Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was an unembarrassed omnivore. She ate meat; and not only made no excuses for it, she defended the practice. She noted the human digestive tract (shortened, like a carnivore’s), the canine and incisor teeth (designed to slice and tear), the metabolic dependence on protein (which fuels, among other desirable things, our huge brains).

And, Kage pointed out, she -and many people- just like to eat meat. More, she – and many more people – really do not like to be told what they must not eat. Especially when based on someone else’s morals. Militant vegetarians distressed her; she compared their efforts darkly to Prohibition – which not only did not succeed in persuading Americans not to drink alcohol, but increased production and imbibing while empowering a criminal empire to new and unparalleled heights.

That attitude, and its results, can all be seen in her Secular Puritan future. Kage speculated widely on the effects of legislated veganism, Beast Liberation and the criminalization of  normal human appetite: she took it to  to comic lengths – chickens, unprepared for an unprotected life, become extinct in England. Conversely, tigers naturalize – because who’s gonna stop them? But she also had some quite serious points to make, showing a growing alienation growing up between humans and the natural world.

You can see it happening even now, as urban dwellers become less informed and more afraid of grass and trees and untethered animals. Those of us who teach small children are all familiar with stories wherein school children – or their parents! – become distraught when they discover the realities of meat and milk: to wit, even good old milk originates in an animal. I have personally had parents become angry when their offspring learned that hamburger once walked around, and a slice of cheese comes from an udder. It’s not because it’s wrong to hurt or abuse animals, either; it’s because animals are nasty.

This is no way to raise normal human beings. They will never respect the sources of their food, they will never feel a bond with other living things, they will never understand that violence is real and not  amusing noises on a computer screen. They won’t even choose vegetarianism from a sense of moral purpose  – only because a soy bean is less yucky than a pig.

By the way, I think vegetarianism- even the rigours of vegan eating – are a perfectly acceptable choice for an informed adult. It’s not how humans are designed to operate, but if you are educated enough to fill in the missing fats and proteins, it’s your choice. I’m not convinced we’re designed to wear shoes, either, but I do it anyway for personal reasons of comfort and style. However: it’s no way to raise healthy children. We’re omnivores – and kids need even more fat and protein than adults. If they are deprived of those things, their immune systems are crippled, their growth is stunted and their brain do not mature properly.

I called today’s rant  LIVERY (and I admit, I am ranting more than a bit) because of an article I read yestreday. One of the meanings of livery is “providing food for someone.” And at the moment, upper scale restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco are providing special liver evenings for fans of goose liver. These are dedicated foie gras menus: multi-course meals based on presentation of foie gras in various dishes and styles. They are doing it because as of January 2012, the production and sale of foie gras in California will become illegal. Those who like to eat it are doing so now; restaurants that like to serve it are making a point along with a bit of extra money.

Kage liked foie gras. She usually abhorred organ meat, not caring for the flavour as well as falling prey to the yucky factor. But a restraunteur friend once served it to her, and Kage was too polite to say Dear God No. One bite and she was hooked – some primal appetite opened its eyes and declared that this was what it had been waiting for all her life!

It was a moral dilemma. Was it proper to eat the liver of a goose purpose-raised to have a big fat liver just so people could eat it? She did some research … feeding geese with lots and lots of fattening food rammed down their throats certainly sounds cruel – but that happens to be how birds do feed their young. And the geese raised for the trade rush to be fed when they see the guy with the funnel and the goose feed. And they live as happy a life as any other goose raised for food.

Kage decided it was as proper as eating any other animal, and it meant another bit of the goose did not go to waste. So on those rare occasions when we went to restaurants fancy enough to include it on the menu, she indulged. And she always commented on how it would soon be illegal, if her future came to pass … then she’d order  something made with cream for dessert, twinkling wickedly.

I remembered that yestreday, reading the news. I thought of Kage, actually looking up the care and feeding of foie gras geese, to see if her fondness for goose liver was justified; I thought of the researcht that went into her decisions. I thought of her still saying grace before every meal, thanking God and the meal’s donors for feeding her.

And I think I need liver and onions for dinner now. Or at least a braunschweiger sandwich.

Kage Baker always said that the world was a lot weirder than most people ever noticed. She noticed – she trained herself to do it, because it’s the weird news and observations that provide grist for the writer’s mill.

I noticed because I was along for the drive – I was usually driving.

Also, that stuff is just out there, you know? In plain view, the interesting cracks in the mundane world that really make life so much more fascinating. Many of you Dear Readers are clearly of the ilk that watches for the amusing oddities – you send them on to me, for which I am most especially grateful. That eel in the waste water plant story came from my good girl Kelly, presently off in the wilds of Florida on assignment for State Farm but obviously on the alert – and several of you sent me links to a frankly wonderful story earlier in the week about what appears to have been an ancient cephalopod that made art with the bones of its prey …

Great stuff. Stuff one just needs to know to colour in the world in all the proper shades. The world is just much more fascinating if you learn that some Triassic cephalopod arranged the bones of its dismembered fishy prey into representations of its own multi-suckered arms. It’s especially neat when you realize it used the victims’ vertebrae; which are, of course,  the main symbolic differences between fish and molluscs … that’s positively sardonic.

Today I’ve found a cute little story from St.Ives, Wales. Well, it’s cute because it has a happy ending: some fecal pore stuffed 7 kittens into a bag and abandoned them. Those familiar with their nursery rhymes will see the significance there. The bag – a hideous purple vinyl purse – was very nearly airtight, and the kittens almost suffocated. Luckily, an alert passerby checked the bag and got them all to a shelter, where they are recovering nicely. Six black kitties with blue eyes and one yellow-eyed ginger tabby, rescued from the dark side of Mother Goose.

Also from the UK – although admittedly via the bureaucratic asininity of the EU – is a report that official documents will no longer be using the words “father” and “mother”. They will instead be referred to as “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”. There’s no indication of which will be which, so there is no way to tell if there is any underlying sexism being demonstrated here – automatically assigning “Parent 1” to the father would be blatant paternalism – but I do think the estate of Theodore Geisel might consider a plagiarism suit.

This is evidently based on the efforts of the EU to establish statutes that eliminate identification by gender in its official paperwork. Of course, gender is one of the most obvious ways to identify people at all, but they seem to feel the law is better off confused than socially fascist. Britain is not only leaping on the bandwagon but into the absurdist abyss.

Kage noted this kind of thing happening a lot in Britain. It worried her no end. Some readers asked if she had a grudge of some sort against the Brits – Kage always assured them that, no, she was an avowed Anglophile. She brought up these kind of crap because she was concerned about what the Brits were doing to their own society. Periodically, as Kage and I have both observed, they do seem to deliberately throw all their civil rights away over there, and it usually takes a considerable fracas to eventually restore them and make Christmas legal again.

I  take a certain  amount of gleeful interest in this all the time, and especially in October: the month of mysteries, monsters and inexplicable lights.  For instance, doesn’t it seem that there is a sudden increase in Cthulhu-references cropping up in nature lately? What was misbehaving under my front lawn? Is there some ritual content underlining the septuple cat abandonment in old St. Ives?

One can come up with plots woven out of anything: it’s particularly fun this time of year. Ghost stories are a staple of the last, darkest quarter of the year, even if the only one most folks now recall is a sanitized version of A Christmas Carol. But there was more even to that favourite tale than jolly Christmas Present and adorable little Tiny Tim …

Since earliest childhood – literally, I remember Kimberly in her crib above me as I crept along the bedroom floor, investigating the noises outside the windows – I’ve been most intrigued by the things abroad in these long nights. We lived in the hills, after all, and near the concrete canyon of the L.A. River. Now I watch the news more for the glints of oddity than I do the streets outside my window – but believe me, Dear Readers, there is just no end to the fascinating weirdness out there!

I well remember peering out my bedroom window one autumn night, while my siblings all slept, and seeing beautiful people in evening clothes out there. A lovely lady in a sparkling gown picked up my kitten off the dark lawn, and tucked it into her fur stole. Then she and it climbed into a dove-grey sedan and I never saw either one of them again …

Strange scenes indeed. It’s just that time of year.

Kage Baker firmly believed that plumbers are heroes. She had many examples to convince her of it – from the dear men who taught us how to plumb at Faire to the various laconic gunslingers who have stepped in to save us from shattered toilets, blocked drains and exploding hot water heaters (twice).

The plumbers from Rescue Rooter now go on that list of heroes. They have successfully gotten the stuck liner out of our main outflow pipe, reconnected us to the city main, and we are now the happy possessors of a working water system! It was clearly one of the worst jobs any of them had dealt with, but they persevered with great bravery, competency and determination. They are even cleaning up nicely!

