C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 121
May 8, 2012
I AM THE DESTROYER…again…
As the filk song has it.
Jane is the builder in the house. I’m in charge of destroying things. I get tagged to kill algae, poison weeds, break down boxes…remove tile…you get the picture. So here I am trying to manage a damned sprayer the instructions to which I’ve lost, and I get a bath in Triox, which is so potent weeds won’t grow where it’s sprayed for a whole year—they say. Says not to spray it in the drip pattern of tress, which is pretty well our whole property, but I got the driveway, the side path, and the lava rock below the retaining wall….I’ve got to get the weedwhacker to the line of foot-tall grass which our neighbors’ lawn crew inexplicably left as a barrier between our paving-stone walkway and his lawn. Go figure. It’s on his property. But it’s seeding onto our gravel path. The Destroyer will be after it, with the weedwhacker, not the Triox.
May 5, 2012
May 1, 2012
CHERNEVOG IS UP!!!
Thank you, Jane!
Jane is co-author on this one for very good reason—as in she wrote some of it….line by line. When we collaborate, even we don’t know who did what.
More basalt chips…
Jane ordered them.
We use them on the walks, and we have resolved not to buy another plant this year—just to spend our gardening time establishing the network of paths and edgings. Basalt chips is a very nice path material.
We are also cleaning out the mouse-y garage, laying down bait, and getting the place swept out. I am exceedingly sore and stiff. But we have a sense of what we need to do this summer, re the paths.
April 30, 2012
I decided to redo the family tree…
All 15,000 to 18,000 people of it.
A tree is a database, and databases that have had bad info input and then erased (learning curve) have problems. So — I started over. OMG. I got 10 generations on with practically everybody—and discovered the program hadn’t been recording it.
Blooie. I had dumped it, think it was autosaved, but stupid me—I’d had the program open in another window, mostly forgotten, and it had right of way. It didn’t record.
Lost it.
I’m doing it all over again. This time down the main family line. 40 gen, and I’ve hit Vikings. Bigtime Vikings.I have Vikings all over my tree. You would not believe how many. My English tree has Vikings. My Dutch tree has Vikings, I foreknow that, and that’s my mother’s tree: I’m still working on my father’s. The Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes really kept records, all the way to frost giants, to whom I am of course related (I love it when we get to mythology). And if it weren’t for idiots in the DB saying they lived in New Jersey in 2007 we’d be happier—and then there are the people that haven’t noticed the -sdottir/-sdotter/-sson business, and give us Queen Cyrid Bjornsson instead of Bjornsdotter. Gettaclue! It’s so easy to follow a Nordic genealogy: you KNOW if they were Bjornsdotter, their dad was named, yes, Bjorn. And since they recycle names in alternate generations—it gives you a help in kicking the DB to see what it might turn up, if prodded (it’s interactive with the World Tree)… Dutch names, too, except (Hanneke will understand, I think) that, beyond going from Pieter Jans to Jan Pieters….start going in genealogical circles…I had one that looped three times before I began to understand somebody had started reiterating the prior sequence, loop-to-loop-to loop, and I had followed it much too far without checking the dates.
I SO enjoyed my stint as GOH in Oslo…I was amazed that everyone spoke English; and I was already so curious—I think my appointed convention guide thought I was nuts: I wanted to see every museum; I had no idea about the Sculpture Park (Vigelund), but I was fascinated—and I wanted to see ordinary life. In Oslo, if you don’t have bus fare, and you’re a regular, you just tell the driver you’ll pay tomorrow. Brilliant! Shiny! And I was so embarrassed to realize if I’d been hit by said bus while I was there, the Norwegian health care system would handle everything—I was so embarrassed I didn’t want to reclaim my VAT (value added tax) at my exit from the country. I could get behind that. I’d have given them a donation. I’ve never felt so indebted. And of course the people were wonderful. Did I mention I missed my flight to Oslo? An airport guard steered me wrong, I missed my plane, my luggage ended up in Oslo and I finally got a plane to Geneva, which was full of blue-bereted UN forces going somewhere. I then nabbed an Lufthansa flight (I wasn’t personally paying for this: I was the airline’s problem, thank goodness, because it was Atlanta’s fault!) over the edge of Germany, which I’d never seen, up over Denmark—screw the distractions in the cabin: I was looking out the window!—and on across to Norway. It was so good. I loved my stay there, in every regard.
Anyway—-back to the ancestry thing….If I’d been doing that, then—I’d have wanted to see Vestfold and Telemark, and more museums. IT’s so fascinating. And then there was the WWII museum—in which they had hollowed out logs in which the Resistance had smuggled stuff inside loads of wood, which was just brilliant….
I so loved my visit there.
