This last weekend we were in Oklahoma City, to celebrate the first birthday of our youngest grandchild, and to babysit the four grandchildren (plus two others) one evening while their parents were at a fund-raiser for R.O.C. ministries. We did a four-day weekend instead of three. I intended to write a post this morning about our weekend.
Instead, I come to work, plug in the new laptop computer I have for my work station, and open some websites, all according to my routine. And I see the terrible news about the shooting in Las Vegas. As I finalize this post, 58 are dead and at least 515 are in area hospitals with injuries.
I simply don’t know what to say. How tragic that this should happen in our nation, that one individual, be he sick, deranged, hostile, angry, or whatever, should be able to take the lives of 50 people in a matter of minutes, and injure at least 200 more.
Oh God, I pray for our nation. Move upon us to come to our senses. Give us hope for the future, because hope will prevent us from doing things such as this shooting. May we turn to You to make it happen.
We have a rock yard, with two maples and one oak, and with forest on three sides. Leaf removal is never-ending for two months in the fall.
We live in a mostly forested area. The hills of Bella Vista, they tell us, were once cleared to allow for cattle grazing. However, once the land was bought up for residential properties (seen as a retirement community), the forest came back. If a lot is vacant, the forest will soon take over.
The part of Bella Vista I live in is mostly unbuilt. The hills are steep; building is expensive; the space between lots, back to back, is enormous. Hence, even if every lot were built on, the forest would be in the gullies behind. From our back lot line to the back lot line on the other side of the gully is probably 800 feet. No one’s built on those lots yet, so we look out our back deck onto endless forest and hills.
That big oak has been down for around 10 years. Too big to saw for wood, it rots away in it’s ecology.
On our street, only four lots out of about 28 have been built on. South of us are three empty lots before the next house. North of us is one lot before another house. Across from us…well, there are no houses on the other side of the street at all. So we are surrounded by forest.
On the lot north of us, about 50 feet from our lot line, a large tree fell over about 10 years ago, a tree maybe 60 inches in caliper (20 inches diameter). I should say that the whole area has mostly second growth forests due to the prior clearing. Or, maybe it’s just how the soil is. It’s very thin topsoil due to the steepness of the slopes. Rocky. Not the type of soil you did in to plant a tree. So the trees grow easily, but never develop strong roots. The average life of a tree in these parts is probably 20 to 30 years. Then, a good windstorm will knock it over, and the saplings will grow and take it’s place. This is what happens all around us, and the woods are littered with deadfall, typically trees not even 8-inches diameter.
But, occasionally, a tree will be able to take root and live to a good age. We have a few older ones, especially along the route the old county road followed before the developer moved in. This old tree lived to well over 60 years, I reckon. But when it fell, it left a crater behind—not from the impact of falling, but from where the roots had been. A hole maybe four feet deep and eight feet across, on the slope, with the tree roots and soil between them up in the air.
The root crater is already hard to see, being filled with leaves—not naturally filled, but deliberately filled, by me.
So what will happen to this small tree crater in a world without human activity? Rainwater will collect in it, reducing the run-off down the slope, reducing erosion. Slowly the dirt will detach from the roots and fall to the ground, making a sort of dam on the downhill side, where the tree fell. This will further reduce run-off. Forest animals will have a source of water as the area dries between rains. The crater will be a leaf catcher, and slowly fill in. The tree trunk will rot away, giving habitat for snakes, bugs, even smaller bugs, and who knows what. With that large of a trunk, it will be around a long time. In the crater and near the downed trunk will be a good place for new trees to get their start. One last thing: The hole in the leaf canopy left by the tree has resulted in more light getting through to the forest floor, and much more underbrush is growing in this area.
But, enter mankind—me. My first thought when the tree fell was: Firewood! However, sawing a 20-inch oak trunk is no fun, even if you had a chainsaw. Plus, I don’t have a wood fireplace and hence have no place to burn, except maybe in a fire pit, which I don’t have at present. So, I let the trunk stay. When a new neighbor moved to the house on the other side of the lot, several years after it had fallen, he asked me if I had any claim on the tree, because he would sure like to cut it up. I told him it was his, but he never has.
