| Back in the Jug Agane |
[22 May 2013|05:07pm] |
If ever two people were more glad to get home, I'm really glad not to have had to deal with whatever those two people were dealing with. Sufficient unto the Chaz is the life thereof.
So the last few days have been a struggle, not helped by the fact that we both have physical issues much exacerbated by long days in aeroplanes and nights of not sleeping. Me, I am back on the codeine again (and was briefly surprised to realise that I hadn't eaten all day and am still not hungry...). K still takes more pills than I do, but I'm narrowing the gap. At least until I can get this shoulder fixed. I'm vaguely hopeful that there may be massage on offer at BayCon this weekend; they fixed it for me at FogCon, and one miracle begets (dreams of) another.
In related news, I did very nearly post a brag last night, to the effect of "All you people who worry how much I drink? Stop worrying: these are stressful times, and I am apparently dry in Alabama." Only then a six-pack intervened, so not so much, actually. But still. The funeral baked meats went down with water, and I made no fuss at all. (Yes, yes, I know, Not About Me. That's rather my point. But this blog is, so.)
In honesty, I didn't really think about it much. Other things on my mind. Karen was remarkable all trip, but you'd expect that.
Now we're home, and I have gathered in the last of the fava beans. We had to wash our mid-afternoon pills down with wine, because the water was off; then I thought I'd sit in the garden and read, only I kept falling asleep. Well, hell, we were up at four this morning, and I didn't sleep at all the night before. Tonight, in my own bed, with my own cats about me - I can't wait. Possibly neither can they. Except that a roasted chicken has to intervene. With fava beans and brussels, and roast potatoes, and gravy. And there's been a request for ice cream, so I'm back to Lucky's in a bit.
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| In which we are here |
[20 May 2013|06:59am] |
We're in Huntsville, Alabama, for my father-in-law's funeral.
This morning we are the perfect image of two people who should really not have spent all of yesterday in transit. Two planes between three airports have played combinatory havoc with our various owies. Karen vanished into the bathroom muttering that everything hurt except her left hand; as it happens, my own left hand is actually quite painful. Though not as much as the arm that it's attached to, which is nowhere near as painful as the shoulder and neck above. That whole anarcho-industrial complex has been seizing up all week, despite anarchic interventions and industrial levels of analgesics; I can neither stand nor sit nor lie, move nor keep still except its hurting. (We have been here before - it's why I have stashes of codeine on two continents - and we know that it will go away. Last time, some serious massage drove it out early. I would like to try that again, but, y'know. Huntsville, Alabama. We're a way from our hands-on specialists.)
Talking of [placename, state], though, Jeannie made us watch Mystery, Alaska t'other night. I really, really liked that. A sports movie that actually works (largely, I guess, by dint of being about something else underneath: but that may actually be true of all sports movies that work? Or possibly all movies that work, regardless of genre? I dunno; I'm really not a movie buff, I just know what I like, and I liked that).
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| Snippet from a life not in progress |
[14 May 2013|10:57am] |
"He threw up politely in his cycle helmet."
"Eww, that's - wait, what? A cycle helmet's full of vents, it's all holes."
"Indeed. It was most unfortunate."
- Doesn't everyone compose an internal narrative, a rarely-written record of what didn't happen? Or is that just me?
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| Slow, slow, quick quick slow |
[13 May 2013|12:33pm] |
I do lovety-love the application of unhurried time to food. Which is not to say that I do not also love its opposite, the fire and flash of swift cooking, but there is something about a dish that takes all day, the way it saturates the house with its odours and the back of my mind with its presence, so that I know I'm cooking even while I'm cycling to the library or reading through my proofs or drinking a cold beer in the garden while I wait for m'wife to come home.
Like today, f'rexample. The yogis will be coming for dinner; and it's just barely past noon now, and the bulk of the cooking is done already. That's the other thing about long slow cooking, it tends to be very low-pressure: you've got all the time in the world to get it started and to get it right.
