Kat Dancing

Yes, yes. I am a sheep. But this meme was SOOOO easy!

Ten things I've done that you probably haven't

1. Performed a head-tuck delivery on a calf.

2. Tutored second-graders in reading.

3. Spent the night sleeping on a park bench in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

4. Gotten up at five in the morning to scrape pigshit, then gone to my "Epic-Heroic Mode" English class.

5. Written a novel in New Zealand, revised it in Britain (on trains, mostly) and submitted it to publishers in the US.

6. Lost all of my money while in a foreign country and then been rescued by a complete stranger who I am now dating. Oh, yeah - at a science fiction convention.

7. Hiked on a glacier.

8. Taught myself html, php, and css and designed two professional websites on my own with the knowledge.

9. Bought goldfish as a Christmas present for the dog.

10. Changed my country of residence four times inside of four years.

Hunter S. Thompson killed himself yesterday.

He was the author of Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Kingdom of Fear, to name a few; the inventor of gonzo journalism; and one of the most fearless, outspoken, and, let's face it, crazed people alive today. At sixty-seven he'd outlived everything the world could throw at him, except himself.

We will not see his like again.

Rest in peace, old man, if you can.

Courtesy of Dan:

Ask me one question - any one - about my writing, then post this in your blog so I can satisfy my curiosity about yours.

Note my clever way of posting this on a Saturday night when people won't actually bother commenting, keeping anything embarrassing from coming up.

But if you do have a question, ask away.

Though use of illicit drugs has held relatively stable, prescription-drug abuse has risen dramatically in the past few years. Indeed, only the illegal use of marijuana is more prevalent today... people are still unaware that perscription drugs can be just as dangerous as illegal drugs. There's an idea that because doctors recommend perscription drugs for some uses, they must be safe.

This U.S. News & World Report article was hardly news to me: my first boyfriend had spent years addicted to prescription downers and had spent a lot of time buying and selling 'scrips from his fellow students to pay for it, mostly Valium and Ritalin, and of course the tiny town I live in is the OxyContin capital of the state. We've got a high cancer rate here, thanks to the furniture factories, and the sufferers usually end up selling their 'scrips to pay off the medical bills.

So, not news. But still damned depressing. And there'll never be a war on these drugs, because there's too many politicians backed by the pharmicutical companies who are making millions off of the illegal 'scrip trade and aren't in the least interested in seeing it end. In fact, if they could, they'd promote it.

What a dirty world we live in.

On a more amusing prescription drug note, we had a mixup here last week... my aunt, who's a nurse and has a very evil sense of humor, sent my father a fiftieth birthday card ragging him about being old, et cetera, et cetera. Inside was a sealed envelope addressed to my mother. She wasn't around at the time, just me and Dad, so we groaned over the card and went our seperate ways.

About an hour later I came over to the cheesehouse. Mom had found the envelope. But there wasn't a message inside or outside, and my aunt's handwriting is very similar to my grandmother's, so when she opened it she assumed it was something her mother had sent her.

Thus she was a trifle disturbed when it turned out to be a package of Viagra.

Fortunately I got there before too much time had elapsed. The mix-up was explained, the card was shown, and, once we convinced Mom to come down off the roof, everything was okay again.

Don't know what we'll do with the Viagra though.

Oh, and I seem to remember posting about the lustful pheasant. It's gotten worse about attacking my brother's legs, and a lot bolder about him, which eventually resulted in this picture. He's not happy that we're spreading it around the Internet, so feel free to pass it on.

(This is my first book review for the Fifty Book Challenge.)

Dan and I were doing one of our wallet-thinning sweeps through used bookstores when he dropped The Goblin Reservation on my pile. "You'll read this," he said. It was not a question.

So I did. I'm not sorry.

Goblin Reservation was written by Clifford Simak in 1968, making it classic - if obscure - sf. It's a peculiar mix of science fiction and fantasy. People travel between planets via "transmitter", essentially instantaneous travel; the novel opens as the protaganist, Peter Maxwell, returns to Earth after ending up at the wrong destination to find that he wasn't redirected but duplicated... and his duplicate had returned six weeks earlier only to be murdered. Very science fiction indeed, save that Maxwell's purpose for making the journey was to hunt dragons. He's a professor of Supernatural Phenomena and has for his closest friends a Neanderthal, a goblin, and a ghost.

