writing
Today, I took Daniel and my daughter-out-law to the Bookmill. There is asbestos abatement happening in the room adjacent to my office and noise drove me out yesterday, so I figured today was likely to be a waste if I went in.
It was a rather dreary day that started raining just as we left. We arrived and found that the tables along the windows (and power outlets) were all taken. Luckily, I had the forethought to bring an extension cord, so we took a table in the middle and, fortified by coffee, we got ourselves all set up and set to work.
We spent the day working, writing, and drawing. I worked on a few work things, but spent a fair amount of time working on a haibun I've been trying to finish for months. Daniel worked on writing a new story: I'm trying to get him to finish a story and actually submit it for publication by the end of the holidays. Emilie worked on several drawings, one of which I hope to use for our holiday cards.
We stayed for several hours and eventually packed up and headed back. We stopped briefly in a store with locally produced artwork. I particularly liked several oil paintings of local scenes, including a panorama of the pioneer valley as seen from the top of mount sugarloaf. In any case, it was a nice way to spend the solstice.
We spent a couple of cold days and nights after the freak October Blizzard. Nights last a long time when you don't have any heat or light. On Monday, the University was closed and, after breakfast at Kelly's we came into the BCRC for warmth, light, and connectivity. On Tuesday morning, I awoke at 5:10 to find the lights were back on. We cheered as the furnace and the pump came on: soon we were warm and the basement was merely damp and our lives regained much of their normality. Many roads and schools are still closed, but life gradually returns to normal.
Since getting dumped as webmaster of E-USA, I've been spending more time on my own blog. I installed the views_cloud module and have been working updating and applying tags to my old posts. I've only gone back a couple of years, so far. It's been good to go back and look at my old posts: I haven't done that systematically in a long time.
Someone complained about spam at E-USA and I replied with the message I'd sent to the webmaster right after the switch, explaining what needs to be done. Not My Problem. I notice that the announcement is still up for ARE. And the same poll. But the community of bloggers is still contributing -- that's nice to see. I don't think I'm going to blog there anymore, however. I'm not feeling much like engaging in Esperanto activity. Or, if I do, I think I'll focus on writing something for publication. I have a few works-in-progress that need my attention.
I started using Twitter and Facebook at almost the same time. When Google Plus became available, I signed up for that too, to give it a try. Twitter is different from the other two and it's been interesting to me to reflect on why.
Both Facebook and Google Plus encourage laziness and sloppiness. They encourage all kinds of mindless/thoughtless posts in your stream, like "Bob done Killed A Varmint!" Or a link stuck in to some other article, with an automatically generated thumbnail and teaser. Or just rambling posts carelessly written. It turns out that I really like the results of the tiny bit of additional structure that twitter enforces: when you make people actually craft a short message and hone it down to 140 characters, it's better.
I don't follow the many of the same people in Facebook and Twitter. I mostly only follow people in Twitter who take the time to craft short, interesting messages. People who post things that get truncated with a link get unfollowed pretty fast. The same with people who just post links without some informative comment. Or who only re-tweet other people's posts. Or who post too often. There's a sweet-spot there somewhere that results in a highly informative feed where I actually want to look at each one of the posts -- even if just for a moment. And the fact that they're short and complete is a critical part of that.
In Facebook, there's too much content: it's clear that I don't see a lot of what's there. And many of the posts are too long or two pointless to read carefully. And having a robot make decisions for me about what I want and don't want to see is not the solution.
I also enjoy the discipline myself to make me craft my message carefully: the 140 character limit makes a huge difference in the kinds of things I write for twitter. The necessity of choosing each word carefully helps me focus on what's important -- what I'm really trying to say.
That's not so say that everything about Facebook is bad or inferior. I enjoy the more extended side discussions you can have there. But having a feed of short and complete posts makes my experience with twitter uniquely satisfactory.
If there was one thing I could fix about twitter it would be to require real hyperlinks: let people link to stuff, but encourage people use links to the actual thing (not a URL shortening service) and to have hypertext, instead of clickable URLS. If people don't know how to write a hyperlink, have the system help them. And don't count the links toward the 140 character limit. It would have two positive effects: first, it would make the messages more concise, compelling and readable, but it would also reduce the ability of the system to be misused with links to spam sites. Being able to actually see the real URL has a lot of value, but having to stick it into the text is just stupid: solving that problem was one one of the key insights that made the World Wide Web so great.
