Why am I not a bear?
There's snow outside. Yesterday there were yellow leaves on the ground sprinkled with snow, and I didn't find the camera to take a photo of this, and today there's a thick and fluffly white blanket over everything and I have a view over snowy branches from my window. Now, snowy branches are lovely to watch, but I feel like never venturing outside for the next five months.
Yuki, btw, finds snow intensely fascinating and stares out of the windows all day. Fair enough - his name means 'snow' after all, and he was born on December 30, so he's a winter kind of cat.
Meanwhile I am reading cozy mysteries. Or semi-cozy ones - I just finished Charlaine Harris's Lily Bard series and liked them quite a lot (I've read one Aurora Teagarden and I probably will finish the series but I found Lily Bard much more engrossing). So now I started series by Madelyn Alt called Bewitching. Apparently, the thing with cozy mysteries is to find an unusual setup. Here the heroine comes to work for a shop owner who is a witch. In the wiccan sense, it looks like. Now, I am not far enough into the book to say whether I like it or not (though the heroine, Maggie, doesn't seem to be destined one of my favourites) but there's something surprising to me about it. Maggie's reactions on discovering her employer is a witch suggest that she finds it all exotic and possibly doubtful. Actually, it looks like she finds it startling to meet a person who is very obviously non-Christian.
I wonder how real is that attitude. Is it something the writer put in to make the setup exotic, or does this exist in real life? I remember reading a fandom blog by someone who is a teacher in RL and she described an argument in her classroom where one student (aged about 12 by her description), discussing a meaning of a poem said something along the lines of 'Let us imagine there's no God', and another student almost attacked him shouting 'You take that back'. But I thought that an example of a weird kid possibly from a weird family. Now I wonder if that might be a more popular POV in the US than I expected.
Yuki, btw, finds snow intensely fascinating and stares out of the windows all day. Fair enough - his name means 'snow' after all, and he was born on December 30, so he's a winter kind of cat.
Meanwhile I am reading cozy mysteries. Or semi-cozy ones - I just finished Charlaine Harris's Lily Bard series and liked them quite a lot (I've read one Aurora Teagarden and I probably will finish the series but I found Lily Bard much more engrossing). So now I started series by Madelyn Alt called Bewitching. Apparently, the thing with cozy mysteries is to find an unusual setup. Here the heroine comes to work for a shop owner who is a witch. In the wiccan sense, it looks like. Now, I am not far enough into the book to say whether I like it or not (though the heroine, Maggie, doesn't seem to be destined one of my favourites) but there's something surprising to me about it. Maggie's reactions on discovering her employer is a witch suggest that she finds it all exotic and possibly doubtful. Actually, it looks like she finds it startling to meet a person who is very obviously non-Christian.
I wonder how real is that attitude. Is it something the writer put in to make the setup exotic, or does this exist in real life? I remember reading a fandom blog by someone who is a teacher in RL and she described an argument in her classroom where one student (aged about 12 by her description), discussing a meaning of a poem said something along the lines of 'Let us imagine there's no God', and another student almost attacked him shouting 'You take that back'. But I thought that an example of a weird kid possibly from a weird family. Now I wonder if that might be a more popular POV in the US than I expected.