Technical Writer

It's Time For a New Board Game

I have an idea for a new board game.  With Scrabble-like tiles (but larger), let's put words on some tiles (articles, root words, prefixes and suffixes) and punctuation on others. Each player selects a game card for the round. The game card poses several problems or ideas that must be explicated by the player using the tiles to construct complete sentences.  Literary license is welcome but texting constructions are not welcome. (Too many attempts to use texting constructions and you will be put out on the back porch in the rain.)

There are two winners in each round. The first other player to discern which of the several possibilities on your game card you have written about using a single, complete sentence wins, and so do you.

To start, players take turns taking three random word tiles, plus any combination totaling three of prefixes and suffixes, and a punctuation tile to start. Thereafter, in turn, players pick one word and two random word (or suffix and prefix) tiles, and a random punctuation tile, a total of four tiles each turn. 

Additional rules:

Players may trade tiles freely with each other.

A player may develop his own idea or problem instead of selecting one from the game card. In that case, the player would write the idea on an index card, and add to it the other ideas from the game card for all to see so as to hide the idea in plain sight.  The index card becomes the game card.

What Will Susan Sing Next? & Saturday Flowers April 25

I read in the morning paper a piece about Susan Boyle, and the news is about hair and brows, and the meaning of putting on one's best, natural face.  I find no popular speculation, however, on what Susan might sing as she makes her way to the next stage of "Britain's Got Talent," in May.

It is important to take the long view of things.  The flowers I arrange on Saturday mornings for the kitchen table remind me that everywhere there are people composing their lives and steadying themselves for their rigors ahead.  Preparation may be a simple contemplative task or a patient examination of each step yet to unfold in a big work, so as to guide the unfolding progress to completion.  The smallest steps taken today on behalf of tomorrow put one living forward.

May I offer you a suggestion, Susan?  I believe that England, and all Britain would love to hear the hymn Jerusalem. The song captures love and ineffable longing for transformation, and it has become a patriotic anthem. I see no argument against singing a beloved song everyone in the live audience will know. The piece is a William Blake poem set to majestic music in 1916. The song is so popular that it has been adopted as the anthem of the rugby union. Here is one version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJRojmvlE6U

The William Blake who could explicate with a few words reality and transformation is a friend of mine.  Blake was a mystic, and I know that he believed in the potential present in every moment for sinlessness, but he also saw clearly present suffering.

Blake died in 1827, a few years before the Sadler Commission Hearings on child labor would in 1832  reveal to the larger world what he had understood with a poet's grace: the newly industrialized regions of England had been transformed by the time the poem was written in 1804 into dark Satanic mills of smokestacks and factories, and countryside where little children pushed coal carts through narrow, stifling tunnels deep in the mines. Susan will not sing about that. 

The world is awash in songs of suffering workers, and of people and lands despoiled by industrialization.  When the people of the British Isles migrated to the United States and found work in the coal mines of Appalachia, there arose amazing songs that chronicled their travails. I urge you to listen to this Web site: http://www.musicofcoal.com/music.htm  (Please see my note at the very bottom of this piece.)

Susan will sing a song, instead, which will unite the British in their longing for something better, and it will be a song that arises from their respect for poetry and the past and their identification with the opportunity of transformation inherent in music.

Here are the words of Jerusalem, a whale of a patriotic song.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

 

The ruggers would vote for Susan.

_______

It would be fitting, providing you as I am with a link to music of coal mining in the United States, to tell you that the link comes from an organization in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth.  It is a public, non-profit agency to help kids.  www.lpoy.org

The music in the coal mining country of early industrial England and that of the Appalachia has striking differences that speaks to the strength of the people, but a book could be written about it, not a blog on Susan Boyle.

Saturday Flowers April 18

Until this morning, ivy had taken over a patch of the garden that belongs now to astilbe and columbine, and a silver leaf ground cover that I just planted by the stone path.  A few square feet of earth matter in my small city garden, and while I can't abide a stiff garden with plants and colors in marshal array, a more relaxed order that invites the eye to wander from one area to another is what I aim in the small space out back.

From where I am sitting to write where I can see both the rear of the garden through the french doors leading to it from the kitchen, and this morning's new bouquet of kitchen table flowers. There are fresh lily buds behind the roses, as there were in last Saturday's bouquet.  I trim the flowers during the week and change the water, and the flowers from last Saturday are these, in the dining room.

I have read that the late Duchess of Windsor used to have an enormous vase of fresh yellow roses replaced daily in her London apartment, and I always thought, what a shame.  Surely part of the pleasure of fresh flowers is watching them develop and mature over the space of days, and to work amid the stems to assure that what remains is always looking its best. With flowers, as with gardens, nothing is ever finished.

I Want to Be a Navy SEAL

http://www.military.com/navy-seals/training.html

In my next life, and I mean the one where I do not sniff mint and bergamont leaves and eat chocolate Easter eggs and rapsodize about the beauties of the flowers I arrange on the kitchen table every week, I want to be a Navy SEAL, a lady SEAL, and I will wear my pearls--the ones I get myself from the ocean, forget Mikimoto. 

Saturday Flowers, April 11

Here is an arrangement that will be beautiful all week, and into the next.  

The tight green lily buds will open slowly and replace some of the other blossoms as they fade and are removed from the bouquet during the week.  By next Saturday, I'll move the lilies to another room, where in fact the lilies of eight days ago are still in full bloom in another vase.

A squirrel just landed on the outside table to nibble a few nuts I put out earlier this morning.  This year's squirrels are quite young, and Perry has not returned.  He is a bold fellow who last year would play games with Tammietta as she dozed in the sun on the porch.  He would dash right past her for a drink from the neighborhood water bowl by the back door, before returning the the fence post to discourse on the laziness of cats. I hope I see him this spring.

Here is a photo of a beautiful Easter egg made of chocolate, and hand carried to us from Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate.  I have kept it untouched for weeks until after Easter dinner, when we all broke it apart and ate it all up in one sitting. Out of respect.

I planted a few columbine and astilbe over the weekend, and some herbs in pots on the porch. With a few leaves of mint and basil, and some bergamont leaves that I pinched from plants growing elsewhere in the garden, I alternately inhaled their separate scents, and felt gratitude for spring.

Where is Gibbs When We Need Him?

I wonder if brave Capt. Richard Phillips, who traded captivity for himself so his Maersk Alabama would be freed from the wretched men who had captured it Wednesday, and who is now adrift in a small boat with these foul people not far from his ship 300 miles off the coast of Somolia, thought that the United States Navy would have had its eyes locked on him and at the ready with SEAL rescue--he might have thought they were already in the water expecting him, a man of obvious action, to alter the dynamic--the moment he slipped overboard shortly after midnight today and made a break for it in the water until he was hauled back onboard by two men who jumped in after him? 

An Honest Dollar Washing Cars

Two blocks east of my house on E. 4th St., next to their tidy place on the corner of Chapel Alley, and in the parking lot of the Sanctuary Progressive Community Church, Dave Kint and his wife Janice have established a car washing and detailing business. I took a walk this morning and spotted Dave working with his son on a couple of vehicles.  On Saturdays, the cars of the church congregants are lined up through the little parking lot, but on other days, there is often a car in the queue. Do you see the bottles of cleaning products lined up against the house sill along the side?  That means the place is open for business, and it is on most days except Sunday, or when it is raining. The enterprise fascinates me because it takes a willingness to work hard, and lots of trust that your neighbors will want you to clean their cars.  This is America, where you can take matters into your own hands to make a living.

Michael, a close friend who lives in Germany, has asked me how one becomes a technical writer.  Michael directs the research at a large cancer research center and has no interest in becoming a tech writer, but he is curious about enterprising Americans, having lived for many years in our midst.

In our conversation, I recognized how fortunate we are in the United States to be able choose our work, and to change it.  I explained that once I had been a book editor and magazine writer, and then about 10 years ago opportunity presented itself to write tech material for software.  I outfitted myself with new skills and knowledge along the way.

Apparently it is difficult to change one's career in Germany.  Christine, Michael's wife, upon returning to Germany after many years of living and working in the United States and already highly educated and certified in her field at home, had to acquire additional specialized training for a new position.  Had the position been in the States, she could have been hired outright to perform it because she is intelligent and motivated.  In Germany, she achieved her new position at the end of a long, government-sponsored pipeline of training and preparation.

My friend Cedric, in France, studied for three years to prepare himself for the entrance exams just to enroll in a university to become a pharmacist.  The open seats to start university in his field were in the very low hundreds in the country, and he just missed qualifying to be among the chosen few.  Cedric had studied night and day for three years, and passing the entrance examinations was his single mission in life. He tried again the next year after spending a fourth year studying for the exams, and trailed by only a few places the few hundred who were admitted.

