Weekend Assignment: In Just- Spring

An astronomer who goes to St Michael's said tonight (if I understood him correctly) that this is as close as Easter gets to the vernal equinox for the next century or so. Between that and my shot of sunset through the shopping center arch the other night, I'm slightly intrigued at the moment about the concept of spring. This week's Round Robin topic will be about the First Signs of Spring, but for the Weekend Assignment I want to tackle a different angle:


Weekend Assignment #208: Meteorologists define spring in the Northern Hemisphere as beginning March 1st; others define it according to the vernal equinox, the return of warm weather, or the appearance of a groundhog's shadow. What does spring mean to you, and what, if anything, do you intend to do about it?

The full moon at sunset (roughly), first day of spring

Here in Tucson, spring is mostly a function of astronomy and calendars. For me personally, the official first day of spring falls on or near my husband John's birthday (March 22), soon to be followed by my brother Steve's birthday (March 25). That means more to me than how full the moon is or what time the sun sets.

The first sunset of spring

Early Spring is also the last chance to accomplish anything before it gets really hot (over 100 degrees) and then monsoonish around here (i.e., it rains a lot, usually around 5 PM). If, therefore, I'm going to fulfill my longstanding intention of culling stuff from our many boxes and holding a yard sale, I'd best get on with it! Gulp! I suppose I have to actually do it now, don't I?

Your turn: have you do you feel that Spring is springing? Have you big plans for spring cleaning, spring planting, or spring break? Tell us about it in your blog or journal, with a ling back to this entry. Then leave a comment here with a link to your entry, so we can all read what you wrote. I'll be back in a week with the roundup of responses. In the meantime, Happy Spring!

Karen

Weekend Assignment Results: The News That Fits

Last week I asked how much interest everyone has in the news these days. The responses:

Becky answered directly in the comments: "Pretty much, I just scan the headlines on the AOL home page. I'll read the full article if it catches my interest. The one about the 800 dogs in your neck of the woods certainly caught my eye. I thought about you immediately and wondered if you'd change your dog specs and get one of the little mexican yappers. ;-) I must say, I have a soft spot for them since the Taco Bell dog. Love him. LOL"

Julie: "This is an easy one. I'm an old journalist. So yes, I'm a bit of an information junkie."

Saqib: "As far as the News is concerned I can only take small doses. It seems to me that the only news fit to print is bad news. And if you watch or read too much of it you get depressed. That's why I go to online newspapers and only scan the headlines."

Sarah: "I don't always want to listen to the news. Sometimes it upsets me. Sometimes it bores mes. But I do want to keep a pulse on what's going on in the area, the state, the nation, the world."

Mike: "I read the Chicago Tribune and will get some news off the radio and internet, but that is about it. It's not that I don't know what is going on in the country, or world, I think I get my share."

Duane: "Yes, I'm pretty much a news junkie, but I have very little interest in the 'baby in the well' (or to use more recent references, the '800 dogs in a mobile home' or the 'woman stuck to the toilet seat') stories. I prefer hard news. I want to know what's really going on in the world."

Florinda: "I think the best way to describe my news-following habits is to call myself an "intermittent" news junkie. Depending on what's going on in the world at a given time, I may devour current-events stories, but eventually I'll hit a saturation point and start to tune out."

Megan: "I sometimes watch the news all day long and other days I just can't take it. I am definitely sick of the rehashing of the same issue."

Kiva: "I don't think I'm a news junkie, although I like to be aware of what's going on. I find odd news fascinating."

Interesting. It looks as though even when we're relatively burned out on the news, we still make an effort to stay informed. Hooray for us!

The new Weekend Assignment will follow shortly. Oh, and by the way, between Holy Week, the new dog, minor illness and other distractions, I still owe everyone comments on the above entries. I'll get to it, but it may not be until Sunday. You forgive me, right?


