Robin McKinley's Blog, page 31

An English (Wintery) Adventure – guest post by B_Twin

 

When Southdowner set to work twisting my arm to come and visit she was met with a great deal of resistance.

“It’s winter!! I would have to leave high summer!”

She persisted – brutally – and ended up resorting to base bribery (more on that later…) I succumbed. So, with a half-shoestring budget, I left Australia just before a scorching heatwave set in and travelled to slightly cooler climes.

The weather was always going to be a challenge at this time of year. Would I get snow? Or would I be caught in the seemingly never-ending drenching that had left the UK a sodden puddle?

The t-shirt I had arrived in just wasn’t going to do on a raw January morning in London so by the time Southdowner had battled the early morning traffic to collect me from Heathrow I was encased in several layers of wool and alpaca*.

I was reliably informed that it had rained solidly for days prior to my arrival. We encountered the locals with dazed expressions and disbelief in their voices as Southdowner and I traversed the countryside. In sunshine.

We pottered about with day trips to ruined castles and medieval houses. One highlight was a daytrip to London to see the Royal Shakespeare Company. (See?! Bribery.) The whole cast gave fantastic performances and the added bonus was sitting 3 rows from the front, within spitting distance (sic).

That day inspired us to go to Stratford-on-Avon when we had a free day. It’s a major tourist trap during the summer but lovely and quiet during the depths of off-season. I’m not really a Bard Junkie but the plethora of medieval houses and the home the Royal Shakespeare Company were very interesting.

The home of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon

 

It’s Sheep St – of course I had to take a photo! LOL

 

Not too far from Stratford-on-Avon is a little place called Broadway. A very pretty village with a curious tower built close by at the top of a hill.

Broadway Tower on a winter’s evening

View from the Broadway Tower

 

Broadway Tower may have started life as almost an ornamental building but has had a fascinating history since then due to its use by the military. The 360º view from the roof is certainly worth the visit.

 

We spent a day in Lincoln and it was really lovely. I especially enjoyed the cathedral (with its chapel dedicated to the bellringers!) If you get a chance to go then do – the roof tours are fascinating and allow you to take in some amazing views within and without the building, overlooking Lincoln.

Lincoln Cathedral

 

Lincoln Cathedral – view down the nave from the gallery dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks

 

Lincoln Cathedral – section of the stained glass window dedicated to St Remigius

 

If you go on the roof tour you get to stand on the Sir Joseph Banks Gallery and next to this amazing stained glass window.

 

And then there was a small foray into Hampshire…..

 

End of Part 1- the Hellgoddess has decreed that my public admissions of indiscretion be delayed… (anyone else think she’s just a trifle addicted to cliffhangers now?? :P )*

 

——

* I knew I kept these animals for a reason!

*  Addicted?!  I resemble that remark.  I want you to know that since I began KES my entire body chemistry has EVOLVED.  Cliff hangers are no longer a rush like biting the head off a mint chocolate frog^, they are a NECESSITY, like tea and champagne and . . . er . . . chocolate.

^ with the frogs there were some divine chocolate peppermint creams . . . the only problem is that these are, individually, rather large, and rather full of peppermint cream.  There was sticky peppermint cream EVERYWHERE that evening.+  Chair legs adhered to floor.  Hellhounds adhered to hellhound bed.  I think the laptop still smells faintly minty.   The middle of the hellterror’s back may also, but good luck getting your face down to test this theory without getting a faceful of delighted hellterror face instead. ++

+ Of course I therefore had to eat them all in one sitting.

++ One of the weirdnesses of this breed, or at least this scion of this breed, is the ferocity of her growling while she kisses you.

–ed

KES, 116

 

ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

I didn’t know ‘azogging’.  But I could guess that it wasn’t flattering.

Someone screamed—way too close by—and then one of the shouting voices said something that made whoever it was holding me up turn away, dropping his hands as he did so.  I staggered, bowing over the hilt of poor Silverheart—I wondered if they made swords whose tips split like a three legged cane.  That would hamper the stabbing aspect but maybe it could be an open-shut thing like an umbrella?  Or one of those spider-catching wands with the plastic fingers at the end?

Yes, I was raving.  But whatever the shout had been that had made my yanker drop me had seemed to include the syllables ‘Murac’.

I didn’t have time either to worry or rejoice at being left alone.  I had only just managed to straighten up and start to look around me—more confusion and more darkness:  but then being able to see the black thing coming hadn’t done me much good—when I was seized from both sides and hustled along.  You wouldn’t have thought you could hustle someone carrying a sword, but my that-side hustler grabbed me under the arm and (painfully) by the wrist, and wrenched Silverheart up out of the dirt.  I could have dropped her but I didn’t:  indeed my hand seemed to have developed an instinct to hang on.

There were a lot of people around us, scuttling through the dark on errands I couldn’t imagine, or anyway didn’t want to, and the occasional flash of light on metal was not reassuring since the metal was often unmistakably long, edged and pointy-ended.  There were duller flashes that I thought might be shields and mail, but I had no idea what any of this looked like outside a museum:  I didn’t even belong to SCA and did almost all my research (heaven help me) on the page, either paper or virtual.  Nothing here looked like it did in a story:  in the first place because I couldn’t see much, and the first rule of storytelling is that there is a story to tell.  Unless you were making an issue of, say, darkness and confusion for a purpose, like that your mercenary-soldier heroine is creeping up on her latest lot of bad guys, you probably wanted some interesting background to describe, briefly but thrillingly, while you got her from point A to point B.  I couldn’t tell if the darker looms I caught glimpses of were trees, boulders, a ruined city, ranks of enemy soldiers or sleeping dragons.

I also, just by the way, didn’t feel the slightest eager or excited.  I felt tired, so sore I half thought I might melt from the throbbing heat of my bruises, and frightened out of my tiny over-imaginative mind.  My nose was telling me that the hygiene in the immediate vicinity was not exemplary, and my bare feet were stumbling through and occasionally squishing over ground hazards I didn’t want to think about.  The natives in generic medieval high fantasy tended to be implausibly clean and well-fed.  Mine were.  I wasn’t going to torture entire civilisations, even imaginary ones, with cholera, gruesome parasites and malnutrition for no reason.

The two men—since by their hands, voices and size they were men—impelling me along seemed to be shouting at each other over my head.  I only caught a few phrases.

. . . Even more useless than last one. . . .

. . . If our heads are forfeit anyway, might as well . . .

. . . How they chose that dolduraging innocent on gate . . .

I doubted ‘dolduraging’ was flattering either.

. . . Who’d take it.  Would tha? . . .

There was a laugh.  It was not a nice, welcoming or friendly laugh.  And at this less than comforting moment my companions jerked me to a halt.

There was a new, a moving loom in the darkness.  New and moving in our direction.  I tried for fatalistic.  Neither running away nor collapsing in a heap was going to do me any good with Big Thugs #1 and 2 holding onto me.  Aside from the perilous impracticality of either running or collapsing while holding a sword.

The loom got closer and closer.  My eyes weren’t much use but both my ears and my nose were suggesting possibilities.  I thought I was hearing an erratic thud clop over the messy ground.  And there was a nice clean animal smell.  There was also a kind of pale churning at ankle level.

A dark dappled brown-bay horse with four white socks and a white star coalesced out of the gloom.  He  was wearing a bridle and saddle;  someone in a draggled leather tunic and a short vest of much-mended chain mail was leading him.

He was the biggest horse I’d ever seen.  Possibly with the exception of the regiment of behemoths that had passed Sid and Merry and me . . . last century.

I looked up at him.  He lowered his nose and looked at me.

“Can tha ride?” said Thug #1.

Rain

 

It’s raining.  Whiiiiiiine.  It held off long enough this morning that I managed to hurtle everyone, including myself of course, extra hard, against the forecasted likelihood that by afternoon we’d need water wings.  Or a helicopter.  And, those being the choices* would elect to remain indoors.  Hellhounds are major wusses about rain** so I took them out first***.  It was beginning to leak increasingly by the time the hellterror and I were on our way out but she’s, you know, a dog, and she shakes herself and gets on with it rather than turning hopeless and pitiful.†  Although hopeless and pitiful is to be preferred when you get home again and are trying to towel off a whirling dervish.

I’m trying to remember the last time we had a proper country hurtle.  We skirt the town perimeter occasionally but real countryside is all eyebrow-deep in mud and washing everything you’re wearing again gets old very quickly as well as reusing already muddy critter towels because you’ve only got 1,000,000 and they’re all wet, including the recently-washed ones steaming off as fast as possible on the plug-in heated-airer rails.††  And there’s no amelioration to needing several raincoats which you wear in rotation, to give them a chance to dry out.  Not to mention the permanent aroma of wet hellcritter. †††

Sigh.  And to add to the joy of the assembled the hellterror, as previously observed, is in season.  The last few days I’ve been determinedly getting her out for an extra walk(s) so I can have the excuse of keeping her locked up in her crate more indoors.  I know the smell of lurrrrrve is pervasive but the hellhounds seem to cope reasonably well so long as she’s not, you know, swinging her booty in the immediate vicinity—which she does whether she’s in season or not.  Aside from longer crate hours she’s not having a good time, poor thing, she throws herself around like that swollen thing sticking out behind her is uncomfortable, which it probably is and FORTUNATELY she and the hellhounds don’t seem to have any clue that together they possess an answer to this situation.  Mind you, I’m patrolling the bzzrgrmph out of any time they’re loose together, so they do not have the opportunity to experiment.  The kitchen floor at the cottage is never so clean as when there’s a dripping hellterror occupant:  she’s worst in the morning, for some reason, maybe just because overnight is her longest stretch shut up.  But she also doesn’t understand why I don’t seem to want her in my lap at the moment—you can see the thought bubble:  All This And No Lap??—so we have sacrificed a clean dry towel toward rectifying this sad situation.  Now an ex-clean towel.‡

We’re going to a concert‡‡ tomorrow night when I usually go to my monks, so I went to the evening prayer service tonight.  There is water everywhere.  When it started chucking it down again after B_twin left we were back to standing water that made the landscape dazzle when the sun managed to come out for a quarter hour or so.  By now we’ve got above-ground water torrenting down the roads and drowning the pedestrian pavements.  I was thinking as I sloshed after the hellhounds this evening on a brief pee run that I’m going to have to start wearing my hiking boots in town:  the water sluicing over the pavements is higher than the rubber edges of my All Stars.

With the rain pouring off my leather jacket as well as my umbrella I met Alfrick on my way into the abbey—trying to shake off the worst on the mat by the door before I left trailing-wet footprints down the corridor—who raised his eyebrows and said, Where did you park the ark?

On the way home again the long queue of traffic on the 60-mph bypass was going 35, because of the amount of water on the road.  And I haven’t even told you about how the main road into New Arcadia has been dug up by the water company, and we all have to take the back way which involves sliding off the hardtop into the sticky trough that is what the shoulder has become, every time you meet a car coming in the other direction. . . .

* * *

* And helicopters are expensive

** I’ve never decided if they hate their raincoats because they hate their raincoats or because they only ever wear them when it’s, you know, raining.  And I, as Putter On of Hated Raincoats, am doomed either way.  Nor have I ever managed to convince them that the hellgoddess’ remit does not include the weather.^  Today I decided to cut my losses and not put raincoats on.

^ Hellgoddess:  Guys . . . you really think THIS is the weather I would conjure if I could conjure weather?  COLD?  WET?  HORRIBLE?

Hellhounds:  Well, you make us eat.

Hellgoddess:  AAAAAAAAAUGH  AAAAAAAAUGH

Hellhounds:  ::blank innocent looks::

*** They came with us to the farmers’ market and had a wonderful time moseying through the back streets with me while Peter negotiated with vendors for emeralds from Samarkand and so on.  But when we got home and I took them out again immediately you could see them giving each other the hairy eyeball and wondering what my problem was.

† Hellgoddess:  Guys.  You won’t melt.  I promise.

Hellhounds [faintly]:  Oh you can’t possibly be sure.  [Hellhound delicately raises paw.  Delicately raises second paw.  Attempts delicately to raise third paw.  Other hellhound is trying to hide under a hedgerow.]  This is particularly . . . penetrating rain.

Hellgoddess:  It’s been seven years.  You haven’t melted yet.

Hellhounds turn two pairs of huge golden eyes^ reproachfully on their goddess:  Today is today.  The last seven years have been the last seven years. 

^ Dark They Were and Golden Eyed.  If hellhounds are part Martian it could explain a lot.

†† I might almost be thinking about a proper electric tumble dryer if I had anywhere to put it.

††† I actually rather like the smell of clean wet dog.  Just not all the time.

‡ Which I have to keep folded up and out of hellhound reach.  LIFE AND PROCREATION ARE SO RATBLASTED GRUBBY.

‡‡ That is Peter and Nina and Ignatius and I, not the hellpack and I.

