chez sweet chez

Door Watcher

You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but this guy’s a candle. He really didn’t like the idea of being set on fire, so I said fine, how about you guard the foyer for us and he was thrilled. With some of the summers we’ve had I’m surprised he’s not looking ragged, but he’s surprisingly tough.

I do anthropomorphise a lot of stuff; my preference is always for a conscious, animate universe. If it helps me remember to be kind, I don’t think it’s a bad reflex. And muttering a polite greeting every time I pass a certain corner is no hardship.

It’s been an odd, somewhat nerve-scratching week, my friends. See you Monday.

Back In (Oven) Business

My kingdom for a filter…

Since several of you have asked, this is what an oven vent filter looks like! The filter itself is the honeycomb-looking thing; it’s made of rough ceramic and so far as I can tell functions a bit like a smokescrubber, catching particles. An oven needs a vent for proper heat circulation, and that vent needs a filter so cooking smoke doesn’t taint the food–even a small amount can ruin a whole meal. You can use your oven without the filter in the vent…but I wouldn’t recommend it for stuff that could produce even a little smoke. (Like bacon. Mmmm, bacon.)

We found out we needed a new filter as the Princess was baking a cake, when the old one literally fell out. The vent tube itself is held by a couple screws and that flared lip–in this picture the tube itself is upside down, it’s supposed to be fixed to the roof of the oven interior. There are ways to get the filter back in if it’s just cracked, but unfortunately ours was too broken by its trip through the wire racks. So a whole new vent tube/filter was necessary; there are tabs on the inside that hold the ceramic disc and, wouldn’t you know, a new disc wouldn’t fit.

Cue about two hours’ worth of weeding through useless AI-tainted swamps before finally finding out what precisely we needed, then a trip to the manufacturer’s website for the precise part number and ordering info, another half-hour of drilling through that mess, and finally I found the part number…only to discover it was out of stock. A month and a half later it was finally back in stock, and it took another long while to be shipped.

Guess how long it took to take the old vent tube out and put the shiny new one in? Less than seven minutes. It would’ve been less than five if I’d been able to take the oven door off like I once saw the appliance repairman do, but I felt like that was just a way to create more problems. And now the oven is back to full use.

I absolutely needed the dopamine hit from this victory; it’s been a heckuva week. And I still have a character to kill in the Sekrit Projekt today–it would’ve been yesterday, but so much intervened. And to be honest I wasn’t ready to let go. This particular fictional person deserves better than what they’re getting; sadly, that’s life. Even in fiction.

See you next week, my dears.

Whatever Flavour of Great

Roadtrip Z

Happy Monday! Cotton Crossing is $.99USD in ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo; the entire Roadtrip Z series is deeply discounted in ebook until 3/22. (Details and links are on the Monthly Sales page.) A little bit of madness in March, as they say, and She-Wolf and Cub is still a Kindle deal for the rest of the month as well.

The weekend was…productive, at least. Another couple short stories brushed up and formatted for the anthology, which is coalescing quite nicely, and I even got some serial wordcount in. I managed to detach and spend Sunday afternoon on the couch with Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation, which is absolutely wonderful. Greek is singing through her English, and it’s marvelous. I’m glad I held off on her Odyssey until I could finish this one, which won’t be long. I wish I could find something comparable for the Aeneid, but my Loeb will have to do.

In fact, I’d love to retreat to said couch with the last quarter of the Iliad, but there’s work to be done. I’ve got the protagonist of the Sekrit Projekt in a bit of a pickle, where they’ve been all weekend, and it’s time to get that sorted. I’d love to do a bit more of the serial today, since there’s about to be another knives-in-the-dark moment. I think it’s time for someone other than our favourite sellsword to get wounded, which will scare the stuffing out of her.

Always a good time.

The backyard is quiet; I am uncertain if Deathwish Bunny is the parent of the nest Boxnoggin found in one of the ferns. At first I thought he’d found a rabbit corpse, since it was before dawn and I was pre-caffeine; however, I glimpsed something moving in the depths after dragging his snoot from the hole and realized what was going on. The dog is quite upset that I won’t let him Be Great, for whatever flavour of “great” requires him attempting to eat newborn rodentia. The tender-hearted may rest assured that we’re keeping him away from the nest; if the kits are still in there, they have remained unmolested. I did notice that something or someone covered the hole back up, so I’m assuming Deathwish (or some other bunny) has attended to whatever’s going on inside. In another week or so I’ll check the hole again, hoping to find it vacant.

