raven | Entries tagged with taruithorn

Things. Well. I am moving departments in a week. I would say it's gone quickly, if it were not for the fact it has taken several eternities. I am finally, a week from finishing, getting to grips with things. (I have rather a big project of my own to undertake - which, if you shaded it on a map of the UK, would show up at all reasonable scales, which freaks me out rather - which for various reasons must be done and dusted in the next couple of weeks. "We have to be on top of things," my supervisor told me one morning before I'd taken my boots off.

"Don't worry, we're on top of things," I said.

"No," she said, darkly, "you're on top of things" - which cheered me up rather.)

On Friday night we had a pub quiz for Macmillan (a thoroughly fabulous idea, incidentally - enormous fun and we made more than £200) which the Caped Crusader and I won, resoundingly. Unfortunately the prize was a round of drinks and my planned sensible evening went the way of all flesh. By the end of it I was staring through the bottle where the white wine used to be, and one of chaps I work with gave me a kiss on the cheek and lovingly informed me that the entire department is as scared of my supervisor as I am. "Why couldn't you have told me that SIX MONTHS AGO!" I shrieked, and was poured gently into the good night.

While I will not miss the stress, disorganisation and general bone-deep anxiety of my current job, I will miss the people. I work with the sort of people who bring me coffee without asking and leave sweets on my keyboard. And threaten to SIM the moon, which is the sort of thing that's very funny if you're me and you've been doing my job for six months.

On Monday I move to contentious intellectual property, just in time for me to start volunteering for OTW legal. I am very interested in, but almost entirely ignorant about, the DMCA. The thing is, I'm bound to be - and although the team do claim they need non-US lawyers, I am, myself, doubtful. Nevertheless, I've volunteered. I doubt I'll be of any use, but I've volunteered. The thing is, I am such a useless lawyer - my academic interests are in philosophy and jurisprudence, my net experience thus far is of obscure ways of holding land - that I almost wish I weren't one, where these things are concerned. People hear "lawyer" and think, well, not of me. We'll see, I guess.

On Saturday morning bright and early, Shim and

elb and I went to Oxford for the Taruithorn Banquet, which this year was sparkling as all years, full of good company and wine and origami birds. I met many old friends, spent lots of time giggling with

brightlywoven, danced and served plates and ate a lot of food and had a lovely time. As usual, we went there for two in the afternoon and didn't leave until midnight. We left the car a few streets away and as Shim and I were walking down to the community centre,

cealdis waved at us out of a car window and shouted, "We're going to buy blowtorches!"

"Ah," Shim said, "We're home."

And we were, too. I miss Oxford, I really do, just because it will always be home to me in some way. Yesterday the sky was blue and the sunlight was sparkling and it's really the loveliest place on earth, when it wants to be.

This week I have to work late a lot and not sleep much, I suspect. (My supervisor again, at nine o'clock this morning: "I am demented enough without your assistance!") I am still keeping on, and feeling better than I did a month ago, though. Sort-of-excited sort-of-scared about new things, which is how things ought to be, and looking forward to the spring. There will be weddings, and sunshine, new people, and also new Fringe. Hurrah.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: The Weepies; Antarctica
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/722517.html

It has taken me three days to write 879 words of a story and I haven't finished the other one I was working on; otherwise I have read no novels, left google reader entirely untouched and I haven't even looked at a newspaper. (I miss the New York Times! very much! and yet.)

Here are some things. I took my degree with honours in everything (this amused me: due to some administrative jiggery-pokery, I finished with a GPA of 4.0, this is not as impressive as it seems, really); and I had another marriage proposal. Long-time readers may remember the occasional series. This one seems to have been aborted midway, rather than progressing; according to my parents, he wanted "well-behaved, homely, fair". Shim notes one out of three ain't bad, I'm still probably not marrying him.

Also, Shim! I am in Shim's bed writing fanfic and eating grapes! Today we went to the Taruithorn strawberry party, inside because of the rain, which dripped Englishly over Christ Church most of the afternoon. By the time the sun came out, I had eaten nearly my whole weight in pavlova and lemon cake and strawberries and squished

brightlywoven a lot. It's good to be home. It really is, if profoundly strange; Oxford is windswept and wet, as usual, and finalists are running around, and I feel terribly decrepit retelling stories of "hey, remember that time we had a party and twenty people kissed

osymandias", "remember time we did a play and they dropped me on my head on Wadham Chapel floor", "remember that night we drank too much white wine and spent the night on Lincoln College roof only we didn't shush don't tell the porters" in manner of cranky old person, we had better drunken orgies in our day grump grump grump. But I had a lovely time! I really did. Such good food. Shim and I brought two bottles of pink wine as our contribution (more pink than wine, as he put it) and

brightlywoven claims to have not known who brought it, when she saw it on the drinks table. Clearly I've been away too long. Clearly I've spent too long not drinking in the middle of the afternoon.

