I was just trying to reserve the username. I have no intention of cat-vacuuming.

Yes, I now have a twitter account. I tell myself it will, if I use it at all, make posts like “QQ I got wet in the rain” shorter, so I can focus more time on either blogging about important things (go on, laugh), or writing.

Yeah. Sure.

Heeeeeere, kitty kitty…

So, like I said, I wandered down to Whole Foods in search of lunch and guacamole. My adventure started off something like…

1) Go outside.
2) Make note of ominous-looking clouds in the direction of the store.
3) Keep walking.
4) Feel a few misty drops at the corner of my building.
5) Keep walking.

By the time I got my food and wended my way through the register lines I realized that the skies had opened the hell up. It’s been raining the last few days, including a hell of a thunderstorm last night - so loud, our house shook with each clap. We had tornado warnings yesterday, too. So, why I thought it would be a great idea to race the storm, I don’t know.

The nice guy at the register gave me an extra bag to hold over my head, then I dodged raindrops all the way back to the office. There are far fewer businesses with awnings between there and here than I realized. At least my hair is dry.

No, really, wet hair can be worse for me than wet clothes. As it is, I got off lightly - the storm let up just a bit as I hurried back. My pants are fairly soaked at the cuffs and my shoulders are damp. My shoes are very, very wet, but I have spare sandals here. I have a sweater, so that should, in theory, keep me from getting chilly in this arctic air conditioning. If I come down with a cold because our building management keeps us frozen, I’ll be annoyed.

My timing could have been worse, though. The rain let up just a bit as I walked back, and when I came inside, a whole department was pressed up against the windows, exclaiming over how hard it was coming down. Seems like I barely beat the next wave of torrential gorramn downpour.

Still. I’m damp and kinda pouty.

We spent this past weekend up in the North Woods of Wisconsin, at Marty’s family cottage in Three Lakes. There was drinking and boating and games and oh my god so much good food. I’m desperately waiting for Shannon’s guacamole recipe, so much so that I’m tempted to go buy some premade from Whole Foods for lunch today, though I know it just won’t be the same.

We went to the Mars Cheese Castle on the way there. I am sorry to say that it is not, in fact, a castle made of cheese, though I suppose that would get pretty stinky pretty fast. Still, there were many Good Things to Eat inside, including some kind of three-foot-long jerky sticks that made me pretty glad I wasn’t in the guys’ car.

The girls had tiaras (awww yeah) and travel games and snacks (Von won at travel bingo. I hereby claim the assist, since I managed to bury my board under stuff and just started pointing out things to mark off.) I was not on the trip to the store that yielded a bear sighting. I did, however, see a drunken chipmunk. He was quite disappointed when Marty took his booze-soaked watermelon away.

We took a walk down a country road in the dark, no flashlights, not a ton of moonlight. It was so very quiet, such a change from even our little suburb, where the sound of traffic is never really far.

Greg and Von made us a fire, and there were s’mores and geek-talk. It’s weird - I’ve, y’know, showered and washed my hair and all since coming home, but I keep thinking I’m smelling woodsmoke every now and then. It’s not a bad thing, really, sort of the last traces of an awesome weekend, making me smile while I ease back into this whole work thing.

Pictures forthcoming at some point, when I get them off of my camera and upload ‘em.

My inbox this morning was filled with 47 pieces of what I call corporate junk mail (”There’s cake in the fridge on the 17th floor!” Yeah, thanks, that’d be helpful if I were in the New York office) and 35 actual non-junk emails. Twelve of those were industry newsletters I’ve signed up for. 23 real emails, and most of those just FYI type things. Maybe seven that required any actual action on my part. Not so bad for three days off.

Anyway, yeah. Back at my desk, wishing I were still up in the woods, sipping coffee with friends and letting the day stretch out before us.

How’s everyone been?

Just a bit of housekeeping today. Updated a few links over there on the side that I kept reminding myself to put up, and promptly kept forgetting to do.

I haven’t been up to anything terribly interesting. Garden’s still alive (but not doing science). There are more tomatoes, since my mother grew some from seeds and more of them sprouted than she’d expected. The great part of having your mom live ten minutes away? “Here, I don’t have room for these in my garden. Also, I’m pulling up my broccoli tomorrow because the deer and rabbits are eating it. Can I put it in here?”

A couple of the tomato plants have these tiny little tomatoes-to-be growing. They’re round and green and will hopefully someday taste awesome. A few summers ago, I happened to stop by my parents’ house when my mother was trying her hand at fried green tomatoes, fresh from the garden. (On occasion, I have awesome timing.) They came out really good. So, hopefully in a couple of weeks, I’ll be trying my hand at my own.

I submitted “Kate” to Strange Horizons on July 1st. Probably won’t hear anything until September. Cross your fingers for me.

