hrj

 If you'd like to read the full entries from my blog's rss feed, rather than clicking though the links I post in my own account, here's what you need to do:

1. Go to the Dreamwidth feeds page: https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/
2. Where it says "Add Feed" and has a box for "feed url" paste in the following: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed
3. Click the "add feed" button.

Remember that I may not see comments posted on the rss feed entries, because there's no way for me to get notified of them. If you want to comment, please click through to the blog itself.

At some point in the future, I may find a way to export blogs automatically to Dreamwidth like I used to be able to do to Live Journal. But for now, this is the easiest way to read them.

ETA: Hmm, it looks like there should be an easier way to subscribe. If you go to the DW Alpennia feed page (https://alpennia-feed.dreamwidth.org) There should be a place up in the top header display that says "subscribe to this feed". If this works for someone, could you post a note here to confirm?

ETA (2018/04/16): I feel like I should note explicitly that I'm not regularly posting links to my Alpennia blog in this account. So if you're using Dreamwidth to follow my blogging, please use the RSS feed as detailed above. I sometimes post things here that are too informal or more personal than I want to put on the Alpennia website, so there will still be occasional content.

ETA (2020/04/15): Revised notional date to keep this at the top of the feed.

ETA (2025/04/15): One again revised the notional date to keep this pinned to the top of the feed.

I can't remember if I've posted any of this before and am too lazy to look back.

I experimented this year with putting in some "winter crops" with variable success. Cabbage probably needed to be planted earlier because one of the varieties is bolting and the other, though not bolting, looks unlikely to set heads. The edible pod peas are doing ok, in part I suspect because I planted them next to the fence, so they aren't getting excessive sun. I harvested a handful of pods today and suspect I can get a handful per week until they give up. The third experiment was some mixed greens (NOT KALE) recommended by the nursery salesperson. I pulled them out when they started to bolt and will do something with them this week.

Because I had to trim some overly enthusiastic grape tendrils, I picked off the leaves, parboiled them, and made dolmas. Very successful (except for not rinsing the rice sufficiently, so the filling is a bit too sticky). Since I had more filling than grape leaves, I pulled some of the bolting cabbage and did cabbage rolls. (The dolmas cooked in broth and lemon juice while the cabbage rolls cooked in broth and crushed tomatoes.)

Last spring, I spotted some asparagus starts at the nursery, having failed to find any sets, and put them in the circular bed around the persimmon tree. I'd more or less had that in mind and hadn't planted anything else in the circle except for some random gladioli. More than half the starts survived the year and then this year I did find asparagus sets so I added them into the mix. It looks like they get enough water from the lawn irrigation system, though I've been supplementing with an extra sprinkler last year, both for their benefit and to help the persimmon get a good start. It'll be a couple more years before they'll be established enough to harvest (and who knows how many years before I'll start getting persimmons).

When I watch various of my friends and acquaintances flit about from place to place, I think about how significantly my life plans are affected by my love of growing things. And how tragic it would be if this property eventually went to someone who didn't value the investment.

The tomatoes are in the ground now--the usual 18 varieties. (Well, except I doubled up on Sun Gold cherry tomatoes because they're my absolute favorite.) Some years I've carefully documented which varieties I plant and how they perform. This year I didn't even make a list. I made my usual sacrifice to hope over experience and planted summer squash and eggplant.

I still need to pick and process the second half of the Seville orange crop. (The first half went to Chaz and has been turned into marmelade.) The lemons that were sacrificed to a bout of pruning have been juiced and frozen as cubes (for summer refreshment), plus zested and packed in sugar (for baking use). There are still a few juice oranges on one of the trees. The strawberries are trickling in. And it's time to update the garden calendar with all of this for data tracking purposes.

In case you haven't been encountering the links elsewhere, I'm now up to 10 (of 16) segments of my essay "The Theory of Related-ivity: A History and Analysis of the Best Related Work Hugo Category." (You can start here. Each individual segment has a link to the next--up through everything currently posted. https://alpennia.com/blog/theory-related-ivity-segment-i)

In theory, the individual segments should be showing up on the RSS feed of my blog here on Dreamwidth, but there's a glitch whereby the RSS feed pays attention to the date when the blog was originally created, not the date when it goes live. So anything I've set up well in advance (like this series) never shows up at all.

Once the whole thing has been published online, I'll be doing some revisions based on feedback and then releasing the work in ebook form. Haven't decided if I'll offer it for free or set a nominal price. I don't want to create friction for people who want to read it, but on the other hand there's the phenomenon that people don't take seriously what they can get for free. There will also be a hard copy version available at that point (obviously for a reasonable price).

Clearly my impulse to mirror The Theory of Related-ivity somewhere besides my Alpennia log was the correct decision, because I'm getting far more engagement (which implies far more readers) on File 770 than on my blog.

I was double-checking to confirm that I did actually get one comment on the blog and noticed something interesting that I'm not sure is correct. According to the "approved comments" index, while I've gotten an average of one comment per month on the blog in the last year (and thank goodness we've finally set up a filter that successfully blocks the deluge of spam comments), according to the index, I received NO comments in the previous 7 years.

I don't think that's right. I mean, I whine a lot (though mostly inside my head) about not stimulating conversations on the blog, but I'm pretty sure I got at least a few comments between June 2018 and June 2025! But since I get them so rarely, it would be a lot of work to scroll back through the blog and search to see if there are comments on the posts that simply aren't showing up in the index for some reason.

Does anyone remember commenting on my Alpennia blog within the last 7 years and remember what you commented on to help narrow the process?

