Robin McKinley's Blog, page 100

Roses. And Singing.

 

I would be very grateful if the dranglefabbing weather gods would (a) STOP SENDING US HARD FRELLING FROSTS and (b) stop ONLY giving us good gardening weather on days I'm rushing around doing other things.  Like today.  Yesterday was a damp grey unfriendly day that felt colder than it was—but I was out there in the afternoon anyway, planting, ahem, roses*, and looking around nervously for places to put the friends of the one, single, solitary climber I ordered yesterday.  There was an evil little wind and just enough rain falling at unpredictable intervals to make you wet if you were out in it** but nothing like enough to do the landscape any good.***

            Roses are, at least, hardy†.  But we've had below freezing temperatures the last two nights—and I had started planting gladiolas.  Which are not hardy.  But they're all (I think) up against house walls so they should be okay.  Arrrrgh.  I've got dahlias and begonias and chocolate cosmos all lined up waiting eagerly to go outside.  The ones already in pots I am now schlepping back indoors again at night—and meanwhile Hannah is coming this weekend which means the Winter Table has to come down†† whether I'm ready to lose it or not, because we want to be able to get the dropped leaf on the proper kitchen table up so that two of us can sit at it at the same time.†††  Tea in the sitting-room is fine.  Breakfast, not so much. 

            Today was a glorious day.  It was still cold when I got up so I pottered‡ around drinking tea before I ferried the chocolate cosmos, the dahlias, the begonias, the kalanchoes‡‡ and the geraniums back outdoors again.  Then hellhounds and I had a magnificent hurtle . . . and then there was the usual mad Monday scramble of trying to get some work done and some lunch eaten and some warm-up singing accomplished before my voice lesson. . . . I planted one pansy in the brief gap between taking hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to pick them up for their weekly adventure and leaving for my rendezvous with Nadia.

            I went in there still brooding about how to think about the performance issue, because while from my perspective an awful lot of where music comes from is where writing comes from, stories don't need to be performed.  The book goes into the reader's hands and the reader reads it.  Yaay.  Simple.  Music has to be performed, and this usually involves human input in some particular.  I'm a professional writer, and I think the genre/literature, grown-up/kiddie face-off is bogus, so I don't worry much about what rung of the great ladder of immortality I'm on.‡‡‡  But to me there's this vast chasm between what for want of better terms we'll call amateur and professional—not that there aren't great amateurs and calamitous professionals—and I am nowhere on the great ladder of musical immortality.  Why shouldn't I not be able to face performing my pathetic little attempts at singing right after Oisin's been playing an organ sonata that feels like something I should have been listening to and being evolved into a higher form of life by for the last fifty years?  That's my music, that sonata.  Mine.  My singing, however, is the dandelion at the foot of the giant sequoia.   The lopsided dandelion.

            Nadia gets this patient expression on her face when I go in with stuff like this.§  And the thing that's really embarrassing is that she instantly dropped me in the teacher place.  She knows that I've taught creative writing a bit—not a lot;  little enough that I can forget when it suits me—and never more than a short seminar.  I doubt that I'd be anyone's Nadia§§ over the long term.  But I do know a few things about being a teacher:  that you cut your student slack for being there and wanting to learn stuff.§§§  That you're glad to see them there wanting to learn stuff.  That you give them huge credit for trying.  That you look for the good stuff, so you can say, here, this is good, work from here, expand here,# think about what you were doing here, try to find that space again.  You don't say, you are crap, you don't know it all yet and you are therefore a lesser mortal, you don't say, you aren't good enough.  She said, how would you feel, if you were a teacher, and one of your students came in one day and had a cup of tea and a chat and as she was leaving mentioned that she'd brought a story—but she wasn't going to let you see it?  Would you be cross?## 

            Oh.  Yeah. 

            Nadia said, You know, Robin, it's not lack of talent that's holding you back at the moment.  It's lack of confidence.

            Sigh. 

             I sang . . . not too badly.  I'm kind of getting somewhere with the emotional expressiveness thing.  Kind of.  And even I can tell that the quality of the noise I'm making has improved.###  That positive feedback loop that Nadia talks about is definitely there, and getting stronger, which means that practise at home is less frustrating and more fun.

            But . . . well. . . .    

* * *

* I seem to have a few left over from last year.  Ah.  Hmm.  The old I'll-put-you-here-and-deal-with-you-later flimflam referred to yesterday.  I had a lot more excuse for not getting around to and/or forgetting things when I had two acres and hundreds of roses.  Now my only resort is blaming Menopause Brain.  This year my negligence included the discovery of three roses heeled in in Peter's garden.  Oops.  

** And to annoy hellhounds, if they were out in it with you 

*** And, speaking of the things that the gods could do IF THEY'D STOP PLAYING POKER AND ATTEND TO BUSINESS: please let those odd little scritchy, flappy noises not be even-earlier-this-year-returning thirsty bats seeking redress from drought.  Atlas is coming tomorrow to look for any holes he might have missed last year.^  And I'd maybe better fire up the extra-large plant saucers I had dotted about the place for any livestock that wants a drink.  More sodblasted things to WATER.  

^ And yes, I have ordered the mosquito netting to drape over my bed.  Just in case.  Except that it isn't mosquito netting.  It's the stuff you put over your strawberries to keep the birds off.  I don't think the bats will care.  It's the right size, the right mesh, the right price, and it's sold by a genuine gardening site.  Mosquito netting doesn't seem to bring out the better class of vendor, although I admit I'm a bit fascinated by the sheik-of-Araby romantic fantasy approach. 

† Even if I agree with Diane in MN that my eyes got a little wide at what Antique Rose Emporium was offering as 'extra hardy'.  I'm at the wrong house but I'll have a stroll through my rose book shelves some day soon.  If I didn't divest myself of them when we moved out of the old house^ I have at least two about rose-gardening in major-bloody-winter areas.  

^ Yes I even got rid of some ROSE books 

†† That which stands over the hellhound crate during the winter, with a green plastic garden sheet over it, to give me somewhere to put the indoor jungle.  When winter gets serious, Atlas and I haul most of it up to the green/summerhouse/shed-with-a-grow-light at Third House.  But winter never really got serious this year, until about a month ago, so there's been a lot of bringing-stuff-indoors-at-night, taking-it-out-again-next-morning, and swearing,^ the last few weeks. 

^ Gently.  So as not to damage my throat. 

††† I do keep telling you the living space at the cottage is small.  

‡ I should be doing housework.  Fortunately Hannah is not easily shocked.  And she's known me for over thirty years.^

^ Bats may be a bridge too far.  But we don't have bats.+

+ Yet.

‡‡ http://houseplants.about.com/od/succulentsandcacti/p/Kalanchoe.htm  I didn't discover these till a year or two ago.  But they're wildly tender. 

‡‡‡ This is aside from Never Writing the Story as Well as the Story Deserves, but I'm not getting into that tonight or none of us will get any sleep. 

§ Have I mentioned (recently) that Nadia isn't thirty yet?  Gods.  I'm being mentored by a child.  

§§ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadia_Boulanger 

§§§ I am very very very bad at students who are wasting my time because they don't want to learn stuff. 

# Not necessarily literally.  Contrary to popular McKinley belief, some short stories should stay short.  

## Might it even hurt your feelings? 

### I'm not ready for the Travelling Tiddybumps Opera Troupe^ tryouts yet however. 

^ Home made brownies at intermission.  It's why anyone comes.  Not for the singing.

Roses

 

Milk Wine 

I work at the Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio, and Madame Alfred is one of my absolutely favorite roses. (: If people are looking for a fragrant climber, I always lead them to her, as long as they have the room. I put her on my parents' front fence, and she blooms a treat. 

