Chicken processing day, shots from my (on foot) commute. We...
Sep. 26th, 2017 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2xydPfs:
Chicken processing day, shots from my (on foot) commute. We rarely start before dawn but the exception is that processing days are fixed start times, and as the days shorten, their starts edge closer to sunrise. So the clock is reasonable, but the sun’s being lazy.
The barnyard looks lovely in dawn’s first rosy-fingered blush, and the second photo– taken earlier, from my yurt’s front yard, shows Venus, and the fence wire carried on high poles past the garden, not a power line. (at Laughing Earth)
Chicken processing day, shots from my (on foot) commute. We rarely start before dawn but the exception is that processing days are fixed start times, and as the days shorten, their starts edge closer to sunrise. So the clock is reasonable, but the sun’s being lazy.
The barnyard looks lovely in dawn’s first rosy-fingered blush, and the second photo– taken earlier, from my yurt’s front yard, shows Venus, and the fence wire carried on high poles past the garden, not a power line. (at Laughing Earth)
Longue houle qui roule au vent et ronronne sa musique jusqu'aux îles droit devant
Sep. 26th, 2017 03:42 amsovayOur house smells like the sea. A sea-fog came in through the windows before midnight, as strong and salt as standing on the docks: I was lying on the couch and thought that if I looked out the windows, I would see water moving under the streetlights, and first I got Jacques Brel's "La cathédrale" stuck in my head and then I fell asleep. I was saying elsewhere in a discussion of dead zones/waste lands in weird fiction that someone must have set a weird tale in the deep anoxic waters of the Black Sea because it's too uncanny an environment to pass up (the millennia of preserved shipwrecks alone), but I can't think of any examples. I hope I don't have to write one. See previous complaints about research.
The Emerald City and Me
Sep. 25th, 2017 07:34 pmcheriepriestWell, we made it. We closed on our Seattle house literally the evening before we left the Chattanooga house - and it only happened then because a dedicated notary came out to our house after hours and helped us file all the paperwork. First thing the next morning, we hit the road.
It was a six-day drive back to the West Coast. We took two cars, and we each took two animals - I drove with Greyson in the back seat, and Quinnie in the front seat. (Both secured, yes.) My husband brought the eldercat and Lucy in a similar configuration. Using a AAA travel agent, we booked all our hotel rooms in advance - making sure that we could bring our furry family members along without any difficulty. All but two of those nights were screwed up by the aforementioned travel agent; but when all was said and done, nobody had to sleep in the car and everything was fine.
My husband and I each traveled with a small suitcase. For the animals, we packed the largest suitcase we own - and at first we could barely close it, for it contained pre-measured meals for all four of them, plus bowls, medicine (for all four), fluids kit (for the eldercat), cannibis oil treats for the canine nervous nellies, flea/tick preventatives, and five disposable litter boxes stacked together. And I guess now I know how to manage a good "bug-out bag" for the whole family, so there's that.
Eventually we arrived at a house I've named "Rockford Place" - a late mid-century modern with an angular seventies vibe and a massive fireplace surrounded by natural stone. There's also an enormous backyard that's mostly rocks and trees, terraformed into paths and a nice landing area.
Besides, I like James Garner. So yeah, it's called Rockford Place.
The house is really rather neat - lots of cool angles and funky architectural features (without going overboard, I mean.) But the bathrooms are an embarrassment, and when we got here, the kitchen was stocked with appliances that only halfway worked. We've decided to live with the bathrooms for now, but the kitchen...well. We scraped up the money to replace the appliances, which turned into a massive shit-show courtesy of HomeDepot.com... but that's another story. Frankly, I'm so fed up with the experience that I'm not likely to relate it here. Suffice it to say, don't buy appliances from HomeDepot.com. Home Depot's own employees (at a local store) told me the in-house joke is that online orders are "job security" because one way or another, they're fucked up literally 100% of the time.
Anyway, we do have working appliances now. Thank God.
We also have a new veterinarian, which is good because the eldercat ran out of fluids, Lucy came down with (what seemed like) a UTI, and Quinnie has had a couple bad bouts of diarrhea - one bad enough that I took her to the kitty ER. Still not sure what's wrong with her, but she's wrapping up another round of medication at present, and she seems to be 100% fine and dandy. Cats, man.
All four of the critters really seem to like the new house. The cats love the stairs, and the dogs love the yard - which is fenced all the way around to the front patio, so they can really get a good loop of "chase" going on. Both dog-fatties have even lost a little weight, which is good.
As a side note: If you're mostly following me (on any platform) because of the household animal population - or if you'd like to, going forward - you can catch me on Twitter or (more recently) Instagram. Twitter is sometimes LadyRage, but often pet pictures. Instagram is almost exclusively pet pictures. In case this matters.
Hm. What else?
I guess you might also be reading this because I write books. By way of What's Up Next, I can offer the following:
And that's all the writing news that's fit to type, for the moment. To be honest, writing updates are probably going to be few and far between for a bit, as I'm taking a little breathing room this year - breathing room that will give me time to get some work done on the house, and take on a day job, perhaps. I could use a steadier paycheck for a bit, and some room for my brain to cool off a bit.
I've been in fifth gear for the last few years, and I'm looking forward to just...doing production work on the Wild Cards projects, and The Agony House, and another adult horror project from Tor called The Toll (pub date TBD). So it's not like I'm quitting the industry and flouncing into darkness or anything. I'm just giving myself a break. Kind of.
More news as it develops.
Okay folks, that's all I can think of, at the moment - but I *will* try to update more regularly over here, now that we're more or less settled in. (We've been here about two months.) So as always, thanks for reading, and thanks for visiting this page. One way or another, I'll see you around...
It was a six-day drive back to the West Coast. We took two cars, and we each took two animals - I drove with Greyson in the back seat, and Quinnie in the front seat. (Both secured, yes.) My husband brought the eldercat and Lucy in a similar configuration. Using a AAA travel agent, we booked all our hotel rooms in advance - making sure that we could bring our furry family members along without any difficulty. All but two of those nights were screwed up by the aforementioned travel agent; but when all was said and done, nobody had to sleep in the car and everything was fine.
