Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

1. I have a new story up at Daily SF: The Troll (A Tale Told Collectively). Go, read, enjoy!

2. It is exactly one month from the start of Fourth Street Fantasy Convention. Conventions succeed because of the awesome people who attend them. We already have many awesome people coming to Fourth Street, but there's room for more. Wouldn't you like to join us?

3. This week my mom is coming over and painting the living room Hilltop. Hilltop, for people who do not memorize paint company databases, is green. This is the last "real" room in our house to be repainted since we moved in, and I am so pleased. (The laundry room and storage room have not been repainted; the storage room doesn't even have finished walls, so it hasn't even been painted once and isn't going to be. The laundry room is tiny and covered in old wallpaper, as well as being filled with laundry appliances, so...we can leave it in '80s flowers for the foreseeable future.)

4. Apparently every three years we do a May painting project and I miss wilfulcait. Cancer: do not approve, am not resigned. Just for the record.

5. Yesterday I worked on my new book, and I ran errands, and I did lo these many things. But my major accomplishment for yesterday was using up a packet of tisane. We have too many things in the hot beverage section of Narnia (a.k.a. the pantry). Clearing out the things with appropriate use is great virtue.

When she gets frustrated, she rips the doors off refrigerators.

I am pretty tired, and it suddenly occurred to me last night, with a ping that was nearly audible, that porphyrin had said that I would be back to eighty to ninety percent awhile back, as the pneumonia went away. And I was, and it was such a relief that I was thinking of it as, "Well, I've been tired today," for a great many days in a row, and it is now dawning on me that this is why she said 80-90% then and not 100%.

So I've gotten into that mode where I think I should post about things and then I think I should do it all at once and make a five-or-more things post, and then I am too tired for that and don't do it.

So this is not necessarily the most important thing, but here, have a thing:

elisem talked about the British TV show Foyle's War, and our library has it, so I got the first episode. I have now watched the second episode. The library is completely psychotic about which TV shows it checks out as single episodes and which as entire seasons, but the Foyle's War episodes are about 100 minutes each, just about right for my workouts, so it's not too frustrating to have to get them one at a time.

The premise of the show is that DCS Foyle is a British policeman in Hastings during WWII, going around having to solve crimes that are caused or complicated or otherwise affected by the war and its environs. It's got a Sergeant who was wounded in early action in Norway, and it's got a driver who is taking advantage of the war to take a job her family would have objected to were it not that We All Must Pitch In. And I am really enjoying it.

I think some of the buttons it presses are more or less factory-standard for people in our culture, since WWII is The Designated Good War, but it's not as simplistic as that. And also some of the buttons it presses are mine more particularly because I grew up with a mother who was reading Liddell-Hart on tank battles and various other things like that for my early childhood. (Liddell-Hart: useful for Girl Scout leaders. They should put that on his books as a blurb.) In fact I was in junior high before I read the spine and realized that Liddell-Hart was the guy's name. I sort of processed it as a statement of priorities: Daddy and I and the grands and the dog and sometimes the godfathers when we could get them, we were Mom's Great Heart, but history was her Little Heart, WWII history in particular at the time. For me getting interested in the Great War was in some ways the category of gentle rebellion that's like staying out half an hour late with a boy your parents know and like.

They are not making a fuss over the historical tidbits, is the thing. They can have food without having obligatory conversations like, "You used your ration coupons to get this for us, didn't you?" "Why yes. Yes I did. Because there is a war on, you know." "Yes, and we must use ration coupons because of this war that is on." The food is done right without being done ostentatiously, and so on with the rest. This time out, Foyle and Sam and Milner got to stop Mosleyites, and it was lovely.

I recommend Foyle's War pretty heartily. I don't know if it's on Netflix, since we don't do Netflix, but it's worth checking your local library if it isn't and if your local library carries DVDs.

So, Valentine's Day, huh? All right: I'll tell you a story about love.

Once upon a time there was little girl who had a bully. He was not unwilling to beat people up if they were boys, although he knew that the teachers who looked the other way when he was a racist little beast (among other fine traits) would step in and put a stop to it if he hit girls. But what he really loved was to say horrible, nasty things to people. Starting in kindergarten, he thought it was great fun if he could make people cry. By the time third grade rolled around, he hadn't made this little girl cry, but he made her furious and miserable quite a lot.

Furious and miserable was not good enough.

So he brought out the big guns, the worst thing he could think of. Surely that would finally make her cry. This little girl was an only child. And her bully informed her that that meant that her parents didn't want kids at all, that they didn't like her and certainly didn't love her. And then he folded his arms to watch her fall apart.

And she laughed.

Of all the things the little girl knew in her clever, bookish little life, the one that was bedrock certain, all the way down, was that her Mom and Daddy loved her and wanted her. And so the bully's spell was broken. After that, he could upset her by hurting her best friends, but she always knew that he was full of it, making things up to be hurtful, and his power over her was gone.

Not everyone is given that kind of bedrock-certainty love as a kid. But everyone should be. Those of us who have that kind of upbringing have the world's most important kind of noblesse oblige. We are obligated to pass that along -- to our own children if we have any, but also to partners and friends, to whatever others we come upon in our lives who have a piece of our hearts, mentors or protégés, cousins, in-laws, godchildren, whoever. We owe it to the rest of the world to find people to whom we can pass on that certainty of love. We need to let the people we love know it so thoroughly that when the world's nasty voices hiss, "She doesn't really love you," they can laugh and say, "Of course she does. What a stupid thing to say," and mean it down into their bones.

