Technical Writer

The Body in the Trunk

When my trusty, humble Volvo developed a case of Check Engine this weekend, the service rep at the dealership assured me that for $2300 all could be set right if he could keep the car for a few days. To dignify the transaction, he handed over the keys to a loaner car that I might "need all week," which I imagine means that the incoming Volvo parts from Sweden are arriving at Dulles today, having travelled first class from Goteborg.

The car loaned to me, and which two service techs spent 20 minutes introducing to me, is a new Lincoln MKS, which you must Google. (You can't even price this baby online--you submit your requirements and a dealer will contact you--if you dare.) The MKS is a big, bad car so trendy that after I remote-unlock the beast I just drop the oval key in my handbag because the MKS doesn't need no stinkin' key--a push button starts the car. What's not to like? The MKS has a touch-control panel with many, many screens that deliver options I must study lest I hit the seat eject tab by mistake and sail through the moon roof into a bright future. The trunk is like a cave, carpeted in case I want to camp out in it for a few days, but I am more concerned that drug lords have stashed their stuff in the far reaches, and this would surely be discovered when I am pulled over for driving a sedate 65 mph down Rt 70 instead of 90, which the MKS begs for. As for the body in the trunk, I'm sure it's there--I'm just afraid to look.

On Rescuing Lord Dunsany's Guerrilla from My Discard Pile

When the knackerman for books arrives in the guise of one of the uniformed recycling truck crew this Friday, I will have a few hundred books to discard.  Why do I need to keep two paperback copies of Matilda, when I have a nice hardcover?  Two paperback copies each of various C.S.Lewis science fiction titles that I also have in hardcover, an extra copy of St. Augustine's Confessions--you get the drift.  It is nearly impossible for me to discard books, but I am biting the bullet and throwing many away.  The shelves are looking better already and I feel free of acid-burned paper.

I surveyed the rejects in the basement last night and recognized that in my zest for rejuvenating the stacks some worthy books were lost in the shuffle.  I retrieved Edward Dunsany's Guerrilla, and just finished rereading just before it was time to get out of bed this morning. Mine is a fine old copy, published in 1944, in cloth cover with a library binding.  This particular book was discarded from a New England town library many years ago. 

The publication date is interesting, because this is a story about resistance fighters in an unnamed Land in World War Two, at a time when the outcome of the war was not known.  To Dunsany, however, the truth of the outcome of the war could be known because Liberty as he wrote of it is as hard as the rock of the mountains that gave their strength to a free people and could not be effaced.

I read the book as a gorgeous, long, discursive essay on beauty and time and human integrity bound to the land.  There is also information about terrain of mountains and of people themselves, and quite a bit on hiding in plain sight from the attacking Stukas above and infantry below.

As Dunsany wrote in his Foreword,

The man who told this tale had got to London, after sufferings of which he never spoke. He was full of hope, a hope so firm that it induced in him almost a kind of gaiety, and certainly a fine energy. He was an uncle of the lad of whom the story chiefly tells. And the story went something like this: without details, with few names of persons or places, nor even the name of the country. Something had taught him to mention names rarely, and to believe that German ears were always listening, even in London.

But it is not the names or the places or the lesser details that are important. And I cannot be sure enough that this violent story of mine of this little fraction of the rage of a furious year will last to be read in the calm days that shall come after our war, for me to describe with any more exactitude this story, magnificent in its spirit and hope and courage.

I commend this book to you, and here is a link to Project Gutenberg, which offers the book text online.

http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/dunsany-guerrilla/dunsany-guerrilla-00-h.html

Learning to Pick Locks

My potential for a life of crime took an uptick today.  Not only can I point to my instance of driving through a red light in my CJ-5 with the top down one dark night on Rt. 125 northbound in New Hampshire 30 years ago, a memory that still warms me with its daring-do, I have spent the morning quietly learning by practicing how to pick file cabinet and door locks in the office.  My pal the cybersecurity geek has a nice set of Southord picks in a little leather case, and he pointed me to a few sites of information on the Internet.  I recommend the MIT lock picking guide, which is easy to read to grasp the concepts you must know to begin.

I have just ordered my own small set of tools so I can continue to practice.  It's a skill worth having, and I will never look at a lock again except as a puzzle to solve.

http://www.lockpickguide.com/MITguidetolockpicking.html

Cat Incoming from Denver on Southwest

When K decided to move his family to Manzanillo, Mexico for a year or two, we decided that old Pumpkin shouldn't have to make the trip south into the unknown and instead K brought her to live with us, 1700 miles to the east.  He hopped on a plane with his orange cat buddy, and she is settling in now, two weeks later.  Life is much better for Pumpkin now. In her former abode, she was beset by young children and younger cats, all of whom are headed to a house near a Pacific coast beach. On the other hand, Miss Tammietta is just coming out of the shock of her long, furry life, but the critters are getting used to each other.  Now, instead of hissing when they see each other in the same room, the hissing is reserved for too-close proximity when they snuggle up to us in bed at night. 

I like to hop in bed first--it's always a race up the stairs--so I get the best spot, the one with a pillow all to myself.  When Joe closes up the house and comes to bed, he is greeted now by me, laughing and wondering what he is going to do.  Miss Tammietta is in her favored place at the foot of Joe's side of the bed, and new cat is sprawled in utter contentment where Joe would lie.  My husband is a capable man who knows how to negotiate treaties and timetables and plot regression statistics while discoursing on matters of heteroscedasticity, but getting new cat to move over is nearly beyond his powers.  Eventually he seizes the advantage and secures a place, and we all go to sleep. 

Until the festivities begin.  The cats argue now about where each is hiding the other's lipstick.

My Lunch at Volt Restaurant in Frederick; Plates by Picasso

Joe and I have dined at Michelin-starred restaurants in France and Germany, where restrained and well groomed staff in their multiplicity of functions are devoted to one's dining experience; and we have eaten at Gallic bistros and Rhineland beer halls where the meat, held high overhead by waiters weaving through the crowd, arrives still smoking on the joint.  In these old world restaurants food is honored. To be a cook or waiter in a fine restaurant in Europe is a noble profession, and at a bistro, at the very least, it is a good job. To be a top chef is a rare honor that extends its beneficence to the entire town, now a destination stop in the world of gastronomy.

Frederick, Maryland has a destination restaurant, newly opened, and right around the corner from my house. Link to Volt Restaurant

A Dietary Revision

Recently, around the time I began to take long early morning hikes through my town, I changed my dietary habits of a lifetime.  I have always liked Haagen Dazs, for instance, but I no longer eat ice cream.

I really like ice cream.  When I lived on Stone Mountain, before leaving the grocery store I would roll a newly purchased pint of ice cream in the day's entire newspaper, wrap that in plastic, and pack it all into a special bag to preserve cold foods.  I would drive the jeep home to the bottom of the mountain and hike to the house.  I would unpack my treat and sit on the porch to read the paper, and tuck into the ice cream, now the consistency of soft-serve.

I am a bit like an alcoholic.  Hello, my name is Ann, and it has been 6 weeks since I ate any food with any dairy (think of butter and yogurt), gluten-bearing grain (that means wheat and oats), and sugar.  I and my husband have increased our daily fiber intake to at least 35 grams, and we have so many vegetable and fruit leavings from meal preparation that we have to buy a compost bin because it seems a crime to throw it all down the sink disposal.

Alternatively, I could take the garbage out on my morning walks and strew banana peels and carrot tops along the way.  I won't do that, of course, because that is not a reasonable liberty a person may take and yet remain a member of an orderly society. 

Tree Houses at Longwood Gardens

Longwood Gardens recently added a feature that was to be a temporary exhibition but is now a permanent part of the gardens, to the delight of all who love wimsey. Tree houses! These are every child's dream of a house in the woods.

The truth is that everyone who has ever climbed a tree house becomes a child, at least for a little while.

Here is a tree house as you approach it through the woods.  I imagine imperfections and knots in old, reclaimed wood that was used in its construction.  

What if the knot were in a timber that once was part of a mighty white pine growing on the banks of the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire in 1653? The pine could have been cut by settlers to supply the Royal Navy with grand masts for sailing ships. What voyages the knot would have seen, and a small child, working his fingers over the loose wood could knock it out and see through the hole grey mist arising over a distant ocean, and smell salt air, and hear the splash of a dolphin on the starboard bow.

The child returns over the long summer to the tree house and is drawn ever more into the sights of the great ship The Flying Heron, for such is what he sees through the knothole.  There is a little cabin boy on The Flying Heron who, weeping alone in his misery one night aboard ship, hears a faint sound from a patch of rough wood on the mast, and goes to investigate. He looks at the knot and it reminds him of his grandmother's garden in the woods back home. 

