C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 118

Jane’s wp program just crashed and took all her editing notes with it.

She is not happy.

My fault, but, damn! I hate pushy programs…

So somebody downloaded a file from CC and has a problem. Jane’s up to her ears in aardvarks on her book, and she asked me to handle it, which involves, in this case, getting the file which I don’t keep on my computer and sending it to the person who needs it. This should be simple.

2 1/2 hours later, I have finally uninstalled the Yahoo toolbar by totally blowing Firefox back to the basics, after reading through every help screen. Yahoo is now on my nuke-it-with-prejudice list, meaning the world will have to turn upside down before I use their search engine, and it was, until this morning, my go-to favorite search engine.

They not only installed the toolbar, they blitzed the normal remove-it functions and hid themselves so they didn’t appear on any menu, from Win 7′s ‘add-remove programs’ to Firefox’s ‘extensions’ manager. No, by this point, I had not only that beastly damn toolbar, I had a free games, a dolphin screensaver, and a free music downloader icon, and I was ready to kill. I’ve lost an entire morning’s work dealing with the fallout, I’m in a hellacious mood, and I STILL can’t get Filezilla to get into CC because it’s on Lynn’s password and I’m too steamed to even try to cope with the situation.

There’s got to be a hot spot in hell for programmers that do this sort of thing. And this was deliberate.

Kudos to Firefox for having a Reset Program: nice little thing: it copies your bookmarks, history, skins, etc, installs Firefox bare-nakedd and then reinstalls your data, then very politely uninstalls ITSELF. Which is the way programs ought to function, and a real reason I prefer Firefox to the endlessly updated IE-whatever. Firefox Mozilla, friends. And for mail, Thunderbird. Less buggy, more friendly, and free.

We worked all morning, went hunting rock, and hauled back about 1000 lbs—

But it’s not the color or texture we really want. This is decent structural stuff, but we may have to dress up in our ninja outfits and go rock-hunting on the highway again in quest of the deeply black and fractured stuff. Next time I heft large rocks, I’m not wearing the flipflops. Very uneven ground, and I certainly didn’t want to drop one of those things on my foot.

We’re holding in principle to our determination not to buy more plants. We’ve weakened a few times, with a daisy and a hydrangea, but we resisted the 13.79 distressed tree sale. We could have gotten a really tall redbud for that. But…we’d have had to dig the hole. And figure where to put it.

Still trying to get edits done, books up: I shove food at Jane and she goes back to work…

THEN there’s the hassle of trying to get covers, text, and format all lined up. But we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Excuse the spam attack on Closed Circle: we got the dike plugged. There’s a hot spot in hell for these jerks. I trust none of you are in the market for quickie loans or mortgages from a shark. What, no miracle drugs from the internet? Weight loss pills?

But we do see the light! It may be the 5:10 freight from Yuma, but, hey, we’ll cope.

We need one thing for the front garden: rock for the path edging. And we finally located the place we were looking for—we hope—not on Google maps, but on some inspired internet searching. I got a word in the company name. Discount. And we hope they’re still in business.

Yesterday, as I found out, Jane’s little foray with the clippers totally filled one of those giant green garbage garden waste bins—all in ragweed. She didn’t stop with us and the 3 neighbors: she kept going, and we have noted that there’s less ragweed where we’ve cut it down in previous years. We have hope if we keep doing this we can eliminate it from the alley…this neighborhood has oldfashioned graveled alleys where weeds grow behind garages and fences, and we have had a heckuva crop. She wore a mask and showered head to foot when she got in, and the air is markedly nicer. My eyes have stopped watering. I would not open the lid on that bin for all the tea in China. Next Friday it all goes away.

Still finding out weird stuff from Akon. After solliciting bios for me and Jane, and getting some good ones which took an hour of our time—they didn’t, apparently use them. Not to mention the madness of the paneling. I can say the anime part of it was quite fun. The sf part, not.

OTOH, we will be back in Dallas this fall for Fencon…and we will be at Soonercon next June. So if you’re in that region, we have hopes that those two cons will be fan-friendly.

A little Product recommendation…Things That Work…

1. glass and windshield cleaner. Down in Texas, bug capital of the universe, a title hotly contested by Kansas, we found that Allsup’s gas-and-go stocks Sprayway Glass cleaner, which we’d been looking for since it does such a bang-up job of windows and tabletops. On the can, it said, also ‘windshields.’ Well, heck-darn, y’all. I bought it, took it out, where Jane was valiantly scrubbing baked-on bugs. Sprayed the windshield, gave it a desultory pass with the squeegee, ran the windshield washer to get the last of the foam off—crystal clear, instantly, no elbow grease required. This stuff also works on windows near sticky-sapped trees that drop gluey crud on the windows; and it works on glass tabletops where greasy fingerprints are a problem. It’s called Sprayway Glass Cleaner, and you can buy a case of it on Amazon. Believe me, one can for the car, one for the kitchen, one for the garage. Give a can to relatives and friends. They’ll thank you for it.

