C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 168

The weather's turning toward fall…

I think our second summer is over. The temperatures are falling, and more to the point, we're settling into more frequent rains, which means the wind has shifted from south to northwest, and once the weather starts rolling in from Vancouver, BC, and from off the San Juans, we get a different pattern. The koi are on wheat germ, to keep their guts emptying before they sleep, and though they're still keen on eating… once that water cools, the hunger trigger will switch off.

The couple who wanted the trees has taken the trees, and promised us rocks in repayment. They have access to rocks, and we gave them two handsome Canadian Hemlocks, which will do well on their acreage, and which are deer-resistent as well.

We did a job on the kitchen lighting: Jane and me trying to mount a 4′ fluorescent kit was quite a sight: it would have helped if we'd had ladders the right height. Try holding a weight over your head while standing on tiptoe while your partner hunts for a screwdriver…but she did all the up-and-down and I did the stand here and hold it part. The new instant on superwhite CFLs that screw into an ordinary lamp and T8 long-tube fluorescents have made a huge difference: and they serve as grow-lights, so they'll keep the tropicals nourished through the winter.

And we've changed diets: we're tired of Atkins, so we switched to South Beach, and I found some interesting data. 1) South Beach made a deal with Kraft to market this line of frozens—BUT some of the content of those meals is forbidden on the South Beach diet. So don't get the frozens. Go from scratch. This is a diet that works with several factors. 1) portion size: they tell you, and you measure. 2) variety —they have thousands of recipes. 3) allergies —you can dodge what you shouldn't have. 4) you do get a greater variety of foods, including veggies, it's cheaper than Atkins, using more veggies than meat, and it is a balanced diet. The downside is — you do have to cook, in the sense of measuring, using ingredients you're not used to, and you have to plan ahead, because you'll run into "this should have been marinated overnight" and "this should be chilled in the fridge all day." Well, when you're cooking supper it's a little late, unless you read the next day's menu. So…I'm cooking things that get every dish in the kitchen dirty, sometimes, as with the measuring cup, 4 times in one session; and since we have a small kitchen—this means we have to run the dishwasher after every prep, or I have no bowls. Using the same small glasses where I can eyeball 6 oz of juice is a time saver.

We'll let you know how this goes. If you want to try it, do not buy the frozen dinners without reading the labels very carefully. It's just crazy they'd violate the rules, but they do. Especially for the phase 1, which is a lot like Atkins.

Anyway, we now are launched. You know we're serious, because Jane is drinking V-8, which she really, really, really hates, I am doing without coffee (I'm a 2-pot a day coffee drinker), and both of us are giving up alcohol for 2 weeks.

The upcoming Rusalka cover:

This will be a total revision of the Rusalka books, not so noticable in the first, but definitely in the second and third. It's a fantasy, a romance, and a ghost story…

I did the cover sketch, and Jane did the color, the finish, the lettering…Thank you, Jane!

Another new e-book site, if you haven't found it.

The Sacred Band is Janet and Chris Morris' site: Thieves' World is one connection you'll recognize. They have a Kindle book, plus music download, and a lot of fun stuff going on.

One of those days…just bits and pieces of frustration.

I got up early to get the iris moved to the front. and Jane wanted to get weedcloth and rock under the stickery junipers by the stop sign and the fire hydrant. But it's brutally hot even if the thermometer says 80-ish. We try to work bent over pounding things in or planting and we get dizzy. So Jane came to help on my job—or I think I'd have thrown in the towel. The iris have really grown into huge clumps where they are difficult to extract, and the roots are monstrous: I collect a wheelbarrow full and come around to try to plant them in ground full of hemlock roots, and I'm getting dizzy from the heat—we're just not used to this.

Then we decided to go to the fish store, on what they said would be its last day for the season—and they're closed. Won't see them again until spring. We'd hoped they had one of Yoruichi's sisters still in the tank. But no go.

We decided to take a small diet break for the next several days: and went out for a hamburger and fries, and are having banana cream pie for supper. In about 3 days, we re-start the diet. Sometimes your system needs something different. On the other hand, we got the houseplants in from the garden and got them set up with a new light fixture.

