More brilliant fiscal management from the Dubya administration comes back to bite us all in the ass.

Aside from the health insurance implosion I’m sure is on its way, this one may well turn out to be the biggest disaster they wrought.

The Plot
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight a surprisingly strong malice, and Fawn is left at camp for a time to fend for herself. The pair are finally reunited after several harrowing experiences that still don’t convince the Lakewalkers of Fawn’s worth as a person. In the end, Dag and Fawn break ties with the camp and set off on their own.

My Thoughts
In the first book, very little about the Lakewalker home life is revealed to the reader, and the reader is left to draw conclusions based on inference and a tiny bit of actual information. It’s very easy to fall into the assumption, which I freely admit doing, that because the Lakewalkers presented such a contrast to the farmers in how they viewed and treated women, their culture must be more liberal and open. We discover pretty quickly in Legacy that such is not the case. In fact, the Lakewalkers are mostly a bunch of dicks.

Dag begins the book immediately on the defensive, much to Fawn’s dismay. She feels that his family (and culture in general) can’t really be that bad, and that she’ll have a shot at winning them over in the way he did most of her family. Resulting events suggest that he was correct, though it’s not clear to me that the outcome was completely inevitable. All the same, it was not very evitable and the sequence of events did not strain my view of the characters or their world very much.

We spend the first third of the book dealing with Fawn and Dag’s arrival at Hickory Lake camp and the assorted reactions of the Lakewalkers to their marriage. It’s here that the arrogance and calcification of the Lakewalker world view becomes clear. We learn more about the background of the world, which is apparently post-apocalyptic: at some point in the distant, distant past, a group of genetically enhanced “Lords” caused a disaster from which sprang the seeds that grow into malices. This disaster also drastically reduced the human population and led to the loss of most advanced technology and historical records from that time. The Lakewalkers, with their abilities to see and manipulate ground, feel that they are the descendants of these enhanced beings, and spend a great deal of time patting themselves on the back over their decision not to rule over the inferior farmers.

It soon becomes clear to the reader, however, that the Lakewalkers, in separating themselves from the farmers, have completely lost touch with the reality of the world and are falling behind technologically. Though Dag attempts to cast the problem in terms of Malice threat — what if the Malice comes up in a farmer city with well-trained craftsmen — it isn’t hard to extrapolate that pretty soon the farmers are going to lose their last thread of patience with the Lakewalkers’ bad attitude and may be fed up enough to attempt to rid themselves of their presence. This, of course, would be a disaster for everyone, but the farmers don’t know it and the Lakewalkers are too full of themselves to pass this information along.

This problem eventually comes to a head when, after several situations where Fawn again and again proves herself as capable and smart as Lakewalkers, Dag’s mother and brother make a last maneuver to try and get her thrown out of the camp and the marriage annulled. Dag has had enough, and realizes that he’s never going to figure out how to solve the problem of Lakewalker/Farmer friction if he stays in camp, so tells everyone off and then declares that he’s getting the hell out. The Lakewalkers are shocked, since their worldview does not permit even the idea that someone would prefer to live other than with their awesomeness.

After this scene, it became clear to me that the whole book had been working up to this point, and that what I thought was the goal — for Fawn and Dag to work within the Lakewalkers to effect change — was never the point at all. Dag needed to see that a single pair within the camp was simply not enough pressure to dislodge their very entrenched attitudes. So they leave in search of more leverage, though I couldn’t figure at that point what it might be.

Throughout the book an additional sub plot continues with Dag’s exploration of grounds, healing, and the relationship between what malicies do and what the Lakewalkers do. It seems mostly incidental here in spite of Dag’s vague angst about it all, but will probably be important later.

In Short
I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as the first one. The romance seemed to take a backseat to the description of Lakewalker society and attitudes. While all of the information is useful and important to the continuing series plot, it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the character development of Fawn and Dag as individuals and more importantly the development of them as a couple. I find them far more compelling when they’re together and operating as a team than when they are apart, and it felt like they spent a great deal of this book divided. On the other hand, a weak Bujold is still much better than most other books, and this one was necessary in many ways to further the actual plot now that the romance was solidly established.

As I was recently noting over at SiB, I have felt very comfortable mocking and making fun of Twilight, even though I have not actually read the book and have no plans to do so. While my knowledge of it is not intimate, I do know enough to know that my scorn is not heaped upon an unworthy object.

