Well I’ve finally turned the central heating on.*  It’s down in the low 40s** out there, & it was fifty freaking three in my bedroom***, & I’m a middle-class first-world little old lady, & 53 degrees† F is too cold for the room I get dressed in.††  It had slowly sunk down to 65/18 in here, the room with the Aga in it, & 65 despite Aga enhancement is usually when I say, okay, central heating. 

So now I get to listen to the plumbing thudding & growling—if you put your hand on the wall in the downstairs loo you can feel it thudding & growling—which if you’re a fantasy reader/writer it’s very difficult not to translate††† into trolls with hammers about to break into this reality & cause trollish mayhem & consternation.  Sometimes I wish I were an accountant.‡  Where the only things that are really real are orderly numbers in columns.‡‡

It is a little warmer in here though. 

But mostly I’ve spent this week making applesauce.‡‡‡  One of my neighbours has a garden tardis, as opposed to the better-known London police box kind ɸ, & for several weeks every autumn there is a Large Box on the low wall in front of their house full of beat-up green apples with a sign on it saying PLEASE HELP YOURSELF.  Any of you out there who know Bramleys know that the trees usually are overachievers but this is ridiculous.  It’s a large box, & as the word gets round, you see people arriving with enormous bags . . . & the apples still keep coming.  I know how large that garden is, or isn’t, in real land area, & even Bramleys have their limits, so the owners must have done Dr Who a favour ɸɸ  at some point, & having ascertained that they like applesauce. . . . It’s down the hill from us but we walk past nearly every day on our way to say hello to Kinsukey ɸɸɸ.  We’ve had a lot of apples.  We might have had more except for the muscle-scorching effort to stop Genghis eating all of them Ω.  After I’ve loaded up my pockets we bound home, with him trying to get his nose into a pocket & me trying to prevent him . . . sigh.  As I say at least 1,000,000 times a day, it’s a good thing he’s cute.

I don’t know how they produce the Bramleys you see in stores, which are a lot greener & less knobbly than the ones people grow in their gardens & look surprisingly like, you know, apples, instead of green meteorites of uncertain provenance. ΩΩ   But it’s a sort of meditative thing, an epic-ly big bowl of home-grown Bramleys, a peeler & a paring knife, & hours go by ΩΩΩ.  But the resulting applesauce is divine.※

  * * *

* SO EXCITING!!!!  This is what this blog is for, of course.  To tell its readers things of such FABULOUS FERMENT & SENSATION that their hearts will beat faster than running after a GWHP would cause.  Irresistible excitement, furthermore, that you won’t find anywhere else.^

^ Which is true, after all.  You aren’t going to read that Robin McKinley turned her central heating on anywhere else. 

** That’s sort of 4-7 in the new money.  I’m a Fahrenheit girl.  I can do 61 =16 & 50 = 10 in my head.  Anything else, I have to look it up.

*** 11.  Maybe all of you reading this are fluent in temperature numbers, & I’m just wasting blog space^ giving you translations.  HOWEVER I DOUBT IT.  You’re all fantasy readers, right?  There will be some crossover with people who can do long division & even algebra^^ but I’m willing to bet there are a lot of you who would rather be honeyed up & laid over an ant hill than do long division.^^^

^ call that GETTING THE WORD COUNT UP any way possible.  I’m trying to do this blog thing again twice a week, ugh, oops, maybe, & I have delusions of say, three times in a good week, a really good week, & I’m rather strickenly aware there’s only so many times I can use Genghis, who is absolutely my best subject.+

+ Also:  AWWWWWWWWW.  Because I am not the not the brightest bear in the wood,# it took me a day or so to realise that part of what the encounter with the dire wolf was about was Genghis protecting me.  Yes, he was yanking me around so we stayed facing the Evil Thing, but he was also emphatically staying between me & it.  All I was aware of at the time was that my shoulders and hands were starting to hurt, & the adrenaline was blanking out all of my brain except the part that let me shout expletives.  But as I said in the last post, he’s so good natured.  As well as a total goof.  He still spends a lot of time on his back, tummy up, wagging his tail like mad & gnawing—gently—on my forearms.## When he’s belly down like a sensible dog, he’s probably trying to crawl into my lap.  I’ve got pretty good at typing over a dog.  It’s hard to adjust to the Great Fierce Chivalrous Genghis.

