Throwback Thursday: The Hardy Boys and the Search for the Squeaky Baritone

Cheating today: this post originally went a few Augusts ago, but I'm stealing it because I don't have time to write a new one this week.

The Davies Memorial Library in the town where I grew up was and remains a sort of time capsule. It resides in the space above the town offices and post office, the top floor in a smallish old building with creaky wood floors. Most of the time the big green wooden front door that brings you directly into the library is locked, so instead you go in by way of the more or less modernized offices downstairs, past the sounds of printers and phones and people talking, and then up, up into a hushed and dusty space where the years have stopped in their tracks. It smells like fragrant old wood, like an old violin case, and the mustiness of old books. Huge old paneled windows let in slanted sunlight, the disturbed dust floating in the light, making the rays seem like a physical thing. In the main room, there is a fireplace and off-limits horsehair stuffed furniture, and a glass case filled with antiquities. An iron spiral staircase disappears into what I now guess is an attic; when I was little, I used to have nightmares about what was at the top of those stairs, behind the closed door.

Most of the children's section resides in a few built-in wooden bookcases against one wall, with stairs built beneath so even the shortest patrons can reach. There are some new books by now, I suppose, but at least when I was little, they mostly dated back years. Decades. While other kids were reading The Babysitters Club and Judy Blume and whatever else was popular in the late eighties and early nineties, we read boys' adventure stories from early in the century, and the Bobbsey Twins, the Happy Hollisters, L. Frank Baum, Thornton Burgess, Tom Swift, and the original Hardy Boys books: brown bound volumes with crackly yellowed pages. We'd collect a stack of books, and then Mom or I would write the titles and authors down carefully in the notebook on the desk. There were no punch cards or a full-time librarian or anything like that: the library works on an honor system, and you just write down a list of what you've got, and bring 'em back when you're done.

Although most of us were (and are!) voracious readers in our own right, Mom read many of these books aloud to us. She was a master of reading aloud: all the characters had unique voices, mannerisms; some had quirky accents. Her voice would rise in excitement at some points, or drop to a secretive near-whisper. She made those books come alive. We liked the slang in the Hardy Boys books, and repeated it ourselves. "Good night!" we'd exclaim. "Aww, nuts..." "Gee, that's swell!"

When we later came across the remade versions from the sixties and later, we were appalled and disgusted. In many cases, they shared nothing with the original books but the titles. They were tamer; more PC, I suppose, but not nearly as much fun.

After all these years, I've forgotten almost all details of the books. But there was one in particular I'd been wanting to find again at some point. I had the vague impression that there was diving involved in some way, but that's all. And one of the characters was a fellow named Mr. Perry. Mom gave him a high-pitched, rather querulous voice that stood out from all the others. And then...about halfway through the book, she read something he said, and then stopped short. She blinked, and then read slowly (I paraphrase, and probably confabulate), "he boomed in his hearty baritone voice." And then she cracked up. And we cracked up. Even the younger kids who may not have understood the discrepancy couldn't have helped laughing once Mom started. Her laughter was contagious: she'd laugh until she was breathless, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

I can't actually recall if she changed his voice or just left it--with the mismatched adjectives creeping in here and there, to our amusement. But it inadvertently turned a minor character and a not particularly spectacular book into a memorable one. When my little brother got an orange kitten at around that time, he instantly named it--Mr. Perry.

(As a side note, when Mr. Perry was a few months old, he went after a toad. Toads secrete a poison--it's about their only defense--and it made him foam at the mouth and otherwise sick. He was rushed to the vet, and in the process of examination he was discovered to be a she. Ben renamed her Peri Ozma, Ozma being of course after the princess in L. Frank Baum's Oz books. Meanwhile, many of the little kids got the impression that licking a toad could cause one to change sex. Oh dear....)

I know the Mr. Perry book was nothing special, but I've still been wanting to track it down. Every few years I'd wander around the internet hoping someone had a detailed enough synopsis that I'd be able to figure out it. And it has finally happened. Thanks to various wikis, I've identified it as The Secret Warning. Not only that, but there's a company reprinting the original series, so I can get a new copy. It's on my list. I don't expect much of it, reading it as an adult and without the circumstances surrounding the first reading. But at least I'll have the satisfaction of having solved a long-standing mystery.

Throwback Thursday: Desiccated

Here's how stupid-smart I was as a kid: at about the age of five, I remember finding a little package of silica gel beads.

I figured out how to get it open. Those little beads looked like candy, so I ate them, though they really didn't have any taste, which was disappointing.

I then paused to read the label, and noted the DO NOT EAT. (Pretty sure the package I found as a kid didn't have the confusing quotation marks.) I could read well enough to understand. So I took the package to Mom and explained what I'd just done.

I don't remember what she ended up doing. Just made me drink some extra fluids for the next little bit, I think. And probably laughed at me after I'd gone to bed.

Throwback Thursday: Personal Computer History

I've been reminiscing on tech gone by lately, since I'm kind of sort of in the research stages for a new laptop. I was one of the first generation to grow up with computers in the schools, though what we had was a far cry from what kids have these days. Fancy touch tablets would have BLOWN OUR MINDS.

What I remember most clearly from early grade school days: old Apple computers with green text on a black screen (Apple IIs?). We didn't get much time with them, but did have one class where we were given a sheet with a list of commands (to make the cursor draw a line left, up, right, down). If we entered the entire tedious list correctly, we could draw something as exciting as--a circle! Whoa. And yet, it really was amazing to see a bunch of tiny steps accumulate to become tangible. A good lesson for a kid.

Later, our first home computer was a secondhand IBM PC/XT with two 5 1/4" floppy drives and no hard drive. It had GAMES. Granted, most of the games were very limited shareware text based adventures written in BASIC, but even so. Best of all, because everything was so simple and limited back then, even we as dopey kids figured out how to get into the code and change it. "You are now entering baby at the time's room. A fat, drooling creature stares at you balefully from a four-legged cage in the right corner. Naked miniature plastic corpses litter the floor. What do you want to do?"

We also had Hack, which is now Nethack, which is still perhaps the best dungeon adventure game of all time, and which I still haven't ever beaten. I always seem to end up starving or turned to dust just before the good part. Argh. But this does mean I still play it now and then, and thus my gaming hardware requirements are, shall we say, modest.

We had assorted other secondhand computers over the years, though none that really stick in my head like that first one. I remember games like International Bridge Contractors, and a Winter Olympics game (WinterG) we played for days straight. I also remember composing music of a sort--somewhere one of my brothers still has "Munchkin Dance," which was our crowning achievement. If I ever track it down...I'll link to it. Electronic random weirdness. We were ahead of our time.

The first computer I ever purchased with my own money was a Pentium 90 with 8MB(!) of RAM and a 1GB(!) hard drive, running Windows 95. Just to contrast, my current phone has 2 GIGABYTES of RAM and 32GB of storage space, plus an extra 16GB on a card the size of a fingernail.

But that computer was my first connection to the Internet (via dial-up, of course). It was so new to me, I remember typing random words and brands .com just to see what (if anything) came up. And later, I was able to talk to Mom all the way back in Vermont using ICQ (remember that?). At the time, I was stationed in Germany, and being instantly able to see what she was typing halfway across the world was pretty incredible.

I experienced my first laptop during a project in Germany: it was at least two inches thick, had a tiny screen that lagged behind anything actually typed, and must have weighed ten pounds. And I fell in love. The whole idea of a self-contained computer you could carry around (sort of) just enchanted me. I've *mostly* had laptops ever since, despite the drawbacks. They've come a long way, baby. It's a little ridiculous how I'm now fretting over whether a system weighs under three pounds or closer to four, and if I can afford a Super Duper Ridiculously High Resolution screen or just one a mere gazillion times better than anything I could have imagined all those years ago.

I'm pretty sure any of them can handle Nethack.

Throwback Thursday: Pop Pop Fizz Fizz

No, I'm not talking about antacid. I'm talking about that most glorious of all summer kid activities: burning holes in stuff with a magnifying glass.

For many of you, just reading those words immediately brought to mind the odor of scorched leaves, burned paper, and charred twigs. You were instantly swept back to days when you spent hours crouched in a sandy driveway or a corner of the back yard, practically holding your breath as you focused that tiny spot of light and waited, struggling to keep your hands steady until you were sure the darkness behind the light wasn't caused by your dazzled eyes, but by real, honest to goodness teeny tiny almost-fire. SO COOL. You bickered with friends and siblings for a turn holding the glass, or shoved bits of grass and stone and orange peel at the glass bearer and said, "Hey, see what happens with this!"

I'm not alone in this, am I?

We, being the aspiring little pyromaniacs most children tend to be, also took on slightly more daring materials. As one example, does anyone remember those dirt-cheap rolls of caps you could buy for cap guns: long rolls of red and white paper layered with a tiny dot of gun powder every inch or so? We rarely had actual functioning cap guns, so mostly we used those caps in other ways. We had a back room in the basement where the chest freezer lived. It was musty and damp and cold year 'round, and it had a bare cement floor. I remember sitting back there with my brothers, taking turns with a roll of caps and a hammer (and oh, it makes my fingers hurt just remembering--I was not always accurate with that foolish hammer). We'd tear off about six caps, lay the strip of paper out flat, and hammer each one. BANG, BANG, BANG. Mesmerizing....

Anyway, of COURSE at some point one of us had the bright idea of using the magnifying glasses on the caps. It was a little bit anticlimactic: you got a bigger pop using a hammer. But the not knowing exactly when it was going to go off...that added an element of excitement that was hard to ignore. You'd focus the beam of light, and sit there blinking and cringing, knowing it was going to snap-fizz, but not just when.

The MOST EXCITING thing we ever burned, though, isn't quite what you'd expect. We were sitting around one day in...well, I guess it had to have been early November. One of us had the idea of burning holes in some of the little mini boxes from our Halloween candies. Mostly this wasn't that more than a time-passer. But then, we made a discovery: for some reason--something in the geometry, maybe, or something about the ink used--when you used the magnifying glass on mini Milk Duds boxes, instead of just ending up with little browned holes in the sides, they would suddenly burst into flame.

Which makes their name rather ironic, if you think about it.

Scattered (UJTU)

1. How do people travel all the time and still manage a normal life? I went on one five day trip from June 27th to July 2nd, and I'm *still* all discombobulated. I'd originally hoped to finish the first draft of Mind Jinx (my current work in progress) by mid-July, but that's out the window. Haven't recovered my usual routines AT ALL. New estimate: end of summer at best. I'd also hoped to write a trip report, but I feel like I'm a bit past the window for that. May yet take a stab at it, however.