A few semi-glad tidings and some other stuff

 

Joy.  Not only are we having the wettest January since records began* but the month has decided to go out roaring like a lion** and tomorrow, according to the local doomsayers, is going to be a big fat drooling ratbag with fangs, high winds and thunder.  And Peter and I will be heading for the farmer’s market just as it’s working itself up to landscape-trashing mode.***

The stroke unit appointment today was nonthreatening but a bit anticlimactic—at least after we (a) found a parking space and (b) found the correct frelling building.  I’d allowed approximately twice the time we should need and very little of that is to do with the fact that Peter walks slower than he used to—most of it is to do with the whole assailing-Tartarus aspect of any close encounter with that labyrinthine epic of a hospital.  Gah.  They’ve managed to change the road lay-out—again—for the approach to the main car park.  I don’t even understand how they can keep doing this, which they do, I think some of the more peculiar outbuildings must be plastic or papier mache or something and periodically the largest, hulkingest members of staff on duty go out in the dead of night—having forethoughtfully prepared a small distracting emergency at the other end of the conurbation—and move them around.

Then, of course, because the car park facilities are wholly inadequate, we couldn’t find an empty spot.  Adrenaline spike.  Peter would miss his appointment and it would be all my fault and the prime minister would sign an anti-Robin sanction forcing me to give up my secret yarn of mass destruction stash.

We found a parking space.  Then we had to find the right building, and while we’ve been to the Reignac-sur-Indre wing before, when they move the rubber buildings around of course they screw up your landmark system as well.†  The hospital is generously bestrewn with signposts, but they rarely tell you what you want to know:  Tiger pits this way.  Overflow car park, guaranteed full, that way.  Exobiology unit this way:  warning possible contamination issues.  Finally we found one for Reignac-sur-Indre.  Or rather we found two:  the external route and the internal route.  What?  I don’t want to have to make frelling decisions.  Just tell me how to get there.  I opted for the external route.  Mistake, of course.  It was probably twice as long.†† When we finally arrived I was confounded by the lift.  Fortunately Peter pointed to a button I hadn’t noticed and said, try that one.

We were on time.  Just.

Peter’s stroke doc is a ridiculously young Scot who does the jolly upbeat routine rather well.  And he didn’t have a magic wand††† (oh well) but he did emphasize that the road back from a stroke is long but—if you’re lucky—pretty open-ended.  He also had Peter’s scans up on his computer and when I asked he ran through them, explaining what we were looking at and that was fascinating.  Much rather not be in the position for this kind of fascinating, but . . .

We went back to the car park the short way.  And while it’s too late for me to go to bed early††† I could go to bed no later than usual and maybe shave a few minutes off 11 a.m. tomorrow . . . maybe.

* * *

* http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/30/england-wettest-january-records-began

** That’s March, you know, the lion thing, although the entire set up seems to me bogus.  Or at least personally I would say that lamb-like is not a description I would usually apply to any part of March.

*** We could go earlier, Peter said hopefully.  Eleven a.m. is early, I replied.^

^ Hey.  Not only does the caffeine need time to work+ I have an assortment of critters to hurtle.

+ I’ve tried getting dressed first.  It’s pretty funny in a why-can’t-humans-be-covered-in-fur-like-most-mammals way.   Although in terms of necessary clothing there’s also the several-times-daily melodrama of getting the hellpack’s harnesses on, which is at least as diabolical as trying to find two matching socks from the unsorted heap of clean laundry on the bed#, and which mere caffeine is not really sufficient defense.  The hellhounds’ either play cat’s-cradle with each other in ways only comprehensible to life forms more flexible than thick stolid humans or they have a rich, complex sex life that thick stolid humans can only dream of.##  The hellterror’s harness, marooned in solitude, has instead developed a speciality of always being too small when I try to snap it around her chest.  Once it is snapped . . . it fits fine.  But getting the two bits of the buckle within closing distance of each other?  I’d suspect her of holding her breath, like a horse that doesn’t like the girth tightened, but she’s too busy snorkelling for kibble bits, which requires a good deal of huffing and grunting.

# Or two matching All Stars from the heap under the shelves by the front door.~

~ All right, they don’t have to match.  But they have to relate to each other in an interesting way.

## Straps.  Strap guards.  D-rings.  Buckles.  Oooooh.

† Also, they repaint them.  The buildings.  When they move them around.  So you look ahead and think, wasn’t there a green shed somewhere about there—?  Yes.  There was.  It’s now yellow, and behind you.

†† Peter would miss his appointment and it would be all my fault and . . .

††† What he did have was two medical students sitting in, both women and both non-Anglo which is very pleasing in a world where a good deal less than my lifetime ago^ any doc that wasn’t white and a bloke was exotic if not downright bizarre.  You did see the occasional white woman but I think I was a twenty-something in Manhattan before I saw either a black woman or a Middle Easterner of either gender any higher up in the medical hierarchy than nurse.

But the really interesting thing is that one of them today was taking her notes with a ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper.  (The other one had an iPad, but its cover was not pink.)  I was fascinated by this, and said something to her.  Oh yes, she said, of course she has and uses a computer, but for note taking she still prefers paper.

Golly.  Hard copy is not dead, even at the individual level.

^ Let me just insert here that the medical students were RIDICULOUSLY YOUNG.  I’m sure they’re too young to be in medical school.

†† Two hours on the phone to Hannah may have something to do with this.

Florence Foster Jenkins lives

 

Stephanie

Interested to hear how the recording went.

AAAAAAAAAUGH.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.  Anybody not know who Florence Foster Jenkins is?*  If you are so fortunate, allow me to ruin your evening/ morning/ afternoon/ life.  Go google her and come back.  I can wait.

You now know everything you need to know about my singing.**  ::Bangs head against wall::***  Nadia did warn me last week, when I took the recording doohickey in for the first time, that recent events were audibly weighing on my voice and if I was going to record and listen to the recording, to try not to be discouraged. . . . †

AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

Nadia has also said that contrary to apparent reality, tuning is not my problem and that it’ll come right when the rest of it comes right—like not cranking your horse’s head in to get him/her on the bit.  Concentrate on getting your seat and legs right and the front end will sort itself out.  So my musical seat and legs equivalent still need a lot of work.††

When I wrote the blog entry for last night I hadn’t played this week’s lesson back yet.  I had listened to last week’s recording before this week’s lesson and had more or less managed to absorb the punishing truth, which is that I sang more flat notes than accurate ones but that was last week.  This week I went in prepared to lighten up a little††† so that my voice wouldn’t keep breaking its fingernails trying to hoick itself up over the edge of the right note.