Karen

I Remember Fanzines

Today Julie sent me a heads-up email that two blogs - one of them from radio station WFMU - had pictured one or more of the Quantum Leap fanzines/newsletters I edited long ago. It turns out that io9 snagged the picture of The Observer #4 from WFMU's Beware of the Blog, which in turn snagged my photos, more-or-less uncredited, from a 2006 Outpost entry. No big deal; WFMU did include a link to the original article. The other blog did not, and so far has not "approved" my comment to their entry. Apparently a discussion of mild Star Wars fan porn meets their standards of information and amusement value, while my musings on the history of fanzines and the technology of making them did not. Or maybe no human has yet reviewed my application to be a commenter. Yeah, that must be it.

So I'll rant to you folks instead.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about 1973, I read about the existence of something called Star Trek fanzines in a couple of books by David Gerrold, most notably The World of Star Trek. In November or December of that year I put together my own zine, 2-5YM, which was short for Second Five-Year Mission, something we Trekkies all longed for back then. That five page ditto led to my meeting my friend d, a young English teacher who later became a librarian. Soon we merged with STAR Syracuse, the local Trek club. We continued to publish 2-5YM until 1977, by which time it was published by offset press, if I recall correctly. At least a few issues in between were done by mimeo, typed for us by a little old lady in Fayetteville.

The Observer #1, late 1990

After I met my future husband at the Clarion '77 writers' workshop, and STAR Syracuse morphed into a Dungeons and Dragons group at Syracuse University, I never expected to edit another fanzine. But by March 1990 I found myself writing fan fiction, a crossover serial involving the Doctor (from Doctor Who) and Sam Beckett (from Quantum Leap) and a cast of dozens. That month I found my way into a new local Who club, later called United Whovians of Tucson, and was elected editor of its fanzine, TARDIS Time Lore, between pledge breaks at KUAT when I was out of the room. In August 1990 we asked permission to start a Quantum Leap fan club. The first membership cards for Project Quantum Leap were issued on Thanksgiving of that year, and the first issue of The Observer followed shortly thereafter. It was written in MS Word (3.0 I think) for Mac, and laid out in PageMaker, with pasteup involving photocopied art by Sherlock. It predated AOL and the World Wide Web, but not by much. By the time I turned The Observer over to Sharon Major to edit, Quantum Leap had a lively online community, PhotoShop was de rigeur, and PageMaker was passé.

I could go on about this, pointing out that fanzines existed as far back as the 1950s, which makes it silly to refer to a 1990s zine as "early." I could track the evolution of fandom as it moved online, if I wanted to make the effort of researching it properly, and note the technological changes along the way. But I won't, not tonight anyway. 'Cause as I researched this entry, I happened across a listing of myself at something called ZoomInfo.com, and got sidetracked for two hours. Somehow they cobbled together an old business card of mine (or something) and one of my online bios, and ended up with a listing for Karen Christine Funk, an employee of Worldwide Travel. Two problems with this: I haven't been Karen Funk since 1979, and I haven't worked at Worldwide Travel since 2005.

In trying to correct that info, I found I couldn't "claim" the listing as myself because it required either an email address for me at Worldwide Travel, an email address at Syracuse University, where I was a student long before email existed, or a credit card number issued to Karen Funk. So I emailed through a contact page instead. Along the way I discovered that I've been almost as lax as they were in listing up-to-date info on myself online. My home page, last updated in 2006, implied I was still at First Magnus, although I didn't name the company. They folded in August 2007, of course. And my bio page, last updated in 2004, had me still at Worldwide Travel, and still going to school! No wonder the Zoom folks didn't get it right! So I spent an hour or two updating three of my personal web pages.

See, all those technological enhancements don't help much if we don't use them!

Karen

The Predictive Power of Photos

Contrary to the impression given by this picture, which was taken Saturday, the dogs aren't getting along all that well with each other. Newdog has started bullying Tuffy a little, which upsets both John and me. As with Jenny and Noodle long ago, John wants to be able to designate the top dog by seniority, but of course it doesn't work like that. The best I can hope for is to catch Newdog in the act of snapping at Tuffy and correct her, often enough to make a difference.

