Yet another day of no brain and too much coughing
Comprehensive ickiness marches on. Booooooring. Last night I not only had insomnia but The Cough decided to demonstrate what it could really do. I had no idea it hadn’t been trying previously.*
So, between having done nothing today** and having no brain to make something up, I will depend on forum comments for structure an d(apparent) progression tonight. . . .
Anne_D
+ And I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t/doesn’t like THE SOPRANOS or David Tennant.
Nope, not the only one. Tennant is my least favorite of the new Doctors. Never watched The Sopranos, but from the clips I’ve seen and the reviews I’ve read, it’s not my sort of thing.
My problem with the Sopranos is that it’s about a nice normal (which is to say completely banjaxed and dripping with neuroses and relationship problems) American family . . . who happen to kill people. Because they’re Mafia. Whatever. The point is they kill people. This is just part of the set up. It’s supposed to provide depth or irony or something. Ewwwww. No. I’m not going there. Killing people is not a normal, acceptable response to business and personal failures. It is not a healthy, positive way to deal with rivalries and frustrations. You want to have a story about going around killing people, you need vampires, werewolves and evil magicians.
I sat through several episodes at irregular intervals because I had so many friends who loved it. I’m not all that interested in endless developmental rehashings of personal troubles**, which left the murders. Squicky.
EMoon
No, ma’am, you’re not. David Tennant’s acting in ANYthing (including the modern-dress Hamlet production in which he played Hamlet–a miscasting if ever there was one) seemed to be limited to acting bugf*ck crazy with his eyes bulging out.
Well, yes. Exactly. He makes me look composed and serene. Take a Valium, David, and sit down.
Sanderling
But this pretty much explains everything, in my mind – for two years, anytime anything went into their mouth they were left feeling pretty awful. I’d stop wanting to eat after that, too.
Yes, well, it’s not that straightforward. They have spells when they’re all over their food like normal dogs, especially Darkness. Chaos, even enthusiastic, runs to the end of his enthusiasm pretty fast. There have been moments when I’ve thought I might even get a little weight on Darkness. (These moments go away again.) But you never know when or why such a spell is going to come on—or how long it’ll stick around. Their moods vary from day to day . . . and meal to meal. Sometimes the Don’t-Eat Fairy coshes them halfway through what was looking like a total gulping-down epiphany. At least one more item that has to be added to the list of Things Robin Must Brace Herself to Be Made Crazy By however is the notorious sighthound indifference to food. Salukis are infamous for this. Deerhounds are too. My guys are one-eighth deerhound—although one of the whippets of the previous generation belonged to the Food Is Optional philosophy too. She was a very sweet dog, but completely, ahem, barking, and I have a fair range of experience of canine peculiarities.
Diane in MN
. . . I’ll stop talking about it in case Teddy’s bad angel starts getting ideas. DOGS. Yes.
Chaos is squirting again. )(*&^%$£”!!!!!!! DOGS. NO. Next time it’s cheetahs or axolotls.
Claning
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WHY DO I HAVE THE LURGY WHEN I AM A PARAGON OF VIRTUE? |
Some health advocates do make it sound almost as though germs are only incidental to diseases and if you get sick it is ALL YOUR FAULT.
Yes, because you haven’t done it THEIR WAY. Here their book only costs £49.99, the cheap rate at the local gym will only rip £1200 out of your flesh every year and the class/machine/trainer you want won’t always be unavailable, the supplements you absolutely must have will only be another £100/month, and the special organic food and fashionable superfoods won’t do much more than quadruple your grocery bill. It’s your health, isn’t it? What are you waiting for?
MNCathy
. . . we took our dog . . . to an off-lead dog park this summer and she went to investigate a pond and somehow fell in. She is not a water dog. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of puzzlement on a dog’s face at finding herself knee-deep in water, and she got out fast. A young Labradorcame along shortly thereafter, and she stood and watched in disbelief as it chased around in the water. She clearly thought it was mad.
