Category Archives: reading

books, miscellaneous, reading

Reading In the Woods

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Dateline Friday, 5 July 2024

The view from my woodland reading chair. Our house is to the left. Well in the distance is where the sound of the limb falling came from.

A few years back, we bought the unbuilt lot next to us, on the uphill side of our house. We got it for a good price and, based on current prices for lots in Bella Vista, it’s perhaps the most profitable investment we’ve ever made.

I’ve done some improvements on this lot, cutting down dead trees, cutting underbrush, clearing leaves from the edges to allow some grass to get a start. We have our compost pile on the lot (actually had it there before we bought it) and a well-worn path from the garage to the pile.

The woods directly in front of me. I’m keeping this are free of new trees and brush, though there are enough mature trees around it that the shade canopy is complete.

Along that path is my reading place. I don’t go out there to read often. Usually, I take my noon reading break in our sunroom. But it isn’t airconditioned, and this time of year it’s really too hot to read in. So on these days, I either read in the basement or out in the woods. I think I’ve gone to the woods most days this week (see the dateline), usually right around noon.

Isn’t it hot then, you ask? Yes, probably around 92°. But it’s shady. The oaks cover the path. I have a chair out at a level spot. A cut log set on end serves as a small table, leveled up with a wedge piece from a tree felling, to set my phone and cup of coffee on. By 1:00 p.m., the sun will have moved around further south and higher, and gaps in the canopy caused by the death of a couple of oaks due to a blight maybe three years ago. At that point I’ll have to move my chair or go inside.

Another view from my reading chair, looking more to the south and past our lot. Sunshine occasionally finds its way to the ground here.

Today I followed this procedure, but the temperature was a little cooler than recently due to rain yesterday evening. It was 92° with a nice breeze. In the shade of the oaks, I felt quite cool. I had a book and a magazine (an old one) with me. I decided to read the mag and try to get through it. Since it was from 2009, many of the articles were dated and not worth reading. Despite the distractions of woodland reading, I was able to read all I wanted in the hour and put it in the recycling bin afterwards.

What distractions, you ask? Just the sights and sounds of the woodland. And yes, even though our house is well within sight, when I’m sitting on our lot I’m in the woodlands. But most of the sounds are of human civilization. Take today. At first it seemed dead quiet, except for the sound the wind was making with the leaves. Then I heard a car door close, then another. Soon, I heard a lawnmower start and start to move. It sounded like it was coming from down the street at one of the two new houses. Then I could faintly hear a voice; probably one of the mowers.

Before the mower sound came, I watched a small lizard play near the edge of the driveway. A butterfly came by but didn’t stay. A fly somehow got in my coffee, but I fished it out and went right on drinking. I heard a mosquito near ear and swept it away. A vehicle made its way up the steep road across the hollow, somewhat faintly, around a thousand feet away or a little more. In winter, when the oaks are devoid of leaves, we can hear vehicle much clearer.

As the mowing continued, a vehicle came up the hill and passed by me, most likely without seeing me in the shadows. The view from the road into the woods is partly obscured by the first row of trees, some underbrush, and my blackberry vines. I looked back down the hill, into the woods. A bird flew silently across the lot thirty feet away from me.

Then I heard a crashing sound. Shifting my gaze to the north, I saw leaves and branches moving in the direction of the crash. It seems a branch fell from a tree behind our backyard. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go down there and see if I have new deadfall just off the property.

I continued reading in this distracted state. The magazine, the monthly publication of our Rural Electrical Cooperative, had a good article on one woman’s historic preservation work in Arkansas. That was quite interesting. Another article covered things that the State Legislature would be dealing with in the session about to start. But I kept looking up from the mag to see what was going on around me. I heard the sound of a squirrel but didn’t see it.

I looked around for WTBD—work to be done. Some underbrush needed more cutting. Leaves need to be pushed back a few feet more from the house, to widen the grass strip that’s coming up naturally there. Three trees, 6 to 8 inches diameter, fell near the south border of the lot. Someday, perhaps, I’ll saw them up and put them on one of my brush piles.

