Further ramblings

A piece of cake

2011-01-01T21:40:00.001-08:00

I recently spotted an ad that proclaimed, "Show off Your Baking Skills. Shop Brand Name Bakeware Online Now!"

Baking skills and baking equipment are two entirely separate things. Baking can be done in or on just about anything: cookie sheets, clean terra cotta flower pots, mason jars. Baking can occur in brick ovens, on barbecue grills, in toaster ovens, in a pan on the stove (tortillas, pancakes), in a crock pot, and even in the microwave.

Given a functional heat source, everything else in baking matters more than the equipment. If you don't bake often or don't have much experience, here are a few pointers that I promise will make more difference to your baking than all the "Brand Name Bakeware" in the world.

Use fresh ingredients. Stuff like flour and baking powder will keep for a good long time in the pantry, but not indefinitely. Using up your baking ingredients regularly is the best way to keep them fresh.
Follow a recipe and measure exactly. There are tons of recipes online, and many have ratings or comments that will guide you in choosing a good one.
Do not over-mix quick breads (anything with baking powder or baking soda in it). Mix only enough to blend the dry ingredients with the wet. Ignore the lumps, unless they're huge.
Fat and salt are in baked recipes for a reason. Don't omit them because they might be Bad For You. Besides adding flavor and (in the case of fats) improving texture, they are often necessary for the chemistry that makes baking work.
Preheat the oven. Place what you are baking inside (don't crowd too many things), and then keep the oven door closed until the end of the cooking time.
Practice. Even with a recipe, there is such a thing as a "feel" for baking. This feel is how you will eventually judge if your batter is a bit too wet or dry, how long to knead yeasted breads, and when your bread has risen enough. It is also what will eventually let you adjust and experiment.

Happy baking, with whatever equipment you prefer.

Correlation

2010-10-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

My company recently moved to a new office, so there are now billboards along my commute. One particularly prominent notice trumpets a brokerage firm with the headline, "My confidence went the same way as my portfolio."

Naturally, I read this to mean that both plummeted.

Just putting a Band-Aid on the problem

2010-04-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

I was doing a bit of mending and I happened to have a little round scrap of band-aid colored fabric sitting around. I couldn't resist. I did do a proper job of the mending after presenting this little, visual gag to the owner of the shorts.

Someone needs HEEP

2010-03-08T18:20:00.000-08:00

Gotta watch that oxygen

2010-03-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

Mothers' advice

2010-02-19T17:08:00.000-08:00

I don't think I'm giving away any big secrets here, but in case I'm letting the cat out of the bag, my apologies to the cat.

One of my mother's pieces of advice to me (which I've never much used, nor needed to use) concerned cooking. If a hungry husband was hanging around, asking about dinner, she advised frying an onion. This makes it look and smell as though something is going on, and gives the cook a couple of minutes more to think about what is for dinner. The onion can then go into just about anything.

Another mom I've talked to offered advice concerning small specks of matter that occasionally appear out of nowhere in food. If it's small enough to be inconsequential and difficult to fish out, add pepper to disguise it.

My great-grandmother's advice to my grandmother, though still about kitchen counter self defense, was of a very different nature. In an earlier era, she advised buying everything on the best possible sale, but telling him you paid full price, and keeping the difference tucked away for a rainy day.

Algunas palabras

2010-01-27T17:55:00.000-08:00

I spent a lot less time than I should have speaking Spanish in Bolivia, but I did learn some new words. Some are regional or have regional meanings. Here is a sampling:

chamarra - a jacket
chompa - a pullover sweater. The word is derived from the English word "jumper".
llajwa or llajhua - a very spicy salsa
polainas - leg warmers
wawa - a baby. This is a Quechua word that has entered the regional Spanish.

I also learned two expressions. I knew the words before, but I didn't have the full context for the phrases.

gracias / provecho - This is the greeting and reply at the end of a meal, said before leaving the table. Although it amounts to saying "thank you", it is not directed towards the cook, at least not anymore. It is said to anyone and everyone dining with you. A couple of people asked me what the English equivalent would be, and I don't think there really is one, at least nothing quite the same.
cuando floresca el chuño - There is a song by this title, which I had heard before my visit. Literally, it means "when the chuño blooms". What I had missed was that the chuño is a dried potato and does not grow or bloom. (I got a chance to taste some, finally. They taste much better than they look.) Thus, this expression means "never", something akin to "when pigs fly".

La pasapelotas

2010-01-24T08:27:00.000-08:00

I accompanied my host to a fustal game one afternoon. Fustal is like soccer, but it's played in a smaller space, often indoors. The ball is a bit smaller and lighter, but the competition is no less intense.

It wasn't a real game. It was early in their season and they hadn't played in awhile, so it was a practice game or a warmup game or whatever you'd like to call it. Something tells me people were at least loosely keeping score, but people came and went and the teams grew and shrank. They were playing when I arrived and they were playing when I left. Otherwise, I might have liked to talk to some of them rather than just let them guess who this extra person was on the sideline.

Practice game or not, they play very intensely. It looked like fun, but I wasn't invited to join. I've never been especially great at sports, nor have I ever practiced soccer very much (and eighth grade girls' P.E. just doesn't count). It wouldn't have mattered, though, if I had been well trained at soccer enough to outplay them all. Women are simply not invited to join such games.

So I stood on the sideline and watched. I can see why soccer is so popular. One ball (even one homemade out of rags) and just about any open space can keep up to 22 people (not including onlookers) involved in some fairly fast-paced action and good exercise for as long as they'd like. I saw siblings kicking a ball around in one of the plazas and a group of cholitas in skirts playing against each other on a small, public field (one photo I regret not getting, but the bus trundled by too fast). Contrast that with golf, with all its expensive gear and green fees and training. I guess I could see enjoying the challenge of playing if I had nothing better to do with my money, but how golf makes good television, I'm not certain.

I stood on the sideline watching, and I happened to stand on the one sideline where there wasn't a wall. So when the ball went out on my side, I ran after it and returned it to play. I figured it was about the only chance I was going to get to handle thet ball, and aside from watching, that was about all there was for me to do, plus it was a little real exercise. Even at such an altitude, I was far enough into my trip that it felt good.

Nobody said anything to me about it during the game. (In Argentina, I look like somebody who might speak Spanish; in Bolivia, I look like someone who might not.) They acknowledged my efforts with an um-thank-you. I heard about it after we left, at lunchtime, when my host recounted my participation: she ran after the ball like crazy, any time it went out. All the other guys asked what she was doing. He just said he didn't know, hadn't asked me to do that.

I don't think I ruffled any feathers, but I suppose I might have raised some eyebrows. If they had really wanted me to sit and just watch politely, they could simply have asked. Or they could have asked me to chase after and return balls. Had they asked me to do it, I would probably have refused.

Polainas

2010-01-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

I bought several things in Bolivia. The sweaters and the poncho I purchased because they are beautiful and fit me well. I think one of them is handmade. The socks are machine made, almost the same sort of thing one could get here, except that they're good socks and they fit my smaller feet well. Yes, the label says "Kiddie" on the top, but I haven't had a problem with them sliding down and bunching up.

But the polainas were an afterthought. I bought them from the same woman as the sweaters for about a dollar, an amount of money that at the very least means more to her than it does to me. They are handmade, probably from alpaca or an alpaca blend, and they are the first pair of legwarmers I've had since the nineteen-eighty-somethings.

Yes, legwarmers. They're not hot pink, and I won't be matching them to my shirt. In fact, I won't be showing them off at all, recent "retro" fashion trends notwithstanding. They go underneath pants, and they keep everything between my knees and my ankles fabulously warm. I returned to one of the rainiest weeks California has seen in some time, and I've scarcely had them off.

I've also turned my furnace down, at least in the mornings when I'm the only one around. Somewhere between the polainas and the sweaters, I'm keeping quite warm without it.

An equal and opposite reaction

2010-01-20T18:53:00.000-08:00

I spent probably too much of my time in Bolivia explaining to my hosts, "We do things differently in California." My focus was partly intentional. They have never visited North America, and we don't know when they will have the opportunity to do so.

Partly, it was the engineer in me speaking. I'm interested in the use of resources and how things are done. I don't travel long distances for the express purpose of seeing shower heads or trash cans, but I do notice (and even photograph) such things when I'm away from home, and that's why. (I have a photo somewhere of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa. I also have a photo somewhere of a not-so-famous downspout off the baptistery roof there.)

People do things differently in Bolivia, of course, and I tried to be open minded toward those differences. I missed sometimes. I fretted about things that are bigger concerns at home. Schedules and refrigeration of foodstuffs are two such things. Bolivians have, at least in social matters, a very flexible sense of time. We arrived at least two hours late to one party to find that it had only just begun. Groceries are purchased fresher and in smaller quantities than here, and the entire city is cool and dry. (I'll stand my ground on my use of mosquito repellent and frequent hand washing. I came to meet people, not germs.) I hope I wasn't too tiresome to my hosts, but my fussing often met with a gentle but emphatic, "You are in La Paz."

Almost a week after my return home (my sleep schedule is still somewhere besides California), I'm seeing not, "why do they do that in Bolivia?" but "why don't we do that in California?" Why don't we use a clothesline when we have ample, dry heat from the sun? Why don't we wear warm, fuzzy sweaters and leg warmers and blankets instead of cranking up our furnaces? Why don't we ride public transportation? Why don't we insist that vehicles be full? Why don't we heat water when and where we plan to use it, instead of keeping a large tankful warm all the time? Why don't we eat a large meal at midday and something lighter in the evening?

In many cases, the difference on both sides is economics, more than altruism or some higher social or cultural context. Downturn notwithstanding, Californians live in relative affluence, and we act in ways that Bolivians would find far beyond their means. Californians are, as a whole, very concerned about the environment, but we're settled in to our comforts. We're accustomed to drying laundry in a powered clothes dryer and driving cars. We have high hopes that we'll develop solar and wind energy and more efficient cars. Bolivians, likewise, act in ways that Californians would not find economical. Many Bolivian vehicles are older and emit dark smoke for lack of maintenance, but fewer people have cars, more people walk, and Bolivian minibuses and taxis going longer distances seek out a full load of paying passengers before going anywhere. A sweater saves not only money on heat but often heating a home at all. It is less costly in Bolivia to buy locally grown, fresh foods than to buy packaged, processed or fast foods.

Even accounting for the aging, smoking vehicles, I'd imagine that the typical Bolivian comes in far ahead of the typical Californian in terms of overall impact on the environment, carbon footprint, overall use of resources, and most other such measures, simply because energy and many other resources are costly.

I hope my hosts were interested in my accounts of California. I also hope they take them as curious tales of a foreign land and not necessarily as ideals to emulate. I think people in La Paz have things pretty well figured out, already.

Huevos batidos

2010-01-19T13:14:00.001-08:00

Somebody asked me if I cooked while I was in Bolivia. I meant to cook pancakes and perhaps some other things. As it turned out, I spent most of my time either tasting foods that were cooked for me or doing something else (such as seeing the country). I never did make pancakes.

I did try one bit of cooking. There, as here, scrambled eggs are a common breakfast food. (It's not common in Italy. Some hotels serve scrambled eggs in an effort to cater to visitors from elsewhere, but I would advise visitors from elsewhere to choose anything besides eggs to eat in an Italian hotel.)

I tried my friend's scrambled eggs. They were good, but they were nothing like the scrambled eggs I make at home. Preparation can make a huge difference. One guest prepared scrambled eggs when he visited me at home, and although I watched him do it, I have never quite replicated his results. My Bolivian friend did several things I usually do differently, so the next morning that we ate eggs, I asked to cook them.

At his suggestion, I prepared three eggs, one for each person eating. I've done this many times at home, with reasonably consistent results. I preheated the pan (he did not). I diced and sauteed a small onion to add some flavor. I scrambled the eggs in a bowl before I poured them into the pan (he cracked his directly into the pan). I added salt, pepper, and a bit of leftover cheese.

My eggs came out differently than his eggs, naturally. "Like an omelet," he remarked. And they were tasty enough. But my eggs came out more like his eggs than my own eggs at home, and I don't know what the difference was. The color was lighter, and the consistency was all different. It might have been the pan (mine is heavier). It might have been that his is a propane stove (mine is natural gas). It might have been the altitude (I live at sea level). It might have been the eggs (likely fresher and more natural than the typical grocery store fare here in California).

He recalls hearing on a cooking show that, when cooking in a new place, an egg is a good place to start to learn how things will behave. After this experience, I think it is good advice. I never did get around to making him pancakes, but for him to eat my pancakes, he may have to visit my kitchen.

¡Vendame, Casera!

2010-01-18T16:53:00.000-08:00

I saw both less and more of Bolivia than I saw of Argentina. I stayed for about the same amount of time in each place. In terms of things like area, distance, and number of landmarks, I certainly saw more of Argentina. I took fewer photos of Bolivia than of Argentina. On the other hand, I saw more of Bolivia in the sense of being closer to it. In Argentina, I stayed in hotels and hostels; In Bolivia, I stayed with a friend I know.

The consequence of staying with this friend is that I got to eat the things he knows and loves, and met many of the people he knows. Besides trying the local restaurants he knows and prefers, I ate many meals at his home, the same things he and his family would probably eat were I not there. For other foods, my friend knows people both in La Paz and in Coroico who sell good foods. Note I say people and not stores. We returned from Coroico and the rest of the family asked if we had eaten Doña Juana's empanadas. We had. She sells them at one corner of the main plaza in Coroico, and they are very tasty. Empanadas are bread filled with cheese and sometimes meat, and either baked or fried. They are a simple enough food, but they vary widely depending on whose hands make them and what local ingredients go in. Doña Juana seems to excel both at the blend of ingredients and at what she does with them.

A casera is a preferred vendor. She (and they are usually women) knows you if you live there, and in exchange for your loyalty, she makes sure you get the best of the products she has to offer. In a world where many products are home grown or made by hand, this can make quite a difference. As a customer, your loyalty makes a difference to her, too. She may get quite upset and even refuse to sell to you if she hears you have been buying from her competition.

The woman in the photo is named Dora. She sells sweaters, ponchos, jackets hats, gloves, and leg warmers on a steep side street in the maze of stalls open daily in the streets of La Paz. Without following my friend, I doubt I would ever have found her booth. (I'm a poor navigator, but without following my friend, I don't know if I could even find my way back.) One of Dora's machine-made sweaters sells for about US$7. The hand-made ones sell for a little more, but not really that much more, considering how long it takes to hand knit a sweater. Hats, gloves (which unfortunately were all too large for me), leg warmers, and scarves all fetch considerably less, perhaps a dollar or two each. She also sold me a large ball of hand-spun alpaca yarn for about US$4. (A smaller, machine spun hank of alpaca yarn in the U.S. recently was priced at $30.) If these prices seem low to you, keep in mind that Dora has many neighbors who sell much the same thing. Then consider that my friend was on my case nearly every time I bought something like this for not haggling down whatever outrageous first offer was presented.

Many things in Bolivia are made and sold on a Bolivian price scale. Much food, clothing, and most basic household supplies do, in fact, cost money that is roughly in proportion to a Bolivian wage scale. Some things, such as computers and air travel, cost as much or more in Bolivia as they do in the first world, and in fact I found myself describing the experience of air travel to various people there who have never tried it.

I don't have a proper source for this figure, but my friend informed me that around 12% of the population of Bolivia has a regular job. The rest earn money at small, individual enterprises, such as Dora's sweater stand and operating the minibuses that ferry people around the city.

For readers who live in the so-called first world, please contrast the idea of a casera with our rough equivalent: a brand name. We use a series of industrial processes (including farming and food processing) to ensure the consistency of our foods and other products. We call the sum of these processes a product, and we assign it a brand name so that we can find it again. In lieu of loyalty or personal relationships, we are guided to products claiming to be superior by product placement deals in stores or paid advertisements in weekly sales circulars that arrive whether we want them to or not. Colgate or McDonald's or Reebok may sell certain sort of "how" and perhaps a particular kind of "what" (after all, others sell toothpaste, hamburgers, and shoes), but they are anything but a "who". Can you name even the person who rang up your last purchase? Presumably, you saw him or her face to face. Almost certainly you cannot name any person involved in producing your last purchase.

So, I apologize if I troubled anyone in Bolivia by not haggling or surprised anyone by buying quite as many sweaters as I did, but Dora has a charming manner and a charming smile. Her sweaters are wonderfully warm and comfortable, and she helped me patiently to find the ones that fit me well (Bolivians are built smaller than most U.S. department stores cater to). Besides, I don't know just when I'll have the chance to come back.

Breathless

2010-01-17T06:55:00.000-08:00

La Paz and its surrounding regions range from about 3200m to about 4400m above sea level. (Nearby Illimani, which was shrouded in clouds the whole time I was there, reaches 6,438m). For those of us who dwell in valleys near the ocean, there is no particularly good way to arrive at such a place. I hiked up California's Mount Lassen a couple of years ago and despite about three miles of huffing and puffing, I saw only an altitude that would probably not get me into La Paz at all. A ballooning bag of potato chips went only as far up as the base of Lassen where the parking lot is. Water boils at 87C at these altitudes.

I spent a few days before my trip in the mountains in northern California, a higher altitude than home but a far lower altitude than my destination. I do not know whether it really helped very much. Despite flying into El Alto, I did not have any trouble with altitude sickness as such. At least, I didn't have a headache or feel queasy.

I did feel very out of breath for the first few days, any time I tried to exert myself. Many of the streets are quite steep. Some sidewalks and many alleys consist of stairs, and my friend's house is up a hill and then some stairs, meaning that it is a long, steep climb from the nearest place the taxi could leave us.

The first few days, I accepted help carrying luggage. I packed as lightly as I could, but I packed books and gifts for my friend. Walking slowly wasn't too difficult, but climbing anything meant stopping every flight or two of stairs to catch my breath, and even catching my breath took longer.

People who live in La Paz and elsewhere in the Andes and the Altiplano develop larger hearts and lungs to compensate, but I think even people who live there all the time still tire sometimes.

By the end of three weeks there, I was making it up the hill to my friend's house all in one go. I even tried racing him up it once. He won, but I think I put in a pretty good attempt, for a foreigner and flatlander.

