Yesterday began with finding a piece of my favorite set of glasses, an etched Great Wave pattern that Jane got me long, long ago, broken in the dishwasher.
And escalated into a birthday present probably involving an internet scam artist on Amazon…
Then the Books LLC hassle— I now know how to reach the more sensitive parts of Amazon and various other sellers. There is a magic address, and if you are a writer with infringement troubles, ask me: I don’t want to publicize it for fear these companies will tuck it more deeply into their structure.
That took all day. Neither Jane nor I got ANY work done. I am still laboring under an adrenaline charge that does not produce good writing. But the brain is working better today. DAW wants more Foreigner books: that came through yesterday. Right now I just want to let my nerves settle. Think tranquil thoughts. Settling back into the deep core of my brain and out of fight mode requires some doing after a charge like that.
So please be kind to the frazzled writer. I need tranquility today.
For a tranquil day: brush Ysabel again; sit by water garden admiring fish while sipping tea or other favorite drink; admire plants in garden; admire fish in tank; wiggle toes happily (preferably while barefoot in my opinion)…; treat yourself kindly. You deserve it.
And yippee that DAW wants more Foreigner: so do we!
Hurrah for the news about DAW and the Foreigner series!
May you continue to be inspired to write about Bren and all our favourite Atevi for years and years.
Is anything in your back garden flowering now? Leave the front for a bit, if that’s just a reminder of more work to do instead of a feeling of accomplishment for all you two have done already – I’m still very impressed by the wall you built. Mine’s limited to phlox and the long-flowering roses right now, but just taking a deep sniff at one of those feels so good. The roses, that is, the phlox don’t have much scent.
Watching the cloudscape is generally relaxing too, if there isn’t much else to see. Lots of silver-lined towering fluffpiles sailing by today, with the sun peeking through. Do you have nice cloudscapes in your part of the USA? I remember some beauties from a few days in Montana, long ago…
Or perhaps just take a day off, and go for a walk in the beautiful park with the waterfeatures and koi-ponds, and find your center again. Might do Jane good as well to just get out of the house and relax for a bit, if you can convince her to come as well.
Flowering in front: roses. Lots of roses.
Flowering in back: alyssum, banks of alyssum, snapdragons, a few sedum types, and until this last week, a couple of clematis; chrysanthemum and aster are getting ready, but not yet.
It’s a bittersweet time of year: the pond water temperature now stands at 60. This will be day and night, with 70 degree days and 40 degree nights because a pond is temperature-constant, except where solar energy gets in during the day and heats fishy bodies and floating algae and rock. The day-to-dark temperature flux is about 2 degrees. But the slow trend is downward. We have now converted to winter food for the koi, no more treats, no more high protein food. You want nice digestible stuff like wheat germ (Cheerios will do) when the water gets like this, so that they don’t go to sleep at night with food in their stomachs: unlike warmblooded creatures, which maintain enough heat to keep chemical processes going at all temperatures, coldbloods need an exterior heat source to digest at night. So they can sicken and die from incorrect feeding: best left entirely to themselves, to nosh on pond life, which is also highly digestible; but the wheat germ is good for them and helps them pack on fat for the winter.
At 58 degrees they will stop eating and start to go to sleep. We’ll install the pond heaters, which will cut on at 32 degrees and keep the pond from icing over—I’m told a pond won’t freeze to the bottom even if deeper lakes in the region have frozen to that depth—because of the dirt and rock, and the fact it takes a lot, lot, lot of cold to freeze any body of water to the bottom. So the bottom heater probably isn’t needed, but we have it, so there. The top heater keeps a circle of water clear so that carbon dioxide can escape and so it won’t build up in the water. We put a 6′ diameter sunshade floating cover on the surface, so they can sleep in the dark and the cold secure from seasonal predators like raccoons, and we won’t get to see our little friends again until the pond temperature rises in the spring. Even so, they’ll emerge spooky and kind of on auto-pilot of pure instinct for a few weeks, until their brains come back on line and they remember we’re the food source, not a threat.
We were talking this morning at breakfast, about how the pond cost the equivalent of a vacation, and vacations in this economy aren’t in the cards, but it’s there for us every day, at every hour, and whenever we’re upset or sad we can go out there and feed our funny fishes. In winter, not so much. But we’ve been advised we CAN keep the pump and waterfall going all winter, even in the ice—and we’re looking into maybe a Costco patio heater—which would give us our pond in the mornings, late, late into the season and earlier in the spring. I think that might be a good investment.
it doesn’t seem like a year since you did this the first time, does it!
It seems all too short. Did I mention that in the middle of my Bad Day, the UV filter exploded (again)?
This is the replacement Savio made of the first one that exploded in fire, which was out of warranty at the time—and do ’em credit— I have now established a good rapport with one of the engineers at the company in charge of these, and I am supplying him blown filters and information about our setup, including water temperature, etc, which he is very happy to get. I received info today that they are shipping me a new unit, (and we are not talking cheap unit!) without waiting for my old one back or asking for photos. I am to put it in the box of the new one and mail back to them, and thus far they seem happy with my input re conditions, hookup, etc, and say it will be helpful. I think I have become an unofficial beta tester for Savio UV filters. 😉
So things rattle on, and we hope this one won’t ‘splode!
Yesterday was a DO NOT WANT. Haven’t you already used up you allocation of bad luck for the year?
I certainly hope so. It’s right up there with the day a decade or so ago when I turned on the light in my bedroom, it exploded—in pieces—I was left in the dark with broken glass; and before the day was out I had lost—my air conditioner (500.00 compressor bill) my refrigerator (500.00 more dollars, plus melting food and the mess in the floor)—my hot water heater (250.00) which poured like Niagara from its shoulder-high mount in the garage—and my dryer—(35.00) —I got a new (used) dryer from the secondhand shops on Reno in OKC, so that, at least, didn’t cost a mint. This on the salary of an Oklahoma schoolteacher (under 10k a year) and a beginning writer, (2000.00 a year).
So whenever I am tempted to say it was a bad day, I can always look back to that one.
unbelievable! what a chapter of horrors. was there something wrong with your electricity supply, do you think?
I’m betting there was a power glitch that got everything but the hot water heater, which just happened to blow on the same day—it was a gas water heater. But it had electronics, so if something fried a wire, who knows? But there was no storm, clear sky, no weather, and no way to claim it on insurance. If it was a big glitch, the fact there was a great honking transformer thingie out behind my house on a pole could have had something to do with it.
I’m holding my thumbs for some peace and quiet, and for no more bad surprises or other evils to jump at you.
Just a side question–in German it is also “push the thumbs” (Druck die Daumen). I seem to remember that Busifer is Swedish. Are there other languages that use that expression for luck?
So sorry about the demise of one of your favorite glasses. Why is it *always* the special things that seem to be the first to go?
Enjoy the day…..everyone needs a personal day once in a while!
Glorious news for Foreigner!
P.S. Exactly a year ago I joined Wave Without a Shore. THANK YOU! 🙂 😀 😆
So glad all of you did! Love you guys! You’re great encouragement…
Here is what I do on bad days. I read good books, often re-read good books read before, to get the emotional ambiance associated with said good books, to take me out of the blue meanies. Often these good reread books are by, are you ready for it? CJ Cherryh. What a surprise. But when I was in my third year of law school, and just a little bit suicidal because of a romance gone wrong (and before I had read any CJC- pre 1979 that is) , I read Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, about 35 times. Literally. It saved my life. Then, after I took the bar exam, I went to Penn Station in NYC, bought a large bag of bagels and a larger bag of science fiction and other serious reading materials, and took the overnight train from NYC to home, which was a bit north of Atlanta, well provisioned for body and mind. I arrived still with a fair number of fresh bagels for the family, who had been deprived all their lives of that special treat, but I believe I had read all the books.
But since before I was ten, reading has provided that buffer between the totally unacceptable event, and dealing with it.
