Great big good news

I like to think that this time I have a pretty good excuse for at least some of the delay in posting to this blog. You see, there was news, and it was big enough that it didn't feel right posting about anything else, but at the same time I couldn't post it here until certain people had been told in person.

So if you haven't heard already, I'm getting married.

Let me try that again.

I'm getting married!

Sorry. Exclamation marks don't come naturally to me, but some situations warrant them.

Shortly before Easter I gave Fiancée (née Girlfriend) a ring. Some people brag about how much their engagement rings cost; we're the sort to brag that I got this ring from my mother and only had to pay to get it resized. It looks like this:

Is it weird for a guy to show off an engagement ring? I'll stop.

As it happened, we were soon to see both our sets of parents over the Easter holiday, so we naturally held off on telling the internet at large until we had told our immediate families.

But since I mentioned Easter, I'm sure what you're really wondering is whether I colored any interesting eggs. In fact, Fiancée introduced me to the use of rubber bands in egg-coloring. This allowed some stripy experiments.

Here is Fiancée's, which I'm sure everyone recognizes as the flag of Scania. (That's not actually what she was going for.) I, on the other hand, didn't have the discipline for straight lines. I did this:

It's not the flag of anywhere.

Then I did this, though:

That's actually my attempt to reproduce a sunset that Fiancée and I saw through the tree branches when we went out for a walk to discuss how hard it is to get my whole family in one room at the same time. Because we had been staying with my parents for a full day at this point and an opportunity still hadn't presented itself to tell them that we were engaged. In fairness, this was because my sister was laid out from an adult tonsilectomy and spent most of the day unconscious, and my dad was at church the whole day on account of him running the church's music program. We toyed with the idea of writing "We're getting married" on the eggs and letting my family find out that way, but decided against it because that would be bad.

We finally got the news to them the next day after everyone was home from the Easter service. Everyone was suitably excited. And a few days later, after we had told Fiancée's parents (with much less logistical difficulty), everyone was suitably excited again.

Anyway, now you know, whoever you are.

How I spent my Thanksgiving vacation

The week of this Thanksgiving I visited my family up in Long Island. It happened to be the final week of NaNoWriMo (or ShoStoWriMo, in my case), with me planning on busing back to Maryland on the 30th, meaning I would have to either hit 50,000 words a day early (unlikely) or cross the finish line in transit. I would be getting home so late that trying to get in a day's writing after I arrived would surely tempt the wrath of the muses, and possibly defy logistics outright.

The day before I left--a day which I had earmarked for a long push in an involved freelance project--my laptop began acting sickly, clicking and stalling and generally toying with the idea of becoming a brick. I was able to do some necessary work in Safe Mode, and then I spent my first day with my parents like this:

I didn't intend this picture to be a selfie when I took it, but there I am. As might be gathered, I was not feeling too great myself at the moment, a heating pad wrapped around my neck like a brace. The bus ride up north was pretty nice as these things went, but it had left me pretty sore and I probably had a cold too.

What my computer is doing in this picture is mostly magic to me, but I did find a way to conceptualize what I think it was doing and explain it to my parents:

Inside my computer lives a cloistered monk, in the medieval style. He sits at his table with a quill and ink, and a massive tome containing all the information on my computer. When I ask my computer to do anything, this monk finds the information I want through a convoluted series of cross-references, or else writes whatever else I want to record wherever he can find enough white space on the nearest page.

In the centuries of computer time that have passed since 2008, this tome has been through a lot. Some of the pages have been marred by water and others by fire. Vandals got in on a few occasions and their additions have been meticulously crossed out. But in all that clutter lately my dutiful monk has spent more time squinting at certain hard-to-decipher passages than he has actually doing what I ask him to do.

So the work my monk is doing here, if I understand the process correctly, is to go through the entire book, from one end to the next, and wherever he finds a page or line that is hard to read, to figure out to his satisfaction what it actually says and then re-write it clearly on the blank pages in the back of the book.

Anyway, that was how I described the process to my parents and to myself, and it made me less likely to rail against fate for how long the process actually took--four or five hours. There's a lot of data in this computer but that monk can scribble pretty fast.

Whether or not I had it right, the process revivified my computer. I still kept the computer in Safe Mode while I worked; I was walking on eggshells. (And if hearing that makes you want to bang your head against the wall, rest assured I suffered for my ignorance... I think. Read on?)

So in the last four days of November I put out almost 15,000 words. Ironically I think these were some of the best words I had gotten down the whole month. My graph, courtesy of Nanowrimo.org, ended up looking like this:

With the highlighted part happening at my parents' house. The days on either side were spent on buses. The day in the middle was Thanksgiving.

