Bradipo rigardas LiveJournal-on

Good earth

2009-04-10T13:51:46Z

Jackie and I rented a garden plot from the local park district. It's about a mile away, over next to the Parkland College campus, which is just a bit far--not so handy for nipping out to get something for the kitchen--but close enough. It's actually walking distance (and a very pleasant walk), if we're up to putting in a little effort, although kind of a long way to carry all the gardening tools. I figure while we're doing the spading and raking, we'll just drive.

It had been too wet to work the soil for days, and the forecast was for yet more rain last night, so I figured we'd better try and get in the garden yesterday, which turned out to be a good call--the soil was just dry enough. We dug up two smallish plots and planted some lettuce, spinach, and kale. Most of the other things will want to wait until after the danger of frost has passed.

Except when I'm actually working in it, I tend to forget just how good the soil is here. My memory of the soil in southwest Michigan (where I grew up) is different. There was good top soil--but dig down more than six or eight inches and the good, black soil ended and you found pale brown clay. It was enough to grow a garden in, but you had to be careful. If an inch of soil washed away or blew away, that was a large fraction of the total fertility of the land.

Central Illinois is different. Here the good black loam seems to go on forever. It's a legacy of the prairie--thousands of years of deep-rooted plants growing, dying, and occasionally burning. It almost seems like you don't need to do anything to preserve the soil--whatever gets used up, there's always more where it came from. It's not true, of course, but it's easy to see how people could think that way.

I enjoy the early-season gardening--the digging, raking, and planting. And, of course, I enjoy the harvesting. It's the middle that becomes tedious--the weeding, the pest control. The last time we tried to have a garden in one of these plots (15 years ago), I was working full-time and really couldn't come up with the energy to get out in the field and work once we got past the initial planting phase. I'm hoping to do better this year.

The #5 ingredient was caramel color

2009-03-19T22:56:40Z

Me (Reading a condiment packet at KFC): Do you know what the #1 ingredient in "honey sauce" is?

Jackie: Sugar?

Me:  No. Sugar is #2. Come on--this isn't hard.

Jackie:  High-fructose corn syrup.

Me:  Right! After that you might hope that honey would be #3, but it's not. Honey is #4; #3 is corn syrup.

"An Education of Scars" is up at Futurismic

2009-03-02T17:26:50Z

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I sold a story to Futurismic. The story went live today: An Education of Scars.

It's fun to sell to an on-line publication. People who want to read it don't need to track down a book or magazine at a bookstore or newsstand--they can just follow a link. I've already gotten my first complimentary email!

Sale!

2009-02-12T22:23:19Z

Just heard from Chris East that he's buying my story "An Education of Scars" for Futurismic! I'm so wonderfully pleased!

The alleged suspect

2009-02-02T19:46:12Z

I heard a news report today on the anniversary of a nasty murder here in Illinois. The story ended by reporting that the case remained unsolved and that "the suspect was still at large." This has prompted me to rant a bit on a particular style of journalistic circumlocution that I have long found annoying. The short version is this: Do it. Just do it right.

In the instant case the right thing to say is that "the murderer is still at large."

I wholeheartedly support the correct use of these journalistic conventions: It does great harm to accuse an innocent man of a serious crime, and even a guilty man deserves the presumption of innocence that our system provides. That is the purpose of referring to someone as "the suspect" or "the accused" or "the alleged murderer." I just want them to do it right. When it is the case that someone was murdered the existence of a murderer follows directly. Especially when they don't even have a suspect yet, it does no harm to call the murderer "the murderer." On the contrary, it does good to speak plainly about the plain facts.

I wish to complain particularly about the practice of hanging the adjective "alleged" off whatever noun is standing around the edges of the sentence looking lonely. "Smith was arrested for the alleged crime of shooting sixteen people," is appalling on so many levels that it may seem petty to complain about the syntax. But really! Alleged crime? That shooting sixteen people is a crime seems far enough beyond reasonable doubt that calling it "alleged" just insults everyone involved. And yet, I see this sort of thing all the time.

It is not just that doing it wrong is stupid and wrongheaded; I think it does actual harm--because there are cases where the crime is properly described as alleged--a gift may be alleged to be a bribe, a sex act may be alleged to be a rape. It makes perfect sense to describe a killing as "an alleged murder" if there's a plausible argument to be made that it was a suicide or an accident or self-defense. When the journalist gets it right we are all rewarded with a clearer understanding of the events being described. When someone is found bound, gagged, and shot in the back of the head it is grotesque for the journalist to describe it as an "alleged" murder.

These constructions serve us well as long as we use them thoughtfully--as long as we use them to tell the truth. The problem is when we resort to sprinkling them on our sentences like fairy dust as a magical ward against lawsuits. It does no one any good to say, "After raping and murdering his victim, the accused left her body in the park where police say it was allegedly found by a jogger the next morning."

One flaw down, maybe

2009-01-21T21:12:11Z

One thing that has always frustrated me in my fiction writing is the way I make the same mistakes over and over again. Although the sample size is small--two new stories--I think I may have finally internalized the lessons for avoiding one of these mistakes.

Many of my stories are stories of the Man who Learns Better. (Heinlein suggested that this was one of three basic plots, the others being "Boy meets Girl" and "The Little Tailor.") My mistake, though--which I have made over and over--has been to turn it into the story of the man who learned better--beginning where I need to end up, with a hero who has already learned what he needs to. This is a no-good way to write a story.

Over the past couple of days, I took the early scribblings of such a story and wrote something new, beginning with a hero who had things he needed to learn and then having him learn them over the course of the story. I am reasonably happy with the result.

Why it has taken me so long to get over this hump, I'm not sure.

My next repeated mistake to attack--and I have already in this story made some progress in avoiding this mistake as well--is to stop writing about characters who, when confronted with an intolerable situation, manage to carve out a tiny space where they can survive. I need to write stories about characters who rise up and smash intolerable situations to bits.

Wish me luck.

Oh, and in other news, I am once again submitting stories to editors. If I keep that up, I just might have some publications to announce, eventually.

Happy Solstice!

2008-12-21T14:33:34Z

I haven't checked personally (no sun-aligned circle handy), but it's been a couple of hours, so I think we'd have heard by now if the sun weren't coming back, so I think we've dodged that bullet one more time.

So, to all the people who put up trees and lights and decorations: Mission Accomplished.

I expect that Christmas trees rather like the period between the solstice and Christmas day--they've done the heavy lifting of getting the sun to come back and can take a few days off just sitting there, all decorated, keeping watch over the presents. It sounds relaxing.

Happy solstice!

Winter

2008-11-20T21:28:26Z

I generally divide winter into two phases.

The first phase generally begins in late October, after the last day that's warm enough to go out without a jacket or coat, and runs until the solstice. I usually bear up okay as the days get shorter and darker and colder, because this phase is short--usually less than two months.

The second phase begins after the solstice. In theory the days are getting longer and the extra light ought to be helping, but the cold and dark weigh on me even so. I usually manage the first six weeks or so well enough--Christmas and New Year help, as does the gradual lengthening of the days, but being unable to do ordinary outdoor exercise is a problem that just gets worse as the weeks drag on. February is pretty much a dead loss. I always hope that March will be better, but many years it isn't. Just a few years back we had a very mild winter, followed by a bitter cold and snowy spring that lasted all through March and April and into May.

I must say that I do find the whole thing less terrifying than I did when I was trying to work a regular job. At least now I've got no constraints on getting out whenever there's a few minutes of sun in the midst of an otherwise long dark week.

This year I have a plan to get to the Fitness Center and work out on the aerobic equipment. They recently got a bunch of new machines with individual TV screens, and their cable gets 5 times as many channels as ours does. Maybe I can find something on a channel that we don't get that I want to watch enough to motivate me to go work out.

Speaking of Muslim presidents

2008-11-05T20:46:41Z

Jackie told me about hearing some man-on-the-street type interviews with people around the world, including one with a guy from Pakistan, who said that, "Even though the US now has a Muslim president," he didn't expect US policy toward his country to get any better.

That reminded me of another thing Jackie told me. She had a Muslim co-worker (also from Pakistan, if I remember the story correctly). At some point they were talking about American presidents, and he told her that the US president he admired most was "Ibrahim Lincoln," because he freed the slaves, but also because he was (obviously) a Muslim.

Kind of makes you wonder what it is about presidents from Illinois, doesn't it?

Computer glasses

2008-10-29T21:32:26Z

A few weeks ago, I started having a persistently sore neck. It took a while, but I eventually figured out what the problem was: I could no longer see the computer screen through the top part of my glasses, so I was tipping my head back to look through the bifocal part. Try doing that for 8 to 12 hours a day. (Or, better: don't.)

So, I went to the eye doctor to get my eyes checked--and most particularly to get a prescription for glasses for working at the computer. They're about mid-way between my regular glasses and the bifocal part of my glasses. I can see fine in pretty close--things are sharp as close as maybe 8 to 10 inches. I can also see fine out well past the distance to the computer screen. I wouldn't want to wear 'em for watching a movie, but they're really fine for any indoor distance. They'd probably be legal for driving in, although I don't think I'll do so.

I like 'em a lot.

So, think of this as a public service announcement. As you reach the end of your 40s, if you start getting a persistently sore neck, consider whether you need computer glasses.

Typos!

2008-10-27T14:48:22Z

Wrote a Wise Bread post yesterday. Read through it this morning, fixed a few things. Went onto the Wise Bread site and created a blog entry (added the picture, got the bullet list and bold face set up the way I wanted, etc.). Gave it a once last read-through, fixed a few typos, and then posted it.

Half an hour later it shows up in my RSS feed reader, so I skim through it (as I usually do)--and found more typos. A bazillion typos! (And by a bazillion I mean 6 or 8--way too many for a short blog post.)

One of the real cool things about blogging is that you've got almost unmediated access to the readers--no editor who has to be sold on your idea or allowed to muck about with your words. But it'd sure be cool if there were someone out there reading every post and catching all the typos before they go live.

Oh well. I fixed the ones I saw. Hopefully, not too many people saw post before that.

Clothing cost

2008-10-23T21:37:09Z

Hearing the news reports on the money that the Republic National Committee spent on new clothing for Sarah Palin, Jackie was moved to calculate that her total purchases of clothing since birth come to far less than that.

The RNC was at pains to point out that Palin had a sudden need to expand her wardrobe from one appropriate for Alaska to one appropriate for the climate conditions across all 50 states. However, Jackie's wardrobe over the years has had to handle the climate from Montreal to Trivandrum--and those were places she actually lived, not just places where she had to make campain stops.

Speaking for mysef, I'd be willing to be bet a considerable sum that my total lifetime expenditures on clothing--birth to death, including whatever I'm buried or cremated in--will total less than $150,000. Quite a bit less.

Link from the Wall Street Journal blog!

2008-10-02T12:58:05Z

It's not a mention in the paper edition (as far as I know), nor did they mention my name, but the WSJ blog linked to my latest Wise Bread post:

http://blogs.wsj.com/wallet/2008/10/01/loose-change-10108/?mod=googlenews_wsj

(Their second link is to my post.)

Steinbeck question

2008-09-24T19:21:34Z

How come there's so much interest in The Grapes of Wrath, but nobody every talks about the rest of the trilogy (The Plums of Sloth and The Cranberries of Ennui)?

Noveling

2008-09-19T21:56:08Z

After a full year of working on my novel, with rather unsatisfactory results, I'd become quite discouraged. In late July, I'd just about given up on my current novel and actually started outlining a different one.

As I did that, though--as I went through figuring out the different characters, what their motivations were, and thinking about how that brought them into conflict--it occurred to me that I could do the same thing for my current novel.

So, I did. I kept most of the characters, most of the world-building, and many situations and events. But I took a close look at the other characters, put form to their motivations, and figured out what they were actually trying to accomplish. Then, I wrote an outline. I did most of the thinking during our St. Croix vacation and the week after, then wrote an outline.

Since then--since I had an outline where the story was driven by characters in conflict--the writing has gone swimmingly. Today I hit 30,000 words, the half-way point to my guestimate of this story taking about 60,000 words to tell. The creation date on my outline is 8/21, so that's 30,000 words in just two days shy of a month. If next month goes as smoothly as last month.... Well, I don't want to set myself up for disappointment by being over-optimistic, but still--it's been a lot fun just lately (after months of no fun, when things weren't going so well).

Differential equations?

2008-09-19T18:57:42Z

If you can solve differential equations, I'd like to urge you to take a look at this paper on peak debt by a friend of mine.

If you can't solve differential equations, the paper is still worth looking at (I can follow most of the math), but you might want to start with my Wise Bread post on the peak debt paper:

Is there a limit to how much Americans can spend? Clearly there is: All they earn, minus savings and service on their existing debt, plus new borrowing. Since the Bureau of Economic Analysis puts numbers on those very items, it's possible to see just how close we are to the edge. In a fascinating paper, Ron Laszewski does exactly that. The results are rather depressing.

I've generally refrained from pimping my Wise Bread posts to you guys, but Ron's paper is too interesting for me to just post it without pointing you at it.

My dreams last night were sponsored

2008-09-05T12:40:00Z

It was probably just random chance--I dream about everything else--but last night two of my dreams included advertising jingles. (One was the old Mobil Oil "flying red horse" jingle. I don't remember the other.)

Just to be on the safe side, I figured I'd mention it to you guys. If your dreams didn't include advertising last night, I won't worry about it. But if you've started having dreams with ads in them, maybe it's the first wave of a nefarious plot to commercialize our sleep.

Just me? Or a new and terrible threat to us all?

Dramatic sky with Sunsinger

2008-08-30T15:25:21Z

Dramatic sky with Sunsinger
Originally uploaded by bradipo

Jackie and I haven't been to Allerton Park much this year, but we went yesterday.

Even when we go, we often don't hike as far as the Sunsinger. It's not all that far--the round trip is probably less than 4 miles--but it's far enough that, if we do any of the other trails, we end up running out of time.

This time, though, we just walked straight to the Sunsinger and then back. We saw lots of teeny tiny frogs, a snake (probably a garter snake, but I'm not sure), two almost-grown fawns, and lots of butterflies around the flowers.

Home from St. Croix

2008-08-11T14:58:19Z

By the beach
Originally uploaded by bradipo

We're back after a week in St. Croix.

We did a lot of stuff--a boat trip out to Buck Island to snorkel around the reef, a tour of the distillery to see how they make rum, a visit to the field to help trap mongooses--but mostly we sat in the cabana and enjoyed the trade winds.

A typical day: Get up around dawn. Hang out on the patio near Steven's cabin and watch the sky get light over the ocean. Lazily let Lucy bring us toast--with me being doubly lazy, by letting Jackie bring me juice and cereal. Once we'd breakfasted, go for a swim in the ocean. Once the sun got high enough that it wasn't shady on the patio, get books and retire to the cabana (but mostly to converse with family members rather than read). Emerge only when necessary (to eat lunch, check email, or to get a new book to read). Along about late afternoon, replenish sunblock and go for another swim. Make a rum drink. Sponge off Steve and Alisa's yummy cooking for dinner. Make another rum drink. Retire early so that we can get up around dawn and do the same thing the next day.

My cat knows that humans can't see in the dark

2008-07-29T01:02:56Z

Rapunzel will lie nonchalantly in doorways and hallways, utterly confident that we will do whatever is necessary to avoid stepping on her. Although her confidence isn't entirely justified--she's gotten stepped on any number of times (when we're carrying something that obscures our view of the floor, or simply when we're distracted)--it seems to be absolute. But only during the day.

Once it gets dark, her behavior changes completely. If she's lying in the path and one of us starts walking toward her, she's up and moving out of the way as if her life depended on it.

She doesn't know exactly how dark it needs to get before we can't see (which is how I managed to observe this behavior), but her guess is a reasonable one. If it's dark enough that a human whose eyes were not yet adapted to the light conditions might not be able to see her, she gets up and gets out of the way.

Very smart kitty.

Thematic Elephants

2008-07-17T14:06:54Z

Thematic Elephants
Originally uploaded by bradipo

Last night we watched "Off the Map," an excellent indy film. Although it's almost peripheral to what the movie's about, the reason I wanted to watch it is that the people in the movie are getting by outside the money economy--they produce most of what they need, scavenge what they can from the dump, and barter for the rest (or do without).

Before getting to see the movie, though, we saw that it had been rated PG-13 for nudity and thematic elephants. So, of course, we had to get out our elephants to watch it with us.

The one on the left is Wellington. The one on the right is Alexander the Grape. They're my military advisers when I write military sf. I usually think of them as science-fictional elephants, rather than thematic elephants, but I suppose they're really both.

Sometimes one of them is the elephant of surprise, but you never know which one.

We have health insurance!

2008-07-10T20:50:53Z

Just to be clear, we've had health insurance right along, but it's been a continuation of my employee coverage. For the past year, we've been able to continue it at the low employee rates as part of my severance package. That would have expired next month, and we'd have had to move up to the COBRA rates--about seven times as much. So, we applied for health insurance from a local health care provider. We just got the letter saying that we'd been approved.

The new insurance will cost about four times as much as what we've been paying, but it's very close to the amount that I budgeted for health insurance, back when we were first deciding if it would be practical to give up having a regular job.

This was really the last piece that I needed to get into place to make this "full-time writer" thing work. If we hadn't been able to get health insurance, I'd probably have had to get a job (or, at least, try to). Now, though, it looks like we're set.

It'll be nice if Obama can get health insurance fixed before either of us gets so sick that our new insurance drops us. It'll also be nice if the economy can hold together well enough for my investments to hold most of their value. And, as long as I'm listing nice things that I'm kind of doubtful of getting, it'll be nice if the supply of fossil fuels continues to support the really essential stuff, like food production, home heating, and some electric generation.

First Fireflies!

2008-06-24T02:20:39Z

Jackie and I have been going for a late-evening walk these past few days, because we knew it was almost time for fireflies. There weren't any last night, but tonight there are!

Seeing fireflies makes me feel like a kid with his whole summer vacation stretching out in front of him. I can't off-hand think of a stronger trigger--fireflies equals warm, fun, happy, carefree, safe--and certainty that tomorrow will be a great day, as will the next, and the day after, and the day after that.

Read The Sword-Edged Blonde

2008-05-08T19:44:53Z

Read The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe--good book.

I rather expected to like it, because I'd have enjoyed either a fantasy-adventure story with Chandleresque trappings or a hard-boiled detective story with fantasy adventure trappings. This book, though, exceeded my expectations by being both.

I don't want to say too much about just what fantasy-story elements are there, because they'd be spoilers for the story. It doesn't spoil anything, though, to say that the detective is a former solder who saw some bad stuff--which is the same sensibility that informed a lot of the detective fiction of the 1940s and 1950s.

On top of doing both of those things well, it offers an extra bonus for me because the economic underpinnings of the world are rather more fully realized than in most fantasy stories. It's not overdone--very possibly most readers won't even notice--but the whole story works better because the author knows more about economics than most writers seem to.

If you like that sort of thing, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that you'd like this one too.

Fuel, travel plans, etc.

2008-04-28T18:13:13Z

For years now I've been making changes to cut down on fuel use. I used to live in a rural village and had a commute of more than 10 miles, but about fifteen years ago moved here, cutting my commute to less than 5 miles. A few years after that, I started bicycling in the summer and taking the bus in the winter, cutting my (in our car) commuting total to maybe 5 miles a week. And, of course, since late August, I haven't been commuting at all.

Our fuel purchases gradually dropped, but I wasn't really keeping track, so I don't know when or by how much.

A few months ago, though, one of the local grocery stores started one of those deals where you get discounts in exchange for letting them track your purchases. It's different than most, though, in that what you get is a not a discount on the groceries themselves, but rather a discount on gasoline. The way the rules work, the discounts accumulate until you make a gas purchase, at which point they go back to zero and you have to start accumulating them again. The individual pieces of the discount are tied to specific shopping trips, and expire after 30 days. So, it makes sense to buy gas every 30 days, whether you need it or not.

With that in mind, we went to get gas today. We bought 5.5 gallons, and we got it at a 35-cent-a-gallon discount, bringing the price down to $3.209 per gallon.

I'm reasonably pleased with the idea that we use a bit less than 6 gallons in a typical month. We'll use more next month, though. Our anniversary is coming up, and we'll be going to Turkey Run for a bit of celebratory hiking and a couple of nice meals out. We'll probably visit an art gallery or two as well.

It'll be our 16th anniversary, which (as any software engineer knows) is the 10th in hexadecimal.