I was very surprised to find Judge Dee taking justice pretty much into his own hands, once he was convinced of the guilt of a guy he would never, for political reasons, be able to get in court. Wow. Not even a shred of the Western "you have to trust the system and use it even if you know it's not going to work" kind of thing one sees in all the police dramas.

He just tricks the bad guy into a room with an angry bear and says, "It's in a higher court than mine. I'll let Heaven judge you."

This is in The Haunted Monastery, and wow... I really enjoyed it. There's something very different about the stories, and a lot of it is the whole set of assumptions, from his three wives to his constables and the whole basis and crux of his authority. It's pretty intriguing.

I also got to watch two of the three Mushi Shi disks that amberley sent, and they're utterly gorgeous, lush, intriguing, and while all the bit players look nearly identical, each of the stories, themselves, are wonderful and so different and haunting in many ways. I'm looking forward to the last one quite happily.

I've also gotten to watch a few more episodes of Bleach and now understand why they want to go to Soul Society. *grin* It's going to be interesting.

I read all of Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher last night. The library put it on hold for me, so I got it and just read it in one night. I hadn't intended to, actually.

I'd started it in the afternoon, put it down to get through dinner and knitting night at church with Jet, who brought along his stuffy knitting. He wants to make a new stuffy like Seltzer by himself out of turquoise yarn, so he brought his knitting along and has been chugging away at it happily.

Then I picked it up again while John put Jet to bed. I didn't put it down until nearly 2 am. I enjoyed the three plotlines running through it. I am rethinking a lot of what I wrote in November, now, and it's kind of hard to keep going when part of me is like, but I don't WANT to do that in first person, not really...

I'm not sure that Captain's Fury would be "that good" for someone else. But I enjoyed it immensely, especially through the progression of the other books and really watching Tavi grow up. I'll probably buy it, after the holidays just in case someone did take it off my Amazon wish list. For some reason the Fury books are ones that I want to own, but the Dresden books aren't. I'm still not quite sure why... but I suspect that it relates to how the moms are portrayed. *laughter*

I'm perculating an idea of drawing all the mothers from Fruits Basket with Honda-san's mom in the very middle being herself, and the other moms arrayed from front to back from good to clueless to completely bad and sending that in as "fan art" to Tokyo Pop for their fan art page. Someone that was 36 sent in fan art for one of the books I just read, and they said that it was the oldest person they'd gotten fan art from and she was like 36. Yeesh. I'll admit that I like thinking of gang girl making good as mom. *grin*

So the book making class was very, very cool.

They had a couple who had had kids and when they had kids, there were only the really early readers with three or four words per page, and then regular chapter books. So they decided that they, as a family, were going to fill in the gap and make their own books. So they did, and the kids wrote, drew, and then read their own books.

So they showed us how to do a single, sewn signature book with end leaves and really nicely done covers as well.

( Read more... )

I am grateful for my birthday presents and for a really cool kid.

( Read more... )

This morning, Jet asked, "Who made God?"

We said, quite honestly, that we didn't know. That there's some that believe there's always been and always will be God, but that it was a good question.

We had dinner at Country Buffet, and in the midst of our meal, the big bee mascot came to our table to sign for Jet to high-5 him. As the guy left, Jet said, thoughtfully, "I don't like it when people are stuffed."

Us either, kid.

At this particular moment, Jet is getting a demonstration of how the Sun makes for longer and shorter days as it goes around the Earth, with a flashlight as the stand-in for the Sun and his one dollar globe as the stand-in for the Earth. While we were thinking it all through, Jet said, "I bet the real earth doesn't have a big C around it."

I like having a kid that thinks.

While talking through evolution and "Who was born first?", Jet said, "Well... we evolved from animals and little plants and things, so it's hard to tell who got born first. I guess the president would know."

I wish.

( Read on about me rather than Jet... hmmm... or don't. *grin* )

But I've been avoiding The Deathly Hallows.   Mostly because of how horrible The Order of the Phoenix was and while The Half-blood Prince was better I wasn't holding out much hope.  So I read Bujold's first The Sharing Knife: Beguilement and planned on just getting the second one in hardback as I enjoyed the first book a lot.  But then John bought the copy of The Deathly Hallows from our grocery store.  AND everyone here on LJ has been saying it was actually quite good and ties things up really well.

So I guess I'm going to have to read it.  :-)

We've had a pretty peaceful morning, Jet and I.

