Hyperlocal Floyd

We'll not make it this year to Floyd Fest, where from the Dreaming Creek Stage, World Music will come--more musical notes than the number of ants on a Tennessee anthill--from Nashville and the rest of the planet. Here's what was said (Miami Herald) about the Floyd music scene, that includes this past weekend's Wine Down the Music Trail event (Roanoke Times article) held at the same venue as FloydFest on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Larger image here.

Blogger Book Review: Many thanks to David St. Lawrence for offering a kind and perceptive review of Slow Road Home both on his blog (Ripples) and especially for adding it to the Amazon.com reviews of the book--where readers of Slow Road are told they might also like Barbara Kingsolver's new book--a comparison I'm happy about but BK probably had best not learn of it.

Blog to Book: Slow Road Home was the topic of conversation at Blooking Central where Cheryl Hagedorn focuses her attention to the relationship between blogging and book publishing, gathering examples of all the variety of paths that can take. Cheryl included a bit also of an email reply to her about my experience in the blog-to-book endeavor.

By It's Cover: I exchanged several emails with a young man in Israel who had found one of my images posted at Fragments back in 2004 that he thought would make a good cover for his forthcoming book. It was interesting there for a while, and I spent a good bit of time trying to make the image work, but in the end, when I told him I didn't work for free, he decided instead to draw his own cover with a crayon. Just kidding.

Update--8:30 7/11/07! See Gary Boyd's (North Carolina Mountain Dreams blog) wonderful red jeep and flowers--his contribution for the America's Roadside Bloomery project started here a few days ago--now featured on Autoblog. Thanks for picking that up, Alex!

Friday Shorts: Almost July

You can see a larger image different view of this shot of a busy barn swallow bringing food to at least two hungry mouths I could see inside. She returned about once a minute with her catch (that sometimes got away before the gaping mouths could take it) so I had several opportunities to catch her on the wing.

* That's My Name Too (three! four!) There is a Goose Creek in South Carolina, and they have a press--which is how it happened to come up in a Google search for the name of my little business, Goose Creek Press. Apparently, more goes on there than in our rural backwater. I give you exhibit A. It involved Rev. Jesse Jackson, who apparently stopped by for a photo-op.

* I'm tinkering with some new sites for the book. If you enter slowroadhome.com or goosecreekpress.com in your web address, you'll go to my newly-redirected site at wetpaint.com. It's very easy to use and change. Stop by, poke around, let me know what you think. I haven't settled yet, and haven't invested anything here but a little time.

* But then yesterday I rediscovered Terapad, where I'd already set up an account back in January and then forgotten about it. It is feature rich, but as far as I can figure out, lacks an easy way to get from the edit page back to the page that's been edited.

* Almost, but not quite. I just couldn't make myself enter the medical quagmire that is health care in America. Yeah, we have insurance. But I will do anything to keep from being jerked around by Southern Health. So I'm looking at something other than straight glucosamine for my crummy wrists and thumbs. Anybody know anything about Osteo-Biflex? It's "special" ingredient is Frankensense. Seems to be something to it as an anti-inflammatory, with a history of use that goes way back.

* Carry me back. The Kingston Trio sings Four Strong Winds. So clean-cut and earnest, the crowd so polite and engaged. Sorry: the good ol' days.

Thursday Shorts 10 May 07

* ~ * Good News from Melville: the 18-200mm lens is fixable (you may remember how poorly it bounced on the clinic floor two weeks ago tomorrow) and will cost me just three hours pay to fix! oh JOY! It will be back in a week

* ~ * I visited professional photographer Johnny Sundby in Rapid City last week, and I must say, his studio is most impressive as was his kindness to show me around and talk about the processes in his work, including the production of full-color books (he has at least three.) He made me aware of Four Color Imports and gave me a contact email which turned out to be the president. I was contacted by email by a rep offering to call and discuss my project, and lo and behold, at the time I had requested (yesterday morning) I had a pleasant and helpful conversation with a representative who is now working on a quote for me. Gulp. Johnny got a good price per book because he was confident of sales of 3500 to 5000. I, on the other hand...and no, I don't begin to have the book completed even conceptually. Just something for me to be thinking about, an uncertain carrot on the very real stick that creates that wonderful tension between what is and what can be.

* ~ * So. I'm hoping for a good turnout at the winery tomorrow night, especially as I have chosen to attend that event instead of the Mt. Rogers Naturalist Rally this weekend--a gathering I first visited with my students in 1975. A scheduled field trip leader didn't make it, and at the last minute (as participants were gathered at the steps of the old Konnarock CCC building on Saturday morning) they asked "is there anybody here who can lead the wildflower trip at Grindstone Nature Trail?" and my students vociferously volunteered me. I lead that same trip for 11 years, and once again in 2005. There are 12 field trips Saturday morning--salamanders, invasive weeds, geology, trees, mollusks and more. Sigh.

* ~ * I have several panoramas and other shots from the Badlands I'll share starting tomorrow.

