Another day, another frenzy
I am now officially putting in for a day that ISN’T another of those FRELLING DAYS. I had a friend coming for the afternoon so the first thing was, of course . . . I overslept. I woke up to the sound of the Delivery Man giving up banging on the door and carrying the FORTY FRELLING TONS of gold-dust dog kibble* up the steep half-flight of stairs beside the house to leave it behind the gate, which is where I ask for things to be left, but that means I have to wrestle the wretched thing back DOWN the (steep) steps and then back UP the steps to the front door . . . and then womanhandle it through the maze of doors, puppy gates, hellhounds, etc to get the freller into the far corner of the sitting room which is where it lives because I have ZERO storage space on the ground floor of the cottage.** ZERO.***
Then I failed to learn today’s Japanese vocabulary because the pdf print out simply doesn’t contain this lesson and my memory is nowhere near good enough to assimilate much from someone chirping it at me two or three times while hellhounds and I are out hurtling†. I’m starting to get a little cranky about the shortcomings of this package. Also I’m back to the squeaky, breathy Ashley-san section again. Maybe it’s time I loaded up the Japanese for Dummies CD.
So hellhounds and I finally got down to the mews with about an hour before I had to go meet a train. I was outdoors with a bucket, rubber gloves and a sponge, peeling a few layers off Wolfgang’s exterior†† when Peter appeared at the front door and said, You are seeking to impress? Seeking to impress? I said. No, I am seeking not to horrify. I’ve also got the two pairs of muddy hiking boots and two and a half pairs of muddy gaiters out of the front footwell, had a quick—very quick—swipe with the dustcloth at the dashboard, and refolded the hellhound-rubdown towels so that the dirtiest bits are inside.†††
I came indoors again, both Wolfgang and I a good bit damper than we’d been half an hour ago, but Wolfgang isn’t dripping on the floor. I glance at the clock and start on hellhound lunch. Don’t forget to get some food into you, says Peter. Menopause metabolism, I reply, I don’t need food, and weren’t you going upstairs to have a nice lie down from which distancy and horizontality you can’t make unwelcome remarks?
Hellhounds won’t eat their lunch. AAAAAAAAUGH.
AND THEN MY COMPUTER SEIZED UP AND CRASHED.
When I tried to text Clotilda that I was going to be late I kept getting the ‘this phone number does not exist, you call that a clean car you filthy slut, your computer hates you and your dogs are weird’ error message.
I was half an hour late to the train station. Clotilda was, I think, so relieved to see me at all that her initial reaction to Wolfgang was muted.‡ I think the afternoon went okay otherwise. Barring the extremely nasty cup of tea I subjected her to. Ambience is not all and next time I have a tea-drinking friend visiting we are going to penetrate into the unambient end of town where there is a rumour of a tea-shop that serves the stuff I drink at home.‡‡ Then I forced her to hurtle hellhounds with me. Oh dear. Poor Clotilda. . . .
I’ve been following your discussion of the research you do for your books with a lot of interest. Just this week you’ve mentioned how you’re brushing up on your Japanese‡‡‡ for Shadows and the studying on bees you did for Chalice. As a dog person, I’ve always loved Deerskin for how dog-smart it is, particularly what Lissar learns and observes as she tries to raise the orphan litter of fleethound puppies. Having raised pups myself, there are so many little details in there that ring true to me. I always smile when Lissar uses the straw to get milk into the pups, because it reminds me of the way modern breeders tube feed (though with different equipment, of course). You even captured the fear of what might happen if milk gets in those little lungs. In fact, it reads so realistically that I have to wonder if your research for this part of the book involved more than just reading about puppy raising. Did this scene come from a real-life experience?
Thank you! I’ve never raised puppies from first infancy, no, but I did raise the litter of puppies which contained my very first dog, a white German Shepherd, when I was a teenager. They were not quite two weeks old when their mum decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood and bolted, and I was in that la-la-la adolescent phase when anything to do with a subject you love is good so I was like, raise eight tiny unweaned puppies by hand? Sure! Arrrrgh. Well, all eight of the little frellers lived, so obviously the learning curve wasn’t too steep. The owner did keep half an eye on me, but she was already way over her head with other duties—she ran a riding stable as well as a kennels—and I was the kind of over-responsible tool who would sit up all night if that was what was required. If you’ve been through it, then you know about the very real danger of diarrhea in puppies—it doesn’t take much to tax them past what their tiny little metabolisms can cope with. Eight hours for a full night’s sleep is way too long, even with vet’s drugs (although the drugs may be better and faster-acting these days). I never used straws, but I wielded a mean eyedropper. I can’t now remember where I learnt about foreign matter in the lungs—but I’d survived pneumonia myself only about two years before this, so the fragility of lungs was probably still a vividly disturbing subject.
