The cat'll sleep in the mailbox and we'll never go to town

[sovay]

Today is my niece's birthday observed. Her real birthday was Thursday, the same as Ada Lovelace. She loves buses and trucks and earth-moving machinery, so her present from me and derspatchel is a sturdy oversized board book of Virginia Lee Burton's Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939). She is two years old.

Last night was my family's annual Hanukkah party, complete with experimental frying. This year's discovery: deep-fried pickled fiddleheads are delicious. skygiants and genarti brought a jar of the ferns, my brother provided the batter and the oil, the results were pronounced something like fried clams from a photosynthetic planet and vanished rapidly. A friend of my mother's brought a half dozen donuts from Union Square Donuts and we meta-fried one of the plain kind at schreibergasse's suggestion. I think just over twenty people showed up. It was hectic, but I got my one traditional latke and caught some nice conversations in between making sure everyone had silverware and something to drink. Matthew gave me a box of Magic cards from a recent expansion based on Greek myths. I am absolutely delighted that I now own cards with names like "Sea God's Revenge," "Curse of the Swine," and "Ill-Tempered Cyclops." If there is an Odysseus analogue, I will have to find a copy. Ditto Sirens. [edit] "Shipwreck Singer." Excellent.

I feel like I've done nothing but run around for the last two or three days doing holiday-preparation things, but I saw Spotlight (2015) with Rob on Wednesday and made dinner with sairaali and ratatosk on Thursday night and that was pretty cool. Cornel Wilde's Storm Fear (1955) is a fascinatingly rough not-noir that I would like the sleep reserves to talk about sometime.

Courtesy of yhlee: a Roman nereid riding a sea-bull. If I had thousands of dollars to spend on jewelry, that is the sort of thing I would own.

Comments

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

*This year's discovery: deep-fried pickled fiddleheads are delicious.*

...wow. I want this in my local chip shop, pronto. And that ring!

That's a fantastic card!

[sovay]

...wow. I want this in my local chip shop, pronto.

If you have a friend who can deep-fry without hurting themselves, I recommend it strongly! The flavor is sweet, sharp, and darkly green. I would even make them at other times of year.

And that ring!

It isn't, of course, but the design looks like it should be Cretan: Poseidon the bull under the earth, making the earth shake with his bellow; this is the early influence of Mary Renault, also as I think about it perhaps Peter S. Beagle.

That's a fantastic card!

I really am going to look for a copy in my local card store, which happens to be my local science fiction and fantasy book stores. They had a holiday fair today which I could not attend due to being at my niece's birthday observed, but it's not like they frown on people giving them money during the rest of the season. It looks like the right kind of siren, classically winged. The other Odyssean ones look like this. So, yes, Greek myth with the serial numbers filed off, but I am enjoying it. Other neat stuff in the deck includes Satyr Hedonist, Lost in a Labyrinth, Boon of Erebos, Sip of Hemlock, and Anvilwrought Raptor, which especially looks like something Hephaistos would design. I like the face on the Scholar of Athreos. The Shipbreaker Kraken is from the wrong mythos, but it looks good doing it.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Hold up: Brunchma genarti?

[genarti]

Brunchma genarti yes!

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

YOU ARE EVERYWHERE

[genarti]

APPARENTLY SO. I lurk in the night! Reading books by flashlight or something, because really, any other kind of lurking in the night is too much work.

(Really I blame the Boston Nerd Effect, except that Sonya and I seem to have been first connected by two or three separate channels that had nothing to do with Boston, so... I got nothing.)

[sovay]

Hold up: Brunchma genarti?

And Genarti who wrote the first fic I ever read. I met them for the first time through the eventual parents of my godchild, strange_selkie and darthrami, years before realizing they lived in the same city and were connected to other friends of mine, because Boston is a tiny, tiny pocket universe, like Time City without all the rituals, alas.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

My corner of the internet also appears to be a tiny pocket universe.

How cozy!

[genarti]

And Genarti who wrote the first fic I ever read.

You've mentioned that before, but I'd totally forgotten. It's enormously gratifying! (I'm still pleased with nearly everything about that story, which helps.)