We are almost to the end of the 7th week of remote school! Next week is fall break, which we are all really looking forward to -- it will be so nice to sleep in and not have to monitor 2nd grade and do some relaxed reading. For the last two years we've gone to Portland as a family for this break, and my kids are sad we aren't going -- especially my daughter, since her birthday happens during this time and there's a lot of things we do to celebrate -- but she's making the best of it, as we all are, and we've talked about all the travelling we'll do together once the pandemic is over and we won't be risking ourselves or anyone else by going places. In the meanwhile there are some family movie plans (Return of the Jedi, Labyrinth, maybe The Princess Bride) and some Minecraft time together scheduled and a lot of special meals on the agenda, and possibly a beach trip if the air quality holds up.

I am still reading when I can, and watching The Untamed with my spouse during our regular Saturday date, and obsessing over Homestuck (which I do not think I mentioned here before, a little surprising since it is a large thing in my internal landscape!) and listening to music and trying to get enough sleep. We are starting to get fall fruit in our CSA box and I have eaten some apples and drunk some hard cider and plan to revel in autumn by ordering more hard cider and starting to think about braised dishes instead of salads. It is about to be hot here again, but we have had a few cool mornings that smell like fall, so as always I am crossing my fingers that the second period of heat will be short and dissolve into cool breezes and changing leaves and badly needed rain soon. (A few leaves have already changed, very very unusual for September here, but I saw orange and yellow at the top of the trees when I was driving by the lake yesterday.)

How are all of you?

Once a week seems a reasonably reasonable goal to aim for here -- my son has at least one day each week in which he is engaged enough with school that I am only occasionally needed to answer questions and assist in locating misplaced notebooks, which leaves both space and mood to write. Today is actually the second such day this week, but I spent the first enjoyably updating my Goodreads.

The wildfire smoke continues, although less so than it has been; my children have been outside for all of 20 minutes, and I made a trip to pickup books from the library & another one to get supplies from their school, both will no ill effect. The supply trip also included a bonus stop at 85C, a Taiwanese bread/dessert chain that I used to go to very often but have not been to since pandemic. I was pleased to find it open and uncrowded with sensible safety precautions taken, and all the people present wearing masks. Along with various buns for quick consumption (curry, hot dog, chocolate) I now have a box of mooncakes for Saturday to eat while spouse and I will finish Handsome Siblings.

In other pleasing news, the library has rejoined the state-wide free interlibrary loan service, so along with innumerable ebooks from many libraries plus paper books from the city-wide system I can once again get books from the academic libraries. In a way this is silly, I already have more books to read than I am likely to be able to finish in my lifetime, even with the typically high speed of my reading -- but I have never recovered from a book-poor childhood, more books is always good, and when I am curious about a thing I love being able to grab books from universities to find out about it. I am trying to keep the number of requests to a dull roar, as books on paper take me ten times longer than ebooks -- I keep misplacing them and then have to find them again before I can resume reading! How did I ever manage this competently for so many decades on end? Did those parts of my brain just get repurposed to other things once I started keeping track of my phone/ipad for reading purposes?

And finally, I have discovered a ridiculous new show on Netflix called Sing On! which is a karaoke competition -- so far Germany and Spain are up on the site and they are charmingly odd in different ways and make excellent before-bed television that does not require actual thought or emotional engagement beyond 'Wow, that Celine Dion song!' and 'Oh look finally a song that's not in English!' (Interestingly the version from Spain is about 50/50 USian songs and Spanish songs, the German version is like 95% songs from the US.)

For school this year my children are doing full-time distance learning, which is my preference during this time of pandemic, but it means that I am spending my days supervising my son's second grade experience so that he does not just read Minecraft novels for six hours a day. My daughter being older is well able to keep herself on track and has some engagement with it, although she is annoyed because I am always busy with her brother, but he needs the supervision.

We are all healthy and safe and well-fed and the like, and despite the enormous wildfires to both the east and west they did not get close enough that we had to evacuate, although the air quality has been lousy for ten days now and I miss the outdoors.

