Running Air

That's the punchline of an old William Steig cartoon from my youth.

It seems that Harlequin, seeking to find a way out of its terminal company-in-mouth problem regarding Harlequin Horizons, has renamed the self-pub branch DellArte Press. I dunno. A turd by any other name...

Last night he brought home a free-range, organic turkey. 16 pounds. Everyone at work gets one. I imagine the farm truck backing up with a couple of hundred boxes, each with its own turkey, and the employees going home with a turkey tucked under their arm. Lends new meaning to bringing home the bacon...

So the menu stands at:

Turkey
Gluten-free stuffing
Gluten-full stuffing
Braised Brussels sprouts
Mashed potatoes
Yams*
Green salad
Cornbread*
Cranberry sauce*
Apple pie
Crustless pumpkin pie
Cherry pie (by special request from Avocado, who realized that she'd never had cherry pie before)
Wine
Martinelli's cider

Fortunately most of this make-ahead or have-ready-to-throw-into-the-oven-after-the-turkey's-out

Maybe I just won't eat for a day or two on either side.

* being brought my my lovely sister in law

Avocado has, from her bed of pain, watched about a season's worth of Gilmore Girls in the last two days. It is, in fact, perfect sickbed watching: well written, funny, engaging, but not too heavy. I decided the other day that Gilmore Girls is sorta to relationships what The West Wing was to politics. And it seems to be making the kid feel marginally better.

• Went to farmer's market and bought apples and Brussels sprouts for Thanksgiving dinner (for apple pie and braised Brussels sprouts--I do not think of them as two great tastes that go great together).
• Had coffee and a muffin with the Spouse, sort of like a mini-date, on the way to Costco.
• At Costco, not only got the things on our list, but bought new tires, which were badly needed, and had them put on. The car now purrrrrs.
• Went to Whole Paycheck for gluten-free bread (for stuffing).
• Went to Safeway for dog food and various.
• Put everything away.
• Supported Avocado (who is still feeling wretched) in sorting through all the things I removed from her old room. Threw out a raft of stuff, got everything else down to two boxes of things to be put away, and a small box of hand-me-downs to be tried on and evaluated.

With a proud consciousness of stuff done, I can go off to see Where the Wild Things Are with a relatively clean conscience. I do wish the child was feeling better, though.

The kid's fever keeps going up and down (from 98.4--her usual standing temp--to 101.4). She has an appetite, her head still hurts, but she's fairly cheery for a miserable kid.

Unfortunately, my eyes hurt and I've got a headache. No fever yet. I really don't have time for this. Hoping I can scare it away by cleaning out Avocado's old room (which is today's project). Tomorrow I'll sleep until 4.

In asking people to introduce themselves a couple of days ago, I found that a number of folks here work in libraries. So I outed myself in my total love for libraries and librarians. This is a lifelong thing for me. I got my first library card when I was four; by the time we moved out of NYC I was hiking the eight blocks to the nearest library, taking out the eight books I was allowed, shlepping them home somehow (it never occurred to me to bring a bag--dopey child), reading them in a couple of days, returning them, and repeating the process. My parents were totally out of the loop, and it was one of the librarians at the now-vanished NYPL branch on Eighth Avenue and 13th Street who suggested, gently, that I'd read pretty much everything they had in the kids' section, and perhaps I might want to get a note from my parents which would allow them to let me take books out from the adult section downstairs.
( Continued for fellow Library Fans )

Avocado is home from school with a curious thing that seems to be making the rounds of kids at her school: slight fever, generalized malaise, splitting headache. I have done the canonical "can she touch her chin to her chest" test for meningitis, and she has no problem with that. She's just a victim of what she pronounced, crankily, Bad Head Disease.

Periodically I note new names/LJ handles in the comments. And because I'm a curious sort, I wonder. So periodically I invite people to tell me who they are, if I know them in TRW, and how they got here.