The Antique Rose Emporium!  Squeeeeee! 

https://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/ 

The very last year I was in Maine, I . . . planted stuff.  In a clearly prescient sort of way.  Gardening had never really occurred to me, except as something that other people did.*  I've said this (often) before:  gardening in Maine, while other people certainly did do it, looked way too much like hard work.  Gardening in Maine is the Xena Warrior Princess end, with evil gods and zombie unicorns and person-swallowing landscape and so on and I'm much more the Gabrielle before she started going to the gym end.  If there are any zombie unicorns around I am definitely looking for somewhere to hide. 

            But I had a silly fit, and, that last summer, went around digging holes and putting things in them.  Including three roses.  Which actually, you know, grew, and produced flowers—I mean, roses, yipe.  I have no idea where this might ultimately have led:  my little lilac-enshrouded house was heavily shaded by not only the two ginormous lilac hedges but several boulders as tall as the house in the back, and a huge, gorgeous old maple tree in the front.  I never was going to have a lot of opportunity to grow roses there—which is just as well, because the joke is that roses are annuals in Maine, and I'm pretty sure my three didn't survive their first winter.  But I might have learnt about the roses that will survive serious winter, and how to help them do it.

            Instead I fell in love with an Englishman and moved to England and his two-acre garden where he spent hours every day eeeeeeeeep.**  And after I got my breath back I started putting roses in left, right and centre, and learning the hard way about growing the beggars.  To do this rigorously*** involved ordering catalogues—this was before the web began infiltrating us hoi polloi:  I didn't have a computer yet† let alone an internet connection—from every rose seller I could get the address of.  This included several in the States.  I don't remember if The Antique Rose Emporium's was one of the ones I had to draft in an enabling American friend to lay my hands on—quite reasonably a lot of plant sellers won't send catalogues overseas when they won't ship their plants overseas—but the whole 'rose rustlers' thing was very attractive††, and little old country cemeteries in England sometimes have drifts of ancient roses with great gnarly stems as big around as trees.    

            The Antique Rose Emporium is pretty much the only American rose nursery I pay attention to any more.  If I want an American perspective on a rose, I look it up there first.  And if I didn't already have Mme Alfred, on the say-so of Emporium personnel, I'd be looking her up for details of her English performance record. 

            I originally bought her, back at the old house, by accident.  Well, I was very young in terms of rose-growing, and Peter was no help, him and his frelling herbaceous borders.†††  I think I'd actually ordered something else, and this thing arrived with a label saying 'Mme Alfred Carriere' and I thought, oh, fie, and heeled her in in a blank-ish spot, because I didn't know what to do with her and I had a lot of other roses to plant, and I'd look her up and figure out what to do with her later.  Only I never quite got around to it.  And she rioted, as she will do, and took over a large swatch of that end of what had been the vegetable garden before my first rose-beds went in.  I probably somewhere have photos of her pouncing over the trellis that several more modest climbers were dutifully scaling from the other side, and engaging Dortmund in mortal combat.  Dortmund was another of my errors—I made a lot of errors—a single, cherry-red rose, white at the base of the petals, and not at all my sort of thing, except that I loved her.  As I loved Mme Alfred.  And her big double creamy flowers looked fabulous tumbling among Dortmund's dazzling single red. 

            I totally had to have Mme Alfred even in my handkerchief-sized garden at the cottage.†††  I put her in my first year there and her tallest stems started  reaching above my neighbour's two-storey-plus-attic roof a couple of years ago—and since I'm looking out my first-floor‡‡ office window, this is not a trick of perspective.‡‡‡   When she's in flower I get gusts of her perfume through my office window.  Yes.  She's one of the best.

            Oh . . . and guess what I was doing today?  Ordering roses.  Remember I said I needed another climber?  Just one climber . . . ?

 * * *

* When I shared a house on Staten Island for a while, one of my housemates was a zealous, not to say fanatical, gardener.  That back yard makes my tiny garden at the cottage look large in comparison but by golly it was INTENSIVELY PLANTED.  It was impressive but somewhat intimidating—you could barely squeeze out the back door without being attacked by a radish.^  I felt I wouldn't have the authority to boss so much plant life around and I was sure it knew it.  I felt no impulse to try for myself.^^  And mostly I used the front door.  

^ Or a banana-sized slug.  Ewwww.  

^^ Being assaulted by the occasional house plant was enough.  I've had house plants catapulting off window sills most of my life.  

** Speaking of zealous. 

*** Is there another way? says the woman who is now waiting for her book on Japanese particles to arrive. 

† shock horror 

†† Even if the Emporium's 'our story' about Mermaid as a rose that will withstand 'droughts and blue northerns' and thrive in the wilderness makes me feel like I'm living on another planet.  I lose Mermaid.  Repeatedly.  She's one of the crankiest madams ever to grace these mostly verdant shores.  And I'm not the only one who thinks so:  she has a bit of a rep around here.  And then there are her thorns:  which are long, curved and prehensile, the better to make you bleed.  She's very beautiful though.  So we all keep frelling buying her when she conks out on us again. 

††† The English cottage garden style has roses.  Peter did have roses.  He just didn't have enough. 

‡ I don't have Dortmund now:  she's one of these great stiff angular things, about eight foot square.^  I do keep thinking about putting her in at Third House, but Third House's garden is still small, it's just bigger than the cottage's.  

^ She also has almost no scent.  And you have to draw some lines somewhere.  Sigh.

‡‡ Second floor in American English 

‡‡‡ Although as I've said elsewhere, it's surprising how many rather too large roses you can wedge into a rather too small garden if you're stubborn enough.  And don't mind the sight of your own blood too much.

 

Blood-pressure headache

 

So Pooka, who came off her drip feed at 100% this morning, by this evening, after almost two hours of Japanese lessons* while hurtling and over an hour Skyping** with a friend*** while recovering from hurtling, was redlining again.  The problem with plugging her into the laptop during working hours instead of the mains/wall last thing, is that the iTunes store pops up and starts blandishing you.†  So I, easily distracted little hussy that I am, downloaded a (cheap) ap that is supposed to make typing on your frelling device less of an occasion for practising vocal exercises. 

            Aaaaaaand it won't load.  It downloaded onto the laptop all right and appears in my app library.  But it won't climb into Astarte, which is what I want it for.  Astarte's main failing as the perfect bedtime companion†† is that you can't type on her.  I'm kind of fascinated by all these people who apparently churn out great novels on their iPads:  not me.  I can't even type two-fingered without going qwk7\7+km££BLERG?xx#.  Arrgh.  But the relentless little error message in this case says 'app will download when you are logged into iTunes on your computer'.  I AM LOGGED IN ON MY COMPUTER YOU FRELLING PIECE OF CLOTHESHANGER WIRE AND CHEAP GLUE.†††  I AM SITTING HERE STARING AT THE APP IN THE 'ROBIN'S LIBRARY' SCREEN.  And the 'help' is useless, of course:  it doesn't even allow for the possibility of troubleshooting:  all of its answers appear to be based on the indisputable fact that Apple is god and therefore perfect and its worshippers are merely sometimes rather stupid and have to have the same things to explained to them more than once in a patronising tone.  ARRRRRRGH.

            So in this spirit of weekend cheer and relaxation‡ I thought I'd re-answer one of those questions that comes up again and again AND AGAIN AND AGAIN because . . . sigh.  Because people not in the publishing industry don't know any better.  But if I'm lucky a few of them, who will now not write me emails, will be reading the blog tonight. 

