The virus relinquishes its grip
Jun. 3rd, 2006 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanEDITED TO ADD: SERIOUSLY EXTENSIVE SPOILERS FOR X-3 ARE NOW SCATTERED THROUGH THE COMMENTS.
I'll put up a new post in a bit for people who want to talk about gardening or whatever without being spoiled.
I feel a little whiny complaining about my illness when so many people on my friendslist are in the acute phase of nasty illnesses acquired at Wiscon. But this virus really was evil. I started coughing on May 11, and yesterday was really the first day I felt ordinarily alert and energetic. Raphael and Lydy and I all had it, and the house resounded with cries of, "I haven't been this sick in years!" I got that over the telephone too, since most unfortunately I gave the evil ailment to my mother on Mother's Day. At least she got to call and see how she'd feel in three days.
I think I'll do updates behind cut tags, with subjects and everything, instead of the ususal muddle.
The book is really behaving pretty well. My brain, not so much. My latest idiocy was to have mislaid Bec, Arry and Con and Beldi's father. I had to write a scene in which Arry is stubbornly writing a letter to him before I realized that inquiries about him would have been made much earlier. I have just about figured out what I'm doing and where he fits in, but it's very annoying when one's characters have to resort to such tricks. Mine do not ordinarily address me directly or seem to know I exist, so this is an extreme measure.
We have a pair of catbirds and a pair of cardinals. We have extremely loud crows who perch on the gutters and yell and then flap heavily next door and do it again. We have house sparrows nesting under my bedroom air conditioner. We have chickadees. I saw a single house wren, which strikes me as peculiar. Bluejays are making a lot of noise, as are starlings and grackles. The grackles are especially noticeable, since they are making a kind of "shcheeeeeeer" noise that sounds more like insects than birds. I have seen them emitting the sound, however, very clearly. I also saw a downy or hairy woodpecker much closer to the house than usual. I'm getting a lot of traffic at the bird bath, and also when I run the sprinkler, predominantly from robins, starlings, grackles, and mourning doves.
A week or so ago I went outside to turn off the sprinkler and saw three bats racing around in the air not far above the back yard. One of them rose up and left, and the other two then proceeded to bonk against one another in mid-air, squeaking audibly. I suppose it was mating season. I saw just one bat yesterday evening, swooping in circles and, I trust, eating the gnats.
We are well supplied with gigantic bumblebees, flies and wasps, cabbage butterflies, and damselflies. I've seen a female whitetail dragonfly as well, and one each of the monarch, painted lady, and yellow swallowtail butterflies. There are a lot of gnats and a huge number of biting ants. I forgive the ants, however, because they are tending the peonies.
Both the mock orange bushes are blooming heavily. I lost my sense of smell about a week into the virus's depredations, and it's only just coming back. If I stick my nose right into a flower and end up with an ant on my cheek, I smell a scent that you might smell if there were a lot of mock oranges blooming about a block away.
The white rose of York is blooming heavily as well. I think it's benefitting from the unfortunate damage that the neighbors' ancient lilac suffered in the heavy March snowfall. The red rose of Lancaster has given up. It is not meant for this climate. The Henry Kelsey is taking a breather. It has three live canes, one of which is blooming. I need to prune the rest of the dead canes back. I've already fed it, which makes me fear that next year it will annex the garage.
Dame's rocket is blooming, though past its peak. The peonies are behaving extravagantly. I counted thirteen buds and blooms on one pale pink one that is not even the largest that we have. The red one, for some reason, is sulking and not blooming at all. It may be discombobulated by the extra sunlight afforded it by the lilac's absence; I don't know. Chives are blooming, and white clover, and the first of the daisy fleabane and the white daisies proper. The daylily buds began by looking like a green waterbird trying to swallow a green fish; now they look more like a green waterbird trying to do a magic trick with green scarves that won't unroll properly. The true lilies have buds. Penstemon and baptisia are trying to bloom, but they're finding the dry weather a bit of a trial. (They just went in this year.) The coreopsis moonbeam returned, cautiously. The threadleaf coreopsis is gigantic. Neither is ready to bloom just yet.
The remaining allium caeruleum, valiantly poking up between the leaves of the marauding daylilies, has buds.
