Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

I love the Indy 500. Some of you know that my parents, years ago when I was a little kid, would tell me that the Indy 500 was run for my birthday to get me to sit through the whole thing without being a nuisance. We continue to refer to it as my race.

Well, today I'm not feeling so well, so I decided to stay home. Mom and dad are sick, too, so I think it's probably best this way. So I'm sacked out on the recliner watching it, and reminiscing about the most memorable year I recall, the 1997 running of the race.

I turned 18 that day ==== ((2010 update: sheesh, second crash of the day already!)) ==== and in my family we would always 'pick cars' to win (various ways of doing it, typically everyone chooses five or six of them and has their own to cheer on). Anyhow, my favorite race car driver ever is Arie Luyendyk Sr., and he was racing, and I had him on my sheet (any year that the race ran on my actual birthday, I'd get to pick first).

Anyhow, it ran over three days, due to weather, but... Arie won! It was such a tense race, and... I was totally ditched school that Tuesday to see the end of it.

Link to wiki article with details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Indianapolis_500

I recall making little jello molded cars for every single car, and having them on an oval tray, lined up in order, in the closest color to their cars, with the car numbers written in whipped cream on the top. They were eaten in order of cars crashing out...

Wish I didn't feel like crap. Much more fun to watch with the family, but, blah, I wouldn't be any fun.

Anyhow, I saw there's FOUR women racing this year! (Pretty sure I counted them all..yeah, Sarah Fisher, the hussie, and two that look like newbies...). That's awesome. I remember when I was always happy when Lyn St. James would be in it.

Gosh, there's some beautiful cars out there today. I'm pulling for Will Power to win. He started second *fingers crossed*

Ai! 'Tis Glorfindel and the Balrog (A Glorfindel vs Balrog sampler)

General readers, feel free to skip; this is kinda like a reposting of sorts of some bits and pieces of the whole Glorfindel vs Balrog, as I've written in. This is really some bits of things for a friend of Lissea's.

First to explain; the Glorfindel vs Balrog thing, for me, is one of those scenes that's extremely heroic and extremely horrific, and very bittersweet. It's also one of two major canon Tolkien scenes that I've had dreams/nightmares of (the other being Maedhros losing his hand: http://zhie.livejournal.com/316405.html). (I've had a number of dreams with the characters, but these are the two that have precisely followed canon.)

I can't seem to find the post from the Glorfindel one, but basically, I'm pretty sure I was sick that time, too. (I have the strangest dreams while sick.) Essentially, I kept dreaming the same sequence over and over: fighting the balrog, taking it down, making the mistake of turning, and being pulled off the cliff. And then falling. And I'd wake up just before hitting the bottom. The majority of my dreams are viewed as if from someone else's perspective, so while having the glorious golden hair and really cool sword and armor were awesome, the repeated falling, not so much. The dream repeated between seven and nine times before I finally just decided to get up.

The thing about my dreams is, they're so vivid. I have the type of dreams where a) I often think I'm really doing whatever it is and b) think I'm actually whoever I'm seeing the dream through. This is both awesome, and also, TOTALLY UNCOOL when a balrog is trying to kill you over and over again! But, enlightening.

The following is a smattering of things that have been partially inspired by the bits Tolkien describes, and partly from that very terrifying interesting night of dreaming.

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From 'Unforgivable'
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The scene from Unforgivable is a follow-up to a scene from 'Recovery', which was written a long, long time ago. I probably need to edit that story a bit, but this gives a different yet similar perspective, of Erestor recalling the event some six thousand years later.
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Now, I obviously can't have just Erestor's view of things, so Glorfindel had to weigh in on the event...

From 'Whispers', drabble entitled 'Fall'
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To offer a balance for the angst of the balrog fight, I designed a coping mechanism for Glorfindel: Humor. The following scene from 'Little Balrog' is supposed to give the reader the idea that Glorfindel has written some highly fictitious accounts of what Balrogs are and are not sometime in the late Second Age. This idea actually came from my brother, who was in the Army and served in the Middle East. While there, he and his company had a large notebook they passed around and wrote in called 'the book'; it was total fiction accounts of the lives of those in the company. I borrowed the idea here.

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I sneak other lines here and there into things, but those above are the largest chunks. Because they're all tied together, it's hard to have just one piece without seeing the rest, or at least, the largest pieces of that puzzle.

Also including this little drabble, not about the balrog, but about Glorfindel as the warrior. Because I think it gives a better image of what the balrog would have seen, or something like that.

From 'Whispers', drabble entitled 'Sun'
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Summer Classes

I never teach in the summer, since my course doesn't translate well to a six week course. So summer is for me to be a student. [I never cease being a librarian, lol] (I need two certification credits every three years, plus for every sixteen continuing education credits I take, I move up another step on the pay scale. Basically, if you want a raise, you have to do a little work for it.)

Last summer, I took ten credits, two for certification, and the rest to move up to my next level. So I'm back at zero again for both. This summer, I'm taking five; I figure if I spread things out, and do 5-5-6, I can keep a pretty good three-year schedule.

One class is advanced Word, another is advanced Excel. Specifically, the 2007 versions were so different than anything before, I've been retaking all the MS Office stuff to pick up all the new and different things (by the time I get those courses done, it should be time for Microsoft to change it all again.)

Another class is on how to incorporate social networking into the curriculum. Then there's a super-fun one on how to integrate the Discovery World Museum into the curriculum.

Finally, there's my 'geek' class. 'Don't expand your vocabulary, deepen it'

The course went live today, so here's the intro page:


Hello and welcome.

Our class begins on June 2, and I will try to make the BlackBoard site available by no later than June 1.

I hope you will enjoy our course this summer, and by mid-July you should have a stronger, deeper vocabulary and will be able to read and write with much great confidence and accuracy.

We are going to start with a very brief history of the English language. This history will provide you with context for the rest of the course.

After you read the brief history, we will begin working on etymology. Since so many of our words (and often the most difficult ones) come from Latin or Greek, we will focus mostly on the etymologies of words taken from Latin and Greek.

Awwwwwwwwwww yeeeeeeeeeeah!

I'm way too excited about taking classes...

Quiz One Done & Also, Blarg

I'm such a good student, I already completed the first lesson and took the first quiz. And the course doesn't really start until the 2nd. I'd keep going but... I want to use the print version of the Oxford English Dictionary for the next part. I'm weird like that.

Still feeling off. Keep doing stuff to try to ignore it, but running out of stuff I feel like doing. I mean, I even stuffed the dishwasher to try to keep my mind off of not feeling well.

What I really, really want to do is write this really good idea I had for the OEAM challenge up right now. But I suck at writing when I'm not feeling good. (It's probably the only thing that keeps me from writing...)

So I'm going to go waste time playing Playstation... getting addicted to this tv game show thing we downloaded the other day. Also downloaded Zen Pinball, which is great, but not zen-like. Pinball is not zen. At all. It's lots of swearing at a little metal ball and bashing a machine around. I mean, it's the only game where it's basically accepted that you're going to ram it like the Greek army hitting the walls of Troy at some point.

Not zen. Fun, yes. Zen, no.

Dammit... want to write Fin and Ress story... *pouts*

*exchanges laptop for game controller*