The Diamond Island

The progress on my book continues. I’m 87% through the revisions, and am about to tackle the climax of the story. Come on, big creative push!

I got my hands on the DVD for Hawk the Slayer, and am very pleased I made the acquisition. It’s a sword and sorcery movie from 1981, and is actually watch-able, in a Beastmaster kind of way. The dialogue, characters and plot are all hilariously awful. I place the movie somewhere between average and good. It’s not “good enough” to be good, but it isn’t “average enough” to be average. This is the kind of movie you can watch with friends and have some laughs. Though nothing will beat the sheer WTF-ness of The Core. All I can say is that the universe must have taken pity on me for having suffered through The Return of Captain Invincible, and compensated me with a movie that is both bad and fun.

Just finished Season 1 and 2 of Heroes by means of Netflix. K’s new computer, plus our nifty high speed FIOS connection, equals “watch now”. Apparently, you can watch Netflix movies on your computer, who knew? Because we subscribe, we get a certain amount of free hours of viewing each month, so we’ve been draining that account dry to get caught up with the show. Maybe I’ll go into analytic detail of the show in another post, but for now all I’ll say is the show is worth watching. Lots of problems and plots that don’t add up, and Season 2 drops in quality significantly, but I’d say Season 1 was a heck of a lot of fun.

Musically, I’ve been listening to The Cure’s Wish and really digging it a lot. It comes on the heels of Disintegration, which carries the distinction of being my big breakup album. So to hear the post-breakup energy many years later after putting college way behind me, it’s very cathartic and enlivening. I’ve also been listening to Deutsch Nepal, a dark ambient sound that I’m really starting to dig. I’m going to have to get some more of this stuff. It puts me in the zone when I need to concentrate at work or hash my book revisions out.

On the cat zone, K and I got a large bath mat for the upstairs bathroom, and Frankie loves it. She uses it as a springboard to dash downstairs, then comes back up and rests on the bunched up mat. Frankie made sure to trill at K and give her the head-butt leap of affection to let her know this was approved. Meanwhile, Michael and Blink got a new soft throw to lay on. The fuzzy warm goodness does well on the couch, and when a human sits there with the throw over them, the two cats gravitate. Even independent Frankie has been taking turns resting on it. Wow!

My car was broken into the other night. I drive a bucket, and one of the doors doesn’t lock all the time. Needless to say I never keep anything valuable in there. Just a glove compartment jammed full of napkins ripped off from fast food joints, some moist towelette packets, and a pad of paper with a pencil. I could follow the progress of the intruder exactly. First, the pad and pencil tossed casually to the floor of the car. Then all the napkins got shoved out of the way and left on the passenger seat. Finally the moist towelette packets had been thrown on the ground outside of the car in disgust before leaving the door semi-closed. I had to laugh, because it’s a lot of effort to clear the compartment out for zero returns.

It may be winter for all practical purposes, but I’m still looking forward to next spring’s planting. K and I got ourselves a garden weasel finally, and aim to test it out as soon as the ground dries out a bit from the recent snow we had. The ground hasn’t hardened quite yet with the cold, but the weeds and other plants are on the defensive. I’ll give the scoop on how reliable this ding dang darn thing is when compared to the TV commercial soon enough.

And on a final note, I have yet to begin writing my Xmas cards. The beat down looms!

Talk about doomsville city at the garden. We had a frost finally in late October, after having a record hot month. The majority of plants left all seem to have taken a major blow. Even the weeds are getting nervous. The bees are gone, and the general insect population seems to have cleared out. The birds are still around, but not to the degree they were a month ago. K and I were busy scavenging up what we could in the way of herbs, but hoo boy it was brutal out there in the trenches.

Tomatoes go bye-bye. The only thing left is the lettuce, which we harvested gratefully and had a small salad with our dinner, hooray! Pretty soon it’ll be time to dig up the horseradish, I can’t wait! Unfortunately, half my seeds haven’t dried out right, and have grown horrible molds. Still, not bad for my first try. I harvested the last of the basil, and some oregano for a Pizza of Doom I’m making for work. But it looks like the garden goodies have hit the bed and are passing out of time and space until next time folks.