The French university system is such that once admitted, you study only your single subject. If you qualify to enter the physics program, that's what you become.  You can't change course mid-stream. The broader education in the U.S. university system, where you may flounder around for a couple of years taking core requirements and then choose a major, is unknown.  To be fair, the French education system for children in the middle through high school ages is excellent, and most people in France do not go to the university. There is not as much opportunity for striking out on your own, and Cedric got no A for effort.

Not so on E. 4th St. in Frederick, where a family is making an honest living and saving its money to lease a garage.  The Kent family is doing what it must to earn a living, and it has required gumption we can be proud of. 

Giant Among Peeps

Peeps Ahoy!  When I espied the Holy Easter Peep at the Giant grocery store yesterday  I surreptitiously snapped its photo to show you.  I sincerely hope that it is eaten by joyful, delighted children rather than some grownup, who might take this item alone through the self-checkout and retire with his plunder to a pickup truck in the parking lot to eat this with both hands plunged into its yellow goodness.  The big Peep deserves happy children.  It looks as if it could grant wishes, doesn't it?

Fresh Bread for Maundy Thursday Love Feast

I just finished slicing some of Joe's fresh bread for supper and liked the way the counter looked and thought you might, too.  He likes to bake bread, which he says returns an immediate result for his day of labor, in sharp contrast to the years, he says, that it takes his economics majors to "turn out." Joe gives most of the bread away to neighbors, and to anyone with whom he interacts throughout the week.  The plumber, our physician, and the guy who puts new soles on old shoes have been the beneficiaries of Joe's largess. 

Apparently the recession has been a boon for the shoe repair industry, and Chris the cobbler, who has a workshop at Dr. Levine's podiatry practice in Frederick, has been exceptionally busy for months. You can find Chris working behind the large plate glass window in his shop that is filled with customers' worn shoes that line the racks and fill the shelves and spill over onto the work benches.  The scene is what you see when you enter the good doctor's waiting room if you look off to the left behind the display of new slippers for sale, the comfortable German ones made from boiled wool that we like to wear around the house. Chris likes Joe's bread.

Most of the bread on our counter today will wind up at church this week for the Church of the Brethren pre-Easter ritual of foot washing on Maundy Thursday night. The church is a small denomination, and it is growing smaller every year. It is much easier washing someone else's feet than having one's own feet washed. 

The ritual, held in the fellowship hall behind the sanctuary, is a quiet affair, and is followed by a meal called Love Feast of broth, bread, and maybe some fruit.  The meal is a reminder of congregational interdependence, and stories are told of churches delaying Love Feast until festering issues have been resolved among the people.

Sometimes the women wear small prayer caps at Love Feast to remind themselves to be present in a spiritual mind during the ritual. Most women do not wear prayer caps anymore.  Of course, there is giggling if little girls are present, and painful in-snorts from 14-year-old boys who have been told to be respectful by stern grandparents, but who at the end simply can not hold back their discomfort and then they laugh.  Then everyone laughs, and the tension of being on best behavior is lifted.

The bread on the counter will sit out overnight and in the morning Joe will bag it up and freeze it for Thursday.  He will probably make some whole wheat bread with seeds this week, and take that, too,  on Thursday for the supper.  The bread is always welcome.

Flowers April 4, Beating a Door to His Path

I had a swell martini at the art gallery last night, the classic kind from the 1930s, gin with a splash of vermouth. A drink scented with juniper berries appealed to me but I discovered that a little goes a very long way. 

Martini in hand, and discussing his own art with Karl, I learned that happiness in marriage has taken the desperate edge off his creativity, a trade he willingly made.  He thinks it would take three martinis to get into the clinical state of mind of his earliest years, when paint flowed freely.  I respect my inhibitions, and I put my unfinished drink back on the sidebar.   

I saw Karl on the street once in those early years sitting on a concrete step watching the passing scene.  A cigarette burned in one hand, and the other lay across his lap, pale arm in blue shadows. He was the quintessential artist, a little out of time and place. Today, he sells successful art (his own included) but the art that he collects is painted by artists on the edge of reason, where brush strokes are made from a deep well without direction from the ego.  He showed me some of his stuff in the back so I could see the difference between commercial art and what Van Gogh might have painted for others to discard.

