You know how many.

[mrissa]

1. Gordon Korman has broken my heart: The Stars from Mars is merely children's hockey fiction, not children's hockey science fiction. I was so excited at the prospect of several books in a children's hockey SF series. The Mars in question is a town. Towns! Everybody's got towns! What we need is planets!

Now is not the time for me to drown my sorrows in writing a children's hockey SF series. This afternoon: probably also not the time. But really, if you want a thing done right....

2. In addition to the recipes linked on Sunday, my mom and I made these and these on Monday. Now all in the freezer for later use. Yay, later use! We were mighty.

3. So far today I have not fallen into the dishwasher or over my desk from a seated position. That makes it an improvement on yesterday in that regard, at least. Still: how ignominious. And of my new additional PT exercises, let us say very little except: aaagh aaaagh aaaagh blech.

4. One of the things that's reasonably good about being in my sixth month of vertigo PT is that I've established a few standard coping mechanisms that actually work. I was always a person who had a standard breakfast to eat if nothing else presented itself, because while I am a morning person, thinking with low blood sugar is not one of my gifts. Now I have a standard lunch if nothing else presents itself as well. Things quite often do present themselves. But if nothing looks like food and eating sounds like a bad idea, I don't have to think about it at length, I just throw together a large salad and some hazelnuts and go on with my day.

And now there are the first of the cherry tomatoes from the garden ripe. So very fine. So very much better than supermarket tomatoes, even from good grocery stores, even in season.

5. I am greatly worried about several of you for various reasons: job, health, familial, and so on down the list of major reasons to worry about people. I am finding sorting the mail pretty depressing, since it's increasingly composed of: 1) offers for extremely dodgy financial propositions through supposedly reputable institutions, in hopes that we are financially desperate; 2) pleas for money from truly reputable charities, on the explicit grounds that nobody else seems to have any; and 3) notices from elected representatives detailing how they are vigorously opposing many of my political values and doing a shoddy and half-assed job of supporting the rest. I've read several people writing about the journals they were reading from 1913 and early 1914, or from early 1929, marveling at how oblivious the people writing these journals seemed to be. I'm not oblivious. I just don't have anything incisive and fascinating to say about the things that are appalling me, and I don't think anybody who's in unpleasant circumstances right now is going to benefit from me declaiming general social gloom on my lj. They might not benefit from my goofy notions of shopping for others, my recipes, or my fondness for tomatoes, either, but it's unlikely to create a cycle of increasing woe, that I can see.

If you are plunged into despair by hearing about my tomatoes, do let me know.

Comments

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

I despair only that I do not have my own backyard supply of ripe cherry tomatoes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ours are in the front yard, under the sand cherry tree that isn't anything like mature yet. Our backyard has full shade and is completely hopeless for anything but hostas.

I think when the sand cherry gets older, we'll just have to have the tomatoes in pots along the steps.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it helps or not, but Sue Blalock's short fiction in Ruins:Extraterrestrial involves science fiction and a hockey player. But no actual hockey.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

To paraphrase My Sister Eileen, No Hockey, No Good.

No, I don't seriously feel that way. I'll see whether our library has it. Thanks for the rec.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I covet the tomatoes a little. I admit it. We are on the verge of moving to an agricultural mecca but not until after the summer season has wound down. Next year, however, I will have tomatoes and green beans and potatoes. So that's good. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fresh green beans are so lovely.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Woe! For the cherry tomatoes on my patio are not ripe yet. In fact, the really interesting tomatoes are only just starting to flower, and I'd quite like to try some before they succumb to blight, or drought, or drowning, or whatever it's going to be this year. Alas, alack, etc.

On second thoughts, that may not be despair so much as impatience.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Whew. Impatience we can do.

And a good thing, too.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

The tomatoes plunge me deep into woe only because it is about lunchtime, I am very, very hungry, and I really shouldn't break until I get yet ONE MORE antitrust audit memo complete.

But otherwise, I'm good. Next year I'm growing tomatoes. Tomatoes and peppers. Yay!

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

Note: whilst posting LJ comments? Not Auditing. ;)

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

1) My first thought is hockey monkeys *evil grin*
2) Yum. I bow to your baking prowess.
3) I have my own set of PT exercises. for recovering from broken finger. Agree most hardily: "aaagh aaaagh aaaagh blech."
4) Vine ripening in nutrient rich soil does wonders for tomatoes. When I am dieting, I found life was much easier if I had a default meal. Glad this method is not only good for that.
5) Worry not for me, too much. I ask when I need help. Due to hereditary and biological reasons complicated by historical dreck I carry a bit of a cloud along with me. {Under undo stress or loss forecasts can look downright torrential, but even in the worst of the storm I have always found hope which is good.} Lately, I have been experiencing joy. It is most shocking and unnerving to be in such bright light. I have been reminded recently that it is completely natural, it is completely okay to feel giddy and I do deserve to soak up some sun.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Mostly I've been worrying for people who have lost their jobs, been hospitalized, etc. I'm glad that you're getting some joy in your life.

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

Me too....*skip skip skip*

I worry for people in those situations too (as a handful come instantly to mind). The best I can do is be a good shoulder and to lend help where I am able.

