(sigh) No blizzard. They promised us a blizzard…and all we’re likely to get now is snow showers. Feh.
This one ought to go in the “Dumb Perp Stories” section under “Self-Referential Perpetrations”: Candy trail leads to suspect
From CBC Radio’s Dead Dog Cafe: Get your own Indian name. (“Red Indian”, as Peter would say. None of your Native [North] American stuff here.)
It turns me into “Celia Giggling Pickle”. It turns Peter into “Frederick Sticky Bunny”. Heaven only knows what it’ll do to you.
Meanwhile, Irish weather is taking a turn for the worse (depending on how you define “worse”). It’s going to snow! And about time…
I didn’t realize that this wonderful document could be found online. It’s an interesting read at any time (and sometimes a little disturbing…), but at the year’s turn, as the Sun starts slowly making its way back, somehow Balthasar’s maxims seem more interesting to me than usual — invoking thoughts of what went wrong this past year, hopes of what might be made to go right instead in the year to come…
We’re on our way down to our favorite of the two little pubs in the nearest village, with a double recipe of Miss Norma’s killer eggnog in tow, to see the New Year in with our neighbors. To all of you who read this (and those of you who don’t. If a blessing falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, is it still a blessing?…), our heartfelt wishes for a good 2003.
Girl captures, hogties intruder
Heh heh.
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I’m gearing up for an online chat with the troops from the Young Wizards website’s discussion forum this evening (7 PM EST if you feel like turning up: you’re going to have to register for the forums first, though, so the sysadmin can send you a username and password. Whatever…) …and so have kicked off work early and have been spending the evening, for the refreshment of my soul, cruising other people’s blogs. (Not without having this process interrupted occasionally by low-yield nuclear kittens.)
…but have run into a happy series of finds which constitute Blog Serendipity. Have you ever had this happen? Where the things you hit when “randomly” using NextBlog (or an equivalent) nonetheless are things exactly suited to your mood, things that make you laugh till you cry, or else things that are not just useful to you, but things you needed to know? I’ve had this happen in libraries often enough: I would go there to do research, but also (as a matter of duty, something I do at intervals) to read something which is not something I think I need, something which at first sight seems like it should bore me to tears — but which turns out (usually within no more than a matter of days or weeks) to have been “put into my hands” by…let’s smile for a moment and call Her “A kindly Providence”.
Had a big dose of that tonight. In some order or other:
How super it is to be able to meet all these people (at the electronic remove) and get (however far) into their heads.
…O Net, I cannot get thee close enough. Or words to that effect.
In the “I’m Having A Short Fuse Day” department: I’m getting really tired of the way the announcers on Cartoon Network UK pronounce “Samurai”. Or mispronounce it. (mutter)
Oh well. If this is as bad as things get, I should count myself lucky. At least work is getting done (writing on The Empty Chair and Wizards’ Holiday, and the “Puss” screenplay). Baked rye bread, netted out the fishpond, got the smaller kitten, Bubble, down from the holly tree (twice); tried out the new e-bike (boy, is that thing heavy…), installed some new software in the Clie, found an online source for Myers “Planters Punch” rum (for the annual New Year’s eggnog extravanganza down at the local pub).
The other event of note is that it hasn’t rained for a whole twenty-four hours. Well, it hasn’t rained here. But the way it’s been lately, this is nearly miraculous. Cold dry frosty weather (as we had this morning) seems like a boon from heaven. I guess it’s too much to expect to hope that it might snow…
The house is in bedlam at the moment. The measuring-every-window-for-venetian-blinds people are coming tomorrow: the kitchen floor is littered with beech leaves blown in every time the door opens, and the living room is littered with sleeping kittens and discarded plot elements. There are wizards and Rihannsu all over the place (virtually speaking). My blogging, indeed my normal websurfing activities, are much curtailed at the moment. But every now and then something seeps through that I don’t mind seeing. The subtitle of this item (which showed up first in Google) was “Fantasy, film tie-ins and farts sell big to kids”. At least the farting isn’t being attributed to me…
A black Captain America. Well, why the heck not? We don’t have enough black superheroes, if you ask me.
