Ursula K. Le Guin is dead.

As far as my own native field of sf/fantasy goes, she was one of the giants in the earth.  The Left Hand of Darkness was groundbreaking, and it’s the book that’s getting namechecked in the obits, though I personally liked The Dispossessed  better.  (She depicted the only fictional utopia I could actually imagine existing – not one that I would want to live in even if you paid me, but one that I could believe might be real.)  As for her fantasy – I read A Wizard of Earthsea during the summer between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, and it made the top of my head come off.

Good-bye, Ursula, and thanks.  It was an honor to share a genre with you.

So what have I been doing?

Shivering, a lot of the time:

The last week of December and the first week or so of January were brutal up here – a solid stretch of subzero temperatures.  (I lie a little; the temperature got all the way up to 3°F for about an hour one afternoon.)  Everything froze.  The electric baseboard heating did its damnedest, but was totally unequal to the task. I spent most of the time huddled in the office, that being the warmest room in the house, for values of “warm” that weren’t, not really.

Struggling with a crumbling household infrastructure, a lot of the time:

The plumbing, as mentioned above.

My elderly desktop computer, which was new in 2011 and by the end of 2017 was groaning under the strain of going from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, and which – just as the subzero cold was easing up – went in a few days from slow-but-functional to functional-in-name-only.  It was like watching a wall crumble, brick by brick.  Finally I gave up and moved my vital work and household programs over to my laptop, which is much younger and herkier than my desktop.

The auto, which went from burning oil a bit faster than we’d like to burning through all its oil and blowing the engine at shortly before midnight on Route 3 just south of Franconia Notch, while we were on the way home from what had been, all things considered, a pretty good Arisia.  We ended up spending two nights in an inexpensive hotel in Lincoln (Parker’s Motel, for whose whose kindness to stranded travelers I am exceedingly grateful), before ultimately getting a tow the rest of the way back to Colebrook so we could put the car into the hands of our local auto shop.

The dishwasher, which responded to the subzero weather by freezing up, and which now is refusing to drain.

The oven, which has a burned-out heating element.  That, at least, is a cheap fix.  I just need to order the part.  But the way life has been this month, I haven’t yet gotten around to it.  But I will, real soon now, because I’m tired of cycling through my stove-top, Foreman grill, and slow-cooker recipes.  I want to make lasagna, or enchiladas, or scallopped potatoes, or roasted chicken.

So that’s my month so far.  How about yours?