2. My garden has grown tremendously. I have strawberries, peas, carrots, lettuce, and am starting to get cherry tomatoes. The big tomatoes and summer squash are right behind, and I have a baby eggplant and baby delicata squash coming along nicely. Now if I can just manage to water faithfully.... Western Washington may have a reputation for rain, but it pretty much all hits in the winter and spring months. Around the 4th of July, a switch is tripped, and it's high desert here. Nice in that you can pretty much plan on weekend outdoor activities without worrying about wet, but it does mean you suddenly go from plants drowning to plants dying of thirst, and you have to develop new habits instantly.

Sweet potato vine, just for fun!

First full sized tomato (a Cascade) is changing color...

Bitty baby bell peppers

Summer squash coming along

Baby delicata squash

Eggplant! First time I've seen these growing....

Mmmm, sugar snap peas....

3. I'm in the middle of a major music muddle: for *years* I've intended to sit down and redo my music library by re-ripping all my old CDs and then re-adding any digital purchases from backup/cloud. I had a lot of gaps and strays and tracks that weren't titled consistently, and it was driving me crazy. I'm thinking about upgrading to a new computer sometime this year, and chances are it won't have a built in CD drive, so now seemed as good a time as any to tackle this project. I'm going to get it all tidied up and then back up to a decent external drive, so I have a clean starting point from here on out.

It's turning out to be even more daunting than I anticipated. I'd forgotten just how much music I've acquired over the years, not to mention Teaching Company courses and the like. But re-ripping has been an interesting walk down memory lane: I still like a lot of the same music I did way back when, but my buying and primary listening habits have fluctuated, and going back through the albums is like excavating layers of the last fifteen or twenty years of my life from sedimentary rock. Early classical period...flatpicking guitar period...folk rock...middle early classical...Irish. Etc. It's all pretty mixed, honestly, but every so often I come across an album that all but defined a given time in my life and which I've not listened to in a long while. Fascinating how a few notes can trigger a flood of half-forgotten memories.

Throwback Thursday: Chill Before Packing

Apropos of nothing, this is Tamino, my conveniently self-packing cat

Tomorrow I'll be flying into Milwaukee, Wisconsin to meet up with family for my youngest brother's wedding near Madison on Saturday. After the wedding, I'm driving back from Wisconsin to Western Washington with my sister, who is relocating out here.

The upcoming trip is just about all that fits in my head at the given moment, so it's what I talked about in between tunes while playing music with friends this past weekend.

We got to discussing various attitudes and styles of packing: last minute, weeks ahead, things that can go wrong. It brought to mind one of my worst packing moments: an anecdote I didn't get around to sharing, and which is a little hard to imagine in these balmy summer days.

It was January of 2003, and I was prepping to fly to Florida with two of my younger siblings to meet up with friends I mostly knew through an Internet forum connection it would be hard to fully explain without a lot more time: essentially, we started talking about a subject that interested us, and didn't shut up for years. And along the way, we got to know each other really well, and met up in a variety of "real world" ways. Still do, to some extent. Some of those folks remain among my closest friends.

That January, we all rented a house on the beach to just hang out for a week. It was a blast. Yes, it was the off season, and though we northerners were still crazy enough to go swimming, I don't think the temperature got much above the high sixties. But back in Vermont, it was -30 that week.

And that's where the trouble came in.

I am a procrastinator. I've admitted that here before. I will make detailed lists, yes. I will plan like crazy. But then...I will stall until the last possible minute. For this particular trip, I held off on washing some of the clothes I knew I was going to need until the night before we flew out, and then did a quick load late at night and stuck them in the dryer before hitting the hay.

That was my first winter in my little bungalow in St. Johnsbury, VT: A tiny place, but it did have a finished basement, where the washer and dryer lived. The basement was only partially heated: most of the heat from the furnace was set to blow upstairs through vents, but the previous owner had disconnected one of the heat vents and left the conduit hanging to blow a little warmth into the basement. It was never *warm* down there in the winter, but it was something.

The frigid morning of the flight out, I got up at oh-dark-thirty (we had to leave by about three to get to the airport), and made my way down to the basement to grab my things from the dryer. In opening the door, I quickly discovered two things: 1) In my sleepiness the night before, I'd forgotten to switch on the dryer after I put the clothes in, and 2) My still-wet clothes were frozen solid. In one giant lump.

I tried feebly to pick them apart at first, but it was not gonna happen. They were all stiff and intertwined. So I did the only thing I *could* do: I turned the heat setting on the dryer up, and turned it on.

OH MY GOODNESS THAT WAS LOUD. If you think about it, a dryer is essentially a large metal drum turning inside a large metal box. Putting a large, hard object in there and starting it up was startling, especially that early in the morning. Ka-THUNK, ka-THUNK, ka-THUNK! But it did eventually thaw out, though I still had to pack my clothes while they were slightly damp.

I'm sure I will find other ways to procrastinate tonight, but I did my laundry Sunday.

Just in case, you know.

How about you? What travel mishaps have you experienced?

Forgive Me

Forgive me, pen snobs and pencil fans, for I have slummed.

In my defense, the Internet has been conspiring against me. First Rhodia Drive got me feeling all nostalgic, then it felt like I kept running across these on Instagram and Twitter all week. I had to pick up laundry detergent today, and these were there...begging. And I was feeling down today, and when I'm feeling down, I have no resistance to begging pens.

