And a great deal of other strange stuff.
It’s been two months since I broached this subject. Now it’s time to make a choice. I’ll be evaluating my options over the weekend.
If you have an opinion and you haven’t emailed me, now’s the time.
(sigh) The graphic above (which occurred to me very early this morning) is the only worthwhile thing I’ve gotten done today. (If you like it you can get one here: we have a tea one, too.) Everything else has been about sick cats. If you’re not a cat person, or feeling sympathetic, skip this blog entry….
Goodman — the all-white cat and the middle-ranked of our three males — found and ate something bad, early in the week, in his wanderings through the countryside. He came down with a terrible case of diarrhoea, went off his food, and initially stopped drinking as well: then the drinking picked up again, so we thought at first he was getting better.
But he wasn’t. He got very dull and lethargic, and was completely disinterested in food — so much so that when I offered him steak one night, he just stood there and stared at it.
When that happened, on Tuesday, I said to Peter, “He goes to the vet tomorrow.” And that’s what yesterday was about. Taxi rides, moaning unhappy cats, sitting around in waiting rooms full of greyhounds, waiting for blood work and other tests to get done, etc etc. Finally our vet told us that Goodman had enteritis — no surprise there — and he stuck him full of pain relievers, anti-diarrhoeics, and cortisone, and sent him home. “Bring him back tomorrow,” our vet said.
So we got up early this morning and did that. Goodman was already significantly improved over his condition just twelve hours before, though the diarrhoea was still a little bit with him (and we’ve had to follow him around the house with paper towels mopping up the occasional leak). Today he had some more shots, and we were given some diet food for him, and we came home again and relaxed a little in hopes that things would get back to normal.
Until we saw that Mr. Squeak, the senior male, who’s been working on extending his territory by the most straightforward method — by beating up on the male cat who lives down the road about a quarter mile from here — had started to limp. At first we thought it was a sprain. But a little while ago I got a whiff of him, realized that whatever else they may do, sprains don’t smell, and took a few minutes to check out his side more carefully. Turns out he’s got an infected bite or other wound buried under all that thick Norwegian-forest-cat fur, where he can’t get at it to clean it, and it’s paining him so much that it’s hurting him to walk…and enough that he won’t let us clip the fur to get at it and and clean it up. So now Squeak has to go to the vet first thing in the morning…get sedated, have the wound cleaned up, possibly stitched, get some antibiotics…
Ah well. In the good news department, for those of you who were asking, there are some more hardcovers of Wizards at War available in the bookstore. (There are some more advance readers’ copies as well, but I have to go into the store and add them.)
Oh, and for those who were asking how I manage to follow baseball season in Europe? It’s these guys — NASN, the North American Sports Network. They have a pretty fair schedule once the season gets going. (wry look) I wish that was right about now…
Just what you needed: a Personal Disorganizer.
I see the Young Wizards books turning up on a lot of “If You Like Harry Potter…” lists these days — hundreds of them, scattered all over the US and Canada (and some elsewhere in the English-speaking world). But this is the first time I’ve seen one of these:
This, I guess, bemuses me even more. Generally speaking — to my eye, at least — in a strictly thematic sense, the YW books have even less in common with Narnia than the “Harry Potter” books do. There’s not even the common thread of “kids learning wizardry and having adventures”: the similarity is more like “kids having magical adventures in another world.” And sometimes, even that would be stretching it.
…Yet at the same time, there’s no denying that the YW books are somewhat haunted by C. S. Lewis’s influence, from Narnia (where I first met him) onwards. It’d be fibbing to claim that Perelandra wasn’t on my mind when I was writing High Wizardry, or that Out of the Silent Planet isn’t very much on my mind (or at least loitering in the background) while I finish work on A Wizard of Mars. Lewis has been my mentor-at-one-remove for many years…so I don’t mind being on this list, really. It’s honorable company to be in: extremely good company — and not just Lewis’s, either.
Still…one walks very softly when coming along behind the great Lion. But in a case like this, bringing up the rear isn’t such a terrible place to be.
