What I should be doing

No, I shouldn't be out walking catching my reflection in the mirrored windows of the deco building at 8th and Nueces. Or maybe I should be. But I'm not. I'm inside and I'm just sort of reveling in the fact that I can stay home and do whatever I want. Yesterday, I canceled my tennis game and stayed inside the condo all day except for a trip to our parking level to help FFP in with some groceries. I'd reached the point in fighting my allergies (?) (cedar fever?) where I was feeling OK (Headache: no; Drippy nose: a bit; Sore throat: no;) but I was also feeling a little bleary from the decongestants. I don't take the non-drowsy kind because I did those once and they made me, um, too excitable. I prefer bleary and sleepy, thanks. But after some Advil and decons in the morning, I didn't take any thing else the rest of the day. I slept fine last night without the overnight cold medicine that took me through the night before.

We slept until almost nine o'clock yesterday. I'm blaming the medicine in my case. I think FFP got up and then just came back to bed to join me in Z's. We might have slept longer yesterday but FFP's mother called. They had decided their smoke alarm might not be working.

"Tot [my father-in-law's nickname] poked it with a broom stick and it didn't beep."

"I think I have some 9 volt batteries."

"I think you fixed it for us before."

So, we got up. We never sleep that late. The overnight drug got me some sleep at least. (This morning I was up much earlier.)

I did a few bits of financial stuff yesterday including getting three more bits of paperwork for the business ready to go to three different IRS addresses. [LB: That Geithner guy has me seething! If you are that big a fish, you have a CPA. If your CPA doesn't do better than that, you and he both should be locked up! The message is: you only have to follow the rules if you are a little punk like me. Ed Note: Save it for the Journal of Unintended Consequences.]

So I should be doing a lot of things, but, instead I'm blogging and reading the newspaper and surfing the WEB. So sue me.

I've thought a bit about the novel in the last couple of days. I had to tweak an earlier paragraph a tiny bit, but no biggie.

So here goes:

Cliff thought about playing a little tennis and how nice that would be. He played some in London or Paris or New York, but never in the winter. He pulled himself up short from thinking about maybe hitting some with young Charlie. "This shouldn't be a vacation," he thought. Rachel was looking down at a phone now so he pulled his out. He still hadn't responded to her comment about Austin's urban status. He looked at his e-mail, incoming texts, missed call numbers. He'd listened to a lot of voice mails from strangers and he didn't see any missed call numbers that inspired him to listen to any more. Some of this stuff, he'd eventually have to take care of, he guessed. He could avoid the journalists and the geeks but he figured he'd eventually have to talk to some of these law enforcement types. "When I get settled in and get some privacy," he thought, "I'll try to figure out how to talk to as few as possible and get them what they need from me." Which was, of course, going to be nothing of value. Even though he was responsible for the guys going to Berlin, he had been as surprised as anyone that they'd gone there until he re-examined his clues. An unfortunate ambiguity. And he certainly had no idea who had decided to do a multiple suicide attack on the memorial and take tourists out. And why they were there mystified him. Although he could see it. They'd reached a deadend and hadn't found the clue and so they were just being tourists while they thought about it.

It's at this point that I throw up my hands. The two friends need names, ages, back stories, girlfriends, wifes. Children? How did the Jilly character get a kid anyway? As a matter of fact how did she come to be named Jilly Kraft and how can I make sure that I remember everyone's name and backstory? Do I need to make a separate document for bios? And should I post it in my blog? You see the dilemma. I don't know how anyone writes a novel.

But I digress.

So, yeah, I stayed in yesterday and I have to say that I mostly wasted time. I ate some leftovers from the Clay Pit (where we went Friday night after seeing an IMAX movie "Space Station" and hearing Richard Garriott talk about his experiences going to space). I ate a grapefruit. I read newspapers, worked crosswords. I watched a movie, rented from Netflix, "Man on Wire." It was about the French entertainer and wire walker who walked between the WTC towers. The name of the movie came from the complaint written on the police report. That is a good movie. It's good to have weird dreams you share with weird friends. Pogonip sees that. He sees the humor of using the world as a giant game board, not for world domination, but just to eventually meet your friends for food and drink. I watched bits of old movies, too. "Paint Your Wagon." Caught the best parts of that one, I think.

Right now I'm sitting here feeling good that I'm not too congested and my nose isn't dripping too much. It's been twenty-four hours since I took something. I could go exericise a little. I could do something useful on my budget and finances. Being retired, you have to watch such things more closely. Being retired, you have the time.

Well, maybe another cup of coffee. And a bit more blogging.

Shadow Me

I'd been noticing a scratchy throat and fighting it off with hope and Echinacea. (The latter may not boost the immune system but I believe it does so maybe it has a placebo effect.) FFP was feeling poorly for a few days, too. We chalk it up to allergies as we don't seem to have fever, but who knows? I feel like a shadow me, not quite in touch with my world when I have to take decongestants so that I don't have to have a Kleenex permananently attached to my nose. I can't take the "non-drowsy" formula because they make me crazy. Right now I'm trying to time my decon effects to see if I can go out to a movie tonight and not sniffle or cough. I haven't developed a cough yet but that may come. For some reason I was sweeping up in cyberspace and realized I had a similar attack last year at about the same time.

I hope it is really just allergies and I'm not (and wasn't yesterday before I felt as bad) infectious. Because I went over to Dad's yesterday and I'm always afraid of giving the old folks something. Of course, they all (including FFP actually) had 'flu shots and I did not. Still no aches, no fever. Probably allergies.

One always tries to rush these things, to change the shadow before the angle of the sun moves. But it always just takes a certain amount of time. Just like the healing on my strained knee and stubbed toe and the cycle of all my chronic little tics and ups and downs. The earth turns and sometimes you feel a lot better before you stop feeling at all. I am barely dripping at all right now, two hours in on another dose of decongestant. Maybe I'll get a cup of tea. I already have a round of sympathy from FFP. I take these same pills when I fly to stabliize my ears so they will pop. So it reminds me of flying to take them. Yeah, if I'd been on that plane from LaGuardia to North Carolina, I would have probably fallen asleep while it was on the tarmac and the whole thing would have been like a dream to me. I was on one flight one time where we landed in an emergency 'brace' mode. Everything was fine...the computer that showed the status of something was messed up. But some people still got hysterical and were still hysterical the next day when we were rebooked to fly again after staying an unexpected night in London. (We were flying from Zurich to Chicago.) I am amazed that those people in the Hudson managed to be as calm as they had to be to save themselves.

Bits and Pieces

Tuesday I read a review of Diana Athill's new book about growing old. Old age is much on my mind and, in my random reading, it happened that I was reading another book by Diana Athill. (This book, Stet, I bought in London at some point and it discusses her experience in the publishing industry. At some point it came to rest in FFP's car and, when I happen to be in his car, I read a few pages.)

I've been thinking about death and old age a lot lately. (Yeah, I know. I think about those a lot. See labels on right.)

But, anyway, life and death reminds me of a random collage, kind of like the wall above. We deal with this, decide that, go back and forth and there is all this random stuff and then whammy...this one certain end.

My dad has been going through a period of adjustment since his car wreck. He has been getting rides places and getting errands run by folks, including me. It's obviously disconcerting for him not to have a car, but with his vision problems driving at night is impossible and he already didn't like driving to certain places because of parking issues or traffic. He has had some interesting reactions to it all. He has threatened to call a taxi a few times, but has, in fact, not done so. He has called friends to bum rides. He declared that he was going to "go a month without a car." (Tomorrow that month is up.) He has declared different amounts he estimated that it cost him to own a car, how much to insure it per day, etc. And, in a possibly unrelated train of thought, he told me the other day that he was "going to live to 112." I could see myself, 80-odd years old, trying to see after him. He revised this downward a decade a few days later, only to reassert 112 yesterday. He manuevered his own giant recycling container back up the steep yard to his garage to "see if he could do it." I don't know what's going on with him except that giving up owning a car (or at least considering it) is a big step and he's adjusting to it, thinking through possibilities.

The review for the Diana Athill book quotes her on the car subject:

“Your car begins to represent life. You hobble towards it, you ease your unwieldy body laboriously into the driver’s seat — and lo! you are back to normal. Off you whiz just like everyone else, restored to freedom.”

But we never know when death will come. A few minutes ago I heard a plane had landed in the Hudson River but it now seems that everyone may have survived. They live. But to die another day.

Because death never gives up. To quote the book review above, quoting a Julian Barnes' book:

In his recent meditation on death, “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” Julian Barnes wrote, “Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down.” He added, “You would buy shares in death, if they were available.”

