C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 73

Spokane. Wildlife abounds. We have marmots at the Falls, moose invade the golf course, and our dogs…drive cars.

Spokane Chihuahua Joyride

Dear me, a new time synk!

Jane and I had a ton ‘o fun last night—started after supper and went to 12 midnight. Guild Wars 2. We really haven’t had so much fun since Might and Magic 4. The problems with most games are: bad art; bad maps; not-ready-for-prime-time glitches; and unsolvable puzzles or character requirements: 4 weeks into the game before you realize a mature jumping skill is requisite for the solution to the game and your mouse won’t do it, ergo your character can’t (Oblivion).

Well, we found a big online game with none of the show-stopping faults, and got heavily sunk into it with baby characters—and the fact that two people sitting side by side or across the country can separately run characters, link them up, and go solve problems together. I’m running a fire-throwing noble-born elementalist and Jane’s running a street-rat ranger with a big spotted cat for an ally, and we’re trashing fire drakes and bandits and having a ball. Lynn’s got the game at a higher level than we have, and we haven’t linked up with her yet, but we can: there’s a way to talk back and forth, even by audio, if you have headphones (not yet) and while my crappy mouse skills have me running into pillars and off stairways, I’m learning for a very practical reason: I’ve got a mouse I can marginally use, and my hands are starting to get just a little sore from the trackpoint mouse I tend to use while writing: since gran had bad arthritis, I pay attention to this warning. Gameplay may teach me to use a trackball efficiently yet.

And my guy is quite pretty, which is fun.

If any of you are gamers and want to give this one a spin, you buy the not-too-pricey disk, and that’s the last money you have to spend. You log on to a server: if any of you ask, we can tell you what server we’re on, which probably helps if you’re trying to ‘meet’ somebody on line; and beyond that, you just run around and have fun. Time just got away from us, and we realized it was midnight.

It’s snowing hard…

We decided to go on a reading trip down to Pullman for lunch…Cougarburgers, best hamburgers in the PNW! and a huckleberry-peanut butter shake, as if our sins of yesterday weren’t enough.

We knew it was heading for snow. It’s a 2 hour trip. And the first flakes fell as we arrived back in our own driveway. Now everything is white and coated. So pretty. And we were golden all the way: no weather at all.

Sigh…and then there are days…

Jane three weeks ago spent literally hours (about 4) on the phone with Comcast tech figuring out they’d sent us a bad gateway…this governs our phone, our tv, and our internet: and provides connectivity for our housenet. We’re not wired down to the coffeepot, but close.

Then we had to go through it all again when the new unit arrived. Meanwhile—my Comcast link for my Tivo unit suffered in the process of upgrade: it became outmoded, TIVO lost its programming, and became, essentially stupid.

So we had to order another module, and when it arrived, it took a couple of hours to get THAT set up: when TIVO goes stupid it takes a while to get it smart again.

Well…yesterday this guy in a yellow hardhat knocks at our door and says, “We’re from Avista Power, and we’ve got to change your transformer. Power will be out for an hour.”

Damn. So I needed to get to the store. I knew that would take about an hour. And of course getting out of the garage requires electricity (garage door opener.)

I back out, go to the store, come back—they’re still working, which means I can’t open the garage door to get the car in to get me to the back yard so I can get to the back door and come in. So I take all the frozen groceries in hand (4 bags) and hike to the front door. Which is locked. So I ring the bell. No Jane.

I set down the bags, one of which tears, spilling stuff onto the porch, get my key, get the door open…and no Jane. No Jane anywhere, upstairs or down. I leave the frozen stuff and go on a Jane-search. I check the back door in the theory that she could have realized I’d arrived and gone out the back way to help me…

Bash. I opened the back door right into Jane, who was standing outside taking pictures of the guys on the pole above our back fence.

So…I go back in and put the groceries away. Electricity comes back. Jane goes out to put the car in the garage and bring in the last groceries. All is well, the yellow-hat guys have gone, and we have a shiny-new transformer on the pole. For what reason we cannot figure, but hey—

We have no internet. We have phone. We have TV.

So…Jane had done a precautionary unplug when they started to work and a plug-in didn’t solve it. The house net is down. Nothing works..

We finally get a call through to Comcast bots who won’t help us because ‘we’re in an outage.’ Well, we friggin’ know we were in an outage, bot! It’s fixed! They drove away! We have no internet!

Took us another 30 minutes of trying to get an actual Comcast tech support guy on the line. He goes through the ‘outage’ mantra. Until Jane very wisely said: “Why do we have tv and phone, but no internet?” Now he’s curious.

We then have to reboot the gateway and come up…tech-directed, as they do various things from THEIR end. No joy. We go from THEIR phone, which is out, to my new TracFone, which uses up 3 hours of its talk-time as TechGuy and Jane try various fixes, and finally end up with something I’m not quite sure of, but it doesn’t involve our LinkSys router, but some feature of the (second) shiny new gateway they sent us, which is linked to the Cisco modem…God help us, it works. We got internet. It’s not wholly optimum, SFAIK, but it works.

At this point, 3 hours down on my pay-to-talk phone and with the rest of our day trashed, we ordered pizza. We will re-diet tomorrow.

Of banniks, the Russian novels, and writing…

Nap attacks and writing…

Ever had one of those sessions where your brain just goes into a near catatonic desire for sleep when you’re trying your hardest to think?

Go with it. That’s lizard-brain trying to communicate. The hind-brain talks to us when we have two ideas in the mill that are trying to link up.

It’s not a verbal part of the brain. It never says a word. It does communicate, however—often at the edge of sleep.

Or in the shower.

There are good showers and showers that are really good.

The old Russians believed there was a bath-spirit, the bannik, that lived in the spooky dim bathhouse and would tell you secrets and foretell the future if you fed it vodka.

A bannik doesn’t like to appear in front of you. He sits behind you. If you annoy him or try to look at him, he’ll swipe at you with long claws. But if you respect him, he’ll whisper the future in your ears.

Court a bannik if you’re stuck. He works best in a shower or sauna when lights are low and you’re pouring water over your head.

And I’ll guarantee when we did our bathroom repair—we poured a little vodka in the bath—just to be sure the old fellow stayed friendly. Progress in writing is often linked to good showers!

Give up and go take a nap when the brain goes on null. Listen to the back of your skull. Likely you’ll lie there for ten minutes, an idea will pop into your head, and you’ll be up and running for the keyboard.

If it still eludes you, ask the bannik.

Back to pre-holiday weight…

That was amazingly painless. We just went back on the stricter form of the diet, and the pounds we gained (6, me) and about that for Jane, have peeled off.

We’re determined to keep going right now and get below the next target: for me, that’s going to be 4 more pounds, and if Jane can break just one pound below where she is now, she will be happy.

Our exercise machine is proving a real good investment: we enjoy using it, and it’s sitting right beside our living room chairs. It’s also quiet, so you really can watch telly and use it. It does really work the gut, and this has been a real problem of Jane’s: she’s taken way too many tumbles off real horses (her dad used to put her up on the untrained ones), and her tailbone healed so that sit-ups and rowing machines are a no-go for her. This one is a good exercise, as hard and fast as you want it to be, and it’s enough to make you aware of your gut muscles for the rest of the day. I’m of a notion to drop the YMCA membership, which is just sitting there.

Hope you are all surviving this cold blast that’s come down on us: the east is getting it worse than we are, and we, of course, are insulated and prepared for this, while southern states are not. Remember to keep those kitchen faucets trickling, and opening the attic access and the kitchen and bathroom cabinets to let house heat keep those pipe thawed. Come spring, be careful to have someone inside the house (or do a fast check) when you first turn on those outside faucets: a burst pipe behind the faucet can be a nasty surprise. You think (outside) it’s working ok, and meanwhile, inside, a water jet has burst through the sheetrock and hit the windows 20 feet across the room. I had this happen once. It’s a simple repair, but not if it’s damaged walls inside.

