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T-Mobile, and Forthcoming Contributor

Thursday, August 28, 2008

First, do you live in or around Tallahassee, and use T-Mobile? I ask because I could go on a corporate cell phone (which would be a nice thing, all said) but I’m unclear how good T-Mobile is here in town.

Second, Ninth Letter noted that I am a contributor “forthcoming in Fall/Winter 2008,” which pleaseth me greatly. That’s a while away, and my essay is so topical I worry everyone else will exhaust the issue of gay marriage by then. But in any event, the plug for The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 2 — now with a grand total of 9 OCLC holdings — was quite welcome.

I’m on the road this week and part of next, but when I’m home I plan to send out a pile of postcards to libraries to encourage them to buy Best Creative Nonfiction. It’s a really easy book to book-talk, and it would make a fabulous reading-group book because you could pick several short essays and have fun with that.

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Fay-be-Gone

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Damage from Fay

We had been considering ourselves super-super fortunate — we didn’t have a tree crash into our house, we aren’t in a flood plain (maybe in a 1000 years, but right now our house is on a hillock in an elevated section in the west part of Tallahassee), we didn’t have to drive in this mess… when we heard a loud crash, which was part of our guest-bathroom ceiling falling in.

(The guest bathroom is “my” bathroom, sort of — we are a bit territorial that way. Except now that there is a giant hole over the bathtub, we are Sharing the other bathroom.)

Well, I had been wondering what the third thing was. You know how things come in threes. There was Sandy’s car, then there was the microwave oven/kitchen fan (far too boring to blog about), and then This.

I may have brought this on by finding the $120 FM traffic receiver that goes to my GPS, which was actually never lost but was just camouflaged among the the 8,000 other cords I had placed in my new glove box, all tidily rolled up, perhaps too tidily.

These cords are all black and about the same length, but one of them conversationalates with traffic conditions in big cities (n.b.: that would not mean Tallahassee) and has already saved my bacon on one trip by asking me if I wanted to avoid a traffic jam (yes! I did want to avoid a traffic jam, as a matter of fact) and steering me out of Atlanta through what a friend who lived years in Los Angeles calls “surface roads” and what reminded me of several scenes in The Bone Collector, but it worked and that’s what counts.

(Nota bene #2: I have never placed gloves in a glove box.)

Or maybe I made this happen by figuring out that my iPod’s butt-hole (as I think of its syncing port) may have gone slightly off-kilter when I landed full-force on top of my iPod during a bad fall while running in Provincetown, and if you have to fall anywhere and any time, it might as well be P-Town in May.

I have had trouble syncing my iPod ever since then (I also tore up my elbow, but who cares about that), and more than once had to coax pins back into place with a sewing pin. Then I decided to try to ease the interface board more centered to the butt-hole by gently but firmly pushing it with a strip cut from an old hotel room swipe card, and that has worked beautifully. So the iPod couldn’t be “three.”

Continuing the “I don’t want to bore you” motif, I won’t tell you all about hurricanes and deductibles in Florida, except to say I am glad we are fiscally conservative and I never liked blue in that bathroom anyway. But I am very, very glad the ceiling chose to fall in two hours after my shower, because the plaster and nasty stuff that rained down might not have so much have scratched me, but just the sound and surprise would have given me a heart attack!

So, my apologies for not giving you a savvy link-roundup or astute insights into our latest writing workshop. Even after a bracing glass of grape-flavored nerve medicine, I still feel rattled. Crawling into the ceiling with a flashlight, this appeared to be the only damage, and compared to what others have experienced, it’s not very much. But I resent that this storm has crammed its hands into our wallets. Fay, be gone, good riddance, don’t let the door hit you in the butt!

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Theme changed, feeds appear fixed, WordPress upgraded

Sunday, August 17, 2008

I switched to a very simple two-column theme for Free Range Librarian on the theory — correct, it appears — that the theme I was using had broken my feeds, probably when I upgraded WordPress a couple of releases ago.

So this morning after reading the Styles section of the New York Times — the first thing I do every Sunday morning is look for same-sex marriages in the back of Styles — I began upgrading. The theme (VeryPlainText) is a stopgap, but it works for now.

It’s a nice quiet time to be doing this. These days Sandy has the luxury of sleeping in most Sundays. We could go visit churches, and might be seen at services now and then, but I’m frankly enjoying the secular life for the first time in decades. I will resume church life again — most likely when we leave here — but I see why people use Sunday morning for Church of the Brunch.

I brought up the idea of leaving Tallahassee to a friend on Friday who shouted in a restaurant, “You can’t sell your house!”

Well, you can sell anything, depending on what you’re willing to be paid for it, and this isn’t Miami nor is this house a condo. But we don’t have to sell our house to leave Tallahassee. We can rent it out (it’s in a great area for that, in a pretty park district next to the Capitol) or we can leave it empty while we show it for a while and wait out the upturn. We’re both good at scrimping, and if that’s how it has to be, so be it.

The other thing we hear is that Sandy could get some other church or line of work in the area. (These are all well-intended suggestions.)

This idea is predicated on several misunderstandings. First, there are no other churches in her denomination — not for quite a few miles around. It’s not as if she can show up at the Methodist church and find a job.

Second, the suggestion implies that we want to somehow find a way to stay here.

I’m glad people love to live in Tallahassee. I don’t loathe it, and I hope my comments here don’t inspire some of the “Yankee go home” comments I’ve had on my blog in the past. But this isn’t our home, and we both feel that way.

We’re not supposed to be here.  We get it.  Before Tallahassee, Sandy had a string of good church experiences, I had jobs I liked (I again have a great job, but it isn’t tied to Tallahassee), and then we came here, and it was never a good fit.  We tried; oh, how we tried. Some of it wasn’t bad, some of it was even very good (I think of my writing friend Lisa and the critique group I founded, and the string of friends I’ve made at two jobs in the area), and we’ll keep trying until we leave. But we’ve relaxed into planning a future away from here — wherever that may be.

It’s been a good lesson-learned about where we belong — or at least where we don’t belong. I no longer wake up with tears in my eyes missing California — my life is too happy and busy for that — but it will be all right when Tallahassee is in our rear-view mirror.

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Should I write about This? Should I write about That?

Friday, August 15, 2008

I’ve had a very full week in many ways… got back to Tallahassee 11 p.m. Friday (detoured through Vidalia for a library visit), on Saturday afternoon conducted a creative nonfiction workshop (excellent turnout!) at Leon County library, plunged into piles and piles of work, went to Cairo yesterday to visit the Roddenbery Library (listening to free CDs from the Florida Folklife Collection while I kept one eye on the mpg meter), and so forth.

Right now some of my writing rules are shot out of the water. When I wake up, my brain is buzzing with work. When I go to sleep, that’s the case, as well. It’s as much as I can do to focus on this month’s submissions for the critique group. I have a manuscript that’s this close to being ready to submit; I don’t have the focus for it, and since it’s a holiday theme (an essay about a Thanksgiving meal, long ago and far away), I’m losing the last window of opportunity to find a home for it until next year.

I have other ideas that aren’t even scratched out on paper… just the blather of a writer saying, “I should write a piece about…” or “This would make a great story.”

It’s all part of the ebb and flow… I may have my focus 100% in one direction right now, but I’m having fun. I also try to note what I see as I drive around Georgia. I may get a recorder for my iPod so I can observe things like the spindles of cut hay on a shorn field, stacked like back-to-school pencils, or the one-room clapboard churches with hand-lettered signs announcing special prayer services, or the particular dusty yellow light of late afternoon filtering through trees that curtain a quiet two-lane road.

(Anyone else noticing how SUV and truck drivers are suddenly driving much slower?)

My office is a comical disaster — an unpacked suitcase, piles of stuff tossed on the futon that was perfectly clean two weeks ago, thick stalagmites of paper and detritus.

Leon County library got back with me about my program not being on the library calendar. It’s because it wasn’t a library-sponsored event. I understand that from the library’s point of view; I assume it means that then no one thinks the library is endorsing the program. From the presenter’s point of view, it’s a different perspective. Nice for them to respond, of course, and the room was just right. Next time I’m sneaking in candy — nobody would have noticed.

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GLBT-friendly accident insurance plans?

Monday, August 11, 2008

For libraries that have offered domestic partner benefits to their employees: does anyone out there have recommendations for accident insurance plans (similar to Aflac, or what Allstate offers) where domestic partners may be covered under their “family” plans? (I work in Georgia, if that makes a difference.)

At MPOW, we interviewed Aflac and Allstate, and at least in Georgia, both companies define “family” as a legal spouse. I’ll make the pragmatic choice — it could be that in the end, once again, I go with a single-payer plan, if I select anything at all, depending on what’s offered, and I’m very glad MPOW cares about this issue — this is the first place I’ve ever worked that has made any effort to offer me DP benefits.

But I’d like to at least talk to a company more enlightened than Aflac or Allstate, and have offered to do the research.

Even if I end up using their services, I’ll never again enjoy those Aflac commercials…

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Creative Nonfiction Workshop, Leon County Library: Follow-up

Saturday, August 9, 2008

As promised, here are the links from today’s workshop (plus any more I added AFTER the workshop). Thanks for showing up! I’m writing this in advance, but I’m sure we had fun.

Here’s the link to Tallahassee Writers’ Association. Come to a meeting! Our next meeting is Thursday, August 21 at the American Legion.  I’ll be there — feel free to sit with me and I’ll introduce you around.

This is a wiki page for workshops I’ve taught about “writing for the web.” The handouts are particularly useful if you’re thinking about writing, and the syllabus lists some great examples of (online) creative nonfiction.

It’s just one woman’s list, but here’s my LibraryThing collection of creative nonfiction. The library also owns some of these books and for materials they don’t own, they can get them for you through interlibrary loan.

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Say hi to Sparkle, my Civic Hybrid

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Say hi to SparkleI’ve been on this car-purchasing odyssey, made wild and crazy because it’s the summer when people will do irrational things to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles, including paying way above reasonable street value.

I changed tactics to a new car late in the game, when I could not find a used Honda that met my specifications through dealers, Carmax, or anything else, only to find that I had now entered the long weird season where dealers are depleting existing stock in a year when they could be turning out small cars like waffles at Cracker Barrel on Sunday morning.

So do not ask how I ended up (at a reasonable price) with a gently-used Civic Hybrid in a pretty sparkly silver (touched with just a hint of aqua blue) with navy cloth upholstery and oodles of time and miles left in its warranty (extended by Honda Certified).

(The “Earth” magnet is one I found in Provincetown in June, with no other plan for it than I was tickled by the sentiment.)

Even Internet dealers, including a very nice one whose mom reads this blog, expressed surprise I had found a hybrid. I suspect I could scalp this car on Peachtree Avenue (just so you know: every other street in Atlanta is called Peachtree Avenue) and with the proceeds buy a bookmobile or a warship. Though after getting over 50 mpg on the drive north (not bad for someone who thinks 65mph is the legal minimum on most highways), I don’t really want a bookmobile or warship. It’s much nicer to have gas in the car left over from the drive.

When I test-drove this car I was puzzled by how much I liked it. I finally realized it’s because it feels like what it is — a Honda –and I’ve long enjoyed driving my 15-year-old Civic (still in the family and doing quite well at 170k, thank you very much). Things were in the right places and did the right things in the right way.

Some things were new to me, though not new to anyone who has bought a car in the last few years. Two cupholders, with cunning prongs to ensure the cup fit just so! A seat I could raise up (and immediately did)! TWO accessory outlets! An MP3 plug! A whoop-whoop (as we call the fob’s homing sound, from Sandy’s dear departed Corolla)! Places to tuck things! A sliding armrest!

But overall, I now understand why people buy the same car; it is for the same reason they sometimes marry the same spouse, several times over. Life is full of surprises. I could see getting used to a lovely green Prius, with its varied amusements and so forth, plus the joy of knowing I was driving an Obvious Hybrid, and there was a mad moment when I almost over-spent and bought one — even though it didn’t have the accessories I wanted and the local dealers are charging a hefty pile of cash above MSRP, which ain’t no peanuts to begin with, so it felt gluttonous and foolhardy and yet strangely underwhelming.

There are even some things the Honda does unequivocably better than the Prius — remember I’ve rented and driven Priuses for very long (but pleasant) trips.

The Civic Hybrid mpg gage is both understated yet positioned in line of sight on the dash, not off to the right on a glitzily distracting panel; after a while, I realized the gage was right above the battery-charge indicator, so I could eye both at the same time. (I’m sure this has been written about to a fare-thee-well, but you don’t drive a hybrid — it drives you, by managing your feet through the consumption data.) You can also see out the back of the Civic Hybrid, and it doesn’t whipsaw when a truck drives by. Plus however solid a ride is the Prius, nothing hugs the road with such eagle-taloned determination as a Honda.

But those are mere quibbles. More to the point, there’s something comforting about not having to relearn my car, for heaven’s sake, in a life where since I last bought a car, I’ve lived in four states and six houses.

Maybe that is why I kept looking for a Honda, and maybe that I got my hands on a hybrid is the best of both worlds. My car is my touchstone to the past, the continuity through homes I no longer live in, rosebushes I gave away, friends I buried, opportunities that will never come around again. Yet my new-to-me car is also, in its own small way, with its modest fuel habits and its alternative fuel technologies, a steppingstone to the future.

One fellow at the dealership made a big case that though it’s a hybrid the Civic “looks like a car,” which made me smile, because I think the intimation was as opposed to that crazy-looking Prius those latte-drinkin’ Obama-votin’ Democrats drive. Beyond the obvious point that all cars look like cars — because they are in fact cars — the bottom line is that I, a latte-drinking, Obama-voting Democrat, am happy to have a sparkly almost-new horseless carriage with an excellent pedigree and well-tended life history, a vehicle that sips delicately of finite resources, has well-engineered cupholders, and feels, at once, both warmly familiar and brightly new.

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Hello, I Must be Linking

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

I am having a blissfully good time in my new job as Community Librarian for Equinox, and just spent a grand time in Idaho talking about open source — a session that was taped, and when it is online will unfortunately reveal, in a shameful moment, that I am unclear about exactly where Idaho is (we did establish that it’s east of California and west of New York) — and in Wisconsin, at WilsWorld Camp and WilsWorld proper, where many wise people, including Roy Tennant, David Lankes, and John Blyberg, shared good stuff, and where I ate some awesome 15-year-old cheese and had a great talk with a waiter who is writing a history of the Drum and Bugle Corps.

But enough about work! I haven’t done a link roundup in ages, and have been tucking away goodies galore.

Don’t forget I’m holding a creative nonfiction workshop at Leon County Public Library on Saturday, August 9! Except — hrmm — I’m not on the calendar. No, really, I am doing this 1-4 p.m. on August 9. I will begin by reading from my essay “Range of Desire” in The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 2 (as well as several other short works), and this is not the last time I will ask you to buy this book, review it on LibraryThing or Amazon, or check it out from your library. It’s still not in WorldCat (I’m looking at you, fellow liberrians) and doesn’t have an Amazon review, but it is in LibraryThing, where it has had five really good reviews and averages 4.5 stars.

As long as we’re talking up books, I read an early copy of Steinbeck’s Ghost, a novel for kids and other readers by Lewis Buzbee (disclaimer: former writing prof), and enjoyed it tremendously. Ghosts! Librarians! The Salinas library closure! Steinbeck! Boy protagonists! Friendship! Annoying parents! Action and excitement, a lot of it on bicycle! A trip to Monterey! Book suggestions galore! (I love a book that leads me to more books — and it takes a skilled author such as Buzbee to raise the shadow of other books amid his own.) And it’s being issued on my birthday, September 2! I love that.

(If I had to name a car, I’d call it the Galore — a much underappreciated word. The Galore: 60 mpg, and more cupholders than you know what to do with! No, I haven’t bought a car. I’m waiting for the Creator to park one in my driveway. Yes, I know I need to pull myself together and do something about that — though we’re not doing too badly sharing a car right now.)

Thinking about rethinking how you eat? I slapped together this bookbag of core books about food politics, the localvore movement, and sustainable/local/seasonal eating. What would you add? I don’t wish belt-tightening on anyone, but I don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing that we’re all far more painfully aware of what it costs to move a radish cross-country, and how we’ve been pawns of Big Oil and Big Agro. Read… and then VOTE.

Me as a Read Bookmark

I just know you want to download your own Free Range Librarian “Read” bookmark. Victoria Horst, director at Tifton-Tift Library, took this picture and ginned it up with her ALA Read Poster software. (I’m reading Pride and Prejudice.) (I’ll be darned — there’s a Flickr set for these posters. Go ALA!)

As Roy Tennant announced in LJ, the festschrift for Anne Lipow is out, with my biographical essay about her in it. Naturally, being a writer, I am critical of my writing and see all the rough spots. But the collection has wonderful writings from a great group, and you can read it online or buy the print edition for a reasonable sum. Anne, we miss you, but this book helps. *Hugging Roy*

I have a tin ear for poetry, so I am (sadly) poetry-ignorant, but this amusing post by poet Kay Ryan about attending a conference will ring a bell with even the most gregarious conference-goers from any profession. “What we have here before us is the exhilaration of bulk: bulk bags, bulk panels, bulk poets.”

While I was in Boise, Jamie Larue of Douglas County Libraries in Colorado (which is surprisingly close to Idaho, it turns out), shared his eloquent blog post defending his library’s choice to retain the title, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding. I think about librarians who believe librarianship is all about the latest sparkly gizmoes and then I read posts like this and I’m reminded of the quiet steady work many librarians do defending the right to read — “kewler” than any momentary gizmo. I’m not anti-sparkle, mind you — I’m just ever-mindful of the long haul.

Speaking of sparkly, I adore this Flickr set of Wii-playing seniors at the Skokie Public Library. My attitude about gaming is we hold programs on potting geraniums, so why not gaming?  The library should be a big ol’ info potluck — books, computers, games, and yes, even geraniums.

My buddies at My Former Place Of Work have revived their blog, The Centered Librarian. Some fun tidbits. I’ll tell you what I advised them, when they asked. When you begin or revive a blog, don’t post everything that you’ve been saving up right away. Pace yourself. Save some stuff for slow times. With a group blog, establish an editorial schedule and stick to it. If people get busy, recruit new voices.

Speaking of Blogger (which I advised them to move from, as it is really cruddified — it will do for now, but I suggest growing an exit plan), TechCrunchIT has a resonant post about Google acquiring and then slowly suffocating interesting startups. The angle that made my ears wiggle was how the employees have to learn a Google-specific group of languages, which makes them less marketable.

Sandy continues to interview with interesting churches. UCC has a placement process in which pastors file profiles centrally, which are then shared with regions the pastor is interested in. Some friends have contacted us to say they’ve heard about jobs but it’s in a church that isn’t ONA (“Open and Affirming”). Sandy has served well in several churches that weren’t (yet) ONA, but were open to change, seeking growth and leadership, and were very welcoming to us both. With the profile process, there’s a good chance we already know about the opening, but don’t let a label stand in the way of a tip-off.

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To Boise, to WilsWorld, and to Present on Creative Nonfiction

Sunday, July 20, 2008

I’ve been getting my sea-legs at my new job and staying very, very busy — blogging is just the tip of the iceberg. I got back from Norcross Friday night, and this morning, I’m off to Boise to talk about open source, and then to WilsWorld to just be there and I don’t know, let the goodness of open source ooze from my pores, and then back next Friday to scurry through piled-up work.

But before I forget, on Saturday, August 9 from 1-4 p.m. I’m leading a creative nonfiction workshop at Leon County Public Library, through the aegis of the Tallahassee Writers Association. Three hours is actually a fun length for a local “taste of CNF” workshop. I can read a little from my own work and the work of others, we can do a couple of fun exercises… we’ll have a good ol’ time.

I am going to brag more loudly next week, but The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2 (Lee Gutkind, ed.) is due out July 28, and my essay, “Range of Desire,” is in it.

What really humbles me is the list of authors in this volume. They’re like, you know, real authors. I can’t wait to read their essays.

By the way, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, but Michael, the editor at Nerve who worked on “Range of Desire,” was the perfect balance of good judgment and restraint. If I did say it, I’m saying it again. I like editors.

No, I haven’t bought a car. I have been Away. Carmax’s suggestions have not been right, and the local Honda guy has so far been mum. Still waiting for the gummint to issue me a car.

Now that I’m car-shopping I’m noticing that maybe it’s not such a terrible predicament to be in… my car leaks inside when it rains, it looks worn-out, and it is mildewy. I love my old Honda, but perhaps it is not so bad to be downgrading it to the Family Beater. A hard acknowledgment, like realizing a pet is getting old. (Or that we are getting old.)

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My dogma and my car-ma

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Over at the Equinox blog I was writing about (in re library software, open source and all that) putting the dogma in the kennel… which I have been trying to do with car purchases as well.

I am realizing that I really just want someone to issue me a car. It’s a big purchase, it’s an important purchase, and yet on some level I secretly yearn for some major government authority to put a car in my driveway so I can just get it over.

Meanwhile I had an absolutely fabu visit with some librarians in Tifton yesterday morning and am now a proud owner of a PINES library card, and dearly want to share pictures with you, but my little fingers have been flying flying flying on the keyboard (and my not-so-little behind has been perched in chairs in various meetings), so I will try very hard to do that tonight.

Finally, I logged in to my blog to see an exhortation to upgrade to WordPress 2.6. Based on previous ready-fire-aim experiences with WordPress releases, all I can say is not on your life. As in the past, I’m waiting to see what happens when other people upgrade, and will then tiptoe out of my foxhole to attempt a WordPress upgrade on a test site. To paraphrase the great bard Bon Jovi, “Shot through the heart/And you’re to blame/You give open source/A bad name.” Well, that doesn’t scan, but you get the drift.

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