Hikes in the Hollywood Hills: Paris for kids
(Though, frankly, I wouldn’t need a kid to be interested in doing most of the things in the second article.)
I have no trouble going to sleep in lighted places if I’m tired enough, but for best results, P. needs it dark This looks like a useful answer: a Lights Out Sleep Mask. “It blocks out stray lightbeams that leak through those crappy free masks; it has an adjustable velcro strap; and the molded eyecups give your eyeballs freedom to flip around in REM sleep.”
Sounds good. (Thanks to Gridskipper for the link.)
[tags]Note to self, sleep mask, eye shade[/tags]
iPass Inc. and Nokia Enterprise Solutions today announced they are developing iPass wireless connectivity software for the Nokia 9500, the Nokia 9300i and the Nokia Eseries devices. Based on the award-winning iPassConnect(TM) universal client, this software will extend availability of the iPass secure remote access service to users of Nokia Business devices.
This is super. For a long time I’ve used iPass for my travel Internet access, and it was always a frustration when I heard that iPass had no plans to do a software implementation for mobile phones. (It had done one for PDAs, though.) However, it seems like something has made them change their minds. Yay!
[tags]iPass, ISP, Internet access, roaming, WiFi, Nokia, smartphone[/tags]
And not just Holland, either (because I’m heading to Utrecht in a couple of weeks). There is more than one region included in The Netherlands, you know? Holland is just one of the regions: calling the nation “Holland” is like calling all of New England “Rhode Island.”
…Though it seems that the fact may possibly have slipped by some of my fellow New Yorkers. (How quickly we forget. And to think we were Nieuw Amsterdam once…)
Tourist guy #1: So what countries make up the Netherlands?
Guide: The Netherlands are one country. It’s also called Holland.
Tourist guy #1: Oh, yeah. Sorry. How about The Hague? Is that one of the countries in the Netherlands?
Guide: Ahhhhh.
Tourist guy #2: You’re all confused! It’s all about Benelux! That’s Holland, The Hague, and The Lux. They’re all sort of together in the EU.
Tourist #1: The EU?
Guide: …and right over there is Roosevelt Island.
Tourist #1: Oh, I’ve heard of that! Is that in New York or Brooklyn?
Ah dear. Somebody get me some frites, quick, and pass the mayo. (Or some herring would be nice. It’ll be the Queen’s Day at the end of the month: I wonder if any black-market “green herring” will be around yet?… She’s supposed to get the first catch, but it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody cheats a little…)
(Wow, the places casual Googling will take you. The second Netherlands National Herring-Eating Championship…)
So Peter is home wrestling with the newly-installed satellite broadband (we can’t get ground-based ADSL: we’re just a smidgen too far away from the local phone exchange) and I’m sitting here in Cafe Hugo in the Place des Vosges, arguably the most beautiful square in Paris.
Dinner was hours ago. After a bunch of work, I got the munchies and came out of the hotel (also on the Place) to get a bowl of fish soup with rouille and a glass of rosé. I sat down by where the newspaper-sticks are stacked, and saw a sign:
LE HUGO
VOUS PROPOSE LE
WiFi
30′ : Eur 3.00
…So here I am. The WiFi comes courtesy of HotCafe.fr.
…Central Bruges was fairly thick with hotspots, too, though mostly I was too busy working to do a whole lot about them. It’s great to see Europe as a whole getting wireless-conscious.
I look forward to being able to get out tomorrow morning, before my train leaves, to explore the area a little; there might even be time to go see Notre Dame. We’ll see. Meanwhile I’m just enjoying being here. The Marais is one of those parts of the world where, when you go outside, the air just smells good…mostly due to cooking smells. I can’t believe the density of little restaurants, cafés, zincs, brasseries, bistros, and other culinary whatnots around the Place, if not exactly in it. (There are three, maybe four restaurants or cafés actually in the Place — most of the rest of the space under the beautiful vaulted arcades seems to be taken up by galleries of one kind or another, including several devoted to sculpture, and one with some of the most beautiful bronzes I’ve ever seen.)
