In a (New) World of My Own

We got a new dog – god help us – on Saturday morning, and a new van on Saturday evening. Not too bad. On Saturday morning we went to Sunset park, which was frankly an Interesting experience. I hate Geese of all kinds with a passion. After arousing their hunger, they took it upon themselves to mob both mob us and chase us around the lake until some other poor bastard decided to feed them. We saw, I kid you not, this blancmange with a pair of limbs sticking out of it, failing desperately.

We survived, made our appointed rendezvous, and came home with Spenser, a chipper little Poodle/Terrier mix. He’s Mariah’s pet, and you can ask her if you’d like to know more.

On Saturday evening, we bought a new van. I can’t help but somehow feeling vaguely screwed over by the dealership. I’ve spent years around retail financing, and I don’t know…some of the terms seemed onerous or just strange to me. It’s a tidy little van, and I don’t doubt that we’re going to put it to good use in years coming.

Lastly, we went up to Mount Charleston on Sunday and spent the evening dodging drivers who’ve never been in anything but a five-lane freeway in their lives. It was frightening and exhilarating all at once, watching asshole dodge and weave in and out of their lanes, randomly slam on their breaks and generally make the trip Interesting. I didn’t shoot much except for a really beautiful tree stump behind the local primary school:

Mazie Canyon

We got home from Mariah’s parents about 40 minutes ago, and set about cleaning up the house after this morning’s excitement. Mariah and I were in our room sorting through finished laundry. We assumed that Caira was with Marilyn in the bathroom as we get glimpses of her in the bathroom, through the ajar door. The lights are on, and Caira is shrieking and laughing like someone is tickling her, so we pay it no mind until we hear a tremendous crash.

We run in there to find Caira sitting in the wash basin, shrieking, laughing, and hurling anything at hand at Princess. The poor cat is huddled in the corner and looking absolutely terrified.

Caira Clanton, aged 17 months.

I can sit down and bash out a few pages for my story (I will get the latest manuscript out to you, I promise!) without a moment of hesitation, but I draw a blank whenever it comes to talking about me. The trouble therein is that one of the central characters of my story is based (very loosely) around me, as who’s head is supposed to easier to get into than your own?

Right, my arse it is.

I have all the scars and issues that comes with both an occasionally bad childhood, and previous emotionally fraught relationships. Should I use the character to attack those people I don’t like?

In my defence, we’re all sick with the flu. It hasn’t been conductive to bright thoughts, as we’re tired and cranky, and very much wanting to be well again. Mariah took Tuesday off work sick, I was sent home from work, and Caira had to go to the doctor yesterday evening. I pity the baby as she’s in a bad way, and doing anything right now hurts her. She’s not sleeping well, and spent last night trying to give Mariah a sound trashing as she kept crawling onto her face.

Bleh. :[

Christmas has come a little early for all of us. Caira’s grandparents came up from California at the start of the week and pretty much spoiled Caira rotten for the entire time that they were here. Some magnificent gifts were given, and the brat came away very happy.

Mariah bought me an electric scooter that promptly died on the first day I used it to go to work, stranding me at Las Vegas Boulevard. I was two hours late for work and had to spend another three that night pushing it home. We think we know what the problem with the scooter is, and how we might go about fixing it, but we need to find the time to go and buy replacement parts.

We’re fit to strangle Caira here. In the past two weeks she’s hit both the crazy twos and her “mine” phase – on one hand it’s impressive that she’s reached this stage at 17 months, and on the other…well… A 17 month old hyperactive screaming “mine mine!” at everything and generally bouncing off the walls inspires thoughts of

to think something is to give it form, right?

Any of you with children know what I’m talking about. We just wish Caira picked a better time; if she’s not swinging out of Mariah, she’s chasing the cats or trying to climb onto our Christmas presents. Generally we’re taking a lot of deep breaths and trying to beat down the urge to strangle Caira.

-_-

It’s not all bad, brat. On the chance that you’ll read this post years from now I’ll add that in the last two weeks you’ve really expanded on both your vocabulary and use of said vocabulary. When you were in the bath yesterday we had an excellent conversation. The topic of it eludes me, but it involved much deep thought and many uses of “yes!” or “no!” on your part.

Last night, I asked you to stop jumping on our bed. You looked me straight in the eye and up came the wagging finger that coincided with a loud chorus of “no no no no!” It was sickeningly cute, brat. You’re lucky you secretly melt our hearts. We’d have skinned and cooked you for dinner long before now, elsewise.