. . . I am a very devoted kindle reader. I had your book, Sunshine, recommended to me by friends. Eager to read it, I search on my kindle right away. I'm sure you can imagine my disappointment when I found that it was not on the kindle, despite being a popular book. Perhaps, you would consider having it put on there, so that ereaders like myself can enjoy it. 

Any of my books' availability or lack thereof in any format has essentially nothing to do with me.  Nothing.‡‡  I have no control over this and—once I've signed the contract with the publisher, and contracts pretty much all now include electronic rights as standard—ebooks as well as all that hard copy stuff are the publisher's problem.  Just like getting the book out in any and all other formats is.  Your contract will say that the publisher does have to publish, and if it doesn't you get your book back.  (Which is not what you want.  You want it published.)  And you can lobby for the format du jour, or something special—like the illustrated ROSE DAUGHTER which we had to get special permission for.

            But if you assume that all the writer does is write you will not be far wrong in most cases.  Yes, some writers are a lot more involved with the rest of the business than I am—I don't know and don't want to know as much as I can possibly avoid knowing‡‡‡ because, ahem, I am prone to blood pressure headaches and chewing the wallpaper over something I can do nothing about is too frelling demoralising.  Yes, you can write letters and make phone calls—and badger your long-suffering agent—and get to know people and network and some writers are good at this, and some of them do make a difference to the rest of us.  And I'm grateful.  But I have no talent in that direction.  'Negotiation'  and 'calm rational discussion of a controversial subject' are not in my skill set.  I want to kill myself over jacket art regularly even now, when I do have some leverage.

            I'm actually surprised SUNSHINE isn't available as an ebook§;  mostly it's the books that came out before electronic publishing was beginning to be an issue that get trapped in the mincer.  But if it isn't, there'll be a reason.  The publishing behemoth regiment is still having trouble lurching into the electronic age, and older books by people who aren't JK Rowling and Dan Brown fall through the cracks sometimes.  

            And self-publishing?  Not me.  Thank the gods for publishers, however paralytically, blood-pressure-headachingly behemothy they can be.  I do read some of the articles (on line, speaking of ereading) about sisters doing it for themselves.  I can barely do the laundry, and every year when I'm trying to produce a full set of bank statements for the accountant—I fail.  If I tried to self-publish I'd be reading the want ads for shelf-restocker openings§§ within the year. 

* * *

* Atama ga itai desu.  Which may mean 'I have a headache'.  Note:  when they say that Japanese [grammatical] particles are a nightmare, believe them.  

** Who is coming to visit.  And thinks we should SING something together.  Aside from my extreme peculiarity on the subject of other people hearing me sing—and, after all, she would be singing with me—we have a slight repertoire problem:  I sing classical and folk.  She sings musical theatre and barbershop.  Can This Friendship Be Saved.^ 

^ I'm not sure.  She hates Sweeney Todd.  I can just about allow this in someone who doesn't like musicals generally+.  But in an avowed musical-theatre devotee?   This is like someone who claims to love dogs making an exception for sighthounds.  The door's that way, honey.  

+ No, it's not an opera. 

*** On the sofa, resisting entropy and the strange hierarchical struggles of hellhounds.  Guys.  It's a sofa.  Play nice or the hellgoddess will go all hellgoddessy on your ass. 

† I'm puzzled that they haven't gone the amazon route and started targeting you.  Hey, last time you were here you bought Demolition Bingo and Space Pastry Chef!  We're sure you'd love Washing Machine Lint vs Sink Elbow Trap!^ 

^ Has anyone played Pizza vs Skeletons?  Which sounds about as likely. 

†† Hey, I'm old.  And possibly a little strange. 

††† Ee, ah, eeee ah, eeee aaah eeee ah.    

‡ Are you KIDDING?  I'm writing a novel.  Novel-writing is a 24/7 activity.^ 

^Barring hellhounds, blogs, and scream—I mean singing. 

‡‡ In deference to Hannah and Merrilee's sensitivities, I am NOT CAPITALISING THAT SENTENCE. 

‡‡‡ Yes.  It's a very good thing I have an excellent agent. 

§ No, I'm not going to go doublecheck on amazon.  If you want to, feel free.  I avoid pages with my professional self on them like six kinds of interstellar plague.  And even if the person who wrote to me is wrong and it is available, and she or her frelling device was having a brain spasm, the principle remains:  once the story I've written is out of my hands, it's out of my hands.  

§§ Shelf restocking at a big supermarket during the graveyard shift sounds quite restful when novel-in-progress is being unendurably wayward.  And no, SHADOWS isn't.  As I keep moaning to Merrilee, if I hadn't been trying to finish it in five months it would be going really well.  Unfortunately . . .

Life goes on

 

We begin with a minute's silence.  I can't call her a friend because I didn't know her well enough, but she was in my crowd, to the extent that I as a nineteen-marks-out-of-twenty introvert have a crowd, and she was a good person—and had three half grown kids—and took piano lessons, and gave me Oisin's name and phone number, six or so years ago.  She's been ill for a while, and at first it looked like she was gaining on it, but we've known for a while now that it was gaining on her.  We knew it wasn't long . . . but this was still soon, and sudden.

            We begin with a minute's silence. 

* * *

Yesterday was a gorgeous day, a perfect gardening day, the sort of day you have to tie yourself to your chair to stop yourself from rushing outdoors but your neck keeps mutinously turning your face toward the window anyway and your eyes gaze longingly into the garden where there are little green leafbuds everywhere.*  Why didn't someone else cancel handbells?  Niall is a monomaniac, of course,** but both Colin and Gemma have gardens.  That was yesterday.

            And today, when I could have wrested an hour or two free of other demanding activities, it was suddenly cold and grey and bone-achingly horrible again.  That didn't stop another (small) box of hopeful plant life arriving on my doorstep or me reading gardening magazines over what passes in my case for breakfast***.  And I came emphatically home after my cup of tea with Oisin† and went out into the garden and damn the weather.  This is partly because it's Oisin who told me that—let's call her Gloriana—had died.  Spring is some comfort;  or if not comfort, exactly, the sense of that new young energy dragging you with it—green leaves, warmer temperatures (sometimes), more daylight, lambs and calves in the fields—makes you keep moving, makes you notice you're still alive.††

            I went out and planted my acidanthera ††† and admired my increasing hyacinth forest, since I've fallen into the habit the last few years of planting out any of my indoor-forced hyacinth bulbs that still look healthy the next spring.  The first daffs are out, and both my gardens are popping with little green noses of things I've lost the labels of—and I have a resident robin at the cottage again for the first time in several years.  The blackbirds have become right thugs, and while there's always a territorial robin in the background, I haven't seen nearly enough of him.  At the moment I even have a pair so maybe there will be a nest with little baby robins.

            And there's a human baby I know who's due to pop into this world and start breathing for itself any minute now.   Life goes on. 

* * *

Maybe we'll end with a moment of silence as well. 

* * *

*Fortunately I'm a touch typist. 

** He does garden, I believe, when Penelope hands him an implement and tells him to go hack that thing down or dig a hole there or something.  But he's not what you'd call self motivated. 

*** Our somewhat-seasonal organic grocery delivery has just put grapes back on its list.  It's summer.  Well, it's summer for fifteen minutes in the morning while I eat a handful of grapes. 

