guests, weather, and whatnot
It's one of those All About Me posts. You know, a real journal. I don't know about you, but unless I'm a real-life friend, I could care less about some people's posts like that. So feel free to skip this one and go on to your next Friends post that you're about to read. I'm sure it will be more interesting that this twaddle.
Now that that's out of the way ...
First: I have bronchitis. I think someone coughed on me at Readercon. Who knows. Could be worse, could be raining. Wait, it has been raining, for days now. Okay, could be worse, I could have pneumonia -- again. The upside of me sounding like Marlene Dietrich? (1) Everyone loves to talk to me on the phone, especially men. (2) I could have tonsillitis -- but I can't now! Wooooooot! No tonsils!! (3) Everyone loves talking to me. I sound like a dirty phone call.
The downside? Jim Baen used to insist that every time my voice did this (it used to more often, when I got tonsillitis often), I had to call him and talk to him in my gravelly voice. Okay, yes, weird, but it made him happy and it was a running gag between the two of us for almost two decades. The first thing I thought of when my voice went all low and gravelly was: "I have to call Jim and make him laugh."
Suddenly I remembered, I can't call him. This is what death does: it makes us stop and remember it exists when we thoug
ht life was going on just fine.
On the guest front: we like having guests. Especially with this enormous house, at the size it is now. baron_elric is driving readwrite down to South Station on his first leg home, as he stayed up here with us for a short time after Readercon. It was lovely, lazy, and friendly: watching movies (introducing him to Shaun of the Dead was a treat), listening to music and moving iTunes files back and forth to our respectively identical LaCie outboard drives, just sitting around reading, lots of good food, and of course hunting for used books, records, and general thrift store shopping trips around the area. Building 19 rocks (I hope the new Manchester store gets in more furniture; man, we need a new couch that doesn't have completely busted-out springs). He's always a good guest, as all three of us have similar temperaments and tastes. Plus, he's just plain a good guest. Hope he'll be back soon.
The Macdonald clan (part) stayed over the night after Readercon, which was a good excuse to try the new Mexican restaurant in Derry, La Carreta, run by a family from (I believe) Guadalajara. Authentic. Mexican. Food. In Derry, New Hampshire. I am in heaven. I lived in LA. I spent time in the Southwest. I had despaired at finding real Mexican food out here. Ahhhhh. Good time, good guests, and an early evening; Readercon wore us all out.
On the weather front: we've had rain, rain, rain, and more rain, and in between drippingly humid weather; thank ghu we had air conditioning installed in the new part of the house. Makes me want to live in the living room all the time. At least we missed the golf ball-sized hail that hit neighboring towns. I heard someone in the waiting room of my doctor's office mention that her mother's car looks "like someone took a baseball bat to it."
On the garden front: the one tomato plant I lovingly managed to get planted in a pot on the deck this year (still no top soil for the yard, as I don't have a spare $10,000 lying around -- no exaggeration!) has two little green tomatoes coming along. Go, little tomato, go! I feel like a proud mother.
On the work front: I'm still slogging away at making calls every day for new clients or to ping existing ones: no work for the last two weeks. That's two weeks too long. That's half a month of income gone. It's as if there is a dearth of work, but only for me (other freelancers in the same field say they have more than enough, or even too much, work). After being in just the right place at just the right time, for years and years, and always getting too much work (I had to turn it down on a regular basis), I realize that when I used to say I was very lucky -- I was very lucky. The luck seems to have run its course. This is getting tiresome, as well as scary. No work for two weeks now means we will be short of our mortgage payment by more than $2,000. Then there are the regular bills, like electricity (hello, air conditioning!). And I just had to have an MRI for my spine (spinal stenosis seems to be progressing; in another 5-10 years I may end up with neural damage which may stick me in a wheelchair permanently -- knock wood that this doesn't happen too quickly). That MRI will be several hundred dollars in copays. I'm not sure how we'll manage; I keep assuring myself that somehow it will all work out. So far, ten months down the pike, nothing has happened and it isn't working out. Yet.
Oh, and we've switched to Vonage for our phones to cut down the phone bills, which has been mostly seamless, but I can't make a phone call while uploading or downloading even a 1 meg file; I get dropped packets on the voice end, even though we've set our Vonage line to prioritize to the voice end. It's a pain in the ass, but damn, it's cheap compared to what we were paying for long distance; I have to call New York every day, sometimes many times a day. We'll adjust our behavior to make it work.
If anyone has any leads for freelance editing, proofreading, graphic art work, or composition (typesetting & design), please consider sending some my way. Corporate, multimedia, technology, computer-associated -- any field, not just book publishing. I've worked in them all, over the years. I'm beyond the stage where I'm too proud to say I need help with leads: all the rocks I turn over are bare, and I know where most of the rocks are. I need help from those who work outside my box, so to speak. Any leads would be appreciated. Even tiny ones.
