C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 141

day 2 of Spocon

The leg's acting up a bit more. And there was a lot of walking. I actually used the cane most of the time.

Did a panel on terraforming with Jim Glass. We did a lot of discussion on terraforming Mars, Venus, Europa…discussed, say, moving Europa into Mars orbit and creating a dumbbell paired-planet orbit which might do a bit of warming on Mars' core, but wouldn't necessarily melt Europa into water-loss… Or maybe crashing one of the ice-moons into Venus. Or cleaning up its greenhouse effect.

Interesting hour, as was.

The rest of the day was a bit more work: panels on blogging and e-pubbing, and just wandering the halls. They didn't schedule Jane and me where we had the same hours off, so we couldn't hang out together, OSG's off to worldcon and Patty's scheduled up to her eyeballs, no surprise. Hung out in the green room a bit. Real nice fare there. Which is not a bad thing, because food at this hotel is through the roof. Don't even talk about the hotel bar. One of the real drawbacks to the Doubletree: pricey food and drink, and the bar food is not that great. The restaurants across the street would be a better choice, but Jane hates Azteca and Chili's takes an hour to produce a sandwich, and neither of us had a schedule that matched well enough to go across for actual food, so we just noshed in the green room until supper.

We stayed for Dragon Dronet's movie costuming and sfx panel, then headed home, late and tired, a bit sore, but not bad.

We've got one last panel left, on writing. I'm not inspired. I almost sat in on the string theory panel with Jim—they scheduled Jane for that AND for her reading at the same time—but it was way crowded, and esoteric math is not my strong suite. It was so crowded I decided to head for the green room.

So we'll see, today. I get so tired of writing panels. Always the same stuff, endlessly repeated. What can you say? Don't pay people to publish your book, learn to paragraph and punctuate: that's how you make it readable; don't expect your editor to fix your prose; and don't trust an agent who tracks you down to ask you to hire him. The Pacific NW has endless writing panels. I swear I may start telling cons I'll do one, only one, per con.

 

 

Day one of Spokon…

…I spent most of sitting in a green and white chair near the lobby and the latte machine. We were there from noon until about nine—and I did great for most of it. I had two programs, one a one-on-one writing critique: I couldn't find the story I'd apparently been sent, got a second copy of it, and then didn't have a room to hold the conference in. What they oughta do if they're doing such things is schedule those two-person meetings in the bar…much more comfy. We did get through it. The concom is entirely new to dealing with hotels, and was surprised that previous people didn't clear the rooms in question until way late. [ This is not, btw, the concom of the Spokane Worldcon bid---different people, and a very experienced committee.] These local folk were running just a little tiny no hotel, no bar con  for last several years, pretty much confined to one classroom hallway of a local college. This year, sensing imminent expansion, they went to a hotel for the first time, and well that they picked a big one, because they were suddenly inundated, with 2 registration lines stretching out for hours. From one hall and half a dozen rooms, all of a sudden this quite-little concom had registration lines from here to eternity and they're suddenly dealing with big-hotel type problems and a multitrack programming and rooms not available as they'd thought they'd be. From "it's just down the hall" where nobody could ever get lost, they were suddenly coping with a huge hotel where you HAVE to have room numbers AND a hotel map on the programming guide—convention goers being convention goers, they coped, but it was one of those oopses that needs fixing next year. Fortunately the hotel (a Doubletree) seems to be playing fair with them and sticking to contract pretty well. Room availability is something the hotel can't really guarantee when guests won't budge.

We met the usual local friends—some from the Wet Side came over, too, and in from Missoula region and the TriCities.  And I held up pretty well, until about 5, when the leg started hurting. We went out to dinner with friends across the street at Chili's—a lot cheaper than the hotel restaurant where we had lunch. We met Patricia [Patty] and Mike Briggs in the parking lot, but they were coming back from dinner. We at least tried to lay future plans.

And we went back to the hotel—I claimed my chair, and we sat and talked for a while…got home at 9 something and discovered, yes, after so carefully installing fittings to be able to lock the newly installed windows—we left the front door not only unlocked but open!—

However since no one had stolen the cats, we concluded all was well. They were certainly ready for us to be home—and we were ready for a nice glass of wine, a quiet sit watching Project Runway, and bed.

 

 

Morning breaks, and the back is much better…

Babying it all day, pillows, Aleve, the s-i belt, the knee-band, ice, and heat—and I am mostly out of pain this morning.  It doesn't say this is going to hold up through a convention day, but it's way better than yesterday. I think we've got it without having to go back to Dr. Shane…and if I just don't insult it today and take reasonable precautions…I think we're in good shape. The shoulder is still ouchy, and shoots fire if I move it too far in some directions, but hey, I have to do that to preserve range-of-motion. It's taped, howsomever.

Doesn't this sound like a wreck report? I'm really in pretty good shape–except the old injuries that come back to haunt me when I do something stupid like fall down a 3 foot berm.

