C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 92

I committed new computer…

I don’t need quite the workhorse Jane does, because mine doesn’t do graphics so often, and words ARE mostly what I do. But the one thing I MUST have above any other consideration is my trackpoint mouse, that little button that sits between GH and B, and with which I can perform anything anybody can do with a mouse except scroll. It’s so automatic, so -keystroke- oriented that were I to lose it, I’d been months learning how to cope with a mouse or touchpad; and alas, since childhood I’ve had a tremor in my right hand that increases in measure as I attempt to fine down a point. Curiously enough I fence and do archery righthanded and have no trouble aiming; I can shoot righthanded or with both hands (shotgun). I do righthanded cursive. And I can model clay or any such thing. It’s purely targeting a mouse that drives me bananas.

I suspect its a neurological defect matched to the neurological problem with my right eye’s tracking—same side, same issue: my world curves like a space station when I look to the far edge, if I don’t struggle to control it. And the right hand does exactly the same thing: it goes where it thinks the target is, but my personal space warps visually, and the hand shakes. Ptui. It’s a bi-otch. I had one surgery, aged 10, trying to sort it out, but it didn’t correct the problem. I’m used to it. But no way in hades do I want to change pointing devices and cope with that problem every time I use a mouse, because the company decided to phase out the trackpoint.

Its usage has been getting sparser at Dell, and Dell and IBM are the only two that offer same. I’ve been with Dell over 15 years, and know how to get good service out of them if it comes to that.

So…I’ll have another Latitude, a machine that’s the son of the current model, only with twice the hard drive (500 gig: Jane calls that scarily small)—ha! not for me!, an Intel i5 instead of 2, and enough room for memory to exceed 4 gig if I someday need to; with the usual stuff, a decent 15.5 screen, a keyboard I’m way used to, in my sleep, plus an HDMI jack so Jane and I can both display on the big screen and discuss stuff. This can come in handy.

It’ll arrive end-of-May-ish. And then I’ll have to bite the bullet and install 10,000 programs. The good news is—we have Carbonite backup, so data movement is not going to be that bad. And this current machine is still working, which will let me take it where I don’t want to take the other. Won’t look any different…except I may splurge and get a ‘skin’ for it, something anime and outrageous.

Got the corporate taxes off and trying to get things settled to sanity here…

The April to mid-May bracket is always a zoo around here, and of course I dropped the new tank right in the middle of it.

But we are finally finished.

We hope to get caught up on stuff.

The front yard is awash in iris.

The back yard in peonies.

And we’re having another cold snap.

Just one of those days: a guy backed into me in the parking lot— and I wasn’t in a car.

Yep. Just minding my business in the Home Depot parking lot and walking toward the greenhouse…when this very elderly gentleman, out for a shopping trip with his wife, threw ‘er into reverse and fortunately didn’t gun it too hard, and didn’t mistakenly hit the gas when I flung my hand (armed with a fistful of keys) against his hatchback’s rear window and scared him out of a year’s growth…

I waved at the pair and walked on. I don’t think he even yet figured out he’d hit me. And he was real, real old and with his wife and it was Mother’s Day so I didn’t explain, I just walked on to the store.

But then my neck and shoulders began stiffening up, so the jolt was worse than I thought. So we came home, I took two Aleve and spent the better part of an hour with an icepack between my shoulder blades. Amazing how a little vector change can rearrange your back…

Our usual theme/images has pulled something weird…

Be patient. We had an update we didn’t install, something’s gone wonky with the headers [again] and we will be fixing it…but it’s late, it’s just hit without us pushing a single button, and we are just too tired to cope right now.

Taxes and furniture moving…

Jane’s balancing the corporate checkbook and I’m trying to shift the living room furniture about to site the 54g in the opposite corner. This is Rubic’s Cube stuff. And there’s only one place for the big square end table that never has been an end-table in our much-reduced furniture scale. The cats get a window seat.

There is tank, and pix will follow…

The chemistry is holding firm, the other live rock, from the breakdown of a tank in the midwest, arrived today, and we made the decision, once we had the rock arranged to our satisfaction, to put the rest of the corals over, and the four fish we have.

The last in was the yellow watchman male, who was just more elusive than the others, and some crud got kicked up in the old tank: when we finally did get him, he’d inhaled entirely too much crud, and the poor fellow fainted, quite unresponsive when we put him in—we’d been talking about a celebratory dinner, but we stayed and ate a frozen one, because we were worried about him: he was mostly unresponsive and breathing like a bellows. Eventually he began to cough (yes, fish can, a sort of a wheeze that blows the gills clear) and twitch his fins, and then began really to come to, about the time his mate discovered him, and he waked up and did a little ‘hi there’ dance with her: they dived deep within the rocks, and hopefully he didn’t take any serious damage now that he’s cleared his system of the nastiness…the old tank had just had too much disturbance of the sandbed, which in a marine tank you don’t disturb. Usually that crud gets processed, instead of being kicked up like that.

The other fish, after initial confusion, are dashing about in all this doubled space and new currents, just enjoying it.

We’re settling the disturbed old tank down again just as a backup in case the chemistry of this tank goes south, but it’s very unlikely it will. The sump sandbed’s been feeding this tank for a week, and if anything were out of kilter, the microlife wouldn’t be multiplying and filling this tank—I saw a mysis shrimp dart for cover in the new tank: they breed in the sump.

