The White Towers

The subject line of this entry sounds like the title of a fantasy novel, doesn't it? That's not it, though. I'm talking about towers that really exist. They're about six feet tall, and made of cardboard, and currently driving John and myself to distraction.



The photo above was taken in the kitchen of the Museum of the Weird, otherwise known as Casa Blocher, just a few hours ago. So was the photo below:


Inside are probably books and magazines, Happy Meal toys, fanzines I edited when I was 16, and Thâle knows what else. Maybe the Star Trek lemon-soaked paper napkins are in there, too. I actually have no idea what's in them. John hauled them into the kitchen temporarily in an attempt to organize our boxes-o-stuff, so we can start going through them and figure out what to keep and what to dump, and how to dispose of the stuff in the latter category. There's no easy answer. Some of what we won't keep is potential eBay fodder, but nothing worth big bucks, or the time to list and sell and ship it. Some will probably go to Bookman's, some to a yard sale, some to Goodwill, and some into a dumpster. The rest of it, probably half, will stay here, and we'll need to find a better way to store it all. Even the new library probably won't accomodate all the books, let alone the useless junk cherished mementos we've been storing all these years, waiting for a chance to sort it all and a place to put it all. There are things in these boxes that are absolutely precious to me, and irreplaceable. But where the heck do we put them?

So you see the problem. There's a lot to organize, based on too many parameters. John struggled with the job for quite a few hours today before officially pronouncing himself "overwhelmed." And who could blame him?


We did make a little progress on the sorting, though. This afternoon, we went through bookcases in our half-finished library, and did some "weeding" of books we no longer felt we had to own. Some stuff was easy to dump: a 2000 Writer's Market, a collection of reviews of 1971 films, a book about Jack Benny's tv show, and other outdated or marginal items. Some were harder to judge. We both wanted to keep the books about writing, but did that have to include the one by Henry James? John picked up and reshelved one book twice, and finally decided to keep it. I picked out an unread fantasy novel with computers in it to discard, changed my mind, and put it back.

Another book I've had for thirty years I intended to keep because it was one of my books about film. Or possibly science fiction. Hmm, what was it? For the first time in a decade, I tested my faulty memory with respect to this book, The Expanded Moment. It turned out to be an anthology of literary short stories of yesteryear, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein, "The Rocking Horse Winner" and other stuff that gets shoved down students' brains in English 101. I placed out of English 101 back in 1975, and I didn't want this book after all. Away it went.

But I did find out I had a book by Charles DeLint to try, and a Jane Yolen I've never read, and several other fantasy and sf authors whose books I didn't know I had. Someday I'm going to read those books - and the one with the wizards and computers.

I didn't do much with Wikipedia today, except help to fight a few fires, mostly set by the same person who's been causing trouble all along. But I did finally finish my revision of Chapter Two of Mages, and opened chapter three to start on tomorrow evening. The rest of the day, aside from church and laundry and shopping, I mostly spent putting a dent in my backlog of unread blog postings. I caught up with Judith, Patrick, Becky, Shelly, Georganna and TNH, and would have started in on Julie had her server cooperated. That probably accounts for less than half of the backlog (and only one of the emails!), but it will have to do for tonight.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Museum of the Weird, Clutter, Books, Writing

D'Oh! How did it get to be 1 AM?...I mean 3 AM!

Okay, so it's true that I got a late start on the day. I had my traditional late Friday night (going to bed at 4 AM, which is better than dawn), followed by my traditional sleep-in past noon. I don't know what time I woke up, but I didn't get out of bed until 2 PM, after reading two Thurber pieces. First there was a weird little comic essay called "Courtship Through the Ages," about how males of virtually all species have to work very hard to impress the female. It was very Thurberesque, but rather dated. The second, "The Whip-Poor-Will," was a short story of psychological horror, in which the sound of the bird drives the main character to an extreme reaction.

When I did get up, John put me to work on a small contribution to his major project of building a library here at the Museum of the Weird, in what had been a storage room completely full of boxes. So far he's painted the walls (after multiple unsuccessful attempts to get wallpaper to stick to them), laid tile, built five bookcases from pine boards, and filled most of them out of our zillion boxes of books. So this afternoon at his request I went through twenty banker's boxes, most of them empty, but some still containing books, magazines, Richard Bach promotional bookmarks, Japanese alphabet flash cards, and holiday greeting card samples from Tucson Audubon Society circa 1990. I broke down sixteen of the boxes and their lids, threw away the cardboard pictures of birdies, and consolidated the rest into the remaining four boxes. Before I go to bed tonight, I've promised to fill a shelf or so of the bookcase John built today.

