C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 8

Counter (numeric) weirdness…

For a number of years, the visits counter on cherryh.com has not worked. I’ve refurbed it several times, but this time couldn’t even find the free-counter site to do it. And this last week, lo, it’s come back to life. With an updated count, as if it’s always had the records, but couldn’t post them. Now it’s counting again. Zombie counter, I tell you.

Ice has melted a bit and we can see the fishes…

Wesley, the orange one in the photo, we think Goku, maybe Sanzo, maybe Maddy….they’re still down in the deep dark and overshadowed by the winter cover, but daytime temperatures have been 40-ish and they’re stirring. Water temperature is probably about 36, and they can’t eat til it hits 58, (their stomachs can’t produce heat enough to digest: being cold-blooded their body temp is that of the water)…but they look healthy, and fat.

More dental misery…this time on the other side.

Implants may be possible on this side, but…3 to 9 months unable to eat on that side and not well on the other: this is not how I planned to go on a diet.

Ow. The knee.

My knees have never been the best. I acquired two football knees without playing the sport—the first time to fail me was when I was about 12, stepping over a barbed wire fence, thank goodness in jeans, but a mile from camp. Leg just quit, with a nasty cracking sound, and I fell, managing not to suffer from the barbed wire—really tough jeans, those. Had to be helped back to camp by my three friends, a long and labored hike. Happened again a few years on, midsentence while talking to a friend at a band contest. Crack. And I was so startled I finished the sentence on the floor. I have for most of my life not trusted stairs, never had it fail on stairs, but worried it would. Always hold the handrail. And when the knee would go, it would lock up and refuse to move after about an hour. My dad once did try to move it, and it was, yes, quite frozen. A day later it would move. And take about half a week to heal, with compresses and babying. Then it would be fine.

So—what’s my college sport? Fencing. Which you do with knee bends, deep knee bends, backward and forward, and more knee bends. I developed fencer’s muscle on the front of my shins, no question. And never have had it fail since.

So…I’m retrieving the garbage bins from the front, up the 4 steps, and the big blue one is unwieldy and hangs. I gave it a tug, while making a step, and the back of my leg (a new spot) felt as if something had torn and let my knee separate just a tad more than it likes to. Ow. Well, I figured I should walk it off, so I finished the job and hauled the brown one up, and I was fine until it came to the 3 front steps. A little ouchiness there. More than a little.

I came in and told Jane, and sit here now on 3 Advil and an icepack under my knee with my foot propped up. No pain, in this position, and being all soft tissue, maybe it will just fix itself. I give this a few days before I tootle off to the sports med guys up at the clinic, but hopefully it’s just something I need to watch, or just a freak of the instant. Boo hiss.

Anyway, I’ll survive. But I think among the chores I’d like Scott to do, one of them may be the installation of a handrail on the right side of the front steps. It has one on the left, but I think one on the right would be prudent.

The hinges came—and one more board we didn’t order.

But now we can put the doors on our last cabinet!

Turns out they were shipped from a warehouse in Oregon. As Jane put it, if they’d just told us, we could have gone over and picked them up.

Beware the vengeance of cats, for they know where you sleep…

Not yet. But I’m sure it’s coming.

All through the Great Remodel, there was no feeding the cats in the kitchen—just too much dust for health, and too much chaos. With my range free-ranging nearly daily and even the icebox waltzing matilda, the fate of the cats’ food tray, well, it was just impossible, and at times I had to get the Terrible Twosome out of harm’s way of saws and paint.

So I began to feed them in my bedroom, one of the only cluttered-as-may-be but stable places in the house: our bathroom is too small to cuss a cat in (as the saying goes) let alone feed two of them, and the living room was stacked waist-high with boxes.

Well, I decided, now that I have largely de-cluttered my 10’x 12′ bedroom, except the exercise horse and the card table, I decided to send kittehs back to the kitchen. They get a pre-bed snack in their respective owner’s bedrooms, but no more breakfast at CJ’s.

