The show portion of the Bichon Frise National Specialty 2010 finished out today, and I’ll take a break from cleaning up and packing (which includes washing all the dog towels we brought) to summarize.
I made a McDonald’s run for the gang this morning at oh-dark-30, all the while that Carol and our friends were furiously brushing and tipping down in the grooming area. Both Aero and Dash were showing today, so I got a chance to put on my best suit and parade our puppy around the ring. Dash doesn’t like leashes, but he held his head up a little better today, and picked up Fourth Place in Open Puppy Dog 10-12 Months, out of a field of nine, again including most of the Bichon Powers. (Bogglingly, we beat a couple of nationally known handlers and their dogs.) Carol says that I’m picking up the dog handling thing pretty well, and although I could smell myself sweat, the judge evidently liked what she saw.
Carol handled Aero in Amateur Owner/Handler, and although it was a small category, she took First Place, just as she did last year. Aero is a very good dog, and few dogs that good are handled by their owners. (Most show dogs of Aero’s quality are owned by wealthy people who hire professional handlers to take them around the country and show them.) Ordinarily, being a champion would disqualify Aero for any category except Best of Breed, but since we entered Aero in the show before he completed his championship, he got to stay in the category. Carol and Aero did not place in later rounds, but considering who we were up against, that isn’t really surprising.
So we’re taking home three ribbons this year: Two Fourth Places for Dash, and one First Place for Aero. Overall a fine showing, and we’re lookiung forward to the big Colorado Springs show in June, where Dash has his first serious shot at a major win. We’ve decided to spend another night here for reasons of simple exhaustion, which was fortunate because there’s a tornado watch in force for most of our path back to Chicago. (By tomorrow morning all that should have passed on over Ohio.) As the bichon crowd leaves the hotel, other groups are filtering in (including a hot-air balloon convention) and we’ve begun hearing an old line that curdles any bichon person’s blood: “Look at the pretty poodles!” Yup. Time to go home.
Bichon Powers…activate?
Congrats, of course. But investing your life in how your dogs look is perhaps, err. Dude, you’re brilliant. I have some hope that you aren’t entirely done with flashing that bit around, yet.
Jeff’s gotta do something to take a break in between all the bouts of skull sweat writing assembly language books and science fiction. And he’s not into video games the way some of us are. 🙂
Not hardly. It just hasn’t been convenient to write much on Contra lately, for various reasons. I’ve been trying to get Cold Hands proofed and finished so I can post it on Lulu, and there’s just a lot of stuff going on here that I don’t have to deal with at home. I want to do a series on writing that plays off the pulps, since I’m increasingly convinced that I’m really a pulp fiction writer. And then there’s the question of what to do with my 2005 Wi-Fi book. If somebody offers me money to update it, I just might. Too many of my books have vanished over the publishing event horizon. So not to worry: I’m still out here doing interesting things, even if I sometimes get out of touch.
Jeff the pulp writer … I thought that The Cunning Blood would have been right at home in a golden-age Astounding, but I did get a similar feeling for you other work. Of course, TCB is also my favorite of all your work. More ‘pulp’ fiction of that order would certain be appreciated here.
It’s coming. I’ve now got a good outline for Hellsnatch, which is a novella-sized action prequel to TCB, in which we learn how Protea comes to Hell, and also who took the covert movie of the Ralpha Dogs’ first operational roton as it launched.
As time allows I’m going to massage my very pulp-ish and Keith Laumer-ish Firejammer into book form, and will eventually publish the two novellas as a Copperwood Double, though whether I can invert them with respect to one another remains to be seen. (I’ve been meaning to ask our former Coriolis layout goddess how to do that, and it hasn’t percolated to the top of the list yet.)
It helps to know that somebody actually wants the material; I can’t get agents to even return my emails. Thanks for the vote of confidence. (You’d think two Hugo nominations and a third of a million computer books in print would mean something, but apparently not.)
On the layout question, if your target is a PDF file, Adobe’s software allows you to rotate the pages, and at least some programs permit you to print last page to first page. Together, those would allow you to print the second book the way it was needed. It also is possible to combine two PDF files into one. So the first book printed normally into one PDF file, the second printed into another PDF file upside down and backwards, then combine the two PDF files — that ought to give you a PDF in the form you want.
If your desired target is a different format than PDF, the above might not be helpful.