C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 186

Another day, and this one mostly digging holes in mud and planting stuff.

Jane's beautiful little espaliered apple tree is in: it looks like one of Tolkien's elvish trees, three branches on a side, and centered on the back (barn red) fence. It has a Gravenstein graft, a Fuji, a Gala, Yellow Delicious, Yellow Transparent, and a Red Macintosh. And it's going to be a gorgeous backdrop, beyond a freestanding arch with clematis, at the back of what will someday be a little rill of water leading down to a secondary miniature pond.

We got some fancy juniper for that major ...

going to drop below freezing tonight—rats!

We have ton-o' new plants. Of course.

Jane worked outside from dawn to dusk, and I popped out now and again to assist, but I couldn't take that icy wind. She came back in after building 50′ of sidewalk (40′ to go) base (it will be gravel, lined with basalt and rimmed in places with retention slabs) and after yesterday wrestling yucca out of the ground. Did you know yucca produces a bushel basket of roots surrounding the central core? In-cred-ible.

We have about a dozen yucca plants. We have...

Passing of another friend…

Some of you knew him as Richard. He did the beautiful rendition of Norway as his avatar, and had many, many others of my ships in graphic representation—a talented artist, and a very welcome member here on Wave. He passed away unexpectedly this last week.

Richard's avatar, his own work.

Note: Stephen Goldin's got his blog running. Link on the left…

…sidebar. I promise it really IS left, this time.

Takes some doing to get through the hoops to comment, but drop over there and wave hello. He's using Blogger software, which wants you to set up a Google profile, which isn't a terribly bad thing. Spam shouldn't follow you home from that process.

incredible sun pix…must see.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/...

You ask me how a writer works…

…and it involves some ideas I've accumulated over the years.

Getting facts and dates straight in a narrative matters. You bet readers notice. Maps. Floor plans. You need these things.

I keep a nice little Laurel Burch book OSG gave me some time ago which is my notebook particularly for the Foreigner books. And that lets me keep track.

One of my discoveries is the value of old calendars. Or just doing a calendar form in your word processor and plugging it in. The combination of a detailed...

We're about to get the pond vac—and boy! is it needed!

It's the annual algae soup festival—we're having to wash the filter twice a day, and the koi don't tend to eat that kind of algae.

First thing I have to do is change out the UV light bulb in the anti-algae UV filter. That could be expired, and these specialized lights don't burn out before they cease to be effective.

Then when I get my hands on that pond vac, which is a powered one—the last struggled to remove a teaspoon of algae, and that went back to the store—I'm going to have a mammoth...

members with .pl and .ru suffixes…please respond.

We are getting a heavy burst of automated spam from these two origins. If you are a member from either of these regions, please send me an e-mail or post a comment, so I can be sure what I'm doing when I trigger anti-spam operations. Those who have already logged comments I tend to recognize by name; but someone who's joined and has been silent could get swept up by accident, and I certainly don't want that to happen.

Well, what did we do today?

Jane got out and ran the Mantis. I stayed in and wrote. Then we headed for the rink. I felt way much better than I have…3-turn is effortless again and I'm not having the dizziness issues. Then we got the notion how to cut those pesky bridge supports that have been hanging fire for a year. We went to Lowe's and got a packet of wood chisels. I needed to get a 'blue stone' or whetstone, but forgot it.

But in the meanwhile, Lowe's had an amazing special on small shrubs.

2.80 per shrub, for...

5×15 on a dig-deep day: 15×15 on a surface day…

with the Mantis. That's what I'm good for before I flag. We have a sidewalk snaking down mid-lawn from the front porch. I have about 15 wide on the side I'm on, and I'm using the Mantis to get through the peatlike root mat left from the sod-stripping. It's slow work, and strenuous: rototillers even of mini size are that. But Jane got the bricks out of the flower bed, and it is now contiguous with the lawn, which is becoming tilled earth. I turn up the roots to kill the re-start of the grass (...