Free Rice and Fairy Princes

1:01 PM PST, February 28, 2009

(Information about my other writing can be found here. Happy reading!)

Having not visited Free Rice for quite a while, I was delighted to find that it's expanded to include more subjects besides English vocabulary. Art, mathematics, geography and other languages have been added to its multiple-choice format, allowing me to feed the world even more lavishly as I bone up on my German and distinguish Cassatt from Caillebotte. (For more information, here's the Wiki article.)

When that world is too much with me--and so often it is, lately--I take my spiffy new imperial-scarlet Dell Vostro for a spin, cyber-escaping to the pagan realms Wordsworth yearned for. What the mild retiring bard would have thought of Prince Nuada Silverlance I can only guess, but my own views are definite. (And yes, I know the prince is an elf, not a fairy, but the alliteration was piquant.)

CK

To Airy Thinness Beat

6:42 PM PST, February 18, 2009

(Information about my other writing can be found here. Happy reading!)

...............

Donne was using gold as a metaphor for distance in his famous love poem that always struck me as the most unromantic effusion ever penned, but airy thinness perfectly describes my mood just now. I've got a cold I can't get over despite weeks of pills and hankies, a half-dozen writing projects that don't feel like being finished and are loafing slackerwise in the basement of my brain; and worst of all, my favorite pine tree where Swoop the Owl used to perch and stare at me as I pestered the muse is reduced to a shattered trunk, victim of last week's high winds. It bent as much as it could, luckless conifer, until it split utterly and its great boughs crashed all over the roof. Now that the branches are neatly chainsawed and piled on the ground, I'm surprised at just how very big a tree it was, and saddened by how much naked space it's left at my window.

Here's the tree with Swoop in it, taken in happier days:

A few lower limbs survive. Maybe he (or she) will come back. Maybe my cold will quit. Maybe that frowsy useless muse will struggle up out of her beanbag and get crackin'.

Hope's a beautiful, silly thing.

CK