C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 79
October 21, 2013
Vanye starts to acquire his ‘face-up’…and I finished the little gargoyle…
You have to appreciate how tiny these bjd’s are. Jane has resculpted a generic eyes-shut plate to be what you see here. And, well, I just had fun with the little gargoyle or demon-kitty.
October 20, 2013
Solar max and magnetic flip…
I find it interesting: in my field (Mediterranean archaeology) there is some evidence that we get a weather Event every 500 years, and 2000 would have been one of those years. Understand, when you’re talking about such things, the edges are blurry, but these Events tend to involve drought in the Steppes and Tarim Basin, etc. Some have suggested the Sun might have a periodicity: the flux is too short-term to be the Sun passing through waves in the galactic disk (another suggestion for ice age variations)…but just kind of over all interesting whether we have more or fewer sunspots inside the Event parameters, but the Tarim, I believe, has been in a dry bit. Tarim
How do Mediterranean archaeologists notice this? Every 500 years some new band or plague comes riding out of the Tarim to annoy nascent civilizations. And it holds up pretty well over time.
We went to lunch with a friend and blew it…
..on a plate of loaded jo-jo’s. A, potatoes, like tomatoes are not our friends anyway: make the joints ache. B) neither is low carb, and particularly potatoes have starch, not our friend on this diet. The good news is, a typical small potato is 12 carbs, and these were converted baked potatoes rebaked with cheese and bacon and jalapenos, so they weren’t as bad as french fries, which add grease to the pile…but…it would have been better to have fewer. The waitress accidentally (she gave it for the same price) brought the larger order. So Jane and I both indulged.
The good news is, A, we left a third of the plate, which once would have disappeared. B, we both concluded while it felt nice and ‘free’ to pig out, it wasn’t really enjoyable as an experience: our over-indulgence didn’t make our tummies happy. It made us think we didn’t want the same tomorrow: we actually want to go back to our strict diet.
It’s good news when the overindulgence starts looking unappetizing. Our eyes are starting to adjust to smaller portions, to match what our stomachs and appetites have already adjusted to. Too much really has become too much in perception as well.
Back to splitting a half order of whatever it is…
October 18, 2013
Adventure for the day: ‘lost’ the current novel…
Two items wanted a computer restart re updates: 1) Dell’s maintenance software and 2) one of the updaters both wanted a computer reboot.
Did a warm reboot and the machine came up. In the process, I’d seen some junk in the Explorer files that was everything from recipes to old novel outtakes, and decided to move them to folders and organize them. Spent about 30 min doing a gross sort.
Then I called up my novel. Word Perfect had lost its ‘history’ of what’s been called recently. This is usual on a reboot. Of course. No sweat. I called up Explorer, asked it for the current file…and got an ancient one, mostly outline.
Well, damn. I doublechecked the directory, called up what should be it, and got the outline again.
I then set about to recall key words which might be unique to this novel, and Explorer couldn’t find them. It found a lot of references in stuff from five years back.
I then got into ‘file options’ and found the search criteria not set to find-word-inside-files, which is my preference, but this is a fairly new computer.
No joy.
Well, at this point I am feeling a little frantic, and contemplating consulting Carbonite, but with my file indexing screwed so badly the computer’s lost its document organization, I’m a little hesitant. I start searching file by file, visually, starting with the most logical places it should (still) be.
Found it.
I did find there are ways to force a re-indexing. But I’d already solved my problem. I trust the computer is now doing that without being asked. I’ll doublecheck later.
Jane suspects (and I think she’s right) that the update required a re-indexing which is not yet complete, ergo the confusion, increased when I moved some files…probably started it all over again.
It would be really nice if I could find a search like my old one that would search by date created: I realize that modern programs generate thousands of ‘new’ files, but if you could target a specific directory, you could weed those enormously.
At any rate, I gave the ‘real’ file a unique name and special location.
