Round Robin: Remembrance of Things Past (Part 2 of 2)

As previously mentioned, this week's Round Robin Photo Challenge topic is The Times They Are a-Changin'. Several days ago there was a big change at Casa Blocher that marked the end of an era, maybe even the end of several eras. For years, John has been nagging me to donate our 1984 Dodge Ram van and our 1984 Chrysler New Yorker and get them hauled away. This week we actually did it.



The New Yorker was my mom's car originally, and the only talking car I've ever had. "Your fuel supply is low." This was cutting edge technology once. I thought it was kind of cool, but eventually John disabled it.

It became my car after I drove my mom in it from Florida to Tucson and after she gave up driving. It became John's car after Mom got me a 1997 Saturn in 2001. It became an unused eyesore in the driveway when it started losing power on John's long commute circa 2004, and he replaced it with an Alero.




The major hold-up in the car donation process was that I hadn't been able to find the title to the New Yorker, despite many hours of searching through likely and unlikely boxes. Just before Christmas I went down to the MVD with the VIN and the license plate number to get a new title, but they said it had been so long since the car was registered that the title had been purged from their records. I was advised to get it towed to Motor Vehicles for inspection so they could issue a new title. Like THAT was going to happen.

But the nice man at the service that arranges vehicle donations to charity noticed that the Vehicle Identification Number I read off to him was one digit too long. He took out an extra 9 and the car came right up in the Carfax database. I went back to MVD and $4 later walked out with a new title. Several days after that, the tow truck arrived, this time at no cost to us!




If the New Yorker was a reminder of my mom, the van was a reminder of our year of great adventure in 1986. That may be overstating things, but certainly it was an amazing year for us. The Dodge Ram was integral to those experiences. John finally came into some money from a trust fund, and we were sick of Ohio; so we put everything in storage, bought a van, put a mattress in the back and drove around the country, looking for someplace it wasn't winter. Two months later, John was negotiating over a pay phone to buy our first house, a mile or so outside the Tucson city limits.



Bye-bye, Mom's car. Bye-bye, faithful van. Bye-bye, reminders of times long past. But the driveway looks a lot better without you.

Karen

Linking List
as of Midnight MST
Saturday, December 31, 2011

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


Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com


Sherrie
Food for Thought
http://100sweets.blogspot.com/


Terri
Ways I See the World
http://teelgeephotos.blogspot.com/

Round Robin: Remembrance of Things Past (Part 1 of 2)

This week's Round Robin Photo Challenge topic is The Times They Are a-Changin', and I swear I had nothing in mind in proposing it beyond the general notion of clocks and New Year's Eve. But over the past week I've been rather obsessed with my new toy, the iPad, which has nearly replaced my computer already. It occurred to me today that nothing tells the story of time speeding along for us as a society than the acquisition and discarding of computers and other technology. For example:

Our Commodore 64, purchased circa 1985. Now it's a monitor for an outdated VCR.

My iMac and my first laptop, circa 2004, photographed using our first
digital camera, a Mavica. The camera stored the images on floppy disks.

 

My brand new laptop, March 2005.

John's first two iMacs (c. 1999-2005) await recycling, 2011.

The latest and greatest going into 2012, and it's not even a computer. 

My iPad 2 will soon be obsolete; the iPad 3 has been announced. And I don't care.

Two other pieces of outdated equipment left our home this week, leaving behind memories of times long gone. To avoid overloading aging computers with a picture-heavy entry, I'll tell you about that in a second post.

Meanwhile, let's see how other Robins mark the changing times!

Linking List
as of Midnight MST
Saturday, December 31, 2011

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


Jama
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com


Sherrie
Food for Thought
http://100sweets.blogspot.com/


Terri
Ways I See the World
http://teelgeephotos.blogspot.com/

Karen

Weekend Assignment: A Button to Pause Time

This one is based on a question posed by Michele Agnew on http://micheleagnew.com, way back in 2005.

Weekend Assignment #336: Magic Button<

If you could have a magic button that would do one particular thing for you, up to once a day, what would that function be?

Extra Credit: Would your answer to the above change if it were a person doing the task (for free and without complaint, using ordinary human abilities) rather than a magic button?

Here's what my magic button would look like:

For over five years now, I've coveted a button that could pause time. (The graphic above, for example, dates back to January 2005.) I'd love to hit a pause button, and have time move forward only locally around me. I would go to bed, sleep until I'm not even a little bit tired, read, take a bath, watch a DVD, eat lunch, read the email and message board stuff that was already there when time was paused, and get some serious writing done. When I had finally done all the sleeping, reading, writing, housework and hanging out that my body and mind craved, I would hit "unpause," jump back to real time without losing the benefits of my actions in "local time," and get on with my day. Imagine goofing off for ten hours, sleeping for another ten hours and still having 24 hours left for work and Facebook and television and everything else that involved interacting in real time. It would be great! I'm sure there are other people who are bored, who have nothing much to fill up their days, and would therefore find a time pause useless. I'm not one of them.

The extra credit is harder for me to answer. I suppose I would have to frame it as having the ability to hire someone to do that daily task. Oh, except I said for free. Well, then, it's someone who just loves to do this task so much that she's happy to do it for free, or else loves me so much she insists on helping out in this way. Or both. At that point we're pretty much getting in the realm of housework. My all-too-mundane answer is to get the someone to wash and put away the dishes, if I can count that as one thing. Alternatively, it would be nice to have someone do the physical labor part of sorting through boxes with me, organizing the results into trash, recycling, donations and several flavors of "keep," and putting the results in the appropriate places. Yeah, that would be good.

****

In other meme news, I've decided to give up on

at least for now. For both weeks of this meme, which was meant to fill in for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot while Carly is on hiatus, only Jama and I participated. Thanks, Jama!  I may give this, or something like it, another shot later. For now, though, when I'm really busy with other things, a meme with almost no response isn''t really worth my time. Sorry!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #315: My Mafia, the Doctor and Other Thieves of Time

Right after I posted Weekend Assignment #315: The Thief of Time over on our new Weekend Assignment blog, I got very busy with work and the Round Robin and the Weekend Assignment and some other things I'm less inclined to talk about, and also the stuff I'll be talking about in this entry. Appropriately, my WA entry about not having enough time to do stuff because other things get in the way was delayed because other things got in the way!

