…seems peonies, which we just cut for the first time today, are poisonous to cats. Ditto, roots of iris (no cat would be that desperate), and lupines (seeds). Roses are ok. Don’t take your cut flowers for granted, if you have a kitteh who loves to drink water out of vases. Everybody’s ok. But it is worth googling cut flowers for effects on cats and dogs, who will get water in the darndest places.
Off topic again, but I found a very good site for space news, with some great photos and graphics.
http://news.discovery.com/space/
… and animal news, history, general science and tech news, etc.
There’s some really interesting stuff there….thanks.
I recently got an outside plant because (a) I recognized it and (b) it’s very pretty and (c) it’s easy to care for. But I was not smart enough to (d) read the label, dummy. It’s a Diefenbachia, which is not gpod for cats and dogs. Thankfully, the cats haven’t given it a nibble, but I keep telling them no around it in case. Not too sure they don’t think no means, “wait till the crazy human is away.” trusting them to be smart, plus, they aren’t ever out without me. Major highway only one street over, if they jumped the fence, so I limit outside.visits as much as I can.
Gotta get Goober’s collar back on and find where he shucked the last two…probably hped by a certain imp teasing him.
I forgot: yesterday, I woke to find imps 1and 2 had somehow gotten the vacuum cleaner pushed out of the closet! I wonder how I didn’t hear it, and how they did it. I am taking this as unintended(?) critique of my lack of housekeeping of late. But too odd and funny not to share. Yes, I’ve had several bright enough to learn how to open doors.
Now if you can get them to turn it on and do the vacuuming …
I have never considered the flowers of plants being poisonous, but of course it makes sense……or scents? I use cheap red pepper powder to keep the kittehs away from my plants as they in general and Aloysius in particular will eat anything! I use rubber gloves and rub it on the pots. Last summer I made it into a spray as it was the only thing that kept the wild critters from eating my dahlias. Something larval is dining on my lilies……going to go spray with Bt.
PS I use goggles and mask when doing anything that raises dust/pollen/clay. I look like an alien, but I would rather look funny than scratch a cornea again. That’s a pain I would wish on no one!
Yep. Jane’s waltz with Japanese spurge was a 300.00 adventure above what our crappy insurance would pay.
I just got out to drain the pond to 1/2, to solve a water quality problem. And while waiting (it’s going to take half the day) I bonsai’ed the Vanderwolf Pine that turned out to be rootbound.
We were always told not to disturb the roots: better advice is, take into the rootball with a clipper or even saw (on a big ball) particularly cutting the roots that are wound about. This makes them get to work and grow into useful territory, like, all the good dirt you gave it. The Vanderwolf took 2 years to get into that territory, its top died, it became a candelabra, and now it is becoming a set of manicured poof-balls, limbed-up to a good underneath visibility. It also tipped over the first winter, so now it is growing in an interesting bend.
Know how Japanese garden folk get interesting bends in pines? Buy a nice straight one, then plant at a 45 degree angle near an intersting rock. It grows straight up, and you have a nice bent pine.
Re: the rootbound stuff–when planting anything that has resided in a pot, I always carefully run a sharp knife vertically from bottom to top of the root ball, at a depth proportional to the size of the root ball (but no more than three or four inches deep on even the largest root ball), at at least 4 points around the circumference. Any roots which have “bound” will be at or right under the surface. Once cut, these roots will start growing radially outward again. Another useful tip: when planting something, dig the hole with a diameter at least 1.5 times that of the pot the plant came from–and amend that soil! Especially in areas which have poor or clay-heavy soil, the roots may encounter unfriendly territory and turn right back around to head inward, thereby becoming root-bound all over again.
That’s one technique many bonsai growers use when transplanting those tiny trees. Bonsai will get potbound and start losing vigor (no grower wants to lose a tree they have spent years training!), and periodially need repotting. The recommendation is to use a 3-tined fork, or even a pointed stick, to loosen any roots that seem to be growing back on themselves, and trim back the ones that stick out too far from the root ball. This encourages new root hairs and keeps the tree healthy.