In the meantime, Boxnoggin will just have to suffer. He also got a bath this weekend since the weather was warm enough to permit him drying in rapid order. We make do with dry or damp-towel scrubs during the winter since he is slick-coated and suffers the shivers if he gets chilled, but climate change has given us a few very warm sunny days so we’ve made the best of it. Of course, he’s quite upset that his familiar stink is missing and doubly put out that I washed the comforter on my bed so he can’t regain said stink from it, but we all have our crosses to bear in these trying times.

…this post has turned into a Doge Report, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was an utter goofball this morning, requiring more than the usual cuddling and bellyrubs before deigning to let me get out of bed. Possibly he felt the dual inconvenience of bath and refusal to let him snack on bunny-nests necessitated a great deal of Speaking to the Manager, which would be me. Alas, he will remain unsatisfied upon both points, at least until he reeks of dog instead of the fancy anti-allergy oatmeal shampoo.

I’d better grab some toast and get going. The biggest decision will be which ankle to put the brace on; getting older is full of such quandaries. At least once I return from shambling about there’s a prospect of more coffee, and I can get a few plot twists ironed out while moving.

And awaaaaaay we go.

Win Or Sledgehammer

The dog started the day by demanding many a bellyrub and cuddle before he would deign to leave a warm bed–which, honestly, fair play and I did not mind. However, he followed it up by attempting to stamp on every hyacinth and daffodil in the backyard, forcing us to trudge around in circles while he sought the perfect place to pee as the temperature hovers near freezing.

I don’t even know. Then there was the Coffee Grinder Incident and I began to despair of ever getting some goddamn caffeine. Fortunately the Moka pot didn’t make me wait too long and now I am safely in my office, shivering with the aftereffects of Boxnoggin’s frigid bathroom break but grateful for the cup of java I’m finally managing to get down my poor sleepy gullet.

I have Flo Rida’s My House running through my head; it’s a supremely danceable tune. Yesterday it was fighting for supremacy with DNCE’s Cake By the Ocean, which starts out sounding like Uptown Funk to a degree which makes it mash with several other tracks on my skull radio. However, it is also supremely danceable, so I didn’t mind. Still, I’m glad to have just one song plaguing me at the moment–when I get three or four going, it’s usually a sign I need more work to keep the ol’ thinkmeat from consuming itself.

Yesterday was all administrivia and video meetings. Honestly I don’t know why anyone talks to me–I mean, sure, I’m hilarious, but I’m also A Lot and a crotchety misanthropist to boot. I got into publishing because it was a job I could handle from home while caring for toddlers (childcare costs would have eaten the proceeds from any other) and now I’m so used to setting my own schedule and arranging things to suit myself I’m largely unfit for not only any other career but also interacting with what one thinks of as “normal” people.

I get weird early, I stay weird, and it’s not gonna change.

Anyway, the Ides of March are tomorrow and the second tranche of sales and price drops for the month are coming ’round the bend. Today there is a cake to bake, plus wordcount to catch up on since I got barely 400 yesterday and I suspect they all have to be thrown out. I may have to reserve one day per week for goddamn bureaucratic nonsense so I can protect the rest of my working time. I need this book done and if I’m going indie at the rate I suspect (developments are underway) I also need a few other things in place.

My patience for incremental effort is being severely tested. I need a win or two. Maybe I’ll get one during walkies, or today’s run. If that doesn’t work, there’s a sledgehammer sitting to the right of my desk, and I’m sure I can find a way to use it around the yard for a bit.

…honestly, the prospect sounds more and more enticing the longer I think about it. Thursday got the first few hits in, but I’ve got a plan for the war entire.

Time to get swinging.

Books and Connotations

Catkins are coming off the magnolias and I saw an actual cherry blossom yesterday, though not on the tree down the hill who’s usually first past the post. I suppose I might be able to relax a bit instead of dreading a sudden cold snap? (HAHAHAHAHAHA WHO AM I FOOLING.)

I got to a major character death in the Sekrit Projekt last night, broke down crying, and decided it was time for bed. Going back over the raw text today will be uncomfortable–up until the very last moment, I thought this character would make it. I always do, I’m always pulling for them even when I know it’s impossible. This one’s going to wreck me even more badly than it does the protagonist, but that’s pretty much always the case as well. Sometimes I even mourn my dead villains, because I know precisely what made them what they are.

