Month: January 2005

Red Mars

I don’t really know much about these books (Red Mars is the first in a series) but I do hear good things about them. They’re something about the colonization of Mars, but the emphasis is supposed to be on the characters and their schemes, relationships, and politics. I thought I’d give the first one a try and see what I thought.

From Amazon:

Red Mars opens with a tragic murder, an event that becomes the focal point for the surviving characters and the turning point in a long intrigue that pits idealistic Mars colonists against a desperately overpopulated Earth, radical political groups of all stripes against each other, and the interests of transnational corporations against the dreams of the pioneers.

This is a vast book: a chronicle of the exploration of Mars with some of the most engaging, vivid, and human characters in recent science fiction. Robinson fantasizes brilliantly about the science of terraforming a hostile world, analyzes the socio-economic forces that propel and attempt to control real interplanetary colonization, and imagines the diverse reactions that humanity would have to the dead, red planet.

I seem to be a bit heavy on Sci-Fi at the moment, though. I’ll probably have to take a break after this and hit some of the nonfiction books I have lined up, or maybe even dip back into Stephen King.

Jamie1 Comment

Sam’s Story: Week 49

Three hundred thirty-nine days. That’s how long we were able to keep Samantha from eating cat food.

I actually don’t think that’s that bad a record. I would have liked to have gone longer, but one day this week we left the kitchen gate open. A few seconds later Sam went quiet. This is always a bad sign, and upon investigating we found Sam sitting on the kitchen tile in front of the cat’s food bowl, gumming away on one of the nuggets. Apparently she liked it, because the next day she reached through the bars of the closed safety gate, snagged the cat food again, and tried to pull it through. If the cat liked Cheerios half as much, I’d let them switch. But fair’s fair.

For those of you playing Baby Bingo, Sam’s new trick for the week is clapping. Every once in a while she’ll stop in her tracks, sit up, fling her palms at each other a couple of times, giggle, then go on about what she was doing. It’s cute.

This clapping relieves us greatly, as we have a sticker gap we’re trying to fill. Allow me to explain. Ger got one of those “Baby’s First Year” calendars, which has stickers commemorating milestones like first smile, first solid food, starts crawling, plays patty-cake, starts walking, et cetera. We realized this week that Sam is almost a year old and we still have a LOT of stickers left, each one representing an unattained milestone. For me, it’s like finding out that I’ve missed a bunch of secret areas or unlockable items in my favorite video game. For Geralyn, oddly enough, it’s like her baby hasn’t hit all the milestones she’s supposed to. Unfortunately there is no “Eats Cat Food” sticker, so we often find ourselves down on the floor in Sam’s face, clenching a fist full of stickers and shouting “Come on! Play patty-cake! Do it! Patty-cake! COME ON! Come OOOOONNN!”

I’m sure we’ll get the sticker, but some day we’ll visit Sam in the asylum where she’ll be rocking back and forth in the corner, muttering “Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man. Bake me a cake as fast as you can. Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man…” I blame society for taking God out of public schools.

Here’s some pictures:



There’s one thing I wished I could have gotten a picture of, but was never able to. Besides the clapping, Sam’s new favorite thing is to shove her face into a mound of soap bubbles when taking a bath. I don’t know if she’s trying to drink the water or what, but when she comes back up she usually has a full bubble beard and a perplexed look on her face. And we laugh, because we finally get to put the “Eating Soap” sticker on the calendar.

One thing you may notice from those pictures is how freaking big Sam is getting. What’s really weird to me is that the growth is so gradual that I don’t notice it on a day-to-day basis. It’s not like we heard a popping noise in her nursery one morning and went in to find her her current size, but just compare the pictures above with some of her earlier photos and it’s amazing nonetheless. One short-lived tradition that I really wish we’d kept up was taking a picture of her next to my stuffed dinosaur week after week after week. The idea was to give a constant reference point for her growth. This is my only New Year’s Resolution: starting with her first birthday, I’m going to start doing this again, every week. I think it’ll be really fun, and a year-long montage of such photos will make a really neat picture someday.

Jamie3 Comments