It seems a shame not to mention Thanksgiving itself, but the day was not the stuff good stories are made of. My extended family was good company and all the food turned out well. I discovered that my father actually prefers marshmallows on his sweet potatoes, which I had previously dismissed out of hand as a barbaric custom, but beyond that what's to tell?

When I got on the bus to go home and settle in for my final lap of the month's writing, I discovered that the last 10,000 words or so of the project were gone.

Why? I'm not certain. Did they refuse to save because I had been working in Safe Mode? Perhaps, but that doesn't some things that didn't disappear but should have. I don't have a better theory, anyway. Maybe the end of story number 4 and the beginning of story number 5 are still knocking around inside my computer, but they are beyond the reach of my own feeble magics. To adapt an old saw, God and I were both there when I wrote the first draft, but I fear that now God has the only copy.

But I'm taking credit for the words because dammit, I wrote them.

As I said, this was intensely frustrating because I think what I lost consisted of some of the best writing I had done that month, including several thousand words of Robert E. Howard pastiche that felt (I'll probably never know how they stand up to rereading) pretty spot-on. Luckily, I do think I remember enough of the content and the feel that the stories themselves won't be lost to the world.

The five short stories, for the curious, are as follows:

1 - Three Go players try to slip out of human space to play a game with an enigmatic race and prove that human beings have souls.

2 - In a world crisscrossed by traveling storytellers, one boy in a village that executes them as blasphemers becomes obsessed with what he's missing out on.

3 - Humans develop humanlike AI and promptly find a way to have sex with it. One programmer wants more.

4 - When a nigh-omniscient computer takes on the utilitarian calculus of governing a country, its citizens come to worship it as God and set out to conquer the rest of the world. An ambassador visits their capitol to sue the computer for peace.

5 - An author with a telepathic link to a sword-and-sorcery hero tries his darnedest to kill the character off.

Anyway, it was a fun month and an... exciting last week.

Spooky deadlines

October draws to a close, and November swiftly approaches. This means several things. First, it means that I and everyone else who agreed to write a story about mermaids in September are late. The end of October also forms something of a hard deadline for that, since everyone who had planned on writing a mermaid story is also doing NaNoWriMo, so new adventures will soon take precedence. I already talked about my own plans for the month.

But the end of October also brings us the yearly ritual of gouging the innards from a gourd and carving it into a human semblance. This year, because there is so much television and only so much time, I did my brainstorming while watching the episode of Angel with the killer tree, and then did the scooping and carving while watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead. But my creative mind, apparently, was elsewhere.

I was pleased with the result.

A dapper o'lantern.

And here is the gentleman in his natural habitat.

Hullo children.

That was yesterday. Sadly, he has been nibbled on a little by the ravenous beasts which scour our neighborhood at night, but the result is merely that his mustache is a bit lopsided.

Today Girlfriend and I realized that a pumpkin on our stoop would of course be an invitation to roving packs of children tonight, and if we didn't want to be paid in the currency of "tricks" then we would need to acquire some "treats" with which to buy them off. Thus I ran out to Target today to pick up some candy, half fearing that they would be thoroughly picked over by the time I got there. Fortunately, they were still well stocked, and wisely so, because I wasn't the only adult in the candy aisle.

However, enjoying the capabilities of my new phone, I did take a surreptitious picture of the Target's "seasonal" section.

Winter is coming.

The staff were already at work converting the display. I remember when it was fashionable to complain about this happening the day after Thanksgiving. Apparently if we had wanted to hold that line, we should have instituted a policy of exchanging Thanksgiving gifts or something. Because this year it looks like T-day's just getting a pass.

A pumpkin again this time

Another Halloween, another hollow fruit. I considered a watermelon this year, but they aren't in season. I also considered a few different kinds of squash out of apparent necessity, seeing only small and moldy pumpkins at the Home Depot where we happened to be looking for pumpkins and storm supplies.* We decided to have a go at another store, though, and they had plenty of pumpkins, so we bought one.

I've tried to be arch or clever with my Jack-o-lantern designs for the past few years, maybe because I had housemates to impress. This year I tried a design or two that amused me but I settled on something more sincerely creepy. Maybe because I've been reading so much Lovecraft. But this is what I came up with:

Not bad, I think. Thought you might like to see.

Sweet dreams.

* We're fine, by the way. The power stayed on, obviously, since it's still on and now I'm posting to my blog. There's a swampy patch in the basement, but we've had worse.