The sun was moving around to the point where I would soon lose my shade, then thin clouds partly obscured the sun. I decided I’d read all in the mag that was important, laid it on my log table, and took up my coffee. Perhaps you think it strange to take hot coffee out to woods to drink on a hot day, but I like the taste, and in the woods it’s not too hot to drink.

But my time was soon up. I:00 p.m. neared, and lunch beckoned me. The sights and sounds of the woods faded as I traversed the rocky path the 50 feet to the garage. Possibly I’ll return to my reading spot tomorrow for another hour with another mag or a book, and once again read distractedly but enjoyably. Cooler weather and the sunroom are not far away. Any place to read is a good place.

books, letters, reading

How An Editor Sees It

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At over 900 pages, this promises to be an interesting book that I can digest in small junks during hospitalization.

About a week ago, when I thought my heart surgery would be today, I began going through books that I would want to take to read. It may be a pipe dream to think I can read much while in the hospital, but I want to be prepared. I’ve picked out one book on prayer and two books of letters. These are print books. I have a fair number of e-books I can easily pull up on my phone.

One book of letters is The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3, 1923-1928. I picked this up used quite a few years ago and kept it on a basement shelf, waiting for the right time to read. Well, that seems to be now. It’s a thick paperback to be holding in bed. But the letters are, for the most part, short. I’ve read 40 or 50 pages into it to make sure it’s a suitable volume to read in my circumstances. So far I find it is.

I read a couple letters yesterday, and found an interesting item.

Importunate old gentlemen who have been struck daily by ideas on leaving their baths, which they have copied out in the most beautiful, and at the same time illegible handwriting, dump these manuscripts at the office, and say, what is no doubt true that they can keep it up or years, once a week, if the Nation will pay £3.3 a column. And there are governesses, and poetesses, and miserable hacks of all kinds who keep on calling—So for God’s sake write us something that we can print.

I need to add a little context. Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, were part of a literary group known as the Bloomsbury Circle, or Bloomsbury Set, who had great political and literary influence in the first two or three decades of the 20th century. Leonard had just been appointed literary editor of The Nation and Athenaeum a magazine that dealt with British politics and English Literature. Virginia was, at that time, heavily involved in the Hogarth Press, print a variety of books. Leonard was also involved in that.

Thus, they were busy people. Virginia wrote a letter to Robert Fry on 18 May 1923. Leonard had been less then a month in the editorship, and the couple had just returned from a month-long holiday in Spain and France. Leonard’s plate was full, with coming up to speed at the magazine and dealing with book publishing. Complicating this appears to be a glut of unsolicited submissions to The Nation, submissions that Virginia, in her letter to Fry, considered as from “miserable hacks”. And she begged Fry to “write us something we can print.”

I find it funny almost that this is the same complaint editors have today. Too many submissions from unqualified writers crowding the mail and e-mail inboxes. Given the universality of typing now, they don’t have a lot of “illegible handwriting” to decipher, but reading those many submissions is not easy. Nor is it a good use of time. So most of those submissions go unread, or get shoved off to an intern with instructions such as, “If you’re still reading it after one page, put it in my inbox; if you’re still reading after three pages, bring it to my office right away.”

This should make all authors take some time before they make unsolicited submittals. The editors probably put you in the category of know-nothing writer, and expect nothing of publishable value from them. You’ve wasted your time submitting like that. Instead, take a long time to hone your writing skills, study the market, study the publishing outlets, study the realm of literary agents. Then, after however many years that takes, start submitting in a smart way.

I found it interesting that, in 1923, the problem editors faced was that same as they face today—with illegible handwriting thrown in. Technology makes the process easier, but the problem remains.

Bible study, letters, reading, stock market, Writing

On Again, Off Again Journal

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For several years I’ve been keeping a journal. I’m not very regular with it. My typical time to write is in the evenings, after everything else is done and we are watching TV.

  • Up at 5:50 a.m. Weight 202.0; blood sugar 117.
  • Walked 2 miles, my fourth straight day to walk that distance, and my tenth day of morning walking in an effort to improve strength and stamina ahead of my surgery.
  • To The Dungeon, without coffee. Devotional reading (currently in a book on prayer) and prayer.
  • Begin work on the Bible study I’m writing. My goal was to write one section, about 600 words. I was able to do that. Had time left, so began work on the next section. It was a good time of writing.
  • No book sales when I checked early.
  • Reviewed the stock market and made one trade.
  • Upstairs for breakfast of sausage-onions-peppers-eggs-cheese on pita bread, then outside to do some light yardwork.
  • Checked on two home improvement items. Our propane company did change out the hardware on the propane takes as I asked. Someone called me about it a couple of weeks ago but the reception was so bad that I couldn’t understand him. And, I called the plumbing supply store about the replacement toilet seats I wanted to buy. They had never called me. I learned they couldn’t find one of the right size, material, and color that I need. So I researched and found one on Amazon and ordered it. Let’s hope the color matches.
  • Worked on scanning documents to save electronically and then discard the papers. I got rid of three stray genealogy papers and a number of writing site papers. I only need two more days at that pace to get rid of one more notebook.
  • Read in the sunroom. Cloud cover made it easy to do today. May have napped a little out there.
  • Lunch of leftover pizza, crackers, and blackberries.
  • Made a blackberry cobbler to give away.
  • Back to The Dungeon for a few more computer tasks, including managing correspondence.
  • Looked through some books to choose a couple to take to the hospital with me.
  • Rested upstairs in my reading/TV watching chair. Worked on crossword puzzles but fell asleep.
  • Read three letters in the Carlyle Letters Online.
  • Had supper of leftover taco salad, still quite good on the fourth day. Dessert for me was, you guessed it, blackberries with a little sugar sprinkled on them.
  • Wrote a letter to my second grandson, which I’ll mail tomorrow.
  • Remembered I needed to write a blog post for tomorrow, and so started writing this.

Well, that seems to describe a full day. Maybe I’ll actually find time to write this in my journal.

books, letters, reading, The Forest Throne

Something To Read

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Elijah enjoyed this as I read it to him. I enjoyed reading it again. Found a few typos I’ll have to fix.

I’m always reading something: a book, a magazine, whatever holds my interest. At least once a month I try to make a dent in my magazine pile, and I’ll take a couple of days to read three or four magazines.

But books are my main reading. A print book is nice, but I’m not against e-books. In fact, at some times I prefer an e-book. On a trip, or with a large book, having an e-book on my phone is definitely easier to read.

I’m usually working on two or three books at a time, which I read in different places, with one of those books being the main one. I’ll have another one I’m beginning to read to see if I’ll like it. I’m also reading a book more for research than for entertainment. And, I’ll have an e-book or two at the ready on my phone, to read in odd moments, such as in a doctor’s waiting room.

But as of late, I’ve had difficulty finding a book that I like. Here’s what I read or started lately, and a little about them.

  • C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love. I just started it, and within five pages I found it very difficult to understand. This is one of Lewis’s scholarly works, and it reads like one. I suppose I’ll find a way to read it, but with great difficulty.
  • Jack London’s White Fang. I brought this book on our recent trip to Texas, planning to read it to our youngest grandson, Elijah. I had never read it. But I got through only one chapter, and Elijah wasn’t interested. I also found it a bit difficult. So I set that aside.  for the rest of the trip, and plan to read it on my own sometime in the next year.
  • I just finished two similar books: XIII Men, and The Master’s Men. They were among the books that belonged to my mother-in-law that we recently liberated from a box or shelf in the basement. The books were similar. The first read almost as creative non-fiction and the second as a Bible study. Two different treatments of the same subject, the apostles appointed by Jesus. They probably aren’t worth reviewing on the blog, though I’m thinking about it.
  • My own book, There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. Elijah wanted me to read it to him, so I did. He hadn’t read it before, and he seemed to like it.
  • The second book in the series, The Key To Time Travel. Elijah and I got about 2/3rds of the way through it when our child/pet-watching gig was up.
  • The Letters of Cicero. Readers of the blog will know I love reading letter collections. I’ve had this one as an e-book for a long time, and I’ve been slowly reading it in those odd moments. I’m around 33 percent through with it. I’ve found it uninteresting, and have laid it aside for now. I plan on making a presentation of this letter collection at the September meeting of the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society.

