C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 156
February 22, 2011
back down 4 lbs. 3 more 'real' ones to lose.
I'll tell you, I am in love with the ceramic knife Jane gave me for Christmas. Got some little steaks, used that knife—cuts more efficiently than a razor: just draw it across the steak and instant slices; did a stirfry with bean sprouts, Teriyaki Sauce, sugar snap peas, sunflower seed and a few almonds. The ricotta cream for dessert. Breakfast of 2 egg omelet, with 2 Canadian bacon pieces; lunch of salad with vinegar and oil and mozzarella. Off comes the weight.
The next 3 pounds won't likely be as cooperative. But persistence and the like of that diet will do it. You have to dispose of 6 cups of veggies each per day, and keep fat low and avoid starch nearly entirely. That's the essence of it. I am here to tell you stairs are easier, and getting into and out of cars is easier, and I'm feeling it.
I'm also much more cheerful since I got on the higher thyroid dose. The miasma of gloom has dissipated. Took a few days, but I'm starting to feel like me again.
February 21, 2011
Back from Radcon, more when I catch my breath…
We each gained 7 lbs between Friday and Sunday night on the convention green room food and a few indiscretions—see how you have to watch it at cons?—but we think part of that is water weight, and will go away. Right back onto the diet today. Last night we polished off a bottle of Champagne, just to finish off our indiscretion, so don't feel too sorry for us.
RadCon is a big convention, 2500 people, in Pasco, WA, one of the Tricities that sits on the Columbia river just south of us. People come in from Montana, Oregon, California, Washington, and Idaho, and in one case, Kansas.
OSG was there, with company. And we had a great time. Hung out with Patty Briggs and friends, and generally a good time was had by all.
February 17, 2011
Lost another pound apiece!
Jane and I both! Yay us!
I've been back in the pit of depression—not fiercely bad, but pretty uncomfortable—thought I needed my thyroid checked again, did, and yep! Doc upped my dose again. I shall be cheerful in short order.
Jane's suspecting the same thing. She's getting re-tested.
So we shall be both svelte AND happy!
The lights all work.
Jane put a spooklight in the pantry closet that welcomes me with light when I arrive or leave with hands full of cans; and turns off automatically when I leave.
She put a new switch on the stairs lights.
We ordered the bathroom tile.
I got a short story done for the Poul Anderson anthology: I'm doing one for Lawyers in Hell. Jane's working on her Seeking North story, and Lynn's working on another.
February 16, 2011
Borders closing 30% of stores, filing bankruptcy…
And the book biz changes…step by step. Ultimately the folding of bricks and mortar mega-stores is, imho, likely to continue, ultimately leaving the indies who deal in used and new and used; the online sellers who ship; and the e-books. And the pirates.
What this also does is mean 30% of Borders' buying is now lost to publishers, who are hurting with every such event, and ultimately to writers, who are hurting right along with them; and the bankruptcy means whatever Borders owes publishers and other vendors across the board won't get paid. Neither will the writers, of course.
Interesting times, my friends. I got a check the other day that is only 10% of what that check used to be. A 90% pay cut is pretty steep, let us tell you.
And now we've got a myth floating the internet that out of print means public domain. The pirates are flourishing on that supposition. They're encouraging readers to scan and offer up out of print favorites…when almost all backlist is out of print, because of the publishing crisis.
How nice!
February 15, 2011
The lights work! Jane's crashed out….
She has spent 3 days on what should have been a simple light take-down, put-up, connecting to same wires, screw to toggle bolts in ceiling, no problems.
She has solved: 1) no power in garage…breaker replacement, switch re-do, 3 hours with bare hands in freezing cold.