            Out in the real world I'm watching the lilac bushes with obsessive attention.  The funny little nobbles that will become lilac flowers start appearing not long after the leafbuds do, and we have leafbuds.  I know every lilac in this town, I swear, and New Arcadia has a lot of lilacs, for some reason.  Before I bought Third House I didn't have any of my own and so I tracked down everyone else's:  we have the purple ones, the lavender ones, the magenta ones, the pink ones, the white ones, and the red-purple with white edges ones.  We have the knock-you-down-at-a-hundred-paces scented ones and the bury-your-face-in-the-flowers-first scented ones, but they're all good.  Peter does not share my enthusiasm—he points out with some justice that they are not particularly attractive shrubs^ and they're only in flower a few weeks of the year.  He feels there are more generally rewarding plants.  Well, maybe,^^ but they aren't lilacs.  Although I may just be marked by all those years in Maine:  as I've said before, you certainly can garden in Maine, and people do, but it's very, very hard graft, of a sort that makes the most back-breaking labour in southern England look like a Victorian gentlewoman with a sun-bonnet and a trug snipping a few blooms for a posy.  Of the standard garden plants there aren't that many that will thrive in Maine.  Lilacs are one of them.  And they are so necessary at the end of that frelling winter.

            I have four lilacs at Third House and it's not a big garden.  Well, five:  the fifth is a 'patio syringa'.  Beware of lilacs called by their Latin^^^ name:  it tends to mean they aren't lilacs, they're just lumped into the genus by some frelling botanist.  I had this one in a pot at the cottage, and I was not nice to it because it wasn't a PROPER LILAC.  I took pity on it and planted it (in a corner, where it wouldn't bother me) at Third House and it is so happy, poor thing.  I like it much better now when I don't try to think of it as a lilac. 

^ He keeps making this same irrelevant comment about roses. 

^^ . . . roses 

^^^ Or New Latin/Greek.  WTF?? 

† Who was perhaps as near as I ever see him get to cranky when, as I was leaving, I admitted I had brought music with me and then hadn't told him.  Well, when I came in, he was playing something amazing on the organ^, Paul Hindemith's first organ sonata, in fact, and fortunately I didn't know it was Hindemith or I might have covered my ears and rushed back outside again.  Oisin has been telling me for a while that I am slightly wrong about Hindemith.  Anyway.  It's exactly my sort of thing and by the end I know this is stupid, okay? the idea of following it with my so-called singing was just not on.  I was even singing what counts with me as pretty well this morning.  Siiiiiiiiigh.  I don't actually know how to think about switching between professional performance and amateur;  there isn't any very useful parallel, it seems to me, between music, which does have to be performed, and professionally-written-down stories, which don't.  The amateur reader doesn't need any help:  she just reads the book.  Caro Mio Ben or Dove Sei aren't songs unless someone sings them.  Arrgh.  

^ I wonder if this works in England.  Never mind.  I'll just buy a CD.  http://www.classicalarchives.com/work/272545.html 

†† I am of course flashbacking to Diana's death—a year ago the end of this month.  And I've got three big anniversaries of loss in April which is weird because now begins my favourite time of year, and it—you should forgive the term—snowballs through April when, in southern England, the lilacs come out.  And the bluebells.

††† I am totally failing to find a good photo of them, possibly because part of their great charm is their scent.  Here's someone talking about how fabulous they are:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/howtogrow/3305281/How-to-grow-Gladiolus-callianthus.html 

And here's an uninspiring photo:  http://www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/bulbs/gladioli/gladiolus-murielae-/itemno.BU30001081/

Oh yes, and you're not supposed to call them acidanthera any more.  Piffle.

Twas spring, and the slithy toves . . . no, wait . . .

 

GRISELDA WAS AT MUDDLES PRACTISE TONIGHT.  YAAAAAAY.

            It's been another blood-pressure-aggravating kind of day.  Thursdays usually are, now that I'm back in the Muddles again, because of the straight sprint of handbells, final hellhound hurtle and two and a quarter hours of Muddlehampton Choir practise.*  Today's excitements began however by discovering a card put through the door that said 'package by greenhouse'.  Not one.  Three.  Three lovely, lovely, lovely boxes of PLANTS.***  And I was unpacking them in the garden when there was an eruption of hellhounds† and I discovered another delivery person with an epic parcel containing Peter's itea ilicifolia††.  It was a gorgeous day and I would much rather have stayed in the garden and planted things but I had hellhounds to hurtle††† and novels to write‡ and bells to ring ‡‡ etc. 

            And owls and pussycats to bludgeon to death mercilessly.  Even Griselda said, hmm, interesting, when we got to the descant.  This didn't stop her singing it right off or anything but at least she had to pay attention.  And it's just as Nadia said (it usually is):  having sung it through with Griselda a few times, I probably could sing it without her . . . but I don't want to.  

* * *

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/close-information.html#ixzz1pD5yT2s2  

Oh . . . raging flapdoodle.  Yes, I'm one of the mourners of the passing of the old regime, and if I had the money I'd probably buy one of the final edition‡‡‡, but has anyone who does research on the web not looked up and discovered it's two hours later while they followed their noses from web site to web site having forgotten what they were looking up in the first place?  The medium is different.  The breathless sense of plunging into the unknown and the serendipitous is the same.  And there are, in fact, serious advantages to the on line version of losing yourself in abstruse information about stuff you didn't know existed, let alone that you wanted to know about:  you can do it in bed on your iPad.  If you're going to stick to the alphabetical approach, you can certainly take one or two volumes of the Britannica to bed with you, but the entire thirty large tomes are a little unwieldy.  Not to mention all those annual update volumes. 

* * *

* Two and a quarter hours is a long time.^  That may be the combination of its being at the end of what has already been a long day, the fact that I still pretty much have no clue what I'm doing and therefore everything is stressful, and the frelling ME which means my stamina is derisory at best.^^  I don't have either time or inclination to eat before practise^^^ but I find the last half hour very long indeed.  We do get a quarter-hour break so I decided to take along a handful of cashews.  If you want organic, you probably have to roast your own.  It is not hard.  I have done it many times. 

            Tonight I burnt them. 

            There's always next week.^^^^ 

^ 'Time is the most frequently used noun in English'.  http://oed.com/public/newwords0312

I follow the OED on Twitter, and have already RTd—retweeted—this link, with the comment ''histrionics' only NOW?  Where have you been?'+ 

+ Clearly not reading this blog. 

^^ Also, after years of hour-and-a-half bell practises, 'practise' means an hour and a half. 

^^^ I don't eat before bell practise either:  when my stomach knots itself up in a Sailmaker's Whipping with extra frapping turns+ I want it empty.  This has nothing to do with whether or not I'm looking forward to the event, whatever it is.  Doing Things Visibly/Audibly in Public freaks me the hell out, I don't care how often I've done them before or how voluntarily.++  You can perhaps (again) surmise how much I don't miss touring. +++ 

+ I wouldn't make this up http://www.animatedknots.com/terminology.php?LogoImage=LogoGrog.jpg&Website=www.animatedknots.com 

++ I did say to Griselda tonight as we were all leaving 'I remind myself I'm doing this for fun' 

+++ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/13/why-the-world-needs-introverts Introverts seem to be copy at the moment:  there's a long and interesting if-a-trifle-obvious-for-those-of-us-who-are article in TIME a week or so ago too (entitled 'The upside of being an introvert and why extroverts are overrated') but you have to be a subscriber to read it on line.#   But the GUARDIAN's  'Are You an Introvert' quiz makes me laugh hysterically.##  I rank about 19 out of 20.### 

# The GUARDIAN is still giving it away.  It must have a plan?  It has to be losing money by the luxury-liner-full.  I'd just as rather it didn't sink like the Titanic.  

## Or possibly histrionically.  I'm supposed to be trying to attract attention on line. 

### The one question I clearly fail is 'People describe me as soft-spoken or mellow.'  Snork.  I admit there are a few other debatable answers. 

