Family history + some mishmash
Well, I made it as far as almost having a meme post done for today, but I'm having a moment of wanting to sleep on it and reread before posting it, so that'll be tomorrow. ^_^ (Topic: telling snailbones about Newsflesh being my main fandom.)
Somehow I've had my Dreamwidth account for over five years (!!!) without ever uploading a custom mood theme. (For quite a while there I was holding out hope for someday finding a Yotsuba&! mood theme.) But then I was talking to taste_is_sweet about photo hosting for embedding kitten photos, which reminded me that I have a Photobucket account that I hadn't touched in even more years, which holds nothing but two custom mood themes: the Haru/Rin Fruits Basket one you're seeing if you're reading this on LJ, and the Tori Amos one I had uploaded on my original (long since defunct, at this point) LJ account. Which is now on this DW account. ^_^ I'm unreasonably pleased about it.
A link via
recessional: adorable pictures of shelter dogs being taken to their new homes for the first time.
netgirl_y2k posted about Scotland yesterday, and when I was commenting I was reminded about what is possibly my favorite memory of my paternal grandfather, so I shared it. And so I'm going to put it here, too, because it amuses me so much. (I may have posted about this before sometime in the past, but if so, not for a good long time.)
First, a bit of context: I'm only something like 1/4 Scottish, but I've always flat-out identified that way, in large part because I never really heard stories about my mom's German family back further than a generation or so, while my dad's family used to tell older stories about our clan. Sure, some of them (maybe even most of them) are all more family lore than family history, but a year or so ago a bunch of my aunts and uncles and cousins had an email thread trying to piece together some more immediate history, and one cousin brought up the thing Grandad had said about the moon in Scotland being called "MacFarlane's Lantern", but said he had no idea if it was true.
I don't know exactly what it says about my one year at University of Toronto (when I had notions of getting a second BA) that the single most useful moment provided by my Celtic Studies classes was that I could chime in and say, "Actually, the 'MacFarlane's Lantern' thing pops up in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (as do some other things about the family), so it dates back at least that far."
Anyway, this is the actual story/comment I left:
When I was pretty little I was prone to reading trivia books for fun, and one of them had a Q and A that was "Q: Why is the moon called 'MacFarlane's Lantern' in Scotland?" and "A: Because a clan by that name stole cattle by the light of the moon in [century; I forget which one(s)]."
So I went to my grandad, appalled, and said, "Grandad, this book says we were cattle thieves! I thought we were SHEEP THIEVES!", all child-outraged. And he basically patted me on the head, and said, "Well, dear, we were definitely sheep thieves. But I imagine if there were any cattle around, we stole them too."
Additional comment on Waverley: my entire class hated reading it, which makes it funnier that it provided that one bit of immediately-useful info. The woman who taught that class and a couple of my other ones was by far the best professor I've ever had, and she kept cajoling us through the novel by promising that it would be grand when Bonnie Prince Charlie made his appearance. And then the prince arrived, and...it was still dull. We complained, and Ann said, "Well, I had to keep you reading somehow!", without a shred of repentance. *g*
(And here's a bit of utter logic fail: for just a moment there, part of my brain said, wait, should I stop and think about it before putting my family name in an unlocked post? Which might be a reasonable thought if I didn't, you know, include my last name on all of my fanfic [not to mention that it's on my professional work, and I don't make a secret of most of what I work on here]. So good job, brain.)
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/482084.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW:
Somehow I've had my Dreamwidth account for over five years (!!!) without ever uploading a custom mood theme. (For quite a while there I was holding out hope for someday finding a Yotsuba&! mood theme.) But then I was talking to taste_is_sweet about photo hosting for embedding kitten photos, which reminded me that I have a Photobucket account that I hadn't touched in even more years, which holds nothing but two custom mood themes: the Haru/Rin Fruits Basket one you're seeing if you're reading this on LJ, and the Tori Amos one I had uploaded on my original (long since defunct, at this point) LJ account. Which is now on this DW account. ^_^ I'm unreasonably pleased about it.
A link via
recessional: adorable pictures of shelter dogs being taken to their new homes for the first time.
netgirl_y2k posted about Scotland yesterday, and when I was commenting I was reminded about what is possibly my favorite memory of my paternal grandfather, so I shared it. And so I'm going to put it here, too, because it amuses me so much. (I may have posted about this before sometime in the past, but if so, not for a good long time.)
First, a bit of context: I'm only something like 1/4 Scottish, but I've always flat-out identified that way, in large part because I never really heard stories about my mom's German family back further than a generation or so, while my dad's family used to tell older stories about our clan. Sure, some of them (maybe even most of them) are all more family lore than family history, but a year or so ago a bunch of my aunts and uncles and cousins had an email thread trying to piece together some more immediate history, and one cousin brought up the thing Grandad had said about the moon in Scotland being called "MacFarlane's Lantern", but said he had no idea if it was true.
I don't know exactly what it says about my one year at University of Toronto (when I had notions of getting a second BA) that the single most useful moment provided by my Celtic Studies classes was that I could chime in and say, "Actually, the 'MacFarlane's Lantern' thing pops up in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (as do some other things about the family), so it dates back at least that far."
Anyway, this is the actual story/comment I left:
When I was pretty little I was prone to reading trivia books for fun, and one of them had a Q and A that was "Q: Why is the moon called 'MacFarlane's Lantern' in Scotland?" and "A: Because a clan by that name stole cattle by the light of the moon in [century; I forget which one(s)]."
So I went to my grandad, appalled, and said, "Grandad, this book says we were cattle thieves! I thought we were SHEEP THIEVES!", all child-outraged. And he basically patted me on the head, and said, "Well, dear, we were definitely sheep thieves. But I imagine if there were any cattle around, we stole them too."
Additional comment on Waverley: my entire class hated reading it, which makes it funnier that it provided that one bit of immediately-useful info. The woman who taught that class and a couple of my other ones was by far the best professor I've ever had, and she kept cajoling us through the novel by promising that it would be grand when Bonnie Prince Charlie made his appearance. And then the prince arrived, and...it was still dull. We complained, and Ann said, "Well, I had to keep you reading somehow!", without a shred of repentance. *g*
(And here's a bit of utter logic fail: for just a moment there, part of my brain said, wait, should I stop and think about it before putting my family name in an unlocked post? Which might be a reasonable thought if I didn't, you know, include my last name on all of my fanfic [not to mention that it's on my professional work, and I don't make a secret of most of what I work on here]. So good job, brain.)
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/482084.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW: