Category:

Home life

Pulling The Lever

by Diane Duane May 26, 2020

This post is as much a marker for me as anything else; the sign of a lot of (sometimes deeply annoying) work finished, and a return to more normal operations around here. I hope.

The DianeDuane.com main site and webspace got hacked in late March, and nearly all my time between then and now (except when I managed to wrestle away some writing time as well) has been spent putting that right. The complications were manifold. The site was on an old server host that couldn’t progress past using php 5.4, which is no longer secure against the depredations of naughty people.

So everything was going to have to be moved to a server that could handle php 7.x, which is the present supported and secure version. And all the website stuff presently stored in the old hosting space had to be either converted to handling php 7.x-and-better, or thrown out and replaced with something better.

This in itself should only have taken a matter of days to sort out. But the next, deeper layer of the problem was that the version of the Drupal platform on which the old main site was built — version 7.x — was aging out. Upgrading it to v.8, with v.9 already looming over the horizon in beta, was going to be just one straw too many on this camel’s back. And replacing the site in a new server but still running on D7 would just have been tempting Fate. What was hacked before could (and very probably would) be hacked again. …And: for some time I’d been thinking about moving the DD.com site over to WordPress, as it really better suited my needs than Drupal did, these days.

So, having made that choice (which I’d been putting off for a long time because implementing it was going to be such a pain in the butt)… the serious work began. Getting onto the people at FXDomains and explaining what I needed of them for this migration. (And a shout-out to the excellent Blake, who made that part of the work so easy.) Installing a fresh copy of WordPress over there to house the Drupal-to-WP migration of the main site. (Fortunately this blog has been running on WP for a long time now: migrating that would just be a case of migrating its database and directories to a new install running under php 7.x. This too had its complications, and involved a week of testing, swearing and kicking things. But it got sorted out at last.)

Dealing with the main site was more of a challenge, as it involved finding a theme I liked (in this case “Uptime” by TommusRhodus: I commend those folks to you for terrific and patient customer service), getting it up and running, and then cutting-and-pasting hundreds of pages of text and portfolio material into it. That work is still not complete — many entries in the new website are still missing metadata that for various reasons couldn’t be forced to follow over from the old Drupal install. But it’s now complete enough to be going on with. More can be done casually, day by day, as opportunity presents itself.

And then, after everything was finally in place: the insertion of various security plugins, to keep this mess from happening again. Then: backups. Backups of backups. Several different modes of backups, to be sure, because DAMN I am not planning to have to do this crap to my own site again any time soon. I’m already now contemplating getting our last site that’s running Drupal off of there: and with that a long chapter will close. I’ve been running our household sites on Drupal since v4.7, but we’re done now; time’s too short and life’s too busy. Arrivaderci, old friend.

And with all the backups done, and the pages loading as fast as they’re likely to for the moment (though more work can and will be done on this), it’s time, as the woman said, to Throw The Lever. That you’re seeing this means it’s finally happened. May great Thoth the Webadmin of the Ennead, the divine Patcher of Code, prosper the undertaking.

…Now where were we before I was so rudely interrupted? I’m sure I was in the middle of writing something…

May 26, 2020

Food, restaurants and cooking Home life recipes

Peter’s Isolation Goulasch

by Diane Duane April 4, 2020

(Appearing here because his own site is down for restructuring at the moment.)

Himself says:

This is a “what was available in the house” reduction from my main goulash recipe, based on a combination of Gyorg Lang, Karoly Gundel, a few Hungarian things run through Google Translate and some tweaks by me…

Ingredients

2 tbs lard or sunflower/corn/ ordinary olive oil. (Not Extra Virgin, you’re wasting it.)
2 large onions, chopped coarsely
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp caraway seeds, crushed (mince the garlic and caraway together with rocking knife technique – the sticky garlic keeps the seeds from flying about. A bit, anyway.)
1 lb / .5kg stewing beef in 1 inch / 30mm cubes (which is usually how it’s sold)
3 tbsp Hungarian paprika, if possible 1 tbsp Hot, 2 tbsp Sweet (or 2 tbsp regular Supervalu paprika and 1 tbsp Cayenne. Don’t use smoked paprika unless using European sausage like kabanossi or kielbasa instead of beef, then go for it, the result is yummy.)
2 tins chopped tomatoes and ½ tin water
1 green pepper, seeded and cubed
4 potatoes, peeled and cubed

Method:

Melt the lard in a heavy pot and sweat the onions until soft, glossy and turning golden. Add the garlic and caraway and stir-fry for a few more minutes. Add the beef and stir-fry until all the cubes have changed colour.

Remove from the heat and let sit for a couple of minutes, then add the paprika (paprika + excess heat = bitterness.) Stir well together, add the tomatoes and water, return to the heat, bring to a very gentle simmer, cover and leave for about 2 hours.

Check the beef for tenderness. It should be at the “a bit more will be perfect” stage, so add the pepper and potatoes and give it a bit more; about 20 minutes should do.

Serve topped with a dollop of sour cream (ours was 30% fat Lithuanian from Eurospar, delish!) over buttered noodles, rice, mashed potatoes, tarhonya (Hungarian “egg barley”, a very small pasta similar to orzo)…

Or what we did tonight: “Bratkartoffel” – potatoes cut into ½ inch dice and slowly pan-fried until crunchy outside and soft inside, then sprinkled with salt and pepper. We finished ours in the oven – 20 mins at 180° C/ 355° F – for less greasiness; NB that this also makes a great snack by itself (try sprinkling with curry powder, spice bag mix, sea salt & cider vinegar, whatever) and using the oven makes them far less trouble than deep-frying home-made chips.

April 4, 2020

Home life Ireland Medicine, nursing, health The COVID-19 pandemic

Business As (un)Usual

by Diane Duane April 4, 2020

With the COVID-19 pandemic spreading itself about, it seemed like a good idea to give people a local status report of what’s going on with us over here. The short version of that is: we’re fine. Peter and I are safe at home, sheltering in place—sort of pre-cocooning (since neither of us is quite old enough to come under that aspect of the present Irish restrictions)—and life for us is going on pretty much as usual.

A little more back story might be useful here for those who don’t know us well. Since we both work from home, and have for many years, our normal lifestyle already looks a whole lot like what a lot of people are now being forced to put up with. We live in a little cottage out in the wilds of West Wicklow, a very rural area—where, unless we actually went out of the house for a walk longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, it’d be rare for us to see so much as a car or truck or tractor. And as for seeing or interacting with other human beings—sure, one might come along once a day or so walking their dogs, but that’d be about the size of it. And our business days look like this: (1) getting up, showering, having breakfast (or whatever passes for that meal, because Peter sometimes works different hours from me: is it really breakfast at 2 in the afternoon?); (2) heading into our separate work spaces—Peter’s is upstairs in what doubles as a guest bedroom, mine’s downstairs in the living room—and (3) getting on with work: writing, and the assorted business that surrounds it.

