C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 116

HEre we go again.

The scoundrel may be shifting his base

Or this may be where he started. He seems to be running a ‘store’ as you can on amazon. Keep an eye on him.

He’s trying to wriggle through the net: more addys:

From Beth Day Jordan on FB: “it seems that while Amazon did the right thing this person is still active on smashwords.com, ielmira.com and it looks like he may be taking it to scribd.com. I also saw references to lulu.com but could find no content so it may have already been pulled. Didn’t see the notice about Amazon in time to help but googled the his name to see what other sites he might be active on. Hope this helps.”

WE WON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the link is now down. On a weekend, yet, —Amazon has reacted…

……to a barrage of reader reviews and complaints. Thank you all. Thank you, Adhunfai, for reporting it. Thank you, John Scalzi, for putting up an FB post. Thank every one of you whose eloquence turned up the heat on Amazon.

Stay alert for this hydra to grow a new head and let us know if it happens. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Campaign against a pirate…thank you: your reviews are brilliant. Keep them coming.

the link: please go act on it and spread the wordIf you’re just now tuning in, an overseas pirate has put up a ripoff masquerading as a Foreigner novel, which is actually a repackaged ripoff of a Foreigner novel. Do honest writers a favor and hit this little offering, along with Rendezvous with Zama and the rest of his piratical offerings…with the most scathing reviews you can manage. They put this stuff out on a weekend, apparently, so all the people that could act are out of the office—but WE aren’t. So go do a good deed. Here’s the link.

Hot. Hot. Hot.

The pond is not now crystal clear—but it’s doing pretty well. It was gruesomely hot, about 94, down to 90 at 7pm. Rain is supposed to sock in for the next number of days, and moderate the temperature a bit.

Shu has stopped spitting at Sei. The vet-smell seems to be going away.

I’m trying to concentrate. When the weather gets hot, my brain goes away. But I’m making progress of an outlining sort.

Not too much news, except the coffee pot seems to be giving up the ghost. I priced out the Keurig system, but the k-cups are pricey and environmentally not-so-good, and the fill-your-own k-cups are being redesigned because of problems, and cost 11 dollars a shot. Now, this would be one thing if it made a whole pot of coffee, but I drink over 10 cups a day. The kind of coffee I favor (Starbuck’s House Blend) is 22.00 for a box of 24. That’s 24 cups of coffee for 22.00. Ouch. And filling 10 of these a day would be a pain. I hate having a coffee pot. Really hate it. I’ve used the Hamilton Beach Brewmaster, a pot-less tank-type for years, but they break or clog. I see that Cuisinart has put out its own tank-style brewer, and that is looking better and better. Cuisinart engineering is usually pretty darned good. Hopefully it won’t have the clogging problem that HB does. I mean, I cleaned that pot 5 days ago, as in using cleaner, which should have gotten any deposits, and it’s clogged again.

You do not want to deal with me when I am short of coffee. So this has to get fixed soon.

Seishi’s off to the vet again…for his dental work.

I am, of course, the Nervous Nellie. The vet’s office had to be glad to get me out the door.

Shu is accusing as we return without Sei, but when we do get him back, Shu will take one whiff of the disinfectant and hiss and slap at him.

Well, it was early up, and a BLT hold the L for breakfast, and now I may fold up and sleep some more. My stomach is upset.

…staggered out of bed, caught Seishi to take him to get the toothcleaning…

…and discovered a food container in the floor, courtesy of our boys. No food after midnight? We don’t think so.

So I had to call the vet, apologize, and reschedule for Wednesday. The vet was very ok about it—I’m sure they’d rather have people catch this and reschedule rather than have a kitty with an emergency on their hands. I’m not sure they got any food out of it, but Jane spotted it, and better safe than sorry. We’ll be more careful Wednesday. Aspiration under anaesthesia is a scary thing. So we let Seishi out of his cage, and I try to get some work done.

We are past the hump re the heat surge, and from now on the week should trend down rather than up. That’s welcome, not usual, but very welcome. We’ll get back into the 80′s.