Big Sky Country: Badlands, Briefly

Well we certainly know how to pick'em. We fly 1200 miles to an alien biome full of places to explore. And South Dakota arranges to get 10% of its annual rainfall (accompanied at various times by pea-soup fog and at all times by 30 mph winds or greater. Until the cloud cover broke (but not the wind) yesterday. (I had to check and see: SD's annual rainfall is about 17.5". Do you know what your state's yearly total is?)

So, we finally made it (very briefly and very superficially) out to the Badlands, and I can at least say I've hurried into one edge of the area and come back with a few usable pictures for the scrapbook. It will be next week, most likely, before I'll have time to take a look at them and post a little gallery of South Dakota pictures, one of which will be...

Our daughters ultrasound that we attended on Friday--this, a high-tech 4D version it's called. The image is all gray and grainy, the usual blobs the trained eye only can see as human. Then he switches to 4D and edges and depth appear in a sepia-toned image. Amazing: a beautiful baby girl. Name very much undetermined and the source of much maternal angst during our few days here. Thirty-something years back, we had chosen a girl's name: Noel. But backwards, she would be First Noel. Along those Christmasy lines, I suggested our new granddaughter's name could be IVY. The Holli and the Ivy. Nah, I think not.

Yesterday, coming back from the Badlands, the skyline to the north (and very near-seeming from my daughter's neighborhood) stood The Needles, shafts of late afternoon sun streaming down behind the stark silhoutte of these rugged Black Hills pinnacles. The lighting was spectacular, but the only pictures are in my mind. Sigh.

We went out to see Holli's horse, boarded with a friend of hers south of town. While we were standing there, the ground began to shake. My first thought was "so they DO still have those Minuteman silos armed and ready!" The rumble built, seemed to be getting closer and over the horizon comes one of these, right over our heads. The horses seemed used to it, I don't think I would ever be. (I failed to appreciate how close we were to Ellsworth Airforce Base.)

Okay, y'all. I'd like to see a half dozen of you at this event. I'm sort of the odd man with Blue Ridge Pens, not a regular attendee being an hour away from their Roanoke group, so some present or future friends and blog readers in the audience at Chateau Morrisette on Friday night would be a real pleasure. There are probably some rooms at Woodbury Inn. T'would make a great week-end getaway.

Friday Shorts April 20

~ Find an image of a giant posted over at Nameless Creek this morning

~ Serving Suggestion: think about how you might use ScrapBlog. It is immensely easy to use, free, fast and rather attractive, even in its early stages. Here's my early sandbox scribble. Have a civic event to tell about or report? a church gathering, vacation, event or project coming up or past that would lend itself to a visual slide show? Look for this program to really take off. But don't quit your day job.

~ With all the very unpleasant reportage at WVTF this week, there was some question if there would be time for the usual Friday essays. Mine (the piece you've read here, or some version of it, about children and nature) will air this morning, and can be heard online from the WVTF NEWS web page.

~ Maybe, just maybe, I've gotten past a hurdle in the purported and future "color images book" project. First, I'll likely go with the 8.5" x 8.5" format for a number of reasons. And second, after going all around the world the past few days looking for the combination of inexpensive printing AND wholesale distribution, I've settled on expensive printing and wholesale distribution. That leaves me with Lightning Source (as is Slow Road Home at this point) for printing. The book's retail price will have to be significantly higher than if I had it printed in China, but at least I won't be stuck with 900 "inexpensive" books in the ANNex. I can produce the proof and be done and ready for supplying demand for less than $200, and if it doesn't fly, I'm only out my time and effort--which lies mostly ahead of me.

~ And I spoke in the Earth Day piece yesterday about leaving a smaller environmental footprint. Would you be willing to go THIS FAR? a year without toilet paper? Yikes!

Fragments / Friday the 13th

This isn't much of a picture--the first, I thought, of what would become a series of images of the "million points of light" that the blooming spicebush offer along Nameless Creek. The several hard freezes of the past week put an end to those ideas, and it looks like this is the only reminder I'll have of the short-lived life of Lindera benzoin in the spring of 2007.

BAMA BOUND ~ I just returned from a few days in the Heart of Dixie--a pleasant trip for this time of year, as 'bama was experiencing the same return to coolness that we were here in southwest Virginia, though to a much lesser degree. And the pollen season had mostly passed by the time I arrived last Sunday to spend some time in my home town with my mom. Wednesday afternoon, tornado sirens woke us from an afternoon nap--one went north of Birmingham towards Gadsden, another south towards Alex City. That weather feature I don't miss about Alabama.

BOOKS on TAPE ~ Well on CD, actually. A very thoughtful patient made a special trip back to the clinic last Thursday to bring me BLINK: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. This was the first audiobook I've ever listened to, and it was great--both the book and the concept. I wonder if Gladwell's first book, TIPPING POINT, is available in the same format?

BOOKS in BAMA ~ While back in Birmingham for my birthday visit with mom, I spoke to the seniors group at her church--about a hundred folks--for a luncheon meeting. This might have been most pressure I've been under to do well--in my little dog and pony show before folks mom would see week after week. But seeing as how the book tied back to B'ham, it was easy to find a few pieces from Slow Road Home that "worked" for this setting. The nice man, after reading my bio, introduced me as "Floyd First." I thought that might make a nice local bumper sticker. I hated to correct him.