There’s no travel associated with our work beyond going up and down the stairs. Meals happen at home, the vast majority of them home-cooked. We have only one place anywhere near us where we’d eat out—the local pub, about a mile’s walk away. The next closest would be in our nearby shopping town, Baltinglass, about 8 km away. (This would be where we would send for takeout, assuming we wanted Chinese. That’s all that’s available in terms of being delivered all this way out to us.) …If you’ve noted that the concept of walking places keeps coming up, well, we gave up our car about fifteen years ago because we found that we really just didn’t need it. For six days out of seven, on the average, it was sitting out in the back, literally growing moss, while still needing to have insurance, car tax, and so forth paid on it. (We let the cats sleep in it sometimes; they started thinking it was their flat.) …Finally we said “The heck with this!”, and let the car go in favor of either renting a car when necessary—an option no longer possible since the local rental chain started making that difficult for the self-employed—or using local cab companies to take us to Baltinglass for shopping, or to connect with public transit (Bus Eireann) into Dublin and beyond. And that’s how things have gone… until a month or so ago.

Without needing to get into the entire timeline of the coronavirus as it affects Ireland, early signs of what was going to happen were already beginning to make themselves plain to me around the last time that we actually had to leave the house for anything. That was the end of February, and a week later at the beginning of March, when I needed (first) to have have routine bloods drawn and (second) to go see our GP for a routine checkup. A day or so after the second visit, I started noticing a runny nose and a bit of a cough that I hadn’t had before. Immediately I got concerned, as not once but twice within the past ten days I’d been sitting in a doctor’s waiting room for a good while. For safety’s sake, starting in the first week of March I decided it’d be smart to self-isolate until I was completely clear what was going on. (Those of you who follow me on Tumblr will have seen mention of this.)

Fortunately the concern turned out to be unfounded. By the 20th it became clear that the runny nose was just secondary to a long-standing, on-and-off chronic sinus infection, and a reaction to the usual seasonal pollens. And to say I was relieved would be understating the case. It’s tough to concentrate on managing other universes when you’re sitting there wondering if you’re about to start sickening with something that has a pretty good chance of killing you in this one. (At the age of going-on-68, I’m unquestionably in dodgy territory, and Peter’s not too far behind me.)

Anyway, by the time that Ireland declared its stay-at-home lockdown, I’d already been sitting tight for a couple of weeks, and I just kind of shrugged. So did Peter. For us, staying in the house and being at the desk for hours at a time, or sprawled in the Comfy Chair or on the living-room sofa binging Netflix (which thank God we can actually do now since we finally had real no-shit broadband installed last year to replace the pay-as-you-go cellular that was previously the best we could get in this neck of the woods)—is exactly what life around here usually looks like, for days on end. (Not least because when depending on a taxi service means we must automatically attach an extra €30 or $40 price tag to everything—from the simplest, quickest shopping trip to a night out at the pub—that’s not an option we overuse.) As for being forced to isolate with another person for a week or two (or three) on end… well, that too is what life around here usually looks like. It’s a good thing we really like each other a lot.

The main change/inconvenience at the moment is that the cab service we use closed itself down for the duration as well. (Which frankly makes sense, as in none of their cars would it be possible to enforce physical distancing.) So in the short term, we really are confined to barracks whether we like it or not… except for walking the maximum 2km from home that present restrictions allow for purposes of exercise. But by and large, other life events have been going on pretty much as usual, and immediate needs pretty much get fulfilled.

Food, for example. Our groceries are normally delivered to us by one of the two supermarket chains that serve our area, Tesco and Supervalu, because we don’t always have time or inclination to go out for them. Granted, at the moment this business is more complicated than usual. Way more people in our area (as one might expect) are now availing themselves of the service than would’ve done so before. So instead of being able to get on the computer and order groceries to be delivered tomorrow—or today, if you get the timing right—you now have to watch the stores’ websites like a hawk for delivery slots opening up, and they’re never any closer than a week or two away. (Our next delivery slot is April 14… and I really, really hope we can make the present jug of milk last long enough to keep Peter in milk for his tea until then.) Also, don’t get me started about yeast. For someone who’s routinely baked bread two or three times a week for the last 10 years or more, suddenly having other people buy the available supply of yeast and flour out from under me is a bit of a pain. Especially as I think, knowing human nature, of the many, many, MANY packages of yeast that are almost certainly going to sit in the backs of people’s cupboards and never again see the light of day until someday five years from now, 10 years from now, they’re thrown out. (…Oooh, bitter much?…)

Other life-infrastructure isn’t too much of a problem, as we’ve had lots of time to work out the bugs and workarounds of a non-car-enabled lifestyle in this part of the world. Other household needs besides food can mostly be ordered in; heating oil, for example (paid for over the phone and delivered by the nice guy who comes along, fills the tank and goes away), and firewood (call another nice guy, arrange payment: bags of wood and turf get left for us). Minor pharmaceuticals, if we need them, we order from an online pharmacy down-country. Banking’s all done online since our local branch office closed. So is almost all other bill paying. So’s almost all of our communication. And as far as income goes, at the moment most of it comes from Ebooks Direct—the operation of which is handled from my desktop—and by other means of payment-for-writing that aren’t physical to begin with.

To sum everything up: we’re having things a lot easier than a lot of the people around us… a situation the irony of which isn’t lost on me. Usually it’s more the other way around. I look on with wonder and encouragement at the increasingly creative ways that people around the planet are finding here to get around the limitations imposed on them and still make life work, for themselves and for the people around them… especially at the small business end.

But “easy” is relative. Increasingly the news makes more and more difficult viewing for me. I was taught enough epidemiology in my public-health unit in nursing school to understand the broad strokes of how what’s now happening must play out. What’s happening in Europe and Ireland are bad enough… but I’m deeply frustrated and frightened by what’s going on in New York in particular right now, in hospitals I knew well because I worked in them or knew people who did. I’m distressed by the prospect of what will most likely unfold as the surge of very sick people starts spreading equally aggressively in other parts of the country—places that are even less well prepared or defended against what’s coming because many people living there have been taught to believe that this pandemic isn’t real. And I grieve for my former colleagues at the nursing and medical end who’re dying on the front lines, and ache for those now having to make choices they never should’ve had to make, being forced to work under conditions that they could surely never have imagined.