Flying first class from the third world

2010-01-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start with the end of my trip and work (as usual) in no particular order.

Flying out of La Paz, I had taken my seat well back in coach when one of the flight attendants asked me if I'd like to change seats. The reason went whizzing past in Spanish a bit faster than I could keep up, but it amounted to somebody wishing to sit with a travel companion, I think. The upshot was that they moved me to first class.

The trip home was in three pieces, a short hop from La Paz to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, a much longer flight from Santa Cruz to Miami, and then, after customs and immigrations and another trip through U.S.-based security screenings, the usual cross-country hop of about 5 hours between Miami and San Francisco. I changed seats again in Santa Cruz, but from La Paz to Miami, I ended up flying first class.

Good deal, right? Well, sort of. The food was better, if a little too ample after a trip like that, and as glad I was not to be eating Airline Chicken Product (isn't it wonderful what they're doing with plastics nowadays?), I felt a bit rushed by the pace at which the flight attendants hustled the Warm, Mixed Nuts off of the tray to bring out the Seasonal Green Salad, and so on. I chose the chicken picante (not so picante, at least not in the wake of llajwa) and puree of yuca. If you've never tasted yuca, it's not unlike potatoes, whether fried or mashed. Dessert was ice cream with hot fudge sauce, also pretty plainly from the Bolivian end of the trip. (The flight crew, incidentally, hailed from Argentina and Chile.)

I'm sure I'll also be in a very small (literally) minority for preferring the size of coach class seats, but I'm not a very tall being, and even with a first-class, extra large pillow behind me, my carry-on luggage did double duty as a footrest.

Unjustified bellyaching aside, the thing that felt wrong about it was that I'd just come from a country where most of the population does not drive, or have a car, or have a washing machine. Water is heated only at the shower head, if it is heated at all (dishes and laundry and hands are all washed in cold water). Houses are not heated, and in the mountains and the altiplano, that choice is certainly not the result of mild, tropical temperatures. It's the result of the fact that many people live on something like US$100 per month. Goods that can be produced there readily (corn, potatoes, fabrics, and so on) are generally proportionally cheaper than they would be here, but many items (computers and plane tickets, to name a couple) are not any cheaper than they would be in the developed world. In some cases, they're even more expensive.

The unscheduled shuffle to first class also had the result that I was among other first-world passengers. I don't think I've met a lot of good friends by accidentally sitting next to them on an airplane, but if there was one thing I really loved about Bolivia, it was the people I met there, and I think I would just as soon have spent that last few hours among people who had lived on the other end of that voyage.

It's good to be home, but I think I'll see my world differently after this trip.

Holiday music

2009-12-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

There are probably fewer than 100 really standard Christmas songs in the world. The ones that truly stick are very simple tunes, things that non-musical, drunk relations can approximately remember and sing, with moderate ranges and few accidentals. Large books of 100+ Christmas standards seem to end up resorting to nonstandard songs. The standard songs get repeated endlessly in stores and shopping centers around this time of year.

I probably also dislike Christmas music more than most people because I've played lots of it. Anyone who plays music invariably ends up in a holiday concert or two, and because most standard Christmas tunes are relatively short and simplistic, they get crammed together into cheesy medleys, often with jarring key and tempo changes. The only other challenges to playing such pieces in a group are agreeing with the others in the group as to how many times to repeat the choruses, and not getting too bored rehearsing them.

A couple of years ago, Scott and I were in Italy around the holidays. On the whole, it was a great trip. All the churches, big and small, and all the towns put up elaborate creches and try to outdo each other. Venice also had a gorgeous Murano glass tree in the main square, lighted from inside. And because it's not really the tourist season, it's less crowded at the major landmarks, which also suited us fine.

There were also lots of buskers in Italy, folks on street corners playing music, hoping for tips. From Pompeii to Milan, they all played Jingle Bells, which has even fewer notes than most and requires no particular talent or finesse. One particularly dreadful rendition was from a saxophonist honking it loudly in one train car, then the next. It was getting on my nerves, so I told Scott that we should tip the first guy who was playing something besides Jingle Bells.

It was towards the end of our trip from south to north that we crossed one of the larger bridges in Venice. At the top of the arch, at night, in the cold, was a violinist playing Silent Night, decently well. Scott pointed out that he wasn't playing Jingle Bells, and we tossed a coin in his case.

Selling thrift

2009-12-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

These folks are selling "high frugality dish towels." In case the link vanishes someday, the attached screenshot will enlarge if you click on it.

I'm basically in favor of the sentiments printed on these dish towels: drink tap water, compost, grow and cook your own food at home. I generally do these things already, and have for years.

But did you see the price? They want $45 for the set of four dish towels. Doesn't that strike you as something less than frugal? Even after we grow the cotton in an environmentally responsible manner and pay somebody, somewhere fair wages to spin and weave and sew it (presumably by machine), doesn't $12 strike you as a bit much for a dish towel?

Here is my idea of a frugal kitchen towel: all those already in my drawer. They came from wherever they came from, but I'm sure they're all at least three or four years old. I plan to keep on using them for quite some time to come. I may even mend small holes. I won't replace them to be trendy or to look good in my kitchen. They're still dish towels, and as far as I'm concerned, they look fine in my kitchen already. I will continue to wash and reuse them and avoid using paper towels, and if ever they reach the point where they're just too stained or full of holes to be worth continuing to use in the kitchen, I will relegate them to rag duty and go on using them for rags. When I get to that point, I may read the label to see where they came from, but I don't think I'll pay $12 a towel for cutesy designer ones.

NaNoWriMo inspiration

2009-11-09T16:04:00.000-08:00

If you'd like to read the very first part of this year's novel, there is an excerpt here under Novel Info although the site is sometimes slow to respond during November.

A little over a year ago, I went with Scott to see author Brandon Sanderson speak at a bookstore nearby. For those who don't know him, Brandon Sanderson authored, among other things, Elantris and Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. So far, I have managed to read only the latter. Brandon Sanderson also has the amazing but daunting job of finishing the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. It is the work that will probably make his other works more famous.

Sanderson was not the only author in attendance that evening. David Farland also attended, read an excerpt, and spoke about his writing process. After both had spoken and people came up to get books signed, David Farland had spoken to the handful of people who were interested and was still sitting there as Brandon Sanderson continued shaking hands and signing books. Since there was no line, I decided to talk to David Farland.

November was approaching, so I asked if he had heard of National Novel Writing Month. He had. I asked him what he thought of it. He said he liked the idea. (One of the hardest thing about writing a full-length novel is getting going to do it. The plot gets a bit stuck, the inner critic gets started complaining about what a mess you've made already, and Chapter Two never quite gets written. NaNo makes it a race, so there is motivation to press on even if things are not going exactly according to plan.)

He asked if I was going to write that year (2008). I told him I had written in 2006. I got to 50,000 words. I don't think I'd spend another minute on it, and I don't think I'd print out the manuscript if I needed to prop up the too-short leg of a sofa. Brandon Sanderson also described writing five "practice" novels that he will never publish before even attempting to publish one.

David Farland smiled and said, "Yes, but you learned something, didn't you?"

He was exactly right. I wrote in 2008, and while the result was far from perfect, it is something I could envision revising and showing at least to friends. It was also a lot easier. I picked an easier premise, planned the plot a little bit better, and generally had more fun with it. This year, so far, has proved even easier in all those respects.

I may never publish a novel, but at least I will learn what it's like to write one, what is involved in the process, and several things to do differently next time.

Greeks and Leeks

2009-11-08T00:40:00.000-08:00

I went to the farmer's market today, and as I was buying some plums, the vendor in the next booth was talking a blue streak about how expensive the war was and how much longer his leeks were than any you'd find in stores. He was brandishing one of these leeks at potential customers, and it was about two feet long.

He was proclaiming that he and his veggies were from "San Guan Bautista" and I was thinking that his couldn't possibly be a Spanish accent, or he'd know how to pronounce that, and it wasn't quite Italian, either, although he sort of looked like he might be.

I asked him where he was from, originally. Greece, he said. Did I know where that was? I was, in fact, aware of such a place. I could pick it out on a map, and I even recall visiting once, but he proceeded to explain it to me, anyway. And then the rant shifted to how England had taken all the valuable antiquities, but they might maybe give some of them back if Greece builds a big, new building for them. (Being vocal and opinionated is a favorite pastime of many older Greek men.)

I explained to him that I'm cooking for only myself and I really have no use for long leeks. By the time I cut up one of his enormous leeks, I'd have six days' worth of leftovers before I added a single other thing to the soup.

I was still standing there, clutching my bag of veggies, trying to stand aside of the fire hose of rants, halfway listening, and taking in the expressions on his neighbors' faces, when two women walked up and asked the price of broccoli. He told them, and they must have taken him for Italian, because they said "grazie" as they turned to retreat.

I corrected them, "ευχαριστώ". I'm sure they didn't get it, but he repeated, "yes, ευχαριστώ πολύ", and went right back to ranting in English without even bothering to ask if I knew any more Greek or how come I knew the word, or anything.

Perhaps if I can manage it, I'll try asking him the price of onions-or-something next week, in Greek, and see what language comes back with the answer. Something tells me, though, that if I convince him to start speaking Greek, convincing him to stop is going to be even harder.

A long bus trip to Salta

2009-11-01T23:18:00.000-08:00

I did most of my trips within Argentina by air, simply because it is faster, but I arrived to Salta by bus. I think many people who live in Argentina do much of their traveling this way because it is cheaper than flying. In any case, it is very well planned.

The cama buses are designed for sleeping during long trips, and the trips themselves seem to be designed with sleeping in mind. The bus terminal is impressive. It has the feel of an airport inside, with lots of people coming and going, snack stands, shops, and so on. Instead of gates it has bus stalls lining one side of the loop outdoors. There are perhaps 80 or 100 stalls in the bus terminal in Buenos Aires. I suspect most of the smaller terminals have fewer stalls than this. The ticket doesn't say "Stall 32" but "Stall 30-35," meaning somewhere in this range, and that's generally close enough.

They had something set up that looked a bit security-ish, but they didn't appear to be checking much of anything. I showed the person there my ticket and he didn't seem too interested. He just shooed me through the door, out to the stalls, which are all connected. (Speaking excellent English is occasionally an advantage in convincing some officials that a conversation should be a short one.) Within about five stalls of the right bus turns out to be quite sufficient in finding the right bus.

Checking luggage consisted of handing the suitcase in question to the person standing by the back of the bus, who did take a look at the ticket and try to load the last stop's luggage first.

The bus is quite well-equipped. Quite a few bus companies compete for business, and I think it helps to have nice amenities. The cama buses cost a bit more, but the seats are larger (frankly too large for me) and recline further. The seat in front has a leg rest that folds out. It doesn't become a flat bed, but it's still fairly comfortable for sleeping, which is good because it's about a 20 hour trip from Buenos Aires to Salta.

There is also a bus attendant, who acts like a flight attendant. The next time you're on an expensive, domestic airline flight that refused to check your bag without an extra fee and didn't include more than sodas, consider this. The bus to Salta included meals. There's a lap tray with reliefs for the knees and raised edges so nothing goes sliding off.

They served a late-afternoon tea around five in the evening. Even once I convinced the bus attendant that perhaps Spanish would work, I couldn't convince him of, "nothing with caffeine," so he brought me a little bit of tea to go with my alfajor and the other cookie.

Around 9:30 or 10:00pm, just as I was starting to think that the tea was a little bit slim and beginning to ponder the granola bar I had tucked into my purse, the attendant came around with dinner. There was a salad of some sort, followed shortly by a foil tray full of pasta with tomato sauce and cheese, and some sort of little sweet. It was better than anything I've ever had on an airplane in the U.S.

There were a couple of movies along the way. I ignored one movie, in favor of my book. The one I watched (I've forgotten the title) was not a great one. I ended up following the subtitles in Spanish because the English audio was turned so low I couldn't really make out the words. The attendant made a point to explain to me (once he was convinced that I'd get it if he spoke slowly) that one of the other videos was Salteño music and dance. I watched parts of that one.

Bedtime was comfortable, and I managed to sleep most of the night, except that the stops woke me up. As I learned from another traveler later on, it's possible to get robbed without even leaving a bus. People did enter our bus selling magazines and other items. I'm a bit surprised the bus company tolerated it, but evidently they either tolerated it or turned their backs long enough. I'm glad I woke up at least a little at the several stops. They were usually signaled by the bus getting off the highway to lumber across town.

The morning meal consisted of a couple of packaged pastries and another drink, simple but good. And sometime shortly after noon, I arrived in the bus depot in Salta, collected my bag, found a restroom, and requested a taxi at the taxi stand.

The person behind the counter at the hostel had a paper map, a recommendation for a restaurant for lunch (a huge meal with more individual attention than I really needed for about $4; things are cheaper in Salta than Buenos Aires), and various suggestions of what to see around town. He explained it all in Spanish, and it all made sense.

It's a beautiful part of the country, and I'm very glad I went. I'm also glad I tried the bus, once.

An international exchange

2009-10-11T21:26:00.000-07:00

It happened one evening in Tigre (photo) and again on a Saturday afternoon in Salta. I happened across a pair of guys juggling in a park. They weren't passing the hat, just passing equipment, practicing their juggling.

I watched them for awhile, and tried to wait until they were between patterns. Then I did something that women tourists probably don't do too often. I asked if I could juggle, too. They were a little surprised, I suppose, but they gladly offered me the use of their equipment to see what I could do.

I'm not the greatest juggler in the world, and I was pretty out of practice, but I can keep three balls and (usually) three clubs in the air, and do a couple of extra things with them, and in both places, I ended up teaching a couple of tricks. My Spanish isn't really equipped to teach juggling, so we all fumbled along in some mixture of Spanish and English and gesture. Words like "inside" and "outside" and "here" and "sooner" all served well. However we managed it, I'm glad we did. It was an opportunity

They all had clubs. One had very dirty professionally-made balls; the other three had tired tennis balls filled with rice or sand and taped over. (Tennis balls alone are too light and bouncy to juggle comfortably.) The fellow in the photo above had torches, of course, and he let me try them, too. It had been a very long time since I had last juggled torches, but I managed it a little bit.

Lost in the Subte

2009-10-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

During the first week or so of my trip, there were people hanging around from the conference, and I mostly got from here to there by finding somebody who was going somewhere interesting and following along. Scott was the sort of person who could get off a train somewhere in Italy and turn the right direction. I'm not.

The first day I ventured out by myself, I decided to make my way across town to the MALBA, a modern art museum well to the northwest of where I was staying. Following my trusty, little street map (purchased at a bookstore in California), I hopped on a train, and headed for a dotted line. The line was labeled 'H', and there is a subway line named that, so I thought that was where I was going.

I got off at the station to transfer to H, and wandered around reading signs for a good, long time. It's possible to get from any one Subte station to any other on a single $1.10 ticket, so I was taking care not to exit any turnstiles, but some of the tunnels between stations run for a block or two underground.

There was a subway official standing there, monitoring the turnstiles I was not exiting, and he must have seen me looking exceedingly lost. He asked me where I was going. This was one of the times when my Spanish wasn't quite working at full speed, but I explained which station I thought I was going to, and he assured me I could not go that way. I showed him my street map. It turns out the planned H line only runs south from A, not north. My street map had the entire planned route as a dotted line.

In the process of explaining all this to me, the subway official decided he did not like my map. It is, he explained, a street map, and what I needed was a subway map. He fished around for awhile in the little pouch he was carrying and pulled out a pocket-sized copy of the official Subte* map. I had seen this map advertised in several of the Subte stations, but others from the conference who had asked about getting one were told that they were unavailable. Apparently, the trick is to find the right official at the wrong station and be hopelessly lost.

He explained where I should go, which was most of the way back to where I had begun and then onto another train, and I wandered off down the ramp. It turned out to be the wrong ramp, leading to some other train. He actually followed me down the ramp, turned me around, and walked me to the correct ramp. I'm pleased to report that I made it to the museum successfully (if later than planned) on my own, and didn't get lost on the Subte again at all after that. The new map served me well for several more trips out.

Now, for some reason, when I was out on my own, people came up to me to ask directions. It happened at least half a dozen times. I'm sure that if the words to explain that I wasn't from there didn't get the point across, the accent surely did. But the very last time I took the Subte in Buenos Aires, somebody getting on the train asked as I was getting off where the train went. I showed them my street map (not the one the official had given me; it was quite usable once I knew how to read it), and I in fact pointed them to the right train. They asked where I had gotten the map, and all I could tell them was, "from a bookstore in California."

There's one more postscript to this story. The wiki community includes various train aficionados, several of whom expressed jealousy (or at least interest) regarding my copy of the unavailable Subte map they had seen advertised. So I attempted to scan it. It is a little too large for the bed of my scanner, so I fiddled around scanning it in sections. I had only started to fiddle with the possibility of sticking the sections back together when I discovered the inscription about the Subte website. If you'd like to see a very nice, complete copy of the official map, you need only look here.

*Subte is short for "subterráneo".

A few awkward restaurant visits

2009-10-04T00:42:00.000-07:00

The first time I ate a meal alone in Argentina, it was stranger than the other times I had dined there. I wandered into a restaurant at lunchtime and...nothing happened. The waiters did not come greet me, or ask me how many were dining. They just sort of stared. It seemed to happen whenever I dined alone. I found my own table and sat down there, and they proceeded to bring me a menu.

I ordered the hamburguesa. As I waited for the order to come, I saw that I was the only woman in a rather crowded restaurant (I still haven't figured out why, but other women did come in later). What came was a pair of patties with nothing on them, and a pile of fries. No buns, no lettuce, and so on. To order a hamburger as we know it, it's necessary to order the hamburguesa completa.

The napkins are different in restaurants in Argentina. If they bring you a fabric napkin, it's just the same as here, but the paper napkins used at sandwicherías and parillas (grills) are small, tissue paper affairs. They're not very absorbent, except when it comes to grease. They do work very well on grease, but it may take two or three to get the job done.

In fancier restaurants, the kind with cloth napkins, I often received bread with no bread plate. I guess I was just supposed to scatter crumbs all over the tablecloth, or at least that's what I ended up doing. After the meal, I always had to ask for the check. The waiters assume folks want to hang around and talk, otherwise.

