nocturnus33 | Recent Entries

A friend comment he felt a 5.0 earthquacke at his country. I can only smile and think how diferent could be the perception of danger arround the world.

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A kindle. They aren't sell in Chile yet but I can buy it through amazon. I will be receiving some extra money and I think I will spend it on it.

Photoshop has broke in Chile after the earthquake.

"We were Adobe" said his owner

(I hope I translate it decently: Photoshop quiebra tras terremoto. "Es que eramos de Adobe" Dice el gerente)

Chilean jokes about the earthquake. In Chile dark humour it's a MUST. So we are having a field day making all kind of macabre jokes.

Do you know that the last democratically elect conservative in Chile started his mandate with a HUGE earthquake? The same situation we are facing now.

There is a civic leson we need to learn:

DON'T VOTE CONSERVATIVE.

Two presidents and a Prince during the eartquake

Today Piñera was the in the ceremony in which he became President.

We face three earthquakes in less than an hour: 7.2, 6.9 and 6.0 Ritcher Scale.

See photos of the earthquakes during the ceremony. The interantional presidents faces are funny

By the way. I'm sick of earthquakes and Tsunamies.

I want normality to return. My strenght it's starting to crumble.

Alonso, my friend little nephew, was found dead in the sea. The family it's traveling to pick the body.
If night caught them in the road they will sleep in our house. I don't want to host them. I don't want to see their pain. I want to hide in my bed away from the world.
We will received them and hold them anyway. We will face the suffer of our people.

Current Location: Talca
Current Music: fados

My dear Caroline,

[…] We are now on our road from Concepción.— The papers will have told you about the great Earthquake of the 20^th of February.— I suppose it certainly is the worst ever experienced in Chili.— It is no use attempting to describe the ruins—it is the most awful spectacle I ever beheld.— The town of Concepcion is now nothing more than piles & lines of bricks, tiles & timbers—it is absolutely true there is not one house left habitable; some little hovels built of sticks & reeds in the outskirts of the town have not been shaken down & these now are hired by the richest people. The force of the shock must have been immense, the ground is traversed by rents, the solid rocks are shivered, solid buttresses 6–10 feet thick are broken into fragments like so much biscuit.— How fortunate it happened at the time of day when many are out of their houses & all active: if the town had been over thrown in the night, very few would have escaped to tell the tale. We were at Valdivia at the time the shock there was considered very violent, but did no damage owing to the houses being built of wood.— I am very glad we happened to call at Concepcion so shortly afterwards: it is one of the three most interesting spectacles I have beheld since leaving England—A Fuegian savage.—Tropical Vegetation—& the ruins of Concepcion— It is indeed most wonderful to witness such desolation produced in three minutes of time.

— Charles Darwin to his sister Caroline

This photo was taken by a journalist the morning after the earthquake and the seaquake with it's three tsunamies.
It's my new icon.I felt it picture the will to stand up and rebuild the country against adversity.

Dear Earth:

Would you please stop trembling?.

221 tremors in a week - 46 in my city - it's a little bit too much to fragile chilean nerves.(Your foreschoks are pretty much the same as the mainshock we experience back in 1985 earthquake). If you can't stop moving please don't tremble during night so at least we can get a decent night sleep.

We apretiate your effort to get the much needed calm.

Nocturnus33

(By the way things are starting to get normal for the families that don't have damage in our homes. We are now having light, water, comunications: internet, cell phone. Gas is back. Food and cash it's still dificult to find as ATM are running out of money and supermarket are "out". We brought some money and food from Santiago.)

I copy and paste this excellent article: In Chile, life between tremors

In Santiago, we feel both lucky and guilty to have been stricken with an earthquake registering 8.0 instead of an 8.8, as it was in Maule and Bío-Bío to the south. Still, most people now keep a glass of water close by as a makeshift seismometer, to see if the rumbles they keep feeling are real or imagined.

We are as shattered as the windows and mirrors that tumbled when that 300-mile fault tore open in the middle of a late-summer night. People are shaking, living in a daze of anxiety, sadness, exhilaration, gossip and a tremendous need to connect with one another and feel that the quake is over.

It is not.

Not all the country is down. Friends got together in cracked buildings with no power for Sunday lunch with not-so-cold chardonnay, to swap stories from the front. People lined up at the local hot dog franchise, reading sold-out editions of all the local papers.

