Bees, Baby, obscure Fandom references only my fellow Tolkien fanficcers will get

[oloriel]

This night, Felix slept almost six hours in one piece. I'm almost rested!

Unfortunately, I still have a headache from the day before yesterday, when Felix was very unhappy and fussy and had to be either carried around or nursed all the time and still often didn't stop crying. (I was running around pretty much in Minoan court fashion all day because there was just no point in covering up :P) The headache is the sort of headache that comes from a stiff neck. Yesterday my legs also hurt something awful, but at least they are back to normal now. Either it was the walking around/ sitting uncomfortably, or the cold that's been going around at Jörg's workplace and that he may well have handed down to me. Or us, come to think of it - Felix has been coughing a few times in the past days, and sometimes breathed as though his respiratory tract was partially blocked. And he was, as I said, pretty unhappy and peevish. Poor little man, and of course the crying and the lack of sleep gets to us grown-ups, too.

Boss lady still hasn't sent new work, so yesterday, in an attempt to feel productive, I went on a MEFA reading/reviewing spree. I actually managed to review 11 stories in a go, that's possibly more than I did in the past two years combined. (>_>) If I keep this up for a couple more days, I'll actually review all the pieces on my wishlist, which would be a Good Thing and make me feel all accomplished. (Even though my wishlist is reasonably short this year - 50 stories - because I assembled it with the utmost prejudice - that means I'll probably miss many good stories, but oh well, I'll hopefully also miss most of the stories that'll only piss me off anyway - with only a few "this premise sounded too interesting to miss" surprises thrown in. And the one single piece of Roverandom fanfiction! <3)
As ever, I am fascinated by some of the genres that appear to be really, really, really popular in the fandom. I don't get them at all. Legolas hurt/comfort, for instance. Yawn. But then other people in the fandom surely don't get my obsession with the Sons of Fëanor, or Númenor, so all's well. Takes all kinds to make a world, even in subcreation-subcreation. I'm just fascinated that some people are capable of moving in all of them! But that's just my prejudice.
While sorting through the many nominations, I encountered a hilarious warning. I am skeptical about warnings on stories because they tend to be overused and I sometimes facepalm at the things people feel the need to warn about* - but there was one story where the warnings made me laugh out loud. It went:
Warning: Flagrant disregard for canon. Egregious librarian abuse. Plagiarism -- both alone and with someone else.⁽¹⁾ Rated PG.
The story as such seems to be not my thing - not my characters, not my genre - but I'm tempted to read it anyway just because the warning is so awesome.
(The footnote, possibly the most delicious detail, references the origin of the Plagiarism -- both alone and with someone else line. Which is really the most awesome thing ever. In this year, anyway, and if you're German or familiar with German politics in particular. Well, and I guess you'd need to be familiar with confessional formulae, too. Oh, gods, context. Why did I leave academia again?)

The bees, alas, were stupid. When you unite two hives, you're supposed to brush all the bees of the weaker hive in front of the box of the stronger hive so they have to find their way in on their own - that way, the queen (or any laying workers) are stopped and killed by the guard bees and there won't be any war or regicide going on inside the old hive. Anyway, the point is you can't just put the frames of the old hive into the other.
My boxes are placed on a wooden palette so they have even footing, and also so that, should there be a lot of snow (as there was in the past years) fresh air can still find its way into the hive from below. So there's a height difference between the ground and the entrance of the hive. For which reason I built a ramp from the lid of the now-empty box (the ground as such would've been too cold for the bees at this time of year). That's what they tell you to do in the bee-keeping courses, too. Foolproof, they say. Works every time. Bees are smart.
Yeah. Guess what the bees did?
Instead of marching into the hive, they balled up underneath the ramp. Where, of course, a goodly amount of them froze. Fortunately, only the outer layers - inside the ball they were still warm and alive.
So I took the ramp away and instead balanced a board right in front of the entrance, and then brushed the bees onto that board, and then most of them made it into the hive before it started sleeting. *facepalms*
(Yes, it's late in the year to unite hives, but as November was so mild, it wasn't clear then whether it would actually be necessary -- I had to wait for colder temperatures. Unfortunately, we didn't get dry cold but wet cold...)

