Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 34

FUUUUUUUUCK

I just got a call from the water company. A pipe is leaking 4000 gallons/day so they're shutting off my water and will charge me for all that water- no idea how much that will be, but a LOT.

I am now stuck in 7 feet of snow with no running water until I can find a plumber to find an unknown buried pipe under 7 feet of snow.

I have emergency water and have filled my bathtub so I won't die of thirst. That is the only positive in this situation.

My car is still trapped, all roads are closed, and the plumbers are not calling back.

Oh and the internet is out. Posting from cell phone.

ETA: None of this is covered by insurance.

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Today I made the last of my coffee

But I am SAVED, because I found eight days worth of instant packets.

Two more feet of snow expected overnight. HELP.

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Snowmageddon: The Snowening

My SUV (Subaru Forester) is completely buried in snow. It looks like a giant snow haystack.

The chicken coop is walled in with snow except for the deep hole I dug so I can squeeze in the door.

I lost one of my Yaktrax in the snow.

I haven't even started shoveling the deck yet.

I need a restorative nip of brandy.

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SNOWMAGEDDON!

We were supposed to get 8-12 inches of snow. We got over 4 feet.

Snow is up past my windows. There are 5' drifts. No one can get anywhere as either the roads are under 4' of snow or the roads got plowed and all cars are blocked by 5' ice berms.

I'm about to swim out to my chickens and then commence shoveling to keep my deck from collapsing. Here are some pics while I drink coffee and procrastinate.

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My deck, seen through living room window.

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Backyard seen through bedroom window. There is normally a wall off to the left.

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Front door, looking left. That's about 4' of snow.

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Front door, looking straight ahead. The house is raised so that's a snow drift of over 5'.

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Front door, looking left toward deck and stairs. You can see the stepladder I used to get onto the deck.

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Neighbor's house. Note depth of snow in crook of roof!

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Another view of neighbor's house.

I'm worried about both the deck and the chicken run roofs collapsing, especially as we're getting snow on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. There's no good way to shovel the coop roof as it's high and also surrounded by 5' of snow.

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I walk backwards into Hell cursing the snow

Over 3' on deck and chicken coop roof.

Drifts taller than me so 5' plus blocking both coop and shed with their food.

I just had to shovel a trench to get out of the house.

This is TOO MUCH SNOW.

Chickens are fine. All six of them laid eggs today!

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SNOWPOCALYPSE!

I just waded through HIP DEEP snow to get to my chickens, then had to dig for 20 minutes to open their door. They're fine, just annoyed, and still laying!

By the time I wallowed back to the house, my footsteps were already mostly filled up with new snow.

Alex took the opportunity to escape as the snow prevented the front door from completely closing. I grabbed him and stuffed him back in before he could attempt to catwalk over a drift.

Photos to come. Later. I didn't take my phone as I was afraid of losing it in a snowdrift.

Snow piling up on my deck to an alarming degree, approaching the railings, and still coming down hard. I can't get on it due to snow blocking both entrances (which both open inward onto the deck) but it's approaching danger levels to I'm going to see if I can get over the gate with a stepladder. I can't get anyone to come shovel for me as they're all snowed in as well.

I have three days' worth of coffee left.

ETA: I just got in from shoveling the deck. I got maybe 1/3 of it shoveled down to about 1 1/2 - 2 feet of snow. I'm taking a break and going back out soon.

So much for "I shall cozily drink hot chocolate and get lots of writing done!"

ETA 2: RimEverything Facebook page is lit today: Is there someone on this miserable frozen hellsacape of a mountain that wants to make some cash tomorrow? Someone with a 4 wheel drive and chains? Someone that can drive said vehicle down some roads to the bottom of the hill?

(No. There is not. All roads off the mountain are closed.)

ETA 3: There is like 3.5' of snow on my chicken run roof. Guess I'll swim out there, take the stepladder out of the shed, and shovel some off.

The deck is still buried in snow.

RimEverything is full of people begging for help shoveling snow but no one can go anywhere.

I can't believe I still have power and internet! It's a miracle.

