(no subject)
Just realised I haven't updated in ages. Oops. Sorry about that...
My free time has mostly been taken up with the Pulpympic Games at pulped_fictions, which is turning out to be enormous fun. I've written two drabbles, which I'll probably post here at some point, and reading everyone's contributions has been really great (if rather time consuming, lol).
I saw the cutest thing at university the other day - the entire campus duck population was waddling up the hill towards the main lecture hall, for all the world as if they were just heading off to a ducky lecture. It was adorable.
Ooh, and I went to my first ever conference yesterday. It was a student conference run by the Viking Society for Nothern Research and it was about skaldic poetry. I had only the vaguest idea what skaldic poetry is, since we're not really covering it in my Anglo-Saxon/Old Norse module, but I went along just to see what a conference was like. It was interesting, even if parts of in went right over my head. The final lecture, ‘Verse as sex act: chiefly in Kormaks saga‘, was particularly memorable. The phrase 'Viking circle-jerk' was used at one point. I kid you not.
Finally, I've just started another re-read of Curse of Chalion. I'd forgotten how much I love Cazaril and it's delightful to be inside his head again, listening to him sending himself up. There's one thing about chapter one that always bothers me though:
It's clearly stated that the clothes he gets off the dead merchant are woolen, and that they're washed and ready to wear by the end of the afternoon.
Now, in one of my favourite TV series of all time, Tales form the Green Valley, several historians spend a year living on and running a farm as if it was 1609, and in the episode for November one of the historians explains that they have to do inside jobs when it rains because if their woolen clothing got wet, "at this time of year it would take weeks for them to dry out, even in front of the fire".
So how the hell does the laundress get Caz's clothes washed and dry in less than an afternoon?
Now, I'm willing to accept that Valenda on the cusp of spring is a little warmer than the Welsh borders in November, and that it is mentioned that the seams of Caz's clothes are still a little damp, but the weather in the book at that point seems to be pretty chilly, and the seamsbeing a bit damp is not very wet at all. All in all, the timescale seems extremely optimistic to me.
I can only conclude that the laundress is in possession of an anachronistic tumble-dryer. Or a spin-dryer at the very least.
And yes, I know I am over-thinking this, lol. ;)