Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 18

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...

mulberries

The two berries I used to pick and eat as a kid were mulberries and black raspberries (a different fruit from blackberries--we had no blackberries where I grew up but plenty of black raspberries). Black raspberries grow on prickly canes, and you can find them in abandoned lots and beside railroad tracks. I was a pro at finding places to pick them.

Mulberries grow on trees. When I was a kid, there was a copse of three or so sapling-sized mulberry trees on my street, at the edge of someone's prop...

horizontal as well as vertical

We're watching The Makanai (舞子さんちのまかなないさん; Maikosanchi no makanai san）on Netflix; the present-day story of two sixteen-year-old best friends who leave their northern Aomori town to go to Kyoto to train as maiko (pre-geisha). One of them, Sumire is exceptionally suited to it; the other, Kiyo, isn't--but Kiyo finds her feet as the makanai, the cook, for the house.

In the episode we saw the other day, the mother of the house is walking with a male friend, and she's talking about all the good-luck ch...

milkweed! flowers, fiber, twine

This year I'm mainly growing milkweed. Milkweed for flowers, milkweed with the garlic and other vegetables:





In part that's for pollinators and monarch butterflies, but it's also in large part for the super strong, super beautiful **fibers* that milkweed produces. I realized I can put that chambira fiber knowledge to work here with my own, local fibers. I used to have a goal of trying to spin the fibers... in spite of the fact that I've never spun anything. But in the Amazon, they're not spinning...

Yukimi Ogawa's Like Smoke, Like Light

This week Mike Allen's Mythic Delirium Press published Like Smoke, Like Light, a collection of short stories by Yukimi Ogawa. Yukimi Ogawa is remarkable: she lives in Tokyo and doesn't feel hugely confident speaking English, but she writes in English, and her stories are imaginative, surprising, and memorable. She's been published in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and, back in the day, Mythic Delirium--among others.

There are more or less three types ...

roads that conform to the human foot

Paul Salopek, this morning, talking about traveling in rural Yunnan Province, China:

Almost without being aware of it, [we] are losing touch with the human hand itself, what the human hand can make ... This realization paradoxically gelled when I stepped over the Myanmar border into China, possibly because I had these conceptions that I'd be walking into the most industrialized country in the world. And I didn't. Instead ... not only [are] the houses all handmade, but the roads to reach them were...