Hurricanes, Twitter, and Sylvia Plath's typewriter

No, it's not a Royal.

I recently read a blog post from a young woman who tells us what she's interested in from Twitter tweeters.

There's not a thing wrong with her preferences, but they prove beyond any doubt *I* had that Twitter is a young person's game.

She's uninterested in following people who mostly tweet retweets and links, instead of their own thoughts.  Items 3, 6, and 7 on her list eliminate me from her world right now, not to mention book promotion, which I'll be doing eventually.

OK, social networking is all about finding people who share your interests, so she can be into "Be original! Say something!" while others might enjoy mostly pass-alongs.

Being original or interesting in 140 characters seems to me to be something only occasionally possible. Does that show my age, or does it show the mundanity of my life, or does her generation really care about trivia like the fact that today I hauled out my small crockpot for the first time in 10 years so I could make a smaller batch of vegetable soup? OK, Larry had to haul it out of a high cabinet. And he cleaned the top of the refrigerator while he was up there.

I can share that fairly succinctly, but what's interesting about it isn't really a 140-letter thing. Would tweeting, maybe, be a good exercise in curbing my longwindedness?

Here's what's going on : another hurricane is out there, and I realized while scrubbing the tray for the toaster oven that my whole life from spring to fall is about (a.) prepping for losing everything and (b.) hoping not to.  For that, and the heat and the bugs, summer has become a stretch of grumpy lethargy. Yard and garden work, I give up, and that probably won't change soon, since the heat and bugs are too much for a few more weeks.  But I dismiss indoor projects too.

We're currently watching the immensely fun Warehouse 13.  It's, for the uninitiated, a steampunky series in which the US goverment finds and stores various highly dangerous "artifacts" under lock, key, and "neutralizer" which is a purple goo that disables artifact misbehavior and is always on hand.

The writers have great fun with this.

In the one we watched last night, agent Pete stepped into the evil force-field emitted by Sylvia Plath's typewriter.

The typewriter causes despair.  The team has only minutes to solve a dangerous problem but Pete, roped in by Plath's Royal Manual, stares at it and can't move.  "What's the difference?" he says dully. Who cares?  Nothing matters. There's no point, etc etc.

I might, possibly, have a sick sense of humor but, despite finding Plath talented and her death tragic, I found this hilarious. A soul-sucking typewriter.  Another agent pushes him out of its field and the agents move on to their task.

Today, I made soup and washed up, and found myself thinking, Might as well clean this toaster oven tray. It's all discolored and cruddy, and I've looked at it many times and thought I should give it a scrub.

As I worked it over with Barkeeper's Friend [TM], I thought, "Why bother?  What's the point?  I'm cleaning this so Hurricane Marie can hit us at Cat 4-5 and take it and everything out to sea....."

I realized that I have my very own Inner Plath Typewriter.  I have no idea whether this is learned behavior from a family of rather anxious and sensitive people, or whether it's brain chemistry.  I think its brain chemistry. At least, I can't think of any family members I might have learned it from.  The sort of gloomy pessimism I see on both sides of my family has rarely made them lethargic.  Every one of them has always lived actively, always done the chores, done projects, lived to the fullest, even while being pessimistic about it, and I am the one exception. I retreat into a sort of functional-catatonic state in which I do what has to be done, but not much more. If a task can sit, it sits.

I kept scrubbing (it's still splotchy-looking but usable), and thought, This is good.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring?  Live anyway.

It's not really a breakthrough. I periodically kick the pessimism/sapped energy habit but fall back in.  The Inner Typewriter will activate its gloom-field but I need to neutralize it when it does. Purple goo.  Maybe a brain-food blueberry shake.

Home. Eating. Grumpy.

That could describe me on any day of the year, but in this particular case, it refers to Scooter.

They couldn't find anything wrong with him.  Joyful joyful!!

He still wouldn't eat much when we got him back here, but he also was sneezing.  Cats insist on testing food aroma before they will eat it and whatever the systemic illness was, it put his smeller off.  He'd eat the smellier treats in our repertoire, but that was all, last night, apart from a syringe-feeding that did not go well.  It seems to be slowly improving, and he's now eating odoriferous wet food. 

Still not allowed outdoors until we get him back to normal.  Not happy, but no lethargy. Grateful tonight.

And just WHEN are you going to open this &$^% door??!

Scooter isn't well

We spent yesterday evening at the emergency vet with Scooter, the downstairs, indoor-outdoor cat. He had no symptoms except lethargy and refusal to eat. At the vet (those wonderful wonderful people! They open when all others close, nights, weekends, holidays. Bless them forever) they found he had a fever, so we left him overnight for bloodwork, etc.

Called this morning. His fever is gone! and bloodwork is normal. ?? That's good but he still won't eat.

This cat has usually lost a lot of weight when away from us. Maybe he had some run-of-the-mill infection and got over it but can't cope with (perceived) abandonment and confinement.

He's also not young, age unknown, but not young, and the dreaded day will come, however much I say PLEASE, not today. He get an x-ray later, and then I pray and pray we can bring him home.

I can't describe the uniqueness of this cat. I can tell you how he comes when he's called, how he takes walks with us, how he converses and signals and all that, but you'd have to live with him on a daily basis to really get the experience. I've lived with a lot of cats, and Larry with many more, and neither of us has ever met anyone like Scooter. All our cats have been producers of good endorphins during the stress of recent years, but Scooter gets way and gone the most credit.

So here we sit. I decided I'd illustrate this post with the most recent photo I'd taken of him, no matter what it looked like, and this is it, above. Hanging around the upstairs front door begging for attention.

