I disagree with the name - I don't think we're in a battle, really, because it's not a contest - Mother Nature has us all whipped without trying.

The Mr. has gone back out to shovel some more. I did a stint earlier - it was about halfway up my thighs ... .

Our house, with the walk and steps shoveled, as well as a little path to the semi-cleared street (where I was standing)

Looking down the side street, around the corner. Note the amount of snow clinging to the branches and power lines.

There are a few more pix here.

I was not tagged because samsarapine does not tag people. I approve of this!

The directions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people Do this if you feel like it!

The nearest book is, in fact, one that I finished reading on the Metro, but it's still here in my workday tote bag:

But woes! Page 123 is, in fact, a full-page illustration!!! So, I'm doing page 124:

"Certainly. Come up."

A black arc appeared noiselessly in the flesh of the tower, a lightless curtain parting to reveal nothing but further and deeper darknesses. With a knowing glance towards me, the Witch entered the fissure, and I trotted in behind her.

"I know the dark well; it and I have become fast friends ... ."

From The Orphan's Tales, Volume 1: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente.

Listen up, people!

NWS wants us to be careful!

1. FOLLOW MANUFACTURERS INSTRUCTIONS WHEN OPERATING A GENERATOR OR AXILLARY HEATER ....   - Special Statement

They're right, of course. Burns to that area could be quite painful!

I sent them an e-mail about it, so it may get fixed at some point ...

rachelmanija has been involved with the Virginia Avenue Project for many years. They're a free afterschool academic and theatre program in Los Angeles. 100% of participating children graduate from high school. 95% go on to college. 98% are the first person in their family to go. Over the years, Rachel has talked about watching the kids go on to exciting and varied lives; one even has a job at the White House.

Unless the Project raises $15,000 by mid-March, they'll lose their centerpiece program to budget cuts. In this program, the One-on-Ones, professional actors and writers write a short play to act in with a kid, rehearse it with them in a lovely camp in the country, and then perform it back in Los Angeles. This program has been running for twenty years.

helptheproject is an auction to benefit the Virginia Avenue Project and help them keep the One-on-Ones. Current offerings include knitted animal-ear hats, baked goods, a custom-designed cookbook full of hand-tested recipes, autographed books, original fiction and poetry from professional authors, and regionally themed packages from several areas. Bidding runs until midnight of March 1st. Please consider bidding and offering items for auction -- and keep an eye on the offers, as more cool stuff keeps being put up there.

I made an icon of Houmei with Minekura-sensei's description of him, as you see here.

If you would also like to take him home, I've put the image up here.

And I'm going to use up the image slots I've liberated in no time at this rate.

I mean, WTF? I'm used to having ants in the kitchen in the spring and in the fall. It's one of the prices you pay for living in a cool old house in a neighborhood where lots of the homeowners are passionate about not using gobs of pesticides in their yards.

But ants in February? While the snow is pelting down? Nuh-uh. What are these, special cold-resistant Boreal ants imported from Canada?

D-:

And while we're at it, WTF snow again??? And more in Friday night? The National Weather Service is not usually confidant enough to say 90% chance of snow this far ahead of time - but that's what they're saying!

The meme is:

Comment with the name of a female character and I'll tell you why I love her. In return, you can do the same in your journal [if you want].

(via inkstone and yhlee, and if someone can explain why it's called what it's called, I'll write you drabble-y flashfic ... .)

Wishing you a day filled with all your favorite things!

After trying and failing three times to post this in debunking_white (I understand that it was going to be screened, but I couldn't get it to post at all - it kept trying to make me log in to LJ when I was already logged in), I figured I'd just post it here.

In comments on one post, someone from the U.K. had asked about the current status of the KKK. The Southern Poverty Law Center is an anti-hate group that (among other things) tracks the activities of groups like the Klan and makes the information public. Their page on the KKK is here. The KKK is still, sadly, quite active.

The SPLC has lots of info on this subject. See, for example, the Hate Groups Map.

Latest bits and pieces gleaned from Amazon and publishers' Websites for series that I am following:

No dates at all for: Saiyuki Reload 10, Wild Adapter 7, Fushigi Yugi Genbu Kaiden 10, or Loveless 9. And that's quite a wait for some of the others.

