Weekend Assignment: #279: This Changes Everything!

Following on from last night's entry:

Weekend Assignment: #279: At one time or another, we've all had some kind of good news, expected or unexpected, that made a big difference in our lives, or at least gave us a sense that things were getting better. Tell us of such an incident.
Extra Credit: Who was the first person you told about your good news?

When I came up with this topic yesterday, it was going to be my excuse to tell you about Pepper not limping any more and the three job leads I had yesterday. But I wrote about all that last night, so I'm not going to do an extended rerun here. Suffice it to say that having three people call me on the same day to express interest in my resume is a major boost to my confidence, giving me real hope that I will soon be fully employed again.

With that rather obvious observation out of the way, let's go back a little over three decades, to two bits of related news that had a greater impact on my life than I ever expected at the time.

Me at Clarion, July 1977.

When I was in high school, my major extracurricular interests were Star Trek and the writings of Harlan Ellison. I also read and enjoyed lots of other fantasy and sf, but Harlan in particular was a big deal to me. He wrote the original version of my favorite Star Trek episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever," but that wasn't the main reason for my interest. I was hooked on his collections of award-winning short stories and edgy, personal and often political essays.

I've written about my interactions with Harlan a few times over the years, but for the purpose of this entry, the thing to remember is this: he was my favorite writer, and a huge influence during my teens and early 20s. He was having a surge in popularity back then, fueled by several awards and a deal with Pyramid Books to republish many of his earlier works plus several new collections. Meanwhile, I was struggling to get a certain novel past page 2. (Yes, that novel, the one I'm still intermittently revising all these years later.)

One book I bought about the time I graduated from high school was titled Clarion 3. It was an anthology of sf short stories by people associated with the Clarion Writers' Workshop, interspersed with essays about writing. The editor was Robin Scott Wilson, founder of the workshop. The last piece in the book was the essay "When Dreams Become Nightmares: Some Cautionary Notes on the Clarion Experience" by, you guessed it, Harlan Ellison. Harlan had taught at several Clarions, but wasn't going to do it anymore. That was unfortunate, I thought as I finished reading the essay in our back yard in Manlius. At that moment, I really, really wanted to go to Clarion and be taught by Harlan Ellison. Apparently, I'd already missed my chance.

So: life-changing good news incident #1. My first two years at Syracuse University, I was majoring in Creative Writing and TV-Radio. (I switched to English Lit and Film my junior year.) My problem with Creative Writing was that I could never find the department head in his office, and consequently spent a lot of time hanging out at his closed office door. That's where I saw it: a little paper notice about the 1977 Clarion Writers' Workshop. Robin Scott Wilson would be teaching, as would Peter S. Beagle, writer of one of my favorite fantasy novels. These facts alone would have been enough for me to want to go, but there was more. Harlan was also teaching. I was stunned, almost shaking with excitement. It was like the Universe was saying to me, "Karen, the thing you wanted really badly but thought was impossible is possible after all. Now find a way to do it!"

Fortunately, both my parents agreed to let me try, as long as I was willing to work a summer job until the workshop began. So I sent Chapter One of The Tengrim Sword (as it was called then) off to Michigan State, along with a self-addressed, stamped manila envelope. Weeks passed, and then that envelope arrived back at my dad's apartment. When I saw it, my heart sank. It was too heavy and bulky to contain just an acceptance letter.

Then I opened it anyway - and a map of Michigan State fell out. Joy! Unbounded, whooping joy! And there you have it: life-changing good news incident #2! I was going to Clarion!

I assume that my dad was the first person I told of my good news.

I've written before about the Clarion workshop I attended, the people I met and worked with, the personal relationship stuff, and the not-entirely-positive effect the workshop had on my writing. (I put the novel away for years after that.) There were a lot of things about "the Clarion experience," as Harlan put it, that still influence me, all these years later, in my writing and in other ways. Harlan was part of that, but only a part.

The biggest impact, by far, came from an unforeseen consequence of my six weeks in an East Lansing dorm in the hot summer of 1977. I started hanging out with one of my fellow Clarionites, this guy named John. Last name Blocher. 22 months later, I married him.

How's that for a bit of good news that changes everything?

So how about you? What bit of good news made all the difference for you? 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: #278: Time to Blog, I asked you about your blogging habits, particularly your blogging schedule and frequency. Here are excerpts from the responses:

Julie wrote...

What it boils down to is the more I have to do, the less time I have to blog. That may be a good thing. Or not, depending on what I have to do. This is one of my busier times of the year, and some days I sit down at the computer, and the next thing I know, it's 3:30. Where has the day gone?

Florinda wrote...

