In Common with Humans

And so begins a new lunar month. It’s raining!!! On my garden!! On the poor little newly planted garlic that actually have sent a couple of shoots up in defiance of the Town of Pepperell and its mean old watering ban! Yay!!! There was even a flash of lightning. 🙂 *happy dance* The big tomatoes are ripening, I might actually eat a tomato from my garden!

Now it looks like it might not rain out Schrödinger’s Band Concert on Thursday, after all. Except, of course, it might! We shall see…my sister and her family are visiting up at the lake, and I’m baking blackberry pie tonight.

On a sadder note, I’d just like to say goodbye to a wonderful actress, Patricia Neal, who passed away at the age of 84. While she had an illustrious career (and a tough life), most of us genre fans know her best as Helen Benson in the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which she faced down a robot capable of vaporizing planets and managed to remember, and say, “Klaatu barada nikto” in circumstances where most of us would be lucky to recall our own name. 🙂

I sent out six packages of books to wholesalers today, plus a complimentary copy. CreateSpace finally deigned to accept the cover PDF for The Longer the Fall and the proof is on the way. The CreateSpace proof of Krymsin Nocturnes arrived, looks great, and I approved it.

Tomorrow, I’m going swimming! 🙂

“At the country level, most of us are completely invested in this global food system, which is built on some very, very rickety pillars. I think, however, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that goes on more on the municipal level with farmer’s markets, community supported agriculture with food policy councils, which are springing up all over cities and towns in Canada and in the U.S.

“And these are really talking about trying to shorten supply chains, create a level of food sovereignty at a local level, investing things like soup kitchens and community kitchens, which act as an insurance policy against food shocks for economically poor people. So, I think the most innovative stuff is actually happening at a small scale across North America.

“And there’s very little attention to this issue being placed at a national or international scale.”

Evan Fraser, co-author with Andrew Rimas of Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

(Source: NPR)

All the news that fits, we print! The rest has to go in another post!

This week’s Publishing News:

On August 3, I posted that Google had requested .epub files for books enrolled in Google Editions by August 6.

I made it. 🙂 All five titles, all converted to .epub and uploaded! It took some finesse, too. I went back to the original InDesign files, made new files just for .epub and adjusted all the formatting for optimum results. They’re not fancy but they look very neat and tidy. Now, if Google would only be as specific about the date when they plan to roll out Google Editions! Enough with the Net Neutrality talks, Google, let’s sell some books!!

In addition to .epub, this week I’ve been doing another conversion that’s been on the back burner for a while. Some time ago, I set up my first novel, Mortal Touch, on CreateSpace for paperback editions sold on Amazon. Publishers can use different printers for the same ISBN and edition, and often do, for various reasons. In this case, I had the Lightning Source edition available to wholesalers and stores, but I made almost three times as much profit on Amazon sales printing those books with CreateSpace.

However, when I first did this, CreateSpace’s sales reports were rudimentary, at best. I wasn’t sure I could get a clear report by individual title, and without that, I couldn’t calculate author royalties. So I held off on setting up the rest of BLUM’s titles with CreateSpace.

Then, Amazon merged CreateSpace with the former Booksurge and changed their approach, much as Smashwords did, to be friendlier to multi-author publishers rather than geared entirely toward individual “self publishing” authors. The reporting system was vastly improved and made far more comprehensive and detailed. But I just hadn’t gotten around to setting up all the rest of the titles. There’s a one-time fee called a “Pro Plan” fee, which is a lot less than Lightning Source’s setup costs, and after that, CreateSpace is so competitively priced, I’m going to crunch numbers and see if it makes sense to print ARCs and even short run orders with them instead of Lulu and Lightning Source, respectively. Also, Amazon pays by direct deposit in 60 days like clockwork. Lightning Source takes 90 days and sends a check.