Another thing I did today was read a few things other people wrote, and give my advice on them. Fortunately, it was all good stuff, and I had few suggestions to made. One friend is on her second draft of the novel she was writing last year. I've always liked it, but there were things that originally weren't very clear about the society she's set up, and some characters made first appearances fairly late in the game. Her new draft is addressing every reservation I had, deepening the characters, establishing the setting without too much infodump, and improving the plot considerably. I only hope I can make as much progress in my own revision of Mages. Yes, I did get some work in on that last night, but basically none today.

Other than those two things, and several IMs with people, a little Round Robin housekeeping and going to dinner with John, I must admit to you now that I blew the rest of the day on Wikipedia. I know, I know. It's sucking up a lot of my time, and keeps me from getting to things like my two-week backlog of FeedBlitz alerts. But someday, somebody will be grateful that Wikipedia has a picture of George Maharis by himself, that his entry no longer mentions him being arrested without citing a source, and that the List of Strange Days at Blake Holsey High Episodes no longer contains some kid's addition: "also juring it Vaughn and Josie have to hold hands and feel very aquward about it." Also: "I think Vaughn and Josie like each other as in fancie each other". Fine, kid. Write all about that on your blog, but don't put your misspelled 'shipper romanticism in Wikipedia articles, 'kay? It's funny. Of all the edits that get reverted, most are either "blanking" (just deleting large blogs of text) or rude or obscene remarks, such as some idiot changing the name "Al Gore" to "Al Gay," or claiming that some celebrity derives sexual pleasure from killing kittens. But there are also large numbers of edits with the opposite problems. Either someone wants to put in some overdramatic, romantic description (usually redundant and misplaced) of her favorite couple, or or someone wants to make an editorial or factual addition but has no sources or even facts to justify it. "Such-and-such is the best show that was ever made or even can be," someone wrote. And he knows this how? And this "fact" was established where?

Someone else claims to have a copy of a 1983 video of A Wrinkle in Time, "with incredible CGI for the time." I've never seen any such thing referenced on IMDB, in published Madeleine L'Engle timelines, or anywhere else. In fact, L'Engle has written about all the people that came to her with treatments and scripts, and why she turned them all down. (She eventually gave in for the 2003 Disney movie, but had no high hopes for it. "I expected it to be terrible, and it is," she told Newsweek.) So I took out the reference, but invited the person to give details. Who wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and distributed this alleged video? It's possible that someone put together a small video production for use at schools, but I doublt it. There sure as heck wasn't a tv special or theatre release, other than the 2003 one.

Enough ranting. I have to wash my hair, put notebooks on shelves and go to bed. Good night!


Karen

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Writing, Museum of the Weird

This Sunset Was Postponed

It's time to ooh at ahh at yet another Tucson sunset...

Another Safeway sunset, take two

Another Safeway sunset, take six

Golf Links and Wilmot

These sunset photos were all taken on Thursday, August 3rd. Thursday is a Weekend Assignment night, so the pictures got "bumped," except for one that I posted the following night. I'd edited a few of them, but mostly I left the raw photos on my hard drive to deal with later. That reminds me: I need to clear some unedited photos onto CDs before I run out of hard drive!

crossing Golf Links and Wilmot

I'm actually writing this on Wednesday the 9th. I'd hoped to sneak three of these shots into the Wednesday night entry, but I would have had eight or nine photos altogether. After Tuesday night's seven photos, another eight or nine would be a killer to anyone like me who is still on dial-up. So this entry gets the blue "Save as Draft" button. Maybe I'll use it on Friday. [Yup! Friday.]

From my front yard.

******

I'm currently (Friday evening) half-watching a few early episodes of Farscape. See, my interest in Route 66 led me to working on the Martin Milner entry on Wikipedia. (This was a little over two months ago.) That naturally led me to the article on Milner's other major series, Adam-12, which in turn led me to check out the entry on that cop show's other star, Kent McCord. Today I looked at that article again. It's a "stub," which means that it's too short to be a proper article. Anyway, I noticed that it didn't even have a picture of the actor, much less an "infobox" with his vital statistics. "I can do something about that," I thought. So I got John to dig me up the Farscape DVDs. See, 30 years after Adam-12, Kent McCord was on Farscape. He was great as John Crichton's astronaut father - and as an alien who chose to look like Crichton's father. I grabbed some screen captures of John's dad from the premiere episode, chose one for the Wikipedia article, and uploaded it. Then I just...kept watching Farscape, until I ran out of episodes on that disc.