I hate that we can't have him up here with us. I hate that Graymatter can't tolerate another cat, and I hate that the one who most "deserves" full time with humans he's clearly uber-attached to can't live in the house where he'd be safer and live longer just by avoiding the scrapes and bites and little venoms of nature.

He wants to come in the upstairs where we are, but he wants to enter and leave freely, and to roam. He lived outside too long to tolerate confinement. We tell ourselves that. Maybe if Little Gray Lucretia Borgia wasn't here, he'd be fine with it, but that's not to be.

We know people, and know others through media, who provide safe havens for a lot of animals and we've thought, because we love the idea so much, that one of our callings in life might be to do that. Then Graymatter intervenes and I'm starting to realize that, if there is some Great Plan, we've, maybe, been assigned a different version of the job. We can take in fewer cats, but we get "sent" the ones with few other options.

Scooter ... well, anyone would adore him, but he chose here, and seems to like this Best Of Both Worlds situation.

It's Graymatter who'd be relocated from a lot of homes. She's who she is, she can't help her high anxiety and her .... um .... need to assure herself that her space is hers by peeing on anything whose ownership isn't clearly marked. That picture of Scooter shows him outside our front door. He approaches it and yowls regularly, and we sometimes seen raccoon pawprints out there. To Graymatter, that's where Enemies try to breach the fortress, and she has peed on the door so often that the paint is dissolving.

Who else would both give her a home and love her? She might get shelter, but not the kind of enmeshed bond she gets with us, and that she needs, little psycho that she is. We're certainly not the only difficult-cat tolerators, but we're the ones who got the job. And I do love her, with all my heart.

Meanwhile, I'll call the emergency vet hospital again in a couple hours, and see if we can get our little Crock of Gold back here. He's our luck, best we ever had.

The chick in the mirror

A few days ago I wrote up a major frustration-venting over selling to self-professed "Christian" customers on ebay.

Then I decided, "OK, this was ONE obnoxious person, I shouldn't make a big generalized deal over it and rant away about all Christians everywhere." I got it out of my system, fine, no need to post it.

Today I get another one.

Is two prissy Christians my tipping point? I dunno, but however much it sounds like I'm painting a big population with a wide brush, I have experienced this enough to truly believe it:

A great many people who identify themselves, in largely unrelated matters and venues, as "Christians" seem to feel a massive sense of entitlement to correct and criticize every aspect of others' lives.

First there was a book I labored over creating the listing for, with multiple photos and description, to eliminate the possibility that anyone looking at it could find it deceptive in any way.

Specifically, I listed the condition of a 1960 design textbook as Very Good, which it was - maybe never used, clean, crisp and bright - even though it didn't have its original dustjacket. Jackets survive rarely on those old textbooks, since they got much much harder wear than other one-use reading books did.

A potential buyer sent a snotty sarcastic "question" couched in sweetness, in which she (or he?) talked to me as though I were a small and errant child who needed to be Guided about book condition. Unfortunately, before we had a chance to place a "block this bidder" on her (or him?), she also bid on the book, despite making it clear in her email that she didn't want it as it really was. Now, why would she buy it if...?

Oh crap. She wants the title, midcentury design is very desireable right now, but the cheapest with a decent jacket is $64 and she's given up on affording that, so she'll buy this superior unjacketed copy and then...

This was negative feedback just begging to happen.

We blocked her anyway, but too late, so there was nothing to do but close the listing.

Why exactly I was targeted for this Lesson From The Righteous, I don't really know. While most sellers are using stock photos and pre-filled information, I take multiple photos of important features and flaws, and write up this detailed description that Larry says nobody reads. 8~)

I'm under no illusions about that, but it does cover me. I can point to it and say, "But I said there are spine creases. Clearly. Right there. Line two. See?"

The potential buyer did read it. Her sarcasm was employed in informing me that she was Terribly excited!! to find this book with its dustjacket, because you called it VG so it must have its jacket, yay!!! The sarcasm with which she pretended shock that it didn't have one was pretty obvious. She wasn't misunderstanding.

I do know how to deal with creeps, and I know that it's dangerous to assume that they are not really misunderstanding.

I expressed my Deep Sorrow that my listing had been "unclear" and explained, in equally kind and gentle terms, how book sellers will give separate ratings for book and jacket, so books can be rated apart from their jackets, and how you can get actual information from an ebay listing, by merely reading it and looking at the pictures! It's fun and easy too! No no, I was more subtle than that. Really. But when she wrote again, instructing me again, it was time to bail.

What does this have to do with tightywhitey Christians? Why do I think she set out to Improve Our Walk In Truth by leaving us negative feedback so as to obey Biblical Edicts to Admonish miscreants? In Christian Love? Her user name is (I'll deliberately paraphrase and misspell this) a variation of ChrisstianLuv.

Keep spreadin' the Luv, honey.

Honest, I know that obnoxious people come in all creeds and associations, probably in about equal numbers. Sample any group, whether it's Christians or Pepsodent users or vegetarians, and you'll get x-number of trolls who have some kind of need to claim victimhood, or feel big by correcting others, or otherwise cause battles just because they feel like it.

Then today, the sale of one of my brand-new Bibles, which I packed carefully and securely in protective packaging, got slammed for using the recycled materials. Why the customer cares what the mailing box looks like -- holy bleep, I boxed it and padded it, instead of using an envelope -- is beyond me unless it was intended as a gift and even then, don't most of us order a book, take it out of the mailing box and gift wrap/bag it??

In my librarian days, I was in charge of inter-library loans. We'd get loaners of requested books from the state library or from other libraries all over the country and returns were particularly important. Each customer was cautioned that this wasn't just any loan, it was a trust from a distant library which had no authority in our state/county to get the material back with, and that our library could be blacklisted from the inter-library loan system if too many out-of-state loans to our patrons disappeared.

