Barbara Hambly's Blog, page 37
August 29, 2011
Whew!
Finished Draft #2 of The Magistrates of Hell - Asher & Ysidro # 4. And am extraordinarily pleased with it, zombies and all. Teaching three classes (Western Civ, World History, and US up to 1865) it'll be a dang tight push, to get it polished, cut, and ready to turn in by the due-date, but I'd hoped to get this far by the start of the semester. Glad I made it with 12 hours to spare.
I got a PS3 for my birthday and it vexes me that most evenings until Halloween I'll be working on the manuscript (when I'm not teaching night classes) instead of climbing vines and leaping from balcony to balcony in pursuit of lost treasure. (I have very cheesy and predictable taste in console games).
And on the subject of Halloween -- at CostCo the other day I saw - above the heads of the mob - A GIANT SNOWMAN AND DISPLAYS OF CHRISTMAS WRAPPING!!! IT'S NOT EVEN FRAKKING LABOR-DAY!!! WTF??!!!??
harumf.
I got a PS3 for my birthday and it vexes me that most evenings until Halloween I'll be working on the manuscript (when I'm not teaching night classes) instead of climbing vines and leaping from balcony to balcony in pursuit of lost treasure. (I have very cheesy and predictable taste in console games).
And on the subject of Halloween -- at CostCo the other day I saw - above the heads of the mob - A GIANT SNOWMAN AND DISPLAYS OF CHRISTMAS WRAPPING!!! IT'S NOT EVEN FRAKKING LABOR-DAY!!! WTF??!!!??
harumf.
Hurricane season
That's the danged thing about having a birthday this close to Labor Day weekend - it frequently co-incides with a massive natural disaster elsewhere in the country. In '05 I woke up the day after my birthday to see news pictures of people evacuating New Orleans. Last night one of the small group of friends who were over for dinner was passing around her iPhone Touch with a video of torrential rains pouring outside the windows of her daughter's NYC apartment.
Either that, or I'm at a WorldCon, or people are at Burning Man.
In either case - since '06 - it means that it's right on top of the first day of classes at the college, which this year is tomorrow. (And there's the usual deluge of e-mails from desperate kids who can't get the classes they need, and can I please add them to my class?) (Hey, if we don't get keys to those classrooms NOBODY's gonna get into that class!)
Thank you everyone for the kind birthday wishes. It was a lovely birthday dinner last night, and I get to spend the morning breaking down the tent and putting the dishes away. (Glen and Laurel, THANK YOU for helping with the clean-up! (www.orbikart.com) Laurie, THANK YOU for helping me set up and for the phenomenal tomato salad! (www.partyknowitalls.wordpress.com)
Either that, or I'm at a WorldCon, or people are at Burning Man.
In either case - since '06 - it means that it's right on top of the first day of classes at the college, which this year is tomorrow. (And there's the usual deluge of e-mails from desperate kids who can't get the classes they need, and can I please add them to my class?) (Hey, if we don't get keys to those classrooms NOBODY's gonna get into that class!)
Thank you everyone for the kind birthday wishes. It was a lovely birthday dinner last night, and I get to spend the morning breaking down the tent and putting the dishes away. (Glen and Laurel, THANK YOU for helping with the clean-up! (www.orbikart.com) Laurie, THANK YOU for helping me set up and for the phenomenal tomato salad! (www.partyknowitalls.wordpress.com)
August 28, 2011
Many thanks!
Thank you to all my Facebook and LiveJournal friends who sent me birthday greetings this morning! I'm extremely touched. It's lovely reading the names on the greetings. A lot of you I've never met - or met only glancingly at a convention. Many others, I see your names (like Stephen in Australia, and Robert and the gang in New Orleans) and see you in front of me, and hope you're well. My parents phoned and sang Happy Birthday over the phone (as they always do), and I now get to go out (while it's still cool) and do a little prep for a few friends who're coming over for dinner tonight.
