pameladean

Fortunately, I am not born to set it right.

David's mother's birthday is in late November, so from time to time it falls on Thanksgiving. We've devised various expedients to deal with this over the years, including one year when we just had her usual birthday dinner instead of turkey. This year, we moved the family Thanksgiving celebration to Sunday. David's sister got three turkey dinners out of this, though she may have felt at least one was superfluous. She had lunch with Mary at the nursing home. Then David and I visited with her for a while and gave her some flowers and snackish treats, plus the present from my mom, which was a neck pillow in the shape of a cat000 (last three characters courtesy of Aristophanes, who is climbing around on me). David and I drove back from Northfield through a beautiful autumn landscape, all golden and brown and red and sunny. After that things felt very strange and blank. I cooked dinner for Raphael and me. David and Lydy had some leftovers.

On Friday I spent the entire day making dessert. There wasn't all that much dessert, really: I am just a slow worker, and both kitchens are pretty dismal. Also, both upstairs and downstairs for some considerable time there was a person sleeping. I made apple crisp with local Haralson apples; vegan pumpkin pie, which had to be put off til last because it requires a very noisy blender for the tofu; and mince pie. The mincemeat comes out of a jar. It was not a good piecrust day; I had to add extra water, which is always unfortunate. No major disasters occurred. I was so concerned about burning something that I slightly underbaked all three items. David suggested that I should make a pie a week so as not to fall out of practice again. I said rather crankily that it was NO PLEASURE MAKING PIES IN THESE AWFUL CONDITIONS, but it may not be a bad idea.

Friday's dinner was takeout from Fresh Wok, which Raphael and I have almost every week. On Saturday I did a bunch of laundry. Eric came over in the evening. Lydy's car had developed some serious wobbliness in the steering since we ran it over a curb during the snowstorm, so we took the bus to Pho Tau Bay, where I lost my head and ordered shrimp curry. It's the heavy coconut-milk kind. I took half of it home. Then we went back to Blaisdell Poly, and David and Lydy came home from their own dinner. It would have made more sense for all of us to eat together, but that takes advance planning because of my dietary limitations, and for Lydy it would be like having a decision demanded of her at four a.m. for somebody on a normal sleep schedule. In any case, after our separate dinners, David drove us all to a small birthday celebration at the Pumphouse Creamery. It was mostly the family of the celebrant, plus us, and I had a lovely time watching their interactions. It would have been more polite to make conversation, though.

Eric and I crammed our date into the rest of the evening, because on Sunday we had to get up at 8:30 in the morning. The horror. My mother can't eat a turkey if she has had to view and handle it in its raw state, and David is very fussy about the stuffing, so he is responsible for stuffing and baking the turkey. I had forgotten my camera and I forgot to tell Eric where I'd put half the greens for the salad he was making, but we got by. I borrowed my mother's camera to take photos of David making stuffing. He made a pan of vegan stuffing for me as usual, and then a gigantic heap of regular stuffing. The Dyer-Bennets are all about the stuffing, really, and his sister and her partner were coming for dinner.

My mom gave us sandwiches for lunch, the cat came out and lay on the carpet so that someone would brush her, and there was a particularly good set of bird sightings. My mother lives in a small preserve -- if raccoons eat your garden or steal your bird seed, that's too bad, you can't trap or poison them. She has bird feeders on her deck, but mostly I hear about the birds she's seen rather than getting to see them. There were chickadees, nuthatches, three pairs of cardinals, a lone goldfinch looking alien in its winter dress, and, at a distance, a pileated woodpecker. David took some photos of the nearer birds. Eric made the salad, and I went ahead and cooked my salmon in the microwave with a little olive oil and white wine. David had brought a Vouvray that was very nice with fish and I just poured some out of my glass into the dish.

The turkey was done early; it always is. Barbara and Mark arrived and we had dinner. Then most people went to groan on the sofa or stand on the deck and try to regain their equilibrium, and my mother and I parcelled out all the leftovers. I ended up carving the remaining meat off the turkey, which my mother felt was unfitting. But it was dead already.

We reconvened for dessert. I got very grumpy cutting the pies; the bottom crusts were underdone, so it was harder to lever a whole piece out intact. Once leftover dessert had been handed out, the apple crisp was gone. We have plenty of mince pie left, and since I made a second vegan pumpkin one for Raphael as a very late birthday treat, there's plenty of pumpkin, too.

I remember that part of the conversation had to do with whether fruit flies sleep and part was some anecdotes about my brother's endless supply of idiosyncratic friends and part was about cats and Barbara's dog and another part was about Mark's studies and part was about my mother's Unitarian church and her book group, but there was much more than that.

It had felt like Thursday all day, but when we had dropped Eric off at home and gone home ourselves and put the leftovers away, suddenly it was Sunday again and I had to do the grocery order for the coming week.

In other news, while I was at Eric's place on Wednesday, I finished my own book and picked up his copy of The Mirador. I had to continue reading it when I got home, and I had to finish it, and now I am reading Corambis. I am afraid I'll have to pick up the first two in the series and just read my way around. I love those books very much, but I'm particularly fond of Mehitabel.

I'm hoping to do a book post soon. Kind thoughts to you all.

Pamela

P.S. I thought I had failed to set up cross-posting between Dreamwidth and LJ, but my Dreamwidth post about Terri's auction did cross-post. I think what I failed at was figuring out the instructions for putting that little banner at the bottom of the page that says that the entry is crossposted and how many comments there are at Dreamwidth and where you can comment. Well, you can comment either place, assuming that this entry does put itself in both places. I still can't post to LJ directly; I just get an error message. I imagine this will sort itself out eventually.