2. blu-ray player cleaner. THese machines, along with X-Boxes, I hear (we don’t have one) and highspeed computer dvds, are easy to crud up with a tiny bit of dust. And they start skipping. Using a cleaner with a brush on it is too rough. Maxell Blu-ray disc cleaner, also on Amazon, or at your friendly local store, has come a clever one: they drilled two holes in a disk, and as it spins, it creates a windstorm in the player that blasts the dust off the lens, while never touching the lens at all. Works like a charm.

My aching back…

This was Deathmarch Thursday…a little writing this morning, and Jane alternated writing with hitting the front flowerbeds with fertilizer. I got the filter washed out, and can say we are showing signs of improvement in the pond.

Then the marine tank. This is the Big Fix, necessitated by lousy tests that expired, and a refractometer that finally went out of calibration, and the lights burned out of ‘true spectrum’. IE, these corals are tough. But it’s time I fixed their array of problems and got the tank back on track toward zero maintenance: zero maintenance is great ONLY if you don’t rely on bad tests.

So…yesterday I prepped 21 gallons of saltwater, and today, after the salt had had time to fully dissolve (it’s more than sodium chloride: it involves all sorts of minerals) —I started a water change, which, since I can’t find the right diameter hose for my one surviving lifting pump, means dipping water out, dumping it, and, well, since I have about 20 lbs of aragonite (calcium) sand that needs to go in, might as well use the waste water I take out to rinse the dust off the sand, which means carrying 30 lb buckets of water up from the basement, and 20 lbs of sand, and then deciding to do it downstairs, so back downstairs, and more 30 lb buckets of water up, and then the wet sand upstairs…not to mention rinsing it and dipping up sand by handfuls…

Jane helped. We scraped pink coralline off the glass, rearranged the corals, the rocks, cleaned, and added water. I’m hoping for my test kits soon, but this can’t wait: it’s gone critical, and we’re losing some coral bits. SO….

We head off to get new lightbulbs (special, to the max) and a heater because what I have isn’t enough; and then—we stopped for a late lunch, early supper, for a burger; and THEN Jane wanted to visit the relatively new Hobby Lobby in the Valley. Sigh. Two hours later, I am done in. I hate shopping. But Jane has so looked forward to this store, and she was having such a good time…

I literally couldn’t walk by the time I got home. A glass of chardonnay, magnesium, potassium, and two Advil have restored humanity and eased the pain in my legs, but by the time I got home—I was having muscle spasms in my feet: magnesium shortage. I know that one when it hits. SO…we still haven’t put the new bulbs in and I was too done in to tackle the heater installation, simply a matter of bending over and plugging the sucker in, but I just couldn’t. Age is a bitch, my friends. But magnesium is your friend. I hurt so damn bad I didn’t even want to bend over to get the power cord plugged into my laptop.

Doing much better now. Advil is also your friend. And tomorrow we will get those lights installed and the fixture cleaned—they’re ungodly bright: you can’t even look at them; and hot; and we’ll have them on a shortened schedule, burning only an hour a day for a few days, then working up to full 8 hour daylight. You can sunburn your corals, even kill them, if you take it too fast, too long on new lights.

The house is now full of roses: they’ve succeeded the peonies and iris. The smell is to die for.

And the tank is now looking much nicer.

A little up and down progress…

Before we took our trip I first installed a new chopped-foam bag for the filter in the pond, then took it out. This loosed a massive amount of crud into the pond. We got through the 2 week absence pretty well, but the weather has been iffy, a lot of rain, and now we’re getting some murkiness, which I’m fighting.

The marine tank is an absolute mess. We’re seeing some dieback in the corals, and I’m going to do a massive 50% water change. I’d be happier about this if I didn’t have some fears that our reverse osmosis filter is expired, which could put some nasty water in. But I’m also suspecting our magnesium, calcium and worse, alkalinity tests are expired. I got new ones, but they are a bear to do, and I’ve ordered the brand I can do in my sleep. I’m not liking the results: the ones I think are expired, are agreeing with the corals: the alkalinity is massively ‘off.’ The ones I just bought that should be good, are telling me everythings’ fine, which it isn’t.