Exactly two non-returns happened on my 10+ year watch. BOTH procured for church matters or activities. In both cases, the borrower took the dismissive attitude that God's Work made return unimportant, and we could go jump.

Christians are assuredly not any more obnoxious than are others, but there's one difference. Other groups don't seem to think that the group itself issues the blanket license to assume authority over others.

A specific license? Sometimes, sure. Vegetarians can cop an attitude about animal welfare and food matters, sewing enthusiasts will critique garment workmanship.

But blanket license? The belief that their Fight For Truth applies to every single aspect of other peoples' work and lives, and that they are called by Jesus to correct posture, parenting and purveyance of ebay goods? I'm seein' it.

While internet selling is a good choice for someone with a thin skin, I still let them get to me on occasion. This has to be about my inner peace. I joke about Opportunities for Growth and how annoying they are, but the advice I want to give these complainers, which is "Start with the person in the frikkin mirror!" applies to me.

Whatever motivates these people -- and this is one stressed-out society right now. We've had more complaints in the last 3-4 years, in relation to vastly fewer sales, than in the whole 1998-2007 stetch on ebay before that -- but whatever motivates them, I have to do my best and then quit caring. I did well by the customer, with secure packaging, timely service and a good deal, and I have to turn him over to whatever version of Higher Power he's into.

Does this sound like something I should have learned many decades ago? I did and I didn't, because it's one of those lessons that come back and come back and come back and come back.....

The lesson being that avoiding criticism by working overtime to please people (in this case, customers) doesn't solve my inner problem of a thin skin. It reduces the number of occasions on which I have to confront it. It's my job to thicken my skin.

Larry pointed out a unique feature of life in our times that I hadn't really thought about. In selling, or any interaction done online, we're not just dealing with the bad (or good) personalities in a limited geographical area. We're dealing with them all over the planet, and maybe in higher percentages. Just as I like to protect my too-thin skin by putting online access to me between me and the buyers, unhealthy personalities can also find the internet protective. They can lob their stinkbombs over the fence and run away unseen.

Which is why the problem always -- always -- comes from a customer whose displeasure I wasn't expecting. Always. The ones I worry about? Never. The ones I think would have absolutely nothing to find wanting?? It's them, every time.

Hurricane Irene

Hurricane Irene a video by nickelshrink on Flickr.

Apologies for the oversized screen - I cannot seem to change it manually.

One minute of the storm, August 26th at about 4:30 PM.

The marsh (yes, this is the marsh, not the ocean!) is submerged by the storm surge! Seabirds are screeching there in the sound portion - there were lots of them swooping and diving as though they were having a great time.

And to think - we got off easy.

Craving Christmas

Our tree 2002



It's August and the Christmas catalogs are starting to pour in. Most years, they irritate the bejesus outta me. Tacky, ridiculous stuff and besides, it's still summer, etc. etc.

This year, for the first time probably ever, I keep feasting my eyes on them, not so much on the giftable goods as the Christmas cards, with their images and their messages.

This craving has a bunch of reasons, one being the relentless heat and mosquitoes. I crave fall and winter. I'm even sick of thunderstorms, which I usually love. Our recent lightning strike shook my storm enjoyment. By the way, it fried every smoke detector in the house, necessitating a full set of replacements.

My grandmother's childhood ornament string, circa 1910


Another is that it's been so long since I really experienced Christmas that I miss it. Last year was something to get through, and actually, the year before wasn't much better. Dad's only brother died and we took a difficult trip in an ice storm to the funeral on December 17th 2009, with my very frail mom, so the next week was recovery and grieving. Christmas 2010 happened and happened well but it didn't happen in my heart, just in cars, shops and rooms. I'm feeling more ready to love Christmas as a way of sharing something with people in my past as well as my present. I need renewal. I feel like I'm running on empty, just over halfway through the year.

The cards in the National Wildlife catalog are a mental vacation. Quiet idealized woods and cottages in snow, little birds puffed against the cold, sparkling lights spattering out of windows at dusk, peace on earth, wishing you peace, let there be peace....

The pre-written lines on the cards ... Well, let's just say that they're exercising my brain. I have the leisure at this time of year to think about what they say and how I feel about it.

"Season's Greetings" is the one I hate. The only one. It's a venerable meaningless sentiment, having been around for business-networking-decades before the culture wars bled over into Christmas.

I'm OK with "Happy Holidays." To deny that there are other holidays is silly. The statistics as to how many more people celebrate "this" one over "that" one mean zilch. It's not a majority-win-all issue, and I fail to see how anyone could embrace the loving spirit of Christmas without liking the idea of wishing happiness for others who aren't interested in Christmas happiness.

"Happy Holidays" is a good thing to offer. "Season's Greetings" is emotionless, soulless, so robotic you can smell the machine oil of the "Don't really care if you're happy" thought that lubricates its dead gears.



But I do Christmas because I believe in it, and that means that the reason I send cards is Christmas. And the reason I'm glad others find something joyful in the turn of the year is that it, I certainly hope, gives them not just happy holidays, but renewal for the year. Strength for a full-year's journey.

So, I guess the next category of card-sentiments that I don't like are the ones that say only "I wish you a wonderful season." Just the season?



Honestly, just me, but I'd get a better holiday that provides a little soul-sustenance year-round.




I need to like both the art and the message. This one (below) has a good sentiment (which you need to click it, to read).

If only the art didn't look like somebody found a distant planet on which all life had been scorched off by a gamma-ray burst, and inexplicably planted a church there.


Last but maybe best is rediscovering a gift I got long ago.

