h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

G'day and welcome to h2g2, anne girl! An ACE will no doubt pop by soon with all sorts of interesting information, but for the time being I'm just letting you know that everyone here on the guide is a wonderful person.......well, they're not all wonderful, but you'll get that . Have fun lurking, jump onto anyone else's page that is in the who's online box, click on reply to talk to me or click on my name to stop by my page and say hi, or visit my Kingdom http://www.h2g2.com/A446078 for instant fame, and generally have wacky fun in the coolest online community known to humanity

Hello to my first contact on h2g2! I am very excited to have joined the community here, and I look forward to many new conversations soon.
Come see the kingdom, you say? When I have a few spare minutes, I assure you I will! Thanks for the welcome, and feel free to come talk to me at any time.

Always happy to meet a newbie, I know how hard it was to just drop into conversations, and how discouraging not getting a reply can be......not to mention I never again spoke to the first ACE that dropped by, simply because they seemed too nice.... but I soon got into the flow of things and met some nice people....and hey, I've only been here a couple of months, and already I spend far too much time here....

Should I take it as a bad sign that no ACE has bothered me yet?
I'm hoping not...
Dropping into conversations seems to be my off computer hobby, now to try it on the net... Let's see what happens!

No, they can sometimes be a little busy, though there are a couple online at the moment, but they just give a welcome and a list of interesting places to drop by, but like I said, dropping in on conversations is fun... It's usually a good idea to read at least some of the backlog, though....(click on the second last of the little red led's under current conversation, for the previous twenty posts).
*shudders*
Now I'm starting to sound like an ACE......

I won't hold it against you. One dropped by a couple minutes ago, actually. Interesting, eh?
Yes, it's always nice to be able to hear most of a conversation before jumping right in... wow, I like that thought, it's going in my journal for today. Thanks!!

ACE stands for Assistant Community Editor, btw....one of those acronyms that doesn't really mean anything........so tell me something about yourself.......

Something about myself... okay, my middle name is anne. Anything else you'd like to know?

Anything else....I don't know, what do you like to do, what country are you from,....ah....I don't know......

Near Chicago, Illinois, USA. Yourself?

Melbourne, Australia.....

Well. The internet certainly is a wonderful thing!
I have to admit, that's not what I was expecting... I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but that wasn't it. Wow.
What do I like to do, you asked. Well, I have a thing for learning languages. I took classes in Spanish, French, German, some very basic Irish Gaelic, and I plan to learn Laotian, though a lot of it has been lost in the depths of my gray matter. What do you enjoy, your majesty?

Isn't it though.....my Queen is a girl from Finland.....
Languages are actually a bit of a passion of mine, though I actually don't know more than fragments of any languages other than English (despite the fact I took French for 7 years ). I'm studying Linguistics at university, which is the study languages in general, and I'm quite interested in historical linguistics, particularly dialects of Old English...(west saxon, high Mercian, etc.) It sounds pretty boring but I like it...

Boring? Perish the thought! It's much more fun when you know where the words are from and why they're similar in other tongues. People have told me to go into linguistics, but I think I'll just try to tackle another couple of languages. I'm especially interested in Laotian at the moment because it's so radically different from anything I've learned to this point, and I want to see if I can teach my brain to fly.
What time is it in Australia?

That's what I think, not to mention all of the old spellings of words, and things like the original meaning of words like "deer" and "poultry" and such....Laotian is different because it's not an Indo-European language like all of the rest you know, which all come from a single ancestor, ProtoIndo-European......the time is.....1457 Thursday afternoon here, what about there?

It was just about 2300, Wednesday night when you posted that. Aren't time zones wonderful? It took me three days to get used to my own time zone again after being in London one summer... It was terrible. The only time distinctions I had were day and night.
What is the weather in Australia now? I'm just curious to see if it's anything like here.

I've never been overseas, unfortunately.....far to expensive for a student like me, even though that's when theoretically people always travel, though I've never worked out how it could be done.......the weather over here? I can't give you a complete rundown of the entire country, but here in Melbourne, yesterday was sunny and 28 (celsius, that is ), today is raining and 15........unusual actually, in Melbourne (especially in spring) that's normally the weather up until lunchtime.... Do you have a beautiful autumn where you are? (or, should I say, Fall...)

Traveling while a student involves saving money for extended amounts of time and not having any regular bills. Some people who are incredibly fortunate get the school to pay for the trip, like a friend of mine who spent a month in Italy through the school she goes to.
So it is spring there! I thought as much. Don't worry, I wasn't referring to the country as a whole, just your area. Autumn (or Fall, both terms work) here is usually nice. It was cold and felt rather wintry last week, but now it feels almost summer again. Chicago weather is strange. Yes, it's very beautiful, with the leaves on the trees brilliant shades of red and orange and deep purple... makes for good postcard-picture weather.

I hate incredibly lucky people like that.........so are you one of those people who love a particular season? Personally. I like Spring here, because I like it to rain but I don't like it to be cold when it does, I like to be able to walk in it....also, spring is thunderstorm season around here....or at least, what passes for thunderstorms...

Actually, this is my favorite season right now, as well. Funny that it's the opposite of yours... It's usually nicer weather here in the fall, and my birthday is later this month, so I'm kind of biased towards it. Rain is nice when it's warm and one can journey through it without feeling miserable, but I like lightning and wind better. I was once through a storm where the lightning flashed every ten to twenty seconds, and it was really awe inspiring! You have to like wind to live near Chicago, also known as 'the windy city'.
My ACE -- the one that first said hi and welcome and all that -- is from Sydney. I think it's kind of interesting, the diversity that an international medium such as the internet provides, as I never would have met either one of you if I didn't have the web.