C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 110

Thinking about some changes in Closed Circle…opinions sought.

We offer about 9 different formats. This has always been subject to review re the evolving technology, and we are looking at the extra time we take to convert—and vet, which is the time-heavy part—all 9 of these formats.

What would be the feeling if we offered principally .mobi/.epub/.pdf/.html (basically our ‘mini’ offering)? Anybody in possession of one of those can use Calibre and/or Sigil to convert to other formats…

What we’d like to learn is whether anybody out there’s using a format other than one of those four, and if so, which. After two years, we’re pretty sure the tech has concentrated around those four—but without asking, we don’t know for sure.

Fencon—aptly named. And a beautiful drive.

A Texas convention run by fen, attended by fen who read, and in a very nice, friendly hotel…pretty big convention, and panels full of people who read and enjoy sf. We were worried after our experience earlier this year, but I can say this is a convention worth driving long distances to attend. Next year’s guests will be Larry Niven and Cory Doctorow.

Had a stay with my brother—who’s prepping his house for sale. If anybody’s in the market, he’s on a little wooded hilltop cul de sac in a suburb of Dallas, a block away from a little playground, and a wooded creek, in an area with some very good schools. Two stories, multiple bedrooms, upstairs studio area or upstairs sitting room or kids play area, etc. House immaculate, new carpet, granite countertops. Easy commute to Dallas central, Plano, Frisco, etc.

The drive down was hard: the belt of fires across Idaho had smoke hazing the sky pink from Spokane to Missoula, to Billings MT, to Sheridan WY, through Denver CO, and southward. When we went over Raton Pass to reach Raton, NM, we got out of the smoke but into the allergens provoked by the rain they’d had—but when we drove the same route back, we hit more rain, beautiful cloud and light effects, and clear, clear skies in the Rockies. We saw nature in action: it’s pronghorn mating season, and the antelope are clustered in herds with hopeful bachelors roaming between and herd males really getting no rest, what with these frequent little standoffs. We’d wondered that sightings had been scarce, but they were clustered in a few places where late green persists, and where temperatures at night are in the fifties and forties. Aspen are going gold, and it was very pretty driving.

We ran into smoke again at Billings, and drove in it as far as Coeur d’Alene, where it noticeably lessened, and into Spokane, where we can see a low haze this morning, but nothing like poor Missoula, where it is so thick you can’t see the surrounding mountains. I know they’ve got to be anxious for that to move on. Let’s hear it for a nice Pacific rain system moving in…and hoping we find one!

The cats were great, except poor Shu, who had been a beast about trying to dive under the driver’s seat, turned up shivering, and we discovered the air conditioning was just too much for his little tropic bones: we got his fluffy blanket out of his cage, and a little one to put over him, and he just snuggled down on the passenger floorboards out of the draft and slept, comfy as could be. Poor Seishi, however, who fared better in that, was lounging on his pillow watching the heavy rain, when some damned fool hauling a work trailer passed us doing at least 85 on puddled road (speed limit is 75)—and inundated and blinded us for a moment (plus the four cars/trucks ahead of us). It made a terrible whoosh as the tidal wave hit the car, and Seishi sprang up—first I knew, he was walking on the windows on the way to the front—he’s a big, long cat—and reached me. I could only think: “Don’t let him hit Jane,” —she was driving—so I flung my arms about him and hid his eyes and patted him until his poor heart settled down. He’s a cattery cat. He’s never, ever had anything like that happen to him, and he was so scared he wouldn’t go back on his pillow the whole last day. OTOH, I’m hoping on the next trip he’ll have forgotten it or at least calmed down about it and go back to his sunny pillow in the back windows. My thoughts about the inconsiderate, self-important jackass that passed a sensible pod of cars like that in a driving rain hauling a trailer—are not printable in this forum.

Re Foreigner, from the Seattle Star:

This is a project we’ve been working on…and I think you’ll be interested.

Here’s a good question: either the panel you’d like to see, or…the best you ever saw.

Describe. And if you can think of names, who you’d like to see on it.

Just got our Fencon programming…

and we have a problem. Stand by for further announcement…but right now, programming and we are not agreed.

Doc visit—and Ari’s getting better…

The every-few-months buzz past the endocrinologist, who keeps me happily functional, and I’m doing fine…excellent blood pressure, no problems. Battled morbid depression for years until I got the thyroid problem figured out, and since then it’s been bluebirds and rainbows. (I know, glug, but it beats bats and cobwebs as general decor.)

The pond is still doing great and Ari’s gaping wound looks to us (I thought it, then Jane said it without my saying so) as if it’s healing in a bit. It was clear to the bone, and now is filled in, and looks as if it may skin over. We would so love it. She’s such a special fish.

Beyond that, just working, working, working.

