C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 75

We’re slightly snowy…

Just a little frosting. We could use some of the snow pack you guys to the south are getting…our sympathies to you. We live where snowplows exist and have a Plan for the event.

We got with our accountant by phone yesterday and finally have the healthcare thing figured out. We have the decor nearly up. We’re reaching the ‘cleanup’ phase…after which we hope just to have a quiet Christmas.

We went out to eat last night—our usual pub hamburgers. We broke a few dietary rules, but not many…

I’ve got my regular prescription to pick up today, plus we’re out of breakfast-ables. The streets are perfectly dry, so no problem there. I’ve got some fish stuff coming this morning and my new phone this afternoon, so I’ll go after that.

It’s nippy enough the cats are making a cat ball on my bed.

I’m thinking I really should do something about lighter winter shoes. Flipflops don’t do it, really, even with tabi socks; the snow boots require lacing and are too hot indoors. The Reebok soles, ditto the garden clogs, tend to turn stiff and slick on ice. I think ideal would be some cheap step-in boots that don’t require a lace up, and that aren’t quite so insulated. Alas, they closed the Freddy Myers that would have been the easy source of such boots and I hate to shop at Walmart—I don’t approve of their policies. You name their policy and I don’t approve of it. But it’s the only thing now within 10 miles, except the mall, and I’d rather wear the flipflops than venture into the mall at Christmastime.

A day for strangeness….

Started it off by getting the blood test I’m required to get quarterly (thyroid doc) a month late because of the crud…

That went pretty well. I’ve only had this car since July and I’m finally learning how to work the lights…(getting there early assures a shorter wait)…

Then we had the where-is-its…

And then an Oklahoma country clerk’s office called needing 17.00 to file a paper that I’d had to file (technicalities) and that meant they needed to talk to my brother, who understands the terms involved, and when I tried to call him…guess what? AT&T has screwed my cell phone again…

And my cousin called with some real interesting genealogy info on a difficult-to-track relative…

Getting off that, I was so annoyed with AT&T I decided to go for another no-contract phone plan, and I thought Consumer Cellular, recommended by AARP, might be a good thing—wrong. They want to charge you 9.99 a month with zero minutes, and you get to buy minutes at need for a quarter a minute. Well, if we got into one of our rare emergencies, that could be a lot of minutes. So I looked up tracphone, which offers 50 minutes that roll over for 9.99 a month. This seems like a better idea…

And then…power blew. That was one thing. But then the fish tank (freshwater) overflowed when it shouldn’t and we couldn’t figure why: I kept trying to analyze and it kept coming up siphon, but the rig is in most particulars no different than when it was a salt water tank…then Jane realized that the outflow had been changed to two hoses and they had ‘sunk’ somewhat.

That meant a flooded living room floor, at least in that area…so many towels and a fan later we’re trying to figure out what to do about that 10 gallon sump that is just forever too small. And brilliant me finally lit on a plan that doesn’t involve major fabrication (wedge-shaped tank, ergo difficult stand to fit a sump under) —and decided to go with a cannister filter, which is about as big as that 10 gallon tank, but vertical, and which will give us the means to operate without floods…

But meanwhile we have fans on; and we shut down the freshwater pump, so we had to install bubblers: I found a filter for a sale price, but it’s going to be five days before we get it, and the fish hasve to breathe in the meanwhile…

Decorating continues.

I picked out a new phone from Tracfone, one with a 16 day battery life, and minimal functions, which I like…not to mention a large, legible display…if I’m at a store, forgot my glasses (not uncommon) and need to use the phone, I sorta like the numbers to look like numbers, not a white blur.

So…a productive but crazy-making day.

We discovered a nice buttered pecan ice cream which is actually within our Atkins diet parameters…

We have an appointment tomorrow crack of dawn to go to a clinic where we can ask technical questions about how to fill out the new health plan enrollment for Jane—it’s not straightforward for us, because we land on the cusp of age etc. There are, in WA, places you can go and have live people help you figure out what goes in the blanks.

And it continues: still having the sale…

and Jane FINALLY (see the epic 6.5 hour struggle with Comcast…) got the new router set up.

It wasn’t glitchless, but we got it. Jane got it.

