West of the Moon

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tuesday morning links.

This morning: the Nice Things edition.  Because why not. Scrivener!  2.0! If you ever plan on writing anything (novels, short stories, nonfiction–I swear to god I wish I’d had this when I was writing my dissertation), this software is worth way more than they’re going to charge you for it.  The new version has some [...]

books-in-progress: distracted brain edition.

This last two or three weeks, I’ve had very little brain to spare for nonessentials.  Two debate tournaments in two weeks, plus tests or papers in every class I teach, plus all this magazine-transition stuff, plus plus plus.  Busy couple of weeks.  One result of this is that I’ve got a very short attention span [...]

much less dramatic: links roundup!

I mean really, people.  I’m carrying about a million open tabs because I want to share them.  I’ll try to feed them out at a reasonable pace, rather than flooding you with eight million at once. Interesting (and depressing) new blog: Being a Woman in Philosophy.  There’s a lot that’s broken about academic culture, and [...]

a good note to end with.

Sometimes there are historical ironies at play.  At some point this summer, a few weeks before the wedding, my mother wanted to do a big mother-daughter spa day, so I went out to New Jersey to meet her for our pre-wedding “day of beauty”.  I hate playing guessing games with morning traffic, so my plan [...]

world fantasy!

So yeah, this afternoon, Matt and I walked up to Greenpoint, since it’s a nice afternoon walk and we’re running out of nice-walk weather for the year.  We’re poking around Word Books, and I’m trying to figure out if I can justify buying anything new when I just bought three books last week and have [...]

a very safe colander.

You may know this: when Crate and Barrel ships things, they wrap them up in this packing material, it’s one layer of tissue paper and one layer of this stiff paper netting.  It all comes in one continuous sheet, wrapped several times around the object in question to protect it in transit. The brushed-stainless-steel colander [...]

summer reading.

My summer is basically over!  People keep asking what I did with my summer, and honestly, I’m not quite sure.  Took a pie class, took a bread class, adopted a sourdough starter, made most of a quilt, rearranged the apartment to accommodate wedding presents, spent about six years of my life driving back and forth [...]

weddings.

When we started wedding planning, Matt and I signed up on one of those wedding-planning-helper websites.  (The Knot, if you care, although I can’t imagine why you would.)  It’s been helpful–it’s got a guest-list database for us to use, and a checklist that reminds us when we’re supposed to do all of those eight million [...]

minor league.

I’m having some trouble deciding what my favorite thing about last night’s Brooklyn Cyclones game was.  Was it the fact that they combined the Armed Services Night, Medieval Times Night, and Ike Davis Bobblehead Night promotions all in the same game?  The moment where the Medieval Times king and queen knighted the Marine officer who [...]

the romance closet.

Last night, I went to a great event at the ever-fabulous Word Books.  “Words of Love: A Night of Romance” was  a panel discussion on romance novels, to celebrate Word’s new romance section.  (Which is, as of last night, only one bookshelf, but it’s growing.  They’re using reader recommendations to expand the section.)  The panel [...]