We went to the beeeach!!!
Ahhh... nothing refreshes you like a few minutes of doing Tai Chi on the beach at sundown... My dad had the day off (and I did, too), so this afternoon -- despite the warm weather -- we nipped over to the library before heading up to Northampton Beach just to take in some fresh oceanside air... and watch the last few stragglers on the beach, mostly families with kids. And puppies. It seemed to be "Bring Your Puppy to the Beach" day: I saw a man and his little boy and girl playing with their boxer puppy, and then there was Rhoda the Rottie and her family. Also saw some nice little sand castles, nothing too fancy, but very lovingly and dilligently rendered by this one young fellow who looked strangely like Haley Joel Osment as David in "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence".
My folks stayed up on the sea wall most of the time, while I took a walk and dipped my toes in the (COLD!) water... and wrote things in the sand ( "MR <3's LW" inside a bigger heart, to be exact. ::Grins!:: )
Oh, back to the library visit: Fortunately, I didn't get bugged about any fines this time. I got out --
"Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" -- since I didn't finish it the other time I had it out: it's a long book...
"The Faery Reel", edited by Eileen Datlow -- I picked it up because I recognized the name of the editor from Neil Gaiman's weblog; I decided to get it out when I flipped through it and found that one of Neil's stories was in it.
And for my mom, I found John Steinbeck's "The Noble Acts of King Arthur and His Knights", the last book he was working on at the time of his death, which is a very interesting reworking of Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur".
I picked up -- and almost took out -- a book on the early Christian missionaries in Europe; specifically, I read the section on the conversion of (what would later become) France, largely a result of the conversion of Clovis I, the king of the Franks. Now, thanks to the conjunction of certain fannish -- and somewhat anti-fannish (viz. the damned "Da Vinci Code") -- things, I've developed a fascination with the historical Merovingian dynasty or at least the little that we actually know about them, since they arose somewhat before the Franks started to settle in and become civilized enough to write historical accounts of what went on (Big question: How on earth did a bunch of barbarians develop or devolve into that nation which claims to be the most cultured nation in Europe, though many of its citizens seem to have raised snootiness into an art form?!).
I was reading this one section which pieced together some of the scant fully accurate historical details we're sure about the early Mero ascendants, when this really odd feeling came over me, like it all sounded familiar, almost like an ancestral echo of some kind (the French part of me is under the delusion it's descended from the Meros, which certain one of my Houseguests finds amusing and fascinating...). It was only a flash, more a feeling than an image, as if I were standing in the midst of twelve men of might or vassals of some sort... The aura of it was enough to make me unsteady on my feet. I don't know if that came from me or the Merv, since when I'm tinkering with the fic I'm working on about his backstory, I sometimes get really vivid images, just not as vivid as this one was.
And yes, some members of the Houseparty tagged along to the beach. I was teasing Flood on account of the odd similarity (at least in terms of color scheme) between him and a seagull that was lurking around. Hey, it was white up top, grey on its wings and black on its tail, so it looked a little like our Alban Flood, esquire, striding around with his hands folded behind his back. Of course he didn't think that was funny.
Enzo the Hyena anthromorph chasing a sandwich wrapper blowing in the breeze.
Ref and the Merv walking on the beach, hand in hand, in the opposite direction I was taking... A few moments later, I came back to find them on the sand at the tideline, doing their best to imitate the famous shot of William Holden and Deborah Kerr in "From Here to Eternity".
My folks stayed up on the sea wall most of the time, while I took a walk and dipped my toes in the (COLD!) water... and wrote things in the sand ( "MR <3's LW" inside a bigger heart, to be exact. ::Grins!:: )
Oh, back to the library visit: Fortunately, I didn't get bugged about any fines this time. I got out --
"Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" -- since I didn't finish it the other time I had it out: it's a long book...
"The Faery Reel", edited by Eileen Datlow -- I picked it up because I recognized the name of the editor from Neil Gaiman's weblog; I decided to get it out when I flipped through it and found that one of Neil's stories was in it.
And for my mom, I found John Steinbeck's "The Noble Acts of King Arthur and His Knights", the last book he was working on at the time of his death, which is a very interesting reworking of Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur".
I picked up -- and almost took out -- a book on the early Christian missionaries in Europe; specifically, I read the section on the conversion of (what would later become) France, largely a result of the conversion of Clovis I, the king of the Franks. Now, thanks to the conjunction of certain fannish -- and somewhat anti-fannish (viz. the damned "Da Vinci Code") -- things, I've developed a fascination with the historical Merovingian dynasty or at least the little that we actually know about them, since they arose somewhat before the Franks started to settle in and become civilized enough to write historical accounts of what went on (Big question: How on earth did a bunch of barbarians develop or devolve into that nation which claims to be the most cultured nation in Europe, though many of its citizens seem to have raised snootiness into an art form?!).
I was reading this one section which pieced together some of the scant fully accurate historical details we're sure about the early Mero ascendants, when this really odd feeling came over me, like it all sounded familiar, almost like an ancestral echo of some kind (the French part of me is under the delusion it's descended from the Meros, which certain one of my Houseguests finds amusing and fascinating...). It was only a flash, more a feeling than an image, as if I were standing in the midst of twelve men of might or vassals of some sort... The aura of it was enough to make me unsteady on my feet. I don't know if that came from me or the Merv, since when I'm tinkering with the fic I'm working on about his backstory, I sometimes get really vivid images, just not as vivid as this one was.
And yes, some members of the Houseparty tagged along to the beach. I was teasing Flood on account of the odd similarity (at least in terms of color scheme) between him and a seagull that was lurking around. Hey, it was white up top, grey on its wings and black on its tail, so it looked a little like our Alban Flood, esquire, striding around with his hands folded behind his back. Of course he didn't think that was funny.
Enzo the Hyena anthromorph chasing a sandwich wrapper blowing in the breeze.
Ref and the Merv walking on the beach, hand in hand, in the opposite direction I was taking... A few moments later, I came back to find them on the sand at the tideline, doing their best to imitate the famous shot of William Holden and Deborah Kerr in "From Here to Eternity".