Not Yet Assimilated

I got home from the Nebula Awards ceremony almost an hour ago, at 2 AM on the dot. I need time to assimilate and process what I saw and heard and said and did, and to sleep before I go pick up Eva and Kevin for church in the morning. For now I'll just say that it went pretty much as I hoped and expected, and it was totally worth it. My only regret was that I forgot to ask Harlan to let me take one good photo before I left. I meant to; I forgot. He has that effect on me.

There are Harlan Ellison stories and Harlan Ellison stories. The ones for which Harlan was honered with a Grand Master Award tonight are the words-on-paper stories that he wrote, that nobody else could have written. But the other definition, stories about Harlan Ellison, was very much in evidence today. As author-toastmaster Connie Willis rattled off her names for her personal treasury of Harlan Ellison ancedotes, such as "The Parking Lot Story" and "The Thanksgiving Story," I realized that my experiences with the man over the years are more the norm than the exception, at least among people who enjoy being around him. I have my own treasury of Harlan Ellison stories, only a few of which I've told online in the past.

I'll tell some more tomorrow.

And in case you've never heard of the guy, and wonder what the fuss is about, here's a brief introduction. Harlan Ellison is the screenwriter who wrote the original version of the very best episode of the original Star Trek, "The City of the Edge of Forever." He wrote for the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone, and was a creative consultant on Babylon 5. He's been a tv critic of sorts, and a semi-journalist on the subject of teen gangs in the 1950s. But his main claim to fame is his short stories, many of which have won awards. I discovered those stories in high school, just as I was starting to get serious about my own writing. The movie A Boy and His Dog was based on one of Harlan's stories.

I have a lot more to say, but it's 3:15 AM and I'm tired. I will probably even put off my Jace Letters installment until tomorrow afternoon. That's how tired I am.

Catch ya in 11 hours or so, after church. Meanwhile, good night!

Technorati Tags: SFWA, Harlan Ellison, Writing

End of the Road Trip, and Preparations for Another

It's time to finish up my series about my trip to New Mexico two weekends ago, and to tell you what I think I'm doing tomorrow.


This picture is pretty representative of what I saw for a good part of that last day of driving, Monday along US 60, before I got back on I-25 South, bound for I-10 and home. The road itself was mostly straight, mostly flat, but with mountains in the distance on both sides. A lot of Arizona is like that, too.


This is one of three buildings of a derelict business in the middle of nowhere on US 60.

Here's more of the same place - not "Water Can," but "Water Canyon Lodge."

Magdalena again. This time it's the former train station. A lot of the late 19th century railroad stations in this part of the country looked like this.


And here is the sightseeing destination I was making for with all that driving on US 60. It's the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio telescope consisting of 27 large dish antennas laid out more or less in a giant Y shape. The combination of movable antennas makes for a much larger, more sensitive device for picking up the relatively weak radio signals from space than would be possible with a single, very large antenna. A system of what amounts to railroad tracks is used to move the antennas as needed to follow the signals of current interest.

The VLA is about fifty miles out from Socorro, and by the time I got there it was too late to catch the gift shop open. Too bad. I would definitely have made a purchase.

The reason I wanted to buy something at the gift shop is that it's impossible to really get a good look at the VLA at ground level. You can't really see all of the antennas at once, even when they're all around you, much less make out the pattern in which they're arranged. In fact, it probably took me close to an hour to find the side road that led to the visitor center. Even that was kind of interesting, though, as I drove to the entrance of an elk refuge (?!) and down a dirt road to somebody's farm. And of course, leaving the area that late in the afternoon probably made my encounter with the pronghorns possible, or at least more likely.

When I eventually made it back to I-25, I started to notice that the interstate was parallel to the Rio Grande. A narrow part of this river was up in Los Alamos with me - well, below it, anyway. The really wide part is the Texas-Mexico border. It was the section in between that I was following now.



Just after sunset, I came upon the Hatch exit off I-25, leading to NM 26, billed as a shortcut to I-10 via Deming. For the last twenty minutes, I-25 had been veering east, definitely not the direction I wanted. So I took the shortcut. It was the hypotenuse of the triangle, and probably saved me many miles. Even so, the shortcut was not short! It was nearly fifty miles, mostly on curving two-lane highway, behind at least one other vehicle. I think there were six vehicles immediately in front of me by the time I reached Deming.

Once I got to Deming, fabled home of the duck races, I tracked down the steak house I'd seen advertised on a billboard a hundred miles before. If you ever find your way to Deming, I recommend Rancher's Grill. The steak itself was just okay, but it came with corn and great mashed potatoes, and a soup and salad bar. Yum!

