Spooky Man’s Nose Surgery

It went well, and now he’s back home recuperating.

True to form, he had an unusual case, in that the septum deviation went “all the way up.” Of course. Biological weirdness is just how Spooky man rolls; I love him, but he is a freak of nature.

I’m slightly disappointed, because he doesn’t have any external scars, sutures or bandaging. Other than a little swelling around the nose, he doesn’t look like he had surgery. No blackmail photo opportunity, alas.

On the other hand, I get the bed to myself for the next few days — he has to keep his head elevated, which means he has to sleep in his new leather recliner (poor thing, she typed sarcastically).

And now he’s going to be able to breathe out of both sides of his nose, hopefully in time for his birthday in a week or so.

Heifer.org and Kiva.org rock

I am delighted with these two charities, because they give people a hand up, not a handout.

My grandparents were sharecroppers on my father’s side and homesteaders on my mother’s side. Kiva and Heifer allow other people to make something better for their families without sacrificing dignity; my grandparents would approve.

Kiva is a clearing-house for investors who want to micro-lend to entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries. Last spring I invested $100, and more than half of it has already been paid back (and reinvested). There haven’t been any defaults, either. Investments are in $25 increments, so you don’t need to jump in with both feet.

Heifer.org gives people livestock with the provision that at least one of the offspring of the original critter gets passed on to someone else. They also teach local communities how to care for their animals to maximize the food and income produced.

Spooky Man and I bought a Heifer.org llama for my brothers’ Christmas presents (because the last thing they need is more stuff, LOL). You don’t have to donate a whole animal, though; they have shares for as little as $10.

If you find yourself with some extra cash this year — after saving for a rainy day, retirement, and the kids’ college funds — I can recommend both of these organizations as a good place to put it.

Ancient Aliens 2012 Doomsday Episode

Oh, my giddy aunt. The History Channel aired an episode of Ancient Aliens about the 2012 apocalypse. Finally, a guilty-pleasure fake-history pseudo-documentary episode that Spooky Man and I can watch together.

We’re going to have to record it, because we object verbally when people say preposterous/stupid things that are taken wildly out of context and presented as fact. There will be lots of Pause button use.

This is so much better than reality television.

Five Things that Make Me Smile

1. I went to shiny-new-author Amanda Bonilla’s first book signing on Friday the 13th of January. We’re members of the same RWA chapter, but it was the first time we’d met (she lives in the McCall area, which is more than an hour away by car). Looking forward to reading her debut novel, SHAEDES OF GRAY.

2. Stuart Does. Not. Like. snow, particularly snow that comes up to his chin or higher. He’s a relatively tall cat, so that’s fairly deep for snow in this area. He doesn’t mind being carried over the snow, however, and he rather likes being rewarded with kitty treats for bravery in the face of frozen water.

3. I am approximately halfway through my heavy edit/rewrite of “Open Mike at Club Bebop,” the novella rejected so helpfully by Carina Press. Target date for finishing it is end of January, when I’ll send it off to a couple of other publishers.

4. Spooky Man is having his deviated septum fixed January 27 (next Friday); after recovery, he’ll be able to breathe out of both sides of his nose for the first time since we met, more than 20 years ago. Looking forward to pampering him a little as he recovers. Well, and taking blackmail photos of his black eyes and bandaging.

5. I saw more urban wildlife recently; raccoons crossing the street again, but this time at 16th and Main St (near the Cabana Motel, which I understand has changed hands and no longer rents rooms by the hour). The little bandits weren’t using the crosswalk this time, though.

6. Bonus Round: Technology has been giving me all kinds of grief for the past two or three weeks; in the last three days I have resolved all the issues, from the source control server connection that would only connect intermittently (service pack 1 is evil, apparently) to the 30-day trial software that didn’t want to install correctly (finally got it running and the document I was supposed to edit was in German), to the font that wouldn’t install from a network drive (copied it to a local drive and it popped right into place).

Did I mention…?

There’s a lovely agent on twitter, Sara Megibow with the Nelson Literary Agency in Denver (follow her as @saramegibow), who periodically does a feed she calls #10Queriesin10Tweets.

She goes through the next 10 submissions in her Inbox and tweets her response and why.

You’d be shocked how many of them are rejections for genres and literary forms the agency doesn’t represent or rejections for multiple grammar and spelling mistakes in the query letter. I know I was astounded the first time through.

It’s fascinating stuff, and valuable information as to what an agent (this agent, at least) looks for in a query letter.

