Flying palaces, parties and patellas

Hi Carolyn,


Whew, it's been a bit since I was last here. Springtime and all that has helped make the last number of days just fly past. Plus impromptu trips to the less than sunny " Sun-Parlor of Southern Ontario " as noted previously.   The weather turned  downright summerish a week or so ago and that meant we were out on the land  hustling about , rake, broom and wheelbarrow in hand. It lulled us into a sense of security as well, which has been shaken right out  in the last two days as we, like you, got side-swiped by snow and sub-freezing temps. It's anything but uncommon, of course, but it still creates an instant feeling of shock and dismay each time.



During those heady, heated days I managed to inflict an injury upon my person. My knee had been sending me small messages even before this flurry of outdoor activity but I did not listen. As a result of, or perhaps exacerbated by those hours of heavy-duty husbandry, it decided to stop flexing without lotsa pain. I should have listened to my knee-cap at that point but got all stoic and decided to "work through it" - dumb, dumb, dumb!





Fortunately, I had a previously made medical appointment during this time and was able to have my family doc take a closer look at things.  After some wiggling, jiggling, pressing and prodding she gave me the news - and it made me burst out laughing. The official name is " Patellofemoral syndrome " - not a jocularity inducing title, to be sure.  The more common name certainly tickled my funny bone though. It's basically a " sports injury " she said. My patella is flying about a bit, it seems.









Anyone who knows me knows that the closest I have ever come to any type of "sports activity"  is playing 8-ball, or riding my motorcycle ( Alas, the sailing thing has reached its end.)  Hearing my name and sports injury in the same sentence is sort of like hearing Muammar Gaddafi being lauded as a humanitarian or Mother Theresa being charged with disorderly  conduct.  So I've been getting lots of ironic humor mileage out of this one. Alas, its made climbing stairs and sitting for more than a short time bothersome too. Don't expect I'll be looking to go wall-climbing anytime soon, Carolyn.  Resting the affected limb is the main way to deal with it, apparently.



Anyhow, enough whining and whimpering about what happens with the body once it goes off warranty.



Ran into a most interesting item recently at Gizmag ( and elsewhere ). Awhile ago I put up some stuff about a proposed supersonic airliner that was on the drawing board and slated to go into production. It was pretty nifty for its high-tech features, stiletto shape and supersonic capabilities. Well, this is in the same vein more or less. The only difference is, this one is rumbling down the runways now and based on a tried and true airliner.  It's a Boeing 747-8 VIP business jet that has been completed and sent to some uber-high-roller client. It starts with an off-the-rack  barebones 747-8 (see above )  which one can obtain for a mere  370 million U.S. From there it gets finished off inside as the buyer wishes into a business jet like no other.  Over four thousand square feet of airborne opulence.  It really is, like the article said, a flying palace.



There's lots about it that I could wax on about here but it's all out there in lots of places. One of the things that caught my fancy was the master stateroom.  You can see it in the model  here and the finished product in the pic on the left.  I immediately pictured myself bedding down in that king sized bed right in the nose and almost freaking out at the thought that a few feet beyond the headboard was the atmosphere at 40 thousand feet and whizzing by at 500mph plus. I couldn't get to sleep to save my life.  So remember Carolyn, when you become a publishing magnate -  this is the way to get about.  Seven of these aeronautical Taj Mahals  have already been ordered and six of them delivered.  Apparently the next version of Air Force One will be made by these folks too.






For some reason this little item also reminded me of the flying building which contained the never-ending  cocktail party in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. If you check out the other pics you'll see that there is more than enough party hearty real estate inside this rolling temple of temporal delight. If one had so much money and power that stuff like this could be acquired like the rest of us buy a small car what would be the thrill of it all after that? What would be left to strive for in the material realm? There would be no more unreachable stars except the ones in the sky overhead.  I'm also wondering, do the birds up there laugh when they see these big, clumsy  circus wagons that we humans are tossing into the sky?



They may even be thinking something along the lines of what Mr. Twain noted:

Nature knows no indecencies;

man invents them.

So, Carolyn, be careful at the gyms. Good to hear that it's your own inclination that has you climbing the walls rather than the students, the publishing business, or life in general.


Don


All images sourced from Google Images

Fig. 1 - carlosnightman.wordpress.com
Fig. 2 - the guardian.com
Fig. 3 - uncyclopedia.com
Fig. 4 - daily.mail.com
Fig. 5 - norteverdadiero.com
Fig. 6 - aircraft-completion.com
Fig. 7 - panmacmillan.com.au
Fig. 8 - birdsasart.com
Fig. 9 - www.slideshare.net

By Any Other Name

Don, sorry to hear about your unexpected trip. This concept of getting old is literally "getting old". I keep remembering my parents looking forward to the day when my dad could retire and how they planned to do this and go there... but my mom got physically ill. It was heart breaking to watch my mother decline physically – mentally she was clear and strong. She knew what she wanted to do, but her body refused to cooperate with her mind. Her last days were filled with anger, frustration and fear. I wish you well with your father-in-law.

This aging thing has come up several times in the last month. Everyone keeps telling me what famous people do when they age and the volunteer time they put in when they aren't painting, or writing or swimming the channel... they all have the financial where-with-al to retire and do great things. What about the average person? What does a regular 75 year old man or woman do during the day? What kinds of foods do they eat? Do they volunteer? Do they still work?

Society just doesn't seem to be ready for me to grow older! I'm not ready yet to call it quits! After seeing the doctor for that 3 month-after-surgery checkup, I was cleared to start climbing again in about 6 weeks. On my way home from the doctor's, I stopped in at one of the new climbing gyms that have sprung up. I was the oldest person in there by 30 years. And I wish I'd had a picture of the desk guy's face when I told I was interested in doing some climbing again. You could have run a train through the pregnant pause. He picked himself up and managed to redeem himself in the end. But it was something to see!

I just read an article that this anti-aging concept is even showing up in the names that grandparents are choosing to be called by their grandchildren. One of the reasons makes sense: blended families, too many sets of grandparents and how to keep them separate; but really?! the name "Grandma" sounds old?; that people at 60 don't mind having grandchildren, they just don't want to be thought of as old – which the name "Grandpa" could mean? Isn't that denying yourself and the grandchildren the full spectrum of life?

As a grandparent, I'm not sure I'm ready to take on a name like "Zippy, Vava, or Yubba" (unique popular titles). However, I'd like to be thought of as zippy! I think I want my grandchildren to remember me as "THAT grandma, you know, the one who is climbing, or traveling or whatever" – that is the legacy I want to leave – that age happens, but it doesn't mean I have to stop enjoying life! And it is beautiful!   And it is graceful. And it's okay. Even if I lose my memory.

Don, you still motorcycle! Fantastic! What do others do? I know you belong to a sailing crowd... Larry and I are the oldest in our "crowd" – and frankly, the people we know who are close to our age are far busier than we are! To see them we have to make an appointment! It is definitely not the relaxed affair that my parents were looking forward to which is okay with me.

Twain's thoughts missed Colorado. Yesterday it was a beautiful balmy 70 degrees, sky was a glorious robin egg blue... today there is an inch of snow covering our beautiful green carpet grass; 3 more inches are expected by tomorrow night. Our trees have not yet leafed out which is good. We'll shake the bushes to make sure they don't break. I planted potatoes last week, but they are deep enough that I think they'll be okay. The tomato starts are on the enclosed front porch so I know they won't freeze. Lilacs just starting to bloom so it must be Snowtime in Colorado – Spring by any other name.

We opened up another free give-away of Tammy's works this week - check  out Ghosts of a Beneficial Place 

Have a great week!
 Carolyn

Images downloaded from Google Images

Fig 1 -- You Know You are Getting Old When.....Retrieved from mistyhorizon2003.hubpages.com

Fig 2 – Cat in the Hat on Aging Retrieved from Gary's Reflections: Getting older isn't all that great

garysreflections.blogspot.com

Fig 3 – Grandma climbs a mountain retrieved from Grandma Climbs a Mountain « Australian Self Publishing Group australianselfpublishinggroup.com

Fig 4 – Babysitting Grandma retrieved from brightgroupinternational.com

Fig 5 – Lilacs and snow retrieved from activerain.trulia.com

mother gives and she takes away.

Hi Carolyn,


Just back from an unexpected trip of a few days to the land that wi-fi forgot to take my lsbh's dad to a date with his Parkinson's specialist in a city a few hours from where they live. Funny that you should have mentioned briefly in your last entry that something dementia related has you " spooked"  ( Tammy's " Ghosts of a Beneficial Place " )  It's bittersweet funny though. It hasn't been that long since I last saw my father-in-law, but in that time period his Parkinson's has become aggressive and the dementia aspect especially has made it's presence known and felt. It is most unnerving to see the man you met four decades ago as the quiet but intimidating  bank manager  father of your bride-to-be, wrestling with incontinence and clearly daunted by the act of simply remembering who is with him and where he is.   Mother Nature takes away.



When we got back we saw that much had happened outside. One short week ago folks were still ice-fishing on the bay here, and there were sizeable  mountains of snow about.   Two or three days of crazy winds and skyrocketing temperatures has transformed all of that dramatically.  There was no ice on the bay at all and things were greening up so fast that I swear I could hear it.



 Today we had a morning coffee on the back deck,  and later I woke up the motorcycle and had my first two-wheeled sorti. Temperatures  tickled 70 (F) and everyone we passed on the road was smiling.  Mother Nature gives.


I read your stuff about keywords and especially " site stickiness " with more than just mild curiosity.  I've always been taken by how the right choice of words can change minds and more. I'll bet that's what Twain was getting at when he noted:

Thunder is good,

Thunder is impressive;

But it is lightning that does the work.

 

 

 

 Your concerns about how to make folks do more than just "bounce in and out again" is, and probably always has been, the marketers main conundrum. The web certainly encourages this kind of innocuous flitting about. It's far easier to click away than to turn and leave the bricks and mortar shop.

 

 

 

May the force be with you on this exploratory marketing foray. I can't quite understand the lure of it, but I can clearly see that you are enamoured. Don't overdo it, eh.

 

Had a chance to get through about the first hour of the first Hobbit flick before we found ourselves on the highway and I still like the literary version of  dinner at Bilbo's over the cinema version.

 

Bye for now.

 

Don.

 

 

 

 

 

If I say it out loud and other things

Don: 
Twain-ism: 136 kinds of weather in 24 hours! Sounds like Colorado! Yesterday was hot and uncomfortable, today is cool, blue sky, smell of rain. Tomorrow is slated to be cooler with a possibility of snow on Thursday... Spring is definitely here.

I've been playing with keyword optimization and Google Keyword planner as part of the copy writing and marketing that I do for Wormhole. From there I'm developing a keyword effectiveness index. It is an interesting process! Some words that work better than "coming of age" (words to describe Tammy's Ursa Major story) are social misfits, outcasts, refugee, peer pressure, bullying. This is helping me to better describe the stories in terms that people use. Our number of hits each day has increased 100%.  However, the site stickiness is not there yet. I'm working on it!

This is where applying the online marketing to Wormhole Electric comes in. We finally got the right code on the right pages and I'm now able to figure out basics about the audience that bounces into Wormhole and immediately bounces out again. We are lacking what the experts call "stickiness". People drop in and move on out. Most go to the home page and never go any deeper. I'm thinking about moving the Books for Sale page to the home page...

We are featuring Tamara Narayan this month and 3 other stories... and I've had one of those runs of weeks where I can't seem to get the editing right: I'm not seeing what needs to be edited, or I'm making assumptions that if the first 8 pages look good, then everything is alright throughout the rest of the 100 pages of manuscript. I have made mistakes or missed mistakes that I would have seen before. I'd like to blame it on technology, but I'm afraid the missteps are within my own technology. I've lost my process list and I don't seem to work well without it even though I've done this for the last 50 months, every month. Tammy's piece on dementia (Ghosts of a Beneficial Place) has me a bit spooked. (This story goes up for Free April 17th - for now, enjoy Ursa Major for free.)

According to psychologists, this is normal. With all that I'm doing and have done to my brain (changing hand dominance 2 times in 6 months), the brain is going to be confused and tired for a while. Tired I am – too tired to really know whether or not I'm confused. This is not a normal I want to get used to. It has also been pointed out that I've probably read all the stories at least 5 times each and my brain has become familiar with the text – I could probably take a test over each story and ace it. Apparently, familiarity with written text (and not just my own stories and books) means that the mind stops paying attention to the details and starts thinking about dinner instead.

A friend, a massage therapist, has suggested that it might be due the constant changing of the barometric pressure. In Colorado, the pressure can start out high and drop what feels like a bizzilion degrees in less than an hour.

I've had a sit down talk with my brain about this after all, I'm an editor! I need to step up and do more than just content and story flow! I should be catching the mistakes, looking deeper into the text, making sure that all is well - paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence! Word repetition by word repetition! My brain yawned, complained that it was tired and slowly sank back into the stupor of "Just get this Done! I'm hungry..."  

Really? Is this what I become in Spring? A manic energy swinger who can't figure out whether to go to work or curl back up and sleep a bit more? The energy I use to kick-start myself in the afternoons could probably light our house for a couple of hours! That might not be so bad actually, at least I'd know where and how the energy is being used!

I'm still writing for Nanowrimo each day. However, the writing is every night just before I go to bed, and I have yet to catch up with the typing! I'm averaging about 1000 words a day. By the time I get it all fleshed out when I type it, the word count goes up. I have found this process of saying out loud to God and everyone that I'm writing daily seems to make me do it. If I whisper it to myself so no one can hear me, I don't get around to doing it.  I'm better at keeping my word to others than I am keeping my word to myself.

Speaking of robins, Don ... we seem to be overrun by rock doves and woodpeckers. And then we need to consider the convention of rabbits that we saw just before Easter. My neighbor swears they were dividing up the egg duty for Easter.

As a tangent...I remember an Easter back when I was raising chickens, the kids were little and we were running late! And of course the kids wanted an Easter egg hunt, but we were already an hour behind. I noticed that somehow the chickens had gotten out into the yard. While I was chasing them back into the chicken yard, the kids found 10 eggs the hens had laid next to the porch and the well house... I'm sorry! The Story: The kids found 10 eggs the rabbits had taken from the hens and hidden by the porch. The hens, upset that their eggs were missing, figured out how to open the chicken yard gate and came to claim what was theirs!

And with that, I'm going for a walk. 

Have a great week everyone!

Carolyn 

Have a great week everyone!

All images downloaded from Google Images:

Fig 1 – Mark Twain retrieved from Mark Twain Quote (About age, aged, birthday, old)

www.celebquote.com

Fig 2 -- Top 10 Site Analytics Plugins for WordPress retrieved from tech.gaeatimes.com

Fig 3 -- Over 101 Internet Marketing Tools (Free & Premium) You'll Ever Need retrieved from

www.minterest.org

Fig 4 -- Left Brain Right Brain Myth, Brain Hemispheres – Posit Science Brain Myth Retrieved from

www.brainhq.com

Fig 5 -- Right and Left Brain Dominance retrieved from www.dallasbrainchangers.com

Fig 6 -- Vector of a Mad Chicken Chasing Easter Bunny with Her Egg by Zooco retrieved from  ..vecto.rs

Bunnies and Raptors and Robins, oh my !

Hi Carolyn and Happy Easter,


Hopefully you are having a good final few days of your erroneously titled Spring Break week. That egg-laying Easter Bunny sent us a couple of relatives and their pets to help create some low-key mayhem around here this holiday weekend. There are no little ones about, though, so no hidden eggs to ferret out.

Also great to hear that you've taken a good deal of edification from your marketing course. Sorry  that the architects' of said course hadn't boned up on their Bloom's Taxonomy before they put it together though. Still, it was quite obviously a full value learning experience.




I think you can make a good case for the Harry Potter series as culturally influential too. I'd not be inclined to see it as " widely" so, however. Those who totally bought into Harry Potter's world were probably, for the most part,  fans who first met the stories in print. The same can be said for the Tolkien trilogies too.  If we broaden the parameters  for this we could also make a pretty good case for The Wizard of Oz which also made its debut in print.

 Star Wars - and I do mean the original three movies -  hit us in celluloid from the git-go, so it probably appeals to a wider base simply because it, as a visual experience, takes imagination out of the equation.   ( I'm using the term " imagination" in it's narrowest sense, here. )



It's a most interesting, albeit academic pursuit, I know. There could be a treatise or two out there already that probes this area. If not, then there's one for one of your students to tie into. Something about the nature and quality of cultural impact from visual as opposed to literary sources. The sheer potential for obfuscatory polysyllabification of it all has my synapses on the ropes already. Like the song says, " Push me into shallow waters before I get too deep!"

Actually, a yuletide gift I received was finally spent last week and I now have the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Hobbit threesome on DVD waiting to be looked at in a fit of binge viewing. I'll report back on that in the future.




Yesterday, before the guesties arrived, I had a chance to slide on my halfway-to-hipwaders rubber boots and go galumphing about on this still very soggy property. We've had two consecutive days of  sun and temps in the mid-sixties (Fahrenheit) accompanied by gusty winds, so things have melted in a most energetic fashion. It was so nice at one point that I sat on a ledge at the back which was out of the wind but in full sunlight and simply reveled in  being warm and outside at the same time. My revelry was short-lived, though.

Once again a killer winter did not decimate the flora and fauna ( well, the fauna at least... ) as my few minutes of sun kissed repose were interrupted more than once by gangs of roaming, rapacious robins looking for whatever they could gobble up in the newly exposed grass. They were not shy about it either. A couple of them almost looked ready to frisk me as I sat there. They were also not shy about muscling each other out of the way when a discovery was made.   If it's true that birds are descended from dinosaurs then these guys  came from the velociraptor family.

That capricious Mother Nature, still has a bit of a "thing" going with Old Man Winter, it seems. Tonight we're slated to dive well below freezing again. Those folks in the sugar bush will be busy now, for sure. Our son has a number of mature maples on  his property and has gotten into the sap and syrup thing in the last few years. This kind of weather, he tells me, is ideal.

With that in mind, consider this week's Twain-ism:

In the spring I have counted

one hundred and thirty-six

kinds of weather inside of

four and twenty hours.
 

Enjoy the rest of your break.


Don




All images sourced from Google Images

Fig. 1 - alumni.furman.edu
Fig. 2 - en.wikipedia.org
Fig. 3 - phys.org
Fig. 4 - birddamagetofruitcrops.info
Fig. 5 - b-e-c-k-y.deviantart.com
Fig. 6 - wzoz.fm.com
Fig. 7 - screeninvasion.com