Works in Progress

So today I packed up most of the CDs in my office, all of my Pern books, misc. books, papers and magazines, a license plate, several very dusty vintage games and a few things in frames, and hauled them perhaps 25 feet into the den. It hardly made a dent in the work I have to do in this room. The den already has lots of boxes in it, and I don't know how I can possibly find space in the house for the masses of books, papers, LotR and Anya figures, photos, unsold eBay items, Quantum Leap scripts, autographed baseball bats and other precious junk cluttering my office. Somehow I have to do it, though. That's the price of getting new flooring in here instead of awful orange carpeting that was already ratty when we moved in twelve or thirteen years ago, not to mention the desk we bought last weekend, and the relief that will come with finally not working in an office so horribly messy and overcrowded that I'm too ashamed to even show you a "before" picture. In fact I didn't take one. Just imagine the messiest photos I've ever showed you, and triple the mess, and you'll have some clue of the depths of my self-caused degradation. But it will get better. It will. Really.

Meanwhile, I wrote several drafts of a query to an agent who blogs, and emailed them to a few writerly friends for comment. I also got a Google Calendar up and running today on the church web site, and posted a rather chatty note about it on the church blog. We'll see if anyone notices. And I'm considering the replacement of a rather old picture of St. Michael's on out Welcome page. Pop quiz: which of the following photos is most appropriate for a church's home page? It is this:

...or perhaps an interior view...

...or one with lots of people...and their dogs?

Should the first picture a visitor to the page sees show a solemn liturgical moment...


...or should we concentrate on showing the social aspects of church life?


That Episcopal web guru guy feels strongly that a church's "brochure site" should be about people, not buildings and stained glass. So tomorrow I'm going to try to photograph people in the context of the church building, perhaps going up the tree-lined walk toward our welcoming open doors.

But what I really want to do is put together a little Java slide show, like that AOL applet. Will that work on a non-AOL page? I don't have any Java authoring knowledge or appropriate software, not even something to make an animated GIF slideshow. Well, I'll figure out.

This is your cue to offer suggestions, folks. Meanwhile, good night!

Karen

"progris riport"

It's been a day of battling three uncooperative entities: the Computer (broadly conceived), Time (as usual) and my own brain (no surprise there). By and large I've prevailed over #1 and #3, but #2 is a killer. Perhaps one reason for my fascination with time travel is my frustration with time as it appears to be in everyday life, that inexorable vector that pushes me toward the future one smooth second at a time, whether or not I'm ready to go there. There are never enough of those seconds to do all that I want, the goofing off as well as the vital tasks and tardy obligations. I want to read Snopes.com for three hours and not feel guilty about it. I want to crack the top 10,000 on the Flixter neverending quiz leader board. I want to sleep for ten hours, mess around online for ten hours, read for ten hours, and write for ten hours, all between now and 9 AM Saturday morning, a little over six hours from now. But alas, Time won't let me use those seconds, minutes, hours more than once each.

Last night I posted my blog entry later than usual for a weeknight, and in two different blogs. "The Clone and the House Guest" now exists in two places in Musings from Mâvarin, once at the Outpost and once in Messages from Mâvarin. Two of those appearances date back to November, 2005, when I first wrote the thing. It wasn't until this morning that I noticed:

1. I had a typo of the word "If" instead of the word "Is", resulting in a sentence that didn't make sense.
2. One paragraph suddenly veered into past tense, while the rest was (by design) in present tense.
3. Two of the postings switched to a different font in the middle of the dialogue. When I tried to fix this, one of them put all of Karen's lines after the font switch into the same red as Kate's lines.
   

And it wasn't until tonight that I noticed the weird links I snarfed from the AOL Search screen didn't work as blog links. Phooey.

All this comes less than a week after John sat in our Tempe AZ hotel room, finding numerous typos in the blog entry I'd posted the night before. When I find I've put up something with that many errors in it, the humorous typo warning on my sidebar just isn't sufficient to assuage my embarrassment. I worry that you will think I don't know the right spellings, the right grammar, the right words for which I've substituted the wrong ones, and the right punctuation to make it all work. When there's an error every 50 words or so, the whole thing starts to look like a sequel of Flowers for Algernon. What I have to do is slow down and proofread some more, and of course sleep more to keep the brain sharp. This is not a new insight.

