Have a slideshow of wedding pictures while I’m away.

At one point, we needed to get diesel for the car and Rob said that he thought he’d wait until we exited for our next turn. I thought that there weren’t any options at that exit — and I was right. It was weird.

If you were in elementary school in Washington or Oregon in 1995-97 or in Idaho in 1993-1995 or 1998, then  I almost certainly performed for you. It is a little awkward how many adults I run across that have memories of seeing me perform or rather of seeing the shows that I performed.

Please give my husband a job. He’s a really good guy and has been looking for a long time now. At least, nineteen months of sending out resumes and looking for a job, seems like a long time. I know that it is hard for everyone. Truly, I do, but I have a very smart husband, who I adore, and not working makes him sad.

So could you please check your job listings and see if there’s a spot he might fit?  The field doesn’t matter. “All work is noble” quod he.

I am linking to his website for your reference but would be happy to forward his resume in any format that you require.

Many thanks for your time and attention.

Sincerely yours,

Mary Robinette

He is something of a minimalist in aesthetic so doesn’t like to receive gifts.  For years, my practice has been to give him subtractive presents.  This has been things like gift certificates to remove the item of his choice from a room, or a day without internet. Sometimes, it involves repairing an item which he is fond of so that it doesn’t need to be replaced.

This year, I am editing the apartment to remove some clutter.

We might go see a movie later. We might stay in. Either way, I will bake a peach cobbler.

For those of you reading along, I posted Chapter 12‘s draft

Here’s a tiny teaser.

Someone shook Walker’s shoulder. “Mr. Browning?”

He woke with a start, face pressed against the Eames’s kitchen table. Light from a shake-lamp bobbed across the table, paining his eyes. His whole right arm seemed nothing but pins and needles.

Miss Parker crouched in front of him. Worry creased her brow. “Are you all right?”

 

I find my self today on the shores of Lake Quin­ault.  The two dozen writ­ers con­vened here dis­play an intrigu­ing range of coun­te­nances and no doubt tal­ent – but I have no basis for com­men­tary, but in this serene and pre­his­tor­i­cally quiet set­ting, I was hop­ing to encounter voices. I must be patient, for it takes days to habit­u­ate to one’s sonic envi­ron­ment, to hear anew.

Read the full post at Robert Kowal » The Ear Directs the Eye.

Incidentally, the next post, An Actor’s Terroir, is also really interesting.

We are off to visit for the week.  Try not to feel sorry for me.

“Reality has passed completely into the game of reality.” – Jean Baudrillard.1

My undertaking here is quixotic perhaps and, I suspect of myself, disingenuous, disdainful and condescending; thus it is perfectly suited to the Internet which purports to sate our intellectual curiosity, liberate us politically, and heal us socially while it (or rather we) dissipate in its confabulatory hallucination.

You may read his words over at Robert Kowal » BLOG.

We caught the shuttle with no problems but then, not surprisingly, traffic to Atlanta was backed up because of two different accidents.  The shuttle wound up arriving at the airport an hour late, which caused some of the other passengers concern, but was okay for us.

Security was no problem, thank heavens. We boarded the flight on time and they shut the boarding door, preparing for an on-time departure.

Then they reopened the boarding door.  This is generally not a good sign.

The captain came on to announce that they were having some maintenance issues in one of the forward galleys.  Then he came back on to say that the maintenance issue was a short in one of the warmers which had given the flight attendant a “rather severe shock” and they would have to replace her.

She walked off under her own power, accompanied by two paramedics, but looked a little pale.

Sadly, her lack of grounding meant that we were grounded. At least until they got that fixed and got a new flight attendant in.

Apparently this was complicated because of the snow in the northeast, which meant that a light of flight crews were also stranded. The pilot said, “Frankly, I’m not sure they even know where everyone is right now.”

During the next hour and a half, the crew was attentive.  They even pulled a couple people off the flight who were obviously going to miss their connections and rebooked them from Atlanta.  We also got random influxes of other passengers, which I suppose were people who were being rebooked themselves.

We got home an hour and a half late, but with our luggage and health intact, so I really can’t complain.

But for those who were wondering if Rob cancelled out my travel karma, I have to say… no. No, he doesn’t.