Yeah, death. A sure thing. It's life that's puzzling.

Pros and Cons, A Study in Yellow

Yellow is such a sunny color. Used judiciously, with some larger splashes of red, against a more muted butterscotch, white, gray and wood tones, it can add some decorating spark. One of the things I like about our new place, is that there is a sort of coherent decorator's touch throughout, not just in certain rooms like in our old house. [The picture above is a reflection in the window of the West Sixth Street store, ArtWorks, which I used because of the yellow and the glassware. Yes, glassware is part of our decorating scheme, in spite of the need for dusting!]

So, yeah, it's time to outline the pros and cons of living in our new condo as opposed to our old house. I'll not try to imagine living somewhere entirely different. That's too unrealistic. That's beyond my imagination skills, probably. Remember how much trouble I have with fiction after all!

Actually, rather than be negative and talk about pros and cons, I think I'll talk about pros and pros. First the pros of living here. Then some things we might miss from the old place.

So, yeah, here are the things that are nice about our current abode:

• We have achieved a complete 'look' throughout by bringing only certain furniture, buying new stuff, building in custom cabinets, etc.
• We have only 1200 square feet or so. This is good on many levels. It forces immediate consideration of where to put stuff and whether to keep it. It means there is less floor to clean, fewer things to clean in general. By trimming down the books and 'artifacts' (art, toys, old martini shakers, etc) to stuff we really love, we have created a look we enjoy and we can find some of our favorite books. Sometimes anyway. The small space made us trim our computer gear and make it wireless and it's pretty sleek. We ditched old TVs and got flat screens. Groovy.
• We were forced to get DirecTV. This turned out not to be a positive, though, in one way, because we got to see "Friday Night Lights" on their exclusive channel ahead of the network.
• Taking out the garbage is easy. No taking a big container to the street in the rain, no worrying that it will be too full, no worries about slide days. Just take the garbage out every time you fill a 13 gallon sack. Walk a dozen steps down the hall. Open the chute and drop. Things too big for the chute require an outing to the loading dock, but there you go. You don't have to get out in the rain. If, you know, it ever rains again.
• No yard to water here, though. People always asked us if we didn't love the yard. But when we were out there we saw ponds that needed cleaning, areas that needed weeding, trees that needed trimming, grass burning up during drought and water rationing, paths that needed remulching, etc. We don't maintain the plants on the pool deck. We see flora and fauna galore on the hike and bike and any maintenance is in our tax bill to the city.
• It's warm inside! We have not run the heater this winter except to test it. The window insulation must be pretty good and we are surrounded by other units. It's in the thirties this morning and the temperature a foot from the windows is 72 degrees. We did have to run the AC a fair amount during the hot times.
  
• You can walk! We can walk to Whole Foods, to a little grocery, to the dry cleaners (although they also pick up and deliver), to my new dentist, to Long Center, to the Paramount, to the University (that's a bit far afield but we've done it a few times), to the hike and bike (without crossing a street!), to Alamo Ritz and Alamo South Lamar. We have two, soon to be three, restaurants in the building. We will soon have a grocery in the building. We can walk to a half dozen or more coffee shops and none of them are Starbucks. We can walk to Starbucks if we are so inclined. We can walk to uncountable restaurants and bars. We can walk to gift shops, furniture stores, clothing stores. We set up an account with a nearby bank and our broker has an office we can walk to as well. We can walk to some interesting neighborhoods, to do weird shopping on South Congress (although it is becoming a little posh and weird is being pushed to South First and South Lamar but we can walk there, too).
  
• Since things are more dense, we have a lot of friends that we can meet on our feet. We have friends in the building, friends in the AMLI, the Monarch, Austin City Lofts, Nokonah.
  
• We are next door to Ballet Austin. When they have events in the Austin Ventures Studio Theater, we are right there.
• We are next door to the Austin Music Hall. Ditto on events there.
• We are next door to La Zona Rosa. Ditto on events there.
• We can walk to the Capitol. The lege is in session. Maybe we should go listen in.
• We can walk to City Hall. If we want to attend a meeting, no problem. Walk a couple of blocks, go through the metal detector.
• We can walk to the Courthouse. We vote there, whether early or on election day.
• Mail is delivered to a box so you can just go down and pick it up and not have to worry about it sitting on the porch. Packages are delivered to the concierge.
• Newspapers are delivered inside to your door. No soggy papers. No trip out into rain or cold to get them.
• The concierge is there 24/7. Sometimes they can help with issues.
• People can't knock on your door without getting into the building. Our friends in the building can get to our floor (it's an amenity floor), but they are mostly kind enough to call. So unexpected knocks have been minimal here. No solicitors.
• Exercise! All that walking plus to lift weights or ride the recumbent bike or walk the treadmill, I just walk a few dozen steps to the exercise room. I could go down the stairs and swim in summer although I didn't do that. I still drive to the club for tennis and occasionally work out there, but this is very convenient. I could take pilates or yoga at Ballet Austin if I were a class-taking sort. When I'm in the gym, I can take a break and go get a towel, go to the bathroom, switch out reading material, etc. in the condo and then go back. The gym was three plus miles away from the manse.
  
• Internet Access. The Internet Access in the building has been pretty reliable. I set up my own wireless router and it's easy to log in anywhere. At the manse, I had pretty good service, but I had to maintain some routers and wires and multiple wireless routers.
• It's only steps to anything. That's back to the 1200 square feet, but if you want a cup of coffee and you're at the computer, it's a dozen steps. Bathroom, right there. Back and forth from TV to laundry to office to kitchen, a few steps. I set up a DVR and DVD player and flat screen in the bedroom but we rarely watch there. The living room is steps away.
• I don't lose FFP as much. He can still wander off in the building or all of downtown, but if he's in the condo I can find him. Sometimes in the old manse I would literally go see if his car was in the garage before I knew if he was home. Even if he was home, he might have wandered outside. People who called laughed when I couldn't find him! I like bouncing things off of him in the office where we work back-to-back. I used to call or send him e-mail! OK, sometimes we still send e-mails. Shut up.
• If you have an event downtown at rush hour, you don't have to participate in rush hour!
• You can be in the midst of big deal downtown nights (Halloween, New Year's Eve, game night) but aloof, up in your tenth-story condo observing the madness without being part of it.
• If we go out of town (we haven't been able to do this much), we can just go and not worry too much about somebody watching the place. The concierge can hold the papers. Or we can get someone in the building to pick up mail and papers (if we don't stop them). Much easier to go out of town.
  

I could go on and on. As I often do. But let's just list some things I miss from the old house.

• Being able to crank up some music or WEB site with noise or something on TV in my office without disturbing FFP. The funny thing is, I didn't watch TV or listen to music in my office that often. Now I seem to itch to do it because it would disturb someone else! I listen to music or watch TV sometimes when he is gone.
• Being able to store stuff until you felt like dealing with it. I had closets, a storage room, vast linear feet of shelves in book cases, a commodious garage, scads of kitchen cabinets, a huge pantry, built-in drawers, shelves, media cabinets, two deco bars with storage, etc. The downside of this was the constant need to do a major cleanup that culminated in the great downsizing of 2007/2008. But back in the day I could freely start collections. I could buy things I found interesting and I'd be able to stow them away somewhere.
• Having the car readily at hand and protected from the elements. We had a large two car garage that held the cars, the garbage cans and lots of junk. The cars were protected from rain, dust, hail, cats, birds, floating pollen. Here we have a covered garage but there are open sections and we park near those. Also, if you leave something in the car, you have to go to the elevator, go down, walk forty or fifty feet. Makes bringing stuff up a challenge sometimes and really makes you regret leaving something in the car by accident. At the house, the cars were right there just outside the house proper.
• Having friends be able to come by and just pull into the drive and they are right there. No parking downtown, no elevators. There is a down side to this, though. See above.
• Having the parental units close(r). FFP's parents were a walkable distance away and Dad was ten or so minutes closer. This isn't a big deal, but I wish they were closer.
• I could walk, from the old house, to Fonda San Miguel, Billy's on Burnet, Pacha, Upper Crust, Jorge's, a library (OK, I could walk to the main library from here and I don't do that either). I miss some of the old neighborhood. And walking around it. I suppose I could do what I used to in other neighborhoods and drive there and then walk! Must go to Fonda soon. I miss that proximity a lot.
• We could entertain a bunch of people. We had lots of fabulous parties there. Of course, there is no reason we can't entertain in the condo club room or our private clubs. And we have fun entertaining small groups in the condo.

I did love my house. But I don't really miss it. I have to work to come up with the reasons it was better. There are always pros and cons, decisions and compromises. I love living here. (Right now FFP is playing something loud on his computer. But it's for work he is doing.)