You've now read my time complaint and my brain complaint. But the big battles of the week were with computers and software and files. The WordPerfect file I've been trying to open from church turned out to be over 11 MB instead of around 300K. No wonder my computer was having fits! So today at lunch I went to the church office and showed the parish administrator how to paste text from that huge church bulletin file into he body of an email. It wasn't perfect, but it worked, much better than the original file would have. I also suggested that she paste the entire bulletin into a new Word doc, because Word is more compatible with what I and others are doing, and easier to use. But in Word that 11 MB of text and graphics was all compressed into one overlapping paragraph. Double Phooey.

I gave out a few suggestions and moved on to check in with Rev. Angela. She had a different question for me, all to do with an email that wanted to defy all reasonable margins. I gave her a few pointers on what the problem was and how to fix it, but really it's a bit of a mess to figure out.

Tonight I managed to put together a huge news and schedule update to the St. Michael's news blog, copied from the stuff we'd pasted into emails. Later on I cleaned it up to look better, updated the schedule page as well, and even converted the following week's bulletin (only 413K!) into Word (138K) and cleaned it up, in hopes that it can be used as a template for later.


There were more computer-related battles. At least once this week my computer at work failed to shut down properly, and generally behaved oddly. Here at home, my attempt to optimize the hard drive with Speed Disk has gotten hung up repeatedly. Blogger was down at one point, and AOL seemingly banned my sidebar portrait for a while on Musings. And...well, there were other incidents and annoyances, but time and my brain insist that I go to bed now. I'll resume ranting some other time.

Karen

Stories of the Weekend Assignments

Weekend Assignment #156: Repost your favorite Weekend Assignment from the past three years. Or, if you can't choose, post the first Weekend Assignment you ever participated in.

Extra Credit: Should we keep doing the Weekend Assignments? Or after three years, should we give it a rest? Let me know; I'm curious.

When I first saw this assignment this afternoon, I thought it would be quick and easy. All I needed to do was look up Holiday Picnic with Tom and Abby and Friends, repost it, and I'd been "rolling with puppies," or whatever it is that Willow says in that one Buffy episode. Then I decided I ought to actually look and see what else I've written at Scalzi's behest since June 2004. I started with a search for Weekend Assignments on Musings from Mâvarin, and never really got beyond that. After all, between the two blogs, I've written well over a hundred of these things. It really wasn't possible for me to read (or even skim) all of them tonight.

But I did read or skim a bunch of them, and I found two contradictory patterns emerging:

1. Despite the occasional overlap, there really has been a huge variety of subject matter in Scalzi's assignments.
2. Despite #1, I personally tend to write responses that hook in to my own obsessions. Several times I've worked in some kind of time travel story or premise, relating to The Beatles, Disneyland, Doctor Who and certain early U.S. presidents. I've written about my novels, about books by L'Engle and others, and about friends, teachers and relatives of the past and present. And when the assignment was something that didn't interest me, such as pie, I tend to dispose of it as quickly as possible and find a tangent to carry us someplace more interesting.

That last thing under #2 led to the entry I'll be reposting tonight instead of the picnic with Thomas Jefferson. Oddly enough, it involves the same "Scalzi's clone" photo that Scalzi himself reposted today. I don't like it much, and wasn't terribly interested in captioning it, but that was the assignment that night. So I did it, and then I had an interesting conversation about it with my pirate house guest, Black Rose Katie Specks. Enjoy.

Thursday, November 3, 2005
9:17:00 PM MST
The Clone and the House Guest

Weekend Assignment #84: Take a look at the picture below. Tell us what you think is going on in the picture. You can write as long as you want, or as short as you like -- even a photo caption works. Now, it's a fairly weird picture, but I thought that would just give you more to work with. Ready? Here you go:

John Scalzi is finally forced to admit it was a bad idea to crib
his cloning experiment from a Treehouse of Horror episode of
The Simpsons.

Extra Credit: Would you like to see more "explain what's going on in the picture" sort of assignments?

No. Not as such. There's not enough material here for writing one of my patented long entries. Yet somehow I'll manage anyway, especially with my nosy house guest asking questions!

"Tell me again who John Scalzi is," Black Rose Kate orders.

"He's AOL's designated, professional blogger," I tell her. "He's there to encourage and inspire people to post in their AOL Journals, give tips on how it's done, point the way to interesting or amusing stuff online, and generally entertain us."

