Iain Banks, in 1988 (!), correctly predicting the problems of suspense writing in the age of smart phones:
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in ( Read more... )

(To the tune of Shake it Off. I blame cortex for inspiring me ( Read more... )

When E.’s new friend from school comes over to our house, the two of them like to spend half their time playing, and the other half sitting and reading books. Which is awesome.

It was a busy year. Nora finished kindergarten and started first grade. She's become an avid reader, finishing over 200 books (mostly chapter books she read herself!) during the library's summer reading program, and winning our branch's drawing to go to the "Breakfast of Champions" in the Space Needle along with the winners and librarians from ( Read more... )

a poem by Roy Batty

Oh, the things I have seen! Oh, the stuff I perceive!
I've seen things that you people wouldn't believe.
Some tall and some small, and some medium-size.
Oh, if only you saw what I've seen with your eyes!

I saw attack ships burning, off the shoulder of Orion.
(If you see Orion ships for sale, think twice before you ( Read more... )

I'm still studying French every day, but since you can't study French all the time, I needed another hobby. So now I'm learning Norwegian.

We're going to Norway this summer to visit some of my relatives, and I ( Read more... )

I haven't really posted in a while, so I'm going to try to write some catch-up posts about stuff that happened over the past year. First up: if you have talked to me at all recently, I've probably mentioned my new-found obsession with the French language.
It started when Salal and I planned a trip to Paris last spring to celebrate our tenth ( Read more... )

For the past six months or so, Nora has been wanting to make money selling lemonade. I managed to convince her that not many people would buy lemonade in December in Seattle. But I told her that in the summer she could probably sell quite a lot if she set up a stand at my parents' house on a heavily trafficked street near the beach.

Last weekend ( Read more... )

As we start to think about school choice, I find it helpful to remind myself that (a) decisions we make now can still be changed later, and (b) real learning is not confined to or limited by the classroom.

Eleanor enjoys seeing the moon (a rare treat for a girl in cloudy Seattle, with an early bedtime to boot), so when I glimpsed a third-quarter moon through the skylight last night, I pointed it out to her, then pointed our telescope through the skylight for ( Read more... )