The deal with NaNoWriMo is that you start fresh on Nov. 1, and try to write 50,000 words of a new novel by November 30. If you succeed, you get 1) bragging rights, b) a PDF-file certificate suitable for printing, & the right to display a banner similar to this one: 

I Won! I Won! I Won!

and iii) a 50,000-word draft of that novel you’ve been meaning to get around to writing one of these days. 

Well, I had been meaning to write a novel one of these days – well, about five novels I’ve been meaning to write – so I picked one* and jumped into NaNoWriMo feet-first, and before I knew it the waters had closed over my head.

(*A synopsis and excerpt await your perusal at my page on the NaNoWriMo site.)

I did make 50,0o0 words, and it feels darned good to have accomplished so much; but it was a tough slog and took a lot out of me, and led to my neglecting  this blog terribly.

If anyone asks, it’s all Carocat’s fault. :)

- the prodigal Evelyn

I’m free of bill-paying for another 30 (well, 24, if I were going to be more prompt about it next month) days – wheeeeeee!!!

It’s not the money (well, sometimes it’s the money, but that’s a separate issue, and fortunately a more-or-less manageable one for now), it’s the physical act of paying the bills.

I just don’t wanna.

I really, really, really don’t want to do it.

Every month, it’s a monumental struggle to make myself gather up all the mail from wherever it’s dispersed itself to (this time was particularly bad), (open that mail), balance my checkbook, sort out which bills are from where and how much they’re for, w-r-i-t-e (this is the really hard part)  o-u-t (I have to force myself to just get it done)  t-h-e (it’s like pulling teeth)  c-h-e-c-k-s,  get the checks and payment coupons all into the correct envelopes with all the addresses showing properly in all the little windows, get stamps and return addresses onto them, and get them into the mailbox.

(I’m trying to make it easier on myself: out of the nine bills I have to pay each month, one is already automatically deducted from my checking account, three are currently being changed over to being automatically deducted last month,  and one I’ll try to get changed over this month. That leaves four that won’t work with auto-deduct for one reason or another, but four is less than half of nine . :)

And now I’m done with all that for the time being: I can feel the weight falling off my shoulders, the millstone and the albatross both lifting from around my neck, the clench relaxing away from my teeth…. …oh, boy.

I think I’m going to go whirl around the room in ecstatic euphoria for a moment, and then collapse into a great big detensioned heap.

Don't Panic!

Way back in the last century, in the late 1970′s, the US wasn’t doing so well.  The USSR was being ornery, OPEC was being tetchy, and that whole Vietnam thing hadn’t worked out quite like we’d hoped. The economy was troubled, too: jobs were scarce, prices were high, and inflation was ridiculous.

So then-President Jimmy Carter instituted a (wildly unpopular) series of price freezes on consumer goods. Now what happens if you hold the price of something artificially low? Sellers don’t want to sell, so they hold back as much as they can, limiting supply. Buyers do want to buy, though, and shortages are readily created.

And, if you hear that a price control is about to be put on something like bread, which means there might be a shortage, you might run out and buy a couple loaves – and if I do that, too, and that guy over there buys a couple loaves, and so do a couple hundred thousand of our closest friends – and lo and behold, now there is a bread shortage.

And what with people’s tendency to behave according to the laws of human nature, people reacted to the possibility of shortages by stocking up on whatever they thought there might be a shortage of, which only made any shortage that much worse.

Now, if stocking up on something is considered a wise and prudent thing to do, it’s called “stocking up.” If it’s considered a greedy and selfish thing to do, it’s called “hoarding.” President Carter and various other politicians, newsmen (they were almost all men in those days), and celebrities made announcements condemning hoarding; and assuring us that, if everybody just stayed calm, everything was going to be all right.

(As  words to the effect of “just stay calm and everything will be all right” were invariably the first piece of government-sanctioned advice regarding what to do in case of a massive nuclear attack (such an attack was considered a very real and uncomfortably immediate possibility), some people found that last part less soothing than was presumably intended.)

Now things were so primitive back then that, as our pet  dinosaurs curled up beside us on the bearskin sofas in the living room areas of our caves, we only had three (only 3!) channels to watch on our knapped-flint TV sets. But if it was 11:35 on a weeknight, that didn’t matter, because everybody was watching the same channel anyway. Johnny Carson didn’t quite invent late-night TV (or even “The Tonight Show”), but (begging the pardons of his predecessors, Steve Allen and Jack Paar) he might as well have.

So everybody who wasn’t already asleep was watching Johnny’s opening monologue when he made a joke about reported of toilet paper shortages, primly admonishing the audience not to hoard this vital commodity. (I happened to be watching, and I remember dismissing it as cheap bathroom humor and hoping that his next joke would be funny.)

And the next day, grocery stores across the nation were sold out of toilet paper, some well before noon. (The first thing on “The Tonight Show” that night was Johnny explaining that it had just been a silly  joke, and encouraging the American people to refrain from buying toilet paper unless they really, really, needed it.)

But it was, for me at least, an object lesson in self-fulfilling prophecy and the power of a single influential individual or idea. Johnny said there was a toilet paper shortage – et voila! - there was a toilet paper shortage.

I mention all this now because I think may partly explain the current global economic whatever-it-is. (Is it just me, or does “Credit Crunch” sounds like what financiers have as breakfast cereal?) One bank heard, rightly or wrongly, that some of the other banks weren’t going to be lending any money, so they stopped lending money. Then, once the other banks heard about that, they did stop lending money. Those banks that had been counting on borrowing a bunch of money, as they routinely did to cover some routine transaction or other, got caught with their coffers empty and went bankrupt. Any banks that had lent the bankrupt ones any money now weren’t going to be getting it back, causing some of them to go bankrupt, and all of them to be that much more unwilling to lend anyone any money.

Now, one thing I don’t understand about this is why everybody, not just banks but almost every business of any size, needs all this credit all the time – why can’t they just use their own damned money instead of incessantly borrowing from Peter to pay Paul? – but apparently they do. (Maybe it acts as the grease that lets the metaphoric wheels of finance and industry turn?)

But I understand that President Bush has just released a statement saying that, as long as everybody just stays calm, everything is going to be all right.

- and old Great-Auntie Ev is feeling very much ambiguous.

The birth of a baby, and especially my dear Nevvie’s baby, is a joy and a wonder, of course – but they’re too darned young (neither one has finished high school yet, or is very close to doing so). I’m too young to be a Great-Aunt, I just couldn’t bring myself to say the word  “Great-Grandmother” to Mumsie on the phone yesterday (I expect she didn’t particularly need to hear it), and Bro is way too young to be  – for the love of crimoney when it’s sitting in the coal scuttle and crying out loud – way too young to be a grandfather.
(For the record, we are 46, 79, and 51, respectively.)

But what am I gonna do? …Tell Nevvie and his GF not to? 

(That horse is out of the barn so long since that we might as well take the barn door down and burn it for firewood.)

(To heat the baby’s bottle, maybe.)

On the other other hand, YoungerNevvie is an intelligent, talented and strong-willed young man who gets what he wants. Up until he started dating this GF, what he wanted was to be a wild boy living on edge, with plenty of drugs and destruction thrown in. He’d quieted down a little – perhaps because of getting a bit older, perhaps because of GF’s influence – before GF became pregnant; but since then he has really been working hard at straightening up and flying right. This is the longest he’s ever been with one girlfriend (over a year), and he’s kept a job for 5 weeks now – may not seem like much, but it’s double his previous record.

He’s a strong-willed young man (and yes, he is a man, if a perilously young one) who gets what he wants – and now what he wants is to keep and care for his baby. If straightening up and flying right is what it takes to do that, I expect he’s going to be the uppest straightener and rightest flyer you’re likely to see in quite a while.

But crikey if he hasn’t set himself one damned tough row to hoe.

Gorfram’s Community Garden Plot
Housing Complex Community Gardens
Seattle Area Suburb, WA   %@#&!

September 25, 2008

M. T. Hedd
Building Manager at Housing Complex 
Seattle Area Suburb, WA   %@#&!

RE: My Request for Approval of “Dr. Earth 7″ Organic Fertilizer

Dear M. T. Hedd,

I am upset. I am appalled. And I am aghast. 

I submitted a request for approval of “Dr. Earth 7″ Organic Fertilizer for use in our Community Gardens was submitted over a months ago. Tuesday, I asked (your  colleague) to follow up on this request.  Wednesday, I received the following e-mail:

 ”I spoke with M. T. Hedd about the Dr. Earth fertilizer. She states that the best fertilizer to use is the Walt’s Organic fertilizer which is on the approved list.