(long sigh) There’s been a lot of work lately, but evenings like this make it more than tolerable. Soupe de poissons, rosé, cheerful conversation in French…bring it on. I can take it.
Geneva tomorrow night…then home on Sunday. That’ll be good too. I miss my kitties. (Oh, yes, and now that you mention it, my husband…) (grin)
Last year I went to the mountains to write, and it snowed for nearly a week without stopping. I said to Peter, “This year I’ll go somewhere it won’t snow.” (And somewhere, I thought to myself, where I won’t fall down and nearly break my foot.) Brugge…Bruges seemed safe enough.
Hah.
It’s been snowing fairly heavily, a wet small-flake snow, for about an hour and a half now. It’s starting to stick, as slush if nothing else. If the temperature stays low tonight, tomorrow is going to be exciting for travel: I may not make it up to Brussels after all, unless I absolutely must to do my return-leg train ticketing (I have to be in Paris Friday night). We’ll see if I can do that online from the apartment.
There is one thing about Brussels that I’d miss if I can’t go tomorrow. (Besides the shopping, which I think will have to wait.) The wonderful café Cirio is the home and stomping-grounds of that easy-going star among managerial felines, Le Chat Minou. I would regret not seeing Minou, who knows where the best spot in the cafe is, in this kind of weather (i.e. next to the espresso machine). Well, we’ll see what happens…
It is a gorgeous day here, sunny and fine…the blue sky being a harbinger (as is so often the case in this neighborhood) of chilly weather in Brugge later this week. No matter. Cold is better than mosquitoes. (Brugge, a well-canal’d city, called the Venice of the North by some, suffers cruelly from mosquitoes in the warm weather. The city sprays and does everything it can, but there’s always stagnant water somewhere.) I am working in a cafe on the Markt (nothing could induce me to tell you which one: you’d all be in here in a matter of minutes, for it’s just about the only one which does not employ the “trap-door spider” technique…more of this another time). (Except for Les Beiardiéres, which is another another story). (And I’ve probably mispelled the Bellringers’ Cafe’s name. My French spelling is not great. Never mind.) Anyhow, this is a good place. The place has been in the same family’s management for three generations now — okay, that’s a short time for this neighborhood, but never mind — and the family member who is “on watch” for this shift is eating his dinner (pasta and a glass of red wine) standing up at he sink behind the bar, while fielding calls on the portable phone. So everything’s under control.
Anyway, a question is on my mind, one which often comes up for me when I’m here. Why is it, in this home of some of the strongest beers in the world, that you hardly ever see anyone plastered?
Maybe I’m just too used to public drunkenness. God knows in New York, and in some parts of LA (which is scarier, in its way, since in LA the odds are better than even that the person is going to be driving shortly…), you see drunk people in the street. We get them in Dublin, though the highest concentrations of them by my observation would be in “stag/hen party” areas such as Temple Bar used to be. (There are other such areas in town now, and nothing would induce me to tell you their names, lest websearches make them more popular.) And usually these drunks have had eight or ten or twelve pints of something, to “keep up with” or otherwise impress their mates. The “something” is usually rated at about 5%. (You can tell, in Britain and Ireland, where the stakes lie. “STRONG IN ALCOHOL!” read the ads that are supposed to get you to ante up for the higher-priced imported beers. Meaning, “Value for money! Spend less, get more smashed!”)
But here in Brugge, the beers seem to start at sort of 7-8% and head north from there…to the delectation, and sometimes the confusion, mental and physical, of the visitors. (I remember walking down a small street near my present lodgings and, with Peter, “giving the wall” to a group of truly stocious British businessmen, who were in the aftermath of some meeting at what is now the Crowne Plaza, near the Burg. They came swaggering/staggering down the middle of the cobbled street, their ties flung over their shoulders, (collectively) twenty-four sheets to the wind; and as they went by, one of them muttered to his friends, “Boy, that lager is really sshomething… where can we get some more?” This suggested to those acquainted with Belgian beer that the poor guys had been drinking something with some serious heft to it, say a golden ale like Hoegaarden, and mistaking it for Heineken, or worse still, Bud. …The only possible comment: “Fffffffffeh.” They couldn’t tell the difference? SHEESH. It’s like not knowing dishwashing liquid from nitroglycerin.
