Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 117

A place I love

It's hard to get to now, because the former entryway has been turned into houses, and due to its being swampy, it's pretty much inaccessible except in winter. I found it again yesterday, though:



The snow is sparkling ♥

And there is hoarfrost growing on top of the snow:



(Speaking of hoarfrost, here is a leaf with a melting veil of it)



... goodbye November... hello December

Ben Johnson Day

Most Fridays I go to the jail to do some essay tutoring, and on the way I listen to Reggae Jam with Sunshine Girl on WTCC. A few weeks ago Sunshine Girl and the King (who's in the studio with her--he does a segment of soca music) were talking about Ben Johnson Day.

I at first thought it was Ben Jonson Day, and I was wondering why Jamaica should have decided to honor Ben Jonson.

Well, it hadn't. Ben Johnson Day, I discovered, is the Thursday before your Friday payday, when your money is at its...

fabulous Silly Beth--an aural palindrome

Little Springtime has a fun free app on her phone: Backwords (there are other versions that aren't free; this is a free version). You record a word or phrase, and it will play it back to you backward. You then play the backward version for other people, and they try as best they can to duplicate the sounds they hear. You record their attempts and play those backwards, and then see if, from that, you can tell what the original word or phrase was. If they copied the backward sounds fairly accur...

pennies, cranberries

I had some Canadian pennies that, technically, I shouldn't try to use here. (Actually, I'm sure no one cares much. In addition to Canadian pennies, I've got English half-penny coins and euro penny coins that I've gotten in change.) So, I decided to flatten them on the train tracks this past Tuesday. (Don't worry: there are no known cases of pennies on the tracks derailing trains.) At 4:10 pm, I heard the train whistle, so I went out with the healing angel to see if I could collect my flattene...

sunlight touches the treetops

(If you click on the picture, I think you can go through to Flickr and look at it bigger, and see where the sun is bedazzling the tips of the trees.)

sea heart

(But first: saw on Twitter that protestors shut down highways in Boston and New York City for Mike Brown. Good. As one person on Twitter said, "The unrest is sacred, holy, and necessary.")

Some time ago, mnfaure sent me a sea heart--a floating seed of the Entada gigas vine, which grows in the Caribbean (also Central America, northern South America, and Africa). The seeds from the Caribbean and Central America can float along ocean currents and arrive on Gulf Coast shores. On this day in Pen Pa...

In less serious film viewing

We brought home Edge of Tomorrow from Redbox last night and vegged out watching it, and it was pretty fun, the way time-reset films can be (for me at least), though we kept shouting suggestions at the screen that the characters were too dim to take, and though we had arguments about better ways to end the movie.

Has anyone seen it? I had never heard of it, but the healing angel assures me it played in cinemas and everything.

Film: Sophie Scholl

osprey_archer 's review of this movie (here) made me curious to see it: I was drawn by her description of Sophie (who was a real person), an idealistic university student in Nazi Germany who loves life--jazz music and jam and the feel of sunshine on her face--but who finds she can't *not* be true to conscience, even if it means dying.

Sophie and her brother Hans are members of the White Rose Society, an antiwar group. They get arrested for distributing antiwar leaflets, and much of the movie is...

Good news for IRIN

Earlier this year I talked about how IRIN, an award-winning, Nairobi-based news network that operated under the auspices of the United Nations, was going to be shut down. (Entry here.) I started a "Save IRIN" petition, and the petition and people's outcry did get a bit of coverage, but it was clear that willy-nilly, the UN was going to "spin off" the network, which would only survive if it got funding from somewhere.

Well, a funder has been found: IRIN made the announcement of its relaunch yes...

pine needle coats

Here is a picture of Bethie and her grandmother raking pine needles, in their pine needle coats.

Except I forgot the buttons! And I made the picture too small, so I couldn't get fine details, so I had to draw in Bethie's features, so she looks like a doll with a painted face -_- But I was able to give them both acorn-knit hats.