Anyway, this week I got all the rest of BLUM’s titles set up on CreateSpace, meaning that I and my authors will earn about 2-1/2 times as much royalty on each paperback Amazon sale, and I may be able to improve our profit margin in other sales, too. I’ve just run into one snag…

…remember all the problems I had getting my own second book, The Longer the Fall, into print? How the covers fucked up and I had to redo them and there were all those delays? Well, the jinx is still alive and well. 🙁 I’ve had to resubmit the cover PDF for The Longer the Fall to CreateSpace about four times now. I suppose it’s really to CreateSpace’s credit that they’re so particular about checking for you. Neither Lulu nor Lightning Source do that. As long as the basic dimensions are correct, what the art looks like and whether the spine is centered are totally your lookout. CreateSpace checks, and they kept spitting out my cover PDFs saying the spine text was too wide. (They’re being very picky–these are the same covers I used for the Lightning Source and Lulu paperbacks and the spines are fine.) I only needed to re-upload the others once, but I’m having the worst time with The Longer the Fall! First the bleed and trim allowance wasn’t enough (I’m still scratching my head over that one), then the spine text was too wide, and after I fixed it, they said it was still too wide. Meanwhile, I have proofs ordered and on the way for Gideon Redoak, Cat the Vamp and Krymsin Nocturnes!

And speaking of wholesalers…I now know for sure (rather than inferring it from Borders.com) that all my titles are listed with Baker & Taylor. I’m getting purchase orders from them…almost every day. That’s along with all the purchase orders that are starting to come in from Follett. I’ve gotten templates set up for author sales and royalty reports, now I need to create templates for wholesaler invoices and statements. I was doing them manually when it was just Brodart, but those days are over! Whew. (There is a recession going on, right?)

I sold out the first short run of Krymsin Nocturnes hardcovers and ordered a second printing. It was just delivered by my next-door neighbor because Unbelievably Pathetically Stupid left it at the wrong house. For the zillionth time. I think I’m going to order a sign from VistaPrint to post out by my driveway, because this is just so beyond ridiculous. 🙁

I had let my Google AdWords campaigns pause while I considered the results of the first one. I decided to try a campaign just for Cat the Vamp, changing the ads and keywords more often. So far, I’m getting click-throughs but I’m unsure about sales. It’s hard to gauge because I can’t monitor sales for most of the ebook editions, and the vendors take months to report. I might try running more title-specific campaigns and see what happens, though.

I’d like to welcome By Light Unseen Media’s newest author, KT Pinto! Her novel Marco will be released in 2011.

Random other updates:

It seems to be a fundamental rule that whenever some unique celestial event is predicted, our skies instantly cloud over. That was the case for the first night of the possible Northern Lights in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. The following night, I took a walk instead of cycling, and I timed it for exactly the period when the “wave” of solar particles was expected to hit the atmosphere and possibly create a display of Northern Lights. I’ve never seen Northern Lights “live.” It wasn’t thickly overcast: stars and a waning crescent Moon were shining. But there was a high thin layer of clouds, forming a haze and diffusing the moonlight. The northern sky did seem lighter than usual, but that could just have been the moonlight and lights from Nashua against the clouds. I can’t say I detected anything that seemed to be out of the ordinary for a summer night. *sigh*

I spent Thursday afternoon watching storms blast by on the weather radar and waiting for a decision on what I have come to call Schrödinger’s Band Concert (because we never know if it’s dead or alive until it happens!). Although it did rain, the storms were past and the skies clear by 6:00 p.m. and the penultimate concert of the season went on. The audience was smaller but enthusiastic and the concert went well. It was still very humid and warm which is hard on Dad, but there’s only one more concert to go (and right now, the forecast is for rain 🙁 ).

By the way: in all the excitement over the incredibly well-reasoned and meticulous decision by District Judge Vaughn Walker shooting down, point by legal point, every single hollow sophistical hypocritical pseudo-argument and self-justifying rationalization used to “defend” bans on gay marriage…did anyone happen to notice that Elena Kagan was confirmed and sworn in to serve on the Supreme Court? 🙂

Happy sidereal Lughnasadh, for those who attune to the earth and solar cycles! The Sun passed 15°00′ of Leo at 10:57 a.m. EDT, the precise midpoint between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox. Since those are (misleadingly and inaccurately) called “first day of Summer” and “first day of Fall” on mundane calendars, that makes today the middle of Summer–now we’re on the downslope. Local sunset today occurs before 8:00 p.m. for the first time since May 13, and the Sun is about the same height in the sky at midday as it was on May 6. (You can get your own local times for Sun and Moon movements at the Naval Oceanography Portal.)