OK, they're skinny. They take some pressure to move. The ink is less than perfectly black. They certainly aren't the best pens in the universe. But I can still stick a piece of paper with my name on it inside the clear barrel so they don't walk away. And they make me think of scribbling at the kitchen table as a kid. And, above all, they were CHEAP.

So there.

Wintergrass 2014 (Late) After Report

This is the one and only photo I took: my scribbling and caffeination supplies for a morning of jotting down memories.

I spent Feb 27-Mar 2 at Wintergrass--the big indoor music festival held at the Hyatt in Bellevue, WA. We take over the whole place--people wandering around with fiddles and guitars and banjos and mandolins, jamming in hallways and stairwells. And then there are the concerts! It was, in short, an incredible experience. Highlights for me:

Beats Workin' (Peter Ostroushko on mandolin, Mike Dowling on guitar, David Lange on accordion, Cary Black on bass): they played swing and bluesy stuff and original tunes and...oh man, were just so good and so fun all around! My favorite was Peter Ostroushko's "Heart of the Heartland" on Thursday night.

Väsen, the truly excellent Swedish folk band, currently a trio with 12 string guitar, nykelharpa, and 5-string viola. I've liked them for a long time, but had never seen them live. My only regret is that I only got to see them twice over the course of the festival. I bought their Mindset album, and I have to say, while there were flashier, more mind boggling performers at Wintergrass, Mindset is the album I've had on repeat ever since. Favorite tune: Hundlaten, which Mikael said he wrote while walking his dog--the title, as I recall, means, simply, "Dog Song." It's bouncy and fun and gets hopelessly stuck in my head.

The Kruger Brothers. I'd not seen them before, either, and WOW. As someone said about Jens Kruger, there are good banjo players, great banjo players, and then there's Jens Kruger. I've never heard music like that before. And Uwe's voice and songwriting are icing on the cake. Favorites: "Carolina in the Fall" and the first bit of their "Appalachian Concerto."

Chris Thile and Mike Marshall. I just don't have suitable words for what they do. Improvising, in harmony, even at high speeds or in funky time signatures like 25/16. Really. They were amazing, and I do not use that word lightly. Mando gods.

Combination of the above: one of my favorite Väsen tunes is a beautiful waltz: Josefin's. Not only did they do it, at the very end of their last set on Saturday, but Chris Thile and Mike Marshall joined them. It was...I still can't describe it. Magical.

I also have so many other happy memories: morning jams after breakfast, a trip to the dim sum place nearby, where we laughed at our varying ability to eat with chopsticks, running up eleven flights of stairs sometime after midnight when I got sick of waiting for the elevators after the last concert of the day, a walk to the QFC (across the street) wherein I got us so lost I think we saw most of Bellevue....

Good friends, good fun, good food, good music. It was a perfect vacation. And the accommodations definitely beat the tar out of your average bluegrass festival...beds? Private bathrooms, with fresh towels provided daily? Thermostats? Whoa!

Ancient Family Tradition: World's Laziest Halloween Costume

As I've mentioned a time or two, I'm the oldest of eight kids. That's a lot of Halloween costumes to design, a lot of kids to be high on sugar and excitement. Add to this the fact that I grew up in Vermont, where Halloween costumes often must be compatible with sub-freezing temperatures. Inevitably one kid ended up that night with a costume that fell apart at the last minute, or which proved inadequate for the weather or which lost some crucial component. For these situations, Mom designed...the dog costume.

Now, lots of people dress up like dogs or cats for Halloween, but usually these are fancy schmancy deals involving ears on little headbands and detailed makeup done from kits with step-by-step directions, and maybe even a furry suit. This was not our way. Instead, Mom would scrounge through the dryer and the bin of lost socks and find two more or less black socks that more or less matched, and tuck these into a hat as ears. Then she'd take a wine cork and burn it slightly, and use that to give us a black nose.

That was pretty much it. A few dots on the cheeks, maybe. Black clothes if we had them.

Most years at least the baby went as a dog, and I remember one year (I think Mom was newly pregnant with one of my youngest siblings and really not much feelin' Halloween) we went as an entire PACK of puppies. People loved it. "Aw, so cute! What a great idea!"

I've used it as a fallback a couple of times even as an adult, most recently at a party this Saturday when it was either that or go uncostumed. I did solicit other ideas, some of which were pretty funny: writing "Error 404: Costume not found" on a t-shirt, for example, or Mike Clemens' mustache-on-a-stick method of playing both yourself and your evil twin, or (horrrrible, but still funny) wearing biking clothes, taping a syringe to my arm, and going as Lance Armstrong. But in the end, I went for the dog.

It ended up pretty slapdash. For one thing, it turned out my only black socks had writing on them, so I turned them inside out so at least they'd say "Dr. Scholls" in blurry backward fuzz instead of as a crisp, clear tattoo. For another, I didn't want to drive up I-5 with a black nose, so I applied it in the bathroom when I got there (burnt cork) while small children banged on the door and whispered theatrically about needing to peeeee. So it came out rather lopsided.

Whatever. Good 'nough. That's the name of the game.

Snake in the...Huh?

Not that I'm setting out to do a series on pesky critters...but here's another tale. Some of you have heard it before, but I was recently reminded of the circumstances, so I'm agonna tell it again.

