Peeking into the rock

2500 words: 1500 to close out chapter 2 (at 5100 total for chapter 2) and 1000 to open chapter three. to make what, about 11600 for the story as a whole, so far? is that a 1900 average? I want to get well over the 50K: if I wasn't working fulltime I'd be setting 60K as a firm goal for the month. I'd like to have a full first draft before Groundhog Day (a day I expect to be difficult to ive through as it is the anniversary of my mother's death).

Accomplished: some backstory and some of Yanek's "little soldier" training in chapter 2. Also, Ludmilla's science stuff, and both the mysterious tree images on Ludmilla's and Yanek's bellies.

I actually don't have a good explanation for those damned trees, but I seem to be wedded to them, and they keep producing more story-useful stuff.

I thought this chapter was going to get them all the way back to the capital and the Duchal Palace and Yanek being mistaken for a servant, but it looks like, as usual, it will take more words and more scenes to get from one place to another than I planned on. I guess we'll at least get the pony stuff out of the way and a couple of other revelations.

Also, I am sick. I have a sore throat and no voice (as opposed to almost no voice and intermittently I feel shaky and achy. I don't know if it's a virus I got from the young fellow, or a virus I got from the babies, or a reaction to the shots I got Friday. I don't usually get this marked of a reaction if that is what it is, but every shot is different. And yes, I would rather endure this, if it is a reaction, than take the chance of passing any of those potentially fatal diseases to the babies.

I feel as if I ought to weigh in on he beating video, and I might at some point say something tangentially related to it. But when I finally steeled myself to watch a bit of it, it crashed my browser, so I feel that I have been mercifully prevented from being able to comment directly on it. I do have things to say about parental authority, however -- even beyond the subject of corporal punishment (which as a child always sounded way too similar to "capital punishment"). I don't have time to elaborate, but here's a sneak preview: the best and truest authority is gained by not imposing yourself as an authority and the best obedience isn't obedience at all.

Zen mommying, huh!

I'm not better at all, but I have to move around or I won't get better. At least I'm better enough that I'm not sleeping all day, anyway. So I weeded for les than an hour -- meaning I made a few tiny fragile dents in the massive jungle that is my backyard -- and I found myself muttering
"no sorrel, no dock, no feverfew, no violet, no borage, no nasturtium, no blackberry . . ." Doesn't that sound like an Elizabethan garden or something? (maybe they didn't have the nasturtium yet, though) They're all thugs. They need to be rooted out with vigilance, which I do not do because, one, I am lazy, and two, I always get laid up in the spring.

Seasonal note: summer's on its way. I had to water several plants today. Drought is close at hand.

So now I'm home with a bacterial complication. I slept all day yesterday except when I went out to get the antibiotic. Doctor says I'm contagious until I've had the antibiotic for three days, which is tomorrow.

So what am I doing with this time? Surfing You tube, off course. I started off with a link from Making Light to Carmina Slovenica doing World War Two songs, and then surfed around their other work, and then from there -- well, let's just say I went through the Resian folk songs and the Istrian dances and now it's polkas from some place in Serbia. As far as I can figure there's these four guys, playing fiddle, accordion, bass fiddle, and guitar, and then whoever they hook up with. One song had a hammer dulcimer on it.

I'm better today than yesterday, so I owe the dog a walk and I think I'll try to catch up the drummer boy material with the stuff I've been writing in pencil and in myu head since the computer was down. It's quite a lot. I had gotten the protagonist born, and his sister and doomed brother born and christened and up to their first birthday, and laid the foundation for what comes next, which is not pretty but necessary.

The story has a high body count before it gets going. I don't know how I'm going to handle the part that's actually in the war, though.

Naturally, when I last went shopping I thought I was getting better, so I got food that needs cooking. I ate the cottage cheese with oranges and raisins, and I took last weekend's root veggies salad and dumped it with some other veggies into a tall can of chicken broth, and I ate that. And now -- I have another can of chicken broth and I have some chard and onions and chiles, so I think I'll make that later. What I want though -- I want ice cream. No I don't. What do I want? Sonmething with the emotional content of ice cream, but not sweet and cold. . . oh, yes, chicken soup. Okay. I'm already doing that.

edit: fixed the Slovenian link, and here's a link to one of the Serbian polkas. At least I think these guys are Serbian. This piece appears to bear the name of a Serbian place, anyway.

I think it's interesting that the Bush plan foir the flu is all about what to do in the case of failure, and not much about what to do to prevent failure.

First of all, there's a reason we have vaccine shortages. Vaccines are low-cost, low-profit items produced in a system which is geared for profit maximization. They are produced by companies which sort of resent making them, andn they never make enough because if they make too much they'll be stuck. The crisis last year occurred because the government refused to listen to the doubts of the supplier about its product and would not act in time to allow them to fix the situation before flu shot season: and by the time it was no longer possible to avoid knowing that there was a problem, instead of cleaning up and starting over, the line had to be shut down, and the only other flu vaccine producing plant had to take up the slack as best it could, months later than they should have.

This is clearly an instance of where the profit system is not sufficient. In order to be effective, vaccines need to be cheap or free and universally available, and those characteristics are antithetical to maximizing profit.

The flu type prediction system has not been working as badly as you might think from reading just some of the news. It's young yet, and is not nearly good enough, but with decent public health measures, it can make a huge difference.

Decent public health measures do not start and end with vaccines and the threat of quarantine (about which more later). Public institutions like schools in the United States need to be much better equipped for hygiene, for example. You go into a public school in a poor neighborhood -- try going into the kids' bathrooms. You'll be shocked. There's no hot water, no soap, and frequently no paper towels in many of them. The custodian budget is slashed and there's not enough custodian hours to keep the trash emptied and the surfaces cleaned. In many cases the bathrooms are locked except during passing periods, or some of them are locked at any one time. This means that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of children are trying to get through the bathrooms in a few minutes. Can you say filth?

Or bus stations.

You can't have cleanliness without spending money on labor and supplies, and you can't stave off an epidemic without cleanliness.

People need to stay home when they first feel ill -- that's when they're contsagious, not a week later when they're exhausted from going sick to work or school. People need to have sick leave that allows them to do this. People need to have childcare benefits that include hiring a babysitter for the days the kid's too ill for daycare. Sick-child babysitters need to have their wages subsidized so they can afford to do that for a living. Old people need the same kind of resources.

All of these expenditures are, coincidentally enough, of the economy-stimulating type, unlike cutting the taxes of the superrich. -- it's always better for the economy to raise the income of those at the bottom, because they don't already have everything, and they're likely to spend that new income on stuff that causes other people to be hired somewhere.

Okay, so what about quarantine, anyway? It's a tool in the toolkit of public health, okay. There should be plans for implementing it whben it's the right thing to do -- but who should have those plans is the Centers for Disease Control, who, by the way, already have the legal authority to declare quarantine and to commandeer any military they need to enforce it or to do whbatever labor needs to be done. That's already there. Bush doesn't need to take that power to himself, or place it in the hands of the army. He may be commander in chief, but the CDC trumps him and should.

Reading the transcript of Bush's speech last week -- I must admit I can't stand to listen to his nasty little whiny voice -- I got the disctinct impression that when he says "quarantine" he means massive martial law, and that's not reasonable. Just as it's unreasonable to expect that there will be riots over flu vaccines, unless you plan to make the flu vaccines scarce and unfairly distributed and smirk all over the place about how there's no plan to make them better available.

It's all just an excuse for another power grab. IUt's not a plan to keep a population as healthy as possible.