While dealing with the bees, I had to leave Felix alone, inside, in his cot - of course. (That is, I couldn't take him along to the bees, of course - and I had to leave him alone because there was no daddy or mom-in-law or other babysitter available during daylight. It was only twenty minutes anway.). By the time I came back he was screaming in panic, and he was crying so hard that the tears were pooling in his ears. I have no idea how people can still propagate leaving babies (even younger than Felix is now, at that!) to cry as a measure of teaching them to be on their own and not pester their parents. In the olden days, when we didn't know all the things about heartrates and stress levels and the way the infant mind works -- but today? ARGH. (Jörg recently asked me why I was getting so worked up about what my aunt had said. This is why. Grandmothers are grandmothers, but she's of our - well, his - generation and could know better.)
Anyway, I felt like a rotten mother for the rest of the day. Felix, on the other hand, calmed down as soon as I cradled him and gave him suck and kissed the salt streaks away, and was back to his cheerful, curious, cuddly self afterwards, so I assume I have been forgiven...

Tenant lady dropped by this morning to say that the mice were back in their ceiling. >_> Hopefully it's just because we finally put the heating ducts inside as opposed to up the outside walls and haven't yet blocked all the passageways into the house (as I said, until recently it was pretty mild outside - and Jörg is back to normal work, which in December is particularly stressful because of the delightful "Whoops there goes the year" brand of planning, so construction work is only possible on Sundays), so that problem will be solved easily. Otherwise, I foresee another Week From Hell (TM) like we had in summer when I was just out of the hospital...

And that's it from Lyra-land for today, or for the moment anyway.

- - -
*dawn_felagund has once parodied this tendency: "Warning for sex (sometimes graphic), blood and violence, mature themes, Maedhros as the main character, Feanor hugging his kids, someone sitting in a purple chair and looking at a goldfish, dirty Kleenex in Chapter 5, Maglor being present in some of the scenes, and cheese." And yes, sometimes it really feels like that.

Comments

[weaverandom.livejournal.com]

I love hearing about Felix! And about your bees. I am the terrible commenter, but I am always the reader. (I even use google translate sometimes, LIKE A CREEPER.)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm not using German to lock people out, I'm (usually) just using it because I'm too lazy to look words up or else because something just doesn't translate. So personal efforts to get behind the meaning of my posts are not all that creepy. (Confusing, perhaps, considering what Google translate sometimes produces... but not creepy.)
And I'm a terrible commenter myself, so that's likewise fine ;)

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

I did not know you kept bees. My family had bees when I was a child. I can remember my mother holding a swarm in her hands, after they split off, and came to rest on a tree branch. We got our starter bees from Sears. You could order them out of the catalog. They came in the mail!

Poor little Felix. I hope he is not getting sick. He sounds like a delightful little guy, Of course you could not take him to the bees. His bed was the best place for him. There was just no way to tell him that!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I only started a year ago! I got my bees from other beekeepers in the area, but it's possible to order them out of a catalog still (though not at Sears - we don't have Sears here!), in which case you would indeed get them in the mail. It's also common enough to order solitary queens per mail!

If he was sick, he's definitely better now. And yes, he is absolutely delightful (most of the time)!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

People of the 'Grandma' generation could also know better than to deliberately leave a baby to scream, because the books of Alice Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)) have been available for thirty years - the biochemistry of stress overload wasn't so well-described back then, but the effect of it on the baby looked and sounded just the same then as it does now.

*hugs hugs* Your little guy just got scared, that's all. Nature has thoughtfully equipped babies with a hair-trigger distress call, and biologically programmed their mamas to be intensely attuned to it, just so a frightened baby can't be easily ignored. But nature has also equipped them with a stand-down program that enables them to quickly get over their distress once they're being comforted. In truth, your biological stress-levels probably stayed elevated from his crying a lot longer than his did.

