C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 161

the weather is turning again

It's been up to 50 degrees, melting the snowpack on the roofs considerably, which is very welcome. The koi are deep asleep under a slab of ice; and everything is still snow-covered, with dark holes where the footprints have melted down to soil.

Last night we looked out to great slushy glops raining past the streetlights onto wet pavement—this could have been nasty. But it went back to rain, and when Jane reported to the lab this morning for the quarterly blood test (thyroid, and so should I) it was pretty clear.

We added up everything we were apt to spend on antibiotics and downtime—or a new (and too late) tree—and decided that we should just get it together and got down and get some air purifiers for our respective bedrooms: so it was pricey—that was a major dent in Christmas—but we think it was smart. I'm already breathing easier, when every breath was going down to the lungs like fire.

The real stuff is coming in this weekend, so they say: it's supposed to snow and Patty and Mike Briggs (Patricia Briggs) are coming in for a book signing from their home south of here. We've arranged to have dinner with them; but we'll offer to put them up if it's as dicey as it could be—there's an absolutely wretched junction of I-90 with WA 305 or whatever, around Ritzville, that is a magnet for ice and the worst weather to be had. So we hope for better—at least for their trip—but it is what it is.

Trying to figure what to have for supper tonight. The big deal on South Beach is veggies. No matter what else you have, you have to eat a cup or two of non-starchy veggies apiece at every meal, so there, I've got to figure something. It may end up being a huge helping of cauliflower and a main course of southwestern beans with cheese. (That would be the protein, which is how we get by with beans.)

On the good side of things, the weight is still trending downward. It's taken us two weeks to diet off what we gained at Thanksgiving, but hey, we had fun!

Down for the count…allergic to the tree.

Woke up yesterday with a sore throat, headache, dizzy as a hoot owl, and not feeling well at all, when the two days prior I'd been on top of the world.

Yep, the tree. We have to have an artificial tree: I'm so allergic to trees in general it's pathetic, and can't even touch raw or living oak wood—I could NOT have been a Druid—but cut evergreen has been the bane of my Christmases lifelong.

As a kid I was sick every December, and would come down with a roaring ear infection that would keep me abed during most every Christmas, and with an infection that would last into mid-January. Ie, when our tree came down, and when everybody else had to put theirs out, I'd begin to recover. For those of you who don't have allergies—the infection follows shortly on the irritation of tissues that comes from bad post-nasal drip. It's such fun. In those Jurassic days, every school, shop, church, and most houses had cut evergreen all over the place. There was no escaping it.

Of course in the 1940′s nobody knew much about allergy, and half the medical profession didn't believe in it, outside of 'hay fever'. I was accused of going outside without my cap, or scarf, or maybe it was gloves; I was bundled indoors at the first hint of snow and told I was too sickly to go out and play. And there would be the tree, cut fir, or worse, at my grandmother's house, cedar straight from the fields; and I'd be abed again for the season, shut in WITH the source of my problem, with all doors and windows sealed against 'cold air'. I tried to tell them the 'cold air' relieved the problem. But of course the doctor knew best.

It wasn't until the '50′s that they figured it out, and we got one of the early holiday trees: aluminum. You couldn't put lights ON it: they came from a color wheel that sat on the floor next to it. You could hang ornaments on it, and we were counted very modern; but they still had real trees at school, and at church, and I was a bit better for longer, but still sick every Christmas. I was forbidden to go out in the snow because, yes, now baby brother was reactive to 'cold air' and 'sickly', and I couldn't go out because the baby would want to go out. Sigh.

Then we discovered a new thing: instead of me growing out of it, it got worse. I got to where I couldn't visit a house with a tree. I taught school for a decade—and routinely, every Christmas, I'd totally lose my voice: they still hung garland in school. So I'd be voiceless for at least a week.

And the new fiber trees have one drawback: if you don't replace them every 3 years, they get mold. And mold has just about the same effect on me as real evergreen does. My ears ache, my nose pours, and, as with many molds, they're psychoactive, and I get depressed and Jane gets her own version of it.