None of these books have been what I would call great reads. They aren’t the sort of book, for example, that I would take to the hospital for a week-long stay. I needed something else.

A few days ago, knowing I needed a book or two to take to the hospital, I started scanning my bookshelves. On a bookshelf tucked away in the basement storeroom are my literature and poetry books. I found several that looked promising. One was The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. I picked this up new many years ago, but put it on the shelf. Now, I pulled it out and began reading it.

A journal is kind of like a letter collection. The passages are short. The book is easily picked up at any point for a short read or, if time and interest allow, a longer read. So this looks like a good read for the days in the hospital. This will not be enough reading material, however. I have a few things on my phone, but will be looking for one more book.

How about you? What does your reading pile/list look like?

Bible study, Documenting America, goals, reading, The Forest Throne, Writing

June Progress, July Goals

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The Key To Time Travel is published.

How can I possibly have progress in a month that I was taking off from writing? Well, taking time off for me is different than for others. It’s hard for me not to keep up with writing even during my month off. So I got a few things done. I’ll list them along with the goals, then I’ll see what kind of goals I can set for July.

  • Blog twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, as always. Even with grandparent busyness, I was able to get this done. Each day had a real blog post written and posted.
  • Attend writer groups meetings as I can based on travel schedule.  As expected, travel kept be away from all but one of the scheduled meetings.
  • Proofread as much as I can of the four completed volumes of A Walk Through Holy Week. I proofread parts 4, 5, and 6 (which I didn’t remember proofreading last year). Part 7 will be a July goal.
  • Work on the cover for the AWTHW series. I don’t sell enough books to pay for cover creation, so I just have to do it myself. I have a concept I want to use, if I can do the graphics. Which leads to my last goal… This is done, sort of. I worked with my 10-year-old granddaughter, who shows some artistic talent, to go from my preliminary concept to a working prototype. Whether it’s a fully workable prototype, I’m not sure.
  • Work with G.I.M.P. on how to do more artistry in covers. I’ll have to find some tutorials.

Other things I got done were:

  • Catching up on correspondence, both new writing and filing all unfiled correspondence for 2023.
  • Publish The Key To Time Travel. I didn’t mention this as a June goal because I wasn’t sure of the timing for getting the cover. After dealing with some health issues, the cover designer finished her work, and the book went on sale this month.
  • Work on the source material for the next Documenting America book. See the July goals.
  • Do more reading than normal.
  • Brainstorm an idea for a new Bible study, and read some source material for it.
  • Made a few updates to my website—not major ones, but things that needed doing.
  • And one thing that wasn’t writing related, but which I feel like mentioning, was digitizing my genealogy files. No, they are not done—far from it. But I added to what I did in prior months and fine-tuned my filing system as I went along. At the end of the month I felt good about how much of this I accomplished.

Now, for some July goals.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
  • Attend two writers meetings, one of which I’ll present at. A third meeting may happen and I’ll attend, if the library can schedule them.
  • Work on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution. Last month, even thought it wasn’t on the schedule, I managed to copy most of my source documents and load them into a Word document. The next step is reading and condensing them to the right length for the format of the series. I anticipate this will take all of July and possibly even longer.
  • Write up my recent Bible study idea into a proper outline of what it would be.

That’s a good number of goals for a month after a break. Documenting America will be my main task for the month.

home improvements, miscellaneous, reading

The Tree Came Down

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Here’s the view of the newly fallen tree, as it looks from my reading chair in the woods, off in the distance.

Summer is upon us in northwest Arkansas, both by the calendar and the weather. But our temperatures are hovering just below 90°F, or even in the upper 80s, for the daytime highs. Nightly lows are still in the 60s. That won’t last long. A forecast for next week shows us hitting 100 towards the end of the week.

But, I find it is cool enough to go to the sunroom and read around noon. That won’t last long either. My alternative place to read is a spot on our wood lot just south of the house. The lot is sloping, and finding a level spot to set a chair is a challenge. Last year I tried it but had a bad spot. Sitting wasn’t comfortable.

