hydro one: time of restoration 6pm "tomorrow"

hydro one: crews are in your area

hydro one: outage reason under investigation

me and everyone on my street: pretty sure if there really were crews in the area they would have noticed all the huge ass trees on the lines.

okay, hear me out, Bella Ramsey as Tobias.

yes, yes, I know they aren't blonde but having a non binary autistic actor play Tobias (who is so gender you can make a good argument for him being ftm or mtf) seems very chef's kiss to me.

and really, they could wear a blonde wig for the...what? 10 minutes Tobias is human.

animorphs book 1: the invasion

I had already started reading the books with my eldest kid before this book club launched so we're ahead a little. Although I'm re-reading as the schedule comes up (I swear!) So I'm getting the unique experience of watching a first time reader for the marketed age range read/listen to the books.

Mostly he gets the references from context or we've just so happened to have introduced him to some of the referenced media before (he knows generally who Xena is for example). We've only really had to stop and do a little mini lesson on the 90s a couple of times (90s malls were particularly fascinating).

Anyway, my kid had a interesting theory for book 1 (and really all the books up to 5) he was sure Marco was going to turn out to be a controller because of Marco's frequent insistence on not signing up for the war effort and his overall efforts in trying to talk everyone else out of it too. Because obviously a yeerk wouldn't want people fighting against them. So his theory was more or less, yeerk!Marco is trying to undermine a possible earth resistance by telling the kids how scary it would be and stop them from fighting in the first place.

I asked 'wouldn't it make more sense for Marco to just turn them all in if that was the case?' and his response was it would be too hard to keep that many morphers at the yeerk pool. So, he's thought about it enough to make some guesses about how hard it must be to keep an andalite at the yeerk pool while Visser Three feeds.

It does make me wonder if that alternate universe Marco as Visser Two was something that may have been tossed around earlier and then discarded.

would make for a fun fanfic idea, having one or two of the others being just a little bit suspicious of Marco in book one. (Tobias maybe? since he wouldn't have as much/any background knowledge as to why Marco is saying what he's saying) And then revisiting that suspicion after the visser one reveal.

but yeah, my kid spent book 1 being extra suspicious of Marco. And really, he's not entirely wrong to be. Marco could easily have been targeted by the Sharing after his mom "died" and his first impression of the Sharing is that they're just cool fun people, so the possibility of Marco being recruited by the Sharing was there.

animorphs book 1: the invasion

I swear I've been reading along on schedule, finding the time to do the club part of book club is another matter.

Anyway, I was viscerally brought back to my adolescent rage about that green anole lizard. When I finished the series back in 2001 and they do the big revel about where they're located my brain immediately did a brakes screech because Cassie would have made such a big deal over Jake finding a green anole in her barn!

Of course nine year old me went to the library and read about green anole lizards after reading book 1 back in 96. Of course I was like, ahaha they must be somewhere warm on the east coast to have green anoles! I am a master investigator! And then the last book. the west coast!? Jake found a non native lizard in her barn and Cassie was just cool with it!?

20+ years later and the lizard still bothers me to this day.

who would have guessed we would be having this conversation again 150 years later

to be a parent for a minute here,

i've talked to a lot of parents who agonize over how to get their kids to eat fruits or vegetables or just anything that's not processed to hell and back and I think a lot of parents over think this.

literally all you have to do is remind yourself that humans are animals. primates. we are not as evolved as you think we are and nowhere is that more obvious than three year olds. so with that in mind consider: new food is a new experience for the monkey brain.

when my kids are trying out a new food, which we mostly do at home because it will be messy, the kids get to peel it apart with their hands, smush it on the plate, poke holes into it, dunk it in water, squish it, pretend it's a truck, whatever it is they want to do with it (within reason, there will be no throwing of food across the room). and maybe that first time they won't even eat it. But the second time it's not a Weird New Thing that might have a surprising texture or smell or whatnot. they pretty thoroughly know now what to expect from it and so they're more inclined to take a chance on what it might taste like. and that's it. that's how I get my kids to eat new foods. Monkey brain wants to squish the food and put it into water to see if it floats before eating it so I let them.

It doesn't require hours of cutting vegetables into fun shapes or making elaborate aesthetically pleasing foodscapes. literally just, sure dump your peas into a bowl of water and then scoop them out by hand and call it pea-fishing.

Once they're consistently eating it, it doesn't take much to say, "it's okay to poke holes through the cucumber slices at home but we don't do that at grandma's house/school/a restaurant/etc." and honestly I've found that once the novelty has worn off they usually just go straight to eating it anyway. making the beans into a train is only fun so many times.

but yeah, less carrots cut into the shapes of dinosaurs and more seems like it would be good enrichment for gorillas at the zoo.

CBC does this thing where they ask authors about books that changed their lives or shaped their work and the responses are almost always these thought provoking nonfiction books or "classics" or those kinds of books that get put into the genre of "literature".

And either a) published writers are the kind of people who read that sort of stuff or b) everyone lies at least a little bit so they look cool on CBC which is...actually kind of funny.

Anyway my five books that shaped my life and writing would probably be:

Red is Best by Kathy Stinson, for proving to me from a very young age that actually you can like something as much as you want no matter how much people try to talk you out of it.

Animorphs #2 The Visitor by K.A. Applegate, look, I'd put the whole series here if I could because this series made me a reader and also snagged me young enough to change or shape a lot of my views on animal ethics, war and pacifism, morality, non-human view points, religions, and authority. But since it has to be just one book, then it has to be the Visitor because that was the first one I ever read.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith, this book made me realize how pervasive male point of view/characters are in media. It made me make a concerted effort to read more books by women and nonbinary people and about women and nonbinary people and in my own writing I consciously choose to fill out my worlds with predominately women and nonbinary people, like okay, we can have a couple of dudes in there as a treat but lets not get too hasty.

The Telling by Ursula Le Guin, it's story about stories. It just made me have a lot of feelings about stories and how we keep telling each other stories and they change a little bit here and there or a whole bunch all at once but its still a story. And just. It's so human to say, let me tell you a story.

Bear by Marian Engel, okay I know what you're thinking, that's a joke, right? but no. I am inspired by this book. Because if Marian Engel can write a book about a lady fucking a bear and win the Governor General's Award then I too can write whatever the fuck I want.

Say what you will about Jupiter Ascending's plot but the advertising for that movie was honest, do you want to see Mila Kunis be a space queen and do cool space shit with a flying wolf man from space which involves rocket boots and explosions (in space)?

And you know what, Jupiter Ascending delivered.