"How often I blog" and "how often I post" are two different things, usually. I try to post here at least five times a week, and most of the time I have something up on one of the weekend days as well. But most of my posts are written ahead of time, and then I schedule them out daily; posting time is 5 AM Pacific time weekdays, and 6 AM on weekends.

Mike wrote....

Well, for me, there isn't a straight up answer. I certainly don't have a schedule. I pretty much blog when I can, or when I have something I want to say. I participate in Karen's Weekend Assignments, but I don't have a certain day that I do them. That's why I'm writing this at 10pm when I should be going to bed. That's dedication for you, people.

Your turn! If you've ever considered participating in the Weekend Assignment (or used to participate but dropped out), please help us out with your thoughts on this topic, or else the next one. You've got until Thursday night to post your entry, and in a pinch I'll even take a late one. And if you haven't considered participating, why the heck not?

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

My Round Robin entry will follow in a few hours.

Karen

News for Now

Some of the following info will be included in my next Weekend Assignment entry, which I'll post tomorrow. But for now, the news:

1. Pepper is no longer limping. John and I have been lifting her on and off the bed all week so she doesn't re-injure herself, but she seems to be okay now.

2. Still no progress on the unemployment claim going through.

3. The car still smells of burning wiring. I'm a little nervous that whatever made the a/c compressor clutch burn up may be burning something else as I drive in the heat. A friend told me today that a car in her neighborhood just plain caught fire recently due to the weather. I am therefore only driving a few miles at a time, windows open, and only when I have to. Obviously, the dogs have not been in the car since Monday morning.

4. I am going to repair the car a/c anyway, probably Monday. My dad is stepping in with a small loan to cover it. I did not ask him; he offered.

Now the other good news.

Cayenne has no idea what the news is,
but is prepared to be happy about it.

5. A recruiter called this morning to say that a really good job with a major disease-related charity opened up again, one for which she sent my resume over early this year. She's sending them the latest version of my resume, which now includes actual, professional non-profit experience with St. Michael's.

6. Another recruiter called this afternoon, with a potential job with a different non-profit! I have no idea what it is, but it's probably also in the medical arena.

7. An hour after that, I got a third phone call, this time from a medical software company! It was in response to an application I put in online late last week. I was invited to come in for a 2-hour application screening process next week. I'm told it's a very good company, and their HQ is about five minutes from my house.

Well! After months of employment drought, interest isn't just trickling in, it's pouring! A phone call is not an interview, and an interview is not a job. But it's a start!

Karen

EMPS: Charcoal Disaster

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #49, Carly wants us to match a word with a color and photograph it. My color: charcoal. You know the color I mean: it's that range of grays, almost but not quite black, that replaced chrome as the default color of electronics and other products, stuff made of metal or high impact plastic. It's the color of carbon, the color that absorbs light and turns it into the most heat this side of true black, the color of things that burned up at the worst possible time.

The color of disaster.

If you've been reading this blog, you know I've been griping quite a bit about the weather here in Arizona this summer. Normally by mid-July, we're getting lots of afternoon thunderstorms to cool things down. This year: not so much. Day after day we're getting high temperatures of 107 to 111 degrees, with some late afternoon clouds but only rarely any actual rain - and when it finally happens, it lasts about five minutes.

Charcoal-interior on a hot day - like we need to retain more heat!

Result: it's hot, all day, every day. Except for those hardy souls who can tolerate such temperatures, and the unfortunates who have no air conditioning or can't afford to use it, we Arizonans are running our air conditioners a lot - at home, at work, and in the car. We've already had at least two blackouts at the house as the overloaded grid reacted, and bits of it burned out.

When I take the dogs to the park, I try to do it in the cool (only 90 degrees!) of the evening, and even then, my dog who is bred for northern climes, with charcoal highlights to her long black fur, hangs out a few inches from the car's air conditioning vents, running full blast. But yesterday, I didn't take her at all.

Charcoal highlights on my suddenly-injured dog, Pepper.

That very dog, Pepper, somehow hurt one of her legs (hips? feet?) on Sunday. She was limping intermittently, enough so that John and I were lifting her on and off the bed. There was no sign of one of the "goat's head" burrs that we sometimes have to remove from the dogs' feet or our own, and nothing seemed to hurt to the touch. We figured it was probably a sprain, and decided that I would take her to the vet today. Disaster, right? It was at least a minor one. If she really needed x-rays and treatment, it would be uncomfortable for her, and financially difficult for us, considering that my new unemployment claim still hasn't gone through, and nobody's getting back to me on any of the jobs I've applied for lately. We haven't really dug out from the debt of Tuffy's cancer treatments from 2007 to August 1, 2008.

But when I called today, there were no appointments available, so we'd have to pay urgent care rates, an extra $20. I didn't want to make Pepper wait any longer, so I agreed. But I watched as I led her into Valley Animal Hospital, and she didn't visibly limp at all. So I made my apologies to the assistant at the front desk, and took the dogs back to the car. (Cayenne was along for the ride.) We then hit the drive-throughs at the bank and McDonald's, and started home, a/c blasting.

