Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 17

Low low low

Do you remember I compared low-ish water in July 2022 with high-ish water in March 2023 for the little tributary that connects Letícia to the Amazon?

(  Here the two photos are again, as a reminder  )

September is a very low-water month, close to the lowest, if not the lowest. And here's what that same area looks like now:

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Barely any water at all. The buildings on the left are the ones that were floating in the other two pictures.

(Photo from this Facebook page. )

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iNumber Number: Jozi Gold (2023)

If you enjoy a good heist movie and have Netflix, I highly recommend iNumber Number: Jozi Gold**(directed by Donovan Marsh), a heist flick out of South Africa. It gives you a very entertaining foursquare of lawful/chaotic good/evil alignment, humor, fun characters, truly luminous cinematography in a most likely unfamiliar landscape (unless you're from South Africa). (Also violence, but less than in American films.) The protagonists are cop buddies Shoes (straight arrow, gentle family man) and Ch...

warm to the touch

I brag from time to time here and elsewhere about the big apple tree in our yard, which we grew from a seed and which blesses us with tasty apples--even though there's no reason that should be the case: apples don't grow true to seed, so if you grow an apple tree from a seed, there's no telling what you'll get. I don't remember what kind of apple's seed I planted. But it grew into a three-trunked tree that towers over us now. And deer come and eat the windfalls.

Today wakanomori and I collected a...

a focused reader

On Saturday, Steven Brewer, author of the Revin's Heart series of steampunk novellas that I've enjoyed, had a tent set up at the farmers market the next town over, to sell the novellas and also some of his writing in Esperanto.

I went to see him and took a 10-second video. (Warning, those Youtube shorts play on repeat--click away, click away, or else you will be stuck in a time loop!) Afterward, while we were talking, a haggard man, older than either of us (I reckon, but who can be sure?) came b...

Do you want to eat pineapple?

In order for me to learn how to say things in Tikuna, my teacher sends me short recordings over WhatsApp. I then save them in files on my phone and computer and listen to them over and over and try to copy what she's saying.

These recordings are so, so charming, they always make me smile. She starts off with good morning, good afternoon, good evening (in Spanish), and in the background there may be music, or kids playing, or the sounds of cooking, or the sound of rain, or birds and insects. Somet...

Apple maps

When I came home from Readercon, there was a tornado watch, and so rather than be on the awful interstate between Quincy, MA, and B'town, likely trapped in a traffic jam (they are pretty much a guarantee for this time of the year, traveling between western and eastern Massachusetts) awaiting a funnel of doom, I decided to go home no-highways (which really just means no interstates), aided by my phone. It took me the route I was expecting it would take me: along state highway rt. 9, which runs ea...

four generations; Koffee

Four generations
At Readercon I came across this quartet of women. (They were wearing masks, as per Readercon's careful regulations, but they took them off for the photo.) The one holding the book is its author, Terrie M. Scott. The one to her right as you look at the photo is her mother. The one on the far left is her daughter. And the girl between her daughter and her is her granddaughter. Her daughter, granddaughter, and mother all came with her to help her sell her [latest--turns out she's wr...

last two pictures in Semillas y huevos

I finished my six-page picture book about planting eggs and incubating avocado seeds. Behold! The egg grew into a tree that has eggs on it:

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And the avocado seeds that the hen sat on hatched some avocado chicks:

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I sent the text and pictures to my friend and Tikuna teacher and said if she wanted to put it into Tikuna, we could create a dual-language book ;-) (And I said she should tell me if I'd messed up the Spanish, which is highly probable.)

The complete PDF is too large for me to send to my guid...

Some jasmine and some wild foods

Here is the jasmine, so pretty, so fragrant!



And below this cut are before-and-after shots of fried immature milkweed pods. This are very tasty! I've mad them in past years, but this year they're like a garden crop, I have so much in my yard. I've cooked them twice already.

(  fried milkweed pods  )

And beneath this cut is a portrait of my staghorn sumac tree, plus some sun-brewed sumac tea (or sumac-ade), made by squeezing/bruising the berries, covering them in cold water, and letting them sit out i...

Icicle Bicycle, Tanabata, wishes

I wanted to try to bring some of the good things that I saw in neighborhoods in Leticia to my neighborhood in western Massachusetts--the sense of (mild) commerce and work mixed in with homes, of people doing things by foot or small transport, right in their neighborhoods, interacting with each other in the spaces by their homes rather than life lived in a series of space stations (the home station, the work station, the shopping station, the kids' activities stations) only reachable in your spac...