This Isn't the Future We Were Promised

Image source: openclipart.org

When I was little, I ate up all the stories about the future: flying cars, moon colonies, cruises to Saturn’s rings, robots doing all the work, and an end to poverty and racism.

What we got was: none of the above, plus the Internet, and powerful computers that we can carry around in a shirt pocket. And texts like this:

Daughter Dearest: Will you bring me some toilet paper?

Can I exchange this future for the one I actually bought?

Home for the Holiday

Home, home again

I like to be here, when I can

— Pink Floyd

I took the three days off work that the office was open this week, but it wasn’t even a staycation.

Last week, the wife went into the doc’s about her knee. Over the years, it never really recovered from the car wreck that brought Daughter Dearest into the world a month early, and a chicken house accident certainly doesn’t improve anything. It finally gave up about a month ago. The doc suggested trying this and that, which weren’t likely to be a permanent fix if they worked at all. The wife said, “Let’s cut to the chase, not mess with stuff that isn’t going to work, and just replace it. Because that’s what’s going to happen after these other things don’t work anyway.”

That hardware is going
to be around for a while

The “system,” usually glacial when it comes to elective surgery, got its act together more quickly than expected, and she went in for a new knee on Tuesday. Yup, that was how I spent my birthday: dragging myself out of bed at way-too-early-thirty, taking her to the hospital, playing solitaire on my phone in the waiting room, then joining her in her new room. The operation itself was a breeze, but the recovery will take a while.

Lots of people have said to tell her to make sure she does her therapy. No problem there—she’s been trying to get ahead of the curve, trying to flex her leg a little a few hours out of the operating room. Her actual first therapy session went well, with her gimping around the bed on a walker.

With Thanksgiving looming, Daughter Dearest and I wondered about the timing. Still, there was plenty of dinner on the table, including the rolls I made from Grandma’s secret recipe. We didn’t have any shortening, but I found online that coconut oil is an acceptable substitute and we do have some of that. They turned out just fine. She called me in the morning, and told me to pick her up after I ate.

So it was off to the hospital, wheelchair to walker to van, then down to the in-laws to join the rest of the crowd for the second round of face-stuffing. There were jokes about her and Big V having a walker race, but Big V has more experience. I thought that “Two Gimpy Sisters” would be a fine name for a punk rock band.

So there’s a few things to be thankful for this year: thousands of copies of Accidental Sorcerers sold, Mason started pre-K, wife is going to be able to walk well for the first time in years… and Daughter Dearest is more like her old self than she has been in a while.

The Many (goofy) Faces of Mason

When Mason takes selfies, he goes all out:

So the wife, daughter, and I were all laughing about this, and Mason came to see what was so funny. I showed him, and he said…

“That’s not funny at all.”

Which was even more hilarious, of course.

Weekend Roundup: Sliding into Fall

Last night brought frost to FAR Manor, the first October frost in three years. It’s all downhill from here:

I committed myself to write reviews for three books I’ve read in the last few weeks, so I wrapped those up last night. Links go to Goodreads:

• Verbosity’s Vengeance, by +Tony Noland (★★★★)
• Trancehack, by +Sonya Clark (★★★★)
• Dragon Guard, by +Eric Krause (★★★★★)

They’re all good, go check 'em out!

In my own writing endeavors, I’ve finished up the first part of The Lost Years. I need to get cranking on the next part, which is sort of plotted out in my head, but The Sorcerer’s Daughter is the priority at the moment. I’m going through +Helen Howell’s beta comments, which were more encouraging than I thought. I figured I’d have to rewrite all of Chapter 2, but Helen said it was the first half of the chapter that needed work. So if I can get that fixed in the next few days, maybe the editor can get it back to me and I’ll still be good for that November launch.

And, this song has been stuck in my head on auto-repeat all week:



I bought the album so I could play the song at will, because that usually kills the earworm, but this one is a little tougher to shake loose.

My shoulder is getting better, finally. I need it to be 100% NOW, though, since it’s firewood season. I have to remember to bring in wood with my right arm and use my left for opening doors, the opposite of how I usually do things, to not hurt it. And I’m nowhere near ready to sling a chainsaw around for an entire afternoon. I started to hit a depression last week, but I think it passed. I don’t need that on top of everything else.

The Drumbeat of Life

Sometimes, instead of writing wibbles, you just need to put on your ear protection, pick up the sticks, and have at it:

A lot of stuff has happened this month, and somehow I managed to not blog about it. Mason’s 4th birthday was earlier this month, a day that kicked off our vacation at the retreat near Helen. This time, The Boy came, new girlfriend in tow. She and Mason hit it off pretty well, and her family has a racing team. (Mason approves.) One of the highlights: The Boy wanted to go tubing, so we piled in the van. Well before we got to Helen, Mason was asleep. “You guys can go,” I said. “Just call me when you’re done.” Then the tubing places were closed. Oh well, it never really got hot this summer, so that water was pretty chilly. Mason ran his hand in it the next day, and was glad he didn’t try to go tubing.

The proper tool needs
to be the proper size.

Then there was the steps project. The manor came with this little brick-lined walkway going from the driveway into the back yard. It has eroded a little, and Mason has always had trouble taking that big step down. Wife has been poking me about building some steps there, and I tackled it. First, we dug out the step-down, which was easier than usual because it has been so rainy this summer (making the ground nice and soft). We have a shovel that’s a perfect size for Mason, so of course he got into the act. And he actually helped. He scooped up loose dirt and tossed it into the wheelbarrow.

I poured a concrete footing, which involved horking 80lb bags of concrete down to the worksite. My brilliant idea was to lay a board across where I wanted it to stop, dump the dry concrete in, and add water. It worked, but it took a lot more water than I’d expected. But after a lot of raking and stirring and hosing, I got all the stuff wet, then smoothed it out. Then, I stacked the concrete blocks I was using for steps in the wet concrete, using more to glue the layers together.

As I was working on the last of it, my left shoulder decided it had had far more than enough, and went on strike. I worked through it, carrying the last bag with one arm—I was like 90% done, and I couldn’t walk away being that close to finishing (defined as being able to walk up and down ugly steps, the esthetics can wait until I’m better). It slowly improved, but I went to the doctor just to make sure I didn’t have a torn rotator cuff or something equally bad. She opined that it’s a tendon, and gave me a round of steroids. In some ways, it’s worse now because it’s better—I can use it for light duty, and it wants to instinctively reach for things that I’d usually use my left hand for, so at bedtime it’s aching quite a bit. I might end up going in for physical therapy… depends on what the doc says when I go in for my usual 6-month checkup today [UPDATE: yes, physical therapy].

Oh, and Mason has started pre-school. He’s in the 4yo class, despite still being 3 when he actually started. The teacher listened to him talk and what he talked about, and said “he belongs with the 4 year olds.” So he’s going to have some regular interaction with a lot of other kids, for the first time in like ever. He should get to really like it in a few weeks. Right now, he’s in a contrary phase, which for the in-laws is constant. I hope it’s just a phase with him.

Oh, Dam.

When this isn’t happening,
there’s a problem.

Even without the chicken houses, there are a zillion ways around here to have a significant percentage of one’s weekend eaten alive. This one, however, was a little different.

The inlaws have a farm. And on that farm there is a pond. With a pump house on one side, and a dam on the other. A few months ago, the pump house was flooding out, due to a lot of rain coming in and a clog in the overflow pipe going out. We ended up running a piece of high-pressure roll pipe down the outflow pipe, and ramming away until it broke free. The obstruction turned out to be a can of starter fluid, which to me was just more proof of the usual bizarre stuff that happens around here. (Only here would a can of starter fluid stop something.)

So on Friday, the wife is telling me a tale of woe. Something was clogging the pond’s outflow pipe this time, and the water was threatening to rise over the dam and cause massive problems. Three people had spent half a day on it, but she suggested I call Evil Lad NOT and ask him for assistance. Well, he was moving into his lodgings at UGA, so I was on my own.

Being by myself, I decided to survey everything first, to see what they’d tried and what I was up against. I suggested opening the drain, to buy some time, and was told the end of the drain is capped and it would be a major hassle to dig it out. I decided to put that in the “last resort” bucket, right before the idea of dropping a weighted M-80 down the pipe. The end of an augur line (a souvenir from the chicken houses) was sticking out of the outflow pipe below the dam, their attempt to break the clog from underneath. I decided to work from the top.

The problem was, the outflow pipe (up top) was difficult to find. The usual formula is “about eight feet left of the drain handle and just a little past,” but this time, the drain handle was under water. Being a pond, the water isn’t exactly clear, so it took a little paddling around the general area until I got close enough to see it. Then, I had to find the outflow pipe. Half an hour later, I was ready to… something. I probed with a thin piece of roll pipe, and concluded that the blockage was probably at the bend.

Then I got an idea. If a can of starter fluid could block the pump house outflow, could another kind of can block this one? And if it was steel, maybe I could fish it out with a magnet. The Boy has blown out speakers of all sizes, and they were piled up in the garage. I figured, since I’ve been planning to repurpose the magnets for a windmill project sooner or later, that I could pull one of the subwoofer magnets, tie it to a rope, and try to fish out any metal object blocking things up. I left the roll pipe sticking out of the overflow, to mark the spot, and got the magnet. I pulled up all sorts of crud with it, perhaps muck with a high iron content, but couldn't grab anything else.