The part I missed until I got back is that I was expected to seat myself, which is not the norm in a sit-down restaurant here at home. I felt like a bit of an intruder plunking down in any old seat, but that was exactly what they expected me to do. I only figured it out by asking somebody who lives there, after I got home. Next time I'll know.

A tale of two taxistas

2009-09-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

I don't think the blogs for this trip are going to be in order. It's not like anything else here is, anyway. (The photos in the flickr set are approximately in order, and yes, they are still coming as I have time.)

Gustavo is the taxista, or cab driver, who collected and then adopted us at the Iguazú airport. I visited Iguazú with a German couple from the conference who speak excellent English, German (of course), and a tiny bit of rudimentary restaurant Spanish. Since Gustavo speaks only rudimentary English, I got the front seat so I could translate.

We spent two days there, flying in one morning and flying out the following evening, spending one night at the Esturion hotel in the town of Iguazú, by far the nicest place I stayed during the entire trip. We asked Gustavo to take us to the hotel, so that we could drop off our bags, but he suggested that we go straight to the park. Now, there are places in the world (and parts of Argentina) where it is not terribly wise to let a taxi driver take you anywhere that you did not ask to go, but Gustavo knew how much time we should plan on spending on each side of the park, and it was late morning when we arrived. He continued driving down the road as he pulled out a tourist map of the park and started pointing at and marking things we should see that day. (The park, the falls, and the wildlife there are spectacular, but they are best described in photos; please see the flickr link to the right.)

We followed his advice about seeing the Brazil side, taking a boat tour there (I think he gets a kickback from bringing visitors, because he was intent on taking us all the way to the ticket office) and then taking the park bus up the road to the pathways close to the falls. He picked us up only fashionably late at the gate where he promised to meet us in the evening. We declined his suggestion about a rather costly dinner show to attend, but we did take a walk around the town of Iguazú on his advice, and he showed us the viewpoint that looks out over the rivers that separate Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

He picked us up at the hotel promptly at 9am the following day, as we had agreed, and again scribbled on a tourist map where we should go in the park and how much time to allow. He suggested meeting at the park gate at 5pm for a 6pm flight. He was right again on that count; the Iguazú airport is 10 minutes from the park and it's tiny. Domestic flights in Argentina also tend to include security checks that are far quicker and more straightforward than in the U.S. On the way to the airport, he had one more idea that wasn't in our plan, and he was exactly right again. He made a rather inelegant U-turn across a mostly empty road to show us some toucans he spotted in a tree, since we hadn't yet seen any in the park. We paid him kind of a lot (at least by Argentinian standards), but he saw us through two full days, and I doubt our visit would have been as complete without his guidance.

I'll mention one other taxista I met in Argentina. I spent less time with him, only about 20 minutes as he drove me from the hostel to the airport in Salta, and I didn't get his name. That conversation was also in Spanish, which I speak with an accent that usually prompts the question, "Where are you from?" I explained that I am from California, and he started asking me about California. California is not something I can explain in 20 minutes, but I explained that the culture was different, that the driving was certainly different, and so on. (Perhaps it was because of this conversation; this driver was the most cautious of any I rode with. Argentinian drivers, especially taxistas, are a very competitive lot.)

He also mentioned that he had never traveled much. He earned perhaps twenty pesos taking me to the airport, which is about US$5, and the cost of some things (including computers and long-distance travel) does not come down just because of weak currency; they are simply beyond the means of most people. The part that surprised me was that when we entered through the airport gates, he said that he had never been inside the airport grounds before, at all. In any case, I hope he also enjoyed his trip.

A word about the language

2009-09-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Argentina as of this morning. I'm jet lagged, and I chose not to save too much water when showering today. I'm gradually starting to work my way through everything that has accumulated in my absence: laundry, mail, unmowed grass, and just shy of two thousand photos. I promise I will get to blogging about the trip itself, and putting up more photos very soon. (Those more interested in photos should keep an eye on the flickr link on the right side of the screen.)

There are many stories to tell of a trip such as this, people, places, reactions. For now, I would like to provide just a bit of background and context regarding my command (or lack thereof) of Spanish, because that aspect has colored the entire trip.

I know Spanish, at least sort of. To say that one knows a second language is always a relative thing. I think I can safely say that I know considerably more Spanish than most American high school student, since I started as an American high school student. I got good grades, which reflected more an ability to do grammar exercises than anything like confidence or command of the language.

I got a variety of reactions and results speaking Spanish (or trying to) with people in Argentina. If I can sit down with someone one-on-one in a fairly quiet place, I can carry on an understandable if not necessarily eloquent conversation. At the same time, Argentinian Spanish is rather different than the mainly-Mexican Spanish I usually hear on the radio at home in California, and when a waiter or shopkeeper mumbles some unfamiliar, short phrase nothing whatever goes in. Thus, I ate entire meals in Spanish, but at the same time convinced a number of waiters that it was time to attempt some English. Slang, especially anything regional to that part, is pretty much hopeless.

Mostly, though, the people I encountered were very encouraging, slowing down when I asked them to, and quite a few sort of "adopting" me, ranging from other visitors to folks on the street to hotel staff. One subway official detected that I was hopelessly turned around and handed me a map, then followed me down the wrong ramp and saw to it that I started down the right one. Just about everyone of whom I asked an earnest question (however awkward my Spanish) took the time to point me in the right direction, advise, or support my journey, in large and small ways. I think that, even more than scenery, was what made the trip so much fun.

Hold the ketchup

2009-09-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

Buenos Aires is a city of many talents, with much to recommend it, but should you have occasion someday to visit, I suggest you skip the ketchup.

I finally had the opportunity to meet in person on this trip with the Bolivian friend from online whose fault it is that my Spanish is (usually) functional. We had lunch in a restaurant and he ordered the Milanesa, a piece of meat pounded flat and breaded. This dish came with fries (papas fritas), and my friend began by dipping them into mayonnaise.

I explained that the North American habit is to dip fries into ketchup, and he seemed puzzled by this, but there was ketchup on the table, so he tried some. Then he made a face and declined to continue. I stole a fry from him and tasted it myself, and found that it was indeed rather terrible. Remember the old Pace commercial in which the cowboys are shocked to find that their brand X salsa is made in New York City, rather than someplace where people know what it's supposed to taste like? It was like that.

There is far more to report about this place and this trip than the bad ketchup, but I think most of the rest should wait until I can post photos to go along. I'm taking notes, in the meantime. At least the blogs should only get better from here.

Tribal knowledge

2009-08-21T16:23:00.000-07:00

This tale took place in a company where I worked for a while, quite some time ago. It could be quite a few companies. If by chance you are a former colleague who has kept in touch, this most likely is not about you.

My task was to reproduce an existing machine that this company had built many years before my visit there. For the first time in about a decade, a customer wanted some more of these systems, and the company never really had complete documentation or control over the hundreds or thousands of parts that made up the machines. There were a few ten-year-old drawings for some of the large parts and partial parts lists for a succession of versions.

To make up the difference, someone found some old machines in storage, so we could go measure parts and do some reverse engineering, if we could figure out which features we needed to copy (no two were alike). It turned out, though, that most of the missing information came from a senior technician (I'll call him A.) who had worked at the company for long enough to have assembled the machines in the first place. Long hours and a lack of recognition (real or imagined; I'd guess some of both) had made A. a bit surly and cynical, but a kind word or a bit of friendly commiseration could usually get the answers flowing.

A. remembered when the company had had a machine shop on its premises, along with a full team of machinists and welders. That shop was part of the reason that the machine had been poorly documented: the shop knew how the parts went together and they customized them however they needed to to make them fit. I'd walk down to the shop floor with a parts list or legacy drawing in hand and ask about some part, and A. would tell me why they were all wrong and declare that they weren't doing that anymore. Then he'd usually fish around in his toolbox or some other hiding spot and produce a hand sketch of the correct dimensions, squirreled away since last time anyone had asked. However rough the sketch, it was almost always right. I'd take my notes and measurements and proceed back upstairs and add this "new" information to the model we were building.

There were other things that A. knew that apparently had escaped the notice of the rest of the company, and most particularly anyone in charge. One of these things was how parts actually came in. One part always needed a threaded hole either cleaned out or enlarged (I've forgotten which) every single time it came in. A proper, clear specification for that part would have stipulated that the hole have a clean thread of the correct size, and a receiving inspection should have caught out-of-specification parts and returned them for rework. As it was, A. ended up chasing most or all of these holes with a tap. But that was just one part.

Almost all the parts this company ordered came meticulously cleaned and wrapped in many layers of packaging, a result of the standard drawing notes on all the drawings that did go out. These drawing notes referred to a numbered manufacturing specification, which nobody read before rubber-stamping the standard notes onto every part drawing that went out.

This level of cleanliness is warranted if the part is very high precision and likely to be used in certain sorts of applications, and this company and even this machine included such precision parts. In practice, though, many of their machines were being assembled not in a cleanroom but in a warehouse environment with no air cleanliness controls at all. Many parts also don't need to be cleaned to this degree. A floor mounting bracket will simply get dirty again, and it should never come near the parts that need to stay that clean, anyway. The company, then, was paying extra for the cleaning and packaging, and it was paying more still for an exasperated technician to peel off several layers of unnecessary packaging.

I did ask for and obtain permission to write some simplified drawing notes for parts like the floor brackets, but I doubt anything happened to the standards in the long term.

Superfluous

2009-08-18T11:12:00.000-07:00

I am not the first to comment on our habit of trying to ward off lawyers. People here place so many warnings on so many things nobody reads any of them anymore. It is already the subject of no shortage of spoofs. We post signs for everything we can think of and then pay teams of safety and legal experts to think of potential problems where none existed.

I don't claim that this one takes the cake or anything, but it still strikes me as a bit absurd that we no longer take it for granted that a literate adult can infer the safe use of a mundane, household object with no power source or moving parts (the photo should get bigger if you click on it):

Here's another useless warning I spotted recently. In this case, the hazard is real (unreinforced masonry does not fare at all well in earthquakes) but it's not at all clear what I am supposed to do about it. The building should be fine if the ground is not moving (which even in California is most of the time), and nobody seems to be suggesting closing it down.

The Satyr of Los Callejones of Coín

2009-08-13T22:50:00.000-07:00

This post is a departure from the usual format (if I have a usual format) in a couple of ways. It is fiction (or at least folklore), and it is not, originally, my writing. It my translation of this story. This work remains copyright 2008 Laura Flores Fernández. I post it here with her permission.

The strange story that I am going to tell you happened in Coín, a town in the province of Malaga, located at the center of the Guadalhorce Valley, surrounded by Monda, Guaro, Alozaina, Pizarra, Cártama, Alhaurín el Grande and Mijas. Located 30km from Marbella and 33 from Málaga, Coín constitutes a strategic location in this Andalusian province, since it is at the same distance from the Costa del Sol as from Antequera or the Serranía de Ronda.

What follows occured in the area of Los Callejones, corresponding to the municipal district, where the Grande river flows. The ancient Romans called it "el Sigiloso" because the light murmur that escaped the calm waters as they circulated on the banks.

For generations, my grandfather's family has always lived in Coín. My grandfather, like his grandfather before him, lived in a farmhouse in an orchard, in a group known among the people there as the Cortijon Benítez.

I still recall with nostalgia that, when I was a girl, I stayed in the Cortijo farmhouse during my summer vacations and every weekend that I could. I felt very at home there. Besides keeping my grandfather company, I loved to walk with my dogs and explore whatever new places the natural setting could offer. Satisfied as the days passed, my trips grew longer and I went farther.

One day, when the spirit of exploration led my steps toward the Los Callejones area, my grandfather sternly forbade me to go to that place. Curious, I asked him the reason and he answered me that it had to do with an evil place, a place inhabited by a demon. On seeing my pupils dilate, he told me to sit beside him and pay close attention to what he was about to tell me.

I sat down beside him and he began relating an old belief, that his father had once told him, according to which, at certain times during the seventeenth century, the witches of the Coín area and their neighbors had gone to that place to celebrate, under cover of the darkness of night, horrifying rituals and all manner of Satanic rites.

His father told him that the neighbors of Los Callejones were so frightened that they could not stand more such acts. The shrill screams and the strange lights that they perceived in the distance until all hours of the night were truly terrifying, a situation aggravated by a plague of strange illnesses for which the most expert doctors and healers had neither explanation nor cure. Under the circumstances, they decided to take the case before the authorities.

But to submit the state of affairs to any official scrutiny, it was necessary to apprehend a witch and bring her to trial.After no shortage of meetings, they agreed to resort to trickery: sending a handsome, good youngster to request a witch's presence in the village, on the pretense of expelling the evil eye from a neighbor. This he did, and once the witch arrived in the village, the a mob of the bravest men set on her to capture her. From Coín, she was taken before the tribunal of the Granada Inquisition, before which she was accused of having placed the evil eye on many surrounding neighbors, causing miscarriages in pregnant women, and turning the cows' milk sour.

All the inhabitants of the Los Callejones area went to Granada to testify against her and to learn the result of the hearing. The witch was condemned to death by burning at the stake, and everyone watched as her body was devoured slowly but surely by the fire. But as she was consumed by the flames, the people of the village heard the sorceress cast a curse, asking Beelzebub to punish the people of Los Callejones and their descendants for all eternity. With bloodcurdling screams, she asked the Prince of Darkness to send an executioner wrapped in goatskin, since the people of the village had so misjudged an innocent as to blame her and send her to her doom.

After telling me this legend, my grandfather told me that, when he was still a boy, he had spent a day with a friend of his named Carabantes to go to the town fair. His friend, to arrive at the village sooner, took a shortcut through the Los Callejones area, rather than follow his usual, somewhat longer route. When he went through that area, the donkey that was his mount gave indications of discomfort, as though it saw something that my grandfather's friend could not see, and started to bray like crazy, wanting to backtrack to the main road.

Suddenly, he noticed a small goat kid, bleating, lost, near a bush. My grandfather's friend caught the kid in his arms and lifted it onto the donkey. He had barely resumed his trip when he noticed that the little, defenseless animal that he carried in his arms was transforming itself into a fiery monster. First, starting with its legs, each moment longer; then, its talons and teeth, and finally, its horns, ever larger, twisted and sharp. It a time barely perceptible, that harmless kid had become an giant, black goat with long legs and eyes that glowed like the fires of hell.

When it finished its metamorphosis, what it presented before Carabantes was something like a cross between a man and a goat, which stood upright over its hind legs, leaving its front legs, with hooves as sharp as knives, free. My grandfather told me that Carabantes, even with all that stood before him, had the courage and valor to ask it, "Who are you?'

And the beast answered, "I am the Satyr of Los Callejones."

On hearing the beast speak, the poor man felt his heart pounding in his chest and, with all the courage he could muster, asked yet another question of the being that stood before him: "Why do you have those teeth and such long claws?

The beast answered him in a sarcastic tone, "Perhaps your poor mother doesn't have the same teeth as I do?"

After that brief exchange of words, Carabantes told my grandfather that the creature disappeared, vanishing in a dense, greyish mist with a strong odor of sulfur.

Shocked by the phenomenon he had just witnessed, he abandoned his donkey to run off into the wild night, and when he arrived at the village, he told my grandfather what had happened.

Seized with panic, that night he stayed in his aunt's house so as not to have to go home to his own. His entire body trembled and it seemed as though his eyes would leave their orbits at any moment.

Even now, the locals still recall the bad end he had. It's said that, the morning following the incident, dawn broke upon him dead, with an appearance of sheer terror. He wore an expression of indescribable panic, his face contorted; his hair turned white as the snow; and his eyes, open and protruding, seemed to watch all those present with a horrifying, fixed gaze.

Still, when night falls, I feel a bit of fear when I pass around the edges of that area. There are those who are sure they have heard some nights, in the dense darkness, the ballads of the Satyr of Los Callejones.

Aboard the U.S.S. Hornet

2009-08-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

My German friend's California visit ends later this week, so this was probably the last excursion together for this trip. Now I have to get back to real life and prepare for a trip of my own.

In Alameda, California, there is a World War II era aircraft carrier that has been turned into a museum. As one guest book comment earlier yesterday observed, "Don't wear heels." They have a good portion of the ship open to the public, with different levels accessible by the original, steep ladders.

We may not have explored every corner of the ship, but we arrived at around 10:30 and we left at about 4:30. After walking around the flight deck, we took a docent-led tour up into the "island," the ship's control tower and navigation unit. Visitors, especially the smaller ones, are invited to sit in the captain's chair. There's an excellent view from up there, one I was not tall enough to see without climbing up.

Most of the ship, though, is below the flight deck. The other docent-led tour was down into the engine room, and it also included such spaces as the galley and the brig. (A detachment of Marines aboard the ship controlled access to munitions stores and saw to it that time spent in the brig was unpleasant.) Some parts of the lower levels are open to visitors, including rooms full of the "racks" and small lockers that served as quarters for most of the enlisted men aboard.

The hangar bay and flight deck also serve as an aeronautical and aerospace museum. The U.S.S. Hornet was the ship that recovered a couple of the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 capsules, and the capsules and the quarantine trailer (a converted Airstream that was state-of-the-art in its day) are among the items displayed in the large hangar bay that forms the main level of the museum.

When we first began to plan the day, we were thinking in terms of something that involved less walking, since the trips to Sacramento on Friday and San Francisco on Saturday involved quite a lot of walking. We certainly missed on that count, but I'm glad we saw the ship. It's certainly not a run-of-the-mill museum, and we'll both have plenty of time when we're not together to rest our feet.

A trainy day in Sacramento

2009-08-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

The same visitor from Germany who wanted to see the San Andreas fault is still in California, and when he's not curious about local geology, he's interested in all things railroad. It was a remarkably cool day for Sacramento in summer at only about 85F (30C).

The plan was for both of us to take the train to Sacramento, getting on at our respective stops. I had never gone to that train station from this end of town, and it was perhaps too early a morning for me, so I missed it on this end and ended up driving, instead. As frustrating as it was to be on the wrong side of the road watching the train go by, I'm now glad I drove. It meant neither of us needed to rely on the train schedule to get home, and in any case, I met him and his train in Sacramento just before 10am.

