All posts by David Todd

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, goals, Harmony of the gospels, Life On A YoYo

The July Report

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Okay, let’s see how I did relative to my goals.

1. Blog at least 12 times. Did this. I think I was at 15 or so.

2. Post 15 articles at Suite101.com. I beat this, posting 17.

3. Research, prepare, and submit 2 other freelance queries. I got the research done, but not the queries themselves. I drafted one but haven’t yet sent it. I had to re-query one from the previous month, due to it being lost in that magazine’s system.

4. Complete one set of passage notes for my Harmony of the Gospels. Got this done, as well as proofing and editing the appendix I almost finished in June.

5. Complete the first two lessons in Good King, Bad King (already started and maybe half-way done) and outline the full series. I can report only partial progress on this. I got the lessons done, and taught them last week and today. However, I have not yet outlined the rest of the series. I’ve brainstormed it a little, but brainstorming without getting something down on paper doesn’t count.

6. For Life on a Yo Yo: Write a “sell sheet” for the Bible study; complete the first four lessons in publishable form. I totally dropped the ball on this, not even thinking about it all month. And it’s not even in my draft goals for August. I may have to amend them.

7. Complete the new chapter of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People that I got half-way done in June. It would be nice to both complete that and start another chapter, but I’m not making that a goal, not with everything else I have going on. Plus, I’m a freelancer not, not a novelist. I did a little more work on chapter 7, but I cannot say it’s done. I imagine it needs another hour or two to be called done. I sent the book as is on to a new beta reader who requested it. We’ll see what he says.

So, I hit some things but missed others. All in all it was a productive month. I’ll next post my goals for August, a month which I hope will be even more productive.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, freelance writing, Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Progress By Inches

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Last night, as promised in yesterday’s post, I went to the Bentonville library after work. They forgave me the fine and renewed the book. I spent a little time in a genealogy magazine, checking to see if I could write for that one, then went to the coffee shop, bought a large house blend, and sat and wrote my article on The Notebooks of Robert Frost. I didn’t quite finish it, but I came close.

This was my first time to sit in a coffee shop and write. My son writes or studies in coffee shops all the time. Somehow he shuts out the noise to background and then effectively uses his time. He says he can do certain work there better than he can in the quiet of his lodgings. I’ve tried reading in coffee shops before, but never writing. I was surprised to make as much progress as I did. The TV mounted up high behind my back kept blaring a sitcom re-run, then a CNN program. I looked its way on occasion. Still, in about an hour I wrote 500 or so words in a steno notebook. Having previously studied the key words for this article for search engine optimization, I felt I had incorporated most of what I wanted to. I headed to the house with the article needing only a closing paragraph and editing.

At home, after a simple supper, I keyed in the article, added a photo, and published. This was my first Suite 101 article in a week, and it felt good to be back in the saddle. I then shifted gears to working on my Harmony of the Gospels. I’m pretty much done with the appendix covering the trial before Pilate, so I went next to the passage notes required for passages in that chapter. I actually finished notes for two passages! I think I have two more passages and I’m done with this chapter. Except…

..as I consulted my workbooks, from which I pulled the passage notes, I noticed that what I wrote in the workbooks did not match what I had previously typed in the Harmony. One of the differences was significant, incorporating something in the gospels I had missed in the workbooks. Had I made the changes while typing, or did I have other notes in the workbooks? I searched a little for other notes, but didn’t find any. I never got around to indexing the workbooks, so I have no way of knowing if I have supplemental notes in another book (I have three all together for this project, the last one being only 2/3 used). So I spent fifteen minutes indexing that workbook.

The hour was such that I could still afford more computer time, so I spent a little time on Facebook, still trying to learn how to navigate on that site and to use it for a combination of promotion, friendship, and networking. Found two high school friends who didn’t show up on the alumni list and invited them to be friends. Last, before leaving the Dungeon for the Upper Realms, I e-mailed a friend a copy of my incomplete novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. He’s a huge baseball fan, and when he visited us in April and we discussed this he said he’d like to read it. Only took me three months to comply.

I concluded my productive evening by reading in Robertson’s Harmony of the Gospels (the book at the top of my reading pile), and read one article in a 2008 issue of Writers Digest magazine. Then I went to bed on time.