Well, darn it, we have a tree we love: the last of the really good fiberoptics. And it's, yes, old. And we should replace it, but it's up, and it's beautiful, one of the prettiest trees we've ever had…

I went off to Costco yesterday while Jane was on the ice and got an air purifier, and we set it beside the tree going full blast, which I think, this morning, is helping. It's one of those Oreck things, with a killer throughput and good filters, and the air is much cleaner in the living room. My room only has one of the passive electrostatic flow sorts, that puts out a trickle of good air. But at least I'm on the upswing: I slept all yesterday afternoon, watched Hell's Kitchen, then went back to bed and slept hard; and this morning, though I now have some of the symptoms of a sinus infection, congestion and the remains of a sore throat, I'm hoping I can throw it off.

I could so easily become a Grinch. But I'm going to enjoy the season. If it takes antibiotics again to do it.

bots have been going nuts trying to get freebies from Closed Circle…

20 attempts inside two minutes is a new record. You have to wonder what they're up to.

See how privileged y'all are? The robots are standing outside battering in vain at the gates, but you can get there whenever you like. Just click those ruby slippers…

The carnage has started on Skating with the Stars…

Just thank goodness it was no worse. We have one unspecified illness—which could be concussion: you can start throwing up after a hit on the head a day ago, and that can be a lasting problem. They're not saying. We had someone—a professional— nearly have a finger severed by her student. Whether that cut missed the tendon they're not saying. She's calling it minor. When 200 pounds pressing down on a blade that can cut a slash in jeans just by setting your skates on your lap hits a bare hand lying on the ice, it's not minor. I hope they're paying these pros plenty, because they're taking their lives and health in their hands.

I'm all for adults learning to skate. There are ways to do it safely, and that includes not trying to do a flip jump or toe loop after one week of instruction, not going out bare-handed for a good impression on the cameras, and not trying complex pairs maneuvers that send you down in a tangle in which the pro's first thought is protecting the student's head from impact (Hel-mets! Please!) or in a situation where the pro goes down because of the student and the student has no clue that he's too close to his partner with the blades.

simple treat for cold weather

Buy bulk cinnamon bark. Break off an inch and drop in hot liquid: coffee, tea, water, cocoa, etc. If you don't use real milk, you can go on using it for hours and hours. It just gets quicker to flavor up. You don't need those pricey little specialty coffees. Just go straight to the source. You could probably do the same with a few cloves. Nutmegs are too large. But the basic principle of tea is something that will exude flavor into heated water, so in that sense coffee is a tea, and so is lemon or a single cinnamon stick in hot water.

Making progress, finally…

There'd just been too many interruptions on the Bren book—had to go back yet one more time and sort.

Now I'm much happier. Making good progress. Things are making the sense I wanted them to.

Got together with Lynn last night, long phone call. Which threw me late getting to bed, late getting up this morning, late with just about everything.

Yesterday's eating out fairly well put the kibosh on the pound-shedding I'd hoped to do, but I didn't gain: that's good. Jane actually dropped a pound, having had water instead of a couple of glasses of vodka. Bad me.

The weather is being iffy—we're apt to get snowed on again for a bit, but then we're going to have a couple of days of everybody's favorite!—wait for it!—freezing rain! Aren't we happy?

Jane and I did look at bathroom tile last night—had a brilliant notion of doing maybe a koi theme, and looked up koi tile panels on the internet. OMG. Can you say beautiful. Now I wish we could really do some redecorating. But…replacing the hog-sized breathing plastic-covered hole in the bathroom wall is kind of a necessity. (The tile leaked, due to a handicapped bar that had not been properly installed: pulled away, cracked the grout, and there we were, mush for a wallboard and tile buckling. So—hog-sized hole. Great decorative feature.