So I made chicken stock in the slow cooker overnight, and this morning I went to Lucky's first thing and bought a bone-in shoulder of pork. (They call it a picnic roast here, though I am not entirely clear why: "Pork shoulder picnic or shoulder arm picnic are labels defined by the government," says the internet, which is not entirely helpful.) By ten o'clock the rind had been diamond-cut [side-note: when you have to keep reminding yourself to go lightly, to glide the blade rather than slash, to let the rind open beneath the edge rather than cutting through to the meat? It is probable that your knife is adequately sharp. *smugs*] and the face of the meat rubbed with a garlic-and-herb paste; by ten-thirty it was in the oven, on a rack over stock and vegetables and port. Where it will stay until half-eight tonight. And there will be carrots, and a fava-bean salad, and I haven't decided what else (potatoes? bread? something, for those of us who don't feel we've eaten unless we've eaten carbs), but none of it is going to be in any hurry at all.
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| We may need a new unit of measurement |
[12 May 2013|06:58pm] |
That moment of time, between my producing a chicken from the fridge and the cats manifesting at my feet in expectation? It must be measurable to science - it is an article of faith with me, that all things that are, are lights measurable to science - but allowing for observational error, it is as near to instantaneous as makes no never mind.
Sometimes I think the cats even manifest before the chicken. Now that is downright scary.
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| Opportunism - and a question! Of laptops and batteries! |
[10 May 2013|12:22pm] |
Hee. I'm sitting in the library - working, manifestly - and there's this little brown bird making its way along the windows, examining all the spiders' webs in the corners of the frames, and picking out snared insects for its lunch. Cheeky sod.
In not utterly unrelated news, a question: is it better for a laptop and its battery-life to be:
(a) generally run on battery, and recharged when it's switched off; or
(b) generally powered from the mains, plugged in with the battery left in situ, to hot-charge as and when it needs to; or
(c) generally powered from the mains with the battery removed altogether?
I ask because the library offers power outlets to laptop users, but not in the quiet areas; so I am alternating between being plugged in among the sniffers and the mumblers and the cellphone users etc, and running off battery among the nice quiet people at my preferred table right by the graphic novels where the Talbots' Dotter of Her Father's Eyes stands face-out on a shelf with no interference from me. As it happens, I can still get four or five hours'-worth of charge from the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection, but I don't know how long that situation will obtain, and if I need to nurse it one way or another I'd like to know what sort of treatment would be best. (Also, if I have to replace it, best to know what best practice actually is before I start...)
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| Perfickly comfy, thanks... |
[09 May 2013|10:05am] |
This bag?
Contains bike locks and maps, mostly. Actually mostly bike locks.
*shrugs*
(Turns out this is a good day for being cheered up by cats. Another old friend from my young-adulthood died in the UK this morning, and a newer friend's news is grim, and and and...)
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| Scanners live in Sunnyvale |
[08 May 2013|05:54pm] |
Oh, the fun we have...
This morning, as noted, I made bacon and fed m'wife and so forth; also, poked some at the scanned-and-OCR'd copy of THE GARDEN that Lethe Press will be reissuing when I get it cleaned up and back to them. This is my first conscious experience of OCR; it's fun trying to fathom out why on earth it makes the mistakes it does, but I'm getting a little tired of the same old same old, especially when there's half a dozen of them on every page. I'm actually quite reassured by the quality of the text itself - given that I was, lawks, thirty when I wrote it, and I'm older than that now - but oh, it is a bleak and gloomy book. Also, I know what is coming. So I can only steel myself to do a bit at a time, what with one thing and another.
This afternoon I zoomed off to the library and wrote a thousand words of newstuff, which is much more fun.
And then I came home and figured something out, which is that I'm dim, essentially. We've borrowed Katherine's scanner, and I thought it wasn't working because it didn't light up or buzz or do anything, nor did any bright new icon appear on my desktop. Hah! Why would it? It was waiting for me to ask it to, y'know, scan something. When I eventually understood, it went zoom! and there it was, scanning merrily away.
So I downloaded an OCR program and lo: we can has words. Early stories are recoverable, in-house. I wouldn't want to tackle a whole book without refined technique and probably other equipment, but for short stuff I could muddle through as I am, just on instinct.
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| Surprised by bacon |
[08 May 2013|11:16am] |
So I had planned to go to the library this morning, to try to get something done. But Karen's unexpectedly working from home, yippee; and the water people are expectedly digging up the street outside our house, boo; which means that it is impossible for the car to leave the driveway, so lunch needs to happen here. A salad can occur - but there is no bacon. A salad without bacon? Unthinkable!