I'll start. I'm Madeleine. I live here, also in San Francisco, and I have a dog, two children, a husband, and a writing career.

Anyone else? Seriously, I love to know about you guys.

Over on Deep Genre, kateelliot, aberwyn and sartorias are talking about putting together a Worldbuilding Workshop, and I'm going to play too, since this is something I have a thought or two about. Anyone have any questions or subjects they're particularly interested in seeing covered?

This Morning: the Plan:

• The Spouse has to leave at 6am (or close to) for an early start at work.
• Sarcasm Girl is arriving early in the AM because she has doctor appointments in the city.
• Avocado wants to get up half an hour early (6:30) because she has a bit of leftover work to finish.
• I will get up early from my bed of sleep and

This Morning: the Monkey Wrenches:

• The Spouse is indeed racketing around at Far To Early in the AM, but I slept through it more or less.
• However, Sarcasm Girl called at 6:05 from the BART station downtown: she's thrown up, feels fainty. Can someone pick her up at the BART station near home?
• Avocado, wakened at 6:30, announces that she is going to do the work on the bus, and is going back to bed.
• Discover a text from client sent last night: one of the files I sent yesterday is the wrong one. (How the hell did that happen?)

This Morning: the Me:

• Up at 6:05 for SG's phone call. Dress, alternately fretting and sighing.
• Sarcasm Girl calls. I walk over to BART to escort her pale, shaky self back to the house. Shovel her into a bed with a bucket and a glass of water.
• Wake Avocado, with whom I have the conversation about sleeping for another half hour. Point out to her that when she gets up early I get up early, and I don't go back to bed. Dammit.
• Boot up computer to resend file, discover email from client sent at 2:30 this morning; she's reconstituted the file, don't worry about sending it in the AM.
• In celebration, and since I'm already up: make chocolate chip pancake batter, wash last night's pots, empty dish washer.
• Wake Avocado. Feed her. Sarcasm Girl shambles in. Feed her. Make coffee. Suddenly remember that I have to make Avocado's lunch. Do so. Begin to feel rather groggy.

Today: the Plan

• Chiropractor at 9:45.
• Pick up CityCarShare car at 10:30.
• Take Sarcasm Girl to doctor appointment.
• Stop at Target.
• Take Sarcasm Girl to other doctor appointment
• Return car to CityCarShare.
• Drag Emily
• Attempt to get some work done.
• Go to high school open house tonight.

Let's see what monkey wrenches get thrown next, shall we?

Because I am a master (mistress) of the little-bit-of-knowledge-about-a-whole-mess-of-stuff school of information, I love the Tuesday Science Times section, where they will tell me a bit about something and I can go off and find out more if I wish (or remember to). Today's roundup?

Doctors are experimenting with spraying chemo drugs directly onto brain tumors--doing an end run around the blood brain barrier which prevents many chemo drugs from reaching the cancer they're meant to fight. This is really cool.

Why, Roland Emmerich not withstanding, the world isn't going to end in 2012. As one of those people who always needs one more thing to worry about, I'm happy to cross this one off the list.

Librarians looking for the perfect perfume might like distilled essence of old book. More usefully, researchers are hoping that understanding the smell of old paper might help librarians tell which books are too fragile to be loaned out, which might need special treatment, and so on.

Dental implants are better than crowns! Now if someone would tell my damned dental insurer this.

And why you may not want to use the restrooms when you take that cruise.

How can you not love stuff like this? Well, if you're me, anyway.

Also: because I messed up a link and gave this one instead: Lucy Kinsley on E-publishing. Enjoy!

Living with Mr. Ears (that is, my husband the sound geek recording engineer) I have learned many things. I already knew who Mel Blanc was when I married the Spouse, but there were other names I didn't know: Mae Questal, Arthur Q. Bryan, Sterling Holloway, Don Messick, June Foray, and Daws Butler. Daws Butler, in particular. He was the go-to-guy for voices at Hanna Barbera: Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Elroy Jetson. He was the voice of Snap (of the Rice Krispie commercials) and Capn' Crunch. He was Cecil to Stan Freberg's Beany, and worked with Freberg on his comedy albums ("St. George and the Dragonet" is my fave--a pitch perfect "Dragnet" parody done as fairy tale). He worked with Jay Ward (in the "Fractured Fairy Tales" and "Aesop and Son").

