Bread Recipes

About 14,400 years ago, someone was baking pita bread in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan. Researchers made this discovery by sampling the contents of 2 stone fireplaces left at a small campsite by the Natufians, who were hunter gatherers. The charred remains suggest the Natufians gathered wild cereals and tubers to make flour for the bread. Bread was probably not a staple food, but a rare treat. Researchers were surprised to find people making bread at least 4,000 years before the dawn of agriculture.

Meanwhile, at another Natufian site 150 miles away, another team analyzed residues on 3 stone mortors and found evidence of beer being brewed from wild wheat and barley 13,000 years ago.

Beer and Bread! Life was good!

Another source says that to make the first bread, cereal grains were roasted, water added to make a 'grain paste', which was then cooked. This flatbread still has a legacy in many parts of the world. Modern descendants include Mexico's tortillas, Indian chapatti, naan and roti, Armenian lavishes, Iranian sangaks and taboons, Scottish oatcakes and North American johnnycake.

Traces of flour have been found at Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe, which means flour is over 30,000 years old. Cereals were a part of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, even though the majority of their food was animal protein and fats. Around 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic period, cereals and breads were eaten more regularly. Wheat and barley were domesticated about this time and spread from Southeast Asia to Europe, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Rice, maize, and sorghum may have been used to make bread in other parts of the world.

Eventually, leavened bread was created by taking a chunk of day-old dough and adding water and sugar to use as a 'sourdough starter', of sorts. For a lighter bread, the foam from beer was collected and added to the dough. For places that drank wine rather than beer, a mixture of grape must and flour paste worked in a similar manner.

 

https://abreadaffair.com/bakery-vancouver/history-bread-fun-facts-never-knew/#:~:text=Bread%20has%20a%20rich%20history,items%20are%20still%20made%20today

Archaeology, January-February 2019, pp 26-27, "The First Bakers"

Author Blogs

The worst part of being an indie author is that you are required to do all of your own marketing and promotion. You always wonder if you are missing something, some way of connecting to your audience. There’s lots of advice out there about having your own blog, so this week, I did some research of what other authors talk about in their blogs.

I was lucky enough to find a list of ‘well-crafted’ author blogs compiled by a well-known site for authors. So I checked out the first dozen or so.

The first thing I noticed was that all of the blogs I was connected to were over a decade old, even though these blogs got points for being ‘frequently updated’. In one or two cases, newer posts were easy to find; but in most of them, I was stuck with the post I landed on, looking for similarities, differences, anything that might tell me what made a successful author’s blog.

Two or three of them were down-right political in nature. I have my political views, of course, but I don’t like cramming my views down other people’s throats, nor do I like having other people’s views crammed down mine. I didn’t spend much time on those sites.

One blog page consisted of boxes with a headline in each box. The headlines did not make much sense to me, perhaps because I wasn’t familiar with that author’s work, and that’s what they pertained to.

One blog page was a guest blog by a friend of the author, who waxed poetic about how much better his life was, now that he had adopted just one of the attitudes suggested is the author’s non-fiction self-help book. Well, that was an interesting possibility... if I wrote non-fiction self-help books.

Several of them talked about their current Work In Progress, which was pretty much what I expected. But even now, I’m not sure how that can be done effectively, given a blog that gets a new post every week, which is the absolute minimum suggested by all the advice given to authors that I’ve seen.

Now, I don’t write 8 hours a day. I am an editor and publisher (and person) as well as an author, and so I spend 8 hours (and more) at my computer, I do not spend 8 hours a days working on my own stories. Not even 8 hours writing, re-writing and editing my own stories. But let’s look at some math:

Suppose an author writes 8,000 words a day ( that’s 1,000 words per hour, and boy, is that fast!) 5 days a week produces 40,000 words. To the best of my knowledge, a typical romance is about 80,000 words, so that’s 2 weeks of work, just for a rough draft. One romance writer complained that she had finished her rough draft, only to have her editor tell her it had problems, problems so bad that she (the author) was going to have to step back and rethink the entire story. And yet, that author still managed to include in her blog post an excerpt from that story.

I’m left wondering, does she include an excerpt with every blog post? Even if all she did was tell her audience about whatever she had written that week, she is basically telling them the story before it ever gets published.

And that’s during the rough draft stage. What does she do during the rewrites? More excerpts? Explanations of what she’s changed?

I don’t really understand, so I guess I’ll have to continue studying blogs by other authors, preferably more than one post by the same author. Do any of you know of an author whose blog you feel would be a good example for me to study?

In the meantime, I’ll return to writing about the science I’ve self-studied.

Closing 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, I’ve been looking back over my daily journals to see what I’ve been doing. Let me explain that a little. I have my daily ‘To Do’ list, where I list all the things I’d like to work on that day. And things I don’t really want to do, but need to, like take my pills and brush my teeth. Fact is, if it isn’t on my list, I probably won’t remember to do it.

