C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 32

The morning has not started well…the desktop accidentally upgraded from Win 8 to Win 10…

…and it is a real old desktop.

I get a weak, weak, unhappy ‘yayyyyy’ from Jane, who believes it may be sort of working.

Nutrisystem, third day, -3.

I can say the women’s jumpstart Nutrisystem package sold at Walmart (and I assume the men’s) does work. Entering the third day and down 3 lbs.

Cost: 40.00 for the packet for one person and another about 40.00 for the fresh food they want you to get.

Taste, not bad; and if we have one complaint, it’s being positively stuffed with food every two hours.

Cost, about 16.00 a day, figuring 80.00 divided by five.

Taste—pretty good, for diet stuff.

Kitchen necessary—a fridge but not a freezer; plus a microwave.

I definitely have had worse. Typical day: breakfast, a small! muffin; midmorning a quarter cup of salted nuts mixed with dried fruit; lunch, a small bowl of carrots, cherry tomatoes, cucumber and a half cup of lettuce with a tablespoon of ranch dressing, plus some little item like a piece of string cheese; midafternoon, 8 oz of yoghurt plus a quarter cup of fruit; supper, about 8 oz of not-bad beef with veggie soup with a cup of lightly steamed veggie such as broccoli, late snack about 3/4 cup of cheddar popcorn. By the time I’ve eaten all that, I’m about ready to say this is overkill and I don’t WANT to eat much tomorrow—

But then I get up and I’m down a pound.

I think the trick is keeping the metabolism high and working on a lot of raw garden veggies that aren’t easy to digest.

I’m also saying that little salad is right tasty. I can live with this. Price for food is a little high, but there’s no waste, and you end up eating healthier and less, so a few less trips to McDonalds might be easier on the wallet.

We’re going to try another diet to follow up, which uses special-sized containers (you’ve probably seen it on tv) to denote acceptable sized servings. Eat anything you want, but it has to fit.

Well, having indulged ourselves with ANYTHING we want since October…

…we are coming to account. And re-starting the diet.

Walmart had a starter Nutrisystem kit, which seems as good as any. We bought two of those (40.00 each) and then when you open them you find you need, yes, 45.00 worth of perishable food to go with. They cover about a week.

So I’ve just been down to Safeway to get a lot of broccoli and salad and cucumbers, carrots and apples and berries and such.

At least we’ll be eating healthy for a while. And it’ll get portion sizes under control.

I’m also resolving to drink the requisite amount of water. I’m not good about that. I grew up with such terrible water my throat locks up when I try to drink a glass of water straight. So I can go days without drinking anything but coffee. This is not a Good Thing. So having reached that age when things hurt and weight piles up too easily, I figure it’s time to reform. Water it is. Lotsa water. I have discovered I can drink it if I keep a tankard of it handy and shoot about three tablespoons of lime juice into it. Which is not a bad thing. That makes it go down without choking.

Seriously, the water that came out of gran’s house faucets was pink to red…and the pump in the yard was better, but always tasted of iron. Same with the water at our house during my growing up. I wasn’t allowed soft drinks at home, generally, just as a fairly rare treat. So I took to drinking tea and iced tea. A lot of iced tea. And when I was about 16, we got snowbound at girl’s camp for about a week, in a large drafty high-ceilinged cabin with no heat but a fireplace that only heated within 10 feet of it; and a Franklin stove with which we nearly had a disaster. I was cold most of the time, being one of the larger kids who could haul a meaningful log from the woodpile out in back (about 20 feet from the back door). But there was coffee. The leaders had a massive pot of coffee and no shortage of that… [we had had to hike 2 miles to the neighboring tiny town (anywhere but Oklahoma you’d call it a village) to get groceries.] Lotsa coffee. I took to it bigtime.

The grocery getting was a hoot. In a moment of madness, and a blank check from our fearless leader, we got eggs for our breakfasts, a whole sack of eggs, and the whole county was a sheet of ice. We took turns carrying the eggs, because if you fell while carrying the eggs you had to hold them up safe—we only broke a couple, all the trip back.

Anyhow—ice storms and diets make you appreciative of what you eat. It’s going to be an interesting number of days.

We have mostly finished the floor. We have the baseboards to cut/finish.

But we are redoing the house windows…which are extremely hard to open and worse to clean. That turned up as it seems the seal on the 8×6 picture window has broken and let water in. Sigh. We found that when we were doing the last of the living room.

The only thing we will say about this job is that we are not doing the windows. Moving a 1700 lb fishtank is one thing. Hoisting a double-glass 8×6 monster into place is another. So we have contracted to have it done. This was not expected, but it will be nice to open and close a window without risk of back injury.

11 windows, six of them fixed-pane glass and no two of the same dimensions..can’t be opened and therefore if we burn something in the kitchen, it’s hard to ventilate the place. Five single-hung windows of varying size. We’ve fixed and fussed with them since we got the house, and replacing that one monster—it’s taking up about a 5th of the window budget all on its own. And is NOT the one we would choose to replace. So we’re doing the whole thing, to get the two we most want to replace. We’re converting two of the fixed-glass ones so they can ventilate.

So the kitchen gets put on hold yet again—it’s the old story with renovating: every step done discloses another problem. Another reason to have the pros do it. Maybe they won’t find anything that needs doing next.