I was scheduled to fly to Nashville Sunday night, but I’m still here, hooked to the news that’s breaking every minute. Near where I went to change my ticket, office workers with no offices shared espressos and anecdotes. The sight of our main airport “not open until further notice” has added a feeling of isolation to this tragedy.

For two decades, since we have been “modern” in this faraway country, we have felt like part of the world. Now, especially in places like tsumani-swiped Constitución, all our supposed advances seem in jeopardy.

The quake hit Chile in the middle of a presidential transition and right smack at the start of our bicentennial celebration. It’s a testament to our infrastructure and social institutions that the whole country didn’t fall down. But we did stumble. And now, live on HDTV, we hear things that make us remember the dark days of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, words like “the missing,” “curfew” and “state of emergency.”

Rumors come and go: The phones are down; that’s true at the moment. Running water will stop for a day; who knows? Supermarkets are full of people and empty shelves. You worry that no one is in charge or, if they are, the situation is too big to handle without force. The real tremor rumbling beneath the rubble is the threat of social upheaval, especially in Concepción and Talcahuano, where ships lie in the streets.

We are in a state of suspension. People are tired and perhaps spent, feeling they can’t make it through another one. A friend told me that, from his window, he watched a church steeple crumble. We have the sensation of having met, face to face and in pitch dark, the big one.

The worst part of the memory, many people say, is not the quake itself but the anxiety that came immediately afterward, when our cellphones were out and we couldn’t reach our loved ones. For two or three hours Saturday morning, all Chileans were very alone. We felt as if we were at the end of the world. Which in a way is true.

Alberto Fuguet is the author of the novels “The Movies of My Life” and “Missing (una investigación).”

A friend of us is searching his little nephew in Pelluhue, an hour from here. They haven't seen him since the tsunami.

There are a lot of kids walking, lost and a way from his parents in that city.

Please pray for Salvador he is 8 yr old.

Talca was a traditional colonial city. Most homes were made of adobe and were older than a century. This photo was taken by my daughter. It's was a really beautiful house in my neighborhood. I always admired it's detail and the flowery garden.

The difference with Haiti, it's that Chile has a working State. A democratic, not corrupt and organize State. This is THE most powerful disaster of our history. We can help our self but it's not enough, we really need external help.

To geminiscorp,

Scatteredlogic, without you my verbs tenses, punctuation and general grammar would be imposible! Thanks

Prelude

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chaper V

Chapter VI
Chapter VII

( Chapter VIII )

( Most of my flist might never had heard of this people, but I bet the latin at my flist know them quite wel )

This fic is owed to geminiscorp,

Again scatteredlogic, How would I thank you?

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chaper V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

They had tipped her that "Eros & Thanathos" was a unique independent Muggle bookstore at Perarchori, at Ithaki Island. It has one of the best and most extensive collections of death and erotic studies in literature known. Her grant allowed her to go overseas, but the board of trustees wanted her to visit a prestigious institute, not a private bookstore. She lobbied defending her cause, presented tons of documentation and finally almost begged them. Hermione was finally there, at the paved small street, watching the white and blue building, with its red door. The aroma of dark coffee tempted her.

Maybe she could leave this for later and look for a new place in which to drink a sketos?

Ever since she arrived in Perarchori two months ago, she had been experiencing problems crossing that street. Not that she first noticed it, but the closer she got to the store, the more she felt this great urge to go and explore the rest of the island. So far she had made four excursions towards Homer's land, read the Iliad and the Odyssey twice, visited Kioni and Vathy more times that it was worth, before it struck her as odd behaviour. After a few more tries she contacted Bill Weasley to ask for an amulet against magical shields; the owl takes three days to find Bill and more than a week to come back.

Bill’s recommendation had been simple, for this particular ward, stating aloud a piece of the Odyssey in which Ithaki was quoted could do the trick. He didn’t say if a translation would do, neither did he mention if her lack of magic could affect the countercourse.

So there she was again, looking at this cute little bookstore, fighting the urge to go and visit again that lovely Monastery near the top of the mountain to drink coffee with the monks.

Inhaling deeply, Hermione cried to no one:

“Bright Ithaca is my home: it has a mountain,
Leaf-quivering Neriton, far visible.
Around are many islands, close to each other,
Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.
Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea
towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun”.

A few people passing next to her mumbled in Greek what she guessed was a reprobatorial comment, but she didn't care.