At the end of the day, I transfer everything I’ve crossed off to my journal and add some comments. Depending on my mood, those comments might be brief (‘I got some stuff done today’), or they could be long and rambling, touching on all sorts of things that happened during the day and how I feel about them. It’s just a method of proving to myself what I’ve done, a way of reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and how I feel about things.

In looking back over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been writing, writing, re-writing, editing and writing. Oh, yes, and writing.

What does that mean? I’ve been working on a lot of different writing projects. I write 2 blogs and try to post those weekly. Now, that usually means research for one of them, writing and re-writing for both of them, before I can post them. About an hour a day for each blog serves the purpose for that. Maybe a little less.

I’m also trying to write some shorts in order to produce an anthology of Atlan shorts in 2020. I keep running into walls where I’m not sure exactly how the next section of the scene goes, but I give myself an hour a day to work on that. Sometimes that only produces 500 words, others I’ll get 1000 words done. I haven’t gotten to the re-writing stage on that, because I have 3 or 4 more shorts to rough draft to get the number of words I need for a book.

I’m editing John’s next book for a spring release. This is a 2nd edit, so it goes faster, since I’m mostly looking for grammar and punctuation. Hopefully, I found all the places that didn’t quite make sense in the first edit, and John fixed them. On the other hand, I’ve read this book before (during the first edit), and I tend now to start losing my focus after a time, so I only work on it an hour a day.

I’m also writing a novel (a romance). This is a straight rough draft at this point, and I usually give it an hour a day, more or less. If I don’t feel like working on that one, I have 2 other novels (a near-future sf and a paranormal detective) that I can move over and work on for a day or two.

That’s a lot of writing projects. Could I get more done if I concentrated on one? I don’t know. I seem to be able to focus for an hour or slightly more at a time, and then I’m ready to move on to the next project. By splitting up my day in such small chunks, it looks like I’ve accomplished a lot, because I can say I’ve worked on a bunch of projects. And I have ‘naturally occurring’ breaks when I can get up and do other things, like let the dog out or throw supper in the crock pot or even go outside and work on the yard. Except for letting the dog out, those things are on my to do list and can be crossed off.

I don’t know if any other writers work on so many projects at the same time. Yes, it takes time to get anything ‘done’ done. It will be a month or three before I get the romance rough draft done. It could be another week before I get this short rough draft done and can start on the next. But in a year or two, I hope to be churning out books regularly.

Wish me luck! And perseverance.

The Insidious Devil’s Claw!

I think I came across mention of this plant when I was studying the Tohono O’odham Nation of the Sonora Desert. I finally got curious enough to investigate them, mainly because of the name.

Apparently, (if I read these 2 short articles correctly), there are a number of related plants around the world that are all called Devil’s Claw, Devil’s Horn, Ram’s Horn, Elephant Tusks or Unicorn plant. There is at least one variety that grows in South Africa, and two that grow in the Sonora Desert.

All of these names come from the seed pod, which starts out green, fleshy and shaped somewhat like a small banana. Somebody must have thought that looked like a unicorn horn, so that explains that name.

The rest of the names come from the ripe seed pod, which becomes woody and develops a split starting at one end, so that it seems to form a pair of claws, a pair of horns or a pair of tusks.

One variety that grows in Sonora is annual, so once it germinates, it must form seed pods that year, or die trying. However, for both Sonora varieties, the seeds may take several years to germinate, and the perennial version does not necessarily flower every year, so that particular plant would not produce seed pods that year. The perennial version does have a large taproot, so it is less dependent on a rainy season.

There is a 3rd variety of this plant in the Sonora, but it is ‘partially domesticated’. The Tohono O’odham use Devil’s Claw seed pods in their basket weaving, and they (meaning the women) developed a strain that had larger seed pods whose seeds did not take as long to germinate.

Basket weaving was/is not the only use for these seed pods. The seeds are edible and are a source of important dietary oils and proteins. The fleshy unripe pods are also edible and can even be pickled!

When there aren’t any humans around to plant the seeds, the plants do it anyway, by ‘catching hold’ of a passing animal’s fur (such as a cow) with its claw. However long it hangs on is that much distance from the mother plant, and it’s even possible the fallen seed pod might be broken open by a hoof.

I just can’t quite get over the idea of pickled baby bananas, although there’s nothing to say that these unripe seed pods taste anything like a banana, pickled or not. Of course, when my mother decided to try pickling watermelon rinds, I thought she was nuts, but I came to like that stuff, in a weird kind of way. Wish I had her recipe.

