Karen's Fried Brain: a Recipe

Take one sleep-deprived human brain, female.
Add four hours of sleep.
Hit the snooze bar four times, but do not allow any additional sleep.
Add one Hershey's Kiss for breakfast.
Add one caffeine pill.
Add two ounces of diet cola, flat.
Fill with senseless numbers.
Place in ungreased frying pan.
Turn up the heat. Cook for 5 hours.
Add 1 chicken salad sandwich and 6 ounces of diet cola.
Increase heat. Cook for additional 6 hours.
Add two tablespoons of self-pity, and 1/4 cup guilt.
Mix thoroughly and pour into blog.
Season to taste. Serves two dozen.

(Alternate edit)

K.

Who Knows Were the Time Goes?

That's the title of a Judy Collins song and album.

But really. How did it get to be 2 AM? Okay, so I worked a little late, and I didn't get home with the food from Boston Market until 8:20 or so. That time of night, it seems I always have to wait for more green beans. And yes, there was that brief stint in from of the tv with John, and a little time reading together in bed. And I admit I did flit around a few Madeleine L'Engle articles on Wikipedia, and tweak the sidebar of the Round Robin Photo Challenges blog. But that doesn't seem like enough to take me to 2 AM!

And all right, yes, I also researched James Thurber's brief, unlikely stage career. In 1960, when he was 65 years old, blind and not terribly well (he died a year later), he played himself in 88 performances of A Thurber Carnival. The sketch he did, "File and Forget", is one of my favorites. It consists of Thurber writing a series of letters to his publisher, trying to stop them from shipping him more copies of the books Thurber's Ark and Grandma Was a Nudist. The replies from the publisher, of course, invariably worsen the situation.

You see me rant about time and sleep deprivation almost daily, so let's go with this Thurber tangent instead. My copy of A Thurber Carnival, from Samuel French, Inc., is the copy my mom used to direct an amateur production of the revue in Syracuse circa 1967, maybe 1968. This was about the time of the riots in Detroit and elsewhere. Even Syracuse was feeling the unrest. Police cars drove around the inner city with masking tape on the windows, to protect the officers from shattered glass if someone came at them with a gun or a baseball bat. This was the backdrop for my mom's production of this funny, cerebral show that has more to do with the battle of the sexes than tensions between black and white. (The photo of my mom below is from 1979, over a decade later.)

A Thurber Carnival has a lot of props considering its minimal staging, and a surprising number of these are weapons. "Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife" calls for a large, lethal monkey wrench (Mr. Preble, in the basement, with the wrench); my mom's hand-written note adds a shovel. "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox" requires a military sword and scabbard. Walter Mitty has a scalpel, a piece of pipe (another Clue weapon!) and a knitting needle. "The Little Girl and the Wolf" equips the girl with a 45 automatic "in basket with red ruffle." For one of the sketches, probably Grant or the Walter Mitty firing squad, my mom added white, non-working parade rifles, borrowed from The Manlius School, a military school that merged with Pebble Hill a year or two later.

The play was rehearsed somewhere downtown or around the University; it may have been at Reid Hall or Peck Hall, the two buildings of University College where my dad was assistant dean (or possibly dean by then). Wherever it was, my mom didn't leave the props there between rehearsals. She stored them in the back of her station wagon, which she also used to drive some of her actors home around midnight after rehearsals. At least one or two of them lived in the inner city.

Picture it: here is a professional psychologist and amateur playwright, age 40ish, driving through riot-torn city streets in her 1961 Rambler. In the back are a couple of rifles, swords, a heavy monkey wrench, a pistol, and a few less likely weapons. The streets are mostly deserted except for heavily-armed cops in taped-up cars. At any moment, my mom thought, she might get pulled over, and have to explain the arsenal in the back of the car.

Fortunately, the Syracuse police had little interest in the midnight movements of a middle-aged blonde woman from Manlius. They never did stop her. Good thing, too, except that it would have given me the punchline I so obviously lack for this blog entry.