Oh, Oxford! It'll always be home to me in one way or another. We walked along the path by the Isis in the evening, watched the ducks and punts slop through the water. I am feeling odd and mellow and in the middle of things. Watching Sapphire & Steel, still - it's giving me strange dreams; I said, earlier, "I really must stop watching British sci-fi from the seventies, it does my mental health no good at all", and Shim's housemate looked pleasantly bemused and murmured, "Quote of the evening" - and writing.

Still here, still here. No plans for tomorrow at all. I'm looking forward to it.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: The Weepies; Gotta Have You
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/705425.html

The South African Siren came round last night and shouted through the door, "I am wearing a DUVET!"

I opened the door in the middle of a lipstick crisis ("I didn't think," I said to the mirror a bit later, "that I was the sort of person who has lipstick crises", but apparently this is possible) and admired her new winter coat, which is less coat and more protective shell. She came in to my pleasantly warm, room-temperature apartment and started to turn a delicate shade of lobster pink.

Taruithorn held their annual Gandalf's fireworks and bonfire last night. For the first time in several years, I didn't attend. Instead the Siren and I got dressed up in thin layers of chiffon and sparkles, headed out into the sub-zero night and went to the law school's annual Fall Ball. This involved teetering around surrounded by some of the drunkest undergraduates I've yet met - this was eight in the evening, and there were some of them smelling of gin and wearing shorts - and going to pre-ball drinks another friend was having, in a very small, very nice apartment that filled up with graduate law students and their plus-ones and acquired a warm-lit, tipsy quality very quickly.

My friend E., who needs a pseud, I suspect, is the only underage person in the law school, which makes her life very difficult. She's also a very serious, studious person, whose sense of humour needs coaxing out bit by bit. Application of cheap Riesling seems to do the trick. Application of such to everyone is probably what got us through the even-more-sub-zero night to the engineering department. I explained to Baby E, with the help of the golden quality to everything, that as I am all of three years older than her, I have taken it as a personal charge to get her to have more fun. She smiled at me fondly and tolerated me. The entire cohort thrives on an atmosphere of patient, kind toleration. This is, I suspect, a natural consequence of taking seventy people from nearly as many different countries and expecting them to cope with the various caprices of an Ithaca winter and a determinedly idiosyncratic department. It leads to bonding through bemusement.

Where were we? Getting up the hill, through the sub-zero cold, and finding the place.

Which was weird, actually; the ball was held in the atrium of the building. It was full of passing engineering students, who had clearly decided they were going to stay late in the library and get some work done, and now their way out was blocked by five hundred law students in formal dress dancing to "Thriller". I waved at one of my upstairs neighbours. He waved back at me with an expression of confusion, which might have been the dancing, and might have been the sight of me in a red and black sparkly chiffon dress when he's never seen me not in pyjamas yelling at him to shut the hell up, it's two am. He doesn't seem to hold a grudge. He disappeared into the night with a face like the world tilting below him.

One of the real law students, another nice chap who definitely needs a pseud, danced with me most of the evening, and as he was retiring, said, wonderingly, "You... people" - motioning to most of my cohort waving their hands around and kicking up their heels - "really know how to relax, don't you?"

I told him it's because we have one chance at everything. For me, and for most of the rest, this is the last holiday from real life. Where other people might choose to exist, we live - much too loudly, much too excitably, with far too much nineties pop - but we do. I don't know how much of it he understood, but he kept on dancing with me until the cooling down of the night.

By the small hours, the Siren, Baby E and I teetered back down the hill, called a cab and drifted home in a collective mood of mellow, and talking happy nonsense about the people we'd met and danced with and the gossip we'd collected, and at the close of it all I sank into my pillows, watched the last bit of Caramel, and fell asleep feeling good about the world. Less than six weeks, now. We're still here.

