So, two-plus inches of knitting after turning the heel and progressing onto the foot of my sock, I'm suddenly suspicious that I knit one less pattern repeat on the leg of the second sock than I did on the first one. Actually, I'm almost sure of it, but I'm holding off on ripping it out until I can go home and compare the two socks.

*sigh* I was so proud of myself for how far along it was.

. . . and I had tally marks and EVERYTHING. But apparently four is too big a number to count to.


Dear internet, please post this.
For that matter, because continue to have enough of a trickle of life to distract me for the next two hours.

"You wretched swine. Did you come back from the dead or something?"

Said in a completely deadpan voice, as if this were totally normal. And I'm pretty sure the movie is supposed to be realistic.

Downloading Ubuntu Server. It's 682 MB, and the low end of my download speed is 6.6 KB/sec. I have seen it get has high as 200 and some KB/sec, but mostly it's hanging out somewhere between 10 KB/sec and 150 KB/sec.

Abraham says that I should start downloading now so that when the guys get here, I can give them the installation CD. I should've started when I arrived at work (and the network was marginally faster). Maybe then it would've been done by lunchtime. Although considering that the current estimate is over ten hours, maybe not.

Oh, the joys of internet in Africa.

In good news, I actually have work to do (albeit 'start this download and then wait until it finishes') and there is electricity and internet, and I'm on the second-to-last row of my Laminaria.

Dear bank Contact US form,

It would be really nice if you would tell me what characters are illegal, especially since I took out the parenthesis and question marks and hyphens. I guess my original submission had two apostrophes, and the complaint I just submitted didn't.

But it's a really bad sign when I try to submit a question about why I can't access my account online from Zambia, and wind up submitting a complaint about the way the form works because I can't figure out how to make my actual problem boring enough to talk about.

No love,

Me

Actually, there were a bunch of photos from last summer that I intended to post, from the bread that I made to the "circus tent" fabric that earned me a couple hundred dollars and temporarily took over the entire first floor of my house. But I'm in Zambia and uploading pictures takes a long time, and and and I'm not going to do it.

But one thing I do want to post, which pictures have already been updated, is a series of photographs I took in New Jersey, the day after a big rainstorm, when we walked along a trail that had been closed the first three days of our trip due to a forest fire. The album is probably still too heavy on the more strikingly burned pictures (one of the things that surprised me is how un-burned it was, actually), but the swaths of charred soil make for more interesting pictures than the slightly browned undergrowth.

One thing that surprised me was how beautiful I found it, in an odd, moonscape sort of way. My mother said that it was beautiful in the way that ugly babies are "beautiful;" they aren't actually attractive, but you can't stop looking at them. But I think it was more than that. I'm accustomed to associating greenery with beauty, but this partially burned landscape was, in its own way, beautiful.

Forest fire remains in Wharton State Forest

I'm here in Zambia. We've spent the past four and a half days at MCC headquarters, being oriented, getting over jet lag, and preparing to go to our various assignments. A, who's in the city, is being dropped off with her host family as I type, and the rest of us, all heading for Southern Province, leave tomorrow morning. I won't get to Macha until Friday, though, because the other two get dropped off first, so arriving tomorrow isn't feasible, considering travel times and the fact that we'll need to do a certain amount of set-up work in every place.

I mentioned on the other blog that I'll be cooking for myself. Setting up a household requires an incredible amount of stuff.

I have a new phone, too. ( It's the fanciest phone I've ever had, and it's going to drive me crazy. )

Long story short, I'm just really glad that I'll have a computer and access to the internet, and won't need to use my phone all that often.

Things are going pretty well, though.

But it doesn't seem to have happened. Instead, I'll just point out that I'm leaving for orientation today, and leaving the country on the 19th. Wish me luck.

I blame plaidviking.

( Bizarre collection of teenage dwarves under the cut )

And then I woke up.

I rather liked Silver Phoenix, aside from the weird reincarnation-love-story bit that didn't really make any sense. The sequel, Fury of the Phoenix, did tie up the things about the first one that confused me, but gained a whole new dimension of weird.

Perhaps I'm just not a fan of plotlines that rely on somewhat likeable characters transitioning into people who use creepy death magic without compunction.

Also, at one point they journey from pseudo-ancient-China to pseudo-medieval-Europe, but the pseudo-medieval-Europe people all have modern viewpoints, especially regarding sexual mores (also, they have fast food? What actual medieval community has enough paper to package food sold by street vendors in paper?), which entirely broke the story-world for me.

Overall analysis: The first one was fun but a little wtf at times. The second one was underwhelming.


Edited to add: I'm also getting a bad feeling from the way the author deliberately picked a non-European setting for her fantasy world, but when the characters visit a European-type setting, it seems more modern/progressive/normal. I can't imagine that it was intentional, but I don't like it.

Have you read this article in today's Wall Street Journal about dark themes in YA fiction?

I'm really not sure what to think of it. I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of the unrelenting grimness in a lot of today's teen literature, and I never got into problem novels, even though I was a teenager at the time when they were flourishing. At the same time, these issues are there, and high schoolers have to deal with them, and to try to create a world where they don't exist seems to me as much an act of deliberate fantasy as any genre work. Which isn't to say that I don't love a good romp with Edward Eager or Elizabeth Enright. But Swallows and Amazons doesn't look any more like my life than Harry Potter does. And I would quickly lose patience with wholesome coming-of-age stories if they were the only fare available. Maybe the article isn't arguing that wholesome coming-of-age stories should be the only fare available. Maybe it's just bewailing the lack of them. But if that's the case, they aren't looking in the right places. The Penderwicks is about as wholesome as they come, even if the mother is dead. And George R. R. Martin or no George R. R. Martin, there's a great deal of tame, wholesome fantasy and science fiction available right now (one that comes to mind is Hilari Bell's Knight and Rogue, and another is Wrede's Frontier Magic).

I think my real issue with this is the whole "it's not censorship, it's responsible parenting" stance. On the one hand, I can understand the I don't want my kid reading that! impulse. Also the complaint that vivid depictions of cutting could be a trigger. But at the same time, that's still censorship.

I also find it really interesting that one of their recommended books is Fahrenheit 451. I find it less interesting that they've divided their "Books we can recommend for young adult readers" section into Books for Young Men (Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi; Peace, Richard Bausch; Old School, Tobias Wolff; Farenheit 451, Bradbury; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Hadon; True Grit, Charles Portis) and Books for Young Women (What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell; Ophelia, Lisa Kline; Angelmonster, Veronica Bennett; Z for Sachariah, Robert C. O'Brien; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith). Can't books just be Books for Young People? Or Books for People? And while I haven't read a lot of the books I just listed, the descriptions use a lot of words like "gritty" and "violent." And my memory of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, admittedly from a great many years ago, is that it was pretty heavy stuff.

Maybe part of my problem is that there are books available in just about whatever you're looking for these days. If you don't like the mainstream bestsellers, buy the stuff you do approve of and try to push publishers that way. And I still maintain that the best way for parents to deal with kids reading problematic books is to talk to the kids about what they're reading.



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Also?
It occurred to me this week that I'm going to Zambia in a little over two months. Starting to freak out a little about that.