Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras by Andrea Höst Page A

inquiry is on. I was used to the routine of it
all. I still get physical training, and the kids get to train with
me now, instead of at the school, but it's a different kind of
routine, and I feel very shut in at times. Fortunately it's warming
up, and the drifts are melting, and the early flowers should be
poking through soon. I've been burying myself in subtitling the
last few days. Ages back now I projected a TV and DVD-player and a
bunch of DVDs and did my best to make them last a long while, and
the technicians have been trying to untangle the DVD coding ever
since. We could make the machines run easily enough, but what we
wanted was, instead of me spending hours projecting Earth
documentaries really slowly, that I just project a DVD and we copy
the data off it and then voila! And that meant not just being able
to get to the data on the DVD (apparently not too hard – Tarens
went through a similar technology stage) but translating the DVD
coding. That's taken an age, but they finally did it. I projected
and copied Blue Planet and The Life of Mammals and
that sort of thing to start with, and then a whole bunch of DVDs
for my own entertainment – so nice to watch some of my
favourite movies again. I'm slowly going to subtitle these for the
kids' benefit, but aren't really planning to turn myself into a
film industry, so I'm setting them so they can't be spread
about.
    I've been working on Spirited Away first, running it in Japanese, with English
subtitles, and adding Taren subtitles underneath that. I chose it
partly because Ys is still pushing through on learning English (but
very annoyed at how illogical it is) and also because the lead
character is called Sen. Sen will love it when I'm done, no matter
how little she understands.
    I've also realised I
can project DVDs of movies I haven't even seen, which will be
pretty cool.
    Twelfth is finally
going to be posted here soon. It's been so long. Zan and I write
occasionally, and she seems okay, but I want to see her to be
sure.
     

Chapter 12
    November
November 20
    Kiddie-palooza
    Siame and Rye's
birthday this month. Siame went home to Tare briefly for hers
(proving a point, I think, though Kaoren didn't try and stop
her).
    Rye's twelfth birthday
was a few days ago (in Earth-time it will be a little later each
year, which is very confusing to me), and we had our first party on
Arcadia since everything got really snowy. Arcadia's been nicely
de-snowed and everything's all over with flowers or buds on trees
and it's very nice in the middle of the day, though still nippy at
night. Rye wanted a swimming party, much like his first one, except
with all his new friends involved, and I'd decided to make it a
relatively large party. Lots of kids, First, Second and Fourth –
and Third and Twelfth who have finally been rostered here (some of
them have moved their families here, but unlike the senior squads
they can't choose a permanent Muina assignment just
yet).
    It was a big guest
list, and I'd decided to do a hangi and was rather anxious about
how it would turn out. Uncle Steve (Aunt Bet's husband) had
introduced hangis to our family and it had become a holiday
tradition, but I'd never actually done any of the technical stuff
myself. I'd visualised myself a manual (I very tediously have to
ask permission to do the smallest thing now), and Kaoren helped me
experiment with finding the right sort of rocks, and we'd prepared
a small pit a week beforehand for a mini test run, and that had
worked out quite nicely (Siame stopped looking at me as if I was
insane after we'd sampled the small amount of food I'd cooked,
anyway, and Zan and Kiste who were my guards for the day were very
complimentary about the flavour). Kaoren – pretty much everybody –
was fascinated by the idea of burying your food to cook it, though
most everyone's initial reaction was total incredulity, which was
very funny. After hearing about it, an awful lot of our guests
wanted to come over early to see us