C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 140

NASA discovers room-temperature stars.

Brown dwarfs, which answer very well to the 'jump points', points of 'dark' mass which serve as spatial tethers, have been known to exist for some little while—sometimes when you predict something has to exist, and they find it, you can be so smug for at least a week—but they are discovering classes of these objects.

Curiously they are all the dimensions of Jupiter—regardless of mass. What sets them apart as classes is their temperature. The brightest, L class, do radiate, do have atomic process, and are 2600 Fahrenheit. The L Class are 1700 degrees. The dimmest, the Y class, do not emit, but reflect light like a planet, and they are also the coolest, at about 80 degrees. The fact that the L's have a huge mass difference despite their size is really quite a thought problem. Why do they work out that way? Is our solar system going to lose another planet as they reclassify Jupiter?

It seems to me that matter, given a chance, will coalesce into lumps, and if enough lumps get together they become larger lumps, and if they get really big, they ignite and become stars. But that leaves a bunch that are too small, having absorbed everything they can, and possibly having an iron core (not good for stars) and that never will make it to star status, and have no anchoring star near enough to grab them and make their existence more exciting. It takes, imho, physics to make classes—in the sense that nature is full of gradations so many and so smooth in transition that they have to kick a physical law to distinguish themselves into a class, eg, reach the magical limit of mass and internal collapse from their own 'weight' that they start fusing atoms in their core, ie, ignite—at which point the pressure of their internal cookery inflates them somewhat, and they keep that star-size and their fusion until they flat run out of material and go catastrophic.

Brown dwarfs don't have the mass. Ergo they just—sit—probably until the heat-death of the universe.

 

 

Blessed relief—

We can't go to the chiropractor until we get a front stormdoor and back door. I've been in increasing and nasty muscle pain, I mean killer….an arm that lights up the sky when I reach at certain angles and a traveling case of leg pain that switches sides according to where my lower back has moved the problem-point, but neither leg will operate well without pain, and yesterday one leg was trying to collapse under me outright. Sleep? Hurts too much.

Well, figuring a chiropractor has to be put off—I delved into my old recourse to such pain from when I started skating: Bengay and Salonpas pain patches. Found some near 10 year old ones in the bathroom drawer. 4 Salonpas patches on the shoulder and my only big Bengay patch on the lower back—and I wore them overnight.

OMG. I got some sleep. Usually not. Near cessation of pain, compared to what I've been going through. I may not need chiropractic for my back. The shoulder, yes, but I can live. I can only guess that what's been going on with the muscles is accumulation of some toxic waste that, if I didn't hurt so bad, use would have moved out. The heightened circulation from the patches has moved it out—and I can fly. Lord! It feels so good not to hurt!

 

For our next act—we are taking apart a steel-gridded storm door…

To paint the security grid, and the frame. This sucker is a steel grid about the size of a pencil in a moorish wave pattern, overlaid on screen, and two glass panels. We discovered the installers installed the door upside down. That's one. Two—I got a finger in the way of a 2×4 we used to prop the door on atop sawhorses, and my right middle finger is black and swollen. Three, I sprain't my sore left arm trying to heave the thing onto the sawhorses, and Four, the dastards that put this thing in also lost the tabs on the pins that should let you control the height of the storm glass. Which, of course, being  upside down, is kinda difficult anyway. We aren't sure we can restore functionality to the sliding panes, but it will look better with new screen, with the panes washed, and with the thing painted dark bronze instead of white—we're painting the inner door red. So somebody needs to run the screen part to Ace to get the thing replaced with new screen—the screen is pretty tired and has a rip in one spot. And then we'll have to reassemble this 50 lb jigsaw puzzle.

Jane's got a new Eu-shu show up!

The rascal's growing!

This time—with yeast.

Bought 20 lbs of top rated flour for 14.90. That will bake 20 loaves of very good artisan bread, which is at least 2.50 a loaf at the store. Or more. So if I don't screw up a loaf —it will replace 50.00-60.00 worth of storebought bread. Which is pretty good for 15.00.

We buy our salad in bulk, though pre-prepared, in bags, because we found that buying veggies gave us some that went to waste: salad doesn't. So we get it from Costco, and it's a good price. Homemade bread at .74 a loaf, salad for lunch, with oil/vinegar dressing; supper usually stir-fry, at about 5.00 each. It is possible to live well without breaking the bank. Never mind the bread machine cost. I figure if it's paying us back 1.75 a week, over its lifetime, it's paying for itself, at the current Amazon price, in about a year. Next year is free.

