I've never done this before and I'm kind of terrified, especially since I haven't written anything since approximately 1915, but I signed up for cliche_bingo and you should too!

( See my bingo card under here )

This year, for the first time, I've got a CSA subscription. Once a week I get a box from a farm out in the county somewhere, full of whatever's growing. Which, this early in a very rainy summer, isn't much, but it's still kind of a thrill.

Today's box contained:

1. mixed salad greens
   
2. red and green lettuce
   
3. a little bundle of parsley
   
4. garlic scapes (yeah, your guess is as good as mine -- I'm going to put them in a stir-fry tomorrow)
   
5. sugar-snap peas (likewise destined for a stir-fry)
   
6. more radishes (I am not a radish convert yet -- I think they taste like mustard and dirt -- but if you slice them thin enough, they don't taste too offensive, and I have to admit they look very pretty in a salad)
   
7. small turnips with greens (not sure what I'm going to do with the turnips, but I'm going to eat all the greens myself and I'm not even apologizing for it)

Tonight we had a salad with the greens, the radishes, some really good cheese, some ham, some chives from the farmer's market, and some out-of-season cucumbers from the grocery store. I felt a warm glow of virtue, which I'm now going to destroy by finishing my day with Oreos.

We get eggs every other week, and starting next week, we'll also have meat. We'll have too much meat; we eat meat in pretty small quantities when we eat it at all, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a box of what the Table Talk people used to call Montessori-raised livestock, but for years I've been saying I'd pay more for someone to raise my food in a way that didn't resemble the assembly line at an auto plant, so now I have the chance to put my money where my mouth is.

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Actually in my car I'm goin' to Carolina. See y'all on the fifteenth.

This entry was originally posted at http://resonant.dreamwidth.org/189453.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Mostly just because I'm lonesome and want some company.

The White Sheep: She totally brought me into her voodoo crazy-lady world!

The White Sheep: This place is like a soap opera. The Old and the Senseless.

Me: It's a cruel world.
Kidlet: Which one?


Things you never expect to hear come out of your mouth: "Of course not. No one means for Harry Potter to wind up in the toilet."

( Read more... )

Hello, world! Sorry to be so absent. My right shoulder now has tendinitis in two places, which is just insult to injury, say I. Chiefly because it hurts to type, which is really cutting into my social life.

Very odd, to live in a world where that last sentence makes sense.

Anyway, I have nothing to offer but a cautious, elbow-close-to-the-body wave, and yet I make requests: Would anyone happen to have an mp3 of Aztec Camera's "Jump" that they'd be willing to share? I'd be ever so grateful. theamusedone came through, as usual!

Thanks to tofty, I'm resonant over at Dreamwidth. The unwanted 8 is still on my e-mail address, but finally I get to shake it off my journal name and get the name I wanted in the first place.

I haven't posted anything over there; I'm still getting my bearings. For the moment I'll be cross-posting, assuming (1) I can figure out how, and (2) I have anything to post.

I was over there on OpenID for a while, so I've found some of you, but leave me a comment and tell me who you are!

Renfield Turbull/Luna Lovegood.

... or, in retrospect it's possible that 'upgrading' me to Windows Vista right before the week when I have to put out three bulletins was sub-optimal.

So. Who out there is an expert in Microsoft Publisher for Vista? ( How it pains me, the Mac-lover, to have to admit I need to know anything about Microsoft Publisher for Vista. )

Day 1 goal: Met!

Kidlet and spouse: Safely across the country!

Current plan: Bed!

Tomorrow morning early, the spouse and the kidlet will be on a plane to spend spring break with his parents.

Me? I work at a church. We have a vacation blackout during Holy Week. I can't go anywhere.

Everybody say: Awwww! Res has to stay home all aloooone! In a completely quiet house where things she cleans will stay clean, and nothing makes noise but her, and there's nobody wanting anything from her except the cats! Poor, poor Res!

OK, so here's the plan. I have no excuses left, and I am absolutely going to get the revisions to the novel done. I have a set of daily goals all mapped out.

And, you, my friends: If you see me online, and I can't say I've met my goals for the day, it's your job to thwap me.

... our president? is hot.

In cleaning off the pile of paper on top of the microwave, I found a piece of hotel notepaper with "Andrea, room 453," and a phone number written on it in unfamiliar feminine handwriting.

When the spouse came home from the gym, I showed it to him and said, "I know all about your fling with Andrea."

He said, "Hey, how do I know you didn't have a fling with Andrea? You could be accusing me to deflect attention from yourself."

So there you have it. One of us had an affair, but we can't remember which one.

