Reading Wednesday
Jul. 2nd, 2025 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Photographer: Anthony Ayiomamitis
Summary Author: Anthony Ayiomamitis
One of the most beloved myths from Ancient Greece involves the father-son duo of Daedalus and Icarus who were jailed by King Minos in Crete after the latter had asked for the construction of a complex labyrinth by the crafty Daedalus for the jailing of the Minotaur (illegitimate son of the King's wife).
The older Daedalus came up with the ingenious idea to construct wings made of wax and bird feathers so that he and his son could fly their way out of prison and away from Crete. Prior to their dramatic escape, Daedalus advised the younger Icarus not to fly too close to the Sun since the heat would melt the wax and lead them to their demise. Similarly, he advised Icarus not to fly too close to the sea since the moisture would dampen their wings, thus making them heavier and which would also lead to a destructive ending.
Although the escape went as planned, the younger Icarus was so excited by their ability to fly that he soon forgot his father's advice by flying higher and higher and which eventually led to the melting of the wax and his ultimate demise where he tragically fell into the Aegean Sea. Daedalus located his son's body and buried Icarus in the immediate vicinity of his tragic drowning and named the nearby island Icaria in honor of his cherished son.
Featured above (at top) is a stunning stainless steel statue depicting Icarus with the spring equinox Sun setting in the immediate background. The bottom photo required seven trips to Cyprus to get the alignment just right because of the greater distance from the statue than the top photo as well as various nuances due to the weather and a broken tripod connection. Top photo taken on April 9, 2002; bottom photo taken on March 15, 2025.
Photo Details: Top photo - Canon EOS 6D camera; Baader BCF2 filter; Baader ND5 filter; Canon EOS EF 50mm/f1.8USM lens; f8.0; 47 x 1/320 second exposures; ISO 200; Digital Photo Pro V4.6.30.0; Photoshop CS5. Bottom photo - Canon EOS 6D camera; Baader BCF2 filter; Baader ND5 filter; Canon EOS EF 70-200mm f/4 L; 200 mm/f14.0; 11 x 1/60 second exposures; ISO 640; Digital Photo Pro V4.6.30.0; Photoshop CS5.
Boardwalk, Ayia Napa, Cyprus Coordinates: 34.981898, 34.001602
Related Links:
Equinox Sun at Pegasus of Corinth
Anthony's Website
@ madisontayt_: imagining a vegan who won't drink nyc's tap water because of the microscopic shrimp
@ TheWappleHouse: The what now
https://dotat.at/@/2025-07-02-cmp.html
Here are a few tangentially-related ideas vaguely near the theme of comparison operators.
( Read more... )
When you get married they ask you to write an inscription. Think of it as being like taking out a subscription.
You should sign it with a feeling of elation and hope it won’t end with a cancellation.Michael Rosen
I wish I could remember where I found this piece of doggerel, it wasn't in a book. Guardian maybe? Past me did a copy-and-paste into commonplace notepad (but at least I noted the author's name)
And yeah, I still like the sentiment, good wedding poem.
I could barely do the morning chores I usually feel neutral-to-positive about this morning -- I open the curtains, unload the dishwasher, make a pot of tea, get breakfast for myself... Things that are always the same and always different. It can be very grounding.
Today I wasn't especially tired and I wasn't in pain or anything, I just didn't want to. I couldn't imagine doing the first tiniest step.
This is a sign of burnout. I need a break. I was telling my counselor this evening that a break for me has to be somewhere away from my house, because my house is full of reminders of chores I need to do, things that get on my nerves, etc. I am not good at relaxing, but when I can do it it doesn't tend to happen at home.
I did an okay amount of work today but near the end of the day I was in this focus group about "inclusion" in our workplace. These things can be kinda therapeutic but by the end I was thinking that we keep having surveys and stuff like this, where we tell some nice external person all our woes and we're assured that the feedback is anonymized into themes that cannot identify us, but all that means is our specific nuanced articulations all get flattened in to "we all have good colleagues who care about their work but the executive team keep letting us down," and we're going to get the same kind of response from said executive team about how impressed they are at everyone's honesty and how committed they are to addressing these themes, and then we'll do this all over again in a year or two.
I felt really tired by the end of it, which wasn't great because it was almost time for my first counseling session in almost a month. A real "let me explain, no there is too much let me sum up" kind of situation.
