C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 180

It's the monthly filk night…

…and we're both off to a party, with guitars and filk books and a box of wine.

We think we deserve it.

Retaining wall…

Jane as usual will have the pix. But half our front yard, up to the front walk, has a retaining wall about hip high, with cinder stone in front of it. The other half, a short half, is—was—grass, rolling down to the street.

Now there is no grass. And we decided to extend the retaining wall the full length of our frontage, which, believe me, looks so much better. And (Jane's brilliant idea) since the retaining wall as existed didn't need to be six stones high, we could begin to taper it off...

New Book on Closed Circle…

Lynn Abbey's The Wooden Sword is now available on CC. If you have bookmarked The Store, she has created a Lynn's Books page reachable from the Lobby, just as a heads-up. We have some navigational cleanup to do over there, but start from the Lobby and you should be able to find everything.

I got the UV unit up…

I hope this is the solution to the pond problems. It's a killer unit. Literally. It's sposed to kill algae, by exploding their cells. It'll do in some of our beneficial bacteria, but we can add more. I want to see the fish.

I got the unit, saw the 1 and 1/4 inch outlet on it, knew I needed plumbing, but did bright me go to the Lowe's a block upstream of the uncrossable traffic? No, I took the downstream course to Ace, only to be told by this sane sounding old guy it was special, and I should g...

4th of July and I'm going to honor the spirit of '76 by disagreeing…

…with the insipid offerings on Discovery, such as the Story of Us and The Revolutionary War.
You know I do genealogy. And you know I'm American. It has not gone unnoticed by me that my ancestors were a mixed bag…and that in the minds of many we weren't so much rebelling from England (the view King George took of the event) as dissenting from the way the English government was working. In effect, we weren't fighting the English. Many of us were English.
And insipid programs that rehearse the...

New members feel free to introduce yourselves…

…we don't stand much on protocols here. I'm CJ, not ma'am, flamers will be assigned a marshmallow stick and set in a corner to do something more useful, and we generally just ask that people be courteous toward each other.

If your membership ever should disappear, it probably got caught in our tougher spamcatcher, me: I'm always suspicious when I see a user name that could not be replicated without a codebook. If this happens, nothing personal: if you post once, you enter my memory bank, and i...

12 members away from 1000

…we're headed for our first thousand members. Thank you all. Those of you who've been lurking a while, hey, we don't send you spam or sell lists or even put up ads. You're welcome to join us!

Getting Closed Circle file to an Iphone…

we have an inquiry on CC. We assume that you first download a file to your computer and use a USB cord to port it to your Iphone. But we're not sure.

So could somebody who uses an Iphone outline the steps for us and tell us what format the Iphone uses?

We have the water feature running…

This is the front yard, mind. Only 2 trips to the hardware store after a) more hose: they only gave us half enough b) a hose-to-pipe threading adapter. We already had: the fountain body, a 2-step hole, a 1 inch hose barb (we keep a marine tank: we have a whole drawer of mysterious plumbing bits), a ball valve (for control, which we don't need,) underlayment, liner, pavers, bricks for fill, rocks for cover and decor, and a float valve (shuts off the water flow when the float rises to max....

Closed Circle is soon to break out in new books…

While I've been busy getting Bren into trouble, Jane and Lynn have been working hard on book conversions, and Lynn has her latest cover (her own work) up on her site. Very soon now, they will be putting up books. Jane is close. Lynn is close. Just a heads-up. Plus we have some fun new material, kindly supplied by readers, for Cafe Press. So all sorts of things are coming Real Soon Now!