Writers are delicate creatures. I can’t work well when taking antibiotics, when stressed, when on painkillers, etc. And the load of stress is slowly easing. The pond is so much help in this I can’t express—just the sound of the water, our funny collection of anime-named fish, the visit of the daily dragonfly, and the wind in the hawthorne leaves—sure, the other side of the fence is a major city arterial, but y’know, you hear what you want to hear, and I’d rather hear the waterfall.
Midsouthcon wrote to say, very kindly, they were going to try to negotiate our cats into the hotel, so if they can, we’re going to go. We have them in a 4×5’x3 rolling cage that contains them, their litter, their food and water, and there’s just no way they damage things, except the obligatory shedding of cat fur. But even that is minimal, mostly confined to our petting them. Anybody who has to travel with cats, a collapsible ferret cage is the ticket: shelves to sit on, enough room, and escape-proof: if it can reliably contain ferrets, it has a fighting chance with cats.
What else? Oh, for those of you who love a waterfall but don’t want the risk and admittedly some fuss (or effort digging) a major pond, have I got a deal for you! You know those mini-caissons/compartments they sink into your lawn around your sprinkling control center? Well…it’s a rectangular bottomless plastic box about a foot square, up and down. You dig an 18″ deep hole in your lawn 6′ wide. Circular. You lay down a square of rubber pondliner and trim the edges with scissors. You set the bottomless box down in the middle of it. You then get a pump and a hose and a stack of rock. Pile the rock around the hose, sticking straight up, and fill the whole basin you’ve made with rock of any size, gravel, rubble, skull-sized rock, whatever.
Fill the basin until you see water in that square box come up over the pump, switch it on, lid the caisson, and pile more rocks over it—some you can remove to check the water level. Voila! Water flows from the hose, down over the stack of rocks, back into the gravel, disappearing…but maintaining that water table under the gravel because the pond liner won’t let it seep away. Periodically top off with the garden hose. Alternatively, you can make a fountain, by creating a L with 1/2 inner diameter PVC pipe, then setting concrete around it, either with stones or not. Connect your hose to that bottom pipe, and water gushes out the top pipe, which can be capped with a rock to hide the pipe and divert the flow.
I saw this rig at a company that makes concrete fountains. And it is soooo easy to make I thought I would tell you guys about it. It can be made any size, but the one I describe is adequate for a chest-high fountain and an 850 gallon per hour pump. You could miniaturize it down to slightly bigger than a flowerpot if you like. It’s also fairly conservative of water, because the rock shields it from the sun.
I see I have some engineering to do, then … and to engineer this down to “slightly bigger than a flowerpot” if I’m to keep it in the flat, here in Glasgow, Scotland! Sounds wonderful, and like just the ticket to keep the noise of the city at bay!
If you’re literally doing it in a pot, you don’t need the liner. Just get some fat PVC pipe for a caisson, lower your pump into it, cap with a flat stone, and I’d put a ball valve or sleeve valve on the hose so you can dial back the pump output fast if it proves to irrigate your neighbor’s porch! It never hurts a pump (within reason) to cut the flow back: it just reacts as if it’s pushing water up a greater distance. They’re built to handle it.
A sleeve valve is kind of an unusual thing, but you can make one with two closely fitting pieces of hose, one that fits snugly inside the other. You cut a 6″ bit of this skinnier hose and cut some holes in it. You slip it into either end of your regular hose and slip it totally shut, both ends of the hose totally meeting. If you want to let water out and reduce the pressure, you slide your regular hose apart a litte, exposing this inner sleeve with its deliberate leaks, thus reducing the water pressure in the fountain above. Elegantly simple if you can find hose that’s that good a fit.
“…if it proves to irrigate your neighbor’s porch.” Umm… scaring me now! Seriously, though: I’ll be building one, in a flower pot (or the local equivalent – they don’t seem to have a grasp on the English Language hereabouts), just to keep the noise of the street at bay. We moved into this flat thinking that it’d be a great thing to be close to the university, but didn’t plan on the fact that close to the university = drunken children, singing Rule Brittania, at 3 in the morning. Will be locating a pump soonest!
