Thanks to the Mysterious Benefactor!
Mar. 9th, 2019 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanI got an email yesterday informing me that "someone" had upgraded my (unpaid) Dreamwidth account with twelve months of paid account. Whoever you are, thank you so much! I take this as partly a nudge to post more often. I write posts in my head with great frequency; or, perhaps more accurately, I narrate to myself what is happening or has happened, and it might as well be written down, but mostly it isn't.
I find that a lot of small observations or thoughts end up on Twitter, whereas reports on revising Going North end up on Patreon. Neither of these is bad in itself, especially the Patreon part; but I value the leftover LiveJournal/new Dreamwidth community and would prefer to be more active in it. I haven't yet looked at all the fancy nifty things I can do with a paid account. I am terrible at reading documentation. But I'll do that soon.
In the meantime, we await a major winter storm. I ended up suggesting or agreeing to the cancellation of both my social events today because I am so tired of winter and it is so stressful being in a car on Minneapolis streets right now. No driver I'd be driven by is the problem. It's everybody else. Winter has worn out my resilience. Ours really started in October, which was cold and cloudy, like November, which then proceeded to be just like itself in serene indifference to the fact that October had stolen its thunder. And I do mean that literally. Naturally, the forecast snow amounts have gone down and the entire affair, which was supposed to start around eleven this morning, is standing in the doorway rubbing one foot against the opposite calf and nervously fingering its hair. It's raining. I'm still glad to be at home and not worrying when the snow will begin or when and how the rain will freeze.
The winter has been very beautiful, once it stopped being abnormally warm and belatedly got down to its business. The snow is lovely. Until it got warmish a few days ago, long stretches of white lay along the tree trunks and branches everywhere you looked.. While one to three inches every three days is annoying to a person who likes to shovel and then be done with it, it provides a fresh clean blanket just as the snow becomes grimy. The weather has also hit the sweet spot for ice dams. Every house in every neighborhood I've been through has had, until the past few days, a fantastical collection of ever-lengthening icicles. I spend most of my time at home on the second floor, and the icicles grew and grew, until some of them were below the windowsills and starting to freeze their ends onto the tiny roof of the built-in in the downstairs dining room. They made rainbows in the sunlight and glowed blue with the moon. The light in the south-facing rooms became muted and cloudy. More and more we felt imprisoned in a magical ice castle of unknown provenance and intention.
Last week I called the roofers who patched our leak last year. I was finding a lot of contradictory information about how best to deal with ice dams, the actual phenomenon of which the icicles were just the most apparent symptom. Some companies use roof rakes and ice picks; some use steamers. Everybody says that everybody else's methods can damage your roof. This is probably true all around. i decided I'd just go with the people who had fixed the roof last time, and David concurred. They had originally said they couldn't get to us until next week sometime, but I got a call early yesterday morning that they were sending a crew out to get stuff off the room before the storm came in and made everything worse.
Their method is to remove snow from the roof (they used shovels) and take out strategic portions of the ice dams so the water has somewhere to go. They also knocked down the icicles, or most of them. The ones over the back door had become frightening. I encountered our northerly neighbor when I went out to meet my mother for lunch on Wednesday, and he said that he didn't even walk around his house any more. He was standing on the sidewalk hopefully looking to see if any of his icicles had fallen down yet.
When our roofers knocked down the icicles outside my office windows, one of them plunged right through the lid of a plastic tote that's kept on the front porch to shelter outgoing packages, breaking the corner of the lid that it hit into a number of pieces. So my neighbor had a point.
It's weirdly light inside now even though the day is cloudy and misty and rainy.
I knew the roofers had arrived not because they made much noise, but because both upstairs cats rose up out of sound sleep and galloped into the kitchen to see what was happening.
I'll just mention before I stop for the moment that the revisions on my novel are actually going well and being fun. I'm sure there will be some more slogging before I'm done, but this part is a great relief after the stubborn slow cranky time I've had for so long.
Wishing you all a fine weekend, whatever that means to each of you,
Pamela
I find that a lot of small observations or thoughts end up on Twitter, whereas reports on revising Going North end up on Patreon. Neither of these is bad in itself, especially the Patreon part; but I value the leftover LiveJournal/new Dreamwidth community and would prefer to be more active in it. I haven't yet looked at all the fancy nifty things I can do with a paid account. I am terrible at reading documentation. But I'll do that soon.
