marmota_b

On account of it's being Mother's Day, I've realised that I haven't posted anything about my mother here yet, which is a serious oversight.

Since I'm being rather picky in what I post on this blog, these reminiscences are also picky, but, well...

Me & mom are very different personalities, and she told me once, recently, that she had had absolutely no idea what to think of and do with my little imaginative self; that one year, when I was about three, there she was with tiny me walking next to her talking about something imaginary and being a complete stranger to her. But I think she did a pretty good job for a clueless person. ;-)

For one thing, mother was indeed the person I came to with my very first creative efforts: I asked her to draw my imaginary animals for me, and clueless or not, she did a splendid job before I could do for myself. The first one, apparently, I asked for at that age of three or four much in the same manner the Little Prince asked for his sheep; except mine wasn't an existing species and wasn't in a box. (The Little Prince is, incidentally, one of my mom's favourite books.)

She is the person responsible for the first Ransome book entering this household, and while I'm not entirely certain, I think also for the Narnia books. (She certainly gave me some of mine, the ones I got next after my older sisters' original concession of leaving Prince Caspian to me because there was an odd number of them.)
The first Ransome book to enter this household was The Coot Club. There is a Czech publishing house specialising in children's books, and each half-year or so, it would send catalogues of its new books to schools, where the children would order books through the school. Our parents were always quite supportive of this venture, so I think every time, each of us could pick up to three books or so? I do remember usually carrying more books home on the day the order arrived than most of my classmates did. Anyway, one time, there was The Coot Club in the offer, and mom convinced one of my older sisters that it was worth ordering. And she was right, of course. :-)

This goes hand in hand with mom later convincing us to listen to a radio programme for children when The Coot Club was on as a serial. We had tried listening to the programme before and pretty much hated it, but it turned out each week in the month was under the direction of someone else, and there was this man whose direction we loved; he had conversations with travellers and natural scientists and writers and all sorts of interesting people, and played music we liked, and adapted books we liked for radio plays (through which means we also discovered other books we liked). You never felt like he was talking down to you or talking about things adults think children will like: he simply talked about things he liked. (Heh, hello, Lewis' priceless thoughts on these matters.) So that was another huge, formative thing we can be thankful to mom for.

Every now and then, she has this curious ability of digging up or stumbling upon something that's just what I needed and didn't know I needed it. One year, she sent me off (with my agreement) to a weekend children's trip organised by her employer, which sounds potentially awful and was actually awesome. The person organising it was another such enthusiast who was good with children because he did what he enjoyed, and I went with them at least three more times, visiting beautiful places around this country I never would have otherwise learned of, and taking my friends with me a couple of times, too.

Mom read books to us in the evenings, and sang traditional folk songs to us, and cut Christmas cookies with us, and did other such wonderful and traditional mom things when we were little.

She likes flowers and gardening, so in a roundabout way (by planting them in the first place), she's responsible for my love of phloxes, the scent of which will forever be the scent of my childhood summers.

And she's the talkative one in the family, the one who'll strike up conversations with strangers; which is how I met my best friend at the age of three. That friend whom, these days, I won't see for months and when we meet again, we'll talk like only days or weeks have passed. How that happened I don't know, but obviously, I would not be that lucky without mom being a lot more outgoing than I am.

Her birthday's next week; sometimes, it would fall on Mother's Day, which, in a childhood logic, was only natural.

Summer weather + standing around for over five hours = tiiiiired.
Summer weather + walking around Prague + dancing = fun, let's go see more of Prague! (The impression my sister gives of her Latvians.)

I'll post more when I sort through the photos. They very kindly posed for me for photos of all the female costumes, plus of course I took lots of other photos of other ensembles as well. (I love Latvian folk costumes. And folk costumes from the general Baltic area. Compared to costumes from areas like France, you can really see how they would have been made at home.)

I don't have any videos, because my camera tends to turn itself off after less than a minute when I take videos...

So an old one. This song's very popular with Latvian folklore dance ensembles; the lyrics are traditional, the melody and arrangement are by the Latvian music group Iļģi.



Heh. Really, really popular.



