C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 104
December 7, 2012
A very light snow, and the frosty red bridge arches over a mirror-still pond…
with now and again a major drop from lines above making a wonderfully ripple.
It’s one of those change of season mornings when the garden is both autumn evergreens and winter frost.
I had a really good day yesterday. I’ve been outlining the ending in increasing detail and yesterday laid down thousands of words in real writing.
December 6, 2012
It’s snowing! :)
WE luvs it!
We have the snowblower ready.
The pipes are winter-safe.
The hoses are in.
The garden figurines are in.
The apple is pruned.
And we’re ready for it to be a pretty blanket, if only it will.
December 5, 2012
You cannot find cedar mulch in Spokane in December…
It WOULD seem logical that at the eve of the first forecast snow, on a day when us last-moment folk are putting covers on the patio chairs and trying to put the roses and Japanese maples to bed—there would be SOME left in town, but nay. Tons (literally) of rock salt, which, pardon me, should not be used anywhere you ever hope anything might grow…and de-icer (which is usually magnesium, a little less harmful) —tons of wood pellets for pellet-burning stoves, but no whisper of mulch. Sooooo…..we rake 2 years of accumulated mulch and leaves up around the roses, trust the surrounding bed of sedum (which stays green under snow) to keep the Japanese maple safe, and pull the geraniums and snip them back to winter in the garage. They looked very nice alongside the house. We hope to reconstitute them from dry-root next spring, when we hope to put up the greenhouse on the patio/old driveway and get a jump on spring.
My lower back has had it. The sciatica in the hip has totally quit hurting and given me just a nasty lower back ache. I may ask Jane to give the upper back another crunch in the hope that will ease the strain.
We’ve opened the taps and drained the outside faucet lines. Those are shut down and I’ve got to ask Jane where she put the little brass taps. Those have to go in a special place (a kitchen drawer) so at least one of us remembers where we put them for next spring.
December 4, 2012
Snow is coming…and the delight of frozen apples.
We had some last stuff to do to winterize the yard…namely getting the soggy hawthorne leaves off the drive so they don’t clog the snowblower, removing the obstacles in the snowblower’s path, coiling up all the hoses that are still out, and getting them to a no-freeze zone; and (tomorrow) winterizing the pipes. Pretty simple, but it takes 2, one to watch the outside faucet and the other to throw the levers in the basement shutting down the water, then one to hold the bucket while the other unscrews the little drain tap between the lever and the outside faucet.
I’d gotten one last golden delicious apple off the tree a month past, so I thought, but the leaves fell last night, and lo there was another—when you find them frozen you have to eat them immediately, because thawing just ruins them. I ate half and took the other to Jane.
I gave the tree (espaliered) a pretty severe pruning. I have no instruction in this, but I figure if that shape was good enough for its first year, it’s still ok to do. I hope this doesn’t mean no apples next fall, but I somehow think the tree will cope. The 6 varieties of graft on that tree are not all equal in strength, and some had a lot of suckers and upright growth: the Fuji branch is very small and so is the Gravenstein. So I just leveled the playing field as far as how much sap it can raise next spring: no sense letting those greedy top branches suck all the food for themselves.
December 3, 2012
We’re starting to take daily walks again…
…spend from 5am until 12pm in the same chair looking for stray commas and periods in masses of code and you can get a little out of shape. Jane’s been working like that. I at least change chairs once a day.
And my back had gotten ‘out’ to the point my sciatica (which I got several years ago from a pretty spectacular fall on a crossover pattern while skating on very tired legs) flared up very painfully — Sciatica is when the main nerve involving hip join and upper leg feels like a cross between burning and having a knife blade in your hip joint. You also lose some rotational mobility in the afflicted leg.
It actually tends to come from the lower back…in my case having dropped myself sideways on my hip from a fair height above the ice, which didn’t help my lower back; but it can also come from a strain placed on the lower back by having nastiness built up in the upper back and shoulders—ie, standing lousy.