My husband and I each traveled with a small suitcase. For the animals, we packed the largest suitcase we own - and at first we could barely close it, for it contained pre-measured meals for all four of them, plus bowls, medicine (for all four), fluids kit (for the eldercat), cannibis oil treats for the canine nervous nellies, flea/tick preventatives, and five disposable litter boxes stacked together. And I guess now I know how to manage a good "bug-out bag" for the whole family, so there's that.
Eventually we arrived at a house I've named "Rockford Place" - a late mid-century modern with an angular seventies vibe and a massive fireplace surrounded by natural stone. There's also an enormous backyard that's mostly rocks and trees, terraformed into paths and a nice landing area.
Besides, I like James Garner. So yeah, it's called Rockford Place.
The house is really rather neat - lots of cool angles and funky architectural features (without going overboard, I mean.) But the bathrooms are an embarrassment, and when we got here, the kitchen was stocked with appliances that only halfway worked. We've decided to live with the bathrooms for now, but the kitchen...well. We scraped up the money to replace the appliances, which turned into a massive shit-show courtesy of HomeDepot.com... but that's another story. Frankly, I'm so fed up with the experience that I'm not likely to relate it here. Suffice it to say, don't buy appliances from HomeDepot.com. Home Depot's own employees (at a local store) told me the in-house joke is that online orders are "job security" because one way or another, they're fucked up literally 100% of the time.
Anyway, we do have working appliances now. Thank God.
We also have a new veterinarian, which is good because the eldercat ran out of fluids, Lucy came down with (what seemed like) a UTI, and Quinnie has had a couple bad bouts of diarrhea - one bad enough that I took her to the kitty ER. Still not sure what's wrong with her, but she's wrapping up another round of medication at present, and she seems to be 100% fine and dandy. Cats, man.
All four of the critters really seem to like the new house. The cats love the stairs, and the dogs love the yard - which is fenced all the way around to the front patio, so they can really get a good loop of "chase" going on. Both dog-fatties have even lost a little weight, which is good.
As a side note: If you're mostly following me (on any platform) because of the household animal population - or if you'd like to, going forward - you can catch me on Twitter or (more recently) Instagram. Twitter is sometimes LadyRage, but often pet pictures. Instagram is almost exclusively pet pictures. In case this matters.
Hm. What else?
I guess you might also be reading this because I write books. By way of What's Up Next, I can offer the following:
- In December, a new installment in the Wild Cards franchise hits the streets - including a story from yours truly. The book is called Mississippi Roll, and my contribution is a somewhat wacky romp called "Death on the Water" that features my (now retired) Fort Freak cop Leo and his new wife, Wanda, on board a haunted riverboat. They share the stage with a trio of ghost hunters who, um, are entirely fictitious and not all mocking re: any given TV show that my husband and I might jokingly call "Brost hunters." Ahem.
- Speaking of Wild Cards - I've just handed in a draft of my next piece, but I can't tell you about that yet. If all goes according to plan, it will be inserted into one of the old volumes, as part of a future re-release. But that's another year or two down the pike, I assume.
- Production is finally getting underway on my next young adult project for Scholastic - a book called The Agony House. We don't have a pub date yet; things have been delayed on this one, largely because my original editor left the house for another job (which happens, such is life). But my new editor is on the case, and I should have more information on that for you before terribly long. The Agony House is not related to I Am Princess X, but it *does* feature a comic/illustrated element in a similar fashion. More details to come!
And that's all the writing news that's fit to type, for the moment. To be honest, writing updates are probably going to be few and far between for a bit, as I'm taking a little breathing room this year - breathing room that will give me time to get some work done on the house, and take on a day job, perhaps. I could use a steadier paycheck for a bit, and some room for my brain to cool off a bit.
I've been in fifth gear for the last few years, and I'm looking forward to just...doing production work on the Wild Cards projects, and The Agony House, and another adult horror project from Tor called The Toll (pub date TBD). So it's not like I'm quitting the industry and flouncing into darkness or anything. I'm just giving myself a break. Kind of.
More news as it develops.
Okay folks, that's all I can think of, at the moment - but I *will* try to update more regularly over here, now that we're more or less settled in. (We've been here about two months.) So as always, thanks for reading, and thanks for visiting this page. One way or another, I'll see you around...
Well, it’s 91F at the end of September so
Sep. 25th, 2017 09:38 pmdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2yDDIKO:
Well, it’s 91F at the end of September so we’re in the creek after a sweaty, hectic day. (at Laughing Earth)
Well, it’s 91F at the end of September so we’re in the creek after a sweaty, hectic day. (at Laughing Earth)
copperbadge: Ha Bun Shu: A Book of Wave and Ripple Designs by...
Sep. 25th, 2017 08:03 pmdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2whqQJ2:
copperbadge:
Ha Bun Shu: A Book of Wave and Ripple Designs by Mori Yuzan, 1919
This book brings together a wonderful selection of wave and ripple designs produced by the Japanese artist Mori Yuzan, about whom not a lot is known, apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihonga style, and died in 1917 (which would make this a posthumous collection). Similar work is also collected in Hamon shu (Wave patterns), a multi-volume work brought out at the beginning of the 20th century. Both these works would have acted as a kind of go-to guide for Japanese craftsmen looking to adorn their wares with wave and ripple patterns. The designs would have found their way onto swords (both blades and handles) and associated paraphernalia (known as “sword furniture”), as well as lacquerware, Netsuke, religious objects, and a host of other items.
copperbadge:
Ha Bun Shu: A Book of Wave and Ripple Designs by Mori Yuzan, 1919
This book brings together a wonderful selection of wave and ripple designs produced by the Japanese artist Mori Yuzan, about whom not a lot is known, apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihonga style, and died in 1917 (which would make this a posthumous collection). Similar work is also collected in Hamon shu (Wave patterns), a multi-volume work brought out at the beginning of the 20th century. Both these works would have acted as a kind of go-to guide for Japanese craftsmen looking to adorn their wares with wave and ripple patterns. The designs would have found their way onto swords (both blades and handles) and associated paraphernalia (known as “sword furniture”), as well as lacquerware, Netsuke, religious objects, and a host of other items.
sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “oh
Sep. 25th, 2017 02:23 pmdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2fLYmRj:
I officially feel better about the quirks of both my mother and my mother-in-law now. Thank you for that.
singelisilverslippers replied to your post “oh my gosh we came home from brunch and said ok, let’s get a picnic…”
lordy
It’s not that I have no drama at all in my family. But most of my mother’s family is dead– in fact, she’s all that remains, so the end-of-life drama of Grandma not really losing her marbles but getting so old she couldn’t cope is a faint fond memory, and my eccentric uncle dying abruptly of cancer he’d procrastinated diagnosing until it was in the end stages was kind of short-lived.
