We’re having one of those Irish Weather mornings: by this I mean, you wait five minutes and the weather does something else. This morning has been unusually varied even by local standards. Got up to feed the kittens (who were conducting a series of Kitten Crash Tests on the bed, using me and Peter as crash barriers), and it was cloudy out, a little breezy, nothing unusual. By the time they and Mr. Squeak and Goodman were fed, the sun was out. Fifteen minutes later, a series of light showers started to walk through the area. Within half an hour, it hailed, hard. Now it looks like it’s clearing again…for the moment.
But the fishpond is full of leaves again. (sigh) Across from our front yard, in the Demesne (that’s the huge tract of land owned by the local Rich Guy), in a curve parallelling the wall between the Demesne and the road, are five beautiful beech trees, each at least sixty or seventy feet tall. They are shapely, gorgeous things…and this time of year, as their leaves go brown or golden, I have to put screen over the fishpond, because every morning, the surface of the water is covered by those lovely golden-brown leaves, which rapidly rot and turn the water into something very like tea. Not good for the fish. The problem at the moment is that we haven’t yet had time to make a screen-frame for the new pond, and the old screening won’t fit it (this one is an irregularly shaped shell: the old pond was rectangular, built out of cinderblocks with a liner inside). Yesterday I spent about half an hour netting the last couple of days’ leaves out of the pond; but after that last hail shower this morning, there’s suddenly what would normally have been about a week’s worth of leaves in there. One more thing to deal with, besides:
- The laundry.
- Tidying the kitchen, which as usual after we come back from a trip has turned into a morass of Stuff That Hasn’t Made It Upstairs Yet.
- Getting together the trip receipts and boarding passes and ticket stubs and so forth, so that (among other things) I can go online and claim the “flight legs” that haven’t yet shown up on my Continental OnePass account. (Today’s vexed question in this regard: I was ticketed to fly back to Europe on KLM, one of Continental’s partners. But the KLM Toronto-Amsterdam flight was canceled due to bad weather, and I got flown home on Air France instead, to Paris. So do I still get my miles? Boy, I hope so, or I’m not gonna make Elite status this year.)
- Doing some work on the outline for Wizard’s Holiday.
- Doing some work on The Empty Chair, the final Rihannsu book.
- Calling the people up in Dublin about getting the satellite broadband installed.
- Calling John the Vet to find out the generic name of the antibiotic he’s trying to get for the cats, since both of the kittens and Mr. Goodman seem to have eye infections of varying seriousness at the moment — infections which John is sure are all caused by a chlamydia of some kind. The cats will probably keep reinfecting one another until the infection is stomped out in all of them. John has been having trouble tracking down the specific anti-chlamydic agent that he’s looking for, and it’s possible one of the online sources either in the UK or the US will have it.
- Extending the rental on the Hertz rent-a-car for another week.
- Installing the new Roland PC-300 keyboard and the sequencing software. (And R’ing the F’ing manuals.)
- Finding out where the jeans are that I ordered from IC3D in September.
- Making an appointment to get my hair cut, since there wasn’t time to see my usual lady before I left on the tour, and the guy in the Philadelphia Marriott did his best, but it wasn’t as good a job as Nathalie does.
- And various other things…
In (I think it was) What Do You Say After You Say Hello, the adult or professional textbook in transactional analysis from which Eric Berne’s less talented disciples extracted such inferior works as I’m OK, You’re OK, Berne describes two phenomena which he christens “reachback” and “afterburn”. “Reachback” is the period before you go on a trip, during which that trip’s concerns — reservations, planning, packing, other preparation — start interfering with the conduct of your daily life. “Afterburn” is the period after a trip during which the trip’s aftereffects — physical weariness, built-up paperwork, getting unpacked and getting everything sorted back into the usual places — continue to interfere with your daily life. The point at which you’re in real trouble, Berne thinks, is when you get into a place where the reachback and the afterburn overlap.
This isn’t that, for me…yet. But the holiday season is coming. There is the growing possibility of another trip to the US in early December. And Wizard’s Holiday is due to be on Michael Stearns’ desk the week before Christmas.
Later this week, this probably won’t seem so grim, but right now, it makes me just want to go net out the fishpond. Fortunately, the sky is now blue and the sun is shining.
For the next few minutes, anyway…
