Trip Planning

Cookie, Sis, and I are going to London and Paris. And Bath and Stonehenge and Versailles and Giverny.

I’ve never been to any of those places before. I am stoked.

The trip is coming up soon, so we needed to get together and strategize. We decided to meet at my house. Planning being thirsty work, we needed something to drink. We thought of tea or beer (in honor of England) or else coffee or wine (in honor of France).

Wine won. Here’s what we drank:

Okay, so it’s not French wine. However, it was thoroughly delicious. We’ll have to see if the French can do any better; we plan to give them every opportunity to prove themselves.

Friday afternoon hooky

I should be writing. Okay, this is writing. What I meant was, last Friday I should have been writing, Instead I went with Cookie and Cookie Junior to the Art Institute. We especially wanted to hear the gallery talk on Cassatt, Sargent, and Whistler, but we stayed afterwards to appreciate a few other things.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures because 1-all I had was my phone, and 2- the art is usually there, and better in person than any snapshot I could take of it.

That said, a few things either caught my eye, or were going to be gone soon. Here’s a small sampling:

Our gallery talk lecturer showed us this picture by John Singer Sargent.

John Singer Sargent – Venetian Glass Workers

It made me think of Mary Robinette Kowal’s novel, Valour and Vanity, a novel which is set in Regency-era Italy and is the kind of novel you might end up with if Jane Austen wrote Ocean’s Eleven. There are Venetian glass workers in it.

As long as we were thinking about Mary Robinette Kowal, who is a puppeteer as well as a writer, we decided to scoot into the Puppets exhibition. It was slated to close two days after our visit, so if we missed it on this trip, we weren’t going to see it. I say “we” but we couldn’t talk Cookie Junior into puppets, as she thinks they are creepy. She looked at 20th century art while we checked out the puppets.

Some historical puppets hung out inside a display case. You weren’t allowed to play with those.

Historical puppets from distant lands

Puppet closeup

Good thing Cookie Junior wasn’t with us to see the next one; creepy on so many levels! I don’t watch horror movies, but I want to know what kind of story someone could come up with about her.

Creepy puppet

The part that was most fun was the shadow puppet theatre. There were shapes on sticks that you could move behind a scrim, but that’s not all!

Shadow puppet theatre

They also provided instructions for making animal shapes using nothing but your hands. I’ve done the wolf one before, but that was the only one I knew how to do. We learned how to make dogs, ducks, horses and rabbits.

Cookie makes a bird!

We also visited the Asian collection. I found this incense burner shaped like an insect cage:

Incense burner from the Asian collection

Possibly the most interesting find of the day was the one Cookie described as “something that belongs in a Terry Pratchett novel.” We must have spent 15 minutes admiring it.

Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs lock

Here’s what the Art Institute says about the item that so captivated us:

Frank L. Koralewsky served as a traditional ironworker’s apprentice in his native north-German town of Stralsund. After obtaining journeyman status, he worked in various German shops before immigrating to Boston in the mid- 1890s. By 1906 he was a member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, specializing in locksmithing and hardware. This extremely intricate lock, which took seven years to complete, exemplifies the early-20th-century taste for sentimental medievalism and represents the pinnacle of the metalworking tradition at the turn of the 20th century. Exhibited at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where it won a gold medal, the lock illustrates Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

We’ve been going to the Art Institute for how many years, and we just now discovered this? Inconceivable!

I want one.

By the way, there are only six dwarfs on the lock. Bonus points to the person who can either state definitively what happened to the seventh, or come up with a convincing story…

I am a flying squirrel!

(Sorry if you get an ad before the video starts, but you should be able to click it away after a few seconds. Or who knows? Maybe it’s for something you want.)

I’ve been participating on the 750words.com web site for so long that I thought they ran out of badges for me to earn. Imagine my surprise and delight when I received a new one yesterday.

It looks like this:

Isn’t it adorable? I got it for a 1000-day writing streak. Whew! Maybe now I can take a break.

Writing Excuses 10.14 – Beginnings, part 3

Part 3 of 3

Today’s post is my third 500-word beginning for the story outlined in my July 14  post.

Elise ran her hands along the cool, brushed nickel box, over its rounded corners. She closed her eyes, the better to focus on the sensations from her fingers, seeking the recessed snap opening that was discernible only by touch. The whole container was barely larger than her fist. So much more elegant than the big plastic box her University upgrade had been packaged in. Though at the time, four years ago, she remembered being excited by that, too, and the future it seemed to promise.

But this box, with its subtly raised FMI logo—this was truly what she’d been working for. What her mother had worked overtime and sacrificed to make possible. She wanted to wait for Mom, and she didn’t.

“Time?” she subvocalized to her implant. In the cool, well-bred tones she’d set it to use as soon as she entered the business college of [NAME] University, it informed her that it was nine-oh-six, . Normally Mom would have been home by now. On a night like tonight, she should have been home an hour ago, even if she had charts to finish. Why didn’t she answer Elise’s message?

Elise felt she might explode. She’d done all the busywork she could think of, filling the time preparing for tonight’s celebration. She’d stopped to buy bratwurst, the cheap pink bubbly wine her mother loved, and a fresh deck of playing cards. A salad was already made, the table set. All the poker supplies were on the wood laminate coffee table in front of their sagging couch. Mom would sit on the couch, hunched low over her cards, trash-talking Elise as they played. The worse her mother’s cards were, the more colorful her mock insults grew.

Where was she? Mom knew Elise was supposed to hear about her job placement today. Didn’t she want to be home, whether to comfort or to celebrate? Elise had expected her to message much earlier in the day, as soon as she got any kind of break at work, but there had been no communication of any sort, and no response to Elise’s message sent—how long ago was it now? Over half an hour.

Well, at least she could access the documentation she’d been sent with her offer. She kicked off her knockoff Feruccis and lay down on the couch. Closing her eyes, she said, “Open email for FMI offer details.”

“Read it out, or will you read?” her implant asked.

“‘l’ll read.” She’d listened to the details already, but she wanted to process the information visually. When she was jumpy like this, it sometimes settled her to read. Scrolling across her interior vision field, the details of the offer still delighted her. Two hundred K to start. That was twice what her mother made. Even if she didn’t get a salary bump at full employment, she would be able to pay her loans off in five years. And she would get that raise. She’d done her research. FMI kept interns at base pay for a year, then bumped it by at least ten percent. She’d heard of some rookies getting fifty percent after the first year, if they were real hotshots. She was just such a hotshot, and she knew it.

No one who started in [the projects] got into FMI, even if they had the grades for it. That is, no one but Elise.

Which of the three beginnings works best for you, making you want to read further? What do you expect to happen in this story?