Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

No more posting for a while; the archive issue has carried over to October. I will try a few more fixes, but not for a few more days, since I have boatloads of other work to do. Those 711,000+ words mentioned yesterday were only the nonpaid variety, after all.

The Fractured Archive

Test for October 1, 2012. The archive function at this blog went FUBAR about two weeks ago. No one else might care, but I want all of the entries to archive and be visible when the archive is called up. Fortunately, the problem only seems to confined to the September 2012 entries.

After some time spent on the problem, too much really, I've essentially reposted all of September's entries except for those around the date when the problem started, so that they're part of the new October archive. They aren't quite in order, but I dislike blog entries that go on and on about the mechanics of the blog, I'll leave it at that.

As long as the archive doesn't give me any more trouble, I'll continue at least until February, when I might start a new blog, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of my first entry at the original web log. Since then, counting this entry, I've posted 1,805 times here, along with 565 on the old BTST.

Not sure how many words that would be. An average of 300 per entry, which is just a guess, would put it at only 711,000 words. Gee, you'd think I'd have hit a million by now, but that's because I haven't posted every day. A million words sounds like a lot, but 10 years is 3,650 days plus a couple of leap days, and 3652 x 300 is more than a million.

Test for Today

Sept 27, 2012

Blogger's acting up. The pre-September 19 posts do not display in the September archives, even though they're still listed as posted, and I can access them. Also, six of the most recent posts display on this page, instead of the usual 10.

This makes seven visible postings. I could send a query to Google about it, but that would be like querying the wind.

Tilting at Tuition Windmills

 Sept 24, 2012

What's with Blogger? It went from displaying 10 entries on this page to four, without being asked to. The preferences still say 10. It's like the shaky old days before Google bought it.

Got another gimme letter from my alma mater a while ago, which I found today under one of the stacks of papers that grow on one of my desks. "Vanderbilt is already full of energy as students arrive on campus and the preparations for the new academic year intensify," says one of the opening sentences. Yep, that and early-year parties.

One September dorm night many years ago I remember learning how to play Thumper with a circle a people I'd just met. That evening I became acquainted with a fellow who later became a close friend. He drank more enthusiastically than I did, and threw up vigorously in the bathroom. These days he's a tenured professor of history at a different Southern university.

Back to the gimme letter. I have a deal for VU. I'll start donating money after tuition has been lowered to the equivalent of what it was 30 years ago (1982 tuition, adjusted for inflation, that is). Heck, they can add 5 percent to that adjusted figure, just in case the inflation calculations are a little rough. It wasn't an inexpensive school back then, as I recall. But it wasn't insanely expensive, either.

Weedy Heat, the Sequel

It's a weedy heat out there. That phrase has been rolling around my head lately, inspired by the only kinds of plants that seem to be growing in my yard, except for those we water: a flowering plant whose name I learned, but have forgotten. Its blossoms are made up of a lot of small white blossoms, and while I can't remember what it is, I have a sneaking suspicion that it's an invasive species. Maybe we can just make the best of it and call it xerogardening.

I googled "weedy heat" and this was the third listing. I was astonished. I'd forgotten I'd ever used such a phrase, but I guess it isn't a phrase too many other people use. Also, I'd forgotten that the June 2005 was so hot and dry.

I tell my children that summers were like this every day where I grew up. They aren't impressed.

New Year Entertainments

The stretch of days between Christmas and New Year's proved to be brown and dry, at least around here, except for the rain and dank drizzle on Friday, and a weak spot of snow on New Year's Day. It's like November never ended -- the least-white December I've seen since '94 in London, which, a native told us, was a strangely warm month as well. Suits me.

Unlike last year, we didn't happen to see any of the holiday movies showing at theaters, such as We Bought a Cemetery for Christmas, Who Cares About the Adventures of Tintin? or The Girl Regretting Her Dragon Tattoo. I did manage to see Duck Soup on television on New Year's Eve.

That was my nth viewing of that movie at intervals of once every two or three years since the mid-70s. I know all the gags but laughed again all the same, and saw some details I'd never noticed before (or had forgotten). I paid particular close attention this time to Margaret Dumont, whose face was remarkably expressive. I've come to doubt the story that she didn't get most of the brothers' jokes, which sounds like something Groucho would make up.

I also paid closer attention to Edgar Kennedy, the lemonade vendor tormented by Chico and Harpo. Turns out he had quite a career and, if Duck Soup is anything to go by, a fitting sobriquet in "Master of the Slow Burn."

