Peeking into the rock

We all know that I am not a language peever, but I reserve the right to hate the word meme anyhow.

So anyway, this week's game is to grab the book nearest you and read the first sentence on page 45: it is supposed to explain your love life. I did it yesterday and the nearest book was 400 Czech Verbs and the first sentence was some damned thing about the accusative case or something and I forgot. But today I was reminded again and the nearest book was the Czech dictionary (don't get me wrong, I've totally been slacking on studying Czech all year, it's altogether unusual for these books to be anywhere near me). On page 45 there are actual sentences, in a sidebar about distinguishing "breast" from "chest." The first sentence is

The pain spread across the chest.


Being that we are in fact fifteen days from the 6th anniversary of the nice fellow's death, it's actually kind of apposite.

Though I tend to feel it in my head (my physical head, not my abstract mind), not my chest.

.........

How to rescue this post from the abjectly emotional? natter on about my living family.

I think I have convinced Hana and Frank to go to Chemnitz with me. Hana has quit her jobs in preparation for following Frank to the UK whenever his paperwork gets approved, so she's available. At any moment Fank may have to duck out and go to the UK for a last-minute job posting, but I don't mind the uncertainty. He's the reason I have developed a habit of flying to Prague, but he is not the only thing in Prague. I'm flying Norwegian Air from Oakland on the 20th of August, which is a strange day for me but it's good to be busy on it.

Emma has gotten a job with Happy Hollow Zoo as a "temporary" relief zookeeper. It puts a limit on her hours and benefits, but it doesn't preclude her applying for a permanent position, of which there are one or two coming up. She's as happy as she has ever been, her husband Jason said yesterday.

This is after a tragedy: their sweet doofus rescue bulldog got her wires crossed and leaped at Jason's throat, nearly killing him in the process. She had to be killed: and grief for her was almost as strong as the terror around Jason's brush with death.

So this year Frank has to start taking the long-acronym licensing exam for US physicians, in order to be licensed in the US and countries which recognize a US license as well as being licensed in the Eurozone and countries which recognize the Eurozone license.  We went through a lot of twists and turns in the spring to find out what he needed to do and what he needed to get other people to do.  I spent half a month's wages on his application.  He did what he had to do.  He got the form to the office at Charles University with plenty of time.  There he had to sign the form in person in the presence of the Czech administrator who then had to stamp it with a particular stamp which the University had designated to the test agency as their one and only official stamp for this purpose and then mail it to the test agency in time for them to process it and give Frank a US test location and test date.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Charles University told the test agency that they would use the dean's stamp to authenticate the forms when they came in.  But they used the vice-dean's stamp.  My first reaction was that the test agency was the villain here for not recognizing the vice-dean's stamp, but then I thought about it -- the University said the only stamp they would use would be the dean's stamp, and then the University did something else.  In any case, no test for Frank this summer.

The next step is to do the form signing and stamping all over again when he gets back to Prague and to pay the test agency another hundred fifty to take the test somewhere in the Eurozone during the school year -- remember that Frank has to do his part of the form wrangling in the presence of the Charles University administration. Then he  gets to buy train tickets to wherever the test is given -- I believe we noticed that the closest place was somewhere in Germany.  So altogether, it's going to cost nearly another week's wages for me (his school loans do not cover this: for some reason they will only loan him approximately five thousand dollars less than he actually needs to go to school, live, and travel back and forth once a year.  It has to do with him being at a foreign school.  And talk about predatory lending practices!  Sallie Mae keeps sending him these come-ons for variable-rate loans that he would have to start paying off immediately -- necessitating higher loans, naturally).

I am a literary trope, aren't I -- widow with a low-paid service job trying to get a kid through medical school.  All I need is a ragged shawl and an excessively deferent attitude.

On the other hand, I have a working car again, I'm signed up for the early literacy class that will be taught in Spanish,  I have canned tomatoes, made wild plum jam, dried plums, and the construction project is moving forward.  More about that when we finalize the plans.

I'd been playing around with an idea about a drummer boy and now suddenly I have I think a full-fledged, entirely new novel in Fantasy Not-Poland Not-Early-Twentieth-Century, involving inheritance, sibling rivalry, a magical wild sow, a foresty marsh, and the aftermath of war. I wasn't even thinking about fantasy when I started. But while I was rationalizing making up a country instead of doing three years of research for what was going to be a novella for my own amusement I was taken with some remembered passages from Landscape and Memory, and the Lithuanian Cow became the Great Sow of the Marsh, and well, the rest is coming together.

The drummer boy is still central, of course. And the collision of semi-modern (trench) warfare and the style of warfare that pertains to black powder technology.

Once again, I am harmed by the absence of the nice fellow, whose thing was military history, and who always had to say something about the broader implications of military technology.

