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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-21 06:49 am

More humdrum prospect

Air temperature 60 F, wind west about 7 mph, partly cloudy. High today supposed to be around 70 F. Got some rain and a single shot of thunder yesterday, neither as much as forecast. Morning appointment, afternoon walk?
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-20 05:45 pm

Minor amusement

Through the wonders of the internet, just found out that my banjo was made in 1924. Ties in with Dad's backstory that he bought it cheap during the Depression.
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-20 07:07 am

Gloomy gray morning

Air temperature 65 F, wind south at 3 mph, cloudy. We have showers in the forecast, starting before noon and lasting into evening, to maybe include thunder and wind. Walk earlier rather than later.
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-19 01:32 pm

(no subject)

There's this prevailing attitude that "they" are doing things to "us" . . . it's all "us" and that's part of the problem.
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-19 12:51 pm

Saturday floral report

First jewel-weed seen in the roadside tangle, lots of chicory and goats-beard and Queen Anne's lace and water parsnip and milkweed and various clovers and vetches. And Canada lily, which I missed last year.

Roadkill limited to one gray squirrel and a number of Unidentified Flattened Objects.

Got out on the bike, up to the golf course and across to the road through the bog and thence home. Warming up out there, 77 F when I finished. Did not die.

15.31 miles, 1:28:25
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-19 06:47 am

Minimalist post

Air temperature 57 F, wind near calm, sunny. Should be able to get out for a bike ride this morning. Only this and nothing more, rapping tapping . . .
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pegkerr ([personal profile] pegkerr) wrote2025-07-18 01:33 pm

2025 52 Card Project: Week 28: Pandafest

Last Sunday, Delia called me up to ask, "Hey, do you want to go to Pandafest?"

Uh, sure. What is Pandafest?

It turned out to be an outdoor festival showcasing Asian foods and vendors, held just outside the Mall of America. It was a fiendishly hot day, which was definitely a drawback, but I ended up being super glad I went, and we did have fun. Since it was so hot, a lot of the fried food didn't look too appealing, but with a little hunting, we were able to find a booth selling cold soba salad, which hit the spot nicely. We tried steamed pork buns, fruit skewers covered with a hard candied coating, coconut ice cream with mango, and fried donuts. Yum! There were performers, and we watched the Korean dancers (pitying them a bit for having to dance in their traditional costumes under the hot sun).

I have been feeling so sick for so long that it definitely felt nice to get out and do something new and fun. Thanks for the suggestion, Delia!

Image description: Foreground Peg (left) and Delia (right). Delia is eating fried donut balls on a skewer. Between them is a "Pandafest: Twin Cities" stick pin. Behind them, center: two Korean woman dancers flourish fans and a tycho drummer are overlaid over a giant inflatable panda. Behind the panda, top: Chinese steamed buns in several different flavours.

Pandafest

28 Pandafest

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
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alfreda89 ([personal profile] alfreda89) wrote2025-07-18 10:58 am
Entry tags:

A new MURDERBOT short story drops over on Reactor

Enjoy a link. Things are remaining weird here as I continue to live SFFH.

https://reactormag.com/rapport-martha-wells/
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-18 06:50 am

Oh what a relief

Air temperature 67 F, wind northwest gusting to 23 mph, partly cloudy. Dew point 57 F. Temp was 70 F when I got up. We have broken free of the malarial miasma of the last few days. Did not get any rain in the process. Trash out.
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-17 06:25 pm

(no subject)

Tornado warning north of us. Sparsely inhabited area, as is much of Maine north of us. Warning came up on PBS news . . .
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-17 06:42 am

Slide down to winter

Air temperature 67 F, wind south about 7 mph, fog at the airport but just cloudy at our lower elevation. High today supposed to be around 80 F. Should be able to get a walk in without dying.
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sartorias ([personal profile] sartorias) wrote2025-07-16 10:23 am
Entry tags:

Old-timey regency romances

"Old-timey" seems to be an emerging term for stuff either set or written before the 21st Century. Here we get an amusing confusion: Old-Timey regency romances, I noted when scanning reviews by what appears to be younger-than-me readers, refers to the regency romances written in the sixties-eighties, even the nineties.

