baroque_mongoose

I have previously mentioned Darg, the rather adorable (and probably autistic) half-orc fighter in my book. Darg is built like the proverbial brick privy (even for a half-orc, he's really big), so he doesn't especially care what other people think of him; indeed, most of the time he doesn't even notice. (He does, intriguingly, occasionally spot some things about other people that nobody else notices, but that is slightly different. Darg can't pick up vibes to save his life, but he will unerringly pick up on anything which would be obvious if it weren't for the vibes.) So, when the entire party is knighted and he has to pick some heraldry, it doesn't even enter his head that a lot of people are going to go boggle-eyed when they see it (including Nivaunel, who's very kindly sewing it on his new surcoat for him). He just thinks "that's a nice cheerful fun sort of design".

I still haven't got anywhere to link images from, so I need to ask you to use your imagination here, which is probably better anyway from the point of view of not boggling you. Imagine a shield. Now divide it vertically down the middle. Colour the left half (as you're looking at it) red, and the right half gold.

Fine so far, but now draw a second shield on top of the first, centred, with its width and height two thirds that of the actual shield. This time, flip the colours, so the left half of the inner shield is gold and the right half red. Now do that again; draw a third shield centred on that, with its width and height half that of the intermediate shield or a third that of the full shield, and flip the colours a second time - left half red, right half gold.

I wanted to know how you describe that in heraldic terms, so, of course, I went and asked some of the SCA heralds, who speak Heraldic. I was told "per pale gules and or, on a shield a shield counterchanged". And I thought, right, thank you, that is even more boggly than the actual design... at which point another herald piped up that it might just as accurately described as "counterchanged orly and per pale, gules and or".

Orly?

It turns out that "orly" in heraldry means, more or less, "stripes of equal width", in cases where those stripes surround an area or a central point. I'm old enough to remember all the wide-eyed owl memes bearing the legend "O RLY?", so the fact that "orly" is actually a word amuses me greatly. I did, to be fair, already know most of the rest of the words, just not how to put them together properly. I knew that "gules" is red and "or" is gold; I vaguely knew that "per pale" means "divided in half vertically", though I tend to get it mixed up with "per fess", which I think is the same thing horizontally; and I knew that "counterchanged" refers to that thing where you have a field divided into two colours and your charge is on top of that division with the colours reversed. It is an extremely odd dialect.

All of which reminds me I should decide on my own SCA device, which I suspect will be some kind of triquetra. I'm fairly sure that weaving a ring through it will make it sufficiently distinctive, but I'm not in a hurry. At any rate there will not be any orly involved.

I reckon Darg should get another +1 to his attack bonus just for the boggly shield...

There is a baby in this story. Quite an important baby, as it turns out.

Let's see if I can summarise briefly. Lord A took a mistress, B, who eventually became Lady B because Lord A managed to wangle her a title (mostly on false pretences). They had three children including a daughter, X, who, despite being illegitimate, was Lady X because both her parents had titles. Lord A then died, and his son immediately threw Lady B out of the house as she was a serious offence to his mother; this left Lord A's son as effective guardian to Lady X, along with his mother.

Meanwhile, a long way away, High Lord C and High Lady D, the regents of an important province, had twins, Lord Y and Lady Z. Lord Y was very slightly older than his sister, so he became heir to this province.

Lady X and Lord Y were both wild and badly behaved, so both sets of guardians had the same idea: send them to a monastery (this is a D&D monastery, of course, so it's what you'd probably call spiritual rather than religious - the important thing is it's very disciplined). The two aristocratic brats managed to escape from the monastery together, and they made for the capital city. At some point, Lady X got pregnant, and Lord Y promised to marry her.

Unbeknown to either of them, Lady B reached the capital before they did. She had tried to find her actual legal husband after being thrown out, but he was no longer on the Material Plane (and, besides, although he was a very kind man, he would not have taken her back after she was complicit in very nearly getting him killed); so instead she decided to go to the royal court and demand a dower house, given that she wasn't being allowed to live in the one on the late Lord A's estate. The King and Queen were a little puzzled by this, especially since they had recently heard information about Lord A's estate which conflicted with what she told them; so they did some investigations which ended with them decreeing that Lady B should not have been given the title. So she was not only stripped of the title, but, due to her behaviour while in the capital, ended up being put to work in the royal kitchens. That, in turn, meant that Lady X also lost her title, though she didn't yet know that.