At this point I suspect no one’s surprised by the notion that we’re all now caught in the midst of a century-changing event, one that’ll be as profound in its influence as the events of any other pandemic or world war. And that said, there’s no escaping the truth that this will be a tough time all around, even for those of us who (out of the sheer luck of the draw) are sitting comfortably at home in our usual circumstances, without having to deal with sudden changes in the way things are on their own turf. We’ve got a roof over our heads, enough money to buy food and ways to get it into the house, work to do and no fear of being laid off or fired… with the certainty that we have not been exposed to coronavirus and are (under present circumstances, anyway, while we keep ourselves battened down) most unlikely to be. What can’t be put aside for either Peter or me, though, is the sense of the sheer luck we’re benefiting from, and the certain knowledge of the level of privilege that’s functioning on our behalf. There are a hundred ways in which things could have been very different—especially had this been one of those years that required us to be on the road in the course of work. The concept’s really unsettling.

And along those lines, our thoughts go constantly to friends who’re facing into this crisis while also saddled with financial trouble—work loss, job loss; friends with family sick with COVID-19 or something else, and unable to be with them; friends struggling to get critical work done despite the circumstances; friends stuck far from home who can’t get back there. Every day’s news, every day’s Twitter, is full of the cruelty and irrationality of people in places of power who should be doing much, much better… as well as of the sacrifice of fellow professionals and of people being gentle with each other.

It’s hard to get on with business under these circumstances… particularly the unending uncertainty about what may come next. Concentration’s far more difficult than usual. Yet making the effort to stay focused and working is part of what I described to someone, some while back, as wanting to “be found at my post” when a crisis came; since this is the job I do, the one thing I’m really suited for, and it matters to keep doing it. …So I’m staying as focused as I can on that.

A number of projects are in progress at the moment. The (LGBTQ) Middle Kingdoms-universe work Tales of the Five #3, The Librarian is well along, and I’m aiming for publication at Ebooks Direct in late April/early May. (No episode of this “prose miniseries” will appear at Amazon until they’re all complete, around the end of Q4 2020.) The new Young Wizards interstitial work Interim Errantry 3: A Day at the Crossings is in progress and scheduled for publication (at both Ebooks Direct and Amazon) in Q3 of 2020. The extremely peculiar first episode of the “Digits of Destiny” series, The Thumb of Zorbo, is also well under way and may be the next thing that comes out from me. And rather to my surprise, I find myself writing Some Watery Tart, in which the Lady of the Lake finally spills the tea on King Arthur’s court. Don’t ask me when to expect that, as I haven’t the slightest idea. …There’s also a TV miniseries being restructured for pitching, and a novel that Peter and I are getting ready to start writing together; and, of course, The Door Into Starlight. But I’m not going to get into more detail about those right now.

Anyway: Peter and I are keeping on “keeping on” through this bizarre time, and will keep doing so unless/until something unexpected happens. I’m on Twitter a lot, in the normal course of things, so if something goes wrong, goes south or gets weird, look for early indications there. Meanwhile, if you feel like encouraging the artist in her labors: feel free to buy a coffee (check the right-hand column here), grab a discounted ebook (we’ve got a 50%-off sale running for the foreseeable future)… or just think good thoughts. Those are always appreciated.

And now back to what I’m binging at the moment (Handsome Siblings on Netflix), and yet another attempt to answer the eternal question: How the hell do these people go out fighting all dressed in white and wind up without so much as a smudge on them? Sure, this is fantasy, but that’s just stretching it too far…

Meanwhile, wherever you may be: take care of yourself.

April 4, 2020

Home life Inconsequentia Ireland Life Nature

Death in the Afternoon

by Diane Duane December 4, 2019

When you live in the deep countryside in Ireland, you get used to coexisting with the wildlife. This coexistence can take many strange forms: bats in the bedroom, sheep in the garden, bored racehorses hanging over the back fence to try to get the attention of the bousehold’s cats.

Sometimes, of course, what country people would classify as “vermin” are involved: foxes, rats, squirrels, weasels (actually, in this neighborhood, stoats). And mice. Lots of mice.

When you have a houseful of cats, the mice can be less of a problem. But we don’t have a houseful of cats at the moment. And inevitably, as autumn rolls into winter, one morning (or one night) you wake up to faint scratching sounds coming from the roof-space, or the attic, or from between the walls… and you mutter, “Great, we’ve got company.” And you put out traps — usually baited with bacon or a bit of a Mars Bar, but sometimes the situation requires a warfarin-based poison bait — and wait for the noise to stop. Sometimes you resign yourself to things getting locally, temporarily a bit whiffy when something dies in the walls (and sometimes this happens without benefit of poison or any intervention on our part at all). But there’s no alternative: you must take action. If you don’t do something about these critters, they’ll be into the food cupboards, chewing through the packages and ruining the food.

…So anyway, let me briefly veer off in another direction. Like most freelancing writers, we have periods of being flush, and periods of being not very flush at all, and long periods of being somewhere in between. The Flush Periods tend to coincide with the twice-yearly arrival of royalty payments from our traditional publishers. One of these happened a couple of years ago — it was Peter’s turn for the payment — and we were up in Dublin doing some errands and making some purchases we’d been putting off until money arrived. And along the way we happened to pass a clothing store, a cashmere shop in fact, that was having a Moving House sale and letting a lot of its stock go at truly ludicrous prices so that they wouldn’t have to move it all into their new digs.

In the window of this shop was something really quite lovely: a mid-thigh-length heather-blue-grey cashmere hoodie. I have to confess that I fell in love with the thing within about ten seconds of spotting it. Having then spent another ten seconds or so in a spate of tasteful drooling against the shop’s window, I peeled myself off the glass and walked away… because even though theoretically we could have afforded the thing, there were a lot of other more important things to be spending that money on. Such is life: you can’t always have what you want. Never mind, I thought, let’s do the rest of the shopping and then go have lunch.

Which we did. And then my sneaky, underhanded husband — Mr. I Signed The Official Secrets Act Twice And Butter Wouldn’t Melt In My Mouth — pretended to be going off to the restroom. When what he was actually doing was running out of the restaurant, hurrying back to the cashmere place, and buying me the hoodie. (Because it was his royalty money, and he got to say.)

Well, what the hell could I say except THANK YOU SWEETIE YOU CUNNING CONNIVING S.O.B. (Because he spent the next two days mentioning that hoodie every now and then — just to make sure I really liked it — before finally handing it over.)

