Category: castle frostbite.

castle frostbite.

kitchen remodels are base and evil; also expensive.

I have a post about Sasquan and the events of last weekend in the works, and there’s a lot to tell. But it’s not quite done yet because I’ve recently discovered a new form of Introvert Hell: house renovations.

Right now, we are having the kitchen remodeled completely. That includes gutting the old kitchen down to the bones and then basically starting from scratch. This has been going on for weeks now, and while I concur with the necessity and understand that this can’t be done in a day or two, it’s a major intrusion, especially for an introvert like me. After an event like Worldcon, I want to retreat to my little cave and recharge the batteries, and that’s very hard to do when you have handymen in the house all day, every day, for weeks at a time. The house is a complete mess because emptying out the kitchen caused a cascading effect of disorder spreading through the rest of the place, so that’s not conducive to relaxation. But my biggest issue is the presence of other people in the house, which means I can’t ever fully relax. (It’s a weird introvert personality thing, at least for me.) Sooooo…I’m a little stressed out and still tired from the trip, and the kitchen rebuild won’t be done for another few weeks. I have an office to go to for quiet time, but I do my off-work living in this house, and right now it’s not the most relaxing environment.

But oh, my goodness–Sasquan. So much amazing stuff happened there, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Right after I run off to my quiet office, where I don’t have a constant soundtrack of saws, hammers, whining/barking dogs, and slamming doors.

 

aminals. castle frostbite. new hampshah.

avian squatters.

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These little guys are currently costing me $5 a day.

We rented a huge dumpster for our long-overdue major spring cleaning and attic junk culling. It costs a flat amount up front that includes the fee for dumping all the trash, and then $5 per day for every day we keep the dumpster beyond the included 5-day period.

I hauled a bunch of old furniture out onto the porch before the dumpster arrived so I’d be able to just take everything apart and chuck it into the dumpster. Right after they delivered the unit, we found that a robin had built its nest on one of the furniture piles sheltered underneath the overhang from the porch roof. There were little blue eggs in there, which turned into the little fuzzy birds you see in the picture above. I can’t remove the furniture until the wee ones have flown the nest because I don’t want to displace them, which would kill the baby robins. So the meter on the dumpster is running. On the other hand, it gives me a good excuse to take my time with the cleaning of the attic, which is handy because right now my priority is finishing Frontlines #4 anyway.

Here’s the parental unit, collecting protein for the kids in our backyard:

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Like Dr. Jeff Goldblum said in that Mostly Cretaceous Park movie—“Life will find a way.”

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

Bitchwinter.

I know it’s kind of gauche to bitch about the winter in New England when one chose to move and live here voluntarily lo these many years ago, but this winter is bitchworthy without further qualification.

We have never had as much snow as we’ve had this year, not even close. It has never been this cold for so long without any thaw days in the mix. We have never had three major winter storms on three consecutive weekends. Even here in the country, we are running out of space to push the snow, and down in Boston it just piles up because they don’t have any room left. Among my local friends, there’s widespread extreme winter fatigue. Spring can’t come soon enough, even if that means mud and blackflies, but at this rate I’m afraid it’ll take until July for all the snow to melt.

This is what the front of our house looks like right now:



The dogs have cabin fever. The humans definitely have cabin fever. And I’ve paid the plow guy so much money this year that I wouldn’t be surprised to see him pushing snow with one of those new Bentley SUVs next winter.

There are locals who have lived here half a century who say that they’ve never seen anything like it before. When you have seasoned New Englanders crying “uncle”, it’s a complete Bitchwinter.

FREE: FIFTY THOUSAND CUBIC FEET OF SNOW. MUST PICK UP. 

castle frostbite. health. worthy causes.

update from castle bleeearrgh.

Emails regarding the Space Marine naming rights will go out today. I meant to send them yesterday, but the Wandering Pestilence visited Castle Frostbite early yesterday morning. One of the kids started barfing at 4am, and it all went downhill from there. All four of us were laid up with one of those nasty 24-hour bugs that make you nauseated and fatigued, so I didn’t have the energy to spend much time in front of a computer last night. Just getting a bucket of warm water out to the chickens had me worn out afterwards.

Today’s all better. kids are back in school, and I’m back to the usual routine, so expect emails later today. Thanks again for participating!

castle frostbite. horseless carriages.

the hazards of winter.

A few days ago, I took the corner at the bottom of our driveway in a slightly-too-spirited fashion, and side-scraped a frozen snowbank. This is what I managed to do to the passenger side sliding door of the new Frostbite One:

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The frame took the hit without damage, but the thinner sheet steel of the door bent inward at the bottom where it scraped against the icy snowbank. The paint is chipped off, naturally.

I’m guessing that’s a $1,000 oopsie when all is said and done, and a good lesson in watching the damn corners even when you’re trying to keep momentum to make it up your icy driveway. Man, I can’t wait to build a house on a flat piece of land somewhere. With a paved, heated driveway. 

castle frostbite. gadgetry. new hampshah. the munchkin wrangler gear whore labs. weather.

winter boots for the grand marnier.

We moved to Castle Frostbite in December of 2007. The Castle has a driveway that is dog-legged and at a 5-percent incline that increases to nine or ten percent at the very top of the driveway, in the least convenient spot possible.

I’ve been driving Grand Caravans since before we moved up here, and those are front wheel drive only. Every year when our driveway gets its permanent winter layer of snow and ice, I’ve had frequent issues with making the driveway run from bottom to top, even with new winter tires, and I’ve had to park at the bottom of the driveway a lot.

This year, I finally decided to spring for a set of these puppies:

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Those are Finnish Nokian-brand studded snow tires. As you can see, they have little tungsten carbide studs set into the treads, for bite on icy surfaces.