In other words, you knew him, you just don't know that you did. He died in 1988. Today is his birthday. I like to think that he and Mel Blanc are up in the Heavenly Green Room playing "can you top this" with voices and having a hell of a time.

It finally hit critical mass and I had to do one of those things I hate to do these days: shop. Nothing exotic--undergarments, socks, a new pair of shoes, and a couple of sweaters. Bras are one kind of ugly because, in the words of Jane Russell, we full-figure girls get rooked. $50 for one bra. $88 for the other. Neither of them contain diamonds, neither of them light up in the dark or permit one to operate a cell phone hands-free. Sigh. Shoes are another species of hell: I have dinosaur feet--significant bunions (particularly on my right foot) and when I get a pair of shoes that fits properly for everything else, the pressure on the bunion makes my lesser toes go numb. Gradually the new shoes will stretch out and look crappy, but exert less pressure on the bunion, and everything will be fine. But: ow.

The sweaters were not to bad: I had a 30% coupon for The Gap, and there's nothing so pleasant as picking out $150 worth of merchandize and paying less than a hundred for it. One black sweater, one lovely tomato-soup colored one, and a hot pink sweater that I'm wearing right now.

I no longer look like a bag lady, which is a comfort.

A year ago we went live with Book View Cafe, uncertain whether it would sink or swim. The answer, a year into the experiment, appears to be that we're not only swimming, but swimming toward new lands to conquer. The site has well over a thousand subscribers, plus the casual visitors. We've added additional writers to the stable. We've published our first e-reprint anthology (with more to come) and The Shadow Conspiracy, a very cool original steampunk anthology--more of a braided novel, really--has just gone to formatting (the equivalent of "it's in production"). I have never worked with a group of people to rival the ingenuity, energy, and enthusiasm of my fellow Book View Cafeterians (?), and I'm proud to be a part of the experiment.

If you haven't checked the site out, please do. Most of my backlist of short stories is there, as well as work by Vonda McIntyre, Ursula LeGuin, Laura Anne Gilman, Steve Harper, Sarah Zettle, Deborah Ross, Kit Kerr, and (as they say) many more. Much of it is free, all of it is "nominal cost," and damned if this might not be one version of the future of publishing.

There's water on the moon. Enough that they could "practically taste it." All my skiffy-reading geekiness rises to the surface and goes SQUEEEEE! Just sayin'.

Fainted this morning. It doesn't happen often, thank God, and it always seems to have something to do with mild GI symptoms. This time I didn't break any teeth or get bruised in any way: I got down to the floor, slipped into a vivid dream for a minute, came to and realized that I was on the floor, and scuttled back to bed, white and shaky but otherwise unharmed.

It's nice that I know what to do when I find myself swooning. It's nice that my doctors tell me that, no matter how florid it seems, it's not a dangerous condition and doesn't mean there's any underlying scariness. Still, fainting? In this day and age? Feh.

I woke up this morning trying to frame a letter to the Superintendent of Schools in San Francisco, whom we met at the SFUSD School Fair on Saturday (I love this about San Francisco: you can go in to look at high school offerings and wind up chatting with a portly guy in an untucked shirt who just happens to run the school district).

I'm trying to explain why the "Every Child Will Succeed" rhetoric has gotten so deadly to some children. Maybe it's partly because it has the "because I said so" feeling of the post-coup PA announcement in Bananas: "All children under 16 years old...are now 16 years old." But it's more that the kids see this, not as a challenge to the teachers to help ensure that success, but a kind of threat. We have ways of making you succeed. And a good number of kids I know have taken this rhetoric to mean that they must succeed, that failure is not an option, that you can't recover from a mistake, that every last thing you do will go on your Permanent Record and follow you throughout your life.