At this point, I suddenly thought of the pump house blockage, and how we used the thick roll pipe to ram the obstruction out. In fact, I wondered why the wife hadn’t thought of it, since it was her idea that time anyway. So I got the unwieldy stuff, spent another half hour relocating the pipe because I didn’t leave the other to mark it, then got at it. After a couple minutes of ramming, I felt something give just a little, and the pipe resisted pulling as if it were stuck. So I bashed away a few more times, then felt a vibration. Putting my ear to the pipe let me hear the sound of rushing water, and I saw a little vortex form above the pipe. Yay!

I left the pipe there, just in case, and went down to the outflow. I was rewarded by the sight of plenty of water flowing out, although I didn’t see anything in the water that could have been the obstruction. I figured it was debris and muck that collected and packed up. I felt rather good about myself, having accomplished in three hours what three people hadn’t in four hours… although, around here, that usually means they’ll expect me to take care of the next problem myself.

Adjusting the Balance

Image source: openclipart.org

It’s often difficult to keep some kind of balance in life, and that goes double for a writer. You have a job to maintain (until you hit it big, of course… I’m still working on that), the Muse is often prodding you with shiny new story ideas or driving you crazy by withholding same. There might be things you want to attend to on evenings and weekends besides writing. (Like blogging?)

Lots of little projects have been back-burner’ed over the years here, and not all of them because I was busy writing. But the new-to-me car sort of forced the issue, and in a good way. After putting the insulation back up, and making enough room to actually park a car in the garage (imagine!), I spent this last weekend attacking the mess on and around the workbench… which, of course, led to other sections of “my” half of the garage (The Boy has his band stuff in the other half). The wife, a while back, bought one of those shop-vac heads that snaps onto a 5-gallon bucket. I got it out of the box, found a donor bucket, and it became the new home for spider webs (and the spiders themselves, when I could catch 'em). I got a truckload of trash out of there, by which I mean it about filled the back end of a Tacoma pickup. A large tool box that was constantly in the way ended up on the bench, as did a drill press that we’re “storing” for someone and has been in the way for years. I collected enough antifreeze to… oh, I don’t know what. We won’t have to buy any for a long, long time. Various pieces of lumber went up in the rafters.

I’m not quite done arranging things, but I’m getting close. Close enough to actually get back to tackling a project that has been hanging fire for a long time: making a fan bracket for the little Suzuki. When I put the big gas tank on, I was able to flip the horn bracket, but there wasn’t room for the OEM fan. Many people just ride it without a fan, but you can mount a computer fan. I just needed to cut holes in a piece of sheet metal, and the new Dremel was well up to the task.

So with Evernote keeping track of stuff I’m remembering I wanted to do, and a place to actually do them, I’m back on track. And I still have plenty of writing time in the evenings. Except that I’m supposed to be editing a book for +Angela Kulig right now… so back to it!

Writing Wibbles

Well, not really writing wibbles this week, because there hasn’t been much writing so far. But with Water and Chaos now launched, maybe I can get back to it soon. Since mid-January, we (that is, the co-op) have released:

• Accidental Sorcerers
• The Crossover
• Oddities: an Anthology
• Pickups and Pestilence
• Water and Chaos

Five books in six months is a hefty production schedule, no matter how you look at it. If you’ve missed any, hit the My eBooks page to see where they’re available.

So… since there’s no writing to discuss otherwise, and I haven’t shared much “weirder than fiction” that happens around FAR Manor lately, I’ll do something about the latter. I started sorting through a huge pile of photos from vacation last night, and deleted 80 (out of around 500). That’s a job nowhere near complete, so there’s no slideshow just yet. But it’s coming.

We returned home Saturday evening, in good order. I was driving the Miata I bought from Solar (my brother), and everyone else was in the van. (I was expecting to have to remind myself to not get too far ahead of them, but instead I was often wailing up the highway to keep up. Miatas aren’t geared for all-day freeway driving, kind of like my little motorcycle.) Of course, I got home, and The Boy had stuffed his Acura in the garage space I’d spent an entire weekend making ready for my car. To make matters worse, he was standing outside with his cousin Kobold, who was smoking in my Civic. I was more than a little peeved, and let them know, and told him to get his car out of there.

“Fine, let me take Kobold home first.” They jumped in the Civic, took off, and that was the last I saw of them until morning. Which did nothing to improve my mood, of course. (He’s using my Civic since his car has serious issues, which I will get to shortly.)