Sacramento has an old-town section that's right near the river, and right near the train station. It also has the California State Railroad Museum, which I figured was a necessary trip for any serious train fan. It's an impressive museum, displaying an assortment of locomotives and cars. Visitors are invited to walk through an old Pullman car and a dining car with place settings from different railroads on each table. There are also stairs up into the cab of a large steam locomotive (my guest could probably tell you which one). It may be sturdy, thick metal, but the back of the cab is the front of the boiler, which the docent tells us is not so bad as long as the train is moving and the windows are open.

The smaller second floor displays model trains in a variety of sizes. There's actually one train on the second floor, too. They got it there with a crane, through a large window in the wall.

We stopped for lunch in Old Sacramento along the water and went back to a part of the museum that most visitors probably don't even know they miss. In the Big Four building (named for the four businessmen who helped underwrite the surveying and building of the western half of the Transcontinental Railroad), there is a hardware shop and gift shop. There's also a door that leads to a staircase and up to the second floor, where the Museum Library is housed. It's a bunch of old books that I wouldn't recommend it to parents of young children who just want to see big trains, but for a Wikipedian and train buff who takes an active interest in railroad timetables from 1870s, it's just the place. We spent perhaps an hour there, talking to a very helpful librarian, leafing through various old train directories and schedules, and even requesting something that was stored on another floor. The librarian dispatched a dumbwaiter in the building, followed it down (or up?) the stairs and sent the materials back in hinged cardboard boxes (much like bakery boxes, only not pink).

From there, we walked a few blocks to the capitol building, stopping briefly in the public library along the way. We turned a corner from the library and somebody coming the other way asked me if the library was close. I'm normally not the right person to give directions, and I don't know that area well, but they asked me the one question I could possibly have answered at that moment about navigating Sacramento, so I told them.

I have been to Sacramento before, but I had never been into the capitol building. I normally carry a Leatherman, but I left it at home yesterday in anticipation of visiting, and they do indeed screen visitors and their bags at the door. The capitol building is well equipped for visitors. Most of the hallways, the museum area, the galleries for both the senate and the legislature, and even the anteroom to the governor's office are all open. We followed a tour guide around for most of these stops and then went back through some of the areas that the tour didn't visit. It's a beautiful building with a lot of history, and I enjoyed seeing it.

I drove him back to the house where he was staying, since it was basically on my way. We stopped for buffalo burgers in Davis at the restaurant formerly known as Murder Burger, where we sat outdoors and watched two Amtrak trains and a freight train go past on the tracks nearby. We took a brief tour of the campus by automobile on our way out, nearly the only time I have ever tried to navigate the Davis campus by automobile.

War stories from the plumbing shop

2009-08-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

There's a plumbing shop just next door to the big chain home center here, and I go there whenever the home center comes up short on parts for my faucets, which seems to be most of the time for my faucets.

Last week I went in and requested a replacement hose for my pull-out kitchen faucet. The home center had a "universal" replacement with at least two additional fittings at each end, meaning six potential leaks. There was a customer in front of me in line, very confused about what needed to happen to repair a broken bathtub drain (the conclusion: call the landlord and let him deal with it). I think the guy behind the counter was relieved to have a patient customer with an easy, specific request, but he didn't happen to have the part in stock. He took down my name and number and promised to call when they got it.

He phoned me today and I returned to collect the hose. There was no one else in the store. My pen conked out mid-signature, and as I restarted with a different pen, I remarked that I could probably sign it "Mickey Mouse" and no one would ever even care. It being a slow day, he was inspired to share a couple of stories. He used to be in the military, and some admiral "got a feather up his tuckus" and put a picture of a chimpanzee on his ID card. As the plumber tells it, the good admiral proceeded to take this ersatz insignia onto every ship in the fleet without being challenged about it once. Needless to say, many people got taken to task about identification needing to match the people carrying it.

It was our hero's turn to guard the door when the admiral came around (I didn't get whether this was the same admiral), so he made a point to ask for ID, as he should for everyone to enter. For his trouble, he got an earful about how he should know who his commanding officer is and so on and so forth. His response, as he tells it, was, "Yes, sir, I do believe you, but may I please still see your ID?" The admiral proceeded to produce valid ID and proceeded on his way. He heard later from others that it was a good thing he stood his ground. He'd have gotten much more than an earful had he not.

I've never been in the military myself, so I shared a story I had read. I'm pretty sure I'm paraphrasing from a book called The Compleat Practical Joker. An enlisted fellow was frustrated with the amount of paperwork his job entailed. In addition to the heap of reports he routinely filed each week, he made up a report of his own and added it to the stack. His bogus report listed a count of the flies caught on the flypaper at either end of the mess hall. The result: those back at headquarters noticed the excess report and started wondering where every other unit's flypaper report was.

The Wiktionary type

2009-08-04T20:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't edited Wiktionary actively in awhile, but I think I may drift back to it eventually. For me, one distraction often leads to another, and back around.

There's something about Wiktionary that attracts a certain sort of people. Perhaps it's because I am such a person that I enjoy meeting the rest of us so much.

One evening, we happened to have a person from the Dutch Wiktionary and Wikipedia wander into the Wiktionary IRC channel. I don't really read Dutch, except that it resembles English in some spots. I looked up this visitor's user page in Dutch, and started putting together the colorful graphics in his user boxes, cognates, a couple of visits to a dictionary, and some plain old guessing. I gathered from these clues that our visitor mentioned the following traits:

He drank no alcohol.
He opposed the death penalty.
He was a fan of quantum mechanics.
He's an atheist.

Now, perhaps these characteristics are not that rare, but I think you would be at it awhile trying to find all four in one person by standing on a street corner asking random passerby.

I wasn't so sure of my Dutch, so I asked the visitor if I had understood those user boxes correctly, and I listed them in the channel. He confirmed that I had them right. I replied, "me, too". Then, in a channel with perhaps 12 to 15 people scattered all around the world, I got a chorus of "me, too"s. Allowing for a couple of people who did like the occasional beer, I think the total came to about five.

I think it takes a certain sort of person to write a dictionary in his or her free time. Whatever sort that is, I tend to identify with it pretty strongly. I'll be back, sooner or later.

Finding fault with a new friend

2009-07-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I get to meet somebody that I know from working on wiki projects. In a wiki, even a dozen contributors may be spread out all over the world. Sometimes they come to me during the course of a visit to California. Sometimes I go traveling and look up someone lives nearby.

This weekend's visitor, from Germany, asked whether he could see the San Andreas Fault. Despite having lived most of my life nearly on top of it, I could not identify it. I guess I just didn't think there was too much to see. So this time, instead of just showing my guest around the public library, we spent some time there. We asked the librarians to get some materials out of one of the locked cases (apparently a rare request; it took two of them to find the right key). Then we reviewed the different publications. Two of them were short booklets describing fault field trips north and south of San Fransisco. We photocopied various parts of these before returning them to the locked cases.

We drove up to Point Reyes yesterday, where they have an "earthquake trail" set up. Besides some rather pleasant grassland and a sequence of signs, the short, paved trail passes a segment of fence that crosses the fault and is split in two across it. The two halves are 16 feet apart, showing the distance the fault moved during the 1906 earthquake. We took photos of this fence and hiked around the area a bit, but that was not the most interesting part of the trip.

Because we knew what to look for, we drove up onto one of the vista points that dot northbound highway 280 and looked north toward Crystal Springs Reservoir and San Andreas lakes. (See here for the view from Google). The San Andreas runs under these bodies of water, in a nearly straight line.

Further north, the Point Reyes peninsula is west of the San Andreas. Here again, the water follows a nearly straight line that separates one tectonic plate from the next. Look at this link and follow the line of Highway 1 and the water from Stinson Beach to Dillon Beach. We drove along this road yesterday, too.

We also took a side trip on the way north to a lesser-known point of interest, the Bay Model in Sausalito, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. In the days before computer modeling, it was used to evaluate the effects of possible projects in the bay, such as dredging ship channels and even one plan to dam part of the bay to create a freshwater reservoir. We enjoyed a picnic lunch looking out on one of the marinas and across the bay.

If he had never asked the question, I would never have looked up any of that information, nor made the trip.

Peeking inside

2009-03-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

The most male-dominated professions in this country are things my size would probably not make me good at: pipe fitters, diesel and heavy equipment mechanics, and that sort of thing. Mechanical engineering, though, is still very male-dominated, and about the only disadvantage I've encountered to being a woman in the profession is that it still surprises people. I don't look like people's image of a mechanical engineer. Many people ask how I chose mechanical engineering. This is part of that story.

I wasn't the curious child who took apart everything in sight to see what was inside. That part of me came later, after I grew out of being quite so timid. Mostly, I think it came after somebody told me I could.

A large part of discovering I could was a class called Engineering 25 that I took during my freshman year of college. It wasn't mechanical-engineering specific, but I think those were the parts I liked best. The class was run as an experiment, with two sections. One had all women. The other was mixed. I was in the mixed class. The idea, partly, was to see whether women learned engineering differently in the absence of men. I'm sure the results and findings were published somewhere, but I don't recall seeing them.

I learned both less engineering and more engineering in that class than in any other class I took. I learned less engineering in the sense that we did not focus on equations or mathematics or textbooks in that class. We did not resolve the motions of things that were rotating on other rotating things, or calculate energy or entropy or moments of inertia.

I learned more engineering in the sense that I learned to try things. I think I still have a screwdriver somewhere that I got in that class, and I learned how to use it there. I am sure I knew how to loosen a screw before, but it didn't usually occur to me to do so, or (even more importantly) that doing so might be educational and fun. No user serviceable parts inside, right? Somebody's going to get angry, right? No. Not at all.

We took apart all sorts of things in that class. We took one-cylinder Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engines down to their component parts and reassembled them so they worked. We took apart small things, like pens and staplers, on our own and observed the inner workings of toilets and things around the house. We took apart small appliances (mostly alreadey dead) in pairs. My partner and I got down to the gears in an electric toothbrush, even though we had to smash the plastic case with a hammer to get in. We took apart larger appliances in larger groups. Ours was a cast-off washing machine.

We even took apart a junker car (one for the whole class), even cutting the frame with a welding torch. Have you ever tried smashing a windshield? Windshields and the tempered glass they use for rear windows in cars smash differently, and they're hard to break. I'd really like to know if those little infomercial car safety hammers do anybody any good. It took me several tries with a real hammer that had some heft, and I wasn't stuck in a car seat.

We also designed our own simple wooden projects with dowels, planks, and wood screws. Mine was a custom back pack rack for when I came home from a wet bike ride. I still have it, but I don't still bike in the rain. We all learned to solder and assembled our own multimeters from a kit. (I still have mine and occasionally even still use it.) We toured a new housing construction site and a wastewater treatment plant. We even took water samples and made cultures to look at under the microscope. Mine had the most interesting microbes of anybody's water in the class. It wasn't from a toilet or from the rather stagnant "creek" that ran through campus. It was the drinking water that had spent a couple days in someone's bird cage down the hall in the dorms.

Ever since, I've made a habit of opening covers, taking stuff apart, and trying things whenever an opportunity presents itself. Sometimes I put things back together so they work; other times I give up because something is not worth fixing, but I try to learn a bit about what's inside before I toss it. I got our current vacuum cleaner off somebody's curb and reengaged an idler pulley that had ceased to turn the brush roll. I repack bike bearings and do other maintenance when my bike needs it. I replace faucets, doorknobs and things around the house. And I try to carry that attitude and everything I've learned with me to work and use it in my designs.

Much of this article and this article grew out of what I learned and the attitude that grew in that class.

At the controls

2009-03-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

My brother-in-law, David, was borrowing this little Bobcat when we saw him this weekend. He didn't rent it. A friend of his owns it and lets David borrow it sometimes in exchange for maintenance work.

I think David might have been partly joking when he offered to let people at the party drive the thing, but I decided I wanted to try it and spoke up. We waited until the next day, when the rest of the party had gone home, and then went out to rearrange the ground in his back yard.

Here's David giving a bit of advice and me driving:

The "official" task was to take that little pile of dirt and go fill in a low spot, which I attempted at a rather timid, snail's pace, generally moving the wrong thing the wrong way before doing what I intended. I did avoid hitting a hose hookup, the one obstacle anywhere in the area, and I did get quite a bit more adept at it in just the ten minutes or so I shuttled dirt back and forth.

I won't be applying for any jobs as a heavy equipment operator anytime soon, but it was an awful lot of fun, and I'm glad I tried it. It's not the sort of thing I would usually do. I did not learn to drive until shortly after getting my bachelor's degree, for instance. And aren't these things for trained people who know what they're doing? But for ten minutes in an empty space I enjoyed it.

The controls are quite easy. There are two hand levers that independently change the speed of the wheels on either side, making it quite a nimble little machine. The left and right foot pedals lift and tilt the bucket, respectively.

It's not as visible as I'd like in the photo below, but these machines are not designed for short women. That's my little foot missing the foot pedal by a good 3-4 inches. I managed to operate it a little clumsily by scooting far forward in the seat and pointing my toes. If I had a job to do besides rearranging dirt, I'd probably strap some blocks of wood to the pedals, or something.

Anyhow, it was not my usual Sunday activity, which was probably why it was so much fun.

Another ungrounded (ahem!) tale

2009-03-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

Here's the reason I've had ditch-digging on my mind today. I've been thinking of summoning a big load of mulch to do some paths in my back yard and I started thinking through what would happen if a driveway full of mulch appeared tomorrow. There is no vehicle access to the back yard, meaning that I could move it into a pile in the back yard and then move it to where it needed to go, or I could move it directly where it needed to go. One of the things I want to do is make a path through my side alley, but before I put a path over that alley, I want to put in a pipe from the sprinkler system timer toward the back yard. Hence the trench.

The whole thing, about 15m long and the depth of my trenching shovel (give or take), took about 2 hours. It needs some of the loose stuff cleared out of the bottom (I'll let a length of pipe tell me where it's too shallow) and, of course, pipe laid and the trench refilled. The soil is dense clay. It was wet and sticking to the shovel, but because it was wet I can get a shovel through it. In summer, it dries to an impenetrable consistency.

Here are a couple more stories about digging holes that (I hope) are more amusing than yard work itself.

***

My parents dug their sprinkler system in the front yard some years ago. The trenches were open on Halloween night, and my mother, fearing that some hapless trick-or-treater might accidentally step in one, donned a costume (a Renaissance-looking gown with a large headdress) and spent the evening handing out candy from a chair at the base of the driveway so that nobody would have to cross the lawn.

While she sat there, she regarded the trenches, and noticed that they looked a bit like open graves. She spent the later parts of the evening asking at least the older trick-or-treaters if they would like to try any of these nice, fresh graaaaves. I think she scared quite a few.

***
One of California's lesser-known is the underground home and gardens of the Sicilian Immigrant Baldasare Forestiere in Fresno, California. He dug the place partly as a shelter from the heat of California's central valley. Apparently not content with however much digging he did as a farmer, he spent forty years chipping away at the hard soil with hand tools, carving out an elaborate maze of tunnels and caverns. You can get an idea of the man and his creation at the website. The place is open to the public as an historic landmark.

Job application

2009-03-18T11:37:00.001-07:00

Not during this recession but the last one, when the dot-com implosion hit California and our area hard, Scott was out of work for quite some time. He is usually a network administrator, but all the technology jobs dried up at once. So he decided to try selling cars for a while instead, mostly to see what it was like. The two or three months he spent at it is another story that I'll tell another time.

These are real questions from the car sales application, and Scott's real answers.

Q. What is the least favorite job you have ever had?
A. Digging ditches for a landscaping company. [This was part of a summer job he had back in high school.]

Q. What did you like least about that job?
A. Digging ditches.

Scott got the job.

Bigfoot

2009-03-14T10:56:00.001-07:00

Bored one summer, my father and one of his cousins molded a pair of large feet in concrete and smuggled them in their luggage to his cousin's home in a small town. They used their large foot-molds to make tracks down into the river on a muddy river bank near the town.

Sure enough, the tracks were discovered shortly, and it was a small enough town that the discovery attracted the notice of the press. I'm pretty sure one of their moms was on to them, and I'm pretty sure she made them go fess up, at least as soon as the stir started.

We were driving along the California coast years later (this part, I remember personally) and we stopped in a gift shop selling rocks, wooden postcards, and other such things. My father (who never purchases such things) found a map of California Bigfoot Sightings, and sure enough, it listed tracks as having been found in his cousin's small town. I think my dad still has the map.

Root beer, hugs, and overseas visitors

2009-03-09T11:13:00.000-07:00

Meeting someone online is meeting someone backwards. You get to see inside their head first, then maybe you get a bit of their voice over the phone, and then you eventually get to see a face, or maybe just a photo. The first person I ever met this way was from Melbourne. When I did eventually pick him up at the train station, it was by finding who was left on the platform looking lost; I hadn't seen a photo.

As it turned out, the restaurant I'd planned to visit was closed, and the train was about an hour late (trains are one thing we don't do especially well here), so I ended up taking him straight home. I think he was almost as nervous about the arrangement as I was. We'd all heard bad things about meeting people from online, but that's the way it worked out, so we did it anyway.

I was busy cooking some spaghetti that I hadn't planned on cooking that night when he asked whether he could have something to drink. I hadn't even realized I hadn't offered. One of the few things I knew about him was that he liked root beer and couldn't readily get it in Australia. So he opened the fridge and there in the middle of the top shelf were a couple of cans of A&W root beer I had put there with him in mind. I don't know if "swooned" is quite the right word for what he did then, but that's what it looked like to me, and both cans were quite empty before the night was through.

He's a very spontaneous traveler, and one thing he doesn't schedule ahead of time is lodging. I had a spare room empty because my roommate was gone for the summer, so he stayed a couple of nights, sleeping better than he'd been managing at hostels and on trains, and I showed him some of the area. I also got to know him a bit.

At the end of his stay here, I dropped him off in San Francisco. We walked out onto the Golden Gate Bridge, had some pretty good hamburgers at some little restaurant I couldn't name now, and I left him at the hostel where he'd spend the next night or two before flying further north. That was the point where I finally got around to hugging him (or vice versa, but no matter), and I haven't seen him since.