The shield was neutralized; she could feel it. She wasn’t happy, though. She knew that the magic was made by the amulet and not cast by her; that brought to her a deep sense of loss that struck her with force. Ever since she started investigating this estrange phenomenon with Death at wizzarding culture, her well build inner wards had melted, making her crave magic; the mystery added by the bookstore dilemma, has turn her sabbatical, not in the self search travel she hoped, but into a intense mourning for what she has lost years ago.

She tried to divert her feelings and concentrate on the task at hand. Hermione consciously held her breath, and then lether breath out slowly while crossing the street. Why did the chicken cross the road? She snorted; she remembered facing torture at the Malfoys’ Manor when she was young; in the middle of that traumatic experience, her mind wouldn't shut up. Making bad jokes and seeing the irony in an unexpected turn of events was a habit that had brought her more than one problem through the years.

Hermione crossed to the little red door that welcomed Muggle buyers from all over Greece and gasped. She was facing the loveliest and cosiest bookstore she´d ever seen. Eros & Thanathos was one of those places in which books, apparently without order, crowded on small exhibition tables or on the shelves that covered the walls. The apparently small store had a first floor with the owner’s selection of books, often exeptional and rare enough to satisfy any social science lover She could well spend a week sharing a cup of coffee with that Gilgamesh she glimpse over there. Hermione had been told that it was the bassement that gave the bookstore its fame. In apparent disarray, the buyer could spend hour after hour walking through the bookshelf labyrinth, finding more and more surprises at each step. This bookstore was designed for the pleasure of discovering books in the chaos of covers, spines and formats. How different from the cold columns of identical volumes at a neat retail bookstore, arranged as if they were a large miniature city of soon to be bestsellers; here titles were supposed to catch the reader's eye seducing, inviting, capturing them. With all her will she fought the lure; not a magical one, but her own compulsion and fetish for what was offered her here. She approached an old lady for directions:

Do forgive me; it’s my first time in here. I don’t see any clerk or someone who could help me. I’m researching the phenomenon of Intermittences of Death in ancient cultures; well that was stupid, she thought, this woman will have no idea what I’m looking for.

The woman assed her while thinking of an answer, her face impassive. You know better than me that life and dead has no intermittence. Chuckling she changed her deep tone for a more pragmatic one: “Still, you might want to check in the last corridor, at the south wing”. Something in her eyes reminds her of Dumbledore. “Good Lord, how long since I last thought of him?”.

Locating it – a grey shadowy corridor, a bit anticlimactic after the gorgeous bookshelves she has step by on her way here – Hermione caressed the side of a few books with her fingers, distracted by the smell of humidity and her own disappointment, not really looking at the volumes. Another reader was near; diffused between the shades and shadows, bent over the pages of a book, totally engrossed and oblivious to his surroundings. She had to go back a few steps, when it struck her as someone she knew, as she had seen him so many times in her childhood. Hermione slowly approached him. Just a few steps, clasping her mouth, her eyes wide. She could see him dressed in layers of clothes: Close-cut textured jacket, a black cashmere turtleneck and a shirt with dark-based fussy patterns. It couldn’t be him, she thought, not alive, not in Muggle clothes. “Lovely logical train of thought, Granger, she congratulated her self” but then, there were his large thin hands and his sharp aura – for lack of a better word – that make her believe her gut instinct, so she called to him:

“Professor Snape!”

So, in the total fandom trivia, I have just realized this month, 10 years ago, in a day unknow, Severus Snape was murdered by the hands of Voldemort

***

In non fandom related topic

Heloise:

"I am still young, and the passions of youth
and my experience on those sweet pleasures
exacerbate the torment of the flesh,
and their assaults against me are more fierce,
the weaker the nature is that they assault. (...)
Men give me praise, but I deserve no praise from God,
who searches heart and mind and see all in secrets places"ago

obsess with this couple:

Abelard:I will always love you, I will always carry you in my spirit. Nor should you be surprised that twisted jealousy should turn its eyes towards such a conspicuous and fitting friendship as ours, because if we were miserable, we could undoubtedly live among others however we liked without any malicious attention. Therefore, let them backbite, let them drag us down, let them gnaw, let them waste away inside, let them derive their bitterness from our good things. You will still be my life, my breath, my restoration in difficulty, and finally, my complete joy. Farewell, you who make me fare well.