It was a good weekend, although I did not do enough laundry. I did watch more Handsome Siblings with our spouse (we have seen through episode 12) and cuddle my son and eat a lot of cheese and encourage my daughter to continue her fanfic.

This is the last week of school, and in lieu of our usual frozen yogurt celebrations, spouse and I have hatched a plan in which he will make the every-three-months trip to Costco on the ultimate day and bring home various treats with which to surprise the children. This means I need to move 'inventory the chest freezer' to the top of my to-do list, which is a good thing; it is the sort of task which is easy to ignore indefinitely if there is not some sort of external deadline.

I am working in fits and starts on a lot of reading posts, since despite my recent posting habits I still read about 10x more than I watch dramas. I was also pleased to discover that the bug in my Kindle app which made it always open PDFs at the beginning, so I can go back to my before-sleep fanfic habit.

I am sad and angry about what is happening in Minneapolis and other cities around my country, by which I mean state-enabled murder by police officers followed by white supremacists using protests as a chance to escalate violence, destroy infrastructure, and otherwise attempt to pursue their awful program. I don't have any more words about it than that.

Genre is one of my favourite things to think about; I love how genre tropes set up expectations in the mind of the reader/viewer, and then a clever creator can use those expectations to ask new questions or push boundaries or simply turn things inside out. I have seen enough wuxia (films and dramas) over the last three decades to have a moderate grasp on its genre conventions, but I have only started watching xianxia very recently and have not seen very much yet, so please understand that while I am enjoying thinking about this, I really have no idea what I'm talking about.

That being said, there are two main things I have noticed so far:

First, in all the wuxia I remember, the over-the-top parts of the genre are presented as explainable and achievable. Yes, martial artists can fly, or do impossible flips, or use their internal energy to fling people to the ground, but it is because they have access to the right information (secret texts, powerful mentors) and have put in the years of practise to become skilled. In the same way, medicine can do incredible things -- turn people into zombies, preserve life in impossible situations, control minds and bodies, increase a person's internal energy so that they become a more powerful martial artist -- but again, it's the result of someone pursuing knowledge in a systematic way. It is fantasy, but it is a fantasy about a knowable world in which people can do the seemingly impossible by studying, sacrificing, and working hard.

Xianxia, from the little I have seen, is much more out-and-out fantasy; there are magical objects and supernatural monsters, and it seems like the world is much less knowable not only to the viewer but also to the characters themselves. Dead people come back to life and don't know exactly why, ghosts walk and then vanish again, monsters abound in the mountains and rivers, and studying hard, while important, is only going to get one so far. It is not clear to me yet if being a 'cultivator' is open to anyone, or if it requires an inborn talent that runs in families.

The second thing I have noticed is that, in wuxia, life as a peasant farmer is held up as the ideal existence; pretty much every wuxia protagonist at some point has the moment where they daydream of leaving the martial arts world to get married and lead a simple happy life as a farmer -- or if they're in danger of death, they talk about how in their next life they hope to be born in a small village so they can marry and have children and be ignorant of the martial arts world. The peasants one sees as side characters might be unhappy and oppressed, but the oppression is because of bandits or evil government officials whom the protagonists can get rid of, not because being a farmer tends to involve poverty and food scarcity and backbreaking work from dawn to dusk. I have a mild sense of the complex political and cultural reasons that leads to this exaltation of the farming life, but I really do not know enough to do more than note that they exist.

I haven't seen enough xianxia yet to be certain, but so far the peasants I've seen have been much unhappier; they're scared of all the supernatural things occuring, they have no faith that anyone is really going to be able to help them, and at least some of the protagonists hold them in contempt as uneducated and superstitious. I would guess this might tie into the idea that talent matters more than training in xianxia, but again, I don't know yet!

1. ( CW: death and mourning )
   
   

I have been sitting here for a while trying to think of more -- and there doubtless are more, it was a day full of things -- but really, that one has filled me to the edges right now.

