Howling Frog Books

Lifted from Lois at You, Me, and a Cup of Tea : Four Jobs I've Had Janitor at an airport business.  My first job was sweeping out airplane hangars. Cashier at a bakery -- twice; one was quite a fancy place.  I don't really eat donuts any more.... Peon at a dining commons (a college dorm eating hall).  Dishwasher, food server, etc. TA at an elementary school.  Great kids, but I got sick a lot. Four Things I Don't Eat Shrimp Lobster Clams Oysters.  I'm not really into seafood. Four Places I've Lived Bakersfield, California Santa Maria, California Otterup, Fyn, Denmark Berkeley, California Four of my Favorite Foods Raspberries Pizza Tri-tip -- Santa Maria-style BBQ, baby! Chocolate The one true BBQ: Tri-tip, pinquito beans, salsa, garlic bread, and salad. Four Movies I've Watched More Than Once The Secret of Roan Inish (my favorite!) Tron The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Veer-Zaara The Secret of Roan Inish Four TV Sho...

My mom and I went to San Francisco, and we even drove there.  Which is insane.  I dislike going to SF, and I even more dislike driving there -- I can get very whiny about it.  I am an East Bay kind of girl.  But this worked out okay.  For one thing, it was on a Sunday, and also our destination was pretty close to the bridge and freeway, but south of it so that it was easy to park.  I did not believe the website's claim about "ample street parking" but it turned out to be true . We actually arrived somewhat early, so we explored the neighborhood a bit.  We found an old, but apparently thriving, brewery. We found a very interesting church!  I mean, it's like a mission style Orthodox church, two styles I never expected to see together, but in fact it's Episcopalian.  We were taking pictures of the outside and this guy invited us in, where a service was going on.  You enter into a large clear area with an altar in the middle,...

I know you're all dying to know how my intro to bookbinding class went, and the answer is, it was fun!  And I'm writing a post about it!  I just need to sit down and spend a little more time on it.  This week, the kids went back to school, but I haven't gone back to my job yet, so in theory I have a lot of free time.  This has turned out to be largely theory (I scheduled dentist appointments) but I did get to work quite a bit on my Tardis quilt blocks.  I ran out of blue, bought more blue, and am not sure I won't run out again.  The blocks are quite large, you see. The ingredients Getting there...maybe 75% done with blue blocks Would you like any used books?  Because boy howdy, have I got used books.  I think I've mentioned that I sort books for my library's booksale, and this week was a doozy.  I walked in and met this pile: My mom and I work on this side of the table.  Other folks do other jobs; everybody has a special...

  The Reavers of Skaith , by Leigh Brackett The last Skaith book closed with Stark and Ashton finding a ship to take them home.  Or so they thought; the captain promptly betrays them, deciding that plundering the entire planet, now that it's in chaos and defenseless, sounds like a better plan.  And he's not Skaith's only problem; the sun is old and cooling, and winter arrives extra-early.  Half the crops were ruined by war, and now the harvest fails completely.  Most of the world population is heading into the warmer areas, but there's no food to eat.  The government has nearly collapsed and its last supporters have turned.  Stark and Ashton head south through the tropical zone to the antarctic, chasing the pirates and meeting yet more fanatically violent warriors. There is no group in the novel formally identified as "reavers," and I presume she means the betraying, plundering spaceship captain, but honestly it could be practically anybody in th...

The Hounds of Skaith, by Leigh Brackett So hilariously bad.  Wow. More fun on Skaith!  Stark and Ashton and company --which includes a pack of deadly Northhounds -- are heading south to try to get to Skeg, the only city on Skaith where spaceships are allowed to land, before the remnants of the Lords Protector can get there and close the spaceport forever.  Half the planet is in revolt and Stark has no compunction about encouraging the other half, through which he is traveling, to do the same. There is a good deal of fairly interesting stuff on why the Lords Protector, as well as a bunch of other Skaithian peoples, want to get rid of the starships.  The government doesn't want to lose its slaves, but also they are all in a kind of culture shock.  It's only been ten or fifteen years since the population of Skaith found out about other planets and peoples, and many of them can't deal with it.  They'd prefer to pretend it didn't happen.  It's a ...

The Ginger Star, by Leigh Brackett For the past few Januaries, I've included some Leigh Brackett in my reading of vintage SF.  This year I have the Skaith trilogy, which features one of Brackett's most famous protagonists -- Eric John Stark, otherwise known as N'Chaka.  Raised on Mercury by aboriginal people, fostered by an Earth official, Stark is now the toughest mercenary around and he has innumerable adventures on strange worlds.  The Skaith novels come later in Brackett's writing career, and also seem to be the longest Stark stories, since the rest is mostly novellas, I think?  I'd have to know a lot more about Brackett than I do to be able to state definitively. Stark travels to Skaith, a planet on the outer edge of Earth's administration, because his foster father Simon Ashton, now a high-ranking official, has been taken prisoner there.  Skaith is a newly-met planet; contact with it is only a decade or so old, and Ashton went to see if he could strai...

Let's see if we can start 2018 off with some nice things. I started a new quilt!  I guess technically speaking, I started THREE.  Which is a little much even for me.  I've been looking forward for months to starting "Patchwork City," a very modern quilt design that I love and that will take me approximately forever.  It has 75 blocks, in three sizes, which can be fitted together if desired into 25 larger blocks (or indeed lots of other configurations).  So far I've made six, and they're quite intricate and tricky.  Fun!  I also started two Tardis quilts for my daughters who each want one.  This is a much easier job, actually, since I've worked out a pattern (of sorts) that will be fairly simple.  A quilt guild friend gave me her leftover "Police Box" fabric, so I have the signs, and I have lots of blue in my stash... By the time you read this, I won't be here at all.  I'm very excited to head down to San Francisco for a bookbinding ...

The Long Mars, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter Happy New Year!  I've been having fun reading some old-school SF, as is tradition in January, but I also finally got The Long Mar s.  I put it on hold months ago at the library -- it lived at another branch -- and it spent months in limbo, wandering around the system somehow until it landed where it was supposed to be, in my hands.  So I was happy!  And now I need to put a hold on the next book, The Long Utopia .  That shouldn't take so long to show up. The Long War ended with the volcano at Yellowstone exploding on the Datum Earth, with global consequences (think Krakatoa, but more so).  Nations still exist, but the Long Earth is filling up with people who never intended to move there.  After that, we have three plot lines that work out practically separately: Our original protagonist, Joshua Valiente, is asked to investigate the possibility that the Long Earth has sparked new developments i...