And then there are trees that are never straight and tall, but are the ground holders, able to withstand storms season upon season and inspire land use all around.  I know that Pierre du Pont loved trees, and he bought the old Pierce farm that became Longwood in the 1920s because he wanted to preserve the magnificent trees on the property.  DuPont expanded and renovated the house that came with the land, and the land itself he never tired of improving as a habitat for all green growing life.

Lengthening Stride

I arise daily around 4 a.m. at the behest of the cat, who makes certain demands and then after about an hour of those shenanigans, returns to peaceful slumber in her King Arthur Flour packing box. 

Truth be told, whenTammietta made the preliminary, delicate rustle this morning that if unheeded would rapidly escalate into a catarumpus, my husband quietly said, if you want to sleep in (4 a.m.!), I'll take care of her this morning.  I almost took the offer, but I thought instead of the pleasures of the cool morning alone in the streets and parkways that I would miss--the quiet time between 5:30 and 7 a.m., when of late I have been walking around Frederick.  

I drank a few cups of rooibos (Mma Ramatswe's red bush) tea this morning, had a bowl of cereal, read The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and when the cat returned from asserting her independence, struck out on my own. 

I am not alone at this time of day.  Joggers, runners, and dogs with their folks appear.  The nighttime crowd of party-goers and bar hoppers have been abed for awhile, and at 5:30, only a few early morning commuters are driving to the train station or setting off for the trip into Washington, which will take them one hour.  If they wait until 7 a.m. to depart, their commute time will double.

My commute is to my office upstairs in the house, so I can afford to spend the morning walking. I took my camera in case I found the Great Blue Heron, a young one, I saw high in this tree yesterday morning by the creek.  I'll post the picture when I find the bird.

I was startled by a couple of men who from a distance sounded like ducks with their cackling laughter. They were sitting near here in a protected area, and they must have spent the night in the local homeless shelter.  Their faces and bodies indicated lifelong alcoholism, and as I strode past and smiled to acknowledge them, they made rude comments.  Humph! I can stack my triglycerides against theirs any day of the week, and I'd bet that they could not walk 3.5 miles an hour if they tried.

Saturday Flowers May 16; Early Morning Walk

I am waiting for a little more light outside before I set off on the brisk morning walk that lately I have taken up.  I used to hike over hill and dale, but that was when I was living in rural isolation and my friends were whatever wildlife I could scare up in the woods or by the big pond on the other side of Stone mountain.  In those walks I have come upon deer, foxes, bear, moose, an otter or two, birds in size from the wren--little Druid bird, to the massive golden eagle, and once, a silent, Eastern coyote passed like a drift of smoke across the road just a few feet in front of me. I treasured every animal encounter on the mountain and felt particularly honored when its creatures allowed me to see their passage.

It is 37 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but I have the kitchen door open to the garden so I can hear the early morning birds in their second chorus.  The first occurs a good hour before dawn, and I missed it.  I have turned off the heat so the furnace doesn't clank to life on this May morning.  My husband is peacefully snoozing still, and I believe that he sleeps more soundly knowing that I am up and taking care of all matters.

I have written in months past about my life on Stone Mountain in the backwoods of New Hampshire, but I never discussed the kinship I experienced with the life of the mountain and the mountain itself.  It was on Stone Mountain that I learned to be in the woods in a non-disruptive way so that critters would not be too fearful of me upon encountering a human.

Another thing I learned while living alone for so long was how to project myself outside my body.  Let me tell you how its done.

After a period of silent meditation during which I called to myself the protection of all I honored--my fellow critters on Stone Mountain and the mountain itself, as well as the central figure of my faith, I would lie down on the floor with my arms and feet stretched out, and close my eyes. I would tell myself to feel my extremities, and then feel beyond them a few inches, then a few feet. Then I would tell myself to experience being outside the house, perhaps on the roof, or on the stone ridge near where the foxes lived, and see what I could see.  Mind you, I did this in incremental steps, over weeks, before I grew adventuresome in my travels.  The travels themselves will await another time to tell, but you can know that upon returning to my home, being my body on the floor, I always experienced a sideways jolt as if I were falling back inside myself, at an angle. It felt as if I had been upright before and suddenly found myself for that instant of reconnection inside a body that was lying on a different plane.  I got used to it.

It's time to go outside and take a walk through Frederick now.  The people I meet will be walking their dogs or running.  There is a nice camaraderie with these folks because we share the enjoyment of the fresh air and the quiet morning.

The flowers in the photo are Saturday's, and my walk is now.