[redbird]

An excellent point. I don't bother writing in my journal about most of what's in world news, because that stuff is pretty well documented already. My reactions to it, sometimes. Bits about my perspective, yes. But if you're a far-future historian who is at the point where you need my journals to tell you about the 2000 presidential election, you have so little context and US history that knowing about that election won't help you. (Likely the whole thing is hopeless, because the English language as spoken in New York, scribbled in something vaguely resembling a Palmer hand, is opaque to you, and all you can get out of the exercise is some information on the ink and paper technologies of our time.)

[skwirly.livejournal.com]

I'm not necessarily plunging into despair because you've got tomatoes, but I might be dipping my toe in and wiggling it around a bit. Tomatoes, as it turns out, don't benefit from the same sort of benevolent neglect that has caused my herb garden to oversupply me and several others with all the yummy green bits we could possibly want. Tomatoes, apparently, need things like regular watering and attention. So my tomato plants are not, shall we say, flourishing. Woe.

Thank goodness there's a farmstand down the street. I pretty much live on caprese salad during the summer, which is hard to do with no tomatoes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That reminds me to buy fresh mozzarella next time I order groceries.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Gordon Korman made me want to go to boarding school well before the existence of Harry Potter. I always wanted to go to Macdonald Hall.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I only found those as an adult, but they're still pretty good. This one...not as good so far. Even beyond not being about Mars. Alas.

[aedifica]

I like those books a lot, but I never wanted to go there. I'd have had to deal with the administration!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Compared to the administration at my actual schools....

[pameladean]

Not despair, or not plunging, as has so wittily been said above. Up to the knees, maybe. I bought tomatoes this year but um, well, didn't clear the space for them and murdered the poor things by neglect.

Next summer I will be OUT FROM UNDER THIS BOOK AND THERE WILL BE TOMATOES.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If we get to the point of excessive tomatoes, as we do every summer, we will give you some.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

My big tomatoes are turning yellow faster than my cherry tomatoes. I'm not complaining, mind you.

Would you mind throwing a few of those red babies my way? Fresh maters. Yumm.

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Dropping by via friendsfriends to say that if there ever is a children's/YA hockey + SF series, it would be the most best awesomest thing ever. Which you probably agree with, but as this entry was my first exposure to the idea, I am completely crushing on it just now.

So thanks for turning me on to a fun idea, even if there is no payoff as yet!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about grown-up hockey fantasy? I can hook you up with some of that.

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes please.

Minnesotan roots die hard. *smile*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My gmail is marissalingen. If you send me an e-mail address there, I'll send you some.

I know what you mean about Minnesotan roots. I actually missed mosquito bites when I lived in California. And the way your toes never get warm when you go out for dinner in the winter, because it's time to go home again by the time they've had the chance. And a million other annoying things that convinced people that it wasn't just the idealized Minnesota that stuck with me.

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

I, too, have ripe cherry tomatoes, and oh what a delicious pleasure they are.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

I can no longer think of cherry tomatoes without seeing the scene from LotR-RotK where Denthor eats while Pipin sings and Faramir's tropp get slaughtered.

But that makes me run off and play a Borormir/Faramir/Aragorn fanflick and sing along... so this is good :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Golly. I don't even think of that scene when somebody brings up Pippin or Faramir or Denethor, much less cherry tomatoes. I'm glad it's not a problem for you.

I think I am the canonical example of how movies can't ruin the books because the books are still there. Because I think Wossname was a quite credible Pippin if you were going to film a Pippin, and yet my mental Pippin has acquired neither his face nor his voice.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

I am easily scarred by poor table manners :D

Yes, the films are the films... I enjoy watching them and love the Theodan part of the story especially.

The book is the book, yes. I don't see the characters from the film when I read it (not even Andy Serkis' as Gollum). And there are so many associated memories bound up with the act of reading LotR, I don't really know what part of the experience is *now* and what part is memories of *then*. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The first time I remember hearing LotR was my father reading it aloud to me when I was small. I don't think anything can ever displace that. Not even a little. Dad's Sam is a thing of beauty.

The only bit that got displaced was Eowyn's speech, and not by the movie: my friend Jen The World's Best Lab Partner read it for a Physics Women's Group event once, and she was Southern, and now the Rohirrim all sound like they're from Georgia in my head. But gently.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Speaking of LoTR, we had an all-employees meeting and as always, they had the new guys introduce themselves. One of them is named Elrond.

(Funny things can happen when people get to pick their own English names in early adulthood.)

Speaking of tomatoes, my Jetson cherry tomatoes (because it's a hydroponic dealie that I'm *sure* is how George and Jane Jetson gardened) are getting bigger, though still all green *bouncebouncebounce*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I would not have assumed that Elrond named himself, if I didn't know the background on your work situation. I know more than one person named after bits of Roger Zelazny, and one named after a Mercedes Lackey character, and...um...at least five named after Tolkien characters in whole or in part.

I love my life.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I think people generally do pick their own names here. My coworker April was originally named something else by her English teacher. Later, she studied in an international graduate program in Rotterdam that was in English, so she's very fluent; as she got better in the language she decided that name didn't fit her so she changed it to April.

On the other hand, things are changing; my coworker Bernie has a new baby boy, about 5 weeks old now and still doesn't have a name in English or Chinese. Today he sent out a poll to our group about what the Chinese name should be. 8-0 Once they get that figured they will be giving the kid an English name.