Gris's Journal

Happy Birthday, Oma!

My grandmother turned 99 today. World, meet Oma. ^_^

And just to make you drool... here's the cake I baked her-- a Plum-Apricot Torte.

The biweekly haul

Actually, the title's a bit of a misnomer this week, as yet again, I seem to have lost track of my weeks. (Anyone else notice how time seems to speed up as one gets older? Summers used to last an AEON, and this one's more than halfway to over already. Just last month, it was May... no, really... At any rate...) I usually pick up my comics biweekly, and this time I seem to have misplaced a whole week somewhere and wound up with three weeks' worth at once.

Next week, if I remember, I'll pick up again, and then you'll wind up with the whole month's list (which should be close to everything, except for the few titles that come out on a "when the artist feels like it" basis). In the meantime, if you'd like the semi-annotated list of what I read monthly, read on...

Right, then. In alphabetical order, mostly (and I'm not going to bother with links, 'cause the list is enough work, thanks):

Animerica: Extra
I'm beginning to think about dropping this title... it's pricey for what I get out of it. Yes, in the tradition of manga, it's many titles under one cover, published serially, but lately I've only been reading about half the titles. Still, one of the titles I *don't* read is ending with this ish, so we'll see what they get to replace it.

Batgirl: Year One
Come on, need you even ask? She's a librarian. I was sort of disappointed by the way she dissed the job, actually, at the beginning of this title, but hey, it's not like she's not putting the skills to use later in her career. ; ) Yes, I get Birds of Prey, too, tho' it's not in this particular haul. (And I'm going to be *very* upset if the stoopid zero-G boobs cover art in Previews is any indication of what's to come with the new art team).

Batman: Detective Comics, Batman: Gotham Knights, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Batman: Nevermore, Gotham Central, Nightwing, and Teen Titans (nee Young Justice)--which I primarily read for the Batfolk)-- and, while we're at it, Batman, Robin, and the occasional issue of Batgirl, (none of which latter titles came in these weeks')
Heh. Um. Little much to see them all together like that, isn't it? Truthfully, I was never very into the Batboys. I've always liked Batgirl/Oracle, for the above-stated reason, and I like the latest Robin because he was *smart*-- he did the detective thing without the Batman-angst thing, but was still believable as a teenaged kid. Then a few summers ago, the "Ground Zero/No Man's Land" storyline hit Gotham with a monster earthquake, and I got sucked in... and stayed, because the writing was *good.* What I like best about the array of books is that, similar as they sound, they've all got a slightly different flavor to them, and completely different stories. You get character crossover, of course, but the storylines remain nicely independent. Gotham Central, for example, follows the GCPD. (What's it like to try to do a cop's job in a city overshadowed by the Batman?). Batman: Nevermore is an alternate Poe storyline written by Guy Davis, who did such wonderful things with the golden-age Sandman revival. Batman: Gotham Knights tends to give you more of a look at the world *around* Batman, in addition to the main character. A good bunch of books... I keep looking for a title here or there to drop, but they've all got such good storylines...

The Blackburne Covenant
Well... I picked this up because the concept intrigued me-- an author who writes about an ancient conspiracy that turns out to be real, and is now out to get him for revealing them. I wasn't that thrilled with the way they handled it, and I probably would have dropped it anyway had it not ended with this issue.

Blade of the Immortal
One of many manga titles I read... a really good samurai story with a truly creative array of weaponry and a fuzzy line between good guys and bad guys. Very handsome art, not a title for the squeamish.

Fables
Phew... only up to the F's? Okay. Well-- the characters of fairytales are real, and they live among us. The latest storyline promises *great* amusement. Snow (White, that is) and Bigby (Bigby Wolf... go on, guess who *my* favorite character is) have been brainwashed into spending vacation in the woods... alone together... one sleeping bag... ^_^

Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface
Shirow's work is gorgeous as usual... this one always reads slow because he packs *so* much detail into the images.

Gold Digger
Let's see, the Diggers family: Mr. and Mrs. Diggers-- archmage and weaponsmaster from a neighboring dimension, respectively. Gina Diggers, scientist, inventor, adventurer, and archaeologist extraordinaire. Brittany "Cheetah" Diggers, adopted big sister, werecheetah. Brianna Diggers, little sister, clone of Gina and Brit', with the best (and worst) of both of her sisters' traits. And that's not to mention the (often hunky) supporting cast.... "Amerimanga" at its finest. ^_^

Hunter: The Age of Magic
Alas, another Gaiman-related book coming to a close... it's good, though. Tim's grown up, and the latest art style's been kind of getting on my nerves.