Those things are purest, darkest magic. My FWD minivan trucks up that icy incline now at least as well as Robin’s 4WD Jeep Cherokee. I don’t know why I didn’t try those out earlier…oh, wait, I do: they’re twice the price of regular snow tires. But man, are they ever worth the extra coin. Not only does the car have traction on ice like it’s asphalt in summer, but it stops much better on iffy surfaces as well. I haven’t spun a tire since I got the Nokians. TWO ENTHUSIASTIC THUMBS UP from the Munchkin Wrangler Gear Whore Labs.  AAAAA++++ WOULD SHELL OUT HALF A MORTGAGE PAYMENT AGAIN.

castle frostbite. fountain pens. shameless self-promotion. writing.

novel the third.

Last Friday, I finished the manuscript for ANGLES OF ATTACK, the third novel in the Frontlines series. 

<insert tired “Hooray”>

Now it’s going to go through the editorial ministrations, and after all the bumps and potholes are fixed, there’ll be the usual publisher magic done to it. I’ll share the release date as soon as my publisher sets one.

I have a modest little splurge tradition going that I may have borrowed from Elizabeth Bear and tweaked for my own purposes. Every time I finish a novel, I buy myself a nice fountain pen. (Bear buys hers when she sells a novel, i think.) Then I use the new pen to start on the next novel. For TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, I got a Lamy 2000. For LINES OF DEPARTURE, it was a Pilot Vanishing Point. And for ANGLES OF ATTACK, it’s this one, which just arrived in the mail:

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That’s a Pelikan M600 “Souverän” in green, with a medium 14k nib. These are to fountain pens what a Benz is to automobiles—solid, traditional, high-quality, and a bit of a luxury. (It’s a modest luxury compared to a new Benz, to be sure.)

I didn’t write ANGLES in longhand like I usually do. Because of the close deadline (which I still managed to overshoot by, uh, LET’S NOT SPEAK OF IT EVER), I had no time for transcribing all the longhand, so I had to write everything straight into the computer, using my MacBook Pro, a Das Keyboard, and trusty Scrivener. 

These last three months have been a bit challenging. Writing is not really hard on the body, but every time I finish a book, I feel like I’ve lifted a dump truck using just my frontal lobe. In addition to the regular mental strain of cranking out 100,000 words of fictional fiction, it has been noisy around the house for the last few months because of the various projects we need to get dome before icy death sets in for another six months. I’ve spent a lot of time out of the house to avoid the hammering, clanging, banging, and dog barking, and I’ve stayed up late a lot. When I turned the novel in, I felt even more drained than I usually do. The next day, I slept until noon and was still tired, and it took me about three days to get back to a regular sleep pattern. So yeah, writing can be hard work—just not the kind where you get blisters on your hands and come home covered in coal dust. But making up stuff all day for months on end can wear the body out in surprising ways.

Anyway, now I am going to reset my brain with video games and other leisurely pursuits for a week or three, and then I’ll ink up the fancy new pen and get started on the next novel. 

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

rasputitsa.

Spring is great, because the snow melts and it stays above freezing at night again.

Spring is not so great because the snow melts and it stays above freezing at night again.

This right here is our road at the moment:

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New Hampshire’s four seasons are Winter, Mud, Blackflies, and Preparing for Winter.

castle frostbite. new hampshah. weather.

well, hello there, spring, you saucy minx.

The snow is finally MELTING. I cannot overstate how great that is. I thought I was never going to be warm again.

I know it’s a little obnoxious when someone who voluntarily relocated to New England complains about New England winters, but this particular one was a cast-iron bitch. To illustrate: we usually buy six tons of pellets for heating fuel in the summer. The last few winters, we’ve burned four, maybe four and a half tons for the season, and we usually have a ton or more left over in the spring. This year, we burned through all six tons just past mid-March already (and used up half a 350-gallon propane tank besides), and I had to get another half ton last week to keep the stove running some more. From what the guys at the stove place told me, that’s by no means an uncommon occurrence this year.

These first fifty-degree sunny days have been pure magic. The chickens have been clamoring for outdoor recess, and the kids have wanted to play outside after getting off the school bus instead of racing each other to the Xbox. I have some hope that the ten-foot-tall snow pile next to the house may even melt before July.

aminals. castle frostbite.

bors, 2000-2014.

Bors, a.k.a. Booger Boy, a.k.a. Elder Dog, is no longer with us.

He had a seizure of some sort a week ago, but bounced back to normal very quickly. This morning, it happened again, only there was no bounce. He went quietly in front of the pellet stove, the favorite doggy spot in the winter, with all the other dogs nearby and us there to comfort him. He was 14 and in declining health, so it wasn’t a surprise, but it’s always sad when they finally pack their bags for Rainbow Bridge.

Unfortunately, it happened ten minutes before school bus time, so the kids are a little upset this morning, especially Lyra. Later this morning, I’ll be taking the Booger to our regular vet to have him cremated, and then we’ll have another long conversation about death and dying when the kids get home. It’s their first hands-on brush with mortality–Guinevere, Bors’ mother, went two years ago, but Robin took her to the vet for that last service while the kids were at school. This one was up close and personal for them.

Bors was a sweet boy, an eternal puppy, good-natured and easy-going. He was a therapy dog for a while–he visited the old folks in the nursing home and made the rounds with Robin while she worked there. (He was the New Hampshire Health Care Association’s Volunteer of the Year in 2011, beating out a bunch of humans for the title.) One of her patients used to have dachshunds before she moved into the nursing home, and that dog’s visits were the highlight of her week every time. She passed away two or three years ago, and in this instance, I’m pretty sure that Bors is going to have someone waiting for him at Rainbow Bridge already.

Farewell, Bors. We’ll miss you terribly, but we are glad you could join us for a while.

Nurse Bors Sir Bors certificate