(Yesterday at brunch I met another friend of his– one of those names I vaguely knew, one of those Troy people who sees me, recognizes me because I’m the spitting image of my mother circa 1977, and knows who I am, but who I know only third-hand by name and not on sight. He said, I always meant to take one of his tours of Washington Park, but never got around to it, and I regret it all the time. He’d all but written a book, I said; Mom found his research, three organized boxes all meticulously laid out, and hasn’t had the heart to go on and write the book. The friend looked pained; I don’t know that he’d known that. Mom hasn’t felt able to talk about it much.)
Anyway. So we’re low on drama largely because of little opportunity for such. But, more importantly maybe, my mother is a Type A competitive person who decided as soon as my older sister got engaged that she was going to be The Best Mother-In-Law Of All Time, and has applied herself studiously to that pursuit in the intervening decade. It can be a little much, but you only have to kind of peek at the alternatives – my older sister’s mother-in-law is a real prize too– to understand that being a little intense is hardly the worst thing a person can be. (Older sister once came home after a two-week work trip for the Army and had her four-year-old marvel that she’d forgotten how to brush her teeth, because Nana had never one time had her do it.)
I officially feel better about the quirks of both my mother and my mother-in-law now. Thank you for that.
singelisilverslippers replied to your post “oh my gosh we came home from brunch and said ok, let’s get a picnic…”
lordy
It’s not that I have no drama at all in my family. But most of my mother’s family is dead– in fact, she’s all that remains, so the end-of-life drama of Grandma not really losing her marbles but getting so old she couldn’t cope is a faint fond memory, and my eccentric uncle dying abruptly of cancer he’d procrastinated diagnosing until it was in the end stages was kind of short-lived.
(Yesterday at brunch I met another friend of his– one of those names I vaguely knew, one of those Troy people who sees me, recognizes me because I’m the spitting image of my mother circa 1977, and knows who I am, but who I know only third-hand by name and not on sight. He said, I always meant to take one of his tours of Washington Park, but never got around to it, and I regret it all the time. He’d all but written a book, I said; Mom found his research, three organized boxes all meticulously laid out, and hasn’t had the heart to go on and write the book. The friend looked pained; I don’t know that he’d known that. Mom hasn’t felt able to talk about it much.)
Anyway. So we’re low on drama largely because of little opportunity for such. But, more importantly maybe, my mother is a Type A competitive person who decided as soon as my older sister got engaged that she was going to be The Best Mother-In-Law Of All Time, and has applied herself studiously to that pursuit in the intervening decade. It can be a little much, but you only have to kind of peek at the alternatives – my older sister’s mother-in-law is a real prize too– to understand that being a little intense is hardly the worst thing a person can be. (Older sister once came home after a two-week work trip for the Army and had her four-year-old marvel that she’d forgotten how to brush her teeth, because Nana had never one time had her do it.)
Busy Weekend
Sep. 25th, 2017 07:47 ammarthawellsThis weekend we ended up going to my husband's 40th high school reunion. It was a lot of driving and sitting in traffic to get there and get back (perpetual high way construction taking four lane highways down to one lane, trying to exit onto another highway just as a large sports event was ending, etc) but we had a good time. (Also we went to a party out in the country where our GPS tried to direct us into an open field.) But everybody ended up having fun. At one point we went into Denton with friends and went to Recycled Books which is a bookstore so huge I think it hurt my brain. We also got to see my family including my two year old grand-nephew, and that was a lot of fun.
I posted a story to the Raksura Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2458567 and that was about all the work I did this weekend besides answering email.
I posted a story to the Raksura Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2458567 and that was about all the work I did this weekend besides answering email.
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2fLL8UK:
tobermoriansass:
One of the biggest flaws of the expanded universe and like the whole clone wars conflict is that fucking everything is manipulated and orchestrated by palpatine which means every single political conflict is in some way or the other, artificially manufactured. Which also makes the pay off nonexistent bc this whole thing implies there’s no legitimate grievances to be resolved, only created ones and that there are no populist movements that oppose the republic on grounds of legitimate cause because all of them without exception are just manipulated and so are suckers for palpatine.
It just makes the political backdrop incredibly frustrating because you hint at legitimate resentment and then veer away from any critique of the republic because in the end, all the opposition to the republic was fake anyway.
tobermoriansass:
One of the biggest flaws of the expanded universe and like the whole clone wars conflict is that fucking everything is manipulated and orchestrated by palpatine which means every single political conflict is in some way or the other, artificially manufactured. Which also makes the pay off nonexistent bc this whole thing implies there’s no legitimate grievances to be resolved, only created ones and that there are no populist movements that oppose the republic on grounds of legitimate cause because all of them without exception are just manipulated and so are suckers for palpatine.
It just makes the political backdrop incredibly frustrating because you hint at legitimate resentment and then veer away from any critique of the republic because in the end, all the opposition to the republic was fake anyway.
Just to be a normal man, just to go out shaking hands
Sep. 25th, 2017 01:22 amsovayI don't understand Facebook's algorithms. Independent of any pages shared by my friends, it keeps presenting me with this photo of violinist Gil Shaham, upcoming guest of the BSO, and I cannot tell if it thinks that I am the sort of person who listens to classical music (true) or the sort of person who thinks this particular musician is great-looking (also true) and in either case I have no money for the symphony and extant commitments on one of the days he's playing anyway, but I still want to know which data they were farming to produce this result. Seriously, it's been every time I go to check in on the news. I'm not complaining, but I am impressed.
(I did not make it to the Brattle's screening of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), so the question of whether I find David Niven as beautiful in that movie as Andrew Moor does will have to wait for another time.)
(I did not make it to the Brattle's screening of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), so the question of whether I find David Niven as beautiful in that movie as Andrew Moor does will have to wait for another time.)
