C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 212

70,000 words…and Jane has a new post.

http://www.janefancher.com/TheCaptainAndLime/

She's been doing a hysterical rundown on the woes during my absence and later—

Yet one more round with the pond.

It hadn't cleared appreciably, and new green algae started growing. Arrgh!f

This is where I put on my water chemistry hat and bite the bullet and get the (fairly expensive) phosphate remover. Or, as we say in the marine reef biz, don't bother getting a test for phosphate. If you've got algae growth, you've got excessive phosphate and no ordinary test will show it, because it's bound up in the algae.

So we killed off a megadose of algae, and here is bright green new algae within 12 hours. Speed of

68000 words. And the fish are ok.

The pond is still a murky mess, but the fish are eating, and doing well. They're spooked because they can't see in the murk, but they know our voices (try talking to your fish: "Here, fishie, fishie, fishie!") and will come when called to eat.

I've also added some bacteria, which hopefully will help.

I don' t know how many times I've been out there today. But we're gaining on it, and we hope to have a cleaner pond soon.

Well, the algae problem is about to win…

I did not want to use an algicide, but the soup was thick and we had hair algae on the bottom. Nastiness. I feared the pond might go oxygen-short if we let it get worse. So I bit the bullet and did it. I keep running out to be sure the fish are ok, but we are getting some major muck in the skimmer, and thus far the fish are annoyed, but don't seem to be in great discomfort. If they started to have trouble, we would have them out of there and into a barrel of fresh water so fast…

What got us was t

67000 words, about. Working to fish Bren out of trouble—

A quiet day. Laundry backed up for weeks—got done. I don't know if our pond sunshield is working but it's no worse.  We woke up last night to thunder and lightning, unusual for Spokane, but when you have a day of 99 degree heat and 68% humidity (I don't even know how you get it that way except under a bell jar in sunlight) and then a forecast 85 degrees for the day following—doh! I don't know how the weather bureau both national and local missed that one, but this former Oklahoman knows how to a

We're getting our summer today. 99 degrees and 68 percent humidity. And a letter from Lynn.

Glug. I'm having to clean the pond filter 2x a day, each time extracting about 5 lbs of algae. Next year I'm going to investigate what's safe to partially reduce this.

Lynn sent us a letter last night: she's still having troubles, but now knows why. It's progress. Also funnier than heck. I hope she posts that letter.

Prepping e-books

The actual launch of Closed Circle is getting close enough I'm going to spend time this evening actually assembling several e-books, notably Faery in Shadow and The Writing Life: A Writer's Journal vol 1-3. Those will be the first out. Rusalka is ready, but Jane is not ready to do the cover yet. She's prepping her own books and doing her own covers. I'll let her tell you about those.

What I have to do is: 1. assemble the book in mobi format. 2. assemble the book in its entirity except the cover a

Just an ordinary day with no emergencies…

I watered 4 sections of the back garden, 20 minutes a section, topped off the pond, cleaned the pond filter, adjusted the tank temp; wrote; did a little genealogy (recreation); and attempted for the 4th or 5th time that incredibly impossible form they want me to fill out for 491 titles (individually) in this confounded Google book settlement. I've filled all the form sets once, filled half of them once, filled some 80 of them today and each time the darned thing has glitched, refused to record,

Just had some great news from Lynn…she has achieved (almost) a template…

And it looks good. She estimates about 20 more hours hammering away at the thing, and she's got some serious business to attend in the next few days that will divert her attention, but she's seeing the finish line very close. Maybe this next week, friends! Time for us to start gathering things together.

What a day!

I did get some writing done, amid all the chaos, Lynn's been working on Joomla! through two serious personal crises and says she's really close to testing; we got the bug fixed and I ousted 2 spammers from our midst. If your user name is ILoseWeightAskMe, you're toast.

Fighting a real battle with algae in the pond, but it's just summer. I have to clean the filter often to give the UV light enough flow-through (speed of water movement) to get the job done. When I take the filter out it's 5 pounds