Well, it's time for me to wrap up my morning writing and go exercise. Then, maybe, a walk. But, I'm thinking of, ahem, writing another paragraph or two of the novel. Or, you know, completely rewriting the first four (1, 2, 3, 4) parts! I pledge, however, not to change any facts in the fiction. I might add details or clarify the language or change clumsy stuff or fix typos or tense problems or mistakes, but you don't have to reread it. Cliff Pogonip's path is set. We are just following him along and filling in the back story. I won't go back into that plane and put him in the First Class cabin.

Travel and Writing

What am I? Six years old? It seems I need a picture and then I can write about it like a kid in first grade. (Or in my case that would have been third or fourth when I finally learned to read, let alone write.)

I had a long walk through Old West Austin with a friend yesterday. We didn't really get to the part I call Clarksville. I've explored this neighborhood many times. (We used to drive here and then walk when we lived further away.) I always find out something new or find something that has changed, however. This picture was actually taken of a shop on West Sixth. I didn't take it on yesterday's walk. I think it was Friday's walk. Walking with a friend you find he has landmarks, too.

I have always been fascinated by maps and globes and, of course, travel. My walking buddy yesterday is a writer. A playwright to be specific. (He has completed plays and had some produced. He tried his hand at a novel, but it didn't work to his satisfaction.) We were talking about writing and he ask if I was working on the novel. I made many excuses (some aloud and some silent). I may have mentioned that I needed to do some traveling to get certain parts of the thing just right, detail-wise. Later, when I was talking about how we enjoy being sidewalk superintendents for all the construction downtown, he suggested that I just write about that and not have to go anywhere. But what would the fun of that be? It did kind of nudge me, though, about the book. I asserted that maybe the entire book was set in Austin and that the other stuff was just background. But important to me all the same. It made me think that maybe if I ever got the protagonist out of the airport (have to decide what season it is first) that I would send him into my very condo tower.

The phone rang once and was answered.

"Where are you?"

"On the concourse."

"Come out the middle exit and we are right here."

He recognized Jilly's voice. He had no idea who else was waiting.

When he walked past the stairs and escalator and out of the secure area there was Jilly and his busy seatmate from the plane.

"Oh," said the woman.

"Did you guys meet on the plane?" Jilly asked impatiently.

"Well," he began...

"We were seatmates." the woman continued. "But he didn't look like the pictures I had of him and I thought he'd be in First Class."

"And I, for my part, was not looking for anyone at all. I'm Cliff. Cliff Pogonip."

"Of course, she knows, this is Rachel Cline. Your New York representative!" Jilly said, laughing now.

"In my defense, I never saw your picture I don't think."

"Why weren't you in First Class? I booked that myself." Rachel said, returning to duty it seemed.

"When I got to the airport there was a problem. This guy had gotten injured on an overseas flight. Something about a runaway service cart. They wanted to get him home to Austin and needed a First Class seat. Guy was in front of me in line at the airport in a wheelchair with an airport representative. The person behind the desk was trying to boot someone who'd upgraded and was having trouble with the system and it was a real mess. I started talking to the guy and he explained that his foot was gashed and they gotten him stitches but it was swelling. I said to them, look, just downgrade me to his seat, he had a seat, and let's go. I'll be fine. They gave me a wad of upgrades."

"We paid for that ticket! Most of those folks in First Class used upgrades," said Rachel, momentarily outraged. "But that was nice of you, I saw that guy and he looked miserable and you have to feel for the airlines after they injured him, in a way."

"We have to get going," said Jilly who had answered her phone while Pogonip talked to Rachel. "Jack is coming around with the car. No luggage, right?"

Rachel and Pogonip nodded.

They emerged into the perfect cool, sunny sixty degree weather. It was January in Austin and on any given day it could be like this. Pogonip left his overcoat draped over his left arm. As they waited on the curb for Jack and the car, Pogonip noticed someone else from the plane waiting. A young man whose clothes looked German to him...the soft lines of the shoes, the material and cut of the pants and the jacket with lots of pockets and buckles and snaps were his clues.

They climbed into the mini van after throwing their hand luggage in the back. He knew how he'd get along with so little luggage...he had everything he needed here... but he had no idea about Rachel. Maybe she wasn't staying long. Rachel and Cliff got in back, Jilly in front.

"Where to?" said Jack. Jack worked for Jilly most of the time although sometimes for other clients of hers, older people who needed rides to appointments and such as well as her management skills.

"Four Seasons or the condo?" asked Jilly glancing around at Cliff.

Pogonip thought the Four Seasons would be nice. He might could be alone with his thoughts there a bit better. But he knew that everything he needed that he hadn't brought along would be easier to come by at the condo. Actually there were two separate condos although he didn't know what the arrangements for Rachel would be or even why she had come to Austin.

"The condo for me," he said diplomatically, giving, he thought, Rachel her choice.

"Rachel is going to stay at Four Seasons," Jilly said. "She's going to set up there and we are putting up some of the relatives there. You might want to stay there, too, but the condo might give you more peace and privacy really."

"Definitely. The condo. Drop Rachel off first, though, no hurry for me." He looked down at the carpet, feeling suddenly overwhelmingly sad and helpless. There was green dirt and a bit of yellow fuzz on the carpet.

Trying to shake off tears he said, "Been playing tennis?"

"What?" said Jilly. "Oh. Well, I've been taking Charlie to the club for lessons since you bought me the membership." She seemed nonplussed at how he might know this.

Cliff had bought the membership in her name because he could use it all he ever needed to as a non-resident guest. She seemed abashed that she'd used the club with Charlie, her son. Charlie was ten,or maybe it was nine, and he and Jilly were quite a team. Jilly had announced she was pregnant a decade ago and that was that. Nothing was ever said about a father. He'd never been involved with Jilly and he even thought maybe she'd used a sperm donor. He was with Celeste then. Celeste probably knew all the details but he'd never asked her. He liked the kid although his visits were not that frequent and he seemed to have grown a foot each time and exponentially more wise. Thinking of Charlie Kraft comforted him somehow and he shook off the sadness and moved back to resignation.

The van took the fork toward downtown and Pogonip looked up to marvel at the changes in the skyline.

"I've never been to Austin. I didn't think it would look so much...like a city." Rachel said, staring ahead and clutching her bag with the phones and probably other tools of organization on her knees.

Yeah...a few more paragraphs and we got the protagonist on the damn road to downtown. My walking buddy yesterday said, and I paraphrase here, that he didn't think he could ever finish his novel because of the impossibility of handling all the details. His novel was about (largely set in?) Viet Nam, too, so he'd have trouble going back and checking out the details. Even Viet Nam today wouldn't do of course.

Now I have to fly somewhere or pretend to fly somewhere and go out and drive from the airport to downtown. Damnable details. The last time I flew, I took the fork toward North Austin when going home from the airport. Anyway, there you go. My friend and I talked about how our fictions (his plays, my unwritten novels and short stories) are playing out in our heads even when not captured. We talked about taking people we knew and taking them forward in time. Or backward. Of course, I think the latter is what we always do...taking people we know and inventing or filling in the back story. How could we write about a character if we had no prototype? How about science fiction? Did you read Michael Cunningham's "Specimen Days"? Yeah, I could really get into the alien life forms in the third part of that one. I mean their emotions even. I listened to it on compact disks, I think.

Yeah, so I've written a little more of the novel. None of my readers (hi all five of you) have clamored to read more. I've introduced five people in the flesh and several by reference. I'm edited the three pieces that proceed this fragment (one, two and three) multiple times. I have made all these decisions about details and I'm lost in them. I told my friend yesterday that plays might seem easier but they consisted of the hardest part almost exclusively, dialog. He didn't disagree, really. But maybe I'm wrong!

The Beginning of 'Philanthropy'

That is your faithful journaler and FFP shaking hands with Dr. William Cunningham, the former president of The University of Texas. It is 1985. You are spared the 1985 glasses by our profiles. Twenty-four years ago. Wow. We were presenting a small endowed scholarship to UT for a female athlete studying advertising or communications. They have been good stewards of our money. We added a few small amounts but they have distributed scholarship money and, even after this year's economic woes, they have a large corpus of three times that initial investment or so. (I'm not sure exactly because I couldn't find the statement they recently sent. I did find a sales tax form I have to send in with a deadline in a week, though, so that's good. Even though I collected no sales tax, I have to file it. Writing service charges aren't taxable and that's all we book these days, no printing or other taxable stuff. But I digress.)

