pameladean

The pandemic isn't over, but the one-year mark came in with a lot of changes. Now that the first year is done, I regret not keeping a pandemic diary, as so many people did. But I have to say, to a far greater extent than I anticipated, the entire situation did a very bad number on my brain.

Once I was fully vaccinated I went in for lab work for the first time since June of 202, when my doctor begged me to do so before the anticipated surge in cases after the protests of the police murder of George Floyd. There was no surge, mercifully, which has not stopped right-wing bots and trolls from whining in perpetuity about how nobody complains about protests even though they obviously spread the virus.

My doctor had had me send her blood pressure and blood sugar numbers taken at home for a week or so in February, and then told me she would like to increase my metformin dosage. I agreed. This has been more annoying than I anticipated. I need to take metformin with food lest it wreak havoc on my digestion. The extra 500 mg is supposed to be taken with breakfast, while I retain the practice of taking 1000 mg with dinner. Medical directions of this sort always think people eat breakfast at 8 a.m. and dinner at 6 p.m., and they think bedtime is eleven p.m. at the latest. My schedule is nothing like that, and in particular meals tend to be crammed into a smaller percentage of the day than in the idyllic regular dreams of the people who write directions for the ingestion of medications.

In addition to eating it late, I also don't eat very much breakfast, since I have never since puberty been hungry until several hours after I get up. Now I'm eating twice as much as I want in the morning, which isn't much fun and also involves preparing twice as much. I used to eat a cup of soy yogurt, which was sufficient to cushion the effect of four blood pressure medications, an acid-reflux medication, and a different diabetes medication. Now I have to, horrors, make toast or oatmeal or something. In the morning. Not only am I not hungry when I wake up, my brain also, even when it was working well, did not really come online for an hour or two either. So I'm eating a larger breakfast than I want earlier than I want, which ends up pushing lunch further out. I usually have breakfast around 1 p.m. if I'm lucky, and lunch around five or six. Dinner is very late for a number of reasons having nothing to do with metformin, but it is not late enough to put twelve or usually even ten hours between breakfast and itself. So I'm perpetually flailing about the kitchen at 2 a.m. trying to find something substantial enough that I also actually want to eat in order to take the metformin.

Despite all these complaints, the new dosage is working and my A1c is down to 6.0. (This test measures the percentage of red blood cells that have glucose attached to them. A result of 6.0 is "pre-diabetes" in normal people but very good news in a diabetic; it's quite a bit below the point at which nasty complications tend to show up.)

Other lab work was fine too, except that, since she'd increased my metformin, my doctor ordered a vitamin B12 test, and I turned up borderline deficient. A remarkable number of symptoms that I had put down to pandemic stress, and that I have seen listed as symptoms of pandemic stress in any number of articles, turn out to be possible effects of B12 deficiency.

I've been taking B12 supplements for a couple of weeks and they are starting to have an effect on my energy levels and on the sweetness of my temper. We'll see about the higher cognition, I guess. My doctor thinks the deficiency is caused by the metformin, but I think it may have begun earlier than that, since I just generally eat somewhat weirdly.

Eric came over today for a short masked, distanced visit in the back yard. There might be one more of those, and then we can meet as in the before times. My brother will be fully vaccinated as of May 19th, and then anybody in my household who wishes can go see him and my mother and sit indoors unmasked and not have to yell all the time.

Eric had a complicated hierarchy of errands that had already been slightly derailed, if one can derail a hierarchy; so the visit was even shorter than anticipated. I stayed in the yard, hunting down all the peonies, which I'd been meaning to check on for several days. Raphael and I went for a long walk yesterday and started seeing the red alien shoots of emerging peonies everywhere, bringing ours tardily to mind. I am usually peering at their locations as soon as the sow is gone. Mine are in fact all up, even the unfortunate one that is being shaded out and wants moving. I watered them all. There were also a number of mystery plants that I'd been puzzling over for some days. They look a  little but not enough like daylilies, and while daylilies will pop up wherever they can, they don't usually jump long distances; these plants were not that close to any daylilies. One in the front finally offered up a bulb, and I remembered that I'd succumbed to a good deal on mixed giant alliums last fall. So that will be a nice surprise when they bloom. I watered those, too.

We have five flourishing green daffodil plants and one lone, extremely tenacious daffodil flower, which remained unmoved by snow, frost, and comparative drought. I should feed all of them. Most of the rest of the yard is either emerging creeping bellflower (argh), rampant scilla, non-native sedges, a bit of stubborn grass, and volunteer trees, largely box elder, hackberry, mulberry, Siberian (or possibly Chinese) elm, Norway maple, and green ash. There is one lilac bush, a volunteer from seed of the neighbor's ancient, lightning-struck, but still persisting bush. Eric said he was glad we had gotten a scion of that lilac before the neighbors put up a six-foot board fence, and I am of the same mind.

