There Is No Safety In This World

I don't love snow. Not most of the time. I want to love snow, but I only have an occasional burst of enjoyment from it. I blame a lot of this on too much urban living, which isn't really fair: I look at snow and think about digging my car out and traffic congestion, but digging my car out is something I might have to worry about anywhere. Actually, when I was living in an actual city, I had onstreet parking which was usually less shoveling than a driveway, and besides, a lot of the time I didn't even have a car because I could get everywhere I needed to go on public transit. Whatever the reason, I've come to see something beautiful in terms of labor and inconvenience and time pressure, and I don't like this state of affairs.

Today, I think I'd be quite justified in disliking the snow, but in fact I'm feeling pleasantly exhilarated. There is no logic here, but I don't mind.

About an hour and a half ago, I went out to clear off my car, and then grabbed my stuff and headed out to work. I got stuck at the end of the driveway. A kind young neighbor with a shovel dug the snow out from under my tires so that I could pull out, whereupon my car, instead of turning hard left as I had planned, slid in a graceful, beautiful, relaxed arc across the street and off the other side.

It turned enough that it ended up parallel to the road, with the left tires a foot or so on the side and the right completely off. This was gratifying, as for a minute there I saw the opposite neighbor's retaining wall coasting toward me in a disarmingly leisurely way. I was going about one mile per hour so hitting it wouldn't have been a disaster, but I very much appreciated that I ended up companionably alongside the wall instead of confrontationally perpendicular.

The kind young neighbor tried to help with a little more digging and some pushing, to no avail. I went back into the house called AAA for the simplest rescue ever, since my vehicle was still exactly across from my driveway, and waited for a shockingly short time before a tow truck showed up. (I also called work and asked the admin there to cancel my pre-lunch appointments.) Now, my car is back in my driveway, and I am sitting comfortably in my living room, refusing to leave until the road conditions have changed.

I am contemplating cocoa. I probably won't make a snowman, as I don't have the right boots and gloves for it, but I am feeling inexplicably serene. Possibly standing outside in the snow waiting for the car to get the help it needed was good for me, and I should do it more often.

To anyone who cares to answer:

What is the difference between 'sad' and 'unhappy' to you?

I have just, with frustration more than sadness, returned to Audible my purchase of R. A. MacAvoy's Lens of the World. I dearly love the book and was looking forward to listening to the whole series over the next couple weeks of commuting, but I could not cope with the narration.

I did listen to the whole thing first, which I could not have done with some narrators. Lloyd James (Curse of Chalion, dammit, which is another book I love), Gerard Doyle (most of Diana Wynne Jones, dammit twice over), a few others whose names I have mercifully forgotten, start each sentence as though they can't be sure where it's going to end, and frequently hit commas and periods like someone hitting the last step of a staircase either one step sooner or one step later than they expected. The people who have only one sentence melody, the people who speak like a 45 record played at 33*, the ones who read lines of dialogue exactly opposite to the way the text describes them ("Hello!!!" she said drearily) - theirs, I stop, return, and delete after only a couple pages.

Jeremy Arthur isn't one of those. His reading isn't inspired, his ability to distinguish one voice from another is limited and not very graceful, but he's not outright painful to the ears. Unfortunately, he has a positive genius for placing emphasis on the wrong part of a sentence, trampling on parallelisms and wasting all of MacAvoy's deftly turned phrases. Even more unfortunately, he mispronounces a /lot/ of words in ways which are at first confusing and then deeply aggravating. 'Credibly' for 'credibility' is one example I recall. I was reduced to shouting at my dashboard more than once, in spite of all my resolutions to just let it roll off me.

I would have been more amused than anything else by his consistent reading of 'cavalry' as 'Calvary' if only the word didn't occur quite so often in the story.



* Sometimes I enjoy dating myself.**

** We generally split the bill. ***

*** What? It's late, okay?

Edited to correct an unfortunate construction which indicated that I delete readers themselves, which even I - who take such things seriously - would consider rather harsh.

