Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 51

a bounding deer

I decided to buy some street-art-quality chalks and see how long they last (answer: not long! This would be an expensive hobby...)

And I drew this...



The nice thing about chalk art is you can keep on tinkering with it. I might add more red to the face.

I also ended up decorating my jeans:



The healing angel and her significant other are living across our household and the significant other's household (yes: we know--we consider ourselves all one infection/virus family), and yesterday evening they...

Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero by Michael DeForge

My brother, who specializes in finding weird, cool comic books and graphic novels, got me this collection by Canadian artist Michael DeForge.

The eponymous Sticks Angelica is ... well, she introduces herself on the first page, and the story/collection continues in this vein:



Leaving the molecules in a bowl for the animals to eat--and then calling the animals filthy--that's the flavor of it. Oh, and her hilarious résumé.

Other characters include Oatmeal, a rabbit who's hopelessly in love with...

poignant

I'm putting this behind a cut because people have different bandwith for stuff. This is not a tragic story, but it's --well, like the subject line says. Poignant.

( There is a new assisted-living facility in my town )

It was a very salient image of our times.

comments

vernal stream

Wakanomori and I went for a walk in a place where water was bubbling up everywhere. I didn't have a camera, so he obliged me by taking this. You can hardly see that it's water, but it is--you can tell by the ripples (click through to see the photo bigger):



I loved the little pools of smooth stones, set in frames of leaves, all underwater.

The sound was beautiful too--he took recordings.

In other non-pandemic news, I finished reading Children of Ruin! Loved the ending; I'll try to share more on...

Ube coffee cake

Some days ago, rachelmanija posted about supporting small, family-owned businesses in the LA area. One was a Filipino café, and the description Rachel gave of the yummy ube coffee cake.... mmmm.

So I ordered some, and my box came today!



Look at all the coffee cakes!!



Such a beautiful color! And the flavor is **delicious**. Wakanomori had made fresh coffee, so we actually ate our slices of coffee cake with coffee--as Stipulated By Law!



All that would have been a wonderful, satisfying experience....

a phoenix

On Twitter, Aster Glenn Gray shared some chalk art from her neighborhood, and chalk art is something I love and something I think is really restorative and heartening, so when I had to give up watching Self-Made (with the aforementioned Aster Glenn Gray--though remotely of course) due to Wakanomori's need to use the bandwidth for teaching, I went outside and drew a phoenix:



Here's a detail



We'll rise from this.

I've been heartened by a number of encouraging posts from people on my friends list,...

It's here! Please share w/anyone needing a fairy tale pick-me-up

The Gown of Harmonies is now live!



All money raised will go to THE FOOD BANK OF WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS, which serves the western Massachusetts counties of Berkshire, Franklin, Hampshire (my county), and Hampden (home of two cities with very high poverty rates: Springfield and Holyoke).

Many of you have probably read this story already, back when it came out in It Happened at the Ball, but if you know anyone who'd like a pleasant, novelette-length distraction of the balls-and-fairies sort, maybe...

coming soon: "The Gown of Harmonies" ebook

"The Gown of Harmonies" was a story of mine that was included in Sherwood Smith's anthology It Happened at the Ball--various stories centering on or involving a ball. The exclusivity period is over, so I thought I'd offer it as as an ebook. (Actually, I had wanted to do a paperback too, but that turned out not to be possible, or at least not possible using the store of energy that I have available to pursue the matter.)

Here is the cover!



Any minute now... or anyway, in the next couple of...

What to do with 66,000 pounds of surplus dragon fruit?

I heard this story on BBC World News, but the online links I could find with the best images were from this Business Insider story by Kate Taylor.

The founder of ABC Bakery in Ho Chi Minh city found that thousands of pounds of red dragon fruit were going unsold out in the Vietnamese countryside because Vietnam had closed its borders with China, the main buyer. So this bakery began buying the fruits and using them in their baked goods:

pink baguettes

(photo: Kate Taylor)

pink buns

(photo: Angela...

my amabie

I did her as a celphalopod, sort of. My thought was that her three legs were arms, and her arms were arms, and her long hair was also arms. But I gave her hands on her arm-arms. Why? I don't know.



Also here are some flying amabie to bless your day.

comments