The book continues in the same fashion, mixing time travel, fairies, aliens, and, yes, dragons, in with an appealing account of a man who's been offered the deal of a lifetime, if he can only get past the red tape. It's a funny book, and also a sad one, and not in the least what I was expecting. The 1960s fiction that I've read was either doom-and-gloom, hurrah for the apocolypse stuff or that frentic fantastic all-hail-the-god-of-technology style that's usually referred to as "Golden Age." Goblin Reservation is a neither/nor. It's too fanciful for science fiction and too prosaic for fantasy; too pleasant to be dystopian but too mixed to be utopian. One of the main hurdles the protaganist must overcome is a lack of departmental funding, for heaven's sake, an everyday sort of problem that both ends of the science fiction spectrum, happy and sad, would have turned up their noses at.

The thing that appealed to me the most about the story, in the end, wasn't the characters - workmanlike but hardly spectacular - or the plot, or even the fairies and aliens. It was the sense of play. All this technology, all these marvels, and what do people do? They bioengineer a sabretooth tiger for a pet. They use time travel to snatch a Neanderthal, or to borrow Will Shakespeare and make him give lectures to bored college students. They transport themselves halfway across the galaxy to hunt down a rumor of dragons.

It's not a serious book, but a whimsical one, fanciful and prosaic and touching because it's true. We won't do wonderful things with technology. We'll make pet tigers. It's what's wonderful and horrible about humanity, all at once, and something that science fiction is often reluctant to admit to.

Thanks for putting this in my stack, Dan.

Read fifty books in a year? No problem!

The writing about them later is more of a challenge, but I'm sure I'll manage. Thanks to Gord for pointing this out to me.

I'm not even going to count the books I read in January, partly because I can't remember which I read when, partly because I don't want to write up the backlog, but mostly because it would put me halfway through the challenge already. And that's no fun.

But all books are gonna have to wait a bit because, for ineffable muse reasons, my muse has sideswiped me. For the past few months I've been piddling away at The Novel. For the past month I've been working in a steady but uninspired way at The Novel, putting in a page, two pages, no pages a day. Now, all the sudden, I'm writing four, six, eight pages a day, nonstop. Instead of having to glue my butt to the chair and forece myself to write I can't wait to get in front of that computer. I'm drifting through work, I barely spend time on the 'net; whatever else I'm doing, I want to be writing, and in my head, I am.

It's not the first time this has happened to me. It's not even the most inconvenient (the most inconvenient award goes to the sudden PERFECT scene which I HAD to write that popped into my head five minutes into an exam on feeding dairy cattle. A three hour exam. Pen in hand, paper in front of me, and I couldn't write. I flunked, of course.) But it's always a bit startling. And I have obligations, dammit, things besides writing which I must get done. Like working. Like cleaning the kitchen so my brother doesn't have to do it all. Like getting the broken glass out of the oven (don't ask). Like feeding myself.

Not that I'm complaining. I hope the fugue lasts. I just hope I don't starve or irreplacably damage any relationships in the meantime.

Rather an up and down week so far. On the up side, we've shipped out at least 30 wheels of cheese to various corners of the country; business is good, we're getting new accounts, and the block-layers have finally shown up to finish that running nightmare of a building project.

On the downside, we tasted the oldest batch of my mother's newest cheese from last year, the Galax, and it was horrible. Not just a bit off; horrible. Unsellable. We tasted out several other batches as well, and the first ray of hope is five batches down the list. That's over a thousand pounds of cheese we're probably going to have to throw out. To make it worse, we only made one batch of this type of cheese in 2003, and that batch was incredible and won awards and everybody's been asking for months when the new batch will be ready.

My mother is inconsolable. The rest of us are just depressed. It's a lot of cheese to toss with a lot of time and money and hard work sunk into it. To make matters worse we can't really figure out where we went wrong. The best guess is that our pH meter was not giving proper readings and so the acid didn't build properly during make when we thought it did, but that's something of a long shot.

Damn. It sucks when you don't find out about your mistakes until you've been making 'em for a year.