Travelling: it's all about the numbers

Yesterday Karen went up to the city for work, for the first time since Alabama. It was huge. I went with her, to manage the walker in the crowds and so forth, and also just to be there, because reasons, wife, so forth.

Once she was safely delivered to the office, I hopped onto BART and went out to Borderlands, which is positively my favourite SF bookshop/cafe/place to work. (Okay, it's my only SF bookshop/cafe/place to work, but none the less: still my favourite.) I had thought I might spend half the day there and come back downtown, sign up at the Mechanics Institute and see if that wants to become my new favourite library/place to work, but no: in the end I spent four solid hours at B'lands, and came away with something over 2K new words on Kipling.

Which is more words written in a day than I have seen since I came to America. Which, doubled with last week's pre-school productivity, only confirms what I did already know: that it is still easier for me to work outside the house, and the sooner in the day I start the better, and the longer I stay out the more I come home with.

In other counting, I guess I came back from the mountains a little dried out, despite all the water they made me drink. I was five pounds lighter when I got home, but it's coming back.

And in other other counting, yesterday I went by car and train and trolley-bus and BART and regular bus and walking. Which is almost all the forms of transport you can use, between here and points in SF. I didn't bike, and I didn't go by cablecar; I'm not sure there's anything else. Actually I've never been by cablecar. You'd think I was a native or something.

Kitchen diary, 25/07/13

Last autumn, we were hectic with squirrels gathering up what fell from trees all up and down this street.

It took me shamefully long to figure out that those were walnuts, and these were walnut trees.

This year, I was determined to be proactive. What can I say? I'm English; I like pickled walnuts. It's a thing.*

Tragically, my determination is not, on its own, enough. I also need impetus, and it took just that little bit too long to build it up. This morning I gleaned a kilo of low-hanging green fruits from the walnut trees, and on examination, I guess I'm about three weeks too late; they've started hardening off the shell inside. Which means they won't pickle. I think.

Still: I have the walnuts, so. I'm going to go ahead anyway, and just see what happens. I've pricked 'em with a fork and immersed 'em in a brine, where they will welter for a couple of weeks before being dried out and pickled in a syrup of vinegar.

Meanwhile, I have had walnut-juice all over my hands, because of course I don't have rubber gloves. I anticipate staining.


*Also, I dislike American squirrels. It's another thing. They are the bane of the Tufty Club.

A vast and splendid giveaway

To celebrate its five-year existence, Tor.com is giving away all the fiction it's published in that time (which is a lot) in one massive e-book. You have to register with them, but that's painless and untroubling, and the reward is great. Or at least sizeable. Five years of fiction, people. Click here. You have till the end of the month.

The better use of fridges

I just had a very happy moment. I have been sitting in the clubhouse writing Kipling, and sipping at a cooling beer, with a looming distress behind the moment because I knew this was the last beer in the wine fridge (bar the really good ones that I think a friend left there, and that certainly I intend to share with that friend however they came). I tried to comfort myself with thoughts of incipient gin, but really I wanted beer, and the fridge was bare. But then because I was in the clubhouse, my eye was drawn to the subsidiary fridge, the bacon fridge; and I thought "Oh, wait a minute..."

And went to check, and lo: I was right. The bacon fridge has indeed been roped into duty as the secondary spillover beer fridge. It's got lots. I could drink all evening. (Tho' m'wife might find me a little tiresome, after a while.)

The alluring error

I am probably not the only one whose fingers want to type "vocal chords", even while his mind knows that is wrong, I am just sayin'.