I used to collect these in my late teens, once I'd gone through everything the library had. They were sold by the bunch in used book stores, fifty cents for ten, which suited my babysitting budget--I could read one a night once the kids were asleep.

I did a cull of these beat-up, yellowing volumes with godawful covers 25-30 years ago, donating the real stinkers* and keeping a slew of others because my teenage daughter had by then discovered them.

But she left them all behind--she stopped reading fiction altogether around 2000--and I always meant to do a more severe cull, perhaps dump the entirety. But thought I oughht to at least check them out first, yet kept putting it off until recently. While I was recovering from that nasty dose of flu seemed the perfect time.

I finished last night.

Of course most of them are heavily influenced by Georgette Heyer, or at least in conversation with. Some were written when Heyer was still going strong. Authors from UK, USA, Australia, etc. For the most part you could tell the UK ones not only because the language was closer to early nineteenth century--these writers surely had grown up reading old books, as had Heyer--but their depictions of small towns in GB were way more authentic than those written by writers who'd never seen the islands.

But there were common threads. Good things, as one reviewer trumpeted: they wrote in complete sentences! They knew the difference between "lie" and "lay"! In the best of them, characters had actual conversations. Even witty ones! (There's an entire chapter in Austen's Emma, when we meet Mrs. Elton, which demonstrates what was and what wasn't "good conversation." I can imagine readers back then chuckling all the way through at Mrs. Elton's egregious vigor in bad conversational manners.)

But those are the superficials. What about the plots? Here were common tropes shared with contemporary romances of sixties and seventies. A bunch of these tropes have long since worn out their welcome. I didn't know why I hadn't culled some of the books containing the most egregious examples--maybe they were just so common that they were invisible, and there was some other aspect of a given book that had made me chuckle fifty years ago.

Dunno. But in this cull, as soon as I hit the evil aging mistress who will do anything to hang onto the (total jerk) hero, including setting the young and pure heroine up for rape and ruin (which she always j-u-s-t escapes), out it went, the rest of the novel unread: the plot-armored heroine will get her HEA. my sympathy lies with the mistress, whose grim situation veers closer to historical accuracy. Ditto I dumped unfinished the ones where the hero, who can't seem to control his raging hormones (or you know, talk like an adult) mistakes the pure and innocent heroine for a lightskirt and corners her at every opportunity for "can't-say-no" making out, while she castigates herself afterward, moaning, "Whatever is wrong with me?" Basically, while these heroines (and their readers) did not want to be raped, they did want to be ravished. And they weren't guilty of being bad girls if they were overpowered, right?

That was a VERY common trope in the early contemporary romances, the ones read by my mom by the literal sackful, and traded with other women at the local shop. In the seventies, Mom and her buddies organized themselves. None had the budgets to read everything coming out, so one woman would buy the new books from the Dell line, and another the Kensington line, and so on, then they'd trade them back and forth. Mom saved a sackful for my visits--she thought they were something we had in common, and I never disabused her of this, though I was fast getting sick of the "virginity" plotline. I read them all, noting patterns.

I could say a lot about why I think Mom and her buddies couldn't get enough of that plotline, but I'm trying to get through these regencies. In which the authors did understand the social cost of straying. But the heroine gets her reward at the (abrupt, usually) end, a ring from the guy who'd been cornering her for bruising kisses two chapters ago, and wedding bells in the distance. As I got older, I wondered if those marriages would make it much past the wedding trip. As a teen, I read uncritically for the Cinderella story--as I recollect all the weirdness about the heroines and their main commodity, their virginity (and their beauty) whizzed right over my head.