STEP-IT-UP ~ Don't forget on April 14 to join in for Step It Up Day 2007 in an event near you. Are you satisfied with the pace of politically-expedient change proposed for America's rollback on CO2 emissions? I'm not. Cut Carbon by 80% by 2050 is the more aggressive timetable proposed by this movement. Make your voice heard on this issue, even as we feel our way toward making this massive change in business-as-usual. These are critical times, folks.

Friday Shorts: April 5

Hmmm. More like Friday Long Woolies. Spring was nice. Remember?

:: First, thanks to Blue Mt Mamma for including two Floydians in her "Thinking Blogger" Awards post this week, after herself being tapped thusly, twicely.

:: Google has made custom map-labeling easy for the common man (or wo- of the same species.) Here's a quick start on a Floyd County map. Come back for updates over the coming weeks. (Serving suggestion: Click HYBRID to show the terrain as well as roads and featured locations.)

:: Did you know that grapes and raisins could be poisonous for dogs? We've been paying more attention to what we feed Tsuga lately, knowing that people foods are not necessarily the best dog foods (though Tsuga protests loudly when I say this.) Last night we fed Tsuga the better part of a whole chicken. Partly because of the scare with processed dog foods. Partly because she thought I would and I thought she would move it from the counter (where it was defrosting for last night's dinner) and the fridge. Ooops.

:: Friends of the BLue Ridge Parkway is sponsoring a viewshed tree planting event near Roanoke, Saturday, April 14 (Step it UP DAY). I'm going to do my best to be there for at least a while. You come, too!

:: Radio Readers: If there are any of you who know visually impaired in the New and Roanoke Valleys of Virginia, let them know they can listen to the author reading Slow Road Home on their special WVTF receiver starting (last official word was) on April 10.

Notations: Late March '07

~ I confess I have several vanity searches set up on Google News to notify me of entries to Fragments, Slow Road, etc. There are more misses than hits with this alarm system, but sometimes in this way, I get a heads-up notice of some good news. Such was the case yesterday when Gary Boyd's very nice review (which he added at Amazon.com, to my delight) came to my attention. Now, I'm bringing it to yours. You can read it over at Nameless Creek. I do so much appreciate his kind words, and now to keep the balance, we need another at Barnes and Noble. Hint.

~ We've a new rhythm going here as the days warm: Tsuga eats walnuts, husk and all, late each afternoon. He rouses the whole house with his heaves in the wee hours and chucks-up out the back door. Then, just after breakfast, he grazes along the edge of the driveway for long stems of grass which he clumsily chews in his meat-shredding (nut crushing) teeth. Binge-purge. Is there a doctor in the house? Meanwhile, Tsuga's oddities are up for all to see, over at Floydvirginia.com--another photoessay some of you have seen/read before.

~ If you are at all interested in what is happening (or about to happen) along the 469-mile length of the nation's longest (and most heavily visited) national park, check out the online eNEWSLETTER of the Friends of the Parkway. I'm hoping to have something to contribute here each month, and would be appreciative if any readers have Parkway-relevant links, comments or resources you'd be willing to share. I'd be happy to compile them for this purpose.

~ It seemed like a bit of software that was meant to be. After using OneNote since I started teaching at Radford back in the summer of 2004, for the first time, I was going to have to pay to upgrade (to OneNote 2007) or stop using it. Doh. The March 31 deadline approached. I waffled. Then, in quick succession, I got three $25 coupons from Amazon. And then learned Amazon carried the upgrade for $79. I have my registered copy now, for $4. Sometimes, life is like a box of choc'lates. Ya never... never mind.

Friday SHoRTs: March 15

* What is your Personal Brand, and how is it changing, growing, evolving. Read more on Nameless Creek.

* There are new additions (to muddy the waters still further) in the Parkway Notecards Gallery. I'll try to make a decision for WHICH FIVE CARDS no later than Monday morning. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts. Input so far has been helpful, if not abundant.

* Related matter: You're a potential note card customer. You find two similar products of photographic cards, similar in every way except this: SET ONE is sealed; there may be a card somewhere that shows what's in the package, but you can't look at each of the five different views you might be paying for. SET TWO is also in a clear plastic envelope, but it is open at the top, and cards can be removed and easily reinserted. Which of these two sets of cards is most appealing to you? I ask this having obtained a heat sealer this week. To seal or not to seal (the tops)--THAT is the question. Thots?

* Thanks for feedback on the pdf document viewed at Scribd. Take a look at some of the recently-submitted files. Interesting. AND for the REAL FFF fans, here's an early, early beginning to what might become the words-and-images book that might be called Field Notes from Nameless Creek. For best viewing, click the VIEW FULL SCREEN button to the right on the Scribd display page after clicking the link to the file. Better yet, download in pdf from the Scribd sidebar.

* I was delighted yesterday at the Roanoke Biz2biz meeting to get to meet some local bloggers whose names were familiar but I'd never had a chance to shake their hands. Among other first meetings, I was glad to get to tell Andrew Cohill, CEO of DesignNine about his role (as founder of the Blacksburg Electronic Village, bev.net) in bringing us back to Southwest Virginia with the idea to live isolated while connected to the larger world. I as also able to tell him about my experiences in self-publishing, as he is looking to move in that direction in the near future.