So, I’m making progress on most fronts. The checkbook is up to date. The budget is up to date. Papers are being filed. Dishes and kitchen are being handled (batching it again). Writing progressing on several fronts. Reading moseys along. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t play computer games.

poetry, Robert Frost

Robert Frost on Poetry

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Last night I was dead tired when I got home, for some reason. Was it the emotional letdown after the successful class I taught during yesterday’s noon hour? Or was it my bagworm ministry for 35 minutes before church yesterday evening? Or might it just be over-eating and under-sleeping while the wife’s away? For whatever reason, I slept the sleep of the dead last night–until about 3:30 AM, when I woke up and felt something crawling on me, something insect-sized. I pulled it off, squished it between fingers, and rolled over. I suspect a tick picked up from the bagworm infested bush. Of course, after that I imagined every little itch to be a tick and probably pulled off several imaginary ones. Still, I got back to sleep and slept well.

I’m working on several articles for Suite101.com, including one on a book I checked out from the Bentonville library, The Notebooks of Robert Frost. I waited for this book to come in, then was somewhat disappointed in it when I finally got it. I guess I expected to see drafts of all of Frost’s famous poems and observe how he went about his compositions. Or maybe I expected copious notes of his poetic philosophy, or preparation for his many lectures.

The book has little of that. I’m going to write a review of it for Suite101.com, so I can’t put all of what I want to say here. But I did find an interesting segment with some quotes on poetry. Quotations allegedly from Frost about “Poetry is…” are rampant, such as “Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Maybe he said this, maybe he didn’t. I never see those with source citations. But this book documents some things Frost wrote about poetry. In his Notebook 38, he wrote the following under the heading “Poetry”:

  • Poetry is prowess
  • Poetry is the renewal of words
  • Poetry is the dawning of an idea
  • Poetry is that which tends to evaporate from both prose and verse when translated.
  • Poetry is the Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts are Poetry.
  • A poem is a momentary stay against confusion
  • Poet is a master of sentiment

According to footnotes in the book, the prowess comment would be related to Frost’s lecture titled “Poetry as Prowess”, and the renewal comment is related to his lecture titled “The Renewal of Words”.

Now, I have not yet studied these sayings of Frost. Perhaps he wrote them together in notebook 38 as a list of lectures given or that he thought he might give someday. I see that he repeated a couple of these in notebook 26.

The notebooks are hard reading, and I can see I would need to own a copy to really get much out of them, for in the little time I have the book for (actually, it’s already three days overdue), and as difficult as it is to read for long sittings, I’m not getting all that much out of it. But he has some gems in it that are worth thinking and remembering. In the same notebook 38, after his list of what poetry is, he has this statement, evidently intended to be another statement of what poetry is:

  • Difference between smoke and smoke rings.

That’s good enough for me. Off to the library now to beg forgiveness and hopefully renew this overdue book for a couple of more weeks. I need to see a few more gems in it.

flood studies, Suite 101, Writing

Progress in Tasks, but not Much in Learning

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Well, the Planning Commission meeting last night was not as long as was expected by the City. One or two items were pulled from the agenda, and I was up to the podium about 7:20 PM, done at 7:40 PM, home just after 8:00 PM. I now get to pull together the FEMA submittal. I’ll set a goal of one week from today for sending that in to the City. I can’t remember if the legal advertisement goes in the newspaper before or after the submittal to FEMA.

Last night I really didn’t feel like writing. Not sure what was going on. I had eaten before the meeting (half-price night at Sonic), so gathered up my financial records to enter in my budgeting/planning spreadsheet. But I didn’t feel like doing that task. Got on my user page at Suite101.com and had a pleasant surprise: I had a record revenue day: $0.72! Whoopee! That brings my average per 1000 page views up to work out to about $90 a year if I don’t post anything else. Two or three tanks of gas is nothing to sneeze at.

That should have spurred me on to writing. But instead I began climbing up the learning curve at Flickr. I think I understand that, and will begin using some of the photos there. I have two articles for Suite in the writing stage, and about six others somewhat planned. Hopefully I’ll get back to these tonight.

What I decided to do next was join Facebook. Everyone says you have to be on a social network. You have to promote yourself (but don’t abuse your friends on the network; be a friend first and a self-promoter second). So I went ahead and did it. I had a fair amount of difficulty registering. My screen partially locked up and I wound up putting in my high school and employer three times each. I managed to delete the two bogus ones, and began looking for friends. I published one short item, but did so before I had any friends. Hopefully it shows up on my “wall”.

