Suzette Haden Elgin's Blog, page 6

Monday...

Big storms here today ... maybe no post from me, therefore.

BookNote; "Cuckoo's Egg"...

Cuckoo's Egg, by C.J. Cherryh; DAW Books 1985.

This is a strange book, but one that I've always been very fond of, and that I've read over and over -- partly just for the pleasure of the reading, and partly in an attempt to figure out some parts of it that mystify me. I recommend it enthusiastically.

It's the only book I've ever read, in or out of science fiction, where an adult male is responsible for the total care of an infant, from infancy to age sixteen. Watching him do that all alone, wat...

Saturday...

Cloudy again this morning -- as it has been cloudy almost every day so far this spring -- but only a 20 percent chance of storms, which is odds I approve of.

Last night's dinner was supposed to be fried rice and English muffins, one of our favorite menus, but in midstream -- after cooking the rice -- George discovered that he had no eggs. He was shocked. We always have eggs, although we waste a lot of them because the two of us aren't able to use them up before their expiration date, and we f...

Friday...

We started our day today with thunder and pouring rain -- and our electric power going off. George went out to start the generator, and had to go get the truck and jump the generator battery before it would start [which is not supposed to happen:], and he came back absolutely soaked. It was chaos here; he'd been in the middle of fixing breakfast, I'd been in the middle of getting dressed. We were lucky; the outage only lasted a couple of hours, and the generator ran without a glitch for that w...

Wednesday...

I thought I might tell you a bit about my consulting contract. That would surely be more interesting to read than yet another lament about the weather.

The contract is for a literacy curriculum, with the core materials being thirty 28-page readers based on Bible stories and a set of detailed instructions [called Teaching Notes:] for teaching each one of them. I've been working on the project for at least the past ten years, and have been very pleased with the way it's turned out. Every page of ...

Tuesday...

Today we have to go to the Old Alabam Schoolhouse to vote in the runoff. This means I have to change clothes twice, which is a real nuisance, but is my civic duty. And after today I am assuming that we will stop getting phone calls half a dozen times a day -- also a real nuisance -- from robots trying to persuade us to vote for Lincoln or for Hallter, including the call that comes from Bill Clinton. I don't feel rude hanging up on most of those robots, but I admit to feeling just a tad rude w...

Monday...

Gloom here, with a hefty line of thunderstorms headed right at us all morning. That meant taking Sheba out in the rain with an umbrella; it meant I couldn't work on my consulting contract because I had to shut down my computer; and it meant I had the emotional problems you already know all about. [Probably you know more about those problems than you are really interested in knowing; I apologize for that.:]

I was hoping that the storms would be gone by noon, so that I could settle down and get s...

Sunday...

This is going to be a very short post, because -- I am happy to say -- nothing is happening.

It's our day off here. George has violated that by packing even more boxes of stuff from his room this morning and will shortly be taking them all down to Michael's shop to stash them there. But not me -- I have been staunchly and relentlessly day-offing.

Yesterday I got half a day's work done on the consulting contract, which pleases me. I used to be able to do a full day's work; not any longer. But h...

Saturday...

A comment from karenkay reminded me of how important my ukelele [not the one I have now:] was when I was a teenager. We used to have whole schoolbusloads of kids with ukeleles, all playing and singing together; we used to sit around campfires and play and sing together. In my teens, I would have been lost without my ukelele. It was useful to be able to play the piano for people to sing along, but the ukelele was a lot handier.

And the comment made me understand how hard it's going to be for me ...

Friday...

It's a beautiful sunny day here, and that's very good news. I'll get more done, and get it done more easily.

Yesterday George started tackling the task of clearing out the shelves and drawers in his room, and discovered two things very quickly. First, that it's a task much like looking up a word in the dictionary; you keep getting distracted by all the stuff you'd forgotten you had and spending time looking at that stuff instead of sticking doggedly to the process of decluttering. And second,...