😆 start with the valve nearly shut, then open it slowly. I’d say take a look at micro pumps designed for tabletop fountains, or at a Maxijet 400 dialed back.
Fountains are marvelous sound buffers: if the water side is facing you, you hear it: walk behind it, and you scarcely hear it at all.
Rule Britannia at 3 am. I’d say uncap the fountain hose and aim!
Third option: see if you can get a tiny recycling pump like is used in a Drinkwell pet fountain. With a little customization, instant miniature waterfall!
Glad you’ve got your focus back, by the way: we’re anxiously looking forward to whatever comes out next. 😉
Your cats travel? That is great. We had a puss with kidney disease who needed to go everywhere with us for a couple of years and he was easy as anything. It was really nice travelling with him. But my Abyssinian fights his way out of anything but a metal dog container and screams his head off for literally hours if you put him in a box, and even the catteries won’t take him a second time.
On my website, I have an extensive ‘how to train your cat to travel’ item in a section called the Panel Room: just scroll through it.
They’re very easy to travel with. They have a covered litter pan, they have their food, they have their water, and the only concession we make is to take the mountain passes in the slower lane so as not to stress their ears: their ear canals take a right angle which makes rapid altitude changes a little iffy with them, but they get along quite nicely. We use anti-flea stuff before we leave, never close enough to the event that they have to travel on the first day. We carry a bottle of Feliway to spritz in case we get a hotel room that has had a previous misbehaving occupant. We hang ‘do not disturb’ on the door, because we don’t want chambermaids poking fingers into the cage; and we carry a small bungee, because if the hotel turns out to have latches instead of knobs, The Black Prince can open them.
We are also very, very careful about temperature, and if we stop for lunch in heat, we crack a window, and one or the other of us goes back to the car and runs the a/c for 5 minutes every fifteen minutes to be sure they’re comfortable, never mind our food has come. One of us will end up eating in the car, the other in the restaurant. Or if it’s really, really hot, lunch is a drivethrough with kitteh treats, and we just keep on trucking.
That brings back memories… moving from Texas to California, we had the cats in the van that my mom was driving (in their travel cages), and the dog in my Celica. Lunch was fast food, with the side doors on the van open on both sides so that the cats had both air and shade, and the dog would get to come out and lie at my feet on the grass with a bowl of water. (The temperature just skyrockets inside a black Celica. Even with the windows open and the AC running.) Most restaurants are surprisingly agreeable to giving you some sort of bowl of water if you explain that you are moving with a dog.
We’d leave them all in the hotel room for breakfast and dinner. And one of the advantages to the ferret cage (which I don’t use, especially since we were only doing overnights) is that the cats can’t find little nooks to hide in when you want to leave in the morning.
There was a time, a few years ago when I used to write for fun. I just can’t do it anymore as my daily stress level never seems to dip to a low enough level to allow it anymore. Depression doesn’t help either.
To keep myself sane, I’ve been working on this thing: http://s114.photobucket.com/albums/n256/treadhead_2001/srv//?start=0 it’s not writing, but at least it’s something 🙂
I agree that writers are delicate creatures — writing itself takes everything that you have. And to me, you are the best writer there is. I’m not kidding. Not only can I finish one of your works relatively fast — but I can re-read them many times over without tiring.
Walter
Pretty cool, Walt!
Thanks 🙂
Thank you very much.
Busy hands are much happier, for sure. We have some lovely ship model kits in house and look at them lovingly, but never can get the time to tackle them. Maybe this winter, if we aren’t wiped out from shoveling snow.
http://www.naturecoast.com/index.html?source=Overture&OVRAW=model%20ships%20wooden&OVKEY=model%20ship%20wooden&OVMTC=standard&OVADID=1216939522&OVKWID=8800181522
We have the Harvey sloop and the xebec, and two cats. 😆 But they’re generally pretty good about keeping paws off things. And we’re generally pretty good about removing temptation from easy access.
I love the ships you’re doing. The precision is beautiful.
Thanks so much for the compliment 🙂 It’s been a labor of love for quite some time.