In general gardening news, I have severely cut back the Japanese knotweed so that it won't smack us in the face as we walk along the south side of the house, and put down grass seed, and planted three tomato plants, again on the south side of the house where I hope the microclimate created by stucco and concrete will offset the lateness of their arrival. I've got a bunch of seesd that really need to go in this week, or there won't be much point to planting them at all.
?
I was already in a mood. A writer whom I admire, truly, quite the wrong side of idolatry, posted a minor humorous little bit that implied that all college students are male. Then I read a review of an upcoming biography of James Tiptree, Jr., and indignantly told Raphael that when the reviewer listed some examples of Tiptree winners at the end, there were "about six men and two women!" This is not true; there are three of each, which strikes me as still somewhat dicey, but certainly not at all what I initially perceived.
Then we went to see X-3, which displayed a truly remarkable fear of powerful female characters. Rogue goes meekly off and gets the cure because she's jealous; Jean Gray becomes a force so powerful that she must be controlled or destroyed, even though, aside from a few murders, all she does is stand around and look decayed; Mystique is cured inadvertently and then abandoned in a scene that I DO NOT BELIEVE AND WILL NOT BELIEVE, EVER. Storm is pretty much okay, but she sure seems to need a lot of pep talks from men. Kitty Pryde, now, is great. She's gone to rescue the kid who can "cure" mutants, arriving just ahead of Juggernaut. She tries to take the kid through the wall, but she can't, because within a certain radius of him (don't think about the science, just don't) all mutant powers fail. Does she panic? She does not. She tells the kid to stay close and lures Juggernaut into crashing into the wall and knocking himself silly. But then, she's young and winsome and hasn't had a lot of practice. I suppose they'll get rid of her eventually, the morons.
*snarl* If the idiots supposedly running this country were not using up presumably valuable legislative time trying to amend the Constitution to define marriage as "between a man and a woman" -- which doesn't even make any goddamn sense; do they mean it has to constantly walk between them and hold their hands or it's unconstitional? What is their problem? -- I might be less touchy.
Maybe. *snarl*
P.
*snarl*
I'll put up a new post in a bit for people who want to talk about gardening or whatever without being spoiled.
I feel a little whiny complaining about my illness when so many people on my friendslist are in the acute phase of nasty illnesses acquired at Wiscon. But this virus really was evil. I started coughing on May 11, and yesterday was really the first day I felt ordinarily alert and energetic. Raphael and Lydy and I all had it, and the house resounded with cries of, "I haven't been this sick in years!" I got that over the telephone too, since most unfortunately I gave the evil ailment to my mother on Mother's Day. At least she got to call and see how she'd feel in three days.
I think I'll do updates behind cut tags, with subjects and everything, instead of the ususal muddle.
The book is really behaving pretty well. My brain, not so much. My latest idiocy was to have mislaid Bec, Arry and Con and Beldi's father. I had to write a scene in which Arry is stubbornly writing a letter to him before I realized that inquiries about him would have been made much earlier. I have just about figured out what I'm doing and where he fits in, but it's very annoying when one's characters have to resort to such tricks. Mine do not ordinarily address me directly or seem to know I exist, so this is an extreme measure.
We have a pair of catbirds and a pair of cardinals. We have extremely loud crows who perch on the gutters and yell and then flap heavily next door and do it again. We have house sparrows nesting under my bedroom air conditioner. We have chickadees. I saw a single house wren, which strikes me as peculiar. Bluejays are making a lot of noise, as are starlings and grackles. The grackles are especially noticeable, since they are making a kind of "shcheeeeeeer" noise that sounds more like insects than birds. I have seen them emitting the sound, however, very clearly. I also saw a downy or hairy woodpecker much closer to the house than usual. I'm getting a lot of traffic at the bird bath, and also when I run the sprinkler, predominantly from robins, starlings, grackles, and mourning doves.
A week or so ago I went outside to turn off the sprinkler and saw three bats racing around in the air not far above the back yard. One of them rose up and left, and the other two then proceeded to bonk against one another in mid-air, squeaking audibly. I suppose it was mating season. I saw just one bat yesterday evening, swooping in circles and, I trust, eating the gnats.
