Thank you so very much!

I'm glad I'm not alone :D That's a wonderful thing you do. Learning together with your kids must be great. And thank you so very much! I can't even express how much it means to me that what I do here is both enjoyable AND helpful. All the best to you. And thank you for taking the time to share this :) Edit: I forgot: I hope you will enjoy Dracula ad nicht as I did. It's a marvelous book. I'd be happy if you'd let me know what you think of it

Of course I remember :) Thank you for saying "hi". How is college going?

@@iReadBooks AWESOME! No problem man. College is super fun, I am meeting so many new people and discovering all of my strengths and weaknesses as a person haha. My grades could do a little work though... its been a rough transition but next year I will know what to do. How about you? How is life treating ya?

I can absolutely imagine that the transition from high-school to college is not that easy. It's a very different way of learning. It's awesome that you like it 😀 I'm very glad for you, and I'm sure you'll get the hang of it and in no time this will reflect in your grades. Meeting new people is always exciting. Life is okay on my side. Thank you for asking. There were a couple of rough patches here and there in the last month, but... hey... such is life, right? I've been doing improv classes for the last one and a half years and took part in an improv show not too long ago. This was real fun and very exciting. I would have never guessed that improv is something I'd be capable of. And I also wouldn't have - not even in my wildest dreams- imagined that it's that much fun. So, yeah... I am pretty sure that I will continue this. So much for strengths and weaknesses. It's astounding what we are capable of 😊

Thank you :) And, yes! Absolutely. I've always been a very curious person. Since nobody was really able to "quench my thirst for knowledge", I started reading books and later dabbled into science and philosophy. Newton is a great example. And Blackwood himself is one, too. The lines between the natural and the supernatural always have been very blurry, and some of the greatest stories live exactly on these lines, don't they?

@@iReadBooks you probably know the story...but a classic example is how phosphorus was first discovered/isolated. In an alchemists workshop, in a German city. In early modern times.....

It's the story of Hennig Brand, isn't it? A great example, indeed. The search for the philosopher's stone has brought forth a lot of fascinating endeavours. Wasn't the invention of porcelain a quite similar story? If I remember correctly, it was something avoid trying to turn lesser materials into gold? I have to check it out again.

@@iReadBooks I think your correct on both counts. Lots of interesting stuff. The porcelain thing - the so called quest for 'white gold' is a good one. Then again some people think Devinci's intrest in running water 💦 was a kind.?...of intuitive quest for a 'unified principle' of living things - a kind of instinctively thought out sense that DNA existed. In literature I would say that M R James - "count magnus'....is a sinister tribute to the power of early modern thought. And the dangers.

Oh, I didn't know about the running water thing. Thank you for pointing me towards it. I'll certainly read up on it. The whole transition from natural philosophy and alchemy towards what we now call science is such an incredibly fascinating subject, and literature from especially the 19th century is so rich with hints and ideas. There is so much to explore