In honor of “first fruits,” I had a tart made of blackberries from my yard for breakfast, and my supper included locally grown red cabbage, locally grown red peppers, and little garlic bulbs from my garden.

My Tarot reading for the coming octave was very…interesting. I did ritual at the crack of dawn. I had this little vase of flowers, all from my gardens, on the altar.

I’ve been somewhat depressed about my gardens this week, though, fighting off a guilty sense of #gardenfail. I did all that work at the end of May getting the garden in, and then neglected it for the next two months. After everything was well up and growing, I didn’t even water, and I didn’t weed or thin when I should have. Granted, the intense heat and dry weather (mild drought) would have affected the garden no matter what I did. But things would be doing better now if I’d been more attentive.

I thought my tomatoes might have been infected by something like late blight, but I’m not sure–it could be heat and drought stress. The poor cherry tomato is almost defoliated. It keeps on doggedly flowering and forming new fruit, though, and the existing cherry tomatoes are ripening. The big tomatoes don’t seem to be forming more new fruit or growing much, but they’re not deteriorating, either, and the tomatoes on them are just starting to ripen. The pumpkins and squash, since being mulched, are growing new foliage and blossoming but not setting fruit. The potato vines are dying off and I know they’ve made potatoes because I can feel them under the soil. But you’re supposed to wait a couple of weeks to dig them. I decided to pull or dig out all the garlic and onions whose tops had entirely died, leaving only a few onions with a little green that I hope will develop further. I was surprised to find that all the garlic had grown a little; I had a pile of teeny little garlic bulbs. A few of them even formed cloves. I also have a pile of tiny little onions. They’re all tasty and I’ll get several meals out of them, but they’d have done so much better if I’d watered them! The peppers never set a single fruit. I guess I’ll see what the carrots do, they’re pretty happy, and I have the fluffiest, healthiest marigolds you ever saw. I sure can grow those!

We were already under water conservation rules here in Pepperell, and I could only water on even-numbered days. After I did all that weeding, I determined that I would water every day I could, whether it rained or not, and I was doing so. (We’ve missed almost all the thunderstorms that have hit the state for the past two months. We might get a little rain, but the big boomers and their downpours go way north and way south.) I also decided to try replanting the garlic. I even bought widgets at the hardware store to successfully repair my leaky garden hoses, and new sprayer attachments.

So, I planted the garlic yesterday, because it was an even-numbered day, and I was going to go out and water in the late afternoon. *Ring* goes the phone. I pick it up, and it’s a recorded message: “This is the Pepperell Reverse-911 automated alert system…” Oh-oh… The Town of Pepperell had just instituted an emergency, mandatory, total ban on all outside water use. I looked online and immediately found out why: one of our wells tested positive for e-coli and had been closed down for inspections. On top of the drought situation, we’re now out one well. Eep.

I have no idea how long the well will be offline and the ban in effect, but it’s the coup de grâce for my poor vegetable garden if we’re talking, say, weeks. 🙁 The weather forecast is warm, clear and dry into the foreseeable future. Unless a tropical storm makes it this far, I’m SOOL.

Sigh.

I really saw evidence of how dry it’s been when I walked down to collect some dandelion greens for the bunny tonight. It’s been more than two weeks since I mowed the lawns, and the plants and grass have barely grown back at all. I’m not into monoculture or chemical-laden, water-hogging turf; grass is just one of the many flora that collectively constitute my “lawns.” But you can see what everything looks like in the photo of the flowers, above–dry grass and a few sprigs, that’s about it.

I’ve gotten the biggest haul of blackberries ever this season, and they’re still coming, although nearing the end of their run. But there, again: I missed a lot of berries, by not picking every day or just not seeing them. One thing I wanted to do in May was stake up the blackberry and black raspberry canes both for their benefit and to make them easier to harvest. I never got to it. Hopefully, I will next year! The black raspberries are squashing the hybrid day lilies, and if I train the blackberries on supports, maybe I won’t get poison ivy (my poison ivy rash is in full itchy bloom now, *grump*).

