This is the blog of Kelly Jennings, science fiction writer. Bibliography here: https://delagarbibliography.blogspot.com/
It was 56 degrees when I took Shamus to the dog park at dawn. I actually had to wear my hoodie. Nice!
We're going to have a five or six day stretch when the highs are in the low 90's, but then it looks like fall will actually arrive. My favorite time of year!
False fall is over. Highs in the 90s this week.
I was almost ready to break out my sweaters. I did bake bread during the unseasonable cool spell, so there's that.
Meanwhile, here is Shamus playing with his herding ball. He is so happy.
It's the first day it's been both cool and not-humid, so I've opened the windows. The cats are pleased. The dog is extremely confused. I think maybe he didn't know windows could open.
Because of the screened porch, I have this by my workstation:
It's lovely. I am writing in a cool breeze and birdsong and occasional crowing from the rooster next door.
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| Shamus confused by the open window |
It's 70 degrees here today, with a low tonight in the 50s.
I love false fall!
Back up into the high 80s next week, but only sixteen more days of summer.
One thing I have noticed about Fayetteville in 2025 (as compared to essentially everywhere else I have lived since about 1995) is that there are kids everywhere. I'm not saying kids with parents -- these are kids from about the age of ten on up to their mid-teens running the streets and parks in small packs or on their own. No adult in sight.
(And before anyone clutches their pearls, these kids are almost universally polite to any adult (me) who they intersect with, though in general they do not interact with adults unless one of them (me) gets in their way with my dog.)
It makes sense that so many kids here would be out on their own -- we have free public transportation (though its range is limited to the university area and areas where most students live -- but that's also where many of the parks are) and free bikes and scooters that anyone can use and miles and miles and miles of bike trails they can range through the city on.
In Fort Smith, on the other hand, there weren't even sidewalks in most places, and anywhere a kid might want to go (a park, a theater, a library) was distant enough that they had to be driven to it. There were public buses, but they cost $1.25 each way and only ran from 8:00 to 5:00, and also only went to places like Wal-Mart. In the parks, there were small children at the playground with their parents, but any age from five to twenty might as well not have existed.
Also, in Fort Smith, everyone hated kids, from what I could tell. At least on the local FB page, everyone was always complaining about children doing horrible things like playing outside or riding their bikes in the street. (See above, no sidewalks.)
Here in Fayetteville, people seem to like kids, though also they don't pay them a lot of attention. Kids are yet another group that lives here, is the attitude, and isn't that cool. It really improves the experience of living in the city, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because they're part of humanity, and it's nice to see a full range of humans? Maybe because it's how a city should be, and the life of children should be.
Anyway, 10/10, all cities should be like this.
As always, I'm reading SF for review. One really excellent book I read for review is a collection of short stories by Theodora Goss, Letters from an Imaginary Country. I won't review it here because I'm reviewing it there, but I recommend it highly.
Books I'm not reviewing for SF outlets:
Joan Austen-Leigh, A Visit to Highbury: Another View of Emma.
I came across this one on the shelf at our library, saw it was an epistolary novel (my favorite!), as well as being fan-fiction for Emma. I was sold. It's a story told as a series of letters between Mrs. Goddard, who you will remember runs the girl's boarding school in Highbury, the one Harriet attends, and her sister, whom she hasn't seen in seventeen years. Aside from Harriet, there are two romances, a ship captain lost at sea, and a couple of orphans. Just the sort of novel a Jane Austen heroine would have loved, in other words.
Joan Austen-Leigh is descended from one of Jane Austen's brothers, and started out writing fan fiction for a Jane Austen society "magazine," which is to say several mimeographed pages stapled together and distributed at the society meetings. This is, of course, how many writers in the science fiction world got their start, though they were usually writing slash fiction rather than straight romances. Anyway! I liked this one a lot, and am now on the lookout for Austen-Leigh's other books, which our library does not have.
Anne Tyler, Three Days in June
I checked this out of the library some time ago, I think, but I didn't read past the first few pages. I can't remember why. It's a perfectly acceptable Anne Tyler novel -- what my kid calls "family books," which is to say books about families and their lives. Here, the only daughter of a divorced couple is getting married. We follow the events of the three days in June around the marriage -- the day before, the day of, the day after. It's very readable, as all Tyler's books are. I liked the cat. And the ending is nice, if not exactly a surprise.
It's also really short, so you can read it in a few hours. 6/10, if you've never read Tyler, don't start here.
Anne McCaffery, Various Dragonriders of Pern books.
I loved these when I was in my teens, and my library has several of them, so when I was lately suffering with the kidney stone, I checked a bunch out via e-books and read them straight through. They are what my kid calls mid, not gonna lie, but they held my attention enough that I read I think eight of them before I'd had enough -- Dragonflight, Dragonquest, Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, Dragondrums, The White Dragon, and about half of Renegades of Pern. Oh, and Masterharper of Pern. Seven and a half, I guess that is.