Well.  I may have thought I was prepared.  HOW DOES NADIA STAND IT?  WHY DON’T I JUST TAKE UP KNITTING? ‡

Blondviolinist

Speaking of erratic leaps forward… they don’t really happen for everyone who slogs, you know.

I imagined it.  I take it all back.‡‡

The teacher has to be good

That I have in full measure.  Have I mentioned lately that Nadia walks on water?‡‡‡

& the student has to be honestly trying to change things, not just putting in hours . . .

Dunno.  We may have a slight semantic difference in the definition of slog.  Slog as in dragging aggrieved hellhounds through hip-deep mud, well, no, this does not improve with practise.§  Slog as in loyally doing your grindlefarbing vocal ratblasted exercises and learning, so you thought, the notes to your new song . . . yeah.  I think that catches up with you eventually.  Sometimes it’s more catchy and sometimes it’s more eventually. . . .

Although thank you for being supportive.

I’ve met plenty of—well, let’s call them musicians for lack of a better term—who’ve been stuck in the same place for years. They’ve essentially hit a musical wall, either through bad teaching, no teaching, or pig-headedly not listening to advice.

Yes, like bell ringers who don’t want to learn anything past call changes, or maybe trebling.  They’re not going to learn methods and you can’t make them.§§

That you’re getting More Voice (and I’d lay money that people besides you & Nadia can hear the difference)

Yep.  They can, poor things.  I’m LOUDER.  I’m seriously louder.  I’m not loud like Nadia or Joyce DiDonato is loud but I’m loud compared to the average congregation member at the annual carol service.  Siiiiiiigh.

is credit both to Nadia’s excellent teaching and to your own engagement with the process.

Oh, engagement, schmengagement.  Yes, I love singing, but then . . . so did Florence Foster Jenkins.  The thing that I was leading up to last night—before I heard this week’s lesson playback§§§—is that I’ve been formally invited to join the ‘band’ for the evening service at St Margaret’s.  You know, singing.

AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

* * *

* I’ve mentioned her here before but you may not have been paying attention.

** Except I haven’t learnt the notorious Queen of the Night aria yet.^

^ Ha ha ha.

*** This will doubtless have an enormous positive effect on my singing.  Doubtless.

† Of course it’s possible that Little Recording Doohickey is possessed by demons.  Most of my tech is.^

^ Everyone’s favourite trick at the minute—that is desktop, laptop and iPad—is suddenly to go, This page cannot be displayed because you are not connected to the internet WHEN I’M CONNECTED JUST FINE ON THE OTHER OPEN TABS.

†† I was never much of a rider either.  Siiiiiiiiiiigh.

††† I’d brought a crowbar, you know.

‡ Oh . . . right.  And I don’t show any great talent for knitting, either.

‡‡ The leap forward anyway.  Possibly not the erratic.

‡‡‡ Which with the weather we’ve been having is a very useful skill.

§ Neither does the hellgoddess’ temper.

§§ This is a somewhat controversial and contentious subject in the ringing world.  I think if you enjoy ringing call changes, especially if your tower is short handed, which most towers are these days, and you don’t want to break your brain and insomniacify your nights with learning methods, you shouldn’t have to.  But at the same time I can’t imagine not wanting to go on, to try for the next level, and most of the people I’ve known—a limited group I admit—who have stopped with call changes have Other Issues, including being taught wrong.  Either wrong in an absolute sense or wrong for them.  The problem with difficult skills is that there’s also more than one way of learning them and bell ringing is volunteer and most towers are lucky to have anyone even relatively able and willing to take on the frequently discouraging and onerous^ task of teaching at all.  There’s also a controversial and contentious conversation going on about teaching ringing teachers and setting up some kind of system whereby a teacher has to pass some kind of competence standard . . . and if you’re asking me, it’s going to end in tears.

^ Because of the spectacular attrition rate.  Bringing a beginner on is a colossal investment of time and effort from the entire band, especially the teacher, and then they go and quit, usually at whatever point where it realio trulio dawns on them that ringing is a DIFFICULT SKILL and is going to require BRAIN and COMMITMENT.  I don’t blame people for deciding they’d rather stay home and shampoo the cat, but I wish they’d figure this out a little earlier in the training process.

§§§ All right, yes, I did sound better this week.  BUT I’M STILL HORRIBLY FLAT.  What I do notice, and I can’t decide if this is hopeful or even more frustrating, is that every now and then when I hit a note more or less like true and full . . . it’s not bad.  And it’s spectacularly not the thin sour noise I was making several years ago.  If all my notes sounded like that, which they do not, I could get into that goodish choir.  But I was saying last night that my new voice doesn’t feel old, it feels young?  My relationship with what I’m trying to sing is a whole lot like watching a newborn foal try to get up on those four spindly things stuck on the corners of its tiny squished-together body.  Now, this one goes here . . . WHOOPS.  Um.  Well, this one goes here . . . WHOOPS.  And so on.  I always used to think that whatever my shortcomings I could carry a tune, and . . . apparently I can’t any more.  And this feels like the result of having more voice.  Nadia even said as much—not on the subject of carrying a tune;  she’s tactful like that—that it’s like when you shift up from the 13 hand pony you actually outgrew a couple of years ago and you’re on a 15.3 hand thoroughbred and . . . WHOOPS.

Maybe I’ll figure it out.  Whimper.

On making singing-like noises.

 

Back before Christmas—back before Peter’s stroke*—I had taken one of those erratic Leaps Forward in my voice lessons that anyone who keeps slogging at anything will eventually take, even if it’s perceptible only to the slogger and her teacher.**  I must have blogged about this before.  And I thought, in one of those vague self-improvement spasms that afflict most of us, that I should find that little recording doohickey that Peter gave me for my birthday years ago . . . I think to enhance my piano-lesson experience (hahahahahaha) rather than my voice-lesson experience (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA) . . . and employ the freller.  I did manage to take it along to Nadia once or twice quite a while ago—I think before she went on maternity leave for Renfrew—but playback, despite the advantage of being able to hear EXACTLY what Nadia had said, was so depressing that I gave it up.

And then Peter did have his stroke, and my focus, concentration and energy levels have gone a bit phut generally.  Although I’m certainly singing I’m singing for sanity as much as for any sense of working toward that distant mythic goal of finding and being accepted by a nice-ish choir.***  Only in the process of trying to clear out some of the accumulation around the piano at the mews so that I can shoehorn a little more of the overflow from Third House† there instead . . . I discovered the little recording doohickey.  And I got Raphael to remind me how to USE IT, since it is yet another of these flapdoodling overspecified pieces of ooh-shiny tech . . . all I want is an on and off switch.  And a method of getting batteries in and out that does not involve a mini-screwdriver whose shaft is the approximate diameter of a hummingbird’s tongue.  Gaaah.