Over the holidays I also chewed at some of the books I've been reading lately, such as The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency (Jeremy Lott, 2007), an entertaining read that (among many other things) makes a good case for regarding President Tyler more highly. Still, I didn't find myself in the grip of an intensely good book, as I did with True Grit this time last year.

I did spend some time reading the entertaining blog Lifetime, Wow! which consists of reviews of movies shown on the Lifetime Movie Channel. I'm not particularly familiar with Lifetime, but apparently it shows a lot of risible movies, and the bloggers at Lifetime, Wow! shoot those fish in that barrel with glee. The blog's plot synopses are probably more fun than most of the movies themselves.

Sesquicentennial

Disunion is a excellent blog. Shows the kind of thing old media, the New York Times in this case, can do if it wants to. It follows -- if "follows" is the right word -- the events of 150 years ago, day by day, as the nation falls into disunion and then war. As of 150 years ago today, of course, disunion was in full swing, but war was still only a dreaded possibility.

Today's entry is particularly interesting, since it only indirectly deals with the situation in the United States. Rather, it discusses the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II of Russia on March 3, 1861, the day before Lincoln took office on the other side of the world (February 19 O.S.).

But if your mood doesn't run toward such heavy reading at the moment, see this blog, which promises the dream of reading exactly as much as you want to, and no less.

Hard Knock Life

Glad the great Southern blizzard didn't come our way. But if it had, the snow would simply be more winter and not a city-closing event. Occasionally I miss those days when I wasn't so inured to heavy snow and ice, living in places that collectively didn't know what to do on those rare frozen occasions.

Speaking of the South, an old friend of mine, an attorney in Georgia, has started a blog. Sure, the world has a lot of blogs, but not so many by people as highly intelligent as she, nor ones describing a corner of the criminal justice system most of us have no contact with. I'm glad I have no contact with it, since she's a public defender.

So far there aren't a lot of entries, but I encourage her to write more, and everyone else to read it. This is the kind of thing she's written: "Last week... I experienced the uncomfortable vortex of a case where I really disliked my own client, I thought he was guilty as charged, and I really, really liked the alleged victim. Boy, was that a mess. Thank goodness a completely irresistible plea offer was made... it's the situation that all my non-pd friends believe I live on a daily basis. You know, the friends who say, 'How can you do that job?' This kind of situation occurs a lot less often than most people think. And that's a good thing, because I for one would have a hard time doing this job if I were in the vortex routinely."

More at It's a hard knock life.

Kerbey Lane Cafe, South Austin

Ah, for the life of a food blogger. It would be easy to photograph your meals and post them. The hard part would be ensuring accuracy in your descriptions, provided you were conscientious in that way. Taking notes with every meal, interviewing the chef (don't call him a cook), following up on what all those ingredients were -- it could all add up to a long list for the conscientious food blogger. Then there's the risk of burning out on eating just-so expressions of a chef's passionate love of the art of food. I wonder whether the young woman doing Lick My Spoon ever gets a strong urge for a Pop-Tart.

Along with my friends Tom and Catherine, I participated in the eating of this carrot cake, served by Kerbey Lane Cafe-South Austin on the evening of August 16, 2010. (Lilly and Ann had ice cream at the same time.)

I can't list the ingredients, though I'm fairly sure carrots were included. Note the grated carrots as garnishes. Texas isn't particularly known for its carrot production, so local sourcing might not have been an option (my guess is California carrots, trucked in via I-10). I also didn't interview the pastry chef, so I can't honestly gush about his love for the art of carrot-cake creation, building on the traditions of carrot cakes served at the 1855 Exposition Universelle de Paris but adding that ever-so modern twist of using x ingredient, which also pays homage to the terroir of California's Central Valley. Maybe the literal terroir, since there was probably dirt on the carrots when they were delivered.

Never mind, it was delicious carrot cake. At least I got a picture of Ivor, our personable waiter.

Not really, that was a painting on one of the walls of Kerbey Lane South, near the restrooms. One of a series for sale, I think, but I took no notes. The restaurant itself is one of a series of five in Austin. "The first Kerbey Lane Cafe opened on May 5, 1980, with the simple goal of having a cozy place to eat that offered healthy local food at a low price," says the Kerbey Lane web site. "At the time, this was a virtually competitive free restaurant concept."