They are not happy with this: they had their post-constitutional-in-the-garden breakfast in the kitchen, then showed up in my room complaining that the bowls in my room were empty. There were worse looks as I put said bowls away.

Both are sleeping off breakfast now, but I’m sure I’ll hear from them.

Crazy weather—6″ of snow and today a rapid melt.

These are some of the babies, who are now half a foot long. Hoping they make it through the winter in good form.

Right now it’s melting as if somebody had taken a giant hair dryer to the town.

Jane is in the kitchen applying copper contact paper to the nice shelves, which we want to keep nice, and I am making a large pot of split pea and ham soup. This is one of those can’t make a mistake kind of recipes, teaspoon black pepper, teaspoon salt, diced ham, two packets of split peas and 16 cups of water, to cook in the Crockpot from noon til supper. It’s impossible to have a seasonal chill with that kind of soup for supper.

Hawaii had a bit of a scare. Thank goodness it was just a scare. Mt St Helens is acting up again, but that’s the normal thing for an active volcano to do.

We’re waiting for a thaw so that Scott can set up his tile saw to work with our backsplash. It needs water to cool it, meaning a hose. We could arrange that, but working while standing in snow, not so much.

We’re also working toward the great garage sale. We have decided after a lifetime of moves (together, moving Jane TO Oklahoma, then moving from one house to another IN OKC, then moving to the third-floor N. Spokane apartment over the cliff and creek, to moving again (on a month’s notice) to another third-floor apartment in Spokane Valley, and finally to here—we have acquired too many things that only fit one residence, only to have it useless in the next, and we have brought along far too many boxes. We are going to shed all sorts of things, from chairs to pots and pans, and the clothes—I just realized my favorite sweatshirt is about 20 years old. I refuse to give it up, but that’s the state of the closet. We are now starting on the dreaded basement, where the ghosts of previous fishtanks vie with weaving projects there’s just no room for in this house.

This strange-looking fellow is Goku…

We got him, about a 4″-5″ size, to reassure our really baby koi, who would not come out from under their rocks and eat. Baby koi have a strong self-preservation instinct. And big ones frighten them. But so does no big ones in the pond. So…Goku. Who eats, yes, oh, yes. Kibble is his friend. And true to form, once big brother was there, little brothers and sisters all began to get nerve and eat. I doubt they will catch up with him.

He is a doitsu kin-something, meaning he has those big metal scales on his back, and he is an unusual (to my experience) coppery color. The water he’s in is a little hazy, but we hope he keeps that color of his.

By summer’s end he was about twice this size, fat, and fearless. His crimped side fin has grown out considerably, and he seems quite healthy. For those of you who’ve watched Saiyuki, you know the Goku reference, Monkey, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, a young lad obsessed with eating and possessed of large golden eyes.

A springtime image, when the azalea is in bloom.

We painted the garage wall in imitation of a Chinese painting—painted it first in mud—real mud, from the ground—so we could get the feel we wanted, hosed off the bits we didn’t like, then re-did them.

Then we got a selection of little sample paint pots from Ace Hardware, and started in on a permanent image, incorporating the mud right into the work in some few places, but mostly just operating from the faint trace left after hosing off a section. We finished it with a transparent layer. And it’s a lot nicer than the blank white wall we started with, kind of organic, like the garden.

The snow-viewing lantern (that’s what they’re called: you can judge the depth of the snow by how much piles up on it, I suppose. We do) was a gift from an early Shejicon, one we light at night on special occasions, and to remember people we’ve lost. It casts a beautiful reflection of light on the pond. We greatly treasure it.

The bridge stands in a little need of repair, but I know how to do it. The problem stems from my choice of 12×2’s, not knowing that they’re a composite board, not a single piece of wood. It is slowly coming un-composited. We are going to ‘sister’ some plywood to it and repaint, and it will be strong enough to hold several people. Right now, one of us is a risk.

Thanks to Chuck—I can change the picture…

I have some things to learn about sizing and I need better pix, but you get the idea. This is that bird netting we use to keep fish IN the pond…