Froshty Mugs

Update on Me

2008-02-11T09:08:00.000-08:00

Author's note: For those of you who haven't followed my blog, both of my daughters were critically injured in a car accident on September 22, 2007 and both spent a week in ICU. Mary, my older daughter, was home a few days after that, but Anna, my younger, spent almost a month in the hospital, had to have her jaw rebuilt and had to have back surgery, before she was sent to skilled nursing facility for 8 weeks. She finally returned home, in a back brace, on December 17. Her story is one of miracles, unbelievable strength of will, and a remarkable attitude. She took her final back brace off on Sunday, but now faces the possibility of serious dental work related to the destruction of her jaw. I've decided to ease myself back into blogging with excerpts from an email I sent to a close group of online friends called "The Amazing Women's Room," or "AWR," for short. So, here they are.

My lawyer recommended that I keep a journal of everything I've felt since the accident because it can be very helpful in court. I've been doing that as much as I can, but today I have a need to share some of it with y'all. The good news is that I haven't changed all that much (I still hate dook, Coach K., and George W. Bush and his administration with a passion so strong that I can feel my blood boil when I see any of them on television, for example, and I love my Tar Heels as much as I ever have, although I briefly considered suicide after Carolina lost to dook last Wednesday) and most of the changes are not negative.

I know I'm stronger now because I've lived through something that I wish no one had to go through. I know that the results of the accident could have been far worse and either or both girls could have died, but even though they lived, the days at times have been difficult. I have even more confidence than I used to because I have been able to bear up under extremely difficult times and have fought insurance companies and hospitals and won. I've let myself meltdown when I needed to, the latest meltdown coming after Anna came home and I could discharge a lot of fears and negativity with impunity (on the phone with my mom) because the hardest part of our war was over.

I've never been that patient, but my patience is a little thinner now, especially when it comes to waiting. I've never liked waiting, but I hate it now. I think that's because of the agonizing amount of waiting I've had to do since September 22: waiting to hear what had happened to Mary and Anna in the Emergency Room, waiting for Anna to go off life support, waiting for information, and waiting at slow stoplights when I was driving to see both girls in the hospital. I especially hate the long waits in doctors' offices now and resent that doctors schedule more than one patient for the same appointment time.

I've also become a little less extroverted. I've had to talk about so many important things related to life and death that I no longer want to engage in social chit chat. I've gathered my really good friends closer and I've shed myself of some acquaintances. For now, I really seem to care only about deep, lasting relationships and don't feel like developing or participating in superficial ones.

My eating habits have changed. For example, the idea of eating a huge bowl of Grapenuts with soy milk like I did before the accident makes me want to choke. Only recently have I begun to eat Grapenuts again, but it's a small amount with a small amount of soy milk. My lunches are very small--usually yogurt or a cheese sandwich. I eat better at dinner, but not as much as I used to. I get fuller faster or I start to feel sick when I'm presented with a lot of food. I'm eating healthier though because Lorenzo and I use a lot of fresh vegetables and seasoning when we cook. Speaking of which, there's the most shocking change of all: I'm cooking and I actually enjoy it! I've even made up dishes in my head or doctored some I've found in cookbooks.

Despite my shocking transformation from a person who used to fear and loathe the stove to someone who is leaving cooking hints in a comment on her brother's blog, I've lost weight. I actually lost a huge amount of weight right after the accident because I couldn't eat at all for about 4 days and after that only a little, but I've gained some of that back now that I try to eat regularly.

I'm drinking more soda (in particular, Coke Zero) and less water. I have no idea what that's about. I still drink 16 ounces of water a day, but I used to drink 32 ounces and I never (or rarely drank) soda. For some reason, plain water feels weird on my throat and I feel funny when I drink it. I force myself to, though, because water's good for me and I've been drinking it for years. I tell myself that I can have a Coke Zero after I drink water.

I'm not smoking (I smoked briefly after the accident), but I crave cigarettes all the time. I went 8 years without smoking and without thinking about cigarettes, but now I think about cigarettes all the time. I really hate that craving.

The weirdest thing is that I can't use body washes anymore when I shower; I have to have a bar of soap. I've given the girls all my body washes and am happily using Lever 2000.

Sometimes I think that the changes in eating habits, drinking soda, using bar soap, and craving cigarettes is a return to the lifestyle I had before the girls were born. In those days, I rarely ate breakfast, and when if I did, it was a small amount. I used Dove bar soap. I drank a lot of Diet Coke and Tab in those days and I smoked regularly. Maybe my mind regressed to that point in case the girls were no longer in my life--I don't know--as a form of mental protection. Maybe over time, once my mind has accepted that the danger of losing the girls from the accident is over, I can return to water drinking, body wash using, and eating bigger breakfasts. Maybe the craving for cigarettes will go away.

I also no longer feel compelled to answer every e-mail I read. I read them all, but I only respond to the ones that make me want to say something either funny, profound, or loving.

And, finally, I've always been absent-minded, thanks to the ADD, but I'm a little more so now. Thank goodness I have Lorenzo, who is really good at watching what I do and where I put things so that he can help me when I forget stuff.

So that's me after the accident. For those of you who are wondering if I've lost my sense of humor, I can happily attest to the fact that it's still here. I don't think it ever went away. I laugh every day and I'm already planning a less serious blog entry called "More Random Things That Bother Me," so stay tuned.

For Nick

2007-10-05T05:55:00.000-07:00

My last post was dedicated to all teens because of the wonderful teens who have sat by my daughters' bed side while they recovered from their terrible ordeal. I've always known that my daughters are special, but it's great to know that there are kids their age who think the same thing about them.

This brief post is dedicated to one of their most faithful friends. His name is Nick, he's 17, and he has been a real constant during these two weeks of fear and hope. He was one of the teens who sat with my friend Madeline, whose daughter was also injured in the accident, while we waited for so many hours for doctors to tell us how our children were doing. He held our hands, hugged us, and cried for both girls when he first saw them.

He is such a good kid. Before we met him, he'd already been through things that no teen should have to endure. When we met him, he was basically homeless because his parents have to deal with a lot because he has siblings that require a lot of care and attention. He bounded up to us one day, got all happy when he saw our dog Lucky, and he has basically become my foster son since that time.

He's passionate and strong, and he and I have had words before the accident, because I, too, am passionate and strong. But, last night, instead of chasing down his friends and hanging out with them, he stayed at the house so that he could help Madeline rearrange furniture in our house so that Anna could sleep downstairs in what we're now calling "Anna's suite." He talked to Madeline and me for hours and put up with all our rants about men. He tried to do back flips and front flips for us and was climbing around in trees with the energy that teenaged boys are famous for.

His will is strong and he's tough, but he also has one of the best hearts I've seen in someone his age. He's sworn to protect all three of us (Mary, Anna, and me) from harm and pain and I believe him. When I saw him cry over Anna and Mary, my heart melted completely. I hope that one day, life will bring him everything he wants. He truly deserves this.

For those of you who read this and are praying for my daughters, please offer up a special thanks for bringing him into our lives. He's a terrific man and he gives me hope that when kids his age are old enough to run this world, it will be a much better place than the one we have now.

Thanks, Nick, for being our friend. All three of us are so glad you're in our lives.

Every Teen is a Miracle

2007-10-03T16:14:00.001-07:00

(I apologize for all typos and misspelled or misplaced words in advance, but I don't feel like proofreading this emotional post.)

On September 22, 2007, an alleged drunk driver going more than 100 miles an hour in the middle of two interstate lanes rear-ended my daughter Mary's Honda Accord, pushing them 411 feet into the guard rail, where it bounced off and hit the guard rail again before landing in the median. My younger daughter Anna was critically injured and had to be airlifted by helicopter to the hospital. Mary broke a rib and suffered a bad cut on her head, which resulted in blood on her brain.

It's now been more than 10 days since the accident and Mary's already home. She's doing really well, although she tires easily and her head tends to bleed mysteriously but not in any way that's dangerous, according to the doctors. She's chatting with all her friends on line, getting text messages from boys, and doing just about everything she used to do before the accident. It's terrific to see.

Anna has amazed all the doctors and nurses in the hospital with how strong she is. Many people who were injured like like she was (broken ribs, smashed mouth and mandible, lacerated liver and spleen, broken back, and a hole in her lung) don't live. Well, she has not only lived, but she's completely herself. 100% Anna. If you know her, you'll know what I mean. She got to keep her spleen, her liver's fine, her lung is staying inflated, and today she walked up and down the hospital hall with her back brace on. The doctor told her today that if her physical therapist gives her the okay, it's possible that she could come home as early as tomorrow.

The girls' dear friend Taylor also had a visit to the ICU where a problem with his lung and pneumonia caused him to flatline at least once. Well, he too has surpassed all expectations. He's home now and doing just fine.

My sister Emily wrote about how wonderful teenagers and young people are. She couldn't be more right. For anyone who has a teenager and been irritated by the seeming self-centeredness or the arguments, stop and think, "Suppose this teen almost died today." It makes a big difference how you view them. I don't know if this 47-year-old body could have lived through what Anna, Mary, and Taylor lived through. I credit the zest for life, the passion, and the feeling of invincibility that is part of the nature of teenagers as the reason these three young people have made such excellent progress and continue to do so.

So, I dedicate this brief post to all the teenagers out there. Y'all are an inspiration and bless you all for being yourselves--lost or found, good or bad, straight or high, sober or drunk, smoking or organizing anti-smoking campaigns, praying to or cursing God, singing hip hop or neopunk or country. You are truly miracles.

Sheep with Parrot Heads

2007-09-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

"We're a nation of sheep." I don't know who said this originally, and I'm not sure that the nation referred to is the U.S., but for the purposes of this post, I'm assuming that the nation is the U.S. That's because, in my opinion, the U.S. has been a nation of sheep pretty much throughout the second half of the 20th century. We have blindly followed shepherds like the multi-media, politicians, oil companies, sports figures, advertisers, and big business eager to do their bidding and not get lost. However, lately I've come to the realization that we are more than just sheep. We don't follow silently or with just a few bleats. Instead, we follow our shepherds and repeat their words ad nauseum without any regard to their meaning or veracity. I attribute this phenomenon, which I call being sheep with parrot heads, to the Information Age, but it's become truly awful in the 21st century. It's like a flu epidemic.

For example, today, I downloaded a research paper about a huge corporation (excuse me, I mean "global enterprise") and its policies for being environmentally friendly and trying to reduce greenhouse emissions and the first line was “'Can we leverage our experience as a responsible company to make money?'" Now, if you've been following this blog (and kudos to you for putting up with my sporadic posts if you have), you know by now that I absolutely hate this misuse of the word "leverage." Unfortunately, and to my growing horror, every single website I visit, every single brochure I read, every single technical manual I edit, every single proposal I review now "leverages" the term "leverage" at least twice. In other words, "leverage" is now misused "across" every form of published entity. That's right: "across" and not "in" or "by" every form of published entity.

I first saw this jargon in 1998 when I was working for a highly evil dot.com that I'm happy to inform you became a dot.bomb before it was trendy. I figure that some bigwig in the IT industry gave a speech and said something like "Our middleware helps you leverage your investment in mission-critical legacy systems, creating an end-to-end solution that you can use across your enterprise." I'm assuming that it had to be some unbelievably filthy rich speaker--maybe Bill Gates or Lou Gerstner--because the slathering devotion and pandering to that kind of language could only mean that it had to have been used by someone with gobs and gobs of money. It reminds me of when the "cool" people in high school (who also happened to be the rich people) started saying "luego" instead of "later" and "booking" instead of "hurrying" and we couldn't wait to repeat them. Shoot, that stupid slang ended up on the inside front and back covers of my yearbook my senior year. Well, the business world might as well be high school. Every marketing piece I read has become a form of torture, one that's far worse than watching all four parts of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet video. Even though the style council at my company has banned the use of all of these terms, they're so much a part of our thinking now that it seems no one can write a sentence without using one of them. I don't think the writers even notice what they're saying. They've got this great formula, so why not use it every time they write it?

Sheep with parrot heads are everywhere and not just in the business environment. Those of you that follow college basketball might remember the last 14 seconds of the final Duke-Carolina basketball game when Gerald Henderson broke Tyler Hansbrough's nose. As a diehard Carolina fan who thinks that Coach Kracktheirheadsopen and his players are slimier than a goldfish pond in a moderate drought, I'll never forget my feeling of horror when I saw Tyler go down. It was appalling to me that such a blatant attempt to injure an opponent was allowed to happen. As soon as it was over, I watched the postgame reports (when Carolina beats Duke, I try to watch and read everything I possibly can about the game, revelling in the sheer joy of besting the Evil Empire) and they showed Coach K's post-game interview. His comment on the incident was "Hey, when you have your star players in the game in the last 14 seconds, you have to expect this." I just about vomited up all the Guinness I'd been drinking when I heard that.

When I checked the basketball message boards and online media reports the next day, it was obvious that the sheep with parrot heads had been busy. Anyone who purported to love Duke or was "neutral" about the rivalry was out in cyberspace debating whether it was a show of poor sportsmanship on Roy Williams's part to have his first string players still in the game with 14 seconds to go and the lead. Never mind that this was Duke-Carolina, a game where the winner can't be declared until the final buzzer. The debate over whether it was poor sportsmanship on the part of Gerald Henderson to slap Tyler Hansborough to the ground and break his nose took second stage to a wild debate over when first string players should be taken off the court. And why was this? Because, apparently and for no reason that I can possibly imagine, the vast majority of college basketball fans and college basketball writers do not find Coach K. reptilian and or think he's the anti-Christ like I do. Instead, they view him as a shining example of all that is respectable in sports and so anything he says must be repeated in every medium imaginable. Any protest that his lame excuse for a player had basically coldcocked an opponent resulted in the accusation that the protestor was "Tarhole lover" and therefore unable to be objective.

This is just one incident of sports fan sheep with parrot heads; there are many others. The fans saying that the Patriots were completely innocent of any wrongdoing when they filmed the defensive signals of opposing teams, the sports writers kowtowing to Barry Bonds when everyone knows that it's easy to break a home run record when you've got 200 times the natural amount of testosterone pumping through your blood, and the cyclists that say that Floyd Landis was accused of doping because the French are sick of Americans winning the Tour de France are all examples. It's insane. And it goes on and on, until it eventually ends up on Wikipedia and children are using it in reports they write for school.

Of course, the worst cases of sheep with parrot heads are that weird 22-25% of people polled who approve of the job that George W. Bush is doing as president. They're easily found on AM talk radio chiming in their programmed "props" to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter or leaving comments on AOL message boards on stories that make the Bush administration look bad (which is simply a matter of reporting on the daily activities of Bush and his cronies). They'll babble at you that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq even though the comments you are reading are associated with an article about ice caps melting in the Arctic. Another good example is the e-mail that someone made up and is sending around that says that Barak Obama went to a radical Islam school in the Middle East and changed his name to Obama so that he could be more like Osama Bin Laden. Wayne, bless his sheeplike heart, came back from his barber's one day with a copy of that e-mail, which has been proven to be a complete fabrication--just like the Swift Boat propaganda.

I think what makes me worry most about this sheep with parrot heads phenomenon is when the originators of out and out lies, like the Swift Boaters, Ann Coulter, or Coach K, are praised for their power and ingenuity. "Swift Boat" is now even used as verb and it's something to be admired. Are we so twisted now that we can't think or speak for ourselves? Or is it now so important for us to worship something that we'll idolize some of the vilest examples of human beings and echo their every statement?"

Oh, well, what sheep (even when they have parrot heads) don't realize is that many times, they're being led to the slaughter house. In the cases of the truly twisted people who adore Duke or George W. Bush, maybe I'll volunteer to be the shepherd. Hmm.......

My New Love Affair

2007-09-14T10:19:00.000-07:00

On Monday of this week, I fell desperately in love. I haven't felt quite this way in a long time; it might actually have been more than 9 or 10 years. I'm having a hard time sleeping and I'm not eating as much as I'd like--two signs that I've lost my emotional equilibrium and also a testament to the height of my excitement. Granted, I've been attracted since June, and I actually had an inkling that this was going to happen on Saturday, but I remained optimistic that I'd keep my cool. After all, I'm not exactly a teenager. I'm a relatively mature adult who prides herself on her self-awareness. I assured myself that I could remain aloof when presented with a slim, attractive package. Well, that was not to be. By the end of Monday, I was an absolute goner. I've spent most of today contemplating the depth of my feelings and trying to get the perfect photograph of my new love. Unfortunately, I'm a horrible photographer who is unable to capture the essence of my subjects, but I'm sharing the photo anyway:

Shocking, isn't it? I don't know exactly how I came to be in this emotional state. Granted, it's true that I absolutely love almost anything to do with computers, along with other super technological advances like MP3 recordings, touch screens at the ATM machine, HDTV, XM and HD radio, and supermarket self checkout; however, the mostly recessive Luddite gene that I inherited from my father has basically reared its ugly head when it comes to the matter of mobile phones.

I first got a mobile phone in 2002 and was kind of excited about it, until I had to close the account because my older daughter ran up more than $300 in charges when I left it and her in a hotel room in New Orleans. At that time, I only had one job and the paychecks only came sporadically, so there was no way I could afford that bill. Also, at that time, "roaming charges" of $4.00 a minute were applied to any call I made that wasn't to my next door neighbor and I rarely saw a cell phone bill that looked anything like the plan they said I bought.

Not long after that, my boss sent me a Siemens phone to use to take Help Desk calls, and for weeks it confounded me. There was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the settings on the phone. My boss berated me for not recording a voice mail greeting 5 seconds after I unpacked it, and I was too ashamed to tell him that I couldn't figure out how to turn the wretched thing on, let alone record a voice mail on it. So, I made up some now-forgotten lame excuse as to why I hadn't recorded the voice mail and then had to spend about two weeks pressing every button possible before I figured out how to use it.

After about a year, the Siemens phone and I had settled into a slightly uneasy truce. So, what did my boss do? He shut that phone off and sent me a Blackberry for a birthday present. I actually mastered that Blackberry fairly quickly, mostly because he had already set it up for me. Unfortunately, a cat (yes, that would be one of my lovely office assistants) knocked a glass of water on top of it and completely fried it. So, I ordered another one that I thought would be as much like that one as possible, but alas, it wasn't. I hated that Blackberry. It refused to do anything it was supposed to do like receive my business e-mails despite all my calls to the AT&T un-help desks. And, without the mail box set up, it wouldn't show me any information about my received or dialed calls. The keyboard was ornery and after the warranty expired, the charger only worked when the stars and planets were aligned perfectly. After several months of frustration, I finally just forwarded all its calls to my little personal Motorola mobile phone and quit using it.

