Quiz for You!

I missed only the one on the Senate, though I was close!

Your News IQ

How'd you do?

Linkage

Yesterday was the kid's very last day of high school. Is she pleased? My, yes.

Although she confessed last night that she was a little sad too. "Do you want to go back to high school?" I asked, curiously.

Her expression grew horrified. "Oh hell no!"

Meanwhile, today is my last day of Spring 2017 -- I'm giving my last exams, I mean. I still have to go to commencement on Saturday. (The kid is not attending her high school commencement, for which I am more grateful than I can say.) And I also have a mountain of grading.

While I am grading? Some links for you:

In Dutch Harbor, Alaska, bald eagles have become so common the local post office has to arm its patrons with helmets to keep them safe as they go in and out of the building. That's just one of the interesting accommodations the locals are making to live with their massive colony of eagles. Remember when bald eagles were endangered?  Me, too.

What I'm Reading Now

It's the end of the semester, the GOP is more and more brazen about revealing their true motives and natures, and I continue to read obsessively.

Though yesterday we did go to Fayetteville to celebrate the kid's birthday -- she's nineteen, if you can believe that. I cannot. She used to be five. She used to be seven. Once she was thirteen. What is this behavior, turning nineteen? Yet here she is, an adult, earning money with her art, heading off to the university. Kids. Whattaya gonna do.

What I'm reading:


Claire North, End of the Day

I can't decide about this one. It's been getting excellent reviews and good reactions all over the net, and there were some amazing moments in it. Plus the premise is just great -- Charlie gets hired to be the Harbinger of Death. That is, Death (or rather, Death's agent) sends him out to deliver certain gifts to people. Maybe these people are going to die, or maybe not. (The gift can be a warning or a courtesy, Charlie explains.)

A Few Things You Can Do To Fight Back Against TrumpCare

(1) You can donate to those running against the GOP legislators who voted for the vile and cruel bill. Go to this link to learn more: ActBlue

(2) You can take broader actions: Enough is Enough

Trump and his rich friends are in this to loot the country. Don't let it happen.

End of the Semester

My last day of teaching was yesterday. Next week is exams and grading, plus commencement on Saturday.  This semester went well, I'm pleased to say -- all four of my classes were filled with students interested in doing good work.

TrumpCare

When I was a young graduate student, living on my stipend and what I had saved from my three years working at the library, I looked at the cost of the medical insurance which was available to us as students -- which cost nearly six hundred dollars a year, or a tenth of my stipend, for what was, after all, not very good insurance. Basically, unless you got cancer, it covered nothing at all. And what, after all, were the odds that I would get cancer?

Hey, Look What You Can Buy!

It's the May/June issue of F&SF with my story in it!

Available from Amazon, among other places. Check your local bookstores, also!

Clockwork!

Your regular reminder that you should be reading my kid's comic, Fragile

This is one of the main characters, Clockwork, who just revealed a plot twist!

Tornadoes!

No actual tornadoes, but our local weather guys keep threatening tornadoes, and the sirens keep going off. It's very exciting.

Last night in the middle of the night, several large storms moved through, and the tornado sirens went off two separate times. The kid and I untethered our laptops and huddled together in the hallway (we have long since stopped going to the tornado shelter, which is a mile away, at the local elementary school). The kid was playing D&D with her D&D group, who offered to stop playing for the tornado emergency, but since she could untether the laptop there was no need.

I was monitoring the movement of the storm cell on my laptop. Luckily we didn't lose power, since if we had we could have lost our wifi. (I did not mention this to the kid, who takes her weekly D&D session very seriously.)

Dr. Skull refused to be alarmed. He just rolled over and kept on sleeping.

More storms on the way, the weather guys say cheerily.  They love tornadoes almost as much as they love blizzards and ice storms.

Links!

One week until the end of the semester. Well, two if we count finals. Two and a half if we count finals and graduation. But then I will have, for the first time in forever, a moderately long break, since I'm not teaching until Summer II.

I'ma spend the entire seven weeks writing and sleeping. Sleeping so hard.

Meanwhile, I've been working hard with my grammar class on Reed-Kellogg diagramming. If you never learned RKD, you might not enjoy this post as much as I did: Antoine Dodson Saves My Class.

Soda Bread

Here's what you can do when you get enough sleep:

It's delicious!

SLEEP

OMFG, I slept twelve hours last night.

Apparently what I need is a solid thunderstorm followed by driving rain. Then I will sleep so hard.

The cats did not appreciate this sleep fest. Jasper especially kept smacking me in the ear. "Hey. Hey! Why you still asleep? Are you dead there? Hey!"

Tuesday Links for You

I slept again -- six hours! -- but I'm still worn out. Soon the semester will be done, and I'll be able to sleep late if I want to (and if I can).

Meanwhile, have some links!


This one, the Language of Doggos, hits both my language innovation buttons and my doggo buttons. Non-stop squee!

More on language innovation -- the Language Log posts on Singular They

What I'm Reading

I slept last night, which was pleasant. Not eight entire hours, mind you -- but six and a half. Better than the past five nights! Tonight I'm going for seven.

Meanwhile, what with averaging three and four hours a night (going to bed at five or six in the morning and waking up at ten or so) I've been doing a ton of reading.

Reading all night is a pleasure I had forgotten. It's different from the usual reading I do, which is a couple hours here or there, between prepping for class, or while I'm waiting to pick the kid up from school, or while I'm eating. Reading all night is seven or eight hours of sustained non-stop reading, broken only by forays into the kitchen for more tea or another sliced-up apple, Then it's back to my big comfy chair under the lamp by the open window, where Jasper cat is waiting grumpily to climb back into my lap. (She does not approve of these interruptions to her sleep.) The Fort, at least my part of it, is very quiet at night, not even any noise from the interstate; and the nights have been cool. These long hours of reading have been blissful -- almost worth the exhaustion the next day.

What I've been reading:


Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

This is an amazing book. I hardly know how to describe it. The plot is simple -- a young scientist comes of age and builds her career. (The book is based directly on Jahren's own life, to the extent that it's almost more memoir than novel.) The power of the novel lies in the writing and in Jahren's insights about not just trees and plants, but about the humans in her life.

Insomnia

I'm having one of my periodic bouts of insomnia.

Ever since I can remember, and I'm talking since I was tiny, I've had what I have since learned is called delayed sleep phase disorder -- my body has a dysregulation of its biological clock, basically, such that I'm out of phase with the circadian rhythm of the planet. I need a thirty hour day, and here I am on this 24 hour planet.

I can remember being three years old, back when we were still living in the trailer, wandering around in the deep of night while everyone slept around me. I was too little to read then, and I mostly just climbed on the furniture and looked through the windows, out at the other trailers, ghosty in the moonlight.