Also, Calypso has a brain tumor.


(Or something. There are a few possibilities, so we're treating for the easily-treatable ones, but those are not by a long stretch the likeliest.)

Last year, I bought The Peanuts Christmas Carol Collection, on grounds that it had a lot of songs I like, no songs I detest, a few songs I hadn't heard of, and looked like a set of nice easy arrangements suitable for having people sing along with. I hadn't actually gone through it until the last few days, when I started going through it from the beginning to see which songs I want to work up so that, when relatives are visiting this Christmas, I can play and they can sing along.

It turns out that it ought to be titled Christmas Carols: The Gloomy Versions. They've made some very strange choices in the arrangements. Some of these can perhaps be put down to over-simplification: Coventry Carol, for instance, is in the key of C, which is Just Wrong. Some may be attributed to a Puritan spirit of solemnity and having no fun at all, or perhaps to simple ignorance of the songs in question: Go Tell It On The Mountain is made slow and melancholy by the simple expedient of writing every fourth measure to a completely wrong tune. Some are just inexplicable: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen traditionally ends the chorus ("tidings of comfort and joy") on an E. The arranger of the Peanuts Collection decided that one good strong note in both hands (as my old free arrangement has it) was too simple, and added a chord. This is all well and good. However, the chosen chord is E minor. E minor is not comfort and joy! E minor is afflictions and doom! E minor is sins and tribulations! E minor does not belong in my Christmas carols!

I didn't make it past God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. I switched to my other new book of carols, which seems much better so far. They're arranged as solos, so there aren't any printed words, they're substantially more difficult arrangements, they have lots of decorative flourishes, and they'll be harder to sing along with, but they sound good and they're not blatantly wrong. (Well, Coventry Carol's a bit cheerier than is really called for, but in a pretty way. I have not thoroughly investigated the rest of the selection; see also, substantially more difficult arrangements.)

This morning we put Hera and Aphrodite to sleep.

This was rather sudden, yes.

( Details, which get explicitly gory towards the end. )

We actually got somewhere in the neighborhood of 31-40 Trick-or-Treaters. The doorbell rang perhaps 8 or 10 times, but most of those were small hordes of variously costumed children. The only solo Trick-or-Treater was the one who was clearly too old for this and didn't really have a costume, although there were two pairs (counting the family that had one walking child and an extra bag for the nine-month-old at home as a pair).

Nobody likes Whoppers.

Poll #1479105 Miscellany
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 28

Our lovely matching stainless-steel kitchen appliances aren't magnetic. How should I deal with this?

Sliced bread:

How many Trick-or-Treaters will we get tonight?

So of course the evening after I post that Hera's doing well, we notice a lump.

Yes, agrees the new vet at the clinic, looks like a mammary tumor. Given the respiratory ick (and her age[1], and the fact that she's a rat), she's a really lousy anesthetic risk, so we're not planning on surgery. If it's growing slowly, something else will probably kill her before it starts to bother her; if it's growing quickly we can try surgery at the point at which not waking up from the anesthetic is better than a continued lumpy existence.

Her kidneys are doing great, though, so we have permission to dose her with Metacam (an anti-inflammatory / painkiller) up to once a day as needed. I offered her a dose on a bit of bread last night, and at first she didn't seem interested. Once I told chinders that I didn't think she was going to settle down enough to eat, so maybe we should try again in the morning before she got regular food, Hera decided that bread sounded like a great idea and ate most of the dosed part (but not the crust -- picky thing).

So then I told her, "You're a very sick rat and you're going to die soon."

Reverse psychology. Worth a try.


[1] We've had her for two years this month, and she was an adult then. We guessed at about a year old when we got her, so the vet has 2 years 10 months as the current estimated age in her chart (she started looking younger when we'd had her for a bit -- must not have been fed real well in her previous life), but she could in theory be anywhere from 2 years 5 months up. So she's certainly old, but we do not know whether she is Really Impressively Old or not.

Here is the ratty update:

Hera: Still on antibiotics for the Respiratory Infection That Will Not Die, but stable and active despite the occasional godawful snorking. She's definitely an old rat now -- back legs a touch wobbly (though they don't seem to have weakened any more since we first noticed, so that's being a good slow decline), napping even more than usual, hard to wake up, appears to be getting a bit of a cataract in one eye -- but a happy old rat.

Aphrodite: Also getting up there; she's a lot slower than she used to be. Friendly and interested in what's going on outside the cage, but has mostly quit trying to break out and explore. Fonder of hammocks than she once was.

Huginn: Has been attempting to climb out and explore when in the small cage for cleaning purposes lately. Good snuggly rat, always comes up to the door in case the visiting human has food and is quite happy to stick around for social interaction in the absence of snacks.

Odin: The quiet, out-of-the-way rat. He's been very background-y lately -- healthy and unobtrusive.

Thor: Poor fella seemed to be having a bit of a paranoia relapse this evening. About two weeks before we left on vacation, he'd been experiencing sudden pains in his backside somewhere, and came to the natural conclusion that other rats were persecuting him, so he was getting himself into a lot of fights. Once we realized what was going on, we separated him and had him on antibiotics and anti-inflammatories for a bit, which seemed to resolve whatever the underlying hidden problem was. He's been good for a while, but was squeaking in a very aggrieved manner earlier. Settled down after a little time apart to cool off, so hopefully he was just having an irritated moment and whatever-it-was isn't coming back.

Tethys: Much calmer than she used to be. Willing to come up to the door if there's food, but quickly backs off if there isn't. Still likes watching people through the bars; still doesn't like to be touched, but will tolerate being picked up with much less scrambling than historically.

Calypso: Still a freaked-out little rat. A bit scared of people, generally avoids contact, looks jumpy a lot. I suppose she's happy enough.

Today I came this-home from work for the first time. I like it.

We have the kitchen entirely put away (we think -- there's a green mug missing, so either one of them broke and nobody remembers it or there's another box with at least some kitchen things in it still lurking), the office in usable shape (though we still need to work out where to put the printers, and one of them and some other fairly important office things are definitely in a lurking box), the bedroom assembled, the big rat cage put back together, and all the furniture in what appears to be the right spots. Today Cathy and I put together the new shelves to go in two of the closets and I replaced the rubber feet on the dining chairs with little felt stickies, because the feet made a horrible noise on the floor. Now Andres and Cathy are going around anchoring shelves to the walls; once they've finished with that we can start putting things back on them, and the boxes will quickly fall.

We still need to figure out good spots for bags and shoes, finish unpacking, and bring some semblance of order to the garage, but it's quite livable. House!

HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE

HOUSE!!!

HOUSE!!!

HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE HOUSE

(House a day later than expected, because the bank is stupid. This has thrown off my planned thing-hauling schedule, but never mind. I have a revised thing-hauling schedule which will work just fine, and should still result in most boxes being out of the way by the time we get the truck on Saturday so we can focus on furniture then.)

HOUSE!

HOUSE!

HOUSE!

In Hawaii, we bought this artwork that turned out to be just a tiny bit too big to fit in our large suitcase -- it was the same length, and the same width, but the suitcase has rounded corners and the art does not. So we bought a slightly bigger suitcase at Sears to take it home in.

At the airport, we found that the handle on the suitcase wouldn't extend, which made it a pain to haul around. When we got home and unpacked, we discovered that one of the tubes that the handle extends into had a dent in it, so the handle couldn't fit past that point. We had the receipt and the suitcase had a 10-year warranty, so Cathy took it to the local Sears to see what they could do for us.

They didn't have the same model of suitcase, so they couldn't replace it. They gave us our money back instead. Great! We didn't really want another suitcase anyway. In fact, because the tax rates in California and Hawaii are different, their system actually resulted in our getting back more money than we had spent. We wound up renting a suitcase for just the time we needed it for -5 dollars. Whoo!

So the housebuying thing is going well. We've done the walkthrough and signed everything and sent all the money to escrow. Monday the bank should "fund", and then Tuesday we actually take ownership.

Cathy has made great inroads into packing the board games, revealing that we do not, in fact, have nearly enough boxes. (I knew we needed more small boxes, for the comic books, but it turns out we need more large boxes, too.)

We have the plans for the house, and have used them to figure out where the major furniture should go. Shelves are being a bit of a problem -- between the kitchen peninsula, the French doors, the fireplace, and the windows, there's actually very little wall space in the living room, so that extra bedroom may be turning into something of a library after all. (I suspect the correct thing to do may be to get wall-mounted shelves and put them rather high up, behind the seating. Also, boy do our desk shapes not work well with that study -- we've figured out positions that should be okay, but a properly designed/selected set of desks and storage that really worked with the shape of the room would let us fit a lot more in there and free up space in some other areas.)