But… just in case people want to avoid my travel paths.  We’ll take the noon shuttle to Atlanta and then take a 4:30 flight back to Portland getting in around 7pm Pacific.  Hopefully, we’ll be home by 8:00 tonight.

We had dinner with my folks, helped with some tree decorating and are now enjoying a fire in the fireplace.

The cats seem surprised to see us.

At least. This is the plan.

Rob had been at work with two people that had pneumonia for a couple of days the week before this hit so it was in the range of possibile illnesses. The bad news is that I was contagious for the past week and saw a lot of people. Hence this post of warning.  Doom!

Did you see me last week and get sick a couple of days later?  Don’t worry, it’s just a respiratory infection but a fairly unpleasant one.  The doctor thinks it is not the flu.  Here are my symptoms.

• Starts with a head cold
• Adds a fever and a sore throat
• Nasty cough
• Green phlegm
• Some nasal congestion, but mostly chest
• Aches
• Rob got shaking chills and night sweats
• We’ve both been sick for over a week.  Rob for ten days, me for eight.

They’ve got us both on antibiotics to which it is already responding.  The point is, if you saw me and you got sick about two or three days after, don’t mess around. Go to the doctor.

And I’m sorry about that. Until the fever hit, I thought the cough was from all the travel.

I mostly hung out and was quiet today, aside from making soup.  See! I am a good caregiver. I made him soup. And toast.

And then I went out to dinner with friends. But he was fine, really.

Bachelorette life is not all it’s cracked up to be. le sigh…

Today I slept in with my sweetie. Then headed off to run errands on the bicycle. Everytime I’m come back from a trip away I feel so much… release when I get on the bike for the first time. I think it is related to a sense of empowerment. With the bike, I’m able to get around under my own power and not reliant on trying to figure out transit in an alien city.  There’s a level of comfort which is nicely reinforced by the endorphins of exercise.

So today I biked down to the post office to mail off some packages and inquire about a P.O. Box. From there I went down to Powell’s where I signed copies of Shades of Milk and Honey, which was fun, and had my picture taken. It’s a totally ridiculous and fun promo thing they are doing.  Basically, when you leave the Gold Room and head toward the Rose room, on the Mezzanine there’s this guy with a camera and a greenscreen. You get your photo taken and they send you a copy. Way better than posing across the street especially since they put my name “on” the marquis.

From there off to visit my friend -e- briefly at Malloys where we made plans to meet up later for drinks. The rest of the afternoon I spent at Central Library researching the WIP. I need to thank Pauline, the reference librarian, who pointing me in the direction specific books in the 975s which was very helpful.

-e- and I had drinks at Secret Society which is fast becoming my favorite bar in Portland. I had a Jasmine Cocktail and a Sazerac. Bizarrely, there was another puppeteer sitting at the bar so I had a moment where the puppetry radar went off in my brain and we had a quick and lovely conversation about “OMG puppets!” and then went back to hanging out with the folks we’d actually arrived with.

All in all a delightful day.

So… it was do or die. Through a variety of circumstance ranging from corrupted uploads to paying work coming in, which always supersedes a freebie, to export errors we’d cut it really close. Still, we had no expectation when we went down there that we’d stay up all night.

We left around 9:20 this morning and my writers group meets not far from the editing suite, so I’ve arrived about forty-five minutes early to have coffee and breakfast.

I ordered a half-caff latte. Shocking, I know.

It really is silly that it sounds like a total wimpy beverage and will in fact leave me a little wired. I have no complaints about this. The bike ride also helped, but I’m going straight home and to bed.

The cats are frantic with loneliness and Marlowe is doing a great deal of chasing invisible demons to prove his affection for me.  Rob is still away at IPNC so I’m just going to go to bed and let the cats hog his side.

So tonight, even though I had stuff to do, Rob and I went on a date. We went up to Ohana Hawaiian restaurant where my husband ordered spam musabi as an appetizer. I do not understand this snack.

After that we biked to the Roseway theater to watch Toy Story 3. The warnings that it was a) really a horror film and b) would make me cry were both accurate. Once again, Pixar proves that they understand character and story.  Also, as Rob points out, their films are beautifully edited and paced.

I’m going to go through my checklist again and then crawl into bed with my sweetie. It’ll be a week before I see him again.