Crossposts: http://pameladean.livejournal.com/143101.html

Note: I can't post to LJ right now, apparently because it's suffering another DDOS attack. I'll duplicate this entry there when I can. In the meantime, I know many of my LJ friends are here on Dreamwidth, and I wanted to get the word out.

Without Terri Windling, I never would have written Tam Lin. She bought all three volumes of the Secret Country trilogy and edited the first two, corralling my still flailing creativity as, probably, nobody else could have done. When she started the Fairy Tale Line, I wanted to be part of it. I have to confess that, though I read a number of them over and over as a child, I don't really like fairy tales. But Terri let me adapt a ballad instead. The rough draft of Tam Lin was much more like a book than my earlier efforts, but she was still instrumental in giving it many of the virtues that it has. She is a relentless and yet kindly editor, a rare combination and maybe the only one that I could have managed to heed in my self-centered youth. She is many other things as well, but that is how I met her.

Lately she has fallen on hard times and needs help, as most people do at some point in their lives.

Hence, this auction:

http://magick4terri.livejournal.com/profile#cause.

I have donated a couple of hardcovers, one of Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary and one of The Dubious Hills, that I'll sign if the winning bidder wants me to, but I don't know when they will be up. It hardly matters, since there is a dazzling array of things already there. Go and look.

If you don't want any more books or beautiful objects, you can donate directly on the community's page. If you can't afford to buy or donate, boosting the signal is very useful and would be much appreciated.

Pamela

Crossposts: http://pameladean.livejournal.com/142686.html

Now that I'm over the excitement of my clean sidewalk, I want to back up and talk about the weekend. It was not one of our hectic ones. I had a sleepy conversation with David on Saturday morning and ascertained that we might overlap at the Minn-Stf meeting but probably not otherwise. Eric came over in the early afternoon. The forecast snow had begun by then and changed to fluff from pellets at some point while we were out. The back end of the car slid a bit when Eric pulled out, and he reverted to his winter driving experience before anti-lock brakes existed a bit later on and tried pumpking the brakes, but he had left so much space to stop that nothing awful happened. The roads were pretty slick, but manageable. Nobody was driving like an idiot, nobody at all. I love Minnesotans when I'm not wondering why so many of them vote for Michele Bachmann.

We had lunch at Pho Tau Bay, discovering that their vegetarian pho comes in a much larger bowl with more of everything than it does in the evenings; or perhaps they have just changed their presentation. We'll have to see. It was lovely, in any case.

Then we drove to the Minn-Stf meeting, right near the Linden Hills Coop. We went around Lake Calhoun, which was still unfrozen, dark gray, and very choppy. The late-fall landscape, scattered with rich brown oaks still holding their leaves, and eerily red euonymous bushes, and golden dry grasses, all with snow, was beautiful. You could not see the opposite shore of the lake through the falling snow and the mist. At Dean and Laura's, Eric participated in a Board meeting (also attended by the usual suspects and by Sarafina, the very old cat) while Laura consulted me about how to make a vegan lentil soup. Eric then proposed that we go off and do some chores we needed to deal with at his place, planning to return in time for dinner. The chores went well.

The drive home seemed to be going fine, but then we came over a slight rise and stared down at where Cedar Lake Parkway meets Dean Parkway. There's a stop sign at the bottom of a short, steep hill, and, Dean Parkway being a big one-way loop, you have to turn right. The hill was smoothly, utterly iced over. Nobody had sanded or salted it, or even, apparently, driven on it recently. We slid through the stop sign, brakes rattling the way they do, and Eric almost made the turn. But Dean Parkway is narrow, and the left front wheel went over the curb. A helpful resident or inquisitive bystander came up while Eric was looking at the tire, saying that he had seen sparks when the wheel hit the curb, but we had really better get out of this location before somebody else came over that hill. Ahead of us in a parking pull-out, two sets of people whose cars had apparently hit one another were conferring in the pelting ice that had taken over from the fluffy snow again. Eric said the tire was fine and wasn't flat, and we could look at it again elsewhere. My first inane remark when we came to a stop had been, "I want to go home." Now we had a slightly less juvenile discussion. Eric was sad to miss the rest of the Minn-Stf meeting, and I was sorry Laura had gone to the trouble of making a vegetarian soup for, possibly, just me, that I wouldn't even be eating. I was trying to come around to the idea that it would be okay to drive as far as the meeting when Eric remembered that we had a nice flat route home from Dean Parkway, but that Dean and Laura's neighborhood was pretty hilly.

We stopped at the Java for dinner, thus getting lentil soup anyway but not feeling any better about Laura's wasted effort. The Java buffet was just the thing, though. The server, who has been there since the 1970's when the Minn-Stf frisbee players used to have dinner there after our games, told us that it ordinarily takes her about twenty minutes to get to work, but today it took an hour. She had gone to see the Twilight movie with her daughter, without checking the weather forecast. It was a mild cloudy autumn day when she went in to the theater, and there were two inches of snow when she came out. Then we went very carefully back to my house. Blaisdell might have been salted by then, or might just have had its ice worn away by traffic; but the road conditions were still quite bad.

Eric and I read peacefully, sometimes chivvied by cats. David and Lydy had gone to see a local roller derby match. I heard them come home later, but was too sleepy to get up and say hello.

