@shirokuro, I'm working on a Faye novella, because it's a small story, but it's one I never told. Faye and Joe got married between Books 5 and 6, so I'm writing a novella that fills in that gap.
I'm calling it [i]Something Old[/i], because that seems right for two archaeologists getting married.
Thank you, @shirokuro !
@wtg, I went out to look at my seedlings, and something has been rooting around out there. 
And it's brassy enough to do it in the broad daylight. There was an uprooted okra seedling that hadn't even wilted yet. I put it back in the ground, but sigh.
There are still some things bravely hanging in there. I planted a ton of onions, green onions, and chives, because they're supposed to repel animal pests. If they'll just come up and start being smelly, maybe the other things will have a chance!
The best-looking part of the bed is in the heaviest shade. The arugula have come up in full force, and I guess they're smelly enough to scare the critters away, but they need at least some sun. I'll be shocked if they produce much. I keep telling myself, "It's all an experiment."
Oh, and yes, the house is Victorian. The only question is when in Victoria's reign it was built and whether it was all built at the same time. The front door is off-center, as if about half the house is an addition that isn't quite the same size as the original house. We are pretty sure it was built without electricity, water, gas, or a sewer connection. Some of that history is visible. There's a huge fireplace in the basement where we think the servants cooked, and there are flues for potbelly stoves that make us think they also lived down there. The house itself would have been heated by fireplaces in the four chimneys on all floors. There's an added room that's just out-of-frame in the pic above of the front of the house, and I feel sure it was built when they got indoor bathrooms. We're told that somebody ran a boarding house here at some point, and there are five rooms on the top floor that are finished, but not luxuriously, that are probably where the boarders lived. I guess with all that history, it should feel haunted, but it really doesn't. It's very bright and sunny and has good vibes.
Awwwww, Cosmo looks so sweet! Loki, Muffin/Amanda, and Rogue say hey!
Quirt does securities law, so he's working with people who want to get their businesses listed on the stock market. On the whole, they are very anxious for him to do things yesterday, and they wish he weren't so persnickety about following all the rules and regulations. However, it's very challenging and interesting work for him, and I'm glad as a person who owns stocks that he's on the job, keeping the people who issue it on the straight and narrow.
I think I'll leave the thumbnails for now. Every time I start to post pictures, I fall down into a rabbithole of user error. lol
wtg, I haven't done any serious gardening, because there are a lot of deer in the neighborhood (plus voles, squirrels, bunnies, and there have been bears seen elsewhere in town) and I'm afraid of investing a lot of time and effort, only to get my heart broken. Also, we have a lot of shade.
So I've been getting my gardening yayas out with my indoor hydroponic gardens. Right now, I've growing tomatoes, eggplants, jalapeños, cucumbers, and lettuce in quantities large enough to use (now and then), and I'm experimenting with collards, mustard greens, banana peppers, snow peas, fenugreek, and squash.
However, I noticed that one flower bed, which had nothing planted in it, gets more sun than I thought, so I threw a few seeds out there to see what happens. We had a very cool spring, so I'm only now seeing seedlings, and I really don't know whether anything will survive the shade and animals. But seeds are cheap! It's a big experiment. I've got a few plants each of okra, trombocino squash, carrots, garlic chives, lettuce, and peas, and I've got quite a number of tiny seedlings of arugula, mustards, and swiss chard. And one potato plant. If they continue to survive, I'll post pics of my experiment in gardening in the north under pressure from predators.
I took that last photo standing in the double pocket door between the living room and dining room. (The pocket door still works great after all these years.) Then I turned around and took this one.
Front of house
Back of house
At some point, I'll take some pics of the kitchen that was a big focus of the renovation. None of the pictures really capture the thing. The tall ceilings, slate mantels, porcelain doorknobs, etc. just don't photograph well, or I don't have the skill. I'm working on a new Faye story, so I reread the old ones and was struck that the house I created for her in 2002 had plaster ceiling medallions, faux painted mantels, double door topped with a palladian window, plaster walls, moldings...I gave all those things to Faye, and now I live with them. It's kinda cool.
View from the kitchen sink.
Piano at Christmas. We have some art up in that part of the room now. Same as entry hall--paint, plaster, electrical, plus window treatments chosen so we can enjoy the outdoors and have privacy from the street.
Also, we now have a better-looking chair. 
Gratuitious Phil picture.
Wow, 68 pounds! That's great, Mik!
You are correct about the corner cutting. Also, our contractor is approaching retirement and his nephew-successor couldn't be bothered to be onsite, so their subcontractors also cut corners. And stole things. And damaged the irreplaceable fir floors and stair treads.
Also, the movers stashed our stuff in a warehouse for three weeks, lost some of it, damaged the irreplaceable fir floors and stair treads, and damaged the piano (not the playing parts but the case).
Also also, GE has had to replace two of our appliances (never buy from them, truly), but it took months of dealing with their incompetent service contractor for this to come to pass.
Since Quirt works the above-mentioned 24/7, I had to run point on a lot of this. Hence the fact that I won't have a novel out this year. It's a good thing we love the house, which is a sturdy beast that will stand long after we're gone and has shrugged off these indignities, and the town. It was listed as being built in 1886, but we've since learned that it was built at least as early as 1869, and some parts of it may be older. You should see the size of the beams in the basement. Trees like that barely even exist any more.
Nope. I've tried and I can't figure out how to post the forum thumbnail. If somebody can tell me how, I'll post a few more.
