Are We Not Handymen?

"Measure twice, cut once; that is the Law."

--H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Mitersaw

I've taken several weeks off work to--

--go to WorldCon in LA? Nope, sorry, but we stopped going to the really big conventions years ago. A WesterCon or an occasional World Fantasy Con is about the largest we make it to nowadays, and not many of those. The big conventions stopped being fun; WorldCon is too big, too hectic, too crowded, and too expensive

No, I've taken time off work to get some household projects that have been on The List for years finally done. The major one of which is refurbishing my office; it's the next-to-last room in the house that still has the original paint (icky flat off-white) and carpeting (a hideous eyeball-searing red shag; what were the previous owners thinking?) from when we moved into this house twenty-six years ago. (The master bedroom, which had actually been redone fairly tastefully shortly before we bought the house, is scheduled for a re-do next year.)

I'm repainting the office with a bright-white semi-gloss, replacing the carpeting with vinyl tile, and I'll be installing shelving tracks and brackets along the studs in one wall so shelves can be set up and reconfigured as needed. And probably some new curtains or blinds.

Part of the reason for doing this now is that since I'm still working -- and getting far too many overtime hours -- we have a lot more discretionary income to do this sort of household upgrade than we'd have when I retire in three or four years. The mortgage will be paid off by then, but I'll only be getting about two-thirds of my current base income for retirement and none of the overtime pay; doable, but tighter than we live now. Hopefully, once I retire, I'll be able to do more writing and supplement our income that way; I may not ever make a full income from writing, but I'm good enough that a significant portion of what I write ends up selling, and once in a while even ends up selling for a significant sum. (Thank you, Paramount.)

Conservatism, Sex, Reality and TV Guide

Some recent issues of TV Guide have included material that annoyed me.

In the 8/14/06 issue, columnist Rochell D. Thomas wrote:

Does Gene Simmons' nonwife Shannon Tweed make it harder for the rest of us?

Shannon and the Kiss bass player (aka the guy with the Tongue) have been "happily unmarried" for 23 years. On the one hand, "Yea, them!" The stars of Gene Simmons Family Jewels seem content. They've got two well-adjusted teens, a nice house, etc. But on the other hand: "What the bleep?" Shannon has made it no secret that she wants -- and has always wanted -- to get hitched. Their kids hope they'll tie the knot. Even Gene's mother wants him to make an honest woman out of the Playboy centerfold. But apparently the self-called "rock god" refuses because he doesn't want to have to lie about his, ahem, extracurricular activities. And see, that's right there what freaks me out. Shannon lets the man dabble with other dames as long as he comes home to her. As if that's all that matters. It sets a bad precedent!"

Then, in the 8/28/06 issue, a reader's letter from Karan Ann DeLuca says:

Shame on him for making the married/unmarried distinction to justify not having to lie about his dalliances. And shame on his girlfriend for accepting that. Because if she really wants to be monogamously hitched, after 23 years, there is no difference!

Where to start on this?

Every relationship, married or unmarried, between lovers, spouses, or just two people dating, goes thru a dance of discovery and negotiation. There are "default" modes of relationships, and the one for marriage is usually "monogamous, for life".

But a default mode isn't set in stone; it's not the only option. And, as divorce rates and LifeTime tv-movies repeatedly show, even people who declare their commitment to monogamy don't always keep that commitment.

There's a bell curve for everything, and there's one for fidelity in relationships, too. Most marriages/relationships pretty much fall under that "monogamous" definition.

But not everyone wants that. Not everyone is comfortable with that. Not everyone is sure that they'll be able to keep such a commitment. Not everyone feels that "sexual exclusiveness" is THE most important facet of a relationship.

And if two people are honest with each other, and open about their feelings regarding sex and faithfulness, those feelings will become part of that "dance and negotiation". And they'll modify that default mode to acomodate those feelings. Or not, if they're too far apart on their attitudes and beliefs. (And if that's the case, it's probably best that they not try to become a couple.)

Back about, oh, fifteen years ago, during a local convention, Hilde and I went out to dinner with one of the writers attending the con. During the dinner, the writer mentioned that his impression of Phoenix fandom was that it was "pretty straight-laced". Hilde and I had to smile at that, because probably about 25% of the couples/spouses we knew had open relationships or marriages to one degree or another.