We've kept in touch, at least intermittently, since then. I've sent him a couple of different boxes. One contained, among other things, a big souvenir A&W mug and a can of root beer. They can't air mail soda, apparently, so it took 2 months to arrive by ship. When it did arrive, I managed, eventually, to convince him to pour the root beer over some ice cream. He was taking it on faith that this was a desirable thing to do with only one can of root beer at hand, but I think he liked it.

One thing I've never figured out how to mail, though, is a hug. That very first visitor is why I insist on getting hugs (and frequently also serving the peculiar American beverage root beer) when I meet people from online.

I heard just in the past few days that he'll be in California again in a few weeks. I don't know if we'll have time for quite the same adventures as last time, but I'm planning to have the root beer and the hugs all ready to go.

Where are we?

2009-02-17T10:26:00.000-08:00

On our last long drive, I looked down and saw this.

Leaf thief

2009-02-05T10:13:00.000-08:00

Last November, I finally got around to doing something I'd been meaning to do for a long time. I took my garden rake and my big yard waste bin and carted it a couple streets down to where there are several large, mature trees that all drop heaps of leaves at the same time.

I collected five or six huge bins of leaves, in addition to the leaves that a couple of my own trees dropped. I didn't go into anyone's yard or even do much raking; there were ample piles of leaves on the sidewalk and in the bike lane. I did make a point to leave the areas tidy for the neigbors.

I got a few strange looks, but not many people went so far as to ask. I cheerfully explained to one person whose house I was in front of that I'd be glad to put them back, if he was using them (he wasn't). He thought I was being very energetic. In fact, I was making a down payment on a lazy winter and spring.

The reason for all this leaf-gathering was to cover my garden. I've cleared out a fairly good-sized back corner of my yard as a vegetable patch, and so far, I have had to weed that same area each spring. Last fall, I spread it six inches deep with leaves I collected. There's one little clump of garlic popping through from last year, and other than that, essentially no weeds, even in February with all the rain. The leaves will eventually break down and help improve the impenetrable clay. If I want to plant, I'll either dig them in or scoop them aside and plant right through them.

That has left me free to expand the borders of the weed free area, which in turn has led me to believe that I might someday conquer the entire weed patch and have a real garden.

We are, of course, a bit short on water in California this year. Thus, I think I may keep my vegetable garden smaller this year. I planted a few cool-season things that can probably get by mostly on the spring rain, and I may plant just enough tomatoes to water with collected water from cleaning fish tanks, waiting for the shower to warm up, and so on.

While I'm working on weeds (the Bermuda grass may take longer to conquer, anyway) and waiting for water, I think I'll try to do some planning, preparation, and hardscaping. I'm starting to decide where to put a patio or deck, pathways, and raised beds. I'd like to build rainwater barrels, too, but I'll need to measure output on some of my downspouts to learn where to put them. I've been thinking about this sort of thing since we've had the house, but it's starting to come together.

Oddly, the piece that's helping it come together more than anything else is the decision to focus on reclaimed and recycled materials. Now that I know I can make a pathway out of recycled concrete chunks with thyme or another groundcover in between, I've stopped worrying about how much it might cost or how long I want it and I can make a decision on where it should go. I also have plans to build raised bed boxes out of reclaimed lumber from torn out fences and cover the paths between them with wood chips from a tree service. I'll probably even be more inclined to water with collected rainwater.

I suppose it also helps in my design that I have nothing much to lose by trying. There are a few established trees that I plan to leave where they are. Otherwise, it's pretty much all a weed patch that I'd prefer not to go on mowing.

This post is a bit late in the writing, but it gives me a chance to mention the results as well as the activity.

An election experiment

2008-10-03T09:27:00.001-07:00

In California, certain laws go directly to the voters for scrutiny. This year we will be deciding propositions 1 through 12. To help inform voters, the Secretary of State has distributed a handy 143-page packet, printed on newsprint, one per household. Each ballot measure includes a summary and description of the law written with some attempt at neutrality, followed by arguments in favor and against the proposition, with shorter rebuttals to those arguments. Depending on the issue, the arguments tend to use a lot of all capital letters. I find this practice annoying and difficult to read, the print equivalent of screaming.

So here is the experiment I would like to see. Gather some suitably random sample of a voting population. Present them with some booklets with some ballot measures, perhaps taking some care to include a variety of issues. Distribute randomly three different versions of the booklet, noting who gets what. One version has arguments and rebuttals in ordinary prose. One version has arguments on one side of the issue written in ordinary prose, while the opponents scream, as in this excerpt from this year's Prop 4:

IF OUR DAUGHTERS COULDN'T COME TO US, for whatever reason, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS KEEPING THEM SAFE. New laws cannot force our teens to talk to us, but they may force them into back alleys...or worse.

The third set of booklets has the other side writing all the same claims in normal sentence case while the proponents holler:

Yet a young girl can get an abortion WITHOUT A FAMILY MEMBER BEING NOTIFIED—and this could endanger her safety, even her life.

The experiment should even switch back and forth between whether the gratuitous capital letters were pushing for the liberal or conservative viewpoint.

Then, see which version of the ballot pamphlet gets more votes one way or the other. Does all that extra emphasis really help to convey the urgency of the point, or does it merely suggest that the argument wasn't convincing enough and so had to be stated more forcefully?

Of course, this experiment may have little bearing on real election results. Even if both sides could be persuaded (or compelled) to mind their manners, a whole host of influence outside the booklet is also at work. Still, it would be instructive to see how one controllable factor influences the results.

Garage sale

2008-09-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

There's a garage sale around the corner this afternoon. Some neighbors have gotten together with friends and relatives and put together quite a selection. There is quite a bit of smallish children's clothing, which doesn't especially interest me, but also quite a lot of adult clothing and an assortment of books and household items.

I purchased two pairs of jeans that fit me (I may need to shorten them a bit, but I have a garage sale sewing machine), a nice sweater, several warm pajama sets (the ones in my drawer have been very well loved) and a Tupperware pitcher for $6.25.

Now, compare this to a department store. I walked around the block, so I didn't have to find a parking place at the mall. I didn't have to hold my nose and dash past the perfume counters. I did what will probably be most of my fall shopping in about half an hour and in natural sunlight. I didn't have to listen to department store music or mysterious chimes.

I also got to meet my neighbors and their dog. There's a lot more variety in garage sales. It isn't all this year's stuff or the current season (rushed by three months or so). I can see how the clothes are going to wear because they have already started. If something is wrinkled in somebody's driveway, it's guaranteed to need ironing every time I wash it, too. If something shrank or ran or faded the first time it was washed, it's done it by now. I also get a tremendously good deal (95% off, anyone?) and do a bit of recycling in the process.

People wonder why I get grumpy when I end up in retail outlets and see some of the foolish stuff they're selling. Maybe it's because I know how much of it is going to end up in neighbors' driveways.

An engineer's basement and hammock

2008-09-10T22:59:00.000-07:00

I didn't ask to take photos, since I'd never been there before and hadn't actually met the people before showing up. Suffice it to say that my friend's friend G (who is also a mechanical engineer) has a large, finished basement below his house, which I had the privilege of seeing after G and his wife (at my friend's urging) invited me, a complete stranger, to dinner at their home.

I helped G's wife prepare some homemade pizza, an effort which consisted largely of chopping and arranging an assortment of veggies. I figured it was the least I could do for someone who had volunteered to serve a friend-of-a-friend dinner and it gave me something to talk about, since I arrived at least an hour before my friend did. The evening that followed was well worth making a bit of awkward-at-first conversation and chopping some veggies, though.

G and his wife have a small but busy vegetable garden tucked in along the sides of their house and a hammock on a frame in the small area out back. G decided, once we'd all arrived, that the four of us should have a hammock swinging contest. My friend, G, and I are all mechanical engineers; G's wife has had a bit more practice being in hammocks than the rest of us.

The object of the hammock contest was to lay in the hammock with one knee elevated and to swing that knee back and forth in the right rhythm to get the hammock going in the least amount of time. "Going" had no terribly precise definition, so I can't say who exactly won, though G seemed to do pretty well. I made a decent showing (suggesting as a rogue entry the use of a windbreaker as a sail), as did G's wife. My friend flailed wildly and still didn't really manage to get swinging. Now, to a mechanical engineer, a hammock is a pendulum and a swinging hammock with a person in it is a simple harmonic oscillator. Most six-year-olds can swing a swing. A mechanical engineer will tell you that they're doing it by driving it 90 degrees out of phase. Yes, we also do other things for fun.

After dinner, we checked out the basement, with some unwarranted apologies about the mess (basements are supposed to be messy!). It does contain a piano and some trappings of a spare bedroom, but mostly it contains a machine shop and lab full of tools and parts to play with. G likes to build model planes of various types, but I'd argue that the most impressive are the small ones made from slender balsa wood rods, a homemade propeller, and thin iridescent sheets of capacitor dielectric, which is both lightweight and relatively strong. With a loose but well-wound rubber band over two opposing hooks and more space than even this basement permitted, they will stay aloft for a remarkably long time, perhaps several minites. Other model planes there were more sophisticated, but these were stunning in their simplicity.

G also likes to invent things. One simple doodad he demonstrated was for combing their long-haired, shedding cat. The cat doesn't like the vacuum cleaner noise, but will tolerate this device. It consisted of a bit of window screen over a box with a large (about 6" square) computer fan in it. The fan holds wads of hair combed off the cat neatly against the window screen for easy cleanup when the combing is done.

I'm glad I got to see the place and meet G, even under unusual circumstances. I may need to rethink the project and tinkering spaces in my own home.

The Grouchy Chef

2008-09-03T23:21:00.001-07:00

The Grouchy Chef is both the name of a restaurant in Mukilteo, Washington and a particularly apt description of what (or whom) you will find inside. We tried quite a few excellent restaurants on this trip, but the Grouchy Chef stands out, certainly in terms of experience. The food is pretty good, too, especially considering the moderate prices.

The chef tends to be fairly short with his customers, and he doesn't say a lot. Posted all over the walls of the place are lengthy, handwritten notifications, detailing the economics of serving drinks and paying rent, laying down the rules for ordering, seating, and the care and handling of the delicate temper who is preparing the meals. The restaurant is a one-man show, and that one man hasn't had a day off since he opened in 2002 or so, as the signs indignantly detail. One of the signs forbids photography inside the establishment, then proceeds into a diatribe about how this is disrespectful and invasive and he doesn't take photos in your home, so the photo above was shot surreptitiously, from outside.

The chef is Japanese (perhaps one reason he prefers to speak very little), and one sign reads, "If you make fun of my English, please show me your ability to mangle a foreign language." Having thoroughly mangled a foreign language for several years now, I must heartily agree with this sentiment, at least.

This lunch was also the one intersection of our Vancouver friend with our Seattle friend. The choice of establishment, and its just-as-grouchy-as-advertised proprietor, certainly gave us all something to talk about as we trod as lightly as we could and did our best to enjoy the meal without running afoul of the rules.

Refrigerator improv

2008-09-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

The friend we stayed with in (or rather just outside) Seattle doesn't really cook. She lives alone and she's starting to cook a bit, but it's basically large-batch, utility cooking at this point.

She heard we were coming and took the opportunity to fill the fridge in her small apartment kitchen. I swear we told her well in advance that we were only staying Wednesday late through Sunday, but she stocked up.

Then she realized that there was a bit too much stuff for the three of us to eat in five days and invited two friends over for dinner. So I had a fridge full of assorted ingredients I didn't choose and two strangers arriving shortly.

Into the pan went some chicken breasts dunked in lime juice, salt, pepper, olive oil, and oregano. I'd have added garlic but there wasn't any that I could find. While that roasted, I cut up and sauteed some green beans and onions. When the chicken was mostly done, I arranged the sauteed veggies over it, covered the whole thing with grated cheese and tossed it back in the oven for long enough to finish and blend a bit.

Now, the Pacific Northwest has plenty of berries around this time of year, and there were some raspberries in the fridge, too. There were just enough ingredients to make shortcakes of them (flour, butter, sugar, baking powder, salt, milk). I've almost never baked without a recipe, but I'd done shortcakes in the past week, so I remembered the proportions as best I could and winged it. They came out fine, as, happily, did the chicken-and-vegetable stuff.

The company turned out to be interesting, too. One fellow coworker, originally from Argentina, and a woman whose relationship I didn't quite catch, other than that she was from someplace besides work. We attempted a little Spanish but felt a little silly speaking it when both of us are more comfortable in English and nobody else there spoke. A fun evening, all-in-all, almost completely unplanned.

Science Fiction Museum, EMP, and music in the park

2008-09-01T21:15:00.001-07:00

I'm going to try blogging at least parts of the vacation I just got back from in episodes. It was a short vacation, only one week, but a fun one. As this blog is about ramblings (usually not the physical ones) I'll start squarely in the middle and proceed out of order from there.

We were both pleasantly surprised with the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. It's under the Space Needle, in part of the park that was originally built for the World's Fair.

Scott is a science fiction fan and I am one largely by association (I read the occasional novel and watch the occasional film). So when we heard about the museum, we were a bit afraid that it was going to be a bunch of classical sci-fi. We have nothing against classic sci-fi, but it's not what we mostly read. Scott likes David Weber, Anne McCaffrey, and quite a selection of stuff, mostly more recent than that.

Instead, what we found there was a well thought out and reasonably wide variety, ranging from Mary Shelley and Jules Verne through Star Trek and encompassing about everything in between. There are vintage comics, space suits, hats and helmets, toys, books, cover art, and plenty of images of visions of the future from throughout the history of the genre, all nicely mixed together with a generous but not overwhelming dose of audio and video.

They don't allow photography in the galleries, possibly because flashing in a dark space would disturb the atmosphere of the place, possibly because too many of the artifacts are copyright. In any case, we lingered happily reading signs and browsing for quite some time. This museum was one of at least three reasons my reading list grew on this trip.

The one thing I really wanted a photograph of is pictured online here, though in the museum it's surrounded by the ink bottles and cartridges and (if memory serves) the fountain pens used to produce it. It's an original, handwritten manuscript by Neal Stephenson for the Baroque Cycle, and it really is that tall. I suppose if you're a known author, you can pay somebody to do your typing. I think I write differently sometimes in ink than onscreen (there's no going back to fiddle with your work).

Adjoining the Sci-fi Museum is the Experience Music Project (EMP). We didn't stay quite as long there, but it was still fun to see. There's a giant musical instrument sculpture in the main hall made up of hundreds of guitars, banjos, an accordion, clarinet, french horn, keyboard, and so on. Some of the stringed instruments and drums have things attached that change the pitch and strum, and visitors can listen to this thing on headphones. I'd like to know if they ever tune the sculpture.

The displays downstairs mostly explore various genres of popular music. One room has an exhibit on the history of electric guitars, which is more interesting and varied than I would have supposed. The upstairs, I think, is more fun. There are exhibit rooms, all unfortunately a little too well occupied to be accessible, where visitors can go in and learn a bit about musical instruments (mainly vocals, drums, guitar, and keyboard). I skipped the piano lesson (I play a bit, but not often) and went ahead to the improvisation part. The keyboard lights up the keys of the blues scale and plays an appropriate accompaniment. I'm not much good at improvising music, but when there are a row of LEDs cluing me in to which notes are going to sound ok with the background, I too can jam.

Somewhere in between, we fetched some lunch and wandered out into the park around the museums and found the Quichua Mashis performing in the park. I seized on the opportunity to practice my Spanish and chatted with them a bit. Although they proudly proclaim that their music is from the Andes in general (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador) they are from Ecuador. I also ascertained that the woman in the teal dress who was dancing in front of their booth didn't really have anything to do with them. She was just a hanger-on who happened to like the music. The answer I got was a good deal more diplomatic than I'd have given in the same situation: "just a friend" (though "friend" has a somewhat more general connotation in Spanish than English). "Hippie" may be spelled differently by some, but it has lodged itself into the Spanish language, probably with good reason.

I was hoping to find a quena among the musical instruments they were offering, since one was playing a quena, but there were pan pipes and some other little flutes I didn't recognize, so I bought a CD. There were no quenas in the EMP, and the music follows a tradition much older than science fiction.

Special delivery

2008-08-01T21:54:00.000-07:00

I received a package at work today. I had requested a catalog from this company a couple weeks ago. They sent it by priority mail, spending about $8.50 in postage to get perhaps two pounds of stuff to California from Ohio.

The package contained:
1. A form letter from the Executive Vice President of Something-or-Other.
2. A binder with colorful pictures of their parts printed on the outside.
3. An itemized packing list, listing both the binder and the form letter.

Now, by "binder", I do not mean "binder with packets of useful information in it." The binder was completely empty. I suspect that the actual contents of this binder are back-ordered from their Somewhere Else office, but I'm not sure what to do next if they never appear. Will I just get another empty binder if I resubmit this request?

Source and sink

2008-07-01T21:42:00.001-07:00

Another color experiment. Index card, color pencils, junk mail.

Colors, and tools for colors

2008-06-12T23:32:00.000-07:00

A friend dropped off some old art supplies yesterday, including some gouache paints that weren't quite too dried out to use. I started just doodling and this is what came out. There are three colors here, cyan/turquoise, magenta, and yellow, each visible in its pure form somewhere here. Everything else resulted from some mixture of those three.

I took this creation to work today to show to the one or two people there that seem to take interest in my artistic dabblings. It's 2.5" x 3.5", but it still had a dominating presence in my gray cube with polite blue-green accents.

To those with an interest in colors and design (whether or not my foray into paint interests you), I recommend Colour Lovers. It's designed for creating and sharing colors, palettes, and patterns.

There is also this color palette generator, which imports a photo and uses it to generate a bold and a more muted color palette, complete with hex RGB values. They're both fun to play with and browse around in.

Whoever comes are the right people

2008-05-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

There was some worry at Recent Changes Camp late today that it hadn't been planned soon enough or firmly enough, and it was probably justified. Still, Recent Changes Camp happened, and it seems to me that the right people came. It was a smaller group, so a whole bunch of food went to another conference tomorrow and a food bank tonight. Still, the smaller group had a certain intensity and focus. We were who were there, so we'd better find a purpose.

