Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 152

grass ... and the goblin bride

foxtail grass is one of my favorite things





So are the tiny flowers of grass, which usually come in the spring, but here is an autumn-blooming grass:




The Goblin Bride
(A photo and a ditty)



At the goblin's bridal feast,
The drums and pipes played loud
And in her wedding gown and veil
The bride danced for the crowd

They cheered and raised their glasses high
And always cried, "Dance on!"
Except her aged sire who warned,
"My child, watch for dawn.

"The sun that warms the great wide earth
Will chill you, blood...

Mrs. Macquarie's Folly

After pretty much a whole day in Darwin, I spent a morning in Sydney--where I was lucky enough to meet up with khiemtran and his family, who helped me escape the airport so I could see the some of the sights of Sydney. And you know what that means. . . drum roll please. . .







Yes, it's the Sydney Opera House--and khiemtran has actually been in it to listen to operas, not merely stood outside taking photos. (The Sydney Opera House users' manual approves both uses, so we're good. It does not, howe...

"The Wind Harp," by Athena Andreadis

"The Wind Harp," up now at Crossed Genres, is a great science fiction story, or really I'd like to say socio-cultural political science fiction story. If part of what you like, in reading or watching science fiction, is the interactions of people of different cultures and the drama of political intrigue, then try this story. Teg-Rav, the new ruler of one of several community on a harsh planet, is in dire circumstances due to a rupture in her community's water reservoir. A Confederation starsh...

nature walk

On my journey back from Timor-Leste, I spent a day and a half transiting through Australia. Most of that time was in the airport in Darwin, Australia. Problems changing money (and limited funds) meant I didn't go into the city of Darwin. I made do with the airport and its environs. Fortunately for me, and remarkably, there was a little park and nature walk right by the airport, with plaques to tell you about the flora and fauna you might be seeing.

This, for instance, I discovered was Pandanus...

birthday cake

The healing angel is a fan of the tenth Dr. Who, so I made him a cake with a picture of the tenth doctor on it.

Here's the picture I used:



I printed it, cut out the dark parts, and used it as a stencil. I sprinkled purple sugar over the stencil and ended up with this:



It's not such a great likeness, but with some prompting the healing angel was able to recognize it :-)

Bright and lonely faces

Yesterday The Writer's Almanac featured the poem "Summer Night," by Connie Wanek. I was transfixed by the first image:

The street lamp looks down;
it has dropped something
and spends the whole night
searching around its feet.

The light it has dropped illuminates its feet, but the street lamp sees only grass and asphalt and senses that this is not what it's searching for.


Street Lamp 2 by ANDYWPHOTO on Flickr.

Also yesterday, I saw a loneflower:



The outbuilding's roof has collapsed and one wall has cr...

apples and nighthawks

I am so happy that my seed-grown apple tree has produced fruit. Here are two more photos of apples from it. Are they not lovely? They say that fruit from a tree grown from seed will not be true to the parent, and maybe not, but these apples are flavorful and practically flawless.



(The light in the lower one is weird because it was nighttime and I tried to supplement the light over the stove with light from a crank flashlight, which is very blue. The coins in the foreground are from Timor-Leste...

the night bus to Dili

Every morning, a bus leaves the market in Dili, Timor-Leste's capital, and six hours later it arrives in Ainaro. Ainaro is only 70 miles away, but the road is rough and mountainous.

Then every night, a bus leaves Ainaro to go to Dili. It leaves at 9:30 or so at night, and it gets in around 4:30 in the morning. This was the bus I rode to get back to Dili, the day before my journey home. One of the local assistants of the program I volunteered with gallantly offered to accompany me on the bus jo...

work and play in Timor-Leste

I've lived in the United States, England, and Japan--all countries that are well-off. I've never lived in, or even visited, a so-called developing country before. There are lots of different narratives about developing countries; what stories get told depend on the purposes of the teller--unsurprisingly. The hard facts of life in Timor-Leste didn't escape me--not just (just!) the trauma of recent conflict, but also the high infant mortality and food insecurity. But there was so much that I sa...

Jakarta 2

This will be probably the most sobering of my entries on Timor-Leste.


Southeast Asia is rich in islands, settled by waves of different peoples, visited by different trading communities, made parts of different empires over the centuries.

In the 1500s and 1600s, Europeans were eager to get control of these islands. The Dutch ended up with most of what's now Indonesia, but on one island in the archipelago, they got only half. The other half was controlled by the Portuguese. That half became pre...