He showed up in time for breakfast, and I stayed on him about getting his car out. “We’ll have to push it,” he said, and repeated the litany of problems he’d told me about over the phone on vacation: burning oil, missing a lot, needed major work, etc. Of course, we’ll have to push it meant that he sat in the car and steered, while EJ and I pushed. We got it about 2/3 of the way, before a slight incline defeated us, and The Boy decided to fire it up for the last 30 feet. Indeed, smoke billowed out the tailpipe, and I heard it miss a couple times as he backed it into a pull-off spot.

With the car out of the way, I put the Miata in the garage then joined The Boy and EJ. The Boy already had the hood up on the Acura and was talking about all he had to do: tear the engine down, do a ring job, probably replace the entire ignition system…

“What’s that for?” I asked, pointing to a loose, thick cable coming through the firewall. “Your stereo system?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The fuseholder melted, so I just took it off.”

“Um… you might want to take the other end off the battery.” I lifted the other end, big around as my index finger, attached to the positive terminal.

“Why?”

I swear I didn’t plan this, but I let the cable go, and it bounced down and contacted the engine block, making a hefty pop sound. “Because it’s bouncing around while you’re driving, and it’s shorting out the battery, and that’s why your car is missing sometimes.” I laughed. “You really need to get that off of there.”

“Well, it’s still burning oil,” he grumbled, and went to get a wrench. The way he tossed the wrench on the garage floor afterwards, suggested he was more than a little peeved about this weapons-grade brainfart.

That’s the kind of stuff we deal with at FAR Manor.

Late Spring

Long November hung on as long as it possibly could, and then some. But the march of seasons persists, and the cold and cool days have become cool and warm days. I even managed to take the laptop to the table out front and work outside.

Of course, it’s April, and that means the pollen count left “extreme” far behind and was playing in “Are you $#%@!! kidding me!?” territory:

After a few hours working outside…

Once inside, I ran a Swiffer across the laptop and cleared away the pollen, turning the Swiffer yellow. The pollen count topped out at 8024; Daughter Dearest heard it was the third highest recorded measurement ever. It starts to clog me up when it gets above 4000 or so, and I don’t have allergies.

As always, wild violets run riot in the yard. The wife thinks they’ll kill the grass; but they’ve been coming up every spring, ever since we’ve lived at FAR Manor, and the grass lives on:

Because plain green is BORING.

The cherry tree really put on a show. This week’s windy weather has turned these into what looks like a dusting of pink snow if you squint:

Pinkitude!

Last night, I finally got to take the wife out to dinner like I’ve wanted to do all… all year, actually. The January royalties from Amazon came in at the end of March, so I had enough to splash on a pretty nice outing. Jam came up to watch Mason for us, since Daughter Dearest was working closing hours at Dress Barn. The best laid plans… we got to the place I’d picked out, and hadn’t realized one of the local high schools was having prom night. I expected the place to be crowded, but not “hour and a half wait time” crowded. Fortunately, there’s a large cluster of restaurants across the highway, and we’d agreed to check those out as a backup plan. “How about that Tilted Kilt place?” she suggested. I hadn’t ever been; I knew it was an Irish pub-themed place was all, and the high school kids wouldn’t exactly be crowding it.

We got right in… and what neither of us realized, is that it’s more of an Irish-themed Hooters (wife laughed at this description). The servers, young shapely women all, wore halter tops and a tartan-patterned mini. I think they might have had a clear or flesh-toned body sock covering the expanse of belly and back between the two pieces; it would have been awfully chilly in there without one, but the lighting wasn’t enough to decide with a quick glance. I wasn’t there to check out the girlies, anyway. I may mount a solo expedition to make a final determination, especially since the food was pretty good.

More yard work is in the cards for today. I think I’ll take a day off work and not tell anyone, then disappear with my writing stuff so I can catch up.

Sick for the Holidays

What I’ll look like, if this cough keeps up.
Source: openclipart.org

At least I have an excuse for not blogging much lately, even for #FridayFlash. The afternoon before Christmas Eve, I began to feel fatigued while running an errand. That’s often the first sign that I’m about to come down with what’s officially called an ILI (Influenza-Like Illness). But a cup of coffee erased the fatigue, so I figured it was just lack of sleep.

Unfortunately, I woke up shivering around 4am that morning. I thought to myself, “No, I can’t get sick now!” but viruses don’t give two tin toots about the in-laws coming in later that day. I dragged myself through the last-minute preparations in the morning, then went back to bed for the afternoon. So I missed out on a rather large feast, for which I’d made rolls, but I was too feverish to care much.