Karl had framed for display two of his own items painted by Steve, who would be coming to the gallery, today, Saturday.  Steve is a sweet, good-natured man who, if you did not know his name, you would recognize (if you have been in Frederick) as the man with the long beard and psychedelic clown pants.  Sometimes Steve sets up an easel and turns out small pieces that he sells for $5 when he needs money.  Steve's art, Karl explained, arises from an intelligent and schooled mind that now paints to express his awareness of a rich and self-effacing understanding of the forms and colors of life.  

Karl framed two pieces of Steve's art and placed them in the gallery show.  I overheard people admiring the man's work, and it is interesting how a frame can domesticate abstraction and make it accessable to all.

A Virtuous Pot is Its Own Reward

When my husband was a young professor and on his first sabbatical abroad, he bought two frying pans in Paris.  One would think that hefting along a couple of iron skillets would have slowed him down, but he had only to carry them across the Channel to his house in East Sussex, where he was living and studying.  The Le Creuset pans from Paris would have made an impression on the neighbor ladies, and I have speculated about where he learned that the best Sunday night supper of all is an omelet, green salad, and a glass of white wine.

Over the years the collection of pots and pans has grown.  The original large skillet, and a number of smaller pots that joined it immediately upon return to the States had become degraded over the years with use, and if truth be known, some misuse when I was first learning to cook with them.  "The fire is too high!" he would call out and he crossed the kitchen, scowling, to adjust the flame under his prized Paris skillet. 

Two weeks ago we boxed up two skillets and three pots and shipped them to the Le Creuset center in Early Branch, South Carolina, where they could be assessed and repaired, and muttered over, darkly.  Over time a wooden handle had split, and chip had been knocked out of a pot lid, and the cooking surfaces had become worn.

An hour ago, Fed Ex delivered two big boxes to the front door, and I was surprised to see that they came from Le Creuset.  I ruefully said to my husband that the company must have decided that the 99-year guarantee doesn't cover the kind of damage we reported.  We opened the boxes, expecting to find our old stuff back, possibly resurfaced and with repaired lids and replaced handles, and with a terse little handwritten note about taking better care of their cookware.  No!  What we unpacked instead was a brand spanking new collection of three pots and two skillets, in bright, flaming red so red that each  piece shouted Bonjour as we lifted each out of its box. I dragged to the garden table all the new pots and pans and put some other Le Creuset with them for additional color for you to see.

My mother always says that virtue is its own reward, and that if you are going to buy something, make sure it's the best you can afford.  Buying pots and pans with a lifetime guarantee may seen frivolous to some, but Le Creuset makes the very best cookware in the world.  See the yellow oval pot behind the rest?  Vegetables slowly simmered in just a bit of broth become the most delectable food in the world.  The big green pot cooks our traditional Christmas dinner of Charcroute Garni that we learned to make in Strasbourg.  Finally, notice the humble little pan in the center. Only omelets are made in this exquisite pan, and it remains in perfect condition.

The other thing my mother taught me was that "Only sluts take naps in the afternoon," but world traveler that she is, my mother has never lived in Paris.

Michelle's Flower Shop

As keeper of a small flower shop, Michelle has more than a few bouquets to sell, day in and day out.  Since inheriting the shop from her father, she has kept the aesthetic ambiance of a downtown Frederick store that remains what it has always been, a place where fresh flowers and greens mix with old art and antiques, and where her customers can say, as I overheard a woman exclaim, "This is my happy place."  Who wouldn't want to sit in the leather wing back chair by the antique wooden sales counter awaiting one's turn in a busy shop after browsing the shop, always lovely? 

I took these photos in the flower shop two weeks ago.  The shop retains its original name, Flowers by Jim.  There are two rooms, separated by the wooden sales counter. Rather than show the shop itself, here are a few images that represent the whole.

Isn't this a beautiful painting?  The word insouciant comes to mind. The little painting is modern, although antique paintings are also for sale. Here is a handsome couple. I hope they lived their lives well. 

Michelle has composed altar flowers that she will deliver later in the day, and this small bouquet is for someone's birthday party. 

My own Saturday flowers boast a bold white hydrangea. My flowers come wrapped in colored, waxed tissue paper, and I arrange them myself, less artfully than the shop owner would.  My flower arranging time is always an opportunity to put the world right side up for myself.