Health

What’s up with my arthritis–or is it arthritis?

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Lately I’ve had a flare up of my rheumatoid arthritis. It has hit my hands and wrists in late Nov/Dec, but in October it was my upper back and right shoulder. Right now it’s confined to both wrists, the bottom joint on my left thumb, and the ring finger on my right hand. That has been getting progressively worse. Aleve has seemed to have no effect, so I quit taking that and putting that foul stuff on my stomach. This morning I woke up and the rt ring finger is so bad it is in constant pain and I can hardly do anything with it. Of course, when one finger on a hand hurts the entire hand hurts, to some extent. Shifted the mouse to use it left handed (as I once did) and I’m keeping on keeping on.

But this really hurts, and I’m not even sure it’s rheumatoid. I must digress a little. I was first diagnosed with rheumatoid back in the early 90s, when I began getting pain in my ankles, an elbow now and then, and maybe other places from time to time. They x-rayed, took the usual tests, and all the rheumatoid tests turned out negative. So they called it “sero-negative rheumatoid arthritis”, which I guess means rheumatoid-like symptoms without the typical rheumatoid chemicals. Sometimes it flares up, and sometimes I have almost no pain at all.

When I had my annual physical in August my new doctor said she questioned the diagnosis, saying that sero-negative is more or less a doctor punting: gotta call it something. But we never got to the point where she could run any tests to see what it might be. And, in August I had almost no symptoms. Now I have the symptoms, and now she has closed her practice and moved to Oklahoma. Blankety-blank Okies!

So today I’ll call our new doctor, one who I’ve never seen but Lynda has, and say “Could I have you look at my rt ring finger and figure out why it’s swollen, deformed, and painful? Could it be phlebitis? Or what? I haven’t had any trauma.” I’ll probably sound ridiculous, but it’s come to the point where I have to do it. If I can’t get in with them, perhaps I’ll go to the ER.

Well, I got through the typing okay. Tapping keys with that finger is a little painful, but I can bear it as long as I don’t tap too hard. My speed was okay as well. Don’t feel like proofreading, thought.

See you all on the flip side.

Suite 101

A Report on Suite101.com

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I have now finished 5 1/2 months as a writer at Suite101.com. I have a little bit of perspective, though not really enough yet to know if it is worthwhile. As I’ve stated before, I first applied to Suite in the hopes of using it to increase my platform–that is, increase the number of potential book buyers I would bring to a publisher. For that purpose, how much money I earn there should be irrelevant. Of course, I couldn’t let it be irrelevant forever, so money has become one of the goals and motivating factors for participation there.

For platform-building purposes, the number of page views I get is most important. The first graph (wish I could get the graphs clearer–click on the graph for a clearer image) shows where I stand with page views. I peaked in mid-October when I had 53 articles posted, and began a slow decline. Page views tanked over Thanksgiving, though that’s to be expected. They have recovered nicely, but not to where they were right before Thanksgiving. Still, my current readership is 86,000 people per year with current article total at 70. That’s not too shabby.

Revenue is going up, though I’m way below the reported site average. The second graph shows my revenue history. It is more volatile than are page views, but the trend is upward. The third graph shows revenue per week. While revenue is still low, I had four of my best weeks in November to early December. As I wrote once before, I began writing some different type articles around October 21st to try to stimulate revenue. That seems to have worked, though the coincident peak in page views at the same time is curious, if not causal. I’ll have to watch that and see how page views go in January, after we get past all this holiday hubbub.

Last week the site went through a major face lift, completely changing its look. The site had limited functionality for about 20 hours, which probably hurt page views and revenue. It’s too soon to know if and how the new look will affect readership and revenue. I can and do hope for the best, however.
Writing

Number 1 on Google

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Dr. Hook and his Medicine Machine may have fixated on getting their picture on the cover of The Rolling Stone magazine. Athletes hope for Sports Illustrated covers. I suppose politicians hope for the conservative or liberal magazine of choice. But for a writer who writes on the web and tries to attract readers through search engines, the goal is to be number 1 on Google for the critical search term(s).

My article, Book Review: Lost Letters of Pergamum, from June 2008, has for a long time been the most popular article I’ve posted to this blog. It’s companion, More Thoughts on Lost Letters of Pergamum, doesn’t get near as many hits. Some of my other book reviews get some traffic. Otherwise it’s a known reader in Rhode Island, a known reader in north Georgia, a mystery reader in Little Rock, and me who look at any of these pages.

I can always tell when some class somewhere has begun a study of The Lost Letters of Pergamum, for I get a few hits from that locale on the article. They show up in my sitemeter stats for a day or two, then things go quiet till next semester.

But Wednesday and Thursday I got a lot of hits on that article, many more than just one class studying the book. In fact, I think the hits came from five different institutions of higher ed. I wondered what was going on. At least one of the hits indicated they accessed the site after searching on Google for “review of lost letters of Pergamum”. So I did the Google search for that term.

And there I was, number 1 on Google. Even ahead of the Christian Book Shops page reviewing the book. Ahead of the Amazon.com page. Ahead of Barnes and Noble. Ahead of 12,799 other sites.

Those who have been at this Internet writing game for a while, and who know more about “search engine optimization” (SEO) than I do, say that somehow, through magical al-gore-ithms, Google can tell what is good writing and what isn’t. Or maybe it’s what is popular writing and what isn’t. Either way, my review seems to have passed Google-muster and risen to the top. It must have always been fairly high in a Google search, because I wouldn’t have been getting the occasional hits if it hadn’t. Research shows people rarely look past the first page of hits, and even more rarely go past page three.

But to rise to the number 1 position for the most important search phrase is validation. I must be doing something right. Since I wrote that article long before I had even heard about SEO, either I’m a natural at that new practice or the writing must be fairly good. Either way, I’ll take it. Time to get back to my SEO-based writing, trying to figure out how to write informative articles that incorporate search terms and that are written with excellence, not with mindless repetition of those terms.

It’s a good feeling.

book reviews

Book Review: From The President

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I came of age during the Watergate era, both literally and politically. In November 1972, helped along by a national law that lowered the voting age in national elections, I stepped into a voting booth in Cranston RI and cast my first vote for president. I voted for Richard Nixon. The Watergate scandal was a gnat buzzing in people’s ears, pushed about by a press that hated Nixon. It was not till five months after the election that it erupted to the point where heads rolled, and it was another year and then some before Nixon resigned.

Out of this scandal was the fight over Nixon’s presidential papers. The courts wanted them. The press wanted them. Defendants wanted them–even more so than prosecutors in some cases. Yet history had said that a president’s papers from his years in office were his own, to be done with as he saw fit. Destroy them, put them in a library, suppress them, edit them. They were his. The need for Nixon’s papers caused a long legal battle that was not resolved until 1987. The papers became available in 1988.

Bruce Oudes began the process of going through the released Nixon papers, which went into his book From The President: Richard Nixon’s Secret Files. Oudes’ title is almost yellow journalism. The files were not secret because they all contain salacious material that showed what bad dudes Nixon and his cronies were. They were “secret” simply because Nixon thought they belonged to him, as those of his predecessors had belonged to them. But Congress passed laws, the courts upheld them, and Oudes and countless like him got the papers.

The lengthy Introduction to the book is excellent. Oudes describes the fight for the papers and how the national mood was pretty much to give nothing to Nixon. Oudes describes how the files amounted to 1.5 million pages, which he culled through to produce a book of 640 pages. It was a massive work, and obviously everything could not be included. With such abridgement, achieving a fair balance is difficult if not impossible. The editor’s prejudices must show through.

The papers focus heavily on Chuck Colson and the political maneuverings he orchestrated. In fact, the papers as a whole are mostly political. A small minority deal strictly with governing. The China trip, for instance, is covered in memos that discuss the political ramifications of the trip but not many that discuss what that trip would mean for the world and for US interests. The years 1973 and 1974 are under-represented, 1974 badly so. It was as if the Administration quit producing memos on January 1, 1973.

Despite these faults, I found the reading fascinating. It was sort of like the business correspondence I read every day. Seeing how the Administration sought to manipulate the press was eye-opening. The reaction to a bad press consumed many memos. The Vietnam War was the backdrop to everything, but the memos described the happenings on the home front, not the battle front.

I was disturbed to see White House employees–Coulson, Buchanan, Haldeman, and others spending time producing memos purely about politics and the 1970 and 1972 elections. I was not pleased to see how my tax dollars (well, mostly Dad’s tax dollars) go to politics rather than governing. Perhaps it is not possible to achieve a complete separation of staff so that some work on politics, some work on governing, and each is paid by monies from an appropriate source. Still, it was bothersome.

It’s a good book, and well worth the $2.00 I paid for it used at our local thrift store. If you have a chance to find it, read it. The memos themselves are unfiltered history–original source material–though of course the selection of the memos make the book a highly filtered flawed history. This one is not a keeper. It will be in the next garage sale, where I hope to make back half my investment.

goals

December Goals

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This may be the season to be jolly, but it’s not the season for audacious writing goals, or plans to make tons of progress on creative works. So I’ll back off some on my goals.

1. Blog 12 times

2. Post at least 8 articles to Suite101.com

3. Make my submittals log perfect: all entries made in appropriate places; all acceptances/rejections gathered.

4. Make my ideas notebook perfect: appropriate dividers; hard copies of all ideas in the file.

5. All poems properly filed; includes transferring all poems from my computer at work to the one at home, and making the one at home the official repository of electronic copies; hard copies of all poems in a file.

6. Write 2,000 words in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Last month’s goal was too ambitious, given all that’s going on.

7. Finish that appendix in the Harmony of the Gospels. I believe I left it, some months ago, with not much more than a page to finish. I shouldn’t leave it hanging.

8. Continue studies of Demand Studios (tutorials, editorial guides), and begin writing for them.

goals

The November Report

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December 1st–time to see how I did relative to my November goals.

1. Blog at least 12 times. I blogged 14 times.

2. Post at least 8 articles at Suite101.com Posted 9 articles at Suite.

3. Write 10,000 word in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Only wrote a little over 1,000 words, so way behind on this one.

4. Complete the Bible study writing goal of October. I actually did this. Early in the month I gathered all (well, I think all) of the started or planned Bible studies, listed them, determined where they were relative to the completion continuum, and put them in a semi-organized file. I have a little more to do on this, but I consider it essentially completed.

5. Make at least four writing related submittals. I completed this, making either 4 or 5 submittals. I’ll check my submittals log later tonight and see what the exact number was.

6. Complete the started but as yet unfinished appendix in my Harmony of the Gospels. Did nothing on this.

7. Work on Screwtape’s Good Advice. Did nothing on this.

So, all in all not a very good month as far as writing accomplishment goes. Guess I’ll have to try harder in December.

family, miscellaneous

The Best Laid Plans…

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Yesterday afternoon, 5:30 PM to be precise, I was basking in the solitude of a quiet house, and the prospect of several days with evenings to myself and the time to begin work on my new writing gig while at the same time work on this blog and articles for Suite101.com.

Then a call came from my wife. She drove our daughter and grandson back to OKC yesterday (son-in-law having left the day before that to be in his pulpit Sunday morning). It seems our daughter did not have her main suitcase; would I check in the basement bedroom? Sure enough, there it was. She had said something to me about her suitcase still downstairs and might have asked if I would bring it up, but that was 30 or more minutes before they left. I asked her right as she left if she had everything from downstairs. She said yes, I suppose assuming I had gone downstairs to get the suitcase. I almost asked her to go down and make one more sweep. Should have.

We made tentative plans to meet tonight, maybe in Tulsa, and do the transfer. Meanwhile Lynda did some checking on-line, and determined a bus company had a bus leaving from Rogers at 1:50 AM and would have the suitcase in Oklahoma City by 2:30 PM. I spent some time debating whether to do that, or just to wait and see what I could do today, since my office is just a couple of miles from that bus stop. I decided to not be lazy and instead to tie up the suitcase, put it in the pickup, and drive the 15 miles. I got there at 12:30 AM. The bus would arrive at 1:30 AM. I had a pleasant time reading in my current selection from the reading pile for that hour.

The bus arrived on time–Great! But then I learned that the driver can’t accept freight that wasn’t already ticketed. I would have to come back during normal business hours and have the agent ticketed. Oh, well, about two hours wasted, and a late night to bed. At 1:45 AM I headed home.

