Bird by Bird

Bird by bird pic, taken by me (a lilac breasted roller, as common in Botswana as sparrows are here)

I heard Anne Lamott on Studio 360 this morning, and although I have very mixed feelings about Anne Lamott, mostly tending toward extreme dislike, and although she does seem quite odd, with her (white, old lady) dreadlocks and wound-up affectless voice, I did like her book Bird by Bird that advised writers to just do it: just go sit there, in the chair, every day at the same time, and just WRITE.

In other words, stop thinking about Who Cares and How Boring My Life Is and Why Bother and Let’s Just Check Who Has Played Words With Friends and JUST WRITE (even if writing in capitals is way too much like Heather Armstrong of dooce.com, who has her own problems these days anyway).

So here’s a spring solstice resolution: I’m back, at least for a while.

My week in retrograde

Saturday evening: huge branch falls from beech tree – the beech tree that used to look like this:

Our majestic beech tree, with a trunk you couldn’t get your arms around, a trunk that looked like an elephant foot, suddenly turned into this last spring:

Internet, TV, telephone wires all ripped from house, hanging in street.

Sunday: call the tree guy, since wires are now conveniently down. All outside timer lights stop working – they decided this on their own, unrelated to the non-electric downed wires.

Sunday night, 3 am: There’s a loose metal plate on the highway we call the Blue Route that runs near our house. It sounds like artillery fire when trucks run over it; until now the sound of the massive air exchange unit across the street has drowned it out, but it’s cool tonight so it’s not on. We listen to the battle till 6 am.

Monday: tree guys come; I park car across street. This is what across the street looks like:

We park huddled next to that log, as we’ve done for 30 years when our driveway is blocked.

The people renting a college house at the end of that long (and unblocked) driveway call campus police. “Boot/tow” notice and $20 ticket arrive on windshield.

College police are very nice when I stop into their office; tear up ticket, say it’s fine for me to park there till tree guys are done.

I park there, so-called neighbors call police again, college tells me to move car (via voicemail, which I can only access by cell phone, of course. People calling get a message we’re on the phone – they all must think we spend a lot of time talking, as well as not blocking driveways). I’ve never laid eyes on these people, and I guess I have to hope I never do.

Spend an hour on cell phone with Verizon. They can’t come to put wires back up till Thursday. If strike hadn’t ended, they say, it would have been several weeks.

Monday night, 3 am: In between the trucks, I hear repeated beeping. Ironic, since the friendly little beep that happens when you lock your car has suddenly stopped happening when we lock our car.

Tuesday: tree guys aren’t finished yet. I park car across the street with note to college. Neighbors call police again. Fortunately, tree guys finish so I move car. Verizon guys suddenly show up, but turns out they’re copper, not FIOS guys. They leave. FIOS guys will show up later, they say. At 3:30. They’ll call me first on cell phone; if I don’t answer they won’t come.

Tuesday afternoon: Earthquake. I’m in my Italian lesson. We learn the word for earthquake – terremoto – as my handy cell phone rattles on the table.

Everyone but us has evacuated buildings; people are all crowded on sidewalks using cell phones that don’t work.

I change cell phone message to tell Verizon guys I’ll be there at 3:30; that if they’re hearing this message it means all circuits are busy (it’s sort of fun to tell Verizon that).

Trains not running.

But my train finally comes, only 10 minutes late. I run home. No call, no Verizon guys, but at least the beeping mystery is solved: display panel on stove is displaying error message. Call stove repair guy; he comes to see what part he needs to order before he goes on vacation next week. Turns stove circuit breaker off.

No phone, no TV, no internet, no timer lights, no stove, no beeping car keys.

“Mercury must be in retrograde,” I say facetiously to my son.

“Mercury is in retrograde,” he says.

Retrograde is supposed to end this weekend, just in time for the hurricane. But things are already looking up – the FIOS guy showed up this morning!

And guess where he parked.

Eagle addict

“You Know You’re Addicted to the Decorah Eagles When …”, went the headline in the Huffington Post yesterday. It went on to tell us we’d know if, for example, we’d stopped watching television, or carried the computer into the kitchen.

