Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln....

Aside from the roses (for which I have some options, discussed below) it was a great weekend.

Friday I finally got to see Bride and Prejudice, best described as "take my favorite book, filter it through my newest fandom, and add my current lust bunny as a major character." Yes, it was good for me - and I practically needed a cigarette after Naveen Andrews did the big dance number.

Saturday, as I mentioned earlier, I did some yard saling before the Greek Festival. I mentioned the baskets, but I didn't mention my ultimate coup - the black leather Coach briefcase. In excellent if very slightly used condition. For $20.

Sunday was fantastic for three reasons:

1) The meeting for the Team Wench bylaws team was in the afternoon and go us - we went through the entire draft bylaws in slightly under 3 hours. I need to type up same and report back to the list, but we blew through in an afternoon what can take groups weeks to do online.

2) I Love a Mystery Newsletter got back to me, and of the first three books I review for them, two are for new series that I'm nuts about. I would have bought those books on my own, and now I'm getting them for free and I get to rave about them. Sometimes, it's good to be the reviewer. (Particularly since I wouldn't even know about one of the series without having been handed the first one.)

3) S came home, meaning Mrs. Palmer was well enough to leave.

All this is Of The Good.


Then, we have the roses.

I've priced pots and what could only be considered a ceramic vat, but have been warned off large ceramics lest they crack or break in weather shifts. Am now considering 20" self-watering pots from Gardeners which are about double the price of the roses, but ought to be able to protect my investment. I can't afford to buy a pot per rose right now, so I'm going to get as many as I can afford and move the newest bushes, as they should be the least traumatized by being yanked up and repotted right now. Some of the older ones are so well established that they're managing to survive with half their root system gone; I've been propping them up and watering them with root growth hormone, but I don't want to further traumatize them by repotting them right now, not if they can hold on through the season.

Also, since I'm temporarily giving up on the Bard Garden, I took a look at the roses that the local nursery had for sale. If I focus on color rather than name, I saw a nice old-fashioned one with fushia petals. I plucked a petal off to check, and it's drying to the same lovely color as the Noble Anthony petals. While David Austen is still selling Anthonys, it's nice to know that I have a local alternative which already comes in a pot. (I may deflect some of my Media*West funds to a replacement rose or two.)

For the future, I saw a nice Renaissancy-looking cement raised water garden pool. I need to find out the exact dimensions and price, and if it's affordable at all, I'll buy it to serve as the new Bard Garden with five roses and assorted other appropriate plants dotted around it. If nothing else, this is making me rethink my entire haphazard garden layout, and I may start shifting to large-scale container gardening rather than trying to make the sand dunes in my area fertile.

(no subject)

You'd think I'd learn not to talk about RPS after last time... but here I go. Since this wasn't directed as a question for the non-RPS folk I'm not going to go stir the shit on the original post or in the community. However, I just can't pass without comment.

carlanime posts a question to RPS readers/writers on fanthropology linking back to this post about how she started looking at people differently after RPSing them as a joke. I don’t mean to suggest for a second I agreed with any of his views or shared any of his motivations; in fact, the more of his speeches I read, the more opposed to his views I became. But, nevertheless, I was taking him seriously in some sense I hadn’t before. It was as if the process of ficcing him had somehow forced me to acknowledge his humanity.

Leading to this comment to the post that really blew my brain: This happened to me too. I looked and went, "Oh my GOD. That's actually a living, breathing, eating, sleeping person!"

Yes. It is.

Which still leaves me with my question about the whole damn genre - Why do you have to turn them into your fictionalized characters before you grasp that a human being is a human being? In all the flood of commentary when I first got my butt kicked for discussing this on LJ, I never got an answer to that that made any sense to me. Why in hell should it be a revelation that the actual person you're writing about is indeed a living, breathing, eating, sleeping person, and why only after writing about them do they become someone whose humanity now can be acknowledged?

RtE reviews and other

Two reviews up on Reviewing the Evidence (link @ right) - The Secret Portrait and Murder Most Crafty. I'm particularly happy with the Crafty review.

In other news, my basement has flooded. *sigh*