The conch and crabs and shrimp are all doing their thing…and I’m pretty confident this tank is now rolling. The four fish we have, each one about 2″ long, and skinny, are not going to stress the sandbed, and we’re not going to be feeding big dinners for a while yet—let the fishes forage for starters.

The invertebrates arrived…

WE have acquired scads of tiny snails, a brittle starfish, scazillions of crabs ranging from 1/8 inch to 1/2 inch, and they are crawling all over. There was also a fuzzy chiton and several limpets, larger variety, about 1/2 inch. And 2 of what was billed as a ‘small’ fighting conch. Ha. One goes in the sump, one above: they’re the size of a baby’s fist. I’m used to 1″. But they’re fun: their eyes are on stalks, and they have an elephant trunk, at the end of which they have their mouth.

The rock isn’t here. We have 28 more pounds arriving. And of course now the tank is lousy with crabs, which we will have to watch out for while arranging the new rock: I’ve already had to turn a stupid snail rightside up, a chopstick operation. Some species can die if they get flipped, and apparently nerites are one of those. Ceriths can right themselves. You wonder if evolution works for snails…

Overheated the shredder…

Time to clear a storage filebox for 2012 records…the victim was 2003, long overdue for sunsetting, and it’s always a memory trip when I do that. We were living over on Coeur d’Alene St, we had certain places we went, things we did…trips we took, that show up in the records. There were the epic screwups, the companies that would not believe we did not want to do business with them, the letters, the usual 941 confusion (it took us years to figure out when those reports were due) — and the whole business of a year now lying in little bitty confetti, with all its trials and tribulations: we collect the good bits and take them with us.

Jane went out weeding the back paths while I attacked the office organization prior to corporate taxes, our separate little re-April-15th because we’re on a fiscal year. At least it separates the personal chaos from the corporate chaos. We’re pretty well organized. Just not totally.

And the shredding, of course the shredding. We have a big crosscut shredder, not one of the little wastebasket toppers, and I still kept overheating it.

We went to the gym—had to activate credit cards that had expired over there; and did a bit of a workout; and we’re resolved, as the aquarium mess sorts out, to start throwing things out. I’m taking garbage bags to the basement, and if I don’t see a use for it, out it goes.

Naturally we heralded this resolve by flooding the basement floor—I was tired, I was distracted; I turned on the ro/di water filter for the 32 gallon tub, and didn’t set the kitchen timer when I came up. Result? 32 gallons of water that went onto the floor, and over to the finished side of the basement. So…lots of towels, the dehumidfier turned on, mopping, laundering, drying…

I swear, I double-dog swear I am going on a stuff-removal campaign. We have too much stuff. I am going to start at one end of the basement and go to the other, disposing of things.

The most obnoxious weight loss plateau ever…192.

I think when two people have shared nearly every meal for twenty-some years, you get similar plateaus, not the same weight, but the same era of what-you-weighed-when, and ergo—when you diet together, you’re going to have sticking-spots near the same time. Jane and I don’t weigh the same, but we sure have been battling this one.

Now granted we made two trips out to eat; but we stayed within guidelines. Granted we had one bottle of Champagne, but we had no weight bobble after that.

But my 192 and Jane’s–whatever-it-is—have been stuck in place for at least two weeks and nearly 3. We’ve gotten back on our vitamins, which had lapsed in the chaos, and we’re being careful to drink water. But try as we would, I’d go up to 193, down to 192.5, down to 192, up to 193 for no earthly reason, and often after I’d worked like a dog, physical labor, and endured being really, really hungry. Then…last few days, with the tension of the tank delivery off, 191.5. Now 190.5. I think we’re starting to move past it. No difference in the diet. Nothing new. Same 5 meals, over and over and over. No snacks. No alcohol. It just decided to budge, finally.

If I can break 189, I’ll be really, really happy. Jane has her own target, but we’ve resolved to eat these same friggin’ five frozen meals every day for a year, if it gets us down into territory we want to see again.

So there’s a reason that weight graph hasn’t budged. It’s because it hasn’t budged. But it’s starting to show signs of movement.

Yay us!

Jane has pix…if you want to see the tank up and lighted.

It’s beauteous. I’m very anxious to get fish and corals into it, but the water’s warming up to liveability. Chemistry for these tropic creatures doesn’t work at life friendly rates until you reach 62 and it started at 58. So We’re trusting the lights to warm it—which it can do. The next question is how to cool it down and get the ‘heat budget’ balanced…

Sort of like making a planet behave…planets figure things in terms of albedo, ie, how much solar input does it reflect back into space— and internal heat from the core; and how much solar input it gets.

For a tank—it’s how much does the heater input, how much do the lights input, how much do the submerged pumps input, how much escapes via evaporation, how much radiates from the glass, the rates while the lights are turned on—and the rates during the dark cycle—not mentioning that we have 2 light cycles. And if you think I’m getting pad and par meter and thermometer and figuring all this out in numbers, nope, nope, nope. I’m doing it by setting up what has to run, and figuring out what has to increase (heater) and decrease (fans) for this to stay within a 1-2 degree swing day to night. Rock and sand are a heat sink: they hold the prior condition, and the more of that there is, the more resistant the system is to change; water holds the prior condition too, but not quite as efficiently, and not while it’s falling in air with wind blowing on it.

And my friend in the East is sending me an 18″x18″ box of rock. So there will be more rock coming next Wednesday.

As a footnote, we did break our diet and celebrate with a bottle of Champagne. Jane had weird dreams that didn’t make sleep easy, and, me, I just got a headache. But neither of us woke up 3 pounds heavier, so we’re happy.