A walk through the ghost trees

Some people wanted to know if I ever got my dwarfpire situation sorted out. (See the end of my last post for the beginning of this story.) Copper ballista arrowheads were slightly more effective than bare wooden arrows. One was enough to knock the vampire down, after that the other arrows just shot over him without hitting him. I gave up on the ballista, and sent miners into the space above the vampire's cell. They mined through their floor/his ceiling until they caused a cave-in. Dropping the ceiling on him did the trick; the vampire mayor was really and sincerely dead.

Now, on to stuff that matters. Last week was a wonderful reunion with college and Seattle friends on the Washington coast. Fun was had; games were played; drink was drunk, and so were we. A Burning Wheel campaign was begun that I hope will find a way to continue; I'm getting better at creating characters that intrigue me. I hope the other players at least find him tolerable.

The house we stayed at was nice, if slightly architecturally surreal. It had no front door. It hovered on columns over a wall-less garage space, from which a spiral staircase took you up into a laundry room. The other door was a glass sliding door opening on a balcony facing the beach. Either of these would have been the back door of a regular house. It was a beach house, so I suppose the side facing the beach was the front.

And how was the weather?

Typical for the Pacific Northwest, I guess. That's the house we stayed at, in the middle.

Not that it stayed that cloudy the whole time, but as I said, we passed more time with games than with frolicking. I did, however, get a chance to walk a little way along the beach and had a pleasant scenic surprise.

You see, the whole beach that you could see from the house pretty much looked like this:

Just out of sight, though, there was a stream that ran into the ocean. Girlfriend and I followed it into what was, for me, the nonsocial highlight of the week.

Here is the stream itself. You can see some of the coloration from the silt, or clay, or whatever the water was full of. In person it was quite vivid and striking: the water was yellow at the edges, then red into carmine, and finally a deep, deep indigo where the blue from the sky took over. The stream cut into hilly forest on the far bank:

You could just see that yellow rock face in the distance from the house; that's what we had set out walking to get a better look at in the first place. But the stream, naturally, kept going, and it had been eating away at the shore for a while.

The trees that the water had undercut were all a ghostly white, essentially driftwood that hadn't drifted anywhere. One fallen tree branched into the bank like it was trying its hand at being a tributary.

The stream had driven people away too. The abandoned posts of several docks marched into the forest, where one supposes houses had stood until the ground fell out from under them.

At least, I assume these supported something because they all come up to the same height. As you can see from some of the lower stumps, someone had cut everything down along the bank, perhaps to get this wood. (A little more searching suggests to me that this used to be a bridge. To where, I wonder.)

Opposite these cliffs the trees came right up to the bank, so that's as far as we went inland. A little farther on, a couple of boys were setting off firecrackers, taking advantage of the natural amphitheater. I wondered if they had climbed through the trees or come from the opposite direction.

It turns out that this area is where the Moclips River empties into the ocean. It's odd, and somehow refreshing, to come to a place and explore it without knowing its name. The whole place felt unspoiled, even though it obviously wasn't. I wish I found places like this by accident more often.

Holiday crafts, oviparous rabbit edition

Happy Easter, everyone! I think for most of my readers it actually is Easter as I post this. For the rest of you, wait for it...

There. It's been a crafty couple of weeks. First, congratulations are due to certain friends who made a daughter this week. Certainly it is more of an accomplishment than anything I had a hand in creating this week, but that's for them to brag and post pictures about on their own.

Girlfriend and I collaborated on a stuffed owl to bestow upon the child, and got it to the parents just ahead of the baby's arrival. Here's a picture of it (the owl, not the baby) and of the person who did all of the work:

I love how surprised it looks in this picture.

But today being the day before Easter, it was time to dye eggs. I don't remember when exactly we decided to make this a "thing,"  but now it's a "thing" and we do it, rather experimentally sometimes.

 Ready for serious art.

Last year, and I think the year before as well, we used food coloring for dye and were able to use the droppers and concentrated dyes to make some Jackson-Pollack-esque patterns. This year we used the dissolving pellets instead, so we couldn't do that, but we did some things I think are neat anyway.

Two things here. First, on the left, yes, I'm continuing my theme of incongruous jack-o'-lanterns*. You don't have to think that's the cleverest thing ever. As for the one on the right, I'm pleased with it largely because it represents a way to use eggs that get botched. I spent a good long time getting an egg an even shade of red, and then managed to break it. I might have thrown it out, but now my otherwise relatively unadorned "eye egg" is wearing it! In this picture the shell is just wrapped around the egg, but I went back and stuck it on with egg white so that it will survive transport.

