sovay: (Default)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2014-06-30 07:39 pm

I can feel it in the way you keep time

And this afternoon [livejournal.com profile] derspatchel and I went out to Long Wharf to pick up tickets for a whale watch with [livejournal.com profile] teenybuffalo on Wednesday. We did so successfully (no tickets left for the sunset watch, but we like the afternoon just as well) and continued the streak with pizza at Regina's right before the dinner crowd got in. (I ordered eggplant on my half, not realizing it came breaded and lightly fried: I basically made myself an eggplant parmesan pizza. No regrets; it was great.) Coming out of the North End, instead of routing back through Haymarket and Government Center on our way to Park Street, we decided to walk back to Lechmere over the Charlestown Bridge.

There were jellyfish in the water! I'd never seen them in the Charles before, even below the dam. Usually Rob sees them in Fort Point Channel around this time of year. We believe them to be moon jellies, recognizable by the reproductive cloverleaf at the top of the bell. The center of the river was dappled with them. We had to detour around some hotels and an office park at the end of the bridge to get down to the water where we could take a closer look, but there they were there even in the shallows by the footpath, flowering slowly open and closed in the green scale-rippling water as traffic banged and rumbled overhead. I didn't take any pictures; my phone is only good for blurry things. They were beautiful. We stayed to watch them even when a photographer came by, more interested in the rust blotches and the overhanging stalactites.

And it was brutally hot, so I pretty much passed out as soon as we got on the 80 at Lechmere; I'm not quite sure why I'm still awake. Possibly because we're still hoping to use the Brattle passes we got from [livejournal.com profile] mrbelm at the beginning of this month to see a movie before the clock ticks over into July. Possibly just because I don't sleep anymore. But there was unexpected sea today, and on Wednesday I hope to have more of it. And that I can live with.

[identity profile] ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com 2014-07-03 04:33 am (UTC)(link)

Eh, put it in Anglo-Saxon and we'll call it even.


My Anglo-Saxon is so terrible at this point that it's not even funny.* This is as close as I can get, and I'm sure it's wrong:

Glæd bewitian hwælas!

*I can't remember if the genitive actually does the same things as the genitive in the genitive-possessing language I'm accustomed to speaking. I also can't remember whether prepositions are necessary in a phrase like this. It looks slightly off to me, but then again the lack of prepositions in the Modern English equivalent often feels slightly wrong to me if I'm caught unaware by it.

[identity profile] ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com 2014-07-04 12:17 am (UTC)(link)
Which I do know is more like "Happy Whale Watching," but I really was and am having trouble remembering how to use the proper mood for wishing people things in Anglo-Saxon, assuming I ever really had it to begin with.

Which is one of the problems for me with a language one doesn't learn by speaking. I learnt An Modh Foshuiteach (which gets Englished as "the subjunctive," although I'm given to understand there are linguists who think it shouldn't be) in Irish almost immediately, simply by virtue of learning how to thank people, even though, like M. Jourdain and prose, it was years before I knew that was what I was using.

Then it occurs to me that I'm not sure any flavour of English uses the subjunctive for that task. Oh well.
Edited 2014-07-04 00:19 (UTC)