Peeking into the rock

 I didn't get out bed till noon but since then (it's now 3:45), I have: cleaned up the dog diarrhea & vomit mess caused by my failure to get up & open the back door, fed the dogs, taken out the residual extra garbage & recycle material left over from the misunderstanding some weeks ago where Zack & I each thought the other had put the cans out for the collection day, washed the food waste & kitchen garbage cans, washed most of the algae off the front stairs, swept the kitchen, cleaned the kitchen sink & emptied the dishwasher & set it up again to run after 9 when the electrical rates drop, & cleaned my ergo touchpad, thus returning it to functionality.

I failed to get to the post office to mail Frank's ballot to him, but I have it, and a piece of mail labelled "urgent; only addressee to open" or some such, ready to mail. Ordinarily that last item I would have told him about and asked if he wanted me to open it and quote it to him over chat but I haven't heard from him or Hana in almost 3 weeks and I don't want to add yet more attempts to contact to the pile already there. For context, I usually see a comment from at least one or the other of them in family chat every day (they use family chat to talk to each other as well as to talk to me and Emma), so no chat or email or response to a text in this long is really unusual.

Thursday six in the morning I leave for the hospital. I'm trying to get the house nice and clean so it will be easy to navigate when I get back. I have borrowed a walker from my sister-in-law, which her mother no longer uses, and I hope to ditch it soon after the surgery.

I've had to stop taking my anti-inflammatory medicine for the time being so that I will have less potential for bleeding. I guess I'm grateful for the natural experiment: yes, I do need it. No, the osteoarthritis is not my ownly problem. There is something in my leg muscles that is kept at bay by meloxicam, and after four days of not having it I am back to hardly being able to walk.  Now, meloxicam is "necessary but not sufficient--" I also had to switch statin drugs and have years of physical therapy to keep the muscle pains at bay. But I didn't know until I quit it temporarily, because I mostly don't have very much pain in the normal course of things. It's function that's demanding the surgery, not pain.

Not directly related to surgery, but related to the things surgery is related to: in my trips to visit Frank and Hana in Prague, I always intended to but never managed to rent a bike. So I thought I would take my bike with me.But after talking it over with Zack, my roommate who was once a professional bike racer in Europe, I've realized that it's even more hassle to disassemble and reassemble a normal bike. He has convinced me to get a folding bike. It looks like I can spend about four hundred dollars and get a nice folder that can be adjusted to my height and can take my weight. I'm leaning towards the Citizen Barcelona. If you have any relevant experience or knowledge, let me know!

The idea would be that I would take it to the UK and other places when I travel, or even throw it in the car when I leave town, just in case. It is so much easier to cover a lot of ground on a bike than on foot. It may even become my primary bike, I don't know.

I still don't know when I'm going to visit Frank and Hana. Hana has gotten the job she wanted too, administering a university program for sustainable manufacturing and recycling, so for now they're doing great. I'd love to go in the second half of March, though it's no longer certain that he has ten days off in the middle as they have been re-doing the rota at frequent intervals. I would also love to be there for Eastercon at the beginning of April, but it may not happen. I have been doing a bit of daydreaming about visiting (Ilocating folk clubs, museums, and so on), though I've mostly been thinking about surgery and trying to make sure I get my February writing done. And playing sims.

Also to prepare for surgery I've been eating liver and the dog thinks her share is not enough.

Frank had to go to the UK for administrative details linked to getting the right to practise medicine there. So it was just Hana and me for four days, one of which was the Strakonice trip for me. Since then we just kind of hung around, with me writing a lot and Hana working on getting ready to move. We have gone for pleasant walks in Centralni Park (pictures in the future), done grocery shopping, and talked a lot. Yesterday we went to the Botanical Park because we thought Frank wasn't coming home today, but we had to cut our trip short because he did come home.
( creamy and delicious )
On the writing front: finished this new version of The Conduit though I had a flash that I want to alter the ending somewhat, and wrote almost half of the other thing I want to submit before the end of the month (I think I am calling it "Tree-Hugger").  I was having severe doubts about how it was coming together, but I'm feeling somewhat better now. At least the market I'm writing it for is pretty likely to accept it if it is okay. Also figured out the dedication for Outside, which was surprisingly hard ("for the children of my accidental family"--accidental family being a term within the story).

