Kat Dancing

*cough*

I'm not really very *good* at reforming.

However, we're visiting the Big City right now -- well, technically we're in Jersey, but as far as I'm concerned the entire upper East Coast counts as Big City. And we will actually be in New York on the weekend. And since I don't speak Russian I tend to spend a lot of the time at the in-laws hanging out reading books while everyone else catches up, so I might as well start with the reforming and catching people up on what the hell *happened* to me last year.

I'll start right in with the excuses:



That would be our cheese cellar as of late December. The picture actually doesn't do it justice -- there's round about 20,000 pounds of cheese in there, all of it needing washing either two or three times a week. In total we made 65,000 pounds of cheese from April to December. Since I kinda got promoted to assistant cheesemaker this year, I was involved in making, washing, and panicking pretty much every pound of it.

As excuses for not blogging go, it at least has the benefit of weight.

Next up: the other half of that silly "promotion" thing.

While we were at World Fantasy, suricattus rightly read me out for never updating my blog. I returned from the con with every intention of shaping up and returning to a regular blogging schedule.

Unfortunately, I also returned from the con with a nasty flu.

... it still counts as reform if you're a month late, right?

Okay, I admit it. I'm not actually reforming, I just wanna gloat. One of the reasons I'm not around much is that I started up a webcomic called Sunset Grill, which has slowly but steadily eaten my time, my brain, and possibly portions of my computer's brain. (Memo to self: back up your work, you idiot.) Now, there are some other people on the web with these comic things, and today one of them tossed a mention of SG into his comic. Someone by the name of Phil Foglio.

Yeah, second panel of today's Girl Genius. Read the sign. That's my baby.

I think I may have gone up another level in geek. But if there was a pinging noise this time, I missed it, on account of running around the house screaming like a crazed crazy fangirl. No idea what made Phil pull that particular name out of his hat, but he totally made my day.

And, yes, I really do intend to reform. Of course, I also intend to clean the house, redesign my website, and show up for work on time, but blogging sounds so much easier than any of those things. Perhaps I'll actually get it done.

... February?!

Okay, I was sure I'd posted more recently than that. Sorry, y'all. The past few months have been... involved.

One of the reasons I haven't posted since February is this. Yes, I'm insane, but this one kinda blindsided me. I guess I should have realized that the incredibly long bout of writer's block would have repercussions; my hindbrain simply can't go without story for long, and given that it wasn't moving forward on the novel, it apparently decided to go sideways. Oh, well, it's new insanity anyhow.

Not that I've actually had time to gnaw my way through the writer's block anyhow. The good, the bad, and the ugly, in non-chronological order:

- Filed self-employment taxes for the first time. Goodbye, thirty percent of Dan's writing income! It was nice knowing you.

- Went to Scotland. Hello, semi-permanent state of drunkeness! You were fun, and much cheaper than you would have been in North America. Pity everything else was more expensive and I had to deal with airplanes to get there. (Oh, and the wedding was pretty cool too. Pictures! ... someday.)

- Took over the assistant cheesemaker's duties while simultaneously attempting to keep up with my own. This does not work nearly as well as one would hope. On the other hand, I do get to collect paychecks for those 50-hour weeks, and my parents are desperate enough to resort to bribes -- er, I mean a raise. No, wait, actually I mean bribes.

- Holy crap, when did I develop a social life? And why did no one ever mention that those things eat your time?

- Dealt with my brother's girlfriend's crap. This was a lot of the problem, actually; it's hard to post when your policy of not saying anything online that you wouldn't say to someone's face means you can't talk about something that's stressing you day in, day out, in a thousand little ways, none of which you can actually address because a) you must deal with this person at work and not create any more stress for the other employees, and b) she'll only take it out on your brother anyway. Ah, family businesses. I can talk about it now, though, seeing as she interviewed for a job behind our backs, quit without bothering with any of that silly "two weeks notice" crap, and spent the one week she did work explaining to my brother and all the other employees how all of this was completely justified because we were impossible to get along with. Just like every other employer, friend, or boyfriend she's ever had.

*sigh* God save me from sociopathic suburban oil trash. And I can say this online because, hey. I don't have to get along with her any more. And I would say every word of it to her face.

- Spent more time in the car than is really advisable for any human being. Darn you, social life, if I had to get you, why couldn't I have gotten the compact version?

- Helped organize the American Raw Milk Presidium Evaluation. This basically involved grabbing my mother and holding on until she stopped running circles and started talking sense, although I did write the evaluation sheet, develop the tasting procedure, and handle most of the logistics of getting evaluations back to people afterwards. Oh, and wrote press releases for it. God, I hate writing press releases.

