... Eaten by a Dragon

(I have no dragon icon! And the gryphon is a protective spirit, so I guess phoenix it is.)

Well, the "reorganizing my life" plan was putting along okay, and sort of still is, except that this week had so many extra activities and snags and stiumbles I have declared it eaten by a dragon.

This makes slightly more sense than it seems. I gave myself cute sticker charts for tasks accomplished, and I have two sticker kinds. Owls for getting the jobs done, and Dragons for when I didn't, but had a genuine good reason why not.

The weekend was less than restful because my husband was sick, so I was semi-solo parenting, and I did myself no favours sleep-wise, so while nothing major went wrong, I never caught up on rest. I still maintained a few of the chart activities and got some owl stickers up. It just meant I wasn't ready for the next two days.

Monday was taken up with some heavy emotional fallout from what turned out to be an important e-mail sent to us vanishing into the aether. So I had time but not mental energy, and I spent part of the night showing Alex how to paint with his sparkle paints. (Facebook consensus seemed to be that the sparkly cat counted as a drawing for the purpose, too, though it was quicker and dirtier than my careful, detailed and shaded drawings to that point.)

Tuesday involved not one but THREE meetings after work: Joseph's IEP, a meeting with his daycare's manager because of some sudden reappearance of behavioural issues - either related to not taking the bus or related to resisting the fact that school is ending, or both - then the Folk Fest crew meeting. None of them were bad (Well, the behavioural meeting was a bit of a drag as we couldn't offer concrete answers, but we were all on the same page as far as wanting to help rather than cast blame) but I had no downtime until I got home.

We have had activities with people both nights since (and will continue to have over the whole weekend) which are both often pleasant and refreshing in other ways (One, for instance, really helped wash away the last of Monday's emotional weight), but do trouble my introvert side, and I have thus taken time I should be sleeping to instead have some non-sleep quiet time. Which at least once did involve mandolin practice (it helps that mandolins and drawing can be good quiet downtime activities in themselves; the fact that I didn't have *time* to do them as much as I ought is itself illustrative of the problem).

So. Week eaten by a dragon. I plan to spend any time we have between arrival home and time to leave for game tonight with the mandolin, and time at our RPG tonight sketching, which will help add a couple more owls, but I have also earned a couple of great big dragon stickers.

The thing with the dragons is, they are a way to say, "this exact task not achieved but it's OKAY." and short circuit the guilt spiral that can lead to skipping more tasks because not finishing tasks is BAD, no matter what else happens in the week. Because some weeks one is just lazy, and that should not be rewarded, but some weeks just get eaten, and a small reward for recognizing the difference can make a big difference.

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

This is the most confusing straightforward book I think I have read. I enjoyed it and want the sequels, but I am not even a little sure I understood everything.

The plot is a near straight line barring the last couple of chapters. If I described the plot point by point it would sound surprisingly lacking in twists and turns. Cheris and Jedao are assigned to capture a fortress. They capture the fortress. It's almost that simple. Even the betrayal at the end is by one of the groups one expects from early chapters to commit betrayal, and the revelation and changes at the end are ones we've been waiting for, though some of the substance in the revelations is still genuinely startling.

And yet... like the calendrical weapons they are using, the thing which looks straightforward from one angle turns out to be a maddening, destructive corkscrew full of foxes with peacock tails, and shadows which think for themselves. And an underclass underestimated, and motives and explanations that range from deeply personal to empire-spanning. I spent large parts of the book feeling anchored only because I could find the plot points under the everything-else, the explorations of tech, the debates over strategies, the brief downtime relaxation with servitors, and the wanderings through human thoughts and emotions.

The tech they are using is the first point of weirdness. It's described almost more like magic, though I find myself believing Lee has at least some grasp of the maths behind it, and of its powers and limitations. It has to be so far in the future that some of the familiar words used to describe it seem to have shifted meaning, and the things people see and experience may be partly a virtual overlay, or may be literally true but beyond our technological comprehension. The easiest way to cope with it is to accept that it is not all comprehensible to use, but that Cheris understands what she is applying and when, and that the result is as stated.

This extends to the whole Hexarchate... though it comes clear early on that there are some horrendous implications to how the empire is structured, and some of what it does is inhuman, in that it is alien, and some is simply inhumane, period. (The calendar that powers their tech includes human sacrifice and torture on set days, for instance). The rebels in this case have some implications they aren't much better, though part of that is how they simply created a different calendar, rather than rejecting the idea of the calendar.

Cheris is a personable character, and Jedao is at least surface friendly, though a reader is left wondering until near the end what is going on underneath his exterior. Their interplay is complex and in some cases horrifying, and in some cases supportive.