It finally took a guy on a ladder (the hole is 8 feet deep) and one of those looong saws like you see used on giant trees, plus some weird machine with a huge hook on the end to winkle the offending section of pipe out. The new section is now in – everything drains, flushes, runs just the way it should.

We still have a wall and ditch in the driveway, but only until the city inspector gets here to approve the work. Then they can fill it in and re-concrete the driveway. I intend to steal some rocks first, though – I think I saw a couple of flint nodules in the spoil; you can find a nice chocolate-coloured flint here near the hills, and I’d like some of that …

We still don’t know for sure what the liner got stuck on. Anthony the plumber says it was just crumpled up on itself … I can sort of believe it, after decades of turning sleeves, waistbands, collars and other narrow bits of hand-made clothing. Plus watching wadding get stuck in friends’ musket barrels – almost as exciting as blocked pipes. Especially since it’s usually still burning when you finally get it out, and tends to end up on roofs and canopies in a smouldering mass …

But I cherish the idea that some subterranean or extra-dimensional EVIL of unimaginable proportions was hanging on to it down there. When Anthony and Jose began to finally saw and lever the blocked section out, the minions of Cthulhu must have scuttled away down the city main – it wouldn’t surprise me me if they have a base camp at the city sewage plant; the DWP is a prime candidate to be a minion of Dark Forces.

Maybe in the crumpled bunch of failed liner there are tiny, strangely shaped hooks and grapnels still stuck – carved from ancient, unspeakable bone in shapes that make your eyes cross and your brain bleed … handprints in ichor, with too-few, too-long digits, and marks like sucker cups … perhaps Anthony will take that pipe section he removed off to the yard where Rescue Rooter maintains a special incinerator, inscribed all over with spells of binding in red ocher and Cal Trans orange paint. Who can guess what only plumbers know about what lurks under the streets?

Though people like me and thee, Dear Readers, can speculate …

Still, it could have been worse. So much worse! The things in the pipes did scuttle away, and the Los Angeles Basin was saved from the hordes of inter-dimensional hell pouring out from under my front yard. The toilet works. We can shower, and spend all weekend washing dishes and laundry.

And valiant Anthony didn’t find what the unhappy city waste engineers of Manchester, Connecticut found in their waste water plant. A blocked pipe there yielded this:

They SAY it's an eel ...

This is described in the story http://www.ctnow.com/news/hc-manchester-eel-1014-20111013,0,2917776.story?hpt=us_bn4  (thank you, Kelly!) as an eel. But it occurs to be that it could be a somewhat battered tentacle …

So maybe we got off lucky. And so did Los Angeles. The forces of evil have been repulsed!

Kage Baker, who utterly loathed all interruptions to her daily routine, would by now have been agitating to evacuate and head for some distant shelter. Her last-ditch haven was always somewhere, anywhere, where no one knew where she was or how to reach her. When things got intolerable in the Fields We Knew, she liked to light out for the Territories.

She would declare a Writing Weekend, and we would run away. We’d end up in a small hotel on Highway 1 somewhere, or in the Borg Motel in Monterey, or a campground somewhere in sound of the waves. And we would just … be there for a few days. No phones. No telly. Music, books, knitting, writing. Back home, someone else would deal with whatever noisy disaster had driven Kage insane, and she’d return refreshed and revivified to a quieter life.

I’d love to do that right now.

Here in the Fields I Know Best, the weather continues freaking hot. It’s 100 degrees here, which means the little Weatherbug icon on my computer has turned crimson and is blinking: like the computer is about to run out of dilithium and explode. Of course, it’s the Buke I’m working on, as my actual desktop CPU is still at the repair facility, awaiting a new motherboard … an inquiring call to the techs today reveals that, despite my authorizing the repair last week, they have not yet ordered the part. No one knows why. But they’re getting right on it, yes ma’am, you betcha.

The plumbers think they have gone to hell; I see it in their eyes, where they look up despairingly from the pit in the front yard. There’s a nice defensive ditch and wall across the driveway now. The plumbers have made a neat pile of the dirt and stones from the pit at the base of the driveway, so it runs right across at a height of, oh, about 4 feet. The ditch itself is so deep I can’t see the workers’ heads from the porch; just the metronome-flash of the shovels, and the regular spray of yet more dirt and stones onto the wall.

