User:	baratron
	Date:	2008-07-04 01:34
	Subject:	de-rubbling
	Security:	Public
	Music:	Richard playing "Enter Sandman" on Rock Band

The garden is progressing. The skip reappeared on Saturday morning, not quite so hideously early (9.30 am). We had already assured a parking space for it via the car of a random friend of one of the next-door neighbours (!). otterylexa came round with big shears and spent a couple of hours attacking the monstrous triffid (which is possibly a buddleia davidii, according to the pictures on Wikipedia). My mum & I chopped the chopped-off triffid into smaller pieces to put in the skip while Richard and Lexa went to obtain a wheelbarrow and skip ramp from HSS, but the skip ramp turned out to be far too large to fit into a normal car.

On Sunday, the skip ramp arrived but the wheelbarrow didn't. Much growling ensued, followed by more chopping up of triffid. Eventually the wheelbarrow turned up at 5 pm. Stupid HSS. I've left a small piece of triffid for the snails to live on, because I didn't want to completely destroy their habitat, but it no longer fills the garden. This means that we have been able to see the vast quantity of rubble all over the ground. My mum & I have been loading this into the wheelbarrow and taking it to the skip. I spent a fun hour yesterday inside the skip, rearranging stuff so the small bits of rubble dropped down into the holes between larger bits rather than taking up more room on top. I think my dad thought I was nuts. Mind you, he also thought I was nuts for carefully removing all living invertebrates from every piece of debris before putting it in the skip, so nothing new.

As of tonight all of the loose rubble has gone and the wuzzie & I have a relatively flat garden that consists of approximately-level concrete. But what is the concrete poured onto? You guessed it. Yet more rubble. Our garden seems to be like Ankh-Morpork, and has been built mostly on our garden. When we first bought the house, we had decking on top of rubble on top of a modern patio on top of an older patio on top of concrete on top of rubble. Now it's just the concrete and lower layers left. Hooray. Breaking that up will require a pneumatic drill and/or pickaxe, and is for The Professionals. The main thing is there's enough space and safe flat ground for workmen to bring in scaffolding to do the building work that needs doing.

I am somewhat alarmed to discover just how much work needs doing, though. We've known for four years that the entire back wall needs to be replastered and have a damp-proof course put in. (The idiots who "did up" this house on the cheap some years ago managed to use hygroscopic plaster, so it's absorbed water from the air and the wall is saturated to the point where it's covered in snails.) If we have any common sense, this has to be done before we get a new kitchen put in, and I'm at the point where I can't stand our (£100 bodged together from Wickes and repainted several times) kitchen any longer. However, I discovered on Monday that the opposite wall is also damp to the point where paint is coming off in flakes, and there's no reason for it to be. I'm thinking we may need to get every wall in the house tested again, which may mean me having to live somewhere else for a while because plaster dust makes me hideously ill. Argh.

	User:	lissamc
	Date:	2008-07-03 17:30
	Subject:	50 challenge: left vs right
	Security:	Public

50 challenge: left vs right
Originally uploaded by lissagwen

	User:	erispope
	Date:	2008-07-03 20:02
	Subject:
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	exhausted

Yesterday was great. I saw 'Hancock' with Indigo - overall, it was charming, if a bit uneven. Will Smith has an unfair amount of charisma. We ran around, did errands, got our nails done.

today I was resolved to clean house. I cleaned the hell out of the kitchen, though I need to complete that by washing the floor. But I also raged on the backyard- cleared out all this brush, removed the would-be trees that had twined themselves into the chain link dogpen. Now I can properly set up the dogpen in a shady corner of the yard - I've got zipties to fix the shade-roof, and will get pine chip bedding to surface it all. The old doghouse is too small - I bought it in expectation of my dog being normal size for his breed. He's twice the breed standard, in terms of height and weight. There's a little chihuahua down the street who lives under a plastic bucket, out in front of his owner's house - once i've cleaned up this house, I'm going to give it to him - once I figure out how to get the stains off of it. Fed the roses - it's a non-organic systemic insecticide/fungicide/fertilizer, because I have yet to find a way to kill the damn borers. They've already killed one of my roses, the bastards.


So, best way to get weather stains out of pale plastic? I've been using steel wool, but that's not very effective, and fucking exhausting.

	User:	zanzjan
	Date:	2008-07-03 20:02
	Subject:	Toe...
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	not surprised

...is indeed broke. Foot is not.

There's nothing they can do about it, so I have been advised to tape it to the toe next door and let 'em be buddies for a while.

	User:	elisem
	Date:	2008-07-03 18:35
	Subject:	Friday shinies will be posted a little early this week
	Security:	Public

... because I'm working on them now.

	User:	pantryslut
	Date:	2008-07-03 14:59
	Subject:
	Security:	Public

I have found my soon-to-be-new motto in the acknowledgements section of the book I am currently reading:

"But I wasn't procrastinating. I was parenting."