Cinnamon rolls for breakfast. I love Rhode's cinnamon rolls, but it's getting hot enough at night that it's not quite as feasible as it used to be to just put the rolls out overnight to rise. They over-rose a bit this morning, so look kind of craggy. But still tasty. I should just make the dough and let it rise in the refrigerator overnight. Whole wheat would be good. :-) But it's a whole dozen of rolls, when we only eat half of them. Hm. I guess I could just freeze half.

( Peace from figuring out my other stuff and the library. )

I've spent the last few days immersed in Michael Pollarn's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The line for the book at the library is long, so I had a very limited time to read it.

I'd first heard about Michael on NPR, when he was interviewed about this particular book. It was a good year or two ago and I was struck by his descriptions of the corn food chain, how "organic and free range" chickens are raised (up until five weeks they're kept in a shed without "outside access" at which point a door to the outdoors is opened to them, but their living habits are so established at that point that they never venture out, which is good as without antibiotics, there's a real problem with this monoculture of chickens catching cold), and how there's this farm in Virginia that uses at least three species of animals and dozens of species of grasses and trees to create a real, sustainable, farm that raises meat from sunlight.

The book goes into deep details on all of these. The details are sometimes even more disturbing than those presented in Plenty, but, oddly enough, for me they were far more palatable, as Michael presents them as the dilemmas they are rather than given evils. He presents the data, what just is about the industries and then businesses that make it their business to feed us. And he is very good at presenting the questions of what really is the cost of our food, not just in dollars and cents, but in environmental damage, petroleum usage (which is also environmental damage in a sense), and cost to the animals and people involved in the production of what's on our tables. And then he questions everything. I was very fascinated when he questions his own "decision" to eat meat.

The book was fascinating for me as a person who prefers a sea of data to pat answers. But I'll happily warn folks that don't like that kind of things that the book was very dry at the start. I *like* to know about my food. I like to know how it's made, what goes in it, who husbanded it into being, where it came from when I can. I think the most important thing about this book is linked to that way of seeing, what he calls "transparency". I want to open my eyes and really see what's going on and some of it is very, very ugly indeed and if you can't stand looking at the kinds of death, suffering, and destruction our "conventional" food, vegetable as well as animal, now deals, don't read this book. I'll admit that I now have to close my eyes in sheer pain any time someone says, "This thing is made with corn, a *renewable* resource!"

The overall structure is very appealing, though. He goes through four meals and the start of all four of them through the chain from sunlight to table and, so far as he's able, he details exactly what happens. The four meals were a McDonald's lunch eaten in his car, a meal made from organic stuff from Whole Foods, a meal from the sustainable farm in Virginia, and a meal that he admits was a self-indulgence which he created from things he had killed, foraged, or grew with his own hand. The last turns into something far more than the premise suggests, though I recognized something like it in my own cooking style.

Each meal he represents with a way of getting food. The McDonald's lunch, of course, is the industrial. The Whole Foods meal he called the organic industrial (which was eye opening for me, I don't shop there much, but I'm now much more likely to shop at our own Vitamin Cottage than enter a WF again). The Virginia meal was "pastoral". And the last was "personal".

It made me homesick for the northwest, badly, badly homesick for the northwest.

There's a man and a woman who live together in Vancouver BC and they decide to eat only food that was grown or made within 100 miles of their home. It gets very interesting, and they learn far more about preserving their own food than I think most people know. I know *I* wouldn't want to can tomatoes or freeze corn the way they did. And no *bread* for nearly six months of their "diet". Plus, I'm now a lot more aware of the miles that my non-local foods travels, though some of the 'warnings' in the book felt more... overblown... than I liked. That part I didn't like about the book at all.

I got a lot more conscious of what I'm eating, though, and, amusingly enough, have been cooking more and been quite happy to buy and eat more local things. But then I have tried to do more of that anyway.

There's a lady near the corner of state highways 287 and 52 that sells eggs from chickens that she has running around her vegetable garden and fields. Every spring she has a real excess and we bought two dozen of them and the yolks are so orange that they turn pancakes golden, and they taste so astonishing just baked or scrambled or put into omelets that it amazes me over and over again.

My garden's spinach has gotten huge, to the point where for the last month we've been picking and eating just a single row. The plants are now big enough that a single plant feeds both John and I for salad. I used just four plants last night for a bowl of spinach salad that filled our half gallon mixing bowl. It was great and I had three people ask for the recipe and one carefully noted "garden grown spinach". *laughter* I loved that.

It's a fun book. John's devouring it now. I don't think we'll do exactly that. I'd be too homesick for wild caught salmon to be able to. But we did find and list everything in all our freezers, got a better handle on exactly what's in our fridge, and we're starting to ask which stores here carry things that are really local to our area. Plus I'm sure I'm now going to be doing even more shopping at our local farmer's market. That is all to the good, I think, for us and our world.

