“Send sleep, vodka, and bacon. . .” (PG)
Chuck Wendig did another brilliant post on his new baby, and I couldn’t resist reposting it below (remember, his blog is often MA). The original is here.
*PSSSHHcracklehisss*
“– you hear me? The stuff’s everywhere — black tar — came pouring out of diapers — could lay shingles with this stuff OH GOD HERE COMES MORE OF IT –”
*kkkkpsshhhhfsssss*
“– haven’t slept in days — seeing things — cherubs with wings, but not like out of a greeting card but like out of the damn Bible — so many eyes — fiery swords — chubby cheeks –”
*weeooooFSSHHHHcrackle*
“– think they’re cute but they’re deadly –”
“– energy levels low, rations dwindling –”
“– everywhere you go it’s always there watching waiting peeing –”
“– alert, alert, this thing’s got witch nails, it killed Samson, merciful Jesus it killed Samson! –”
“– we thought we controlled it, but no, no, it controls us! –”
” — such hubris, we thought we understood the parameters –”
*KKKKFSSSHHHHHBSSHHHH*
“– OH SWEET SID AND MARTY KROFFT IT’S CRYING AGAIN WHICH MEANS ITS HUNGRY — “
” — send sleep — vodka — baaaacon –”
CARRIER LOST
TheLittlestPenmonkeyBeseechesYou
The baby is well.
He’s covered in the acne of an 8th grade math nerd.
He’s still trying to tear off his own face with his komodo claws.
He still looks like we enrolled him in Baby Fight Club.
He sometimes smiles. He likes dancing to the Beastie Boys. His poop has transitioned from the foul black hell-slurry to something that looked like swamp mud to something that looks like deli mustard.
He’s good. And we’re pretty good, too.
This amused me
De Grandpre-de Pique (1808)
Monsieurs de Grandpre and de Pique discovered that their mistresses were actually singular, a Mademoiselle Tirevit cheating with both of them. Rather than kicking her to le curb they decided that honor – and sanity – both needed to be shot at. FROM THE SKY. They ascended to 2,000 feet in hot air balloons and started blasting at each other. De Pique managed to miss an entire hot air balloon with a blunderbuss and therefore deserved everything which came afterwards (de Granpire’s buckshot through his balloon and the ground through his everything.)
Read more: Dueling | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/funny-4231-dueling/#ixzz1JfeHk3u5
Be advised that although this article is pretty safe (PG for swearing and some amusing violence), the cracked.com site is often MA in both pics and words.
Ten Things Teen Writers Should Know
John Scalzi (NYT bestselling author) writes a good blog, with occasional writing advice.
This is one of my favourites articles (you’ll have to click through to see the picture of young John Scalzi.
Hm. It keeps crashing my computer when I try to cut and paste a section. Here’s the address again anyways:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/04/27/10-things-teenage-writers-should-know-about-writing/
And here, as always, is a cat pic from the files:
Throw Up
There’s a great deal of difference between a pregnant woman who claims she’s “really very, very sick” and hasn’t tried a single medication – and a pregnant woman who is on the strongest possible nausea meds and still throws up just because she walks past some food.
To all the medical personnel who gave me disbelieving looks this week – I told you so.
Being a vomit expert thanks to my days at sea (did I mention I threw up while working aloft? I did? Did I mention it was also raining? Well, it was), I already knew that the best thing about throwing up is the fifteen minutes afterwards, when your body actually thinks it’s solved the nausea problem and leaves you alone for a moment.
So I cleaned up my own chunder, drank water, and (gag) brushed my teeth.
I don’t feel better physically, but psychologically I’ve gone from a quivering jelly of patheticness to someone who is having a genuinely bad time and handling it pretty okay.
A sixth birthday party
A couple of weeks ago, my nephew turned six. I enjoyed it roughly as much as he did. Here is his cake (and a toy he described blithely as a “turtle sharpener”, which for some reason made me think it sharpened knives. Those are pencil holes in its back, however):
The bottom layer is vanilla (with chunks of white chocolate). The middle layer is strawberry (with real berries) and the top is chocolate (with real chocolate chunks). There’s cream between each layer, and the top has chocolate icing, white chocolate swirliness, and sprinkles. Lots of sprinkles.
Nuff said.