Ooh, I'm posting early! Maybe I can get some work in on Chapter Two of Mages of Mâvarin tonight. I'm quite enthusiastic about it again, having just add some nice little bits for two characters who needed further development. One of my beta readers had good things to say about Chapter One last night, so I'm psyched. Besides, if Tor buys Heirs of Mâvarin, I'll need to have the sequel ready as soon as possible. Hey, it could happen! In less than two weeks, the publisher will have had my submission for six months. Do you suppose they've opened the envelope by now?

Karen


Technorati Tags: Photos, Sunset, Wikipedia, Writing, Tucson

But It Was "A Good Car"

Weekend Assignment #124: How did you learn how to drive? How many tries did it take? What was the first car that you bought?

Extra credit: Got a picture of that first car?

The Artful Dodger at the house on F-M Road

See the car in the driveway of this slightly enhanced photo from 1971? That was my first car, a 1967 Dodge Coronet wagon. Not that I owned it back in 1971. I was only fourteen years old. But later when I was in high school, my mom bought a Pinto, and sold me the Dodge for $1.00. I insisted on giving her the dollar, too. The Artful Dodger, as I sometimes called it in later years, came into the family in 1968. I remember reading Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the back seat the day Mom brought it home to our house in Manlius, NY.

In New York State when I was in high school, the written test to get a learner's permit consisted of about ten ridiculously easy questions. It was the road test that was considered hard. My dad started me out driving around the P&C's parking lot in Manlius, late one Sunday afternoon. Then he had me drive home - straight into the glare of the not-quite-setting sun.

My dad's oft-repeated driving advice was this:

"Backing up is the most difficult and dangerous thing you can do in a car." (I suppose that's true if you assume the driver is a careful one, not drunk or reckless.)

and

"The secret to driving in snow is to do everything slowly." That included accelerating slowly, and decelerating slowly.

After that I took driver's ed, the high point of which was driving about a mile down an extremely snowy rural road as the late afternoon sky started to darken. The word in school was that the road test was easier to pass in the outlying town of Oran than in Syracuse, so Dad drove me to Oran. Problem was, the town's only traffic light was either burned out or barely lit. I came to a complete stop, stared at the entirely uncommunicative signal, and started forward. That was an automatic failure for running a red light. So much for Oran!

My dad sprang for lessons from a driving school after that. Then I went to Florida for the summer.

It was 1976, and my parents had just divorced. My mom bought a Maverick (or was it a Malibu?) and moved to Cape Canaveral. Public transportation there consisted of one bus, pretty much literally. It made a two hour circuit of Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, Merritt Island, and Cocoa on the mainland. It was 50 cents to cross the causeway to Merritt Island, and another 50 cents to get the rest of the way to Cocoa. A couple of times I blew my meager funds on used comics in Cocoa, and then had to walk halfway back - or accept a ride in the 94 degree heat, with 94% humidity. My mom and I both wanted very much to get me licensed, so that I could drive her car instead.

But Florida's driving tests were the opposite of New York's. The Florida written exam was long and tough, and it took me two tries to pass it. Then the driving test itself was a breeze. I just had to drive around cones in a parking lot, park, and use my hand signals. Done! I had my license!

When I got back to Syracuse in the fall, the Dodge was well and truly mine. I parked it on Walnut Ave., which was a pain because Walnut had odd-even parking. I had to move the car daily to avoid a ticket, and spaces were scarce. I loved that car, though. It gave me freedom to go places around town, such as St. Patrick's Church in the west side, where Fr. Ed Van Auken was assigned at the time. There was a gas war on, and a self-serve gas station near that church that briefly sold "Regular" for 27.9 cents a gallon. I had terrible stress backaches, but they always went away behind the wheel of that car, the seat of which fit my back perfectly. The engine ran great, except for one little quirk. Sometimes I had to stick a screwdriver in the butterfly valve to hold the choke open while I started the car. My friend Howard would tease me about this, repeating back my claim that "It's a good car." But it was. It really was.

New York winters are tough on cars, though, and the Dodger had seen ten of them, full of snow and ice and salt and sand. Rust was getting to be a major problem, and not just cosmetically. The hinges to the hood eventually rusted so badly that one or both of them broke completely. One day in the summer of 1977, I was driving on Interstate 481 when the hood simply blew away, sailing over my head and landing (fortunately!) on the shoulder. I stopped the car, walked off a nearby exit ramp and called my dad. He wired the hood down, but that was only a temporary solution. The next time the choke wouldn't open, that was the end of my "good car." My dad had it junked. He then loaned me his Duster for the last two weeks of my summer job, after which I went off to the Clarion Writer's Workshop and met the love of my life.

