Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 107

Reading a book

Some years ago I read Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi. I really loved it. When I talked enthusiastically about it to people, though, I found that many had been burned by their experience with The Windup Girl.

Well *now* I'm reading The Windup Girl, as a mother-daughter reading club experience (this is with Little Springtime; next I'll read Ancillary Sword, which I'm going to read with the ninja girl), and I can see where all the hackles and suspicion came from.

The Windup Girl certainly is g...

flower crown -- truck -- bottles

The flowers are wearing flower crowns these days, and going dancing:


What better thing to do as midsummer approaches?

The last time I walked this way, a truck was pulled up onto the sandy shore at the edge of the sea of meadow grass. A guy was lying beside, and sort of under, the truck. I think I saw tools under there--no doubt he was repairing something--but I kind of imagined maybe there was a lunch under there too? He was on his cell phone. Maybe he was consulting about the truck's problem....

A day in doodles

(Asakiyume on a slackline)

playing with cars

There is a young princess who loves to play with cars and building blocks. Her father the king is a city planner, and each summer the whole highway system becomes her toy. Her father works in a skyscraper overlooking the ring roads and the interstates, and every Wednesday, he brings his daughter to work with him and lets her play in a room on the top floor where there's a diorama of the city. She puts little model traffic cones here and there on the diorama, and down on the actual roads, they...

Boardwalk lovers

I love the boardwalk over the marsh, on the way to the supermarket. I'm not alone in loving it. The plants that grow underneath it and roundabout it love it too. They show their affection by growing up and around it and through it--sexy green embrace. (You can click on these photos to make them bigger.)

The Virginia creeper loves it:


The oriental bittersweet loves it:


The poison ivy loves it:


Rosa multiflora love-love-loves it:


And so do the local grasses:


What can I say? It's a very lovable boardw...

In mirrors

I'm still very much enjoying Boy, Snow, Bird, which is doing all kinds of complicated things, things I'm still trying to stretch my mind around, while at the same time telling a comprehensible story in an intriguing way.

This section is told from Bird's point of view (Bird is the dark-skinned daughter whose birth reveals that her father's family have all been passing). She doesn't always appear in mirrors, which makes her fascinated by how other people regard themselves in mirrors:

Grammy Olivi...

mercury tears

The healing angel and I were eating a late dinner, very late. (How late? Like 10 pm) There came, from outside, a loud, hollow rumbling, like a kid peddling a Big Wheel. It seemed really close, like the kid was maybe pedaling up our driveway.

I realized it was someone rolling their trash bin to the end of their driveway. Probably my neighbor across the street. But it sounded like maybe she'd rolled it right up to my porch.

Since the healing angel had looked as nonplussed as I felt at the sound,...

Irom Sharmila in court again

On June 4, Irom Sharmila will be in court in Delhi, which is to say, she'll be in a court that can capture the national eye (not so true of her appearances in court in Imphal, in the northeastern state of Manipur). The charge against her (attempted suicide, because of her hunger strike) is spurious, and worse, has the pernicious effect of distracting attention from her intention, which is to protest an unjust law--the Armed Forces Special Protection Act. People can be tempted to focus on gett...

eyeliner

Today at the jail one of the women I was working with had the most amazing eyeliner on, two shades: golden green on the portion of her eyes near her nose, and then red-violet at the ends of her eyes. It looked gorgeous.

I asked her about it, and it turned out she used colored drawing pencils to do it. "You dip them in water," she said. "But now the commissary has stopped selling them..."

In a skype call with wakanomori (who is in Japan), I mentioned this trick and how cool the results were, and...

laying a road by hand

This description came from someone's article in Australian Road Rider about a motorbike trip around East Timor:

I’ve never seen a road being handmade before. There were young men and boys placing river pebbles and stones in a neat arrangement, others tended fires on which 44-gallon drums of tar rested. A few men had ladles on long poles which they dipped into the drums of molten tar then carried to the stone sections and poured.

Source: "East Timor: Land of Children"

Here's a photo of roadbuil...