Tag Archives: personal

Outgrown?

literature, , , , , ,

Teen-ager leaning against a "You must be this tall to go on this ride" sign.
At a Six Flags theme park. I was 19 years old.
One of my unpublished goals last year was to re-read a bunch of books by one of my favorite authors from my middle school years. One of her books I have re-read again and again and again over the years since, but there were a lot of her other books that I remember liking quite well that I haven’t read since my late teens.

While several of her books are grouped as series, she didn’t write them in chronological order. She would write stories about the children of characters from her earlier books, for instance, and then decide to go back and write a story about some of the original supporting characters before any of those second or third generation kids had been born. So I was also going to try to read the series in the order of the events depicted within the stories.

The first one was easy to read… Continue reading Outgrown? →

From the roots

life, , ,
© 2015 Gene Breshears
A cherry tree just a few doors down from our place.

There are a lot of cherry trees in our neighborhood. Most of them put forth pink blossoms. A few are white. There’s something about the pink ones that always strike me as more delicate and fragile than the white ones. And a whole row of pink cherry trees covered in flowers is gorgeous.

I noticed this morning that the new shoots coming up from the stump where a split from the trunk had been cut off some time ago were covered in only white blossoms, while the upper branches are all pink. I assume that the main cherry tree is actually a graft of a pink-blooming variety attached to a hardier white-blooming root, and that the new shoots are coming from the root stock.

My big, aggressive pink climbing rose started a similar growth pattern last year. While the grafts that produce huge pink roses has always been very fast growing and very bushy, after 19 years, something made the root ball start sending up new shoots. These new growths go even faster than the graft, though the branches are never as thick or strong. And instead of blooming enormous pink and peach double blossoms, it blooms in tiny white single blossoms. When they fully open they don’t even look like roses.

Lots of plants we humans find useful don’t grow “true” from their seeds. Many of these carefully cross-bred varieties aren’t disease resistant or otherwise are less robust and hardy then the wild, “mongrel” versions, so we graft shoots from the delicate and feeble versions that look the way we want or produce the size of fruit we want, et cetera, onto the root balls of those sturdy and vigorous mongrels. The hardy roots do the hard work of pulling nutrients and water from the soil, fend off underground bugs, fungus, and more, while the parasitic hybrid grafts are visible avoe, gathering sunlight which it uses to convert the carbon dioxide absorbed from the air into carbohydrates to store in the roots (and elsewhere) and new growth.

It is a symbiotic relationship, rather than parasitic, but when the root sends up its new shoots, I always feel as if the oppressed root is trying to live out loud and proud. So I’m going to let my rose grow both types of stalks for at least another year.

Because everyone deserves some time in the sun.

Literary digressions

writing,

ursula-k-le-guin-quotes_8626-3I accidentally wrote a book.

This was not a case (as has happened to me a few times) where I began writing a short story and it just grew into something much longer than I meant. This time it was because I couldn’t finish a scene in the denouement of a book which I had planned as a book.

I had been working on the second novel of my Trickster series for a while. I had finally finished the the big climactic battle, and was working on the wrap-up chapter last September. I’d been struggling with one specific scene in that final chapter for more than a week. It wasn’t meant to be a super long scene (though when it was finished it was about 1200 words). I knew what had to happen in it. I needed to tie up one of the main plot lines and its most closely associated subplots… Continue reading Literary digressions →

I remember…

love, , , ,

Gene and Michael standing in a living room.
Picture taken at my Aunt Silly’s house circa 1999.
I don’t remember the exact moment I fell in love with Michael.

I remember meeting him, at the Northwest Science Fiction Convention, in 1996. I remember meeting him at a room party I was co-hosting. He tells me we actually met the day before, at a panel discussion. I do remember discussing the cute, shy guy from Missouri with Ray after the party. I remember meeting him again, a year later, at NorWesCon. I remember him showing up for a Red Dwarf Marathon Party Ray and I hosted a couple months later, and because by the time the party ended there were no more buses going back to Tacoma, he crashed at our place and we drove him home the next day. By that point, he and Ray had bonded like they had known each other for years. So we started seeing him a lot more often.

When Ray died suddenly (only days after the doctors had given a cautiously optimistic report on how the second round of chemo had gone), Michael was one of many friends who kept me from falling completely to pieces in the aftermath… Continue reading I remember… →

What do you mean, “real” father?

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A man and a toddler stand on a half-disassembled utility vehicle under trees.
I’m the kid in this picture. The man standing beside me on the old street-sweeper is my mom’s biological father, who is not my grandfather.
I’m the first to admit that I have more than a few buttons that people can push to send me off on a long rant. One of them is the use of the term “real father” (or mother, or virtually any other familial designator), particularly when it is used to refer to someone’s biological-but-absentee relative. And sometimes I don’t just rant, sometimes I’m barely suppressing an urge to punch someone in the mouth over the use of the phrase. More than a little of the blame for that irrational reaction rests solidly at the feet of the man pictured here with a very young me. A man named Ralph.

The story can get a little convoluted, so I’m going to first sum-up, then unpack a bit as I also explain why I get so ticked-off about the use of the phrase “real father.”… Continue reading What do you mean, “real” father? →

How’m I doing on those goals?

life, ,

When I set my goals for the year in 2014, I also committed to doing regular updates. Just about every month I met that commitment. I also felt as if I accomplished more of my goals last year than usual, and I suspect that making the regular reports helped keep me focused on the goals, so I’m doing it again.

