Peeking into the rock

I just confirmed that the onliest bra that ever works on my body -- fits and doesn't make me scream after half an hour of wear and doesn't wear out in three minutes -- has indeed been discontinued by Vanity Fair. I've been wearing that bra for twenty years, maybe twenty-five. It's not that I refuse to wear another bra on principle -- I try them on sometimes -- but I'm not willing to be uncomfortable around my tender mammaries, okay? Not to mention armpits, back and shoulders.

I found a place that was selling them for $13 (they used to be more than twice that except I only ever bought them on sale). I ordered a dozen. Yep. A dozen. I might change size, but not enough to make a difference (experience shows)

For the record, they are the Vanity Fair Cotton Lace Piquant, out of which I studiously cut the underwires and then they are as comfortable as a comfortable thing.

On other fronts:

"Rubaiyyat of Omar Camacho" to Iris Print.

The rewritten "Tasmanian Flower Basket" to Fantasy Magazine.

My new submission tracker is set up: now I must spend way too much time reconstructing the information that was garbled away from the old one. Which is why I mention submissions here, by the way, it is a failsafe in case I lose the information elsewhere.

Zoom.

So I was companioning all day and my befuddled friend's carpenter son called and said I should stop by the mansion he's working on and pick up a morel. So we have a morel. I checked out the possibilities and I can use my jump drive on the computer over there and get some writing done on the days that Gloria takes a nap, which is not every day because she gets restless. Today she really wanted to take a nap but between the fact that she dozed off in the car when we went to the foot doctor and her daughter's impending departure she was just hopping up and pacing all the time, looking for things she could not name. She spends a lot of her time doing that, looking for things, and also a lot of her time ordering things, moving things in and out of handbags and drawers. Consequently we couldn't find her ID card today. Other days it's been her purse, or her cane, or the dog's leash that we couldn't find because Gloria put them into clever places around her very large house.

My email had the first nibble I've had this year, not a sale, but North of Infinity is holding on to "Tasmanian Flower Basket" until October. They might buy it, depending on what else happens between now and October. And I'm not Canadian. I'd love for them to buy it. I ended up finally being able to write a story I was hapopy with, after carrying around that story germ for years and years.

I haven't decided whether to use my writing moments to work on more shorts or to work on Afterwar. I'll try both and see whether I can make real progress on the novel or whether the other is wiser. While I was trying out the computer, I developed another fragmentary image that might work into the story germ I got from the farmworker book -- a drifter coming into a valley to cadge some work, and he's hired to tie vines, and the vines are not grapes, though he's instructed to treat them as grapes -- that's it, so far, and the fact of a green summer. The story germ I got from the farmworker book is that I want to do something sometimes about Native Californian farmworkers in the late Mission era. That's sort of an overheated thing to want to do -- it's like saying you want to write a story about Auschwitz. Which people do, and I've always shied away from stuff like that because I choke on it.

I just realized this might all go with the idea I got from reading the Ralan's entry for the anthology called "Thou Shalt Not . . ." in which they want stories based on one of the ten commandments. I thought the keeping Sabbath holy one was the most interesting possibility, and I had an image of a doomed damned man saying "I don't ask you all to do anything I don't do, all the time" to his employees . . .

We'll see, we'll see.

In other news, the drizzle almost made it all the way to rain this evening -- I had to use windshield wipers. It is the 18th of May. Not that there's never any precipitation in the summer, but it's just wrong to have it now. We're supposed to be having the early heat wave and the mini-drought now, to be relieved by true summer with its morning and afternoon fog and a tropical-feeling storm once in July.

I'm making a list of things that should be in place to make us non-burdensome old people. Powers of attorney for the kids, house in trust, advance directives about health care and end of life, long-term disability insurance. All the financial records -- of which we have many fewer than we're supposed to actually have -- centralized in an obvious place. And I want to start getting cognitive screening -- with my vague turn of mind, how would anybody be able to tell if I were losing it , just from external evidence, until it was too late for Arricept to help? Damn straight I'm going to use whatever is available if there's the slightest indication that it's warranted. "Do not go gentle" and all that.