| We're Doomed |
[November 13, 2009 @ 8:38am] |
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Good Housekeeping, not a literary magazine by any means, but certainly a professional one, of whose writers one expects a basic grasp of language, wants me to buy clothes that "compliment" my shape. They mention this repeatedly in one article. I am overwhelmed by images of women walking around in clothing that mutters compliments in an undertone, barely audible over ambient noises...And wouldn't that make quite an interesting ambient noise in the office, if every woman there bought clothing that complimented her shape?
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| No Spikka da Inglis |
[November 08, 2009 @ 6:40pm] |
So I'm trying to read this mystery novel, and I come across this passage: "Spence had my hair color, my late older brother's handsome features, and my late husband's eyes. But, although the light green hue and large, round shape were Calvin McClure's, the emotional expression inside them held little resemble to the man I'd married...."
Okay, so everybody needs a proofreader once in a while, but how do you explain "...put a hand on my shoulder and asked Sadie and I to take a seat...." followed only a couple of pages later by "waddled" for "wattled" and "he has another thing coming" for "he has another think coming," not to mention using "me" when "I" is wanted (perhaps just to balance using "I" when "me" is wanted)? Looks like we need more than just a proofreader.
Oh, well. The book has other problems. The author's voice is quite pleasant, but I do wish publishers could afford competent copy editors as needed.
I will try another author now.
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| dukka |
[November 02, 2009 @ 10:19am] |
I regret to say that I want things to be different. That is the core of all suffering. I know better. That doesn't stop me. I want things to be different.
I live in a nice house in a pretty place with my very dear honey and spoiled brat cat. I can have just about anything (reasonable) that money can buy. It doesn't matter: I don't want things.
I miss Hawaii, I miss Upham, I miss my friends. I have been blessed with great good fortune, having lived twenty years in a tropical paradise and having got, when I left it, some five years in a wintry haven with wonderful friends and a palatial dwelling many would kill for. And I am very grateful for those years. I just haven't been able, yet, to let go of them and embrace my new reality.
I'm working on it. I try to organize my tiny little sewing room so I can use it, and I got that Janome I wanted. I have many UFOs (that's Unfinished Fabric Objects) and many ideas for more (that I naturally hope will be finished someday), and I get out the pieces sometimes and lay them out on the table (haven't figured out how to make a design wall in the space provided) to look at them. That's usually about as far as I get, but it's a start. Or so I tell myself.
I've even gone so far as to start thinking about writing. I have thoughts about a mystery series, but there are no words on paper yet (and not many stored electronically either), and I don't know that there will be. I hadn't meant to write again. We'll see. If I did, it would at least be better than spending the rest of my life playing WoW.
This is a good place, and my honey has friends here, which he had not in Hawaii or Upham. He has work, too, which was not readily available in Hawaii or Upham. And it seems to be work that pleases him. These are good things. If we cannot both have what we need in any one place, I expect it's better that he have what he needs, as I'm more likely to be able to adjust. I suppose it's not really amazing that it takes a little time, though.
Guess I'll go do the laundry now.
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| Number 37! |
[September 11, 2009 @ 11:41am] |
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Here's a cool song about the USA's existing healthcare system as compared with 36 other industrialized nations.
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| Time Flies |
[September 01, 2009 @ 7:56am] |
An old friend used to say, "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
I've been cleaning and canning and unpacking and drying and weeding and pickling. Well, not so much pickling. And not enough weeding. I cannot keep up. The flower beds are all weeds now, threatening the walkways and peeking in the windows. [sigh]
OTOH I have made raspberry jam and pear-something (maybe jam, maybe syrup) that tastes pretty good. I've dried peppers and cukes and melons and I don't remember, some other stuff. Zucchini. (Mostly grated the zukes and froze 'em, though, for later bread and casseroles.) Am planning fruit leathers with more pears; they're the one tree fruit that really did well this year.