. . . And at this point I am going to start what may be a horrifying new tradition, and declare TO BE CONTINUED††.  We went to Tabitha again this afternoon and my brains feel pummelled.  Also, this compromising with Peter about the time at which things happen—things like when I pick him up after the daily shopping excursion, since in fact he’s only comfortable walking one way—is a ratbag.  If you figure that he’s getting out of his bed when I’m getting into mine you’d only be a couple of hours out and he likes to do his shopping in the morning. . . .

* * *

* We have the follow-up appointment with the stroke unit at the hospital on Thursday.  Any of you so inclined, all prayers, positive thoughts and finger-and-other-limb-crossings gratefully received.  I’m trying to remind myself they are not going to wave a magic wand and they do not have a schedule sheet that says ‘by the end of February you will . . .’ and ‘by the beginning of May you will not . . .’.  Still.  I would like it to be somewhat more informative and possibly even comforting than merely the poor old weary beleaguered NHS ticking another box on its paperwork.

** I’ve told you, haven’t I, that with the new school semester, and Stella, Nadia’s daughter, in primary school, we’ve had our lesson times and order shaken up?  And Boris—the baritone who could have been professional—IS after me?  After that meltdown I had and everything??  Nooooooooo.  When the doorbell rang last week I started trying to climb behind the piano^ but when Nadia came back from letting the invader in, she said it’s okay, it’s only Boris’ wife, Boris is sitting in the car practising his German.  This week when the doorbell rang and I started trying to climb behind the piano^^ Nadia said no, no, Boris isn’t coming this week, it’s only Myrtle . . . who is another of Nadia’s, ahem, mature beginners, and who makes a little squeaking noise when she sings, like I used to.  Although I was thinking as I (relatively speaking) made the windows rattle (it’s a small house with low ceilings) with my Sebben Crudele^^^ that hearing me isn’t necessarily doing Myrtle any good, nor giving her hope for her future, since I’m kind of the aural version of the large clumsy ungulate in the vintage knick-knack shop.  I KNOW THAT NOTE IS AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE.  HERE, THAT’LL DO, WHAP.  I realise that you can’t start doing something with your voice till you have a voice to do it with but still. . . . I was thinking, as I ricocheted off the walls this week at home that at my age I should be worrying that I’m going to develop a little old lady quaver before I get all that far with letting what voice I have out of durance vile—and of course I do worry about this because I worry about everything—but my own experience of my voice is not that it is old and frail and tottering toward ultimate retirement and (possibly) resentful of being prodded out of the shadows . . . but young, like it’s been in suspended animation all these years, and clueless and has NO IDEA what it’s capable of or even what it’s for.  There must be someone else out there who started taking voice lessons late?  What was/is it like for you?  —And in this case I specifically mean voice lessons, since the whole your-body-is-your-instrument thing is a crucial part of the weirdness.

^ Which is against the wall, the unhelpful thing

^^ This week I brought a crowbar

^^^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj64UzeprI4

Sigh.  I don’t sound like this at all.

I don’t sound anything like this either:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hlk8EDA02M

All you other mezzos out there will know these are absolute standards of the student repertoire and EVERYONE SINGS THEM.  Including, probably, a lot of people who have hung their recitals on YouTube who shouldn’t’ve.  I lost my taste for student recitals some while ago.

*** That’s not a slap at the Muddles.  I’d still be a member if I could stand either the length of their rehearsals or the funny air in their choice of practise venue.

† Remember Third House?  Speaking of sagging energy levels and loss of focus.  Sigh.

†† It’s not a real cliff hanger.   I’m just talking about singing.  There are no swords or banners with a strange device.

Procreation. Stop it before it spreads.

 

THE FRELLING FRELLING FRELLING HELLTERROR IS IN SEASON.  IN JANUARY.*  WHAT THE.  THE.  THE. . . . FRELL. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.  I assumed, fool and inexperienced entire-bitch owner that I am, that when she missed out the autumn I was, in the first place, safe till spring, and in the second place, possibly going to be lucky and she’d be a one-annual-heat bitch.  I’m very strongly of the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it philosophy, and aside from questions of whether or not I’m going to try to breed her** if she doesn’t make the hellhounds crazy she will probably keep her bits.  If she doesn’t make me crazy.  Which is presently being reassessed.

We have here the Incredible Hulk-ette.  I swear she’s bigger (and greener) than she was last week.  There’s noticeably more noise*** including her seeing off a much-wider-than-usual selection of invisible monsters in her crate—and her telling everyone in Hampshire, when we go for our hurtles, that she is not interested, that her swollen rear end has a mind of its own and she does not share its manifest desire for immediate copulation and to keep your distance, whoever you are.  I believe this is the stage described as ‘will not stand for the dog’.

Honeybun, I have no intention of letting you stand for any dogs, now or next week.  The hellhounds, at present, are saying, oh, gah, this again, and putting their heads under the blanket.  But it’s still early days.  Waaaaaaaaaaah. . . . 

* * *

* That is, in the northern hemisphere.  It’s probably a perfectly good month to get your livestock preggers in the south.

** Which I am putting off absolutely for at least another year.

*** It’s always welcome to have your resident goblin barking her head off when the neighbours have the poor judgement to be holding their conversation under your kitchen window.  Especially at, oh, 8 a.m. or so.  At the moment hormonal sensitivity seems to be extending her aversive range to the entire length of the cul de sac which is not short enough.  Plus her hearing is much too acute.  If a beetle farts in the hedgerow I DON’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT.^

^ Wildlife.  Feh.  Did I tell you that the local Pet Shop Proprietors say that birdseed take up is bad all over Hampshire?  So it’s not just me.  I did eventually get Birdseed Feeder #2, now so clean it hurts,+ put back together again, despite the manufacturers’ best efforts against, my success mainly due to a misspent youth playing those horrible hand-held tilt games where you’re trying to get the coloured ball to fall through the right coloured hole.  I performed this feat of dexterity with the frelling microscopic screws that hold the base on and whose sub-microscopic holes are unattainable by super-microscopic human fingers.  I got the nasty little frellers out with a miniature screwdriver whose business end is about the size of a hummingbird’s tongue, but getting them in again?  Through the squirrel-repelling hard wire cage?  Whose base is a crosspiece perfectly sited to prevent you getting a finger through (let alone two, since you probably need two fingers to HOLD a microscopic screw)?  AND THE BIRDS CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO EAT MY BIRDSEED?  Fine.  You guys all need to fly to Tahiti next winter.  I’m sure I can create a few tall thin planters out of these ex-birdfeeders.

