Camping, Day 2

360 view of the campsite.

Omaha and Yamaraashi-chan were up in the morning long before I was, making me wonder what happened to my usual up-and-at-'em while camping. I was a grump this time. Omaha was having the worst allergy attack, and it would stay bad throughout the rest of the day. This was our first camping trip early in the summer and maybe that was the problem, because everyone was a little sniffly.

I made coffee while the girls read their books. Breakfast, after everyone was awake, consisted of Omaha's breakfast muffins, only slightly burned in the camp oven, but not tragically.

Ancient Table

The campsite was comfortably situated right next to the river, and we had a table of middling age. Some of the tables were brand new, and had proper iron fire rings; ours was older, with a crack in one end, and the fire ring had a welded grate. The oldest tables were decrepit and had only a stone fire ring. This table must have been ancient, and I'm not even sure when the last time the grill was even used.

It was while dressing to go hiking that Omaha discovered the one major mistake we'd made: we hadn't checked the girls' clothing inventory closely. The list we'd given them had instructed them to have enough pants, shirts, underwear, and socks for seven days in the woods. We discovered, to our horror, that they'd each brought six pairs of shorts and six pairs of long pants. Worse, Kouryou-chan had brought exactly one pair of underwear.

"She gets to learn how to wash her clothes in the river," Omaha said. "With Dr. Bronners."

Duckabush River from Jefferson Trail Cove

We walked the Jefferson Trail, a small trail near the campsite (and near the well with the iron-heavy water) that led to a nifty little cove where we stopped for lunch. While we were there, we saw

Frog!

this nifty frog sunning himself and eating bugs. He lunged to catch one as I watched, so I turned my camera to movie mode to see if he'd do it again, but he never in the ten minutes I watched. I deleted the film to make room for more photos.

Nobody liked my choice Gorp, although Kouryou-chan greedily picked out the chocolate chips.

After that, we walked back and then drove into town for some supplies we'd forgotten, like paper towels. This was an interminable exercise in boredom while we waited for various road construction crews to asphalt the roads. We passed by steamrollers that sounded like something out of Quake.

Evil Chicken Overlord!

We got back to camp and Omaha used her amazing fire skills so we could make dinner. Tonight's choice was beercan chicken, and I for one am ready to reach out and shake the wing of our evil chicken overlords! It took fully two hours to cook, but it was so moist and delicious when we were done that no one complained. We played charades while we waited. I made couscous and steamed broccoli for sides.

Omaha's allergies made her miserable and kept her up most of the night. Everyone else seemed to have slept well, though. I didn't recall waking up once.

Review: Trial of Flowers, by Jay Lake

Trial of Flowers is one of those new books in the "steampunk and decadence" genre that seems to have become popular since the emergence of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Trial follows the adventures of three men: Jason the Factor, Imago of Lockwood, and Bijaz the Dwarf, as the three of them face the rising old and corrupt gods and their magick that threatens to either overwhelm their beloved City Imperishable, or attract the attention of neighboring nations determined to raze the City to the ground before the gods can gather their full strength. The City is a place of "eletricks" and "hedge mages," of "poor magicks" and "boxed dwarves," of steam and iron. It might be New Orleans, or Casablanca, or Shanghai, with the last magics and the first difference engines vying for attention.

Jason is a mercantile agent who works for the city's most powerful mage and who has a secret torture chamber under his warehouse, Imago a shifty lawyer who's lost one case too many and owes money to legbreakers, and Bijaz is a "made dwarf," his body artificially stunted in its growth, trained as an accountant, with a taste for snuff theatre. These three don't necessarily get along as they each fumble their way toward saving themselves, and maybe the city as well.

As I mentioned, the inevitable comparison to China Mieville is there, but if there's one thing Jay Lake does better than China, it's this: Jay does not flinch. Not for a second. Heck, Steven R. Donaldson, once hailed as the modern master of characters wallowing in their own degradation, was never quite as skilled at not flinching the way Jay does not flinch. Thomas Covenant's self-loathing was never quite as pointed or tangible as Bijaz's.

That said, the issues involved do make it hard to care about Jason, Bijaz and, to a lesser extent, Imago. These aren't nice people, and the scatological hells through which Jay metaphorically and literally drags them, often face-down, is tough reading. The expected redemptions aren't as rewarding as we might hope. This ain't no book for the beach. But they're all done so well and so artfully that once you're into the book, once you've accepted the humane ugliness that Jay has decided to show you, you'll be hooked.

Trial of Flowers isn't a perfect book. There's a sense of isolation to the City Imperishable; its presence on a world full of people never quite feels right. Even Moorcock's Melnibone' felt more attached to its wider world than the City Imperishable, and I sensed that discordance more than once. But the wider world isn't what the book is about, so once you've stepped into the City Imperishable, there really is only one way out. You'll just have to travel through the city's sewers, pursued by eyeless, frog-tongued children and accompanied by two mad dwarves, each insane in his own way, to get there.