My counseling happens on the phone and usually in my bedroom; I normally come right back downstairs in search of dinner, but this time I just lay on my bed for something ridiculous like an hour. I kept trying to get up and go back downstairs but again: so many steps. And it was relatively peaceful just lying there.
Since I had to come downstairs and try to eat dinner I'm feeling more depersonalization, so maybe all of this has been more stressful or triggery than I realized. I hate it; is probably the most uncomfortable symptom of my anxiety/depression.
Wot a saga, eh, wot a saga, first time I have ventured significantly forth these many years -
And to start with, MAJOR HEAT EVENT.
In anticipation, I had - or so I thought - prudently booked a taxi via taxiapp, with a certain amount of leeway, just in case -
- which turned out very prudent, as when I went to check the booking this morning the app was showing 'network error' and this was clearly on their end rather than mine, and a little looking about suggests that this is not their first rodeo server problem.
So when, at designated time, taxi cameth not, I set out towards the Tube, not without some hope that a black cab might pass me on my way, but that Was Not To Be -
And on reflection, I should perhaps have waited for a Bank train, because getting out on Charing X platforms at Euston involves rather too many stairs.
However, Avanti kindly texted me the approx time my train would be boarding, and this all seemed set - although my (1st class) seat was aisle, backwards, there was nobody in the other 3 seats so I switched -
HAH.
When we reached Coventry, choochoo sighed and gave up, and we had to debouch and take the next Birmingham bound train - which was delayed....
At Birmingham New Street had considerable faff trying to discover a Way Out that would take me to a taxi rank.
When I finally arrived at hotel booked by conference organisers there was an immense performance trying to find the right group booking, as it was not under any title that I might have thought of but that of some hireling booking agency.
However, I am now in nice cool room and have had tasty room service snack. Even if I have had to wrestle with getting my laptop to talk to the free wifi...
Hop on board for author Matthew Kressel’s newest ride through the galaxy, Space Trucker Jess. In this Big Idea as he takes you through not only his writing process for this particular story, but on a journey through a high-concept sci-fi world viewed through the eyes of a teenage girl.
MATTHEW KRESSEL:
I was a feral kid. Both my parents worked full-time jobs, and I’d come home to an empty house. I had no supervision. I went off with friends and we, ahem, did things. Stupid things. Really fucking stupid things. And when I look back on those days I’m like, How the hell did I make it out alive?
But that freedom was glorious. You could do whatever you wanted. Go anywhere. You had the feeling that anything could happen. And it often did. The good and the bad.
That’s the kind of feeling I hope to evoke in Space Trucker Jess. The joy and spontaneity of discovery. In my childhood, we got into trouble all around the neighborhood. In my novel, Jess gets into hijinx across the galaxy.
Like Jess herself, I began the book with a simple premise: Screw the “rules.”
In my past stories and novels, I labored over every paragraph, sentence, word, and punctuation mark until I’d wound myself into a Gordian knot a million words long. In Jess, I felt the need to loosen the bridles, to let my idea run wild, like that feral kid who got into trouble around the neighborhood. What emerged was Jess, a take-no-shit foul-mouthed kick-ass teenaged girl who’s smart as hell, caring and empathetic, who solves problems not with violence but with brains and determination. Though too often for her own good, Jess’s curiosity gets her into trouble. Big trouble.
Think Natasha Lyonne narrating 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There’s lots of high-concept SF, and, yeah, Space Trucker Jess has all the tropes: starships and FTL travel, alien gods, missing planets, galactic secrets. But I wanted to tell the story a different way. Not from an omniscient or a dry and distant third person, but from deep in the point of view of a sensitive and expressive girl who’s journeyed across the Milk and back a thousand times and who knows more about starships than most people know their own nose.
And so you get high philosophy and fart jokes. Orthodox religion and irreverent sacrilege. Weird inscrutable aliens and deadbeat dads. All told from a foul-mouthed over-confident, wicked-smart and sometimes willfully naive girl who just wants, at the end of the day, to be left the hell alone.
Space Trucker Jess is also about identity. I wrote a good chunk of the book during the first Covid lockdowns. Cut off from friends and family, from work and all the many inter-personal relationships I took for granted, I felt my sense of self drifting. Without those external interactions reflecting my identity back to me, I didn’t know who I was anymore. It was very disconcerting.
A lot of that experience makes its way into the book. Jess’s worldview expands enormously throughout the novel, sometimes suddenly and violently, and she is forced to reckon with a new sense of self and a greater awareness.