^^^^ When I will need shoring up even worse.  Ravenel is back next week.  In his absence we've had nice young Japheth.  I don't think he's any less demanding, but he's not as scary. 

 *** WE HAD ANOTHER FRELLING FROST LAST NIGHT.  ARRRRRRRRRRGH. 

† One of the good peculiarities of hellhounds is that when they're still in their crate they do not react to knocks on the door.  Go away, they say.  We're not on duty yet.  We're asleep.  They don't start trying to—er—protect me till I've let them out of their crate in the morning.  Which may be rather, ahem, late. 

†† And one or two little items for me 

††† The Idiot Off Lead Dog problem gets so severe in good weather it goes a way toward making me depressed when it's beautiful outdoors.  Today we had two things the size of adolescent elephants come racing at us from around a corner.  One of them decided that the hedgerow was much more interesting than we were, which was fine with me, but the other one . . . fortunately she wanted to be our new best friend, but you don't necessarily know that till it's too late if that's not what incoming had on its small furry mind.  What is the matter with people.  I was bellowing^ CALL YOUR DOG while this young elephant was trying to submit to the hellhounds:  even lying down she was nearly bigger than they are.  But what if my dogs weren't friendly?  She doesn't deserve to get mauled because she doesn't know any better—she was clearly a puppy, even if her size was a trifle distracting—that's her owner's job. 

^ Maybe I should start carrying a megaphone, to help protect the purity and sweetness of my singing voice.  How I'm going to use the freller, in the thick of things, I'm not sure, but it must be worth a try. 

‡ I'd be happy to finish one right about now 

‡‡ Don't tell Niall, but I actually did entertain a brief fantasy, as I stared at my beautiful new violas^, of cancelling handbells.  But I realised I couldn't do it.^^  

^ Any British gardeners out there who don't know:  http://www.elizabethmacgregornursery.co.uk/

I recommend her/them.  You get a human being on the phone—usually her husband—the plants are always well packed and in excellent shape when they arrive—and usually recently potted on, so if you don't (ahem) get to them as soon as you should, this isn't a disaster—and while all her plants are good, her viola list is to die for.  

^^ The Muddles, feh, they're after dark. 

‡‡‡ In which case Peter might divorce me, so maybe it's just as well I don't have the money

Various. Hey, I've been working, I have no brain or ability to make connections

 

So I finally made it to bell practise at the abbey again tonight and . . . the less said about it the better.

            Sigh.

            I tell myself that it's been a month since I was there last, that I already know I'm finding the learning curve with those particular bells steep*, and that tonight wasn't as bad, say, as the first time I rang there.**  Or the first time I rang there after quitting New Arcadia, being intimidated out of my tiny mind, and wondering if I had a future as a ringer anywhere.

            But not very much better.

            Siiigh.*** 

* * *

I wish to say that I am DELIGHTED at the forum comments about year round decorated not-just-for-Christmas trees.†  I've actually thought of trying to do this, de- and re-ornamenting a tree†† or a tree-like object, but in the first place I've never got round to it, partly because in the second place as soon as you start thinking, okay, this can be anything I want it to be the possibilities unfurl into infinity . . . beginning with the fact that it wouldn't have to be exactly a tree, although, come Christmas again that might be easier.†††

           I am also delighted that several people have posted liking John Carter:  the critic-flayed film.  Excellent.  Now all it has to do is come to Zigguraton or Mauncester.  I admit I want the full theatre experience. ‡

            Meanwhile, Diane in MN posted a link to this excellent article about Burroughs and the original novels:

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Library-Without-Walls/A-Dreamer-of-Mars-Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-and-John-Carter/ba-p/7187 ‡‡

             And last but not least, also carrying on from last night's link-post, my favourite story so far about recent rampant sexism: 

Maren:

Only a little over ten years ago, when I was an undergrad exchange student inFrance, I received a telemarketing-type call on the separate line that my host family nicely provided in their exchange student room. The woman on the other end asked to speak to the man of the house. As I was somewhat flummoxed by actually hearing this question out of the 1950s, the first phrase my still-shaky French brain offered up was: "I don't have one."  

* * *

* Not to mention the stairs.  Which have definitely got steeper in the last month. 

** I had a cup of tea with Penelope today at her house^ and was describing my difficulties at the abbey, including the business of not ringing in a circle, which is what most of us are used to and what our rather feeble ropesight can cope with, but a line.  Not a line, said Penelope, who has rung there herself, a banana.  She's right.  Unfortunately I thought of this image tonight and it did not help my concentration. 

^ Not without difficulty.  Her entire street is up, with 'road closed' signs at both ends and mobs of yellow-jacketed persons rushing up and down waving uninterpretable instruments of destruction, flanked by diggers and dump trucks in a wide range of sizes and numbers of teeth.  Having tried both ends without success, I parked Wolfgang in a hedgerow and hiked in, leaping over abysses and bubbling pits, and fending off over-familiar bulldozers.  I believe they were air-lifting Penelope out when she had to go to work.  

*** Maybe I should focus on singing.  I pulled Che Faro Senza Eurydice off the shelf today for the first time in a while, to have a go at being tragic.^  Um.  I think I may have achieved whining.  Perhaps I'd better not focus on singing.^^ 

^ This may be as far as I can get into opera, but I want to sing this properly.    

^^ I did get Nadia to help me with the frelling Owl and frellinger Pussycat on Monday.  With her at my elbow being crisp it all seems terribly doable.  This has gone away again.  Yes, I can now sing the descant alone, possibly even without the one-finger-on-the-piano to hold me steady.  But as soon as the basses start up tomorrow evening I'll be toast.  Pleeeeeeease let Griselda be there.  

† Goes nicely with 'a dog is for life and not just for Christmas'

http://www.dogstrust.org.uk/az/a/adogisforlife/default.aspx

And this year, Marks and Spencer, not to be outdone in the responsible consumer and empathic small-footprint, we're-all-just-visiting-this-planet stakes, brought out a holiday-red shopping bag that says 'a bag is for life, not just for Christmas'.  I have a second-hand one—it arrived in this household bearing Christmas presents—and it amuses me every time I need a red plastic shopping bag to put something in. 

†† I am totally with the idea of a chocolate Easter egg decorated tree, for example. 

††† In the third place, I think Peter might not be entirely thrilled with the idea.  Hmm.  I could start experimenting by decorating the geraniums^ on the windowsills at the cottage perhaps.  But a year-round holiday tree would, in my dastardly hands, turn into another sort of shelving for little noodgy objects—I already have not only a full complement of the standard sorts of dustcatchers, but little dangly things on chains and ribbons suspended from curtain rails and the cottage's gigantic overhead beams and so on. 

            The good part of a rolling-with-the-seasons decorated tree is that you do get the fun of decorating (as someone on the forum said is an important part of the tree thing) while the boringness of the taking-down part is somewhat ameliorated.  But what I foresee is that I'd just end up with the seasonal decorated not-a-tree plus a frelling Christmas tree all over again. 

^ I've been moving around the cottage garden the last three days muttering Empty space!  Look at all this empty space! and frantically trying to remind myself that this happens every year, I've got stuff ordered, CALM DOWN.  Today in my inbox I have about sixty-two 'your order has been shipped' from plant nurseries all over England.  And Scotland.  Wheeeee.  There goes my plan to repot everything on the windowsills before Spring Frenzy starts however.+

            + ::says in a very small voice::  But I do need a climbing rose . . . 

‡ Opera and cheezy SF&F:  McKinley's theatre-going priorities.  Which reminds me.  Last-month's-but-I-missed-it big story was:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/02/van-halen-different-truth-review

Remember I told you that I finally got around to having my adolescence in my thirties?  Yeah.  Well, the David Lee Roth Van Halen was a major feature in this enterprise^ and I was totally with Bloom County when Michael J Binkley declared that the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket since David Lee Roth left Van Halen.^^

            Now . . . want to know how I finally found out about the new album?  By following an opera singer on Twitter.

