melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2006-06-29 12:42 am

Word of the day: hectocotylization.

Got back from my sister's apartment to find the rain gauge in our back yard *completely* full. However, it looks like the creek never actually quite overflowed, so we've had worse here. And on the upside, the tomato plants are about twice the height they were on Wednesday! A couple of them even have cute little tiny baby tomatoes on them now. I am dreaming of a summer spent having whole fresh tomatoes for lunch.

The raspberries also started to come ripe while we were gone. Of course, the birds got them all. When I was very little, and our house still had forest on two sides, the vacant lot on the corner had been co-opted by my father and the husband of the family living downstairs as a big vegetable garden. There's a house there now, and a sterile monoculture lawn, but at the time the entire border on it was all berry brambles, and it used to be so much fun to go picking and then, if you were really lucky, have home-made ice cream with fresh berries over it! Mom's let raspberry bramble grow for the last few seasons by the back fence, using the "laziness is good!" method of gardening. There's finally berries on it this year! Not a whole lot, but it's early yet.There's also a few very tall wands growing among it that I suspect of being blackberries, rather, though they haven't even bloomed yet. And Pop-pop called to say he'd fixed the ice-cream freezer for us, so I'll have to make ice cream some time this summer. With berries. (Or possibly tomatoes. If they all come ripe at once, five tomato plants is going to be rather a lot.) Jewelweed's gotten tall too! And the poke is just *scary*.

It was a lovely, lovely day after all the rain earlier in the week, so of course I stayed in and messed with the computer all week. But I did manage to find shelf space for all the books I bought! Which was a minor miracle, honestly. Let's see. frey_at_last posted a What's In Your Backpack meme. And since I still have to unpack from the weekend anyway, here goes:
Every single paper I've gotten in summer semester
Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, by Robert M. Schoch. (Not nearly as batshit as the title makes it sound, disappointingly.)
The mutant notebook with two covers, which I'm currently using as my braindump notebook. It's been sitting around my room half-full for years, and is also the notebook which records my entry into fandom, with the drawing of Snape and McGonagall kissing that I drew while watching the credits at the opening day of the CoS movie.
The charge cord for my cell phone.
A package of thumbtacks.
A Mulder and Scully magnet which I bought at con.txt and meant to leave at sister's, but could never find when I wanted to find it.
To continue the XF theme, a bag of sunflower seeds.
A very old brown glass root-beer bottle half-full of drinking water.
The empty case for sister's BL mix CD. (The CD is still in the car's CD player.)
A DC public transit master system map + a months-expired MARC train ticket.
The USB cardreader sister gave me with a mostly-empty 128 MB memory card in it.
The disembodied limbs and head of the plushie Voldemort I'm working on, + supplies to maybe finish him, all wrapped up in leftover white fabric.
A dried-up silver gel pen and a mechanical pencil.
A bunch of tiny colored rubber bands for my hair, and a paper crane folded out of a cherry cordial Hershey's Kiss wrapper.
Toiletries: Toothbrush and toothpaste and terry-cloth rag.
An extremely battered metal Battlestar Galactica lunchbox from the '70's, containing the remains of yesterday's lunch: Empty wrappers from sandwich cookies, peanut butter crackers, fruit snacks, and a wedding cupcake brought from Texas; two extremely well-travelled granola bars, a rather tired apple, and a carton of chocolate milk.

I'd like to say it's more random than usual because of the stay at sister's place, but no, actually, that's pretty typical. I think I fail at both grown-up and girl.

And while I'm all meme-y and listy anyway, 50 years of Hugo Best Novel winners. Italic I own it, bold I've read it, you know the drill.

2005 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
2004 Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold
2003 Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer
2002 American Gods, Neil Gaiman
2001 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling
2000 A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
1999 To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
1998 Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman
1997 Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
1996 The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
1995 Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold
1994 Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
1993 Doomsday Book, Connie Willis
1993 A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
1992 Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
1991 The Vor Game, Lois McMaster Bujold
1990 Hyperion, Dan Simmons
1989 Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh
1988 The Uplift War, David Brin
1987 Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
1986 Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
1985 Neuromancer, William Gibson
1984 Startide Rising, David Brin
1983 Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov
1982 Downbelow Station, C. J. Cherryh
1981 The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge
1980 The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke
1979 Dreamsnake, Vonda N. McIntyre
1978 Gateway, Frederik Pohl
1977 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm
1976 The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
1975 The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
1974 Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
1973 The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
1972 To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer
1971 Ringworld, Larry Niven
1970 The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
1969 Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
1968 Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
1967 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
1966 Dune, Frank Herbert
1966 "...And Call Me Conrad" (This Immortal), Roger Zelazny
1965 The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber
1964 "Here Gather the Stars" (Way Station), Clifford D. Simak
1963 The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
1962 Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
1961 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M., Miller Jr
1960 Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
1959 A Case of Conscience, James Blish
1958 The Big Time, Fritz Leiber
1956 Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein
1955 They'd Rather Be Right (The Forever Machine), Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
1953 The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

Cleary I have some reading to do. :D

Also, while the lists up there, every so often I come upon discussions of why women don't write Sci-fi, and this always puzzles me. You can see why if you look at the Hugo list: Since 1976, 14 of 30 Hugo awards have been won by women writers. That's very nearly half. So either women write just as much SF as men, or women write highly disproportionately better SF than men, or the Hugo committee is biased in favor of women. None of those possibilities seem like bad things to me. (Okay, I can see the argument that published women's SF is disproportionately better than men's because it's harder for women to get published, but even that doesn't translate as women are *writing* less.)

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