Doubtful Muse

Cover Me!

2009-07-31T07:40:00.001-07:00

It's taken literally months, not to mention a very patient artist, but we finally have a cover for The Art of Effective Dreaming!

Thanks to everyone on the mailing list and on Facebook who helped out with this! I'm sure I wouldn't have worked out the problem with my own cover preferences without your help.

And what was the problem?

The problem is that there's a conflict between the title of the book, the content, and my cover design preferences.

For example, here are some of the covers that we tested, in order of my preferences -- i.e., my preferred covers are at the top.

The problem that the test groups helped me see was that the title of the book sounds like one of those silly self help books (presumably non-fiction, although I sometimes beg to differ), which it does because that's kind of the point, and the cover style I was leaning to is a type often used exactly for that sort of pop psychology book, leading a lot of people to mistakenly think the book was meant to be nonfiction.

Ack!

And so, as much as I hated to do it, I chose my least favorite cover simply because it was the one that looked the least like a self help book.

Therefore, here it is, the final cover for The Art of Effective Dreaming by Gillian Polack!

You Can't Get There From Here

2009-05-31T13:48:00.001-07:00

Have you ever had that feeling that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, things are a mess and anything you do to try to fix them, is only going to make them worse? That's certainly been my mood for the last few weeks; I've felt as if I were walking around with storm clouds over my head!

It all started with my computer. I love my computer. I've had it for several years, but it was top of the line when I got it, and I don't feel it's obsolete yet. However, the hard drive started to fail and a couple of weeks ago, I began to get CHKDSK errors every time I started it -- time for a new hard drive. I backed up as much as I could on a removable hard drive and then I took it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to get the hard drive cloned. Fairly simple, right? Maybe not.

I have dual hard drives and they are huge, and I thought it was important to have them completely backed up before starting the clone procedure, so I told the Geek Squad to do that first. It took four days just to do the back up. Yikes! At the same time this was going on, the artist who is doing the cover for The Art of Effective Dreaming sent me the first proofs. Brilliant! Except that all I had to look at them with was my little laptop and I couldn't really get a good view.

ARRRRGGH!

I've been waiting for sooooo long -- completely my fault, not the artist's -- but still, I was dying to really examine the proofs. And I couldn't. Except for the color, which was, unfortunately, too close to the brown shade used on our last book. I asked her if she'd mind changing that base color to something else, and she said she wouldn't, but that she'd hold off sending me new proofs until I got my computer back since I couldn't really look at them anyway.

OK. But, AAAARRRRGGGHHH!

In the meantime, Geek Squad called and said I needed to come and pick out the new hard drives. DH and I went to do that. And then we had another problem. Because there are two drives, they have to match exactly, but Best Buy only had one of the model I chose in stock, so we had to get another one from a different store. A helpful clerk called around until we found a store that had one in stock and then we made arrangements for DH to pick it up. Geek Squad said it would only take a little while to install it once they had it in hand. Great. This was on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. We made arrangements to bring in the drive the next day (Saturday). They said they should have it by Monday. Great.

Monday morning we called to see what time it would be ready. They weren't sure. "Call back tomorrow," they said. "Tomorrow," was Tuesday; DH was leaving for California that day, so he wouldn't be home to help me pick it up even if it was ready. That was a problem because my surgery last autumn has left me less than capable of carrying heavy things. DH wouldn't be home until Friday. So that meant more than two weeks without my computer. ARRRRRGGHHH!

DH left on Tuesday as planned and that afternoon, Geek Squad called to tell me that my computer was ready. Of course. They also left a message stating that they wouldn't hold it longer than five days. I felt like going over there and strangling all of them. By this point, however, I was resigned, so I simply called and asked them to please put it aside because we wouldn't be able to get it until Friday.

That night there were terrible storms. Thunder, lightning, the whole nine yards. Pippin, my dog, who is normally not afraid of storms, was suddenly terrified. Neither of us got any sleep. I left for work in a cranky, miserable mood, but I should have known the fun was only just beginning. I turned out from a traffic light and my car wouldn't accelerate properly. The RPMs just kept going up and up, but the gears didn't seem to be shifting (it's an automatic transmission). So there I was in rush hour traffic and I couldn't make my car go any faster than 35 miles per hour -- and while it was going even that fast, it sounded like a 737 on the runway getting ready to take off!

I nursed the car about a mile down the road until I found a side street to turn off on. People behind were honking and being a$$holes the entire time, so when I got there, I was on the verge of tears. I turned off the car, tried to call DH (who didn't answer), and fiddled around in my briefcase, looking for my Triple A card and the number for my office so I could let them know I'd be late. I found neither, so I sat there for a while, just trying to calm down. Once I'd done that, I decided to try the car again on the side street since there wasn't any traffic. It seemed to work just fine, so I cautiously edged it back out on to the main road and took it on to work.

When I got there, I rang the dealership and made an appointment to bring it in for service the next afternoon. I gingerly drove it back and forth to work and then to the dealership, terrified the whole time that I was going to have a repeat performance, but I didn't. The people at the dealership were very nice; they gave me a rental car as a loaner, which I took all the way home before I realized that I had left my house key on my key ring. With my car. I had to go all the way back and get it and then drive home again. All at rush hour, knowing that my dog was probably having fits locked in my house (he was).

The thing that really capped off my week happened on Friday. DH had been gone since Tuesday and he was supposed to be home early in the afternoon on Friday. I'd had such an awful week and I was really looking forward to seeing him. I got a call from him on Friday afternoon to say that he had arrived, but that it appeared that he was going to have to leave on the next flight to Delaware -- and I wouldn't even make it home in time to see him before he left! ARRRRGGGHH!

When he told me that I very nearly melted down in a puddle of messy tears. Fortunately I did not. Nor did I give in to the urge to scream obscenities at him. He was able to push off his urgent trip for one day, so I got to see him for 24 hours before he left again. He picked up my computer from the Geek Squad and I have it now. He also went with me to return the loaner car and get my own car back. The problem with the car was apparently caused by a software bug and according to the dealership it has been fixed (we'll see about that).

DH is now in Delaware. The computer is in my office. My car is in the garage. And I'm hoping that the cloud is no longer over my head! I REALLY REALLY want to see those proofs of the cover for The Art of Effective Dreaming!

What You Wish For

2009-05-13T16:23:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in traffic this morning, skipping through the CDs I have in my car, and I hit on one song that I always used to listen to when I lived in Washington: "What You Wish For" by Guster. It started me thinking of how strange my life has been these last few years. I mean, I've gotten something, but I'm not really sure it was what I wished for. What did I wish for?

Wishing has always been a problem for me. Not that I don’t have wishes, but they've always been a bit amorphous. When I was growing up, I was never one of those children who said, "I want to be an accountant when I grow up." Life would have been so much easier if I'd been able to do that. In fact, oddly enough, I've never had a clear desire to occupy any kind of specific profession. I don't mean, I didn't want to work; I did, and I always have done, but I didn't have a particular job that I wanted to do. I could take the easy way out and say I wanted to be a writer, but then I've always been a writer, ever since I was old enough to hold a pen in my hand. To me, that's not a job, that's life.

I know when I was young, I hoped someday to fall in love, and maybe even to get married. That, I've done, so I'm sure I've fulfilled at least one of my dreams, but the reality is incredibly different, and better, than anything I could have imagined. At one point, I wished for children. That didn't work out, but now that my disappointment has faded, I see that I received so many unwished for gifts in life – things so far beyond my wildest dreams – that I doubt I would trade them for the wish I did have.

It pleases me to think that I have come far enough down the road in life to be able to appreciate the fact that even though I do not always know what I want, or what is best, there are good things here to be had and enjoyed. For example, as my friends on Facebook know, I went to a charity ball last week, after agonizing madly over what I was going to wear. I only had one long dress and I didn't want to spend the money on another one. The problem was that my only long dress was bright pink, but I have been told all my life that I shouldn't wear pink because I have red hair and it clashes. For the two weeks prior to the ball, I spent a lot of time wishing that my dress wasn't pink, or that my hair wasn't red. Indeed, I almost bleached my hair blond because I was so disgusted with it. But after whingeing for days, I sucked it up and went to the ball. And I had a good time – my wishes were clearly stupid, but I was handed the gift of a good time on a plate, and I was at least smart enough to be able to appreciate it.

I haven't learned how to do this with everything, but I plan to keep trying!

What You Wish For
Guster

Woke up today
To everything gray
And all that I saw
Just kept going on and on
Sweep all the pieces under the bed
Close all the curtains and cover my head
And what you wish for
Won't come true
You aren't surprised love
Are you?

If this serenade
(Repeat after me . . . just a little bit closer)
Is not what you want
(And do what I say . . . caught up in a lie)
It just how it is
(It won't change a thing . . . got a little bit colder)
It keeps going on and on

Come out come out wherever you are
Would you do it all over
Right from the start?
And what you wish for
Won't come true
You aren't surprised love
Are you?

And what you wish for
Won't come true
You aren't surprised love
Are you?
Once had this dream
Crashed down in Oz
Not black and white
But where the colors are

I never dreamed that
I would let it go
And I will get
What I deserve
Keep all the secrets
under the bed
Open the curtains
forget what I said

And what you wish for
Could come true
You act surprised, love
Are you?

Riding the Bull

2009-04-15T18:39:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, DH and I went to see Sara Bareilles in concert. She performed at the Austin Rodeo, so instead of having another band as her opening act, there were rodeo events instead. All the different events – calf roping, barrel racing, and such – looked hard, but the big one – the one with the real tough guys – was the bull riding. To get on a huge angry beast that has horns and try to stay on it while it tries to buck you off so it can kill you – that takes some cojones, man!

Oddly enough, I was getting ready to leave the house this morning and I thought of that bull riding contest. For the last three weeks or so, I think I've felt almost exactly like one of those guys sitting on the bull's back!

Does that sound melodramatic? Of course it does. But after telecommuting and doing various writing projects from a home office for the last nine years, I decided that in order to keep my publishing company in business, I was going to have to accept a job that requires me to work in a downtown office. It's just a temporary job, and it's a great one at that – I'd be insane to complain about getting paid lots of money to write, just because I have to leave my house to do it.

In addition to the job, I've done so much in the last few weeks. I have, for example, visited my relatives in Arkansas (and attended my uncle's birthday party). I've also managed to snag a couple of truly awesome Louis XIV-style chairs at the Round Top antiques fair, which I attended weekend before last. I've found a cover-artist for The Art of Effective Dreaming, which I can now (woohoo!) afford to pay for – a much better solution than futzing around and doing a half-assed job of it myself. I've tested "Dreaming" on the Kindle and it works, so I think we'll be good to go with an ebook version as soon as I can get the paperback version of the book released. I've found the perfect Badgley Mischka dress for my brother in law's wedding in August and the perfect pair of Manolo's to go with it (you know I keep my priorities straight).

So, you see, this isn't really a whinge, it's more like a "Whoa Nelly!" while I hang on to the bull.

Women's History Month

2009-03-28T15:58:00.001-07:00

In past years, I've had more time to spend writing about WHM, but even though I haven't been able to write anything about it this year until now, I've been giving it quite a bit of thought. One of the things that I keep noticing in articles about women's history is a tendency to pick out some woman or another who did some job or another and say, "Look! She did this thing!"

That's all fine and dandy, and I wouldn't want to take away from anyone's accomplishments, but quite frankly I can't think of anything less interesting than reading yet another ode to a twentieth century woman who was a lawyer or a doctor or a scientist when everybody knows that "women didn't do that." Why? Because it's all HOGWASH. Women DID do it, at least they certainly did in the twentieth century, and we all know it, so it's disingenuous to keep pretending that it's such a complete surprise to find a woman who did whatever this thing is that has apparently left the writer breathless.

I think it would be more valuable for those of us who care about women's history to actually pay a bit of attention to the women in our own histories because if we don't document their lives, then who else is going to? Turning that thought to my own life, it occurs to me that the last thing I'd want to be remembered for was for any sort of job I'd done! I'm not a mother, but I know that if I were, I'd want to be remembered for that. I'd want to be remembered as a daughter, and a niece, and as a friend. I'd want to be remembered as a wife. If I were a sister, I'd want to be remembered for that. I'd want to be remembered for trying to do good somewhere, some how. But the thought of only being remembered for doing some job, doesn't make me happy at all.

Auntie was in the Foreign Service for thirty years, but it isn't the job itself that's memorable about her. It's that she's so intrepid. She was in all kinds of dangerous hardship posts like Damascus during the 1960s, and Nigeria, and various other ones. She had a fascinating career (more than one; she had another after she left the FS), and it's part of who she is, but what's important about her isn't what jobs she held.

My grandmother went to college during the Great Depression. She worked some as a teacher, and also as a clerk in my great grandfather's law office when he was the County Clerk. I doubt if it would have mattered much to her to be remembered for any of that. I do, however, think it would please her to know that I remember her for teaching me to read Shakespeare when I was nine years old. And for making the best orange cake on the planet. And for being a defining influence on my life. I also think others would have known and loved her as a wife, a daughter, a sister, a mother, and a grandmother. And if she'd ever thought about that (And who knows? Maybe she did!) she would think herself well-served by our memories.

If women's history is ever going to be more than a freak-show, I believe it has to move beyond trivializing the activities and accomplishments of everyday women. Not just the ones who become Supreme Court Justices. It has to include the woman next door who bakes cookies for her kids. And those of us who ARE women are the ones who have to make this happen. We have to look at the women in our lives and we have to pay attention to the value of what we're all doing. We have to look at the lives of our grandmothers and our mothers, our aunts and our cousins, our sisters and our friends, and we have to look at our own lives, and we have to acknowledge that we are all making history and it's up to us to recognize it and acknowledge it in each other.

Change at Seattle Post Intelligencer is a good thing for Seattle - I don't THINK so

2009-03-18T05:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I wrote a post about my sadness to see the last print edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. I received the following comment on that post from business consultant Adam Hartung, author of "Create Marketplace Disruption," who writes The Phoenix Principle blog.

The change at Seattle Post Intelligencer is a good thing for Seattle, and for Hearst. Developing a viable news model for on-line reporting is important to future readers and society.

I had a look at Mr. Hartung's blog and then I clicked over to the new PI site to see how it was going on the first day of their new venture. The site looked approximately the same, and it appeared to have been updated with local stories, but when I clicked into the headline story, it was just a two sentence blog-type post by someone I wasn't familiar with. And so, I clicked over to the PI's former newspaper rival, the Seattle Times to get the *real* local news for the Seattle area.

There, in addition to the local news, I found an interesting column by Danny Westneat who had written about a goodbye rally a Seattle Times reporter had organized for the PI reporters, editors, and photographers on Monday. He wrote:

Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton organized it as a memorial of sorts, to say thanks to the P-I's reporters for helping tell the city's stories. He said he wanted it to be like when a firefighter dies and all the other firefighters come to the funeral.

It was. We gathered in a little park near the P-I offices. Some spoke wistfully, others ruefully. When it was my turn I said that while everyone is focused, understandably, on the corporate side of newspapering — on the making of profits — it's worth remembering that that's not why anyone goes into journalism. Reporting is what matters. Asking questions, prying things open, telling stories.

And this:

So Seattle wakes up today a one-newspaper town for the first time. But The Seattle Times is hardly alone. It's also a multiple-Web-site-town. And a dozens- or hundreds-of-blogs town.

Someone at the rally compared today to the frontier days — an unruly but inventive era when some of today's news businesses first formed.

Loggers or fishermen will tell you living through sea change like that isn't easy.

I take comfort that they also say this: We're still here.

I think it's fascinating at how views like Mr. Hartung's diverge from those of Mr. Westneat. Mr. Hartung thinks in terms of business model and how the PI's model and, the newspaper industry's model in general, is flawed and must be changed or it will completely die. I agree with him; this is patently obvious.

And yet, Mr. Hartung doesn't see, or doesn't acknowledge what is also patently obvious -- that if the newspaper industry dies, we, as a culture, will suffer a tremendous loss. Because this is not just about making money for Hearst of Sam Zell or anyone else. Mr. Hartung wrote his own blog post about the death of the PI and in that post, apparently, without realizing it, he alludes to the problem:

The on-line paper already achieves about 4million hits/month, and it hasn't really started trying to be competitive on-line. The site (www.seattlepi.com) already has 150 bloggers - so you could make a case it has more reporters than were let go from the old newsroom. And it has made agreements to pick up content from Hearst Magazines, xconomy and TV Guide amongst other partners.

Right.

The size already has 150 bloggers - so you could make a case it has more reporters than were let go...

Um, no. That is a problem.

Why?

Well, it isn't because the bloggers are inferior as writers (although they may be; there's no way of knowing). It's because, at least on this first day of the new PI, these bloggers are not writing articles, they are writing two sentence blog posts! I clicked over to the Seattle Times because I wanted to read the local news, which means I wanted details; I wanted quotes; I wanted sources. In short, I wanted articles! Journalists know how to do this. I can get syndicated content anywhere, however, now that the *real* PI is gone, I apparently will need to go to the Seattle Times web site to get detailed news about Seattle.

Although Danny Westneat has a vested interest because he wants to keep his job, I think he is a smart guy because he understands what he, as a reporter, is supposed to be doing: telling stories.

A note to Mr. Hartung -- if you are going to advise the newspaper industry, you need to incorporate this aspect of it into your business model. There MUST be stories; they MUST be detailed; and they MUST be LOCAL. The Huffington Post is fine, but advising every paper to try to be just like them is silly.

As for the Seattle PI, well, hopefully, they're just having first day glitches and they'll improve as they go along.

In Honor of the Seattle Post Intelligencer

2009-03-17T04:51:00.001-07:00

Today is the last print run of a newspaper I have long admired: the Seattle Post Intelligencer. I was a faithful reader and subscriber both times when I lived in Washington and I've continued to read that paper online nearly every day since I moved away from Washington. After today, the paper will continue with a limited online-only edition, but somehow, it won't be the same.

I know it seems peculiar in this day and age, but I'm such a newspaper lover. I mean a real news-PAPER lover -- I like the ink and the paper and the pages themselves. I've been this way ever since my dad started working for the Tribune Company when I was 13, and he started getting all kinds of newspapers sent to the house. When he did that, I started reading all those newspapers and I became addicted.

In all the different places I've lived, I've subscribed to a local rag, and once the web came along, I continued to read many of those I left behind. I currently subscribe to the hard-copy edition to the San Antonio Express, and I pay for some online stories from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. I also read the online editions of the NYT, the Seattle PI, the Houston Chronicle, and the occasional story from the Lake Charles American Press and the Chicago Tribune.

None of this is strictly about the news -- you can get that straight from AP and Reuters (or the plain vanilla CNN) -- it's about the place. With the exception of the New York Times, which I read because it tends to have more in-depth coverage of major events, the primary reason I read newspapers from different places I've lived is because those papers give not only in-depth coverage of those specific regions, but they also report with the viewpoints of those regions.

For example, when Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast last fall, I wanted to read about it in the Houston Chronicle. Who else would have a more relevant viewpoint? CNN? The NYT? The Seattle PI? Highly doubtful. Of course those viewpoints were relevant when I wanted to read about how the rest of the country viewed the storm, but not when I wanted details about the storm itself. And now, no one cares about the aftermath of the storm except the Gulf Coast, and so for that, once again, I turn to the Houston Chronicle.

It works that way for most things. For an earthquake in California, naturally, I turn to the LA Times. For the economic melt-down in the car industry, I start with the Detroit Free Press. There are so many wonderful newspapers: the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Austin American Statesman...

The economic downturn and falling advertising revenues has really hit the newspaper industry hard. The Tribune Company, where my dad finished his career, declared bankruptcy in December, and it made me incredibly sad. The venerable Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado, which began in 1859, published its final issue in February.

And now, today, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which started in 1863 is distributing its last press run. Without these papers, the news will still go on and it will still be reported, but we lose so much when we lose these local voices doing the reporting of it. The headline on the final issue of the PI is "You've meant the world to us" -- playing on the iconic symbol of the globe that sits atop the PI building in Seattle. I think I can say the same back to the PI and all the other great newspapers out there.

You've meant the world to us.

A Bug the Size of a Mouse?

2009-03-09T11:45:00.001-07:00

I made a cake for DH's birthday last week and it was a success. I also encountered -- in my bathroom -- one of the not-so-wonderful local species: a palmetto bug. As to whether or not the outcome of that meeting would be defined as a success, I believe it probably would depend upon your viewpoint. Suffice to say, the bug probably would not agree with defining as a success.

If you've never been to the Gulf Coast, you probably have no idea of what I'm talking about. A palmetto bug is like a roach. a GINORMOUS roach. These puppies are about two inches long and they are nasty. They normally live outside, and they don't seem to be attracted to the kitchen like a cockroach would; they go for the closet, or the bathroom, or the bedroom. Oh, and they can fly. There are all kinds of stories about them flying around and tangling in long hair. Yikes!

I still shudder when I think about the first time I encountered the horrid little beasties. I was about 10 years old and spending the summer with my grandparents in Florida. I stuck my foot into my tennis shoe and felt something odd in there. I pulled my foot out and shook the shoe and not one, but two palmetto bugs fell out of it! Naturally, I screamed the house down and my grandmother came and killed them, but to this day, I never put on a shoe without shaking it first.

I had almost gotten over my palmetto bug trauma by the time we first moved to Houston 12 years ago. However, we had only been living there for a few weeks when I heard a sound that I originally thought was a mouse in the closet. DH and I had just gone to bed and I kept hearing rustle, rustle rustle. He refused to do anything about it, but I couldn't sleep, so I got up and turned on the light in the hall, thinking that if it was a mouse, then the light would at least drive it to another room.

The rustling didn't stop when I turned on the light, which seemed kind of strange. That's a pretty bold mouse, I thought, and I went to look in the closet. It wasn't a mouse; it was a palmetto bug. But it was easily as big as a mouse! Naturally, I screamed the house down -- and nearly caused DH to have a heart attack since I was only standing about 3 feet away. He tried to kill it and missed and it scuttled behind some shoes, so he told me to go back to bed and he turned off the light. I could hear it in there going rustle, rustle, rustle. The dog could hear it too, so he started barking. Thank heavens for Alexander the pekingese because it was his barking that bugged DH enough to finally get up and get rid of the palmetto bug (Yes; I know I should have done it, but I'm terrified of the stupid things).

Fast forward 12 years. I was putting something in DH's closet and Pippin the pekingese started barking hysterically. (Apparently pekingeses don't like palmetto bugs either) I turned around to find Pippin and Tabitha (my kitty) facing off with a huge palmetto bug. I stood there for a moment, hoping Kitty would do something to it, like whack it with a paw or something, but she was totally useless.

Well, damn, I thought. My pets aren't going to do anything, so I'm going to have to kill it. Then, I looked around the room for something I could use to do it with. I was in the bathroom, which I had just cleaned, so there wasn't anything lying around that I could hit it with, and it was between me and the door. Of course, I was barefooted, so I couldn't just step on it. I had a reassuring thought: What if it starts flying around? Yikes!

Then I saw the bottle of Windex that I'd used to clean the mirrors. I could hit it with that, but it would be disgusting. But I wondered, what would happen if I sprayed it with Windex?

I will not go any further except to say that while Windex is probably not a good alternative to an exterminator, it was sufficient for the task. I suspect, however, that the man who cleans our pool thinks I am a bit odd. I did not know he was out there until after I had got rid of the bug, but I am fairly certain that he heard me yelling, "Hah! Take that, you frikking b#####d!" because when I saw him (the pool man), he asked if everything was quite all right. I gave him what I hoped was my best Mona Lisa smile, but I think he is still wondering.

Marvelous Day: Mission Accomplished

2009-02-24T12:56:00.000-08:00

It isn't that I suddenly have a new ambition to become Suzie Homemaker (Like that's even a possibility!), it's more a part of the ongoing healing process from the health problems I experienced last fall. The physical part of that healing was difficult enough, but coming so close to death made me aware of things that I have taken for granted and I decided then, that if I survived, I wouldn't do that any more. And so, I am not.

I made a promise to myself that if and when I was able, I would make a point of finding new friends in my new home, instead of burying myself in "work" – no matter how important I or anyone said that work was – because work is never as important as having and making friends. Work IS important; money is important, but not at the expense of friendships.

The same thing goes for cooking. I have let my husband cook for me for so many years because I am a terrible cook. It isn't intentional; I just am. DH, on the other hand, is a great cook, and he generally enjoys it. But still, even if I make terrible meals, it's only right that I make the effort, even if it always sucks. And so, I am doing that too. His birthday is this week, and I intend to make him a cake from scratch. I have no doubt that it will likely suck, but what the heck? He's worth the effort.

I suppose being so ill has been good for me in one way because it has given me an important reminder of how short life is and how important it is not to waste it by being too busy all the time. Marvelous days only come when you make them.

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

The Vasty Deep

2009-02-20T12:09:00.000-08:00

=== Begin Whinge Here ===

Lately, I feel as if I'm walking through deep water. You know how it feels to walk through deep water. It's difficult. Sometimes a current pulls at your feet and you feel as if you'll be swept away at any moment. Waves lap at your chest and you know that a bigger one might come along and go right over the top of your head. That's how life has been recently. Something is either going to pull me down, or go over my head! Not a good feeling.

There are a number of reasons for my water-imagery. I've nearly completed my latest book, but a multiplicity of technical issues has arisen: repeated software failures, a broken printer, stuff like that. Getting to the finish line is like trudging through a swamp. There are times when I want to just throw in the towel. I won't, but I sure do want to.

