Another Green World

It was quite warm today – the temperature on my car dashboard was 87F around 4 pm – and J and I worked on the blackberry vines near the fragile bit of fence again, which was rather tiring! Also, about a week ago most of the buddleia (butterfly bush) beside his former strawberry bed just toppled over. Too bad, as it was pretty. We’ll need to clear that up too.

Today I finished a full draft of Chapter 2 of the academic version of the book based on my dissertation topic. Chapter 1 has lots of loose ends, but not Chapter 2! My intention is to make a good faith effort to tackle each of the most difficult chapters before trying (yet again) to find a publisher. That would be Chapters 3, 4, 8, 10, and maybe 9 and 12. Or maybe after 3, 4, 8, and 10 I’ll be feeling more confident. For Chapter 2, I spent maybe two weeks organizing the material, two weeks drafting the text with indicated gaps, and three weeks filling in the gaps. I’ll have to see if I can reasonably speed that up a bit.

We celebrated Labor Day in our usual way – a barbecue with our four closest people here, and no real thoughts about labor. I mowed the lawn and set up the chairs, and J did the grilling. AA and DG arrived first, then D and S. We had nice burgers and hot dogs and such, and lots of good conversation, and we were even able to download a bunch of AA’s photos from her phone (both for the wedding and the Europe trip).

After I helped clean things up, then I had book club! Next time we’re going to possibly read two books: the classic Fahrenheit 451, which is one of JLS’s favorite books to teach, and A Wizard’s Defensive Guide to Baking, by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon).

Today felt autumnal in many respects. We had our first football game of the year, with the #2 ranked Oregon team barely getting a win against Boise State, which is always a strong team yet unranked this year. As always, I used the football game to start making progress on my big stack of this year’s local newspapers, in today’s case the month of February. There were only three articles that I set aside to read at some point.

After that, J and I started working on the overgrown mess of the yard next to that fence that’s started collapsing – we worked fairly vigorously for 30 minutes, then he did a bike ride and I ate lunch then walked down to the park to meet him, then we worked on the yard for 15 minutes more. There’s still lots to do, but our progress was noticeable.

This week’s Friday movie was one of my favorites… Jason and the Argonauts! It seemed slower than I remembered, but that’s okay.

The movie I watched with meals was a worthwhile surprise – a relatively smart Hallmark romance. The title, Much About Love, hints that it’s an adaptation of “Much Ado About Nothing,” and the two main characters (Bea and Benny, naturally) are a former couple who now have to put on a production of a Shakespeare play with another pair of bickering and bantering lovers, “The Taming of the Shrew.” I looked up the writer so I could see if they write other Hallmark movies, and it turned out to be the lead actress. She hadn’t written any before, but her dad is a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and her sister has written a best-selling memoir, so she obviously comes from an educated family.

Books. For the first time this year, I didn’t complete a book resolution for the month. I gave up on The Guns of August after that first paragraph, and although I did start reading History of Beauty and got as far as the Renaissance, it wasn’t very well written, and the excerpts were in such small type that it was almost too much work to read them. For September, I’m going to either finish that one or declare that I’m giving up on it. I’m also going to see about reading The Myth of Disenchantment, by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. I’d liked his other book quite a bit.

J’s Indoor Parking and My Massive Computer Backup. This resolution was formerly Boxes. I need to move a bunch of stuff out of J’s garage so he can park in it, before the rainy season starts. We’re expecting rain tomorrow, but hopefully he won’t mind that I haven’t made more progress! My intention at this point is to deal with the three boxes of ancient clothes (wash them, sort them, pack things up), to move the closed tubs of things back into my spare bedroom, and to actually do something with the contents of the other boxes, etc., but it’s possible I’ll just shift all that into some tidier arrangement.

As for the massive computer backup project, I did manage to locate the external hard drive I bought years ago, yay, and then I bought a new adapter for it. The next steps are to look at that external hard drive (I think it just has some pdfs on it), start the massive backup project with the various handy computers, and ideally make an inventory of all of the computers I’ve got.

Better eating. My digestion was pretty good this month. I had salmon six times; I also had five peaches and numerous blackberries.

