the essential kit

Recent Reads: Enchanters’ End Game

February 23, 2013

Turns out ENCHANTERS’ END GAME has all kinds of POVs in it, mostly, in fact, of women. Well, no, not mostly: mostly it’s Garion. But every other POV is a female, because Eddings dips in around the West and visits the queens who are holding the thrones while their husbands are off fighting the big war. Re-reading as an adult, I found that interesting for two reasons: one, it means every POV in the Belgariad that is not Garion’s is female, which–from the adult perspective–is fairly awesome. One wonders if…

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ugh.

February 22, 2013

I can’t be the only person who thinks the trailers for “This is 40” makes me think poking myself in the eye with a sharp needle would be more fun than watching it, can I? Because to me it looks like “This is the most exhausting frustrating tiring annoying parts of your life, played by people a lot thinner, prettier*, and richer than you are, just to make you feel like *extra* shit.” Or maybe I’m just not the target demographic. Maybe I’m twenty years too young or twenty years…

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Kitsnaps: Snowy St. Paul’s

February 22, 2013

Whoops. I apparently forgot to pre-set an image for this morning. Tsk, tsk! St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in snow. I had known St. Paul’s quite miraculously (er, so to speak) had survived the Blitz, and that a bomb had in fact hit the place but (again quite miraculously) not gone off. I had *not* known that firefighters and volunteers had spent every night of the Blitz on the cathedral’s roof, throwing away incindiary chunks and putting out incidental fires, in order to protect it. Across the street from the…

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cold rise

February 21, 2013

The last couple batches of bread I’ve made, I’ve done cold rises on. The theory here is that it means not forgetting it’s rising due to Mommyhood, and therefore having it ready to go at lunch time. So I’ve made the dough in the evening to bake in the morning. First time, I did the cold rise on the first rise. It worked all right except the dough was very difficult to manipulate into the loaf pan for the second rise, ’cause it was, y’know, cold. :) One end was…

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Natural light falls on a church altar, turning it to gold

Kitsnaps: Natural Light

February 21, 2013

Natural light falls on an altar in Sligo, turning everything to gold. One of my MANY GOALS (because I have no sense of proportion) is to someday go around and do a “holy sites” kind of photographic book, in part because if I did that I could probably get permission to photograph a bunch of places one isn’t normally allowed to, and with better lighting in the places one *is* allowed to. Although really, you can’t get much better than this light, which I caught out of sheer fortune.