Bad weather

Yesterday was icky snow, so I had my first experience driving in slippery conditions. I took Marcos home first, so I got some good advice (Marcos is from California, but he lived in Minnesota for awhile--I'll trust him) before I was on my own. Christine had already said I could stay with her if the roads got bad, but directions to her house from SCC don't have much in common with directions to her house from Marcos's house, especially after I made an unplanned turn onto Leighton in order to avoid rear-ending the giant black pickup in front of me at a stoplight. I had to navigate one of those insanely labyrinthine neighborhoods common to Lincoln before I could find 81st, and then I had to ask a lady shoveling her driveway in the early dark where I was in relation to Vine, Christine being a block north thereof. Fortunately I was still a little way north, and once I crossed Holdrege Christine called and directed me the rest of the way.

So then I had my first experience of an impromptu sleepover. Christine was a little hyper-hostessy, but we sat on the couch and watched movies until bedtime. I was thinking rom-com, but "A Walk to Remember" and "P.S. I Love You" are, it turns out, dramas. Hardcore dramas. Someone-special-dies dramas. Sigh. There were fun moments, I guess. And they're both based on books. Is that good?

I had a clean t-shirt and my Krav pants in the car, which made tolerable pajamas. I have a toothbrush in my backpack, I had leftover food in my backpack, Christine happened to have a charger compatible with my cellphone......and I slept like a rock until my phone and the alarm clock went off at seven.

And it's such a short drive to school that even leaving later than planned, I still made it to the parking lot before Conan got out of his truck. Nice.

Yaaaay!

Wednesday is my day for volunteering at St. Elizabeth's. I like St. E's--the atmosphere, the location, the Christian worldview (even if they are Catholic) but I'm a little frustrated. I'm volunteering up in the postnatal ward, and the nurses aren't busy enough to delegate much to volunteers. Finding enough to do is a bit difficult, because I can't take my supervisor's advice and knock on doors, asking patients if they need anything. This is, apparently, the nurses' territory. They have a point--a new mother probably isn't interested in doing much beyond sleeping and cooing at her baby, and who am I to interrupt? But that leaves such activites as making tea-pads and badgering Mallory at the desk for chores to do.

Well, today I did very little badgering. The tea-pad supply was actually low, and I spent an hour and a half making tea-pads. While no task can be entirely mindless, one does eventually hit the limit on refinements to technique. I think I am approaching this point, making tea-pads. I mean, I've got my work setup down. Now I'm trying to order my operations to maximize cooling of the tea before I have to hold a thin plastic bottle full of it. Divide and Conquer sounds fun, but the fun is limited. Anyway. The supply of tea-soaked maxipad icepacks is now Topped Up.

After that I did go and ask Mallory, just in case, because while the supply of care packs is low, I can't make up more without more photocopies of the booklet, which always runs out before I come. Mallory told me that the lady at the Labor and Delivery desk had mentioned a project for a volunteer. That was interesting! I mean, it was filing, and I probably committed a dozen HIPAA violations today, just trying to find a clear version of a patient's name in order to look for her file, but admissions and things were going on in the background, and medical eavesdropping can be educational--especially if one asks questions afterwards. Medical questions, not gossipy ones, of course.

To summarize--today I felt both competent and useful. Best of all, I felt as though I was learning.

Literary devices

Sometimes, after an epic, life-changing adventure, a character forgets everything at the end. Patricia McKillip used this in Ombria in Shadow; the city shifted, and nobody could remember that things had ever been different. Robin McKinley explains in a blog post why this is a horrible thing to do to one's characters: adventures are for learning about oneself, and how can the changes in a character remain when the character has forgotten what she can do? I thought it just bothered me because I hate forgetting, but okay. Erasure of character development.

However, even though this device is Not Okay, writers still use it. I understand why, of course. Sometimes the author wants to release a character back into the wild after a long and disturbing period in situations that ought not to exist, and the only clear way for the character to return to normal life as if nothing had happened is for him to forget all about those adventures. Artemis Fowl was mindwiped by the fairies because, if I recall correctly, they didn't want him complicating things anymore, and I think he went along with it. Of course, since he'd become Chaotic Good only through the long process of Adventures, as soon as they erased his memories he went back to being evil, though perhaps with a nagging feeling that he shouldn't be doing this stuff.