The fat balls are disappearing at a rate however.  I hope it’s my penguin-sized robin (who is too robust to get through the squirrel cage wire) who is consuming these.++

Further in wildlife news:  We haven’t seen the frelling churchyard hedgehog in a while +++ but a few nights ago hellhounds and I came around the corner onto the main street again and . . . saw a fox loping lazily away ahead of us.  I think foxes are dangerous vermin and while this town, plonked down in farmland as it is, is doubtless swarming with foxes in the vicinity I prefer to avoid close encounters.  Therefore imagine the adrenaline spike when we’d rounded that same corner two nights later and . . . there’s a break in the terrace row of little old houses where the let’s-make-it-obvious-we’re-fabulously-wealthy owners of the big house on the corner have installed ye Gate of Gates at the back~ thus creating a niche.  Hellhounds’ heads came up and they careened round the wall into the niche before I, it’s very late even by my standards and my reflexes are not too good right now anyway, hit the brakes on their leads and apocalypse by the sound of it ensued.  I thought it was the fox, and that the vet bills were going to be really expensive.  I had done my hellgoddess in a panic trick and thrown myself against the ends of their now-fully-extended leads and began dragging them away from whatever was happening, like fishermen winching waterlogged nets up onto the shore where they can get at them.  I was amazed that, as hellhounds emerged, backwards and mostly on their hind legs, no one seemed to be bleeding.

Nothing else emerged.  I waited a couple of seconds, got hellhounds on very short lead—the kind of very short lead I can hold them on—and we walked past the niche.

And there was Phineas’ marmalade ex-hellkitten, sitting at the very back of the niche against the closed Gate and his tail curled around his feet, looking utterly unbothered.  Cats are masters of the Happened?  Did anything happen?  No, I didn’t notice anything happen, nonchalance, but I assume my winching had taken effect at an opportune juncture.  Although I would have sworn there was more noise than two hellhounds, even two excited hellhounds, could have made.  Speaking of noise.

+ And therefore badly out of the cottage décor.

++ One of the items B_Twin brought from Australia are . . . wait for it . . . peppermint chocolate frogs.  I’m sitting here eating peppermint chocolate frogs.  I want you to know I find it very disturbing to bite the heads off frogs, even chocolate ones.#

# No of course I’m not going to eat them tail first.  I want them to die a swift, clean death.

+++ I hope it’s just hibernating and hasn’t drowned.  The sky pitched it down again yesterday and we’re back to standing water in all directions.

~ With the glittering high-tech dashboard set into the wall which keeps going wrong so the Gate of Gates often stands helplessly open and any riffraff could wander in.  Hee hee hee hee hee.

PORKOPOLIS; or, A Visit to the Guggenham *

Guest Post by Diane_in_MN

Local attractions are, of course, frequently ignored by locals until some outside stimulus calls them to mind.  In my case, the outside stimulus was a visit from a good friend last September.  She would be staying for a few days, and while life in my house is not entirely boring and predictable, it’s boring and predictable enough that I like to line up a few interesting things to do.  We have gone to the Stereotypical Used Book Store. **  We have dressed up (so as not to look like tourists) and gone to the local Renaissance Faire, a good option but not if one’s friend isn’t staying over a weekend.  Poking around the little shops in a not-entirely-touristy little town is also good, but that’s just one afternoon.  And then I found the SPAM® Museum.#

We have lived in Minnesota for twenty years or so, and while I knew that Austin, Minnesota is the home of Hormel Foods, maker of SPAM®, the SPAM® Museum was a new one on me.  In fairness to myself, it only opened in its current state about ten years ago, so it missed being included in Minnesota: Off the Beaten Path, the guidebook I bought before we moved here.***   I myself have only encountered SPAM® in a school cafeteria—where it was not a popular feature—but a whole museum devoted to a canned meat product could hardly be passed up.  Besides, the web site said that the exhibits include a Monty Python tribute.

We really wanted to see the Monty Python tribute.

So on a nice sunny day, my husband, GF and I abandoned the dogs and headed out to Austin and the SPAM® Museum.

We arrived early in the afternoon and found a spot in the gated but free parking lot, which had more cars in it than you might expect.  The museum building is a handsome brick structure, trimmed in SPAM® blue and yellow, and as we walked up to the door, we passed a bronze sculpture honoring the ones who make SPAM® possible—namely, pork on the hoof.^

As we picked up our Official Tour Guides inside the museum—admission is free, too—we saw the impressive Great Wall of SPAM® over the entry doors.

The SPAMbassador (that’s what they call them, really) who greeted us told us that photos were not only allowed , they were encouraged, and to prove it offered us disposable cameras in case we’d forgotten our own.  She also told us that the Great Wall is made up of almost 3,400 SPAM® cans—empty or full, she didn’t say—and directed us to the SPAM® theater, where we could see an informative video on the history of SPAM®.

You can’t see this from my photo, but the theater is shaped like a can of SPAM®.  (And by now, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.)

We emerged from the theater into a replica of an early twentieth-century grocery that gave us some information about the founders of the Hormel meat-packing company.  Hormel packaged the first canned hams, so the 1937 debut of a chopped-and-pressed seasoned pork shoulder product—i.e., SPAM®^^—was probably a logical next step.  The rest of the museum is devoted to SPAM® exhibits.  A graphic map of the United States highlights where all that pork shoulder, not to mention the bacon and ham that Hormel also produces, comes from.  A global map illustrates SPAM®’s world-wide reach.^^^  I liked the display of SPAM® advertising through the decades, and was particularly charmed by this one

from 1938 or so.  I suspect that anyone employing a live-in maid or cook during the Great Depression wouldn’t have been frying up a slice of SPAM® on the maid’s night out.

We had learned, from the helpful educational video, that SPAM® is now made in twelve varieties, including one made out of turkey instead of pork+, and SPAMbassadors in the museum proper had samples available for tasting.  (My husband, the carnivore in our family, tried a few, and thought the teriyaki version wasn’t bad.)  In the best modern style, the museum offered several interactive exhibits, including one where the user can make a can of SPAM®, but by the time we got to that point, GF and I were ready for the Monty Python exhibit, and it did not disappoint.

The Monty Python exhibit is the last one in the museum, and the Official Tour Guide describes it as “the funniest SPAM® brand moment in the history of television.”  Who could argue?  The exhibit gave us the Green Midget Café, with a highlighted menu, and a Viking.  (And how could I have forgotten the Vikings?)  Pushing the helpful interactive button ran the Monty Python SPAM® skit.