Well, I’m not that bad, but I do have to admit I found myself staring at this:

for a rather long (but I’m not going to tell you how long) time?

(In my defense, it started out like this: one miserable eagle!)

Hypnosis by eagle

So calming and mesmerizing, watching this little eagle household . The eaglets, just two weeks old, are so much bigger now. Like little kids needing one more story or drink of water, they seem to resist getting tucked under their mother, popping their heads out and flapping their skinny wings. Mother Eagle pokes them back in, surveying her landscape with gimlet eyes.

Eight weeks to go till they learn to fly. It’s going to be one crowded nest.

Bookmark OCD

I’m not sure what I’d do without my bookmarks, probably more than 100 of them, that parade down the left side of my computer screen like this:

Firefox has an add-on called x-marks that stores your bookmarks in some cloud up in the computer sky, so that you can transfer them to another computer like your notebook (and yes, I know notebooks are so yesterday, and I’m working myself up to either a Macbook Air or an iPad, but my friends who have Macs keep complaining about not having any idea where things are on their Macs, and, as you’ll soon see, being computer-organized is pretty important to me). So on vacation my little notebook asked me if I wanted to merge my bookmarks, and I stupidly said yes (synchronize is the right answer), and my bookmarks on both computers proceeded to duplicate themselves.

And so now we’re talking at least 200 bookmarks, if not more, because I think they’d cloned themselves at least once before.

Yesterday I cleaned out this particular closet, and I’m feeling very pleased with myself, except that it made me pay attention to the overwhelming number of bookmarks I still have. It’s like the piles of books and magazines that I get worried I’ll never read. The good thing, though, is Folders. Here’s what it looks like with them all closed up:

Just like those staged houses that look like no one lives in them.

More than you ever wanted to know about toilet paper

I once spent more money than is conscionable on a wrapper design study for ScotTissue. The conclusion? ScotTissue buyers didn’t like change.

Long before I became Scott’s brand manager, I was one of those loyal buyers; and, long before that, I was urging my mother to buy Scott Paper products because they advertised on Father Knows Best (she thought I was crazy).

I have the rather odd distinction of knowing more about toilet paper than most people. I used to entertain people at parties with various random facts: about the people who wad it up, while others carefully fold; about the media-created toilet paper shortage in the early 70s, which distorted all our market size studies for years; about how the early manufacturers determined the dimensions of a sheet based on the size of a man’s hand (which is very odd, since men use so much less than women – but when they need it, they really need it, I guess).

I also know that when your performance is based on your brand’s profits, you sometimes have to slip cost savings in and hope no one notices. But this –

this is egregious. I noticed. It’s not even the size of my hand anymore.

And so, dear current ScotTissue brand manager, whoever you are, you’ve lost me. I’m wadding up a different brand now.

Lives

Slides (waiting to be digitalized)

This is Chip’s life (well, I’m in the slides too, and a shadowy presence in the calendars).

Engagement calendars

 

 

 

 

 

This is my life:

Photo albums

 

 

 

Diaries

 

 

 

Strange, the way we feel the need to do this; stranger still that they will outlive us.

This is Chip’s grandmother’s life, now resting on my bookshelf.

Diaries

And now we come to the end

I Googled this title, since I thought I was plagiarizing Joshua Ferris’s wonderful book, Then We Came to the End; but instead I found I was plagiarizing a female soldier who blogged from Iraq. She stopped writing a year after she returned, a year after she was wounded in Iraq, because her life was “wonderfully mundane” as she put it.

I agree. Mine too. It’s been fun, but it’s time to move on.

There’s my day, and then there’s Obama’s

This day is getting away from me, and all I have to worry about is the heat and the loud air handling unit across the street that goes on and off during the night and drives me insane and categorizing press clips for the guy running for Joe Sestak’s Congressional seat and formatting my hospice newsletter and calling my friend who is sitting in a car in North Carolina waiting for her husband’s all-day meeting to end who can’t read because she has non-dominant lobe aphasia and finding an electrician to fix our porch fan that doesn’t work and canceling the hotel reservation I made for a night when we won’t be anywhere near that hotel; and I wonder how on earth Obama does it all.

Things you almost get used to in Iceland, till you get back home