            And am I going to buy the first David Lee Roth Van Halen album in almost thirty years?  Hmmm. . . . 

^ Although a friend who was there used to say that I didn't have a disturbing and unhealthy crush on Roth, I wanted to be him.  Well, yes.  The wardrobe, you know, although I've kept more of my hair. 

^^ I had the original cartoon taped to my wall in Maine, but I didn't get it laminated fast enough and it disintegrated when I peeled it off to take to England.  This may have been an omen, of course. 

‡‡ Michael Dirda is fabulous.  He is fabulous not least—as I was saying of Michael Chabon last night—because he takes genre seriously.

Three (or four) links

 

Read this:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/twitters-tales-of-sexism 

I've wasted some time trying to annotate it a bit from my own life.  Linda Grant is only a year older than I am;  the world she's talking about is the world I grew up in too.  But this kind of thing is—still—one of my hot buttons, and I'm tired, having had my head down for a protracted period over SHADOWS* today, and not feeling 100% after the friendly weekend visit from the ME either.  So I keep getting to the gibbergibbergibber *&^%$£"!!!!!! point, hitting 'delete', and starting again.  I would do more political stuff in the blog if I didn't have such a short fuse—but I arguably don't have a fuse, I just go from jolly la-la-la to global meltdown in the wink of an eye.  And I don't have the time or the strength to support that kind of blog.

            So, if you haven't already read what Linda Grant says, read it now, and assume that I've got stories to go with most of these.  Arrrrrgh.

 * * *

And then, speaking of How the World Changes, Sometimes in Ways That Don't Make You Entirely Happy even if You've Known It Was Coming: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/13/encyclopedia-britannica-halts-print-publication?newsfeed=true

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/ 

This has been all over the place—I had like six tweets with links to six different articles in the space of half an hour.  I'm interested that they're saying that Wikipedia is generally considered reliable;  I use it, but if and when they have to start charging for it, I'll stop using it, because their hands-off policy on editorial bias is not okay with me, on the subject, for example, of homeopathy, which article is pretty blatant about saying it's bulltwaddle.  It isn't.  But any alteration toward the positive is smacked down at once.**

            But I grew up worshipping the Britannica and—I've told you this story—with my tiny advance for BEAUTY, my very first published novel, I bought . . . two bookcases and a Britannica.***  And I've been buying the yearbooks ever since.  That's a lot of yearbooks.  Peter will be delighted if these stop, which I assume they will too.  But . . . the passing of an era, oh. . . .  I am less nostalgic for the paper encyclopaedia than I might be because the instant-update online thing is completely persuasive.  But the fact that this is the way world now is—pretty well incredibly different than thirty-four years ago when I bought my Britannica—is a little vertiginous.   And I still want a copy of the—eleventh edition, is it?—for what I suppose amounts to nostalgia.  But I have an old two-fat-volume eighteen-sixty-something Pears Cyclopedia which I love to bits†.  You're not going to get the same picture of the contemporary world thirty-four years from now from a daily updated on line encyclopaedia, even if it keeps chronological records—although perhaps the world will have changed incredibly again by then.††  

 * * *

Third link, and returning at last to the frivolous, where I am (perhaps) less likely to get myself in trouble: 

http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/john-carter-doomed-by-first-trailer.html 

Um.  I kind of liked the first trailer, although I was seeing it on a laptop screen and not in a theatre.  It wasn't totally in my face trying to bully me with how clever it was and how much money it had spent on its special effects—even if how our hero woke up on Mars was a little obscure to me.  Has anyone actually seen this epic-disaster-epic?  I've seen three or four reviews, each one breathless to outdo the last in bludgeoning this film-like object into paste.  But then I'm one of these old people who has read Burroughs' John Carter books and hasn't seen every science fiction and fantasy movie since STAR WARS.  I might be the deluded director's target audience.†††  I wanted to like this film.  Didn't Michael Chabon write the screenplay?!?  The Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist who takes comics and SF&F seriously?‡  I still do want to like it, although it begins to look like one of those feats painfully accomplished for inclusion in GUINESS WORLD RECORDS:  I ate 1,000,000,000 chocolate chip cookies at one sitting!  I LIKED Andrew Stanton's John Carter of Mars!

            My problem, from looking at the trailers, however, is that the hero looks like a git.  Sigh.  So I'm not the target audience after all. . . . 

* * *

* Yes.  It and I are running late.  Now shut up and go away.  I'm busy. 

** Note that the Britannica online is pretty negative too . . . and also just wrong.  However.  This is another of those political swamps I stay out of to maintain my fragile mental health. 

*** Which was as far as the tiny advance would reach. 

† Although it was already pretty much in bits when I bought it for $1 at a garage sale twenty years or so ago 

†† But if 'incredibly' is going to involve plugs in the back of my neck, I'll pass. 

††† It is possibly relevant that I hated THOR.  If I stick to the minority opinion, then I have quite a good chance of liking JOHN CARTER. 

‡ And wrote The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which is better than Kavalier and Clay

 

 

The Usual Monday Stuff

 

I pretty much always come away from my voice lesson exhilarated, because one of Nadia's tricks is to winkle something good out of SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE to end on (I caught her at it today, so I was thinking about it on the drive home) but sometimes—no, often—this is as frustrating as it is delightful.  I WANT TO TAKE THE TEACHER-MAGIC HOME WITH ME SO I CAN USE IT DURING THE WEEK.  I'm sure I would get on much faster if it were like pills or something, and at the end of the lesson Nadia would hand me a little bottle and say 'twice a day, morning and evening, take with food' or whatever.    

            I also do know that voice lessons are like every other kind of lesson—or anyway I assume it's this way with every other kind of lesson:  it's certainly this way with every other kind of lesson-learning I've ever done*—that you have to take responsibility back again from your teacher and do it yourself . . . till you can do it yourself.  Nadia keeps telling me I need to figure on a six-month lag between the time she starts teaching me something on Monday afternoons and when I'm (more or less reliably) doing it at home by myself.  Don't want to wait six months!  Don't want to!**  And I've had this little intense rush of improvement lately—well, since I quit my tower.***  Although the foundation of this improvement is that I finally started breathing from my gut, which Nadia says I was due, on the Great Scale of Teacher-Magic, to do anyway, and you really can't do much of anything till you have the breath to support it.  But my own sense of breakthrough is that quitting my tower—getting out of a situation I found very oppressive—gave an extra charge, an extra release, to what's going on with my singing,†  and I think there's still some momentum from that rolling me forward.

            But not fast enough.  I missed a couple of days this week due to stomach flu and ME, and yesterday I had to work really hard to make any kind of a noise at all.††  ARRRRRGH.  But this morning was not too bad so I went off to Nadia hopefully††† and indeed was rounding up and getting my hocks under me‡ relatively soon—which she commented on.‡‡  Now the thing I've been working on this week is keeping the space up at the top end open:  asking your brain to tuck itself away‡‡‡ so you can have more empty space for resonance.  Nadia's been telling me about the singer's smile—that strange smile-shaped rictus that you see on the faces of a lot of classical singers—from the beginning, but getting it connected so that something is going on behind your face has only just started happening recently for me.  And I've been working on that this week, which is one of the reasons (I think) I opened up faster today when she was running me through my exercises. 

