Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 23

Pa' dónde se fue?

On December 14 wakanomori shared a Guardian article with me about Joaquim Melo, the 64-year-old owner of a remarkable bookstore in Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon. The bookstore, Banca do Largo,

serves as a refuge for Amazonian writers and activists alike, pushing to protect the region from exploitation.​ By promoting local literature, particularly works by Indigenous writers, Melo believes he can help spread new ideas about societal organisation and the environment that are different f...

Cassava bread

Cassava bread is grated cassava from which you squeeze out all the extra moisture and then press into a hot skillet. Remarkably, it holds together as if it had egg or something in it, and then you can turn it over. Also, as it cooks, it smells like fariña... because that's basically also how you make fariña, only instead of cooking it all mashed together, you cook it slowly, slowly, slowly, turning it and turning it, so it gets all dry and crumbly.

I made cassava bread the other day and documente...

gingerbread photos

So I didn't end up wrecking all the gingerbread when I tried icing them. I did wreck a few though. But here are some successes:

The bees! I like the bees. Here are two photos, one with flowers:





And in the end I was able to add touches to the snowmobile and the microscope:





And here are some Pokemon (and a squirrel):







They look very festive all together:



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Resolutions and gingerbread

I haven't made New Year's resolutions in quite a few years--like, since even before the pandemic--but this year I have a couple! I am sharing them. Accountability!

One is to try making croissants. It seems impossibly hard. But so rewarding!

The other is to make a more consistent and frequent effort with my writing. I have the Tales of the Polity novel that I'm working on, but for the past year or so, I've only been sitting down to work on it once a week, with rare exceptions. And/But also, I thin...

"just passing through ... hey, what's this?"

A friend who has ties to Honduras told me it was okay to post and share this compilation video from trail cams set up in the rainforests there to take a wildlife census. The organization paying for it is Bosques del Mundo --apparently until now there's been no study, to speak of, of wildlife in Honduras.

The video is delightful, especially the animals that investigate the camera (especially the ocelot near the end), and the baby peccary that turns to face down someone coming up behind him. Enjoy!



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"I didn't know..."

My friend KM is an amazing storyteller: she can tell you something that happened to her, and her face is so animated, and her voice, that you listen enthralled, and it's like whatever the thing was, it's happening to you, too.

Last week she was telling me a story that Laurie Anderson told, a story about rescuing her twin brothers from death in an icy lake when she was eight and they were two. KM heard this story on Anderson Cooper's podcast about grief,** so when she was telling the story, I was...

Crowdfunding the purchase of Twitter

Now I know several of my friends on here have no interest in/actively dislike Twitter, but I do like it, so my thoughts these last few weeks have turned to 🎶How-do-you-solve-the-problem-of-the-owner.🎶

And I got to thinking, why not crowdfund a buyout? World's largest Kickstarter--$44 billion! Since Kickstarter doesn't take donated money unless the goal is met, and since $44 billion is not likely to be met, people could donate without worrying that it was a scam that was designed just to enrich wh...

"But they always said hello and stopped to chat"

The Boston Globe broke a story on Tuesday about busting up a Russian smuggling network and arresting a key link--a 35-year-old in New Hampshire who was receiving high-end US tech in the mail, repackaging it, and sending it to Estonia, where another agent would take it across the border to Russia.

Today they had two stories describing how the smuggling operation worked in detail, including the long-term investment in agents and their embeddedness in the United States. It's all so spy movie!

"What t...

snow, woodland marimba, Netflix

It snowed!

I knocked the snow off the clothesline and it fell all at once, from the entire length of the clothesline, a rope of snow hitting the ground.

I'm back from my dad's house, but while I was there, I found a tiny nature preserve that has been set up across the street from my high school. It's on low-lying land unsuitable for development: a land conservancy has bought it and made it into a preserve, so high school students can learn about wetlands and local people can go for walks.

Because ...

Hot Chocolate Run 2022

So I collected some wishes to run with this year, as I did in 2018 --not as many as that year, though, because I didn't fundraise really. This year I wrapped the wishes around paperclips and then safety-pinned them to my jacket. They looked like this:

(The words you see aren't the words of the wishes: they're the words printed on the back of the sheet of paper I printed the wishes on.)

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As I mentioned in a locked entry, I wasn't able to be at home--and therefor to participate in the actual race--on ...