"Then by what authority can he assign you to do anything?"

"Oh, it's completely voluntary. But it gives me something to write about that I might not have thought of otherwise."

"Is this something you wanted to write about, now that he's thought of it for you?" she asks pointedly.

"Not really, but I'm proud of the caption I came up with for it."

"I do not understand it. What is a clone?"

"A clone is an exact copy of a person, like a twin, but made by science instead of nature. It's been done with a sheep and other animals. Nobody's ever really cloned a human being yet, as far as we know, and a lot of people say we shouldn't even try it."

"But the monster on the left isn't an exact copy," Kate points out.

I decide not to mention that "monster" would not be a politically correct term for a "cloned American," even a wonky-looking one like Scalzi's. "That's because the premise of the photo is that the cloning experiment didn't quite work out," I explain. "It's supposed to be a joke."

"Well, I fail to see the humour in it," says Kate. "What does your caption mean, about The Simpsons? You have DVDs with that name on them. Are there clones in The Simpsons?"

"Not that I recall," I admit. "But the fake clone in the picture looks a little like the drawings of Homer Simpson in the tv show."

"There are drawings in the tv show?"

"It's nothing but drawings. You can watch some of the DVDs tomorrow if you like."

"And the treehouse of horror? What, pray tell, is that?"

"It's a series of Halloween episodes of The Simpsons, in which horrible things happen. If a cloning experiment went wrong on The Simpsons, it would probably be in a Treehouse of Horror episode."

Black Rose Kate shakes her head. "I think I have done very well so far in understanding your century; but this explanation remains unclear to me."

"It's not important," I tell her. "Nothing kills a joke faster than trying to explain it."

Kate nods thoughtfully. Then she hits me with a question that I should have expected but didn't. "Am I a clone?"

I look at her. There is no denying that Katie Specks looks enough like me that she could indeed be my clone. It is also true that she still doesn't know how she got here. I can't blame her for wondering whether she might not be who she thinks she is.

"You're not a clone," I tell her.

"Am I a twin?"

"Not of me, you aren't. Perhaps we're related."

"Aye, perhaps. Were your ancesters from England or Ireland?"

"Some of them. I used to jokingly refer to the Irish ones as Viking Irish royalty, the ones who got tired of returning north and became landed gentry instead."

"Aye, I come from the same hardy stock," says Kate. "Mayhap we are relatives. But stay, I have one more question for ye."

"What's that?"

"Am I fictional? You told people that I was a fictional character."

Uh-oh. "How do you know about that?"

"I read the emails you sent to Paul and Gem."

Poor Kate! I'll have to approach my explanation delicately.

"I didn't think you would learn to use my computer so quickly," I admit.

"I find your keyboard difficult to operate, especially the keys with the letters missing. But even I can point and click with the mouse. What is your explanation, Karen?"

"What would you have me tell everyone, Kate? If I post the truth, that you're really here but we don't know why or how, people will either assume that I'm lying, or that I'm crazy, or that I'm telling a story. As a fiction writer, I'd rather they think I'm writing fiction than that I'm lying or crazy."

"You think people will not believe the plain truth?"

"That's right. People just don't turn up from centuries past, alive and well and asking questions."

Kate chuckles. "Fair enough. All right, then. We can pretend that you're spinning a yarn, an it helps you preserve your reputation."

"Thank you."

"But you should have asked me, Karen."

I nod. "Yes. Sorry."

"Aye, well, 'tis unimportant now. Tell me more about The Simpsons. Do these drawings you mention move, like the images in Buffy?"

I think I'll spare you the rest of that conversation.

Karen

Extra Credit: please don't stop handing out Weekend Assignments. It would make me sad.

Some Fictional and/or Time Travel W.A.'s:
Holiday Picnic with Tom and Abby and Friends
Not Your Usual Subscriptions
With the Beatles

Black Rose Katie Specks
An 18th Century pirate looks at the modern world.

• On Halloween and Modern Life
• On Technology and Fictional Pirates
• On Love and Death...and Life
• The Clone and the House Guest
• A Pirate Incognito
• Kate Weighs In
  
• Absent Friends

Aargh.

