Cover of the first edition paperback, World’s Best Science Fiction 1969 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.I was either 13 or 14 years old when I acquired my copy of the 1969 edition of the World’s Best Science Fiction. As was so often the case, I picked up my copy at a used bookstore. I recognized several of the authors in the table of contents, though I don’t believe I had read any of the stories. That was the point! One book, a whole bunch of stories! Brilliant!
Once I got the book home, I read through the titles in the table of contents again, and one jumped out at me: “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” It was just an interesting image: a helix of gemstones and the like as some sort of analogy or metaphor for time. And the author’s name, Samuel R. Delaney, seemed familiar, though I couldn’t think of any stories I had read by him.
A few weeks back when one of the serious news sites reported that people of color have only recently become involved in reading comics and science fiction, Arab-American past Hugo-nominated science fiction author Saladin Ahmed shared this historical photograph showing a bunch of African-American kids reading comics in the 1940s.So, one of the official new Star Wars universe novels came out last week, STAR WARS: AFTERMATH by Chuck Wendig, and it is getting flooded with one-star reviews. About a third of those reviews are along this line: “I don’t like the inclusion of so many gay characters because my personal opinion is that sodomy is not normal and I am tired of the liberal media trying to make me accept this lifestyle.”
Oh, dear. A galaxy that includes countless species and droids and races acknowledged the existence of homosexuality? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Can we PLEASE get back to giant slugs with a fetish for other species, green muppets, blue elephant people, and giant walking carpets? You know, characters who are normal.
Conservative pundit Earl Hall (here’s a DoNotLink link if you want to subject yourself to it) weighed in (including a really bad attempt to write some Yoda dialog), asking why there are suddenly so many gay characters everywhere: “Is there all of a sudden way more LGBT people in our population than we once thought? Is this really about diversity, or is it more about forcing a story line and lifestyle down our throats?”
First of all, yes, Mr Hall and all the bigoted one-star reviewers: there are more queer people in the population than you thought. But it isn’t suddenly. I’ve quoted before the CDC study in the 1990s about sexual activity that found that while Americans would rather admit to being heroin addicts than bisexual, if you just went by their sexual activity rather than asking them to identify their sexual orientation, about 45% of the population regularly engaged in sexual activity with both men and women. That and other studies indicate that only about 6% of the population engages primarily in sexual activity with members of the same gender. But that means that just (45% + 6 % = 51%) a bit over half the population of the planet is non-heterosexual.
That means that in the U.S. about 19,800,000 (that’s more than nineteen million) people are exclusively gay, while about another 148,500,000 (that’s over 148 million) people are bisexual/pansexual/whatever you want to call it.
And worldwide, the combined number would be 3,570,000,000 (that’s more than three-and-a-half billion) non-heterosexual people.
So, yes, a lot more than you think. And we’ve always been here. There was a wonderful scholarly article I read once that was dissecting clues in various documents and diaries and so forth from the 1890s that put forward a really good argument that men were having sex with other men more often in the U.S. in the 1890s for at least part of their adult lives than was happening in the 1990s. Just as an example.
If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids.
And a bit later in the post:
And if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire.
Wendig also points out all the women and people of color appearing prominently in the trailers for the new movie, in case that kind of inclusion also upsets the one-star reviewers.
Finally, one last note about all those one-star reviews. Amazon’s algorithms push books to the top of recommendation queues based in part on the number of reviews, total. It does not take into account whether the reviews are good or bad. The algorithm cares only that lots of people feel strongly enough about a book to review it. And sales statistics seem to bear that out: readers are more willing to take a chance on a book that has lots of reviews, negative or positive.
I suspect a lot of those people read the negative reviews, see what the reasons a person dislikes a book are, and say, “Well, they may not like books like that, but I do!”
Regardless of that phenomenon, there’s an actual campaign on some conservative fan sites asking people who haven’t even read the book to go give it a one-star review. I don’t think the understand that just means that more people who haven’t heard of the book will have it recommended to them by Amazon.
But then, bigots have seldom been known for the brilliance.
I get so tired of reading the melodramatic laments for the good old days. You know what? It was only peaceful and happy if you lived in the right neighborhoods, had the right skin color, went to socially approved churches, hid away your true self for fear of being beaten to death for being gay (for instance). And also, if you weren’t a man, it was only peaceful and happy so long as you had the protection of a man who wasn’t a wife-beater, et cetera.
