Posted in Holidays, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, Memorial Day, Tim O'Brien on May 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »
“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
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Posted in Other, Reviews, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, home, reading, right to repair isn't enough, The Goblin Emperor on May 29, 2021| 3 Comments »
The sun is out and while it’s not exactly warm, the world is bright and beautiful. I’m working on a number of project ideas and am about to help Mr Man dissect the fridge.
(brief break for said dissection)
Yep, we need a new fridge. Or rather, the fridge needs a new compressor and it doesn’t make sense to replace that one thing. I shall now spend a not-insignificant amount of time imagining a world in which incentives for engineers are structured in ways that make designing modular, easy-to-repair systems the goal.
So I’m a little sad today, because having to get rid of a mostly fine appliance is a damn shame.
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That said, I am also reading. I just finished Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. It’s a good book but not, like so many others, an easy one to ingest. I stuck with it and am glad I did. The language is challenging, any name or title under four syllables is rare, and the author does an astonishing job (I realized about 10% of the way in) of putting the reader in the place of the awkward, out-of-his-depth, confused main character. It adds an extra, internal dimension to the act of reading an external book.
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And here’s to my parents, who raised me with the belief that no day with a book is ever truly wasted.
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Posted in Likes, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, fun, quotes on May 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »
“If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.”
— Katharine Hepburn
Posted in Likes, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, ideas, inspiration, mugs on May 25, 2021| Leave a Comment »
I may have a new favorite mug.
For no reason whatsoever, I decided that I would be much more productive if I had a new mug. When one is writing or slogging through the data mines or sailing with a letter of marque on the Great Internet Seas, a mug is a friendly, forthright, supportive companion. Choose right, and it’s a burst of good cheer on a cloudy day.
Sure, it’s a weird fixation, but it’s cheaper than drugs. And it works.
I got these mugs from Roy Kirkham in Staffordshire, England. The good: the colors are rich, the designs pretty, and the china delicate. The bad? Shipping. And duties. That said, I really like these.
The one in the middle with the robin is my new favorite.
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, books, making on May 24, 2021| Leave a Comment »
It can be fun when your own life becomes something of a treasure hunt. There I was, looking for Thing A when I stumbled across Thing 2. I went through a book binding phase and one of my experiments was with leather and copper. It’s been buried in my book collection ever since.
I’d be more precise now, but I still like the little leather map on the fastener.
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Posted in Entertainment, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, movies, story structure, technology solves everything, television, writing on May 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »
When it comes to writing, I try to study the substance behind the story, the skeleton that supports the larger whole. Novels have time to throw curve balls, and short stories can just upend everything because they don’t always give you all the information up front, but television and movies? I find that they tend to be much more predictable.
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One thing I’ve noticed is that the more closely I study the structure of fiction, the easier it is to predict the course of any particular show.
This is useful because it helps me better study and understand story structure. It’s also less helpful because it leads to me muttering things like “Yep, you’re definitely going to die,” and “Oh yeah, he did it,” or “Well, if you didn’t want to die a horrible death, you shouldn’t have had that heartfelt moment with the main character. Did your mother teach you nothing?!”
This is also why I love shows like Resident Alien and Sherlock and Wynonna Earp and Killjoys. Great characters and humor, plus creative, often unpredictable storylines and dynamics. And they’re just fun.
Dear Industry of Entertainment, please do not underestimate the power of fun.
Especially after the year we’ve just had.
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This brings me to my apology: Dear Mr Man, I am sorry for the ongoing commentary (ok, heckling, let’s just call it what it is) during shows. Please understand that it is a natural extension of my ongoing writerly education.
Also, we bought that high-capacity PVR for a reason. We can always rewind:)
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Posted in Other, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, bees, plants, pollinators on May 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »
A plant is running a casino in my yard. Also, yesterday was World Bee Day, so let’s talk about the intersection of the two.