(I wondered at the time if the writer's choice of topic was his way of putting out a feeler to see if Hilde was available or interested. Umm, he was a very interesting dinner companion.)

There are degrees of "open": Some of our friends really were, in deed, monogamous and not seeking other lovers or relationships, but they'd discussed the issue and agreed that if it ever did happen that one or the other of them ended up in bed with someone else, it wouldn't be a marriage-breaker. Some had a "don't ask, don't tell" agreement with each other. Some people "made love" to each other, but had "friendly sex" with some of their close friends. Some found themselves ending up in polyamourous relationships with others. (One friend of ours, part of a 3-person poly group, told us that the nice thing about threesomes was that there was always someone available to run the video camera.)

And most of these people were, in public, "normal". With very few exceptions, they didn't make a public proclamation that their relationships were "custom", rather than "default".

Science fiction fandom tends to be a bit more liberated and open to alternative lifestyles, so the 25% figure I mentioned is probably higher than in the general populace. But the guess I would hazard to make is that probably around 10% of marriages/relationships at large have private agreements that occasionally having sex with other people isn't that big of a deal.

(Sometimes, though, it is, despite best intentions. When that 3-person poly group I mentioned above broke up, it broke up very publically, and very VERY ugly. But I'd still have to say that overall the sexually-open relationships I've known of have tended to be more stable and long-lasting than the couples who've promised faithfulness to each other in public, and cheated on each other in private. Like Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the sex wasn't the big deal, the lying about the sex was the big deal.)

That "harder for the rest of us" part of Thomas' TV Guide column is particularly annoying. Sorry, Rochelle, but the rest of the world is not going to believe what you believe, act like you want to act, have the relationship or marriage that you want to have, just to make it easier for you to get what you want. Deal with it.

Pretty Pictures

A striking photo-montage:

Crow Fight


And a spectacular take on a usually cliched subject:

Bald Eagle

Shatner Roast: 350 Degree Oven, Baste Frequently With Ego Sauce

The William Shatner Roast will be on television later tonight. The occasion moves me to tell my favorite William Shatner story; this is one of those stories that, if it isn't true, ought to be:


Everyone knows that Bill Shatner has, as he's gotten older, had some problems with his weight.

Part of this was because of a habit of sneaking midnight snacks from the refrigerator. So his wife, as a motivational aid, got ahold of some of the slash fanfic-zines published by some of the more uninhibited Star Trek fans, unstapled them, and removed some of the more explicit illustrations from them.

That night, Shatner snuck downstairs to raid the refrigerator again. When he turned on the light, there, taped to the refrigerator, was a double-page drawing of himself:

Young, slim, lean, totally nude, and spectacularly endowed.

Shatner stared at the drawing for a long moment. Then, he turned his head and shouted back up the stairs:

"Honey, do we have any bananas in the house?"

A Shocking Display of Utter Geekitude

I've been watching the Sci Fi Channel's reality series Who Wants To Be A Superhero? since it premiered earlier this summer.

The premise is that participants create a superhero character and portray that character themselves during the course of the show; the payoff is that the last surviving superhero will have a professional (Dark Horse Comics) comic book produced about their character, written by Stan Lee. Participants are eliminated in each episode via tests and trials for the proper characteristics of a superhero: helpfulness, courage, self-sacrifice, honesty, etc. The judge for the elimination process is Lee.

This is not a great reality series; I'd like to see more of the personal interactions between participants (a la The Real World) when they're not being tested; the editing is rather lacklustre and the seams show at times.

But it's been interesting, particularly to someone who's been reading comics on a fairly regular basis since childhood, daydreamed about having superpowers himself, and when he got older and started writing fiction, made a few attempts toward breaking into actual comic-writing.

(In fact, the very first real story I wrote, when I was fourteen, was a superhero story. Actually, more of a supervillain story: The character was a scientist who was repeatedly turned down for research money, had to do his experiments on the cheap, and had them blow up in his face as a result. Good news: the chemical explosion gave him superpowers; bad news: they also drove him insane and turned him into a compulsive bank robber. Even back then, I tried to put a twist into my fiction.)

When I saw the announcement of the show earlier this year, my first thought was "No way would -I- ever dress up in a costume and let myself be filmed wearing it for weeks." Writing about superheroes is one thing; dressing up like one for more than a convention masquerade or the like is another.

