(no subject)

Hullo, loves. Brasington's Ninth Law is in full force here ("A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned one will take only twice as long"); I'll still be posting weekly Moonshadow updates and maintaining the Crack Broom alphabetized masterlist at Snupin Central, but pretty much all fandom-related writing/drawing/archiving is on the back burner for the time being (technically, reading is too, but let's be real - sometimes there's insomnia, and sometimes there's needing some undemanding fluff to ameliorate the effects of Real Life, which this week will include choir retreat and the funeral of a friend from church).

The RL docket is stocked to the gills at the moment, and it's a nice variety - some corporate writing, some academic copyediting, and several side projects: I've resumed research on my long-deferred Frederic Melcher article (he founded the Newbery and Caldecott medals, and seems to have been an all around good guy, so it's one of my life's missions to make more people aware of him, which at the moment consists of trailing through assorted books about Robert Frost (Melcher was one of Frost's friends), and requested some books on science in Nazi Germany for a potential on-spec project. (This was nowhere in my original plans for February, but I got hit with the non-fiction equivalent of a rabid plotbunny. There's no running away from the things, it seems...)

My UU lay preaching gig starts up again next month as well. The working title of my sermon is "Pink Ribbons and Chocolate," and it's going to center on trying to be a responsible consumer when it comes to food -- becoming aware of what exactly is being donated when you buy, say, specially-marked cans of soup or whatever, and about the connection between child slavery and chocolate.

...and this post went way overlong when I started talking about the chocolate issue (especially on my quest to confirm that it's still an active issue -- and the short answer is, yes, it still is), so I'm going to paste all the wibbling and linkage to various reports/recommendations into my general journal instead, and I'll post the link here when that's up. you can find some of my initial wibblings and a whole heap of links here.

FWIW: Chocolate Company Scorecard (PDF; issued by the International Labor Rights Forum a year ago)
ETA: Better World Shopper's scorecard (the most user-friendly list I've come across so far)