But aside from that: the Belgians seem not to have this problem (and I’ve noted the same in parts of Germany and Switzerland), of being publicly plastered all over the landscape. People come into a bar or a cafe and have one, or two beers, or wow, even three… and go away in possession of themselves. Even late at night, you hear no Bacchanalian whooping in the streets such as you get all too used to in parts of the UK (the Midlands in particular) and some neighborhoods I can think of in London.
Is it just the cultural thing? That a lot of people here are taught from childhood not to
see booze as “forbidden fruit”, the thing you get to overindulge in once you hit legal age, but something partaken of with family, or over meals, not routinely or necessarily to excess — and then this tendency slops over into social drinking as well? Or is it the lack of “chucking-out time” at 11 PM or thereabouts, which in the UK and Ireland seems to function as a gun held to some people’s heads, “making” them order vast amounts of drink, and drink it all in half an hour, at which point they have to leave? …
It’s definitely not the price of beer here, anyway. Beer is cheaper here than it is in Dublin (due to the goverment not slamming nearly 40% tax on it. Or it might be more: I forget). And in the UK as well. (Don’t ask me what the tax rate is there, but it’s high enough.)
Maybe I’m just not out late at night in Brugge enough? Maybe. This book is distracting me. I look to the citizens of Brugge to enlighten me. (But out late at night or not, what can’t be hidden is the “result” of late night overdrinking, on the sidewalks. I’ve never seen it here, where I walk early in the morning…and I’ve seen it too often in New York, and in London, and in Dublin, where, early or late, the streetcleaning isn’t what it might be.)
Meanwhile, I’m going to finish my coffee and get out of here. Roshaun is getting crazy again: I don’t know what I’m going to do with that boy. I hate to kill my characters unless they give me cause. But he’s pushing it….
The koi at the Fairmont Miramar
And they’re all at least two feet long.
I’m across the road from the hotel the producers have put me in. This hotel, where I’ve stopped for a nightcap, is the Fairmont Miramar. It’s very plush. But the best thing about it is the outside bar.
Water thunders softly into the surrounding pools in various minor cataracts. There’s some underwater lighting, but not so much that it ruins the mystery of night. Loitering under the surface of the pool are koi. And what koi! Some of them are nearly pure white, with only a golden “crown”. Others are more typical, more patchy, in calico of soot, silver, orange and gold. They laze, drifting, diving, rising. They’re like whales…leisurely, easygoing. A sign says PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE FISH. No kidding! They look like they’d disdain being fed anything smaller than Captain Nemo.
I was sitting under that right-hand umbrella
The last time I saw koi this big was at the front of an old cottage (old by US standards: in Ireland it would hardly register on the age scale) over in Culver City, by the Sony lot. Those koi navigated up and down in a huge waist-high pea-green pond, half-seen, silent, secret. Here the water is much cleaner; doubtless the customers want to see the fish. They’re worth seeing. Here the waterfalls run, and a breeze goes by that smells of clean warm water, and (on the edge of things) the salt smell of the sea.
I wish Peter was here.
Later. Later he will be.
Comments here, in the quoted parts, from a friend:
“So the Pig is one of those characters that just waits on the sidelines for a good book to wander into whether he was meant to or not? 😉 ”
The Pig would say, “That last requires a definition of who’s doing the meaning…”
“No wonder you get writers complaining about their characters running away from them.”
(snort) I wouldn’t be one of those as a rule. I’ve said it before: if a character routinely shows an inclination not to do as they’re told, to the point where their actions threaten to derail a carefully designed plot, I kill them. Plotting is mine, saith Me: I will handle it — and I expect my characters to “understand” that I have their best interests at heart, even though it may not look like it at the time. They start getting disruptive, I return them to the Creativity Pool and tell them to find some other author. We’ve got work to do here.
