Like birds it was against the wall

[sovay]

The sky and the snow outside are lavender. I don't mean this poetically; I mean they are the color of the blossoms when they shade toward grey, a little warmer and a little bluer than a lilac-pointed cat's fur. I figure it's the confluence of dusk and streetlight diffusing from the snow, but it is very beautiful nonetheless.

I made two trips out of the house today. (There were going to be three, but the state of Massachusetts is asking people to stay off the roads.) Around eleven in the morning, the sky was still light; flakes were just beginning to fall. By the time I left the house again around three in the afternoon, the sky was plate-grey and the snow was solid, the dense soft fall that doesn't blow around much: it is no-nonsense snow, filling up the spaces in everything as steadily as it can. The sidewalks were powder over dry glass. I walked in the slushy streets for better traction.

I have no idea what to do with my evening, except drink lots of hot liquids. Maybe I will actually watch something. Maybe I can write.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

The sky and the snow outside are lavender.

Lovely imagery, all of this.

I have no idea what to do with my evening, except drink lots of hot liquids. Maybe I will actually watch something. Maybe I can write.

I hope you had a good evening and that all's gone well.

I went to my old department's Christmas party, and due to the snow had to leave from a closer station with fewer trains. A late night, but I think I got some halfway useful schmoozing done, as well as confirmation that my abstract for a conference paper had been received.

[sovay]

I went to my old department's Christmas party, and due to the snow had to leave from a closer station with fewer trains. A late night, but I think I got some halfway useful schmoozing done, as well as confirmation that my abstract for a conference paper had been received.

Congratulations on the paper!

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on the paper!

Thank you!

I don't know if it's been accepted. I'm kind of nervous about this--I'm very used to conversing in Irish, but I've never done an academic paper in the language before and I'm fairly well flying blind with the subject. "Humour in Irish" is the sort of open-ended topic for a conference that probably sounded nice at the time but isn't so much inspiration as intimidation. I said something vague about how I'd write about humour on the internet, particularly image macros/memes and its relationship to humour in literature and song.

For that matter, the other conference that's going on in the spring is about Irish-language literature and mass media. I said something vague about the link between popular literature and mass media. I was hoping to find fanfic, but all I could turn up, barring near-criminal applications of machine translation, was one ungrammatical Naruto fic and a fic about my least favourite Harry Potter pairing with some Irish-language dialogue (real dialogue rather than Google translate, at least, but even aside from my distaste for the pairing it's book fic rather than media). If I'd managed to secure a copy of the dub of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that was shown on television a few years back I might have tried to do something with that and the translation of Philosopher's Stone,* but I couldn't and I'm not sure that it would have counted in any case.

TL/DR: The topics for the Irish-language academic conferences in the Eastern US this spring are all very frustrating.

*Harry Potter agus an Órchloch, done by someone named Máire Nic Mhaoláin. I feel vaguely embarrassed that we haven't got a more thoughtful translation of "Philosopher's Stone" than "Goldstone," but I suppose it can't be helped. I wonder if there might be a better word in a manuscript somewhere, but such is life.