If it’s not one thing, it’s the other….plumbing saltwater…

A marine tank is not a matter of tossing water conditioner into city water, oh, no. It’s a matter of getting a small ro/di filter to filter gallons of tapwater into a quality exceeding what they run in your supermarket RO kiosk. A carbon block, a 1-micron filter, something else I forget, a carbon block that helps break the chloramine bond, and a di cylinder with resin to absorb other stuff…I mean, it strips water down from 900 total dissolved solids to 0. It leaves just the h’s and o’s. THEN you add the carefully compounded ocean salt, that has the right balance of minerals to represent what ocean water carries: boron and iodine, calcium, lots of calcium—the ocean continually recycles that, much as your body is constantly handling it—bone is calcium, muscle runs on it…

In the marine hobby I’m constantly struck by the fact that corals are all one design: there is no structural ‘big’ difference between the tiny ‘mouth’ and tissue that comprise one pore on a stem of, say, acropora, the colored sticks—and the larger mouth and tentacles of a stony plate coral, or an anemone; or a zoa polyp; or a mushroom polyp; it’s all the same design—a mouth and sticky tentacles, large and small. Mushrooms get to have a kind of thready ‘pipe system’ conveying water about, maintaining fluid pressure—and mushrooms can walk. So can anemones, a little more complex. Take a razor to them and you have two mushrooms. Two anemones. (Woe to the novice that tries to ‘scrub’ an unwanted mushroom off a rock that is a major part of his reef structure.) And then there’s the whole array of corals that developed the trick not just of using a little calcium to power contractile tissue, but laying it down in massive amounts, as a protective casing, a skeleton…which the ocean would endlessly recycle, as it dissolves ‘old’ ‘unclaimed’ calcium into its water to fuel, yes, more movement and more skeletons…

A jelly is the same structure as a nem, just upside down, and really good at sucking in water, and squirting it out.

A worm is the same. Just good at wiggling through sand.

Ultimately, clams, which don’t move—often—in the jellyfish mode. Their inner anatomy is very highly evolved: look them up. Star Trek never came up with anything so weird or alien as the drive-train that powers a clam’s feeding system.

Crustaceans that swim and crawl—the mantis shrimp, when it strikes, literally creates a ball of plasma in the water. If that were scaled up, it’d be scary-movie stuff.

Cartilaginous fish—the sharks and rays—depend on collagen, a fibrous protein, but then some cartilaginous fish discovered a deeply-buried trick and began to lay down calcium like a coral…

We are ALL ultimately connected, and it’s really all one design. We started out radial and learned new chemical tricks.

And all of which is to say, you learn more than plumbing doing a marine tank…

But that filter that makes just h’s and o’s is giving out and I’m getting some signs I need to find some stuff to change those cylinders out…before I start prompting something to evolve in my tank that I really had rather not see. We’ve already got cyano (a nice fugitive from the Permian, that gave us our atmosphere back when various things had trashed it) —and I think I’ll change those cylinders and nip that in the bud.

Jane is blogging again and she has pix…

of the beautiful new baby koi on her blog…link on the left sidebar.

Going to do hamburgers for supper. On homemade buns…

y’know those big 4″ muffin-top pans? Great for hamburger buns. Set up the breadmaker for making dough, and drop a slightly flattened ball in each of 6 muffin-places. Makes great hamburgers.

We’ve still got a couple of pieces of the pineapple upside down cake left. It was so thoughtful of Jane to do that for me—Mum always made that cake for my birthday, ever since I was a teenager, and I’m not inclined to bake my own birthday cake, so I wasn’t going to do it. But Jane found a real good recipe, and aced her very first one, right down to getting it flipped out of the pan, which is no small trick!–and not only that, her tweak to the recipe (adding a cup of fine-chopped pecans) makes it a cinch to freeze. It doesn’t go soggy, it unfreezes on the countertop in about an hour, and it’s really good. Uses an amazing amount of butter and brown sugar. And oh, it’s good. Well, tonight we do in the last of it.

We turned Ari out into the pond…

Well, we maneuvered her onto a tea towel for a sling and gently took her over to the pond from the 50 gallon fountain we’d used for a hospital tank. Her head wound hasn’t closed yet, but it’s a lot better, and her ripped fins have all healed, a very good sign in a fish that has battled infection: the rips won’t heal until healing has become the going process, and then they seal up nearly overnight. Ragged fins are a bad sign, and she had those for a while.

She was very gentle—she’s terrifically strong, a foot and a half plus some long and so big my hands just barely go around her body, but she was ok with my maneuvering her where I wanted her, and with us picking her up, and went into the pond, I think, with great relief when she smelled home water—she went down under the winter cover, where her whole school was there to meet her. They rubbed all over her, getting their slime all over her and vice versa, I’m sure, until she would smell like them, and then they all went out into the pond for lunch, which she scarfed down in great style.

I don’t know if she will recover, or survive the winter, but we gave her the best chance we could, and it becomes a case of how long to keep her in a square only a foot longer than she is, and only a foot deep. Oxygenation we did as best we could, but the more she felt better, the more oxygen she was using, and though I changed out the water once daily and filtered it and dropped water in from a high hose, to pound air into it, we were still constantly only one predator-invasion from having that hose go off its aim and drain the water from her, or some other calamity.

So she’s home, in 5000 gallons instead of 50, able to swim twenty feet in a straight line without having to slow down, and having her own pond to tootle about, and plenty of oxygen in very good water constantly—which I think is probably an essential for that wound to go ahead and heal: her metabolism needs to be running full bore. And the infection is cured, at least. So we’ll see. Nasty wound. I really wasn’t hopeful. But now she’s on her own and much improved. A fish that’ll eat from your hand and tolerate being taken hold of and moved about better than some four-foots will tolerate it is really a pet, and I’ve got my fingers crossed for her.