A Real “As You Know, Bob…” Conversation

I was flipping through channels last night about 5 p.m.-ish and came across a PBS gardening program where two hosts were telling each other stuff they already knew about planting. The few seconds I saw were about paying attention to sun requirements, or what can happen when a sun-loving plant is stuck in full shade.

I thought, “Hey, they’re As-You-Know-Bob-ing” and flipped on, settling on HGTV with my microwaved entree (Spooky Man was napping and I hate cooking for one).

I’d never seen anyone actually do it with real people before. It made them both look completely stupid and a little bit psychotic, as if their two personal realities didn’t quite match…. And that’s why we don’t do that in our books, fellow writers.

The Most Interesting House Cat in the World

In the continuing saga of the Most Interesting Man ad campaign, I recently saw the one with…The Naughty Kitty. MIMITW’s Naughty Kitty is a mountain lion who jumps onto a kitchen counter and gets a scolding. Typical house cat behavior, but in the extra-large-economy size.

Full disclosure: I love mountain lions. They are my favorite of the big cats and I included one in my debut novel. (Note that I’m entirely annoyed by the fact that I can’t call them cougars without search engines getting entirely the wrong idea. Whoever coined that term needs Such A Pinch.)

That being said, I would never NEVER try to turn a mountain lion into a pet, because they’re too darned big. Cute batting with claws and nibbling from a 15-lb cat becomes call-911-trauma from a 150-lb cat, even though it’s exactly the same behavior.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been watching big cats on TV and thought, “Hey, my cats do that.” Stuart, who only weighs in at about 18 zaftig pounds, can get rambunctious enough to create bandaid-worthy wounds when he plays with Spooky Man. And keeping a big cat in a cage is too wrong for words. Even in the big-cat sanctuaries, where they have to use cages to keep them separated from each other, it doesn’t feel right.

In 1996, I worked with a woman whose child was attacked by a pet mountain lion while visiting grandparents who live in the Boise Front foothills over Independence Day weekend. In this real-life case, Naughty Kitty tried to fit the six-year-old’s whole head in its mouth, puncturing his skull in two places. And kitty had been declawed, or it might have been worse for the child. It already was worse for the cat, who couldn’t hunt his normal prey without claws. The attack wasn’t the cat’s fault; it was being a cat. It certainly wasn’t the kid’s fault; he was playing in grandpa’s yard.

Why does the MIMITW need a mountain lion for a house cat, anyway? Wouldn’t he be just as interesting with a regular cat?

Or is he (snicker) compensating for something?

Doomsday Is Coming

We are all going to die. Seriously. Nobody gets out of this life without dying.

According to various religious persons and the Ancient Maya (as opposed to the Modern Maya — yes, the Maya still exist, they just don’t have an empire anymore; kind of like the British), Doomsday is December 21, 2012! Except….

Okay, first there’s the problem of the missing 10 days in 1585 when Western Civilization transferred to the Gregorian calendar; how do those fit into the calculation? I’m a calendar geek, which is a side effect of having been a Y2K consultant. Yes, I was one of the brave project managers who averted the last great Doomsday, Y2K. But that’s another post.

Then there’s the fact that the Mayans aren’t worried about it. They consider their nicely accurate calendar perpetual. You get to the end? Okay, go back to the beginning and run through it again. And you have a big party, because you watched the calendar roll over to 0.0.0.0.0, which is always a good time.

But the Hopi agree — there’s a big blue star/planet/thingie coming to smack us hard! Except maybe there isn’t, if you actually talk to Hopi Indians/Native Americans/tribe members. Sirius is the blue star of the Hopi, and the blue star kachina dancing in the plaza and taking off his mask doesn’t sound like planet smacking to me. It actually sounds like a wonderful party. Again, pointing to a party instead of an apocalypse. Those first Americans know how to have a good time. Just sayin’.

Harold Camping thought Rapture was last May, no, October, no — I guess we stopped paying attention when he got it wrong twice four times (he started with sometime in 1994). Jesus said, straight up, “Look, nobody is going to be able to figure out when The End is coming, so don’t even try it.” Or words to that effect; he was speaking Aramaic, after all. And yet, all these people (including Isaac Newton, which is just bizarre) have tried to calculate when the end of time is going to be, disobeying the Son of God. A fallible human knows better than God, because…?

Then there’s the I Ching thing…which is so conspiracy-theory weird I don’t even get how it’s supposed to predict Doomsday. I think you have to put the long lines over the short lines and divide by 23, then look at it through the color blue (or was that Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?). I know the theory was developed under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms, and the author changed his date from one edition to the next to match the Mayan calendar. Bad form, changing the date. Regarding the mushrooms, well, I’m neutral.