Many years ago, friends told me I should watch a show called Farscape, and leant me some terrible-quality VHS tapes (I did say many years ago) of Season 1 episodes. I was entranced from the first episode: so much world-building, happening so quickly and elliptically. A whole set of plot and relationships being revealed woven through the quite interesting plot.

Then I found out that what I had thought was the premiere (you can't really call it the pilot when there's an important character called Pilot) was episode 7 (PK Tech Girl).

I mean, I still like the show. But that sense of breathless excitement I had watching that first ('first') episode promised things that were never quite fulfilled.

More recently, I got a book called Deathwish on spec for $2 from BookBub by an author I'd never heard of (Rob Thurman), and was immediately drawn in and agog for a couple chapters, until I followed up on a sneaking suspicion and found it was actually the fourth book in a series. (I read the whole series. I have many, many mixed feelings about it, but that is another story and will be gone into at another time.)

Tonight, I have realized that the reason why the opening sequence of the first episode of Naruto Shippuden is so breathtakingly bewildering, and the world-building with its jutsus and mysterious headbands and kazekagis and hokages slips by so fast and smooth isn't that it's being tantalizing and expecting its viewers to keep up, it's that this is actually the second Naruto series.

My bad. I could have known that. I blame my young client/informant, who assured me that I had to see all of Naruto Shippuden before I could watch Naruto Next Generation, but failed to mention that there might have been anything before either - but really, given the first 5-10 minutes of Naruto Shippuden, I should have guessed that anime aimed at oh, probably younger teens, wouldn't be quite so sneaky or demanding of its viewers. I /did/ finally stop and check, not because of the speed and slipperiness of the establishment of plot, world, characters, and relationships, but because of the sharp change of pace between those beginning sequences and what followed.

Mostly, I think, I don't catch it sooner when these things happen because I love the sensation of being dropped into a river midstream and expected to get my head pointing in the right direction and start moving with the current on my own. It's exciting and intriguing, and in all three cases, I wish I'd been right.

Alas, what is learned cannot be unlearned*, and so I am going to go back and at least poke at the first Naruto series.


(The art's not bad and there is, blessedly, no fan service (read, T&A) that I've seen yet, and the girl who is probably supposed to be the Healer Type also is wildly powerful and destructive. Unfortunately, Naruto follows the classic model of the brash, cheeky young hero, who does very little for me. We'll see. There are hints that he has backstory angst, which might help.)

* This is manifestly untrue, of course. There are probably more ways of forgetting things than there are of learning them in the first place, but a good aphorism doesn't have to rely on such paltry factors as accuracy.

I can't - or I won't - call it Veteran's Day. It's not that I don't respect veterans. I do. I'd be more than happy for them to have a holiday. It's that the Armistice was something very specific and worth remembering in its specificity, on the day, at the hour and minute. It feels to me that broadening that out to all veterans of all wars everywhere obliterates that meaning.

Happy day of peace.

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

-- A. E. Houseman, "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries"

For the British Expeditionary Force, 1914, disparaged by German propaganda as 'mercenaries'.

Pls help.

I need TV. Rather, a new TV series. I need something new to get absorbed in, something new for my thoughts to revolve around besides work. Unfortunately, if I'm going to get sucked in, I have a stupidly specific list of requirements. So here goes. If you can think of anything that meets most or many of the requirements, I would be infinitely grateful for ideas.

I usually gravitate toward SFF, but not exclusively.

( Here's what I hope for: )

( Shows that have worked really well for me overall: )
( Shows I really wanted to like, or did like but eventually couldn't cope with: )

Thoughts for new shows? Please? Help?

Edited to correct a few of the more egregious typos/errors.