The funny thing is, despite what these people have been led to believe, crime rates of all kinds in the U.S. are lower than they have been for more than 150 years. So, maybe these folks need to stop watching Fox News and reading and believing every email from their friends about the latest outrage against “real americans.”
Also, if god didn’t “withdraw his protection” from the U.S. over incidents like intentionally infecting Native American women and children with small pox (which was not the most horrible thing we did to Native Americans), then he sure as heck isn’t going to do so now simply because we’re going to give a few more people equal rights.
I love my country. I literally get tears in my eyes when I play songs such as the old Kate Smith recording of “God Bless America.” I will go on and on about why Thomas Jefferson is my favorite Founding Father (with very specific examples), or why James Madison is my second favorite. I support liberal politicians because I am patriotic and I want my country to live up to the ideals expressed in those founding documents about liberty and justice. We aren’t there yet, by a long shot. But we keep getting closer. We keep getting better.
And at every step along the way, we have gotten better over the objections of people who claimed that the Bible forbids women to have equal rights; or the bible says slaves should be happy to be owned, used, and abused like cattle; or the bible says that the races should be kept separate; or the bible says that gay people are abominations. The bible doesn’t quite say most of those things, but it most definitely says that left-handed people are abominations (mentioned 25 separate times, as opposed to the 3 mentions of same sex activities, and the 4 other mentions of things we aren’t quite sure what the original writer meant but in very modern translations have been twisted to be about homosexuality). Funny, no one is calling for us to pray for god’s forgiveness that we don’t criminalize the left-handed.
I’m not saying you don’t have a right to your beliefs. I am also well aware that there are many christians who don’t feel that invoking the bible should give them a free pass to oppress, discriminate against, and vilify whole swaths of the population.
I am saying that, if you feel the need to constantly decry and lament the fact that I now have the legal right to marry my husband, or campaign against my legal right not to get fired just for being gay, or my legal right to buy things at stores open to the public without being refused just because I’m gay, then you are not my friend. This isn’t about me rejecting you, it is a statement of fact. You are actively engaged in trying to take away my rights. You are actively engaged in trying to hurt me.
Friends don’t do that.
And if you feel the need to consistently insist that god is going to punish this land for no other reason than the civil laws have finally started to recognize gay people as actual people who have the same rights as everyone else, you are also not my friend. Again, this isn’t about me rejecting you. You are saying that me living my life as a productive member of society—not hurting anyone else, just refusing to hide who I love—is somehow so terrible that it justifies the creator of the entire universe ignoring everything else happening on trillions of planets circling billions of stars in the millions and millions of galaxies in the known universe and wipe out a country? My existence is so awful, that the creator of the entire universe is going to punish everyone (including babies and animals and other living things that have done nothing wrong) by wiping us out? If you think my existence is that terrible, that is neither love or respect. And again, friends don’t think that way about people they actually love and respect.
Keep posting those hurtful, hateful things. I’m not going to stop you or call you names. But I’m also not going to sit here and keep reading rants that say these horrible things about me and people like me. I’m not going to silently let you salve your conscience with the occasional assurance that you still love me, sandwiched between your posts about what an abomination I am. Or what heroes people who discriminate against people like me are.
That isn’t love.
And you don’t get to say those kinds of things and still call yourself my friend.
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten. – Neal Gaiman. (click to embiggen)A couple months ago I had to read a bunch of “stories” which were actually just sermons. Which was extremely ironic since the author of most of those stories (and the people who put those and similar stories onto a ballot we’ve already discussed to death) all claimed that they had taken the actions they had because they were tired of reading stories with messages1.
Over dinner last night, my husband pointed out2 that C.S. Lewis, even when writing stories that were meant to be Biblical allegory, remembered that the stories had to be stories first: fully-rounded characters that you care about facing obstacles that seem insurmountable which they overcome through their own actions. And that made me realize that even Lewis’s Christian apologetic novel, The Screwtape Letters was less preachy than some of the other stories we were discussing—because even while discoursing on the nature of human imperfection in the form of letters from a senior demon to his nephew (who is a Junior Tempter), Lewis created a demon who was, as a character, sympathetic and relatable.
