Book 3 - still being written

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Evaine
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Post by Evaine »

Lindt is OK, but I suppose you can't get hold of Green and Black's organic dark chocolate where you are.
Food of the gods - and it's fairtrade, too.
(They do cocoa, too).
when the floppy-eared Spaniel of Luck sniffs at your turn-ups it helps if you have a collar and piece of string in your pocket.
Terry Pratchett on taking opportunities in writing.
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Post by hgladney »

Not sure--don't think I've had it before, but sometimes we can pick up some odd things from the local Organic Food Coop.
I'll certainly keep an eye out, thanks!
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by wolfspirit »

heather: It's a sane hour of the day, you aren't allowed to be online!! You should only be posting at 3AM and the like!

:P

Glad to see your writing is going fairly well. I just finished teh piece that I'm submitting for teh TenTen contest (contest for short stories that are 1,010 words long exactly, not counting the title).


wolfspirit
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Post by hgladney »

wolf: That's only because I stayed home sick from work, and I'd have to be <i>daid</i> not to glance in on the net at least once or twice during the day.
Netjunkies? Who, us??

And congrats on finishing the piece! Want to pass along a link to it, so we can go admire?
Now, where's my strikeout type when I need it...
Hey, there's a tip somebody could post for the html of the week--how to do different kinds of type.
I know italics and bold.
But how do you do strikeout?
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by hgladney »

some catchup here. And we're not talking tomato-based vegetable sauce.

Yes, I've been goofing off.
But I did want to post some really good news.
(on lj) kadymae let us know a new Sequential Tart is up.
Her comments on what's new & interesting are interesting in themselves.
That's here.
http://kadymae.livejournal.com/210461.h ... 57#t688157

Sequential Tart itself (I like to do backup posts, just in case there's a problem with servers etc at one place, you can get to things another way) is here:
http://www.sequentialtart.com/home.php

Included there, a great article on a reading/interview given by Peter S. Beagle.
Seems he's got a lot of new work coming out.
Go, read!
http://kadymae.livejournal.com/210461.h ... 57#t688157

Also, those of you who are artists would be well-advised to take a look at the on-going interviews there.
In this one, colorist Laura Martin gives good advice on basic manuals that are helpful, and talks about where the colorists hang out on the web.
====

gakked from (on lj) calligrafiti, who gakked it from stakebait.
as calligrafiti says, here:
http://calligrafiti.livejournal.com/323308.html
if you have some spare books, hardcover or paperback, the New Orleans libraries are trying hard to restock and would love any and all donations.

Please send the books to:

Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112

If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they may give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate.
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by clong »

How about an update Heather? Are you still working through a reorganization of the first 17 chapters?
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Post by hgladney »

Sorry, I've been neglecting <i>everybody</i> for days now.
Just got back last week from AZ trip, and one of the excuses for neglect is that I was just given a new camera, and <i>used</i> it on the trip.
So I've been trying to label 2 gig+flashcards of digital photos, mostly taken out the car window at speed, so I can figure out if any of them are worth keeping. I think there's some good ones there. Maybe.
My house has been a wreck, too, as first decent day back, I was given a new big compost bin that begged for usage, and we went to new semi-disposable furniture store run by Scandinavian company, using funky product names.
Oh yes, we planned this. We measured. We bought cabinets and boxes and lamps and things that have to be delivered. And then we have the paper and cardboard packing dealt with.
Hmm, says I, compost...we always need more compost...why do you say I'm eyeing the neighbor's streetside green waste with an acquisitive eye? Let's be frank. That's outright greed in me eye...
And yes, I'm shredding while I'm trying to deal with pix and posts and Flickr and etc.
But I still <i>want</i> those grass clippings for my new big compost heap...
In the meantime, there has been much shredding of packing cardboard to dry out and spread out the startling amount of kitchen green/veggie scraps we generate.
I really like having a shredder that can handle carboard!
It's a little hard to look at trip photos, label them decently, and stuff paper in the shredder machine <i>at the same time,</i> but I manage, somewhat distractedly.
Meanwhile, other folks in the family are grappling with doors and things.
So room had to be made for these unexpected new activities, and junk has to be put away.
In that process, everything else is left to wrack and ruin. My 90-gallon tank is a wreck and needs a new CO2 tank, and etc.
Oh yes, and I just taught myself how to post to lj from Flickr.
That's starting here.
http://nagasvoice.livejournal.com/138225.html

Haven't yet started posting AZ trip photos, still have to get them properly labeled. I'm hoping to stash a select wad of those 2 gigs of photos on SilentFlame, when appropriate. I was thinking that writing and travel photos should go on SilentFlame, and more idiosyncratic silly things, or family things, should go over on Flickr.