One more learning curve to climb. I’m determined not to let this become a time sink. I’m not even going to try to log on to Facebook from the office; I imagine it’s blocked anyway. Tonight I’ll set a time limit, say 15 minutes to learn a little more about it, then I’ll need to write an article, wash it through an SEO tool, lace it with apt images, post it, and wait for the revenue to roll in.

Right.

Engineering, freelance writing, Genealogy, Suite 101

So Much To Learn

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Today I have two major tasks at work: prepare for Planning Commission meeting tonight, and prepare for the brown bag class I’ll teach tomorrow noon. The P.C. meeting is easy to prep for: ten copies of two figures and about three pages of text. The figures need some hand coloring, but that’s a throwback to childhood and not at all unpleasant.

The brown bag is tougher to prep for, because I want to include a PowerPoint presentation with it. This is my second PowerPoint to prepare. The last one was all text. For this one, I want to include photos and drawings. This increases the degree of difficulty (from about 1.0 to about 3.5, I’d say). Plus, the last one I did was back in March, and I’ve pretty well forgotten all I learned then. So it’s a learning day. When I get frustrated with building the slide show, I just pull out one of the figures to color. I have till 6:00 PM to complete them.

Then there’s the whole question of learning photographs for the Internet. I spent some time at Flickr, following a link to their Creative Commons, which is the area that’s supposed to have the copyright-free photos. I had a little time with this, then Internet Explorer locked up. So I exited and went back to Flickr, this time the home page. And on that page I could not find a link to the Creative Commons. Am I missing something? I’ll get back to that after this post.

I love learning, but this is almost too much today. PowerPoint alone would be fine, or maybe the photo study would be fine, but the two together are somewhat overwhelming.

On the other hand, the pleasant evening I wrote about yesterday came to be almost exactly as I hoped. The genealogy meeting was good. I actually knew the speaker, and met a few new people. Any time you are in a library, even if it’s just the meeting room, is a good time. At home I filed and wrote and read and talked on the phone for a long time with my son. I balanced the checkbook, which in two prior sittings had refused to be balanced. I didn’t get to my financial record spreadsheets, or paying a couple of bills, but I have tonight for that. Another pleasant evening coming.

Engineering, flood studies, Genealogy, Harmony of the gospels

A Pleasant Evening Awaits

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It’s 4:32 PM by the clock on my computer at the office. I returned here a little while ago from Centerton, where I presented my flood study to the mayor and department heads. This was for the purpose of presenting the summary of findings and recommendations, and to help them understand what their options are concerning future conditions in the drainage basin. Tomorrow evening I present it to the Planning Commission (for information purposes only).

I’d like to say that’s the end of the project, but, alas, it’s only the end of the study phase. I now need to pull together a submission to FEMA. This consists of reworking my report to include only those things FEMA will look at, filling out about 15 pages of FEMA forms, having one more exhibit drawn–the actual changes to the flood map, and getting the City’s approval of those. At some point this will involve a public hearing and newspaper ads. The actual flood map revision, which will be the end of the project, is likely 6 to 8 months away.

But, a burden is lifted. I look forward to a pleasant evening tonight. My wife is away (no, that’s not what will make it a pleasant evening), having gone this morning to Oklahoma City with her mother to spend a week with daughter, son-in-law, and grandson Ephraim. I’m going to take advantage of the time, however, and attend the regular monthly meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Genealogical Society at the Bentonville library. I’ve never been to this group. I look forward to the fellowship.

Then, what to do at the house? A quick supper of leftovers won’t take much time. I’ll probably read in Robertson’s harmony of the gospels, then go work on my own. I made some good progress on this yesterday, and would like to finish the appendix I worked on. That would feel pretty good, if I could finish that. The progress I made yesterday would have been greater except, having taken so long away from it, it was difficult to shift my mind from magazine articles (on-line and off-line)and Bible studies to that work. Tonight should be better, with me having not worked on other writing since then, except for this blog.

After that, probably about 11:00 PM, I’ll exit the Dungeon for the upper realm and read something lighter, say in an old issue of Writers Digest that I picked up at a thrift store. That will put me in the mood for bed, and I should get six hours of blissful sleep, dreaming about the Bible, genealogy, and writing, with a little successful engineering mixed in. What could be more pleasant to dream about?

Good King-Bad King, King Asa, Life Group lessons

Good King, Bad King

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Well, today I began teaching Good King, Bad King to our adult life group at church. I’ve written about this off and on. The lesson series will be about the kings of Judah and Israel, which were a series of good and bad kings. It seems that Israel had more bad then good, while Judah may have had about the same.

I began with King Asa, third king of Judah after the division. I’ve blogged about Asa before:

The first prophet speaks to him
Asa’s first religious reforms
Asa and the high places of Judah
Asa responds to a threat from Israel
Another prophet confronts Asa
The Jerusalem Assembly: good or bad?

For life group I’m breaking this down into two lessons. The first covers Asa’s early years, and focuses on the good he did. The second covers his later years, and focuses on the mistakes he made then.

The class went well, despite the fact that I left the handouts I had prepared on the kitchen table, including the creative non-fiction piece I was going to read to start the class. I relayed the creative non-fiction from memory as best I could. As expected, no one was able to guess which king it was about. During class, several people focused in on the Jerusalem assembly, and were troubled about it, specifically the part that anyone who did not take the oath to follow I AM wholeheartedly was to be killed. I wasn’t going to bring that up this week, but rather next week, but it might be good to have it now. Next week it will be easier to show that assembly as possibly the turning point (for the worse) in Asa’s life.

I’m ready for next week already. I think now I will go and write some on my harmony of the gospels, either finish up an unfinished appendix or possibly some passage notes. I’m not quite ready to jump back in with Suite 101 yet, due to the picture deal. Maybe in a couple of days.

Health, Writing

The Emotional Roller Coaster

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Life is an emotional roller coaster for me, maybe for most people to a certain degree. Rare, I think, and probably drug-induced, is the person who doesn’t have emotional highs and lows. For some the track tops and bottoms are higher, the run-ups and -downs steeper, and the twists sharper than for others. But I think it is all there for most people.

Seasons in life are another factor. When we lived in Saudi Arabia the roller coaster was particularly pronounced. A lot had to do with our time in life (children ages 3 and 1). A lot had to do with the harshness of the country and culture. A lot had to do with being at the whim of the company for everything from drinking water to rides to spending money. Back in the good old USA was the merry-go-round to Saudi’s roller coaster.

I find the writing life to generate those roller coaster type swings. They can be quite wild at a writers conference, where you’re at the peak one minute and 15 minutes later, after a meeting with an editor, at the bottom of the trough. Other aspects of writing can do the same, almost as quickly.

Take Suite101.com for instance. I’m now up to 26 articles posted, in 31 days. Several of those articles rank high on a couple of search engines for key words I included in the articles. I had one article selected as an Editor’s Choice. I’m starting to generate a little revenue–emphasis on “little,” but that’s better than none. Everything was humming along.

Then, Suite101 adds the requirement, previously a recommendation, that every article include an image. No exceptions. So I quickly had to ramp up on how to find copyright-free images, how to download them to my computer, how to save them to the right type of image, how to upload them into Suite101’s image uploading system, complete with caption, file name, source reference, and available link. I got several uploaded on new articles, and even went back to some earlier articles and added some photos and map excerpts.

Then I captured an image of Ben Franklin to illustrate my latest article. Poof. The image wouldn’t upload. Not from my computer at work. Not from my computer at home. No reason why. It took a couple of days to get help from an editor, as the site trouble-shooting guide and the editor’s e-mails contain many terms I don’t understand. And I find I can’t really do things I don’t understand. I have to understand what I’m doing. Save the image as a jpeg or png file? What do those mean? Why, or when, should I use one instead of the other? Make sure the dpi is 72 or less? Okay, never done that before. How do I do that? And why is that necessary? Make sure the size is not more than y by z? That I think I can handle, but I’m not real sure. Use shorter file names? Okay, but how do I keep them straight on my hard drive?

All these are going to take weeks to come up to speed on. Meantime, all my creative writing time has gone into writing for Suite101. Now suddenly all my creative writing time is going to go to learning photos and images and how to manipulate them for the Internet. Doggone it. I want to write. I don’t want to be a photo manipulator, or a layout artist. The bloom has certainly come off the Suite101 rose. Whether it will bloom again remains to be seen. I’m not a happy camper.