That said: “sidelines”, in the sports idiom, are exactly where some of my characters are. I usually have one eye on players who haven’t yet entered the game, as it were, and I’m not above one of them sidling over to the manager in the dugout, also as it were, and whispering, “Boss, come on, break the lineup and let me bat after him…” If I can be convinced that it’s a good idea, sure, why not? — as long as the main thrust of the through story is assisted.
I’m not going to add spoiler protection on what follows, except to suggest that people who don’t want to know one way my characters get developed should probably refrain from reading it.
Flash back to June of 2000. Sometimes, when circumstances at home haven’t been quiet enough for writing to get done in a timely way, I take off for a week or so with the portable to be by myself with the work. We have a friend in Switzerland who has a small studio apartment in a remote spot on Mount Rigi, and for a nominal charge to cover heat and power and resort tax and so on, one or the other of us can catch a cheapo flight via Ryanair (with a change to Easyjet) to Zurich, catch the train downcountry and up the mountain, and go hole up there in perfect quiet and just get on with it.
It’s a great spot. There are no roads. There are no cars. (That trip I got to see one of the neighbors having their newly-cut hay brought down the mountain by helicopter.) There is no phone in the apartment (though on top of old Rigi is a massive candy-striped cellphone mast with so many emitters on it that it ought to be possible to receive calls on one’s fillings, and the Nokia connected to the portable [in the days before wireless broadband] made it possible to pick up the e-mail and send off completed files anyway.) It’s absolutely quiet up there, and all the views are wonderful, especially the southern one (see The Wizard’s Dilemma p. 129 for a slightly reworked view of the Alps as seen from the Vierwaldstätersee area). There are no distractions. You can even order your groceries online from Migros (formerly LeShop.ch, though the domain has been retired) and have them delivered to the local post office/train station for you to pick up.
But for stuff like milk and bread and fresh vegetables and so on it’s silly to do that. After a day or three of hard work the urge to get out a little further than the apartment’s terrace gets strong, and besides, you need fresh bread…and Swiss bread is the best in the world…so you grab a shopping bag and walk down the paved footpath to the dorfladen or village shop in Rigi-Kaltbad, about half an hour’s walk down the mountain, and then (if you’re a lazy thing like me) avoid the climb back up by catching the little cogwheel Rigi-Bahn train back to the apartment.
Rigi-Kaltbad is where I was when the Pig ran into me.
I have to write carefully about this, because people are prone to misunderstand it. After forty years of this work, I’ve found that — for me at least — there are modes of creativity which can briefly overlay the normal senses, so that things that genuinely aren’t there except in your imagination seem for a few moments to coexist with things that have what passes for physical existence. It doesn’t qualify as hallucination, since never for more than the initial split second of surprise are you in any doubt that what you’re experiencing is an internally sourced artifact of the making-it-up process. It’s not a state that can be induced or forced. And it’s not invariably useful. Sometimes it’s just funny, your brain making a visual or aural joke to break the tension. Sometimes it turns out to have been helpful after you’ve figured out to what use the data or suggestion can be put. It’s never to be taken as gospel, but it’s always something to pay attention to when it happens, which for me isn’t all that often.
So I’ve done my shopping and got my bread and milk and so on, and it’s going to be about another hour and a half before the train comes through. Scene-setting here: Rigi-Kaltbad is all one steep hill. It’s a small resort — I guess from the name there must have been a little spa up there at one point or another — and has a number of good small hotels. One of them, the Hotel Alpina, is right by the train station, which is literally only a place where the track briefly becomes flat so that when the train stops, people can get in and out without immediately falling either uphill or downhill. The nearest hotel is set at a right angle to the tracks, directly across from the station building, and the front of it, one story up, has a narrow terrace restaurant.