From Deming to Tucson turned out to be only a couple of hundred miles. Frequent warnings about winds and dust storms were not accompanied by any serious winds or dust storms, and the construction zones were no big deal. At roughly 75 mph, I was home by midnight, almost to the minute.

Now, about tomorrow. This is the weekend of the Nebula Awards, handed out by the SFWA. This used to stand for Science Fiction Writers of America, but now it means Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. I expect to be a member someday. Anyway, this weekend the SFWA is giving its Grand Master Award to my old acquaintance and matchmaker, Harlan Ellison. I haven't seen him in a few decades, but I did speak to him on the phone a couple of times last year. And the ceremony and related events are in Tempe, a suburb at the near end of the Phoenix megalopolis.

If I get up early in the morning, I can attend a reception, followed by readings by numerous writers, and a panel with Harlan on it in the late afternoon. I can't afford the banquet, but I can theoretically attend the awards ceremony. All this for $50 + gas + driving time. There seem to be no obvious opportunities to market my writing to agents or editors.

Is it worth it, just to see "Hello" and "Congratulations!" to Harlan, attend readings by writers whose work I haven't read, attend a panel or two, and hear Harlan's speech at the award ceremony? I kind of think so. Then again, I wanted to get a good night's sleep first. It's past 2 AM now. I will probably decide that sleep is more important than the reception, but I'm not quite sure about the rest of it. I'll have to decide when I'm conscious again.

On the sleep thing: yes, I know that dreaming takes place during REM sleep, and that it takes a while to get there. Two hours would probably have done it, but it took me a long time to actually get to sleep last night. If I remember correctly, REM becomes a proportionately larger part of the sleep cycle in the course of a full night's sleep. Unfortunately, I seldom get a full night's sleep, which is why I occasionally get hypnogogic effects - stray thoughts and waking dreams, such as the brief impression - not a hallucination, just a mental image - of a fleeing woman. Earlier today I was obsessed with the linguists' pet phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." I've worked out how it's possible to sleep furiously, but the colorless green ideas are trickier.

See what you miss out on, having a brain that's functioning on adequate sleep? And do you understand why I'm blowing off the morning reception to sleep in?

Yeah, I knew you would.

Karen

Update: I misread the online program. There's nothing much going on in the morning anyway. I can sleep until noon without a scheduling conflict!

Saturday afternoon: okay, I'm going, leaving now. And I've updated the entry below this one with a dream. Excelsior!

Technorati Tags: Photos, Travel, SFWA, New Mexico, personal, Harlan Ellison, Writing, Tucson

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Weekend Assignment #110: Recount a strange dream you've had recently. Any sort of strange dream is fine except the really explicit sex dreams. Because, you know, we're running a family show, here. Otherwise, they can be as weird as you want them to be.

Extra Credit: Name a favorite song with the words "dream" or "sleep" (or some variation of those words).

Well, I just went through the nightmare of reconstructing the templates of two ruined blogs - twice each, because Netscape ruined the internal links. Does that count?

I didn't think so.



Here's my problem--well, my other problem. I always, always do the Weekend Assignment on Thursday night, but the truth is that I don't remember any recent dreams at all. I remember waking up a lot last night, and feeling a little unwell, and that being part of the dreams. But I can't give you a single image or situation or anything at all other than that.

So here's what I'm going to do, in my borderline OCD way. I'm going to sleep on the couch right now, so as not to disturb John with my shenanigans. (I would have gone two hours ago if it weren't for the Blogger Template Emergency, but oh, well.) I'll set my phone to wake me during the night. Then I'll get up and make a brief report of any dream I can remember. If it doesn't work, I'll try again next time I wake up.



On my mark, get set, sleep!

8:19 AM. No luck. I couldn't remember any dreams at 4:15 or 4:30 AM, probably because I hadn't been asleep very long. A fire truck that pulled up through the alley to the house next door (this is real, mind you) was just one of several distractions keeping me awake.

Now I'm exhausted, and I have to go to work! The one thing I can tell you is that eventually I had one of my house dreams. I was living on (fictional) Stone Mountain Road, where the houses are supposedly huge, the model of gracious living. But our house wasn't that way at all. If anything, it was even more cramped than in real life. Usually I dream of the house in Manlius, only with secret rooms and my mom alive in a Schroedinger's Cat kind of way, which is to say that I don't want to examine her too closely to resolve the question. I don't remember either the extra rooms or my Mom from this morning's edition, but that doesn't mean they weren't there.

That's all. I'll try again tonight.

Saturday:

Okay, here's one, from some time this morning.