Weekend Assignment #315: It seems that we're all too busy these days to get around to everything we'd like to do, even if we had the money and means to do them. Is there a particular activity that takes up far too much of your time, and thus prevents you from getting around to other things?

Extra Credit: What is the #1 activity you wish you had more time for?

When I wrote the question above, I kind of had it in mind that I would be ranting about how much time I spend playing games on Facebook. It's a bit of a problem, because most of the games are designed to suck up as much of your time as possible. Look, for example, at the Mafia Wars screen that is open at this very moment on another tab of my Firefox browser. "PARIS: START TODAY BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE GETS THERE FIRST," it's screaming. Meanwhile the Weapons Depot wants to make sure I'm aware that it's time to manufacture a weapon. And while I'm doing that, wouldn't I like to like to alert all the Facebook friends in my mafia that I need them to send me more forges, buzzsaws, etc. so I can upgrade to manufacturing the next type of weapon? Of course I would. After all, I only have "PARTS OWNED: 3 of 50." I could also rob or fight other players until my 26 stamina points run out, check the other cities to see if the properties are ready to be collected from, bank my $250 in New York and other amounts in the other cities, send "mystery gift bags" or other gifts, send "respectful" gifts to others via the Safe House page, ask for or receive gifts via wish list, accept any Mafia Wars-related requests on my FB request page, help people with missions and send car parts on the main Facebook wall, exact "revenge" for one of my properties being robbed, as suggested in an email, and eventually do a mission of my own when my energy builds up again.

And that's just one game. Vampire Wars is every bit as demanding, if you allow it to be, and there are lots more games available. I'm far from the worst offender on this: I currently play six games and have stopped playing three others, whereas I sometimes see lists of 15 to 20 or more games for which some other gamer is soliciting allies. Judging from what I see, there must be people who spend all day every day attacking other characters and racking up kill counts, which to me is the least interesting and most annoying part of all of these games. I've almost completely given up the fighting part of each game, because I don't enjoy it and it wastes my time. I just wish a particular woman on School of Magic 2 would stop attacking my character 20 times a day.

But that isn't what I wanted to write about when I started this post.

The other thing that takes up a lot of my time, aside from blog-related stuff, church-related stuff etc., is Doctor Who, particularly when it's in season. Let me explain this. British television is different from American tv in that historically, American tv shows were on network tv more or less year-round, including reruns and minus the occasional preemption or hiatus. In the UK, they don't produce 22 episodes of the average drama or comedy. There might be six or seven this year, and the same number again next year. Doctor Who, which is the flagship family show of BBC One these days, gets 13 episodes and a Christmas special, except for 2009 which was a "gap year" of four specials (well, counting New Year's Day, that is). Doctor Who typically premieres right around Easter, airs weekly with perhaps one preemption for the Eurovision song contest, and after 13 episodes disappears again until Christmas. In the UK you can now watch the first run episode in regular or high definition, catch a rerun during the week and watch it online. Meanwhile, two weeks after each UK premiere of the episode, it airs on BBC America here. The first run of BBCA this year appears to be uncut, but for reruns a week later they squeeze in an extra commercial.

I typically acquire a copy of the new episode the day it airs in the UK, through Means That Must Not Be Mentioned, which I deliberately leave to someone else to accomplish rather than learning just how it's done. Each new episode is precious to me, and full of details that reward repeated viewing. So I watch the episode twice or more on that first day, and then I watch its companion "making of" show, Doctor Who Confidential, and then I watch the two-week-old one on BBC America, and then I go online.

Doctor Who fans are a social, opinionated, over-analytical bunch, so they tend to congregate on Doctor Who-related blogs, on sf tv websites and, most of all, on a forum called Galaxy Base, which replaced the Doctor Who Forum, previously called Outpost Gallifrey. (And now you know the inspiration for the name of this very blog.) The "Poll: Rate / Review "The Time of Angels" thread on Gallifrey Base, in which fans offer their opinions and then argue with each other about the episode that premiered just a few days ago, currently has 1209 replies and has been viewed 37,430 times. I've personally scanned (and in some cases actually read) nearly all of those replies, a few of which I wrote myself. I also frequent a select handful of the thousands of other discussion threads on GB, including the one about favorite quotes from the episode,  one for speculating about how many times to date the Doctor has met a character called River Song, and several photoshopped humor threads, which inspired me to make this:

This won't mean anything to you if you're not a Doctor Who fan, but it's a key scene from the most highly-regarded Doctor Who story ever (The Caves of Androzani, 1984). In this final scene of the story, the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) succumbs to spectrox poisoning after giving the last of the antidote to his new companion Peri, and regenerates to become the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker). Here I've strategically marred the image with a parody of a promo banner that ruined the cliffhanger at the end of this week's episode ("The Time of Angels," April 24, 2010). The incident featured a cartoon of flamboyant comedian Graham Norton, whose reality show about casting Dorothy for a new musical version of The Wizard of Oz appeared immediately after Doctor Who on Saturday. The cartoon Graham and his banner obscured part of Doctor Who star Matt Smith's face and distracted viewers as the Doctor gave an impassioned, angry speech to his enemy:

"There's one thing you never put in a trap if you're smart, if you value your continued existence, if you have any plans of seeing tomorrow, there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap...me."

So many people complained about the Graham Norton Over the Rainbow banner over the Doctor's face that the BBC was forced to issue an apology the next day.

My parody of this outrage is kind of a "what if" in which the next version of the Doctor appears in an inappropriate banner over his predecessor's head, obscuring his companion's, erm, torso. I'm sure it's all completely meaningless, obscure and not at all funny to most of you, and I've just wasted a lot of time over-explaining it. But this is just the sort of thing Doctor Who fans sometimes do for the amusement of themselves and their peers.

So yeah. Between watching Doctor Who, reading and writing stuff about Doctor Who online, reading Doctor Who magazine and making silly photoshopped pictures about Doctor Who, I was pretty busy this weekend, in addition to the Round Robin Photo Challenge (for which I owe comments to most of the Robins still), my EMPS entry, church, Coffee Hour and lunch with friends and a mini-crisis involving the friend whose financial affairs I manage.

