Hellhounds and KES
I may have a new hellhound system. It’s HOT again (as observed yesterday) and hellhounds hate heat, possibly even more than I do, or at least they start moaning about it sooner.* A mere hellgoddess eventually wearies of dragging the frellers along, and as a result, the last two days, hellhounds have been hurtled less than required. This is bad. They are even less likely to eat if they are not being forced to hurtle to the usual extent** and if I don’t hurtle sufficiently I start bulging out of my jeans.***
Last night driving home at mmph o’clock it was lovely and cool. And quiet. And I got a mad gleam in my eye, hoicked my knapsack through the door of the cottage . . . and took the hellhounds for a hurtle. Hellhounds sleep twenty hours a day anyway, they aren’t very particular about when things happen. And we didn’t meet a single off lead dog. Well how about that.†
And then . . . and then . . . they ate their supper. ††
Catherine
I suspect Merry will serve Kes well, especially in a place with names like Cold Valley and New Iceland where one would expect she’ll be driving in snow (that’s probably measured in feet).
Generally speaking pickups are not ideal for snow driving; their back ends don’t weigh enough, unless you have thoughtfully borrowed a few marble slabs from the local mortuary, in which case you will need an extra mortgage to keep up with fuel consumption. That said, the way vehicles handle in snow and ice is often mysterious. I drove my first MGB through a Maine winter and she was brilliant. I frelling FROZE TO DEATH††† but she handled beautifully. I did have a sack of sand in the boot, but I didn’t have special tyres or anything.
But Merry is old, and local. I imagine he knows what to do.‡
Katsheare
I love that the pickup has a name.
WELL OF COURSE. Do you really think my alter ego is going to have a vehicle that doesn’t have a name???‡‡
I do hope Merry and Kes get along. If for no other reason than that she’ll become everyone (who only has a car)’s best friend. People with trucks always are.
Snork. Merry was, as so many things in my stories including KES are, a given. Kes needed a vehicle, and Merry is what appeared. But it did immediately occur to me that there could be interesting plot developments from her ownership of a non-car. Which is also to say that I’ll be extremely surprised if she doesn’t take him. Yo. Story. You’re cheating. But I think she will.
EMoon
. . . Old red pickups take care of their drivers.
Oh good.
Glad you remembered the toilet paper, Kes. That’s the thing you really don’t want to be without in a strange house that first night. Brooms, yeah, something to eat and something to eat off of and with . . . but being in a house with no toilet paper…no fun at all. Not that I would know.
She’ll have forgotten something. I don’t know what it is yet. Or unless she has to sacrifice the toilet paper by stuffing it down Yog-Sothoth’s‡‡‡ ravening maw.
Catherine
. . . I am so amused by her shopping list, that covers most of her basics, and I’m with her, bagels are a basic! Though I wonder how she’ll cope with the bagels not being New York bagels… Looking forward to seeing how team Kes & Merry bond and how the SWD will appear!
Yes, I’m waiting to experience the non-NYC bagels too. Having been through this myself, she’ll have recognised anything that was merely a bagel-shaped object, and rejected it utterly. But she may have been bamboozled by a bagel that looks like a proper bagel. Or maybe there’s a refugee NYC bagel baker hiding at the mall.
I’m writing the arrival of the SWD right now. I have to warn you, however, that from your end, it’s a ways off yet. And returning Mr Wolverine’s phone call is even waysier. I think I know what he’s calling about. It’s a whole hell of a lot more disconcerting not knowing stuff when you’re putting it out there for people to read before you know.
GKCRambler
I just caught up on Kes over the past week or so . . .
Honestly, I’d also love to have a dead-tree version. Not a paperback novel, to go with the other McKinley books, but something small and readable to leaf through and chuckle. This story is just too much fun.
Not, with background murmurs of We Haf Vays to Make You Talk, to shine a dazzling klieg light into the face of someone who joined the forum over a year ago but has only just broken silence to leave a compliment for KES, but . . . what do you mean, ‘not a paperback novel . . . but something small and readable’? I confess to hoping for a dead-tree version myself, some day, although I want something to have HAPPENED first§, and I’m already wondering how to translate the 800-900 word ‘chapters’ with their frequent recourse to cliffhangers into something that doesn’t look dumb on a page. But I am assuming a more or less book-shaped object.
abigailmm
I wish I were of a temperament to see a Kes episode, say, “Oh, how nice,” and pass it up. Then after a couple of weeks I could read five in succession, gleefully clicking right past the cliffhangers to the next section.
But I’m not.
Drat you, McKinley! You’re having way too much fun with this.
Yep. Guilty. Thank you for mentioning it. Mwa hahahahahahaha.
* * *
* Moaning, in a hellhound, usually consists of hanging back at the fuuuuuurthest ends of their leads, hump-backed, tail-tucked and glaring.^ There may be actual aural moaning involved but it is not required.
^ This is more a sort of reproachful to the nth degree look. Hellhounds don’t really do glaring. Too crude.
** And yes, this is true even when it’s HOT.
*** Periodically there is another journalistic round of SHOCKING EXPOSE: BURNING CALORIES DOESN’T WORK. Here we go again. They’ve been producing these revelations—with New Scientific Evidence—ever since I was a fat teenager, which is a long time ago now. There was another rash of them fairly recently. You’d have to run two marathons^ to work off a doughnut and we’re all going to die, etc. Okay. Whatever. I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention. They’re leaving something out: mood or metabolism or body mass or motivation or something. In my life, and in the lives of the comparatively few ex-fat people I know who’ve made a permanent long-term change to not fat, you have GOT to take regular exercise.^^ The other side of this is that the official calorie count of what you eat doesn’t balance against the official calorie-expenditure count of the exercise you take.^^^ In hindsight I think it took me longer to figure out what worked for me because I wasted so much time trying to do it the Right Way.
^ Three if you’re menopausal. No, four. No . . . forget it. Just don’t eat the doughnut.
^^ Although it seems to me very likely that this is a function of the kind of metabolism you have. People who stay thin even though they don’t take any exercise clearly do have a higher set point. But those of us who have to run around and sweat and pant don’t just have a lower requirement—our bodies require exercise to make anything happen. Like turning the kettle on to boil water. If you don’t turn the kettle on, the water never does boil.
^^^ Also not all calories are created equal. They’re like people. You get along with some of them. You don’t get along with others. Arrgh. But that’s a rant for another day.
† Mind you I’m aware that if we did meet an off lead dog at mmph o’clock in the morning it really would be bad news. Unless of course it was a slightly misplaced Silent Wonder Dog.
†† I can’t decide whether to hope that I am on to something, or that I’m not. Regular last-thing hurtles, even short(ish) ones, are not going to assist my always somewhat vexed ability to live in the real world. And what about winter?
††† No, I had the roof on. But it didn’t actually do much except creak and wreck my panoramic view.
‡ Which I suppose might involve driving to the local mortuary, stopping, and refusing to start again until his rear shock absorbers are sufficiently compressed.
‡‡ Okay, she could have had to name it herself. But she didn’t.
‡‡‡ Somebody explain to me why a small retrosnub (retrosnub?) icosico . . . um . . . thing is Yog-Sothoth (geometry). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yog_sothoth_(geometry)
§ Aside from the Eatsmobile, Rose Manor, Caedmon, Merry, the SWD, etc. . . .
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