They say it seems we won't be getting snow*

At last count, the Bay Area had eight separate Severe Weather Warnings massed like clouds on the horizon. Over the next couple of days, we are expecting more storm than I have seen in California thus far. Speaking as a man who loves a bit of weather, I say yay.

Up in the mountains, friends are taking in their horses and fetching firewood, battening down the hatches**, watching the horizon with a looming anxiety. They might get eight inches of rain over twenty-four hours, and hurricane-force winds. It's not going to be so grim down here, but we should probably take down our garden umbrellas. I might not even get out of the house tomorrow. One way or another, what with the ground being saturated still by last week's rain, there's going to be an awful lot of water.

It is apparently not at all unlikely that we may get power outages also. If you don't hear from us, send gushy fudz. And kibble.


*This subject line is actually a mismemory of a line from a popular Christmas song of my youth. But I love this sequence - four verbs, regressively conditional, Ossa heaped on Pelion on some other mountain and how's about one more? - so fiddle to accuracy. Also, it should be noted that US Christmas songs are bizarrely unexpectedly different from ours; I recognise virtually none. And why is the air not filled with Greg Lake, anyway?

**I was delighted to learn, comparatively recently - possibly from Patrick O'Brian? - what this actually means.

They call me ScarHand*

The year Anathem came out, I had a bad thing happen to me. My lovely enormous very heavy chopping-board lived atop the washing-machine, because teeny-tiny kitchen with no countertops. At any given time, the chopping-board tended to be covered with accumulated bottles and jars and stuff, with only a bare corner left actually to work on, because teeny-tiny kitchen with no storage solutions.

The washing-machine vibrated quite significantly during its spinning cycles. Can we spot an emergent problem here?

Quite often, I would hear a crash of more or less volume, and go through to find bottles or jars or the whole damn equipage on the floor, board and all.

One particular time, I did this and found a broken oil-bottle among the wreckage. And was scrupulous and careful about picking everything up and wiping it down and so forth - and just as I was finishing, after I'd cleaned all the oil off the floor and swept up the broken glass and so forth, I contrived to pierce my thumb with a shard. Not badly, not deeply, not enough to worry: I stuck it under the tap and wrapped a plaster around it and carried on.

And woke the next night in serious hurty, with all the ball of my thumb inflamed and obviously infected; and dithered all day about going to the doctor, until it was too late and I had to go into town for an event.

By the time I got to the library, I couldn't stop shaking. I stubbornly refused to bail on the event, because hullo; but straight after I was done, people poured me into a car and drove me straight to Casualty.

Where they said, "Hmm. You have an infected thumb," which I knew; and, "We need to admit you," which really surprised me because I thought they'd just give me antibiotics and send me home. But they take hands very seriously, because people can lose the use of them at remarkably short notice ("another forty-eight hours," they said, "you'd have been in real trouble"); and anyway, my infection was in the tendon sheath which has no blood supply so antibiotics wouldn't have helped.

What they did, they took me into hospital and kept me there a week and operated twice and nearly a third time, cutting open my thumb and my wrist both and literally washing out the sheath; and meantime I could have morphine when I wanted (because, seriously, ow: majorly infected thumbs are no fun at all; Stalky says he never saw a man shot through the hand who didn't blub like a child, and I believe him) and I had a week in bed with books. Which is when I read Anathem for the first time, and Bear's Shakespeare books also.

But anyway, that was years ago and my hand is fine now, thanks. It's just that I looked at it just now and the scars are really prominent, on wrist and thumb both, where usually they're almost invisible. Maybe they're weather-sensitive, and I only need to glance down to know that a storm is coming? That'd be cool...

*Not because it's euphonious, no. Nor useful.