Neither she nor I is as energetic as we wish, but hey, the router does work.

Yesterday she got mulch for the new trees. WE hope this will be soon enough, because fall fell with a minus -1 thump! this year and we got no grace period.

I am finally MENTALLY doing ok…for a while there, with the crud, I was so full of meds I couldn’t think through plot. The book is moving along.

Otherwise, we are just staying in where it’s warm and not doing too much but decorate and work.

SALE at Closed Circle…

You are the first to know…

10% off all e-books and physical books until Jan 1.

Free domestic shipping on all physical books until Jan 1. Foreign shipping discounted until Jan 1. [The foreign shipping discount is equal to the free domestic shipping, somewhere close to US $6.00.]

Things offered by Cafe Press are not included in this: we have no control over them.

Happy holidays!

Fiendish Feline Intelligence…

Sei is not the brightest light in catdom…so he’d have you think. Shu is. And you should be afraid…be terribly afraid.

The morning and nightly routine involves the payoff: kitty treats. PM, I call Sei, who always ‘loses it’ [oh, look, a butterfly!] when trying to pass the hall door and Feliway dispenser, to get to my room. Shu will have had no trouble. Jane will have to call him, so I can get Sei to my room to shut the door and distribute dry food and kitty treats.

If I open the door during the night, Shu will hear it and come thumping down the hall at high speed trying to get in because he knows Sei will have saved some kibble for breakfast. He never makes it in, but he tries.

AM, Sei has his breakfast before I open the door. I open the door and Shu is lurking to run in and find any forgotten kibble. I get my coffee, and Shu and Sei OUGHT to show up for a measured 3 treats each. On many mornings, Sei has forgotten he is supposed to come back, so only Shu shows up. I do not exceed 3 treats. Jane gives him 3 treats out in the living room, where she has her work station. Give him credit: he will, at Jane’s call, return to the living room to have his treats, when in his kitty brain there IS a sure thing going on in the bedroom. In coming when called, Shu is our shining star. Sei just stands and looks at you as if to say, ‘Well? I’m here. I can see you. You can see me.’

If Sei comes in later looking for the 3 treats—if I so much as speak to him or (shudder) pop open the kibble can, as softly as a mouse in a pile of leaves—here comes Shu wanting another 3 treats. I will at most give him 1. But it’s the victory he’s after. Any day on which he ‘wins’ more treats is a good day, in his book.

Sei [oh, look, a butterfly!] is the one born with thumbs. I have not figured out whether they are doubleteaming us, or what. Possibly Sei is just easily confused and Shu runs things…but whatever it is, we definitely are being had.

Down to 18 degrees last night…

And the pond is really, really frozen. Yesterday our two scoundrel fish-raiding cats (because of whom we have had to net the pond) were out there near the pond heater hole in the ice, and the ice was cracking under them—I watched them the entire time, really not wanting to have to run out there and rescue an ungrateful and very wet and cold cat who’d be tangled in our pond netting, but they managed not to fall in.

We have left the side garage door open because we have problems with a winter mouse infestation out there that has cost us a lot of work and nastiness, but I think as temperatures head for the single digits Wednesday, we should close that door to protect stuff in the garage, not to mention the cars.

Still a few lingering effects of the crud.

And I got half the copyediting checked last night while watching telly.

There is one copyediting tendency that drives me bananas. Say you create a name. Now, the first creation may be unstable. Second or third time you write it, you figure how it should REALLY be spelled, and you use it that way 300 times during a book. The copyeditor will, very reliably, take the first spelling and ‘correct’ all 299 correct forms into the initial ‘wrong’ form, so you have to, patiently, change them all back. Why didn’t YOU correct the first form? Because you couldn’t find the damn thing. There’s one instance that was earlier than you thought.

The copyeditor decided to use Shishoji instead of the proper form, Shishogi. God only knows what form the c/e used in the prior book, because there were so many other copyeditor-produced errors that that one could have gotten past me. I don’t give a damn (Lord, my language goes downhill when I’m doing c/e correction) what was in the prior book: the name is Shishogi, with a hard -g-. and accent on the second syllable. Aarrgh!