I was getting ready to fly home to somewhere from somewhere, possibly my dad's house, except that I don't think I was 49-year-old Karen Blocher or that he was my dad. I think there was a slight shift into fiction or alternate reality. Isn't there always, in my dreams? It took me a while to get around to digging up the ticket and checking the time of the flight. 10:38 PM. Late. Good - I had plenty of time.

Soon after that, I was at St. Michael's, where the Social Concerns committee and others were preparing to go on an overnight birdwatching camp out. Most of them were wearing quilted ecclesiastic garments for warmth. Since I wasn't going with them, Ila gave me communion.

I was concerned that some animal (hawk? snake? wildcat?) was after me, or the younger person I was earlier in the dream. Then I saw it - a smallish bird, lying near the birders, eyes open and alive and still.

It may have been at about this point that the phone rang, waking me. Turns out my co-pay on the stress test is $597. Yow!

Extra Credit: I love the mid-1960s experimentation of I'm Only Sleeping by the Beatles, especially John's ambigious lyrics. If he's only sleeping, how can he be waiting for a sleepy feeling? Oh, yeah, there's subtext, no question.

Karen


Technorati Tags: Weekend Assignment, Dreams, Scalzi, Sleep, Experiment, Templates

Another Word on Birds; More M.O.W. Exhibits

It's a two-parter tonight!

Another Word on Birds

First off, here are two quick updates on the birds I've been posting about all week. This morning I parked my car in the usual place and started for the hated crosswalk. In my haste I blundered right past the female hummer on that same sage bush. She flew into the nearby tree and scolded me.

I apologized immediately.

"Sorry, little girl," I told her. "I didn't see you!"

At lunch time she scolded me again as she hovered next to the tree. I hadn't done anything wrong this time, though she apparently disagreed with me. That was the last time I saw her today.



But when I got back across the street after lunch, I belatedly noticed that there was a hawk on the same telephone pole our "mutant robin" hawk was on two days ago. The photo's not great - I took it from across the street. But it does show that this is clearly another Harris' Hawk, and just as clearly resembles our mystery bird. I therefore declare in favor of Sam's theory that our "round robin" was an immature (and possibly injured) Harris' Hawk.

Technorati Tags: Monday Photo Shoot, Birds, Scalzi


A Five Things Meme, Tailor-Made for the Museum of the Weird

This meme is from TJ over at Paisley Skys. The game is to post five photos of the items listed in blue below. Let's get started, shall we?

One picture of something you made

Hmm. What have I made that I haven't already shown you? That's the problem with this one. I've shown you my fake book and magazine covers, my notebooks full of novel manuscript, rock buttons from my Rockarama days, and some Shrinky Dink Christmas ornaments. My poor eye-hand coordination and other issues pretty much preclude my doing anything wonderful in terms of drawing or painting, collage or sculpture, even sewing or knitting.

I do still have a few things I've made other the years - a round Australia travel poster from eighth grade art class, a semi-cubist block print block from even longer ago, even a Route 66-themed house sign from the late 1980s. Where are these things now? The standard answer around here is "in a box somewhere"--and it drives John crazy when I go looking for such things. Not that I'd find them, anyway.

Nevertheless, I did find I few things to show you that I made:


Okay, I didn't literally operate the copier at Zudo's (later Kinko's) to produce these 15-year-old bumper stickers, but I did design the stickers, about five computers ago. They were part of the package of "goodies" sent to Project Quantum Leap members. There were four designs altogether. The other two were "I brake for holograms" and simply "Project Quantum Leap." To be honest, I've lost track of whether PQL members still get the "goodies" when they join.

Something else I made is pictured below, in one of the other four categories. Really, these things overlap quite a bit, especially here in the M.O.W.

One picture of a gift someone gave you

This is a very recent gift from Dan and Anita, parents of my godson, Jacob. It's signed by Walter Koenig and the woman he asked about "nuclear wessals" in Star Trek IV. They were both at some recent Trek-related event in Los Alamos. The woman, a Star Trek fan, apparently got her walk-on role by literally walking on to the location, according to Dan.

One picture of something strange

You folks seem to think that the Casa Blocher Museum of the Weird has endless exhibits, readily accessible for photographing. It does get a little challenging after a while, trying to show you something new. But having photographed an elongated wooden Moses, perfectly innocent metal salt shakers that would make Dr. McCoy blush (well, maybe not), and a collection of jelly glasses, I've settled on these spoons. They turned up in my mom's dresser as I was going through her effects. I suspect they're Thai (and old enough to be from "Siam"), but they're not labeled so I don't know this for sure. They're about as light as balsa, so I would think they would snap if asked to lift anything heavier than a single lettuce leaf, or a few mushroom slices. So what are they for? Where did Mom get them, and when and why? I have no idea.