Yes. There are water dogs and there are not water dogs. Mavis, my dog minder, asked me a couple of times last summer when it was beltingly hot if the hellhounds really wouldn’t get in the river to cool off and I said they haven’t yet. Darkness has fallen in twice by stalking a duck too near the edge, but he has rocketed straight back out again without pause to invest in the experience. I’ve twice waded in on hot days*** and tried to persuade them to join me, but they stand on the shore with that alert, patient look that many dogs get when you’re doing something even more doolally than usual and they’re hoping that it’s not going to interfere with your taking them home again by the most scenic possible route to their nice comfy dog bed (we say nothing about food).
In my deranged and poverty-stricken youth, I used to housesit for an aging lab who had to be prevented from plunging into the Maine Atlantic in the winter because it was hard on his rheumatism.
Mrs Redboots
The first of your recipes is known in my family as “Cow cake”, especially when iced with chocolate butter icing as my mother cuts it into portions whose size resembled that of the concentrate then fed to dairy cattle.
I love this. LOVE LOVE LOVE. Cow cake. That’s it forever. —It is one of those recipes that everyone has a version of. But I’ve never heard it called cow cake before. Hee hee hee hee hee hee. I personally much prefer the digestive-biscuit version to the rice-krispies version that I saw far more of when I was a kid. Although this may have had to wait till I discovered digestive biscuits, which we didn’t have in the States when I was young. Graham crackers or vanilla wafers just aren’t as good.
BlueRose
It appears your computer equipment is possessed by all nine circles of gremlins. Have you considered something other than Outlook – like Thunderbird?
Outlook is a right bitch to deal with if it decides it doesn’t like you, and if you DON’T need the appt bit then Tbird will sort your email side right out.
And I imagine you have all your appts on your iphone anyway
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You have not fathomed the depths of my daily shame. My appointments are in my small paper pocket Ringing World diary. †
I did ask Raphael why I’m on Outlook, and it’s as I was expecting: he says that given the sinister conflation of my somewhat unusual requirements plus what local broadband support is available plus what the archangels themselves can do, Outlook is still the least of evils.
Sigh.
Mrs Redboots
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. . . the only problem with 1571 is that you actually have to pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone to know that you’ve got a message . . . |
The message on ours (recorded by me!) says “You’re welcome to leave a message, but as we are very bad at checking for messages, please ring our mobiles!”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I try to prevent people from even knowing I have a mobile phone. ‘Oh that pink iPhone-shaped case that I wear around my neck at all times? Oh, no, it’s an emergency bar of chocolate.’
* * *
* Somebody tell me what frelling evolutionary advantage is conferred upon one who has insomnia and/or hosts a cough. Being able to get by on very little sleep would be great, but that’s nothing to do with the experience of insomnia: maybe you’re awake when the camp guard has nodded off and you see the sabre-tooth tiger creeping toward the headman’s baby and you raise the alarm.^ But next day when you move camp they’re going to have to carry you, you’re so tired . . . and they aren’t going to. Every early prehuman for him/herself. So the sabre-tooth tiger gets you instead, next night.^^
I can’t remember if there’s any actual science for this or not, or whether it’s just the obvious joke that every semi-literate menopausal woman since Darwin has made, but that your caloric requirements plummet the moment you’re no longer fertile makes some sense. That provides another pair of hands to tend the tribe’s children while the young women are either pregnant or foraging, and these hands increase the likelihood of more kids surviving and don’t cost the tribe anything.
Insomnia? Coughs? Successful parasites don’t kill their hosts. Coughing gets you left behind too, and you may be glad to see that tiger.
^ Or maybe you don’t. The kid’s a brat, and is going to grow up to be another big stupid bully like his dad.
^^ Or possibly not. It may still be full of headman’s brat.
** Except a few paragraphs of SHADOWS. Not enough paragraphs, but still . . . paragraphs.
*** Yes: there goes 90% of all nongenre story-telling media. I’m a lowbrow^, what can I tell you.
^ With a few exceptions. Most of which (Eliot, Trollope, Dickens) I would be happy to argue are genre really.