Here's the deal: these new CFL bulbs (the ones that look like Dairy Queen ice cream) function very well as grow-lights, and you can put a hundred watt CFL in a 60-watt socket, because it only draws 28 watts. So we got an inexpensive ceiling fixture, got a swag kit, (ignoring the ceiling plate that it is s'posed to hang from as a light fixture,) hung it where the window light is inadequate during the winter, and it's quite nice. Now we will have a nice timed light that will keep our plants healthy during the dimmer days of winter (we can be overcast and grey for days or weeks in that season)…and it all worked quite nicely. Jane did most of it: I just managed to screw in the retaining rings for the light-shades backwards for her, so it all had to be re-done. We'll have that on a timer—even plants like regularity about their light-dose. And hopefully we'll be done with plants for a while.

The iris still aren't moved. We aren't sure we like them where we were going to put them, so we want to look at the ones that are planted for a while and be sure.

Moving lava rock…in the heat…

We're approaching fall and probably snow—but in the meanwhile, after nearly freezing all our flowers, and putting the poor koi on a wheat germ diet (you can't feed them protein in cold water)—we are now baking; and all the lava rock we had scraped up to put down new weed cloth now has to be shoveled back again. It's really hard to drive a shovel into a pile of red pumice. We worked as long as we could and gave it up. That's still a big pile and we're about 1/3 done. I don't mind carrying rock, but I hate shoveling it.

Rocks are so thick in the soil that we've given up driving the long-awaited weedcloth pins into it: I'm bending 4 out of 5 pins so badly they won't go in, and the 5th one is apt to be hammered flat like a badly driven nail, capable of holding, but just obnoxious-looking. Thank goodness for a hefty rubber mallet.

And I'm still working on the Bren book, and still spending my spare time prepping Chernevog for e-book release. Rusalka is ready. That leaves Yvgenie yet to go.

Fixing the fence a bit too late…

We lost our favorite and prettiest koi—the smallest—to a predator. I found a track I'm pretty sure was a raccoon in the mud from the drain near a break in the gate. We're so upset. She was gorgeous, and ate from your hand. And the butterfly-fins are just a little less agile in the water. We have ample cover for them, and we lost no others, but I spent some time today repairing a sprung board in the gate: we've tried screws, glue, and all sorts of fixes, and it keeps coming loose: this time I got a metal-bit and got a bolt all the way through it, with a washer to hold the bolt head from working through. I also laced the area with a noxious mix of pepper oil powder and yes, coyote urine powder. And we're filling in under the fence with gravel.

It's nature. You can't complain. But you can make the fences better and put up a 'no visitors' sign in raccoon-ish.

More English fun: Who/whose/whom: how to, and the sensible way to tell.

All the following statements are grammatically correct. And these examples are very, very frequently handled incorrectly in print these days. You may have to read this several times: there is no simple way to explain everything at once, for those that have forgotten transitive and intransitive verbs and what takes objects and what can't. But once you realize WHAT the subject of the who-clause is—you've got it. Also note: who/whose/whom/which/of which AND the substitute 'that' are ALL the word 'who' in various permutations.

Ilisidi had adjusted her schedule. She did not say who she had moved.

She did not say whose meeting she had moved.

She did not say who was coming.

Who shall I say is calling?

Whom do you wish to see?

To whom should I address this question?

The trick in figuring out who-whom is at once simple and difficult: but first let's understand the who-clause. It's called a RELATIVE clause because it uses a 'relative pronoun'—ie, who/whose/whom or which or even 'that'.

Note that it is a CLAUSE, and not a Phrase. The difference between clause and phrase is simple: a clause could easily be a whole sentence: a phrase is just a group of words. There are dependent and independent clauses. A Relative Clause is by nature a variety of Dependent Clause, because it begins with a connective word—in this case not 'and' or 'but', but 'who', a 'relative pronoun', so named because it 'relates' [carries-back/connects] to something outside the clause. Ergo—dependent.

Got it? All Relative Clauses are dependent, just because they contain that connection and are not fully independent. [Should you wonder what is an independent clause, your typical short sentence is an independent clause.]

But let's get back to our simple and confusing little who-clause, at issue above.

How to tell whether to use Who, or Whom…

The secret? Find the subject in the who-clause.

Look at example #1: She did not say who she had moved. What's the subject of the little clause? The answer is: SHE. SHE had moved. So what the heck is WHO? The trick is—words are left out, or 'understood' to be there. [The technical word for a dropout is an 'ellipsis.']