I mean, literally. Princess took one look at it, then gave me a dirty, disgusted look, and climbed the tree to take a nap.

Everyone at home was pretty upset over it. They said we had no room for it, that they wanted it, but that the it we got was too big.

But I say pooh to the naysayers. Our puppy is just awesome.

Bailey (pictures to follow) is an eight-month old Golden Retriver/Border Collie mix who we adopted through a local animal sanctuary, the Lied Animal Shelter. I don’t recall the actual sanctuary right now, and much as it’s unkind of me to say it, they are of the type of animal lover I’ve never been comfortable around. I’m an animal…okay, cat…lover, but I know from my own experiences and from volunteering for Heaven Can Wait that there is a practical side to all this love.

They are to me the people who slide toward the fanaticism toward an animal that they would ignore the opinion of a clinic full of veterinary staff (literally, everyone spoke to her) who wanted to humanely put down an old feral male with a broken jaw. He was severely underweight, couldn’t eat or drink, and the lady and group in question insisted that rather than put the animal out of it’s misery HCWS should go ahead and neuter it and release it. HCW were in turn obliged to perform the operation and release him back to the lady. Four months later and there’s still some nasty bad blood going around over this incident, for which I cannot blame HCW.

All of this is to say that while we love Bailey, and I’m very grateful to the group for their adoption program, their kind of devotion to animals was something I’m really not personally comfortable with. Personal rule of thumb: You really don’t want to get involved in an animal group that doesn’t have a sizeable veterinary staff.

/rant

Bailey is awesome. He’s shy, but he’s coming out of his shell a little more each day, and I’m looking forward to bringing him to our new home and letting him run wild with Caira.

New home, you ask?!

Why yes, we’ve rented out a beautiful little house in east Last Vegas, just off the Boulder Highway. It’s a beautiful little (and this is my word) three-bedroom cottage on a large plot of land, so we have huge front and back lawns for the menagerie to run around on. I’m happy, as the landlords are lovely people, Caira finally has room to run around and play. Actually we have room in general now, glee.

In a Neal Stephenson-ish twist of fate, I happily connect my Macbook Pro’s new charger and discover that the power socket on the laptop is damaged.

…thank you, Apple.

Oh, for sure I’m kicking myself for not purchasing Applecare. After eight years in Currys I have a very fine idea of the worth of an extended warranty for a laptop, especially in consideration of the typical cost of repair, but for some ineffable reason I decided to not purchase it (actually it comes to mind now that the sales assistant in the Apple store mentioned it didn’t cover internationally).

I wouldn’t say I’m screwed; to describe the fault, I’ll say that the power connection on the laptop looks slightly distended and needs to be jiggled before power will go into the machine. If it’s a case of that there’s just a wire loose, the repair will be less expensive. If Apple decide the mainboard needs replacing, I should just start hunting for a replacement right now…

Back to Apple. You’re not off the hook.

Your 85W Magsafe power charger is a piece of crap – nearly every review of it on the Apple Store, Amazon and elsewhere is negative, and our own experiences with it are scarcely better. It’s flimsy, the head is easily damaged, and your practice of (first) using a proprietary head and (second) refusing to license the patent involved leaves Macbook owners in a nasty situation. The only two ways we have are to purchase another flimsy charger for $80+tax through the Apple store and wait a few weeks for it, or purchase a new or used one from a reseller, and hope it works.

Bastards..? Yes, absolutely. I love OS X, and short of Adobe Photoshop being released natively on the Linux platform it’s going to remain my first choice of OS, but the bulk of your peripheral hardware is plastic junk. Sure, they have a definite look and style, but it’s one which unfortunately screams “cheap!” in twenty-point lettering. In a tacky and non-aliased font, to boot.

The dry spell is nearly at any end, my laptop’s charger should be here tomorrow. Once it’s here I can finish some very outstanding processing and printing works.

But truth be told it’s been nice to hang up the camera for a spell and not have to go snapping the kids or anything else for that matter. I haven’t even been looking at anyone else’s works in that time, for that matter, outside of trolling randomly on photographic forums.

“How is my photo?”
“It needs more truthiness!”

Har.

Of all things, I’ve been working on a short story that I’ve had in mind for some time. I’m particular about my science-fiction – it must be a certain kind of hard, or a certain kind of soft…it’s like porn with ray guns, now that I think about it. There’s good porn, bad porn, and downright nasty porn that you’ll eternally regret watching.