Does anybody have a recipe for pickled unicorn horns?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proboscidea_(plant)

https://www.desertusa.com/flowers/devil-claw.html

Hallucigenia

I have started a new list of subjects to research and possibly write a blog about. I get these ideas from on-line and magazine articles that I read; sometimes I jot down the article subject, or a phrase, or just a word I’m not familiar with.

Hallucigenia is one of those last ones. If I had realized how many MORE words I would have to look up just to make sense of the wikipedia article on this extinct animal...

However, I’m trying to expand my science knowledge, so let’s get on with this.

Hallucigenia is a genus of lobopodian worms from the Cambrian period, which lasted from about 541 million years ago to 485 million years ago. The Cambrian period is known for its explosion of new creatures, as nature explored all the different variations it could think of.

Hallucigenia was discovered as articulated fossils in shale-type deposits in Canada and China, and isolated spines have been found around the world. Even so, trying to reconstruct what they looked like was difficult. In fact, the first attempt showed the creature upside down and said the front was the back.

I probably would have made the same mistakes. First of all, these creatures were only 3/16 to 1-3/8 inch long. It kind of amazes me that anybody even noticed them. To try and imagine what they looked like, start with a worm about that long. Put 7 or 8 pairs of short, flexible appendages down the length of it. Now, flip it over, and put pairs of longer, stiff appendages down the other side of it. The ‘head’ and ‘tail’ are pretty much identical. Which appendages are the legs?

The first reconstruction attempt placed the pairs of stiff appendages as the feet because half the flexible appendages were still hidden in dirt. But once the other flexible appendages were discovered, it made sense to put them on the bottom. Flexible legs are easier to use, and stiff ‘spines’ offer some protection.

And, by the way, each foot ends with a claw.

I found no information on whether these were marine or land creatures, what they ate, what might have eaten them...

Now that I’ve researched these creatures, how could I possibly use this information? I suppose I could have a bare-footed colonist step on one, and strange chemicals from the creature are introduced through the spines now buried deep in the colonist’s foot? Or maybe on another planet, these creatures got larger and became the dominant, intelligent species? That might be interesting. How would you incorporate them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucigenia

What is This World Coming to?

I firmly believe in climate change. In my mind, it is here, and it’s going to get bad.

But I’m not here to debate that with anyone. So, for the purpose of this series of blog entries, let’s say I’m trying to figure out what could happen (climate-wise) in the next 50 years, and how it will effect the people who have to live through it. Well, try to live through it.

The sea level will rise. There has been and still is a lot of water on the Earth that is not located in the seas. It’s not a liquid, it’s solid in the form of snow and ice. Glaciers, sea ice, and so on. This has all been melting at an increasing pace, and probably will continue until snow and ice become rare items.

You can already see the sea level rising, if you look; Miami FL has streets that are underwater during high tides. Miami Beach, located on a barrier island that barely qualifies as dry land, is quietly raising its streets, particularly the ones that run along the edges of the island.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was much talk of how badly the shoreline was being eroded. If I remember right, there is an oil refinery or some such that was built on the shore. Now it is pretty much an island, and the road leading to it may or may not be passable during high tides. Those tides even reach 5 or 10 miles inland, making it hard to get in or out of small towns that dot that road. The road, I understand, has been raised in a lot of places, making it even harder to navigate in those small towns.

Parts of Amsterdam in The Netherlands are 18 feet below sea level. Much of The Netherlands consists of land ‘reclaimed’ from the sea and thus below sea level. They did this by building dikes, dams and canals to control where the water could go. This will be an ever increasing chore, as the sea rises.

So I find myself wondering, what happens when the sea rise reaches that critical point, whatever it is? Will The Netherlands continue building their dikes taller, until they loom and cast an ominous shadow over the land they are intended to protect? Is that possible? Does it make more sense to raise the land they are living on? Is that possible?

At what point do people simply give in to nature and move to higher ground? Do those who are displaced get any assistance from their government, or do they have to abandon the home they’ve had for who knows how long, take what they can to some other place, and try to start over again? I suspect the latter, because the former would probably bankrupt any government.

Even if Earth’s population doesn’t grow beyond what it is now, it’s possible the concentration of that population will increase, because there could be less land for us to live on.

Well, with the next entry, we’ll continue with the water theme. Yes, there is more about water to think about.

Let me Babyl on

Mankind’s history – particularly the really ancient stuff – fascinates me. Are Atlantis, Mu and Lemuria fact or fiction? When did our ancestors start domesticating livestock, tilling fields and forming cities?

Of those questions, researching ancient cities is probably the easiest to tackle. So now and again, I pick one that I’ve heard about and look around to see what I can find about it. This time, it’s Babylon.

