Category: General

My national Congressional represenative rocks!

I know, this should go in my political blog, but that’s been kinda defunct for a while. Maybe I’ll start it up again, or start another one.

I’ve totally come up with an idea that will let me write every day during the month of November, a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month. (I mentioned this a few days ago).

No, I’m not going to tell you what the idea is. You’re just going to have to tune in, starting on November 1st, to see how it turns out.

I’ve got the main character, the setting, what he’s trying to accomplish, and what the obstacles are. I’ve got a couple of different themes I want to explore. And beyond that (which I have, in fact, written down) I’m not going to think about it until November 1st, one day at a time after that. It’s going to be entirely improvised.

Because it’s improvised, I’m not going to be able to do a lot of research. So expect some mistakes and expect me to use a lot of locations and events from my own experience. You have been warned.

I will have a link in the sidebar to the novel, which will have a separate section of this site.

It’s going to be so cool.

I see that my webhost’s sysadmin was, in fact, on top of Mt. St. Helens, which clears up the mystery of which mountain he was on top of and what he was doing during the recent downtime, as I posted about previously.

So, congratulations, Caleb! Looks like you can now join the Mazamas!

• “The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1915 to 1950” by E. Kimbark MacColl, 1979
• “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, 2006
• “Fragile Things” by Neil Gaiman, 2006
• “Breaking The Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon” by Daniel Dennett, 2006

So… one history text, one fiction (short stories), and two atheistic books (the very definition of “non-fiction”, heh). Quite a lot. And, yes, I tend to read more than one book at a time. It’s a habit I’ve developed over the years and it serves me well. The above list is in the order in which I’ve added the books to my list.

I may at some point make this a regular feature, if only because they’re easy to generate and I’m reading all the time.

I may also, at some other point, update this particular post, and any future posts, with actual book reviews or maybe short descriptions of what I think of the books I’m in the middle of, or more details, or something.

I may also, at some other other point, update these to reflect actual book citation conventions, if only to satisfy my own inner pedant.

I could come up with a separate list of books I’ve started but haven’t been able to finish. I may do that, at some point that’s different (probably) from the other, afore-mentioned other points.

My apologies for the downtime on Friday. My webhost’s sysadmin was on top of a mountain. Perhaps he was searching for that lost boy? I’m not sure, since I don’t know which mountain he was on top of. And he does crazy things like rock climbing as a hobby so he might have been up there for pleasure, not altruism.

At any rate, I have so much to write about that I can’t write. It’s a terrible, terrible state to be in. I could write about the craziness at work. Or the side-effects of my running… except that I’ve got another blog for that.

Today I planned on eating a modest breakfast or lunch, and then finding a quiet coffee shop with free WiFi, from which to write. I just wanted to enjoy some delicious caffeinated beverages and pour my thoughts out, and hopefully give greater shape to my vague idea of a novel. And maybe blog some (hey, like I’m doing right now! Yay!).

And in the course of walking around my neighborhood I walked past Wallace Books, a small independent bookstore. And, since my amorphous novel is set in and around Portland, I was thinking about the history of Portland, and that led me to think of books I know about Portland, and that led me to this series of books by E. Kimbark MacColl*, an historian and former adjunct instructor in the Graduate Program in Public History at Portland State University. Every time I go to Powell’s to see if they have the books, they either don’t have them, or they’re used but fairly expensive. Of course that’s to be expected since the books are both small-press and out of print, but it never hurts to shop around.

So into Wallace Books I stepped.

And was greeted by a graceful, slender, distracted but still beautiful brunette, in her 30s, wearing a dark brown long-sleeved form-fitting t-shirt, and a long skirt that appeared to be made of dark gray cotton candy. It was fleece-y and nappy and looked as if it would fall apart in a stiff wind or if it got wet. A young teenage (?) girl, blonde hair, was also behind the counter, but on the computer.

Sitting right next to the main counter was a table of books about Portland. How lucky is that? I scanned the titles but didn’t see the one I wanted. So I asked the gray-skirted woman if they had other books about Portland. She then led me back into the recesses. The store occupies an old house, and every room has been fitted with bookshelves overflowing with books. It’s a lot like my dream house, actually, except I’d want more comfy places to sit, and maybe a small kitchen, but otherwise perfect. The woman showed me the section on Portland and Oregon and pointed out the sub-sections, like fiction and local authors, or the books on hiking, biking and the outdoors.

I told her that I was looking for books by Professor MacColl, and spelled his name. She left me to browse and said she’d look him up to see if they had any record of his books.

Having worked in a bookstore many years ago, and just being generally familiar with such things, I can scan a bookshelf fairly quickly to find a specific author or title. And within just a few seconds, I had spotted the exact title I was looking for: “The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1915 to 1950”. It was the only title from MacColl on the shelf, but this was the volume that covered the time-frame I was most interested in! And it was a modestly-priced $17.95, a good $7 cheaper than the last copy I’d seen at Powell’s. I scooped it up and brought it back up to the front, where I raised it triumphantly for the brunette and teenager.

“That’s amazing! This is the exact book I was looking for!”

She smiled and murmured words of congratulations, and I dug out my debit card. While waiting, I leafed through the book, and the woman processed my payment, having to reach around the teenager to do so. When the brunette saw what the young girl was looking at, she said, “Oh, you got into your schoolwork?” I glanced up, and saw some webpage with bright primary colors displayed.

The girl agreed. The woman said, “Then you have no excuses for doing your homework! But…” she paused, smiling. “Are you going to go get me some coffee? You said you’d go in five minutes, and that was ten minutes ago!” The young girl mumbled something and smiled, pretending to be intent on her homework. The woman then playfully bumped the girl to the side, as if to knock her out of her chair and get her started towards the coffee shop. The girl grunted and giggled, and the woman repeated the bump.

I smiled and looked up, and the woman met my eyes. “Hey, if you can’t beat your own children, who can you hit?” she asked me facetiously.

Hmm, that’s her daughter, I thought, and they look nothing alike. Wonder where the father is? I stole a glance at the brunette’s left hand and saw no ring. She may have seen me look, but since she was holding my debit card at the moment I had a perfect excuse.

I laughed and agreed. “I just have a nephew** to beat, and it’s fun but not the same thing.”

“Hey, you take what you can get!” she said, and handed me my receipt to sign.

I wandered out of the store, thinking that I’ll have to shop there more often.

* I find it shocking that Professor MacColl does not (yet) have a page in the Wikipedia. I intend to fix that shortly.

** In fact, I have three nephews and a niece, of various ages. In the moment I was only thinking of Max because he’s the only nephew with whom I could rough-house. Both of my other nephews are adult men and much taller than me (hi, oldest nephew!); yes, they’re good sports but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. And my niece is 6 years old. For this shameful lack of accuracy and omission, I plead forgiveness – I was flirting (ineffectively) and not in my right mind at the time.

12 days and counting since the last post on Erraberra’s blog.

If you’re reading this, click over and send Tracy some ideas on what you’d like her to post next.

Ask her about her headlight, for example.

This has been a service of Blogwatch.

Just to balance out all my fanboy gushing over Apple, I’m linking to a huge oops from them.

Seems that some new iPods are shipping with Windows viruses on them.

Yeah. Dumb. That’s not a good corporate citizen, Apple. First the funny accounting, and now this?

If they do a commercial for this, they should have the “I’m a Mac” guy bring out a cute little kid and introduce him as an iPod. And the kid has got a runny nose and fever and keeps sneezing without covering his mouth. And the “I’m a PC” guy will try to run away from the kid but the kid jumps up on him, and barfs all over the PC guy’s suit. And then the Mac guy just laughs and laughs and laughs, and then suddenly stops, becomes serious, and apologizes.

Just a reminder, for any writer-ly leaning readers of mine.

National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo) begins on November 1st.

The idea is simple, really: write 1,667 words a day for one month (the organizers, if you can call them that, picked November), without editing or much advance thought at all, towards that novel that you’ve had in the back of your head for years, and get ‘er done.

I, however, seem to have gotten started early. I’m so tempted to post pieces of my novel-in-progress on my blog. But even though I’ve got that Creative Commons badge in the left-hand sidebar, I’m still a bit spooked by the idea of people stealing my words and claiming them for their own.

I still might post bits and pieces of it… or I might make y’all beg me for it. I’m kinda mean (and needy) that way.

Or maybe not.

Everyone knows what an iPod is, right? Apple’s music and movie player, iconic white (although the nano is available in colors now), easy to use, everywhere? <a href="
http://www.apple.com/ipod”>Here’s a link, just in case.

OK, now, how about the Zune? Microsoft’s Zune? Anybody? Hello? I can hear you breathing out there, people!

The Zune is Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. It hasn’t shipped yet, so Microsoft has announced a bunch of features for their iPod killer*, like built-in WiFi so you can share songs wirelessly, and it comes in the blandest, most boring color of brown (yes, brown) that you’ve ever seen. Although if you’re old enough, and you had one of those hand-held Mattel football games, you might recognize the color. So you just know that Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer had a personal say in the exact color they’re using.

Yes, yes, and it’s going to run on the batteries forever and a day, and you’ll get laid, and it’ll even julienne fries. Yawn.

So Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and coolest guy in the tech industry, gets asked about the Zune. Specifically, if he’s worried about it:

“In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.”

…Um, yeah. Is it any more obvious that Steve Jobs gets it? And Microsoft doesn’t?

* Tee-hee! I have to giggle everytime someone uses that phrase, and not just for a Microsoft product! EVERY music player that comes out is described as an iPod killer. Except that, y’know… they don’t kill anything, and Apple just keeps making money hand-over-fist with iPods.

If I could buy a loaf of bread that was all heels, I would.

Because I love the heels that much.