I also had a discussion with John about taking on a "housewife" role at home now that my unemployment benefit is about to run out with no possible renewal, in exchange for John working a lot of overtime to make up for the loss of income. So I will need to cut back on the Who obsession, most likely, to get in more housekeeping stuff. After all, it's only fair!

And that's my extra credit, the thing I need more time for. Oh, and sleep. I need more sleep. Nothing new there, except that the sleep schedule is as skewed as it's ever been, and insomnia gets in the way or fixing it. But I'm working on it.

Karen

Weekend Assignment: #278: Time to Blog

Tonight's Weekend Assignment should be relevant to anyone who blogs:

Weekend Assignment: #278: How often do you blog? Do you try to maintain a schedule, or just blog when you're inspired and have the time? How do memes affect your blogging habits?
Extra Credit: Are you blogging more or less often now than you were a year ago?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that my blogging schedule has gone all to heck in recent months. For years I blogged every single day, no matter what. There were at least two occasions when I pulled all-nighters at hotels with bad internet connections, trying desperately to connect long enough to get a blog entry posted. Okay, so I might have gone 30 hours between entries one day, 18 hours the next, but the rule was, I always posted before going to bed. Or if I had connection problems or was just too sleepy, I would take a nap for a couple of hours, and then get up and get the entry done.

But several months ago, between Facebook, CPA review assignments and a suspicion that obsessive daily blogging was not necessary a good thing, I gave myself permission to miss a day. And then another day. Soon I was only blogging three or four times a week! It eased my immediate time pressures, but it didn't make it any easier to blog effectively, to come up with good pictures to post and interesting things to say. And I feel that I've lost a measure of self discipline and good writing practice, without gaining anything substantive in return.

I have never, ever missed a Monday Photo Shoot or a Weekend Assignment, not since John Scalzi started the former and I first discovered the latter, both in his now-defunct AOL journal By the Way. It used to be that I always posted my entries on Monday and Thursday nights, respectively, without fail. Now it may take me several days (in one case almost a week) to get to the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. And even as the current host of the Weekend Assignment, I've often let Thursday night become Friday night. Having written over 250 WA entries as participant or originator, I now find it a little harder each week to come up with a new topic that might entice you to write something. It's much easier to keep up with the Round Robin Photo Challenges, because they're only biweekly, and we have a pool of suggested topics that we periodically manage to refresh. I'm sorry to say that despite my frequent dog-blogging, I haven't managed to participate weekly in Feline and Furball Friday, which Steven may be passing the baton on soon as his elderly cat Pickle is reaching the end of his life. My heart goes out to him; the death of a beloved pet is never easy, even when it means the end of months of worry about your furry friend's prognosis and quality of life. We went through this with Tuffy Toro, exactly a year ago on August 1st.

This blog is not just about the memes, though, nor will it ever be. I still appreciate the opportunity to write a nice cathartic rant, or tell an amusing anecdote, or show off my dogs. I may not be adding to it daily at the moment, but don't expect the Outpost to be deserted any time soon.

So how about you? Is your blog primarily a place to share family news, or keep up with all the photo memes? Do you try to post daily, or on certain days of the week, or just when you feel like it? Please tell us about it in your blog, and include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below, so that next week I can direct people to your blog, thus:

For Weekend Assignment #277: Running the Gauntlet, I asked you to recount your experiences with government bureaucracy. Here are excerpts from the responses:

Julie wrote...

Most of my dealings with the city and county have been via their web sites, which, amazingly, work fairly well. I can pay my water bill, renew my car registration (except I forgot, so I'll be standing in line later this week), get hold of city and county departments, and so on. It's not perfect, but it beats sitting on hold. Now corporate entities are another issue.

Mike wrote....

This year was a little different. We tried to file our state return electronically ourselves but we needed a PIN number for some reason. Since we have someone else do our taxes usually, we had no PIN. And since I was being the typical me and waiting until the second-to-last day, when I tried to call the number I got the, "We are experiencing and unusually high call rate. Please try again later." Yeah, right. I ended up mailing it in.

Your turn! And please, if you have an idea for a future Weekend Assignment, email me at mavarin2 (at) gmail.com. Thanks!


Karen

Unusual or Infrequent Items

If you're not an accountant or frequent user of financial statements, you probably just looked at my subject line and said Wha...? It's a phrase that cost me at least an hour of confusion Sunday night, because of two nearly identical questions in a CPA review module in which I missed the fact that one said "unusual or infrequent" and the other said "unusual and infrequent," and my unfamiliarity with the way the module shows you where you went wrong. If it's both unusual and infrequent, it's called an "extraordinary item." If it's only one or the other, by GAAP criteria, it's not extraordinary.

By those standards, I guess today wasn't extraordinary.

Starting this entry with the above is what's known in an entirely different profession as "burying the lede." But I have my reasons.

I got a job today. I wish I were more happy about it.

As per my usual ethical stance on discussing my job online, I'm not going to say too much about it. I can tell you that it's a seasonal position doing income taxes, something I haven't been applying for because my only income tax experience consists of one class 3 1/2 years ago, doing my own taxes using TurboTax, messing around with TaxCut, and doing my mom's 1040EZ exactly once circa 2001. I figured I wasn't qualified, not without some training, at least.

I start this job at ten o'clock MST tomorrow morning, pretty much the exact time Barack Obama starts his new job on the East Coast. I may or may not get some training when I arrive at work. Otherwise, I'll have to refer people to another location or ask them to come back later in the week or something. Don't worry; I won't do anyone's taxes tomorrow morning on unfamiliar software while someone sits at my desk. Probably. The good news is that I'm very good at learning new software, the venue is expected to have mostly people with very simple returns, and I'll be referring anything tricky to a CPA offsite.

The money isn't terribly good, but it beats the heck out of McDonald's or unemployment payments. And tax accounting is a good skill to pick up for future employability.

Why am I not thrilled to finally get a job? One is that I'll be paid a lower wage than I would have considered four months ago. Two is that it's another temp thing, so I'm still not secure. Three I'm not prepared to discuss. I'm hoping that it will all be worth it, though, good experience and a good bridge to a better job when the economy starts recovering.