The garden is about done for. RK is planning geothermal heating (house came with an air pump, but it's old), now that we live in a house small enough to make it affordable, so there may be delay in building the new raised garden till we figure out where to put the trenches for the heating. The old garden is in a sorry state. I'm thinking I might get rid of pretty much all the raspberries, as they're not the fave of either of us, and see whether we can grow nice blackberries instead. I don't know how those do in snow country, though. Used to have a yardful in Berkeley. This is pretty mild snow country here, but it does snow, so I'll have to check that out.
The weather has turned chilly already, and I think swimming is also done for the year. Time to get the weeds done in and then turn to indoor pursuits: I have many quilting plans and several tops almost finished. And I need to see whether there's a Lutheran World Relief quilting group around here that would accept a Buddhist into their ranks. (Daunting thought. I'd really rather put it off till next year, but feel I shouldn't as my pickup has been fixed so I could attend such a group if I find one nearby.)
In my copious spare time I think and think about writing (but seldom anymore about doing it myself), and about the changing language and our attitudes toward it. In the Olden Days all those (at least, those I knew) who thought of writing (wanted to be or were "writers") were passionate about the language. These days there are many storytellers to whom the language is just a vessel, and apparently not even an important one as they make no particular effort to master it. Certainly nothing like the effort they would make to master a musical instrument (which is more the way I've always thought of it). It puzzles me. It's like they're storytellers, not writers, and only write things down because their audience is too far-flung to hear them tell their stories aloud.
But if that were true, why not tell stories on tape or disk and offer those to the audience? Is it just that there's no infrastructure for such an endeavor? Would they rather do it that way if they could? If not, why aren't they interested in using the language at least correctly if not well?
Thoughts for an old woman to ponder in the dark of night, I guess.
wanders off in pursuit of weeds
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| Stuck? |
[August 03, 2009 @ 9:45am] |
Some time ago I wrote here about a woman I'd met through Embiid who kept friending and unfriending me on LJ. She either never read it or didn't comment, but last night another woman I met through Embiid friended me, commented on an entry, discovered that entry, said she hoped it wasn't she, deleted both comments, and unfriended me. That's too bad, and I'm sorry if it was because I offended; but the interesting part is that when I look at it, I see she fits the description I gave as well as, perhaps better than, the woman I had in mind. She, too, had experiences similar to mine in the distant past (in her case, the sixties) and wrote about them. She, too, is still writing about them. In fact, she's writing about them even more directly than the woman I had in mind: I think she now has a series actually set in the sixties. (And coincidentally she, too, has friended and unfriended me more than once on LJ; but I suspect in her case it may be a function of a slow connection or computer and possibly a certain ungeekiness that makes her interaction with LJ awkward and somewhat unpredictable.)
I'm looking at this now and seeing one other woman I know who also fits the description pretty well (except she doesn't friend and unfriend me; I don't even know whether she's on LJ), and this is the point that interests me. Similar experiences we all wrote about, they're still writing about them, while I've lost interest. Mind, I don't see any particular significance in this. I don't think my career failed because I have no interest in times long past. (It had plenty of other reasons to fail.) But I do find it curious that I am apparently in the minority on this. Now I'm going to be looking at other authors, trying to figure out whether they are in any way "stuck" in a certain time past, and if so whether it seems in any real way significant.
All this could apply to our lives as well as our writing, of course. I've often noticed that many people get stuck in a certain decade or so as far as popular music goes, which is why "Golden Oldies" radio stations do so well. I'm sure there are other areas where we remain in a time gone by in one way or another. I think my taste in hair styles probably got stuck in the 80s, frex, although I've noticed recently that the very latest choppy styles for girls are extremely pleasing to me. Doubtless my most "stuck" places are invisible to me.
I'm not half sure all this stuck-ness is a bad thing. What do you think? Are you stuck on any aspects of the past? Do you prefer music or clothing or hair styles from some other time? If you write, do you consistently set your stories in your past, either literally or figuratively?
Just curious.