My question is not, "But why would anyone ever want to do that?" My question is, "Does anyone actually like this device?" Is there a single reader out there who reads something like Artemis Fowl and says, "Oh, yeah, they erased all his fun memories of adventures and making friends and becoming a decent person! I love it when they do that! I hope he never remembers!" I would understand some enjoyment if the reader was looking forward to the process by which, in spite of everything, the character remembers after all. I would understand some pleasant anticipation of Artemis's sneaky recording of a video to himself, explaining everything he's forgotten. Sometimes shoujo mangaka like to use temporary amnesia as a device for demonstrating that circumstances don't matter, and the hero will fall in love with the heroine all over again even without the help of whatever weird situation the writer used to bring them together in the first place. These tend to irritate me a bit, but I could understand someone enjoying them. But--at the end of the story--no sequel in sight--for everyone to forget? Completely? It's so unfair to the characters! Readers remember their adventures, but characters aren't allowed to read the book themselves......

Ponies

As a horse-mad child, I scorned My Little Pony. I liked my toy horses to have some verisimilitude, and purple ponies with long pink manes had nothing to do with the animals I adored. For me, there were no pink ponies, only strawberry roans. Commercials for the toys annoyed me, and I never discovered the TV series.

Now I am less horse-mad, and three of my four brothers watch My Little Pony. In my defense, it's not quite the same as the MLP I despised. The theme song has changed, and the ponies are even less realistic. I still twitch occasionally, I admit. The characters are just a little too dextrous with those hooves, and some of the poses bother me a bit. For the most part, though, I can relax and enjoy it. It's become so unrealistic that I can dismiss most standards of reality while watching it, doing my best to suspend all disbelief while Pinkie Pie and Apple Blossom make cupcakes, or Rainbow Dash herds clouds to shape the weather.

I finally finished the first draft of the second paper for Sociology! It's due Monday, but I needed to have a draft early enough to get it to Smarthinking and back. Initial objective: completed! I'd like to do well, but I'm not sure my interpretation of the requirements is in compliance with Mr. Packard's intentions, so we'll see. I'd like to do well on this; most of my quizzes have been 100%, while my previous paper was 98% and my midterm exam score was perfect. Mr. Packard wrote on the score sheet that I'm the second student in his nineteen years teaching this class to get a perfect score on that exam. That's when he started putting smilies on my grades.

I was telling Christine about it--she's been doing a paper for Psych, but she's got a lot going on, so her grades are suffering. This means she's getting A-minuses instead of A-pluses. Christine has high standards, so we've been getting along well. She was telling me about her experience with Soci, earlier this year--she did pretty well, but the paper I'm working on now is one she had a bad grade on, and in comparing that grade with the others she had in the class, she happened to mention that her midterm score was 103. "Was Mr. Packard your teacher?" I asked. Yes--in other words, if it wasn't for Christine, I could've been the first student ever to have a perfect midterm score! While I'm wishing for nice round numbers.....if I'd waited a year, I could've been the first student in twenty years......

No more barn

On Saturday I sold the ewes. I'm going to school full-time this winter, and I won't be able to supervise lambing the way I usually do. Originally, I hoped to time lambing for spring, but the fences weren't up in time to separate the ram, and he had his way, as usual. So they had to go.

Two of the ewe lambs have been gone about a month. Nora and Zora went to a happy home near Lincoln with an enthusiastic lady interested in handspinning and knitting their wool. She sent me some photos; they're much tamer now, and she's been brushing the burrs out of their wool. I'm entirely satisfied about them.

I had more trouble selling the others, though. Three different buyers vanished on me, responding to a couple of emails--even coming to see the sheep, in one case--before vanishing into thin air. I adjusted my prices. Then I readjusted them. No good.

Finally, last Thursday, someone emailed me asking if I was selling "sheeps," and for how much. I phoned the number in the email on Friday. The guy was Muslim, and any animals I sold him would clearly be slaughtered, but I expected that for Felix, and Letta had hurt herself trying to jump a fence. Slaughter might be the best I could hope for, if she sold at all. We set up a time on Saturday for Dana and his dad to come see my sheep.