I opened up “Running” and stared at Lil for a while last weekend, and she stared back at me. I have some better ideas of where the story is going for her, but I’m not quite ready to go back to it yet.

Also, I snagged tickets for Great Big Sea in October! /squeeeeee

About four years ago, a feral cat abandoned three of her kittens in our backyard. They weren’t even a week old. We brought them inside and bottle-fed them. Had to teach them to eat and bathe and all the things mother cats do. Two of them, we found homes for. The third, we kept. Her name is Arya.

She is very, very fluffy.

The last few summers, we’ve been able to brush her without too much trouble. When she did get a few inevitable mats, we were able to cut them off with scissors. This year, however, she sees a brush and her first instinct is DO NOT WANT. She gets bitey, she gets pointy, she tries to eat the brush. Because OH GOD MOM ANYTHING BUT THE BRUSHING OMG.

Which meant, of course, that as the weather got warmer and she started to shed, she couldn’t groom herself well enough to keep up with the long fur, and the mats began to form. It was no longer something Greg and I could handle by sneaking up on her mid-nap and snipping one or two off before she woke up.

We found out that our vet’s sister hospital does grooming, and so, this morning I loaded a very unhappy cat into the carrier and took her there.

This is what she looked like before:

The mats were close enough to the skin that they had to shave her. Now, she wasn’t completely lumpy, but there was no way a nice, relaxing bath followed up by a few passes of a detangling comb was going to do it. Not that I think any bath Arya could be part of would ever be considered “relaxing.”

They gave her a lion cut, so-called because they leave her head and paws and tail alone. She is not entirely happy with me right now, although she’s let me pick her up once or twice. Pixel, our eldest cat, followed her around for a little while, doing the kitty equivalent of WTF? Now he’s sleeping on the bed. Arya’s off sulking.

The after photo:

Hopefully she’ll be more amenable to brushing as her fur grows back in so we don’t have to go through this torment next summer. We did discover that she’s not quite as pudgy as we thought. A lot of it really was just how fluffy she is - though she has a bit of a belly right near her back legs. Still, we thought she was more round than she actually is.

And yes, it’s okay to laugh. I am well aware of how silly she looks right now.

I have a garden. On occasion, stuff grows in it. If you’d like to see what it looks like so far (or, as of a few days ago, anyway), the photostream is here.

I’m hoping one of you green-thumbed people out there might be able to help me out with identifying our mystery flower. It grows on the fence beside the pool, and despite spending its first couple of years choked by some fuzzy red vine thing (which we finally yanked out so the mystery flower could grow), it comes back every summer. It’s awfully pretty. My mother thinks it’s some kind of grapevine, but damned if I ever see any grapes. My mother-in-law wondered if it might be some kind of morning glory. I forget why she ended up dismissing that theory.

Take a gander, tell me what you think:

I’d just like to know what to call them. If I ever change the theme for this blog, I’m considering turning one of these flowers into the banner. Too bad they don’t fit with the old-fashioned theme all that well right now.

Any guesses?

It is very, very tempting to hop onto ye olde bandwagon and examine my writing process, as Lori and Deb are doing. I’m fascinated by both, partly because I can see similarities and differences between how they plan their writing and how I do.

I’m tempted to say that mine is planned not-at-all, but that’s not true. It’s just something I do so automatically, I suppose, that I’ve never really considered it a process. I’m awful with outlines. I have character spreadsheets all over the place, and snippets of story scrawled onto whatever paper I can find. (There is a stack of legal pads in my study, whose first several pages are all whatever I was working on when it was within reach. I should take a picture.)

There’s an ATM receipt that’s been in my purse for a year - that, much like my old hard drive - made the trip from one purse to another, actually. It has a snippet of conversation from a scene I’d planned on writing for Threnn nearly a year ago, but never got around to. I still like it, though. Four lines of dialogue, a thought, and a closing sentence, and I want to find somewhere to put them.

Though, my WoW writing has always been like that - scene by scene, not even what I’d necessarily call a short story, since what’s happening is so organic. Other people contribute to plotlines, and one simple line of dialogue from another character can make your carefully planned out story take a completely different turn (this is very rarely a Bad Thing, by the way.)

But the process of writing my other stuff, my I Wanna Get This Published Someday stuff, while it shares some similarities, also has more structure in my approach. I’m thinking that a closer examination of what I’m doing might actually make me progress better.

There are things that both of the ladies are doing that I’m curious to try, now, to see if adapting some of their techniques would work for me.

And of course (she says, resigned that yes, she’s going to pick up her dusty ol’ backpack and take a running leap onto that bandwagon as it comes around the bend), the question becomes, which project do I choose to yatter on about?