And, if I created a superhero character that was going to have an actual comic produced around the idea, I wouldn't want it to be written by Stan Lee. I'd want to write it myself, dammit!!

So I had no urge to participate in the show. But it's been interesting to watch. It's coming close to the end of its run, and only three superheroes are left: Major Victory, Feedback, and Fat Momma.

I'm going to predict that Feedback will the the final winner of the series, barring some boneheaded error during the remaining trials.

The reason I say this is that in terms of character (courage, honesty, etc), the remaining participants are on about equal footing. So I think the final choice will be determined by one question: Which superhero will be the most interesting hero for Stan Lee to write a comic about?

Major Victory is a hero out of the Big Strong Doofus school of superheroes. (Superman, Captain Marvel, etc.) Admirable, but... in the end... boring.

Fat Momma is a "novelty" superhero, with a limited cause of action. (She defends the "differently sized".) Again, admirable, but not that interesting as a character.

Until last week's episode, I'd have said the same thing about Feedback. But in that episode, we learned that Feedback's real-life father had committed suicide during Feedback's childhood. (And that, in part, was why Feedback became a heavy-duty comic fan, seeking a better, more understandable world there.)

And that was the point at which Feedback became an interesting character, one that a writer would want to write about. His father's suicide, like Uncle Ben's death in Spiderman, could be the starting point for the comic book's origin and motivation.

So I'm calling Feedback to be the winner of the series.

Catblogging -- Special COTD Editon

A few days ago on Cat Of The Day, the featured feline was one Memo, from Chile.

Besides being a strikingly handsome black cat, the accompanying text reported something unusual about Memo: returning from an outside foray, he had returned to his owners' doorstep carrying a young abandoned kitten in his mouth.

Most of us have heard of mother cats going to extrardinary lengths to rescue their own imperiled kittens (see Scarlett Saves Her Kittens), or of nursing cats accepting orphaned kittens from another litter... but this is the first time where I have ever heard of a male cat rescuing a kitten.

(Among feral cats, at least, the more usual reaction would be for a tom to attack and/or kill kittens not from its pack.)

PATCO 1981: A Postal Perspective

Over at Firedoglake, there's an interesting post on the 25th anniversary of the 1981 PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike.

When that strike occurred, then-President Ronald Reagan fired all 11,000 air traffic controllers. They were temporarily replaced with military ATCs (I believe some of the striking ATCs who belonged to National Guard units actually got called to duty and ordered to replace themselves), and "permanent replacements" were hired and rushed into expedited training (which sounds a lot better than "crash course", in this context).

This was the first, and most drastic, attack on unions by Reagan's right-wing administration. As the Firedoglake article points out, the number of strikes by organized labor dropped drastically afterwards, and union membership in general has also dropped dramatically. The successful firing of the PATCO members also set the groundwork for rollbacks on benefits (pay, pensions, hours, insurance, virtually every benefit labor had gained in previous years has come under strong attack since PATCO).

The firing was also a high-risk gamble by Reagan's administration; they were gambling that they'd be able to get replacement workers trained and in place without having an air disaster take place in the interim. They won that gamble. But boy, I (and a lot of other members of the public) was aghast when the PATCO members were fired and suddenly air traffic was in the hands of (considerably fewer) military ATCs, and then in the hands of quickly trained replacements; I could scarcely believe that Reagan and company could place so many innocent travellers at such high risk.

Thinking back on it now, I believe that Reagan and his chorts saw the action against PATCO as, literally, an act of war. The PATCO firing was their own, earlier, version of the "Shock & Awe" attacks on Baghdad at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And if there had been an airliner crash, if there had been hundreds of people killed because of an error by the replacement ATCs... I think the Reagan administration, while publically regretting the loss, would have simply considered hundreds of dead Americans as "collateral damage" in their war to "protect American business interests".

As it happened, the year 1981 was also the year in which the NALC's (National Association of Letter Carriers) contract with the Postal Service had, several months before the PATCO strike, come up for renegotiation.

It was a very tense period for letter carriers. The talks between the NALC and management were light in conversation and compromise, heavy in confrontation. And the general consensus among letter carriers seemed to be that a strike would have to take place before management would bend. The day before the current contract expired, the word being passed around amongst employees was that a call to strike would almost certainly be issued by the NALC the next morning.

