C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 91

Back from Miscon in Missoula MT…

Had a great time, really. Tired.

We were quite done in having conned from Friday til Sunday afternoon, and we could have stayed for Monday, and had planned to, but we have so much work to do, and we were quite tuckered out. It’s one of our favorite motels, Ruby’s Inn; very pet-friendly, and though it has neither bar nor food service, they’re liberal with what you’re allowed to bring in and set up, plus it’s right next to a Diamond Lil’s, which is a casino/cafe, and across from Rowdy’s Steakhouse and a Taco Time, and down from The Stone of Accord, a somewhat pricier Irish Pub, so you takes your pick. We ate mostly from the con suite, which was hot dogs. Sans bun.

Jim Butcher was GOH, and Patty and Mike Briggs were there…any con where they are is going to be fun.

Jane and I were very, very, very good on our diets, ate just exactly the same things, didn’t drink, didn’t cheat, not once, and Jane came back having gained no weight, and I gained 3 pounds. Go figure.

Ah, well, it came on fast, it’ll go off fast.

Sigh.

Inspired by previous post—the difficulties of car travel in mid-US…

Or why we find some conventions harder than others to get to…

Chattacon is as far as Atlanta, when you’re considering driving from where we are, in Spokane…and there aren’t roads between Here and some of There.

We’re going to be looking at Kansas City, which is not much closer, but maybe easier to reach. We’re not sure.

And of course my brother has moved back to OKC, where we have a lot of friends. OKC is easier than Dallas, where he was.

Curiously enough, it’s a fast trip from here to San Diego, but not so much so to Chattanooga or Atlanta or even Oklahoma City. It has to do with the dearth of good highways and resources.

If we go from here to San Diego, it’s an easy overnight in Winnemucca, Nevada, and on down behind the Sierra, in a day. If we go from here east, we’re good and easy going to Chicago via I-90, but there are a lot of right-angle turns instead of diagonals, which adds time and miles, and I-80, while an amazing trip during bird migration season (it’s on the Flyway) is not an easy route, lacking good stops at the points we need them, outside of staying in cities, which we don’t like to do: in one case we had an indication there was a motel, but you had to ask at the gas station up on I-80, and then somebody there would leave the gas station, and guide you to the motel some distance off-route, check you in, take your money, wishing you a good night, and there you are, no amenities, no telly, no supper, no breakfast, and no prospect of any in the vicinity: you sleep, you get up and move on, and there’s still no breakfast…that sort of lack of facilities.

So we know if you’re going that route, pack food, or plan to spend city prices.

And when you do get over to what should be I-35 south, it isn’t—in a dispute with the feds, Kansas has built its own extension, but it’s not quite what you expect at all times, in the way you can drive the federal system and kind of know what you can hope to have. Not so on this one. The last time we did it, they’d built barriers between us and any facilities we wanted in Wichita KS, and it was a heckuva long trek past Wichita to Stillwater OK, where we ended up staying, well off I-35. We were blind tired from that one.

There should be another interstate going down from I-90 to I-80 and down to I-40…hell, there OUGHT to be an I-70, and there is—it is, in fact, the oldest of the interstates, but in need—at least the last time we drove it—of some fixing. It heads the right direction, but flat and straight—not so much and facilities, again, we didn’t find at the times we needed them: maybe they work better if you start from KC or St Louis. And from the south, if you’d really like to drive to Joplin, say, and up to KC, instead of to St. Louis, the roads at least 10 years ago, the last time we tried it, will shake your teeth out, and there’s another long stretch of no-facilities. Same if you go south toward Arkansas, until you run into the complex around the country music center, and all of a sudden you’ve got roads, and mega-resorts and things clearly designed to part you from your money…

There are some black holes if you look at the interstate system: Texas has one, and the American West has some, where it regards mountains and deserts. And heaven knows whether they’ve EVER gotten that construction near Tupelo finished. It looked promising as a route to the south off 40. But as our interstates stand, there are great big holes, not always of transport, but real gaps in service, and detouring around them is a pita.

You get the same problem of connections trying to navigate between 40 and 80 in the west, or, Heaven help you, trying to get from below Dallas up to 40— Carlsbad, south of Roswell, is in the middle of a highway Bermuda Triangle.

And heaven help you if you need to get from the Grand Canyon up to 80. We tried that in the dark, ended up in a spur of a road in the pitch dark at the edge of a cliff in Cedar Breaks National Monument, and had to backtrack when we were tired and still motel-less. http://www.nps.gov/cebr/index.htm was the cliff. This was pre-GPS. So we haven’t done that again.

