pameladean

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

Hello! I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted. Apparently it's easier for me to post if I have something to report on regularly. However, nobody with four feet has eaten any sour cream and onion dip or anything else toxic, and fortunately I have not broken any more bones. I did get the flu, but the clinic advised me to take Tamiflu (MY GOD THAT STUFF IS EXPENSIVE WHAT IS UP WITH THAT), which actually behaved as advertised. I think I've still got the flu aftermath with a general dragging-around, can't -get-moving, can't-get-motivated fog, but it's lifting.

Since I posted last we've had one last plumbing emergency, in which a well-researched and well-intentioned attempt to unclog the cranky ill-designed low-water-use toilet from 1997 resulted in the recommended instrument's getting stuck in the toilet. When the plumber who put in the new bathtub faucet requested financing for us, he did an estimate for installing a new toilet as well, so we had extra financing sitting around. When I hadn't wanted to get the toilet replaced at the same time as the faucet, he'd remarked that it was fine to buy a toilet ourselves, on sale, and then have them install it, so I'd set up some email alerts for good deals on recommended toilets. But at this point we were just done with the toilet situation, and so the plumber came out the next day, removed the offending toilet, and installed one that seems to actually work. The sound of it flushing still sometimes makes the cats jump, if they happen to be around, and it's sometimes necessary for them to put their paws on the seat and inspect the situation. They never see anything, however, because the flush is so fast.

Compared to some places' winters ours has not been overly dramatic, but it has featured quite a lot of snow and a lot of thawing and refreezing, resulting in massive amounts of dangerous ice and slippery piles of snow that have to be climbed or worked around. I have not gone out much, and when I have it's been with loud cries of "This sucks" and people who will let me clutch their hands. David, Eric, and Lydy have all been very patient in this regard. I did walk over to Dreampark for the MinnStf meeting on Saturday, under the impression that the sidewalks were largely clear. The ones on our street were, but the intersections were small jagged landscapes of frictionless surface, and the north-facing side of 40th Street was a crazy quilt of cleared walk, smooth horrible ice, and lumpy horrible ice. You could tell that people had tried. There was sand in the ice, and patterns of small holes told where householders had sprinkled ice melter, which had just bored through leaving a pocked but still treacherous surface. The clear patches looked more like the result of luck with the angle of the sun than any more effort on anybody's part.

I had a doctor's appointment last week. My blood pressure is too high. My doctor suggested a number of possible medications or increases in the medications I'm taking now, but I refused more beta blocker because it is messing with my adrenaline reactions, and I'd already taken and really not much cared for the other things she'd suggested, or else I was allergic to them. She got me to agree to take a daily aspirin and said that summer was coming, and it would be easier to exercise, so I should just work on that. When I went in to get the ankle X-rayed, my blood pressure was much improved from where it was in November and also much better than it was last week, so the enforced lack of exercise caused by the broken ankle is probably partly to blame. For the rest, I emphatically blame the Republicans.

Minicon is rapidly approaching. I'll be doing a reading and two panels, one on the legacy of Theodore Sturgeon and the other one on retellings, which I am particularly looking forward to.

I hope you are all surviving.

Pamela

First, thank you with all my heart to everybody who's commented on my previous post about starting a Patreon. I'm working on setting it up now.

Second, as I keep a wary eye on the weather reports, waiting for an Active Advisory or a Special Weather Statement to suddenly pop up, I thought I'd tell a couple of cat stories from last Tuesday, when thunderstorms battered and flooded parts of Minnesota, including the Twin Cities.

The weather report mentioned hail, torrential downpours, and wind gusts of up to 80 mph. Raphael and I decided that as the storms approached, we would box up the upstairs cats and put them in the upstairs hallway, with doors shut to make it safe from any broken windows that the storm might cause. If there were any sign of tornadoes, we'd have to rethink this, but we thought it would do to go on with. We painstakingly lowered all the warped cranky ancient storm windows, a ritual usually reserved for some cold autumn day. A little before five, I gave the cats their daily dental treats, which they recognize as Entirely Splendid Food rather than a treatment for tartar. Then Raphael and I stood conferring earnestly in the cat-sitting room for a little while, and then I got out the carriers. Saffron immediately went into one of them, so we shut the door on her. Raphael bent to scoop up Cassie, who is soft and round and winsome-looking, but she is no slouch -- she ran at incredible speed under my bed and refused to come out. We thought the nightstand would protect her from broken glass if necessary; and later she scooted down the hall like a furry fat snake and went under Raphael's bed, which is much sturdier. We put Saffron's carrier in the hall. She emitted one protestation and then went to sleep.

We got a few gusts of wind and some very hard rain and some minor hail, but the power didn't even go out. (I am not complaining.) In time the storm passed. I took Saffron's carrier back to the cat-sitting room and opened the door. She came right out, saw Cassie's carrier standing open, and promptly went into that carrier. After a moment she apparently thought, "Nah. The other one's better," and returned to her own box.

Cassie stayed under the bed. She is extremely fond of her food, but she would not come out for wet food or for additional treats. She did come out for dry food at the end of the day. But the next afternoon right around treat time, Raphael and I happened to be standing in the cat-sitting room talking about something in earnest tones, and Cass went down on her belly and galloped into my office and refused to come out for treats. She made a very careful appearance for wet food later on. We have agreed that we should avoid having earnest conversations in the cat-sitting room around five p.m.

Pamela

The snowdrops came up all of a piece, leaves and drooping white flowers, three or four days ago. The purple snow crocuses are blooming in the front flower bed. The peony on the south side of the house is showing red shoots, as is the evil but beguiling Japanese knotweed. The bleeding-heart in the front flower bed has put up red-and-green shoots, already frilled with proto-leaves, right out of its mulch. The blue-and-yellow thug irises are putting up leaves, as is the burgundy one that hasn't bloomed much in recent years. I should feed that one.

The dames' rocket and the motherwort have greened up. The daylilies are four to eight inches high, depending on where they are. The bare earth of the south side yard is filling up with tiny violet leaves, a bit of periwinkle, and the aforementioned Japanese knotweed. The grass is greening up. There are small leaves on both mock-orange bushes, and on the neighbors' peabush hedge. I really ought to rake the leaves off the remaining plants, but I have a deep conviction that we are going to pay for this weather with sub-zero temperatures and a raging blizzard, pretty much ANY TIME NOW. So I walk around in bemusement instead.

Ari and I saw a morning-cloak butterfly a few days ago, sunning itself on the back of a lawn chair. I've also seen various small flies and beetles, but no queen bumblebees yet, and no green darners.

Juncoes are still here, and there are so many I think they may be either passing through or preparing to leave. We have a pair of cardinals, which is always cheering. The chickadees and house sparrows and house finches are singing in their various ways, and crows are rattling.

In a rash frenzy, I ordered a bunch of plants from the Lake Country School just down the street. They used to send out six-year-olds with forms to go door to door, and you never knew exactly what you would get when you went to pick up your plants. But now everything is online. I confidently expect that the edited manuscript of my book, with a short deadline for return, will land on me on the weekend I am supposed to pick up the plants.

The mint hasn't come back yet, which concerns me. If it doesn't, I had better buy three plants of it and put them in different locations. This is a good recipe for disaster, but maybe the mint can fight back the Japanese knotweed.

Pamela