	User:	anghara
	Date:	2008-07-03 14:48
	Subject:	Murphy the Magnificent is feeling *much* better, thank you...
	Security:	Public

( And this is what he had to say to his vet today... )

	User:	micheinnz
	Date:	2008-07-04 09:37
	Subject:	Oi, physics types
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	happy

Subatomic particle soft toys

If I had more cash, I'd get myself a whole pile of electrons. Whee!

(Link courtesy of stellar_muddle)

	User:	sailorjim
	Date:	2008-07-03 15:49
	Subject:	Intro for writing contest
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	amused

(To those who regularly read this blog, greetings and apologies.  This is a required introduction blog entry for

brigits_flame so please ignore this brief interruption.  Thanks.)

 

Hi, I'm Sailor Jim Johnston!

Who is Sailor Jim and how did he come about? (Good Question . . . and one my VA shrink would love to answer!)

Let's start with Jim Johnston and work our way up to Sailor Jim Johnston.

Jim is fifty years old, retired and living on a small farm in the midst of the Big Thicket area of Texas, in a town that shall remain nameless (out of fear of his neighbors beating the hell out of him for making fun of them in his writing). In the years after he was medically retired from the Coast Guard, he's delivered pizza, repaired magazines and books at a university library, been an office manager for one Louisiana state office and a benefits counselor for another, done night auditing at two different motels, manned a telephone technical assistance line for a cell phone company and a telephone account rep line for a Virginia electric company, helped Hurricane Rita victims repair houses, and even spent a tax season working at for the IRS.

While working at the university library, he discovered that he was a writer.  He'd always been a storyteller, cadging beers with unlikely tales for years in the military, but had never written any of them down.  Then, one day when he was very bored, he wrote a little article about working in a university library for an internet magazine.  It was later published by a paper magazine, College & Undergraduate Libraries magazine, as were several others ... then the editor asked if he wanted to be the humor columnist. Whereas the pay sucked (being non-existent), how many people can honestly state that they were an internationally read columnist? It was a serious ego stroke, gave him something to casually drop during parties, and was well worth the effort of trying to find humor in working at a university library.

At the same time, he was regularly sharing his little bits of silliness with his friends at alt.callahans under the nom-de-web of Sailor Jim and collecting rejection slips from some of the finest publications the world knows ... as a matter of fact, rejecting one of Sailor Jim's odd little stories has almost become the very definition of a fine publication.  Y'see, he'd gotten the bug and now wanted to become a paid author.  Alas, it's never happened and his rejection slip collection is the envy of any hack writer in the world.

However, several of his fans at alt.callahans decided that they actually wanted to pay ten bucks for a paperback collection of his posts, instead of copying them free from the web and sticking them in a two buck binder. The end result was Naked Through the Snow and Other Bits of Silliness, published by Quaternion Press Publishing House and still available through the publisher even now.  (Or, if you insist, you can buy a used copy from this guy for $177.38 ... why he's charging that much for a book you can pick up new from the publisher for only $12.60 is something I'll never understand.)

A free "please don't sue me for using some of your extremely copyrighted characters" copy to Spider Robinson, author of the excellent series of Callahan's books (that Sailor Jim regularly plagiarized characters from) resulted in the following:

I've been slowly working my way through NAKED THROUGH THE SNOW as deadline pressures allow--I've been keeping it in the bathroom, in other words--and I am very impressed. You're welcome to borrow my bar and tender anytime. It's the most consistently interesting and entertaining nonfiction book I've read in a long time. You are one of the world's great storytellers--and it seems Fate, sensing this, has punished you with an amazing life, to supply material. I've read several chapters aloud to Jeanne, and she's enjoyed them as much as I have. (Then she makes me put the book down and go back to work. You are a textbook example of why I dare not hang out in alt.callahans: that way lies bankruptcy.) My highest professional compliments, and thanks from both of us for sending us a signed copy of NAKED THROUGH THE SNOW. I'm proud to have played a part, however peripheral and faint, in its creation and publication. I hope it sells a million copies and brings you a thousand new friends.

Which amazed and terrified him so badly, he didn't write anything for almost half a year.

In addition to this, Sailor Jim has been, in no particular order, a stand-up comic, magician, juggler, impressionist, photographer, programmer, yeoman, coxswain, boatswain, helmsman, killer, drug addict, alcoholic, smoker, mental ward prisoner and superhero.

Of these varied roles, he still tells jokes, takes pictures, writes, does the occasional coin trick, will nervously juggle three of anything he can get his hands on, still suffers mental problems and has an occasionally has a drink.  He is also still in no particular order.

He is, and has been for better than twenty-five years, married to a woman of angelic compassion and understanding named Dian Marie Mullins and has been the willing slave to an endless series of cats.

	User:	worthyadvisor
	Date:	2008-07-03 14:02
	Subject:	WANT!
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	amused

As seen on _scientists_:

Scientist "Saint" Candles.

*glee*

	User:	wshaffer
	Date:	2008-07-03 13:38
	Subject:	I've got the day-before-a-holiday blues...
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	restless

This place is like a ghost town. There's hardly anyone here. Every time I send out an email, I get "Out of Office" responses back.

