Lurgy Update*
It was such a gorgeous day today that hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle, despite my feeling about as lively as that mess in the bottom of your gutters, thanks to another of those ten-hours-in-bed, two-hours-of-broken-sleep nights.** I’m catching up on back issues of magazines. I’ve thrown a few more books against the wall.*** I finally downloaded BEJEWELED from the iTunes store because I’m keep hearing that it’s the original and still the best of those line-up-the-same-shape/colour-things-they-go-bang-and-you-get-points games. It’s okay, although I could do without the Fu Manchu voiceover. It’s not as good as MONTEZUMA.
But when I finally crawled permanently out of bed† it was a beautiful blue sunny day and the frelling birds were frelling singing and the hellhounds were all over me†† and I, drowning in guilt as I am because all things considered they’ve been very good about my less than impeccable maintaining of standards the last week and some†††, decided, okay, countryside is in order, and we went out to seek same. And it really was pretty fabulous. We didn’t even meet any unusually savage off-lead dogs.‡
katinseattle
I want more Mongo. I want a whole book of Mongo.
No pressure.
Certainly not. I’m very relieved, since I’ve been working to this plan since the last time we had this conversation. Mongo did, in fact, break training in a big way today . . . noooooooo you moron you were told to [mmrgllrrrmph]. This is not how this scene went last time. Yelp! Arrrgh! Yaaaah! —It’s going to go a lot differently with Mongo in it. I so need sleep.
blondviolinist
You know how there’s Team Gale and Team Peeta for the HUNGER GAMES trilogy? And Jodi Meadows wants Team Sylph and Team Dragon for her INCARNATE trilogy?‡
I’m on team Mongo.
::Beams::
* * *
* Does anyone else keep having their eye caught by the ‘12’ of our new year and have brief dazzled moments of thinking that means it’s still last month? Or is that just someone with a lurgy and a deadline the end of the month that unfortunately it is?
** Colin and I have been emailing lethargically back and forth today, ostensibly about tower ringing tomorrow night, but a certain amount of reciprocal whining has crept into the conversation. I admit I’m a bit relieved that not everybody else that has this lurgy is all shiny and new after three days. Uuuuuuungh. And unless I’ve developed bubonic plague by tomorrow I probably will go ringing. I may not be able to do much but ring rounds for beginners, but Colin has beginners who need rounds rung for them, and it would at least mean pulling on a bell rope. Maybe Colin and I can cough in harmony.
*** I’m an even nastier reader when I’m ill and short of sleep.
† Having wept through the sound of my bells ringing.
†† I was talking to a friend today who’d been ill in the night too. She has cats. And while she was sitting in the bathroom at a totally untoward hour having a small private self-absorbed moan, as one does under these circumstances, the cats were of course all over her. Hey! You’re up! Great! Aren’t you glad to see us? Aren’t you going to feed us? Barring the ‘feed us’ part, hellhounds have a similar reaction. Hey! You’re up! Hey! All these critters that sleep about twenty hours a day and don’t care which four they’re awake for are very disorienting . . . when you’re pretty disoriented anyway. But last night I kept coming downstairs for more (filtered) water and fetching more magazines, and then back upstairs again getting up for a pee because I’m drinking all this flaming water, and by the time I officially let hellhounds out of their crate they were all it took you long enough. So, we’re going out NOW, right? I wonder if they could learn the concept of ‘dressing gown’?^
^ Mongo could. The problem with the Mongos of the world is that they do not sleep twenty hours a day, and they need stuff to do. If you don’t give them stuff to do, they will find stuff to do.
††† Here four bright beady little eyes roll significantly toward the sofa. You just keep giving us extra sofa time, beloved hellgoddess, they say, and much may be forgiven.^
^ I’m also practising using the argleblarging new TV set up with the new freeview, non-satellite box and the forty-seven new remotes.+ I’m practising in case the Nice TV Man turns out to have more little stories he would like professional writers’ opinions on. Why don’t people do their homework. His manuscript starts with an elaborate description of what the first illustration should be. Two seconds—okay, maybe twelve seconds—on any reputable how-to-write-for-kids site will tell you this is not what you do.
