C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 149
May 21, 2011
Yet again, the world ends…
Yawn. I've been through some SERIOUS ones, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nuclear test ban fracas, and the design some idiot was peddling to the superpowers, a c-bomb. You can't scare me with a mere prediction of doom at 6pm…whose time zone, I wonder? Local to the yokel who published this nonsense, or did he have something more general in mind?
Oracles throughout history have made their budgets on a relatively small number of no-fail prophecies. You hear it first from the Wave Oracle. In the following year: 1. there will be a great earthquake, 2. a government will fall, 3. a great storm will come from the sea, 4. a famous person will prove to have feet of clay, 5. there will be a flood causing great destruction, 6. there will be a famine in Africa, 7. a famous person will demise.
May 19, 2011
Eushu's labs came back fine…he's now vaccinated, safe and…
…full of it. I had to pluck him out of the airconditioning vent: the one in my room lacks a cover. Well, that's going to have to change.
You can read Jane's full account of his checkup on her page.
"Thirty-five Years of the Jack Williamson Lectureship"…
…is now a book, softbound, 19.00 from www.haffnerpress.com and it contains the interchanges between myself, Tim Powers, Jack Williamson; another one with Robert Silverberg; plus Fredrick Pohl; Joe Haldeman; and the list goes on. These are the literal recorded interchanges (with the occasional but rare transcription errors, because sometimes the audience reaction obscures a word, as in what Pyanfar did when alarmed—:) )
At any rate, purchase of this book goes to sustain the Lectureship, so it's a good cause, a meeting of minds important to the field, and an interesting read. Topics include future cities, biological ethics, story, and a range of things. Jack was one of my friends in the field, an amazing man who lived in Portales NM, where his library wing is, and who was very close to the Old West and the historic cowpunchers as well as the far future and the designers thereof.
May 18, 2011
We got the door in…
Finished skating, went and picked up a new door at the valley store—measured it carefully, got it home, pulled the 'old' new door and shoved this one into the opening. Perfect. It opens. It closes. It's in balance. All we have to do is add a few shims for stability and screw it in.
Yay us. And now we return the mismeasured door and get our money back.
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Think of this as one free-for-all ongoing convention. We get panel topics going, and we just sit in the hall and chat. There are two allied sites, The Captain and Lime [Jane Fancher], and Face of Chaos [Lynn Abbey], plus Closed Circle and Seeking North and the Closed Circle Bazaar. So we're a very varied lot, and we hope you'll sign in with all of us. Lynn doesn't have memberships, but Jane and I do. Membership here is a lot warmer and fuzzier than just visiting a website. Join us!
May 17, 2011
While we wait for Lowes to get a new door…regarding commercials and sound…
…have you noticed the new trend in commercials: they start soft, then dial up the volume to a near-painful point. On my particular never-buy list: Bare Minerals. And Humana Supplemental health insurance for retired persons: I find it particularly insulting that they assume all of us over 60 are also deaf as posts and need to be shouted at.
Runner up: commercials that repeat phone numbers again and again and again, especially targeting old people. What do you think we can't remember, or what? I have a long memory for annoying commercials.
I also have had it with commercials exhorting me to buy "now" or "today." My answer: "I'll buy, if ever, unlikely, since you have annoyed me in a very memorable way, when I feel like it."
And stupid exaultation over stupid products. HD Sunglasses? Give me a break. HD. Yeah.
Why do I need TWO slap-choppers? Because they break?
May 15, 2011
We didn't get the door in…
While I know that mauling can affect the shape of a frame, there is no such thing as a board-stretcher, and even 5lb mallet-driven shims cannot make the top and bottom of this framework equal.
Measuring the two jambs and lintel yields 33 1/4 inches. Measuring the two jambs and threshold yields 33 1/2 inches. THIS may be the reason we have shimmed and fought this thing for 6 hours.
Jane did the brunt of the work, and collapsed, after calling Lowe's. We only have to transport this one back and they will give us another one. I don't know the total weight of this thing, but Jane and I cannot carry it when it is mated with the frame. We can lift it, barely, and since I can lift and carry 40 lbs, and lift 50, and Jane is stronger than I am, considerably, so this thing exceeds a hundred pounds when in its frame.
May 14, 2011
The great door drama…ah, the joys of home ownership.
