Dichroic Reflections

I’m going to WorldCon … wait, not I’m not. But I bought a Supporting Membership, which means I get to pretend I’m there. I get to vote on this year’s Hugo and Campbell awards and, if this year follows the pattern of the last few, I get digital versions of the works that are up for awards. I do hope that part pans out; I hear that it makes a Supporting membership a bargain.

Meanwhile, reading-wise, I’m in the middle of Ysabeau Wilce’s Flora’s Fury, having won an ARC in an auction. You know how sometimes adolescents go overnight from soft and pudgy to whip-lean and carved after a growth spurt? I think that’s what’s happened to Flora after the second book. It may have happened physically (she makes references to going through the equivalent of Basic Training) but it’s a pretty good analogy for what’s happened to her character. A lot less childhood softness this time. I’d reference Harry Potter Book 5, but there’s a lot less ALL-CAPS YELLING and Flora is a lot less annoying than Harry at that stage. Like him, though, she’s justifiably pissed-off.

…and now that I have covered books, let’s take a run through the other usual topics.

Knitting: Sweater done, two baby hats done, so now I’m back to the socks I started to have an alternate project on the Spain trip. I’m using a new kind of heel Cat Bordhi’s Sweet Tomato;I like it because it’s simple, logical, and unlike most other sock heels, easy enough to remember that I don’t need a pattern. We’ll see how wel it actually fits. The yarn is Juno Buffy Sock Yarn, which I’m not completely thriled with; it’s so thin that I should probably have used a size 0 instead of 1 needle, and for that reason it’s going a bit slowly. It also tends to split a bit with these needles. I think it will make for nice looking and durable socks, though.

Rowing: Last April we went to Oregon and I hurt my back a bit gardening (digging holes). I quit weightlifting then, and then got into doing more distance and never picked it back up. In December was the Holiday Challenge, so that helped build an aerobic base. Just after New Year’s I started lifting again. Right now I’m in a weird but gratifying stage; I add more weights every workout (well, I did start pretty light, since it had been a while) and all of a sudden I’m rowing faster. I can pull in the 2:40s for the same effort the 2:50s were taking a month ago. (Non-rowers: those are still fairly slow times; those are “splits”, or the length of time it would take to row 500 meters at the current pace). The plans are to visit our house in Oregon in April, in time to race in the Covered Bridge Regatta. If all goes well, we’ll have a couple of rowing friends visiting too, so I need to be in training to race by then.

Travel: I’m heading to Japan on Sunday for a week. This is getting silly again; Ted and I will meet for dinner in Schiphol Airport, because he’s leaving for Taiwan just as I get back from Japan. At least they’re both one-week trips. Starting from late March, there’s a possibility I will go to Japan for a week and a half, return for 2-3 days, head to the US East Coast (CT) for a week for a department meeting, then go straight to Oregon for our two weeks there. It could all change though, so who knows. I do hope I get enough travek this year to be at least Gold in frequent flyer status next year – then again, it’s also possible that I won’t fly at all next year, once we return to the US. Other trips planned for this year involve a Baltic cruise in July and a trip back to OR in September, when we get everything arranged (the RV bought) for our move back to the US. There’s also a family reunon planned in June, and though I don’t actually know most of those people I’m considering it, mostly to see my immediate family (Dad’s been having health issues, and now with the nephew, if I don’t see him at least yearly he’s going to grow into a completely new person each time).

Way back in the first half of the 1990s, my husband worked for a small NASA contractor on a project that had the worst acronym ever: the TOCWQM, or total organic carbon water quality monitor. It checks for the presence of carbon in parts per billion, needed for some of the Space Station’s ultrapure water systems. That company had a colorful cast of characters of varying degrees of sanity, from his (excellent) team lead who was a dead (sorry) ringer for Sam Kinnison, to the manager who once put a pencil through his own hand in a fit of rage. One of his most interesting (and sane) coworkers there was a guy named Donald Saxman, who was an expert on many things and spent his spare time writing highly technical books on things like the outlook of the batteries needed to electrical or hybrid cars. (I guess the outlook was good.)

It turns out that Donald Saxman was many other things as well, including an early fan of roleplaying games. One of those early ones was Strange World, invented by Don and friends including his college buddy John M. Ford, and later played on some of the first online systems back when the way to cmmunicate was by uploading files because not all systems had email*.