Colorado is really two states, one on one side of the Rockies, the other hard to reach from there—which you would kind of expect; and Utah has a central valley, getting into which can be interesting. There are routes through from Colorado, and the northern one ends up in Vernal, UT, where there are dinosaurs in reach. But once you’re in Vernal, you have to do some maneuvering to avoid going back to where you’ve been, if you’re trying to get to points north or south.

That’s generally the same trouble on the southern crossing of the Divide. There are wonderful things to see, but there’s often a quandary of how far do we have to backtrack, and, Can we do this as a loop?

Driving is great. If you’ve never seen Meteor Crater, you should. Carlsbad. Marvel Cave. Mammoth. Great Sand Dunes. Bryce Canyon. The Redwoods. Yellowstone. And the Rockies and the Uinta range…

If any of you are planning a driving trip in the West, we are full of information…we have generally been there or contemplated being there. We love doing it, but we have our favorite routes…and our less favorite ones.

20 lbs down. 31% of weight goal achieved.

I have not seen me in Levi’s 14 slimcut jeans since the 1980′s. Jane is also making progress.

That is all.

My brother, niece, cousins, et al, all ok in OK.

Which is a relief. And fewer killed than they feared: people just kept turning in new paperwork, apparently, and they kept adding instead of realizing it was the same unfortunates.

Weather rolled in here while we were at the gym—turned right cold all of a sudden! And strong wind.

Tomorrow we get the kittehs to the vet for shots. This is going to be interesting. Ever since puberty, Shu has been a terror…we are going to give him kitteh vet-issued tranquilizer for tomorrow so he’s a bit more sedate…please God!

And meanwhile one or the other of us has to be here to receive—yes! my new computer!

My poor bewildered brother called me to ask why a mutual friend believes I live in South Africa, namely in Kwazulu Natal…

I change my residence weekly to interesting places on FB…I am so put out with their endless marketing of info, I just figure, hey, let them have something more colorful than Spokane…I think my current Location is Beijing. At one point it was Ulan Bator, which is an interesting city, capital of Mongolia…

It gets people to look up these interesting places and learn things!

Wishes for safety and recovery to Moore, OK and places thereabouts…

They’ve been hit again by a terrible, massive tornado.

Jane and I were in OKC for the 1999 outbreak, and this one followed almost the identical track, except that it missed Tinker. This is a terrible mess.

Thinking of you, friends and relations in OKlahoma.

The new book is coming along…

I don’t always outline quite as tightly as this, but seeing spring looming with conventions (Miscon in Montana, Soonercon in Oklahoma, plus a visit with: my brother, and Lynn, and seeing old friends–) there’s ample room for distraction. I also volunteered us to get my brother’s new koi pond into shape…

So I decided I’d better go that extra step; and I’m also using another technique which can be helpful in getting moving: since the Foreigner books are written with two viewpoints, I’m writing from only Bren’s view on the startup, and then on the edit, filling in Cajeiri’s. This means a re-edit to get the two pulled into harmony. But a re-edit is nothing, compared to struggling with a shifting mindset when you’re on the road a great deal.

And an outline is a good thing.

The iris are now blooming…and the peonies are out…

This is one of the prettiest seasons…the front yard is irises, lots of irises….we’re going to be digging up large yellow and purple clumps and setting them out on the roadside with Free on them so we have room to plant some of our other colors as they multiply.

And the red and white tree peonies have done their thing and are shedding petals, and now the pink tree peony is blooming, with the bush peonies coming close behind…

Azaleas and rhodies are in bloom: we have sunset colors, plus one red, and one pink… The magnolias have done their bloom, but the dogwood is out, such as it is: a very young tree.

Not forgetting the red hawthorne, which stand about 20 feet tall and arches over our fence: this is how it blooms.

Our spammers have branched out…

I now get quite a few from China.

Loving the software that now ties them in a bundle for me. Makes it so much easier. Every morning, from 5 to 15, just bundled up and waiting.

If you are a legitimate user who has found difficulty registering, do write to me. I can make mistakes, because this requires a glance-over; but generally someone whose screen name is appiaiuoqtoose is really, really suspect.

And they think there might be alien life on other planets…

Our own is doing right well.

Weird animals

Kepler satellite in trouble…lost an orientation instrument. They’re trying a fix.

kepler

This would be a sad thing…though they’ve already gained years of data.

Here’s hoping.

We need another, more potent Kepler. ASAP.