I think what it all boils down to is this: Humans somehow need a doomsday threat. We’re just not happy without some horrible thing hanging over our heads sometime in the future, whether it’s a calendar rollover, a galactic lineup (what is the dark rift, anyway. other than a bunch of dust?), a blue star/rogue planet/comet leading a UFO, or a radio announcer calculating “the date.” Or any of the other Doomsday causes floating around out there — magnetic pole reversal, crustal slippage, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, giant coronal mass ejections, the Yellowstone supervolcano’s overdue eruption, the list goes on. We just need something to look forward to, in a bad way.

Don’t like any of the above? Well, the Flying Spaghetti Monster could withhold his noodly appendage from the world, and then where would we all be?

If you’re not a Spaghettarian, the next computer doomsday is January 19, 2038, when 32-bit Unix runs out of time.

And, for the win, Nostradamus didn’t say a darned thing about 2012.

Defining Traditional Christmas

Traditionally (and we’re going back to the Middle Ages here), Advent is the 40 days before Christmas. It’s a waiting period (Advent means “about to arrive”), not a decorate-the-house-till-it-can-induce-migraines period.

I know the stores started stocking for Christmas decorating in September (yes, I saw the first Christmas stuff right after Back-to-School was done), but that’s retail, not religion. They put the stuff out ahead of time so you can buy it ahead of time and already have it on hand when it’s time to decorate. Or at least that’s the theory.

Besides, what would they do with that empty Halloween candy aisle after October 31st if they couldn’t put out serious amounts of Christmas stuff?

Advent ends with Christmas, and the Christmas season lasts for 12 days (remember the song!), until Epiphany, January 6th.

So, to celebrate a truly traditional Christmas, the tree goes up on Christmas Eve, along with all the other decorations, and it all goes back into storage on January 7th. Period. The UK Boxing Day holiday has never made a bit of sense to me for this very reason.

Another thing to consider when celebrating a truly Traditional Christmas is that any gift given on or before January 6th isn’t late. You can shop the “After-Christmas” sales without guilt.

Nobody has explained this schedule to my neighbors, who put up their external Christmas lights (that play music) over Thanksgiving weekend and promptly take them down the day after Christmas. These are nice people (and senior citizens), so I haven’t even considered explaining to them that they’re doing it wrong according to the Christian religious calendar.

Their schedule works for them and makes it pleasant to walk our dog in December, unless there are two competing carols going on at the same time (see migraine-inducing decorating, above).

I don’t have a tree up yet, because it’s not time. However, I probably won’t put up a full-size one. I have somewhat oversized house-cats and a large dog, which contraindicates a large Christmas tree, as well as glass ornaments and tinsel of any kind. Alas.

Of course, it’s all relative. Spooky Man is always one of the first to pipe up with the “Christmas is nothing but co-opted Saturnalia” line, because lambing happens in March-April rather than December, even in Israel. Whatever.

It’s cold outside, and it’s dark for way too many hours from mid-December through January. Let’s have a little color and light, and take a few days to show the people we love just how much we love them. Spooky Man is getting a new office chair and an Ipad (don’t tell him!), and lots of love.

Catching up

I found out today that I know the (proud) mom of a Higgs Boson hunter. My friend Stephanie Berget had mentioned her son works at CERN before, but this morning she mentioned he works on the Higgs Boson team at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider, for those of you who aren’t physics geeks — this was the supercollider that was going to create a black hole and destroy the planet when they first turned it on a few years ago).

He says, according to his mom, that they’ve all but nailed the elusive little god particle (so nicknamed because it’s responsible for mass, according to some theories), but it will take them quite a while to work through all the data they collected this year. Very exciting stuff. Physics geek Muppet flail!

And a couple of weeks ago, I found out I had touched someone who had touched Charlton Heston. Candis Terry, another writing friend who once-upon-a-time worked in LA, shook hands with him while working a Hollywood fundraiser. She’s touched me with that hand, too (grin). And she writes great, fun books about Deer Lick, Montana, and its quirky citizenry. You should buy them.

Only four degrees of separation between a CERN researcher and Charlton Heston, and one of them is me. Squee! Freaky weird, isn’t it? Okay, I’m done now.

In less silly news, I now have a new roof on my house after a week of banging, drilling, sawing, and the bizarre sound of people walking over my head. The cats have finally calmed down — apparently they don’t like people walking over their heads, either.

And finally, Spooky Man has requested that I quit the second job. I did a face-plant in the driveway on Sunday afternoon, because my right ankle folded under for no particular reason as I was going back to the car for a second load of groceries. He seemed to think it had to do with fatigue from working too much. So I’ll have to give notice, again.

But it will give me more time to write, so it’s not all bad.