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By Lynn, on August 2nd, 2010%
When I got to my parents’ house yesterday afternoon, Mom was outside sweeping the (empty) driveway. She was adamant that her encounter with the semi hadn’t affected her at all physically and I really can’t disagree. Emotionally, she and Dad were are still coming to terms with events, but they’re doing better today. They’ve seen and photographed the damages, spoken with body shops and insurance companies, and have a better sense of what’s likely to happen over the next few weeks.
As a family, we burned through a lot of karma on Saturday and, for the moment, it looks like we’re going to be able patch our lives back together without too many changes.
My new chair may turn out to be a bigger change. It arrived today…in pieces, in large box with a single page of purely symbolic construction diagrams. The diagrams were actually pretty straight-forward, though I could have used a helper when it came time to attach the seat to the base and the back to the seat. This beast is heavy! Fifty-five pounds, according to the box, more than twice the weight of the Balans. And more controls than my first Volkswagen. I’ve figured out everything except the forward-tilt, which was one of the purchase criteria. I found the proper lever, but pulling on it didn’t do anything. I called customer service (I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing when your task chair comes with a 1-800 customer service number) and they promise to have a technical service rep call me tomorrow morning. (And what do you do for a living? I’m a long-distance chair tech….)
Sitting in it is a very different sensation. Well, probably a fairly ordinary experience for anyone who’s sat in an actual chair for any length of time, but it’s been 28 years since I’ve tried that trick. Honestly, in those 28 years, I never met anyone who liked my Balans. A good many people took one look at it and asked for a real chair, or they tried to type while standing or even kneeling on the floor. Everyone said it hurt their knees.
For me it had been love at first sight in an ad in a computer newsletter that made the rounds at AAA-Michigan where I was working in the early 80s. The first thing I did when I quit AAA to start writing full time was order my Balans. Bob and the kids were quite appalled when I assembled it in the living room. At least I never had the Goldilocks problem: no one ever wanted to sit in my chair.
One did not “sit up straight” in a Balans; straight in a Balans is tilted about twenty degrees off perpendicular, which took most of the weight/pressure off my pelvis (bear in mind, my mom’s had four hip replacements….and I inherited her bone structure…keeping pressure off my pelvis has always been important to me.) Based on the first six hours, I think I can be pain-free in the new chair…even if I can’t figure out how to make the forward-tilt lever do something useful, but it’s going to take practice…
..and maybe a visit to the eye doctor. Getting a good center-of-balance in the new chair puts my eyes a good twelve inches farther from the monitor or right in the wrong spot, vision-wise, for my computer glasses.
This whole growing old thing is a royal pain.
By Lynn, on July 31st, 2010%
Statistically, any day could be a bad news day: the phone rings and a few seconds later your life’s crossed a threshold from which there’s no going back. And, statistically, the older you get and the older the people around you get, the better the odds are that any particular call will be that call.
Lately, by which I mean since Bob died in 2008, it seems I’ve been getting a couple every month and I almost got one today.
The phone rang about 5:30, which was a little unusual in and of itself – my usual crop of politicians, solicitors, and misguided debt collectors only call at dinner time during the week; on weekends they tend to call around eight in the morning. It was my mom. She sounded fine—and sometimes she sounds weary—but she told me I probably should sit down. And I did, though it was more like I contracted into the nearest chair. She hastened to tell me that she was, indeed, fine but that she’d been in a car accident.
Mom and Dad live in a very nice community just off US Highway 441 in Tavares. When they moved there in 1980, you could practically go bowling each day out on Highway 441, but that’s changed now. 441 is six lanes now and while just about every place lays claim to the worst drivers in the country, I think Lake County might actually have them. When Jane and CJ came to visit, they watched as the driver at the next gas pump, dragged himself out of the driver’s seat and down the length of his car, clearly a stroke victim, completely paralyzed on one side—with all that that means for depth perception and peripheral vision. Jane and CJ were agog, but I scarcely blinked—that’s an ordinary sight on Highway 441.
It’s the kind of road that drives you crazy and brings out the worst in every driver – including me and, today, apparently, including my mom. She was trying to make a left, which means crossing the three southbound lanes (never mind that they’re actually going due east), holing up in the median cut, then merging into the northbound lanes (which are going due west…love driving that road at sunset). And, somehow, she overlooked a semi in the outside lane and merged into its second axle – the rear wheels of the cab.
