Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 60

maple syrup season

I subscribed to a local newspaper, a physical paper that comes to the house, for the first time ever, and it's a decision that delights me. Even the ads delight me. If it weren't for the ads, I wouldn't have found out about a place nearby called the Strawbale Café (built with straw bales, but then plastered over), which, at this time of year, makes its own maple syrup.

We went for a visit this past weekend.

The bottom part of their evaporator dates from 1959.



Here is the main line, reaching up...

blackout

At 6:30, this windstorm knocked out the power, and I freaked out, picturing us without power for days in the well-below-freezing temperatures. The pipes would surely freeze and burst and then cost extravagant amounts to fix, and anyway we wouldn't be able to fix them right away because everyone else's pipes would have burst too, and so the helper-fixer people would be in short supply.

I went to the supermarket to get milk and maybe another candle. In the parking lot, I met Wakanomori, who'd ju...

asakiyume @ 2019-02-24T23:45:00

Sometimes I save up things to post, and then by the time I get to doing it, they either seem stale or inconsequential, and I think, Is this really worth posting? ... But tonight I'm going to go ahead and post a couple anyway.

A black crow

The first is from an author interview I heard. It was with a former governor of Vermont, a woman named Madeleine Kunin (I'm not up on my former governors of Vermont). She's written a memoir which--I just checked Google; I didn't remember this from the intervie...

A Stranger in Olondria: An Appreciation

A Stranger in Olondria
by Sofia Samatar
2013, Small Beer Press

Jervick, from the Tea Islands, is not only a stranger in Olondria, he’s a stranger in his homeland, too: someone educated in and besotted with the culture of a faraway land, schooled in letters in an oral society, able to recognize and make Olondrian allusions and references but bored by and ashamed of the place where he grew up. After his father dies, he travels to Olondria and briefly gets to experience the heady cosmopolitan exist...

Wednesday reading--A Stranger in Olondria

Hey, it's Wednesday, and I've actually read a thing: A Stranger in Olondria. I'm going to write up a review of it, because I ended up loving it; I think it's an amazing book, beautifully, powerfully told--and that's not what I went in thinking, or even what I was feeling in the first fifth of the book. Early on I had the impression that it was an admirable book that I was going to effortfully work my way through, but my mind completely, totally changed, so much so that by the end, this passag...

skateboarding

In 2012, I was briefly a skateboarder. I loved the speed and grace and daring of it--I wanted to touch that and live that.

That time was brought back to me so vividly tonight watching Skate Kitchen (2018), which I requested from Netflix DVD because of osprey_archer 's excellent review ) of it. The film coveys the feel of skateboarding beautifully (and also the dangers of it--part of why I quit: I loved the daring but wasn't up for the injuries), and I loved the posse of girls--real-life members...

addendum to yesterday's entry

The same day my friend showed me the photo from the previous entry, I had a great encounter in a pharmacy. There were two pharmacy technicians, young women, chatting. One came over to give me the prescription I was picking up, and I saw on her name tag that she had the same surname as Em in Pen Pal, and a really pretty, unusual first name (so unusual that when I typed the whole name just now into Google, a picture of her popped up on the first page of results).

I don't know if you've seen that...

Sabelle Morning's Cup

A friend (no longer on DW, apparently!) found this beautiful photo, part of Gordon Parks's "Segregated Story, 1956," and shared it with me. She said it reminded her of Pen Pal, and it did me, too.



(I’ve been setting out Sabelle Morning’s cup every night so it can catch the dawn light,)

The girl on the right could be Em; the girl on the left could be her sister Tammy; the house, if only it were floating, could be their house.

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via osprey_archer, a short film: "Lost World"

In this entry , osprey_archer talks about short films she's watched recently, and one of them, "Lost World," by Cambodian American director Kalyanee Mam, captivated me.

It's narrated by a young woman, Vy Phalla [surname comes first here], who lives on the island of Koh Sralau. The way of life there is threatened by sand dredging: sand is dredged in Cambodia and taken to add landmass in Singapore.

Scooping up Cambodia ...



... To create more Singapore




The film's write-up at shortoftheweek.com say...

"you don't know where that's been"

In the supermarket the other day, a mom scolded her baby, who was sitting in the little seat at the front of the shopping cart, when the baby leaned down and started chewing on the cart handle. "Don't do that! You don't know where that's been!" the mom exclaimed.

AND HOW RIGHT SHE IS! Just **think** of the adventures shopping carts get up to!

The cart you are sitting in right now, baby, may recently have been sunning itself on the beach...


(source)

Or it may have been tangling with rival gangs in...