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thanateThis week's goal is to make the house semi-presentable again, to the point where it might even be acceptable to start inviting people over or the like. Progress, as with all things, is slow, but I've finally bagged up most of the clothes I no longer need/want/fit, and two trash bags of them are downstairs, and one is in the car already... Of course, the really fun things are still awaiting being sent off to people who might appreciate them, but I'm working on it. Oddly enough, several of the skirts I depended upon as staples of my work wardrobe when I did business casual (poorly; "corporate me" was always a disguise) had two to three inch tucks safety pinned into the backs, and with those taken out they fit me loosely again. Sad.
At any rate, slow progress is being made. Some creature rudely came in and ate the bottom off my rosemary plant-- it's still got its stem, and a handful of leaves a few inches off the ground, but the bottom 3" or so have been nibbled bare. This is typical; the last two or three rosemary plants I tried to grow came to unfortunate ends of one sort or another as well. Other than that, the plants continue to thrive; we have daylilies blooming now as well as roses and sundrops. I am cursing the profusion of rose of sharon (or as "rosasharn" as I keep accidentally calling it-- clearly The Grapes of Wrath has warped my brain) seedlings coming up, and crawling under the hawthorne to break off the stupid japanese knotweed, but aside from that things seem to be going all right out of doors. (Well, we won't mention the street, which was supposed to be done by May 30...)
Last weekend there was eventness and a doll meet at which I completely failed to take pictures, and I was reminded that people actually exist and are worthy, and that pukis are adorable in person, if a bit silly when photographed. Today we'll be hitting fight practice, and tentatively climbing on Friday. Things! Jury is still out on Pennsic, but last seen we were veering towards a 4-day stay, and giving Readercon a miss this year. I sincerely trust that it won't go the way of Saloncon and the doll retreat that both folded the year I was finally determined to get to them.
I finally finished reading Moonwise and was fascinated; I really wonder what I would have thought of the book had I read it in high school or college. It's one of those things where you could sum up the plot in a paragraph if you wanted, but the point of the book is more in the subtleties of language and things. There's a lot of odd food, incidentally mentioned, a lot of patchwork and fantastic baubles, a lot of miscellaneous references (about half of which I estimate that I got, but they're to ballads, and Beatrice Potter, and Tolkien, and George MacDonald's Princesses Irene, and other little bits of my childhood and things I've half studied) and then she's got a deck of world-building tarot-esque cards that are also constellations and half of them overlap with the miscellaneous additions and substitutions I made when I was planning out my own personal tarot deck; things like the harp of bone that I couldn't actually say just where I got it from, or why my wording is the same as hers. And meanwhile, her writing is all wrapped up in complex dialect with the voices of a pair of dreaming twenty-something girls tossed in and tangled up in it. I'm quite sure![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heuchera should read it; I'm not sure who else would have the context to appreciate it. Or how much context it needs. It is a slow read, although it speeds up some as you get in, but bits of it reminded me of reading middle english from the antiquity of the wording.
Also, one particularly forastormorray, although I think a lot of people would enjoy it: Bones of Faerie by Janni Lee Simner; it's another post-apocalyptic children's book, only the apocalypse was Faerie. And the first chapter is beautiful. I could talk about it lots, but I think it works better unexplained. I will add, however, that the reason I remembered the midnight mockingbird at all was that there's an incidental mockingbird singing car alarm songs a good fifteen or twenty years after there are no more cars that work in the world.
And last but not least, this is the book reject pile; let me know if you want any of these before I take them away to more anonymous venues:
Up for grabs, with the possible exception of a pair of the Gaiman books which I'm contemplating giving my father for fathers' day, but far and distant people might get asked for shipping money if you want lots of them.
And that, I think, is enough of that.
At any rate, slow progress is being made. Some creature rudely came in and ate the bottom off my rosemary plant-- it's still got its stem, and a handful of leaves a few inches off the ground, but the bottom 3" or so have been nibbled bare. This is typical; the last two or three rosemary plants I tried to grow came to unfortunate ends of one sort or another as well. Other than that, the plants continue to thrive; we have daylilies blooming now as well as roses and sundrops. I am cursing the profusion of rose of sharon (or as "rosasharn" as I keep accidentally calling it-- clearly The Grapes of Wrath has warped my brain) seedlings coming up, and crawling under the hawthorne to break off the stupid japanese knotweed, but aside from that things seem to be going all right out of doors. (Well, we won't mention the street, which was supposed to be done by May 30...)
Last weekend there was eventness and a doll meet at which I completely failed to take pictures, and I was reminded that people actually exist and are worthy, and that pukis are adorable in person, if a bit silly when photographed. Today we'll be hitting fight practice, and tentatively climbing on Friday. Things! Jury is still out on Pennsic, but last seen we were veering towards a 4-day stay, and giving Readercon a miss this year. I sincerely trust that it won't go the way of Saloncon and the doll retreat that both folded the year I was finally determined to get to them.
I finally finished reading Moonwise and was fascinated; I really wonder what I would have thought of the book had I read it in high school or college. It's one of those things where you could sum up the plot in a paragraph if you wanted, but the point of the book is more in the subtleties of language and things. There's a lot of odd food, incidentally mentioned, a lot of patchwork and fantastic baubles, a lot of miscellaneous references (about half of which I estimate that I got, but they're to ballads, and Beatrice Potter, and Tolkien, and George MacDonald's Princesses Irene, and other little bits of my childhood and things I've half studied) and then she's got a deck of world-building tarot-esque cards that are also constellations and half of them overlap with the miscellaneous additions and substitutions I made when I was planning out my own personal tarot deck; things like the harp of bone that I couldn't actually say just where I got it from, or why my wording is the same as hers. And meanwhile, her writing is all wrapped up in complex dialect with the voices of a pair of dreaming twenty-something girls tossed in and tangled up in it. I'm quite sure
heuchera should read it; I'm not sure who else would have the context to appreciate it. Or how much context it needs. It is a slow read, although it speeds up some as you get in, but bits of it reminded me of reading middle english from the antiquity of the wording. Also, one particularly for
astormorray, although I think a lot of people would enjoy it: Bones of Faerie by Janni Lee Simner; it's another post-apocalyptic children's book, only the apocalypse was Faerie. And the first chapter is beautiful. I could talk about it lots, but I think it works better unexplained. I will add, however, that the reason I remembered the midnight mockingbird at all was that there's an incidental mockingbird singing car alarm songs a good fifteen or twenty years after there are no more cars that work in the world. And last but not least, this is the book reject pile; let me know if you want any of these before I take them away to more anonymous venues:
Up for grabs, with the possible exception of a pair of the Gaiman books which I'm contemplating giving my father for fathers' day, but far and distant people might get asked for shipping money if you want lots of them.
And that, I think, is enough of that.
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Date: 2009-06-09 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-09 06:35 pm (UTC)Moonwise is definitely a lit major's sort of book-- if the other people who talk about it hadn't gone on so much about the ballad tie-ins, I probably would have thought of recommending it to you as well. (There's also a newly released sequel, Cloud & Ashes, which is why I've heard of it.)
Also, have you encountered Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees? It seems to be another one in the category of half my favorite authors seem to consider it required early fantasy reading. I feel so young...