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older. Mossa & Pleiti #1. I learned about this book when someone online asked about science fiction romances, and although in some ways I liked the book very much (the characters, the story, the unusual setting), I also found myself having major “suspension of disbelief” problems that kept distracting me. Two women who’d been in a romantic relationship in college find themselves working together to solve the mystery of a man who has disappeared. Their ancestors escaped from Earth after its ecosystem was destroyed, and they now live on platforms in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. One of them is a professional investigator; the other is a Classics scholar – where Classics no longer means Greece and Rome, or ancient China or India or such, but rather, life on Earth. In other words, she studies Earth’s ecosystems.

Now, I have no problem suspending disbelief when it comes to “faster than light speed” or “magic is real.” But how could humans live on platforms in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, platforms that aren’t enclosed in ways to protect them from the various swirling gases of the planet and to keep their supply of breathable air with them? They think this missing man may have stepped off the platform and gone hurtling down toward the planet, which would of course kill him, but why doesn’t their air supply likewise escape? When we’re more than halfway through the story, we learn that there are “atmoshields” that used to enclose the spaces, but the technology advanced so that the atmoshields are now permeable, so that the gases can come whirling through them (and people can step off platforms) – but the oxygen stays where it belongs? Eventually I had to decide to assume that the humans had somehow been engineered to live in such wild conditions, but then later I learned there were pigeons all over one of the places, and surely pigeons hadn’t also been engineered like that. Maybe I’m not the intended reader of the book… but giving us a narrator whose professional focus is ecosystem stability, so that we’re set up to think about such issues, makes it pretty hard to accept that this particular ecosystem works just fine.

Today J’s Worldcon experience and mine were much more interconnected. He was up first, of course, and had a proper breakfast for once, then visited the art show, then went to a panel that included two of our favorite authors, Martha Wells and Robert Jackson Bennett. When I woke I found that he’d sent me messages asking about whether he should bid on some art – there were two paintings he liked very much, by an artist who often features both cats and dragons in the same work, but the total for both was seeming too high. I pointed out that the one with the white cat better matched his livingroom color (the white dragon had blue wings), so he bid on that. Then he went and played that starship bridge game again, and then he attended a panel about designing things that don’t exist (and Larry Niven, like last year, really liked holding forth on whatever topics were popping into his head).

I then tried three different panels and ended up really enjoying the one about gender – each of the panelists seemed smart, articulate, enthusiastic, and thoughtful, and I ordered a book by the one I liked the most, Alex Kingsley. I told J and he went to find their booth (where he bought me this book’s sequel) – it turned out to be near our local author Mary Lowd’s booth. He then went and raised his bid on the painting, then rested up in his room until the auction was about to close. Meanwhile, I attended a panel on dragons, which included Marie Brennan. At one point, the other woman panelist said something along the lines of not wanting to give spoilers for her books, because there could be people in the audience who hadn’t read them all yet, and I thought, wow, who would say that? I looked online to see who this was, and it was Robin Hobb, who certainly should use phrasing exactly like she did.

I went off to collect and feed all the cats, and J decided to pass on increasing his bid again, then the auction closed. But when I came back to my laptop I discovered that the artist’s website offered the same images as limited edition prints, which seemed a very satisfactory alternative. I ordered them and a third print, even though the artist’s website said it wasn’t secure… but the process ended up putting some malware on my laptop. I was getting incessant messages from both Chrome and Avast. Thankfully I was able to use my phone to get instructions on how to fix it, since even upgrading my Avast anti-virus software didn’t do it, but it’s apparently fine now.

Then, finally, it was time for what had been my very favorite Worldcon event last year – the dramatic reading of scientific papers that had been nominated for or won the Ig Nobel Prize. Each panelist has two minutes to read choice bits of the actual paper while humans dressed in banana costumes become increasingly menacing, then audience members ask questions about the research as if the panelist was the author, with both the questioner and the panelist doing their best to be witty. I knew J would love it, as he’s very much into puns, and I’d been urging him to go. When I logged into the event, I could see him on camera! The camera later had to point elsewhere, but I knew where he was and could hear his voice the first time he asked a question. He ended up asking three overall. The event was tremendously funny, just as I expected.