I sometimes say that I live and die by routines. If I have a routine for doing something, then it gets done. If I don't have a routine (or I depart from one) then anything could happen. This means there are things I do more often than I need to (like checking blood pressure or recording weight) because if I don't fit them into a daily routine, I don't get around to it. But it means that things that need a less frequent routine are sometimes tricky (like theoretically once-a-month housekeeping tasks, such as cleaning the cat waterer).

The daily bike-coffeeshop-write-bike routine is solid (even though there are two days when it's coffeeshop-write-gym instead), but if I need to do something substantial before biking--especially if it involves putting on normal clothes--then it's hard for me to shift myself back to it later in the day.

So on a day like today when I started off with an online podcast interview to record, I probably won't get the bike out. Knowing that, I plan to do yardwork and housecleaning. But there's always the temptation to say, "I make my own rules; I could just take a day off." Except I bought some Alpine strawberry sets a few days ago and they really need to get in the ground...

Having made a resolution to try to get more engaged with local politics (on a more-than-just-voting level), I followed up on an email inviting me to meet up with a couple of county and state level representatives. The email clearly stated 4:30 PM today. I just double-checked the original email. But when I arrived at the venue and asked about the event, they said it had been held at 10:30 AM this morning.

The previous time I tried to go to a local meet-up held at a coffee shop, I hung out in the coffee shop all morning (a normal thing for me to do anyway, so not a problem) and the rep never showed. I commented on it to the barista who said, "Oh, yeah, I saw them poke their heads in and look around then they left again."

Contemplating whether to make it 0-for-3 in a couple weeks at a different town hall meet-up I've put on my calendar.

Is it me? Is this a strategy and somehow I need to get on the super-secret "we'll tell you when and where it really is" email list? I mean, this is super-blue California so I don't think my reps are chickening out. But I'm not feeling the love.

Finished doing the paper draft of my taxes and have enough confidence that I understand all the new (retirement-related) elements to be ready to go online and fill in the forms. Also did a very rough draft of my expected 2026 federal taxes (based on 2025 forms and projected numbers) and I don't see a need to adjust my current withholding at this point. Of course, the rough draft doesn't include the unknown amounts I'll be getting from Bayer (pro-rated bonus from last year and what's likely to be a very minimal long-term-incentive program bonus), which will only apply for 2026. So 2027 will actually be the first year when I'm working entirely on retirement numbers. (As usual, I'm using spreadsheets as my self-soothing mechanism and nattering on about the results.)

I think I now have all the data and documents and forms assembled to do my transition-to-retirement-year tax returns. Today's task was to turn last year's financial spreadsheet into my usual yearly summary, then put the relevant data from it and all the various W2s and 1099s and whatnot into my tax data template (which needed to be updated for several new types of documents and data).

Because of how my brain works best, I'm going to go to the length of printing out paper copies of the forms to noodle on, even though I'll be filing online. And I'll be reading through the pdfs of the instruction booklets and highlighting everything that looks relevant. But on my first skim through, I think this is going to be easier than I feared. The schedule C stuff (writing business) is the same as always. And although the worksheet to calculate how much of my social security income is taxable is convoluted, the instructions walk you through it step by step.

One new wrinkle is that they now have a separate "1040-senior" form, evidently to simplify the instructions for the enhanced standard deduction for seniors (which get convoluted if you're married filing jointly but only one of you is a senior). I'll compare it point by point with the standard 1040 to make sure it doesn't do anything else bizarre.

And despite the rather chaotic nature of how my withholding is set up for the various retirement incomes, I think it's still pretty close to the right amount. Once I have this year's returns done, I can probably do a mock return for next year and see what adjustments I should make on the withholding.

There's a terrible tension when reading fiction submissions between wanting to share the experience (both the good and the questionable) and knowing that no good ever came from discussing specific submissions in public. [1] Especially when...*waves hi to some of my submitters who also read this journal.*

If I had an editorial team, then that would be the appropriate forum for such discussions, but the project simply isn't big enough to call for anyone besides me. (Also, part of the joy of a small project is that ability to cater to one's own tastes without the need for compromise.)

I think as the Fiction Series has evolved, I've gotten a bit more skilled at identifying and articulating what I'm looking for and what drives my decisions. I've blogged a couple times in general terms on that topic (and link to it in the Call for Submissions) so even those who don't follow me personally in social media can have a glimpse inside my decisions process, if they care to.

Anyway, nothing really important here, just ruminating on my current priority. Only 7 more stories to read in the first round, then comes the harder part.

[1] Conventions have occasionally had panels on the theme "it came from the slush pile" where stories get shared, but anything that gets specific enough that a particular story/author could be identified is rather in bad taste.

I left NYC on Tuesday and did the train-bus-rental-car thing to get up to Augusta ME, where I've been enjoying a couple days visiting with my brother and sister-in-law, getting the tour of their current livestock (goats and chickens and geese oh my!) and finally getting a chance to see the small theater-and-studio/shop complex that they bought and have been working on turning into a going concern. (Going slowly, but to interesting places.) This was accompanied by sitting in on a rehearsal for A Doll's House: Part 2 (someone's modern "15 years later" extension of Ibsen's play). I've interspersed that with a couple of "me days" getting writing done and recovering from all the peopleing I've been doing.

This morning I got a notice that the train leg of my trip back toward the airport was cancelled and it wasn't until this evening that I had the time to play phone tag with Amtrak to reschedule. (I was concerned that it was a weather cancellation, which would affect in which direction I rescheduled.) After all that, I'll be taking a slightly later train and still getting to the Newark airport at a reasonable hour Sunday evening. I have an airport hotel room that night for a scheduled flight out Monday morning. We'll see if the planes are flying Monday. If not, I have multiple options for what to do. Playing it by ear. Life is an adventure.