I’ve written about this before, during which I quoted (and disagreed with) a Christian filmmaker’s argument that all fiction has a message. The same argument has been being repeated by a lot of people in the discussions specifically about sci fi/fantasy writing, with a new variant: maybe none of us (of any political opinion) notice the messages we agree with because we are so passionate about the things we believe.
I think this is just as wrong as the earlier version. All fiction tells stories, yes, and those stories will embody the values of the author in many ways. I’ve given the example that part of my fundamental temperament is a refusal to accept a no-win situation4, and therefore even when I write grim stories with unhappy endings5, there winds up being at least some hint of a glimmer of hope somewhere in the tone of the story.
But the C.S. Lewis example belies that notion that all fiction is message fic. Yes, some people find the allegory of the Narnia books not to their liking, but I haven’t met anyone who’s read them who can’t explain the plot. Yet, I read scores of reviews of “Parliament of Beast and Birds” earlier this summer (by some very smart people) who couldn’t find a plot6.
So I remain firm in believing that if your story is a message, you’re dong it wrong. That isn’t how you make good art.
I agree that messages are to be found in stories. But they ought to be more like that one alluded to in the Neal Gaiman quote, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” They are meanings that can be inferred by the reader. They are meanings that different readers will interpret in different ways. The interpretations of some readers can contradict the interpretations of other readers and can contradict the interpretation of the author.
Some readers will come away from the story knowing that dragons can be beaten. Others will come away convinced that wizards always find loopholes. Others will say that kings always find ways to take credit for other people’s work. Others may say the message is never to underestimate the damsel. And some, of course, will say the message is humans would rather kill an endangered species than learn how to live with them.
If the story is art, if the storyteller has done their job, the world of the story should be vivid enough and rich enough for readers to find and see all of those sorts of things in the tale. Which is what you want. You want the reader to be transported into a world that they will experience and interpret themselves. You want the reader to share your vision, yes, but you want that vision to take on a life of its own and for the reader to find visions of their own.
That is the opposite of a sermon, whose goal is to bring a person around to thinking the “right” way. To adhere to the truth as defined by the speaker.
I want my readers to run through the imaginary world and find new things that I never dreamed of.
2. We were on the subject because he had been reading one of his favorite sci fi zine sites and had gotten pulled into the comments section of a book review, if I recall correctly3.
3. I was into my second glass of my favorite wine at my favorite restaurant, so I am probably getting the details wrong.
4. Intellectually, I know that lots of situations are no-win, but there’s always that one voice in the back of my head arguing that we should just spend a little more time and try something else…
5. And despite the fact that more than one reader has accused me of being a hopeless optimist who writes everything through rose-colored glasses, I actually have written more than a few tragedies.
6. Or figure out what the story was supposed to be about7.
7. Quick sum-up: imagine an idiot savant has read some Aesop’s Fables and then binge-read the entire Christian apocalyptic snuff-porn series, Left Behind8, and then attempts to write fanfic of it.
8. To be fair, much of the New Testament’s Book of Revelations is treated as snuff-porn by a lot of Xtians I knew growing up. One of them was me. It was my grandfather who pointed out to me that I was spending all my time and energy focusing on the end of the word, when god put us here to build each other up and make the world a better place.
“We hold that the provisions of I-1240, that designate and treat charter schools as common schools violate article IX, section 2 of our state constitution and are void. This includes the Act’s funding provisions, which attempt to tap into and shift a portion of moneys allocated for common schools to the new charter schools authorized by the Act. Because the provisions designating and funding charter schools as common schools are integral to the Act, such void provisions are not severable, and that determination is dispositive of the present case.”
— Chief Justice Barbara Madsen
This is a big win. I know that some of my friends think that charter schools are wonderful. They aren’t. That’s not a matter of opinion. The only study that pro-charter school people always quote proves that they aren’t. People misquote the studies all the time, “Charter schools produce 20 percent better student outcomes than public schools.”
No. The studies actually find that between 15-18 percent of charter school students perform as good or better than the average public school student. That means the more than 80 percent perform worse. Also, what does “average” mean in these statistics? Well, as a matter of fact, when we determine a statistical mean (what most people call an average) of all the public schools, that means that 50% of public school students perform as well or better than the average. That’s how we calculate it. “What is the performance level that half the kids perform better than, and the others perform worse than.”
