The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ariel:

from #194, and the tiny size of dead moles:

When I was younger, I had a most remarkable cat. She was silver-grey, and a pound cat; she was my first real pet, though not the first in the household, and I'd picked her out myself. She was a survivor (really-- she got lost once for more than six months, and still managed to find her way home) and had been fairly poorly treated by life before we got her. She was half-blind from cataracts, half of her whiskers didn't work properly, and her tail was nothing but dead weight. She was also the best hunter I have ever seen or heard of.

This cat brought home at least one bit of prey every evening during warm months until she ran out of local rodents; and, what's more, she sorted it. Moles went on the back porch, voles on the front. Squirrels had their top halves eaten; back legs and tails went on the front walkway. Rats were laid out neat as you please on the living room rug (thankfully, only five of them made the mistake of moving into the neighborhood) and rabbits went under a dining room chair.

It could have been worse; the others didn't hunt so much, but one of *them* left a bird right next to my parents' bed to step on in the morning.

(Greta also shed enough that, when I was in high school, I decided that *something* useful had to be done with all of this hair, and started spinning cat-hair yarn. It was incredibly soft, and made a great threat for all of my allergic friends. Sadly, I wasn't coordinated enough to make anything of it before she died.)

On Hungarian menus, #64:

When traveling with a friend in Europe at age 11 or so, we went through Hungary, Austria, Germany, Italy, and just a smidge of Yugoslavia. (It was right when the war started, we we avoided more than some necessary corner.) The trip was marvelous fun, although I only remember odd images here and there, like the Magyar horse-trainers who had horses that sat like dogs and whose wives sold marvelous embroidery.

My friend was an absolute American heathen, and the pickiest eater ever. She travelled with a giant sack of puffed rice cereal and several boxes of pop-tarts, and lives on those and wiener schnitzel the entire time we weren't in Italy. I, on the other hand, discovered real Bolognese sauce, goulash, gelato, and the absolute joy that is European hot chocolate for breakfast. (The apple juice there also tasted unlike anything I've ever had here, and I'm still looking for it.)

The most memorable meal moment, though, was in this Hungarian restarant that was all gray stone and sturdy wood tables. They solved the tourist-menu problem in an apparently sensible fashion by putting pictures in next to the unpronouncable Hungarian dish names. One of them appeared to be flaming beef on a sword. I, of course, didn't buy it for a sec, but figured that *whatever* it was had to be interesting.

It was, in fact, large hunks of beef, flaming bright blue with alcohol, on a primitive sword-shaped spit. I can't for the life of me remember what it tasted like, but boy did it look impressive.

SylvieG @224: I was in a mental hospital for depression some time ago, and my parents (who I have an excellent relationship with) came up to visit. (After asking me first, to ensure they wouldn't make things worse. I appreciate how incredibly lucky this is.) They sat in on one of the doctor's interviews, when he asked about my history and what my childhood had been like. I said "Eh, perfectly ordinary." They looked at me in absolute shock and said "You don't remember???"

*That* was terrifying. I still am not entirely sure what's in those six or so years of mostly-blank-space; until they said that, I thought I'd only lost a single year, not the majority of elementary and middle school. My best guess is that what was under there is years of isolation and wearing emotional abuse at school, but since that's what I *do* remember... well, it's a bit scary. I haven't had the nerve to ask them for more details, especially since I'm sure they would have told me if it was anything really serious. I've been told since then that high stress and massive emotional overload can cause amnesia by reducing the brain's ability to record the short-term memories to long-term storage, so it may just be that my childhood and your parents' divorce broke something.

...which is a long way of saying, you're not the only one, and yes, it's scary. But it may not hide any big skeletons.

(Hm. There's something a little disturbing, in retrospect, about my considering years of social and emotional abuse from classmates as *ordinary*... but I think that's more society's problem with geeks in general.)

Ah, making. I've come to the conclusion that given infinite time and funds, I want to learn how to make everything. Except perhaps poetry. I never quite caught that bug. And, oddly, I couldn't tell you why; I just love to create things.

I make chocolate semi-professionally; it's a little hobby business, but I mostly do it to pay for supplies to do more cool things. Today's challenge was to make a bar people would want to eat titled "Ignorance should be painful."

I'm making my first suit of armor, and am already trying to figure out how to afford to make suit #2 in order to learn from my mistakes. I should probably finish the breastplate first.

I make furniture, at least the kind that comes from Ikea. ;)

I'm learning to make pretty things out of leather, as well as large armory things.

I make lovely calligraphy pieces, but they're rather embarassingly late because I tend to mess up on the final draft because I do something idiotic like listen to music and then get demoralized and abandon them.

I make giant piles of unfinished craft projects. ;) Currently including one quilt, four skirts, two needlepoint pieces, a scale mail purse, scale mail armor, a lilac leather halter top, some jewelry, some calligraphy, some illumination, and a whole lot of "I'm sure this would be really neat when I come up with a use for it" supplies. And that's just what I can remember off of the top of my head.

And, in general, I make myself happy. Isn't crafting fun?

Actually, what caused me to be so suspicious of Obama's charisma wasn't that it might be a tradeoff for other characteristics. It was the demagogue potential; anybody who can attract that much support because people *like* him could do a great deal of damage if he was so inclined. It's one of those history lessons I'm not convinced America has learned.

I did, eventually, end up voting for him anyway. But I had to take a long, hard look at him, his policies, and how sensible people reacted to him to get over my worry. And I'm still not entirely comfortable with it.

Brenda von Ahsen @ 15: Bush *isn't* a mudering sociopath. Sociopaths suffer from a particular set of psychiatric symptoms, which can be conducive in some cases to very scary behaviour. While you can certainly make an argument for deceitfulness, lack of remorse, and aggressiveness in public policy, from everything I've seen Bush doesn't have any of the sociopath symptoms in his personal life. He's just an ordinary person, not a mentally ill psycho.

I say this not just because I like being precise about mental illness, but because it's critically important to understanding what's going on in this country. This isn't "we elected someone who is inherently evil/unstable/ill". We elected a *perfectly ordinary guy* with some odd ideas about policy, who took full advantage of the political environment handed to him by 9/11 to run with those policy ideas. From a certain perspective, he's actually exceptionally competent: he's great at getting branches of the government to do what he wants, if not at having those policy ideas turn out to be effective.

This can happen again. This can happen again in the same "conservative" direction, or with a wild swing towards a liberal nanny-state, or anything in between. The problem isn't the President. The problem is the system that is allowing the President to so dramatically and single-handedly shape America's government and policy.

Michelle @6: Yes, at least to some extent, as several Islamic charities have recently been discovering. There are apparently religious requirements in Islam to give to charity, and the convenient charities in much of the middle east are organizations that have both a humanitarian wing and a militant wing. It doesn't matter that you're channelling money to Hamas or Hezbollah because they're the ones building schools and repairing roads; they're terrorist organizations, and the US government will freeze your charity's funds if you keep channelling them money.

I know that at least for a while there were threats of prosecution hanging over the leaders of some of those charities, but I'm not sure what's happened to those cases.

Re: #75, and the question about Tooks' pregnancy: I'd been speculating that she was pregnant since she started acting off in book 6. Not being able to shapechange as well as usual seems like just the kind of first symptom one would expect; add in stress, irritability, and an unexpected-to-most-people marriage which never seemed to produce newlywed cheerfulness? My bet is that the kid noticably predated the wedding.

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