C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 99

Today we do the messy part of fishkeeping. Pumps and hoses.

I’ve got to go to Lowes and the feed store, in inverse order, and get two pumps, one that will accept a garden hose for the pond, and a little Maxijet for the topoff tank. Then I get to go find tubing/hose/adapters that will do the job.

I nearly flooded the basement: turned on the water filter we use for marine, to fill the freshwater reserve tank, and forgot to set the timer. I remembered at 5:30 this morning and dived downstairs to find the water within 2″ of the top of the 32 gallon reservoir (read, Rubbermaid Brute trashcan) I use for that.

So now—the great hose and pump expedition. It’s a chill, grey, rainy day here, so I’m not going to mess with the pond yet.

I’m in that strange stage of the new book when I outline, and this feels like a book I really want to outline very tightly. This consists in writing sequentially what happens, who’s there, and sometimes the issues that have to be dealt with and when. This is where I arrange to be brilliant: if anybody thinks all this just flows off the top of my head with no backtracking, I’m flattered, but it don’t work thetaway—I’m doing the outline of the middle of the book when something occurs to me that needs to be built into the front end, so I scroll up and put that in, then tuck in a note: controlling where detail appears is important, plus you have to have it pop up often enough the reader may not really notice it, but it’s there…and then you have to make it pay off. That sort of thing is best handled in outline. So this may mean I write less than 300 words in a day, but the brain is burning fuel bigtime and I get this horrid yen for greasy cheeseburgers or fish and chips…

I finally found the search function I installed on this site…we haz one…

It’s on the black bar that says Wave Without A Shore, clear to the end, a little spyglass in grey so you can’t see it.

It’s snowed. It’s hailed. But the temperatures are inching toward 50.

And I’m going to have to go pump shopping tomorrow—oh, not the big guy that would be a serious ouch! but the little one that runs the auto-topoff on the marine tank. Getting a cheap pump that can take the abrasion of the calcium powder in the auto-topoff reservoir is just about down to a Maxijet 1200, which is fortunately easy to find. And this time I’m going to go look at irrigation drip line at Lowes and see if I can get a nice set of delivery hoses scaled down to fit the 1200. Problem is, the 1200′s output is 3/4″ and the hose really should come down to a 1/4″ aperture at the delivery end—without clogging from the calcium. Replicating the ocean, mind, is not easy.

Meanwhile the outdoor pond is starting to warm up definitively: once it hits 58 degrees we’ll have hungry fishes. The water is, yes, army green. But I can fix that in about 5-6 hours: step one, drain the pond down to the point the fish are getting antsy. Refill with clean water. I need to test the temperature of our tapwater to know what I’ll be putting in versus what’s there now. And then while the water’s down and filling, we install the main pump. Draining the pond is not a given. I’m going to see what I can find in spa hose, so I can use the pond vac to do it, hands-off. I just set it to run and it’ll slowly empty the water. Or I can use a small marine pump to start a siphon (I’m sure not starting it by mouth!) with the garden hose and just let it drain by siphon, which is about as fast.

Then once it’s filled, I add dechlorinator, then an algae killer, as we have the main pump now to aerate the daylights out of it. And that will drop the remnant of algae to the bottom. Step two, two days on, I add sludge remover. And if I get cladella (string algae) later, I add the Interpet formula. La! I think I have gotten this figured. It was crystal clear last year, and most of the winter. The fact the algae is growing apace means it’s waking up. The fish will poke about eating the algae at first, but that’s practically zero food value. Then they’ll really wake up and want some nice pellet.

Russian Meteor…

A little more information Stony-iron, and sent shockwaves clear to Antarctica…

I don’t do commercials (except for CC) on this site but…

FTDNA has a good deal going. 39.00 Y-DNA test.

A 12-marker test is smaller, obviously, than a 37 marker or 67 marker test: the more they test, the more they’ve got to compare to other people and the more surely they can say you’re related.

If you’re female, this doesn’t help you—but! if you’ve got a paternal-side male reachable, if you pay for the test and they’ll do the simple cheek swab and mail it in, you’ll have access to the results, password and all. A birth-father, father’s brother-of-the-same-father, or son or grandson of same will have the same Y chromosome.

If you want to get in on the ground floor of DNA, this is a reliable company, a pioneer in the field of genetic testing for genealogy. They will not give you modern relationships or medical info unless you pay for a very much ‘tighter’ and differently targeted test and indicate it’s for that purpose. They also will accept GEDCOM (universal genealogical tree access) info and notify you of other matches in their DB: that is the only sense in which it will tell you about a relationship—usually 8th-degree cousins, of which you have potentially, very, very, very many. There is also the possibility of upgrading the test later: read their information. This is a really deeply discounted quality test.

Badge of Sir John III Comyn found in boggy field…first Richard III and now this…

THE ARTICLE, with photos

Talk about a guy who probably deserves rehabilitation in history: John III Comyn, Guardian of Scotland, son of John II Comyn, who held the same office, and Robert Brus succeeded William Wallace [who had that office for one year] after the Battle of Falkirk, which Wallace lost…and Robert ended up killing John in front of the altar of the church at Dumfries—some distance removed from this area (Kinross, outside Perth) —so John could have lost this ornament at some time prior to his murder.

The Scottish chroniclers of this period were pro-Bruce and anti-Comyn, and slanted their account, even putting people in scenes where they were not present.

Wiki the names: John II Comyn; John III Comyn; Robert the Bruce; William Wallace; Edward II; Guardians of Scotland.

I’m not as well-informed on this as I should be: I know most of what I know about this era via geneological research. But every time I hear one good thing about Robert the Bruce (Robert Brus) I then hear two negatives. My impression of him is self-interest above all else.