Captain Maxolon saves the day (ish)
Dear rest of the world (USA, I’m looking at you): Public health care is the best idea ever.
Yesterday CJ and I spent seven hours at hospital (in the past, I’ve waited longer than that in the waiting room, which is the down side of a triage system – the sicker people get treated first – but pregnant women are always a priority) getting looked after by a doctor and two nurses. The only thing we paid for was food.
We wandered through the usual labyrinthine passageways to get to emergency, where I was assessed almost immediately. Since both of the antenatal (“antenatal” meaning “while pregnant”) triage beds were free, another pregnant woman and I were wheeled up to that department.
That’s right: I said wheeled. Awesome.
I settled into the bed with CJ on a chair beside me (we’d brought two books each – I read “Soulless” by Gail Carriger, not realising that CJ was deliberately watching my face during the naughty bits).
The main doctor and nurse gathered more information, and basically pooh-poohed my pleas for a feeding tube (I was so nauseous I could barely drink water, and so nauseous/phobic of food that even a picture or mention of food made me feel ill). They prescribed counselling (which, sorry, has been tapped out long ago in my case – but of course I’ll attempt it again anyway) and maxolon.
Maxolon is a tiny, foul-tasting pill with the exciting side-effect that if you take too much you get lockjaw and (this is the exciting part) your head turns itself to the side. Somewhat offputting to those not in the know!
Unsurprisingly, it is somewhat more effective than over-the-counter ginger pills. In about half an hour the idea of food was appealing once more (and the idea of a food tube shoved down my throat somewhat less so) and I began eating for the first time that day.
For the first time in weeks, my body didn’t immediately punish me for eating (not for about an hour). Hurrah!
At around that time, I gave the first of what turned out to be four different urine samples. The nurse tested it, and came back in at once to tell me I had heaps of very large ketones. “Ketones” is pronounced “key-tones”, and sounds rather like a sweet jazz notation. Sadly, they actually indicate dehydration.
I was put on a drip and monitored for another few hours. The drip was awesome. I liked having a painless plug in my arm – even if it is utterly nuts to put water (or whatever it was) into my veins. How does THAT work? Over time, I got better at shifting position without kinking the tube, and at peeing in a cup after dragging the five-wheeled IV stand into the bathroom with me.
As far as I can remember, I’ve never actually been in a hospital bed before. I’ve had stitches, but no broken bones. I’ve had food poisoning every time I go to Indonesia, but it never occurred to me to go to hospital (even when one bout – ah, Bali, how consistent you are – lasted three and a half months).
So, here’s a photo commemorating my first hospital bed:
As CJ keeps saying, “You know we can buy you new socks ANYTIME you like, right?”
Rather sadly, socks and I just don’t get on. These are the only socks I have that can cover a reasonable amount of leg without cutting off circulation (I have begun making forays into diabetic-approved socks, which are much better than the norm, but still not that great).
So that was our hospital visit! I’m still nauseous for nine out of ten waking hours, and I still dread meals (even with Captain Maxolon on my side, I feel sick soon after eating), but for the moment I can manage. One week down. . . five weeks of crippling nausea to go.
Sidebar – if any of you says any of the following, I will hunt you down and kill you:
Every pregnant woman gets ill, dear.
When I was pregnant, I didn’t have time to be sick – so I wasn’t.
Try [random cure], it will solve everything.
Oh, when *I* was pregnant I was SO sick that I. . . .
———————————————-
Oh yes. . . there was one more thing.
The doctor did an ultrasound – mostly, I think, just because they can.
The amniotic sac inside me was a clear circle, and on one side our little baby was a blurry dot perhaps a centimetre across. It flickered to its own beat – the beating of a brand new heart.
Ever since the ultrasound, CJ pauses every so often mid-conversation, reaches across to touch my hand or shoulder or belly, and says, “Heartbeat!”
Alternative Medicine
My so-called “morning” sickness has lasted all day, every day since last Tuesday evening. Yesterday I hit the wall. I reached the point where I didn’t want to eat or drink ever again (even water makes me sicker) – so I went to the doctor. She told me to buy some morning sickness pills (which helped; I was able to eat some chicken soup last night) and told me to get acupuncture.
In my mind, the phrase “alternative medicine” translates seamlessly to “not actually medicine” but it was clear we were mutually not taking each other seriously – so I did what she asked (although she was kind enough to let the acupuncture guy use suckers instead of needles).
