u/SalishSeaview

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher is the third in the Sworn Soldier novels. Set in a fictional late-nineteenth century Europe, these novels slot into the “mild horror” category and could easily be seen as alien first-contact stories.

I’ve really enjoyed all three. It’s not a spoiler to say that this third story is set in America, with Alex and Amos helping Denton out with a missing persons case. Definitely recommended.

We’re planning to visit the Painted Hills and the John Day Fossil Beds in late June/early July. Any recommendations for where to camp? There will be three of us with a car and a large tent. A site with toilets (vault is fine) would be nice. Beyond that we just need space, as we’re otherwise self-contained.

*UPDATE: After some decent feedback from people, I went back into the app and was able to update my second reservation (Site 40) to extend it to a second night. So thank you to this community for the assist. Now if I’m lucky, I can catch the resident of Site 40 before they set up and we can swap for the one night. If not, we move camp and I have learned a lesson.*

This is more of a rant than anything. But maybe I’m missing something that someone can educate me on.

We want to go camping at Mora Campground, on the Olympic Peninsula, in two weeks. Sites at Mora aren’t released until fourteen days ahead. Yesterday I found a site that would fit our tent, waited for the 7:00 a.m. Pacific time for the sites to be released, and hit Reserve for Site 57 for the first night fourteen days out. This morning I went through the same thing for the next day, because you can’t reserve a site for multiple nights, not even a soft-reserve, if one of those nights is more than fourteen days out. I waited, and I hit Reserve, and was told that someone else had already reserved the site. It had to have been two seconds ahead of me, no more. I was like a hawk on that button. So I cleared my search (no easy feat; I had to go use a web browser rather than the app) and found another site just around the corner. So now we have to pick up camp and move it 200 feet for the second night. And tomorrow I need to do the same damn thing, hoping the new site is available.

There has to be a better way. I get that recreation.gov doesn’t want people reserving huge blocks of nights at once; they want to avoid abuse. But their current system just shifts the abuse to another area.

If anyone has reserved Mora site 57 for Saturday the 20th and wants to swap it for site 40 for the same night, let me know.

Teaching the child to make kombucha. She likes green tea, so we went with that as a base, using GT ginger as the starter. She’d like to use honey for the F2. Will that work well? If so, how much? If not, what other suggestions do you have?

I’ve just finished reading “What Feasts at Night” by T. Kingfisher, the second in the Sworn Soldier series. Kingfisher writes brilliantly, which is what draws me to her work. Set in the late nineteenth century in a fictional Europe, the stories are horror(ish) in the way that Poe’s work was (indeed, the first book in the series, “What Moves the Dead” is a retelling of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”). Looking forward to the next book in the series.

Even if you don’t care for horror (I don’t particularly), give this series a read. The novels are short, so fast to read. Kingfisher’s wit and witticisms alone are worth the time, let alone her observations on the human condition.

Has anyone here read *Old Colony* by John Walker? I’m about 2/3 into it and am ready to DNF. Wanted to know if it’s worth continuing. There’s an indicator that it’s the start of a series.

It’s desperately in need of line editing (punctuation mishaps abound, particularly where quotation marks are concerned), and frankly it seems like I missed an entire chapter, if not two or three, between chapters 11 and 12. I have other concerns about it, but don’t want to spoiler it. The novel started out strong, which is why I got this far, even with the rough road to get here.