Armistice On The Hidden Frontier

     The Agreement of 1989 ended the war between the Federation of Concerned Spacemen -- the non-government of the Far Edge -- and the U.S. plus selected NATO members. But it almost did more than that--

     There's a new story -- more a vignette, really -- at I Work On A Starship!

Armistice Day/Veterans Day

     Let's talk about people -- starting with the people who, 99 years ago this day, managed to put an end to the First World War and who thought they were going to be able to fix the peace in place, like a beautiful moth on a collector's display.  It didn't work.  With the war over, six months of peace negotiations were entered into with the highest of hopes -- the first three of Wilson's Fourteen Points are a libertarian dream -- and the parties built a peaceful Europe that carried the seeds of its own destruction.

     But they had hope.  The weary soldiers had hope -- and for nearly eleven years, that hope soared.  Don't lose sight of that.  People fail; our institutions fail on a grand scale -- but we get up and try again.

     As time -- and wars -- have passed and piled up, the focus of this day has shifted, from the agreement that ended the War To End All Wars, from politicians and their fine words to the people who have fought all wars and the peace in between: the veterans.

     You can, I suppose, look at the sidewalk and mumble, "Than kew for y'service," like you were tipping a waiter.  A little recognition is better than none.  But better yet, make eye contact, listen -- maybe the veterans you know spent four years, or twenty, as a glorified filing clerk in uniform; maybe they did brave or dangerous things.  They served.  Lend them your attention for even a little time.

     I have worked with a guy who did comms on a big SAC airplane, with an African-American commercial artist who would smile sadly and look off in the distance when his service in WW II was mentioned, with Army, Marine and USAF vets who fought in Vietnam; with a man the army spent a few months teaching high-speed Morse Code and then sent off to radio in radar plots to fighter bases in the Pacific -- by voice.  I had an Uncle who served on a tiny Naval patrol craft in the Med (that once bumped into an Italian submarine with a crew bound and determined to surrender and figured a Chief Petty Officer was as good for that as anyone), a brother who served as a chaplain in the Middle East and a great, great grandfather who got through Army training, was kicked on a hip by mule en route to his first assignment, and sent home after (mostly) recovering.  They all stepped up.  They all had hopes -- and put themselves at risk to preserve them, and yours as well.  Thank them and know who you are thanking, and why.

Jack Woodford On Writing

     Jack Woodford was the pen name of a prolific writer of fiction and film scripts.  His fiction, I'm told, was largely ephemeral, what might be called "airport books" today.  But he also wrote several books on how to write, and they are highly regarded.

    Robert A. Heinlein found Woodford's Trial And Error of use.  An expanded version is available from Amazon as Write And Error.  I'm reading it now, and it is indeed full of good and useful advice.  Some of the information on markets is out of date; there's barely any market for short fiction these days and unless you are really amazingly extra-special or well-known -- or better, both -- it's no way to make money, but that's just one aspect of a multi-faceted book.  If you write or would like to, it's worth your time.

A Story About Crutches

     In response to my recent report of trouble with my poor, abused right knee, one piece of online advice was "get a cane."

     Get?  I've owned a cane since the late stages of my recovery from the 2006 motor scooter wreck* that damaged my right knee (and broke the thighbone, an ugly spiral fracture).  And a knee brace, and the crutches I used and came to loathe for months before (and then a little while after -- my immune system took issue with the plate and screws used to hold things together while the bone healed, so I had to go back in and have all the metal bits taken out).

     Loathe?  Oh, yes.  Crutches and canes are perverse, annoying things.  Other than the four-footed cane -- with its own problems -- they won't stand up on their own and yet if you need them, you're probably not in shape to bend or kneel and pick them up.  They get caught on things.  There's rarely a good place to put them when you don't need them.  Driving, dining, desk work -- it's all made more difficult by having to mange those blamed sticks.  But try to cross a room without them, and--  So you come to resent the darned things.

     Decades ago, I worked with a man who'd suffered polio in early childhood, well after the vaccine was available but before he'd received it.  It got his legs and left them weak and spindly.  He had braces, but still needed "elbow crutches" to get around -- the kind with a loose cuff for the upper arm and a grab handle that sticks out at ninety degrees, about as small and light and "convenient" as crutches ever get.  They're tricky to use, which is why hospitals send you home with old A-frame full-height crutches, but if you're a long-term user, the smaller ones are better.