I realise the line about what is acceptable advice-seeking and what isn’t may be blurry in some areas. I try to double-check before I ask Gemma any medical questions, for example, that I’m asking out of my natural, not to say pathological, inquisitiveness, and not out of a desire for free advice.++ And she’s also a friend, and I give friends a whole lot of slack because I think if you actually know someone who does something it’s reasonable to ask them first, and if she started asking me about illustrations in kids’ books I’d just tell her what I know. Which is not, in fact, much, and she’d be better off researching some good how-to-write-for-children web sites.
And if this joker had said, the first time he was here, oh, hey, wow, you’re professional writers? Say, I’m writing a children’s book, and I wanted to know how detailed I should make the descriptions of the illustrations, maybe you can tell me?, I would have. There wouldn’t even have been any blood loss (probably). But he shows up on our (Peter’s) doorstep without warning one afternoon with his frelling story in his frelling hand? No. Not on.+++
So I don’t want to have to ask him any more questions about the TV. So I’m practising. I’m not watching TV, mind you, but when I’m going to be lying on the sofa for a while, I turn it on.
Ajlr
I’m so sorry to hear that The Cough is still unwilling to leave, Robin. I hate that feeling one gets where it seems as if one’s brain is going to be shaken out through one’s forehead at the very next convulsion.
I tend to specialise in the brains-leaking-out-your ears cough. Whatever that is that is causing intolerable pressure on my forehead is unlikely to be brains.
Yesterday while I was not watching television there was something so clearly bizarre on the screen that I found myself distracted from the book I was going to throw across the room in a minute anyway#. Eventually I figured out how to call up ‘information’ and was apprised that this was a film called ‘The Trail of the Screaming Forehead’ in which a small harmless American town is taken over by . . . alien foreheads. Ahem. I think whoever came up with this idea was having a really bad case of flu-with-pounding-headache at the time and had been hitting the cough medicine a lot harder than is safe.
+ They breed. Like coathangers and odd socks.
++ Even over here, where we do have the NHS, so the absolute question of money is not acute, doctors in their off-duty hours are off duty.
+++ I am a curmudgeon. But we knew that. And I haven’t read it—that’s Peter’s self-immolation. But Peter mentioned the illustration thing, and I picked the ms up off the table and . . . yup.
# Carefully missing the Christmas tree. I’m not even feeling shame about its continued upness yet. Hey, I’m sick.
‡ Although the herd of pygmy rhinoceros was a surprise.
‡‡ Team Sylph and Team Dragon? Ewwwwww. I’m on Team Sam.
In which Mongo is comforting
It’s after one frelling a.m. and I haven’t started the blog yet. Since one of the ways I avoid thinking about how much time the bangleflandadblinging blog eats is by starting that night’s post in the (comparatively) early evening and then writing it in driblets while I work on something else at the same time* this is bad. What else I’m doing may not be very demanding—if I weren’t half thinking about the blog I might not find out after it’s too late that I’ve once again ordered enough plants for next season to fill all New Arcadia’s gardens** for example—the point is merely that when it’s AAAAAAUGH o’clock and for frell’s sake I started the beastly blog hours and hours ago . . . at least it hasn’t all been the blog. When I’m up against it like this there’s nowhere to hide. I have to write it and I have to write it NOW.
Today’s problems began last night as they so often do. Yesterday was seriously bad anyway because I had to get up whether I’d had any sleep or not (I hadn’t), so today I decided I would simply stay in bed till I’d had enough sleep. It might be February. Well, it wasn’t, but it took about twelve hours to get about six hours’ sleep, between the cough, the sleeping sitting up because of the cough which means that not only aren’t you sleeping very well even when you’re sleeping, when you wake up to pee again because you keep drinking water from the sad delusion it will dampen your flaming throat, you are crippled with muscle spasms. Woman was not made to sleep sitting up. Fortunately the hellhounds are so accustomed to ignoring my screaming at inanimate objects that they don’t react to my screaming at . . . me. Which either says something rather ominous about the success of my tendency to anthropomorphize (or at least critter-morphize) computers, furniture, articles of clothing and little noodgy objects, or it says something even more ominous about my status the last few flu-addled days. Or it may just be they don’t recognise the harsh rasping croaks that are the extent of my vocalisation lately as having anything to do with the hellgoddess.***
Anyway. Twelve hours eats a vicious hole in your day. I’m still too enfeebled to think about pulling on a bell rope so, barring some half-speed hurtling and a cup of tea with Oisin†, all I’ve been doing ALL FRELLING DAY is working on SHADOWS. So I haven’t got anything to tell you about.