If anybody wants to play this game, ancestry.com always runs a 2-weeks-free offer…and it’s kinda fun: what you need is the best info you can get from grans and family Bibles, and a week in which you can live on potato chips and liter bottles of Coke. It’s intuitive, and in 2 weeks without sleep you can run down everything easy to extract from the World Tree…then bail off, reconstruct, and figure if you want to carry on with it.
Pleasant call today—
a skating buddy called up, said, “I”m hungry, let’s do lunch!” Ta-da. We revisited an old fave restaurant and survived it. They’ve changed their recipes back to avoid garlic powder in everything….they’re using garlic, real, in recipes.
April 28, 2012
April 27, 2012
New things here—and coming…
1) You know I turned Protector in yesterday.
2) We have audiobook contracts for Cyteen, Downbelow Station, Foreigner, and Chanur with audible.com. If you buy from these links, I get a dollar. I’ll put them in the first comment box, because the program strips code from the initial post, and I haven’t gotten in to fix that undocumented feature yet. The Cyteen production is first rate: I have high hopes for the others.
3) I’m working on the next after Protector.
4) Lynn Abbey’s got her Orion’s Children books up on Closed Circle.
5) Jane’s now preparing to put out ‘Netwalkers.
April 26, 2012
Even this late…you get kind of paranoid about shipping a book off…
…and yes, Protector has flown to NYC….
In the real old days, you took your carbon copy and put it in a safe place, found a stout box for your 20 lb bond typescript, [heavier from that with the weight of 3 bottles of dried correction fluid] and went to the post office, applying a green Notify Me card for a fee, and as much insurance as you could, because it would take you 3 months to retype it—as well as the postage, and return addresses of all sorts, plus, inside the box, the return label and postage should it be shipped back for correction or (gasp!) rejected though under contract.
You then sweated it for a week until the green card came to tell you it had actually been received.
In the medium old days, you took your 20 lb bond typescript to the copy office, refusing to leave it to be copied, and just letting people needing just a few copies ‘play through’ while you tried to remember where you were and sweated whether you’d pulled page 158 from the glass before surrendering the machine to the gal with the party invitations to run. You usually got about 20 interruptions before you reached page 425 and finished the copy…unless you had to call the technician to relieve a paper jam or load more ink. Then you collated it, neatened it up, put it in a box, and kept your original. You paid 10 cents a page for those copies, so you forked over 42.50 for the copy, and went to the post office where you got the green card and the insurance, and likewise mailed it off…to your agent, who would laboriously copy it and deliver it to the publisher, and other interested parties, like a UK publisher. And you got another copy charge from the agent.
Then there was Fedex. But they weren’t immune. One book package got ripped open and random pages strewn all over NYC. By then we had our own copier, and ran duplicate copies, so one copy went to the agent and one to the publisher.
Now—I attach a file to letters to my agent and my publisher…who will later ask for transmission of yet another electronic file, because they will probably lose that one or not be able to convert it to Word. Dunno why I can and they can’t, but I will, when they ask.
Times change, but you still feel terribly at loose ends when you’ve shipped one off.
In the old days, you got a new box of carbon paper and a frighteningly blank box (not packet, box) of 20 lb bond. And inserted 2 sheets with carbon, and started typing.
Now—the white space is infinite, so you write something down to anchor the project in space and time and try to get going.
I’d sorta like to go out to eat to celebrate, but we’re trying to cut back on food. Sigh.
April 24, 2012
We took a little hop over to Seattle…
Mariners’ game. It wasn’t the Mariners’ best weekend. The next day they were the losing team of a Chisox ‘perfect game.’ Bummer!
We ate far, far too much junk food.
And while we were gone, local temperatures had soared to 81, and we’d cut the pond pump and UV off for fear of having the pump run dry. This didn’t work well. The fish are fine, but it was algae soup when we got back. I don’t know how many times I’ve washed and changed that filter, but at first it was every 5-7 minutes: you could literally watch the water level in the pump well drop as it clogged. It’s better now—you can see the fish, though dimly. And I’m still hosing out filters.
We also needed to recover the ferret cage we use for the kittehs in hotel rooms: mice had nested in it, chewed up the cushions, and the mouse leavings with the mousie-urine-dampness would take your head off. I spent an hour up to my elbows in straight Clorox getting that cage cleaned up, and the salvagaeable traveling case laundered but I think it is now mouse-free and sweet-smelling. Ugh!
On the plus side, the kittehs made the trip really well: we had to break the news that they’re (being a little less disciplined than our elder kittehs) traveling in harness, with a leash ready to clip on at need. And while they were not at first thrilled with this, they traveled well with it—it oddly enough seemed to click in their heads that these harnesses (the Comfort Harness, with a soft Y yoke and broad, not narrow bands) were somehow protective for the trip. They were without them while we were in Seattle—and when it was time to come home, I just quietly slipped the harnesses back on and they took them without any fuss at all: it was time to take a car trip and expectations were rewarded when they ended up back in their own house again. So the first overnight trip is a success.