Also, Space Trucker Jess is about family. Jess loves her deadbeat dad, and she and him have been grifting their way across the galaxy for years. But she knows he’s an asshole, he knows he’s an asshole, but she just can’t let him go. The relationship is, from the start, highly dysfunctional. Jess just wants stability, away from him. But getting away is harder than it sounds. Without getting too personal, I had a lot of turbulence in my childhood home, and I wanted to explore the contrasts between the family we’re born with and the family we choose, and how those dynamics can alter the course of our entire lives, for better or worse.
So if you want to go on a fun adventure alongside a bad-ass genius girl head-firsting her way through the galaxy who’s just looking for some peace in an uncaring universe, while encountering alien gods, missing planets, galactic secrets, and more, well then, Space Trucker Jess might just be your ride.
Space Trucker Jess: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Welcome to July, 2025!
It's worth noting that "happy" is a very rare mood tag these days. The last time I used it was in 2019, after Mom's 99th birthday party.
Photographer: Meiying Lee
Summary Author: Meiying Lee
It turns out that those of us living in the mid and low latitudes have only been seeing half of the Moon's trajectory! We're used to the Moon rising in the east and setting in the west. If we observe closely, we'll notice that its path shifts north and south every month, while the Sun only shifts north and south once a year. From February 22 to March 7, 2025, I traveled to northern Norway, around 69 degrees north latitude. The first few days I was there, I found that I couldn't see the Moon at all, day or night. It then dawned on me that because of how far north I was, the Moon's path was too far south for me to see.
However, in the latter half of the trip, on March 4 and 5, I discovered that the waxing crescent Moon stayed in the sky all day and night! In fact, if the weather was clear enough, we could observe this waxing crescent remaining near the level of the horizon for five to six days, much like the phenomenon of the Midnight Sun during the summer solstice, where in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle the Sun stays on the horizon continuously.
Unfortunately, due to the weather and my travel schedule, I couldn’t capture the entire trajectory of the Moon across the sky. But during the early hours of March 5, while photographing an aurora, I managed to capture two segments of the Moon's path. The left image shows the time from 12:30 to 1:52 am (local time) on March 5, and the right image is from 2:48 to 4:07 am. In the left image, the Moon is still descending, while in the right image, it appears to be moving horizontally just above the horizon. From the position of the North Star (at the center of the concentric circles), we can see that the Moon has reached its lowest point and is beginning to rise again, though the movement is so subtle it’s almost imperceptible.
Additionally, the Moon that appeared in the northern low sky at this late hour was a waxing crescent Moon, which shouldn't have been visible at this time and direction. This phenomenon, where the Moon never sets, is actually the other half of the Moon's trajectory below the horizon. It's a sight that people living in the mid to low latitudes have never imagined and is truly fascinating! Photos taken on March 3, 2025.
Senja Island, Norway Coordinates: 69.2965, 17.6459
Related Links:
Perspective of the Moon from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres
Meiying's Facebook page
Have you ever had one of those places you want to go to, but never get around to checking out, and suddenly a year has passed and you’ve still never been? That’s how it was for me and Grist, a restaurant in downtown Dayton that I had heard about from so many people and had been meaning to get out to for literal months. Well, I finally made it happen, and I’m so glad I did.
Bryant and I were going out to dinner, and I asked him what kind of food he wanted. He picked Italian, which, in my opinion, is the hardest cuisine to get around this area. At least, good Italian, that is. There’s always Fazoli’s, and TripAdvisor has the audacity to label Marion’s Pizza as the number one Italian spot in the area, so pickings are slim for Italian ’round these parts. But I wanted something nicer than Spaghetti Warehouse.
Eventually my searching led me to Grist, which was labeled as Italian, and looked pretty dang amazing from the photos provided. Plus, I’d heard from numerous Daytonians in the past that they liked Grist, and I trust my sources. So, I made us a reservation for that evening, excited to try somewhere new.
Located on Fifth Street, it’s just down the street from the Oregon District, and close to the Dayton Convention Center. There’s a parking garage right across the street from it, and some street parking, too.
Upon walking in, the first thing I noticed was how bright and open it is. The large wall of windows let in so much natural light, and you immediately get to see all the baked goods in their glass display case.
I immediately loved the decor and vibe in Grist. It was like sort of rustic but nice at the same time. Like fancy Italian farmhouse vibes? It was really cute.