* * *
Maggie has (also) had a bad day, and last night was pretty stressful too.†† There have been skeletons coming out of closets and bogeys from the corners. The world is not the shape she thought it was. And she has just withstood a creepy-making conversation about when what you have is a relationship and when what you have is a parasite. And why do we keep pets anyway?
* * *
I looked down. Mongo hadn’t quite given up on the possibility of more sandwich. He was sitting beside my chair with his head pressing rather heavily against my leg. When he saw me looking at him his tail, of course, began to wag. “Trombone,” I said, and he leaped up and shot away to look for his rubber trombone. It wasn’t a fair command: I should know where it was before I sent him after it. You want to reinforce your training with success. But I wanted my parasitic dog to show off how clever he was. I heard him scurrying around the living room. Not there. He made a quick pass down the hall to the front door, but the dining room door was closed. It wouldn’t be in the dining room. He scampered upstairs. I heard him nudging the door to my bedroom open. It might be under the desk or the bed. No. Not in the bathroom either. (Dog toys occasionally got in the bathroom as the result of the drama of baths.) Damn. It was probably in the back yard then. Damn. Use your brain, Margaret Alastrina, not your stupid emotions. He’s not going to find it and he’s going to be unhappy and feel that he’s failed. Which will be your fault.
Mongo flung himself downstairs again. I might be giving up hope but he wasn’t. I was just about to get up and open the back door, which was better than not doing anything, but dogs have a strong sense of fairness and Mongo would know I hadn’t played fair with him, even if he forgave me, which he would. But he trotted to the back door himself without looking at me. And reared up on his hind legs, took the handle in his mouth and pulled down. The door snicked open.
I had never taught him to do this.
He ran outside and found the trombone under a rosebush.** He came dancing back in with it again (I admit he didn’t close the door behind him) and laid it proudly at my feet. “You are wonderful and amazing,” I said, “good dog.” I got up and fed him the last slice of chicken from Val’s sandwich-making. I also closed the back door. Then I put the plate that had had the sandwiches on it on the floor so he could lick up all the crumbs.
“I can live with ‘parasite’,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
* * *
* This does not include the hours I spend reading up on South American vampire bats when I meant just to be checking the spelling of ‘pipistrelle’, or trying to find a nice neat short definition of the difference between quantum theory, quantum mechanics, and quantum physics^ so that if I’m going to make a fool of myself I can do it forthrightly and in full cognizance, or googling not quite at random in pursuit of that perfectly off the wall metaphor that I know is out there waiting for me on . . . just . . . the . . . next . . . opening . . . screen.
^ Which appears to depend on who you read. A bit like asking what the difference between fantasy and science fiction is.
** Hey. It’s a small town.
*** Hellhounds are actually being very patient with me. They are not getting hurtled to their standard full extent due to human infirmity^ and I don’t dare let them off lead because I can’t call them back. You don’t realise just how much you use your voice for things other than conversation till you haven’t got it to use.
^ My dogminder costs. Put me in my All Stars and I can still walk.
† I forgot to remind him to boil the mug I used for forty-eight hours and then let it stand in bleach for a fortnight. He’ll probably remember. It’s a little hard to miss that there’s something wrong with me. Oh, and he claims he’s going to write me another blog post.^ And he has the new Finale update. Sob. Lust. Loooooonging.
^ If this is pity, I’ll take it.
†† Although there was a Very Cute Boy.
††† Sic. Maggie’s mom likes roses.
Cough
I am a walking cough; a cough on two legs; cough made flesh. Cough. Talking is a mistake.* Eating is perilous.** I think the arrival of the cough is supposed to indicate you’re improving.*** I’m too tired from coughing to tell. Cough.
But SHADOWS is still going.†
I am however cranky†† about the bad news about ultrasonic jewellery cleaners. I had thought part of the point of the ultrasonic gadgets is that they’re gentle on jewellery, possibly to the point of being so gentle they don’t really clean anything. (I do know that you can’t do anything to pearls except smile at them and wear them against cashmere.) I also didn’t know, or had forgotten, since I’ve barely worn my tourmaline ring in twenty years, that tourmalines are fragile. Feh. And yes, of course I can ask our nice local jeweller for advice about cleaning, but he will feel obliged to go all professional on me and I was hoping some of you guys might have the answer without the official hedging.††† Ah well. More little brushes and washing-up liquid in my future then. I guess I can bear it.