Our party, for plot reasons, was looking for Lady X. They found her by means of spells, and simply waited at the east gate of the city until she and Lord Y walked through it, at which point they had to break the news to her that she was now just plain X and tell her what had happened to her mother. Lord Y promptly dropped her like a hot brick ("do you expect me to marry the daughter of a kitchenmaid?"). While X had caused the party a good deal of trouble, that still did not go down well, shall we say.

Needless to say, High Lord C and High Lady D were informed. They weren't worried about the simple fact that their son had got someone pregnant - had he taken full responsibility, it would have been fine; but they were very upset that he'd abandoned mother and baby like that. So they decided that Lady Z should now be the heir. Lady Z, however, could not have children, following a very difficult stillbirth which had almost killed her; so the obvious solution, which X was entirely happy with, was to have Lady Z and her husband adopt the child, keeping X as its nurse (her nurse, as we find out a little later). The succession therefore continues just as before, but bypassing the dastardly Lord Y.

So this is why the baby is so important; and, obviously, she now has to be transported from the capital city to the distant province, which could be up to six weeks' journey by carriage. And babies need nappies; and, while you can certainly wash nappies en route, what you cannot do is get them dry.

Enter the Prestidigitation cantrip.

Prestidigitation is one of the simplest and (ostensibly) least powerful spells in D&D. You can do minor illusions with it. You can clean things with it, so magic users never need to get their robes cleaned. You can colour or flavour small amounts of stuff with it. You can dry wet clothes if you've been out in the pouring rain. And so, of course, I thought... that's what they'll need to use; let's work out just how many terry nappies one cast of the cantrip is able to clean.

So I looked it up. One round in D&D is six seconds, and Prestidigitation, once cast, lasts for one hour. According to the manual, the spell will clean 1 cubic foot of stuff per round. All right, I am incapable of thinking in feet, so let's say 30 cm; that is pretty close. A 30 cm cube I can imagine.

Now, a terry nappy is not going to be more than 60 cm on a side, so if you fold one of those in four it will fit in a 30 cm square. Let's say that is 3 cm thick, at a reasonable guess. That means you can get ten of them into your 30 cm cube. You can clean 10 nappies every 6 seconds, so you can do 100 of them per minute. That means you can clean 6000 nappies during the time the spell lasts. That's... well, they're travelling in two carriages, but even so they're not even going to have room for 6000 nappies. (They decided in the end to bring three dozen.)

If you cast Prestidigitation yourself, it costs you nothing; however, if you cast it from a scroll, it costs you 12 gold pieces and 5 silver pieces (which is to say 125 silver pieces). So, for interest's sake, I worked out how much it would cost you in the D&D universe to have that many nappies washed in the normal way. You can hire an unskilled labourer, including a laundrymaid, for 1 silver piece per day (D&D, thankfully, does not have a gender pay gap). Assume your laundrymaids work 8 hours a day (again, they'd have worked much longer hours in a historical setting, but D&D generally assumes 8 hours), and it takes one laundrymaid, on average, 10 minutes to get a nappy properly clean, including the time taken to hang it up to dry. (Some nappies will inevitably take longer than others.) Do all the maths, and it turns out that that'll cost you... exactly 125 silver pieces. It's the same. You just have to wait longer for the turnaround.

I'm pretty sure nobody's ever worked that out before. But don't anyone tell me in future that Prestidigitation isn't extremely powerful for what it is!

I have a minor character in the current book who appears only fairly briefly. She's a dwarven bard; there aren't so many of those in the D&D universe, since bards basically run on Charisma and dwarves have a racial penalty on that. However, this one's a specialist. She does execution ballads. Every time anyone is sentenced to death, it's her job to gather all the relevant information - what they did, how they did it, why they did it (if known), who their accomplices were (if any), and all the rest of it - and work the whole lot up into a lengthy ballad. She then sings most of it just before the execution, and after that takes place she adds a few more verses covering that, after which she sings the complete ballad in the town hall. The words are then copied out and distributed. It's an effective and memorable way of getting the news out in a society where they don't have regular newspapers and there are probably also quite a few people who can't read.

This is not a figment of my imagination, though I suspect anyone outside the SCA will probably take it as such. Nope. This is actual history (well, other than the fact that she's a dwarf, of course). They really did this in the late Middle Ages.

Mediaeval execution ballads were pretty much tabloid articles set to music; they tended to be long and sensational (and they very often went to the tune of Fortune my foe, given that it was a well-known and rather sombre tune; I have a very nice recording of d'Artagnan singing the original words). They also frequently, but not invariably, contained a pious expression of repentance on the part of the condemned criminal, to which they may or may not have actually subscribed. Some of them went on for a full 15 minutes. We don't know exactly how many of them were written, since there's good historical evidence that many did exist but are now lost; we also don't know whether they were written for all executions or just those relating to the most serious crimes, given that there was a strong tendency in the Middle Ages for punishments to be out of all proportion to the crime committed (unless you were a member of the nobility, in which case you were very unlikely to be hanged for stealing some valuable item you didn't need; ordinary people could be, and were, hanged for stealing small amounts of food that they desperately needed to live). But there do seem to have been quite a lot of them, given how many of them did survive.

It just occurs to me I can't remember if I've posted about this before. If I have, please bear with me. I am whacked out this morning (combination of recent circumstances and a late night or two too many).

You know how a lot of websites give you a link so you can easily opt out of Mother's Day and/or Father's Day e-mails?

Ryman don't.

Now, let me be clear right from the start, I like Ryman. Probably more than half my scribal kit comes from there - all the specialist drawing pens, all the brushes, the travel easel (which is a major back-saver), and I think the paints. They're also by far the best place to get a personalised hardbacked notebook at a reasonable price; I've done that for Christmas presents before. I even bought my air cooler from them, which is what enables me to survive our horrible East Anglian summers. Nonetheless, the simple attempt to opt out of Mother's Day (and Father's Day) e-mails opened a surprising can of worms.

Yesterday they sent me a Mother's Day e-mail, and obviously I thought, oh, no, don't want that, let's find the link to opt out. There wasn't one. So I went to their website to fill in their contact form.

It starts off with the usual drop-down list so you can give them a rough idea what you're contacting them about. Fine so far. I selected "general enquiry", as you would; and, of course, a general enquiry does not have to be about any specific order or product. But then it wanted an order number, and this was a required field. Oh. Right. Will it take "n/a"? Fortunately it would, so I was over that hurdle.

Then I got to an even more bizarre required field. I had to upload an image showing the fault with, or damage to, the product I had ordered. Huh? I actually went back to double-check that I had indeed selected "general enquiry". Yes. I had. Definitely not the "I want to complain about a faulty or damaged product" option. But I couldn't continue without uploading some kind of image. So... as it happens, for some reason which is lost to history, I have a very small image of a fuzzy purple sphere. It was probably part of some piece of art I was doing. I uploaded that.

Well, I hope they liked the fuzzy purple sphere; anyway, I'm happy to report that I got a really nice reply this morning. They're going to opt me out of e-mails I don't want, and they're also going to look into the problems with the web contact form. So all is good, in the end.

Nonetheless, I can't help feeling it could have been a little easier.

Just to update you all on the earrings: I did get a reply yesterday afternoon from X Jewellery. I think they'd spent some time very carefully working it out, because it was really interesting to see exactly what it did and didn't say. But the line that stood out for me, no matter how carefully they'd attempted to bury it, said that I had to be signed up to the website to get stock notifications. In other words, when I requested the stock notification, I'd been automatically signed up to both the mailing list and the website itself, and the screen that came up just after that asking me if I wanted to sign up to either of those was simply a lie.

So I will never visit their site again, and I promptly went and bought a pair of 9 ct gold earrings from a slightly more up-market jeweller. They were, of course, a bit more expensive; however, they won't tarnish (I've had a fair bit of 9 ct gold before), there's no plating to rub off, and also they're thin enough to hang charms on, which my original pair was not. Since I have some earring charms, I've now got five or maybe six pairs of earrings for the price of one, which makes it suddenly not so bad after all.