The evening started out to be so productive. I cleared out a bunch of email and started typing up the twelve handwritten pages of the Fayubi and Jor scene. But after a page or so I took a break to open an emailed file from church and post part of the contents on the St. Michael's news blog.

Two hours later, I'd force ended MS Word, AOL, a CD burning program, PhotoStudio, Firefox and probably Paint; burned three CDs full of recent photos, deleted a bunch of those same recent photos to clear about a GB of space on the hard drive; and finally turned off the computer rather than shutting it down. All of this activity was basically just to get Word to start responding again by freeing up RAM and disk space. It didn't work.

Fortunately, autosave had all my text I'd typed for the scene, but the church bulletin was another matter. "Recover text from any file" gave me a document thousands of pages long. The most readable part looked like this:

ADULT€FORUM€„€CONTINUES€€IN€THE€SCHOOL€Ð

MUSIC€ROOM€ó

from€9:00€to€9:45€AMÔ

THE€BARNABAS€GROUP€ó

of€encouragementÔ

for€those€who€haveÐ

experienced€a€loss€at€sometime€meets€monthly.€€Next€meetingÐ

Monday,MarchÔ_

12€at€11:30€

at€the€City€Grill€restaurant€locatedÐ

Tanque

_

Verde€Road.€€€Please€call€Lucy€Ô_

Rasmus

Yeah, that's helpful.

Dang it. Even the photo editing tonight was unsatisfactory.

Karen

To the Point

As I mentioned last night, our last sightseeing of the "Big Five-Oh" trip, if you don't count IKEA, was a visit to a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Spire in Scottsdale, AZ. It was part of Wright's proposed 1957 design for the Arizona State Capitol, along with some shorter spires and other features that were too outre for lawmakers of the era. It was finally built all by itself in 2004 at the corner of Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard and Scottsdale Road, at the edge of The Promenade Mall. It weighs more than 75,000 pounds, according to the Roadside America tip about it, and is assembled with about 1,700 individual pieces of steel.

Yeah, well. The point is that it's this historic thing, designed by the best-known architect since Charles Eiffel; and yet it exists basically as a big turquoise-colored curiosity at the edge of a shopping mall.


But I got out of the car and walked over for a closer look and some better photos. Right away I came upon a big canvas-covered fence behind which the spire was apparently barricaded. The sign on the fence proclaimed the creation of a Frank Lloyd Wright Commemorative Park, to be opened in Spring, 2007. Peeking through the tears in the canvas told me two things: 1) they've barely started doing anything with that little block of land, and 2) the spire was not actually in the barricaded area. I walked on.


I'm glad I did! There already is a park covering perhaps a quarter acre around the spire. This bear sculpture is one of quite a few animal statues found in there, along with javalinas, a coyote and several bunnies. Real desert plants, including this youngish saguaro (perhaps 75 years old) and firecracker bushes, add natural elements to the landscaping.


According to our tour guide at Taliesin West yesterday, Wright liked the idea of a ship design in the desert. The spire and its surroundings seem to reflect this interest. Doesn't this water feature remind you of the prow of a ship? The bricks that box it in are the same kind John and I see around Tucson all the time, and want to incorporate into our house. And the water here attracts a natural, albeit ephemeral, element to this little park. Do you see what I'm talking about?


It's a whole flock of grackles, here to take advantage of the cool water on an unusually hot March day.

***

Now that I'm home again, I need to get on with a number of things, like packing stuff from my office into boxes, and getting on with diet and exercise, and updating a resume or two. I'm getting to the point where I can't put off such things much longer. After all, I said I was giving up avoidance for Lent!

To that end, I copied some leads off a Writer's Digest online article tonight. It was about 23 literary agencies currently accepting new clients. Of those, I found three that represent the magic combination fantasy/science fiction/young adult, and that didn't, to the best of my memory, reject a previous query years ago. If I don't announce by the end of the week that I've written at least a first draft of a query to one or more of these agents, you have my permission to start nagging me.

Karen

Home

First off, here's the Monday Photo Shoot:

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Post any winter photos you didn't get around to posting earlier. Because winter is going, going, gone, baby. Think of it as a last salute.

I can do that.

This isn't snow. It's rain. I think so, anyway. I have no particular memory of taking the photo, but it dates from January 31st.