Once upon a time, there was a girl.

This girl had a computer. It consisted of some new parts and some hand-me-down parts, and while it wasn’t cutting edge, it did its job well. When some of the parts migrated from the old case to a newer, faster, shinier one, the hard drive went too.

For reasons the girl doesn’t remember, she decided to purchase a new hard drive somewhere along the line. Once, long ago, the concept of filling up her old one seemed preposterous - when would she ever have sixty gigs worth of anything?

Somehow, though, she did, and perhaps it was for this reason that she went and bought a new hard drive. It had quite obviously been a Very Long Time since she’d last purchased one. The new one could fit one hundred and sixty gigs, and she had a hard time imagining she’d ever fill that.

Reflecting on it, though, as she created partitions and named the drives, trying to put some order into the chaos that was her machine, the old drive had to be at least five years old. That’s, like, a million in computer years, and on that ancient drive were all of her various writings - things from games, short stories she’d abandoned, two or three projects that might even become novels… not to mention years’ worth of MP3s, including some rare Counting Crows songs she’d had since college.

The girl made a wise decision, and moved all of her precious information from the old drive to the new.

As time went on, she forgot she’d done it.

Sometime later - maybe a year on, maybe more - the girl came home from a long day at work and turned on her machine. Motherboard splash screen, diagnostic splash screen, operating system splash screen… black.

She pushed the power button - maybe it was a glitch. Same thing.

She went to the wizard that lived in her house, to whom she was conveniently also married, and tried not to whimper as she delivered the news. “It won’t turn on,” she said. She said a few things that sounded vaguely smart, like, “It’s posting,” and “I rebooted!”

The wizard took a look. At first, being a fan of Occam and his Razor, he thought the problem might be dust on the motherboard. Off came the case, out came the vacuum cleaner.

No luck.

He reseated the video card. (The girl couldn’t help thinking that if something had to go, it wasn’t so bad if it was the video card. I mean, really, what better excuse to buy a new one than “my old one broke?”)

No luck.

He took out the memory, to see if the motherboard was even paying attention. The computer screamed, shrilly and frequently, alerting the world to its missing brain. That was a good sign, at least. He put the memory back in.

He unplugged the newer hard drive, the shiny 160 gig master, to see if it even recognized the old drive.

The computer saw it, but it hung, and hung, and hung.

He unplugged the old slave drive and left the master on its own.

It took a while, because something mysterious called a Jumper Setting was left in place, so the master drive was casting about frantically, trying to find the suddenly unresponsive slave drive.

But boot it finally did.

Login screen! Startup sound! Pretty desktop background picture! Gtalk letting the girl know that, even in her (brief) absence from the internet, she had not been forgotten!

And the fear that had crept in, that maybe she’d been lazy and left all of her old stuff on the old drive, the worry she didn’t want to speak out loud for fear of making it true (for, remember, she’d forgotten her long-ago forward thinking), was quickly assuaged. The wizard looked, and lo, there were her stories, and her songs, all safe and sound on the new drive, where they belonged.

Still, no time for distraction.

The wizard shut it all down. Plugged the slave drive back in. Booted up. “Give it time,” he said. “It has to try to find the old drive.” The went down into the dungeon and he showed her the work that had been done during the day. They took their time with the tour, giving the computer a chance to think.

Once the girl went upstairs again, the computer was only just getting around to the log in screen. She sat and tried to look at what might be left on the slave drive, but the old drive had gone silent, now. She shut down, and unplugged it one last time.

Well, the wizard unplugged it. The girl for some reason couldn’t get the cable to come off. He also removed the Jumper, and put the case back on for her.

Another boot - the fastest boot in months and months - and the girl was back in business. Gmail! IRC! Intarwebz!

And they all lived happily ever after.

The end.

—

So, yeah. Let me tell you, it’s no fun to sit there, half sure that you moved all of your important stuff over, and half sure you didn’t, with no way to tell until you can figure out why your machine won’t boot up and then figure out how to get it to actually boot.

It also probably couldn’t have been all that fun to be Greg, with me sitting over his shoulder trying to be helpful. I pretty much know my way around the guts of a computer. I’ve put one together before, and can follow along relatively well when the conversation turns to computer geekery. But when it comes down to “OMFG WHY IS IT BROKEN WTF?” I’m not so great at diagnosing the problem, aside from asking questions that are most likely obvious ones.

But, all is well (for now). Funny thing is, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed what I thought was one of my fans getting awfully loud. I figured it would just be a matter of cracking the case and either cleaning the dust out of the offending fan or replacing it.

Now that I think about it (and considering how quiet my machine was last night), it must have been the old hard drive, whirring its last.

Alas, poor hard drive. Tonight I shall drink something alcoholic in your honor.