Beyond Sing the Woods was given to me by my writer-grandmother, when I was about 16. I couldn't get into it then. I picked it up again a couple weeks ago and have been Wowed. Some gifts wait till the right time and this was the right time, most certainly.

Beyond Sing the Woods has rich, glorious Christmas scenes. The novel takes place in a vague era that's probably the late 1700's or early 1800's, and the goods and food are varied and opulent, but the power in the festival comes from something more nebulous than that opulence, and gift-giving is practically an afterthought. The feast renews an awareness of something higher, especially in the poorer residents too careworn most of the year to think long about the beliefs that they do hold.

The book is filled with visions of the new added to, or built onto, the old; the new 18th century house, attached to the older hall with its heavy leaded glass windows and its multiple generations of weapons and ironware piled back in the shadows, and, opening off of another room and still older, the house from antiquity with its hearth in the middle of the floor and smokehole in the roof. The past isn't gone, it's encompassed in the new. The rituals have tied past to present since memory began.


I'm craving cool weather and time outside, and the short days that ease into night. And gifts are good, I like gifts when they're in proportion to the purpose of the festival. There has to be a way to give, without gift-giving becoming the disproportionate thing it can become, like a bowling ball balancing on a straight pin. I want Christmas for the connection with people in my past, and connection with people who will remember our Christmases when we're gone.

Our power company is teh awesome!

At about 7:30 PM yesterday, a lightning bolt cooked our end of the neighborhood. It sounded like it hit our chimney -- the roof sounded like it was splitting, things sparked -- but there's no sign of a hit, and the bolt seems to have struck only outside, a few yards away.

It took out the transformer on our corner, and the absolutely awesome crew from Santee Cooper was out there replacing it by 10 PM. A slightly more cynical friend reminded me that they were probably loving the overtime, and I'm sure that's true, but it was a l-o-o-ong hard day for those guys, storms and similar strikes all over the place. It took 3 huge trucks, two with cherry-pickers. I took the picture at close to 11PM, from the front porch, where we stood and watched, having read with booklights for 3 hours and not wanting to run down any more batteries.

By the way, it made me decide to get more booklights that take ordinary AA batteries from now on. I have a charger for rechargeable batteries. Most booklights that they sell now use those expensive, non-rechargeable, little specialty disc batteries. I've got one light that's out of commission because I carefully opened it, got the battery number, bought one, got it home, and found that the little %@$-d needs TWO of the bleeping things.

We still had a fried modem and no cable, which took another day to fix. I spent the day reading and -- I amaze myself! -- sewing. I loathe needles and thread but it was an undeniable shoutout from God/The Universe/Opportunity, to do several annoying clothes-mending jobs that have sitting for years.

It could have been a lot worse.

I could dust something off...

I have a bunch of drafted posts waiting to be rewritten into publishable states. But I'm not going to work that hard. Instead, I'll ramble.

My novel is also stalled. All it "needs" is proofreading that I've realized I'm incapable of doing because I'm too familiar with it and my brain just slides past goofs. I put "needs" in quotes because my opinion of the basic story, characters and execution is merely that of the author and not sufficiently objective, so my belief that it needs only proofreading could be total brain-goo. I'll be hiring a real editor when I can afford it, but not before.

My review of The Dry Grass of August (which I wrote about on this blog awhile back) is now up, on the book blog.

So is an overlong (but I cut a fourth of it!) treatise on women in the 1920's, as depicted in a few popular fiction books I know of.

I haven't been announcing book blog posts. A new one appears on occasion.

I'm finding Real Life hard to write about lately. Mostly because its uneventful, and that's very very good. Enough with Events. It's not a terribly happy time, but actually, a good part of life in some ways. This year+ since Mom got sick has been, and keeps being, an Opportunity For Growth.

I'm fed up with Facebook. I post only selectively, and post links to articles or fun things only if I really think they're interesting to a wide swath of my "friends" but get practically no indication that they were seen. And I've realized what most people -- really, I do think it's most -- use Facebook for. Their egos. They amass 200+ friends and immediately click each one and choose "Hide all posts by soandso." Then they themselves post, and bask in the "likes" and attention and discussions they spark, but care not a bloodyblue screw what you have to say if they are not the center of attention. A website that used to tell you who had your posts blocked has been taken down. Man, them facebook moguls sure have got some kind of far reach. So FB has become the ideal way to

A. promote yourself, I guess. Unless everybody's blocked you.
And...
B. claim your friend list is terribly diverse, while you make sure you never hear anything you disagree with.

Facebook is a major player in the complete divide that's happening in the U.S. No information sources for the general public, just a batch of resources each dedicated to their own viewpoint, and to making sure their members preach only to the choir and act as good choir-members to others they already agree with. Facebook has brilliantly managed to become a way to be a source for all sides while letting each member silence all diversity and stew only in his/her own pot. You can hear only liberals, or only conservatives, or new-agers, or atheists, or fundamentalists, only whatever you're into. No wonder it's taking over the planet.

Plenty of other topics coming, when I get them ready.

Peanut-free Sesame Noodles

Cook, drain, and cold-water rinse:
8 oz. of your favorite pasta.
I used whole wheat.
GLUTEN-FREE rice pasta works OK, has a more brittle texture.

Mix - in a medium bowl that will hold the entire recipe:
3 tablespoons of Sun Butter (sunflower seed butter)
2-3 tablespoons of sesame tahini

Microwave the seed-butter mixture about 30 seconds, till quite warm.

Whisk in:
2 tablespoons Tamari sauce
2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 teaspoons powdered ginger

Add the noodles, mix thoroughly to coat, and chill.

Yummy, if you like this sort of thing!
Better than they look in that photo.