Don has now become one more thing: a fiction author. His book Strange World and its four (so far) sequelae based on that game are now available at Amazon (Kindle only). I’ve just finished the first book of the series, which as you might expect is titled Strange World. It’s not exactly about a world, though, strange or not; it’s about the tunnels that connect worlds, and what happens when a group of teenagers from multiple worlds is selected to travel in the tunnels and work together as part of the Zone Pioneers. (It’s not entirely clear yet what the ZPs actually do.)

The best thing here is the world itself, which is as inventive and detailed as you’d expect given that the author has been working on it since the 1970s (the book is based on an early RPG). Worldbuilding is handled via the characters themselves learning about the tunnels and the Zone Pioneers (some already knew all about them, some knew nothing) and via infodumps in the form of selections from various “records” of the tunnels and the ZPs. This book is a bit short on plot; it mostly serves to present the characters, bring them together and get them to begin working together – it’s very clearly the start of a series, not a standalone book. The characters don’t feel fully developed yet, but you can tell each voice apart and and they are fully characterized enough to make me curious to see how they grow in future adventures.

Strange World doesn’t really feel like a thing in itself; it feels like the start of a thing, and it has enough promise to get me to come back and see if it grows into a good thing. I have the second book, and I’m curious to see where it goes.

*I know all that about the history of the Strange World game and the early days of online RPGs because it’s told in a rather faascinating afterword.

Ted had committed to go rowing in a double with his partner today; it was warmish (mid-40s) but wet, misty to drizzly, and with very high winds. I was looking for excuses not to go, until I realized that I’d made a mistake and signed up to take out my own boat (a Wintech Explorer 21) instead of the club racing shell I usually row. Honestly, since it lives at the boathouse, I tend to forget I have it. It does get a lot of use from classes and inexperienced rowers – that’s the deal for keeping it stored there. That actually changed my opinion about rowing. It’s made to handle open water; unlike a racing single, it’s wide and stable, with a self baler built in, and it’s actually kind of fun to take out in wind and waves.

And it was fun, despite the drizzle that hit in a couple spots and the wind gusts. The wind was coming from the direction we normally row (the canal ends quickly in the other direction). I had planned to row up the canal to the Sea Scouts base, nearly 3km, back to the boathouse, then take it up to the other club’s boathouse and back for a total row of about 9km. After that first outing, though, I took it in. The wind had gotten stronger; the boat can handle wind and waves, but this was just getting silly, and it is winter after all. I was humming sean shanties to myself the whole way back, which makes rough water much more fun.

To eke out the distance and use up time until Ted and his partner came back in, I did another 2km on one of the boathouse ergs. There were two newbies on them with their coach, which was good for me; they had such awful form that I had to keep my erg splits below theirs, but of course they were much bigger than I am so even with them rowing lightly and badly I had to pull hard to do it. Maybe I should erg at the boathouse more often, for motivation. It looks like I’ll be racing in Oregon in April – racing from our own dock!!! – so I do need to get more serious about training.

… well, I would, if I weren’t me. Because I have just received an ARC of Flora’s Fury, sequel to Ysabeau Wilce’s Flora Segunda and Flora’s Dare. Also, tasty-looking exotic chocolates and a poster for the book (it was all part of the Magick 4 Terri auction). I haven’t read it yet, having opened the box only about ten minutes ago but after a quick skim – I confess, I peek at endings – I can tell you two things: Flora’s definitely grown up a bit, which isn’t surprising as she did noticeably in the last one too, and this series isn’t a trilogy after all. This book is clearly not the end.

I finished my sweater yesterday! It’s blocking now, and should be dry in time to wear to my local knitting group night on Wednesday.

Possibly I should have done some waist shaping so it wouldn’t be quite so rectangular. It does fit well, though.

Once again, I seem to have my knitting planned a ridiculous while ahead; I’m halfway through the first of two hats for coworkers’ new babies, after which I’ll go back to the socks which were my hotel-room knitting project on the Spain trip. (I’m nearly to the heel on the first sock.) I’m looking forwardf to that, because I’ll be trying Cat Bordhi’s new Sweet Tomato heel.