We watched it three times before moving, still laughing, into the essential museum exit area, the gift shop.

The gift shop may not contain “every SPAM® item imaginable,” as the Tour Guide suggests, but it gives it a good shot.

GF has friends in Hawaii, where SPAM® is so popular that Honolulu holds the SPAM® Jam festival every year, and did a fair amount of Christmas shopping amongst the assorted bric-a-brac.  I considered a few tee shirts,

but since my tee shirt drawer is already full of Great Dane shirts, I somewhat regretfully passed them by.

I didn’t see any sign that Hormel has embraced the use of their product’s name for junk e-mail, but aside from that, the company deserves a good sport prize for not taking themselves or SPAM® too seriously.  The SPAM® Museum turned out to be a lot of fun, and the next time I have visitors (well, visitors in SUMMER), it will probably be on my list of things to do.

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

*  I wish I could take credit for these names, but they came right off the museum’s web site.

**  Old house, narrow stairs, literally sagging floors, double-filled shelves, piles of stuff next to the shelves, the whole shebang.  Pictures and knickknacks, too.

***  This excellent book did inform me about the Kensington Runestone, the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion, and the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.   We haven’t visited them.  It’s the dogs’ fault.

^  There’s a farmer with these hogs, but clearly it’s the porkers who are the real stars of this show.

^^  The name is a contraction of SPiced hAM, as we were informed in the educational video.

^^^  I had just recently heard a story on National Public Radio about the great popularity of SPAM® in South Korea, especially as a necessary ingredient in a dish called, no kidding, Army stew.  Apparently a can of SPAM® is a nice hostess gift in many parts of the world.

+  I have been told that Minnesota has more turkey farms than any other state.  I guess turkey SPAM® should be a no-brainer.  There is, as yet, no vegetarian version of SPAM® even though you can hardly go five miles without encountering soybeans in the Upper Midwest.

# May I just say . . . love.  –ed.

KES, 115

 

ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

The transitional phase from life to death was surprisingly noisy.  To the extent that I’d been expecting anything, I wasn’t expecting that.  It was pitch dark, but that seemed, you know, plausible.  I’d always thought the tunnel and the shining white light seemed unduly optimistic.  Some of the noise might have been voices shouting—shouting, I thought, savagely, furiously, wildly, frantically—but they were shouting in a language I didn’t think I recognised.  I supposed—in a vague, leaving-it-all-behind way—that the devils in hell would speak (or shout) in their own language, which probably wasn’t on the average earthly school syllabus.  I’d barely made it out of intermediate French with a passing grade;  Devilish was probably beyond me.

As I waited to finish dying I listened to the voices.  As a fantasy writer you find yourself having to cope with weird languages oftener than is comfortable for someone who found intermediate French a struggle.  When I listened to a story in my head I began by writing anything that wasn’t English as collections of syllables, but eventually, if I couldn’t figure out a way to delete them (the preferred alternative), I needed to know what they meant.  Occasionally in the commotion around me now there was a word or a phrase that seemed familiar, but the memories this familiarity teased and tugged at were not friendly.  One phrase I heard several times sounded a lot like Grah, ablud alaladik do vorn zeblastr which Flowerhair had picked up on one of her mercenary gigs and which translated approximately as ‘Your entrails are mine, ratspawn, and thus you die’.   Another one, Bierna flit sed guntoon moronocur eda for dash dash was ‘You go now to hell, but you will have to wait a long time before you welcome me there’.

I knew I wouldn’t be on the fast track to heaven, but hell seemed a little harsh for someone who had never murdered anyone (at least not until today, and only because they were trying to murder me first) or even lied to the IRS.  (I may have been wrong, but I didn’t lie.)  But those were definitely not angelic voices shouting, unless the whole post-life set up was even weirder than the half-dozen major religions I knew anything about predicted.  Although a friend who’d grown up to take holy orders as a Benedictine monk said that his guess was that when Christians showed up at the pearly gates they’d have some surprises.  That wasn’t reassuring in the circumstances.  Vorn zeblastr.  Maybe.

But if this was heaven, I didn’t want to go there.  I hurt too much.  Surely you got to leave pain behind on that unreliable dirtball, earth.  In which case this was much likelier to be hell, and my tormenters had already been assigned.  Ugh.  Although if so, they weren’t being very creative:  I merely felt like one gigantic bruise.  Ugh.  Or not so merely.  In tormentors you want a low level of creativity really.  Was there a third possibility?  Sure, if I was into fantasy.  Maybe I wasn’t dead yet after all.  That would be stretching this story’s credibility pretty far however.  Remember the black thing and, more to the (ahem) point, the black thing’s sword.  Maybe that irresistible partnership had been called away to quell some other country/planet/dimension at the last minute—at my last minute.  Maybe it had just been amusing itself with me while it waited, like a kid restlessly bouncing a basketball against the back of the bus shelter because the bus was late.  If the bus comes soon enough the wall will still be standing.

Maybe I’d wake up in a minute, in our bed in the penthouse, with Gelasio snoring gently behind me.

Involuntarily I shivered, which was a mistake, because wherever else I was, that shiver shook me consciously back in my body again—the body that felt like one gigantic bruise.  All the gazillion individual bruises that made up the single gigantic one came into murderously sharp distinct and discrete focus.  And I was suddenly even more sharply aware of voices—human voices—shouting very nearby.

Something that might have been a foot inserted itself under my ribcage as I lay curled up on my side, something I was pretty sure was a knee pressed against my sore back as something that might have been a someone bent over me, and something I was sure was a hand—an ungentle hand—grabbed me under the arm and gave a heave.  I squealed as I came up off the ground and nearly fell, but the someone’s other hand caught me under the other arm and jerked.  Every muscle fiber in my entire body shrieked.  I was too traumatised to make any sound at all—my mouth was still open from the squealing but no sound came out—but I came more or less upright, and still holding Silverheart.  I looked at her in amazement.  You don’t really expect a sword-holding arm to be covered to the wrist in a draggled cotton jersey nightgown with little pink roses on it.  Let alone your arm and your nightgown.  At least not if you’re an almost-forty-year-old genre fantasy writer, even if you’re having a really, really, really bad day.  I swayed, digging my poor sword’s tip in the ground again to keep me vertical.  The hands under my arms gave me another yank.

“Keep it together, tha useless mare,” said a rough hoarse voice.  “Tha’re all we’ve azogging got.”