No chance for pictures yet.

So nice to be here again, with family, and so familiar. And bitttersweet, as it is probably my last trip. Frank and Hana are mostly involved with geting ready to move to the UK. But that's nice too, because it means their lives are moving forward after a year in limbo.

I sat next to Norwegians on the flight over. I didn't know for sre they were Norwegians till we started talking in the last hour of the flight. Before tha, all I was sre of was that their language sounded as alian as Simlish, and not at all like the Norwegian of the announcements or my memory (the flight was on Norwegian). She was from "the valley" as she called it -- Hallingdal I think.

I saved a lot of money by flying on Norwegian but I also sufered more -- the seats were not especially narow, but they were hugely uncomfortabe.

Passed his very last test this morning.

Is resting in the arms of his sweetie before tackling the next steps, which are 1) passing the USMLE (test for placement in North American resident programs) and 2) finding relevant temporary work until he gets placed at the end of next year.

So apparently I am exploring all the different ways a person can have a magical affinity for trees. The latest story has a couple of guys constructed from willow twigs in order to be servants of black magicians. I have an unfinished one about a person who is more or less a dryad. And there is not-Poland, in which the sister is a botanist with extra tree senses (also the tendency to be a seer, but she says much more cryptic and less-detailed things when the subject is human than when it is tree), and the brother has an uncomfortable attachment to the wooded wetland, and will eventually be rather like the lorax, with respect to the urban forest. And I have written a couple of other stories about zelniks which do not highlight their tree affinity but still.

So I don't know. Most of these are pretty urban stories. The big novel starts out utterly rural but ends up urban. So I could call the arc Trees and the City?

on another front, the degree verification finally came. So as soon as the Dean coughs up Frank's letter, his application to Malta is complete: Ireland is next.

and on yet another front: I heard scrabbling in the walls so I think I have to call on Emma and Jason for help with the rat traps again. I am already cleaning in slow motion, so I better pick up the pace.

The reasons that I haven't been posting in the last month are two: one is lovely and the other is hideous.  The lovely reason: Frank and Hana are here from Prague!  It's lovely having them in the house.  For a couple of weeks there actually I had a house of seven people.  I really liked it.  This is funny because I do not seek out the company of other people that much and I don't feel lonely when I am alone.  But when there are other people in the house I am more alive, or something.

The other reason is that I am having intractable issues with leg pain and allied difficulties.  I have been whinign all over the universe, so forgive me if I spare you most of the details - I bore myself -- but I will tell you that the physical therapist sent me back to the doctor to talk about the possibility of torn meniscuses in both knees and the doctor said "Well, I thought so all along," and promptly kicked me upstairs and now I have an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon (a conservative one, he said, who is not overly likely to cut any time soon), and I have already met with the neurologist for some of the allied symptoms and he's going on a grand fishing expedition -- he did a conductivity test (ow, hurt worse than I remember the one on my arms thirty-five years ago), and EMG (ow), and I am also having a battery of blood tests including one for syphilis (that's what it said when I looked up the little letters on the referral) as well as thyroid, b12-folate, iron, and rheumatoid factor, and also an MRI on Friday.

Sounds very heavy, doesn't it?  And it takes a lot of my time and thought to do all these things.  But in all honesty, I can't tell how heavy it is in real life.  It's a lot of pain and disability at the moment, which exercise and pain meds doesn't reliably take care of (again, no details at the moment because I keep talking about it all the time and I am tired of myself). But at other moments it seems like it's no big thing and I am being a wuss to even care about it.

I just got off my not-Poland hiatus, in other news, and I reread the first seventeen chapters and made bitsy revisions because apparently I do not have the imagination to see what's really wrong with it.  I've started actively writing again, and discovered that, once again, the goal post of this section of writing has been moved back another chapter.  But the good side of that is that some of the work that I was afraid I might have to do in "while we were out of touch, these things happened" kind of dialog, I am being able to do now, which is more organic.