This is the best place to wait for the train, since if you’ve paid for what you’ve had, all you have to do is walk down the outside stairs and walk across the tracks to board. I went up there and had a salad and a couple decis of white wine. Nice day, warm, sun leaning westward, the lesser of the two views showing to the north — Luzern, and the Jura in the distance. When lunch was done I pulled out the pad I always carry with me up there (the laptop was locked up in the apartment) and started to go over the remainder of the Dilemma outline and the beginning notes for the broad “arc” outline for the next three books. There were some details that were evading me.
I kept getting distracted. The day was gorgeous. The surroundings were gorgeous. The restaurant manager, waiting tables, let me alone except to bring me a little more wine and to pause by me briefly to deadhead some petunias in the nearby windowbox hanging over the railing. I stared at the train station for a while, and the building site to the left of it where they had finished tearing down the century-old hotel there and were rebuilding it on the same site, and then I turned my attention to the pad again.
Pad. Pen. Red and white checked tablecloth. Something standing beside the table. White. A pig. A large pig, its back at nearly the same level as the table.
“You never come see me any more,” says the Pig in a voice partaking about equally of Milton Berle and Harlan Ellison. “You don’t even call.”
The next second contains the following thoughts, in more or less this order:
(1) A pig?
(2) Boy, this is a good one.
(3) Why a pig?
(4) Oh, it’s him…
(5) Now isn’t that interesting. I wonder….
“You come here often?” I “say” to the Pig, since I feel it’s rude to treat one of these visitations entirely as if I were making it up. Then I laugh. Dumb line.
He laughs too, and he’s gone. Reality, such as it is, reasserts itself in toto. But I’ve been reminded of something I hadn’t thought about in a while. I think about it. Some ideas start to arrange themselves in configurations they hadn’t been in before. These look like much better configurations than the earlier ones. I start making notes. The train comes. I ignore it. I ignore the next one. And the next. I finally catch the last train up, around the time it gets too dark to write.
When I get home I check my own reference to the Pig, and check the one in Barry Hughart’s BRIDGE OF BIRDS. I do a big old web search and another search at the main library at Trinity, and find hardly anything. Through a mutual acquaintance I get in contact with Hughart (who never made any use of the character beyond the one throwaway reference) to see if he knows anything more about the Pig. He gets back to me in due time and adds a little info from another source besides the Larousse, a large work on Chinese mythology, but there’s really very little data, and nothing to prevent me going in the direction I’m heading already.
So I write the Pig my way.
…In the original posting, what followed would have been spoilery: but Dilemma has been out a long while now. As matters evolved, it became obvious why the Pig got involved (and indeed needed to become involved) in the Wizard’s Dilemma storyline (and not before: and why he was going to step in again, if briefly, during Wizards at War).
…And why we are not done with him yet. But that’s all I’m going to say about the subject at the moment.
Ursula Vernon’s perfect take on the Pig
In Toronto now. I have one more function, tomorrow, and then I’m free! Free! And I’ll see Peter within the next 36 hours….
Meanwhile, a happy hour (hmm, a Happy Hour?) with the noble and excellent Accordion Guy. (aka “When Bloggers Meet: Part 1”). Fortunately the post-7 PM meeting with business connections was briefer than I feared it would be: a steak in haste, more or less. Though the haste was very cordial. I now plan to go up to my room, play with the high-speed Internet access, and eat Cheetos.