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2yAA3h2:
a vignette: well, first, background: we had a good week for flowers, sold almost entirely out at market. So, no big arrangements came home. Those are the ones my sister decorates her house with because what else do you do.
another background: as we were arranging flowers Friday afternoon (and Friday afternoons are a bit exhausting, because it’s quitting time for everyone else, and we’re stuck there still working, and it looks like fun because it’s flowers but it’s sort of mournful because everyone comes by on their way out for the weekend and looks so happy, and we still have eight… seven… five… two buckets to fill, endlessly…), the vegetable manager came by cradling an eggplant in his hands. It was a beautiful eggplant. He just wanted to show it to us, I suppose; he’d seen it, unharvested, in the field, and it was so perfect– the surface was slightly flawed in one spot, but it was a beautiful shape, a perfect fullness, a classic eggplant. What will you make with it? my sister asked. (She took his portrait with this exemplar of his craft and Instagrammed it, and it looks like a professional shot.) Oh, he said, probably eggplant parmesan, I haven’t done that yet this year. oh, I said, I love eggplant parm so much. i never make it, but it’s like, my favorite. you should make it for all of us. oh, he said, ha ha, i’d need more than one eggplant. I’m kidding, I told him hastily, Lord, I wouldn’t actually demand that you cook for me, I’m not an animal.
Well. He comes to my sister yesterday and says, I’m making eggplant parmesan for all of you Sunday night, and in fact he did, and he also made tiramisu, including making the ladyfingers himself, so.
Anyway. Such a nice dinner needs flowers on the table, my sister decided, so she rediscovered that place inside herself that does actually enjoy making flower arrangements, and went out and harvested just a handful of flowers, and made herself an arrangement for the dining room table, since she’d already set the table with a cloth and napkins and the good china and all– because, being an adult, she owns these things, and so why wouldn’t she break them out for every Sunday dinner?
So, it’s 5 pm, Veg Manager is banging pots around cheerfully next door, periodically coming by to borrow very promising things from my sister’s much larger kitchen. Sister has her flowers laid out on the kitchen counter and is arranging directly into a vase.
She trims all the stems, picks up the flowers, is placing them one at a time into the vase.
A little cloud of insects and spiders go scurrying off across the kitchen counter, having been on the flowers when they were harvested, and now seeing an opportunity to jump ship.
I watched this, and she watched this, and she said, “I’m just– going to let this happen,” because what else was she going to do?
I don’t know what gardeners do; we usually harvest into buckets that chill in a fridge overnight (if you see “conditioned” flowers for sale, that’s what that means; it does prolong their bloom period significantly), and we arrange on a table in a barn, so we notice bugs once in a while but it’s nothing like this little scatter pattern of many-legged refugees was. It was impressive.
Hours later, after a sumptuous repast (made of that perfect eggplant and some of its friends!) and much conversation, my sister hastily drank the dregs from a water glass on the table and put it down on the floor inverted. “What,” I said, and then I saw the spider, a goldenrod crab spider I’d seen run off a zinnia, clamber up the side of the glass. She took it outside and put it into the hostas. We felt better.
a vignette: well, first, background: we had a good week for flowers, sold almost entirely out at market. So, no big arrangements came home. Those are the ones my sister decorates her house with because what else do you do.
another background: as we were arranging flowers Friday afternoon (and Friday afternoons are a bit exhausting, because it’s quitting time for everyone else, and we’re stuck there still working, and it looks like fun because it’s flowers but it’s sort of mournful because everyone comes by on their way out for the weekend and looks so happy, and we still have eight… seven… five… two buckets to fill, endlessly…), the vegetable manager came by cradling an eggplant in his hands. It was a beautiful eggplant. He just wanted to show it to us, I suppose; he’d seen it, unharvested, in the field, and it was so perfect– the surface was slightly flawed in one spot, but it was a beautiful shape, a perfect fullness, a classic eggplant. What will you make with it? my sister asked. (She took his portrait with this exemplar of his craft and Instagrammed it, and it looks like a professional shot.) Oh, he said, probably eggplant parmesan, I haven’t done that yet this year. oh, I said, I love eggplant parm so much. i never make it, but it’s like, my favorite. you should make it for all of us. oh, he said, ha ha, i’d need more than one eggplant. I’m kidding, I told him hastily, Lord, I wouldn’t actually demand that you cook for me, I’m not an animal.
Well. He comes to my sister yesterday and says, I’m making eggplant parmesan for all of you Sunday night, and in fact he did, and he also made tiramisu, including making the ladyfingers himself, so.
Anyway. Such a nice dinner needs flowers on the table, my sister decided, so she rediscovered that place inside herself that does actually enjoy making flower arrangements, and went out and harvested just a handful of flowers, and made herself an arrangement for the dining room table, since she’d already set the table with a cloth and napkins and the good china and all– because, being an adult, she owns these things, and so why wouldn’t she break them out for every Sunday dinner?
So, it’s 5 pm, Veg Manager is banging pots around cheerfully next door, periodically coming by to borrow very promising things from my sister’s much larger kitchen. Sister has her flowers laid out on the kitchen counter and is arranging directly into a vase.
She trims all the stems, picks up the flowers, is placing them one at a time into the vase.
A little cloud of insects and spiders go scurrying off across the kitchen counter, having been on the flowers when they were harvested, and now seeing an opportunity to jump ship.
I watched this, and she watched this, and she said, “I’m just– going to let this happen,” because what else was she going to do?
I don’t know what gardeners do; we usually harvest into buckets that chill in a fridge overnight (if you see “conditioned” flowers for sale, that’s what that means; it does prolong their bloom period significantly), and we arrange on a table in a barn, so we notice bugs once in a while but it’s nothing like this little scatter pattern of many-legged refugees was. It was impressive.
Hours later, after a sumptuous repast (made of that perfect eggplant and some of its friends!) and much conversation, my sister hastily drank the dregs from a water glass on the table and put it down on the floor inverted. “What,” I said, and then I saw the spider, a goldenrod crab spider I’d seen run off a zinnia, clamber up the side of the glass. She took it outside and put it into the hostas. We felt better.
one-step-enough: delicatepr1ncess: Stop telling girls they have to be super heroes and not...