My teenage Duke is behaving really immaturely and acting a complete spoiled, lovesick, entitled brat, while Yanek on the other hand is a rabbit paralyzed by fear of impending disaster.  Oh well, the disaster will impend, and then it will happen, and then Yanek will be liberated by the fact that the worst has already happened and that for many purposes, he might as well already be dead, and perhaps that is the point of the story after all. And here I thought it was just a melodrama for my savoring.

In one of Pynchon's books -- probably the one with the banana breakfasts -- there's a part during the Boer War, where a group of people are surrounded (in a fort? a village?) by an enemy that will most certainly kill them all before too long.  I might be remembering the rest of this description all wrong, so forgive me if that's the case: you can pretend I've made up a completely fictional composite of a thing that shows up here and there in literature instead of calling on a particular story. So they figure they are already dead and nothing matters, really, there are no rules, and they celebrate this revelation by behaving very badly and being all decadent and nasty.  But I've always thought it was the other way around: if your fate is sealed, and you're already dead, there's no reason to do other than your best because this is all you've got. If you plotz out and behave badly you aren't going to get a chance to make it up later.  And also, there's an assumption in the Pynchon bit that what we really want to do, down at the bone and in general and without restraint, is nasty things. 

Which makes little sense to me as a final pronouncement for all we are.  Of course I think that all we are is in fact all we are: every good thing, every bad thing, every beautiful thing, every nasty thing.  But I'm pretty sure that unless that (fort?) was entirely full of sociopaths, the end times there wouldn't really be nothing but nasty.

Of course, there is the Donner Party as a real-life example, but when you read the primary accounts, it's pretty clear they were at least led by sociopaths in the first place.

To come back to not-Poland, let me assure you that Yanek and the other drummers on the battlefield are not sociopaths, so though they consider themselves to be already dead, the things they do themselves are not decadent orhorrific (there will be no chains of ears in this story).

First:
This is from here. I saw it here.

Secondly:
I am now a mother-in-law twice over. Frank had to get deportation proceedings started against him in order to get married. Because, you see, when they start deportation proceedings against you, you have 30 days before you have to leave the country, which meant that the foreign police could sign off that he had a legal status to be in the country on the day of his wedding. And now that he's married, he gets to appeal the deportation on the grounds that he is married to a citizen of the EU.

If you want to see way too many pictures of the happy event, you can go here. Notice, especially, the glass balcony on which the fairytale princess and her consort are standing, in the room full of low arches like unto a salt cave, within the Staremestko Town Hall (next door to the astronomical clock, of which of course there are pictures). Frank is not wearing an orange sateen tuxedo with matching pork pie hat, he is wearing a good dark suit of the type apparently most fashionable in Communist times,along with an orange shirt and tie. Hana is wearing an absolute fairy princess dress and elbow-length gloves and is having the time of her life, apparently. I invite you also to notice the tesselated sidewalks.

Meanwhile, my younger offspring has not been idle. She got her scuba certification, and would have her advanced certification also, but they had to cancel some of the dives for that because of rough water and poor visibility. The weekend her brother was tying the knot 9000 miles away, she was exploring the microbreweries of the north coast. In general she's living as exciting a life as one can in Santa Cruz without doing unwise things.

And I got to be the trick or treat lady at the Agave Agape tequila tasting fundraiser for the Women's Center, by which I mean that I handed little tasting glasses to the people when they came in and I handed them little goody bags when they left. In between I ran around and did whatever needed done. I was far from the busiest person there, but I was plenty tired after.

And I am almost finished with the hundred-years-after story, which is way topical for some reason, and I have figured out so many things I am ready to go back to the beginning of the not-Poland book and revise the feathers off it and then forge ahead and finish it.

I'm thinking that the sister needs her own story, but while I believe she is an interesting person who does interesting things and who has interesting thigns happen to her, I don't have a particular story in mind for her yet. Maybe it's her daughter who gets her own story, I don't know. It will come to me eventually. probably.

Also, I have been studying Czech for almost an hour every day again. I spent time in bed in the morning with the dictionary and the verb book, rying to memorize things and to compose simple sentences with what I'm learning. Then at my break at work I use this online vocabulary quiz thing to try to memorize more words. I figure that just knowing a lot of words would be better than having all the declensions memorized (though I do intend to memorize the declensions!), because it's better to be able to say a thing incorrectly than not to be able to say it at all.

