My Dell XPS laptop had to go to Dell’s Advanced Repair center in Houston to have the keyboard and fingerprint reader replaced. (Good thing I bought the 4-year all-hazard protection plan.) Naturally, when the tech proposed this, I assumed it would be gone for at least two weeks, which I didn’t think I could stand. But I needed to get it fixed. So I was surprised when the tech said, “No, you’ll have it back in five business days or less, and we pay for FedEx overnight shipping.”
I still put it off, but finally—after moving sensitive financial files off the drive—I boxed it up in the box they sent and took it to Walgreens for FedEx pickup. That was Monday, at 4:30 p.m.
On Tuesday morning, I got an email saying it was at the center and a tech was working on it. On Tuesday evening, I got an email saying the repair was done and it was on its way back to me. That couldn’t be right. Could it?
On Wednesday afternoon, I was taking it out of the box and plugging it in. That’s right, they fixed it—and cleaned it inside and out—and got it back to me… in less than 48 hours! Holy cow.
Not only do I have a new keyboard, but the cooling fan is barely perceptible, because they cleaned it and the heat sink inside, which was probably full of animal fur. Folks, my hat is off to Dell. I know they had problems in the past, but from where I sit in 2022, their service rocks! (Tip o’ the hat to FedEx, as well.)
We are in shock and mourning. Our beloved border-collie mix, Captain Jack, has left us. Just two weeks ago, he was joyfully chasing a younger dog round and round at a friend’s house, totally exhausting us just watching. However, three days ago, he abruptly went into a precipitous decline—not eating, having difficulty walking, and even standing. I realized with a start that he had lost weight, which I hadn’t noticed. Despite long sessions in two different animal hospitals, the cause remains uncertain. But probably it was a return of the cancer that almost took him a year ago. Here he is, enjoying a last review of the property during a brief rally toward the end.
Many of you will remember that he had radical cancer surgery on his jaw a year ago, resulting in a new lease on life, though one with his tongue hanging out for lack of a place to park it. He enjoyed that year, and we are deeply grateful to have enjoyed it with him.
The timing was uncanny. He abruptly showed serious symptoms on the very day Allysen and Jayce were flying back from Puerto Rico. I was at the hospital with him the very hours that they were in a plane coming home. We are all devastated, but grateful that the whole family could be here to say goodbye. A lovely vet named Dr. Johnson, who makes euthanasia house calls, came to our home to ease his way. Many thanks to her, and to Jackie and the other dog walkers, and to our regular vet Dr. Parker, and to Jack’s oncologist Dr. Cronin, and many others who helped make his life the amazing life that it was. I have owned (and said goodbye to) many dogs, but never one about whom so many people have come to me to say, “I love this dog; what a great dog; he was the highlight of my day.” We already miss him terribly.
Still with us is Lady McDuff, aka Duff-Duff, aka Septima, aka Nugget, aka Possum. She was Allysen’s mom’s dog and is now ours, and she has found her own way into our hearts. Here she is with Jack in happier times. No doubt she is mourning in her own way.
Work has pretty much wrapped at Casarboles for this trip. The California half of the crew has already gone home, and Allysen and Jayce head back to Boston tomorrow. What did they get done? A lot, but not nearly as much as they’d hoped, by all accounts. A lot of cleaning, emergency plumbing, and uprooting of out-of-control flora. A lot of estimates from workers who promised to show up the next day and then didn’t. (What else is new?) So, things like broken windows and skylights are still broken. What can you do? Go back in February, is the current plan.
Although power was restored on their second or third day, internet service was not, so they were dependent on their cell phone data service for things like Allysen’s and Andrew’s trying to keep up with their regular jobs back home. I’m not sure how well that went, but I think I can guess.
One thing I do know, because you can see it here: They pumped the green swamp water out of the pool!
That pool will remain empty for now, because shortly after this picture was taken, they discovered that there wasn’t actually any water reaching them from the city, after all! No, they were draining the giant cistern all this time, and now it’s empty. Oh yay, no water! (Well, except for the small secondary cistern which, due to certain, uh, irregularities in the way it was hooked up, years ago, feeds just one toilet way in the back.)
Jayce also supplied me with some essential pictures of the cutest and most adorable of the stray cats wandering about this year.
I’m writing this from home, where I’m holding down the fort while Allysen, Jayce, and Allysen’s brother Andrew and our niece Lauren take on the challenge of working on the house, known as Casarboles. In case you’ve been sleeping in a cave, Hurricane Fiona recently tore through Ponce and the rest of Puerto Rico, leaving shambles in its wake, especially in the least prosperous and most vulnerable areas. There’s city water on the hill, finally, but no power as of the arrival of our company on the hill—except from a small generator, plus another small one Allysen picked up at Costco on her way from San Juan airport. Update: The power to the hill was finally restored, on the evening of day three, Monday. There was much dancing and celebrating, by all accounts.