Stupid translating engine story of the day: Google can handle "stony" and it can handle "brook" but it can't handle "stony brook."

This will show my age:
one of my favorite songs ever is Bert Jansch's "Bright New Year," which I thought of all the time with respect to my own mother. Here it is covered by a young man who gets it okay.

Bert Jansch - The Bright New Year

Hello mother dear
Hope you are well and happy today
I do love you and think of you
Each single day
I dream of seeing you happy.

In summertime I thought
I would be able to see you again
I do love you and think of you
Each single day
I dream of seeing you happy.

As the bright new year
Draws closer now
I'm on my way
To bring you my love
And wish you good cheer over there.

Actuallym, I saw my mother all the time. But there is this feeling of concern and worry and maybe even downright fear that mom's falling apart, maybe going crazy with the weight of age and separation -- I lived with it all the time after I left home. She was going crazy and she was falling apart, she was fragile and my father dumped her when she hit middle age -- I like to think it was not because she was getting older but because he couldn't deal with her fragility and because he wanted to live the life he sang about, the free-hearted anarchist, and she was anything but free-hearted.

I didn't really intend to talk about any of that, really. I just wanted to make note of how I've started the new year.

New Year's Eve the dog and I walked in the New Year Parade, with the Women in Black, relatively silently, sandwiched between the bagpipes and the gamelan. Seriously. It's Santa Cruz, that's what we do for the New Year. Then I went to Connie and Israel's house meaning to stay for an hour and come home but what I did was stay till two-ish. Also I cooked. I made cauiliflower and cheese thing, not a great example but edible, roasted roots, chocolate bean flour cake with walnuts and agave syrup instead of sugar and some of the butter replaced by peanut butter, and also sesame candy with agave syrup. I'm not sure that agave syrup is actually lower in glycemic load than other syrups, because I haven't seen a source I trust, but it's rumored to have its fructose molecules all chained up into less-available fibrous strings. I need to talk to my favorite nutritional biochemist. AlsoI swept all the floors and did dishes and laundry.

New Year's Day I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, a lot of floor cleaning and some throwing things away and wiping down surfaces and moving papers around. And then the in-laws came over and we went to Bean Hollow Beach for the traditional Minus Tide Viewing, with the dog of course, and with the intention of going to the famous Duarte's artichoke restaurant of Pescadero, but it was closed, so the inlaws took us to a Greek restaurant in town and I had Horta Vrasta, which is dandelion geens boiled and served up with lemon and feta. And also a dish of "gigantes," which are butter beans in a kind of thick mild starchy sauce, better than that sounds. Everything was pretty good except the avgolemono, which was too lemony and at the same time bland. I put my name on a list to be notified when they have music (and dancing) night again. And I promised to tell Helen, my sister-in-law, when they tell me. She's Greek and is wistful about dancing.

I forgot to put my card in at Bookshop for their New Years' Day drawing. Oh well.

Yesterday I took the dog to the field and she romped around sedately and I had successful conversations with human beings. Then I went and visited my brother which was pleasant though I think the dynamics in his family are not and I fear for their equanimity over time. I forgot to take the telescope and contact the guy in El Cerrito who wants to buy it. I think my original plan of only dealing with locals is the only way to go. I can't deal with all this far away stuff.

Today I pruned half my apple tree and sprayed it and the plum tree and the apricot tree and the pomegranate tree with dorman oil spray. I still need to do the rest of the pruning and get the prunings into the greencycle can. But this is the first time in years I have gotten the first dormant spray done before late February. I just paid attention to the weather for once and I noticed that there was going to be no rain for a few days and I went for it. I also cooked some more --m some eggs and some rice and lentils for the week -- and swept some more -- I sweep and sweep and vaccuum almost every day and I still have barely made a dent in the mountains of dust that have accumulated while I was wrapped up in a little mourning ball -- not that I've ever been a great housekeeper. Also I dyed some white underwear orange, because orange was the color of dye I had for historical reasons, and orange is not as bad as white, at least I think it's not, we'll see.

I meant to get out to Lighthouse Field with my clipboard, but when I thought it might be either the field or the pruning, I thought the pruning was more immediate.

