Day 241: night breezes

Day 241:

One thing I noticed when I was up all night all night is that there’s a beautiful spring breeze once the sun goes down… the kind that reminds me of dozing off on the porch swing while my folks sipped fancy lemonades and talked in those voices that told you everything was okay in the world.

I can’t open my windows, first because they’re really just thick blocks of glass, and second because if I did every spider in six counties (do they have counties here?) would be trying to squeeze through them.

And it’s really hard to sleep through the mooing and quackeling and oinking and zombie groans, so sleeping out in the yard with the animals really doesn’t seem to be a solution.

But I miss those warm spring breezes.

Day 240: sleepless in Serendipity

Day 240:

Some nights you sleep. Other nights you stay up all night because while you were feeding the animals a horde of zombies came over the plains at you and the zombies needed killing.

I mean, that’s just the way of it here.

Birding Is My Favorite Video Game: Cartoons about the Natural World From “Bird and Moon” by Rosemary Mosco

Bird and Moon is one of those comics that shows up in my twitter feed, but that I haven’t had a chance to check out.

It is excellent. Scientifically factual, and at the same time funny. Well-drawn and clear. Precise. And much easier to carry around in book form than to find in my twitter feed.

Day 239: I’m starting to wonder if squid is good eating

Day 239:

Unlike the horror land squid that whip the snot out of me with poison tentacles and rocks and who, oh did I mention, pass through walls, the water squid out in the bay/ocean/lagoon/whatever to my north never seem to get aggressive.

Well, not in the “kill you” way, anyway.

They are big fans of HI WHAT ARE YOU DOING CAN I BE IN YOUR FACE? Which I am not as fond of. Especially when there’s six or eight of them at once.

I had initially assumed that the squid were native to this rock the same way I believe the zombies and skeletons might be… but now I’m starting to think maybe the squid were put here by whoever terraformed the place, because they’re too docile and too “please stab me and cook me and eat me” to be of the same kingdom and order as the horse-sized spiders.

I haven’t hunted any yet, though I did break a shovel on one earlier because it got in my way. Broke the shovel, not the squid. They’re tough ones.

Smoke Eaters by Sean Grigsby

It’s obvious from the tiny details in Sean Grigsby’s book Smoke Eaters that he is a professional firefighter (a fact that his bio confirm) and he puts that knowledge to good use in this fast-paced romp through a future US where dragons have emerged from the earth and destroyed all but a few city-states.

It’s a breath of fresh air to see firefighters fighting dragons instead of knights (with both laser swords and lances, no less!). And it’s also a breath of fresh air to have a protagonist old enough to be my father leading the pack.

If you liked Flex by Ferrett Steinmetz, the pacing of the writing and the stubbornness of the protagonist will feel familiar… but not a big surprise since they’re both published by Angry Robot.

All in all a romp of a read.