But along this theme: here is one of the most encouraging and exciting news articles I’ve seen for a while:
Farming surges in state with new crop of devotees

Now that is really cool. 🙂

Google has asked for .epub files for Google Editions (which might, actually, some day, really launch!) by August 6. Plus, I’m looking to sign up with Kobobooks directly, and they need .epub files.

Adobe InDesign CS5 will export to .epub. But I wanted some hands-on control of the output. I’ve learned xhtml (my blogs, BLUM and author website are all xhtml-compliant), but hand-coding the html Kindle files is enough of a pain. It would be nice not to have to crash-learn the whole .epub protocol (I want to learn it, eventually) and do every book manually by August 6.

So, I girded my loins and braved Adobe’s scary Help resources. In about ten seconds, I found this:

InDesign creates a single .epub file containing the XHTML-based content…The .epub file is essentially a .zip file. To view and edit the contents of the .epub file, change the extension from .epub to .zip, and then extract the contents. This is especially useful for editing the CSS file.

I’d done a test .epub file, so I tried renaming it .zip and then clicked on it. Bingo. StuffIt! (which I’d just recovered and re-installed along with some other things that got lost during the Hard Drive Reconfiguration) popped the file open…and there it all was. xhtml file, fonts, css file, and all of it opened right up for editing in Notepad. So, I can access the components, tweak them, rezip and rename the file…I can totally control my .epub files! But InDesign will start out doing all the work. How cool is that?!?

And I can convert other people’s books for them, for pay. I’m a coder, I can solve any format problem, even if I have to go in and edit the code line by line. It’s a snap for me. Another free-lance skill set! I should start an online portfolio. 🙂 (Do you have a book you’d like converted to .epub? Contact me!)

I am so happy that I bought Adobe Creative Suite CS5–it was a big chunk of change to drop, but man, it’s saved my sanity a dozen times already. I don’t know how I was managing without it!

Happy traditional Lughnasadh/Lammas! I actually celebrate at the true cross-quarter point (when the Sun is at 15°00′ of Leo), which this year falls on August 7 at 10:57 a.m. EDT. But August 1 is “Loaf-mass” or Lammas, the festival of First Fruits of harvest and also of the god Lugh and therefore a time to honor all forms of skill and craftsmanship.

I keep doing this–I determine that I’ll post more often and then don’t get to it! It seems like July was endless, and now summer must surely be over…it can’t only be Lammas, it must be Labor Day, isn’t it? (Look at all the Back To School ad flyers!) The days are already obviously shorter. The sky isn’t light when I go to bed now and local sunset will occur before 8:00 p.m. in a few more days. It’s gotten cooler and dryer–last night, it went down to 53°, although the heat and humidity will be back by mid-week.

We’ve come to the point where I can tell that it’s been a great summer: that I’ve been spending time outside, working hard, taking advantage of the summer weather and getting good stuff done in my yard and garden. I can tell because everything hurts or itches. 🙁 I wake up and hobble into the kitchen like I had terminal arthritis, although most of the kinks dissolve in the shower. The itchies are less cooperative–the flip side of hot weather skimpy clothes, I’m afraid–and not wearing a shirt to pick blackberries!

Last Monday and Tuesday afternoons, I spent a total of 8 solid hours in the vegetable garden, mostly on my hands and knees weeding every square inch. I’d let it get much too overgrown, and between that and the heat and drought, most of it isn’t doing all that well. The garden now looks very tidy, but it also usually looks parched, and I can only water on even-numbered days. Pepperell has instituted water use restrictions with fines. After all those floods in March, the Nashua River is barely trickling over the dam, and there are more rocks than water visible downstream from the bridge.