So. I have lit the charcoal, taken the slabs of cured pork out of the meat-fridge and set them to smoke for an hour or so. I am still a n00b at this, but oh: it is such fun. Even at this rough-and-ready level. (I have promised myself a proper smoker, at some point in the future; for now, the grill is good enough. Actually, that's the story of my life: promises for the future, making do for now. It's probably the story of most people's lives, I expect. Certainly it's the life of most stories.)
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| Deborah J Miller |
[07 May 2013|05:19pm] |
Via Charlie Stross at  autopope: Debbie Miller has died. I used to see a lot of her in the early days of The Write Fantastic, before cancer started to curtail her involvement, but it was never enough; she was always a delight to be with, vivacious and smart and a wicked-sharp wit not dulled at all by her inherent kindness.
She was a protegee of David Gemmell's (though I always thought her far the better writer), and after his sudden death she flung herself into the project that would carry his name, the David Gemmell Legend Awards. Even after cancer pulled her back and back, she stayed at the heart of that for as long as she could. Sickness has a way sometimes of giving the rest of us the chance to see the pure gold some people are; Debbie was extraordinary, and I wish I'd found or made more chances to tell her so. (The last time I saw her in person, I said no to something, and disappointed her deeply: which is of course the kind of memory I could really live without right now.)
And now she's dead herself, too bloody soon. I loved her, and we've lost her, and fuck cancer.
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| Side by Side by Wallowing in it |
[06 May 2013|08:10pm] |
Two thirds of my life ago - very possibly to the month - I first visited the house that changed my life, where I met Jay and Philippa and Phil and Dean. Jay died last year, and that's a thing; Philippa is now married to Mike, who was staying here last week, and that's a different thing. Phil I haven't heard from for too long, which is another thing; and Dean I haven't heard from for significantly longer, and that's another kind of thing, but it was because of Dean that I moved to Newcastle thirty-two years ago, with all that that implies. Which is all my life since then, basically, that implication...
Anyway: I was eighteen and they weren't, and they introduced me to many things that an eighteen-year-old ought to meet in the company of people older and smarter than himself; they taught me to drink, and to smoke, and and and. They lent me books, and played me music. And in between the Edith Piaf and the George Crumb, they not so much exposed as revealed me to Stephen Sondheim. Since when he has been one of my criteria, and I love all his works almost without reservation - but Side by Side by Sondheim is what I heard first, and what I loved first, and you know all about first loves.
So here I am thirty-six years later on the other side of the world, and I just dug out my copy of Side by Side...; and while I cook and drink and wait for the yogis, I am playing it loudly and singing along. And yes, I still remember every word; and yes, it still does the thing that it always did. Two pianos, three voices, one overarching wit. It's extraordinary, and extraordinarily effective. And sunk like a harpoon in my soul, seemingly. 'Scuse me, I need to get back...
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| Wet stuff |
[06 May 2013|07:13pm] |
Today we experienced a weird phenomenon: atmospheric moisture! Atmospheric moisture. Atmospheric moisture. *is bewildered*
In the true Californian spirit of running-a-tumble-dryer-despite-baking-sunshine, I have none the less turned the hose on to give the garden a thorough soak this evening. Tragically, it was only after I'd done so that I remembered I had meant to harvest the fava beans and repeat my bean-with-a-pea-dressing salad for the yogi tonight, alongside the chicken-and-white-bean stew and the mashed spuds.
I suppose I could harvest wet favas, but my feet would get all icky. Maybe I'll just steam the broccolini and the sugar snap peas instead, toss a little butter over 'em, and save the favas for m'lovely wife in days to come. Besides, there isn't any bacon to enliven the putative salad; we finished the last batch over the weekend, and the next lot is drying in the meat-fridge in anticipation of a smoke tomorrow.
In other dampish news, I seem to have washed everything today, except the cats. Which reminds me: the news you really want is this, that our little furry convalescent ate all his own (wet) breakfast and as much as he could snatch of Barry's, played loudly with his mousie and complained even louder that I wouldn't let him out to enrich his diet with a bit of wetwork, a birdie or two. I think he's fine.
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| "drop-dead gorgeous, murdering Stravinsky..." |
[05 May 2013|05:18pm] |
And there it is: I have ground 575 grams of corn (say a pound and a quarter?) into fine meal. And if I don't wake up tomorrow with broad shoulders and mighty thews, there ain't no justice. I don't know how many kernels there are in a pound and a quarter, but every one of 'em's an officer, and I have saluted them all. Individually, is how it feels. Longest way up, shortest way down.
