Peeking into the rock

So, like others, here I am with page 77, lines 7-14.  (It would be line 7 if the piece were shorter) "No cheating" means I have to cut off in the middle of a sentence.

.>>
Pushing open the schoolroom door, Mr. Glazky sighed. "No one is ever good enough," he said.  "We always have to be getting better.  Especially anyone whose position is ambiguous --"
    "I'm not a bastard!"
    "No, you are not.  But you've been disowned anyway, and your very life depends on the goodwill of your foster family.  Do you understand that? Even little Master Sasha, who you condescend to and barely allow to tag along with you, who worships the ground you walk on, will one day have absolute power over you--"
    "Of course he will, he'll be the Duke."
    "Even before that.  Do you know?  He comes into relative majority at fourteen and he can only be overruled by his father."
    Yanek still couldn't find it in his heart to be afraid of an eight-year-old, who was sometimes<<

It's odd that it actually comes up with a crucial little bit.

edit.  Seems that several chapters were set to 10 point which is an annoying thing that Word Perfect does unexpectedly sometimes when saving in .rtf.  When that's fixed, line 7-14 of page 77 is considerably earlier and less revealing and more confusing.

..
The Feast of Daodo came and went.  In the country, there was literally a feast on this day, but well after dark, and the people were expected to fast all day beforehand. This year, however, the old castle only kept the first part of the tradition.  There was no feast at night, no special lighting, no congratulatory songs about making it through another year.  Just a big vegetable pie for all of the inhabitants of the house. Yanek hadn't known what to expect, though, since Zhenny had all but banned him from the kitchen.  After the pie was set down on the servants' table and nobody went back for more things, Yanek asked if he should go and get the rest.
<<
of course there is nothing more. This is when they literally starve for several months.

I wonder, though, when people do this, is it at all interesting to their readers?

I'm not in the most confident mood today.  I wish it hadn't fallen to me to write the obituary and I wish that we had met about it a week earlier and I wish that the notes I got from our little meeting didn't look like I was suppsoed to write a full-length autobiography and weren't full of remarks about how this person or that person ought to be called for more information.  To hell with it: the memorial's only in a week and I have already missed the SUnday papers and I am going to send in something that barely scratches the surface because I do have to work today.

I think later I will write my own obituary and keep it on the computer clearly labelled and my survivors can amend it as they see fit because this is a pain in the ass.

Yesterday I only wrote a thousand words, cut short by a phone call with my stepmother. Moher's been in remission from breast cancer for a year or so, but apparently that is no longer the case. She has days of testing ahead of her, and apparently a gamma knife procedure early next week. She feels fine, she says. And though the new lesion is in the brain, it hasn't affected her balance or speech, which are already impacted by the stroke she had before my father died.

So there was that, and email to Frank about the situation, and then I went to work. And then last night Emma came over because I hadn't had any new news for her yet and we talked for a couple of hours which is why I didn't go to the occupy-support demonstration at the courthouse.

But today I wrote 2100 words, ending Chapter 6 at 6500 words (too long, I think, for the rhythm of this thing, and I will look into cutting this up differently when I go back later), and starting Chapter 7 (novel total between yesterday and today is about 35K). But between yesterday and today I did accomplish some important story things, including some foreshadowing, some incluing, and even probably a bit of plot. Also: quaint customs of the upper and lower classes. And some necessary bits of alienation.

But I had time to keep writing, and I had the energy for it today, but I just couldn't think of what words came next. I know what event I'm building towards, but I don't know what the transition is. I am pretty sure I'll know by tomorrow, though.

edit: what I hate about Google is that it's so completely removed from its users. I'm having an issue with google docs and there is no way whatever to get any direct help with it, and when I went to the help forum all I saw was a bunch of people saying they had the same problem. (You can't read the files online, you have to download them, which sort of misses the point for me)

For the first time in a long time I have no plans to celebrate the Fourth. I'm going to call my stepmother sometime during the day but her friends and neighbors tend to take her out a lot so I may not reach her. I may make a cake. The nice fellow has to work, and Emma's sort of down for the count because she walked downtown yesterday and her leg is all aflame today. This is because the nerve is inflamed, partly because it hasn't healed from the insults of before the surgery, and partly because it hasn't healed from the insult of the surgery. Dr. Harper warned us about this. He also said it may take months and months to resolve. I think we're just beginning to realize what that means.

I will get some work done this morning, though. I have Word Perfect open with the files I intend to finish.