Anyway. I'm now almost at the end of chapter 11, and the sequel is going to be much more complex (and probably also longer) than the original book. The thing is, it isn't even just that characters keep developing on me... although they certainly do that; Nivaunel, the main protagonist, has gone in the space of a couple of months from a neglected young woman without a great deal of confidence to a fully-fledged cleric with enough confidence in her god to challenge an entire dwarf town when she discovers that one of their traditions is starting to slip out of keeping with the Lawful Good alignment that most of them have... and win. (She's a very good negotiator. Dwarves, it is true, tend to be sticklers for tradition, but they're even more sticklers for their alignment, so it just took Nivaunel to point out what was happening and then dig her heels in. In fact she's Neutral Good herself, not Lawful Good; but the tradition had slipped on the good side rather than the lawful side.) If it were just that, it would be interesting enough. But no - things unrelated to the characters keep happening that I didn't originally predict.

Like the sword. Darg, the party's rather adorable half-orc fighter, who's probably autistic (he takes things extremely literally, and he apparently thinks tact is some kind of glue, but he's generally very cheerful and friendly), needed a new greatsword. That is to say, his old one wasn't bad, but the party could afford to get him a better one and decided that that would be a good idea. Darg is Chaotic Good, and he worships Kord, who is the Chaotic Good god of strength. So he wants to get his new sword from the Temple of Kord if possible. Turns out it is, so they get him the new sword; normally it would cost a lot of money to give it a permanent blessing (which is to say the weapon becomes good-aligned and you get a bonus if you're fighting anything evil), but Nivaunel is an aasimar and her angelic ancestor has already turned up once to deliver a couple of items that Kerian and Lindith (who are in Elysium and can't safely leave there) want to give her. The angelic ancestor is therefore persuaded to make a second visit in order to bless the sword, which she can do easily without incurring any cost.

Darg - who is rapidly becoming the chaotic equivalent of a paladin - is delighted. So is the rest of the party. They, and I, think Darg's managed to get a full-on holy sword at a bargain price. They take the road up into the mountains, and... oh, look. Two dwarves, who don't appear to have any spell-casting ability, are being attacked by a winter wolf (intelligent, evil, and pretty nearly the size of a horse). Our party hurries to the rescue...

...at which point, the sword suddenly demands to know if there are any undead it can fight. And I had no idea that was going to happen till I actually typed it.

It turns out that the sword is called Kythis, and while I never directly quote game mechanics in the narrative (this is D&D-based but not full-on LitRPG), I did then have to go and work out its stats for reference. It is a +2 holy sword with INT 16, WIS 16, and CHA 10 (so it is a bit more tactful than its wielder, but not a whole lot); can both speak and read Common, Celestial, Elven, and Draconic; has 60 ft darkvision and hearing (dratted D&D, everything is in imperial so I have to keep converting); can cast Detect Magic at will, and both Bless and Zone of Truth three times a day; its special purpose is to defeat/slay undead, and anyone wielding it gets a +2 bonus on any attacks, saves, or checks which further this purpose; and its Ego score, if I've worked that out correctly, is 16. Since it was made in the Temple of Kord, its alignment is almost certainly Chaotic Good. The person who forged it died shortly after, and Kythis was bright enough to say nothing so that it didn't end up with a massive price tag, because if it did, it would probably be priced out of range of whichever wielder it decided was the right one. And it picked Darg as being the one most likely to be sympathetic to its aims.

Well, it settled for killing the wolf for the time being (not undead, but evil, and that would do), but it was very happy later on because it got to finish off a ghast. And... I think I'm going to need to create a whole new D&D class now, especially for Darg!

The earrings can wait. I've got something much better to post about today.

We have a lot of littles in our congregation; there are certainly a lot more under-threes than over-sixties. One of these littles is called Micah. He's one and a bit - not quite sure what the bit is, because it's so hard to keep track, but he's certainly less than one and a half. Micah likes to toddle down to the front and sit on the front step of the tiered seating in the school hall where we meet, just near where I park my scooter during the service, and his daddy comes down with him to ensure that he's all right and he doesn't go running off anywhere. Usually he doesn't pay me much attention, and to be honest I don't expect them to when they're as small as that; I'm just this strange grown-up on wheels, and I can imagine that's a bit of a step too far when you're really tiny. You know about grown-ups, but you also know they walk about. Wheels are a bit outside your experience.

But, yesterday morning, Micah looked at me, and I don't know whether or not the wheels registered, but I'm pretty sure he thought "ooh... friendly grown-up". And he held my hand through most of the first two songs. I mean. D'awwwww. He's not even old enough to know what death is, let alone the fact that it throws people badly out of gear; whether or not he nonetheless had enough intuition to realise that I'd be happy with a little hand to hold at that moment, I have no idea. Maybe it was nothing more than Micah suddenly realising that [amorphous wheeled thing] is actually a person, and as such might be persuaded to pay him attention. I don't know. But it was awesome, whatever the explanation.