They really are impressively tidy. It’s a very even wall. Kimberly has been trimming some of the trees and vines; if I pack the wintergreen branches and dried grapevine around the dirt and rock pile out there, I ought to be able to vitrify it into a really nice defensive face. The rocks are mostly decomposing granite, and the soil has a nice sand content – ought to vitrify something lovely.

And maybe a vitrified wall would be a good idea. Who knows what’s down there? Anthony, the unhappy plumber in charge of the project, has been wandering around mumbling, “It’s a nightmare. I’ve never seen anything like this.” I believe he suspects something is deliberately holding on to the liner down in the depths, something … evil. But eventually, they’ll have to pry it loose, you see?

Who knows what evil lurks below the edge of the lawn?

If some tentacled and multi-eyed horror from a less-salubrious dimension suddenly finds a portal on my lawn, I may want some good defensive earthworks. I wonder if Kimberly and Ray’s homeowner insurance covers chthonic invasion? Are they liable for a hole in the dimensional wall if contract plumbers make it, or only if we do it ourselves while planting a tree?

Kage was always outlining stories where the boundaries of reality melt away in familiar domestic settings. Stories like Calimari Curls, and Monkey Day … if she were here, watching the excavation in the front yard, I know full well she’d be clamouring to take off right now. Time to go North for a while, she would declare. Where’s Harry’s travel cage?

Of course, we were renters. You can leave the hole to the underworld in your garden for the landlord, when you’re a renter. Homeowners have to be more responsible.There are limits, though, surely? Isn’t interdimensional invasion a kind of illegal immigration?

I just hope that if untoward and unseely troops start pouring out on the front lawn, the authorities can cope. If Los Angeles becomes a scorched and embattled wasteland – if it all starts to look like the edges of Morder (or at least Irwindale) … well, I’m sorry, that’s all.

Kage Baker was wont to describe days like this as “clusterfucks.” I have been dealing with many small but ghastly domestic disasters, which is why this is so late and brief.

The temperature at my house today got to 102 degrees. Cars were crashing and catching fire all over the freeways. Surface streets were crammed, craaaammed with cars fleeing the smoke and flames on the roads around (badly named) Elysian Heights.

The trash collectors accidentally carried one of our trash cans a block away. The power is flickering on and off, as every air conditioner in the Los Angeles Basin gets turned on at the same time. And the plumbers, through a pure (but purely horrible) accident, got a pipe liner stuck in our connection to the city sewer, and have so far been unable to remove it even with a tow rope attached to the back of the sump truck …

So we had no running water today. I couldn’t do laundry (which I’d put off in a fit of laziness yestreday) or dishes (ditto). To give honor where it’s due, we  do at least now have a working bathroom: because the noble plumbers worked until 8 PM – with floodlights and shovels and archeological-looking snake-mounted camera displays – to get the pipe at least open.

They’ll be back tomorrow to try and get the damned liner out. I don’t know what with – the rope they ran through an electric windlass and looped around a 3-story tall cypress tree this evening for leverage snapped in half … in the meantime, though, the toilet works.

We are asked not to shower lengthily -so it’s sponge baths in this heat – but we do have a working loo. And believe me, I am grateful. I shall sleep better tonight knowing I don’t have to venture out to find a privy in the dark, especially since there’s a 6-foot deep hole in the yard. I think a raccoon fell in a while ago, but you know what? The fuzzy beasties are on their own out there.

But I wish we could have called the Ghost Hunters.

Kage Baker loved Shakespeare. That is made pretty obvious in her Company novels and stories; where – as she did with so much and so many that she loved – she made him immortal, and gave him a local habitation in her 23rd century.

She came by her admiration genetically – Momma’s mother, another Kate (we only have a few names in our family; we use them over and over, like the ancient Romans) was a remarkably educated woman. She wrote her degree thesis on Moby Dick – which was also one of Kage’s favourites – and earned herself a Ph.D. in late 19th century North Carolina. Or would have, except for the fact that when she was done, her advisor informed her he didn’t believe in advanced degrees for women and refused her …

Kate, among many other similarly independent adventures, eventually married and produced two daughters. She also managed to secure one of the first divorces and one of the first driver’s licenses issued to a North Carolingian woman. And for several years thereafter, daughters in tow, she was a travelling English teacher throughout the lovely hills and hollows of the Carolinas. Among the people she met were three little kids named Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed by their culture-starved mother.