Meanwhile, in other news: Runaway black hole headed our way! You think CNN could have been a little more alarmist when they titled that story? Sheesh.
(sigh) Another of those “wait five minutes” days, as far as the weather’s concerned. Nothing much to do this morning but some “computer tidying”. Moving images around, trying to get the JPGs and GIFs in one place where I can find everything for a change. It’s getting to be time to do the holiday cards, and I’m looking for that picture of the holly with the frost on it. I have a couple of hours to blow on this before it’s time to go down to the grocery store and get more cat food… Ah, the wild mad glamorous excitement of a writer’s life. (snort)
So, a report on the last entry’s “to do” list.
- Medically-oriented readers: What the heck has happened to chlortetracycline as a veterinary drug? Or even oxytetracycline? When I was still working in nursing, you couldn’t spit without hitting the stuff. Granted, that was twenty-five years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth. But now it’s hard to find. It seems to have been largely superseded by newer variants like doxycycline…but why? Have the bugs become resistant to it, or has it just fallen out of fashion with the drug company sales reps? My vet wants it because it was very good at knocking down chlamydia-based infections. But now it can’t be found. Mutter, mutter…
- The kitchen is less messy, but only marginally so. Matters have been complicated by some of the cat toys I brought home from the US (i.e., the Flashy Rolly Balls: The Electronically-Squeaky Mouse). Every time you tidy something, the cats find a way to knock it sideways / over / down again.
- Work? What work?
- Satellite broadband info is coming in from all directions, from the companies involved in doing installation in our area. Reactions have varied from “You want HOW much??” to “Hey, that’s not bad…wait a minute, there’s a download cap here…”
- At least the haircut has been handled.
- Wait a minute, I just got home. What the heck am I doing in Switzerland again?
(sigh) It happens. It was a business thing: it came up suddenly: and Peter, that model of forbearance, gave me 20K of his Swiss(air) miles to get me a free ticket. Greater Love Hath No Hubby than He Who Giveth His Wife his Airmiles. So here I am, in Basel, business done, and one clear day left me to run amuck about the countryside on the SBB (that’s the Swiss National Railways to you) before I have to go home Saturday morning.
This is a good time to be in Basel. For one thing, (the soccer team) FC Basel chucked Liverpool FC out of the Championship League competition the other night. It was a tense game, but Liverpool had to win the game to advance to the next level, and all Basel had to to was draw. They drew, 3-3, and shortly thereafter the city erupted in general craziness. The game was a home game for Basel. The team took the tram into the center city after their win (the police gave the team tram a motorcycle escort. There’s an image that may strain your brain…) and shortly thereafter the team greeted the city from the third-floor balcony of the City Casino. And I mean, They Greeted The City…or a significant fraction of it…because there were about fifty thousand FCB fans surrounding the Casino in Baerfusserplatz (see here for Real-format footage from TeleBasel), waving scarves and singing and generally celebrating an astonishing turn of events.
So this place has been in party mode for a couple of nights now.
As well, dinner tonight was at our old friend Chefi’s. “Chefi” is his title in dialect, not his name. He’s the chef at one of the local restaurants, officially a beerhall — the “”brewery tap” for one of the local breweries, Warteck. But you would be lucky to eat food this good in many another strictly restaurant-style restaurant. Chefi is kind of a wild and crazy guy. Not only does he cook like an angel, but every year he spends thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of francs of his own money, turning his restaurant into the venue for a Christmas show the likes of which I guarantee you’ve never seen (unless you’re a Basler).
The pedestrian parts of the show feature things like dry-ice smoke, angels (with turn signals) that fly backwards, highwire-bicycling Santas, Christmas model railways with gesticulating puppets, and other minor entertainments. But three times a night the “main show” runs. This changes every year, and tends to be indescribable except in the most general terms. The first one of these I ever saw featured an audio-animatronic Elvis singing “Blue Christmas” while backed up by a small grove of singing Christmas trees. (I wish I had video of that, but I don’t. I do have some video of last year’s show, featuring “Dean Martin”, “James Brown” and “Edith Piaf”, which I’ll post here when I’ve converted it.)