Meanwhile, it's led me to a decision I hadn't even considered until about half an hour ago. As you may know, I've been spending many hours at this computer the last few days, struggling through an assignment for an online seminar. The first assignment, emailed Saturday night at 11PM MST, was to complete all the reading and get a score of at least 90% on all the online tests for the following modules:

1. Environment of Financial Accounting
2. Financial Accounting
3. FASB's Conceptual Framework 1
4. FASB's Conceptual Framework 2
5. The Balance Sheet and Disclosures
6. Related Party and Subsequent Events
7. Income Statement
8. Discontinued Operations
9. Extraordinary Items
10. Comprehensive Income
11. Earnings Per Share 1
12. Earnings Per Share 2
13. Statement of Cash Flows 1
14. Statement of Cash Flows 2
15. Statement of Cash Flows 3

I had already done the first two when the email arrived, but that left me with 13 more to do in approximately two days. Since the grading is Tuesday and no time was listed, I was shooting for having it all done by 9AM Tuesday, which would leave me all day to watch the inauguration, visit my 103-year-old friend Eva, give blood, and get a jump on the next assignment before it arrived.

I have started using my old textbook to help with concepts I've forgotten.

Only I'll now be working 10-7 tomorrow. And as of tonight, after hours or struggle with Earnings Per Share I, I still have four modules to get through by morning, none of which have anything to do with reviewing personal income tax concepts. I'm taking much longer than the average student on many of these things, probably because my original coursework was in 2003 and 2004 and I'm getting a little distracted at times. (A little? Ha!) I could get it all done by tomorrow morning, but only if I start a new job on three or four hours of sleep. And how do I complete another 15 modules every two or three days once I'm working full time?

Dug out my income tax textbook, too!

Fortunately, I have an alternative. The course is set up so that I can add or drop a seminar at any time. So I just dropped the January 18, 41-day seminar, and picked up the 61-day one that starts January 29. This means I've already put a dent in the coursework for the later course, which will give me a little time to get even farther ahead, and see if there are any modules that will help me develop a better conceptual basis for the new job.

I kind of feel as though I've been defeated by the 41-day course, and I'm being a quitter. But I know better. I'm basically adding 11+15=26 days to my preparation time for an exam I haven't even applied to take yet. And it gives me a much more rational schedule to accomplish things in, given my unusual or infrequent (but not both) new job circumstance. I can even use the lag time to get through more modules of the AUD (Auditing) course, which is 8% completed already.

But for tonight, I'm saying goodbye to earnings per share. I'm going to look up info on the tax software I'll be using, study income tax in general a little bit, watch a little Doctor Who, and try for a good night's sleep.

My last weekday sunset at the dog park for a while.

Yeah. I feel better already.

Karen

Loose Ends

Four days (but only two business days) since my most recent job interview, five days before my scheduled FAR accounting seminar, one week from the inauguration of President Obama, one day after writing five pages of my first promising piece of non-Mâvarin fiction in years, and yet I feel curiously timeless. Each day except Sunday has no particular marker. Sleep in, get up, feed the dogs, check my email (where there might be a lead on a job), blog if I didn't do it the night before, study (maybe; got to be more consistent on that), dog park, dinner, and an evening and night of MSNBC and more online stuff: Facebook, HTML wrangling, blog jogging, etc., and maybe studying or novel-editing. The night ends, as often as not, with some Doctor Who at 3 AM or later. It could be Monday or Wednesday or Saturday, and sometimes I have to check to see what day it actually is.

This particular--I checked--Tuesday, I've already fed the dogs and updated a page on the St. Michael's web site. Now I'm considering whether to study online or to take the physical books I paid for and go sit at B&N or Austin's or Borders or Golden Corral for a while. When I was in college the second time, actually getting my accounting degree, I did a lot of my studying at Barnes and Noble, mostly to get out of reach of the Internet, and maybe have a slice of pumpkin cheesecake in season. I wrote papers during my lunch break at Golden Corral, taking my laptop along on the afternoon before class. Before I went back to school, I wrote most of Mages of Mâvarin in notebooks during lunch at Austin's, back when that restaurant was almost next door to Worldwide Travel.

But this is a different time, and the old strategies may not work. The CPA review course can be done online on the computer, offline on the computer, or by reading hard copy. But there are advantages to the online iteration - it automatically tracks your progress and the professors of each seminar can probably see where you stand. The only advantage to sitting with a book is that I can't lose concentration after two minutes and go see if anyone sent me a virtual plant in (Lil) Green Patch. No, instead I can wander off to look at books, or eat something. No strategy is perfect. Yet I know I can do this. I've accomplished big things before, and can do so again.

And I shouldn't waste time worrying about whether every entry on this blog is compellingly interesting, at the expense of more urgent things. But I do, of course. There's a Widgetbox Musings channel on my sidebar, and at one time the Outpost was the #4 blog on it. Now I'm more like #14, er, #16. Ouch! The number of blogs on the channel is up from about nine to 82, but it still offends my silly pride. I want to come up with something deep and amazing and amusing and universal for you all, every single day. Is that too much to ask?

Sigh. Well, I'd better get on with it. Tell you what. I'll pay some bills and then start with the online FAR for a bit. If I get too restless I'll, I don't know, take my laptop to a coffee shop. I know: I won't be fooling anyone.

Update: I took a textbook to the food court at Park Place Mall, and it worked out well, at least on the studying front. I'm actually not feeling well today, and couldn't eat much of the gyros platter I bought.

Update #2: Dog park time. But look: Ta-dah!

Update #3: By the end of the day, I'd completed three AUD lessons also, checked in with a recruiter and applied for a job online. Go me!

Karen

The Year That Doesn't End

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly - Macbeth.

I'm taking this Macbeth quote somewhat out of context. He's talking about trying to get away with murder; I'm talking about trying to get away from 2008. It's technically over, according to the clocks and calendars, all the way across the world to Samoa. It's even January 2nd in Tonga. But the prevailing conditions of a difficult year are hard to banish with a ball drop or the tick of a clock. The economy is still bad and getting worse, I'm personally still unemployed, and George W. Bush has another 19 days to do further damage to the country and the world.

