![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienReply to this meme by yelling (or any other form of writing) "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
green_knight gave me these.
Astronomy
What I do for a living. Actually, I'm a physicist; I took a left turn into solar after my PhD for mostly personal reasons and found it interesting enough to stay. The Sun has a lot of surprises inside, and I get to watch the slow shift of its inner patterns over the years. It's been nearly two cycles now -- or would be if the current one wasn't running a little late, which is interesting in itself.
Beading
This year's hobby. I sometimes feel the need to create something that isn't just words and pixels, and I had a use for at least a few necklaces to fill in the necklines of summer dresses, so I thought I'd give it a try. Two dozen necklaces later, I'm still having fun. Some of the beads are lovely little artifacts in themselves, and I get to play with colors and shapes and textures and numbers and create things that I can actually wear. It's also nice that even my most elaborate projects only take a week or so to complete; it makes a nice change from writing, that way.
Photography
I started at the age of nine with a Kodak Instamatic that took square black-and-white prints, but I didn't make much progress for a long time. I had trouble with parallax, so I tended to go for landscapes rather than simple centered portraits; with my father's example to follow, I wanted to do more than snapshots with what were basically snapshot cameras, but it wasn't until 2005 that I finally got a camera that would do close-up shots. That was also my first digital camera, and the liberation of being able to take as many shots as I liked without worrying about developing cost was amazing. Autofocus and image stabilization are wonderful things, too. I don't call myself a serious photographer, but I love the way that modern technology lets me at least capture some of what I see.
SF
I read (and write, a little) to escape into other worlds, and that mostly ends up meaning science fiction and fantasy, from Narnia and the Hobbit and E. Nesbit's fantasy in junior-school days to Donaldson and Eddings and McCaffrey at university, and on beyond that to more complex fare, Cherryh and Wolfe, Bujold and Banks. I like rich, deep imagined worlds, cities and landscapes that are characters in themselves; I'm not so fussed about characters unless they're truly unpleasant to spend time with, or particularly congenial.
Cacti
make really good photographic subjects; they don't blow around in the breeze. There are a lot of them around here, both in streets and yards and around the extensive and rather well-planted campus, and once I had the camera in hand I started to be more attuned to their brief flowering seasons. There's usually something in bloom from April to September, but it's no use looking for hedgehog cactus in August or (usually) barrel cactus in May, and there are some that flower at fairly unpredictable times but only for a day or two at a time. I stalk them, coming back again and again to monitor the progress of a bud, occasionally dragging myself out bed at the crack of dawn to catch the great white blooms that only come out overnight. They repay my devotion by shooting spines into my skirts.
green_knight gave me these.Astronomy
What I do for a living. Actually, I'm a physicist; I took a left turn into solar after my PhD for mostly personal reasons and found it interesting enough to stay. The Sun has a lot of surprises inside, and I get to watch the slow shift of its inner patterns over the years. It's been nearly two cycles now -- or would be if the current one wasn't running a little late, which is interesting in itself.
Beading
This year's hobby. I sometimes feel the need to create something that isn't just words and pixels, and I had a use for at least a few necklaces to fill in the necklines of summer dresses, so I thought I'd give it a try. Two dozen necklaces later, I'm still having fun. Some of the beads are lovely little artifacts in themselves, and I get to play with colors and shapes and textures and numbers and create things that I can actually wear. It's also nice that even my most elaborate projects only take a week or so to complete; it makes a nice change from writing, that way.
Photography
I started at the age of nine with a Kodak Instamatic that took square black-and-white prints, but I didn't make much progress for a long time. I had trouble with parallax, so I tended to go for landscapes rather than simple centered portraits; with my father's example to follow, I wanted to do more than snapshots with what were basically snapshot cameras, but it wasn't until 2005 that I finally got a camera that would do close-up shots. That was also my first digital camera, and the liberation of being able to take as many shots as I liked without worrying about developing cost was amazing. Autofocus and image stabilization are wonderful things, too. I don't call myself a serious photographer, but I love the way that modern technology lets me at least capture some of what I see.
SF
I read (and write, a little) to escape into other worlds, and that mostly ends up meaning science fiction and fantasy, from Narnia and the Hobbit and E. Nesbit's fantasy in junior-school days to Donaldson and Eddings and McCaffrey at university, and on beyond that to more complex fare, Cherryh and Wolfe, Bujold and Banks. I like rich, deep imagined worlds, cities and landscapes that are characters in themselves; I'm not so fussed about characters unless they're truly unpleasant to spend time with, or particularly congenial.
Cacti
make really good photographic subjects; they don't blow around in the breeze. There are a lot of them around here, both in streets and yards and around the extensive and rather well-planted campus, and once I had the camera in hand I started to be more attuned to their brief flowering seasons. There's usually something in bloom from April to September, but it's no use looking for hedgehog cactus in August or (usually) barrel cactus in May, and there are some that flower at fairly unpredictable times but only for a day or two at a time. I stalk them, coming back again and again to monitor the progress of a bud, occasionally dragging myself out bed at the crack of dawn to catch the great white blooms that only come out overnight. They repay my devotion by shooting spines into my skirts.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-30 10:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-01 02:36 am (UTC)