I asked Jane to give the upper back a crunch last evening, and it popped like Rice Crispies. It helped. I had to go ice the nerve down for a couple of hours, but this morning the nagging pain is mostly gone. It’s such a relief. The gluteus maximus in the OTHER hip is protesting our resumation of walking once a day, but that’s just protesting a general re-tensioning: a muscle protest, not the protest of nerves that have been aggravated to the max.
Ought to go down and give Dr. Shane a go at it, but we’re just so busy.
We finally decided not to give the GE dishwasher another go at flooding our kitchen floor: it’s a POS, pardon my French, incredibly bad design (no change filter, my aunt Betty!) It means call a serviceman if it clogs. We bit the bullet, deciding to give ourselves an early Christmas present that won’t clog the garbage disposal line and then backflush the garbage disposal onto our load of dishes. Nay. We prefer not to have yesterday’s egg or a coating of grease on the newly washed plates.
December 2, 2012
Note that our mail with your new codes comes in via something called Mail Chimp.
It’s a perfectly good mass mailing type site, and they let us do this free…but your spam filter might think an e-mail with a lot of codes sent by Mail Chimp is beyond suspicious. It’s us! [waving hand frantically] Friendlies!
Check your spam filters if you haven’t gotten that email, and let us know too if you changed your e-mail addy since you bought something from us.
We will resend if you just let us know.
Looking for Christmas gifts? Don’t forget our Closed Circle Bazaar, via Cafe Press
Tee shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads, sweatshirts for winter chill…you name it.
December 1, 2012
Kindle FIre HD? Nook? Kobo?
Does it support flashplayer?
Does it support drag and drop USB loading?
—Ok, I’ve got some answers. Flash is moribund: it’s being replaced by html5. Adobe has withdrawn support for it and is going ALL HTML5, which will not affect those of us with websites, etc—because HTML5 is really a menage a trois of old HTML with a little new code, + CSS (that’s your proportional, scaling type that can increase or decrease size) + a new version of Javascript. The HD readers, both Nook and Kindle, will do HTML5. We here at Closed Circle will hardly notice, except to answer puzzled queries from people on Kindle wondering where their bookshelf went (it’s now a drawer called ‘favorites.’)
So if you’re looking for a Christmas present, consider if you want a full-web experience at your fingertips: Fire HD or a Nook HD can do it, but an iPad probably does it better. If you just want to read books, an older version Kindle or an older version Nook, not the flashy new ones, AND the newly available (for Americans) Kobo, which is an independent that takes ePub and most file formats without a fuss.
The readres that have color have a lit screen; and are probably HTML5 machines or halfway there. The ones with e-ink are readable under the same lighting you would use on a paper book, and are a lot easier to load ‘foreign’ files on.
Another stinger: Amazon has devised its own browser, Silk, which means the Fire HD will NOT run Firefox or IE, but it can display websites and run apps from the Amazon app store. The kicker is that Silk reports to Amazon what you’re viewing and what your browsing habits are. Nice, eh? And it tries to be predictive: it loads its buffer (I’m guessing) with what ‘experience’ says you’ll do next. How good are bots at figuring out what YOU’LL do? They’re not good about predicting me, based on my experience with, say, Netflix.
November 30, 2012
The “update letters” have been/are being sent…
…so you can download new cover/text updates to Closed Circle Books. If you wish to preserve an older cover for your personal files, be sure to save it separately so that it won’t be overwritten.
We apologize that we are sending you so many e-mails, one for every product, but we’re a little operation and we use software that doesn’t have as many choices as big companies get.
We should be updating nearly everything on Closed Circle, so if you aren’t getting e-mails and you have bought books from us, do check your spam filters. Some don’t like *any* urls in a letter.
If you don’t wish to receive e-mails in the future, there’s an opt-out, and we’ll remove you from our customer list. We do not look to use e-mail very often at all, so don’t fear you’re going to get a flood of mail from us, just a small spate involving upgrade codes for the books you already have. We’d rather write books than letters, ourselves, and getting this one mailing to work has taken us more effort than we like to contemplate anytime soon!
Thank you all.
