So, here’s a crazy thing. I’m writing this on a Wednesday, and as I left work today I was actually feeling a little excited about my job. This shouldn’t be a crazy thing. I work in Astronomy, as a Scientific Programmer, which is a combination of two things I really, really like and am good at. However, for a variety of reasons, not all of them to do directly with my job (you can probably guess one or two), the…
Yay, I’ve made something pretty for my house, or rather two somethings. Two pretty pillow covers for the pillows on my couch. (Actually, from the picture below you can see that I had the bases for three, but I’ve only got two of them complete right now and also only two couch pillows, so that third one might languish, unfinished for…a bit. Not forever, though. It was too very satisfying sewing with such yummy colors; I know I’ll want to…
Alright. I think it’s about time I tell you all about what might very well be my very favorite movie: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, starring Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black, among many other excellent actors. For those, poor souls, who might not be familiar, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle came out in 2017 and is sort-of-a-reboot-of and sort-of-a-sequel-to** 1995’s Jumanji starring Robin Williams and Kirsten Dunst. In both Jumanji’s, the premise is a game, which turns itself into a…
These stories are all apropos of nothing. I offer them merely for the sort of entertainment one gains from truly random things. 1.1 How I learned coincidences that span the globe are just like other coincidences. So, it happened like this. It was my senior year of college, and someone in my belly-dance class had invited me to tag along to a hafla, which is just Arabic for ‘party’ and was pretty much just a group of other college students…
“Your girls are so lucky.” It was after a TaeKwonDo class, and I was dropping off a classmate home, telling her about my little girl who had (still has!) such a talent for drawing. “What do you mean?” I asked. “We weren’t allowed to focus on anything that wasn’t ‘serious’ when I was growing up,” she said. “Sports were okay, but not art.” And I was kind of gob-smacked. Up until that point, I had really never conceived of a…
(*) Well, dang. It looks like mental fatigue is a beast I still haven’t licked yet. That’s the thought that crossed my mind last year after I’d been hammering away at assembling a formal code update and found myself (once again) feeling extremely mentally rundown. Except that ‘mental fatigue’ and ‘run down’ really don’t cover what it feels like, and, taking another look at that sentiment from this perspective of a year later, there’s also this whole extra layer of…
So, I wanted to do a post that was going to be, sorta kinda, about one of my favorite fairy tales. But then I realized there were a lot of different layers to that, not even necessarily relating to said fairy tale at all, and that what I really need to post about was Video Stores! I spent a non-insubstantial fraction of my formative years in video stores. From the time when I was little and slammed my sister’s hand…
Okay, it’s time for another post about writing (because I like to write about writing, apparently). This one is about story ideas! Story ideas are lots of fun and can feel really precious, but are actually pretty darned easy to come by. This, of course, is not news. It seems like nearly every writer’s blog I’ve read has some variation on the idea that story ideas are the easy part of writing (the actual writing is way more work!), or…
Happy Solstice! The 2024 new year is coming soon, and with it, I’ll be hitting the 1-year mark of having this blog. Therefore, for the final, regular (non-weekly-garden) post of the year, I’d like to do a look-back of what I’ve done with this blog over the course of 2023. When it comes to any sort of hobby, I’m definitely prone to, and enjoy, tabulating the various stuff associated with it. And so, without further ado: General Accomplishments 1. I…
Okay. We’re closing in on the end of the year. Which is the first year I’ve had this blog. Which I started in large part because I wanted a place to be able to talk about my writing (and my garden). You’ve seen my garden, so now, the least I can do is tell you how my writing’s gone this year. The short answer is: Not as great as I was hoping. But, I didn’t do nothing. So, I’ll give…