The weeding itself took most of the time, and I also, finally, thinned the carrots, which are starting to make carrots, yay! I tied up the tomatoes, which are loaded with green tomatoes, a couple of them just starting to get a yellow glow on top to indicate that they’re thinking about ripening. I’ve been picking cherry tomatoes for about a week, but only one or two at a time. They rarely make it into the house. 🙂 All the plants are indeterminate, but the cherry tomato is aiming for the stars and I’ll have to put in stakes over the tomato cage. I’d mowed the lawns the previous Thursday, and raked up piles of fluffy dry grass from the thickest sections to mulch the pumpkins and zucchini. The pumpkins are very happy with this and immediately started putting out tons of new leaves and blossoms, but it may be too little, too late; I don’t know if I’ll get a pumpkin. I am getting some zucchini, but ditto there; all the zucchini so far have shriveled blossom ends. I picked one today to see if the “good” part is edible. I don’t think I’m going to be buried in zucchini. The garlic is a total loss but I might replant that. The onions and potatoes…we’ll see. The Brussels sprouts, nada, next year I will start them very early in pots.

The basil is doing better than I’ve ever had basil do, but I haven’t picked any so far and probably should have. The pepper plants are big and fluffy but don’t have any peppers. The biggest successes are the tomatoes and flowers–I sure can grow marigolds! They’re thriving! The bachelor’s buttons (or cornflowers) have been blooming for a while, and the purple and blue gladiola I planted have just started flowering. The bee balm in the back yard is about five feet tall.

But I’ve learned some lessons for next year, and now I have a tiller. 🙂 First things: till the soil deeper and mulch much earlier.

All that was a lot of work, like catching up on neglect always is. I’ve also been pushing myself hard with the Bowflex, and taking those long walks. By Tuesday night, I had to pop one of the only two over-the-counter meds in my bathroom cabinet, acetaminophen. The other is Benadryl, for itchies and very rare sleep aid, and I might end up taking those because I simply can’t manage to avoid the poison ivy no matter how careful I am! Every year I swear I’m going to spray it and never get to it in time. Between the mosquito bites and little spots of poison ivy here and there (mostly where I got scratched by blackberry brambles), I have very annoying itchies. Plus blackberry bramble scratches, of course.

I’m picking pints of blackberries and freezing them. I promised my sister blackberry pie, and I use them for my fruit-oatmeal cookies and other things in the winter. I’ve found something amusing: that old party game Twister is terrific practice for picking blackberries (especially for picking blackberries without a shirt when you know there’s poison ivy in there someplace). I’ve contorted into the most amazing stretches to reach just one last berry…and not get snagged. It’s like Twister combined with that old Operation game. 🙂

Otherwise, it’s been publishing work, watching book sales climb, going to Dad’s band concert which was great this week with a huge audience. Two tight deadlines proved very fruitful creatively. I made a half-page ad for Readercon 22, because we did an exchange with 5Pi-Con and they needed our ad this week. And, I decided to write a short fiction for the Bay State Equine Rescue Blogathon run by novelfriend. I’ve been wanting to write and market some short fiction and, as usually happens with such a vague objective, ideas were just circulating without gelling. But the Blogathon post gave me a deadline, a theme and a length limit, all of which got my Muse into peak form. The story, “Last Word,” came out well, and taught me what I need to aim for with short fiction, generally–it’s not my preferred oeuvre. (I wasn’t trying to make people cry, though–honest!)

How do you make homemade ice cream without an ice cream maker? Oh, there are all kinds of ice cream makers–from those plastic balls you fill with salt and ice and shake, to electric ones that sit in your freezer and churn the ice cream while your freezer freezes it, up to expensive countertop machines that freeze and churn all at once. But I have none of those.

I had a little whipping cream left over from the cheesecake and nothing to use it for, and I thought…”suppose I just added a little sugar and vanilla extract, put it in the freezer in a stainless steel bowl, and stirred it at intervals–like, every five minutes?” So I tried that.

It worked perfectly. I made ice cream! With a whisk, a bowl and my freezer! It’s a bit of a pain to jump up and stir the stuff every five minutes, but for home made ice cream–it’s worth it! The recipe does need some tweaking, though. Oddly enough, pure whipping cream doesn’t make the best ice cream in the world. But it’s tasty!

As for the minor rant–this has been on my mind for a while, but was re-triggered when I read yet another awards banquet menu this evening.

