avrelia

We've been longing to see California since forever. But in the last years it was a very remote possibility, but now we are actually planning to go there some time this year. Right now we are looking at August-September-October.

So right now we are at the planning stage. We want to fly to SF and then go somewhere. Definitely looking at Silicon Valley. Possibly driving south to LA.

so here I am asking for your advise. What to see? Whom to meet? Where to go?

help, please :))

Thank you the pretty snowflakes, swsa and dtissagirl!

We also have had the first snow today. But it disappeared before it hit the ground... Not hurrying the winter though, we'll have enough of it.

I have a strange quandary about gift: I have been given a $60 gift card to Indigo (Canadian dollars, Canadian bookstore chain), and I have no idea what to get myself: what books and dvds I really want to own as opposed to just read or watch, which I can do for free in the library.

So, any advice would be welcome. Was there anything recently that you absolutely loved?

It came to my attention that Buffy fandom has an inordinate amount of lawyers (future, past, and present) in it.

I can think of three possible explanations:

1) I notice them (birds of a father and all that), and they take a prominent position in my mind, but not in reality.
2) The amount of lawyers in the fandom represents proportionally the amount of lawyers among the general population.
3) The fandom attracts freaks of nature.


What is your opinion?

I am reading Wilkie Collins. Again. The Woman in White. And I love it again. I am quite fond of Walter Hartright, and I love, love, Marian Halcombe. She is one of the most interesting female characters I know of. Ever. And what a description, and what a role physical beauty plays here. We meet with her turning back to the Walter – and to the reader. And with Walter we admire her back, her stature, her body, and then she turns, and… her face isn’t up to contemporary beauty standards. Oops. And look at the description – she isn’t really ugly

The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression -- bright frank, and intelligent -- appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete.

She mostly isn’t feminine enough in her expressions. Then she starts talking and all ugliness is forgotten. Until, of course, Laura appears, the vision of a perfect beauty, not perfect in its features, but in its influence over a man. I don’t find Laura interesting per ce. I like her, she is a sweetie, but she is always an object – of love, greed, villainy, or nobility. She is like Irene from the Forsyte Saga, slipping through other lives, influencing other lives, but never acting themselves.

Beauty does mean a lot in our first impressions – whether we admit it or not. But the second impressions help us with a touch of reality.

And I loved Walter in the fateful meeting on the road to London with the Woman in White. How sincerely perplexed he is! How he is trying to justify himself in helping the stranger!

As she repeated the words for the third time, she carne close to me and laid her hand, with a sudden gentle stealthiness, on my bosom -- a thin hand; a cold hand (when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry night. Remember that I was young; remember that the hand which touched me was a woman's.

Hee!

More to come. ;)

And now, I have a favour to ask. Could please think something encouraging for me tomorrow around noon EST? I have an interview, and I really want this job. Pretty please? ;)

Finally, a question: what are your favourite female characters in books? Any time, any country?