To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Awesome crossover idea: A serial killer is on the loose somewhere in the US, and the characters of Castle, due South, Bones, Body of Proof, and Rizzoli & Isles have to team up to catch him or her. Some or all of the following happens:

( I have obviously given this FAR too much thought. )

You know what would also be amazing? If Mary McDonnell were to guest star on BoP as, like, Bud and Sam's lieutenant/captain, or one of Megan's old med school mentors or neurologist colleagues or something. Anything where she and Dana Delany would share several scenes. I think my screen would implode from that much awesome on it.

(ETA: Come to think of it, DD did guest star in an episode of BSG ("Sacrifice"). I should rewatch that and see if they were in a scene together...)

Bones watchers! Answer me this important question: last night's episode. Should I watch it and mock heavily, or will it just fill me with rage? Inquiring minds want to know!

I am very confused. ( Spoilers for the rest of the season )

We've started Ulysses in my Joyce class, and we'll be reading it until the end of the semester. I read the first three chapters this evening.

I...don't know how to mark it up. Nothing in my career as an English major and English grad student has trained me for this. So I'm just marking the lines I find beautiful, and anything to do with Irish literature or history or myth (which is rather a lot of things, admittedly). And if I had to guess, I would say that was Joyce's aim--to have you fall into the language and just roll around in it like a pig in mud. I have Gifford's annotations--and this is a separate book that is bigger than the novel--but I kind of hate to look at them, even after finishing a chapter. Turning it into a jigsaw puzzle of allusions takes much of the fun out of it.

(I think I'm considerably more sanguine about this than I could be because I know already that I'm writing my one paper for this class on Portrait, so I just have to absorb enough for class discussion rather than for production of something scholarly.)

Speaking of that paper...I have to have an abstract by Thursday, and it's driving me crazy. Everything I want to say is scattered across eight or nine bullet points in a Word document, but I can't seem to turn them into a 250-word piece of prose. This should be easy, but it really isn't. I may have to write the introduction and a body paragraph or two before I can abstract the thing.

I do have a title for it, though! "Joyce's New Mobile Aisling: Women as Aspects of Art in A Portrait of the Artist." It'll be great. And it ties into my thesis topic oh-so nicely, although probably I won't be able to use much of the text in the thesis, which is a bit of a drag, but, eh. Good background.

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Watched the newest episode of Bones today as well. ( A couple not-too-spoilery comments )

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I owe people comments, which I will totally get to soon. And then probably be on radio silence, because I have a comps study session tomorrow (yes, the orals are some fourteen months away. The reading list is five pages long) and another paper to write. And I have to finish Adam Bede at some point as well...

Click the image to download a .zip file of all the mood icons.

Instructions for uploading via the admin console are here, or you can use LJ's Manage Mood Themes page. (I have no idea what works and what doesn't with various levels of account. I have a paid account, and both options work for me. Your mileage may vary.)

It includes caps through "The Passenger in the Oven" (4.09), but I would only consider it spoily through 3.10, "The Santa in the Slush." (Your idea of a spoiler may not be mine, etc.) Caps come mostly from Bones Fans Online, and also from laugh_cry_live.

If you use this mood theme, credit would be greatly appreciated!

I made cranberry sauce for the first time this year. I was never a fan of the canned stuff, but since I've really gotten into dried cranberries over the past year or two, I decided to try my own version, cobbled together from multiple recipes online.

The amounts here made enough for my parents and me to have it on turkey and have some left over to drizzle on a loaf of cranberry orange bread next week. Keep the ratios the same and you can make as much or as little as you want.

Ingredients
4 oz fresh cranberries (about two or three cups; basically, this was a third of a 12 oz bag)
1 orange
1 cup sugar + more to taste (I probably ended up with two cups; you just have to keep tasting it as it cooks)
1/2 cup water
Splash of orange juice

Preparation
Bring sugar and water to a boil. Peel orange and dice into small pieces (use a knife to get ride of the bitter white stuff just under the peel), then add orange and cranberries to boiling sugar water. Boil for about thirty minutes or until the cranberries have popped and the mixture is red and kind of jamish.

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I'm done with my Bones moodtheme! I figured I wouldn't finish it until 2010, so that was a surprise. (Dear lord, there are a lot of moods. And some that are just unnecessary, like "recumbent" or "complacent," while they leave off infinitely useful moods like "dubious" or "horrified.") I just have to do some last-minute color correction then I will share!

Still freezing. But woodstoves and heat are good.

( Grumbly comments on two more Bones episodes )

( Over-caffeinated thoughts )

Ohhhhhh, I need to lay off the capslock there.