Then the wife got it, too. Christmas Day, we both sat in the lounge chairs, trying to be part of the thing. The Boy was here, fortunately—and even more fortunately, he limped in with a deteriorating CV joint, so he was more or less stuck at FAR Manor for the week. Between himself and Daughter Dearest, who got along pretty well this time, they kept Mason busy shredding wrapping paper and blasting through his presents. Snippet, whose boyfriend also has an iPhone, uses FaceTime to “see” Mason every couple of weeks, and they pinged in to watch Mason open the big box of stuff they sent him. That works out pretty well: during those calls, she mostly focuses on Mason, who usually grabs a handful of toys and plays while she talks to him. Being a thousand miles away, she can’t get on The Boy’s nerves or tempt Daughter Dearest to commit ditzicide.


The next day, I was feeling well enough to drive, and took the wife to the doctor’s. I figured she had what I had, and would be feeling better the next day, but I still wasn’t in any condition to argue. They took a throat swab, and she had strep. At that point, I should have asked for a swab as well, but here’s where I brain-farted. I figured since I had a routine appointment scheduled for the next day, I could get it all done then. The appointment was actually scheduled for a week after the next day. I continued to feel incrementally better with each new day, but figured it was better on the half-dozen co-workers who’d be at the office if I stayed home and used the VPN. Oh, and The Boy got his car fixed and departed on time.

So I finally got to my real appointment, which included an application of The Glove cue banjo music. I got the throat swab, and yup, I had strep too. The antibiotics are already doing their thing, but I have this almost-dry cough that won’t go the eff away (cough syrup is effective for maybe 20 minutes). I’m either going to hack up a lung or have washboard abs by the time it’s done.

Here’s hoping your holidays were pleasant and disease-free.

Changin', Arrangin'

The wife asked me to clean off the computer desk in Mason’s room, because she wants to move her video editing system in there. Then the old office will become a guest bedroom. So in I went, with trash bags, vacuum cleaner, and a rag with a can of Pledge. The dust bunnies were large under there, but not overly aggressive. I think I bagged about a pound of them, along with a half-ton of trash and a new (and unused) power strip.

With that done, I hung the DSL box on the wall next to the router, and neatened up the UPS position. Then it was time to unhook everything in the office and drag the computer stuff over. That went as well as could be expected, dusting each item as I brought it in. There are plenty of dust bunnies in that room, too, but the pile of papers on that desk is close to approaching critical mass and creating a black hole like the one we had in our college dorm room. She knows what the papers are for, so I’ll let her deal with them. :-)

So after I got Mason down for a nap, and the girlies took off, I finally got to relax. Then I got a text from Daughter Dearest: Go ahead and clean off your desk, so we can move the one upstairs downstairs. So there were more oversized dust bunnies, more trash, and then I hauled the old desk into the living room. With that space open, I cleaned out behind the dresser before moving the new desk into position.

Then… I started loading it up. The new desk has both more and less space, both due to the shelf. The laptop and monitor couldn't both be up there, so I moved it as shown here. But there’s room for the microphone, and (with a little more arranging and dust bunny eradication) I managed to get the laser printer in place. The printer was displaced by the wife’s DV deck.

I got smart and zip-tied the power strip to the framework on the back of the desk—now, it’s out of the way but reachable. The UPS is on the bottom shelf, and the desk is on rollers, so cleaning behind it won’t be an ordeal. Maybe the dust bunnies won’t have a chance to proliferate this time.

Monday Musings

We’re definitely in the Countdown to Christmas. A week and a day before the wrapping paper flies. Mason is old enough, this year, to understand the whole presents and Santa Claus thing. Of course, he had to get sick… and he’s always uggggly when he’s sick. We’ve heard, “Am I on the naughty list?” a few times. He just wants cars, and I mean the Hot Wheels kind. We could get him ten of those, wrap each one, and he’ll think he hit the Presents Jackpot come the 25th. It reminds me of Daughter Dearest—we could get her twenty bucks worth of puzzles, back in the day, and she was happy as any kid on the Big Day.

It’s been too long since icicle lights were the Big Thing for decorating. They’ve finally come up with a new “must have” light set: the waterfall/cascading kind. Well, Mason does love the extravaganza of lights outside, and we’ve made a few adjustments with wiring so we don’t blow those tiny fuses in the first string of lights this year. Pictures will be taken once the last set of lights are hung.

The clever and talented Angela Kulig is almost done with my cover art. It’s going to be glorious. I just hope it’s all ready by Wednesday, so I can wibble about it.

This evening, a couple hours after we put Mason to bed, he came up the hall saying, “there’s a problem, there’s a problem.” After a little cuddle, he let us know that his projection nightlight had cycled off and he wanted it back on. With the moon and stars once again glowing on the ceiling, he went right back to sleep.

Writing Wibbles

With the White Pickups blog tour in the rear-view mirror, I heave a sigh of relief. There were a large pile of guest posts to write, plus an interview. As I type, there’s still two days to enter the raffle. You can’t win if you don’t enter!