I’ve never been able to pry any better reason out of Chefi for why he does this than “I like it: it’s fun.” This year, though, he seems to have gone unusually far over the top. Last night he told me that the show was going to feature Switzerland’s first indoor fireworks display. He said he’d engaged the same company who did the centenary display for the Eiffel Tower. “There will be a waterfall of fire inside the restaurant,” he said. “Three times a night.”
I’d pay money to go see that, and as it happens, no one has to pay any money over the price of their dinner (or just a beer: Chefi’s place is a true lokal, a baiz, as the local dialect has it, where you’re as welcome to linger over a single drink or a coffee as you are to pig out on a multicourse meal. ( — I have no idea about the etymology of the word baiz, by the way. From context, it means a neighborhood place, comprising but not exactly equalling a bar, a cafe, and/or a bistro: there is a quality about the word that can also be found in the US English slang term “joint”, though I don’t think there are many “joints” that have twenty-thousand dollar sound systems in them.)
The sound system came briefly into play last night when I came in. Chefi knows that Peter and I live at something of a distance, and he doesn’t wait to show off whatever’s new: though he would not run the show for me — he said it was “too early”, but I suspect that there may still be some work being done on it. However, he wasn’t above doing something which has always delighted Peter: playing, very loud, the sound of a helicopter going overhead, low. The 5.1-or-much-better system reproduces it most authentically. Everybody else in the place looked up at the ceiling, wondering what the heck was going on. They wondered even more when a rooster crowed very loudly right above where I was sitting. Not much I could do at that point but raise my wineglass in the general direction of the kitchen, where Chefi’s wife Nicole was grinning out at me, waiting for the reaction.
A little later (during a lull in the cooking) Chefi came out and we exchanged some gossip. After many previous meetings over lunch or dinner where he and Peter and I discussed food and cooking at length, Chefi asked me and Peter to come out and cook St. Patrick’s Day dinner for him and a select group of twelve or fifteen friends. This we’ll probably wind up doing with (heaven help us) local media in attendance , as Radio Basilisk across the street has expressed interest in documenting what kind of food is cooked on The Day That’s In It by Irish science fiction writers. (Apparently the station manager is one of the people we’re going to be feeding.)
So Chefi and I spent about twenty minutes discussing the menu, which includes such things as wild alder-smoked Irish salmon with key lime butter and brown bread, Bushmills-flambeed Wicklow lamb with three champs (green onion, smoked bacon, saffron) on a rosemary jus, and a choice of a board of the best Irish cheeses, (Gubbeen, Cashel Blue, Cashel White, Milleens, Durrus, Carrigaline, Lavistown, Cratloe Hills Gold, etc…) or that infamous dessert “Scharfe Tricolor” (coconut ice cream on a kiwi coulis, with Swift-style [the poet, not the canning company…] butter-grilled pineapple and a sweet Habanero syrup). And then a selection of high-end whiskies, fraughan mead and spiced comfits for the cognoscenti.
The menu seems to have passed muster. Nothing left to do now but work out logistics…. Chefi headed back to the kitchen as the second wave of diners came in . When I heard a rumble, I thought maybe it was going to be the helicopter again, but it turned out to be just a tram going by. But the helicopters will come soon enough. Chefi will start running The Show next weekend.
We’re having one of those Irish Weather mornings: by this I mean, you wait five minutes and the weather does something else. This morning has been unusually varied even by local standards. Got up to feed the kittens (who were conducting a series of Kitten Crash Tests on the bed, using me and Peter as crash barriers), and it was cloudy out, a little breezy, nothing unusual. By the time they and Mr. Squeak and Goodman were fed, the sun was out. Fifteen minutes later, a series of light showers started to walk through the area. Within half an hour, it hailed, hard. Now it looks like it’s clearing again…for the moment.
