I know in the past I’ve been a little upset, maybe even a little OCD/freaky about your decision to discontinue Extra Large Ruled Cahiers. To add insult to injury this year you introduced two new colors – blood red and navy – in addition to your regular black and cardboard cahiers. Again, without an XL Ruled Cahier in the lineup. I didn’t whine, though, until I discovered you’d also discontinued the XL Ruled Soft Cover books.
Sweet Jesus.
To tell you the truth, I’ve been in mourning and unable to gather enough strength even to complain about it here. Instead, I did the next worst thing and gave up, started cruising other sites for “almost” notebooks. I don’t mean to disparage all those Rhodia people out there, but that paper is white. Doesn’t matter how smooth or fountain-pen friendly it is, it’s blinding.
So imagine my delight today when this appeared in my email.
It’s not a full-blown ruled cahier resurrection, but close enough for me. I can exhale now and scribble like a madwoman in the last twenty pages of my old XL Ruled Soft Cover. There will be more! And I won’t have to figure exchange rates to get one of the last five on the planet.
So thank you, Moleskine. You’ve saved my brand-loyalty and my sunny disposition.
I love our local newspaper. Not that I would consult The Log Cabin Democrat for any national or global news, but that was never this newspaper’s purpose. This journalistic wonder was the heartbeat of our community for over a hundred years before Kris Allen, and I hope it weathers another hundred. Maybe only the conglomerated, big-city newspapers will die out. Maybe the small-town rags will outlive us all.
Why? The Police Beat. There’s nothing like it. I’ll give you a taste from today’s shock and awe. These are numbered in the paper. I have no idea why.
4. Theft of property at 3900 block of [deleted by me]. A woman called police to say she’d accidentally left her purse at Walmart and someone had stolen it before she could get back to claim it. In the purse were keys, credit cards and a Kel-Tec .380 handgun.
What? Are other women in the checkout line pushing buggies and packing heat? Apparently so. I’m a complete gun nerd, so I had to look up this particular weapon. The fine people at Kel-Tek advertise this as “…mainly intended for plainclothes police officers as a secondary weapon, or for concealed carry by licensed citizens. The small grip size and light trigger pull make the P-3AT ideal for female shooters.” At Wal-Mart. They left that part out.
That’s not the day’s favorite from the police blotter, though. This one is.
6. Assault at 500 block [deleted by me]. A woman answered a knock on her door Friday morning to encounter a heavyset white female wearing a brown hat and scarf and “big dark glasses” spraying her in the face with what seemed to be hairspray and beating her with what is described in the report as “a plastic dump truck.” After the attack the assailant fled in “a black, foreign-type passenger car,” according to the report.
This is why the South produces so many good writers. It’s not that we’re all literarily gifted, it’s because the local newspapers sweetly dump these prizes right into our laps like birthday presents. We don’t have to make it up. The stuff of fiction happens all around us. There’s no such thing as writer’s block when there’s a good hairspray-and-plastic-dump truck incident to get us over the hump.
Was it Aquanet? Tonka? Did that unfortunate woman at Wal-Mart lose irreplaceable pictures of her grandbabies along with that Kel-Tek .380? These are questions a writer must answer.
So keep on plugging away, Log Cabin Democrat. Just to make sure you do, I’m re-upping my subscription. Sure, you’re free on the internet, but my loyalty to the Police Beat requires hard cash and a fresh year-long commitment.
In honor of JuSt WriMo (June Stuff Writing Month) and in anticipation of JulNoWriMo (July Novel Writing Month) I’ve decided to post some really terrible typewriter slams. Since both JuSt WriMo amd JulNoWriMo are thankfully loosey-goosey with their rules, I figure I can do just about anything I want.
What I want to do is type every single day to one of the prompts on my Easy Street site. The thing is, I have 548 writing prompts on there, and I’ve never used a single one. Ever. I think finding and posting them takes all the AHA! out of it for me. At any rate, each day during the month of June I’m going to hit the random prompt button and write whatever comes to mind, and I’m going to do it on old pieces of stationery. With a typewriter. Maybe I can shake off some of the academic dust that’s settled in my head, I don’t know.
At the very least, I can use up some accumulated paper as an excuse to buy more.
It’s that time of year again. I crave puttering and seedlings and faded pink canvas gloves and big straw hats. There’s nothing like the hot, green smell of tomato leaves after a storm, or the random geometry of climbing yard-long beans. I’m a Southern Grandmother and it’s my right to tend the garden.
