Climbing · the · Third · Stair

Last weekend I did something to my right shoulder and arm that made typing painful. It wasn't that typing per se was the problem; it was that putting my arm in the position to type was painful, along with a scattering of other things. It was bad enough on Monday and Tuesday night that it disrupted my sleep, which was even more annoying than falling behind in my writing. I'm behind in letter-writing, as well. :-(

This week's big event was work-driven: I was interviewing and hiring for some new day people in the bakery. This was very difficult for a couple of reasons. One is, I had two positions to fill and in the first round of interviews I had four people who I thought would be wonderful. Trying to decide who to hire when everyone is hirable is one of my least favorite tasks. (Granted, figuring out what to do when you don't want any of them is no fun either.) Second was, we recently began a new policy that required two interviews (the second conducted with two people) and mandatory reference checks. In theory I am in favor of this (because I am in favor of anything that will help me find more reliable employees) but in actual practice I hate making telephone calls to people I don't know, which meant that I spent a lot of Wednesday cat-waxing. On the plus side, some of the cats I waxed were long-delayed R&D projects, so at least I wasn't completely wasting the co-op's money.

Anyway, I finally got everyone vetted and interviewed by Friday, and Saturday morning I went into work to make my final decision and do calls. Calling the people you want to hire is easy, calling the ones you don't is hard. I call everyone, though, because I don't like to leave people hanging. It's just hard on a person.

Last night I had an incredibly odd dream. I was taking Karin's brother-in-law to a doctor appointment somewhere in the south edge of Lincoln when we had to stop and visit the ancient beet fields outside of town where once beets destined to be exported to Egypt were grown. For those of you not familiar with Lincoln, or beets, there are no such fields and why would you want to ship beets from Nebraska to Egypt anyway? I've had some odd dreams in my life but for some reason this seemed notable.

Finally, it is snowing. Still. It's been snowing or raining for several days now, and it appears it will go on until at least Wednesday. *sulk*

I have spent a lot (A LOT) of January poring over seed-catalog websites. I am probably sounding somewhat monomaniacal about it, but--last year from mid-May through September I grew all the vegetables I ate, save for potatoes, onions, and the odd carrot. (I'm not a huge carrot fan, though they are good raw in lunchboxes.) All that food, and I wasn't even all that diligent about it. Now I am wondering, how much food could I grow if I applied myself a little more? ( The secret lives of common veggies... )

Yesterday evening I got a phone call from my dad and the first thing he said was "I'm ok now" which is, as you know, never a good thing, and the second thing he said was "I had emergency gall bladder surgery this morning."

I hate it when my dad has something medical happen to him because it always reminds me that he is getting older and one day he will die. This is a purely selfish reaction, but there it is. We haven't always been close and there have been times in the past that he's done hurtful things (not knowing how much he was hurting me, but that never helps, you know?) but--when my mom went to the hospital with what we learned was cancer and I rushed to Omaha to do whatever it was I could do I met up with Dad at a Burger King and the first thing he did when he saw me in the parking lot was to put his arms around me and say "It's ok, we'll get through this". I'm not ready to think about him dying. I don't know if I'll ever be ready for that.

But he's fine for now, and he should be released from the hospital very soon. I don't have to worry about it. Too much.

Earlier this month I joined Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit group dedicated to preserving heirloom vegetables, by ordering a membership off of their on-line store. Then I accessed the online version of the Yearbook, the database which lists all the seeds that SSE members have to offer other SSE members. I used it to start an email exchange with a gentleman in Oklahoma who had seeds of an heirloom tomato I am interested in trying this year. This culminated in my sending him the fee for the seeds tonight via paypal. All so I could participate in the ancient practice of growing a vegetable, saving some of its seeds, and growing it again next year.

It's awesome, isn't it?

Poll #1518029 And I don't even like slash.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11

If Dante (from Devil May Cry) was in a scantily-clad jello wrestling contest with Sephrioth (from Final Fantasy VII), who would win?

This post is not about cats.

I'm feeling grouchy about my brain today. There's nothing really wrong with it, so far as I know--I'm just feeling very unfocused, listless, and out-of-sorts. It is almost certainly being caused by sleep-cycle disruption: I'm training a new bread baker, so I've been going from working days to working nights to working days to working nights. My body can take that strain (mostly) but my mind resents it. I've been spending my days with my 45 mind going 33-1/3. It bothers me. A lot.