New Mutants
One of the few X-related books I still read... the X-books really went downhill a few years ago, alas, and I've not really been impressed with the "fresh start" they made when the movie came out. I used to read New Mutants a *very* long time ago, when it first came out. I'm giving it another try, as they've just restarted the title after a long absence. We'll see. Title's still on probation.

NHS, nee Ninja High School
I used to really like the original incarnation of this book, back when Ben Dunn was still writing it. Lately... eh. Some of the characters are sort of amusing (for example, the son of Thor who doesn't know he's related to a rain god... echoes of Douglas Adams, anyone?). The art in the new NHS is... immature. Not in the "childish" sense, but in the "hasn't hit its stride" sense. Still trying to get the hang of the manga style, I think. The grammar and spelling don't get tended to as well, either, which bugs me. Overall... it's just not as funny a book as it used to be. Well... we'll see how this storyline finishes up. Also a title on probation.

Runaways
Yet another probationary title... this one's rather amusing. A bunch of kids with little in common who only know each other because their parents are friends/business associates. They discover that the "business" their parents are all in is the supervillain business.

The Silken Ghost, Way of the Rat
The first is a spinoff of the second. I get both of them. These are CrossGen titles, in this case set in a Chinese-flavored landscape. Action, humor, a really smart monkey (I read the WotR letters page *just* for the monkey). My personal jury's still out on the CrossGen titles... the ones I like best don't rely too much on the brand shtick. They *claimed* they were going to keep the titles independent, but with the advent of Solus they're failing miserably at that claim. The books also *feel* a lot shorter than most of the other titles I read... I don't feel like I'm getting as much bang for the buck. Ah, well, we'll see.

Usagi Yojimbo
Ahhh, a classic. The original anthropomorpic rabbit samurai. Great art, great stories... Sakai just rocks.

Wolverine and Wolverine: Snikt!
Wolvie's the one X-Men that has never, ever let me down (well, except for Origins, but I'm pretending that never happened). I'm a little annoyed that they've restarted his title YET AGAIN, and I'm not too fond of the Wolvie-as-hairy-brute look, but inside it's still Wolverine. Snikt! is part of Marvel's ongoing attempt to catch a ride on the manga train... there's been very little plot-progress so far and the action scenes are almost *too* blurry-fast (what made me think they could only do that in movies?), but the artwork is gorgeous, and Nihei gets kudos for capturing the spirit of Wolvie within the first few frames.

Non-"comic" titles:

Newtype USA
Japan's best (IMHO) anime magazine, in English, complete with all the extra goodies (like DVD samplers) that come in the original. Much fun for an non-Japanese-reading otaku like me.

Natural History
Well, I *did* say NON-comic titles, and this is one of my monthlies. I got hooked on this in grad school, when I realized that I was looking forward to the Birds Library getting it in every month. The AMNH has a chocolate exhibit this summer. :9

Graphic Novels (well, alright, manga books):

Ceres: Celestial Legend
I started this one because it's by Yuu Watase, the same author/artist as did Fushigi Yuugi. I'm keeping it because it's got the same bishonen guys and fierce, funny characters as FY does. This is a much darker title from the start, tho... I can sense this one getting *very* messy down the road.

Kare Kano (a.k.a. His & Her Circumstances)
I'm addicted to the anime of this title. Yes, it's a boy-meets-girl with the usual dose of anime humor and relationship quirks and insecurities, but the deeply introspective natures of both main characters gives it a whole 'nother layer. Oh, and Yukino's SD form is a riot.

Love Hina
Very cute and funny. Boy looking for childhood-friend-girl meets girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, and girl. (Yeah, I'm probably missing a few...) I want a flying turtle.

Marmalade Boy
No, I spelled it correctly, tho' thanks to this title I spell the citrus preserves wrong half the time now. The cover blurb says it quite well: "A tangled teen romance that puts the 'fun' in 'dysfunctional.'" "Tangled" is an understatement... you need a flow chart to keep track of the love polygons in this one. Sweet and occasionally sappy but over-the-top silly/funny.

Whiteout
A murder detective story set in the Antarctic. Haven't read it yet, so can't comment, tho' the title came recommended to me.

The Wicked Omnibus
I picked up the single issues of these awhile ago. Um... I seem to recall them being in color, and I'm sort of disappointed to find this isn't. (Couldn't they get the colorist on board?) Still has the same lush artwork, though, and it was a good story.