“But since before I was ten, reading has provided that buffer between the totally unacceptable event, and dealing with it.”
Me too, Kokipy! BTW, I didn’t realize until relatively recently that I read as much as I did while growing up. I thought just about *everyone* read constantly — until my cousin & sister coincidentally said something. Apparently, that’s what I will be remembered for. 😉
A not-so-cheerful article on the “falling status of books.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2266734/
Interesting article, nighthawk. And I have a thought. There ARE people who are in love with the feel and character of a hardbound. And I *know* the art of bookbinding, though I’ve never done it larger than a folio. I would have no objection whatsoever for anybody buying, downloading, printing, and hand-binding one of my books: the fanciest books are hand-bound. I could add a ‘page’ of instruction for doing just that. It’s not that hard to do, just requires some hand-made jigs and a handful of commonly-available tools and materials. Is there any interest among you in having that page?
I learned some bookbinding techniques when I finished my degree. Like you, my actual experience is minimal, limited to doing class assignments. (OMG was that really almost 20 years ago? I sometimes still think of my self as only just *finally* finished school) I would love a page of new instructions. 😉 😀
Buying, downloading, printing, and hand-binding one of your books…..oh, a dream come true!!
I would also say if you want to do one for somebody else, just buy the download for them [please!] and bind away. It’d make a superb gift, not just my books, but family albums, etc.
And in the extreme other direction, I was thinking for my family I’d take my mom’s photo albums and digitize them for everyone…
That’s the course we’re taking: no fade. But you could print it out as a digitized album. Canon software has a real nice program for that.
Do you have a picture of the pattern of that glass? Was it the only one you had? Is there someplace special we could look to see if we could find that pattern again? We can’t replace the glass, but we can help keep alive the memories of the original present.
I had a set of Waterford wine glasses in the Powerscourt design, I bought them before I met my wife, the set of 6 glasses was over $120.00 and that was in 1981 at the Navy Exchange at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, CU. After the divorce, the ruling was that my property from before the marriage was mine, but somehow, those glasses have never made it back to my possession. I don’t even think Waterford makes that design any longer, and even if they do, I have no need for them. Other glasses I had from even further back are forever gone, unless she has a change of heart. Hah! As you told me on the Dinner Cruise, “been there, done that, have the tshirt, don’t want to do it again.”
I may see if I can get it duplicated. I have a couple of survivors of the set. The problem is, it’s layered etching, not just a clouding of the surface, but actual layers and detail carved into the glass, and I still have a couple of the glasses. There is a local company that does that kind of work for huge plate glass for architectural accents. I don’t know if I could con them into doing a set of glassware. But one of these days I may look into it. The glasses replicate the wave of a Japanese screen print by Hokusai entitled The Great Wave, and they have all the detail of the wave itself, not the mountain, in a big circle.
These are beautiful glasses; I’ve never seen any like them. If Jane can recall anything about them, incl. the manufacturer — maybe eBay? I believe eBay can be set to “watch” for newly posted auctions of desired objects.
This may be a remote chance, but we were able to replace our discontinued stainless Oneida flatware via sites that offer discontinued patterns.
Try this:
http://www.replacements.com/top500crystal/top500crystal.htm
Also try this:
http://www.replacements.com/registration/form.htm?=freeemail2
I agree with Kokipy and OSG: rereading a favourite book will allways help to get me out of a bad mood or get through unpleasant things, and has been doing so at least since I was 8. My whole family consists of bookworms, so I never knew anything else. But for a writer in the middle of a rolling rewrite to recapture her own story, that might not be a good idea. Maybe watch some favourite anime instead? Or ice-skating or dancing programs?
I’d love a bookbinding-instructions link or page.
@docmom: in Dutch we say “I’ll thumb for you”, to give you luck, meaning twiddling both thumbs and first fingers around, right thumb to left forefinger, left thumb to right forefinger, and on and on. Careful, the other kind of twiddling, turning both thumbs around each other (done when bored) can bring bad luck 😉 and we need no more of that for CJ and Jane!