But it disturbed the whole household when Jane was trying to remember a bit she’d formed, then forgotten; and myself,on a sincere roll, who lost that thread; so Jane’s in there pulling hair algae from our [still in maturing-mode] large marine tank and I’m sitting here writing this post.
Aagh!
October 17, 2013
We share another grandfather: my 19th, Jane’s 21st.
Thomas Knowllys (Knowles), Lord Mayor of London. He was mayor during the reign of the very mild-mannered and easily-shocked Henry VI of England, who mostly was interested in religion and education and seems over all to have been a pretty good king, if he had not lived in violent times that needed a stronger hand…it was also during the time of Joan of Arc and the end of the War of the Roses. if you look at his portrait as a guy who might have played basketball if he’d been a shade less interested in his book collection, it seems about right. A good mind, perhaps, but not suited to be in a position of power in those times.
I kind of view him as a prime case of what happens when you put a good and kind but unrealistic person in charge of a bad situation. A lot of people came to violent ends while he was being non-violent.
October 16, 2013
October 15, 2013
176! I am one pound away from what I was in 1978.
We’re keeping to the diet. Jane’s on a heckuva plateau that’s fighting her hard, and she got an awful upset stomach from the mold involved in the fishtank cleanup downstairs—nothing would work to settle it, and she finally got it quiet with some sweet potato chips we had on hand, so it’s not her fault: she didn’t eat those for recreation. She was really miserable, and she helped me out after I was worm-stung and exhausted. So I’m down a pound and she’s up on, after eating the same thing…except the potato chips a day ago.
But we’re sticking fast to the diet, and it’s continuing to work. I’ve got a couple of recipes that keep us from diet boredom: can of chili split between us, over cheeseburgers, no bun; and chicken strips with bamboo shoots, green beans in coconut milk with bamboo shoots and red curry powder. The rest is typical.
I fit into size 12 stretch jeans! Not only that, I may make it to non-stretch…these are a little loose. I’m going to see if I can find my old khaki cargo pants I devoutly saved 20 years ago, telling myself I’d fit into them again.
October 14, 2013
Frost on the local pumpkins…
…and on the bridges.
If I’m going to get the windows washed before it snows, I’d better get at it. Pretty soon we’ll have to roll up the hoses for the winter.
October 13, 2013
One of those completely yucky jobs that I really have postponed too long…
Cleaning the marine tank sump. This is a live sump—live rock, sand, everything a tank has, except fish…
Or it’s supposed to be without fish. Three fish escaped via the drain upstairs, made it through complex piping, being very cigarette shaped and tiny—and I was able to get 2 of them out and upstairs again. One is doing pretty well. I’m afraid the smaller one may have dived through the plumbing again to rejoin the buddy in an area I couldn’t reach.
I washed sand (it comes filled with chalk dust) and siphoned muck, which you might optimistically call mud if you didn’t know it was fish poo half an inch thick in spots. The sandbed has been through heck and whatever, and hasn’t been handling it well, and I kept on postponing doing something, even if I know how bad the 54g tank got during breakdown — before we converted it to freshwater and connected the living sump to the new 105g. I should have done this long since, but I went in and hauled out (by hand, in cramped space) 3.5 gallons of very mucky sand, replacing it with new, and leaving enough muck behind to ‘seed’ the new sand with bacteria. In point of fact, because I have a functioning healthy sandbed in the 105 g it will ‘carry’ the system AND seed the new sand, but I couldn’t get the last of the muck out. I have been up and personal with bristle worms, sponges, and gotten stung (the worms) and gotten grit under my nails…I feel as if I need a bath in Clorox.
But…once we can see the fish again (the water is a little opaque with chalk dust) it will all be fine. That should make everything happier. Normally you leave these things alone, but this sump had an iffy start back in 2007 when we set up after the move and the sump I’d ordered didn’t come in and my microlife all cooked in the buckets waiting for it…I’d tried letting the system clean itself up naturally, but some times you just have to intervene and shovel…ahem…muck.