I was highly anxious about the prospect of a strike. I wasn't a union member back then. And I didn't believe that a strike was, quite, necessary yet. I thought that the union and management should issue a temporary -- for a month, or a week, or even just a few days -- extension on the current contract, and keep talking. Keep talking, until an absolute stonewall impasse had been reached. Then, and only then, could I see a strike being justified.

And if I thought that a strikecall was not justified... then I couldn't see myself making any other choice than to cross the picket line if that strike were called.

When I mentioned this to a couple of the other employees, they were aghast. I was warned that my car's tires would be slashed, that my wife and son would receive obscene phone calls, that if I was ever in the wrong place alone I might be badly beaten.

(None of this was told to me as if the teller would be the person doing all these things. A sort of amorphous "They" would be the people doing all these horrible things. But this sort of intimidation, and other reports of corruption and violence in unions that I'd seen in the news for years, was one of the major reasons I hadn't felt comfortable joining the union.)(And didn't, until more than ten years later, in large part because of those intimidating remarks made to me in 1981. And when I finally did join the union, it wasn't so much that the union had cleaned up its act, but that management had grown so much worse in the intervening years.)

So I didn't sleep very well that night. But woke up to the clock-radio announcing the news that a tentative agreement on a new postal contract had been reached at the last minute (literally, at sunrise) after all-night talks, and that there would be no strike. *whew*

But if a strike by letter carriers had occurred that year... I think it would have been the NALC, rather than PATCO, that would have been made an example of, with thousands of letter carriers, rather than air traffic controllers, being fired and replaced. I think Reagan was looking for a union to destroy, and it was just luck that letter carriers dodged that bullet, with PATCO taking it instead, a few months later.

Answer: About Two Friggin' Hours

Question: How long does it take to clean up about two gallons of liquid laundry detergent off a laundry room floor, sufficiently that the floor doesn't act like a Slip'N'Slide?

Threat Levels

In the wake of the recent British roundup of suspects in an apparent plot to smuggle explosives onto airplanes, the US Department of Homeland Security brushed off its "threat level" color code and declared Red, its highest level.

At the same time, it was reported that individuals in the Bush administration and other Republicans welcomed the news of the plot's foiling, not because suspected terrorists were behind bars and lives had potentially been saved, but because the news could be used to Republican political advantage in campaigns for the upcoming midterm elections.

Can I make a suggestion here? Rather than referring to the DHS' categories as "threat levels", let's call them what they really are: "anxiety levels".

Because the Bush White House, and the Republicans as a whole, want the American public to be anxious, they want us to be afraid, they want us to live in fear.

Because the more anxious, fearful, and afraid the public is, the more inclined they'll be to not vote for a change in elected officials come November.

Eddings' Heir Apparent, Alas

In spite of David Eddings' popularity, I never read more than a portion of the first Mallorean book.

What kept me from continuing wasn't the story itself, but several stylistic tics of Eddings' writing that kept jarring me out of the actual story. In Eddings' case, it was running across repeated instances of starting a paragraph with "However," or "Unfortunately,". These were not only unnecessary words, but they were the author's voice intruding on the story.

It was sort of like going to a movie, only to have the rude kid sitting behind you keep kicking the back of your seat. After about forty or fifty pages of the first Eddings book, I put it down and never went back to the series again.

I have found the new Eddings, and the magic word this time around is "Now".

p.17: "Now Lord Hasha turned his attention toward me"
p.19: "Now Maram's knuckles grew white around his bow"
p.21: "Now Lord Hasha swallowed the last of his beer"
p.25: "Now both Lord Hasha and Asaru -- and Joshu Kadar as well -- looked at me in amazement"
p.38: "Now Asaru examined the arrow"
p.40: "Now a fire burned through me"
p.68: "Now my father looked at Asaru with puzzlement"

Which was about as far as I got. I don't object to starting a paragraph with "Now", when properly used. But my idea of proper use would be to use it when there's been a break in the narrative to refer to past events, and use "Now" as a time-check to restart the present-time flow of the narrative again. That didn't apply in any of the above instances.

(There's also a heck of a lot of "And then"s that, to a lesser extent, also kicked the back of my seat.)

So congratulations, David Zindell, The Lightstone wins you my judgement as "Heir apparent to David Eddings". (Out of context, that will make a great blurb for a paperback edition.)

