Fragments From Floyd

THE SHOW MUST GO ON: Well it has been a morning of dead-ends. I wanted to do something other than put up the weeny image size dictated by the blog page. Landscapes--like the ones I brought back from the Buffalo on Wednesday--just lose their impact viewed in miniature. But my Exposure Manager gallery is inexplicably unavailable; Flickr doesn't tell me how to do what I need to do; and the Quicktime Movie I can make is way too large to download. So, for those of you who want to see a little movie of Buffalo Mountain (11 slides, 10 seconds a piece) you can download it here, and it will play with Shockwave Flash, which most computers will have. I didn't add music to keep the file size small. Do let me know if this works for you. I suggest you enlarge your Flash viewer once the slides start; it should hold up to at least 640 x 480 size.

IS IT JUST ME?: Last year, we let the Government keep way too much of our money til our whopper tax return in May. But we didn't make any changes to our witholding, nor were there any significant changes in our income this past year (my teaching income made hardly a blip on the screen). So we were counting our chickens: we had our last year's tax return amount allocated to 1) new desk; 2) son's college expenses; 3) savings; 4) laptop; and 5) trip to Vancouver. But NO. We were shocked to get our return back and find less than half what we expected. The explanation (according to the CPA): the president's tax cut already gave that (missing) amount back to you in the recent tax reductions. Oh yeah? I couldn't see a bit more take home than the previous year. Well it went SOMEWHERE. What's going on here!

READING: Well thank goodness. The radio essay sounded better than I'd feared. But I do find one thing that is regrettable about the time constraints of such a reading: there's not much time for pregnant pauses. A couple of places where I took a breath between paragraphs--more for emphasis than respiration--were edited out. And so the break between thoughts isn't there, and it makes it harder for a listener to follow the story. Ah well. I may try to get a digital recording when it rebroadcasts at 8:55. I have a few of them in digital form (the last thanks to a Fragments listener-friend!) and may see if Audacity is capable of recording directly from the sound card.

RECORDING: Lots happening in Virginia in the coming years. Next year is Floyd's 175th birthday. And the next is Jamestown's 400th. History, tradition and culture can be viewed under glass in a museum. But largely, it resides in the people. Here is an excellent guide on how to interview someone in an oral history project. Thanks to Kathleen from the local historical society for the link. A meeting to discuss this method and a local project is upcoming in future weeks.

RECEIVING: The laptop approacheth. It's somewhere in Roanoke, according to UPS tracking. Oh please, people, don't throw that box around. Let's make this DELL like the first ones I ordered ten years ago that have all their parts and work like they should from the git-go. The wireless hub was supposed to arrive early in a separate package. It hasn't. Anxious? Well yes, just a bit. I think I've made a good decision (both to spend the money and in the choice of system I've made) but won't know for sure until a few weeks of use. Thanks, all, for your helpful advice. I may have more questions, especially in the wireless realm. Old dogs. New tricks. Woof.