Speaking of which, the autumn colors here are getting wonderful — I keep forgetting the contrast between autumn here (or in NY or wherever) and at home, where routinely we don’t get sharp enough frosts to really bring out the colors in the leaves. (Also we seem to be short on maples and the more dramatically-colored trees in Ireland.) Gonna get cold tonight. Bracing…
So now I’m in LA. Last night I felt strangely as if I was in a Randy Newman video, as all the familiar sights poured by the cab on the way from the airport. (Though last night, since my mood was a little somber at being on the wrong continent on Peter’s birthday, maybe the appropriate piece of music to invoke would have been something by Billy Joel: a touch more wistful. And with the coasts changed. “I’m in an LA state of mind….” …and the white and red lights pouring down out of the Sepulveda Pass as the cab took the Wilshire exit off the 405. How many of you recognized that long curve of light in the dark from the UK edition of Door into Fire?…)
Quick retrospective: The return to NY (and to the Regency) for a couple of days was highlighted by Kevin behind the front desk, who asked how Beemer was doing (he remembered her from our mention of her on our last visit). I gave him the blog’s URL…and shortly thereafter was surprised by a call from the banqueting manager, who said that he understood (from the previous blog entry) that I liked pretzels…and sent me up a huge bowlful. This is why we keep staying at the Regency. Thank you, guys! See you next week… (And to further clarify: The Regency really is much better, in my opinion, than the L’Enfant Plaza. The Regency is in the middle of a neighborhood: the L’Enfant Plaza, handsome and plush as it is, is in the middle of a huge office block/development, too removed from the bustle of town life for my tastes. Add to this that the Regency has that comfy, residential-hotel feeling in its bones…and there’s no contest.) (This stuff will of course only have been of interest to those of you who find themselves in hotels a lot on business. The other really good thing about the Regency, of course: broadband!! (There’s a whole area of a General Geekery site devoted to this. I’ll dig up the URL momentarily.)
Now then: LA. The cool thing about the angling going on right now among various production entities as regards the Young Wizards books is that the ante of how the writer is treated has been, shall we say, raised a little. So now I find myself staying in — get this — the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“It reeks of money,” says one of the characters in James McCourt’s Mawrdew Cgzocgwz, “a scent which I do not despise.” Well, no. Neither did Dickens, and neither did Twain, so I suppose a writer is still allowed to think about money, and the places to which it inheres, somewhat. This one’s kind of nice.
Strangely, too, I find that the rooms aren’t overpriced for what you get. There’s good value for money to be had here: surprisingly so. The big garden-terrace bedroom I’ve been plunked down in compares favorably with some mid-to-high-end hotels in Manhattan, but is a time and a half as big for slightly less money, and the bar on the “luxe level” has been considerably raised. (Pace to our buddies and associates at the Regency: there’s a lot more room for LA hotel “real estate” to spread out in than there is in Manhattan.) Here I have a shower as big as my bathroom at home, a bathroom as big as my living room, and a bedroom/living area the size of the whole lower floor of my house…along with a private dining area on the upper level of the terrace, and a lounge area on the lower level. As one of my editors would say, “Sweet.” Philips flat-screen TV (the baby brother of the one P. and I have at home), stereo CD/DVD/all the rest of it, various other amenities…I could get used to this.
And you know what? A double at Motel 6 would be better, as long as it had Peter in it. Does this sound ridiculously maudlin? I don’t care. I miss him. It’s his birthday, and I’m here, and he’s there. ARRRRRGGHHHH! And I miss the cats too. I was listening to some people at the next table talking about their kitty’s diet problems and I was instantly homesick for Beemer. Ai, alas!
That said, there’s no moral virtue in refusing to enjoy the brier patch into which cruel Fate has thrown me. I will therefore sit here in the Polo Lounge and blog. And damn’d be he that first cries Hold, enough! (Actually, a lot of the people here are staring in poorly-disguised tech lust at Ryoh-Ohki, which suits me fine. Technogeeks Rule!)
Believe it or not, brunch here features a mariachi band. This strikes me as so wildly out of character for the place that I can’t wait to see it.
So…back home once more.
As we left LA, Peter gave up the silver rental Jag with some regret and considerable affection. He’d always wanted to drive one: now he’s had his chance (and interestingly still holds that the Mercedes we rented to do some errands in a few months ago was a nicer car). The most useful thing about that car, though, was the NeverLost GPS system. It couldn’t cure the LA traffic, but it sure took the strain out of getting to all those meetings.
After a night in the airport hotel (not terribly inspiring: the Crowne Plaza there is just a hopped-up Holiday Inn, not nearly as nice as the Crowne Plaza in Bruges…), we headed for NYC again. To me there always seems to be a change of rhythm on these homeward legs — a little more frenetic, a little less satisfying — and when (as usual on trips to the US) the last leg involves NY, it acquires a somewhat bittersweet quality, as we leave what remains (Zurich and Basel notwithstanding) my favorite city on Earth.