Sunday morning was sunny and the snow blinding. We drove cautiously to the Rainbow at 27th and Lake to accomplish a couple of errands put off from earlier; then Eric talked me into going to the Hard Times for brunch. I don't usually need any persuasion to do this but was rattled by the icy adventure of the day before, mild though it had been. He pointed out that we could get there on major surface streets with no hills, which must in any case surely have been salted by now. They had been, too. The Hard Times was about as crowded as I've seen it. We had biscuits and gravy with added protein and vegetables -- tofu for me, tempeh for Eric, broccoli for both. We ended up talking about short stories, with the background of a young woman exclaiming, "He just TEXTED me! I cannot BELIEVE this!" and other personal details. I'm sure Eric's and my conversation was also clearly audible to our neighbors, but it was probably less riveting.

We'd planned to go to Trader Joe's, but realized in time that it was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. My family and David's are doing Thanksgiving on Sunday this year because the day itself is my mother-in-law's birthday, so I wasn't as attuned to the details as I usually am.

So we came home and parted, Eric to use the wireless for a while and then take the bus home, and I to do the grocery order, glare at my short stories, cosset my cat, and watch reruns of "30 Rock" with Raphael. I also cornered David and Lydy and heard a little about the roller derby match.

I hope none of you has slid through any stop signs recently.

Pamela

I am so smug. I am always excessively, obnoxiously smug when my failure to do something that everybody else does and that I've been beating myself up for not doing turns out to have been beneficial.

The tree on our boulevard is a Norway maple. All Norway maples are on a schedule that may be Norwegian but may be from some alternate dimension. They stay green late, late in the fall; if there is a hard freeze they shrug off their green leaves and look insouciant; and if allowed, they turn a glorious gold in mid- to late November. Then they like to preen themselves a little. I'm sure that, whatever timestream they hail from, they know exactly when Minneapolis has decided to send in street sweepers to get the leaves out of the gutters. Then they drop about half their leaves the day afterwards, and hold onto the rest until their local human companions have raked their yards clean.

The maple on our boulevard is always the last one to drop its leaves, and the one on the boulevard of our neighbor to the north is the next-to-last to do so.

The entire public sidewalk and a good portion of the walk leading from that sidewalk to our front porch were solid with maple leaves. In a wet autumn, I'd have had to deal with them because wet leaves can become as slippery as ice. But these were dry and crisp. I did try to prevent the leaves from utterly concealing the one step down from our walk to the public sidewalk, but it was so windy that in as little as half an hour after I cleared the leaves, more leaves would gather and obscure the step again.

On Saturday, it snowed, first ice pellets, then big fluffy flakes, then pellets again, for a total of maybe two inches. I had actually planned to just let the stuff melt, since it will be fifty during the day by Thursday. But then I remembered that the person delivering the groceries would have a bit of a struggle if I didn't shovel. The mixture of ice and snow, dyed a delicate yellow by the underlying leaves, looked pretty grim. But it peeled right up from that glory of glories, a perfectly dry sidewalk. The sidewalks of my obsessive raking neighbors aren't nearly so clear.

I am so smug.

Pamela

It's actually almost still and calm today, but it's been windy for weeks. The leaves are crisp and dry because of the drought, and I could hardly go outside for days without thinking, "How Shelleyesque!"

In the past week, I have:

Sent two vegetarian and two vegan pizzas to Occupy Minneapolis.

Made a rash of tiny donations for Give to the Max Day. I forgot a couple of places, though.

Taken Aristophanes to the vet for his third thyroid test. The vet wants to catch it going over into the high range, but it sticks stubbornly at high-normal. I don't really want him being poked so often, so I might ask for a longer interval before trying again. After they took the blood, the vet tech told me, she took out the remaining mats in his tail. He is mat-free for the first time in I don't recall how long. Since half his fur is also shaven, maybe I can groom him well enough to keep him that way.

Arranged for the thermocouple in the downstairs furnace (the newer furnace) to be replaced. The repair guy had to walk past the older furnace, and, like the last furnace guy, said, "Wow, you might want to get that replaced on your own terms instead of waiting for it to fail." We hope it will get through the winter and will seriously consider replacing it next spring. It won't celebrate its hundredth birthday, but will come close -- the house was built in 1916 and this is the original furnace for the upstairs.

Broken through the defective child-proof cap of my new bottle of metoprolol with a hammer, a screwdriver, and a pair of scissors, and decanted the pills into an old bottle whose cap worked.

Finished rereading the Aubrey/Maturin series. I was Not Really Happy with the last five or six volumes when I read them as they came out. I apparently have never reread them, stopping earlier in my rereading, but this time I did, and, aside from a couple of events most readers of the series will be able to think of at once, but that I will not mention for fear of spoiling those who haven't read them yet, I was much better pleased this time around.

Watched, with Raphael, a really annoying one-hour movie starring Alan Rickman and wasting Emma Thompson. It's based on a poem that in my opinion would have been far better if it had been told from Thompson's character's viewpoint. It had "lunch" in the title but I'm too annoyed to look it up. Emma Thompson was excellent. Well, so was Rickman. But the situation was cliched and did not rise above that at any time.

I continue to be far, far behind on everything from yard work and laundry to writing.