Sep. 24th, 2017 08:03 pmdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2yn5mev:
one-step-enough:
delicatepr1ncess:
Stop telling girls they have to be super heroes and not princesses. Stop telling girls that wanting to be a mother or a homemaker isn’t a real job. Stop telling girls that makeup isn’t art. Stop making fun of girls who like being in a relationship and looking for love. STOP telling girls that femininity is bad. I thought being a feminist and being a woman’s rights activist was about giving women the freedom to choose. Stop the internalized misogyny.
I had a professor/research mentor in college who was a very left-wing feminist. Like, we had to buy some supplies at a craft store for one of our experiments, and she made us drive to a Michaels 30 minutes away because she refused to support the Hobby Lobby that was only 10 minutes away.
Anyway, she was telling me once about friends of hers with two daughters, who were intentionally raising the girls in a gender-neutral environment. No pink clothes, no Barbies. Which isn’t necessarily wrong; certainly girls can play with trucks and boys can play with dolls. But, my professor was lamenting that despite the careful avoidance of anything overtly girly, by the time they were in preschool both daughters loved princesses, pink, dress-up. Much to their parents’ chagrin, they were both girly-girls.
And none of these very progressive people recognized how problematic their attitudes were. Certainly, we should not force girls to engage in traditionally feminine activities. BUT, perhaps more importantly, that doesn’t mean we should deride these activities in and of themselves. It is misogyny to condemn or ridicule something just because it is a stereotypically feminine activity.
Both of my sisters who are married have mothers-in-law who don’t agree with them about not buying constant truckloads of shit for children and enforcing heteronormativity and such. When my older sister found out she was pregnant with a girl, she actually put her foot down and sent out an email: NO. PINK. SHIT. She said it nicer than that, but she said, “This child will have enough pink stuff in her life. If you are buying something new for her, please please please, buy a color other than pink.”
It worked for the first… minute or so. Of course everything secondhand was a random mix, and often was pink, and that was fine. But it worked so well my other sister, upon giving birth to a girl a year and a half later, adopted the same principle, which was tremendously difficult to enforce with her own junk-shop-addicted mother-in-law. (But said child celebrated her first birthday in the most adorable, badass neon yellow tutu, which mother-in-law may have bought in protest about the no pink rule, but it turned out to be totally delightful.)
And now that said girls are three and five, their favorite colors are, of course, pink. (Well, the younger one likes yellow too, and the older loves purple too, but pink things are guaranteed paths to their hearts.) Both mothers understand that they don’t want to crush their daughters’ spirits, and always accept their choices when they express a preference and such. The younger one is a little less pink-obsessed. But the older one, who has two big brothers and is probably somewhat reacting to having to wear their hand-me-downs, is OBSESSED with shades of bright pink and pale lavender.
Are their mothers disappointed in this? No. Do they sometimes encourage them to pick a color other than pink? Sometimes. (Older child’s mother, when the girl wanted to paint her room pink, talked her into a pink base wall covered in rainbows, which looks awesome.) Are they ashamed of their daughters for “betraying” them? No, not at all. Do they wish their daughters liked blue or yellow better? Not really; not any more than, say, the older sister wishes her eldest son hadn’t chosen to paint his bedroom bright neon orange with neon green trim. (She talked him into maybe a gray base wall with the other colors in stripes, and he actually came up with a pretty cool design. He’ll still grow out of it sooner rather than later, but for now, he’s nine and it’s great, and when it needs repainting he’ll be big enough to do it his damn self.)
And many of the little girls I know are growing up excited to be princess super heroes. Their mothers are fighting the adults who tell them that thinness is important. There’s one mother in pre-K who sends her daughter in high-heeled shoes (I’m astonished; they make platform pumps for four-year-olds), but everyone else is politely horrified, and the pre-k insists on all children changing into slippers indoors anyway.
I think it’s far more important to agitate for legislation to protect the health, safety, reproductive rights, and access to education and protection from sexual assault for our daughters than to constantly police one another over what kind of activities we encourage them to. It doesn’t really matter one way or another what dolls we buy our daughters/nieces/nonbinary babypals if our sons– hell, their doctors and teachers and bosses– can assault and harass them with impunity and they’ve got to have their healthcare approved by a panel of moralizing judges and there’s no funding for it anyway and they can’t afford it because they legally can be paid less for the same work their brothers do.
I have a hard time giving a fuck either way about Barbies, with that kind of bullshit going on.
one-step-enough:
delicatepr1ncess:
Stop telling girls they have to be super heroes and not princesses. Stop telling girls that wanting to be a mother or a homemaker isn’t a real job. Stop telling girls that makeup isn’t art. Stop making fun of girls who like being in a relationship and looking for love. STOP telling girls that femininity is bad. I thought being a feminist and being a woman’s rights activist was about giving women the freedom to choose. Stop the internalized misogyny.
I had a professor/research mentor in college who was a very left-wing feminist. Like, we had to buy some supplies at a craft store for one of our experiments, and she made us drive to a Michaels 30 minutes away because she refused to support the Hobby Lobby that was only 10 minutes away.
Anyway, she was telling me once about friends of hers with two daughters, who were intentionally raising the girls in a gender-neutral environment. No pink clothes, no Barbies. Which isn’t necessarily wrong; certainly girls can play with trucks and boys can play with dolls. But, my professor was lamenting that despite the careful avoidance of anything overtly girly, by the time they were in preschool both daughters loved princesses, pink, dress-up. Much to their parents’ chagrin, they were both girly-girls.
And none of these very progressive people recognized how problematic their attitudes were. Certainly, we should not force girls to engage in traditionally feminine activities. BUT, perhaps more importantly, that doesn’t mean we should deride these activities in and of themselves. It is misogyny to condemn or ridicule something just because it is a stereotypically feminine activity.
Both of my sisters who are married have mothers-in-law who don’t agree with them about not buying constant truckloads of shit for children and enforcing heteronormativity and such. When my older sister found out she was pregnant with a girl, she actually put her foot down and sent out an email: NO. PINK. SHIT. She said it nicer than that, but she said, “This child will have enough pink stuff in her life. If you are buying something new for her, please please please, buy a color other than pink.”
It worked for the first… minute or so. Of course everything secondhand was a random mix, and often was pink, and that was fine. But it worked so well my other sister, upon giving birth to a girl a year and a half later, adopted the same principle, which was tremendously difficult to enforce with her own junk-shop-addicted mother-in-law. (But said child celebrated her first birthday in the most adorable, badass neon yellow tutu, which mother-in-law may have bought in protest about the no pink rule, but it turned out to be totally delightful.)