The good news is, the floor is gorgeous. We love it. We love being able to slide on it. So do the cats. I wish I’d had a pic of Shu running to land on a folded fluffy rug we have been using for padding. It traveled, and he was quite delighted by it. He did it again later. Much better than a cat bed.

Mmmm, two women could tackle the pyramids…

Just moved 2 fish tanks, one 54 gallon, weighing (with stand, sand, rock and water) about 800 lbs; and one 105 gallon, oak stand, glass top, weighing (with stand, sand, rock and water) about 1700 lbs—out of their corners on carpet with scuzzy padding and back to their corners on laminate about a third of an inch higher than the subfloor.

Yay us.

Jane has retired to go shoot things (video games) having done plumbing and shoving and lifting, and I, having mostly pumped water from one receptacle to the other and run stairs, am thinking about shooting things.

SFWA Grandmaster Award…

I’ve known for a few weeks, but they’ve now announced it. Yrs truly will receive the honor at the Nebulas in Chicago to be followed by an autographing open to the public, as I understand it.

I didn’t achieve this without the kindness and loyalty of my readers.

And a happy Valentine’s day.

Jane and I are taking the day off, mostly, playing GW2 and having a fancy breakfast (bacon, hashbrowns, eggs with sour cream, and English muffin (I think the English call it a crumpet.) And skipping lunch because we pigged out on breakfast, supper will be Jane’s favorite: chili on spaghetti topped with cheese, jalapenos, and sour cream, a little more GW2, and then coconut cream pie (storebought, not mine) with Champagne. I figure I cooked breakfast, I cook supper, and the pie—I’m not baking, because that’s a 2 day job. My recipe calls for refrigerating the fussily made pie dough overnight before one single chance at proper rollout, then a light bake, while making egg cream filling on stove, which requires constant stirring, with coconut, then bake while you whip up a real meringue (to heck with this modern fear of egg whites!) and then fill and top and bake the pie. That’s for people with time. I’ll content myself with cream pie with ooky stuff on it—the type our supermarket uses isn’t that bad.

We sort of missed Christmas, we sort of sat out New Year’s in a pile of stuff from the rooms we were trying to get finished, so I figured, hey, let’s do a nice Valentines Day of Idleness…

The eyes are almost better… a little soreness, but manageable with eyedrops.

It’s apparently a ‘known’ accompaniment to the cataract surgery, along with conjunctivitus, aka pinkeye, which in combination is just ducky. But hot compresses and, oddly enough, Similsan drops for pinkeye, are getting me through it. The worst bit was that the area involved had a nerve connected to the left lower sinus, and that was no fun at all.

All’s well that ends well. We may get that floor done yet.

The geology of this place…is kind of interesting.

This is what I live on:

400,000,000 years ago, there had been a considerable mountain range in Eastern Washington. Steptoe Butte was the tallest of that range. So there was some elevation that didn’t eventually get submerged in lava.

But 17,000,000 years ago, the Yellowstone Hot Spot was closer to us. And we had already had some action from the volcanoes of the sequence of subduction zones of the Pacific coast—volcanoes tend to form 80 miles inward of a coast where subduction is taking place, as wet rock gives up its water and it helps the formation of magma. A succession of islands had rammed the Washington coast, creating Washington in the process. The Steptoe area was probably an uplift not unrelated to that action.

But 17,000,000 years ago we had Yellowstone much closer to us, and our own flood basalt Columbia River Basalt Group, specifically the Grand Ronde basalts, laid down some 17,000,000 years ago. Probably this whole region at that time looked like a smoking parking lot, without the stripes, of course; and there was no Columbia river….just black rubble.

Then, 13,000 years ago, the ice age gave way to warming and melting of an ice dam on Lake Missoula, (Montana) sent flood after flood in our direction, giving us Dry Falls, the Columbia River, and the Channeled Scablands—before massive dustbowl conditions swept a lot of Nebraska toward us, creating Palouse hills to the south of us, burying Steptoe, once a very respectable mountain, up to its neck in loess.

We live on a ridge the Missoula floods missed. If you dig down too far in our lawn—you hit 17,000,000 year-old basalt, which exists in huge fractures. I can say we had one 4.5 earthquake here, and this place (we weren’t here at the time) acquired no cracks, but our apartment floor over on Latah Creek split right across, under the carpet and across the entry tiles. It moved as two pieces during the shaking. I was standing on one side and Jane on the other. This house is only one floor, brick and shiplap wood, pretty sturdily built, though our chimney might be at risk from another one.

Love the geology around here. Drive down the Columbia and you get a cross-section view of a huge basalt formation.

Thursday…at least waking without eye pain.

My new glasses are ready. I might go pick them up, if the eye stays as quiet as it is, but I can still tell it’s not happy, so it may not stay quiet all day. I’ve had compresses on the eyes every hour or so all day yesterday, and it’s helping—which is a good thing. Jane says the swelling is going down.

I was at least able to do a little work yesterday, and catch up on some sleep, which this has affected. Quel pain! I’ve never had this problem in my life—but as aforementioned, I think, an online opthamologist friend says this does happen with cataract surgery, as a consequence of the surgery itself, and though the left eye is the stronger, visually, the accident in childhood with the ether just left it the more vulnerable. The problem is pretty well just above where the worst scarring on the eye itself is. So not unrelated, I think.

Still, of all things that could remotely go wrong, this one is fixable with a heated compress, and it’s getting there, so all’s well. Hopefully it’ll be all good by next week.