C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 11

Well, a batch of applicants are now ‘denied’, which I hope may get the real ones to write…

Some will. I always worry that there’s somebody in the lot just too shy to reply, but otherwise the stack of applicants just grows more confusing.

You HAVE to write that letter. If I denied you, I can still fish you out of the ‘deny’ pond and put you through with power to comment, et al, but I need to hear from you.

I also look somewhat suspiciously at those with usernames that even a linguist can’t pronounce. And I do look up strange sites like wedospam dot com to know where they come from.

But here goes. I ‘denied’ about ten and hope to hear from a few that, yes, they are not bots, so I can pass them on through.

The good side of this is that we just don’t get spam, and I get to spend my energy writing.

Ouch, the fingers….just some cleanup sawing to do—in icy cold.

I’m unwilling to wear either of my good coats out there to the garage, so with 3″ of snow coming down, I go out to saw boards in sweatshirt and bare-handed.

Cold. In the words of Bela the Bat, I tell you wot, cold!

OTOH, there’s a visceral joy in getting real cold when you can come into safe warmth with a job done, and a pot of stew in the Crockpot.

The recipe: pkg 15-bean soup beans soaked overnight, water; a pound of rump roast cut in slices and seared, potatoes, carrots, celery, and a tablespoon of black pepper, sprinkling of red chili flake, and 2 teaspoons of salt (jury still out, while cooking: beans particularly uptake a lot of salt), tablespoon of basil, and cooking all day. It’s not certain that’s all the pepper and salt, and I’m searching the kitchen ruin in the living room for the bay leaf—I need one leaf. But it’s well underway by noonish.

I am not cut out to be a hacker…

I managed to lock myself out of my password manager. This is not a happy accident.

I do have a record of the password that gets me the other passwords.

Unfortunately my handwriting is not always legible when it is a note scrawled amid a page full of other notes. There were at least 8 ways to read this fairly intricate item, and since you’ll get locked out for multiple mis-entries, it can take some doing to work your way in. Took me two hours to get in.

They don’t want us to use an ‘easy’ password. Well, it isn’t.

We have a dragon. His name is Biscotti…an Italian trick or treat dragon.

He stands about 7 feet tall, is black and red, glows in the dark, flaps his wings and breathes fire.

He will reside in our basement until his next emergence.

We fell in love with him, and, well, he’s ours. We can’t let him out when it’s raining or blowing, but it’s quiet weather, and he made his first outing last night.

He’s one of those inflatable creatures with a fan in the base, and he goes out at sundown and comes back in at 9pm, which we consider a nice bedtime for a dragon. He’s not that big when the fan isn’t on.

I’m about to purge the application-for-membership list again…register AND get me the letter…

My addy is in the usual category up top. Write me a “hello, I’m not a robot!’ if you’re waiting forever for that confirmation letter. The letter from you must precede it.

Today I blitzed some 28 plus spammer-origin applicants that popped up within a few hours, and the list is getting a little long to sort for people from spamopolis dot com. I’m sure some of you who can read but not yet comment are people I’d like to hear from, but the membership process has to be completed to allow comments, and that involves your writing to me. ‘Kay?

Finally—TWO aspects of the kitchen remodel are done.

The lights.

The floor. We finished Friday. The baseboards are yet to come, but we don’t count those: that’s wall, and Scott will do the baseboards. We now have a complete floor. Yay us.

Ceiling painting, dining area painting, almost done, pantry interiors, done, closet almost done. Kitchen area painting, yet to do.

Pantry 1 is functional: freezer is in, pantry shelves are in.

Pantry 2 is still under construction, but we’ve stained and varnished the doors.

Cabinets arrive on Nov 13; install to follow.

Countertop template to be made following cabinet install. Delivery and install of same uncertain date.

