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Oh, we're bound to Mother Carey where she feeds her chicks at sea
My father and I are approximately three boards away from finishing the ceiling in the summer kitchen. There is a lot of sawdust around the house right now.
The relatives left on Saturday. The game Tristan wanted to play all morning was the sea and shape-changing: he was born on land, he instructed me, with a pearl on his forehead that told him how he would change into a mermaid if he ever fell into the water, and I was to be the sea-dragon who spotted him walking on the shore one day and seized him and dragged him down to my cave of coral, and his hair and his scales would turn as red as seaweed, so that he could hide from predators; he would think that I wanted to eat him, but instead I would protect him from giant squid and viperfish and send out seagulls and petrels to all the seas of the earth for news of his mother, who had been lost in a tsunami ("because the earth shook and she floated far away to the farthest sea"), and if we happened to swim too near the polar icebergs, I would fend off the killer whales. I swear he didn't get any of this from me. Later he decided that he might turn into a sea-dragon, too, and his scales would be "as red as fall and as red as apples," almost the color of a polished stone that I gave him, a tumbled piece of agate, because he kept running his fingers through the bowl of them and asking, "Where did this one come from? And this one? And this one?" My aunt and uncle are thinking that they may try to take him to Maine before the summer ends, so he can see where his great-grandparents lived, and if so I am definitely coming along. He is an amazing cousin.
I meant to post about Sunshine after![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ericmvan and I saw it on Saturday night, and instead I transcribed songs from Mission of Burma's The Obliterati. I did not find it a perfect film—and the print we saw had jagged black flaws persistently flickering across the screen, which was less than helpful to a story whose iconic image is the human gaze dissolving into light—but its resonances were Ursula K. Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," greygirlbeast's The Dry Salvages, and Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," and it was absolutely worth seeing in theaters. So far, this has been a very decent summer for movies.
My brother turned twenty-two yesterday, but since he now has an apartment and a job and a work-week, he came up on Sunday and my mother made him some kind of incredibly, terrifyingly dense chocolate cake with butter frosting, whose theobromine content I am almost sure must be illegal in some states. I presented him with an IOU for the new draco cantabridgia centralis T-shirt from Pandemonium and my parents had gift-wrapped him a cast-iron griddle, which made him very happy. He is developing into a person who cooks seriously; he has inherited our father's ability to look at five disparate ingredients and half an hour later have a restaurant-quality meal, while I have inherited our mother's ability to read recipes. On the other hand, I can parse Akkadian verbs . . . ?
And on Monday,strange_selkie and darthrami came down from Vermont for the day and introduced me to piping-hot cream puffs, sandrylene, ms_ntropy, genarti, and Upstairs on the Square, in more or less that order. Any restaurant that has leopard-print staircases, tables shaped like purple pianos, and "GO RED SOX!" painted on the six-foot angled mirrors over the bar, has an immense confidence in itself which I can only appreciate. And the food was appropriately impressive; I now have a context for zucchini (along with the eggplant recipe I got last weekend from schreibergasse) that I will actually eat. There was much excellent conversation. There was oddly inaudible salsa music, which you only noticed after you'd already started sort of nodding to its beat. There were light fixtures made out of tomato soup cans. And this silly quiz is entirely ms_ntropy's fault:
You know, that's not even very implausible. There totally is ballad porn.
The relatives left on Saturday. The game Tristan wanted to play all morning was the sea and shape-changing: he was born on land, he instructed me, with a pearl on his forehead that told him how he would change into a mermaid if he ever fell into the water, and I was to be the sea-dragon who spotted him walking on the shore one day and seized him and dragged him down to my cave of coral, and his hair and his scales would turn as red as seaweed, so that he could hide from predators; he would think that I wanted to eat him, but instead I would protect him from giant squid and viperfish and send out seagulls and petrels to all the seas of the earth for news of his mother, who had been lost in a tsunami ("because the earth shook and she floated far away to the farthest sea"), and if we happened to swim too near the polar icebergs, I would fend off the killer whales. I swear he didn't get any of this from me. Later he decided that he might turn into a sea-dragon, too, and his scales would be "as red as fall and as red as apples," almost the color of a polished stone that I gave him, a tumbled piece of agate, because he kept running his fingers through the bowl of them and asking, "Where did this one come from? And this one? And this one?" My aunt and uncle are thinking that they may try to take him to Maine before the summer ends, so he can see where his great-grandparents lived, and if so I am definitely coming along. He is an amazing cousin.
I meant to post about Sunshine after
ericmvan and I saw it on Saturday night, and instead I transcribed songs from Mission of Burma's The Obliterati. I did not find it a perfect film—and the print we saw had jagged black flaws persistently flickering across the screen, which was less than helpful to a story whose iconic image is the human gaze dissolving into light—but its resonances were Ursula K. Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," greygirlbeast's The Dry Salvages, and Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," and it was absolutely worth seeing in theaters. So far, this has been a very decent summer for movies.My brother turned twenty-two yesterday, but since he now has an apartment and a job and a work-week, he came up on Sunday and my mother made him some kind of incredibly, terrifyingly dense chocolate cake with butter frosting, whose theobromine content I am almost sure must be illegal in some states. I presented him with an IOU for the new draco cantabridgia centralis T-shirt from Pandemonium and my parents had gift-wrapped him a cast-iron griddle, which made him very happy. He is developing into a person who cooks seriously; he has inherited our father's ability to look at five disparate ingredients and half an hour later have a restaurant-quality meal, while I have inherited our mother's ability to read recipes. On the other hand, I can parse Akkadian verbs . . . ?
And on Monday,
strange_selkie and darthrami came down from Vermont for the day and introduced me to piping-hot cream puffs, sandrylene, ms_ntropy, genarti, and Upstairs on the Square, in more or less that order. Any restaurant that has leopard-print staircases, tables shaped like purple pianos, and "GO RED SOX!" painted on the six-foot angled mirrors over the bar, has an immense confidence in itself which I can only appreciate. And the food was appropriately impressive; I now have a context for zucchini (along with the eggplant recipe I got last weekend from schreibergasse) that I will actually eat. There was much excellent conversation. There was oddly inaudible salsa music, which you only noticed after you'd already started sort of nodding to its beat. There were light fixtures made out of tomato soup cans. And this silly quiz is entirely ms_ntropy's fault:You know, that's not even very implausible. There totally is ballad porn.
no subject
Between the shape-changing and the earthquake, totally.