West of the Moon

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hello world!

I really do think that my ninth-grade class will, when next week comes around, regret spending so much of today quizzing me about my internet life when they -could- have been reviewing material for their upcoming test on the Atlantic Revolutions.  That said, if you’re really that desperately curious about the whole science fiction magazine [...]

best practice.

(US History post in progress–y’all said such thoughtful things, I figure it needs a thoughtful response.  In the meantime, something else.)
I first started this by saying something like “is it completely unreasonable of me to not want to do business with people who can’t write an adequate or competent email?” but I changed my mind [...]

on teaching u.s. history.

Dan asked for a syllabus post, I believe, and who am I to say no?  (I’ve mentioned before that teaching high school has made me much more cautious about what I say about my job, both for student privacy reasons and for general public-exposure reasons.  But I’m not going to say anything here that I [...]

correspondence.

Dear Susan-on-12/31/99:
It’s going to get better.  I remember being where you are–the boring and frustrating computer job, the sense of being trapped and stir-crazy, the growing suspicion that your friends don’t even like you, feeling most days like you don’t even like yourself.  It’s going to get better.  In a couple of months, UC Berkeley [...]

the little things.

And, of course, the day that Matt and I decide to get back on track with weekday cooking, the pilot light has gone out on our stove. Or something that creates symptoms like the pilot light, namely, the oven does not get hot.  The stovetop still works, but not the oven. I feel as though [...]

why this is going to be difficult.

Monday morning, the alarm goes off at 5:10.   I manage to get up pretty quickly, and spend a little while shuffling around the kitchen, washing dishes and making coffee.  After showering and combing my hair and whatnot, I spent fifteen minutes or so blearily checking blogs and news and stuff, and then (once I’ve woken [...]

eating local.

The plan to cook more during the week is not going as well as I might have hoped.  We have good weeks, where we cook dinner three nights a week, and we have bad weeks, where it’s restaurants and takeout every night.  At the beginning of my school year, good weeks outnumbered bad weeks.  By [...]

Strange Horizons and John Scalzi

I’ve been working on a post about the Strange Horizons fund drive, but the comprehensive and well-thought-out post I had in mind is going to have to wait until Monday, because today I’m just all squee-ful and excited.
This morning, the totally wonderful John Scalzi and his equally wonderful wife Krissy (see a picture of the [...]

clearinghouse.

I’m back from the seminar, which was both excellent and exhausting.  And I’ve got all these open tabs to close, so.

We went on a trip to Mount Vernon, and I took a lot of pictures.  Our trip to Mount Vernon was focused less on Washington-as-statesman and more on the experience of slave life on the [...]

frames of reference.

For what it’s worth, I don’t actually think that it’s fair to characterize this whole “RaceFail” situation as a fight.  It has aspects that contain fighting, this is undoubtedly true.  But I think that pleas for people to just stop fighting, or dismissals of the whole thing as a crazy internet mess, are missing something [...]