Behemoth Voyaging

36 new books, 11 rereads. Apparently not having a job (and hence not having a commute or a lunch break away from the computer) means that I read less rather than more. I'm mostly only reading at night, and if the book isn't very compelling, or I'm tired, that might only be a few pages. Kraken took me a whole month to get through, and I'm currently slogging through the third instalment of Tad Williams' latest series; on the other hand I got through All Clear in not much more than a (travel) day. This tends to mean that I reach for smaller books; the last two volumes of the Malazan series, and a few other large tomes on the to-read pile, just look too intimidating. I need to figure out a way to fit more reading into my day next year, and more non-fiction, too.

Another observation is that once I got my physical books back, the e-reader didn't get much use. Again, I might have used it more if I'd been travelling/commuting more.

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The warm weather is bringing out butterflies -- and wasps -- that probably should be dormant by now.

So the final word on that falling satellite seems to be that it came down overnight. Somewhere, most likely at sea. If it had fallen on anything important we'd presumably have heard about it by now.

Meanwhile, the Sun has been flaring away at a brisk pace -- one X-class flare today, and so many M-class that they're kind of merging together and the X-ray flux has barely been below the "M" level since noon today.

Facebook is utterly messed up and full of cranky people. Near as I can figure, they've rolled out way too many changes at once (but not consistently to everyone), and given people too many useless new buttons to twiddle while quietly taking away some useful privacy controls. By anecdotal evidence they may have managed to badly break privacy in the process, at least for some people some of the time by accident and probably by design for a lot more who don't realize the implications of tagging someone, for example. It all makes me even more wary of saying anything over there that isn't utterly innocuous, let along posting photos with actual people in them. (Not that I take a lot of those anyway.)

Two views of my local "lake" -- actually the dam for an eighteenth-century water-powered factory, whose buildings can be seen in the background. One was taken on Monday, when it was sunny but quite windy (not nearly as bad as it was higher up, I gather) and there was a good chop on the dam; the other was taken yesterday when the water was as smooth as I've ever seen it.

who's having trouble seeing images on the Cheezburger network sites the last couple of days?

I'm still here. And on LJ, if this gets through. I suppose if a site has to die, going out fighting for free speech in Russia is better than the usual sad fizzle ... I hope it doesn't come to that, though.

I replaced the broken plug on my old-fashioned TV aerial this afternoon, and the four channels are actually coming in better than they did before it broke. I'm still glad I have Freesat. Digital switchover is in a couple of weeks here; it will be interesting to see what happens then.

Last night I was looking at reviews of my old Tucson apartment complex. It doesn't sound as though it has been improving in my absence -- though those reviews never seemed to reflect my experience all that well. It was a bit shabby, yes, and not particularly select, but despite occasional noisy neighbours, sometimes dubious maintenance, and roach infestations, I lived there quite contentedly for nearly thirteen years and never ran into any obvious crime or drug activity.

My mother and I went for a walk today: from Grindleford station up through Padley Gorge (where we met an adorable black lab puppy trying to wrangle a dead branch rather longer than the path was wide), then up through the Longshaw Estate. Instead of turning left up to Fox House at that point, we turned right and went in quest of the tall wooden pole on the skyline (which has its own car park). We almost got there one day last summer, but had to turn back to catch the bus, so it was nice to succeed in our Expotition this time. There's quite a nice view of the Hope Valley from up there, from a perspective that was new to us. Along the way there were coots both adult and juvenile, ducks and moorhens, a giant wooden ant with small live ones crawling all over it, nuthatches and great tits dodging in and out of the bark on a dead tree, foxgloves, and of course sheep -- the lambs quite large by now but still sticking close to their mothers and suckling when they got the chance. From there we went on along the uphill side of the estate, then across Totley Moss, passing the chimney and barrow-like spoil heap for the Totley rail tunnel that runs under the moor, and down a rough, bike-damaged track to rejoin our usual route back to the Totley bus stop.

It was quite warm, but not mostly overcast, not too unpleasant for walking.

Via james_davis_nicoll/james_nicoll

Italicize the authors you've heard of before reading this list of authors, bold the ones you've read at least one work by, underline the ones of whose work you own at least one example of.



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This afternoon I went back to the polymer clay. The general aim of the exercise was to make sets of beads that shaded gradually from one colour to another, by mixing graduated amounts of two colours; in the first set I stopped before the colours completely smeared together, and in the second I didn't. The process was a lot less precise than I imagined, and my plan of cutting everything into triangles was somewhat stymied by the nature of the clay (the red being particularly stubborn even after a quarter-hour of hand conditioning) and the fact that the red was a much stronger pigment than the yellow; there's actually twice as much yellow as red in the second set, and I considered making it three times, but that would have meant smooshing everything into a line and chopping and re-rolling yet again, and it was getting close to dinner time.

I'm not displeased with the end product, for a first serious attempt. (The zeroth attempt is visible in the background of the second picture.) Any irregularities are a natural feature of the process, as they say. But I need to find a better work surface than an old plastic chopping board, and probably a better baking surface than aluminium foil on an old cookie sheet.

	Red/Blue Hand-made beads in graduated amounts of partly blended red and blue polymer clay.
	Red/Orange/Yellow Handmade beads in graduated proportions of blended red and yellow polymer clay.

We had a magnificent M-class flare and prominence eruption from the Sun this morning, as explained in the video below.

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And those external shots of the space station and Endeavour from the departing Soyuz finally came back from the chemist, as seen on NASA websites and elsewhere. I think they were worth the wait!