New Thing, New Thing, nanny-nanny-boo-boo, tra la la New Thing
::dandles New Thing::
::dandle-dangle-dandle-twinkle-dingle-dangle::
::hums idly::
And, finally, bursts into loud roars of evil laughter. MWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA . . . . Sorry guys. Ordinarily I loathe and despise people who tease* other people but . . . but . . . well I’m having a good time with the New Thing. I think you will too** . . . or if you don’t I will crawl away into a corner and cry . . . but the thing thing is that the blog is such a lot of work. I’m increasingly aware that I can’t do this forever, even if there were enough people who wanted me to, but that while the obvious answer is to change the wretched thing somehow, I am hideously constrained by what I can do . . . which includes the limitations of the peculiar personality that does it. Just declaring ‘less often, fewer words and more other people’s books’ does not work.
I think . . . I think . . . I’ve found something that will work.
It’ll make better sense after I post the beggar. And then I’ll tell you more about it too. Meanwhile . . .
::dingle-dangle-glitter-flourish-swank::
Tomorrow? I might post it tomorrow. I might. Or maybe I’ll post it Wednesday. Or Thursday . . . or . . . decisions, decisions . . .
::twinkle::
Catlady
I have so far avoided getting a cell phone because the very idea that someone could call me at any time is so terrifying that I’d rather get stuck halfway home and have to walk my broken bicycle straight to the dentist than have the ability to call someone to come rescue me.
Um. Not that I wish to damage the perfect bloom of your paranoia—having a number of healthy, well-nurtured paranoias of my own—but you do know you can turn it off, don’t you? There are, so far as I’m aware, two options for the turning-off thing: you can either merely make it not make noise by setting it to ‘vibrate’ which means it will undulate embarrassingly against your leg—GADFRELLINGZOOKS I HAVE A RAT IN MY POCKET—oh, wait, it’s the phone. Or you can turn it off off, and then you’ll never know that you won that voucher for a free glass of champagne the next time you’re at Charlie’s, because of course you never check your messages.*** But this does at least mean that when you’re lying at the bottom of the muddy ravine you can ring someone with a rope ladder.†
BlueRose
Your comment about the phone lines always being bad . . . unless you have had fibre installed then your broadband is sent over your copper phone lines . . . if your standard phone line is crappy due to interference, then that has a direct affect on your broadband performance, it will likely manifest as random disconnects all over the place and sometimes trouble getting connected.
Also I recommend getting a powerfilter . . . it may spike badly enough over time to damage your router or anything else electrical plugged into it.
SIIIIIIIIIGH. . . . I thought I’d talked about this before. Well, I probably have, but given the several gazillion words that have passed over this opening page in the last few years. . . . Anyway. Yes, I know. This entire area sucks for landline service, and the wiring in my little cul de sac makes linemen burst out laughing and have to grab hastily at their poles before they fall off. This is probably sixty years old, one of them told me, wiping the tears of mirth off his face. There is not a thing I or any other mere citizen can do about it. It’s all owned by British Telecom and they don’t give a flying bugger. BT, just by the way, and I know I’ve told this story, informed me, when I tried to get Third House plugged back in a few years ago††, that there was no phone line to that house and I would have to pay several hundred pounds to have it installed. Pardon me. This is a 1930’s cottage in the centre of town and there is a phone jack in the kitchen. But that’s the kind of thoughtful, efficient mega-mono-incredible-o gigantic-o national corporation it is. There are regular rumours that we’re going to have our broadband area-wide upgraded—although meanwhile it’s getting worse because of all the new build and new people and more of them wanting broadband—but I’ll frelling believe it when I frelling see it, and even when it happens it’s not going to happen to my cul-de-sac till the very, very, very, very, very, very end. If they remember it at all. Grrrrr.
And I have a surge protector. I have several surge protectors. I even replace them.
Diane in MN
who uses a landline any more?
Well, I do.
Well . . . so do I. But don’t tell anyone. And my ways around my interference issues are of the tin-foil-hats-to-keep-the-alien-probes-out-of-my-brain level. I don’t care.
Despite the presence of multiple towers in our area, our cell phones are mostly non-functional at the house because we don’t get a signal. I assume we are in a hollow or something.