The back-drop to all of this is getting used to another new place, and the constant bad news about the economy. I am so happy to be in Texas, where the sun shines while I'm dealing with these problems because, right now, that sun is one of the few saving graces of my life, and you'd better believe I am thankful for it. I'm also grateful for my DH and my animals, and many other things too numerous to mention here, and I know my little setbacks are petty. But there have been so many of them; they are really beginning to stack up!

I need to unstack them. This is one of the times when I really miss my grandmother because talking to her was always such an excellent way of gaining perspective on things. I never went to her with a big problem dump, but she was just so good at making me see the value in things, without actually spelling it out.

She's not here, so I suppose I have to find my way out of my mess all on my own. C'est la vie.

Shame on the Authors Guild!

2009-02-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

With the exception of the Friday night dining and dancing that DH and I did to celebrate the 22nd anniversary of our Friday the 13th meeting in February 1987, I haven't had a particularly good week. It wasn't particularly bad -- we did get the new carpet installed in our guest room, but it wasn't really stellar either. It was just a random garden-variety week.

Today, however, I saw something that really irked me: the Authors Guild, a group I normally hold in high regard, has decided to slam the blind. I cannot believe it.

I don't think they intentionally set out to slam the blind; I think they intentionally set out to hate on Amazon and the new Kindle 2. They (the AG) issued a statement reminding members that audio-book sales surpassed $1 billion in 2007 and recommending that members not grant e-books rights to Amazon until they can work out ways to get more money from them, but in a noxious way:

In the meantime, we recommend that if you haven't yet granted your e-book rights to backlist or other titles, this isn't the time to start. If you have a new book contract and are negotiating your e-book rights, make sure Amazon's use of those rights is part of the dialog. Publishers certainly could contractually prohibit Amazon from adding audio functionality to its e-books without authorization, and Amazon could comply by adding a software tag that would prohibit its machine from creating an audio version of a book unless Amazon has acquired the appropriate rights.

That's right. The Authors Guild wants to make extra money from blind and low-vision people. I'm sorry but that is disgusting. If a person PAYS for a book and wants or NEEDS to listen to it instead of reading it with their eyes, then by golly they should be able to do it. What is the loss to the author? They still receive a royalty on the book purchase.

The National Federation for the Blind has issued a response to the Authors Guild:

Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “The National Federation of the Blind supports all technologies that allow blind people to have better access to the printed word, including the ability of devices like the Kindle 2 to read commercial e-books aloud using text-to-speech technology. Although the Authors Guild claims that it supports making books accessible to the blind, its position on the inclusion of text-to-speech technology in the Kindle 2 is harmful to blind people. The Authors Guild says that having a book read aloud by a machine in the privacy of one’s home or vehicle is a copyright infringement. But blind people routinely use readers, either human or machine, to access books that are not available in alternative formats like Braille or audio. Up until now, no one has argued that this is illegal, but now the Authors Guild says that it is. This is absolutely wrong. The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright.

I am a huge, huge reader, and so many books are never published as audio-books. I have a genetic eye condition that is likely to leave me relying on text-to-speech technology at some point in the future and this issue is incredibly important to me. In fact, the primary reason I like my Kindle is because I can use it to alter the text size to make it easier to read things without having to be stuck with large-print books. I have always supported an author's right to be paid for his or her work, but I don't see how text-to-speech violates copyright because the text would be paid for. The only logic in the Authors Guild's stance is that audio books are so much more expensive than paper texts (and they are, sometimes more than double); they really don't mind that they would be exploiting people who are already at a disadvantage.

Shame on you, Authors Guild!

Keeping Up With the Joneses

2009-02-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

The weather here has been amazing this week and I've been itching to get outside and start playing in my new garden. Every time I think about it, though, I get a little twinge of sadness because I know that whatever we do to our garden here will never be as wonderful as the garden we had in Washington. In fact, it's daunting to do anything here in the land of perfection because it's all so ... well ... perfect. Are we're so ... well ... not!

Other than a brief sojourn in a townhouse many years ago, we've steered clear of neighborhoods with Homeowner Associations (HOAs) because we've always been leery of the arbitrary rules they seem to impose like what kind of plants you can have, and how tall your grass is allowed to be, and things like that. We live in one of those neighborhoods now and they send out a little newsletter each month that bugs me so much that I actually miss the guy next door in Washington who had the lemon yellow El Camino on blocks in his yard.

For example, the last newsletter politely scolded some rude unnamed lowlifes for forgetting to take in their trash can on the day trash was picked up. My God! They left it out until the middle of the next day. That rendered the neighborhood into an immediate ghetto! Shock! Horror! And you know who did this, right? Yes; it was me. DH took out the trash, and left to go out of town and I forgot that he'd done so, and it only occurred to me the next day. We are pigs. We might as well just put out a junked car on blocks in our front yard and be done with it.

The newsletter also informed us that it was the week for our once-a-year "big brush" trash day. Now, of course, I had no idea what this was and I didn't think about it again. Until I saw trucks parked all up and down the street disgorging workers who were cutting massive swathes of stuff from the trees and bushes in my neighbors' lawns. OK. So this is how you get a perfect neighborhood. Wow. In front of each house, there was a HUGE pile of brush, each one big enough for a giant bonfire. Well, in front of each house except ours. Oh noes! We were already in trouble with the HOA for not bringing in the damn trash can and now we haven't done the proper grooming of our brush.

Oh but it wasn't too late after all. We were eating dinner on Friday night, and a helpful tree-trimming person came and said he could still do our house in time for the big brush pickup. I could tell DH was thinking he'd rather use that money to go skiing, but we looked at those tidy piles of brush in front of all our neighbors' houses and caved. So treetrimmer guy (TTG) agreed to come back on Saturday morning with his team.

TTG proposed to do a radical whack job to our stuff as he'd done to our neighbors' lawns, but I nixed that right away. "No. No. NO. I do not want to top the crepe myrtles. Only dead and diseased limbs."

"But--"

"Nope."

So we got our lawn groomed, very gently, but still done. We also got a dead shrub removed from the front of the house. And we had a big overhanging limb removed from the ancient live oak in the back yard. That was the one I was really concerned about because it hung right over the bedroom and I was worried about the potential for it to come down on our heads in a wind storm.

TTG turned out to be a really nice guy, and so did the neighbor across the street because during all the cutting and sawing, the sprinkler pipe in the front yard sprang a leak. This is not a sprinkler like you use with a hose; it's a permanent water pipe that affects the water to the house. San Antonio is experiencing a terrible drought, so it's imperative not to waste water -- we can't have a pipe draining water out into the lawn. So TTG came back on Sunday and he and the neighbor helped DH try to fix the stupid pipe all day long. TTG refused to take extra money, so we gave him the martin birdhouse that had been on the limb that was removed from the live oak tree because he'd admired it. We haven't given the neighbor anything yet, but I believe cookies are in his future. It's a pity that even after all that work, they weren't able to fix the pipe and we had to have a sprinkler service out on Monday, but it was nice of them to try.

And brush day was today and I was able to hold my head up because I, too, had a nice neat pile of brush that was nearly as large as the ones in front of my neighbors' houses. All I can say is it's a very weird way of Keeping Up With the Joneses...

Where Men are Men and Women Hold Public Office

2009-01-29T08:04:00.001-08:00

There was a column by Marcy Meffert in our local paper today that I thought contained an interesting quote (emphasis mine):

For example, my Lower East Side Milwaukee ward’s alderman lived across the street from our brownstone apartment. I often wondered if I could be an alderman one day, but since only men held the job, I assumed that I could not. Fortunately, when I was grown up, and in Texas, where it’s been said that men are men and women hold public office, I became a council member, a mayor and chairman of a regional council, three of the most rewarding endeavors of my life, other than rearing five children.

When I was a child, most people I knew were second-generation Americans who still identified with their European origins and lived with their own kind. My grandmother never learned to speak English. She lived in a Polish city and a Polish neighborhood; there was no need. Although my Lower East Side neighborhood was predominately Roman Catholic, the Catholics were of Irish, Polish and Italian origins.

I found Meffert's comments particularly interesting because Auntie and I have been working on a project that involves scanning a lot of old family photos. Seeing them en masse, and in approximate time order, gives me a much better appreciation for my own family's culture, than did randomly paging through multiple photos. I also found it interesting that, in direct opposition to the anti-feminist stereotypes, Meffert appears to perceive the culture of Texas as allowing more freedom for women, a view that I happen to share with her for the most part. In the past, Texas and the South were culturally very similar, and indeed, my own ancestors frequently moved between Texas and Arkansas, although they tended to retain Arkansas as their home base.

The thing that is most striking to me, looking over more than 100 years of sequential photos of my family, is that stereotypes don't apply. There are stories of a jerk or two, a frail person here, a mistake there, but there are no rules about "little women" and "men ruling the roost" and "dinner on the table at 5:00." Oh, there were some little women, and dinner probably was on the table at the proper time most of the time, but there is a big difference between having to do it, and wanting to do it -- because you love someone and you want to take care of your family.

It's easy to look at law books and decide that women couldn't do this or they had to do that, but the reality on the ground may have been entirely different than what the books say. In the U.S., for example, there are a multitude of seatbelt laws. It would be easy to look at the existence of those laws and conclude that everyone in the U.S. wears a seatbelt whenever they get into a car. If you look at the accident statistics, however, you'll see just how wrong that conclusion is. People not wearing seatbelts are in accidents every day. And the statistics only show the people who are in accidents; there is no way of knowing how many people get into a car without a seatbelt in general because most of them are not in an accident. By the same token, we have no idea how many women in earlier times were able to do exactly as they wished because they were unremarked and left no record. i.e., They caused no trouble because no one minded.

This photo, taken in 1950, shows my great-grandmother, Mai Smith Beasley, with her son and her four daughters. My grandmother is in the polka-dot dress on the right.

My grandmother and her sisters went to college, and they worked, and in various combinations, they married, and had children, and lived their lives. They are remarked mainly for being kind, loving, intelligent women; they didn't cause trouble. None of them held public office, but had any of them wanted to, I doubt very seriously that anyone would have been able to stop them!

Conduits and Time Passages

2009-01-23T11:41:00.000-08:00

When I was twelve, I read a book called Green Darkness by Anya Seton. It was a romantic melodramatic novel in which the modern-day (1960s) heroine relives a troubled past life in Elizabethan England as a kind of requirement for setting things right in her present life. I adored that book and I have very specific memories of reading it because it was during a period in which I was horribly ill and home from school for several days.

I also have specific memories of it because … well … because … it's difficult to explain. You see, DH went to Delaware week before last and caught the flu while he was there. He'd had a flu shot, but it didn't work, and by the time he got home, two weeks ago, he was feverish and miserable and he stayed that way for over a week, essentially until he went to the doctor and got antibiotics for the infection that had settled in his chest. In the meantime, I stayed well until this past Sunday, when I succumbed to his noxious plague and had to cancel the cool trip I'd planned to Arkansas this week. While none of this appears to have anything whatsoever to do with my memories of reading Green Darkness, it does – because I got a fever.

I don't have fevers all that often, but when I do, I've discovered a funny thing about them. They seem to be a kind of conduit, for lack of a better word, to other times in my life in which I've also had fevers. When I'm really sick and I have a fever, I can sort of close my eyes and BE myself at another point in my life. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true!

So on Wednesday, when I was feeling just dreadful, I visited my 12-year-old self reading Green Darkness, which is why I have such a specific memory of it. Until now, I hadn't really considered what a nifty piece of life-magic this conduit thing is. I never thought it would be of more than passing interest to see my clarinet case parked under the windowsill, or to feel that slight drift of guilt for not practicing, or even to know that my dad was coming home early with pizza to cheer me up. (Alas, other people never make through the conduit; it's always just me.) But in that moment, he was alive, and bringing me pizza. And I was going to be in trouble with my clarinet teacher when I got back to school. And Oh! Green Darkness was SO romantic; it made my heart ache. And my head ached. And my nose was running like a river. And I was utterly miserable in both 1975 and in 2009.

I made a few other brief visits. My 15-year-old self lying on the sofa, reading R.F. Delderfield's Diana. My 9-year-old self in bed with Gone With the Wind. My 14-year-old self draped over a beanbag chair watching a Beatles movie marathon (wishing I could put a clothespin on my nose to stop it from dripping!).

When I was done with all my time travels, I still felt like utter shit, but for the first time ever, I realized what a wonderful consolation prize this conduit thing is, no matter how crazy it sounds. Because I have always been able to do it, for as long as I can remember, and yet I've never noticed before, that in that brief moment, it's not like a memory, it's like being there. The experience of it, including the feelings, like guilt, or the expectation of seeing someone with pizza. Which means it's a brief respite from the feeling that I'll never see that person again. It's definitely like a conduit through which something can pass. It only works when I am truly ill and it only takes me to other times when I've been truly ill in the past, but if its purpose is comfort, then it works.

Here's a video from a guy who seems like he might have a few experiences of his own with conduits. Oh yeah; and I was listening to this song when I was reading Diana.

Stupid Gits and Free Stuff

2009-01-15T12:00:00.001-08:00

I posted a question about e-books to a mailing list I belong to because I wanted to get opinions about the possibility of releasing the books my company publishes in e-book form. I got a few responses – all interesting – and a couple of the responders mentioned free e-books.

Hmmmm.

I like free stuff and I've downloaded a few free e-books myself. There are tons of classics available. There certainly lots of other things available as well, although I'm not as keen to bother myself with them unless they're part of a promotion by a well-known publisher. That's not me being a snob; that's just me being practical. I get submissions all the time, most of which haven't seen the pen of an editor, and the hours of my life simply aren't worth the time it takes to wade through unedited books. And that's the reality of e-books: anyone can make a PDF file and call it an e-book. No editor required.

It's fine if the crappy stuff is free, but everyone seems to want the good stuff to be free too. I understand the desire; I think it would be great. But how do we reconcile the fact that without payment there is no incentive, and no mechanism to produce the good stuff? It won't be there if people don't pay at least a small amount for it.

Just this morning I was telling someone about my favorite tee-shirt. It's this hideous ratty old thing that's more than twenty years old. I treat it with only the kindest of handling, however, to preserve its life because it is one of the most valuable things in my closet. If forced to choose, I would sacrifice my St. John suit, or a Marc Jacobs dress before I would give up my old grey tee-shirt. Not because it has fond memories attached (although it does) or anything so sentimental, but because it's supremely wonderful to wear. Why? Because it was manufactured in an American factory using American grown cotton. My love for it isn't from national pride; it's because the quality doesn't exist any more. I would be willing to pay 10 times the price of a normal tee-shirt to get one like it, but they're not to be had (and I've looked). We don't make tee-shirts like that any more.

Every time I hear about new ways to nickel and dime publishers and authors (and any other producers of a product I value), I think about that tee-shirt and how I would feel if the thing that I cared about were no longer available. Sure; there would be other things that were almost as good, and there would be huge numbers of people ready to insist these new things were improvements over the old ones. But I'm pretty sure that I would be able to tell the difference.

When I first became aware that excellent tee-shirts had gone the way of the dinosaur, I began to search for them, thinking maybe I could find a remaining source and buy up enough to last for a while (like, the rest of my life?), but alas, I was a stupid git; I had left it too late. I simply cannot bear to do that with books – if I had to give up everything else, I would still need books.

There has to be a way to reconcile this. I don't know what it is, but there has to be a way.

Dog in the Manger

2009-01-09T11:55:00.001-08:00

I've been to the doctor today, for the first time since the follow-ups with my surgeon. Aside from the fact that it was really annoying to have to sit there and wait for an hour and a half for a 9:00 am appointment because their electronic records system was down and there were, like, 10 people ahead of me (at 9:00 am???), it was also annoying because he didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know. I'm not really over my surgery yet. Dammit.

It's not as if the external stuff hasn't mostly healed. Well, except for the ugly scars, which I'll probably have for the rest of my life. But the other stuff; the pain and stiffness, and that kind of thing, has definitely receded. It's not a problem. But eating? I have a such a long way to go with that. And for some reason, even though I quite liked the doctor, when he said the words "low residue diet" I felt like bitch-slapping the guy.

Of course, it's not his fault. And of course it isn't news that I still need to follow a low residue diet because every time I put a piece of fruit in my mouth I get violently ill, but it's driving me batty! What makes it worse is that just about every person on the planet seems to be on some kind of health kick now, and they seem to delight in misunderstanding that what's healthy for them is noxious for me.

Seriously. A low residue diet is a low fiber diet. I cannot have fiber, which means I cannot have fresh fruits or vegetables. I cannot have a lot of cooked vegetables either, like broccoli, or beans. The ones I can have must be peeled. I cannot have whole grains. I cannot have nuts, seeds, or berries. I know it sounds counterintuitive. In fact, it sounds utterly bizarre. My surgeon said it, and now, my new doctor has confirmed it. He said it's probably not forever, but it can take up to a year to adapt and I'm barely into the first stage. i.e., 9 months to go. And even after a year, I may always have some limitations about what I can handle.

However upsetting it is to not be able to have what I want to eat, it's far more upsetting to have people who don't understand lecture me on my "unhealthy" diet! I experienced this firsthand a couple of times over the holidays, and I also got the feeling of it from magazine and news articles recently as well. One size does NOT fit all.

My mother in law had beef and pork tenderloins and a huge selection of beautiful roasted vegetables for Christmas dinner. But she, in particular, seemed to have a hard time understanding that I could not eat the vegetables. At all. She asked me about them repeatedly. There were so many different kinds, and I wanted some, but she had roasted every single one in its skin, and there wasn't a single one that I could eat. She kept saying, "But they're so good for you." I had a piece of meat and a piece of bread on my plate. How embarrassing. Sigh.

Until I had to deal with these things, I had no idea what a pain it could be. Those yummy little sesame seeds on your bun? Nope. Can't have that. The raspberries in your yogurt? Out of the question. Toffee or peanut brittle? Forget it. Don't even think about that salad. The almonds in the biscotti? No way. Whole wheat bread? Absolutely not.

One of these days, someone is going to give me a health lecture at the wrong time, and I fear that they may regret it. I'm just sayin'.

I'm Somehow Not Surprised By This

2009-01-09T03:40:00.001-08:00

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Gone With the Wind? Not Me!

2009-01-07T14:36:00.001-08:00

DH is in Delaware, freezing. The drywall guy is in my bedroom, building me a new wall. The sky, according to CNN, is falling again. (When is it not?) Gillian and I had a nice chat this morning. All is right with the world.

I think that's why I amuse Gillian so much – I am perverse. My husband is away, and miserable; the economy is in the toilet; my bedroom looks like a war zone (although I admit that the drywall guy is a positive addition … Niiiicccceee) and I, in all my glory, have decided that all is right with the world! I feel almost compelled to try to explain – this is the upside of the anti-Pollyanna!

See? Back when everyone was dissing me for being a pessimist, I was quietly biding my time. And I was planning. If they had asked me, I'd have been happy to tell them how stupid they were to think they were going to get rich flipping condos, or whatever other dumb-ass idea they had, but they didn't ask me cause they think I am ~shudder~ a pessimist. DH wishes he'd listened to me about buying commodities (nota bene: if you're going to buy cotton, pay attention to the weather), but he's happy enough that he listened in time to save a big chunk of our retirement account – a little late, but soon enough. Oh yeah. I don't pick individual stocks (although now is a good time for oil stocks :-)) and I don't try to time the market, but I know how the hell to pay attention to conditions; my dad taught me to do it in high school and you'd better believe that I listened.

So the crisis comes and I'm ready for the long haul. And I'm calm. That's one of my strong points. I'm calm in a crisis. I don't always feel calm, but I'm going to act that way. I'm like Scarlet O'Hara when she made that dress out of her old curtains. When things get bad, and my life has certainly not been a bed of roses, I've made them work out of sheer will -- and planning. And so, I have confidence that I can do it this time too. I'm not going to freak out and cancel the books I'm set to publish. I'm going to do them any way. Of course I'm going to be careful with expenses, but I won't panic. Good things are worth doing. Good things are still worth buying. Good things last. And I do good things.

Over the holidays, I took DH to see the Old Mill, which appears in the opening credits of Gone With the Wind. It's just down the road from Auntie's house. It'll be there for a long time, and so will we!

I would have posted some photos of it, and also of my righteous snowman, but blogger is having problems. Maybe later on that.

New

2009-01-02T14:55:00.000-08:00

We made it through the holidays -- a funeral, driving through the worst ice storm of the century, Christmas Eve & Christmas Day with the in-laws, nephew's christening, driving back through the worst traffic jam we've ever seen -- and the new year has begun. All in all, it was a pretty good trip. We got to see lots of friends and family including our new nephew and my new baby cousin Tory (both adorable); we got to build a righteous snowman; and we got to absorb a lot of goodwill toward men. Thank heavens it's all over!

I suppose my boycott against Amazon is also over because I got a Kindle for Christmas -- and I really like it. One of my uncles, who also has a Kindle, gave me a hard time about sacrificing my principles, and, of course, he was right. Auntie also has a Kindle, so in some kind of sick way, my family is, apparently, providing ample support for the Great Evil of the book world. I would hang my head in shame, but I've noticed that, so far, I haven't got any new e-books in place of the ones I'd buy in hardcopy. I still want the same old fashioned paper books, and I've added a whole new source of books I wouldn't have otherwise read. Reading (and buying) more books, can't be all bad, can it?

I'm actually going to have a post soon on my two best books of 2008: The Devil's Brood by Sharon K. Penman, and The Time of Singing by Elizabeth Chadwick. It will be a little while on that, however, because I have to think more on what I plan to write. I don't know why, since I love to read and to write, but I suck at reviewing books -- it always takes me forever to do it -- yet, I always try to note my best-of-the-best since I'm afraid someone might miss them.

On an entirely different note, the painter and dry-waller for my bedroom repairs came today, which means we're going to get the repairs started soon (no more exposed concrete subfloor -- Yay!). My cousin Sherry turned in the paperwork for her Chinese adoption (Good Luck Sherry & Aaron!). My pets are only moderately traumatised by their week-long stay in the kennel, well, except for kitty who hasn't stopped howling since we got home. DH is planning a business trip to Aruba (companion ticket, anyone???). I've already knocked a bunch of things off my to-do list, which now contains mostly things for my publishing company (Finally I can focus). I just fetched the mail and found that in my absence I received a priceless gift: candy from VM in Idaho (her candy is to-die-for). I lived through the second worst year of my life (the year my dad died was the worst) -- and I'm still here.

I think this is going to be a good year.

More Than Enough

2008-11-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

We're supposed to be on the road to Arkansas right now to spend the holiday with my family. That's not going to happen, though, because we woke up this morning and stepped into a pool of water when we got out of bed. A pipe in the wall broke and our bedroom and the guest room were flooded.

We've had a team of plumbers here since early this morning, and an emergency water damage company has set up a giant humidifier to dry out the rooms that got wet. It is going to cost a FORTUNE to fix. The new wood floor in our bedroom is completely ruined, plus the plumbers had to cut huge pieces of sheet-rock out of the wall in our room to find the pipe that was leaking. And the thing that's particularly galling is that the leak was caused by the people who installed the floor in our room. Apparently when they were replacing the quarter-rounds, they hit a nail into the pipe. It didn't start leaking until cooler weather caused the pipes to contract, and then it was a gusher.

We have already learnt several new things, like the fact that our homeowners insurance doesn't cover the cost of the plumbers. So, even if the insurance covers everything else, we're still on the hook for $4,000. The floor installers are sending someone out on Monday, and we're hoping that they'll cover at least part of the cost since they're responsible for the damage. We're certain of that because we found the exact nail that caused the breech.

It would be easy enough to have a real melt-down at this point because in addition to this little nightmare, we have a lot of other sudden financial setbacks (who hasn't in this economy?). But I still have so much to be thankful for that I'm not going to flip out (yet). Instead, I'm just going to think about the good things and not worry. DH and I have each other, and we have our dogs (and kitty). We have some excellent steaks in the freezer we can defrost for our dinner tomorrow. We have our families.

That's more than enough.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Halts Acquisitions

2008-11-25T11:21:00.000-08:00

According to Publishers Weekly, HMH has temporarily stopped acquiring new manuscripts. I suppose it's not surprising considering the doldrums in the economy, but wow...

It’s been clear for months that it will be a not-so-merry holiday season for publishers, but at least one house has gone so far as to halt acquisitions. PW has learned that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books.

Right. Wow...

... a number of agents said they have never heard of a publisher going so far as to instruct its editors to stop acquiring. “I’ve been in the business a long time and at a couple of houses I worked at, when things were bad, we were asked to cut back,” said agent Jonathon Lazear. “But I’ve never heard of anything so public.” Lazear added that, in the past two weeks, business has been more “sluggish” than it had been all year. Another agent who had also heard about the no-acquisitions policy at HMH called the move “very scary” and said it's indicative of an industry climate worse than any he’s ever seen.

Read the whole thing.

Oh. My. God.

2008-11-18T06:48:00.000-08:00

I was evangelized yesterday. By three very nice people – two ladies and a man – who apparently live nearby and who wanted to tell me that if I had not yet found a "church home" in the area that I was welcome to attend their Baptist church. I was a bit taken aback, but rather than slamming the door in their faces, I decided to stand out on the front porch and chat with them for a while. I'm fascinated by religion and it seemed like a good opportunity to either learn something about my new neighbors or to convince them that I ought to be burnt at the stake!