On to more interesting sights:

So today we did go to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home, studio and architectural school from the late 1930s until his death in the 1950s. I'd been there once before, briefly, meeting my online friend Sarah for the first time. Today, though, I actually went on one of the tours.



John and I opted for the 90-minute Insights tour, because it included a few living quarters interiors. I liked the lack of box shapes, inside and out, but overall, there wasn't much that we thought would be relevant to our own needs and tastes. For example, these two beds above, separated by a low wall, were Frank Lloyd Wright's "Do not disturb" bed (left) and his OK to disturb bed (right). If he was in the left one, which was farther from the building's entrance, it meant he was catching up on sleep after a marathon creative session, and should not be awakened unless someone really important needed to see him urgently. I wish I could get away with that! But the beds themselves are just little cots.



And here, steps away, is part of FLW's bathroom. At one time I wanted to go for an industrial modern look for my own bathroom, sort of space ship style, with lots of gleaming metal offset by blue. But it's not going to happen.


After Taliesin we found our way to the Spire FLW designed for the Arizona state house. When it was finally built a couple of years ago, it went up at the corner of Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Drive, in front of an Italian restaurant. More on this tomorrow night.

From there we made our way back to IKEA. John measured his car trunk and back seat with twine, and decided that the desk I liked (Mikael in "beech effect") would fit in there, barely. So we bought it, and drove home.

Now I have to pack up much of this room, throw away what I can and move the rest out so that we can put the new desk in and make other improvements. The ucky orange carpeting will go away, and the unusable closet doors, and foam where unfinished walls meet the unfinished ceiling.

But not tonight!

Karen

And if I'd charged my camera battery...

After I took hundreds of pictures yesterday, I charged my camera battery before going out again and taking pictures at Organ Stop Pizza. But I made a mistake. I forgot how to tell whether the battery was fully charged. The charger for the Canon, if I recall correctly, had a reddish-yellowish light that turned green when the battery was ready. The Nikon one has a light that flashes until it's done, and then stops flashing. The Sony one has a steady yellow light until it's charged, and then the light goes out. But I didn't remember that last night. So after maybe twenty to thirty minutes of charging, I saw the steady light and thought it was done. Then I took more pictures and a twenty-second film, and left the camera attached to the computer a little too long (which would charge my iPod battery, but it drains my camera battery). And because I thought it was fully charged a handful of photos ago, and was distracted by multiple computer problems, I didn't charge it again.

Big mistake. Because today, you see, we went on a four-hour train ride on the Verde Canyon Railroad. It's basically a twenty mile and back again nature tour through a mostly red rock canyon, where eagles winter and a few (named Black and Decker) nest.


And my camera was out of juice. I knew this early on with my first few pictures at the Clarkdale end of the canyon. That upsetting graphic of a battery shape with a line through it kept appearing whenever I turned the camera on. I did my back to nurse it along, but the camera was pretty much completely dead by the time we reached the red rock areas so reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, only on a much smaller scale.

I did get a few decent shots, though, as you see here. Verde means green, of course, and it's easy to see why this is called the Verde River. That's the front of our train in the shot above, curving its way over a bridge.

And here's the beginning of the red rocks. They got better after that--much better. But I couldn't photograph them.

Between that, the severe traffic slowdown near an accident (which made us worry we'd miss the train), the worrisome sight of a crashed motorcycle in the canyon itself, and stretches of road that were poorly labeled both on a map and in reality, we had our share of stress today. Overall, though it was fun, and very pretty. I even saw a male eagle sitting on a nest. I couldn't take the picture, and anyway he was on the opposite wall of the canyon and I saw him only through binoculars. But still, it was pretty darn cool!

After the train ride, we drove about five miles to Jerome, Arizona. This is one of many former mining towns scattered around the state, mostly based on copper and occasionally silver. Once the mines are played out or otherwise abandoned, they tend to become ghost towns. A few, though, retain enough residents to keep going, sustained by tourism, artists and artisans. Jerome is one of the latter, a place where it seems that every second building is the home, store or studio of a painter, sculptor, maker of glass decorations, potter, jewelry maker, etc. I generally have little use for this kind of art, but it means that I can see and enjoy am 1870s town like Jerome, although all we had time to do was drive to the top of the mountainside streets and down again. My battery allowed me one severely underexposed photo of a small part of Jerome, and then died again.

Tomorrow: Taliesen West, I think.