* Been wondering if your Money Market shares have tanked with the recent "readjustment"? Take a look at Google Finance (fairly new, at least to me) for some nice interactive graphs that are intuitive to operate and let you custom-view the period over which you'd like to track changes in your investments.

* Take a look at Just Another Day in Roanoke at roanoke-found.com. Blogger Keith Clinton spoke at the meeting yesterday, and is active in bringing the different segments of the Roanoke blogging community together and keeping important current events (political, news, social) before the smaller clusters of bloggers in each quadrant of the city.

Noise, Nuts, and Notes

Our Dog, the Chimera ~ Half canine, half squirrel. It's not that Tsuga is underfed or lacks variety in his diet. Sometimes he just feels like a nut. He has taken a liking to walnuts, and we can hear him crushing them from across the creek. Then, in the middle of the night, we see them again. Can you imagine how hard it must be to digest a walnut shell? Do you know that ground walnut shells are used as a sand-blasting abrasive? Small wonder then that the dog has problems digesting them. Even the squirrels are smart enough not to eat the shells.

Blogger event ~ Tomorrow I'll be attending a blogger event in Roanoke sponsored by Roanoke biz2biz.com; I expect it will be a pretty well covered event, and there will most likely be live podcasting and moblogging from WDBJ where the event will be held. I didn't know until I had or he signed up at one of the speakers will be area blogger, Sean Pecore, from nearby Boones Mill. My understanding is the program is primarily to facilitate the use of blogs for business communications and marketing, and so I expect to learn a few things and also meet some new friends and fellow bloggers.

Note cards ~ Thanks to the several folks who left suggestions about the note card choices. I had already pretty much decided that the rock church didn't fit as well as some of the others. I'll be going back through and looking for another couple of choices before I finally decide on which five to include. It will probably be at least three weeks before I'll have any cards available, but I'll let you know.

Noise and smell of city ~ The smell of clean air and the sound of nothing but nature -- these are things that I am too often indifferent to until I experienced their opposites, which I remembered this morning can be found at the Roanoke Airport. Stepping out of the car to help Ann with their bags made me want to get back to Goose Creek as quickly as possible. Exhaust fumes and sirens stand out in such sharp and unpleasant contrast to the pleasantries of home. I know the wife will be glad to return to the ordinaries that we take for granted.

Scattered. But GOOD Scattered

Yikes! My desk suffers from a bad case of the piles. Somewhere underneath Appalachian Voice, NRDC newsletter, Today in PT, Hindman Summer Brochure, assorted bills and solicitations et cetera is the Phoenix Hardwoods oak surface of a clean slate, not seen in some weeks. And this, in spite of my Getting to Done attempts (even incorporating GTD into Gmail. Tried it?)

Front burner: getting ready for Community College book talk Thursday (that's just tomorrow!). I think I'm okay for baggage--carton of books, change purse, bookmarks, laptop slide show for the pre- and post-meeting perusal. What I don't have together is my 30-40 minute talk. On the one hand, there is SO MUCH that will spring from the audience--old friends and neighbors we haven't seen in decades--that I want to stay unscripted so the conversation can go where the energy of the moment dictates. On the other hand, because of the level of potential distraction, I need some notes to guide me and not let me wander down any rabbit hole that comes along. There is a certain fear in operating according to a very loose script, but that seems to have worked out okay in the past. Still, I'm a little bit anxious. But good ANXIOUS.

Some of you read this in rough form a few weeks back. I massaged it some, and turned it into an essay: Nose for Winter. It will air live on WVTF this Friday. You can listen online now. The intro goes like this:

Anyone who walks Virginia's fields and forests in winter might easily forget they even have a sense of smell. The olfactory world of the cold months can seem a trackless desert for the nose. But WVTF essayist Fred First says if you know where to look, you can find ways to use your sense of smell even on the coldest winter day.

If I'd finished the article, I'd most definitely have something to say about Richard Louv's Orion essay, Leave No Child Inside. I highly recommend this topic for your consideration and for discussion here next week. I think this is a crucial issue, and one to which I can, perhaps, contribute--with my writing, photography and general concerns for esthetic and biological awareness, especially among the nation's cloistered and apathetic young people. An excerpt to lure you over to the article:

We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature—if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm—they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow. They recall those "places of initiation," in the words of naturalist Bob Pyle, where they may have first sensed with awe and wonder the largeness of the world seen and unseen. When people share these stories, their cultural, political, and religious walls come tumbling down.

Over on Nameless Creek today: Abby asks Dumpa a nature question.

I could go on, but I know very few are left reading this far down a blog screen. Lost most shortly after YIKES! Does anybody know if there is an "extended reading" function (to hide most of longish posts) that can be added to blogger like used to exist for Moveable Type? Would be nice. More as it happens...

Monday, Monday

We picked up a Mommas and Papas CD last week, so today's potpourri collection title is a natural. Man, that Momma Cass had a sweet voice. Do I remember correctly that she died by choking on food in a restaurant? (Update: not so. She died of a heart condition.)

(:) The extra pair of glasses that Ann insisted I get will be ready today. The optometrist we go to has an office at the Pine Tavern. Park in front. Walk in. No wait. Walk out with disposable dark glasses and pupils from Night of the Living Dead. So pleasantly small-town.

(:) I. MUST. Do it! Our taxes are so simple, but even so, I hate sorting out interest income, W2s, charitable deductions and such. And my Goose Creek Press stuff this year actually is sort of involved--at least to me. Our accountant (home town boy, Allan Thompson) sent us one of those multi-page forms to put everything down on. I didn't do it. That's some of the aggravation I pay him for. I'll ask forgiveness rather than permission to omit this niggling bookkeeping step.

(:) I've benefitted from some sorting-out as a result of the interchange in comments and emails over the past few days. I think Rob Paterson understands; and Andy; and academic writer friend Tom, who is also sort of "between projects" and knows the feeling of unfulfilled drive to move ahead in the absence of clear focus or direction. There was never any hint of "don't blog"...only what, where, when, and a periodic need to understand why. All those answers are not yet in, but you've been a help. Thanks.

(:) OH! The main reason I'm going to town today is...no, wait a minute. That's a post in its own right. Stay tuned later this week. Maybe next. It's a GOOD thing!

(:) And, almost finally, if you live in this part of the country, pick up a Winter 2007 copy of Appalachian Voice (free news magazine available at libraries, grocery stores, and such.) On page 20, Gene Hyde (Radford University Appalachian Collection Librarian) offers a kind review of Slow Road Home. I've put a copy up on the book website if you're interested in taking a peek.

(:) This week in the book world: sending my first copy of SRH to France. And Thursday evening, a very wonderful opportunity to speak to a "home town" audience back in Wytheville, an hour's drive west, where we spent twelve years and the setting for quite a few of the vignettes in the book. (Scroll down the sidebar for time and place.)

Better Days for the Blue Ridge

* I started to call this little cluster of paragraphs SUNDAY SHORTS but the very idea made me go looking for my long-johns.

* I see Yak-Tracks ("Walk, Jog or Run on ice") showing up over in the ads strip in the side bar (the recent posts referening to frozen water has drawn a disproportionate number of ad-links to that topic). These shoe and boot friction grippers are highly recommended. We discovered them after the Ice Storm of 2006, and both have a pair and won't leave home without them! Take a look.

* Speaking of ads sidebar, I'm hoping to reach the $100 mark soon--maybe today!--and so many thanks for your interest, not always because these commercial pointers are as context-relevant as I might have hoped. The relationship between clicked links and income-per-click is bewildering (everywhere for me from two cents to almost two dollar a click) but this article--Making Sense of Contextual Advertizing-- helps me understand a little better.

* I've recently discovered a FireFox extension that will serve me well--maybe it will help you as well if you want a streamlined way to upload images to your gallery. It's called FotoFox and it will help me get much more value out of my SmugMug account. This morning's picture, you might notice, is uploaded there.

* If you've never used a WIKI or had any idea that you needed to, give pbwiki a look. I'm using this very easily edited webpage utility for the book's website. Recently, the free basic service has gained a WYSIWYG interface that makes the process very easy. You may be one of the ten folks to whom I shamelessly sent a pbwiki solicitation as a way to double my image storage space there. Apologies, but if you can't abuse friends, who CAN you abuse?

* Good news -- bad news. Slow Road Home's Amazon.com page has the good news regarding the book: "Only 2 left in stock--order soon (more on the way)." Yes, some books are selling via direct order, but not many yet--a total of nine, last time I checked. I'm disappointed that the book's only had one review at Amazon after being on the site for more than six weeks now. I'm expecting book-related events to increase soon. There is a review of the book to "hit the streets" soon (circulation 75,000) and I hope that piques renewed interest. More about that soon.

* Do stop over at Nameless Creek if you haven't already. I'll be pondering how to use that "overflow" blog in the coming weeks, and open to your suggestions. Read the sad news from this week: The Day the Music Died.

Friday Shorts

* Coldest day of the year so far, but a dry cold, and though I will have to start warming up the car at 7 to get to work by 8, I think I'll get there just fine. I left the house yesterday in a blizzard, gambling that it was just a brief, intense snow shower. Five minutes later, I was driving in sunshine under a cobalt blue sky.

* I have been approved for Google AdSense, and still undecided what to do. Would be nice to recoup at least the cost of the monthly DSL by some (hopefully tasteful and unobtrusive) ads on the periphery of the blog page. I've resisted going this route now for almost five years (anniversary of FFF actually in March) and can cancel out after a few months if it isn't an acceptable fit. This, just in the way letting you know the blog may change in subtle ways soon. Or not. We'll see.

* Hey man, why don't we get wasted and do an interpretive dance of protein synthesis? Maybe only a biologist would get such a kick from this YouTube presentation of a noble laureate in a tighty whitey dress shirt and thin seventies-type tie narrate as several hundred UCDavis college students play the role of messenger RNA, ribosomes and such. What a hoot (at least for me.)