President Biden recently flew into Ponce* to visit the disaster, instead of following the customary official route of visiting San Juan, which (because it sits on the northern coast and is sheltered by the mountains) typically suffers the mildest effects of these superstorms. I think the folks of southern Puerto Rico appreciated the gesture, especially since it stood in stark contrast to a previous executive’s tossing of paper towel rolls to people who were reeling from Hurricane Maria.
This trip by Allysen and company was actually planned before the hurricane, to fix a bunch of things that needed fixing. Now there’s more to fix. Mostly, from this storm, it’s damage to skylights and windows and doors, and a bent driveway gate that had something land on it. Plus, a general ravaging.
Am I sorry I’m not there? Well, I can’t say I’m envious of what they’re facing. I’m not physically in shape to be able to do much work anyway, and I’m tentatively glad to have some time to myself here, to try to focus less on my health and more on getting some of my own work done. But we’ll see.
I’ve been unable to extract any selfies from the crew, or pictures showing much of the state of the house, but here’s a very nice sunrise, photographed by Allysen the morning after their arrival.
*Side note of complete irrelevance: years ago, when my private pilot’s license was still current, I rented a beat-up little Cessna and did a little sightseeing out of Ponce’s Mercedita Airport, from the very same runway that Air Force One landed on two weeks ago.
I’ve got a new treebook to offer the world: Seas of Ernathe, my first novel and the beginning and the end of the Star Rigger universe to date. The beginning, because it’s the first novel I wrote in that world (or any other world), and the end because it’s set farthest in the future in the chronology of starship rigging. That might seem a little odd, but so it goes with story writing. I actually created star rigging in a short story, “Alien Persuasion,” which later became the starting point of my second novel, Star Rigger’s Way, published in Galaxy in 1974, I think it was. That came before I’d even considered attempting a novel.
Seas of Ernathe came about because of an odd opportunity for a new writer—I wrote it because of a rejection letter for a completely unrelated story. I’d been submitting short stories to a number of markets for years, including to the late Terry Carr, editor of a prestigious anthology series called Universe. He’d been responding with encouraging rejection notes. In this case, he sent back a story called “Love Rogo” (later published in the triad Future Love, edited by Roger Elwood). In his note, he said the story wasn’t right for the book he was doing, though he liked it, and would I be interested in possibly writing a novel—with an advance up front, if I could send him a sufficiently interesting outline and three sample chapters?
Would I? I dropped into my chair in front of my Olympia portable typewriter and started pounding… well, not so much the keys as my forehead. Novel. Novel. What could I write a novel about? I had recently sold “Alien Persuasion” to Galaxy, and starship rigging was in my head. Well… well… what if… well… what if they lost the ability to rig ships? Who knows how or why? It would have to be much farther in the future, maybe because of some breakdown in galactic civilization. I didn’t know. But I just started, eventually, to type. And what I typed was Seas of Ernathe. (That’s a silent “e” on the end, by the way. It’s pronounced Ernath.) And this story told us, not how they lost the art of rigging, but how they made a start at getting it back.
Well, now you can read it! On paper! And not in the cheesy-looking Laser Books edition, which was its first publication. In fact, it now has gorgeous cover art by Chris Howard, who also did my Starstream edition covers for The Infinite Sea, The Reefs of Time, and Crucible of Time. Okay, it’s the same art that’s been on the ebook for a while, and in fact provides the backdrop for my website. But it’s gorgeous, nonetheless, and you can hold it in your hands. The type layout is by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff.
Right now, it’s available at Amazon. Soon it will be available elsewhere, as well.
My goal is to get all of the Star Rigger books back into treebook print in time to make a complete Star Rigger set available for holiday gift giving. Wish me luck!
My son-in-law Connor recently commented that he was done with Marvel movies. They were just getting too awful. I should have followed his example. I recently watched Thor: Love and Thunder. What a terrible mess of a movie. The writing sucked, the acting sucked, and the story sucked. The best part of it was the screeching goats, and that was only because they were slightly less annoying than the rest of the characters. What a waste of great talent. I used to like the Thor movies. What the hell happened?
I should have taken the hint after watching Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. OMG, what a terrible mess of a movie. Way to ruin every character in two hours and six minutes, which in context seemed like a very long time indeed. Even Rachel McAdams, whom I happen to have a thing for in better movies, couldn’t come through this without looking like a total mistake. Which in fact is a kind summary of the film.
Between the two, that’s just over four hours of my life I can’t get back. I think maybe I’m done with Marvel movies, too. I need to learn to just turn them off when it’s clear they aren’t going to get better. Which, come to think of it, is what I should have done with Obi-Wan Kenobi, too.