That was our first bit of significant philanthropy. I've used quotes around it in the title because, really, our contributions hardly qualify. My joke is: "I always dreamed of being a philanthropist but I never had enough money." I wanted to go on fancy cruises, fly on private jets, eat in all the three star restaurants, too. Same problem.

But, seriously, that was the beginning of significant giving, such as it is, for us. FFP had dreamed of being able to give a scholarship at his alma mater. We'd become interested in the Women's Athletics and were impressed with the drive and the scholarship of a lot of the young women. We were young and we had never had a lot of money and we were very impressed with ourselves. We would later meet real philanthropists. People with millions to throw around. We never reached those heights, but I still enjoy the giving we can do, such as it is. And I wish that the UT people could have been convinced to handle some of my own money the last couple of decades!

Disoriented

I took this picture in a portrait mode, trimmed it and just didn't hit 'rotate 90 degrees clockwise.' [Ed. Note: Have you ever noticed that FFP always orients the camera so that photos have to be rotated counter-clockwise? LB: Yes, Yin and Yang and all that. If a photo is taken portrait-style on one of our cameras, there is a marker about who took it. Assuming, you know, we didn't hand the camera to someone else.]

It's disorienting not to rotate a photo before presenting it, isn't it?

I have a 'day off' today. Which means there is nothing on the calendar. FFP has a cold or allergies so he might not feel like a walk or a movie which sound like good ideas to me. I can go to the gym, read the papers, drink coffee (wait, already been doing the last two). There are a few chores I probably should do. (FFP already started doing some laundry. He also removed the recycling from the condo yesterday and did some dishes.)

Not having anything scheduled is delicious and yet disorienting. Too many choices!

I guess that's why working is sometimes the best thing for the attention-deficit wracked mind. When I worked, I would often have a confusing set of goals and ideas rattling around in my head. Things I needed to do for work and for my own life would seem like a wave about the swamp me. I often felt, when my rear end hit my chair and I logged on to work mail and incident reports for my products, an incredible easing of my mind. There was my 'to do' list: answer these mails, work on these problems and questions and then pull up the real 'to do' list and work on designs and code and reviews I'd noted there. There were meetings scheduled to get through or embrace (in the case of the rare ones that moved things forward). People came in and asked for assistance or pointed out some flaw in my thinking. It was structured and it was a relief.

I can achieve this same scattered peace in retirement by forcing myself to go through a routine of some chore. Clean the bathroom. Go through the various accounts and verify balances and update my bookkeeping and spreadsheet system. But nothing really comes close to the feeling of having a job and getting the butt in the chair to start a day. Especially a Monday when I took Sunday off. Because Sundays, especially Sunday nights, were sometimes agonizing. Even if I worked on work or other things I needed to do but especially if I relaxed and read the Sunday papers and watched TV, I felt like a jockey on a horse at a race in one of those narrow cages waiting for the gate to open and the race to be on.

All my time now is in Sunday night mode, waiting for the starting gun. I have appointments, sure, but nothing like putting in a work day. And like those waning hours of the weekend I find myself bouncing from activity to activity. Like today, which happens to be Sunday.

I got up a little before eight. I think I would have slept longer, but I wanted to call my dad and see if he'd located a ride to church. Because while I wouldn't go with him I would have gone to take him if he wanted. I was getting the best sleep of the night right then. But I felt OK after getting up. FFP had fired up the coffee machine, gotten the papers in (they are right in the hallway here, that's so cool) and was telling me about an article in the Statesman about arts organizations I should read. I made my call to Dad. (He found someone who lives near by to give him a ride and says this morning that he plans to live to be 102 which is an adjustment from the 112 he asserted the other morning). I pushed a picture to Austin, Texas Daily Photo. I edited a picture for this blog and started thinking about what to write. I read the article FFP suggested and on a trip to the kitchen for more coffee I thought of eating a banana. There were two apples in the fruit bowl. I decided to make tuna salad and started boiling eggs, chopped the apples opened some tuna, found mayo and relish. The eggs are in the final (sit for fifteen minutes after water boils) phase of my egg boiling technique. The rest is mixed and in the frig, ready for the eggs to be chopped and added and the result refrigerated again to chill.

Well, I wandered off to finish the tuna salad. I rued the fact that I didn't have an onion so I could pep it up with a little finely chopped onion. I did eat a banana (my breakfast). It's chilling in the frig for later snacking. I looked at some newspaper articles, poked around the puzzle page in The New York Times Magazine. (The 'standard' crossword looks hard today.) I read something about the CIA.

And so it goes. Left to my own devices, I'm a little erratic and random and, at best, productive but slightly disoriented.

What Were Those Reasons Again?

Pictures was one thing, huh? Well, um, I'm not all that thrilled with this one except that I like the way my hair was spiked up. I'm reflected in a shop window on West Fifth. The shop sells and repairs lamps.

I was walking down West Fifth yesterday (even though it is pedestrian unfriendly) partly to see what was going on and get some exercise, partly to take some pictures for Austin Daily Photo. I had some 'free' time. I spent some on finances and taxes yesterday and did a tiny bit of proofreading and computer fixes for FFP, but mostly I did whatever I felt like. I had a long walk. I say 'long' but it was only a couple of miles. Maybe 2.5 after I detoured to the post office and through Whole Foods. I walked all the way to El Arroyo on Fifth and back on Sixth. and stopped for a late lunch/snack and read while I ate.

I heard some great conversations while sitting there, eating and drinking my water. There was a table with three blonds. They were celebrating a birthday and there were pretty gift sacks involved. These conversational fragments seemed like they were out of a movie:

“I don’t wear anything when I run. I take everything off. I can’t believe you run in your wedding ring.”

“Skinny girl margaritas…tequila on ice with lime juice.”

“What happens when you eat ice cream?”

“Sick to your stomach? Yeah, I’m curious because that is starting to happen to me.”

I enjoy going out and watching and listening to people. I checked out a lot of construction and wandered through two shops. (I had a vague mission to find one perfect little accessory for the condo, but really I was just enjoying goofing off.)

I have some things on my mind today but I mostly want them off my mind. I don't want to even think about them, much less blog about them. One of my friends and I talk about letting things go. I'm trying to embrace my happiness with the way my life is going and not concentrate on things I could (and did you might say) rant about. I played tennis today and I enjoyed it, wind and chill notwithstanding. I am going to have a few drinks and some good food tonight.

Oh...the other thing is...I'm thinking it may be time to get a Smart Phone. Or at least a Smart(er) phone. Any opinions? Maybe I could buy Obama's Blackberry after they cleansed it?

Top Ten Reasons to Blog

Yeah, everyone is always re-examining blogging and whether they personally should do it. (Often these same people are writing comments in their favorite blogs saying 'Please, please, don't stop.')

In countdown fashion, let's do it. Top Ten Reasons to Blog:

• The number ten reason is....Because everyone sees things differently and my viewpoint is important. (See above photo from the clock they burned during First Night at Auditorium Shores. Pizza on Earth. A more realistic goal. One person's added footnote.) I thought maybe this should be the number one reason, but, really it's so egotistical. I mean, speaking for my blog, I just write what's in my head most of the time and don't research Middle East politics or something. In fact, your faithful chronicler has yet to get it firmly in her head how close Egypt really is to it all. Geography-wise. I can't remember all the new countries from the Soviet bust up, much less research and interpret the Gazprom crisis between Ukraine and Russia. Anyway, so my viewpoint might be worth something, but not the top of the list of advisers you should listen to on World Affairs or philosophy or domestic politics or the revamp of the SEC so that Madoff represents the end of an era of fraud.
• The number nine reason is...Even if your viewpoint isn't an earth-shaking opinion, it is a little bit of human life. Add up all the blogs from all the people and it's a history of ordinary life and all that jazz. But really are one woman's friends, meals, movies, rants, reading list yada yada really a significant part of what's going on? Particularly when, statistically, she is 'out of step' with the mainstream?
  
• The number eight reason is...Otherwise how would I keep up with my own life? I note that one of the blogs I read mentioned this recently:

  "I don't really want to stop blogging. It's been part of my life for over six and a half years now, and besides all the stuff I've recorded that I'd never remember otherwise..."

  This reason isn't higher (lower) on the list because, really, why not have a private journal and stick all the pictures and words there and don't pull any punches and really have it all. You could still use handy search and keyword stuff. You could make it a blog but entirely private. But, no, we do this writing entirely in full view of whomever. Who, after all, are we fooling? We don't just expect to keep track of stuff, we expect to be read. (Hi, faithful five readers!)
• The number seven reason is...It gives me an excuse to type like someone is making me (paying me?) to do it each and every day (or so). Hence I'm sitting here with a fresh cup of coffee at nine in the morning with bed head, wearing sweats and writing here because it's a 'duty' after all. So I'm not writing a book, reading the paper and getting material for more reasonably important views on something, exercising, managing my money, cleaning house or saving the world (for peace or pizza). But it's OK. Gotta blog first, then all that will come.
• The number six reason is...Bulleted lists are fun. No, that isn't it...let me think. Yes, that's it...I have a 'rule' that each entry has to have a picture. Usually an original one and not just something stolen from the WEB. Between that and Austin Daily Photo, I have to take pictures and I like the result. There is a collection of my pictures made automatically by Blogger and also I can just sit and watch the slide show screen saver on my machine. Yeah, I love words but I love pictures, too.
  
• Number five. hmmm (can I really think of ten reasons for my biggest time waster???). OK, links. Since a blog is hyper-text you can link to sites that have real information or other blogs with more articulate and clever writers. You can link to yourself, too, in endless loops and circles. You can link to random silliness. Your readers (and you, later) follow a little trip through cyberspace with you as tour guide. It's not just writing, it's hyper-writing. Some people forget that this form is different in that way.
• Number four? It keeps me somewhat connected to modern technology. Oh, sure, I use a blogging tool that the legion of monkeys typing Shakespeare could probably navigate but once in a while as I blog or sail through others' blogs (an inevitable result of blogging is reading other blogs) I eventually want to do something that makes me look at HTML or puzzle something out that is at least vaguely technical and this makes me feel less like the techno-saurus that I am.
• Number three? Otherwise I'd be doing Facebook. Nothing against social networking sites but they are so 'in and out,' so one sentence/one picture, tag you're it' that really it's not writing is it? The best Facebook folks link to their blogs. (The journalists do this, I've noticed. Well, one journalist anyway.) I mean I just went over to Facebook so I could write about it and found some cool links and such and I made a status update that I was blogging. Which wasn't as interesting as the person who found a double yolk in an egg or the one drinking a smoothie and coffee at the same time after a run but still one doesn't bump into a coherent essay unless one follows someone's link. Facebook, though, has become exceedingly popular with my set lately. But, I digress which brings me to number two....
  
• Number two reason for blogging? It supports my favorite modus operandi: digression. If you are writing a book or a real essay or article, there is a call for a certain, dare we call it dramatic?, structure. A beginning, a middle, and end. With a blog, it is more like we are creating index cards or pages in our scrapbook with random pictures, drawings, words, quotes, diary notes. It's OK to say "Today I got up late because I had a hangover" then ramble on about hangovers without really concluding anything. You have more to say than you do with a sentence on Facebook: "Linda got up late because she has a hangover." But the expectation is somewhat less than an essay on hangovers. You can 'finish' with less polish. And you can go from hangovers to what booze you like and digress into the ridiculous prices of some wine and talk about wine bottle shapes and then just wrap it up and call it a blog entry. I have rules, but they are lax for blog entries. (Sometimes I even leave out the picture but I really hate doing that. I really like it if they picture relates somehow to the text but I even let that go pretty easily.) [Ed. Note: Do you have a hangover today? LB: Not at all. Nothing to drink last night and two glasses of wine the night before. One Pinot Noir, one late Harvest Malbec. If you must know everything.]
  
• Number one reason for blogging? Have we really already done nine? I thought I'd run out of reasons. Anyway, the number one reason for blogging (especially as opposed to published work but also in contrast to commenting on other blogs and sending messages on other sites) is that you can edit it to your heart's content. I usually publish an entry and then reread it for typos and confusion. So I might publish it and change it one minute later. Yes, I know someone can get the stuff before I edit it, but I ignore that. I even come back days, months, years later and edit and delete. I'm never through editing, I've found, so this makes me feel very satisfied if a little dishonest. I've even been known to hunt down online journal entries from back in the day when I didn't use a blogging tool and edit them. When you see something in print with a typo, does it make you crazy? Especially if it's your own work? Well, that's me. Even other people's typos make me crazy. So writing with pixels that can be turned on or off at a whim? Priceless.
  

So How's That Going?

I didn't make resolutions other than to make some lists of things I 'never get around to doing' on Stickies. (Virtual ones in the Stickies app on Mac.) I told myself I'd occasionally spend 10 minutes, a half hour or an hour doing the things. That hasn't gone too far. Above is a picture I took of someone's resolutions that were offered up to burn when this went up in smoke on New Year's Eve.

If you made real resolutions instead of my slacker idea of promising to just spend time on things, then I bet some of yours were similar to Ruthie's. I do like one of hers very much, though: "Create daily." I don't feel very creative today, however. It is hot outside and I got sweaty on the tennis court earlier. I didn't enjoy the activity too much, really, because it was a play day with drills and made-up games and playing with various partners and a lot of people were better than I was. But, like I said, I got sweaty because it's hot and I've had to drink twenty or thirty ounces of water since I got home because one calf was cramping as I drove through my parking garage to park. Maybe if I took a shower I would feel creative. Ever since I got home from tennis (until, you know, a few minutes ago when I started blogging) I've been doing things I have to do, things to keep up with money and taxes and our schedule and dealing with e-mail. No points for doing things you know you will have to do. (Although Ruthie resolves to 'be current with chores and financial matters' I just don't see the point. Unless you've gotten hopelessly behind before and gotten in trouble. But I don't really do that.)

So did you make resolutions? And, a week in, how are you feeling about them?

Perspective

There are lots of state-wide associations in Austin. These organizations lobby the legislature on behalf of their members and put out newsletters and maybe vet members with some sort of credential. This one looks interesting in today's charged environment. Do you think the members of this group got a lot of business during the Enron debacle? Has everyone forgotten Enron in the wake of Madoff and bailouts? I haven't because I had one loan bond that the *&^%$ broker who sold it to me has to keep on the books at zero value because occasionally the powers that be send a few dollars or a few shares of stock in some company. I then have to explain these little poops of money to my CPA as return of principal on that bond. Assaulted by fraud and terrorized by bookkeeping. It was a tiny part of our portfolio and I'd have been glad to show the loss and move on but NO...couldn't even do that. A couple of failed munis have been similarly troubling. We diversify, though, so we try to just ignore this stuff. Piles of paperwork about restitution arrives. We recycle it. Can you imagine what paperwork the Madoff investors will receive and, if they want a chance at any of their money back, how much they will have to fill out? Ugh.

But I digress. I diversify and so these matters are not extreme to me. Not yet anyway. They are just little additional glitches to add to keeping up with different accounts, stocks, funds, bonds. But is interesting to think of the perspective of fraud investigators coming along, after the fact, looking at things knowing that the financial statements may be a crime scene.

I really wanted to return to the topic I touched on earlier, during Holidailies. Sadly, Holidailies is over now. Oh, it's a good thing really as most beginnings and endings are in a way. And that topic was perspective which I talked about in the entry entitled "Do You See What I See."

Did you look at Holidailies while I was participating? Did you actually arrive from Holidailies? I know some people read from there due to comments and some "Best of" designations. (Thanks, anonymous readers panel.) But beginning on a portal like that is like going to a giant outdoor concert with hundreds of stages with different bands playing around the clock only you can go back and forth in time. You can still never quite see it all and you will never experience it quite like any other visitor there.

The page is static now when you open it because folks are not allowed to post new entries because the fun ended 2009-01-06 23:59:59. Miraculously someone managed to post at the last minute. The happy result for us is that this entry is on top of the Holidailies page. And it is an amazing entry about projects and focus. That entry really hits home for me. I've written many times about the struggle for focus. But a never made an art project to represent it and then blogged about it. Yo! (An example here. Or search for 'focus' in my blog. Searching for a word in someone's blog is an interesting random walk.)

The penultimate (I just love that word, don't you?) entry recorded went with the writing prompt of epiphany (Epiphany) and has this great quote: "Anyway, you can imagine how the kings might feel about their holiday nowadays, latecomers to the party, bearing wine and snacks, not knowing that coffee has already been served, or worse, that the hostess is already hungover."

You see what I'm doing, right? I'm conducting you on a random walk through Holidailies. How long will you be able to follow along without succumbing to the temptation to just follow a link yourself?

Often when I went to the Holidailies page I'd use it to find Chip and Jette's entries to see if they'd updated because when they write they are very cool. I'd just search the page for 'Chip' or 'Jette' to find a link into their blogs (even, though, yeah I have them bookmarked and Chip's on syndication). Today this strategy runs me first to an entry where the excerpt mentions Chip and Jette. A delightful entry it is, too, with a 'Best of' designation which made me look at it and made me learn a new word, triolet, and marvel at someone's long-standing Holidailies production of one (a triolet is a certain form of poem in case you didn't follow that link). The next button in my search does lead to a new Chip entry, however, and I had to stop and read it. (He used the word penultimate. Sweet.) I had to comment, too. I'm back now.

So I searched for Jette and found a new entry. She posted a picture of this, only close up. And, oh...there is my building in the picture! After veering off to Jette, I for some reason I decided to go to the entry recorded just below hers. A rant about returning Christmas stuff. I'm not a returner. (The world is divided into those who return things and those who simply give them away. Or regift them.) But I, um, digress.

So you get the idea. We all take off on a tangent through life, seeing what we see, missing what others see, learning new words at 60 and not knowing some words ever until we die. Do you ever read an obituary of someone you knew slightly and find out about ton of things they did and knew and places they went and think "Hmmm...what a different life from mine they had." And also be amazed that what you knew of the person was a very different view.

Well, that's my random walk of the day. I'm going to exercise and do chores of the domestic variety as well as some financial chores. I may keep up blogging here after the Holidailies rhythm or I may drift into other pursuits. I have several ideas for the long-neglectd Journal of Unintended Consequences, for example.

I Don't Like Cupcakes

Holidailies is over! It's the last day. I wrote an entry for thirty-three days! (When I get this published, but actually I started before that.) Does this feel like an accomplishment? No. I have, some time in the past, written an entry for every day of the year. I did enjoy the structure, the occasional push that a writing prompt gave me and, of course, the gift of other people's writing and ideas. So thanks Jette, thanks Chip. Let's hope we find ourselves doing this again when holidays 2009 roll around.

I'll keep writing, of course. Perhaps with less frequency. I hope to find time to read a bunch of the contributions to Holidailies and give my few readers a few links to interesting things in other peoples' heads. I haven't found enough time to do this reading. And now it's, ugh, tax time and other obligations loom.

[Ed. Note: So what's with the title. And the picture. Cupcakes??? LB: I'm getting to that.]

Today's Holidailies writing prompt is 'Epiphany.' It is Epiphany, a Christian holiday having something to do with the manifestation of Christ in the person of the Magi. Since all the Holidailies writing prompts begin with an initial cap (the site is run by a writer and such things are not sloppily done) it is hard to say if the Christian meaning was intended. In fact, did Holidailies run to Jan. 6 just for this happy coincidence of this writing prompt? Anyway, the word epiphany, initial letter lower case, is where we are going today. To me it's a sudden feeling that makes something (or everything) clear.

I've had a few of these flashes. Hundreds. They are identifiable to me because from that moment forward these realizations changed my perceptions. They didn't necessarily change my behavior, they just provided a lens or filter through which certain things in the future would always be processed.

Cupcakes are all the rage. This happened outside Austin first. I read about cupcake shops in New York City. Then Austin got a cupcake trailer on South Congress and now there is a cupcake shop on Burnet Road. (Its giant cupcake is pictured above. The shop will probably be the Austin, Texas Daily Photo tomorrow.) I did not have an epiphany about cupcakes. Rather it was about a larger class of iced cakes. I don't really like cake. I don't care for a lot of desserts, really. One day I was at one of those office parties and there were some fine cakes, not just sheet cake with sugary icing, but Italian Cream Cake maybe. And as the pieces got passed around I just skipped it. Because I love dip, chips, cheese and a good cobbler. I like pure sugar candy like those little hearts you get at Valentine's with messages on them (like I DIG U). I like coffee ice cream although I don't usually want other flavors. Gelato with a shot of espresso? Yeah!! But one day I realized I didn't care for every dessert. So why eat them? I mean sometimes you are hungry and the only choice is a hamburger or something. But you never have to eat dessert becuase there isn't anything else. After that I usually passed up the cake at office birthday parties. Sometimes I went to the office kitchen and made nachos afterwards. So this isn't a story about beating calories or losing weight. It's a story of learning to embrace and trust what you like.

I've had other epiphanies, too. Most of my life I was trying to get things into this wonderful, impossible static state of neat organization and correctness. This goal did drive me to do things that were good, I suppose. I kept books for FFP's business by hand in ledger books for five years, balancing everything to the penny, for example, and I think that it did help us through those years. We knew what money we had. Back in those days, vendors would give you a discount to pay ten days from billing instead of thirty. We made our margins on these 2% discounts, but you had to keep a tight rein on all the money coming and going. But I digress. I agonized over every decision about how to account for something, every line on a tax return. One day I was working on something and I thought "Well, this could be the way it should be accounted for according to the IRS, I'm not really sure. It isn't a very material amount. Why don't I go with my best guess and, if they want to audit me, they can change it." This was very freeing. And, no, this isn't a story about how I went from there down a slippery slope to running a Ponzi scheme like Madoff. Nope, I just finally gained the perspective to understand that there was black and white but also gray areas. I would just do my best to do things correctly and follow rules. And understand that I might do it wrong. Similarly, I try to keep track of everything, but I realize that things will get lost and misplaced. So be it. I think I just realized that the world is messier and moving faster than I could control. Balancing a set of books to the penny, by hand, month after month, gives you the feeling that you could do everything just right. But it's a false notion.

My last epiphany was much more recent. It concerns my responses to certain people in my life. Not those closest to me, good friends, FFP, parental units. But some people outside that circle. People I'd felt obligations to that were silly. People who were more than capable of taking care of themselves (particularly financially) who imposed these obligations in my head. They weren't trying to control me or ask anything of me. Not really. But I had a flash one day, talking to one of them on the phone that I didn't have to really worry about them, that I was on my own and they would never be there for me in any non-trivial way but on the flip side, they could probably get along fine without my help and I should be worrying more about me and those close to me who did need and deserve my help. It was complicated but very freeing. It didn't really change anything I did. It just changed my feeling about it.

I guess I have these all the time. Flashes of perception that add another nuance to my approach to life. I think today's is this: things get done when the time is right. It was too wet to play tennis today and my plan was to go after tennis to my dad's to take care of some things. So I've blogged, drunk coffee and discussed some financial decisions and movies with FFP. Now it's time to move forward. Do things, however imperfectly, the best I can, when I can, concentrating on the people I should. And not eating cupcakes.

And I leave Holidailies with that, um, wisdom. Thanks for following along.

Feature Creature

Chip at Holidailies brings us today's writing prompt: "The one thing I want for Holidailies 2009 ...." I'm not really going to write about that. Rather I'm going to write about the danger of adding features. Or worse sometimes 'improving' them.

Holidailies is a portal that has code to present a changing view of a group of blogs as people register entries. Or, in the case of Holidailies at Home it is a list of blogs and a randomizer to scan through them. When Holidailies started it is unlikely that the participants were called blogs. But I digress. Chip has created a simple interface. You go there and there is a list of participants on the left, ordered by the number of entries they have made, descending. In the center is a list of entries registered with recent ones at the top. Along the right side is news, info, writing prompts and links to other info, contact and to login (when you do there's a link to post an entry). It's simple and anyone who comes here can set off on a blogland journey knowing they can find some new content.

You could make up new ways that this could work all day long. You could ask that the code automatically find your blog and see that it is updated. Our Austin, Texas daily photo participates in a portal like that (City Daily Photo). While it's nice not to have to post to the portal, posting gives you control over the blog entry presented and when it appears as well as letting you select an excerpt.

You could ask that the code grab picture or allow people to link to pictures and have them show on the portal. But this would interfere with the simplicity of the site and its celebration of words, words as a gift.

You could ask to be able to search the list or order it in different ways. (Fact is, Chip had some ordering options and they gave him trouble with his tools so he wisely simply ditched them.) But ordering by number of posts puts the real Holidailies hot shots near the top and a find on your browser takes care of the rest.

You could ask a lot of things, but be careful if you do. Because change and 'improvement' can slay efficiency and simpliciity.

Since I participate in another portal to blogs as I mentioned, City Daily Photo, I'll mention a bit about how it works. On that blog you don't have to post an entry. The code scans the sites and notes new entries, extracting the one picture (you are only supposed to put up one but really it will get the first in an entry). These can be displayed in the (reverse) order of update. It takes thirty minutes or so for your site to be noted in a regular scan. You can also choose favorites. This portal has been through lots of code changes and hiccups, but its coders have done an equally good job. While the portal behaves very differently it's appropriate to its mission and not too confusing. (That has improved over time.)

Things that are 'coded' are just static because we don't rewrite some lines and replace and integrate. It is so easy to change (not really always, but still) that the tendency is to change the code. Sometimes there are bugs. Sometimes they are very annoying. These things need to be fixed. But whenever we touch code we think we need to improve it. We especially think we need to add features. And sometimes those new features are very cool and useful. But sometimes they just get in the way. And even if a new interface is more 'intuitive' (in someone's opinion), it may be very unintuitive to someone who is used to the old and has the old interface pounded into muscle and visual memory. (We look for things where we expect them and push keys without thinking.) Moving things around is like getting in your car and finding that the controls work differently. Maybe reverse is up instead of down. (My car is a standard shift.) Whether that is better is one thing. Changing in mid-stream is hard.

Another interface I've used lately is Facebook. I keep being drawn in there because a lot of friends are there. They say it is a 'social networking site.' But really it's a portal, too, in the same sense as these others. But the thing seems jumbled to me and I have trouble figuring out what I'm doing. I like seeing things change as people put up statuses, but I think I prefer my dull blogs, completely under my control, which are then registered with portals in a rigorous way. I want to simplify my life, even in cyberspace.

[Today's photo is a reflection in the as-yet-unfinished chocolate shop on Second Street which has, obviously, a mirror inside.]

Nostalgia for a Camera

Yesterday I was writing about how we sometimes want everything new and refreshed if not replaced. But we have a strong nostalgia for the past way of doing things. People collect tintypes and old photos, even if they are of people or places they never knew. People collect LPs, swearing they sound different (or that changing the record is part of the charm or that the cover art and liner notes in that large size are incredible).

It's been all over the news that Polaroid is going to discontinue its instant film. There was a piece in The Times, I think, and one on CBS Sunday Morning today.

I don't even use film these days and I gave away, finally, my Polaroid Automatic 101 camera that I acquired in 1964 or so during the great downsizing of 2008. I used Freecycle to find a camera collector who took some old digital cameras and wrote me about working on them and then I offered that camera to him. He claimed in an e-mail (I never met him) that he fixed a pinhole in the bellows and worked on it.

But Polaroid film and the ownership of that camera (see above picture for one virtually identical being peddled by an ebay trader) had a great influence on my photography vision as well as my relationship to and desire for gadgetry.

Examples of the photography with that camera are in lots of albums I still have and I have scanned quite a few in the service of online journals and blogs like this. as well as to do various family projects. Today, though, I offer the example below. It is a picture of my brother-in-law in 1967. He is smoking a cigarette in my parents' home. He did not yet have children. He was a lieutenant in the Air Force, if I'm not mistaken. I do think there is a difference in the colors, the skin tones especially, in these old prints developed instantly with a package of emulsions given sixty seconds to do their work after being triggered by compression between stainless steel rollers.


That camera! It was top of the line (trimmed with leather and stainless steel). I had two lens adapters with gadgets to put over the viewfinder to make close-ups or portraits. I mostly took portraits of people. Especially after my brother-in-law and sister adopted a daughter in 1968 and my sister had her second daughter in 1970. I wanted the camera for months, maybe a year. I got it while I was still in high school, maybe Christmas 1964. My mother surprised me with it. I think it blew the Christmas budget. (I think it cost about $120 which was real money then.) I had been cadging Green Stamps (remember those) to try to get one. I had, I think, thirteen books of Green Stamps. I think it took forty or fifty to get one. That Christmas my mother convinced me I'd never get enough of these trading stamps. You got them from retailers, mostly the grocery store, and pasted them in books and there was a catalog of gifts you could get. Anyway, she convinced me it was futile and used the stamps to buy other Christmas presents. And she secretly found the money somewhere to give me the camera. I took so many pictures, finding the money somehow for film and those crazy exploding flash bulbs. (The gadgets I got had an extra plastic diffuser for the flash to soften the explosion for close-ups and portraits.)

I used that camera for a good decade, I think. And I knew all the ins and out. I knew to keep the stainless steel rollers clean and I could load film and pop in flash bulbs with my eyes closed. I pulled the film out with a firm, confident motion. I could count to a minute while taking another picture. I deftly folded the emulsion waste and discarded it. (Much later I would use this waste with an artist friend's help to make artsy transfer prints by using the film to take pictures of slides with a gadget that used a similar film.)

I knew that camera and its limitations and mine. I have had six digital cameras (maybe five, but, I think, six). Sure I know a bit about them and have learned to use some editing capabilities on the computer for the resultant pile of pixels. But I never learned all the ins and outs of those cameras. I never coveted owning them like I did that Polaroid 101. I'm not sure what that means, but I think it means that flat packs of magic film and exploding flashbulbs are things I experienced that the young folks can't begin to understand. I think they probably blow through gadgets before they really learn how to use them. Just as I do today. Time is compressed. But nothing can take that memory away and, now that I've floated my brother-in-law's image on the Internet (probably not for the first time) the Polaroid colors and his dream-like smoker's state take on a new life albeit in pixel-land.

[Ed. Note: Tomorrow is the penultimate day of Holidailies and the writing prompt today is "Your favorite Holidailies post(s) this year (yours or someone else's)." Which is a great prompt as is tomorrow's: "The One Thing I Want for Holidailies 2009" and the last day's, appropriately, "Epiphany." I hope that I can write about some of this in the coming days. I need to do some reading before declaring favorite(s) and I need to work on my idea for epipany to make it sound less, um, bitter. As to what I want for Holidailies 2009, well one always fears making a 'feature creature' out of a bit of programming that is pretty great the way it is.]

The Wasteland

This is a picture of a vacant lot in the Rainey Street neighborhood. A careful look (maybe blow it up) shows our building in the distance. There are vacant lots near us, of course. Although about the only one not turned into parking is the one the Feds own for a federal courthouse project, the former site of the infamous Intel Shell. (Your government can hold property, off city tax roles, your money invested without trying to get revenue for you to help pay the national debt. Maybe Obama will build the courthouse as part of his works projects. Maybe he will just build a parking lot and give someone a job running it. But I digress.)

All I'm saying is that the wide sidewalks and trendy shops and cafes in my neighborhood are still a beachhead. While the neighborhood with this debris-strewn lot has fancy condos and apartments and a new Mexican American Cultural Center, it has some unreconstructed, not-yet-gentrified areas including some run-down houses across the street from this lot. Our neighborhood has the decommissioned Seaholm Power Plant and Green Water Treatment Plant that are vacant, waiting a grand mix of homes, shops, hotel, etc. but which for now look like an abandoned industrial wasteland. Near Whole Foods, Book People, GSDM and the Noknonah Condos there is a single, old house with a trampoline and volleyball court out back. I think that is great myself. It is this jumble that makes a place livable to me. In our old neighborhood we had that. Sure, you sometimes wished your messier neighbors would clean up or that certain areas weren't zoned commercial, but then you enjoyed the patina of the neighborhood (and being able to walk to a seedy convenience store and a burger joint).

Cities evolve. Every time I'm in New York, Paris, London, Berlin, etc. I remark on the construction, destruction, the ebb and flow. I can see tall, new buildings rising outside my window but I can walk a few blocks and see a house built over a century ago. I like that.

Some people are saddened by any bit of blight, by anything that isn't brand new or a trendy reuse like Lambert's Fancy Barbecue in the old Schneider Store. That's not me, though. In any urban environment, any place not built from scratch by a developer (ugh), there are grubby bits, older houses or apartments or even vacant lots. Things to contrast with the trendy wide sidewalks of Second Street. (Which, by the way, I do love.) I'm happy, personally, to see things torn down, rebuilt, renewed or, sometimes, just happily decaying, waiting for another day. We have this tendency to think that nothing should ever change, that it should be spruced up or bought new and then remain that way.

The truth is that I even like the look of the wasted lot and the dead tree in its own way.

By the way, yesterday's 'Home Alone' entry was annointed as a 'Best of Holidailies.' I feel very honored since I already received recognition for 'A Long Way from There to Here.' Holidailies has been a good ride of writing for me, I think. Maybe I've cleared some cobwebs and can do some real writing. Or not.

Home Alone

This dark image where I'm barely seen, sort of presented (and protected?) by a mannequin was, I thought, appropriate for the Holidailies writing prompt: "Home Alone".

I haven't spent many holidays alone. I have spent quite a bit of time otherwise alone. Mostly before I married or, during our marriage, on business trips or pleasure trips where I spent some time with friends and some time alone.

But there was one Christmas before I married. I hadn't moved to Austin yet and I lived in an apartment on Abbott Street in Highland Park, a city surrounded by the city of Dallas. It is a fancy pants place to live only I lived in the slums part of it, near a railroad track. (If you are reading this today and know the area and are saying 'huh?' then I'll say the tracks are a hike and bike trail now.)

