Day 3 – Too Much Hank

care-bear.jpgThis was a good day. Ate light, had a really good workout at the gym, and then got to visit with my good friend Carl Buell, the world-class wildlife illustrator and all-around great guy. 

Argh. It’s like I’ve been zapped by Care Bears.

I do feel indefinably lighter, though.

I have these sayings I make up, stuff I call “Wise Old Sayings I Just Made Up” — which I sometimes refer to by the clumsy acronym WOSIJMU.

I’ve been wrestling with one about the subject of getting back into the gym after an absence of months or years. The beta version goes:

In 3 days you’ll be stronger.

In 3 weeks you’ll feel better.

In 3 months you’ll be changed forever.

It’s meant to encourage people to get back into the gym.

Are you encouraged?

Picky Eaters

picky.jpg

In full diet/exercise “get back in shape” mode, food is ever on my mind. A fellow blogger writing recently about a picky eater in the family sparked this:

I remember how EASY life got after I just started trying all the new foods I was presented with. And damn! Some of them – sushi!! – were GOOD!

I have friends back in Texas who have never had sushi and never will – you couldn’t get them in the same room with it – and darned if that isn’t a tragic loss for them. If I was 12 years old and you presented me with a foot-high chocolate sundae with a gallon of whipped cream and a pound of walnut sprinkles, I couldn’t love it any more than I love sushi. This weird-looking, conceptually freaky – OH MY GOD IT’S RAW FISH!!! – stuff is food so great poor people like me shouldn’t be allowed to have it.

And I never would have known it if I hadn’t tried it.

For me, there was a pivotal moment in trying new things, and it actually came in reading about a dog’s sense of smell.

Continue reading “Picky Eaters”

Sorry about that!

The site crashed sometime after midnight — likely all the traffic that came my way as a result of mention on Pharyngula. I upped the bandwidth dramatically; I think it’s fixed.

Like I say below, I’m still working out the bugs.

I’m Back!

h.jpgHank on the RiverAnd still fumbling my way through learning WordPress. Kindly ignore the sawdust and debris — and the Kindergarten appearance — until I get things all fixed up.

I’ve been away for a year writing books and sitting on my fat ass gaining weight. I have some ambitious plans for the site, and for the next phase of my life. (First of which is that the fat ass has got to go. But also look for an announcement sometime this spring for a Very Big Project that I think will attract a lot of interest.)

Come back and visit when you can!

Hank

PS: Until I can figure out how to post it as a link in the sideboard, check out what I do now at

www.EditorQuick.com

After being a magazine / newspaper editor and writer for 22 years, I’m doing proofing and editing — and copy writing — freelance now. (Doesn’t mean I won’t make lots of mistakes here. Just means I get paid to tell other people about theirs. And I’m GOOD at that.)

You need me to proofread your writing, and help you make it better. You know you do. 🙂

Thank you, Miss King

I had a geometry teacher in high school in about 1968 or so, a certain Miss King, one of those rare teachers you have who leaves a permanent mark.

This was the mark she left:

Sometimes, there is only one right answer.

I was pretty good in school, producing a decade or so of straight A’s without much trouble, but even I occasionally got the wrong answer. Mixed in with the lessons I absorbed for most of those years, though, was the lesson of “partial credit.” If the answer to a test question was “hydrocarbons” but you put down “carbohydrates,” you could usually wheedle at least half credit. Considering the infinite number of possible answers that would include neither “hydro” nor “carbo,” lots of times the teachers would give you more than half credit, sometimes as much as 80 percent. Because you almost got it right.

The lesson, that pretty close is often good enough, certainly affected our aim. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one caught up eventually in providing answers that were only good enough.

But in life, even in the safe, rich life so many of us enjoy in the West … 

Continue reading “Thank you, Miss King”