No. It’s the alien probes. (But don’t tell anyone.) It sodblastingly amazes me how often the old ‘we can’t get a signal’ is trotted out. Our horizons look like angry hedgehogs or secret military intelligence encampments with the numbers of phone masts and at this point most of the people I know—and I would include myself in this sad, misguided number—are addicted to their mobile phones and feel vulnerable and endangered (and cranky) when they can’t get a signal and check their Twitter feed regularly to see if @rhinestoneAllStars or @pinkcentifolia has answered their tweet yet. And it is a monthly wonderment to me—which is to say when the chirpy message about the bill comes in—what I pay for the privilege of . . . sometimes being able to pick up a signal. What is the deal here. And whatever it is I want to upgrade my package.
Ajlr
(We use Skype all the time at work, including holding 10-participant team meetings on it. Mostly, it’s fine.)
I CANNOT BEGIN TO IMAGINE A SKYPE MEETING INVOLVING TEN PEOPLE. I think I have to sit down. Oh, wait, I am sitting down. Maybe I’d better lie down.
Looking forward to hearing about The New Idea.
::Beams::
EMoon
If having us feel tortured with your Mystery Fun was the goal, then yes, I feel tortured. Silent but intense screams of agony are even now wafting across the land between here and the Atlantic and will soon be wafting across the ways, you-ward, to give you the satisfaction of knowing your torture plan was successful.
YAAAAAAAAY. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You cheer me immeasurably.
blondviolinist
::dies of curiosity::
::enters afterlife furious that premature death has prevented her from FINDING OUT WHAT ROBIN WAS TALKING ABOUT!!!::
There, there. Send me a forwarding address. In these digital, immaterial days I’m sure we can work something out.
serenityruler
As for the surprise, I’m intensely interested. Because the reader forum is detached from the blog itself, I’m not sure if the blog exists to create conversation or just to hear from Robin. It has to be her style and humour in the writing seeing as it isn’t excerpts from the books or exclusively book related subjects. Hmmmm….
The blog exists because my agent told me, five years ago, that all authors have blogs these days and I had to have one too. I am naïve. I thought this was more or less the literal truth. Feh. But it was too late by the time I found out she was exaggerating for effect . . . and it is certainly too late now. The blog is supposed to be a marketing tactic. It’s supposed to be getting Robin McKinley, Author, out there as a concept. It doesn’t (said my agent reassuringly) have to be literally marketing. Which is the good part. Unfortunately it—and you—are stuck with what I can do, as I keep saying. Days in the Life are what I can do.
However . . .
* * *
* Ask any of my friends. I Do Not Tease Well. Peter spent years being startled at having his head ripped off and handed back to him.^ I was teasing, he’d say. So? Your point would be? I would respond. Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to, you know, play? he’d say. I’m American, I’d say. Life is real! Life is earnest! Art is long, and Time is fleeting! And our hearts, though stout and brave! Still, like muffled drums, are beating! Funeral marches to the grave!^^ No messing around!
^ Remember we had spent exactly one weekend together when we decided to get married. There were lots of surprises.
^^ http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-psalm-of-life/ Maybe it’s just that I went to Bowdoin College. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is like this great informing spirit in my life. He’s not alone, mind you, but he’s sure as hell there. Great thundering humourless New England patriarchal Puritan thug. The Protestant frelling work ethic. Get me the Katahdin out of here.
Mind you, I do have time for Longfellow, possibly because (last I knew, maybe he’s come back), he is Not Fashionable. I am (almost) always willing to give a fellow unfashionable an extra break. Maybe it’s just that I went to Bowdoin. And am sort of from Maine. But Paul Revere? Hiawatha? Totally. I’m not at all sure that there’s much of Longfellow you can read for the first time as a grown-up without deciding you’d rather be weeding the cat or painting the dishwasher, but when I was a kid those stories with their fancy metrical shimmy were hot fudge sundaes with extra sprinkles.
** ::trembles and looks around anxiously::
*** Ask me how I know the never-checking-messages part.
† How I’m going to attach hellhounds to my body for the ascent I don’t know, but I’ll worry about that after the person with the rope ladder answers their phone.
†† It had stood empty long enough that the phone got turned off.
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