"I am Catholic," I told them, and then I shut up and waited to hear how that would be received.

One of the two nice ladies whose names utterly escaped me said, "Oh! Well that's good. Catholic is good. We are the same in many ways. We all believe that Jesus Christ is our savior."

"Uh huh," I said.

The man looked at his shoes.

The other lady piped up. "Even though you're Catholic, we believe you'll go to heaven, as long as you're saved. We believe you have to be saved; you won't go based on good works alone. Are you saved? Are you sure you'll go to heaven?"

Am I sure I'll go to heaven? If I don't lie, the only answer to that can be, "Hell NO! I'm not sure I'll go to heaven." Of course I'm not going to say that to them, so, naturally, I lied. "Yes; I'm sure I'm sure I'll go to heaven," I said.

"That's good," said Lady #2, nodding vigorously. "That's really good. It means you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior."

"Uh huh," I said. I considered mentioning that he was here just yesterday, and that I had told him that yes; he was indeed my personal savior, but that seemed like overkill, so I shut up and nodded along with Lady #2.

The man smiled vaguely and looked at his shoes again.

In spite of her assertion that "We are the same in many ways," Lady #1 seemed a bit doubtful about my confidence in being heaven-bound. Unless she is good at spotting liars, or is a bit of a liar herself, I'm not sure why since I wasn't dressed like a hooker and I wasn't openly drunk. "My mother is Catholic," she said. "She thinks good works are enough. You don't think that, do you?"

Uhhhhh. WTF? Okay, I admit it; this is the kind of thing that brings my inner witch to life. Remember that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie when they open the Ark of the Covenant and the holy spirit pours out and turns everyone who looks at it to ashes? Well, that's about the closest I can get to describing the temper that her question incited in me.

If her mother is Catholic, then she knows good and well what she is asking – even though I've acknowledged a fundamental agreement in beliefs – i.e., Christ as savior -- she's attempting to get me to disavow a cornerstone of my faith: that what you do matters.

The funny thing is that I'm not a good Catholic. In fact, I'm hardly Catholic at all. I was raised Protestant, and I identify most closely with the Episcopal faith. But this idea that "good works" are irrelevant is infuriating to me. I absolutely reject the idea that I can gabble some bullshit about Christ being my Saviour, and then go out and murder somebody and because I am "saved" I will go to heaven, no problem. I believe in atonement. I believe in redemption. However, I do not believe in this bizarre "I can snort coke and knock off a liquor store, but as long as I accept Christ as my personal savior, I'm cool and all is well," stuff.

I suspect the man on the porch may have seen the first Indiana Jones movie and recognized the signs of the holy spirit rising within me because he suddenly spoke up. "Do you or your husband play tennis?" he asked. "We're always looking for new members here at the club."

He meant the neighborhood club, not the church club, so he was obviously trying to stop the train wreck before it happened. I decided to help him stop the train wreck because it's such a pointless one.

I gave him my best smile. "My husband does. He was just talking about it. You'll probably see him there soon."

He turned to the others. "Ladies, I think we should be going. It's getting late." He smiled back at me. We were in collusion.

It was good.
I thanked them for stopping by and told them if I was ever in the market for a new "church home," I would certainly consider stopping by their church, but that was a lie too.

I have a lot of Baptist friends and family and I have nothing but the highest regard for them. But apart from cursing and the occasional lie, I really am Christian and I have deeply held beliefs and practices that only fit within the Catholic or the Episcopal/Anglican churches because of their historicity. My faith is abiding; I don't pick and choose, so even though it would be convenient to decide to accept Jesus in this easy way and not have to worry about "good works," for me, that would be a bigger lie. I definitely believe that God would judge me harshly for that.

That Old Hedonic Treadmill

2008-11-12T11:20:00.000-08:00

My grandfather's sister, Marion Barber Crawford, died on Monday at the age of 91. I'm not noting this because I want sympathy; I wasn't close to her and I didn't know her well, and I don't intend to display some kind of inappropriate crocodile tears. However, she was Papa's sister and Auntie and Daddy's aunt, and I had been hoping to interview her for my upcoming project on Arkansas history, and I am sorry she is gone.

I considered going to the funeral, which will be held in Warren, Arkansas on Saturday, but it's a long drive and we're planning a trip to Arkansas in a couple of weeks for Thanksgiving, so Auntie and I thought it was best that I just send flowers, since DH wouldn't be able to go with me and I'm not quite ready, health-wise, to make a drive that long (9+ hours) on my own.

It's just as well that I don't go, since, as I said, I hardly knew Marion, and it's a really long drive, but also because my publishing business is about to cause me to pull my hair out and I probably ought to go wig shopping instead. (How's that for shallow???) Really, I don't think the stupidity of the FEMA hurricane recovery efforts have anything on what small publishers have to go through on a daily basis.

e.g., The company who used to do my covers have gone out of business. Arrgghghh, I have the artwork I want to use for my next book. I have the back cover text. I FINALLY have the ISBN. I've nearly got the typesets. Final edits to come (Sorry Gillian). But now I need someone to put the cover together in a decent-looking and acceptable format. I do NOT want to deal with some a$$hat artist who wants to charge me $10k for a 15 minute Photo Shop job. Sigh…

It's a good thing I'm an essentially happy person, or I'd never get through it all. What? You didn't know I was a happy person? I suppose you wouldn't based on the stuff I write since it mostly comes across like chronic misery. But oddly enough, I think that's how it works. It's like that hedonic treadmill thing. Big ups and big downs only affect me for a little while and then I return to my baseline, which is generally happy. And when I write about my ups and downs and annoyances, I return there faster.

In fact, I'm about to return there now. With a margarita. I have wireless and a cellphone. There's no reason in the world that I can't pull out my hair in my new backyard, which is … not half bad.

Let it Rain

2008-11-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

It's raining. There's a first time for everything, and this is the first time it's rained since I've moved to San Antonio. It's a nice, soft, pattering rain that immediately reminded me of the frequent comments I heard about Washington state from silly people who live in non-rainy climates. "Oh, I LOVE rainy days," they'd say. "You can just stay indoors and curl up with a book."

Right. You can do that if you live in a place where it doesn't rain almost every day for nine months out of the year. If you intend to wait out the rain in the Pacific Northwest, you'd better be retired, independently wealthy, and stocked up with a LOT of books! If not, I can pretty much guarantee you will not be able to spend all the rainy days curled up in front of the fire. I think you would probably go mad, and at the very least, your muscles would atrophy. You have to go outside and live. In the rain. It gets old. Fast.

Here, however, this nice, soft, pattering rain is a lovely break after weeks and weeks and weeks of perfect sunny weather. And yes; now that I don't have to deal with endless rainy days, I like them again. I may even resort to curling up with a book myself since I'm having one of those days where I wonder if I'm not going to lose my mind.

I'm not sure how it works that I can get a confluence of events that is so maddening; I think it must have something to do with my horoscope! My cat, for example, has conceived a fatal attraction to the plant my mother-in-law sent me when I was in the hospital. It's pretty thing in a basket, and even though I'm usually a plant-killer, I thought I would try to keep it alive. Part of it is a fern and part is something else, probably poison, and apparently, Tabitha NEEDS to eat it. She has never been a cat who would jump on the table, so after noticing her interest, I moved the plant to the table, thinking she'd stay away from it. Not a chance. I walked into the kitchen this morning to find her sitting in the middle of the table, breakfasting on my plant. She was sick shortly thereafter, so I assume that whatever she ingested is not a worry any longer. I think I'll give the plant to DH to take to his office.

That was just one of the maddening bits of the day. Bowker, the keeper of the ISBNs was the perpetrator of another one. I, well, my company, owns a block of ISBNs. We paid for them ages ago. I'm ready to register two new books that we're about to publish. All very straightforward, no? Of course it couldn't be straightforward. I haven't yet unpacked all my moving boxes, and probably won't be able to get to them for a while, and I'm not sure where the paper copy of the list of ISBNs is located. I'm a registered member of Bowker, so I thought I'd just look them up online.

Except.

When I signed into Bowkerlink, they would only show me the ISBNs for books I'd already published, unless I paid them $25. Even though it is the same site I use to register the books under the new ISBNs, they hide those damn numbers unless I pay their extortion. Isn't that helpful? I paid the $25. Under protest.

The final maddening thing has left me flummoxed – sort of like Elmer Fudd trying to get the best of Bugs Bunny (never going to happen). It's so peculiar, it's difficult to even explain. The week before we went to Lake Charles, I got a call from the real estate agent who sold our house there. She said the people who'd bought it had received a box that was sent to me and wanted to know how to get it to me. Of course it's been three and half years since we moved and I couldn't imagine what was in the box, but I told her we would be in town and we'd pick it up when we were there. And we did.

After marveling over how amazing it is that we were able to stay in touch and still receive this box, we opened it. It was a box of returns. Book returns. They didn't enclose a packing slip or original invoice. They were from Amazon. GAHHHH!

Several questions come to mind. Say, like, why did Amazon order 43 copies of this book in September and return 9? Those are strange numbers. Also, if they were able to sell 32 copies, then why not hang on to the other 9? They turned around and ordered 22 copies in October! But I have to eat the shipping. That's seriously galling.

The Elmer Fudd part of this is trying to figure out how to fix the shipping address used for the returns. My God. Somewhere in "the Internets" my address is wrong and I have no idea where. I have looked at every place I can think of to change it, and none of them list my old Lake Charles address. Where in the world did they get this and how do I fix it?

I feel half-demented trying to solve this, so I think I'm going to give up for now. Instead, I'm going watch my favorite stupid movie, Les Visiteurs. I found it on youtube and I intend to justify this by telling myself that watching a French movie, even one so incredibly puerile as Les Visiteurs is a good way of improving my French.

Right.

Arrgghhh -- Make it STOP

2008-11-03T16:12:00.001-08:00

Spending last week in Lake Charles was wonderful. I played the slot machines exactly once and I won $130. I then proceeded to make myself sick with a terrific hamburger and a HUGE double-margarita -- totally worth it. I learned that Hurricane Ike flooded our old neighborhood. That made me feel really sad, but also relieved that it never happened to us once while we lived there.

We saw quite a few old friends. In every case, we somehow ended up talking about -- surprise -- politics. I had forgotten how different politics are in Louisiana; I can't explain it, but they just are. In the course of four enthusiastic ... um ... discussions, I was told by two people that Barack Obama is not a natural born American citizen and therefore, should not be eligible to become president. Unlike most of what seems to be the rest of the country, I'm not a huge Obama fan, but even so, I thought those comments were stupid and I didn't hesitate to mention it.

Regardless of who is elected, and I believe it will be Obama, I will be SO glad to have this damned election over and done with. I admit that I don't like either candidate, but it really doesn't matter what I think because I was in the hospital on the deadline for registering to vote, so I don't get to vote anyway. It will be the first time in my adult life that I'll have missed voting in an election. I suppose it shouldn't bother me much anyway because if I still lived in Washington, my vote either way wouldn't have mattered because Obama is certain to win there. And here, in Texas, McCain is almost certain to win, so my vote wouldn't have mattered here either. It would only have mattered to me.

Tomorrow night Gillian and I are going to have a virtual election party with virtual election cake and then, I can sigh and say, Thank God it is over -- except for the bitching and moaning, which is bound to last at least four years!

Arrrgggghhhh...

Roulez! Roulette!

2008-10-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

DH was out of town last week and, except for the brief visit of my uncle DB and his wife VM, margarita-expert and life saver of Prissy, I saw no one all week. No one human anyway. I did see the horrid little chihuahua belonging to the people who live behind us. I saw that because it dug a hole under the fence and was waiting for me when I took the dogs outside. Pippin immediately proceeded to chase it into the narrow gap between the pool and the fence -- a gap lined with prickley palm trees -- and engage it in battle. I had to climb in there after him to break up the dog-fight. I was not a happy camper, and if my toe wasn't still broken, I would have seriously considered drop-kicking the little rat-faced monster back over the wall. Instead I hauled Pip out by the tail and screamed curses at the rat till it was scared enough to go back on its own. I shoved a piece of stone into the gap, hoping it would be enough to prevent further incursions, but I have my doubts.

DH had another business trip this week, to Port Arthur, Texas. Since that only requires a drive of about 6 hours, rather than enduring another 5 days of stomach-hurting, toe-aching, dog-fighting solitude, I decided to go with him. We arrived last night, and thus far, accompanying him is turning out to be more entertaining than staying home. The drive itself would have been interminable, except DH was driving my new car and he obliged me with impressions of old-school race car driver Jackie Stewart about our "fine European touring sedan."

"Drive spectacular!" he said. I have to admit, DH does a remarkably funny version of a Scottish accent.

I, in turn, obliged him with shrieking harridan impressions about "Veering!" and "Speeding!" and, "Dammit if you don't slow down you are GOING to get a SPEEDING TICKET!" Yeah; I'm sure he was really amused by that.

Port Arthur, which was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Ike, has never had much in the way of hotels, but it's nearly impossible to get a room in those they have because FEMA, in their glorious ineptitude, hasn't, even after 6+ weeks, done much to help the victims repair their houses, so, naturally, the hotels are filled with storm victims. The nearest hotel room we found turned out to be 60 miles away, in our old home, Lake Charles, Louisiana. However unhappy DH is about driving 120 miles to and from the hotel to his meetings, staying in Lake Charles is not a problem for me.

What's also not a problem is that the hotel room we found is in L'Auberge du Lac, the fancy high-rise casino they were building here when we moved away. I'm not a fan of casinos, but this place is a completely different world to the other local casinos. For one thing, it's massive; according to the brochure, it's 26 stories tall. For another thing, unlike most other casinos on the Gulf Coast (except for Beau Rivage in Mississippi), rather than being a hotel next to a ridiculous little river-boat, it's land-based, and it has a golf course, a huge pool, bunches of restaurants, and tons of high-end shops.

DH knew someone who got us the special comp rate reserved for "members" (i.e., high rollers) and apparently we've been flagged as such because people keep asking me, "Do you feel lucky?" So far, I managed to stick to smiling vaguely and nodding rather than saying anything for fear that what would come out of my mouth would be along the lines of, "Actually, since you asked, I don't feel particularly lucky right now because I'm in heinous pain from a recent major surgery and a broken toe; my arms and legs are covered with scratches from breaking up a dog fight; I've paid a deposit to the phone company for a line that hasn't been turned on although it was supposed to be last Friday; and THIS HOTEL decided to test the fire alarm system at the break of dawn so there was NO chance of sleeping in. How about YOU? Do YOU feel lucky?" Ahem ... I'm afraid that might be construed as slightly threatening, so it seems prudent to smile and nod.

I'd intended to spend today in one of my favorite pursuits: drinking mai tais in a cabana by the pool, but alas, a cold front has come through and the high temperature is only supposed to reach 65F, so that's a non-starter. This leaves me with the choice of limping, Quaisimodo-like, down to the casino or the shops -- neither of which seems very intelligent considering the morning news headlines are all about the world economy circling the drain.

On second thought, perhaps I will hit the casino. I got to have one of my favorite Southern delicacies for breakfast this morning: grits. Maybe that means my luck is turning. Hell, it can't get much worse without someone (probably ME) actually being dead! I need to find my one-and-only pair of shoes that still fits; I think have a date with the one-armed bandit (and maybe, just maybe, an indoor mai tai).

:-)

Bon chance a moi -- laissez les bon temps roulez!

p.s. I find it annoying that I can't get accented characters to work on my keyboard. Just so's you know.

Sometimes you just have to laugh

2008-10-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened since my last post about my surgery woes. Three days after that post, I had some complications and got to spend another fun-filled week in the hospital, complete with the beloved NG tube and additional pain killers.

My mother came to stay with me and she fell in love with my dogs -- Prissy's future may well lie in Arkansas.

DH took care of supervising the movers and our pitiful possessions were deposited into our new house. We are living there now, in towering piles of boxes that I'm not yet well enough to unpack. I try to do a couple each day and DH does a few more when he gets home at night, but it's a slow process for sure.

My 21st anniversary is in two days and though I haven't been well enough to manage a gift for DH, my health problems must have seriously freaked him out because he has given me the gift of a lifetime -- my dream car -- a blue Mercedes E350! We needed a car, but it was because his was failing, and it was his turn to get a new one -- not a common occurrence for us since we literally drive our cars until they're ready for the junkyard. Cars may not sound romantic to you, but DH is a typical engineer (and guy) who adores anything to do with engines, so for him to give up his chance for a car, and to buy one so over the top nearly blew me away. It was so sweet of him that it made me cry in a way that even diamonds wouldn't have done. I can't really get out of the house to shop and it's too late for deliveries, so poor DH is going to have to wait for his gift -- I'll never come up with anything that will equal what he gave me, but he reads this sometimes, so I need to tell him he has my undying love (and he would have even without the car).

I have had exactly one spin in my new chariot, after foregoing pain pills so I wouldn't kill myself or anyone else while I was doing it. I can hardly wait until I'm better so I can give it a real roadtest. That's going to a bit longer than I expected because yesterday, I broke my damn toe! I caught it on a box and nearly tore it right off my foot.

Like I said -- sometimes you just have to laugh!

C'est la vie.

Improbability

2008-09-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

Warning: this post contains gross health details that you may want to avoid!

You know how, in some books, you’ll come upon a plot twist so unbelievable, so absurd, so manufactured to fit an implausible story line, that you throw the book at the wall in disgust? You know the ones: the long-lost rich relative conveniently dies, leaving a poor earnest orphan rich beyond her wildest dreams, or alternatively, leaving a cool house in Tuscany/France/fill-in-place-here. Or, maybe it’s about a man who falls in love with a woman simply by seeing her photograph (or in the course of a single meeting) and spends ginormous amounts of time and money trying to find her – and, of course, he DOES and she immediately falls in love with him too. There are any number of variations, including ones that don’t involve at least one super-rich person, but the common thread is that they always lead to the implausible situation. I had one of those plot twists in real life this week, which, in a book, I would have instantly scoffed at. Seriously – I’d have considered a book with this plot twist a total wall-banger.

What happened? Well, to explain, I have to go back a bit – to when we first moved to Washington. We’d only been there a couple of days; literally, the movers were still at my house unpacking. I got a terrible stomach pain, and I had to go to the Emergency Room. It turned out that I had a partial intestinal obstruction, a condition that can be life threatening, and I had to spend my first week on Whidbey Island in the hospital. There are only two treatments for an intestinal blockage: conservative treatment, which involves having a nasogastric (NG) tube put through your nose into your stomach for several days, while at the same time, not having any food or water, so your digestive system can rest – and surgery. Conservative treatment is hideous – I wouldn’t wish an NG tube on my worst enemy – but it’s always the preferred treatment because with surgery, there’s an uncomfortably large risk that the blockage will re-occur. If conservative treatment fails, or if the blockage is complete, rather than partial, then surgery is required. Without surgery, your intestines will die, and then you, too, will die. It’s a complex situation, but the treatment decision is pretty simple.

I was lucky that time because the conservative treatment worked, mostly. I continued to have a blockage, but it resolved enough that I was able to manage it by being super careful about what I ate – no fiber, including one of my favorites, berries – and no food at all when I felt it getting worse. Still, I considered myself lucky because the surgery was supposed to be so risky and painful that it seemed like a much worse alternative. Because it was so horrible to go through, I spent a lot of time working out the events that led up to getting sick so I could avoid them in the future. When it happened, I’d just completed the long-distance drive from Texas to Washington, and I was in the process of unpacking my stuff in the new house. I was also completely overloaded with stress and “to do” list items and I hadn’t been eating right at all.

Naturally, I thought of all those things when I was planning my recent move to Texas – so many of the same elements were due to be repeated, in an almost identical fashion. But I was really careful, in spite of my moaning about Prissy, to space out my driving so that I wouldn’t be spending so much time each day in the car, and DH came to Washington to help with the movers, so I wouldn’t have to deal with that on my own.

And it seemed as if my careful plans had worked, in spite of all the problems we had getting back to Texas. By Saturday, I was feeling OK and DH and I went out to look at cars (his is on its last legs), with plans to visit the mall afterwards to see if I could pick up some hot-weather clothing at an end-of-season sale. We were at the mall when I got an awful pain in my stomach. At first, I thought it was just the Mexican food I’d eaten the night before and I tried to ignore it. But it got worse and I told DH I thought we’d better go. He must have known something really bad was happening because he knows I have to be nearly dying to cut a shopping trip short!

DH asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, and at first, I said no, so we went back to the apartment, where I lay down and tried to wait out the pain – I still thought (hoped) it might go away – I didn’t immediately think it had anything to do with my obstruction. But it got worse and worse. In fact, it got so bad, I thought I really might be dying, and I finally, reluctantly, agreed with DH that I needed to go to the hospital after all.

He took me to a hospital that he knew of because it was on one of his running-routes, a fortunate choice too, because it turned out to be one of the best in the city. The waiting room was crowded and my heart sank because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to last sitting upright in a hard chair, but there was a nurse doing triage and she sent me back to a room (with a bed) right away.

I saw the doctor and gave him my history, and he sent me for a CT scan, the results of which produced my bizarre plot twist. My pain was caused by an intestinal blockage, and this time it was complete. In other words, conservative treatment was not an option. I needed surgery right away because my small intestine was ischemic, which meant it was starved of blood supply and was already beginning to die. It was just too bizarre to think that the first blockage was caused by the events surrounding my move from Texas to Washington, and this new one was caused by moving back! As I said, if I’d read it in a book, I’d never have believed it; I’d have pitched the book at the wall.

I had surgery last Sunday (today is Friday), and it was even worse than I’d imagined it could be. The surgeon, who was terrific, started out trying to just open up the blockage with a small incision and a laparoscope, but when he got inside, he found sections of dead bowel, so he had to convert the surgery to a complete open (big incision) one and he had to do a complete resection of my small intestine, which involved cutting out the dead bits and sewing the remaining, healthy bits back together.

I went into the surgery hoping to come out with just a small laparoscopy scar and no blockage, and I came out with no blockage (yay!), but with a huge 5-inch long vertical scar, plus another small vertical scar and accompanying drain. In addition, I given a central line because my veins were insufficient for the IVs I needed. For the uninitiated – like me, till I had one, a central line is a kind of IV port with caps on it where different needles can be inserted, while leaving others free for drawing blood and giving injections. The central line was startling because it’s much larger and more permanent looking than a regular IV, and it was placed in the most uncomfortable position on my neck. And it was “installed” there, not just stuck on with tape. And, as if all that wasn’t enough, even though the conservative treatment hadn’t been an option, I was stuck with an NG tube too. ~Shudder!

I’ll tell you what – it’s a pretty big attitude adjustment to go from looking at David Meister dresses at Neiman Marcus on Saturday, to facing the surgery I just described on Sunday.

There was one bright side to all this misery – I got an immediate payback for moving to Texas. DH called Auntie on Sunday to tell her about my surgery and she arrived in my room on Monday. She was a God-send. She spent every day this week keeping me company; she took care of the dogs while DH was at work; she brought me magazines and face cream; she helped bring home some of the gorgeous flowers I received so I could enjoy them at home; she even brought ME home from the hospital because DH was in a meeting he couldn’t get out of when I was finally released, and, now that I’m home, she’s making me my grandmother’s favorite baked custard, which is fabulous because there are very few things that I’m allowed to have, but that’s one of them. She’d have come to Washington if I’d asked her to, but because we weren’t so far away, she was able to get here in time to really make a difference. I expect she’ll read this at some point, so here’s to you, Nancy Barber. You are the best!

Auntie’s going back to Little Rock tomorrow, and I have a huge long recovery ahead, but I’m not as down as I might have been otherwise because I’m so grateful for all the support I received from my friends and family. In addition to Auntie coming to stay with me, my Uncle Mack and Aunt Shirley and my mother sent me amazing flowers. And, most importantly, DH went so far above and beyond to take care of me that I still cannot believe it. Even though his back has to be KILLING him by now, DH spent every night in a chair in my room so I didn’t have to be alone. Every night he stayed – all night. And he brought me every single thing I asked for, e.g. he raced out to get me a hair dryer on a moment’s notice because I got to have an unexpected shower and I was going to be cold if I couldn’t dry my hair. Gillian called me twice and talked for hours, although it must have been seriously expensive; and my friends on Penman Review cheered me up by playing along with the pathetic missives I sent from my mobile phone.

Thanks to all of you. I love you all. God bless you.

Close Call

2008-09-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

We had a lot of things to do last week.

Move out of our house in Washington. Check.
Sell our house in Washington. Check.
Fly back to Texas so we could buy our new house. Ahem.

The movers were terrific; they had everything packed and loaded by noon on Thursday. We were really pleased about that because we had rescheduled our original flight, which was supposed to go through Houston on Friday, for Thursday night, so that we could get into San Antonio before Hurricane Ike closed the airport. We were all set to start the long drive to the airport when the call came in from Continental Airlines -- our red-eye flight was departing as planned, but they weren't allowing any pets on the flight, which meant that, for all intents and purposes, our flight was cancelled because we had to get Tabitha, our kitty, to Texas too.

"Um, what do you mean, we can go, but our cat can't?" I asked the guy from Continental. "Do people often just abandon their pets if you arbitrarily refuse to honor their reservations?"

"Noooo...," he said, "...but the hurricane..."

"What about it?" I asked. "It affects pets first? There'll be extra turbulence cause there's a little cat on board?" I may have sounded a tad bit sarcastic there, but oh well.

"Um...," he was clearly stunned. "Management..."