Well, I drained off about 3000 gallons—which would have gone faster if I hadn’t forgotten I’d temporarily used the pot-filter for a trash can to keep 2 plastic sacks from blowing. They were still in there. But I got it done. I manually skimmed the surface with the pond vac, and gave it dechlorinator and buffer, and I am over-sunned (yes, I wore a hat) and pretty tired. Jane was out front moving dirt. When are we not moving dirt? I think mad dogs and these two English-descended Americans should get out of the noonday sun now and take a sitdown rest.
incredibly sorry but I have to tell tales and mention all three of your latest books are on Demonoid.me
Which titles, please?
foreigner 10, 11 and 12, also something purporting to be the complete works at 56 MB. it’s a bit torrent site, so a risky place to play in … and goodness knows how readable….
pretty awful discovery though :((
We appreciate these reports, however disheartening.And we have told others in the field that would like to get into e-books but despair of piracy—we have ONE defense, and that is the good will and generosity of our readers—people who live by a code of ethics that makes them appreciate books that have the same thing.
If you want to help us, go out and grab friends you know have readers or pcs, that love books, and head them in this direction. We haven’t got an advertising budget: word of mouth is all we’ve got, and it has to come from you guys. Grab them in convention bars, hand out our addy, urge them to come in and give us a try. We try to be fair, and to turn out things as good as we can make them… It would be a dream come true to make a living at this e-book thing, but right now, it’s not there yet.
well, I must say that my experience of downloading free so old as to be out of copyright books onto my kindle made me stop bothering – they didn’t fit the Kindle nicely, and were rather annoying. I don’t see how this sort of person would have the time and patience necessary to scan 100’s of pages of a book, never mind tidy it up, so I would be very surprised if they were worth downloading at all …
You don’t suppose this is akin to those rascals who thought they could make a fast buck by collecting all those Wikipedia articles and trying to sell them on Amazon as the real books?
Hmm… Someone out there isn’t playing nice. Whoever put those on Demonoid has thereby deprived the author of income. Not nice.
This evening, I found my Kindle app on iPad and iPhone have somehow dropped the custom-loaded ebooks purchased from Closed Circle, Smashwords, Lulu, and free Project Gutenberg content. I *think* I know what slipped and will try it tomorrow when I get home. But…dang irritating.
On the plus side, I managed to read maybe 50 pages last night. Foreigner 2: Invader.) while only 50 pages is paltry, I’m glad I could. Hoping to finish the book in a couple of weeks, and on to Inheritor.
Again off-topic but of interest to fans and authors:
Women of Science Fiction — CNN iReports Wanted
http://ireport.cnn.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=624424
[quote]
With Comic Con approaching, CNN.com is taking a closer look at the influential women of science fiction.
Ladies, we want to hear how watching sci-fi television shows and movies has changed your life. Did you get inspired to become a pilot because of Star Trek? Did you learn how to stand up from yourself by watching Battlestar Galactica?
Take a picture of yourself with memorabilia — or dressed as your favorite female character — from your favorite sci-fi show and tell us how it has influenced you.
The deadline is Friday, June 24.
[/quote]
And of course Demon Cat, having been sweet all day, waited til we were having an important phone call and upended a cut-glass flower vase containing, oh, about a quart of water, all over the coffee table, the dvds, the paperwork, the…
And then stood under the drip looking up at the water running on the glass table.
Kittens.
Something just went crash-thump in the kitchen…
“Ooh, lookee, it’s raining inside!”
“Yes, cat, that *was* my paperwork and flower vase….
Heheheh. Easier for me to laugh when it wasn’t my important phone call and papers. — It’s been over a year now since a certain cat decided to jump on the makeshift desk / old sewing table and turn over a full glass of tea into a running laptop, leaving me with a very hot doorstop (unplugged immediately in hopes of saving it and not being electrocuted). Said feline only wanted to be with his human, but still….
Well, this morning, we had the first real rain in over two months, and the first dip below highs over 100 in over two weeks. So of course, when I got home, I didn’t mind letting my cats have their usual few minutes outside. All was well until a certain 1.5 year old who still acts like a kitten decided to play hide and seek under the deck. Oh, come on, kitten, it’s raining, fer cryin’ out loud. You were a street cat. You know this is not good. Why didn’t you head for the door? Big dummy.
I had said I intended to stand out in the rain when it finally rained. I did not really plan to be shooing the other cat in, shucking my shirt, and trying to coax the kitten out, before heading in to get swim shorts (and seeing if the little nerd would come out on his own). Sure enough, when I’d taken the chance, grabbed shorts, and come back, he was at the door. “Meow! Meow!” Which, being translated, amounts to, “Hey, you stopped playing the game! Why? Let me in, it’s wet out here!” Big dummy. He was mostly dry and a bit earthy when he came back in, bright-eyed from his adventure. I’m glad it wasn’t flooding. I’m glad he didn’t hop the fence and get scared. I’m glad all’s well. My clothes are drying in the bathroom and I’m in swim shorts. Also, only got 4 hrs. sleep last night. Might nap this afternoon. Not doing needed bill paying today, hang the rotters, I need to have a functional brain. (I could if absolutely necessary, and should, but…lately, no gumption at all and this terrible risk-taking attitude. I’m telling myself it’s because Sunday was the first time in months I’ve had over five or six hours’ sleep in a given 24 hr. period. That amounts to a military emergency schedule, watch-on-watch, almost.
Anyway, Goober has a new yellow collar on, very handsome, and Smokey aka Trouble aka Rain Daredevil aka Fluff-Brain (lol) are both just fine, inside, and quite pleased with it all. Of course. They got breakfast and their human’s home until 5:00 pm as usual.
If only it were so simple for us human-type critters to keep satisfied….
But maybe these two know how good they have it. Smokey, if he’d even lived past the night he was rescued, would’ve had a short life as a street cat, and Goober, much the same, though his kittenhood was less dire. Instead, they both have, if not the most clean and organized home, a home where a human loves them, and each other, plenty of food, dry and warm/cool shelter. I have it pretty good too, despite the insane present circumstances. Just have to outlast it and make something better. Somehow.
This rumination brought on by…probably by lack of sleep and lots of frustration.
Anyway, the cats say hi!
Heheh, still chuckling, though, about the kitten watching gleefully as the water drips from the table. Heheh. Goofy little cat. Hmm, you know, it’s possible he has the right idea on that paperwork. Are you sure the thing isn’t all wet? 😉 If only we could be so dorkily easily pleased. Maybe we are. At least we can laugh with the little fuzzball.
Oh. Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum are looking outside at the rain, wanting to go out there again.
“Can we go play in the rain?”
“You don’t like getting wet.”
“Can we, can we, huh?”
“No, doofuses, it’s raining too hard. The sky is dark.”
“So?”
“Yeah, I know, I’m tempted too. I’m also tempted to go nap. But we’re not goin’ out. Sorry.”
If that is my worst problem today, then life isn’t so bad after all.
Thank heavens.
Cat, how am I supposed to do anything if you lie down on my arm?
Oh, right. That was the whole idea.
Cats.
Regarding the piracy of your books, don’t feel that you are being singled out.
There isn’t any SF author who is even slightly popular, whose books are not available as pirated copies via BitTorrent, Usenet, and other systems.
It doesn’t matter whether they have been released as ebooks or not.
Any book can be scanned. Thousands of old or out of print SF books by hundreds of authors are available, even though they’ve never been released as ebooks. The same with new books which have only been released in print format.
There is one torrent out there with 7.5GB of zip files containing collected works of 956 different SF and Fantasy authors. Yes, 956 authors and who-knows-how-many books, that is not a typo.
It’s the same for authors of any other kind of book. Also every movie, TV series, music album, comic book, magazine, computer game and piece of software for which there’s any demand.
The movie industry knows that pirated copies of every new release are immediately available online, but there is little they can do about it. The same with the music industry and the games industry.
Today, anybody who produces any kind of creative content which registers at all on the scale of public interest, can simply assume that their work will be pirated. That’s the reality.
So it shouldn’t be news that practically all of your books – and Jane’s books, and Lynn’s books – are available as pirated versions. Every author is in the same situation. Basically, if your books are not being pirated it means that nobody is interested in reading them. (Cold comfort, I know!)
What to do about it? Nobody knows.
