But I found them. Had lunch at Peking North and of course, deposited them on the bench seat instead of into my purse. It took me a while to figure this one out—and it was Jane who remembered this restaurant.
We found a reasonable pond store locally. And ended up with a new koi. She’s the same size as our average. Her name is Maddy. She’s a pearl white with butterfly fins, ie, a long-fin, and very reasonably priced. Baby koi tend to be around five to twenty dollars depending on quality. The adults with show markings can cost a mint. But the kicker is—you don’t know what the markings are going to be until they grow, because new spots are always turning up as the fish acquires more rows of scales. So you can make good bets based on lineage, but you’re not certain until they’ve reached a certain size. Grant, for instance, started with an orange head and white body with black speckles, but in the last month his orange head has acquired inky black and rather attractive spots that make him quite distinctive. Ichigo, who has a bright scarlet spot on his head and a white body with black spots, has gotten a second red spot on the side of his head which looks as if it is going to be red and black. They’re like Easter eggs: you never know what’s going to develop. Ari was sold to us as a platinum, but she isn’t: she’s a cream metallic. Amy is gold and staying that way. And Denys started out all orange, but is now getting bronze metallic scales all over his back.
So…not too bad a day. The others immediately welcomed Maddy in, and she’s tootling about with great energy and at high speed: she’s lived all summer in a barren stock tank, and now she’s got a 4000 gallon pond with water lilies and algae and worms and a waterfall. She’s found the filter basket, found her way to food, and since our pond abounds with worms and algae, she’ll join the others in growing like a weed. We are aiming at only one more koi, a bekko type, red and black. But that will be next spring. And after that we will have all the koi we can possibly handle. You should have seen the horses that occupy the store’s pond. A good two feet long and as thick as a man’s forearm.
It’s 66 degrees today, in mid-August, with an uncharacteristically strong wind nearly constant. Very pleasant out, but you need a jacket.
Perhaps worse than glasses. Glasses can stay in their appointed place when you use them and much of the time when you don’t. Keys are always going in, or out, or getting disturbed by something else stored in the same place. Glad you found them.
I hope the new fish settles in well. They do grow big — a pond near my apartment holds some real monsters. With a startling habit of foraging in water too shallow to hold them.
This is really a comment for Closed Circle, but I couldn’t find a place to comment there.
I have most of your books, most of them read to pieces. Lately, I buy mostly ebooks, mostly in eReader format for my Treo 650 and iPod Touch. I have arthritis and fibromyalgia and holding large books is often difficult. I have fallen in love with the ease and joy of reading books on my Touch. MobiPocket format leaves me cold, though I confess I have too many books in that format, and they refuse to do a reader for the iPhone/Touch. So I have to keep my Treo to read my Mobi books.
The point of my post, is to encourage you all to include eReader type formats for the large and growing population of readers who read on their phones. (Seems I saw a note on your site today about getting an iPhone) I’m going to have to start buying new copies of all my favorites (Chanur, Cyteen, Merovingen, on and on) as they fall apart. I don’t like to read on my computer; I read mostly in bed. Also, having a couple hundred books on my Touch means I can choose what I want whenever. Paradise…
I’m so glad to have found your website today. Don’t know why I never looked before. My grandkids have got me on Facebook now, and that has me moving in new directions.
I’m willing to do any format I can find a friendly conversion tool for. Right now I have mobi and ePub. Recommendations for others are welcome, particularly if you can give me the url of a conversion software.
Welcome in!
Second the request for rtf. Sigh, if you used Word I’d point you to the free plug-in for Lit, and the free add-on for Rocket rb (which converts easily to the format for the eBookwise) but…
Tip for others, the Mobipocket Creator software, now free, will convert pdf files that aren’t drmed, to html that can be cleaned up without too much hair-pulling-out. Since some form of html is the basis for most e-book formats this gives you a start.
Note: I have learned to avoid any downloads with the .mobi extension. Don’t know what they did but it doesn’t convert to anything usable.
One problem I’m going to face is that my revisions are in html. So I’ll have to back-convert it to text format, before getting to RTF or the like, which is the reason I’ve been reluctant to go to RTF. These older books were written in dos, on Volkswriter, and the spacer # is interpreted by newer Windows-based program as a delete for whatever follows, until the next # comes along. Since I used this symbol for all scene breaks, you may imagine what a frustrating situation this is. So rather than go through a multi-step process, while hand-typing missing text, I’ve gone to html plain and simple: I key the codes myself, rather than using conversion on that step.
So if anybody’s got a good conversion path for html flowable text back to word processor text, let me know.
Open in Word and save as .RTF? Or if the text is simple enough, just cut from HTML and paste into WordPad.
I think I’m not understanding why there’s a problem. If you’ll send me some problematic text, I’ll see what I can do.
if anybody’s got a good conversion path for html flowable text back to word processor text, let me know.
Display in browser. Copy-and-paste into Word Processor.
(And I vote for pdf as a format.)
RTF, please! Select all, cut and paste into Word or even Write should work. If you use the extension .RTF, on systems with Word and Write, Word will usually be launched. With the extension .WRI you can force Window’s standard Write.
On things piscine, or actually molluscan, I just watched and greatly enjoyed this Nova program:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1150618835/program/979359664
If it doesn’t sell you in the first minute…!
Something for the marine tank perhaps?
(And now that PBS has gotten on the streaming bandwagon, who needs cable? More money for books or fish!)
My thought as well, Walt. Open the html file in Word and save into RTF.
Jeff
those koi sound lovely, what fun. that is the one thing I can’t have in my swimming pond – quite apart from clients being scared of being touched while swimming, they produce too much waste – ie pooh.
I am watching the temps go up in my area of Spain, sitting here at home in the UK having a very pleasant summer, bit of sailing, sitting in the garden, making lots of pots etc, it’s forecast 37 max all week there, and 18 k per hour winds … of course extremely low humidity … boy am I going to lose some water!
Thanks, guys! Sounds do-able.
I wonder if Sigil will be of any use to you? It’s a newly-released WYSIWYG ebook editor which accepts HTML, TXT and EPUB format.
The project’s still in alpha so there will be bugs, and functions that you might expect to see are not there yet. Still, it appears to have plenty of promise.
Thanks! I’ll check that out.
I wonder if Ichigo is of the aiji’s house? Red and black together, Tabini’s colors. Oh, golly, keys, one time I was out in the woods cutting firewood, had just finished loading up and couldn’t find my keys. I tromped around the woods for about a half-hour until I found them, in the car, in the lock that lets the back seats down. What a relief, especially since it’s a half mile out and a half mile back, it was cold, my knee was acting up, and I just didn’t feel like doing it at all.
Fortunately I only lose my glasses if I take them off and put them Somewhere New. Otherwise, they’re in one of two or three Usual Locations.
Your store has Trident missile koi, the kind that come up and say ‘Feed me, or else!’
(I saw some at the ‘Proud Bird’ restaurant, near LAX, all of two feet long, and expecting food from all passers-by.)
and the ex was here for the first time for 3 years, we went to the beach so he could swim, he locked the house and didn’t give the keys to me – so they are somewhere on a shingle beach below the tideline I expect …… luckily someone who works for me has a duplicate set … we had to wait an hour to get them though ….
😆 that’s bad!!
Another vote for rtf files from me, please. (Actually, it never occurred to me that that format wouldn’t be an option.)
On point: I love the names you’ve given the koi, and it makes me chuckle that Grant is turning out to be “quite distinctive”. ;=)