If you’re a fan of fantasy and steampunk, then you’ll want to know that Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam will soon be available at Subterranean Press.

I loved this book. It was sort of a cross between Ellen Kushner and Kate Ross, and one of the best books I read last year.

My only problem is that I want MORE and I want it NOW.

Looks like I’ve made it through today without breaking anyt

Things I considered doing with our tax rebate check:

1) Get the house resided
2) Replace the sofa
3) Get Michael a new computer
4) Upgrade our cell phones

Things I was not planning on doing with our tax rebate check:
Repair or replace the wood stove.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, I–your gracious host–managed to break the wood stove this morning. It absolutely cannot be used until it is repaired or replaced, and considering the shape it’s in, replace makes a lot more sense than repair.

What did I do? It had four heavy glass panels on the front lining the two doors that open to allow you to put in wood. It was a pretty stupid set-up, actually, but as the wood stove only cost us $50, we weren’t complaining. As you may have guessed, I shattered one of those panels this morning.

Bah humbug.

So…. I’ve signed up for a writing game with the Whateverettes et al. And YOU are invited to participate.

Rules and list of participants are here.

If you’d like the play along, make a comment on Nathan’s blog before noon (EST) on Sunday.

It’s most likely going to be silly, so don’t be afraid to jump in even if you’re unsure of your writing skills. Hell, you’ve seen my writing and I’m playing, so jump in.

Whenever it gets to me, I’ll have a link to the previous portion of the story, and to portion that comes after me.

Although rumor has it there may be portions involving the digestive tracks of dinosaurs, we’ll just have to see.

Holy Cow!

As if the morning wasn’t rough enough, as soon as I got my computer on, I got an IM from the GA at the front desk that there were two cops in the facility.

And they were there to proctor an exam or something.

Or maybe protect a teacher or student.

That of course got an, “I’ll be right up,” from me.

Apparently a resident got booted from their program and made random threats, so the University Police were here to make sure that if said loser appeared, nothing untoward would happen.

Thing is, it sounds a lot worse than it felt. The officers were relaxed and didn’t think the individual would actually do anything, but all things considered, felt it better to take the threat seriously. So we had at least one cop here for the entire six hour exam.

One can only imagine how the other students taking the exam felt. (Luckily they were squirreled away in a classroom and the cop sat out front where he could see the front door of the facility, so they should have been able to focus once they got started.)

Or the professor who had been threatened.

On one level you can almost understand how someone could be upset about getting kicked out of their residency. But my understanding stops when someone threatens to come back with a gun, and instead makes me wonder what this creep had done to get booted out of the program, and to hope that this is the end of her career.

Because that’s just a crappy thing to do.

Is this:

Daisy (not her real name) plopped down and stretched out.

“Really,” she said, “it’s just a job. I got tired of givin’ it away for free, y’know? They’re always buzzing in and out, and it’s always take, take take. Well I’ve had it with all that bullshit. I decided that this time I’d get something back. I’ve already got a bit stashed away as you can see, so I figure I’m gonna spend the entire summer relaxing. Eat, drink and be merry and all that.”

“No, I’m not worried about anything. My mum’s long gone–don’t even know where she is anymore, so who cares? Yeah, I’ll probably end up with kids, but isn’t that what all the girls want? Really? They may protest, but you see ‘em standing there, so proud, with their offspring crowded around them, but you know they’re going to come to no better end than than their mother–and will she be looking on as proudly then?”

“Hey, it’s a short brutal life–we’re living on the edge and have to take what we can get. I have no apologies for my life. You don’t like it, then just turn your eyes when you walk on by.”

Based upon this from S. (Go ahead, it’s safe. I promise.)

The changes I tried to make earlier are now implemented.

If you look at the sidebar (sweeps arms to point to the viewers right) and look at the recent comment listing, you’ll notice the new and improved comment listing. Not only does it update immediately, but you can now scroll through and see this last 50 comments (this can be modified to display 10, 50, 100, whatever comments).

Thanks to Michael, who was willing to poke through the WordPress code and pluck out what I needed to, it was a relatively easy process. It’s combined with the WP plugin bdp comment, but it could easily be used with any comment listing system. No it’s not a plugin, because I’m not smart enough to make a WP plugin. But still, I’m very pleased with it.

