C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 216

Took a day off from writing to pound stakes and haul dirt…

Washington soil is stubborn. Put a spade in it and you can hop up and down for an hour on it without penetrating more than half an inch. It's gravel. Glacial till. You can shovel it if you slant your shovel sideways and hack, like somebody shoveling coal on a steam locomotive.

Say that driving stakes meets the same problem. The only help is to have the ground a little damp. But I got out there to put the back-board on the flowerbed in front of the mural, and swung a regular hammer to little avail

an update on Lynn's progress with php and css…freely translated…Closed Circle

She's still reading her new reference books, which apparently provide you sample files that don't match the examples, which has her kind of stumped, but she's forging ahead, and says she's making progress.

Meanwhile I've got some books mostly ready to go, and I'm halfway (after a month) toward getting Rusalka into shape, but it will need a new cover.

Jane has ordered her art computer, and will be in shape to start back to work on covers. Right now everything I have ready to go has a cover, but Jan

400 members, people! Welcome to all our new members!

So glad to have you aboard!

One more round of waiting rooms…

Took Joan back to the doctor today, and now they want her to go to a lab, which her daughter in law is doing. Jane's meanwhile using fish tubing to connect the fuel injector on her car so she can get to her hair appointment, and her hairdresser apparently had a yen to cut things short…Joan's disgusted, and miserable, and it's just been one of those days.

On the brighter front, it's so much nicer to type when you don't have to back up every fifth letter. I'm loving my new keyboard. The Dell guy ca

Testing my new keyboard. Stiff but even.

I think it's an improvement. My keys get hair-triggered as the springs get used, and then some of them get so laid back they refuse to fire. Or the key caps fall off.

That was without having to backtype. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog and we didn't skip a letter. Yay!

(And if you folk of the post-typewriter but not post-computer age don't know that sentence, that's a keyboard test.)

Getting instructions from Dell was a PITA, but the internet abounds in information, with illos. A few s

It's going to be a busy day, but not as hectic…

9 am, and I've gotten an important scene written. Jane and I had breakfast in the garden, and the day is wonderful for July, a high of about 75 is forecast, the skies are blue, the (—here we interrupt this idyll for a breathless dash to the garden, where I recall as of an hour ago, I put dechlorinator in the pond and turned on the spigot to fill to make up for evaporation and the slight overspill at the waterfall we have still not been able to trace: since 30 minutes runs 200 gallons, a fact tha

This has been a day!

I got some work done this morning…woke up to gentle rain, but during the night a thunderstorm had pretty well stripped the roses of petals and knocked the hollyhocks down in front.

And then our friend Joan, who is recovering from surgery, called, needing transport to the doctor. Without going into detail, shall we say I got her home, and then she had to go to another doctor, and having started noonish, I got Joan home again at 6:30…I'm tired. She has to be absolutely exhausted. We went out to eat

I've added a feature…

A book discussion. You'll find the tab above. I hope you enjoy it. I'll answer if I feel like it. Or if I can think of an answer.

So what are you doing on the 4th?

We're working as usual. We'll probably go up the street to Joan's place: she lives on a cliff overlooking the valley, and that means we can see the fireworks downtown. We'll sip a little wine—Joan may or may not: she's still recuperating.

The whole of the neighborhood heads to Joan's street: the fire department sets up street barriers, and people come in cars and park. It's that good a view. There are people sitting on curbs and all over. Joan isn't sure how much she's up to, but they're having a

Rough yesterday, but when in doubt, work: the creative part…

…isn't working too well today, so I don't want to touch that delicate scene in the Bren book. So I worked on Rusalka, getting it into HTML, with all the fallouts from a damaged file. Not as rough as Faery was, but it's as if every second scene is missing about a page.

Fortunately I'm a very fast typist, and I have a system for getting proper curly-quotes into HTML: you type XX for an open quote, ZZ for a close quote. APO for an apostrophe, LEFT for a left-facing single quote, and DASH for a 1/m d