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| Still Moving Boxes |
[August 02, 2009 @ 9:54pm] |
Lift that barge! Tote that bale! I don't know why we own so much stuff. Mostly books. But slowly but slowly, we're getting boxes near where they belong, and even unpacking a few. And we found someone to mow the lawn so I don't have to, which is pretty super. He did a good job, too, and charges so little that we can have his services for two or three years before we'll have spent as much as a lawnmower and weedeater would cost; and by then, they'd be needing repairs.
Went to thrift store to look for something to put my sewing machine on. Found a cherry wood writing desk, possibly vintage, definitely wonderful. Bought it for Very Little Money. It's lovely. Doesn't solve the problem of what to put my sewing machine on, though. While I was looking online, trying to determine whether the new writing desk was vintage, I discovered that my vintage Formica table that everyone sneers at is probably worth a couple-three hundred dollars, for whatever good that does us. Since I've no notion of selling it, I don't suppose it does us any good at all. I've just put it in my office/hobby room, where I will use its surface for something like making jewelry or rugs or something.
The pool hasn't seen much use yet. But we keep having to empty excess water from it; rain, don't you know. Incessant rain. Which is the biggest reason we don't get much use of it. Even if the weather were warm enough, it might be a Bad Plan to go swimming during a thunderstorm. It is to sigh.
Not that we have a lot of time for swimming anyway.
I've been weeding the garden in my copious spare time, and finally found some rhubarb therein. Not much, but I haven't got that section fully weeded, so there could be more. The asparagus is a little thin, but there's a fair amount of it. Cukes are slowing down; too many were allowed to get too big before I got a handle on it. Don't know whether they'll perk back up now that I've almost caught up. Zucchini isn't as prolific as I'd expect, but as I'm the only one what eats it, that's okay. It's keeping me fed. There's winter squash too, and some kind of melon that seems almost ripe. Life is good.
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| And Here We Are |
[July 16, 2009 @ 9:18pm] |
Thanks for all the congrats. We're more or less in place now, though we haven't figured out which rooms we'll use for what, and most of our stuff is still in town—most distressingly, all the cleaning stuff, because I thought this would be clean enough to live in for a couple of days. Ick. Can't even put things on shelves; there are actual lumps of crud on shelves. Ick, I say.
But we can camp among the icky bits till the weekend. And we went swimming as soon as we got everything out of the pickup and the kitty settled into the house. Then I went out to water the garden, and picked the biggest cucumbers because they were getting too big. Can't do anything with them till we get kitchen stuff here (didn't even bring a sharp knife), but they'll keep in the fridge for a few days. There were nice carrots ready to eat, too, but they'll be fine in the ground till I'm ready for them. The tomatoes have nearly expired of drought, but there are some melons that seem to be coming along nicely. I emptied the whole rain barrel on as many plants as I could, and tomorrow I'll see whether I can get a hose down there for the rest.
Right now, however, I'm thinking of bed. Moving is so exhausting. And jeez, we've only done the smallest bit of it. I hope this is the last time for a while. I'm tired of moving so often.
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| It's Ours! |
[July 16, 2009 @ 12:58pm] |
Money changed hands. Papers were signed. Keys were received. Okay, that exhausted my store of passive phrases.
I'm shutting down my computer for transfer. We'll be taking what we can carry in my pickup, which should be enough for a couple of days, and then moving the rest on the weekend.
Whew.
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| So Far, So Good |
[July 16, 2009 @ 10:12am] |
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I haven't heard anything to the contrary yet, so I'm assuming the loan company is actually coming through with the loan. My honey has an appointment at 11 am to sign the papers and receive the keys. We've debated camping out there right away, even though we can't really move till the weekend. If you don't hear from me for a while, that will be what we decided to do. (We'll probably take the computers, but I'm not sure how soon they'll get connected. We have been paying for Internet connection there, so it might not be long. We'll see.) Meantime I'm sorting things and compiling lists, in case.
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| And Yet... |
[July 15, 2009 @ 1:43pm] |
Turns out there was a way for us not to know by the end of yesterday, that we hadn't considered at all: if something happened to make the purchase possible. Either the loan company could back down and waive their extortionate fee (not a chance), or those people to whom my honey had said, in effect, "if you think it's such a small amount of money, you pay it" could agree to pay it.