It's cruel to frighten babies on purpose, of course, and that's what people are doing who leave them to cry themselves into exhaustion. It doesn't 'toughen them up', it conditions them to permanent insecurity, never knowing whether or not comfort will come. Very useful conditioning if one is raising a slave, I suppose, but definitely not the way to rear a Prince.

That's not at all the same thing as the baby getting scared (in his perfectly safe cot) because Mama's delayed by a task one time and thus doesn't get back to him before he's got the full Red Alert going. Mama came, all's right with the world; if babies weren't designed to withstand getting scared now and then, our species would never have survived.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Heck, having heard Felix in his state of panic and having seen his face - the red eyes, the salty lines from his eyes to his ears, the tears that had collected in his ears, for Someone's sake - I don't know how anyone with just a vestige of empathy wouldn't realise how pain- and stressful this would be for a baby. No matter what the "experts" said at any time, just looking at the baby should've settled the matter, biochemistry or no!
(But then, 50 years ago they'd still do surgery on babies without anaesthetics because the scientific opinion was that babies didn't feel pain yet...? the fuck? And if babies were supposed to be too primitive to even fail pain, how then should they be able to manipulate their parents through crying, as was claimed at the same time? The mind boggles.)

They definitely did! As I said, I felt rotten for the rest of the day, even when Felix had long forgotten about it...

Doesn't have to be a Prince, a plain happy citizen is good enough! But a happy citizen, too, wants to know that whenever he needs comfort, he'll get it, I'm sure.

Of course humans can handle that sort of stress, every now and then. It's just that having seen the effects of even just one instance of a necessary delay, I really can't wrap my mind around the idea that one should do that to a baby on purpose.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I know - every time I watch the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, I get mad all over again about the scene where the cursed pirates are attacking Port Royal, and there's this one little toddler screaming in terror. Oh yeah, thanks, Disney; way to manipulate the audience's emotional reactions by abusing a tiny child - a kid that little can't ACT terrified like that; he had to really BE terrified, and I just want to smack his parents in the head for allowing that to be done to him.

Everybody's got to learn to handle fear and loneliness eventually, but infancy is not the time for that lesson. Infancy is the time to learn that you're infinitely precious and irreplaceable. Seems like your pretty boy is getting that lesson down very well. :)

[hhimring]

The "librarian abuse" story is actually very good, especially if you like Saki, and I can recommend it, but I know you don't have a lot of time for reading at the moment.
I hope your bees are working on their survival skills!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Depends on when boss lady gives me something to do, really. I did put it on my wishlist just in case!
Yeah, I hope so too. It all souns so easy and straightforward in theory and then they misbehave like that...

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Wait. You mean people actually write Silmarillion fanfic? Or at least fic set in the LOTR universe?

Dangit. I now have somewhere to put my stories that will never happen in LotRO but that I want to write about.

>.<;

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Wait. You did not know that? Oh wow. There's a very active and creative Tolkien fanfic authorship, including but not limited to the Silmarillion, yes!

"Somewhere"? Many somewheres! Oh my, I don't even know where to start linking you. The AO3 (http://archiveofourown.org/tags/TOLKIEN%20J*d*%20R*d*%20R*d*%20-%20Works/works)? The SWG (http://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/index.php)? HASA (http://www.henneth-annun.net/)? SoA (http://www.storiesofarda.com/)? Oh dear oh dear oh dear...

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

There goes my free time... :D

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my world. :D

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Well I have to finish Sil:TGPV 4 for today, then I am free to write fanfic for the rest of the evening, sounds like a plan.

Oh right, laundry.

;)

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Looking at your icon, I have another question though. What IS hurt/comfort fic actually? I have asked about what the icon said before but I never figured out what the answer meant. ;)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

A character gets hurt just so another character can comfort them. A reasonably simple trick to illustrate their special relationship and/or get them to hug/kiss/have sex, but sometimes serving further purposes after all. As any plot device, this can be cheap or terribly overused, but it can still result in some good writing every now and then.