Part 3: Volcano

On the way up to Volcano, we stopped at a black sands beach. This differs from most other beaches on the Big Island by having some sand; otherwise it looks pretty much like the rest of the lava-rock coastline. (Okay, the historical park had a coarse salt-and-pepper sand beach, but it's mostly rocks.) Lava rocks make great tidepools and, like most of the other times we were on the coast, there were some sea turtles hanging around just offshore.

In the afternoon, we checked out the Volcanoes National Park visitor centers and the view of the main Kilauea caldera from the new overlook. The old overlook, along with most of Crater Rim Drive, has been closed for a while because of the clouds of poisonous gas and steaming ash the volcano has been spewing on it for a year or so. They had some nice big rocks and burnt fenceposts that had come from the old overlook to demonstrate.

Cathy was tired, so she rested in the house[1] while Brooks, Andrés, and I went to Kipuka Puaulu, a little island of forest in the midst of newer lava flows. We saw a great many chickens and pheasants, and a lot of really interesting plants.

The next day we hiked across Kilauea Iki, the small crater that we'd watched spew boiling rock hundreds of feet in the air in a film in the visitor center the previous day (it did this in 1959, so Not That Long Ago Really). It was a little nerve-wracking but also very cool. It rained on us most of the hike, which was dispiriting but probably more pleasant than the grueling-sun alternative. Afterwards, we drove Chain of Craters Road, and got out in a few places to hike across lava flows crossing the old road (1979 -- this gave a much more visceral sense of the recentness than watching video clips, even much more recent video clips), through a huge petroglyph field, and across the lava flow covering the road we were in fact on. Sometimes we could see the steam plume rising from where the current lava flow was reaching the water, some kilometers east. We had no desire whatsoever to get closer to it, given the clouds of hydrochloric acid and tiny bits of flying glass created by lava flows hitting seawater.

The next day we drove up to the Hilo area to see various waterfalls and did some shopping. We bought fantastic jam, some cookies, sarongs, a Christmas present for my mom (hi, Mom!), and a bigger suitcase to fit the art we'd gotten in Kona that turned out to be just this much too big to fit in the big suitcase we had.


Part 4: Maui

This is where they put the nice beaches! After our flight arrived, we checked into the astoundingly wonderful bed-and-breakfast, went out for brunch, and spent the rest of the day at the beach swimming and digging and snorkeling and eating fruit and having a generally lovely time in the pretty, soft sand.

The next day, we went to see Iao Valley, which was the site of a major battle in uniting the Hawaiian islands, and discovered that our legs were really sore from swimming. Mine didn't feel all that tired, but the right one kept trembling. We had planned to go to the aquarium afterwards, but it was more expensive than we'd realized and nobody seemed very enthusiastic, so Cathy picked out a beach with really big waves to try for better boogie-boarding than at the first beach and we went there instead. I thought that the brown churning water at the shoreline indicated quite clearly that swimming at this location was a good way to get covered in sand and probably injured (especially given the trembly leg), so I sat in the shade and read my book while the other three got covered in sand and in some cases injured. Then after we'd all cleaned up we climbed on top of the roof of the main house to watch the sun set.

Oh yeah, and somewhere in there we drank, and then ate, fresh coconuts. Not quite the sort of impractical beverage I was thinking, but any foodstuff that requires a machete to properly appreciate is only so sensible.



[1] In Volcano, we rented two rooms in what turned out to be a great big house with a fully-equipped kitchen and nice common areas to hang out in -- the rooms themselves were pretty lousy (and at opposite ends of the house -- one on the top floor and one in the basement) but the common areas were pleasant, and it was nice to have a kitchen. I liked it better the first day, when we were the only people there; the second day it was fully booked and a lot of random people kept wandering through and making me nervous while we were eating dinner.

Part 1: Kona

This area is on the west side of the big island. We visited two historical parks, lounged about the hotel pool (we were going to go snorkeling, but there was a tsunami warning so all the beaches were closed), went snorkeling the next day, poked around a number of interesting art galleries and shops, and saw a palace and the first church established in Hawaii.