* And here are two images that I found worth a look: a bike "eaten" by a tree (thanks Pablo) and something in our child rearing years I neglected to ever do with duct tape.

* The image above--which has absolutely nothing to do with any of the above topics--was taken a few days ago from the logging road that winds through the steep immature pine forest behind the house. Now this would be a great place to use that panorama function with the camera. And if this isn't done in the near future, there will be no view from back there. The pines are quickly filling in the vistas, as I describe in Slow Road Home in the piece called "Succession".

Now, I better go put on my Friday shorts (and don't forget the pants!) and get to work.

Friday Fragments

Yes, this is the same old apple tree that appeared a few days ago in a more artsy black and white impression. The lichens that decorate its dying branches give it a kind of surreal luminance and false life.

* We both had meetings last night. We didn't go. Within ten minutes, the walkway and the footbridge over the branch iced over about 7:00, and our decision to stay home from our 7:30 meetings in Floyd and Elliston was confirmed: they can meet without us. This morning, temps have risen and the threat of black ice is not zero but it is much lower than I'd feared. Ah yes, this is what winter travel feels like. I can't say I'm sorry it waited to visit until mid-January this year.

* I feel like I've recovered from a chronic illness. First, every time I'd close an Explorer (XP) window, MSIE7 would pop up. It was maddening. In the end, I disabled tabs in that browser, and that problem disappeared. Then (for the past two weeks) about once a minute, it was if I'd hit Alt-Tab, and in the middle of a browser session, the Excel spreadsheet I had been working on would pop up, then the Word document, then back to a different Firefox tab. It seemed possibly related to the browser, so I uninstalled FF 1.5, installed FF 2.0, and I have my computer back from the hijackers! (Sigh: the Tiny Url extension doesn't work in FF2.)

* With the above-mentioned problems, it made little difference to me that Citizens Internet had doubled the speed of our DSL (for the same price) on January 1. With my program switching problems and general sluggishness that went with it, my new 1.5Mbps connection made little difference. Now, we be jammin'!

* Okay. Excuse me but I need to cut this short. The dog has requested that I stop dawdling and finish the last few bites of cereal. (He can tell and only jumps up when the bowl makes sounds of a certain frequency as it approaches emptiness.) He never expects Ann's cereal bowl, but the spoonful of milk and single tiny fruit in my bowl seems to be his "raisin d'etre" (sic). So I shouldn't keep him waiting.

Those Look Lyke Cumftubble Shoes

Granted, I didn't know where I was going yesterday afternoon. Originally, the meeting was scheduled for the Winston Link Museum, but nobody there knew anything about it. A phone call found out that the writers' meeting had been rescheduled for the art museum three quarters of a mile away, in the center of downtown Roanoke. As problematic as parking would be, I'd walk, thank you.

But no, actually it was not at the art museum but around the corner another few blocks at the Center on Church. And so I paid the penalty of being a half hour late, and only after the meeting was over, as I began to walk the mile and a half back to the car, did I realize I also had paid the penalty that a country boy pays when he walks fast on city streets and sidewalks in his prissy dress shoes--fine for standing about but not so good on pavement.

My shins were so sore after the meeting that I had to walk on my heels all the way back to the car. And yes, they are even more sore this morning. Call me R2D2.

On my way home from Roanoke, I stopped by to see an elderly gentleman I had learned about from a local minister at a party. The man's wife of almost 70 years and died recently, and the minister, knowing that I was interested in local stories, described this gentleman is being a master storyteller and in some considerable need of company just now. My intention was just to stop by and introduce myself to him, bedridden and living with relatives at the foot of the mountain.

Instead, I spent almost an hour there--only maybe 15 minutes of that with my recorder on, with his permission of course. I haven't reviewed it yet. I'd like to think I would go back and hear much more of what he has to tell about life in Floyd County in the 30s and 40s. I at least need to get what I have onto the hard drive today and then send it on a CD to his family, who have never been able to get this man's life to paper or other permanent recording. Pity, the loss when these old treasures are gone.

By the time I got home it was already dark. My camera and lens had come (I was almost too exhausted to care) but only be after the sun comes up this morning will I be able to do anything to test the combo, now that the batteries are charged and everything is ready to go. The D200 sure feels good in the hand!

I have waded into an online users guide for the camera that is quite excellent, making recommendations about some of the custom settings and explaining some of the more arcane aspects of this extensively--tweakable camera.

It is a little unsettling to be near the bottom of the learning curve again, after the D70 had become so familiar. But it's a little exciting, too. And I'm up to my hip waders in taking notes, so apologies for this blah blah post. Maybe I can get an image up later today--from the new camera-lens combo, of course!

Wimpy Winter

No, this isn't from THIS so-called winter. We did get a skiff of snow yesterday, and there might be a trace of white this morning when the sun comes up. But so far, even though we're 200% of normal moisture for the year, it hasn't been in the form of ice or snow this time 'round. I was just wandering through my image archives (wondering how to make room on the hard drive for larger images to come) and liked this one.