The other thing that Raphael and I saw on our walk was a glorious abundance of species tulips. I ended up ordering three different kinds for next year.

In addition to having energy and regaining such sweetness of temper as I can be said to have possessed, I've begun to be able to work on my Zeno's Novel in a more efficient fashion. I hope I may post here more often, a pandemic aftermath diary, perhaps, though when I think of India, and of all the people I'm worried about because they haven't been able to be vaccinated yet, I don't think we are in any aftermath just yet.

I've read every post in my circle all this time and have really appreciated every one of them, and the persistence of everyone's existence.

Pamela

Edited to correct previously-invisible typos.

I 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

Hey, you guys, my 1994 novel The Dubious Hills, one of the prequels to the new novel Going North is available for pre-order from Smashwords. There will be a Kindle and a trade paperback edition available as well, but we did the Smashwords editions first this time, since people who wanted those formats had to wait around for Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.

Here's the link:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/617626

With regard to my previous post, many thanks to everyone who expressed an opinion. I went with an option I hadn't altogether considered, originally suggested by sartorias, I think: I just inserted the single word "now" at the end of a sentence.

I really liked bunsen_h's suggestion, even if it may have been tongue-in-cheek, of an academic preface listing all the changes. But where there's only one, I can't be quite that deadpan about it.

Pamela

I will be doing a reading at Minicon from 5:30 to 6:30 on Saturday evening, in Atrium 2.

I'm going to read some material that was cut from Going North, because I can.

My voice doesn't hold out very well for an entire hour, so I'll probably read for a little over half an hour, take any questions or sign any books people want to offer up, and then let you have a little more time between the end of my reading and the beginning of Emma Bull's at 7:30 than you would if I persisted until 6:30.

Pamela

It's a hardcover first edition of The Dubious Hills. Here's the link:

http://con-or-bust.livejournal.com/119195.html

This is the copy that I reread and referred to while writing Going North, the joint sequel to Hills and The Whim of the Dragon. It's in good shape, but not pristine. I had thought this was pretty much my last copy, but when I unearthed a few more in the process of massive cleaning, I decided that since this one had a little added interest, I'd put it into the auction.

Pamela

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

This year Fourth Street left room to drag people onto panels at the last moment. I had an hour and a half's warning of the first one, but missed completely the moment when I was put on the Sunday afternoon panel about how you know when to stop revising. skzb reasonably felt that, given the situation my book and I are in, I should be on this panel. I didn't have any preparation time at all, however. Furthermore, everybody else was talking about revision driven by the writer or at most by beta readers. What I had to say about that wasn't really different from what the other panelists truepenny, matociquala, and skzb himself) had to say.

Unfortunately, at the time I was in the foggy, foggy middle of formulating what was making me most uneasy about the project of cutting the 375,000 words of Going North and Abiding Reflection down to 100,000 words. I was over being grieved that I had to remove half a dozen characters, and had at least become calloused to cutting a lot of scenes that I loved madly and wanted other people to read. But I hadn't yet realized what was still making me twitchy. I kept thinking, though I didn't think of saying this on the panel, because I don't do well in realtime, that what I needed was to recognize at what point the book was no longer like a book that I would write. This isn't very useful advice to beginning writers in any case, because they don't know yet what the books they will write are going to look like. Every time I cut down a description, or removed a convoluted section of dialogue, or started with the action rather than moving into it crabwise, I would wonder if I had reached the point where the book didn't sound like me. I've always tried to keep all of such tendencies under control, not wanting a book entirely composed of them, but I thought I could go too far.

The problem was elsewhere, though. It was thematic. This book is about a lot of things, but among the ones I am aware of are such diverse elements as family, whether chosen or biological, and in particular mother-daughter relationships; identity, including both disguise and misidentification, and in general the matter of what I've heard Graydon describe as "being present as oneself in the world"; how community is formed and maintained; how romantic relationships are formed and maintained; and how all smaller relationships fit into communities. I just deleted a long conversation between Frances and Arry about why they never visited Arry's paternal grandmother. It's not directly pertinent to the plot, though it acts indirectly on the plot by informing Arry's actions. Her actions are somewhat overdetermined anyway, so that wasn't an issue, but I suddenly saw through the overt structure of the book and into the thematic underlayer and became seriously worried that I was doing a lot of damage to it. I manage that layer primarily by intuition rather than painstakingly thinking it out as I do plot (such as my plots are), and I felt that I might have done something crazy that would result in an earthquake.

I guess we'll see.

Pamela