Last year each goal was paired with some specific tasks based on the notion of trying to replace a bad habit with a good one. This year’s goals continue that idea and include extending the success of some of last year’s.

So, how did I do…? Continue reading How’m I doing on those goals? →

Oh, what was it?

blogging, , ,

The other night while I was walking home from work (which takes a bit over an hour) I had this brilliant idea. For a while last year I participated in Throwback Thursday (#tbt or #Throwback) by writing a blog post inspired by one of the large collection of scans of the contents of Grandma’s old photo albums. It was fun. It was an easy way to make me write about something other than politics or the news.

But it isn’t something I really wanted to do constantly. Particularly since I was trying to avoid posting pictures of living relatives without their permission—or at least to minimize it. So that limited which pictures could be used. There’s also only so many childhood memories that I can make at least potentially interesting to other people.

So I took a break, figuring I would do it occasionally, or maybe pick a month next time, or something. Anyway, there I was, walking home in the drizzle, listening to music on my headphones, cars zooming by in the dark, and I had an idea of something else that I could do on Thursdays; make it the usual Thursday thing. It was a topic that could include Throwback Thursday. So I would have the benefits I get from having a weekly scheduled task, that could sometimes be a Throwback Thursday post, but most of the time would be something else. And that something else would, I hoped, be of slightly more interest than just another walk down memory lane with Gene.

It was brilliant! I even thought of a cute name that had the same initials as the short hashtag (tbt). I resolved to start my first post as soon as as I got home.

When I walked in the door, my glasses fogged up. I heard my husband call to me from upstairs, but I couldn’t understand what he said because I still had my headphones on. I had to turn off my headphones, take off (get myself untangled from) my backpack, peel off my wet hat and coat, hang up the coat and the hat, get out of my shoes, get the rest of my damp work clothes peeled off and tossed into the hamper, then pull them back out to check the pockets which I always forget, figure out where I set my glasses down when I came in the door, put on some sweatpants and fuzzy socks—all the while as Michale and I babble at each other about dinner and/or our days or something else that one of us thinks is important—check the mail, collect my phone and iPad and watch and headphones to put on their chargers…

And finally I sat down and woke up my laptop. I jumped to WordPress right away to start the first post in the new Thursday idea…

…and I couldn’t remember what the nifty notion was. I don’t just mean that I didn’t remember what I meant to start writing for today’s post, I mean that I couldn’t remember the umbrella topic/personal meme that was going to be my new regular Thursday thing. The thing that had the initials T B T and could include Throwback Thursdays as a subset.

I remember having the thought. I remembered the entire internal conversation about how I’d do it. But the idea itself? Gone.

And it’s still gone, days later. I haven’t got the slightest idea what it was. None.

I hate when that happens!

Stuck in the middle with you

society, ,

My 8th grade official picture.
My 8th grade official picture. I remember how angry Dad was that my glasses are so crooked in the photo.
Today, I’m continuing to answer questions raised by the author of the Twist in the Taile blog, to wit: “I want to learn how the American school system works. It is just SO DARN CONFUSING. Even after reading all these books about kids in high school (?) I still do not understand which age corresponds with which year. (And honors classes?? What are they?)”

Yesterday I explained roughly what age kids are expected to be at different grade levels, along with why it can vary a lot, and why just knowing what grade a kid is in tells you nothing about what he or she has studied by this time. Today, let’s talk about how American schools group those grades, and answer the blogger’s question about what we mean by “high school.” Continue reading Stuck in the middle with you →

It ought to be elementary, but…

society, , ,

My official first grade school picture.
My official first grade school picture.
So, I was reading some other blogs, and over at Twist in the Taile blog, the author listed as one of her goals for the new year: “I want to learn how the American school system works. It is just SO DARN CONFUSING. Even after reading all these books about kids in high school (?) I still do not understand which age corresponds with which year. (And honors classes?? What are they?)” My first thought on reading it was, “Good luck with that!” Then I started figuring how I could explain why it is so confusing.

I grew up in U.S. public schools (the term “public schools” in the U.S. refers to the taxpayer-funded schools that are administered by the government and are free to attend for all children), and it was confusing to me. I hang out on enough writing forums, follow enough writer blogs, and so forth to also attest that lots of other people who grew up in this system who are now trying to write books that involve characters who are either students or teachers feel compelled to ask questions about the ages of kids in certain grades, or what subjects they should be studying and so forth.

To understand the U.S. school system the very first thing you must understand is: there is NO U.S. school system. Americans, particularly Um-merr-uh-kins, are deeply suspicious of central authority (yes, most especially the ones who wave American flags all the time), and insist that schools must be subject primarily to local control. Even when a good ol’ boy Republican President like George W. Bush proposes something as harmless-sounding as “no child left behind” conservative Americans rise up foaming-at-the-mouth angry about the federal government sticking its nose in and telling us how to educate our children. Continue reading It ought to be elementary, but… →

…and what I had for breakfast

life, , ,

My lynx plushy seated at my laptop.
One wonders how I hit 105 wpm with these paws.
There will be no reports of any of my breakfasts in this post. A friend uses the phrase “what I had for breakfast” to describe a certain style of blogging that many of us fall into from time-to-time (and some seem to do always). Today’s post is a mish-mash that hits lots of topics, such as: my specific writing goals for the rest of the month, me getting tangentially caught in a blow-by from an anti-gay activist, and a few other oddments in my life. If none of those trivial details sounds of interest, don’t click… Continue reading …and what I had for breakfast →