I've just spent about two hours responding to a very helpful, but excruciatingly detailed document review. I've got a couple of other document tasks to take care of, and then I think I'm going to slip out for a walk in the park.

	User:	mrissa
	Date:	2008-07-03 15:01
	Subject:	My Friends Jump Off a Bridge. I Follow.
	Security:	Public

On my friendslist there are several people who are posting lists of their potential/unfinished novel projects. Only the ones with outlines and prose on them! That look shiny at the moment, I mean. Not counting the one I'm revising right now (like, two seconds ago! Right now! Because I'm organized like that!) and the one that is rough drafted but needs revisions, we have:

( kind of a list, really )That I'm thinking of. Right now. Mostly I'm not thinking of it right now, I'm just doing what I can through the vertigo and letting the rest take care of itself for the moment.

	User:	james_nicoll
	Date:	2008-07-03 15:32
	Subject:	Old Tea Leaf Reviews 17: 1997 Locus Poll Best First Novel
	Security:	Public

Cut for length and to temporarily conceal how few of these I have read.

( Read more... )

	User:	cjsmith
	Date:	2008-07-03 12:19
	Subject:	Snackies
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	exhausted

Sawdust bars go bad FAST. Most of my first batch now has nice fuzzy mold spots.

Mozzarella prosciutto basil roll is a small piece of heaven on earth.

Happy hour today, at work, will include something from Dittmer's. Life is looking up.

	User:	rfrench
	Date:	2008-07-03 12:10
	Subject:	Drugs!
	Security:	Public

Just in case anyone else, like me, can buy prescription drugs more cheaply overseas with cash than having insurance pay for them in the U.S., I'd like to recommend CanadaDrugs.com. They probably aren't the absolute cheapest provider around, but I've been using them for a year and a half and have found their service and response time to be superb. Most recently I placed an order at night and the prescription had run out. They called the doctor, got reauthorization, and then an actual human called me on the phone to let me know everything was OK and it had been shipped less than two days later.

	User:	zellandyne
	Date:	2008-07-03 10:36
	Subject:	Epiphanousness!
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	epiphanous

So I'm using Scrivener's binder function and essentially creating an outline of the novel, and as I'm doing it, I find myself stopping the outline at the end of the first story arc.  I think about taking it further, but something in me says no, focus on the story up to this point, and that feels right.  Then I notice that my chapters are unbalanced; some have twice as much material as others.  So I figure I should break a few of those up a bit.  Which takes me out to something like 10 or 12 chapters.  And I find myself thinking that I want to label the next part of the book (un-outlined at this point, remember, although fully drafted) Book II.

And then, hours later, as I'm brushing my teeth, I get the epiphany.  And I get excited.  And I start bouncing up and down.  And Navarre, also brushing his teeth, starts laughing at me.

No, this was one of those leaps, and the logic fills in backwards.  So I wasn't consciously thinking these things, but they all fell into place once I had the thought.  Which is, the section I've already outlined is a complete novel in itself.  Too short for an adult book, but this is YA.

The arc is complete.  Katta, my main, has completed her first goal, and had it completely change shape under her feet.  Her perception of the world has completely changed, and at the very end of the section, a new story arc gets seeded.

(For those from Fictionados who might remember the first draft from when I took it through the group, this is after she "frees" Uncle Rutherford in the jail and when she gets captured by the other side in the civil war.)

	User:	densaer
	Date:	2008-07-03 11:53
	Subject:	Behind the eight ball and trying to catch up.
	Security:	Public

Dear $DEITY,

I have lots to do, and not a lot of time in which to do it.

Let me be productive today, with no tones on the radio.

Let me finish my expense reports, that the gods of AMEX may be appeased.

Thanks.

	User:	anghara
	Date:	2008-07-03 11:48
	Subject:	Spam idiots, redux
	Security:	Public

1) In the department of "You use that word very often I do not think it means what you think it means" the subject line "Exchange your life" doesn't give me a good feeling, people (exchange it for what? An octopus? A set of Encyclopedia Britannica, the 1951 edition? A cool drink on a hot day?)

2) If you are going to sent me email telling me that my Windows Firewall expires soon and that I need to download an update... don't send the email from Panama. I live a couple of hours away from Redmond. I know where Microsoft is.

Sigh.

	User:	serenejournal
	Date:	2008-07-03 11:33
	Subject:	Locals: Obama events
	Security:	Public

If you're not local to me (SF East Bay), or planning to be visiting soon, you can skip this. Well, you can skip it anyway. :-)

Obama & related events coming up:

July 12: Voter-registration training in Kensington/Berkeley. I will be handing out burritos, so I won't be at this one.

July 16: I'll be helping with non-partisan voter registration at Children's Hospital in Oakland from 11:30-1:30, in the Cafeteria

July 26: Giant registration drive, with a booth, at the Ashby flea market, all day.

	User:	cjsmith
	Date:	2008-07-03 11:33
	Subject:	The ravel'd sleave of care
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	exhausted

Half an Ambien is a lot more tolerable.

O'course, it doesn't work all that well, either. You win some, you lose some.