J flew to Anaheim with maybe five and a half hours of sleep, then wandered around the con all afternoon and evening. One highlight of his day was meeting a couple named Jonathan and Mandy, who are publishing a cozy fantasy trilogy under the name M.J. Gillbright; he talked with them a while at Barbara Hambly’s birthday tea party. He also saw a friend from N.C. who’s on the Worldcon staff and will be in charge of the Hugo Awards next year. AH, driving from Arizona, arrived in the evening, and they attended some parties.

I had quite a headache today and didn’t much mind that the streaming was just as messed up today as it was on the first day in Seattle. I attended a virtual panel about fairy tales while I waited for some of the normal streams to work. Then I tried one about Murderbot for which the video was fine but the audio was poor, and then I switched to one about “hidden gems of anime.” I wrote down a big list of anime series, but if I really had the time and inclination to watch more these days besides One Piece I would probably start with lovelyangel’s reviews. Then I attended the opening ceremony, which was just as not-exactly-interesting as last year’s, except that I got to see Bjo Trimble accept a special award! She’s the fan who organized other fans in the 1960s to get a third season for Star Trek, which meant enough episodes that it could go into syndication. Without that, the show would have been forgotten. I was surprised that she’s still alive – she is 93.

The moon looked very odd to me this evening. I’d been looking forward to it being full, but when I saw it, there was a shadow that seemed much too regular and stationary to be a cloud, nor were there clouds elsewhere in the sky, but I hadn’t heard anything about an eclipse. I photographed it, then several hours later checked it again and it looked as I’d originally expected. Then I learned from J that there was, in fact, a lunar eclipse tonight, just not one that was publicized as well as they usually are, I guess.

The Fatal Unpleasantness at Netherfield, by Claudia Gray. Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mysteries #5. These mysteries, starring the son of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy and the daughter of Catherine and Henry Tilney, might be my favorite Austen fan fiction (although I’m also very fond of the Maria Grace dragon series). This time there’s a murder at Netherfield, and we get to enjoy personal growth by two of Austen’s original characters – and the awkwardness of Darcy having to stay at Longbourn without his wife as a buffer. Of course Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney are very much in love at this point, but even more obstacles appear in their path to happiness. The ending was quite satisfying, and I’m looking forward to the next in the series.

This afternoon, I got to go to a fun concert – my friend Kim was violist for the Delgani String Quartet until she developed long Covid, and now she just does one or two local concerts a year, playing with friends, often with not much notice. We got two weeks’ notice for this one, but about 50 people came. They played two short works and a Haydn string quartet in the first half, and then most of an album by the Danish String Quartet, which arranges Scandinavian folk music. She was playing with my friend Julia and two others I recognize but haven’t met. During the intermission, I got to chat a whole bunch with my friend SDH, whom I haven’t seen for at least a year (she’s been on sabbatical). The concert lasted more than two hours!

Then I came home to work on two big projects with J. He’d been wanting D to help us take down a tree that he’s let grow taller than usual, and I asked him not to pester D for help until after the wedding, so today was the day. It’s an English walnut and quite attractive, this time more than 25 feet tall, but it’s immediately next to the hot tub and only a few feet from the house. We hooked a rope around it, which D pulled to ensure the tree wouldn’t fall into the fence, and J cut wedges with a chain saw, and I made a video recording. Then we lopped off the branches and moved it all onto the main lawn to deal with it later. (Yard debris is only picked up every two weeks, and this will take a while.)

Meanwhile, there’s a section of the fence on the west side of J’s yard (near this tree, in fact) that’s in very poor condition, but the owner of the house on the other side is absent so we’ve procrastinated dealing with it. One 8’ section was starting to fall over recently, though, and this week our resident male deer knocked it down and trod on it some. Yesterday we assessed the situation, measured it, and tied a tarp over the opening, and today while I was at the concert J went and bought some boards to see about holding the section in place if we could stand it back up. So D helped with that too. There was much clambering about and hammering – I even got to do some hammering, though mostly I was just handing people nails when wanted. So now the section of fence is mostly in place again, which we hope will deter the deer. I’ve told J we should have a fence company come and replace the fence in a few weeks, but he expects we’ll procrastinate until next year. I guess we’ll see.