Thought the linguistics part of it might amuse you…

thoughts or states English doesn’t have a convenient standard-English expression for We can talk about the blahs or the dumps but there’s cultural context here and some history of the idea as a ‘state of being’ that has some cultural importance.

I could add others. Latin: “pietas”—simultaneous right relationship to the three realms of creation: celestial, terrestrial, infernal, and right relationship to your parents. “Paterfamilias” Father of the familia… head of the family with certain rights and powers, and spiritual presence—somewhat like the Godfather. Materfamilias, a tinged with the female rights and privileges; gravitas—seriousness, or weight, or ‘presence’ in the sense of having an impact on people. The -as indicates a ‘state of being’. You also have several words for brown re yellowness or not, several words for black depending on opacity/transparency; a few words for red, again with implications of transparency or not; one green; one white; one blue, really; and then you can shade them with sub- as in ‘sorta’ Subrufus = reddish.

Greek: beaucoup religious symbology, understood not as, eg, literal snakes-for-hair, but the association of snakes with the earth and under-earth, a creature that comes out of the earth. Greek lit is full of this sort of thing. Not to mention the habit of packing particles together to form an idea. The Greek title Anabasis is translated ‘the march to the sea’ but it’s made up of pieces: ana=again, or back the way you came; ba = go; sis =state of being or process…So as they’d come to where they were and decided to fight their way back out of Persia, the work is called the ‘process of going back again’ or the ‘march to the sea.’ You can go crazy learning Greek until it dawns on you at about 3 am in your third semester that it’s all a jigsaw puzzle of pieces, and they’re the same little words dressed up in a lot of suits like hypo (under) hyper (excessive/over) kata (down or flat) and that if you memorize one verb’s crazy parts, everything that rhymes with the thing in the first place behaves like it in its other parts—doesn’t work all the time, but often enough to help.

Spokane the 11th-happiest city in the nation—if you believe our tweets.

Happy and Sad Cities

Spokane has housing market woes, we lost a couple of our big plants, we have a wee problem with unemployment, and we have ongoing controversy with city budget…but hey, we also have 2 skating rinks, a minor league baseball team, hockey, arena football, college teams of all sorts, ski and crosscountry venues an easy drive from downtown, a waterfall and park at the heart of the city, other parks designed by the guy who did Central Park, a decent cost of living, affordable housing, and real good food. A kayak is a common summer car-topper, and skis in winter. We host (even IN the city) marmots, cougar, bear, coyotes, moose, deer, bald eagles, herons, osprey…and California quail by the thousands. We can look out and see mountains, we’re 80 miles from another country, we’re 20 miles from another state, and we’re right on the highway that crosses the northern US. Big stage shows stop here. We have casinos. We’re an easy drive to Yellowstone or Crater Lake or ocean beach. And you can walk to most sites and hotels downtown without breaking a sweat—it’s also pretty likely that part of that walk will be in a park beside a whitewater river. What’s not to love?

Back from RadCon

In recovery.

It was actually a very nice convention, but the ‘bookish’ venues were overcrowded, standing room only and the ‘gamish’ venues were cavernous places only 1/3 to 1/2 filled. This left us ‘bookish’ types so cramped for space there was hardly any opportunity for signing books at a panel, or holding any ‘after’ discussion, as your alternative was a highly trafficked-at-high-speed hallway…kind of strange. We didn’t sell a single e-book, didn’t have anywhere to set up even an informal station, there was no bar until 9PM, and the coffee shop was barriered on all sides and not real friendly attitude toward people wanting to sit down. The convention atmosphere, however, was very nice—lot of fans whose name I didn’t get to know. Jane and I alternated panels: I got a full load, huge number of panels, and she got none, so as informal as this con was, we just each took the ones that most interested us.

So all in all, we had a very good time—room was comfy, though the card-lock could use cleaning: we had to use the keycard up to 10-12 swipes to get it to take, we had to take the problem to the desk once, and to a nearby chambermaid on the last run to get our luggage and the cats. BUT the hotel staff was wonderful: they had spare toothpaste, they had spare bandaids—this was good. It’s a great hotel, but getting populous. Tanya Huff and Jim Glass were GOHs—we like them both. And Mike and Patty Briggs were there—a real plus! I got poisoned at one breakfast buffet—they had onion in the eggs and in the potatoes; so I ate the sausage, and it had so much msg I stiffened up like a 90 year old and had trouble even sitting down and standing up, not to mention constant pain. The food at this hotel is possibly the worst hotel food in the United States and Canada. The convention, however, runs a pizza and hot dog concession that will prevent your being poisoned. And bringing your own bottle is a must: the bar is sort of nice, but some years they throw out all the convention folk in favor of rowdy locals. Just take it that RadCon is a good con hampered by incredibly bad hotel food, but it can be worked around.

We visited Patty and Mike afterward, Jane got to ride—I was still limping from my blisters and the MSG, and my iffy hip is still in rehab at the Y, so I’m not able to yet—but it was still good. I recommend the com—but bring your own edibles or plan to eat pizza and hot dogs!

New land in the Pacific?

Possible new island as large as Florida…or something weirder

The Deccan Traps, the Siberian Traps, the Columbia Flood Basalts, and the Lakhi eruption in Iceland are all from when the Earth ripped open along a large seam on land. Now, volcanic eruptions produce basalts, which do not as a rule produce continents—continents, which ‘float’ on the mantle, are granite, a lighter rock than basalt. Hawaii, however, is basaltic…some have even suggested that its hot spot WAS the Siberian Traps hotspot, as the overlying plates migrated over time.

At a time yet to come, a hundred million years from now, we may see this break out—from our orbiting station, we hope.