Air Time
Thanks to Wilma Synder for reviewing Slow Road in her regular About Books segment on Wytheville Radio Station WXBX this Thursday. You can read her short review here.

DigiTutor
If you have a Nikon camera (which the movie narrator pronounces Knee-Cone, I suppose, in the more Japanese-correct way) you'll want to stop by and watch the tutorial that may introduce you to features of your camera you've forgotten about or never really understood. Their Digitutor (after you get past the name that conjures up all sorts of images for me) is really quite helpful for newbies like I will be to the D200, which by the way, arrives TODAY!

XFiles
Did you hear about this November (but only recently widely public) UFO sighting at Chicago's O'Hare airport? This BlogCritics writer wonders what gives with the failure to produce definitive answers, or to even ask the questions.

Print As Needed
My choice (thanks, Bob) to go with digital printing as my option for future SRH needs has given me the advantage of being able to have books available when needed without depleting my business bank account. So, I've managed to work on that outcome instead by ordering the camera and lens and letting the photography take center-stage, outlay-wise. Here's a good overview of the economics of Print on Demand for any of you considering getting your book between covers.

Self-cleaning underwear?
Knew a guy in college who, instead of being bothered by washing his skivvies, simply gave them a spritz of Lysol every week or so. This clip is for him:

"Self-cleaning fabrics could revolutionize the sport apparel industry. The technology, created by scientists working for the U.S. Air Force, has already been used to create t-shirts and underwear that can be worn hygenically for weeks without washing.

The new technology attaches nanoparticles to clothing fibers using microwaves. Then, chemicals that can repel water, oil and bacteria are directly bound to the nanoparticles. These two elements combine to create a protective coating on the fibers of the material.

This coating both kills bacteria, and forces liquids to bead and run off."

And So It Goes

"Ann, you should see some of the great suggestions Fragments readers are offering for the lead-in and byline fade-out for the radio essay" I told her yesterday morning.

"Like what?" she wanted to know.

"Well, like Stranger on the Shore. It's such a haunting..."

"No! That comes from my brother's era, not ours. I don't want to be dated any older than I already am!" And so the search took on a new twist, with acceptable tunes only within a narrow window of time (not yet negotiated) though I argued (if she would just read the piece again) that the essay was about "the times" both before and after we graduated from high school, so that the exact year was less important than the emotional weight the music would lend to the piece. Venus. Mars. In separate orbits of course.

But then later in the day, it no longer mattered. An email from the radio station said the piece (which I figured was destined to air sometime in the spring) would be up on Dec 22 (this Friday!) and due to time constraints, they had to select something instrumental and get it uploaded and done.

And so, as you can hear, the piece ends with some music that is pleasant enough, but lends nothing to the memory of the times. I'm sorry about that. But it was fun "producing" this piece with your great suggestions. Heck. I may just have to download the radio file and splice in my own intro--WITH musical bookends: intro maybe the instrumental organ leadin to Whiter Shade of Pale; fade out: last bars of Floyd Cramer's Last Date. Hmmm....

Meanwhile, if you're interested, catch the little reunion tale real-time broadcast on WVTF this Friday morning, or listen to the unreal-time mp3 file here. The Way We Were / An Essay by Fred First

This was fun. Thanks, all.

Musical Bookends Needed!

Okay, Fragmented Few, here's an opportunity to pool your collective nostalgia and set the musical score.

The situation: on Saturday at the Roanoke NPR station, I recorded a shortened version of the Reunion piece posted here a while back. Dutchie at WVTF wants me to suggest an appropriate musical introduction and trailer for the piece. It needs to be instrumental because the spoken intro and byline will have to be done over top of it.

Of course, given the nature of the little essay, it should be an "oldie" from the sixties--a melody, I think, that is more emotionally evocative than rhythmatic; and preferrably one whose title has to do with love lost or found.

I have one such song in mind, but won't bias you by telling yet. I'd be interested in hearing your ideas, you boomers out there. Send those cards and letters in. The winning submission gets a free pack of Fragments Notecards. Drawing ends at midnight, Friday, December 22.

Seasonal Chores: the Musical Score

Do this:

Go to Pandora.com

Create a new station and type in The First Noel.

Enjoy.

Sand in the Gears

Technology. Bah! Humbug. It's down a few notches on my list of the Wonders of our Age. Sometimes I wonder how things would be without so much of it intruding into our dreams and waking hours. But then, I've just been dealing too much lately with computer keyboards and not enough with family and friends. Maybe that is about to come to an end. I'll be with folks for the bulk of today, much of tomorrow, and away from blogger issues, upgrade decisions and the fine print of digital paperwork. I bet I'll wake up in a more technophilic state of mind tomorrow.

BlahBlahBlogger
Blogger is unreliable. Several times in the past two weeks, it won't let me post (like yesterday for instance.) Then after I give up and am away, mysteriously, it posts. Something about an sFTP socket error.

Failing Memory
I probably should upgrade and add another gig of RAM to bring my 3.5 year old desktop up to 2 GB. On such an old machine, does that make sense? And with four 256Mb chips in the four slots, I'd have to replace them all with 512MB chips to get to two gig--more than $200 upgrade. I've lived this long with barely enough memory to run Photoshop, Word, Excel and InDesign at the same time--sluggishly. Maybe I should just make do.