† Remember that a ‘river’ in England is any minor concavity that contains at least one teacup of water for at least forty-eight hours once a year. By these standards New Arcadia has quite a nice little river. It’s still only knee high in the middle.
†† http://www.ringingworld.co.uk/purchase/diary-calendar-other/diary.html
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.
Grinchly yours
IF WHAT FOLLOWS IS MORE OF A MESS THAN USUAL, PLEASE WRITE A LETTER OF APPRECIATION TO WORDPRESS, WHO LOGGED ME OUT AS I WAS FINISHING THIS POST. I WRITE OFF LINE, BUT IT TAKES ME A GOOD HALF HOUR MOST NIGHTS TO TWEAK AND TIDY BEFORE I PUBLISH AND I WAS ALREADY LATE POSTING. I HATE WORDPRESS. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HATE WORDPRESS.
The day did not get off to a good start* when I discovered that my desktop is frelled. I was only halfway through my first cup of tea of the day, it’s Christmas Eve, I have a novel due in five weeks and there’s something wrong with my bottom line everything backs up HERE desktop computer.
Joy. Possibly not to the world, but to my world. This leaves me in the interesting position of relying for the duration of the holidays on one elderly, increasingly doddery laptop, one brand shiny new laptop with a hidden and still unknown canker gnawing at its vitals and a brander shinier new OS I can’t use and gives me a blood-pressure headache every time I turn it on**, and one knapsack computer too small too use except bunched up on a train or having a bohemian moment at a café.***
Um. Well, hellhounds and I had a very nice hurtle this morning. I had frustrations to run off.
And the rest of the day has been a blur of wrapping presents and getting the tree up. Yes! It’s up! It’s even decorated (mostly)! And Peter put the wreath on the front door (after dark†, but dark comes early these days)! ††
And I even got a couple of hours in on SHADOWS. Aren’t I fabulous.
. . . . I’m also exhausted, and I have to ring bells in way too few hours.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS
* * *
* We’re skipping over the standard ‘did not sleep and therefore overslept’ part.
** While we were waiting for other people not to show up last night at the tower we were talking about Operating Systems We Have Known . . . and Penelope offered to drag me through enough of Win 7 to get me started. Next week, when she’s on holiday. Penelope is a wonderful human being. And I’m the kind of low scoundrel who will take her up on it.
*** I’ve happily done a good bit of writing (serially) on each of my (two) knapsack computers, back in the days when I was going up to London on the train regularly. There’s something about being able to work on the road that blergs the exasperation of the too-small screen that doesn’t open quite wide enough and the too-small keyboard that engenders even more typos than usual. Taking notes on it lying on a sofa with hellhounds at home is also excellent but using it for producing text under ordinary working conditions, which is to say my office or the kitchen table at the mews^, and it makes me nuts in about half an hour. Context is everything.
Speaking of computers and of context . . . I’ve been reading reviews of another of these WE UNPLUGGED AND LIVED memoirs which, as these things usually do, is tending to polarise its readers. I probably won’t read it^^ so I’m not going to name it or crank on about it specifically. But one review refers to the author’s astonishing discovery that life is still possible without their laptop. This is the point at which I decide I’m not going to read the book. What does this person do for a living? If they’re a journalist, how are they pursuing their craft, pray? How did they write their book?
As I have mentioned on this blog with what is probably distressing regularity, I bought my first computer because I could no longer get parts for my typewriter. I don’t want to learn frelling Windows 7, I just have to—Microsoft, that despicable ratbag, demands it^^^. I don’t watch television because I don’t have time, and I am attached at the hip to my iPhone because she’s the phone number that my 84-year-old-husband’s emergency service will ring if he falls downstairs. And yes, my iPad is a pretty toy.# Sue me. I could live without Montezuma and Fingerzilla if I had to, but is playing them really different in type from reading a no-brainer murder mystery or LOTR for the 1,000,000,000,000th time because I’m too tired to do anything else but too wired to sleep? People have always needed (ahem) downtime . . . and have always wasted good time and good brain on the latest fashion in glitz. I’m very interested in what computers and the internet are doing to our brains and our society but it’s not simple.