My last job before I hitched up the wagon (read: mini-van full of books, instruments, and cats) to head out west (read: Fort Collins, Colorado) was as a computer support tech for a small state college nestled in the Vermont hills. We maintained the computer labs, set up PCs for faculty and staff, and provided helpdesk support for students and employees alike. It was a fun job, for the most part. We certainly kept busy, and...well, let's just say academia's reputation for eccentricity isn't entirely unearned, or at least it wasn't there. Quite a few interesting characters and situations.

The campus itself is a hodgepodge of some pretty distinct "characters" as well, architecturally speaking. The core of the main building was originally the estate of the first president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and is classic brick (and as I recall, was rumored to be haunted, at least in parts, by a certain past college president). Other buildings were spliced to it over the years: for example, a theater, a student center, and a concrete and glass monstrosity (my opinion only) of a "modern" library, built in the 70s. It includes an outdoor staircase made up of steps too short (in height) and too deep for anyone to maneuver without looking like a drunken gimp.

The campus also encompasses a few old farmhouses. The alumni relations department was--at least when I was there--situated in one such house: desk and printers and file cabinets packed in willy nilly through what had once been foyer, dining room, etc. Not exactly ideal modern office space, but it had its cozy charms. They did have to get a little creative when it came to stringing network and power cables around, especially since for the most part the furniture wasn't made for computers either, but they made it work.

One day I was on helpdesk duty, and a call came in from one of the alumni relations gals. They were trying to hook up speakers to one of their computers in order to watch a training video, but couldn't get any sound to come out. I ran through your usual basic troubleshooting, but to no avail. So I opened a ticket and headed up for a first-hand look. (Ah, the luxury of doing on-site support!)

When I got up to the house, I first did what any self-respecting tech would do: went to check if the speakers were actually plugged in correctly. I traced the cable down into a messy wad beneath the desk and was giving it some gentle tugs to help figure out where it was going when...one of the other cables moved. And not because I'd pulled it. And then it put out a bright-eyed little head and flicked a forked tongue at me.

Now...I realize garter snakes are helpful critters and all that. I realize they aren't exactly major threats. When I was a kid, we'd actually go off and search for garter snakes on purpose, turning over logs and seeking out the places they liked to sun themselves. We were pretty good at catching them, holding them right behind the head so they couldn't flick around and bite. Thus safely restrained, it was fascinating to feel the softness of their back scales, their armored underbellies. (I'm sure this was much more enjoyable for us than for the snakes.) I did get bitten a few times, but the bites were rarely worse than a needle stick--albeit a needle stick that Completely Freaked Mom Out.

Point is, they didn't really alarm me as a kid. However, somewhere along the line a sort of latent instinct (irrational but uncontrollable) activated itself, and now...the adrenaline kicks in before my brain can even fully identify "snake!!!" So when the "cable" revealed its true identity, I let out something between a whimper and a yelp and in about two seconds flat had propelled myself up onto the nearest chair.

Apparently this instinctual reaction to snakes isn't an isolated case. When I chair jumped, heads came up throughout the front rooms, and the instant I stammeringly made known the situation, I had company atop the furniture. A conference ensued. "You catch it and throw it out." "No, you do it." Ultimately one of us called someone from maintenance to come deal with the problem, and we did the best we could until his arrival.

This, I could mention, is something never accounted for in books. In fairy tales, when the princess is awaiting rescue from the dragon, the focus of the story is always on the action: the prince riding across league after league of hostile wasteland as he comes to her aid. No one ever details the awkward small talk of the rescuees and how they handled the tension of waiting. Someone should provide more guidance, srsly.

But eventually our prince arrived, in the form of a bemused middle-aged maintenance guy. He retrieved the snake (all scant 12 inches of it) and threw it outside.

And there was much rejoicing.

And then I fixed the sound issue (a driver or some such thing, I believe), and headed back to the office, where (it being a small and gossip-prone campus) news of my exploits had already spread. You'd think I'd get some credit for doing my duty in hazardous circumstances, but noooo. For the rest of my time there, I could count on the occasional not-quite-innocently-asked, "So, seen any snakes lately?" *shudder*

On the other hand, I imagine it was an even more alarming day for the snake...

The Persistence of Pencil

Something of a case in point: a childhood journal entry from the 80s, in which the pencil looks as clear as it did the day it was written, though the notebook wasn't always properly stored and the paper has seen better days.

If you'll allow me to go off on a mini rant for a moment here...occasionally I find myself wandering pen forums and get cranky at certain misconceptions.

Note to the Internet: STANDARD GRAPHITE PENCIL DOES NOT FADE.

It's graphite. It is, essentially, powdered rock. You could stick a lump of graphite out in the sun for a thousand years, and it's not going to bleach white.

Pencil *can* smear, of course. Especially if you're using rather soft pencil. If you have very soft pencil on a page that is constantly exposed to friction of some kind, you may end up with smudged, illegible writing. This is entirely different from fading.

Thank you. I feel better now. Carry on.

The Perils of Journaling

(And if I may state right up front: I have very mixed feelings about using "journal" as a verb...)

As mentioned in some previous posts, I've kept a journal or diary off and on since before I could write. Journals have been different things for me at different times. When I was little, they mostly tended to be one or two lines about what I saw as the most interesting or important event of the day, and maybe a countdown to the next big holiday.

As I grew up, my entries expanded somewhat. I wrote more detailed reports of my days, some days almost minute by minute as I carried my notebook with me into the woods or watched younger siblings play. Once in awhile I recorded my dreams of the future or indulged in a bit of complaining about dealing with one particular brother or another, but for the most part, these entries remained primarily factual and in-the-moment.