Pamela

I don't know why I'm so thoroughly out of the habit of posting. One of the things I like about reading my friends-list is the combination of homely everyday detail and really chewy intellectual posts. I am not very good at making the latter -- I start them, revise them, get bogged down in some detail of nuance or research, and eventually lose them somewhere. But I can do daily life.

The juncoes are here. I was concerned for a week or two that the Norway maples would not get a chance to turn yellow, instead dropping their leaves madly while still green; but they have managed, and if I walk to the end of my block and look back, there is the proper tunnel of gold, leaves drifting down onto the black asphalt of the street. They are not mallorns, and there is certainly no asphalt in Lothlorien, but the effect seems Tolkienesque in any case.

It was a peculiar summer in many ways. As I mentioned at the time, I cracked or bruised a rib at the end of April, and just when that was healing up nicely I got the Wiscon Death Cold and coughed for five or six weeks. While I put in basil, mint, thyme, and two tomato plants much earlier than I had managed in 2010, only the herbs thrived. I forgot about the thyme and have not used it for anything. David and Lydy kept the mint well pruned by harvesting it for their drinks, and it is probably going to take over the world next year. Eric and I were going to make spring rolls using the fresh mint and basil, but we never did. The basil is unhappy with the frost or near-freezes we've been having at night, but the mint and thyme are still looking fresh and happy. I should put some thyme in the soup this evening. We had a pot of rosemary on the front porch, too, and I did make good use of that; but I failed to bring it inside the first night temperatures threatened to go below freezing, and it gave up and died.

Raphael and I did fairly well with hiking, under the circumstances -- my rib injury and the horrible virus from Wiscon weren't the half of it. June was cold and rainy; then Minnesota Republicans forced the shut-down of the government because they have an insane desire to control women and oppress poor people, so the state parks closed on July 1. Raphael and I were up on the North Shore at the time, at Temperance River State Park. The park, I think like most of the parks thereabouts, is divided by Highway 61. We started with the lake side. When we went out to the lake, there were no notices. When we came back, all over were simple printed pages saying that the park was closed. We went across the highway and up the river anyway. We were there because somebody in the 1990's had seen boreal snaketails in the powerline clearance. They did not appear, but the river and its rocky surrounds were spectacular. The powerline clearance runs over a tilted slab of basalt, broken up by water, scattered with patches of thin sand shading to soil in which hawkweed and other wildflowers grow, with here and there a juniper or an aspen sapling. A young deer with just the velvet stubs of antlers wandered out of the woods beyond the clearance and set about grazing. He knew we were there, but he did not give us any wide-eyed paranoid looks, did not freeze and think about running. He looked us in the eye, swaggered, and ignored us. His dignity was upset, however, by the fact that his antlers obviously itched. He had to stop from time to time and scratch them with a hind leg, which was both impressive and hilarious.

We had planned to stop at Gooseberry Falls and Split Rock on our way back south, on the grounds that the parks would still be in perfectly good order even though officially close. However, both parks include rest areas that had been blocked off with barricades, so we had to give up, cursing the Republicans in the legislature. Even if they had behaved like reasonable beings, the closure of St. Croix State Park would have distorted our hiking year. We did have several excellent visits to Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge.

Eric was working night shift until July, and then a classic mid-continental heat wave moved in, so we didn't do any hiking until much later in the year. We made one road trip to look at fall color, staying in LaCrosse but spending much of our time at Great River Bluffs State Park. We did also visit Perrot, avoiding any bluffs this year but hiking along the Riverview trail, where we saw an egret sitting atop a muskrat lodge; and also along the Black Walnut Trail, which was more hilly than we expected but full of goodness, including the biggest black walnut tree either of us had ever seen.

Writing has been frankly terrible. I don't even want to try to come up with the number of words I've written. I certainly don't need even the fingers of one hand to do so. I'm feeling a little cheerier since I did a reading of the new second chapter of the Amazing Expanding and Shrinking Novel at Conjecture -- many thanks to Laura Krentz for asking me. It was useful to see that the new structure actually worked rather than being a heap of disassembled incidents bunged together with semi-colons. I'm looking at my present projects with somewhat more equanimity, at least.

Aristophanes, although bony, seems to be thriving. A failed attempt to remove a mat from his belly us to the emergency vet late on the day before I was to go to Wisconsin with Eric. They were very nice to us, calling the wound a grooming injury, as if he had done it himself; I guess some cats do damage themselves yanking out mats. The vet tech who brought him back to us also exclaimed, "You guys, he's in such good shape for his age! You must take very good care of him!" He had to have ten days' worth of antibiotics, which Raphael heroically put down his throat; and he had to wear a blue cone, which he bore with great insouciance, much to my surprise. He did have epic grooming sessions when it was taken off though. He seems fine now. When I take him out for walks, he mostly patrols his yard, sniffing carefully, and then goes back in. But a few days ago he tore across the front yard to the maple on the boulevard, ran six or seven feet up its trunk, dropped down, tore through the side yard to the back and all the way to the garage, tore back to his favorite mulberry and ran up that, and then tore to the back door and pawed at it to be let in. I must have been a very funny sight, lumbering after him fast enough that the leash was never taut but quietly enough that he wouldn't take fright at the MONSTER FOLLOWING HIM.

I'm rereading the Aubrey/Maturin books, finding all much better than I remember. This is especially gratifying for the volumes after The Thirteen-Gun Salute, though I still expect to be very annoyed with O'Brien for one or two things nearer the end.

I am reading all of you, but I tend to forget that I actually can comment now, Opera's update having apparently fixed my problem with LJ. I'll try to provide more blather soon.