"Right," I said. "Good answer. Thanks a bunch."

I hung up on him and asked DH what he thought we ought to do. DH thought we ought to reschedule our flight and not worry. I, being the anti-Pollyanna, thought DH was nuts. I called our real estate agent in Texas and told her we might not make it to the closing of our new house on Monday and asked her what we ought to do. I expected her to tell me that it wouldn't be a problem to reschedule the closing, but without coming right out and saying it, she implied that we might lose the house if we didn't close on time.

The seller was supposed to close on his own new house on Monday as well, and there was a backup offer on the house we wanted from the very first day we made the offer. The possibility existed that the seller could use that as a reason to break our contract and accept the other offer. But the seller's new house closing was IN HOUSTON. It was obvious that his closing was NOT going to happen on time. The realtor said she'd check with him about postponing and get back to me. She did and the news was not good -- he insisted his own closing was going forward, and that ours had to go forward as well.

Our realtor is very nice, but she didn't seem to understand that we might not be able to wave a wand and appear in San Antonio on Monday. "Can't you just kennel your cat?" she asked.

It took me a while to explain that this was our last trip, and that we couldn't leave our cat in a kennel indefinitely, and that I had no idea when I'd be able to come back and get her. I finally had to tell her that if she didn't figure something out, the deal was probably off. Once I managed to get that point across, things changed quickly. She contacted the title company handling the transaction, and they found a local notary who would meet us with the closing papers, which we could sign on Friday afternoon. The notary would then send the papers overnight to San Antonio, so they'd be there in time on Monday. Funny how "impossible" things can be made to happen when there's money on the line!

Then we were left with the other problem -- getting back to San Antonio in time for DH to appear at his new job on Monday. We spent Thursday night sleeping on the floor of our empty house in Washington, trying to figure out how to do this.

DH called around to all the airlines and finally found a flight on United that went through Denver on Saturday. United doesn't have the special pet program that Continental does, and in fact, United are complete idiots about pets because they suggested that we put Tabitha in the hold, but then they said they couldn't put her on the connecting flight, so she'd arrive on the same flight the next day. I didn't want to put her in the hold in the first place, but the idea of leaving her in some God-forsaken baggage area overnight was impossible, so we arranged to take her on the flight.

We signed our house papers on Friday and spent that night at the W Hotel in Seattle. It was fabulous having a bed again after spending the previous night on the floor. Saturday morning we headed over to the airport bright and early to be sure we had plenty of time to check in since we expected it take longer with Tabitha in tow.

The airport was a freaking nightmare~! I swore last year that I would never fly United Airlines again, and if they hadn't been the only game in San Antonio this past weekend, I would have kept that resolve. As it is, we probably would have been better to keep it anyway -- they are just pathetic. In addition to the hurricane, there was bad weather in Chicago and San Francisco, and there were several hundred people waiting in line to check in! We waited in line for 3 hours, and we were still waiting when our flight departed -- without us.

When we finally got up to the desk, the gate agent was kind and apologetic and she booked us a flight for the next day, this time via Los Angeles. She also gave us each a $100 certificate for future travel (yeah, right; like I'll fly United any time soon), but that was it. So we had to find an airport hotel that would accept cats -- NOT an easy task -- people travel with dogs, but who brings their cat? By this time, there were about 400 people in line, and some of them were turning into an ugly mob -- United got a manager out there to talk to them, something they should have done hours earlier. Since they were having so many weather problems, they should have called in extra people to work to reduce the line, but I suppose they've fired them all so the management can still take home big bonuses. Whatever.

On Sunday, we went back to the airport and waited two more hours to check in, and were finally able to do so. United got their revenge on me for my animosity because they marked my ticket as requiring an extra security check, so while DH and Tabitha were able to sail through, I was forced to be hassled and felt up by my favourite folks, the TSA, before proceeding to the gate, where we learnt that the status of our flight was "delayed." Indefinitely.

At this point, DH informed the people standing near him that he could completely understand why people sometimes went insane on airplanes and defecated on the drinks cart -- and I didn't even shush him because I agreed, although I admit that I sincerely hoped he wasn't thinking of doing so. Fortunately, before we were required to consider that possibility any further, we were told that our flight would only be an hour late, and we would probably still make our connection to San Antonio.

And we did. We arrived there on Sunday night. DH made it to work on time. Our house papers arrived on Monday morning and we were there to deliver the cheque for the house in person. As we expected, the seller of the house was not able to close on his house in Houston; his closing was delayed by 10 days because (Surprise!) there was a hurricane there, you know. Our kitty was a champ -- she was stuck in a carrier for more than 12 hours and she never made a peep. Our furniture will not be here until 4 October, but we are all, including our animals, here, safe and sound, in Texas now.

Thank God. I thought it was never going to happen.

Welcome Home?

2008-09-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

The movers cleared out our house in Washington yesterday and we were supposed to leave on the 11:50 pm flight. We had moved up the flight because it had a connection through Houston and we were concerned about the possibility of weather delays caused by Hurricane Ike. At the time we changed our flight, it appeared that Ike would pass well to the south west of Houston, so we weren't that concerned. Fast-forward two days -- Houston was in the direct path and the airport was scheduled to close about an hour after our flight to San Antonio was due to depart.

We were all set to get on the plane, in spite of the risk of being caught in the Houston Intercontinental airport during the storm -- a distinct possibility if our flight was delayed for any reason. We didn't get on the plane, however, because although our flight was still on schedule, Continental called yesterday and said that kitty's flight was cancelled! Kitty was supposed to fly in Continental's special climate controlled pet section, but they decided to cancel pet flights before doing the same for the rest of the flights. Kitty has to go WITH US, though, so we were out of luck.

The only real reason that it mattered was because we completed the sale of our house in Washington on Friday morning, and we're supposed to close on our new house in Texas on Monday morning and it will be a big problem for us if we lose the new house. DH got the company travel agents on it and they found us, including kitty, another flight for Saturday that goes through Denver and flies directly into San Antonio. We're still not sure whether it will happen though since the weather is going to be dicey across the southwest, so we also got the seller and the title company on the case and they were able to get the closing papers to a notary on Whidbey Island, and we did a contingent signing of the papers this afternoon. If we can't make it to the closing on Monday, then all we'll have to do is to wire the money to the seller on Monday and we'll own our new house.

This whole week has been incredibly fraught, and last night was pretty close to the culmination of it. After we found out that the airline wouldn't take kitty, we had to work the phones to get the new airline reservations and to get the sellers' title company into gear to do something to save the deal on our new house. It is, incidentally, amazing what can be accomplished by phone when people think a lot of money is on the line to be lost. Originally, we were told there was no way we could buy the new house without signing the papers in person, but funnily enough, that seemed to change when DH informed them that he works with contracts on a daily basis and Hurricane Ike falls into the category of "force majeure" (act of God) and we were ready, willing, and able to execute the contract and therefore, it was on the other party to do everything in their power to bring the deal to fruition (I've always hated contracts, but those BIG words come in handy sometimes) -- and, suddenly, a notary was located on Whidbey Island who would meet us with the proper papers and who would send them overnight so they'd arrive in time, even if we did not.

So, we signed our papers and we spent last night sleeping on the floor of our empty house. Tonight we are in a swanky hotel in Seattle, with our fingers crossed both for our flight to leave as planned tomorrow and also for all our friends in Houston and Lake Charles who are getting hammered by Ike tonight.

It is bizarre to us that the Gulf Coast has not had a major hurricane since our own experience with Hurricane Rita in 2005, just before we moved to Washington, and now, our old and favourite places are facing devastation tonight with Hurricane Ike. We've been phoning our friends to see if they need help -- if we arrive back in Texas tomorrow, we're ready to help them in any way we can. If any of our friends, and you know who you are, need us, please call on our cell phones and let us know. We should be in San Antonio on Saturday evening and you can stay with us, or if you need us to come to you with ice, etc. we will be there as soon as the authorities will let us through. For our Lake Charles friends, we know the levee is breached in Cameron, and our thoughts are with you. We believe you'll be OK, but if you need us, just call us and we'll do whatever we can to help. As for our Houston friends, y'all are in the path. We're praying that you all make it through, but if you need us, let us know. We are praying for you...

Peace of Mind or Piece of My Mind?

2008-09-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

This whole week is turning into a comedy of errors. Every hour seems to bring a new absurdity to light. DH called the phone company yesterday to tell them we wanted to cancel our service as of Friday. Of course, the phone company has a fancy automated message -- press 1 for this; press 2 for that. And they list an amazing array of options in that message; I know because DH used speaker phone to call them. You can press a button for all kinds of cool additional services -- even high speed internet. You cannot, however, cancel your basic phone service from the automated message. To cancel, the message said, you must stay on the line until a customer service representative is available. The message then said that there was an approximately 30 minute wait, but you could leave your name and number and the next available customer service representative would call you back.

DH left his name and number and then moved on the next absurdity. A couple of things about that one: 1) we're really lucky that DH received a relocation home buyout with his new job; the market is terrible here and our house isn't going to sell until it picks up, which could be years; 2) our house is over 100 years old, but it was essentially rebuilt from the ground up about five years ago. It had new everything, including new windows and a new roof, which we're sure of because we had the house inspected when we bought it two and a half years ago. The relocation company decided they needed to have the roof specially inspected by an inspector from Portland OREGON. That's hundreds of miles away. Our former realtor talked them out of that, but he's former now because he got so irritated with them he said he couldn't work with them!

In addition to the comedy of errors with the inspections, the relo company now says they didn't receive the notarized forms we sent them last week. The purchase of our new house, which is supposed to happen on Monday, is dependent on receiving the equity from this house, and that is dependent on those forms. The receipt is, naturally, in Texas -- because we expected them to let us know if they didn't receive the forms. And they did -- the day before the absolute deadline. We have no idea whether we'll get our new house in Texas now.

And finally, we were supposed to fly back to Texas on Friday morning (with our kitty), but now, Hurricane Ike is projected to come in on Friday night. It's only going to be tropical storm strength in San Antonio, but there are no direct flights from Seattle, so we have to connect in Houston, which may be evacuating by then, depending on the forecast. We've changed our reservation to the red-eye on Thursday night, and we have our fingers crossed that we'll make it back before they close the airport. Kitty is already locked in the bathroom to keep her from getting out (and lost) while the door is open for the movers. She's utterly miserable. If our flight doesn't happen, and it may not, there's no telling how long she'll have to stay locked in her cage.

Life's a beach. To be continued... if we survive!

Pleasant Activity -- NOT!

2008-09-09T16:28:00.000-07:00

For a person who hates to fly, I find it bizarre that I am on the verge of making the Continental Silver Elite frequent flyer program this year. We flew from San Antonio to Seattle yesterday to complete the final stage of packing and moving our stuff out of the house. The flight itself was fine, but I had a brief interlude of hyperventilating for a few minutes after we took off. I can laugh about it later, but I have to admit that the slightest deviation from what I think of as the normal pattern freaks me right out.

Yeah; I know I'm an idiot, but I just can't help it. When the plane takes off, it usually ascends fairly rapidly, and then a flight attendant makes some pointless announcement thanking me for flying their crappy airline and telling me they have mixed drinks available for $5 and that someone will be along shortly if I wish to purchase headphones for the movie. I don't care what the announcement says (unless it's telling me to assume the crash position); I only care that it does happen. My logic for caring is that I've concluded that if something happens to the plane on take-off, the flight attendants probably aren't going to be worrying about collecting my dollar for headphones!

So yesterday we took off and I waited for the announcement that helps me stop panicking. I've trained myself to remain calm when the engines switch from a sort of high pitched whine to a roar. That normally happens at a certain altitude, and it normally happens within the first two minutes after take-off. The announcement generally follows the change in the engine sounds within about a minute. I know when it usually happens because I time it. So I waited for the announcement. And I waited. The window shade was down because it was really sunny and hot, so at first, I looked at my watch instead of looking out the window. After about 5 minutes, I noticed that my ears weren't popping as they normally do as the plane increases its altitude. I raised the window shade ... and started hyperventilating.

My ears weren't popping because we were still so low to the ground. Too low. I must have made a little gasp because DH asked me what was wrong. I pointed at the window.

"Oh yeah," he nodded, "that's the Woodlands. I hear they have a really nice mall."

"Um ... right," I said. "That's the mall right there. I think I can read the license plates on the cars!"

DH laughed, but I wasn't kidding! I was, in fact, trying to work out whether to head for the forward exit when we crashed or the one behind us since we were midway between them.

Six minutes passed, and then seven -- no ear pops and no announcement. "Don't you think we're flying awfully low?" I asked him.

"Maybe, but what's the big deal? It's not as if anything is wrong. We're still in the air."

"Why don't they make the announcement then?"

He looked bewildered. "What announcement?"

"You know," I said. "The one about the drinks and earphones."

"Who cares? Nobody listens to that anyway."

"Holy Mother of God," I said. "Of course nobody listens to that dumb announcement, but when they make it, it means the flight attendants aren't making burial arrangements!"

DH laughed again. "Holy Mother of God? You are such a goofball." He's entertained by my occasional bouts of melodrama.

I looked at my watch again. "It's been eight minutes. Do you think we should try for the forward exit or the rear one?"

"I think you should stop hyperventilating," he said. "You're going to pass out if you don't quit that. I'm going to read my book, but maybe you should ask the guy sitting next to the door if he would change seats with you. That way you can be the first one out when we crash."

I informed him that he sucked and he agreed with me and went back to reading his book.

The announcement was made after 9 minutes. I had a ginger ale.

The Wild Wild West or Nightmare on Highway 10

2008-09-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

Pip and I made it to San Antonio on Sunday, as planned. Prissy made it here too. Barely. She would not have, if not for divine intervention. i.e., She would not have made it if my uncle had not married VM, who happens to be a goddess.

What happened? Well, for one thing, doggie Xanax does NOT work. At least it doesn't for Prissy. I gave her one, as the vet instructed, about an hour before we left the house. Prissy's carrier wouldn't fit in my car, so I made her what I thought was a nice secure-feeling nest in the back seat. I wedged her bed, which is a sheepskin covered foam thing, into the space between the two front seats to keep her from jumping on me while I was driving, and then we left.

Prissy melted down. I don't mean this in the sense of getting a little upset; I mean she went f#$% crazy. She bounced all over the backseat of the car, all the while making this horrible sort of keening sound. After about 15 miles, I stopped and gave her another Xanax. The first one clearly wasn't working, and she was completely hysterical. We started off again, with me telling myself that the second Xanax would help and that surely she'd get used to being in the car and calm down.

I was wrong. By the time we caught up with the last remnants of Seattle rush-hour traffic, Prissy's keening was so loud that I couldn't even hear the stereo. And then she started lunging. Prissy isn't a big dog -- she only weighs about 22 pounds -- but she's muscular and strong, and that, combined with being hysterical, allowed her to knock down the foam bed barrier I had put between the seats.

If the thought of wrestling with a hysterical yelping pug while navigating through bumper to bumper traffic going 60+ miles per hour doesn't make you nervous, then your disposition is much steadier than mine. Of course there was nowhere to stop; we were on an expressway filled with people trying to get to work. Talking to her didn't work. Yelling at her didn't work. Pushing her back with my elbow didn't work. I slung my right arm across the gap in the seats and held on for dear life. It was pretty grim.

I finally made it to the exit for the road heading east. At that point, I was still hopeful that once we were out of heavy traffic (and noise), the Xanax would kick in and she would settle down. It was not to be. I wrestled with her across Snoqualmie Pass, and ultimately, all the way to Boise. In more than 8 hours of driving, Prissy never stopped lunging and keening for more than 15 minutes. By the time we got to VM's house, I was on the verge of tears. I was also on the verge of wringing Prissy's neck with my bare hands.

Still, I was hopeful that she'd calm down once we got out of the car at VM's house. When we did that, it wasn't hot, so I put Prissy in the garage, along with her bed and a chew-toy in hopes that some quiet time outside of the car would help her calm down. Nothing doing. She keened and bounced off the walls the entire night. Neither VM nor I got any sleep. By this time, I had about decided that something was so terribly wrong with Prissy that she'd never be all right again. I was on the verge of taking to a local vet and asking him to put her down.

I called DH and told him this and he convinced me not to do it ... yet. We decided that the best plan was to find her a carrier that would fit in my car before I left Boise, so at least her lunging wouldn't cause an accident. After that, I planned to give her one more day. If she hadn't calmed down somewhat by my next stop, then I intended to take her to a vet to see if there was anything they could do to help her ... or it would be the end of Prissy's line.

I should note that while I don't adore Prissy, I am a dog person, and the only reason I would even consider this is because I was desperate. And because Prissy was so freaked out, I was afraid that she was permanently broken. DH said later that he tried to convince me not to do anything drastic because he knew that I'd feel like crap later, and that I'd probably never stop kicking myself. And, of course, he was right.

VM was awesome in all of this. She was calm. She was patient. She was tolerant about the fact that a hysterical keening dog was bouncing off the walls of her garage all night long, preventing her from getting any sleep whatsoever. I know VM didn't get any sleep because I was standing out on the patio with Prissy at 1:30 in the morning and VM came out there and hung around with me. The next morning VM helped me find a place that had carriers in stock and she went with me to get one. She also made an awesome coffee cake for breakfast! (And margaritas the night before, which I truly needed...)

Once we got on the road again, Prissy continued being hysterical for a few hours. But just when I thought I was going to have to look for a vet at our next stop, Ely, Nevada, the gaps between her bouts of keening started to get longer. Gradually, gradually, she settled down. When we stopped for the night, I was ready to give her a chance until the next day. She was hysterical in the hotel for a while, but then she settled down there too. And so, Prissy survived.

We spent the night after Ely with my friends in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. I wish I could have stayed there longer. My friends have a beautiful house and I would love to see more of that area -- it's an amazing-looking place. But we needed to get to Texas, so there was no lingering.

In addition to Boise, Ely, and Lake Havasu City, we also spent a night in Lordsburg, New Mexico and Ft. Stockton, Texas. Pip was an angel the whole time. He never made a squeak in the car.

This drive was definitely up there with the most difficult things I've done in my life, and I was too distracted to appreciate the scenery, but the American West is stunning. I've seen parts of it before, but I've never driven on the smaller roads that I used this time. The smaller roads allow you to see more than just the highway -- you really feel like you're THERE.

I hope to see more of the West someday, without a crazy dog in tow. Speaking of towing -- I think it would be a good idea to institute a law whereby people driving ginormous recreational vehicles that are towing massive trucks, boats, and other vehicles behind them, should be required to submit to a mental status test every 100 miles or so. I can understand why you'd want to tow a car or a boat behind an RV; those things are too big to drive around once you get to your destination, so you'd want to park it and use the smaller vehicle (or ride around in your boat). What I can't understand is why so many of the people who do this appear to believe they're cruising in a Maserati!

Heelllooo, people. You cannot make lightning-quick lane changes going uphill in a 40-foot land-yacht while dragging a Suburban behind you. As far as I'm concerned, attempting to do this puts you in the same category as Prissy, and you need your head examined!@

Good Luck DH and JM: Accenture Chicago Triathlon!

2008-08-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

DH and his brother JM are at the starting line right now for the largest triathlon in the world: the Accenture Chicago Triathlon! I wish I could have been there to see them, but I wasn't able to go since I have to get my dogs down to Texas. DH nearly canceled, but he and his brother had been planning this since February and they've worked so hard to be ready for it -- I'm glad he decided to go after all, even though I couldn't go too.

The distances in this race are twice as long as the ones in the triathlon they did a couple of weeks ago here on Whidbey Island (although without the hills). And the field is HUGE -- 9,000 participants. In fact, the field is so large, DH and his brother aren't even in the same wave of starts. JM has already finished his swim (time 29:47) and DH doesn't start for another 5 minutes.

Although I couldn't be there in person, I'm still having fun tracking their progress because they set me up to get text messages when they complete each leg of the race and I'll get to watch them cross the finish line because it's being broadcast live on the web.

I will probably be back with more on this later... because I'm required to congratulate them (and brag)...

JM had a decent transition (3:19) and DH has begun his swim -- Oh I have my fingers crossed that he's able to swim straight! He's fast, but that's his worst problem; he doesn't like to take his head out of the water to look where he's going because he's used to the lanes in the pool, but this swim is in Lake Michigan...

Woohoo! DH finished his swim in 32:38! He's the Man! (I was worried -- this swim was twice as long as the one in the Whidbey triathlon)... NOW he's ready for the part of the race he's great at. Go Mike!!!!

DH only had an OK transition (3:45), so JM has a real lead on him now. They began the bike race with JM at 33:06 and DH at 36:23. So, JM has a solid head start. It'll be interesting to see if DH can catch up to him. The rivalry between brothers is an amazing thing to watch -- it's all in good fun, though, and they're both good sports. JH was the best man at our wedding and they're great friends as well as brothers.

JM is looking great on this one! His total bike time was 1:12:29 and his transition to the run was 3:25, so he's started his run at 1:49. DH is in the wave after JM's, so it'll be awhile before I'll know how he's doing on his borrowed bike. I hope he's able to hang in there.

DH was phenomenal on the bike! His total bike time was 56.18 and his transition was only 2:28, so he completely made up the lead JM had and started his run at 1:35:09 (JM started at 1:49:00).

JM just finished the race -- his complete time was 2:40:49. Congrats bro-in-law! Now we just have to see how DH does.

All that hill training really paid off. DH finished the race in 2:19:06. Wow!

Whoops! Alas, DH had a flat tire just before the end of the the bike race and he had to walk it in, so his results aren't valid. He was still able to complete the run, and his time for that was 43:57. But he didn't get an complete time for the race after all. Oh well, he still did a great job anyway.

Congrats to both JM and DH!

Anti-Pollyanna!

2008-08-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

I seem to spend a lot of time defending myself against charges of being a pessimist. That's because, in America, we worship, along with extroverts, optimists.

For example, the other day, I was talking to the real estate agent we're working with in San Antonio. I said I wanted flood insurance for our house there. She said we didn't need it because our house wasn't in the 100-year flood plain. I said I wanted it anyway.

"Why?" she asked, "the lender doesn't require it."

"No," I said, "but if we ever get water damage, our regular homeowners' insurance won't cover it."

"But that house has never flooded," she said. "Even though we had a 100-year flood several years ago. YOU'RE A REAL PESSIMIST AREN'T YOU?"

I smiled and didn't say anything -- because she is nice -- but I wanted to tell her that in my opinion there is a difference between being a pessimist and being a moron!

And there is a BIG difference between believing something is GOING to happen and acknowledging the possibility that it MIGHT happen. According to floodsafety.com, San Antonio is one of the most flash flood prone areas in North America. I do not BELIEVE my new house is going to flood, but just in case it does, I would like to be insured against financial ruin. Because the house is NOT in a flood plain, the cost will be minimal. To me, that's not being a pessimist, that's simply a smart strategy to protect my investment in my house.

I'm not sure if it's because I grew up in a rural area or what, but I generally tend to plan for taking care of things in a variety of adverse circumstances. That doesn't mean I believe they're going to happen, but just in case they do, I want to be able to deal with them. For example, when I get on a plane, I actually look at the safety card in the seat pocket. And yes; I count the number of rows between me and the exit instead of zoning out. I don't do these things because I'm a pessimist; if I thought my plane was going to crash, I'd never get on it. In fact, in one way, I'm a true optimist, because I believe that even if my plane were to crash, I would survive because I know how to get out!

One interesting thing I've noticed is that to be classed as an optimist, you have to pretend that bad stuff is never going to happen. I think that's great and I wish I could do it. The problem for me is that my dad, the person I loved most in the world, died when I was 21. That pretty much destroyed any chance of me pretending bad stuff couldn't happen and set me on my path to becoming the anti-Pollyanna. The other interesting thing is that I find survival quite satisfying. I have no trouble whatsoever accepting that bad stuff will happen occasionally because I believe I will surmount it.

I generally feel quite positive about the future, in spite of the random bad stuff that will be coming down the pike, because I know that I will have done my best to plan for it. Personal responsibility is the key here rather than pinning my hopes on random good fortune, although good stuff will come too. But that's the thing -- in order to feel the satisfaction, you actually have to THINK about the possibility of a situation in advance, even if it isn't pleasant, and you have to consider the options, and then you have to make a decision and mentally file it away somewhere. It's like counting the seats between you and the exit -- if you wait until the plane is going down, it's too late.

I learned an important lesson about all this during the Hurricane Rita evacuation. You have to help yourself; you can't wait for people in authority to help you or tell when to do it. If we had listened to the police who were guarding that route, we would have run out of gas and our dogs would have died of heatstroke, and maybe we ourselves would have died. It was only when we decided to help ourselves, unlike most of the others who were evacuating, that we were able to get clear of the road.

It isn't easy to break free of the herd, but that's what it takes to protect yourself sometimes. I thought of that when the real estate agent told me that I wasn't required to get flood insurance -- the herd isn't required to have it, even though they live in the flash flood capital of North America. But since it isn't prohibitively expensive, I WILL HAVE IT and if it rains, SO WHAT. If my plane goes down, the herd is welcome to try to count the rows between their seat and the exit, but I will already know, and if it is possible, I WILL MAKE IT OFF THE PLANE.

You can call me Pollyanna.