Grandma Kate refrained from such grandstanding. She’d named her daughters Kate and Anne; Kate (otherwise known as Momma) named two of her own girls Kate and Anne, as well; and so did sister Anne, when it was her turn. (I fully expect to be a great-aunt to yet another Katie and Annie at some point in the future.) And I am Kathleen, called Kate by most of those who know me best.

Momma tended to point and call out “Come here, child” rather a lot at family gatherings …

My sister Kate Genevieve became Kage, in the fullness of time; when she was 14, and the last baby girl was born, and Daddy in a fit of absent-mindedness named her Genevieve, too. But despite all these similar names – and the same situation on the male side, with names like George and Henry and Thomas – there’s never been any doubt who was whom.

Shakespeare had rather a lot to say about that, which mostly boiled down to names being convenient but not vital: what something is called is not  necessarily its essence. And if you know its essense, its name may not even matter. This is a good philosophy to cling to right now, as a movie addressing the old question of who wrote Shakespeare’s plays is about to hit the theatres.

Kage would be exasperated. But she’d also laugh. Who gets the credit after all this time is irrelevant – the very name of Shakespeare has its own undying fame, quite unattached to any specific man. Whether you fancy the Earl of Oxford for the task, or Francis Bacon, or that sulky bugger Wriothsley, or a consortium of scurrilous actors – the question still comes down to “Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?”

Shakespeare. Dear old sweet Willie. Whether he was a ghost or a ghost writer, it doesn’t matter at this remove. They are Shakespeare’s plays now. If it stirs your egalitarian juices to imagine that a jumped-up glover’s son wrote them, more power to you. If you can only imagine that burning prose as coming from a noble brain, ditto. The power of the words has surpassed the physical hand that held the pen, and joined the deathless powers of the Upper Air.

Kage felt William wrote them. But she didn’t waste her energy on the argument; she saved her passion for appreciation of the words themselves.

And on being questioned about it at a con one afternoon,  Kage Baker grinned and then replied, “Neither Bacon nor Shakespeare wrote them. Elizabeth Tudor did it. But she was, of course, actually a man.”

And there it is.

Kage Baker had a deep and abiding love of plumbers.

She was a landlady’s daughter, and lived in the Hollywood Hills for the first 40 years of her life. You develop a real appreciation of plumbers in those circumstances; they are some of the best actual heroes you are likely to meet. The guys who keep the pipes clear (and literally fastened to the hillsides) are agents of the gods.

Then there were the years of doing Faire. We had to do most of our own ad hoc  plumbing there, and in fact still do – but it was real plumbers who taught us how to lay pipe, fasten pipe joints together, adjust pressure, and plumb in the all-important beer lines.

Gods like Dougie (the model for The Brick in Empress of Mars), and Bobbie McGowan (who once politely refused my “Catholic whiskey” when I offered him a dram of Jameson’s); sweet clever lads like Wayne who cut vital washers out of leather, and gentlemen like Norman who donated their boot tops to the cause. Brilliant ladies like Becky, who never goes anywhere without some irreplaceable spigot part concealed about her person … my boys and girls have plumbed entire bars armed with Swiss Army knives and a spare can of Blue Goo, and only ended up in the emergency room once (sorry, Steve!).

Also, we always preferred houses with character to squeaky-efficient modern dwellings; Kage and I had to deal with lots of plumbing disasters over the years. When you live in an unimproved oak grove, or in a beach town where the water table is three inches down and rises and falls with the tide, some very odd things can happen. Decorating your house with props from 500 years of historical recreation can be a might risky, too – we once accidentally smashed a toilet with a semi-sacred conch shell.

All this left Kage with an almost religious faith in plumbers. It was only reinforced yet further by her fondness for the paranormal crew of Ghost Hunters on television – Jason and Grant are RotoRooter plumbers in real life, and she always felt that gave them impeccable gravitas. She was more inclined to believe guys who said they found a lingering ghostly presence, if they could also identify the funny wheeze in the pipes.

It’s why the Dark Lord Gard spends so much time on the plumbing in his fortress, too. Plumbers are gods even to demon lords, if they want the baths to work …

Here where I dwell with my family on the edge of Griffith Park, the houses are old. The neighborhood was initially plumbed between the two World Wars, connected to the antique clay pipes that are now eroding and undermining the elder sections of Los Angeles. Bits of our pipes have been dying over the last two or three years – and this morning, it was the ancient connector between our house line and the municipal main in the street: 10 feet of hand-smoothed clay laid down  80 years ago.  And if not for our friendly plumbers at Rescue Rooter, we would now be neatly and horribly severed from the 21st century in the worst possible way.