We’ve faced the music, gone back on the diet…

We had a holiday pretty well from Jane’s birthday back in October, (with intermissions of atonement)—then Thanksgiving, small dose of atonement, then the week before Christmas, with goodies both arriving and abounding, we began to be ‘bad’, with pizza and cinnamon sticks, ice cream (they now make a no-sugar-added and a low carb ice cream: Lucerne from Safeway is particularly good, so we had a couple of gallons of that.) And pasta. And went out to eat a few times. And fruit cake; and champagne. And once out to the sinful waffle house. And an entire tin of Almond Roca, plus an entire tin of Scottish shortbread cookies…

Well, can you wonder we gained some weight? I gained six pounds, Jane maybe a bit more (she says she won’t torment herself by checking until she’s started down)—so now we diet.

I am delighted to report that once a communique from the mouth went to the brain (it’s back to the strict side of the diet, ma’am, and it’s that meatloaf again)—the weight peeled off at high speed. I began losing 2 lbs a day, so you may guess there was not much substantial about that weight gain: water weight—but nothing the body thought it should hang on to. Jane is back where she was; I’m one pound away from it; and this 3 days after a very indulgent (clean up the candy and cookies and pasta) New Year’s Day.

I’m even cheating a little on the resumption of the diet, giving us a cup of veggies outside the evening entree. So the body ‘remembers’ what it’s apt to get, ergo what it needs to pare down to.

We are continuing the office cleanup. I have now a batch of completed business papers over 6 inches high: this represents, after rejecting some of the attachments which no longer matter, and clipping everything neatly into clam clips, half the file drawer. I have drawer 2 to go, but the fact the printer and I have reached a peace in which I feed it paper loosely and carelessly (which is what it’s designed for) and it doesn’t paper-jam; and I have set the Adobe thingie for 2-sided, in which it queries me to be sure, because we have a lot of papers with surprises on the backside. These papers are going to go into a plastic bin, and I am beginning to think there are very many other things that would do better in electronic, searchable form. I’m finding a lot of unsigned duplicates of contracts I have in signed form. Those can go.

And I can do this when taking a break from the story, which is also starting to move. It’s hard to write during the holidays…

Happy New Year’s to all!

We’ll have some exciting stuff—

We’re cleaning out the office—

We’re cleaning up the house—we’re actually unpacking from the move of 2007, and playing keep, sell, or toss with lots and lots of stuff!

Happy with Adobe…

We have an Epson Workforce 840 printer… which has been helpful—it allegedly slices, dices, and makes coffee. But not that well..and occasionally it just really screws up. The only thing it does well is talk to all the computers in the house via the net. It networks well. But—ask it to do other operations…like OCR: sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t.

So we got onto this scanning for records thing—and after struggling with various softwares, recalled —we have Adobe. We have Big Adobe, the real office pro thingie. We turned control of our wonder-printer over to Adobe, and OMG. It BEHAVES. Scans, runs an OCR before I can quite sit down to tee up the next document to scan, and produces a beautiful image; you get to assign a filename, it stores things where you want; it does two-sided copy where needed, it allows you to combine files if you found another piece, and it’s just brilliant! If you have a printer that promised you the sun and moon and it won’t quite deliver—this is one way to get the machine to tap-dance.

I have rarely been so pleasantly surprised with the efficiency of a software with a really monster job.

One of those days—41 new spammers, and I go to the store and get everything BUT…

the fish food I went after.

I had to drive about a 7 mile round trip to go back after it.

We are, however, supplied with New Years’ Dinner and New Year’s Day dinner, and breakfast for a month, and supper for at least 2 weeks. Blow wind, come wrack—we’re set to eat well.

It snowed this morning, has stopped with a 34 degree temperature this afternoon, and is still cloudy, so it may snow again tonight. This is not atypical for Spokane.

And I got Jane her New Year’s present (we always save one, but it just made sense to give it to her at Christmas, so I know she saved me one, and now I’ve got one for her and Wiishu. Heh-heh.