In the meantime, we await a major winter storm. I ended up suggesting or agreeing to the cancellation of both my social events today because I am so tired of winter and it is so stressful being in a car on Minneapolis streets right now. No driver I'd be driven by is the problem. It's everybody else. Winter has worn out my resilience. Ours really started in October, which was cold and cloudy, like November, which then proceeded to be just like itself in serene indifference to the fact that October had stolen its thunder. And I do mean that literally. Naturally, the forecast snow amounts have gone down and the entire affair, which was supposed to start around eleven this morning, is standing in the doorway rubbing one foot against the opposite calf and nervously fingering its hair. It's raining. I'm still glad to be at home and not worrying when the snow will begin or when and how the rain will freeze.
The winter has been very beautiful, once it stopped being abnormally warm and belatedly got down to its business. The snow is lovely. Until it got warmish a few days ago, long stretches of white lay along the tree trunks and branches everywhere you looked.. While one to three inches every three days is annoying to a person who likes to shovel and then be done with it, it provides a fresh clean blanket just as the snow becomes grimy. The weather has also hit the sweet spot for ice dams. Every house in every neighborhood I've been through has had, until the past few days, a fantastical collection of ever-lengthening icicles. I spend most of my time at home on the second floor, and the icicles grew and grew, until some of them were below the windowsills and starting to freeze their ends onto the tiny roof of the built-in in the downstairs dining room. They made rainbows in the sunlight and glowed blue with the moon. The light in the south-facing rooms became muted and cloudy. More and more we felt imprisoned in a magical ice castle of unknown provenance and intention.
Last week I called the roofers who patched our leak last year. I was finding a lot of contradictory information about how best to deal with ice dams, the actual phenomenon of which the icicles were just the most apparent symptom. Some companies use roof rakes and ice picks; some use steamers. Everybody says that everybody else's methods can damage your roof. This is probably true all around. i decided I'd just go with the people who had fixed the roof last time, and David concurred. They had originally said they couldn't get to us until next week sometime, but I got a call early yesterday morning that they were sending a crew out to get stuff off the room before the storm came in and made everything worse.
Their method is to remove snow from the roof (they used shovels) and take out strategic portions of the ice dams so the water has somewhere to go. They also knocked down the icicles, or most of them. The ones over the back door had become frightening. I encountered our northerly neighbor when I went out to meet my mother for lunch on Wednesday, and he said that he didn't even walk around his house any more. He was standing on the sidewalk hopefully looking to see if any of his icicles had fallen down yet.
When our roofers knocked down the icicles outside my office windows, one of them plunged right through the lid of a plastic tote that's kept on the front porch to shelter outgoing packages, breaking the corner of the lid that it hit into a number of pieces. So my neighbor had a point.
It's weirdly light inside now even though the day is cloudy and misty and rainy.
I knew the roofers had arrived not because they made much noise, but because both upstairs cats rose up out of sound sleep and galloped into the kitchen to see what was happening.
I'll just mention before I stop for the moment that the revisions on my novel are actually going well and being fun. I'm sure there will be some more slogging before I'm done, but this part is a great relief after the stubborn slow cranky time I've had for so long.
Wishing you all a fine weekend, whatever that means to each of you,
Pamela
no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 10:58 pm (UTC)We are expecting snow sleet freezing rain. Landlord went up on the roof today and pounded on the ice dam, I had no drippies until late in the day. He keeps telling me it's 'not so bad' and you know, he might be right. I hate it though.
It was wonderful to hear what you're doing. I Hope the storm has lost most of it's oomph (and doesn't come here.)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-09 11:39 pm (UTC)I think it's getting close enough to spring that the light is lasting enough to notice; I was a little shocked a few days ago that it was past five and not dim yet.
(A storm which might be the storm you're waiting on is expected late tonight, freezing rain and then rain and in quantity. "Colorado Low", the forecast says, which leaves me wondering if decidedly mountainous Colorado is required to export any lowness which arrives for complex altitudinal reasons.)
I would not mind an actual spring this year; the last few have been sleet to hot in what feels like under a week. (It wasn't, quite, but today was not a winter jacket day, when last night had a posted frostbite risk.)
Book-wise, I keep discovering more ways in which I am perhaps not quite skilled enough to write this obstinate thing. Looking forward to Going North with definite anticipation.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 12:15 am (UTC)IT SNOWED AGAIN HERE. Just a tiny bit of a dusting, but it felt a bit like two digits up!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 04:21 am (UTC)I'm so happy about the novel progress!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-10 10:24 pm (UTC)And I'm glad the novel revisions are going well!