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SNOWPOCALYPSE NOW: Day 1: Road Conditions

I encourage anyone with personal experience of Hwy 18 to chime in. It is the fairly terrifying steep windy mountain road leading to Crestline, with no or inadequate guardrails and thousand-foot drops. It is not a highway you want to be driving the wrong way on, especially when it's snowing and icy. It's called Rim of the World for a reason.

ETA: Here's some local webcams

Here's the local traffic report.

YESTERDAY

9:45 pm Hwy 18, mm 41:20, Tesla stuck in snow, facing wrong direction.

8:15 pm Hwy 18, mm 16:50 Traffic Collision reported.

7:22 pm Hwy 330, mm 38:30, Vehicle stuck in snow.

6:28 pm Defective traffic signals, Hwy 18/Lake Gregory Dr, Crestline

6:02 pm Hwy 18, mm 14:60, Traffic Collision reported.

5:51 pm Hit and Run, Crestline, Lake Dr/Fern

5:26 pm Hwy 189/Pine Crest, multiple vehicles sliding, stuck on ice.

5:20 pm Rim Forest, Bear Springs Rd multiple collisions and vehicles stuck on ice.

5:18 pm Crestline, Crest Forest Dr/138, traffic collision , school bus vs vehicle, no injuries reported.

4:54 pm Hwy 18/13 Curves, Subaru vs snow bank, blocking.

4:54 pm Hwy 189/Lake Gregory, multi vehicle collision, stuck vehicles.

4:38 pm Hwy 18, Arctic Circle traffic collision.

4:30 pm Hwy 18/Hortencias, Crestline, traffic collision, vehicles driving wrong way to go around.

4:25 pm Lake Dr between Fern and Knapps Cutoff, Crestline-vehicle vs pedestrian.

4:20 pm Lake Dr/Fern traffic collision, blocking, vehicles stuck, blocking.

4:19 pm Hwy 138/Balsam Lane, traffic collision, blocking. MULTIPLE VEHICLES STUCK IN ICE!!!

4:15 pm Hwy 38/Baldwin Lane traffic collision, blocking lanes.

4:12 pm Hwy 38/Lake Williams, traffic Collision, blocking lanes.

3:51 pm Hwy 189/Highway Spur, Twin Peaks, 2traffic collision, blocking lanes.

3:49 pm Hwy 138, above the Crestline Bridge, 2 vehicle collision, both lans blocked

3:45 pm Hwy 138/18 vehicles backed up due to one being stuck.

3:27pm Hwy18 near Lake Gregory Crestline area
Truck stuck in a ditch.

3:25pm 189 x North Bay.
Two vehicle Traffic Collision. Blocking Down Bound Lanes.

3:10pm HWY 18
Snow Valley Area
2 vehicle Traffic Collision. Blocking lanes.

3:04pm HWY 18 Arrowbear
Vehicle on it's roof. Occupants out of vehicle.

TODAY

CHAIN RESTRICTIONS SUMMARY
HWY 18 (Lucerne) : R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES
HWY 18 (Arctic Circle): R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES
HWY 18 (Arrowhead) : R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES
HWY 38 : R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES
HWY 330: R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES
HWY 138: R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES
HWY 173: R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES
HWY 189: R3 - CHAINS REQUIRED ON ALL VEHICLES courtesy of socalmtns

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The Last Flight (1931)

"Her name is Nikki. She holds men's teeth. She sits at the bar and she drinks champagne."

Four American WWI pilots who've been disabled out of the service go to Paris to drown their sorrows in an absolute tide of alcohol. Cary burned his hands landing the plane so his gunner Shep could survive. Shep has a nervous tic that only goes away when he's drunk, so he drinks until he can't remember where he is or what month it is. Bill rushes into danger, tackling anything big enough to have a chance of killing him. Francis drifts into dissociation or outright sleep so often that he sets regular alarms on his watch, but when someone drops a glass he jolts awake, instantly alert.