I think it was after I joined the military and moved overseas that my journals became introspective and personal. I was alone a lot, especially when I first arrived. It took me awhile to find my crowd: I've never been much for the club or the bar scene, and back then I was a bookish, rather sheltered and naive kid, completely overwhelmed by new information and new places and new people. My closest friends were my family, who were now in a time zone six hours away, and this was before any of us had so much as e-mail. Mom and I wrote letters back and forth, and a few friends wrote now and then...but it wasn't exactly the same as being able to talk at any time.

So, partly at Mom's suggestion, I started keeping a journal again, but this time, I told it everything. At first (and this may be a little hokey), I addressed my pages as letters to an imaginary person--it made it easier to bare my soul to a notebook. Eventually I did away with that, but continued to write down anything and everything: not just daily happenings, but all the feelings and fears I would have told Mom or a friend had they been there.

It's a habit I've kept up, off and on, ever since. The proportion of facts to contemplation and complaining has fluctuated somewhat, but it's almost always a part of what I write. Some of the time, I believe it's helpful: when my head is spinning out of control, writing down my thoughts can help me pinpoint exactly what it is that's bothering me, so I can work on it. But sometimes...?

I came across this brief article recently and found it interesting. It's more to do with journaling about broken relationships, but I would think applies to other subjects as well.

I think there's likely some truth in it. I mean...I don't know about you, but I tend to remember things when I write them down. It's one reason I take copious notes in meetings and classes: even if I never look at my notes again, I'm far more likely to remember the material covered if I wrote something down. Writing things down makes them stick in my head. In some senses, it may be that writing down very negative thoughts gives them a credence and weight they wouldn't otherwise have.

I don't think I could completely give up the occasional vent, but perhaps I could make a New Year's resolution to avoid using my journal as a means of turing my psyche into a punching bag. I get very frustrated with my failings at times, but it would be better to come up with positive actions to work toward moving past them (and write about these postive actions so I remember!) rather than dwelling on them ad nauseum. A spiritual director I once had used to stress always stating goals in a positive way: "Practice random acts of kindness," rather than "Avoid being such a cranky sourpuss." Heh..or something like that. In any case, I think there's a lot of wisdom to that approach to life.

What about you? What is keeping a journal to you? Is it a bare statement of facts? A record of special happenings, the activities and accomplishments of your children? Or (if you're willing to admit this out loud) do you ever find yourself wallowing in the darkest bits of your life? If so, do you think it helps or hinders?

Encoded

Our alphabet code, entered in a notebook when I was 12.

When I was a kid, back in the dark days before Encarta and Wikipedia and all that, we had a couple of sets of encyclopedias. They were great sources of knowledge, as well as interesting snapshots of a given period in time--one set dated from the 60s, another was slightly more recent, though still out of date, so the science items in particular were occasionally unintentionally comical. (You can imagine the example photos they had in the article about "Computer," for example...)

My brother John and I spent many a rainy day or winter evening with those books, either tracing themes from one volume to another, or just reading straight through. Sometimes I'd take a volume to bed with me and fall asleep reading about aardvarks and Albania and the Appalachian Trail. I also liked studying the very first page of those volumes, where they discussed the history of whatever-letter-it-was.

Now...like most kids, we were also captivated by secret codes. Who wasn't? We came up with various forms of encryption, like the old standard of using a key word to come up with a 26 number alphabet code. Remember that? Basically, you'd pick a random word with no repeated letters, write that out, followed by the remaining letters of the alphabet, and write the numbers 1 through 26 by them. Unless the recipient knew the keyword, it was hard to figure out which numbers meant what.

But like I said, I also found those historical predecessors to the current alphabet very interesting, and somewhere along the line, we hit upon the idea of using those to make a simple to use and intuitive "code" to use amongst ourselves. It was pretty easy to break, but easy to memorize and fun. Some letters had common predecessors or no very interesting variations, so we had to make up a few letter shapes, but most came straight from older forms. I kept journal entries in code some of the time back then, and even as an older teenager away from home used to write letters to my brother using these letters. Kinda fun.

I used to write portions of my journal entry in code, even if it wasn't really anything secretive...

What sort of codes have you played around with? What did you use them for, and with whom?

Vignette #9 - School Bus

Vignette #5 - The Big Old Tree

I sat down and read a bunch of definitions of what a vignette should be, and I think I'm more confused than ever. I'm not sure most of my previous blurbs qualify, and I'm equally unsure about this one, but it's what I wrote, so it's what you get...



Awful lot of repeated phrases and words and other such things, but this being a typecast...what you see is what you get.

Vignette #4 - Daybreak

I'm behind on these things, I think...had a bad cold/flu thing over the weekend that pretty much put me down for the count. For the record, reading peculiar sci-fi whilst feverish can lead to some interesting sorta waking dream type things. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. This has nothing to do with the vignette, however.



In other news, somewhere between the peculiar sci-fi and the waking dreams and some other reading, I'm really fired up about finally finishing my first sci-fi novel...not this past year's NaNoWriMo project, but an older story. It needs to be taken apart at the seams and completely and ruthlessly rewritten, so I'd shelved it for ages. But now...I think I have enough distance from the initial writing that I can carve it up and start again. Yay for a summer writing project!