And now that said girls are three and five, their favorite colors are, of course, pink. (Well, the younger one likes yellow too, and the older loves purple too, but pink things are guaranteed paths to their hearts.) Both mothers understand that they don’t want to crush their daughters’ spirits, and always accept their choices when they express a preference and such. The younger one is a little less pink-obsessed. But the older one, who has two big brothers and is probably somewhat reacting to having to wear their hand-me-downs, is OBSESSED with shades of bright pink and pale lavender.
Are their mothers disappointed in this? No. Do they sometimes encourage them to pick a color other than pink? Sometimes. (Older child’s mother, when the girl wanted to paint her room pink, talked her into a pink base wall covered in rainbows, which looks awesome.) Are they ashamed of their daughters for “betraying” them? No, not at all. Do they wish their daughters liked blue or yellow better? Not really; not any more than, say, the older sister wishes her eldest son hadn’t chosen to paint his bedroom bright neon orange with neon green trim. (She talked him into maybe a gray base wall with the other colors in stripes, and he actually came up with a pretty cool design. He’ll still grow out of it sooner rather than later, but for now, he’s nine and it’s great, and when it needs repainting he’ll be big enough to do it his damn self.)
And many of the little girls I know are growing up excited to be princess super heroes. Their mothers are fighting the adults who tell them that thinness is important. There’s one mother in pre-K who sends her daughter in high-heeled shoes (I’m astonished; they make platform pumps for four-year-olds), but everyone else is politely horrified, and the pre-k insists on all children changing into slippers indoors anyway.
I think it’s far more important to agitate for legislation to protect the health, safety, reproductive rights, and access to education and protection from sexual assault for our daughters than to constantly police one another over what kind of activities we encourage them to. It doesn’t really matter one way or another what dolls we buy our daughters/nieces/nonbinary babypals if our sons– hell, their doctors and teachers and bosses– can assault and harass them with impunity and they’ve got to have their healthcare approved by a panel of moralizing judges and there’s no funding for it anyway and they can’t afford it because they legally can be paid less for the same work their brothers do.
I have a hard time giving a fuck either way about Barbies, with that kind of bullshit going on.
Ornaments hang from ramparts, let me know where to go, but not who's coming
Sep. 24th, 2017 03:53 pmsovayI dreamed I was in Providence last night, visiting friends who don't exist in waking life. There was no particular occasion—I hadn't seen them in months, NecronomiCon notwithstanding. I had brought one of them a ring I had found in a thrift store in Boston. It looked like heavy gold with a blurred device on the signet and chips of emerald down the band; I thought it was costume jewelry. It had been priced accordingly. The girl at the register hadn't been able to tell me where it came from. I almost tossed it to my friend as we walked through Burnside Park, telling him it had looked like his style. He didn't even put it on: he turned it over once or twice and dropped onto the nearest bench like someone had kicked his feet out from under him and burst into tears. I thought at one point he said, "How could you do this to me?" but I didn't have an answer and I wasn't sure he was asking me. When he left without looking at me, he left the ring resting on the bench behind him. I put it back in my pocket. I went back to their house. He was there helping his partner prepare dinner; no one said anything about it. I can do something with this dream, I think. spatch asked me months ago if I had ever written Lovecraftian noir and I couldn't think of a way to do it without being cheap or clichéd or ripping other authors off: I might have dreamed myself a way in. I just wish I could think of things that don't require research.
1. Thank you, question mark, Facebook, for pointing me toward this teeth-grinding article: Zoe Willams, "Yes, yes, yes! Welcome to the golden age of slutty cinema." I was a little wary of the opening, but then we reached the following claim—
"On the big screen, we look to the 1930s and 40s – rightly – for an object lesson in how to make a female character with depth, verve, wit and intelligence, but to expect those women to shag around would be unreasonable, anachronistic."
—and I blew a fuse. Can I chase after the author screaming with a copy of Baby Face (1933)? Or the bookstore clerk from The Big Sleep (1946)? Pre-Code cinema in general? A stubborn and sneaky percentage of Hollywood even after the ascendance of the Production Code? "It is a radical act," William writes, "which every film generation thinks they are the first to discover: to create characters who are not good people"—well, apparently every generation of film critics thinks they discovered it, too. I wrote on Facebook that I was reminded of the conversation between an ATS driver and her prospective mother-in-law in Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943), where the younger woman declares proudly that "for the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men" and the older woman quietly lets fall the fact that she served as an ambulance driver on the front lines of the last war. Just because the young women of the rising generation don't know about the social advances of their mothers doesn't mean they didn't happen. Just because the author of this article lives in a retrograde era doesn't mean the onscreen representation of morally ambiguous women is some kind of millenial invention. It's so easy to think that the past was always more conservative, more blinkered, more backwards than the present. It's comforting. It's dangerous. It permits the belief that things just get better, magically, automatically, without anyone having to fight to move forward or hold ground already won. Once you recognize that the past, even briefly, got here first, it's a lot harder to feel superior for just being alive now. We can't afford it and anyway it isn't true.
2. Apropos of nothing except that I was listening to Flanders and Swann, I am very glad that I discovered them before reading Margery Allingham, otherwise I might have thought she invented "The Youth of the Heart." It's quoted in a scene in The Beckoning Lady (1955)—correctly attributed, but her books are so full of fictional artists and musicians that when I read of "Lili Ricki, the new Swedish Nightingale, singing Sydney Carter's lovely song against a lightening sky," I might have easily had the Avocado of Death problem and assumed she made them both up. As it is, I know the song from a recording of Swann performing it solo as part of At the Drop of a Hat in 1957, since he wrote the music. And I was reminded of Allingham because there's a copy of Traitor's Purse (1941) on Howard's bookshelves in Howard the Duck (1986). I assume someone in the props department was a fan.
3. The Somerville Theatre has announced its repertory schedule for October. I am sad that the double feature of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the same night thatrushthatspeaks and I already have plans to see William Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928) at the HFA, but I am looking forward mightily to the triple feature of Psycho (1960), Psycho II (1983), and Psycho III (1986), because it is the Saturday before my birthday and five and a half hours of Anthony Perkins seems like a good preemptive birthday present to me. I have never seen Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), either, or Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), and I always like Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004). I know Brad Anderson's Session 9 (2001) was shot at the derelict Danvers State Hospital before it was demolished for condos, a decision which I hope is literally haunting the developers to this day. Anyone with opinions about the rest of this lineup?
