Linguist's Lair

...and the other half. I even carried hand-wrapped sugar cubes in my pockets. And a little flashlight.

Yes, there was yet another FedCon this year, and I managed to do TWO costumes. Well actually only one... Or two halves of the same?

I guess I should be concerned....






In case you ARE wondering, Dewey's is a system of library classification!

Yay me. I finally got around to uploading and sorting my Cardiff and Swansea pics. I was stuck in translating and editing as well as admin work until yesterday, so this is the first sign of life from me in a while. Apologies. Go to this Flickr set to enjoy my pics of the location shoot on September 26, and this one for general random Torchwood stuff.

Gone off to locate where the actual filming is. This is from my hotel window.

Every September 11, I get reminded of that-it's not terrorists I'm afraid of, but my very own September 11-in 1999.

Read all of it here!


If anyone wants to do some plane spotting, the little bugger is still around and causes happiness. It's registration is G-UKFC, and you can even buy it as a MODEL PLANE (Herpa does these detailed tiny model planes that are based on a real plane complete with registration, and the Air UK Fokker 100 is MINE. I have two of them. I keep thinking I should do something bad to one of them...)



I can offer that from a report I found years later:
"DATE: 11.09.1999 LOCALTIME: afternoon LOCATION: Frankfurt Int´l AP/Germany AIRLINE: KLM uk TYPE: Fokker F-100 REGISTRATION: G-UKFC C/N: 11263 AGE: 7 years OPERATION: ISP FLIGHT: Frankfurt - London (UK2291) OCCUPANTS: 88 occupants FATALITIES: 0 INJURIES: 0 DAMAGE TO AIRCRAFT: minor While on climb out, smoke was reported in the cockpit and the cabin. The aircraft turned back to FRA and made an emergency landing at rwy 18. Reportedly, nobody was hurt."

Runway 18 is Startbahn West-I'm still very much into planes and airports and stuff, which doesn't help.I'm almost okay with flights to the UK, because they're fairly short (yes, I know, that doesn't make them less dangerous as take off and landing are the most crucial parts), but flying to Egypt every year is downright terrifying. I take medication. It sucks. I still read the forum of the PPRuNe (google it!) and I have even, on occasion, said something. My title there is scaredy-cat. I paid for it. Talk about some weird kind of love-hate-relationship I have to planes.

Here you can see the little bugger about four months before it annoyed the hell out of me, also taking off from Frankfurt. That looks like runway 18 to me, too. It already had the KLM livery, just as I got to know it-my model plane still has what I had originally booked-Air UK.

Click Here to view the photo

(Due to copyright reasons, I can just give the link).

I called the little Fokker (yes, please DO pronounce that with an American accent!) "new" in my story, as in, it looked and smelled new. But in fact, it was already 10 years old when I boarded it...so someone must have given it a make-over a short time before, as some of the other pics I've seen make it look extremely dirty and shabby. I know it says seven years in the snippet I quoted, but it was in fact first registered in 1989. And it wasn't quite afternoon either-well, I was STUCK at the airport until late afternoon, yes, but the flight itself was in the morning.

Oh, and I got two flight vouchers for it.
As compensation. Gee thanks. After 911, every little turbulence gets a whole truckload of psychologists to help you, and possibly lawyers (WTF???) too.

...and I'm feeling a bit blue, as always. I hate birthdays. I'm 36 now. *GROAN*

In memoriam- a pic when she was still in good health.

I'm about to drive to the vet to have my old cat Mädchen put to sleep....during the last few weeks, she has grown weaker and weaker and today I couldn't bear it any longer. One of her eyes was suddenly blind today. She can't eat or drink any more and all the other ugly stuff that comes with senility. She's the mother of all our cats, and I'll bury her in the garden in the evening. May she rest in peace.
(userpic is my cat Tinker, who died in 2002 after getting run over by a car. He was one of Mädchen's sons.)

Edit: I'm back and have buried her in the garden. The vet said she must have been over 20 years old...that would mean that when she came to us she would have already been ten-AND she gave us several litters of kittens after that. Tough as old boots, the little one....

I am devastated. A kind soul (thank you, Rand0m!) sent me this today:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1935822/Michael-de-Larrabeiti.html

He was the writer of three of my favourite books, The Borrible Trilogy. (His other books were fun to read as well, and all of them very unconventional and quirky). But the Borribles....yeah. I can safely say they were the books that influenced me most at around age 13. Lord of the Rings, yes-that influenced me in a totally different way. The Borribles were more visceral, both in a literal and metaphorical sense, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I am the proud owner of every edition in English that has ever been in print, including a review copy from 1976, as well as every German edition. Yes, of the same three books. I also have an extensive collection of "location photos" from these novels, as they are all set in London. You can have a look at them here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alyxsands/collections/72157603184637515/

I always dreamed of meeting that man one day, and I had actually toyed with the idea of getting into contact with him for a meeting in September when I'd be in Oxford (if I were able to get the necessary time and money to actually go.).

I feel sad in a very profound way.

And, as promised in the comments:

As I was a VIP guest at this year's Fedcon again (due to being an "intellectual", i.e. someone who is giving papers on sci fi topics instead of being an actor), I didn't have much time to go hunting for autographs, as always...so I just took the handout I prepared for my little introduction to Egyptian, complete with swear words, and let Michael Shanks sign that. Probably beats all those model pose shots he has to sign all the time...

And a close up with daisies. Really. Can you see the light was hurting my eyes? Bloody sun!

Yes, it's the infamous Psi Corps, with friends! On a green meadow! With blue skies and stuff! And me in the middle!

Okay, just for now, a few pics....these two guys were so much fun at the convention!

I still have convention blues....last weekend was FedCon at Bonn (http://www.fedcon.de) and I did two presentations (one on Ancient Egyptian for beginners, the other on archaeologists and linguists as characters in sci fi) and an improv/q&a show thing with the fiance which was hilarious. I still have to sort photos though.

It started with high drama tho- the fiance gave me transparencies he swore could be used in a laser printer.


Well, they couldn't. Thank God I'm a good little techie, but I still burnt my fingers and had to endure the pong of burnt plastic. Hooray. To say I was pissed of is an understatement. You could prolly hear my yelling across the Pond.

Con was great, tho!

On a different note-right after I borrowed some money and bought a new laptop (on which I'm writing this....Vista is WEIRD), I managed to revive the old one. I spent two days repairing broken stuff after I magically revived the hard disk. I might really be the result of some alien experiments. My right hand has magical electronic devices reviving powers. Jusk ask my fiance. I touch stuff and it works again. This hard disk was PINING for the FJORDS, I had repeatedly tried to reinstall Windows (gave me too many errors to count), checking for faulty RAM, taking the hd out and looking at it....nothing. Then I just switched the laptop on after a few days (had tried that before, never worked)-using my magical right hand. And it...worked. It was seriously borked and took a lot of work afterwards, but....it was running again. Now I have a spare laptop....I can haz me own huge networkz!
I still think the hd might die any minute, so I might just strip it of all my stuff and give it to my mom for surfing teh interwebz tho. I'm far too afraid of data loss.


Oh yeah, and the new admin job at uni (work more, less money) that I got makes me think I turned into Ianto Jones. Coffee anyone?

Something closer to home-from my backyard, January skies....

Oh yeah, the obligatory annual Medinet Habou pic, my fave temple!

This one looks so unreal....but I was *there*, it really looked like that!