Current Music: Dar Williams; The Ocean
Crossposts: http://loneraven.livejournal.com/684400.html

I woke up ~~this~~ yesterday morning with a hangover. Luckily I went back to sleep and woke up this afternoon feeling much better. (Apparently I was slightly too out of it to do anything other than stare at the update window.) Saturday was the Taruithorn Banquet and I remember it very well indeed, thank you very much. It's just a little... honey-tinted. This time I didn't really have the spoons to help set up ; I went up for about three, having spent an indecisive hour deciding what to wear, and when I got there the dancing was just beginning.

I have written about the banquet in these metaphorical pages before - it's a big shindig hosted and run by the Oxford Tolkien society, with about a hundred people drinking, eating, dancing, and cooking and washing-up (in gleefully chaotic shifts) and the decoration is epic, gorgeous and entirely done by hand. There were lovely canopies of leaves and fairy lights entwined, and hand-painted wineglasses (of which I have ended up with six, somehow), carefully calligraphed placeholders, and banners hanging from the ceiling. It was very pretty, especially against the grey background of the day. I was wearing a black dress, amazing thick stripy purple tights, amazing purple shoes with leather roses on them, and my very favourite necklace (silver and garnets - a gift from

shimgray to mark an occasion that wasn't Valentine's Day.) I was ready to enjoy self, yes.

Which, I have to say, I did. I love the idea of Taruithorn despite the fact I have never yet made it through Lord of the Rings, let alone anything else, and I love all the events, but I do find the banquet in particular a little unsettling - the demographic reminds me that I'm brown, shall we say - and on the whole, I didn't mind this; the food and the company were far too much of a resounding compensation. I wandered in around three, met

teh_elb and

proskynesis both looking beautiful, and lots of nice things happened after that. In no particular order:

-FOOD. Okay, so, food. There were starters - salads, which Elb, Gemma and I served (that was our shift, and I made much less of an idiot of myself than I did last year, when I was responsible for pushing around the mulled wine trolley, I think we can all guess how well that went, aha), and Elb didn't want hers, so I said, womanfully, that I would eat it. And Shim doesn't like rocket, so I kind of ate most of his, too. And then there were tapas, and I kind of maybe ate quite a lot of those. And olives. And amazing herb and cheese stars. And chocolate. And the main course, right, was an astonishing chicken pie with apricot and Moroccan spices. And I ate some of Shim's lamb and all of Elb's carrots. Om-nom-nomivore, yes. (I said this at the time through a mouthful of carrots to great hilarity. I am the most predictable person I know.)

It all came kind of unstuck, though, when I said in a moment of great foolishness that I would eat as many puddings as

exactlyhalf. (Last year he ate seven! This year I managed chocolate pecan pie, apricot meringue roulade, some mousse, two large bites of baklava and some cheesecake before conceding defeat.)

-Dancing! Lots of it, highly structured, with plenty of scope for twirling, laughing hysterically, and stepping heavily the wrong way onto your beloved's foot. In the end we had three circles of dancers inside each other, all going in different directions, fairly often at unscheduled times. Oh, but the light was dim and the music a little hypnotic, and you twirl and flail and see fairy-lights above your head like explosions of stars, and it was lovely, lovely.

-DRINK. Mead, and wine, and elderflower cordial with wine in it, and some whisky, and I think we all concluded the evening in a fine state of inebriation. Just the right state, though - the one where you decide doing somersaults over bars is a good idea, and laughing at nothing at all. I managed to make Shim dance with me this time, something of which I am justly proud. Also, drink may have been involved with

dr_biscuit discovering a new talent: impromptu, scientifically accurate raps on a given clinical sign. I received a four minute rap on mitral incompetence and another on hypothermia. It was enormously impressive. She's like a one-woman teaching aid, only cooler.

-STAGGERING INCOMPETENTLY HOME. I was hideously tipsy, Elb kept wanting to commune with bus stops, Shim had that resigned face he always has when he has to make sure I don't decide to live in the gutter,

dr_biscuit did the very smart thing and poured us all into taxis. We got home safely and I got purple eyeliner onto the pillows and it was all so worth it.

...okay, I totally deserved the hangover. Thank you, banquet organisers, fairies and hoopy froods - your efforts were as extraordinary as ever. Thank you, thank you.