And before I bore you all to death . . . I am loitering frivolously with the thought of going ringing at Forza tomorrow. This is a really bad idea. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the energy, I have a novel to finish—the bells there are tricky sods, I already know Gemma is not going to be there, and I might find myself the only mediocre ringer present, with my usual additional burden of not being able to handle those particular bells and the supernumerary burden of the lurgy.
Maybe I’ll just stay home, and post a recipe. And cough.
* * *
* Why do hellhounds insist on waiting till I say something? Isn’t the mad waving of hands containing harnesses enough to tell them they should sit?
** Eating is always perilous. Ask Darkness and Chaos. AAAAAUGH. Having given the impression that he was on the mend last night, Chaos barely made it outdoors this morning to start the diabolical double-ended geysering all over again. AAAAAAAUGH.
*** http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/09/new-year-health-regime-last The headline in the paper version is more eye-catching to me in my present state: ‘Dr Luisa Dillner Says Switch Off the TV, Stop Snacking and Start Exercising to Ensure You Feel Good Beyond January.’ I haven’t watched TV in YEARS,^ I am post-menopausal and my daily energy allowance is 3.5 calories and I NEVER snack, and I walk an hour and forty five minutes to two hours EVERY DAY. WHY DO I HAVE THE LURGY WHEN I AM A PARAGON OF VIRTUE?^^
^ I talked to Hannah today. “Hi,” I said. Cough. “Wow,” she said. She still hasn’t read CHAOS. After she does we’re going to read either JANE AUSTEN or CHARLES DICKENS by Claire Tomalin. Or both, because we have so much time to read. She was telling me about the TV programmes her daughters are watching and I’ve never heard of any of them. I haven’t been deeply involved in a TV show since BUFFY. No, really. ANGEL? Too gruesome. FIREFLY? Eh. It had its moments, but it never entered my heart and mind the way BUFFY did.+ It’s probably safe to say that I wouldn’t be writing my first high school novel at fifty-nine if I hadn’t watched BUFFY at an embarrassingly advanced age which was nonetheless more impressionable than it should have been. Which may or may not be a good thing.
Oh, and the mysterious non-cooperation affliction of our de-cabled TV? We changed the batteries in the remote and it still refused to climb away from BBC 1. So there was a knock on the door one afternoon and there was the Nice Man who had installed our freeview box who wanted to ask if one of us would read his CHILDREN’S BOOK MANUSCRIPT. Fortunately Peter answered the door and dragged him into the sitting room and thrust the remote at him. There are too many buttons on the wretched thing. And Peter is reading his manuscript. I had my mouth all open to do my rant on this subject which is that ASIDE from the fact that I am a cranky cow, what I think about an unpublished manuscript has no more to do with its chances of getting published than what Chaos or Darkness thinks of it.++ Go start researching AGENTS. What you need is an AGENT who likes your work. But I was forestalled by Peter’s old-fashioned gentlemanliness AKA the man is nuts.
+ And I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t/doesn’t like THE SOPRANOS or David Tennant.
++ Er—you aren’t expecting us to eat it, are you?
^^ Of course they also tell you to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night. They must be joking.
† And my email seems to have settled down . . . for the moment. Sort of. Or, possibly, not, and I just don’t know it. It was even weirder than I told you yesterday, as I eventually found out when I stopped abusing my damaged larynx with screams for vengeance and had a look for the easily findable stuff that had reappeared. When I got back to the mews and turned the old laptop on—which is the one I’ve been using the last several flu-demented days of filing and deleting—I was braced for what I’d just seen on the cottage machines. But what had come back was NOT what I’d deleted that morning. It was some OTHER stuff. Whimper.
So . . . I basically have no idea. GIBBERGIBBERGIBBERGIBBER. Right. Enough of that. I have a novel to finish.
As to why I still use Outlook . . . I forget. I will ask Raphael to remind me. I think it’s to do with my apparently somewhat unusual requirements combined with my total lack of patience, interest in, or skill in understanding anything to do with computers. I think it’s what they’re willing to support me with. The bright spot, such as it is, is that the shiny new laptop with the vibrantly hated Win 7 on it did in fact discharge its battery by 50% overnight despite being turned off. YAAAAY. For once something goes wrong even when there is an archangel present.