Anyway, I didn't have vacation to get away with my folks to go see my sister and her small children in Colorado. I think I must have just moved into the apartment. It was furnished so it had a sofa, a dining table and chairs and a bed and dresser. I added some stuff of my own which included at the time, if I'm not mistaken, a desk made from cubes with drawers and open spaces and a large white top. (The cubes have mostly survived and some are storing things in the storage cage here and we painted a few black for incidental uses in the condo.) I mention the desk for later reference. My mom had gone with me to buy it.

So my parents were going to leave and I had to stay and work. I worked a few blocks from the apartment (on McKinney Avenue) and it was a little neighborhood with a grocery store, drug store, bars, a cafeteria, an ice cream store, a furniture store, an army surplus store and a secondhand book store. The year was before 1975 (moved to Austin before Thanksgiving that year) but after 1972. I think I was unemployed the Christmas of 1972, having only recently returned from a vagabond trip to Europe that lasted from Labor Day until the first week of December when, with cold setting in and my Eurailpass expired and the money running out (I'd spent maybe two thousand dollars in three months!), I decided to return. I eventually got a job at a credit insurance company doing programming and after living in a different apartment in the Cedar Springs neighborhood and then with my parents, I'd gotten the apartment on Abbott. So this could have been Christmas 1973. Only ten months on the job, not much vacation.

My parents left town, like I said. I had two aunts who lived in Oak Cliff (a suburb across the Trinity to the south), but they went to West Texas to visit their sisters.

I'm sure I worked most of the days except the actual holiday so it wasn't like I was that alone. My parents and sister had given me presents and said I should open them Christmas morning and call them. I'm sure I'd never been alone on Christmas morning in my life.

I don't remember all the presents, but I remember liking them. Several were on the theme of the 'home office' inspired by me putting together that desk in the apartment. I got a pencil sharpener that you could attach to a surface with a lever-operated suction cup. Remember pencils? Anyway, I liked my presents. Maybe I got a book or two. I remember making a pot of coffee (I used a percolator then) and I had the newspaper (I might have subscribed to the Dallas Morning News at the time). I opened my presents. Gushed about them over the phone to my folks in Colorado. (I don't remember much about the conversation. They were probably caught up in the kids' Christmas becasuse my nieces were five and three that year.)

It felt delicious. I had some new things. This was back when a present could add something to my life. I didn't have that many things yet. I had coffee, the newspaper to read, no demands. I read every word in that edition of the paper, I think. Maybe I sharpened some pencils and wrote something. (If so it is either lost or buried in a box of paper journals I've yet to uncover.)

I don't think I've ever been alone for an entire Thanksgiving or Christmas Day since. I'm not sure about Thanksgiving 1972, but they don't celebrate in Europe in any case and I did have friends there although I also traveled alone quite a lot.

Would I ever want to spend a day entirely alone again? Not really. FFP and I were commenting yesterday about how nice it is to have someone else around. Even if we do things on our own during the day (errands, workout, walk, our obligations to boards and meetings and his interviews) and even if sometimes we are in the condo but on different tracks (he is cooking eggs for himself and I'm blogging right now) there is the feeling that you have someone around and it is nice.

My dad spends whole days alone these days. (Although we'd never let him be entirely alone on a holiday.) He says he doesn't mind it. However, today he found a ride to church to play games and asked me to pick him up after. He's been home alone since Tuesday, I think, when I stopped by to do a couple of things for him.

There are people who prefer to be alone, for sure. I spent many nights alone before and after I married in hotel rooms (or before marriage in apartments), but usually I had some interaction with people during the day. A few times I was by myself among strangers for a few days. But, really, I've rarely been home alone. And I'm not looking forward to a time when that would be a regular thing. But that one Christmas, that one day, with my loved ones far away but represented by presents and their voices? With the coffee and the newspaper and the quiet? That was sort of delicious.

What a Way to Start

The good news about the New Year's Eve celebrations is they are just festive with no gift exchange and religious overtones. The bad news is: what a way to begin a year...with a bang, yes, but drinking and staying up late and then you start the first day of the year getting up late, sort of behind. And then you realize: yikes I can't start the new year on the books without taking care of a couple of things on 2008 and saving some info for the CPA. And then you realize that you have to start taxes and that is so depressing. A friend called to say Happy New Year and said I should be glad I had money to count. Can't you imagine going into tax season as a Madoff investor? You would have horrible tax issues and no money. Or even as Bernie himself. He had to turn over a list of his assets by yesterday to the court. When did you last update your own list of assets? Does it include yachts? Still, it's an excellent exercise.

I wrote the above paragraph earlier. I had some breakfast, read some of the paper. Then I set a timer on my Mac desktop and started working on some year end and month end bookkeeping. I spent about three hours on it. I still have several things I need to do. I wrote them on a little 'to do' list on a Sticky and decided I would do my blog. Holidailies lasts another four days, I believe. So I have to do it. Yeah, not really, but doesn't it make you feel better to know you can do something every day even if it's kind of indulgent? FFP is taking a nap. We slept in this morning a little (9 o'clock it was almost when we finally got up and stayed up). But we were up very, very late. FFP took the picture above on the pool deck last night at midnight when the fireworks over Lady Bird Lake were erupting. We stayed up a while after that visiting with friends. We stayed up a while longer reading. I probably drank too much. Wine and champagne it was.

So, here we are. 2009. I've made the stickies for my promised New Year's Resolution. Which is to spend some time each day doing things that I never get around to. The three hours I spend today on bookkeeping? Doesn't count. It is stuff that eventually gets done and doesn't get shunted aside indefinitely.

I feel like I should go to the gym or go for a walk. I don't think we will go out to eat or go to a movie today. FFP has some writing he has to get done. But we may get cabin fever. (Would that be condo fever?) A walk would probably cure it. Going to the gym doesn't do the trick since it's just across the hall. (Can't go to the club today, even if I thought starting the car was a good idea, because it is closed.) But right now I'm listening to iTunes execute a play list of jazz tunesI made with "Genius" starting with a Roy Hargrove track. I still bridle when Apple uses Genius for people or software, but that's me. (Did anyone see the Simpson's Mapple episode? Loved, loved it. But I digress. But you know me...I think digression is the better part of valor.)

While I was goofing off, FFP got up from his nap. I wish I could nap. I'm not good at it. FFP can doze well in his chair or (as in this case) go to bed and catch some winks. Maybe I'll take a nap today. That would be different.

Well, before I continue too far down the digression path...I want to make a beginning of 2009 comment. I may expand on this in my other blog, The Journal of Unintended Consequences (which has fallen into disuse because it was overwhelmed with material). But I just want to make a list of the things that the press keeps telling me I did in 2008 and prior to that that I did not do.

• I did not run up credit card debt I had no hope of repaying. In fact, I paid cash or charged for thirty days only all year and for lots of years before.
  
• I didn't ignore that I might lose my job and health insurance. Rather I prepared financially to quit my job and buy insurance.
• I did not invest in things that 'looked too good to be true.' (Well, maybe a couple of times, but I knew the risk and it was usually some financial advisor dispensing and drinking the Koolaid.)
• I did not buy a house I couldn't afford with a toxic mortgage with zero down at adjustible rates I didn't understand and then blame someone else when I lost 'my' house. (If I had, though, I would realize it wasn't ever mine! Hell, you don't even own a house you own unless you can pay the tax collector thousands of dollars a year.)
• I did not assume real estate would always go up and buy property to flip.
• I did not gain two pounds. (I have done that, on average, sometimes in the past. I'm pretty sure that I'm pretty much the same as I was last year. Yes, I still could use to lose ten or twenty pounds. Shut up.)
• I did not buy an iPhone or any other smart phone. My phone doesn't take photos even. It is seven (more?) years old. But it works and the (original) battery still takes a charge and has good life.
• I did not cut back on eating out. And, contrary to the wisdom I heard on TV today I'm not going to start packing a lunch to go to work because I don't work. On the other hand I won't be saving money by not buying lattes. I don't buy lattes. I drink coffee out sometimes, but it's usually a brew, French press or an Americana or espresso. Mostly I drink many cups from my expensive Capresso machine at home.
  

I often look at the world and wonder what kind of place it would be if everyone were a little more like me. It isn't a pretty picture, in some cases. But it would be a world without Golden Arches. Or Starbucks. I'm just saying. And there wouldn't be an ARM.

So I'm tired of hearing 'it's our own fault' and stuff like that. Speak for yourself, journalist person.

Well, that's all. I'm going to the gym. Then I'm having a shower. Maybe a walk after that. Maybe I'll read a book. Hope you have a nice holiday and that your hangover yields as easily as mine did if you have one.