Outside my office building there are some rosebushes with blooming and budding flowers amidst the ripe rosehips. They make me happy, just because nature so often defies expectation. They also make me grin, because every single time I walk past them, my mind offers up the lines,

                  But take no further notice.
I'll just nod in at the window like a rose;
I'm a black and frosted rosebud whom the good God
Has preserved since last October.
Take no notice.

(Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not For Burning)

I am completely, compulsively dependent on lip balm. I make my own. If it somehow happens that I go somewhere and discover I don't have lip balm with me, I will buy some (store-bought and thus inferior but better than nothing) if possible, and quietly (usually) freak out if not. On more than one occasion when I was working overnights at residential programs (and thus was allowed to use the kitchen with moderate access to its contents) I lifted a butter packet and kept it with me because even though it was salted it was still better than nothing.

So it's always stressful when I start running low on lip balm and always nice when I make some more. I used to make a recipe that used only oils and vegetable butters, no wax, which I loved in a stick and liked quite well in a little tub. The lack of wax made it glide on really smoothly, because everything that kept it solid melted at skin temperature. Unfortunately, melting at skin temperature meant that keeping a tub or tube in my pocket was problematic, and sometimes my lip balm went runny on especially hot summer days. Leaving a container in the sun was right out. So I've been experimenting with some beeswax to stabilize it.

This time, I got to experiment with a lot more than that, because my order of what amounts to a carefully chosen oil sampler came.

I made a thoroughly ridiculous hand-and-face balm using something like 14 ingredients, not counting the essential oils for scenting it. It was unnecessary and excessive and I love it. I managed to create a blend which A: is healing and nourishing for the skin, B: should be seriously shelf-stable despite including rosehip oil, and C: has that magic, weird, rarely-achieved 'dry' feel. It's not just that it absorbs quickly into the skin, leaving minimal residue. It's also that even before that, while there is still oil on the surface of my skin, it doesn't feel greasy or slippery. Cocoa butter by itself sometimes achieves this sensation, but I've never managed a blend before that does.

The challenge here is that, although all the balms/butters I make have the same fundamental composition - oil(s) and vegetable butter(s) and/or wax - other than moisturizing, I want the exact opposite effect in something for my hands and something for my lips. On my lips, I want something slippery that forms a soft protective coat and doesn't get absorbed too quickly.

Unfortunately, the one new oil I got to experiment with specifically because it's got excellent 'lubricity' - slipperiness and spreadability, basically - turns out to have a strong scent that I don't hate but don't think I want on my mouth. However! I got a new kind of vegetable butter - murumuru - which turns out to be /wonderfully/ slippery in a mix.

The batch that's hardening right now is--

• jojoba - really easy for your skin to make use of because its composition is very close to sebum, long shelf-life


• argan oil - rich and nourishing and doesn't absorb too quickly


• meadowfoam seed oil - a generally good oil which is only amazing for how much it extends shelf-life


• pomegranate seed oil - improves skin elasticity


• cranberry seed oil - basically uses a unique mechanism for moisturizing


• murumuru butter - slippery! also humectant, drawing in water. Think of how moist baked goods are with honey in them. Honey is humectant.


• beeswax - generally nice and useful for achieving solidity.

Also a drop of Rosemary Oleoresin, which is a powerful antioxidant and thus improves shelf-life.

Scented with essential oils of bergamot and sweet orange.

I could have done it with either jojoba or argan, rather than both, and considering how fast I go through lip balm, I probably didn't need the meadowfoam seed oil for such a small batch - about 1 oz in volume - and it's likely that neither the pomegranate seed or the cranberry seed oils will make a really perceptible difference. But it's still playtime for me, with these ingredients, and I'm having a lot of fun.

When I first discovered Dick Francis's books as an adolescent, I found them exciting. I read everything my library had and waited eagerly for new releases. I didn't like all of his books equally, but there were very few I didn't like at all. I even wrote to him, although I was 16 or 17 at the time and it was less fanmail than it was a complaint that I felt his characters drank too much, especially for jockeys trying to watch their weight.