But I don’t have one and it’s my own fault. I tried to simplify yard work by moving into a gardenless garden home where mysterious bands of young rogues sweep across the subdivision on riding mowers, slinging edgers and leaf blowers. Twice a week, the battalion tidies our postage-stamp yards. A plague of well-paid locusts. They do a good job, mind you, but a yard that can be manicured in half an hour is too small for a garden.
When I was a young mother with a strapping husband and big yard, I planted thick raised-bed gardens every summer. He fought the grass and bamboo, I nurtured seedlings, weeded, and staked. Later as a single mother, I turned to flowers and herbs. It was all I could manage in those busy years. Weekends when Em went to her father’s, I’d hit the plant stores. Putting rose bushes in the ground somehow helped the shock of childless weekends. It filled the empty places.
It occurs to me now I’ve unconsciously given myself less fertile ground to tend and maybe it’s a sign. The need to parent vegetables and blooms is still strong. But gardening is maternity and I suspect my own waning fertility has made choices without consulting me.
I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not ready.
So look out, Home Depot and Lowes. It’s Sunday and I plan to worship a little dirt. Grammy needs to plant even if it’s only a few tubs on a concrete patio.
Through the miracle of modern shopping (see video), my new Gateway laptop arrived yesterday. Oh, I could’ve shopped and cross-priced mercilessly, checking the latest product info in Consumer Reports and such, but I figure these things are only meant to last a few years anyway. That’s all I got out of the last one, right? In three more years I figure laptops will be small enough to wear as earrings and all the technology that arrived yesterday will be obsolete.
When we buy a new computer, we’re not purchasing longevity. It’s healthier to accept this and move on.
After seven hours setting this thing up, I thought it might be interesting to actually share the steps I go through to do something that sounds, on the surface, so achingly simple, but in reality is not. Besides, I cheated a little on the “How To” assignment by offering up an old post.
Step One: Open the Cow Box and pull out the sparkling new laptop, power cord, battery, and strange conglomeration of free programs so you can later make out your last will and testament while playing golf with Tiger Woods. Plug in the computer, install the battery, turn it on. Lovely. (Time, 5 min.)
Step Two: Get online. This is a no-brainer, especially for those of us with wireless systems. Just click on the little icon in the taskbar, find your wireless network, click to connect. Wait. You need the key (password) this time because the new laptop hasn’t been formally introduced to your wireless system. Put in what you think is the network key. Try seven or eight more. Rifle through your desk for that little piece of paper you know you wrote the key on last time. Aha! Wait – that’s the key you lost three years ago.
Go to your daughter’s computer, find Linksys and try to log on there to find the key. You don’t remember that password either, so you click around a bit on the Linksys site to find their phone number. Call Linksys. A helpful guy named Ron will put you on hold several times, make you crawl around underneath your daughter’s computer to get numbers off of things, then walk you through a password change that sounds a lot like writing a master’s thesis for Advanced DOS. This time you write the new key down on something important and carry the piece of paper like the Hope Diamond back to the new laptop. Enter the key and sign on. Voila! (Time, 45 min.)
Step Three: Time to download. Go get a cup of coffee first. Add a little Bailey’s. And then a touch more. You’ve done this before, so remember to keep your expectations low. Breathe deeply, then attend first to the volcanic eruption of insistent popup messages from your taskbar. Java, Norton, Windows, whatever – they all want to whisper in your new laptop’s ear and they want it done now. Click and sip. (Time, 15 min.)
Now install all the programs you really care about – Firefox, Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, Novell Groupwise (email at work), and such. There are others, nifty little things such as Poladriod and whatever looks interesting from the free programs that came in the Cow Box. Family Tree? You bet. Make a list of online downloads and stack up those cds. Start the first one and refill your coffee. Repeat. Click and sip. (Time, 2 hrs. 35 min.)
Step Four: Now it’s time to add the good stuff. If you’re lucky, shortly before your old laptop started to sing Taps you had the foresight to powersave all your precious documents and pictures to a reliable flash drive. If you’re unlucky, this step is replaced with hours and days of back and forth to friends, old work computers, and tearful, heavenward pleas. Bless your heart. Let’s assume you were lucky. The alternative is unthinkable.
Transfer everything from the flash drive into its proper place. I always begin with my saved Firefox bookmarks, move deliberately through Word documents, and end with pictures. This sounds easy, but in your panic to save all these precious files there was never any cleaning up. Fine. Just be sure to scan that flash drive for any piggybacking virii or maliciousness first. Then get a little brutal when transferring the squeaky-clean files over.
