C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 3

That blighter has gotten on my last nerve.

He’s eaten two baby fishes from the lotus pond. He’s ripped up a 30.00 lily. And the struggling lotus. He’s ripped up some of the waterlily pads on the main pond and tossed bark chips into the pond that nearly stalled out the 300.00 master pump, and would have if I hadn’t seen the waterfall stall out and gotten down on my hands and knees to decouple the pump and clear it of bark chips. He’s tried to eat our larger koi. He’s set off alarms that got us locked out in the back yard and cost us a 300.00 basement window.

Tolerance has run out. My only way to deter him forbids our cats the pleasure of their own garden. He’s destroying stuff. He’s eating our fishes. And waking us up at night. So he’s toast. I’ve called someone who will trap him in a trap safe for neighborhood cats, so if I get the neighbor kitty by mistake, we can just turn him loose. But this is war. Unfortunately by state law there’s no catch and release for this fellow, and I’m very sorry about that, but he’s beyond the annual nuisance some of his kin are who just trek through on their way to the river. He’s regarding our back yard as his and is big enough to threaten neighborhood pets, and I’m drawing the line.

A little note for those using Firefox browser. The latest update of an Intel driver apparently caused my browser to hang after several hops across the internet, particularly in graphics-heavy sites. This would produce an error message in Win 10 to the effect that firefox had been blocked from accessing graphics hardware, and the program would hang on the next requested hop to another site.

The cure for it apparently was to go to the video adapter on the hardware list and roll back the last update. We’re not totally sure this fixed it. But so far no more hangs.

Dunno if it’s Intel’s problem or Mozilla’s, but the two aren’t playing nice with each other.

Bummer. I love pasta. But I am wearying of it. Eating is a bit of a chore. The good news is I’m down 10 lbs.

Then they may start the other side.

To deal with prowlers at the pondside we installed little spooklights around the path, and when they go on, we know something’s out there. So I went out about 11:00 last night armed with an electric lantern to put whatever it was out and away from the pond. Jane followed, and because her cat decided to help, shut the back door to keep him in.

With the lock engaged.

We were locked out.

And the lantern died.

And I tripped and fell on some rocks by the waterfall.

And then we ascertained that, yes, the front door was locked, too.

And the neighbors lights were out.

So Jane decided to try to get in the side of one tiny basement window that had a wooden insert to admit the dryer hose. In the process, we broke the adjacent panel. And she still couldn’t get in, despite painful efforts.

I decided to go wake the neighbors—so in my nightgown, I trek over next door, wake that household, and then Jane shows up saying she’s in.

Well, in, except for the cuts from the glass still in the frame. Mostly scrapes and one nasty slash on the underside of her arm.

A pile of bandages later, and some reassessing what we’re going to do with that window, which right now is provisionally secured—we have a plan.

I have to apologize to the neighbors.

Jane is calling the basement window repair people.

I have the long-awaited dental appointment tomorrow.

This is going to be a week.

These look a lot harder than they are—the terms are really scary, but they give you a lot of examples, and the test of each unit is 4-5 questions which you have been prepped for. I didn’t get to finish my marine evolution course—nearly did, but time ran out on me, just a schedule problem. But they’ll repeat it and I can start where I left off, which was the last unit in the course. You can learn suffixes like -ine, -oid, and such, prefixes like meso-, di-, a-, and syn- that will make the big names ever so much easier.

The REASON for the big names is not to confuse outsiders to the field, but to (in one package) give an adept reader a pretty good picture of the critter’s skeleton or relation to other critters without even seeing it. In other words, it’s clan and tribe and family wrapped up in a bundle of prefixes, suffixes and core.

So once you get onto that, life becomes a lot easier. You can practically visualize where your critter fits on the tree of life.

The one I didn’t get to complete is Early Vertebrate Evolution. They currently are’t offering that, but may in a month or so. And the last one I completed is Dino 101, which is very broad and a lot of fun. Early Vertebrates is a little more dense, but because I know a lot about fishes, it was very illuminating, too…like our inner ear and a fish’s lateral line are related.

And the keyboard has a nice touch. If you’re used to Dells. The sd reader does not let you leave the card in…it sticks out about halfway, so it wouldn’t be wise. And we have had issues with that. But the screen is nice, the speed is good, and thanks to Carbonite’s excellent on phone assistance, we managed to get both my Win 7 and my Win 10 computers happy at once with the same files. It’s different. I haven’t been able to dissuade it from powering down (but not off) when I close the lid, but that’s minor.

I am slowly dragging stuff *I* want into the display of choices. Jane found me Spider Solitaire and Mahjong, which are necessities of life.

And last night our garden prowler was back. Jane chided me for going out after it in the dark without waking her, but I’m pretty sure it’s a neighborhood cat, nothing too fierce. I have sprinkled Havahart black pepper where it can get to the water, and maybe that will discourage it. Fish do swim on bright nights, since they have a kind of radar that operates along their lateral line, and I don’t want them investigating that pond edge with company perched there.

When I told them fast, they believed me. It’ll be an i7—this is an i5. Win 10, which I will, well, see about. And I have gotten Carbonite straightened out. It took me 2 days to locate the phone number to reach a live person, but when I did he was excellent, and had an explanation. I think that an advisory about some security changes must have come through during the time we were in Chicago seeing to things and in the confusion, I didn’t update. So now we are fixed. When I told him my machine was showing mostly currently backed up and the info online was saying it had been some 6000 days since the last backup, that seemed to say everything. So we are now completely backed up and current and the systems are talking as they should. Which means when I get the new computer I can tell it ‘restore’ the data from the current one to the new one, and that job will be done while I sip coffee. Removing the bloatware and consigning Cortana to the ninth depth of hell is going to take a bit more time.

New machine is coming. I get to go through all the hassle of reloading all the software. Ugh. Oh joy, oh rapture. But I’m going to be a little slow communicating through this mess. Current computer state: up and running, but I’m not going to shut her down until the new machine is here. And I have to deal with Win 10. I hates it, I truly hates it.

I tend to reject as robots names that are alphabet soup or that have certain linguistic tics. I won’t say which, but say that Derp is not going to get admitted.

They come in sets of 3. For a gold-plated no-prize (Marvel comics style: you may know there is truly no prize)—let’s hear your ideas.