A lot of what we do involves twisting our bodies into odd positions and then holding weights over our head, while lip-syncing and singing.  There are more comfortable postures, but very little of it is the way the human body is actually designed to work.

While I always try to build ergonomic puppets the fact is that there are times when it’s just going to hurt. Even holding your arm out in front of you, without a puppet is fatiguing and will eventually hurt. Someone once asked me why more puppeteers don’t do yoga. I showed him a standard operating position and said, “Now I have to sing while holding this position with a eight pound weight over my head.”

I’m reminded of the types of pain while going to the gym.

My trainer is very good at reading body language and knows how to take me right up to the limit of what my body will do, without damage. But, there are somethings that he can’t tell without a report from me.

To help with wrist strength, he had me hold a weight under handed, supporting my forearms on my knees. Using my wrists, I lowered the weight and brought it back up. As soon as he showed me the position a voice in my brain went “Uh-oh” because I’d had a wrist injury involving that position years ago. So, I started very cautiously, with a lot of control, to see how it would feel.  It was fine. We moved up in weight. Five reps into it, I stopped because it was giving me the wrong type of pain.

This is one of the things you learn to identify as a puppeteer. There’s the pain of fatigue and there’s the pain of damage. The former you try to tune out. The latter is very, very important.

My wrist twinged for another fifteen or twenty minutes and hasn’t given me any other trouble. But let me explain why I know exactly how important it is to stop when the body is giving you that signal.

In early-2000 I was in a three-month run of Little Shop of Horrors. The largest puppet in that production weighed about 80 lbs and was well-balanced so it was easy to handle. Easy being a relative term.  It’s still heavy and you can’t breath or see, but besides that, it’s easy to work.

The weekend before we closed the show, the actor playing Seymour and I were doing our usual fight scene and he threw his punch slightly early. It was supposed to happen while the puppet was on the ground, but happened while I still had it in the air.

The puppet twisted to the side and I tried to control it. In my wrist, something popped.

“That’s not good,” I thought and adjusted my grip to finish the show. Adrenalin is useful.

Afterwards, I iced it and wrapped it. It was a two show day so I just worked in different postures to try to avoid problems. That was a Sunday. I had Monday, Tuesday and most of Wednesday off during which I babied my wrist. It seemed like it was just a minor ouch.

Then I got back in the puppet.The moment I put my hand back into operating position I knew I had done something very, very wrong. Of course, I did the show anyway, by shifting to positions that didn’t hurt.

I was lucky and this was a rare show with workers comp so they whisked me off to ER as soon as the show was over. The doctor didn’t listen to anything I said and kept talking about repetative use injuries, ignoring the “sharp impact” and “popping” sensation I reported.  He put me in a brace and sent me to a regular doctor the next day.  The injury had very localized swelling and only hurt in certain positions. He thought it might be a cyst.

So I was immobilized for a week and then put into physical therapy.

The physical therapy felt wrong. I kept telling the therapist that it hurt and that it didn’t seem right. I couldn’t articulate why though, just that the pain was wrong. After a month, my whining eventually got me sent to a hand specialist.

It turned out that I’d torn a ligament — though not all the way through — and that I’d been re-tearing it every day for the past month.

I wound up being in a cast for the rest of the year and in physical therapy for months after that. So now, when the pain is the wrong sort of pain, I am very clear about the need to stop.

Fortunately, my trainer is smarter than that first physical therapist and listens to me when I say that something doesn’t feel right. There’s the good pain, that means you are doing it right. Then there’s the bad pain, that means you are doing it wrong. It’s important to understand the difference.

As a side note, the wrist injury happened two weeks after I met Rob.

But Rob has been working down in the Willamette Valley more frequently and there’s no viable way to commute without a car. No regular bus service. No carpools that fit a winery’s sporadic schedule.

He found a 1985 Mercedes 240D, converted to run on biodiesel or pure vegetable oil. It’s a nice vehicle and fairly low-impact.

But.

The fascinating thing is the shift in thinking the occurred the moment we had it. Situations where I’d have happily hopped on the bike the week prior suddenly required thought. Did I want to mess with rain gear or just take the car.

I’ve finally settled into the thinking that I’ll use the car in situations where I would have checked out a Zipcar. Which mostly means if I need to haul something.