Nothing too original** here. I am kind of pleased with my bucolic egg on the left. On the right, another egg salvaged using the remains of a less lucky one.

 If this were local news I'd say something about "sunny side up" here and my co-host would laugh.

This was the first egg where we discovered something that's maybe obvious to everyone else, but Girlfriend and I discovered at age 27. You know those clear crayons that come with the dye? Well obviously you can use them to keep part of an egg white--I knew that already--but you can also use it on top of one layer of dye to preserve it through a second layer of dye. This is a trick we'll tuck away for the future, like the shell-wrapping thing. If we keep doing this this way every year, we are going to end up a couple of old people who are awesome at Easter eggs. That is not something I saw for myself, but I'll take it.

Okay. Because we're crazy, were going to drive to Philadelphia now. Bye.

* I went back to look up my "pineappolantern" post, to make sure I spelled "jack-o'-lantern" consistently. I thought it might be easier to just search for "pineappolantern" on Google than to go through the blog archives. You know what's humbling? Finding out you don't come up on the first page of search results for a word you invented.

** First, I wrote "origingal." In a better world, that would mean something.

Pixel Quest would be a cool name for a retro game, I think

Oh, Google. Just when I had thought I had nothing to say this week, you went and did something interesting.

It's April Fool's Day, after all. If you have the same nostalgia centers that I do, you should probably check out their new joke. For those of you who don't have time, it's Google Maps compatible with the NES.

Why am I posting about this? Because I got caught on the heavily pixelated street view for about an hour, collecting pictures of places I recognized. And they were cool enough that I thought I would share them with the Internet. Like this:

It's just a filter, of course, yet it makes everything just strange enough to produce the aha! of decoding something familiar. It also coats everything you see in nostalgia like a thick crust of cinnamon-sugar. My first aha! was poking around my old neighborhood on Long Island, not recognizing anything in the blown-out pixelscape until I came to this:

A car wash, of course. As far as I know, it has always looked like that. Not with the pixels, I mean, but otherwise.

Then I decided to take a tour of Seattle.

Why the Space Needle is wobbly like that I really don't know.

 The Hedgehog House, back when hedgehogs lived there.

 Take a bus to the Ave.

 Find my favorite bubble tea place in Seattle.

Last of all, I decided to take a look at Baltimore, since I'd been there so recently.

Yup, that's the Washington Orthanc Monument in Baltimore. But where's George? One can only assume that he was borne away on the back of the Lord of Eagles.

Adventures in Baltimore

Presidents' Day weekend was a nice one. Girlfriend and I went to Baltimore, about as spontaneously as we do anything. That is, we wanted to do it. On Friday I did some research on what you can actually do in Baltimore. (The case for the city up to that point had rested mainly on proximity.) On Saturday we started actually planning it, looking at train tickets for Sunday morning and Monday evening, and reasonable hotels for in between. So as it had turned out, there are several good museums in Baltimore as well as an aquarium, but their hours, combined with the hours Girlfriend needed to be back in DC to get work done, were generating headaches. We'd be rushing to get there when there wouldn't be much to do, then rushing back to get back to work. I was beginning to wonder if we actually had time for a vacation, and was getting ready to call the whole thing off, when Girlfriend asked me, "What if we go tonight?"

It was 3 p.m. at this point and I had already made a hotel reservation for Sunday night. The deadline for cancelling that reservation was 4 p.m. the day before, or one hour from then. But over the next hour she convinced me she had the right idea. We canceled the reservation with five minutes to spare. We booked a different room at a different hotel and bought train tickets for 7 o'clock. Then we ran around the house throwing things into bags, swung by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription I had to have refilled that day, ate dinner at the mall food court, and were off.

I forgot to account for the track work on the Metro. We had a long wait for the red line to get us to Union Station. But, there we got, timed so perfectly that you would have thought I knew what I was doing.

So, there's a Quality Inn in Baltimore that's surprisingly nice. Actually, possibly the nicest hotel I have any memory of staying in. (I think the place in Westport was, on the whole, a better experience, but that was a family operation. Also, we got trapped in the parking lot by an elk.) Booking the room at the last minute apparently brought it back into our price range, so hooray for that!

Girlfriend particularly liked the window hangings.

She made a nest there and hibernated until Monday.

As you can see, Girlfriend remembered to bring her camera, which means I get to put pictures in this post.