Also, over this same period I have written 7000 words of a probably 10K word story. One of my endless "fellow with little to no self-esteem and his crush" stories, but this one features the song "Spanish Merchant's Daughter:"

Father was a Spanish Merchant and before he went to sea
made me promise to say "No Sir" to all you say to me
--No sir, No Sir, No Sir, No Sir

I know your father was against me. Should he not return from sea
And they say you have no mother, would you then say no to me?
--No sir, No Sir, No Sir, No Sir

Yes I know I have no mother, should father not return from sea
Then you see I have a brother who would take good care of me
--No sir, No Sir, No Sir, No Sir

If we were walking in the garden, plucking roses wet with dew
Would we be in any way offended if I walk and talk with you
--No sir, No Sir, No Sir, No Sir

I know the world is very cruel if you have no one to care
But I always will say no sir until from father I do hear
--No sir, No Sir, No Sir, No Sir

As we tarry in the garden and we linger side by side
would you tell me I must leave you and refuse to be my bride
No sir, no sir, no sir, no sir,
No sir, no sir, no sir, no no!



Tomorrow, back to work.

Last night I went to bed early and in my own bed -- for the first time in almost a year. The cat and dog were more than delighted. The dog was so excited she tried to hump ythe bed. The cat just purred all night and now he is upstairs yowling at me, trying to get me to go back to bed.

Light at the end of the tunnel, I guess.

The storage shed is leaving in about an hour.

What I'm mostly doing now is taking crap upstairs and throwing crap out. I like to think I'm not a clothes horse, and I try not to buy crap, but stuff accumulates when you're passive.

I am fortunate to have the attic area to put things into. Since my closet isn't finished yet, I have put three laundry baskets!!! of hangable clothes right inside the attic door, along with a box of hangers. I am also moving some just plain stuff into the attic -- things I don't want to go through, things I know I want to keep but I don't want to access all the time, and four boxes of children's books that will go in a particular shelf that has not been built yet.

I have put my folding clothes into the drawers in the bed that used to be Ted's and into some of the drawers in the wall that used to hold my clothes. I do not understand why, after a year of throwing things away and not buying things, I still apparently have more than I started with. I have subsumed some of Ted's clothes, but not that much!

For example. My underwear, swimclothes, pajamas and socks used to go into two drawers that are smaller together than the one big drawer I have subdivided with plastic boxes. I swear I could close those two drawers. I have culled a bunch more socks, also ironic because for the last year I have been desperately search for socks everyday, and now I find I have too many. Well, I stole all the socks that Emma thinks are too juvenile, so that's explainable. But as for underwear -- I haven't bought any in a long time, and I have been throwing pieces out because they were two worn out and discolored even for me.

Anyway, you can see the (very very dusty) floor in the former kid's room, but I haven't been able to sleep there in a week because I was using the bed for a staging area. The upstairs masttress needs cleaning before I can sleep on it -- not to mention all hundred pounds of it need to be dragged upstairs -- so I've been sleeping (badly) on the couch. It's okay for a nap, but a full night's sleep is not possible since the dog insists on sleeping with me even when it's obviously not possible. I'll have the downstairs bed cleared off for tonight, I think, and sleep a bit better.

I've been sweeping the floors that I expose, and sweeping my room upstairs when I track dirt up there, but everything's still very dusty. And there was a rat skeleton, which I think Truffle found somewhere, so naturally I'm coughing from my stupid reaction to the epithelial tissue. No welts were my hand landed on it though, which is a mercy. (Come to think of it, I never got welts on my hands from the pet rats back in the day -- only my shoulders and arms)

Now I have to go find a steam cleaner to rent, some paint for the walls and for the floor of the closet, replace the wrong hinges I bought, and let's see, dog and cat food too.

I hate the way my throat feels, though.

Among other things, I have also transformed three boxes on miscellaneous stuff into a box of recycled paper, a box of books for Logos, a pile of books to read, more books on the children's book shelf, some actual garbage, and a new trove of miscellaneous postage stamps (some of which I used to mail out a manuscript).

And this too:

A quarter to midnight, I'm getting ready for bed, and I get a call. I'm too surprised to even be scared. But all potential fears are laid to rest as I hear the peremptory voice of a woman rapidly complaining in Czech. She's not really. She's actually being very polite and thoughtful: it's just the intonation of Czech that makes it sound like that. She switched to English, and now between me and Frank we have personally spoken to people in four countries about the whereabouts of his suit roll, which made a delightful sidetrip to Venice as he went on to Prague. Frank spoke to the folks in Munich, where his plane landed: and I have spoken to people in Venice, Phoenix, and Prague.

The luggage is doing well. It's in Prague again. The only problem is that they can't deliver it: they think the address of the friend's apartment where Frank is staying is incorrect. I think they are mistaken, or at least that it is not incorrect in the way that they think it is, but I didn't think it wise or even possible to explain that the address isn't on the postal maps because the apartment is illegal . . . it's just like a granny unit, like that, only in a converted apartment house garage.

and I wrote 700 words of a new story, too, uncharacteristically one where I don't know what's going to happen except that I hope that I get these two characters together . . . it starts out really gloomy, because our guy is basically saying the same things to himself that I say to myself when I'm not busy enough.

