What's new with the house

Here's what the new house is looking like right now. The floor joists have been added as well as the foundation gravel for the driveway. There's a lot of embedded piping going in. The framing is probably about to go in, too.

The kitchen and the great room

Looking across the front of the house

The front porch of the house

We had hoped the driveway would be less steep than it looks like it's going to be. Drat. I think it'll work out, but I suppose that's part of the hassle of living on a hill: things are frequently steep.

The driveway foundation

The garage is actually fairly large. It's a 2-car garage with an additional keyhole area that is generally used for a work area. The master bathroom and closet have been expanded somewhat at the expense of this work area, which is fine with me. I'm sure that boxes will end up being stored here for a while, but because this house has a lot more room than the current house for books, there are going to be fewer boxes.

The floor of the garage

The fence currently ends on the one side at the next-door neighbor's driveway. We've noticed that they store their garbage cans on the side (a logical place for them) but looking at their garbage cans—or anyone's garbage cans—is not a big scenic attraction, so we're probably going to have the fence extended. I hope they like cats and are generally friendly sorts on all sides of us; it's going to be difficult if we have crappy or unfriendly neighbors.

The front hall

The front hall looking across at the next-door neighbor

We were a little concerned about feeling like we were in the bottom of a well, but in fact the bottom of the windows in the house are going to be about level with the top of the retaining wall, so we'll have plenty of good view of the plants (read "rock roses and lavender") in the hillside that's part of our back yard. There isn't going to be a lot of backyard, sadly, but that's the way it goes.

The back of the garage looking at the master bathroom.

The retaining wall and hillside run all the way across the back of the property. There's going to be a board fence at the top of the hill so we'll have a little privacy from the house above us. We're thinking of terracing this. I remember as a boy that the house my parents built in Cheney had a hillside similar to this in size and shape and my parents terraced it with railroad ties and then planted things in it, particularly squashes and strawberries. I'm willing to pass on the strawberries but I love the idea of squashes and the like being planted here. The big question will be access: how to get up and down it without having to climb huge rocks and so on. Don't have an answer for that one, yet.

Looking at the kitchen and great room

What's new with the house

The garden and most of the cats

I've been talking (well, bragging) about the gardening lately and I wanted to show you a few of the results. These are a couple of the flower barrels on the deck, which turned out pretty darned well, I'd say!

One of the flower barrels

Another of the flower barrels

The cats have been really helpful with this process and have conferred on the best layout of the garden during the entire process.

The cats discussing where to plant

Meanwhile, the cats have been enjoying the relatively brief periods of sunny weather (sidenote: I could-a sworn it was almost summer, yuh know) on the deck.

Solar cats

Willow is impossible to photograph in any kind of sunlight; she radiates too much light and overexposes any pictures I take.

Willow being glowish in the sun

BC is moving slower these days, but he's still the same big sweet cat he's always been.

BC standing in uffish thought

BC contemplating an open door

Yang has been a pest lately, largely because he's such a huge cat. When he's not leaping onto the monitor and knocking it askew, he's plopping around and getting in the way of everything.

Yang in a typical pose

Yang in his other typical pose

Bo is getting to be a big guy but he's lost none of his tendency to be full of energy. His tale is huge and it always looks like a Dr. Seuss character's tail. I keep expecting to see a light bulb hanging from the end of it.

Bo, pausing between leaps and dashes

Bo distracted by something in the dirt

The garden and most of the cats

Good heavens, has it been a week already?

Sheesh! I realized that I've not posted anything since last Tuesday. Sonomagun! Okay, it's late and I've been on the run all day but tomorrow I'm going to post a zillion pictures that I uploaded this evening, I prrrromise!

In the meantime, let me suggest that you watch this classic clip from the Stick Figure Death Theatre, a classic site that combines time-wasting with doing truly horrible things that make you laugh and feel guilty. A truly fine example of this--which you should all immediately go look at right away--is the Bungee Rock Climbing Super Death of Doom or Miscalculation. Be sure to watch it all the way through; there's a lot to see. It keeps getting worse. #4 is my favorite for the sheer perversity, but all of them are funny in that "ohhhhhh, nooooooo!" sense that We Love So Much.

Lots to tell you about soon, including a great show we saw on Saturday with the "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" cast doing improv for about 90 minutes on stage. Go look at truly awful things happening to stick figures for the moment and I'll be back witcha shortly.

Good heavens, has it been a week already?