The other thing is that I am not much more comfortable using Photoshop, and have added a raft of new images to my main page. As with the header images here, Ctrl + F5 will refresh the page and bring up a new random image. I’ve got a few more Photoshop tricks I’d like to try to figure out, so new images may be added, but for now I’m pleased with what I’ve got. So instead of a redesign of the front page, I just made new images. Which is good, because I’m actually really happy with the layout of the main page (the fly out menus work only if you’re NOT using IE. Because IE is stupid and evil. [It's all straight up clean CSS. It's just that IE doesn't do CSS properly.])

the reunion band that Hendrix plays in headlines in venues neither you nor I nor anyone else on earth can reach

That comment on Nathan’s site dropped an idea in my head. Since I have nothing else for you today, here’s the result:

Vince pulled aside the curtains and stepped into the darkened room, dragging a large wheeled suitcase behind him. “Come on,” he said and waved to the person behind him.

Jeri peered uncertainly into the room. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

A soft voice sounded from the inky shadows of the room. “Of course it’s not a good idea dearie. It’s never a good idea to disturb the spirits on the other side.” A short thin woman dressed in elastic waist jeans and some sort of draped Hawiian print shirt stepped forward. Her hair was curly and gray and went halfway down her back. “But you’re going to do it anyway, because he’s piqued your interest, hasn’t he?”

“Well,” said Jeri uncertainly, “I guess he has.”

While Jeri and the woman were talking, Vince had started pulling equipment out of the suitcase and setting it up on the table. He’d obviously done this before, as it took very little time to get everything assembled.

Jeri looked uncertainly at the table. In the dim light the assembly looked like little more than black boxes and tiny satellite dishes, all strung together with network cables.

“Almost all set up,” said Vince. He turned to look at the tiny woman. “You ready for us?”

“Of course I am,” she replied. “Why don’t we all sit down?”

The small woman sat down at the table, with her back towards the wall, facing the door that Jeri and Vince had entered. Vince sat on her left, Jeri on her right. Vince handed Jeri and the woman earphones.

“Bose?” asked Jeri. “They’re awfully pricey aren’t they?”

“Trust me, you want quality for this,” replied Vince, as Jeri settled the earphones on her head. With that she heard nothing else. “Wow, he even got the noise canceling ones,” she thought.

With that, the woman placed her hands face down on the largest black box and closed her eyes. Her face relaxed almost immediately.

Suddenly, a sound like nothing she had ever heard started to come softly through the earphones. It quickly grew louder, and within a minute tears were streaming down Jeri’s face as she listened to a music like none she had ever heard before.

After what seemed like mere moments, but Jeri later discovered had been three hours, the music ended. She opened her eyes, and saw Vince and the woman taking of their headphones.

When she could finally speak, she asked, “What was that?”

“That,” said the woman, “was Mozart and Jimi Hendrix playing the latest piece composed by Wagner.”

“It was incredible,” said Vince. “Even better than Steve Ray’s playing of Beethoven last week.”

“Stevie Ray Vaughan and Beethoven?” asked Jeri. “Who else have you heard?”

“Why just about everyone,” replied the woman. “The bopper, Vivaldi–why last month we even heard some of Shakespeare’s new sonnets set to music by Aaron Copland and performed by Ethyl Merman.”

“No Elvis?” Jeri asked.

The woman looked disdainfully at her. “Of course not!” she replied. “He plays evenings at the local bar down the street. I don’t expect he’ll be joining for another ten years or so.”

This is amusing only if you were reading yesterday’s comments.

sericeous \suh-RISH-us\ adjective
: covered with fine silky hair

Example sentence:
The shapes of the aster’s sericeous leaves range from lanceolate or oblong to broadly elliptic.

Did you know?
In the writings of the ancient Greeks, there is mention of the Seres, an eastern Asian people who made “serikos” fabrics. Historians now believe that the Seres were the Chinese, from whom the ancient Greeks first obtained silk. The ancient Romans wove the Seres’ name into their language, creating “sericum,” the Latin word for silk. The English word “silk” is also assumed to be spun — with some very dramatic alterations from Old English to Middle English — from the same Greek fiber. Both “silk” and “silken” have been in the English language for many, many centuries, but scientists of the 18th century wanted a new term to describe the silky hairs on some leaves and bodies, and so they adapted the Late Latin word “sericeus” (”silken”) to create “sericeous.”

S made some crocus pr0n for me!

I just KNEW flowers were all flaunting their naughty bits for something other than the birds and the bees!

Trying to learn new things.

If the website freaks out, refresh and it’ll probably be fixed.

ADDENDUM the First:
Nevermind. I don’t have the patience to fight with php today.