Saturday Flowers May 2 and Avon Breast Cancer Awareness in DC

Driving into Washington DC Saturday morning with Joe for his German class at the Goethe Institute,   I saw that today was the Avon Breast Cancer Awareness walk in the city, and snapped this picture on the way out of town. I saw hundreds of women (and a few men) walkers, a sea of pink T-shirts on a gray and drizzely day. Their men were route marshals, standing at street intersections in bright vests, and everywhere at the ready with first-aid supplies and water and a handy cell phone for emergencies.  It was rather touching to see brothers, husbands, fathers and sons participating in this way to support their loved ones.  Each woman raised at least $1,800 to walk.

  I came home and arranged the morning flowers for the kitchen table.  Here they are, a bright antidote to the rainy weather. As were the walkers.

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.

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. 

Alive!

It wasn't until yesterday that I received the call I've been awaiting, and it followed a series of progressively serious diagnostic tests, ending last Thursday with a biopsy that I could watch on screen because it was guided by ultrasound.  Early that morning at the hospital, I trained my eyes on the far wall of the procedure room when lidocaine was injected in a few places. I was fixed on the screen above me as the sonogram wand located the areas of concern, again. 

My eyes never left the screen when an apparatus was pressed up against me and a long needle was pushed inside, right up against a tiny, dark mass, then the second one, four times each.  When the needle was up against the mass, the physician pressed a trigger and with a loud report the needle was shot into the trouble spot.  The core sample, for such it was, was removed, and the procedure was repeated again and again. It was fascinating to watch on screen, there, not here.

Benign!  What a sweet word. Relief washed over me yesterday and surprised me because I didn't realize that I needed relief. I had been keeping busy.  

Wondering if things might not turn out for the best, I decided last week that at least I could help my husband prepare for what would surely be a lonely, miserable (and brief) life without me.  My sisters and I still laugh at the conversation we once had about what would happen to our husbands should we die first. We seriously discussed their abilities to negotiate life on their own, and concluded that only one would survive the first year.  My own husband, we determined, would be the second one to go. Even though he has nearly lifelong friends, and has picked up real friends along the way, and despite the fact that he somehow managed as a young professor to raise a child on his own, and with just partial sight earned a PhD in economics, without me, he was a marked man. 

What could I do right now to give him the edge I knew he might need?  I cleaned house with a righteous zest that left no corner untouched. 

I decided that what was packed away, if not potentially useful over the course of a long life, just had to go.  Then I turned my attention to the garden, and hauled yard waste to the town dump.  Get rid of the waste. Don't let it fester and breed disease. Work work push push.  I felt great. 

Then last week a letter came from the hospital urging me to contact my physician.  The letter drove right out of my mind that the physician had said the letter was on its way to me, and that our arrangements were already in place.  I read the letter in hand, and my mind was frozen on its contents, my heart began pounding, my breath come in gasps and sweat beaded my face.  Who is this person?

It's never too early to begin paying attention to the urges and impulses of corrective behavior that accompany the slightest impression that something is not quite right.  I was pretty certain that my situation was essentially harmless to me, but I wasn't fully aware how disjointed was my intellectual grasp of my situation and my ignored emotional response. The emotional response is what surfaces in a panic, and panic arises when fear displaces reasoning.  Nothing good comes of fear, but if it is there and ignored, it is preserved, ready to be loosed without controls. 

I hope that I am a reformed citizen.

My Own E-mail from Nigeria

Today I achieved membership in a crowd of people who have received e-mail scams involving Nigerian bank accounts. My hotmail account in-box is where I found this, and because it looked suspicious I did not open the thing and instead checked the status of the sender, wherein I found this text embedded in html code.  Here is the text itself, for your edification.

X-OriginalArrivalTime: 05 Mar 2009 20:00:56.0387 (UTC) FILETIME=[18A19930:01C99DCD]

I know this mail will come to you as a surprise since we have not had previous correspondence. I am 19 years old boy from Ivory Coast West Africa.</DIV>

My sufferings began after our president killed my parents and my only sister because my father was an opposition leader to the president of my country (Ivory Coast West Africa) I am the only child of my late parents. Since then I have been with my uncles but they have made thing to be more difficult for me because of their eyes on my late father’s properties. They planned to take away all my late father's properties from me since the unexpected death of my beloved Parents.</DIV>

Before the death of my father, he has $2.5 m USD (Two million, five hundred thousand dollars.) in account with a bank in Côte d’Ivoire that I am the next of kin. I need your assistance to help get this money transferred to your account, to serve as my guardian and to make an arrangement for me to come over after the fund is transferred, also to look for a good venture where the money will be invested.