He put suckers on my knees, wrists, and belly – giving me “flower marks”.
Other than extremely mild discomfort from the suckers (which look like old-fashioned bicycle horns), there was no effect whatsoever. At least, not as far as I was able to discern.
The massage was nice, except that my neck and head are not the source of my stress.
I mentioned last week that it was pregnancy hormones making me like my doctor. The reason I don’t 100% trust her is that I get a very strong vibe from her that I should get over my anxiety disorder and focus on real problems. (Of course, I could just be paranoid – it comes with the territory.)
I am terrified of eating and drinking. Way more terrified than I should be. Back in the day I’d have sucked it up and got on with things (and by “things” I mean “regular vomiting” – just ask my sea-mates how I dealt with nausea back in 2006). But anxiety means I’m constantly running on an emotional backup generator, and after hovering on the edge of vomit for seven days there’s just nothing left. I’m shutting down on all kinds of levels.
The doctor’s advice was to eat, throw up, eat, and throw up again – every day for the next six weeks.
There is no anxiety treatment that is safe while pregnant, and very few nausea treatments (the pills are made of ginger and vitamin B).
I SHOULD be able to face a bit of physical illness. It’s really not the worst thing in the world. But I got nothing.
Today CJ is taking me to hospital.
Someone else’s baby
Chuck Wendig is a naughty, funny, dirty man. He writes very well (at about an MA standard).
On Friday, his son was born. He blogged about it here. This entry is PG.
Transmissions from baby-town
“I think something is happening,” my wife says.
She says this to wake me. At 1:30 in the morning.
The lights go on. Fan, off.
I don’t know what’s happening. Something. That’s what she said. Something is happening. Could be anything, I think. Leaky roof. UFO on our front lawn. Goblin invasion. Everything and anything.
“I think my water broke,” she says.
Oh. Oh.
She asserts that she has not peed herself. Which is always good news in any situation. I do this spot-check periodically in my day-to-day. “Did I pee myself? Mmm. Nope. Score!”
We call the doctor. They say to keep an eye on it. We keep an eye on it. The water, it keeps on coming.
Along with it: the mucus plug. Which has another name: “the bloody show.”
We have no idea how apropos that will be.
* * *
The wife, she puts on makeup before we go. I pack some bags, get stuff together: camera, chargers, reading material. Just in case, we think. We know this is not real. This is not really the something that’s happening. It’s two weeks early. And besides, conventional wisdom says: new moms have kids late. Everybody’s told us that. She just saw the Obi-Gyn Kenobi the day before and, in his words, “There’s no way this baby is coming early.” Except he must have — oh, just for a goof — put a small thermal detonator against her internal membranes, a detonator that went pop around midnight, because why else would her water have broken?
Thermal detonator, shmermal shmetonator. Baby’s not coming today.
We go to the hospital at 5:00 AM knowing full well that they’re going to send us home.
* * *
They do not send us home.
In fact, they inform us quite frankly: we’re having this baby sometime in the next 24 hours.
*blink, blink*
We’re in a little room. So small that the nurse is entering our information into a laptop, but her chair is a medical waste bin. Doctors and residents come in and out. The one doctor says, she’s not that dilated. And she’s not even having contractions. They say, “we’re going to get you started on pitocin.” We say, hold up. We’ve heard about that. If we need it, we want it, but we’re not sure we need it yet. We don’t want to get on the drug train, not so fast.
Read the rest here.
Ingenious Steam Machines
Hot air balloons were invented in the late 1700s – well before the Victorian era. Almost from the beginning, people attempted to give them the ability to steer – but it was only when diesel engines (half the weight of steam engines, because the process of creating power is more direct) were invented that airships really started happening.
There is one exception, however: Henri Giffard’s steam-powered dirigible was invented in 1852.
Today’s blog is all about a great article on peculiar steam inventions.
While manufacturers busied themselves with increasingly successful farm steam engines, inventors were experimenting with a host of steam machines many of them fascinating, some of them zany, and a few of them bizarre. Here is a look at some noteworthy steam devices culled from the pages of history.