What’s worse, the charter schools get to exclude students who are difficult to teach. Public schools have to accept everyone. By excluding the more difficult students, the charter schools should have better outcomes just because they start with students more likely to be successful. Since that have significantly worse outcomes despite this advantage, that means they’re even worse at education than the statistics would have you believe.
Charter schools don’t work better than public schools, and they don’t even work as well as public schools. And they are stealing money from the public schools that are doing a better job (not perfect, but provably better) to do it.
As soon as the news of Davis’s arrest broke, conservative Christians began referring to Davis as a “martyr”, claiming that her arrest crossed the line into persecution because of her Christian faith. As an evangelical myself, I want to suggest a different perspective than the one many of my other brothers and sisters have been offering. I believe that Kim Davis’s arrest is neither persecution or an impingement on her religious liberties. In fact, I believe her arrest actually strengthens religious liberty nation wide…
… Kim Davis posed a great threat to the religious liberties of our nation by refusing to carry out her duties as an agent of the state, issuing marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity. Davis forced her Christian faith on the people of Rowan County, and violated their right to be able to receive equal treatment from the government, regardless of their sexuality, race, religion, or values. If Davis was able to continue serving as the county clerk, she could, in theory, continue to refuse to grant marriages licenses or provide services to everyone she disagrees with, which would, in effect, completely dissolve the religious freedoms of the people in her county.
Related, Dan Savage has a nice take-down of the current claim that it isn’t fair or just for people to talk about Davis’ many divorces and related issues: The Federalist: Baptists Aren’t Christians
Yes, Davis has been divorced three times and is on her fourth marriage, Hemingway concedes, but not one Davis divorces “[took] place within the time period she was Christian.” It’s a miracle: Davis hasn’t divorced anyone since becoming a Christian. So it’s not fair and totally uncool for people to bring up Davis’s own not-the-least-bit-biblical marital history. Davis isn’t one of those “screw as I say, not as I screw” conservatives… because she wasn’t a Christian back when she was marrying and cheating and divorcing and marrying and divorcing and cheating and marrying and divorcing.
So what was Kim Davis back then? Was she a Zoroastrian? Was she a Rastafarian? Was she a Rosicrucian?
Kim Davis was a f–ing Baptist.
Her first three marriages were performed in a Baptist Church of which she was a member. Her first three marriage licenses (issued by the county) were signed by a Baptist minister. I was raised Baptist. You do not become a member of a Baptist Church until you make a declaration of faith, said declaration is accepted by the congregation (“all in favor signify by saying ‘Amen'”), and being Baptized into the faith (or providing proof that you had been Baptized in another Baptist church). That acceptance from the congregation is required, in part, because Baptists don’t believe it is right to Baptise children who are too young to understand what they are doing. The congregation is collectively saying they believe your declaration is sincere.
So Davis’ defenders who are claiming she wasn’t Christian back when she was doing all this stuff that is actually explicitly prohibited by the same Jesus she claims told her not to issue civil marriage licenses to gay couples are essentially claiming that Baptists aren’t Christian.
If the words of Jesus are a legitimate reason to withhold a marriage certificate from a pair of consenting adults, than Kim Davis should not have received her second, third, and fourth licenses. If the argument is that a later “cleansing by the blood of Christ” makes all of that okay, then logically it is wrong to withhold the licenses from otherwise legally qualified people because who can say whether or not they may have an epiphany and a literal “come to Jesus” moment later?
It’s the first Friday in September. September, ah, that most blessèd month! Summer is drawing to a close (thank goodness!) and autumn will soon be here! And soon, soon the regular NFL season begins, and my Seahawks mania is only going to get worse.
And, hey, it’s FRIDAY!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Link of the Week
Open Letter to Parents of Gay Kids: This Is Not About You. “Parenting is 100 percent choice. You chose it. When we choose to be parents, we are taking on the responsibility, obligation and honor to love the children we adopt or create. This statement does not come with an asterisk at the end. You don’t get to parent only children who are academically gifted. You don’t get to parent only children who are gifted at sports. You don’t get to parent only healthy children. You don’t get to parent only well behaved children… You get to parent your child, and everything that comes with that.”