Pamela

sartorias and

rachelmanija have an essay up on Genreville (a site well worth the attention of readers of sf and fantasy in general) about sending a collaborative YA fantasy novel to an agent and being told that the agent would represent and expect to sell it if they would just remove a gay viewpoint character, or make the character, at least apparently, heterosexual -- one suggestion was that, should the series the book is part of be a huge hit, the character could be revealed to be gay later on. Ugh.
I am frankly astonished that anybody should have such an experience in 2011, but that just shows my naivete, and my enormous good luck in having an editor who told me that the same-sex relationship in my forthcoming novel was one of the things she liked.
The article is set up so that other authors who have had similar experiences can comment pseudonymously if they like. I am curious but alarmed to see how many more writers have had this happen to them.
Pamela

ETA: The agent not named in the original Genreville post has responded:

http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-blogger-joanna-stampfel-volpe.html

sartorias and

rachelmanija have responded in turn:

http://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/969918.html

And Malinda Lo, who has published YA novels with gay characters, produces some statistics, which demonstrates that really, there is a serious problem here:

http://www.malindalo.com/2011/09/i-have-numbers-stats-on-lgbt-young-adult-books-published-in-the-u-s/

Having known

sartorias for the better part of 25 years, and having known

rachelmanija for a much shorter but non inconsiderable amount of time, I am inclined to look askance at the agent's version of events.

I haven't been posting much because, after a brief moment just after LJ struggled to its feet again in the wake of the latest DDOS attack, when everything seemed to work, LJ is again failing to play nicely with Opera. I can type in entries till I'm blue, but neither the Preview button nor the Post button works. If I click on the link in an emailed comment notification, I can type merrily away in the comment box thus provided, but the Post and Preview buttons do not work. If I attempt to comment directly on a journal, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I can comment on a journal, and if I go back to answer a response, suddenly I can't comment any more. Some journals seem permanently barred (

karenkay, I would pester you a lot more if I could). LJ Support heroically worked on the problem during the DDOS attack, but told me they had been unable to reproduce my difficulty with several different versions of Opera.

I'm using Firefox to post this.

I don't know why I don't just switch to Firefox, aside from a less than healthy hatred of unfamiliar things in my working environment. I think some deep part of my brain, faced with the fact that a particular website does not work with Opera, decides "Forget that website!" rather than "Forget Opera!"

Oh, and I can't post to or comment on Google+, either. Well, I could, but only if I didn't put spaces between words. This would give my comments an interesting flavor of very old classical manuscript, but seems unproductive in the long run. In any case, I'm unimpressed with Google's handling of its insane insistence on real names.

However, I do have some good news. I heard back from

sdn, my fabulous editor. She does not hate the book! It needs more cutting and tightening, as I knew when I sent it off, and hence has been moved from Fall of 2012 to Spring of 2013. This is not, I understand, good news to people who are still actually waiting for the book rather than having found authors who write regularly and don't end up expanding and shrinking their novels as if they were variable stars, but it's good news for me. The book would have needed to be in copy-edit by November if it were to be published in the fall of next year, and now it doesn't have to be in that enviable state until March. Breathing room to make revisions -- with any luck at all, the last revisions this unfortunate composition will need to suffer -- will be useful.

I should make posts about this summer's hiking and about books I've read, but we'll see.

I am reading you all, and I rejoice at your triumphs and am saddened by your sorrows and laugh at your jokes.

Pamela

I think Shakespeare was talking about spring, but hereabouts, you get the mass of prairie flowers right about now. Most of Minnesota's state parks now show green on the DNR's Reopening page, and Raphael and I hope to get to one of them next week.

In very local phenology, mulberry season is almost over. There are still a few unripe berries, mostly being gobbled in their red phase by juvenile squirrels and house sparrows. But the time when you could stand outside and hear the patter of ripe berries dropping, and when the sidewalk on the south side of the house was a morass of pulped purple, so that Ari had purple paw pads and I had to clean my shoes carefully before I came inside, is past. The lilies are finished, except for a small volunteer near the giant hosta in the front yard. The rudbeckia is going strong, along with the twenty-one mulleins. I think it's twenty-one. Eric and I counted nineteen a few weeks ago, but since then several more have put up their flower stalks. I couldn't mow too close to them without destroying the lower leaves, so they stand in a cloud of common yarrow, daisy fleabane, and volunteer chives. The Shasta daisies got flattened by torrential rain and are blooming sideways. They are almost done too, and I may mow them if I ever mow the lawn again. I have no patience with mowing if the heat index is above 85. Lawns are overrated. Mine is far, far prettier run amok. But if I don't want the city to come in and hack up my mulleins and charge me outrageous amounts of money for not even taking the evidence of the carnage away, I have to mow bits of the yard to show I that I care.

It doesn't help that last year Eric showed me a book that said the first plants to take hold after the glaciers retreated were ragweed and plaintain. Who wants to mow down plants like that?

The daylilies, which are in flower beds instead of the lawn, are going very strongly. The phlox is very late. Starfire, in front, is putting out a single blossom at a time. The two types of David (how could I resist a plant named that?), white and pink, have buds, but haven't flowered yet. Moving to the animal kingdom, the cedar waxwings did not come to eat our mulberries. We have a lot of young rabbits. I've seen red and white admiral butterflies, and a monarch. There was also a green darner clinging to the blooming bee balm in the front yard. Oh, yes, that's blooming like mad, and so is the little hydrangea. I should get it some pine needles from the neighbors' yard so it will bloom blue.

