So we had us a good hard early frost up here in the North Bay. I took in my one remaining epi (after losing the other to last year's weather) and covered all the cymbidiums. The spouse protested my usual Trader Joe's bags, though -- hey, they may not be pretty, but they're free with purchase and they do the job -- so I had to cover about half of them with some nice white cotton muslin to keep him happy. You can see how this is going to end, right? I wrecked a few yards of muslin and lost, at a guess, two out of seven flower spikes -- I mean, one came out looking like overcooked asparagus and was cut back, the other may have a few viable buds left when all is said and done, and it's too soon to make promises about the other five. And it's only December.
I guess I have to remind myself that he's a better interior designer than he is a gardener, that's all....

So I started my holiday shopping today. Kind of suboptimal, considering I have friends and family scattered as far away as Australia, but I haven't been feeling it. My spouse says that (no, really) we can go to Dickens Fair this weekend, and I am rereading The Dark is Rising, which usually helps.
Otherwise... bah, humbug.

Okay, okay, I finally went and got an eye exam. The good news is, I don't really need glasses, other than a mild over-the counter "cheater" pair for reading. The very temporary bad news is, my eyes are still dialated, and anything closer than about five feet is hella blurry (I'm kinda typing this by Braille). The extra-good news is, my employer will pay for it all as a "wellness benefit". w00t!

Just got home from a benefit for a friend who has cancer. He managed to be his usual nitpicky, irascible self, while simultaneously looking like his own ghost. But that's towards the end of the story.
 Every single solitary time I read Allcom, I am more grateful that I missed this year, and more convinced that I want nothing further to do with the Ranger organization. It's growing into a self-righteous, psychobabble-spouting bullshit clique with no sense of its own history, and no regard for the people who made it what it is today. This is not the duty I signed up for, sir.
 I got an email from Jeremy this morning that made me realize that it's good to have somebody in my life who really gets me. Too bad the subject matter was so depressing.
 Yesterday I went to the Handcar Regatta in Santa Rosa. It was fun and entertaining, and blazingly hot -- over 100 degrees by most estimates. I had to forcibly stop the spouse from responding to radio calls for fainting people and automotive woes (yes, he wore a radio and a headset even though we weren't working the event, the big dork). There really is a freak community in the North Bay, but in many ways it's like moving back to New England -- I don't know the secret handshake.
 Gods, '09 has been a strange year so far, and it ain't even over yet.
 

I have yet to receive any Halloween candy at work, but I have received something like twenty master cases of holiday merchandise. Holiday as in merry f*cking Christmas; this BS doesn't usually get rolling until October, and even that's too early for my taste.
I suspect that the economy will turn this year's retail frenzy into something even more bloated, protracted, and frightening than normal.

Tonight my beloved spouse left for the remainder of TTITD -- Burning Man -- without me. Sigh. Because guess who has to work tomorrow. Yes okay, we're in the run-up to inventory, but really....
 Any bets as to how many Ranger shifts he gets himself roped into in three days?

My cat has been placed on a "reducing diet" by her veterinarian (the vet's choice of phrase, not mine). I've realized that we'll do better if we diet together, and of course, there's the exercise portion of the programme (I hear cats are really good at Pilates). The upshot has been to make my husband stop slipping her treats, which will probably solve the problem all on its own.
 I still say she looks damned good for fourteen and change.

 I just received some fabric I bought online (from a source I have done business with before, with satisfactory results), and the minute I touched it, I realized it didn't feel quite right. So I did a burn test, and it is definitely not 100% wool, as the site claimed. A sheep may have been involved somewhere along the line, but the last time I checked, wool does not melt.
 Caveat emptor, y'all.

One summer, when I was nineteen or twenty, I mastered bearnaise sauce. Now, needless to say, this was all a long time ago; but I still sleep better at night knowing that, for one brief, shining moment, I kicked its tarragon-inflected ass.

From BoingBoing:
"Locus Magazine reports that publisher Charles N Brown, one of science fiction's great figures, has died peacefully in his sleep on his way home from ReaderCon."

 Holy fecking schnit. Srsly. Am not sure whether to be sad/upset, or break out the Champagne....

So I've been buying books. Okay, a lot of books. Why? Because I can. Whenever my own personal book-stack gets down from three feet to about two-foot-six, I buy more books. It's been excellent. Sewer, Gas, and Electric was funny and dark, The Giant Under the Snow was as good as I remembered, The Anubis Gates was well-done and a very fast read, and then there are the cookbooks, craft books, and classics like The Hoboken Chicken Emergency that I somehow simply never managed to put my hands on.
 Literacy. 'S nice.
 

My spouse got a new iPhone and gave me the old one.
The 4th of Juplaya is looking complicated and expensive, but the spouse still says he wants to go.
Yesterday at work, I got to wait on Pema Chodron.
That is all.

OMG, I have found the most perfect pair of boots EVER!
 They are made by Double H, and therefore have a vaguely Western thing going, but they have the right toe for Victorian and the right hardware for steampunk, and they are comfortable, which is an astonishing achievement on my (admittedly weirdly shaped) feet. And they lace -- no damned zipper! No lug sole! No painfully pointed toe or awkward heel seam! They are perfection!
 If you have ever beheld a Cat in boot lust: this is it.
 Now I'm wondering whether to go buy another pair in brown....

On this date on year ago, the photo above was taken, with the spouse's camera. It seems like an eyeblink has passed, and it seems like a million years, all at the same time.
 We celebrated by going out to lunch and doing some shopping -- low-key people, we. And as soon as the laundry stops whirling round and round, I'm going to bed. It's been kind of a strange week.
 