I'm not sure that we produced any one thing. It was a very shapeless conference, governed loosely by a masking-tape schedule on a wall in the courtyard. I don't think there are even any one coherent set of notes, save perhaps for the batch of photos uploaded on Commons.

It was, I think, in that very openness and disorder that this weekend had its greatest strength. It's a mixed-up mess, and that means that people and ideas that might otherwise not meet each other, did. They met around loose themes and grew out organically from there.

Some sessions started with a prepared presentation or statement, but these invariably set the stage for open discussions in more of a forum style. Some hovered more or less around a given or stated topic; others strayed wildly and wonderfully. Pretty much all of them blossomed.

It was a small enough group, too, to put faces with names, to get nearly all of the names, and to connect at an individual level. There is a power in that, too, especially starting with a shared (but diverse) understanding of what this thing is that is called a wiki.

Perhaps someone made a connection, someone met someone else, someone put words to ideas or names to faces they already knew.

Perhaps, we just got together and had fun.

Maker Faire

2008-05-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

"Have you noticed that the term maker is being used to describe the activity of various people who may in the past be referred to as crafts person, or applied artist?" notes Sharon B in her quilting blog here.

I attended (and helped staff) the Maker Faire this weekend. It took a broad view of the term "maker", including everything from rockets and steam engines to spinning and weaving. It also included plenty of electronic things: a beat box using a visual pattern of bubble gum balls, various lasers and lights, websites, widgets, and hacked games, to name a few.

So what is a maker? Broadly defined, it's one who makes, in this context with a connotation of homemade, handmade, self-invented, reinvented, or hacked. There seems to be a division (still?) between crafts (fabric, paper, yarn, string, ink, paint, and things done for the sake of decoration or art) and another sort of making/inventing, the sort that often looks more like engineering (metal, plastic, motors, electronics, gears, fuel, etc.) Somewhere, there's a third function or category for innovations in virtual space, things like wikis, widgets, software hacks, online communities. O'Reilly, the publisher that instigated the Maker Faire, publishes Make Magazine for the solid stuff and Craft magazine for things more in an artistic vein, all while maintaining a selection of websites, online forums, and dead-tree books about many programming and electronics topics.

The thing is, it's all one and the same; one big, lovely mess. It's not needles on one side and wrenches on the other, with programmers and writers of websites sitting at home. It's a big sea of ideas that need to be dreamed up, rearranged, recombined, reprogrammed, and written down so that new inventors can find resources and do it all again. Those people who recombine bicycle parts into novel shapes and unintended functions would do well to learn a bit of stitchery to fashion comfortable seats. A thriving community of textile artists and crafters shares patterns and ideas online in a whole world full of blogs. Anyone intending to build a robot will need to know at least a few things about mechanics, electricity, and, if it is a robot with intelligence, also some programming. Machines can be art, and can certainly be just-for-fun, while textile artists are experimenting with lights and other electronics. Certainly anyone building or inventing for the common good or otherwise hoping to change the world should publish their ideas so that others can use or improve them.

So please experiment beyond your chosen field. Generalize and diversify in addition to becoming an expert in something. Play. See what others are up to. Then, write down as much of it as you can manage and let others see what you have done. As much as you can, open your ideas to reuse by releasing them under a free or open license and asking that derivative works remain open.

The more mixed up, the merrier.

Fuschia

2008-05-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

An experiment in shading.

Iris sketch

2008-04-28T23:26:00.001-07:00

The photo on which I based this is here.

Sunglasses

2008-04-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

My life is reasonably well organized, but not especially tidy.

When I arrived home from work yesterday evening I found Scott lying on the bed reading and hopped in beside him for a greeting hug. My sunglasses were still perched on top of my head and Scott pulled them off so they wouldn't be in his way.

I protested, since they would never end up in the right place if I took them off there. He asked where the right place was, so that he could ensure that they landed there.

I replied in earnest that there isn't a right place, but the bed is not it. He knows me well enough to believe me when I say such things, though he did tease about it a bit. True to his word, he remembered to hand them back to me when we got up to see about dinner.

I replaced the sunglasses atop my head, where they remained throughout dinner. They came to rest on the bathroom counter some time later. Here is where we differ. Scott was making a point to notice where they went, so he has decided that the bathroom counter is where they go.

What I think is that I have to be the one who puts them down. They may land on the kitchen counter, on the little table beside my purse, the nightstand, or my desk, but if I put them down myself, I am more likely to find them the next morning. It's just the way I operate.

Mandala

2008-04-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I dabbled in collage. I should remember more often that paper can be used for quilting and mosaic, too. This one is a serendipitous intersection of the solid purple page that is the end page of my current drawing notebook and a bit of junk mail that appeared today. The blue circle shows through a ring on the front cover and the design grew out from there.

Collage is a mixture of creativity and opportunism.

Counter-rant

2008-04-06T12:24:00.001-07:00

I went to a different craft store yesterday. We were in that end of town for an assortment of other things and I hadn't been in that one before, so we wandered in, just to take a look.

This one is, in my mind, far more of what a craft store should be. For one thing, it's a hobby-and-craft store. That means there are things from the "guy" side of the spectrum (model trains, Warhammer, radio control helicopters) alongside the traditional crafty stuff like fabrics and paints. One consequence is that you'll actually find things like pliers and screwdrivers in this place, not just a token tool here and there like the one pair of pink-handled jewelry pliers in the beading section. (I don't put much faith in tools that are pink.)

It's a single store, not a chain. We don't get the weekly sales circular, though I seem to recall occasional ads on the local TV stations.

The thing I like most, though, is that there's vastly more variety there and more emphasis on raw materials and basic supplies. Even within the basic crafts categories, you'll find things that aren't in the major chain stores. There's paper and tools for quilling and leather working beside smaller (but somehow reasonably complete) sections for things like beading and scrapbooking. I don't think cake decorating figures in, but it doesn't seem to need to. Also, though they carry various prepared kits, I think I'd be a whole lot more likely to find plain, basic items in this place: a sheet of copper, a length of plastic or wooden rod in various cross sections, wooden and paper shapes awaiting decoration or incorporation elsewhere. There is vastly less plastic, and a smaller selection of things like yarn and beads, but if I want those things I can find them easily.

It's a bit cluttery there, but it's an awful lot of fun wandering through the clutter. It guarantees that there is some new discovery around every turn. I get the distinct impression that the people there can not only help me find something specific, but tell me how best to put it to use.

What I'm wearing

2008-04-05T09:43:00.001-07:00

No, no plans to take up fashion blogging here, but I was hunting around for drawing practice the other day, to try out my new pencils. I drew the necklace, thought the page looked empty, and decided to try adding the collar underneath. Here's what came out:

Buried treasure

2008-03-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

I went out again today and tore out a bunch more weeds. I uncovered the peas I planted back in January (they're doing just fine, but they'll do a bit better with some tomato cages supporting them), one lettuce plant that must be from previous years' seeds, and a one-inch high tomato seedling.

After I stopped for lunch, I almost didn't go back out. I was already tired, but I wanted to finish up that corner.

I don't know quite what persuaded me to fiddle with my compost today, but I'm glad I did. I have a couple of bins that I filled with grass and leaves during the fall and winter, and I even turned them a couple times along the way. I decided this afternoon to see about moving them along a bit.

Sure enough, the bottom of each bin had a pretty good layer of finished compost, so I put this in the areas I'd cleared today. I've turned those areas before and I was exhausted, so I just top-dressed this time. It'll be ready for tomatoes and things as soon as I get around to planting some.

There may yet be hope for a garden this year.

The annual spring attempt

2008-03-29T22:34:00.000-07:00

This is my back yard (please click to zoom in). It does include some mature trees and shrubs. Other than that, it's a fifty foot (about 15m) flat square of suburban clay. I'm standing (or perhaps sitting) on our deck (more like a gangplank) to take this photo.

I've mowed most of the stuff in the foreground. It's not really lawn, just more weeds that I've managed to keep a bit shorter than the rest. The stuff further back is a bit too much for the mower. You can also see our lilac doing its thing, the compost bins (some years, compost is my best crop) and some knee- to waist-deep weeds. The ground underneath is already going from hopelessly sticky mud to impenetrably dry clay. This, I think, is what adobe is made from. Who knows? Maybe I should mix in some of those weeds and build an adobe wall somewhere, and then haul in topsoil.

I hacked back a mess of weeds today, and if I'm very smart I'll go out and make another dent tomorrow, but I did this sort of thing a month or so ago and they just came right back.

Actually, I think I could control this mess if I really wanted to. I even think I could improve the soil, and I've done it in that back corner a bit. That's where I put vegetables when I get around to planting them. The trouble is, I really don't have a grand plan in mind.

I have at my disposal one person (me), available very part time on weekends. I've managed to install an automatic sprinkler system in my front yard, and I left a stub pointing toward the back, but I don't want to put a spigot somewhere and then decide it would be a perfect spot for a patio.

I'd like to grow plants that are useful (fruits, veggies, herbs) as well as those that are attractive (flowers, shrubs, etc.). I'd kind of like them mixed, so the vegetables are tucked in among the whatever-else. This is the view out the kitchen window. I'd like colors besides green, especially in summer when all this dries out and turns to brown. At the moment, I'm going easy on the poppies because they're colorful and basically weeding around them, even though many are right where my tomatoes should go.

I'd like little or no lawn back here. I think grass is a rather silly crop, especially in our arid climate. I think I have a patio in mind to put against the house in place of the gangplank, but I haven't thought through paths or where to put what. I don't mind putting stuff in, but I don't especially like doing things over and over, especially weeding. Going out trimming stuff back, one section per weekend, is far lighter work, and something I could probably get myself to keep up, especially if I automate the part about schlepping around a hose.

What do you think? Is there hope for this yard? Are there any obvious directions I can take it?

Creativity isn't made of plastic

2008-03-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

I made an uncharacteristic visit to a craft store today. Anyone who knows me will tell you I don't shop very much, and I can scarcely remember the last time I went into a craft store.

The place I visited today is a craft store more than it is an art store. While you can find such things as paints and canvases and good drawing pencils in this place, you have to wander past rows upon rows of beads (largely plastic and ugly), rubber stamps, scrapbook supplies, fake flowers, things that aren't craft supplies at all (stuffed bunnies for Easter this month) and a whole host of other things that strike me as exactly the antithesis of creativity. They're mass-produced and combining them in various ways would most likely result in some object I would be even less inclined to use than something somebody didn't pour hours into decorating.

When I'm in a creative mood, shopping isn't what I generally do about it, and especially not there. What I find in stores, mostly, is things that somebody already thought of. A truly creative person can do amazing things with a pencil and a piece of paper, or even just the paper itself. I tend to start with what I already have sitting around. In the mess on my desk currently there is a cookie tin that may someday be redecorated and repurposed into a pencil container or perhaps a cam in a marble machine. There's a roll of excellent string that represents one of the best dimes I ever spent at a garage sale. There are two plastic cups full of colored pencils and one full of writing implements, though I do most of my writing these days online. There's a roll of craft wire that I periodically mutilate and rearrange. I like to start with basic items and sometimes found items and see what they suggest.

Though I've never been trained in art, I've reached the point in my drawing where I think it might be worthwhile to look beyond the printer paper and plain-old #2 pencil I've been using for drawing. I'd like to have a better range and depth of color pencils, someday, too. So I ventured to the back of this store, where the real art supplies (canvases and pencils and things) reside. I hadn't a clue what to get. I found myself faced with a bewildering array of pencils and paper. Asking one of the employees to explain the merits of the various supplies didn't help much. She waved knowingly at various things with large, artistic price tags, and I felt no wiser.

I decided to start with a $3 box of pencils. There are six pencils in the box, each with varying hardnesses. I figure I can try those for a while and see what difference it makes compared to the plainer, older ones I was using. If I like them, I might go looking for a proper sketch pad one of these days. Perhaps I'll look in another store, next time, one more focused on basic art supplies.

A sketch and a photo

2008-02-23T21:26:00.000-08:00

Spring isn't really here yet (it's pouring today), but the sun has come out a couple times, and a few early bloomers have gotten started. Here's a photo I took while walking Wednesday.

Here's my sketch based on that photo. As you can see, I don't really enjoy drawing background stuff, especially mulch.

Learning beyond the classroom

2008-02-21T20:59:00.000-08:00

Nobody ever taught me how to French braid. When I was a girl, my grandmother tied three thick strands of colorful yarn to a drawer handle and showed me how just, plain braiding worked, and I practiced on those until I had the feel of it. Braiding hair, though the same motion, takes a bit more coordination because the strands don't stay together by themselves. I figured out French braiding on my own many years later. I was laying on my bed, playing with my hair, and reinvented the technique for myself based on how I knew braiding worked and how I knew French braiding looked and felt. I've never French-braided anybody's hair but my own.

There are other things I've figured out on my own. I've had some formal training in technical drawing, but a lot of my drawing, both technical and especially artistic, I learned by fiddling with it, making mistakes, noticing what works and what doesn't, and just practicing.

With languages, there is a great gulf between pushing grammar exercises around and actually carrying on a conversation or reading real material. We do not learn our mother tongues by having somebody explain what a noun is*, and ultimately, we do not do well in additional languages without being exposed to them and then muddling along for a while. That's not to say that formally learning the grammar isn't valuable, but rather that it's not too effective by itself.

In many ways, I think that knowledge I acquire this way, and especially procedural knowledge, sticks a lot better than the sort that someone just tells me. When I used to have to memorize music for marching bands, I'd play it plenty of times, get familiar with it, then turn away from the music stand and feel it out all over again. Finding it for myself made it stick like repetition never could.

I've learned a great deal from teachers in classrooms, teaching in the traditional manner, or slight variations of it, but I have to wonder whether students, and especially students who are heavily kinesthetic learners, would be better served by a learning environment more geared toward guided experimentation and discovery. I think such an approach would more closely resemble the real world, as well. It is a process worth being comfortable with: experimentation, debugging, invention.

*A notable exception here is the written component of language. While I imagine that determination and practice could improve a person's ability to read given some basic knowledge, the beginnings seem by and large to require some sort of training. I'd be interested to know to what extent reading could be self-taught. If you know of any discussions or studies on the subject, please drop me a note.

German engineering

2008-02-12T19:50:00.000-08:00

All too often, I spend long chunks of time at work doing what amounts to clerical stuff, crossing t's and dotting i's so that drawings and the ECOs that accompany them can get through the system. I'm glad of the consistency it brings, especially down the road when it's time to revisit those drawings and find some information or further refine a design. It doesn't especially engage my mind, though.

Another chunk of time goes to designing and in many cases, redesigning, the parts of the large and complicated device that we are building. This is generally fairly engaging, but quite frequently done lacking various things that would make it easier or more effective: background information, time, the right people to consult.

This evening, fairly late in the day, I was introduced to an engineer visiting from Germany. I don't really know that much about him, other than that his name is So-and-so, he is from Germany, and he worked as a machinist for a time. My strength, operating the CAD software we use to keep track of this stuff, is something he has not tried much of.

I explained what he had come to learn about, a new device we had designed for our tool, and then we got to talking about the part where the new device attaches. The primary purpose of this part is to hold still, but that turns out to be harder to get right than you might suppose. Things like rigidity and squareness are very relative. Steel is floppy stuff, and there are times when one one-thousandth of an inch can be too much error. This was the nature of what we discussed intensely. this evening.

Mechanical engineers (or those of us engaged in solid design) are, to a large degree, geometers, and a great deal goes into making things fit together correctly so that what goes together fits smoothly and doesn't collide when it's moved.

We tossed ideas back and forth, but this was an intense session that effortlessly ran later than I usually stay at work. His drawings are much tidier and far more detailed than mine, though I can get a point across well enough. Indeed, that seemed to characterize the whole exchange. For all that I am casual and disordered in my work style, he is very meticulous with his details. I wish I knew more about his background and how he did what he did, as we brought up a problem, tossed solutions back and forth, and he looked longer and deeper and cussed (as politely as it's possible to cuss) as he spotted some tiny, subtle flaw in that idea. To be sure, there are times when this sort of examination of detail is not warranted. There is such a thing as over-design. When thousands of dollars worth of delicate stuff needs to not wobble, though, it pays to mind the fine possibilities. I hope I listened patiently enough that he was comfortable feeling around for technical words in a language not yet entirely his own.

How do we learn these ways of thinking, problem solving, caution, and iteration? Can they be taught, or must they be discovered through experience, as one learns a language? Would I be better or worse at my job if I could master that particular aptitude I witnessed tonight?

I wonder what else he knows that I don't, and whether I'll ever know my branch of engineering in that depth.

Supporty socks

2008-01-31T23:54:00.000-08:00

Do your socks offer you this?

Orchid

2008-01-31T00:46:00.000-08:00

(So yesterday's entry doesn't sit on top forever.)

A coworker heard that I occasionally like drawing, so he gave me an orchid, one of the ones he's raising, to draw. I figured I'd better get at it while it was actually blooming. Here's my attempt.

Bedrock

2008-01-29T23:55:00.000-08:00

Being overtired somehow brings out the worst in me. Scott tucked me in the other night and asked if he should turn the volume down. Little did he know he would start this avalanche:
Me: I think it's ok. I'm very tired, and I'll probably sleep like a rock.
Scott: You mean log, right?
Me: I just said rock, didn't I?
Scott: Yep. My little basalt. That's you.
Me: Just don't take me for granite.
Scott: Good night, dear.
Me: Perhaps I need to be a little boulder in vying for your attention.
Scott: I'm leaving now.
Me: (Sniff!) I try to be a good lava for you...
Scott: GO TO SLEEP!

Sign hacks

2007-09-26T00:20:00.001-07:00

These are a couple of signs I found on my walks. People have adjusted them.

A life that almost never got written

2007-09-10T22:35:00.000-07:00

To hear Ruben Dozal Jr. read is to hear him enter another world. He reads with an intensity and conviction that can only come from putting himself back into the state of mind that he had when he wrote.

He writes his anecdotes only once, but he writes them straight from the heart. If tears could be put directly into words, they would sound like Dozal's writing.

Ruben Dozal, Jr. was born in the U.S. His family was Mexican-American, and he and his family got deported to Mexico when he was young, because somebody thought that his father didn't have papers. His father did not know where he was born. After some years, the family came back to the U.S., but somewhere between the detour and working in the fields to support himself, he didn't really have a childhood.