            So then we started working on Caro mio bien, which has been drawn back out of dusty obscurity again as a learning tool and . . . it all immediately went to hell.  ARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH.  Well, you know, it's a song.  Exercises are just exercises.  Songs are scary.§  There's stuff going on in a song.§§  So Nadia, pulling her teacher-magic wand out of her sleeve, told me to sing it phrase by phrase—literally.  I sang a phrase and stopped.  And then sang another phrase and stopped.  You don't have to think about anything except one tiny phrase! she said.  Don't think about anything else!  And all you need to do during this tiny phrase is keep your breath going (which will mean that the top end will take care of itself)!  Sing it like you believe your breath will be there to support you!

            And . . . it worked.§§§  Eventually we put all the tiny phrases together and I sang the whole damn thing through with breath support and an open throat and top end.  Yaay.  In spite of what the churlish might call backsliding from last week, when things are free and energized like this you can feel the emotional, interpretive stuff poised to come rushing the frell out, whether you actually want it to or not.  Eeeek.  Scary.  But Nadia does keep telling me that if you can set stuff up well enough the rest of it just happens.

            Meanwhile . . . another week of practising at home begins.  Ah well. 

* * *

* Riding lessons spring to mind here 

** And if you learn nothing else from this blog, you have learnt that age does not necessarily mean maturity.  Tantrums just look sillier, the older you get.^ 

^ Although singing at my computer WHEN IT'S GETTING ON MY NERVES is . . . surprisingly effective.+  It's early days yet though,  I could still revert.  And the first shout of outrage—YOU FRELLBAGGING SODBLASTED GILGALDERAGDAG RAT TURD—usually escapes me.  But as I draw breath for the second volley I register what is happening.  And start singing.  Ee aa eeee aa.  Eeee aaaa eeee aa.  This may go on for quite a while . . . I'm not sure Peter has been present for one of these occasions yet.  He knows about the new system++ so (I assume) he won't immediately assume I've lost my mind+++, but they tend to happen after he's gone to bed when I often have a bash at the vocal art if I'm too burnt out to keep working and it's too early to go to bed myself.#

            You get really good volume when you're furious.  I've always had a cross-country bellow for recalling hellhounds## but trying to shift that, ahem, energy up into head voice is an interesting exercise.  

+ Hey—why are you laughing?  

++ Feh, he read about it here 

+++ Or that Nadia gave me some very strange homework 

# Having lost my weekly Sunday morning early-service-ring reset button I'm getting later and later and . . . I may just stay up all day some day, and go to bed the following evening at what the rest of the world considers a sensible hour.  I don't know though.  I might come all over strange if I tried to sleep before midnight. 

## Fortunately they indulge my little fantasy that I'm in control 

*** Sigh.^ 

^ Although Colin seems to have taken on the burden of keeping me going while I get myself sorted out wherever.  Not only, under his tutelage, am I being forced to ring Cambridge on another bell+ he made me call some bob doubles tonight.  Arrrrrgh.  It takes considerable force of will, harrying learners to do stuff.  When you're a visitor at another tower, the tower captain/ringing master will probably ask you what you want to ring or what you'd like to practise (assuming they have the band to support you) but they won't assume they know what you ought to be doing for your own good.  No, that pleasure is reserved for a ringing master who knows you well.  

+ You usually practise a new method on the same bell till you begin to know what you're doing.  Then you can try it on a different bell.  It's the same pattern . . . but you start in a different place in the pattern and all the other bells are obviously in different places relative to you on your new bell than they were on your old bell.  It is VERY CONFUSING. 

† And this aside from the whole throat-trouble-since-October, several-weeks-of-sore-throat-so-severe-I-couldn't-sing-at-all.  Now, however many weeks later I'm like, throat trouble?  I had throat trouble?  Really? 

†† Except at my computer. 

††† Only slightly cursing a beautiful gardening afternoon.  There should be another one tomorrow.  

‡ Sorry.  Dressage joke. 

‡‡ ::Beams:: 

‡‡‡ Why don't you go to the library for an hour or so, dear? 

§ It's also only just this minute occurred to me that I keep carelessly thinking 'Caro nome' rather than 'Caro mio bien'.  Caro frelling nome is that totally killer aria from Verdi's RIGOLETTO.  I couldn't sing it if my life depended on it^.  If I'm getting these mixed up in my head somehow it's no wonder poor Caro mio bien is scaring me silly. 

^ Well, not recognisably anyway 

§§ And, because I'm insane, at some level I'm thinking that I'll hurt its feelings if I sing a song badly. 

§§§ Of course it worked.  This is Nadia.

Big Fat Throbbing Ratbags

 

 Andraste and Luke were supposed to be here today.  But they weren't.

            I was up late last night* taking down the Christmas tree** in their honour.  And then I was up early this morning*** to get hellhounds comprehensively hurtled before they were due to arrive for what-in-my-universe-is-early lunch.  I was standing in a field† surrounded by bemused hellhounds when Pooka started barking at me.  It was Andraste saying that their Specially Adapted Car was making a funny noise and they were returning to base till the RAC could come and sort it for them:  when one of you is tetraplegic your acceptable-risk level is pretty low.  And it took the RAC forever to get to them, of course, because that's the way it is.  The problem turned out to be pretty much one mouse hair and half a sesame seed, but they didn't know that till the RAC mechanic told them.  All they knew was that it was a funny noise.  So they didn't come, and we don't know when they might be in this area again and . . .

            Snivel.

            It was, however, a gorgeous day—Spring!  Hurrah!  Please don't go away again!—so hellhounds and I went back to the cottage and I played†† in the garden for a bit to cheer myself up, although the cheeringness factor was a bit mixed.  I lost a lot in that I-hope-final malevolent cold spell when we had hard frosts every night for most of a week—stuff that had come through this mostly mild winter and thought it had nothing more to worry about and might as well get going on the spring thing.  So I was hauling stuff out and looking at all this empty space and trying to remind myself that I do this every year, every year I think I have all this EMPTY SPACE to fill up and . . . 

* * *

*Shock!  Horror!  Film at 3 a.m.! 

** Stop that giggling.  Fiona, when she was here in February, seemed to think it was very funny we still had our Christmas tree up.  Hmmph.  It's still before Easter.  I don't see what your problem is.  For one thing ours didn't go up till Christmas Eve, as I'm sure I reported here at the time, and you want to enjoy it a little, don't you?  Especially the new-last-year baubles with the roses made out of glitter stencilled on them.  Also, this is a small, civilised fake tree, so it's not like it's dying horribly and dropping needles everywhere.  I'm sure it enjoys being out of the box it spends the rest of the year in a little longer than the standard . . . uh . . . what is the standard for Christmas trees?  Fortnight?  A month?  Feh.  Mingy. 

            Also, while it is little—about four foot—it is well furnished.  Which means there's a lot to look at, you know?  You don't want to rush the process of artistic appreciation.  Not to mention the fact that it is kind of a lot of work to set up and even more to take down.^

            But Andraste is one of these organised people.  Your birthday present always arrives exactly 2.5 days before your birthday^^ and I'm sure her Christmas tree comes down on the thirteenth day of Christmas.  I decided it wouldn't be all that much fun watching her trying to think of something to say about our Christmas tree in March. ^^^  But the sitting room at the mews looks all kind of hollow without it.  Sigh.  Maybe I could start a new fashion?  You just move your Christmas tree back against the wall the other eleven months of the year?  And turn it occasionally so you see all the ornaments?#

            Meanwhile . . . I have four boxes of Christmas decorations wedged into the front passenger seat of Wolfgang.  I feel it is reasonable that I haven't quite got them up to Third House yet, but why aren't they in the boot?  Um.  Well, the boot is still full of bagged manure and compost because I still have this little starting problem with Wolfgang, I don't dare park him next to the cottage so I can unload and I can't quite face schlepping it all down from his parking space at the top of the hill.  The steep gruesome stair from road level up to my garden gate is bad enough.  I realise I will have to face all this some day . . . but not today.    