Anyway, getting to that particular plot-knot means that I am definitely past the halfway point in this particular book, which means there’s a bit of a slog before the slipsliding race to the finish. I know a lot of things will have to be expanded in revision, but that’s a completely different problem. Now it’s me and the book trapped in a cage, and only one of us will emerge victorious.

Technically we both win–it gets born and I get another notch on the belt–but at this stage it always feels an awful lot like a zero-sum game. And after this week I have to split working time so I’m not solely focusing on pushing this bloody great boulder up the hill, Sisyphus-style. It will also mean I say a more definite and thunderous no to a great many things people have grown accustomed to demanding from me, always a fun time.

I finished Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes this morning, listening to the rain on the roof as Boxnoggin’s nose was buried my armpit. (Don’t ask me, our dog is a weirdo.) It’s an eye-opening read, and I particularly enjoyed both Ghosh’s careful tracing of how a great deal of colonialism was built on opium as well as the connections between that trade and the fossil fuel addiction leading to climate change. His positing of the humble poppy as a force in and of itself is extremely valid as well. All in all, a fantastic read, A+, absolutely recommend.

Next up, Emily Wilson’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, since the Princess wants to read both as well and talk about them. She’s loved the Odyssey since childhood–Odysseus is, in her words, a picture-perfect explication of “that fuckin’ guy”, and not in an entirely pleasant sense either. As in any household, in ours there are a few terms whose connotations are completely dependent upon tone and context, and that’s one of them. It’s said with extremely loving and positive overtones when it’s, for example, “that fuckin’ chocolate guy“; however, when it comes to certain political figures it’s overwhelmingly negative.

I can’t wait to hear her takedown of Achilles, frankly, who I always found a bit of a jackass.

Okay, a lot of a jackass. I kept reading the Iliad going, “Wait, this guy is supposed to be a hero? But he’s a douchebag, Hector’s much better!” My feelings on both Helen’s husbands are a bit unrepeatable, as well, and don’t ask me about either of the Ajaxes. (Ajaxi?)

This is going to be amazing. I can’t wait.

The rain is taking a bit of a breather, so I should probably amble into the kitchen for some toast. Before then, though, I’m going to absorb the last half of my coffee in something approaching peace.

Pushing the boulder another few inches can wait for a bit while I do so. It is, after all, a Tuesday.

Ivy and Horizons

Even in winter, life is everywhere.

It’s too warm for February. (Thanks, climate change!) At least we’ve had some icepocalypse to cut down on summer’s insect population, and the cherries aren’t blooming yet. Even the one down the street which usually wakes up first–giving me no end of worry, I might add, the poor thing’s going to gamble wrong one of these years–is still blissfully asleep. But that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening.

For example, the ivy-banks are full of berries. The blooms were active far later in fall than anything else, and on sunny days late bees clustered them with zest. They’ve swollen through the worst winter has to offer, and I’m not sure what precisely eats them but something must be overjoyed at the snack.

Ivy’s a terrible plant in this part of the world, and can choke entire hillsides if allowed. Yet for obvious reasons I feel a sort of kinship with something thriving despite every effort to kill it. I also saw a dandelion in the backyard t’other day, while waiting for Boxnoggin to decide which part of the turf to christen. A tiny yellow sun saying hello, good afternoon, fuck you to the world; many are the yards in this neighborhood where such a thing would call for a sudden vengeful application of weed-n-feed. But the older I get, the more I want to just… let things live, if they’re not hurting anyone.

Still going to prune any ivy so it doesn’t kill the Venerable Fir, though. There’s letting things live, and then there’s being foolish with a vine which can kill a tree that will in turn absolutely take out two whole houses if it comes down during a hard wind. I’m broadening my horizons, not being stupid. (Granted the line is a little blurry some days…)

See you next week, my dears.

Love, Anonymous

I needed to hear that, thanks.

Chalk art is one of my favorite things. The beauty, the impermanence, the care taken with each scribble…I love it. And I see a lot of it at certain points in the neighborhood when weather permits. The rain has no doubt already washed this away; I’m glad I got the snap.

It’s odd to have been living in one place for so long, and to feel almost as if one belongs. I wandered a great deal and never felt at “home” even during childhood. How could I? Home is where one feels safe, after all, and I knew very well from an early age that I was not. Finding a tiny corner of the world to call my own has been a revelation. Ah, so this is what people talk about when they say home…how odd!

How odd indeed. How wonderful.

Anyway, this felt like a tiny, anonymous hug, and happened right when I needed it. So I pass the gift along, with thanks to the anonymous artist.

Have a lovely weekend, my dears.