Did I say that?
The speech-to-text software (Naturally Speaking) is a mixed blessing. I can't use it in the mornings when I do a good bit of my writing because Ann is either here talking or here asleep. It has done some strange things on my desktop--like hanging the system during use, deleting entire email messages suddenly, as if I said "the dog ate my lunch" which means "delete this document immediately!" On the laptop, it is helping with the physical therapy paperwork, now that I've finally trained it to recognize that I'm saying PARASPINALS and not PAIR OF SPINE EELS. And so on.

BookNotes
Thanks to Fragments friend, reader-editor Bob, for helping me find my way forward into what happens next with the life of Slow Road Home. I'm dipping into the last of the offset-printed books (about 160 left from the first shipment of 1145) and need to move on. Here's what I've decided to do, with advice of those who have a better idea of how these things work than I do: Have the book digitally printed. Call it a second edition rather than merely a revision (it has a full TOC and I made maybe 100 small changes and a dozen corrections). Give it a new ISBN number (I purchased a bundle of 10 and only used the one for SRH 1st ed so far). Get a Library of Congress catalog number for the book (a PCN that is the self--published book version of the LCC#). This process will pass the book back through Books in Print and help it "start over" with the potential of distribution through Ingrams to those places that wouldn't bother ordering it from my back room here on Goose Creek. So all that is in place, just awaiting a few final details.

Christmas Giftpack from Goose Creek
Thanks to all who have availed themselves of the one-book plus notecard set offer for $25. I packed one up last night, and stopped for a minute to really appreciate how amazing that really was. Last year this month, I told people (and myself) I was finally going to complete the book. I honestly didn't know if I would or could do it. Then it was done. Then hundreds of them came up our drive on a truck. Then I wondered if I'd still have 900 in the Annex come Christmas. The notecards came only a week ago--at Ann's insistence, and now I've done another thing I said I was going to do "some day" but never really believed myself. And what a wonderful role you readers, friends, editors, writers, bloggers and general characters, online and local, have played in all of this. And that is the most wonderful part--to be able to share these times from this place with you, in words and pixels.

And coming full circle, it certainly wouldn't have happened this way without the marvelous technologies that we rely on. When they work, they are the most amazing tools. Now, let's see if the software will hark up a hairball when I try to post this at 6:45 on Saturday morning...

HWA

Here's what the HWA (Hemlock Wooly Adelgid) is doing to our forest. Have you noticed?

Mixed Nuts

NOAA Wx Radio's Greatest Hits

We call him Jose because he seems to have a south-of-the-border ESL quality to his robot speech as he reads the weather synopsis, forecast or current readings of conditions around the area. He came out with a good one yesterday. Of course he just reads what the statisticians put before him:

November 19, 2006. Blacksburg Virginia set a record for snowfall amount of TRACE which exceeds the former snowfall record for this date of ZERO recorded in 2002.

Words Fit to Print

Drove to Wytheville yesterday to make final arrangements for the notecards. They are spot-on and will be ready for me to pick up on Friday, December 1. But the best part of the trip was the guided tour of the facility at Wordsprint, owned and operated by Bill Gilmer. We knew Bill when he moved to Wytheville in the mid-eighties, a young man with the purpose to live away from town, and write--short stories. He took in typing by the page because it was something he did well. He now has both floors of the old Leggetts building on main street, twenty employees, and a thriving regional print and mail business. I'm pleased with what he's produced for me, and more than that, with what he has produced for himself and the community by persistence, character and hard work.

Words Fit to Finesse

Two words were added to the Fragmented Fred lexicon at the writers workshop in Tennessee a few weeks back. I'll share: 1) efreet (or afrit) -- an evil spirit, especially in Arab mythology. It came up in a bit of science fiction poetry that was read, and everybody went HUH? and 2) ekphrasis, which poets are more likely to know, perhaps, than other flavors of writers. And I guess it deserves more, because without knowing it, it is this kind of one art leading to or enhanced by another that is inherent in my "images in words and pixels" relationship between photography and the written word. Here's the fuller description of what the word means:

Ecphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one art tries to relate to another art by defining and describing the essence and form of that original art, and in doing so, "speak to you" through its illuminative liveliness. A descriptive work of prose or one of poetry, a film, or even a photograph may thus highlight through its rhetorical vividness what is happening, or what is shown in, say, any of the visual arts, and in doing so, may enhance the original art and so take on a life of its own through its brilliant description. The kinds of art described in this way may include painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, etc.

And a third word often used, never dissected by me until someone did so in church a couple of weeks ago. The word is SARCASM, and I claim it reluctantly as a perverse gift of mine, pulled out when threatened, wounded or frustrated, usually with family. And I should have picked up on the word root long ago; it is well-known in medical terminology (e.g. sarcoplasm). It is in the word sarcophagus. In the word sarcasm, too, sarc- means flesh. When we use sarcasm in our language, it causes the hearer to bite the flesh of their lip in pain, is the original meaning. I'll remember this, next time my words risk wounding another.