Next up is a lap blanket for my dad, for which I still need to get the yarn, and maybe one for my mom too. Also, while we were in Amsterdam on Friday, we stopped y Penelope Craft, where I got not only the yarn for the aforementioned baby hats but also enough Cascade 220 for sweaters for both Ted (in brown) and me (in gray, because it’s not like I have enough gray sweaters (that is sarcasm – I have at least 6, though one gets so many fluffballs that it’s not wearable anytime I care how I look. I like gray sweaters). No idea when I’ll work on those, though; I’ve warned Ted not to expect his sweater thiws year. I’ve also got a couple of lightweight things for me – a wispy cowl and a cardi – that are lurking in hiding until it’s too warm to work on anything heavier.

I wrote a few days ago about how some books have a permanent address in my head. I meant that fairly literally, in the sense of a computer memory address, andd thought I’d provide a fwe short examples here. I will spare you all and not do a complete brain dump.

from Little Women:

A woman in a lonely home,
Hearing, like a sad refrain,
Be worthy love, and love will come
In the falling summer rain.

and of course

On the breast where she had drawn she first breath, she quietly drew her last, with no farewell but one loving look, one little sigh.

Yup, it still makes me cry.

From the Menolly books (I could go on for quite a while with these:

Honor those the dragons heed
In thgought and favor, word and deed.
Worlds are lost of worlsx are saved
From those dangers dragon-braved.

and

The fickle wind’s my foe
With tide his keen ally;
They’re jealous of my sea’s love
And rouse her with their lie.

Oh, wide sea, oh, dear sea
Heed not their story wile,
But bear we safely to my home
And from their watery guile.

From A Wrinkle in Time:

Das Werk lobt den Meister

and

Un asno viejo sabe mas que un potro

and from A Swiftly Tilting Planet:

At Tara in this fateful hour,
I call on all Heaven with its power,
And the Sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
adnt he Earth with its steepness,
And the rocks with their starkness.
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness!

From The Dark is Rising,

When the Dark comes rising
Six shall turn it back;
Three from the circle, three from the track.
Wood, bronze, iron, water, fire, stone,
Five shall return and one go alone.

I solemnly swear I typed all of those from memory. They are really only samples; I think I can probably still quote all or most of the Menolly poems and all the verses from the Dark is Rising series. (Can’t do the whole poem from Little Women about the four chests in the attic, though, probably because when I replaced the falling-apart copy I inherited from my grandmother, the Scholastic paperback I bought turned out to be *spit* abridged.)

I have lots more poetry memorized, but the ones that are not from a book, I remember for their own sakes and for what they actually say. What words have permanent addresses in your brain, just because of their associations? They don’t have to be poems.

A few people have mentioned getting ideas for their reading my list of minireviews yesterday, and I realize that I may not have been sufficiently clear about what those books were – genre, subgenre, age, etc. I did try to go back and mention which ones were kids’ or teen books, because my brain doesn’t subdivide them that way, but I realize that not everyone switches uncritically between MG, YA and adult books the way I do. I’m also not sure I made it clear which books were new and which older, and what form they’re available in. I’d assume that anything here that’s available for Kindle is available in other ebook formats, but Kindle is what I use so I don’t know about others. I recommend Alibris as a way to find older out-of-print books if you prefer paper to electrons.

So here are some details: Continue Reading »

I wrote this in response to a conversation elsewhere, but wanted to save and expand on it here.

Because I read constantly, I will reread almost anything, even books I was fairly ‘meh’ about the first time through. I reread for comfort, but also for entertainment – I don’t mind spoilers, and often I find new things on further rereads. (I don’t know how many times I’ve read, Pride and Prejudice, but it is still bringing me new gifts each time – and Darcy falls for Elizabeth a little earlier on each reading.) There are very few books I don’t reread, and they fall into three categories, two related and one opposing. One group, of course, is the books I hated so much that I will not go back there. Those are the ones that feel sordid or so badly written that I can’t sink into the story, or where every character is unpleasant, or nonfiction that I find stupid and illogical. The second is books that I’m not set against rereading, but always seem to find something more appealing when I look at my shelves (this is the biggest of the three categories; Byatt’s Possession falls here for me, as do many of the things I read because I was made to or thought I should rather than because I wanted to).