^ I tend to forget how silly this is. It’s normal to me.
^^ I finished CHAOS! In spite of reading/listening to most of it two and sometimes three times . . . I couldn’t put it off any longer! I am bereft!+
+ I will probably download ABSOLUTELY SMALL~ tonight. Or possibly YOU ARE HERE.~~ Decisions, decisions.~~~
http://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/absolutely-small/
~~~ Also dependent on the download working. Speaking of Life with Tech.
^^^ I hope to live long enough to see someone bring this monumental creepazoid down.
# On a somewhat related subject . . . the Mac thing. I’m not going to shift from PCs at this point for a variety of reasons, starting with that if I’m snarling about having to wade involuntarily into Win 7 I certainly do not want to learn a whole new solar system with too many moons and a binary star, and ending with the fact that Blogmom doesn’t do Macs. But . . . in fact I am yearn-free. I love my Pooka and my Astarte. But they’ve got important stuff wrong with them from the stupid-end-user viewpoint—stuff that makes me wonder if their programme designers were off their meds that day. Ultimately my little pink darlings are still gizmos like other gizmos. Mac? Feh.
† If we’re counting, I had lunch after dark.
†† Peter is worrying about his Very Large Present. I already have a garden shed! he says. I don’t have space for whatever it is! —Mwa hahahahahaha. When I showed up with it tonight—and it did not want to fit into Wolfgang^—he looked at it dubiously and said, well, at least it’s a flatpack shed.
^ It would have fit fine into the boot but the boot tends to be full of wellies and compost and Mysterious Sticky/Crumbly Objects. And yes I could have put a clean hellhound blanket down or something but . . . I got it into the front seat. Where it sat stiffly and disapprovingly upright like a combination of a small coffin and an old-fashioned maiden aunt, and hellhounds sulked because everything else was in the back seat with them. GAAAH. CHRISTMAS. I fall farther out of the loop every year. I’m not, as I also keep saying, Christian, but I do respond to the still, contemplative, something-larger-than-you-are aspect, and ‘Christmas’ makes me feel as if I’ve landed on a strange planet and the how-to manual I shipped out with is not only several hundred suspended-animation years out of date but was already wrong when it was new. Wait. Christmas is about what? And we do what to celebrate? Never mind. Please pass the champagne.
Another Great Day
Not.
I got back to the cottage last night later than I meant to, as I had gone on with SHADOWS rather too long after Bronwen left and was late tackling the blog . . . and there were archangels coming in the morning, I mean, you know, morning, before-noon-type MORNING, and while hellhounds (when all is well) have amazing sphincter control, I did want to take them out before archangels arrived, in case I became absorbed in biting the carpet and screaming.
And there was a car parked in my space.
I have sufficiently impressed upon you that the cul de sac my cottage is on is not merely narrow and land-mined but a seven-dimensional jigsaw and you’re required to take six months’ advanced driver training at Silverstone before you’re allowed to buy a property there? Every micron of pavement is privately owned and you encroach on someone else’s territory at extreme risk to life and limb. And have I mentioned that it was 3 o’clock in the morning? If I’d known where the miscreant was hiding I would have been happy to bang on the correct door till they or their severed body parts emerged, but I wasn’t going to go looking at that hour. I managed, by good fortune and fury, to wedge Wolfgang in next to Phineas’ car, left a CRISP note on the windscreen of the brigand, went indoors and . . . called the cops.* They are not allowed to draw blood, more’s the pity, but they could at least locate the little rat turd and tell him to move his gorblimey vehicle. Yes, of course I thought of letting the air out of his tyres, but with modern tyres that’s more of a faff than it used to be in the rough days of my youth, and the car was middle-aged and in even worse shape than Wolfgang, so he probably wouldn’t notice if I did key the thing.