Techie computer question for clong or anybody else who might know:

how do I go about blogging a photo over here on IBDoF in the proper format for Flickr?
They give an FAQ of their formats, here.
http://www.flickr.com/help/blogging/#152
They say:
We currently support the following blogs:
Blogger
Typepad
Movable Type
LiveJournal
WordPress
Manila
Atom Enabled Blogs
Blogger API Enabled Blogs
Meta Weblog API Enabled Blogs

For that matter, same question sort of applies to linking from any pix that I post over the SilentFlame server, and I haven't even taken the time to look at the IBDoF FAQ about posting pix.
Brain=tired...
Needs more sleep.
Or more chocolate.
Better yet, both.
Snoring cats will happen too...
Right now, too short of sleep for too long...
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by Kvetch »

The BBCode for posting images is

Code: Select all

[img]http://image-url-here[/img]
Sadly, there is (to my knowledge) no way to post to the boeard from other sites automatically, but there is no problem with linking directly to files on the Silentflame server (I do, all the time).
"I'm the family radical. The rest are terribly stuffy. Aside from Aunt - she's just odd."
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Post by hgladney »

Thank you, Kvetch!
I should probably put that one up on the techie answer of the week thread, too...
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by Kvetch »

and it saves me thinking anything up - great!
"I'm the family radical. The rest are terribly stuffy. Aside from Aunt - she's just odd."
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Post by hgladney »

As I mentioned on the html tip of the week thread, I've been running like a chicken, flapping and squawking the whole way.
There has been shortage of grocery runs, lack of caffeine and ages and entire eons of a horrible lack of chocolate in any form. at. all.
Yes, we're even talking scraping down the last of the ...shudder... white chocolate cocoa mix with ...gulp...cinnamon in it.
Some things are just an affront against the multiverse, I'm sorry.
Tired tired tired.
Well, <i>part</i> of it is things like this.
Two days ago, on lj, the first time I'd posted anywhere in ages, I said:
Too busy to report until now, and this may be just the pause before the real bloody storm.
Tired.
Some of the family were going to go off to Bay Area, but that's on hold, as the sister with chronic lymphodema developed temp up near 100 F so she may have to go into ER tonight. With any luck, if she has to go in, they can give her meds and send her home same night. I like this, because then we only spend ten hours in the ER, and not days n days n days after going to the hospital (and of coourse making her sleep in the place.)
We're waiting to see how bad it is, her temp has gone down a little bit in the last hour.
Yes, I had a full and busy day before that.
Long rambly important unit meeting with boss etc. this morning, which I had to interrupt for possible promotional interview.
I postponed the practice with a group for Toastmasters, also originally scheduled for today, wasn't that wise of me?
Meanwhile, family spent the day running such fun errands as driving pink slip for old car to new owner. This is because our old Ford died on freeway from too-expensive alternator problems *yesterday*. It got towed to mechanic yesterday, sold onward to friend of same as Not Our Problem Any More, then they got rental car for weekend jaunts while the van-driving part of the fam were supposed to be going to Bay Area this weekend, etc. where they would pick up friend(s) in need of packing and unpacking work for pay.
Which we will have lots of. Or planned to, anyway. This was supposed to be part of preparing to pack workroom books and fabric and papers and computers, ripping out bad popcorn ceiling coating and intolerably ruint carpet, repainting, reflooring, receiling-ing, etc. NO stress there.
Hey, tonight is easy, just errands and packing for them, right?
Wrong.
We ran to Kaiser this evening for meds for another later, more extensive fam trip in a few weeks.
(Arguing with six different pharmacists about it was also part of their fun yesterday.)
We ran to fast food to stop me from snarling. Which didn't because it wasn't fast at all.
We go to cell phone store across town in howling rain, and store was also not fast at all.
We come out about 8 pm with on-sale but expensive phone which wasn't actually covered as promised by customer service who used very intriguing wording, when I came to check on it (yes, this is what quasi-competing monopolies are like, dears, just imagine what a real one would be like) and guesssss what, girls and boys?
We find ticket on van for parking in handicapped zone (they didn't see the handicapped placard inside it).
Sigh. Call down to court or wahtever tomorrow, right?
Driving down street, driving felt odd, stopped, found it was flat tire. Called Triple A tow. Luckily, we pulled over in parking lot with a dry overhang for stuff like wheelchair unloaded out of trunk, and a pizza place open until ten pm with bathroom for stuff from me!
Turned out to be a chunk of metal in the rubber, probably coincidental.
Just lucky that tire didn't blow out when they were shuddering about in Altamont Pass in the full shrieking fury of the next storm wave on Doppler there. Yeah, *that* set of hills--the ones with the wind turbines.
If you're wondering if guardian angels have a bloody sense of humor, I advise you to reread Pratchett and Gaiman, "Good Omens," and shut yer bloody gob, right, mate?
So no huge surprise that my sister might be stressed out and her temp a bit wobbly.
It's been one helluva day so far.
Full moon, too.
Seen through the rain rain rain.
Filling up the rivers, reservoirs, levees, creeks, flood-weirs, overflows, and erm, parks. And some downtown streets. And wherever else we can find to stash it.
Good night, and good luck...

