C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 208

Life in Spokane…

Mr. Lector, back in the institution, has now gotten a phone and called the news station. He assures everyone he meant no harm, he is no longer schizophrenic, and the sickle he was carrying was to protect him from mountain lions.

A kid at school had a cough. Fears of swine flu led the school to dismiss him home. He got on his bicycle, and headed home. He was struck by a car rounding a corner and sent by ambulance to a local hospital. The hospital called his parents, who got in their car and...

Window washing and the Keystone Cops…

I went out to wash the windows. Plain water wouldn't cut it. I came in after the swabbing brush and the Dawn dish detergent. And I headed out again to hose down the windows and scrub.

"I'll help," says Jane. The wind is blowing a gale. She comes out of the house.

The door slams.

We are, yes, locked out. We have a 6 foot fence around the back yard, and we believe the back door is open. But—it requires climbing skills to get over that fence. The ladder is lying, yes, inside the fence. All the...

Jane's got some Closed Circle questions. If you want to input, go there.

We're getting down to the nitty gritty and are talking about site structure and emphasis.

the freeze is coming—29 degrees Monday night.

The koi are huddled under the water hyacinth, and they aren't eating.

The Valley had major hail, uncommon for us: usually hail falls as styrofoam pellets, but this dented cars.

And then a major wind gust blew over the gulls that sit on our outdoor table, blew over the brass lily fountain, blew a chair into the table, and, probably first, in what may have been a downburst from that storm, about 10 miles from us, blasted our back gate so hard it yanked the bottom drop-pin  right out of the...

A rainy morning—finally. And I got to thinking about the Dark Ages…

The resurrection of the genealogy DB (it crashed) has gotten me into the Dark Ages again, and fixing breakfast this morning I got to thinking how rich my ancestors would think I am.

Breakfast: I turn a tap, with a choice of hot or cold water to rinse a dish. I'm annoyed that the hot water takes ten whole minutes to arrive.

Ancestor: go to water jar, break the ice crust (it's the Little Ice Age) and get some water in a pot, poke up last night's fire, put on more wood to bring fire (and light...

91750…and it's autumn here. I expect the trees to turn in days…

We're forecast to get into the 30's, and it hasn't gotten much above 50 this afternoon. They promise us rain, but I have yet to see more than a few stray-sheep clouds.

The longterm forecast is saying we're entering an El Nino pattern, which will (usually) mean a rainy but temperate winter. And we just bought a snowblower last year! (But we wouldn't have survived without it. Jane did most of the shoveling, and she was getting exhausted.) So I suppose we could do with a moderate winter, but I...

92000 words. And the power unit on my computer…'sploded.

Well, not quite, but it quit and then got very hot. I use a Dell. If you recall the viral internet pic of the Japanese businesssman recoiling in horror from a burning computer, you may remember that Dell and several other computers were getting batteries from, I think, Sony; and there was a little thing called The Battery Recall.

Well, it didn't catch fire, but it could have. I'm glad Jane noticed how hot it had gotten, or we might have had a fire.

We had breakfast on the patio this morning...

Is there any item you absolutely cannot keep track of? Mine is…

glasses. Glasses and cups of coffee.

I have lost my glasses again. A-gain!

I have a problem. I have a torque in my vision: my eyes switch problems at a certain distance, which means I can't wear bifocals. A doctor who prescribed neomycin for a minor eye infection just before BucConneer nearly blinded me: my eyes got worse and worse, and by the time I lost patience with the pain and blurry vision and went to a major eye clinic, where they informed me it was, yes, allergy—I had some permanent...

no writing done today: the office reached critical mass…

It had become a Rubik's Cube problem. Move the wastebasket to move the box of sortables to move the chair to reach the stack…

It's a very small office for 2 people and their business records. It's become complicated by computer bits and bobs, by research books, tax stuff, junk mail, and things that we didn't know what else to do with, so they got stuck through the door and set on the printer, which doesn't help the printer situation, either.

I specialize in destruction: you want a dead tree...

89394 words. And Jane's aspect of Closed Circle now has content.

That rascal is going to have a bunch of books, several of them brand new, going up. She's been working on covers for the books, so she doesn't have the text fixed yet, and in her copious spare time she's been proofing Rusalka, but she is going to have a really big slice of the upcoming catalog, which I'm starting to work on.

We're going to need to revise the size of the cover images I've got: they're too slow loading for the catalog. But that's minor. We're needing to establish a file size...