It seems to me that for many years now, the prevailing attitude for me and for John every New Year's Eve has been, "Thank God that's over." That's what the celebration is about: hope that the next year will be better. But if I were a superstitious person, which I'm not, I'd say that my experiences of the past 24 hours do not portend much improvement. Consider:

Scenes from a dysfunctional gas station.

• December 31st was the last day to fill a collector's request for political buttons; apparently they don't "count" unless they're made before the election year is over. I didn't get them done - too distracted, I guess, and conflicted over charging money for them and not reporting it as income against unemployment. Plus the week got away from me - I lost a day somewhere and thought I had more time.
• It was also the last day to redeem a discount on gas at a Safeway station five minutes northwest of the dog park, about 20 minutes from here. My almost-daily shopping at my local Safeway had racked up a $1.40 per gallon discount on my purchase. I had hoped John would use it, since he's the one with the long commute, but his tank is full and he's on vacation. My tank was half full, but I went over there after the dog park. Cars were in line in several parts of the parking lot and out onto Broadway Blvd, and the employees were organizing people into the most efficient pattern possible. After half an hour of waiting, and seeing about two cars get gas and pull away, I was told that they were having equipment problems, and needed to close down immediately for at least half an hour. The nice young man who told me this advised me to call the toll-free number on my Safeway receipt to (probably) get a rain check. We'll see.
• My brother called sometime around 11:30, and was in mid-rant about something or other when my phone decided I'd waited too long to recharge it, and turned itself off. The phone was the only place I had Steve's current phone number, so I couldn't even call him back on the house phone. Until he gets my explanatory email, he'll probably think I hung up on him.
• When I went to check messages on the house phone, which we hardly ever use for anything, there was a job lead on it from a potential employer - from December 23rd. My resume has only my cell number, so I tend to forget that someone might call me on the land line. What are the chances he's still interested? John was already worried that I won't get a job before my unemployment runs out, and will have to resort to McDonald's, which add to my stress over the whole thing. This unreturned call doesn't help!
• Cayenne was freaked out all evening by illegal fireworks in the neighborhood.
• I was so distracted by a table on a web page that refused to align left no matter what I did, that I lost track of the time both before and after Steve called. When midnight came, I was typing a div tag. John gave me a head's up on the time, and I rushed to turn on Dick Clark, kiss John and grab some sparkling cider, pretty much in that order. We missed the ball drop; it was probably 12:01 AM when we kissed. Ah, well, close enough. We marveled about Dick Clark still hanging in there, years after his stroke, acknowledged that neither of us cared for the show's music (admittedly on the basic of one or two songs only), and John soon turned his DVD of the British series Spaced back on. Happy New Year, John, and can you tell me how to fix the alignment on this table?

There's nothing dire there, although I'm a bit upset about the job thing. But do you see what I mean? 2008 ended with a fleet of minor difficulties, and no good news, except...this:

Less than half a day ago, the St. Michael's web site I've been slaving over rose from the fourth page of Google results to the third result on the first page for terms that could hardly be more specific to a church called St. Michael's in Tucson. This was the delayed result of my submitting a site map to Google, which is a formatted page showing what pages exist on the site and how they connect to each other. It may also have been influenced a little by my work on the pages themselves. #3 wasn't perfect, but it was a huge improvement, and #1 and #2 were for the school that our church operates, more or less, at the same address. I was very happy to see St. Michael's almost at the top of the first page for "St. Michael's Church Tucson." But I was even happier, not to mention astonished, when the result above turned up on a refresh of that page, in the wee hours of January 1, 2009. #1! It should be the number one result for those search terms, but I didn't think we'd actually get there.

Maybe 2009 will be okay after all.

Happy New Year, all!

Karen

Where Did Today Go?

Unrelated dog picture

Seriously. I've been awake for over 13 hours (I went to bed at 6 AM and slept in), and can't come up with much that I did to account for the time. I watched some tv with John, took the dogs to the park, bought groceries and made dinner, caught up on the Doctor Who Forum after a couple of days away, posted a shortened version of the entry below this one to my Obama blog, and read a lot of political stuff online. Is that all? In 13 1/2 hours?

Well, not quite. A week or two ago I announced in my horribly neglected LiveJournal that I was going to try to put in at least an hour a night on my latest Mâvarin edit. I did well for the first four days, and then started to falter as I got involved in this whole Obama thing. Last night (this morning) I stared sleepily at the page and went to bed. So much for that run. But today I started a new run. I've reached Chapter Six, which is nearly halfway through Heirs of Mâvarin.

And on working on it, I promptly hit a snag.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm a continuity junkie. I'm the one who spent several years writing about (among other things) the internal evidence in Quantum Leap that Sam's whole body leaps, and that descriptions saying he "leaps into the body of..." are inaccurate. I once wrote all the questions - sorry, answers - for a game of Whopardy. At one time I could tell you the three mutually incompatible histories of Atlantis in Doctor Who, and the two origins of the Loch Ness Monster. I noticed when Anne McCaffrey changed a character's name from T'ton to T'ron, initially without explanation. I'm good at both identifying and explaining away inconsistencies in complex works of fiction. Yup, continuity is a wonderful game for me - when it's someone else's fiction.

When it's my own fiction, it's harder, and I'm not quite sure why. I think it's because I can't seem to sit down and read the whole story in a day or two, as I would a book by J K Rowling or Madeleine L'Engle. Usually it's more like a third to half of a chapter per night,with lots of tweaking along the way. By the time I reach a scene Chapter Six, I may not remember the exact timing of a related scene in Chapter Four. Also, working my way through the story for the second time in the last couple of months makes it harder to recall whether a scene is in the chapters I just went through again, or in a later chapter I looked at a month ago.

So tonight in Chapter Six (titled "Two Princesses," fact fans), the imposter king tells the Archmage that some tengremen are about to leave the city, having learned that the real Prince is traveling with a rival faction of tengremen. Two problems, I realized belatedly. One: the Archmage is probably responsible for that particular pack rushing off to attack the Prince's allies, and therefore ought not to express surprise about the pack's wherablouts. Two, Sunestri has known about the Prince for three days. Why is the enemy pack still hanging around the capital city?