But the fishpond is full of leaves again. (sigh) Across from our front yard, in the Demesne (that’s the huge tract of land owned by the local Rich Guy), in a curve parallelling the wall between the Demesne and the road, are five beautiful beech trees, each at least sixty or seventy feet tall. They are shapely, gorgeous things…and this time of year, as their leaves go brown or golden, I have to put screen over the fishpond, because every morning, the surface of the water is covered by those lovely golden-brown leaves, which rapidly rot and turn the water into something very like tea. Not good for the fish. The problem at the moment is that we haven’t yet had time to make a screen-frame for the new pond, and the old screening won’t fit it (this one is an irregularly shaped shell: the old pond was rectangular, built out of cinderblocks with a liner inside). Yesterday I spent about half an hour netting the last couple of days’ leaves out of the pond; but after that last hail shower this morning, there’s suddenly what would normally have been about a week’s worth of leaves in there. One more thing to deal with, besides:
- The laundry.
- Tidying the kitchen, which as usual after we come back from a trip has turned into a morass of Stuff That Hasn’t Made It Upstairs Yet.
- Getting together the trip receipts and boarding passes and ticket stubs and so forth, so that (among other things) I can go online and claim the “flight legs” that haven’t yet shown up on my Continental OnePass account. (Today’s vexed question in this regard: I was ticketed to fly back to Europe on KLM, one of Continental’s partners. But the KLM Toronto-Amsterdam flight was canceled due to bad weather, and I got flown home on Air France instead, to Paris. So do I still get my miles? Boy, I hope so, or I’m not gonna make Elite status this year.)
- Doing some work on the outline for Wizard’s Holiday.
- Doing some work on The Empty Chair, the final Rihannsu book.
- Calling the people up in Dublin about getting the satellite broadband installed.
- Calling John the Vet to find out the generic name of the antibiotic he’s trying to get for the cats, since both of the kittens and Mr. Goodman seem to have eye infections of varying seriousness at the moment — infections which John is sure are all caused by a chlamydia of some kind. The cats will probably keep reinfecting one another until the infection is stomped out in all of them. John has been having trouble tracking down the specific anti-chlamydic agent that he’s looking for, and it’s possible one of the online sources either in the UK or the US will have it.
- Extending the rental on the Hertz rent-a-car for another week.
- Installing the new Roland PC-300 keyboard and the sequencing software. (And R’ing the F’ing manuals.)
- Finding out where the jeans are that I ordered from IC3D in September.
- Making an appointment to get my hair cut, since there wasn’t time to see my usual lady before I left on the tour, and the guy in the Philadelphia Marriott did his best, but it wasn’t as good a job as Nathalie does.
- And various other things…
In (I think it was) What Do You Say After You Say Hello, the adult or professional textbook in transactional analysis from which Eric Berne’s less talented disciples extracted such inferior works as I’m OK, You’re OK, Berne describes two phenomena which he christens “reachback” and “afterburn”. “Reachback” is the period before you go on a trip, during which that trip’s concerns — reservations, planning, packing, other preparation — start interfering with the conduct of your daily life. “Afterburn” is the period after a trip during which the trip’s aftereffects — physical weariness, built-up paperwork, getting unpacked and getting everything sorted back into the usual places — continue to interfere with your daily life. The point at which you’re in real trouble, Berne thinks, is when you get into a place where the reachback and the afterburn overlap.
This isn’t that, for me…yet. But the holiday season is coming. There is the growing possibility of another trip to the US in early December. And Wizard’s Holiday is due to be on Michael Stearns’ desk the week before Christmas.
Later this week, this probably won’t seem so grim, but right now, it makes me just want to go net out the fishpond. Fortunately, the sky is now blue and the sun is shining.
For the next few minutes, anyway…
In the “So Relieved To Hear It” department:
From the Amazon.com page regarding “Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses”:
“Customers who shopped for this item also wear: