Slices of life … mine.
I just yesterday finally bit the bullet and learned how RSS works. Damn! Why didn’t somebody TELL me!?
Now I have all my favorite sites in a Bloglines feed. I click on ONE link in the morning to check everything, rather than a dozen or more, and I can skip the sites with no recent updates. Wonderful!
If I get really daring, I’m thinking of trying out those incandescent indoor light thingies. I hate it that I have to stop work when the sun goes down, and the torches are just so smoky.
For a guy who gets nervous when he has to call in to work and tell somebody he’s going to be five minutes late, I have a hard time even imagining what it’s like for a doctor to tell a patient he has cancer.
And yet they do. And I doubt they sugar-coat it. After Sen. Ted Kennedy’s recent diagnosis, I’d bet Kennedy and his family heard it in blunt terms that same day. A doctor came right out and said “You have a large tumor in your brain.”
If I was the patient, I know some part of me — the wishful part that wouldn’t want it to be true — would desperately NOT want to hear it.
Continue reading “A Sunny Optimist, Darkly, on Planet Earth”
Stuff I Do:
Freelance Writing & Copy Writing
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I’ve worked as a freelance writer and magazine editor since 1985, as well as a newspaper copyeditor for the past 8 years. I also design brochures, flyers, menus, all sorts of printed matter for businesses and invididuals.
Visit my EditorQuick site for further info and contact details, or shoot me an E-MAIL if you’re in the market for good, fast Editing, Writing or Design.
I’m looking for work.
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In most dog-related things, I was a fairly indulgent dad. But having my four-leggers roll in dead stuff, or go off into the brush and bring back something rotten, I had a hard time with that.
Tito was especially bad about it.
One summer day we were out along Varmint Creek hiking. I have this thing I sometimes do – I think of it as my super power – I hike and read at the same time. The subconscious Guardian Idiot that resides in all our heads, in my case has terrific peripheral vision, and I’m able to read and navigate along a trail, even rough mountain terrain, at the same time. I never fall down, I never walk into trees, I never even stumble.
I first met him when I lived in a small apartment at the back of a publishing house that did a twice-weekly local newspaper. I worked as an editor and writer in the back-office magazine division, and lived exactly one door away from my work. My commute was all of 10 feet.
The town was called Mammoth Lakes, and it was a summer-winter resort that offered skiing (and way too much snow-shoveling) in the winter, and hiking, camping and fishing in the summer. I can’t say whether it was the altitude, or the innate dryness of the air, but fleas were unable to survive at the 8,000 feet elevation, which made the place a paradise for dogs. Add in the limitless trails due to the fact that the town stood on the edge of the High Sierra mountain wilderness, an uncountable number of crystal-clear, ice-cold streams flowing out of those mountains and into cold, clear trout-filled lakes, and the plentiful wildlife – deer, bears, coyotes, raccoons, squirrels, chipmunks and lightning-fast bunnies – and it would have to be the place every good city dog dreamed of finding as his reward after death.
There are people capable of thinking in dynasties, or Great Works, but I’m sure I’m not one of them. Knowing myself from the inside as I do, I have a hard time imagining that anyone ever actually SET OUT to build a pyramid. Or that China’s Great Wall came about after a single act of decision by some one person.
But maybe it comes with practice. You start out with small projects, say a tabletop pyramid, or a Small Wall across the back of your lot. Once you learn you can complete those, you go on to larger and larger ones. Until eventually you can say “Okay, I’m ready to start a Great Wall,” and feel confident that you can cross all of China eventually. Or you start with tiny model rockets, go on to bigger and bigger ones, until eventually you graduate and say “Okay, now let’s put some human footprints on the moon.”
In reply to my post about a yearned-for speech by Barack Obama, David Harmon made a couple of worthwhile points in the comments. I started to reply to them, and — typical for me — I couldn’t seem to express my thoughts in just a few words. My answer ended up being post-length rather than comment length, so I decided to just make it a separate post.
David said:
In some happy alternate universe, this is the speech given by Barack Obama on the night he formally accepts the Democratic nomination to be the party’s presidential candidate.
Barack Obama:
One of the major issues of this presidential campaign, for all of the candidates, has been the war in Iraq. Yet in speaking of the war, and of so many other issues – issues of security, economic issues, issues of the global environment – we have continued to react to emergencies now before us, rather than taking a more thoughtful, proactive approach, to foresee and avoid potential emergencies to come, and to foresee and help create the countless opportunities which may lie in our future.
Falling Rock was never seen again. Black Deer questioned Grey Owl and Running Wolf when they returned with the trophy, and became suspicious. He delayed his decision and sent all the tribe’s warriors out to look for signs of the missing brave. They came back with no sign of him, but expert trackers believed Falling Rock may have been attacked, had escaped, and might return.
So they waited, but they also continued to search. Years passed and Black Deer died, but Shining Fawn never married. Braves who had liked Falling Rock continued to search – to find even his bones would satisfy the tribe’s desire to know what happened to the well-liked young hunter. They traveled north and south along the rough mountain range, and to the east and west of it, meeting other tribes and telling the story, asking for news, and never finding anything.
Charley’s not a very big guy, but he’s solid, and every inch of him you can see is either burned a deep tan by the sun, or covered in tough hide from a lifetime of hard outdoor physical labor. Below the neck, everything inside that hide is either hard muscle, rawhide-strong tendon or solid bone. And there’s this: Charley has a reputation. He’ll fight anybody, anytime, and he’s never been known, in any town within a day’s drive, to lose. If you catch his hands still for a second, you can count the scars on his knuckles from those fights. As I found out later, even the local cops would back away from getting into a physical dispute with him.
Anyway, about 20 seconds into this male-dominance dispute, Danny-boy picks up his plate with as much grace as he can muster, and quietly moves to another chair.
