Hilary Moon Murphy

A Whole Bunch of Grousing

December 19, 2000

Here's a list of some of the things that bug me right now:

Rejections

I haven't gotten any lately. Where are they? I have seven pieces out, and some of them should have responded by now. I feel like I have dropped off the planet. Even Gordon Van Gelder, my most regular correspondent, has forgotten me. Gordon, Gordon, wherefore art thou?

Badly Made Baby Clothes

These manufacturing offences should be felonies:

• Small neck holes that cannot go over large baby heads;

• Baby outfits that button (or even worse, lace up) in the back;

• Pant legs without elastic cuffs that trip crawlers and new walkers;

• Draw strings - the ultimate strangulation hazard;

• Dry-Clean only material;

• One piece outfits that do not have snaps in the bottom!

Who designs these things, anyway? Sheesh.

Blizzards

Minnesota received a half foot of snow yesterday. For those of you that live in balmier climes, this means shoveling. Lots of it. I spent an hour and a half shoveling snow from our walkways, driveway, and around our recycling and garbage bins. Hey, who needs a health club membership anyway?

Traffic yesterday was just plain awful. Buses ran anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour late. Fortunately for me, I'm chronically early and so arrived barely on time. I got to man the downtown children's department by myself until my colleagues all straggled in, still shivering.

The American Electoral Process

I'm going to cheat and let fellow rat Anne do my grousing for me…

My Utter Lack of Writing Discipline

Some of you may notice that this has been my fourth journal entry without a word count. I've written up plot notes and sketched out a couple of scenes to a story that I thought I had trunked, but I don't think any of this counts. Nag me. Nag me often and ruthlessly.

Evil Christmas Present Hints

Every year, Andy buys me a Christmas Present, and then torments me with useless clues to what it is.

One year, he said, "Your present is small, red, fragile and you asked for it." I knew that I had not asked for anything small, red, or fragile. I was certain of this.

What I had forgotten was a conversation that we had had a few months before. He asked me what I wanted for Christmas on a day that the Minneapolis Public Library Bookmobile broke down. I told him, "All I want is a bookmobile!"

He took me at my word and gave me the Dept 56 Christmas Village Bookmobile. It was small, red, fragile and I had asked for it.

This year, he told me that I cannot hold my present. When I whined about this to my friend Frank Tuttle, Frank graciously sent me this hint:

By the way, Andy let this slip while we were discussing the gifts we had given to our wives:

Clearly, the integral of BnV around the closed contour C with transverse velocity of magnitude V for each length dl traversed is simply the time rate of change of the magnetic flux through the surface bounded by C. This change is due directly to the passage of path C through lines of magnetic flux. Hence, the complete expression of e.m.f. above in eq.(10) is the time rate of change of the magnetic flux over any surface S bounded by the closed path C, due to the changing magnetic field and the movement of the path through the magnetic field. eq.(10) may be written --

But here, I've said too much already! Suffice it to say that delta(x)/delta(G) is inversely proportional to the flux density (Q) when the etheric plane flux directional constant Ef describes a sinusoidal emergence path about asymptotic vector P(fex)!

So I cannot hold it, and it involves incomprehensible math. Ha! They can't fool me. This time I know what I got.

A black hole. I'll use it to clean out the cat boxes in the basement.

Hmm