Since it’s Halloweenie, I need my costume. I dug into my enormous bookshelf of tricks and pulled out a 1976 copy of Make-Up Monsters by Marcia Lynn Cox. Oh, I gots ideas galore thanks to this book. Hopefully, with the make-up stuff I have acquired, things will come out neat. Some of these, I haven’t tried out since I went trick or treating with my cousins or my elementary school friends. Oh yes, and I scored a pumpkin, though I’m guessing I’ll be my usual unskilled self and create a rather mundane jack-o-lantern. I don’t know. I just haven’t got the right touch for doing a pumpkin right. Maybe I need a kung fu master to show me what I’m missing. And of course the bowl is filled with candy for the screaming brats. Hopefully K won’t eat all the Mr. Goodbars.

My friend, Dr. C, called me up the other day and we rapped about what he’s been up to. I’m totally psyched for him to be doing what he’s doing. He’s been busting his buns through med school and his residency, and now he’s finally at the point where the powering up starts. Basically, he’s getting to write his own ticket for the hospital he’s going to be working at, and he’ll be living in a fabulous area for his family (and dog). I’m very happy for him, because there were some times where his life was pretty bleak and I was very worried for him.

That brings up another old friend from way back, someone whom I haven’t spoken with in a long time and only hear of through the astrosending, but I was thinking about a lot in the last week. Mainly in the terms of some spiritual connections we made back in the day, which still resonate with me now. Looks like she’ll be getting a website soon, which I’ll shamelessly plug here, but it’s not up yet. So get kraken, Xtine!

Going even further in the wayback machine on YouTube, I found someone posted a copy of The Frog Prince, with Kermit the Frog and Robin the Brave, plus Sweetums the Ogre before he was made safe for work consumption. Oh, wow, this takes me back a ways. I had this on vinyl, along with many other records, and played it often as a kid. But now it’s unavailable on DVD, and only rarely can you catch it on cable (when I was still mooching off my folks). That’s a shame, because the musical numbers are fantastic, and the story itself is both charming and wholesome. I still have the record, but it’s in rough shape. I’d love to get my paws on this one. Still, to see it on YouTube brings me to a deep place inside full of happy feelings and warm thoughts.

This weekend Lush came out with some new products, so K hinted that we ought to go to the nearest store and check them out. Since I was out of bath bombs and shampoo bars, I thought today is the day we replenish our ammunition or perish. Pricey luxury stuff, but its on my top list of bath goodies so we had to go. I stocked up on my usual array of nice things and she got herself some hair treatment prizes. K then proceeded to cut her hair, change it into a nice cerise color, and pamper it with wonderful hair-treatment goodness. Me, I’m set for the next alchemical treatment. I started using a new flavor of shampoo bar and so far its got good value. I was getting annoyed with the generic soup du jour of shampoo you can get at any supermarket, anywhere in crumbsville.

And I worked on my book. I finally decided on a teaser page to show you all. One that doesn’t reveal too much, but gives some good thoughts on what I’m about. I just have to turn it into a PDF and post it, which given the Halloweenie whackiness, might be a few days. I’m 70% through the revisions, so I’m getting closer to my current goal. I’ve accumulated a list of things that will have to be addressed in the polish stage, but I think most of it is minor work. It may be that my work will have only just begun after I finish my revisions, but it’s a major goal just the same. I’m still considering my cover. What color it will be, what the picture and text will consist of, and the spine. I’m not satisfied with my notes, so I predict I’ll have to spend more time on this when I’m not distracted.

I hung out with my gamer friends, and it was a blast. We watched the unimaginably horrible Universal Soldier: The Return and had a lot of fun mocking it. The game we played was a nice little gem called Arkham Horror, which is based on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos. In a nutshell, it’s the 1930s, and alien horrors are coming into the town of Arkham as precursors to the outright monster apocalypse of a randomly generated Elder God of Evil. Players take the part of archetypes from the era (Flapper, Gangster, Archaeologist, etc.) and try to gain the knowledge and power to kill the monsters and defeat the ultimate bad monster before the town is destroyed.

