Sarah Monette's Blog, page 41

5 things for Wednesday

1. New Simon's Cat: "Sticky Tape."

2. Baby platypus! For which the correct word is puggle. Ditto for baby echidnas.

3. People have started reporting the arrival of Unnatural Creatures. Yay!

4. Last night involved a trip to the emergency vet with the Second Ninja. As best we can tell, she hurt her right hind leg, although since the vet couldn't find anything wrong, about all I can say for sure is that she scared the living daylights out of me, mirrorthaw , and herself.

I really need 2011 to cut this shit out.

5. Dear Universe, truepenny is still looking for a job, which she more and more needs to find thanks to her state's fucknut of a governor. (Yes, mirrorthaw is a state employee.) Since she now has, along with all her other health problems, RLS which means her sleep schedule is Teh FUBAR, she is pretty damn baffled as to how to find one. Any help you wanted to offer, O Universe, would be much appreciated. Sincerely, me.

Project Valkyrie: waterlog

50 minutes, 36 laps.
305 laps, 26 laps.

And, okay, "triple-X gentlemen's club" with your ads on my radio, let's put aside all of the skeeve and the skanky and the rest of it and talk about your promotional decisions. Because Couples' Night? Seriously?

another one!

Giuseppe Bastianini, the Foreign Undersecretary, said to Mussolini at a meeting of the Grand Council, "Ideas are not canaries to be kept in a cage" (Deakin 448). There's a line that belongs in blank verse.

(I suspect The Fall of Mussolini is behaving as displacement activity from the novel revisions I can't get a grip on. But it's also just nuts how readily the subject matter lends itself to the form.)

quote from an imaginary play by an imaginary playwright

I'm reading F. W. Deakin's The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Fall of Italian Fascism (1962), and for some reason a minor exchange Deakin mentions between the King of Italy and one of his marshals insists on being rewritten in iambic pentameter, as if it were a quote from some time-traveling Elizabethan playwright*:

VICTOR EMMANUEL: The old guard . . . ghosts, all of them.
BADOGLIO: Then we, sir, we two are also ghosts.

--The Fall of Mussolini

If anyone wants to do anything with this, you may consider yourself to have my blessing. Because I'm not ABOUT to write a five-act blank verse tragedy about Mussolini--despite the sudden, ridiculous temptation of writing the Hitler scenes.

---
*This is oddly appropriate, since February 26 was the day of Christopher Marlowe's baptism in 1564, and in matociquala 's excellent story, "This Tragic Glass," Marlowe is exactly that: a time-traveling Elizabethan playwright. Happy approximate birthday, Kit, and next time, just pay for the fucking fish, all right?

Project Valkyrie: waterlog

60 minutes. 36 laps, plus 1 helping the lifeguards get the lines across the middle of the pool for the free swim. So, 37 laps.

304 miles, 26 laps.

I am exhausted from being unable to sleep and having to get up early for the electricians, and because I'm exhausted, I'm depressed. Can't write, either, which NEVER helps. So I'll stand here in the rain and feel sorry for myself. Probably I've already lost my tail and just don't know it yet.

PSA: snail mail

I have acquired a post office box.

Sarah Monette
P.O. Box 259838
Madison, WI 53725

Ben Jonson Memorial Fundraiser: DONE!

I just got back from taking the last of the packages to the post office. Everyone's book or books are now in the mail (unless, of course, you've received them already). I mailed things the cheapest way, which was sometimes Media Mail and sometimes First Class. I did my utmost best to get dedications and names and addresses right, but I'm human. If I screwed anything up, I apologize in advance.

I have sent books to:
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington DC, Washington State, West Virginia, Wisconsin (35 of 50, plus DC)

And to:
Australia (New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria), Canada (Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec), England, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden

And to someone in the U.S. Army stationed overseas.

The final total of donations (minus production costs for Unnatural Creatures) is: $3570.42

Shipping costs were: $374.47

In the interests of getting a nice round number for the check, I'm going to eat $4.05 of the shipping costs, so

*ahem*

The donation I will be making to the Companion Animal Fund, in memory of Ben, is $3,200.00.

Thank you to everyone who donated, both those who bought books and those who just threw some money in. You are all wonderful and amazing, and I am deeply grateful. And the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital is going to be thrilled.

5 things

1. 45 minutes, 30 laps (stopped early because of horrific headache)
303 miles, 25 laps

2. Did not wipe out on the icy sidewalk either leaving the house or coming home. Go team me!

3. Thank you, everyone, for your kind thoughts re: the First Ninja (who is also the Skinny Ninja, the Tsarina in Exile, and the Executive Transvestite; her sister is the Tubby Ninja, the Terminator, and the Action Transvestite). She is emphatically hungry today (she sat in the kitchen doorway making little moop noises at me while I mixed her pills into her food), so we soldier on with as much bravery and good will as we can.

4. The electricians will be back in the walls tomorrow to finish upgrading the house, starting at 8 a.m. This dovetails just beautifully with my current inability to get to sleep before 4.

5. Chattanooga has a baby snow leopard.

2010 just keeps going and going . . .

So, the back-end of 2010 was pretty awful, what with the ankle and all, and the beginning of 2011 isn't much better. Ben's death was hard, and since that obviously wasn't enough, the First Ninja has hydronephrosis in both kidneys. She was diagnosed a month and a half ago (By then the blockages were gone, which is a blessing--we have no idea when exactly this happened. Was it related to her seizures? No freaking clue.), and she's still losing weight despite the new renal diet (which, blessedly, she likes--and she likes having special food that the other cats don't get).

Her case, unlike Ben's, involves some hard decisions. We could try for a kidney transplant--she's only six--but there are two reasons not to, and I can't even tell you which one is the more important deal-breaker:

1. we can't afford it.
2. prolonging her life is not worth the misery it would cause her.

If it were a different cat, I might be doing the cost-benefit analysis differently. But of the two ninjas, she is the stubbornly feral one. And, as the vet tech said today, she's a worrier. She's highly anxious. She's difficult to catch, nearly impossible to hold; I've never had to pill her, and doing so would be a major daily trauma (for both of us). Even routine trips to the vet terrify her, and I can't imagine what it would be like for her to undergo major surgery and then have to spend up to a month in the hospital--and then, like any human transplant recipient, be on a regimen of drugs for the rest of her life. She is a lovely affectionate girl (in her own particular way), and I can't stand the thought of making her undergo incomprehensible long-term suffering like that.

We're not in end game yet. The vet loaded her up with fluids and anti-nausea medication at her check-up today, and we have a prescription of kitty Valium to try, to see if perhaps she will eat more if she doesn't feel she has to flee from every unexpected sound. And I'm willing to keep trying things as long as they're (relatively) inexpensive and non-invasive, and as long as she still seems to be enjoying her life.

But it's still just really hard.

Project Valkyrie: waterlog

40 minutes, 29 laps.
302 miles, 31 laps.

Plus fifteen minutes chipping the mastodon out of the glacier . . . I mean, de-icing the car.