We need, most simply, some work on our door. We thought, gee, we need some ventilation in the kitchen. What about a half light vent door, qv, which would solve everything.
Found one, in budget, at Home Depot. Ordered same. 30.00 for guy to come out and measure. Ok, he can't come until our regular dinnertime—turns up an hour late, our supper is fresh bread, so, y'know, that was annoying. But we coped. He says he needs to do a little trim at the top.
Well, we get the call to come in and pay for the door. And it's 300.00 to get this guy to remove the frame and door, 20.00 to get him to haul the old door away, 20 more dollars to have him nail our trim back on, and 65.00 to cut that top opening a little higher.
We walked. They had the order written up, and charged us too much for the door and claimed they couldn't change it because they have a DOS system for orders and it can't be changed. So we told them, in essence, "Bye. We don't appreciate this. And we're going."
We went over to Lowe's, who also have a door (different brand)—and they can't trim the inch off the top, because it requires a work permit and they don't do that. If we do the trim, they can do it.
Well, heck, say I, why don't we just hang a new door in the old frame? Why don't we get a wooden door and trim it until it fits? I helped my dad plane ordinary wooden slab doors until they fit, back in the day. I got to where I was pretty good at it. I've drilled holes for the lock mechanism. This is not rocket science.
Now, I am informed, a door has to flex in its mounting, hence the doors now coming pre-hung, and needing a larger hole than you would think and the shims make it fit—you know the suction a door can get in the whole house when it slams: it does need that flex. But—the extant frame is up, and works. The hinges, yes, can be unmounted from the extant door and (doh!) put on the new one. What we really need is a door, not the whole thing. And we don't need a 400.00 handyman to mount an under-200.00 door.
So we conclude that we should go to a place called The Ugly Duck, which sells distressed, overstock, odd lots and whatnot lumber, doors, windows, flooring. It's a very bare bones warehouse which buys cheap and sells raw stuff, and if we can get a halflight vent door either pre-hung or not, we're going to do it ourselves.
Meanwhile we're tracking a mysterious crackle in the kitchen wiring, which we may have isolated to the heater in the bichir tank on the kitchen counter—that one has us spooked. We have sequentially unplugged the coffee pot, the cats' water fountain, the tank pump, the left and right Sea Swirl water movement rotation devices in the marine tank, and we have now turned off the air filters, trying to track this down. We're afraid to leave the house for any prolonged time until we can get this one solved.
May 13, 2011
disappearing kitten…
…is so high in squee factor you can't get aggravated at him, but neither Jane nor I got any sleep last night.
Eushu disappeared. And I mean, if you fit in a coffee mug, you CAN disappear very effectively. It helps, of course, if you're black, especially heading north, and if it's night, and if most of the furniture in the house is black.
At something like 2 am, he finally exits the entrails of the black rocker-recliner, which we have not dared to fold back up, because Eushu-unaccounted-for is a no-go on that chair's operation. He also crawls into other furniture, up into arms, into cushion supports, into unguessed places, and since much of our furniture is 'motion furniture' of some sort, there can be no furniture movement of any kind (requiring gymnastics on our part to extricate ourselves) until Mr. Eushu has been sighted far away—because he darts, and teleports. Everything is a game. And he has no sense of danger about anything.
We're keeping the Feliway dispenser going 24/7, the plugin model. And here it gets grimly funny, because I kept claiming I smelled bugspray or the like in the living room. We turned the house upside down, and finally decided to cut on the Oreck air purifier over near the source.
Well, what I was smelling was the Feliway. I'd been out painting the gate with a chemical that corrupted my sense of smell and had me coughing, and it made it smell odd.
Our turning on the air purifier and forgetting about the (pricey) Feliway dispenser meant—yes, we were taking it out of the air.
So the living room lacked the calming scent. And Mr. Squee jumped Ysabel full tilt. She was NOT in a tranquil mood. She pasted him. Mr. Fears-nothing got mad and came back, and got pasted again. We had a cat fight going. We separated everybody, and only then realized what we'd done.
We plugged the unit in again in the hall, and Ysabel, trying to recover her nerves, went out and parked by it, and was her admirably tranquil self when, half an hour later, Mr. Demon Kitten remembered the feud and went and jumped on her again. She shrugged him off and moved half a foot. That's the difference that stuff makes.
We're not sure what it does to us, but hey, it's tranquil when it's running.