We still need to replace bits of the line, and it’s gonna be expensive and time consuming. But not as bad as arranging for a privy rental and a twice-weekly sump sucker truck, and re-accustoming the household to venturing outside amid the skunks and raccoons for nocturnal bladder relief. I, at least, am getting too old for that kind of adventure.

So who’s the god of plumbing? My thanks go up to him today!

Kage Baker loved the Los Burritos chain of restaurants in Los Angeles. There was one on Hollywood Boulevard, down near Vine; there’s one on San Fernando on the edge of Glendale. They’re an old Los Angeles chain, or were – maybe they’re all just vaguely associated with one another now, as the economic sinews of the city dissolve; though they all still display the same cute neotonic burro on their signs.

Kage loved their tacos, because they were made of discernible shredded meat and had an actual taste. What meat, what taste? Better not to ask, she always said, and giggled. It was good and it never made her sick, which was quite enough for her.

The other thing she loved about the places was the heavily orange decor. Vinyl booths, plastic tables, water glasses – all orange. It went with the good orange grease (GOG) she felt was absolutely vital to a Los Angeles taco stand; natives, she averred, could not only digest that stuff but needed it. We’d all evolved to consume that GOG you find in really tasty taco stands and pizza houses.

The Los Burritos near Glendale has gone a little upscale these days – the upholstery is now a nice fresh moss green in the booths; there are actual live plants on the counters, and they serve fresh fruit smoothies! They’ve added a vegan section to the menu!

But there are still the lovely mysterious bottles of tamarindo and orchata in the cold case as well, and the real Mexico-bottled Coca Cola with cane sugar in it. And when they packaged our tacos upside down in the traditional manner, what leaked out of even my trendy potato taco was GOG. And BTW, potato tacos? Really, really tasty. I suspect they’re good for me, and I don’t even mind.

Besides, they still make the same enormous bacon-and-egg burrito I’ve been happily consuming since adolescence, and nothing good for one could compete with those. Beans, bacon and scrambled eggs in a flour tortilla – tastes like breakfast in a roadside caf on the M1 outside Manchester, with just a hint of salsa like a nice macho aftershave …

Nobody got up in our house this morning until very nearly this afternoon. Well, no one but Kimberly – she gets up at dawn, being evidently set to a personal time 6 hours ahead of everyone else in the family. Even the dog and cats just stagger into the kitchen, fall face-first into their breakfast dishes and go back to sleep – and Harry won’t even come out of his cage. Not all birds are morning people.

Anyway, by the time the rest of us caught up to her, it was noon. So it was lunch instead of breakfast, which is a wonderful excuse for a bacon-and-egg burrito: not that one is actually needed. Not for me, anyway. And it was so delightful to find the same old GOG still rendering all the bags translucent as we drove home … and for eggs, bacon and beans, Harry will come charging out of his cage, ramping and roaring and squeaking for tribute.

That always amused Kage. She was very careful to make sure he got his parrot-geld of goodies like tacos and burritos for brunch. Otherwise, he just climbs into your plate and helps himself …

But for now, everyone is happy, I’ve re-connected with the GOG of my youth, Jurassic Park is on the telly (Harry looooves that movie -he honks back at the velociraptors) and it’s time for a driving exercise with the nephew. His test is in a couple of weeks, and then I’ll have a spare driver for Dickens!

A lovely autumn Sunday. May all of you, Dear Readers, have a likewise comfortable day.

Kage Baker, being a very modest lady as well as a generally private person, tended to keep her illnesses to herself. Whether that was a sinus headache or the undifferentiated carcinosarcoma (Rare. Fast. Deadly.) that killed her, she just preferred not to broadcast the information.

Kage always did feel that the most elegant fashion choice was invisibility.

Not being anywhere near as modest as my sister, I’ve never especially hidden it when there was something wrong with me. If I have a headache, I say so: bum some pain pills off someone, warn everyone to let me sleep, and curl up until I feel better. If I develop heart disease, I tell people why I no longer sprint from place to place and tend to pant a lot … just to be pro-actively polite, you now? Because being asked if you have rabies can be so awkward.