There was an interesting article on memory I read a last week, and I meant to make note of it, but… errr… forgot. So after the subject came up elsewhere, I’m going to mention it now… before I forget again.

…memory is of two minds–that is, memories are captured and recorded separately and differently in two distinct parts of the mind.

They say children depend more heavily on a part of the mind that records, “what actually happened,” while adults depend more on another part of the mind that records, “the meaning of what happened.” As a result, they say, adults are more susceptible to false memories…

The two types of memory are called “gist trace” and “verbatim trace.”

Now the article focuses upon court cases and witness reliability, but I think this information is interesting on a broader level.

First, it may help to explain why people remember the same incident in very different ways.

Secondly, it may further explain why memories from childhood are so vivid, while later memories are less so. And why when one starts to lose their memory, those vivid memories of childhood are the ones that stick around the longest.

Since we’ve got down time this week, one of the things I’m trying to do is become more familiar with Photoshop. So, I’ve been playing around and trying things out, and as a result I’ve got lots of new headers for the weblog. I’m going to work on some larger images from the splash page of my site, and then I’m going to play with some of the more esoteric functions that probably won’t work so much for the image style I have to my website.

If you see anything horrible, please let me know. I already think I hate one the formatting and blending and fonts on one of the images.

So I’ve been vindicated!

Not only are flowers pretty and pleasant smelling, but they may also boost your mood!

So I have been justified in buying flowers all winter long! And in all the time and money I spend for my garden! Yippee!

Now if only my flowers were ready to bloom…

Even though I have to work.

Is this an awesome week or what?

Happy Easter to those who celebrate.

I almost didn’t post this, but decided that today isn’t the day for my own personal beliefs and doubts to e important.

Even when it isn’t.

Jim at Wabi-Sabi made it to the Obama speech in Charleston last week, and has some thoughts on the matter and some pictures.

It’s nice to see the candidates paying attention to WV, and I can’t wait until the candidates head up this way.

I have to admit, however, that I was amused by the news of Hillary’s visit to Charleston. Obama went to the University of Charleston. Clinton went to Capital High, and was pleased that the gymnasium was filled with lots of teens. What the Gazette article doesn’t say, and what was reported by WV Public Radio is that her question and answer period was cut short when at 3:00 PM all the students left, since it was the end of the school day.

Makes me wonder how many of those students would have been there if they weren’t getting out of class.

Michael is significantly stronger than me, this is an uncontested fact. If a jar lid needs opened, a bolt or screw needs tightened, or something heavy needs lifted, he ends up on the job.

This is not to say I am incapable of these things, only that things I bolt sometimes work their way loose, and it takes me three times as long to carry heavy things, because I have to make multiple trips to his one.

And I’m okay with this. It’s not simply a male/female thing, it’s also that he has a greater ability to build muscle than I do (we participated in a research study on strength and muscle, and he has two body builder genes, while I have zero copies of the gene [not the scientific name, but I can't remember the name given in the study, as it was about six years ago]). Do I take advantage of this sometimes? Of course. I don’t like carrying wood into the house one log at a time while he can do it in three trips. But I do try to carry my own weight.

So, if Michael is significantly stronger than me, why is it I have to go back and re-scrub every pot he washes?

While going through the great CD and DVD organizing project, I found several things that I have NO IDEA why they are in my house.

So if anyone wants ‘em, you give me shipping and I’ll send ‘em to you. Alternatively, you can come to my house and pick them up.

(more…)

The following conversation happened as we were coming home from the grocery store. Note of importance: My grandmother is very Catholic.

Michelle: What are you making for lunch?
Michael: I dunno.
Michelle: What are you making for lunch that that’s fish or vegetarian?
Michael: Oh. I don’t know.
Michelle: We could get take-out from Flying Fish.
Michael: YES! And I could get hush puppies! They’re vegetarian!
Michelle: No they’re not! THEY’RE MADE FROM PUPPIES!

To celebrate spring (since it’s not actually, you know, springlike here in WV) I made a new header image for the blog.

Now since I simply added this new image to the random rotation, it may be awhile before you see it. But when you see the purple crocus header? That’s the one I made for today. It would have a much faster experience, except that I decided to use Photoshop to do the image, so I could learn more about the program, it spent half an hour figuring out how to replicate a filter I use all the time in Corel PhotoPaint (I believe there has to be an easier way. But at least I got what I wanted.)

And I think it’s time I added more new header images here, as well as new splash images for my main page.