Babylon was established as a small city in ancient Mesopotamia around 2300 BC. It was built on the banks of the Euphrates River and eventually, these banks were made quite steep, to contain the river’s annual floods. As Babylon grew, so did its importance and influence, until the southern portion of Mesopotamia became known as Babylonia. Its location is now inside Iraq, about 53 miles south of Baghdad.

Despite efforts to contain the river, the Euphrates eventually changed its path, and the western portion of this ancient city is now under that river. It is also difficult to find any traces of the truly ancient portions of the city because; 1) the groundwater table has risen, 2: it underwent several ‘urban renewal’ plans, 3) it was pillaged a few times by invading armies, and 4) it has been mined for building materials.

It is estimated that Babylon was the largest city in the world from about 1770-1670 BC, and again from 612-320 BC. It may have been the first city to reach a population over 200,000. The area it covered may have reached a maximum of 2,200 acres, which would be about 91 people (or more) per acre. I tried to compare that to modern cities, starting with a couple I’ve lived in, but even when I went up to New York City, my math came up with a density of only 44 people per acre. So either Babylon was almost twice as packed with people as New York City, or my math is off tonight.

Babylon is probably best remembered for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, supposedly built by King Nebuchadnezzar (604-562 BC) to appease his home-sick wife, and which may or may not have actually existed, or might have been located in another city.

Well, that was kind of disappointing. Most of what I found was ruler’s names, dates of battles, and so on… the kind of stuff one gets from history classes, but which doesn’t tell you anything about the people. What kind of businesses existed in this metropolis? Where did they get their food? What were the houses like? For instance, did the houses have doorways similar to what we use now, or did one enter them through a trap-door in the roof, like the Pueblo Indians? These are the kind of questions I would like answered.

Sometimes, I use bits and pieces from this kind of research to create different habits or a different ‘society’ for my stories. I don’t get that kind of springboard from names and dates, I get it from the daily lives of normal people.

What about you? Do you have anything about Babylon or some other ancient city that you would like to know?

Failure!

Well, I’m late getting this written and posted. (Sigh.) What a bummer.

I actually tried to do some quick research on ‘tardiness’ for this thrown-together blog. Google returned lots of sites where I could get the definition, but I already know that. The few sites that weren’t for the definition were mostly about students who were habitually late, and a few were about business policies concerning tardiness. Not what I was looking for.

I was looking for clues about the reasons why people are late with projects. I thought maybe I could share some insights about why I am sometimes late getting a blog done on time. But that kind of site didn’t show up, or if it did, it was so far down on the list that I never got to it.

THIS week, I know why I’m late. Our household has become a mad-house.

Last weekend, we got another storage unit and started packing up and taking boxes of stuff that we’d been using the last several months. Any effort to maintain some semblance of a ‘daily schedule’ flew right out the window. My hubby was so worried we wouldn’t get things done that there were times when he got up at 5 am to pack. Having finally gotten our new po box number from the Florida post office, I’ve been trying to notify everybody of our immediate change of address, which made Hubby mad, because I wasn’t helping him pack and take stuff to storage. So no, I’m not done with my list of businesses and people to notify.

Today, Hubby dropped me off to drive home the rental truck. He is off at dospace for one last session on the laser printer. The moving men are supposed to arrive sometime around noon to load up the furniture and take it to storage for us. Then I can take the truck back.

Almost everything is packed. We will take the tv to storage in the morning. I have a laptop and e-reader to throw in my suitcase, and we’ll do one last load of wash tonight. (The washer and dryer are staying.) So, without him ranting about ‘never getting it all done’, I can take a break and do this blog, at least until the moving men show up. I have to be careful with what they take, because we have quite a bit of stuff that we are actually taking to Florida with us.

So, no big insights into tardiness. Only the insight that I do better when life has some semblance of a schedule. And eventually, once we get a new home and get settled, we will develop something that could possibly be called a schedule. I will be so relieved when that happens!

What’s coming next week? Hmmm. Hard to say. We are attending Icon in Iowa City this weekend, on our way to Florida, so I won’t have a lot of time for research. I keep hearing tidbits about ‘Planet 9’ - not that they’ve found it, only that it has to be there. I might put that off a bit longer, see if they finally do find it. Possibly a report on Icon; we haven’t been there for several years. Or maybe not, because once we get to Florida, there are lots of conventions of all types for us to attend.

I guess you’ll just have to come back and see what I write!

To Do or Not To Do?

Yeah, I know I’m late getting this posted. Again. But only by a week. Or maybe two.

I find myself of 2 minds about continuing this blog.

     A.   Do I declare a hiatus at least until the new year (2017), and remove it from my to do list (and stress level) until that time? I am experiencing a lot of stress, caught in the tedium of trying to get moved, but – at this point - with nothing more I can do to get moved.

a.    It’s not that I have a lot to do, it’s that my choices of what to do are so limited. All my hobbies, like leatherwork and needlework, are in storage.

