It seems we are not getting our floors done this fall. My mother-in-law broke her foot a bit over a month ago, and is wheelchair-bound, though otherwise in good spirits. My father-in-law was originally going to be coming over alone, since the flooring was going to be his big job, not hers. But her foot isn't healing - she's going in to have her foot bolted together this week, as the bones were separating. So he's staying with her, at least until he heads to the Ukraine in November. (That last sentence... is not atypical. Colin tells a story of noticing one day that he hasn't seen his dad in a while, and asking his mom where he was. IIRC, the answer was "China.")
Hoping she gets well. She seems too irrepressible not to, but sometimes, the body stops being able to keep up with the mind... and my in-laws are about halfway in age between my grandmothers and my parents.
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On a lighter note, we went to the fundraising dinner for our church, and we are so going to end up fat.
They had two money-raising efforts happening. One was a "bag auction", aka a silent auction, or actually a raffle draw. The other was an actual auction of goods and services. I put most of my tickets in the prize with the McNally Robinson gift certificate, but a few in a few other prizes, as you do.
But the actual auction happened first, or we might have done things a little differently... Colin bid very strongly, and won, the auction for one home-made pie a month delivered to our home (The first went home with us, the rest we get to pick the kind). because Colin loves pie. (I haven't tried it yet. But it looked good.)
He also bid on the 12 dozen home-made perogies (And 12 knitted dischcloths and 12 "potscrubbers", knitted things of a fabric rough enough to use instead of steel wool). And won those.
And then I won the other 8 dozen perogies from the bag auction. And another 12 potscrubbers (Someone else at our table bought the second dozen off me for $9.50. I'd have given them free, but he insisted.)
They take up less room in the freezer than we feared, and they last well. But at an average of 4-6 per person per meal, that's at least 20 meals, and possibly as much as 30, if we *don't* invite friends.
We are SO going to be stuffed.
And Colin won an espresso maker.
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I don't like it when I feel the urge to shout, "Hey, you, get out of my religion" at conservative fundamentalists. I don't like it because that would be their approach to me, and I want to be better than that.
But, really (via
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
karnythia, whose tag for these sorts of things is "if I have to suffer, so do you"):
Conservative Bible ProjectShorter: "We don't like what the Bible actually says, so we're going to change it to suit us."
I'm pretty sure that the correct reaction if the holy book of your religion and your personal beliefs differ, is to find another religion (or to compromise, by following what you can, and sometimes doing things you don't prefer, and picking your battles). I'm pretty sure if the tenets of your faith and your own behaviour disagree, the thing to reexamine is your own behaviour.
I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the complexity of actual Biblical translation, but I'm also pretty sure this:
"Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning"is a bit beyond the ways the meaning of words, passages or culture has shifted over time, so that words don't mean what we think they mean.
I'm also pretty sure that this method:
"In the United States and much of the world, the immensely popular and respected King James Version (KJV) is freely available and in the public domain. It could be used as the baseline for developing a conservative translation without requiring a license or any fees. Where the KJV is known to be deficient due to discovery of more authentic sources, exceptions can be made that use either more modern public domain translations as a baseline, or by using the original Greek or Hebrew. "isn't how most scholars go about crafting a real translation. "or by using the original Greek or Hebrew" seems almost an afterthought.
Also, how on earth do you claim "Volunteer" is a Conservative word?
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Finished the Fionavar Tapestry again. The books are justifiably a fantasy classic. The first one starts weak, and a bit unconvincing: Five people from our world have been invited to another magical world to help with anniversary celebrations. Before they even leave our world, one evil creature has attempted to follow and kill them, and the instant they arrive, they discover that the political situation isn't nearly as clean and welcoming as it sounded, and the danger is much much worse, yet only one balks, and even the one who we're told is frightened gets over her fear within sentences or moments. Big issues are brought up in front of them, yet it's seen as a sign of abnormal wisdom to catch on to the dark side of this, and they all stand passively listening for at least one major issue.
However, it doesn't take too long to convince the reader that they Have now thrown in their lot with the people they meet, genuinely, and not much longer to sketch the characters of the world in high terms and still give them eventual dimension. My favourite example of this is Tegid: Huge, fat, boistrous, rowdy, heavy drinking, a classic example of the bar-thumping jolly guardsman. Except. When he sees someone hurt, he protects them. He appreciates beauty. He's competent at fighting. He plays a killer game of chess. He may scratch his hind in the middle of formal negotiations, but he takes the part of his duties that matter seriously. And he's a thoroughly minor character.
The writing is glorious, I love the people, the choices, the powers and the poetry. I still cry at certain tragedies along the way, at certain acts of courage and defiance. it's an amazing piece of storytelling, and again, a rightful classic.
I also find the Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere love triangle even less convincing than ever. Because it really seems to me that the saddest of all the sad stories shouldn't be one where one of the three characters can't say, "You know what? I'm not actually married to you this time, and there's no law against it here and now to make it a betrayal. Why can't I have two boyfriends?"
(And before you argue that that's too much modern thinking, consider that even Paint Your Wagon bloody did it.)
Even granting that Fionavar is a world of high romance and highly tradition-bound, *several* of the characters have casual sex or premarital sex (Outside of the religious festival, which I would grant as a whole nother ball game). It's Not a world where the social rules make that choice impossible. Kay seems to be trying too hard to have it both ways; to have a place where the prince's men can carouse with barmaids, where the women of the plains culture can visit any man they want before they're married, where people from our world won't feel too alien, and still have the high tragedy of "Oh, noes, I love two people!"
It's actually a relatively minor thread in the multiple plots, but it's one that failed to sing for me, and caused a nagging distraction.
Another oddity, this is the first time I really noticed how *small* Fionavar is. It seems like the whole of the place from top to bottom would take a week to cross on horseback, tops. (And it does have the "horses" of DWJ fame, that don't resemble real animals, don't founder after two days of gallopping, and don't balk at fighting things that even warhorses might say, "Bugger this!" to. And probably pollinate.) It's internally consistent, except that I found myself wondering how a plain that small could support herds of animals big enough that the plains people taking seventeen of them for a feast doesn't noticeably shrink the herd.
I'm also slightly inclined to take the sheer smallness of the world as explanation why it seems like almost everyone is blond, and even the dark-haired Cathalian people sound more like Mediterrainean Caucasians in looks, not people from further away.
If Kay weren't so firmly declaring Fionavar to be the world from which all other worlds spring, too, I'd just nod at the strong Celtic roots of it all and let the latter be, too. But because he does, I have to say it doesn't seem nearly large enough, geographically or culturally.
(Seriously, if I were making films of this series, I'd be as true to the books as I could in very way but casting.)
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OH, and something
matociquala chose to unveil (With help and suggestions for friends) for all those who've talked about it in the past but seemed unclear on what it really included:
The Homosexual Agenda![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