I have been enjoying my vacation a lot. The past semester left me feeling profoundly burned out. My job has grown to the point where I can't really do it anymore. Instead, I'm constantly satisficing the competing demands, and putting off the difficult and intractable problems. The result is that, instead of healthy structured procrastination, I've started to feel paralyzed, because every time I try to fix something, I find other things not-quite-right (because I didn't have time to do them right in the first place) and end up increasingly hedged in by the hard stuff I've been putting off for a lack of time to address it properly. It's very unsatisfactory. The next few weeks are going to be particularly bad: I have to resolve some sticky problems to migrate BCRC webservices from old hardware to new hardware, and then set up everything for the spring semester. Next week, I'll have to go in and face this. But this week, I've put it mostly out of my mind to do other things.
The only real "work" I've been doing is Esperanto writing. I have one piece out, a piece accepted, a piece submitted, and several more partly done. If I push myself, I'm hopeful to have at least a couple more done before I have to go back to work. But then it will be a long dry spell before I'm likely to have any energy to work on Esperanto stuff again.
I have a new article up at Libera Folio. I saw a note by Renato Corsetti at La Ondo which was talking about the failure of UEA to change with the times. I wanted to expand on a few of the points and drafted a note for Libera Folio. It's wonderful to have the help of other smart people in drafting an article: Istvan Ertl corrected the grammar for me. And Kalle Kniivilä came up with a great title and nice introduction (in which he called me a "konata usona esperantisto"!)
For several weeks, I've been working on a secret project which I can finally reveal today: I've published a book! Today, you can order Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo, a book of my original haiku with associated artwork in the original Esperanto with English translation.
I checked with a couple of likely publishers to see if someone else wanted to publish it for me, but there's almost no money to be made publishing any kind of poetry -- let alone obscure Esperanto poetry by an unknown author. So I just published it myself.
It was fascinating to go through the process of laying out the book, playing with the typography, and ordering a proof. To actually get the book in my hands was a wonderful experience.
As a kid, I was always fascinated by postage stamps. In this project, I took some of my best photography and got to turn it stamps! For a long time, I dreamed of being a serious photographer. I learned, eventually, that I was never going to be more than an amateur, but it's amazing now what you can do with software -- way better than a dark room ever was.
I did the whole project using Free Software: the illustrations were created with GIMP and Inkscape and the book was laid out using Scribus. I used Createspace to publish the book because they seemed the one that was most focused on enabling people to build the pieces themselves -- the other services I looked at were more focused on having you submit your content in some kind of web-based wizard, that would magically mangle your content into a slick looking book. I wanted to get my hands dirty (in a pixel-stained-technopeasant sort of way).
Maybe in another year, I'll have enough haiku to publish another book. Or maybe I'll make some other kind of book next time. If you make the interior just black-and-white, it's amazing how cheap it is. With full color, I managed to keep the price per book to just under $10 (I make $0.14/copy!) And so if a million people buy my book, my royalties would make me a hundred-thousand-aire! (Before taxes, of course. :-)
The other day, I decided to try installing the twitter_pull module and found that I was a full major revision out-of-date with my blogging software. So, over the long weekend, I spent a couple of hours updating and retheming my blog. I decided to use the Newswire theme, which I've been using at E-USA for a year or so. It's a really solid theme. I rejiggered stuff a bit. It's not perfect, but it's probably close enough.
It's our last night in Champaign. Tomorrow, we're planning to stop at the Pine Hills Nature Preserve in Indiana, and then drive back to Massachusetts. We'll probably need to stop on the road someplace and will get home sometime on Friday.
We've had a great visit! We did a lot of fiction writing -- I wrote thousands of words. I finished one story -- at least a rough draft. It still needs a lot of work, but was satisfying to finally get it written. I have two other stories in progress. The three of us also wrote a draft of a collaborative story. We had a lot of fun.
It's all been over much too quickly, but I'm also looking forward to a quiet weekend at home before going back to work on Tuesday.
We arrived in Champaign as a heat wave swept in and gripped the city. We had planned to visit a water park for two days, but thunderstorms prevented us until Wednesday. In the morning, we worked in the library until the water park opened at 12:30. Around noon, some dark clouds swept in and we worried that we'd have to wait yet another day, but a quick check of the radar showed that they were just passing clouds, and we changed clothes, put on our swim suits, and headed for Centennial Park.
Daniel, as usual, was wearing his swim-trunks, black crocs, and an orange and silver swim shirt with his swim goggles around his neck. Philip was wearing a loose, light-blue mesh shirt over his swimsuit and had his fedora. Jackie wore a large straw hat. Lucy hadn't changed into swim wear, intending to find a quiet spot in the shade to read while we went swimming.