October is the crazy month. Well, they’re all crazy months at FAR Manor, but October stands out as the real moonbat. It’s not Hallowe’en so much as that it’s tourist season in Sector 706 of Planet Georgia. That, and the “change of season” feeling that we don’t get much of the rest of the year. So it’s natural that I get the Biggest Word-Bomb Ever, or at least my personal biggest, in October. Perhaps I should explain…

If you’ve been around a while, you might have read at least parts of Accidental Sorcerers, a serial I've been blogging for a while. What is on the blog is about half of a completed novella, roughly 30,000 words. But that’s not all of Mik and Sura. Not by a long shot. I’ve had an idea for a second novella for a while now, and took a shot at writing one scene. One. This story really puts Mik and Sura through an emotional wringer, and frankly those two voices in my head got angry. Very angry. And while they may be kids, they can do magic. One has summoned an Elemental Dragon, and lived to tell about it; the other one gets the urge to set people on fire when they cross her. They chained me to the keyboard and made me write the ending (with the resolution), then sent me to the beginning where they were having a really good time at first. I call it a word-bomb, because it didn’t really feel like a Download from God like I’ve had a few times in the past. Still, 17,000 words in a week was mentally taxing. At least I excerpted a little of it for my #FridayFlash last week.

So I’m over halfway done with this story, and they’ve left me to muddle through the middle. Anyway, I need to finish beta on the first story, and then get the second one up.


I got a rather pleasant email from Amazon this morning. My first royalty “check” is going to be direct-deposited toward the end of the month. Nothing huge—I’ve sold about a dozen copies each of White Pickups and Xenocide—but it’s a start. The wife is suddenly realizing that I could have a little income out of this… so maybe I’ll get more time to write? Let’s hope.

Opening Hosta-ilities

Pulling a few things together into one post…

One corner of the back yard, directly behind the downstairs bathroom(s), is one of those spots that none of us have figured out what to do with. Beneath the master bedroom is a very utilitarian cellar space; there’s about 10 feet of sidewalk in front of the door, and a low rock wall on the left (facing the door). In previous years, when I haven’t ignored this space entirely, I’ve gone in with the lawn mower and took no prisoners. But last year, I realized that there was something other than grass and weeds along the top of the rock wall. This spring, I pulled up some of the grass around the hostas planted there, and one of them rewarded me with some flower stalks. Well played, hostas. It probably helped that the tree (now the stump on the left side of the above photo) was removed, giving them a little more sunshine to play with. The lawn back here is as much wild strawberry as grass, but that’s fine with me. Mason might find some forage-snacks in late April, and they don’t need as much mowing.

Around the front of the manor, we had a handyman replace some rotted wood around the door frame. He used some kind of (I think) PVC-based composite material, which should last until the house collapses. The wife & I got around to painting it yesterday afternoon. She ever so helpfully left the paint bucket at the bottom of the ladder, whereupon I stuck my foot in it and knocked it over onto the brick stoop. Well, the window frames on either side of the door needed some fresh paint too, so I dipped brushes in the spillage and took care of it. The rest of the spilled paint I scraped into a paint tray. I figure we’ll use the pressure washer to clean off the stoop once we put the screen door back up.

After some weed-pulling outside this evening, in which Daughter Dearest threatened a rabbit who got too close to the flowers, she went upstairs for a shower. Shortly after, I heard a scream and my name being called.

“You need to come up here and kill this spider in the shower!” she yelled. Oh yeah, like I’m really comfortable with spiders? Well, I came upstairs and saw this monster in the shower. Now there are places (especially Australia and Indonesia) with much larger spiders than this, but this SOB was the biggest I’d ever seen outside an enclosure on Planet Georgia. And it was IN MY HOUSE. And its eyes reflected the flash on my phone camera. (What was even scarier was that Daughter Dearest was wearing only a towel, and it was barely adequate to keep the important stuff covered. She used this as evidence of how urgent this was to her.)

I decided I needed long-range artillery to deal with this thing, so I went back downstairs and got a shoe. Mason, meanwhile, was attracted by all the noise surrounding the situation and had to come up to get a look at it himself. Fortunately, it stood still until I opened fire; it only took two or three attempts to get the shoe angled where it could compensate for the rounded shower corners.

I reached in with the toilet brush, planning to knock the corpse into the trash can, and it stuck to the brush. It was then I realized that it had webbed the bottom of the shower stall. And the web was all over my hand. I made sure Mason didn’t hear what I really felt about that—I hate spider webs more than spiders themselves, when it comes right down to it—as I boarded the spider for his one-way trip on the Septic Express. Then I got the webbery off me as best as I could, while Daughter Dearest laughed.