Here's a test photo. If it works, this is what you see when you come in the door. We are in mid-restoration of the kitchen door at the back, hence the blue tape. Quirt is working too hard to focus on buying some art, hence the blank walls. But there's a lovely stained glass light fixture overhead, just out of frame, the plaster has been redone, the electrical work has been brought up to modern standards, the plaster nd original woodwork has been painted, and the fir floors (a century-plus years old, but not original) have been refinished. One day, it will be finished....
postimg.cc/xJkw7nXf][img]https://i.postimg.cc/xJkw7nXf/IMG-0040.jpg
We decided there was room on the first floor for the big piano, after all, so I was able to keep it instead of trading it for something smaller.
I am trying to upload some photos to share, but I can't for the life of me figure out why PostImage can only see my whole Photos album and not the House subalbum.
Hay, Mik! The house is, in theory, finished. We are still sweeping up after stupid contractor tricks, but that may be an ongoing situation. (Why didn't they insulate under the kitchen floor? Why does the insulation the kitchen wall stop a foot above the floor, causing the water line to the dishwasher to freeze up? We will never know, and we have washed our hands of them. We've got somebody who will fix these things properly.) Overall, though, it's lovely and it's comfortable to live in. We love it, and we really love being in a town where we can walk to groceries, the bank, the dry cleaner, restaurants, the playhouse, the jazz club, yadda yadda yadda.
Quirt is ridiculously busy with work. It really is 24/7 for him, whereas I'm going to be able to smear my retirement over the rest of my life. He will probably have to work full-out until he turns it off like a switch. I stopped teaching a year ago this month, although I'm doing some freelance online classes now and then. I've got four book projects in various stages of completion--final editing, drafting, proposal, proposal--but I'm in control of my schedule, so I spend a lot of time traveling to friends and family or having them come here. It's all good!
How are you?
I'm only using it for one thing, but I'm thrilled. I've been taking sumatriptan for migraines since 1990, about the time it became available in pill form. It was very expensive. Back then, my insurance mostly defrayed that. It stopped debilitating headaches.
Great! "One day, it will be generic," I thought.
For the next seventeen or so years, multiple doctors tried to switch me to newer drugs that weren't much different, just time-released or fast-dissolving. This would have extended the time to a generic version. Indefinitely, if I kept saying yes. "No, thank you. This one works."
At some point, I received a letter from my insurance company that said, "No matter what your doctor says, we will only cover eight pills a month." I've never received a letter about that about any other drug. It must have been REALLY expensive for them to cover it.
The generic date came. The price didn't go down, because the drug company sued. I had gone on COBRA after my divorce and it didn't cover prescriptions, so I was paying $200/month for those eight pills, but they prevented days of debilitating pain, so I forked it over. When they lost the suit, the price went down to generic levels, but I still only got eight pills a month and they'd gotten years of my money at the non-generic rate. I had became very skilled at deciding how bad I needed to feel before I took one of the precious jewels. (Also, I'd gotten prescription insurance again.)
We got new insurance last year, and suddenly I could only get 50 mg tablets for the generic price. My usual 100 mg tablets went up to $80/month. I could still only get eight. Tony said, "Have you tried Mark Cuban's outfit?"
Well, Mark Cuban sells me 30 pills/month, and they cost $12, including shipping. Just being free of worrying whether I'm going to run out is life-changing.
It feels like it was designed and decorated by ChatGPT.
This fog study is really interesting! When I was working for the environmental firm, which has been quite some time now, bioremediation of soil and water was fairly new, at least at a commercially implementable level. Finding out that microbes in air can do this, too, is exciting.
Bioremediation firms at the time were using the fact that microbes in polluted soil and water evolve to consume the contaminants. (Sometimes the breakdown products, both from the microbes and from natural decomposition of the compounds, are worse than the original contaminants. Like all things in nature, it's complicated.)
I never actually worked with a bioremediation contractor, because traditional methods like air strippers and removal/incineration were working at our sites but there were several approaches to getting the contaminant-eating microbes to do your work for you. You could make more of them by improving their conditions, such as injecting oxygen or nutrients. You could cultivate beneficial microbes and add them to the contaminated area. You could do those things in situ or you could remove the soil and do them elsewhere.
Anyway, I imagine that this is going to spur new technologies that use similar approaches to clean our air, which seems like a good thing to me. I wonder if any of the newly discovered airborne consume carbon dioxide? That would be awesome.
That has always been the way I imagined it worked, Bernard. However, as I understand the experiment, the listeners were evaluating the tones of single notes, so our legato/blending theory doesn't apply.
Those with more knowledge of a piano's inner workings (Ron?) can probably speak on this, but SK's thought that the pianist might be imparting some kind of vibration to the hammer before it leaves their control makes sense to me.
You're not spamming, sk. I'm curious about this, too.
The reason I don't get how it works is that my understanding of the physics of a piano is that the motion of the hammer is out of the pianist's control at the time it hits the string. We can control the speed with which it hits the strings, making the sound louder or softer--hence the name "pianoforte"--but nothing else.
I've read that some think that the quality that we perceive as a more musical tone or varying "touch" is a function of how a pianist plays in a legato or staccato style. In other words, it comes from whether there is a separation between the notes or not or whether there is some overlap between the notes in terms of time. But this is not what the experiment tested.
However, since the experimenters were interested in human perception and not physics, their work didn't address the physical means of sound production. (I haven't read the more detailed material that you and Ax posted, but the summary that I posted suggested that it wasn't addressed.)
I have some questions about the methodology here. Also, I don't know how this could possibly work, based on what I know about how a piano works. Nevertheless, I do hear differences in people's playing that seem to be a result of their "touch," however that's defined.
New mapping reveals that a musician can cange the color of a piano's sound through pure technique: https://www.ecoportal.net/en/scientists-prove-pianist-touch-effect/22234/
I saw it, and it made me so sad. It prompted me to get out of my rut and come back here.