Small Amazing World

2008-08-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Washington now, trying to figure out how to transport three animals to Texas (easier said than done). Since DH's new job is also with a new company, he doesn't really have the freedom to take a lot of time off to come back and forth to help me with this move. That presents a problem because two of our animals are flat-faced dogs that cannot fly in the hold of a plane, which means I could only take one at a time if I were to fly. The result appears to be a long-distance road trip in my mustang with the two doggies, and then a plane flight for kitty later when we come back to move the furniture. According to Google maps, I am looking at a drive of 2,326 miles. Pip isn't a problem; he loves the car, but Prissy acts like the Tasmanian devil when she even gets near the car. In other words, it's sure to be a nightmare, and that's a pretty long drive!

When I look at the map, the world -- heck, even the US -- seems like a huge, scary place, but I had an interesting experience on Saturday that reassures me that it's manageable. What happened? DH met a guy, DS, in the coffee room at his new job. They got to talking and it turned out that DS and his wife are from Arkansas. DH told him I was too and mentioned the little town in which I was born. Wonder of wonders, it turns out that not only had DS heard of the town where I was born, he and his wife were from the same town. The odds of that are almost astronomical!

DH and DS were so amazed by the coincidence that they made arrangements for us all to go out to dinner on Saturday night, so we did. DS and his wife JS were absolutely lovely. We were able to talk about the place where the three of us are from, and it took all of two minutes for DS and I to realise that his grandfather was my great-grandmother's little brother!!! Not only that but his great-grandmother was my -great-great-grandmother's sister!

Holy cow -- we are cousins in two different ways!!!

San Antonio is nearly 600 miles away from where we were born. Maybe the world isn't so big after all...

Instant Karma

2008-08-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

I'm in San Antonio this week, looking for a new place to live. Several people have told me they think the moving we've done sounds exciting. Whenever I hear anything like that, I get a sense of cognitive dissonance – whatever excitement I may have felt about our moves when I was younger has drained away entirely. All I feel now is dismay and exhaustion and the vague sense that I am carrying some pretty bad karma. I sometimes feel as if I am the ultimate homebody, destined to never have a true home.

Because of that, I seek to recreate *home* wherever I live. It doesn't always look the same on the outside – in fact, it rarely does – but on the inside, it's unmistakable. Of course, that makes finding the right place a real challenge. When I discuss real estate with others, they tell me about their own house criteria: size, number of bedrooms and baths, price per square foot, neighborhood, school district, etc. I pay attention to those things too, but the additional, and most important, criterion for me is that I have to be able to envision the place as home.

That's also the reason why I don't like to rent a house instead of buying (if I can manage it, and so far, I've been lucky enough to do so) – *home* doesn't have neutral colors. Landlords don't like random (bright) paint jobs, and they don't like pets. They also don't like it when you tear out the carpet, but home doesn't have carpet, All of which presents a problem with living in a house I don't own.

A lot of people buy houses as an investment, although I suspect most of those people are pretty unhappy right now, but my primary goal is to have a nice place to live that I can paint in the colors I like, and where no one will bother me about having pets. We always lose money when we move, but each time, it's been for DH's job and it has ultimately seemed inevitable.

So here I am again with the need to find a new doctor, a new dentist, a new vet for the dogs. We'll search out new restaurants, and where the library is located, and which is the best grocery store. Before we can do that, though, we have to find a place to live.

Looking at a bunch of houses in quick succession feels strange, particularly when the houses aren't vacant. In some ways it's like trying on shoes – will this fit? But in other ways, it almost feels as if you're trying on someone else's life – if I live here, who will I be? Someone who lives in THIS house is a gourmet cook (professional range). The lady of THIS house has a perfect manicure (everything absolutely coordinated). The man who lives here is a hunter (deer heads on the wall and built in gun racks). The family who lives here has a lot of children (swings and sandboxes).

After a while, it all begins to run together until I wish I could fall back on school districts and prices per square foot, but I can't because I'm destined to search for my ever elusive home. I wish I could believe in instant karma – that if I bought the absolutely coordinated house, I would suddenly be able to have a perfect manicure. Or I could get the one with the sandbox and suddenly have a lot of kids. Life doesn't work that way, however, so no matter how much I'd like to change it, my karma remains what it is, and no amount of trying on the lives of others is going to alter it. A new town and a new home is not like a new pair of shoes. It isn't smooth and uncreased and unbroken – when you move, you take your baggage with you. You're an old pair of shoes, whether you want to believe it or not.

I was reflecting on this yesterday when I walked into a nice suburban-looking house inside the city limits. On the outside, it was significantly different from the houses I've chosen in the past. It isn't an old farmhouse, nor a former rectory, nor an historic bungalow. In fact, it's not even old, unless you consider a house built in 1989 to be old. It's an unprepossessing house – nothing romantic about it -- the only truly noteworthy thing it has is a beautiful pool. But as soon as I walked in the front door, I recognised it: home.

I told the agent to cancel the rest of our appointments so we could go back to her office to draw up an offer. DH hadn't even seen it yet, but I knew he would love it (he did). Another offer for that house came in right after we made ours (both offers for full asking price). If there is the slightest glitch in the buying process, the seller will be able to simply accept the other offer, so we have no idea whether we'll get the house or not.

I hope we do; I want to go home!

If we don't, well, maybe that would be instant karma.

Swansong Triathlon

2008-08-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

DH is in San Antonio now, midway through the first week at his new job. This is not an easy week for us since everything in our lives is completely up in the air.

Before he left on Sunday, though, my hubby had a nice ending to our brief time here in Washington. His brother, JM, came out from Chicago and they both participated in the Whidbey Island Triathlon.

We had dinner the night before the race with our neighbor, MR, who was participating in a team with her nephew (he was going to do the swim and she was planning to do the ride and the run) and her husband. A couple of racer-doctors from Bellingham, who were staying with them because they couldn't find a hotel on the island were also at dinner. We had a great time.

On the morning of the race (Saturday), it was typical weather here -- cloudy and not that warm (under 60 F. in fact) and the swim was the first thing on the agenda. They had to swim 800 meters in a lake, then ride their bikes for 19.5 miles, and then, finally, finish up with a 3.8 mile run.

DH and his brother took their bikes in JM's rental car and I took my own car. I also took Pip to keep me company since I figured I'd be spending a lot of time waiting around between the different parts of the race. I had no trouble finding a parking space along the road, but DH and JM couldn't find one after they unloaded the bikes and they almost missed the race altogether.

About 3 minutes before the start of the race, I was nervously standing at the entrance to the park looking for them, and then I saw them running furiously down the road toward me. They were both carrying their wetsuits and JM was barefooted!

When they got close enough to hear me, I started yelling at them to hurry, but I needn't have; they were half-way to being in a panic already. DH flung off all his clothes except his bike shorts and pulled on the wetsuit and then he took off towards the water. I chased him and made him stop for a quick photo! JM ignored me so there isn't one of him.

JM beat DH in the swim, and there is a photo of him coming out of the water.

DH didn't do as well in the swim as he did in the rest of the race, but I love that lime green cap he has on his head. You can't see it well in the photo, but I also love the fact that's he's grinning like a nut as he's coming out of the water. I asked him why later and he said he wasn't sure, but that it might have been because he was happy that he didn't drown.

Unlike nearly everyone else in the race, DH has an ancient rusted bike that he bought used 10 years ago. JM had brought his slick new bike with him from Chicago. JM told me that he was feeling sorry for DH because of having to ride such a heavy old bike, particularly since JM got such a good head start on him in the swim, until DH cruised right by him and left him in the dust! DH ROCKED that bike ride!

I saw them both finish, but I didn't get any photos because Pip was the star of the sidelines at that point and I was busy defending him from an idiot child who caused Pip to part with a thick section of his tail.

Then there was the run and DH rocked that too. After several years of injuries, it was amazing to see him do so well. In fact, DH came in 28th overall in the run, out of a field of nearly 300! That's not by age; that's over the entire field.

In spite of his bad swim, DH did much better than his goal of finishing in 2:15. His actual time was 1:55:36! JM did pretty well too, in spite of being bigger and younger [g] -- his time was 2:02:55.

Except for losing part of his tail, Pip did the best of all. He got to ride in the car; he got to ride in his carrier (he adores that thing so much he sleeps on top of it); and he got all the little girls at the race to pet him.

Overtaken

2008-07-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

I had every intention of writing more about my trip to England, but as soon as I got home, my life was overtaken by events.

First, a quick wrap-up of the trip:

I had a brilliant time meeting my favourite author, Elizabeth Chadwick and her friend Alison. EC's DH is gorgeous; her house is beautiful; her garden is amazing; and, her chocolate cake is awe-inspiring (yes; I have my priorities straight). We went to Swaton to see the effigy of Nicholaa de la Haye, but the church was locked and the key holder was not home, so we did not get in. Note that we did not actually do any damage to the church while we were trying. [g]

The rest of the week was spent site-seeing in a very "busy" manner, probably more so than I would normally like, but I did enjoy spending time with Auntie and I do love England. Next year, however, I think we are going to have to eschew the tour and find a holiday cottage instead. The primary reason we didn't do it this time was because I was leery of driving in the UK, but I'm a good driver and I've decided that if I pick up a hire car outside of London, I will be OK.

And now for the events that overtook me when I got home:

DH accepted a new job, and we are moving back to Texas. Seriously!

And it is happening fast; he is starting his new job on Monday, 4 August.

Yikes!!!

Shacking up at the Savoy???

2008-07-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

Time for the second part of my English odyssey!

To my amazement, we arrived early and customs was a breeze. I was met by a cheerfully efficient driver who took my suitcase and trotted off toward the car. I had gone maybe a quarter of the way across the parking lot when I realised that I was breathing like a winded nag. The driver, OTH, who was quite overweight, a good 15 years older than me, and dragging my heavy suitcase, was rapidly pulling away.

Oh my God, I thought, I can't keep up with that chubby little man pulling my case. I probably have a blood clot! I'm going to drop dead in Heathrow parking lot-- I wonder if my travel insurance will pay for shipping my body home.

Fortunately, my sensible side quickly reasserted itself. “You don't have a blood clot, you daft cow. You have 3 hours of a screaming brat on top of very little sleep. Man up and get your ass in the damned car.” And that's what I did.

On my first night in town, I had dinner with MS, SS, and their adorable daughter Jessica, who appeared to enjoy the puppet princess I brought her. It was fortunate for me that she accompanied her parents as I read the sign that said “ look left,” promptly “looked right” and would have walked into traffic if Jessica had not grabbed my hand and stopped me.

Auntie arrived bright and early the next day and we went off to the V&A for a look at whatever we could set our greedy eyes on in the brief time that we had – alas, there is never enough time to do the V&A properly. I had to be physically restrained from hieing off into the textiles collection, never to be heard from again.

We are with this tour group and after the V&A, we had our first dinner with the group. Everyone seemed very nice and they were all chatting politely about other trips they had taken with the tour company. I, of course, have never taken any sort of tour before and I found myself a bit lost for words to describe the kind of holidays I have enjoyed in the past.

I will pick a hotel in a place that I want to go and sort of stick there for a while,” I said.

But what do you DO?” someone asked.

Well ... I can't say exactly ... I look at whatever is around the place that I've chosen. Like with my trip to London – I called it 'shacking up at the Savoy--'” I meant to go on and say that I stayed at the Savoy and went to see everything in easy reach of the hotel. I wanted to know what it was like to be right THERE. That was the point of the trip. But I never got that far because when I uttered the words 'shacking up at the Savoy' there was a collective gasp – as if I had claimed to be shacking up with Harry Potter or something!

The tour guide said something witty about Winston Churchill liking to shack up at the Savoy but, with the exception of Auntie, who knows how awful I am, all the other ladies in the group looked absolutely scandalized. I tried to appear mortified, but I admit that I was secretly delighted – as long as Auntie wasn't offended, then being a bit scandalous is right up my alley.

The next day we visited Kenwood House and Hampstead Heath, and then, joy of joys, we scored tickets for Spamalot. We were packed like sardines on the tube, but it was well worth it. The performance was brilliant!

Yesterday we went to Flatford Mill, and stopped off for evensong in Norwich Cathedral. They had a bunch of visiting bishops on-hand in preparation for the Lambeth conference, which is happening this week. There was supposed to be free tea for everyone afterwards, but it's just as well I had my tea beforehand because I was ejected from evensong on a mobile phone violation – and it wasn't even my phone!

What happened was that I don't have a mobile that works in the UK, so I had given Auntie's number to DH. I was supposed to remind Auntie to turn off that phone before we went into the church. She forgot and I forgot and naturally, DH chose a moment about 1/3 of the way into the service to ring. Auntie dug in her bag for the phone and it took nearly 4 rings for her to get it. It looked like she was having trouble making sure it was off, so I asked if she wanted me to take it away and make sure it was off. She handed it to me, so I slipped out toward the aisle, intending to simply take a side chair, while I examined the phone closely to be sure it was completely off. Suddenly, it began chirping to indicate there was voice mail, and then, while I was trying to shut it down the rest of the way, the damned thing started ringing again – except it doesn't ring; it plays a song. A nearby usher opened the door and said, “Would you like to go outside? PLEASE!” It was not a question.

I went outside – the call was from DH, so I waited out the rest of the service chatting in the arcade. I could still hear the singing although I fear I missed the immortal words of the Bishops of ... somewhere, and ... somewhere else. Oh well. The lawns were pretty.

I am now at The Dales Hotel in Sheringham. Today we checked out the beach at Sheringham; we rode the steam train to Cromer; we looked at the shops at Holt; we went to see the seals at Blakeney Point; we did other things too numerous to mention. I am completely and utterly exhausted. Tomorrow I am off to Nottingham via Norwich.

A Wing and a Prayer -- and a Taser Would Have Been Nice

2008-07-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

So far, so good. Please be indulgent on spelling & grammar errors -- posting from an internet cafe -- proofing time = $$$!

I made it to the airport hours early, thanks to my extreme paranoia over missed ferries and rush-hour traffic. DH was kind enough to drive me so that I didn't have to deal with public transportation AND paranoia. I'd spent so much time rushing around getting ready, that I only realized when we were nearly to the airport that I hadn't eaten anything all day – I was starving! Of course, that made me wonder what else I'd forgotten – Doh! – earrings. I hadn't planned to bring any fancy jewelry, but I have pierced ears and I meant to bring a pair of earrings. Normally, I would have been wearing them, but nowadays, you can't be sure even something so tiny won't set off the alarm at airport security and get the TSA baboons chattering (and feeling you up), so I pack them now. Except that I didn't.

Still, I was SO early, it wasn't going to be a problem. SeaTac airport has some excellent restaurants in the main terminal and better still, they have a shop there full of things made by local artists. I had plenty of time to get something to eat, and then duck into the artist shop and buy a cute pair of earrings – and better still, I actually had an excuse to buy something in that shop. I normally go in there, look around wistfully, and drag myself away because it's stupid to pay airport prices for anything. However, in this case, airport prices are a bargain when you compare them to what I would pay if I waited till I got to London. Case closed!

So, that was the plan. Check my luggage. Go through security. Get something to eat. Buy some earrings. Oh, and hit the Barnes & Noble for a book or two to read on the plane. I hadn't had chance to get books either. I have some e-books on Lili (EeePC) but the flight is 10 hours and I wasn't sure I would be able to charge Lili on the plane. (I reserved a seat that supposedly had PC power, but you never know).

I checked my one bag with no problem. I went through security with a handbag and a carry-on. My carry-on and I also had no problem. The gibbering idiots who man the TSA station apparently did not like my handbag. They X-rayed it twice and then they upended it into a plastic bin. Fine. It's not like there was any contraband in there. In addition to my wallet, my travelers' cheques, and my passport cover, a couple of stray aspirin and a piece of gum fell out. The fact that they felt they needed to do this isn't an issue – security is security – it's the way that they treat you while they're doing it that's so annoying.

For one thing, they bark orders at your barefooted self.

"Is this your bag ma'am?”

"Step over here, ma'am, you're holding up the rest of the line.”

Well, DUH, I'm holding up the rest of the line. My carry-on bag with my laptop has just gone through and is down at the other end, with my shoes, while you've just dumped the entire contents of my purse into a plastic box 20 feet away. I would like to leave this area with my purse AND my laptop and my shoes, thank you very much, you f***** baboon!

I was finally able to retrieve and reassemble all of my belongings and make my way off to the terminal. The purse dumping incident ruffled my feathers a bit, and I stayed on auto-pilot while I got on the tram to the international terminal. That's when I remembered the international terminal isn't the one with the nifty artist shop, the good restaurants, and the bookstore. The international terminal is really crappy. They have one Burger King, one cocktail lounge, and one coffee shop. They have a newsstand, but no bookstore, and the only other shop in that terminal is the duty free shop. And the doors on the tram slid closed just as I remembered this. Damn!

I had a hamburger at Burger King, although I needn't have – to my surprise, there have been THREE meal services on the flight. I bought three less than arresting novels at the newsstand. And, I found a pair of tolerable earrings at the duty free. It could have been better, but it could have been worse.

The flight itself has been pretty good as well. It isn't full and I lucked into getting a short row of two seats to myself, which meant I was able to put up the arm rest and curl up and sleep for a few hours.

At this point I would like to thank the unnamed physician who answered the call for help with the medical emergency. The repeated requests for assistance made it sound pretty urgent – I wonder if we wouldn't have had to divert to Nova Scotia if you hadn't been here. In any case, I realize you probably won't be compensated, so thank you for interrupting your flight to help.

And on the flip side – no thanks whatsoever to the father who had to be scolded by the flight attendant for allowing your small son to run up and down the aisles of the darkened plane, pressing the flight attendant call buttons and turning on the overhead lights over OTHER PEOPLES' SEATS while you read the Wall Street Journal.

I think most people understand that it's difficult to travel with small children, particularly on such a long flight. They get tired; they get bored. It's tough on them; it's tough on you. Other passengers know this. We don't expect your child to be the model of perfection for 10 hours straight.

We do, however, expect you to pull your head out of your bony ass and tell him to be quiet when he's yelling LA LA LA at the top of his lungs at 3:00 in the morning on a red-eye flight on which EVERY other person is trying to sleep. And we do expect you to attempt to restrain him when he is running – RUNNING – up and down the aisles of the plane, pressing OUR flight attendant call buttons and OUR overhead light buttons!

The flight attendant who asked you to please keep your child in his seat was the soul of restraint. When she pointed out that the seat control panel is not a toy, I wanted to hug her. Your reply, “He is a child. What can I do?” was completely inappropriate. You were lucky you did not say that to me because I would have been happy to tell you what you could do (and I very much doubt that you would have liked it!)

Apparently, the threat of an incident report was sufficient inducement to you to put down the Wall Street Journal. I think you escaped mildly. When I was waiting for the toilet, the woman in the row ahead of me came out – she said she wished she could taser you!

We are over Birmingham now, and starting our descent. Thus endeth part one of my journey.

Lie Back and Think of England

2008-07-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Take your dirty mind out of the gutter; I didn't mean it THAT way. I'm thinking of England because I'm leaving for the airport in a little while and I'm going over the last-minute details of what I need to take. I reckon the most important thing I need to take is an attitude adjustment because I have really got into a habit of casting a jaundiced eye on everything to do with travel. That makes me sad because when I was younger, I loved to travel. Now, I REALLY have to want to go somewhere, in order to force myself to make the effort.

So ... as of this minute ... I am on holiday. I am going to have a wonderful trip. Nothing is going to go wrong. The flight will be on-time and uneventful. I will sleep on the plane and when I wake up, I will not look like shit (yeah right). There will be no delay at customs and the car I have arranged to meet me, will be waiting to take me to the Vanderbilt Hotel. I will arrive in time to take a shower before I meet my friends for dinner. Their daughter will like the puppet princess I have packed in my luggage for her. All will be well.

Friday morning, Auntie's uneventful flight will also be on-time and we will have a fun weekend exploring London. It won't hurt that our hotel is across the street from Harrods and the V&A Museum. On Sunday, we'll go on to The Dales hotel in Sheringham for our sojourn in East Anglia. On Tuesday, I will not miss the train, nor be involved in a train crash, when I go to meet my favourite author, Elizabeth Chadwick. When I arrive at her house, I will do my best not to mortally offend her or any of her friends or family. All will be well.

When I visit Sandringham with Auntie, I will not destroy any priceless antiques. All will be well.

On this trip, I will be involved in no auto accidents, no street altercations, no polical demonstrations. In short, it will be a lovely holiday, on which we will visit interesting sites and meet lovely people. All will be well.

I am open to the abundance of the universe.

I'm really bad at this. I'm taking my new EEEPC, now named Lili. Depending on internet access, there may be reports of just how "well" it all is. (g)

Amazon Antitrust Suit - Small Publishers in the Fray!

2008-07-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

I just received this from SPAN, and I think it's good news for small publishers -- I've signed the petition already. Amazon are perfectly entitled to do whatever they like with their store -- and we, as publishers, are perfectly entitled to PUSH BACK if we don't like it. Maybe we won't win, but we have just as much right to try to stop them rolling over us as they have to try to force us into using their crappy printing technology.

Go Booklocker!

Go SPAN!

==============
News Release
July 7, 2008

Small Publishers Association
of North America (SPAN)

1618 West Colorado Avenue
Colorado Springs, CO 80904
719-475-1726
www.spannet.org

Contact: Scott Flora, Executive Director
scottflora@spannet.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Amazon Throws its Weight Around,
Book Publishers Push Back

Association rallies independent publishers
to support lawsuit against business giant

Colorado Springs, CO, July 7, 2008 — The Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN), a national trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of independent publishers, launched a campaign to generate support for the class action lawsuit Booklocker.com, Inc. vs. Amazon.com, Inc. The SPAN board recently voted to publicly support the lawsuit.

Booklocker.com, Inc., initiated the class action antitrust lawsuit to challenge the legality of Amazon’s new policy requiring print on demand (POD) publishers using the company’s distribution services to print their books using Amazon’s subsidiary BookSurge. The lawsuit states that Amazon is illegally tying the BookSurge printing to Amazon’s distribution services. According to antitrust law, companies generally cannot require a customer to buy one product in order to have access to another distinct product.

Through its campaign, SPAN aims to generate significant public pressure to compel Amazon to reverse its new policy. The campaign is built on two objectives:

To collect 10,000 signatures on a petition that will be sent to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
To unite 100+ writer and publisher organizations in opposing the policy and supporting the lawsuit

“From the public outcry over the announcement of Amazon’s new POD policy, we have an army of enthusiastic writers and publishers ready for the next step in getting Amazon to change its policy,” said SPAN Executive Director, Scott Flora. “This campaign is the next step.”

SPAN’s campaign is creating support in five primary ways: uniting voices through the petition; writing letters to Amazon; recruiting other organizations; generating press coverage; and passing the word along friends and colleagues.

About SPAN — SPAN is a nonprofit trade association of independent book publishers with more than 1,000 members. The association provides support to authors and independent book publishers through industry news, business benefits, education, and marketing opportunities.

###

For more information about the SPAN campaign and the lawsuit against Amazon visit www.spannet.org/amazonantitrust-home.htm.
To schedule an interview with Scott Flora, please contact Lisa Gilman at 719-475-1726 or lisa@spannet.org.

The Week of Long Days

2008-06-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

It was a week late, but summer did finally arrive, just in time for the close of my favorite time of the year -- the week of long days. Here in Washington, that means dawn edging in at 4:00 am and sunset edging out at nearly 11:00 pm. That's a lot of daylight!

The temperature has nearly reached 80 F today too, which, in my book, is as near to perfect as exists on earth. DH spent most of the day gardening, and I spent most of the day appearing to garden, although what I was really doing had a lot more to do with basking in the sun than with anything like work.

You know I couldn't resist giving you flowers, though, could I?

First is a shot of these two unknown white bushes blooming on either side of our front gate. I don't know what they are, but I do know they didn't bloom last year or the year before, so seeing them covered in delicate white lace was a nice surprise.

Next is a photo of our "secret" garden. It was mainly a huge mess until DH weeded it a few weeks ago when he dug up the lavender to plant in my pig wallows. It's not very big, but now that it's cleared out, it's amazing. You can follow the little path into the middle and peer out through the trees and all you can see are flowers, leaves, and the distant water down below.

The next photos are all of the same thing -- the most beautiful roses I've ever seen. They are in a part of our lawn that has not really been landscaped. In our first summer here, two years ago, they were nearly choked over with weeds -- we only discovered the roses because of a desperate long shoot of blooms that made it over the top of the weeds near the end of the summer. We cut back the weeds and made sure the roses got water last summer. This year, we are seeing our reward!

The buds are a deep salmon pink when they are closed, and when they open, they are a deep golden yellow, edged with apricot.

I took so many shots because I couldn't seem to get one that showed them in their true glory.

The next photo shows how much work is left to do on that section of the garden -- it is a wild mess -- but it is a wild mess of the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen.

Miss Worthen, Where ARE You?

2008-06-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

It has become very clear of late that not everyone had a fifth grade teacher like Miss Worthen. For proof, I offer Exhibit A, the source of which I shall leave anonymous, as it is irrelevant to my point:

Stop and take a look at what us women have in our closets.

US women?

Miss Worthen – you missed one! Where were you when this poor writer was in fifth grade?

More and more I believe we need an army of Miss Worthens – her primary mission was to prevent ignorant ten year olds from the misuse of personal pronouns. If you, for example, foolishly uttered something stupid like "Me and Jim went to the store" – Miss Worthen would deliver unto you the appropriate punishment. If you were an habitual offender, you would be sent to sit on the floor in the hallway and made to write out the correct construction a specified number of times. Occasional offenders were allowed to sit on a stool in the corner of the room while writing out the punishment.