Not that I was sure at first that an inconsistency existed. I had to dig back a few chapters, and check the dating on who was where when, and who knew what when. Yup, there's a problem. To fix it, I need to place the scene earlier, and kill Sunestri's expression of surprise. But how far back do I move it? What other timing issues still exist that I'm just not seeing?

Bottom line, I'm comparing the current versions of the chapters with my day by day and scene by scene outline. It's the only way I can think of to get the big pictures, and see how all the moving parts fit together.

After all, I don't want some editor or reader to point out all of my continuity gaffes!

Karen

Slouching Toward Midnight Mass

Time is rushing forward, and I can't keep up. But I have gotten a few things done:

I bought the rest of my offline gifts for people not named John. They were all flat pieces of plastic with the words Barnes and Noble on them.

I finally wrote my letter to the friend who dumped me by mail two weeks ago. Be proud of me: I kept it under a page. Be ashamed of me: I stuck it inside a Christmas card with one of those B&N cards, taped it to his door and walked away without so much as ringing the doorbell.

John and I bought the rest of what we needed for Christmas dinner. It took two stores to finish the job.




I emailed my godson's mother, asking whether she received my shower gift from Amazon a month ago, and advising her to check her spam filter for it. I also explained that his birthday present (above) hasn't been mailed yet. Then I did an Amazon e-card and gift for his Christmas.


I made this Christmas graphic, which is probably as close as you're going to get to a Christmas card from me.


I got out the vintage aluminum Christmas tree and its ornaments, but I won't be putting the tree up tonight as planned. It's far too late, and I work in the morning.

Karen

...What Keeps Everything From Happening at Once

Y'know, I just took a few minutes to research the title of this entry, trying to get the exact wording from Buckaroo Banzai. Instead I found this:

"Time," he said, "is what keeps everything from happening at once."
--Ray Cummings, "The Girl in the Golden Atom" (1919)

And this:

“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once”
--John Archibald Wheeler (American physicist, b. 1911)

I even found someone advising not to worry about whether Einstein or Woody Allen said it first. One thing's for sure, though: it didn't originate with ol' Buckaroo.

I thought of the quote, or paraphrase, tonight as I cast around for something I was ready to say with respect to this seminar I've been attending. Yes, Julie, fish were thrown on a video screen, and there was also an unseen gorilla. But that wasn't really the gist of the thing. I still don't know how much I understand the details of this particular cognitive/gestalt system of self-improvement, or how much I'm willing to buy into it, or at least give it a chance. I'm only halfway through it, after all. The other half will be the week before Christmas. Some of it does seem to make sense, and I don't want my normal skepticism to turn into postmodern cynicism. So I'll have to think it over, possibly test some elements of it, and make up my mind in the fullness of time.

One particular claim that came out today seems counterintuitive, to say the least; and that's where the time quote comes in. Affirmations guru Lou Tice claims that you should write a bunch of affirmations (think of the Al Franken character Stuart Smalley, only less pathetic) in different areas of one's life, and thus improve all aspects of your life at once. The idea is to avoid being too obsessed with one thing, and being "out of balance" in one's priorities. As someone with a marked tendency to obsess over one thing at a time, I can sort of see this reasoning even as I rebel against it. After all, just a week ago I wrote about the major stressful changes in my life over a three month period. I'm sure I've read before that the more major changes going on in your life (good or bad or both), the more stressed out you'll be. I've therefore never thought it might be a good idea to work on my writing, dieting, exercise, CPA exam, finances, house cleaning, etc. all at once! But perhaps the explanation is that the affirmations thing is supposed to get you primed for your new improved life rather than just dumping the end result on you. You have a little time to get used to it, I guess.

So here we are, just under a month before Christmas. The holidays are a stressful time anyway. I'm just digging out from my lack of industry knowledge at work, my dog just finished her radiation therapy for cancer, and I'm supposed to be selecting materials to fix up my bathroom. Is this really the time to start reading sentences every morning and night about losing weight, writing every night, and [third affirmation omitted here]? Sorry, but that doesn't doesn't sound right to me.

Still, the writing thing is something I can do, even if I don't read about it off a 3x5 card. I finished revising the opening scene of Heirs tonight. I'm still not sure page 11 is soon enough for Something Awful to Happen to get the plot moving, but overall I'm pleased with what I've accomplished. For now at least, I plan to keep that going.

On the 3x5 card labeled "Health," the one on which I wrote about good food and daily exercise and such, I also said something about seven hours of sleep a night. Yeah, like that's going to happen. If I ever do try this affirmation thing, I'm going to cross out the word "seven" and write in "six" instead. Even at that, I'm running a little late tonight. Good night!

What Time Is It?

Okay, I have to laugh at myself first. I typed in the subject line of this entry, hit the Enter button, and voila! A totally blank entry, successfully posted!

And it's not just because I'm tired. Probably.

Not necessarily.

Actually, what I wanted to talk about is an incident that happened a little before midnight, about an hour and a half ago. It's notable for the fact that it gives me a rare opportunity to laugh at John when he's not being intentionally funny. John is a funny man--"He makes me laugh," as I'm always quoting Jessica Rabbit as saying--but this was something else. This was John making (gasp!) a mistake!

Sorry, John, but I was desperate for a topic. You don't mind, do you? Much?

Clocks can lie. So can computers.

Here's what happened. John asked me what time it was. I told him it was almost midnight, which it was. He then went into the kitchen, where the wall clock said it was after midnight. (It runs a little fast.) He went on to protest that according to his computer, it was only 8:38 PM (or something like that).

"Did you really think it was only 8:30?"

"I lost track of the time. I just thought I was really getting a lot of work done, and it was only 8:30! It was a nice change from looking up and seeing that it was midnight."

"Except that it is midnight."

"Yes, but I didn't know that."

Okay, the above may be slightly fictionalized. But that's the gist of it.

On this computer, if I let it go idle, the clock in the lower right hand corner stops advancing until I bring it out of screen saver or sleep mode. At various jobs I've seen one slightly-wrong time on the office computer, another, even more wrong time on the telephone display. Or maybe they were the same wrong time, whatever. The point is that I knew not to trust them.

But what about the clock in my car? I figure I have five minutes to spare, and I make a five minute stop, and suddenly I'm running five minutes late. How does that work?