But, I must first backtrack. About a mile from the bus stop (which is at a convenience store at the highway exit), the truck began acting rough–loud engine noises. What was going on? Was it low oil level? I was several thousand miles behind on having it serviced. No, the oil pressure gauge showed good pressure. I left the convenience store and headed home, deciding to drive through town and avoid the high speeds of the convenient Interstate. This took me right past our new office, the Ford garage near the office, and the Wal-Mart Supercenter. However, despite the rough sounds of the engine and the oil pressure gauge now pegged at zero, I kept going.

It got to sounding so bad that I decided to stop at the Phillips 66 station/convenience store in Bella Vista. In the near darkness I couldn’t really see what the oil level was, but it looked low. I put in two quarts, started the car, and the oil pressure gauge showed a good level. Headed down the road and the gauge pegged zero within a block. I stopped, checked to make sure I had the cap on tight, and decided to drive the remaining seven miles home. When I got there I was too wound up to go to bed, so finished the chapter in the book and got to bed at 3 AM.

Up at 7:30 AM, called the Ford garage four miles from the house, and after I described the problem they said to drive it in. Got there at 8:10 AM. Sat till 8:45 AM, when they told me the engine was blown. It was just a matter of time before it locked up, maybe a mile, maybe a month. Why did it do that, I asked them? Low oil? Oil pump quit? Long term damage that just reached a critical point between 12:30 and 2:00 AM on a Monday morning? No way to know. I waited some time at the dealership before telling them to go ahead. And while they are at it, to check the clutch too. The other Ford garage told me a year ago it was bad, and I’ve been nursing it, trying to get by for as long as possible.

They gave me a loaner for the duration. Went home, ate an early lunch, headed to the bus depot, got the bag on the 12:30 PM departure, and arrived at the office.

With my equilibrium and my tranquility quite upset. Haven’t gotten much done today, but will try to knuckle down as soon as I get this posted. Did I cause the engine damage by letting the servicing go? Was it just time for it to happen, and it happened in the wee hours when my back-up transportation and cell phone was in Oklahoma City? All I know is the outcome, which is in a week I will be considerably poorer, with my emergency fund, auto repair fund, and savings significantly drained.

Suite 101, Writing

Home Alone

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Well, it’s 5:30 PM Central time, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and I’m home alone. The holiday company have left, my wife taking our daughter and son-in-law back to Oklahoma City this afternoon. So I’ll be batching it for a few days.

Time to work on my writing, catching up on what I let go from Tuesday until now. I don’t know that I’ll do a whole lot today. I’ll probably write a second blog post a little later, and possibly I’ll work on and maybe complete an article for Suite101.com. My article on homemade turkey soup has done quite well there lately, helping to sustain my page views at respectable levels through the holidays. My revenue is also up, at the highest level for any month with three days to go in the month. I’m within striking distance of having enough to get a payout this month.

Tonight, though, I may take most of the evening to just relax. I’ll fix a thick turkey sandwich, complete with gravy and dressing, and watch Gladiator, which is supposed to be on one of the cable channels tonight with limited commercial interruptions. While watching that I might get my submittal log up to date, and take notes on a couple of Suite articles. I can multi-task, since I’ve seen Gladiator before.

I also have a new writing gig that I should take the evening studying, but I think I will put that off till tomorrow, and will report about it on this blog sometime later in the week. For now, this will suffice to get me back in the groove.

holidays

Crunch Time

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I’ve never particularly enjoyed the holidays. At least not in recent years. All the work preparing, and then all the work un-preparing, has caused me considerable angst. Thanksgiving is not too much trouble. There’s not much decoration. It’s just a big meal and making sure the fridge is prepared to hold the leftovers. Christmas is more difficult, with the round of parties, extensive decorating, and the big meal(s) so close on the heals of Thanksgiving. But I muddle through.

I suppose the worst part of it all is cleaning the house for guests. Lynda and I do not tend to keep the house real clean, not that we two are the only inhabitants. Heck, why mince words: the house is a wreck. The kitchen table is generally covered with papers: mail to be read, finances to be filed, coupons to use or discard, magazines and newsletters we don’t feel like reading. Since we rarely have company between holidays, by Thanksgiving it is an insurmountable task to clear the clutter. So, a day or two before the kids arrive (or other guests) for Thanksgiving, we shove it all in a box, put it in the south bedroom, and figure we’ll get to it before Christmas. But, a week after Thanksgiving the table is covered with Christmas card stuff, and other stuff also begins to pile up. When someone comes for Christmas–another box or perhaps the same and the same outcome.

By now the south bedroom is incredibly full of junk. Not all of it is junk. Much of it is boxes and bags of children’s books relatives have given us to give to Ephraim. These are mostly unsorted, and maybe we’ll go through them with Richard and Sara when they arrive. But also in the room are boxes and bags of…what? I couldn’t tell you what all is in them. We need a serious house cleaning, starting with the kitchen table, then the south bedroom, then the storage room in the basement, then maybe the garage.

Actually, except for the south bedroom I would say other parts of the house are, right now, in better shape than they were a year ago. We have done kitchen table cleaning for the last week, slowly working through the piles. We even pulled one box out of the south bedroom and went through it. It was mostly stuff from last year, or maybe two years ago. The good news is if we haven’t had or seen the stuff for that long we don’t need it, and most can be discarded. The bad news is a few things are not easy to decide on.

The garage is relatively straightened up, and the basement storage room is slightly cleaner than last Thanksgiving, in part due to some extra shelves. We may, however, have a little less junk in the room; certainly fewer empty boxes, which tend to add to the clutter.

So what’s to be done? Tonight we must finish decorating the Christmas tree, which stands there with lights but nothing else. I must move a file cabinet out of the basement bedroom, and see that the Dungeon (our computer work area) gets a significant overhaul. Must also find a place to stash the old, over-sized monitor that I changed out last night for a free, surplus one from the company. I’d love to do a little work in the storeroom. I’m not far away from having it look pretty decent.

But, it looks like the stuff on the table will find its way to a box, perhaps the same box not yet emptied from last year. We’re careful not to stuff bills in there, only those things that are junk mail or a step above junk mail, which we’d like to go through but never seem to find the time. Hopefully that box will get cleaned out the week after Thanksgiving. I don’t want to see some of that stuff for a fourth year.

Engineering, freelance writing, Suite 101, Writing

Back On-Site, and a Writing Lesson Learned

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This morning the street superintendent of Centerton called. He needed me at a construction site. He was modifying something I “designed” a year ago and he wanted me to look at it. I put designed in quotes because this wasn’t a rigorous engineering design. A culvert wasn’t draining properly; erosion downstream had exposed a water line; wingwalls obstructed proper flow of water; he was tired of waiting for the highway department to fix it. So he and I met on site and I drew a sketch of what needed to be done. He hired a contractor and had it constructed. It has worked fine.

Well, sort of fine. The erosion control measures worked like a charm, save in one location they didn’t complete. The culvert drains as it should now. But a problem he has noticed since is that the flow entering the culvert, from the east and west and which turn and flows south, don’t work well together. The flow from the west is so much more than from the east that it overwhelms the smaller flow and creates backflow in that direction, over-topping the highway three hundred feet east. He wanted to put in a diversion wall and let the two flows get into the culvert with less co-mingling. I helped them lay it out, and hopefully it will accomplish what he wants.

I say hopefully, because once again this is not rigorous engineering. I get to do that this afternoon as I re-evaluate a flood study and respond to FEMA comments. But this approximate engineering is something I’m not as comfortable with. There’s no way to know if this will work until the next rain storm allows us to watch it in operation–and it needs to be enough rain to have the ditch flow at lest two feet deep. One of these half-inch rainfalls won’t do that. Much better to engineer something that works according to the laws of science and mathematics. Something I can reasonably predict how it is going to perform. Oh well, billable hours are billable hours. I shouldn’t complain.

It’s sort of like the difference of writing for a residual income website and a pay up-front website. On the latter I know exactly what I’m getting for what I have to write. For Suite101 and its residual income payment model, what I get paid is totally dependent on how many ads are clicked, which is somewhat dependent on what subjects I write about. It’s also dependent on how well I optimize the article for search engines. Maybe, over several years, it will amount to more than I would make writing for up-front pay; maybe not.

I’m working on my SEO abilities, but frequently find that butting up against what I consider to be good writing. So far, with one exception insisted on by an editor, I have always come down on the side of good writing. I hope I always will.

Author | Engineer