Why is it that restaurants always seem to assume that “vegetarian” means “carbo load?”

I’m a vegetarian because I love vegetables. I mean, really, truly, love them. I eat more vegetables, by weight and volume, than any other food group most days. I love steamed veggies, sauteed veggies, raw veggies, roasted veggies, any kind of veggie (except, ew, eggplant). I think broccoli is ambrosia. I eat broccoli by the crate. I can’t imagine having “too much zucchini.” I love zucchini. The last time I grew summer squash, I ate every squash my garden could produce and wished there were more. I eat salad without dressing–I don’t think salad greens need any!

I could go on, but I’ve made my point! Now, conversely–like most vegetarians, I’m into generally healthy eating, and that means whole grains. I don’t voluntarily eat pasta–not even whole wheat pasta. It’s not that I don’t like it. Actually, I do. But it bogs my system down and makes me gain weight, which is one of the best clues my body gives me that I shouldn’t eat something. I don’t eat pizza. I don’t eat white rice. Again–not that I don’t like them (although white rice is pretty boring). They don’t like me. And I’d rather have veggies!

And yet, over and over, when I’ve requested or been offered the sole “vegetarian” (really just “meatless”) option from a limited, banquet-type menu, it’s been things like: a couple of pieces of mushroom, onion and zucchini swimming in tomato sauce on top of four pounds of pasta. Or, a “stir fry” that consisted of a few vegetables in a pint of soupy liquid on top of a huge bowl of white rice. The menu I looked at tonight offered as its sole non-meat choice: mushroom lasagna. And this is typical. Cooks don’t seem to know what to do with people who’d rather throw away the entree and eat the lettuce it was served on. Chefs, hotels and restaurants have trouble believing that people who ask for a “vegetarian option” want fucking VEGETABLES, damn it, and no more refined carbs than the people with the steak or chicken are confronted with.

That is all. I just needed to get that off my chest. *sigh*

I’ve had a busy weekend, with the Readercon 21 Debriefing committee meeting yesterday afternoon and and Full Moon ritual followed by some quality time with Dad today.

Good publishing news: book sales are continuing to increase on a daily basis. The first thing I do every day when I sit down at the computer is go around and check book sales for the past 24 hours. Exciting news: as of today, all of BLUM’s print editions are listed with Borders.com. That means that they’re now listed with Baker & Taylor, which means Baker & Taylor accepted all the metadata and cover images I uploaded last weekend. I’ve got to order a couple of short runs from Lightning Source because you just know the first order I’ll get from Baker & Taylor is for one of the editions I’ve nearly sold out.

I tried out the ePub conversion in Adobe InDesign CS5. CS4 was supposed to export to ePub but I never could get it to work. I tried out CS5 a couple of days ago, and then had to find, download and install an add-on for Firefox to read the resulting file. But it looks great! Now I can create my own ePub editions–I’ll need to tweak the InDesign files a little to make them come out just right, and add the proper copyright and edition information–and this is timely because Google just asked for ePub files for Google Editions “by August.” (Why are these requests always so last-minute? That was like Smashwords giving us about three days’ notice to update our titles for Apple.)

Less exciting publishing news, or more accurately, non-news: Kobobooks.com still only lists our first three titles. Borders.com has not picked up even those titles from Kobo for its ebook store, and I am now applying to Kobo to supply them with ePub editions directly, since there seems to be an irreparable kink in the Smashwords supply line. Alas, Sony won’t let me do that and they’re still listing just two of our titles. Sony is quite simply an unsolvable problem. If they won’t take BLUM’s books, they won’t, I’m helpless to do a thing about it. I updated prices for the Kindle editions and I’m waiting for those to change over, I’m waiting for replies from several people, including Locus magazine, and all I hear is crickets chirping, still waiting to see if Blood Justice gets pre-pub reviews…*sigh* Publishing is not a career for the impatient.