Why do these clocks keep lying to us?

I've done work on TWO pieces of fiction today. Go, me! Go to bed, that is.

Karen

Poor Karen's Almanack

Weekend Assignment #187: Share a story about when you were once memorably late to something. Late to a big event? To a date? To a wedding? Your wedding? If you were late, and it made for a good story, that's what we want to hear.

Extra Credit: How many times do you have to hit the alarm clock before you get up in the morning?

You know that maxim attributed to Benjamin Franklin, the one about being early to bed and early to rise? I am the absolute opposite of that. I mean, here it is, 4:30 AM, and I'm just starting on this entry, having spent most of the night watching Doctor Who stories from 1963, 1964 and 2005. This is Friday night, so I can do that, and sleep into the early afternoon tomorrow - I hope!

Anyway, this pattern holds true for my natural tendencies when it comes to appointments and other obligations. I can get there on time, and usually do, but I tend to cut things close. Just this week, I happened to leave home a couple minutes later than usual, hit extra-heavy traffic on Golf Links, and soon realized I was going to be about two minutes late for work. It wasn't a huge deal; the person I'm replacing (in some of her duties, anyway) always arrives well after I do, and I'm constantly staying late at the end of the day, just to get to a good stopping point. So I was slightly annoyed about the two minutes, but far from panicked.

But then...

Every city has its confusing intersections, places where you need to pay close attention or you'll end up on the wrong street. One example of this in Tucson is at Palo Verde and Irvington. There's a right turn just past the Honda dealership that's actually an I-10 on ramp. Less than 100 feet after that, the next right turn, is Irvington Road.

So I was thinking about being two minutes late and analyzing the implications of this, and failed to notice that I turned right about a hundred feet too soon. This put me on I-10 West. The first exit was a couple miles west and a mile north of where I needed to be, but I got off and started backtracking. Silly me, I disregarded the construction notices and chose Country Club as my southbound street to get back to Irvington. And my "two minutes" lateness turned into ten minutes, total. People still didn't really mind, though, and I was told by a co-worker that "everybody does it" from time to time. It's just the nature of that intersection. Let your mind wander, just for a second, and you're suddenly heading off toward Phoenix!

Other things I've been late for, so late that I sometimes didn't get there at all:

• I'm pretty sure we once published an issue of 2-5YM, our 1970s Star Trek fanzine, roughly a year after its originally scheduled cover date. I think that's when we abandoned whatever publication schedule we'd been trying for. In my defense, I should point out that the more frequent, early issues were five to seven pages long. The June, 1975 issue was more like 30 pages, I think, and had an interview with David Gerrold.
• I once forgot that a particular Saturday was the date of All Country Choir rehearsal, and realized my error several hours after the rehearsal started, probably 30 miles away or farther. I called in, but it was too late, and I wasn't allowed to go to All-County that year.
• As I've mentioned before, I once misread the schedule at Friendly Ice Cream, and thought I was supposed to work the night of a local public appearance by Gene Roddenberry. When I showed up for work that Thursday, I was promptly fired. I'd actually been scheduled to work on Wednesday, and had reported for work a full 24 hours late! I have to say that I was more relieved than upset upon losing that rather miserable job.
• Having promised to be a crucifer or torch bearer at Michaelmas a few weeks ago (I was also scheduled to be a lector), I remembered the 6:30 PM mass at 11:30 PM that night!
• I have a bad habit of posting the week's church announcements only when the week is almost over. Good thing most events are announced more than a week ahead!
• Oh, and of course I was once so late in coming home from a Sunday afternoon session at First Magnus, working alone on year-end stuff, that I think I actually got back to the house around 2 PM Monday - 22 1/2 hours after arriving at work on my day off!

I can't think of anything else offhand - nothing amusing, anyway. And I hit the alarm twice, usually. Can someone explain why every snooze I've used is calibrated for 9 minutes? Why isn't it an even ten?

Ah, well. 5:03 AM, and I'm going to bed now, late as usual. But won't be setting the alarm, I assure you!

Karen

Back Burners

I'm backed up tonight. I owe emails to several of you, an overdue birthday gift to my own brother, and another one to a friend whose birthday started a couple of hours ago. I have new fiction files from two friends to read, and I must, must, must sleep, and I mean in the next five minutes if possible.

A friend mentioned in an email today (one of the ones to whom I owe replies!) that logging in to comment here hasn't been working for her this week. Is anyone else having trouble with this? If you do, please feel free to email me. Then you, too, can be on my list of people to whom I owe emails! Seriously, though, I suspect it has something to do with the changeover to Google accounts (with for example @aol.com or @gmail.com at the end rather than a naked login name), but I'm just guessing. If you're still using the old style login, that may be the problem.

I did write a little piece of the follow-up to the fire scene tonight, and read another scene from my friend's novel, and did a little work on chapters Two and Eight of An Adept in Mâvarin, the first volume of Mages. I'll get to the emails tomorrow, I hope, and if Scalzi picked something good, I'll have a nice Weekend Assignment entry for you. But for tonight, here's some photo or other, and enough words so I can say that I posted. Good night!

"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

My Week of Desperation Begins

I don't know why there are cups on my neighbor's cacti.

Sunday Morning

I went to bed sometime after 5:30 AM Sunday morning, got two phone calls between 8:00 and 8:50 AM, got up about 9 AM, picked up Kevin and Eva, went to church, was substitute crucifer, checked in with Father Smith and Reverend Angela after Mass, was loaned the church's digital recorder to transfer sermons to my hard drive, was talked into signing up for a bunch of church webmaster workshops in Phoenix on March 3rd, was told I need to have the photos for the church directory printed and the layout work done by the end of this week, interrupted a Social Concerns committee meeting to confess that I left Ila's photo printouts home and make alternate arrangements, and dropped off Jan and Eva and Kevin. And that just covers the period from 5:30 AM to 12:45 PM Sunday!

Sunday Afternoon

I grabbed a couple of sandwiches at McDonald's, went home, checked my email, checked my Wikipedia watchlist, cleaned off my dresser and my jewelry (over half of it Mom's originally), took allergy medicine, read a little, and finally took a badly-needed nap from 4:45 PM to 8:20 PM.

