C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 77

Long weekend. I’m still rocky, but at least I got some sleep last night.

The ‘common cold’ is about 200 different viruses, so I hear, and lasts around 7 days or so. Well, type B flu remains the chief suspect, because I’m still symptomatic (cough-cough) and it’s been, what, since this onset, about Wednesday before this last Wednesday? Thursday, Friday Saturday, Sunday, and Monday…with the stuff still hanging on. That’s 12 days. Bummer.

Some of Jane’s doll-hobby friends are out and about and we’ll do supper there, this time not in a driving cold rain and soaked to the skin.

And I hope to heck I’m not still contagious. At least I sort of got to lie within 20 degrees of flat last night without choking.

Meanwhile, what else?

The orange cat was fish-shopping this morning, to the outrage of Shu and Shi. Yes, nearly sushi, but not quite. And the fish seem finally to have snugged down to the winter sleep instead of wandering drunkenly around the pond, vulnerable to predators. They all are under their winter shelter.

And…it’s kind of drizzling today. Grey sky. Chill. We’re not showing signs of getting that gravel moved.

And the autotopoff died. Again. I used the first unit (which supplies fresh water to make up for the evaporation in the main tank) from before 2007 til now, and its replacement died within 2 months. The replacement for the replacement died within 1 month. These are not cheap units. I wrote them a note that they have a serious design flaw, and bought a unit from another company: this is not a thing you can have fail while you’re, say, out of town for a week. The big tank evaporates 2 gallons a day, and that evaporation drives the calcium feed to the corals, while the autotop helps keep the salinity level for the critters. A float switch, like a bathroom tank float, simply turns on a small pump as the water level sinks, and the small pump sends calcium-laced fresh water up to the tank to keep the salinity steady. This should not be a complex wiring job, and it SHOULD be waterproof—water tends to happen around tanks, after all!

So…one damned more thing breaks. And has to be replaced. I’ll be so glad when I get this system stabilized. I also concluded my skimmer is too weak: I ordered a more potent one, which should help over all with the chemistry. You know how the wind and waves kick up foam on the beach…that’s amino acids, dead and decaying plant and animal matter, all sorts of refuse: it’s sort of the ocean’s sewer system. And if you aerate marine tank water, you get that froth, too, which bubbles up into a place where it collects as murky to black-green water: you toss that, and it’s sort of like cleaning a fish-tank filter, which marine reefs don’t tend to have: we rely on the skimmer. Well, there are skimmers that do a good job on a 50 gallon tank—but the old skimmer isn’t handling this 100 gallon tank well. And it’s going to help, I’m relatively sure, if I get an upgrade. Wish me luck. This is going to be a beautiful tank. It’s not there yet. All the fish are healthy, but I’ve still got some water stability problems, and I think that skimmer problem is the heart of it.

Pretty sure they made to Seattle. In what state of exhaustion is another matter…

I saw a tweet on FB from someone attending that showing, so it’s my impression that all went well. Thank goodness.

I’ve reached the stage of the crud in which I pile pillows into a huge mass, with the two new heavy ones as the core of the mound, and sleep semi-upright, like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a rock. It at least prevents the coughing fits. And we both went to bed early last night: about 9. And got up at 7-7:30. That’s how tired and run down we are. Jane’s on her second round of antibiotic, which makes you slow, and I’m on the tail end of the crud, so I don’t feel too spiff either; we both got soaked to the skin in ice water, then had to go to dinner and a social function, and I just said to hell with the diet and ordered pizza—but Pizza Hut got my order wrong and gave me half pepperoni and half black olive on mine. Waa. I wanted them mixed. But I’ll live, she says, coughing.

Weather’s grey and heavy; it’ll be twilight by 3pm, this season, with the clouds thick up there.

The good news is I’m making slow progress on the writing—not the slow part. The progress part. That’s good. If I can get through the section where I have to handle moving everybody about the map, and get to the people interacting part, that will go much faster. It’s a law of nature that you have to work the hardest on the scenes that just aren’t by their nature exciting…

Hoping our friends got through Snoqualmie…

Peter Beagle and company had a special showing of The Last Unicorn last night—and while the event went well—weather did not cooperate. We’re hoping everybody got to Seattle this morning: they had to get there by nine, because a mis-shipment of the film for a showing tonight in Seattle resulted in THEM having the only copy of the remastered film they could lay hands on…weather slowed them getting here from Seattle and set up last night, so Jane and friends and I had a little scramble getting Peter over to a restaurant and back.