If you have further questions about this, please feel free to contact M. T. Hedd.”

So, which one of you is sleeping with Walt?

 
The present list of Approved Gardening Products includes:
- Walt’s Rainy Pacific NW Blend Regional Natural Fertilizer
- Miracle-Gro Organic Choice All Purpose Plant Food
- Miracle-Gro Tomato Plant Food 
- Miracle-Gro Shake n’ Feed All Purpose Plant Food 
- Miracle-Gro LiquaFeed Bloom Booster
- Miracle-Gro All Purpose Plant Food
- Cedar Grove Compost

 So, which of you is sleeping with Walt, and who owns stock in the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company? 
(And who is sleeping with Scott?)

To the best of my knowledge, “Miracle-Gro Organic Choice All Purpose Plant Food” and “Cedar Grove Compost” are organic, pesticide-free, and an entirely suitable garden products. However -

“Miracle-Gro Garden Feeder”
The Scott’s Miracle-Gro Company website does not show any product by this or a similar name.

If a conventional garden product, a product that does not exist, and three conventional products containing Hazardous Materials can be considered approved Garden Products; what the hell could possibly be so wrong with “Dr. Earth 7″? 

 
Irately yours,
Evelyn Q. Gorfram

PS. No, I am not sleeping with “Dr. Earth,” nor do I own any part of the company that makes “Dr. Earth.” I do, however, own 3-1/2 pounds worth of a 4 lb. box of “Dr. Earth 7″ purchased in 2005.

And I have no intention of, nor budget for, buying a 4 lb. box of “Walt’s Rainy Pacific” just so that I can still have 3-1/2 pounds of *that* in 2011.

[The following does not address the US and global credit-crunch/mortgage-backed-securities-meltdown/Three-Hundred-Billion-Card-Monte-Scheme that is ongoing even as I post; not because I don't understand it (I don't, but I've never let that stop me yet); but because I can think of nothing more outrageous or nonsensical to say about it than what is already being reported as hard fact in the New York Times.]

[Nor does the following, which is purely hypothetical, bear any relation to anyone's real financial status and/or dealings. Unless, by purest coincidence, it does, because I know nothing about said statuses and dealings and wouldn't be able to tell.]

[The same goes for livestock values.]

Delores Loves Hydrangeas

Okay, so -

My friend Alfie works in the greater Washington area, owns her own home, and does not particularly care for hydrangeas. 

Let’s say that her house is worth some number of items for potential barter, say, 2500 goats (unneutered yearling milking nannies in good health; for further details, see fine print). Since Alfie & Mr. Alfie had saved and traded carefully for several years, they had 500 goats to buy the house with, and they were able to borrow the other 2000 goats from the Bank Of Seat Pleasant (at a fixed interest rate of 200 goats per annum). Thus Alfie’s house payments are 20 goats per month, at which rate she will have paid off the mortgage sometime after all the present goats have gone to goatie heaven. 

Now, the Bank of Seat Pleasant gets 20 goats/mo. from Alfie, but it can only gainfully pasture and lend 10 goats per month itself. So it has a standing agreement with the Nutbury National Bank in Connecticut, whereby BOSP loans the other 10 goats to NNB at 5% per annum (i.e. one goat biennially), shipping them in armored livestock vans on some pre-arranged schedule. 

Turning our attention to my Connecticut-based friend Hay, who is extremely fond of hydrangeas but otherwise reasonably sane, we find him at the Nutbury Hydrangea Nursery. He only has 5 chickens (standard exchange rate = 8.5 chickens to the goat, see fine print op. cit.) in his portable wallet-coop, but he brought his On The Hoof™ debit card (fee-free thoughout the entire Goat Remote® system) along as well. 

And it’s a good thing, too, because they’ve just gotten in the hot new hybrid wonder-hydrangea H. x. ‘Stay-Puft Cumulus’. The nursery is charging a pricey 2-1/2 chickens apiece; but Hay, having learned of their existence and availability, will now not be able to survive until midnight without at least one.

He throws fiduciary prudence to the wind and buys three of them, and with state and local sales taxes (we won’t go there) he authorizes a debit totalling (ever-so-conveniently for us) exactly 8.5 chickens (and is glad he still has some chickens on him in cash when he stops by KFC on his way home).

After a trusted nursery employee totals out the day’s charges and credits and takes them to Nutbury National Bank the next morning, he returns with one goat in payment for Hay’s purchase. 

To review, let’s consider an individual goat, perhaps named “Delores”: 

Alfies recieves Delores; along with several other goats, a few chickens, and some chicken feed; in her pay packet. Delores is then bundled up with 19 other goats and sent to the Bank of Seat Pleasant to pay Alfie’s mortgage. 

After a brief stay at BOSP, D. is trucked up to Nutbury National Bank, where she joins, among others, a few goats that were in Hay’s pay packet and which he deposited in his checking account at NNB. 

A week or so later, Hay’s debit clears, and Delores finds herself at Nutbury Hydrangea Nursery, where there are lots and lots of large, billowy bushes with really tasty flowers. :) 

Thus, some monetary value from Alfie’s paycheck has covered the purchase of Hay’s hydrangeas. 

Now, Alfie has pointed out to me that while you can eat goats and chickens; should the worst come to the worst, and assuming that you’re not a vegetarian; they’re not very convenient for carrying discreetly about one’s person. Which is why her grandmother’s family kept all their money in the form of jewels, which are much more portable and less obvious than goats or chickens, and don’t take nearly the same sort of daily upkeep.

But you can’t eat jewels, either. Like small green pieces of paper, or little round disks of shiny metal, or certain sequences of 1′s & 0′s, they only have value because we all agree that they have value. If diamonds were to flood the market; as they did in the late nineteenth century after the huge diamond finds in Southern Africa; the value of diamonds would drop like, well, a rock.

It goes similarly for goes for the dollar or any other currency: it has value because we all say it does, and we all (more-or-less) agree on what that value is. If no one believes that the Elbonian MudDucat is worth any more than any other small mud-colored piece of paper, the Elbonian currency collapses. 

And if it turns out that Nutbury National Bank had a big goat-roast at their annual company picnic yesterday, and now there are nowhere near enough goats in NNB’s pen to cover all the promissary goat-notes they have out in circulation, there is a strong risk of a sharp decline in the value of the Nutbuck.  

(And something like that may turn out to be what’s been up lately with Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, and with Bear Stearns and Merril Lynch and Lehmann Brothers…) (But now that I’ve thought that, tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal headline will probably read “Big Goat-Roast at NYSE.”) (With the subhead “Trading Floor Awash in Barbeque Sauce.”)

My friend Hay read most of the foregoing, and responded:

“Please send all your worthless dollar bills to the Nutbury National Bank in Connnecticut for furthur deposit into the account of Nutbury Hydrangea Nursery and make a note to credit it to the account of Hay. Please feel free to throw in the family jewels (the glittering kinds), and, you’ve got any old pretty stock certificates around, you can send them along, too. Thanks. I hate to see you burdened. 

(Keep your goats away from my hydrangeas, though.)

If Evelyn would just go one step farther, I think we’d be right on the money, as they say. 

Instead of shipping all these goats and chickens around, why don’t we just put them all in a big pen somewhere and issue a receipt to anyone who wants to bring their goats in for safe keeping along with mine. Now, instead of having to ship these goats around, we could a lot easier just trade the little receipts around. Anybody that gets hungry can take their receipt in and get a chicken or goat. And because we don’t want to be looking at ugly receipts all day long, let’s put a nice picture of some of our outstanding presidents on them, color them green, and call them “money.” (And if you don’t have a goat, you’re allowed to put some part of your house in there, too. Say, your bathroom maybe. (You can still use it if you want, no problem.))

(But right away I can see that maybe you wouldn’t want to traipse out to the pen everytime you needed to tinkle, so I’m going to let you keep your bathroom with you, with the understanding that it really belongs in the pen.)

And money is indeed real, and valuable. Are stock certificates of any intrinsic value? Well, they’re usually very pretty, but beyond that, they’re your certificate representing your proportional interest in real buildings and the like. No one’s running around saying that their stock certificates aren’t real, that the deed to their house aren’t not real, that the coupons they clipped from the paper this morning aren’t real. Money is just as real.”

(Alright, Hay, maybe I would view all this differently if I owned any stock certificates, or a house; or if the coupons I clipped out of the paper last week weren’t already expired and worthless.

Then again, maybe not.)

Of course money is real and has value. It’s real just as long as enough of us believe it’s real, and it has value as long enough of us say it does. And since money is so handy for helping us exchange goats, chickens, hydrangeas, real estate,  & etc.; and keep track of all those exchanges; let’s hope that Ben Bernanke can get consistently better results than Tinkerbelle does.

Waves Rolling In

(This is a truly wild and ridiculously oversimplified analogy, but it might be of some help to someone somewhere.)

A broadcast wave (radio, TV, etc) is really two sets of waves: the carrier wave, which is the one you tune your radio to (e.g. 91.5 MHz), and the audio wave, which is at a much higher frequency. 

You might be able to imagine it as something like if you guys were all on the beach, and I were out on a raft too far from shore for you to be able to hear me, but I wanted to tell you elephant jokes. If I had a bucket of red ping-pong balls on the raft, and a bucket of white ones, I could translate my elephant jokes into binary code and place a series of ping-pong balls on the passing waves, using red for one and white for zero (somehow also making sure that they would arrive in their proper sequence). If someone there on the beach with you (let’s call him “Bill”) could then translate them back from binary to English, you’d all get to hear why elephants wear red tennies. :) 

(Because nine-ies are too small, and eleven-ies just flop around on their feet.)  

 The thing to realize here is that the ocean waves are too large to be affected by the ping-pong balls, they roll on in just the same. But the ping-pong balls are carried from the transmitter (me) to the receiver (Bill) by those waves, and as long as they roll in to where you are, I can transmit information on them. [There are lots of ways in which ocean waves are very different from the broadcast waves we're really talking about, but this is the relevant-to-this-analogy way in which they are similar.] 

Radio Repeaters:

A radio repeater just receives the radio signal (much like your bedside clock radio does, but in a bigger and better sort of way), and then rebroadcasts (just like the original station transmitter) the signal to some area where the signal is otherwise blocked. They are often placed on top of tall mountains to re-broadcast into deep valleys.

 In the raft-&-ping-pong-ball analogy,  this would be as if some of you were not on the ocean beach, but on the far shore of a bay blocked off from the ocean waves by a narrow sand spit. The radio repeater would consist of two guys: Pete, who picks up the red and white ping pong balls and tosses them (in their correct binary sequence) across the sand spit to (who else?) re-Pete, over on the near shore of the bay. Re-Pete then re-launches them into an (extraordinarily convenient) current that carries them over to the group on the far bayshore, where Bill’s twin brother Phil translates them back into elephant jokes for the rest of the group.

A Touch of Jargon:

In signal transmission “noise” means “everything the receiver takes in other than the intended signal”. That little hiss that those of you playing vinyl records on your resurrected turntables hear is officially called “surface noise”. For radio signals, noise is static, squeals, etc., (and the “motorboating” sometimes heard on AM radio). In audio signals, noise is feedback, sixty-cycle hum, car alarms, barking dogs, and very definitely your rap-loving neighbor’s boom box drowning out the intended signal of what your  literate-but-soft-spoken friend has to say about Jane Austen. 

And, in terms of rafts and ping-pong balls, “noise” would be any and all flotsam, jetsam, seaweed, driftwood, deceased marine fauna, not-yet-deceased marine fauna, floating trash, rubber duckies, and anything else other than red or white ping-pong balls that comes floating around Bill’s feet.

To get very thoroughly carried away with this analogy:

Let’s say I’m not the only ping-pong-ball-transmitter out there. There’s a guy a hundred yards down the beach doing light bulb jokes in purple and yellow balls, and one fifty yards the other way doing knock-knock jokes in blue and orange. To keep us from interfering with each other’s transmissions, the government sets up a Floating Comics Commission (FCC) and gives it the right to regulate ball colors and auction off raft mooring sites. Pretty soon the whole thing catches on, and there’s  a nearly solid line of rafts up and down the beach, broadcasting good, bad and mediocre humor in every ping-pong ball color imaginable.

Trouble might arise if the FCC sold the raft next to mine the right to broadcast in tan and pink, and the raft three down the other way the right to use ecru and maroon. It was easy enough for Bill to sort out the purple, yellow, blue, and orange balls from the red and white ones, right along with all the other “noise” on my broadcast signal. But the tan and ecru balls could easily be confused the white ones, and the pink and maroon balls with the red ones. Just how far apart on the AM and FM radio broadcast spectrums (yes, I know it should be “spectra,” but that’s way too hoity-toity for this sort of analogy) any two stations must be is something that broadcasters and that other FCC get to spend lots of time arguing about.

And now for Pirate Radio, and our Exciting Action Sequence:

A black flag rises swiftly over the horizon, and a dark ship swoops towards the line of moored rafts. Hearts sink into beach sandals as the ping-pong transmitters recognize the race-built pinnace captained by the dread pirate Black Anne Cash. Soon she is hove to just seaward of the rafts, and suddenly her crew are at the rail, heaving barrels of Day-Glo Orange and Emergency Yellow-Green onto the ocean swells.

 The flood of ping-pong balls from the pirate transmitter overwhelms my much smaller broadcast stream, so that poor Bill on receiving end can’t make out my elephant jokes through Black Anne Cash’s binary blast demanding: “WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?”

This is as illegal as all get-out, of course; but before the Coast Guard can arrive, she has dumped out barrels of ping-pong balls forming the signal “BECAUSE IT WAS A FOWL PROCEEDING,” hoisted sail, and slipped away into the gathering sunset mist.

 (“Waves Rolling In” image modified from photo by MUmland at morguefile.com)

I really like the interview format that host James Lipton uses on “Inside the Actors Studio” (the Bravo cable TV show). But it’s vanishingly unlikely that I might ever be on that show, so, hey – I might as well interview myself. 

(No, really, Mr. Lipton. It’s not plagiarism- it’s homage… pure homage.)

What is your full name?

For the purposes of the internet, my name is “Evelyn Q. Gorfram.” It’s even “Doctor Evelyn Q. Gorfram, PhD.,” whenever I want to give myself more credit than I deserve. 

(And no, that’s not what my driver’s license has to say about me. I’m nuts, but I’m not *that* nuts.)

Where did your life begin?

In Berkeley, California. Some people say that explains my politics (I’m just ever-so-slightly left of center :).

What are your parents’ names?

Again for the purposes of the internet, my parents are named Ozzie and Harriet Gorfram. That’s me being ironic, because their marriage was very much the opposite of the “Ozzie and Harriet” archetype. 

On the internet I usually refer to my mother as “Mumsie.” That’s more irony in that it connotes exactly what she is not. She’s aged a bit now (she’s working her way up to octogenarian status) but she was always a very tall, strong woman; and I always believed could wrestle her weight in wildcats before breakfast, any day of the week. 

Your Mumsie must be quite a woman. What was her maiden name? Or else the name she wrestled those wildcats under?

[laugh] I said I believed that she *could* do that, not that she ever did… well, not to my knowledge, anyway.

And heck, since I’m making it up – for the purposes of the internet anyway, let’s say she was Harriet Evelyn MacClaine, distantly but directly descended from the MacClaines of Lochbuie.

See, that way I get to wear the MacClaine of Lochbuie tartan (albeit only for the purposes of the internet, which are not really very sartorial purposes :). It’s my favorite of all the traditional Scottish tartans, only and solely because I think it has nice pretty colors. 

(The only really proper way for me be able to wear it otherwise would be for me to get married to a MacClaine of Lochbuie, and that would hardly seem fair to the poor clansman in question.)

Is your ethnic background Scottish then?

Yes and no. My background includes Scots, English, French, German, Irish, and just about everyone else Western Europe had but didn’t want. 
But both my parents’ surnames are of Scots origin – Mumsie’s from a not-so-unnotable old family around Perth, and my father’s from an almost-infamous reaver clan from near the English border.

Do you have any siblings?

Three. A brother and two sisters.

“Bro” is a few years older than I am, and is an engineer for a computer chip manufacturing company in upstate New York. 

My older sister, whom I’ll call “SFSis,” lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and does something extremely managerial for a company that used to be Hewlett Packard, back before it got spun-off a time or two. 

“SeattleSis” is younger than I am, and lives in (surprise!) Seattle. She’s a fisheries biologist who helps try to figure out how to keep both fish and a fishing industry alive in the North Pacific.

What schools did you attend…? 

Oh, lots of ‘em…

I went to public schools in California back when they were supposed to be the best in the nation, and the schools in the town we lived in were supposed to be among the best in the state. 