Eden

I had a craving for sesame seeds for some weird reason. Cravings can sometimes be a nutritional need asserting itself. Sesame seeds are full of great nutrients, especially a broad spectrum of B vitamins.

So this is a What I Had For Lunch entry -- kind of. I could satisfy both my acute craving for the seeds and my ongoing love for fruit-and-protein shakes.

As I looked at the luscious delights piling up in the mixing bowl, I had this strange, kind of awful and kind of wonderful realization : I live in Eden.

Or rather, I live in a privileged position in a privileged society in which Eden is brought to me in trucks. This morning's paper headlined the latest food crisis in Somalia and, for that matter, right here at home people are living in the woods of the state park and -- we hope -- seeking assistance from food pantries. There's one at a church right down the street.
I, on the other hand, can decide I'm in the mood for sesame sticks and blueberries and bananas and this delicious sweet vanilla protein powder, which makes a sugar-free fruit shake that's killer-wonderful. And things I wouldn't even know existed if I lived here 50 years ago, like acai juice. All I need to do is load a grocery store shopping cart. And pay for them. Which too many people can't do.

How men solve clothing problems

So since we're moving furniture and boxing up stuff, finding one's belongings isn't an instant process right now.

Yesterday we worked up until 10 minutes before we had to leave for a lunch appointment. I had to find a shirt in a color that would not look poisonous with the capris I had on. NOTHING worked, minutes ticking away. "I can't find a shirt that will go with these!" I yelled.

Larry answered instantly: "Black! White!"

"Don't have either!" (Findable at that moment)

"Gray!"

"Yes! Got it!"

Men are great outfit-simplifiers. For every problem, one of three answers will work. Black. White. Gray.

Another day, another mammal

If I posted an entry about every raccoon we capture and transport, they'd all look pretty much the same.

Bright eyes reveal a look of suspicion and contempt. This one had an air of resignation:



Raccoons are also smart enough to eat the food rather than letting the fear of their predicament kill their appetite. "OK. Gonna be in here for unknown amount of time. Might as well enjoy the meal."

The release spot we've been using for a couple years now:



And usually an exit so fast I can't even get a photo:

Yet another spew about juries and verdicts

Since justice isn't a topic I've written much about, I don't mean that this is another spew about it from me, but another in the massive stream of reaction to a recent case that dominated the news.

I did not keep up with the case and haven't clue one about it. This is about being a juror. Already, in this morning's paper, a microcephalic rant appeared from someone with the phrase that we hear, over and over and over and over and over......

"Everybody knows....." A phrase for and by the unthinking and ineducable, a phrase that has shored up a million wrongful accusations, reputation-destructions and wrongful deaths.

That particular proto-hominid insists that "everybody knows" the child was smothered. He obviously has no concept of evidence, proof, legality. And as for understanding that belief and knowledge are not the same thing - I doubt he's capable.

I was on a jury once and it's one of my most miserable memories, and not because it was any life or death matter, but because I was incapable of doing the job, and because the other jurors were too. My faith in the jury system went completely to hell after it.

It was a drunk driving case. We were a jury of six.

I was newly sober and as stupid as the arrogant, crusading, newly sober can possibly be. The other 5 jurors -- all 5 -- were ready to acquit.

I was a shy, follower type. But I was full of self-righteous condemnation of all who weren't as Marvelous, Special and So-oh-oh-ber as Superior Me, and was practically drunk on my rarely-felt power to persuade. I convinced all 5 of them to convict.

No need to tell me how many people drunk drivers kill and how the conviction might have been the wake-up call the accused needed.

No need to tell me that however bad my judgment was, I was judging to the best of my pathetic ability and that was what they chose me to do.

No need to tell me that, to reiterate, I did not volunteer for duty or for the case, but was chosen, coerced by law to do it at every step.

No need to tell me that if the others disagreed, their failure to stand up and say No, I will not convict is on them, not on me.

I get all of that.

The guy could have been guilty, but it was a borderline case with no proof and no real evidence except a timetable of what he ate and drank in the previous few hours. I had no business Saving the World with a conviction that was inadequately supported. Maybe I stumbled into an accurate verdict and maybe the Anthony jury did too, but in both cases it had to be about what was adequately proven, not what was likely or what "felt" right.

I was a crusading jerk, and the other 5 were spineless and uncaring jerks who just wanted a consensus so they could go home. It was a Perfect Storm of Category 5 Jerk, and something desperately needs to change about the jury system.

As I said, I didn't follow the Anthony case and don't feel entitled to any statements like "I think" she did or didn't do it.

But I did learn something in the past, about the huge honking difference between

"maybe,"
"probably,"
"most likely,"
"she's a horrible human being"

and

hard factual evidence
that answers the questions
beyond reasonable doubt.

I have no solution to stupid juries, and I'm not convinced that this was one. The little that has come out sounds like they were conscientious and serious about their legal responsibility. If the system fails, the jury gets blamed and I'd want to stay anonymous too if I'd been on this one. The system failed when I was juror, and I still feel the weight of the responsibility. But I do know juries of carefully chosen morons are too frequent, and that something oughta be done.

I wouldn't call it my "solution," more like my vague thoughts, but I'd like to see much bigger juries, selected more randomly, but from trained -- trained -- people, and verdicts that do not have to be unanimous. Which does not mean convicting on 51% votes. Two-thirds or even 90% to convict could be required.

Or not. Could it be worse than this system? Yeah, my smart readers will probably think of scenarios in which it could, scenarios I haven't even thought of, but my experience instilled in me a horror of the system as it "works" now.

In which we discover that rearranging the house is as much work as moving out altogether

I'm time-challenged right now because we're shifting things in our house.