That's when I noticed the burning smell in the car, like hot tar, like burning electrical wires, like melting plastic.

Like disaster.

I tried to ignore it, explain it away; but I looked at the engine temperature and it was halfway up. Thermostat failure? I opened the windows and hurried home with the dogs.

This afternoon, I was called to St. Michael's to write an emergency check for fixing the air conditioning on a house the church owns and currently rents out. On the drive over, not a whisper of coolness could be detected in the hot air my car was blowing. The interior of my car was hotter than the outside air, I discovered as I stepped out into the St. Michael's parking lot.

So after my errand at church, I headed over to ask the mechanics at our favorite local garage to give me some idea what the problem was and how much it would cost. Martin opened the hood, and we saw this:

On the hot charcoal-toned bits of engine, there was visible evidence that the clutch of my air conditioning compressor had quite literally burned out. There were bits of charcoal-colored ash, actual charred bits of ex-clutch, coating the charcoal-colored metal.

And what looks like bits of actual burned wiring: charcoal-colored, of course:

Disaster! The clutch assembly alone costs more to replace than the whole compressor, including the clutch. We're looking at $450, even with the mechanic giving me a good customer/pity break on the price. Without this repair, a drive in the car is suddenly infinitely more miserable, and it's impossible to drive across town to a job interview (if any) and arrive cool and dry. More immediately, it's not safe to drive the dogs for more than a couple of miles, if that, and even then I'd better have cold water out for them.

But how can we spend the money right now? John has asked, and I've agreed, that I wait out the week and see whether the unemployment payments, which I supposedly applied for successfully a week and a half ago, finally start getting approved and posted to my account. If that doesn't happen soon, and if potential employers continue to ignore my resume or two-hour application, our personal economic disaster will be darker than the ash on my engine block.

And Pepper is limping again.

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

F&FFF: The Dogs in the Daytime

For Feline and Furballs with Feathers Friday:

Pepper's pre-grooming shedding and post-grooming sleekness
(and bandanna!)

From Reid at Random

As I mentioned in my previous entry, Pepper was groomed this week. She had been shedding clumps of black fur all over the place; more important, all that fur can't have been comfortable for her in all this 100-degree-plus heat. So I took her to PetSmart on Tuesday for the "Furminator" treatment. Most of her undercoat is gone, her coat is soft and shiny, and she has hardly been shedding at all. She also acquired a bandanna that actually looked semi-decent, before shedding it in the back yard.

It was suggested to me the other day that the problem of taking the dogs out in the Arizona heat might be solved by taking them out early in the morning. I try never to be conscious that time of day, if I can help it; but nevertheless I tried it on Thursday morning.

By 8 AM(?) we were at Miko's Corner. Even at that time, things were heating up. Most of the humans were congregated at the picnic tables under the ramada roof. Even the dogs tended to be in the shade, and did very little running around. All in all, it was no improvement.

There was a definite advantage, though, when we left the dog park itself for the wider romping grounds of Reid Park. The dogs and I finally got to see the critters that have dug so many holes in the ground outside the rose garden. I had thoughts of gophers, or possibly something even more exotic, but the truth was more prosaic. The morning shift at Reid Park featured lots and lots of rock squirrels, the Arizona equivalent of the common gray squirrel. They were popping in and out of holes, some of them freshly dug, peeping and peering warily at the dogs.

And the dogs were peering right back, making noises of their own! I have never felt them tug on the leashes quite this hard. But no, I didn't let go!

One year as a Blocher dog.

**Update: after posting this I went to Steven's newest F and FF entry, and learned that his beloved cat Pickle will probably be put to sleep on Monday at the end of a long illness. Let me take this opportunity to extend my sympathies to Steven in this difficult time. Exactly a year ago, we took our dog Tuffy Toro to the vet for the last time, and felt the gamut of guilt and grief and relief as her evident suffering came to an end. The next day, we adopted a dog called "Ireland," who was soon renamed Cayenne - not a replacement, but a new friend. Tuffy and Cayenne are very different dogs. This isn't necessarily the right answer for everyone who loses a pet, but for us it was. **

Karen

EMPS: The Two Towers

When Carly assigned "Landmarks" as the topic for this week's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, I was briefly stumped. Over the years, this blog has featured lots of photos of Tucson landmarks already: historic buildings, ballparks, Tucson's one downtown skyscraper, interesting bridges, public statues and so on. What was left that I hadn't already photographed for you? And, could I get to it on a day when I was scheduled to give blood and Pepper had a grooming appointment?