Somehow, she got the car back onto the median (from which I infer that it wasn’t so badly crumpled that its tires were no longer in contact with the ground).
And she’s not hurt. Embarrassed, but not hurt.
And I’m blogging rather than doing any of a great number of things that I’m really not looking forward to at all.
But a semi– The mind boggles, and cringes. I don’t think I’m going to sleep well tonight.
All in all, I’d rather have had a replay of last weekend’s crisis. That was when we lost Jane’s email archive. Seems she’d been archiving all her email (and all the Closed Circle email!) on the server and in the midst of trying to tamp down Carolyn’s spam torrent, I missed the warning messages (assuming there were warning messages) that her archive had grown larger than its server-space. She sent me this very plaintive message—did I have any idea why she couldn’t access her email archive?
I didn’t…until I looked at the server directories, then I did a swift OMG, ‘cause her account was gone, gone, gone. Fortunately, I had access to a full system backup of everything on our server. Once I got it downloaded, I started picking it apart. Ultimately, I found the missing archives and restored them (along with her email account which now has infinite storage!)
But it took a while and while I was working I apparently forgot to move because when I finally stood up I had a stabbing pain above my left hip. Ibuprofen didn’t touch it and I thought I’d done something not only stupid but serious. It’s still stupid, but it’s not serious: I managed to pull a groin muscle while sitting! For several days, I asked myself, How did I do that? all while grumbling to myself that it wasn’t really getting better. On Wednesday it dawned on me (one of those “dawn broke over the universe” moments) that the problem was my computer chair—my beloved Balans chair in which I’ve been kneeling for nearly thirty years.
I don’t know whether the fault lies with the chair or with my body (a bit of both, I suspect), but I rolled the Balans aside and sat myself down in a spare dining-room chair. The dining-room chair brought instant misery to my back, but my groin stopped hurting immediately. So I went on a quest for a new computer chair. I guess I’m glad that there are so many more choices now, but I lost hours figuring out what all the adjectives meant. After sitting in every chair at the local Office Depot, I concluded that I wanted (needed?) a mid-back chair with forward-tilt adjustment and a waterfall seat (waterfall seat??? Who knew???) None of the available local chairs worked for me, so I’ve ordered one from Amazon. It had gotten as far as Jacksonville by midnight last night and should be here, ready to assemble, on Monday.
In the meantime—and for the first time in a long, long time—I’m having ration my at-the-computer time, which meant I didn’t get to alert everyone to the shout-out that Closed Circle got on Tele-Reads last Thursday. It’s an interesting article, worth reading even without Closed Circle. We’ve moved into the next round of the publishing Kerfluffle – now an agent has their authors’ backlists and given them exclusively to Amazon. I’ll have more thoughts to share about this…once I’ve assembled the new chair…
By Lynn, on July 14th, 2010%
Now that we’re committed to Closed Circle in particular and ebooks in general, I’m always on the lookout for new justifications for my Kindle.
I’ve encountered many, but this, I think, is the best…
Ebooks against bedbugs!
Because it’s true, those shelves of cherished paper and glue can harbor far worse critters than dust bunnies.
Back when I was living at (with? in?) Tau Ceti, we lost several reams of paper to termites one summer and here in Spanish Oaks we waged war against bedbugs last year after one of our less-responsible tenants decided to furnish her bedroom with a mattress scrounged from a dumpster. In the end, we had to push the furnace thermostat to “roast” and keep it there for several days. The interior thermometer topped out at 115, but I think it was hotter, and the landlord still had to replace all the carpets.
Compared to that, a Kindle…even an iPad…is a clear bargain
By Lynn, on July 9th, 2010%
Yesterday I woke up to the sound of beeping, a sound that usually means the power’s died…again. But there were numbers visible on the alarm clock and the overhead fan was spinning. It was spinning a bit slower than usual, but I don’t turn it on until after lights-out and I have been known to pull the chain three times, instead of two. So, the in-charge part of my brain directed my body to roll over and go back to sleep, but the beeping didn’t stop and eventually the word “brownout” penetrated my uncaffeinated fog.