I am off to write letters to politicians.
spatch asked me months ago if I had ever written Lovecraftian noir and I couldn't think of a way to do it without being cheap or clichéd or ripping other authors off: I might have dreamed myself a way in. I just wish I could think of things that don't require research.1. Thank you, question mark, Facebook, for pointing me toward this teeth-grinding article: Zoe Willams, "Yes, yes, yes! Welcome to the golden age of slutty cinema." I was a little wary of the opening, but then we reached the following claim—
"On the big screen, we look to the 1930s and 40s – rightly – for an object lesson in how to make a female character with depth, verve, wit and intelligence, but to expect those women to shag around would be unreasonable, anachronistic."
—and I blew a fuse. Can I chase after the author screaming with a copy of Baby Face (1933)? Or the bookstore clerk from The Big Sleep (1946)? Pre-Code cinema in general? A stubborn and sneaky percentage of Hollywood even after the ascendance of the Production Code? "It is a radical act," William writes, "which every film generation thinks they are the first to discover: to create characters who are not good people"—well, apparently every generation of film critics thinks they discovered it, too. I wrote on Facebook that I was reminded of the conversation between an ATS driver and her prospective mother-in-law in Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943), where the younger woman declares proudly that "for the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men" and the older woman quietly lets fall the fact that she served as an ambulance driver on the front lines of the last war. Just because the young women of the rising generation don't know about the social advances of their mothers doesn't mean they didn't happen. Just because the author of this article lives in a retrograde era doesn't mean the onscreen representation of morally ambiguous women is some kind of millenial invention. It's so easy to think that the past was always more conservative, more blinkered, more backwards than the present. It's comforting. It's dangerous. It permits the belief that things just get better, magically, automatically, without anyone having to fight to move forward or hold ground already won. Once you recognize that the past, even briefly, got here first, it's a lot harder to feel superior for just being alive now. We can't afford it and anyway it isn't true.
2. Apropos of nothing except that I was listening to Flanders and Swann, I am very glad that I discovered them before reading Margery Allingham, otherwise I might have thought she invented "The Youth of the Heart." It's quoted in a scene in The Beckoning Lady (1955)—correctly attributed, but her books are so full of fictional artists and musicians that when I read of "Lili Ricki, the new Swedish Nightingale, singing Sydney Carter's lovely song against a lightening sky," I might have easily had the Avocado of Death problem and assumed she made them both up. As it is, I know the song from a recording of Swann performing it solo as part of At the Drop of a Hat in 1957, since he wrote the music. And I was reminded of Allingham because there's a copy of Traitor's Purse (1941) on Howard's bookshelves in Howard the Duck (1986). I assume someone in the props department was a fan.
3. The Somerville Theatre has announced its repertory schedule for October. I am sad that the double feature of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the same night that
rushthatspeaks and I already have plans to see William Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928) at the HFA, but I am looking forward mightily to the triple feature of Psycho (1960), Psycho II (1983), and Psycho III (1986), because it is the Saturday before my birthday and five and a half hours of Anthony Perkins seems like a good preemptive birthday present to me. I have never seen Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), either, or Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), and I always like Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004). I know Brad Anderson's Session 9 (2001) was shot at the derelict Danvers State Hospital before it was demolished for condos, a decision which I hope is literally haunting the developers to this day. Anyone with opinions about the rest of this lineup?I am off to write letters to politicians.
Up in the Mt Greylock War Memorial tower looking toward NY...
Sep. 24th, 2017 06:13 pmdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2wPLVte:
Up in the Mt Greylock War Memorial tower looking toward NY State. (at Mount Greylock)
Up in the Mt Greylock War Memorial tower looking toward NY State. (at Mount Greylock)
oh my gosh we came home from brunch and said ok,
Sep. 24th, 2017 03:43 pmdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2y0GjBP:
oh my gosh we came home from brunch and said ok, let’s get a picnic lunch together so we can go on that drive, and my sister said, “give me 20 minutes,” and we all went off on our separate tasks. At nineteen and a half minutes, her mother-in-law came into the room where Sister was just putting the last things into the picnic bag, and said, “I’m gonna go get some gas in the car,” and Sister said, “I will be ready in one minute,” and m-i-l said “okay” and drove away, and now we’re all sitting in the kitchen (including the toddler, who was carefully managed to be ready in 20 minutes) waiting for her to come back.
(The best punchline to it was her son, my brother-in-law, who looked bewilderedly at the empty driveway and said, “but the tank was full?” [he drove her car to breakfast with us all in it].)
WELP.
She’s here for another week.
I don’t think I’ll time how long she takes to come back, it’s not helpful to know it.
oh my gosh we came home from brunch and said ok, let’s get a picnic lunch together so we can go on that drive, and my sister said, “give me 20 minutes,” and we all went off on our separate tasks. At nineteen and a half minutes, her mother-in-law came into the room where Sister was just putting the last things into the picnic bag, and said, “I’m gonna go get some gas in the car,” and Sister said, “I will be ready in one minute,” and m-i-l said “okay” and drove away, and now we’re all sitting in the kitchen (including the toddler, who was carefully managed to be ready in 20 minutes) waiting for her to come back.
(The best punchline to it was her son, my brother-in-law, who looked bewilderedly at the empty driveway and said, “but the tank was full?” [he drove her car to breakfast with us all in it].)
WELP.
She’s here for another week.
I don’t think I’ll time how long she takes to come back, it’s not helpful to know it.
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2xoB520:
i woke up at 5 am and have been puttering around, cleaning things, tidying the yurt, and so on. came inside around 7:15, farmsister’s mother-in-law was awake and puttering around too. farmsister told me, we’re going out to breakfast and then on a drive, and i thought that sounded nice, so i went and took a shower.