Cathy is terribly upset with me for not previously revealing that snorkeling is her favorite thing in the world. Andres is much less pleased with it, and tends to flail. A sea turtle swam under me! I didn't see it until it was right there (you're not supposed to bother them), and I hope my subsequent shrieking and pointing didn't disturb it too much. We've seen a lot of other sea turtles, too, mostly hanging around just offshore as we've been walking along looking at tidepools and things.

Part 2: Macadamia Meadows

Yesterday, we collected Brooks from the airport and headed south to a little bed and breakfast / macadamia nut farm. It's a very pleasant place. It was raining when we got in yesterday, so we mostly lounged about and read. We discovered that the little green geckos that live everywhere bark at sunset.

Today, we had breakfast with the very talkative proprietor and two other guests, then got a brief tour of the macadamia nut orchard. We picked up lots of nuts while we were out, and got to try fresh, unprocessed macadamia nuts, which taste rather different from the dried kind you get everywhere but a macadamia nut farm (a little almondy or coconutty, depending on how moist they are).

Then we headed out to the Green Sands Beach, which was very difficult to get to. We took the car down a horrible pitted one-lane road, then parked it and walked another couple miles over a series of rocky, braided off-road vehicle ruts, then climbed down this giant pile of slightly-fused-together sand to a tiny cove where the waves tried very hard to kill anything living that might have the temerity to approach the waterline. Some idiots went swimming and boogie-boarding. (We know they survived because on the way back they tore past us in their erosion-mobile, kicking up giant clouds of red dust.) Upon return, we all took showers and decided not to do anything else today.

Tomorrow: to Volcano!

Today I did some volunteer habitat restoration with Save the Bay. I can now identify three plants that grow in the Baylands and which two of those shouldn't be there! (Horehound and pepperweed are invasive. Marsh coyotebrush looks rather like pepperweed but is native.) Also I won a bumper sticker for knowing what "herbaceous" meant.

Tomorrow chinders and I are going to go investigate the Folsom Street Fair.

Then Monday we leave for VACATION!!!!!!! I have three goals for this vacation:
* snorkel
* look at a volcano from real close
* drink an impractical beverage from a coconut

As we are going to Hawaii, I should be all set.

I cleaned the fridge yesterday. In addition to cleaning the inside, I took all the magnetic poetry off and scrubbed the outside. The fridge looks very strange without its words.

( Here, for posterity, are some of the words. )

The way this works is, you say "Icons!" and I pick out a couple of yours and then you talk about them a bit.

Here, the_siobhan and I will demonstrate.

( Like so. )

We are in contract.

WHOO!

There was quite a bit of excitement this afternoon when, about an hour before our agent presented our offer, she discovered that there was another offer. So we increased our offer at the last minute -- I suspect that we are paying more than we could have gotten away with, but it is a nice house.

I kind of wonder about these offers -- there was apparently one just before we saw the place, which the sellers had counteroffered, and then those offerers didn't follow up, and this concentration of offers seems peculiar to me given that it's been on the market since May.

We are gonna be busy for some time here.

1. Leslyn Leong (Alain Pinel) -- This is the one we met at the open house. She's very enthusiastic, in a steamroller kind of way. She reminds you, every half-hour or so, that she was a commercial real estate lawyer for 20 years so she's really experienced even though she's only been doing the agent thing since October. She provided a lot of helpful information about the various processes of closing. We got the feeling that, if we went with her, she would immediately find us a house that was everything we ever wanted and more and sweep us through closing with no trouble, during which we would pay everything we ever wanted, and more. Did she mention she was a lawyer?

2. Angele Price (Coldwell Banker) -- Wonderfully businesslike. We gave all three of them a three-page description of what we're looking for and a few houses Cathy found online that sounded like they might work before we met. The other two looked at and thought about this information; Angele went to most of the houses (plus another one or two we hadn't mentioned), toured the insides, and took notes on a printout of the list. She also got a brief but evil grin when we talked about negotiating. We like her.

3. Susan Nevins (Cooper & Gamble) -- Very nice, very friendly, very much a people person. Also not very organized, not super-comfortable with e-mail, and really not used to being interviewed first. Our general sense was that if we went with her, she'd become our bestest friend and talk to us all the time and come over and plant, with her own hands, beautiful flowers in the yard of the house that we found online a year or two from now.

The best anagram of my name is, in fact, Noblest Geek Charmer. Thanks, tenacious_snail!