The crowd that arrived on Saturday was not "Dana and his dad." Dana was there, yes, and so was another college-age guy, two middle-aged men, and a teenager named Muhammed. Felix and Letta were not going to satisfy this crowd. We all went out to the barn, with Doug following along to satisfy Dad's paranoia.

The bargaining process was long and complicated. One of the old men wanted Felix, while Dana and his dad were interested in Hina and Lizzie. Prices bounced back and forth, giving me my first taste of serious bargaining. To complicate matters, Bashir explained to me that the sheep were for a "donation," a charitable feast for which the animals were required to be staggered a year apart in age. Felix was six months old; Hina and Letta were two-year-olds; and Lizzie was somewhere near seven. Dana translated questions and offers, arguing in long volleys of foreign syllables, Arabic or Farsee or who knows what. I am not a scholar of Arabic.

Arrangements morphed swiftly. First they were taking two sheep; then they were taking three, but leaving one until Monday. Then they were going to put Hina and Felix in the SUV, and Lizzie in the trunk of the sedan. However, even hog-tied they wouldn't all fit, so they had to cut Felix's throat before they loaded him. Then they offered fifty for Letta, while they were at it. I fought them up to seventy, but her throat had to be cut, too.

Then one of the old men noticed the chickens. Would we sell chickens? Mom was willing to sell chickens. I started catching chickens. Another? I made Dana and Muhammed help me catch chickens. "We're buying all Anna's animals!" Dana joked.

They did, too. Almost. Oak is still here, wandering forlornly through the pasture. I watched him closely while we tied his ewes, wondering if he would fight, and he wondered, too, but he never did. His harim was kidnapped and slaughtered, and now he's alone, waiting to be sold.

AAAAAUUUUUUUUGGGGGGH. My brain is gone, my paper's gone, the sunshine's gone! At least the Easter candy isn't gone......

Brain: Try going back to look at the remaining math later in the day. For now, play some music.

Paper: Uh.....finish typing it at school tomorrow, when I can access what I wrote yesterday? It would help if I had some idea how I'll rewrite it by then, of course....

Sunshine: It's back. It'll come and go today. Maybe I should go graze the sheep.

Identifying Quotes, part 1

In, um, probably Cryoburn, Miles remembers a quote he once memorized. It turns out to be from "Descent of the Goddess Ishtar into the Lower World," and runs thus:

"I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,
I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors.
I will bring up the dead to eat the living.
And the dead will outnumber the living."

The full text can be found at www.sacred-texts.com.

Lois McMaster Bujold tends to seed her stories with tons of quotes, Biblical, Shakespearean, and miscellaneous. Noticing and identifying them is an ongoing scavenger hunt for me, and I thought I'd better write them down so I'd know which "Hey, I know that one!" moments are new and which aren't.

The Crippled Calf

I have a lot of chores in the morning. It takes a long time to get all the animals taken care of, and they all bawl at the tops of their voices while they wait. The loudest voice is Corbie's, and when I finally get to her pen, she dogs my steps until I set her pan of corn down. Then she goes for it, and it's impossible to get it away from her before she finishes the corn.

When Corbie first arrived, two weeks before the end of last year, we had only the faintest of hopes that she would ever act like this. She'd had a stroke three weeks before; her hindquarters were paralyzed, and the cornea of her eye on the weak side had burst during a session of flailing flat on her side. It was crusted and oozing, and she was beginning to develop bedsores on the weak left side. The farmer told us about the therapy he'd been doing, dropped off a bale of prairie hay and a bucket of cracked corn, and left.