The first location happens to be on a small Austin street called Kerbey Lane. I don't remember eating there during my Austin summer in 1981, but by the time I visited town regularly during the mid- and late '80s, I started going there with my Austinite friends. In fact, it was almost always the first place we would go once I got to town.

Last year and this year I went with those same friends to the South Austin location on South Lamar, opened in 1986 and marked by some spiffy neon (I didn't try the tomato pie).

Kerbey Lane South's comfort food is just as comfortable as at the original location. Besides carrot cake, which came last, I enjoyed breakfast for dinner -- biscuits & gravy with sausage. Here's my stab at food blog writing: mmmmm.

Mayflower & Izzle Pfaff!

How is that "summer reading" is supposed to be mindless? Seems like a mindless assumption. Even beach reading doesn't have to be "beach reading." An old friend of mine once went to Greece "to read about pre-Socratics on the beach," he said, and believe he did it. Then again, I have some peculiar friends.

The distinctive thing about my summer reading is that I get to read out on the deck sometimes, not that I try to dumb it down. Lately I finished Mayflower (2006) by Nathaniel Philbrick, who also wrote the splendid Sea of Glory about the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. I wasn't particularly looking for a history of the Mayflower voyage. The author is why I picked it up at the library, and I wasn't disappointed. Mayflower was a great read, and not in a summer-beach-mindless sort of way, either.

Only the first part of the book is about the voyage itself, including the travels, and travails, of the Pilgrims before leaving Europe. Remember the Speedwell? No? The Pilgrims originally sailed on two ships; Speedwell was the other. I remember hearing about that ship in grade school, but no one else I told about it had ever heard of it or even believed there was such a vessel.

I previously believed that Speedwell's unseaworthiness made her turn back to England. What I didn't know was that the non-Separatist captain and crew of the Speedwell apparently swindled the landlubbing Pilgrims by handling the ship in such a way that made it leak, but not too much to founder. So they went back for expensive "repairs." Heading out again, she still "leaked," so the captain called off the voyage to America -- which he never intended to make anyway.

The rest of the book is a history of the Plymouth Colony in the 17th century, including a lot of interesting detail. I've always heard of wampum, for instance, but never thought about it that much. But it was money for a while. That meant that people paid very, very close attention to it.

Philbrick writes: "Following the lead of the Dutch in New Netherland, the English used the Indians' finely crafted shell beads as a form of currency. Wampum consisted of strings of cylindrical beads made either from white periwinkle shells or the blue portion of quahog shells, with the purple beads being worth approximately twice as much as the white beads. To be accepted in trade, wampum had to meet scrupulous specifications, and both the Indians and the English became expert in identifying whether or not the beads had been properly cut, shaped, polished, drilled and strung. A fathom of wampum contained about three hundred beads, which were joined to other strands to create belts that varied between one and five inches in width. When credit became difficult to obtain from England during the depression of the 1640s, the colonies eased the financial burden in New England by using wampum as legal tender. In this instance, the Indians had provided the English with a uniquely American way to do business."

The second half of the book has a special emphasis on King Philip's War, which was fought during the 1670s. King Philip's War only goes to show that no matter how terrible an event is, it can still be forgotten. And not just a terrible event among some distant people on some distant shore, but a heart-wrenching, brutal war right here in North America. Keep that in mind next time some politico tells you that the memory of such-and-such will live on. The odds are against it. All it takes is a few centuries, and sometimes not even that long, for an event to become the concern only of a few historians and a few oddballs with a taste for history.

Maybe New England schools discuss King Philip's War. I hope so. But I don't ever remember hearing about it. In my Texas schools in the 1970s, the story arc was pretty much this: Jamestown, then Plymouth. Then there were 13 colonies, and after the French and Indian War, they got a hankering for independence. Shot heard around the world! (Also, the Indians and slaves suffered a lot during all of this.).

I read about King Philip's War later, even that its casualties were high, but never in such detail before now. From the Washington Post review of Mayflower: "The early years of Plymouth Plantation were exceedingly difficult but comparatively peaceful so far as relations with the many Indian tribes were concerned. Gradually, though, as English settlers moved ever deeper into New England and as Indians grasped the full extent of the threat to their established way of life, the settlers grew more belligerent, and the Indians grew more hostile..."