It is good to have a husband that says, "Stay home. Don't go to the party just because you said you would. You're going to be way overwhelmed if you do."

And he's right.

Every since the OUR Center garden turned more into a managerial/direction type of thing where I have someone talking to me the whole time I'm working there, it's been a lot harder on me. I'm still not recovered from the overwhelming "having people talk to me about a lot of things" from the projects I was doing at work. All I want to do is hide in the basement and play video games with Jet, which isn't really healthy for either of us.

( So we haven't *just* done that... )

We had a good day, today, though.

It was 70! Hot, sunny, and my onion starts are all grumpy about getting a little dried out. Sigh.

It started with Jet waking ME up this morning instead of Dad, as he wanted to paint some bamboo and write his name in Chinese this morning. 

( Read more... )

At the moment it's 1.2° F (-17° C). The highs around here have been in the teens and lows have been a bit below zero without wind chill, with wind chill it's down around -16° F (-27° C).

It's not Minnesota or the East Coast. They're actually having warmer weather there than we are. Hmph. We usually have warmer weather than they do and it's just a bit weird to have snow so fine and dry that the only way to get it off the sidewalks is to use either a squeegie or a push broom. It's powder fine and even after a few days on the ground it still crunches under the feet.

It definitely is cold enough that my body *knows* it'll die if I stay out there much. But Jet seems to ignore it cheerfully in order to kick and push every single bit of snow he can find. Boys. *laughter*

It's been about this cold since Thursday afternoon, on Thursday you could watch the thermometer just start to drop down and down and down. Wednesday was in the 50's and we were thawed enough we could actually see a bit of ground between the white and a bit of black top right in front of the house. But about an inch or so fell on Friday, half an inch the night before Saturday, and then another two or three inches today. Powdery fine stuff. Excellent if we were a ski resort, but we're not!! Hmph.

It is beautiful, though.

( And for something completely different... )

Fragile Things by Gaiman has more of the spookiness and edge that I remembered, plus a whole lot of unresolved endings. Some of them were good that way, some just felt... left, I guess. Nothing more to say.

But the short form is very, very much a stronger point for him than the novel forms, from my point of view. I enjoy the novels, but they don't unsettle, rethink the way his short works do.

I also managed to get a copy of the Mirrormask book from the library and it's nice. *grin* I like the real cut in the one phrase at the beginning, and the resolution was very solid and good and settling. An Spider story with some of the same laughter and terror but not the "wrong" ending, not a Tiger story. I liked it. Hensonesque, perhaps, lost its edge perhaps, but I enjoyed it. :-) I'll likely enjoy the movie as much, and now feel like Jet could see it and not worry.

We saw Jet off to the bus this morning with his Pumpkin Head on, and he was happy enough with it. The other kids thought it was cool. For all that "pumpkin head!" is a mild put down by some, I don't think Jet has that in mind at all, and is enjoying the fact that most people think it's really cool and a little funny. :-) I like his world a lot.

Jet and I were making a chocolate cake from a boxed mix. I had him do as much as was possible, I did the fine measuring and opening of the tough plastic bag inside. He dragged his ladder over and pre-heated the oven, greased the pan, washed his hands thoroughly, opened the box, dumped all the mix into the bowl, and dumped everything into the bowl as soon as I measured it. We did the water, flour (necessary at altitude), and oil. Then we came to the eggs.

I automatically broke the first one in. Jet said, "I can do that!"

And I reacted, "No you can't. It'll be too messy!"

Jet just looked at me.

He waited.

I blinked.

( Hmmm... )

amberley pointed me at a review of a book called "Why?" by Charles Tilley, and it really highlights something I'd never known before about how explanations can show where a relationship is.

It really brought home to me why I'm comfortable working with Jet on listening to his stories and listening to his explanations and trying to do story for reasons rather than just "laying down the law". Sometimes straight boundaries and conventions are necessary; but how a story feeds a relationship now seems much clearer to me.

The Longmont Library is getting a copy of "Why?" and I'm now first in line. :-)

It still amazes me that I can go to the library and just pick up any book and read it and get all those ideas, thoughts, and concepts for relatively free.  I know, I know, I pay taxes to enable libraries, but STILL...

I went, last night, at the last hour, to get Jet his Farkleberry Farm video, and he tagged along, and was great when I asked him to hurry and we went upstairs to the adult section, and I peered at the new non-fiction books, in case there were any knitting books.  There was just one book called "Knittisicms:  Purls of Wisdom" which I had to get, but right next to it was a book titled Sandcastles Made Simple.  Wow.  I borrowed that and devoured it in a night and now I want to get back to a beach.  Soon.