Sunday Night

After another check of my email and another trip to McDonald's, I went into the office and worked until 2:30 AM (excluding the time spent checking my watchlist and commenting on a minor dust-up between John Scalzi and Wikipedia), came home, transferred and tried to organize the files from the church recorder, was forced to stop when Windows Explorer, AOL and RealPlayer all stopped responding, ended processes by hand until Windows deigned to reboot, ran Norton, booted AOL (which took five or ten minutes just to launch!), and here I am. It's 4:11 AM.

This week I have to get about three weeks' worth of worth done at the office, probably without assistance; get Ila's photos and the recorder dropped off at church; find, select and have printed a bunch of church photos that are currently scattered on some back up CDs somewhere as well as numerous folders on my hard drive; take a better cover photo for the directory; do actual layout work (which I've never done before unless you count putting fanzines into PageMaker followed by physical paste-up work in the early 1990s); do dishes and laundry, and still manage to work in Valentine's Day, sleep and some sort of sanity.

Wish me luck!

Karen



P.S. The trackback ping for the Scalzi entry is supposed to be http://www.scalzi.com/mt2/mt-tb.cgi/4438, but it doesn't seem to work for me. I never did understand trackback, though.

Blink. Blink. Gone.

Is it just because of my wonky sleep schedule,or is it legitimately true that two-day weekends tp too darn short? Here's how this one went:

Saturday

• Wake up a little after 2 PM after going to bed around 4 AM
• Watch a little TV with John (very little), mess around on the computer
• Go to dinner
• Work on church web stuff
• Do dishes
  
• Bath
• Bed around 4 AM

Sunday

• Wake up at 8:45 AM when Eva calls
• Sleep another 20 minutes
• Get dressed, pick up Kevin and Eva.
• Church. Serve as Crucifer, and photograph a baptism
  
• Coffee hour
• Take everyone home
  
• 20 minutes at computer
• Sleep until 6 PM
• Grocery shopping
• Read a little L'Engle
  
• Dinner
• Watch tv for about an hour
• Wikipedia
• Whittle away at my email, which is now disappearing if unread in 25 days. It used to be 30.
  
• Write this entry
• Bed soon

Reverend Angela performs her first baptism
as celebrant, assisted by Father Ed.

Okay, the lists aren't all that short. It looks like a lot. But really it's practically nothing. Basically it means I slept, ate, shopped, did some computer stuff and the weekend was over. No cleaning to speak of, no putting in time at the office, no trip to the gym, no laundry. Blink, and Saturday is gone. Blink again, and the weekend is over.

Coffee hour. Father Womble, Toni Sue

and Eva enjoy a baby's company.

I don't regret sleeping in on Saturday, and I don't regret my nap today. I really needed them. And I'm pleased at the progress on the church stuff, and about the reading I got done while waiting for the sermons to upload and download, and before and after sleeping.

But gee, where the heck did the weekend go? Is there anything I could reasonably have done to keep it from flying by?

Karen




Technorati Tags: Personal, Time, Episcopal, Tucson

35 and Counting

No, that's not a joking reference to my age. I'll be 50 in March, and I'm fine with that. No, that's the current count of unread emails on this screen name. At one point last week it was 165. When this entry posts it will be 36.

Mostly over the last few days I've caught up the AOL Alerts, deleted all the "Today in the Tucson Citizen" alerts (and unsubscribed from same), mucked about with my LiveJournal Friends list, and gone through one, count 'em, one, FeedBlitz alert. That last isn't as hopeless as it sounds. I used it as a means to unsubscribe from two feeds - one from someone I doubt has ever visited Outpost, and one BlogSpot mirror of an AOL Journal I read on the AOL side. (Hi, Pat!) I also went through every Making Light entry in the past 25 days or so, continuing a few conversations long after everyone else had left the party. The one whose threaded comments had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe was basically a collection of silly or out-of-context disclaimers. I added a few of my own at the end, including this one from a bowl I've been using in the microwave oven for years: "May become hot in microwave." Almost as much fun, for those of us who aren't overly fond of GWB's Presidency, is this collection of bumper sticker slogans. I particularly liked the subtle reference to a Doctor Who Christmas special, although it's a slight misquote.

You want me to do what? Forget it! Hands off!

Unfortunately, just doing that much (and deleting a few miscellaneous emails unread) took all evening, and I haven't even gotten to the Round Robin blog yet to RSVP - first time in a year and a half I haven't done so right away. Let's rectify that right now. Ooh...good one! The next Round Robin topic is "Magic"! You know that's right up my alley. Not so much rabbits and hats and three card monte and swords through beautiful assistants - not that there's anything wrong with that! - but The Magic of Mâvarin, and perhaps also the magic of photographic trickery. Yeah, this is going to be a fun one, I think! Be sure to RSVP if you'd like to play along.

"But that trick never works!"

Time to go. Catch you tomorrow!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, memes, Magic, Round Robin Photo Feeds, email, Simlify

Time Out of Time

"Time is an illusion - lunchtime doubly so."
- Ford Prefect, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Time is a problem for me. Having spent most of the afternoon asleep, I now find myself just getting around to this journal entry at 5:40ish AM. See, other that some time spent with John around midnight, I've been up all night researching the history of A Wrinkle in Time, the Time Quartet and the Time Quintet, and the history of calling Charlie Brown a loser. In the process I piled up a bunch of books (some of which I've since put away), worked on five Wikipedia articles, and had a heck of a good time. But dawn will be here soon, and the New Year is here. If I am going to get me day and night, sleep and organization issues under control, now is the time to start.


Coincidentally, one of the concepts I've been researching is L'Engle's idea about the differences between "kairos" and "chronos", two Greek words for time. L'Engle defines chronos as "ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time," and kairos as "real time, pure numbers with no measurement." In her book A Circle of Quiet, she writes:

"Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel...the saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos."
- A Circle of Quiet, page 245

Yeah, I like kairos. I've been in kairos all night, fully involved in my research and my writing. The problem is the chronos has been slipping by in the background, unnoticed except for the occasional "booga-booga."

2007 is the year I must come to terms with chronos.

Happy New Year.

Karen

Technorati Tags: L'Engle, Wikipedia,Writing, Kairos, Happy New Year, Time