With that in hand, I rejoined Mason downstairs and gladly went into his room to watch him play with his blocks, while Daughter Dearest finally got her shower.

There may be three of us having nightmares tonight. I’m self-medicating in advance.

Writing Wibbles: Kreativ Blogger Award

Thanks to Helen Howell for passing the Kreativ Blogger award to me! (When she releases her young-reader book Jumping at Shadows, you’ll want to get it for your kids. The book, not the award.)

As part of the acceptance speech, I have to tell you 10 things about myself. If you’re on a diet, you might want to read before you eat—knowing me, some of these could be appetite suppressants…

1) I prefer not to use the syllable “Win” in conjunction with Microsoft products. Because they generally don’t.

2) In college, I had a small article published in Byte magazine, and several in Micro.

3) If you count user manuals, I’ve had about 15 million books published. I’m guessing maybe 1500 of them actually got read. :-D

4) When I was on the cross-country team in high school, I would run about 5 miles a day. That was… oh, 35 years and 80 pounds ago.

5) During those runs, I often had to detour into a brushy area to take care of business. I’d come home a couple pounds lighter.

6) My first attempt at writing was when I was 12. It was a Hardy Boys knockoff, and I think I only wrote about 3 chapters. But as part of the effort, my mom gave me her old “portable” manual typewriter and a typing textbook she’d kept from high school. By the time I abandoned that first attempt, I could touch-type. (I keep thinking I should post a photo of that typewriter. Think “netbook, ca. 1955.”)

7) In college, I had a job as a “galley hand” (cook’s assistant) on drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. My uncle Sonny was a cook for one of the service companies, and he got jobs for my brother and me. I completed my first novel that summer while sitting in a bunk, far out of sight of land. The whole thing was hand-written on scrap line-printer paper, and I still have it.

I thought I’d have to winnow 15–20 facts, not struggle to think of 10…


8) For several years, from late childhood to early adolescence, I would narrate my life to myself as it happened. My brother would say something, and I’d mentally add “he said” when he finished.

9) I nearly left the wife over the purchase of FAR Manor. I didn’t want to buy it for several reasons, not the least of which were the easily visible issues with the place. The decision already made on her part, she ignored every objection on my part. I’ve so far been right about everything regarding the house.

10) I wanted to retire when I was 40. It obviously didn’t happen.


Okay, now comes the other hard part: pass the award onto some other bloggers. There are some who come to mind immediately, but either never started blogging or gave it up (Jen, Janet, I’m looking at you). But fortunately, there’s a lot of other choices. I’m going to throw in my reasons for giving each recipient their award as well. So…

• Andi and Jim Ferguson at 40 Acres, More or Less (daily photography)
• Boran’s Saturday Painting Palooza (a weekly painting series)
• Kendall Grey (for her unorthodox views on publishing)
• Patrick Hester (a podcasting Hugo nominee, and another early serial writer)

I’m looking forward to reading your acceptance speeches!

Adventures in Potty Training

From the moment I could talk

I was ordered to listen

— Cat Stevens

Nothing was exposed
in this exposure…

We’ve begun the arduous task of potty-training a toddler. Given Mason’s family tree—one branch is Type A, another branch just stubborn and contrary—it’s going better than one might expect. We’re getting into the habit of putting him on the throne when he wakes up (morning or nap) and that ’s going well (no pun intended). I think he’ll be out of diapers by summer’s end.

For now though, it’s the Atomic Diapers that are the problem. He just doesn’t want to take time off from whatever’s got him interested, and thus loads up his diaper. He knows by now that he loses TV or outdoor privileges when we gives us a nuclear waste dump, but hasn’t taken steps to avoid it yet.

But he does know when he has or hasn’t done it. Yesterday, we were going home and I smelled something. “Mason, are you atomic?” I asked him.

“No!” A very vehement “no” it was.

“It wasn’t him,” said Daughter Dearest. That was all that needed to be said, but who’s going to pass up the chance to say more?

Friday was better. His Grandmom was in the bedroom, and he came in and took her hand. “Come here,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“Come on.” He led her into his bedroom, where he had a diaper and the wipes laid out on the bed.

“No spank.”

“What… did you put those there?”

“Uh-huh. No spank, okay Grandmom?”

He did avoid a spanking on that one, yes. But it would be better if he said something beforehand.

If Planet Georgia wasn’t so bug-heavy, I’d do what Mom did to me: let me run around all summer flapping in the breeze. For whatever reason, I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have something on. But I wouldn’t get the kind of pictures she did…

Multitasking

Last week, I wanted to get some writing done, but the wife was glued to the TV and Mason wanted attention. We played in his room for a while, then the old evening refrain…

“Watch George.” (i.e. Curious George)

“Grandmom’s watching something,” I said. “You can watch George when her show’s done.”