I didn't personally own another car until 1987.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Scalzi, Weekend Assignment, Cars, Driving

Zot!

Yesterday (Tuesday), I took 87 pictures. 16 of them were for the Round Robin Photo Challenge. With my usual predilection toward overkill, I had trouble narrowing the list of pictures I actually posted to just six, plus one photo I took a week earlier. So what were the other 61 photos, and what possessed me to take so many? Well, I'll tell you. (Was there any doubt?)

Tuesday sunset from my front yard

First of all, there were sunset photos to be taken. Here's one of them. Never mind that I have a backlog of rather nice sunset shots you haven't seen yet.

Same place, different camera setting, a few minutes earlier

The sky doesn't put on an amazing show every night here, even though it seems like it sometimes. When there's a good one, I have to grab the camera. That poor thing has had some hard and heavy use, in all kinds of Tucson weather. (Okay, not snow.) I'm sure I'm not going to be able to get free warranty work done on it at this point.

The Catalinas across a rainy parking lot at 22nd and Kolb

So anyway, I took about ten sunset shots, maybe a few more, and a handful of basic cloud pictures. The other forty-plus photos were a valiant attempt to photograph the lightning to the south and west of me. Until I get a tripod (John claims we own one, but if so it's lost in a box somewhere), I figure my best chance of capturing lightning with my Nikon is to try it before it gets so dark outside that the exposure time is prohibitively long. So Tuesday night at sunset, I pointed the camera at the two parts of the sky where the lightning hit most often, switching back and forth based on wild guesses where it might strike next. I took a bunch of photos while nothing was happening, just in case something did happen after I pressed the button.

And guess what! It worked! Aside from one really lousy shot from last year of a lit section of cloud, I got my first-ever photo with lightning in it. Here it is:

A shoestring of lightning, seen from my front yard

Okay, so it's not terribly impressive. There's just that one broken shoelace of a zot, and you kind of have to look for it. But that's okay. It's a start.

Looking south across my front lawn. Zot!

Then as I was going through the rest of the photos, deciding which of the almost-identical shots to delete, I belatedly noticed that another photo had lightning in it! Can you see it? I cropped a close-up version, but it doesn't look that good. S'all right. I'm happy anyway. Maybe I'll even improve on these before this summer's monsoon is over.

Karen

Tucson monsoon tracker - NWS

Technorati Tags: Photos, Monsoon, Lightning, Tucson

RR: How Does Your Garden Grow?

With our first names,
And online games,
And pretty shots posted just so!

I had an even weirder parody going in my head earlier today.

This is my entry for the Round Robin Photo Challenge topic, "Summer Gardens," as suggested by rRose. It's not going to be one of my text-heavy extravaganzas, but I do have a few interesting photos to share.


First off, here are a few that I played around with quite a bit, boosting saturation beyond all reason and using the fine art oil painting effect. Hey, I like bright colors!


The first four shots here are of the trees and large flowering bushes in front of an office building near St. Michael's. I've shown you pictures of this before, but it's really the closest thing to a flower garden that I see on a regular basis. Living in the Arizona desert, I do see some flowers, but generally it's nothing like Back East. For us, it's kind of a big deal when the saguaros or barrel cacti bloom.


This is a patio at the edge of the office building, given privacy by all the plants between the wall and the street. It's intended for people to eat lunch here, and I've seen them do it, even in high summer. But mostly, from what I've seen, it's a smoking area. Pretty, though.


Back across the street at St. Michael's, we have more traditional desert landscaping, a xeriscape. The tall thing is an ocotillo. Part of the year, ocotillos look like a spray of tall, thorny sticks, with no green to speak of. During the monsoon, though, they take advantage of the moisture and put out a bunch of small green leaves.


Here's another St. Michael's xeriscape, but it makes me sad. The tree with the reddish brown leaves is dying. It used to have green leaves, sometimes bluish-silver. The other day I came upon a guy with a landscaping company as he raked up the fallen leaves from this tree, which was my favorite tree at St. Michael's. I told him I was sad that the tree is dying. He said he was sorry. In broken English, he told me that an infusion of leaves from this tree, mixed with honey, is good for a sore throat. So what does that make it, slippery elm? I wish it would survive, but I think it's too late.

At home we have two - count 'em, two - flowering bushes. This is one of them. It's kind of interesting, though, with all its green tentacles. The other one is our firecracker bush, which has tiny orange flowers that hummingbirds like. That's why we planted it. It's grown so huge that we really need to cut it back.

That's enough for tonight. Now go see what everyone else is up to!