Tonight I have the new baker's last night of training, so this morning I slept in until 10 am. I spent the rest of the morning making breakfast (managing to burn my hot cereal in the process), eating breakfast, and reading. In the afternoon I did laundry and washed dishes, but made essentially no progress in writing, which is the one thing I REALLY needed to get done. It vexes me. I hate to be a prima dona about writing--yeah, it's an art, but a lot of it is craftsmanship: the putting down of one word after another, thoughts being laid down like courses of brickwork. Writing for me is sitting down and doing it. Other writers approach it differently, but I can't write with their brain, I have to write with mine. And right now mine is as useful as an incandescent bulb when what you need is a laser.

I forgot to say this earlier. My newest L5R fiction, Conjunctions and Aspects was posted this weekend.

I suspect I could have given it a better title, but I always have trouble with titles. I also suspect I could have done a better job at making it cohesive, but that might be my obsessive perfectionism talking. If I get around to doing a Writer's Notebook entry on it I might explore the question more.

I DEMAND SUNLIGHT!

FOR ENDLESS DAYS THAT HAVEN'T ENDED WE'VE HAD RAIN AND FOG AND DRIZZLE AND MORE RAIN AND FOG AND THE FORECAST HAS MORE DAYS OF FOG AND RAIN AND SNOW AND WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT WHY IN THE NAME OF THE FOG-SHROUDED ISLES OF THE ALEUTIANS ARE WE HAVING FOG IN NEBRASKA? IN JANUARY?

SUNLIGHT! MUST. HAVE. SUNLIGHT.

Dear Reader, when last we left our heroine, she had just suffered through two snow-related cancellations of her dental checkup. Her third attempt is scheduled for this coming Thursday morning.

With throbbing heart and foreboding mind she inquires of the state weather oracle as to the remaining week's weather. Could she really be so accursed as to have another snowstorm interfere with her efforts to stave off gingivitis?

Indeed, she is not. There are no snowstorms forecast for this week.

Instead, the next two days will feature freezing rain, freezing rain mixed with snow, and freezing drizzle.

*headdesk*

I've been cleaning my desk at work for the past week (don't ask) and the most amazing stuff has floated back up. My John Belushi "Samurai Baker" action figure, an embarrassing number of deli tabs that I need to pay off, floppy disks with cryptic phrases written on them (my current work computer doesn't even accept floppies!).... I've also encountered a number of quotes that over the years I have scribbled, printed, and sometimes even laminated and taped to the wall of the bakery for a time. ( Warning: contains quote and writer lust. )

Last Sunday I decided that I couldn't take it any longer and started gardening. I dug out (heh) my bag of seeds and went through the packets. My whimsy settled on red russian kale, a tomato my mind can no longer remember the name of, and two different kinds of peas.

One could point out that at that time Lincoln was still snow-covered and it was pretty darn cold, but that did not stop me. I have a sunroom, more plant pots than I care to admit to in public and a very large bag of potting soil. After potting up the seeds I moved the containers into the warmest parts of my apartment (namely, sitting directly over or next to a heat vent) to encourage the seeds to sprout. As I am a patient woman, I waited until Tuesday to start checking if anything had happened yet.

One of the peas is a dwarf garden pea named Tom Thumb, said to be suitable for container gardening. If peas are self-fertile (as my foggy memory keeps insisting) I might actually get a crop out of it. The other is the sugar snap pea I grew this past summer in my garden, which produced monster vines somewhat taller than me. I'm not sure I can coax it to produce pods, but if worse comes to worse I have a good source of pea shoots which are very tasty and exquisitely rare in Lincoln in the dead of winter.

The tomato is the biggest gamble; I'm not sure I really have enough sunlight to bring it to fruit inside. But even if I don't I've proved that the seed is still viable, and maybe I can keep them (so far I have three sprouts) healthy enough to plant out early in the spring. I have a package of those 'wall of water' plant shields that I was given several years ago, and I've always wondered if they would work. Sunroom + the heat capacity of water=June tomatoes? I can dream, right?

I regard the kale as a sure thing, so long as the seed is viable. It's a leafy green so I am sure it will find the amount of sunlight satisfactory, and it's kale so it won't even notice the chilly temperatures in the sunroom. My biggest question is if to harvest they leaves when they are young and tiny as microgreens or let them mature into longer, somewhat chewier leaves. I have a slightly embarrassing memory of scattering way too many seeds in the container, so might be able to do both: transfer some of the thinnings to larger containers to get big, harvest the rest as micros.

So far the tomatoes and the sugar snap peas have sprouted. This only tempts me to do more planting this weekend. Lettuce? Chinese broccoli? Radishes? Green onions? Decisions, decisions....

Today:

Me: "[rant]"
Friend/co-worker: "You do bitter very well. However, I don't know if you are well-served by it."
Me: "Since no one cares about my life, I have no reason not to eat out my own heart."

What can I say?

I'll have a real entry soon, but I just had to giggle over this.