(Endnote: I see from the copyright page of Tor's American edition that The Lightstone was originally published in England in 2001, and that "The Tor edition has been specially revised by the author." I will refrain from comment.)

Drive-By Posting

Still working far too many hours at work; over twelve today.

Thus largely accounting for the paucity of postings here of late. Working long hours means that 1) I have less time available at home in which to try and get done all the things I struggle to get done after ordinary eight-hour workdays, and 2) that trying to keep up means I tend to stay up later and get less sleep. (Rule of thumb: Each hour of overtime worked means half an hour's less sleep that night. Which frequently means I'm using "energy drinks" to get thru the next workday. Why, yes, this is an example of "diminishing returns" in action; thank you for pointing that out. So the next time you see a postal vehicle driving down the street, get out of his way just in case the driver's about ready to pass out over the wheel.)

I've had several postings in mind, but it may be another few days, or more, before I actually have a chance to write them here.

(I haven't even noted how I came home about ten days ago to the news that we had running water in our kitchen. Unfortunately, it was running from the ceiling. The furnace/blower combo that had been installed in the attic as part of our new air-conditioning system included a large drip pan to collect condensation from the coils, plus PVC piping to direct the excess drippage out the side of the attic and onto the ground. Unfortunately, not only did the drip pan not drain properly, but one of the joints in the PVC piping leaked, badly. End result: sodden attic insulation, a soggy kitchen ceiling, and about half a dozen steady drips from various points on the ceiling. Good thing I have a fairly large number of stockpots. The A/C company fixed the leaks and drip pan the next morning, and is sending someone over this week to inspect and repair the damage to the kitchen ceiling. Good for them, but I'd rather they'd done the job right the first time.)

No "Thanks", Thanks

So Saturday afternoon I get back to the station after delivering my route, plus several hours off another, and find a little Post-It note stuck on my card by the time clock:

"You have to come in on Monday (forced OT). Thanks. [supervisor's initials]"

Being forced in on my SDOs (Scheduled Days Off) isn't that much of a surprise anymore these last few months. The surprise is much more when I don't have to go in on my days off. Still annoying, though.

But I was actually more annoyed at that "Thanks" on the Post-It. It made it sound as if I had been asked to come in and work Monday, and as if I had agreed to do so.

I'd actually have been less annoyed if the Post-It had said something a little more suitable, like, oh: "I'm forcing you in on your day off again. Up yours."

Life As Damage Control, or, Why I'm A Grumpy SOB

There are times when it seems like life is 90% cleaning up other people's messes.

As mentioned downblog, we ended up having to replace our air conditioner. Since we have a fairly large house, and I didn't want a unit that would start needing repairs within just a few years, or one that would make our electric bill creep up, we got a top-of-the-line double-compressor 5-ton Trane. About $10,000.

Ouch. Should pay for itself eventually, but still....

I put $2,500 from savings down as a deposit. For the rest, I initially thought of using the home equity credit line from our credit union, but some number crunching revealed that using our Mastercard (which I got a few years ago, when they were still offering very low fixed rates) for the remainder would actually save about $400 in interest (based on a three-year payoff plan). And still leave a couple thousand available for other purchases.

So, when the new a/c was installed, I gave the company the credit card info. Checking online a few days later, though, there was no sign of the charge to the credit card. After a week (!), still no charge.

I call the company. The lady responsible for running the credit card charges had been on vacation. But she was back, and she told me she'd run the charge right away.

Problem solved? Uhhh... no. Checked again yesterday, four days after the phone conversation, and still no charge to the card. Called the lady at the a/c company again.

When she'd submitted the charge, she'd forgotten to deduct the $2500 deposit I'd already paid. Which meant the submitted charge had been for the full $10,000+.

Which was more than the credit limit on that card. Which meant:

1) The charge was not approved.

2) But it wasn't disapproved, either. What the attempted over-limit charge did was kick the transaction over to the "Authorization" division of the credit card company, where an "authorization representative" would determine whether the credit limit should be increased and the charge approved... in about a week.

3) If it had been simply disapproved, the a/c lady (who realized her error after getting the bounceback from the credit card company) could have resubmitted the charge with the correct amount. Which she tried to do. Except...

