And all the angels and all the wizards black and white

My cousin Tristen has been visiting with his grandparents since Sunday, so yesterday we made a particular field trip: I took him to the New England Aquarium, which he had never seen and I hadn't visited since college at least. I am delighted to report that little has changed except for the better; I miss the blacklit wall of sharks, but there's an exhibit now of weedy and leafy sea dragons, the electric eel has a much nicer environment than it did when I watched it stun its prey, and the three-story ocean tank was exactly as I remember it, morays and nurse sharks and green sea turtle and all.¹ The seals were silver as tetradrachms and sleek in the water. There are not too many screens. I fed Tristen shrimp at Legal Sea Foods and then we both came home and collapsed, which was sort of the state I remained in for the rest of the day. Watched In the Beginning (1998) with Eric and the rest of the Babylon 5 people. Wished Nickelodeon had released a soundtrack album for Avatar: The Last Airbender. I had better be able to start making up sleep for Readercon soon.

Yesterday's mail, however, brought me contributor's copies of Sybil's Garage #7, in which my poem "Candle for the Tetragrammaton" appears alongside work by Amelia Shackleford, Tom Crosshill, Sam Ferree, Hal Duncan, Amal El-Mohtar, Anil Menon, and Alex Dally McFarlane, just to name some of my favorites. The after-hours reading at Readercon was too crowded for me to get into,¹ but the contents don't suffer from being read off the page; the issue has been beautifully put together, and for the first time it's bound like a journal instead of a half-legal 'zine. If you want to pick up a copy, it's right there on Amazon. Its closing epigraph is the same proverb that titled my poem: נר ה' נשמת אדם. The human spirit is the candle of God.

Off to meet wind05 and Sabitha and their friend. I could carry my Brandeis umbrella and ensure it doesn't rain.

1. I'm glad the Aquarium keeps a timeline; I just wish it were more specific than architecture and temporary exhibits. I didn't remember the giant green anemones at all.

2. I'm being entirely literal. I think it was held in mattkressel's room on the last night of the con. Standing room only. I stuck it out for the duration of Crosshill's "Thinking Woman's Crop of Fools" and then decided—I know it's passé—I liked being able to breathe. I had already heard tithenai perform "Schehirrazade" at the Rhysling Awards.

Chase the dog star over the sea

He walked, and sailed, under an arching web of stars moving slowly east to west from their rising to their setting points, and knew them so well—more than 100 of them by name, and their associated stars by colour, light and habit—that he seemed to hold a whole cosmos in his head, with himself, determined, stocky and unassuming, at the nub of the celestial action.

His memory for a blessing and a compass: Mau Piailug, who steered by the stars.