like pebbles on the beach

( Pardon me, I didn't knit that for you... )
( Pardon me, I didn't knit that for you... ) 

Went curling tonight for the very first time EVER. Had SO MUCH FUN. (yes, a capslock amount of fun). Actually left the house for something other than work or parenting, which is a far too infrequent occurence. Fell over on the ice and hit my head, but did I mention the fun? There's something highly appealing about sliding big rocks down a sheet of ice.

*am feeling very Canadian, and also like I now want one of the big cardigans with a deer on it*

Happy Things
Day 7

Two words: Christmas. Pageant. 

Complete with bathrobes, hockey sticks used as shepherd's crooks, kids dressed up as donkeys and cows and doves. With muttered dialogue and proud grandparents and goofy smiles.

Happy Things
Day 5 

I used olive oil today when I was oiling the bowl for my bread dough. After turning the dough in the bowl, my hands were covered  olive oil. I rubbed my hands together as I stood in the kitchen and as the oil warmed up, it smelled so wonderful.

(The bread was great too, but the unexpected rich smell of the oil was my happy moment.)

Meme from jbmcdragon  - posting something that made me happy: eight consecutive days

Day 1:  I tidied up my knitting baskets this afternoon. I think my needles are mostly in one place now, and I have only one small basket with current knitting projects.  

Fandom: SGA - which wholly belongs to not-me

Title: I've Enough to Endure Without Being Tutted At

Rating: PG

Note: Inspired bygaffsie 's comment on face of joe about John as Bertie Wooster.

( 'The modern young man,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'is a congenital idiot and wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.' )

In the 1920's towns and villages across Canada erected cenotaphs engraved with the names of soldiers who died overseas during the war. Men who went out from trenches, and disappeared into the artillery fire, the tear gas, the horrific sucking mud and did not return. Did not return to their battalions that night, or ever again to the towns, villages, native reserves and cities from which they had come.

The Imperial War Graves Commission looked after burials, constructing those huge cemeteries filled with white headstones: "row on row, they mark our place". The hospital cemeteries have mostly marked graves, but in the battlefield clearing cemeteries, where bodies were sometimes not recovered for a year or two, up to 80% of the gravestones are anonymous.

Some families added names to family headstones in local cemeteries, but at this time each year, we gather at cenotaphs to pay our respects, and remember the cost of wars. Because, to our grief and shame, it is not only First World War deaths inscribed in the granite, but also Second World War and Korean War veterans as well.

And we have men and women serving and dying overseas now as well.

We gather not only to remember the dead, but to remember their families. Families who had cenotaphs here and unmarked graves overseas. Families who have loved ones serving overseas now, risking their lives in Afghanistan.

We owe it to these families, owe it to the soldiers we send overseas to remember the sacrifice we ask of them. Not only the sacrifice of risking their own life, but the sacrifice of living in difficult, frightening conditions, and the sacrifice of making unimaginable decisions, and living with the actions required.

We must be vigilant, critical and thoughtful, not averting our eyes from either history - remembering the grey mud and the thousands dead in places like Passhendaele; nor averting our eyes from the complications of occupying Afghanistan.

I saw the film Passchendaele this week, and I thought it was wonderfully done. And I hold in my heart the questions the film raised in me: about the complicity of those who stay behind while we send others out in our name.

Flist help?

I've got piece of committee work where I need to view a video that is sitting on a computer in Winnipeg, and I'm in Ontario... Do you have a recommendation for an easy to use uploading site? Sendspace? Something else?

I wasn't thinking  youtube, as it's an in-house piece of committee work at the moment.

- thanks, beachlass 

SGA fic
Rating G, crack
Disclaimer 1: Neither the Stargate characters, nor the genius of Maurice Sendak belong to me.
Disclaimer 2: I'm not sure this makes a whole lot of sense, but I'm putting it out there, because it's driving me crazy living in my head.


( ... mischief of one kind and another )