My friend, Sharpclaw, who while being a fan of fantasy is not normally that interested in the Hugos, sent this link: Mutiny at the Hugos. I find it hilarious that the people who block-voted the steal much of the ballot claiming that “social justice warriors” had controlled the Hugos for years, are now trying to claim that all of the new voters registering and voting No Award is proof that… the social justice crowd has decided to invade the Hugos and take it away from the people who have always been there. What? There are many other amusing contradictions…
Sad Puppies 4 Begins. “Between now and MidAmeriCon II people will expend a million words arguing whether Sad Puppies 4 is a slate or a recommendation list, a Hugo voter registration drive, an outlet for those frustrated with message fiction, a movement to oppose the dread SJWs, or all of the above. But the opening paragraph of Kate Paulk’s Mad Genius Club post about Sad Puppies 4 shows its first priority is gratifying the egos of the organizers…”
FunCatPictures.ComWhen I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year and added some new things. One of the things that I think helped me achieve those goals was writing a monthly report on the blog on my progess. It’s yet again a new month, so here’s the next report!
I had a half-written post about the county clerk in Kentucky who is steadfastly refusing to obey the Supreme Court and issue marriage licenses because (and this is from her official statement yesterday): “I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage.” One of the issues I have with this is that, actually, Jesus only ever said one thing about marriage, and it wasn’t that gay people aren’t allowed to do it. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality at all. What Jesus did say about marriage is that Moses was wrong to allow for divorce, because divorce is wrong.
Why is it that so many of the politicians (and Davis is a politician: she’s an elected official, which is why no one can simply fire her for not doing her job) who are most virulently opposed to marriage equality, et al, on religious grounds, also the ones with a lot of divorces and infidelity in their past? (Gingrich, Trump, and Davis have ten remarriages between them… and at least one of those remarriages for each of them was to someone that they had an affair with while married to a previous spouse.)
I started a long post about this, but then Dan Savage made most of my points better than I was: And Now I Have to Say Something About Kim Davis. Like Dan, I don’t believe this is really about her sincere beliefs. I think it is far more likely that she is trying to become a public martyr so that she can sell her book, go on the hateful rightwing speaking tour, and in other ways get showered in the “sweet, sweet bigotry money.” Heck, a pizza parlor owner managed to rake in a million bucks for religious rightwingers just by saying that he wouldn’t cater a gay wedding if anyone asked him to, even though nobody was.
I have other issues with Davis and her argument, which I don’t have time to go into because I wound up debating the very topic with a friend on line (though he helped me see a few aspects of this better, so it’s all good). But for me, Davis’s real crime is summed up by Dan in a section that I think a lot of other people are ignoring:
I say this with sadness, I say this as the son of a preacher, I say this as a former seminarian: This pathetic bullshit is what passes for Christianity in America today. Thanks to the efforts of hate groups like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council (co-founded by a tortured closet case and lately the employer of a kid-diddling serial adulterer), the 700 Club, the Moral Majority, the National Organization for Marriage, the National Association of Evangelicals, etc., and the mousy, near-complicit silence of left-wing and progressive Christians, “Christian” is now synonymous with “anti-gay bigot.”
To be a good American Christian like Kim Davis—or a good Alaskan Christian like Bristol Palin—you don’t have to stay in your first marriage, you don’t have to stop sitting on the dicks of randos who aren’t your husband, you don’t have to deny marriage licenses to straight people who are remarrying or marrying outside the faith or obtaining marriage licenses for Godless secular marriages. Nope. You just have to hate the homos. Hate the homos and you’re right with the God of Tony Perkins and Josh Duggar, hate the homos and you’re good with American Jesus. (Toss in support for capital gains tax cuts and American Jesus loves you even more.) You don’t have to feed the sick, clothe the naked, house the homeless—you don’t have to do any of that shit Jesus actually talked about—you just have to hate the homos hard enough to go to jail for for your beliefs cash in on your bigotry.
I do have more to say about other aspects of this (and I’ll probably use fewer swear words than Dan). But I’ll have to post them later.