Leaving the land of accident and moving to intentional cultivation: my tomatoes are making new greenery, but not blooming. The basil and the mint are doing pretty well. I think I put the thyme in too shaded a spot, but we'll see.

I must try to actually get something done today. As I run off, I'd like to thank LiveJournal Support for working on my posting problems in the midst of a DDoS attack. Now let's see if this will actually post.

Nope. It wouldn't. I had to use Firefox.

Pamela

I keep going back to This website, which the Minnesota DNR put up when the government creaked arduously back to life, burdened with an incredibly stupid, patched-up, very temporary solution to the budget problems Tim Pawlenty created and nourished when he was in office. It's been curiously comforting and invigorating to watch the red circles next to the names of state parks turn yellow or green. There are far more green circles now than when I first began to look.

One then begins to wonder about the red ones. I know what happened to St. Croix State Park. On July first, a storm that Raphael and I left earlyish to get away from at the end of a visit to Duluth worked itself up to 90- or perhaps 100-mile per hour winds and flattened the majority of the trees in the park. One park employee said that it would be a different park, that it would now be a meadow. The trees were not ancient, since the entire area was clearcut about 80 years ago, but there was a diverse forest with a diverse understory, including, incidentally, near one dip in a washboarded dirt road, the only purple fringed orchids I've ever seen. I hardly know what to expect when we finally go back.

So I know about St. Croix. But I wonder what's up with Camden, Old Mill, and Upper Sioux Agency parks. We haven't been to any of them, but I like just looking at the map with all the parks on it, and knowing that they're there. It turns out, if one clicks through, that Upper Sioux Agency and Camden also suffered in the July 1 storm, and that Old Mill was hit by a storm on July 20th. And they couldn't clear things up at once because the Republicans were ranting about stem-cell research and abortion, and playing with their shiny new toy of refusing revenue to government.

I didn't think I could be less impressed with either the local or the national incarnation of the Republican Party than I was during the Bush years, but I was wrong.

Pamela

Well, that was exciting, if all things to do with weather excites one.

I woke up at seven a.m., fed the cat, got a glass of water, and noticed that the air conditioner in my bedroom had temporarily lost its battle with the supersaturated air, and was spewing a thin mist into the room. The unairconditioned parts of the house did not feel as much like an ill-run sauna as they had earlier, so I just turned the air conditioner off so that it could get rid of its accumulated moisture, and went back to bed. I was joined by Ari, who made himself very long and tried to push me across the bed with all four feet. I did manage to get back to sleep around nine, after a lot of restless thought encompassing yard work, taxes, the novel I'm supposed to be writing, the general state of the publishing industry, hot-weather cooking, the hideous state of Minnesota and national politics, whether they had actually opened the state parks yet or would have to wait until they had finished their wrangling (they haven't, but hope to do so by the 23rd), why my tomatoes aren't blooming, taxes, which of my sweeties I'm neglecting and what to do about it, and the novel I'm not writing.

At eleven-thirty, when I was starting to feel weird because I was late taking my medication, Raphael brought Jordan in, on the grounds that it was too hot for her in Raphael's bedroom. I got up and checked the Weather Underground site. Eighty-nine degrees, heat index of ninety-nine, do not want, but the new normal.

It was very dark, and about five minutes later a thunderstorm blew through. My ancient weather radio that lives in my office is showing signs of finally breaking down altogether, so I looked at Weather Underground again to see if there was a severe thunderstorm or tornado warning. Not for this part of the county, but it was 84 degrees. If it gets down to 80, I thought, I am opening ALL THE WINDOWS. Five minutes later, it was 81, and about fifteen after that, 73. I ran around up and downstairs, opening windows. I changed the sheets on my bed. It is of course possible to perform this task while the window air conditioner is running, but the sheets were in the dryer in the basement, and the back staircase, which has two south-facing windows and one east-facing window that must, must, must be left open for cats, and in any case has no climate control of any kind, acts like a chimney and is even more like an ill-run sauna than the unairconditioned rooms. Also, squirrels destroyed the screen in the upper window, so it's no longer possible to put a fan there to pull the hot air outside. If I can get the screen out, the hardware store will repair it, but I have a nagging fear that, once there's a new screen in the frame, it will be the wrong shape and I'll never get it back into the window. This is a very old house, the storm windows were never any good and have not improved, and none of the windows is exactly lined up at right angles any more. Since the window is useless anyway, I should take the screen out as soon as the weather breaks, if it ever does for more than an hour.

It's 81 again, and I have to go close the windows. But the hourly forecast for today said it would be 94 by now. Hahahaha, take that, heat wave!

Perhaps I need a cool compress. I hope you are all surviving whatever the day provides you with.

Administrative note: LJ will still not let me post in Opera. It also at complete random refuses to let me comment in people's journals. I have commented successfully in someone's journal, gone in a few minutes later to make another comment, and found that the Post button is suddenly inactive, although it worked five minutes ago. I'm going to post this with Firefox, but firing up Firefox for a one-line comment is sometimes more than I am up for.

Pamela

I am on Google+ as Pamela Dean. If I know you but have not added you yet, it means only that I'm a little bewildered and somewhat beset with daily life.