O yeah? Big deal!

It is for us. I'm sure it's obvious that we live in a nice house, but what's not obvious is that we live in only half of it, and what we're doing right now is switching halves. It's creating a major weed-out of unused stuff, and rediscovery of forgotten things.



Aw, man. Tower Records was so awesome. Tower dot com isn't the same.

Our Fourth

American favorites from everywhere.

Great Granddaddy's flag in its usual place - wind is very high today!



Hot dogs from Rochester maker - woman-owned for 5 generations!
Purchased at our favorite Italian deli. (Link goes to their "about us" page. If you click the main page, you get automatic concertina music. You can hit the stop button on that before you proceed. Just a fair warning.)



Watermelon from Georgia USA:


Happy Fourth to everybody.

Burglars and smoke

Ever come home from the grocery store mid-morning, say, 11AM or so, and surprise a burglar? We did, Tuesday.

Three guesses as to his mode of transportation.

I'd play hard to get with the answer but those who read my blog regularly have probably already guessed.

He came on a bike, with a basket to hold one pack while he carried another slung over his shoulder. Apparently planning to quik-pik his way up the neighborhood.

He parked his bike in the driveway, in a position that made a good compromise between hiding it from immediate view, behind shrubbery, and keeping it enough in the open for handy retreat access.

An amateur would have wheeled it around back where he entered, but he'd have had to ride it back out through mushy grass or garden, on a narrow path that could get him trapped and necessitate taking off on foot and abandoning it. Parking it in front looks so "I'm just a thirsty cyclist on a hot day, I have nothing to hide," if it gets seen by neighbors or even caught by the homeowner. He knew what he was doing. We certainly took him by surprise because he was around back of the house, and had quickly exited the garage when he heard the car pull in. He left the garage door pushed open, and we later found drawers pulled open, way off in the foyer.

We have not been locking the garage's patio door because the garage does not allow access to the house, and because the masses of paperbacks and grubby Cabbage Patch dolls, and other unsold goods in there are about all it contains. If the guy had taken the moldy Alf lunchbox, I'd thank him.

And we keep the door cracked because Scooter the cat needs to get his stubborn butt in to cool off, eat and drink. Yes, before you say it, it's time for a locked door with a cat door cut in it. Since the door is steel, and since it's not our house, that's not been a top priority project.

When I spread the word in the neighborhood, I got confirmation of a homeless camp in those State Park woods right across the creek. Always thought it was the ideal spot so that was no surprise.

The woods across the creek, and this neighborhood have obviously always been this near one another, but when park visitors had to walk down a dangerous highway shoulder -- Highway 17 splits right there and cars are whippin' along at the Bypass 17 speed as they enter Business 17, which I neglected to label in the map -- not much crossing back and forth went on. Now the bike bridge makes it safe, easy, and fast.

Larry confronted him in the back yard. The guy seemed to be high but not too high to plan and execute the attempted theft, and to play it nicely to avoid personal harm. He wandered away from the back door with a dumb grin. He said he was just looking for water. Larry pointed out the hose at his feet, one of two he'd walked past. He drank a few sips, asked to shake Larry's hand, walked back to the front with Larry following. Larry said, "Is there any reason we should look in your bag?" The guy grinned dopily, said "eh eh....Nah....Have a good day." He rode slowly off. We checked and can't see any particular thing missing, though it's a chaotic heap in there. I expect he was caught too fast, or found little worth picking, probably both. We did not call authorities. Several people have told us we should have. We'd already decided to lower the hammer in any future incidents.

And then the smoke started. Late yesterday it was so thick that I thought surely the dreaded wildfires are coming our way. This photo lacks the drama it should have, but you should know I took it directly facing the western sun, and the smoke was dimming everything like a blanket.


The pack-and-run anxiety began to build. Then, amazingly, it turns out to be coming from Florida and Georgia.

In the map below, you see Garden City at the top, and that's where we live. At this projection, the map doesn't label Murrells Inlet which is right next to GC, just a little set back, down the inlet. Source of the smoke is a bunch of fires at the bottom of the map. Not good.


The wind conditions have improved the air today. You can still smell the smoke, but it doesn't make me wheeze. This is shaping up to be an interesting summer. I've had interesting summers and I'm really not wanting one.

It's a heartache

Still photographing and scanning, enough to force me to pay for "pro" status on flickr!



Meet Georgia, and doesn't she look like a pistol!

This is my Great Great Grandmother (1846-1925), date of this photo unknown. I titled it "1890s" but she could be anywhere from her 50's to her 70's here. I'm thinking 60+, making the photo from 1910 or so. There's no telling.

She's my ancestress straight down the female line, my mother's mother's mother's mother.
You can see her three daughters here.
My grandmother (the short story writer) used to tell an anecdote about her own birth. Apparently, Georgia took one look at her newborn granddaughter and said, "Well. She's all Burroughs." Gran did look very like her father, not so much like her mother, who was Georgia's middle daughter, Iola.

It seems that there was more to it. In my journey through old photos, I found a photo of a younger Georgia,

marked on the back with Gran's handwriting:

"She did not like me."


How anybody, much less her own grandmother, could dislike my grandmother at all, much less on newborn sight, is disturbing.

Gran had loving parents and doting aunts and uncles, and an essentially happy life, so it didn't wreck her or anything. She rarely talked about this lady, and the inscription on the picture was my first encounter with the fact that this wasn't just a snitty first reaction, but persisted.

The inscription was written fairly late in Gran's life - that's her handwriting from when she was at least 40+ and looks more like the age 50's and 60's writing I always knew. The fact that she identified her grandmother this way makes me pretty sure that it still stung. She had plenty of love and support, but it's hard not to want people who should love you to love you, or at least for their opinion of you to make sense.