4) The other automatic result of the over-limit attempt was to place a "Hold" on any further transactions to the account until the "authorization representative" made his decision on whether to allow the incorrect charge to be processed.

5) This also meant that the a/c lady couldn't even cancel the over-limit charge. Which she also tried to do.

6) And this ALSO meant that I couldn't make any OTHER charges to the credit card until the "authorization" guy makes a decision on Monday or Tuesday. Charges for things like... oh, refills for some of Hilde's medications.

I spent about half an hour on the phone with the credit card company yesterday. I must have heard the words "we can't do anything for you" seven or eight times in that half hour.

Apparently, having a transaction sent to the authorization division puts the charge inside of Schrodinger's Box: neither alive or dead, until the authorization rep issues his decision. It can be neither processed, or cancelled. The customer service rep I spoke with couldn't even transfer my call to anyone in the authorization division.

I was not impressed.

Fortunately, the medications I tried to refill aren't any of the absolutely essential ones, and Hilde probably won't run out before I (hopefully) get this mess straightened out next week. (And I could, if absolutely necessary, activate a couple of other cards I've only previously used for their 0% introductory rate to save interest on paying off some earlier debt.)

But still... lots of people order meds online these days. And the customer service rep said I was not, by any means, the only person who's found their credit account frozen by situations like this, or even the only one unable to order urgently needed goods. Which means that eventually, some customer will end up in a world of hurt, in the hospital or worse, because the credit card company's policies don't allow for an error to be corrected in a swift manner. Which means the credit card company will eventually find itself facing a wrongful-harm-or-death lawsuit.

And that's why I'm a grumpy son-of-a-bitch today.


("Idiots!" -- Napoleon Dynamite)

Ketchup

Catching up with goings on:

Still working lots of overtime. Thirteen-hour-plus day yesterday, over twelve on Saturday. Annoying. Tiring. Though the big fat paychecks will help pay for the new air conditioner.

Managerial mathematics: One of the routes I had to carry a long relay on has a street delivery time of at least five hours, on a good day. So the supervisor told the carrier casing in the mail to "Split it into two two-hour relays." Well, duh, I ended up taking close to three hours to deliver one of those relays, in addition to overtime on my own route.

Working that many hours in a day is also a violation of the local contract, which means the union has been filing numerous grievances daily, which means management will eventually end up paying penalty money on top of the overtime pay. (But it will probably be months or more before it's actually paid.)

I don't usually gripe about work. But, jeez....

- - - - -

Hilde should be getting a walking cast on her foot next week, if the x-rays show good fusion in the ankle. This will make life a lot simpler.

- - - - -

I've been feeling less inclined to write political posts lately, even if I had time. It seems to be a combination of ennui and angst (textured angst available for a small extra fee)(old, old fannish reference) and futility. I noticed this in the last few months before the 2004 elections as well. I can't seem to shake the feeling that writing a blogpost that'll be read by a few dozen (maybe fifty? I should install SiteMeter) people will have as much influence on deciding the future of the US as trying to stop a runaway train by pissing off the side.

I tend towards a deep cynicism and pessimism, particularly where politics is concerned. I hope I'll be proved wrong in November. But I have a bad feeling....

Missing Movies

Barnes & Noble has been having a "Buy 2, Get A 3rd Free" sale on DVDs recently, so I've been splurging a bit.

Browsing their website, I came across... or rather, didn't come across... several titles I would have liked to buy.

If... was pretty much a cult movie, which may be why it's not available. Ditto O Lucky Man!

But... A Clockwork Orange not available? (By itself; the B&N website did have it as part of a Kubrick boxed set, but I didn't want to spend $100 for it.) I'm really, really surprised. It's not only highly regarded as a science fiction film, but I think I've seen it listed on several "100 Best Movies" lists over the years. (Checking around the Web a bit, I find Amazon.com does have an ACO DVD available. But DeepDiscountDVD.com, like B&N, doesn't. Hmmph.)

(And yes, I do like Malcolm McDowell, if you noticed the common denominator.)

The Way To An Editor's Heart

John Scalzi, guest editor for the just-out 4th issue of SUBTERRANEAN MAGAZINE, bought one of my stories for the issue.

In his intro to "Labyrinth's Heart", Scalzi also mentions that I make "a kick-ass German Chocolate banana bread", a reference to this post from last year, and gives the URL for this blog. So I thought I should post a link to the recipe, in case any SUBTERRANEAN readers wander by as a result of the mention. I'll also post a link in the sidebar.