Oh, I also was out of commission a couple of days this week, having a colonoscopy. Not the world’s greatest experience, but at least all seems well (one “small polyp” removed). Bad week to have that in terms of emotions.

movies

Movie Review: The Half-Blood Prince

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Lynda and I went to see “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” on Sunday afternoon, at matinee prices of $4.00 each. Popcorn and pop cost more than the movie. I hesitated to write a review yesterday, wanting a day to see if my feelings had changed. They hadn’t. I know no other way to say this than to say it straight, and with words that Ron Weasly might use: It was a bloody waste of time and money.

I haven’t read the books, and so don’t know what this particular one said. As a lead-in to seeing this one we watched the first four Potter films over the last two weekends, finishing up Saturday evening. We had re-watched the fifth one in late April in Chicago.

Now I know everyone is supposed to be all ga-ga about Harry Potter. Maybe the books are good, I don’t know. But this one did not, for me, do enough to warrant the 2hr 20min we spent in the theater. Nor the $8.00 we paid for two tickets (the popcorn was excellent though).

I’d say some specifics of why I didn’t like it, but I have already invested enough time on this thing, and won’t waste any more.

poetry

Of Bagworms and Blackberries

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Don’t confuse the title of this post with my sonnet “Of Bollards and Berms” (which garnered a bit of critique and discussion at AW-password is citrus. No, this is about my war against the bagworms and my quest for blackberries–the edible kind.

My first experience with blackberry picking was in Snug Harbor, Rhode Island, on a vacant lot, or couple of lots, right behind the stony beach we went swimming at when we didn’t drive over to East Matunuk. They grew right next to a cleared field, so getting them was easy. As kids we probably ate as many as we brought home. The fun was in the picking, not in the having. Years later, on a return to Rhode Island, the blackberry patch was gone, torn out to make room for waterside houses. Alas.

Now I pick blackberries both for enjoyment and for food. I love the taste, and they taste even better because they are free. The cost for a half-gallon: an hour and a half on a Saturday morning, a few scratches, two chigger bites, and maybe a pound of water sweated away. I’m having some right now, as I write this, with lunch. Now, a quart of blackberries won’t stretch the budget a whole lot, but it will help. Especially if we get another quart this Saturday, when the temperatures are supposed to be fifteen degrees cooler than last Saturday.

Now, as far as bagworms go, I am at war with them. Not at home, but at church. There we have four evergreen bushes of some type, a cedar relative, kept neatly trimmed but not otherwise maintained–except by me. Every May the first bagworms appear. I pick them off and squish them under foot. But I never take time to go through the bushes thoroughly. So they are back in June and abundant in July. No one seems to see them or care about them except me.

I’m enough of a HEED-onist (only URI grads will know the background of that) to not want to spray some kind of chemical on the plant to kill them. So I pick the bags off the bush. I used to do that at our property in Bentonville, and never lost a bush. Did that back in Kansas City too, if I remember correctly. It’s more work than spraying, but it has to be environmentally friendly.

So I pick, and pick. Yesterday I got to church 30 minutes early to have 20 to pick bag worms. I came with a doubled plastic sack (that’s a bag to your Rhode Islanders) and had it about 1/3 full when my time was up. I picked one bush clean; it only had a few. I moved to the next one which was fully infested, and could stand in one spot and pick forever, moving branches to get the ones that were hiding. All the time I’m picking, I’m stewing, wondering why no one else cares enough about the poor evergreen bush to rid it of these parasites. People pass me by, heading into church, and ask what I’m doing. No one stops to help, except Jeremy, the grandson of my best friend in these parts. He sees it as a child’s game. But, like most child’s games, I’m on my own again in ten minutes.

But I’ve decided this is one of my ministries. It fits my personality. It’s solitary. It’s mindless, allowing for mental multi-tasking. It is limited in time duration: by the mid-August I’ll either have saves the bush or it will be dead. It’s a service no one will even know I did, except for those few who saw me–and Jeremy, of course. It doesn’t involve any interpersonal relationships–except Jeremy, of course. What better ministry could there be?

Well, my blackberries are fully consumed. They were good, but somehow not as good as they were when eaten straight from the vine on a hot summer day. And, they seemed just as enjoyable as they did when they were a child’s game during a Rhode Island summer. The joy is still in the picking, but eating them is nice, real nice.