(no subject)

Hmm. Haven't updated my word count for a few days, in part because I had other things to talk about. Wednesday about 550 words on the dolphin shapeshifter and a couple of hundred on the Ipswich story, Thursday about 210 on the shapeshifter (partly because I was out much of the afternoon taking Other Half to the airport), and about 1000 words yesterday, in spite of spending the afternoon printing off part of a government manual I am going to read in pursuit of a career change.

As mentioned, I'm here on my own, with car, and will be for the next couple of weeks, which means I'm inclined to wander about and see people within easy driving distance. However, the last two times Other Half went off on a business trip I promptly got sick enough to reduce my driving range to somewhere between "none" and "San Jose as long as it's somewhere I've been before" (i.e. David's house). I hope not to repeat this experience, but am not making plans to go as far as San Francisco or Berkely.

I'm printing off that government manual because I really, really cannot bear reading anything at length on screen. I tried. I failed. If I print out the entire thing it will probably cost me at least $50 in paper, toner and binders, and probably double that, but I don't care. So I was pleased to find an essay by Eric Flint about this in his Letters from the Librarian section at the Baen Free Library:
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver10.htm
Some of the things he talks about there are ones that I heartily agree with. As I've mentioned to a couple of people, I will start reading ebooks routinely when the reader device works like a book. The pages will be made of epaper, but it will have pages, bound together into something that looks and handles like a paper book. It's not because I'm an old fogy. It's because the packaging *does* matter, and for exactly the reason Eric gives - reading off a block of physical pages is easier than reading from a scrolling screren, at least for me.

(no subject)

1600 words on the shapeshifter, and around 600 words on the Ipswich story, so pleased with today's progress.

Time for a tomato update. Fruit on four of the plants started colouring up last weekend, although the Yellow Pear and Brandywine are still showing no signs of doing so (though the Brandywine is in practice at least two weeks behind the others anyway because of the blight it suffered early on).

I had a fruit from the Red Grape earlier in the week, although it wasn't truly ripe and had just been knocked off by accident. I picked the first ripe one today to try, although it was probably still a little underripe. Sweetish, some tomato flavour, still a little bland. It was one of the smaller fruits, and only weighed 2g. Really quite tiny, and definitely more suited to salad or snacking than using in a sandwich. The plant is covered in fruit and has shot up -- it's now around six feet tall and becoming a nuisance, because it's well outgrown its support.

The Green Zebra is ripening nicely, but it's rather difficult to tell when the fruit is ripe, because it's, well, *green*. I can't remember whether it just goes yellow with green stripes when fully ripe, or whether it has red pigments as well, so the ripest looking one just gets prodded every couple of days. (Rummage - yellow-gold with green stripes, it seems.)

The Purple Cherokee is purpling up on the Giant Mutant Compound Fruit that resulted from its habit of fusing several flowers on a truss together -- there are about six or seven fruits fused into a ring, and they're colouring one at a time, working around the ring. I'm going to have to take a photo of this thing when I finally harvest it. It too has escaped the confines of its supprt cage, although it's not as enthusiastic as the Red Grape.

And the patio dwarf one is doing something, although as I have no idea what colour it's supposed to be, I don't know how far it is from being ripe.

I also have a couple of self-sown plants from last year's experiment with the species tomato. They're far behind the others, of course, but it's interesting how many seedlings did turn up around the trough. It's obviously pretty hardy as tomatos go, and as it's a very pretty plant I want to get these ones to the stage of one ripe truss just so that I have seed for next year.

The basil is doing nicely and I've been cutting it for kitchen use for some time now, so sometime next week I will be having my first pasta lunch with tomatoes and basil picked from the garden while the pasta is cooking. :-) I have by no means saved money by growing my own--by the time you add it all up, it would be much cheaper to buy from the shop. But nothing beats a tomato straight from the plant, and they certainly brighten up the patio.