Since then, rereading his books has been comfort-reading, and the ones I liked best, I have reread to the point where, on any given sentence, if I had closed my eyes, I would have had a very good guess how the next one started.

And now, alas, after my recent bout of rereading, I'm discovering that I can't anymore. Things I noticed before but was able to set aside - primarily what now feels like pervasive self-satisfied/self-righteous conservatism with the majority's peculiar conviction that it is being oppressed by almost any minority that gets attention - keep thrusting themselves to the forefront and refusing to be ignored, spoiling my ability to wallow.

Alas. Farewell. We had a long and close - albeit 100% one-sided - friendship, but we have grown apart. Or, I have grown apart, since the books are static and the author is no more. (And his son does not count. At least his father could write. Or his father and mother in a largely unacknowledged collaboration could, anyway.)

The caveats to this wake do seem to keep adding up.

---

As always, when I criticize a book or an author, I am quite content to speak only for myself. I am very happy for other people to enjoy books I cannot; I'm only sorry that I no longer seem to be one of them. Reading is highly individual, and although I don't dismiss authorial intent, I do think it's true that every reader invents the book in the act of reading it, and reads a very slightly different book from that read by anyone else. If you like Dick Francis's books and expect/intend to go on liking them, I think that's awesome. I still cherish the memory of what that enthusiastic fandom was for me for decades. If you like Felix Francis's books, I'm vaguely baffled but still very happy for you.

I just purged my aging, sticky collection of well-past-their-time-and-getting-rancid vegetable oils and butters and have placed an order with Camden-Grey for lots of wonderful things in very small quantities so that I'm likely to finish them before they go off, this time.

I got, in fact, rosehip oil, pomegranate seed oil, murumuru butter, meadowfoam seed oil, macadamia nut oil, kukui nut oil, jojoba, horsetail butter, foraha/tamanu, cranberry seed oil, camelina oil, argan oil, and andiroba oil.

They're mostly chosen for long/stable shelf-life, nourishing and restorative properties for dry or fragile skin, rapid absorption and non-greasy feel, treating eczema, and/or helping to reduce the formation of scars or to soften and reduce scars that have already formed. Camelina oil I wanted for 'lubricity', which is pretty much the opposite of rapid absorption, and is exactly what I want for lip balms, though not for hand/face moisturizer. Andiroba oil has amazing antibacterial/antifungal/antiseptic/antieverything properties, and, unlike most other things that are effective that way, is actually gentle and nourishing to the skin, and, unlike neem oil which is at least as amazing and also (no, I'm not making this up) good for dandruff, it doesn't smell like toxic peanut butter. I respect neem no end, but I can't stand actually having it on me in any quantity.

Most of the things that are good for skin are also - in small quantities - good for hair, so that works out well.

I also got shea butter and cocoa butter in slightly larger quantities. I already own beeswax, which I didn't need to purge, and coconut oil which - despite its nice qualities and overwhelming popularity - I don't use very much in part because the overwhelming popularity is having a regrettable environmental impact. I do use it for my home-made deodorant, though, because it has some antibacterial properties (used topically).

I also still own rosemary oleoresin (not essential oil), which is a natural antioxidant that will significantly extend the shelf-life of other oils.

I am feeling mildly defensive about the money this cost, but extremely happy at the prospect of being able to make some really good hand-and-body butters - both general and specific - and lip balms again. Fortunately, my store of essential oils is still good, so I can play with blending scents without having to spend any more money on that aspect.

(But oh, if I had money to burn, I would dash right off to buy uncut sandalwood essential oil - very mild scent, not much like sandalwood beads or incense, but it blends well with almost everything and stabilizes other oils so that they don't evaporate off so fast - and chamomile essential oil. They're appallingly expensive and I want them even more than I want attar of roses. Ah, well. It's good to have some things left to long for.)