C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 45

We finally got the rain.

I waked with something making a racket at the window screen. Wasn’t sure but what I ought to get Ol’ Betsy and check it out, but the tops of the bush outside my window were tossing wildly in the wind, and the joint-ache that had plagued me all evening was gone.

Yep, that was a front barreling through. With rain. Quite a lot of it. I am still sneezing my head off. The yellow pollen dust (it’s the first time I’ve seen dust rimming puddles on the ground, and coating lawn furniture like some alien plague fallen from space—that was yesterday morning. This morning things are rain-washed, and the day’s jobs—water the front yard plants with fertilizer and pull and clean the pond filters—are in doubt.

I really, really need to get the pond filters done, because when they back up, the emergency drain can lower the pond level and generally mess up the chemistry.

This is where a rain suit can come in handy—top and bottom. Rubber clogs, pants, coat hood of impermeable cloth: and pretty warm. That may be the order of the day, to get that filter cleaned out. Yesterday I tackled the waterfall filter and backflushed it into a hose that wasn’t clamped down enough…and it needed a flush badly: smelled of hydrogen sulfide, which is not a friendly situation. Wasn’t too bad a condition yet, just a hint of it, but I still got it right in the face and soaked my clothes. So I fixed the clamp (new drain hose) and then went for my second shower of the day.

Today—at least it’s not that filter. I just have to pull 8 filter pads that weigh a ton when full and hose them down over the ivy bed until they’re light again.

The hawthorne is in full bloom. Every branch is pink half-inch rosettes on all sides. Maxfield Parrish, I tell you.

I gripe, but if not for the garden I’d sit in my chair working all day, which is not good for a body.

And a fast check of the weather forecast shows rain as far as the forecast goes. A lot of it. So I think I’d better put on the rain suit and get that filter changed. The fertilizer-job I think will get skipped this week.

Drive-by posters…not here… on other sites.

I swear, there’s a thing almost as bad as trolls, and that’s people whose brain only picks up buzzwords: they flit through the internet looking for a word that sets them off, and they drop some post picking nits with the original post—not that they read it. But they found one of their triggers.

Sheesh. Some people need to get a more productive hobby.

Even worse when somebody starts arguing with the drive-by.

Several of them this morning. Not here. Elsewhere. Everyone here is selected to be civilized and sane. But sheesh! There are times I just run in here and shut the door fast!

Recipe

Pork chops. Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing, in powdered form. Coat chops, no salt or pepper: the dressing mix powder has plenty of flavor. I had a good result using a little oil in an iron skillet, starting them on the range, then finishing the same under broil (an iron skillet moves easily between the two) until done.

Real easy. Pretty darned good. Kind of a tangy taste. We prefer the thin-sliced chops: two does nicely as a serving.

Coleslaw on the side.

Totally legal on Atkins. And otherwise indistinguishable from just good healthy food.

Tonight, I think, spaghetti and meatballs. If you have a Costco, Kirkland frozen meatballs are almost as good as good homemade. I fix the spaghetti, pop a sufficient quantity of meatballs into a lidded small 1-pint saucepan, heat with a very little olive oil, until they start to brown. This coincides, on low (5) heat about with how long it takes to cook spaghetti. I add a half cup of Classico (pretty darned good) spaghetti sauce from a jar, serve on spaghetti with a dusting or shaving of Parmesan, and the whole deal takes just a shade longer than ten minutes.

During the week, when time is shorter, I often just put diced precooked chicken bits into the same lidded pint saucepan, heat with olive oil, black pepper, tablespoon of dried basil, pour in half a cup of grated Parmesan, stir to melt parm onto chicken, serve as topping for Caesar salad, Cardini dressing, with an half cup of added sugar snap peapods. It’s less than 10 minutes to fix, and cleanup’s a snap.

Kitty crisis…

One thing kitties never miss is suppertime.

When mine didn’t show for supper—I knew something was wrong. Though he’s finicky and sometimes decides he doesn’t want chicken tonight, he wants salmon. And he will eventually show up and eat whatever chicken the black one didn’t.

But he didn’t show.

Well, I thought, he’s sleeping somewhere. Had the evening game. Signed off early with a headache. And started looking in his usual sleeping spots.