John has rejected the names Tess, Martha, and Lady Madonna. He currently favors Lady Bigfoot. To his mild dismay, our semi-nameless Trouble Dog hasn't quite warmed up to John yet, either. I think it's because I've spent many more hours with her than John has to this point. He thinks she may not be as well-disposed toward men as women - or maybe it's just him. Not to worry; we'll get there. She's only been here four days.

Monday night I noticed the setting sun was peeking through an arch in the Subway building in the Safeway shopping center. I shouldn't have been surprised; as the ancient Mayans and the Beaker People knew, when the sunset is perfectly aligned through the Subway arch, it will mark the Vernal Equinox, followed closely by John's birthday and Easter.

As you can see, it has a week to go. The sun is still a little bit off to the south!

Karen

Outatime

In her proper color.

Okay, look, I've used up the evening and then some, so this will be quick:

*Tonight I shopped for and cooked corned beef and cabbage and carrots, with a little celery and a few formerly frozen chunks of potato. John didn't want that for dinner, so it was all for me. The corned beef was thick-cut sandwich meat from the Safeway deli - and no, that didn't work terribly well. But it was better than searching multiple stores for a $12 slab of way too much corned beef.

*I then spent the evening sitting next to Newdog, watching Doctor Who. She isn't affectionate yet, but she definitely wants me around, preferably scratching her. She also seems much more secure. Oh, and John and I walked the dogs tonight, and she did really well on the leash after the first couple of minutes.

*I've just spent two hours battling OpenOffice and Word and SeaMonkey and Blogger, all to get the Holy Week calendar posted. I prevailed!

*Newdog has a vet appointment on Saturday. Tuffy has an oncology appointment on the 25th.

*John's birthday is on Holy Saturday, the night of the Easter Vigil. Hmm. Tricky.

Karen

Monday Photo Shoot: Being Green

I'm not a fan of St. Patrick's Day, at all. I don't drink, and I find the annual obsession with superficial Irishness and the color green to be crass and artificial. I'm a quarter Irish myself (Viking Irish, but still), but this fact is no more and no less important to me than being half German, on March 17th or any other day. If you want to celebrate something that really is Irish - the Irish countryside, Irish music, Irish poetry, Irish history (or Irish-American history) - that's something else again; but please spare me the "kiss me" buttons and the green beer.

Having gotten my annual rant out of the way, let me now undercut it considerably with the Monday Photo Shoot:

New Monday Photo Shoot #12: In honor of St. Patrick's Day and in anticipation of spring, show us something green. If you want to photograph something that really is green, fine. If you want to photograph something that's definitely not green and then edit it to look green, that's even better!

I've had this dragon bank since seventh grade. His name is Dino, because of his resemblance to the Flintstones' pet.


The couch we keep covered up really is green. It's not quite this green, however. I compensated for a reddish cast coming from the camera and the wall.

Let's give Newdog a green tongue, and a green throw cover. This was done with saturation and hue tools.


Aw, what the heck. Let's paint the dog herself green! Virtually, of course.

Your turn! Show us something green, faked or otherwise! Post the picture(s) to your blog or journal, and come back here to post your link. As always, a link from your blog back here is appreciated. I'll be back in a week with a roundup of entries. Meanwhile, Happy...well, you know!

Karen

Monday Photo Shoot Results: Far Away, and Not So Much

For last week's Monday Photo Shoot, I asked for shots with something in the foreground, and something else in the background. In other words, something near, and something far. Those of you who did this one came up with truly interesting stuff:

Carly has gulls in front of a pier in front of hills.

Jama Hameed offers us several layers of an island cityscape, and a garden with a...Merlion?

Martha shows us how to handle the sun.

Kiva has a husband and trees in the way, and mountains in the rear view.

Greg belatedly shows us a fern and a waterfall.

Well done, all! I'll be back with the new one as soon as I determine whether the obvious theme has already been done!

Karen