T-T

... I can count the number of times I have done such a thing on the fingers of one hand.

(The occasion was a farewell for our student library assistant, who has been offered a decent job as a real Librarian despite the fact that she still has a semester to go on her MLS. And no, I'm not sure why I never end up going out for drinks. I just don't usually seem to work or hang out with going-out-for-drinks people.)

My graphics offering and opalmatrix' fanfiction offering are still at their minimum bid! Get a bargain! Let me make pretties for you! Make her write het, even ... Black Lagoon, SDK, BotI ... ! ;-)

If you are organizing some sort of relief drive and need some pictures of aid being delivered in Haiti, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies' Flickr site has some very effective photos marked with Creative Commons tagging, so that they can be used for non-profit efforts.

Look for the notation "Some rights reserved" and click on each of the icons to the left of the note to see the specifics of how to use the material legally.

The U.S. Coast Guard also has a site with some effective Haiti pictures, for those who want pictures of U.S. aid efforts for this sort of use.

See here.

visited 21 states (42%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Mostly driving up and down the east coast ... have visited Chicago twice, Hawaii once, Texas twice, Arizona once.

Linkspam has had a lot of stuff that's made me think hard in the past couple of days. This is one that I really liked because it gives me a level to which I can aspire:

How Do I Know If I'm Getting It Right? (by Paul G. Bens, Jr.)

So, in honor of finally blogging the manga series Loveless, I made a new icon of that bundle of contradictions, Kaido Kio Kaedo:

That was my 115th userpic. I have no more userpic slots, so I have to get rid of some. This makes me feel bad, because I get sentimental about the damnedest things.

There's another world, quite similar to ours, where the young people attend schools at various levels, teachers worry about their students and gossip about them in the staff room, kids bully and tease each other in school and send text messages on their cell phones ... and everyone is born with animal ears and a tail. A child will lose these features after his or her first sexual encounter with another person. And that oddity is not even a main point of the plot of Loveless ... although it does become significant several times.

Aoyagi Ritsuka is a 12-year-old, still with his ears and tail (cat features, in his case, although we see some kids who appear to have puppy ears and tails, and a couple of them seem to be foxes) as well as more problems than any child deserves. His beloved older brother was murdered, and his mother is insane: she thinks Ritsuka is not her real child and it become clear, quite early in the series, that she abuses him physically because of it. Ritsuka's father occasionally tries to stop her, but he rarely seems to be around at all. Ritsuka's new teacher worries about him, but she's meek and ineffectual. Ritsuka is seeing a psychiatrist, but she doesn't seem to feel that she can interfere with his mother. To Ritsuka, the message is clear: grown-ups can't or won't do anything when bad things happen to children.

It's not too surprising that when a mysterious young man shows up, claiming to be a friend of of Ritsuka's dead brother Seimei, Ritsuka is completely fascinated with him. Especially because Agatsuma Soubi says he loves Ritsuka, And keeps saying it. Ritsuka is extremely suspicious of what Soubi means by this (as, I am sure, most readers would be), but sex doesn't seem to be the goal, despite Soubi's skeevy behavior. And then things start getting really weird.

Soubi and Seimei were apparently involved in a deadly serious game of magical spell battles. And Ritsuka has apparently inherited Soubi from Seimei. Given the nature of the adults in Ritsuka's life, it was not much of surprise to discover that all the combatants in the game are essentially children of some age or other (Soubi, at 20, seems to be one of the oldest). Over the course of the existing volumes of the manga, Ritsuka will attempt to discover what exactly happened to Seimei, while facing increasingly powerful teams of combatants with Soubi as his "fighter unit."

This is one of those manga series that leads mainly with the heart. There's a plot in there somewhere, and the artwork is loose and sketchy (and sometimes bad enough on the anatomy that I find myself thinking "I could do this better myself"), but the overall effect is compelling - if it hits you in the right places.

The True Fan

OOC is blasphemy, canon is everything.

Take The Fan Fiction Personality Test at OkCupid

Heh. Fair enough!

I am so behind in reviewing things, because November and December were big months for other kinds of writing. I read a number of things though - enough that my INFP brain can't figure out where to start.

So tell me: my next writeup should be (feel free to vote a couple of times if you are so inspired) -