     He hated them.  He was a big, muscular guy of Scots-Irish ancestry, with a bushy blond beard and a volcanic temper.  A good man, good at his job, but perpetually short-fused and never more so than at the frustrating behavior of his crutches, always in the way, often out of reach, and when stowed, occasionally falling over unexpectedly.  A storm of profanity would follow, often accompanied by a door slamming and the thumps and clicks of a man moving rapidly on crutches.

     Time passed and he was offered a better job in a distant state.  It was a big step up and he went for it.  That meant finding a new doctor in his new city--

     About a year later, he showed up at the business where we'd worked for a visit -- walked right in the front door, all smiles.  Walked in!  He had been going to his family doctor for years, keeping the same hardware he'd used in High School; his new physician had taken one look at his old braces and half-crutches and sent him to a specialist.  The state of the art had advanced considerably, and before he knew it, he was up on his own two feet (with a little technological assistance) and shopping for a tasteful cane for occasional use.

     Hearing his tale that day, seeing the light in his eyes and the persistence of what had been a rare and fleeting smile, I thought I knew how frustrated he must have been before.  Twenty-five years later, I broke my right knee badly enough to put myself on crutches (and in a knee brace) for six months -- and only then did I begin to have a glimmering of how he must have felt.

     I own a cane.  I keep it in my car (and there's a backup stashed in the garage) so that I can always get it no matter where I am.  I've been using my cane this week.  I don't much like it -- but there's way worse and I'd like to avoid that as long as I can.
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* A wreck, mind you, for which I have no one to blame but myself.  I'd owned the scooter for a couple of weeks and had commuted to work on it.  I was on standby for the ABATE Rider's Course. Went out to pick up lunch and on the way back to work, got the shifter stuck between gears on a bumpy stretch of road.  Fought it back into gear with the throttle open, hit a bump, got the front wheel briefly up and came back down turned to one side.  Loss of control was immediate and irreversible and as the scooter wobbled, I stuck out a foot.  It went road, sky,  road, sky and then I was on my back in the road, a little way from my scooter, which was on its side and idling.  I tried to get up, felt blinding pain, wormed over to the scooter and turned it off.  This was right outside work; coworkers came out, called an ambulance, and some of them were walking my scooter off to the building by the time the ambulance arrived.  The ER was sure I just had a bad sprain, so I lay there on a gurney and ate my lunch.  I was just finishing when the X-rays came back: "Okay, looks like you do have a broken leg.  You'll be going into surgery in a few hours-- hey, is that corned beef?"  It was, and I was off the surgery list and off food until the next morning.  That evening my cellphone rang: "Miss X?  We have an opening for the ABATE class this weekend...."  I replied, "How do you feel about irony?"  Turned out they weren't so keen on it.  Six months later, I took the class. 

Stupid Trick Knee Tricks

     My right knee is not happy.  Sleeping with a nice sealed cold pack on it helped -- the swelling is way down and it is not as painful -- but it still hurts plenty.

     Sunday, Tam and I walked about two-thirds of the width of the State Fairgrounds and back again, with the slow Gun Show Shuffle through the Indy 1500 in between.  It was a nice show, nice they way they often are when I go without any fun money to spend, and the elfin young woman who has taken over the knife-sharpening work at these shows did a wonderful job with my Japanese carpenter's knife.  But the hard-floor slow walk at these events is always rough on my bad knee and the long walk before and after does not appear to have helped.

That's It, I'm Officially Over With This Day

     Not, mind you, that it is unlikely to get worse.  But I'm not endorsing any of this day as it has gone so far, a farrago of small frustrations from having so much going on at breakfast that I failed to preload the thermal carafe with hot water and then melted a notch in the handle of one of my good spatulas by using it, propped up on the edge of the skillet, to try to keep a breakfast wrap for Tamara from unrolling.

     My own breakfast was cold by the time I got to it and as I sat down at my desk to eat, Tam's cat began to throw up on my bed, where I had left the covers thrown back.  Tam was kind enough to deal with that...but once her effort was underway, the cat walked down the hallway and horked just outside the door to the office and that was clearly my job.

     Tempers are now short all over (including the cat, who is not at all happy about her tummy) and thus prepared, I sat down to write.  Maybe it helps to talk about it.

     Update: By the time I got to work, my right knee, which was hurting a little yesterday, had started to swell and hurt like the dickens.  Hurts worse if bent.  After an hour, I fetched my cane and avoided walking as much as I could.  It still hurts.  I'm going to try an icepack.

Unfitting The Narrative

   --And yet impossible to ignore.  Sunday, a cowardly and evil man shot worshipers in a church in Texas; when he emerged from the building (and here's the money quote): 

A man who lives next door to the church grabbed his own rifle and engaged the suspect[...]. The gunman dropped his "Ruger AR assault-type rifle" and fled.