We walked out that night to get drinks and some food. We had a frustrating time at the bar we finally settled on. It's partially, but not entirely, their fault. For example, it was unfortunate that they were out of Blue Moon. It was my fault that, when browsing their remaining beer selection more or less at random, I forgot what's special about O'Doul's. Similarly, it was not their fault that my girlfriend is passionately averse to the substance known as "nacho cheese," but it is their fault that their menu specified mozzarella. (It was special. Or supposed to be.) And ultimately it is on me that I didn't send either of these things back.

Downtown Baltimore looks pretty nice. On the walk back we saw the back of the Baltimore Basilica.

We intended to circle around to the front at some point, but didn't get around to it. We also saw the Washington Monument (not that one) and got a shot of that in daylight.

Commemorating George Washington's imprisonment atop the tower of Orthanc.

We found The Walter's Art Museum, and that's a pretty cool (free) place. We got to the bulk of it in our two hours or so there, but could have spent two, or six, more. I'll share one bronze thingy that caught my eye:

It was maybe one or two feet tall. That's the Fall of Adam and Eve, there, but what got my attention was the monkey munching away in the background. Conjures up some fun thoughts. Of course Darwin wouldn't come along for another two centuries or so, and inasmuch as this prefigures him it's a coincidence. The monkey, according to the museum card, symbolizes lust and foolishness or some such. But I like to imagine him a step behind Adam and Eve, waiting for his turn.

The chunk of the museum I found most interesting was an eclectic collection organized as the sort of things an Enlightenment-era nobleman might accumulate. An 11-inch Egyptian "mummy" filled with corn sat on a shelf under a Mesoamerican stone "idol," with cards explaining not only what they were, but what the people collecting them in the 1600s thought they were. A narwhal horn hung, contextless, on the wall. At least, I couldn't find an explanation. It looked about 10 feet long--much too big to have been passed off as something that grew out of a horse's forehead, as I understand they had been.

We went down from there to the Inner Harbor to check out the National Aquarium with some of Girlfriend's relatives. The aquarium's exhibits were interesting, but the layout made for a tightly-controlled experience. I felt like I was on an assembly line. It was dark, and hard to get good pictures.

Guess.*

But there were some successes.

There's a rainforest exhibit too. I found out what a Screaming Piha sounds like. That's something that stops being fun right away.

All in all, a good trip, a good break. I discover, over and over, how nice it is to just up and go somewhere with Girlfriend. We might go back to Baltimore some time. Then again, we might pick a completely different destination at random.

* It's the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

The Pineappolantern

Hey, I figured out how to put pictures on Blogger (like it was hard).  This post is mostly about showing off this thing I have pictures of.

Halloween is a holiday I enjoy somewhat.  I haven't enjoyed dressing up in many years, but I still approve of candy in small pieces (the real fun of "fun size" being the ability to eat a Snickers bar, a Reese's cup, a 3 Musketeers, and a bar of dark chocolate in one sitting without endangering one's digestive stability).  I'm ambivalent about jack-o'-lanterns.  Drawing has always been an amateur-level forte of mine, and it's not every day of the year you get carte blanche to draw on things with knives.  Fire, also, is a medium I am seldom invited to work in.  But at least since I've been in the Hedgehog House, there's been an expectation that I would handle the design and execution of the jacks.  I think it started when I did this:

The problem is that I don't generally like pumpkins.  I can enjoy a slice of pumpkin pie in a Thanksgiving setting, but I certainly could never approach the enthusiasm that some of my housemates evinced at the prospect of fresh squash innards.  When I could, I got someone else to handle the scooping.  I think whether or not you find something appetizing can have a lot to do with how you feel about plunging your hands into it.

This year I didn't feel inspired with any clever pumpkin designs, and as usual I wasn't really feeling the pumpkin thing.  The people who would most expect me to perform have moved out now, so I could probably have punted.

But at the supermarket a week or so ago, I saw something that I hadn't thought was in season, and I got an idea.

An awful idea.

A wonderful, awful idea.

...

This probably isn't as big a reveal as it could have been, since it's right there in the post title, but check that out!  I'm pretty pleased with it.

Abby was doing some work at the dining room table and I didn't actually explain what I was doing--I just sat down with a knife and a tropical fruit and went to work.  She approved of the idea, and took the pictures when it was finished.

In the dark:

 That looks a lot better than I expected.  I'm just sayin'.  And you get this translucent effect all around the shell:

Here it is in its proper place, on the front stoop:

 

 

With a long exposure, the thing looks pretty demonic:

This is almost certainly my last Seattle jack-o'-lantern, and I think I went out on a good note.  I just hope it holds together until Halloween proper.