It’s still so tempting though, just sitting there and waiting for me to go places without effort.

We did this today.

There’s my beloved, manning the camera in his role as director. I limited my input to art direction and occasionally movement coach.

Interesting factoid… the table that the vase and flowers is sitting on is not a real table, although the vase and flowers are real.

It’s a music stand.

Well, a music stand with some strategically placed cut paper to change the silhouette into something more appropriate for the Regency.

What actually turned out to be a bonus was that we could change the height of the table depending on what we were filming at the time.  Also, I was able to raise the “feet” of the table above the bottom edge of the shadow screen so it was visible.

Because the light beam widens as it travels from the projector to the screen, even if you are only an inch away from the screen there’s a little well of shadow, that clips the bottom off of images. In this case it was pronounced because we also had a roll of paper on the ground as part of the screen.

Being able to tape the “feet” to the stand  gave me the ability to get over that dark area.

There’s still a load of work to do on the Shades of Milk and Honey trailer, but it’s all in Rob’s camp now. Me? I’m going to bed.

We’re doing the entire trailer using various forms of shadows puppetry as a nod to the popularity of silhouettes during the Regency.  Interestingly, at this point in England silhouettes were called Shades.  So you could say that the trailer is shades of Shades of Milk and Honey.

In the apartment itself, Rob had two beakers of irises waiting for me. These are the flowers that we had at our wedding so very sweet. The cats were indifferent and needy in the way that only cats can pull off. Rob had also baked some of his famous chocolate tart cherry bran muffins. So tasty. And what had he baked them in?

This.

I’ve been gone longer than this before, but we usually know that I’ll be gone for months and you can prep for that, emotionally. This time, we thought it would be a week and a half. We do manage to talk almost every night, but a month is still a long time.

So the fact that I will see Rob, tonight, makes me a very, very happy girl.

I made black-eyed peas and collards, with Grandma’s pear relish. Rob made ozoni soup so we had a very traditional meal, albeit from two different traditions.

Also, I just have to point out that it’s 2010, which is such a science-fictional year. It is also the year that my novel will come out, which seems like dream-land.

I always use the married version of the honorific when I’m filling out forms but it’s exceedingly rare to actually have someone call me “Mrs. Kowal.”  It feels a little like I’m pretending to be a grownup.

All of this is percolating around in my head because Rob and I are celebrating our eighth anniversary this week. November 17th, 2009 we got married in Chattanooga, TN. I am as deeply in love with my husband as I was on our wedding day.

To celebrate eight years of being Mrs. Kowal, I’m disconnecting from the outside world.  No phone, no internet.  Just Mr. Kowal and me.

In the evening we joined the SF in SF group at Henry’s Hunan for dinner. It was like KGB in reverse in that Chinese food preceded the meal. Seeing Cheryl Morgan, Jeff Vandermeer, Jacob Weisman and the rest of the gang was a lot of fun.

Then I was off to Writers with Drinks in the Mission. Oh, my goodness. What. Fun. Charlie Jane Anders absolutely rocks as a hostess and M.C. I very much enjoyed hearing the other readers. In fact, they were so good that I got nervous about my fiction and offered the audience a choice. 1 story, 2 very short stories, or 1 very short story and a puppetry demo.

They chose option 3, so after I finished reading “Death Comes but Twice,” I pulled off my boot and used it as a puppet to demo the 4 principles of puppetry. So, you may imagine my delight when Chris Hsiang, gave me this dollar bill as I walked off the stage.

Rob and I had a relaxed day in SF and are now in San Jose where I will be teaching for the next couple of days.

It was really bizarre looking through the locker as we’d forgotten what a lot of the contents were.  Rob said that it was like going through a deceased aunt’s house because all the things in there seem like they belong to another life.  Creepy.

I found my box of juvenilia, which I did not bring back to the apartment, tempting though it was.  At some point next summer, we’ll go down and sort through things but at the moment it was just too overwhelming.

Confused? He was driving back tonight from California, after driving there yesterday to drop off grapes.  He thought he’d make it back by 12:30ish tonight but also thought he might stop and sleep instead. So, I’m waiting up to see if he calls to tell me he’s pulled over for the night.

