passion fruit and published friends

It's been a pleasant weekend for me here, in spite of a lingering sore throat from last week. I'm getting settled in and starting to head out and explore the markets in the area - I've been on the lookout for passion fruit and was overjoyed to find a lot of it at a nearby fruit market, only 5 NT dollars each:


A few nectarines seem to have snuck into the background there as well.

I also turned up a happy surprise while browsing on Facebook: an old friend of mine from college has published a fantasy novel for young adults called Northlander. It looks like it'll be a good read! I'm going to have to check it out, especially since I'm in the privileged position of having read some of her earlier work firsthand. Reminiscing about old favourites of mine from the same genre led me to run a search for titles by Monica Furlong and I was delighted to find that there's an out-of-print sequel to her books Wise Child and Juniper titled Colman. Paperback copies were going for upwards of $70, but I found a hardcover edition for a mere $5.93 and promptly snatched it up.