A little bit of enlargement. You can see how it’s at about a 45% angle. I haven’t walked down there yet to see what’s holding it up.

This year I chose another spot, just off the path to my compost pile. It’s not deep in the woods. In fact, when the sun comes around to due south and then a little to the west of south, the canopy of leaves becomes imperfect and it gets kind of hot. But, before 12:30 PM, when the sun is in the right spot and the shade is full, it’s quite pleasant there, even with the ambient temperature above 90.

The problem is, I find sitting in the woods distracting. I come out through the garage, walk the 40 or 50 feet down the path, put my coffee and book on the log I’m using as a table, set out my chair, and have a seat. I open whatever book I’m reading (currently C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms), and read.

Except, I find it impossible to concentrate for long. I’m constantly looking up to see what is in the woods. Or to listen to whatever sound is about. Our street is little traveled and so doesn’t give off much noise. If a strong enough breeze is going, I can hear the trees swaying and rustling through the leaves. I don’t hear many critter sounds. Sometimes a squirrel will be dashing here or there perhaps a hundred feet from me. I will watch it for a while. A bird or two may fly through the woods, but birds I hear more than see.

I will take that walk down the hill soon. But I don’t think I’ll do much about it.

Anyhow, one day last week, I interrupted my reading to look into the woods. Off to the right and quite a way down the hill, but still on our lot (or just a few feet south of it), was a tree that was newly leaning, closer to horizontal than vertical. I knew this tree. It was one of three trees in the area where I had established a brush pile and a log pile. The trees were dead, but standing. One of these trees, about 6-inch diameter, had come down over the winter. I’ve slowly been cutting it to movable lengths and taking them down to the log pile.

This new one is at least 12-inches diameter. It sits, as I said, a few feet south of our lot line, but is falling in the direction of our lot. I can’t leave it how it is. In North Carolina they called this type of tree a “widow-maker”. So this will be another one I’ll have to clean up.

A 12-inch tree is too big to try to cut without a chainsaw, so maybe I can get a friend to come with his chainsaw and help me out. I want to keep the lot clean for when the grandkids come, so they can play on it without a lot of stuff to trip over. But that will have to wait until after blackberry season, which is now in full swing.

What’s the point of all this? The difficulty of concentrating, which might be a sign of aging? Enjoyable things seen in the woods? The extra work that an extra lot puts on you? I suppose any of those could be a subject to expand.

I was thinking, though, of how using our senses results in expanded observations. When did that tree come down? We had a windstorm, with a little rain, over Saturday-Sunday night. That might have been it. But, it could have come down sometime before that. I’ve been sitting in the woods off and on for about a month, and I don’t remember seeing it before. Had I not seen it, or was it a new casualty of the forces of nature?

I’m not sure how much we use all our senses. Sight. Hearting. Touch. Taste. Smell. Rarely, I think, do I take a moment to observe around us and evaluate the area with all five senses.

I’m trying to do a better job with this. Right now, Friday evening, I’m sitting in the living room. The TV is on in the background, providing sound. It has to compete with ringing in my ears, however. The sight factor is easy, and I won’t describe to you the combination of furniture, clutter, carpet, etc. that I see. No particular smell stands out from whatever the background smell is. I’m sipping cold water, which has a neutral but somewhat enjoyable taste.

As to touch, I’m in the recliner, laptop on my lap. The chair presses in on me, causing some pain in my slowly-recuperating left shoulder. It reminds me that I don’t much like this chair; something about the height of the arms and the way they press in. The “pillow” behind my head also is a bit too big.

Ah, using the senses. Time to get up and find something to exercise more fully my sense of taste. Peanut butter and jelly, perhaps? Or maybe half a grapefruit.

Bible study, reading, stock market

Working Hard

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It’s 6:26 a.m. on my blog posting day. I normally try to have this written long before this on the day before, but circumstances worked against my getting that done.

The circumstances are, we are in West Texas again, the third of four trips here this year. The first was to babysit the grandkids while our daughter and son-in-law were on a mission trip to Thailand. The second trip and this one are to help out as they begin transitioning to a new location, south of Houston. Richard is down there two weeks and back here two. While he’s gone, we’ll come here to help out.