But it does mean we can shout straight down to the basement, if we wish, or tell if we left a light on down there!

funeral yesterday…on short notice…

…family member of a friend. We found out way close to the moment, and ended up dashing down to a church for the funeral, then out to lunch with Joan. We may or may not get the tree up today: got a lot of work to do, of every sort, office work, writing-work, housework, etc, and yesterday sort of went away in one left and right turn after another.

Nobody told the figure skaters about the hockey tournament…

So Jane and I and Steve and Tracey all showed up, somewhat annoyed to find no available ice.

But we got the grocery shopping done. We may go out with Joan to lunch tomorrow, just for a non-cooking holiday.

We bought 26.00 worth of bargain chicken, and Jane is in there grilling all of it: we'll dice it, freeze it, and have chicken for fast dinners. She's also prepping broccoli and cauliflower.

Meanwhile having worked through some very hard scenes in the book, I'm going to go into the office and perform a mail sort.

We're going to put up the tree tomorrow. It's starting to snow again on Sunday, and will continue through next week, but at least we have the major load off.

And the diet, while slow and a little frustrating at times, is still working.

Well, I'd better hit the office and start sorting paper into piles.

Alien life found…in California.

Apparently there's more than one way to build a DNA molecule. And here I shout, "I knew it!" and smile broadly.

Arsenic, would you believe?

It's from Mono Lake.

One of my unguessable career bits was on the RNA thing—nothing too elevated; but some work was being done in French, which I could translate for my roommate Linda, who was working as lab assistant to a professor who was working on the whole DNA/RNA business. Her job was flipping planaria (flatworms) to see whether they righted themselves to the left or the right, then chopping up worms of the lefthanded religion and feeding them to righthanded flippers, then flipping those worms and seeing whether they converted. This meant a basement full of white enamel pans, bubblers, pumps, etc, and I got drafted preparing slides, washing pans, adjusting bubblers (my fishtank hobby) reading French, grammar-checking the resulting papers and notes, and otherwise being Jill of all trades. I also did some of the observing and recording, which of course would be crosschecked!—so I was sort of in the background of what appeared in—I think it was Science, not Scientific American.

Anyway—shall we say I absorbed a lot of really esoteric stuff, and became better acquainted with flatworms than I would ever have envisioned, not to mention the RNA/DNA thing when it was new. So I did some daydreaming, while scrubbing white enamel pans, on how I would build a helix if I had to build one, and whether the helix we have would be the only possible construction, and didn't think so, but here we are! It was living in California, all this time!

Relieved to report a second day of melt. This takes weight

…off our roofs. I figure the church over there will go first, that and the flat roofed sections of the house across the street. But that snow was incredibly heavy and wet: a shovelful was a strain to lift, and I'm in pretty good shape.

Last Snowpocalypse, if you were with us then, we lost, in just our neighborhood, a modern grocery, more than 6 garages and carports, a Hancock's Fabric Store, Mel's Nursery and Gift Shop, and we were really worried about our ice rink—but the manager, no fool, spotted the snow removal team on the Wally-world-style store (Fred Myers) across the street and hired them to get the snow down. Jane and I are officially declaring ourselves too old and valuable to go onto the roof to move snow, but finding someone to do it who's actually not apt to sue you if they fall off is not easy. So we're really glad for the melt.

The small machine repair shop down the hill has so many snowblowers to repair it spent more time checking them in than fixing them, and has hundreds lined up to fix, most of them probably with broken or slipped belts. I'd have thought the big ones would take an ice berm from a snowplow, but apparently not: apparently they're not supposed to. So the belts break or slip, or they screw up the motor beyond all repair. I love, love, love our little electric! It doesn't require annual service, I suspect it doesn't have a belt (gears), it's light, and it starts like your vacuum cleaner…

We were going to go skate today, but I'm working on the hairiest bit of this redo, and I just want to be through this scene with my brain focused. So we're sitting pat.

We're going to have just cloudy weather until Monday when the snow starts again.