July 29

Yes, the river view is lovely

Evening light glows blue

Above river's edge, city profile --

But what am I doing here

In the office?

Another Fantasy/SF Con

I went to the library on Thursday to pick up a collection of short stories by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, having gotten reintroduced to their work at the 4th Street Convention last month, and picked up a flier for yet another small local Sf/Fantasy con, also held in a small local hotel (Diversicon). The draw for me was two-fold: the presence of an acquaintance from years past, a local poet who has apparently been writing (in part) for SF publications, and the presence of Joan Slonczewski, a long-time favorite SF writer, who has at long last a new book coming out.

Joan is a feminist, Quaker biology professor at, I believe, Kenyon College, who has published several SF books involving ethical dilemmas humanity will face with scientific advances in genetics, among other things.

The new novel is being marketed for the Young Adult market, which is fine with me, posits an orbiting college. Packed with ideas.

More later.

Back in Lovely Idaho

We're just about at the end of a visit to my family in southern Idaho.  As always, the time has flashed by.  My sense of myself - the young person who left the state in 1969, the person now bewilderingly graying with young adult children - keeps fluctuating back and forth.  While I'm here, too, time seems to operate in different ways, speeding and slowing elastically.

The weather has been hot and clear.  The mountains assert themselves as fixtures in my psyche, revealed again as bedrock.  Leaving again (early tomorrow morning) seems unbelievable - how can it be that I've lived for decades and aged somewhere else, somewhere rather flat and moist?

The street where I spent my first six years.

Layout tweaks - need more gladness, here. . .

I've tweaked my font sizes - it occurred to me I was having trouble reading my own blog without coming up a bit close to the screen.  It took a while, though.  Hope it's helpful.

Dinking around on the set-up - I never noticed the "stats" tab before.  Just as soon I didn't know about it - too tempting to see if anyone's reading.  Which is NOT the point of writing.

The weather was a touch crisp today - the hot, muggy, deep-in-the-heart-of-summer feeling of last week vanished with the flow of Canadian air. 

I continue to post on my daily "small stones" blog (http://daystone.blogspot.com/).  That's been a fun challenge - I have to ask myself, did I notice anything in particular during the day?  Or - what was there that was worth noticing, that perhaps I missed?  Because otherwise it's easy to slide through a day so busy or distracted or generally low-spirited that nothing has much sparkle.  And that's not really being alive, is it?

Being alive is all these youngsters are about (from this morning - and also on my "small stones" blog):

How to recapture that openness, that gladness? 

More library book reading

I finished Jo Walton's Farthing and immediately located the next in the series (Ha'Penny) across town in a St. Paul library and read it in one day.  It's difficult to explain how haunting these books are - these days when politicians use hatred as a tool to gain power.  It's been done before, by experts.

Now - to find the third book.

I'm doing my daily small stones thing

You're welcome to take a peek at my daily "small stones" (and photos) of July days.

http://daystone.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, it is sure hard to keep up the energy at work.  The long weekend (even longer, as I had Tuesday off) was delicious - I read numbers of library books. 

Discovery: Jo Walton - impossible to describe how smart and imaginative this woman's writing is.  I've just started Farthing - a typical murder mystery in a gracious English manor in the 1950s, but . . . over in Europe, Hitler won.  So everything is different, but subtly so.