And now, it appears I too have endometrial cancer. And the Universe scores again! Quite aside from having all the modesty taboos of a nautch dancer, I am possessed of an overwhelming urge to stand in a high place and scream at the sky: How dare you? This is freaking outrageous!

Which it is. But all of you, Dear Readers, have been very kind and patient about this absurd current adventure; and I am grateful. So very grateful, to all of you. Thanks for listening, thanks for the splendid advice (Lots of it. Good, practical stuff, too. And I can use all of it.), thanks for the solid support. Thanks for laughing at the bad jokes; with crap like this, you just gotta laugh.

Please be assured I am hounding my doctor for information and speed. The purely practical aspects of bloggery here have not been assisted by my desktop developing its own mysterious disease this week, but it is now in the CPU clinic and I have hooked up Kage’s dear little Buke, so I can peck out the daily writing I need to do. Getting a daily schedule back on some kind of track is a great help.

So, there we are. Back to some kind of normal, now; less time spent running around in circles howling out lines from Shakespeare … besides, I always get Lear confused with Merry Wives, and end up seguing from “Blow wind and crack your cheeks…” straight into “Let it rain ringadillos ….”

Which, unless they are chocolate-coated, are of no use to me right now. But chocolate, now … hmmm, yes.Time to go top up on selected antioxidants, I think.

Kage Baker would  declare from time to time that things had just gotten too hard to deal with, and it was time to run away. Her fondest wish was to one day run away to sea, but in default of that, she usually ran away to a sea side town – one we didn’t already live in – and spend a few days in a motel with no phone.

Sorry, Dear Readers of the male persuasion – things may get a little indelicate here. We women are not actually frail flowers of delicacy and tact: we’re a lot cruder than you valiant gentlemen, and have a truly horrendous sense of humor. I’ll try to spare your gentler sensibilities, but … quite frankly, gentlemen, being a woman requires one to be especially tough and ferocious.

The last week has been … peculiar. Went in Monday for a biopsy – no biopsy achieved, due to what my (semi-freaked-out) gynecologist primly referred to as “a significant bleeding event.” That means whatever is wrong with me prefers not to be disturbed in its isolation, and objected by flooding the examining table. I am fine now, but spent Tuesday and Wednesday mostly lying down in a fairly light-headed state.

The doctors resorted to using an ultrasound (they can be used internally – did you know? I don’t recommend it for light entertainment) instead of a biopsy, which was rather like having a MetroRail station installed between my legs. Lots of beeping machines, flashing lights, people calling for something to dam the flood …also, what they euphemistically referred to as an ultrasound “wand” had obviously been mixed up with a baseball bat. That thing should have been capable of reading the inside of my skull.

Someone should train young doctors on careless things not to say during ultrasound exams, too. Hearing them exclaim “What’s that?” is unnerving. Makes one wonder if they just can’t find your cervix – I know where it is, they could have asked – or if an alien is about to leap out and eat your gynecologist’s face. And whether or not you would like it to do that …

Bottom line on the exam experience: something is wrong with me, and something that shouldn’t be there is taking up room in my uterus. So very soon I will be going to the hospital for a hysteroscopy, where they’ll have a look with me safely asleep under anesthesia – Huzzah! – and probably remove most of my plumbing. I don’t mind at all, as it’s obviously gone to the Dark Side and is no longer my friend.

But then, back at the ranch … my CPU died, and is no longer talking to my monitor. So it makes noises like it’s working but I can’t see anything. Our home network here has some sort of glitch, and the other desktop is only working intermittently, and I’ve been asleep so much of the time that I just never got to a working computer. That’s where I have been all week. But now repairs are under way, and communications have resumed!I won’t lose so much time again.

But in the meantime, the corgi has an ear infection and had to go to the vet’s this morning, because he’s been travelling through the house with his head pressed to the floor, rubbing his ears on everything. And the trip to Fry’s to drop off the CPU found every bit of road work between here and Burbank, which I think is being removed. And I have to go running off to the doctor’s again with more paperwork while they work on cramming me into the hospital as soon as possible …

Busy times. Annoying times. Times when I would love to go hide somewhere for a week, and am sort of grateful for the last several days of dazed quiet. But I missed everyone, and my nice little soap box here: and anyway, I’ve been quiet long enough now.

So I’m back. Normal functions are resumed, and – as the poet says – anything you still can’t cope with is your own problem …

But I’m relatively fine, and absolutely back!