Needless to say, that piece of clothing has become something of a favorite. It doesn’t get worn lots, because I want it to last a long time. It gets put on to wear at home when cozy-curl-up-in-the-big-chair-near-the-fire-with-some-tea-and-read sessions are going to happen (never for casual chore work around the house, never while cooking or washing dishes). It comes out for conventions, sometimes. (I spent a goodish bit of time in it when we were out in Bristol for BristolCon last month.) The rest of the time it spends carefully folded up on top of all the other folded-up things on my shelf of the clothes closet, because I don’t want it getting creased.

…So. A few days ago we started hearing a bit of scratching up in the attic space. Now, this could have been bats. (Which would be fine with me. I like bats, and wouldn’t hurt them whether I liked them or not, regardless of whether they were protected here under EU law… which they are. Anyway, we normally get some bats in the house over the summertime — young males looking for a nice place to shack up with a lady friend. They’re quite welcome for as long as they stay.)

So the first day we just kind of shrugged at the scratching noises and said “Let’s see what happens.” What happened was that they continued, and got louder. A lot louder. At which point the discussion changed to: “Mice or rats?” “Maybe it’s a pine marten,” I also suggested, as that kind of thing has been known to happen around here.

The noise continued, anyway, so we knew what to do: put out some baited traps and waited to see what materialized.

The first thing we found, while checking the traps the next morning, was this.

If the perpetrator of this was a mouse, it was some mouse. These humane tipping traps are straightforward — mouse goes in after bait, trap tips shut, and then in the morning you take it outside and release the inmate over the big wall of the neighboring estate, where the mouse won’t be able to readily find the way back.

This creature, though, was plainly unwilling to have anything to do with this scenario. The thing, whatever it was, first bit the door off the trap and threw it away, then chewed through the body of it to get at the bait and take it away upstairs into the roof space. Where we heard it again, that night, gnawing on the beams.

“Okay,” Peter said to me the next morning — yesterday morning — “we can’t be having with this.” And down go the traps with the warfarin bait.

Which we find, this morning, knocked about and scattered (though some of it may also have been taken away up into the attic “for later.” And we also find, in the bedroom clothes closet, on top of the other folded-up clothes, where it belongs… this.

My prezzie from Peter, my cashmere hoodie… with some additions to the design. Many additions. Mostly on the back, but also on the sleeves, front and back.

An overview of the hoodie

…Now people who know me know that I am generally a temperate creature, not given to sudden extremes of violent emotion. (Because, among other reasons, when you’re a nurse, they kind of train that sort of response out of you — both for your patients’/clients’ safety and your own.)

But you’d have had a lot of trouble believing that this morning, because — having been handed the hoodie by a very shocked and upset Peter — my immediate response was as follows:

“Get me MOAR POISON. Get me ALL THE RODENT POISON THERE IS. I want that fucking thing shitting out its bleeding innards by sundown.”

So it has been written: so it has been done. Now I wait… and meanwhile, I get to call the nice cashmere people in Dublin and find out where they send customers to have their knitwear mended after vermin have attempted to devour it.

I do not think I will be writing anything life-affirming today. Right now the general mood around here is horns-of-Rohan, death, death, DEATH.

…And in the meantime, I’ll let anyone who’s interested know when we find the corpse.

December 4, 2019

Absent friends Animation Home life Ireland Writing Writing process

The Lament of the Cartoon Cats

by Diane Duane March 24, 2019

I was cleaning out my Gmail account a bit earlier today (because stuff does get piled up in there over time) and came across something… unusual.

Long long ago, before Google developed Google Drive, various people got clever and found ways to store larger-than-officially-permitted files inside Gmail by attaching them to mails using a specific tagging/uploading method. (Forgive me for being vague here but I no longer remember exactly how this particular hack worked; the brain cells once harboring that data are probably now full of Scrivener strategies or Sherlock fanfic.)

I found a bunch of such mails today and proceeded to delete them or empty them out into more modern forms of storage. But one of them brought me up short. It held a text file containing several fragments of a poem.

What really got my attention were the first couple of lines, because as I read them something went twang inside me like a plucked string, and an image sprang out to accompany the twang. If you write at all, you may know this drill. You reread a line, sometimes many years after it was set down, and some sensory cue, visual or auditory or taste- or touch- or smell-based, pops up to accompany it. For example: there are parts of Spock’s World I can’t now read without hearing the sounds pfttt, as of the firing of a pellet-firing air gun, and squawk, which was the sound of one of the pheasants Peter was targeting out the window of the castle-wall cottage we were renting in Scotland. (BTW, “no pheasants were harmed…”, as the saying goes: they could have cared less about the pellets — they just shook their feathers and rolled their eyes at Peter.)

Anyway. I read these two lines at the top of the file —

O, Hell is deep an’ Hell is dark
And Hell is full o’ mice…

…and immediately I was standing in the kitchen of our little cottage, about twenty years ago, and John M. Ford was there. Maybe not in the room: but somewhere in the neighborhood. He and his partner Elise Matthesen (who, as many of you know, goes by @LionessElise on Twitter) were visiting us. And somehow these verses had resulted — either during the visit or right after — and had been tucked away to be completed.

I date them as having been written between 2002 and 2005. It’s hard to be sure, due to the unusual way the file was stored. As for the subject matter? Ghu knows what brought it on. Outside of Mike’s normal superpower — which seemed to involve raising the “talent bar” in local space so that the people packed into that space with him got smarter/more creative than they usually were — the local influences remain obscure. There’s no denying that I’ve written my share of animation, and like other animation writers working during the 1980s, my relationship with what would eventually become the Animators’ Guild was ambivalent. (This is secondary to its originally being an artists’ organization, not a writers’ one. But that’s all a long time ago now.)

All I can be sure of is that something during that visit, something mediated by Mike’s and Elise’s presence, got me thinking about the indignities inflicted on cartoon cats. All that was missing from the poem as it stood were a few lines. I finished them a couple of hours ago.

So now, here’s this. Just doggerel, to be sure. But won’t somebody think of the kitties?…

The Lament of the Cartoon Cats

O, Hell is deep an’ Hell is dark
And Hell is full o’ mice:
They ha’ wee horns and wee barbed tails
An’ eyes o’ cockatrice;
The kitties bad who made them mad
While they were still on life
Now sairly pay by night and day
For contramuscine strife.

Wi’ wee barbed tridents poke they us,
The mousies o’ the damned:
Wi’ mickle anvils dropped on us
Our days and nights are crammed.
Wi’ mallets all they mousies come
An’ bang us i’ the head:
Wi’ ropes an’ rods an’ cattleprods
A sorry chase we’re led.

