This was a really good book.

I really liked all three of the main characters (although I wished Will had a better understanding of people ... but then, he's young). I liked the world, I liked the idea of steerswomen (although I had a really hard time disencumbering myself of the idea that the whole thing was about woman cowboys in the Old West), I liked the mystery Rowan was trying to solve, and her interactions with the other steerswomen and her friend the baron.

One way I've been finding new art has been looking at the National Gallery of Art's Collection Highlights page.

That led me to this lovely work by Alma Thomas: Red Rose Cantata.

This is one of my favorite language resources on the web.

"Tadoku" means "wide reading" or frequent reading (it combines the kanji for "many, frequent, much" - 多 - with the kanji for "read" - 読). It gives even beginning Japanese students a chance to read on a wide range of topics.

One way I've been finding new art has been looking at the National Gallery of Art's Collection Highlights page.

That led me to The Old Violin, a work by William Michael Harnett - an artist I'd never heard of before.

Thanks to the National Gallery's Open Access image policy, I was able to download a high-resolution version of the image so I could get a better look at it.

I liked this a lot - and was surprised by how much I liked this, especially since I had such a hard time getting started with it.

The book starts with a death, and each time I started it, I just didn't feel up for a book that starts with a death. But the last time I tried, I didn't really have anything else I wanted to read more, so I just kept going.

I have a real affinity for poems that contrast teachings about God with the experience of God, and for poems about talking with God.

The middle section is just wonderful ...

The Bridge at Grez caught my eye. I liked the looseness of the watercolor style (compared to the impressionistic yet still relatively precise style of some of his oils and watercolors). The longer I looked, the more taken I was with the shadowed undersides of the arches.

Well, this one looks like more of a general concept. Not a lot of blanks that look like math or chemistry today.

Article length is medium (about 9 screens worth on my big monitor); article title is 11 characters.

These are definitely fun, but I may take a break for a while pretty soon.

So this one's interesting: it's a four-letter word.

I'm not getting a lot of clues from the punctuation.

A few phrases catching my eye: