bloggers and bios and bears, oh my
Yes, I know. I’ve been neglecting my blog. It’s all that power gone to my head. The post on Schulz drew in a record number of hits…I’m contemplating just writing book reviews, only I can’t read that fast. Actually yes, I can, but not if I also have to do inconvenient things like work. Or write a blog.
Meanwhile, I got added to a complete stranger’s blogroll. I don’t know why, but thank you, lovevshateblog, for making my day. Naturally I quit blogging for the rest of the week…sorry about that. Got busy at work.
I’m happy to say it looks like asbestos is over with, finally. Except the bio came back to haunt me. I’m getting hits from people searching on writing a writer’s bio, so here’s a follow-up: go ahead and tweak. Just because you don’t want to sound like you’re grasping at straws doesn’t mean everyone else will be so particular. You’ll end up looking like the one who has no accomplishments to speak of. Fortunately for me, we’re re-doing the whole bio page for everybody. The client has requested that we sound more technically qualified. The website brags about the quality of its research staff and writers, but I know who produced this stuff…people like me!
Anyway, I rewrote. I rejected about a dozen ideas that flitted across the mental screen until I had an absolutely true but largely irrelevant description of work I’ve done. There’s a line I won’t cross…I’ve read plenty of similar blurbs (about people known to me) that gave me a laugh. Or at least pause. I’ve decided that every phrase in my bio has to be defensible, and even mock-proof. So there.
And hell, we’re writers. We can make anything sound like anything, can’t we?
happiness is a cold wind
It’s here: nasty weather. Huzzah! Yesterday it was 91 degrees, today 58. In celebration, I set a small piece of my kitchen a little teensy bit on fire.
We recently bought a nifty convection/toaster oven to replace our failing crummy toaster, and it apparently works *really well* up to and including reducing corn tortillas to carbon atoms in the very short time it takes to forget they’re in there and start humming a little tune as you look out the window at the leaves falling and daydream of snow flurries and ice fishing.
Tomorrow I’ll see if I can salvage the poor appliance. At any rate, the mosquitos are all blowing away, so I think it’s a fair trade.
happiness is a warm biography
A book I want: Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography. I don’t know about you—you’re probably too young, most of you—I was barely old enough to appreciate this guy, but I did, because my parents had collections of the older Peanuts running way back. I may have been among the last, as I was surely one of the last Compleat Students of Pogo, and for the same reason.
This wry, depressive voice in the wilderness obviously spoke to my parents with overtones that resonated, and to me too, although in the last five years or so, maybe ten, Schulz lost me entirely. Maybe I’m too young after all. Or maybe he should have quit. I’m not qualified to make the distinction.
You Calvin and Hobbes fans, you are the heirs apparent of both Peanuts and Pogo. If you dismiss the former, it’s only because you weren’t there in a timely fashion. (If you dismiss the latter there’s no hope for you, no hope at all….) And no, I wasn’t either, but I had a great talent for projecting backwards. If only I could harness it for novel-writing…and that’s one reason among many I need to read Schulz’s biography.
Happiness is a warm puppy. We always knew that, certainly. We, the family we, the unit indivisible, flawed though it may have been…WE knew. We still make Lucy’s lemon squares straight out of the Peanuts cookbook. We still use “rats” in place of offensive language (well, not me so much—). We still think fleetingly of the Great Pumpkin at this time of year. We still lean against the kite-eating tree, tiny little necks bent at an anatomically unlikely 90 degrees, giant bobble heads full of resignation and yet, still, improbably, prayer.
A small dose of genius, every day, for the price of a newspaper. You can’t quite appreciate it in the Internet Age, you youngsters, you callow youth, you babes lost in the info wood. Fortunately for you, you’ve got 40, 50, maybe 150 geniuses at your fingertips for every one Charles Schulz we were able to find back then. Treasure them all.
And good luck with that. Genius is a lot easier to deal with one comic strip at a time.
Makers
According to my private sources, a lot of people are getting decoupaged bowling balls for Christmas this year.
One neat thing about having a WordPress blog is that you can see which search topics have sent your visitors over. My hits are running heavily from people searching on decoupage topics, with bowling balls at the fore. (No Soliciting signs are a close second after decoupage, and I find that comforting…I am not alone.) Not that I’ve done any, but in mentioning them somewhere down there I’ve lured in the searchers. It’s a project I may actually try out some day; I like the way they look, like the gazing balls in Victorian gardens; not that I have a garden, not that my dogs or chickens would leave one standing, not that I want to spend all that water here in central Texas…but as an alternative garden with bowling ball flowers, the potential beckons.
People who decoupage bowling balls are makers, with a capital M. I didn’t see any bowling balls at Maker Faire this weekend, but they’d fit right in.
Maker Faire was definitely worth the trip. Just to gawk. Unlike the state fair, for instance, you didn’t have to rope and hogtie that little voice that kept saying “but that’s so lame” before you could really get into the spirit of things. There were lame bits, but they were our kind of lame, they were nerdy geeky people trying to be salesmen, for instance, or put on shows, and we could all relate, and the basic premise or creation was so brilliant that you could forgive the fumbling for words and social contact out of respect for the intelligence brought to the project.
In Austin, Maker Faire occupied the same venue as the Travis County fair and the rodeo. The same dust got ground between your sandal and your foot, the same booths sold funnel cakes and cotton candy (and buffalo jerky and designer root beers), but instead of bulls and tractors and jars of pickles, every manner of circuitry, human-powered vehicle, and embellished surface shone in the spotlight.
I didn’t understand half of what I saw. But I was pleased by the crowd-pleasers, the roachmobile, for instance: 
And especially the fire art (pictures do not half do justice):
Assorted vehicles:
There were a surprising number of textile-based Makers. I found that comforting too. Textiles I can grasp. One of the busiest sections contained piles of clothing for picking through, ringed by sewing machines and helpers to modify the chosen garments as desired.
I didn’t see enough hats. And I didn’t see enough steampunk creations, though the wood iPod was there, and some really quite cool Stirling engines. There were a lot of music interfaces and I loved them all, especially a set of Tesla coil generators—they weren’t much to watch, but they were powerful.
All in all, the main effect on the viewer was a compulsion for self-expression. Especially extreme self-expression. Could be pretty, could be functional, could be sheer freaky art. Perhaps bordering on the insane, like this guy:
the purl drummer, who sat all alone with his drum kit, and knitted on his sticks in between percussive comment. Perhaps as tame as decoupaging a bowling ball. Doesn’t matter what, really: a blog, a car completely covered with old cameras, a 30-foot-tall juniper log sculpture, a vintage blouse refreshed by new buttons…a new set of kitchen towels, I dunno. Just get out there and do it.
blog action day
I don’t follow many blogs, but one that has grabbed my attention recently mentions that today is Blog Action Day.
I didn’t know. And I didn’t do anything for the environment today at all. T. remembered to take out the recycling bin, <surprise>, so I didn’t even have to do that.
I guess I’ll have to fall back on asbestos. Ouch, pointy stuff. Environmental health surely qualifies.
I know, I know. You thought asbestos was banned back in the 70s or 80s, right? It was, pretty much, in 1989, with the EPA’s “Asbestos Ban and Phase-out Rule.” And then guess what, the ban was overturned by the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991. And since then…nothing. Big government, you know. Poking their damn noses in where they didn’t belong, and threatening, of all things, profits.
You know who was behind the appeal? Halliburton, among others. I tend to think that’s sufficient proof of evil. Subsidiaries of Halliburton, among others, have routinely filed for bankruptcy since then rather than pay out on asbestos claims. A complete SNAFU…everything bad and good you ever hear about lawyers is illuminated by the history of asbestos litigation.
Unscrupulous lawyers have signed up legions of people not even sick yet or ever to file claims, tying up the courts very handily. Actually sick people die before they see compensation. Actual corporate records reveal conversations about the best strategies to deal with investigations: delay, stonewall, obfuscate, cooperate (never favored), wait for death.
Death. Mesothelioma, the marker cancer associated with asbestos exposure, is apparently an agonizing death. But hey, it’s quick. Most people diagnosed with mesothelioma don’t live two years.
Asbestos was found in crayons, crayons, in the year 2000. Were you paying attention then? I wasn’t. We stopped using it in spray-on insulation somewhere back in the 1970s and we thought everything was fine. Only, oops, it’s in the vermiculite you pot your plants with. It’s in the crayons your kids are coloring their teeth with. It’s in talc—the very makeup you’re putting on your face.
You get talc from mines. Miners at the turn of the century, this century, received killing doses of asbestos.
Didn’t you just assume somebody was taking care of it all? I did.
They’re not. There are no rules that really make sense. Even the current government-mandated exposure limit, which sounds good at less than 0.1 fibers per cubic centimeter of air, allows over a million fibers per day for a full-time worker—of a substance that has no known safe exposure level. One fiber could be the one that lodges in your pleura. The limit is chosen for economic feasibility, not for human safety.
Caveat: Yeah, you have to do that in general. Cost/risk analysis makes sense. Otherwise you end up with a system like American health care, where maximum expenses are tolerated for greatest return on the tiniest of probabilities.
But why is it that in many countries where they allow greater risk (in health care) for lesser cost, they have also banned asbestos outright? Because they’re socialists? Because they don’t care about the individual, only the statistic?
Because they’re sane? Because they realize that prevention always trumps reparation?
Why can’t we realize that?
trouble at home
I’m making trouble at home. Not actually having trouble. All the difference.
I’m always making something. That reminds me, the Maker Faire [“the most fun a hacker can have with his pants on!!!”] is coming to Austin next weekend, and I am going to be there, even though it will be dripping with geeks, even though I have to work next weekend, even if I’m still sick, even if I have to pay full price because I didn’t get my act together far enough ahead of time to get discount tickets.
I’m not a hacker or a geek, but I’m married to one and somewhat close to the other (restricting the term to the subset of non-left-coast 46-year-old women). So I’ll be there, and I expect it will be a far bigger thrill than the first Hays County fair (sponsored by Sac-N-Pac), which is this weekend here in my town. I’ll probably be there too. How can I pass up a chili and BBQ cook-off? A bull-riding contest? A washer toss competition?—Yeah, you heard me. I didn’t know it was a sport, but the prize money is considerable.
Meanwhile, stuck here sick at home, I’ve been making…Arrangements. Things. Plans. Got a guy over to make an estimate on replacing our yucky carpeting with laminate flooring. Still making plans on that one since I haven’t been given a figure yet, though I’ll probably scream and then cry like a girl when I hear it.
Made arrangements to interview some high school seniors for my alma mater’s alumni admissions program.
Got T. to bring me a pile of books on asbestos from his university, as the website project has now morphed into a book as well…Since I was going to be out of town a week, I didn’t commit to much, but I have a couple of smaller sections to write. I am a poor researcher though, wasting a lot of uncompensated time on actually reading these things. I can’t just ignore free information. So now my stomach hurts too, because it really is a sordid story all the way through, the way industrial interests trump all kinds of health concerns and even basic human decency, the kind you probably learned in kindergarten.
Made a trial run of Envirotex varnish on a cigar-box top. Now I know lots of things to do differently. It’s beautiful despite my efforts. Except, after the most painstaking babysitting for 90 minutes or so past my bedtime, after covering the thing with an inverted plastic bin to keep the dust off as it cured, I woke up the next morning to find a gnat half-embedded in plastic-coated death. Stupid bug. I don’t even know how it could find its way in there. It would have been okay, too, if it were thoroughly covered with epoxy, would almost have matched the decoupage picture, but instead it was sticking out in messy fashion. Stupid death throes.
Made a start on a new crafting idea—well, an old crafting idea new to me: locker hooking, for rugs. We’re going to need rugs once we get our cripplingly expensive floors, right?
Got the windows washed and the screens cleaned. This in anticipation of the lovely fall weather that’s going to happen ANY DAY NOW. Or not. Getting the screen doors or at least one of them tomorrow.
Got a cough. Got a box of Kleenex ™. Gotta clean the kitty litter boxes. (I wonder if there’s asbestos in there?) Got a birthday present for T. Got master Peggle status.
Didn’t get much work done today, as you can plainly see. Spent far too much of it blogging.
no go
Rats. I was supposed to be driving off to autumn today. It won’t seem to come here, so I was headed towards it. Specifically, westward to Arizona mountain country. It’s only a thousand miles away, a trip I’ve made in my trusty Honda CRV many times.
But there’s this cold, not the kind I wanted, that T. picked up and brought home, and it’s been flirting with me all week and finally on Friday well and truly threw me to the floor. I woke up Saturday with my sinuses filled with cement, feeling like both cats and maybe the four chickens were all sitting on my chest, and drowning in my own juices…well, you get the picture. Grossness. And I can be miserable in the car just as easily as at home, but at the end of the trip were people who love me, and a rhinovirus makes a thoroughly bad hostess gift. Look what I brought you! I made it myself!
So I’m still here and it’s still summer, dammit. This makes me very cross in October. We still have the house closed up and the air conditioner on. It’s still ninety degrees every day. The mosquitos are still out in force.
We don’t really get autumn in central Texas. We get spring, and it’s a lovely one. We get summer, and it can be never-ending—and really, ninety degrees is not so bad considering the hellish power of summer here. Winter we sometimes get, about five weeks of it randomly distributed throughout the darker months–just about enough. But for autumn all we really get is huge variation depending on which air mass is dominant. The ninety-degree stuff gets overrun by a Canadian cold front, and the temperature drops 40 degrees in an afternoon. Those days are marvelous; full of brooding sky, sometimes rain; sometimes just wild and woolly wind. And then it switches back again.
All I really want is to be able to open up the house for the night and get cold enough for sleeping under a blanket. Just one. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
In February, I love living here. I just have to keep reminding myself. Even during parts of October, usually. I’m going to take all that money I saved by staying home to the nearest big-box home-improvement store and get me some dog-proof screen doors for the bedroom and kitchen, and improve our ventilation immensely. There’s nothing that a little fresh air from the north won’t cure. Once it finally gets here.
