Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 95

blossoms

It was the scent of these that drew me. (ETA: I haven't checked what sort they are yet.)

no more naked toilet paper

I believe the unadorned form of naked toilet paper should be celebrated, not shamed into covering up, and yet-- a conversation with a friend this morning got me looking at the usually very frilly, and sometimes very creative, world of toilet paper roll covers. An image search revealed to me a world of Southern-belle-style covers. This is a particularly frilled-out version (Source evil Pinterest page):



Here's a sweeter one, with a homemade head (source).


But some people have let their imaginatio...

speaking of money design

I like that we're getting Harriet Tubman on our money! I am in favor of having a wide variety of significant figures on the currency. Japan has Natsume Soseki, the novelist, on its money, and England has Charles Darwin.

We've been reading (very slowly) Terry Pratchett's Making Money as a family read, and we came to the scene where the mind-wiped counterfeiter Owlswick (at this point known as Clamp), whom Moist has hired to create the first official Ankh-Morpork banknote, presents it:

On the des...

granola cookies

In January I blogged about Providence Granola, an organization in Rhode Island that acts as a training ground for refugees: it gives them jobs in its granola-making operation, so they can learn about work and life in the United States while improving their English. Most then go on to get other jobs elsewhere in the community.

I gave some of the granola to the forest creatures (except the ninja girl; she's not a fan of dried fruit). Little Springtime made cookies with some of hers, and that ins...

Large beasts of weather and sky

I've decided to walk to work, even though I work at home.

On my walk today, I stepped in all the large potholes on my street. They are the footprints of some creature whose weight affects the asphalt the way mine affects wet sand. A winter-weather beast, a very large dinosaur or lumbering mastodon. Some kids once tried to charge admission to see them--the potholes, I mean--as a way of raising some quick money, but no one would pay because these dinosaurs and mastodons get everywhere. (No, I'm...

red swing

I saw this yesterday. It's not really in the woods; it's at the back of someone's backyard, which backs onto the woods. But it looks like it is. The woodcutter was alone in the world after the untimely death of her husband, so she took her child with her when she went a-felling in the forest. She strung up a swing so the baby could rock and sway and converse with the squirrels and the birds while she worked. (They have red plastic in this mythical nevertime.)

Three things to share

First Thing
I think many of my friends can identify with aspects of this cake-making (and life-living) experience:

There are only two things I really care about: impressing people and death sugar. Baking involves both of those things and I derive a lot of--what's the approximation of joy for a person who obsessively competes with others? Whatever that is, that's the thing I get from it.

But I'm also really impatient, not exactly a character trait compatible with baking. I don't wait for the oven...

The Dubious Hills

The Dubious Hills is mysterious, powerful, paradoxical story. It’s both very small (milk pans left outside, dogs sleeping on a doorstep, planting beans while school’s out) and very, very big (the nature of knowledge, pain, and freedom and compulsion). It’s a story that directly addresses philosophical questions while at the same time making you remember what it’s like to be five years old (or live with a five-year-old). It’s about coping with abandonment and loss; it’s about struggling to car...

Dinosaur Comics tackles the suck fairy

Today's Dinosaur Comics takes on that painful experience, the rereading of a childhood favorite and the discovery that it's not at all the book you remembered. A lot of times in SFF circles I see this talked about in terms of tripping over biases or stereotypes that you didn't notice or question when you were younger, though sometimes people also talk tone or writing style disappointing them on a reread. But Ryan North gets at a more fundamental fact of rereading--that our experience of a sto...

An afternoon with Ndirangu Wachanga and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

If you know your mother tongue and then you widen out to learn all the languages of the world, that's empowerment. If you know all the languages of the world and not your mother tongue, that is not empowerment: that is enslavement.
--Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

I've heard the phrase "decolonizing the mind" tossed about a lot, but didn't know until last night that the book Decolonising the Mind was written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a seminal Kenyan writer who's very active in supporting mother tongues and enc...