- Won a major award from the American Cheese Society: first place in Farmstead Cheese, and second for Best of Show. Well, not me personally. Our cheese. But our cheese did not have to write a press release (ARGH!) and send it out to a bazillion places and revamp the website and deal with new distributors and do all kinds of other crazy publicity shit, so I maintain a certain fingerhold on the prize.

However, seriously; this rocked.

- Threw a picnic for the local Slow Food chapter. That was pretty fun, actually, and not a lot of work, except for the mad cooking and cleaning frenzy at the farm. But it says something about your workload when organizing and providing meal and entertainment for fifteen people barely makes a ripple in your schedule.

- Survived.

And now somehow it's August, and I'm putting out a webcomic, and I have a friend coming end of the week and another next week and Dan's parents at the same time or maybe a bit after and one of our vendors visiting and a party the week after that and two presentations to write because my mother is sending me to San Francisco at the end of the month. Did I mention bribery? Bribery is cool. Do I know anyone in San Francisco? Does one still have friends after not posting for six months? ...it is still August, right?

I think 2008 will officially go down for me as the year of The Blur.

Kinda cool Blur, though. And I will at least try to keep people more updated on which direction I'm falling apart in from now on.

The last week or so has looked something like this:

Thursday: Have great inner debate with myself on whether it's OK to go up to Blacksburg, given that my brother is still covered in hives from learning he's allergic to penicillin (thank you, modern medicine) as well as not entirely recovered from the disease he was taking penicillin for in the first place and my parents are still in Belize. Allow Dan and the bro to convince me. About two hours later, get a call. One of the first-calf heifers is miscarrying her calf. I've had more experience with this than the bro but I'm an hour and a half away, so I have to walk him through the nasty, messy business of a mispresentation and disposing of a dead calf over the phone. Note to self: listen to the inner debate next time.

What a day from hell. Sorry, bro.

(On the other hand, I assumed on the phone that his girlfriend -- who used to work on the dairy -- would be there to support him. Turns out she wasn't. *sigh*)

Friday: Oh, hey, nothing much actually happened this day, except fallout from the dead calf. Jude -- the cow -- has milk, which means we won't have to sell her, but we do have to milk her.

Saturday: Deathmarch our way through work so we can get down to Greensboro in time to catch the end of What the Hell?! Con. Small, free, and mostly webcomic artists. It was a hoot. I spent entirely too long hanging out and talking to ursulav and Otter, who probably thought I was being clingy. But I was mostly just being introverted ("Argh! Crowds of people! Cannot relate to crowds! Fine one person! Maybe two people! Relate to THEM!") I was pretty tired.

But we had fun, and will probably try to bounce through it next year.

Sunday: Go down to the Biltmore House with my roleplaying buddies. Despite living in Asheville for three years, I'd never been to the Biltmore -- largely because tickets run, like, fifty bucks, and I was a starving student and cheap besides. But one of the buddies had free passes so we made it a road trip.

I will say this for the Biltmore: it's HUGE. With an order of huge on the side. Seriously, 175,000 square feet? 99 bedrooms? Indoor pool and gymnasium? What were these people thinking?

It's also a bizarre intersection of the old and the new which is well worth seeing. To show off his wealth, the guy who built the place had full electricity put in -- this is in 1895, by the way -- and there are toilets in all the bathrooms (all 40 of 'em). But no sinks. Why? Well, they didn't see a reason for sinks; there were servants to bring you your water in the mornings. And many of the rooms still had chamberpots, as some guests were hazy on the toilet concept.

Well worth seeing. Even if the 45-mile an hour winds made it all a bit more exciting -- and chillier -- than I would have liked, especially the driving.

Monday: Prepare madly for the return of The Parents on Tuesday. Discover that the girlfriend hasn't been helping my bro milk the cow either -- a really tedious chore, since one cow isn't enough to fire up the machines for, and Jude, like most first-calf heifers, has a serious case of IBTs (Itty Bitty Titties). There is a muscle between the thumb and forefinger that apparently never gets used for anything but handmilking; if you only milk by hand, say, once a year, it hurts like bloody blazes. Especially if you're trying to get a grip on IBTs. And bro's been doing it by himself for three days.

*headdesk* Me and my choices of time off.

(In defense of the girlfriend, she had a lot on her plate, and she didn't grow up with this shit. I know better and really should have canned my weekend plans. Bad Kat, no cookie).

So milking. Jude at least does not have IBSTs (Itty Bitty Sensitive Titties); in fact, aside from occasional lunges to get the chickens out of her feed, she's perfectly well-behaved and never picks up a foot.

But all seems well aside from that, so I go home with the reasonable expectation I can face my parents in the morning without needing the hara-kiri knives.