Yesterday I got the three older grandkids working on pre-move projects. They couldn’t get on screens until they had achieved a certain degree of completeness. They did it without complaining. In the evening, I worked on Bible quizzing with the two middle ones, as they will have a competition in June.

During the day, I have so far been working on yardwork tasks. Yesterday I completed the main task I had, though in reality there is much more to do. I’m going to take today off from outdoor stuff, I think, as I was quite worn out yesterday. I also slightly injured my chest swinging an ax to cut out some old, dead roots from a long-gone hedge. But that’s done, the debris discarded, and I need a day for the old bones—or perhaps it was muscles, ligaments, or tendons—to heal.

We’ve eaten leftovers so far. Today I’ll have to cook something. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

I’ve had plenty of indoor time to work on my other “jobs”. Over two days I added over 3,300 words to A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 7. I’m down to only one chapter left now, most likely three days of writing. Then I’ll have the Introduction to do and, of course, editing to turn it from a first draft to a publishable book. On to the little bit of work left to Part 5 of AWTHW, which I hope to finish in May. I’ve had time the last two days to do my stock trading. Fortunately, the type of trading I’m doing right now doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s relatively low risk, yet I’m ahead of the market for the year. That’s nice to see for a change.

I’ve been able to get a little reading in, but not a lot. It’s been good reading, however. To be a good example to the grandkids, I’m reading in a print book when they are around rather then one of three books I have going on my phone.

So, it’s been a good trip. Still more than a week to go before we head home. Lots of work to do. Today I’ll have to take a little time to work on The Key To Time Travel, as the cover designer has reached the point where she needs book dimensions and back cover copy. Since she’s there, it’s time for me to get a few last-minute edits done. I should have that published in May.

books, miscellaneous, reading, research

Library Memories – Part 2: The Company

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These massive structures took computer programs to design optimally. A library helped me do it well.

The first company I worked for had several libraries, one for each of the major divisions. But the main library was in the main building, Building A, on Meadowlake Parkway in Kansas City. I discovered this when I was working in Building N (or was it Q?) in Roeland Park, Kansas.

I had to go the 10 miles to Building A a couple of times a week to deliver a deck of punch cards to the main computer room, where they fed it into a modem to have the program run at McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. Don’t laugh, folks. This was 1975-76. Sometimes I would go, drop the cards off, and get the results the next day in the interoffice mail. Sometimes I was supposed to wait for the results. On those times, with nothing to do, I found the library and browsed in it.

This led to what I call two of my “career moments”, those times when you do something so spectacular that you remember it for the rest of your career and even after. At the time, I was with a group that was doing the structural design of 230 kV lattice steel transmission towers for the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. A few years later, I would be in Saudi and get to see those towers on the ground.

We were designing the towners using what we thought was a very good computer program, and none of us knew a whole lot about it. In the library, I found shelves full of journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers. One of those was the Power journal—many years of it—dealing with all things a civil engineer does for the electrical system. I found several articles about transmission towers. Needless to say, this was interesting reading.

In one issue, I found an article comparing the six or eight major transmission tower design computer programs (the analysis done by an unbiased party). The one we were using, the BPA program, was ranked second. The one that was first was proprietary, available only to the company that created it. My boss was about ready to head to Japan to a meeting about the Eastern Province project. I showed him the issue and article, and he took it with him and read it on the plane. In his meetings, someone criticized our program, saying it was not the best. My boss, fortified by the article and with the issue in hand, said, “Well, the ASCE Journal of Power Engineering says it’s the best program available. Look at this.” He won the argument and I was a hero. Career moment #1.

In another of those issues was an article on the general methodology of structural design of those towers. That led me to check out the manual on the BPA program and I learned it was a whole suite of programs. We were using the Design program, but after that we were supposed to go another step and do a more detailed analysis with the Analysis program. Based on what I learned, we started using it.

