We've got an extensive air/land search going on around China Lake for a snowmobile and teen driver missing since last Friday -- with snowmobile tracks leading into open water:

www.bangordailynews.com/detail/134152.html

Note that "since last Friday" encompasses our Great Blizzard of 2010 . . .

Sunrise.  Actual light in the sky.  Shadows and such.  And half a moon over the newspaper walk -- haven't seen the moon since before "full".  And the city plowed the State Street sidewalks.  Don't know if I can handle all this excitement . . .

Ms. Beak in her roost hole when I got back.   She actually trusted me enough that she took off while I was there.  Usually retreats into the Stygian Depths if she sees me.

In case you missed this post - As some of you know, I have been working for Adventures in Fiction, a creative writing mentoring programme based in London, which takes a limited number of apprentices each year for various genres. I will now be offering this service privately. More details via the link:

http://mevennen.livejournal.com/754644.html

Just for the record, it's was lovely clean crisp snow this morning. BB went out and cleared the front path and even managed to get one car door open (the passenger one, unfortunately) but now it's snowing again and the cleared path is white again, so time for another cup of tea.

Tags: birdsedge, snow

Puppy and BB in snow.... awww





And his pathetic Let Me In pic (He was only out withut us for half a minute.)

Tags: diezel, puppy, snow

Latest 'link exchange' spam, in which they allege that they have found my website (actually, the Victorian subset of it):

While browsing and find the website resource Section quite interesting and relevant to one of our business partner's websites.

Please consider posting a link to the below mentioned website under your "Links/Resource" section.

My website detail is given here.
[Redacted]
Description: - [Redacted] provides a fantastic opportunity for your friends and family to earn extraordinary income. [Redacted]gold team is a leader in Internet marketing and works with you to get your [Redacted]business off to a great start.

Unless their special marketing opportunity is Soluble Urethral Crayons or similar, I think not, rly. I've looked on the link given and the main site appears to be selling antiques and collectibles, but the links are what is technically known as A Right MishMash, most of them of no apparent relevance to the world of antiques and collectibles (?'Bestiality Sex'??)

Though on link exchange emails, I was taken aback by one recently which suggested that I was 'at liberty to include' link to their spa-products site.

I suppose this strategy must work in a sufficient number of instances to make the procedure worthwhile?

This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1158655.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View comments.

Tags: link exchange, spam, weirdness, zoophilia

Vinny Chong emailed me to say he's starting work on the cover for my collection, A Handful of Pearls. Right now he's reading stories. He'll send me his ideas so we can discuss them.

I am so jazzed. This is the artist who created that fabulous cover for Ars Memoriae. I can hardly wait to see what he comes up with for this one.

Tags: collection

Jani didn't come to me yesterday. She needed help to get her things into the car and while she dropped heavy hints to her friends they didn't understand that she was actually asking for their help!

So it snowed heavily during the night. Luckily that meant it wasn't as cold as the other night and her gas is now working. Trouble is it means she can't get to me. People have been skiing down the hill I live on, on the main road. The lady on the next boat to her is walking Storm twice a day for her and said she would have offered to help get Jani's stuff into the car had she known she needed help. Funnily enough she was one of the first people that Jani told she did need help last night, and she ignored it. Or perhaps she thought walking the dog was the only help she needed?

The snow is heavy for the south west, we hardly ever get snow to start with and it's due to fall to -7C tonight so it will freeze what snow we already have. I've checked that Jani has enough food and wood for her stove, she is warm enough in front of it. She recons that the fear of being ill alone and incapable is what might be increasing any breathing problems she's been having. I think that the wood burner may also be giving off fumes. But I'm trying not to panic her. I also pointed out that when you need help don't go doing the English thing of dropping hints, ASK for the HELP, instead.

Anyway I'm constantly checking on her to ensure she's ok. She isn't in need of emergency services help yet and there are far more critical people to take care of.

In the meanwhile my garden is looking absolutely gorgous, my rose tree is covered in snow that is begining to melt and refreeze so it looks like chandelier. I have enough supplies to last for ages yet, so am not going out.

I was fooled by the dim light this morning and assumed it would be grey and raining. But in fact it's white and still snowing. It was tiny flakes earlier, but now it's big and fluffy flakes and the tyre tracks in the snow are getting covered ... and our postman has just come past walking his bicycle, bundled up in a big coat and wearing shorts. Yes. He always wears shorts.



(Ah, well, the timing wasn't quite right, but honest, those are shorts)

But ... we are saved! A bread lorry has just gone past, presumably from re-stocking the co-op down the road. Not that I actually eat much bread and thus I didn't even walk down the aisle last night in Tesco. I went out to fill up the car, in case I need to make runs to Wells to help out my parents and had to de-ice it then at 8pm. As I was in the Tesco petrol station I thought I'd pop into the store and get the few things I needed - veggies mostly - and was totally flummoxed by the empty shelves on at least half the fruit and veg aisles.

When I got home and started to read friends' LJ entries about snow, it occurred to me that I'd better check the met office web site and found pretty much the whole country subjected to warnings. And Dorset (into which the bottom right hand corner of Yeovil intrudes) is one of the 'red' counties.

So, we have snow, a couple of inches so far, but I've just seen the first totally-unable-to-cope car abandon its attempt to get, front wheels spinning, to the top of the road. It's not too bad as long as you start slowly to get traction and then keep some momentum up. But, of course, the more cars stick and spin their wheels, the less traction there is.



Oh, look ... a car jam! We now have, effectively, a single track road because everyone's driving in the slushy tracks. and we have traffic calming measures which mean that people have to stop and negotiate humps in the road under the snow. And stopping means loss of momentum and yes, having to start again. Wheel spin! :) At least there are plenty of people out walking in it to give a push.

In fact, as the snow has stopped for the moment, I'll probably go out with the camera myself, in a bit.

On one channel they were showing a jolly little documentary about how we all became kidults in the Noughties. On another, as if to reinforce the point, they were showing The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe- a kiddies movie in primetime.

I think the Lion, the Witch and the wardrobe is a really ugly film. The combination of live actors and CGI animations makes for a blotchy effect. The eye moves from textures that are rough and sensuous to textures that are oily and unreal.  Oh look, a real wolf holding down a computer generated beaver! Any fool can see the difference between real fur and CGI fur- and it's visually offensive, it hurts the brain. It's as if you were looking at a picture painted by two artists with quite different styles- one of whom is God and the other Walt Disney. Do you get my drift?

That was a digression. To get back to the whole kidult thing: I like it that adults are allowed to be daft these days- that we're acknowledging that- however venerable we may be- we are also "still children in some sort". On the other hand, there's a reason why the word "childish" is used as a put-down.  Children are silly and ignorant. Adults should be reading and watching things other than C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling.

And here's an odd thing. As adults turn themselves inside out to display the inner child, so we clamp down more and more on real children. You know what I'm talking about- school exams beginning earlier and earlier, with all the stress that entails, the clampdown on childhood freedoms in the name of health and safety and keeping them safe from paedos, the sexualisation of little girls by bloody commerce- all that sort of horror.

We're not allowed to be childish when we're of an age to be childish,  so we seize the opportunity later.  Makes a sort of sense, I suppose. Welcome to a world in which the kids are all Midwich cuckoos- dead-eyed and dutiful- and their parents are chasing balloons.