Back from BayCon. It was like visiting another planet -- Santa Clara, that is, not the convention itself. I have attended science fiction conventions in many flavors, for something like twenty years, in many states and two countries, and I gotta say that this one was pretty weak. The spouse and I spent most of it shopping, sleeping, eating, drinking, and soaking in the hotel hot tub. Thus, an entirely satisfactory time was had, if not quite the tour of duty I thought I'd signed us up for. (I was, to be fair, warned. An old friend and native of the area told me flat-out that the thing had gone downhill from its heyday. The extent to which she was not kidding is the only thing that really surprised me.)
 Moreover, I was, for the first time in my life, mistaken (repeatedly) for someone who didn't belong there, and/or someone else entirely. I may very well have a doppelganger of some evolution in the South Bay; that much I will credit. But I am an original-recipe fossilized '80s Goth, and as I was coming back from dinner with no membership badge visible, I overheard a couple talking about how I "could almost pass for a vampire" -- except that they were certain that I was just a guest of the hotel, and in no way associated with the convention itself. (There was an "Asian bridal show" going on in another part of the convention center, whatever that means.) I found the whole thing rather puzzling.
 I did get to hear Peter Beagle read an as-yet-unpublished story (I suspect I would enjoy listening to Peter Beagle read aloud out of the Yellow Pages, though -- he's got a great comic delivery), and had a lot of fun at a panel on steampunk props. (Steampunk, I am told, is the new black. Who knew?) It's good to be back in the cool green undeveloped North, though, even if it means I need to start taking Claritin again. Silicon Valley is just too weird for me.
 

So I haven't been walking on the winery grounds lately. Just haven't been going. The winter depression (and the didn't-get-into-grad-school depression, and the my-job-is-tanking depression, etc.) has been hanging on a lot longer than normal. The writing is stalled. I've been spending a lot of my free time sewing, the rest drunk on absinthe, as I am now. It isn't as unfun as I'm making it sound, it's just... not what I set out to do. And I suppose there's a lesson there about the unpredictable nature of the creative process.
 The spouse has, for the record, been pretty wonderful, all things considered. He's been displaying a level of patience I did not suspect him of having. But then, as long as dinner keeps hitting the table on schedule, I suppose he doesn't have cause for complaint, as he did when then writing was going full steam, and the housekeeping kind of went by the wayside....
 I did get to see an old friend this week, and the Honda miraculously recovered from its inability to start. I still, for the time being, have a job at all, so I ought to be grateful. And Jeremy got into grad school, and will be spending yet another year in the Midwest -- a mixed blessing, sure, but when he arrives on the West Coast, he'll be much more employable this way.
 Also, I don't know what's blooming right now, but I'm hella allergic to it, whatever it is.

Budbreak has been and gone on the winery grounds; the more seasonal of the seasonal creeks are beginning their annual fade. The oak trees are producing tiny leaves that look, from the ground, like green mist. But the real harbinger of spring here, for me at least, is the ratchet bugs.
 That's not a technical term, of course -- I suspect they belong somewhere in the cicada family. They sing all day long from spring to fall, and their song sounds like nothing so much as an industrious, invisible mechanic ratcheting something down tight (the urgency goes up with the temperature). I tend to only listen for them when I'm at home, and thus I can't really say how widespread of a phenomenon they might be; but they are as sure a sign of spring here as nightly frog-song.
 I am, I am told, going to be camping up in Mendocino this weekend. I expect it's colder there, and do not expect to enjoy the trip particularly; however, since the writing has ground to a halt, I am more willing to let the laptop be pried out of my hands than I was. My friend Jeremy has been my Perfect Reader on this one -- every author needs at least one Perfect Reader. You can hand a kinda-sorta-not-really-finished draft to your Perfect Reader, and he (or she) will not only say, "I think you need a comma here," but also, "Wait, I don't get what happens in this scene," and/or "This part is a little boring, can you show me instead of telling me?" or whatever, et cetera. They are harder to find than one might think; every writer likes to hear "I liked it," but, apparently, not everyone can say why.
 OrchidCam has not come together, and the early bloomers are starting to look a little peaked. Still, it ain't over; one still has yet to bloom, although the buds look like they're going to pop at any moment.
 Let's hope I don't miss it.

I am back from the great East Coast migration, and permit me to say, it did not go true to plan.
 I did, on the plus side, get to meet my new niece (she was unimpressed) and visit with the old niece, brother, sister-in-law, mom, stepdad, and stepbrother. Then, with a glorious lasagna-and-chocolate-cake birthday feast on the horizon, my dad and I both caught the grandmother of all stomach bugs.
 Bad. Things. Happened.
I am home now. I lasted all of an hour at work this morning (shouldn't have gone, but didn't want them to think lazy slacker was trying to extend vacation). I went back to bed and woke up at quarter to three, mostly because the landscape crew had fired up the leaf blower under my bedroom window. Having had a lavish lunch of chicken stock and saltines, I am considering going back to bed, although the fever has given me a few fun creative ideas.
 I have often said that I don't do mild colds -- I am either fine or on death's door. This time, suffice to say, I have lost five pounds in two days.
 Bleh.

I will be, as the saying goes, "off the comms" for a week or so while I fly to The Land of the Ice and Snow to visit my family. (What kind of California wanker flies to New England in March? *sigh* This kind.) I have elected not to bring the laptop, since the odds that I will have connectivity (to say nothing of a moment's peace) are vanishingly small. And I am looking forward to having a week of webcomics and posts saved up to read when I get back (yeah, I know, I have to get out more). That said... have fun, y'all.