My mother and my teachers and my Sunday School leaders taught me that the way we deal with racial differences is never, ever to talk about them.

My mother and my teachers and my Sunday School leaders were all good, liberal, white Southerners, and in those days, when good, liberal, white Southerners wanted to teach their children that everyone was equal in human dignity, the way they did it was to teach their children to play a game called, "Let's pretend we're all alike."

A certain amount of anxiety was communicated with that lesson. No one ever outright said that if you mention the ways people are different, something awful might happen, but that was the message I got, just the same.

( Read more... )

So the spouse nagged me into getting a Facebook account. (Don't ask.) And after a month or so of getting pieces of flair, hating Mondays, and having mud-pies thrown at me by people I vaguely remember from high school, I thought, "Well, hey. LJ people sometimes talk about books. Maybe I'll get a conversation started about books."

So I change my status to: "Res's Real Name is reading 'Fire and Hemlock' by Diana Wynne Jones."

Instantly I get a comment from my mall-loving cousin saying, "Is that like 'Fire in the Hole'?" and another comment from someone who friended me because she used to have a crush on my brother in the seventies saying, "Is that about a tree that burns down?"

I mean, seriously, people! If I said I was learning about Pakistan, would they think it was hilarious to say, "Is that like packing a suitcase?" How is this wit?

Thoughts on the current multiheaded conversation on race (rydra_wong sums up here)

As a reader: I've lost a lot of respect for Elizabeth Bear and the people who came rushing to her defense. It's probably wrong of me to say I expected better of them because they're writers, but I did. This is a colossal failure of imagination and empathy; I expected people who can create characters to be able to listen to human beings.

I've been very happy to see intelligent responses from writers I respect, including Tim Pratt, Jo Walton, and Naomi Novik.

As a writer: killabeez said it very well: If I write something that makes you feel marginalized, invisible, fetishized/exoticized, or just plain misunderstood, I want to know about it. Seems to me that the point of writing is to understand. If I fail to understand, I'm eager to be corrected. (I don't promise that my first response to criticism won't be to run away and hide for a bit. I do promise that my first response to criticism won't be to lash out at the critic.)

As a fan: I'm a little sad that the name RaceFail has stuck so well, because I've read an awful lot of win on this subject. Fans of color are writing beautiful and moving accounts of their own experiences. White fans are listening and discussing things that we've always been taught are dangerous to talk about. Astonishingly, I've even read one or two conversations that were about the original topic rather than about the conversations! (I especially liked supacat's insights about fantasy.)

I consider slash fandom to be my 'us,' and on the whole, I'm proud of us.

Who out there has had experience with those water filters that you attach to your faucet? Does the water actually taste as good as bottled? I'd love to stop essentially paying good money to bring a bunch of plastic into my house and then have to carry it out again, but water from a Brita filter pitcher just does not taste good enough to me, so if water from a faucet filter doesn't taste any better than that, I guess I'm going to have to continue to be evil.

(I'm particularly poking cereta, way2busymom, and others who live in my neck of the woods and know what the water here tastes like when unadorned.)

To make up for this incredibly boring post, let me point you at an incredibly interesting post, from the food-meta blog Raspberry Debacle, which I love: A Sketch Towards a Taxonomy of Meta-Desserts.

(It's a favorite of my father, who shares the trait.)

A guy takes a job at a bank. The first day, his superivisor hands him a bundle of bills. "There ought to be a hundred in this stack. I need you to count and make sure."

The guy starts counting. "One ... two ... three ... four ... five ... six ... seven ..." Then he hands the stack back to his supervisor. "If it's right so far, I'm sure it's right all the way through."

Last night we spontaneously went to hear some Mozart (because that's the kind of wild family we are), and we were about six feet from the harp player.

A harp, seen from the end rather than the side, is a strange-looking thing. It looked like a newel post standing in a small boat.

The harpist looked fannish to me -- a beaming, bespectacled, dumpling-shaped woman with one long braid of silver hair.

It was the least I-dreamt-I-wandered-in-a-misty-glade harping I had ever heard -- clear, ringing notes, melody and counterpoint, no long sweeping chords.

And when the harpist rested her hand on the strings to damp the sound, I had a sudden powerful image of the woman in the Strength tarot card shutting the lion's mouth.

Sinus infection OMG. I will never stop coughing, and every breath tastes of mucus.

general_jinjur has just posted podfics of my Due South stories The Teeth of the Hydra, its deleted scene, and its sequel, Display.

You can find links to them all here. Be sure to leave her a comment if you like them!