The first thing Dad did, once the calf was settled in, was get online and order a hip-clamp, like the one the farmer had been using. It arrived in about three days, but it was Saturday again before we set it up. In the meantime, I massaged Corbie's legs and tried to flex them. It didn't seem very effective. With the clamp hanging from a rafter, though, we could do so much more. I would clamp it onto her hipbones, then Dad and Owen would hook the other end of the cable to the Suburban's bumper. Dad would pull away until the slack was taken up, then crank the cable shorter with the come-along. Corbie would rise slowly to her feet, staggering around until her hindquarters were high enough for her forelegs to plant in one place. The staggering was good exercise, but only for her forelegs; we were focused on her hindquarters, especially on that weak left. We flexed it; we moved it forward, and cheered when she shifted it back; we coaxed and nudged her to walk. For a week, we did this three times a day: once after Dad got home from work, once more before dinner, and again after dinner. Corbie's progress was slow, but visible. Sometimes she even made little moaning noises at us, though she never outright mooed. Then Mom and Doug got back from Colorado, and Dad and Doug set up a new rig for the hip-clamp. They ran a cable from the pole-barn to the big tree, and hung the come-along pulley from it. Now Corbie could walk in lines, rather than circles at the end of the cable. Almost more important, Owen and I could raise her during the day, without help from Dad and the Suburban. Corbie's progress increased. She began to put more weight on that weak leg; sometimes she even walked on it. We cheered. By January tenth, Corbie was struggling to her feet before we clipped the come-along to the clamp, and we were hooking her up and then going off to chore, letting her stand without nudging or interference. At the end of a session, I would get her up against a post or a bale, then release the clamp while she was still on her feet. She would plunge a few steps, before she left my support behind and fell down. Things were looking good.

On January fourteenth, disaster struck. Her hips swelled, making it impossible to clamp her hips and raise her. Dad gave up all hope. I resorted to exercising her by trying to shove her to her feet; sometimes she gained them, but walking did not go well. Then, two days later, she got up, and began staggering about the pole barn. She wasn't walking well, but she was walking, and she refused to go down. Worried about leaving her on her feet unsupervised, I recruited Doug to force her down somewhere sheltered, out of the weather. She did not appreciate the concern, and when she stood again next day, I did not try again. She was up, she was about, who was I to complain? By the eighteenth she was walking more confidently; the process was wobbly and uncertain, but she did not fall. On the nineteenth, as snow fell, I put in a good sturdy fence along the road.

Since that time, Corbie has escaped her pen at least four times. She has slipped on ice and mud and gotten up again immediately. Her sores have healed; the swelling on her hips disappeared. She went through a wild period, when she ran from petting and touch--I think she felt she had to make up for the time when anyone could touch her. I know she enjoyed the running part. When it rains, she kicks up her heels and pretends to be wild. We eventually put a water tub in, once the weather became sufficiently mild that it wouldn't freeze solid, and she began to moo at us pretty shortly afterward. She comes to me for petting when she feels like it, and yesterday some neighbors seduced her into coming to the fence to visit. They sealed the relationship by coming to the front door and asking if they could feed her. Corbie was pretty enthusiastic about that.

So the paralyzed calf has become a healthy young heifer. When the grass comes in, we'll put her out to pasture with the sheep. She'll deal with them well enough, I think; she gets along with the baby goats, when they come and try to steal her corn every morning. I don't think she's serious when she tries to trample them in a wild mood, and at any rate the sheep will get out of her way. She'll go to slaughter eventually, but in the meantime I think she'll be happy here.

Owen.

Please feed Winter's kids, Owen. And then go see whether Hina's lambed. If so, wake me up. If not, and if I'm not up by ten, please milk. Thank you. The performance of any other chores is between you and your conscience.

I'll change the home page back later.

Sunshine!

It's pretty nice out today, so I moved the kids out to the barn once I got home from Jim's. They've been living in the area around the woodstove, though, and as they've gotten around to sleeping behind it I had to wait 'till they came out for food before I could snag the little beggars. Heh. Actually, I fed them first. Then I captured them. Anyway.

I keep reading these protests to objections about Obamacare. These writers say, "Nobody objecting has actually read the laws! They don't know what they're talking about! It's not what they think!" This confused me, but I think I've developed my own objection. It doesn't matter what the bill actually says. The problem is not, specifically, that the State can order euthanasia, or refuse healthcare on the basis of how likely they think your death is, or finance a teenager's abortion with my tax money. The problem is that the government is interfering with our lives again. What business is it of theirs whether I go to the doctor or not? What business is it of theirs whether a stupid teenager messes up and wants to escape the consequences? It's not their problem, it's ours. If I'm sick or injured, that's the business of myself and my family. The Feds can keep their noses out of it.

