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The sharks would have their hands around her

  • Jun. 19th, 2012 at 5:15 PM
Castle
Here's today's progress on my 19th century D.C. spy caper about a powerful Difference Engine that will end the Civil War - now with warhawk conspiracies, clockwork assassins, two presidents with more in common than they know, three disgraced spies with less in common than they think, and a Bonus! not-at-all mad scientist who can save the world if someone will just give him a chance:

    Project: Fiddlehead
    Deadline: September 15, 2012
    New words written: 3297 (not bad)
    Present total word count: 13,645 words





    Things accomplished in fiction: Wrapped up Chapter Two, started Chapter Three. Brought back Belle Boyd, by popular request. She's getting another weird assignment [see Clementine] and this one's a doozy...

    Things accomplished in real life: Email chat with agent; phone call with Mom; a little bit of business online; staked up and tidied up half a dozen "volunteer" tomato plants that have somehow survived despite my wholesale neglect of the garden since we moved here; printed out/sorted out all my stuff for ConTemporal travel come Thursday; took a scrub brush to the un-restored mantle tiles in advance of a hypothetical restoration job; ordered some curtains for the guest room; filled in some minor drywall holes with vinyl/plaster sealant and did touch-up painting; and that's about it.

Comments

( 4 comments — Leave a comment )
sillylilly_bird
Jun. 19th, 2012 10:25 pm (UTC)
those tiles are GORGEOUS!!!!!!!!!!
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cmpriest
Jun. 19th, 2012 11:32 pm (UTC)
Agreed! They're also almost impossible to match - and we're missing half a dozen of them. I found a batch in an architectural salvage store over the weekend, and they're very, very close ... probably as close as I'll get, but with a little strategic arrangement, I might be able to make it work. It turns out that builders often did these tiles by the batch, drat it all.

Ah, the joys of a hundred year old house ...
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mtfay
Jun. 19th, 2012 11:30 pm (UTC)
A tiny bit of unsought for advice regarding those volunteer tomatoes - trim them back to only the main runner - otherwise you'll potentially have tomato plants that cover 6' of ground each and spread beyond any efforts to control them....and then you wind up with dozens more volunteers...
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cmpriest
Jun. 19th, 2012 11:36 pm (UTC)
Oh, we were well beyond six feet in any direction by the time I found them. They'd been growing alongside the house, out back. On the one hand, yay - free tomatoes! On the other hand, HOLY SHIT they will TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

So I trimmed back the biggest octo-tomato vine down to the main couple of arms, pruned off everything that wasn't about to blossom on the spot, and propped it up over a couple of days - using increasingly bigger stakes and cages.

Now it covers two cages and four spikes, but it's mostly upright and about a quarter of its original size.

There's one other tomato I caught a little quicker. It's confined to one cage, and is doing quite well without having erupted into a small tomato-laden jungle.

*sigh*

There are at least 8-10 sproutlings creeping around the area-which-was-formerly-a-garden ... I have a Master Gardener Friend coming in a few weeks; between us, we'll decide what to save and what can go, I guess.

Wow. Long comment.
About tomatoes.
Anyway...
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( 4 comments — Leave a comment )