As soon as the weather clears a little. What happened to August? And September?

• Two and a half years after we bought this land  and  building a house on  it (in exchange for our share of “Cruz Blanca”, the farmhouse in the mountains that was our home for the past twenty years, plus some more) – the title deed was finally released by the Provincial Registry. It became “legally ours” – so have been able to start untangling the remaining issues …

• We very nearly lost Remy, the other half  the K9 division of our immediate family (two German Shepherds Champ and  sister Remy, both seven).  We had never heard of Bloat , or “Gastric Dilation – Vulvulus” until the Saturday 23d August … and then learned more about it than I’d ever care to know. A rare opportunity to know you dog inside.  Two hours emergency surgery (the duty vets, a couple of lasses, one still in her evening clothes) . Remy is fine now, though will be forever at risk if we are not careful with her feeding. She figured on her own that she’s to take a nap after her meals. Smart.

• In the midst, rearranging my work to accommodate writing full time , as a business – far from real yet, but much more realistic.

“Danzig Daughters” the novel is – work in progress, still in rough draught.
A heartening bit of good luck, I got a third place in a flash fiction contest (at the UK site, Writelink.co.uk for a dark little piece (probably reflecting my mood at he time). First place was way ahead, it did provide some welcome cheer at the moment! Thank you, Writelink & Paola.

“Seventh Aubrey” returned (can be revised, sent again); “Mother Dear” needs working on some more. Then a week ago, I thought it time to get back into the fray with writing friends in the different forums (fora? ). Writers Village U. and the L. Ridge alumni at Storycrafters. At Writers Village University a new round of the six week introduction to basics for writers is starting up, and in November of course, another bout of “writing 50 000 words in a month”, the notorious and totally mad NaNoWriMo

BYKNIGHT.COM will just have to wait a little longer. I’ve got (finally) Dreamweaver, Photoshop and other Adobe stuff and no more genuine excuses for stalling.

So Q rides again. Windmills will remain un-tilted, damsels will have to take care of their own distress’, knaves will stay unpunished for a while.
Sunshine.
Q

We watched the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in this 08-08-08 edition in Beijing – spectacular, as I’m sure you’ve all seen … we missed the start (there will be many opportunities later; this exhibition must have been canned in every medium available and i’m sure we’ll see many replays).

Then I recalled this handy reference to the antipodes, in Wikipedia – and collected this map. It appears that from here, central Argentina (31.95 South, 64.56 West *) we are exactly at the opposite side of the planet. So: digging straight down, through the core get us within a few miles of the Stadium – with some correction, our tunnel could emerge within the boundary and save us the cost of the entrance tickets – I suppose there are tickets, and that they must be pretty well sold out by now.  The hole will have to be a mere  12, 742 kilometers … ah – deep? High? Both? Across!  Not too bad.  I will start digging presently – meanwhile, enjoy The Games.

Q

*Latitude and Longitude coordinates have been slightly modified: they actually belong to an obnoxious neighbor, so if any of you have a cruise missile handy … but please advise ETA as I’d hate to miss the fireworks -  if I’m not too far down on my way  to China

I have to find a good theme: Some look great at first but the text starts drifting across columns, or picture don’t quite stay put – at least, where I thought I put them. Others … I tried one and couldn’t find my way back into this site management place: Q was locked out of Q’s Place!.

Pretty can? The Original:

Still working on this site. “Q’s Place” is a little low on an overcrowded priority list.  Mrs Q and I discuss what might go here. It’s definitely be the place to put personal things,  for friends and family as well as any that wander by and care for the kind of things we post.  writing of course, and home making as we haven’t been able to settle down yet; for oh so many reasons!

This morning though there were forty seven messages spam queue, blocked by the wonderful WordPress Akismet plugin.  Wonderful software,  that!. But the topmost was nasty – a few hundred lines of filth. So long that it wasn’t practical to search back for any genuine messages.

So if I haven’t acknowledged a genuine post: my apologies. Please post again. I know I should check in more often and look at comments held by Akismet before the list gets too long … of course it wouldn’t have done anything about the garrulous pornographer of that long, long comment.

Of course, one can just let the sewage through and then collect from Adsense? I doubt it, the good people at Google must be wise to that one, ages ago. Whatever,  it’s sad to see so many twerps and nitwits using up bandwidth like this. Nitwits and twerps is too mild for those sad sacks that make a living promoting the junk.

Until the next one, soon I hope. Pictures of where we used to live.

Where we are now – which is also where we hope to move out from.

And some grandchildren pictures, and great pictures of great grandchildren as well.

Meanwhile …

Please don’t open the can !

Q

Three weeks now, about 200 hours: The cost of bad computer setup, even a small home unit like this one. It’s a Hewlett Packard/Compaq Mini-Tower 2200 with twin Intel processors and 300 GB: (not very small at all). With Windows XP Pro Sp2 installed from factory in Mexico – so it’s in Spanish which can be a nuisance for other reasons – I ordered and paid for MS Office (also in Spanish) which turned out to be a pirated version: The vendors, in Cordoba City, went out of business. It tanked along a couple of years but began to get slow and unpredictable. The bad Office went out and I repalced it with a legitimate one, on Office 97 I had from a previous machine. During the 2007 NaNoWriMo writers marathon it began to get really unstable, specially the Office installation: for a writer, the most basic. From Writers Village University I was clued to the alternative open source office suite:

Open Office: It is a wonder we use Microsoft.  Getting used to it can take a while, the Ways of Word are very ingrained. Open Office has a huge number of extra features and I see no reason for not making it the default suite here, but I’m not yet confident enough to use it for submissions on-line, where the finished product will probably be opened with Microsoft Word. Whatever, discovering Open Office has been the first big step forward.

Yesterday and the day before I may have found the second:  Ubuntu:

Quite amazing! It is the most friendly version of Linux / Unix I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying. The download took six hours! (about 630 megabytes) and this server actually managed to keep the connection live during all that time. I’ve been able to make a clean, error free, CD and It loads just fine. So now, as soon as I get on far enough with my writing commitments, I’ll see about installing it as the main Operating System on this computer.

But first:

• Get back to MFA and WVU. There I’ve left good friends and fine writers without contributing anything to that most excellent and brave course. Grumps, Susan, Raven, Joni and company…
• Maybe I’ll get back to the “Tales of Chestamovarado” and try and present some of it there.
• Jean Lauzier – The Book Tour will be in June. I Will have finished the next project by then (tentative working title “Plot Thickeners” but I see that is taken by another tutoring book, so will have to think of something else: A writer’s guide and cook book combined.

Tomorrow is crucial in this matter of the “property scam” we have fallen into (actually blundering into other peoples blunders is more like it). It seems we have good legal grounds to stave off the Golf owners claim that we should pay a 100% increase in the condo tax as well as their claim on supposed back payments, which are usury (in excess of three grand if they get their way, which of course is out of the question). But whatever the costs, we must avoid lawsuits (which in Argentina are another perpetual scam as neither judges or lawyers have any interest in the actual law). We will of course, be moving again. The only part of my own design that survived, the wood stove heated ‘loft’ is extremely comfortable, easy and economical to heat, so we’d aim at staying until this winter is over, at least.

Q