It’s one of those games with tokens for every single thing in the game, and it’s a long game, but the mechanics seemed solid and the setting was hard not to get into. Everyone cooperates to stop the monsters instead of competing against each other. And the artwork and production values are very high. It was a blast walking around with my researcher and checking out all the various spooky places for clues and fighting off ghouls and alien fungi with my pistols.

I’ve been trying to record my dreams this October, but something about them has not wanted to be put down on paper. The messages from the unconscious haven’t wanted any photographs taken at their press conference, I suppose. As the Celtic New Year draws to a close, I’ve got a lot to ruminate on from this last year. A lot has happened, both in the external world and the internal.

The garden continues to wither away. Each time K and I come over, we have to pull some poor plant up by the roots and deliver it unto the compost pile. K has planted some lettuce for the autumn, so this year’s garden is not quite through yet. But the end is definitely in sight, I’m afraid. Today, we actually needed to buy tomatoes from the store. That’s how bad things have gotten. The potato harvest we took hold of in early August is nearly spent. I’m making a beef-vegetable stew right now that puts us one charge from empty. The herbs are looking lean and crummy now too. I have to do a harvest soon to save most of them for winter. The sage, lemon verbena and sweet basil need to be stored stat!

It’s a communal garden we labor in, so one of my garden neighbors comes over and asks me if I’ve had some tomatoes stolen. Yup, I says. A half dozen beefstake level goodies ready to be plucked the next day, and when I show up the next day, they gone. I tell the guy everybody wants their cut – the bugs take their cut, the birds and gophers take their cut, and now the hungry people take theirs. What can you do? I can’t complain though, I says. I got 2 or 3 bushels of bounty, and that’s not considering the non-tomato cut I got. The guy laughs and gives me four Juliets, tomatoes to keep for seeds, since we’re talking about getting seeds ready for next year. We talk shop a little, and he takes off. I feel like I got the level up, it’s cool.

I finally got the pictures developed from the demolition derby of Big Blue I mentioned earlier. As you can see, Big Blue has had all windows removed and chains run through the doors to keep them from bursting open. The front hood has a hole cut into it to allow the fire department ample access to put out any engine fires that may develop. I’m sniffing, as I know Big Blue looked so good for the debut, it’s a crying shame that the glory was denied my loyal automobile.

During my book revisions, I’ve been studying numerous editing articles on the internets. I want my book to conform to grammatical standards of some kind. I don’t think I’ve found my writing “special sauce” formula, exactly, but I’m learning everything I can get my hands on and doing what I can to craft my book into a finished piece that I’m satisfied with. As a result, I’m taking out books at random from my shelves, and when I encounter them in public, to study the composition.

At the grocery store I picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I’m not a fan of the books, but I figured this would be a good example to pick up and examine. Late in the series, the author should have everything about their special sauce figured out.  All the things I read about not doing are there. Passive voice, check. Heavy reliance on –ing verbs and –ly adverbs, check. Excessive use of “was” to be verb tense, check. Crumbs! This book violates just about every standard of editorial checking you could think of. Now, I’m not saying I’m any better – my own writing has needed some tough work to beat into shape. But it just goes toward proving my point that your success as a writer has much to do with luck, and little to do with standards of writing, talent, or what you write.

And, on a final note, I’ve been compiling a wish list for music to get a listen on. I’m still short two Lustmord albums, there’s that Skids album by the lead singer of Big Country, before he was the lead singer of Big Country, I’m hankering to get a hold of The Ocean Blue’s Cerulean, Concrete Blonde’s Walking In London, The Verve’s A Storm In Heaven, and of course Sia’s new album, whatever it’s called. I’m gathering soundtrack for book number 2, which will be digging deep into the ground for rocks and minerals to play with.