War came in 1675. "Taking its name after the son of Massasoit who became chief of the Pokanokets, this dreadful little war... lasted for about two years, with gruesome consequences for everyone involved. Plymouth Colony lost 8 percent of its male population -- by comparison, 'during the forty-five months of World War II, the United States lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population'... Overall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss of somewhere between 60 and 80 percent.' It was a costly and entirely unnecessary war, brought about by Philip's vanity, Puritan stubbornness and a pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and misunderstanding."

Too depressing for a summer book? Maybe. Of course, Mayflower hasn't been my only reading so far this summer. I'm also working my way through the hilarious online archives of Izzle pfaff!, which is incredibly entertaining. Whoever this Seattle-dwelling fellow is, he's a got a dash of comic genius I can only dream about as a writer. Just a random sample, plucked from 2003: "At my local liquor store, the employees are friendly. And colorful. There is the hale red-faced man, who looks rather like a cross between a lumberjack and Gabe Kaplan. I'm pretty sure that for him, working in a liquor store is a lot like a boll weevil finding employ at the Gap; he always looks slightly boozed."

A 2007 posting, describing the massively productive garden his mother kept when he was a kid: "The garden, once in full horticultural freakout, inspired me to some weird, compulsive habits. One was my utter and over-the-top voraciousness for peas right off the vine. I would defoliate (delegumiate?) entire rows of peas, leaving a damning Hansel-and-Gretel path of spent pods behind me. I was the Joe Stalin of peas that summer, and my mother would wail about this: 'Stop eating all the peas, would you?' 'You don't like it when I eat a bag of Doritos! Isn't it better that I eat these peas, then?' I would reply, causing her to wonder if she had taken one too many bong hits in '67."

Finally, writing about his visit to Paris in 2008: "Paris, pound for pound, contains the most undiluted concentration of hilarious crones that I've ever seen anywhere in my life. They are, quite honestly, incredible. On any given afternoon on the streets of Paris, you will witness the most astonishing collection of grotesques, gargoyles, termagents and just plain caricatures than you would believe. I saw things such as an upswept dye-blond beehive-cum-pompadour with half-inch long visible roots, wraparound designer sunglasses, pleather jackets with "NO MERCI" on the back, and high-heel leather boots with a crosshatched rhinestone design. Unfortunately, I saw all of these on the same woman at the same time; she of course also yanked along with her a tiny little dog whose only clear purpose of existence was to be stepped on by passersby. Watching old ladies in Paris is like owning free tickets to a Commedia del'Arte show every day for free: Columbinas tottering around with their little mewling canine Punches."

Weekend Recommendations

Some recommended reading: Amanda Castleman. I traded e-mail with her over the weekend because she was looking for someone to comment on -- for want of a better term, roadside Americana -- for a short article she's writing. She'd been tipped off about my recent visit to Rosie's Diner and my writeup a few entries back. If Rosie's isn't roadside Americana, I don't know what is. I was happy to provide her more details about the visit, and why I bothered to go out of my way to see it.

Some recommended eating: Oreo Cakesters. A Kraft product. Various on-line sources tell me that they were actually introduced last year, but we only discovered them last week. Yuriko brought a couple of boxes home; I haven't asked yet where she found them or why she decided to buy them. Man, are they good. Too good, in fact, considering how plentiful their fat content is. They are not really Oreos -- that's just branding. Rather, they're two soft chocolate cookies -- roughly the size of Oreos -- pressed together with either a vanilla or chocolate cream filling.

Some recommended listening: An old, mostly forgotten one-hit wonder. One of the biggest one-hit wonders, it seems. It made quite an impression on me when I was eight. I think my brother Jim had the 45, but I'm not sure: certainly I heard it on the radio. Until this weekend, I probably hadn't heard it in 30-odd years, but the maze of little twisty passages on the web -- or is that the twisty little maze of passages on the web? -- led me to it.

Listening to it now, I marvel at what a bizarre song it is. Techophobia and eschatology in a 10,000-year framework. How many pop songs before or since offer that? It's actually not all that good, lyrically speaking -- one comment I read called it "dystopia for teenyboppers," which is apt -- but it's interesting anyway. The lead singer's voice -- I'm not sure if it's Zager or Evans, but I think it's Evans, who might be the one with the beard -- has a melancholy edge that perfectly suits the material.

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

Four years = 48 months = 1461 days (including one leap day). An infinitesimally short time, geologically speaking; a yawning eon in subatomic terms, at least if I’m right in my assumptions about those abstractions. But I know I’m right when I say it’s a fair chunk of time, but not a tremendous one, for human beings.

Four years ago today I sat down at the same desk and the same iMac I still have – though these items and I were a few miles south of where they are now -- and converted a long letter I’d recently written about my second daughter’s birth into an entry on Blogspot. I’d been vaguely aware of that blogging thing for a while before that, but vaguely associated it with semiliterate teen writing. Sometime that January, just as Ann was poised to emerge, I read something somewhere about more sophisticated uses of the medium. (“Something somewhere” is where a lot of people get their information, and I’m no exception.)

So I decided to give it a go myself. It was then, and it now, an extension of the diary- and letter- and other-writing I’d been doing for years. And I mean years. In the summer of 1969, when I was 8, I spent a week or so with my aunt and uncle in Oklahoma. One of the things they had me do was write a postcard to my mother and brothers back home. They didn’t explain to me, probably because they didn’t think of it, that you’re supposed to leave half of the postcard blank for the address. I proceeded to fill up the entire card.

Not that I was an obsessive writer as a kid. I didn’t have many people to correspond with until I left for college, and never had the stick-to-itiveness to keep a diary until after September 1, 1980. But I did have bursts of writing energy in the years before that, such as the time in the second grade that I wrote a book, of sorts, about the planets because I’d been given an assignment to do a report about the planet Jupiter. I copied most of my information from the Junior Encyclopaedia Britannica, late-50s edition (“only please to call it research”). Or the numerous comic strips I drew in which the point was to kill off all or most of the characters by the end. Or the pages and pages a thing called The Plane Racers, a stick-figure imitation of The Wacky Racers that, if I remember right, eventually became much more elaborate (in its way) than that cartoon.

In junior high, a fellow named Billy and I created a war game that must have occupied 30 or 40 pages of notebook paper, supposedly spanning a couple of solar systems, with intricate rules of engagement for an array of combatants. In high school, among other things, I invented a farcical pseudo-history of Dark Ages Europe that went on for about 30 double-spaced typewritten pages (and, true to the freelance writer’s impulse, recycled some of that material in college, in a student magazine). In college, I took diary-writing seriously, and wrote student-paper news stories, short stories and other oddities for publication.

So keeping a web log for four years is no big deal. It’s in character. I was going to launch a separate third volume today, but there’s no reason to be so particular. From now on, however, I’ll publish pictures sometimes (but not today). I haven’t had anything against posting images before now, it’s just that my equipment wasn’t really up to it until recently.

Conjecture of the Deep

Through the marvel of the Internet, I’ve made the acquaintance of the wife of my fourth cousin, once removed. It’s the marvel of the age, this Internet thing, and kids growing up now will not fully appreciate its marvelosity… marvelitude… marvelousness… the wonder of it all.

Also, please see Dead Presidents Daily. Today, presidential paternity.

My daughters are bound to grow up a little strange. Today, Lilly offhandedly wished that mermaids were real. She’s been influenced by the sunny view of mermaids and mermen propagated by Disney and that ilk, so I had the urge to suggest a different view of a world in which merfolk were real.

“Well," I mused, "if mermaids and mermen really existed, I think they would have started punching holes in the bottoms of wooden ships as soon as people started sailing the oceans.” [Daughter looks at me askance] “No really, either from fear of land-people invading the water, or to plunder the iron and other stuff from the ships, things they couldn’t make themselves.”

“No way, Daddy.”

“Yeah, and of course people would have responded by attacking any merfolk that ventured near beaches or in shallow water.”

“Daddy!”

“It would be a history of bitter fighting…”

“Daddy!”

And that was that. But I could have added more detail – the arming of sailing ships with merfolk harpoons to shoot down near the hull; the capture and unhappy fate of mermen and -maids in the Merfolk Panic in colonial Massachusetts; the eventual communication with some tribes of merfolk in the 20th century, to the point that some of them were recruited by the Nazis to sink Allied ships, while others attacked Axis vessels; and their role in the Cold War, in which the United States supported King Trident (not precisely an enlightened despot), while the Soviet Union backed the rival Democratic Republic of the Pacific Basin, whose notorious gulags were in the Sea of Okhotsk.

And a Tip-Top Tet

Had some technical issues with my wheezing, Model T iMac yesterday. I could have posted, using my more up-to-date machine, but I don’t have Word installed on it yet, and I’m not hep on the notepad program on whatever it’s called. I will use it if I have to, but I prefer Word and its dozens of typefaces and format functions. Besides, I had a fair amount of other things to do.

Fixed the issues, more or less, by rebuilding the desktop. But it took a while to realize I hadn’t done that in months. Soon that will be the equivalent of changing the ribbon on the typewriter; something that only the old-timers remember. Of course, I remember changing ribbons, too, sometimes just black and sometimes black and red and the zzzzzzzzing sound the spool made if you moved it with your finger.

Meanwhile, the Internet continues to amaze. I wanted to use a Krusty and Klown quote to sign off for a few days ahead of Christmas, and I remembered seeing him, years ago, offer seasonal wishes to his viewers, but all I could remember from it was a “tip-top Tet.” So I put that into Google. A moment later, I had the full quote.

I’ll pick up again around Boxing Day. Till then, Krusty says:

So, have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a kwaazy Kwanza, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn, dignified, Ramadan. And now a word from my god, our sponsors!

Mighty Stonehenge

Dankness and rain to wrap up November, and authorities at Weather Central claim that metro Chicago might be thumped with a snowstorm around the first of December. Something fitting about that, I guess, but I can’t claim to be happy about it.

I seem to have an actual occasional reader outside of my family and a few friends, a fellow named Keith Demko in Macon, Georgia. Impossible to say how he came across BTST2, or why he bothered to read any of it in the first place, but he’s commented twice now when I’ve mentioned a movie (in the case of Borat, one I haven’t seen even yet). Nice to get the feedback, Keith.

He keeps his own web log, Reel Fanatic, about the movies he’s seen, and he sees a lot of them. And writes well about them, too, more thoughtfully than some people who are paid to write about movies. According to “About Me” at the bottom of his page, he says, “When I was very young, my father brought home a little movie called This is Spinal Tap, and I have never been the same since.”

Which tells me that he must be a fairly young man. When I was very young, or even not so young, it was impossible to “bring home” a movie. Also, I was fully grown when This is Spinal Tap came out, though I still smile at the thought of seeing it for the first time at Vanderbilt’s movie theater, probably about a year after it was released. It has many, many funny things in it, of course, but I don’t think I’ve laughed harder at any scene in any movie than I did as “Mighty Stonehenge” was being lowered on the stage, accompanied by a couple of dancing dwarves.

I haven’t done it recently, but some years ago when Lilly played with clay more than she does now, I would create a tiny trilithon structure out of clay and tell her it was “Mighty Stonehenge.” She would just tell me I was weird.

Summer Break

Busy day, mainly trying to wrap up an article and push a few others along. Tomorrow will be another such day, and next week something else all together, so NO BLOGGING until about August 8, when I’ll have plenty to report.

Dan's Blog

Mondays are still Mondays, even when you work for yourself. It just has that stigma. That, and my work has picked up. Three assignments to do over next three weeks.

My old friend Dan Monroe, currently of Birmingham, Alabama, has started a blog, Story of the day. So far it has one entry (yesterday), which is called “Finding Dees.” He's got kind words for me, which I appreciate. I hope he'll post many more interesting things—he's got the chops for it. (See also his comment on my Next Door posting, July 12.)

On September 1, I will have known Dan exactly 24 years, a little more than half my life, though, of course, we’ve gone separate ways since the early ’80s, as he notes. How I remember that date so exactly is a matter of a written record, lore among friends, and my own propensity to remember that sort of thing, at least sometimes.

Notes From Ed

Too busy! After I'm done with buzzing through a current assignment, I need to take a couple of days off. Except from child-rearing and blogging.

I only have access to a Mac these days, which makes you a second-class citizen in Blogger-world. For one thing, you can’t use the shortcut buttons when posting, to do such functions as post a link without having to enter all the html code. So I would have posted this link earlier, but when faced with html code, my indolent streak kicks in.

But here it is. You might remember traveler Ed, who’s now in the big leagues of the travel-writing world (Arthur Frommer knows his work and gives him assignments, for instance). Ed’s started a blog, Unexpected World. It’s even the same format as this one. The main difference is that he gets to go far and wide, while I go near and narrow.

Back on Monday

This was a busy day. I've been trying to wrap up an article that I've been working on too long, and doing a half-dozen other things that needed doing as well. At least everyone's asleep at the moment -- pushing 11 p.m. pretty hard. I can finish some of my tasks.

NO BLOGGING till next Monday. A full report after that.

Check Again Around April 4

No new entries for a while, over Easter and the spring break that follows. I’ll have plenty to write about after next week, with any luck.