Karen

The Return of Messages from Mâvarin

After all my Wiki-distraction, worrying about Tor and messing around with Sherlock's illustrations, I'm happy to announce that I've finally gotten a bit of fiction writing in, the first fiction I've written in months that was more than a few sentences long. You can see it in Messages from Mâvarin, which I've finally posted to for the first time since October. Shocking, ain't it? Actually I wrote this bit intermittently over a period of months, at least. I can't swear to you that I didn't start the scene a year ago or longer. But no matter. It's moving forward now. I even have the beginning of an inkling of a clue where it might be going. Huzzah!

Mind you, it's not a continuation of the thing I was writing last October before I got stuck and distracted. I was trying to get the prequel to Heirs of Mâvarin moving, past the bits I wrote years ago. But it doesn't look as though I have the inspiration or interest right now to write about the main antagonist of the Mages trilogy in her teenage years.

So instead I posted the bit that I've been writing intermittently at lunch in the mall. It's from a much later book, The Mâvarin Revolutions. In theory it takes place a year or two or three after the end of Return to Mâvarin, which is volume 3 of Mages of Mâvarin. Unless you're one of my faithful beta readers you're going to be lost, but just go with it. All I'll tell you for now is that the scene I posted doesn't take place in the same universe/timeline/reality as Heirs of Mâvarin. Cathma Masha is not Crel.

Now that I've got you thoroughly confused, here's the line-up of Mâvarin-related fiction as it stands now:

Canonical works:

1. To Rule Mâvarin - the prequel, about how Lore becomes Lormarte, and Queen Genva's deadly enemy. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be as bad as Star Wars Episode III.
2. "What About the Children?" - Crel and Del, age 10, brush up against their future destinies in this novelette - if only I can reconstruct what the plot was going to be!
   
3. Heirs of Mâvarin - the introductory book in the series, the one I started in high school a million years (and as many drafts) ago, the one that will have been at Tor for eleven months in another week.
   
4. Mages of Mâvarin - the original sequel, which grew into a trilogy:
1. An Adept in Mâvarin - Darsuma comes to Mâvarin, bringing trouble with her.
2. Another Mâvarin - Rani is stranded on a remote island, and Cathma is stranded in another world.
3. Return to Mâvarin - Cathma and Rani try to get home - but issues of identity get in the way.
   
5. The Mâvarin Revolutions - Cathma and Carli find their rule threatened by their respective love lives. Meanwhile, in the other Mâvarin, the time is ripe for revolution - if only the revolutionaries can get their preferred ruler to cooperate.

Apocrypha:

• Missives from Mâvarin - all that short stuff - letters and diary entries, mostly - that I've posted in Messages from Mâvarin. Might end up being canonical, but they're not part of the existing books.
• Mall of Mâvarin - that slightly silly serial I posted in 2005.
  

Should keep me busy for a while, don't you think? Mages is mostly done and Heirs is entirely done, but the prequel and the other sequel are each just a few pages long, so far. If I can just get the first book sold, that will go a long way toward motivating me to write the rest.

Karen

Seven Rooms in Search of a View; The Last Speech

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Pick a window in your home. Take a picture out of it. We're looking at things that are close to home this week.

Okay, but you're going to be disappointed. Let's start with my office:

See, around here, for much of the year, it's not a good idea to let a lot of sunlight into the house. The rooms get up around 80 to 90 degrees as it is. On top of that, we have room air conditioners in a couple of rooms. They aren't all effective - one isn't even wired up yet - but there they are. So overall, the windows around here are mostly closed off. Even in the winter, it doesn't seem worth messing with them. So we don't. The other issue in this particular room was glare as I sat at my desk. Hence the FedEx box used as a shade. Someday I'd like to see the walls finished in here and curtains hung.

It's not a great view anyway. Here's what I see if I actually stand next to my office window - which I almost never do. Can't even see the Rincon Mountains with the fences and neighborhood houses in the way.

The view out the bedroom windows is no better. Another fence, a tree, and a neighbor's back yard.

John's bathroom window. The sill used to have two dead butterflies on it. Sorry, Bea and Carly. I can't remember whether I eventually cleaned them up or John did. They were blue, similar to monarchs in size and markings.

My bathroom window. In this case it's the neighbor's front yard that isn't quite visible.


The library. The tree in front of the window protects from the heat but blocks much of the view. I don't know what that metal thing in the window sill is.

