Best Made Plans

Have you ever made plans that just didn’t live up to your expectations? Even vacations have bumps when things don’t go your way. Our last vacation ...

In Florida, every time I lay down, my sinuses immediately plugged up and I was soon mouth breathing. My cpap mask only covers my nose, so it was no help.

John had signed up to march in Disney’s StarWars weekend parades. He was up at 6 AM that first Friday in severe pain and unable to bend one knee. I took him to ‘urgent care’... which didn’t open until 8. He had to scoot in and out of the back, with the leg stretched along the seat. It was gout; they prescribed steroids and ice packs. (He did get to march the next day, and for the rest of the parades while we were there.)

To see the parade, I had to be at the gate by 7:30 (one never knew what time they were going to let people in), rush to one of the (2) benches along the parade route and park myself. The parade happened at 11. The humid heat did nothing for my stuffy sinuses.

I got a page written for my ‘Mac’ serial, but Open Office kept crashing and finally refused to open my ‘Mac’ file again. Unable to think, having no OO specialist to consult, I gave up. John, however, got his 2nd novel rewritten (2nd draft).

I finally let John take me to ‘urgent care’, and I waited 3 hours to see a doc. Then the pharmacy didn’t have the medicine! Augmentin was on back-order? The doc changed the prescription. To sulfur pills. My brother has to take sulfur pills. They work, but not quickly. Another week before I started feeling almost decent.

Friends spent weekends with us. On the last parade day, as everyone was getting ready, the wife fell and struck her head. The husband took her to urgent care, so John went alone to do the parade. Long story short, it was much more than a bump on the head; she ended up in the hospital for 2 nights before they could go home.

Wednesday, I started home, stopping to call my mother-in-law to say I was on my way. She had been taken to the hospital that morning. Frantic phone calls and text messages dogged me all the way home.

Thursday, the radio talked about severe rain and some flooding ‘in Missouri and along the Mississippi.’ I was in Illinois, about to turn west to St Louis. I called my son and asked him to research this, in case I needed to continue north and go through Des Moines. He said it was located south of I70 (the road I would travel).

East St Louis, Friday morning, heavy rain. Happily, the worst was over by the time I left St Louis. But EVERY river and creek I crossed was definitely over its banks! Like I wasn’t nervous enough.

NOT a good vacation. It wasn’t a bump, it was a series of steep cliffs the entire time. I suppose there’s bound to be a bad one every so often, right? But I haven’t given up; we plan to head for Washington (state) and an Alaska cruise in August. Hmm. Maybe it’s good we got this ‘bad luck’ over during this vacation.

What If?

Last weekend, I attended Demicon, a science fiction convention held in Des Moines, IA. While there, I gave 5 panels and 1 reading. So far, readings have not brought me loads of fans, but I don’t think I’ve ever given a reading where nobody has shown up, so those who do come get a taste of my writing style.

The panels were better attended. As I explained to the audiences as each panel broke up, I generally like to introduce a subject, and let the ‘talk’ turn into a discussion. In that case, the audience members might participate as much - or more! - than I do, although I will attempt to guide the conversation from time to time. I really like that formula, because being an introvert, I tend to sit at my computer for long periods of time, and that can lead to thinking in a circle... no new ideas. But when I get other people lending their thoughts and knowledge to a conversation, I wind up with a whole batch of new (to me) ‘what if’s to ponder.

One of these discussions was on planet building. This subject is not just for science fiction; I have one fantasy universe set on a world with 3 moons. But we tended to compare our ideas to situations we’ve heard about within our own solar system, and when the talk moved to dwarf planets, I mentioned that one of the dwarves living out beyond Pluto is not spherical, as the definition states, because it spins so fast, it has flattened itself. That brought up the question, what if you had an actual planet, roughly the mass of Earth, but also spinning so fast that it is flattened quite a bit. Would the gravity be different at the equator than the poles? What an interesting idea! Of course, nobody had an answer for that.

The side subject of moons - If you don’t have a relatively large moon, you probably won’t have tides in your oceans - brought the question, if your planet had rings like Saturn, would they exert enough gravimetric pull to effect your tides? Another stumper! If I had been giving out prizes...

These particular questions both came from James C Hines, who poked his head in the door half-way through this panel. I invited him to join us, without realizing who he was. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to the face until the talk was breaking up. Thank you, James. I now have specific questions to pose to my brother-in-law, the astrophysicist.

Every sf writer should have access to an astrophysicist.