Gilding the lilies

Last fall, a couple of my friends undertook a *major* fall planting, settting 300 lilies and daffodils into a new bed in their front lawn. Dreamy fool that I am, I started eyeing that stubborn bare patch next to the driveway last fall, and thinking how nice it would be to have a little color out front. Not like I'd even have to lift sod to put a small bed in, after all, nothing's growing there now, right? Buy a few bulbs, loosen up the dirt and put a little edging around it, and in the spring I'd have beautiful flowers, just like Jeremy, right?

Heh... heh... heh....

On such dreams do gardening centers make their really big bucks.

You see, grass will grow just about *anywhere.* If there's a nice sunny spot on which grass refuses to grow, there's usually a reason... and silly me, I found out the hard way. I staked out my bed and started digging, and quickly discovered that the "soil" beneath was composed of packed clay and stones. No drainage, no organic matter. It took me not one but *four* afternoons (two of them in mizzling rain) of hard labor with a pickaxe to carve my 6'x4'x8" bed out of the earth. (There were times I thought it very convenient that my muddy little hole was about grave-sized. Just in case, you know.)

The "native soil" was so awful that I didn't so much amend as replace it. Three *large* bags of a rich soil mix, two bags each of manure, vermiculite, and topsoil, a bag of blood meal, and three more bags of black cedar mulch to top everything off. Seven yards of edging to hold everything in place. (Told you the gardening center loved me.) I'm sure the sweat and fresh blood helped the flowers, too.

Other fall planting aside (I went a little nuts with the planting last fall)-- 141 bulbs total went into my brand-new "lily" bed. I designed it to bloom continuously from March to August, starting at the outside edge and blooming inward, culminating in lilies; blue, white, and yellow for spring, and bold colors for summer. 21 "bright mix" Asiatic lilies, 5 paperwhites, 20 mixed fragrant narcissus, 15 Hollandica white iris, 20 J.S. Dyt Iris reticulata, 40 "Magic Carpet" mix grape hyacinth, 10 snowdrops, and 10 winter aconite.

That was my fall-- lots and LOTS of planting. Blisters I could be proud of. I would look around at my little covered-over holes in the ground and actually *giggle* in anticipation of what spring was going to look like the following year.

Winter came, snow covered everything over, all was well... and then the snowplow came, and plowed straight into the new raised bed. We actually *paid* that man for the privilege of having him *miss* the driveway by five feet and tear up half of my brand-new, never-bloomed, blood-sweat-and-tears lily bed. It's not like it's easy to miss, either-- post on one side, trees on the other side. He even had to jump the curb. I was furiously angry, I was in tears, and I was certain all my work, my careful layout, had been destroyed.

Well... I'll save you the angst. it made for a rather depressing winter, gardening-wise, but it wasn't that bad in the end. My mother helped me out with a little gardening surgery, and by spring, the damage had mostly been repaired. The damaged half of the bed bloomed later than the undisturbed half, and the pattern was sort of... squished-in on one side, but everything came up, eventually.

The spring flowering was quite impressive, and I had a broader array of daffs than I'd dreamed of. The irises were a little disappointing, but I later discovered that half of them were late bloomers-- more early summer than spring. But the lilies-- after all, the lilies were what this bed was *about* to begin with. I've been waiting to see my lilies bloom.

And just last week, they started...

Meese!

A certain someone has yet again suggested that my blog has been woefully short on content of late. Sure enough... here it is July, and my last post was mid-June. So, to keep the readership entertained (ye happy few) until I can find something interesting to talk about in my own life (ha. yeah... sorry.), I bring you this close encounter of the natural kind. My parents live much of the time in the Adirondacks of New York (this is not to say they're *not* alive some of the time, but that life is carried on in other places). Of late, some of New York's "forever wild" critters have been coming back from whence they fled upon the arrival of the tourists ("whence" being the same place any sane person flees to in times of distress: Canada). Dad's seen a few in the area, but this time, he had his camera. ^_^

This particular wild thing decided to "return" to a cow farm down the road, although my father mentioned recent evidence that they've been on our property, too. Moose are typically solitary, but this one got curious about the cows. He jumped the fence, and didn't have the takeoff room to jump out again. (Don't worry, they dropped the fence to let him out later.) The reason the moose's antlers look fuzzy is because they are-- these pictures were taken mid-June, while he was still in velvet (the pictures are fuzzy from distance, too, but not THAT fuzzy). Cool, neh?