The real advantage to that was that we students were always being evaluated to see how well we were doing, and those standardized evaluation exams used the same complex format, with the “Do-Not-Write-In-Your-Test-Booklet” and the Scantron cards, as standardized college entrance exams. So by the time I got to the entrance exams, I was a veteran test-taker, and all I had to worry about was the thing about actually knowing the answers.

… I don’t think this question appears on the SAT’s very often, but what was your high school mascot?

Darned good thing it wasn’t on the SAT’s – I have no idea! 

…Um, let’s see… the Luther Burbank Senior High School… Titans?
…Or was it Spartans? …Vulcans? …Ninians?… Quotidians?… Arthropods? …uh, I think it was probably the Titans.

It was, and is, the “Titans;” the “Mighty Titans,” in fact. Apparently you got into college anyway: what was your college mascot?

The “Cal Aggies” (it was the University of California at Davis, and it had started off as an agricultural school).

But the only reason I remember that is because I especially liked the name of the UCD marching band: “Hell Yes, We’re The Cal Aggie Marching Band – Unh!”

“Unh?” …. You do that very well, by the way…. Was that really part of the official name of the band?

Hell Yes.

What did you study at UC Davis, and what is your profession?

I studied Metallurgical and Mechanical Engineering, and I was an engineer for about twenty years. I’ve worked examining broken airplane parts to figure out what made them break, on assembling semiconductor chips into usable electronic widgets, looking at gemstones and gold to see if they’re what they claim to be, and my last job was designing corrosion protection and deicing systems for highway bridges.

That’s quite a resume. But you’re not working as an engineer now?

Well, no… I came down with some really nasty health problems which forced me into early retirement. It’s Fibromyalgia/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (yes, Virginia, it can be completely disabling). While it’s not life-threatening or contagious, there isn’t any known cause or cure.

That’s really terribly unfortunate.

Yeah, it is. It’s pretty much thrown everything I ever planned for into a cocked hat; and I’m slowly figuring out how to cope with life as it is for me now. I can keep carrying on about it for hours, but there’s no need to subject you to all that.

Perhaps the one silver lining in that rather large & gloomy cloudbank is that it has given me more time to explore what I might be able to do as a writer. I’ve always dabbled around with writing, and people – even people who are not my mother – have told me I was good at it. 

I used to do a lot of technical writing for my engineering work, but now I’m able to work on anything that strikes my fancy. I have any numbers of projects in the works: mostly literary fiction, but some narrative non-fiction, memoir, the obligatory screenplay idea or two, and a fair bit of really bad poetry. They’re mostly unfinished, and all unpublished.

Could we ask you to recite some of this “bad poetry”?

Are you really *quite* sure? I should probably have everyone here sign a “hold-harmless” waiver or something…

Oh, for the love of Pete…

All right – a couple short ones might not be too painful:

“Here I am,
And here I be.
Were I elsewhere,
I’d not be me.”

[wince] Or there’s…

“If you think this is
Bad, wait ’til you see the rest of
My lousy haiku.”

Er, well…. right… thank you…. I think we’ll just be moving on now… Where is your home?

In Seattle, in the North End. I have a very nice studio* apartment in a subsidized housing complex.

(*So you see, we really are “inside the blogger’s studio.”)

And who lives there, normally?

Me, and a rather large “retired tom” cat named Bruno.

And is it paradise?

Didst Thou bring a Loaf of Bread and a Jug of Wine? [wink]

It’s a nice apartment, has a south-facing balcony big enough for my container gardening, allows cats, and has pretty much everything I want or need in a place to live. I’m very happy with it.

And now (at long last, our readers say), the famous questionnaire:

What is your favorite word? 

“Translucence.”

What is your least favorite word?

“Overdue.”

What turns you on?

Intelligence, emotional maturity… 
…and muscles.

What turns you off?

Lack of real internal fortitude, that quality sometimes described as “grit” or “sand.”

What sound or noise do you love?

Wind soughing in the tops of very tall evergreen trees, especially if there’s a nuthatch calling.

What sound or noise do you hate?

A child crying on and on without being comforted.

What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?

Superintelligent Shade of the Color Blue.

What profession other than yours would you not like to attempt?

Retail Accountancy, as at H&R Block.

What is your favorite curse word? 

“F***in’ A.” It’s so succinct, but it can say so very much.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

I would be vastly relieved to hear the words: “Please come in.”

(James Lipton image from TVRage.com; by fair use)