I admit that I suffered Miss Worthen's punishments a few times. I also admit that because I preferred the hallway (where I had time to woolgather if I wrote fast) to the stool in the corner, I learnt to escalate myself into bigger trouble (by arguing) just to get the bigger punishment. Of course, I didn't prefer the bigger trouble brought by the note home to my parents!

But I digress – Miss Worthen's methods were sometimes harsh, but they worked.

I do not say "I" when it should be "me."

I do not say "me" when it should be "I."

I do not say "us" when it should be "we."

When they are not sure of which word to use, I cannot understand why people don't simply remove the extra words to see how the sentence sounds. In my example above, that's all it would have taken to see that the correct word should have been "we."

Stop and take a look at what us have in our closets.

Miss Worthen was never my favorite teacher. Till now.

Garden Girl and the Pig Wallows

2008-06-15T16:47:00.000-07:00

After all the sniveling, whingeing, and moaning I've done lately, it's probably hard to believe that it only took two consecutive days of sunshine to do it. But it did.

Witness garden girl.

Able to dig dandelions out by the root. Able to frighten snails away by her very shadow. (I wish!) Able to transform a patch of mud that looked an awful lot like a pig wallow into a patch of mud with some sparse droopy flowers.

It was a good day.

We started out by going to the Lavender Wind Farm to pick up some replacements for the lavender plants we lost over the winter.

We decided to go with Folgate English lavender (lavandula angustifolia) this time because the blooms are a deeper purple than the hybrid and French lavenders that we planted last summer. The conditions here also seem closer to England, so we think it will be hardier in our weather.

Folgate lavender grows fairly large, but it takes about three years. Two of the plants we lost were on either side of our gate, and we debated replacing them with something else because the empty beds are the part of the lawn that looks like a pig wallow, but the owner of the Lavender Farm suggested replacing them lavender, but filling in the gaps with annuals until the lavender grows large enough to stand on its own.

That seemed like a good idea, so we decided to do that, and then we went to Sally's Garden to get the annuals to fill in the holes. I ended up with purple and pink cosmos and some other purplish daisy like things whose name I can't recall, but as usual, I didn't get enough because there are really two pig wallows! If I had put them all on one side, I think it would have looked fine, and I almost did, but for some reason, I didn't at the last minute.

Here is one of the pig wallows.

Fortunately, DH found two lavender plants that were much larger than the ones we bought hiding in one of the big beds near the front of the lawn, and he dug them up and moved them to my pathetic pig wallows, so they don't look quite so bad as they would have otherwise.

Here are the pig wallows with my droopy cosmos and DH's lavender plants.

I suspect a trip to the garden store is in my future. One can never have enough droopy flowers can one?

While we were out, we had ice cream at the world famous Kapaw's. They make their own waffle cones -- Yum!

In my other garden endeavours, I pulled up a weed with a firmly embedded root, which let go suddenly, showering my entire head with truly disgusting mud. I also managed to trip on a clump of turf and fall down, face first, barely missing the rake! I twisted my ankle, ruined my jeans, and laughed for 15 minutes at the picture I must have presented, considering that I already had mud all over my head. I limped over to where DH was weeding and asked if he'd heard me scream. He said yes but that he'd assumed it was because I was rolling in the mud with the dogs. On purpose.

In spite of the nasty weather we've been having, our flowers have been progressing from spring to summer.

My pot of pansies is offering assurance that the Curse of the Black Thumb is in retreat.

The poppies are popping!

The snapdragons, which a few weeks ago, appeared to be at death's door, have a new lease on life. I love snapdragons.

The backyard is like heaven for dogs.

I don't know what this little bush is, but the photo doesn't do it justice. It's quite amazing up close. The flowers are shaped like stars that have yellow centers. It's a gorgeous thing.

In the bed where DH found the large lavender plants, we also found a lone iris. We really need to sort that bed out. It's large and it's so crowded, it's difficult to see what is even growing inside. Ah well, surely there will be another sunny day before the end of summer. Surely...

Two Good Things

2008-06-12T19:14:00.000-07:00

The sun came out today. That was one good thing. The other good thing was totally unexpected, and totally due to Auntie. The blog entry I wrote last summer about the snake in my mother's kitchen, won second place in one of the contests at the Arkansas Writers' Conference!

I took it down since the rules of the contest required that it be "unpublished' and, technically, having it on the web could be interpreted as being published, so I'm not linking to it now. When I remember what I did with it after taking it down, I'll put it back up and link to it then, but in the meantime, I'm chuffed. Particularly, since I only wrote the thing for my own amusement.

Good things are supposed to come in threes, so I wonder what the other one will be...

Unruly Sun!

2008-06-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

It's been nineteen days with no sun. My flu has turned into bronchitis. We've had a winter storm this week, which is only remarkable because it isn't winter!

But it's back. A hole has opened in the clouds and the sun has come back. I was beginning to think it never would.

I feel too crappy to jump up and down, so instead, here's a poem to celebrate the return of the sun.

The Sun Rising

by John Donne

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school boys and sour prentices,

Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

But that I would not lose her sight so long;

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,

Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

She's all states, and all princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,

All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,

In that the world's contracted thus.

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Thanks!

2008-06-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

Thanks everyone, for the helpful suggestions for cheering myself up. I know it's a drag to read about the misery of others, but sometimes suggestions help because when you're lost in your own woes, it's hard to come up with them yourself.

Shoes? Shoes are good. I have ... ahem ... a few pairs of shoes already, but a few more can't hurt. I just bought three pairs, so rather than buying more, maybe I'll put them on (inside, there's no point in drowning them immediately) and think about going outside again someday! The rain will stop. I know it will. I'm sure it will. Really.

Ice cream? I think I'd better wait for a holiday in a warm place for ice cream. I need to warm my bones. My heating bills are astronomical right now. I'm running the furnace and a space heater. But I can have hot chocolate!

It's funny. Until I lived here, I always took summer for granted. It's hot. It's miserable. You get tornadoes. You get hurricanes. You get mosquitoes. West Nile disease. Name some nasty summer pestilence, and I was ready to deal with it. What I was not ready to deal with was not having summer. Oh my God. No summer! What kind of messed up deal is that?

Now I long for my humidity. My swamp. The sound of the mosquito truck spraying noxious chemicals in the air. Shimmering heat poisoned by the emissions of a million stalled cars. The feeling of your skin fusing to the seat of your car when you first get in. The taste of the salt and the ice when the margarita first hits your tongue after you've fought your way home through miles of sweltering traffic. Home.

I thought about this a lot this weekend as I stared out at the rain. I think the real problem is that I have to come to terms with the fact that short term solutions like walks, and shopping, and books -- all things I normally enjoy -- only have a brief effect, and once I've finished, I settle right back into feeling blue. Which means I was right in the first place; the solution to my problem has to come from within. Distraction isn't going to work.

Oh well; I really do appreciate the suggestions. It's nice to know you're out there! And now I know there is only one way to a happy ending -- I will have to write it myself. But I am good at doing that; I'm just reluctant to expend the emotional energy unless I have to. I see now that I have to. So that's OK.

Running on Empty

2008-06-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've always believed we bear a certain responsibility for our own attitudes about things. Sitting around and moping is nothing if not self indulgent. And yet ... and yet ... I haven't seen the sun in more than a week -- it's 46 degrees F. and rainy, with no sun in the forecast. I've barely seen DH in days; he's on a big project at work. I am not having any fun and I don't even know when I will be having any fun in the future.

My reserve of positive mental attitude is hovering dangerously near the empty mark. I need a refill, but when it's this low, it's hard to work out how to get it.

What do you do to cheer yourself up when you're feeling low?

Suggestions are welcome!

Age Ranges on Books: Just Say NO!

2008-06-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've seen several discussions of proposals to put age ranges on books. I have trouble grasping how this would work because of my own experience with reading progression.

I remember when I was in my first year of school, we were divided into three groups for reading, according to level. Each group was allowed to choose their own name, and ours, the advanced group, chose the politically incorrect name "the Indians", in response to the middle group's choice of "the Cowboys." (OMG, I think the third group was "the Horses"! LOL!) We weren't, however, allowed to choose our own books, and they were, I recall, stultifying variations on "See Dick Run." The only difference between the groups was that ours was allowed to progress through each volume faster than the other groups, and so, we got through more of them.

Naturally, I never learned a dang thing in school. In fact, I don't recall learning anything in school at all until I was about 15 years old. Pretty sad. That's not to say I didn't learn things; I just didn't learn them in school. I spent most of my time in school staring at the wall, at the clock, or at the notebook on my desk. My dad taught me maths; books taught me everything else. I was good enough at words that when called upon, I could BS the teachers so they didn't know that I never paid a bit of attention to a word they said.

The thing about age ranges on books is that I hated school so much, I don't know how I would have got through my childhood if I'd not had books to look forward to! Every day when the bell rang, I raced home to my dogs, and my books. No matter what kind of plans I had with my friends, and I nearly always had some kind of fun there too, I always had an hour or two in the afternoon, after school, with my books. The good ones that taught me things. The ones that gave my life some color!

When I was six and seven, I was into Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and Cherry Ames. They were far more interesting than the silly Dick and Jane things we had at school. Then, I moved into LOVE with Harlequin romances! No sex, but I doubt very seriously that mild romance novels would have been rated at an age range for an eight year old! Or Georgette Heyer and her magical Regencies -- I was fascinated with the Ton.

By the time I was nine, I was ready for the big leagues -- my dad's Book of the Month Club books. So I moved into reading the featured NYT bestseller of the month. Whatever it was. I learned a LOT that way.

I asked my parents and grandparents a lot of uncomfortable questions about the words and meanings in the books. And they gulped and explained them to me. I'm sure it wasn't easy for them, but it meant we talked about books. Almost every day. I'm sure it was hard for them, but I'm still grateful. And as hard as it must have been, it did give them useful ways to talk to me about things well in advance of me coming upon threatening situations in real life. For example, our discussion of Valley of the Dolls happened long before anyone offered me drugs in school -- but that cautionary tale was already lodged in my memory as a reason to stay far away from them.

The idea of intentionally making children dumber is just alien to me I suppose. But there will always be some who want to do that. In the end, it probably doesn't matter, because those people wouldn't have read and discussed the books with their children anyway. But it makes me sad to think there are people who want their children's lives to have fewer colors.

The Shape of a Song: Singing in Tull

2008-05-31T10:38:00.000-07:00

As an unnamed cousin recently noted in the comments on my blog, the 123rd Old Folks' Singing was held in Tull on the third Sunday in May. I was in Lake Charles that weekend, so I wasn't able to be there, but, as always, it sounds as if a wonderful time was had by all.

Lynda Hollenbeck, an editor from the Benton Courier, attended the Singing this year, and she has a pretty amusing description of her experience. I suspect her "Friend DeAnne" also happens to be one of my cousins (how many DeAnnes can there be in such a small community?).

Here are a few excerpts from Lynda's write up, but for the best effect, you really should read the whole thing here.

We learned that there are sacred rules about Old Folks’ Singing. This isn’t the place where you do just what you want. There’s a plan, and sisters and brothers, you’d better follow it or you’ll get stomped. If you’re newcomers, as Ed and I were, you may find yourself confused. (EVERYONE else knew how to play the game.)

The afternoon session includes singing from the Cokesbury hymnal, which I grew up with at night services at the Cotton Plant Methodist Church, but the morning session includes no songs other than those included in the “Christian Harmony” songbook. That’s like looking at a foreign document to me. I’ve been playing the piano since I was 6 years old and have never stopped, so I do know a little bit about music, both instrumental and vocal. But don’t EVER put shaped notes in front of me. They’re scary.

Lynda describes her confusion over the shaped notes in the songbook until Janie Wilmoth tells her to "go to the third line to get the melody."

That makes absolutely no sense to me, but I started watching that line while listening to the voices and determined that, yes, that is what they’re singing, but for the life of me I don’t know why. If you ask anyone, they just tell you, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”

The funniest part is when Wilson Duvall, this year's leader, calls on Lynda to lead a song. This means she has to CHOOSE a song on the spot, choose some people to help her lead it, and go up to the front and start singing.

That’s pretty much the setup for Old Folks’ Singing. Everything is done “the way we’ve always done it.” Once they get past a few introductory acts, they get serious about singing. There was no explanation as to how anyone is chosen to lead a song or what song he or she should lead. Wilson would call out the names of those who would be next in line to be the songleader.

I know this probably doesn't sound all that funny, but that's only because you cannot imagine the scenario. This tiny little church would have been packed to the rafters with people from all over the country (it's usually standing room only), and 99% of us are related by blood or by marriage. Lynda had friends in the audience, but she'd never attended before, she'd never seen a shaped note songbook in her life, and she was called to lead a song. LOL!

She did what we did last time we were there and asked to lead a song -- she chose Amazing Grace. You don't need a book for that. (There was no way I was going to put DH through a shaped-note-singing-test in front of my entire extended family and there was no way I was getting up there without him.)

In addition to Lynda Hollenbech's piece, the Benton Courier has a lovely photo of some of my cousins leading the final song of the day. If you're interested, you can see it here. I don't know the others as well, though I've met them all, but I would recognise Jean Carlisle anywhere, even though I probably haven't seen her in 15 or 20 years. I thought about visiting her last summer when I was staying with my mother -- Cousin Jean has lived next door for my whole life, but Mother was so sick, and then there was that little ... um ... difficulty with the snake ...

For shaped note aficionados, here is a scan of a page from the Christian Harmony songbook.

Sluggish

2008-05-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

If you are a garden lover then you will know the destruction that slugs and snails can do to your flowers. I have been having some success against the slugs by placing dishes of beer among the plants. The slugs head straight for the dishes, fall in, and apparently drink themselves to death -- but the snails appear to be cannier sorts. There are usually a few snail-lushes, but the majority of drowning victims are generally slugs. After my week in Houston, and then another week with the flu, I hadn't been paying attention to the slimy denizens of my garden until yesterday, when I glanced out the window and realized that the entire snail population of North American was racing toward the blue pot of pansies on my porch!

"Ack!" I shrieked at my startled spouse. "We have to DO something! NOW!"

"Tea?" He replied calmly -- obviously familiar, after twenty years, with my particular brand of insanity.

"Of course I can't have tea now. Are you crazy? Look out there! There are dozens of them. There are two right on the side of the POT! I have to go out there and get those snails right now. NOW."

"OK," he said, "but I assume you'll be getting dressed first..."

Ahem. He had a point; I probably ought not go outside wearing just a nightshirt.

I spent quite a long time on snail abatement yesterday, but this morning, I made the mistake of glancing out the window again as I was on my way to the kitchen.

"Ack!"

I was out there at the crack of dawn with a Safeway bag and a plastic spoon.

The George W. Bush Commemorative EEE PC

2008-05-25T13:30:00.000-07:00

My compatriots at Financial Softworks all have these. My best friend has one too. I am a shallow, covetous person. The president of this great nation has just deposited a useless "economic stimulus" payment in my bank account. Adding all of the aforementioned factors together has produced one result: my own "George W. Bush Commemorative" Asus EEE PC will be arriving on 4 June.

Nota Bene: The name will only be retained until entertainment purposes are exhausted or until 4 July 2008, whichever happens first.

Conehead

2008-05-24T16:21:00.000-07:00

I came back from my trip with a to-do list that was a mile long and promptly got so sick with the flu that I couldn't even manage to turn on my computer for two days, much less knock off any items on my list. It's funny how the importance of things can suddenly become reduced when you're wondering whether or not you can make it into the bathroom without falling down and hitting your head!

I suspect I need to stock up on vitamins because this is the second time in less than a year that I've come down with a bad virus-like illness; I'm not usually susceptible to these things. Prior to this year, I've only had the flu maybe three or four times in my entire life. Twice in one year is not a good trend. About the only good that came of it, if you can call it good, was that it gave me an excuse to indulge in eating weird childhood comfort food that I don't normally go for. Cheese sandwiches and orange soda pop. Actually, I had a grilled cheese sandwich at a restaurant in Houston last week, because I was at place that didn't have anything I really wanted, but it gave me a taste for them that stayed with me, so I ate grilled cheese sandwiches nearly every day this week. Heaven only knows where the idea for the orange soda pop came from -- I think it may have been a kind of proxy for cough syrup because we were out and I kept having violent coughing fits, but that's all I wanted, and that's what I had. All week. I'm over that now, and I'll probably never want to see another cheese sandwich or orange soda again, but they were definitely a comfort during my miserable week. DH was kind enough to fetch them for me (and flowers; he's a sweet guy) and to put up with my moaning and hacking. I owe him big-time. I'm going to have to think of something nice to do for him one of these days.

Being ill like that is so disorienting to me -- I'm not connected to my normal life. It isn't that I don't want to be connected; it's just that I can't do it. For the past 15 years or so, I've had a weird eye disease that no one's ever heard of. It can cause blindness, but I've been fortunate in that, so far, it has not; it only left me with some residual damage to certain parts of my colour-vision (the cones in my retinas). It's been in remission for more than 10 years and it doesn't bother me much, with one notable exception: when I have a fever. When I get a fever, I don't get a new attack or anything, but what happens is that the damaged cones in my retinas sort of ... sparkle ... brighter than the undamaged ones.

Well, I had a fever this week, and my cones went to Disneyland! I'm not a drug-taking kind of person, but I doubt there are many hallucinogens that would produce stranger effects than a fever does on my vision! The most striking one is produced by a large round lesion in my left eye. It has a slightly irregular edge, not unlike the shape of the sun seen through mist. The damage to that particular group of cones is mostly the ones that perceive the green range and, seen against a clear blue sky, looks exactly like a bright green sun! I am not kidding!

I can assure you the novelty of the green sun (or the "baleful eye" as I think of it) wears off in about 15 minutes, and then it is just damned irritating because you cannot read through the green sun and its companions, and no amount of light or text size changes really help because the stupid things sparkle and distract you, so it takes immense work to keep your attention on what you're trying to look at, even if you can manage to bring yourself to work hard enough to do it. And last week, I was too sick to concentrate. So I was out of sorts in all the ways I could have been.

My fever is finally gone now, thank heavens, because today is a beautiful day, and though I don't feel well enough to do all that much yet, it would have been a pity to have missed such a beautiful day altogether. Here are some photos of our garden at its gorgeous green best. This is the sparkle that I WANT to see!

Toothless

2008-05-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

I finally made it back to Washington last night. As always, it was an exhausting trip. It was sad leaving Lake Charles, but we had a great time. Our old neighbors met us at the bar in the casino. I lost eleven dollars in the slot machines and, even though I swore I'd never touch alcohol again, somehow a margarita made its way into my hand -- don't know how that happened. The band was excellent; we danced a lot. We watched others dance a lot too -- it's always an amazing sight to see a big group of people doing the two-step at the same time. Particularly when there are a bunch of men wearing cowboy hats.

One drunk, skeletal old cowboy was really taken with our friend Kris. He was particularly noteworthy because he didn't have any teeth. I don't mean that he was missing a tooth. I mean he didn't appear to have a tooth. Not a single one! He kept trying to get her to dance with him and he didn't want to take no for an answer. Her husband hadn't finished playing the slots so she was sitting with DH and me and I was afraid DH was going to have to stand up for her honour and I was going to have to experience some kind of tawdry casino bar-fight, and thinking how that would really cap off the week. Fortunately, however, he shambled off after a while.

Since drunk, skeletal, toothless cowboy was gone, it seemed safe enough to send DH off to dance with Kris because she clearly wanted to and her husband still wasn't back and I was done with dancing myself -- I cut my toe somehow -- don't know how I managed that; DH didn't step on my foot or anything. It must have been my natural clumsiness. As I was watching them, I saw the cowboy come up and try to cut in, but DH grabbed her hands and swung her around hard (he's a pretty good dancer) and they ended up on the other end of the floor. The song was over before the guy was able to make his way over to where they were.

When they sat back down, Kris said, "Did you see? Did you SEE? That cowboy with no teeth tried to cut in!"

I kept a straight face. "Which one?" I asked.

"The one with NO TEETH!!!" She was beside herself.

I tried to looked real concerned. "I heard you," I said. "Which one?"

"T--! The one with NO TEE--" Then she realised that I was just giving her a hard time.

She punched me in the arm. "You are so mean, girl."

I agreed with her. But it was fun.

Grace & Lagniappe: It's All Right

2008-05-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

I woke up in Lake Charles, Louisiana this morning for the first time in three years, one month, and 14 days. Yes; I've been counting. This is the first time I've been back since we left, and it wasn't an easy trip to make because leaving here was the most difficult thing I've done in my life. I knew I needed to get here, though, because coming here in the first place was probably the best thing I've done in my life.

Isn't it funny? Lake Charles isn't much of anything – just another podunk Louisiana town off Highway 10. It's got a crappy mall, a couple of oil refineries, some chemical plants, an estuary that's been designated a superfund site by the US government, and some fair-to-middlin' casinos that cater to tour buses filled with elderly Texans. From that description, no one in their right mind would actually WANT to live in Lake Charles, and when I first saw it, I was still in my right mind and I didn't want to live here either. Paradise it is not!

It was probably brain damage from the superfund site chemical poisons, but after living here for a couple of years, something started to change. In the beginning, it was small things, like being able to remember what I loved about my childhood in the South – things I had completely forgotten. And then, after living in Lake Charles for about three years, I woke up one day and realized that I had passed a milestone in life. For the first time, I had lived in the same place – in the same house – for more than three years. Once that had happened, like a puzzle lock clicking into place, I had a little epiphany. I was home. I don't mean that in the sense that Lake Charles, the place, was suddenly the home I never had, I mean I suddenly knew what it felt like to feel home. I knew what it meant when people said they were “home sick.”

I was very taken up with my thoughts about “home” for a few days after my new awareness that I’d lived longer in Lake Charles than anywhere else – I went from a sort of happy buzz about it to horror at the realization of what I’d done. Oh my God, I thought. Was I really that bad? And a review of the last 40+ years told me that I was. I was really that awful. What did I do? It was more what I didn’t do. I didn’t give a damn.

You see, I was born in Arkansas and I lived there until my father was transferred to Illinois when I was eleven. I finished school in the suburbs of Chicago. My grandparents had moved to Florida when I was about seven, and I spent summers with them until I was fifteen. So, other than brief trips to visit my other grandmother, who stayed in Arkansas, there was a period in which I didn’t get back there often, and I rarely even thought about the South at all. My parents always considered themselves Southern, and frequently talked about moving “home,” but I was teased about my accent when I moved to Illinois, and I managed to get rid of it within a few weeks. I changed schools two years after moving to Illinois and no one had the slightest idea that I had ever lived anywhere else, and it rarely occurred to me to mention it to them.

As time went by, I began to feel completely rootless, and the list below is why. I’ve lived in these towns (sometimes in different houses in the same town):

Tull, Arkansas
Arkadelphia, Arkansas
Mountain Home, Arkansas
Round Lake, Illinois
Palatine, Illinois
Barrington, Illinois
Arlington Heights, Illinois
Ronceverte, West Virginia
Muncie, Indiana
Lombard, Illinois
Bellevue, Washington,
Redmond, Washington,
Bellevue, Washington
West University Place, Texas
Houston, Texas
Lake Charles, Louisiana
Lake Jackson, Texas
Coupeville, Washington

Looking at that list now, I can see why, when someone would ask me where I was from, it was so easy for me to answer, “all over” or “everywhere,” rather than to say I was from Arkansas – it had been so long since I’d lived in Arkansas, or spent time anywhere near Arkansas that it didn’t even cross my mind to say it. The problem is that, of course, if you are not from somewhere, then you are from nowhere. If you are not something, then you are nothing. And what I had been doing until I woke up one day after living in Lake Charles, Louisiana for three years was to reduce the very essence of my history and my culture – of who I am – to nothing more than a collection of the strip malls I’ve been to in the suburbs I’ve lived in these various places across the US.

Don’t get me wrong. These are all nice places. They have nice strip malls. They have pretty houses. I’m sure they have their own cultures and I’m sure they are wonderful ones. But they’re not mine, and somewhere along the line, I came to the realization that I don’t want them to be!

And what has Lake Charles to do with all that? It’s not in Arkansas, after all. Well, the funny thing about Lake Charles is that, while it’s not Arkansas, I think I had my little epiphany there, not just because I lived there longer than anywhere else, but because the culture is so similar to the one I remember from Arkansas. We lived in the Ozarks for my dad’s job, but where I am from, my real home, is southern Arkansas, and that has far more in common with Louisiana than it does with northern Arkansas. And so, the time I spent in Lake Charles was like being offered a path. A path back to the girl I was when I moved to Illinois – when I moved onto the “traveled” road, which also happened to be the easy road.

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

And so that is what Lake Charles gave me: the gift of myself. I lived there two more years, and during that time, I drank in the culture and I learned to take pride in my heritage again. I learned to code switch so that I can at least reclaim my Southern accent among those who also have one, although I can rarely do it with those who don’t (I try). I learned that places have very little to do with the strip malls or the houses, or even what the land looks like; it’s all about the people. The people of Louisiana, the people of Arkansas, heck, even the people of Texas – these people rock!

When we had to leave, I thought my heart would break. And then, of course, it did break when Hurricane Rita came in here and wrecked poor ugly little Lake Charles and hurt all the beautiful people who live here so badly. They, hardy souls that they are, have done a wonderful job of restoring the town, without a lot of help from the outside. Our old house, which received some heavy damage, looks marvelous now, like a brand new house – which is great as long as you like brand new houses. I’m mainly sad that the handmade door with the leaded glass is no longer. Oh well; such is life. It lives on in my mind’s eye, so that’s OK.