I'll never know what that was about, other than resemblance to the "wrong" side of the family, and maybe Georgia disliked her son-in-law for, again, unknown reasons. My first reaction to the top photo was that this was one tough but witty lady, and maybe that's still true. I'm not sure whether I'd have liked her or not, but I'm pretty sure crossing her wasn't a very good idea!

Candy-coated goodness!

Over on facebook people are posting pictures of their dads for Father's Day weekend, and it was a good reason to fire up the PC (urgh!), which is the only computer my scanner will negotiate with, and scan this one in.

I love this photo. Dad is the little one, here with his big brother in their back yard. The photographer (my grandfather?) appears to have his camera on a tripod and to be standing to one side, probably snapping the photo with an extender cord hooked to the shutter, whatever those cord things are called.


I rarely boot up the PC. I wrote in 2009 about what a mess it was, and how I'd be doing a "system restore" on it when I no longer need the 9-year-old (now 11-year-old) word processor to work. That time ought to have long-since arrived but the typos and little errors in my novel ... that's a whole other story. Short version - it's only typos now, and I keep thinking I'm just hours away from publishing, but more errors show up.

Anyway, I resist using the PC, so when I do decide to scan something, I make a project of it and do a bunch of stuff that's been accumulating.

All of these should come up large if you click them individually.

I spotted this ad for the genuine original Downyflake baked goods, so I wanted to show yall where our sweet free-floating-anxiety-ridden golden cat gets his name.



That led me to all kinds of great ads in the rest of the magazine, which is the June 1954 issue of Woman's Day and a super time capsule!

This one, I thought of for my occasional posting of comic strip ads. Oddly, just a couple days ago we were in the pet store and I overheard the owner talking with another customer who makes his own dog food. She was saying that too many people who make homemade dog food use only muscle meats, but dogs need organ meats too. So this really is a poor little rich dog :
And oh, the good ole days of guilt-free sugary cereal! Hey, it may be candy-coated, but it's wholesome :


I copied the ad below, thinking, "Wow, lookit those toxic chemicals we used to use..."

Guess what. That stuff is relatively non-toxic (I always think, "relatively") and still used in foggers. It is worth posting just because I had no idea insecticide home-foggers were around that long ago. I sort of recall them from the '70's and used them in the 1980's, in my all-out war on roaches in an apartment complex, but they were available the year I was born.


Not all ads of the era were mockery material. Modess sanitary napkins had beautiful and classy ads, and are famous for not showing the product or using text that explained what it was. If you didn't know, you didn't need them anyway!


Last but far from least -- Mrs. Filbert was an actual person! I never knew that.


Oh all right. The guys wanna see some cheesecake. Fine. Here:

Tinderbox

Heat, lots of heat, and no rain. Scooter could be in his air-conditioned foyer, but insists on being out in this miserable weather and I wish he wouldn't. He's not young. But he refuses to leave his territory unsupervised, so he moves from shade spot to shade spot. The shade isn't that much better than the sun, especially when you're encased in (rapidly shedding) fur. Stubborn little cuss.



Here's what's going on around here : fire prevention. Maybe "fire defense" is a better term.

Our house sits between two wooded lots. The lot on our west side is right up against the road, and the bike path.

As a treehugger type, I never thought I could dislike a bicycle path, and to do so is selfish of me, but being next to it sux.

What used to be a quiet village road's end, past any village destination points, has become just the most sought-after parking spot ever. People haul their bicycles to our neighborhood by car, park the car, get on the bikes and cycle across the creek bridge to the state park.


That is not a diagram of a tooth. It's meant to represent our house, yard, and driveway. It's not a reliable map. Scale and relative placement are very very ...very... approximate.

There's often a whole row of cars on the shoulder next to the wooded lot -- where I've marked it as a ...um... parking area -- as though we were havin' a big ole party at our house.

They are in fact crashers into our personal space.

For one thing, problems with our service have made us pretty sure some are/were wi-fi thieves. Across the 2-lane paved street is an abandoned development project where cyclists and others also park, and it's closer to our house than my map makes it look. They could catch the signal with a booster, and maybe even without one. Sometimes there's a car or SUV sitting right ON the bike path, as though it were a pull-over spot, and that's so near our house they could get an even stronger signal. Yes, we have tightened security and are now thwarting them.

Many of the real cyclists treat this dirt road like it must be Nowheresville, and leave their cars halfway out into the road blocking a lane. They dump trash out of their car doors. They pee.

I do not love nature lovers. They don't seem to love nature much themselves.

The food wrappers and empty cans are bad enough, but a cigarette butt is something to fear. The drought is becoming a real problem, and those woods are full of dead branches and underbrush. All it would take is one jerk to flick his butt on the roadside. That could start a fire that would take the house we live in.

There's not a lot we can do except to trim trees and brush back and make it a little harder for a fire in those woods to jump our driveway, over to the house. So that's what we're doing, and it's hot, tiring work. Such projects are for cooler weather but now's when we need to do it.


It takes this lovely new lethal weapon, an extension limb saw with a nice pruning shear attached. Larry used the saw on a couple limbs, but the pruning shears are so sharp that they take fair-sized limbs down, so we mostly used those. A professional with a truck is going to haul all this material off for us.

Along with the heat and the exertion, we're also doing this job during (augh!) mosquito season, but let me recommend these nice plants:







As patio plants they do a pretty good job of discouraging the little bastards, and even make a nice natural repellent to rub on yourself -- though if we each took a leaf every day, the plants would be denuded fast, so I'm still using the nasty chemical repellent, and showering it off right away.