They agreed to pay it. The real estate agents are both taking a cut in their, er, cut. The seller is contributing. And in the face of this, my honey is contributing. Four contributions add up to the loan company getting its outrageous fee and us maybe getting the house.
They say it's certain. They say guaranteed closing by Friday, and maybe even already tomorrow. We've heard these words before. The loan company that could come up with another paper it claimed to need a week after closing was originally scheduled, and who took another week to find its regional VP so they could ask him to waive a fee that everyone involved agrees they shouldn't charge (everyone but, apparently, the regional VP) could all too easily come up with Yet Another stalling (or even deal-breaking) maneuver.
We wait.
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| Whatever |
[July 14, 2009 @ 7:37am] |
Every day we've thought the next day would surely bring resolution to this ridiculous situation. Yesterday my honey finally issued an ultimatum: if we don't have resolution by 4 pm today, we're creating it by withdrawing our offer. Otherwise we're all too likely to find ourselves homeless at the end of the month. He refers them by chapter and verse to a court case establishing that we'd better also get our earnest money back since the failure to buy wasn't our fault. (He works for PA courts and has learned a thing or two.)
Even in the face of this, the loan company has been unable to reach their officer. (Turns out it must be the Regional VP; apparently nobody else is able to waive this "give me a bonus 'cause I failed you" fee. That they have a Regional VP suggests this isn't their first loan. Who knew?) As of last night (when again everyone worked till 8 and wanted praise for it, though it seems to be their routine and they never get anything done), there were excuses but no results.
We're planning a celebratory meal out tonight. Don't care which way it goes, it will be nice to have our lives no longer on hold come dinnertime. We'll either be planning our move or working out ways to fit some of our stuff into the townhouse. And either way, we'll be buying a chair or two. Maybe even a bed, or at least a mattress. Yay!
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| Not Today |
[July 10, 2009 @ 3:39pm] |
Yesterday it seemed that everything was in place and the only sticking point was whether we would pay the $4,000 fee occasioned by the loan company's failure to come through with the (pre-approved!) loan on time. (Not our failure, theirs. What universe are they from, anyway?)
They told us they were working till 8 last night (they've often told us they were working till 8pm, but they never say on what), and this morning they were happy to report...Nothing has changed. They're all ready to loan us the money as soon as we agree to pay their unwarranted extra fee for not having completed their work within the agreed time.
It requires one manager at the loan company to waive this fee. No one in either the loan company or the real estate company is willing to speak to one manager who can waive the fee. No one else can do it. We will not pay it. (No matter how wonderful the house was, I'd absolutely refuse to pay someone a bonus for doing a lousy job. I'll pay for the job done, but no bonus unless it was done well. Certainly not a bonus specifically because it was done badly.)
So we won't close today. Maybe Monday. Maybe never. At this point it would be a relief just to be done with it, either way. If the seller weren't in a spot, we'd happily walk away; the loan company's delays have given us plenty of time to realize all the potentially negative aspects to owning the Folly. But the seller is a very nice lady, and she's done all she can to make this work, far above and beyond what any reasonable person would expect of her. She's getting married in two weeks and does not need this hassle.
Consequently instead of withdrawing our offer, we continue with noticeably diminished patience to repeat to the loan company (and to our agent!) that no, thank you, we will not bend over.
Their move.
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| The Saga Continues |
[July 09, 2009 @ 3:52pm] |
The loan company applied huge fees as a consequence of their own negligence, and we reached the end of our patience and said no. We assumed this would end the process and we'd get our earnest money back (because we weren't walking, but only refusing an unexpected and unwarranted fee); but then the seller called. She really can't afford to put it back on the market and the deadline was only a bluff by her agent.
The loan company promptly required Yet Another bit of paperwork that they should have asked for weeks ago if they really need it, which we can only assume they don't. My honey is dutifully providing it. I don't know whether he is agreeing to the outrageous fees. Nor what else the loan company will ask for when they find he's able to fulfill their latest request.
Who knows what weevils lurk in the hearts of men?