The best thing of all about my life in Lake Charles is that, even though I didn’t get to stay forever, I got to stay long enough. If I’d left before reconnecting to my past, then I’d have remained forever traveling the shallow easy road, with its pretty houses and its strip malls, and its interchangeable suburbs where little matters beyond the price of real estate and the scratch on the door of the BMW. If I’d left after becoming aware of what an idiot I’d been, but before coming to terms with it, then I’d have been left mired in guilt for not valuing important things, but not really understanding what I could do to make it right. But because I was able to stay long enough to absorb not just the guilt, but also the remedy, Lake Charles gave me the ultimate gift: it gave me grace. And I can take it with me; hence, the quote at the top of this blog.

I will never cease to be thankful for receiving the rare opportunity to move from the easy road to the one less traveled – in mid-stream. Not many people get that chance, but I did, and Lake Charles gave it to me. I call that Lagniappe!

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Bad Dobby -- Hits Head -- Baaaad Dobby

2008-05-14T03:28:00.000-07:00

I am in Houston. I really like it here. I always have a lot of fun. This time, I seem to have ... um ... instigated ... a bit of trouble. We went out to lunch on Monday. At noon. I called DH to come get me. At 8 pm. This is the first time I've ever had a hangover that lasted more than 24 hours. I totally deserve it.

For the record, the hangover may even be persisting beyond 24 hours because, for the life of me, I CANNOT figure out what the heck the blogger word verification letters are at all!

The Grammar Cop Wishes You a Good Weekend

2008-05-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

This isn't a mistake, but you know, I just really couldn't pass up the great tits. I have no defense. I'm a vile person. Have a great weekend, though.

From the Weirdness Files

2008-05-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

I get a lot of emails. Most of them are Viagra spam, a few are from people I actually want to hear from, and the rest are queries. The queries come even though I posted a notice on our website that we're not accepting them. Apparently nothing stops them. I don't generally enjoy being a jerk so I try to answer the queries politely, even though it's just going to be a rejection without considering the content. The one exception is the query I get every six weeks from the same guy. I responded to him politely the first three times, but now I just delete his emails.

Yesterday I received a query that I suspect is going to join the queries from the every-six-weeks-query-guy. The only way I knew it was a query was because it said "query" in the subject line. The first line of the email started with "Chapter One." It then proceeded into – you guessed it – chapter one. A quick scroll down showed chapters two and three, in which I caught glimpses of "Hitler" and "Jewess" and, at the very bottom, an email address. And that was it. There was no actual question or information about the rest of the book – so it appears someone sent me the first three chapters of their manuscript, accompanied by their email address. They didn't ask me to publish it, nor did they even give me their name. The person sent me three chapters of something I don't want to read, without addressing me directly; I don't really feel compelled to reply. Does that make me a jerk? Maybe. I guess I'll just have to live with it.

I wonder why someone would think it's enough to send three chapters of their novel and nothing else. I mean sending just that, without even prefacing it with some kind of greeting or explanation of what they're doing. Do they really think anyone would have the time or inclination to read such a long email (this thing was thousands of words long) and then email them to ask about it? There was no synopsis, so you'd have no idea of the remainder of the story – where it was going. Even if I wasn't already working on two long over-due manuscripts, I wouldn't be interested in this one. It just confuses the hell out of me as to why someone would think I would be interested in reading the first three chapters of their novel, and then tracking them down to find out the synopsis of the book, and who they are, etc. It just seems bizarre.

As to the two manuscripts I am working on, well, I am working on them. Office Max ought to give me a frequent customer discount – one of them is looooooooong (Louise!) and it takes more than a whole ream of paper just to print one copy of it. Gillian's manuscript is very nearly done. Once she sobers up from testing all those Prohibition Banquet drinks recipes and finishes the new opening (told you I'd get you back for being mean the other day, Gillian), then I will be ready to start tinkering with getting rid of all the strange numbers she put in it (don't ask). After that, it will be a piece of cake until we get to the part where she wants to strangle me. That always happens near the end. Then it will be ready for the world. And it will, of course, be wonderful at that point!

For some reason, with Louise's book, it's the title that's the difficult part, and I don't know why; the book is excellent. But I have a plan. I'm going to Houston next week. That means I have a long plane flight. I am, to put it mildly, a nervous flyer. To deal with that, I normally take a minimum of three books when I get on a plane. The reason I do that is because it increases the odds that I'll have at least one decent book in which to absorb myself when one of the plane engines dies, or when the wing of the plane appears to be hanging drunkenly perpendicular to the ground, or the as-yet un-thought of disaster is announced by the pilot. This time, however, I'm only going to take one book in addition to Louise's manuscript and I will stick strictly to thinking about the manuscript until the disaster strikes. Then I will turn to the book because I wouldn't want to taint the memory of the manuscript with my feelings about the disaster. But until the disaster occurs, and I have no doubt that it will because it always does, then I will be a captive audience to thinking about the perfect title for the manuscript. Note that I have a positive mental attitude about all this. I am positive that there will be some sort of disaster. I am also positive that I will survive it. And that I will come up with a good title for that manuscript by the time I get off that plane. They don't call me Pollyanna for nothing. Actually, they don't call me Pollyanna, but what the hell!

Book Review: Shades of Gray by Jessica James

2008-05-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

As I indicated yesterday, I'm going to review a book by an independent press today. I'm also cross-posting this review at Indie Market Place.

Shades of Gray is a romance, but it is not a category romance. It is, instead, the sort of sweeping romantic fiction that asks the reader to look back to days gone by. Set in the American Civil War, it is the story of Andrea, a Union Army scout and sometime spy, and Alexander Hunter, a Confederate officer who is modeled on real life Confederate hero Colonel John S. Mosby, leader of Mosby's Rangers.

I am not typically a fan of Civil War novels, and I admit that I was not really looking forward to reading this one. However, I am glad I changed my mind. The author, Jessica James, clearly took the time to understand the complexities involved in the conflict and she was able to convey that in the narrative without interfering with the story itself. In particular, she was able to capture the sense of inevitability of the conflict for those who were involved because of their location – in this case, the Virginians.

As the books opens, Andrea, the heroine, dresses as a boy and acts as a scout in the Union army. She is headstrong, reckless, and at times, seemingly suicidal – for reasons alluded to, but not entirely explained. Her identity is known only to her commanding officer, who also happens to be her cousin's husband. He is uncomfortable with the situation and attempts to protect her, mostly to no avail. Andrea's actions repeatedly bring her into conflict with daring rebel commander Alexander Hunter, who vows to capture her. When Hunter finally does capture Andrea, after a complicated series of events, he brings her to his estate, Hawthorne, in Virginia.

It is at this point that the author's talent for writing dialogue really shines. The conversations between the two main characters are charming and at times, reminiscent of some highly entertaining regency romances. I was particularly impressed with James' ability to convey the fine nuances of Andrea. She was an educated woman of breeding and privilege, who, for reasons not made clear until well into the story, donned trousers, delivered messages, and drank whiskey with the Union army. She was also born in the South, and when necessary, was able to fulfill the role of the perfect Southern Belle.

Perhaps the above description sounds like a stereotype from a romance novel, but I found in Andrea rather more. In fact, I thought Andrea to be a good portrayal of a Southern woman because the Southern women I know have always been this way. They do what they need to do, regardless of what it entails. The Andrea created by Jessica James does just that.

All in all, I found Shades of Gray to be one of the best novels of the Civil War I've ever read. I highly recommend it.

Title: Shades of Gray
Author: Jessica James
ISBN: 978-0-9796000-0-5
$27.99
Patriot Press
2008

You Can Call Me Ma'am: Prelude to a Book Review

2008-05-05T06:33:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, after I wrote about reading Rhett Butler's People, Jessica James, the author of another novel of the Civil War invited me to review her book as well. I was hesitant to do it for a whole bunch of reasons, some of which I am about to discuss, but I changed my mind for one reason alone: it was published by an independent press. Knowing that, it occurred to me that it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to sit here and rant about the unfair treatment that independent publishers so frequently receive while at the same time knowing that I had paid the cover price for Rhett Butler's People yet had declined to bother to even review another novel of possibly better caliber simply because I had already read the "popular" Civil War novel of the season. Therefore, I decided to not only do the honourable thing and review the book, I decided to buy it rather than accept a review copy.

I am posting this separately because I didn't want to gum up the review itself with my ridiculous reasoning. I also wanted to note a couple of things about my worldview and how it affects my reading of novels about the South and the American Civil War.

First and foremost, I am a Southerner, but I am not a racist and I am deeply ashamed of slavery and all of the things that accompanied it. To my knowledge, although I cannot be certain, most of my ancestors did not own slaves, but to a person, they were all Confederates, including the women. They were citizens of the Confederate States of America.

The problem for me is that I was born in a tiny little place in Arkansas, where no famous battles were fought, but where a lot of people died. And I mean this literally. They died right around where my great great grand parents (and I) were born. These small, unfamous battles and skirmishes took place in the fields right around the houses. My sixth great grandmother watched her uncle, who was home on furlough, get dragged out of the house and hung. She was sixteen years old. Her father had been killed less than two months before and her mother was dying of consumption. She had sisters and a little brother to take care of. Stories like these don't die. They get told. They get passed down along with the saved medals and the bullets and the land where the blood was spilled. It is not academic. It has nothing to do with history books. It stays in the family. And it stays in the heart.

When I read a book about the Civil War, no matter much how I want to disengage and be modern, no matter how much I know that I should condemn the Confederacy, well, I think of that terrified girl from whom I am descended, and how she watched her last male relative swinging from a rope, wondering how she and her sisters and brother were going to survive, and I cannot. I think of how she fought. To survive. And I think, "You go, girl. You go!"

But, you see, that's the thing. The people living on the land, not the big plantation owners, just the people – my ancestors – they didn't have slaves. For them, it was just about the place that they were. The war came to them, and they fought. Their houses were burnt. Their fields were burnt. Their goods were burnt. They were left with nothing. They starved. And they fought. The ones who survived. They had stories. And they told them.

When the men died, their children put iron crosses on their graves. And it's ironic in some ways, because it's really the women who deserved them in many cases because it was the women who fought the hardest for those of us Southerners who live today. I know for a fact that my many-great grandmothers fought much harder for subsequent generations to live because they were the ones who lived, literally, on the fields where the battles took place. Nearly all of Tull was destroyed during the retreat after the battle of Jenkins Ferry. No lionesses could have fought harder for their babies to survive. I am not here because of the lions; I am here because of the lionesses.

So, my opinions of books about the Civil War are coloured by that. There is no getting around it. When someone from the South uses the euphemism, the War of Northern Aggression, it is often considered to be the affectation of a Southern partisan. It is looked at by some as another romanticisation of the Lost Cause myth. To people like my ancestors, however, it would have been a reality, however, as they were just small people who lived in a small place. They would not have been involved in the Great Doings of their day but for the fact that those doings came to their doorstep; the battles came to them.

I am writing about this now because the book I intend to review includes a strong female character who was caught up in the war in ways not unlike the ways in which my own ancestors were, albeit in a different location. This made the novel very believable to me. I like books that don't gloss over the roles of Southern women because they are hard to find, and I will write more on that when I review the book itself.

It's funny, not long ago, there was a letter to the editor in a local newspaper here in Washington in which the author complained about being addressed as "ma'am." It seemed the author felt insulted to be so addressed as "ma'am" or "Miss" by clerks in stores and others unknown to her because she thought it was sexist or ageist. I immediately thought of how different that is to my own feelings of being addressed that way.

As a Southerner, I am used to hearing and saying, "Thank you ma'am" to other women, and after living in Louisiana for a while, I even got used to hearing myself referred to as "Miss T." The lady across the street was "Miss Kris." Miss Claire lived next door. It felt strange at first, but it didn't take me long to understand that this is intended as a form of respect. Why would I not wish to treat others with respect? Why would I not wish to be respected? I am descended from a long line of ladies to whom I owe respect. If I wish to join them, then I need to be worthy of them. They would have said, "Thank you ma'am." And they would have said it in a particularly kindly manner if they were thanking you for sharing the coffee you had "liberated" from the federal supply train you had raided, perhaps knocking off a few Union troops along the way.

Book review to come…

Backyard Darryl

2008-05-01T18:50:00.000-07:00

It's hard to describe Washington state. It's got a lot of natural beauty. It's clean. There are nature trails. The people are mostly polite. They drink lattes. If the news is anything to go by, they worry a lot about trees, but they don't spend much time worrying about the homeless. They don't want you to move here. If you already have moved here, they hope you'll move away soon. They don't like the war; they like to protest it. One local lady, who enjoys quilting, went on a hunger strike last year – to protest the war. Apparently, it didn't work.

There are a lot of ex-hippies here too. Like the former dead-head who wallpapered my dining room two years ago. He was great. He told me he had moved up here from San Diego with his wife and grandchildren after selling his house for a killing. He also told me about forty years of amazing drug trips. That was a new one for me. I had never had a building contractor tell me about their drug trips before. It was pretty interesting. He seemed like a happy guy and he brought treats for my dogs. What's not to like?

I have some really great neighbors. They are competing in a contest to grow the world's largest pumpkins. Last year the largest ones they got were over six feet in diameter – and weighed over 800 pounds. This year, they say they'll be even bigger. I believe them. The other neighbors, however, are making me crazy. There is the bulldozer guy, who has continued to dig at his damn pile all this week. He refuses to quit.

And now there is back yard guy who reminds me of a character from the Bob Newhart show: "I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl and my other brother Darryl." My backyard neighbor is the other brother Darryl! He always wears a baseball cap turned around backwards. I see him all the time when I am out there pottering around with my dogs. He will catch my eye and look away. Sometimes he looks away and grunts. What is THAT?

Anyway, I let the dogs out this afternoon and my other brother Darryl was hanging around the fence between our yards. I have no idea what he was doing, but whatever it was, it apparently required the use of a pitchfork! It is really unnerving to have this peculiar guy who has never, in two years of seeing him repeatedly, done anything more than turn away and grunt, suddenly be lurking on the other side of my little picket fence with a pitchfork! He was not digging or forking or whatever it is you normally do with a pitchfork – and I know this because he had the forked end of the thing up in the air.

Of course my dogs ran over there and started barking furiously. I would have let him have Prissy, but there was no way I was not going to save Pippin, so I went to retrieve them. I'm not sure what I thought I'd do with it, but as I went out, I picked up a heavy crystal vase that was sitting on the table by the door and tried to be nonchalant as I walked toward him. That vase is big. Today was one of our rare sunny days, and it was REALLY sunny. The vase was clean. It sparkled like a diamond. There was NO way in hell Backyard Darryl didn't notice that I was carrying it when I went to get my dogs. I'll bet that guy thinks I'm a lunatic. That makes two of us.

I have a new nephew!

2008-05-01T11:56:00.001-07:00

His name is Nicholas! I just saw the first photo. He's a cutie.

Grammar Cop: The Texas Beat

2008-04-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

Those darn transporation picks are making trouble again.

Gosh. I really shouldn't have even tried to read the news today.

Grammar Cop: The World Edition

2008-04-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

I know the pundits sometimes claim Hillary Clinton is overreaching, but I had no idea she was running for president in India too!

My Grandmother Would Have Gone to Jail!

2008-04-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

Publishers Weekly is reporting:

The Association of American Publishers is fighting censorship in Oregon. Yesterday it joined with six Oregon booksellers and the ACLU of Oregon to challenge a new Oregon law that criminalizes the dissemination of sexually explicit material to anyone under age 13, or the dissemination to anyone under age 18 of any material with the intent to sexually arouse the recipient or the provider. The new statute, which makes no provision for judging the material as a whole, nor for considering its serious literary, artistic or scientific value...

It doesn't seem like such a terrible thing, does it? Well, not until you read the example!

The Oregon ACLU said that among those who could be prosecuted are a 17-year-old girl who lends her 13-year-old-sister a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever, or a mother who gives her child a copy of Robie Harris’s It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health.

My grandmother used to take me to the library EVERY week, and help me cart home the maximum limit of 14 books. By the time I was twelve, NONE of them were from the children's section. None of them. Unless, I was in the mood for rereading an old friend.

Sometimes the librarians would point out to my grandmother that I was picking "adult" books, and she would say, "Yes; she reads at an adult level." And that would be the end of it. She told me later that she had asked her sister, who was also a librarian, if she thought it was all right to let me read grown up books when I was so young, and the answer had been an unqualified yes. She said El had told her that if she forced me into simplistic children's books when I was ready for more complex reading that it might cause me to lose interest and that it was better to be ready to handle the awkwardness of discussing things I didn't understand than to risk turning me away from reading.

I'm sure she was right and that's one of the reasons I'm so grateful to her (and to my parents, who followed the same policy). Reading is such a major part of who I am as a person.

I read The Sting when I was eleven. Think how awful it must have been for her to explain to me that a Protestant and a prostitute was not the same thing! You cannot always count on phonics!

All in the Family

2008-04-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

I was looking at my statistics the other day, and, no big surprise, I get a ginormous number of visitors whenever I write about Amazon, particularly since LibraryThing and Writers Weekly picked up a couple of my posts. If I were trying to sell something here, I suppose it would be a good idea to write about Amazon every day. But obviously, since I spend a lot more time writing about my family and my garden, and I don't even use my name on this blog, I'm not trying to sell anything here, or at least I'm not doing a very good job of it.

Auntie commented on my last post about my dad that she was glad "we found each other" – presumably referring to my cousins who have also been reading and commenting on some of my blog posts, as I've been commenting on some of theirs. Yes, Auntie, I'm glad we found each other too. I think, in a way, that's probably part of my deep-down reason for why I decided to blog in the first place, even though I didn't rush out and tell everyone in the universe that I was doing it. I actually didn't mention it to many people at all for a long time, although I've been doing it for more than two years, and though I had a couple of different blogs before that. The earlier blogs were on my web site, and one of them was more of a "selling things" blog, and I took it down because I got tired of doing it. This one, which owes its existence to RunSteve, is just a "whatever" blog that contains spill-over from the journal I've been keeping since I was little.

Sometimes, the spill-over includes Amazon, but far more frequently, the spill-over includes my dad or something else from my life. And that's just the way I like it. In the whole scheme of things Amazon is nothing and Daddy and Auntie and DH and my dog and my flowers, well they're pretty much the sum total.

So, I reckon I will go on writing about stupid things like reading Fried Green Tomatoes yesterday and being overcome by a longing for a Nehi grape soda that was so strong that I practically begged DH to get me one when he was out running errands. He got me a grape soda, but it wasn't Nehi; it was some nasty Yankee Jolly Rancher thing that wasn't nearly as good. Even so, I dreamed about walking down to the Tull store for banana popsicles with Cousin CH. We loved to do this and, for some unknown reason, we never wanted to wear shoes. I can still remember how the tar would bubble up and burn your feet if the gravel on the side of the road was too sharp and you took a side step onto the black top.

(The Tull road in late June. It's so hot then, you think you really can imagine the fires of hell)

The store was nothing more than a shack by the side of the road. The freezer with the popsicles was a little low case with a sliding glass top. The inside was coated with a good 4 inches of ice. Oh, but it felt so fine after slogging down that burning pitch road to stick your arm into the case to retrieve your banana prize!

(The Tull store in the late 1940s. It looked much the same as I remember it in the late 60s & early 70s)

We had to eat them fast, before they melted, so for three quarters of the way back down the burning pitch road we had nothing to look forward to but the fan in the cool shady bedroom at the other end of the journey. Once we were there, we'd get a glass of iced tea and lie on the wood floor in front of the fan until we recovered enough to play dress up in our mothers' old homecoming dresses.

That's a different cousin from the ones who have been reading and commenting on my blog, although I'd like to hear from her too. But that's the thing. When my dad died, since I'm an only child and the rest of my family lived so far from me, it seemed as if I had lost not just him, but that whole side of my family. My grandparents really came through for me then – just as they did for all of my life. I'm a lot older than my cousins, and we've never lived near each other, nor spent enough time together to know each other well, but we must have something in common besides a common last name since we are all blogging. Right?

Or maybe not. But I still think it's cool.

Blogging Barbers:

Auntie (tamsaunt)
John (Caviar & Dirt)
Janna, John's Wife (Rainbow Dull)
Sherry & Aaron (Adoption Journey)
And me, of course, but you're here already

This photo is of me and my grandparents and my dad's little brother (my blogging cousins' dad). It was taken circa 1969. My grandmother was doing some serious stylin' with those glasses!

Pennies From Heaven or Daddy Blows the Train Whistle

2008-04-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

I used to read Dear Abby in the Lake Charles newspaper; every so often she would run these "pennies from heaven" letters from people who would find pennies in places or ways that would remind them of someone who had died. I'm a sentimental person, but I just really cannot get into the whole pennies from heaven thing.

I sure do miss my dad though. If I had a penny for every time I've wished I could talk to him, just ONCE, since he's been gone, then DH and I would be drinking champagne on our yacht in the Caribbean right now – 23 years is a long time. They say time heals all wounds, and I suppose it does, but wounds that deep, those wounds, they leave scars.

I was thinking about him last night, and funnily enough, I guess I had my own kind of pennies from heaven moment. To explain – when I was a kid, every Saturday without fail, Daddy and I would watch American Bandstand and Soul Train. He loved music and he taught me to love it too, something that has always stayed with me.

Well, anyway, last night, we were watching Scrubs, and they did a silly skit about moving elderly patients to new rooms. The music they used was Love Train by the O'Jays. I don't think I've heard that song since our Soul Train days. For me, that was like one of Dear Abby's pennies from heaven.

Auntie wrote about the amazingly noisy train whistle that blew during my grandmother's burial service. We thought it seemed like a final salute. At the time, I had fleeting thoughts of a train whistling goodbye, but my new silly thought for the day is of joining a love train. A soul train. I doubt very seriously that Mama and Papa Barber would pick Love Train as their song of choice, although I'm sure they would know it just as they knew all the top forty songs of the seventies because of me (Mama Barber once threatened to write down the words to Bad Bad Leroy Brown and strangle me with them), but, Hey! This is heaven! They can pick whatever song they want to listen to. Love Train is exactly the type of song Daddy would pick. If people can believe in pennies from heaven, then I can believe in train whistles.

Thanks Daddy. I hear you. If you are on that train, I hope you have a better sense of rhythm now.

:-)

Daddy and I watched this show together. I wish there was a better version of it on youtube!

Grammar Police: On the Beat

2008-04-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

I am sorry to learn that, according to CNN, Mr. Wesley Snipes, an actor for whom I have had much admiration, has been "setnenced" to three years in prison for income tax evasion. I believe the copy editor at CNN online should be required to share his cell for egregious crimes against the spelling of the English language.

AuthorHouse & iUniverse Bow to Amazon

2008-04-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

Publishers Weekly has the story.

Accolades, or How a Peculiar Sense of Humour Runs in My Family

2008-04-21T23:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not entirely sure he'll thank me for pointing it out, but my cousin John has written the funniest thing I've read in a long time. It's nice to see that in addition to good looks and prodigious writing talent, a sense of humour also runs in the family.

Making the World a More Grammatical Place

2008-04-21T04:37:00.000-07:00

The Grammar Police, sometimes known as Nanci, have inspired me to join the effort to Make the World a More Grammatical Place. I also couldn't sleep last night and all known drugs have failed me, and so I give you my own feeble attempt at correction, from a CNN/Money article (Yes; I read about mortgage-backed securities when I have a headache. That's because they normally give me a headache, so I figure I have nothing to lose when I already have a headache. Go figure.) Anyhoo...

There are so many problems here, words (almost) fail me.

1. "they'll dumping" - they'll either dump or start dumping, but I doubt very seriously that there will ever be a case in which "they'll dumping."

2. Whether they dump something, or start dumping it, the paragraph above refers to "loans" and "them", implying that the thing potentially being dumped is loans, but it isn't. What would be dumped is mortgage-backed securities, which is noted two paragraphs down. Perhaps instead of dumping mortgage-backed securities, investors should dump the editor of CNN/Money!

I know this is not as impressive as properly punctuated signage, but cut me some slack -- it's 3:00 am.

Easement

2008-04-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

We live in an old house that was here before all of the houses around us, and so while we have a lot of neighbors, we don't actually share a street with them. Instead, our house faces onto the original gravel track (it's just an easement to the street now), rather than an actual street. The result of this is that we only see the back lawns of all our neighbors, and the land owned by the little church across the way. The church is great, and so are most of the neighbors, but our nearest neighbors have a pile of ... stuff ... that may be dirt (or compost) way down at the end of their back yard. Next to the pile, they have an electric yellow El Camino with a rusted boat trailer attached. It clearly doesn't run as it is sitting on blocks rather than wheels.

This neighbor's house faces perpendicular to ours, and like ours, their lot is long and narrow. They have placed their ... stuff ... and their junked car as far from their own house as possible, which, of course, means that it is right next to our drive way, and in fact, it is maybe 15 feet from our house. That eye-catching yellow is, naturally, the first thing you see when you turn into our driveway. In spite of the fact that I don't like it much, I am not one of those people who requires a plastic-y perfect environment. I've never cared for fake looking suburban perfection, so I expect that means I'm going to have to live with the odd junked car now and again.