I just love our church.

I spoke to both sisters last night over Zoom. I think the best way to sum things up is that all of us are basically all right, but the whole thing is weird. It was when Dad died a few years ago, as well. That, in fact, was quite similar, in that he also wanted to go; however, although he had become increasingly frail and towards the end we were pretty sure he didn't have long, he was at least managing reasonably well at home until his final admission to hospital, after which he died quite quickly (we have a grim joke in our family that he simply couldn't stand the food in Lancaster Infirmary, so he wasn't going to live long after he went in there... and, as with all good grim jokes, there's a fair bit of truth in it. He hated hospital food, and Lancaster, sadly, has one of the worst reputations for that.) When someone is old, infirm, and has made it very clear they want to go, and then they do, grief isn't the biggest part of the survivors' reaction. It's there, but it's not dominant. The dominant reaction is shock, even when you knew very well it was coming. It's far worse to lose someone suddenly, out of the blue; when that happens, you get both the shock (dialled up to 100%) and the grief.

Anyway. I e-mailed d'Artagnan about half an hour after she died; I didn't need to tell the other two, as they are both also friends of my sister so they knew already (and, in fact, I woke up the next morning to an e-mail of condolence from Athos). The next morning I e-mailed everyone else who needed to know, and, honestly, people have been amazing. I have previously mentioned my friends with the autistic toddler; well, the toddler's dad immediately offered to ferry me up north for the funeral, saying it would be a good reason to go and visit his father. His father lives in Bolton, so... well, yes, it's north, but Kendal is still quite a way on beyond Bolton. I am most deeply appreciative and grateful, because I was very much fearing another long taxi journey. While I did get two very nice taxi drivers last time, it's much better to travel with someone you already know well, especially in such circumstances. I was also able to tell my sisters that a large number of people they'd never met were currently praying for them; and they will need it, as there will now be a huge amount of stuff to sort out, not least selling the house (which is an undertaking in itself - it will need, at the very least, a deep clean and some repainting before it goes on the market).

There is a little poem by Joyce Grenfell I've always liked, and it seems appropriate to quote it here:

"If I should die before the rest of you,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone,
Nor, when I'm gone, speak in a Sunday voice,
But be your usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must;
Parting is hell,
But life goes on,
So sing as well."

Ever have one of those days that just feels wrong, despite the fact that objectively things are actually pretty good? I had one yesterday; they don't happen to me very often, and most of the time they mean I've done something wrong that didn't fully register at the time. However, I don't think that was the case yesterday. I think it was nothing more than the temperature. 17 degrees in February is enough to make anyone twitchy, and it really did not help that the landlord sent the odd-job people round to scalp the lawns. That shouldn't be starting for at least another month.

But, in fact, it was a surprisingly good day. The boiler engineer was pleasant and quiet (normally I like it when they're chatty, but I was not in the mood on that occasion). There's also the fact that d'Artagnan has a birthday coming up, so I decided to get him a voucher for his local bike shop; I didn't know exactly which that was, so I just did a search, found the three most highly recommended bike shops in the city where he lives, read the descriptions, and thought "yes, knowing him, it'll be that one". It was. They assured me they could sort out a voucher for me over the phone, so I rang them up, and when they discovered who it was for, they positively squeed. I had my ear bent for several minutes about what an inspiration he is... well, he is; but it's always good to hear it from someone else.

And then I got some unexpected news about Mum. Turns out they now think it's not a gall-bladder infection at all, but something much less serious which doesn't require treatment with antibiotics (she has refused those). So she may very well rally again, as she has done so many times before. Exactly how far she'll be able to rally is another matter, as she hasn't been able to eat or drink properly for nearly a week now, which will in itself have taken a toll. But still.

There were one or two other minor nice things that happened, too, but those were the main ones. I really need to train myself not to be derailed by unseasonal mildness; I wouldn't mind so much, but when it goes round masquerading as my conscience trying to point something out, that's a bit of a nuisance. Today, however, is another day.