Hilde At Home

Hilde came home from the rehab facility a few days ago, after only three weeks, rather than the six planned for.

We purchased some medical equipment to make it possible for her to function at home for the remaining weeks of "No Weight-Bearing On That Leg!" that will allow the ankle bones to fuse properly. Besides the hospital bed (which we already had in storage), one of the pieces is called an "E-Z Turn Transfer Disc" by its manufacturer, but which we call the Tilt-A-Whirl (think of a heavy-duty lazy-susan with handlebars), which allows her to get out of bed on the good foot and rotate in place to use her wheelchair or the portable commode.

It's good to have her home. She's been spending a lot of time with Caty (her daytime caregiver) watching DVDs of the old HIGHLANDER tv series and INUYASHA, a Japanese anime series Caty is a fan of. (I'm thinking of making up a t-shirt for Caty with SIT, BOY! emblazoned across the front.)

Now if only the air-conditioning hadn't gone kaput last night.

(This last is actually a good thing. We've had an intermittent problem with the a/c for the last three summers, where the compressor would sometimes stop when the outside temperature got up in the 110-degree range, but (usually) be able to be restarted after a twenty or thirty minute wait, or sometimes restart spontaneously. The half-dozen or so times when we had repair guys out to try and track the problem, the a/c would of course be operating just fine. Then the weather would drop back into lower temperatures, and the problem go away. This latest compressor failure, though, is the first time it's happened at night, during lower temperatures, and we haven't been able to get it restarted. Huzzah, it's completely broken! So finally, once the repair guy gets here later today, we may actually be able to get the problem fixed for good.)

Smart Pills, Smart Sex

Via Amygdala, a link to this story in the Washington Post, about how school kids are increasingly taking memory and concentration-enhancing drugs like Adderall to prep for exams and focus on schoolwork and grades.

So-o-o-o...the thought occurs to me...

...if a guy took Adderall and Viagra at the same time, would you have a guy who'd actually pay attention to a woman's needs in bed?

It also occurs to me to wonder if there have been any writers, facing tight deadlines, who've used Adderall or its ilk to focus on their projects in-progress? And how effective it might have been? (Instead of NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month -- you could have NaNoWriWeek!)

Under The Knife Again

Hilde's newest surgery, for a fusion on her right ankle/foot, took place this morning.

She'd been having increasing pain and trouble with that foot for the last several years, as the RA-degraded bones shifted and drifted into incorrect positions. (Plus a twisting of the entire foot about sixty degrees to the right.) And it finally got intolerable enough to make losing flexibility an acceptable tradeoff.

(There hasn't been an acceptable artifical replacement for ankle joints developed yet, unlike most of her other major joints which have been being replaced -- and sometimes re-replaced -- since 1975.)

So, four hours in surgery. Basically, her foot was taken apart and the bones put back into proper position, held in place, and then a length of cadaver fibia was inserted into/thru the foot, ankle and leg bone to act as a dowel holding everything together. Also, a blade-shaped piece of metal was inserted into her heel bone, then bent and shaped to run up along the back of her lower legbone. Screws were inserted to hold the blade-piece securely, and more (diagonal) screws to hold other bones together. Plus bone paste in between the joints. Over about the next six weeks, the ankle should fuse together into a solid mass.

During those six weeks, however, she's not allowed to put any weight AT ALL on that foot. So, after a few more days in the hospital, she'll be going to a rehab facility for six weeks.

*ouch* This will be the longest we've slept apart since we got together thirty years ago.

This is going to be a rough summer.

(And since I'll be visiting her as much as possible, don't be surprised if it's even longer than usual between blogposts here.)

"Ce n'est pas une aubergine."

Meanwhile, over at Making Light, Patrick Nielsen Hayden has posted about LiveJournal's recent ban on using breastfeeding images as user icons, with copious comments.

Well, jeez. I guess LJ users will just have to end up using nice, safe, tasteful pictures for their user icons. Like flowers. Or fruit. Or vegetables.

So here, for anyone who wants to use it, is a picture of one of the Thai eggplants from my backyard garden. And, as an added bonus, the same picture Photoshopped to turn it into a neon display:


 

 

Remember: Clean icons, clean minds.