The optimistic view is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and that some proportion of people who download poor quality pirated versions of a work will want to buy a decent quality copy.
even worse is possible – I found and article in the Guardian online –
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/23/ebook-spam-problem-growing
“This type of violation was experienced firsthand by SKS Perry who found his book had been taken by another ‘author’ and was available on Amazon. “I was doing a vanity search of my name on Google when I noticed a page for Amazon.co.uk listing Darkside by SKS Perry. When I linked to the page I saw that it was, in fact, my novel for sale.”” eeeeeeeeeek ….
This goes on…somebody collected all the wiki articles about me and my work and put it online. Some of these jobs are done from countries where webcrime is a major industry, and where governments have no interest in stopping it. You can pretty well write them down as pirate states in that regard, and if you do business with them, or view their ads (which is what a lot are after, pay-per-click) you are possibly supporting other, far darker enterprises, all the way over to funding all sorts of criminal and extremist mayhem. It’s not about internet freedom: it’s about theft, piracy, and stuff that goes over to the violent side of misdeedery.
Unfortunately, it is what it is. It means someone else has copied a work without permission from a living author/artist, thus depriving him or her of income for original creative works.
However, despite bad proofreading and formatting, it means that readers will be exposed to that writer’s work, and some portion will go in search of legitimate copies for sale.
In other cases, the unauthorized formats may be the only widely available source for a given story or author, even if it hasn’t yet entered the public domain.
I wish there were a good answer.
Another aspect of the piracy issue is who exactly is doing the downloading.
The fact is, that the vast majority of people who download pirated movies, books, etc. are ordinary high school and college kids, and normal people in their 20’s and 30’s. The reason they do it is that it’s easy, it’s convenient, “everyone is doing it”, and there is approximately zero chance of any repercussions.
Pirated movies are pre-ripped and more convenient for watching on a computer than DVDs. Books which may not otherwise be available in e-book format are available in pirated versions.
If someone wants a back-list book, they have two options. They can go to Amazon, AbeBooks, e-Bay, etc., buy a second-hand copy, and wait for a few days until it’s delivered. Or (especially if it’s SF or fantasy) they can find and download a pirate copy, which is quick and free, and they then have it as an e-book. After reading a few pages they may decide they don’t like it, and then they haven’t wasted time and money ordering a paper copy. Or they may decide they like the author, and immediately download another dozen of his books.
The problem is that there is no legal alternative which is as convenient.
Most people are reasonably honest, and they may feel a few pricklings of conscience – but the pirate copies are there, and the legal ones are not.
Human nature is human nature, and people will justify it to themselves, or regard it as a minor peccadillo. Many, especially young kids, may simply not realize that they are harming real authors who are trying to earn a living, rather than faceless corporations.
Many people justify it to themselves by saying that they would never buy the book or movie anyway. They are just downloading it because it’s there, and they may start reading authors and books they wouldn’t otherwise try. To some extent this is even true.
If all back-list books were easily available in good quality e-book versions, in one place, for a low price, and it was possible to read a sample chapter for each, a lot of people would turn away from piracy. To some extent, this is what Google books is offering. The whole question is very complex, and it may be many years before its resolved.
I downloaded Jane’s Uplink, GroundTies and Harmonies of the Net from Amazon to my Kindle. Have to say I found a couple of typos here and there, but don’t know how to tell her where they are because there are no page numbers in Kindle! Devoured all three back to back in one marathon session – (Used up half the charge on my Kindle battery.) Glad I had the free time to do that, because I would have hated to have to put any of them down. Thank you for giving her that excellent advice on writing.
There will always be people who want something for nothing and unfortunately, there will always be people willing to give it to them, just for the thrill of “getting away with it.” God knows what kind of botnet zombie software, spyware and viruses are in those ripoff freebies. Maybe a good virus scare now and then might make people think twice about downloading those ripoff freebies.
Go to her site and tell her—she’s having a day: adjustments in blood chemistry play hob with your nerves, and that would cheer her up.
What are people’s favorite e-readers? I’m thinking more and more of getting one, but the most popular one (Kindle) is notoriously problematic to non-Kindle content; for example, our library uses Overdrive for downloading, but it won’t work with Kindle. Are fewer available e-books with something like Nook compensated adequately by being more friendly to all content?