BUT…Christina Martine has been doing guest blogs and two giveaways to promote her YA novel, Cat the Vamp. David Burton promoted Blood Justice at Comic-Con in San Diego and reported back to me that all the flyers and post cards I sent him to put on the freebie racks were gone within hours. I’ve never had that many flyers and cards taken from the freebie racks at conventions, not even at World Fantasy and Worldcon, so I obviously erred way on the side of caution. At Comic-Con, they want their freebies! Next year, we’ll send a lot more! Meanwhile, Erwin Strauss (aka “Filthy Pierre”) has taken all the leftover BLUM flyers from the Readercon racks down to this year’s NASFiC, ReConStruction, which is a very generous thing for him to do! Thanks, Erwin!

Dad and I went to see Inception this afternoon. I really hadn’t heard much about this movie at all before I started seeing all the raves about it on my various flists. I didn’t even see a trailer. Normally, I’d wait for the DVD, but Dad likes to go to the movies, and he’s the only person I’ll break my no-more-cinemas rule for (and not even for Dad will I set foot in the Gardner cinema, ever again). Dad is a huge Fringe fan and I thought maybe he’d like Inception. Then Dad told me that he’d been talking to my sister and brother-in-law about it, and they had mixed feelings about the movie but he wanted to see it. Well…he loved it. Totally blown-away loved it, can’t wait for the DVD! And I thought it was pretty damn good, myself, I really enjoyed it. That’s not to say I don’t have some minor criticisms, but I thought it was very well done and the cast was terrific. (Did they really resist working that Edgar Allen Poe quotation in there, or did I just miss it?)

Dad’s been complaining bitterly about missing Fringe–he hasn’t seen Season Two yet and he’s got the DVD on pre-order. It’s not coming out until September 14, and I’ve offered many times to run it for him on iTunes, since I have the whole second season in my iTunes library. But I can’t convince him to come down here to watch it! I feel all snubbed. 🙁

I’ve been officially added as a programming participant at Albacon in October, don’t have a clue yet what I’ll actually be doing! But Albacon news should be ramping up soon because I helped their prog chair unsnarl a sticky database problem, and she is now set to go with that. Sometimes it’s good to be geek! 🙂 Anyone who’s attending, or interested in attending, Albacon, give me a shout-out! Broad Universe will be doing a Rapid Fire Reading and I’ll be coordinating and MCing that.

And last but not least: now that it’s been voted on and is official, I can announce that I am the new Con Chair for Readercon 22. My first job is scheduling the first committee meeting, and I need to find a venue for those which allows distant committee members to join via conference call. I’m juggling various possibilities right now and hopefully solutions will settle in the next day or two.

It’s a beautiful night and the Full Moon. Think I’ll take a walk!

So, what has…

two and half pounds of cream cheese
six eggs
fresh grated zest of lemon and orange
blackberries picked in my own yard
heavy cream
a homemade brown sugar shortbread bottom crust

…and is taking forever to finish baking? 🙁

It’s not the oven temperature–I have an oven thermometer. I think it’s the shape of the pan, which is an industrial-size springform pan wider and shallower than the one I used to use for this recipe. It’ll be done when it’s done (I hope). It can’t burn, anyway, you start by baking it for 12 minutes at 500 degrees and then reduce the oven to 200 degrees and bake it…for days, evidently! *wry smile*

(disclaimer: the following post contains rhapsodizing. Click away if you’re feeling a high level of rhapso-intolerance. 🙂 )

After Readercon ended, I needed to get back to my workout routines. But it was so hot and humid, I just couldn’t face the exercycling, even with two fans and cold water spritzes. The Bowflex workouts are three times longer but paced much differently. I don’t get nearly as hot, and I can take breaks.

So, I decided to try taking walks instead of cycling: brisk, fast, non-stop walks around my pleasant town.

At 2:00 a.m.

And I’ve been loving it. I have excellent night vision, and even though I take a small flashlight with me, I never need it. Mostly, I’m walking on roads that have sidewalks (and the only sidewalks in Pepperell exist primarily on the roads near schools and were built for kids, not civilians) but not entirely. My town is safe, peaceful, very quiet at night, quite dark–not a lot of street lights and they’re widely spaced–and quite rural. We don’t have a “commercial district” where the commercial buildings line both sides of the road or exceed three stories in height, anywhere in town, and we don’t have a single traffic light.

