felis_ultharus

Happy Festival-of-Helios-meets-Saturnalia-meets-Germanic-Solstice-meets-observed-birthday-of-first-century-rabbi-Yoshua-bar-Yoseph. Hope the household nisse brought everyone lots of gifts.

The flooding is over, the pipes are fixed, and after we lost power in half the house yesterday, we have electricity back. My father says the next evil to visit us will be famine, but we have a fridge and cupboards full of food right now, and I think he's just thinking of the Four Horseman. We all got a cold/flu thing, so there's Pestilence.

My sister just called, and she and infinitecomplex won't be able to make it over for Christmas Day itself, but they're hoping for Boxing Day. Vancouver sounds like Caina right now, so I'm rethinking my trip out that way.

Still, it's been a nice, relaxing day. I haven't slacked off on my editing, and I should half done my own edit by the time I go home.

There's been so much chaos this year, though, it hasn't felt much like a vacation, and I think I'll need some time off when I get home to recover from this holiday.

It's been a pretty emo Christmas, so far -- more than usual. Seeing node357 has been the highlight of it, with my writing (now past 50 pages of what I hope to be the last version) running a close second.

On another note, looking up Tartarus on Wikipedia produced this gem:

"In Hesiod's Theogony, c. 700 BC, the deity Tartarus was the third force to manifest in the yawning void of Chaos.As for the place, the Greek poet Hesiod asserts that a bronze anvil falling from heaven would fall 9 days before it reached the Earth. The anvil would take nine more days to fall from Earth to Tartarus, making it approximately 4733.22 miles deep."

There really ought to be a geek award -- some high honour -- for using time and gravitational constant to calculate the distance of an ancient Greek underworld. I actually tried to do this myself in grade seven, but wasn't good enough at math yet (or now) to pull off the calculus of acceleration -- even after my ex-physicist father tried to explain it to me.

It does make one wonder, though -- when you throw Einstein into the mix, funny things happen to gravity. Erebus -- the layers of darkness surrounding Tartarus -- would trap even light, so does not that mean they could be considered to have some of the properties of a black hole?

And what of mass? Would Tartarus share Earth's gravitational constant? Is Tartarus oblong?

Clearly there's much work left to do in the physics of afterlives.

It's been a good day. I got two pages written this morning on a short story, and I came into work to find out I'm getting a slight raise and paid vacations/sick days as of next year.

This will mostly offset the fact that I now have student loans to pay back, so money's not going to be quite as tight as I expected.

Yesterday, I managed to get about 80% of my Yule shopping done.

(I like that the city's three independent English bookstores, one quasi-independent, and two big Canadian-based chain bookstores are all within a ten-block radius -- the Argo-Concordia-McGill-Paragraphe-Indigo-Chapters hexagram, if you will. With books, I'm able to cover the majority of my friends.)

After that, I had a lovely evening at foi_nefaste's, who, as usual, was able to conjure a great meal (especially the apple crumble) ^_^