I buy my shoes - infrequently, as I'm not really a great shoe person, preferring to have one pair per season with a few occasional exceptions - from a place called Vegetarian Shoes, which is based in Brighton. As a matter of fact, they're vegan shoes, as you would expect. They are your one-stop shop for really good quality, breathable, flexible, plant-based shoes; I just used to wear plastic, but I avoid that as much as possible these days, not just for environmental reasons but also because I'm quite susceptible to athlete's foot if I wear anything that doesn't breathe properly for too long. I haven't had that for many years now and I'd like to keep things that way.

Vegetarian Shoes do, however, have a particular type of style. They tend to the utilitarian, and, indeed, the clunky. If you're after a pair of steel toecaps, for instance, you're in immediate shoe heaven; they have at least a dozen different types of shoes and boots with those in. They also do a lot of trainers, which I'm aware are very popular but they aren't my thing (fine if you're a runner, but they really don't look elegant). And the sandals... well. If solid is what you're after, you'll do very well, but if you want something with a bit more finesse, you're struggling.

They do a few colours, but mostly what you can get there is black or white. This works for me, because I basically have black shoes (again, I do have a few pairs of Indian khussa shoes I trot out in high summer, but even one of those is black) - they go with everything. And it seems they have a bit of trouble selling the white, because lately I've had a few e-mails from them touting the white shoes as an ideal artistic canvas for personalised shoes. I will admit I have looked at those and thought "yes, some of those chunky white sandals would look an awful lot more elegant with, say, a bit of knotwork and maybe some of the cuter mediaeval marginalia images", but, although I would quite like a pair of workhorse sandals for the summer, I haven't bought them because I didn't have any suitable paints.

So. Yesterday, I'm fighting Sibyl all day (I changed her in the end because I didn't think her kit would stand a repeat of last night, and she didn't seem to be about to slow down... of course, as soon as I changed her, she did), and I'm thinking "this is a stress thing", and then I run across an appeal from our Kings. Yes, Kings plural; Drachenwald has two Kings at the moment, rather than a King and a Queen. Their Majesties are running low on tokens to give out to new members/children. My first thought was "ganutell flowers", and then I thought "don't be silly - those aren't really for children, at any rate not younger ones, as they squash too easily". So then I thought that maybe I could get a few of those blank mini boxes and paint them up with, I don't know, maybe an illuminated letter on top and a bit of knotwork. I do love my knotwork. Not too slow to do, and it's the sort of little thing that goes down well. Pretty much everyone has something they want to keep in a mini box.

Who sells mini boxes for painting? Oh yes. Hobbycraft. So I go and look over there, get myself a few of these boxes, and then look at their clearance section just in case there's anything there I could do with.

And... there is a set of leather paints. For less than half price. It's the last one. It goes straight into my basket.

So now, a little later, I can get myself a pair of big clunky white sandals in the happy knowledge that they don't have to remain white and clunky. (I have used good leather paints before, and they really do stay. My mother once gave me a rather tired-looking pair of beige boots she no longer wore, and I thought, boots good, beige bad; and I painted them bright emerald green. They did splendidly for years!)

I still have a mother who is clearly on her way out, and no news. But I also have the prospect of some art to do, in addition to what I'm already doing; and it's helping with the sanity quite a lot.

To my great astonishment and that of my sisters, we do still have a mother. My sister e-mailed last night to say she was looking so bad they didn't think she'd last the night, so they were going to take it in turns sitting up with her. This morning I'd heard nothing, so I e-mailed, and said if it was bad news I'd honestly rather have an e-mail, as I find that easier to process. (I have had the news of someone's death on the phone before. I didn't handle it well.) I didn't get a reply before church, so I set off; the not-knowing bit is very difficult. Still, I wanted to go, partly for itself and partly because I had a few things for various people I knew would be there (knitted jumper for the latest new baby in our congregation, and some chocolate bars I don't like because of the texture but I know someone who very much does).

I arrived home and wasn't quite sure I wanted to go near the computer straight away, and in any case I had mundane things to do in the kitchen; I needed to cut up and fry half the seitan I made yesterday and freeze the other half, rinse the hand washing and hang up such of it as I had room for, heat up the curry for lunch, and so on. I did all that and finally approached the laptop, duly fortified by the curry.

My sister had e-mailed about 1 pm. Yup. She's still with us. Great Scott, she's tough.

So, we're all still watching this space, for the moment, and it's rather hard to post about anything else. I'll give it a go tomorrow, if things remain the same.