What's Up?

Here, it is just over two weeks before the kid goes off to her first year of college. (Wasn't it just yesterday she was starting her first year of high school? WTAH.) We're occupied with the incidentals of getting her prepped for college -- dealing with financial issues, buying her supplies, thinking about the gear she'll need.

Trump's America

Here's what Trump tweeted before the election:

Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2016

Linkage

My editor has given me the next set of edits for my new novel, Fault Lines; so expect light posting for the next few months.

Meanwhile! Have some links!

Conservatives are weird

As Louie C.K. notes, the most dangerous person in a woman's life is the man she's in relationship with.

What I'm Reading Now

I've sent my novel edits off (the first round), but I'm still teaching two sections of comp, with a different prep for each. So I'm busier than usual.

Nevertheless! I'm reading and reading.

These are the books I've finished lately:

Cooking

I've been living on tabouli for the past few weeks. It's too hot here to actually cook, plus the tomatoes from my little garden are all coming ripe.

Here's the recipe I'm using now: Tabouli.

Also, a recipe for red sauce.

Fault Lines

 From Candlemark & Gleam:

Velocity Wrachant, owner and captain of the merchant starship Susan Calvin, is broke and stranded on a Drift station, when she is offered what seems like a simple job: to escort young Brontë Ikeda into Republic space and help her retrieve several bonded-labor children.

While Velocity is tempted by the fee Brontë offers – which is enough to clear her debts – she also knows that Ikeda House, a powerful Combine, just had a major coup; and both she and her crew suspect the story they’re being told by the Combine child is not the whole story.

Velocity takes the gig, but it takes her into the heart of Combine territory, a place she fled almost twenty years earlier. What is the price she and her shipmates may end up paying for this job?

More here.

July? Again?

There are only two things I like about July.

(1) Homegrown tomatoes

(2) In less than 12 weeks, it will be fall

Today we have a temperature in the 90's and a humidity in the 60's and all I want to do is drink seltzer and mope.

What I'm Reading Now

Since I had revisions of my novel and am teaching two classes in Summer II, my reading rate has dropped off just a bit. Also my physician gave me some Valium for my anxiety, which has helped so much.

But! Not much Valium -- just enough to use when the anxiety is the worst. So I'm still self-medicating with excessive novel reading.

Here's what I've read over the past week or so:

Links

I've started teaching Summer II. One class meets at 8:00 a.m. and the other at 10.20. They're two different comp classes (Comp I and Comp II), which means I'm doing two different preps.

I'm busy, is what I'm saying, and also exhausted, since in order to teach at 8:00 I have to be awake by 6:00. And even though I mean to go to sleep at 10:00 p.m. like a sane person, every single night I look up from what I'm working on (usually writing fiction by then) to find that somehow we have skipped straight from 7:00 p.m. to midnight.

DIY Dryer Repair

Inspired by a post at Nicole & Maggie's blog, I took apart my dryer venting system yesterday, using a vacuum and leaf-blower to clear (what I hope is) all the lint out of both the internal and external venting line.

The W/D hookups in our current house are the worst ever. Originally, this house (built I think in the mid-1960s) had no hookups. At some point, one of the previous owners added a laundry space. But rather than locating it, sensibly, against an exterior wall, they located the laundry room (really a closet) in the middle of the house. Thus, our vent line has to travel about sixteen feet underground -- yes, they dug an underground line, under the house's slab -- to emerge in a dug-out hole exactly where the AC vents its water.

Here Comes the Dragon

In the kid's comic, Fragile, the dragon has arrived. (The dragon is the best.)

Remember, you can support our young artist on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month!

I'm Not Blushing...

I swear I don't know Leslie Gornstein. OTOH, she obviously has excellent taste in short fiction:

Think you can't write brilliant short spec fiction in under 5,000 words?  @delagar's short in @fandsf will prove you wrong. So, so wrong.

— Leslie Gornstein (@famefatalesays) July 4, 2017

Yes, This is the REAL Problem

Trump's EPA administrator is axing rules against dumping toxic chemicals in our environment, Trump's Secretary of Education is bent on destroying public schools, the GOP-dominated Congress is destroying Medicaid, and Trump himself has pulled us out of the Paris Accords -- but this is the real threat to America's children.

Seriously, how much of a wanker do you need to be to write a post like this?

Scott Pruitt has rolled back 30 environmental rules in the past 4 months, with apparently 0 regard for children's nervous systems, the earth pic.twitter.com/N3E8HWI1EF

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) July 2, 2017

Saturday Links

Still working on the novel revisions. Have some links!


I like this LJ post on Being Jewish


What it would take to replace the government-backed social safety net with private charity