I learned this while a full-scale model of one of our towers was being tested in Japan, and we had a man there watching it. We worked late into the night and discovered that tower was 3% overstressed in one structural member. We quickly made a change, reran the analysis program, and had our fix, and waited for our man to make a pre-arranged call (no cell phones back then).

That morning, our man in Japan called and said that the tower being tested had failed at 97% of full load. We gave him the fix and were able waive the re-test, saving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Career moment #2 was in the books.

My next corporate library experience: While in Saudi Arabia, I discovered an Aramco library in Dhahran, where I frequently had to go for meetings. Perhaps it was more of a privately run public-type of library, but I’m calling it a corporate library. Whenever I had a half hour to kill between meetings, I would go there and browse. My main find was an atlas of the universe. I don’ remember the exact name. This had more than star charts. It talked about all things stellar and galactic. I learned about stars and galaxies near and far, and clusters of galaxies. I learned what a parsec was and how it was used to measure distances in the galaxies.

This gave me a fascination with space travel. I have several books queued up about that. Not sure when, if ever, I’ll get to write them.

Alas, my last couple of memories about corporate libraries aren’t good. When CEI moved into our new building in 2000, we had a great library. The then-director of training and his assistant did a wonderful job of organizing and labeling everything. And we even had a digital card catalog. This worked great from move-in day to around early 2005. A re-organization caused the library to move to less prominent quarters in our building. Things didn’t get put on the shelf the digital card catalog said they were on. This was not a downsizing but rather a reduction in usefulness at the start of the search engine era.

The downsizing came in 2009. After three or four layoffs, we were giving up our beautiful building and moving into rented offices. The library would move, but would be reduced in size. I was assigned the task of deciding what to keep, what to throw away. First, I had to organize it, which resulted in finding many duplicates of manufacturer’s catalogs and many we didn’t need. Things such as old phone books, old municipal standards, etc. all had to go. It was hard, but I made the cuts, and the truncated library barely fit in its new shelves.

That wasn’t the worst. As the Information Era came on full blast, and as we had a little growth, around 2012 the library lost much of its usefulness. It had to be shrunk even more, to maybe 125 linear feet of shelf space in a conference room. Again I had to make those hard decisions. Then, around 2016 the company decided to get rid of it all together. I took some of it into my office, got other people to take things, and got rid of everything else. Those were hard decisions to make, and hard to see valuable books and references overflowing in our dumpster.

I’ve wondered what my first company did with that library in Building A. The thought of all those journals being discarded isn’t a pleasant one. Maybe they found a way to keep it. I hope so.

miscellaneous, reading, Writing

Three White Ribbons

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It’s hard to see, but in this photo are three white ribbons (paths) and two houses, mostly unseen most of the year.

Monday morning, we woke up to a layer of frozen stuff that fell in the night. It was thin, almost more condensation than falling precipitation. This was forecast; no surprise. For the rest of Monday, the frozen precipitation did come. Sleet. Freezing rain. Ice. Maybe even some snow. By the end of Monday daylight, it had accumulated to perhaps an inch, maybe less.

Tuesday dawned cold, around 18° F and cloudy. Mid-morning brought some more frozen precip—again as predicted—though not as long as expected. Maybe a little more accumulation.

I didn’t leave the house for these two days, not even to check the mail. The farthest I went was one step onto the deck to strew birdseed. We stayed inside, did inside tasks, and, to some extent took it easy. Put away a few Christmas decorations. I was glad that I got some yardwork done on Saturday.

I spent my usual time in the chilly sunroom, including some looking out the window time. Behind our house is a valley, known in these parts as a hollow, or “holler”. The photo above is from the sunroom. If you click on the photo to get it full screen, then enlarge it as much as possible and pan around, a few features come out, features that are totally obscured by forest vegetation seven or eight months a year, and features that can’t be seen except when show highlights them.

One of the features is three white “ribbons”—strips of land that are significantly lighter than adjacent areas. At the bottom of the valley is the channel bottom, covered with light-colored gravel. Up just a little higher is part of the Tunnel Vision Trail. Built in 2019 to early 2020, this trail forms a 20 mile loop in western Bella Vista, popular with mountain bikers. That is also light-colored and visible in winter months even when there is no snow.