Backsplash tiling yet to do—

You patient people must be weary of the details, but it occupies our lives right now. I’m writing while all this is going on. I’m going to be able to put the table saw away for the rest of the operation after I cut the four shelves that are waiting out in the garage. Floor install means Jane sitting on the floor, shuffling pieces around and looking for flaws, marking same with a pencil, me picking up same, donning mask, glasses, hat, and going out across the garden to the garage to cut a piece, trekking back, delivering it, standing on the joint while Jane taps it into place, waiting while Jane measures another, repeat, repeat, repeat. I’m pretty good with the table saw, getting good with the Dremel. Our system for flooring accuracy: pencil lines with arrow on line to be cut: if no arrow, no cut, it’s just a chance line. X’s on areas of the tile that will go away, no x’s on area that will be part of the floor. And if it requires a cut that the table saw can’t make, it’s the Dremel, which can cut straight down and along any line. Great little tool, especially for this kind of flooring, where there’s a rigid repetition of whole-tile matched by 2 half-tiles. If you’ve got an anomaly like a doorway or whatever, you need the bottom of a U cut — a table saw can cut the two upright arms, but the bottom cut has to be a jigsaw or Dremel, and I’m here to tell you, the Dremel has it—you don’t have to finagle a starting hole or force a corner: just press the blade against the tile and it vibrates its way through the flat and then cuts forward. Love this thing!

Anyway, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve eaten way too much fast food, and we’re going to have to be good and diet for months to get off what Burger King and Zip’s put on. Christmas is going to be way tempting, but we have to be good. Even with the new kitchen.

We have a date-by-which for the cabinets. Yay! Then we only have to wait several more weeks to have a…

….countertop….but it’s coming. November 13th. It’s a felicitous day. Can’t wait.

I can’t believe this stupid mouse ate the whole post. But it did. It’s cheap, it ‘jumps’ and sometimes obliterates text. Its sole virtue is being small enough to fit this dinky desktop beside the laptop.

Anyway, we have most of the floor, except for one stub of a hallway, done.

I spent yesterday mostly in exile because Jane was working on coating the bifold pantry doors—and I’m allergic. Ugh.

The remodel

This is after pulling the cabinets and deciding to put an equipment closet midway to section off the dining area. The walls are now coral in the direction of view, white trim, and will have a grey slate flooring. Cabinets are quiet brown, fittings are ruddy copper, backsplash will be mixed glass tiles, countertop black. We were going to do flooring today, but our faithful carpenter is now starting another job, and needed to be off and took a needed tool with him. [He is really incredibly generous about letting two amateurs use his gear.] We had fallen in love with this gadget and can see future uses. So we ordered one of our own, which is the biggest honking dremel you can manage to hold in both hands. Its virtue is being able to cut a hole in the middle of a panel: a half-moon disk vibrates its way through the wood. Takes a little learning curve to do it without a gash on the corners, but its the most useful thing Dremel ever came up with. We have their little ‘hobby’ kit, which has trouble with balsa wood. This baby can buzz its way through hard floor paneling and cut weird shapes.

Preparing the pond to survive…

A little warier than last year. I am doing 3 things, first of all having a pond ‘turnover’ device, a little heated pump that will keep circulating a stream of water up to outgas CO2 buildup and then to return to the depths…and a regulation hole-creating pond heater that simply floats at the surface and makes sure an area stays open.

I’ve positioned both of these where wind cannot carry them out of sight under the bridge, so I will KNOW visually if the power is off to that line.

And I’ve put the black 6′ circle of fabric on a floating ring in place atop the fishes’ sleeping hole. So they can start to rest and calm down. If they don’t settle in a safe spot, they can keep swimming in confusion as the cold puts their conscious brain to sleep, and the end of that is freezing to death close to the surface.

Because the freeze-depth in this area barely reaches 6″ down, that means the dirt deeper than that stays warmer than 32 degrees F, and that means it keeps the water down there above 32 F, too. So the fish may be sleeping (it’s called torpor, not hibernation, a technicality of how the body survives) but they will not freeze. They apparently carry on some metabolic activity, and may even carry on ‘eating’ or rather drinking, just because there are algae spores in the water. I swear they come out of winter as fat or fatter than they went in, but won’t wake up and actually eat until around St. Paddy’s day. As they come out of sleep, you can feed them Cheerios or other grain-based food, but they won’t have any appetite until their stomachs ‘wake up’ and inform them they can eat now. This happens when the water (or their bodies, from the sun) reaches about 58 degrees. At that point, bio-activity starts to climb.

So probably they have had their last kibble until March. No Halloween treats for them.

We have functioning lights, and the new faucet came.

It’s a thing of steam-punked beauty. Coppery. We’re not installing it yet. I can get by with what I have. The ceiling with the lights is nearly finished, and we’ve found a way to move some wiring onto other breakers so that I won’t have the toaster, coffeemaker, dishwasher and fridge all on the same little breaker. Yay! I won’t have to run down to throw the breaker because I forgot and toasted something while coffee was brewing.