I am just having more watery fun than I can stand.

Meanwhile Jane is nearly through with her edit, and we plan to get our lives back just as soon as we get these books up on CC!

Jane and I did a little speech for ConComCon here in Spokane…

Had a little hark back to oldtime cons—the virtues of having SPACE around a panel, having far fewer panels, even at larger cons, and using some of the extra space for big roundtable discussions—interested audience with pros at tables, in direct discussion, far more up-close, a lot less like a college lecture. I’ve literally seen groups of people taking notes—sheesh! We need more up-close and a lot less view-from-distance where it comes writers meeting with readers. THat was our recommendation—at a con dedicated to people who put on cons. Some extra space to go to after cons for more extended discussion, maybe with refweshments.

We also agreed we’d rather see a big airy consuite where pros can interact with fans (more tables) and less greenroom, where mostly pros meet for 5 minutes prior to the panels and get coffee and hopefully a donut in the morning. The only people you see hanging out in a green room tend to be neopros who are hoping something interesting will happen. Everybody else is grabbing food and moving out. What the heck is this with a sacred secret meeting place of pros (we see each other more than once a year) and no chance to sit and interact with fans. We’re not movie folk: we’re writers—we actually LIKE people!

A surprise is in the offing…

just sayin’.

I rarely do short pieces. But in the process of trying to get my head on straight after the Yvgenie edit while traveling, I’ve done a Foreigner short piece, involving Ilisidi, and involving her viewpoint. I haven’t got it up on CC yet, but it will be. It’s technically a novelette, but nobody actually knows what that is, ie, it’s shorter than a novella, longer than a short story…but—the dictionary that *doesn’t* reference the SFWA definition calls it a novella. Whatever it is…it’s coming.

We’re still kind of done in…

Nothing like a 2-hour time adjustment. Traveling as fast as we do, it amounts to jet lag, and the only thing we can say is—we’re sleepy half the day and awake half the night.

We’re getting stuff done, but we feel kind of done in. Some vitamins are in order, likely.

On the other hand, we’re getting some writing done. We’ve done a lot of snipping in the garden, to keep spring growth in check—one of those things about a well-regulated ‘low’ garden is that we do have to snip, or pretty soon we can’t see the pond. I just went out and removed a bushel of quince bush between my working chair and the pond. I’ve cleaned the filter and decided to put back the sponge bag (filter media) I took out of the waterfall yesterday: the pond suffered a bit, and I think I know what was the matter in the flow pattern, so I’m trying that. The water is still great, just a little clouded by muck stirred up; and I think I’ve got that fixed.

The cats do NOT understand time zones. They want their food on Texas time, thank you. Of course they always want food, so they’re starting complaining two hours before meals.

But we’re getting along. It’s going to sock in and storm, and I wanted to get that waterfall situation rectified before the rain, so I’ve done that. Jane’s working on her book, I’ve gotten the final edit on Yvgenie done, and am working on the Foreigner story again…so as aforesaid, we’re kind of muzzy, but we’re trying. Allergies aren’t helping; and we’re running the filters that we’d shut down while we were gone, but there’s catch-up to do. At least the outdoor temp is a gorgeous 71 degrees…going to fall into the 60′s with the rains…but the garden is absolutely glorious. We do clematis really well, and several vines are in bloom.

We need to take a drive down to the falls—midtown. They’re absolutely glorious, and will be on the rainy days. They’re dangerous…people fall in now and again (two this week) and it’s very sad; you stand the same chance in the Spokane Falls area that you do falling into the Colorado in the Grand Canyon: even experienced world-class kayakers have to respect these rapids, and you just do not want to take chances on the slippery rocks around the water edge. When you go out on the bridge that spans the falls, the whole bridge vibrates and hums to the impact of the water on the rocks that it’s tied to. The water comes out that glassy cold-water green that you see at, say, Niagara, because this is not only rainfall, this is snowmelt. Water shaped the Pacific Northwest, and though we’re the ‘dry’ side, we have creeks that would be called rivers in some states, and water here has a fierce gradient—we’re at 2000 feet in the city, and halfway across the state, beside the Columbia, you’ll be at 600 feet—then up to 3000 for the Cascades, and back to sea-level in Seattle. We have our ups and our downs, and the most of our ‘dry side’ water heads straight for Grand Coulee and the Columbia as fast as it can get there. The Columbia heads for the sea and comes out near Astoria WA with considerable impact as it hits the incoming Pacific—making that area the place they train the US Coast Guard for high-wave rescues.