Penmanship: an On-going Odyssey

My mother had beautiful handwriting.  Even her everyday hand was pretty nice, and when she took her time, she could write just like the examplars in the Zaner Bloser handwriting books we used as kids.  (By the way, does anyone else remember those funky shaped blue and red Zaner Bloser mechanical pencils?  Loved those!)  Sometimes, to give us extra practice, Mom would write additional sentences and exercises out on our practice paper, in penmanship so perfect that it could almost have been typeface.  And back when she was in college, if friends had to miss a class, they often asked her to take notes, because they knew her handwriting was wonderfully legible.  My father, on the other hand?  Let's just say no one in their right mind would ask him to take notes for them.

Guess whose writing I inherited?

I managed to write more or less decently in school, but as time went on, my penmanship sort of...went feral.  As in...became truly appalling.  I could have been in the running for worst handwriting of all time.  Don't believe me?  I have proof.  Here's a scrap of a story I wrote for my little sister back around '02 or '03.



For years, I kept journals in this sort of chicken scratch.  I knew it was bad, but since I didn't do a whole lot of re-reading my journals, I just lived with it.

Then came my first NaNoWriMo, when I got back into fiction writing for almost the first time since high school.  I discovered that I liked writing by hand, and that I liked what I wrote by hand, and often found it easier to find the right words when writing by hand rather than on the computer.  Plus, I could write wherever and whenever.  Just one issue: interpreting my own handwriting later on was a painstaking, tedious chore, especially if I'd been trying to write fast.  Sometimes I had to paraphrase when transcribing, because I simply couldn't read my own writing.  Ludicrous.  That was also about the time I started getting into fountain pens in a big way, and it seemed shameful to write so horribly with nice pens.  I decided I had to mend my ways.

At first, I worked on writing more like I had in school: the Zaner Bloser style cursive I'd learned in grade school.  But then I came across mention of cursive italic writing, and--more specifically--a book called Write Now that provided instruction in this style of cursive.  It's less ornamental than some styles--pretty no-nonsense, really--and faster than printing.  Since my main goals were legibility and speed rather than anything fancy, it sounded like just the ticket to me.  I ordered the book, and began the process of completely revamping my penmanship.  I practiced whenever I could.  It was during a period when I was also moving across country, taking on many other new challenges.  I remember hotel rooms in Pennsylvania and Iowa, where I spread out Write Now and Clairefontaine paper (another new discovery) on unfamiliar tables to practice writing individual letters over and over again or copy out poetry.



It didn't exactly come easily.  I'm the sort of person who couldn't draw a perfect circle to save my life, and since I was fighting against years and years of muscle memory and bad habits, it was often frustrating.  And I admit, in the end, my day-to-day writing isn't even as good as the writing I did on those practice sheets.  I will never be one of those people with effortlessly beautiful penmanship.  But I did come out of it all with (in my opinion) a much more legible hand.  Here's a page from a current notebook, casually written at a good clip.



It isn't perfectly neat by any means, but I can read it!  Lately, though, I'm noticing some backsliding.  In particular I struggle (as I always have) with keeping the slope of my letters even.  Also I can get sloppy with the connectors between letters, which can make some words confusing.  With the new ink here to play with...I'm thinking it's time to return to handwriting boot camp for a bit.  My penmanship is still very much a work in progress.

Storms and Crashes and Grillin' and Marshmallows: What I've Been Up To

I am lame: no typecast, no pencast, no nuffin.  But there are pictures!  Lots of pictures!

The end of last week was rough.  Thursday morning, I was in a car accident on the way to work.  Another driver pulled into me from the side as I was going by, and the whole passenger side of my bitty car is scraped up.  Looks like someone keyed it with a Really Big Key.  Her insurance company and my insurance company are duking it out, and the whole process makes me queasy and uneasy.  I guess I've been really fortunate...aside from a few minor parking lot bumps and the one time I slid partly off the road in the snow and popped a tire, I've never had an accident.  And as accidents go, I guess it's pretty minor.  Still...oof.

And then Friday, I woke to news that there had been a major hail and wind storm back home in Northeastern Vermont, like nothing anyone had ever seen before: roads washed out, vehicles and homes flooded, trees knocked down.  One of the biggest roads near town (Rt. 5, which runs North/South) is closed down due to a major cave-in.

I've driven down this road I don't know how many times...it's hard to fathom this kind of damage.  And many of the smaller roads are at least as bad.

Closer to my own heart, the pond where we used to play growing up is gone--the storm took out the embankment that held it in place, and there's really nothing left but a big muddy hole with a little stream running through it.

The big gap left after the storm rolled through...



Obviously, it wasn't that big or that deep to begin with, but it's still sort of impressive that it disappeared literally overnight.


I actually shed tears, though I realize how silly this is considering that a) this wasn't even our property and b) others suffered far greater things.  Fortunately no one I know was hurt or anything like that.  Still...the pond!  I don't know how many hours I spent down there as a kid, skipping stones, catching bugs and frogs and salamanders, sailing toy boats, coming home muddy and smelly and wet...  Good times.

Apparently one of the neighbors on the road is hoping to start a fund to repair it, since the young man who now owns the land is likely unable to be able to pull it off alone.  Here's hoping it lives again.  Poor little pond!

But this weekend was good, if busy.  Things I did this weekend:

1. Played with inks, including the very pretty new Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses.

(Those of you on my letter writing list should have a chance to see this ink in person soon.  Yes, I'm actually getting caught up on letter writing.  Try not to faint.)