I may have been playing Janis Ian, just to see me through. (Ian Rankin was a bit miffed, I think, one night, when I skipped his gig to go to Janis'. I told him she sings better than he does. And of course she writes too - I love it, that one of my musical idols is an SF writer on the side.)
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| Some of you I know have been waiting for this |
[05 May 2013|03:56pm] |
M'friend Jessica Rydill has Kindle-published her third novel, set in the same world as Children of the Shaman and The Glass Mountain. Malarat is available now; Jessica says it's darker than the previous works, but that's all to the good.
In other news, a cat of unknown specificity was copiously sick straight after dinner last night; Mac was copiously sick straight after breakfast this morning. Hmm. We will be watching developments, and hoping that nothing develops.
Meanwhile, I have been mostly grinding corn. I am aware that my mill is frankly little more than a toy, and probably not meant for grinding by the pound, but even so. I suspect I am getting healthful aerobic exercise; I keep changing arms and everything. Also, I have to keep poking about with a chopstick, because corn kernels are probably too large for the device and they keep getting wedged down below the hopper, so it's suddenly like cycling downhill, there's just no resistance and I'm only spinning my wheels. But no wonder millers in myth & legend have such brawny arms; there's work in this.
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| If wishes were horses, we'd have spurs that went jingle-jangle-jingle |
[04 May 2013|12:35pm] |
If I made lists of everything I need to keep in mind, all those things I am committed to do in the house and the garden and the world of writing stuff, then possibly I might experience less slippage, I am just sayin'. Also possibly totally droppage, as in ball.
Except that I'd forget to list things, and then they would vanish for ever from human ken, as against simply getting submerged in the dreadful swirl.
I dunno, really. *is feeling a little overwhelmed*
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| Friday night, when the grinding's done, we'll go dancing... |
[03 May 2013|05:35pm] |
This morning was all about new stuff. I unpacked my grain mill! After tiddly-um years! Also, I made a salad dressing you could use to construct model mountains. Convincingly.
The grain mill: I bought it because bargain (fifty quid, reduced by stages down to eight), and because I bake. How cool, I thought, to grind my own malted barley flour! Only then I learned that all the homebrew stores in the neighbourhood had closed down, and I couldn't buy malted barley. And I only used a teaspoonful per loaf, and I had plenty of the commercial flour, so the mill sat in its box. And I only shipped it over here because bargain, and I was going to bake more, and who knew...?
As it turns out, m'friend Katherine grows corn and wanted to mill it and lamented her lack of a grain mill, and I said "I have one!" So there you are. She brought some corn around, and I have milled it. I have made cornmeal.
Also, dressing. I made a fava-bean-and-bacon salad with the favas that I grew and the bacon that I cured and smoked; and I dressed it in peas'n'cheese. Specifically, I blanched fresh peas and pounded them in a mortar into a kind of pesto with basil and parmesan and walnut oil and lemon juice, and it was utterly yummy. The sort of dressing you could spread on toast and call it bruschetta, if you so chose.
In other news, Mike went home today. So after two weeks, it's just the two of us again. We shall slump into our former ways, and go to the grocery store and buy wine, and come home and watch TV most likely. Somewhere in my head are a buzzy young couple always on the go, but they ain't us.