Tuesday-Thursday: Be SICK AS A FUCKING DOG.

....yeah. Best laid plans, and all. Dan was coughing when we went to bed, I assumed as a hangover from last week's cold. I was not expecting him to wake me up at five am due to the sheer amount of heat his body was putting out. I wasn't expecting to feel the beginnings of coughing and general illness myself by the next morning. I certainly wasn't expecting to get to work, sans Dan, so exhausted that there was basically nothing to do but help Jim milk, check in with the parents, and huddle miserably over the heater until I could gather my strength for the drive home.

Being laid up for three friggin' days wasn't in the game plan, either.

And to add insult to injury, the fever had me so addled that for the first day and a half I couldn't even read. I kept passing out. What a waste of perfectly good guilt-free lie-in-bed time, I tell you!

*sulks*

I'm better now. We'll go in to work tomorrow, if nothing else to keep me from going stir-crazy. But seriously. The interesting times, I can has less of them now?

Signs you may be falling behind in your housework, #442: you have to evict a spider from your dishwasher.

Of course, the whole "can't see the counter for the dirty dishes" thing might have been a clue too. I'm such a slacker.

In other news, my book is kicking my ass. I had to give up on Novel in 90 because focusing on word count was just bringing me down: too many days when I could only get 250 good ones, too many other days -- like today -- when I had to use up precious writing time untangling a plot snarl. A few hundred words of brainstorming later, and I have a tentative plan. It's a scary plan, because it takes the book in a very different direction than I was expecting and I'm not sure I can fit everything I want into it and it basically has the potential of collapsing on me like a bad cake. A very fragile plan. But once I'd thought of it, it was pretty much either back away knowing I was chickening out on something that would make this a better story, or suck it up and ride the tiger.

Nice Mr. Tiger.... *sigh*

You know, this writing thing used to be easy. I was writing crap, of course. But I might still be writing crap, and I really, really miss the easy.

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell

Agnes Shanklin has always lived her life for others: her overbearing mother, her beautiful sister, the children she teaches in her small Cleveland school. Then, in 1919, the influenza robs her of mother, sister, and job all in one stroke. Cut adrift, Agnes decides to take a cruise to Egypt with her dog Rosie. There she will be a witness to the Cairo Conference that changed the face of the Middle East and a friend to some of the most famous and infuential people of the time; she will meet a man who changes her spinster life forever; she will begin, at forty, to discover who she is.

In Dreamers Russell has taken on the ambitious project of telling a small story -- that of Agnes -- against the backdrop of giant ones. She does this largely by making the giants equally small; World War I, the influenza epidemic, the Cairo Conference, all are explained mostly as they affect the tiny and diffident figure of Agnes. The giant personalities that threaten to overshadow her -- Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell, Lawrence of Arabia -- are likewise rendered in miniature: not Churchill's leadership, but his love of painting; not Lawrence's deeds but his nervous giggle. Greatness lurks behind in the shadows, coloring the edges of events and words, but is never allowed to take centre stage. The result is a book of heartbreaking poignancy and beauty.

There are flaws. Agnes, particularly in some early passages, shares with Dickens's Esther Summerson an unfortunate tendency to be too good while at the same time characterizing herself as a bad person, giving her an air of unbelievable martyrdom. And I found the final passage of the book less than satisfying. These flaws, however, speak less to the quality of the work than the immense challenge Russell takes on in portraying a small woman among greatness -- a balancing act that I have never before seen performed with such finesse and power. A brief glimpse of an oft-overlooked period of history, this is a book I will be chewing over for a long time to come.

I suppose one of the downsides of having a pet is watching them make great strides in rather different directions than you would wish. Alphie the parrot came to us able to say "step up" (his command for getting on a finger): now, six months later, he can also say "What's up?", "What's that?", "Stop it," "Alphie, no!" "dammit," "brat", and (today's accomplishment, still a bit wobbly around the r) "You're a twit". As well as doing an imitation of water gurgling and an imitation of my laugh that makes him sound like a mad science-bird.

Other people get their birds to say stuff like "Polly wanna cracker" and "pretty bird". I am a bad bird-momma, I am.

In other news, I'm doing Novel in 90 again, so progress reports are hereby removed from here to there. But there is progress again, for now.

And if it's neither too hot nor too cold tomorrow we may kill hogs. So that's all right.

Well, I at least managed to keep track of what books I read this year, even if I didn't review them all. Here's the list, with occasional commentary. [Read More!]

So I was checking my site stats the other day, as one does, and discovered an incoming link to my Mary Sue test. From Wikipedia.

The Wiki entry on Mary Sues, to be precise.