Until tonight, I had a similar relationship with Windows Vista. I had never used the beast, though I had seen it in person a few times, yet I derided it as the biggest piece of crap to come out of Microsoft since Windows Me.

Well, let me tell you, Bob just got a new laptop with Vista on, and I’ve spent the last while playing around with it. And it is the biggest piece of crap to come out of Microsoft since Windows Me.

It is so annoying, slow and has the stupidest set of defaults enabled that anyone could possibly have come up with. Who the hell was in their user testing group? Seriously? Here are my guesses:
* Double agents hired by Steve Jobs
* Clockwork monkeys
* The brilliant minds at CNBC
* Those who think Edward Cullen is romantic and not a creepyass stalker. Sorry, SPARKLING stalker. (Sorry hon, Mitaka did it better than you 20 years ago.)

I didn’t think it had been quite so long since I updated here. Guess it’s time for another round-up.

Work
The new library is almost done being built. It’s really exciting, but a bit worrying at the same time. Organization for the move does not feel very organized — we’ll see how smoothly it manages to go off.
I’m getting to work some extra hours until the move is over, which has been lovely and done much to improve my morale.

The Economy
So far we haven’t been hugely impacted by this, thank god. Knock wood we won’t be, but it’s really frigging scary. Especially considering the economy wasn’t exactly going gangbusters for us non-rich folk in the first place.

Republicans
Asshats.

Democrats
Not doing so hot either.

The Restaurant
I got copies of the first two seasons of this UK reality series. As with many reality shows, the first season is much better than what came after, when they tweaked the format and got slicker production values. The premise is that pairs (they constantly refer to them as couples, but it is more two people with a pre-existing relationship ala Amazing Race, not all romantically involved couples) will be given a small restaurant to run. Each week Raymond Blanc and his sidekick judges pick out three pairs whose restaurant did not perform to the standard they would prefer and those people perform an additional food business related challenge to see which team will be eliminated. I found it hard to get into the show for the first few weeks, mostly because there were too many people still and it was hard to get a sense of what was really going on. By the second half of the series, though, things had improved a great deal. With fewer restaurants to cover, there was more information given about the individuals and we could really see what was going wrong and going right. The second season seems to have less interesting restaurant concepts (to me) and the people are duller. Plus, the format changes (the contestants do not all live together in a communal house, for instance) are not for the better.

Victorian Farm
The description for this series made it sound like 1900 House/Frontier House/Colonial House/etc., documentary style reality shows that were all over PBS a couple of years back. But as it turns out, it had a different aim entirely. The former series focused on taking average families and plunking them down in the past. They were forced to use the tools and wear the clothes of the age, but generally they attempted to use these things to recreate their usual lifestyle in terms of food and entertainment. The participants in Victorian Farm, on the other hand, were archaeologists and historians, who were excited and eager to really try to do things the way the Victorians had and quite revelled in being history dorks. They did not whine or freak out trying new things. They were also allowed to consult experts in the various tasks they were trying to do, giving the series a feel far less like Survivor and more like a documentary. After the series was over, I discovered that the same presenters had been involved in a similar series a few years ago about a Tudor-era farm. I am still looking for copies.

Law and Order: UK
I never thought this would ever come to anything. I’m so happy it did. I’ve read enough detective novels based in the UK that I feel semi-comfortable with their police system, but I’m completely at sea with their courts. Watching shows like this (the rare remake where the US version is the original) really brings home how much essential cultural information most series rely on their audience just knowing without even thinking about it. Information that won’t be and shouldn’t be explained because to do so would be stupid.

Vesper Holly
Did I talk about her yet? How did I not read these books 20 years ago? I was reading Lloyd Alexander; I got all the Prydain books in 5th or 6th grade, and I know I saw the Westmark books in the school library (I couldn’t get into them). But I don’t remember seeing these AT ALL. Why not?! A smart, fearless female character who travels and has adventures in the manner of Indiana Jones — all written by an author who won a Newbery medal. You’d think this would have been recommended all over the place. What happened and why are most of them already out of print now?

Nintendo DS
We gave in and bought another one, and I think it was the right decision. We still don’t end up playing at the same time very often, but it was annoying to have to keep remembering to swap the games out, and I was always afraid the little games were going to get lost somewhere.