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| Blizzard Entertainment |
[July 09, 2009 @ 12:12pm] |
Blizzard continues to amaze. I looted a valuable item that the game would not let me auction or vendor. I queried Blizz. They provided "restoration" and warned me that each player is granted only a limited number of restorations for virtual property: while they understand that "accidents can happen" (wtf?), I should be more careful with my stuff in future.
That's bizarre. The thing was broken when I got it. How could I be more careful? WTF was I supposed to do to prevent looting a broken item? Man, there are times when I would like to stuff "user error" up some people's sanctimonious behinds.
Incidentally, "restoration" seems to consist of removing the item from my inventory. I dunno, maybe they gave me the couple of gold it was worth at a vendor. I don't keep exact track of that toon's finances, but I doubt they'd have given me the tens of gold it was worth at auction. Oh, well. I'm no worse off than I was before I queried. At least that.
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| Not Looking Good |
[July 08, 2009 @ 4:19pm] |
The seller is leaving on vacation Friday at noon. She has decided, I think quite reasonably, that if we can't close by then, she'll put the house back on the market. (Really I'm amazed she's been as patient as she has been.)
At the rate ERA Home Loans is fumbling, I don't think we'll close by then.
Oh, well. They could yet come through. And if they don't ... There are other houses. You never know; there might be an even better one waiting for us to discover it.
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| Death by Hearthstone |
[July 08, 2009 @ 3:47pm] |
Another WoW toon of mine died (of exhaustion from falling into the sea miles from land) while hearthing to Dalaran the other day (and graveyard rezzed in the Barrens), so I thought maybe Blizz needs to hear about this; if they get enough reports, maybe they'll look into it.
I opened a ticket, mentioning in it that I don't use add-ons. After a while I got an email response from donotreply@blizzard.com. Surprise! "After some research it appears the issue you are having may be related to your User Interface (UI). This applies whether you have a custom UI or not." To resolve the problem I should delete the wtf file and some others, thus necessitating an entire reset of all my action-bar hot keys and macros. Ow, ow, ow! Thanks, no! "If these steps do not resolve your issue, please submit a new In-Game ticket and we will attempt to assist you further." Lawl! This is a problem that has happened twice in as many months. I should spend a few hours resetting my UI and then wait to see whether it happens again? And if it does, it'll likely be long enough from the reset that Mr. Donotreply can say that "after some research" yatta yatta, and that a person should consequently reset the UI again.
I don't think so. Not unless it begins to happen a lot more often. What the heck, most of my toons aren't well-enough geared for a graveyard rez to cost all that much anyway. The real problem is waiting for the hearthstone's cooldown so they can get back to Dalaran.
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| Loan Company Adventures |
[July 07, 2009 @ 5:39pm] |
It is becoming SO tempting to tell them to stuff it, that we'll find another house and a loan company that knows how to do business. But if we did that, come the end of the month we wouldn't have anyplace to live.
Of course we may not, anyway. We don't know what further hurdles the loan company may come up with. It has just decided, a week after receiving some information, that it might be a good idea to submit the associated paperwork the VA has to receive before the loan can close. It has also decided, in its wisdom, that it won't allow any of our money because it has all been "co-mingled" with money from the sale of the school. Consequently we're going to have to do some very fancy footwork, trying to fulfill our agreement with the seller without either of us actually breaking the law.
And the whole thing is a problem because, and only because, the loan company didn't think to question the source of the school-sale money till the day before closing. (That is, the day before we were supposed to close, obviously. At this point it's not at all clear when or really even whether we will close; we can only hope.)
Given a little time, we could have come up with some evidence of the money's provenance. Or delayed applying for the loan the week or so it would have taken to grandfather the money into our bank account. But no. The loan company's astounding incompetence, layered on astonishing negligence, and really quite impressive stupidity, adds up to ... maybe we'll still get the house.
We'll see. I do not hold my breath. Meantime we had to give sixty days' notice here at the townhouse, so we're expected to be fully moved out by the end of this month. Wheeeeee!
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