Highly recommended to readers of the "new weird," urban steampunk, and good literary fantasy.

Kouryou-chan Undergoes A Rite Of Passage

Kouryou-chan's teeth.

Kouryou-chan underwent one of those terrible rites of passage many children her age go through: she got her first orthodontic appliances put in. A pair of maxillary expanders, top and bottom, to shape her jaw into a slightly wider alignment to give her front teeth room to grow.

As you can see from the X-ray, her front teeth have been pushed way out in front and she has a terrible overbite. Part of this was due to her knocking out her front teeth in a sledding accident four years ago; this gave her adult teeth no guidance on where to go, quite literally, when they started to come in.

She was very brave at the orthodontist. The little rubber bands she'd worn for the past two weeks came out easily, and the woman doing the work talked her through the process of cleaning out the space around the teeth, applying the glue to the unit (covered with little pieces of Post-it note to keep the glue from spreading, and the springs were coated with Chapstick so they wouldn't scratch-- very straightforward tech), and then cleaning the excess glue and fixing it with the UV lantern. It only took about an hour for the whole process, and while she complained a bit in the middle she was completely cool by the time it was done.

Omaha and I packed her off to summer daycamp.

When she came home, she said she had no problem speaking (although I can hear a slight lisp), but she couldn't eat very effectively. She had trouble with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, even.

It was really trouble when she went to bed. For the first time all day she had the peace and quiet to contemplate what had happened to her, lying with her head to one side pressed her cheek against the appliance, the cleaning ritual was long and involved, and she finally broke from the stress of it all and began crying.

Since I had had braces as a kid, I was able to tell her all the truths: it was gonna hurt for a few days. It would be over eventually. We gave her ibuprofen, and I put some dental wax, perhaps overly theatrically, on two upper spring mounts and the lower crossbar where her tongue pressed against it. I told her the truth about the aching, that there wasn't anything I could do about it, and that it would go away in a while.

Poor little girl. But, she's tough, and she'll make it through this. After much fussing and attention, we finally turned out the lights and she fell straight to sleep.

Book Review, Warhammer 40,000: Hammer of Daemons by Ben Counter

I've already reviewed Ben Counter's first two books in his Grey Knights series, Grey Knights and Dark Adeptus, and I've now read the third book in the series, Hammer of Daemons (Grief, that's a great cover, ain't it?).

I wrote in my original review that the Black Library "is over-the-top space opera fantasy cranked far beyond 11." Hammer takes it further and, sometimes, jumps the shark with it.

In Hammer, Brother Alaric, the hero of the previous two books, leads a doomed mission of Space Marines into battle, is overwhelmed by the enemy, and is sent to Drakaasi, the world of The Blood God, one of the Lords of Chaos, where he is run through a successively brutal collection of gladiatorial games for the amusements of the various Blood God warlords who live there.

This book is half-disappointing in that, in order to exceed himself from his previous two works, Counter must go so far over the top that the writing becomes campy. You know how the average human body has six liters or so of blood? The people of Drakaasi seems to have six thousand liters hiding away in there, and they must breed like rabbits on a world with no discernable ecosystem, because there are oceans of blood (and not a little gore) being tossed around in this story.

On the other hand, Alaric's dealing with defeat, with the destruction of his psychic defense shield and the removal of his eldritch tattoos that protect him from corruption and evil, and the way that he battles through this post-hellish landscape, is surprisingly persuasive. Counter has a strong grip on Alaric's character, what makes him "work." Taking Drakaasi at face value, the interaction Alaric, his allies, and the horrors they face tells a compelling story.

There's one scene Kouryou-chan (my eight-year-old daughter) got a glimpse of over my shoulder and she thought was funny. Two villains, a warlord and his chief warrior, are talking. The warlord, it must be said, has had his body surgically modified to look like a dragon. You can probably guess which is which:

"I will be forced to eat you at the first sign of betrayal, Venalitor."

"Eat me? I had heard you consumed your enemies in the past, but I did not know if the stories were true."

"Oh, yes, I have eaten many enemies. It hardly does to possess a form like this and not indulge its appetites. Spies and enemies, and a few sycophants, go straight down the gullet. The inconsequential, I chew before I swallow. Those who truly anger me I force down in one go. I can feel them wriggle as they dissolve, most pleasing."

"As threats go, Lord Ebondrake, that was one of the more civilly delivered."

There's a scene at the end where Counter tries too hard to show how Alaric is both corrupted himself and yet still capable of making "difficult" choices in the service of his Faith in his Emperor and Humanity, but the scene does make sense in the long run although it's a bit much for the reader to swallow after Alaric has come so far.

Still, this is a fitting end to the Alaric trilogy. It tells us everything we needed to know, and ends with the same kind of long, brutal fight scenes we've come to expect. It lifts the series out of the sag I mentioned in the second book, for here the evil is everywhere, the grotesqueries non-stop, the cinematic tour de force of descriptive writing, about a character who, surprisingly, still seems human enough for us to relate to.

Of course, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.