I am not going so far as to grow my own veggies, thank you: I get about 1 pint of strawberries a season off that strawberry plant that survived my strawberry-growing venture, and we have not yet seen even one blueberry off the bushes we planted. I count the strawberries pretty successful by comparison.

 

 

Fresh bread tonight. Making the Italian crispy-crust version.

With chicken parmesan Caesar salad.  I managed to burn the last piece of bread this morning (Jane and I split a piece for breakfast) so it was quesadillas for breakfast (leftovers.) Oh—crap!

It should be done, and I forgot to add the yeast. That's going to be a monument. We're going to change the menu tonight. I can't believe I did that!

Well, revise that. Stirfry tonight. Scrambled eggs for breakfast. New try at bread tomorrow.

Clouded over for the first time in a month or so: farmers better hurry.

It's wheat harvest in the Palouse—you have to see this country to understand it: towering, rolling, completely unfenced hills of loess that grows wheat and lentils like nobody's business. In the old days they used a 40-horse hitch to get a plow or harvester up those slopes. Now it's specialized tractors with independent suspension, and if you want to get somewhere in a hurry in the Palouse—detour through Idaho. When equipment is moving on those two-lane roads, you just wait for a town or a 3-lane hillclimb to pass.

 

Peace and quiet…

A little walk after breakfast, a koi pond sparkling clear, the house in fair order, Seishi riding herd on Eushu so Ysabel can sleep her days through, and most of the garden walks 'pathed' in basalt chips so the weeds won't grow. Mornings are sweatshirt weather at 57 degrees, it warms to low 80′s to high 70′s, and while we could use a nice rain, the farmers are in wheat harvest right now, so I'll hold off wishing for that until early September.

Elsewhere, people are in Reno having Worldcon, where they're about the same at night, but the days are about ten degrees hotter. I'm just as happy being here this year, with Jane getting healthy and the cats learning the car on short trips.

Dunno what I'm going to cook for supper: I'm leaning toward rice. I like rice. We don't get it too often: it doesn't qualify as a vegetable, but as a bread. But I think I would like that.

 

Two toes are purple but the back popped back into line…

Which is a relief. The swelling evidently diminished enough in my fall-abused back that it popped back with a sound like a manhole cover going back on—we went ahead and took a lengthy walk, and it seized up again, so I am sitting here with an ice pack, and it is de-seizing. The temporary misalignment caused a pins-and-needles sensation and sciatica (that's burning pain where one of the major nerves to the upper leg gets annoyed: since the main upper leg nerve exits from the spine and passes through a fairly narrow gap in the pelvis where a muscle also goes through [the pirifomis]—you can get some grief also if you overexercise the piriformis muscle and it restricts the space for the nerve as it goes through.) That sensation is miraculously gone, and I'm real glad to know I'm not going to have that discomfort longterm. I know many people have it, and it's a very bad sort of pain.

The toes I dropped the chili can on (I thought it was only one, but it got the big toe and the second toe) are an interesting shade of blackish purple, which promises to turn an interesting sequence of colors. At least neither is broken, and I missed both the joints, and the toenails.

I'm trying not to do these things, honest. Trying to watch where I'm putting my feet. It's my natural gracefulness.

 

Day 3 of Spocon.

We had just one 2 hour panel: me, Jane, Patricia Briggs, Mark Ferrari, John Dalmas and Deby Fredericks—advice on writing. I'm seriously beyond burned out on writing panels, but it was pretty painless. It wasn't the funnest way to end a con, for me, but it served. We did our thing, hugged friends bye, and headed home. The cats are glad to have us back earlier than the last two days, and while the leg hurts, it doesn't hurt much now that I've gotten out of convention clothes and am back in sloppies.

Myself, I'm just really tired. I had way, way, way too much sugar today in the name of food and am really anxious to get to our favorite watering hole and get some actual protein, but that may not happen for a while. We're home, at least.  In one sense, attending a local con and going home at night should give you more stamina—but you miss all the parties and you don't get to go up to your room when you're really tired of questions and just need silence for a few minutes. I think it's the latter sense in which I'm tired—a lot of anxious new writers and trying to phrase things in a positive and helpful way. They come in with a load of anxiety: I leave with it.

But it was a good convention, and such a relief to have it in a local hotel, not the college classrooms.