When he was 11, his school placed him in the third grade. He spoke a mixture of Spanish and English at home, but didn't know enough English to follow the classes. When he was 14, the employer he had been working for for two years finally asked how old he was. He couldn't go on working for the same employer after that, but he ended up with a different job soon enough. At 18, he was discharged from a school system that had not served him, unable to read or write more than his own name.

Unable to read and without a high school diploma, he lived a life of manual labor, working variously as a field hand, truck driver, and other odd jobs. If nobody would teach him how to do the work, he stayed extra hours practicing to learn.

In his fifties, with his young grandchildren, he began watching Sesame Street. They thought he was playing, but he was really trying to learn some words for himself. It was his grandchildren that inspired him to take his first steps toward literacy. He recalls going to the adult literacy program four times, walking up and down the street, not quite able to open the door and go inside. He envisioned being placed into a classroom with others who were much younger. Nonethless, on his fifth visit, he made it through the door.

His tutor started by helping write his words for him. Then one day, she asked him to read what they had written. As he tells it, his entire body broke into a sweat, right down to his toenails.

Gradually, he got over his fears and learned to read and write. He now reads with relative fluency and writes with great power. He calls his writings stories and does not set out to write poetry, but many of his pieces have a poetic quality about them by their strength and tone. His work is at times touching (stories of his grandchildren), at times heart-wrenching (the hard labor, the racism, the demands, the put-downs).

I asked Mr. Dozal whether he ever wrote in Spanish. He does not yet know how, but he did show me one piece he attempted to write anyway. It was not all spelled correctly, but it was remarkably close, and just as powerful as his other works. He would like to learn, but he has not yet found somebody close to home who can teach him. Even as I told him how close he was to reading and writing Spanish, I could see traces of old fears in his eyes.

Mr. Dozal published a volume of his works in 2005. It is titled My Dad's Thoughts: Bits and Pieces of Life, and is available here. It is a small selection of his writings, which he has transcribed from the notebooks he carries into several large binders.

Mr. Dozal found it difficult to take pride in his work after struggling for so long, but he does not regret his education, and he has certainly accomplished something to be proud of. Whatever Ruben Dozal may have missed in school, he more than makes up for in determination and spirit.

Engineers 1, VCR 0

2007-08-11T22:31:00.001-07:00

Recently, I checked out a video tape from the library, a documentary called Genghis Blues, a pretty good film about Tuvan throat singing and a San Francisco blues musician who taught himself how to sing in that style and then traveled to Tannu Tuva to meet some of the other artists who practice this most unusual craft of singing multiple notes simultaneously.

It had been a while since I played a tape at home (as opposed a DVD), but I coaxed my VCR into playing and even rewinding the tape successfully. Then I pressed eject and felt the button bottom out with no effect, and no amount of jiggling, pressing, or coaxing helped. Now, I had a library video tape stuck in a VCR.

I briefly pondered returning the entire VCR to the library. "Hi! Um, here's your tape. You figure it out!" Then I thought I'd better have a look inside, to see if I could recover the tape, at least.

As it happens, the trouble was that the little plastic lever on the right had popped off of the plastic bezel, on the left. When I pushed the button, the lever failed to transmit the motion to a small switch on the main circuit board, and flopped around uselessly, instead.

I pressed the button on the board directly and the tape obligingly popped out. Three strategically-placed dots of super glue later, I once again have a working VCR.

Details, details

2007-07-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

My mother was a fine arts major before she was my mother. One of the consequences of that was that us kids got dragged to art lessons (which they had stopped teaching very regularly in schools) and museums (often in the company of scout troops). My mother invariably stopped to admire things longer than either of us wanted to.

We did once stop at an art museum I enjoyed. The collection included mostly paintings, mostly older, and while it was undoubtedly good work, it was mainly nobody too famous. It may still be there, tucked in among shops in Sacramento's old downtown, within view of the capitol building. What stood out in my mind about this museum was not the work, but the signs. Alongside each painting, the curators had placed a sign stating (as usual) the title, artist, medium, year, and so on. For their permanent collections, at least, they had also dug up and recorded some interesting tidbit about each piece, whether the context in which it was painted; the symbolism used by the artist, which might have been understood better in the century and culture where the painting originated; or simply the story behind the painting. This one was a palimpsest, one that survived through a fire and been repainted over; look at the crack in the middle. That one has 13 spikes (who knows to count these things?) representing thus-and-such. It gave those of us who didn't know more about art something to understand and appreciate about each work, something to explore, something to be fascinated about.

More lately, I explored the Getty Center in the company of two other engineers. None of us knew art and we certainly took the engineers' pace through the place. As engineers tend to do, though, we were instant "experts" on the (completely unfamiliar) subject at hand, and we nitpicked and commented our way around. I'm sure our comments lacked any sort of expertise or refinement. They ranged, if I recall, from "I don't think I want to meet the guy in that portrait. He seems very full of himself" to "Does the perspective in this one seem off to you, too?" Still, it was fun to see such a place on our own terms.

This post isn't about art museums, though. It's about context changing the perception of an experience, so I have one apparently unrelated story to add. Once upon a time, touring with my marching band, we were driving back from a show late at night to our temporary quarters in a gymnasium somewhere. The mood had relaxed because most of us were tired, and most people were sleeping, reading, or playing cards quietly. One little glitch: the interior lights in the bus kept blinking out. As it happened again, and then again, the teenage crowd* started getting restless. What's more, it started to look like the bus driver himself was the cause! The lights flashed, a chorus of grumbles rose up in the bus, and the driver, who seldom spoke much, explained what it was. Evidently, the interior lights were wired to the headlights, a factor beyond his control. He was, in turn, flashing the headlights as a courtesy to truckers. Drivers of larger vehicles flash their lights to signal that it is safe to pull back over when passing and in reply as a thank-you and acknowledgment. Armed with this new tidbit of information for context, the flashing lights became not only tolerable but cool: those lights were now flashing because our driver knew his stuff.

*There was one bus driver who sought out our band and drove our tours for many years. Puzzled that he would want to ferry around a bunch of rowdy teens, I asked him why one time and he replied cheerfully, "It's a whole lot more interesting than driving a bunch of sleeping old people."

Fidelity

2007-07-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

The following is a favorite quote of mine, from Robert Heinlein (Time Enough for Love):

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Here is that same quote as it circulates in Spanish:

Un ser humano debería ser capaz de cambiar un pañal, planear una invasión, despiezar un cerdo, ensamblar una barca, diseñar un edificio, escribir un soneto, hacer un balance, levantar una pared, expresarse en otro idioma, remendar un hueso roto, confortar a un moribundo, obedecer órdenes, dar órdenes, cooperar, actuar en solitario, resolver ecuaciones, analizar un nuevo problema, esparcir estiercol, manejar un ordenador, cocinar una comida sabrosa, sufrir con entereza, luchar eficientemente. La especialización es para los insectos.

This latter version is quite consistent. If you find this quote in Spanish, this is the version you will find, and people faithfully copy it and pass it along, just like this. The interesting thing is that it is not an exact translation. The last two items are reversed: suffer (strongly/with fortitude), fight efficiently. Also, the translator either started with a different version of the English or put some words into the author's mouth: expresarse en otro idioma (express oneself in a different language) is absent from the English version in circulation.

A curious turn of phrase

2007-07-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

Why do we speak of a "meteoric rise"? Meteors, if they do anything, fall and burn up in the atmosphere.

How to recycle

2007-06-23T18:11:00.000-07:00

This was in a neighbor's front yard. The recycling bins aren't the same as the ones for our town, so they've recycled them. Seems fitting.

Unscathed

2007-05-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

Casinos are just not one of those places I go. They're filled with two things I really don't do: gambling and smoking.

Last weekend, in between long hours of driving home, we started to get hungry for dinner. The billboards proclaimed a casino for miles in either direction, and we approached the casino right around the dinner hour.

"Penny slots?" I exclaimed at one such billboard. I didn't know there was even such a thing as a penny slot. I am a dyed-in-the-wool tightwad, and I know enough math and enough Skinner that I'm not really enthralled by slot machines, but even I can be persuaded to get out of the car on a long trip and part company with the six cents that have been rattling around on the floorboards for the whole trip. Thus, those traveling with me decided that it was time for me to try gambling.

So in we went. The casino had enough ventilation that it was more tolerable to be around smokers than it would have been outside, but I still didn't find it especially pleasant. There was a non-smoking room, so we scurried past the racket and into that area, small change in hand.

Just as I was getting up the nerve to part with one of these pennies, even as a cell phone camera emerged from my companion's pocket to catch me in the act, I noted that there was no slot on the machine that accepted pennies. Evidently, slot machines don't really have slots anymore, or at least these did not. Credits had to be purchased in dollar increments from the various machines scattered around. If I couldn't unload some pennies in a penny slot, I was not about to bother.

Dinner didn't happen in the casino, either. We saw neither entrees nor prices that suited us on the posted menus, so we turned around and did the non-smoking shuffle back towards the nearest exit. I think I'll unload the pennies in the donation jar at my local library, instead.

In the end, we ate a bit further along our route, in a café that wasn't a chain. Although the prices weren't much higher than those at the Burger King across the road, it had nowhere near the traffic of the other establishment. Instead, it had good, sit-down meals; a pleasant, attentive staff; and a berry cobbler I regret not having had the stomach space left over to try after an excellent sandwich. I'll have to remember the place for next time. It doesn't have a billboard.

Dinner and the symphony

2007-05-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

Last night, Scott took me out to dinner at a nice restaurant and a symphony concert. We had a lovely evening, lots of fun.

I should note at this point that most of the audience was younger than we are. It wasn't a school thing, either. If anybody was there under duress, it was probably at the behest of a child, not a parent.

You see, the younger generation really will attend a symphony concert, but they'll do it on their own terms. The show was Play, a concert of video game music performed by a live symphony orchestra and chamber choir. If you haven't seen video games in a while, that's not as bad as it might seem. They played medley arrangements of a couple of classics (Mario and Zelda) that for many in the audience were the sounds of childhood. They also played music from some more recent games, including a couple that have yet to come out.

All the pieces were arranged for a symphony orchestra, so they didn't repeat incessantly, and in case you haven't listened to video game music lately, it's gotten a lot richer. With the advent of games on CD and now DVD, along with various other technologies, a lot of current video game music makes for a pretty good symphony. Think good soundtracks for action movies, and you'll have it about right.

For the benefit of the video generation, and for some of us not-so-digital hangers on, they also had a projector going, playing a combination of clips from the video games in question and close-ups of the conductor and orchestra. It was fun, for a change, getting an orchestra-eye-view of the conductor, instead of just the wagging tails of his dinner jacket, and from the far back, the close-ups enhanced the performance considerably.

The audience looked more like a high school on Halloween than a symphony concert audience. By contrast, the orchestra on stage, Symphony Silicon Valley, and with them the Silicon Valley Chamber Choir, are established classical groups in the area. Most of them, I think, were old enough to be the parents of most of the audience members. As such, I have to wonder whether many of them had ever before heard the music they were playing in its native context. No doubt some had children. The rest, as professional musicians, interpreted it simply as music. Either way, we enjoyed the show.

Shade for sale

2007-04-24T22:05:00.000-07:00

Doggerel

2007-04-23T23:47:00.000-07:00

The local library, in honor of Poetry Month, has a "Poet Tree" on display. It's a bare branch standing upright in a jar. Underneath is a pile of little, paper leaves on which patrons are encouraged to write a poem, either their own or an excerpt of an old favorite. It was raining last Saturday when I visited, so I lingered long enough to concoct and submit the following bit of silliness (deliberately dreadful):

A poem will surely be brief
and the meter will give everyone grief
When we have just five lines
To make it all rhyme
And hang it all up on a leaf.

Monday

2007-04-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

When we first moved into our college apartment, we were shown a unit with a ceiling fan over the second floor loft. When we were assigned our unit, it did not have this fan, but an old (and ugly) light fixture. The summers there were hot by any standard, and a ceiling fan would make our stay there far more comfortable. We agreed to take the place because they assured us they would replace the ugly light fixture with a ceiling fan. They had dozens of apartments in that complex, and they were doing that upgrade gradually, as they got the chance.

The day came and we moved in. There was no fan, so we reminded them that they had promised one. The maintenance guy, Skip, assured us he would get to it. Pretty soon, a box appeared on our doorstep with a note from Skip saying that he'd be back Monday to install it. We hauled it inside and happily awaited Monday.

Monday came and went, and then another, and the box just sat there. We couldn't install it ourselves because it was too high up and we didn't have a ladder. We asked Skip a few times more, but he had gotten busy working on other apartments and other projects. We didn't quite get to the point of marching into the office each and every Monday asking, "So was this the Monday you had in mind?", but it was several months before he finally installed it.

In search of treasure

2007-04-02T23:45:00.000-07:00

We went to the Treasure Market at Stanford on Saturday. For the past 50 years, they have reserved one of various large buildings on campus, solicited donations from their Masters of Fine Arts students, and from well-off alumni and neighbors, and sold all sorts of interesting whatnot. If I wanted to drop $900 on a painting, I could certainly fill a large wall with something interesting and different. I didn't buy anything there besides a sandwich at the lunch counter, but it certainly was fun to snoop around pondering where I might put an expensive, fancy painting or doodad. It was high-class, sanctioned junque.

After that, we wandered through a Goodwill store, also in Palo Alto. There was a nice, wonderfully comfortable pair of shoes there for $4 or so. Unfortunately, they were one size too large for me. There were a couple of shirts that might have looked nice on me, had they fit. I was heartened to listen in on some other patrons' conversations in Spanish and understand them, but I didn't buy anything in that store, either.

Coming home from that, I wandered past many heaps of garbage on the curb. During spring, the city will pick up extra trash left on curbs at no extra charge, but only during the designated week. People throw away some unbelievable stuff. A particularly persistent person with a largish truck could easily furnish a house and build a shed with the items discarded by my neighbors each year. Even someone who was more discriminating could still find some good, usable things. I've found dress clothing with the tags on it. That's another whole blog, or several. Suffice it to say that I didn't pick up much on Sunday, just a few scraps of green, shiny granite tile. I think I might like to do a bit of mosaic work someday and I think they would make a handsome addition to a tabletop or stepping stone.

My most exciting discovery was even closer to home, though. I discovered today (though I'm sure it's been available for some time) that the library that is a mile from my house is part of a network of more than forty libraries. I can press a button online and request materials from public and university libraries throughout the state. I asked a librarian about it this evening, and he graciously explained that, if they are available, they send the materials by courier and they will probably arrive in four or five days. I tried a few searches, and even the most esoteric, hard-to-find items on my list were in there somewhere, so I think I will have to try it soon. That is a real treasure, I think, to live a mile from access to almost everything in forty excellent libraries. I found one volume I had all but given up on finding anywhere. I am eager to try it out.

A model bathroom

2007-03-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

This photo arrived in a sale ad recently, alongside a hair dryer-wielding model and a trash can and tissue box set. I won't be buying this set anytime soon, though. Do you see what's wrong here?

Authenticity

2007-03-06T21:57:00.000-08:00

Direct from the green mountains of Belgium?

A quick sketch

2007-03-03T16:33:00.000-08:00

It is quite common, when specifying an off-the-shelf part for use in a larger machine, to obtain a data sheet and even a 3D model from the supplier. Once in awhile, a supplier doesn't publish a good drawing. Lately, I called one. The switch was reasonably well documented, but there was a sheet metal bracket with not even a sketch, and I needed to know where to put the mounting holes on a panel.

The person I talked to said there really wasn't a drawing of the bracket. The thing was a bent rectangle of sheet metal with three holes in it so he simply described it to me over the phone.

I had to model it anyway, so when I was done, I tossed the model into an empty drawing and added the half dozen or so dimensions needed to describe it completely. Within about 10 minutes of our phone call, I sent him a copy to confirm that I had the geometry right.

He replied that he went and shook the drawing at his engineers while giving them an earful about not having done it yet and added, jokingly, "You're hired."

Water cooler politics

2007-02-28T22:31:00.000-08:00

I can change the 5-gallon (40 pound) bottles on the water cooler at work, all by myself. What I apparently cannot do is change them with help. That is, if anybody male spots me trying to change one, it is promptly taken from me and the task completed without me, no matter how far along I was.

Not such a new idea

2007-02-08T22:04:00.000-08:00

Ideas are not the sort of resource that is scarce. Most great ideas are built "upon the shoulders of giants," as variations on a theme. We repeat each other and add a few things.

Lately, we've started writing open licenses for things like software and content. It's partly a reaction to the efforts by organizations like the MPAA,the RIAA, and the corporate software producers to clamp down on who "owns" information. The idea has been well discussed by Lawrence Lessig and plenty of others, so I shan't explore it in depth here. Suffice it to say that an open license is simply the use of copyright to protect the piece not from being copied, but from being restricted. Under most open licenses, derivative works must explicitly remain freely licensed.

What I'd like to do here is point out that it's not at all a new idea. There is a book of Spanish poetry called the Libro de Buen Amor (Book of Good Love), written in about 1330. It includes this passage, several centuries before its time:

Qualquier omen, que lo oya, si bien trovar sopiere,

puede más y añadir et emendar si quisiere,

ande de mano en mano a quienquier quel’ pidiere,

como pella a las dueñas tómelo quien podiere.

Pues es de buen amor, emprestadlo de grado,

non desmintades su nombre, nin dedes refertado,

non le dedes por dineros vendido nin alquilado,

ca non ha grado, nin graçias, nin buen amor complado.

Whatever man that hears it, if well he knows [how to write] poetry

may here add more, and amend if he wants,

walk hand in hand [collaborate] with whomever he wants,

like a ball thrown to the ladies, take it who may.

Since it's of good love, loan it with good grace,

Don't deny its name or hesitate to give it,

Do not give it for money, sold nor rented,

For it has no gusto nor grace, nor [is] good love purchased.

m&ms, part two: the end of an economy

2007-01-30T00:51:00.000-08:00

The office was a little quieter today. Friday was the last day for the guy who sat across the hall from me. Besides being a good worker and all-round nice guy, he was the keeper of the m&ms.