But adrenaline is not your friend when you want to go to bed and sleep. I turned my computer on which (frighteningly) is pretty much my default response to any and everything any more**, which gave me the opportunity to discover that my email was NOT WORKING. I did all the unplugging and replugging and closing and restarting and dancing and shouting things you’re supposed to do in these situations and . . . no. Okay, at least Computer Archangels are coming . . . in about six hours. I sent Raphael a text saying, please don’t come before eleven. . . . volleyed through the whole teeth-bath-and-hellhound-snack pre-going-to-bed business, turned the light out and . . . lay there thinking about . . . well, about Maggie’s mom and her sisters, and about some of Mongo’s friends, and about . . . um . . . never mind. Thinking.***
The alarm went off way too early, except I was already awake. Moan. The gorblimey vehicle was gone, and there was a note through my door from Phineas’ son apologising for his contemptible low-life of a friend. You may gather I am not appeased. I found moth holes in one of my favourite sweaters.† Computer Men were there for over two hours and . . . the new laptop is still eating its battery like a lion tucking into a wildebeest and they never figured out what was wrong with the email, it just started working again. And then stopped again. And then started again. . . . ††
While this was going on there was an exciting Christmas delivery! No. Wrong delivery.††† Boring boring delivery. I have about thirty-six Christmas things coming and one boring one. So the one that arrives. . . .
After we finally had our proper morning/afternoon hurtle‡ and loaded up Wolfgang to traipse down to the mews . . . there was a large delivery truck parked in the archway into the mews courtyard. I think the driver was eating his lunch. Parked in the archway, so that no one could get past. The courtyard behind him was empty. He could have parked in the courtyard to begin with, or he could have backed up six feet and parked in it now. But he didn’t. He saw me, got out of the truck, opened the side door in a leisurely fashion, examined his hand-held electronic gizmo for instructions, unhurriedly selected a parcel, ambled over to one of Peter’s neighbours, knocked on the door, had a nice chat . . . and frelling FINALLY drove out of the *&^%$£”!!!!!!! archway.
And now I am going to try to go to bed early. Beginning with driving calmly back to the cottage and parking in my space.‡‡
* * *
* Who were gratuitously polite. I have insurmountable philosophical problems with the fact that High Tories in positions of modest social authority in small towns in Hampshire are pretty well universally well-mannered and considerate. It’s true that for all my bellowing I’m (mostly) extremely law-abiding^, so when we have contact the fuzz and I tend to be on the same side. It’s still disconcerting.
^ I would be capable of letting someone’s tyres down—ideologically if not practically—probably not keying. I’d feel sorry for the car.
** . . . and chocolate. Between turning your computer on and chocolate, most of the exigencies of life are covered.
***Maggie As far as I’m concerned, learning that Shadows has Mongo and maths and physics AND origami is an excellent Christmas present…
Oh glory. Are you one of these scientific people? Brace yourself. Your namesake is not. She has certain scientific principles thrust upon her, but she bends the physwiz^ out of them whenever possible.
^ sic
EMoon
You said: I haven’t got time for unexpected plot developments! It’s due in six weeks! It’s really simple! Mongo saves the universe! The End!
Yes. That. My idiot book has been changing its plot in the last few weeks and even today, dadblast its fiendish excuse for a mind. Idiot person riding from A to B to tell X that Y is coming for a visit changed his mind on when (actually Y changed his mind on when to send idiot person) leaving fossil bits of conversation relating to the earlier decision scattered across several chapters.
Riding. That’s your problem. Riding. There are no horses in SHADOWS.^ But I wholly concur about the ‘dadblast its fiendish excuse for a mind’.
^ Okay, two or three ponies in the background. But they’re little ones, petting-zoo burn-outs. And if you tried to ride them they would bite you.