Catlady
Fostered a litter of kittens. All four kittens (and mama) found homes. One kitten’s home didn’t work out. I don’t even like tuxedo cats, I said, nearly crying with happiness as he leaped back into my arms.
He’s doing his best impersonation of a fuzzy ball right now in my lap, purring and dozing with ears the size of bat wings. Speaking of bats.
I love stories like this. I therefore forgive you for the reference to bats.
Tassiegal
If I am not mistaken [Haro] is a very well formed wire haired fox terrier puppy. At which point I melt and go SQUEEE! I love my terriers.
He does look like one, doesn’t he? And far more this week than last—if I’d got photos of him last week you’d’ve known he wasn’t. He’s really come into his own as diabolically cute. No, he’s a Jack Russell/Border cross, and while they are all frelling little terriers he looks like he’s going to grow up to be a very handsome scion of the genre.
Sigh.
* * *
* Yes, it’s a lot of gold dust. Priced accordingly. But if you want free postage—and at these prices you certainly do want free postage—you have to order it in upper tonnage.
** I have lots of bookshelves, of course. But bookshelves aren’t storage. They’re bookshelves. They’re a basic necessity, like tea, chocolate and champagne. And books. Oh, and there are never enough of them. Like tea, chocolate, champagne and books.
*** Did I ever do you my tapdance-with-added-arrrgh about my little row of dwarf appliances under the stairs? Most people have an under-stair cupboard. I have to keep my refrigerator, freezer and washing machine under there, and I swear the spice rack on the wall above the washing machine sticks a corner out, like someone putting a foot out in a slapstick comedy, every time I straighten up from doing something with laundry. At least I can employ language. It’s worse on handbell evenings, when the spice rack nails me as I’m getting the milk out of the refrigerator for everybody else’s tea. And they’re all right in the next room, and they’re all British. MMppphggggrhrhrhrhrhGGGH.
† NO. STOP THAT. WHATEVER THAT IS YOU MAY NOT EAT IT. NO.
†† Hey! He’s red!
††† I have also decided I am not letting her indoors at the cottage, where I haven’t hoovered since approximately . . . when I turned the second draft of SHADOWS in. Furthermore I suspect her of being a neat freak and never having dirty dishes in the sink.
‡ And I haven’t even mentioned his vibrant array of dents which might cause a feeling of insecurity in the timid.
Since I nearly always order on line I don’t worry about this interesting factoid from their opening page: ‘ We are open seven days a week from 10.00am to 5.30pm, and Sundays from 11.00am to 3.00pm.’
‡‡‡ ‘Brushing up on my Japanese’ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I now remember . . . maybe twelve kanji, although always for the wrong reasons. For example, the kanji for ‘father’ is described as ‘regrettably, hands wielding a stick’. Or, to my eye, two sticks. Or, how about this, from my lovely if over-optimistic READ JAPANESE TODAY: ‘The character for evening [squiggle] combined with the divining rod [squiggle], used by shamans and necromancers who worked at night to bring their customers news from the spirit world, made the composite kanji [double squiggle], meaning other or outside of. [previous double squiggle plus squiggle for person], gaijin, other-person, is a foreigner.’
Brainless brainless brainless
. . . brainless*. Although this may have as much to do with my doomed attempt to begin clearing out my email inbox(es), which is a stunningly enervating activity, as it does with SHADOWS. Email tends to . . . creep up on me. In an avalanching sort of way. Okay anyone who hasn’t written to me since 1999 you’ve just been deleted. Maybe.
And what has brought on this clearly uncharacteristic seizure toward organisation and sensible limitation and manageability? Does anyone remember that something like two months ago I bought a new laptop because this one—yes, this one, the one I am still using—is stuffed to the walls, which are bulging in a virtual sort of way? I had the new one something like a fortnight while I complained savagely about being forced to upgrade both Windows and Office/Word** . . . and then I noticed that if I didn’t plug it back in overnight it discharged by about fifty percent, even if I never turned it on.*** Hmm, said the archangels, and took it away with them. Here Beginneth the Anti-Adventure. First they dorked around with it, and then they rang up the manufacturer, or rather the manufacturer’s customer service department in India, where the customer service representatives are not always as well-drilled in techie English as they might be, and then they had hot and cold running engineers coming to the archangels’ office to Perform Tests, and then even Raphael began losing his temper while I was saying ‘drop kick the sucker and tell them I want a new one or the CEO’s head on a platter.’