O, ilka morn and evenin’ too
We wail fra’ mousies’ whacksies,
And aye their sticks o’ dynamite
stuck up our wee poor jacksies.
An’ wha’ sad justice is there here
For a’ the meowin’ dead,
When we poor puss-cats only did
Wha’ some screenwriter said?

O curst be Local 839
o’ the MPSCG*,
Since we must writhe in pain condign
For their naughty sadistry:
May they run whinin’ through some Hell
Where kitties scratch and bite,
And so be paid i’ their own coin
For our own piteous plight.

*The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, Hollywood CA, formerly known as the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists’ Guild.

March 24, 2019

Ireland from space, with happily screaming writers

Home life Ireland Tech The Internet

Tenterhooks

by Diane Duane February 5, 2019

We’ve been living in rural Ireland for a shade more than thirty years now, and the household’s online connectivity has been a bit of a challenge from the very start.

When we first arrived, the only way into online life (then mostly CompuServe and AOL and MCIMail) was dialup, and it was what everyone else here had, so that was all right as far as it went. (Sometimes this could get a bit exciting, and could wind up involving alligator clips. I remember going up to the Telecom Eireann offices in Dame Street — that building houses a Starbucks now — and showing the techs how to finesse this. Remind me sometime to tell the tale of how I almost wound up storyediting an animated series from Scotland, more or less entirely on MCIMail, with those alligator clips hooked into a phone line in a castle wall.)

Then the Internet started to become accessible, and for that too there was dialup, slow and clunky and expensive as it was. If you wanted anything better, for a long time satellite was the only way… and it was insanely pricey. (The equivalent of $250-350 per month wouldn’t have been unusual.) For a long time we struggled with that, looking wistfully forward to a time when local providers would be able to offer something like the faster, cheaper methods that were becoming available in the US and in big cities in Europe.

For a long time the providers here lagged behind, until finally in the very late 1990s and early 2000s they started to catch up. We happily enough gave up the satellite for DSL (at least a bit more reliable: the satellite had tended to get wonky in wet weather) and then ADSL. And then slowly the national phone company started to introduce fiber… though only in big cities.

We moved to our present house in the late 90s and watched other areas of the country gradually get better service and have access to all kinds of goodies that were far beyond what ADSL and its kin could provide us. Then came true hardwired broadband, and the nature of our problem abruptly changed. Our tiny local exchange, home to maybe no more than a few hundred subscribers, was too small ever to be broadband-enabled. And none of the companies that kept buying the national phone company, and passing it from hand to hand like a hot potato, had any particular interest in committing to the infrastructure spending that would pay for (among other things) running fiber out to the likes of us. We heaved a sigh, as it seemed likely that the only way we’d ever get broadband was to move. Then dialup vanished, leaving us with only one option that wasn’t satellite: cellular broadband, running off a router that would only function when placed as high as possible in an upstairs bedroom window, since our local mobile service is so funky and we live in the shadow of a hill that keeps us from getting a signal of any significant strength. And has a tendency to fail out when it rains.

To say that, as people who as part of work need to have an online presence, and who run an online bookstore, this whole situation has been pretty frustrating… would be putting it mildly.

The government here wasn’t insensible to this problem, to their credit, it being shared by hundreds of thousands of other people nationwide. As a result there ensued something called the National Broadband Scheme, intended to get the national government involved as a partner in extending broadband service to Ireland’s most rural users. This proposition started out well enough but then rapidly started going through more plot twists than a George R.R. Martin novel (and nearly as many corporate casualties, as participants fell or were pushed out of the scheme, depending on your point of view). Finally it expired of its (political and other) injuries, to be replaced by the National Broadband Plan. (Which also started to look distinctly peaky after companies began dropping out of it as if they’d drunk out of the wrong bottle at a royal banquet.) Leaving us, like many other people all over the southern part of this island, in a situation where the Moon had better internet than we did.

Yet in the most recent twist in the tale, what remains of what used to be the national phone company — an entity now called Eir — swooped in and creamed off some of the most accessible of the rural routes that the Plan was supposed to see equipped with the very best state-of-the-art, fiber-to-the-door broadband.

And by what can only be considered sheer luck, one of these involves the little rural road we live on! A man in a van came and discussed with us what service we wanted, and gave us a contract to sign, and we signed it. And when he left there was singing and dancing around here that could have been confused with something out of an old Savarin commercial starring their picky coffee expert, known as El Exigente. “And the people are happy!” Cue the mariachi band.

The very thought of at last being able to do the online things other people do — streaming (impossible with our expensive cellular broadband, which has been our last-resort solution for years now), seeing video content from online providers (bwahahahahaha you must be kidding, we’d burn through a 20-gigabyte / $50 cellular topup in a matter of hours), backing up our computers to the cloud… It was heady stuff. So many useful possibilities that other people take for granted would at last become available to us.

Except… maybe that excitement was a little premature.

Yes, people came along with backhoes and ran new cable pipes down the road, and then came the fiber itself. And we actually thought we were going to get hooked up last August until a pre-installation surveyor came around, took one look at our utility pole, and said “Nope.” After a week or so, the pole was pulled up and replaced with a new one. Then a nice gentleman came and ran the fiber up it, and another nice gent came to install the cabinet at the top. But as far as the final stage, actually getting the fiber into the house? Nothing definite. “Maybe before Christmas.” Except… sorry, nope. “Technical difficulties.” The week before Christmas, we called the customer service people and said “WHEN?” And they sighed and said, “February 7th.”

Ooookay. Peter and I looked at each other, and sighed too, and said, “We’ll see.”

And Christmas went by, and New Year’s, and January. And Peter said, “We’ll call them first thing on the week of the 7th.”

And he did. And the nice lad who took his call said, “Yes, you’re still on for the 7th. Morning or afternoon?”

…So now we wait. I’m practically giddy with excitement now. I finally get to SEE American Gods? I finally get to stream the audio from the Romansch-language channels in Switzerland and that terrific bundle of classical channels in France? OMG.

Anyway, since we’re both in celebratory mood, there’s no reason not to spread it around. The Ebooks Direct store will be in 60%-off mode until the installer arrives here on Thursday. So if you’re after cheap ebooks, knock yourself out while you can: the present inventory will load below. (PS — if you’ve seen the Hugo-nomination reader discount offer, please wait till Friday to use it. If we try to run two sets of discounts in the store at the same time, the software has a nervous breakdown.)