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| When the Hero Comes Home, vol 2: ToC |
[30 Apr 2013|06:39pm] |
Gabrielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood have announced the table of contents for When the Hero Comes Home, vol 2, which includes my own "Bringing Back Raby", a story I confess I'm rather fond of:
* denotes ebook-only bonus stories
*Bagabones by Jacquelyn Bartel
Beginning by Jillian Boehme
Bringing Back Raby by Chaz Brenchley
After the Winds by K.T. Bryski
Living Bargains by Suzanne Church
Vasilissa’s Doll by Elaine Cunningham
The Last Perfect Heart by Fanny Valentine Darling
Remnants by Erin M. Evans
*Prince Goldgriffin Rides In by Ed Greenwood
*Closure by Gabrielle Harbowy
Jack Crochety by Larry Kay
Juan Carceres in the Zapatero’s Workshop by Derek Künsken
Safe Within You by Mercedes Lackey
Broken by K.D. McEntire
Narcolepsy by Bob Neilson
The Last of the Unicorn Hunters by Diana Peterfreund
Waiting For You by Leah Petersen
*Blood Runs Thicker by Mary Pletsch
*Come is the Wolf in her Wounding by Dan Rabarts
*The Return of Hobard the Vanquisher by Mike Rimar
The Hero of Abarxia by Deborah J. Ross
*The Stiletto by Maggie Sokoll
A Spray of Bittersweet by Andrea Stewart
Faces of the Revolution by James L. Sutter
A Sword that Heals by Clint Talbert
*Smoke and Feathers by Juliette Wade
Call of the Sky by Cliff Winnig
Faith by Chris Wong Sick Hong
The Clever One by Jamie Wyman
(and it's nice to be under the covers with numerous friends)
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| Anywhere Karen hangs my hat |
[30 Apr 2013|10:58am] |
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My Newcastle house has been sold. I am feeling fantabulously equivocal about this: huge relief (in accumulated hours, I've probably spent one month out of the last twelve lying awake at night in a state of high anxiety), a little disappointment (I am not one of those who gets rich by dealing in property, apparently; I think the new owner got a bargain) and a little distress (it was my house! my first and only house! and my home, the place where when I had to go there it had to take me in, and so on and so forth). I am going to spend the next several minutes reminding myself of the romance of emigration, the artistic value of deracination, etc etc. Then I am going to hug my wife, and then I am going to SETI with Mike, because that is my California lifestyle: old friends in new configurations. *nods*
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| The state of the Chaz, ongoing. With added poetry. |
[29 Apr 2013|02:51pm] |
He came. He saw. He removed the whole damn spout and took it away; came back with a replacement. (If I'd known he was going to do that, I might've thought of doing it myself. I assumed he would complicatedly open the thing up and replace an intimate washer. Still: it is the business of the wealthy man, etc. Tho' if US plumbers are anything like British ones, he's doing okay...)
Anyway. That happened, in the end. We have a working shower, and instructions on how not to abuse it. (He is amusingly forceful about the proper use of plumbing. Also incomprehensible, but hey. We get there in the end, with signs and demonstrations.)
Also, John came with a mercy delivery of coals and meats, so we should not go hungry tonight. (Also also, Mike offered his help and I turned him down immediately and without thought; apparently one of the social interactions that I'm really bad at is asking someone else to do a thing that I'm accustomed to do myself. Hunh. I might need to think about that.)
Anyway: pork is rubbed with fennel/spice mixture and on the grill in an indirect way, getting smoky. Chicken will follow soonish. Dough is mixed and yeast is rousing sleepily. M'neighbour Jerry is much amused that I am standing over the grill on the hottest afternoon of the year. Mike is making notes on the California Ale (which is not a beer, alas, but a Morris moot).
I appear to have missed lunch, and it's too late now. No matter. It's the hottest afternoon of the year, and I am grilling; this entitles me to drink cold beer soon, if not immediately.
Meanwhile, in a careless moment I confessed to sovay that I had written a poem, an epithalamion for m'friends Mark and Helen (who met on an eclipse-chasing holiday). I can't remember if I ever posted it here; if not, here it is. If yes, here it is again.
ECLIPSE
by John Mark Linden (I didn't want them to know I'd written it, as the day was so much not meant to be about me; so I hid it behind a pseud)
An eclipse is sheltering,
the shadow of another body
between you and a hard sun.
Lovers eclipse one another
wilfully
standing in each other’s light
and in that timeless twilight
no birds sing
so they can hear the beat of each other’s blood against the silence.
And is it any wonder
then
that we should chase eclipses of our own
to snatch a taste of it
and feel obscurely threatened by the size of it
the rush of it
the moon’s shadow and how we run to stand within it
at that place, that time
that angle to the sun?
And it’s not about the sun
though we pretend with pinhole cameras
pinhole sentiments
it’s about what comes between the sun and us
graceful, monumental, undelayed
the urgency of moment
and it trails its shadow like a disregarded veil
that falls across us because we have run to be there
but it’s not about the shadow, nor the light.
It’s about us, as it always is, our bodies in their perilous orbits
and how we chase that touch of perfect balance
eye to eye
lit only by each other.
It’s all about eclipses, in the end.
Lovers have always known this. We can learn.
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| 11:30 |
[29 Apr 2013|11:29am] |
Half-eleven stands halfway between the hours of eleven and twelve, which is the window during which the plumber is mildly supposed to be arriving.
The last time he said this, I think he came four hours later.
I am being remarkably mild, all things considered. And he still has half his time in hand.
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