The full clause would be: who [it was that] she had moved. It's, in other words, a complex little bitch of an expression, two little clauses pasted together with words missing. The word WHO is the [God help us!] the Predicate Noun of an Intransitive Verb [this means it's equivalent to a subject, and is always in Subject [Nominative] Case] of the first little clause; and SHE is the subject of the second. This nasty little trick of expression happens a lot with WHO, just by the nature of what it does for a living.

Bitchy trick #2—the verb IS [am, is, are, was, were, be, been] is 'intransitive', meaning a 'forceless' verb. It doesn't ever take an object, so WHO could not possibly be in the Objective case [whom]. [ "I am I, Don Quixote!"] So though HAD MOVED is a transitive [force] verb and CAN take an object, in this case—there's no object in its clause for it to take.

#2: She did not say whose meeting she had moved. Again, SHE is still the subject. But the first little clause has changed: The full expression is: She did not say WHOSE [possessive] meeting [ellipsis: it was that] she had moved. MEETING is the antecedent [word described] for the 'it was'. This very nasty little combo is TWO who-clauses pasted together with words left out: thus: she did not say whose meeting it was that [=which] she had moved….MEETING belongs to the first one, its subject being IT. She had moved: subject is she and the object of 'moved' is the neuter who, ie, WHICH or THAT, a relative pronoun describing 'meeting'.

#3: She did not say who was coming. In this case it's straightforward: the only available subject for the forceless verb 'was coming' is WHO. It's in subject form. You could still expand it out to 'She did not say who it was that was coming,' but because the verb is the intransitive 'is' there's no chance of it needing to be 'whom'.

#4: A trio of little sentences now: memorize these, as THE most commonly screwed-up high English currently in issue.

a: Who shall I say is calling? This is CORRECT. "I" is the subject of 'is calling'. There is, again, a fallout. The full expression is: Who [is it/ that] I shall say is calling? So it's exactly the same as sentence #1.

b: Whom do you wish to see? The OTHER most screwed-up question. "YOU" is the subject of "wish". But now you have that rascally "who-word" as the OBJECT of the OBJECT. The object of wish is TO SEE. [This is an infinitive: an 'infinite' verb, that can act like a noun---WHILE taking its own object.] And yep, WHOM is the OBJECT of that infinitive TO SEE. In this case you have a choice, and could justify 'who' by saying there is an elliptical 'who is it whom' I shall say is calling? —but this is needlessly convolute, and sometimes you just throw up your hands and shorten the damn thing.

c. To whom should I address this question? "I" is the subject of SHOULD ADDRESS, "this question" is its object, and "TO WHOM" is a simple prepositional phrase belonging [adverbially] to the verb "I should address."

Note: English is so confusingly bitchy to sort, because it has eighteen tense-forms [most languages get by with 6], and constructs all of them out of spare parts. In Latin, for instance, "he will be arriving" is simply one word: adveniet. The base of the verb is ADVENI- The ending has an slight shift for the future-ness of it and the -t is the "he, she, it" form. English goes berserk when it has to break up that verb to insert other information. Will he actually be arriving late? Latin just says: Tarde enim advenietne. -ne is the question mark. Enim means actually/you're kidding.

Well, English borrowed all its who-rules from Latin, which neatly packages things, as above, and turned it into a nightmare due to its eighteen-tense diced-up verbs. Small wonder we get confused!

1100 members, people! Congratulations to us all!

We gain a little every day. I've kicked off 424 spammers, and we still have 1100 honest readers who are very welcome here! For those of you new to the site—there are 4 interconnected sites: this one, and Closed Circle, which is where we sell e-books and everything else that brings in funds to keep us going and keep the lights on, and there are also the blogs of the 2 other members of Closed Circle, Jane Fancher's The Captain and Lime; and Lynn Abbey's Face of Chaos. Links to those sites are o...

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Maybe the collective wisdom of WWAS can identify some of these.

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We're losing another giant…

Article: thedailypage.com
Harlan Ellison says he's dying. Damn. I don't know him as a close friend, but he's somebody I can call and know I'm going to talk to a sensible, can-do sort of acquaintance, on whatever it might be. Brilliant man, wonderful writer. I learned how to write a short story after hearing him explain what a short story is. ["Compression of time and space. Everybody has to come together at the right moment.":] And this gesture of going out for a final foray is like him. He's ...