Boomerang Day
Remember that the Silly Signing Clothing Contest for a signed copy of the UK edition of PEGASUS is in full, erm, swing. You can post to the thread in the forum in Talk, to last night’s Facebook thread, and to Twitter #sillypeg any time till midnight Wednesday—and let me just add that I will be very sad if the Twitter hashtag doesn’t get used. So far we’ve had a good handful of entries in the forum*, but most of the people who said they’d be willing to enter are still digging through their closets and scratching their heads, and there’s lots of room for everyone. Please enter! I’m enjoying all this vicarious toggery immensely!
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Another day which began, as so many of my days do, last night. I frittered way too much time on the blog—here I had a given brief, suitable-for-Saturday-night-before-Sunday-morning-service-ring blog waiting for me: a couple of photos and a few rules of engagement and I’m outta here.
But there was the concert. And I REALLY wasted some time trying to figure out how to talk about the actual music without sounding like an ignorant prat and/or boring to death those of you who would rather be shot at dawn than spend an evening listening to a herd of classically trained singers doing what they do.** I failed. So I told you about trolls and ticket anti-technology instead.***
And then hellhounds refused to eat their supper.† Refused. Pointblank. Again. And I hung around wasting more time waiting. . . .
I got about three and a half hours of sleep last night. Not good.
This morning Niall, who is an unspeakable fiend, called for Stedman. This is appalling enough on a Sunday morning but it was additionally appalling in this case. The rope on the six broke at Friday practise and wasn’t replaced till after service ring, which meant we had to ring around the absence of bell number six. USUALLY when you’re ringing six of eight bells you ring either the front six or the back six. For complex harmonic reasons Niall and Edward decided we’d ring . . . the one, three, four, five, seven and eight. I was on the five. Which is to say bell four of the method. The fifth bell of our particular eight is getting on for being moderately big. Not big big but big enough that you can’t yank it around with impunity—so if you gleep your dodges, well, they stay gleeped, because you can’t recover quickly enough: the bell’s too heavy.†† I’ve only recently even begun to ring methods on the five—as opposed to baby things like call changes and plain hunt—and here I am on a Sunday morning on three and a half hours of sleep ringing it in Stedman and, furthermore, pretending to be the four. And ringing over the three which is the two, the four which is the three, and the seven which is the five. I cannot begin to tell you how confusing this was.
But we did it. Even in spite of the fact that frelling Edward called a touch. So I reeled out of the tower††† thinking hey, maybe it’s going to be a good day after all.
And then Darkness didn’t eat lunch having not eaten supper last night either. Damn. Frell. Two in a row with these guys is yellow alert: whoop whoop whoop. DAMN.
AND THEN I FOUND A BAT IN THE BATHROOM. NOOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. This is the first bat I’ve seen since Atlas—as we hoped—blocked up all the holes.
But both hellhounds ate dinner. Okay, if this is one of fate’s clever-cute trade-offs, I’ll take the bat and the hellhounds eating. Please the gods they eat supper. And I get some sleep. . . . Am I allowed to ask for sleep without the sound of wings. . . ?
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* Several of them seriously fabulous. ::Clothing lust::
** Somehow boring you to death with tales of, say, bell ringing isn’t in the same category. The Seraphim are awesome. Any bell ringing with me in it is not awesome.
*** I missed out the waterlilies in the Crusaders’ Garden. I kept thinking about them today. There’s an enormous pond covered in waterlilies. They were closed up for the night when we were there. Speaking of awesome: wouldn’t I love to see that pond at midday. But I don’t think the garden is generally open to the hoi polloi.
† I gave up on breakfast a long time ago. But in the interests of both more opportunities to present them with food and the fact that sighthound digestion tends to be delicate even when there are no additional challenges involved, I added the third meal round at the back end. So they get lunch, dinner and supper.
†† Good ringers will tell you (endlessly) that it’s all about accuracy anyway, not brute strength. I know. But I’m not a good ringer.
††† Having also survived a touch of Grandsire doubles when the conductor changed his mind about what he was calling halfway through a call, and I happened to be one of the affected bells. I swear the bell did that one all by itself. I can’t respond that fast even when I’ve had enough sleep.
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