     Yeah.  This is the usual behavior for this kind of murderer: confronted with effective opposition, they flake out.

     I expect this story to drop out of sight quickly, or to be accompanied by a lot of pushing for "gun control;" but it was Texas state law forbidding firearms in churches that gave the killer a sanctuary full of unarmed victims, and* the Texan gun culture that meant an armed citizen was able to respond in an effective and timely manner.

     At least for now, the oldstream media has to sit up, swallow their bubblegum and report the facts: to stop a spree killer, you need a citizen with a gun.  And it doesn't make a bit of difference if that citizen has a spiffy uniform, a badge and the sanction of government or not.  I'm only sorry the killer wasn't stopped more quickly, by one of his intended victims.
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* Not so!  This was true until 2015, when the law was changed; since then churches must post specific signage forbidding the carriage of firearms openly and/or concealed, or it is allowed.

Heinlein Wanders In...

     Not the man himself, of course, or his shade, either; but I became curious about a book of essays to which had contributed,* and looked it up in the massive two-volume biography by William H. Patterson, Jr.,† which lead to reading around in the book (I am bad for following footnotes backwards into the text, in a "Hunh!  What prompted that?" sort of way).  Heinlein's an interesting writer and an interesting man, never terribly comfortable with his public image and rarely in as good health as he liked to have people think.
  
     Love him or loathe him, his influence looms large (and somewhat misunderstood) over SF, which he helped legitimize as literature while writing for a living and without even a hint of an MFA degree.
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 * I could swear he also contributed to a book on writing SF in the later 1940s or early '50s, which I located years ago at what was, at the time, a ruinous price; but I can't run the title to earth and it was about three desktop computers ago.

† Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialog With His Century, a marvelous and very readable effort, for which Patterson's reward was to unexpectedly fall ill and die.  This is the kind of thing that leads to nihilism in the survivors.

Lazy Day

     I admit it -- I have done nothing today.  Nine and a half hours at the thing yesterday, followed by an end-of-the-week dinner at A Real Grown-Up Restaurant left me all wrung out.  Slept eight and a half hours, made a very small breakfast, and have wandered the house ever since, midly dazed.

     Huck the cat and I played "chase and be chased" (you take turns; most cats will play this game) for awhile about noon and that's been the extent of my exertions so far.

Yearly Engineering Conference

     Today, I'll be going to a statewide Engineering Conference on the kind of engineering for which I am a technician -- and if you think that's confusing, ponder that most of the Chief Engineers (it says so right on their door) who will be there aren't officially "Engineers" in the hang-out-a-shingle legal sense, either.  About half of them have some form of EE degree, maybe more than half, but it's not a line of work where regular big boss engineers need to be Certified Professional Engineers, so they're not.  They hire 'em for projects when needed, and if a CPE is not needed (or if there is any sort of heavy lifting), you get soldering-iron jockeys like me.

    And tomorrow, the whole lot of us -- techs and Chiefs and Assistant Chiefs, plus the occasional CPE (usually teaching the rest of us) get to go hang out, learn stuff, attend a big rubber-chicken lunch and awards ceremony with non-technical people in our business, and then go learn more stuff while trying not to fall asleep.

     It'll be fun.

First Of The Month, End Of The Week

     Hooray!  It's bill-paying time!  At least I can pay the recurring utility and house-payment bills; the days of deciding who gets a wave-off until the disconnect notices arrive are behind me, at least for now.  You never forget those times if you've been through them, and not having to play Stupid Deadline Tricks is a relief.

     My Poetic License is up for renewal, too, and I let a good magazine subscription slide that I shouldn't.

Now It Can Be Told

     Finally warm!  The weather turned cold last week and the furnace at Roseholme Cottage needed to be checked out -- but our service guys were booked solid 'til Halloween.

    We dug up a 750 W (on low) forced-air space heater and kept the house at 58 (with occasional dips to 57 and that last degree is brutal), and a little warmer in whichever of three rooms in the back of the house it was aimed at.  Between it, electric blankets, comforters and cats, we did okay.  I simmered big pots of stew over the weekend, which kept the kitchen nice.  (When I moved in, I added two new electrical circuits, one for the washroom and one for my bedroom.  That's two dedicated circuits for just this kind of use.  The washroom opens off the middle of the hall, so the heater sat just outside the door and I did without a blowdryer.)

     Still, it was not entirely comfortable.  When Tam called me Tuesday afternoon to report the central heating was back, I was greatly relieved.  68 degrees F is wonderful!