                                                i.    Without that relaxing time with a hobby, doing fairly repetitious stuff that doesn’t take much brain power, my subconscious doesn’t roam through various possibilities for my Work In Progress, so I don’t make any progress with my writing. Even a short blog once a week is difficult to accomplish.

b.    Also, with Hubby retired - and we immediately started preparing to move – we haven’t really adjusted to having all this time together. I wind up doing whatever he wants to do, and things on my To Do list get pushed aside.

     B.   Or do I tell myself to grow a pair, and keep doing my blog, hoping to work my way back to once a week? I am supposed to be writing regularly, if not every day.

a.    I don’t want to keep complaining about not being moved yet, so I’d have to do some research, find things to talk about.

                                               i.    Research would be more productive than games. (Somehow, playing games does not let my subconscious roam free.)

                                             ii.    There’s plenty of things to research, like discoveries made about Pluto or Ceres, or even the actual diet eaten by Paleo man.

b.    When the house does sell, I expect we’ll take a couple days to tie up things here in Omaha, put the rest of our stuff in storage and then head for Florida, which will take 2-3 days. That might make it tough to get a blog posted that week.

                                               i.    I could write a ‘spare’ blog ahead of time. Then I could upload it and schedule it to post at the right time.

                                             ii.    Repeat for the week that we come back, get our stuff out of storage and take it down to Florida.

Hmm. When I started writing this, I was strongly leaning towards a hiatus. Now I’m leaning toward ‘growing a pair’. J And that tells me that I’ve enjoyed writing this post, that I miss writing, which is much more interesting than ‘the usual’ games have become.

I also just finished an editing job, which took lots of my ‘spare’ time. The subject of the book, however, made me depressed, so it’s a relief to have it done.

I’ll try for #B. The next time I feel like doing a tough Sudoku, or order my Tribez to get to work, I’ll open one of my incomplete manuscripts instead. Or see what’s new about Ceres. Cross your fingers that I’ll post something next Wednesday.

No Deadlines

I honestly don’t know which is worse:

• A.   Having gobs and gobs of chores to do, all of them inter-related and requiring research and learning, with deadlines for some stuff, and the entire day, nearly every day, to work on these chores.
• B.   Having limited chores to work on, because everything is packed away except for four flashdrives and a laptop with limited capacity; no deadlines; and the ability to go to a place and use their computer with a nice big screen (or two!) for a whopping 3 to 4 hours a day.

A is what I had before my husband decided to retire. It was mind-numbing. Every morning I would stare at that long list of chores and wonder, ‘Which one should I work on? Is there one that seems shorter, so I can feel like I’m making progress?’ (Inevitably, that short chore would turn out to be HUGE!) ‘Can I break this big chore into smaller pieces? So far, I’ve done research on X, L, and S, and now look, they all come together in this big knot, along with 6 other things I haven’t even begun to research!’ Over-whelming. Enough of that, and your mind truly goes numb. It ceases to function.

B is what I have now, as we wait for repairs and renovations to get done on our house. If you follow me on facebook, you know that we’ve been ‘living’ in one room for a month. To attempt to stay sane, we go out each morning to use those wonderful computers until lunchtime, then go home to check in with the workers. (At least they’ve mostly stopped finding more water-damage problems that need to be fixed. Now, if the carpet would just arrive…!) After lunch, we go to the gym for a couple hours, ending with 20 minutes in a massage chair before we go home to spend the evening watching tv, probably reruns from Netflix.

With everything we need to survive until the house is sold scrunched into that one room with us, there is only a path through the room, really. Only one of us can get up and move about at any one time, and unless they wander outside that room, they are probably blocking the other person’s view of the tv.

B is also mind-numbing. I start the day eager and happy to be working on a REAL computer, grit my teeth and put my body through its paces in the name of health, and then settle down to do… absolutely nothing.

Hey, something for me to research tomorrow! CPR for numbed brains! You know, for when we finally do get to settle into a new house and I start having deadlines again.

How Many Hats?

Long, long ago - they tell me - all an author needed to do was write. And maybe go on a speaking tour from time to time.

Now, an author wears many hats. How many hats can one person balance on their head before their neck snaps?

First, there's the Writing Hat. You have to get that rough draft done, or your writing career will go nowhere.

At some point, you will probably need the Research Hat, even if you write fiction. If your story involves some military, how is it organized? What ranks does it have? If it's science fiction involving humans, you might research militaries throughout history, and extrapolate from what you've learned. If you're writing a fantasy about dwarves, you might study the tales about dwarves, and try to figure out how they might organize an army. (Hint: A dwarf army is not likely to have cavalry. At least, not a cavalry on something as big as a horse.)

