C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 209

Ta-da! I have gotten cover images (I'm sure) and purchase buttons (I think)…

…actually installed on my Buy these downloads! page on Closed Circle. You can't see it yet, because I haven't figured out which toggles are safe to push, but I think I know how to make it visible.  We have the sales pitch, we have the covers, we have buttons, and all of a sudden things are making sense.  I'm so proud of myself. This program was not intuitive…but I'm beginning to see how its controls work.

88498 words. It's a beautiful day…

We've discovered the pond area is a good 10  degrees cooler than the front yard. Amazing.

Jane had bought a bunch of sale plants from Wayside Gardens end-of-season sale. They arrived looking pretty sad, but should perk up a bit with sunlight and TLC. Hostas, heuchera, plumbago, and a couple of creeping thyme, plus a baby hinoki cypress and a blue geranium. Those are to plant tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I'm just typing away. I've got some office work I have to do, which I've been postponing

87600 words. A hard day of work. And got the release date on Deceiver.

May 10, 2010.

I've otherwise not been too interesting today. I spent the day typing my fingers off.

86682 words. A productive day. Jane found the annual crop of cat teeshirts…

…at Walmart, and is happy. I got one that says: "Instant Pirate. Add Rum." And I also got something I had to ask myself if I needed, but yes. I need a place for my working papers and books instead of stacking them on the floor and getting them blown about by the ceiling fan. It's a put-together cabinet. It has 3 wicker drawers across where I can store papers and my huge stacks of printout, and 6 cubby-holes where I can put stray reference books and little boxes of oddments. Plus it's the...

85000 words. We had our first 'cold' night. The room temperature hit 62…

…and Ysabel wanted under the covers. Took me a while to get to sleep considering the new room arrangement (funny thing, hotels don't bother me)…but it works great.

The koi were too cold to eat this morning. They were down at the bottom not moving, but warmed up and wanted lunch.

We still haven't heard from Lynn, who is trying to recover from a double dose of the flu (a regular flu shot atop swine flu)…what luck!

And Jane organized my spice cabinet. Well, we may have some interesting recipes for ...

A day for MY room…the Augean Stables, part III

I never really have moved in since we came to the house. My lighting hasn't worked, never did get my pirate hat hung up, I'm using a child's coathanging rig on the back of my door to hang adult clothing (it drags on the carpet) and the walls have gotten dusty, of all things. Plus I am so jealous of Jane being able to put her chair where she can directly look out the window at the pond.

I mentioned this, and Jane, out of the goodness of her heart, and the fact I described my room as a Rubik's c...

85,000 words and gaining on it. Thank goodness.

Mr Lector notwithstanding, I am making progress now!

I spent the day glued to the working chair. I got blisters on my hand yesterday wielding a broom, trying to help Jane clean up the gutter mess, which shows you in what sad shape my hands are. They caught the gun-waving bad guy who held up somebody in a state park the size of a postage stamp, kind of off the beaten track and in a wooded area, where nobody in his right mind should be at 10 pm…they had the choppers around hunting for Mr...

And here comes the chopper again…(11 pm)

Some brilliant functionary decided that it would be nice to give our local prison inmates a holiday at the fair. At the end of the day, they're missing one, sort of a Hannibal Lecter type, far out of touch with reality, to hear the local news guys, and probably off his meds. He just sort of walked away from the fairgrounds. Apparently his voices tell him to do very bad things.

Now we have a chopper with a spotlight circling across the street, and probably every police car in Spokane having...

84,000 words. And with a clatter on the roof…

Nope, it's not Christmas, and that wasn't a sledful of reindeer that got me out into the garden. It was Jane with an extension ladder and the determination to actually clean the gutters.

I wasn't about to leave her solo out there, especially with an aluminum ladder and power lines: I'm sure she got tired of hearing, "Watch the power line."

But the gutter was packed with, yes, compost, which we are going to be using on the flowers: half a decade or more of no-cleaning, in which the hemlock...

Jane (who is far more clever with media than I) has got member galleries up…

…including cute kitteh pix from the Black Prince and Her Furry Grace. If you go to her Galleries page and click on the highlighted name of the member in question, you will get, center screen, their personal gallery. More pix are welcome. She has written an instruction for uploading pix of your own.