Work

Okay.  New day, new week, new attitude.  Back on the horse.  I'll sell this thing yet.  And if I don't I'll sell the next one.

What turned my mood around: work.  This weekend was warm and sunny, and since our yard was looking rather Tom Joad-ish, we attacked the lawn for the first time since moving in.  Tore down the goldfish pond that was in the middle of the back yard, so now we have enough room for whiffle ball (we are still accepting names for the stadium, by the way).  Raked out the dirt so it was level.  Used the bricks to make the beginnings of a raised bed for flowers in front of the house.  Built a compost heap, and half-filled it with raked grass and leaves.  Created a large heap of trash to take to the dump in the near future.  I love going to the dump. 

That night the lil hux made a homemade pizza with the girls, and we ate outside on the back patio as the sun set, with a fire going in the clay stove for warmth.  A lovely end to a good day.

I'd post a picture, but I was too tired to take one.

Next step: planting drought-resistant xeriscape grass.  Fun.

Wah.

So.  Not much forward progress on getting an agent for the novel.  It has admittedly been only a couple of months.  And there are lots of feelers still out there.  Still.  I fear I am writing in a vacuum, with no one reading my novels but a small circle of friends.

That said, a new novel is slowly rearing its head.  I'll take the characters out for a test drive in a short story soon.

Got a flash fiction posted a few weeks back, here.  Not my best work.

At least the short stories are getting a little attention. 
 

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Below, a hole in the moon.  Really.  It's about 200 feet wide.  The theory is, a hollow lava tube got punctured by a meteorite.

That, or space worms.

Picture taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,  I grabbed it from Bad Astronomy.

Godzilla Haiku

I had a real post in mind, using my own words, my own thoughts, but then this website came along and my mind went blank.  Godzilla Haiku, by SamuraiFrog.  Loving Godzilla 17 syllables at a time.   

Primordial Goo

That this is a five story high blood red waterfall oozing out of a glacier isn't even the strangest bit.

The strangest bit is what the blood red goo is made of.  It is an ancient community of microbes, sealed off from the rest of the world by ice for the last two million years.  "Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes existed without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of 'primordial ooze.'"  A high iron content is what lends it the blood red color.  That, or, you know, loathsome blood-devouring demons lurking under the crust of the Earth.  You make the call.

The gunk is coming out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica.  The photo, and the accompanying facts, are from my new favorite web site, Atlas Obscura.

History

We recently put two photographs up on our living room wall, both circa 1890 or so, of my great-great-great grandparents.  My Dad gave them to me; he's sort of the family historian.  He and I were driving with the girls somewhere one day, and he told us this story:

Their great-great-great-great grandpa, William Walbridge Wood, was traveling with his wife Louisa (that's them pictured above), some time in the 1860s, and when they stopped to water their horses found a 6 year old girl sitting in a chair at the bottom of a cistern (a basin used to catch rain-water).   She was sitting down there because she was being punished.  Not by her parents - they had left town on a train, said they'd return, never did - but by whoever it was that was raising her.  William and Louisa took the girl with them, and raised her as their own.  Her name was Bessie.

It is maddening incomplete, but that's what I love about this story: the huge gaps in it, the details that will never be known.  What was Bessie being punished for?  Who were the people raising her?  Were they abusive, or merely strict, to punish her by having her sit in a cistern?  William was 59 at the time, and Lousisa, as a Choctaw woman, had suffered greatly on the hellish Trail of Tears years before.  What was their motivation in taking her, in raising her?

It makes me wonder about what odd scraps of story will cling to my own family 150 years from now, when my great-great-great grandchildren are driving in their flying cars, telling their kids about how strange and primitive life was back in 2010.  What questions will they be asking about us?  What stories will define us in their eyes?  What will be lost?  What will remain? 

Geysers of Enceladus

My favorite moon. 

That's Saturn in the foreground, and the crescent Enceladus behind it.  The remarkable bit about this shot is the erupting geysers clearly visible at the south pole of Enceladus (at the very bottom of the crescent; click the picture to make it bigger).  Wow.  These ice geysers are coming from quarter mile deep cracks in the surface of the ice, called the Tiger Stripes.  The Cassini probe keeps making passes over this section, and on this last pass, on Feb 23, observed 30 geysers.  This was once supposed to be a dead moon, all rock and ice.  Now we know it to be alive with geological activity, and likely hiding a great lake of water beneath all that ice (though the jury is out on that).

Curiouser and curiouser.

Here's a close-up.

 
Thanks to Cassini, and to Bad Astronomy, for the pix.

First Pitch

This image sings and soars all on its own.  Not that it needs a realistic Earthbound analog, but if I had to choose one, I'd say that sprite in the upper left is flinging a baseball to that mitt in the lower left.  This being Spring Training and all.

This is in reality a group four very old and gravitationally bound galaxies,  Hickson Compact Group 31, interacting with each other.  One day, perhaps a billion years from now, they'll be one big galaxy.

The shot is from the Hubble.  Astronomy Picture of the Day posted it yesterday.  It's worth clicking to see in a larger format.  Particularly that sprite on the left.

Near Dark

Lil hux and I watched Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker last week.  Great date movie!  Brutal, powerful.  Stays with you.  Though, oddly, the image that sticks in my mind days afterward is that shot of the limping cat.

I was lucky enough to see a movie Kathryn Bigelow made twenty years ago in a real theater (in Times Square, no less).  I've been touting it as the best vampire movie ever made since.  It is, though it's sort of a western/vampire hybrid.  These vampires aren't dreamy tween fantasies.  They're mean, and bloody, and hungry.   The excellent Bill Paxton is in it, chewing some serious scenery.  Lance Henriksen is predictably menacing.

Worth watching for the bar scene alone.

Google

Our six year old had a sleepover guest last weekend.  We usually stretch the rules for sleepovers, let em stay up later than they normally would.  So.  About ten p.m., Hux is asleep, I go upstairs to check on them.  They're very quiet, their faces are ashen, they're glancing nervously at each other.  The computer, conspicuously, is out in front of them.  My little one finally says, "We saw something we shouldn't" and bursts into tears, very upset.

I pull up the history on the computer and see they've been doing Google searches on "naked boys" and "penis" and, my favorite, "naked boys penis stiken out."   I should point out right up front they didn't see anything.  I've got a program called FoxFilter that's pretty good at filtering sites.  So while they didn't see anything, their guilt at even looking up those terms was overwhelming.  I calmed them down, told them there was noting wrong with being curious.

They didn't get into trouble.  I'm not gonna punish my kids for their curiosity.  Curiosity should be celebrated.  And they confessed right away.  And the internet filter did its job.  So it's all good news.  I was even impressed at their spelling (except for that "penis stiken out" bit).  But the unsettling thought remains, that we are leaving the calm, quiet waters at the shores of parenthood, and every day stepping out to the faster, more dangerous currents beyond.

Addendum

So in my last post I threw out a quick little one liner about how our youngest heard the Alanis Morissette line "I'm brave but I'm chickshit" and asked me what a chickenship was.  Funny.  What I left out was the rest of the conversation, where I was explaining to her what "brave" meant.  I said something to the effect of "when you're scared to do something, but you do it anyway, that's brave."

She said, "If my sister was in a cave with a bear, I'd go in and kill the bear and save her."

Because they fight so much, I sometimes forget how ferocious their loyalty is to each other.

Before they came to our home, they had to live with so much chaos.  I'm guessing there were many times when each other was all they had.