The Sholem Aquatic Center lies in the middle of a green park surrounded by subdivisions and adjacent to a middle school. We got the last parking place and walked along the black chain-link fence to the entrance in a low, cement building with a blue metal roof. As we approached, the woman in the ticket office slid open the window and took our money. A man sitting at the entrance marked the receipt with a blue highliter and let us pass. We walked through a dark hallway, past the changing rooms and other doors, emerging into the busy pool area with the bright sunlight reflecting off the cement deck.
The place was packed. People of all ages, sizes, shapes, and colors were running this way and that, splashing and playing and shouting. There were small children, young women wearing bikinis, skinny boys, parents, grand parents and everything else. Life guards, wearing red swimsuits, were positioned strategically around the pools and would occasionally whistle to redirect children not following the rules.
The aquatic center is divided into regions each with a catchy name: the Puddle is a small pool for toddlers, the Oasis is a large, irregularly-shaped pool with regions for all ages, and, at the other side of the center, are the Plunge, with water slides, and the Lazy River. We took Lucy to the Meadow, a grassy area near the pools, and found her a shady place to read, then slathered on a copious amounts of sun screen before setting out. Philip and Jackie headed directly to the Lazy River while Daniel and I went to the Oasis.
The Oasis has a shallow end, like a beach, with water lapping at the shore. Jets of water spray up in one area. Another place has a post with branches, like a tree, each with a bucket that periodically fills and dumps water. In another spot, a mushoom-shaped structure produces a circular sheet of water that children can duck under and splash in. Little children were running and splashing here with their parents
At the deeper end, older children would hang on the walls, climb out, and jump in, in a never ending cycle of laughter and splashing. Most of the people in the deep end were in small groups of two or three, sorted by gender. Young women, talking constantly, and young men swimming, yelling, jumping, and rough-housing. Floats sectioned off a few lanes where a handful of people, mostly grownups, were swimming laps. Daniel and I floated in the cool water for a while before going to join Phil and Jackie in the Lazy River.
The Lazy River is a water-filled channel 10 to 15 feet wide formed into a irregularly circular loop with underwater jets creating a current that carries swimmers, using inflatable rings, around and around. One of the water slides, an open slide, enters the Lazy River near the middle. Two entrances to the Lazy River open on either side of the Waterfalls -- a region where jets of water soak anyone floating through on their inflatable rings. Jackie particularly liked the waterfalls and would exit on one side and run back to the other to float through the waterfalls again and again like a little kid.
After an hour in the sun, I was ready to just sit in the shade. Little by little, everyone trickled back and joined Lucy in the Meadow, except for Daniel who is indefatiguable when it comes to aquatic sports. Finally, we dragged him out, dried him off, and headed for the car.
It's magical getting new glasses. I can still remember the miracle of getting glasses for the first time and having the whole world snap into focus. Now, getting new glasses isn't so dramatic, but it's still amazing to be able to see.
As an interesting counterpoint to Phil's post today, the woman who fitted my glasses simply gushed over how wonderful they looked on me and how good they made me look. Whether it was true or not, it made me smile and feel better about the experience than I might have otherwise.
Over this week and next, the semester reaches its climax. On Monday, I tried to get my students organized for collecting data, but we didn't really get everything set until Wednesday. Last night, I went with one group to collect data at the East Amherst Common. I'll go with another group tomorrow. The other groups haven't contacted me -- I suspect that means they'd just as soon not have me go with them. The goal is to have the data collected by Monday, which will give us a full week to analyze the data and write the final reports. It would have been good to have another week, but I'm really excited by the data we're collecting.
This semester, the students chose to look at lichens on trees. I love lichens -- I've always thought they were really cool. We're collecting imagery of lichens on trees on town property in Amherst. This is a critical year to collect the imagery, because the coal-fired cogeneration plant on campus is shutting down this year, being replaced by a new oil and gas fired plant. The imagery we collect now can serve as a baseline for studying the changes in air quality associated with the new plant. And we're looking at a bunch of other factors: distance and orientation of roads, traffic, north-south orientation, species, and distance to other trees. There is real potential here for publishable work.
We had a great party in the department to celebrate Zane receiving the Distinguished Teaching Award. The chairman said a few words and then Randy and I each spoke a bit. It was such a treat to see Zane surrounded by her colleagues and students. And friends -- friends all. I sometimes get frustrated by the University and the senseless way they approach things and then I remember who I get to work with. Zane and Randy and Elizabeth... And George and Chris and Robbie... And Tom and Tom and Sally and Brian and Elsbeth... And everyone. Well, not quite everyone. But I really love my job. What wonderful people and what a great place I have to work.
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