Dog broke. Please advise.
Boneless Andy
Dog broke. Please advise.
Category: castle frostbite.
Worst criminal ever
I don’t think I need to hire an investigator to find the identity of the culprit who stole a handful of animal crackers from the low table next to the recliner.
Achtung! Kein Kinderlakritz!
“An acquired taste is an appreciation for something unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it. It is the opposite of innate taste, which is the appreciation for things that are enjoyable by most persons without prior exposure to them.” –Wikipedia
I explained the concept of acquired taste to my kids as flavors that you generally have to grow up with to find them appealing. Salmiak is a great example of acquired taste. It’s licorice (which in itself is a polarizing taste–people tend to either love it or absolutely hate it), but not the sweet form you can find in grocery stores everywhere. Salmiak licorice cranks the flavor dial up to 19 because it is flavored with ammonia salt (ammonium chloride), which gives it an extremely intense astringent taste.
Salmiak is only common in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. It’s pretty much impossible to find outside of those areas. People who love salmiak flavor almost invariably grew up with it, and I’ve never met anyone that liked it who wasn’t from one of those countries. Everyone else usually finds it disgusting. In Germany, salmiak licorice has to be labeled “Erwachsenenlakritz-Kein Kinderlakritz” (“Adult Liquorice – Not Children’s Liquorice”). Even my son, who’s the only other person in the house that likes licorice, will not touch the salmiak licorice. It’s pretty much the only candy I can buy for myself and just leave sitting out in the kitchen somewhere because I know it’s in no danger of being pilfered by teenagers in search of a snack.
The little baggies in the picture are salmiak-flavored Fisherman’s Friend menthol drops. I usually carry one of those with me when I am out of the house in the winter because let me tell you, that ammonia salt in combination with menthol will clear your sinuses right up. My daughter came down with COVID a few weeks ago, but nobody else in the house got it. I know it’s likely because she was mostly isolated in her room and we’re fully vaccinated and boostered with the new bivalent shots, but I’d like to think that the virus didn’t find a foothold in my nasal passages because it smelled the ammonia salt from the salmiak and went all, “Nope, nope, nope. I’m out.”
Gone fishin’
Girl Child likes to fish, and this is a good time of the year for it, so I have been driving her to her various fishing spots all over town in the last few weeks. I usually sit in the car or my folding camping chair while she is fishing, and I’ve come to appreciate the alibi to do some writing out of the house and away from most connectivity. We go out for a few hours, and I usually come back with a bunch of words that were written without the buzz and ding of notifications or the distraction from the dogs alerting me to the FedEx guy coming up our driveway with CLEAR INTENT TO MURDER US ALL.
The kids are still in Summer Vacation Loafing Mode, and we’ve been out with them to do stuff and enjoy their company. Switching up my writing schedule and adapting it to our other activities is kind of a nice change. It reminds me of the time when they were little and I had to get my writing done while they were napping or playing on the swing set. It’s a good reminder that art supports life, not the other way around, as Stephen King says in “On Writing”. (That’s one of my favorite books about the philosophy of the craft, along with Philip Pullman’s “Daemon Voices” and Lawrence Block’s “Spider, Spin Me A Web”.) The kids will be adults and out of the house soon enough, and then I’ll have all the quiet office time I can stand. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy squeezing in a few hundred words here and there between hitting the good fishing spots, the burger place, and the rock shop where Girl Child likes to spend all her cash.
The greatest evolutionary success story
Behold the Great Northeastern Snuggle Otter in his natural habitat: a private recliner.
Mr. Floofy
I know it’s high time to groom and trim Andy A. Doodle when he starts to look remarkably like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
From the Castle Frostbite IT department
Robin’s iMac started giving her the Beachball of Death, hanging up on almost everything she tried to do with it. I used to be a hardware tech support guy and systems administrator, so I am the official Castle Frostbite IT department. In that function, I diagnosed the iMac and suspected that the hard drive was failing.
$90 for a repair kit and two hours later, the iMac has been rejuvenated with an SSD. I also gave it a thorough interior cleaning while I had the screen off. It’s not a terribly difficult repair with the right tools—the hardest part of the operation is to line up the strips for the new screen adhesive and then putting the screen glass back on perfectly aligned because once the glass touches the adhesive, it doesn’t want to move again.
I bought this iMac in mid-2014 and maxed out all the specs when I ordered it. It’s a Core i7 with 16GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX780, and now it’s faster than it was in its new state because it’s booting the operating system and running applications off an SSD and not the fusion drive it came with originally. For the stuff Robin does with a computer, it will probably last her for another two or three years, so I’d say I got my money’s worth out of that purchase. One of the nice things about Macs is that they stay useful far longer than their PC counterparts. That useful period is much extended when you future-proof the computer by buying the highest specs you can afford.