But as I dropped Pepper off at PetSmart on Tuesday, I thought of a few places. One, the Mission San Xavier del Bac, is too far south of the city to reach quickly, but there was something else that I'd been meaning to photograph for a while, just off Broadway Boulevard near Reid Park. As I drove toward it, with Cayenne still in the car and perhaps a little nervous at the absence of her "sister," I came across another major Tucson landmark, one I should have thought of before. Here it is:

5151 East Broadway is the tallest building for miles around.

From the Picasa albumTwo Towers

This is the office building at 5151 East Broadway Blvd. As far as I can tell, the street address is the complex's only name. It stands at the corner of Broadway and Rosemont, across the street from Barnes and Noble and very close to a travel agency I worked for in the late 1980s.

Built in 1975, it is the fourth tallest building in Tucson, and can be seen from miles away. Tucson doesn't go in for skyscrapers much, partly I suspect because nobody wants to block the mountain views we have in every direction. 5151 is the exception. According to a really neat page on Google 3D Warehouse, it has 16 floors and is about 246 feet high. My late mom's friend and therapist has an office there, as does one of my recruiters.

In front of the tower on the Broadway side of the property is a long, flat annex, which has recently been gutted. I don't know why this is, whether there was a fire or a need to remove asbestos, or they just want to redo it for some reason.

5151 makes the Rincon Mountains look short by comparison.

Parking for 5151 is on a large, slightly sloped deck behind the tower, accessed primarily from Rosemont. This flat expanse makes the tower stand out more than it does from Broadway itself.

And check out the view from the back of the parking lot!

It's kind of hard to get a sense of the size of the building. If you're back far enough to photograph the top of it, chances are good that the view of the bottom is obstructed. Also, the fact that it's broad rather than narrow mitigates the impression of height. But trust me; it's not a small building. And by the way, I appreciate its modern style.

A little over two miles west of 5151 is a very different tower, from a very different period in Tucson's architectural history. This is the El Conquistador water tower. Built in 1928, when Country Club Road was at the edge of the city rather than in the middle of it, the tower is all that remains of the ambitious but doomed El Conquistador Hotel. According to the book Tucson: The Life and Times of an American City by C. L. Sonnichsen, the project ran out of money before the hotel was completed. Even after it was finished it continued to lose money, having too few rooms to offset the cost of its opulence. The El Conquistador underwent bankruptcy reorganization in 1935, changed hands a few times, and lost its appeal as the city grew up around it, particularly the El Con shopping center, which opened across Broadway from it in 1959.

The hotel was razed in 1968 - all except for the water tower, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is designated as an official Tucson Landmark. These days it's tucked away about a block behind Broadway, between an urgent care facility and an unmarked condo or apartment building, a few blocks north of Hi Corbett Field. Several other features from the hotel have been moved to other locations around Tucson, including a copper dome that adorns the Casa Blanca shopping center on North Oracle.

The "Spanish Colonial Revival" or "Arizona Mission" style was added to the tower in 1932 under the direction of Tucson architect Roy Place, who was also responsible for the Hotel Congress and a number of other historic Tucson buildings. My favorite detail on the water tower itself is this weather vane, depicting a miner and his donkey.

Be sure to check Carly's blog Ellipsis each week for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. I'll have an entry sometime tomorrow morning for Steven's Feline and Furball Friday, followed a little later in the day by the new Weekend Assignment - assuming I can think of a new topic by then! Any last-minute suggestions?

Karen

The Photo Not Taken

Back in the days of his AOL blog By the Way, John Scalzi used to periodically warn his readers and fellow bloggers not to post pictures of other people's children without permission, because of the privacy and security issues this might pose. I have not always complied perfectly with this principle, but I try to be sensitive to it, and not to cross a line. So when I drove past the Alamo Wash early yesterday evening and saw a child doing something rather amazing, I did not stop the car, turn around and try to get a picture. But I will tell you about it.

The photo above is from back in May, right after a rain storm. Where you see water flowing in the picture, substitute a dry street and dry dirt, and you'll have some idea of the scene Tuesday evening. As I approached the wash on my way home, with newly-groomed Pepper and rather relieved Cayenne, I noticed there were a couple of kids playing under the blue bridge. It wasn't until I drove past them that I saw what they were doing.

The boy, maybe ten years old, was wearing a Spider-Man costume, a decent one but with a crummy mask. He was hugging the slab of concrete in the left (west) side of the wash, trying to crawl up the wall! His sister(?), a few years older, was dangling a rope from above, presumably trying to help. I tried to give her a high sign, but I doubt that she understood the message. Already past the wash and the kids, I shouted out the open window, "I LOVE that!" and drove away.

I've taken my photos for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot and will edit and post them after I've slept. They do not involve Spider-Man or the wash, but please stop back anyway.

Karen