As for yesterday, my sister did not have to go to the ER, beyond which I do not ask for much in the way of blessings.
It was quite the struggle to drag myself to work next morning, and I found out today that I'd made quite an amusingly massive collection of goofs that draw nasty attention, but hey, I got there, and I stuck out the day.
For today, yeahhh! It didn't rain the entire day today.
Oh yeah, and we caught those goofs.
Erm.
Thenkyew veddy much. Sooo glad you caught that before it turned into a much bigger problem. Yes, yes, that could have been <i>ugly.</i>
Oh yes, and <i>typos</i> too, indeed that just rounds it out nicely.
Thenkyew, I'm ever soo grateful about getting a chance to fix that.
I think.
Now, about that weather...
We are checking for mushrooms behind our ears and trying to shake off the web-feets we have acquired.
The overboots I bought from Airgas had come in--they sell safety gear and first aid and all kinds of weird stuff, you see, besides things like snaplighters and gas lines and regulators and welding helmets.
The boots would be better if they could close further up my leg, but oh well, the shoe fits, shaddup.
For those of you in clement climates, (I'm not sure what those are, people keep claiming it for places I've lived, and it's all a bloody lie) just visualize black fireman boots with latches, but not built quite so heavy.
My fam ran over today and picked them up for me.
So, once I got home from work, I galoshed my way into the back yard and actually dumped kitcehn waste and shredded paper in the compost bin where it belongs, and galoshed my way back across the pond.
Why yes, I grow Japanese irises wihtout benefit of concrete or plumbing or aynthing. But honestly, they're having a losing battle with the wisteria back there. Vicious stuff, that.
I found that rubber boot treads designed not to pick up mud, that don't actually pick up mud, also work nicely in swamps too.
I was pleased.
Then I vegged out tonight--I mean, as in TV (and not as in dirt-gardening) for the first time in weeks.
Nope, I lie.
It's been months.
Yes, I actually sat like a sofa-lump in front of the box, and we ran the imitation TIVO box through two eps of Lost, and at least my brain was reduced to fairly high-fiber carrots and broccoli by the end of this sinfully decadent explosion of sofa-bound slothfulness.
We left the box to record DR. Who because even these eyeballs have a limit.
And there was even...chocolate. A little bit.
I'll take my pleases where I can get 'em.
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
Evaine
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Post by Evaine »

Gosh! It makes losing my front door key during a medieval show seem positively tame in comparison (I just had to dump my chainmail, sword and weaving demonstration stuff in the back garden and hike down to my friend's bookshop for the spare key).
when the floppy-eared Spaniel of Luck sniffs at your turn-ups it helps if you have a collar and piece of string in your pocket.
Terry Pratchett on taking opportunities in writing.
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Post by hgladney »

evaine wrote:I just had to dump my chainmail, sword and weaving demonstration stuff in the back garden
There's something incredibly attractive abot a woman who dumps her weaving and chainmail together in the garden.
Sorry, just had to say it!
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by hgladney »