And in the meantime… we wait, in hope, to join the rest of the 21st century…

February 5, 2019

Europe Home life Ireland Weather

Ophelia

by Diane Duane October 16, 2017

It’s going to be an interesting day. (I leave aside the local confusion over whether to properly refer to this storm “Hurricane Ophelia” or “Ex-Hurricane Ophelia.” Never mind: here she is, not so much emitting snatches of song as gusts of wind, and strewing leaves all over everything instead of flowers.

This is as much a status report as anything else (and I guess I can update the post over the course of the day if anything interesting happens locally, though mostly I’ll probably be on Twitter, using the #Ophelia hashtag, like a lot of the rest of the country. If I fall silent there it’s more likely to be due to local power loss than anything else, and I’ll let everybody know as soon as possible before the fact — our broadband is cellular and runs on batteries, so even after a power failure I’ll still have network access for a good while.

This is also to reassure people who might routinely follow me and be concerned. Peter and I are not in the direct storm track. The track as presently projected calls for Ophelia to head up the west coast of the country. Peter and I live in one of the easternmost counties, Wicklow, close to where it borders on County Kildare.

Nonetheless the whole country was last night tagged by Met Eireann, the Irish national weather service, as a Red Weather Alert area, the warning being for “Violent and destructive gusts of 120 to 150 km/h countrywide and in excess of these values in some very exposed hilly and coastal areas.” As the storm is big enough to span the entire island, we’ll naturally be feeling its effects over on this side.

As I write this (0950 UTC) the northern fringe of the storm has made landfall in the southwest of the country and nearly 100,000 people have already lost power. In that part of the world, flooding is also going to be a huge issue (as it routinely has in the past with lesser storms), and we’re all watching that situation with a lot of concern. The storm surge is also going to be problematic on both the west and east costs, with a strong south wind coming up the Irish Sea this afternoon and evening, pushing sea levels up by as much as a meter in the storm surge period.

In our own area, the forecasts right now seem to indicate that a fair amount of rain will fall over the course of the day (40-50mm) but most of the trouble is going to be caused by high winds bringing trees down — especially since the trees still have a lot of leaves on them, even here on the high ground — and people losing power. This happens to us at least once every couple of years due to storm/wind damage in this very rural area, and we’re well prepared for it.

Let me reassure everybody who might be concerned that, based on previous experience of long periods of much heavier rain, our house is in no danger from flooding. We are about fifty miles west of the Irish Sea. Our cottage sits on high ground, more than 120m / 400ft above sea level and in an area of quite “sharp” drainage. Slopes here are acute enough so that even in the wildly unlikely case that the ground around us gets saturated, what water can’t sink in will run off downhill.

My main concern at the moment is about the line of very tall and handsome, and old, beech trees in the estate property across the road from us. Every now and then one of them says “That’s it, I’ve had it…” and falls over when the next big storm hits it. Those trees are just tall enough to hit our house if the storm put too much strain on them… and there’s no way to tell when this is going to happen. All the warning you get (as in a previous year when a tree in the neighboring field pulled this stunt and took the nearest power line down) is a loud rushing noise reminiscent of a sound clip from a recording of a large waterfall, and then a dull THUMP. Believe me when I tell you that my ears are going to spend the day being cocked for that waterfall-y “whooooooosh” sound. Additionally, since our broadband is cellular and subject to network overload or interference by bad weather, especially rain, it means checking every now and then to make sure we’re still getting bandwidth.

While all this goes on, my work day will be progressing as originally planned: updating the backups on my main work computer and doing other file-organization-related scutwork. This is actually a perfect day to be doing this kind of thing, as it requires no creativity whatsoever. (Writing isn’t going to be possible for me until this thing passes over: there’s no way I can get settled into serious work while also constantly listening for whoooooshTHUMP.) Anyway, if you want to cheer me up while I’m trapped in this godawful drudgery, feel free to stop in to the Ebooks Direct store and grab yourself some reading material.The store has an app that makes my iPad go “kaching” when someone makes a purchase, and if it does that every now and then I won’t have to keep checking to see if the broadband’s still working.

Meanwhile the national broadcaster Radio Telefís Eireann / RTÉ has (on its RTÉ 1 channel) gone over to continuous all-news format to cover the storm, with reports constantly coming in from around the country. Those of you who’re interested may be able to access video and/or streaming coverage at this URL for the RTE Player. Also, RTÉ Radio 1’s daytime shows will (if I’m guessing correctly) be all about Ophelia.

Anyway: everybody who’s tweeted or mailed me with messages of concern — thanks! We’re as ready as we can be: we’ll see what happens next…

October 16, 2017

Fantasy and SF Home life Writing

That Feeling When

by Diane Duane July 17, 2017

…you’re tidying up some paperwork and you stumble across a (1999) printout of a novel proposal that you had completely forgotten about, including outlining, notes, and detailed timelining for the six main characters…

LIGHTNING IN THE CUP first page

(here’s the text if the image gives you trouble)

LIGHTNING IN THE CUP tells the story of the deadly culmination of a three-hundred year war between two mighty nations, and the end of the world…all caused for the amusement of an angry god and goddess.

The world is in its Renaissance: art, literature and magic are flowering as never since the great Triple Empire was destroyed in mysterious catastrophe, three thousand years before. Poised at either side of the great continent which surrounds the Central Sea are the nations VOROSHEN and MIROKH, provinces of the old Empire, now finally grown into their pre-eminence as rulers of the known world. Their ancient rivalry—Voroshen is the more populous nation, Mirokh the greater naval power, controlling the Sea—has been flowering, too. For the better part of the last millennium, they have practiced war against one another as another kind of artform, a violent and lucrative one, using the armies and territories of their various client nations as their battleground.

Now this graceful, amused, habitual aggression is growing into something more deadly. Each country has begun to feel it has the right to be the most powerful in the world. The old mindset, which would have seen life as not worth living without the existence of the essential, noble enemy, is passing away. The new rulers coming to power—a less poetic, more opportunistic lot—believe that it would be better if there was only one “greatest country”. And the only way to manage that, each side now feels, is by wholesale destruction of the other….

People on both sides—powerful lords, wizards, politicians—are beginning to realize that the means may be within their grasp. Mastery of the theory and technology of magic is growing by leaps and bounds, fostered by the patronage of Voroshent and Mirokhel lords for great theoretical sorcerers like ARDAN and ELIEGRI. Things which would have seemed great wonders even a hundred years ago—cloudcastles, soaring-ships, scorchfire—have become commonplace: magic has been turned to the service of man in peace and war, and makes the exchequers of both countries fat by its taxation and control. Riches and prosperity are more widespread than ever: on the surface, at least, because of magic, peace reigns in both the Great Lands.

