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This is an update, on my most recent (a month ago is recent?) post and on my very first post ever.
Diane gave me a nice surprise the other day when she presented me with a copy of the Victorian-era book I'd mentioned, having sneakily ordered it while I was still in the "must get this some day" state of indecision. It's called Country Pastimes for Boys, and parts of it remain as fascinating in reality as it was in my memory (which is always nice to discover, since that's not always the case.)
Unfortunately, there's the darker side: I mentioned a suspicion that the book, because of its period (mine is the "new edition", published in 1897) contained a lot of stuff that's now illegal, but I'd forgotten how much there was of it.
100 pages of this 440 page book is about birds'-nesting (a dignified term for stealing wild birds’ eggs). It's a perverted (reading this article will show why I chose that word) "hobby" that I've never been able to understand, but then despite the violence in some of my writing (or maybe because it sublimates something?) I can't get my head around any sort of trophy collecting that involves killing the thing being collected.
Still, I'm glad to have the book again.
The other update goes right back to July of last year and my first LJ post: the little wasps in the bookshelf have started to hatch. (They take their time about it, don't they?) Tiny neat holes have appeared in the mud plugs, and one of the wasps was fluttering around looking for a way out. I think previous hatchees have gone through the mesh of the ventilator (they're that small) but for this one, I opened the Velux window and let it fly away. Once they've all gone, I'll clear away the rest of the mud and see if the cycle repeats.
Diane gave me a nice surprise the other day when she presented me with a copy of the Victorian-era book I'd mentioned, having sneakily ordered it while I was still in the "must get this some day" state of indecision. It's called Country Pastimes for Boys, and parts of it remain as fascinating in reality as it was in my memory (which is always nice to discover, since that's not always the case.)
Unfortunately, there's the darker side: I mentioned a suspicion that the book, because of its period (mine is the "new edition", published in 1897) contained a lot of stuff that's now illegal, but I'd forgotten how much there was of it.
100 pages of this 440 page book is about birds'-nesting (a dignified term for stealing wild birds’ eggs). It's a perverted (reading this article will show why I chose that word) "hobby" that I've never been able to understand, but then despite the violence in some of my writing (or maybe because it sublimates something?) I can't get my head around any sort of trophy collecting that involves killing the thing being collected.
Still, I'm glad to have the book again.
The other update goes right back to July of last year and my first LJ post: the little wasps in the bookshelf have started to hatch. (They take their time about it, don't they?) Tiny neat holes have appeared in the mud plugs, and one of the wasps was fluttering around looking for a way out. I think previous hatchees have gone through the mesh of the ventilator (they're that small) but for this one, I opened the Velux window and let it fly away. Once they've all gone, I'll clear away the rest of the mud and see if the cycle repeats.