I've been offline quite a lot lately, because we've been ripping up the room where I normally work on the computer. Me and my fish have migrated into the living room now, and are set up again. For awhile. I may get blocked off again, so don't worry if I'm not posting sometimes.
The working room should be much-improved when we're done, but the interim is quite disruptive, and we're trying not to rip out all our hair as well, during this process.
If you're getting the impression that life has not been supportive of writing for about 3-4 months now, you'd be right.
Or else I'm letting it be that way.
I've also been shredding quite a lot of paper and cardboard and using that in a nice big compost bin obtained at low cost from a city waste-reduction workshop (open to any resident, BTW, they honestly are that motivated to reduce landfill usage around here). So when I have no brain wahtever, I sit and read things and tear up cardboard and shred it with paper. Eventually it goes outside, when it's not raining.
I also attended an Earthday rally at our lovely state Capitol today, with booths by various waste-reduction and wastewater reduction agencies. One of them is Integrated Waste Management Board, which had smallish vermicomposting bins. I gave them a used teabag for their worms, which they happily accepted--once they tore out the reprehensible teabag staple. It worried the nice lady that the metal toxicity might damage the worms in the small bins, which were perhaps four times the size of a shoebox. I rarely worry about it, on the larger scale of my bin, which is about 3' on a side and as tall, and besides, my worms are the regular garden earthworoms. They can always run away down into the dirt at the bottom, where they came from in the first place.
Staples, as I told the nice lady, are mostly iron, and shouldn't do any harm once it starts rusting down.
Actually, aside from toxic mine areas, in many environments it's in short supply.
So, while doing something else later in the day, I was idly recalling this deadly removed staple, and how I don't usually bother.
Which somehow led to the idea of mining and environmental metal toxicity in general, and conversations about acid pits leach from mines that need remediation (that was a different booth than the vermicomposting) and I had the sudden thought connecting metal toxicity to these books.

One of the Sharinen doctors (possible spoiler if it stays!!) implies that Naga is a very strange duck indeed, when it comes to what his body does with toxic metals. Just their test results say a few things about what a strange liver he must have. I'd already implied that the Sharinen were around in this particular Hold because the local volcanic soil is incredibly rich in a lot of intriguing minerals, which leach out as some really wild salts.
So the local soil is probably nothing like either the alluvial soils down near Fortress, and not like the alkali soils of the desert. Changes like that can cause all kinds of other new events, right?
Well, maybe...
At any rate, it prompted a thought that might grow into a nice setup for an otherwise cryptic scene that popped in on me with no anchorage whatever and insisted that it really did belong in the current mss.
In other words, trivial thoughts this afternoon about office supply uses can lead into productive directions.
I think.
If I can get it written down before it wanders completely out of my brain during the ripping of cardboard and badly-aged carpeting.
Did I mention that I was tired, too?
Seems like I'm always saying that...
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by hgladney »

I've posted the first batch of pictures from my Arizona trip. It doesn't actually show any particle of AZ at all, btw.
Just where I stayed in SD until we left eastward.
Mostly plant pix.
But don't worry, we'll get enough bare bare cruel rocks later on.
And sagueros, eventually.
The whole batch, all sets so far, are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/girdethsvoice/

The AZ set starts here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/55043902@N ... 119000148/
You can click on it as a slideshow, or run through each photo in turn, which allows you to see my comments.
Adding the comments are what takes so long, you know!
Of course I'm hoping to add more soon, but we'll see how that goes...
Enjoy!
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by Sean Whitton »

Shall we work on adding those to your site? I have some time now that some IBDoF work is done.
Formerly known as 'Xyrael'.

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Post by hgladney »

oh, that would be great, xyrael!
I know there's ways of linking to Flicker (it's in the FAQs) but I'm not entirely sure of the detaisl.
I've got more to upload, too.
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by Sean Whitton »

Let me know when they're all up, and I'll do something about it :D
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Post by hgladney »

Will do, thanks!
This is where they have the blog pic posting FAQ, BTW.
http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by hgladney »

Quiet weekend, with everybody gone, and I got a lot done of the book.
Enough to be able to see how much more I need to wrestle with it.
Things have been demanding at home and at work during the week, however. Workman who was to finish the ceiling in time to clear out for the flooring guys delayed and then walked off the job with fiberglass hanging out of the hole. We pulled that out of the fire by turning to another guy we'd worked with before, and he kindly agreed to come over at last minute to do work *after* the flooring, which is not ideal but is doable.
Flooring goes in tomorrow, while I'm at work.
Team speech for Toastmasters got done today.
Stress. moi??
I shall be very, very relieved when this mess is done and things are back where they belong.

