Stone Bugs

On Saturday I was privileged to be able to join one of the hikes put on by the Burgess Shale Foundation up to the Mount Stephen trilobite beds. This important deposit of fossil trilobites is included on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and is part of the Burgess Shale formation, which is perhaps more famous for the Walcott Quarry creatures, a collection of very strange looking prehistoric organisms on display at about 20 times life size in a memorable exhibit at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. I got a few good pictures, which you can check out on my Flickr profile here.

Sunday accomplishments

1. Went to LL and J's baby shower. Am very excited for them! Baby is only about a month away.
2. Engaged in my least favourite part of sewing, cutting stuff out. The good news is that I think I am completely done cutting stuff out for this project and should be able to forge ahead with the sewing part uninterrupted.
3. Read "Dead Men Walking", by Paul J. McAuley, and "Home Movies", by Mary Rosenblum, both in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. This is an anthology I try to buy every year. I don't always love every story, but I like the short fiction format because it's easier to find the time to read a whole story in one sitting, and many short stories do a good job of really getting me thinking about some issue in a way that novels don't seem to.
4. Did some sewing at falashad and blue_flydragon's house while watching Bridge to Terabithia. We all observed that the young actress who played the character of Leslie bore a strong resemblance to Keira Knightley. I found some of the themes reminiscent of a short story (non sci-fi) that I was required to read in high school english. I think it might have been called "The Glass Horses" or something like that. The main idea was that a young boy was out with his father and a bunch of other grown men at a logging camp or some other very traditional "masculine" way of making a living, and he had made friends with one of the men who was an immigrant from an Eastern European country, but eventually the father was worried that this friendship was going to cause the boy not to turn into a "Real Man", so he made the boy cut the friendship off. I guess the similarity comes in because in both the young male protagonist doesn't fully fit into the traditional, rural, male gender role that is expected of him because he is a little too imaginative, and it causes friction with both his father and his peers. However, it seems to work out a little better for Jess (the male protagonist in Terabithia), because he has other supportive adults in his life and I think his father comes around a little more towards understanding him in the end. In the realm of interesting pop culture connections, the father is played by Robert Patrick, who has had his fair share of iconic genre roles, and the music teacher is played by Zooey Deschanel, who played Trillian in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and who will be playing Dorothy in the upcoming miniseries Tin Man, a reimagining of the Wizard of Oz story which also stars Alan Cumming as the Scarecrow.