Recent reading

Däggdjur by Anders Bjärvall and Staffan Ullström (Mammals)
A field guide to wild mammals in Europe. Yes, I read this straight through (though skimming the entries about some animals not found in Sweden). There's so much I don't know about mammals, so this was interesting.

Then I read about a third of Nisi Shawl's Everfair, which I guess is good but it just wasn't what I felt like reading right then. Will continue later.

The Edge Between the Sand and the Stars by rain_sleet_snow
Apparently what I did feel like reading was book-length Star Wars fic! This is really good, you guys. It's a Rey-centric fic which I'm glad to have read before it's jossed by the next movie. The pairing is Rey/Finn/Poe but there's so much besides the pairing. There's worldbuilding and plot and Rey's Jedi training and Rey searching for her family. In fact this fic kind of reminds me of some of my own due South fics in that it is interested in family history and family bonds (as well as non-family bonds) and sense of place. It is a solid Bechdel-test pass and I really like Rey's relationship with Luke and Leia.

Ha ha, and now I see that the same author has written Obi-Wan Kenobi/Owen Lars/Beru Whitesun. That is totally the Star Wars equivalent of Bob/Buck/Caroline.

Fix things Friday

Okay, slight overload on the organizational work this week, to the point of it feeling like a second job. Should probably tone it down a bit. But I'll be spending time with my sister this weekend (she's visiting from another town) so hopefully I'll rest a bit then. I have:

- Taken minutes at a members' meeting of the union at the town level.
- Set up the next members' meeting of the union at the university level.
- Written up a response from my environmental organization to a Forest Agency proposal. This has taken a lot of time, between reading the document, doing research, and talking to people in our org to see what they think so that what I'm writing is properly anchored.
- Worked with the ongoing forest conflict I've written about on previous weeks. This has also taken a lot of time and involved lots of talking/emailing to people. I have 1) sent in a complaint to the company's certification body, 2) alerted the authorities of findings of protected species, 3) written an op-ed in reply to the company's op-ed.
- Agreed to talk at a seminar about forest and climate and worked out with another person how we're going to divide up stuff between our two contributions. It's meant to be for people involved in the climate movement, so they can learn more about forest stuff.
- Written up and sent off a letter of protest to the Ukrainian government from our environmental org, in support of Ukrainian activists trying to protect forests in the Carpathians from a potential ski resort.
- The eternal eeemailing in both organizations.

"Anchored" is not actually used that way in English, right? In Swedish you use it to mean "making sure that something has enough support within an organization".