The view out the kitchen window - is of the den. For the first ten years this room, which we spend a lot of time in, was variously called the tv room, the living room, or the fireplace room. Finally John decided it's the den. So it is. But it's an addition to the house, predating our arrival by at least a decade. This kitchen window used to look out on the back yard. Now it reveals that I haven't put away the Christmas stockings yet. The window to the right of the fireplace is the one with the not-hooked-up-yet air conditioner.


And here we are on the left side of the den, looking out to the north on the best view in the house, (with the possible exception of the living room, which looks out on the street from behind white curtains). The den has these sliding glass doors, which I suppose aren't technically windows at all. The view is of our cracked and empty pool, a fence, and - voila! - the Catalina Mountains. We must be in Tucson after all!

Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter whether there are pretty views to be had from inside this house. I get an eyeful of mountains every morning and evening. That's good enough for me!

*****

Today was Martin Luther King Day, of course. I had the day off, and took the opportunity to get 11 glorious hours of sleep. But I don't want to let the day pass without comment, at least a retroactive one. On Sunday on the way to church, I heard a story on NPR about King's last speech. He was terribly tired, probably a bit discouraged, and wasn't even scheduled to speak that night. He was in his hotel room in Memphis, trying to rest. Over at a local church, Reverend Abernathy was supposed to speak. But the place was packed, and they wanted to hear Dr. King; so King was sent for. Without notes, he gave one of his greatest speeches ever.

He talked about great moments in history, and about the troubled present time, and his desire to help improve it. Mortality was on his mind. He spoke of a time years before, when he'd been stabbed in New York City. A ninth grader had read that the knife was so close to his heart that if he'd sneezed, it would have gone in. She wrote to King, "I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze." In that last speech, King agreed with that sentiment. He told about the things he would have missed, had he sneezed and died, the events he took part in in 1960, 1961, 1962 and beyond. Eventually he made his way to the rousing and, in retrospect, poignant conclusion:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!

The next day, he was dead.

One of the subdeacons at church told me that on Friday, he accidentally referred to the upcoming holiday as "St. Martin's Day." Then he got to wondering whether anyone has ever suggested sainthood for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, they have. Colby also found references to allegations of wrongdoing - that King plagiarized his first public sermon, that he may have made some personal indiscretions, that he may have been a communist. On the last point, Colby said, "So was Jesus."

It's easy to comb through the life of a public figure and find things they did wrong, or that people accused them of doing wrong - true, half-true, or totally false, the accusations stick around. But it doesn't matter now. As Colby pointed out, lots of saints had checkered pasts. What matters is that the man did amazing work, year after year, led and inspired and helped millions of people, and changed the conscience of a nation. And he was one heck of an orator.

God bless him.

Karen

I've been to the mountaintop.

Power and Prescience of King's 'Mountaintop' Speech - NPR - Jan 14, 2007

Second Tries and Lost Opportunities

I'm really, really tired, so I'm going to rush this entry and go to bed. But notice, please, that with Shelly's help I've got the blog set up pretty much the way I want it. Thanks, Shelly!


Today was one of those rare days when I get miles and miles away from Wilmot Road, the corridor that pretty much defines where I eat, sleep, work and worship. A friend asked me to take her shopping on Oracle Rd., in the northwest part of Tucson. On the way, we happened to pass this big fellow. Roadside America calls his ilk "muffler men," because many of these giant figures hold mufflers in their huge hands. This fellow is more properly a Paul Bunyan, made by the same company, International Fiberglass, in the 1960s and 1970s. The company started making these giant lumberjacks before adapting them as muffler men, cowboys, Indians, and even spacemen.

This particular Paul Bunyan figure is at the corner of Glenn and Stone Avenues in Tucson, in front of a hot rod supply shop. His nickname is "Glenn Stone, the axe murderer." Rumor has it that rookie cops are told to respond to a call about a big man wielding an axe at Glenn and Stone. Years ago, I bought a Mercury Capri right across the street from old Glenn. I like him. At Christmas they sometimes give him a candy cane to hold instead of his axe. For at least 20 years I've been wanting to write a story about one of these guys coming to life. but I've never managed to get an actual plot worked out. Maybe I should just take it from the top and make it up as I go along, as I pretty much always do.