He had a couple of those plastic m&ms dispensers, shaped like the characters from the ads. When someone pressed the lever, they dispensed a modest handful of candy. One had plain and one had peanut.

I didn't partake very often, perhaps half a dozen times, or less, in the six or so months I sat opposite him. I'd like to claim superior willpower, but the real reason was that they were up a bit too high for me to reach with decorum, and without dumping m&ms all over.

I did have an excellent view of them, though, and I noticed some rather interesting things. Somebody trained in economics or sociology could probably write a better thesis on the subject, but for now, just a few observations.

A few people partook occasionally, only when reminded of it. Certain people in the office went out of their way, even coming from different buildings to wander by and get their fix, especially as the afternoons wore on. Some just wandered up and grabbed; others partook furtively when they thought nobody was looking. Some, in between these extremes, grabbed their handfuls and made excuses. Regardless of the plunderers' style, it was probably well worth the few dollars my coworker invested, simply for the traffic and conversation starter it offered.

The m&ms had their own little, sugar-coated economy, too. The owner of these dispensers encouraged and badgered and cajoled frequent takers to contribute a bag of m&ms. Some did. Some holdouts continued to munch with nary a contribution and not much reserve. It was a telling (if basic) glimpse of ethics and honesty on the honor system.

Finally, for the Skinner fans out there, I should note that there were plenty of folks wandering past muttering about "no more m&ms" today, in a classic case of an "extinction burst". Conditioning still works, and for what it's worth, the pellets were really tasty.

m&ms, part one: surprise!

2007-01-25T20:51:00.000-08:00

On the way out the door this morning, closer to late than I'd have preferred, I found my trail mix container, empty. (I mix my own because it's cheaper and I don't have to put sunflower seeds or raisins in it. The recipe, if anyone cares, is roughly equal parts dried cherries, peanuts, almonds, and m&ms.)

So I picked up the sack of m&ms in my cabinet. It is supposed to zip closed, but it must not have closed completely, last time, and so out poured hundreds of m&ms, onto the shelf in my pantry. It was behind some other things, so I heard them more than I saw them spill.

I left them there and did without trail mix today. I picked them up this evening, dusted them off just a bit, and tossed them back in the bag. I made sure to close it more carefully, this time.

Living with engineers

2007-01-20T23:17:00.000-08:00

This scene greeted me on my breakfast table this morning. I did help to create it, but I was by no means alone. The glass beads are supposed to be in that bowl (some still are), where they look attractive glimmering in the candlelight. Or, they can be arranged on the table, thus.

What I'm reading

2007-01-16T23:54:00.000-08:00

For the past year or so, I have making a somewhat more concerted effort than any since high school to learn Spanish again. With the kind and patient help of a friend in Bolivia I have been making slow but steady progress. I've also been seeking out opportunities to read and hear Spanish, translating various wiki articles (with more success translating out of Spanish than into it), listening to the radio, and so on.

A week ago I went to the library and got a book in Spanish, for reading practice. This is not the first book I've read in Spanish. (I've read one and a half others, so far). Despite being short with largish print, the present volume is proving a challenge. Spanish literature often incorporates something called Magic realism, employing fanciful metaphorical or symbolic elements that range from supernormal to surreal. This particular book (Bestiario, by Julio Cortázar), it seems, has lots and lots of this quality, and it makes for confusing, slow reading for one who is also new to the language. What follows is my translation of a short excerpt from the book, demonstrating how odd the book is and how many words I am still missing. (The missing words are decently specific, and I'm not troubled about lacking them just now. In a new language one learns common words like "airport" far sooner than rarer words like "tremble" or "hoarse". I tend not to pause to look up each of these terms in a dictionary unless I am lost because I can get many from context and get the gist without them. Also, it would take too long, and I would prefer to learn the language as much as possible on my own terms.)

When I feel as though I will vomit a somethingflower [conejito], I place two fingers in my mouth like an open (claw?) and I wait to feel in the throat the something something that rises like an effervesence of fruity salts. Everything is quick and hygienic, happening in a short instant. I pull the fingers from my mouth and in them I bring the subject ?? a white somethingflower. The somethingflower seems content, it's a normal somethingflower, only very small, small like a chocolate somethingflower but white and entirely a somethingflower. I put it in the palm of my hand [...?] caress it with my fingers. The somethingflower seems content to have been born and something something against my skin.

And no, this doesn't make a lot more sense in context or when I look up and verify the missing words. My tactic at the moment is to keep on reading, look up words that are interfering with my understanding of the story overall, and be glad that the book is not very long.

Local trivia

2007-01-15T21:43:00.000-08:00

Stevens Creek Boulevard divides Santa Clara from San Jose. It's the main drag, and there are car dealerships on either side. What you may not notice, cruising past the rows of attempts to get your attention, is that Santa Clara and San Jose have different signage ordinances. That means, for instance, that dealerships on the San Jose side may display balloons all week long. Dealerships on the Santa Clara side may only display them on weekends.

A picture is worth...

2006-11-30T21:47:00.000-08:00

A good alternate title for this post might be "Why I haven't written anything here all month."

Sometime in mid to late September, in my random meanderings about the Internet, I stumbled upon the website for National Novel Writing Month. By month, these folks mean just that. The sole objective of their crazy competition is to write a 50,000-word novel, entirely in the month of November.

Of course, I had to try something like that. I like to write, and I enjoy doing things that are about that quixotic. I am, after all, trying to write a dictionary, of all things. What's one short novel?

It turns out it's quite a bit. If I had done it religiously at the 1667 words per night into which it evenly divides, it would have taken me a minimum of two hours each night, and I'm a fast typist. It doesn't go that fast, of course. There's the sitting there, thinking about what to do, and if you're anything like me, there's the reading back (some of it accidental) over what one has done thinking what a bunch of rubbish this all is and pondering the three zillion other things that would surely be a better use of time. Entire guilty days went by without a word, prevaricating about where to go next.

I did not actually have a plot in mind when I began. The contest permits making as many notes in advance as you'd like. I had a few, thought up after I decided to participate, but they were a general concept rather than any semblance of a plot. The approach I took was something more like putting some characters in a box, introducing a disturbance, giving the whole thing a good, hard shake, and seeing where everybody ended up. It surprised me when a couple of characters I thought were incidental ended up center stage, but it mostly all works, taken as fiction.

I'm not done. I got to 50,000 words this evening, and I've written the ending, but there's another character, one of the main ones, that needs to be developed. Now that I know where he ends up, I think I can write the stuff in between that gets him there, something I'll likely be fiddling with it for some time to come.

There's also editing to consider. My manuscript still has the safety pins in it, along with a few largish holes full of nothing but air, waiting for the stuff in my head to reach my fingers, to knit the whole thing together. I'll confess I also have some filler to trim, scenes of minimal relevance, compounds dehyphenated, and extraneous, excessive modifiers introduced to fill space when I was groping for a broader direction. I will be tinkering with it into December, though I may take a break first and catch up on my sleep.

Can you read my novel? Certainly, not yet. For one thing, it is far from coherent. I have to go back and put the scenes in the order that they take place, rather than the order in which I wrote them. I have to recheck that nobody appears before he is introduced or after he departs.

It's also still a little too close to my heart. A novelist is an actor playing every part and making it up along the way. I'm not quite ready yet to release these characters upon the world, with so much of me in them. If you're curious, though, click the picture up there. It takes you to my profile on the website, where you'll find a graph of my progress (the flat bit was me being offline over Thanksgiving weekend, where you may note I actually made quite a bit of progress, even if I didn't record it right away). If you click around a bit, there's a short excerpt there, too. I promise, no spoilers.

Why did I do it? Why do people climb mountains? I did it to see if I could.
All in all, I think it came out better than I feared, and worse than I hoped. Oh, and I woke up a few mornings ago with a totally different idea in my head. Of course, I jotted it down for next year.

So what's a picture worth? This month, a minimum of 50,000 words.

Dressing for the office

2006-10-31T22:44:00.000-08:00

Almost nobody in my office wore a costume today. We had one woman trotting around in a horse costume. Her legs were the two hind legs, and sewn into the costume were legs for the rider and the front legs and head of the horse. Rather than a bunch of heavy stuffing, the whole thing had a little battery-operated fan in back keeping the whole thing inflated.

I dressed up as a mime. I simply wore black shoes, pants, and a shirt I already owned, tied my hair back, and let the face paint imply the rest. The costume could use some white gloves, too, but I don't have any on hand (ahem!). I didn't paint my face until after my drive in, since it's sticky and itchy to wear face paint. Otherwise, it's as comfortable a costume as there is. It had the unintended effect of startling a number of my coworkers, because it doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary from behind. They come into my cube from behind me, to ask a question, and only when I turn do they suddenly realize that my face is not my usual. I've inspired some great double takes in the hall, too.

Later this evening, I used the same face paint, touched up a bit, to pester the kids who came to the door for candy. I bent down to get a good look, acted shocked, had the bright "idea" to give them some candy, and wordlessly admonished one who was taller than me. I spotted butterfly wings on one little girl and jumped up and down, flapping my arms.

After grade school, I've always dressed for Halloween a little reluctantly, uncertain of whether I might be the only one dressed up, but I've always been glad that I did. It is, after all, the one day when it's sanctioned and expected to be a little crazy, to dress strangely, and to act like someone you're not.

The really scary part

2006-10-30T20:44:00.000-08:00

Halloween has evolved since I was a kid. We used to dress up at school, to show off to the other kids. In the evening, we'd go around with our parents behind us, dressed up as witches and warriors, princesses, dinosaurs, and ninjas. We'd parade around to the neighbors' houses gleefully participating in a peculiar sort of sanctioned extortion. By the time I was a kid, pranks had mainly fallen out of fashion and many parents quietly omitted to tell us what the "trick" part meant in "trick or treat".

The decline had, in some people's opinions, already begun. The holiday had been well-safetified by the time I got there, with pre-wrapped candy only, porch light on, known houses, parental accompaniment, and flashlights were all drummed into us by concerned parents and teachers. Mass-produced costumes had appeared by then, too. Even as a kid, I recalled being put off by the printed foam and plastic masks of licensed characters. They hung stiffly and made a poor excuse for a superhero or cartoon character.

Still, a trip up and down my suburban street this month looks nothing like the Halloweens of my youth. Perhaps one yard in three is festooned with orange lights and sports large lawn decorations. The part that irks me most about them is that they are not at all unique or individual. House after house has essentially the same things: inflatable ghosts and pumpkins, unconvincing fake spider webs, plastic skeletons. They have all come from a handful of stores, mass produced, and they're all cutesy rather than scary.

I have nothing against getting into the holiday, or even decorating yards. Some of the coolest homes we visited as kids were the ones that went all out with scary decorations. A couple of years ago, some teens a couple of houses over got together and built an eight-foot high monster with blue lights for the eyes. It wore an expansive black plastic cloak over a scrap lumber and chicken wire frame and they rigged it to wave its arms when an operator behind the scenes tugged the other end of a fishing line. The improvised teenaged engineering meant that the monster's entire form shuddered, giving it if anything an even creepier appearance after dark. To top it all off, they put the candy dish inside a homemade "jaw" that opened on another string.

You just can't buy that sort of stuff. Unlike plastic tombstones, the thing really was scary, at least in the dark. Some of the littler kids wouldn't even go up the driveway at that house. One went away bawling as her mom tried to contain laughter. It also involved some actual creativity an ingenuity. Purchased light-up plastic things only involve -- according to market surveys -- an average of $51 per household, per year. (More for the houses that decorate.)

I don't have figures for this one, but I'd venture to guess that fewer kids and parents than ever are making their own costumes these days.

Where does this leave us? Another mass-produced, over-commercialized holiday, rapidly being stripped of its original intent, and coming soon to a neighborhood near you. What can we do? Buy the requisite candy, but carve our own pumpkins and use our imaginations instead of plastic to decorate. Spend less money, and have more fun. Isn't that the whole point, anyway?

The wind changes

2006-10-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

As if overnight, the road that is my noontime escape has changed character dramatically. Only Monday a fellow walker there commented on the heat; today, the first tiny hints of autumn are in the air. For one thing, there is a wind today, where all summer there were only breezes, if that. The wind scattered a fresh blanket of pine needles down onto the road.

Whether it was the air itself or the plants around me noticing the change, the mountain smelled different, hinting at the crispness of the season to come.

It is not cold yet. I was quite comfortable walking in short sleeves, but I certainly should start reminding myself to dig up my jacket and bring it along. By the time I really do need it, I may remember.

Road hazards

2006-10-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

The dry wind of an Indian summer today left a tree across the two southbound lanes of Highway 17 this morning. The conifer's tip encroached a bit on the southbound side, the direction I was going. We had one and a half lanes in which to dodge the obstruction, so I was delayed only a bit, but the southbound traffic was all but stopped. A few brave southbound drivers wound around under the base of it, on the right shoulder. It didn't look as though anyone was hurt, though it must have been fairly fresh, since not much traffic had accumulated behind it and no work crew was in evidence working its way towards the fallen log.

This marks the beginning of what will doubtless prove to be another adventurous winter of commuting over that mountain. In dryness and daylight, it's a lovely, if curvy, road. In pouring rain and darkness, it is treacherous. When it is wet, the mountain drops rock and wet earth onto the road, and out from under it. It is best, for these reasons, to travel in the inside lane: the problem is more likely to be near the edges. Please drive safely, and I will try to do the same.

Rules and regulations

2006-10-18T21:21:00.000-07:00

If you go to the US Postal Service Website, there's a list there of what things may not be mailed to various countries. Most of them are about what you'd expect. Most places have predictable, routine restrictions on explosives and weapons, coins and currency, various agricultural items, and occasionally also on media of a subversive or unduly lascivious nature. I'm curious who makes the call on the last type, but all those things are basically understandable.

This one, from the list of things one may not send to Togo, though, is a bit puzzling. What, really, would be the harm?

Weights and measures other than those of the decimal metric system.

Apparently, if someone you know in Togo needs a contraband tape measure in inches and feet, you'll have to get it there some other way.

Talk radio

2006-10-14T20:35:00.000-07:00

I saw my grandfather today. He's 88 years old and he and my grandmother celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary this month.

We compared notes on passing the time, him for his regular workouts at the gym, me for my daily 40-minute commutes over the hill to work. It turns out we both like to listen to talk radio. I mentioned that I was flipping channels earlier this year when I stumbled upon a talk radio station that I've been listening to ever since.

"Which one?" He perked up.

"You wouldn't like it," I assured him.

"Liberal?" He eyed me suspiciously. We don't talk politics.

"No, Spanish."

At bat

2006-09-04T07:43:00.000-07:00

Last night, my parents' street had its annual block party. I lived on that street long enough that I am an honorary resident there, so I usually go back (a whopping three miles) to catch up with everybody and be astonished at how much all the kids have grown. On a cul-de-sac with 10 houses, 9 come out and have this pot-luck barbecue each year. They put a few little traffic cones at the end of the street and the one anti-social neighbor does something else that day.

One of the kids, Jacob, had a tennis ball and a kid-sized plastic baseball bat. He let the ball bounce a couple times and then smacked it off down the street. Now, I don't know that much about baseball, and I haven't played baseball or softball in years, but I do know that it's much more fun if somebody throws the ball to you. The adult conversation slowed down about then, so I excused myself and offered to go pitch for him, cautioning that my pitching might be unskilled and inconsistent.

It turns out that I can pitch a tennis ball with at least enough accuracy to suffice for a 10-year-old batter, provided I don't think about it too hard first. He managed to hit most of my assorted throws, anyway. (I realize that this is not the purpose of competitive pitching, but I am satisfied that my unskilled arm put the ball mostly over where the plate would be and only walked him a couple times.)

Eventually, we traded places. He asked me if I knew how to bat. I said that I knew to stand facing the plate and not facing the pitcher--my cousin saw to that when I was young. In the next ten minutes, he told me more about how to hit a baseball than anyone ever had before. Hold the bat at the end, with the hands together, like so. Line up these knuckles with those ones so the bat can swing all the way around. Start with the bat back here, close to the ear. Watch the ball hit it. Step forward a bit with the left foot; dig in and pivot with the right.

He coached me on the details through a few practice swings and then threw out some pitches. He was right: my distance and consistency improved immediately.

Fire season

2006-09-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

California is a hot, dry place in summer. According to a long-time wildland firefighter here, it is easy to tell whether it will be a bad fire season here.

If it has been a wet year, a larger-than-usual crop of weeds and smaller plants will grow. When they dry in the heat of summer, they will produce an excess of light fuel, and it will be a bad fire season.

Conversely, if it has been a dry winter, all the heavy fuels will dry out and contain less moisture, and it will be a bad fire season.

Between the purple covers

2006-08-31T21:39:00.000-07:00

Somebody asked me what's in the journals I keep. This is my answer.

You might as well ask what I don't write in my journal. The list would be shorter.

I'm down to the final pages of a notebook that has been my constant companion since last summer. It contains a cross section of my mind and my journeys of the past year, whatever caught my fancy at the moment. I mailed some of its pages to a dear friend on another continent, a letter and a collection of stories for him to read on the plane to come meet me. Some shopping and to-do lists landed there, some notes from a business meeting, some doodles I may one day make into computer artwork. I have poems in both of the languages I know well enough to write a poem. I have the confirmation number for a flight last month. (It saved the day when I lost my itinerary 3000 miles from home!) I have sketches of inventions, floorplans, phone numbers, names of books and music to explore, quotations that resonated, potential blog topics, and an entire page of just fiddling with purple ink on a homemade brush.

Mostly, though, I write. I write to get things off my chest, to unload burdensome or difficult thoughts where they needn't trouble others. I write to think through quandaries and uncertainties, personal and professional. I write to tease the tangled thoughts in my mind into some sort of order, to tinker with ideas that aren't yet complete. In my last year's journal are the drafts for my wedding; the plans for two presentations I gave at a conference; notes and essays that may someday become a book, or two, or three; love letters; rants; ideas; words; confusion; research; stories; meanderings.

My journal is a more inviting place for having no rules or boundaries save perhaps this one: I write to catch each fledgling idea so that the next one can emerge more freely.