Birthdays have always been extremely special to me, since my fifth, when I a) was given a book called "The Tall Book of Make-Believe" which I'd loved from checking it out of the library and b) was taken to Disneyland for I think the second or third time (so even in the parking-lot I knew how marvelous it was going to be. This was when they still had a real mule-train ride, and every store in the park wasn't The Disney Store).(In fact, I realize this was probably the year after it opened, so there wasn't a lot there. It was still magical.)
Thank you all for making this birthday lovely.
Birthdays have always been extremely special to me, since my fifth, when I a) was given a book called "The Tall Book of Make-Believe" which I'd loved from checking it out of the library and b) was taken to Disneyland for I think the second or third time (so even in the parking-lot I knew how marvelous it was going to be. This was when they still had a real mule-train ride, and every store in the park wasn't The Disney Store).(In fact, I realize this was probably the year after it opened, so there wasn't a lot there. It was still magical.)
Thank you all for making this birthday lovely.
August 26, 2011
Dinner with friends prep...
Cleaning out the refridgerator. Don't ask, don't tell.
August 24, 2011
End of summer
"Faculty orientation day" tomorrow - since faculty, I presume, tends to get a little disoriented during summer's lull. We really do need to get our heads back into school-head: a few training-sessions, departmental meetings, seeing everyone again.
I didn't get NEARLY all the things done I'd hoped to do during the summer - though I promise I will return to my Book Stories about what was going on in my life during each of my books. On the other hand, seven chapters from the end of the second draft of Asher & Ysidro #4, I am REALLY pleased with it.
And with the work I'll get done today, I'm pretty much prepped for the first couple of weeks of classes.
I've been having school-dreams - presumably as another form of orientation - though in them I'm more frequently a student than faculty; the usual, "It's time to take the test, I've forgotten to attend classes for the last two months..." and a lot of visits to the library.
I didn't get NEARLY all the things done I'd hoped to do during the summer - though I promise I will return to my Book Stories about what was going on in my life during each of my books. On the other hand, seven chapters from the end of the second draft of Asher & Ysidro #4, I am REALLY pleased with it.
And with the work I'll get done today, I'm pretty much prepped for the first couple of weeks of classes.
I've been having school-dreams - presumably as another form of orientation - though in them I'm more frequently a student than faculty; the usual, "It's time to take the test, I've forgotten to attend classes for the last two months..." and a lot of visits to the library.
August 22, 2011
Night at the Drive-In
Every year for about the past six years, the Hollywood Bowl has done a "Fantasia" performance. That is, they take excerpts from the Disney film Fantasia, show them on a big screen with the sound turned off, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra plays - in sync - the classical pieces they illustrate. Friends took me to this for my birthday last night - after a marvelous picnic of roast beef, Ryan's grilled artichokes (see partyknowitalls.com for the recipie), phenomenal potato salad and the kind of very simple tomato salad which can only be made from home-grown tomatoes.
It will be very hard now to watch the DVD, because I want it to sound like it did with a live orchestra at the Bowl.
It had very much the ambiance of a drive-in movie: waiting for it to get dark enough to start the show. They did the Tocata & Fuge sequence (one of my absolute favorites in the film), pieces of Beethoven's 7th and the Rites of Spring/Dinosaurs, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Dance of the Hours (the one with the dancing hippos - my other favorite in the film), and wrapped up with the Nutcracker, accompanied by fireworks that filled the whole Bowl with brown smoke. People still laughed with delight over the Sorcerer's Apprentice and the dancing hippos (as I did myself, even after watching them a zillion times). The music was beautiful.
I got home WAY late and have been trying to catch up on work all day.
It will be very hard now to watch the DVD, because I want it to sound like it did with a live orchestra at the Bowl.