And then there’s the third group, that only includes about four books. Those are the ones that made me, the ones I reread so often as a kid that I simply don’t need to read them now, because they have their own permanent address in my brain. A Wrinkle in Time is one of those. The others are Little Women, and to a lesser degree the two Menolly books, Dragonsong and Dragonsinger.

Not bad; out of three new recipes this week, one was just OK and two were successes that I’ll make again.

On Saturday, I made what purported to be a Dutch hutspot recipe. It wasn’t really, just a beef stew – the potatoes were in chunks instead of mashed as in traditional hutspot. I think I’m going to give up on beef stew at least until we return to the US, because I don’t get very good results with the beef here. I’ll stick to making goulash – in that, the beef cooks entirely in liquid so it tenderizes better. Also, there are a lot of tomatoes and some tomato paste, and I think their acid helps. The vegetables were good in this, though – the main thing I learned is that I do like parsnips. (I don’t think the Brussels sprouts added much, though.)

Red beans and rice were more or less from this recipe. I used brown beans instead of red because that’s what the supermarket had, and a mix of Dutch rookworst and Spanish cervelaat for similar reasons, and those worked well. The one change I’d make is to use less water next time.

Today I unvented Workout Onion Soup. The perfect time to make this is on a winter Monday or Tuesday, when you made a big meal over the weekend, and you’re not sure if the leftovers are enough for another meal. (Actually, I knew mine were enough; I just felt like making onion soup.) Also. you still have some of the French bread left that you bought to have with the weekend meal and it’s getting stale. In other words, today.

Recipe (about two hefty portions or 3-4 smaller ones):
Heat up about a liter of beef broth (I used bouillon cubes; if you are the sort of cook who always has homemade broth on hand, or if you live in a country where you can buy boxes of organic broth that taste better and have lower salt, of course you should use those. Chop up and add a medium onion and whatever else you want – I added two chopped shallots and some parsley. Season; I used salt, pepper, basil, thyme and some Hungarian spicy paprika. A dollop of wine might have been a good idea, but I didn’t have any open.

Go work out – at a minimum, a half-hour workout plus a shower. This is how you time the recipe. (I just erged 5 km.)

Come back to the kitchen, cut up slices of that French bread, and toast them. Slice or grate a hell of a lot of cheese – I used a cheese slicer to get thin but larger slivers, instead of a grater. (I used a mixture of Dutch belegen kaas (medium-young) and some sharper cheese we got in Spain, as usual because that’s what I had. They weren’t quite the right thing, but they weren’t bad, and the Dutch stuff is what we usually have on hand. Put the bread into oven-safe soup bowls. Ladle in the soup, including plenty of onion bits. Add the cheese, letting it sit on top of the bread, and put the bowls of soup under the broiler for just a minute or two to melt the cheese.

I’ve never made onion soup before, and I was working without a recipe. Fancier recipes insist on Gruyere and on caramelizing the onions. Some mozzarella might mix well with it too, though I think all mozzarella would be too greasy. Still, the cheese wasn’t too bad, and the onions tasted fine despite just being tossed in raw. This is very definitely weekday use-what-you-got cooking, and it’s filling, comforting and tasty. I will definitely make it on hand – though if I know in advance I’ll be making it I might explore my local cheese options. (Which are excellent, this being the Land of Many Cheeses.)

I’ve seen a few people posting a “Where I Slept in 2011″ meme, and of course I couldn’t resist that one. So:

Eindhoven and Amsterdam, Netherlands
Venice, Italy
Eugene area, Grants Pass, and a few assorted points along the coast, Oregon
Budapest, Hungary
Yokkaichi and Hiroshima, Japan
New York, NY
Allentown and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Bayeux, Mont-St-Michel, Margaux (near Bordeaux), Brive-la-Gaillard, and Chartres, France
Bilbao, Madrid, Seville, Almuñécar, Mar Menor (near Cartagena), Valencia, and Barcelona, Spain
Gibraltar, UK (though my GPS seems to think it’s an independent country)

Kate Elliott Talks about the importance of talking about books, and as it happens I read a whole bunch of good ones in 2011. I’m not going to remember them all, but here are some (if I don’t mention one you think I should have, it doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t like it – it may just mean I forgot it yet or that I haven’t read it yet. There are at least two or three by authors on my flist that I just haven’t gotten to yet, so I wanted to make that clear.) Some are new, some very old.

This gets long, so have a cut: Continue Reading »