Meanwhile, to pass the time, I’ve completed a short story, made a peach and apple cobbler, and made vanilla ice cream.  I believe the first two are successful. The third is a little… crunchy.  If I think of it as snow cream then it’s fine.  Note: lowfat milk doesn’t cut it for icecream.

On the other hand, the cobbler really wanted it and… this will tell you a lot about me. I was too lazy to walk back to the store to buy ice cream.  It’s okay. I see the crazy there.

Did I mention I finished a short story?

Edited to add: 12:45. He is home safely. Night all!

Through the magic of Skype, I spent two days reading the rest of Glamour in Glass to the folks back in the Puppet Kitchen. I’d gotten into the habit of reading stories to them when I was finished and they had been listening to me read the novel as I worked my way through it. This makes me happy that 3000 miles will not keep me from using them as a sounding board for fiction. It makes me feel like I’m still sort of there.

The rest of the week was spent trying to tempt Laurel Amberdine and her husband to move to Portland. Now, other people might regard having houseguests a week after moving in to an apartment as a crazy idea, but having company actually helps me feel more grounded. I think it’s a nesting thing.

That helps significantly since I’ll spend the rest of this week being a wine widow, while Rob is off on another trip to California. Thank heavens I’ve got some short fiction to work on. Might be time to call the Puppet Kitchen again…

This will let Chris and Laurel, who are staying with us, have the apartment to themselves for the evening. I’m pleasantly surprised by how well the apartment is working for having house guests.

After everyone had gone, Rob carried me across the threshold.  In a fireman’s carry, to be sure, but romantic in his own way. We never did that when we got married since I already owned the house when we met.

I managed to get most of the kitchen unpacked, which makes me feel a little better. It also gives me a clearer sense of what we’ll need in order to make it a workable space.  Actually, the layout, compact as it is, will probably be the most efficient kitchen I’ve worked in. It’s just going to be a matter of deciding where things go.

If we drop the “must have a gas stove” requirement, the field widens. We’re giving ourselves a little longer with the current criteria.

My feet are tired.

It’s also been interesting what things each of us sees in the apartments.  I respond to views. Rob responds to ceiling height. He notices how many outlets are in each room. I notice how the windows open.

Did I mention my feet?

When we got home, -e-’s friend G– was here with her son. G– it turns out is a fantastic baker and had turned up with homemade bread, quiche and a loaf of banana bread.  -e- made a salad.  We contributed cheeses carefully aged in a vintage ice chest and agitated in a large truck for ten days.

I wonder if Rob will rub my feet?

No, no. Don’t mind us. We were awake anyway.

Rob is out of surgery and well. We and the GBoF are going out for breakfast.

He took his wedding ring off this morning and says that his hand feels strange without it. I think that’s good.

Meanwhile, later today you can look forward to the return of the Giant Block of Foam. Now, here’s the question. Rob thinks I should customize it, but we’re not sure what to do. How do you think I should mod it?

Yesterday was fairly low-key, largely because I spent the day hanging out in the kitchen. Maggie would eat a few bites at a time if I was in there, so I hauled a chair in and hooked the computer up.  She eventually ate some White Chunk Tuna in oil with a fair bit of enthusiasm and even had some kibble.

Today, mysteriously, she likes the kibble and not the tuna.  The ways of ailing kitties are mysterious.  The kitchen floor has seven bowls of different food set out to tempt her. It’s a kitty buffet.

My big accomplishment yesterday was finishing the outline for Glamour in Glass, the sequel to Shades of Milk and Honey.  With the help of Michael Livingston, I pounded out some details to make them clearer for people who aren’t in my head.  You know how it goes. “Interesting scene with local characters” makes total sense to me it’s just, um, not particularly clear to the rest of humanity.

I actually like outlines and at some point will post the two versions of the outline for folks to look at. There’s the one that’s meant for me, and there’s the one that’s “unpacked” to make sense for other people.

I sent the outline off to my wonder-agent, Jennifer Jackson
to see what she thinks and spent the rest of the evening hanging out with Maggie and Rob in the kitchen.  Today, Maggie seems to be feeling better, so we are alternating between the kitchen and the sofa.

(Happy Mother’s day!)