The first walk was Monday night, July 12. I usually cycle for 35 minutes, and walking didn’t feel like nearly as much of a workout so I wanted to walk a lot longer. I headed out, walked down to Donelan’s grocery store, came back, took the long way around to get back to my house, and it clocked at 50 minutes.

Not long enough, I thought, so the next time I walked, I decided I would set my cell phone timer and walk 45 minutes, then come back the same way, thereby walking for 90 minutes total. The weather cooled off and got rainy, so I did cycling the next couple of days, then came another warm muggy night, and I tried out the new walking plan.

Well. I learned a few things. (a) In 45 minutes, I can walk a long way. I completely underestimated how much ground I could cover in that space of time! (b) I live in a really, really small town. In 45 minutes, I’m “downtown,” through the “downtown,” out past the post office and well on my way to Dunstable, the next town over! (c) 90 minutes walking at what must be close to 4 mph is a damn good workout. Whew–and ouch. Using some different muscles than I do for either cycling or the Bowflex, I’ve been so stiff and sore! 🙁

Which, of course, is a very good thing. It’s always great to challenge new muscle groups. 🙂 Truth to tell, at my fitness level, I probably should be running, even if it’s just gentle running, but that’s awfully tricky at night even with my good night vision. The sidewalks are pretty rough.

90 minutes seemed like a bit much (especially when I got up the next day, oof), so the last two walks I’ve tried out different routes that weren’t quite so long. Last night, I ran two errands–I walked to the post office and mailed a bunch of items and then stopped at the bank ATM and made a deposit. At 3:00 a.m. 🙂 And the cops pulled up next to me once to ask “if everything was okay.” Yep…I live in a really safe town! Thank you, officer, and, sheesh. (But, I suppose broken-down motorists and domestic violence are two of the main types of calls our cops respond to, and both of those might be a reason someone was walking alone late at night.)

The main thing about these late night walks, though, is how incredibly beautiful the world is at that time. My town is so lovely at night! The stars have just taken my breath away–every night. Brilliant against a deep black sky, the Milky Way wending a clear path like a hazy river straight overhead, the Pleiades so bright in my peripheral vision (they’re brighter that way than looked at straight-on) that I kept turning my head to see what they were. I never realized how much light is cast just by the stars. Walking down a completely unlit road, with no streetlights anywhere near, no house lights, I could see clearly just from the light of the stars overhead, they were so bright. The air is the perfect temperature for walking and the humidity makes it soft and caressing, not oppressive. It’s so quiet, I wince every time I scuff my sneakers on a rough spot, it sounds so loud. I think a bat went right by me once, I saw just a brownish flick go by. And walking across the bridge, which has no lights at all, over the Nashua River in the dark is so cool. And the smells…! Good smells, bad smells, I couldn’t even start to describe them, they’re so varied and complex.

I love being out at night. I’ve missed it so much! Last night I stopped at Cumberland Farms, which, along with White Hen Pantry, is open 24 hours. I asked the night clerk, a woman about my age and even shorter than I am, if she liked the night shift. “Love it,” she said, and we chatted a moment about how much we like working nights. We night owls, we’re a tribe, of sorts. Most of us can’t be awake and alive at night the way we used to. In the 80s, I did my grocery shopping at 2:00 a.m. Now nothing is open all night anymore, except convenience stores, and getting a good night shift job is almost impossible.

As far as I can calculate, I’m walking from five miles to six and a half miles each session. That’s a pretty good walk. I’m also starting to get accustomed to it. Last night I was out for 93 minutes total and I wasn’t nearly so worn out. In fact…I didn’t want to come back inside!

Today, I mowed and weed-trimmed all the lawns, front and back. They look so nice and tidy now! My neighbors won’t hate me! (Unless my sneaker scuffs are disturbing them at 2:30 a.m….but nearly everyone is running air conditioners and fans, I can hear them as I go by the houses.) But that was today’s workout, it took about two and half hours. Next up is some serious work on the vegetable garden. I’m picking blackberries by the pint now and they’re just ramping up. I’m going to have to start freezing them!