I also capitalize Earth as the name of the planet, with ‘earth’ in the normal other or proverbial uses, and the c/e ‘corrected’ all of those. And the East (capital) is Ilisidi’s province. The cardinal directions are not capitalized. The c/e ‘fixed’ all of those.

I tell them time and time and time again. I create style sheets for them. I add notes to the c/e on the title page. I advise them not to tamper with things in quotes because we are dealing with people who do not speak perfectly. I advise them stet all forms of earth or Earth and trust me. Does this make a difference? Only sometimes. By the time I get through fixing all this, the word STET has become STET PASSIM and then STET, DAMMIT! and sometimes one form beyond that, and my blood pressure is through the roof.

But as c/e goes, this is a good job and it is going fast.

It’s going to be a little snow, and a dive into the teens.

As in 7 and 8.

Coldest it’s been in 3-4 years.

Jane’s out tending to some shopping and getting a strand of lights to replace the dead one for the ‘woodland tree’, a little tree we hang all our wild-animal motif things on: it has frosted little round lights and one strand has bit the dust. It’s about 15 years old, so we can’t complain. Strange to think that everything we brought from Oklahoma is now at least 13 years old and probably older.

I’m finally able to get back to work. And we do finally have all the winterizing done except that Jane needs to wrap that new little mimosa she planted, with this freeze coming.

And it’s a white winter morning…

We got snow last night. The pond, already frozen hard and deep by a week of 20 degree weather, is white, and dark below, and we hope the fishes are well asleep.

Jane bravely got out yesterday, got the last of the juniper to the compost can, and the trash and recycling out, got the snow-blower positioned…I swear to you, if you have to buy one of these things, the little electric Toro snowthrower is perfectly adequate to clear a driveway and a walk even in a winter where the snow piles up to 5 feet total…Beyond that, you probably need more, but this little workhorse starts at a button push, handles pretty heavy snow, even that thrown by the city snowplow and beginning to set up; and throws it far enough to clear a driveway.

And I can say, finally, after a measurable 20 days of this nasty flu-stuff, I think I am really, truly on the way out of it. I’m feeling better and have a clear head. The ability to think is an improvement. I’ve lost nearly the whole month of work to this stuff.

Spokane’s trees are frosted white, it’s snowing, and the roads are clear…

It’s Black Friday (for those outside the US, that’s the orgiastic shopping sale day) and the streets are nearly deserted. We went out and took a look, and had less trouble than usual getting through the checkout lines, since the stores had massive extra help.

We did get a new tree this year, because our 5-year-old artificial is bound to come out with a little mold, and we greatly fear it would trigger allergies, and we’re fragile. Jane happened to spot one she loved, (it was at [shudder] Walmart, but it was the only one she’s liked in 5 years) and we nabbed the last one.

Mel’s (an institution in Spokane from way back) has mutated. Snowmageddon collapsed its roof several years ago, and it’s never really come back—it’s mutated into a clothing and gift store up near Mead, WA, and it’s not what it was. All the plant nursery is gone. It’s just spendy Stuff that isn’t that great, alas.

Freddy Myers had nothing: we’ve not liked the store since they closed ours and sent us to this branch, which is a lot of walking through repetitous aisles after stuff that used to be more convenient at the old store.

So…we nabbed our tree at a 30% discount and came home.

Now the snow is coming down in earnest, and Black Friday is turning white.

Did you know—that the coincidence of Hanukkah falling on Thanksgiving is once in 70,000 years?

And it looks as if Ison could have been hit by a solar flare, if you can believe it. The comet was 3 miles wide when it headed near the Sun at 91000 MPH, and now it looks as if indeed some remnant is exiting on its former track, whether as one piece or more than one.

Jane and I are having dessert first…

Because we can. It’s one of the bennies of being grownups. We not only had dessert for lunch, we had it twice, and may have it again after Thanksgiving dinner. We had pecan pie and (go figure) low carb ice cream. (well, it limits the damage!) —and will have it as often as we like today and tomorrow (Leftover Day!) And we will have spaghetti/chili for supper. And dessert again. It’s a large pie. Then we will watch grown people throw pumpkins in mediaeval war machines.

We are still sniffly, but we are parked in front of the tv violating our diet.

We hope you all are having a great Thanksgiving!