When I came out of church this morning, there was actual snow on the mountains again, but this time with no clouds. It was starting to melt, though, as I left the house again an hour later. But the time I reached Oracle Road with my friend, it was all gone. Drat! But I did manage this shot of the Catalinas reddened by sunset, and much closer as seen from, um, I think it was Roger Road. (The garish yellow building is a local mattress factory; I like that, too.) Even the red on the mountains was gone by the time I dropped off my friend a few minutes later, and was free to pursue the photography. Moral: when a photo op appears, drop everything and take the shot!

Karen

(Just Like) Starting Over

Now I'm likely to have the Lennon song stuck in my head for the next day or two.

You've probably noticed that the Outpost looks a bit different. Actually it's gone through a flurry of changes over the past eight hours or so. I upgraded to the new version of Blogger, the one that came out of Beta recently; and somewhat rashly upgraded the template so I could use the new customizing features. Ever since then I've been trying to get back some features I wanted to keep from the old template, with only limited success. Yes, I can go back to the original template,(and have already done so once), but I want this new version to work, darn it!



Problems I've had so far:

1. It took Blogger about twenty minutes to convert my blogs. No big deal.
2. As the originator of the Round Robin blog, I couldn't upgrade my other blogs without changing over the team blog as well. This means that Steven and Carly and I can only post to the Round Robin Photo Challenges now using the new version.
3. This is the big one: there is no provision in the new drop-and-drag, modular settings controls for setting background colors and images. I went through three or four templates and hours of experimenting to get the sky background on the edges, the wood pattern on the header and the "sky_blue" one on the sidebars and so on. I still don't know how to make the footer work right, or the bottom of the sidebar, which used to end after the buttons, and let the background image show below it. I have no clue how to get it to do that again. And oh, joy. Apparently I've given ordered lists like this one a sky background as well.
   
4. Similarly, I can't get a line of text to display in the footer. I can only get it into the wrapper below the footer.
5. If I add a photo element, Blogger doesn't recognize the web address of a jpg as a valid image source, and gives me an error message. I had to upload the Robin all over again.
6. When it converts the old template to the modular one, it just leaves out anything it doesn't understand, which is to say anything that doesn't fit its canned definitions of different page elements. So the list of Robins was gone because it began with an image. It took me probably an hour to get the list back in, because I had to past in all those links and descriptions individually. The Frappr, Technorati, hit counter, and other third party widgets were also gone, but I was able to restore them with an add element that's specifically for that sort of thing.
   
7. Similarly, at one point I had two of each of such headings as "Some Favorites" and "Please blog more." I deleted the dupes, only to discover that I saved headings and accidentally deleted actual lists of links.
   
8. In restoring my link lists I discovered that if I don't let it alphabetize, it puts the newest links on top. To get things in the same order requires entering everything from bottom to top.
9. I couldn't make my flag fit in the header properly. I had to shrink it, which is probably for the best anyway.
10. The poem at the top absolutely won't recognize any line breaks unless I use a "pre" tag.

Overall, I'm not impressed. Yes, there's a handy place for tags (except that Blogger calls them "labels") but that seems to be the main advantage so far. For all the really critical customizations, there's no way to do what I want except to experiment with css styles, which are extremely confusing to me.

And it occurs to me that this is just another example of the way the year is going so far, with lots of hopes and promises but little actual movement in the right direction. It's like a giant reset button has been pushed on my life, and not in a good way. The only New Year's resolution I've carried out so far was writing to Tor, and despite that and other developments nothing has really changed on that front. I'm just settling down to wait again, just like before. I haven't been to the gym, I haven't cleaned the house, and I haven't gotten more sleep. If and when I work on carrying out any of these reforms, it truly will be starting over . Like designing this blog.

Karen

Random lists, Sancho Panza and Scooby Snacks

Cloudage viewed from 5th and Wilmot

National De-Lurking Week, or whatever it's called, has not been a stellar time for two-way communication here at the Outpost. Aside from the usual winter doldrums and the fact that I didn't even mention the delurking thing until now, it may be because I've mostly been trying to communicate with pictures rather than words, and so haven't elicited many words in return. Worse, I've mostly been obsessing about my Mâvarin characters, a topic that's probably of limited interest outside a small circle of beta readers and close friends. Someday people outside that circle will care about Rani and Carli and the rest, but that day has not yet arrived. First I need to sell the books to a publisher, and then they have to go through the whole publishing process. When Heirs of Mâvarin hits the bookstores, then I can reasonably ask the fantasy fans among you to care about Fayubi and Cathma.