In eighth grade. When they have hormones and social functioning and algebra to deal with.

We already know that not all kids learn the same way (I was a whole-world reader in a phonics world, and until I threw out phonics when I was in 4th grade (!) I just thought I was too stupid to read). I think different kids need different encouragements, too. They need to be told that making a mistake isn't fatal, that mistakes are often how you learn, that a mistake can take you down a corridor to a huge success. I know at least two kids who were hospitalized for suicidality in high school because the anxiety got to them--the idea that they couldn't make a single wrong move. These kids didn't disdain a challenge, but they felt, after years of absorbing the Permanent Record of Life message, that the deck was stacked against them and it was all too much.

I talk to other parents and we agree that it wasn't like this when we were kids. I know the world is different place now, but I'm not sure we, as a society, can afford to lose these kids because we don't know how to make them sort out between the true no-mistake situations and the ones you can learn from.

Anyway, that's what I'm trying to say to Garcia. If anyone has any thoughts on how to make it clearer, please jump in. I feel like I'm trying to save lives here...

So: this year we get a free, organic, 21 lb turkey from the Spouse's employer, just in time for Thanksgiving! Yay! Of course, Sarcasm Girl is working that day, and may spend any time she isn't at work visiting The Beau's aunt over in their neighborhood. And of course, Avocado has just become a vegetarian again. And the three people we invited to join us for dinner declined (well, one said maybe). Meanwhile the Spouse's lovely sister, who lives in Sebastopol, called yesterday to say that their standing TG plans with another family have been cancelled this year, due to a medical emergency (other family's, not S-i-L's), and what are our plans.

So I invite them for dinner, confident that there will be more than enough free, organic turkey. Well, actually, she was hoping we'd be interested in coming up there and having dinner with some other friends of theirs.

I think we're going to do thanksgiving here, on our own. But I see a lot of Free! Organic! turkey leftovers in our future.

Sometimes it's what you're willing to let High School students print about you:

The school newspaper at Dalton, a private school in Manhattan, contained a cryptic note from its editors last Friday.

“We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints,” the note said. It promised “an explanation of the regrettable delay” in the next issue.

It turns out that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values, had provided the newspaper, The Daltonian, with a lesson about journalistic independence. Justice Kennedy’s office had insisted on approving any article about a talk he gave to an assembly of Dalton high school students on Oct. 28.

Cause there's nothing worse than getting quoted out of context in a High School newspaper.

Frank D. LoMonte, the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, questioned the school’s approach. “Obviously, in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech,” he said. Even at a high school publication, Mr. LoMonte said, the request for prepublication review sent the wrong message and failed to appreciate the sophistication of high school seniors.
“These are people who are old enough to vote,” he said. “If you’re old enough to drive a tank, you’re old enough to write a headline.”

And to realize they're being managed.

And sometimes it's less what you say (albeit clumsily) and more the fact that your handwriting sucks. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been taken to task for a condolence letter he wrote to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. He's not the world's most socially adept human (and apparently he's penmanship is appalling, largely because he's highly visually impaired). By the end of the article I felt a bit sorry for him--and for the grieving mother, who seems to have taken every flaw in Brown's delivery of his messages (a: condolence on the loss of your son; b: horribly sorry to have hurt you at a time when you're mourning) as callousness and lack of concern. None of this would be so bad, except that the British press (read: Murdoch press) has jumped on the Bash Brown bandwagon and inflamed something that should have been a private correspondence into a to-do.

and appear to be this year's Nebula Awards Commissioner. Which sounds grandiose, but looks more like being the person who comes in to periodically unclog the pipes.

Some people came home from WFC with H1N1. Me, I came home with a Volunteer Opportunity. The spouse is threatening to tape my hands to my sides.