I think the “cold” war has been won. The germs are giving up the ghost to the combined pesto-pasta and tomato slice beatdown with a dram of fresh squeezed orange juice. Both K and I appear to be improving rapidly, and are getting main power back. We spent the weekend catching up on life patrol and the maintenance of our Slack pool.

She bought herself some new jeans, as her current selection was getting beyond threadbare and the ability for the astronautics fields via sewing to repair. I spotted for some Halloween goodies, as I think this will be a Celtic New Year where I have the motivation to actually dress up. I’m going to be Bloody Gore Face! Aieee! We also got ourselves a new futon, as the previous one had decided it just didn’t have the will to go on anymore. To recap, clothes, decorations and a good night’s sleep vitaly important to well-being. I see my Sims bars going up now. All about the tyranny of objects drill sergeant!

Long range patrol even brought back some fascinating tidbits from the internets for me to mull over. The uncommonly cool Designated Sidekick is doing a survey on what people want from their comics. I took the survey (it’s a long one), and have to say it was informative just considering the questions. I want sex and violence in my comics, and the mask is a must-have, but I’m more interested in believability and consistency than what superheroes are wearing or that the leaders of a team always have a certain quality. I think it’s ultimately neat that such questions are even being examined now, by someone, rather than relying on the good old staples. The bronze, silver and gold ages of comics are over. Now it’s time to get busy!

Some aliens on other planets are just plain disturbing to my sensibilities, but good grief, bless them for keeping the universe alive! I’d just gotten done talking about Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and that movie’s musical oddness. Well my science officer told me over in the Occasional Superheroine galaxy, there was a sensor reading of Christopher Lee sings. From an 80’s movie called The Return of Captain Invincible. Dear, sweet baby yeh-seus, I gained some Insanity points. Oh, can’t wait to see this one in its entirety. Christopher Lee certainly has lived a fascinating life!

Meanwhile, back at the bat-garden, the tomatoes continue to go down. The marinara sauce is on back order now, so it’s smooth sailing. But I don’t think we’ll be getting too many more tomatoes out of the deal. Maybe the last wave in the next two weeks, but then that’s it. The herbs are all going to flower, and it’s gotten harder to harvest them regularly. farming isn’t just growing and harvesting, it’s also preserving and storing them properly. The Jalapeno plant refuses to give up, however, and this brave little plant is putting forth a nice juicy array of peppers that are all turning red now. Wow, love to ya, little plant. You go!

We did the fertilizer thing, did some weeding, though the pesky weeds have free run of the place. Too many orcs for this tag team to take on. We’re going to have to call in the garden weasel or something. A huge wolf spider jumped out of its burrow, deciding that the watering was not to its liking and ran for the storm shelter. Sheesh, talk about what big fangs you have! Which brought me to thinking about how K and I have been battling a lot of spiders lately.

A host of them have been running loose in large numbers on the bottom floor. Even the cats, who do cave cricket patrol, leave them alone. I’ve had to squash these intruders, because I resent having my body turned into an emergency liquid nutrient supply when the lesser insects get overwhelmed. And man, reddish translucent scary spiders (Gnaphosids?), brown nasty hairy biters (Sac Spiders?), and even a few large rapid-moving wolf-like spiders (Wandering Spiders?). What, did I just enter a sequel to The Giant Spider Invasion?

Love that movie. Great late night show for a kid to watch and get scared out of his wits! Special guest stars are Alan Hale Jr., also known as “The Skipper” from Gilligan’s Island, and Leslie Parrish, also known as the inspiration for Richard Bach’s soulmate novel The Bridge Across Forever and the crewmember who decides to go with Khan in the Star Trek episode where Ricardo Monteban tries to kill Kirk with his “genetic super-soldier” army. Both Alan and Leslie are outstanding avatars of cultural development in The Giant Spider Invasion.