About four days ago, I was in the basement and heard a chirping beep—just like the sound a smoke alarm makes to alert you to a low battery; you know, the one that makes you scratch your head and say, “Am I hearing things? What was that?” Except in this case the sound was not coming from any of the smoke detectors, at least none that I could find. Eventually I became convinced that it was coming from above the ceiling sheetrock, and further convinced that some contractor had put up sheetrock over a smoke detector. Then I became convinced that it was coming from a big junction box for our ductless mini-split system. Connor was convinced it was coming from another device, but that didn’t sound right to me. It started making increasingly shrill sounds at intervals.
I finally texted Plumber Mike, asking if it could be from the ductless system, and he said, Maybe. He and his assistant came by today to check it out. They searched and searched, going through all the same suspicions I had. But it was not coming from the ductless system, or the other. Finally they found it:
It’s a battery-powered leak detector that used to be attached to one of our old water heaters. At some point it must have gotten kicked off, and someone carelessly put it up on a shelf. A high shelf, well out of sight. Where it sat until its batteries ran low, and its trilling could confound the allegedly wise.
The batteries are out now, and it is in the trash. Sanity, for the moment, is restored.
They came and took away my oxygen concentrator, and also almost a dozen small tanks that were clustered in the other room. In their place, they left a new oxygen concentrator—one that I think puts out a flow closer to the advertised rate—and a Dalek-like machine that sits on top, which refills tanks while I sleep. Now, instead of being limited to the ten smallish tanks that I was allowed per month, I have only two, but I can use them as fast as I can fill them.
This is for going out, of course, especially for dog walks. I’ve learned that my clever Inogen portable concentrator (POC) is fine for going out to the store or whatever, or just knocking about where exertion is low. But when it gets more aerobic, like dog-walking, it just can’t keep up with my needs as well as a small tank in a backpack. I believe this is because the POC gives the O2 in little pulses when I inhale, which is less assistance than a tank on continuous flow. The duration of a tank is shorter, of course, but all I need is 30-40 minutes to walk the dogs, and for that it’s better.
The new machine has a different and no less annoying continuous drone from the old one, and since it’s near where Allysen works all day, I spent that afternoon putting together some sound baffling to try to cut the decibels. That part is still a work in progress.
The last two weeks have been all about oxygen. O2. Breathing stuff. Not that important until you’re not getting enough. Two weeks ago is when the first oxygen supplies arrived. (In case you missed it, the reason for my oxygen is spelled out in Pulmonary Fibrosis and Me.) We now have the constant drone and rhythmic ptoosh of a big oxygen concentrator, which sits centrally located in our apartment and sends supplemental oxygen through a network of green tubes laid out through the house: one to the bedroom, one through the bedroom and up through a hole in the closet ceiling to my office, overhead, and one that I just snake around behind me as I move about. I’m on the O2 most of the time, to keep my blood saturation levels up. I can go off for short periods, but if I’m active, my O2 percentage will drop right into the 80s, percentage-wise, which isn’t great. Most people are pretty stable around 97-98, as I used to be. Also, staying on the O2 seems to reduce my coughing. Here’s the big guy.
Also, I bought a secondhand portable concentrator that I can wear in a backpack when I’m out doing things like walking the dogs.
I never knew walking the dogs was such an aerobic activity! I really have to pace myself. But as promised, I have increased my daily exercising—leg lifts, crunches, etc., before getting out of bed. The highlight is forty squats and forty pushups while the coffee is brewing. That’s something to look forward to every morning! (Not really.) Stopping between sets to breathe really hard and wait for the O2 to come back up, that’s the ticket. Here’s my cool ring oximeter.
Sometimes I get sick of the cannula in my nose and I switch over to Darth Jeff mode. I sound just like the guy in the black suit.
Weird thing about in-home oxygen supplies: It apparently has never occurred to any of these companies that people might need to split their O2 feed into different rooms. They’ll give you the hoses and connectors and cannulas that you need, but when you ask about a splitter valve, they wonder what language you’re speaking. Well, okay, I thought, you can get anything on Amazon, right? Um… After much searching online, I did eventually find a link to a really overpriced two-way plastic valve that works (the gray one on top of the machine). A week later I realized I needed more, and eventually I found the brass gizmo with the yellow knobs. I had to MacGyver a connector between them, because no one seems to make an O2 connector that’s female on both ends. It’s not rocket science, people! Lots of folks are out there looking for the same solutions as I was, but you can’t get it off the shelf. Victory to those who can think outside the box. I feel like I’m controlling a submarine here.
But how am I doing? you ask. Well, some days I feel kind of discouraged. Most days I soldier on. You’re not taking me without a fight, dammit. I’ve got stuff to do!
A few days ago, Allysen and I celebrated our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. Here we are having dinner on the sidewalk patio of the Town Tavern, right here in Arlington.