And there was even a selection of wine for purchase:
I didn’t get a shot of their other indoor dining area or their little patio, but it does have a super cute patio.
Grist has casual service, so you can either place your order at the counter or order at your table using your phone, and they bring the food out to your table. I chose to use my phone because there was a pretty steady flow of people ordering to-go stuff from the register.
Here’s what they were offering on their dinner menu:
It’s basically a law that you have to try a restaurant’s bread. The bread a restaurant offers is a window into all the rest of their food, and also into their soul. So we split the half loaf of rosemary and parmesan focaccia:
Bryant and I both loved the focaccia, and there was more than enough for both of us. The outside was just a little bit crispy and the bread inside was soft and chewy. It wasn’t overwhelmingly herbaceous, and was definitely worth the six dollars in my opinion. The only acceptable reason to not try this bread if you visit is if you’re gluten intolerant.
We also shared the house-made meatballs:
I can’t say I’m like, a huge meatball fan. I don’t really eat them that often and they’re not something I crave regularly or think about all that much. However, these meatballs were really yummy! I was impressed that there were five of them, and they were quite sizeable. I think the portion size is honestly pretty good. They definitely tasted like they were made fresh in-house, and had just the right amount of sauce on them. I would be more than happy to have a meatball marinara sub made with these meatballs.
And our final appetizer was the mushroom pate:
First off, I love how toasty the ciabatta was, it’s like the perfect shade for toast. The mushroom pate was packed to the brim with mushroomy, umami flavor. Total flavor bomb, and a little goes a long way. The pickled shallots added a wild contrast, and there was a lot of interesting textures. It was seriously delish.
To accompany the starters, I decided to try their sweet wine flight, which came with three wines for fourteen dollars:
I can’t remember what the red one was, but the two whites are a Riesling and a sparkling Moscato. I did not care for the red at all, in my opinion it wasn’t even remotely sweet, but I generally prefer white anyway so maybe it just wasn’t my cup of tea (or wine, I suppose). Normally I like Rieslings but this one was kind of a miss for me, too. The Moscato was the bomb dot com though. I loved the bubbles and the sweetness level was perfect. It was so smooth and delish, I ended up polishing that one off but didn’t really drink the other two.
Choosing an entree was pretty dang tough, but Bryant ended up picking the Cacio e Pepe Orecchiette:
I absolutely loved the presentation of this dish, and I’m a huge risotto fan, but I honestly didn’t care for this dish. It just really didn’t taste like much to me, but then again I only had one bite and Bryant said he really liked it, so maybe it was a me issue. I’m glad he enjoyed it!
I opted for the Sweet Corn Agnolotti:
I actually wasn’t sure what type of pasta agnolotti was, but it’s basically just a stuffed pasta, kind of like a ravioli. These little dudes were stuffed with a delicious, creamy filling that I totally burned the frick frack out of my tongue on. They had a great corn flavor, you could definitely tell it was sweet corn. I noticed on the menu it also said it had black truffle in it but I actually didn’t notice any truffle flavor at all, so that’s kind of odd. I really enjoyed my entree, and I think next time I’d like to try the squid ink pasta since I still have yet to try squid ink.
Of course, we had to save room for dessert, and you can’t eat an Italian dinner without ending it with tiramisu:
Funny enough, Bryant’s favorite dessert is tiramisu, so he definitely wasn’t gonna pass this up. He was kind enough to let me try a bite, and I feel confident saying it’s a pretty good tiramisu! It was creamy and rich, and honestly didn’t have any sort of alcohol-y boozy type flavor. No complaints, solid tiramisu.
I went with the apricot and passionfruit tart with pepita crust:
Oh my DAYS! This bloody thing was loaded with flavor. Holy cannoli this thing literally punched my tastebuds into next week! The passionfruit flavor is absolutely bonkers on this sucker. Don’t get me wrong, it was delicious. It was sweet and tart and the crust was awesome and the meringue on top was fantastic and wow. Seriously wow. It took me three separate tries to eat this after I took it home, because I would take one bite and be like, okay that’s plenty for now. But don’t misunderstand me, it is very good!
Before leaving, I simply had to get one of their incredible looking cookies to take home, and I picked the white chocolate pineapple one:
This cookie was dense, chewy, perfectly sweet with pieces of pineapple throughout, and the flaky sea salt on top really was the cherry on top, or I guess it was the flaky sea salt on top (I know, it’s not a funny joke). Definitely pick up a cookie on your way out, you won’t regret it!