Did you save all those pictures – you know, the top of someone’s head with your crooked finger mysteriously in the lower left corner? Get rid of them now. Any of those document files need updating from Wordstar or worse? Oh dear. Think of those poor people on Dr. Phil who walk sideways through stacks of old newspapers and empty ketchup bottles, the ones hoarding thousands of old butter tubs and groaning closets bursting with Simplicity dress patterns from the 70s. Save yourself and clean out those files. (Time, 3 painful hrs. Maybe more.) Step Five: Time to hook up the printer. Maybe when you bought your new laptop you also sprang for a fancy new printer/scanner/fax machine. That’s how they get us with the one-two punch, especially when we’re panicky. If this is you, then no big deal. Follow the bouncing ball and install your shiny new printer.
There are those of us, however, who don’t always buy a new dryer just because the washing machine quit. My HP Photosmart works just fine, thank you, and I’m keeping it. The only problem is that the installation cd has dematerialized. Nothing a spanking new laptop shouldn’t be able to handle, though. Plug the printer to your new laptop and wait for them to make friends.
Except they don’t, do they? No, you’re redirected to a frightening website where nothing makes sense. Tech-speak and numbers. Pick up your printer/scanner/whatever and turn it upside down to find the numbers it wants in response. What exactly is a driver? Does it have anything to do with that Tiger Woods game you didn’t install? Doesn’t matter. Just click where you’re supposed to and download it. Eventually, your printer will be installed. How or why just isn’t important at this point. Remember – eye on the prize. (Time, 45 min.)
There you go. It only took a little over seven hours to set up the laptop and install all the goodies. You’re back in business now, so go email someone, write a blog post, cruise Ebay. You may be sick of the new laptop for a bit. Nothing like Steps 1-5 to take a little glamour out of your big-ticket purchase. You’ll feel better tomorrow. I promise
In the meantime pull out one of your old manual typewriters, roll in a sheet of paper, and leave the world behind. (Set up time, 20 seconds, tops.)
We have so many fallen to remember. Too many wars. We are all touched in some way by loss, and some of us are overwhelmed by the numbers. I know I am. But it is important that we remember.
Today is about finding a way to honor those memories. I didn’t and don’t personally know any of these women, but I’ll carry them with me all day and for more days than I know. I’ve read their stories now and I’ll return to them again and again because they are the little stones I’ve sewn in my pockets to keep me grounded.
This typecast brought to you on a 55 year-old Remington Quiet-Riter that may look exactly like a squatting river toad, but types like it’s dancing – even when the typist is an almost-two-year-old with a fascination for the zip and zing of tab, return, tab, return, tab, smash all the keys down, return.
Yes, Virginia, there is more typewriter music. Here’s a little bluesy moment for you thunkety-thunk typewriter fans and those who just love Janis. Perhaps there are a few of you out there who are both. Like to download a few songs? Click here and put The Typewriter Tapes on your Ipod. I’ll bet Janis never dreamed such a thing was possible.
Good Lord. I think I just resurrected my DJ voice.
Bless his heart, he won! I can hear the screaming and see the fireworks from my front porch, and I suspect it’ll go on for hours. Things are hopping here in Conway for damn sure.
Here’s the thing – 38 million votes last night from Arkansas alone. Have any of you ever been through Arkansas? We might have almost that many ticks here after a warm winter, but nothing close to that many people. We don’t vote for the ERA around here or much in a presidential election, but put one fairly cute, aww shucks Baptist boy on American Idol and stand back, brothers and sisters. Stand back.
I won’t pretend I followed any of this before tonight. I was too busy trying to find parking during finals week to make his on-campus concert and, well, American Idol comes on during Deadliest Catch. Sorry Kris.
It’s possible I’m the only person in Conway who doesn’t own a t-shirt with his name across it. Wait – the second person. My daughter still harbors a grudge over his free Stoby’s cheese dip for life, so there are two of us. She’s fairly put out over this and I’m sure she’ll have plenty to say about fame and fortune and belonging to the right congregation.
Soon, all the profs at UCA will start pouring over old gradebooks to see if he was once in their classes. I couldn’t tell you on a bet right now if he was in one of mine. Nothing against Kris at all, it’s just that you could walk into any class on any day at any hour and see about three or four just like him – good boys who smile and say “yes ma’am.” I love those students, and their numbers are legion around here.
I do wish him well. I know his mama is mighty proud, because I saw her. In that red dress. Weeping. I’m also sure that for the next few weeks we’ll hear about the power of prayer. Jesus will get most of the credit for a while, but that’s fine. Jesus doesn’t have free cheese dip for life.
It’s not a full-blown ruled cahier resurrection, but close enough for me. I can exhale now and scribble like a madwoman in the last twenty pages of my old XL Ruled Soft Cover. There will be more! And I won’t have to figure exchange rates to get one of the last five on the planet.
No Telling 