I just had enough brain tonight to post some more AZ trip pix up on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/girdethsvo ... 119000148/
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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Post by hgladney »

Well, older photos are dropping off visibility in Flickr, which is too bad, until I upgrade to Pro account, when they will all apparently pop up again, probably to embarrass me with old typos.
On the house reno, not enough to report. Neither the empty room's floor nor ceiling has got done yet; but the wallboard has been put up in the hole, with new insulation, so we're at least better off than before.
I whined over on lj about how fed-up I was getting with things in general, particularly with the renters next door (parking your car on the lawn just under the front windows is, by the way, against code around here) and they topped it today with more bad behavior. Eight-year-old boys who swing baseball bats in hot destructive pursuit of small creatures into my yard are not doing their parents any good at all in my eyes. Last time he really swung at something over here, he destroyed our wimpy old metal mailbox with a couple of good swings of a piece of lumber left lying in their garage, not even a bat. Yeah, that was an eight-year-old who was capable of that kind of damage.
Oh yes--and if you're going to sneak out and leave garbage in somebody else's construction dumpster, then I suggest you use a shredder on your mail first.
I particularly liked the opened envelope sent to them from an inmate at Folsom Prison. Yeah, that's one of the high-security ones.
Johnny Cash sang about that place.
I somehow suspect it hasn't got any nicer since then.
Gives a whole new perspective on who I'm living next to, but I had my suspicions anyway.
You certainly can't say we live in one of those tidy boring cookie-cutter inbred Stepford wives neighborhoods that's manicured within an inch of the sidewalks.
I think my family is praying that I don't catch that kid chasing something alive with his nice big black bat. They think I have a bad temper when I find people beating up the small and helpless.
Hmm.
They may be right.
I was quite proud of them for going over and having a rational discussion with the neighbors, suggesting they might want to shredding their stuff so nobody commits identity theft against them by going through their garbage.
Nicely done, I thought.
I was pretty mad about the kid acting up after that. Hard to say what I'd do about it if I see him at it again, but I should probably think ahead of something I can do which is rational and calm and useful. I mean, besides taking the bat away and cracking it in half over an inanimate object, which is reasonably easy to do with the correct leverage.
I didn't want to be mad at them.
What I wanted to do was get some writing done. Get some laundry done, clean the fish tank, water my orchids, peaceable stuff.
So I decided to take all that mad and do something that needed doing anyway. I got the plants watered (the way I run my fish tank, that water does wonders for my orchids first, and then it goes outside to water the plants in containers). I got the filters rinsed out and the fish are clearly happy.
The immediate mad has worked out of my system, which is good.
I'm not sure why I feel so much better about things. It's amazing how soothing it is to haul buckets of water and know you're doing something worthwhile that really needed doing.
I feel a lot better.
I'm not sure if it's the exercise of hauling thirty gallons of water outside, or the way the plants and the fish perk up when you do this, or the way it just looks so much better when you're done.
Or just the pure satisfaction of knowing that things are good for another week.
I must say, clean cat boxes are good, too, but just not as satisfying as a plant well-watered. Not as soul-satisfying as seeing a fish chasing after scraps of hard-boiled egg and avocado where you can see them again.
Big doses of slightly cooler water and lots of good food is also how you end up getting Corydoras catfish breeding in your tank like a colony of unspayed cats, too, by the way. Sponges on all the filter intakes also help feed the babies until they're ready to come out where you can see them.
While I did this messy stuff, I was playing Holst's the Planets and Smetana's Ma Vlast, which includes the shorter piece that many people know by the name "the Moldau"--after the river of that name.
This is either hysterically funny, or altogether way too appropriate for cleaning a fish tank.
I've been playing those two cds for writing to, along with Dvorak's New World Symphony, which is very much in the same tone and mood as the other two, for the last few weeks--as wordless movie scores for my head.
I've also been leaning heavily on "The Mozart Sessions", by Chick Corea and Bobby McFerrin, but that's to put me in a calmer, more intellectual mood. Better suited to careful editing, if you like. Or for balancing your checkbook.
I've been playing them so much because my other cds were packed, and I wanted to get these on cd anyway. It's been so long ago I had these pieces and listened to them over and over while writing that I was wearing out the grooves on the vinyl, lo these many <i>many</I> moons ago.
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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progress report?!

Post by hgladney »

