Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 8

What fruit or vegetable is my baby this week?

So nowadays, if you're pregnant, there's an app that will tell you how big your baby is, week by week, with fruit and vegetable comparisons (lentil sized, grape sized, lime sized, and so on). There is a website for this, too.


I found this out because the tall one's girlfriend is pregnant! And they have been keeping track of the pregnancy this way. And now that they're out of the first trimester, I can talk about it ;-)

Anyway, I find these comparisons very fun if sometimes a bit ??? I've been mak...

(c) The Los Cedros Cloud Forest

There are rivers whose personhood has been recognized--in New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh, Canada, elsewhere too. And now, on the occasion of COP16, the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference currently underway in Cali, Colombia, there's a legal petition to have Ecuador's Los Cedros cloud forest recognized as a co-copyright holder for a song, created by writer Robert McFarlane, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, mycologist Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito--and the forest.

In this Guardia...

a last job

I was retired, but when the Queen of Faery comes with a request, you listen.

"I have a little job I need you to do. It requires cold iron--and lead. I'll pay you well."

Now I didn't want to get wrapped up in that line of work again, but she's a hard creature to say no to, so I agreed. My only stipulation: payment in cash, up front.

"But of course," she smiled.

And left me two gold coins, a king's ransom in today's world.

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seige perilous

There's a chair beside the path in the woods. Some leaves have collected on it.

Would you sit on it?



I sent the photo to my Tikuna tutor. She said maybe it's the seat of Madre Monte, a guardian of the forest and the animals in it, a terror to hunters, clearcutters, and fishers. She appears in the deep forest when there are storms, is responsible for water-borne ailments, and her screams are louder than thunder (says Spanish-language Wikipedia).

But maybe in her quieter moments, she appreciates a g...

boba--sort of

When I make casabe, I grate cassava and then squeeze out the fluid. The fluid is always milky white--cassava starch, aka, tapioca. The last time I did this, I let that starch dry... and there it was, actual tapioca, like I buy in the store! That I made out myself! Not very much (maybe a tablespoon's worth), but still!

I decided to use my homemade tapioca (generously supplemented with store-bought tapioca) to make boba, the bubbles in bubble tea. First step was to find some guidance on how to do ...

a strangeness

I saw the aurora. I saw it only with my eyes, not through a camera. It was not cherry pink or brilliant turquoise. It was a mysterious strangeness, a hint of something that made me think I was imagining. And then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I realized it was really there, weird veils of color, faint and deep, like iridescence on black bird's feathers. I laughed for joy to have all those vibrating, excited electrons overhead, our atmosphere talking to me in a new way about the sun.

Th...

Icarus and the birds, pawpaw

I wrote a microfiction about Icarus the other day:

Sent out to gather feathers for his father's project, Icarus only picked up ones that birds had shed--he never harmed a single bird. And he learned the birds the feathers came from: osprey, gull, raven, jay, starling.

Later, when he flew too close to the sun and the wax melted, when the feathers were coming out one by one, when he was falling, the birds remembered his careful ways and came to rescue him, in flocks and bands and murmurations.

I als...

More on The Mountain in the Sea

The characters are so alone in this book. There's no community and no model for/of community--at all! Just people groping toward (or away from) one another on an individual basis. Evrim, the sole android ever created, Ha, the solo octopus researcher at the research site, Rustem the solo hacker, Altantsetseg the solo security agent, Arnkatla Minervudóttir-Chan (LOL, Minerva's daughter), the solo designer of the android. Eiko, the enslaved guy on the fishing ship, strives not to be solo: he active...

The gate was shut but the invitation was in plain view

Yesterday mallorys_camera and I went for a walk in a location more or less equidistant between the two of us (more or less... it was closer to me, though). After a couple of false starts that included infiltrating the high school bathrooms during a soccer tournament (we blended right in: "How's Dustin enjoying soccer, Sandy?" she asked me. "Oh, he's loving it, Lisa. He'll be playing for Real Madrid one day, you just wait"), we found ourselves at the entrance to the Housatonic Flats Reserve.

The g...

In the context of my previous entry, this news story was hilarious

Or, octopuses can be assholes, too. (And you thought only human bosses were jerks)

"Octopuses and fish share leadership--and enforcement--in group hunting."

The octopuses punch the low-performing or freeloading fish. They punch them!

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