Literary Wow on a personal level

I'll be writing about this novel over on the book blog, and may even cannibalize a few paragraphs from this entry, but the personal side of my reaction to it goes here.

If you've ever felt that the segregationist South of the 1950's was a place beyond your comprehension, you might find yourself feeling a little less so after reading this novel. It takes you there. Then again, you have every reason not to want to go there. It is not a nice place.

The title, as much as the cover, attracted me in the bookstore and I discovered right away that it took place within walking distance of the house in which I grew up, and only a handful of years earlier. The family in the book lives a few streets away from the street I lived on. The daughter bikes to Freedom Park, which I did too. It's like, the stage sets of my life: the towering shade trees of the avenues, Ivey's and Montaldo's stores, the Manor Theater. Having a house next to Sugar Creek, and knowing that the springtime creek rising will soak the back of your lot. My (later) high school's marching band plays at local events.

The author is a decade+ older than I am and knew a more rigid version of the segregated world, but not by a huge degree. And only in its laws, not in its social divisions, which had changed very little by my childhood of the 1960s.

Jim Crow laws were banished by the time I had a semi-thoughtful awareness, but, predictably, attitudes changed a LOT more slowly, which kept racial divisions alive and well for years and years. The same old system dies hard and isn't gone yet. Separate neighborhoods, little shared experience that wasn't engineered by school desegregation laws, a distinct us-and-them feeling.

By my era, school integration was beginning, and it was perfectly legal for all races to sit down in any restaurant, or go to any movie theater. We knew the old laws, but we were so young that anything a few years back was "the olden days." Often, a few African Americans were at another table at the restaurant, or at the drug or department store, and we found it normal. They were such a small minority of our daily experience that it reinforced our feeling that they had their own world.

In fact, the author has her teenage character go to a movie at the Manor Theater and walk home, and doesn't mention the unspoken rule there, even in my time - blacks sit in the balcony, whites sit downstairs. That gradually deteriorated and by my teen years, I could sit there, which I'd always craved doing. The theater still operates -- along with the neighborhood, it kind of morphed into an indie film place, now a Regal cinema but still given to "films" more than to movies. The balcony doors are locked, or were every time I visited in the 1990s or early 2000s.

At about age 10 -- and I have no idea what the occasion was -- I was dumbfounded to see a pleasant middle class black neighborhood in Charlotte. It might have been on a multi-den Girl Scout activity of some sort (?), held in various Scout meeting places around town. I have no memory of the occasion other than the discovery that there were African American neighborhoods that looked basically like our white neighborhoods. Someone's pretty, classily dressed mother, obviously on car-pool duty, was ushering her little girl charges into her station wagon, and it was all I could do not to stare.

I knew some desperately poor whites, especially in the farm country my grandparents lived in. I honestly thought that "we," the whites, lived a spectrum of poor-to-rich, based not on race but on various unrelated factors. And that "they," the blacks, were uniformly poor and did low-pay domestic work or manual labor.

That's the society I grew up in, one in which black professionals and middle-class families had an entire other universe that ours rarely saw. It was no leap at all to the realization that this part of town not only existed, but that it must have been existing all along. Well, duh. But it shows you how completely dis-integrated, in every way, southern society was then.

The Dry Grass of August takes a white girl of 13 who lives in a nice house in the Myers Park section of Charlotte, through the racially violent and ugly South of late summer 1954. The racism is a spectrum of its own, semi-literate, violent and deadly in the deep south towns the family drives through on a road trip, but neat and cordial and evil in a different way, in the "decent folks" society of the 50's suburbs.

(Publisher's promo video):



When I write a book-blog entry about it, I think (!) I can be objective about its literary merits, but it's entirely possible that what would have seemed like just a really good book to me otherwise, will take on superpowers of literary importance to me because of the sheer "me me me!" thing that's going on. Not the plot, in which 13-year-old Jubie encountered horrors I never knew existed till I was much older, and not the family dynamics, which have no resemblance to mine, but the outside world that Jubie is reaching into and absorbing. This is where I'm from.

Drought? What drought?

Story after story comes through the news of storms and floods, not that we want tornadoes or flooding, but they aren't happening here. We're bone dry. It goes on for weeks, then we get a brief spell of rain but it changes nothing. More dry weeks come. The water table is down, the plants dry up, the animals suffer.


On the rail you see a Lean Cuisine [TM] container with water in it, which I put out for a poor black and lethargic chameleon who hangs around the front porch. He drank deep and greened up in a few hours, and I've left it there as a chameleon-spa. With the container plants we've put out, it's a popular reptile resort now. A light color container would be better, and I may rummage around for something, but I grabbed what I had, since the poor little guy looked like he was hurting.

The cactus photo is kind of a cheat though. Yeah, that cactus is thriving here, next door in my dad's vegetable garden, but not really because of the drought. Coastal SC actually is cactus country, sort of. 4 years ago, that one appeared after a high tide, washed out of somebody's garden, or...something! He planted it right there, for fun, and 4 years of winters and rains and an occasional snow haven't bothered it.

Then last summer, during THAT drought (!) we saw this cactus, which appeared at the end of our driveway by the utility pole, source unknown. It's still there, but we want to transplant it. We just don't yet know where.

I know many of my readers are sick of wet weather, not to mention violent storms. We'll take the rain off your hands. If necessary, we'll take a nasty storm, though that's possibly a "Be careful what you wish for" declaration. Our one tornado scare a few weeks ago had me filling bottles with water and putting family photos in a zip-lock, then stashing it all to take to the basement and hunker down. And it's staying handy.

But I've stayed here through a Category One hurricane and that was no big deal, so a couple tropical storms sound really really good to me right now.