I will note that the main female character, a scientist played by Barbara Hale, survives in the movie. I attribute this to her having a pair of pants on at all times. The women who run around without any pants on do not fare so well, as you can see in the trailer. Remember, being a sexy woman in a movie nearly always equals death, injury or unconsciousness! Well, at least there’s a cheesy giant spider wrecking havoc in downtown that looks suspiciously like a modified VW bug. You get your culture points where you can get ’em!

The family gathering was pulled off with a minimum of fuss.  Charcoal-grilled Nature’s Promise hamburgers, homemade peach cobbler, and plenty of generic chips, freezer-thawed french fries, and garden vegetable salad with mom’s homemade dressing.  Nothing beats a fresh slice of garden grown tomato on your burger, whoo-eee!  Then, crack out the Labor Day punch and talk family business to candlelight in the backyard.  Yeah, the Slack bonus points were a-cumulatin’ in the Slor that day I can tell you.

The book revisions have reached the 55% mark, which is awesome.  I got more done this weekend than I did my week long vacation to sit and write, even though I am sick with a sore throat and a clogged ear.  I can’t explain the discrepancy in the space-time continuum, though I believe it has to do with hitting a stretch where the writing didn’t need as much work, and the fact that the revisions are gaining momentum on the remaining pages.  Still need to do that polish stage, and complete my artwork for the cover, but I’m happy.  The revised material is much better than the first draft stuff.

K has been watching the first season of the Highlander television series, and I keep getting drawn in to watch.  We finished the first season this weekend, and all I can say is Darius!  I still think the first movie is the only one that counts, the others being pretty lame.  Part of that is nostalgia, and part of that is revulsion at the franchising effect on the story.  If you forget the movies, the television series is actually pretty good action, with some nice camp and an attempt to tell a story in exploration of the alternate universe.

The tomatoes from the garden have totally defeated us; we’re just giving them away now.  The weeds have gotten out of control, and the groundhog roams at will.  The sunflowers have pretty much bitten the dust, but there isn’t a seed left on them, so at least they are dying satisfied, so to speak.  We planted some fresh basil, which ought to produce for us some nice pesto in the next few weeks before autumn forces our hand to garden mark two.  We have a lizard now!  About seven inches, black with brown and ochre markings, living in our pile of unused wood.  We threw him some baby tomatoes and the next day we were rewarded with a pile of skins.  Yea!  Feed the animal bonus points!

This weekend marked a turning point in the evolution of the garden. K and I stopped to take stock of our progress, and made some preliminary plans for next spring’s crop. Pretty soon it’ll be time to get the autumn garden planting in, but for all practical purposes, the harvest has reached the peak. We’ve got tomatoes coming in faster than we can turn them into marinara sauce, and jalapenos galore. The bean plants refused to stop producing, despite being eaten to swiss cheese by the bugs and looking like desert shrubs. So we harvested the last set of beans and pulled them up to go into the compost bin. Crumbs! Those beans were relentless, like the Terminator.

This was the first year for this particular plot, so the soil hasn’t been really worked to my satisfaction yet. Busting the sod and working soil into the clay was back breaking work. Now that we’ve got a good layer of compost, hay and manure down, the turning of the soil for winter ought to pump things up nicely for spring. Case in point, our smaller plot from last year was taken over by the parental units, after we had done the hard work the year before, and they’ve got bountiful goodies with minimal work. It seems like getting the garden into shape, first year style, takes a certain amount of trial by fire.

So, what worked and what didn’t? Broccoli was the big loser. Attracted large numbers of pests, needed lots of water, used a lot of space – and the yield for one small crown of broccoli just didn’t even out. The beans, obviously, were the big winner by a landslide. Next year we will be more prepared for the harvest and be ready for mass freezing. And we’ll give them the pole structure they deserve, so they are easier to pick and water. Potatoes were a huge hassle with all the potato beetles and the watering. But the harvest was good. Hashbrowns and stews have been out of this world tasty with the freshest of potato goodness. Jalapenos were a winner, but next time we’ll fertilize the one plant less. Tomatoes have been the big crop this year, but we’ll cut back. Even with the marauding gopher, it’s way too much. Green peppers will continue as normal. Lettuce needs to be scaled back, way too much for our needs.