Today was maybe the last of the water tours and I had too much fun. First stop was the Loch Lomond reservoir which provides 17% of our water. It has an earth dam which is covered in emerald grass and steep wooded banks. You can take a canoe or a kayak out on it and tool around looking for ospreys and herons. You don't have to look for the cormorants because they hang out in this one prominent group of trees right there. We learned some history of the watershed, and logging in the Santa Cruz mountains -- there were at one time more than thirty sawmills in our mountains -- and a bunch of stuff about the habitat and the maintenance of the dam.
The Newell Creek watershed was clearcut about a hundred years ago so for now the habitat management is hands-off except for revegetation on some old logging roads. The forest won't get to where it needs a fire for a long time, especially as there was a pretty severe burn a bit over forty years ago. You do know that many California plant species need fire to reproduce, right? One hillside at the north end of the lake is chapparal, which is good too, but most of the watershed is mixed forest and redwood forest.
The way they keep track of the water in the lake is by altitude. The lake is lower than I thought: 570 feet is a full lake (contrast this with the pass at the summit which is I think just under 2000 feet.
There was lots more about fish and spillways and aeration and sampling and where the water comes from (there are four pipes but the one which is used the most is the second to the lowest one).

But we toddled down the hill to the treatment plant where we saw the water being flashmixed with activated carbon, and mixed more slowly with polymers to get flocculation going, and filtered and filtered and filtered and filtered and charged up with chlorine and phosphate (the phosphate is to resist corrosion in old pipes). The flocculation pools are a beautiful shade of turquoise.

And then we went to the pumping station where 47% of our water is drawn right from the San Lorenzo River and pumped up to the treatment plant. You know what? The river is beautiful. It wasn't in 1970 when I came to town -- it was all gravel and trash and dredged-up goo. We got so much information here about the history of the water system, the politics of water,o gosh everything about water. The guys who met us there were map and chart guys. They brought two big old maps -- the watershed and land use on one, and the district and lines of supply and stuff on the other. I learned about the desalination plant we're most likely going to get, and got my brine question answered (they'll pipe the concentrate to the wastewater treatment plant, where it will join the treated wastewater and be piped out to sea. which might make the effluent better for the ocean environment by lessening the difference between the effluent and the seawater) I looked at a really interesting graph of wet and dry years (four categories: wet, normal, dry, and critically dry). It makes an almost regular pattern which couldn't be used for predicting wet and dry years -- except that, knowing the climate, we know we will have dry years, and we will have runs of critically dry years.

in other news, my stepmother, who's really had enough crap by now, is in the hospital getting her medication adjusted and various tests after her right arm went numb(the one originally damaged in the stroke she had in Africa back in November). This time she's in the Santa Rosa Kaiser, which is because she was on a vacation at the time. She's pretty disappointed to be in a hospital again.

So Gloria has shown signifigant deterioration in the last couple of weeks. We're sure that she's having those little strokes all the time -- she has these headaches, she becomes less coherent, she feels bad, she lies down. Yesterday she was frantic all morning to get things done -- mopping the floor, which has been the job of the weekly housecleaner forever, and various other strange little tasks. And we were talking past each other all day.

I went googling for advice, and nobody has any, apparently, for what to do during these little stroke things (if that's what they are). They talk about aspirin or warfarin for prevention, but nothing for during and after. I decided I have to become more proactive again about talking with her and doing things with her -- I've been sort of passive this last month, I think because I'm just generally tired from driving to San Francisco and back twice a week. (which also means I've been eating badly: I always overeat when I'm tired: and I've regained, I think, the four or five pounds I'd lost. And my new blood pressure medicine that doesn't make me cough also doesn't keep my blood pressure down, which will be addressed in a couple of weeks)

On the other hand, things are better in San Francisco. My father has had his first week of radiation therapy, and while he's not bouncy, he's not exactly wasted. Frank has been making him tiny meals many times a day and he's eating better. Moher is walking without a cane and taking charge again (she's the take-charge kind of person. She had started to insist on being in the know a week or more ago, and that was definitely a milestone).

Okay. personheadhttp://hrj.livejournal.com/ tagged me for one of these silly list things that I've come to the point of maybe resisting. It's the only time I've ever been tagged for anything, so it would be discourteous for me to refuse, or to refuse to tag somebody. But before I do that, can I register my disappointment that a word I hate has been adopted by the world online?

Goodness knows I'm not opposed to neologisms. I'm no kind of purist about neologisms, either -- when I see a painful hybrid of Greek and Latin and Germanic roots I think it's funny, not sacreligious. But sometimes a word comes along and a person just can't abide it for their own reasons. I hate hate hate the word "meme" for two reasons: 1)it originates in a stupid fashionable misunderstanding of the way genetics and evolution work and 2)it has unpleasant connections for me because it first spread in usenet by people I don't like. Lots of people I do like participated in this spreading too, so if you can recall being one of the first people to spread this word and the unfortunate stupid idea that clings to it like a mind-numbing stumbling block to comprehension, don't worry -- if you're reading this and you're one of those first people, you're probably not one of the people I don't like, though you probably know who I'm talking about. (probably better than I do because I have not had anything to do with them for a while)

Okay, the silly list thing goes like this: you list five guilty pleasures and then tag five people.