However, those of you hopefully offering advice about the hellhounds: I think you’re probably late to the party. Long-time readers have heard all this before. My hellhounds are five and a half years old and I spent the first two of their years of life on this planet trying to find out why they had diarrhea all the time. The answer is, as I eventually figured out with absolutely NO help from any of the fantastic and expensive panoply of vets, specialist vets, and specialist vets’ laboratories and techno-gizmo whatsits that I consulted, that they are allergic to all cereal grains. (Pancreatitis, as someone mentioned on the forum but I can’t find it now, is one of the things they were temporarily diagnosed for.) I’d tried an elimination diet nearly first thing, but I took them off brown rice while continuing to use barley and oats, and then swapped. It took me a long time to think of all cereals. But two years of eating something they were wildly and violently allergic to has left them with some permanent damage.
And the only time they won’t eat when I’m nearby is when they’re already looking for an excuse not to eat, and me being an ogre will do. (I think this has more to do with the fact that they know I want them to eat and I’ll be testy if they don’t.) I’m actually not very fond of the alpha theory. Why would a good leader want his/her colleagues not to eat? The alpha business as the great comprehensive answer to everything is less popular than it was, for which I am grateful. When it first came crashing out it was The Solution, and I thought, since it clearly didn’t apply all that well to my experience, that I just had weird dogs. Well, I do have weird dogs, but the alpha theory has also lost centre stage. I am, however, a great fan of what works. If something makes you and your dog(s) happy and healthy and comfortable and satisfied, then it’s the answer for you.
†† Cough
††† Note to self: The Answer never exists.
I can’t very well ask the fellow who bought the stones for us. That was twenty years ago in Maine and I have more or less deliberately^ forgotten everything about him except that he was a self-absorbed twit.
^ Ie making a virtue of Middle Aged Brain
But SHADOWS is still still going*
I still feel like stagnant pond scum and the water in vases where the flowers have all died. I wrote something today when Maggie has a very large purring cat in her lap and she says that it makes her eyeballs buzz. Yeah. Only I’m like that just sitting here. **
The day did not begin well when I woke too early and lay there thinking about an intractable bit of plot machinery while my thriving young cough gleefully explored its rapidly expanding capacities. Eventually I decided there was more rustling*** going on than could be explained by my cough-driven blood pressure thudding in my ears, put on a dressing-gown, stumbled downstairs, let hellhounds out . . . and Chaos bolted out into the courtyard and began erupting in both directions. OH JOY. We’ve already been having hellhound follies the last few days which I haven’t told you about because they wind me up and I can’t afford to snap and run off into the blue, I have a novel to finish.† I do know what started this particular too-many-ringed circus: Darkness heard a monster at the cottage the other night while he was behaving in a reckless manner—which is to say eating—and isn’t going to make that mistake again any time soon. Chaos missed the monster†† and initially attempted to carry on with the eating . . . but you can’t just lie about eating when your brother and life partner is crammed into the back of the crate becoming one with the, um, darkness. You could see the Dawning Horror creeping over him, although Chaos isn’t so much a back of the crate hellhound as a floormat with large beseeching eyes hellhound. NOOOOOOO. NOT THE BOWL OF FOOD. NOOOOOOOOO. Anyway. Things have progressed. Not in a good way. Today we appear to have added reality to the mess.
As I was hosing down the hellhound courtyard there was one of those chirpy knocks on the door, you know the one: tap, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, tap, tap. GO AWAY. YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT I’M DOING. I answered the door.††† It was the postperson, who handed me a Large Wodge of Stuff. I staggered under the weight, being weak and infirm from coughing. Will you be here in half an hour? he said in a voice to match the knock on the door. I stared at him through puffy red-rimmed eyes, a large pile of post and a bad attitude. I couldn’t think of a way out of it. Yes, I said. Oh good, he said, I have some packets for you as well. EVERYTHING I HAVE ORDERED OR ANYONE HAS SENT ME IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS ARRIVED TODAY.‡
And then Raphael showed up‡‡ to (a) take the shiny new laptop away and make its possessed-by-evil battery spin 360° and spew green bile‡‡‡ so we can demand a new one and (b) tell frelling Outlook to stop playing silly buggers and function again. I mean, again Raphael told it. It giggles feebly while there’s an archangel in the house and instantly goes off the rails again as soon as he leaves.§ ARRRRGH.§§ Since I’m presently trapped at home with SHADOWS, two mentally- and digestively-challenged hellhounds and a cough, I’ve spent some time trying to sort out my dreadful email inboxes. I spent a good two hours doing this this morning while I was waiting hopefully for the fifth or sixth mug of tea to penetrate so I could get on with SHADOWS. And when we went back to the cottage this afternoon and I turned on the desktop—and the knapsack laptop just to doublecheck—NONE OF WHAT I’D DONE ON THE MEWS LAPTOP UPDATED.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM.§§§
* * *
* The end is actually in sight. It’s just nowhere near enough. I want to be able to see it without the assistance of the Hubble telescope.