None of this produced the desired outcome. Eventually the wretched piece of twisted garbage was sent off to headquarters for pity’s sake—I’ve left out that they found about 1,000,000,000 other things wrong with it none of which I had encountered, which makes me wonder a little about the engineers—and they’ve swapped out almost everything, and they’ve now . . . sent it back. Point one: it would have been simpler, cheaper and much better customer relations if they’d just given me a new one SIX WEEKS AGO. Point two: I no longer want the ugly sod. It’s a frelling Friday afternoon machine and probably all the swapped-out parts are Friday afternoon replacement parts AND I DON’T WANT IT. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s anything I can do about this except write an extremely vitriolic letter to some CEO or other†—presumably google will provide a name—and if I get no response . . . hey, I can get a free blog post out of it. Raphael says that Gabriel has been keeping a beautifully detailed list of the pertinent mayhem which I will draw upon.
Meanwhile . . . I still urgently need a new laptop.†† Raphael is bringing the Mouldering Monster of Mordor back to me on Tuesday, with the free hazmat suit, and I’m trying to decide if it’s even worth it, at this point, to try to move SHADOWS onto the new, clearly unreliable and possessed by demons machine with the NEW OPERATING SYSTEM which I already know I frelling hate because it’s full of more idiotic little whizzy bits, or whether I should just hang [ha ha] with this one††† and keep the sticking plasters, the string, and the bottle of single-malt Scotch near to hand.
And while I’m trying to make up what there is of my mind to make up ‡ I thought I could at least hammer Outlook a little. Maybe it will relieve my feelings. And it will be less to move onto the Monster of Mordor.
* * *
* Since lovely darling adorable WordPress, revelling in its 1,000,000,000,000th special upgrade, still does not let you have italic or bold—or capital letters—in your title.
** I drive a seventeen-year-old car, why do I have to drive a frelling shiny new operating system with dependent gremlins? All I really need is the ability to create and edit text. Throw in a few minimal graphic capabilities and the power to move cautiously through the dead centre of what’s available on the internet and I’m fine. Windows 1887 would be plenty, and Word Venerable Bede.
*** Yes, I took it to bed with me too. The original plan had been to join something like Lovefilm^ and knit and fall asleep during some vague scrabblings at my intensive lack of knowledge of current screen-type pop culture.^^ One of the things I checked about the new laptop was that its battery could run an entire film away from the mains and survive until the next morning in case I didn’t feel like getting out of bed to plug it in to recharge.
^ Anyone have any customer experience of Lovefilm or Netflix? I think I told you Lovefilm keeps sending me come-ons because I cruise Amazon a lot. I did look at its opera catalogue and it has the ancient Beverly Sills LA TRAVIATA so I’m disposed in its favour, even though I would eventually need something else to watch too. I’ve been reading the comparative Lovefilm/Netflix reviews and . . . . unnh. I have this fantasy of streaming, and not just streaming but moving blithely from device to device which Netflix at least allows . . . but with my broadband that’s probably a really, really dumb idea+ NOT TO MENTION THE EXTREME UNLIKELIHOOD OF MY BEING ABLE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS. I haven’t figured out how to shift from mere audio download book to book on Pooka: the few times I’ve tried something jams, decides it hadn’t downloaded in the first place (which it had), or loses my place, and trying to find my place. . . well, I probably needed to listen to that part again anyway, but as a long-term solution this is not satisfactory. In a perfect world I’d be moving fluidly from Japanese lessons to entanglement [sic] to Barbara Tuchman. Somehow I suspect that watching the first half of SWAMP THING VS. GODZILLA on the laptop and the second half on Astarte is . . . not on. Sigh. The Venerable Bede and I would have gotten along really well.
I’d better stay with DVDs by post. Lovefilm.
And while I’m on the subject of visual media, what are anybody’s favourite SF&F TV and/or films from the last, oh, ten years or so? Barring DOCTOR WHO. I know about the Doctor.
+ Raphael said, try it. You can always cancel. Ah, but Raphael doesn’t have head-exploding meltdowns when his tech misbehaves. At least not until after a month of talking to semi-English-speaking customer services in India.
^^ Plus ancient Beverly Sills operas.
† After I finish SHADOWS.
†† This one has developed the utterly terrifying habit of collapsing pages. Even someone who writes her drafts straight through does need to be able to move back and forth a bit, and this laptop is no longer willing to move back and forth and you suddenly discover that entire SWATHES of your manuscript have disappeared. AAAAAAUGH. Thus far they’ve always reappeared again but it’s not doing a lot for my peace of mind.^ And yes, I tried breaking up the ms into separate files, but since this collapsing thing may happen on any file more than about a dozen pages long, this is not too practical.
^ Now imagine how often I’m backing up. No, oftener than that.
††† Assuming that the Collapsing Thing does not get worse.
‡ Maybe I could just import a Tyrannosaurus Rex to eat all the bad guys? Then I don’t have to worry about the ending.
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.