No writing done yesterday: I went to the center and moved boxes and furniture and then I was in too much pain. But this morning I am better. I only wrote 1300 words, which barely puts me at 50K, but that's all right, because I figured out how to accomplish a lot of things in those words. Those new characters that interloped on Saturday are earning their keep, so that's all right. And anyway, they will keep me from having to introduce other characters lter, since they have replaced them all.

Found while trying to get some terminology straight: Lamber Simnel, who sounds rather like the outline for a boy's-love story in which the protagonist eventually finds love and peace of mind with a falconer's apprentice.

Going in early because my coworker has a sick kid.

And lastly, the Prague contingent has determined that they're going to marry at some point in the discernible future, which will apparently involve taking out a license there and eventually throwing parties wherever necessary. As Frank says: it's an excuse for a pie.

And I say: good enough. One big wedding was enough for me.

One of our teachers (whose position is assistant teacher) is going to take a regular teacher position at another school. It sounds to me like she'll be taking a net loss in her income and benefits, since the new position is part time, but she wants that teacher title.

I'm taking the assistant teacher position that she's leaving, which entails a drop in pay over what I was making before the layoff (but not what I was making during the independent contractor period). Also, part of the desperate attempt to stay afloat after Even Start was defunded was that everybody got cut from 8 hours to six and a half, which means, altogether, when you add the cut in hours and the cut in hourly together, I'm taking about an eighteen percent pay cut. But I'll get my benefits back in a while (I have to go through the whole rehire thing with the ninety days till benefits thing, I think). There's some program with the state called "workshare" which allows unemployment benefits for people who work at places where everyone's hours are cut, which I am not eligible for because at the time that the program was set up for the employees at our center, I was not on the payroll, being an independent contractor at the time.

The overall cut in hours doesn't bother me as much for myself as for everybody -- because I personally do not like eight hour days and will cut my own hours whenever we're low in numbers and I don't have a big project to do. So I shouldn't complain about that part. And the cut in hours was done to avoid a complete loss of health coverage. Well, it wasn't billed as a complete loss. There was some fiddle-faddle about a health care account, into which the center would put a minuscule amount of money and the employees could put whatever they wanted on top of that, and that would be expected to cover all your health costs. Right. Fortunately, my boss's boss told the board that was unacceptable. Our insurance is going to erode a lot, but that's mostly from the insurance companies, which are raising the costs and cutting the coverages across the board. We're changing over to some HMO that makes my boss grimace to name it, but even though I haven't seen the details I know it could be a lot worse.

The smallest cut that any of our workers is taking is a ten percent cut in wages. If you ask me, this constitutes a raise in taxes -- since our wages are public money, paid for out of our own pockets, and it has been taken away from us to fund wars, torture, giveaways to wealthy criminals, and luxuries for their mouthpieces.

I read that the sticking point for the republicans in the house of representatives in voting for John Boehner's vindictive mess was that there was money in it for Pell grants. Pell grants are the thing that allows poor kids to go to college. It's just breathtakingly mean to object to them. But every single dog-damned detail of the whole mess, from the Tea Party ravvings to the Koch Brothers to Obama, is breathtakingly mean and evil Avedon Carol said something a while back -- I wish I remember her exact words, but she said that all this hardship and degradation isn't an accidental byproduct: it's what they want us to have.

When it wasn't so wildly flagrant, when it wasn't so maniacally destructive of everything of any use or beauty in western civilization, you might have been able to say it was because they hadn't learned anything about economics or politics in the last two centuries and they sincerely thought they were going to improve their profits this way. But they've gone so far beyond what could improve profits in any sustainable way that I am forced to conclude that they really don't believe they will be here in ten years and it doesn't matter how bad it gets because the obscene inflation of their wealth at the expense of the rest of us is all there is.

It's a pyramid scheme on a global scale, is what it is. We're all paying everything back to the tip of the pyramid: even our great-grandchildren are.

But, anyway, as of August 15, dog willing and the creek don't rise, I will have a regular job again. It will be in the toddler room instead of the infant room, which has its advantages and disadvantages.

And next week Emma's working fifteen hour days for six days straight, last I heard: and Frank is coming on Wednesday to spend most of August here. So life goes on.