Mary Rafferty

Dune

When I saw trailers for a Dune related mini-series in the fall, I thought it was time to reread the Dune series of books.  So I went online to get the right order only to find that since I last read the Dune books, their number had increased greatly — there were another nine books!  Fortunately my local library had all but one of the books I did not already have.

So more than six months later, I have finally gotten to the end of the series.  I have come across other sci-fi books which are longer, those in the Dune series are not short reads.  Most of them were over 400 pages and a few over 600.

The initial books were authored by Frank Herbert.  His son, Brian Herbert and his co-author Kevin Anderson were responsible for the later books (which tell parts of the story before, after and in between the original six books.) The writing style between the two was significant.  After this re-reading, I am totally puzzled why Dune was such a big hit.  Page after page is a character thinking or talking about what they are thinking.  It often felt like the Frank Herbert was pushing a philosophy of some sort on his readers.  The other books stick to more normal story-telling principles. With one exception — it seemed like they were writing for a multi-year TV series.  Books didn’t really end with a conclusion, but left the reader hanging for the next book / season.

As I recall from my schooling, fiction often requires a “suspension of disbelief”.  Sci-fi tends to rely heavily on that.  But some of the Dune stories and themes seriously pushed my abilities in that respect.  For instance, the imperial family, the Corrinos, had been in charge of the empire for 10,000 years.  Seriously?  With all the palace intrigue along with normal issues of hereditary rule, that is a bit much to swallow.  And I do not understand how a society with advanced space travel and related tech would be so inclined to no tech for just about everything else.  Even allowing for their fear of machine intelligence which had once enslaved them, the extremes and inconsistencies were awkward at best.  (And I do not understand why the machines would want a bunch of unruly organic human slaves when they also had the ability to have well behaved machine robots.)

Another direction I found my thoughts going I as read through the Dune series was the “compare and contrast” assignments from long ago classwork.  So compare and contrast the Dune empire with that of Asimov’s Foundation and Empire series or else with the Empire of Star Wars.  (And what is with the need for imperial government in a future society???)

 

 

Oh, Deer!

Our home is on a rural parcel of slightly less than 5 acres which has lots of oak trees and other than my garden area is not fenced.  We enjoy seeing the local wildlife pass through.  For some, it is a regular pattern that depending on time of year is as dependable as a bus schedule.  Others are random surprises that do not happen often.

Deer are common visitors.  The moms and their babies have been regular summer visitors.  Sometimes two or three families at a time.  Antlers are a rarity and it seemed that when a male showed up a few times in past years, they were not particularly welcomed by the mothers with their offspring.

So this evening, having three young boys show up and decide to browse close to our house was unusual in more than one way.  The largest of the three appeared to make some aggressive moves on one of the others at one point.  But they quickly got back to the business of mowing the weeds on the back hill.

If I get time, tomorrow I will do a bit of summer pruning and leave the boys some fresh fruit tree branches to  strip.  Typically they come around a few times and then wander off to somewhere else for a while.  Now that most of the annual vegetation has turned brown, fresh greens outside the fence may be the equivalent of the all you can eat buffet.

 

 

Sunset or Sunrise

My photography skills do not do justice to this gem.  The colors blend and shift as the stone moves.  Yellow, orange, red and a hint of green appear.

The rough material was purchased in 2024 from Farooq Hashimi during a chance encounter at one of the many Tucson gem shows.  it was labeled “Sunset Tourmaline”.

I am not sure if the colors match those of a sunset.  My location on the California central coast  is such that there is a strong marine influence bringing fog or high cloud cover.  Besides, our home is on the side of the hill which faces the sunrise instead of the sunset.  Occasionally the elements cooperate and the fog stays low enough to allow for a lovely sunrise.  So it may be that this is actually a “Sunrise Tourmaline”.

Stone is 4.68 carats and measures  9.4 x 6.2 mm. with some concave facets on the pavilion to add a little extra sparkle to the sunshine.  Available on the website.

 

June Gloom

The “May Gray” weather gave way to enough sunshine that I was able to make a lot of progress in taking the garden back from the weeds.  But now we appear to be in for a spell of “June Gloom”.  Yesterday the fog was thick enough to register .02 inches on the rain gauge.

The cool weather crops seem to be doing well.  I have been harvesting peas and lettuce as well as berries.  This is the first year I have tried broccoli and it appears it may soon be ready for the dinner table.


The first crop of corn is starting to put out tassels and silks — but it is not very tall.

It looked as if we might finally have a bunch of cherries.  (Getting the pollinators in sync has not been working well.) But before they were really ripe enough to harvest, the red house finches found them so I was only able to pick about six that had not been bird food.  They are also feasting on the blueberries as they ripen.  We need to make a frame for a bird net cover as well as trimming the cherry tree down so we can net that next spring.  It is about time to cover the stone fruit with individual net bags.  I tried that last year and it was really nice to be able to have peaches, plums and pluots which had not had huge spots pecked away.  I don’t mind sharing, but birds tend to take it all.

Another new item this year is a short day onion.  In the past years I have had day neutral varieties and they are very slow at producing bulbs and often are still growing as the holiday season approaches.  I was surprised to see bulbs already forming.

Hopefully sunny days will be returning soon.

Weeds, Weather, whatever

 

So with the broken shoulder, the garden did not get weeded since at least mid-August.  By the usual time to prepare for the spring planting (late February, early March in these parts) the weeds had taken over.  Of course the weather did not cooperate, so getting days when things weren’t too wet and / or cold to pull weeds, meant that it was the beginning of April before the  raised beds were ready.  There was a spell of nice weather then and I planted seeds and seedlings.

 But then the May Gray came weeks early.  It was too cold and wet to weed or do  much else.  The veggies did nothing while another crop of weeds took over.  A large percentage of the seeds failed to germinate.  For weeks it seemed the soil was too wet to weed.  We even had some late April rain.

It took several passes to get the majority of the weeds out and it will require another pass or two to deal with the ones that escaped.  At least now I can see the veggies and was able to plant additional seedlings.

Meanwhile, mice were getting to the strawberries as they ripened. The owls and hawks have not been doing a good job.  In the past week I had 15 caught with a live trap and removed them to the far corner of the property.   Dealing with the gophers will have to wait a bit.  We put hardware cloth at the base of the raised beds to keep them out and have bird netting to protect seedlings from becoming bird food.

Anyway, lots more to do.   Borders along paths and fence need weeding and trimming, stone fruit needs to be thinned and general maintenance is needed.  Maybe by Memorial day weekend it will look more like a garden than a weed patch.