By nine, and no kitty, I was searching bedrooms, office, kitchen cabinets, and beginning to search outside—we’ve been letting the black one sit out in the ferret cage on the concrete, so he can roll and watch the birds and butterflies.

Jane had been to the store about mid-afternoon. We began to fear my rascal had gotten out. He is a housecat, has never set foot on dirt, well, not but once or twice, and has no senses about traffic (we live between two very busy 4-lane streets, buses, trucks, you name it)—and I’m not sure he has any homing instinct at all. If curiosity carried him out of sight of landmarks, he might not find his way home. He is chipped, but the chip registration expired a week ago.

By 10, Jane and I have searched upstairs and basement, called and called (he is not good about coming when he thinks he could be in trouble or that there might be a cat carrier involved or if he’s in a place he’s not sure he should be in or if it’s Tuesday and it’s raining…) And we followed the black one’s searches about the house, which began to convince us he was as confused and upset as we were.

At a certain point we left the front door open to the screen so if he came home he’d find a door, and us, and I made trips out to search the garden.

By about 11:30, after searching the back yard repeatedly, I decided to go out for one more search. Jane decided to make a try too. And I also checked, as I had previously, the aisle between the neighbor’s house and ours, through the gap in the gate. And I saw, just for a moment, a fleeting patch of white, as the rascal passed from neighbor’s house to our front yard. I called to Jane and headed out the gate and around. Jane went some direction or another, maybe through the house. And I spotted him—crouched on the path some thirty feet away, wild-eyed and not inclined to come. Nope. He darted past me, down the space between the houses, under the garden gate and in. Jane and I both followed. Jane opened the back door, and we hoped he’d go that way. Nope. Back to the equipment jungle at the back of the ell, where it’s darkest.

At that point, finally, he seemed to think he was in sort-of a ‘right place’ and might deign to come when called, maybe. If it felt right. I called, didn’t make a grab for him. He came right to my hand—-then decided it could be a ‘guilty place’ after all and dived past me. I nabbed a hind leg and a tail and flattened him so I could get a good grip, at which point he became ‘guilty kitty’ and tucked down as small as he could get. I gathered him up, this time with a good kitty-cuddling escape-proof grip, and hailed Jane that I had the escapee.

We took him inside. Oh, yes, glad to be back. Black one sniffs him over. He spends thirty minutes sitting where he can see us, but where he’s not quite in any ‘territory.’

Then evening snacks. OMG, he’s back. He spent the night where he usually does, sleeping right by me, and wanted to sleep in, this morning. I got him up anyway.

This morning, for breakfast, NEITHER cat seemed interested in sitting by the back door, while we ate on the patio.

It probably says something about us that we are better about charging our…

…gaming headsets than we are about charging our cell phones.

The gaming headsets are a moment of justified and harmless mayhem after a day of getting Bren in trouble…

The phone is a device that really should sit on the table and ring only with the pleasant salutations of friends wanting to do lunch.

Alas, we have calls from Unidentified, and various bogus or nearly bogus charities. Even if we’re on the do not call list.

The cells don’t have that kind of nonsense, but I do forget to feed them. So does Jane. Until we’re on the road again and say to each other, like Dekker, ‘What time is it?’

Of course our phones are deader than the ever-unfortunate mackerel.

I know the kind of cell phone plan I need: one that doesn’t charge you if the darn thing isn’t charged.

The crisis that wasn’t.

We’ve been procrastinating the pond netting, because, a) the netting roll was locked up and I didn’t know where the key was, and b) we’re up to our ears in editing and c) it’s a big job.

So yesterday while Jane was deep in edit, I undertook the run to Petco after cat food (or else), and the run to Bed, Bath, and Beyond after refills for fizzy bottles for Jane’s Soda Stream—because Walmart screwed up and got the wrong size bottles, and she’s getting desperate. And to Costco after a list of things we’re out of. The first two were not too bad. The next one—OMG. I was there fairly early, and I thought this would save me crowds. Not so. The plants are spring things are in. It was a slow-moving, large-family zoo. Every line was at least 10 carts long. And in my line there’s a large family having a dispute with the cashier, forever. Finally they get this settled. Everybody in this line is buying for a large Antarctic expedition—at least—or has a lot of plants, which have to be handled carefully. Gal before me not only has plants, she checks out, and can’t pay. Husband gave her the wrong card. Pin won’t work. Finally they let her give a check. I get checked out, mind, with monster containers of cat litter, which I can barely lift—yours truly is no teenager. Broke my fingernails. But I got ‘em in.