Now I go read, perhaps to sleep.

And no fathers around here anywhere. Yeah, well, I'm maudlin a lot of the time.

On the other hand, We're picking up Frank tonight, not tomorrow night.

By the time we get him home it will be early tomorrow morning: for him it will be tomorrow mid-day.

Edit:

Okay, I'm confused again.

I thought this drug was supposed to make me less spaced out.

Wrote: half the last chapter of the romantic comedy, and a chapter of the thing about the guy who is at one with the water system and enmeshed in a political struggle he doesn't understand and doesn't want to care about until people start threatening him.

It's close to a stopping place, but if I stopped it where it feels like it ought to end, it would be 40K or less, which makes it not a novel. Where the story goes after that isn't to my liking as a thing to write: I mean, I envision forty-fifty years of a life by turns tedious to describe because it's all about the bureaucratic plodding, and briefly, explosively dangerous, with those episodes not so much resolving as retreating as an ebb tide, the danger promising to return in its own time. You could write that, I suppose, as a picaresque, or an adventure series, and there've been more unlikely heroes for adventure stories than a water engineer with unlikely powers of perception and communication with watery things. No, it's not a fantasy, and his powers are not supernatural. He's been genetically tweaked so he can do his job better, is all. The bacteria and algae that have been tweaked to act as controls and movers for the water system don't have personalities. No sprites anywhere. Just biology and engineering and hydrology.

It occurs to me that it might work as a fixup with the similarly short one about the guy who has been set up to think he's a nutcase, so the bad guys can pin the assassination of our guy's mentor on him. Except it happens about fifty years earlier, now that I think about it. Unless I rework it completely.

I have called several termite outfits and finally got one that returned my call and is willing to come look at my house. The painter I was talking to before the house revealed all its horrors is now too busy. Another painter thinks he may not be able to get to it very soon, but he's coming out. I have called several tree services but not one has answered me.

The tree thing is getting urgent. I can hear my almond trees scraping against Hanelore's garage.

I have another job interview on Tuesday. I volunteered last week twice at the school where the Watershed Council is doing projects. I helped Emma move a bit. I worked the polls on Tuesday. I went with Zac to buy lumber.

I fixed my horrible leaking rear hose faucet. Practically falling in love with the woman who works in plumbing at the hardware store while I was at it. She was so competent and calm. It's too late for me to be her when I grow up, I'll have to make do with what I've got.

I got mc to two of the appointments he needs to get to for his SSI evaluation, which is all the appointments they've set up so far.

I deadheaded the front roses.

I got the checkbook for the life insurance account so now I can pay all my big bills and get my car tuned up.

I'm going to be out of money in a couple of months, but I won't have to do any of these things to my house again. And I'll be working soon.

So, and the nice fellow's birthday came and went and I survived it. One more first-without-him I don't have to look forward to.

I have discovered that if Truffle doesn't get a decent walk three days in a row, she will pine: she'll stop eating, she'll get constipated, and she'll start to look Addison's-y.

So I am working on getting up earlier so she'll get her good walk even after I start working again.

Oh, also, I figured out how to make a thing in Milkshape, but not how to view it in a form that will allow me to see how the texturing is working out. Nor do I know how to export the thing into SimPe, or how to scale it so it's actually the size it needs to be for the Sims. The project I'm working on in Milkshape is interchangeable pieces to make false fronts for Southwestern-style buildings, which also seem to be exactly what's needed to make the false fronts on the narrow old buildings I saw in Amsterdam and Prague.

Took the dog and the temporary dog to Meder Street Park yesterday morning. We walked for almost an hour but it didn't make me act like a human being (instead of, for example, a shelf fungus) later. The point is, however, that I've been playing hide and seek with a tick ever since. I keep getting it and losing it. There's no excuse for this. The first time I was startled and dropped it on the floor and then I couldn't find it again. The second time I brushed against it in bed -- barely registered that it was the tick -- and again I couldn't find it. Now I keep imagining sinister little arthropod feet creeping around on my flesh and worrying that it will dig in someplace I can't reach and no nice fellow to look for it for me.

On another front, we've had water restrictions for a little over a week and I've already forgotten my watering days once and nearly forgot to water today (which is one of my days: Saturday is the other one).

Back on the topic of dog and temporary dog, the temporary dog happily went home with the brothers in law yesterday and today Truffle went into a tailspin. She wouldn't eat breakfast so I had to tempt her with peanut butter to get her medicine into her. Then she moped and acted like she was going to get sick, which she might well do, since she has no stress hormones but what I give her. She's better now that she's had a walk and a day to get over it, but it was really dramatic. I feel like telling the brother-in-law just to give me the dog.