Grist is open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner, with a break in between the two. You can make reservations for dinner but not for lunch, and you can order online for lunch but not for dinner. While I was there I learned that Grist also hosts cooking classes on Sundays, so that’s neat! I’d love to check one out sometime.
All in all, Grist was a great experience. Though we didn’t have waiters and whatnot, the service we got from the people at the counter and from the chefs that brought our plates out was extremely friendly, and also the food came out really quickly. We both really loved the food and the vibes, and I also like the prices. I definitely want to come back and try pretty much everything I didn’t get to this first time around.
Have you tried Grist before? Which dish looks the best to you? Do you have any recommendations for nice Italian places in Dayton? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day! And be sure to follow Grist on Instagram.
-AMS
My schedule is finalized! I didn't list participants in case there were changes.
Who will I see at Readercon next month?
The Works of P. Djèlí Clark
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!
The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT
Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.
Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing
Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
It's becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.
Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen
Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
Meet the Pros(e) party
Salon F Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT
Program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.
The Works of Cecilia Tan [I'm moderating this one]
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov's, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America's other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia's many talents and accomplishments.
Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?
The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?
We did finally meet with the university senior management on 10th June, over a month after we originally requested a meeting. It wasn't a complete success, but we did come out of it with assurance that the existing policy on gender reassignment was still in place, and trans people can continue to use the toilets that match their lived gender, that no-one should be challenging people in the toilets, and that any changes to the policy would not happen until after the EHRC guidance is published in the autumn, and would involve a proper consultation, and a full Equality Impact Assessment of the changes
We asked them to respond to the EHRC consultation as an institution, and gave them a deadline of 20th June to communicate the above facts with all members of staff, including information on how to seek advice and support (other than just the staff counselling service!)
Instead they published a statement on Sharepoint on Tuesday (24th June), which did not meet our requests. The unions have put out a joint statement today (drafted last week, but it took a while to get it online) as a result:
Finished my response and submitted at 11:30 last night, having had to start from scratch on Sunday because a browser refresh had lost my previous attempt. I copied and pasted my responses into a document before submitting, as I'd been warned it wouldn't save them or send them to me. Tired now, and too hot today too, but glad I got it done.
Not sharing it all here, but from the final question:
Overall, as a trans inclusive feminist woman, I find this Code of Practice to be incredibly upsetting. I want to be able to include trans people in my life. I want to accept them in their lived gender. I'm happier with women's places which include trans people than I am with ones which exclude them. I want to have advice on how I can do this, and it's completely lacking here.
The Code is unclear in many places not just on how trans inclusive policies can work, but also on how the suggested trans *exclusive* policies can work in practice. It relies too much on the idea that you can always tell which people are trans and which people are not, and it seems willing to change existing practice significantly even where this will disadvantage trans people.
I don't think this is what the ruling in the Supreme Court was trying to achieve. The changes here are so incredibly broad, and so much at odds with other legislation, that they seem to go far beyond what is necessary, and it feels like an ideological stance to exclude trans people. If this is not the intention than it needs re-writing considerably.
How is it the end of June already? Where did it go?
And tomorrow I have to travel to Birmingham for a conference.
I am telling myself that I survived the Hot Summer of 76 in an un-airconditioned office where, if one opened a window in came the noise and fumes of a heavily traffic-polluted thoroughfare.
Of course, I was Much Younger in those days.
I see that it is supposed to get somewhat cooler (and wetter) on Weds.
I have heard the sad news from several friends, who
heard it from a
friend of a friend, that acelightning passed away
suddenly two days ago.
Sadly, I never got to meet her IRL; all I knew of her was her signature purple posts and comments that occasionally brightened my days. I was always glad to see that flash of purple on my reading page, and now it's gone, never to be seen again.
Farewell, Ace -- perhaps I'll see you again, with Colleen and Ame, somewhere over the rainbow bridge. The purple rose icon I made for Amethyst has rarely been so appropriate.
Regrettably, we have to go home again this afternoon. I am packing with the intention of leaving our luggage at the hotel while we do one last amble along Southsea beach.
Swag count:
Also some chocolate from the Lindt outlet store. My suitcase was fairly full when we came. I'm sure I can make it all fit ... somehow.
The seed for choosing Portsmouth for this getaway came from seeing a sign for "Explosion Museum" while driving a bunch of hockey players to Gosport rink back in May. I'm very glad I went with that impulse, it's worked out well.