Ok. I get home, get unloaded with Jane’s help, fix lunch, because Jane’s still working on that passage. I haven’t stopped vibrating from the shopping trip. I decide, yes, I’m going to sit down and relax.

Jane comes in upset—sometimes in edit or work, we take a turn around the pond, just to think, and one of her favorite fish is missing. We’ve been procrastinating the netting, right. So poor Ishida may have paid for our hesitation.

She goes after the netting, and I nose-count the fish. Ishida is there. So are two lookalikes. Everybody is there. But spooky, inclined to stay under the winter shelter.

Well, we declare, on consultation, we could have had a predator fly-by, which would upset them. And maybe it’s a karmic warning, this mistake. So we decide to put the netting on.

I’m exhausted. I’m sitting down on pondside. Jane takes the netting across the pond, while I hold the roll. I miscut the first strip, and we’re kind of short of netting. So we move that netting to the winter-shelter side of the bridge, attach it, which requires moving rock and crawling around bushes with delicate buds ready to bloom, and iris, which are fragile. We get another long strip ready, and fasten it. Each of these strips is about 6 feet wide, so that, with the 3′ wide bridge, covers quite a lot of pond, and we’re now down to using netting which has been folded, and is not in a roll. We decide to risk the minor ends of the pond which aren’t covered, difficult spots for a predator. I am by now really, really done in.

So…we still have some work to go, and the netting is lying on water surface and on the lilies, not tight enough, but it’s on. I have a notion to use a lengthwise piece of fishing line stretched from the bridge to the end of the pond to lift that netting up right at the sag point and thus keep the netting well above the lilies. I know how to do this. And I think this will wait a couple of days. The lilies have pads up, but most are just starting to leaf. There’s plenty of time for this.

Bloomsday and we did our own walk—up and down the block twice…

This is the day when everybody in Spokane who is NOT doing the Bloomsday run stays well out of the main course, stays home, doesn’t go to restaurants, and doesn’t go shopping.

Outside of that, it’s a gorgeous day, the white peony has blooms all over so huge they look like Mexican wedding flowers—over 10″ across, the red peony is beginning to bloom, the hawthorn has a branch gone all red-pink with little rosettes, and some of the tulips are hanging in. The pond lilies are trying to grow, and the quince has been blooming for weeks, undiminished.

It’s a gorgeous day out there.

Worked really hard…and sore…

Job one, writing.

Job two, get the pond netting replaced. Well, we got half of it: plants had grown through the mesh, so we had to cut euphorbia (poisonous and allergenic, what a lovely plant, but pretty) with gloves and loppers, clamber around rocks, pull netting out of euphorbia, algae, and horsetail grass. We pulled out a knee-high (when wet) pile of cladella (string algae) and cleaned up, then we were exhausted and I poured black-brown sludge remover in to camouflage the fish from aerial predators because we’re just done in.

Then of course, toward late afternoon Jane tackled moving an 8 foot tall recently planted (thank God) crab apple and causing the rock dry streambed to take a major zig and zag—then using the crab apple hole to plant a new Japanese thready evergreen shrub, while the crab is about 8 feet further from the house.

At this point I went in to fix dinner, and we wolfed it down. Rabbit food. I’m getting weary of salad, but we need the weight control.

Today, replay, except the crab tree, and now we have to put the netting back. ASAP. All it takes is our eagle coming back and spotting lunch.

We did go on line for gaming last night, and funny thing, we had a curtailed session because most of the other players, mostly guys, were so sore from gardening they were done in. It seemed a nationwide malady yesterday…

Have they found Downbelow?

You may recall that Tau Ceti is Pell’s Star, with several planets, including Downbelow.Tau Ceti Planets

A drive to St Regis MT, which has really good huckleberry milkshakes…

And a pretty good restaurant.

We’re still reading on the road, and being on the road lets us discuss the story and figure things out.

This is the way we work. Jane is so much help. Two hours out, two hours back—and we’re pretty tired. Brain-tired. Which is a good thing.