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As I’ve mentioned before, lawns are a pain. Right now our lawn is an interesting mix of grass, ground ivy, and wild strawberry, with a few dandelions thrown in for good measure. It actually looks quite pretty, with green grass and purple, white and yellow flowers.
The ground ivy, or Creeping Charlie, is particularly good at spreading.
It’s also good at bringing in the bees. Right now there are several big bumblebees happily flitting from flower to purple flower. Watching them fly, I noticed that they bounce from plant to plant before settling on a flower. Curious, I did a bit of research.
It turns out that Creeping Charlie is playing those bees like a fiddle.
“Creeping Charlie employs a unique strategy to attract some bee visitors, such as sweat bees, bumble bees, and honey bees, that is tied into how the flower produces nectar. The flowers have a unique strategy for rewarding visitor pollinators, commonly referred to as the “lucky hit” strategy. Creeping Charlie flowers produce an average of 0.3 microliters of nectar per flower, but the amount of nectar in any one flower varies greatly, ranging from 0.06 to 2.4 microliters. “
— Creeping Charlie: Management and Value to Pollinators | Turfgrass Science
Like the psychology of gambling, such random reward mechanisms keep those bees coming back for more. The good news is that on average, these flowers are worth the bees’ time and energy.
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I’m all for pollinator planting, but before you sign on to the Creeping Charlie train, let me say that it is considered invasive in many places and is most certainly difficult to remove.
“While Creeping Charlie could be a good nectar source for bees, we are not recommending that you let it take over your lawn.”
(It’s a bit late for that, but at least the bees and I can look on the bright side.)
Consider a turf alternative like this Bee blend, or plant clover instead. Bees love it, and they aren’t the only ones.
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Posted in Likes, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, life, quotes, some days are just like that on May 20, 2021| 1 Comment »
“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.”
— Albert Einstein
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Posted in Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, purpose, Tuesdays on May 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »
While Tuesdays are not highest on my list of favorite days, there is something to be said for knowing exactly what needs to happen. No waffling, weighing of options, dithering or otherwise wasting time identifying (or attempting to stray from) the prescribed path.
There is only the path.
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Posted in Holidays, Writing, tagged #365Ways, #365Ways2021, around the world, Egypt, travel on May 17, 2021| Leave a Comment »
I’m still thinking about travel, so today we have a short excerpt from my trip to Egypt (and apologies to anyone from Cairo, but that taxi ride made an impression).
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June 29
Thursday
Cairo
I’m liking Egypt. Even the boys’ open stares and the sticky heat don’t deter me, and the organized chaos seems creative rather than threatening. That’s how I know I’m infatuated, not truly in love. No clear-eyed observer looks out from the back of an Egyptian taxi and sees anything but fear and death.
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Our guide picked us up in yet another van, but this time we were the only ones aboard. It seemed that no one else was crazy enough to tour the Valley on a June afternoon. And yes, it was hot.
The guide was very well-informed, trained in the States, and proud. He took us to many burial sites, tomb after tomb baking in the hot sun. As the day went on the heat made it harder to listen and certainly to remember all the facts being thrown at us. This caused us some trouble as the guide kept giving pop quizzes. At first we thought he was joking, but it turned out he really did care if we knew exactly which Ramses we’d seen (three in total), what the symbols on either side of the tomb entrances meant, and how the tombs were built. It was a little disconcerting, but kept us on track. We spent most of the time in the Valley of the Kings, but also headed around one of the mountainous valley sides to visit the Tomb of Queen Hatshepsut, the only woman buried as a king.
When Hatshepsut’s husband the king died, she bribed his priests into declaring her a man, transformed through divine will. In that way she was able to become more than a regent for her husband’s heir and take control of the throne directly. Her tomb is backed into a towering cliff wall and covered with carvings. Wherever her name appeared, however, her bitter nephew later scratched it out, hoping to keep the gods from finding her spirit in the next life. No love lost there.
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I find it fascinating to see how much the world has changed, and how much humanity hasn’t.
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