Wave Without A Shore

7:15 am, and we’re up and writing when the phone rings, and lo! OSG has been ousted from the building where she works due to ’smoke in the premises.’

She asked if she could come sleep on the couch. Yep. She drove over (rather than drive back to her own town, another 20 miles) and collapsed on the couch with coverlet and pillow. Her office, meanwhile, had made the local news: turned out to be no more than a couple of batteries in the, yes, security and fire detection system that had burned up. Nice. At least it reported them, I take it.

So we had breakfast, OSG slept, and managed to lose yet one more earring—she must have lost half a dozen on our premises, and we never find them! Gotta figure it’s tunneling electrons sending them to Sirius.

Ice was great today: I managed finally to smooth out my 3-turns, which had suffered greatly from the wobblies, and got them to be silky-easy again, thank goodness, while Jane, that precocious rascal, managed her mohawk (forward foot to backward foot hop-let that looks really neat, like one of those click-ball desk toys) which I can’t do; and her inside 3-turn off the wall, at least a bit, which I can’t do either. I’m going to have to get to work.

Back again and trying to get back to work when I get an enigmatic message from my domain registry, which meant I had to check that out and do a password change just to be sure. And all in all, it’s been one of those days, which came down to an entire cannister of Salmon Fish Spice showering all over the kitchen. Sometimes it just seems to be an odd day.

Just because 221B Baker Street is fictional and Middle Earth is not on a tourist guide doesn’t make them declasse for adults; and just because Venus isn’t a swamp doesn’t mean sf set in such an imaginary locale doesn’t make a heckuva fun story.  I’m going to be running an sf selection from Project Gutenberg now and again, and my first one is a fun story for very young readers; or for older ones who want a trip down memory lane. Today’s featured author is Carey Rockwell, a pseudonym that has never been cracked, although some think it may have been more than one writer, and it could actually have been someone associated with Willy Ley, who wrote the first sf book ever admitted for a book report in the Lawton OK public schools (me.) So here is a link to the Project Gutenberg Carey Rockwell entry: dated but not done, so far as I’m concerned. Based on a radio show I listened to as a kid, translated to early TV—here it is…Saturday morning kids’ television at its finest, with, gasp! character complexity aimed at younger readers. I saved my lunch money and went hungry to buy these books.

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/r#a8081

and into the garage.

Back on the ice three days running and beginning to get steadier. I think I’m suffering a bit from cedar fever, since my ears are iffy, and so is my balance, but though my brain feared I couldn’t do a 3-turn without tipping over, the feet did fine.

Go to their menu, on the left of the initial page, and look in the Blog Posts item. http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2010/02/04/words-from-the-wise-cj-cherryh

Time for checkups, which we postponed last year. Jane laid the law down, so we went. I lucked out. Instead of waiting a week or so, I get, “Can you come in this morning? We had a cancellation.” And then for a clinic item, “In two hours, just catch lunch and scoot over there. ” So that was fairly painless. At the blood test lab I had my glasses. When I got home, after stopping to get gas, I didn’t. I toughed it out with storeboughts for 24 hours and finally located them, between the car door and the driver’s seat post, when a sunbeam just happened to catch them.

We went back on the ice today. And went out to lunch with Joan and OSG and Terri, which was pleasant. I managed to get my feet under me, which was good. I’m not quite back to what I was, which was well-balanced enough to slop about a bit recklessly and easily catch my balance from all sorts of angles, but at least I was feeling solid and secure when minding my manners. My brain is telling me my righthand 3-turn isn’t there, but it actually is: I did it, just to see how badly I’d fall out of it, but no problems. Dunno what’s the matter with my head. Possibly it’s cedar season.

Jane says she counted all of the koi this morning, out from under their winter shelter for a bit, then back under by the time I came outside.

This would be a good time to make the round of our three blogs and see what’s going on.

My take on the biz, and a brief history of how publishing’s changed. I’ll let you know when it actually goes up, as soon as I know it.

Worth a read. Definitely worth a read.

…there’ll be something in February, we’re pretty sure. Jane’s getting a book ready; Lynn is; I’m writing a short story, which should be done soon. We’ll tell you when.

We had a nice letter from Bookplace Cafe, and they sent us a nice congratulations on CC, which I’ve posted over there, along with a link, for more e-books. Sheesh, I used to play guitar, draw, catalog my photos, read, weave, and do my genealogy project, and nowadays I just work on manuscripts and skate when we take a break. I felt incredibly guilty taking the time for Nationals and kept telling myself I should be working on this and that.

But this is a phase. Once we get up and going, there will again be free time. Jane wants to dig up all the grass in half the front lawn this summer and install rocks. I say there will be free time. I can see that creative rock arrangement may play a part in it. I still have to get my rings repaired from the pond dig: one flattened considerably, from my grip on the Mantis tiller handle (when it hits hard stuff it jumps like a startled skunk!) and the other lost a small set and now snags everything: it’s a tiny garnet, so won’t be ruinous to fix. The other one, the pearl ring, just has to be heated and reshaped. I think next summer I am not wearing my rings while gardening.

OSG says don’t trust February, but it’s been generally trending warmer. Mmm. We have seen fishes: Ari and Maddy, Ishida, maybe Grant, and a couple of the orange ones, which we can’t see well enough. We have 11 of them, and they shift about a bit. But they’re staying under cover, near their bottom heater. They don’t look to have dropped much weight, which is good. And we hope they stay torporous (that’s the technical word for what koi do, not quite hibernation, but close) until March. I do recommend our watertop shield for anybody keeping koi in a predator-rich area: so far a raccoon and a blue heron have tried, without any evident success. For those just joining us, it’s a sheet of black sunscreen fabric (garden store) stitched to a ring of lawn sprinker hose (usually buried: that stuff) which is made into a ring by a double-ended hose barb. It floats. A similar though smaller ring will, this spring, contain water hyacinth, which is a great water-scrubber, blooms, through the summer, and moderates the heat in July and August. And it frustrates predators.

Jane’s car is still in the shop. They’ve found why the engine light has been coming on now and again for the last two decades or thereabouts, and possibly what prompted the original owner to sell it. The throttle sensor is faulty. Doesn’t hurt the car, but it does cause that light to come on. She’s having 2 tires replaced: original equipment on a 22 year old car—they’re kinda  cracked…

We’re not skating today: the rink manager/owner warned us they’ve got a school class coming in. That’s a mess. We had a church group yesterday, but they were all good kids, most really, really first-timers, and I don’t mind helping them get moving safely, (put your weight here on your blade, shove sideways, bend your knees, keep your hands low and if you’re going to fall, squat. Fast.) But two days in a row, with a school class, is asking a bit. There’ll be some who can skate, some who think they can skate, some who hope they can skate, and some who’re sure they’re going to die. And it’s a scary mix.