Today is dog day. I’d scheduled an appointment with a new vet at two, so the dirty dog and I had a bath this morning.
Tess was sooo good in the bath. She’s never stopped hating it; she trembles nonstop from the moment she knows what’s coming until I tell her she can go. But she no longer struggles or tries to make a break for it, just puts her ears down and cooperates. All I have to do now is point at the bathroom and she jumps into the tub and waits for me, shaking. It’s oddly endearing.
I toweled her down afterward and left her to finish the job — she licks her paws dry like a cat, it’s crazy — and it wasn’t until I got to the vet that I noticed the little grey clouds of undercoat wafting in her path. Ah, summer.
This was the triennial vaccination-and-titer visit, so not only did it involve a new place new people, but also a series of sharp pokey things. She was very brave and only jerked her paw away once during the blood draw. I felt sorry for her afterward and stopped by the pet store to buy her a bone. And a brush.
Tessa hates being groomed, too, and didn’t like the new brush any better, though I did; it’s built to get the undercoat and does so much more efficiently than the old hairbrush I’d been using on her. Most of her undercoat is on her rump, and she keeps sitting down so I can’t reach it, or creeping away when I have to pause and pull a handful of hair from the teeth.
I got a finger-toothbrush and enzyme toothpaste as well; both Tess and Sammy need better tooth care. But I’m not going to start today; she’s been through enough. I’ll let her gnaw on the beef shank in peace for a while, and throw some toys for her later.
I’ve finally gotten her to distinguish between the names of the different toys — ring, bunny, ball — so that she brings me the one I ask for instead of a) whatever’s closest or b) her favorite. Despite the vaunted border collie intelligence, I had been doubting whether Tessa was smart enough to learn much more than the basic sit/come/down/stay. But with this success I’m starting to think again about something more advanced.
Some dogs can learn to fetch beer from the fridge on command. It’s a long process; you have to break it into steps for opening the fridge, holding the bottle, and so on. And we don’t regularly keep beer in the fridge anyway. But I may think of something …
Having an unrestricted public venue for one’s personal thoughts is a dangerous thing, for so many reasons. Right now I’m in danger of whining about my many physical ailments like an old woman. Expansively, and at great length. And who wants to hear that?
Twitter is safer; 140 characters of whining is more forgivable.
Okay, I’ve got two new comment plugins working now, one that puts recent comments in the sidebar and one that allows comment notifications by email. I did some hacking of the php script on the latter (to improve layout, however slightly) and haven’t fully tested the whole subscribe/unsubscribe procedure, so please let me know if there are glitches.
Also: behind the scenes, I added the Widget Context plugin. It is a thing of much usefulness and beauty.
WordPress sidebar widgets, while neat and easy, lock you into an everywhere-or-nowhere choice. Widget Context lets you specify locations on a per-widget basis, on the fly. All I’ve done with it thus far is to remove the ‘Recent Entries’ widget from the front page, where it’s redundant, but the capabilities go much farther. All WP bloggers should have this!
The library continues to provide us with a rotating stack of very solid fantasy hardcovers. Doorstops, the lot of them. Huge books, and heavy — just ask poor Jak, who decided to get some exercise by making the last library trek on foot, and had to lug five of the buggers home.
And then there’s this one shabby trade paperback, pages bent and battered, cover barely attached. Poor thing won’t make it through another three pairs of hands before falling utterly to shreds. The one series out of dozens thus far that didn’t rate the more expensive hardcover treatment from its publisher, which turns out to be the newcomer Pyr, rather than one of the usual suspects.
I’m sure you can guess where this is going, because we all enjoy irony here, yes? That trade paperback series is the only one thus far that I’d consider worthy of a hardcover printing.
Like GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire, Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law series eschews absolute good and evil for a cast of complex, morally grey characters. It’s fantasy-of-the-trenches, eased along by wry humor, with nary a cliché in sight.
I am at present only halfway through the second book of three, so there’s always the possibility that the author’s talents don’t extend to crafting a satisfactory conclusion … but I’d be surprised. The Blade Itself is the first book, if you’re inclined to chance it. I’ll let you know when I get to the end.
I did not expect my appointment with the orthopedist today — my first in well over a year — to end in minor surgery, but I think I’m glad it did.
The tibial tubercal transfer surgery that I had in the fall of 2007 left me with two long titanium screws through my leg bone below the knee, one of which has been incrementally extracting itself right out the front of my leg. I haven’t been able to kneel since the surgery, which is frustrating on top of my other problems, and makes for some very dirty floors. Worse is the fact that even a minor tap against the skin-covered metal sends me into paroxysms of pain, and in my chronic clumsiness I usually manage to slam it into something two or three times a day.
Now that two-inch screw is sitting here in an envelope. Jak, whom I’d dragged with me to the doctor, made some joke about going out for coffee during the extraction so he didn’t have to hear me scream.
This, incidentally, was over a hastily-procured pomegranate martini at a nearby restaurant. We had just under an hour between my original appointment and the impromptu screw-removal — not enough time to fill a Vicodin prescription, so I opted for ‘vodkadin’ instead.
I glared at him for even joking about abandoning me, and insisted that I would not either scream. I’ve endured a great deal of pain in my life and had high confidence in my teeth-gritting abilities.
I was wrong. My shriek of “SHIT!” reverberated throughout the office, and I belatedly understood why they wanted this to be the last appointment of the day.
Still, it was over relatively quickly — perhaps five minutes, all told. The doctor estimated I’d just saved three thousand dollars over an operating room procedure with general anesthetic, so I figure it was worth it.
We’ll see how complacent I am later, when the local anesthetic wears off …
Those of you reading this are about to learn a secret that I doubt the eventual readers of our eventual book(s) will ever imagine:
Our epic fantasy is science fiction in disguise. Really, really deep disguise.
I am often able to lose myself in someone else’s fantasy novel without questioning, for example, the provenance of human beings on a planet that is very obviously not Earth. When constructing my own, however, I want an explanation, if only so my brain will stop complaining about convergent evolution and crap like that.
So our planet’s humans are descendants of colonists that originated on Earth. Our magic systems are examples of Clarke’s third law; they are technological in origin, even if the wielders don’t know it and the readers never guess. And so on.
(It occurs to me that I do this for much the same reason that I slaved over villanelles and sestinas but rarely bothered with free verse. I don’t work well in a loose system; it feels … sloppy. Give me a tight framework, please, and let me weave something intricate around it.)
By the time we got a trilogy’s worth of plots and characters roughed out, we had four major countries, each with a distinct culture. Each of these peoples has its own language, but again — the secret is that they’re all descended from a future English, which was the shared language of the colonists over a thousand years before. They are all cousins, like French to Spanish.
Jak and I are both getting tired of the lack of names for our major characters; we’ve been making do with placeholders like ‘mountain king’ and ‘red herring dude.’
So late last week I began the complex process of creating four separate versions of ‘far future English’, learning the necessary linguistics as I go. I spent almost all of Saturday and Sunday on it, on little sleep, and nearly burned myself out. Now I’m progressing a bit more slowly. Language One is at the phoneme stage, Three is into morphemes and basic vocabulary, and Two, where I’ve spent the most time so far, is all the way into early grammar. (Language Four I haven’t even started; none of Book One’s major characters are named in it, so it can wait.)
I’m enjoying the linguistic geekery quite a bit, despite occasionally feeling frustrated or overwhelmed. Plus it was totally worth it to read off a pair of sentences in Language Two, with translation, and watch Jak’s eyes go wide and his mouth fall open. Heh.