My silly list of five guilty pleasures:
1. fried fish sandwiches in a fast food restaurant
2. salty Japanese snacks
3. dumber and dumber and dumber romantic comedies with fakey cryey spots ("In her Shoes," "Just Like Heaven")
4. mint chocolate ice cream
5. amateur online gay coming of age erotic romance serials. Which I feel less guilt about as the genre develops and I realize I'm watching a new form of literature evolve, and I'm also watching a very interesting phenomenon develop in the interactive community of readers and writers involved with them, and I think I may be able to produce a stuffy analysis of it all, if I can remember how academic writing is supposed to go.

Okay, I'll tag, um, del_c,mayakda,orangemike,brooksmoses, and aynathie.

On another front, I have finally finished transcribing Chapter 21 of The Donor and will upload it sometime after I tour the water treatment plant and look at orchids with the nice fellow. And I wrote six hundred new words in that story about boys who don't: I think I know what it is now: I think it has four sections and they're really quite grown by the third one. Maybe five, depending on how I work out this one thread of the story.

Oh yes: the manzanita in front of Gloria's is in full bloom, and so are my two almond trees, and the apricot tree is in advanced popcorn stage, and the plum tree is in early popcorn stage, and the Belle of Portugal (rosa giganta) is blooming. And the mustard and oxalis are blooming all through the apple orchards on Calabasas Road. No arguing about it: it's springtime.

So I'm in the City again. My father spent a couple of days in the hospital. His chest pain had gotten worse, but the thing that made the scheduling nurse at Kaiser tell him to call 911 instead of waiting around for a regular appointment with his primary physician was that he was having a harder and harder time breathing. They dosed him with oxygen,prednisone and pain relievers and did an X-Ray, a CT scan and a biopsy. He has not one but at least three masses in his lung that weren't there a year ago. The biopsy results aren't back but a friend who knows something about it says that very fast growing tumors are often benign.

Tomorrow they're sending my stepmother home from her hospital stay (she's been in post-stroke rehab). So the house has two people and an ancient dog all of whom need caring for. Luis is mostly taking care of himself but he ought to be doing less than he wants to and Moher needs to continue with intensive therapy to regain the use of her right hand, complete mobility, and full use of language. And Kaiser doesn't pay for that. So the network is devising a schedule of willing hands to be around all day and all night.

I took some amazing pictures of the view from here, at least if they come out, and when I get home I'll see about posting them. From this house you get about a 300 degree view -- only the front angle is obscured by the hillside. I can see Twin Peaks with the massive radio tower that looks like a monster come to stomp the city, large chunks of downtown, the Bay Bridge and the East Bay from there on down to the San Mateo Bridge, all that Hunter's Point shipyard stuff, and almost all the way down to San Bruno Mountain. It's a lovely city, well appointed with trees and barren hilltops and red banded chert outcroppings. It's a lovely bay. The eastern shore of the bay is beautiful too.

The house is full of dogs: only one lives here, but three others spend their days here. One is a sixteen hundred dollar fluffy little cinematic special effect puppy who goes airborne in his youthful enthusiasm. (Somebody has too much money, but it's not one of my relatives).

Anyway, it's just about spring, here. Not quite: that'll be in about three weeks, when the native violets begin to bloom (the wildly escaped viola odorifera from Europe has been blooming for weeks).

Oh, and it's not raining, and it didn't rain yesterday, and it probably won't rain tomorrow, and I'm not in my garden pruning fruit trees. I probably wouldn't be, anyway, if I were at home.

Bella and Chain is almost but not quite updated. I've update Bella through Dec. 8, and Chain too, and will be updating Nonyomni in a few moments. I have solved the technical difficulty of updating The Donor: Rosemary found my notebook with the chapter in it under an afghan here at my father's house, where I've been the last two days and will be until Tuesday. However, I have no FTP access in this house so no Terry and Jack and Eurick until probably after Christmas.
I saw my stepmother on Saturday. She's been moved to the rehabilitation center at Kaiser Hospital Vallejo, which is apparently the best rehab center in the country, and all because of unions and litigation. When the UMW (mineworkers) got their big black lung settlement, they shopped around for an institution to give money to to build a rehab center and they decided on Kaiser because it was the best deal they could get and Kaiser has good relations with unions anyway. So Moher's supposed to be there until abotu Jan.6, working six to eight hours a day every day on rehab stuff. Apparently she is doing very well for three weeks after a severe stroke. She can't do anythign with her right hand yet but she can move that shoulder, and similar with the right leg, but best of all she can talk quite a bit though her words will give out on her at the most frustrating times. Most characteristically, she laughs a lot.
also liked what I saw of Vallejo town, which is the first time I've driven around in it for probably forty years. It's a grimy industrial city, but it has a warm and inclusive atmosphere, meaning the signs of ethnicity are mixed up and people seemed friendly.
Because of all these things -- my father's pain and disability, Moher's stroke, Emma's problem, etc. etc., Christmas is starting to seem like a minor but persistent irritation. People on the nice fellow's side of the family are being really sweet and wanting to get together and maybe band together to do some volunteering as a family and I'm just overwhelmed because it's all this scheduling and negotiation and I can't think straight. Even though a large part of my time is spent sitting and waiting to be needed.