(no subject)

Wax's brother started teaching himself the guitar about six months ago, and he can already play several neat things like The House of the Rising Sun and a walking blues beat that he figured out by ear. I googled "El Condor Pasa" yesterday and came up with this page of sheet music and was playing it on the recorder, and he managed mostly to play along. I was shocked to learn that he can't even read music. But Wax's knowledge of theory is also super shaky. No theory or piano lessons or anything like that. Anyway, even though she can only play one chord so far, maybe there's hope for her yet if it runs in the family.

Call Ikea

I've promised myself that I won't upload any more icons until I've migrated back from this 400x600 goblin monitor which I have christened er, dubbed Gleeb. One doesn't get the proper effect. It'll probably be a while, but luckily it's perfectly adequate for reading badfic, mediocrefic, and even (should I chance to come across some) goodfic.

I'm supposed to be painting a colourful princess-related... painting for Carmela's wall. It was my own idea, and I've already started, but my sense of artistic inadequacy stems (I wouldn't feel that about painting furniture, but this is an actual picture) from growing up with brains and the ability to distinguish how much more awesome my mom is than me at it. I still feel that she needs it, or something like it. Carmela's room is, by my American standards, about the size of a broom closet and completely white, with a white bed and brown flowered curtains, and decorated with:

• One of those little nylon tent thingies, which is crammed into one corner between the bed and the single table.


• The table is actually a very small wooden desk, and is positioned on the short wall opposite the door. It is covered in a dark red Indian cloth that drapes to the floor, and holds the CD player alarm clock and basically nothing else.


• A wooden chair painted faded turquoise.


• A plain white toychest the size of a footlocker.


• Plain white walls ornamented with two very small posters positioned next to the floor squeezed into an empty space between the closet and the window. These aren't art posters at all, but are the sort you get free in toy boxes or magazines. One is a mainly-brown map of Moominvalley.


• A small store-bought round canopy hanging over the head of the bed with Disney princesses printed on it and pink netting hanging from it. It is not voluminous enough to create the genuine impression of a princess bed, and the only other pink things in the room are:


• A collection of small vinyl cling stickers of Disney princesses that probably came with it, arranged at child's-eye-height along the length of the bed on the wall, each one depicting one of the main princesses. None is more than about seven inches high. There are only about six or eight of them.


• The table and the head of the bed are arranged at right angles and nearly touch at the corners, leaving a hollow in the corner of the room which is completely filled by the abovementioned nylon tent. The other end of the bed is a few feet from the door; the other edge of the table is a couple of feet from the wall with the window. The empty space on the floor is therefore about half the size of a broomcloset, and mainly filled by the white toychest and a small wicker basket which also contains toys.

Historically, in the Nordic countries - before the introduction of electric heating - it was very costly as well as very difficult to heat houses, which was why they were arranged as compactly as possible, usually with the large stove in the kitchen in the centre so that the heat from it would go through the shared wall into the main bedroom. The living area was the largest, and as much time as possible was spent in it, all the family together, because it was warm. Bedrooms were the furthest from the heat, so quite sensibly the family would sort of draw out their waking time as much as possible, then sprint to the bedrooms, shedding a few garments as quickly as possible, and then climb under a pile of duvets, hopefully with another person to help them keep warm.

Casa Windows is a modern house very much in the Nordic style, with a spacious downstairs, and a good third of the floor plan open all the way to the peak of the ceiling at the second storey; the three bedrooms and a bathroom, upstairs, are all crammed into the front half. And the, er, life... model is still to spend as little time in them as possible. The toys in Carmela's bedroom are backup toys - or rather overflow toys, I suspect, that wouldn't fit in the copious downstairs toy storage. So it makes sense that less effort would be spent decorating bedrooms because they are really bedrooms and not personal rooms that one would be expected to spend a lot of time in. But still, my strong decorator's impulse cringes every time I walk into her room. It's so incredibly depressing that there's nothing hanging on the walls and the dominant colour impression is white and brown.

graaargh

I hate SSH. And for the record, I never requested strict host key checking and have switched it to 'no' everywhere I can find. WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME, SSH? I'll sign a waiver! I love the Ubuntu forums and their Answers for Almost Everything, but I still hate SSH. Or maybe my ire would be more correctly directed at the Hardy team.

i read livejournal at 80% srsly. fortunately my graphics card is good.

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