Monday

On the way home this evening, I saw a young man standing at a busy intersection. In one hand he held aloft a tiny puppy, about the size of a two-month-old kitten; with the other he was juggling a handwritten placard advising that the puppies were '75% Chihuahua, 25% Poodle'. Granted, with that ancestry the poor mite may not have been as young as it looked, but it still seems to me that the lad had chosen a suboptimal strategy for finding good homes.

The jacarandas are in bloom. For some reason (too hot? too cold? too dry?), they don't seem to do particularly well here, but two of the three youngish specimens I saw had plenty of flowers, delicate pale purple against the bright blue of the sky. I appear to have missed the first opening flowers on my low-branched saguaro, but there are still plenty of buds. The prickly pears are mostly getting to the far end, but still have some flowers; the barrel cacti aren't even budding, as far as I can see.

Wellspring of Chaos, L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Modesitt's Recluce fantasy series is a solid buy-in-paperback for me; I don't expect wonders or an elegant style from him, but I think he's doing something more interesting than the flat prose and repetitive plots suggest at first glance. As I said once in a comment on green_knight's journal, the books -- and maybe the series too -- are almost like a magic eye picture; squint just right at the repetitive image and a different, 3-dimensional picture pops into view, if usually a rather crude and stylized one. The novels are often built up mostly in a series of repetitive scenes where it's the changes in detail -- the price of food, the seating arrangements at table -- that tell the larger story. There's usually some attempt to deal with halfway realistic economics, too: war causes inflation; authorities setting tariff rates have to worry about deterring trade. (It is a little odd that the relative values of copper, silver and gold coins remain at a tidy 1:10:100 ratio over multiple countries and several centuries, and no-one ever seems to think of making any different denominations.)

( Maybe mild spoilers )

In so far as I can judge, this may not be one of the stronger entries in the series. It seems to be trying to go in new directions, but being so tightly wedged into the history doesn't leave it a lot of room to maneuver. I wouldn't normally spell that in American, but I can't get the English way to look right.