I am willing to offer you 10% of the total sum as compensation of your effort. Note that the confidentiality of this transaction would be highly appreciated in replying soonest to my private email address:(I deleted the e-mail to save you from yourself. --tech writer)

Thanks and best regards.

Peter

Borrow This Line

When you want to stir things up a bit at your next 

luncheon, drop this little phrase to no one in

particular.  It's quite provocative.

The work is not all about the tiara, darling, but our responsibility to others.

Home Improvement

The past week has been a flurry of house maintenance.  Doors that have creaked and perhaps never closed in a century have been made right with the world (I can now feel the gentle poof of air pressure when each of eleven doors close); door jambs have been replaced, and a new basement door installed to the garden that scoffs at the lengthy (and by-passed) process with the Historic Commission. Bricks have been pointed; window panes have been glazed, and all that is just on the outside.  While workmen have been busy with the exterior, plumbers have made themselves busy on the interior and we have new copper pipes that I believe are sheathed in hundred dollar bills.

 

Every few years, an old house deserves a serious maintenance overhaul.  I, too, could use an overhaul. Maintenance, reinvention, call it what you will, I could use a fresh gloss of paint and a little caulk, too.  Perhaps a new tube of Chap Stick!

Birthday Thought

A birthday is a handy way to mark the passage of time, but the real birthdays occur every waking moment, if we just took a moment to acknowledge them.  The concept of living in the moment is usually misunderstood to mean living recklessly with no thought beyond the gratification of the moment, with the gratification gyrating down around the ankles.

 

I told a friend that I wanted to live in the moment, and he replied that if one lives in the present only, then there is neither past nor future.  For me it means instead that one anchors the past and future in the present, which is purely creative and responsible.  The responsibility comes when you recognize that you make the world rolling out before you.

 

On the other hand, try to tell that to someone in deadly peril right now, and who would rather be anywhere else than at the danger place.  You can't say this to the person walking the gang plank because the overwhelming meaning of the moment has been determined by everything the person has learned to be true, and death is the future of that moment.

 

Have you ever noticed how the greatest threats always involve money or the body? I think that's because the body is the temple-front we construct to protect a vulnerable interior of inchoate thought.  The body becomes a magnet attracting the very thing we would protect it from.

Money is another form of materialization of what we value, and we depersonalize it and make it paper and metal or maybe sea shells, but in a way, it is nearly the same thing as what we construct of our bodies--protection against harm, or offense against looming threat. 

 

I do not see the difference between attack and the recognition that the body it seeks to protect is ultimately vulnerable.  I will take the leap and assert that attack is never in strength (although we may train for it and coordinate muscle and purpose), but in fear that something will be taken away.

 

I have read, “Beware the soul that relies on the body.  Beware the body that relies on the soul.”  There is a balance to find.  Maybe I should go take a walk.

Crisis of Handbag Confidence

The Sunday NYT arrived a short while ago while I was awaiting the imminent return of the cat, who needed to step outside for just a few minutes, she assured me.  Since turning the pages of the Style Magazine that arrived with the paper, I have been seized with sudden doubt that my companionable 18-year-old Coach bag is not quite as stylish as I thought yesterday.  Oh, I have maintained it well, and it has been refurbished four times over the years by the company.  The leather welting is replaced, the brass is changed for new, and the handbag is given a professional once-over wince and then returned to me, the delighted customer.

I am not certain why pocketbooks have suddenly struck me this morning as objects worthy of my admiration.  It may be that they alone seem attainable items of fashion, especially the Stone Mountain bags on pages 176-177, although I would prefer a slim bag that would dangle from a wrist strap, something that would hold a few essentials.  The problem with getting a new handbag is that it would require a complete reassessment of my wardrobe because I can’t quite picture the new bag of my dreams with my trusty L.L.Bean and Lands End clothing.

My clothing choices are so simple.

I select a black skirt or a khaki skirt, and pair that with a cream or white shirt or blouse, or the occasional black T-shirt for drama.  I do have one rule in combining colors, and that is never to combine colors. 

With this faithful assembly I wear white or gray pearls.  When I go out with my husband to the Kennedy Center about seven times a year I take my elegant Paloma Picasso bag and wear a black velvet dress.  No sartorial surprises here.

Maybe my word for the day ought to be chic.  Maybe I have a few things to learn about the word and the concept first.  In the meantime, my handy old Coach bag could use a buffing.