We didn’t do the final leg of shopping that we’d been envisioning. Peter was having too much fun sleeping in, after a long week of doing all the driving, and I spent Sunday and about half of Monday doing final work on the roughs for A Wizard Alone, handling some final queries and adding some afterthought material. We had a late and very satisfying dinner with that estimable editor Michael Stearns on Sunday night, saw him briefly again on Monday to hand off the roughs, and then headed for the airport. My enduring memory of NY on this trip: the flags, flags everywhere… It reminded me of Ireland during the World Cup fever, but obviously with a more sober note to it. …Yet there seemed to me to be something else in the air, too: a sense of, “You may kill us, but damned if we’re gonna stop doing what we do for you.” It feels as if NY has learned a little of the Belfast spirit: even before the shift toward peace, those people just were not going to stop partying because there was a possibility they might get blown up at any moment. Possibly a good way to handle matters, since the bomb that is entropy is going to go off under all our butts sooner or later, no matter how safe we try to be. But NY is coming out of shock, I think. I knew it would.
The flight home was uneventful except for some choppy air secondary to thunderstorms off the East Coast. We were in Dublin by 8 AM, neither of us feeling too horrible: back home by 10, after picking up another rental and swinging by our local post office. Everything seems to have weathered our absence without too much trouble. The fishpond fish are all OK, though the pond’s kind of weedy; the rockery seems not to have suffered too much from slugs while were gone. The rosebush on Lilith’s grave / Kasha’s memorial, which had the leaves eaten off it twice by sheep, has leafed out again and has flowers coming (though the buds are covered with aphids, and I don’t know where the bug spray is: I have a feeling I’m going to wind up spraying them with garlic water or something).
The one thing that did go wrong while we were gone seems, on closer inspection, as if it may not be such a problem after all. This far down in the country we get some pretty emphatic power spikes sometimes, and occasionally one is violent enough to trip the circuitbreakers in the house. Naturally this had to happen while we were gone, and our landlord, on discovering it, also discovered that he couldn’t find his set of our housekeys: we had to FedEx him ours so he could get in and turn on the power again. We had assumed that everything in the fridge and freezer would be a loss, since we weren’t sure how long the power had been off when the landlord discovered the problem, and it took nearly a week from the discovery to his getting our housekeys and being able to do something. There was some moaning about the freezer in particular (My Swiss grilling and braising sausages! Peter’s homegrown habaneros…!) But on returning we found that the food shows no sign of having defrosted. The freezer (a Bosch “larder freezer”) does indeed have insulation guaranteed to keep food frozen for 72 hours after a power failure, assuming the door’s not opened. It looks as if it may have kept the food frozen a lot longer than that…and if this turns out to be the case, boyoboy, do those people have my loyalty from now on. We’ll be checking the food more carefully over the next couple of days to see if our suspicions are right.
So after a day off, we get back to what passes for routine around here. Tonight, Mary the Cat Lady brings the kitties home. In a few days, after Squeak and Goodman have settled in again, we bring the new kitten, Beemer, home at last (which event promises to open a whole new chapter in the local cat “soap opera”). Tomorrow there are premises due in LA for a couple of animated scripts, and I now have to get back to finishing the third Rihannsu book and The Door Into Starlight. After that, work begins on Wizards’ Holiday, and continues on the feature screenplay, “Puss”. We also get to take down the old concrete-block fishpond and install a new in-ground one.
Business as usual…
But right now I’m still a little stiff from the flight. Time to go take an aspirin and have some ramen, then put my feet up and watch Cartoon Network for a while. And “Six Feet Under” is on tonight, and “West Wing” tomorrow. Or is it the other way around? I forget.
It’s nice to be home…
[tags]Jaguar, Mercedes, NeverLost, GPS, Crowne Plaza, Bosch, freezer, FedEx, Rihannsu[/tags]