Next comes the Self-Critiquing Hat. You go through your rough draft and make it better by smoothing out rough spots and inconsistencies, adding description and explanation where it's needed, making sure you've said what you intended to say. Actually, you wear this hat more than you wear the Writing Hat.

Next comes the Listening Hat. You ask for feedback on what you've written, and you listen to what they say. Maybe your hero's eyes changed color mid-book, or you use the same phrase over and over, or 3 out of 4 readers didn't understand the first half of chapter eleven.

Back to the Self-Critiquing Hat as you go through your manuscript, considering the feedback, whether or not to change anything, and if so, what's the best way to do that?

Many authors are opting to self publish, these days. Once they've gotten their manuscript as good as they think they can get it, they probably hire an editor, maybe a copy editor, possibly a proofreader, and some will even hire someone to format the manuscript into e-book and print templates.

Or maybe they don't. In which case, those are all hats they should make sure fit their head; the Editor Hat, the Copy Editor Hat, the Proofreader Hat, and the Formatting Hat.

If they are making print copies, they must wear a Deciding Hat (What company will I hire to print this? Where do I get cover art, and who can do the cover layout?), the Receipts Payable Hat (How did the final printing bill get 30% higher than the quote they gave me?), and the Signing Hat (I only ordered *** copies, so why are there so many big, heavy boxes on my doorstep?).

Think they're done? Oh, no, not yet. This part is for all authors, even those with a publishing company, whatever that company's size. Very few authors don't have to wear the following hats:

The Marketing Hat (How do I let people know about my book?) often leads to The Social Media Hat (How many times can I announce something about my book on fb, twitter, linkedin, goodreads...?), the Webmaster Hat (How do I get this shopping cart to work?), the Personal Appearance Organizing Hat (Did that bookstore ever respond about the reading I wanted to do?), the Merchant Hat (Step right up! Get your brand new red hot sf book by that upcoming new author, me!), which, of course, leads to the dreaded Bookkeeper Hat (I gave away 5 books. There's no money involved, so how do I put those in the bookkeeping records?).

I will be wearing the Merchant Hat this weekend. I have rented a table in the Dealer's Room at a Dr Who convention in Wichita KS. Tomorrow, I will be madly trying to wear both the Publicity Hat and the Organizing Hat as I try to design some way to 'decorate' that table and decide how many copies of each book to take with me. A full box of John's book, because, you know, I still have 6 full boxes to sell, 15 of my first book, 12 of the anthology I'm in (plus 6 of the companion volume for that anthology), and 12 of my latest book. Wait, will all those fit in the car with John's suitcase, my suitcase, the costume suitcase and my full make-up case?

Too many hats!

Pluto & Company

Sometimes, reading science fills my imagination.

Remember when Pluto was declared NOT a planet? Mercury is also tiny, I objected. Turns out, Pluto’s diameter is half of Mercury’s. They are both small, but that is a significant difference. Still, they have decided Pluto IS a planet, although they stuck ‘dwarf’ in front. I didn’t realize that until today.

Pluto has a moon. Charon is big enough, compared to Pluto, that it doesn’t revolve around Pluto; they both revolve around a point between them. Weird. I don’t know of any other planet & moon that does that. Today, I discovered Pluto has 4 additional moons. Way to go, Pluto!

There are other dwarf planets in our system, way out in the nether regions, so Pluto is not alone. At least 3 have names. Our system has more planets than the 9 I grew up learning about.

Pluto has an atmosphere. What? How can it? It’s so tiny, so little gravity, so cold- Some times. When Pluto gets closer to the sun (it comes within Neptune’s orbit), some of the surface thaws into a thin atmosphere, mostly nitrogen with methane and carbon monoxide for flavor. When it’s not that close, that atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground.

In 2006, NASA launched a probe for Pluto. It woke up in December 2014, and is seeing if it needs to correct its trajectory. In July 2015, it will reach a point 6,000 miles from Pluto, and it will snap pictures and take readings as fast as it can. At some point after that, it will send its observations to Earth. Just think, if you had snuck onto that spacecraft just before it launched, you’d... Well, you’d be dead, because it wasn’t built for passengers, but your body would almost be there to not see it for yourself!

The most interesting bit of today’s research was that frozen dwarf planets may be the most numerous type of planet in the universe. Really? I figure we should set up bases on/in ours. Why would we want to? Once we figure out how to colonize Pluto and its cohorts, we would know how to colonize frozen dwarf planets in other systems; to study, to serve as a base, a stepping stone.

Yeah, when I dream, I can dream big. I got that from the science fiction I read as a kid.

What do you think? If you were designing a colony for Pluto, would you build on the surface or dig inside?

Textbook Cases

No researched science today. I feel lucky to be out of bed; I don’t have the energy to research, so this post is based on experience and observations.