The herb garden will need some revamping. We did too much sweet, lime and cinnamon basil, and not enough of the regular basil. Cilantro needs more active management; we’ll have to watch that one closely next year. Rosemary, sage and savory were about right. We did a lot of parsley last year and it was awesome, but this year we did none, which we are regretting. Next spring, the parsley will be back on the map. The lemon verbena has been a success, but we haven’t done enough with it in potato salads and tea, so I’m thinking we’ll dry it out and save it for winter. The oregano varieties and the thyme rocked the mike. There’s just no comparison between even fresh herbs from the store and right from the ground.

We mixed the harvest plants with flowers this year – sunflowers, marigolds – and it really made the garden look fantastic. And it helped with the pollination of our harvest plants by attracting bees and butterflies. Next year, I think this is the way to go – mix and match. We didn’t do this with some of the sections of the garden and they didn’t seem to do as well. Also, we grew moss by itself, and it didn’t do so well either. I’m thinking we will plant the moss in patches under the main array of plants and see if it doesn’t help.

It was a hassle killing pests by hand, but the decision to avoid pesticides seems to have paid off. Our garden in the middle of the day is crowded with bees and yellow jackets of all kinds, ants, butterflies, ladybugs, weird bugs I can’t recognize, and birds – especially the yellow finches. I’m thinking a birdbath of some kind might be in order. Of course, the flies and mosquitoes were present, but what can you do? I saw a rabbit and some chipmunks in other people’s plots, so I’m guessing the fence is losing integrity and Mr. Gopher will have competition next year. Oh yeah, and the baby praying mantises have moved into the plot, so that’s a plus. It’s a trade off – fewer pests and contaminated goodies, or work harder but share the work with the pest-patrol and get a nice ecosystem. It’s a kick to watch a single ladybug clear an entire plant of aphids in an hour.

Hopefully, as the weather grows less humid and we get more rain, the watering duty will lessen. I swear, I should buy stock in the water company; these tomatoes are like living sponges. The payoff is coming now in droves, which does help when I think back over the summer – my head a blazing cloud of gnats and the hose trying to catch up with the ground’s rate of heat loss.

So, what’s on the slab for tonight’s dinner, you ask? Well, lately the dinner manufacturing process has been receiving a variety of randomly created vegetables from the garden. Today’s beam-aboard material is lots of jalapeno peppers, and boy do I love the heat produced by these puppies! I dialed into my brain stem and that old reliable chili manifestation visualized itself for my tantalization. Hey, is that the buck-buck of helpless chicken patties? Yes! Victory is mine. Still have the pesto-goodness from the previous night to rely upon, and there’s that vegetable soup experiment K made as a secondary backup. I’m tellin’ ya, when you make your Cook Roll (and making your Garden Roll adds that bonus), everything comes up videos.

Of course, when I whiff that Roll, then its time to order up the community-pool wheel of taste. Mrm. Grease and processed material made by human misery or robot slavery. Yeah, the beat-down is part of the equation. Sometimes the land of android invasion requires you to rely on that rat-in-a-box, because you’re too tired from blasting away at the pincer-bots and gorgonoids to think about how you’ll plot coordinates for the refueling stop to restore your body’s health bar. Eesh! Thank goodness I put some experience points into getting Cook and Garden on my character sheet. It’s a sharing, cooperative work for K and I.

The battles against the potato beetles, the gnats dive-bombing my ocular mechanisms, the shaking of my fist at the cousin of the Caddyshack gopher as I find another tomato skin left right where I can find it at the dramatically appropriate time. The confrontation with the earth and her feral friends teaches wisdom, gets my head in the right place, and surprises me with the tasty manifestations of plant reproductive rackets. We take it back to the honeycomb hideout and it makes for a few more bonus points when the meal gets made. Making it yourself is one degree of better. Making it yourself with your own produce, well that rocks it to the crypt!