Atkurtai Lietuvai 100

BIRTHDAY TOMORROW

TOMORROW? BIRTHDAY? IMPORTANT ONE! TOMORROW! SLIGHTLY TERRIFIED? BUT STILL, TOMORROW! ADULTHOOD??????? PLEASE SPARE ME???

I'm making a wand! ^-^ Will send pics when more done.

Ice age children frolicked in 'giant sloth puddles' 11,000 years ago, footprints reveal

More than 11,000 years ago, young children trekking with their families through what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico discovered the stuff of childhood dreams: muddy puddles made from the footprints of a giant ground sloth.

Few things are more enticing to a youngster than a muddy puddle. The children — likely four in all — raced and splashed through the soppy sloth trackway, leaving their own footprints stamped in the playa — a dried up lake bed. Those footprints were preserved over millennia, leaving evidence of this prehistoric caper, new research finds.

The finding shows that children living in North America during the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) liked a good splash. “All kids like to play with muddy puddles, which is essentially what it is,” Matthew Bennett, a professor of environmental and geographical sciences at Bournemouth University in the U.K. who is studying the trackway, told Live Science. Read more.

I have a couple of Hanukkah questions:

When the Maccabees rededicated the temple they only had enough oil for one night.

1) Why didn’t they wait the seven days until they could make more pure oil first?

2) How long does the menorah or hanukkiah have to be lit to rededicate a temple? Is it indefinitely? Is it also for seven days, like being pure again for the Maccabees?

Hanukkah Sameach!

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

So I had a great time at the con today! The baby con I first went to two years ago is really growing up! These pictures were from the competition. Sadly, I didn't place, and I feel a little cheated considering some of the winners but! I'm not the kind of person to get hung up on these things. Everyone did a good job and I'm happy I got to be apart of it! I got to talk to one of the judges! I told him how I designed the things and he asked if I wanted to go into costume design and I showed him my pirate England cosplay and he thought it was great. I am happy. Very tired. Goodnight.

In the au, Shiro is twelve and the big brother of the group. He was best friends with Pidge’s brother Matt. I haven’t decided his family life yet but I do know he becomes an authority figure among the kids. He isn’t an adult but he’s the closest of them to being one.

Shiro helps keep the peace because he knows a good deal about kids and is old enough to explain earth things to the adults. He carries Pidge around on his shoulders to keep them from wandering off and causing trouble, and is often the first one the kids go to when there’s mischief, whether they caused it or are hiding from it, for protection. They all consider him their big brother, latching onto him to different degrees.

Pidge knew him from before because he’d come over to hang out with they bother. Hunk sees him as the biggest and strongest around and therefore the safest person to be with. Lance sees him as someone else to get attention from and goes to him a lot for little things because Shiro always takes the time to listen to him. Keith never really had anyone but his mother and Shiro understands that, trying to help any way he can and giving him ‘jobs’ as he is the second oldest.

@hinotorihime, here's the fall outfit!

Close ups of the arrows. I painted dial rods and tore apart feathers them glued them on to make these. They're too short to actually shoot but they work for what I need, decoration.