The concord grapes growing outside my building are ripe now. There are a ton of them this year, which is nice because otherwise it would be hard to leave them on the vine to sweeten up in the frost.

I consumed things!

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, and I’d never heard of her so I borrowed some random books of hers from the library. The Grass Is Singing is a terribly sad and tense little book about people trapped in their roles — both exploiter and exploited as master/servant, husband/wife, rich/poor, man/woman. The book is skillfully balanced in gray areas — no character comes out as virtuous or as really evil, just struggling as best they can with the circumstances they were given (though at times I think it gets a little too close to the hopeless victims of fate end of things).

It’s roughly autobiographical too — it reads as kind of “what would have happened to me if I didn’t become an independent writer.”

I randomly borrowed this from the library because I remembered watching the movie of the same title as a kid. The book is a lot deeper than I remember the movie being — not sure if that’s because it actually is or simply because I’m in a frame of mind to notice recursion, metaphor, non-dualism, etc…

It’s interesting to see how different countries’ textbooks differ about the same issues in US history. I think it would be even more interesting to branch out more into world history (maybe it would be too hard to find US textbooks that deal with non-US-related events…).

For example, in the US we learn that the Spanish American War started because the Spanish blew up the US warship Maine while it was in Cuba. However, the Spanish textbook claims that the Cubans blew it up to bring the US on their side against Spain, the Cuban textbook claims that US agents blew it up themselves to make an excuse for declaring war, etc. And of course the Philippines has a completely different opinion about the whole thing.

I went to Steph Davis’s book tour/slideshow when she came through Seattle, and bought the book there. Now I want to go to Indian Creek, and Yosemite, and Pakistan, and Patagonia… She writes like a very normal person, except for the occasional sentence about somethign like running an ultramarathon while taking a break from climbing.

It’s a 300g can! I resteep it 5 or 6 times, so a cup lasts me the whole day.

This is my favorite salmon. But I can’t order it in any restaurant except sushi places because I like it rare with the skin on.

The original shorts had a offbeat weirdness that the movie is missing. The ambiguously fetishistic entaglement between the two main characters turns into a conventional movie love story; many of the biotechnologically weird minor characters are cut out.

Pretty decent for a special effects driven action movie, but that’s not really the kind of movie I look for.

This was my first attempt at homemade sauerkraut. I stuffed two small shredded cabbages and some salt in a jar. I added about 3 Tbsp of salt for a quart of cabbage, but I tasted it today and I think that’s too much salt. Next time I’ll try 1.5.