It had very much the ambiance of a drive-in movie: waiting for it to get dark enough to start the show. They did the Tocata & Fuge sequence (one of my absolute favorites in the film), pieces of Beethoven's 7th and the Rites of Spring/Dinosaurs, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Dance of the Hours (the one with the dancing hippos - my other favorite in the film), and wrapped up with the Nutcracker, accompanied by fireworks that filled the whole Bowl with brown smoke. People still laughed with delight over the Sorcerer's Apprentice and the dancing hippos (as I did myself, even after watching them a zillion times). The music was beautiful.
I got home WAY late and have been trying to catch up on work all day.
August 19, 2011
Ode to Joy
A beautiful evening last night at the Hollywood Bowl - I've been having a lot of them this summer - Beethoven's 9th, which I'd never heard in its entirety, concluding of course with an amazing rendition of the Ode to Joy - certainly one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.
School-work all afternoon, after groceries all morning. Can I PLEASE get some work done this evening before I go to bed?
Classes start in ten days. Most of my prep is prepped, but some remains to be done.
School-work all afternoon, after groceries all morning. Can I PLEASE get some work done this evening before I go to bed?
Classes start in ten days. Most of my prep is prepped, but some remains to be done.
August 16, 2011
Summer's end, and a pile of projects optimistically regar...
Summer's end, and a pile of projects optimistically regarded in June: I'll at least have time to START that...
Nope.
But, halfway through the second draft of Asher/Ysidro #5, and TRULY enjoying this one... (not that I didn't LOVE Blood Maidens...)
About 2/3 through lectures for the Fall's new class. Prepped for the first week, and the second, of all classes.
A couple of unexpected new directions opened, which may lead nowhere.
Deb the Sitemistress tells me that Silicon Mage has dropped out of sight on the Open Road website - I've instituted queries.
Autumn haiku by Buson:
The beginning of autumn:
what is the fortune-teller
looking so surprised at?
August 14, 2011
Shakespeare in the Park
Twilight picnic last night in Griffith Park, to see the Independent Shakespeare Company's performance of Love's Labors Lost. The ISC hilarious, as always. One of the coyotes in the hills set off what Laurie thought was the hyenas in the near-by zoo. They certainly didn't sound like coyotes (or any earthly creatures!) - eerie yikking and shrieking. And then, because of repairs to the roads out of the park, getting out of there we actually did get lost in the woods in the middle of Los Angeles.
Almost finished with the piece I'm doing for a non-fiction book about Dr. Who; it's divided up by seasons and I got Season 27 - or as it's better known, Season One of the re-boot, to my great delight.
Almost finished with the piece I'm doing for a non-fiction book about Dr. Who; it's divided up by seasons and I got Season 27 - or as it's better known, Season One of the re-boot, to my great delight.
August 12, 2011
Computerspeak
Just got a phone-call, computerized voice-message, which (for purposes of the plot) read off my address...
I happen to live on an Avenue (as opposed to a Street or a Boulevard), and the computer read it off as XXXX Whatever Ave... and pronounced Ave as in "Ave Maria." Do people not KNOW - or not care? - that mistakes like this make their businesses appear to be run by doofuses? There are giant billboards I've seen while driving up Lincoln Blvd that have mis-spelled words in them: "You spend thousands of dollars on advertising and don't bother to proof-read? What's that about?"
Another day of, "You can't do your work because there's all these other things that have got to be done."
And the cat is grabbing my hands and chewing my thumbs.
I happen to live on an Avenue (as opposed to a Street or a Boulevard), and the computer read it off as XXXX Whatever Ave... and pronounced Ave as in "Ave Maria." Do people not KNOW - or not care? - that mistakes like this make their businesses appear to be run by doofuses? There are giant billboards I've seen while driving up Lincoln Blvd that have mis-spelled words in them: "You spend thousands of dollars on advertising and don't bother to proof-read? What's that about?"
Another day of, "You can't do your work because there's all these other things that have got to be done."
And the cat is grabbing my hands and chewing my thumbs.
