Seven Quick Takes: Lazy Edition

Laundry is calling my name, and a dozen other things, so this week’s Quick Takes is going to be brief.

1.
I’m linking this story about over-reaction making parents’ lives much more difficult because I see the advice “Better call the police. You never know what kind of people you’re dealing with” given far too often–about dealing with noisy neighbors, delinquent kids, people pulled over by the side of the road, seemingly-abandoned cars, and anyone who slows down their car to make conversation with passing kids through the window. It’s paranoid, it divides neighborhoods, it overworks police who should be preventing actual crime, and, when the police also catch this “just in case, cover our bases” mentality, it leads to things like parents being charged with a crime because their children chose to disobey instructions and went walking by themselves.

2.
It might be possible to save the woman sentenced to hang for being Christian. There’s time. Pray—and U.S. citizens, put some pressure on your representatives to investigate every possible avenue her status as wife of a US citizen and mother of US citizens might open up.

3.
Time to reread Pieper, I think! Simcha talks about the importance of recreation. Not just zoning out on the couch, but doing the things that re-create ourselves and, consequently, the world around us. Reading this piece inspired me to get out in my garden on Wednesday, which will hopefully pay off in beauty as much as it paid off in immediate mood lifting!

“Is health important? Uh, yeah, duh. Is it the summit of our human experience? Is it the sole quality off of which we should determine the worth of our children? No.
We need to move past this fatalistic attitude we have that says a life with a disability is tragic and hopeless. We need to get over the idea that a handicapped baby is better off dead.”

Read the rest.

5.
Visiting the used book store last week reignited some fond feelings and memories of hours spent reading sci fi and fantasy novels as a teen. There were years when I routinely read a book a day, or at least three or four novels a week. Obviously, at that rate, I wasn’t reading great, weighty works of literature. I was reading Robert Asprin, Patricia McKillip, Christopher Stasheff, Ann McCaffrey, Tad Williams, Harry Harrison, Madeleine L’Engle, Robin McKinley, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Diane Duane, Mercedes Lackey, and Lois McMaster Bujold. Some I read when I was still too young to fully appreciate the skill and depth of the writing. Some doesn’t bear re-reading now, as an adult, without the undiscriminatory appetite for story and taste for melodrama that I once had. And then there are authors I didn’t appreciate sufficiently at the time. Fortunately, Tor books has a little free library of ebooks so I can go back and reread the books I overlooked before. This week, I’m reading the first of the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, and enjoying the rather militarily flavored prose and descriptions of battles and space navigation more than I expected to.

6.
Ummm… I’ve got to have something more in me this week. OK, how about this?

That is a picture of a little victory.

Despite never having barbequed over charcoal before in my life (I’ve always left such things to guys who seem to have been in training for starting fires and charring meat their whole lives), I bought this tiny little camp-bbq-in-a-bag set on clearance at Canadian Tire a few weeks back. I’ve dragged it out a couple of times, but could never get the charcoal to light or stay lit. So, this week I went out and bought some charcoal starter, soaked it well, and got it lit! It was a bit stressful, since the kids were disinclined to keep their distance from such an interesting enterprise regardless of how I scolded, and the little shelf the last residents built onto the deck is pretty flimsy. Nothing particularly untoward happened, though, dinner turned out great, and I didn’t even mind that I smelt like smoke the rest of the evening.

And…there’s no number 7! Sorry ’bout that. Enjoy your weekend!