Colds last 7 to 10 days. Children get ear infections, not adults. That may be what the ‘textbooks’ say, but it’s not written in stone.

In November, I thought I had an ear infection. Since the age of 30, I’ve come down with them occasionally. What I actually had was a sinus infection. Somebody in our household develops one every year, seems like. Doc gave me antibiotics for 7 days and sent me home. I dutifully took the pills and eventually felt better. But not well.

In December, I went back, saying, “Something’s still not right.” Sure enough, I had a sinus infection. The same infection? Could be. So I got antibiotic#2 for 10 days.

10 days later, as I took the last of those antibiotics, I noticed my throat was scratchy. What the-? How can I come down with anything when I’m on antibiotics? Of course, antibiotics work on bacterial infections, not viruses, so I figured I had caught a cold.

Colds last 7 to 10 days. So I tried to be patient.

Eventually, “This is day 11 of the cold I came down with the last day of those antibiotics,” I told Doc with a bass gravelly voice. Guess what! Yep. Sinus infection. The same one? Who knows. So he pulled out the Big Guns, antibiotic#3, for 10 days.

I went home and climbed into bed for 6 days. Oh, I did get up - it’s hard to push fluids when you’re sleeping - but never for long, and when I was up, I didn’t have any energy.

Supposedly, antibiotics help you feel better after 48 hours. Not this time. On day 5, my throat was not as sore, and today, I have not needed a nap. But I only have 3 pills left.

Monday, I’ll see Doc again.

I used to worry when I made a character sick that I wasn’t ‘following the rules’ for that illness. But obviously, from this winter alone, illness doesn’t always ‘follow the rules’. And when I write science fiction - or fantasy, for that matter - I can make up an illness, and define its ‘rules’ myself.

If I have a spaceship of 500 people in quarantine because somebody came down with Martian Measles, some of the crew will catch it right away, others will take longer to show any symptoms. Some might take a few days to get over it; others might take weeks. Certain crew members had it as a child, and won’t catch it at all. A few others have had Martian Mumps, which is sort of related, so they probably won’t catch Martian Measles.

I can do that. I’m the author.

Christmas Eve!

Today is Christmas Eve. Or, rather, the day I post this will be Christmas Eve day. You’d think I’d write about Christmas, wouldn’t you? But I’ve already discussed holidays, several times during the life of this blog, and I don’t want to get too repetitive.

Besides, as I write this, I am nowhere near ready for that holiday; I still have gifts to purchase (not to mention wrap, NONE of them are wrapped yet), a grocery list to make, groceries to buy, and an entire house to clean. These things have been weighing on my mind since Thanksgiving, and I need a break from thinking about Christmas.

So, I’ve been reviewing some science stories I down-loaded during 2014 but never got around to incorporating into a blog, trying to figure out what to say in my next several blogs. (It’s called advanced planning, something I probably don’t do enough of.) There’s some good stuff here.

1.              The Willy Wonka elevator is not necessarily pure fiction.

2.              The Keppler telescope isn’t dead yet. In fact, they’ve fixed it... sort of.

3.              Everybody is talking about a trip to Mars, but Venus is much closer, so... Yeah, there’s plans for that!

4.              There’s a big geothermal project in western US.

5.              Lab-grown burgers.

6.              Rocks that mysteriously move by themselves when no one is looking.

7.              Roads made of solar panels.

8.              Wyoming cave has a treasure of Ice Age fossils.

9.              Cloning woolly mammoths. (Or have I already done that one?)

10.                    Robot farmers.

11.                    Blood test for suicide.

12.                    2-million-year-old pre-man, what was he like?

13.                    Ancient Caribou hunting.

14.                    Ancient lizard fish graveyard.

15.                    Ancient Chinese flying reptile.

16.                    Ancient squirrel.

17.                    Chatting with a Stone Age person.

18.                    Ancient Tsunamis.

19.                    Ichthyosaur fossil.

20.                    The first bird.

21.                    Pinocchio Rex.

22.                    The Scourge of Jurassic Europe.

23.                    Ancient footprints in UK.

24.                    6,000-year-old parasite egg.

25.                    Ancient men and their dog buddies.

26.                    Stonehenge skeleton.

27.                    Fossil eggs.

28.                    Do failed stars have planets?

29.                    Super Earth.

30.                    Orphan planets.

31.                    Twin planets.

Jeepers. That’s enough for half of next year, even if I don’t have enough info on some of them. Maybe I should keep this list and cross them off as I write that blog. After all, I wouldn’t want to repeat myself.

And that doesn’t count any subjects I come across in Archeology, Discovery and the other magazines that I read. Or any new stories I come across on the internet.

Well, my cup runneth over, I guess. The problem will be deciding which of these to write about when. Any suggestions what you’d like me to start with?