But it amazes me that I can pick up the experience and practical knowledge that some professional sand sculptor got from years of experience and collaboration with her cohorts and now do something I never thought I could, before.  Now *that* is magic.

I bought the workbook How to Feel as Confident and Capable as Everyone Seems to Think You Are at the end of last week, it's the one that was linked to the website about Impostor Syndrome. I hated the workbook, especially the first half. There are a few nuggets in there that are useful, but most of it feels like male bashing and some really, really terrible gender definitions that are so stereotypical I gagged. To be really harsh, it takes a lot of things people "know" about how all-else-serving women "are" and how self-serving men "are" and goes from there.

*bleh*


I think, to be fair, by reading it I did figure out that I am doing the right things in trying to work on the next steps of filing off the edges of my perfectionism, that I *do* understand that I have strengths and capabilities, and that I don't have to be a jerk to 'prove' I'm capable. I can wing things. I can figure things out and start a new job with very little knowledge and not feel like I have to know everything simple to proceed. I'm getting better at that, and getting mildly better at making decisions where I don't know everything, yet. I do understand that her perceptions of women and men are the ones that I've been trying to get away from all my life, and this just makes my struggle that much more defined. Still, the whole

As a balance to the complete imbalance of that, I finally picked up Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is all based on finding my moral principles, and gives specific steps on how to be get to embody those principles and carry them out. No gender issues here, at all. And I think it's all about the positive things that can be done to make every aspect of my life more what I want it to be. That's important to me.

What was really funny was then going on to read Pratchett's Thud!, and seeing Vimes pretty much DO all of Covey's steps in spades.

Okay, it was even funnier after I read Where is My Cow?. Kathy had given Jet this one while giving John Thud!, and the combination floors me every time. What's even funnier is that JUST like Young Sam, Jet is running around now going "Ptui! Buglit! But 'buglit' is my favorite! Buglit! Buglit! Buglit!" The book has me rolling with laughter every time Jet and I read it. And Jet's old enough now that he anticipates all the "original book" bits very handily and they make him giggle themselves.

Jet's really into trying to read, now. He's "making books" for me and for himself, and he's happily copying any book he can get his hands on into his books. He can't read them, yet, but, like me, is writing them, first, and then figuring out from the writing what makes words and sentences and such. It's funny, because with Chinese, I'm having fun just writing, doing the brush writing as beautifully as I can and not understanding much of it, but enjoying the forming of the words and using that to become more literate. He's doing the same with English.

In just the last two weeks Jet's undergone some kind of transformation. He's sleeping all night, most nights. He's being tremendously polite, saying the "Please" and "Thank You" and even "You're welcome" like he did much more of when he was two. He's starting, again, to experiment a little with what foods he's eating, taking to canned peaches and trying half a dozen things that he hasn't liked, but I'm just amazed and happy that he TRIES them.

I'm amazed. We talk about things, now, and he tells jokes and we have a lot more fun on our days "off" together than before.

( More about the weekend. )

I love the rain.

I've gotten to walk between the campuses here while it thundered, rumbled, and rained. It's wonderful. I love the scent of the wet pavement.

I'm going to get to go to ramen with umetaro and I'm looking forward to it.

Work is tumbling through me like a well-channeled avalanche of interactions. All to the good it seems as I've even been invited out to lunch by my boss as a result of the big presentation on Monday. A good thing. Five other, different projects have each spun through my attention like facets to a gem, and I keep it all spinning with a word here, a definition there, a document to underly it all...

But I want to go back to my room and watch Sky High. No, now the teen supers movie, it's an astonishingly grisly and grabbing movie about a woman murdered and faced with the very Japanese choice of acceptance and Heaven; denial and being a ghost haunting the Earth; or cursing a single living person to death and going to Hell. There's some extremely well-staged cinematography in this one. I love the Gates of Rage.

I've also been hooked on Midnighters and gazing longingly at the last Bujold book. I may just have to buy that. Hmph.

There's TOO MANY THINGS I want to do while I have the time to just do them instead of taking care of my family, but I miss my family something fierce, too. Bah... It's a good thing that the lender of the books has said that I may take them home and ship them back when I'm done. Whew.

I am tired. The hotel bed is not my home bed and the pillows don't rustle when I shape them as my buckwheat hulls do at home. Sniff.

It's rare when I read a book that I've wanted to throw across the room into a wall half a dozen times.

( Read more... )