I hadn't realized it'd been so long since I last commented.
Haven't been keeping up with online very well--first sick, and then too busy. Sick=head cold gone baaad. I'm on meds for sinus infection again, I've got a new regime using a lot of saline nasal spray and tissues all day long that seems to be helping the most. I still make moose-call noises way too much!
Weather was gorgeous this weekend, lots of planting got done. Just tonight we finished up the last of 14 tubs potted up with things that were falling out of dying plastic pots, and some entirely new setups. I was quite pleased with two new tubs in the shade of the garage with camellias and fuchsias and bronze heucheras and alyssum and lobelia. Some new tubs in back went for tomatoes. The yard is crummy enough clay that, while I can grow pretty darn good roses, it won't grow veggies.
All this hard work and activity was helpful in reducing frustration levels for my family, too, as reno work is still in mid-course, work room still isn't done. Flooring is in now, walls painted, still waiting for rewiring and light fixture and styrene ceiling panels to go up, also to be painted. That's supposed to happen during this week. I'm still working at improvised (but quite decent) computer setup, but I'll be glad to be back in place. The trauma of moving furniture back in and stashing all those boxes of stuuuufff back in there will disrupt life a lot after that. Hopefully a little greater organization will eventually prevail, but there will be frustration and muddle in the meantime, and we all know it.
But on to the important stuff.
Yes, I got some writing done!
I feel that's one of the best ways that I have to pay my respects on Memorial Day: do a decent job of showing the soldiers I've put in my work.
During this long holiday weekend, I did get a lot done on the Teot book, deleting duplications where I'd copied some useful 5-10 paragraph chunks forward into new sections at the beginning--but until now, I hadn't got around to reknitting the narrative that was left behind.
Trying to recognize bits scattered here and there is harder when I'm so tired that I can hardly stay awake, so I've been trying to spend less time online and go to bed at a decent hour. Which I am failing to do, right now!! When I'm tired, I also find it hard to keep track of things at a larger scale, remembering details of a paragraph here and there throughout 3-4 chapters at a stretch, without having to go back and check constantly. Checking can also be confusing, so I can end up wallowing around completely muddled as to what I've done where.
With the perspective of quite a lot of time, and coming back into it by reading and editing through from the beginning, by the time I got down to Chapter 12, reknitting became much less traumatic. Instead of struggling to make sense of either end of a gap, I was happy to drop bits that'd got used elsewhere and simply drop bits that I wasn't attached to and which longer worked, and grab chunks that did work and tie them together.Working at this scale is an different mindset from slowly bricking up one sentance to the next, the way that I usually work on a normal day. I was pleased I could do this. It was actually a bit annoying to recognize bits I'd already used, and it made me happy to scratch them, not worried and frustrated by it.
It actually felt nice to get the whole thing moving along a little better.
It feels like progress.
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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clong
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Post by clong »

Thanks for the update Heather. I hope you continue to make progress!
hgladney
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Post by hgladney »

Like many other folks, we have got ugly weather.
They have a heat advisory out for tomorrow, expecting 109 degrees F.
At almost 11 pm, local conditions:
Currently: 88°F Clear
Currently: 31°C Clear
Wind: West at 6 MPH
Humidity: 53%
Dewpoint: 69°F
Barometer: 29.81 inches and steady
Heat Index: 92°F
Now, I realize this is nowhere near the same as 90 per cent humidty and 90+ degrees F with power failures, as in some places.
But it may be power failures tomorrow.
And of course I'm obligated to go volunteer tomorrow afternoon at a big public do where people will be at the mercy of a large venue's a/c, or lack of. Well, it may end up being cooler than my house will be.
Which is what I'm afraid of, actually. During power grid strain time, public venues round here often let the temp climb to 80+.
I am not looking forward to this.
There's been quite a number of other things I haven't been looking forward to, either, this week, but they all worked out eventually, and sometimes more smoothly than I really expected.
This was one of the high points of a month I wasn't looking forward to, with extra work demands and challenges above the usual routine; last week had its moments too.
12-hour days with down and back from LA in one shot are not my idea of fun travel, call me a stick-in-the-mud. It does kncok you out of your blah old routines, indeed it does, but my attitude is still wobbling on the edge of whether to fall heads or tails that "it's a really good thing to shake up your routines!"
It also means routine chores get crammed into what's left over, and maybe I don't get to the computer to work on the book at all that day.

And I may have at least two or three more of those trips ahead for next month.
I am planning on one of them being going to WorldCon in LA, if anyone is interested.

This week has been successful, workwise, in the sense of battling your way through sucking bog and monsters you hadn't dealt with before and people handing off things unexpectedly at you, often with completely inappropriate glee--which in my life often means karma will eventually come along and kick them in their pointed heads, if I don't do it myself first. I should be patient. Karma, in my experience, is pretty darn thorough about working over with the hobnail boots. But it's not quick or immediate satisfaction, generally.
Have to shut down computer, we're having brownouts now...
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.
---Plutarch
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clong
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Post by clong »

I am planning on one of them being going to WorldCon in LA, if anyone is interested.
I had thought about arranging my summer travel plans so that I would be in LA at WorldCon time, but it didn't work out that way. :(
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