It's also true that I haven't been writing many tour de force blog entries of late, being distracted with Wikipedia, Madeleine L'Engle and the whole Tor submission situation. Tonight is no exception. It's 4:45 AM already. I'm going to post a few pictures, explain the title of this entry, and then go the heck to bed.

In reverse order, then:

Scooby Snacks

I'm somewhat embarrassed to report that Tuffy, always a finicky eater, really seems to like Scooby Snacks. John bought them for her after she started burying a large proportion of her dog biscuits in the mud in the back yard rather than eating them. My objection to these latest treats, aside from the higher cost, is that I've never been fond of Scooby Doo, either the show or the character. Tuffy, of course, has no idea who Scooby Doo is, or that the green biscuits are shaped like ghosts, the brown ones like Shaggy. That's probably as it should be.

As for my own culinary experiments, such as they are, I finally went to Delhi Palace today with some people from work. I resisted for a long time, because my last visit to an Indian restaurant, in London in the early 1990s, did not include much food that I found at all palatable. I'm such a coward when it comes to food adventures! But today's buffet was just fine - not wonderful or even splendid, but reasonably pleasant and a nice change.

Ernie Sabella and Sancho Panza

In the course of my wanderings on Wikipedia tonight, I took a look at the article for Ernie Sabella and ended up working on it for at least an hour, pulling up web sites as research and adding a bunch of info to the entry. Who is Ernie Sabella? you may be wondering. Well, I'll tell you. He's this guy. He was in the Quantum Leap episode "Catch a Falling Star," playing the dual role of Manny (a smalltime stage actor) and Sancho Panza (as seen in Man of La Mancha). He did a batch of NyQuil commercials back in 1994, appeared in his friend Nathan Lane's short-lived sitcom Encore! Encore!, and sat naked on the subway in an episode of Seinfeld, a show I personally hate. But you probably know him as the voice of Pumbaa in The Lion King, its sequels and its spinoffs. He's also been on Broadway, where he played Sancho on stage several years after doing so on QL.

One of the things I wanted to add to the article was a screen capture from the Quantum Leap. So I pulled out my Quantum Leap Season Two box set, and quickly got thoroughly annoyed with it. The CDs are two-sided and barely labeled, and there are no special features at all on the disc containing "Catch a Falling Star." This is a major, important episode. It should have had a commentary and interviews. But no, they didn't even get the facts right on the one-sentence episode description. Grrr. But I watched the episode anyway, and I got my screen captures. I even went to the Sancho Panza article and added a section about MoLM, since the article didn't even mention that the character had ever been anything except the Cervantes novel.

L'Engle at Random

When I checked my Wikipedia edit count, I was up to 1694, six edits short of being able to update my little box to claim "over 1700 edits." (The update itself would be 1701, you see.) I thoght I would do a handful of quick and easy edits, but instead I spent a few hours on one edit for the article on Random House. Various people had made half-hearted attempts to mention some of the companies and imprints that are part of Random House these days, but it was ill-organized and highly incomplete. I took a chunk of listings from their web site and turned it into a partly-annotated list of divisions and imprints. It needs work, but it's a start.

As I did my research for that, I noticed belatedly that a L'Engle book I special ordered recently, The Ordering of Love, was featured on a page for Shaw Books. The weird part about that was that this used to be Harold Shaw Publishers, but not it's part of Random House. When did that happen? Random House now owns about all the publishing companies and book imprints you've even heard of, and a bunch that you haven't; but I don't recall ever seeing that one on the list before. It means that L'Engle is getting to be about as much a Random House author as a Fararr, Straus & Giroux one. FS&G publish all the novels in hardcover, and that's the edition I prefer except for the whole let's not-wreck-the-expensive-book thing. The Shaw imprint means that a bunch of her non-fiction and poetry is now Random, along with all the paperbacks.

5:45 AM. I may not have entertained you with all these nearly-random ramblings, but say hi anyway, willya? Meanwhile I'm going to bed.

Karen