** So maybe the ending is near enough. I just can’t make my eyes focus.
*** Nothing to do with brown paper.
Jabenami:
And, um, on the subject of bad physics jokes…
Heisenberg and Schrodinger are driving down the highway when they are pulled over by a police officer.
“Do you have any idea how fast you’re going?” the officer demands.
“No,” says Heisenberg, “but I know exactly where I am.”
“I’m going to need to take a look in your car,” says the officer and goes around to the back of the car.
“Did you know that you have a dead cat in your trunk?” the officer exclaims.
“Well NOW I do,” says Schrodinger.
And from xkcd, that incomparable fount of scientific wisdom:
And, while we’re at it:
Yeah. This is the kind of thing I think about at 5 a.m. when I can’t sleep and Mr Military Man is going to start crunching gravel soon. Does xkcd’s little brother write fantasy? Has his little brother recently started reading brain-exploding quantum physics which is having no discernable effect (he thinks) on his actual story-writing, but is making him feel like his own doppelganger?
† In twenty-three days. In case anyone else is counting.
†† We were having a typhoon.^ Wind, rain, banshees. The banshees have never bothered the hellhounds, but there is, I am assuming, a sub- or supra-banshee who has infiltrated the area recently, to the dismay of some sensitive hellhounds.
^ And I am so tired of resetting my phone machine, and the alien-invasion-klaxon back-up battery that protects the desktop from berserkers and boiling oil and is worse than the banshees. The typhoon went on for several days. I can go for weeks without getting any messages on my phone machine+ except from people like the dentist++ but over the three days of typhoon I think everybody I’ve ever met tried to phone me and have subsequently been variously waspish or petulant about my yet-again-un-re-set phone machine.+++
+ Probably because I never answer them
++ And I’m certainly not going to answer him. The nice young receptionist is leaving me increasingly forlorn-sounding reminders about my check-up however.~ Go away. I have a novel to finish. You don’t want me till I’ve finished my novel, and got paid. And I don’t want you at all, but . . .
~ There’s a special module in Dental Receptionist School about sounding forlorn.
+++ It’s not like I ever, you know, answer the phone.
http://www.quotegarden.com/telephones.html :
The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875. In other words, if you had been living in 1850, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without having to answer the phone. Bill DeWitt, 1972
Middle age: When you’re sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you. Ogden Nash
The situation is made additionally complex in my case because the phone that works doesn’t ring. The phone that doesn’t work does ring, but it’s the one in my office which is to say next to my bedroom and I certainly don’t want it ringing at me at an unsuitable hour, like any time before noon. So I leave it unplugged. Why should I plug in a phone that doesn’t work? Which means I don’t hear phone calls. Every now and then I’ll hear some clicking and muttering noises but by the time I figure out it’s someone leaving a message, they’ve rung off, and I didn’t want to answer the phone anyway, did I? No. I’ll listen to the message later. If I remember. If the banshees don’t wipe it first.~
~ I have a perfectly good email address. It’s not like people can’t get hold of me. Of course I don’t always answer emails either, but I do read them.
††† I have to draw the line somewhere. I already don’t answer the phone.
‡ Okay, I don’t know that it’s everything. Everything I know to worry about the non-arrival of. I’m well aware that anything that doesn’t arrive at its destination by Christmas enters an interdimensional time warp that laughs at both Heisenberg and Schrodinger, and re-emerges at an undivinable wave/particle node which generally involves being gnawed by dragons during the detranslocation and is most often rendered as March. But some of today’s haul was ordered/sent in November.