Now that that's out of the way ...
First: I have bronchitis. I think someone coughed on me at Readercon. Who knows. Could be worse, could be raining. Wait, it has been raining, for days now. Okay, could be worse, I could have pneumonia -- again. The upside of me sounding like Marlene Dietrich? (1) Everyone loves to talk to me on the phone, especially men. (2) I could have tonsillitis -- but I can't now! Wooooooot! No tonsils!! (3) Everyone loves talking to me. I sound like a dirty phone call.
The downside? Jim Baen used to insist that every time my voice did this (it used to more often, when I got tonsillitis often), I had to call him and talk to him in my gravelly voice. Okay, yes, weird, but it made him happy and it was a running gag between the two of us for almost two decades. The first thing I thought of when my voice went all low and gravelly was: "I have to call Jim and make him laugh."
Suddenly I remembered, I can't call him. This is what death does: it makes us stop and remember it exists when we thoug
ht life was going on just fine.
On the guest front: we like having guests. Especially with this enormous house, at the size it is now. baron_elric is driving readwrite down to South Station on his first leg home, as he stayed up here with us for a short time after Readercon. It was lovely, lazy, and friendly: watching movies (introducing him to Shaun of the Dead was a treat), listening to music and moving iTunes files back and forth to our respectively identical LaCie outboard drives, just sitting around reading, lots of good food, and of course hunting for used books, records, and general thrift store shopping trips around the area. Building 19 rocks (I hope the new Manchester store gets in more furniture; man, we need a new couch that doesn't have completely busted-out springs). He's always a good guest, as all three of us have similar temperaments and tastes. Plus, he's just plain a good guest. Hope he'll be back soon.
The Macdonald clan (part) stayed over the night after Readercon, which was a good excuse to try the new Mexican restaurant in Derry, La Carreta, run by a family from (I believe) Guadalajara. Authentic. Mexican. Food. In Derry, New Hampshire. I am in heaven. I lived in LA. I spent time in the Southwest. I had despaired at finding real Mexican food out here. Ahhhhh. Good time, good guests, and an early evening; Readercon wore us all out.
On the weather front: we've had rain, rain, rain, and more rain, and in between drippingly humid weather; thank ghu we had air conditioning installed in the new part of the house. Makes me want to live in the living room all the time. At least we missed the golf ball-sized hail that hit neighboring towns. I heard someone in the waiting room of my doctor's office mention that her mother's car looks "like someone took a baseball bat to it."
On the garden front: the one tomato plant I lovingly managed to get planted in a pot on the deck this year (still no top soil for the yard, as I don't have a spare $10,000 lying around -- no exaggeration!) has two little green tomatoes coming along. Go, little tomato, go! I feel like a proud mother.
On the work front: I'm still slogging away at making calls every day for new clients or to ping existing ones: no work for the last two weeks. That's two weeks too long. That's half a month of income gone. It's as if there is a dearth of work, but only for me (other freelancers in the same field say they have more than enough, or even too much, work). After being in just the right place at just the right time, for years and years, and always getting too much work (I had to turn it down on a regular basis), I realize that when I used to say I was very lucky -- I was very lucky. The luck seems to have run its course. This is getting tiresome, as well as scary. No work for two weeks now means we will be short of our mortgage payment by more than $2,000. Then there are the regular bills, like electricity (hello, air conditioning!). And I just had to have an MRI for my spine (spinal stenosis seems to be progressing; in another 5-10 years I may end up with neural damage which may stick me in a wheelchair permanently -- knock wood that this doesn't happen too quickly). That MRI will be several hundred dollars in copays. I'm not sure how we'll manage; I keep assuring myself that somehow it will all work out. So far, ten months down the pike, nothing has happened and it isn't working out. Yet.
Oh, and we've switched to Vonage for our phones to cut down the phone bills, which has been mostly seamless, but I can't make a phone call while uploading or downloading even a 1 meg file; I get dropped packets on the voice end, even though we've set our Vonage line to prioritize to the voice end. It's a pain in the ass, but damn, it's cheap compared to what we were paying for long distance; I have to call New York every day, sometimes many times a day. We'll adjust our behavior to make it work.
If anyone has any leads for freelance editing, proofreading, graphic art work, or composition (typesetting & design), please consider sending some my way. Corporate, multimedia, technology, computer-associated -- any field, not just book publishing. I've worked in them all, over the years. I'm beyond the stage where I'm too proud to say I need help with leads: all the rocks I turn over are bare, and I know where most of the rocks are. I need help from those who work outside my box, so to speak. Any leads would be appreciated. Even tiny ones.