John wanted me to show you a Bullwinkle token for this, or a racy button about trading card designers, one of his former professions. But let's stick with the spoons.

One picture of something with a pig (Why a pig? Why not?)

Yappa-pa! Yappa-pa! This is P-Chan, Akane Tendo's pet pig in the bizarre anime classic Ranma 1/2. Akane doesn't know it, but P-Chan is really Ryoga Hibiki, a boy who turns into a pig when doused with cold water. This is nothing unusual in the context of the show. Cold water turns Ranma turns from a boy to to girl, his father Genma from a man into a panda, Ranma's second fiancee Shampoo from a girl into a cat, and Shampoo's suitor Mousse from a young man into a duck. All this is due to these characters having fallen into various cursed springs in Jusenkyo, China, each of which is associated with a "very tragic story" of a drowned person or animal. I told you it was a bizarre show.

Aside from his inner pig, Ryoga is best known as a boy who can get lost in his own back yard and end up in China. He is Ranma's mortal enemy, originally due to a spat over bread in school, but later because Ranma accidentally caused Ryoga to fall into the Spring of the Drowned Pig. Ryoga is also one of several competitors for Akane's affections, but Akane is Ranma's #1 fiancee. Not that she likes him or anything.


One picture of something unique.


This is truly a one of a kind item, and the other thing that I personally made. This painted wooden board used to hang in front of our old house on Grannen Road in the late 1980s. John's publishing business at the time was Storyteller Productions, named after the clay storyteller figures produced by certain Pueblo artisans since the 1960s. Storyteller published a number of Beatles books. We eventually had to sell the house, but this old sign is a relic of a pretty neat time in our lives.

Hey, I'm done! And it's not even midnight! Thanks, T.J.!

I'm supposed to tag people, but I don't like to do that. If you'd like to do this meme, though, consider yourself tagged.

Oh, and speaking of Round Robins, the next Round Robin Photo Challenge is in six days! The topic, as chosen by Phinney of the journal Paragon, is "Free." Free as a bird, free ride, free lunch, free speech, free beer tomorrow, land of the free... there are a lot of ways you can go on this one! So hie thee over to the Round Robin blog, read about the topic and the Round Robin guidelines, and RSVP in the comments there if you'd like to play along. Remember, the posting date for "Free" is Wednesday, May 10th (and not a moment before!). So, Robins, get ready to set us free!

Karen


Technorati Tags: Games, Photos, memes, Round Robin Photo, personal, Museum of the Weird

Little Bird, Little Bird

I'm going to postpone my next but of travelogue for tonight, along with my response to TJ's tag on a meme. You see, I had a little encounter after work tonight that caused me to take an entry's worth of photos--and then some. Here are the best of them, such as they are:

Hey, is that a bird on that sage bush? A little, tiny bird?

Why, yes! It's a female Black-chinned Hummingbird!
(Well, I'm almost sure!)

She was between me and my car, but she barely moved as I walked carefully around her, taking flash photos. It was nearly sunset, but I left the camera on automatic, reasoning that a longer exposure would not help without a tripod. Even a decent digital camera and an amazingly cooperative hummingbird couldn't overcome the lighting conditions well enough to give me a really sharp picture of such a tiny subject.


Once I reached the car, I took a peek at my photos in camera, and decided to try again. This wasn't the closest picture I took, but it's the best. I got within about five feet of her, ultimately, before I decided that I'd pushed my luck and her patience far enough. She watched me, but she didn't fly away, or even scold me, as hummers near that spot have been doing for the last couple of days. She's clearly not on a nest, so I don't know what she was up to. It's kind of unusual to see a hummingbird perched just two feet off the ground. Feeding, yes. Perched, no.



This last shot is to give you a sense of scale and context, and some idea how close I was. I got several steps closer than this, with the zoom on maximum. But it really was a tiny, tiny bird!

I should explain, although I've mentioned this before, that Southeastern Arizona has more hummingbird species than anywhere else in the country - about 15, I think. Not all of them turn up in Tucson, though. Some are mostly in Madera Canyon, Ramsey Canyon (which has a hummingbird refuge), and other riparian habitats (i.e., with running water). Most of the best hummingbird habitats are at a higher elevation than here. Here in town we mostly get Anna's Hummingbird in winter, Black-chinned and Costa's in summer. But heck, most of you folks Back East only get one hummingbird species, so nyah-nyah! And I mean that in the politest possible way.

Tomorrow: Strange, Unique, Made, Gift...Pig?

Karen

Technorati Tags: Monday Photo Shoot, Birds, Scalzi, Tucson, Photos, Hummingbirds, Wildlife

Watch the Birdie!