The weather forecast for tonight is a temperature of seven below zero. For the past week I've been looking at that forecast and thinking, "I'll have to stay up late Wednesday--we'll probably get some babies then." I was thinking of stuff to do tonight to stay awake in case Dad took the Internet connection when he went to bed. Crack some corn for Corbie, crochet a liner for my hood and maybe some tube socks, maybe bake that leftover cookie dough from yesterday.

At nine o'clock I checked on the ladies for the first time. They were all pretty excited to see me, since the evening check is when they get their grain. The goats all rushed over, and Winter, being a greedy girl, ran out into the hall to try to get into the feed. I thought I heard a baby bleat, but, I thought, it was probably one of the lambs. I dismissed it, poured out the grain, and went to chase Winter back in. She's getting quite good at understanding, "I WILL BEAT YOUR FACE IN, YOU STUPID, GREEDY GOAT!!" bellowed by someone chasing her. Goats learn quickly, and we've been performing this routine for several days. Anyway, I got her back in, and then, because cold makes me paranoid and the lamp for that room is temporarily out of commission, I walked around the room, peering at white shapes in case one of the girls had already kidded. On the far side of the room, in the lee of the bale we'd brought in for bedding and a windbreak, there were two. One looked very much like a kid trying to stand, even in the dark and without my glasses (earlier removed because when it's this cold they tend to fog.) They were both kids: Snowflake had kidded, cleaned them, and even fed one before I distracted her with the promise of grain.

I promptly abducted them while her back was turned. Snowflake is a very good mother, and if we don't take her kids away immediately she will let them nurse until they are sold or dead. I am not kidding. She might not see them for a month, but having nursed them for a week after birth she will recognize them. If she were a sheep, I would cherish her as a pearl among ewes. Unfortunately, she is a dairy goat, and we want her milk. We do not want her to permit chance-met incorrigibles to drink her dry every time we let the whole herd out to graze. So we try to take her kids away immediately after birth. I took this pair inside, and we dried them in front of the wood stove, fed them, and tried to convince them to go to sleep. This last isn't working quite as well as we could wish: the buck keeps waking up and bleating. But so far, this night is a success. I'm still going to have to stay up late to check on everyone, though. Murphy's law suggests that Hina would jump at the opportunity to catch me off guard, and first-time mothers should not lamb alone when it's minus seven outside.

Hey, cool. You can see Clarinda.

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Snow day!

Today is my winter ideal: a blizzard outside, Mom and Doug home, the fire going. The lambs are both big enough to keep themselves warm and none of the pregnant ladies are quite ready to give birth yet. (I hope.) They are, of course, waiting for the night when the temperature gets down to negative eight Fahrenheit, but I'll cross that bridge (survive that night, rather) when I come to it.

And, in the way of news, I got an email last night from the Digital Manga Guild, to whom I submitted my application months ago, saying that I had passed the editor's skill test and was welcome to their team. Something like that. Anyway, now I have to go find myself a translator and a typesetter to form a group with. *grin*

A plug for someone else.

There's a blog I've been following since, hm, last July. It's run by three authors of YA, and they're all crazy. I got there because Robin McKinley linked to them, but one was already familiar because Sarah Rees Brennan keeps recommending her. I've read a couple of her books, but I really prefer the short stories.

Anyway, they're running a contest, now, for an ARC of Tessa's new book, an ARC of which Robin has also received. She reviewed it on her blog, and then laughed evilly because it's not released yet. 9_9 To be entered in this contest, I have to post somewhere about my favorite of their stories, and then link to this post in the comments at their blog. Choosing one is pretty hard; I'm extremely fond of the ones about the paladin, or the one fairy who took over Delaware, the one about the demon bar-bouncer and Brenna's story for the MUGEL THE GIANT illustration prompt. Tessa's Frog Prince story; the MMA one based on a South African story; the one about the young man who shed his skin every New Year. There are dozens. In the end, however, I chose "Wag."

It's Maggie Stiefvater's story for the Hellhounds prompt. It's a bit of a grim warning: the thought is not necessarily what counts, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But it's also hopeful: sometimes it matters what your intentions are. Mostly, though, I like it for the loving way the dogs are described.