But each nation secretly is looking to magic for the answer to the question of how to get rid of its great rival…and one of them is on the brink of finding it. Mirokh’s genius-mage ARDAN has learned of the existence of a sorcerous relic so potent that, properly altered and manipulated, it could cause the earth to open and swallow a whole country down to ruin. Eagerly, Mirokh’s lords send an expedition into the Debatable Lands to find this thing and bring it home, for their glory and the final destruction of their enemies.

What none of the Mirokhel suspect is why this relic has now been found.

…And then things get interesting.

Note to self: import into Scrivener. Add to ToDoIst project list. Schedule for more research after completion of YW#11 draft. Possible scheduling: spring/summer 2018.

(sigh) Just what I needed before I’d even had my tea. Another novel.

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July 17, 2017

Holidays Home life

Day 23741

by Diane Duane May 18, 2017

I sat doing some computer stuff over the first mug of tea today and found myself wondering: 65 years. How many days is that?

And of course there’s a web page to tell you.

So, the usual question: Any plans?

Yeah, because there are always plans… but the day will be, relatively speaking, quiet. Which is fine, because generally I’m not much one for birthday parties (for me, anyway). At age nine, I think it was, I had one of those episodes that seem surprisingly commonplace to those of us who were the Strange Looking Smartass Weird Kid in their class at school. Clueless though well-intentioned parent insists on throwing birthday party for unenthusiastic child, invitations are sent, big buildup ensues, and on the day no one shows up; and afterwards, the person whose party “failed to launch” largely goes off the concept. I wouldn’t say I was exactly scarred for life, but the subject aches a bit when picked up for examination… so as regards further parties, as we say over here, I’m “not fussed.”

(Other people’s birthday parties, now, that’s a different story. One of those, earlier this year, is where I had the Karaoke Incident that laid me up for the guts of two months with a torn right external oblique. And you know what? Now that my back feels better again, I do not regret it. It was the best rendition of “New York, New York” I have ever produced, bar none. It was like shower singing, but with a backup group and kick dancers and a roomful of applause at the end. So what if the dramatic drop-to-your-knee-with-the-mike-in-the-air finish went colossally wrong? Some things are worth a little pain. [“The falling over part?” said the birthday boy’s brother after the fact. “We thought that was part of it!” 🙂 Such a diplomat.])

Anyway. What today looks like for me, for those of you who’re curious:

All day: Trying to avoid the US political news. Trying SO HARD. Probably failing. (…And hearing in my head again and again Plato’s line: “The fate of good men who are indifferent to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”)

11:00-13:00: Do some writing on [redacted].

13:00-15:00: Do some writing on [other redacted].

15:00-20:00 probably: Go to local shopping town and do errands. Grocery shopping, etc. (The high point of this: pick up multiple bags of The Really Good Lithuanian Bread Flour. Jeez but I am so glad we can get this flour here: it’s fabulous beyond belief. I finally got around to putting up the recipe for the basic white loaf we make with this stuff at EuropeanCuisines.com: it’s over here.) Then stop at local pub/restaurant bringing samples of Peter’s new vegetarian (Vegan in fact) chili recipe. (They’re looking to add some more vegetarian options to their menu, which can only be a good thing.) Have wine. Doubtless get given cake with a sparkler in it.

While there, leverage the pub’s broadband (which is way better than ours…) and gloat in a demure way over the goodies now available to one just turned 65. (It’ll be another year before I’m qualified for the Irish Free Travel Scheme for seniors, but that’s okay. I can wait.) (Note to self: check out what has to be done at the DB and SBB ends of this issue. If someone offers me a discount to travel on an ICE train or one of the Swiss Pendolinos, you better believe I’ll take it.)

And also: answer all the HB wishes, which are already coming in. ALL of them. Because, you guys? You are my party. You didn’t wait to be invited. You just showed up. And you are who I work for, so it’s great to have a chance to thank you. 🙂

Afterwards: Go home, watch the rest of the Doctor Who episodes piled up on the Sky box, and hang out with my honey.

In short: A good day. The 23,741st in a series. And already looking forward to 23,742…

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May 18, 2017

Ebooks Direct Home life Online life Random musings

Virtual coffee

by Diane Duane May 10, 2017

Just a note in passing: There’ve been times lately when people who’ve stopped by the Ebooks Direct store have left notes in their orders asking whether it’s possible to simply contribute something to the local creative endeavors without actually buying an ebook.

I thought about this a bit (while looking into some of the online options for this kind of thing) and then came up with a temporary solution. For the time being I’ve simply added to the store a virtual product that’s about the same price as a good cup of coffee in Dublin. (The pic above is of a flat white from the “Bald Barista” up in Aungier Street.)

So for those who don’t need any more ebooks, and feel like adding one of those (or however many they please) to their shopping card at the store: Go for it! And thank you very much. 🙂 …If you do this, the system will send you a little digital “thank you” card once you’ve been through the checkout… a stopgap measure till I can drop you a note myself.

Eventually I guess I’ll make a button or a widget for the side column to handle this. But for the moment, the Virtual Cuppa product page is here:

http://bit.ly/cuppacontrib

Thanks, all. 🙂

ETA: Sorry, the link was redirecting back to Facebook for some reason. That’s been fixed.

May 10, 2017

Hobbyhorses and General Ranting Home life Medicine, nursing, health Obscure interests

The hiccup cure

by Diane Duane April 25, 2017

First of all: why did I use the image above? Because I don’t like any of the stock art available for the term “hiccups”, and I do love Toothless and his boss. So if you think this is going to be anything to do with How To Train Your Dragon, please be disabused of the idea. This post is about curing hiccups.

It’s a copy of information that appears elsewhere about the one true “magic” trick I know. Somebody just retweeted the Google Plus post I did about it some years back, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have a copy here at my own blog. Seems like an omission. So here it is.

Disclaimer: I know that this is one of those endlessly contentious subjects, and there will be people who rise up immediately and insist “That’s not how it works at all” and will cry BUSHWAH and so forth. I’m entirely happy for them to do that, and I wish for them that Their Mileage May Vary in peace, and that their hiccup cures may always work. As for this explanation: I trust my source implicitly — he was busy very effectively and good-naturedly saving lives on a 24-hour shift when I ran into him — and, most to the point, this strategy works: reliably, repeatedly, past any possible doubt of its effectiveness when considered statistically, and to the endless amazement of many skeptical (and badly hiccuping) people across two continents.* Nuff said.

