romping

Gimbling in the Wabe – Curling Up With a Good Book, Redoux

This is a reworking of a Gimbling in the Wabe I wrote in back in 2013, but it felt especially relevant today as the temperature here took a nose dive. The Mighty Belle and I still made it out to the Lake of the Isles, though! I hope you’ll allow […]

Gimbling in the Wabe – Karma in the Snow

The Mighty Belle and I got busted the other day. My fault. I know that letting your dog run free in a city park risks a $140 fine, which is why I take Belle to the licensed off-leash park every weekday. But this was the weekend, and we needed a […]

Birthdays

On this day, March 5, in 1952, Margaret Astrid Lindholm (better known under the pen names of Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm) was born in Berkeley, California. As Robin Hobb, she is the author many works of epic traditional fantasy, including The Farseer Trilogy (which began with Assassin’s Apprentice), The Liveship Traders Trilogy, and the Tawny Man Trilogy. She also writes as Megan Lindholm, and her works under that name have been finalists for the Hugo award, the Nebula Award and the Endeavor award. She has won an Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers’ Award twice, and in 2014 she was a Guest of Honor at the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention in London. Today, she turns 69.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.