Night’s adventure started when Jane and I made the mistake of walking the sidewalk between the theater and the parking lot and got splashed with freezing water by 3 large trucks—it had been raining and still was coming down. So Jane and I were soaked below the waist, she just after anaethetic yesterday and me still recovering from the flu. We drove to the restaurant to hold down our reservation: she stayed there, and I went back to the theater hoping Peter would have made it in.

He had. I picked him up and drove to the restaurant…

Meanwhile Connor et al, who were setting up, had the weather setting in: ice water was turning (though thankfully briefly) to snow…and they had found out their Seattle film had been misaddressed, so they were going to have to leave at oh-God-thirty to get back over there to handle that…

We heard this when we got Peter back (on time) for the signing and reception, which was well-attended despite the weather—and I meanwhile was so rocky with coughing I opted not to go into the movie, but just to go out to the car and wait it through. Jane and I are still soaking wet, fortunately only where we sit, so that can be kept warm, if not dry. And the weather is not as bad as could be in Spokane, but the pass between Spokane and Seattle is due for 18 inches of snow, with freezing rain; and Ritzville, a town on a hump between us and Seattle, is above freezing, but always iffy in weather like this: it’s notorious. Not to mention the mile long descent to the Columbia bridge and the mile long climb out, though that’s not usually the weather-chokepoint that the aforementioned two places are. Snoqualmie Pass is well-maintained, but if it gets badly dumped on, you can sit in a line for a very long time while the plows do their work, and we’ve been on it when cars were spinning out and going topside down around us, even when it was just snow involved, and not ice…

So we’re hoping Peter and crew did get there ok. They’d planned to stay the night in Spokane, and it was looking like they were just going to have to pack back up and drive back at least as far as the foot of the pass, to be there in the morning.

Winter is arriving. I can see blue sky through holes in the cloud this morning, but they’re forecasting as much as 5 inches this weekend.

In the aforesaid condition, mildly hung over from Sailor Jerry’s…

I had to take Jane in for her mandated endoscopy: it took forever–and somebody had to be there to drive her home because of the sedation.

So I walk in when it’s over, and she’s semi-awake. Asked me more than once “What time is it?”

If you don’t know how funny that is, there’s a book you should read.

Bad night…glug…

Shallow cough, constant cough…all night long. Had no cough medicine in the house. By 3 AM of no sleep, and nearly constant coughing…I decided I had to do something. The liquor rack held wine, mostly old sweet stuff we got years ago by mistake—I detest sweet wine, and sweet would only make it worse anyway, some nice single-malt Scotch…two unopened bottles of Captain Morgan, and an open bottle of Sailor Jerry’s Rum.

Sailor Jerry’s, taken tablespoon at a time, did let me tame the cough, but it has to be the worst taste since that red powder the druggist used to make up, when I was a kid. I at least got some sleep.

Jane did get to the dentist yesterday. She says it’s better, even if sore…

Doing better…

I can report, yes, the guaifenesin makes a difference. I left it off yesterday in the theory it might be contributing to the sinus congestion: wrong. I coughed. A lot. And by evening I was coughing really badly every few minutes (postnasal drip was bad) —and finally took guaifenisin that evening. Stopped the drip, stopped the cough for the most part, so I actually got some sleep.

Discovery/Science/History2 has a couple of nice programs, btw. One is How the Earth Works: I could do without the cutesy athletics of the hosts, but any program that can tell me or show me things I didn’t know… is a delight. And the athletics may appeal to some who desperately need to understand this stuff. Program #2 is a one-shot called The First Apocalypse, which is a thorough go-over on all the reasons for the demise of the dinosaurs and going back to other events, such as new info on the Deccan Traps eruption, which has long been discounted, and is now being looked at far more seriously.

Which is how I spent the restive bits of last night.

Here’s the interesting bit: the Deccan Traps eruption is now understood to have been more intense and shorter than previously believed. And it coincides with the era of the Chicxulub impact. The measurement of the SIZE of the Chicxulub impactor is due to the thickness of the iridium deposits around the world…ergo, with that much iridium, plus Mexican rock frags in the iridium layer in Colorado, you’re dealing with a 6 mile asteroid impactor. BUT volcanoes also emit iridium from the Earth’s own core/mantle, and the massive Deccan eruption was around the time of the Chicxulub Event.

From Wikipedia: “The Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary of 65 million years ago, marking the temporal border between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods of geological time, was identified by a thin stratum of iridium-rich clay.[41] A team led by Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980 an extraterrestrial origin for this iridium, attributing it to an asteroid or comet impact.[41] Their theory, known as the Alvarez hypothesis, is now widely accepted to explain the demise of the dinosaurs. A large buried impact crater structure with an estimated age of about 65 million years was later identified under what is now the Yucatán Peninsula (the Chicxulub crater).[42][43] Dewey M. McLean and others argue that the iridium may have been of volcanic origin instead, as the Earth’s core is rich in iridium, and active volcanoes such as Piton de la Fournaise, in the island of Réunion, are still releasing iridium.[44][45]”

Hanging in…the crud is at least no worse.

