stonepicnicking_okapi

Challenge #4

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

I think I introduced myself well in the response to Challenge #1, so I am going to combine this with Music Monday and tell you about two of my recent Christmas gifts. My forever fandom is Sherlock Holmes, and a good friend gifted me with this.



I got a proper bedside table installed last autumn and I was using a William Morris pattern tea towel as a kind of tablecloth, but for 2024 I am using this as my bedside tablecloth and it's very nice and striking.

Also, I bought myself for Christmas a video game. One of you (my DW friends) mentioned The Great Ace Attorney in relation to Holmestice exchange so I bought it (for Nintendo Switch) and have been playing it (with the boys' help as I don't really understand the controller very well). I finished the first story (there are 10) and moved on to the second.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a series of two games set in Victorian-era Britain and Japan, featuring the adventures of Ryunosuke Naruhodo as a defence attorney.

There is a character called Herlock Sholmes, but he is kind of a buffoon. I am sad they killed off the character I liked (Kazuma) from Story 1 in Story 2. It is a bit slow-going but fairly interesting.

So in honour of all this Holmes talk (and his birthday on Saturday) let's have the opening of Episode 1 the old Russian Holmes (the Livanov Holmes) which I love and the theme song which I also love. I don't care for the more recent Russian Holmes, but I love the genderswapped "My Dearly Beloved Detective."





More interesting things about me?

I used to be Very Cool, and the fact of the matter is I gave up that part of myself when I had children, and part of my mental angst is accepting that fact, which part of me, even after 13 years, still rebels against.

1. I traveled a lot in my 20's and I lived for years in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Rwanda. I traveled even more extensively and two of my favourite places were Sri Lanka and Zanzibar. I really like places where cultures have historically collided (so ports and islands and crossroads). I did my graduate studies in New Orleans, which is another place like that.

2. I was a volunteer for Phase I of a clinical trial for an Ebola vaccine.

3. I've been skydiving. And parasailing. And ziplining. And I love it all. I love riding on the back of motorcycles though I haven't done it in almost 20 years.

I have been listening to and reading about Mozart's The Magic Flute. I even watched an episode of Inspector Morse where he's accused of killing his girlfriend while participating in a production of it. One of my gentle readers (a year ago in April) asked for some Omegaverse in the Livanov Holmes 'verse, and since the first of year I have been watching the whole of the Old Russian Holmes & Watson canon (I finished it about a week ago), and Holmes and Watson mention going to see The Magic Flute and both seemed to enjoy it (they hum it together in a cute way while looking at the newspaper advertisement for it). There is a scene in the Milverton case where Watson gets angry at Milverton (when he visits 221B and taunts Holmes and disparages his victims) and Holmes sort of steals his hand into Watson's (it's shot from behind so you see the hands but not really their faces) to calm him (a sort 'not now, dear' gesture) and it's so lovely and if you think I can't write a whole Omegaverse plot around that, well, we just don't know each other. And, of course, it'll be called The Magic Flute because, of course, that's perfect in terms of turning sorrow to joy, etcetera.

I've also continued my general classical music listening and have finished list #2 (of 5) of Classical Music for Dummies.

( List )

The only one on that grabbed me by the ears was this one, Smetana The Moldau