I know, some of you probably thought I was kidding when I referred to seed catalogs and garden websites as 'vegetable porn'. Those of you who took me seriously are gardeners, who know what it is like to look in the mailbox and find page after page of full-color images of artfully posed beauties. And the text! The text! Vigorous...meaty...6-8 inches...all season long... AAAAAIIIII! I WANT EVERY GREEN BEAN IN THIS CATALOG!!!
( Excuse me while I check the thermostat--it's gotten hot in here. )

My friend cassandra_e has a request for help finding stories about space ethics for her high-school son, who is doing a paper.

An excerpt from her post:

In addition, please let me know of any science fiction books or short stories in which space ethics played a significant part. I'm mostly looking for moderately realistic stories such as the ones mentioned above, as opposed to things like Frank Herbert's Spacing Guild and its need for spice. I want to pass them on to my son so that he can use them as part of the history of space ethics, to show him that consideration of ethics related to space didn't start with the founding of NASA in the 1950s. Any help I can get from my Internet friends here would be very much appreciated!


I am not myself convinced that ethics in space should be different than ethics on earth, but that in and of itself would be an interesting conclusion to such a paper.

I am starting to find this whole temperature thing very tedious. (Currently: -8F/-22C) With temperatures like this I'm going to be stuck inside all day, because while I am willing to brave coldness for definite reasons (work, church, etc) I'm not going to do it just to take a walk. Especially when there are still massive snow piles everywhere. I hate not being able to just go out and take a walk when I want to.

At least I now know why we are having this cold. This week the Omaha World Herald helpfully ran a front-page story on how a jet stream that normally deflects arctic air masses away from the middle of North America is now running diagonally (more or less) across the continent, allowing said arctic air masses to roam freely through the Great Plains. This has no practical impact on my life, but something in me feels better about understanding the whys of the situation.

From yhlee, a meme!

Were I a summonable creature, what kind of ritual would you craft to summon me?

So apparently the Imperial Heralds have gone out, and they show the card for Tamago, formerly known a Matsu Nimuro. I'm pointing this out because first of all the art is drop-dead gorgeous--you can see a a larger, clearer version of it here on Drew Baker's website. Second, it also has fabulous flavor text (Read it here on the AEG forum)--I need to find out who on the team wrote it so I can slobber all over them in adoration.

The drawback here is now I want to write fiction about Utagawa and Tamago and how they are quietly patching together a shared destiny out of the bitter tatters of their past lives. Which would never do. *sigh* Maybe I'll get a print at Gencon....

I got up, checked to make sure the dental college was open, had breakfast and brushed my teeth, and got myself to the bus stop.

After about 15 bone-chilling minutes of waiting, I concluded that I had somehow missed my bus. (Which I still think is impossible. There is no way that bus should have gotten from 22nd and Van Dorn to 17th and Washington that quickly. But there you have it.) So I walked back to the apartment, checked the schedules, called and left a message at the appointment desk (not yet open, of course) that I had missed my bus and was going to be somewhat late.

As I was suiting back up to go back to the bus stop the phone rang. It was my dental hygienist, calling to say that the snowfall had left her stuck at home, so she was going to cancel all her appointments today and reschedule later.

Now strictly speaking this makes missing the bus a good thing, as otherwise I'd gotten all the way to the Dental College and then found out it was for nothing. However, it just felt frustrating to me. I mean, really, should it be this hard to get the tartar cleaned off my teeth and listen to the semi-annual lecture on how I should be flossing regularly?

I could have gone to work at that point, but I had already made the preparations to take the day off and I was feeling annoyed. So I'm going to stay indoors, do housework and ogle vegetable porn gardening websites.

In the meantime, I've rescheduled my appointment for the end of January. You've been warned.

A few months ago I scheduled my usual 6-month teeth-cleaning-and-check-up for a day in the early part of December. The day before my appointment a snowstorm rolled through, bringing snow, bitter cold, and high winds. Lincoln ground to a halt and UNL shut down everything, including the College of Dentistry's clinic.

The week after that I called up the clinic and rescheduled my appointment for January 7th. (If you live anywhere in the Midwest you know where this is heading.)

Today a storm rolled through town, bringing snow, bitter cold, and high winds. It's not nearly as much snow as the early December storm (yet), but the cold is, if anything, worse. Tomorrow's high is supposed to be -2F (too depressed to translate to C, sorry) and that's going to happen in the early morning; temps will then drop to -5F noonish.

This morning the scheduling clerk at the clinic called me with the usual reminder about my appointment. "Check the closings or call ahead to make sure that we are open," she advised. *sigh*

All I can say is, those buses better be running on time tomorrow. Silk underwear or no, there is a limit to how much time I can spend in a -32F wind chill.