It is now 8:55 and farmsister’s mother in law, who was told the plan at the same time as me and was in the shower when I got out (there are two showers in this house) is still doing her makeup.
it’s sort of astonishing, i think, how long she spends, when I honestly can’t tell the difference between the before and after.
anyway. i’m goddamn starving and have been awake for 4 hours with no coffee so it’s starting to get dire in this lil brainspace. I just thought I’d document the moment here.
i woke up at 5 am and have been puttering around, cleaning things, tidying the yurt, and so on. came inside around 7:15, farmsister’s mother-in-law was awake and puttering around too. farmsister told me, we’re going out to breakfast and then on a drive, and i thought that sounded nice, so i went and took a shower.
It is now 8:55 and farmsister’s mother in law, who was told the plan at the same time as me and was in the shower when I got out (there are two showers in this house) is still doing her makeup.
it’s sort of astonishing, i think, how long she spends, when I honestly can’t tell the difference between the before and after.
anyway. i’m goddamn starving and have been awake for 4 hours with no coffee so it’s starting to get dire in this lil brainspace. I just thought I’d document the moment here.
honeyandwormwood: magnvsbvrnsides: sale-aholic: 1eleven: ale...
Sep. 24th, 2017 12:03 pmdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2xxD6YF:
honeyandwormwood:
magnvsbvrnsides:
sale-aholic:
1eleven:
aleshakills:
sale-aholic:
Perhaps the people that claim “immigrants are taking their jobs” should go work on those farms.
So now they can suddenly afford to pay above minimum wage
it’s almost like they were paying people less than their labor was worth :Y
Exactly
Oh wow I am so incredibly shocked. Are you telling me that our entire agricultural infrastructure was predicated on the exploitation of foreign-born workers who were forced to live in inhumane living conditions and paid next to nothing? And that now that this presidency has created an extremely hostile environment that those immigrants are going elsewhere? Causing a shortage of cheap exploitable labor? Who could have seen this coming??????
Not just “this presidency.” As someone who comes from a family with a small, family-sized orchard (9 acres), who has always paid well over the standard, I can tell you there has been a worker shortage for going on a decade, since Obama started mass deporting people.
My father, 72, with an MBA, retired from both a state job and the Army, was spending his summers working as a farmhand for an 81-year-old friend who literally could not find anyone else to help him harvest crops.
The 81-year-old has since changed what he grows to something less labor-intensive. High school kids won’t do the work. You literally can’t find anyone. All the local large-scale operations have long-term crews of Mexicans or Jamaicans that they get in on those provisional visas every year. I toured a conventional melon farm recently up by Greenwich, and the owner proudly said, “These are my Mexicans. Enrique’s been with us for 22 years.” It was a Sunday afternoon and Enrique was out there working, along with all the others. That same farm hosted a gala benefit dinner, and the tent was set up next to a field, and as the sun went down and we wined and dined, there was a crew of Mexicans two rows over, harvesting until it was too dark to see. (I watched the pickup truck headlights come on as I went up to get another drink.)
honeyandwormwood:
magnvsbvrnsides:
sale-aholic:
1eleven:
aleshakills:
sale-aholic:
Perhaps the people that claim “immigrants are taking their jobs” should go work on those farms.
So now they can suddenly afford to pay above minimum wage
it’s almost like they were paying people less than their labor was worth :Y
Exactly
Oh wow I am so incredibly shocked. Are you telling me that our entire agricultural infrastructure was predicated on the exploitation of foreign-born workers who were forced to live in inhumane living conditions and paid next to nothing? And that now that this presidency has created an extremely hostile environment that those immigrants are going elsewhere? Causing a shortage of cheap exploitable labor? Who could have seen this coming??????
Not just “this presidency.” As someone who comes from a family with a small, family-sized orchard (9 acres), who has always paid well over the standard, I can tell you there has been a worker shortage for going on a decade, since Obama started mass deporting people.
My father, 72, with an MBA, retired from both a state job and the Army, was spending his summers working as a farmhand for an 81-year-old friend who literally could not find anyone else to help him harvest crops.
The 81-year-old has since changed what he grows to something less labor-intensive. High school kids won’t do the work. You literally can’t find anyone. All the local large-scale operations have long-term crews of Mexicans or Jamaicans that they get in on those provisional visas every year. I toured a conventional melon farm recently up by Greenwich, and the owner proudly said, “These are my Mexicans. Enrique’s been with us for 22 years.” It was a Sunday afternoon and Enrique was out there working, along with all the others. That same farm hosted a gala benefit dinner, and the tent was set up next to a field, and as the sun went down and we wined and dined, there was a crew of Mexicans two rows over, harvesting until it was too dark to see. (I watched the pickup truck headlights come on as I went up to get another drink.)
Whiskey. Buddy. The yurt roof is not where the cat goes. I...
Sep. 24th, 2017 10:48 amdragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2hnzp2b:
Whiskey. Buddy. The yurt roof is not where the cat goes.
I can’t reach her to get her down, which I’m pretty sure she smugly knows.
Being awoken by an animal leaping onto your canvas roof is not, hm, conducive to heart health, let’s say.
#yurtlife
Whiskey. Buddy. The yurt roof is not where the cat goes.
I can’t reach her to get her down, which I’m pretty sure she smugly knows.
Being awoken by an animal leaping onto your canvas roof is not, hm, conducive to heart health, let’s say.
#yurtlife
Gone full circle when things went square
Sep. 23rd, 2017 08:51 pmsovayHappy autumn! Happy Bi Visibility Day! Happy centenary of the invention of Fluff, which explains why the first thing I ate today was a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff cookie: I spent the later part of my afternoon in Union Square with rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and Fox, who may or may not have liked their first taste of marshmallow but was really into a crunchy organic juice blend one of their parents was trying to drink. (Eventually they covered themselves in it. It was green. That's the first time I've seen a baby cosplay Howl's Moving Castle.) I am delighted to learn that plasmodial slime molds can share memories. I would definitely watch Dwayne Johnson as Plato. I am faceplantingly tired, but I have cats. It has not been terrible, being awake today.
rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and Fox, who may or may not have liked their first taste of marshmallow but was really into a crunchy organic juice blend one of their parents was trying to drink. (Eventually they covered themselves in it. It was green. That's the first time I've seen a baby cosplay Howl's Moving Castle.) I am delighted to learn that plasmodial slime molds can share memories. I would definitely watch Dwayne Johnson as Plato. I am faceplantingly tired, but I have cats. It has not been terrible, being awake today.