C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 20

Skype. Microsoft. Both on my no-no list.

I have never dealt with anything as needlessly complex as a Microsoft account. They screwed it a decade ago, and I finally, during a 2-hour battle with passwords, phone calls, entries, re-entries, password changes and downloads, have a working copy of Skype. I am going to use it for one event. Then I am going to quietly get it off my machine and strongly resist ever agreeing to it again. Lovely if your business is being reached by people, but mine is avoiding that sort of at-their-convenience day, in which my train of thought can be blown off the tracks by a random yak or message wanting something. I have now lost a whole morning in the middle of a delicate bit because of Microsoft’s ineptitude at communication. They need a writer. Someone conversant with plain English, as in, no, not THAT code, the OTHER code, and wait, we’ll send you another one. We’re texting your landline. Did you get it yet?

Are you seeing the ‘contact’ info on the top line?

I am seeing some names I recognize among the new joiners—BUT I’m not getting the letters that need to accompany the registration, which new joiners have to write. Is the address visible?

Note that we have passed 90,000 words on AR…

A really good milestone. We’re on pace for what we need to do.

Welcome to our several new members.

Those of you still awaiting approval, remember it won’t happen until you e-mail me (addy is in the obvious tab in the header) and tell me something—anything—proving you’re not another incarnation of ‘isellweirdpills.com’

Welcome all.

The pond is filling…

We took the day and kept at it, arranging rock, washing rock, scooping and pumping muck, and getting the pond about as clear as a 5000 gallon hole in the ground surrounded by trees, plants, and dirt can be.

I decided to revert to automation, in this instance, and connected the autotopoff, aka horse tank water level fixer, so by morning we should be on our way to having a full pond.

There is more to do: I have to wash out the filter boxes and the filters, add bacteria, add chlorine remover, add buffer, but our two pumps will be running to help those processes along.

When will there be fish, you ask. The temperature is running about 48 degrees, but the sun and the two pumps will add a bit to that. We’ll have to ask our koi place what temperature their fish are in, because we don’t want to stress them. We have to toss all our adult koi kibble (sob) and go over to baby koi food (the difference is size) aand then we can start thinking about baby fishes. I want one of Ari’s type, yamabuki ogon, and one of Maddy’s, which is a platinum butterfly fin; and we’ll want an orange one for Jane and a type which is rather hard to describe, but it has bluish sides and largish scales. Maybe a black one, and (for my vote) an orange-white spotted, because Renji was one of my favorites, the class clown. We’re not going to overload the pond. Give them room to grow fast so we can take the damn netting off sooner. It’s such a pain with the waterlilies and dragonflies.

We clean the pond

…of ten years of rocks sliding in; and just dust; and evergreen needles. And stuff. The very bottom of the wintering-over pit is, well, due for a cleanout. And a lot of rocks have rolled down there over the years.This is the pond drained down. We’ve thrown towels over the particularly exposed water lilies to keep them wet.

And here is Jane, in waders and thermals, at 48 degrees, in the rain, cleaning out the wintering-over pit. She’s restacked the rocks on the rim, a hands-and-knees job, and the water in that pit is green.

She toasts us with a cup of what she’s scooping out—old needles, sand, pebbles—

Draining the pond

We’re starting over. Clean out, start with fresh water, find ourselves some bird netting (fruit trees) to cover the pond while baby fish grow, and as soon as we have the water nice for fish, we’ll be starting over. We’re sad but starting to plan, and we’ve got a better winter system: I only wish we’d seen it before this happened. We’ll probably have to special order two, of Ari’s type and Maddy’s—the golds and silvers are specialty colors that have to be bred for. And we’ll just apply what we’ve learned and do it better this time. The pond is close to ten years old, so a cleanout is due: I’ll turn on the back yard water supply—it’s past a real hard freeze, now—and the snow is mostly melted. I’ll possibly put on a sprinkler nozzle to keep the water lilies wet while the pond continues to empty. Can’t get all the muck out, but we can make it better.

Bren would laugh.

An e-mail. ” Dear User,

Kindly go through the attached official letter, it is very compulsory.”

Just because your syntax is straight does not mean that you’re communicating what you think you’re communicating. In this case it reads: “Hi! I’m the cousin of the widow whose husband died in Dubai wanting to give you his millions because she knows you’re a good person! Have I got a deal for you!”

My answer will be: I shall be of course delighted to invest a few of the millions of your cousin’s departed spouse in your enterprise as soon as it all clears the bank.”

If you want to join—2 steps. Join, then write!

Please don’t forget the second step. Write to me: addy is on this page, and a ‘real’ [not bot] person can find it. I’ll be delighted to hear from you, will answer you personally, and I only ‘deny’ a membership that has sat there a number of hours with no letter yet. If you HAVE been denied, write anyway—I can still catch your membership and approve it.

Making progress

This isn’t the final form Wave will take. This is the ‘workable’ form.

One thing I’m really liking is the effortless blitz of the spammers (I’ve tossed 26 of them with a keypush and admitted two new members who are most welcome here).

The atmosphere here is, well, sort of like your neighborhood pub. I post, but everybody can comment, and we talk about most everything. If you’re missing any of the former features, you can find them in the buttons up top.

But we remain a work in progress. We’ve got help, and we’re not afraid to use it.

It is a real downer with the pond, and I wasn’t worth much yesterday, but now we’re on track with what to do about it, and we’ll just soldier through.

I think we’re on track for a melt pretty well before St. Patrick’s Day, usually the date by which we’ve seen the last of the snow piles, but these ones are apt to stay around for May Day by the size of some.

But when the spring winds and rains come, that thaws things pretty fast.

We’re cleaning up the house—the white kitchen floor is a disgrace (never get a white floor! but we didn’t choose this) with the tracking of mud and ice-melt: it’s just been unavoidable. But we are firmly resolved on minimal conventioning this year, and getting down to business about a garage sale: we condensed two very large houses into one and moved crosscountry with a lot of stuff we thought we might need and didn’t. We’ve moved to two apartments and a house under what you might call emergency conditions—the police swat team coming up over the garden rock-work in front of our windows looking for our neighbors was fairly persuasive on the last move!

The result was chaos. Boxes that haven’t been opened since Oklahoma City. Time to pare down and get rid of them.