THE GIFFARD STEAM DIRIGIBLE
On Sept. 24, 1852, French inventor Henri Giffard, using a steam engine for power, designed and flew the first full-size airship. His flight took him from a Paris racecourse to the small town of Trappes some 15 miles west at a speed of roughly 6 mph. Giffard’s airship consisted of a net surrounding a gas-filled, cigar-shaped balloon. A pole hung from the net, horizontally and in line with the balloon, and a gondola was suspended beneath the pole. The ship supported a boiler weighing 100 pounds and an engine weighing 250 pounds; relatively light, but still heavy for an airship. Aware of the potential for fire or explosion, Giffard surrounded the boiler’s stoke hole with wire gauze. He also pointed the boiler’s exhaust down and away from the balloon.
Giffard’s next experimental craft barely escaped disaster. Giffard tried to suspend a boiler and engine beneath what he hoped was an improved bag, but escaping gas caused the balloon to flatten. In turn, the gondola’s nose tilted upward, some lines broke and the balloon slipped from the net and burst. Giffard and a passenger miraculously survived with only minor injuries. Following this, Giffard planned a mammoth, steam-powered airship weighing 30 tons, but prohibitive costs caused him to scrap the project. Giffard is best known in the farm steam engine community as the inventor of the injector.
THE WINANS STEAM GUN
In 1861, Ross Winans, a locomotive builder in Baltimore, Md., manufactured a steam-powered gun invented by a Charles S. Dickenson. Winans welcomed novelty, a trait he was known for in his locomotive designs, and he applied his enthusiasm for innovation when he produced the steam gun that came to bear his name.
The idea behind the gun was to use steam to hurl a cannonball; his “gun” was supposedly capable of throwing 200 balls a minute (weight unknown) up to 2 miles, of projecting a 100-pound cannon ball and even of firing bullets. The Winans device could be considered an early machine gun, and certain writers have described it by that term. A hopper fed the pivoted gun barrel of the Winans gun, which itself ran on railroad tracks. Winans evidently hoped it might be used to bring the rapidly escalating Civil War to a quick conclusion.
Although born in Vernon, N.J., Winans was a Confederate sympathizer who was actively involved in Confederate politics. In May of 1861 Winans shipped his gun south from Baltimore to Harpers Ferry, Va., but on May 11, 1861, Colonel Edward F. Jones of the 6th Massachusetts Regiment under Brigadier General Benjamin F. Butler intercepted Winans’ gun. Three days later, Butler captured Winans in Baltimore. Had Secretary of State William H. Seward not interceded on behalf of the millionaire prisoner, Winans might have been hanged for treason. Instead, he was released, a fact that angered Butler for the rest of his life. Through the remainder of the war, the gun protected the Baltimore & Ohio Patuxent River Viaduct.
THE EBAUGH STEAM CIGAR BOAT
Nicknamed ‘Davids’ (with reference to the story of David and Goliath), these partially submerged Confederate cigar boats carried torpedoes. The moniker “cigar boat” describes the shape of the hull.
In 1863, David C. Ebaugh privately manufactured the first of these crafts at Charleston, S.C. Christened David, it was appropriated by the Confederate States Navy. On Oct. 5, 1863, David, steaming under the cloak of night, attacked the Union ship NewIronsides. Quite unexpectedly, however, David’s exploding torpedo set up a spray that extinguished the cigar boat’s fires, and a piece of shrapnel jammed David’s engine. Through the efforts of the engineer, however, the injured boat escaped. New Ironsides sustained damage but survived.
The following year, David saw additional action. . .
Read the rest (there’s plenty more) here.
Is your writing good?
Literary agent and all-around nice lady Rachelle Gardner blogged an article today that asked the question, “How can you tell if your writing is any good?”
Here is the link to that article.
How do you learn to write?
I think the answer is that you have to learn any which way you can. You piece it together. You take the lessons where you can find them. This could mean:
→ You read books on writing, and books in the genre in which you write.
→ You’re a member of writers’ organizations and online forums.
→ You take workshops offered whenever and wherever you can find them.
→ You take creative writing classes, such as at a local community college (although I’ve heard these can be a waste of time).
→ You have a critique group (this may or may not help, depending on the qualifications of your critique partners, as well as your own personality).
→ You submit your project to agents and editors, hoping for scraps of feedback.
Read the rest here.
Or just gaze at this kitten (yes, that’s a sword under her paw).
Felicity Banks 