Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans; it's lovely to be silly at the right moment

Horace

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Oh, well. Horace approves, so here goes.

I've been tagged to give eight facts about myself. I'll oblige only this far but I won't tag anybody else. Many people will already know the first one, but there we are...

1. My username Himmapaan is the name of a forest in Thai mythology. You'll probably find it more commonly spelt as 'Himmapan', but I find this insufficient as the last syllable will then be read to rhyme with 'can', which isn't right. It's a long 'ah' vowel sound (rhymes with 'Khan', as in Gengis Khan, for instance), hence my choice of the double 'a'.

2. My name Niroot is derived from a word of three syllables, 'Nirutti', meaning 'Linguist'. A Thai linguistic symbol called a Karand is placed above the last syllable to render it silent in the original Thai spelling, as it's considered more pleasant as a name, thus we have Niroot. I probably could have spelt it phonetically as 'Nirút', as the second syllable is short, but I didn't want to confuse further with accents, so a compromise was reached.

3. My maternal grandmother was a Lanna princess. The northern provinces of Thailand were once a seperate kingdom called Lanna ('One million rice fields' ), with their own Governors and ruling Princes (or kings, depending on how one defines the terminology) until it was fully annexed by Siam in the late 19th century to become Thailand as we know it today. My ancestors on my mother's side included those princes who once governed Lanna. The north is still occasionally called Lanna today in acknowledgement of its history, but it has no administrative power of its own.

Just a very, very potted history for you to give this fact some background.

4. I spent a very brief period as a novice in a temple as part of the Theravada Buddhist custom when my grandmother died. I did think (and do still, occasionally) of entering a monastery at some point for a longer period. But I worry about missing art... Plus there are other attachments besides that I cannot help thinking of, though it makes me sad...

5. I am running out of interesting facts. (There are more name facts, but you are already bored to tears, so I'll leave them.)

6. I am unhappy.

7. My heart is broken (Okay, this begins to get too personal).

8. Finally, here is a picture (oh, horror, what am I thinking?) of me. Note it happens to be a flattering picture which mercifully doesn't show all the acne scars. Look at it whilst you can. I'll remove the link eventually.
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And to save this entry from complete vacuity, a progress picture

(Last edited on 12th May. I've been posting a new in-progress image at each significant stage of this illustration, here they are now altogether as links:

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Finally, here is a bad photograph of the finished piece; it will be submitted properly when a copy has been sent to my friend for scanning):