I went to the eye doctor today, for the first time since I had a peripheral vitreal detachment in 2004 or thereabouts. To my great pleasure, the eye doctor told me that my eyes looked "very healthy," with no sign of the various bad possibilities lurking in my family history. I certainly do need new glasses, though, and have a prescription for same. I had been a little uncertain about whether I simply never got the hang of bifocals, or whether I seriously needed a new prescription; it's clearly the latter.

At the moment, what with the dilating eye-drops, I have the overwhelming sensation that the lower, near-vision half of my glasses is smudged and must be cleaned, but of course I could clean it till Doomsday to no avail.

Since the Minnesota legislature contains too many Republicans with no sense, no empathy, and no apparent wish to use whatever intelligence they possess, who willfully let the state government shut down on July 1, and are still faffing around refusing to negotiate with the governor unless he criminalizes stem-cell research and does other evil things he is not going to do, Raphael and I went to Willow River State Park in Wisconsin yesterday. The vegetation at the edge of the lake near the boat landing was packed with damselflies: if you looked at a square foot of sedge or daylily, dozens of bluets sewed the air. Elsewhere were huge numbers of dragonflies, primarily twelve-spotted skimmers and widow skimmers. I have never seen so many widow skimmers. Every few feet, one was perched on a stick or blade of grass, or swooping back and forth over the short grass of the path. There were a few Halloween pennants, too; also a spotted sandpiper running along a fallen log near the foot of the dam, a red-bellied woodpecker, and bluebirds. At sunset at the edge of the lake near the swimming beach, Raphael found a single vesper bluet, with a bright yellow body and a tiny blue tail-light. We didn't even get to the waterfall, but we plan to come back, even if the Minnesota parks reopen.

I don't want to live in Wisconsin. I love Minnesota. And at least we aren't afflicted with the equivalent of Scott Walker. But sailing down the steep hill on I94 West, zipping over the lovely St. Croix River, seeing the Welcome to Minnesota sign, and then seeing the first big rest stop blocked off with orange barrels, yellow tape, and huge orange CLOSED signs, was infuriating and lowering.

Pamela

Just a note to say that I am pathetically behind on LJ after Fourth Street and a trip to Duluth and environs, and am being stymied in my attempts to catch up by the curious fact that, once I let Opera update itself, the Post Comment button wouldn't reliably work for me on other people's journals. The Add button for putting people on one's friends list also won't work. Oh, yeah, and the Post button for entries, already defunct, still won't work either, so I'm going to have to dig up Firefox to post this, but I don't really like it for everyday use.

I have ten thousand things to do, things that have been piling up ever since I cracked my rib at the beginning of Minicon. So maybe I'll try catching up silently. Anyway, I'm not ignoring anybody, but I am both behind and impeded by the vagaries of software.

Oh,

anghara -- if you want to try Dee Morrison Meaney's works, I think I started with Iseult, which I think is a standalone. There's also a trilogy that begins with Death of the Raven. I think I also said, in the comment that I couldn't post, that probably the only reason I had heard of her is that we shared both an agent and a publisher when I was first getting started.

Pamela

Someone in a Delicate Condition has requested that people post.

Well, I'm still sick from Wiscon, though I am somewhat more confident than I was a few days ago that the sore throat and even the lingering cough may be gone by Fourth Street. I am not attending the playreading on Thursday, just in case.

This is a truly evil virus and has partially eaten my brain. I had a very odd experience a week or two ago. I was reading Cat Valente's The Orphan's Tales and was relieved that my feverish brain was not having any trouble at all with her lovely prose. But several narratives in, I started getting confused about how deep I was and who had done what to whom. I had already devoured The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It was perfect for reading while ill, though I expect to find things I missed while foggy when I reread it, which it also seems very well suited to. I really loved the book. The blurbs list influences like James Thurber, which I can very well see, but I think they left out Lewis Carroll. A lot of the peculiarities of my own dialogue come from the Alice books, and I think I know them when I see them. Fairyland is both warmer and darker than the Alice books, containing more humanity and more strangeness.

Anyway, I had finished that, so I reluctantly laid aside The Orphan's Tales and picked up a Kage Baker novel I had gotten at Uncle Hugo's some time ago. The prose is very different, but it, too, is a first-person narrative that begins with a young girl encountering terror and wonder, and for about the first half I kept thinking, "All right, the last tale before this was the grandmother's tale, so I have to remember that we'll back out of this at some point and I wonder when we will get back to the girl with the stories on her eyelids -- oh, wait." I loved the Baker too. I wonder if illness makes me uncritical, but I don't think so. I got very cranky about several other books I read while ill.

I signed up for my Fourth Street panels before I got sick, and am now muzzily looking at the descriptions and wondering if I can remember what I wanted to say.

Today's muzziness, however, I think is not caused by the virus. There were endless thunderstorms and torrential downpours last night. I was finally sleeping around five a.m. when the doorbell rang. I picked up the phone and listened, and heard a couple of voices saying things like, "I don't know if that's their open door there." They sound like the police, I thought, so I said, "Hello?" They were the police. I put some clothes on and for some reason got not just my keys but my cellphone, and went downstairs. Yep. Police. They said they had gotten a hang-up 911 call. I was much too sleepy to either recall their names or to ask what number the call had come from. I hope our house is not going to just suddenly start calling 911 at random. We have an ancient PBX intended for small offices, not readily replaceable except for huge sums. I hope it is not getting frisky in its old age.

I am reading you all, truly.