For some reason, everyone seems to be in the mood for biscotti. So here’s the recipe I use. These make very crisp crunchy biscotti that are best dunked in hot coffee, tea, or chocolate.

Almond Chocolate Biscotti

Recipe calls for almonds; I almost never have almonds, so use walnuts. I usually make half a without nuts for my grandmother.

3 eggs
1 cup sugar
½ tsp vanilla
1 ¼ cup toasted almonds, coarsely chopped
2 ½ cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
7 oz bittersweet chocolate chopped into chunks (I used 1 ½ cups Ghiradelli semi-sweet chips)

Preheat oven 350 F

Whip the eggs, sugar and vanilla until the mixture thickens (It says it should hold its shape. Mine didn’t and were fine.)

Sift together flour, baking powder, add to egg mixture. Stir in nuts and chocolate.

Line baking sheet with parchment paper (my silicone baking sheets were perfect for this.) Form dough into two logs ~3” wide and almost the length of the baking sheet. Dampen hands and smooth each log.

Bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven and lower oven temperature to 300 F. Let biscotti logs cool a few minutes.

Remove logs from pan. With serrated knife (bread knife works best I think) slice the logs diagonally into ½ inch slices.

Place sliced cookies flat on baking sheets (you’ll need two) and bake 20 more minutes. Cool and store in an airtight container for up to a week. Biscotti also freeze extremely well.

from Room for Dessert by David Lebovitz

Just got some good news at work. Won’t be public for a few days, but I have hopes that it will make our lives a lot easier here in the coming months.

Wheee!

Happy Spring Equinox!

Go smell a flower!

ADDENDUM the First:
I should not, apparently, have pre-posted this.

No flowers here. Just 36 degree temperatures and wool coats. And temperatures in the 40s for the foreseeable future!

Oh yeah! How could I forget? It’s spring break in Morgantown! Maybe we’ll get lucky and won’t have a snow emergency this year.

As I have mentioned in previous occasions, our house is relatively small, early 50s house, and when we bought it, it had two bedrooms, one bath, a living room, kitchen, a hall closet that has to double as the closet for the master bedroom (because it has none), and an unfinished basement.

Since we moved in we built a computer room and bathroom in the basement, both of which are finished and heated.

But even with those two additional rooms, with three adults the house can feel a little small at times.

So I am always looking for ways to organize, which is why I ended up with a subscription to Real Simple, and I have to say that for the most part what I have tried as worked extremely well in cutting down the clutter (especially after we had to remove all tables from the center of the living room so my grandmother could maneuver her walker after her fall in January).

So my recent organization binge has been to ditch all the jewel cases for my CDs, and put them into an organizer (DVDs are next, as their cases are even worse space hogs.)

First and foremost, I have forgotten how much music I own. This is beginning to feel like a Sisyphean task, as I realize I have CDs all over the house (because I couldn’t keep them all in once place) including what Michael brought up from the basement last night, a paper box full of CDs I hadn’t seen in years.

It’s actually been kinda fun going, “THAT’S where all my Stevie Ray Vaughn CDs went!” and “HEY! I forgot I owned a White Zombie CD! Awesome!” Unfortunately, almost all my heavy metal was on cassette, and those got tossed when we were remodeling the basement, because I quite literally had no space for them. So there have been some pleasant surprises.

Of course there are also the times when I say, “I bought a Jewel CD? I own ‘The Best of REO Speedwagon’? What the hell was I thinking? I don’t think these have ever been listened to! Maybe they really belong to Michael.” (No, that won’t work. When I met him he only had Megadeth, Queen, and Weird Al Yankivick CDs. Yes, I know that’s really weird.)

I also discovered that I own a Green Jello CD. (That’s right, Green Jello, not Green Jelly.) I am pretty sure I have not listened to that since the novelty of the Big Bad Wolf song wore off.

So now I’m staring at this last box of CDs, at a loss as how to organize what I have left. (I have 7 U2 CDs. What goes in the eighth slot on that sheet? What do I organize ‘The Wonder Stuff’ with? It’s pretty much the only British Bluegrass Pop I have. I have no idea.) And as someone who lives to organize, this is become pretty painful. I’ve got about 12 sheets of sleeves left, so I can’t just stick the Klezmatics in their own sleeve and move on.

Of course it probably means it is past time for me to stop for the evening. And I should probably continue to resist the urge to put White Zombie in the CD player, because I can guarantee my grandmother won’t enjoy it at all. :)

Next project? Getting an external hard drive and putting all this music on my computer. (Looks at pile of CD cases.)

Or maybe not.