Back home, Rob made rhubarb pie while I made a dancing bear.  It was very relaxing. I’m taking process shots of the bear and will post them a bit later.  Now, I’m off to bed.

I got home and she was basically a skeleton with fur and just hiding in the closet.  I called the vet, explaining that she wasn’t eating or drinking.  We discussed humane euthanasia, but decided that as long as she was still happy sitting in someone’s lap that we’d let nature take its course.

I was struck by the fact that she kept trying to go to the litter box with no success.

Now, this serves as a warning to everyone that I’m going to be talking about the tail end of a cat’s digestive system.

Seriously, read no further if you don’t want to know about a kitty enema.  I’ll let you know right now that she’s much better, but it does involve an enema and a cat.

I mean it.

You’ve been warned.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

Right… so, I researched “constipated cat” on the internet and found several different sources that talked about how this was fairly common in older cats, particularly ones on a high meat protein diet. Now the only thing she’d really been eating last week was tuna, so this seemed to qualify.  Several of the sites had people commenting that their vets had told them to adminster a glycerin enema for infants.

It was fairly late, but Rob and I talked about it and decided it couldn’t hurt at this point.  I trotted off to the pharmacy and came home with a box of them, guaranteed to invoke a bowel movement in 15 minutes to one hour.

The results, shall we say, were astonishing.

I’d read that what would happen to a cat would be that water would leach out of the colon and turn the stool into a “hard, concrete-like object.”  Yes.  What nothing prepared me for was that the gylcerin greases the system enough so that these hard pellets come out of the cat like projectiles.  Thankfully, Rob had the foresight to do this in the bathtub.

Basically, he laid her on her back in his lap on a towel. My job was to scritch her ears. We alternated between saline enemas and glycerine three times. The tube for the actual infant enema seemed awfuly large for a kitty, so Rob inserted it into a narrower tube from the bottle that I use when dying my hair. It’s totally clean enough for use with her, but I’ll be buying a new one for me, thank you very much.

There was nothing wrong with her vocal cords, but she was weak enough that she just let us do this unpleasant thing to her.  So, we cleaned out her, um, system and washed her off. She hated us but seemed to be moving better.

Then this morning, a miracle occurred. She jumped onto the bed and demanded to be fed.  She’s been eating and drinking normally all day. Now, she’s still feeble and not back to her old self, but the turnaround is so astonishing. I mean we both really thought she was dying.

She might still be, but we’re hoping that we’ve got a reprieve.

• 12:49 Worried about Maggie. Rob and I realized that neither of us saw her eat yesterday. She has no interest in food today. Not even the treats. #
• 13:22 Just loaded an unprotesting Maggie into the cat carrier. The vet has an opening today. She’s drinking water at least, so that’s good. #
• 13:33 We’re in the cab and there’s NOTHING wrong with her vocal cords. Man, that’s a lot of volume from such a small cat #
• 14:35 Maggie and I are on the way home. She weighs 5 lbs 10 oz, which is way too light. They are doing bloodwork. #

The vet gave Maggie an appetite stimulant and pumped her full of fluids.  The suspicion is that it’s kidney trouble which isn’t uncommon in older cats.

About an hour after I got home, she nibbled on some tuna which was an enormous relief.

An enormous and short-lived relief.  When I got home tonight, Rob told me that Maggie has developed diarrhea in addition to vomiting.  The poor thing is curled up on a heating pad and looks just miserable.

I’ll be honest, Rob does our taxes. Why? Because he’s more likely to follow Rule #2 from my suggestions on how to survive tax season. What, you don’t think fantasy films can offer insight into taxes?

From there I swung by the apartment to collect Peter and we went to see August: Osage County. Rob was supposed to join us, but then couldn’t so I gave his ticket to an old puppeteer friend who I hadn’t spent time with in ages. It was great catching up although I think that bored Peter. He reports that the play was good. I’m pleased, I must say, by the fact that my nephew wasn’t put off by being taken to a pretty heavy bit of theater. Bleakly funny though it is.

We went out for Italian for dinner and then came back to the apartment so I could get some work done. He’s used to having his xbox 360 so is a little restless in the apartment. We wound up going for a walk around 9:00, up to the Hungarian Pastry shop and then around the Columbia campus, just shooting the breeze.

It was a good day. If only I didn’t still have work to do.