Then, up at the top of the photo, hard to see, is a strip that is a road going up the hill on the opposite side of the valley. I saw those clearly Monday night and Tuesday morning. Alas, by the time I snapped this photo, the City had run the plow up the road. If you look closely, you can see a black ribbon. That’s the road. It is totally not visible except when snow highlights it, in this case the absence of snow shows where it is.

Our house on the left; the 700 ft house at the line on the right; the other house above that. Note the density of the forest canopy in the valley.

Other features that can be seen near the top of the photo are two houses. You can see the white roof of one. It’s on the far side of the black ribbon road, just right of the vertical projection of the evergreen tree near the bottom. The other is harder to see. It appears as a dark rectangle, partly obscured by tree trunks. This is the house that is closest to us across the holler, on this side of the black ribbon road, 700 feet as the crow flies. These two houses are barely discernable during normal winter conditions. The tree trunks reduce visibility that much.

There’s a metaphor somewhere in all of this, but I can’t tell what it is. Remove the foliage of life to see more of the background. Add a little adversity to see things even more clearly. Enlarge the vignette to see more details. I suppose I ought to explore that some.

All of which is so many words that doesn’t get me anywhere down roads I want to travel. Oh, I suppose better usage and description of metaphors would help me. My main concern Tuesday evening, when I began writing this post, was would I be able to get out of my driveway on Thursday to be able to attend the afternoon meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group? That’s the road I need to travel next. By then the roads should be good enough to drive, but will I be able to get up the 50 feet of driveway to the street?

All of this is hurting my head. Too much thinking for a Tuesday night after a full day of editing, reading, and disaccumulating. I’ll add an update just before posting this on Friday.

family, reading, The Forest Throne, travel

A Pleasant Weekend Behind, Crunch Time Ahead

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On Wednesday, we drove to Meade, Kansas, my wife’s home town, to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend with my wife’s cousin and her husband. We had our Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, to accommodate the schedule of another cousin.

Thursday we went through a box of old family photos that we brought from Bella Vista to Meade. How we came to possess this box is a complicated story, not to be recounted here. We sorted the photos by family group and era, and were able to identify almost everyone in them. A few were mysteries, but after the sorting we figured them out. One was a puzzle, a photo of Lynda’s grandmother as a young girl, sitting on a man’s lap. The man’s name was written on the mounting cardboard, but no one in the family knew who he was. I did some quick internet research and discovered he was a neighbor at the old homestead in Finney County. A mystery solved.

I got in a fair amount of walking around town. Most of the streets are wide, there’s not much traffic, and, since the sidewalks are mostly in rough shape or non-existent, it was quite safe to walk on the streets. Still, even with the exercise, I came back almost two pounds heavier than I was when I left. So the crunch time for weight loss begins today. Despite that, my blood sugar readings were mostly good.

We had lots of good conversations, watched some good music performances on TV, though a little too bluegrass for my tastes, ate good food, had a good Sunday school class and church service yesterday. Our son called us from his vacation in Spain a couple of times. I wrote two letters, one to a pen pal by e-mail, and one to a grandson on paper.

I got done a lot of reading, mostly in the biography of David Livingtone. I’m still less than halfway through this 633 page tome. I started on another book, Great Voices of the Reformation, which is close to 600 pages. Trish and Dave gave me two C.S. Lewis books I didn’t have—compilations of essays and stories, though I did have some or the individual items compiled. So I may have come back more encumbered than I went.

Thus, we come to the crunch time, mainly writing. I’m going to try to finish The Key To Time Travel before the grandkids arrive after Christmas. 1000 words a day and I’ll accomplish that, with time to go through it once editing.

The crunch time is here for clean-up. The special projects I’ve talked about in a couple of blog posts now need to be wrapped up and the “residue” put back on shelves. Piles of books need to be returned to shelves. A few Christmas decorations need to replace the few fall decorations. And then we’ll be ready for the family celebration between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Now, I must leave you and see what trouble I got Eddie Wagner into in the future, and how I’m going to get him out. Oops, guess I just gave away some of the plot.