Dan also links to an excellent (and profanity-free) op-ed piece by John Corvino from the Detroit Free Press which, coincidentally, I had already cued up for next Friday links before I found Dan’s piece: It’s time to remove Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. It’s worth a read.
A lot of my life has involved the struggle not to be defined by the assumptions of bigots. Whether it was being called sissy, faggot, or worse while being bullied as a kid, or being called depraved, hell-bound, or worse while being denied legal equality as an adult.
As irritated as I get when someone tells me that I could stop being gay if I really wanted to, or that if I just met the right woman I would feel differently, or if I read the Bible and prayed hard enough it would all go away, you would think that I would never, ever say or imply that someone else is “really” something other than they claim, particularly in the area of sexual orientation.
You might think.
I have been called (somewhat angrily) a hypocrite for not believing at least one person who claimed to be ex-gay…
*sniffle*The pollen count has not been high this week. In fact, because we got so much rain over the weekend, the pollen count is forecast to be extremely low today. But my hay fever is not always strongly correlated with the pollen count. I generally assume that’s because I also react to molds and spores that are not always captured in that count.
I haven’t had horrible hay fever symptoms most of the week. Itchy eyes and mild congestion on a couple of days. But when the weather started changing (the first real rain in months hit Friday night, there were drizzles in the early morning, but the rain didn’t come until quite late), my sinus congestion got worse and a headache slowly built up. I tried a couple different combinations of medicine on it over the weekend, but they didn’t help much.
It was bad enough that I pulled out the bottle of prescription strength nasal spray. I don’t like resorting to it because one of its side effects is having really intense disturbing dreams. Because it contains a steroid, it suppresses immune response in the sinus membranes, so I often wind up with a sinus infection after using it. But the headache was really getting to me, so I decided late Saturday night to give it a try.
Except I noticed that the expiration date on the label was a while ago. I have used it a couple of times since the expiration date, but I didn’t know what the risks were after the expiration date, and it was the wee small hours of the morning, so I didn’t really feel up to researching the issue on line. I grabbed an ice pack to put on my head, instead. And I was able to get back to sleep. The pharmacist got a good laugh when I stopped in on Sunday and put in the request to ping my doctor for a refill. I last filled the prescription a whopping five years ago.
We had a few other misadventures over the weekend, though nothing as bad as some of our friends. Event though the high temperatures during the day outside were in the mid- to upper sixties, I couldn’t got the house below 80 until quite late Saturday night. We had all the windows and the front door open, with fans placed strategically around the house to try to create a flow that would push the cool air from outside through everywhere. It’s one of the downsides of a brick house. Those bricks hold heat for an awful long time.
It was bad enough Friday night that the combination of the heat (and to be fair, we turned off the air conditioning because it was below 70 outside by sundown, so we had ourselves to blame a bit) and my sinus headache, I kept waking up getting no more than an hour’s sleep at a time. I felt as if I was waking up my hubby every time I woke up and tossed and turned, so I moved down to the living room in the recliner at about 5:00 am and aimed two small fans at me. Then I finally slept for four hours straight.
Along with the even heavier rain we got Saturday came a lot of wind. Trees were blown down all over the region, knocking out power lines everywhere. More than one of our friends was without electricity for over 24 hours. We wound up with a few of them over at our place Sunday afternoon, recharging all of their devices and just hanging out to visit.
There was also, Saturday morning, the incident of the overflowing toilet. Still not sure what caused that. But it was followed up Sunday with me not being able to get the bathroom sink faucet to turn off. We finally figured out I was being mildly dyslexic and turning the cold off while turning the hot on, then reversing the other way. In my defense, Michael couldn’t figure out what was happening at first, either. After he shut things off under the sink, he experimented a bit. Because of the low-flow fixture, there were no discernable difference in the flow of water between barely turned on at the faucet, cranked halfway, or cranked all the way to full. So you can’t really tell whether you’re turning one side (say the cold) down if the hot is on even a little bit.
We’ve now got the under-the-sink valves turned back to about a third pressure (they were turned on full force before), and now you can tell the difference as you adjust the faucets.
He did ask me if my horoscope for the weekend had said anything about trouble with water, since I seemed to have several incidents.
Since I virtually never look at such things, I couldn’t say. But I think it’s more likely that the sinus headache and the interference with my sleep pattern are more likely culprits.
Font Folly 