† They’ll mend. But I’ll need to take my wounded garment in to the craft shop to look for the right colours of embroidery floss. No I am not going to spring for an entire two skeins of yarn. Probably.
†† After they left I rang Penelope and cancelled going to see HUGO with her tonight. I knew I shouldn’t be sloping off to the cinema but this was not how I wanted to get out of it. Should I tell Niall you aren’t going to stop round for handbells then either? she said. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
††† Had another of those extremely enjoyable experiences on line today. Got to the check out. It wouldn’t (a) accept my email address (b) accept my password (c) let me re-register (because my email address is already on their database. I knew that) (d) accept the new password they sent me after I hit ‘forgotten password’, even though I hadn’t forgotten it. I wrote to customer service and was rewarded almost immediately with a robo letter thanking me for contacting them and promising to respond some time in the next twenty-three years.
. . . Meanwhile as I write this I have received confirmation of an order put through the end of last week within their stated Christmas deadline. This is one of those delivered-live-plants things, and I’ve fired off plants to half my address book. When you buy more than eight hundred and forty three they let you choose a few free ones for your home address. The confirmation is telling me that the free ones coming to me have been dispatched . . . and none of the others is now guaranteed to arrive before Christmas. Thanks. Thanks loads.
‡ In the rain. All forecasts for today said ‘sunny’. It’s been raining off and on all day. Oh, and there wasn’t supposed to be any frost last night? There was. I now have several fewer pots that will need bringing indoors the next time we have an official frost.
‡‡ It’s now raining hard.
ANOTHER RATBAG DAY
I took New and Shiny home with me last night and . . . just by the way . . . this going to bed with your technology is getting out of control in my house. Two years ago I was only in danger of being crushed to death by falling piles of books. Then I bought Pooka—but putting her on the shelf next to my bed made some sense because it’s her phone number that the emergency-line button Peter wears round his neck forwards to. (If neither I nor either of the two back-ups answers, they send an ambulance and ask questions later.) Then there was Astarte. But I’m afraid it is extremely luxurious lying at your ease with six pillows and a duvet, reading or cruising on your iPad.* Reading. I’m still a hard-copy girl at heart** but the joy of reading hundreds of loose pages of manuscripts on an ereader makes me so emotional I can hardly type.***
Anyway. I took New and Shiny† not merely back to the cottage †† but to bed, thinking that I’d have a nice low-stress post-relaxing-bath stroll through some of its arcaneries at a time of day/night that when I can’t figure out what the *&^%$£”!!!!! is going on, it doesn’t matter. The first thing that happened is that it told me it had 98% of its battery charge. . . and 1 hour and 58 minutes remaining. Sound of Robin exploding straight up through the canopy and leaving a little dent in the ceiling. It’s probably a good thing it was the middle of the night so I wasn’t tempted to ring any archangels.††† Fortunately New and Shiny changed its mind and decided it had five hours left before I threw it off the (tall) bed and jumped on it. But one of the benes I have been persuading myself with‡ as I flinch and whinge about the necessity of learning all this new software rubbish is the prospect of watching films on an unplugged-in laptop that can actually do this without gargling, stalling, running out of battery and falling over. So New and Shiny had better.‡‡
Meanwhile . . . my bell-ringing software won’t run and several of the shortcuts on my desktop won’t open. SIIIIIGH. I haven’t even dared try my two monster programmes, the homeopathic RADAR and the musical Finale: I’m afraid there will be blood and screaming. And possibly entrails.
But my original point was that, having heaved New and Shiny to one side, to join Astarte and 1,000,000 half-read books on the other side of the bed, there is precious little room left for me. I hope New and Shiny doesn’t turn out to be a restless sleeper.
I woke up this morning out of a dream of someone holding me penetratingly at swordpoint which turned out to be a corner of New and Shiny, schlepped all four of us‡‡‡ back down to the mews, and discovered . . . that my email inbox wouldn’t open on the old laptop and crashed if I tried to persuade it and I couldn’t get into New and Shiny at all because it was rejecting both my fingerprint and my password§. . . .