This bird is thwarting my attempts to identify it:


It turned up on a telephone pole at the very edge of the St Michael's parking lot. This was as close as I could get without standing directly underneath, which wouldn't have helped.



I think it has to be a hawk or falcon, rather than the unholy combination of American Robin / Ruddy Duck / American Coot / Evening Grosbeak it kind of looks like. It's on the smallish side for a hawk, but it could be a Cooper's Hawk, or possibly a Peregrine Falcon. Nothing other than raptors has that beak. If it is a hawk, though, the wings are all wrong. In fact, the whole bird is oddly shaped. I'm wondering whether it's immature, or injured (missing wingtips and leg feathers), or both. Also, the coloring is way too even for the species I mentioned.

Maybe it's a mutant robin?

'Tis a puzzlement. Can anyone help me out on this?





I photographed this bird in my neighborhood on the way home from work. There is no question what this one is. It's a Curve-billed Thrasher, relative to the Mockingbird. And yes, it sings about as well as its cousin.



This last shot is the Harris' Hawk from last week.

I have a lot of old bird photos from 1986, but I've posted most of the good ones already.

Karen


Technorati Tags: Monday Photo Shoot, Birds, Scalzi, Tucson

The Road to Kelly

Three and a half miles from the town of Magdalena, New Mexico, according to this historic marker, is a ghost town called Kelly. I had seen it on a few maps, but had not decided to go there. When I read on the marker how close it was, though, I could not resist!

The road to Kelly starts out a normal, wide, paved road, with an unnecessarily constrained speed limit of 25 MPH. One of the houses on the left has a sign offering a "Kelly Mine Pass" for sale, but that seems a bit too intense for this little side trip of mine. I drive on. After about a mile, though, perhaps less, the paved road turns into what one might call a dirt road. Dirt is only part of what's there, though. It's mostly loose bits of rock - loose shale, I want to call it, but I don't know whether that's right.



After a while I come across some unlabeled bits of brick that might be some kind of mine works, or building foundations, or neither. It seems too soon to be the ghost town, so I drive on. Shortly after that I come to a fork in the road. There's a little yellow sign with the number 103 (301? I forget) on the right fork. I turn right.

This is a mistake. The road winds past ranches and remote private homes. The rough road is shaking my poor car unmercifully, even at 10 to 20 MPH. Eventually I turn around in a driveway that's still being bulldozed a few feet away. Perhaps 50 yards farther on, a woman in a car is talking to someone in another car. I wait for her, and ask directions.

She turns out to be very nice, professionally dressed and with a smallish terrier in the front seat with her. The woman tells me that the ghost town is on the left fork, and impossible to miss from there. I follow her down to the fork. She waits for me to make sure I know where to go from there.



Peggy Lee's Is That All There Is? plays on my car stereo as I struggle over the rough road, ironically a little less horrific for the car than the fork that leads to places where people still live. I eventually come upon an intact church (St. John the Baptist Catholic Church) on the right hand side of the road. I park there, and take the last half mile or so on foot - very carefully. Spraining an ankle yet again would be a disaster in a place like this!



Aside from the church, there are no intact houses or businesses left, just foundations. Ghost towns on tv are usually full of weatherbeaten but intact wooden buildings, but I have yet to see one like that in real life. Kelly is much more typical of the ones I've seen. Yeah, Peggy. Is that all there is to a ghost town?



But up ahead I see a sign: Kelly Mine. I struggle on.




Soon I see mine works, this time for sure, off to the left of the sign. I pass a barrier meant to stop cars from going further, and walk a little closer to the mine works for a picture or two.


I have no idea what any of this stuff did in its day, but Kelly was a silver mine, and later a source of zinc carbonate for paint. A web page promoting the mine pass says that over 80 minerals have been cataloged here, including smithsonite, whatever that is. (I assume it has something to do with the fellow whose endowment got the Smithsonian started.) The page also say that the metal bit above, the "steel headframe," was designed by Alexander Eiffel back in the 1880s!

I do not approach the mine works any closer than necessary to get a good shot with the zoom setting on the camera. Then I turn and start back down, slowly, carefully. I'm almost back to my car when a truck pulls up, containing, based on appearances, a rancher and his lady friend.

"Need a lift?"

"No thanks. I'm almost back to my car."

"Oh, that's your car. We're going to drive to the end and come back. You can ride along if you like."

I decide to take no further chances on this little adventure. "No thanks. Have a good day!"

And that is that. I get back to the car and head back to Magdalena.

Still at least one installment to go, folks!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Travel, Old West, New Mexico