I’m anxious for it to be better. But it’s just going to run its course. Nyquil, Dayquil, and Mucinex. I’m getting real tired of that cocktail. Last night we just decided what-the-heck and ordered pizza, which we also had for breakfast. A thin-crust small pizza isn’t too far off our diet: only the tomato sauce and the crust are sins. And neither of us was up to cooking last night.

Flu shots and getting the flu…

There is trivalent and quadrivalent vaccine. Most people get trivalent vaccine. This year it’s primarily protecting against a California virus that looks a lot like H1N1, the truly nasty stuff, and a couple of others that aren’t much fun either. The one-in-four it’s not protecting against is a piffly type B which amounts to a cough and runny nose, the sort you can kind of shrug off. They reserve the quadrivalent vaccine, I think, for people who are really healthwise compromised.

And it takes 2 weeks to get any kind of immunity out of your shot, and the shot is valid about 4 months for an older person: youngers may go longer.

The upshot of it all is that I was exposed to a type B (Jane’s brother had a cough and cold when we visited) before this vaccine had any kind of chance, and probably it’s a type B that wasn’t covered by the shot anyway. Incubation for the flu being 1-4 days, I can figure that’s probably what I got; and Jane, who got her shot a week before me, is having some symptoms too—not as bad, however.

There’s a lot of sincerely bad info floating around on the flu shots: I do recommend them. I feel bad enough with this slips-through-the-cracks type piffle of a flu. An H1N1 relative is no joke. If you haven’t gotten your flu shot, go for it. Even if you still get this sort, not getting the major-nasty sort is a biggie. Especially if you go around people who are unable to stand bad flu, get the shot.

Just back from Seattle area…hard trip…

We went for a wedding of a couple of friends at the house of another friend from back-when, had a good evening, thank you, GPS! and went with 3 friends to the Seattle Aquarium the next day—I was really flagging at the end of that outing. And at the end of one more day, I’d begun to come down either with Jane’s brother’s cold (we were staying at his house) or feeling the effects of the flu shot: there is one variety of flu shot that gave both Jane and me laryngitis at a con—went totally voiceless and had to whisper into a mike. Plus the week after at Jane’s OTHER brother’s house I caught my blouse sleeve on fire from a candle, and got burned rather badly—couldn’t make a sound to tell other people in the house I was afire, and it was a white carpet, so dropping and rolling seemed rather problematic. I managed to get it out.

Well, remember I let them give me a double dose of flu vaccine, which, along with the pneumonia vaccine, is the CDC’s recommendation for seniors. Hmf! I suggest the director for the CDC take same before he recommends that for people. I’m wondering if what they gave me a double dose of is close kin to the strain that gave us laryngitis a decade or so ago.

Anyway, I’m feeling really crappy, and dosing myself with Theraflu at night and Dayquil by day; and trying to keep moving, but I’m tired of this set of reactions to shots, I’ll tell you. I sound like a bullfrog and my sinuses are in an uproar, plus I have a cough, but I’m using antihistamine to keep the post nasal drip from causing a sore throat that can then get a secondary infection, or getting to my lungs: so far so good. Glug.

Jane’s doing much better, and has an appointment tomorrow…

The antibiotic is really helping. She thinks she may have had a low grade infection for a while.

So what does she do?

The City delivered us a notice to lower our bushes by a certain amount at the corner and 75 feet along the roadway, and they’re old junipers that have been there at that corner for about 40 years. Well, it is a stopsign, and we’d hate to have someone have a wreck; but of course it’s been snowing-cold, and I have this sore arm and Jane has an abscess…and we have to do it by the 20th. Nice. So we start in. The preacher at the Methodist church spotted us, and came over and helped with some of it, and we have a pile of branches, some as thick as my wrist, and some as long as I am tall, in a pile at the curb that’s taller than I am, and the corner looks a nasty wreck of brown dirt and dead underside branches of some juniper as thick as your leg. The preacher said he’d help us cart away those branches, since the city won’t do it. It’s the Methodists to the rescue again, I’ll tell you. I’m very tempted to put a sign out at the corner that says: “This devastation brought to you by your City Council,” but that would be more work. I’d be happier if they enforced this all over the city; probably one person who complained.

We had burned hamburger for supper. It’s that kind of day.

But at least we’ve got the corner pared down.