Today, perhaps not surprisingly, I am out of spoons in a big way. That said, I did manage to go to class, do some food shopping and prepare a plea in mitigation, and tomorrow the revision starts in earnest.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Karine Polwart; Terminal Star

The Taruithorn banquet was yesterday. Well, it was today, accounding for a mid-morning many-hour nap. Having spent twelve hours drinking, dancing and dishwashing, sleeping until lunchtime didn't really seem like such a bad idea.

shimgray, for reasons BEST KNOWN TO HIMSELF, decided that for the nth year running, he wished to spend a lot of time washing up, and I had decided to come and make merry and also to use the opportunity to wear a pink salwar kameez, and accordingly we set out yesterday morning for the wilds of North Oxford through what was probably the nicest day of the year so far, being all fresh and springlike and other such entirely unprecedented things.

(An explanatory note: Tauruithorn is the university's Tolkien society. I have been meaning to go to the annual banquet, which is a cheerfully chaotic self-catered affair, every year since 2006, and had been failing conspicuously on this point until yesterday. It is notable mostly for singing, dancing, food, so much food omg, a plethora of small children, and a long, slow, cheerful slide into somnolent corpulence by the end of the night.)

It was exactly half past twelve when we arrived (this part is important), and I got embroiled immediately in helping put up a canopy with the help of several bamboo poles, duct tape and string. I had never met

teh_elb before, and I think I had met

proskynesis once. For some reason this didn't seem to be an issue; they told me joyous things about the Aubrey and Maturin series ("You have debauched my sloth!") whilst we got into a rhythm with the duct tape and table cloths. The canopies nevertheless decided to collapse and had to be cut away with fabric scissors, and were got rid of in time for them to start bringing the food out.

I am now going to take a deep breath, pause, and talk about the food. There were seven courses. They were kind of amazing. Er. Highlights at this point included honeycomb toffee and candied orange dipped in chocolate, nuts burnt with chilli and brown sugar and flowing mead (which, because of the golden colour, did look like everyone was cheerfully knocking back enormous amounts of neat whisky). Later, there were tiny little amuses (avocado and tomato miniature sculptures) and starters involving feta-aubergine creations of amazing, sushi, more avocado, chicken, roast vegetables, more sushi, more feta, I may have gone to a happy food place. The main course was pie. There were five different types of pie: I had the pheasant and brie and had to go and take a little walk in case my body decided to never let me eat again. And there was dessert. There had been blowtorches involved in the construction of the desserts. Shim found God in the chocolate pudding. It was that sort of an experience.

Other things happened that did not include food in any way:

-

osymandias dressing up as the Watcher in the Water, and touching everyone greatly with his noodly appendages;

-

sir_rosealot deciding that she was entirely too drunk, at three o'clock in the afternoon, to dance; I thought I wasn't drunk enough. We decided that between us we cancelled out, and should get up and attempt to move in a rhythmic fashion. I actually didn't regret this at all; it turns out I like folk dancing, despite never having done it before.

(Also, there is something very lovely about being drunk in the middle of the afternoon, and being sober again by evening. It gives everything a kind of blue-sky surreal glaze. No one seemed to mind my being the far side of tipsy when helping out in the kitchen; it seemed almost approriate when I went round with the mulled-wine-flagon trolley.)

-

sebastienne arriving, glorious in her helmet, in the mid-afternoon, and being immediately asked to sing. I explained, through my flagon of mulled wine, that she has an invisible sign on her head with "I can sing, ask me how!" on her head. She may not have believed me. There was nevertheless more singing.

(Much, much later, and after a lot more mulled wine,

teh_elb,

proskynesis and I got up to sing a composition of our own making, that I cannot really remember now but featured "Moooooooooooooria!" to the tune of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing". There was applause. I may have repressed the rest of it.)

-A declaration, over aforememntioned dessert, from

dr_biscuit, regarding an unexpected feature of a penis viewed in cross-section. "It looks like John Howard."

-More dancing, with violent twirling and flailing and getting it wrong and laughing, and finally, after twelve hours, getting Shim out of the kitchen long enough to dance with me, only for

osymandias to come running out and shout, "Dishwasher! How do you switch the machine on?"

And off he went - but I got him back eventually, and there was quiet twirling around an almost-empty floor, and we went home eventually, on bikes without lights at one o'clock in the morning, but it was a lovely, lovely day. Real life continues somewhat suck, but it was a very lovely holiday.