My Motorola isn't a bad little phone, but you still either have to have a master's degree in engineering or a birthdate sometime after 1987 to figure out how to forward your phone calls or change your ringtone on it, and I majored in radio, television, and motion pictures and was definitely born well before 1987. My daughter Anna used it for a little while when hers was lost and she did some thoughtful things with it, such as assign photographs to some of the numbers in my address book so that I see that person's face when the phone rings. I don't know how she did that--it's all I can do to send a text message or add a phone number to the address book. Most of the time, I fight with the phone because the former Cingular and the new AT&T ("less bars in more places") seem to have mandated to cellphone manufacturers that your phone default menu setting is one that will send you to the World Wide Web, especially if you don't have a Web plan, which means that you pay something like $5.00 per byte downloaded.

Well, on Monday, as I said, all that changed. My boss called me on Saturday to tell me that my new iPhone was on its way. I was beyond excited; I've been hearing about the iPhone for a year, because part of my love of technology includes reading everything I can get my hands on about the latest gadgets. For some reason, I just had a feeling that the iPhone would be the right phone for me. Maybe it was because I had heard that Apple was marketing the iPhone to a female demographic--one that wanted something friendlier and less arcane than your standard Envy or Palm Treo. I personally liked the idea of something that didn't need a stylus because an attachment like that is a recipe for disaster if it comes my way. In my world, styluses get stuck in the side of the phone or fall into the toilet. If neither of those things occurs, they disappear into a pocket book, along with the 4,776,233 pens that have been sucked up by the black holes that are every purse that I own.

Even when the iPhone arrived, I was worried that it would take me two days of solid studying of a tiny but extremely dense manual, which is what usually accompanies my cell phones, to determine how to answer a phone call or record my voicemail. My experiences with such manuals is that they usually begin with a message congratulating me on being such a brilliant consumer because I now own their phone, launch into dire warnings about what might happen if I drop the device and its plug in the bathwater while I'm talking, and then spend about 8 pages telling me that the device won't work if I leave it in the box and showing diagrams of how to get it out of the box.

When I unpacked the iPhone, I had a moment of panic. There was only a small booklet and then a nice note telling me to hook it up to iTunes and where to get iTunes if I didn't already have it. Since I already have iTunes on this laptop, hooking it up was easy (okay, there was a slight issue with the activation of my SIM card, but my boss handled that for me). After the iPhone charged, I turned it on and figured out how to do everything on it in about 15 minutes. I'm not kidding. It was that easy. By the end of Monday, I had picked a bluesy ringtone, set it up to receive work e-mails and e-mails from my personal AOL account, took pictures and used one for my wallpaper, sent a text message to Peru, and made a bunch of calls, mainly to people informing them that I have an iPhone. This is because the designers of the iPhone actually understand the language that most of us speak and have used icons that look like the functions behind them and settings that are helpfully called "ringtones" and "photos" rather than "sound" and "multimedia." I can tap the Safari button and be on the Web instantly and if I can't read what's on the screen, I can turn it sideways and the picture adjusts.

I have even done something completely uncharacteristic--I ordered a bluetooth headset for it and that arrived today. It's charging and I'm hoping to try it out before the day is out. The only thing I'm not doing is taking it out of the house--not until I receive the case I ordered for it. As prone as I am to dropping things or getting them wet (even in a drought), I'm not risking the life of this baby until I know it's safe.

Why I Love Peru

2007-09-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day in Lima, Peru, and it's likely to be some time before I return because of the new law regarding passports. You see, the geniuses in Washington, D.C., passed a law requiring travelers to and from Canada and Mexico to have passports to enter/reenter the U.S. recently. The law went into effect earlier this year, and apparently it didn't make any provisions for handling the massive amounts of passport applications that came pouring in because of all the traveling that Americans do to Mexico and Canada and back. My passport expires a week from Saturday and I understand that even if I ask them to expedite my renewal, it'll take about 12 weeks for me to get it. That means I might get it at the end of December. Woo-hoo. So, when I return here again, it won't be until next year.

Anyway, I've been here since last Thursday and have completed the business I needed to get done and have had time to socialize with my friends here. In 2003, a number of Peruvian programmers and I worked on a gate automation/web development project together and in the course of stressful times and long weeks in New Orleans, I became friends with them. When I'm in Lima, I usually try to get together with them at least once or twice.

On this trip, two of my Peruvian friends asked me at different times why I love Peru (and Lima) so much. I have found that it's really hard to explain why because my love for Peru is emotional and emotions are hard to explain. When I first traveled here in May 2003, it was for business. The development team for the project and the development manager for the project had said that they liked the work I was doing for the online help for the web application and they wanted me to visit and get to know the whole team. I was excited about this development because I come from a family that has wanderlust flowing through our veins; we are all great travelers and have been since my mother first took my sister Lindsay and me to England when I was almost three and she was almost one. I had some trepidation, too, because my Spanish is rudimentary at best and I get frustrated when I can't understand other people and vice-versa. Well, by the time I had had my first breakfast in the lovely little hotel that's now my home away from home when I come here, I had lost all nervousness. As I looked around and saw the beautiful, lush plants and flowers that grow even in this desert-like climate, there was a tug on my heart strings. By the time I had tried cebiche, pisco cours, and Inca Cola and traveled to Cusco and Macchu Piccu, I realized I had fallen in love with this country--the views, the food, and above all the people.

Two years later, in 2005, I was the project manager for the second phase of our project. That meant I got to travel here 4 times that year. The first trip was at the end of March and the beginning of April, which is a beautiful time of the year here. By that time, I had worked with the developers closely on numerous things and had gotten know many of them either in New Orleans or by MSN Messenger and that made the trip more special. (I also decided that Lima was a good luck charm for me, because while I was here that year, UNC won the NCAA Championship in Men's Basketball). I think that having so many friends here also deepened my love for the place, especially since I returned three more times that year and another three times in 2006--that truly cemented the friendships. I also brought my mother, Mary, and Anna on separate trips. Here's a picture of the 2005 development team at lunch with me (from left to right: Marco, Juan Carlos T, Nestor, me, Luis, Rale, Victor, Juan Carlos C., Felton Yaddif, and Edwin).

Some of my good friends are not in that photo because they started their own company in 2004, so here's a picture of them in 2006 with my mother (from left to right, Mom, Juan Carlos V., Julio and me):

(It's possible that you are now seeing a pattern here--I'm surrounded by lots of nice-looking men and am often the only female in the group. So, sue me, I'm human--this is part of the reason I like it here so much. I mean, c'mon, what self-respecting woman could possibly resist having attention lavished on her by so many attractive men?)

Anyway, handsome men aside, I also know that I love the spirit of the people I meet here, from the clerks in the "hypermarket" to the wonderful people who run this hotel to my friends from the project who are now spread far and wide--some to Australia and others to Spain. I know that there are problems here with violence, stealing, and the Shining Path still has a presence, but the individuals here are kind and thoughtful. They haven't lost their manners like Americans have and they are also not as intent on destroying their uniqueness with McMansions, Wal-Marts, and Barnes & Nobles as we are. They don't look at you like you're crazy if you smile at them on the street and they have the kind of courtesy that reminds me of when I was a young girl growing up in North Carolina, when politeness was still the norm instead of an aberration.

I admire Peruvians for their work ethic and their ability to find joy in lives that aren't always perfect and my heart ached for them when the earthquake wreaked havoc on the southern part of the country. But unlike the U.S. during Katrina, the Peruvians here have pulled together to help the unfortunate people in Ica and surrounding places. You don't hear any Peruvinas saying, "Well, if you choose to live in an earthquake-prone error, you have to pay the consequences when there's an earthquake." But most of all, I admire their sense of humor because it is so much like the sense of humor in my family. I might not speak the same language as my Peruvian friends, but we laugh the same laughter.

Peru is also a beautiful country and Lima is an impressive city. Lots of it are poor and crowded, but there are oases of loveliness and prosperity throughout the city. You can find almost anything you need in Lima and you can even get a flu vaccine at the local supermarket on a Sunday. To me, that's amazing. I also know that, despite living in North Carolina in small cities, I am an urban girl at heart and I just love big cities--and Lima is huge. I like the skyscrapers and the sounds of the cars on the streets and the good restaurants and pretty parks and squares that are in the city. There are some people I know that think I'm crazy to love big cities, but I think my daughters, mother, and sisters understand this love. Here are some of my favorite shots of places in Lima. The first one is of a lovely park not far from my hotel that has olive trees in it:

And this picture was taken at the site of a Pre-Incan pyramid that's right in the middle of the city--you can get an idea of the architecture of the city.

And here's a picture of the pre-Incan pyramid, which is truly well within the city limits of Lima. Think how cool it would be if an American city had a ruin like this in the middle of it. On the other hand, if we had such a wonder, some developer might view it as a sandy eyesore, immediately buy the property, and put a Best Buy or Wal-Green's on it, because apparently there just aren't enough of those in the U.S. yet.

Another great thing about Lima is that it's right on the ocean and you can get some spectacular views of the ocean with houses high on the cliffs above it. On the east coast of the U.S., we don't have ocean views like you see in the picture below, which was taken at Larcomar, a shopping and restaurant center in a tony part of Lima.

As I said, I love Lima, but there are other parts of Peru, that are beautiful. In 2006, my friends Julio and Juan Carlos took my mother and me to Lunahuana, which has a nature preserve on it; it's about two hours from Lima and the views that you see as you drive there are superb. This photo is actually the wallpaper for my computer:

So, when you combine beautiful scenery, excellent food, and lovely and kind people, what's not to love about Peru?

It's interesting though--in some ways Peru is entirely different from home, but in other ways, it's not that different, especially in North Carolina. North Carolina is blessed with beautiful mountains and a gorgeous seashore and rolling hills in between. We don't have a huge city, that's true, but Charlotte's pretty big. And, despite my complaints, most native North Carolinians are lovely people. So, it's possible that the main reason I love Peru is because it touches me in the same way my home state (that I love so much) does--there is a chord of similarity between the two that plays to my heart.

Who's Minding the Store?

2007-09-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted because I suddenly had a boatload of work I had to accomplish before I left for Lima, Peru, which is where I am now. The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity and my time management skills were taxed to the limit, but I got it all done and arrived here safely. I'll write more about my trip in my next post.

Anyway, in my absence, my unpaid office assistants (scroll down to the second post if you click this link) have been holding down the fort. Since I wrote the post about them in June 2006, I have acquired another assistant; his name is Sammy. Here's a picture of the good job they're doing (and you can also see that second law of thermodynamics at work with all the cords): Sammy is to the left of the laptop, Michiru (aka Sausage) is in the window, Ping is washing himself with one paw on the printer paper to the right of the laptop, and Finn is under the desk.

And they say good help is hard to find nowadays...yeah, right!

The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Me

2007-08-02T06:08:00.000-07:00

Recently, I decided that physics is my favorite science, despite a rocky introduction to it in high school. This is because I have spent most of my life asking how things work. As a child, these questions were simple, such as "How does the bicycle stay up when it's moving but not when it's stopped?" or "Why is the ice cream in this cone melting all over my hand faster than I can eat it?" They've gotten more complicated as I've gotten older: "How do servers communicate wirelessly?" and "Why is data packet loss more noticeable when someone is reciting a specific number?" To me, and I realize that this is extremely simplistic, physics is the science of how our world works (as opposed to chemistry, which is the science of what our world is made of). One thing I remember from high school physics is that the natural inclination of the universe is to move toward disorder (or for entropy to increase). It's amazing that I remember anything at all from the class that I took 30 years ago, because my high school physics teacher, while a brilliant physicist who consulted with NASA, was an extremely terrifying woman who bullied girls and I spent a lot of time in that class wishing I could disappear.

Today I was researching a topic for an upcoming writing project and I discovered that the disorder law is actually called "The Second Law of Thermodynamics." Mary Crone summarizes it better than I could like this: "The second law of thermodynamics states that over time, systems tend to go into disordered states. If you start with many boxes of balls, some in ordered states, and other in disordered states, and shake them all around for a while, they will probably all look disordered in the end." She also says, "In this context, 'disorder,' has a specific technical definition which is often stated in terms of the temperature and energy of a system. In physics, this kind of disorder is called 'entropy.'"

This is exactly why I love physics. It has a law for something that is part of everyday life. There are numerous examples of the second law of thermodynamics in my life. I thought I'd mention just a few here, not in any specific order because there is one thing that my thoughts do and that is obey, to the letter, the descent into disorder dictated by the second law. One disclaimer: My entire house is a thermodynamics physicist's dream. Unfortunately, discussing its disorder is better reserved for a post where it is the only subject.

Cords
Despite progress in the wireless arena, most households, mine included, have probably hundreds of devices that use cords. These cords are forced into dense masses by the necessity for these cords to be plugged into power strips, modems, electrical outlets, and each other. My home office is the best example of cord disorder that I can muster. At one time, each cord was neatly attached to the back of laptops or my big computer tower with nary a tangle in sight. Even though I have no recollection of touching most of the cords since I first placed them so lovingly in their places, if you look under my desk, you'll see something that looks like spaghetti after you throw it from the pot into the colander. They are so irrevocably wrapped around each other that if I try to untangle one from the somehow roiling while stationary mass, computers beep unhappily at me like a dog whimpering in its sleep, lights flash, and monitors often go completely black. I experience something similar around the cable box, to which are attached a TV, a DVD player, a VCR, and games. These cords are something like pythons, pulling in a stray object or two--like a sock or DVD--and choking the life out of it. Sometimes I think that they're going to eat these things because they're very hard to extract.

The disorder all these cords descend to also includes wrapping themselves around the wheels of my office chair (even though my office chair is usually nowhere near them) and sometimes my feet and hands. I have to be very careful about how I remove my foot or chair wheel or an entire bank of computers or entertainment system will come crashing to the ground--the ultimate in disorder.

Objects and Pet Water Bowls
It's a fact of life that if you have pets, you must have water bowls. It's also a fact of life that if you have water bowls, objects will fall into them, even if they have a huge floor to fall into. In my house, the laundry room is also a bathroom. It's also the cat food and water headquarters. This bathroom is not small--it can hold a full-sized washer and dryer as well as a toilet, sink, and shower, as well as big shelves for storage. Yesterday, I went to extract a roll of toilet paper from on top of the washer and it rolled out of my fingers landed on the floor, took a bounce, and landed right in the cat's water bowl. Never mind that the water bowl is about 2 yards from the washer and that the toilet paper could have bounced anywhere in a 7 x 12 foot space. I shook my head and thought "There's yet another example of the second law of thermodynamics."

I also have a big water bowl in the kitchen for the two dogs that live here. I've had just about everything from the last coffee filter in the house to part of a watermelon fall from a counter or my hands right into the water bowl. In fact, I think there might be a corollary to the law that says: The greater the damage that might be caused to the object by getting wet, the more likely the object is to fall in a water bowl that can be as many as 15 feet away.

Computer Keyboards
Computer programmers must not be familiar in any way with the second law of thermodynamics. Maybe it's because they all seem to program late at night, often in the dark while listening to loud music. Or maybe it's because algorithms are very specific, with strict structure and syntax, and therefore have no basis in reality--just in servers. Therefore, they make no allowances for people with fingers that are firmly rooted toward disorder. So, they create all kinds of what they think are cool "keyboard shortcuts" and release them into the world.

The result of their work is that if you accidentally hit the "Alt" key on your computer and some random key, like the "Y" key or "F9," you'll see your document scroll quickly down to the very bottom and then disappear. Or, you'll hit some number of keys only to find that you're now typing in Cyrillic or there's no typing going on at all. In my case, I've learned about all kinds of "keyboard shortcuts" because of my clumsy fingers and the two cats that walk across the keyboard of my laptops at least twice a day. Recently, a cat walked on some keys and the writing I was doing in a project database was sent to the wrong set of recipients. Just two days ago, I hit an unknown combination of keys and all the writing I'd done in the same database vanished. There's no way to back up this work because it's a database, so here's another corollary: The more your work cannot be recovered from a keyboard shortcut, the more likely you are to hit those keys and destroy it.

Duvet Covers
I used to write about duvet covers when I worked for a home furnishings catalog, but it's only recently that I discovered how wonderful they are. For a fraction of the cost of a new comforter, I gave my old, perfectly warm but definitely faded and drab, comforter a brand new look. My comforter has now been transformed from faded wallpaper from an 1890s boudoir to a bright and colorful celebration of stripes. The duvet cover fit beautifully over the old comforter and for one day, the comforter remained flat within its new cover. However, the good ol' second law of thermodynamics made sure that it was the one and only day that the comforter lay flat. Despite the fact that the comforter is lovingly and carefully removed from my bed and folded neatly near it, I've spent the last 13 days wrestling with a duvet cover with a great big crumpled mass in the middle of it. When I undo the buttons and get one end of the comforter flattened, the other end turns into a great big version of those sausage-shaped throw pillows that you find in cushy hotel rooms. My formerly 5-minute bed making routine now takes about 25 minutes.

Shoulder pads behave similarly, as does clothing that needs to be ironed. I'll do everything in my power to try to keep them straight, but after 24 hours, the second law rears its head and the shoulder pads have become tight little coils that roll off my shoulders (I'm so glad they're going out of fashion) and the clothing will look like some 18th century laundress went through my closet and dragged the "touch up with cool iron" clothing through a wringer that doubled as a torture instrument in the Middle Ages.

My Body
My body was beautifully designed for heading into disorder. If I stretch my legs out in front of me while in my office chair, one toe will invariably land on the button of the power strip and shut off the cable modem and the desktop computer. That happened just today. There's a ton of room under my desk and the odds are small that my toe would hit that button, but hit it it did and that wasn't the first time, either. Search your memory carefully and you might remember seeing someone driving down the highway in a car with hair sticking out from between the roof of the car and sun roof. Most likely that was me--when I closed the sunroof, usually hair got stuck in it. My hair loves the second law--it winds itself around the tiny fan in my hairdryer, leaps into the flame of a lighter during the lighting of a candle, and becomes "one" with the tiny silver chain of the necklace I wear.

My feet also obey the second law. If there is a tiny dip in only one small part of a restaurant floor, my foot will find it and leave me scrambling--either up from a fall or to keep my balance. My foot will seek out hard, metal feet of beds and throw my toes at them, painfully. Not to be undone by their ambulatory cousins, my hands will smack into hard objects and my fingers will reach into a drawer and attract sharp objects like knives and straight pins--even if the drawer is huge and there's only two pins in it or the knife is face down.

Sticky Stuff
I'm convinced that sticky stuff is what inspired Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot and the gang to develop the theories that eventually would form the second law of thermodynamics. Sticky stuff is as ubiquitous as entropy itself. In my life, if sticky stuff is anywhere in the house, it will immediately plunge itself into the highest disorder by moving somewhere that it shouldn't be.
For example, syrup will dribble down from the top of a bottle onto a counter top until labels from other products adhere themselves permanently to said counter top. Or it will drip quietly to the floor and immediately become part of a foot, shoe, sock, or animal paw and become a permanent addition to several carpets, a carpeted "kitty hotel," and the floor of a car. A bottle of Elmer's glue will slowly implode in a desk drawer until no paper can be salvaged or the drawer itself won't open. A hair gel bottle will pop open in a suitcase during a flight or car trip and immediately ooze into a hairdryer that's on the other end of the suitcase so that the hairdryer is rendered completely unusable.

Mysterious, unidentifiable sticky stuff is the most insidious. It'll end up in my hair, on my office chair seat, between my toes, on the iron (where it's only discovered during the ironing process), underneath the modem for the cable phone, on booklets printed for a presentation I have to give, on my favorite CD, in between the pages of my favorite book, and on the steering wheel of my car. If I have to go somewhere in a business suit, it'll end up either on the toe of my shoe or on a place on my blouse or skirt that can't be hidden. Of course, there's a corollary and this one includes a specific factor: The higher the number of people under the age of 21 in your house, the higher the likelihood of unwanted sticky stuff landing on either valuable, important, or beloved items.

Reasons Why I Blog

2007-07-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, Ian tagged me with this question. I was never good at tag as a kid because it involved running fast and my legs' notion of fast was a turtle crawl. However, this is a cyber tag, so I think I can do it.

1. I blog to have a central place to record my descriptions of events or share my feelings because so often, people ask me how my latest trip to Peru is or what's going on with me. Before I started blogging, I would have to repeat these things numerous times on the phone and in e-mails to inviduals and invariably, I'd leave something out that I'd have to explain later. With a blog, I'm saved from the "Oh, yeah, I forgot to say...blah, blah, blah" postscript or apology.

2. I blog so that I can comment on my brother's blog. Okay, that's not true any more. But when Ian started his first blog, you had to register and have a blog if you wanted to comment. So, I created one just so I could tell Ian that I was the sister who *didn't* hold his foot down so that he couldn't move until he screamed in frustration.

3. I blog because I love to write anything but fiction, but sometimes I'm not fulfilled after writing (1) a 2500-page whitepaper about data storage for business continuity; (2) a proposal describing each and every training session I'll offer a potential client to help their staff learn how to install use their optical character recognition cameras on gantry cranes and then use a web-application to compare the output from those cameras to the input in their databases; (3) an article stating the case for putting radio frequency tags on every shipping container in the world; (4) a description of the quality control process used by one of my clients to ensure that they hire only certified medical coders with the latest knowledge of the ICD-9; (5) a letter to a state senator asking him to introduce a bill that will designate a building a historic property to prevent a developer from tearing up the sidewalk around it; (6) a report that explains the results of a survey of 40 companies to determine whether they still process orders manually or if they use software and systems. However, the idea of writing a novel makes me break out in a cold sweat. So, instead, with a blog, I get to pretend I'm David Sedaris and write essays that are either about me or parodies of things that bother me.

4. Like Ian, I blog to connect with siblings. Since I haven't gotten around to accumulating friends from the blogosphere, because to do that, I have to read other people's blogs and I've just started doing that, my sisters and Ian are pretty much the only people who read and comment on my blog posts regularly. It's so satisfactory to help them relive funny or happy times in our lives and react to them in their comments.

5. I blog so that my cats have even more reason to walk across the keyboards of my laptops, leap onto the box that serves as a woofer and tweeter for my Dell Dimension desktop, knock my books and papers onto the floor, sleep behind the cable modem, and fight with me for the occupancy of my office chair. Blogging adds more hours to the days when I'm on the computer for 8-12 hour stretches and that means that the cats have even more time to mess with my office area and computers.

6. I blog because people ask me to write more. My only regret is that I don't have as much time to blog as I'd like to. I hope that this will change before long, but because I love to work hard and I love what I work on, I don't know if it will.

7. I blog because sometimes I'm bored. There are times when I have to wait for a 6-meg brochure to wind its way through cyberspace or I don't have any work to do, but I have to be near my computer to take help desk calls. I can only read so many personal emails and play so many games of solitaire. Blogging helps stave off that boredom because if there's one thing I really hate, it's to be bored.

I think that's all the reasons. I don't have anyone to tag because Ian opened the challenge and Emily's already taken Ian up on his tag.

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

2007-07-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Leaving the beach is always sad for us. I'm sad because my two-week period of rest, relaxation, and reading is over and the girls are sad because they always make friends when they're down there that they then have to leave. This year, I decided to cheer us up by driving along the Island's two main beach roads looking for illustrations of what I was talking about in my last post when I described what we as children hoped we'd be staying in at the beach and the stark reality of where we ended up. It's also been three years since I tried to upload a graphic on this blog, so this should be interesting.

First, here's the type of house we hoped we'd be staying in:

Here's a house that is a little more like what we would drive up to:

This one is also a candidate for a Michie beach house:

But, the piece de resistance is this beauty:

This one is for sale with the unique message, "For lease, sale, or trade." Maybe I should buy it for the sake of old times.

Thoughts from the Beach

2007-07-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

Mary, Anna, and I have been at the beach since June 30 with Wayne's family and assorted friends and "drop-in" guests. We've been coming here together since 1999, usually at the same time, and we usually stay in the same house, a bright, open place with four bedrooms, a loft, and an observation deck that's level with the house roofline. This hasn't really been a complete vacation for me because I've still had to take Help Desk calls and work on projects, but it's been way more relaxing than being at home. This is because, at about 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. each weekday, I tear myself away from this laptop and walk the short walk to the beach, book in hand, where Wayne has a chair, umbrella, and cold soft drink waiting for me. I stay there, reading with the surf in the background, and after about an hour and a half or two hours, I feel really relaxed and return to the house to make dinner (something that I only seem to enjoy when I'm not at home). On weekends, my time in front of the ocean is much longer, often from before lunch until an hour or so before sunset. I rarely go in the water because that entails reapplying sunscreen on a sandy body (not fun) because no sunscreen is waterproof, no matter what they promise on the bottle. Also, I get knocked down and dragged along seashell beds by the gentlest waves, emerging with ears and nose full of water and scraped skin and bruises on my legs, so that also keeps me from running in the ocean. I don't mind this, because, to me, the ocean is like snow--it's something to love from a distance (like up on the sand or through a window or from an observation deck), but not to have too much direct contact with. After I've been exposed to the sound of the surf and the wind for at least an hour, I feel like I can handle anything stressful that life throws at me and I sleep much better than I ever do at home.

This year, for some reason, I've been reminisicing about past beach trips as I marvel at what I consider a whole separate culture--the family beach trip culture--and ponder two of the 12 books I brought along to read (which have all been read now, to my dismay, but fortunately there are some "beach house books" here that I haven't read), and I felt like sharing some of my thoughts here.

Childhood Beach Trips
One of the things I think about a lot when I'm here are my childhood beach trips. For years, I thought that beaches were similar to desert islands with hardly any people on them. I didn't understand what people meant when they said that beaches got crowded. "Crowded with what?" I'd wonder. "Seagulls? Beach houses?" It wasn't until I was in my teens that I actually saw a crowded beach.

The reason for this is the curse of the fair skin. When I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, SPF 50 sunscreen was unheard of. Actually, no lotion was even given an SPF rating at all. As a result, anyone with skin as fair as everyone's in my family, was a candidate for the lobster look and future trips to the doctor to discuss melanoma if they were in the sun for any period of time between about 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. during the day. So, when I was young, we'd get up very early and go with my father (and sometimes my mother if she wasn't busy with breakfast or my younger brother) down to the beach sometime around 7:00 a.m. We'd stay there until about 8:30 and then go back to the house for the family's self-imposed sun exile until after 4:30, when we could go back out and stay longer, mindful that we all had to be in bed before 9:00 p.m. Sometimes, if my mother came with us in the morning, we could stay out longer than 8:30 a.m. if she slathered us with Sea 'N Ski because she objected to Coppertone for some reason, but we still had to go in by 9:30. (I miss Sea 'N Ski--I haven't seen it on the shelves in years. The smell always sent me back to the beaches of my childhood.)

We were all very happy with this arrangement. We'd all been sunburnt at some point in our lives and it was horribly painful and then itchy so we didn't want to get sunburnt if we could help it. Because of our early and late hours, the beaches were essentially ours for the taking--we could race along the edge of the water for what seemed like miles and dig huge sandcastles wherever we wanted because there weren't any "beach camp vs. beach camp" wars. My mother always managed to bring along some fun board games or graph paper (for Battleship) and we'd play those games for most of the day, if we weren't reading. I remember fondly a beach house called "The Pink Panther" that had a screened porch that ran along the length of one side of the house (on the sound side, I believe), where we played Monopoly (and possibly Life) for hours, even during a thunderstorm. Nowadays, with SPF 50, big straw hats that tie under my chin tightly, and strong beach umbrellas, I can go to the beach at any time of day I want as long as I sit in the shade, mostly covered. I'm glad that I can be there for longer times, but when I listen to Wayne plot his ideas of how he plans to win the "beach camp wars," which exist even on this fairly sparsely populated beach, I miss the times when that wasn't a concern. Maybe that's why I really still enjoy the hours between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. on the beach so much--they take me back to a simpler time when my family ruled entire stretches of sand.

The other thing I remember vividly about my childhood beach trips is something that continues to amuse my daughters even now that they're teenagers. My family's decision to go to the beach was usually made after the first of the year and involved my mother's making phone calls and looking through books that advertised beach houses for rent. As children, we never paid much attention to that part of it other than to suggest to my parents that they rent houses with names that we liked (which is how we came to stay at the Pink Panther that year). Therefore, when it came time to drive to the beach, we had no idea what our house would be like. We'd arrive at whatever beach we were going to (my parents took us to a lot of beaches along the North Carolina coast from below Wilmington to the northern Outer Banks) and we'd be told the beach house name and address and given the task of helping my parents find it. We'd drive by brightly painted, tall, two-story wonders with exciting decks and huge windows right on the beach, all of us children hoping that we'd spot the house and it would be one of those. Invariably, however, because my parents were living on the salary of a professor at a small all-women's college and not that of a manager at Western Electric or RJR, my father would turn down the street until we were at least 3 blocks from the ocean, and eventually pull in front of a house that usually looked like it was a candidate for condemnation, complete with faded asphalt shingles and dingy, slightly rusted metal awnings and at least one screen door that wouldn't shut properly so that it banged in the wind and convinced us that the house was haunted. Because this was the 1960s and 1970s, none of these houses had air conditioning or televisions, which we really didn't miss because we didn't have air conditioning or anything but a black and white TV that was mostly for watching the news, but we still felt it would have been nice to stay in a house that offered those amenities just to see what it was like. When I was very young, we stayed at one house around the Ocracoke area that had spiders in a bathtub that was one step away from having claw feet. In fact, it might have had them, but I was so young that I don't remember anything much except how huge and scary the spiders were (as a side note: I love claw-foot bathtubs now that I'm an adult but as a child I was slightly afraid of them). Finally, the year I turned 18 and graduated from high school, we stayed in one of our dream houses, but that's because we shared it with another family and it was a number of blocks from the ocean. Because I was 18 and my sister was 16, however, we wanted to be as far away from our parents as possible, so we didn't spend much time in that house and instead careened around the Atlantic Beach area in the family car, looking for cute boys and clubs where we could go dancing.

When Mary and Anna were younger and we were driving here, I told them about how we wished we were staying in a brand new beach dream house and what we actually ended up staying in. Now it is a favorite game of theirs when we drive along this beach to ask me to point out ramshackle two-bedroom shacks with siding blown off that might have been a Michie beach house once upon a time, especially if we have a guest who has not been here before. This year, it was Anna's boyfriend. After I point out one or two of these houses, they get into the spirit of it shouting, "Look, there's a Michie house right there!" and collapsing into laughter.

The Family Beach Trip Sub-Culture
Before I met Wayne and after I grew up and got married, I didn't go to the beach very often. When I did go, it was usually either a quick weekend jaunt with a one- or two-night stay in a motel with fast food as our meals or a drinking spree with "the girls." Even when I was young, our trips were to different beaches at different times of the year. My mother would pack a few food items, some games, the Sea 'N Ski, a couple of blow-up floats, and plastic buckets and shovels, and off we'd go. As a result, I had no clue that there is an entire Family Beach Trip Sub-Culture that has existed for years. This culture includes owning items like special low-rise beach chairs that are made only for sitting on the beach, skim boards and boogie boards, sand augers that you manually twist deep into the sand to hold beach umbrellas so that they aren't blown over, small coolers for six packs of beer or Cokes, water bocce ball games, and small anchors that you can put in the water and tether floats for small children so that the floats aren't carried out to sea. There are also beach carts and golf carts for carrying all this paraphernalia so that you don't have to make lots of trips to the oceanfront. And now, there are fairly wind-proof canopies that you can set up so that more people can be in the shade. I used to be amazed at all the items for sprucing up your life and your house during the Christmas season, but this beach paraphernalia thing has that completely beat.

This sub-culture does not stop at possessions. It also extends to the houses and schedules as well. Until I started going to the beach with Wayne, I thought that getting a beach house that you wanted when you wanted it was a crap shoot and if you were lucky, the stars and planets would align themselves and the house and schedule would work out for you. I marveled at the amazing luck of people who got the same beach house at the same time year after year, including Wayne's parents. Finally, Wayne let me in on the secret: during your stay at the beach house, you have until the Wednesday of the week you're staying to go to the beach rental people and reserve the house for the same time the next year for a relatively small reservation fee. You then have until January of the next year to confirm that reservation or cancel it. For Wayne, this is perfect, because he is a creature of habit who likes things to be the same as much as possible, and, except for a few lapses that have resulted in our having to move to a second house after one week, we've managed to be in this house since 2000. Every once in a while, I look at the book of available beach houses and think of other houses and other times to come here. Wayne and I discuss the possibility of all of these, but in the end, we decide that this period in the summer works best for us, and so does this house.

The other thing I learned is that, in North Carolina, beach houses that are manged by rental companies or real estate companies are rented from Saturday to Saturday. I used to think that you could rent a house for any day of the week and keep it for a few days. Of course, you can do that if you choose, but it's more expensive that way. For some reason, I find this comforting. Maybe it's because in my internal struggle to fit in with the rest of the world when I really don't feel that I do (and at times wonder why I want this), when I hit I-40 East with hundreds of other families all headed to the beach at the same time I am, I get that belonging feeling I long for much of the time.

Beach Reading
The popular media labor under the misapprehension that the only books you should read at the beach are page-turning thrillers that are long on action and short on philosophy or deep thought. Because those types of books make up about 90% of the normal reading that I do when I'm not on vacation, a number of them end up in my beach book bag; however, I also take along books that I've acquired in the last year but have continued to put aside in favor of lighter reading. I usually have a long list of "I should read this" books that often gather dust on the bedside table while I race through Janet Evanovich's latest. However, when I'm down here, the only books I can read are those that I bring with me, so those dusty books are put in the bag and are read avidly. This year, I brought The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and American Chica by Marie Arana. I am a big Joan Didion fan but had been hesitant to read a book that is devoted to discussing the death of her husband and the illness of her only daughter and that's why I had owned it since January without reading it. My mother sent me American Chica because I love almost all things Peruvian and the author was writing about her childhood in Peru and America and what it was like to have a Peruvian father and an American mother. At the time she sent it, I had just finished a book by Mario Vargas Llosa and one by Isobel Ellena and after reading the first chapter of this one, I decided I needed a break from the harum-scarum wording that threads its way through the heart of Latin American prose and I set it aside.

On the surface, neither book would seem to related to the other. Joan Didion is sharing her grief and her thoughts about her life without her husband who died of heart failure in 2003 and Marie Arana is writing about her childhood. After I finished both, however, I realized that they were actually both tales about the marriages of two couples who were of the same generation--that of my parents. In Didion's case, it was her own marriage and in Arana's, her book focused on her parents' marriage. Both marriages were larger than life with deep abiding love and huge disagreements and both lasted more than 40 years. The interesting thing was that the marriages were so different. Didion wrote several times that she and her husband John were rarely apart. They were both writers who had home offices and the few times they were separated involved their traveling as journalists to cover some event. Didion commented that the time they were separated could be measured in days. Arana's book recounted how her parents tried living together in Peru for 14 years without any measure of success because her mother was unhappy in a culture that believed basically in the subjugation of a wife to her mother-in-law and thought that independent women were only worthy of contempt. The parents then tried living together in Summit, New Jersey, and that was also unsuccessful because her father missed his homeland so much. In the end, they compromised and her father would travel to Peru and other parts of South America for several months at a time and in the end, they were a very happy couple who lived for their reunions.

When I think over the books, I'm amazed that Joan Didion, who appears to be a strong person that pursued personal freedoms throughout her life, had such a dependent marriage and I'm amazed that a Peruvian man found himself happy in a marriage that was completely unlike many of the marriages of those of his Peruvian class and culture--where men might stray to a mistress or a brothel, but not away from home for months. It just goes to show what happens when I create pictures of people in my mind without knowing the whole story. I also wonder if I married someone from Peru or another culture, would I suffer simply because I was an American and fight with my in-laws or would I decide to throw myself into the culture completely, walking away from my life as a woman who runs a household by herself. This might seem like a silly thing to worry about since I have a long future with Wayne, but I look at it as a philosophical exercise. Sometimes it's tiring to be a single mother and an independent, successful career woman making crucial decisions by myself almost every day. The idea of giving my life over to someone else, whether it's a husband or a mother-in-law, is very seductive sometimes. On the other hand, when I think of my almost 30-year battle with the stove and mop, I have to laugh at myself thinking I could either cook or clean for any length of time without doing anything else for years. I'm sure there is no anti-depressant on the market today that could help me handle that kind of future.

Last night, I talked to Wayne a little bit about the two types of marriages I'd read about. We decided that, given our personalities, we had a greater understanding of the happiness derived from having separate lives than one in which the couple lives in each other's pockets. Neither he nor I want to live thousands of miles from each other for months at a time, but we do think that having breaks from each other is a great idea. We have also discussed buying a duplex to live in during our retirement, with me on one side and him on the other or something similar to that. My sisters tell me constantly that the reason we've been so happy for almost 9 years is because we don't live together. He and I both agree that they're right. When either of us is irritated by the other, we can go home. That way we avoid the undesirable result of the irritation festering long enough to become an unhealthy discharge of accusations and emotion. We're able to laugh at each other's foibles instead of actively declaring war on them. Since I envision a retirement with no pet care and little strife or discord, I think that the duplex idea makes sense.

Sucking at Life

2007-07-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when I say that I don't know the answer to a simple question or I'm unable to perform a simple task, my younger daughter (who will be 17 in one month and one day), will say, "Well, you suck at life." I've heard her say it often enough now to realize that it is hyperbolic and is not really a statement about my life in general, but it's a statement about how good I am with the minutiae of living. Recently, she said this to me on a day when I read my sister's and brother's blogs, both of which involved compliments that they have received and what they considered the 10 best. Because of their blogs, I recalled one of the most surprising compliments I've ever received which was from a friend that I greatly admire (and who has just ended a ruthless combined session of chemo and surgery to curb breast cancer). She once told me that she admired me because of how much I accomplish each day and how much I've accomplished in my life. I was thrilled, but very shocked, because I see myself as barely making it through each day by the skin of my teeth while my house continues a downward spiral into disarray, decay, and depreciation; my pets are eaten alive by critters like fleas; bats fly down my chimney because I've never gotten around to putting a screen down it; and my daughters are forced to order pizza or Chinese for the fifth time in one week because I'm pounding on my keyboard late into the night and won't emerge from my exile to my office long enough to cook something and I have not provided them with anything in the cupboard for them to cook other than an old box of jambalaya mix with bugs in it and an ancient broccoli and cheese soup mix.

The merging of the notion of not being good at life's minutiae yet managing to impress a friend came just the other day as I was sitting on the beach with my significant other, Wayne. He noticed a couple walking on the beach with their very young daughter and pointed them out to me as "the next couple for the vacation guide cover." He and I play this game often--we point out people that we see and peg them for different roles in life and the vacation guide cover is one of our favorites. Even though it was extremely windy and a rainstorm had ended a bare 30 minutes before, the little girl's hair was charmingly arrayed in lovely ringlets with a bright bow in it, there was not a speck of sand on any of them, and the woman was wearing one of those cottony-crepe oversized beach wraps in the style of a man's Oxford shirt over her bathing suit. I remarked to Wayne that if that couple had been Alex (my ex), my daughter Mary when she was young, and me, we would have looked like we'd been sandblasted in an attempt to remove the bright pink and red hues of our sunburns, Mary's hair would be a huge mass of tangles that no ribbon could go through, and the shirt would be clinging to my legs so that I could barely walk and blowing open at the top so that the whole world could see that my stomach never recovered totally from childbirth, leaving me to grab at it ineffectually while trying to hold Mary's hand.

The reason that I don't see myself as being successful at life is because I am bogged down by my inability to do many of the small things other people do so effortlessly. For example, I cannot attach a cell phone to my body in anyway that does not result in either a crushed cellphone because a car ran over it after it fell off my belt loop on the way to a hockey game (true story) or a frantic search through my cars and those of others to try and locate a phone that has fallen out of the clip somewhere in the course of a day. I am also completely unable to keep earphones either on my ears or attached to MP3 players, laptop computers, phones with headsets, or diskmen/walkmen. They either become unattached when the device they're attached to falls off my body or out of my pocket or I get my hands or some other body part tangled up in the wires and the wires detach themselves, usually by breaking so that they can't be used again. And forget about bluetooth headsets--they can only stay on my ear for about 30 seconds before sliding onto the floor. Wayne's son Jeff can go on 30-mile bike ride with his iPod strapped to his arm with an arm band and earphones without incident; I shudder to think what might happen to my poor iPod if I tried to use it while riding a bike.

I'm also unable to clean up spills properly and I cannot mop a kitchen floor to any satisfactory state of cleanliness. I can sweep the floor, then vacuum it, then sweep it again, but when I try to mop, there are huge dustbunnies that attach themselves to the mop. Many people think that I have someone clean my house every two weeks because I can afford it, but the real reason is that I cannot perform any house cleaning task successfully. If I try to use those wonderful scrubbing bubbles, after the first spray, the sprayer clogs and the bubbles become tiny spritzes of air or a dribbly bit of liquid. I don't want to go into cleaning toilets other than to say that no toilet bowl cleaner I've used ever flows upward and under the rim like you see on T.V. I'm not bad at getting dishes into the dishwasher, but thanks to the immense pressure put on me by Wayne to buy a dishwasher that was not my first choice so that I have a dishwasher that has a huge spot in the middle of the bottom rack where no dish can be put and an incompetent installer who did not hook it up to my hotwater valve (because that would have required extra work), it barely sanitizes the dishes. If even one little tiny speck of food is on anything, it's sure to be there still after the dishwasher has been run. Also, if there's any slightly difficult spot on my clothing, such as spaghetti sauce or a bit of chocolate, my attempts to remove it will result in its permanent addition to the item of clothing unless I send it to my mother for emergency spot removal.

I have a very difficult time cooking, too. I hate to stir things over a stove and am prone to forgetting to set the timer while something is baking and then either undercooking it or burning it into an unidentifiable mass that looks like something Neil Armstrong brought back after he walked on the moon. When I drain hamburger, there's a 50-50 chance that the grease will land on some part of my body. Combined with this are my wars with packaging. If a package has a "tear here" line, it will steadfastly refuse to tear. Then, I'm on a frantic search for scissors that ends fruitlessly with a butter knife that I try to poke into the package with either no or disastrous results. If it's one of those packages that you're supposed to pull apart, it either refuses to come unglued or it bursts open and half the contents ends up on the floor. This is more likely to happen if the contents include something like coffee, sugar, or cheesy powder that's difficult to wipe up. If I give up and manage to tear or cut the package open in some other way, the contents both rush out in a lump far away from the bowl or pot I want them to fall into or they cling desperately to the package so that only about a third comes out. I'm not even going to describe what happens with one of those salad dressing or mustard packs with a tiny slice on one end that's supposed to help you tear it open.

Then there's my computers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the laptops I have (the one I'm using right now to type), has lost its R key and the other is the first laptop I've ever seen that has almost all the letters on the keys rubbed off. This is okay when I'm "touch typing," but if I'm hunting and pecking with one hand because I'm holding a phone with the other (remember, I can't use headphones), my keyboard turns into something akin to Chinese water torture. I will never forget the laughter of the customs agent in Lima that saw that laptop. All of my computers have unbelievable amounts of dust under and around their keys, even though I close my laptops every night. My friend Debbie has the same model of Thinkpad that I do that she got a full year earlier than mine and it looks like she just unpacked it. Of course, Deb is also able to edit 60-100 pages a day and still take time to sing in the church choir and do crafts, including baking gingerbread houses with her daughters. She's also a witty and fun person and a superior editor. Now there's someone worth admiring. Also, no one else I know has a cat throw up on their laptop, rendering it both completely ruined and classification as a biohazard.

My hair is a candidate for sucking at life, too. I can never get it to look like my stylist does, no matter how I try. If I try to blowdry it so that it curls under, one side will curl under but the other will flip out. My stylist has no such issues with it. I can't pull it back without it all falling out within an hour, either. And you know those quick updos and topknots that most women with shoulder-length hair can whip their hair into in about 30 seconds complete with a few hair clips? Well, I can forget even trying to do something like that without looking like I got out of bed after sleeping in a pony tail and damaging my scalp with the clips or pins.

Other things I can't do include:

Wearing anything with a strap (it'll invariably slide down my arm and tangle up on my wrist until it's almost sprained)
Carrying more than two things in my hand at a time (something always ends up on the ground)
Keeping a suitcase with wheels upright
Standing in the ocean without being knocked down by the first slightly strong wave
Exercising in the sun without swallowing half the sunscreen that's sweated off my face into my mouth
Sucessfully removing sand from my body and belongings
Eating ice cream without dropping some of it on my body or, if I'm wearing a light colored shirt, on my clothes
Eating a fast-food sandwich in the car--much like the ice cream, no matter how much I cover myself in napkins, I still get mayonnaise and ketchup on my person somewhere
Keeping a car in running condition for more than about a year, no matter what the age of the car or how often I take it in for tune-ups
Glowing with good health after exercising--instead, I look like I'm a candidate for the cardiologist's office with my bright red face and body covered in sweat
Being the kind of parent who keeps up with each child's life milestones and reminds them to do things like register for the SATs or sign up to get their senior pictures done or study more than one hour for an exam they need to get greater than an 80 on
Getting my daughters to pick up after themselves or putting something away as soon as they've finished with it (except at other people's houses, where they do that as easily as breathing)
Opening a CD case without cracking it, or worse, cracking the CD
Walking down the steps to my family room without missing the step and breaking my ankle

With these kinds of struggles with daily living, it's no wonder that I was shocked at my friend's compliment. The hardest thing is accepting that it's not likely that these struggles will end. In fact, they might get worse. So, my project at this point is to remind myself that my friend complimented me because of the big things I can accomplish and to try to stop sweating this small stuff. Unfortunately, the small stuff is more likely to jump up and remind me that I can't do it in some horrible way such as ankle splint or a stack of cracked CDs, but I have resolve. I'll let you know how it goes.

I Think I Might Be an Artist

2007-07-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

I've been fortunate in my life to have been acquainted with a number of painters, including my sister. As a result, instead of scouring the Ballard Designs catalog or Pier One for reprints of real art to hang on my wall, I've been able to acquire, either free or at low cost to me, lots of great original paintings and other artwork done in interesting media. I get a lot of compliments on the artwork in my house and the only downside is when someone asks, "Are you an artist?" At that point, I have to say, "No. I just appreciate original art" or "No, my sister and some of my friends are." Over the years, when I've thought of all the talents that are handed out to individuals, I really wish that I had the gift of creating beautiful visual art, but, until recently, all I've felt I was gifted with were the abilities to hang art in just the right spot or paint a wall just the right color to show it off. Now, I'm starting to rethink my feelings about my abilities.

Now, I'm not a millionaire and much of my life, I've struggled along without much money, so you might be wondering how I ended up with this nice collection of original art. After all, artists need to make a living and can't just stand around handing people their work for nothing. That would be taking the notion of starving artist to the extreme. The answer to this is what I call "Acute Artistic Embarassment Syndrome." Every artist I've known, bar none, seems to have this syndrome, which causes them to loath and feel ashamed of their earlier work. When one of the artists I'm closest to surveys some of the paintings she's given me over the years, her mental cringing when she surveys it is palpable. It's true that she continues to grow as an artist and you can see how she's refined her technique and style over the years, but her early works are still awesome and I'm proud to own them.

Another artist I know had this syndrome to the extreme: When she decided to concentrate her considerable talents on making ceramic jewelry, she told me that she was going to burn all her paintings because she couldn't bear the sight of them. To me, this seemed like a criminal act, so I asked her if we could have some of the paintings she was planning to burn, and she gave us a bunch. My ex got custody of most of them in our divorce, which was a pity because I loved all of them, but I got my two favorites: one is the picture of a gladiola in a vase in front of an open window and the other is a picture of the fields that surround the N.C. Children's home, which is practically in downtown Winston-Salem and includes barns and a cows. That is one of my favorite places in my home-town and I feel intense pleasure when I see it.

Yet another artist I know was not as extreme as Children's-Home-Painter, but she had a tendency to start giving away her earlier works whenever her artistic path led her to a new medium. She said she felt guilty trying to sell work in a medium she would never work with again, so I was the beneficiary of much of her work whenever she changed media. (It also helped that I agreed to model for her in the nude, including when I was pregnant.)

I've also read biographies of artists that suffered from this syndrome. Modrian is the artist I remember suffering the most from this, but I think that Picasso and Monet also had it and so did others. I can't remember this for certain because it's been a long time since I read anything about Monet and Picasso.

I'm not sure what causes this syndrome. It's the complete opposite of what a lot of people do, which is long for times past rather than be ashamed of them. Maybe it's akin to that feeling that you have when you remember something you did as a child that was embarassing and you wish you hadn't done it, even if it helped you become a better person. Or, I feel it sometimes when I look over the few diaries I've kept and cringe at the teenager that wrote such things. On the other hand, when I read poetry that I wrote as a teenager, I rarely fail to be impressed with what once flew out of my so lyrically--I've lost that ability now and cannot write poetry like I used to. Now, I can only write silly birthday poems for friends--the angst and pain I felt as a teenager and poured into my work just isn't there anymore and, apparently, without that, I can't be a poet.

Last week, something happened to me and it made me think that I might have this syndrome. In my previous blog entry, I shamelessly self-promoted a website that I designed for one of my clients. I basked in the comments I got that it was a great website (my clients absolutely love it) and beamed when one person told me I was really talented. Well, since that website went live, I've started working on another one. And in my mind, the one I'm working on now, is so slick and so cool, that it blows the earlier one away. Now, when I show someone the earlier website, I'm ashamed of it. It looks blah and simple to me now. And probably, once this latest one goes live, I'll hate it, too, as I work on the next one.

So, if I have this syndrome, doesn't it follow that there might be an artist deep down inside me? I'd like to think so. Call me self-delusional, if you must, but I still think there's something to this.

(P.S. For those of you who are wondering, about three hours after I wrote my "Shameless Self-Promotion" entry, my company was actually the third result of a Google search for "Flexi-Word." Hmm....maybe Google saw my sycophantic raving about how useful Google is for me and decided to reward me? Okay, okay, now I am being self-delusional.)

Shameless Self-Promotion

2007-06-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

In the fall of 2005, I started a small company called Flexi-Word, and designed a website for it. Even though I produced keywords for metadata tagging and an abstract, which is how search engines like Google find websites when someone does a search, I have not been able to get Flexi-Word to come up when I search for it, or any of my other keywords such as freelance writing, small business, international, and more (including my full name). I understand that, for that to happen, I actually have to cough up a substantial amount of cash to give to a company that will then go after the search engines and arrange it so that my company's name not only simply appears when you search for it, but it also appears at the top of the list. Well, I do all right with my little business, but not enough "all right" for me to come up with that kind of money. This makes me sad, because I believe that Google is the reason that my life as a writer and researcher is so easy. In fact, when I have to write an overview for a product sold by the software giant I work for, rather than wade through the 147,800, 111 instances that the product's name is mentioned after a search on the company's website, I use Google to find that product immediately. Google also helps me discover if that product has been re-named (or, "re-branded" as they say in the biz) when the overview page does not immediately appear. So, I'm really disappointed that they do not have a democratic method of showing their search results but instead only a capitalistic one. But, I'm digressing.

Recently, for fun, I did a search for "froshty" on Google and this blog is the first link that appeared. This is because blogspot is owned by Google, so naturally it appears immediately. That got me thinking. What if, in my blog, I mentioned my company name and did a pitch here. Maybe that would get my company name out there and I wouldn't have to find $15,000 or more to go the advertising route.

So, I'm doing some shameless self-promotion for my company here to see how it flies. My company is called Flexi-Word and you can visit my website from here. I offer all kinds of writing services like proposal writing, brochure writing, ghost writing (articles, books), software documentation, press releases, and writing for the web. I also edit, translate from Spanish to English, audit websites with suggestions for improvement, train users how to use software, and I do website design and content authoring. In fact, one of the websites I designed (for a company called CSBS) went live yesterday.

I hope this works. Maybe I'll check it out and my next post can either be a brief update about the success of my little plan or a lengthy diatribe about why the Web should be more democratic.

Forsyth Needs

2007-06-13T05:43:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to do more blogging until several massive projects come to fruition or Wayne returns from Italy (whichever comes first), I decided to steal another meme from Emily and Courtney. Because Forsyth is an unusual name, reserved usually for last names of Scottish botanists and bestselling authors or for towns and counties in the U.S, I decided to "google" "Forsyth needs," and post the results (with commentary, of course). In the cases where the pronoun "he" or "his" or "him" was used, I changed it to reflect my gender. So, here goes.

1. Forsyth needs to have a unified vision.
Look, I don't wear contacts in both eyes because I like being able to use the uncorrected right eye to read things up close without reading glasses. My doctor says he admires this approach and is thinking of having laser surgery on just one of his eyes for the same reason. Why would I throw away the one thing that I do that impresses my doctor?

If you think this might refer to my finally deciding whether I'm an editor or a writer, I can tell you that I'm not unifiying that vision, either. Nor am I going to settle for just one job. That's so boring; I prefer living life like the Jamaicans in the now-famous In Living Color skit and holding down at least 3 jobs at once. So, I'll leave the unified vision to other Americans, mon.

2. Forsyth needs to be completed in November.
Wow, that doesn't give me much time. I thought I didn't have to be complete for a few more years at least. Well, I guess I'll just have to step up the process by trying to do all the things I think I need to be complete starting now and giving up anything that might be distracting me from this process. If I suddenly stop blogging around November, you'll know that a complete person doesn't need a blog. Although, given my tendency to blog sporadically, you might want to wait until January before coming to that conclusion.

3. Forsyth needs an experienced administrator.
Well, as much as my unpaid office assistants might disagree, I think I do need an experienced administrator to: a) manage my teenaged daughter and her friends, b) remind me to pay my bills by the date they're due, c) keep track of my appointments, d) find a cook and housekeeper that will work for free, e) call all the people I keep meaning to call but am too tired at the end of the day to dial, f) keep track of all my ideas for my blog that vanish moments after I have them, g) make sure my bike and car are tuned and ready for riding whenever I want, h) suffer hangovers for me because it seems I get a hangover if I only say, "I'd like a margarita," i) eat sweets, chocolate, and junk food for me, and j) make sure my library books get back to the library before they're a year overdue or identified as a "lost book." This would then allow me to do only the things I truly love which include reading one book or more a day; shopping and hanging out with both daughters; spending time at Wayne's house; traveling to Peru, Italy, Spain, Hawaii, and New Orleans; riding my bike; having a margarita or two without paying for it the next day; working on all my writing projects (paid and unpaid); chatting with my friends online; and watching every kind of crime show, house flipping show, and dancing show offered on TV.

4. Forsyth needs to a) get an editor; b) begin to care about readers again; c) rediscover a sense of pride in her craft.
Slap in the face! All this time, I've thought that because I am an editor I don't need an editor, but after looking at all the typos in my blog entries, I can see that this part is true. I also didn't realize that I'd stopped caring about my readers or that I'd lost a sense of pride in my craft; caring about my readers is exactly why I wait so long between blog entries: I want them to read quality posts. Case in point: my ten things you don't know about me post has not interested anyone but Emily and she pointed out that she knew most of the ten things. I knew I should have waited 6 weeks before posting after the modern fiction one. Maybe I have lost my sense of pride in my craft.

5. Forsyth needs better cooperation.
Yes, this is true. I need better cooperation from technical reviewers that should check the code in the material I send them rather than editing my edits with changes that violate every style and grammar rule known to man. I need better cooperation from the people who developed Photoshop CS because it is the only software that I haven't been able to teach myself and that makes me furious. I need better cooperation from my teenagers in the matter of making sure that the health department doesn't come over and shut my house down. I need better cooperation from my house, which should know that I can't afford to paint the exterior or have the first floor re-wired at this time in my life and pocket book--I have a kid in college, for heaven's sake. I need better cooperation from nano-technologists because I want to be able to teleport myself to foreign lands and distant cities and they haven't done enough to help me in that respect.

6. Forsyth needs to stand up and defend Alberta’s five-point childcare agreement.
Wow, apparently I'm the one person that can help a Canadian province keep a childcare agreement alive. Ah, the heavy burden of responsibility I must bear.

7. Forsyth needs to hire an elections director.
This is a no-brainer. To defend Alberta's five-point childcare agreement, I will have to run for office. Is anyone out there interested?

8. Forsyth needs computers and software.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that the last thing anyone who has two laptops and two desktop computers in her house needs is more computers and software. Well, you're wrong. One of my laptops is missing the "R" key. On the other laptop, most of the letters printed on the keys have worn off. As a result, last year, when customs officials in Peru saw that computer, instead of charging me a duty of 20% of the computer's value, they just laughed. My other desktop is four years old and protests when I try to run Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver at the same time while playing iTunes. None of these computers has a dual-core processer, which I'm dying to have, nor do they have the latest editions of Office 2007 or Adobe Creative Suite, all of which cost too much. So, if someone wants to contribute to my savings account to remedy these dire situations, I'd be happy to accept donations.

9. Forsyth needs no introduction.
How could I disagree with a statement that is so patently true?

Ten Things You Might Not Know About Me

2007-06-12T15:26:00.001-07:00

My sister and brother have both addressed this topic on their blogs, although I think the original number was eight. I decided to write 10 things because my mind likes to work in multiples of 10 (maybe that's my 11th thing and this should be 11 Things You Might Not Know About Me--I'll let you decide).

1. I'm more likely to cry when I'm happy than when I'm sad.

2. I watch Apolo Ohno and Julianne Hough perform their version of the Samba (from "Dancing with the Stars") on youtube at least once a week.

3. I don't think chocolate ice cream is that great unless there's something like brownies in it.

4. I've convinced myself that, just by watching, I have the power to affect how the Carolina Tar Heels play in any given sport and I have to wait until I start watching to decide whether I will help them win or lose.

5. In 2004, while I drove over the Mississippi River Bridge just as the sun was setting over the New Orleans skyline, singing "Clocks" by Coldplay with my Peruvian friend Rale, I experienced a feeling of intense joy that I constantly try to relive.

6. I have a crush on a friend (a man) who is 15 years younger than I am.

7. I love to ride around aimlessly in a car after I've had a few drinks as long as someone else is driving.

8. I don't enjoy writing fiction, but I feel pressured to because many people I know say, "Oh, you're such a great writer; you should write a novel."

9. I hate the prepositional phrase "in order to."

10. My favorite number is 9 because of all the cool things about it, especially its symmetry. For example, the multiples of 9 from 2 to 10 all add up to nine, like 9x2=18 and 1+8=18 or 9x3=27 and 2+7=9. Not only that, but each sum derived from the multiples goes up by one increment and then back down again: 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, and 81.

My Foray into Modern Fiction

2007-06-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

I come from a family where reading is the favorite pasttime, except perhaps for eating, and almost all of my friends (except my boyfriend) are big readers. A conversation with any of them at any given time will usually include the mention of a book that we're reading or have just finished. Now the caveat here is that the books I read are usually suspense thrillers, murder mysteries, or chick lit; however, they're still books and I'm still reading. Every once in awhile I can mention that I'm reading Faulkner (every year I take a Faulkner book to the beach) book, or something by John Steinbeck (my favorite American novelist of the 20th century) or something by Latin American authors--I like Vargas Llosa in particular and now I've just discovered Isabel Allende. Basically, though, I lag behind my siblings and friends when it comes to reading books that were not written to get a $4.5 million advance and the Edgar Award for Best Mystery.

Recently, I've started pondering this, probably because I feel inadequate when I discover all the esoteric books my family and friends are reading. From the time I was 13 until I was about 5, I read all kinds of great fiction written in the 20th century by authors as diverse as Chaim Potok, Milan Kundera, Jerzy Kozinski (not spelled correctly), and Kurt Vonnegut. Why have I not continued in this vein? When my sister lists all the authors she likes on her blog, why don't I recognize any of their names? Why am I more excited about Sue Grafton's latest novel than the latest book by the guy who wrote The Kite Runner?

I was in the process of purchasing a Wally Lamb book that didn't really appeal to me just to say his name when someone asked me what I was reading rather than "Lisa Scottoline" or "Sara Paretsky" when I mentally slapped myself back to reality with a cathartic thought: I don't like books written by people like Wally Lamb. And the reason I don't like them is very simple: they just aren't interesting or even well-written. On several occasions, I've fallen for a critic's lyrical praise of a new work of fiction or a book that's won some National Book award or even a Pulitzer Prize and I've bought it at Barnes and Noble on a whim. Almost every time, I've been disappointed. All of these books are dreary books about painful human relationships that are caused by cold, unfeeling parents and told from the point of view of the multitudes. They run in three basic writing styles.

The first I like to call "diarrhea of the adjective and run-on sentence in present tense" and this style reads something like this:

She pours the lukewarm sepia tea that is supposed to be green but is always oversteeped so that it is never really green but somewhere between sepia and midnight oil out of the teapot that has poured countless such cups because she somehow thinks that tea is more motherly than another beverage and trying to be motherly is what she is all about although she has as much clue about how to be a mother as one of those animals that eats their young. Why do I do this? Every week I answer her call as if she is one of those hunters that blows a duck call and all the ducks come flying out of the bushes and over the murky lifeless ponds of winter just so the hunter can shoot them and brag triumphantly about bagging a bunch of ducks that might as well have been sitting because they fell for this siren's call and were not prepared for death. I sip her witch's brew and listen to her recount the details of her very uninteresting life that is filled with minor skirmishes over those empty headed despots she considers her social equals. I sip and I brood and I hate her with every fiber of my being for everything she has done wrong or not done right and I gleefully think of her choking on that tea and falling face forward into the plate of limp watercress sandwiches that she thinks are sophisticated but are just her pathetic attempt to look classy.

Do you like this narrator? I don't. One paragraph like this and I close the book angrily, especially if I've bought it. I know that the author is trying to emulate writers like Faulkner who see language as something rich and lush. The difference is that Faulkner knew how to write and even though his characters are tragic, they are sympathetic.

The second style is the complete opposite of of the diarrhea affliction, and I'd like to credit my sister Lindsay with helping me perfect my satire of it.

"Would you like some tea?" she asked.

"Yes, please," I reply.

We drink in silence. Later, on the subway ride home, I burst into tears.

Books like this are full of tantalizing vignettes that never really explain the story. They often have no ending or beginning. You are left wondering if the author simply followed a few people around, jotting down their conversations and recording their actions with no real knowledge of them or why they behave the way they do.

The third style is what I call "unnecessary character development in print." It is my understanding from a statement made by one of my clients, that nowadays, workshops about writing fiction emphasize character development rather than plot. My client opined that because I write nonfiction well that I couldn't write fiction because fiction involved character development and my nonfiction is based on telling a story. At the time, I was mildly insulted because I thought that telling stories and writing novels are one in the same. However, as I look over all the books that people praise that have been written in the last 20 years, I see that my client had a point.

Many modern novels are nothing more than the index cards that workshop attendees accumulate to use as background material for their characters. The result is 400 to 900-page tomes where every character, no matter how minor, has at least a chapter devoted to his point of view. There are some novelists that can a get away with this, most notably Vargas Llosa in his book La Ciudad y los Perros and Maeve Binchy, but that's because they manage to use these voices to tell a story irather than just spilling every voice in the book onto the pages. And the worst part of it is, I don't like any of the voices. It appears that the age of ugliness is upheld by book after book filled with ugly, bitter, savage people who hate for no reason and people suffering internal angst when they actually have wonderful lives.

Lest you all think that I'm just a cranky curmudgeon who likes to complain and has nothing positive to say about anything, I am pleased to report that this blog entry ends on a positive note. After spending 20 years searching for a writer as good as the writers that inspired and challenged me when I was in my 20s, I finally found one. About three weeks ago, I checked Ravelstein by Saul Bellow out of the library. Even though this book was another one where one male character idolizes another male character (often for reasons only known tp the narrator), such as Dr. Faustus, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the Robertson Davies trilogy, Bellow writes so well, that I was caught up in his fantasy whereby an antihero is really a hero and I ended up enjoying the celebration of the main character, Ravelstein. I wish I hadn't returned the book to the library so precipitously because there were some great lines in the book that I can't quote word for word. But, my favorites go something like this: "He was one of those large men whose hands shake when he has to perform a small task" and after a comment that during Hitler's Germany, the world was convinced that Jews should not live, he wrote something like "That's something you feel down to your bones."

Good writing like that is something that I feel down to my bones.

Journalism Today

2007-03-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five years ago, I graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures (which is now called "Journalism and Mass Communications"), a degree that I have never used in real life. However, part of earning that degree was a requirement to take an Introduction to Journalism class. UNC has an excellent journalism school with marvelous professors and I was fortunate to have one of them, although it wasn't Professor Shumacher of Jeff MacNelly's Shoe cartoons. She was a stickler for attendance and good writing and to this day, I remember her basic rules, using some of them each time I write a marketing piece or edit a book One of them is the inverse pyramid rule. This involves answering the questions "Who? What? Where? How? When?" and then creating an opening line that not only answers them but also puts the most important information first.

I remember putting that to use with an assignment that involved conducting a survey of friends and other students and asking them what their favorite word was. Everyone had a different word, so my opening statement couldn't be something like "Eight out of 50 college students say 'chocolate' is their favorite word." Instead, I looked at the answers they gave me for why the word was their favorite and the answer, for the most part, was that they liked the way that word sounded. So, I started out my "article" with "In a recent survey, college students revealed that their favorite word is based on how it sounds." I got an A from my professor for that and an A in the course, so, of course, that means I am an expert in journalism and therefore qualified to write about how journalism has gone horribly wrong in this day and age. (Okay, not really, but many "experts" on other subjects are about as qualified to write about their subjects as I am about journalism and they get away with it, so why not I?)

The two basic rules of journalism when I studied it was to leave editorializing for the op-ed pages and to report nothing but the facts. The most important part of that rule was to eschew adjectives and adverbs when at all possible. The second rule was to keep ourselves out of the article because readers weren't interested in the writers--they were interested in the subject of the article. Unfortunately, shortly after I graduated, these rules fell by the wayside, starting with a horrible trend in magazine writing that I lay at the door of such magazines as Spin and Vanity Fair that has now spread to such respected newspapers as the New York Times.

I remember how excited I was when Spin first came out. As my earlier blog post attests, I love music. In those days, I loved reading about music almost as much as I loved listening to it. But after reading a few articles, I was horrified. The magazine was patronizing and pseudo-intellectual, and most of the articles that were supposed to give a history of a band were, instead, a history of the writer's original slathering sycophantic love of the band that soon turned to a rabid, vitriolic hatred because the band had either released an album (CD for you young people) that pleased most of the public or the leader of the band had snubbed the writer in some way. The writers constantly lambasted bands for "selling out" in metaphors that would make some of today's respected poets roll in their graves. I like metaphors as much as the next person and use them all the time, but I like to use them in a way that doesn't leave my readers wondering what hallucinogens I might have ingested or smoked before I picked up my pen or turned on my computer. When I read their scathing description of one of R.E.M.'s albums as being "Pre-raphaelite, dancing in the kudzu cotton candy," I decided then and there to stop reading the magazine. Granted, Michael Stipe was sporting blonde curls at the time (this was before he started shaving his head), but those curls are "Raphaelite" not "pre-Raphaelite" and his curls had nothing to do with R.E.M.'s music. Unfortunately, metaphors that stretch the boundaries of the English language are now de rigeur for most music magazines, unless you pick up something like Death Metal Today, which explains how to achieve the right combination of gutteral screaming and endless heavy metal riffs that would make Slash proud.

This insidious injection of the writer into magazine articles has now extended itself into interviews with famous people. It used to be, in the old days, that you could pick up a magazine that advertised an interview with Brad Pitt and it would start with a brief description of the location of the interview and then go right into the interview. It might go something like this: "Brad Pitt is sitting in the living room of his recently completed home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Relaxing on a leather sofa, with pictures of his and Angelina Jolie's children on a nearby table, he answered some questions about his current film projects, being an adoptive parent, and his plans for the future. Here's what he had to say." (I purposely left out the number of children in the photographs because Angelina seems to adopt children at the same rate that I add to my huge shoe collection.)

I subscribe to People magazine, and to give them credit, they still have interviews like that for the most part. Sadly, magazines that are more respected than People have completely abandoned this form of interview. Instead, we readers are force-fed mindless pap regarding the writer's feelings before and during the interview. This turns the Brad Pitt interview into something like this:

When I learned that I had the assignment of interviewing Brad Pitt while he relaxed on his buttery-smooth leather sofa dishing about his movies, kids, and the 'Brangelina' phenom, I felt a flutter of excitement. I had met Brad at a party thrown by Elton John right after his huge success with Tom Cruise in Interview and had found him to be a decidedly avowed bachelor ala Clooney. Now that he's a father several times over with la belle Angelina and a lifestyle centered more around 2 a.m. feedings and diapers than hanging at with the A-List until 2 a.m., I was looking forward to seeing how he had changed. Of course, the woman in me was also hoping that he'd remember our intense conversation and my beloved black Versace frock that everyone told me turned me into a 'hot vixen.'

So, with breathless anticipation, I boldly rang the doorbell at Chez Pitt-Jolie. Brad answered the door, cellphone in hand and clad in one of his pale, slightly-see-through shirts he sports that reminded me of why I and all the other women in the world are prone to swooning at the sight of those unbelievable pecs. He put his hand over the receiver of the phone and said, 'Talking to Angie about what Maddox should take for his cold. I'm almost through.' Oh, how the mighty have fallen! The great Brad Pitt--Sexiest Man Alive, jetsetter extraordinaire, movie star, was not talking to Martin Scorsese about his next Oscar-nominated film--no, he was consulting with 'Angie' about his kid's cold.

True to his word, he was off the phone in a jiff. Inviting me into his gorgeous, architectural marvel of a living room, he told me to have a seat and twinkled those wonderful blue eyes at me. 'Well, here we are,' he said. 'A little bit different than partying with Elton John. Do you still have that black dress?'

And then I got it. The secret to his success. How he got both Jennifer and Angelina. He remembers things--important things. Things that make people feel good, no, strike that, that make women feel good. I knew then and there that this interview was going to go totally his way and that was fine with me.

It's at this point that I usually stop reading because a) I can't stand that entertainment writing that says it's okay to use "dish" or tries to toss in some really bad French in an attempt to sound more sophisticated and b) I realize that the only quotes from Brad are going to be those that are directed at the writer. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but when I want to read an interview with Brad Pitt, I want to hear what Brad Pitt has to say. I couldn't care less about how the name-dropping writer feels about Brad Pitt or her history with Brad Pitt or whose dresses she wears. I want to know what films are in his future, what books he's reading, his favorite director, and how his project to help rebuild the Gulf Coast going. (Of course I also want to know if he really plans to be with Angelina for the rest of his life, but I am realistic enough to know he wouldn't address that topic.) I also hope for tons of pictures of him--another reason why I like People interviews--they usually have 2 or 3 good shots of Brad in their articles about him.

In the end, I wonder if writers like my fictional writer simply read other interviews with him and write about their feelings to cover up the fact that they've never been closer to Brad Pitt than spying him across a huge ballroom at a charity event. My sister and I even considered starting a parody magazine called Vanity, that would be filled with nothing but self-indulgent articles centered on how we felt about celebrities, but these days, I wonder if anyone would get that it was a parody.

Not content to toss impartial interviews with celebrities and other figures out the window, today's breed of journalist has decided that even the supposed bastion of objectivity, the newspapers, should also include the writer in them. The way they do this is a little more subtle than the adulatory or disdainful entertainment magazines, but it's just as horrifying to this subscriber to old-school journalism. Instead, these journalists decide that because it's very difficult to get a publisher to believe that they are the next William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez rolled into one, that they will prove it in every newspaper article they write. And thus they break my favorite professor's other rule--they inject every possible adjective and adverb into their article, while burying the main story somewhere on page 2.

For example, if there were a shooting outside a night club, an article (or "story" as my professor called it) written by someone who studied journalism with me would probably start out like this, "At approximately 11:30 p.m. on June 30, a gunman wearing a stocking mask shot and killed James Thomas Rogers, 38, of Durham, outside the Silver and Gold club at 127 South Saunders Sreet in Raleigh." Even saying "an unidentified gunman" would be considered editorializing because "unidentified" is subjective--people at the club might not have known the gunman, but someone else might have been able to identify him. Well, no more. Today's story would be something like this:

The four year old boy with chocolate brown eyes the size of a CD clutched the tattered stuffed dog against his chest as he solemnly announced, 'I can't sleep. All the sirens woke me up.'

This boy and a handful of other stunned residents of the block next to the Silver and Gold club are standing outside their homes in the thick Raleigh summer air. A group of teenaged girls stands in front of their bungalow, arms locked, crying. 'Someone was killed down there,' one of them sobs, pointing at the club. 'It could have been one of us. It could've.'

A woman, bowed over in a combination of premature aging and arthritis, shakes her head sadly and says, 'This used to be a good neighborhood. Then that club came. It's a shame. Partying and drinking all night. And now this. You have to wonder what's next.'

What's next indeed. The once proud neighborhood with romantic Sears craftsmen bungalows and a few graceful Queen Anne homes has been rocked with horrifying incident after incident since the city gave a permit to the Silver and Gold Club and it opened its doors two year ago. Fights, DWIs, and reckless behavior have become the norm, shattering the peace that residents used to take for granted. And tonight, tragedy. For tonight, James Thomas Rogers, 38, of Durham, was brutally shot and killed in cold blood by an unidentified gunman who fled in a tattered Buick missing a headlight and several hubcaps. With this wild killer still on the loose, the neighbors have every right to be upset and worried.

It used to be that local papers were only guilty of such writing and that the national papers, or the ones that were highly respected, like the Washington Post still stuck to the facts. Then came the fateful day, when I opened the Post and read, "The sky was a bright azure blue, a perfect contrast to the sun high above the horizon and the peaceful green field where Jack Kent Cook, the former owner of the Washington Redskins, was finally laid to rest." And then the final blow: An article in the New York Times about how many schools were taking recess out of the school day so that they could add more subjects to the day that started out with (I don't remember the girl's real name, so I'm going to make one up): "Caitlin Goodwin rests her chin on her hands and stares out the window of her school room at the playground where rusting swings sway gently in the wind and grass grows out of the cracks in the cement where boys used to gather to play basketball and four-square. The teacher calls her attention back to the subject and she sighs. Later she says, 'I miss going out to play with my friends.' Caitlin is not alone. Children all over the country are losing that once hallowed special time where relationships were built and wars raged among the sexes: recess."

The only newspaper I can think of that doesn't do this is USA Today, which I refuse to read because it's written so that George W. Bush can understand it. Since T.V. journalism doesn't exist any more (that's a different blog), I'm reduced to getting my news from NPR, which, although it uses odd sound effects to bolster a story, still tells it to you pretty straight. So, basically, I pay attention to People and NPR. That's kind of a nice mix in a way. I just hope that my journalism professor has gone to that giant newsroom in the sky because I can't imagine how she could live with what people think is journalism today.

Random Things that Bother Me

2007-02-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

Not long after I turned 40, I told some friends that I thought I'd become more tolerant of things as my 30s ended and my 40s began. I used as my proof the fact that I've become so much more accepting of the different types of popular music than I did when I was younger. In my early to late teens, I terrorized my two younger sisters whenever they mentioned that they liked a song that was outside of my very narrow "white, either British or American, rock band with no country or funk overtones" window and in college, I fought the introduction of disco music at dorm parties tooth and nail. Well, it seems that I might have become more tolerant of music and now I'm really proud of the diversity of the music I have on my iPod which has blues, jazz, hip hop, neopunk, rock (classic, new, and old-school punk), country, blue grass, reggaeton, and Latin pop music on it. Unfortunately, it seems that this has come with a trade-off and I'm now more intolerant of many more things than I was when I was young. This blog entry tackes some of these things, not in any particular order.

My first topic is so-called "women's fiction" books that needlessly kill off a main character, usually from a cancer that only women can get, because the editors and writers think that any serious book for women must include an unnecessary, tearjerker death. I just read a book that was highly recommended by friends and a couple of magazines and for absolutely no reason, the author killed off the main character with ovarian cancer. It ruined the whole book for me, because when I sit down to read a novel, I want to escape from a world that's punctuated with debates as to whether you can say "HFS file system," because "HFS" stands for hierarchical file system and books with titles like Migrating from Oracle Enterprise Server to WebSphere Enterprise Edition or Tuning up for VOIP. I want to read something that is upbeat and interesting with witty and memorable characters, not someone who is about to die. I have a couple of good friends who are battling cancer in real life now and I can assure you that there's nothing upbeat or witty about it--it's a world full of worry and concern. And people wonder why I look forward to the next Stepanie Plum novel or happily ensconce myself in a hilarious book written by an English or Irish woman.

Another is the sexist fashion on ordinary TV today. Okay, to go along with reading to escape the convoluted and mentally demanding work I do, I watch a lot of detective shows on T.V.--Law & Order, Law & Order CI, Law & Order: SVU, CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, Numbers, Without a Trace, and Bones. I am vastly entertained by the detective and forensics work involved in solving crimes; however, I am not entertained by the fact that most of the female characters on these shows wear tank tops and low cut blouses that show off lots of skin and cleavage, while the men wear normal "business casual" to "casual" clothes that hardly show anything. Now, admittedly, I don't hang around crime labs or murder scenes, but I'm pretty sure that in the real world, on a cold day, the women assigned to these spots are not wearing low-cut tank tops or blouses. In the days when I still went to work in an office, I did not don something that would assure me free drinks from the bar at any given TGI-Friday's and several indecent proposals. Neither did my female co-workers. This is the kind of sexism that makes me crazy--the producers can all say, "Hey, we put women in high positions in our shows, what more do you want?" My answer to that is "The opportunity for viewers to think that the women earned their rank due to hard work and skills and not because they wore something that would get them a job at Hooters."

Then there's Microsoft, the morality police. I admit it. I play a lot of computer solitaire. A lot. I find it a distracting activity that helps me pass the time while I wait for things to download onto my overused, laden with megs of RAM-eating programs. In the old days, if you were stuck with a game where there were two cards with the same color and value (like two black 9s) and only one card with the proper value and suit to put one on (a red 10), if moving one didn't work out for you, you could use "undo" umpteen times to get back to where you have a chance to move the second card. Well, those days were gone with Windows '98, when the "undo" selection could only go back one move. Now I know it's not a good idea to cheat, but I'm plagued with the same color and value issue about 70% of the time that I play Solitaire and I'm sick of being stuck with my first choice. How dare Bill Gates and his crew prevent me from doing what I want in a game?

Another thing that Microsoft, the morality police, does is decide that anything you cut and paste from one Microsoft Office document into another is obviously something that you're plaigiarizing. To stop you from committing a crime that Microsoft believes is heinous only if someone besides them is doing it, they force the formatting, font style, and anything else funky from the document that you are cutting and pasting from into the document you are pasting to. Oh sure, after working with Microsoft Word for 10 years, you might realize that the annoying little clipboard that pops up when you paste something offers the option of making the pasted text match the current document, but most people don't know that. So, you spend a lot of time trying to adjust the style, which actually usually changes after you paste the text until you either scream or your document blows up from too many stules. I don't know about you, but as a 40-something professional who assembles newsletters, proposals, and papers that are written by numerous contributors who sent them to me in emails, I don't appreciate Microsoft's assumption that I'm a high school student writing a paper that is cut and pasted from Wikipedia and it is up to them to save me from myself.

I am also very bothered by the fact that in this modern world, we equate honesty with being rude. How many times have you heard someone say, "I just love [insert rude media personality such as Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, or Ann Coulter here] because he's/she's honest." The problem is that usually this media personality is not in the slightest bit honest. In fact, that person is likely to be one of the biggest liars on the planet. So, why then do people think they're honest? The answer is simple: that liar happens to get in front of a camera or microphone and call people horrible names. For some reason, the fact that the person is behaving like a mean bully on the kindergarten playground makes people think that they're honest. And, if you happen to be a nice, pleasant person when you're behind a camera or microphone (like so many of us southern folk were raised to be), then people watching or listening to you will tell their friends that they don't trust you. Can you believe that? They don't trust you because you haven't called a radio or TV host "a lying scumbag" or a "dithering idiot," but instead have tried to behave the way your parents (those who gave a dang about you) raised you. This has even boiled over into sports--coaches who scream at their players, sock them in the stomach, or throw furniture at them are revered for having "the heart of a champion," when they should actually be shunned for being horrible human beings that most likely hate their players. The fact of the matter is that someone who calls someone else nasty names in public is not really anything but rude. And if you look "rude" up in a dictionary or thesauraus, you won't find "honest" as a synonym. Of course one could argue that "dictionary" and "thesaurus" are words that people no longer recognize, but I'll save that rant for another blog entry.

Another thing that bugs me is the popular notion that I want to read books or watch movies filled with characters, including the protagonist, that are whiny, self-indulgent, unpleasant, selfish, and filled with unnecessary angst, usually related to family, the opposite sex, or their jobs. Critics laud these books and films as "dark tales that strip away the niceties of society to reveal the dark side of the human spirit." Why these critics love them is a mystery to me. Personally, I've met enough nasty characters in real life to last me a life time and I don't really care to read or watch fictionalized accounts of their counterparts. Sure, there's nothing wrong with a one-dimensional villain or one or two characters that are either morally or emotionally bankrupt, but please spare me the 500-plus-page tome or the two hour movie that does nothing but showcase the thoughts and actions of a whole town or family full of these "dark" characters. If I want to spend my free time surrounding myself with people like that, I'll make plans to attend the next Republican National Convention or the next meeting of the coaching staff for the dook basketball team.

The last item for this rant is people who have no concept of what words mean when they either use them or force others to adopt them for a particular use. Common examples are the overuse of the prefix "pre," which is interpreted to mean "done before" rather than simply "before"; the interpretation of the word "help" to mean "instructions for how to do something" rather than "assistance" or "aid': "offline" to mean "private" rather than "not currently connected to a network," and "via" as "through or by means of" rather than "by way of" (as in physically using a route to get somewhere); and many other little gems like that. Another example is from an email I received from a client that informed me that a person on the project had been promoted and no longer had the "bandwidth" to participate in the project. At first I thought this meant that the person's Internet connection had been downgraded from a high-speed network to dial-up, but eventually, I realized that the guy writing the email was using "bandwidth" to mean "time and energy." The problem with using "time and energy" escapes me, but apparently "time and energy" has some, dark hidden meaning and the writer had to use something else to describe it. In the last year, I've also run into the phrase "boil the oceans." It took me awhile to realize that the term means to waste time and energy, excuse me, I mean "bandwidth," on something that's impossible. What a horrible metaphor. It brings to mind tsuamis or underwater volcanoes exploding and killing thousands of people. I don't understand what's wrong with saying "we should try to avoid wasting a lot of time and energy on something that is probably not possible"--maybe because it uses the phrase "time and energy"?

Pushing Cars

2006-12-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

The year of 2006 seems to be a year of paired experiences for me. For example, in October, I drove to a funeral in Williamsburg, which was the site of a horrible "freak rain event" caused by a nor'easter that parked itself near Norfolk. Eight inches fell in something like 10 hours and, yep, I was driving in it the whole time. As I drove, the Williamsburg police seemed to following me and closing portions of the roads after I passed by. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I drove through another nor'easter to get to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. There's just nothing like driving through sheets of water to the tune of the wind howling at about 25 miles an hour--in fact, if you haven't tried it, then you might as well hang up your driving gloves.

My other paired experience this year is pushing cars. Twice now I've been put in the position of having to push someone else's car that has gotten into trouble without any help from me (which is highly unusual because I have ADD and therefore cannot pay attention long enough to drive safely). The first push incident occurred this summer. I was driving my boyfriend's white and wood-grain Chevy station wagon, which is the size of a hearse (it's the same size and style as the last model of the Buick Roadmaster) to pick up my little Toyota Corolla, which had been in the shop. Although the battery light was on, he told me he hadn't noticed any problems with the car and deemed it safe enough for me to drive with my daughter Mary to get the car. The plan was that she would drive our car home and I would go in the station wagon. We got to the mechanic with no problems and off Mary went in our car and I in the hearse. It was starting to rain with ominous rumbles of thunder, but the temperature was still about 100 degrees, so I had the air and defroster on. Not a good idea when the battery light is on because that light in that particular car means one thing--your alternator is dying and draining everything from your battery.

So, first, the radio started fading in and out and then the dashboard lights flashed before going dark. I was trying to keep the car moving until I could get it home but, as is always my luck, when I got to the last stoplight before being home free, I was behind an elderly gent who decided that it was important to stop at a yellow light. I had no choice but to stop behind him. The light, normally red for about 30 seconds, was on some sort of delay and stayed red for almost five minutes. Meanwhile, the car died. Just then, the heavens opened up and rain began falling about about an inch a minute. There were cars behind me and because my car was so big, they were completely unable to see my arm motioning for them to go around. I couldn't turn on my hazard lights because they, too, were dead as doornails. So, I had to get out in the pouring rain and motion for folks to go around me so it wasn't long before I resembled a contestant in a wet-T-shirt contest for middle-aged women with bellies that stick out farther than their chests.

Eventually, the cars got past and I was able to sit in the car and decide on a plan of action. I had forwarded my house phone to Mary's cell phone because I had lost mine in Peru, so I couldn't call her. I decided to call my boyfriend for guidance. Immediately, I got his office voice mail that intones with a lovely mechanical female voice, "Wayne Wood [pause] is on the phone." I tried him several times during the next hour and each time I heard "Wayne Wood [pause] is on the phone." On the last try, I left a message for him to call me. So, then I tried his daughter and several other people, including my other daughter, only to find that no one would answer. I finally decided that I was going to have to take matters into my own hands and call a tow truck. I called my mechanic who gave me the number for their towing company and three subsequent calls to the number resulted in a cheery busy signal. Great. Fortunately, right after this, Mary called because it had been some time since we'd left the mechanic and I hadn't gotten home, so she was worried. I told her that I was in trouble and that she should probably come get me.

Then, Wayne finally called. I told him what had happened and that I thought I should tow the car to the mechanic. The reaction of my boyfriend, affectionately known as "Cheapy," was similar to that of someone who had just been told that he was about to be shot by an angry gang member and there was no way to escape the bullet. His idea was for me to wait in the car until he could arrive with another car and jumper cables to try to jump it off. The only problem with this plan was that Wayne commutes to work by bus and it would be about an hour and 45 minutes before he could arrive. I had work that was due at the end of the day. I told him that I couldn't afford to be away from work that long and that I would pay for the tow truck myself--provided I could actually get one.

Meanwhile, the stoplight went to flash because apparently the storm had knocked out some power in the neighborhood. This was actually a boon because it made people realize that I was stopped for some other reason than the light. It also immediately brought a city road crew truck to the scene. He noticed my plight and offered to help push the car back from the light and so that it was close to the curb and put some cones around it so people would know I was in trouble. I told him that I was having problems getting hold of the tow company, so he told me he'd see what he could do. He went back to his truck and returned a few minutes later to inform me that he had called the Cary Police and they were sending a car. I know he was being thoughtful, but the last time the Cary Police were dispatched to the part of town where I live, they got lost because the road I live off of is a long road and a lot of rich people live way on the other end. The result is that I waited two hours for them to find me. However, I decided to see what happened this time, so when Mary showed up, I told her that I was waiting for the police and she could go home without me and also unforward the phone.

Well, I waited about half an hour and watched four police cars drive past me. The fifth turned onto the road I was stuck on, but in the wrong direction, and soon it was out of sight. So, I called my mechanic and asked them if they could recommend a different towing company. They gave me another name and I called them and, miracle of miracles, someone answered. They said they could get someone out there at 6:00--and for me to leave the car with the key hidden in it. So, I agreed and then decided it would be a good idea to call the Cary Police Dept. and tell them I'd solved my problem myself. I did that and was actually thanked by the policewoman on the other end for being "a responsible citizen." Then, I called Mary and told her that she could come get me.

While I was waiting for Mary, I decided to see if I could get anything electrical in the car to work, so I turned the key and presto! The car started. I was so excited that I drove off and started home. Then, I remembered that Mary was coming to get me, so I drove back, ran into her and told her to follow me to the mechanic. Then, it became a race to the mechanic. In the far recesses of my mind, I had the notion that a car uses more power at rest than in motion, so my goal began to be not to stop at a light...unfortunately, since I live in a nightmarish area of surburban shopping centers and elementary schools, there is no way to avoid lights. So, as I approached my first light and watched it turn red, I knew I had to turn right on red, even if there was no reason for me to go that way. I quickly made the right and then found the connector road that would put me back on the right path and perhaps I'd get a green light then. Unfortunately, five SUVs and two mini-vans (Wayne and I are the only people in our town that don't drive one of these monstrosities, I swear, except for the Porsche and Mercedes drivers that wouldn't be caught dead on our side of town) blocked the view of the hearse from Mary and she had no idea that I had turned.

I could feel the car starting to die on me at this point, so I turned off everything inside the car, and risking a huge accident because all the windows fogged up in about 20 seconds flat, I whipped out onto the road where the red light had been and made it past the light and on to the next one, which was also green. I knew I didn't have long, so I turned right at that light and pointed the station wagon into an empty parking lot, where it died right in the middle. Since I didn't know whether the car would be there in the morning or not, I knew I had to get the car in a parking space. So, I put the car in neutral and proceeded to try to push it into a parking spot. The only problem with this plan was that the parking lot was on a slight incline so every time I had the car pushed about a foot, it would roll back about six inches. However, I inched it along and almost had it in the spot, when a nice man ran from across the street and helped me push it the final six inches. Hallelujah! No tow truck--Wayne would be my slave forever! I called the towing company and cancelled my request.

After I finished my mental happy dance, I started to walk back to my house. As I made it up to the corner where the light was, I remembered that Mary was still driving around looking for me. I had no idea what to do. I paused, and what did I see, but Mary in the Corolla rounding the curve. I started running to the corner waving at her, praying that the light that was so happy to be red when I was in the station wagon would be red again. Well, no such luck. The light was green and off went Mary. People saw me running and waving and some cars even stopped to let me get to a better spot where she could see me, but it was to no avail. Mary was gone. So, I just kept walking. Eventually, she called me, and I told her that I was almost home and that she didn't have to come find me. Wayne showed up at my house about an hour later and I was able to get him to the parking lot. We jump started the car and got it safely to the mechanic and all was right in his world.

My second pushing car adventure happened on my most recent trip to Lima, Peru. My friends took me at a show of Peruvian traditional dances that also serves drinks, including the Pisco Sour, my personal favorite Peruvian mixed drink. It had been my understanding that we'd have dinner (even though we started our adventure at 9:00 p.m.), so I hadn't eaten since lunch. About 6 Pisco Sours later, I realized that there was to be no dinner. The organizer of this outing, my friend Julio, also had not eaten, which explained why I got to dance with him twice--normally, he'd rather cut his own throat then get out on the dance floor. After the show was over, the guys decided that, at 3:00 a.m., that the night was still young and they decided our next stop would be a karoake bar. My friend Luis assured us that he knew how to get there, and he offered to ride with one friend, Juan Carlos, while the rest of us followed in Julio's car.

This is the night that I learned that, when Julio drinks more than a couple of Pisco Sours without eating, he channels Dale Earnhardt, Sr. So, suddenly, we were tearing around Lima at top speed and I got some bruises banging into the door of his car as he took curves as if he were on the track at Talladega or Rockingham. Thanks to the Pisco Sours, instead of praying that I would live through the night, I was laughing as if I were on the latest rollercoaster at King's Dominion or Six Flags. In the midst of this wild ride, the car suddenly came to an abrupt halt.

It seems that Luis had led Juan Carlos and Julio straight into a public park of some sort and into a quicking offroading adventure. Since Juan Carlos has a 4WD mini-SUV, this was not a problem for him, but for the Peruvian "Intimidator," this was not something his Nissan Sunny could handle. The result is that the bottom of the car was resting on cement while the wheels hung off, unable to touch the grass below.

Well, out we all got to inspect the situation. We were spotted by a group of even younger, more drunk men and they approached to assess our problems as well. This assessment apparently included pushing one of the guys in our party and Juan Carlos and Julio both had to intervene. In the mysterious ways of all men worldwide, this little scuffle led to intense male bonding and now the guys decided they would help us push the car out of the way. I offered to help push and was forbidden to touch the car. They pushed several times and the car moved a little, but not far. I began arguing that they needed my help and tried to explain about Wayne's car, but I had lost the ability to speak English by that time, let alone Spanish, so instead, I just went up and when they started to push, I put my hands on the hood and shoved with all my might. Up onto the pavement the car's wheels went and we were back in business, even though I was now face first in the dirt. I don't remember if anyone noticed this, so I got up and got in the car and we resumed our NASCAR tour of the Lima streets until we reached the karaoke bar. I'd like to think that my shove helped move the car, but I can't be sure.

The night remained exciting--my friend Felton showed up from a wedding and he was about in the same state I was in. While my friend Luis and I tried to sing karaoke and drink Sangria (just what the doctor ordered, I thought), Felton and Julio began playfighting. This resulted in my being challenged to an arm wrestling match with Julio (I lost, to his great glee) and eventually ended up with Felton on top of Juan Carlos on the floor, our table knocked over, and my glass of sangria broken. The bartender, obviously used to these kinds of hijinks, calmly came over and cleaned everything up. Juan Carlos, in his role of responsible member of the group, asked for the bill and we left shortly after that to the great joy of the bartender.

Our ride back to myhotel was yet another NASCAR adventure with Felton alternating between yelling "Fuckeeng beetch" and "I want more beer!!!" There were also Spanish comments about the fact that my hotel is located across the street from a strip club. When we got there, I kissed the boys and waved them off. I later learned that they went back to Felton's house and drank until 9 in the morning (it was 5:30 when they dropped me off). Julio then took one curve too many too fast and flattened his tire and bent his wheel and his car ended up in the shop.

When I woke the next morning, I ached all over and there were a myriad of bruises all over my body. The moral of this story is to eat dinner before imbibing Pisco Sours and let men be men by graciously standing to the side when they try to push cars out of parks. I also plan to avoid driving any large American car when its battery light is on.

My extended end-to-end solution for leveraging and optimizing marketing communications transparently across the universe

2006-10-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

This post requires a little more background information about myself. I have always wanted to be a writer, but I am too lazy to expend the energy to write a novel and get it published (for example, right now I'm writing this blog entry instead of finishing the first chapter of a novel I started writing). Instead, I have sought out jobs where I could write and edit smaller pieces without having to hire an agent and weep over three rejection letters from publishers, three being about the number of publishing companies that are left after all the publishing house mergers.

Over time, I've found myself doing a lot of technical editing and marketing writing--for companies that like "to blur" the distinction between technical publications and marketing publications. Actually, in the marketing business, they call marketing publications like brochures "collateral," one of the many terms that is misused today. In my world, which is one that involves using a fabulous invention called the "dictionary," collateral means something that you use as security when you apply for a loan at the bank. I can just see the face of a loan officer if I tried to buy a Porsche and told him or her, "The collateral for this loan will be two brochures and a radio ad about how trustworthy I am."

Anyway, now that I've been writing and editing marketing copy for more than 10 years, I feel that I've been exposed to just about every form of abuse of the English language from the minds of people who probably slept through any grammar lessons they took, if such things are even offered anymore. The abuse has gone from making verbs out of nouns like "prioritize"out of "priority" to misusing a simple word like "transparent," to the blatant misuse of parts of speech, such as using "spend" as a noun.

It seems that all marketing copy that comes to me in my email or in a Word document was all written by the same uneducated, jargon-stuffed person. Here is a sample (yes, sample, not sampling) of what I see all the time:

"End-to-end solution" - What else is a solution but end to end? If you're solving something, then it is going to have an end. Otherwise, it's not a solution but a product. I'm tempted to start a company that promises "In the middle solutions: - We give you the middle part of the solution process and you're on your own after that."
"Extends the end-to-end solution" - If a solution is end to end, then how the heck can it be extended?
"Tightly integrated" - How do you tightly integrate something? Do you pack a school built for 500 students with 1000 students, making sure that all races are evenly represented? Now, that's tight integration. If you mean that two different computer programs can work with each other if a third one handles the communication, then just call it "integrated" and be done with it.
"Leverage" - This is one I really hate. When I see "this end-to-end solution can leverage your existing investments in technology," I see a piece of software using a lever to pry apart servers and workstations.
"Loosely coupled" - This sounds obscene to me. I can imagine all kinds of lewd ways that two or more people can couple loosely. Add "leverage" to that, such as "this end-to-end solution can leverage your loosely coupled outputs" and the picture gets even nastier.
"Out of the box" - This is one of the hottest marketing phrases out there today and the silliest, especially when someone applies it to software or servers. I envision someone in an IT department cranking a handle so that a piece of software comes out. Nothing to do with computers is "out of the box." Software is either downloaded from the Web or uploaded from a CD. Servers do not come loaded with everything you need to run them or your programs--there is always something you need to put on them.
"Out-of-the-box best practices" - Why yes, I'm always pulling best practices out of boxes--so much so that I'm too busy to leverage my tightly integrated end-to-end solution investment.
"Improved ease-of-use"- Look, either something is easy to use or it's not. If you have improved a product so that it's easier to use but you don't want to imply that the earlier version was difficult to use, then say "We've improved this product and you'll find that it's even easier to use now." Saying something has "ease of use," is ridiculous anyway. That's like saying that a chair has "reduced hard of seat" or that a class is "difficult of study."
"In concert with" - This is one of my jargon-loving colleague's favorites. He uses it to mean "together with" or just "with," as in "In concert with Oracle, we have built a database and server solution that offers optimized database administration and processing power." I immediately see, in my mind's eye, a company performing onstage at Red Rocks or Radio City Music Hall as an opening act for Oracle.
"Optimize" and "optimization" - Although these are perfectly good words, they're misused to mean "improve" and "improvement," respectively. Optimize means to make something nearly perfect and since those offering optimized solutions are always optimizing them for the next release, then they're not nearly perfect.
"Mission-critical" - The notion that every corporation must have a "mission" is an invention of the 1990s. I'm sure that when Henry Ford decided to start a company that manufactured cars, he didn't gather his managers and say, "Before one car rolls off the assembly line, I want a one-sentence statement that describes our company's goals so that I can put iton signs and on overhead projectors." Also, the notion that a company's mission is anything other than "To make a profit selling our products," is ridiculous. So are "mission-critical applications." If an application isn't going to help a company make or save money, then the company isn't going to use it. So, all applications are "mission-critical" because if they aren't, then no company is going to buy them.
"Deliver" - The U.S. Postal Service delivers. UPS delivers. My software, on the other hand, does not deliver. Unfortunately, the rest of the world thinks that their software does deliver. In fact, it all "delivers reliability, availability, and scalability." However, when I open the software box, I don't see reliability, availability, or scalability anywhere.
"Install," "spend," and "restore" used as nouns, as in "Perform the restore or, if that is not successful, locate the original disk and perform the install. If that doesn't work, you should plan to allot some IT spend to upgrading your hardware" - I have to wonder what's being taught in English classes in this era of No Child Left Behind. Do schools figure that because the President of the United States doesn't know a verb from a preposition that teaching children the different parts of speech isn't important anymore? What's next? Will we all "Perform the drive" when we get our cars out on the road? Or maybe we'll all "Perform the listen" with the songs on our iPod. My sister the artist can "Perform the paint" for her next show, and my brother can "Perform the read," as he studies for his next exam. My other sister is in the process of "performing the relax" in Maine or else she might join me as I "perform this complain."
"Across" - This preposition is constantly being misused as a synonym for "all over" and "throughout." For example, I just edited a sentence in a book that says that a customer was thrilled that he could get information about his customers from across the enterprise. I wanted to find that customer and ask him how long it took him to walk across his enterprise and get it.
"Transparent"- This is another abused word like "across." I see it in sentences like "This end-to-end solution gathers data from sources across the enterprise and delivers it in a single interface that is transparent to the end user." Isn't that cool? The "end user" can see right through that interface and into the inner workings of the computer and program. I have always wanted a "solution" that does that. Unfortunately, because there is no such "interface" available to the average customer, I know that what the solution actually does is gather the information from all kinds of places and put it into one screen or web page without the user having a clue that the information came from 100 databases and 28 servers that are located in 10 different countries.

After eight years of dealing with mission-critical applications and end-to-end solutions, I've had it. I can't take it any more. I am charged with editing some of the Web pages that advertise products sold by one of the biggest companies in the world and I'm slowly removing and replacing jargon with words that actually mean something. I'm hoping that this is a trend that continues.

Yep, my end-to-end solution for leveraging and optimizing marketing communications across the universe is to eliminate 21st-century jargon one page at a time.

Sports and Me

2006-06-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Something came to me last night as I watched two Hurricanes players streak down the rink toward the Edmonton Oilers' empty net and score with about a minute to play in the 7th game of the Stanley Cup Finals. As the puck hit the net, I knew then that the Carolina Hurricanes had won the Stanley Cup - the first North Carolina professional sports franchise ever to win a champoinship. At the same time, I realized, for the first time, that all the years I've thought I was a cursed sports fan were an illusion (or an allusion, given my penchant for stand-up comedy acts performed in the living rooms of others).

I used to dwell on all the NCAA basketball championship games that UNC should have won that they didn't; all the chances the UNC football team had to beat a ranked opponent to crack the Top 10 that ended in embarassing defeat; all the Super Bowls where the other team won; all the World Series games that the NL champion Braves have lost to wild card teams; all the times that Duke has beaten a favorite team and convince myself that I was doomed to pull for sports failures. Like my father, I could happily recount numerous games where the team I followed was either crushed mercilessly by its opponent or other games where my team (or player, in the case of tennis) seemingly had the win in the bag only to blow it in the last quarter or last inning or last 4 minutes of the half, or the last set, depending on the game. With that recounting came a certain satisfaction - it's easier to be funny (my goal is to have "She was funny" put on my tombstone) when you're talking about a loss or losses at the hands of the enemy.

As I settled down to watch the local news coverage after the game to see if the celebration in Raleigh was anything like the celebration in Atlanta, when the Braves won the World Series, I remembered that I had actually been in the home town or home state of championship winners more than once. In 1979, I was in the stands at the Gator Bowl when UNC upset Michigan. I was in Chapel Hill and a senior at UNC when Dean Smith won his first National Championship in 1982 with the storied team that featured Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Sam Perkins, and Jimmy Black, among others. That same year, I drove to Charlottesville, VA, to watch the UNC Men's Lacrosse Team beat Johns Hopkins and win the NCAA Men's Lacrosse title. I was in North Carolina in 1983 when State won the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament and still there in 1993 when UNC won again in 1993. I drove to Atlanta in early 1992 and watched UNC beat Mississippi State in the Peach Bowl. I lived in Atlanta when the Braves won the World Series (I've been a Braves fan since I was a little girl, because they were as close to a home team that the National League had for a North Carolina resident - the Orioles were out of the question because they were in the AL) in 1995. I should have been in North Carolina when UNC won the NCAA Baskteball championship again in 2005, but was actually in Peru due to an airline snafu.

Now, in 2006, I was a mere 7 miles away from the site where the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup and last night, I asked myself (after spending most of the game trying to follow superstitions so that I wouldn't jinx the team) why I thought I wasn't one of the luckiest sports fans in the world. Okay, maybe someone who was born in 1960 and who's pulled for the Dallas Cowboys or the UCLA basketball team all their lives might be seen as a luckier fan. But, somehow, I think that I'm more fortunate because I've pulled for teams that have overcome embarassing losing seasons to rise to the top. I'm going to try to enjoy the moments of glory my teams have earned over the years. I'm sure I can find some other way to be funny - such as discussing my boyfriend's compulsions. Of course, if UNC blows it in the College World Series this year, I might forget all this.....

My Unpaid Office Assistants

2006-06-05T06:49:00.000-07:00

My sister has started a blog that is devoted to telecommuting. She's decided to chronicle her first year as an official telecommuter. She's heard all kinds of things about whether you can telecommute and succeed, with most "experts" weighing in with the opinion (all they probably state their "opinions" as if they were facts - a disturbing trend that has created an entire news network devoted to stating opinions as "facts" - Fox News, or Faux News as the members of the Democratic Underground are wont to call it) that someone who telecommutes can't manage work or people as well as someone in an office. These experts, I firmly believe, are the same experts that announced (1) that using rock/Top 40 music in commercials would not be successful; (2) that there was no future for home PCs; (3) that Voice Over IP had too many problems to ever be a reliable method of sending voice over networks; (4) that no one will buy hybrid cars; (5) that if you are a mother and a career woman, both your parenting and career suffer because you can only do one thing in life well; and (6) that a college-educated, single woman in her 40s is unlikely to marry. In other words, they are people who are paid by fearful old men (and yes, I mean men) to promote Luddite and other antiquated philosophies.

So, I commented on my sister's blog that I'd been telecommuting on and off for six years and steadily for the last three years and that I'd managed to be quite successful at it. In my comment, I noted that I had three unpaid feline office assistants who did not talk behind my back about me at the office cooler. I thought it would be fun to write a little more about these assistants: Michiru (affectionately called "Sausage" because of her girth), Ping, and Finn.

Since I am the primary food provider at our house and I have a propensity for disappearing from said house for up to as many as three weeks at a time, when I'm at home, they've decided that they need to keep an eye on me as much as possible. Ping has the most rigorous duty in this respect. He follows me from room to room and can wear himself out if I happen to be cleaning the house. Fortunately for him, I don't clean the house as often as I work in my home office, which is fitted with a huge U-shaped desk and three computers (two laptops flank a Dell PC). There is still plenty of room on each side of the laptop for a huge, fluffy cat to lie down. (Ping is our biggest cat and he looks like he's a Maine Coon with lots of fur and a huge, bushy tail). Depending on the season, I tend to favor one laptop over the other. From October of any given year to March of the next, I work on an IBM laptop. So, Ping lies down to the left of the laptop, effectively blocking the fan. So, eventually, the poor laptop gets hot and shuts down to prevent damage. This usually happens while I'm in the middle of frantically trying to edit 7o or more pages in a Framemaker file.

From April to September, I usually work on the Compaq laptop and Ping lies in the space to the right of the laptop, generally knocking any papers I might be using for work to the floor if he happens to decide they're in the way. Fortunately, the fan is not located there. However, Ping lies with his huge tail either draped over the mouse or the keyboard. If I try to use either, he starts swishing the tail angrily. Eventually, he'll get up and walk across all the keyboards on all computers to go lie somewhere else (like the top of my defunct flatbed scanner/printer/fax that the cats ruined or the chair in front of my daughters' computer) for about 5 - 20 minutes before he returns. Or, he'll lie in the space behind the Compaq laptop and sulk, tail still swishing.

Sausage's responsiblity is more hostile monitoring of my work. I have a two-door wooden cabinet to the right of the U-shaped desk that I use to hide stacks of papers that I think might be important but don't want to look at. On the top is my collection of computer paper, my backup CDs, and office envelopes. She'll leap on top of the cabinet, knocking and crumpling paper or boxes that might be in her way to the ground, usually behind the cabinet, and settle herself in the tiny space between the computer paper and the box of envelopes. She'll sit there staring at me unnervingly for some time before going to sleep. She also firmly believes that the best way to get to that cabinet is to start by leaping on the flatbed scanner/printer/fax and walking across all three keyboards and using the operational printer to leap onto the cabinet. Michiru has also designated herself as the "Enough is enough" monitor and from time to time, she'll take actions to try to stop my work if she thinks I'm spending too much time in the office. Last summer, this entailed vomiting all over my IBM laptop while I was away for a weekend. The result of that was that the computer wouldn't turn on. When I tried to send it back to IBM to be fixed, they announced that they couldn't touch it because it was now a "biohazard." They issued me a new one and required that I send the computer back to the land of dangerous IBM laptops. I asked my boss if he thought I should obtain one of those "biohazardous" zip lock bags from my doctor and wrap the laptop in it. He said he didn't think I needed to go to such extreme measures.

Finn is a relatively new member of the family, having been adopted in October 2005 as a kitten. Since he is still learning how to be a cat, Ping and Michiru are his mentors and he's a very fine apprentice. His job is to protect my feet when I'm in the office. To do this, he goes under my desk and attacks my power strip and cable modem, because, apparently, cable modems and power strips become dangerous in the period from dark until dawn and they have to be beaten into submission each morning. As a result, sometimes the power to all my computers is shut down or I suddenly start getting dire warning from my laptops that "a network cable is unplugged." After the power strip and modem are sufficiently subdued, he curls up next to the cable modem for a short nap. Eventually, since the now harmless modem has been convinced to behave itself, he moves to the sofa and naps there until he decides it's time to go upset the birds and meows to go outside.

You're probably thinking, "What a sap this woman is. Obviously, she's one of those loonies who lets her cats run all over her. Why doesn't she just close her office door and prevent the cats from coming in?" Well, the answer to this question is that my home office is attached to the utility room/bathroom where we keep the cat food and litter boxes. They have to go through my office to get to those important items--actually, the food bowls are critical; the litter boxes are some sort of playground where the game is to move all the cat litter from the box to the floor. We've installed a cat door in the door between my office and the utility room because otherwise our dog goes in there and eats all the cat food out of their bowls (this is the same dog that can't eat out of her real food bowl - she has to carry the food in her mouth to another room, drop it on the priceless oriental carpet and eat only the bits she likes, leaving the rest, but the dog is a different story for another time). So, I can't lock the cats in there, either.

I also can't put the cats outside, even though they're indoor/outdoor cats. There is a door to the backyard in my office, and it's a very nice wooden door with beveled panels and nine panes of glass. The height of the panels before giving way to the glass panes is the perfect height for cats to leap up and dig their claws into so that they're hanging onto the bottom panels of the bottom row of glass panes. From that position, they meow frantically, scrabbling to stay hooked to the panels. Their meows sound exactly like the meows of a cat that has been horribly injured in a fight or by a car and they get progressively louder and more insistent as time goes by and I haven't let them in. Of course, at first Finn thought this was just a fun game to play and didn't understand that he was supposed to come in when I opened the door. So, he'd just continue hanging there meowing when I opened the door until finally letting himself down and running back out into the yard. Michiru also doesn't always come in. If she's decided that I've taken too long to get to the door, she drops to the ground and just stares at me with a look that says, "Since you took your sweet time coming to the door, I'm going to take my sweet time coming in." If I close the door on her, then she leaps over the backyard fence and onto the window that's directly above the Compaq laptop and meows frantically in the window.

So, those are my adventures in having feline office assistants. They probably think that they should all get yearly performance reviews with "Exceeds Expectations." Maybe they should. I figure that in some ways, they're still less destructive and annoying than human office workers who complain that I'm too loud when I talk on the phone or try to sabotage my work because they think I'm a threat of some kind....

April 12, 2006 - PERU!

2006-04-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I never got around to writing about 2005. Suffice it to say that I broke my wrist on January 1, 2005, I got to travel to New Orleans (once) in April, and Lima, Peru (March to April. twice in June, and once in July - four times) and I made a lot of new friends along the way. Most importantly, the UNC Tarheels won the NCAA Men's Basketball National Championship and I watched it all in Peru, thereby completely missing all the Coach K. commercials, as well as Billy Packer's slobbering praises of Duke and snide remarks about UNC. The saddest, most devastating event was Hurricane Katrina, which affected many of my friends and acquaintances in the Big Easy. My heart still hurts for everyone there.

Today's blog is about my most recent trip to Lima, which was for vacation and not for business. I took my mother. We flew from RDU to Houston and Houston to Lima on March 24, 2006, arriving at the airport at 12:01 on March 25. We left Lima on April 4, 2006, and arrived in Newark (first class thanks to my Elite status) on April 5. A few hours later we flew to RDU. We had an awesome trip - it was great for both my mother and me. Each day was an adventure, but the best part was how social we were. We had a social engagement with some or all of my friends almost every day that we were there.

We arrived at about 12:00 midnight on Saturday and my friend Julio (whom I got to know in 2003 when a huge group of us were in New Orleans working on an automation project for the container terminal at Napoleon Avenue) and his friend Juan Carlos were waiting to drive us to the hotel. (It is important to note that Juan Carlos is a very popular name in Peru - possibly because of King Juan Carlos of Spain. I have met 6 Peruvian men named Juan Carlos). Since we didn't go to sleep until after 2:00 Saturday morning, we took it easy that day and walked to the stores I knew near the hotel to get water and a few other staples. I took Mom to two local department stores and we had ice cream at my favorite gelateria. That night, I introduced her to Pisco Sours, which is practically the national drink of Peru. It's created with a wine from the Pisco department of Peru (although the wine is very strong and is more like tequila than table wine), lime juice, egg whites, and bitters.

On Sunday, Julio and Juan Carlos drove us two hours south of Lima to a place called Lunahuana where we had lunch at a nature preserve that featured over 50 different kinds of fruit trees and an splendid herb garden. We ate traditional Peruvian seafood and tried a bunch of different fruit drinks. The drive there wove along the Pacific coast of Peru before winding back up into the hills along a river (which I think is the Rimac River, which also runs through Lima). We left at about 11:00 and returned at about 6:00. We invited Juan Carlos and Julio to have drinks with us at the bar and after that, we had a light supper and retired, because my mother was a bit tired after all the traveling.

On Monday, we slept in, had a great breakfast, and looked over the guide books to decide what to do that day. My mother wanted to buy a Peruvian notebook, some pens, and coffee, so we went to a store called Metro, which is the Peruvian equivalent of Wal-Mart (only much nicer). We had a hilarious interlude when my mother had to use the rest room and we couldn't remember how to ask for a public restroom. We were directed to the bed and bath section of the store, where we spent about 15 minutes trying to explain that we wanted to use the bathroom, not buy bathroom items (I was saying "no para comprar, para usar" and my mother was trying to describe them as rooms for men and women). Finally, we were understood and my mother was escorted to the bathrooms. We bought all those items, as well as some coffee mugs. My mother decided she wanted to go shopping, so after lunch at my favorite cafe across the street from the hotel, we went to the Jockey Plaza mall, and I found a really cool skirt made in Peru and she found some presents for Mary, Anna, and my sisters. We really enjoyed the first-rate, courteous service you get at all the stores. My mother got tired again, so we had another quiet evening in the hotel and watched a couple of movies on television.

On Tuesday, we spent most of the day at the Museo de Nacion, which is Peru's national museum. It details the history of Peru from pre-Incan times to the present and has a wonderful collection of artifacts collected at various architectural sites. We had an excellent guide who taught us a lot about Peru and stressed the fact that Incas are only the tip of the iceberg for the history and that the pre-Incan peoples were just as amazing, if not more so, with their agrarian planning and knowledge of astronomy. The most interesting thing I learned, however, was that a community/society has recently been discovered in Peru that might be the oldest in the world. The place is called Caral (I think) and it is still being excavated by archaeologists. Our guide said that it might be open to the public sometime in 2007 - so I hope to go back not long after that.

We saw a great replica of the Nasca lines and several tombs. There were also some beautiful Peruvian textiles and an intriguing art exhibit that we saw as we tried to find the museum store. My mother was hoping to buy postcards at the store, but most of them were for places other than Lima. Instead, she bought a book about the Nasca Lines and I bought a small present for Wayne. After our long day at the museum, we had another quiet evening, with delicious soup Criolla for dinner. We watched television, which is entertaining for me because a lot of the shows are in English with Spanish subtitles and sometimes the subtitles aren't quite right, although for the most part, the translators do a really good job, especially since American TV shows use phrases like "Stick a fork in it, it's toast," or "You gotta walk the walk first, pal." They obviously don't use literal translators like the ones you get on the Web because the manage to paraphrase the sentiments of our phrases pretty well. Anyway, I enjoyed reading the subtitles for CSI and Law and Order SVU.

On Wednesday, we went back to Metro to look for postcards and were sad to discover that they didn't have any. Then, we went to TSS, the company where most of my Peruvian friends work and met another Juan Carlos for lunch. He took us to a wonderful Italian restaurant called Donatello's and we had the luxury of enjoying an excellent Chilean wine with our lunch, since I was on vacation and didn't have to go back to work like I did last year when I was there on business. Lunch was quite long, so we went back to the hotel and my mother had a nap, while I went out to get more water.

That night, I had dinner and drinks with Julio at a Chinese Restaurant ("Chifa"). The Chinese food in Lima is really good - it reminds me of the Chinese food you can get in London which I think is closer to real Chinese food than what you can get in North Carolina. We had a great discussion about our family lives and our thoughts about our careers. He reminds me of my daughter Anna, who has mapped out a very clear path for her life, as he has. My goals haven't changed, but I took a more scenic route to attain them and am not averse to detours. After dinner, he suggested we get one more drink at a place called "Longhorn's" and I told him that at a place with that name, we had to have margaritas, not Pisco Sours. So, we did, and I was pleasantly surprised at how good their margaritas are (better than the one I tried the last time I was in Lima).

On Thursday, we slept a little later than usual and lingered over breakfast. We walked to get money from an ATM machine and had more coffee when we returned. After that, we had lunch with my friends from TSS at a restaurant that has a wonderful selection of seafood and ceviche. Lima is a coastal city and there is seafood in abundance there. The ceviche I like is ceviche mixto, which is a mixture of uncooked white fish and shellfish, marinated in lime juice and served with the sauce thinly sliced red onions, along with Peruvian corn and sweet potatoes. In the past, I've eaten at cevicherias that also offer a cooked version of ceviche mixto served up with rice - kind of like a seafood jumbalaya - and a fried version, where the mixed seafood is fried similar to Calabash style seafood.

After lunch, my mother and I took a taxi to an Adobe temple (c. 400 A.D.) in the middle of San Isidro, the garden district of Lima. It has a nice, small museum there and after you tour the museum, you can walk up to the top of the Adobe temple and you get a wonderful view of the homes and rooftops in San Isidro. Due to past unrest and burglaries in Lima, most residences are behind huge walls with electric wiring on top. You can't get much of a picture of what the residences are like from the street, but you get a great picture from on top of the temple. My mother was afraid to walk down by herself (because there was no handrail), so a security guard came and got her down. We decided to walk back to the hotel because it was a safe walk near a park and the weather was beautiful. It was a really nice walk, even though the map we were using didn't have the street names printed on it correctly and while we were trying to figure out what to do, a security guard that was watching a very nice house came out to help us and before long so did the resident of the house, who gave us the right directions. We also found postcards in a little shop on our walk and my mother was really happy about that.

That night, we had both been invited to have dinner with Julio and "his" Juan Carlos, but my mother decided she would rather have a soup and a drink at the hotel and not go out where she would have to speak Spanish (Julio's Juan Carlos, who is also Julio's business partner at their company, Agile-Works, does not speak English). Julio and Juan Carlos took me to a very nice restaurant near the ocean that specializes in Peruvian cuisine and I had a great dinner while we shared a bottle of Peruvian Cabernet Sauvignon. We talked about the plans for Agile-Works. On the way to the restaurant, I got an impromptu tour of the city at night while Julio and Juan Carlos debated whether to take the direct route or the scenic route. Miraflores and the ocean are quite beautiful at night, although it's hard to realize how breathtaking the ocean views are until you see them in full daylight.

On Friday, my mother and I went to Larcomar, which is a shopping center that specializes in Peruvian handcrafts, that is partially built into the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. There are spectacular views of the Pacific there, so we took a lot of pictures. We bought more presents for Mary and Anna, had a nice lunch and ice cream, and watched the different families and nationalities stroll by. That night, I went out drinking with four friends, three of which work for TSS and one who used to work for TSS but now works at a life insurance company. We went to a microbrewery in Miraflores, which is the part of Lima that tourists flock to for antiques and art shopping, as well as good food and to see the park that is dedicated to lovers. We had a great time together there and then went to a disco, where it was fun to watch the younger people dance.

Saturday was very full. We had been invited to a barbecue at another friend's house and they'd asked us to get some meat to bring to it. So, while my mother stayed in the hotel to get ready, I had fun buying ground beef, hotdogs, and chicken. We were picked up at about 2:30 and taken to the friend's house (his name is Nestor) where most of the guys that I worked with on the New Orleans project eventually congregated. The guys had a lot of trouble keeping the grill lit because of a cold wind that suddenly came up from the north. No one knew what to do with my hamburger, so I made patties and spiced them up with some Peruvian spices. Then, they didn't know how to flip them on the grill, so I demonstrated that as well. My mother, Nestor's wife Fanny, and I chatted while we helped her make salad and other side dishes, which were ready long before the grilled meat was. My mother worried that there was too much food until she saw the hungry young men descend on everything like a pack of well-behaved wolves and before long, no food was left. Then Fanny made us Pisco Sours (the best I've had so far in Peru) and we had ice cream for dessert. My friend Rale drove us home to rest for about an hour and then we were off to a pena, which is a show that showcases traditional Peruvian dances. We saw examples of dances from the coast, the southern highlands, the northern highlands, the Amazon jungle, Lima, and the dances created by the combination of African and native Peruvians. They also got everyone from different countries onstage and made them do what the emcee at the pena considered traditional dances, which for the U.S. was breakdancing (which I couldn't do because I was wearing a skirt) and the YMCA - LOL. They also had dancing between performances. We didn't get in until after 3:30 a.m.

On Sunday, we were invited to lunch at Juan Carlos de Vinatea's house (the one who invited us to have Italian lunch) and we had yet another fantasic meal, which was prepared by Juan Carlos's wife Martha. We also met his sister, who had lived for a year or so in Siliver Spring, and she and I got along really well. We talked a lot about our children and it was really nice and relaxing to sit in their beautiful, sunny home. We were tired, though, because of the long day we'd had on Saturday, so we went home at about 3:00 p.m. and just took it easy.

Our plane didn't leave until 11:00 p.m. on Monday, so after we had breakfast and packed, Mom went to the Central Business District and saw Lima's famous cathedral, which is beautiful. I decided to wait at the hotel because I was tired. Unfortunately, photographs of the interior weren't allowed, so she didn't take a camera. I'll have to go the next time I'm there and take pictures of the exterior when I go back. After that, we had lunch at the cafe, and searched for a place where we could download the pictures in the camera onto a disc, because Julio had lent us the camera after he learned that I hadn't brought my digital camera (the charger is missing) and my mother forgot hers. I'm happy to say that my Spanish had improved to the point where I could make them understand my questions and I could understand the responses. We had ice cream and returned to the hotel. After that, Julio arrived to pick up the digital camera. My mother went to the hotel mezzanine to take a nap and Julio bought me one more Pisco Sour for the road. He really was the star host on this visit - witty, entertaining, and very helpful.

So, as you can tell by this very long email, we had a wonderful time. Because it was the end of summer in Lima (they're in the southern hemisphere), the weather was gorgeous except for the afternoon of the barbecue where a mist and a chill wind blew up from the north. Everyone in Peru is so courteous and helpful and they love to ask questions about the U.S. They also want to know why I'm not married (!) and some wonder if the women in the U.S. are a cross from Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives. It's fun to tell them about our lives and to demonstrate that Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives are fictional. I like answering all of their questions about the U.S. I hope that my Spanish will improve to the point that I can understand them. I have less trouble speaking it but often when they reply to my questions in Spanish, I can only catch a word or two. My mother and I were a good team in that respect - she lived in Argentina when she was young and can understand Spanish, but she says she has a harder time remembering how to say things in Spanish. LOL

A week after we left, Peru had a presidential election. The candidate with the most votes (Humala) is someone that many think will return Peru back to the violent times of the 1980s and they're very worried about it. Humala did not win a majority, so soon there will be a second election between the top two candidates. Right now, it looks like Humala will face Alan Garcia, a former president, but there is a small chance that Humala might face Lourdes Flores, a woman who is friendlier toward the U.S. than Humala, who has implied that he prefers the stance taken by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela regarding the U.S. The reason that Humala is popular is that the citizens of Peru that do not live in Lima think that he'll do a better job of handling poverty in Peru. Sadly, the inequities between the rich and the poor are great in Peru. I just hope and pray that this beautiful country with its lovely people will not descend into violence and even greater poverty. I think that Peruvians have made me feel more welcome and treated me with more courtesy than any other country I've been to. I plan to go back in July this year (my daughter Mary has requested a trip as a high school graduation present) and, as long as the political climate allows it, many more times after that.

I've uploaded pictures of the trip on yahoo, and you can see them at http://photos.yahoo.com/ph//my_photos. You'll need a yahoo ID and password to see them. If you don't want to sign up for one, email me at falexander@flexi-word.com and I'll let you use mine.

Enjoy!

In Lima

2005-08-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

August 4, 2005. It's been over a year since I posted anything on this blog. I've had so many adventures since then. Anna, my younger daughter, turned 15 on August 11, 2004. She also became a freshman in high school, so I became a mother with two daughters in high school. I picked up an editing job with IBM in September 2004, became the mother of a daughter (Mary) with a learner's Permit, rode in the MS150 for the first time that same month, traveled to New Orleans to try to train Ceres staff on a system that they'd had in place since January 2004(!) and got to complain about those characters to my other friends at P&O.

One of my favorite parts of traveling to New Orleans is hanging out with my friend Will - while I was there, he left P&O Ports and landed a great job after I returned home. He's now working with his friend Todd Marshall, who was also part of the original GEM team from P&O. GEM, for those of you who don't know, is the name of the system that runs the automated gate for the Napoleon Avenue Container Terminal at the Port of New Orleans.

I don't remember much about October, other than meeting a great new group of people (my fellow editors and ITSO managers at the IBM 662 Building) and killing myself to edit RedPapers and RedBooks (as well as finish a freelance ghost writing project) while still handling GEM testing, support, and help (my full time job). I think of October 2004 as a blur of FrameMaker 7.0 and Word files and not much else. I seem to remember that the leaves were beautiful, though.

With November came a welcome respite from all the hard work - it was time for our 7th trip to Myrtle Beach (and the Caravelle Resort) for Thanksgiving. I had some adventures trying to use a touch screen at an Internet Kiosk located in the Caravelle registration building while handling Help Desk calls and during that time, I missed a hotel evacuation caused by some child or teenager pulling the fire alarm bell. Lucky me. When we returned home, my mother called with some very sad news; my cousin Katharine (whom we called Kathy for years) died in her sleep on the Friday after Thanksgiving. She was 50, I believe. She was six years older than me, but I'm not sure when her birthday was. We were closer when I was younger, but I loved her very much and her absence is quite noticeable on special occasions.

December is another FrameMaker 7.0 blur. I had a 660 page IBM Redbook on ThinkVantage Technologies and a TSM exam prep book to put together. I did have a fun evening out with some of the IBMers I work with early in December - we went out to Stonewood Grill, drank trendy martinis, and cracked each other up, but then it was back to all FrameMaker and "GEM Help Desk, May I help you" all the time. Wayne turned 48 on December 15 and I surfaced from my office (which looks like a NASA control center, thanks to all the computers in it) long enough to celebrate that with him, go Christmas shopping, and attend the annual Christmas Eve bash at the Hodges (Wayne's neighbors). By Christmas Eve, Wayne had not received an invitation from the Hodges, so he did a lot of hanging out in his front yard and trying to see if they were even going to have the party. Luckily, their daughter Millie caught him at his mail box and made sure that he knew we were invited. We had a great time as always. The next morning, we arrived at Wayne's to open presents and our gifts to Jeff (a poker-playing table top) and Christina (a new cordless phone that actually works) were a big success. Then, we were off to Charlottesville for the usual time with Lindsay and Dan, Mom and Daddy, Ian and Margaret, and all the dogs.

I returned home to finish up my work, while Mary and Anna spent that week with Alex. Wayne and I decided to go to Oriental for New Years' Eve (we went there on New Years' Eve 1999 for the Y2K non-event) because we had enjoyed ourselves there before. We had a great dinner at M&M's, trying chocolate martinis, and then hung out in the street for the 8:00 dragon parade. Wayne had all these noisemakers he had gotten from volunteering at a Hurricane's game, so we passed them out to the crowd and they were much appreciated. Oriental has a great New Years' Eve tradition - they create a dragon with a papier mache head and a long, long swath of canvas-type cloth with sticks, and certain townspeople and children go under the canvas and hold the sticks. A band plays and the "dragon" parades down the main streets of Oriental while the townspeople bang pots, yell, and click noisemakers (most of them thanks to us). We watched the parade again at 11:00 p.m. and rang in the new year very happily.

The first few hours of the New Year were great - but unfortunately, there would be an unwelcome break in the celebration during an afternoon bike ride. I'll write about the beginning of 2005 in another entry.

2004-07-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

A friend from Peru sent me roses for my birthday this year. I turned 44 - a nothing age, it seems.

Why I'm Here

2004-07-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

I wanted to comment on something my brother wrote in his blog, but I found out that I couldn't unless I had a blog, so here I am.