What went before: Finished reading “Shout of Honor,” and put it to marinate.
A Question Asked; A Question Answered: The “boys in the basement” (sometimes known as “the back room”) are the committee of rowdies that passes for my muse. They drink a lot of beer, eat a lot of pretzels, watch re-runs of Time Tunnel and I Dream of Jeannie on Youtube, and occasionally kick an idea upstairs where I can find it. Astonishingly often, they’re good ideas. I do occasionally have to cut off their beer to get them to focus, but compared to what some of my colleagues have to do to get their muses to focus, that’s minor.
Another Question Asked, and Answered: Phil Jurus was a silversmith down in Maryland. Steve and I bought our wedding rings from Phil, and probably more silver than we could afford at the time. He created the Runes of Roke Knoll. Our wedding rings are engraved with Mette, the Rune for Courage (Sharon) and Illum, the Rune for Wisdom (Steve).
Onward!
Wednesday. Snowing and cold.
Breakfast was blueberry muffin and cottage cheese. Still drinking my first mug of tea. Lunch will be, um. Oh! Potstickers and fried rice. Sounds good, and I can do that out of stores.
Well, I miscalculated. I thought there’d be a dusting of snow on the overnight and I’d just hang in ’til 10 or so and then go to the grocery store. I am not going to the grocery store today. Looking at the list, there’s nothing I can’t get by without for another day, so tomorrow’s adventures will include the grocery store.
I’m still monkeying around with the Pair accounts Steve left. Having finally gotten inside Pair — there’s not even a directory for stevemillerwrites, so that makes that decision easy. However! There are two other domains that I do need to keep: liadenuniverseCOM/NET, even though they’re not manifesting on the internet. So, some of today will be once again making the part of my brain that used to know this stuff, err, work. Ow.
I also need to do some laundry, mostly because I ran through all of my Extra Special Warm Socks, and man, I’m gonna be wanting those.
(I made the mistake of reading a News Summary. Oh. My. Ghod.)
Back to focusing on the stuff I can do something about. I believe I have a starting point and a conceit for the next book. It is not at all what I thought I’d be doing, but ain’t that always the way.
I may take a little chunk of time to go through my jewelry box and look for pieces that may go into a memory necklace, as a reward for bending my brain into pretzels.
In reading matters, I last night finished Seeing Red in Gretna Green and have moved on to Code Yellow in Gretna Green. I’ve been reading Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent over lunch, and it’s been an agreeable companion. Also, yesterday, I got sidetracked into re-reading “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” by Samuel R. Delaney. It’s been a decade or so.
So, it’s still snowing. And I need another mug of tea.
What are you focusing on, today?
How it started, and how it’s going. Two pictures of Rook, aka Rookie, Lord High Rookifur, Fool of a Rook, Bananabread… The one on the left is from July 2024; the one on the right was taken this morning.
For some reason, I love comparison sets of photos and these two of Rook are quite revealing of his growth (and only incidentally of your snow)! Today we will have a local vet who does house calls. The hope is that my Dr Jekyll-and-Mr Hyde kitty (real name: Onyx) will cooperate with a meet-and-greet so that he can be legally prescribed the medications he’s been on all his life. Fingers crossed and all that.
Snow shoveling has been my exercise program, because we are getting lots of it. But we haven’t been trapped by too much snow in the lane for the car to handle, at least, never when we actually wanted to go out. (Since the garbage trucks go down the lane, the city plows the lane before garbage day if it is bad enough. Garbage trucks seem to have no traction and can’t plow through much snow — this seems like a bad plan in a city that specializes in winter!)