“Watch George!”

I suddenly realized: there’s a way that all three of us could be happy. I plucked a Curious George DVD off the stack and put Mason on my lap in front of my MacBook. I plugged in the outboard monitor, moved Scrivener over to it, then put the DVD in.

Soon, Mason was watching George on the laptop screen, while I was typing away onto the other screen (and balancing a toddler on my leg). Both the computer and the granddad managed without anything falling over. All too soon, Mason decided to go back to playing.

I’ve been promising the MacBook a memory upgrade for some time. But a recent update got the computer into constant swap mode, warming things up and getting the fans going, so now it was past time. I went hunting on lowendmac.com for info, and found that my MacBook was manufactured between May and October 2007. So… if it hasn't happened already, its fifth birthday is imminent. The memory came in yesterday, and it took less than 10 minutes to install. Not only did it cure the fan-spinning problem, the whole computer feels a lot snappier. No bop-to-swap when changing apps!

The MacBook continues to be plenty fast for my needs, even at age 5. It will keep going until a major hardware failure or until too many apps require Cougar Mountain Lion to run (and in the latter case, I could just go with Linux and run Scrivener in emulation).

With tablets as capable as they are, I may make my next computer an iMac or Mac mini, with an iPad paired to a Bluetooth keyboard. (That is, if I can keep Mason from stealing the iPad… that’s a problem with the current one.)

They’re Bawwwwck…

See how they're in the farthest corner
away from the crucifix?

Fortunately, not in the numbers they once were though.

My mother in law was either overcome by nostalgia for the “old days,” when getting eggs involved walking across the yard, or just got bored at how much less evil things have become since November. However it was, she got herself a dozen laying hens and a couple roosters last month.

Of course, they need a little fresh air and the like, so she converted an old shed last used to raise orphaned or abandoned calves. This shed has a generous half-acre of fenced in pasture, and “all we had to do” was hang some chicken wire on it to help keep them in.

Do hippie chickens
lay psychedelic eggs?

With the place prepared, the new avatars of evil were brought in and shown their new home. Being of non-industrial breed, they’re a lot more colorful than the plain white chicken house chickens. Mason enjoys watching them walk around outside, and we all enjoy the eggs.

But I have to wonder: do hippie chickens lay psychedelic eggs?

Commence to… Something

Let’s start with the big picture — long-time readers will recognize the “Then” pic from July 2008.

So yesterday morning, we got up at 6:30 a.m. That was a Saturday, which is a bad thing, but this is something that only happens once. I have several pictures to share, so I’ll let them do most of the talking.

Here they come! You can see DD with a big smile
close to the bottom-right.

I was on the side where her back was to me for the diploma,
but I had a clear line of sight to her in the seats.

And here she is, taking the handoff!

And I got a clear shot of her coming off the stage.

Hey Dad, I got it!!!

For me, the highlight came near the end. She was chosen
to lead the entire assembly in the alma mater!

Today, we’re sort of recovering. I’m going to take Mason outside for a while now.

If anyone needs a music teacher who graduated magna cum laude yesterday, she will entertain all offers. ;-)

Junk in My Trunk

It’s been a long overdue chore to clean out the trunk of my car, and I finally tackled it this weekend. Here's what I found:

• Trash. Enough to half-fill a big trash bag. Actually, there was already a trash bag a quarter full.
• Lots of hardware. I knew The Boy had a screw loose, but not that he had a couple dozen of them in my trunk.
• Scat-loads of his and Snippet’s clothes, and a few of Mason’s.
• A couple of Mason’s toys (he was happy to have another ball).
• $1.14 in loose change.
• Three UPS batteries. Oh yeah, that's where I put them — thinking I’d soon find a place where I could replace them — two years ago.
• A skateboard. I texted The Boy about it, and he thought he might have put it in there to keep stuff from slipping past the gap at the front of the plywood platform.
• Daughter Dearest’s kite (in a vinyl bag, so it survived).
• A shade for the back window, that I bought last summer to keep it from getting too hot on Mason when I took him somewhere.
• Two binders that belong to the choir.
• A bunch of CDs (all The Boy’s, I presume).
• Three pens. Two of them still write.
• Two screwdrivers and a wrench.
• Two jacks, various extensions and the like — but no spare tire (I knew that) or lug wrench (oops).

I think I excised a good 20 pounds from the trunk, when all was said and done. The thin plywood that serves as a floor over the spare tire well is seriously warped and coming apart, so I’ll need to replace that soon. I’ll reinforce the replacement so it doesn’t sag so badly over time. I just wish I knew where the water was coming in back there; it’s keeping me from stuffing some camping gear in there for an impromptu getaway.