Distant Ancestors

In my never-ending quest to get my science knowledge a little more up-to-date (the better to write science fiction), I periodically surf the net in search of interesting but not too complicated science articles. This past week, I ran across quite a few articles about Neanderthals; when they died out, where they died out, why they died out, and so on.

You know about the Neanderthals; big heavy brows, broad flat noses, short chunky bodies. All those characteristics were helpful to them as they lived in Europe during ice age conditions. I don't remember how the heavy brows were helpful, but the noses helped warm the frigid air before it hit their lungs, and their compact bodies conserved body heat.

Up until recently, it was believed that the last of the Neanderthals died out in the area of Spain about 40-42,000 years ago, helped along on the road to extinction by the arrival of 'modern man' into Europe shortly before the demise of the Neanderthals. It wasn't certain that the two groups came into direct conflict and poked holes into one another, but if nothing else, they were both vying for the same food supply, and it was thought Neanderthals just couldn't effectively compete.

According to what I read this week, a new dating technique for old skeletons and other remains has now pushed the demise of the Spanish Neanderthals to around 50,000 years ago. So, were they completely gone before 'modern man' arrived? Probably not. The scientists were going to be conducting more tests on other sites, but it was rather expected that the new dating technique would also push back the date of modern man's arrival into Europe a similar amount of time. So, other than changing the position of a couple dots on a timeline, this didn't really change much.

On the other hand, genetic anthropologists have been analyzing tiny bits of Neanderthal DNA wherever they could find it, and by combining the results of all their work, they figure they've got about 12% of a complete Neanderthal DNA workup.

And it seems Jean Auel was correct when she wrote in Clan of the Cave Bear that Neanderthals and modern man had babies together. Scientists have compared current DNA to Neanderthal DNA and found that modern people have as much as 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals. The amount varies between ethnicities, but it's there.

So... I blame my son's unibrow on Several-times-great-grandfather Oogh, of the German Neanderthals.

Dogs of the World

I like dogs. (I love cats, but that's another story.) Lately I've been reading a few articles having to do with the genealogy of dogs, particularly in the Americas.

When I was a kid, school described North American indian tribes as having horses and ponies. I was too young to question that at the time. Later, it was explained that the ponies originated with the Spanish explorers in Mexico, and that they quickly spread throughout North America. I assumed the indian dogs were a similar story.

But it turns out that dogs had already been here when the Spaniards, the Vikings, and other Europeans arrived. It had been assumed that when the indigenous people died out, their dogs died with them, having no one to take care of them.

These recent articles explained that the original 'American' dogs came over the land bridge from Asia and Siberia with the people who became indigenous indian tribes. Those dogs did not die out and were not supplanted by European dogs. They survived, interbred with the European dogs, and are still here.

This was discovered by comparing the DNA of American dogs with that of Asian and European dogs. The American DNA was much closer to the Asian DNA than the European DNA. This was true as far east as Greenland.

So the Mexican hairless, the Peruvian hairless, and any number of other breeds are about as American as they can get.

My family has a mutt. He's a great addition to our family, and I assume he's an 'American' mutt. How about you? Tell me about your dog.

NASA News

Yesterday, my husband and I visited the Orlando Science Center. We'd heard they had a NASA person coming in to give a talk on Curiosity, their latest probe on Mars. Since we both had expected there to be at least one space station, a moon base and a Martian colony by now, we are always eager to hear if we're getting any closer to that.

The talk started with a few questions from the audience as the rest of the audience filed into the auditorium. One guy asked if it was true NASA had recently launched from some old base in Maryland, and young Samantha, the rocket scientist who had been with NASA for 2 years, said, yes that was true. Then the guy asked if Maryland was a better location for launches than Florida. No, she returned, Florida was the better location for an equatorial orbit like the ones they want. Then why launch from Maryland at all? Sam, flustered, turned to her older cohort, Rich, who promptly answered, "Because some Congressman told us to."

He went on to explain that this unnamed Congressman thought it would be a good idea for NASA to make some launches from his district, and because he thought that, they had to rebuild launch pads, construct a clean room and several other buildings, and finally, make a launch. Billions of dollars used for that effort that some people feel could have been used in better ways. My first thought was that it was no wonder NASA was 'behind', if they had to stop and fulfill every Congressman's egotistical whim.

They touched on the International Space station, roughly the size of a football field, counting all the solar panels, but the living space for the crew of 6 is about the size of the interior cabin of a 747. The ISS is expected to be decommissioned by 2020, did you know that? Well, the US expects to do that, but the Russians think it should be left there. The Russians tend to keep using what they have until it can't be kept in one piece any more.

There was a lot of information in that one-hour talk. Next week, I'll try to remember enough to talk about the Kepler telescope and the Curiosity robot on Mars.