^ Including the fact that the boxes and the bubble wrap you have been using every year for yonks morph strangely between the time you took everything out and the time you try to pack everything away again.  Somebody tell me why I have a twelve-hole box for my set of basic red baubles . . . and fourteen baubles.  I realise the answer is that I originally had two identical boxes and twenty-four red baubles,+ but I feel that even I would have noticed breaking ten of them.  Or perhaps that was the year that Peter met me at the door, one day late in December, wild-eyed and panting, and as I think about it he may have had a broom in his hand, saying no, don't come in, there's just been a bulletin on the radio, there's an outbreak of wyverns in Ditherington, and they need every pair of hands they can get!  And so of course I went to Ditherington where in fact they were rather surprised to see me as the report on the radio had not included an appeal for ordinary members of the public.  But when I explained that I'd helped to deal with wyverns in Maine a few times (although the New World wyvern is rather different from its European cousin) they gave me a flak suit and a multi-zorm stick and were glad to have me.  By the time I got home again I was too tired to ask Peter . . .    

+ Remember that at the old house we had two-storey trees in the elbow of the stairs.  Two-storey trees require frightening numbers of ornaments before they stop looking green and start looking decorated.  I used to buy baubles by the parsec.  

^^ The Royal Mail wouldn't dare mess with Andraste.

            I had a card through the door yesterday saying that a package I had to sign for had been returned to the post office and that I could pick it up 'tomorrow'.  I couldn't find the special Sunday-opening button though so I'm going to have to wait till Monday. 

^^^ It's not Easter yet. 

# This would also solve the Untangling Problem.  We gave up lights several years ago, but there are still a lot of long tinselly and bannery things which tend to pound themselves into dreadlocks over the course of the year.  Never mind that they are wrapped LIGHTLY and GENTLY and laid on the TOP of the boxes.  

*** Well, comparatively 

† Make that hiding.  Some evil little terrier was dragged past us, snapping and snarling in the standard evil-little-terrier way, while various of us had stopped for calls of nature.  When I was done picking up same I looked ahead and saw that they'd let the sodding little villain OFF HIS LEAD.  And I may have mentioned recently that we move faster than pretty much anyone else we meet while we're out hurtling.  So we went and hid in a neighbouring field for a while. 

†† Slowly.  The ME has its feet up on the furniture but it's not running me too ragged fetching it peeled grapes and cups of tea etc.

One-Legged Dog, Part 2 – Guest blog by Diane_in_MN

 

I had shown Teddy in our club's rally trials two years ago, at which time he had refused to go into his portable canvas crate because it was new and therefore scary.  Since it was too cold for him to wait in the car, he had to be held on lead all day, which was a nuisance.  So in addition to a quick private obedience lesson, we had crate practice at home for a week before the trial.  This consisted of setting the crate up in the living room and giving him a chance to find out that it wasn't a death trap.  Luckily, it worked; the rally trials were scheduled in the morning on both days, and the Novice class was, as usual, scheduled last in the obedience trials, so he really needed a comfortable place to spend the day before competing.

Saturday started out well.  Teddy waited nicely in his crate during the rally trial, and when I took him out to warm up once the obedience trial started, he was paying attention to me pretty well.  (Ted loves all dogs and wants to greet every one he sees, so I am not necessarily his main interest when there are new dogs to be investigated.)  I was happy to see that the obedience judge handed her clipboard to one of the stewards before approaching the dogs in the stand for examination exercise, because Ted doesn't like clipboards* and might well have edged away from it, thus failing.  When we entered the ring and started the heel on lead, he stayed in good position and gave me quick, fairly straight sits.  He did a beautiful fast recall with a straight front and a perfect finish.  When we left the ring to wait for the group stays, he was working on a very nice score.

Things went downhill when we went back into the ring for the group exercises.  Once the dogs are lined up for the sit-stay exercise, handlers are required to place their leads and armbands behind their dogs; this allows the judge to identify any dog that breaks its stay.  I had removed my armband and carried it into the ring, but Teddy caught a glimpse of it as I set it down, and he wasn't at all comfortable with this white paper menace behind him.  He didn't want to sit with his back to it, and it took several circlings to get him to face out into the ring.  Not good.  The stay exercises require the handlers to leave their dogs and walk across the ring, then turn and face their dogs.  Usually the dog will look towards the handler, but Ted wanted to watch the armband to make sure it wasn't sneaking up on him, and kept his head turned back like an owl.  But he held the sit for the required one minute and didn't move when the handlers were sent back to heel position, so even though we had lost some points, we were still on track to get a qualifying score.  The final exercise is a three-minute down stay, again with the handlers across the ring from their dogs.  Teddy went down, but his ears were back and his eyes were nervous, and it was clear that he hadn't become resigned to the armband.  He stuck it out for two and a half minutes by my count and then it was too much for him, and he came to me.  Failed exercise, NQ, aaargh.  Not unusual for a novice dog at his first trial, but still—AAARGH.

So Saturday night, after we got home, we had armband practice.

The Sunday judge had been the judge of a rally trial earlier in the year at which Teddy had NQd spectacularly**, so I really wanted him to perform decently in her ring.  The fact that she examined the dogs while holding her clipboard behind her back rather than handing it to a steward was not promising, but one can always hope.  So we went into the ring for the individual exercises hoping for the best.  I could tell that Teddy wasn't performing as well as he had the day before, and he didn't give me quick and reasonably straight sits until the end of the on-lead heeling exercise.  And he was lagging.  But he stood still during the stand for exam in spite of the clipboard—yay Teddy—and stayed with me during the off-lead heel even though a heeling pattern that runs down the middle of the ring gives a dog a lot of opportunities to stray.  He had another nice recall and good finish, so we were looking okay going into the group exercises.

I carried my armband into the ring again, and was careful to put it and my lead closer to the wall behind the dogs than I had done on Saturday.  I was hoping that this would keep Ted from seeing it out of the corner of his eye.  For whatever reason, he did sit in place immediately, and he did look at me during the sit-stay exercise.  This can be a long minute, because it's easy for a dog to get bored and lie down, but it passed successfully for us and we had just the long down-stay to go.  Again he went down, again I crossed the ring, and if looks could nail a dog to the floor, mine would have done that to Teddy.  At the same time I was trying to count out three minutes, but I got well beyond 180 alligators before the judge's stopwatch called time.  Hearing "Back to your dogs" was welcome, but nothing like as good as hearing "Exercise finished" with my dog still lying down where I'd left him.  YAY TEDDY!!  We qualified!!

At the end of an obedience class, all qualifiers go back into the ring to receive class placements and qualifying ribbons.  We didn't get a placement, but qualified with a very nice score of 187 out of 200.***  When one is working on a title, a qualifying score is referred to as a "leg".  I am happy to say that Teddy is now a one-legged dog with a green ribbon to prove it, and hopefully will be a three-legged dog with CD behind his name before he's too much older.

Teddy relaxing at home with his winnings.

*********************

*   Remember distraction = paranoia?  This is more paranoia.  As far as I know, no one has ever tried to kill him with a clipboard.

** Grooming area with blow-dryers going full blast ten feet from the ring.  Need I say more?

***  This score also gave Teddy the award for high-scoring Great Dane in the trial.  Since he was the only Dane in the trial, this is less impressive than it sounds, but it got him a nice stuffed toy that lasted two entire weeks before he destroyed it.