And now for the details on How To Cure Hiccups. ADDITIONAL AND IMPORTANT ADVISORY RIGHT UP FRONT: if you are on a sugar- or sodium-controlled diet of any kind, this solution is most likely not for you. Consult your physician before attempting it.

One afternoon [in 2011] while working, I found myself listening to a local TV station’s “science lady” attempting to explain the cause of hiccups… and getting it all wrong. As usual, this event makes me want to share what I was long ago taught about the subject by a medical resident in the emergency room at New York Hospital (now Cornell/NYH Medical Center). He took five minutes to explain the physiological mechanisms behind hiccups, and then taught me a simple, foolproof three-step method for stopping them dead.

So here’s The Hiccup Cure. (And if you share this around, please do so in some way that will allow as many people as possible to see it, so that more folks can be spared the Curse of Hiccup Embarrassment. Thank You For Your Continued Support.) 🙂

The explanation: Hiccups are the result of an chemical imbalance in your blood — a temporary derangement of the normal acid/alkaline balance of your blood electrolytes. There are all kinds of reasons why this can happen all of a sudden, but the most common ones are talking too much while eating (my favorite), and eating or drinking too fast, and some kinds of emotional stress, and periods of sudden exercise (running for a bus, etc). Different causes tend to induce different kinds of imbalance, but the commonest ones are these:

(a) Respiratory acidosis — too much CO2 in the blood: and
(b) Respiratory alkalosis — too little CO2 in the blood.

When you get one or the other of these, the body’s tendency is to try to rectify the situation by pushing the lungs’ contents in and out a lot faster, so that if there isn’t enough CO2, some more can get into the bloodstream, and if there’s too much, some can get out.

The body doesn’t want to bother your conscious mind with this, so it handles the problem in a simple, inelegant, and not wildly effective way: it makes your diaphragm spasm repeatedly, compressing the lungs and trying to shove a significant percentage of their tidal volume out with each spasm. This is the hiccup.

Now, understanding this, you’d think that concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly, and ventilating yourself in a thoughtful manner, would put this problem right. Well, probably it will. But it takes forever, and you meanwhile are sitting there hiccuping and feeling like a fool (and the continuing hiccups can themselves keep making the electrolyte situation worse). So it becomes time to take more drastic measures.

It turns out that the smartest and fastest way to derail the hiccups themselves is to quickly increase the electrolyte imbalance significantly. The simple three-step intervention derived from this concept deals with (first) the most common one, the acidosis, and then, if that doesn’t work, the less common one, the alkalosis. The fortunate thing is that all the raw materials are usually present in the average bar or restaurant, so you can cure yourself or a friend fast in one of the places where you’re most likely to look like an idiot as you just sit there hiccuping and hiccuping.

Step 1: Take a large spoonful of sugar, dry, in the mouth, and let it dissolve. Some of the sugar gets absorbed directly through the buccal membrane of the mouth. The acidosis is kicked way further along, and your body, distracted by the sudden extreme change in the blood chemistry, “calls off” the hiccups as ineffective. It calls them off right away, too: within seconds. The “spoonful of sugar” approach, in my experience, works for about 60% of hiccuppers.

If this doesn’t work, the hiccuper has a worse case of acidosis than mere sugar can deal with. So we take the intervention up a notch.

Step 2: Take one small spoonful of salt (the equivalent of a cooking teaspoon is plenty). Again, hold in the mouth and let it dissolve. It’s gross, but in the next 20% of hiccupers, the hiccups will stop. Bang, right away.

If neither of these steps work, then your hiccuper is not in acidosis, but in alkalosis. So you switch tactics.

Step 3: Give the hiccuper a lemon slice and tell them to chew on it. (Or alternately, give them a small spoonful of vinegar if no lemon is available. But lemon works better.) Their hiccups will then vanish.

WARNING: It is vitally important to do these things in order and not try to cut back on the amounts of sugar and salt, or the intervention may fail and you’ll wind up having to do it all over again, which is annoying, especially if you’re on a low-sodium diet or just don’t feel like retaining liters and liters of water the next day.

But if you follow these instructions faithfully, the hiccups will vanish. You can get a real reputation as a miracle worker with this routine.

A side issue, henceforth possibly to be called Duane’s Law of Necessitative Anxiety: When you are running this routine on someone whose hiccups you absolutely have to stop because you’ll fall very low in their estimation if you don’t, they will always be alkalotic, and you will always have to run through all three stages, feeling dumber and more desperate every moment as you go along and nothing seems to be working. (This law first became plain to me when I was de-hiccuping my producer for the “Science Challenge” educational series I wrote at the BBC: if I hadn’t proven I was good at the science part by curing him, well, you can imagine.)

And a note in passing: All other even slightly useful hiccup cures are, in one way or another, attempting to exploit this electrolyte-shift mechanism (though most of them are fairly ineffective at it). Scaring the person (causes acidosis: see The Andromeda Strain), drinking water upside down (forces the person to hold his/her breath, slowly increases the CO2 in the blood), breathing in a paper bag (rebreathing, ditto), whatever: they are all merely thin pale versions of the One True Cure.

So there you have it. May it do you (and those around you) good. 🙂

*Still working on that third one.

April 25, 2017

Home life Ireland Nature

The Muddy Bath Sheet Blues

by Diane Duane January 14, 2017

I’m about to have a strange conversation with Peter when he wakes up.

DD: That yellow towel in the bathroom? Put it in the wash.

PM: What? Why? It was just washed yesterday.

DD: Yeah, that was before I had to go out and throw it over a swan.

One of the juvenile swans who hang around the pond behind our house somehow got out of the field and into the road, and was walking up and down trying to figure out how to get back where it belonged. A number of casual drivers had pulled up and parked and were waving other traffic away from it while they tried to figure out how to get it to safety.

All the gates to the field were locked and we don’t have any of the keys, so I wound up dropping one of our bath sheets and a blanket that one of the drivers had brought over the swan, wrapping it up well (the wings were my main concern). We were helped by the swan being a bit young and uncertain: by the time it would have started arguing the point, its head was already covered and it couldn’t see what to do – so it went quiet.

I picked it up and carried it to a spot where the fence into the field was low enough to drop it over. At that point some hissing was beginning from inside the bundle, so the timing was right to lean over the fence and shake the swan out of the wrappings. It landed on its feet, waved its wings around a bit and then headed in the general direction of the pond, looking faintly embarrassed but otherwise none the worse for wear.

So the various drivers and I congratulated one another and went about our business. Just another exciting day in the country…

January 14, 2017

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