Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 55

walking the rails

Walking the rails is better when the weather isn't quite so bitingly cold, but it's always good. It's a way through the landscape that you don't usually see.

The rails were shining blue from the blue sky overhead:



I saw...

Hot Chocolate Run 2019

Last year I fundraised here for the Hot Chocolate Run, which raises money for Safe Passage, an organization that helps people recover/escape from domestic violence. This year, I wasn't going to fundraise; I don't know why not really--just a kind of psychic tiredness, maybe.

But I remembered stories that two women in my classes told me about what they had suffered at the hands of their boyfriends/husbands. ( TW abuse )

White Kitten

For wakanomori 's third-year Japanese class, he's having students read something from a different decade each week, starting with the present and working back over the course of the semester until 1900. A couple of weeks ago, they read a portion of a children's story from 1942, 白い子猫 (White Kitten), written and illustrated by Nakajima Kikuo.

In the story, the next-door neighbors have moved away, leaving behind two white cats, whom protagonist Ichiro and his little sister Hanako adopt. There are ups and dow...

Beautiful wise one

A puddle of gold beneath a golden tree: it's gingko, the ancient of ancients, gingko, who watched indulgently as the dinosaurs rose and fell; gingko, who, a mere kilometer's distance from ground zero in Hiroshima, survived and flourished when all else died. That's how you survive for 270 million years.

Gingko, at some point along in your evolutionary journey, you chose to turn to brilliant gold before shedding your leaves in the cold. You were the first of all the deciduous trees to do so (.....

flu immunizations

Look at this; two entries in one day--what is this, 2008? But it's because I had two very disparate thoughts that didn't sit nicely in the same post, so here you go.

When I did a unit on vaccines with my students, almost all of them were pro-vaccine ... with the exception of the flu vaccine. Many more people were on the fence about that or were actively opposed to it. The flu vaccine has the problem of being a best guess as opposed to a sure thing in terms of how relevant and effec...

Is it a Chekov's gun or just a wall ornament?

I was recently thinking about when a detail is a Chekov's gun and when it's just, y'know, part of scene setting or world building. I was thinking this because my mind was pinging on things that I was sure were being placed in the story to be picked up later (the story was Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, and the details in question *were* picked up again, but not in the way I expected), and yet not all details are there to be used later. To take an example that pops into my head, in Ann Leckie's Imper...

Late October--leaf maze season

I'm happy to report that both a squirrel and our cat, on separate occasions, more or less honored the walls of the maze and walked along the path. The squirrel was stopping periodically to check the leaf pile and a couple of times used its little squirrel hands to pat the leaves back in place, like squirrels do with the ground after they've buried a nut.

Making the maze
Making

A revenge tale

These days we're watching two Spanish-language shows on Netflix. One is La Reina del Flow (The Queen of Flow), an 82-episode-long revenge tale that we're only 30 episodes into. Talented teen lyricist Yeimi Montoya is invited by her best pal, Juancho, to join Soul and Bass, a duo consisting of Juancho and another teen, Charly Cruz, whom Yeimi has a huge crush on, but who has never even noticed her. (Juancho, in turn, loves Yeimi, but she only thinks of him as a friend.) All three of them are...

The Big Top

Two of my children live in Japan, and one--known in this journal as Little Springtime--was directly in the path of what the Japanese call Typhoon 19 and what in the United States is called Typhoon Hagibis. Little Springtime lives in the flood plain of the Sumida river, which they were saying could flood to 5 meters. She and her girlfriend were assiduously thorough in their emergency preparation and took shelter on the second floor of their house, as advised, and kept the TV on to hear if thei...

volunteering

I did some volunteering today in the adult-and-high-school learning program I've volunteered with before--first time I've been able to in many months, because the jail job kept me too busy. It was so good. I had three students I've had before, plus a new student I liked instantly. We read a bit from the chapter of When I Was Puerto Rican that I used for my first class in the jail, and it sparked some good conversations--including a tangential discussion on heritage versus citizenship and what...