2) antique basement wiring turns out to involve current-carrying white wire (ain't s'posed to!—except—when returning from switch, apparently!) and a general mess. Seems when you wire a concrete basement that's been finished, you come down from overhead for wall sockets, and we have a mess that has been worked on several times, starting with fiber-encased house wire, and graduating to more modern stuff)—if not for a multitester and things we didn't believe when Jane tested them, we'd still be at it: read—3 days mostly on a ladder working overhead, and multiple installs. Multiple trips to hardware stores, various, and now an order in for some pieces to refurb a pair of never-used 1980′s halogen wall sconces into a modern pair of wall sconces, plus installing an intermediate line past wall studs on the stairway. Jane has figured out how to do this by carrying the line outside the wall behind a decorative molding and then going behind the wall to install the sconce, thus obviating a major destruction of all the sheetrock lining the stairs to the basement. Our source for the spare halogen bits is a company called Harrington, which seems to stock about everything electrical you would have need of. Including the bulbs. So essentially we're gutting the old fixtures and installing new insulators and circuit, to take a more modern (and safer wattage) halogen.
Jane was so sore by yesterday evening she could hardly walk straight, and is spending the day in bed.
4.3 at 9 miles from St Helens summit…with aftershock.
There's been some adjustment going on just about daily for a month or so in a long line running up the Washington coast: I don't know the fault maps well enough to say exactly which faults are active, but there was a larger one, around 4, recently, somewhere up near Vancouver BC (you could about pin them between Vancouver WA, right near the Oregon border, and Vancouver BC, up in Canada) and another series in the strait near Seattle…and, southward. While St Helens itself has microquakes nearly daily and has had for years since its last dome-building, this is the biggest quake closely associated with the mountain that's happened in some few years. It apparently was centered under Spirit Lake, which you may recall from the big-eruption side blow-out footage. Interesting to watch one of the more active tectonic processes in the States: St Helens will rebuild itself: it's far from finished. And while this may be a response of the fault system to stress of the moving plates, this could also provide a nudge to St Helens and an influx of magma.
February 14, 2011
relayed from Martha Berry! cover sketch!
WAY OFF TOPIC!
I checked Amazon this morning and found a cover painting for DESTROYER!
February 12, 2011
Jane's too busy to post this—we're installing new lights…
she's working on her story—or trying to.
We go out to the car (detached garage) to go to Home Depot and pick up our lights for the basement (we're installing daylight white fluorescent in place of yellow nastiness of 2-bulb incandescents.)
No power to the garage door.
Or to the lights.
We get out to look around, run in to throw the house breaker for the garage.
No joy. The breaker is loose. We conclude: must be the breaker.
We go to Lowe's where we know we have senior people to ask about installing a breaker. Our alternative is 300.00 for an electrician, and we're being fiscally conservative.
We find better lights and cheaper at Lowe's, then are told 'brand of breaker matters'.
We go home, extract old breaker, Jane runs to Ace (closer) and gets a single-switch 20 amp breaker.
We install it. Still no joy.
I go back to Lowes with the old breaker. Get a new new breaker.
No joy. I have also learned city code says there should be a breaker in the garage. Our garage is walled .in junk, a real mess. So…..I search where I can along the visible wiring. I find a hoe has fallen onto a transformer plugged into the circuit. I fix the situation, still no joy. I report this to Jane.
Meanwhile we have no power, and we have a mess. We have the garage door up for light in there, and just outside, at the end of our drive, two police cars have stopped a car and they have the occupants undergoing questioning while we're trying to fix things. Jane has located the garage 'breaker', which consists of an ordinary lightswitch, meaning the power has an on-off but no short protection.
We now fear the line to the garage has broken somewhere under the koi pond. We can fix it, but this entails rearranging our breaker box, running a new line out to the garage, etc, which, by code, has to be buried 18″ deep in what amounts to rock.
Meanwhile a neighbor has come over, and he knows electricity and circuits, so we borrow a tester from him and discover the light switch, under its cover, is not wired right. So we're working with that, the police are still at it, and at this point, we notice in the dim depths of the garage, there is a red light. This is on the battery charger. We start following that power down the line and find—yes, that plugin the transformer is in. It turns out that is glowing too: I didn't know it was a GFI (groundfault interrupt) —and all the power passes through that circuit on its way to the light switches. Ha! Reset the button, the GFI switches back on, and we have power. It's still not wired right: Jane spent the next while with very brittle cold wire, freezing her fingers off, and having the wire break repeatedly, rewiring that triple switch in the right sequence—
We're still thinking of running a new line and installing a breaker box in the garage, which we now (after this learning curve) know how to do…we'd vowed never to work with direct house wiring—but y'know, it would have been a way lot more than 300.00 by the time an electrician figured this mess out, and now we are confident replacing breakers and even installing a breaker box, and we *have* worked with house wire without electrocuting ourselves, so we're feeling at least triumphant and at least 300.00 richer.