The four of them meet Nikki, a young woman who initially seems eccentric and eventually seems as deeply damaged as the rest of them, though for more obscure reasons. They first meet her in a bar holding someone else's dentures in a martini glass. She explains that she's holding a man's teeth so he can go fight without risking breaking them, and surmises that he was a pilot who lost them in a crash. The men rush out immediately to see the fight, and return to find Nikki still there but the teeth gone. This dialogue ensues:

Bill: "Say! What's become of the teeth?"

Nikki: "Oh, the man came and got his teeth."

Cary: "Well, what did he say?"

Nikki: "He said thank you for holding his teeth."

The four pilots promptly sweep Nikki into their group. Cary explains, "Despite your practically innumerable faults, we adore you. We've decided to adopt you."

They quiz her about her life, and get answers that don't explain very much at all. She has a rich mother who she doesn't see. She writes. When they ask about her writing, she says, "I'll send you a photograph of my poetry." She says her toes were ruined by a childhood experience with too-small shoes. She drinks as much as the rest of them.

The men have a hanger-on, a man who claims to be a reporter and probably really is, though he's not writing about them. He follows them around, an unsettling presence; he has a job and seems not to have fought in the war, and likes to point out that he's the normal one. If he is, and he may well be, that doesn't say anything good about normality.

I mentioned drink. They drink a lot. I don't think any of them are ever sober after an initial scene in the hospital. They drink so much, and are so explicit about doing it deliberately, that it made me wonder about all those 1930s movies where everyone drinks relentlessly. Are they too trying to forget something?

Their conversation skitters between jokes, surreal non sequiturs, peculiar anecdotes, and offhand mentions of the horror and damage they're drinking to hide from. Nikki's bathtub is full of turtles, which she takes with her in a basket when they get on a train and appoints Francis in charge of sprinkling them regularly. He attends to this job with a determination that cuts through his permanent daze.

Despite Nikki mostly living on a dimension half a degree skewed from consensus reality, she has an uncanny knack for asking questions with deeply painful answers. When Shep warns her that Cary is brittle and needs to be alone because one insensitive remark will break him like a breadstick, she replies, "Well then, I don't think he should be alone."

We follow them as they drift from Paris to Lisbon, drinking and partying and joking as hard as they can. Despite the old-school theatrical acting style, the movie feels oddly modern in other ways, like a 1970s naturalist film that lets its cast improvise their dialogue, only sometimes they drift back into their screwball comedy script and sometimes they talk openly about their complete loss of meaning and purpose, and their sense that they died in the war and they're not really there, so what does it matter what they do?

The only thing that does matter is each other, their relationships. They're all very tender with each other. Nikki is paired with Cary, mostly, but it doesn't cause any jealousy. She loves them all and they love her, and they're all dancing as fast as they can.

In retrospect, Nikki holding the teeth feels like a metaphor for her holding the pilots' pain. But she has her own pain too, and she can't fix theirs any more than they can fix hers. When one of them eventually says he wants to help her, after a movie's worth of her saying she wants to help them, it's a big moment, but maybe just a statement of what was happening all along.

It's a strange, haunting movie, often funny and as often deeply sad. I've never seen anything quite like it. It was directed by William Dieterle, who fled Germany in 1930.

You can watch it free here.

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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & other lessons from the crematory, by Caitlin Doughty

A memoir by the goth mortician Caitlin Doughty. I've enjoyed her surprisingly chipper YouTube series her YouTube videos, so I thought I would like this. Especially after I'd just read S. A. Cosby's noir My Darkest Prayer, whose hero works in a mortuary.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is part memoir of how Doughty got obsessed with death (as a child, her goldfish died and she witnessed a serious accident that may have killed someone) and got a job operating the crematory of a San Francisco funeral home, and part facts about death, corpses, and funeral customs.

The memoir part is fairly interesting but a bit marred by Doughty making the same points and jokes over and over with minor variations. It turned out that I already knew about 80% of the factual material, so that part was pretty dull for me. There's definitely some gross parts, but it's not that gross. Ultimately I was most interested in the stories of the dead people and their loved ones (or hated ones), a la the opening scenes of Six Feet Under, and the book is spread about in focus enough that there's not that much of that.