If you have somehow managed to miss these books, they are about a planet, Pern, where every 200 years 'thread,' or a vicious kind of fungus, falls from the sky (crossing through space from another planet, except cold kills it, so don't ask me how). The early colonists used genetic engineering to make a local species, a kind of flying lizard, large enough to ride on, and also it spits flame. So when thread is falling, dragon riders fly out and burn it from the sky. This is science fantasy rather than science fiction, but the whole special boy/girl chosen by the dragons and lauded as a hero thing works well with the soap opera plots. I also liked the Harper Hall parts of the books a lot, as I recall.
Anyway, if you need something mid about dragons to read, there are a ton of these.
Another successful cabinet meeting with Dear Leader
— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) August 26, 2025 at 5:46 PM
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Surely even those in the MAGA cult are ashamed of this sort of groveling from their leaders?
No, what am I saying? Members of the cult are shameless.
Weather guy says we're getting yet another "false fall" next week. Highs in the low 80s and 70s.
And there are only two more weeks of summer.
I mean, good for Mother Jones, but using facts and evidence to argue with bigots is pointless. If they could be convinced by the truth, they wouldn't be the lying scum they are.
Bigots all over the MAGA world are pissing themselves with glee over the news that the latest school shooter is trans.
To them, this killing is wonderful, the best news all year, because it proves that trans people are terrorists. Or something.
Of course, cis men do most of the mass shooting -- 97.7% according to this source. White nationalists, white supremacists, men's rights activists, conservatives shoot children and women and their own families -- these bigots shrug that off.
In fact, if the shooter in MN had been a white cis man, not a single one of these bigots would be saying a word about the shooting today.
When a cis man shoots 27 children in a classroom, why, it's thoughts and prayers, and no one could have prevented this, and our fear about the lives of children doesn't trump their right to bear arms, and usually they don't even bother to comment.
When a trans person shoots someone, they start having orgasms of glee. Any excuse to hate. Any excuse to harm.
I started to say they don't care about dead children in a school shooting. But in fact, they do care, this time. They are delighted by these deaths. They are delighted that those children are dead: it gives them a chance to spew their vile lies.
May they burn in the hell they are creating.
So I was on my way to mail something to Social Security (an important form which cannot be done online, God knows why) when my kid texted me: Mom, there's an active shooter on campus.
Those of you who are parents will appreciate my terror. I was in traffic, driving toward the post office, and could not respond at once. I found a place to pull over and asked him where he was, where the shooter was, if he was safe.
He was locked down in the building he had been teaching in; the shooter was in the library (so we thought) which is close to where he was. But they were in a fifth floor room and there were no windows in the door. I told him to stay put. He made me promise not to come on campus.
I don't think I could have gotten near campus anyway, though at that point I was maybe half a mile away, parking in the parking lot of our recycling facility. I sat and panicked for about half an hour, hunting the internet for hints of what was happening. Police cars and fire engines sped past, lights but no sirens -- to keep from alarming the shooter, I surmised.
My kid was as scared as I was, and no one on FB or Reddit or the online news sites knew anything. Or rather, they all were posting a lot, none of it sensible. There was another shooter at the nearby Walmart; there was one in the parking garage by the Union; there was one in the art building.
I finally went ahead and went home, where I watched about six live reports simultaneously and followed the Reddit thread that had reports from people on campus. A lot of wild rumors, and other people saying not to repeat wild rumors, that that caused panic.
Eventually the Fayetteville police held a tiny press conference, a young corporal saying they had found no shooter, no shots had been fired, no one was injured. There had been about sixty calls, she said, but no confirmed sightings of a shooter and no one had actually heard any shooting. They had cleared the library and were clearing other buildings.
About half an hour after that, it was confirmed that there was no shooter. It was a very mean hoax. Eventually my kid was allowed out of the building he was in and he walked home.
Dr. Skull slept through the whole thing.
Then later that evening, I had to take Dr. Skull to the ER because his home health nurse and his PCP thought he might be having cardiac issues. (Spoilers: he was not.)
Today I am exhausted and having leftover traumatic twitching. Everything is fine, but tell that to my adrenal glands.
I did take the dog to the dog park this morning and let him run around with another border collie mix. That helped a little.
We had reports of an active shooter on the university campus, and everything locked down. My kid was locked in his building for an hour and a half. As it turned out, no shooter at all. Someone SWATting the campus.
I'm glad no one got hurt and there was no actual shooter. I'm still traumatized. My kid is more so, of course.
Each month, here in our progressive little city, the power company sends me a breakdown of how much energy I'm expending where.
I'm not entirely sure what I'm meant to do with this information, but it's nice to have. I suppose if I was spending a lot on, say, running my laundry, I could Take Steps. I could also maybe spend less on cooling, but honestly I have the thermostat at a barely-tolerable level as it is.
I had the procedure for my kidney stone done yesterday. An outpatient "procedure" is what they call it. Now Dr Skull and I are both recovering from different medical issues. I hobble around moaning, he hobbles around swearing.
"Is this going to be our life from now on?" Dr Skull said. "One ER visit after the next?"
However, I am here to report that Medicare A plus Medicare B plus Medicare G = a functional medical system.
Medicare D, which is the drug part, is some help, but it does not pay for things like the nausea medication I needed to keep from vomiting non-stop with the pain of the stone. That was almost 90 dollars, and also didn't really work all that well.
