blowing away the blues

[lobelia321]

I am no longer melancholy! Magically, as soon as I had finished opening my presents, the dreaded anticipated moment had passed and needed to be no longer anticipated and now I am fine! T'family was so sweet! And guess what?

I got an Oxford Shorter Dictionary!

I'll just repeat that and try not to drool as I type it:

I got an Oxford Shorter Dictionary!!!



*drools abjectly*

I love it! How could I remain melancholy when that plopped out of its wrapping? T'h gave me my first Oxford Concise in 1981 and it sits by my desk, its cover fallen off, its pages ripping out, the most used book in the house! And now the Shorter! And I immediately had a word to look up that wasn't in my Concise: punctiliar. Oh, how I drool!

Also, I got some yummy books, incl. Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio, in the bilingual edition, and poems by Petrarch, and the newest Vikram Seth and Margaret Atwood; also (HAH) the Sims. Hah. My addiction will be fed! Hah. Hah.

But omg, the Oxford Shorter.

Oh, and t'son (so sweet) gave me a gmail account. And t'other son gave me a self-made card. *hugs them to bits*

And I had a horrible meeting with my horrible line manager, *vomits* but I got the Oxford Shorter so who cares, whee!

My gmail address is @googlemail.com. Now why is that, and how can I change that to gmail.com?

*goes off to eat cake, look up words, peruse 'first usages' and etymologies, and debauch my Sim*

Comments

[crazybutsound]

See, now, I was going to post a Happy Birthday post but I was worried you'd still be feeling melancholy and it would maybe rub you the wrong way. ;-) So I'm glad you're feeling better and I come here with a massive Happy Birthday hug! *hugs*

Glad you had a good day and hope this year is plenty full of good, too! :-)

Also, dictionaries rock. I kinda collect them myself, have way more than I need apparently, though I tend to think one never has too many dictionaries, lol.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh no, no, you see, it's the having to be reliant on others to do the happy-birthday thing that gets me melancholy so it's all terribly important that everybody does wish me happy birthday! Thank you!!

*does some more dictionary drooling*

[cupiscent.livejournal.com]

Oh bwee! Shiny and big and TWO VOLUMES. Isn't it the most fabulous thing? I swear, sometimes I think I just keep the Male around for his Oxford Shorter.

Happy, happy, happy birthday, you lovely, quirky, wonderful woman. I'm glad to see you so showered with good things.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

It is beautifully big and two-volumed, except mine is no longer shiny as I discarded the book cover things in order to have the no-frills, hard-core dictionary look. Also, the cover kept slipping off and in my excited haste I nearly ripped a page that got caught in the shiny-shiny.

Thank you!!!

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

happy birthday! And yay for decent dictionaries! And etymologies!

(This one's nice, I have it on my PDA! Not the same as a Real Paper Book though.)

You have googlemail.com 'cause there is a bit of a dispute in the UK as to whether Google are allowed to use 'gmail'. So all new addresses are googlemail, for the nonce, but may change if/when Google win dispute.

Happy birthday, again!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you!! Goodness, I didn't know there was a legal dispute: what about?? I did some test emails, sending myself messages from my other accounts using both googlemail and gmail, and lo, both worked. Heh. Your etymology dictionary looks very juicy! But you're right, nothing beats an actual hard-core, hard-cover two-volume set.

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

legal dispute stuff here: Google are big players, though, so have a good chance of getting a satisfactory ruling.

The only real advantage of having an etymology dictionary on the PDA is that it's ever so portable. (And I have a lingua franca dictionary as one huge text file, which makes searching a lot easier.)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I did read that legal info in the end. It turns out that on my decrepit old home imac, I get only about a third of the google links. I logged in at work and was amazed!!

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

OMG HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Your dickos (as my mum says) are teh sex (as my mum doesn't say).

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!! I looked up 'dicko' in my concise dictionary but it wasn't there! So I shall rush downstairs forthwith and look it up in my new SHORTER and whee, all about you weird English people will become instantly clear!

Not that the word 'dickos' used in the same sentence as the word 'sex' causes me tremendous surprise.

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Isn't Zelenka lovely?

I know this has nothing to do with anything, I just felt like saying it.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I have yet to see Zelenka 'live'. When I tune in to Channel Five, all I get is a field of fuzzy snow.

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Oh, I saw my first complete episode the other day, and he's great, he's all sort of ... dusty.

But who cares, really - seeing them on the programme is just a kind of bonus - the fic is the real thing. :)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Dusty..????!!

I want that bonus! I want to be part of it all!

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Shall I try and tape some for you?

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

*YES!*

*falls over in abject gratitude*

Could it be an episode with Sheppard and McKay and Zelenka???
(Or do they figure in all of them?)

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Sheppard and McKay are always in it. Zelenka less so, but oh, I wish I'd taped the last one I saw, because there was this bit where they were bickering about something, and it was rather lovely.

Acutally... I have a nasty feeling I'm about to buy the DVDs off eBay. In which case I will lend them to you.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I can see that not only have you been sucked into fanon but now into CANON as well! Ack. Is it weird? Is it different from lotrips?

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the canon/fanon thing - I was talking about that (albeit rather inarticulately) in the post I made yesterday. It's the fanon that drew me in, and the fanon that'll keep me. The canon is just a bonus for me, although at the same time it's, obviously the root of everything. It's really, really different from lotrips. I dunno, maybe with lotrips the difference was that the fanon and canon (or the fic and the canon) were somehow very closely linked, whereas with SGA ... No. Backtrack - I don't think this is what I meant to say. Maybe what I'm saying is just that FPS and RPS are very different beasts. However, I can't really see me writing in this fandom, or participating in the same way I did in lotrips.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I think I rambled on about this in the post I made today. fps and rps are very different, and I'm not sure I'm cut out for fps! Maybe I was too imprinted with the way one can do things in fps. I know all of fps's limitations but I know how that beast ticks. And I keep having rps'y moments. Also, how do those fps people who have movies and series to go with keep apart the role / character from the actor? I can see how lotr fps can be very 'pure' but SGA? Where does Zelenka stop and whatever-his-name-is begin?

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Maybe it depends what you're interested in. It's like, I was very, very interested in the dynamics and the relationships in lotrips canon. That, I suppose, was what made me want to read and write fics about them. I'm really not at all interested in the people who play the characters in SGA, although I suppose I am interested in what they look like. But what I'm mostly interested in the relationships between the fictional characters.

[piran.livejournal.com]

happy birthday, lobelia!
so glad it turned out to be a wonderful day for you. :D

*lots of hugs & kisses*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!! You are so sweet.

[ukcalico.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday!! And doesn't dictionary paper smell *good*? =)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you! And it does!!

[gabbyhope.livejournal.com]

Yay for non-melancholy birthdays! I'm glad you had a good day, complete with some geeking out, which is always fun, and happy belated birthday from a fellow fallen fangirl. :)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!! Falling, falling, fallen....

[msilverstar]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEARHEART!

(I don't do posts but I do defo do birthday wishes, and I hope you have a fabulous year.)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you, sweetie! Thank you so much!! :-)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh, I missed your birthday! Hope it was a good one.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It was a very good one. The lead-up was melancholy angst but once the dreaded day had actually arrived, it were fab! Mostly because I got the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as a present!!

*drools*