# “Those who are clever, who have a Brain, never understand anything.”
—Winnie the Pooh

## Which means I spend most of my life with blue-&-purple polka-dotted hands & forearms.  Have I told you this before?  It’s a permanent grumble.  Little old lady skin is a—well, a nudnick, if one is allowed to say that about parts of one’s body.  It is a NUISANCE.  It makes tissue paper look like chain mail.  & I don’t get any less clumsy with age=, never mind the GWHP with teeth.  So I’m dotted not only with pinhead bruises, but with freaking plasters.==  I look like I’m probably contagious.  The keeping people at a distance aspect would be fine, so long as they don’t report me to Disease Control.

= I CUT MYSELF ON A DOG FOOD TIN TODAY.  I only open dog food tins two or three times a day.  Every day.  

== Including a new one for the DOG FOOD TIN CUT.  Which bled like mad, of course. 

^^ ::shivers violently::, which is very unfair to the junior-high teacher who shovelled me through Algebra I to a ‘B’ grade.  I think I’ve told you this story?  Never mind if you’ve forgotten, I’m sure to tell it again.  If I’d ever got round to being president+ I’d’ve fished her out of retirement & given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

+ I’D BE BETTER AT IT THAN SOME PEOPLE

^^^ That would be me, of course.  I can do long division+ but on those occasions I find myself forced to do so, I break out in a rash similar to being chewed on by ants. 

+ I mean without recourse to technology beyond paper, pencil, & screaming

† I have to venture into the diabolical Microdingdongsoft insert tab to get a degree sign, & life is too short.

†† Particularly because as soon as I turn the electric fire on, Genghis lies down in front of it.  GWHPs are very large & absorbent when they’re lying in front of an electric fire.

††† Speaking of translations, & also of fantasy.^

^ Some day I’m going to do some snarling about fantasy being as real as so-called consensual+ reality.  But not today.

+ Define consensual.#

# Nope.  Wrong.  Try again.

‡ Although that probably wouldn’t work either.  I know of at least one accountant who reads McKinley.^  I have no idea what he & his colleagues chat about at the 21st-century water cooler equivalent.  Maybe not trolls?

^ &, for example, Diana Wynne Jones# & Octavia Butler ## & A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE, BUT THIS BLOG POST MIGHT EXPLODE IF I LISTED THEM ALL

# all the best people read DWJ

## all the best people read Octavia Butler too, but you might want to read your campervan’s instruction manual or something between Jones & Butler, or your head might explode

‡‡ NOOOOOOOOOOO . . . I’ll take the trolls, thanks.

‡‡‡ No fear I’m turning into a domestic goddess.  HA HA HA HA HA HA.  I just like applesauce.

ɸ There’s a pun here about ‘common or garden variety’ but I’m not grasping it.  I probably need more applesauce.

ɸɸ Or a whack up longside the head, depending on your attitude to hard sour lumpy green apples

ɸɸɸ No, I haven’t found another garage yet.  Every time I think about it I go into a kind of Coma of Terror & have to go lie down on a GWHP & read a murder mystery to recover.

Ω In the first place, I have an all-points verboten about him scavenging anyway, which is one of the reasons walking him is such a nightmare, but you don’t have to clean up the kitchen floor^ or get up in the middle of the night^^ to take an abdominally bursting dog outdoors very often to start getting a little pathological about what he eats.  & he doesn’t differentiate.  There’s no way I’m going to put over the concept of ‘apples okay—green & black slimy stinking rotting corpses NOT okay’, aside from the further fact about Genghis & ingestibles, which is that he eats until whatever it is isn’t there any more.  I’ve already told you it’s a BIG BOX, & the wall is plenty low enough for Genghis to get at it, except I have him in the kind of stranglehold that makes little old ladies^^^ who have never walked a dog in their lives, or at least nothing bigger than a Yorkie, tsk at me. 

^ the old Victorian plank floor with CRACKS in it, right?  Where noxious substances can SLITHER & OOZE?

^^ I’ve told you my sleep patterns are a trifle deranged.  Let’s say the middle of the time stretch I would like to be asleep during.

^^^ Littler.  Older.

ΩΩ I think Dr Who might have granted the greener less knobbly kind.  So maybe it was a whack up longside the head, & my neighbours put all the apples in the box out front while wishing they hadn’t said that about his hairstyle or his messianic complex^.

^ I stopped watching several doctors ago.  I keep meaning to try the one with the woman.

ΩΩΩ & the alertly sitting dog is trying to convince me that he’s dying of hunger, specifically apple hunger.  He likes Bramleys!  Green & sour is fine with him!^

^ I actually like green & sour myself, but occasionally for variety I put a few dates in the applesauce, since I’m a sugar-free zone.

※ I put a—decorated—note through their door saying thank you about a fortnight ago.  Apples are fun to draw & I have all these coloured fibre-tip pens . . .