That goes doubly for iMacs because they are NOT designed for end-user upgradeability. They have a handy little trapdoor for replacing RAM, but that’s as far as Apple wants you to do things yourself. To get at any interior components, you have to cut the adhesive that holds the screen, pop the whole big glass panel off, and hope you don’t have to sneeze when it’s time to stick it back on.
Still, it’s satisfying to flex the old IT Guy muscles every now and then and Fix a Thing. So much of my day revolves around sitting at a desk and having conversations with imaginary people that it’s nice to be able to get out the special tool kit and engage in some manual tinkering that fixes a problem with a physical object.
Countryside Internets
This is the current connectivity situation at Castle Frostbite: 100mbit fiber with 25Mbit upstream. That’s not gigabit fiber, but it’s absolutely workable, even with two teenagers in the house and about 30 devices on the WiFi at all times.
We live out in the country, but we have the luck to have picked a town that got wired for subsidized fiber half a decade after we moved here. But that’s the luck of the draw when you move into the countryside. Before fiber got here, we were on 1.5Mbit DSL for a few years, and before that….well, satellite was “Internet” of sorts, but it was slow and had 1,000ms latency, and a 200MB/day data cap. 100mbit fiber isn’t “downtown Seoul” speed, but it’s plenty fast even in the age of 4k HD streaming video.
In other news, we made it into 2021. And the first week of the new year sure has given 2020 a run for its money, hasn’t it? But I am done with the developmental edits for CITADEL this week, and then it’s on to other things, like Frontlines #8. 2021 will be better than 2020, because I won’t give it a choice.
View from the factory floor
On the rare occasion of a neat and cleaned-up desk, here’s a picture. Does this ever scream “science fiction writer at work”, or what?
The eagle-eyed among you will notice that all the gear is Alienware-branded, which means you can probably guess that I occasionally use it for pursuits other than the typing of sentences and paragraphs and so on. That beast of a laptop is a 17-inch AW17R4, which I bought three years ago with all the configurable specs maxed out as far as possible. It still tears through everything I throw at it, so I am guessing it’ll probably serve me a few more years before I’ll think about upgrading. It weighs over ten pounds because it’s built like a tank, so I don’t really use it as a laptop. Instead, it’s sort of a portable desktop with a backup screen and a built-in uninterruptible power supply.
The monitor is a recent addition. It’s a 34-inch ultrawide, which is the berries for editing and revising because it lets me have two full-sized application windows open side by side. It’s also the berries for gaming because a 21:9 display at this size is ludicrously immersive. Once you are used to one, going back to a 16:9 screen feels like wearing blinders.
Peripherals are hardwired because input lag kills, and they’re Alienware as well because I like it when everything matches.
Anyway, that is where the sausage gets made these days. I have a lightweight 2-in-1 Windows laptop for writing on the go, but there isn’t much of that going on at the moment, so I only use it whenever I want to chat with friends or browse the web from the recliner. My writing software is still Scrivener, which has been my main first draft tool ever since I started writing novels. Revisions and edits are done in Microsoft Word, which is the de facto industry standard, but I don’t like doing first drafts in Word for anything longer than a chapter or a short story because Word doesn’t let me organize and reshuffle chapters like Scrivener does. (I’ve been using the Scrivener 3 beta for Windows since the very early versions, and it hasn’t crashed on me once.)
Not in the picture are my corkboard, where I pin index cards with ideas and frequently used reference data, and my whiteboard, which holds my color-coded sticky notes for the individual chapters of the current draft. While those would make interesting visuals, one has a lot of personal information on it and the other would comprehensively spoil CITADEL, the third book in the Palladium Wars.
There you have my view on most days. It’s not a cool Manhattan loft office looking out over 31st Street or anything, but it’s quiet, the coffee is much cheaper, and I have everything I need right where I want it.
Color palette: New England X-treme
Even 2020 can’t manage to make a big dent in my enjoyment of the fall here in northern New England. This year has been an awful, cortisol-swaddled slog, but that just makes it more important that we carve our own little pleasures out of it whenever we can. For me, one of those pleasures is sitting in a garden recliner with a cup of coffee on a cool, sunny morning and watching the dogs race each other through the leaves. In a week or two, I’ll have to put away the fire pit and stage the snow shovels, but not just yet. I want to squeeze a few more mornings like today’s out of this season.