That said. Every so often you'd get a storyline that was a real comedy of manners, and while the research/worldbuilding was never as period-consistent as Heyer's secondary universe, they'd be fun stories. Like Joan Smith's Endure My Heart, which I'd remembered fondly for the battle of wits between hero and heroine--she the secret leader of a smuggling ring, and he the inspector sent to nab whoever was running that successful venture. Now, on rereading it, there were plenty of warts, but I remember the fun of the early read--and the only two attempted rape scenes were done by a villain, not the hero.

The regency romance has staying power, but it's evolved over the decades since these "old-timey" regencies for the 21st C reader who wants on-page sex, without real consequences. And only vague vestiges of the manners of the time. Few, or no, conversations or even awareness of the dynamics of salon socializing. Basically modern women in sexy silk gowns, and guys in tight pants and colorful jackets and rakish hats, with all the cool trappings--country houses, carriages, balls, and the elegant fantasy of the haut monde.

In the donation box the old ones go.

*I'll never forget the one that had to have been written in the mid-seventies, which had the pouting heroine stating on the first page that she was bored, bored, bored with Almack's and why did she have to participate in the marriage mart anyway? She wanted, and I quote from memory, "actualize her personhood!" Then there was the one that featured the hero, leader of fashion, sporting a crew cut and a "suit of flowing silk of lime green"--I think the author meant a leisure suit.

Then there was Barbara Cartland. Whether or not she hired a stable of writers to churn these out once a month under her name or not, she boiled the story down to the barest skeleton of tropes, padded out mostly by ellipses. Except for one early one, published in the thirties or early forties that lifted huge chunks of a Heyer, stuffed into a really weird plot...
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-16 06:51 am

This is hot for us

Air temperature 68 F before 0700 hrs, dew point 66, wind near calm, partly cloudy. Supposed to reach 90 F or above this afternoon. AQI "moderate" and pollen high. Walk contraindicated. Hope my small friends with permanent fur coats are staying inside . . . .
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-15 01:01 pm

Be careful what you wish for?

I see that a Governor is asking for an investigation into the National Park Service over that Grand Canyon fire. I don't know the politics of said Governor. Are we looking for decades of mismanagement here, or short-staffing due to budget cuts that prevented adequate and timely response?
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-15 06:49 am

Squirrel avoids death

Air temperature 66 F, wind near calm, fog. Visibility under a mile at the airport, about half a mile here. Air temperature up to 90 F this afternoon. Foraging day.

Watched one of our fancy rats climbing the utility pole out front, reach the top and contemplate reaching for the high voltage line, and then back off. We still have power . . .
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-14 11:04 am

Post-walk irritation

Nice meet-up with Ms. Sasha, including an extended petting session on her front steps. Got home and cooled off and had a robot tell me that I have one prescription ready for pickup. At the pharmacy I had just walked past . . .
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-14 06:42 am

Game of fox and hounds

Air temperature 61 F, wind south about 7 mph, fog at the airport. Visibility under half a mile there, far side of the park visible here. We remain under the boot-heel of the oppressor.
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-13 12:58 pm

Sunday roadkill/floral report

Roadkill limited to another loser crow, a flat squirrel miles away from the crow, and numerous blood patches on the road without corpse for ID.

Mullein blooming, both common and "moth" varieties, possible butter-and-eggs, and the usual suspects. Honeysuckle berries turning red, likewise the sumac, and the seed heads of the curled dock have gone to the brown of ripeness.

Got on the bike, up to the country club and over to the road through the bog and thence home. Getting warm out there. Did not die.

15.34 miles, 1:25:45
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-13 07:24 am

Constant surveillance

Emptied the thistle seed feeder yesterday and washed it, hung it out to dry. Brought the empty feeder in this morning and filled it and hung it out again. By the time I got back inside and started to mix up some frozen orange juice, a chickadee was collecting seeds . . .

Air temperature 61 F, wind south about 7 mph, cloudy. Will probably get out for a bike ride later. Rest of the week looks to be nasty hot.
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jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2025-07-12 07:18 am

Casual meanness

Air temperature 63 F, south wind about 5 mph, fog at the airport. Our lower elevation seems to be below that particular cloud. Morning errand, then walk? Lethargy rules. The world can fix itself.