For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
I went out biking today with a glorious, record-breaking temperature of 72 degrees in Boston in February. I can’t deny it was wonderful, a great day for walking, biking, dogging. Here is a selfie of me out on the bike path, soaking up the wondrousness. At the same time, I had recurring visions of icepacks melting into the sea, polar bears on ice floes, and sea levels rising. And the thought: This can’t be right.
You listening, Pruitt?
I’ll be at Boskone (SF convention in Boston) this coming weekend—by which I mean on Saturday, and possibly Friday night. Boskone is always a good time, and a great bunch of fans, writers, editors, etc. I’ll be on a couple of panels Saturday afternoon, and doing a reading, as well. Haven’t picked out the reading yet, but I’ll find something from The Reefs of Time manuscript. So it you’re there, do stop by and say hello!
Psssst. The cat moved!
Just making sure.
All is well. You can’t be too careful.
This is what happens when you have a snowstorm and you’re shoveling a foot of snow off the deck late in the evening and you realize you’re hungry.
Website Moving to a New Cave
This website, and its sibling site WriteSF.com, have moved to a new home in the land of internet things. My host for the last twenty or so years, SFF.Net, is closing its doors, sending all of its inhabitants scurrying for new caves. SFF Net has been a major fixture in the SF community for a very long time, and besides being great people, they were known to authors with websites as being the people who never slept. You’d email them with a tech support question at virtually any time of day or night, and would get an answer back usually within the hour, sometimes within minutes. Plus, for years, they hosted my writing course for free, because it was aimed primarily at kids and they liked to help kids. I’m going to miss those guys a lot. Thanks, Jeffry and Steve!
So, with sadness, I embarked upon the job of looking for a new host. I’ve landed at InMotion, who offered a great price and were very helpful in moving my site over. That happened just today. As of this moment, the site is loading verrrrrry slowwwly. I’m sure we’ll work out the problem; at least, I hope we will. WriteSF.com is not yet working on its new platform, but I hope to get that fixed soon, also.
If you’re seeing this page, we’re 90% of the way there. Wish me luck for the last 10%.
Update: The site is still loading slowly, but writeSF.com is now up and running just fine.
Yeah, this is not how I was planning to spend my first week at home. But my laptop, Cygnus-X, started failing on the trip and limped along just far enough to get me back to Boston. In this case it was the screen, not the smart innards, that went bad. I googled the problem and tried the most common fix, which was replacing the video inverter for $20 from Amazon; and that killed it dead. Here’s me, heroically trying to rescue trusty Cygnus, but it was too little, too late.
Given that the little fellow was over seven years old in laptop years—which is I don’t know what in dog years, but old, and slow—I decided it was time to replace it. (But really, two computers in three months? Seems extreme.) Anyway, here is the new beauty, Antares. Named for her glowing red backlit keys (Antares is a red star), and for the lovely Antares in the Chaos books.
Antares is an Asus gaming laptop. I don’t do gaming, but I wanted as much speed and capacity as I could afford, because in two years, it’s going to seem like molasses. So get a running start, is what I figured. Plus, I really like the keyboard!
Antares, live long and prosper! Please.
Chasing leaks. That’s how this trip started, what with tearing up a tile floor to find out where upwelling water was coming from. (We never did, not really. We couldn’t replicate the problem after the tile was up. We have guesses, but only guesses.) Other leaks were smaller, but equally enigmatic. We had some workarounds in progress.
Then, on our last-but-one night at Casarboles (tree house), I was showering upstairs, and Allysen ran in with cries of, “Stop! Water’s raining down into the closet!” Nooo! (Yesss!)
Too late to get the plumbers before we had to leave, and anyway, all the pipes were in cement. It was up to me to see if I could find the leak. And amazingly, on the last day, I did. Silicone seal between shower tub and drain pipe was all deteriorated. Ask Freddi, and he says, in Spanish, “Oh yes, that happens. Phil always just put new silicone in.” And so that’s what I did, carefully troweling it in, just like Doctor McCoy in the Star Trek episode about the Horta. And it cured the leak. We think. There wasn’t time for really thorough testing. Plug and pray, that’s our motto.
In the last couple of days, we did that, and finished painting every inch of what seemed like a 7-acre deck, complete with railings, and caulked a bunch of molding in a different shower, and inventoried tools, and made little cautionary signs (bilingual) to post above the toilets, and of course made trips to Home Depot. And, oh, a hundred or so other things.
We took a little time in the evening of the last day—before the big, final push right through to 4 a.m. and departure for the predawn flight—to relax and enjoy a meal by the pool. It really was quite lovely. Here’s a selfie of the two of us, relaxing by the pool.
And here’s how Casarboles looks after dark. The place is pretty much ready for guests! We’ll be putting it on Air BnB and like that, very soon.
Oh—we’re home in Boston now, recovering. It’s snowing.
This is too good not to share.
It’s 3 a.m. here in Ponce, and I just heard my daughter Jayce take off for home. That is, I heard the rumble of a JetBlue Airbus take to the skies from Mercedita Airport, which I used to be able to see from the hilltop here, before some trees downslope got too big and blocked the view. (You can still see it beautifully from our next-door neighbor’s lovely rooftop terrace.)
The reason I know it was Jayce taking off is not only that I just took her to the airport a little while ago, but because the only airline serving Ponce is JetBlue, and they have exactly two flights in and two flights out every day—and they are all in the middle of the night. The one to Orlando, connecting to Boston, leaves at 3 a.m.; and the one to JFK, connecting to Boston, leaves at 5:50. Okay, I suppose that’s not really the middle of the night (though it is to me), but it’s definitely the middle of the night when you have to arrive at the airport.
There isn’t a lot of other traffic from there, as far as I can tell. I once flew a Cessna 150 from that same runway, back when I was still active as a private pilot. It was great. I rented a plane and an instructor on one of my visits, and we flew around over the city and over the hill where the house is, before heading back. That was one well-worn Cessna, let me tell you. I described it as “quaint” to the family when I got back, but refrained from mentioning the peeling paint and the aluminum patches on the fuselage. I guess I can say it now. I wonder if that little one-man flight school is still in business. I hope so.
Only a couple of days left, and then we’ll be getting on one of those middle of the night flights home. Wait—does that make it a fly-by-night airline? Hmm.
The pool deck at start of day yesterday, many shredded sanding belts into the job. The Work Force really hates sanding.
The pool deck at day’s end, many rivulets of sweat later. (We did other stuff, too.) Can you spot the board we missed, which I saw right after putting everything away?
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Here are a couple of Puerto Rico’s more charming critters.
Still getting work done on the book, though the Force is ready for a vacation. Maybe in some nice, sunny place.