At this point I did ring the archangels. And then knitted while they remote-controlled into the Battle of Hastings being re-enacted in a small Hampshire mews terrace.§§ At the end of all this I had two more hellhound squares and a throbbing headache. And it was nearly time to dash back to the cottage again to ring handbells. Frelling Niall was frelling early, and there was a knock on the door (and a cacophony of hellhounds) as I grasped the handle to flush the toilet AND THE HANDLE BROKE.§§§
* * *
* Not to mention a whole new fresh approach to playing Montezuma on a bigger screen.
** And the whole reading-in-the-bath thing is likely to keep me that way. Although you suspect you have a slight skew to your system when you’re waiting for the paperback not because you don’t want to spring for hardback prices but because you want to read it in the bath.
*** Sure cuts down on your second sheets though.^ And I’ve been getting through a lot of scratch paper lately, testing pre-doodles. And pre-pre-doodles. And . . . . ^^
^ Every now and then some mingy publisher sends you a ms where the pages have been printed on both sides. Feh. This should not be allowed.
^^ Remember the doodle it took me four tries to get right? I took #5 out of the envelope this morning, sighed, and put it back on the working side of my desk.
† I know. She? He? needs a name. It’ll come to me. At the moment our relationship is a little testy and I might inadvertently name it Grendel or Grendel’s Mother.
†† And it BARELY fits in my tattered canvas briefcase equivalent. AND IT WEIGHS A TON. It might as well be a third hellhound.^
^ Hmmmm . . . .
††† I did think about texting Raphael. Texting is a very very bad thing when you have shortness of temper problems. The immediacy of email is nothing on the diabolical immediacy of texting.
‡ NEW OS. AAAAAAUGH. Archangels did warn me that I was going to have to move on from XP this time, but . . . AAAAAAAAUGH. Gods on toast, why doesn’t someone come up with some stripped down programmes instead of the endless even-more-pumped-up ones? Sodding Microsoft is like a factory turkey—it’s already flabby and it’s half water.^ I don’t WANT a million more choices! I didn’t want about 80% of the choices in XP!^^
^ Not to strain a metaphor too far or anything, but its basic level of health is so poor it’s also full of pre-emptive antibiotics.
^^ Yes. This blog post is also coming from the old laptop.+
+ And yes, they all have names. The desktop—who is older than CHALICE, just by the way—is Seneschal. This laptop is Gonfalon, and the little knapsack-sized one is Pennoncel.
‡‡ Meanwhile, when the frell are they going to get both batteries and battery read outs a little more RELIABLE?
‡‡‡ Three hellhounds, that is, and me
§ And because this laptop was designed for the business market you can’t merely turn off the security pass thingy. What?
§§ My purling is improving. My counting is getting worse. But maybe it’ll be easier to pay attention when it’s counting stitches instead of rows. I’m eyeing the leg warmer pattern again.
harpergrey
I remember you mentioning that you are on Ravelry…may forum members add you as a friend?
Of course you can. For that matter I can’t stop you. But I haven’t really figured out the purpose of friending on Ravelry. Perhaps I haven’t reached Full Knitting Saturation Point yet or something.
§§§ Handbells after this were going to be unusually exhausting, but this was exacerbated by Colin deciding to call St Clements and bob minor spliced. So you have not only to remember what frelling method you’re ringing, but what the calls do to you. The calls themselves are the same—at least I think they’re the same—but since the methods are different you come out the other end of the calls into different places in DIFFERENT PATTERNS. ::blergablergablergablerga:: Then we rang some little bob minor just to finish the brains-as-spaghetti job. And then Gemma showed up so we had to ring MAJOR.
And I have to flush my toilet by taking the lid of the tank off and YANKING till I can get a plumber in. And have I mentioned I have Fiona coming tomorrow? Yo, Fiona, how are you at cold water, limescale and yanking?