Over an entire year ago now I realised that it was no longer an unreasonable expenditure to pick up some imps from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, a perfume maker that was extremely popular in my LJ circles ages (15 years? 18?) ago -- and so I did! I have been enjoying them very much, even the ones that do not work on my skin, and my children enjoy them as well.

Somnus is named for the Roman god of sleep. It smells green and lavender and other florals in the bottle to me, sharper rather than sweet, but unfortunately on my skin it goes immediately to powdery soap. It does, however, help me relax and fall asleep, so I do use it occasionally, but usually not on my wrists because I do not want to smell it.

Dragon's Hide, on the other hand, I absolutely love. It smells warm and spicy to me, a little like leather and incense on a summer's day, and on my skin it stays in that range, maybe a little stronger on the spice, which I think is from dragon's blood (which I have just learned is a plant resin from a genus of tropical trees!) being one of the main ingredients.

More imp reviews to come, and if anyone else is a fan of BPAL I would love to hear about some of your favourites!

To my surprise and delight Wiscon is online this year -- and while it is very unfortunate that it must be, I am delighted because for the first time since I heard of it 25 years ago, I am actually able to go! I am Cassandra/alchimie and if you are there and would like, please feel free to private message me and say hello!

We are sheltering in place, which means not leaving the house except for necessities -- food, health of ourselves or our pets, exercise in the fresh air. So far it is not so difficult, I am used to being home with my children during summers and vacations and they enjoy our home and each other, while my housemate already works from home full-time and my spouse (who yes, made it home safely) has done so intermittently, so they are both prepared. I am now on my second day of semi-homeschooling, more to keep them occupied than in the expectation that they need the academics; they are doing math through their school software, reading/language arts through the free Scholastic website, and each is studying a language using DuoLingo on their ipads. I am certain it will not stay easy, as they begin to miss their friends more and get more stir-crazy, but for right now it is actually pleasant, nothing to do but be together and take care of each other.

I saw someone (Ursula Vernon?) somewhere (Twitter?) suggesting that this is the time to use all the good art supplies one has been saving, and I am trying to embrace that across my life -- for instance, I have a hoard of fancy tea samples from Adagio that I had been saving for the 'right time' so why not now? This morning I tried Assam Harmony which was delicious -- I knew I liked Assam but I always forget how much. I love how rich and malty it is, how it feels heavy in the mouth in that best way, and I am looking forward to another cup of it tomorrow -- I would have one now except for the caffeine.

I have not been reading much, too much anxiety and uncertainty and constant refreshing of liveblogs about the pandemic, but I am trying to put that aside today, and When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey just came from the library, so in the half hour before the afternoon homeschool session (which will be music and 'library' and perhaps art) I am going to sit here and drink cinnamon herbal tea and read and perhaps send an email or two to friends I would be seeing in the next few weeks if we were not all staying at home instead.

It is difficult to pick up the thread again, after so long without, but I am seeing how it goes.

Life continues apace, there was a very good holiday vacation with my children that I was reluctant to have end, and then school began again and I had various things to do with Girl Scouts and other events, plus some necessary but dreaded medical things to take care of -- but now the medical things are likely dealt with (and were not as unpleasant as I had feared), and Girl Scouts is down to its usual steady flow, and other school events have been handled, so I am looking around me trying to remember what it is I do with my time when I am neither engaged in family vacations nor making things happen for other people.

The answer, of course, is reading & thinking about books, and it is that latter that has nudged at me persistently to write here again. It is time for the 2020 Tournament of Books and I am finding myself less enthused than in past years; so many of the books seem to be so earnestly About Something and while the things they are About are often things that I feel it good for people to become informed about, I do not know that I necessarily want to read fictionalised versions of things that I am already at least somewhat aware of -- neither the new Atwood nor the new Valeria Luiselli intrigues me at all.

Along with thinking about books I have been reading fanfic again, and at last starting in the smallest steps to write some of my own -- none of it is ready to be posted yet, but there are several very short pieces I am working on and I would like to finish them before the next school vacation (in mid-February). It is ridiculous how terrifying it is, but I am trying not to let being terrified keep me from doing it, so -- we will see.

How are all of you?