February 9, 2011
Chaos, Inc. –or—our place.
We got ready to go skating today and got a call first from Joan asking if Sharon was going to be there and then a call from Sharon warning us that school buses with 90 kids had just arrived.
We cancelled.
The ceiling lights Home Depot had run out of were supposed to be in yesterday, so we went there to get them and they hadn't shown up.
Meanwhile the 'do not overtighten' warning on the new sink meant Jane did not overtighten the faucet connection to the metal sink. Now it's loose and we'll have to take everything out from below and try to work with a Big Wrench on a sink part that is supposed to be fully assembled before the sink is installed.
And after getting a nice new large tank for the two bichirs, (freshwater fish that look like stegosaurus) one of Jane's fish died. We thought maybe ammonia, which can get stirred up during a move. But that was a bummer. I did some online research and it turns out they're susceptible to a parasite and I got a recommended med. Which may or may not work, but we're giving it a shot at saving our remaining one. This is touchy because they're predatory and trying to get two to live together is iffy.
I, meanwhile, am working hard on the promised short pieces, and discovered a major technical glitch in one, ie, I misread a certain item which now causes me to have to go back to a total rewrite, but I'll fix it. That's annoying.
For weather, we get really cold weather, and frozen mud. If there's one thing as bad as soppy squishy mud, its mud frozen in ridges.
And the downside of actually losing weight—I'm fighting a battle with my mirror: when you wait late in life to lose weight, you do go through a little phase of realizing you do have a few facial lines as your skin loses some of its padding. On the other hand, if you're careful and use every miracle preparation known to vain humanity, you can diminish that. So I'm trying not to look like Boris Karloff, with a pound and a half of cold cream, as the song goes…Well, you change out every cell in your body after x-many years, and I am serving notice that the next ones to be recycled will be useless cells, thank you, which I do not wish refilled. Take note, procrastinators! Lose it before you join the cold cream club! And if you're where I am, well, we can sympathize with each other.
No signs from the fish yet: the pond is mostly frozen but wouldn't support a cat safely. We wake up with a dusting of snow and by noon it's slush.
Jane's in there serial-cooking a large purchase of Costco chicken: little ziplock bags of diced chicken mean I don't have to cook much for supper, and it's not been fortified with tons of fat and sodium, which is often the case with convenience foods. I made some cheese bread yesterday: we enjoyed a couple of slices and then I froze the rest. Cheese bread toasts wonderfully—but we have to hold back on how much bread we eat. Jane can have fruit, apparently, now that we're this far along in dieting. I, alas, gain weight if I eat fruit the way she does. So she owns that nice batch of pear apples we have in the kitchen. I stick to cheese. Our metabolisms work mostly alike, but my system tends to love any fruit sugar way too much!
February 7, 2011
Going mildly crazy…
I don't do short stories while writing a novel, with rare exception—-Seeking North will be easy to maintain; but…I had promised to do a bit for Janet Morris for a Thieves World piece; and a bit for Janet for Lawyers in Hell; and I have a debt of honor: Poul and Karen Anderson were two of my most frequent convention buddies in years past, and there's an anthology in Poul's honor that I'd been asked to do a piece for. Karen chimed in to ask me personally—well, so I'm in midstory on other projects. For Karen, yes. I will. I am. So that's getting done; I've done the TW bit; and then I've got an outline for the LIH project, and THEN I get to putting together the next novel, which will probably be another Bren book, while I've still got all the moving parts in order. Meanwhile we've got the kitchen cabinets in, and are drawing a bead on the bathroom tilework. And it's warming, which will mean we need to assemble the portable greenhouse and look at the yard.
But it's still cold as the hinges of you-know-what out there, so we're ok.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here with pain patches on—dunno what's got me so sore after skating today, but I am. Hope I'm not coming down with something…I haven't time!