I’m going to try again to go to bed early tonight. . . .

 

Having signally failed (again) last night.  I need either to learn not to fall asleep in the bath or how to keep the water hot and just sleep in the bath.  I sleep there so much better than I sleep in bed.  Maybe it’s because Scorpio is a water sign.  So it’s not my fault.  It’s that I’m doomed.

B_twin left today and . . . it started raining about two hours later.  Speaking of water and never mind the astrology.  BUT THE HELLHOUNDS ATE DINNER.  Rain?  Fine.  Whatever.  Let it rain.  I can deal with (almost) ANYTHING . . . as long as the hellhounds keep eating.*

And furthermore it’s Friday.  And that means tomorrow is . . .

Rainycity1

O.K., now it’s really time to go pick up The Blue Sword again… not that it’s ever not time to read it, but Kes’ visions are reminding me of Harry’s and I’m being called…

You know I keep banging on about how the Story exists and all a poor dope of a writer can do is choose her words as well as she’s able.  But a story does try and come to a writer who has (maybe) a hope of relating to or engaging with it.  If a lost and confused story about the early expansion of the railroad across the North American continent in the 19th century shows up panting on my doorstep, I will attempt to repress my shudder of horror (stories have feelings), pat it on its head, and send it back to the Story Council for reassignment.

Stories about girls who do things come to me.  So do stories about girls who have visions before/during/after they do things.  I assume one of the reasons stories with visions in them see me as a kindred spirit is because I’ve always been rotten with visions myself.  Most of them are story related.**

***MILD SPOILER WARNING***

BLUE SWORD began with a vision of Harry pulling that mountain down.  CHALICE began with the Master saving his Chalice’s life on that cold hillside.  PEGASUS began with the night of Sylvi’s twelfth birthday.  Sometimes the vividest visions however are not where a story begins, but where I realised it was a story.  Peter was mulling over the difficulty of raising an orphan baby dragon*** because you need to keep it hot, but my recollection (which may well be faulty) is that he was thinking of something like a bucket or wheelbarrow of embers.  It was when I saw some random teenage boy put a baby dragon down his shirt that I knew the story was live for me.  And baby critters with big brains tend to need serious contact with their mums;  I don’t know that a brainy dragonlet would do very well stranded in a barrow of embers, even if the barrow was topped up regularly.  And then of course it turns out that the dragons in this particular story are marsupials, and their babies are born pretty well foetal. . . .

And so on.  There have been a few periods in my life—not recently, fortunately, it’s another of those ‘getting old is a good thing (mostly)’ things—when I’ve thought that my tendency to visions meant I was nuts.  Eventually I decided that if I coped (more or less) in the real world too, who cares?  Poor Kes is going to have a harder time hanging onto her sanity—or her belief in her sanity—since her stories/visions are showing, and, I will tell you for free, will continue to show, an alarming tendency to break into our so-called real world and mess her around.

Bratsche

My favorite sentence/image of this week’s episode is: I saw the banner flying from its topmost tower very plainly: two sword blades crossed to divide it into quarters, and in the quarters were a horse, a hawk, a sighthound and a rose. I wanted the whole Kes story from the very beginning, but that line bumped it further over an invisible enticing ledge for me.

Oh good.  Whatever works.***  ::Shuffles feet::  Mind you I haven’t much idea about this part of the story myself.  I can feel that it’s live or I wouldn’t have put even this much in–I don’t even know how to describe it, but that banner is as real as the chair I’m sitting in, or Cecelia Bartoli on the CD player.  I can also feel where I need to go to find someone—someone I mean who lives there—to talk to about it.  There’s a fair amount of seething going on behind that bit of scenery.  But I kind of imagine them drawing straws, and whoever gets the short straw has to talk to me first.  —No, no, no, the loser is saying, clutching his/her hair.  You know what she’s like!†

Your nicer readers may respect you.  Your characters . . . nah.

* * *

* B_twin said, I’ve seen skinnier dogs.  Good thing you weren’t here a month ago, I said.  I don’t think we were ever quite in danger of the neighbours ringing up the RSPCA^ but I felt we were getting close.  When the only food that’s going into them is what I’m prying their mouths open and stuffing down . . . they get really skinny.  I will go on force-feeding when they’re still not voluntarily eating enough to keep a hummingbird alive^^ but every sixteenth-mouthful scrap that I didn’t have to poke into them helps . . . including my stress level.

^ I’ve said this before, haven’t I:  Yes.  And let the RSPCA try to make them eat.

^^ Although hummingbirds are another of these tiny frantic things, like shrews, that have to eat pretty well constantly to avoid starving to death.  I thought this was fascinating:  http://www.hummingbirds.net/hainsworth.html

Anorexic hummingbirds don’t survive to breed.  Note that I have turned away all inquiries about breeding from the hellhounds not only because I don’t want them to find out what sex is.

From http://www.worldofhummingbirds.com/facts.php :

‘A hummingbird can weigh anywhere between 2 and 20 grams.  A penny weighs 2.5 grams.’   And even several times 2.5 grams of food a day is not going to keep an 18,000-gram hellhound alive for long.

(Also from http://www.worldofhummingbirds.com/facts.php)  ‘A hummingbird’s brain is 4.2% of its body weight, the largest proportion in the bird kingdom.’#  Yes, but 4.2% of 2 to 20 grams still doesn’t leave a lot of room for Sanskrit and quantum physics.  Has anyone tried to find out if hummingbirds can learn weird human-type stuff like coming when called or pressing an itsy-bitsy lever that dispenses food?

# Note that you’re seeing in action WHY WRITING THE BLASTED BLOG TAKES SO LONG.  Pretty much every time I look something up—like the eating habits of hummingbirds—I get into an ‘oooh shiny’ rut and half an hour later. . . .

** But it’s not surprising that when Jesus decided to hoick me over the ‘believer’ line he showed up in a vision.

*** Words to live by.  Where a lot of professions meet on common ground, I guess:  writers, mechanics, ditch diggers, bakers, critter trainers, shoe salespersons.  Probably not accountants and surgeons.  And I wish these were the words by which computer programmers lived.

† I’m sitting here on this chair, listening to Cecelia Bartoli, and realising that the first person I speak to isn’t going to have a clue about the banner and is going to think I’m, ahem, nuts for wanting to know.

††We were discussing ideas for short stories for FIRE ELEMENTALS, right?  Long, long, long ago.  Four FIRE novels^ ago.  Before Peter realised what he had married.

^ Peter wrote TEARS OF A SALAMANDER, remember.  It’s not only me.