What I'm not happy with today, however, is the bulldozer! Yes; Mr. Neighbor has got a bulldozer and he's out there digging in his pile! I was just on the verge of making a phone call when he started up; it's been nearly three hours and he's still going at it. I stuffed cotton in my ears because It sounds like a motorcycle convention -- there's no escaping the noise anywhere in the house. I suspect the UPS man thinks I'm mad as a hatter because he saw me peering out the window at Mr Neighbor and his bulldozer -- and I forgot to take the tufts of cotton out of my ears before opening the door!

I felt like Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched. Abner? ABNER! The UPS guy is probably still laughing.

Full-Court Press

2008-04-10T08:04:00.000-07:00

I am in all-out creative-mode -- which, for me, means boosting the music and reducing the email for a little while. If I owe you an email, please be patient; I promise, I'll be in touch soon. If it's important, you can reach me on my cellphone. In the meantime, here is some nice music to get your own creative juices flowing. For all you kids out there, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young were a famous rock and roll band in the 1960s and 70s. This song was the background music for one of the first stories I ever wrote. I still remember the groove I felt listening to it on my dad's brand spanking new stereo!

Washington State Attorney General Statement Regarding Amazon

2008-04-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly has posted an email she received from the Washington Attorney General:

As with all complaints regarding a business, we have advised Amazon.com
of these concerns and have asked the company to respond to us. In the
meantime, the Antitrust Division is conducting an initial review of the
marketplace and will respond more fully once that review is complete.

Read the rest here.

SPAN Says Email Jeff Bezos at Amazon!

2008-04-07T20:05:00.000-07:00

Here's an excerpt from an email I just received from Scott Flora at SPAN (Small Publishers Assn of North America):

If you would like to write your own letter to Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, and the Amazon Board, the e-mail address is jeff@amazon.com. They must be getting thousands of letters. I got the canned response in three days. Keep them coming.

Also feel free to share this e-mail and my full letter with blogs, Web sites, and writer's and publisher's organizations.

Read the letter Scott Flora sent to Jeff Bezos here.

Amazon Furious?

2008-04-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

According to the Times Online they are:

Amazon furious after publishers undercut its book prices online

An online price war for books has broken out, pitching Amazon against some of Britain’s biggest publishers.

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.

Poor Amazon. I feel for them. Not!

Such is the power of Amazon that several publishers did not feel able to talk on the record yesterday. One senior executive said: “It’s very serious. I can’t believe they’d be allowed to get away with it under competition law. Forcing people to increase prices seems to me entirely wrong.”

Others accused Amazon of having become particularly aggressive lately. One source claimed that the online seller recently removed the “buy buttons” from a book on its website to prevent users from being able to purchase it. “They then went to the publisher and said, ‘Give us an extra 2 or 3 per cent or we won’t put the buy buttons back’,” the source said.

Read the rest here.

What's that thing they say about the chickens coming home to roost?

Springtime at Pennington Farm

2008-04-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

We interrupt our incessant ranting about Amazon to bring you a little springtime at Pennington Farm. And to note that we really need to paint our front steps!

The curse of the black thumb is in retreat!

SPAN Response to Amazon Policies

2008-04-05T09:02:00.000-07:00

Scott Flora, Executive Director of the Small Publishers Association of North America (SPAN) has written a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and posted it online. You should read the whole thing, but here's a quote:

As we all know, a significant part of Amazon.com’s business comes from sales of books not carried by a typical “big box” bookstore, and that a large portion of these books come from independent publishers. It seems to be bad business to alienate the vendors who contribute to so much of Amazon’s success.

The rest is here.

Thanks Scott!

More Publishing World Shake-Ups

2008-04-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

Apparently this is the silly season. I guess we can truly say that the winds, they are a changing.

From the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

HarperCollins Turns Page in Publishing

Marking a radical departure from traditional book-publishing practices, HarperCollins Publishers says it will launch a new book imprint that won't accept returns from retailers and will pay little or no advances to authors.

PMA, The Independent Book Publishers Association Speaks Out Against Amazon

2008-04-03T16:04:00.000-07:00

This is part of an email I just received from Terry Nathan, director of the PMA:

PMA, The Independent Book Publishers Association, representing more than 4,000 independent publishers, is speaking out against Amazon's recent policy aimed at publishers who use print-on-demand technology to sell directly on amazon.com. The company has directed that publishers either must print their books on demand exclusively at Amazon's subsidiary printer for fulfillment of orders placed with Amazon or incur additional cost to print elsewhere and maintain inventory with the online retailer.

“This policy imposes a significant financial burden on tens of thousands of small and independent publishers who can least afford it,” points out Executive Director Terry Nathan. “Without the opportunity to benefit from competitive pricing, small publishers risk at best an expensive and needless overhaul of their manufacturing process, and at worst, the loss of their livelihood.

“On behalf of all the small and independent publishers whose businesses are in jeopardy, we urge Amazon to reconsider its position,” continues Nathan. “Over the years, Jeff Bezos and his company have given small and independent publishers a level playing field to compete with the largest of companies. Suddenly, this magnificent playing field has been converted into a 'members only' club, to the detriment of those very publishers who have contributed to Amazon's success. We will continue to monitor developments in the weeks ahead.”

NEW Threat From Amazon!

2008-04-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

What? Are they trying to kill EVERYONE? From British journal Publishing News Online:

AMAZON HAS THREATENED publishers who sell direct at discount on their own websites with punitive action. PN understands that it has said that if the publisher continues, Amazon will take the selling price as the RRP and apply its terms of trading to that price. In other words, if Amazon receives a 50% discount from Penguin, for example, but Penguin is selling a £20 book for £15 on its website, Amazon will only give Penguin £7.50, rather than £10.

Read the rest here.

To use a Texas saying, somebody needs to open up a can of whoop-ass on Amazon!

More On the Amazon Mess

2008-04-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

From Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly:

Many guffaw the idea that, after taking over POD titles, Amazon might dare to go after traditional publishers, too. What most don't understand is that it's already happening. Booksurge is already printing POD versions of back-list, out-of-print and large-print books for HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Springer, Gale, Oxford University Press, and others.

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania Press contacted us, reporting they'd received the Amazon ultimatum, too. She said, "I work at a medium-sized university press, where most of our titles are conventionally printed via offset. However, Amazon called our director about two weeks ago, telling him that soon we would be required to use Booksurge."

And this:

It wouldn't surprise me at all if Amazon's ultimate goal is to print every single book they ship. I bet Walmart's sorry they didn't think of it first!

Wow!

But, according to Angela, there is hope.

Despite all of this, the good news is Amazon has not removed anymore "buy" buttons from POD publishers' books pages. Maybe, just maybe, after such a large public outcry, and perhaps after some consultations with their attorneys, they're realizing that this wasn't such a great idea after all. And, as I noted earlier, attorneys and government officials are still studying the legalities of this situation.

Read the rest here.

DashBook Part 2

2008-04-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'm still not happy with Amazon, but this makes me very happy!

HOUSTON, Texas -- Today Financial Softworks, LLC announced the release of DashBook 1.0, Microsoft(R) Windows based software, expressly designed for small and medium sized publishers. According to founder Gregory Carrier, "DashBook is focused on the idiosyncrasies of selling books."

DashBook provides both front and back office functionality for publishers' needs. Specifically, publishers can use DashBook for orders, invoices, payments, returns, product inventory, contacts, royalties, and reports. DashBook also allows users to customize their reports with an integrated report writing tool. Finally, as an "open system," DashBook data may be imported and exported to external sources.

The rest is here.

Finally, A Little Good News: DashBook

2008-04-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

After all my disgust and ranting about Amazon, it's nice to see something happen that's good news for small publishers. DashBook Version 1 is available!

I've seen it, and (disclosure) I've worked on it, and I think it's going to be the key to changing my business enough to deal with Amazon's shenanigans. Heck, I may even go back to running my own bookstore, which I used to do until messing with ridiculous spreadsheets drove me bananas.

If you're interested, you can read about it here:

And you can see it in action here: www.dashbook.com

Amazon Open Letter

2008-03-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official. Amazon are doing exactly what we feared. They have confirmed it with an open letter on their site.

We wanted to make sure those who are interested have an opportunity to understand what we're changing with print on demand and why we're doing so.
One question that we've seen is a simple one. Is Amazon requiring that print-on-demand books be printed inside Amazon's own fulfillment centers, and if so why?
Yes. Modern POD printing machines can print and bind a book in less than two hours. If the POD printing machines reside inside our own fulfillment centers, we can more quickly ship the POD book to customers -- including in those cases where the POD book needs to be married together with another item. If a customer orders a POD item together with an item that we're holding in inventory -- a common case -- we can quickly print and bind the POD item, pick the inventoried item, and ship the two together in one box, and we can do so quickly. If the POD item were to be printed at a third party, we'd have to wait for it to be transhipped to our fulfillment center before it could be married together with the inventoried item.

Read the rest here.

Oh, and for the record, this is utter BS about fast shipping. Our books are shipped with the same speed as any others, including the ones printed by Amazon/BookSurge. This is ALL about forcing suppliers to pay them instead of their own chosen printers. This is ALL about money.

So be it. But lets call it what it is.

No Regrets!

2008-03-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

I thought I might wake up this morning and regret the diatribe I posted last night. But no; I'm still annoyed as hell at this purported new policy of Amazon's. Gillian is annoyed by it too, and she had some interesting things to say about it.

I suppose it remains to be seen how it will all turn out, but we can hope that opposition will *encourage* Amazon to rethink!

Amazon ... and the horse they rode in on!

2008-03-28T19:46:00.000-07:00

I am going to regret this tomorrow.

At present, however, I have liquid courage, courtesy of the delightful bartender at the Mad Crab in Coupeville, Washington, who makes the best dang margaritas in the whole state.

But I'm pretty sure I'm going to regret this tomorrow.

Because, right now, I have angst.

More importantly, I have ire.

I have ire and I have fire.

As DH says, "Fire in the hole."

As I said, after finishing that last margarita, "It may be time for me to write my manifesto."

The timid conservative side of my soul resists doing this, but -- you know what? -- sometimes, even the timid have to overcome their inhibitions and take a stand.

I guess this is my stand.

In case you're wondering what the hell I'm going on about (besides margaritas), here's a little hint from Publisher's Weekly:

BookSurge, Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary, is making an offer that most publishers would like to refuse, but don’t feel they can. According to talks with several pod houses, BookSurge has told them that unless their titles are printed by BookSurge, the buy buttons on Amazon for their titles will be disabled.

Angela Hoy of Writers Weekly gives an in-depth descripton of what's going on. Regardless of whether you are a reader, a writer, or a publisher, you should take a look at this.

"POD" has a negative connotation in the literary world. It is associated with vanity publishing. The problem is that POD has nothing to do with a particular type of publishing or publisher. It is a way of printing books. My company is using Lightning Source to print our books. They are not self published. They are not vanity published. We are a traditional, royalty paying publisher.

At present, the majority of our sales come from Amazon.

So, if something doesn't change, it's pretty obvious what this means to my company.

Curtains!

Except...

I just can't give up.

I've weathered too many storms. Real ones and psychological ones.

God dammit!

I. refuse. to. quit.

This IS my stand.

This IS war.

Pay attention, Amazon!

This is WAR!

We will NOT cave.

We will go to Barnes & Noble.

Exclusively!

FU** you, Amazon, and the horse you rode in on!

(Yeah; I admit it. I've always wanted to say that, only without the asterisks ...)

DH says I am mad. And you know what? He's right.

I am so freaking mad that you cannot believe it. I cannot even believe it.

I am generally pretty temperate these days. But not today.

No. Today I am out of my mind with anger.

i will NOT cave in to these bastards.

I. will. not. do. it.

If you love books from any angle, and if you value diversity, then you will NOT do it either. This is not just capitalism. I AM a freaking capitalist. This is a blatant play to establish a monopoly.

If you like historical fiction, you'd better listen up. Historical fiction is NEVER a bestseller unless it's written by a Michael Crichton or a Dan Brown. It NEVER is and the books you like are AT RISK as long as smaller independent publishers are at risk of being put out of business by this type of behaviour by Amazon.

If you CARE, you will PAY ATTENTION and you will NOT buy books from Amazon as long as they're maintaining this position.

Yep. This is my stand.

Thank you for your patience.

Gag Me II: Writing in Dialect

2008-03-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

I've already brought dialect up on a mailing list (Yes; I know I'm a pain), so my apologies if you're sick of it, but I've been having real problems with written dialect lately -- as in, I hate it. And so I want to share a little something from an email I received from Scottish author Louise Turner:

I've been reading the reviews of all the 'Heiland Laddie' type novels that are being published at the moment, and they make me want to scream!! They all seem to run something along the lines of 'Gazing into her limpid violet eyes, the darkly handsome chieftain gasped, "Ach, but yer a bonny lassie.' "You'll noo talk to me like that!" the spirited young woman snapped, but when she felt his strong, manly arms about her, she swooned...' And so on, and so on, ad nauseam...

I LOVE this -- thanks Louise!

Gag Me

2008-03-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

I am appalled. Seriously. I've been feeling too unwell to dip far into the query pool lately, but I decided to have a go at it last night. And what did I find?

Limpid pools.

Violet ones.

Limpid pools of violet.

~Shudder~

I am not joking. I did. I really did. And what's worse? This is not the first time I've had one of these in the last 6 months. Does this signify a renaissance of the tired cliché? I don't know, but I most certainly hope not.

For your edification, Google Books has provided me with a few examples of WHAT NOT TO DO when you're writing a book. Please take note!

Charlotte was struck by the girl's beauty; her violet eyes were accented by thick dark lashes, and a tumble of luxuriant black curls... (The Lady in Question, Judith Laik, p.160)

...she gazed up at him, her green eyes limpid pools of desire. (River Road, JoAnn Ross, p. 11)

Her eyes were limpid pools with the ability to take a man under and make him not care that he might never again surface. (Love with a Scandalous Lord, Lorraine Heath, p.71)

Jessye met his gaze, her eyes limpid pools of green...(The Outlaw and the Lady, Lorraine Heath, p.105)

These make me want to vomit. Heck, even violet eyes turn me off because I've never seen anyone with purple eyes, but every silly heroine has violet eyes or green ones. At least green is common enough to be believable, but violet? Really? And, of course, they're always framed with "thick dark lashes" because whoever heard of a heroine with thin sandy lashes?

If you're going to send me a query, I'd really appreciate it if you'd try not to make me sick...

And if you send me anything that includes "limpid pools" then I am going to assume you are, as my dad used to say, as dumb as a box of rocks!

Women's History Month

2008-03-04T21:54:00.000-08:00

It's wonderful to celebrate the beginning of Women's History Month with women making history!

Women did this!

Sprung!

2008-03-02T17:54:00.000-08:00

The sun showered down on us for a little while today, waking the slumbering giant that is Whidbey Island in the winter, and everyone and his dog hit the streets to celebrate surviving another dark season. Our happy dance took us to the garden center, where they had early spring plants and some blue-glazed pots that I really coveted. Some of the pots were empty, but some were already planted with artfully arranged selections of narcissus, violas, and primroses -- those were the ones I wanted.

I lingered and coveted so long that DH finally asked why I didn't get a pot and some plants for the front porch. Of course I was secretly hoping he'd encourage me to buy one of the pre-planted ones because I have a black thumb and I thought maybe my dead plant curse wouldn't strike if somebody else did the planting. But then I decided it would be even sillier to spend extra money for the pre-planted ones if the dang things were going to die anyway.

I got too many plants, too much potting soil, new gardening gloves, a bunch of seed packets, and I needed a new spade, and I ended up spending more than I would have if I'd just got an arrangement! It was, however, lots more fun playing in the mud while DH cut the grass and whacked weeds.

Here is my arrangement of paperwhites, violas, and some weird grass.

And here are the extra plants that wouldn't fit in the new pot.

My snapdragon seeds are now planted right here -- this will be a true test of the strength of the dead plant curse.

Here is my gardener. Love those glasses!

These are my gardening assistants. They are particularly useful for digging up things you'd rather not have dug up!

Here are my deer babies, who are getting into fighting shape for having a go at my roses.

Home sweet home.

Idaho - You Should Go!

2008-02-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

We visited DB and VM in Idaho this past weekend. DB is my dad's brother and VM is his wife, which makes her technically my aunt, but as I suspect I'm the black sheep (baaaah) of the family, I want to be considerate about her feelings and not insult her by implying a genetic relationship. As for the rest of you rellos who might happen to stop by, you are genetically related to me so you'll just have to suck it up.

Anyhoo, the weekend was great! DB and VM are great! Idaho is great!

They have a gorgeous house. They gave us fabulous food. VM made beignets! Nothing makes me happier than beignets! Well, nothing except for margaritas, but VM makes the best margaritas I've ever tasted. I had a LOT of margaritas. I even dumped a fresh one on the table in a nice restaurant ... and watched in horror as a sticky lake spread across the table towards DB's lap. Fortunately, most of it went on me (my tennis shoe still has a faint whiff of orange, which is actually an improvement).

VM drove me around on Sunday and we went to all the open houses we could find. I wish I could have bought one. Boise is beautiful; I think it would be a wonderful place to live. Alas, I forgot my camera, so I have no fabulous photos to post. But you can take my word for it. Idaho is way cool.

Oh, and on a totally different note. Thanks for all the nice emails you sent hoping that I don't have a brain tumour. (Well, most of them wished that; the rest I'm planning on ignoring :G:). I'm an annoying person, but I don't have a brain tumour, so I can't claim that as my excuse!

VD

2008-02-14T16:22:00.000-08:00

Today is Valentine's Day and I've seen DH all of 30 minutes in the last three days. He's been doing some noxious work thing all week, and staying out all night, though he did come home to sleep a couple of hours this morning before going back to the salt mines. I had the brilliant idea of texting him a little while ago -- I had an electronic glitch and I think I may have asked the wrong person if he'll be home for dinner! I'm too embarrassed to check my message history, so I expect there may be a bit of humiliation in my future. Thank heavens I didn't attempt to say anything sexy (or even worse, funny)!

Sending a Valentine text to the wrong person pretty much sums up how this week is going for me. I went to the doctor for a sinus infection last week, but he doesn't think I have one. He wanted me to have a CT scan to rule out a brain tumour, which he says he doesn't think I have (thanks, dude). Seeing as how this is the third time he's said the words "brain tumour" to me in the last year, I finally decided to give in and have the damn CT, in spite of the radiation. I know he feels he needs to protect himself legally, and I can respect that. I also know that I'd prefer to be well and truly sure that I don't have a brain tumour since it apparently comes to mind for him every time I see him. I suspect it comes to his mind because he thinks I'm so peculiar -- I obviously need my head examined!!!

And maybe I do. I stopped at the Office Max on the way home and was waited on by a clerk wearing a huge hat edged with fluffy pink feathers. She told me it was for "VD" and I admit that it didn't dawn on me that she meant Valentine's Day until I was almost home.

Hope your VD is nice...

Lagniappe

2008-02-04T20:39:00.000-08:00

Seeing as how tomorrow is both Fat Tuesday and Super Tuesday, I'm compelled to post about very little.

First and foremost, elves and vampires are dead. What? You don't believe me? Look at the number of recent deals for elves on Publishers' Marketplace. Zip. Nada. The last one was announced on 30 November. A lot of vampire deals went down in January, but I feel almost certain we've reached critical mass there too. Woohoo! If I never see another query for elves or vampires, it'll be too soon. Spare us all and let the nasty little horrors rest in peace, please.

Ingesting magnets is bad for you. Repeat after me: Don't eat magnets.

The American Civil War is on the upswing in fiction. I think I'd rather eat magnets than see any more of these. The good news, however, is that the Middle Ages are poised for a new upswing as well. Woohoo again! I am SO ready for an historical fiction renaissance and I think we're about to have one.

Washington state holds its elections by mail. This is incredibly boooring. I suppose it doesn't matter because it appears everyone is voting for Obama? Well, we didn't, but I think we're the only ones. For the record, I was for John Edwards, but now that he's out of the race, I have only one thing to say -- to Hilary Clinton: You GO girl! At least two people in Washington State are on your side.

Although we will neither be dancing in the streets tomorrow, nor voting, to everyone who is: Laissez les bon temps roullez!

Tickled Pink!

2008-01-31T11:01:00.000-08:00

S. Andrew Swann (Off the Pink) checked his server logs and noticed that I had linked to his post on query spam, and he did a little more snooping on our "professional" author. It turns out she has a "certificate of competence" as a writer.

Dang! That changes everything.

Read this if you're in need of a good laugh -- or if you want a truly good example of what not to do when you're looking for an agent or a publisher.

I always feel stupid about harping on query letters because it seems so elementary to me that if you want to find a publisher or an agent, you'll research the process well enough to know who is a potential target for your manuscript and what their requirements are for evaluating it. Why is it so difficult to understand this?

Why it is so difficult to understand that no matter how much your paid "critique company" gushes about the fabulousness of your manuscript, if you have not written a book that fits the type of books with which a particular agent or editor works, you are not only not going to get any interest from that person, you are going to irritate the hell out of them, and you're going to look like a fool in the process.

Looking like a fool is rarely to your advantage.

I'm sympathetic to the difficulties authors face. Truly; I am. But, use the web, people! Look it up! Find out who you're talking to before you send a query! Our website is very clear that we're only interested in publishing historical fiction and alternate history, so WHY would you send me a query for a self-help book, or a terrorist thriller, or a medical thriller, or modern-day chick-lit?

Is it so you can grouse to your friends about how everyone is too focused on money to take on a Great Literary Work like yours? Spare me.

(And WHY would you send query-spam to another author --Off the Pink -- at all? Are you an idiot???)

If you really are an idiot... well ... OK then. But if you're just acting like an idiot, please, help us out: Get a clue.

That concludes today's public service announcement.

Thank you.

Query Spam

2008-01-29T19:52:00.000-08:00

I may have seen it all now. I've received a particularly bizarre form of query-spam in which I'm promised not a blue pill or a "replica pen" (why would anyone want a "replica" of a pen; why not just get a real one that writes?); I've received an email offering me "a Best Seller awaiting publication."

Wow!

And I'm offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contact the author and receive a synopsis, sample chapters, and a promotional website.

There is no author name or website on this gem; just a generic author-with-a-big-ego@lycos.com email.

Wow!

I was curious about the thought process that went into sending out a query for a book without an author name or any other identifying information and lo and behold, I found that The Rejector received one of these last summer and so did Off The Pink.

With a slight variation in the generic author email address and the text of the letter, it's the very same one I received.

They've already critiqued it thoroughly, so I'll forgo that, but my Google search also seems to have turned up the author's website too. I won't be mean and give that part away (although I'm sure you can find it if you look), but I have to tell you that I'm stunned (stunned!) to note that there's a "publisher's and literary agent's enquiry form" on the website. Oh, and this author appears to offer "literary services" on her website. (She's giving advice???)

Wow!

OK. I'll close my dropped jaw now. But really ... Wow!

If this is Tuesday, it must be East Anglia

2008-01-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

I was planning a trip to San Diego next weekend to stay at the Hotel Del Coronado and get some much-needed sun. California appears to be on track for a wave of winter storms, however, so, although I'd like to meet the Hotel Del ghost, there doesn't seem much point in making the trip now. Funnily enough, about 5 minutes after we decided to cancel, Auntie asked me if I was interested in going to East Anglia with her this summer.

I had to think about it for maybe 30 seconds, before I emailed her back with a wholehearted YES!

There is nothing like pawing around in some crumbling ruins to lift the spirits. And I have a particular interest in a medieval effigy in a village called Swaton that I think Pevsner mis-dated -- because as any idiot knows, tight sleeves were popular well before 1300. I have a burning desire to sort that one out. (Yes; thank you. I am aware that I'm a peculiar sort of person.)

And, of course, it will be loads of fun to look at Stately Homes and gardens with Auntie, who used to live in England and knows all the good spots. And if I'm there, I'm hoping I can meet up with some of my English friends. English friends -- if you're reading, I promise that if we can get together, I will not bore you with my thoughts on mis-dated effigies (although I don't promise not to bore you in other ways)!

Book Title Block

2008-01-25T11:45:00.000-08:00

I have posted this on several email lists (apologies if you've already seen it!), but I am seriously blocked. What I'm trying to do is come up with a title for this book, one that doesn't sound like some kind of bodice ripping "Highland Warrior" thing. Elizabeth Chadwick had the best suggestion -- turn to the Bible -- which I plan to do next, but in the meantime, if anyone else has suggestions, I'll be eternally grateful! If you'd rather not post a comment, my email is doubtfulmuse-at-gmail.com.

Here is a simplified description of the book:

It is the summer of 1488, and King James the Third of Scotland faces a rebellion led by men loyal to his son Prince James, Duke of Rothesay. Fighting for the King is John Sempill of Elliotstoun, a young man of nineteen. Knocked unconscious during the battle, John awakes to find his father dead and his comrades routed. He returns home in defeat; he has inherited his father’s lands and Sheriff’s title, but his dreams of gaining a knighthood are shattered when he learns that the King has been murdered and that his son has now seized the throne.

John's situation is difficult. Because he was his father’s only son and is, as yet, unmarried, he is especially vulnerable. Soon he finds himself at the mercy of the Stewarts of Darnley.

Lots goes on after this: thieving, burning, rieving. A bitter marriage with an unhappy woman (who eventually comes around). A revolt against the king and a chance to redeem himself, which he does. And finally, a dénouement that concludes with a reconciliation with his wife and a bright future before him at the court of King James the Fourth.