Pleasant and clouded this morning, before 9 am, and I got the algae-preventer in the pond (just to prove it’s working, we had a very little blush on the rocks as it ran out [once weekly]) and trimmed the suckers off the tree peonies, and wished the filter.

Got my schedule to SpoCon and it looks good, a lot of writing stuff, which I really don’t like a schedule full of (does it occur to people that writing is what I do to get to the part I like, which is story and science and such, but at least not stupid writing panels…last year we had somebody in tears over a critique, and I really empathize with the gal. I would NEVER subject my work to a panel of people to take apart—I’m not sure I would do it now, because a writer’s writing mechanism is so iffy that a butterfly wing can disturb it. I don’t like Milford or that other conference, Clarion, for example. I’d never survive it as a writer. I’m tough as nails in some regards, but I’m really very fragile when it comes to my writing, and I’m not sure I could survive it even as an instructor. It’s just too unkind, and I have heard of people who went and just got messed up emotionally for quite a time.

So I think I’m going to do myself AND a contestant a favor and duck out of the writing critique operation this year.

We have been spoiled by our weather…

We’re used to 72 degrees. Jane had done a little planting in the cool of the morning and I ran the leaf blower to get the hawthorne husks off the patio and path, and that was about it…well, I did fill the green-compost garbage can with forsythia branches…but neither were that bad. Then we undertook a venture to Costco, and the temperature I swear rose while we were in there, as if the door to the desert opened, and it decided to be 90 degrees with 19% humidity. It was like walking out into a wall of heat. Jane and I have been chugging iced drinks (she–diet Mountain Dew, me—iced coffee) and unable to move.

It is gruesome out there. 90 whole degrees. It’s due to be 96 Sunday. The good news is that it’s going to start down again, but I plead we have lost our acclimation to this. We have become soft. Totally done in.

Seishi is no longer refusing to eat…

He is beween me and myc screen trying to persuade me that it is noon. It is 10. He prefer to be on Texas time in the Am, adn Washginton time in the afternoons until it is 3, at which point he goes on Texas time agian, caliming to be starving….for tuna.

Hellacious day yesterday…

Seishi turned up sick, refusing food…

We’ve been blaming his weight loss on our attempts to keep Shu on a diet, and his skittishness and leaving food on Shu’s tendency to gulp his own and then shove Seishi out.

But it got to absolute refusal to eat. And Jane suggested a pattern in the behavior, like refusing a crunchy treat after begging for it—that suggested teeth.

Well, yes. Gingivitis. Maybe needing a teeth cleaning. Short-faced cats have particular problems in that line. I took him to the vet.

The weight loss and a constellation of other items in the exam indicated we needed a blood test and urinalysis. Done. Seishi was very good throughout it all.

We got him home. Shu pitched a fit, first glad to see him, then, when he got a whiff of the disinfectant from the blood draw, Shu slapped Sei, who’d already had a bad morning. Sei slapped back, unusual for him; so we had to keep them apart. Shu is hysterically upset about vets, Sei wasn’t feeling well…but chowed down on tuna that I’d whipped to a paste. So his appetite was there.

So I waited for the results. At 4:35 I got a call: white count down a bit, kidneys ok. But again, the pattern could indicate feline leuk. Had he been tested? I knew he’d been vaccinated. They had a Xerox of his papers from the vet in Montana (where his cattery is)—and it was late to call Montana. But my vet did, got the earlier vet—and no, he never had been tested for either leuk or feline aids, though he’s been vaccinated, along with his litter. The good news was that his cattery has always tested clean, and the cattery requires the test of any animal that comes into their premises, and does not allow visitors and customers general contact with the cats. They ship internationally, and any cat that goes out of that cattery has to have all sorts of tests to be certified: there has never, ever been a cat from there fail the test. So the odds are in Seishi’s favor.

Shu was both tested and vaccinated before we got Seishi. But the smart thing to do is to go ahead and test.

Fortunately a fast call to the lab that had just done the blood test indicated they had enough sample left for the next test, so I’ll get the results of that today, and then we’ll know for sure where we stand.

But yesterday was a real non-productive day.