Linking list

rRose
WAIT-NOTYET-/ - Posted!
http://journals.aol.com/rrveh1/WAIT-NOTYET-/

Carly
Ellipsis...Suddenly Carly - Posted!
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Karen
Outpost Mâvarin - Posted!
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Tammy
The Daily Warrior - Posted!
http://mylifeasawarrior.blogspot.com

Nancy
Nancy Luvs Pix - Posted!
http://journals.aol.com/nhd106/Nancyluvspix/

Robin
Search the Sea
http://searchthesea.blogspot.com

Suzanne R
New Suzanne R's Life - Posted!
http://newsuzannerslife.blogspot.com

boliyou***Welcome New Member***
Percolation
http://boliyou.blogspot.com

John
Personal effects - Posted!
http://personaleffects.blogspot.com

Maryanne
Inside the Gilded Cage - Posted!
http://insidethegildedcage.blogspot.com/

Janet
Fond of photography - Posted!
http://fondofphotography.blogspot.com/

Patrick
Patrick's Portfolio - Posted!
http://patricks-portfolio.blogspot.com

Betty
My Day, My Interests Photoblog - Posted!
http://journals.aol.com/rap4143/MyDayMyInterests/

Reminder: it's not to late to join in. Click here for details!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, memes, Summer Gardens, Round Robin Photo, Flowers, Tucson

Ice Cream, Friendly, Family Style

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Cool down with a photo that in some way involves ice cream. Other frozen treats such as Popsicles, frozen yogurt, ice milk and sherbet are also entirely acceptable. If it's sweet and it's frozen, it qualifies.


Aha! This is the perfect excuse for an entry I've wanted to do for a while now. There's a little family-owned ice cream shop not far from where I live, and they deserve all the free advertising they can get. Let me tell you about them.


Trevor's Ice Cream is right next to Subway, in the shopping center at 22nd and Kolb here in Tucson. It's not a big place or a fancy place, not part of a franchise or a chain. It's homey and colorful, though, with green and yellow, red and blue in their walls and decor. The main menu is a big chalkboard, and there's a little chalkboard for overflow.


The owner is Trevor (hence the name), an easygoing guy with good taste in music. (He listens to KXCI, Tucson's highly independent and eccentric radio station.) When Trevor isn't working, and sometimes when he is, he's helped out by his daughter Trudy. She used to work at Unnamed Largish Company before I got there, but she prefers the ice cream business.

The ice cream itself is good (Breyer's and Good Humor, mostly) but nothing extraordinary. The three things that make this place worthwhile are the eclectic menu items, the low prices, and most of all, the customer service. Both father and daughter are friendly and quality-oriented. Trudy in particular really enjoys making these ice cream treats, and her enthusiasm is catching. If you don't know what you want, she'll gladly recommend something.

Here is one of Trudy's recommendations: a 1/2 boat banana split, with three(?) small scoops of ice cream, several toppings, whipped cream, and even a vanilla wafer cookie. "Make sure they know this is the half boat," she told me as I took this photo. The full boat split is much larger. Cost on the half boat: just $2.00! At most places, you probably can't even get one scoop of ice cream for that price any more. Yes, it tastes every bit as good as it looks. If there were such a thing as an ice cream diet that you could really lose weight on, I'd be in and out of this place all the time for 1/2 boats, orange freezes, ice cream with fruit, and other delights. As it is, I sometimes just say hello to Trevor and Trudy on my way to Subway, and buy something ice creamy only occasionally. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I know I sound like a commercial here, but there's a reason for it. Once upon a time, many years ago, I managed a small business myself (Rockarama, remember?). It's not easy to open a family business like this one, and keep it going, and do it your way instead of letting a franchisor dictate the terms. Rockarama was never a commercial success. I want Trevor's Ice Cream to do much better than that. Trevor and Trudy deserve it!

Karen

******

John Scalzi also asks:

To the best of your recollection, what were you doing on this date three years ago?

I cheated. I did a search for documents last modified on 8/7/03. The results of that led me to this line item on my University of Phoenix course list:

FIN/320 Corporate Finance 3 07/10/03 08/07/03 A

Yup! Three years ago tonight, I finished up my Corporate Finance course, with one of my two favorite instructors. I was still working at Worldwide Travel then, so that's what I did all day before going to class that night. My daily writing schedule had almost certainly fallen apart by then, a victim of the copious homework. Blogging was still a little over seven months in my future.

Karen

Reminder: the next Round Robin Photo Challenge, "Summer Gardens," is almost upon us! Click here for details!

Technorati Tags: Photos, memes, Scalzi, Monday Photo Shoot, Round Robin Photo, Ice Cream, Tucson