‡‡ I backed up politely, explaining that I had the lurgy. So do I, said Raphael cheerfully. I’ve had it since the beginning of December. And through two courses of antibiotics.
Moan.
‡‡‡ All right, I’m a little obsessed with undesirable effluvia at the moment.
§ It hasn’t tried undesirable effluvia yet. Small mercies. Or no, medium-sized mercies at least.
§§ So, arguably, I don’t have a perfectly good email address.
§§§ Don’t do this when you have a sore throat and a cough.
But SHADOWS is still going
Well I feel like death on toast. Old, decrepit death on burnt, spongy toast that was nasty chemical-laden mattress bread in its heyday. I also have laryngitis. Well, half laryngitis. I can croak, but it hurts. There will be a cough later. Joy.
Yes, I missed service ring this morning.
No voice lesson tomorrow.
No second-Monday at Old Eden tomorrow.*
Not in a good mood.
I did, however, meet Colin and Anthea while I was out hurtling hellhounds in slo-mo this morning.** Colin has the lurgy as well so they were also moving in slo-mo.*** Oh, you sound much worse than he does, said Anthea admiringly. Thanks, I rasped.
Clearly more bad jokes are needed. All of you who read the forum will have seen (almost all of) these. And if you’re feeling healthy and sharp and brainy you are permitted to skip. The rest of you will enjoy seeing them again.
blondviolinist:
A piece of string walks into a bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender looks him up and down and says “We don’t serve your kind in here.” The string walks back outside, stomps around, and ties himself all up. He then walks back into the bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender says “Aren’t you the piece of string that was just in here a moment ago?” “Nope,” the string replies. “I’m a frayed knot.”
Us old married women are allowed to laugh and laugh at the following. The rest of you have to pretend to be stern and poker-faced. Mrrrnghmph.
LRK:
“Mrs Svensson, why did you shoot your husband with a bow and arrow?”
“Because I didn’t want to wake the children.”
Or another:
“My husband is a sailor – he’s only home one month a year.”
“That’s awful! I’d never stand for that!”
“Oh, I don’t know… a month passes so quickly…” †
And here’s a joke from me. I can’t remember where it comes from, except that I picked it up somewhere in the last few months of cramming physics and maths, probably several times:
“We don’t serve your kind here,” said the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.††
* * *
* This, I admit, may be as much blessing as curse. Not my favourite bells in the universe, especially not in January when even nice bells may be dyspeptic. But having not rung tower bells in seven days I’m starting to twitch.
** You have dogs, they have to go out. If you’re incapacitated, you stuff a broomstick down your spine, tie the leads to your hands, and go out anyway. (My dog minder, bless her, took them out yesterday.) Next time, I’m adopting an elderly, three-legged Chihuahua. Or maybe I’ll go the amphibians in tanks route. No, probably not. I think the wingless fruit flies in the refrigerator would creep me out. I have enough trouble with the mealworms for the robins.
Ajlr
Oh, Robin, that ring… *haz a envy*
It’s good, isn’t it? ::Preens:: It provides a little cheering-up in the present dark days uggggh. I tell myself that winter is the logical time to have flu: flu in the summer feels really unjust. But I’m ready to notice that the days are literally getting longer. Any time now guys, Apollo, Helios, Surya, whoever.
My fabulous ring has one fairly fabulous drawback however, as some of you with jewellery fetishes will have already twigged, which is that it’s a ratbag to keep clean—all that surface area, those big flat facets—and the backs are worse, as they always are, because you have to fight your way through the setting, but if you don’t clean the backs the fronts look dull. I’ve been doing the job with one of those soft mini toothbrushes that I can poke into the back, but it’s a fiddly business. Do any of you have any personal experience and/or recommendations about the ultrasonic jewellery cleaners? I know they get mixed reviews, but I’ve been the noxious chemicals route and I really don’t want to do that again.
. . . but what else is there that sings in the middle of the frelling night? They can’t all be robins.
I’m not sure if you have street lights anywhere near you, but it’s quite common for some birds – blackbirds, particularly – to sit near the lights at night and sing. And as blackbirds are also among the first to nest each year, so they’re pairing-up now, that may well be a male blackbird starting to proclaim his territory that you’re hearing in the early hours.