2. Planted a bunch o' flowers and herbs: petunias, alyssum, marigolds, basil, rosemary, dill, and a few random others.

Hopefully at least some of them survive.  I have a tendency to go, "Oooooh, pretty!!" whenever I walk into a greenhouse / garden center, end up purchasing more than I set out for, and then forget to water come July when Washington suddenly becomes high desert.  But for now, everything is doing well except the basil.  I'm batting 0 for about 5 where basil is concerned.  It's starting to feel personal.

3. Went on a nice long walk with thedog, down paths now green and leafy.  These pictures are actually about a week old, but I didn't think to take any this weekend...so you get old footage.


Gratuitous shot of the trees Jeff liked a few posts back.  I'm not quite sure what these are, actually!  They aren't the standard white "paper" birch we have back home, though in certain light, they do look like them.  But they're more silvery, and the bark is pretty solid.


4. Bought a bitty little gas grill, and after a day where I debated using it or taking it back (I sort of had post-purchase sticker shock, I guess)...I broke down, put it together, fired it up and was very pleased with the results.  Best grilled chicken I've ever made, by far!  And it's just big enough to make dinner with leftovers for the week without having to do batches.


I also grilled mangos (they're on sale this week, and ohh, I love mangos!) and avocado.  The avocado in particular was a revelation.  Cut it in half, took out the pit, brushed with olive oil and slapped it down on the grill for maybe six minutes.  It was soft and creamy and subtly smoky.  I put a little salsa and sour cream in the middle and...nom.  So good.  I'll be making those again.

And I didn't torch any major structures!  Yay me!

Now I have a very, very short work week, and then a brother I haven't seen in awhile and my baby sister will be visiting.  They'll mostly stay with another brother and his family up near Tacoma, but I may kidnap 'em for a day or so to show them the sights.  Next weekend there's a music festival in Winlock, WA, and I'm hoping to drag my brother to that.  It's maybe my favorite local music festival, for a number of reasons: first off, there's a wide variety of acoustic music from bluegrass to Celtic to...whatever.  Also, after the concerts, everyone hangs out to just play music for hours.  Also--and this is important--there's a pavilion with an open fireplace where you can roast marshmallows.  I mean, c'mon--marshmallows!

Speaking of which, I was at Fred Meyer this weekend and they had GINORMOUS marshmallows.  Like...almost-the-size-of-a-small-apple marshmallows.  What is this world coming to?  Aren't regular marshmallows more than enough sugar for the average person?  And yet...giant marshmallows are just awesome, especially if (like me), you're one of those people who toasts marshmallows by burning the outside, peeling it off and eating it, and repeating.  You could go a long time on a marshmallow like that.  Woo-hoo!  If, on the other hand, you're one of those weirdos like my Dad who like to carefully, carefully toast marshmallows to a perfectly even golden brown outside and complete inner gooeyness, I'd guess these'd get very messy.

I didn't buy any, but I keep thinking about that open fireplace deal coming up next weekend.  Hrm.

Spontaneous Lunchtime Pencilcast

A quick and dirty writing exercise inspired by Mike Clemens' latest post, in quickly and dirtily scanned format.

Milk crates full of memories...

Faced with housework, I procrastinate in every way possible. This weekend, I organized my journals while putting off vacuuming. After my move this spring, they'd been crammed onto shelves in no particular place or order, so I gathered them from the four corners of the house and arranged by date. (Mostly by date, anyway--for some reason, there are a few journals in 1997 that overlap. Apparently 1997 was the Year of Living Disorganizedly.) They span some twenty-seven years now: that little one all the way on the left was given to me for Christmas when I was six, when I was first learning to write.

And of course, once they were all nicely organized like that, I proceeded to yank them off the shelves (those classy milk-crate shelves...) and look through them. Some are in better shape than others. The colored journals I favored in the nineties fared the worst: the blue fountain pen ink I used in some entries vanished, and at least one journal was the victim of temporary storage in a damp basement. And there are large gaps in the record: I tend to write more when there isn’t as much going on, which means that most of my entries, especially those in the most recent journals, are mundane daily details and rambling. Their value is in the writing of them: they help me process my days and sort out thoughts, and many may never be read again. But other content makes me smile, or laugh out loud, or get a little weepy. Inconsistent though they may be, they contain a lot of memories, these books.

There is evidence of my long standing fascination with office supplies:

Translation: John and Jim got a car. I got crayons.

There are birthday reports:

I recall this as one of my best birthdays *ever*, especially the bird seed, strangely enough!

Book reports:


I’ve waxed poetic:

I was twelve when I wrote this entry, and apparently hadn’t yet learned appropriate apostrophe use in its vs. it’s. I guess I’ll cut my young self some slack....

I’ve attempted artsy:



Sometimes relatively casual entries make me smile, looking back. Stumbled across this comment about a conversation with my brother as I was flipping through...


A wedding and several children later...I’d say it turned out pretty well!

I’ve recorded thoughts on births, deaths, current events, pets, books and music, bemoaned my own bad habits and worries about the present and future. Reading through these, I’m amazed at how much I’ve changed in some ways, and how little in others. It’s kind of fun to revisit once in awhile on a rainy afternoon.

And speaking of revisiting and rainy afternoons, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the day I picked up the gloriously restored Olympia SG-1 from Blue Moon Camera.



Happy rebirthday, big guy!