Ugh.
I’d rather have no power than a little power. The UPS did its job of protecting Cobalt, but everything else was at risk. I raced from room to room, flipping switches and pulling plugs, then I hit the circuit-breakers and waited….and waited, because when the power goes off, it’s pretty easy to tell when it comes back on, but once you’ve thrown the circuit breakers, there’s no juice in the wires, so nothing’s coming on.
And there’s no coffee…when I really needed it
Eventually I found a less cautious neighbor who convinced me that the power was fully restored. I made coffee, but my mind had been thoroughly fried by that point and the best I could manage was cleaning….deep cleaning.
Back in April–after two neighbors died leaving an overstuffed condo behind, while Diane was immersed in boxing frenzy, and I left the television on as background noise during a marathon broadcast of several episodes of HOARDERS—I decided that it was time to lay hands on everything I own with the goal of divesting myself of at least 5% of it.
It’s been a slow process—not just dusting or polishing, but emptying every drawer, every shelf and asking “why” questions about every object. I’m barely halfway through the living room, but I think I’m a bit ahead of the 5% goal and definitely gaining space. Some of the drawers remain empty and the bookshelves are definitely sparser—thanks mostly to Kindle: I’ve replaced as many of my undergrad paperbacks with their digital equivalents as I could find. (I bought all 150 volumes of Balzac’s Human Comedy for $5.00!)
With other things that are more memorable than valuable, I’m taking a picture and adding the picture to my never-ending photo slideshow. It’s not like the place is getting barren or anything, but there’s noticeably more room and I’m feeling lighter, freer.
(Today, BTW, I upgraded the blog. When Wordpress went to version 3.0 last month my old “Green Apples”-based theme officially hit an evolutionary dead end. I considered all sorts of fancy, odd-ball options, but finally settled on the same theme that Carolyn’s using over on Wave Without a Shore.
I kept the old look-and-feel, or tried to, but the back end is much simpler. No more hand-coding whenever I want to add a page or widget!)
By Lynn, on July 6th, 2010%
With Jane’s help, I’ve added The Wooden Sword to our Closed Circle inventory.
As with most things on the Internet, adding inventory isn’t really difficult, it’s just fussy…very fussy. HTML and its many relatives have zero tolerance for spelling and syntax errors, but I think the product is on the shelves. Good descriptions will have to wait until tomorrow (or later today, as the case may be).
Right now Dart and Berika’s story is available on my fantasy page here and on the full-inventory page here
There’s a free sample that contains the first two chapters in .pdf, .epub, and .mobi format available here
By Lynn, on June 26th, 2010%
Life is never boring in Florida.
All the omens and experts say that we’re headed into an active storm season. I’ve stockpiled bottles (which I won’t fill with water until/unless a storm gets immanent), batteries, crackers, peanut butter, and—most important of all—a big bottle of No-Doz (because when the power goes off, there’s no COFFEE!!!!) On behalf of the condominium I’m meeting with roof contractors to see if there’s some passive solution to the swimming-pool-on-the-roof problem that our buildings develop every time it rains – because the pumps are no more useful than Mr. Coffee once the power goes.
There are dozens of ways of keeping track of serious weather; I expect the local television stations to descend into 24/7 hysteria now that we’ve got our first named storm (that is, if it’s technically possible to become more hysterical than they already are because of the BP spill). But my favorite source for storm info is Stormpulse, which satisfies my appetite for statistics and pretty graphics.
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What I'm working on these days
Exiled on Main St.
Short Story
Status: Active
Word count: 5500
as of: 7-12-2010
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The diagrams were actually pretty straight-forward, though I could have used a helper when it came time to attach the seat to the base and the back to the seat. This beast is heavy! Fifty-five pounds, according to the box, more than twice the weight of the Balans. And more controls than my first Volkswagen. I’ve figured out everything except the forward-tilt, which was one of the purchase criteria. I found the proper lever, but pulling on it didn’t do anything. I called customer service (I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing when your task chair comes with a 1-800 customer service number) and they promise to have a technical service rep call me tomorrow morning. (And what do you do for a living? I’m a long-distance chair tech….)
Look Who’s Talking…