The thing I am doing, however, is disposing of leaves in the crater. We have two maples and one oak in our front yard, and thus have many leaves to take care of in the fall. I blow them downhill until the piles are too large to blow, at which time I pick them up and move them to the woods. A few years back my wife suggested we not just dump them right next to the yard, but move them aways into the woods to reduce the chance they’ll blow right back on us. This sounded like work to me, but not a bad idea, so the leaves go off into the woods: about 150 feet on the lot to the south, or 50 feet on the lot to the north, right to where the downed tree is.
For the last four years I’ve been taking the leaves to the crater and dumping them in it. One Saturday I’ll fill the crater to overflowing. The next Saturday they will have settled under their own weight, and I’ll fill it to overflowing again. Week after week, for two months, I fill the crater. Now, after four years of this, the crater is pretty much gone, filled in by man, accelerating the natural process. At the height of leaf removal season, the crater is so filled I dump lots of leaves right around it, on the underbrush. Once I started doing this, the underbrush doesn’t grow as much as it did for a few years, having less access to sunlight.
Obviously, I’m causing the crater to fill in faster than natural processes would. Those leaves are being converted to new soil, year after year. This year, or perhaps next, I will declare the crater filled. No more water catching. No more water source for forest critters between rains. Less underbrush creating root structure to hold the soil in place.
In other words, my leaf depositing is speeding up natural processes. It seems to me I’m not doing anything worse than that. The forest will be essentially unchanged years from now when I lay down my leaf blower and rake. A few critters may have to look elsewhere for water. Thus their contribution to the local ecology will be reduced. We’ll see less deer and chipmunks.
All in all, this aging environmentalist doesn’t really see a problem with his ecology-changing activities. I hope I’m not overlooking something. Maybe someday, I’ll figure out how to make a book or story about this.
Yes, it is Friday. I got so busy the last couple of days, at work and with extra-curricular activities, I totally forgot about my blog post. I’m sorry folks. I’ll have something substantive for Monday.
Yes, it’s true. I’ve had a very lazy weekend. We’ve been watching television and reading. We dog-sat for our neighbors, so I did a fair amount of walking with the little fellow. I did almost no writing, save for a page or two of manuscript in my family memoir. Yesterday was church. Though they cancelled life groups for the day, I didn’t get the memo, and so prepared to teach and came on time. About eight other people didn’t get the memo either, so we had a combined class.
Today we went to two auto dealerships, looking at newer used cars. We are ready to trade in my truck for a late-model van. That will become Lynda’s vehicle, and I’ll drive the old van until it wears out. We saw some nice cars. Just too early to pull the trigger today.
I was a senior in high school when this eclipse happened. The map says I was in 98% eclipse. I don’t remember it as being particularly special.
The last four to five days have been much taken up with things that I found distracting, and, to some extent, useless.
Oh, I’ve had some important things in my life. Such as work around the house and yard on Saturday. Such as the weekly Wal-Mart run on Saturday. Such as church yesterday, including teaching adult Life Group. I spent a little time on the checkbook, and am pretty well caught up on that (though not on budgeting). Beyond that, truly meaningful things accomplished recently are few and far between.
I view the eclipse that will take place today as something similar. Big deal. We will be at about 92% eclipsed. Based on eclipses I remember from 1970 and 1979, that’s not really enough to get excited about. The amount of sunlight is lessened, and the sky looks eerie. But it doesn’t really get dark. I suspect you have to be at 99% for it to be really dark, to really see the disc of the moon covering the sun.
Our maximum eclipse is at 1:12 p.m. I’ll take my usual noon walk between 12:30 and 1:00. So I’ll be walking as the shadow is getting larger. I might glance up for a quick look just before I go inside. But, anything more? No. It’s just not worth it. One more thing useless and distracting.
It’s been a bad few days, with computer problems, people problems, etc. Spent all yesterday evening trying to work through the computer problems, so I didn’t write a blog post for today.
Nor can I do it this morning. Not a real post. I’ll work through this stuff, and hopefully, by Monday, I’ll be back with a real blog post.
My wife and I, along with her mother, just made a four-day trip to Meade, Kansas, for the funeral of Faye Pohl, aunt of Lynda and sister of Esther. As a result, I didn’t get a post written for today. I’ll be back at it Friday.
Well, I just finished the typical busy weekend. Yard work wasn’t too bad. I cleared the last of the leaves away from the backyard. With grandkids to visit soon, I wanted one less place for snakes to hide. Next weekend I’ll take the leaf blower and clear the stragglers out. In the front yard I sprayed for weeds, and picked up sticks. That’s a never-ending task, as the three large trees in the front yard like to keep me busy.
We made the usual shopping run. My wife came too this week, as she’s wanting to do some new things in the kitchen and wanted to make sure the grocery cart was properly filled. She also bought some herbs to plant, and some larger tomato plants. That will be work for this week.
The waterline in our street was leaking, we noticed when we came back from the store. I could see that it had already been reported (based on markings on the pavement). The repair crew was there in an hour or two, tried the simple repair, which didn’t work, so had to shut the water off. We were without it for five hours, as it turned out to be a very bad line break. It was around 9 in the evening when we got it back. I spent the afternoon doing a lot of filing of financial papers, including culling some old files. The evening was mainly straightening some things up inside, and reading. Thus ended a full day.
Sunday was Life Group (I didn’t have to teach) and church. After lunch I walked 5K, in just over an hour. I felt okay about that, given the hills in our area. That afternoon, Lynda and I went to a couple of stores for some clothes purchases ahead of vacation. I found what I needed, but she didn’t. In the evening I got the checkbook entries up to date (still have to add it), but otherwise mainly read. It was a good way to wind down.
So here it is, Monday morning. Rather than have a sense of accomplishment for what I got done this weekend, I have a feeling of dread of all I have to do today and over the next couple of days. Here’s a partial list:
Lab work at the doctor’s office this morning
Call in prescriptions
Pay company credit card bill
Call the IRS about the letter I received from them this weekend, a non-so-good letter
Pay the last bill from my procedure in January
Double-check on our reservations for Branson, since I’ve never received the confirming e-mail
Plant the herbs; figure out a place for the tomatoes
Begin the many little things in the house needed to be done before guests come next weekend
Get by the store (probably tomorrow) to pick up the prescriptions along with diabetic supplies
Order the one item I couldn’t find at the store, and hope it comes within a week, which is when I need it by
That’s enough on the to-do list. I need to get a few of them done before I think through everything that needs to be done. Needless to say, writing is on hold for a while. I’m ready to do the next round of edits in Documenting America: Civil War Edition, but will wait a couple of days to do that. Plus, it’s out with a beta reader, and I’ll want to incorporate his comments when I next work on it. I won’t be messing with stock trading much this week, and maybe not next week either. I won’t be working on much else, writing-wise. The main pages on my website are in desperate need of an overhaul, but I don’t see me getting to that for about a month.
Life is busy. I guess that’s good, though I’d go for a little less busy right now, if I could.
I regularly read two publishing industry blogs to keep up with the news and opinions. One is Between The Lines, the blog of the Books & Such Literary Agency. This agency serves the Christian booksellers market, and could be considered closely aligned with the trade (sometimes called traditional) publishing model. Their five agents rotate through the week with a daily post. The other blog I read is The Passive Voice. This is by a lawyer who re-posts and sometimes comments on news from the publishing industry. This blog is closely aligned with the self-publishing model. Both blogs have a community of readers/commenters, and I comment at both blogs from time to time.
Creativity comes in many sizes. Sometimes it even comes inside the box.
Being part of the self-publishing industry, I tend to be more in agreement with TPV than with BtL. I keep reading the latter, however, because I want to keep up with news and trends in the other side of the industry. I’ve tried other blogs, but find BtL as easy to read, and it provides an adequate sampling of what I’m looking for.
So, all that said, I recently read this on the BtL blog:
“The need for money is the bane of art. Oh for the days of good old-fashioned patrons of the arts. Writing for the paycheck is the fastest way to kill a career. Each book needs to be better than the last, if we’re to build over time.”
This irks me. “The need for money is the bane of art.” How? How is commercial viability a bad thing, but whatever is not commercially viable a good thing? Commercial viability (a.k.a. artists making money off their art) indicates people are willing to pay to own or use the art. This, in turn, is a reflection of what society believes is good art. The inability of an artist, by which I mean anyone who does artistic things as a career, which would include writing, to sell his art indicates that society doesn’t believe he’s producing good art. Who is a better judge of what art is good: society, or the artist who produces it?
The writer of that phrase is implying that the need to produce art that society will accept as good and pay for somehow compromises the artist’s creativity. Follow the supposed train of thought by the artist: I need to feed myself and my family. No one’s buying the art that I produce, even though I think it’s good. But they are buying that [genre of book; type of painting; method of sculpture; etc.]. So maybe I should just emulate that artist and produce art I don’t this is good so I can feed my family. I guess I won’t be able to produce the stuff that I think is good but which society apparently doesn’t think is good.
Kids know. Sometimes playing inside the box is better than all those toys outside the box.
What’s the solution to this? The original poster said, “Oh for the good old-fashioned patrons of the arts.” Their solution: For the artist to find a source of Other Peoples’ Money, to allow them to produce art they believe is good, even though no one wants it. And this is supposed to free the artist to produce whatever they believe is good. This is supposed to advance the arts, to produce stuff that people think isn’t worth paying for?
I could go many ways with this. Is artistic creativity really stifled by having to produce art that people want to buy? Cannot an artist be creative while staying “inside the box” or “between the lines”, or within the range of commercial viability? I think they can. I’ve said often before that my favorite type of poetry is formal poetry. Give me a sonnet, a ballad, a haiku, or a cinquain any day. Give me those constraints, and I’ll produce something with artistic creativity. Inside-the-box creativity is equally creative as outside-the-box creativity.
It always amazes me that people want to pigeon-hole creativity by saying it can only happen outside the box, and that it can’t happen on the lines. It’s funny that, in wanting the maximum artistic freedom, they say creativity can only happen one way. Once again, I reject that. I believe my creativity is best released by being presented with boundaries, and, since my art is the written word, finding words that do something new and different within the boundaries.
That’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it. Any comments?
So here it is Friday morning. I’m in my quiet time at work, the hour between 7 and 8 a.m. that I call my time. I get in early to beat the traffic, heat up my breakfast (I bring 5-day’s worth on Monday), grab my first cup of coffee, and then have a quiet time at my desk. I read a chapter in the Bible, and pray, then go through various writer/writing sites on the internet. If I have any stock trades on, I also check the pre-market conditions. Then, I’m ready to start my workday.
Usually I have an idea for a Friday blog post by Tuesday. I think I did get an idea on Tuesday, but didn’t write it down. Then the week became full. Every day I had meetings, and people needing help on projects, and meetings—I guess I already said that. And I had construction specifications to write, something I enjoy doing but which tends to take a fair amount of brain power.
So, I came home every day pretty much exhausted, both of mind and body. I fixed supper (mostly heating up leftover and adding something to it), and then found it hard to concentrate on doing anything. I kept up on paying bills, wrote letters to my two oldest grandsons, and read some each night in my current read, The Greatest Generation. But I spent no time on a blog post, and had no return of the idea from Tuesday, and no new idea germinate.
I also had two after-work functions this week. Wednesday was a Vision Summit at church, related to our current building project and capital campaign. I missed it a couple of Sundays ago, being prepared to teach Life Group only to have no one show, as they were all at the Vision Summit. Then, last night, the Chamber of Commerce’s monthly “Business After Hours” event was at our office, which we also made an open house. Our remodeling is done, we spiffed up the place, and over 100 people came. It was hot and crowded in our break room, where the people and hors d’oerves were. I took a couple of clients on a tour of the office. Ate more than I should have, and got home around 7:00 p.m.
At that point I collapsed in my reading chair for almost an hour, alternately dozing and doing nothing. Went to The Dungeon, but couldn’t concentrate on anything, so came back upstairs to read. Kept looking at weather radar, because a line of storms was coming toward us, out of Oklahoma. Went to bed around 11:15 p.m., after packing my lunch for today. No sooner had I gone to bed than the phone rang. It was an emergency services auto-call (to which we’re subscribed), saying we were in a tornado warning.
And not just one warning, but two overlapping tornado warnings. So I got up, turned on a local TV channel that had gone to all weather reporting, and watched. The storm moved quickly, but radar didn’t show the “hook” pattern that you typically get when tornados form. It was a straight wall coming toward us. The TV news folks said that threat was starting to diminish. At places west of us, the winds were strong, but no one reported actual rotation. Still it’s hard to tell that at night, so I stayed up till 12:15 a.m., till it was clear if we would have to rush to the basement or not. It turned out to be not, a non-event. So I went to bed, fell asleep quickly, and slept soundly till I woke up with a start and checked the bedside clock: 5:57, three minutes before the alarm would go off. I got up and started my day.
Now here I am, it’s time to start my workday, and I still have no idea for a blog post. So I’ll wrap this up, and try to come up with something for my Monday post, instead of random blathering about my week.
