The Reddening

That was quick. It’s only a week since my tomato harvest started to color up, and now lots of tomatoes are getting red. Last year’s batch took a lot longer; I had tomatoes slowly, slowly blushing pink until January. You may notice that I’m carefully not saying “ripening.” While the color is nice, I have […]

Re: Equal Rites

After all the grousing I’ve done about how much I dislike Terry Pratchett‘s wizard’s, I’m overdue for talking about how I like his witches, starting with Equal Rites. For one thing, it has a wonderful opening line. This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from […]

Juncos

For me, the first sign of winter is the arrival of the juncos. Sadly, the first two I’ve seen this year were the ones who weren’t faster than the cat. Happily, I’ve seen live ones, too, though they’re easy to overlook. They’re about the same size as the infinite number of fat house sparrows draining […]

Re: The Self-Aware Universe

Like Programming the Universe, I got one key idea from The Self-Aware Universe, by Amit Goswami: that the probabilistic realm of quantum potentia is the same thing as the unitive consciousness of mystic experience. Unlike the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, this book conveys a good introduction to both quantum mechanics and the unitive consciousness. I just […]

Beginnings

Currently I’m in yet another “final” round of revision on my “Pen” story, and I’ve been having a terrible fight trying to arrive at a beginning that’s good enough to satisfy me. So I’ve been rereading Nancy Kress‘s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, and listening to discussions of beginnings on Writing Excuses and The Writing Show. […]

Re: I’ll Give You My Word

In “I’ll Give You My Word,” by Diana Wynne Jones, Jethro’s little brother has a habit of looking angelic and egg-shaped while he spouts wonderful nonsense. “Ponderous plenipotential cardomum,” he would say. “In sacks.” And after a bit, “Sentenious purple coriander.” “Does that come in sacks too?” Jethro asked him. “No,” Jeremy said. “In suitcases.”

The Ripening

Here’s a simple season extender. Pick all your green tomatoes, pile them in a basket, and wait. So we’re hitting the two week mark, and there’s maybe a half dozen turning red. And then wait some more. You know, there really isn’t much more to say. Just wait.

Incandescence

I’m not sure it’s right for me to write about Incandescence, by Greg Egan. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t even make it past the 150 page mark. In fact I lost count of how many essays it took me to read the first four chapters. But I put it on my 2008 list of […]

New growth springs in fall

There isn’t a whole lot to show off outside, aside from piles of leaves and thickets of dead plants. But inside, my orchid is sending up a new flower stalk. As I mentioned last March, every year, It puts out a new leaf, and then it puts up a flower shoot. Usually when it puts […]

Re: The G.O.D. Experiments

I checked out The G.O.D Experiments, by Gary E. Schwartz partly because it was right next to God: The Failed Hypothesis in the library, and partly because it seemed like a logical followup. Followup, yes. Logical, not so much.