So, as far as hard sci-fi goes, I like the entire book to be realistically believable. What do I mean? As a Linux and general computer geek, I have a good grasp of what the actual state of the art is, which is incidentally why I think that Hollywood writers as a whole should be put through a few CompSci classes.

I’m an armchair astronomer and again, I have a fair idea of the technical and practical difficulties involved in space flight. Even something seemingly trivial, say beaming a photograph back to Earth, is an involved process. To quote an email from the Cassini imaging team:

The spacecraft points its high gain antenna toward Earth and transmits the data from all of its instruments, as well as information about the operational status of the spacecraft. These telemetry signals make their way across 1.6 billion kilometers of space and are received by the giant dish antennas of the Deep Space Network. These packets of telemetry are piped to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where they are “unpacked.” Raw ISS image files are assembled from the data stream and are forwarded to CICLOPS…

I want my story to have a solid base, grounded in established facts. It’s honestly a daunting task,because the more I learn, the I need to learn. Do you know what a planetary magnetic wake is, and what it’s relationship is to protecting people from the hard radiation of a gas giant’s magnetosphere?

It’s something I happily do as I’ve always found anything related to space fascinatingn and before me is as good as reason as any to buff up on it. There is a line though. At some point I have to bend the rules in favour of telling a good story. It’s great that I might educate you a little on some of these things in the course of telling you a story, but if you want a wanton deluge of facts, just go follow links on Wikipedia for a few hours.

There’s an even hazier line to be found in Things You Don’t Need to Know. In his excellent novel Titan, Stephen Baxter spares nothing in immersing you in the story of a hobbled-together mission to Titan, including detailed sections of the effect of sustained nutritional deficiency in low and zero-gravity environments. In layman’s terms, zero-g diarrhoea. It’s something that brings home their dire situation and adds another level of involvement, but it’s also something that personally made me step back: I want escapism, not poop stories!

Technical and scientific facts aside, there’s a more subtle difficulty: The mindset of the protagonists. To put it to you directly, the author is affected by his world, and this in turn influences the characters. I’m a young person from a western society who has twenty four hour access to a little thing called the internet. I have immediate and arbitrary to information, communication, entertainment in just about any audio-visual and text format I care to name. That influences me, and it would influence my characters also. How would you react in moving from an environment saturated with instantly available information to one where, at best, there’s a twenty minute time lag..each way?

If I look back to books written before the invention of the internet that are set in quasi-modern times and settings, the characters look dated. Their reactions to events and thought processes aren’t what they would really be if the book was written today. It’s an odd and personal peeve.

Those are my challenges, or at least the first ones to rear their heads.

I’ve decided to reinstall Gentoo Linux. It basically came down to a choice between a new MMOG, and reacquainting myself with Linux, and it’s easier to go AFK from a compilation, than from a quest party.

Better yet, I actually have a practical reason for it – I want to set up a network file server once we have a place of our own, and I’d like to brush up on Shorewall, Image Magick and other and funner utilities.

It’ll be Gentoo again, I guess, as Ubuntu invariably Breaks Things when I install it.

Woe is me.

You are mother fuckers, one and all.

I don’t care that you love your daughter and would never hurt her, that you own six cats and would never hurt them, that hey, I have this cat here you can have to replace yours, that I’m going through hard times right now, that I’m really sorry, I didn’t notice hitting anything and why are you shouting at me. It doesn’t give you fucking leeway to do 50 through a 15 mph area and run down my cat.

We loved Scooter. He was one of the most absolutely friendly and playful cats I’ve ever had a joy to know in my life – it was nearly a daily thing that we would see him at a neighbour’s house and playing with their children.

Mariah rescued both him and another of his litter from death’s door and bottle fed them back to health. Caira loved him. He was her play pal, you know. He never bit her or clawed her – a true rarity for our eclectic selection of cats – and she loved nothing more than to just hug him.

Everyone else here loved Scooter too. You’d never get him to admit it, but even Mariah’s dad loved the cat, and he’s a curmudgeon in the finest sense of the tradition.

So thank you. You ran down my daughter’s cat in front of her. Watching Scooter bleed out and die on the pavement, and knowing I couldn’t help him, was one of the absolute worst moments of my life.

Thank you, you son of a bitch.

Scooter