We are well supplied with gigantic bumblebees, flies and wasps, cabbage butterflies, and damselflies. I've seen a female whitetail dragonfly as well, and one each of the monarch, painted lady, and yellow swallowtail butterflies. There are a lot of gnats and a huge number of biting ants. I forgive the ants, however, because they are tending the peonies.
Both the mock orange bushes are blooming heavily. I lost my sense of smell about a week into the virus's depredations, and it's only just coming back. If I stick my nose right into a flower and end up with an ant on my cheek, I smell a scent that you might smell if there were a lot of mock oranges blooming about a block away.
The white rose of York is blooming heavily as well. I think it's benefitting from the unfortunate damage that the neighbors' ancient lilac suffered in the heavy March snowfall. The red rose of Lancaster has given up. It is not meant for this climate. The Henry Kelsey is taking a breather. It has three live canes, one of which is blooming. I need to prune the rest of the dead canes back. I've already fed it, which makes me fear that next year it will annex the garage.
Dame's rocket is blooming, though past its peak. The peonies are behaving extravagantly. I counted thirteen buds and blooms on one pale pink one that is not even the largest that we have. The red one, for some reason, is sulking and not blooming at all. It may be discombobulated by the extra sunlight afforded it by the lilac's absence; I don't know. Chives are blooming, and white clover, and the first of the daisy fleabane and the white daisies proper. The daylily buds began by looking like a green waterbird trying to swallow a green fish; now they look more like a green waterbird trying to do a magic trick with green scarves that won't unroll properly. The true lilies have buds. Penstemon and baptisia are trying to bloom, but they're finding the dry weather a bit of a trial. (They just went in this year.) The coreopsis moonbeam returned, cautiously. The threadleaf coreopsis is gigantic. Neither is ready to bloom just yet.
The remaining allium caeruleum, valiantly poking up between the leaves of the marauding daylilies, has buds.
In general gardening news, I have severely cut back the Japanese knotweed so that it won't smack us in the face as we walk along the south side of the house, and put down grass seed, and planted three tomato plants, again on the south side of the house where I hope the microclimate created by stucco and concrete will offset the lateness of their arrival. I've got a bunch of seesd that really need to go in this week, or there won't be much point to planting them at all.
?
I was already in a mood. A writer whom I admire, truly, quite the wrong side of idolatry, posted a minor humorous little bit that implied that all college students are male. Then I read a review of an upcoming biography of James Tiptree, Jr., and indignantly told Raphael that when the reviewer listed some examples of Tiptree winners at the end, there were "about six men and two women!" This is not true; there are three of each, which strikes me as still somewhat dicey, but certainly not at all what I initially perceived.
Then we went to see X-3, which displayed a truly remarkable fear of powerful female characters. Rogue goes meekly off and gets the cure because she's jealous; Jean Gray becomes a force so powerful that she must be controlled or destroyed, even though, aside from a few murders, all she does is stand around and look decayed; Mystique is cured inadvertently and then abandoned in a scene that I DO NOT BELIEVE AND WILL NOT BELIEVE, EVER. Storm is pretty much okay, but she sure seems to need a lot of pep talks from men. Kitty Pryde, now, is great. She's gone to rescue the kid who can "cure" mutants, arriving just ahead of Juggernaut. She tries to take the kid through the wall, but she can't, because within a certain radius of him (don't think about the science, just don't) all mutant powers fail. Does she panic? She does not. She tells the kid to stay close and lures Juggernaut into crashing into the wall and knocking himself silly. But then, she's young and winsome and hasn't had a lot of practice. I suppose they'll get rid of her eventually, the morons.
*snarl* If the idiots supposedly running this country were not using up presumably valuable legislative time trying to amend the Constitution to define marriage as "between a man and a woman" -- which doesn't even make any goddamn sense; do they mean it has to constantly walk between them and hold their hands or it's unconstitional? What is their problem? -- I might be less touchy.
Maybe. *snarl*
P.
*snarl*
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-04 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-04 04:19 am (UTC)P.
I know this isn't what you meant
Date: 2006-06-04 04:42 am (UTC)http://www.thechicagoloop.net/yahtzee/XMMfic/HeWeTheyI.htm
A very good short story set after the first movie.
Re: I know this isn't what you meant
Date: 2006-06-04 07:45 pm (UTC)P.