We had a breakthrough moment—Ysabel, who has not passed Seishi without brandishing a paw and swatting him if he's close enough, gave him a tail-sniff this morning. That's not saying Her Furry Grace won't hit him next time round, but she's processing the fact that he's here and belongs here. I so wish she'd calm down and be snuggles with him.

Pain. Oh, pain. :(

Remember I took a downhill-facing tumble a few days ago.

Well, between landing on the hand belonging to the bandaged shoulder, thus screwing that, I twisted mid-fall to avoid a faceplant among the foot-diameter sharp rocks I was aimed at, and now my right leg is, to put it mildly, a mess. I went to Dr. Shane yesterday, and he taped up the shoulder, which helps: it's doing great. The leg, not so much. He worked quite a bit on it, but assuming adhesions in the soft tissue, he didn't do a back crunch. Now that he's got the peripheral soft-tissue pain solved, I can now feel the real pain, which kept me awake most of the night—can you say screwed-up sacroiliac?—meaning that place where, without a proper joint-joint, the backbone attempts to maintain a connection with the pelvis…

Jane worked it over with the percussion thumper we have (a very good one)—and lent me her SI belt, which is a Good Thing, so I did the morning walk, but this pain is really quite distracting. I would say from the 'feels like your upper leg is afire' pain of yesterday, and the inability to raise my knee at all, it's better; but this is 'my hip joint has a toothache' pain that just kind of ebbs and flows constantly.

And we have our local con tomorrow. I am so not happy with this. The cane I used for walks before I took up figure skating has been gathering dust since we moved here, but I think I am going to take it for use on stairs and just when I want to get the weight off that side.  And if anybody bumps into me I may use it Ilisidi-fashion. Ow! I'm using ice, Aleve, the SI belt, and hot baths, hoping to get this damn joint to slip back into alignment, but ow! ow! ow!

OMG—slide show alert—major LOLs over on Jane's blog.

We got a second cat tree—because we have a half-Bengal, and they climb. If you're smart, you provide them something to climb. If you don't—they FIND something to climb…

…and you hear mysterious and horrid crashes from the kitchen.

 

Scary couple of hours this afternoon with Seishi…

Seishi turned up limping violently on a left hind foot, as if his whole leg was affected, and I feared he'd had a hip dislocation. .. He and Shu leap and dive like gymnasts and Seishi's spent his whole life in the confines of a cattery, much of it probably in a cage. And to make matters weird, he'll limp a bit, then not.

Well, we could get in with the vet, and thank goodness, one of their people is an orthopedics specialist. He's a doll. Nope, hip not broken: what he's got are loose kneecaps. He's had a patella slip, and it pops back in. Doesn't hurt, actually, but this is a condition that can worsen to the point where it needs surgical intervention—it's fixable. OTOH, Sei's a cage cat, and he's getting stronger, so more leg muscle may help the problem, so he goes back to running and romping with Shu-Shu without even a shot.

Seishi's had a day: he began it by eating a feather cat toy—and heaved up the mylar ribbon that was part of the bundle, but the feathers are still missing. We have noticed before this he WILL eat feathers. We have bought a number of these: we think that we are going to put them away.

Then the kneecap thing. We hope he may outgrow that.

He was soooooooooo glad to get home from the vet's without even getting a shot.

And I'm so glad they can go back to playing!

Thunderstorms produce antimatter…

and there are 'Van Allen Belt'-like bands of antimatter surrounding the earth.

Shu-shu's nap on Jane's site…cute on the half shell.

Now and again ya gotta find a camera. This was one of those times.

In 1991, according to Time, the first website launched on the internet…

…my site (cherryh.com, the mothership for this blog) is not quite that old, but it's been there a while…I think since about 1993, maybe earlier. I could see the importance of having a web presence. I knew very little about HTML—I got the HTML for Dummies book, and hired a guy to do the graphics you can still see (old-fashioned, yep, I'm a Historical Internet Landmark) back in the 90′s. Had no idea at all how to organize it, except on the model of an sf convention.

It's huge, sloppy, and I haven't updated the main body of it in a year (gotta tend to that soon)–but it's kind of like a large museum and library of bits and bobs, the sort of place you can wander around in it, the attic where I store stuff. Wave is structurally part of it: the WP sites require an HTML index page for an 'anchor' and initial navigator, so it was easy to tack it on.

The site has lost the visitor-count three times and had to be re-started from what I could recall as the number, so the count would be quite a bit higher if I had set the first re-start where I should have: I can't remember numbers worth a damn, and I think I lost about 50,000 visits.  This is my brain on numbers, eh?

I did the splash page and other artwork, off a very rudimentary graphics program: Microsoft Image Composer. So it's far from professional, but it's vintage Me.

Nowadays I can type in HTML for elementary purposes. I've officially stopped short of learning PHP—I decided that when we decided not to go with Joomla! and to adapt a WP template, which has adapted pretty well, imho. But all resolutions are subject to change.

So as far as the WWW goes, we're kinda venerable. And we just keep swimming…just keep swimming…

 

Jane's got a Seishi slide show (say that 3x fast) up…

Scottish Folds do have big feet. The paws are amazing.