Well, that explains the odd pinging noise I heard a few days back. That was me gaining a level in Geek.

The actual Thanksgiving part of my Thanksgiving was great, as usual. Thanksgiving is really the only holiday my family believes in. We're anti-consumerist, anti-authoritarian heathens, which puts a damper on, uh, well, pretty much all American holidays, except the ones we can't be bothered to care about. But we all love to cook. A holiday for eating? Is a holiday we can really get behind. Some non-Thanksgiving things intruded to make this a rather stressful holiday -- mostly involving a specific employee/family member's poor sense of timing -- but the food, oh heaven. The food made up for it all.

In other news, Kith and Kin (the novel I prod with a sharp stick from time to time, to see if it's decided to live or die yet) has informed me that it thinks it would be better off with a first-person narrator.

...
...
...

*headdesk*

Okay, yes, I admit that would address some of the distance-from-narrator issues, and probably stick a patch over the slow start and the timing problems. However, comma, I am not rewriting eighty thousand words on a nine p.m. fit of inspiration. You thought Harmony needed a dead body, and look where that got us.

We will sleep on this. And in the morning, if writing an entire book from inside the head of a saturnine 600-year-old male still sounds like a good idea... we'll plot it out, dammit. Properly. No writing until we're sure this isn't the proverbial paintbrush waiting to back us into the proverbial corner.

God. My friggin' brain.

Round about eight this morning, our youngest group of heifers had a conversation that went something like this:

FEARLESS LEADER: Hey! Some nice deer has knocked down the fence for us! Let us stage AN ESCAPE!

MOB: Yay! Escape!

FEARLESS LEADER: We have escaped to the road!

MOB: Yay! Road! Which way?

FEARLESS LEADER: We go... that way!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: Yay! Another road! Which way now!

FEARLESS LEADER: Up the hill!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: This hill is boring and steep.

FEARLESS LEADER: Then we will go into the woods!

MOB: Yay woods!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: Yay woods!

*mob mob mob*

MOB: Yay... hey, there sure are a heck of a lot of woods out here, aren't there?

*mob mob*

MOB: Trees are boring.

FEARLESS LEADER: Um....

MOB: Hey, isn't it about time for breakfast?

FEARLESS LEADER: Okay, does anyone remember which way we came from?

MOB: No! We are not woodscows! But we are very hungry!

FEARLESS LEADER: Well, let's see what's in that direction....

MOB: Trees!

FEARLESS LEADER: Ah, but in that direction --

MOB: More trees!

FEARLESS LEADER: Oh. Well --

MOB: We are hungry! And bored! And surrounded by trees! This isn't fun!

FEARLESS LEADER: ...I don't wanna be leader any more.

LEADERLESS MOB: HALP!

Which was probably about the time that the deer hunter came around and asked if that group of cows was supposed to be rampaging through the woods, and our Mennonite employee and I groaned, hopped on the bike, and went looking.

It is surprisingly hard to find a formerly rampaging mob of cows in the woods. I ended up leaving the bike to the Mennonite girl and trekking around on foot, and even then I pretty much stumbled across them, as they had gone into a huddle and were sulking quietly about the unfairness of it all. Got them out of the woods by a mixture of coaxing and bullying, put them back in their field, fixed the fence, and fed them so they could sulk on a full stomach.

Idiot cows.

In the meantime, one of our three sausage hogs was having the following conversation with herself:

HOG: Hmm. Feels like I'm in heat again. Shall I escape?

HOG: .... sure, why the hell not.

We had noticed this development, but as the hog always does this when she's in heat, and as she never goes far, and as we had our hands full with the juvenile delinquents, we were ignoring it. We (and the hog) had neglected to remember that the hog would be escaping into the field where the milking herd was currently grazing. About the time we got the ex-woodscows dealt with I heard a particular type of bellow from the vicinity of the herd. It was a bellow particular to the Jersey breed of cows, a bellow which translates roughly to "OMG NEW TOY! I loves it! Let's all play with it until it falls apart!"

"Whoops," I said.

So then we had to rescue the hog from the cows, which wasn't easy, since the whole lot of them had surrounded the hog by that point and were dancing, bellowing, head-butting, frothing at the mouth, et cetera. The hog, at first inclined to take this calmly, soon began to panic (as one does when surrounded by eighty frolicking beasties weighing half a ton each and equipped with numerous hooves). The cows loved this. Panic was cool! More panic!

In the meantime the Mennonite girl and I are trying to seperate one increasingly frantic hog from a throng of dancing cattle. I thought we were going to have piggy pancake for a bit, but in the end we got her back in her pen with nothing more than a bruised ego.

Idiot hog.

Idiot cows.

... why am I in farming again?