For those who might be interested, we’re in the middle of restructuring the Young Wizards CafePress store. Things are getting moved around, old designs are getting spruced up or dumped, and a lot of new designs are being installed to take advantage of the much wider range of products available since the store opened up in ’03.
Just added: a couple of T-shirts that appear in Wizard’s Holiday and Wizards at War — Roshaun’s “Fermilab” T-shirt and Sker’ret’s “Will Do Magic For Food” shirt. Also, there’s an entire section devoted to various sorts of Wizard’s Oath material, which people have repeatedly been asking for.
(Also: CafePress is just now rolling out its API. As soon as I can figure out how, I’ll install an RSS-fed box on OOA so those interested in such things can see what’s new in the store without blog posts being required.)
The first of the Transcendent Pig items are up in the store now. Some more stuff will go up later after I’ve finished remasking the image for output on white things.
For those of you who were asking, I should have the masking issues on the black T-shirts sorted out by this afternoon — check the YW CafePress store then.
There’ll also be a few other items — mousepads, etc (including the new WizPod design). I’m still undecided about the merits of a TP chef’s apron. 😉
More later.
…I was starting to wonder why OOA was all of a sudden getting all these referrals from Joey’s blog. The far-famed Accordion Guy has tagged me for a list-of-four meme.
Well, let’s see now…
Four jobs I’ve had:
- Florist’s assistant (1968-69)
- Psychiatric nurse (1975-77)
- Writer’s assistant (1978-80)
- Story editor (1985-86)
Four movies I can watch over and over:
- Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster (“Godzilla! Such language!”)
- A Christmas Story (“It’s…it’s smiling at me!” SFX: WHACK!)
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (“Smartly done.”)
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Oh, you know the line.)
Four places I have lived:
- Manhattan Island
- Northridge, CA
- Bala Cynwyd, PA
- Philadelphia, PA
Four TV shows I love to watch:
Four places I’ve been on vacation:
Four of my favorite dishes:
- Maluns. (Ideally, as served in the Bündnerstube in the Romantik Hotel Stern in Chur. Tart apple compote on the side and a nice glass of Zizerser Gewürztraminer, please….)
- Peter’s incomparable goulasch: never the same twice, and better every time. (Took that picture about twenty minutes ago: as soon as I’m done here, I get to go make dumplings for it.)
- In springtime, the gitzi (that’s deep-fried kid nuggets, for the rest of you. …Oh, come on, not that kind of nuggets! Tsk.) at Kaiser’s Reblaube in Zürich
- The steak frites at “Ma Bourgougne”
Four websites I visit daily:
Four places I’d rather be right now:
- On the Moon, in a spacesuit…looking down. This is about the right time of month for that…
- In the picture to the right. (Well, in the picture to the right again.) Summer solstice of 2003, in the hot-spring-fed infinity pool at the Hotel Source des Alpes in Leukerbad, looking up at the Gemmiwand mountain-wall, the week after we turned in the first-draft screenplay for Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King. It was a sublimely happy time: perfect weather, the best company, great and genuine relaxation…
- Zürich HB (see also this morning shot), waiting to catch a train to…just about anywhere, really. Budapest might be nice this time of year. Meanwhile, let’s go over to Brasserie Federal and have a Calanda Brau while we decide…
- Right here, at the desk, when the phone rings and it’s my agent telling me that the TV series has been greenlighted.
And now, to continue the meme, I tag:
For those inquiring about the new Transcendent Pig items in the YW.com CafePress store: the T-shirt will be ready in a day or so. (The basic design is here.) The “Got Pig” mug is there already, but I may do another design or two.
All praise to Ursula Vernon, whose work this is! (And yes, of course she gets a cut of the profits. A significant one.)
For those of you who might be using Google Earth and are also YW readers, I’ve uploaded a file of Google Earth placemarks for the Young Wizards series.
The list isn’t by any means complete or exhaustive as yet: it’ll probably keep growing for a good while as I continue work on the Errantry Concordance. It just seemed like a good idea to start coordinating the two, where possible.
Have fun!