(That's from Dzeismu svétki, the Festival of Songs, a tradition since the 1870s. I guess this goes a long way towards explaining why this particular choreography seems so widespread.)

Take 1 as in, my initial thoughts on it. :-)

I've made three claims; two stories down, one to go.

Someone made a claim on my prompt overnight - yes, indeed, I've been sitting like a stupid watchdog on it. The claim's made me giddily happy, even though there's no story yet.

The whole exercise, especially thinking about a "safe story" for the prompt, has also made me realise that in the recent months (not sure how long), I've adopted a much more cavalier attitude towards my creations than I'd had for the rest of my life before.
( Read more... )

So now that I was looking at my stories, I realised I did not feel all that attached to any of them to prevent them from being remixed. I guess this means, if I ever publish any original work, I may be less bothered by fandom. :D

I'm in the final stages of moving from one flat when at school to another. My family had been occupying the old one for over ten years, it turns out; my sisters before me. We kept finding Things. Little sentimental mementoes and practical things completely forgotten about because they were part of the landscape. A little ceramics whale I made years ago in art class. Four extension cords; I nearly forgot one. The dust pan and brush, and the bin. Father's tools. He even had a pair of jeans left behind in the wardrobe. The curtains in the kitchen window were about five shades of grey darker at the bottom than they were on top.
We have to move out because the house is a little over a hundred years old and apparently the electrical wiring in the flat hasn't been changed since it was first put in, or something. And there's a persistent gas leak. And the bath is in the kitchen, which was fun while we were there, kind of, except that there was no door, just a curtain, so, you know, the new tennants will no doubt want a more modern approach to in-house hygiene.
The old little green sink in the toilet that I'm so fond of and refused to have replaced got a stamp of approval from a member of the reviewing committee (there was my aunt, whose house it is, the young lady who helps oversee the house for her, and the man in charge of the upcoming renovation). It made me a little warm inside. Hopefully the new tennants will like it, too.

The new flat is somewhat smaller, which means now there's stuff everywhere, before I figure out where it all goes. And I kind of hate the bed; I slept on the floor in the old flat, because it turns out I like my sleeping surfaces really hard. So for now, I sleep on the floor again, which of course doesn't help the situation with stuff everywhere. And there are zero nails in the walls and we're not allowed to put in new ones, which is rubbish, especially because I have several pictures and a mirror.
BUT
There's a river at one side, and forested hills on the other side, and gardens everywhere, including right in front of the balcony that my room opens into. (The neighbours have chicken even, which is so much right, and I've heard a woodpecker and seen a jay.) And even though there's a fairly frequented road right in front of the house, it's still a considerable step up from the old place where there's one of the busiest streets, right next to a busy crossroads, and trams going underneath your window every ten minutes or so; and if your forgot your laptop open overnight, it would be covered in dust in the morning.
Also, internet. Right now, I'm sitting in the old flat with the mobile connection, which has been rendered mostly obsolete with the move.
So it's mostly a win.

All the moving and all the school stuff, though, means there hasn't been much fanfiction writing in the past months. I can't move on with The Peridan Chronicles, even though I want to. I'm stuck on a chapter that needs primarily stylistics, and an ethical/spiritual debate, and such like, which requires more thinking than I have mental capacity for for the time being. I figured out the stuff with the Polynesian heritage for Telmarines I mentioned before (it makes so much sense for this character I had had a vague idea for), and that's about it when it comes to inspiration for it.
There hasn't even been any sewing (aside from darning a sock recently), which tends to be my go-to activity when I'm intellectually depleted.

In other news, though, I wrote two limericks in the creative writing course, one as my regular assignment and one instead of a critique because the critique was to point out the rhyming scheme; so I feel rather accomplished in that regard. Me and poetry don't normally get on.


So I'm sitting in the old flat, writing a post to make sense of it. To put a thick line behind it. Something along those lines. I'll miss the green sink, but the green chairs went with me. On the bus. In three consecutive journeys over the weekend. My sister joked that the drivers on the line would come to believe there was a green-chair-wielding ghost haunting them.


This should not fit, but the mood does.