I will share my very favorite part though. The machine that grinds up bone bits is called a cremulator, which as Doughty points out sounds like a cartoon villain. "Beware the Cremulator!"

I've had more-than-average contact with death and dead people for someone who doesn't deal with it professionally, due to spending my childhood where people often just seemed to be dead where I could see them, and then, as an adult, volunteering for a number of years with the Crisis Response Team, which did crisis counseling on-scene when people died suddenly. So I not only attended some funerals where the body was burned on a pyre while we all watched, but with Crisis Response mostly no one had done anything at all to the body other than check to make sure it was dead.

I think Doughty was around corpses that had been sitting around for longer than the ones I encountered, and of course she encountered way way more than I ever did. Also, the deaths I'd get summoned to were exclusively ones that the police got summoned to, as we got called by the police. If someone has been declared by a doctor to be dying, the police don't get called. So the scenes I went to were exclusively unexpected deaths, which both means that they were more likely to be violent but less likely to be of someone who was in absolutely horrendous condition before they died. I think that explains our different experiences with them.

Cut for comparison of my and Doughty's experiences with corpses, but nothing really graphic. ( Read more... )

This all sounds like Doughty was making a pitch for morticians, but in fact she ended up very against automatically embalming corpses and uncomfortable with efforts to hide the reality of death from loved ones, like shifting the washing of a body from the family to professionals. She talks a bit about death doulas, whose ideals she liked but whom she found to be too New Agey for her. The most interesting thing I personally got out of the book was the idea that being a death doula might be something I'd like doing if I could avoid the New Agier aspects of the community.

I've always found corpses and what we do with the corpse itself to be the least interesting part of death, and this book didn't change my mind about that. If you're curious about American mortuary practices plus a sprinkling of comparative anthropology, this book is okay. But honestly, her YouTube videos are better - and I say that as someone who would almost always rather read a book than watch a video.

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Candyheartsex Reveal!

I wrote five stories for candyheartsexchange .

Annihilation - Movie

Embrace. 477 words. Lena/Dr. Ventress. Rated T.

The final encounter of Lena and Dr. Ventress goes a little differently.

I love writing for Annihilation - so much beauty and terror and wonder and strangeness in that movie. It gets excellent fic, too.

Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander

With Flowers in her Mane. 679 words. Gwydion/Melyngar. Rated G.

Gwydion gets Melyngar ready for a festival.

The very charming prompt: "I read these books for the first time a couple of years ago and absolutely adored Gwydion but also made an offhand comment to a friend that he was clearly married to Melyngar and shoot, headcanon permanent. Anyway, I am all for sweet moments, fluff, and/or the magical horse-bathing/grooming fic you've always wanted to write.

Fandom-Specific DNW: anything over a G rating"

I could not resist writing G-rated "His wife? A horse."

Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey

Another Round. 1491 words. Jaxom/Original Green Rider. Rated E.

AU of the green dragon's mating flight in The White Dragon. This time, Ruth participates. Which means Jaxom participates.

In The White Dragon, Jaxom has the chance to have gay sex, absolutely freaks out, and has het sex instead. So I was very pleased to see the prompt "but what if he didn't?"

Worrals - W. E. Johns

Special Friends. 1695 words. Rated M. Frecks/Worrals.

A get-together set during Worrals Flies Again, the night Worrals returns after being presumed dead.

That book has a fantastic presumed dead, one of Johns' best which is saying a lot as it's his number one with a bullet favorite trope. But the books stints on the aftermath, so I wanted to remedy that.

A Wolf for Worrals. 4151 words. Frecks/Worrals. Rated T.

“Girls can bond with wolves too,” said Worrals. “There’s no reason they should be kept for the boys.”

“If they let us bond with wolves, they’d have to let us do more than that,” Frecks pointed out. “They’d never waste us transporting Tiger Moths.”

“Exactly,” Worrals said triumphantly.

Worrals and Frecks in an AU where people bonding with psychic wolves is a known, rare, and valuable phenomena. I wrote this for cyphomandra , who wrote me Malory Towers with psychic wolves a while back. All fandoms should have psychic wolf AUs.

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