A positive affirmation for the day

Our dear friend Ken bid us goodbye at the Tacoma train station with the following affirmation:

"If life hands you lemons, make a big batch of lemonade. Then go looking for the guy that life has been giving vodka to and have yourself a party!"

A positive affirmation for the day

Fun site du jour

This came in today from the Nev Dull list. It's a little clip of what Windows computers do when no-one is looking.

Fun site du jour

It's late at night

"It's too haaaaaaaaaht!" he whined. Actually, it's still too darned warm for me. Shoot, if I wanted it to be hot, I'd still be living in Tucson. I like it about 67 most of the time. Not a lot of sun is okay with me, generally, although I still have hopes of growing Crenshaw melons this year, which do require all the sun they can get.

I'm probably going to have a non-alcoholic drink of something, like a Diet Squirt, and go to bed. Bleah.

I like having married into a big family that gets along pretty well. My family tends to get along pretty well these days, too, but I like seeing a whole family that has always gotten along pretty well. And they're nice people to know and be part of, too. I really like that.

It's late at night

Memorial day weekend note and a thought on Heinlein (feh!)

Just got back from a weekend in Tacoma that was very nice. I'll put something down about that shortly, but first, I want to take a hot bath and finish the last few pages of a high-tech thriller with an admittedly very contrived deus ex machina that's going to clean up most of the details at the end. Meanwhile, here's something I wrote a few days ago that I wanted to share with people.

I find it interesting that whenever I run into a Heinlein quote these days that I skip it. For the last 15-20 years, I've found his stuff mawkish, juvenile, and irritating. (Reading "The Number of the Beast" shortly after it came out really frosted the cake; I was so strongly disgusted that I haven't read any of his stuff since.) I’m strongly reminded of a comment a German professor at Reed made to me when I was 18 that I only came to appreciate 20 years later: "One’s distaste for Herman Hesse as an adult is directly proportional to the esteem one held him in as an adolescent."

Several years ago, I scored a few boxes of old Analog and F&SF magazines and one of them had a speech Heinlein made in 1972 to the graduating class of midshipmen at the Naval Academy, in which he first pitched writing as a profession to be had on the side, after which, he drubbed his political ding for a while. He damned the protesters of the Vietnam War as completely uninformed, as cowards not having the courage of their convictions, as hypocrites and liberals, and generally as a blight on a free society of Men Who Fought For What They Believed. (Never mind that even Robert McNamara has admitted that the war was a Stupid Idea we shouldn't have gotten into and that we should have actively gotten out of and stayed in only for swank--something that it seemed a lot of the rest of us were able to correctly identify at the time--Heinlein felt that the Vietnam War was a Great Idea that shouldn't be undercut.)

He also had a lot to say about the need for an atomic space fleet—it was going to happen, he assured everyone, and Americans should get there first and have lots of atomic warships in space. What was particularly interesting about this is that he said the reason we should hurry towards this end was not that there was anyone else in the world then [or now] who remotely stood a chance to do such a thing before us; it was that we could get these atomic warships up there and then (this is more-or-less a direct quote) "enforce a 'Pax Americana' on the rest of the world." Shoot, don't we have a name for people like that, like... uh... 'neo-cons'? No, wait, wait, just a moment... oh, yeah, that's right, 'Effing fascists!'

Understand that this was not the basic male-chauvinist-pig dribble of Heinlein's that we’ve all read, nor the "Live Free and Screw a Lot!" stuff of Heinlein’s later years; this was real militaristic fascism at its best. I’ve still got the issue of Analog lying around that the transcript appeared in if you care to read it. It was pretty repugnant stuff. I don't think there's a lot of point to this except to remind everyone that we need to know the fascists and the liars wherever and whenever they appear.

Memorial day weekend note and a thought on Heinlein (feh!)

Where's Ken Lay?

It occurred to me yesterday that it's been years now and, while we've heard about several smaller Enron fish going to trial, Ken Lay--beloved dear friend of the penny-ante dictator (despite claims by the White House to the contrary)--seems to be living a life of ease and luxury. Must be a coincidence, that; this is a country of laws.

Personally, I'd be glad to put $29.95 down on a pay-per-view event just to see Ken Lay flogged to death by Enron employees and customers who got jacked up by Enron's pricing, with monies collected going to reimburse the same people. That has a certain charm to it and, given the number of folks who might choose to watch, might be financially sound, too. It'd be just, certainly. For an extra $9.95, we could include Ken Lay's worthless trophy wife, who was beating her breast about how hard things were for them now that they only had 7 houses and they underSTOOD the plight of all those poor people. Gawd, it sounds like Immelda Marcos.

