of little tardises. Shiver.

BTW not ignoring your other mail, just haven't had the time to do anything about it - rather crazy week...

[jeejeen.livejournal.com]

Awwww happiness and yay!

I think pictures would be a good idea, yes. We need to see the pictures.

And thanks for the lemon-chickpea pasta thing. I would never have thought of combining them!

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Yay!

I must get organised to take some pictures. My camera is rubbish for snapshots, because it takes a second or two to focus and so on. Niall's is great, but I don't have easy access to the results.

[ailbhe]

He's ten! Have you used the thingy, so? Is it useful?

[radegund.livejournal.com]

I know! Bizarre!

We've used the thingy a couple of times, but in Dublin he rarely eats anywhere other than at home, in my parents' house (where there's a high chair) or at the creche. However, we're going to Dingle in two weeks, and it'll be most useful there.

[ainetl.livejournal.com]

fantastic update. Oisín sounds so cute - it's a great age. and good news about the 4-day work week.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

He is pretty damn cute all right :-)

I can't wait for the 4-day week to kick in. It'll be my salvation, I tell you.