Month: August 2017
Garden Notes
I’m getting things from the garden pretty much every other day now. (This should feature a third pictures from Friday that involved kale and tomatoes, but was just too dark to salvage.)
Two Lights State Park – Cape Elizabeth, ME
We wanted to get out of the house, so headed over to Two Lights on Wednesday for a picnic dinner. It was a lovely night. Unfortunately, it was also a perfect illustration that the light is fading earlier. Oh well. It’s the end of August. It was bound to happen.
Knitting Notes
I’ve finished the colorwork section of my Snowflower sweater. It’s been slightly slow going- it’s been hot enough on and off I haven’t been working on it every night. I’ve also been procrastinating on the next task, which is to undo the provisional cast on at the bottom, so I can continue. I need a very free evening to do that. I’ve at least gotten better at provisional cast ons that are easier to undo, but it’s still one of my least favorite knitting things to have to do. (That said, I do it because it usually results in a really nice finished product.)
Cloaked in Red – Vivian Vande Velde
I found this book while looking at what was available under Amazon Prime Reading. It would translate to a small volume in paper – not sure I would have paid for something that size.
The author starts out with all the parts of the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale that make no sense – like how Red’s mother must be a terrible parent to send her young daughter into the forest, and how Granny can’t be that smart to let a wolf into the house.
She then tells various versions of the story to correct those issues, so you end up with stories from different character viewpoints. I think my favorite was the wolf’s story, which was very much an “I was minding my own business, and these humans are crazy” tale.
Still not sure I would have paid for this, but it was an entertaining evening’s reading.
Garden Notes
I’m getting something each time I step into the garden(s) now – this was Wednesday – all the nightshades.
We finally got some rain on Friday, so the zucchini are off and running again. (This is from today – quiet a few of the cherry tomatoes has burst from all the water.)
I took some time this morning to clean up the cherry tomatoes in the side garden – they needed some staking of side branches, and since I was in there, I cleaned out some of the suckers as well. I need to make a better point of doing that next year. Maybe not as they come out, but at least a good round in July, when I can more easily see how much I want to leave in so the plants can still photosynthesize.
Elementary – ed. Mercedes Lackey
This is the second short story book where Lackey has opened up her Elemental Magic world to other authors. She’s got a story in here as well, but it’s a bit of a disappointment, because it’s clearly the short story she expanded into Blood Red, so nothing new here.
There’s an interesting mix of stories, going back to Roman times, and expanding into the American West (the only rule for timeframe is that the Edwardian time period is the latest these stories can go.) Two of my favorites were “Arms of the Sea”, where a Water Master who’s lost the use of her legs is handicapped on land, but shows herself more than capable of saving countless lives when she’s in the sea, as well as “Fly or Fall”, where a young woman has to face up to her magic in order to save a little girl from her magic.
These are serviceable stories – I liked the other edition a bit better, and I still prefer the longer forms in the books.
Garden Notes
The big tomatoes are finally starting to turn! This particular one is probably in the sunniest location in the plot, so here’s hoping the rest follow suit soon.
The above was Saturday’s haul, looking a bit like a still life.
Miles Errant – Lois McMaster Bujold
This omnibus consists of the short story “The Borders of Infinity”, and the books Brothers in Arms (which I’d previously read) and Mirror Dance. All the stories deal with Miles Vorkosigan’s alter ego Admiral Miles Naismith, commander of the Dendarii mercenaries. More importantly, the two books deal with his clone brother, Mark.
In Brothers in Arms, Miles deals with having a clone with a great deal of equanimity, welcoming him as a brother – which makes sense when you remember his mother is a Betan, and has very liberal views about such things. At the end of that book, Mark escapes, but Miles wants to find him, and convince him that he really does consider him family.
Mirror Dance is Mark’s story of how that happens, mostly because Miles is dead for most of the book. (Which makes sense with the level of technology in this universe.) Mark has a pretty complicated (one might even say horrific) journey to even accept that he might want to be Lord Mark Vorkosigan. It’s an amazing story – absolutely typical of why I love these books. Bujold really makes you think about a lot of things in the course of these stories.
The North Wind and the Sea 