Pamela

Among the many things that made me speechless with admiration when I first read Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles was that, when Lymond has a headache, he thinks of a poem about the megrims. I don't have a migraine; I just have a cold. I keep trying to think of a quotation about having a cold. I did think of one. Long, long ago,

coffeeem wrote a Minneapazine while she was sick, and its title was entirely appropriate to my situation. It's a little bit gross, though, so I haven't used it. I am thinking it, though.

I think this is the Wiscon head cold, and it is really nasty. I have been sick since June 1 and I am bored with it. I also infected Raphael, which is totally unfair. And it's dragonfly season.

Anyway, if I owe you email or an LJ comment, this is why you haven't gotten an answer. I hope to be less foggy in a few days.

Pamela

Puzzled note: the Spell Check, Preview, and Post buttons did not work in Opera, and I had to fire up Firefox to post this, Ghargh.

Here is the link to Joel's website

I met Joel in 1987, when he and Felicia came to an early, maybe the very first, Fourth Street Fantasy Convention. We were good friends until we had a falling-out in the late nineties that could probably have been resolved if there had not also been increasingly serious political differences. He continued to be a good friend with and to David, including providing work during some of our hard times.

If he wasn't mad at you, he was the kindest person in the world. He would notice if you were puzzled and explain in-jokes; he would notice if you were ill at ease and tell anecdotes that you could comment on; he showered favors and kindness on you like the sun. And he had a light touch with it. One did not feel oppressed or overwhelmed. He drove me to take the body of my cat to be cremated, a 90-minute trip out into the country; she had died at home and at the time my vet did not deal with that situation. For several years before that, he let me add Sukey to the visits he made to the vet with his and Felicia's three cats. We made a Big Stack o' Cats in the waiting room, and they sang in four different registers like a barbershop quartet, which amused him very much. He was an amazing cook, a great teller of funny stories, a complete cat wimp, and one of the stubbornest people I've ever known. He should have been around much longer.

Rest well, Joel.

Pamela

Here's the link:

http://daedala.dreamwidth.org/123141.html

Soleil needs to be the only cat in a household. Just about everybody who wants a cat seems to already have one or several, but if you are in the general area of the Twin Cities, Minnesota, are catless, and want a really beautiful sweet cat, check out the photographs and the situation.

Pamela

Well, maybe I've made up my mind and am only looking for validation.

I'm part of a group reading at Wiscon. The rest of them (David Levine, Seanan McGuire, Sarah Monette, and Cat Valente, it's at four pm on Saturday, do come, because they are all amazing writers!) very kindly let me in even though they had enough people already, but this means that everybody's time is quite limited.

What I would like to do is to read the (new) prologue to the Shrunken version of the Amazing Expanding and Shrinking Novel. It's a letter, in Ruth's voice, so it's fun to read and, I think, funny; it also gives a bit of an idea of what her half of the book is like. However, it contains a tremendous wealth of spoilers for the Secret Country trilogy. I don't want to upset people, but those books have been out since 1989 and were reissued at the beginning of this century, so I'm not sure who all hasn't read them who still wants to.

I am very short of other material because I do not write things that move quickly. I've been through the Amazing Book and also through the partially-written Liavek novel, and even with cuts, there isn't anything else that really has good narrative movement to it.

How upset would you be, o my readers (readers of this LJ, I mean; there's no need for you to have read any of my books) if you were read a prologue like that at a convention? I am going to use a few seconds of my allotted time to provide a warning; how disgruntled would you be at thinking you'd better leave for twelve minutes and come back to hear the rest of the reading?

Pamela

Originally posted by

kate_nepveu at Con or Bust NOW taking requests for July-September cons!

Con or Bust is pleased to announce that as of this very moment, and through May 31, fans of color/non-white fans may request assistance to attend SFF cons in July, August, and September 2011.

Because there was no advance notice that we'd be taking requests, please repost and link to this post far and wide so that people know that assistance is possible. I will announce the precise amount after WisCon, but a minimum of $700 will be available to help fans of color attend cons for the next three months, plus two memberships to Renovation.

These cons are taking place in July-September and are supporting Con or Bust:

Renovation, the 2011 WorldCon, Reno, Nevada, USA, August 17-21 (donated memberships);
Readercon, Burlington, Massachusetts, USA, July 14-17 (donated money).

Read this post for how to request assistance. Donate con memberships by e-mailing knepveu@steelypips.org. Donate money with a PayPal account or credit card with this button:

Or learn more about Con or Bust generally. And thank you for your help in spreading the word!

Updated May 23, 2011.

Here are some links with suggestions of where to donate to help people affected by recent tornadoes:

Alabama and environs

Joplin, Missouri

North Minneapolis

Pamela

Profile

pameladean

November 2011

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style:: timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jan. 29th, 2012 02:29 am

Recent Entries

The time is out of joint

Fundraising Auction for Terri Windling

Slip sliding away

New frontiers in sidewalk insulation

Thou breath of autumn's being

Daylight's on the windowsill

One step forward, six steps back (Say Yes to Gay YA)

And my words like silent raindrops fell, and echoed in the wells of silence

Paint the meadows with delight

Restoration

O night and storm and darkness

The tempest of my eyes

If dust could only talk, what would we hear it say

By request

Blargh

Joel Rosenberg, 1954-2011

Does anybody need a cute, sweet, affectionate, ONLY cat?

Tardily seeking advice

Con or Bust NOW taking requests for July-September cons!

There's a chance of rain but no real chance of rest