Well. I got to spend the evening of Mother's Day with my mom, my grandma, and my Onie (who is, for the people who have not been keeping score, my great-aunt, Grandma's oldest sister). And earlier in the day I got to run a care package up to one of my favorite mothers who is not officially related to me in any way, and little notes and so on went out to several more important maternal types in my life. If you don't want to celebrate a Mother's Day, don't -- I'm against obligatory celebration in most forms -- but my family tends to like celebration. We're good at it. It's an excuse to bake things.

(Peach-blueberry crisp, this time. And I had the nice fellows over at Sambol make us garlic naan, which my grandparents fell upon like ravening beasts. Very happy ravening beasts. My good-kid point total is pretty high tonight. Peach-blueberry crisp tends to make people happy.)

The headache returned in the early part of the day, so I had another nap, this time with assistance from the Nurse Poodle. She set her best toy, Piggy, very gently on my shoulder while I was sleeping. She is a pretty good bop. And the headache receded, and the peasants rejoiced, and then the vertigo came back this evening, so that's not my favorite thing ever. At all. So I'm hoping it'll go away tomorrow, because who needs it? Who wants it? Who feels comfortable going up and down the stairs with it? I will try to make tomorrow a fairly physically easy day in hopes of kicking this stuff to the curb, but it may be that tomorrow is a fairly physically easy day because I'm too unsteady to do much. Hope not. It's nicer when I can take credit for being sensible rather than having good sense thrust upon me.

Scene: my mother's glamorous gourmet birthday dinner of take-and-bake pizza and chocolate cake.

Cast: Both parental units (Mom is mormor1, but I just can't make myself type it that way mostly), self, timprov, missista

Mom, to Dad: She fed me nothing all day long, on my birthday, and that's why I'm starving.
Me: I fed her crusts of stale bread.*
Mom: She locks timprov in his room so he can't help me.
Me: This is true. I'm terrified of what would happen if they colluded. It might mean the end of my evil regime.
timprov: Which is why we don't do it.
Me: It's a good evil regime. It got all you people pizza and chocolate cake.
Mom: I just want you to confess in livejournal that you were the one who glurped paint on the ceiling again in the music room.
Me: Duly noted.
Mom: Good. Then I will go cover your shame.

Which she did. It is well covered. Hardly anybody will know there was a glurp there at all, or in the library either. Well -- hardly anybody except my entire social circle, now that it's on lj.

We have the last coat in the music room to do tomorrow, and miscellaneous household things. "Miscellaneous household things" includes "shelving all the books." Also buying some of the new bookshelves and assembling them. Also washing some of the windows, steam-cleaning the carpeting, and laundering the kitchen curtains. Not all tomorrow. But -- there is stuff, is what I'm saying.

I am deeply pleased with the blueness of all three rooms.

*This is perfectly true. We each had sandwich leftovers from last night, and we ate them for lunch.

I just got spam offering me "Charity or Pamela?" I like there being charity in the world -- I think it's a good thing. But I'm also fond of pameladean. So it's another example of not letting Them sucker you into Their binary worldview. Screw you, spammer! I choose both!

Ahem.

I am in a good mood this morning. I'm still pretty dizzy, but I slept like the dead, and yesterday felt like progress on more than one front: I got some medical stuff handled and also managed to do some of the (very extensive) Sampo revisions while I was lying on the couch. Little stuff, but it's little stuff that's done now and wasn't before. And I like feeling useful, even if it's just a little bit. And I have horizontal-friendly projects in mind for today.

My mom continues to be immeasurable amounts of help. They have the bop with them again from last night, which again put my mind at ease extremely. So considering how crappy yesterday was in some ways (being put on a table that moves around for an X-ray, while your head is already spinning? not fun), it was a very good day. So I'm going to go lie down, as I mostly have been after posting for the last week and a half, but I will lie down in a good mood, and that makes all the difference, no matter what the man says about roads diverging in a yellow wood.

Sometimes my mom was totally right about the things she told me as a kid. This time she was totally wrong. She told me I would "have to" learn to watch football socially, because I would be invited to football parties and would need to at least feign interest for awhile before I could get someone conversing over the bean dip and ignore the game for awhile.

Absolutely, totally, in every way wrong. I don't recall ever being invited to a SuperBowl party, much less any other kind of football party. Do I feel snubbed? I do not. If timprov was up and around and feeling good, it would have been a great time to go to a favorite restaurant (probably El Meson) when there wouldn't be People there. As it is, markgritter and I will have fajitas, and if the TV goes on, it will be because we wanted to watch something, not because we're feigning interest for someone else's sake. And if it doesn't go on, oh well.

We have friends who watch football of various types. They never invite us over to watch "the game" with them. Why? Because they know we don't care, so we go out for dinner or watch a movie or go for coffee or tea and talk or go look at flowers if we're feeling like it. They don't think that we're antisocial or that we dislike them. They just think we don't like football. Because we don't. I don't see a problem here.