Blackbirds. Thank you. That’s it. I even thought it sounded rather like blackbirds, but I can just about tell an eagle from a dodo on a good day^ and blackbirds at night? But there is a streetlight at the end of my little cul de sac^^ as well as several down on the main road.^^^
Mrs Redboots
I envy you your husband in his lovely choices of presents. Mine has to be told what to buy me (but then, to be fair, he does!). A lovely ring.
Thank you! Peter takes direction very well. In this case he didn’t have to—he had the idea and then it was the jeweller’s problem. But it was Peter who found this jeweller-who-listens twenty years ago, so the points are still all his.
And I would assume a blackbird – we are having them here in London, too.
I want to say, good for them, and I suppose I do still mean good for them. But the critters that manage most successfully to colonise human towns tend to be the thugs—blackbirds, foxes. Rats. Cockroaches. Doesn’t speak well of us, although we knew that. At least blackbirds have a pretty song. But I barely see my robin any more because the blackbirds have taken over. I’d rather have my robin.
But the other night I was staying with my parents, in Sussex, and I heard an owl. I was almost sure it was an owl . . . I haven’t heard one there since my childhood . . . But when we went out to the car to come home to London, the owl swooped overhead.
What kind of owl? Little owls are dead common around here, and we have tawny owls pretty much by the yard as well. Occasionally if you’re very very good you’ll see a barn owl at twilight, if you’re out wandering the countryside. Absolute magic. No mere Harry Potter snowy owls need apply. They’re also amazingly huge—you have that adrenaline rush at first sight which is both the thrill of it and a faint atavistic memory of pterosaurs or something when you think it might be coming for you. Or at least a hellhound. One of the things I’m not going to get around to, this life, is keeping a bird of prey.
I’m currently having a fantasy about quail, though. A tall thin tiered cage so they can fly and perch. Nice little eggs. This comes of faithfully reading COUNTRY SMALLHOLDING http://www.countrysmallholding.co.uk/ I should get out more.
^ If it’s alive, it’s probably an eagle. Unless we’re in a Thursday Next novel.
^^ Which is approximately the only way in which I’ve done better than my semi-detached neighbour, who has a cellar, despite being farther up the hill than I am, as well as an attic, four bedrooms, a dining room and two sitting rooms, a larger garden, room to park three or four cars and a chunk out of my tiny sitting room and equally tiny office to run his frelling plumbing. But he has the streetlight.
Of course I have the hyperactive security light belonging to Mr Military and family immediately across the road from me, which is apparently carefully aimed to dazzle into my windows and make sure I’m not trading world secrets with Martians or anything.+ Yes, there are very likely hellhounds on the bed/sofa. Sue me.
+ No, just handbell ringers.
^^^ I’ve never caught him at it, but I swear there’s one that sits on the wall six feet from my bedroom window and serenades the security light.
^^^^ I rescued a small fluffy baby owl something a few years ago, sitting in the main road at the end of the mews’ drive, waiting for something to happen. What happened was that I got out of Wolfgang and moved it. What I remember is blogging that I’d pulled my sleeves down over my hands to pick it up and someone who knows more than I do posted to the forum that its mum wouldn’t have minded human smell on her offspring the way us mostly-clueless vague tree-hugging nature-lovers would expect.
*** I don’t know what their excuse is. They have cats. They can’t possibly subscribe to the fallacy about fresh air being good for you? In an English winter when you have the lurgy?
† Negotiating acceptable comic rudeness is always a ratbag. There’s something in the rule of thumb that says you’re only allowed to be gratuitously horrible about something you have personal experience of, so LRK and I can be rude about husbands. It’s not the only rule of thumb, but it’s somewhere to start. As I’ve told you before I was gobsmacked when I first started going out into the world as a published writer—a single published writer—and was accused of being a man-hater. What? Yes. I have uppity heroines. Siiiiigh. I still get mail to this effect. Hey, some of my best friends, etc, aside from being married to one. For twenty years.
I think these jokes are funny. But I also think ‘I’m a natural blonde, please speak slowly’ is funny. And I’ve only ever seen it on women’s t shirts, not men’s. I was also a natural blonde through my twenties.
†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
You see it both ways—my way, and ‘we don’t serve faster than light neutrinos here’ said the bartender. I realise my way requires that your auditor has been cramming on maths and physics lately too, but this way spoils the joke, I think. I’d rather undergo the humiliation of having it explained.