Where's Ken Lay?

Speaking to a high school class today

While Eugene soared to 90 degrees, a circumstance I was not dressed well for (i.e., I still had clothes on and was not standing in front of a fan or AC unit), I was taking part in a panel discussion for the benefit of a bunch of high school students at Marist High School nearby. The physics/chemistry professor, Ryan Mosier (sp?) invited a bunch of us to come tell his students what they can go on and do with their interest in science.

It was fun seeing the HS campus and seeing the kids, that's for sure. They were a pretty good group. The other members on the panel were an MIS manager, a hospital lab tech, a pharmaceutical researcher, and a forensic scientist. All of these are interesting occupations. I encouraged the students to consider writing as a career or at least as an adjunct to any other technical career. We got asked about our favorite and least favorite parts about our jobs. I talked about the freedom and not having to commute and being in control of my own hours, which a student told me later produced a somewhat envious look from the other panelists. The students had a number of good questions and seemed fairly interested in what we had to say. For me, the most memorable comment came from the forensic scientist, who observed about the level of care that was necessary in his job. Every time they did something, it tentatively took away from another human being's civil rights, and, the longer they were in their profession, the more weight their opinion would carry. That's quite a responsibility and one that I'm not sure I'd care to have.

Speaking to a high school class today

"Relentlessly cheerful"

I was reading stuff I'd written about myself 9 years ago and one of the things I'd described myself as was "relentlessly cheerful." I don't think that's entirely true anymore--I can do "grouchy" really well when I get impatient with idiots who are wasting my life, like, say the folks at Wells-Fargo Home Mortgage who are clearly incapable of finding their butts with both hands, a road map, and a search party--but it's still largely true. About 15 years ago, my ex-wife gave me a cartoon that shows a man looking happily at a glass with a couple tablespoons of water in it thinking "Hey, my glass is 1/32 full!" And this is still an accurate description: My life works on optimism. Things happen serendipitously. Things manifest when I need them. The universe frequently lines up to make the shot easier for me. I win things. All of these things happen as a result of my belief that they will and that they should.

I'd tried to explain this to people for a number of years, because it really is the best way to go about things. My dear, departed friend Sharma said once that she had decided working with counselling patients that the optimists tended to see things through rose-colored glasses. The pessimists see things exactly as they are, which is to say, pretty crappy. Optimists tend to be happier and more resilient to life's slings and arrows. She was trying to help the pessimists be more optimistic, which kinda boiled down to getting them to relax and be in a bit of denial about the reality they saw so clearly.

There's a book by Martin Seligman that's been out for about 10 years that can help people get to this point. It's called "Learned Optimism" and the whole focus of the book is teaching you how to do these things for yourself. Most of the book (which I've not read) shows you that you deserve to have what you want.

But there's another element to this that I like sharing. A magazine article I read years ago described "power thinking," a phrase that's horribly overused if you care to look at Google to try to find the article I read. The gist of the article is a key to optimism and serendipity: you can't close things off. You have to give the universe room to work. If, for example, you say "I'd like to buy a new car, but I can't afford the payments," you've already beaten yourself. Maybe you can't afford the payments and maybe you can, but the presumption of the second half is that because you can't afford the payments that life's ready to stop and no further discussion is warranted. Very simply, the author said, when you find yourself saying "I want A, but B," you should change the "but" to an "and," so the sentence reads "I want A and B." The assumption in the second sentence is that the second half is merely an obstacle or a condition that must be dealt with, but it's not the final obstacle that Stops All Further Movement. From this, you might say "Well, if I can't afford a payment, how can I work out a deal to obtain a car without having to make a big payment or even any payment? Can I trade something? Can I get a car and then sell advertising space on it? Can I share a car with someone else?" A wide variety of other possibilities may spring to mind when you say "and." I like this technique a lot. I encourage everyone to try it out on their next three problems.

Failing any of this, you might just want to hope for the best. Things can and do happen. And be sure to buy at least one state lottery or Powerball ticket in the next week. It's only a buck and wotthehell?

"Relentlessly cheerful"

Warning!

Warning!

While you were reading this, the entire universe has been replaced by a joke.

Do not be deceived!

Warning!

Blogger messed up, but they're back now

My blog--and the blogs of a lot of other people--were down for a few hours. As you can see, we're all back now.

Blogger messed up, but they're back now