Greenville Keeping Edition Online

In case you’re curious, I’ve uploaded the full text of “Greenville: Where Longing Meets Loss” , the Keeping Edition, online at Woo Woo Teacup Publishing. You’ll find it under the Books link. The file has been uploaded as a pdf and what you’ll see there is what you’ll get for layout when purchasing the book. (It take a minute or so to load, so be patient. The first couple of pages are blank, so you’ll have to scroll in order to see text.)

Heartening Editing Session

I’ve had a heartening round of editing this morning. I picked up a story I wrote in 2004. It’s called “Family Enchantment” and was one of my early stabs at writing short stories. I’d always liked the premise of the story, but when I’d reread it, I’d cringe at the awkwardness of some of the writing and construction. I didn’t want to abandon this early effort completely and decided to do some editing this morning. Turns out, I’d already combed through a copy and had it marked up. As I went through reading both the original text and the edits, I found that I wanted to change the same things I had already made notes on. There were other things I wanted to change, too, so I opened the latest version I had of the story on my computer, version number 3, dated September 2005, and discovered I had already made the original edits, plus the new ones I had found but had apparently not noted.

I’m not sure it’s as strong a story as it could be, but I’m not inclined to fuss with it any longer. I’m okay with leaving it as an example of early work and moving on to something else.

If you’d like to read “Family Enchantment,” it’s posted under Other Writing on my website.

The Red Carpet

Continuing on with my description of last night’s activities …

After the fete at the Melrose American Legion (“We do cows“), Hubby and I and his college mates headed back to St. Cloud to The Red Carpet Nightclub. One of the college mates had suggested this form of entertainment because she knew one of the members of the band due to play at “The Carpet.” We arrived early, before we had to pay a cover charge, and found seats close to the stage.

Two bands played – Beautiful Trigger and Annex. Beautiful Trigger is a four-member hard rock band fronted by a woman named Carly V, who has a tremendous stage presence. I’m not sure how she maintains the energy to hop around stage and sing, yet she does both with great vigor. Hubby thought her vocal range wasn’t as wide as other singers, but this wasn’t an issue for me because I wasn’t sure the music actually warranted it. Carly’s on-stage persona is captivating and would translate well to a mass audience. The rest of the band members were solid performers, as well. At one point, Carly yielded the stage to them and they performed a rockin’ cover of a tune I recognized, but can’t, for the life of me, name. With all of the band members, I was struck by their stamina. They performed non-stop for an hour, barely taking a half a breath between songs.

The next band, Annex, which was the headliner, also kept a non-stop pace and delivered a high quality performance. By the time they took to the stage, more spectators were ready to hit the dance floor and it was packed in short order. Quite interesting to watch tipsy people attempting to dance. One blotto woman kept falling on the floor, only to be scraped up by the men around her. She toddled around for a bit, with a watchful bouncer on the edge of the stage keeping a close eye on her. Suddenly, she was close to the stage and fell face-first into one of the monitors on the front edge of it. WHAM! She went to the floor and tried to get up immediately, almost as though she didn’t know what had hit her. (Or, rather, what she had hit.) The bouncer was immediately at her side, offering his assistance to get her off the dance floor. The lead singer made a comment about her face-plant and how she was going to feel that in the morning. Crikey! I felt it when I saw it.

Hubby and I left The Red Carpet at 12:30 a.m. because we still had a drive ahead of us to get home. We said goodbye to his college mates, made a stop at the bathrooms, then headed out to the parking lot to our car. When we got there, Hubby grew concerned. His friends’ car was gone. It had been parked right next to ours, but now was nowhere to be seen. Worried that the car had been stolen, we headed back to The Carpet and he went in to find his friends. They were no longer there. We figured they had left while we were occupied in the bathrooms, hence the car wasn’t stolen. At least that’s what we hope went down.

We Do Cows

Hubby and I were out last night. We met up with 3 collegemates of his in St. Cloud, grabbed subs at Erbert & Gerbert’s for supper, then drove out to Melrose to listen to a band at the suggestion of one of the collegemates. As we entered Melrose, I was awakened from a doze by Hubby, who had burst out laughing upon seeing a billboard with the slogan, “We do cows.”

Really?

“We do cows?”

The double entendre was unmistakable. I hope it was also intentional, sort of. Not that I like to think about someone actually “doing cows,” but I was hoping the company behind the sign realized that its slogan could and would be interpreted in a randy way and was prepared for the ribbing.

Somehow, though, I think the owners of Stearns Veterinary Outlet Store get it, as they also have “We do horses” and “We do pets” as slogans and they have trademark symbols on each of them. It certainly takes guts to advertise a business this way, but the humor made us notice. It’s a slogan we’re not going to easily forget, which is exactly what a business needs.

WordPress Twitter Widget

I’m all excited. WordPress must have been hearing this from all quarters because it has finally created a widget specifically for Twitter. Previously, if I wanted my Twitter feed in the sidebar of my blog, I had to use the RSS Feed widget and wonkify in in order to get it to work. Now, I just choose the Twitter widget, enter my user name and the number of tweets I want to display and voila! I’ve got tweets on my blog. Wheeeeee!

Capital

Been thinking about capital lately. The typical definition is …

• assets available for use in the production of further assets, or …
• wealth in the form of money or property owned by a person or business and human resources of economic value

There are various other types of capital, however, not just that which involves material wealth. There’s social capital and human capital, for example, but the one that I’m most intrigued with is cultural capital.

I stumbled upon the idea of cultural capital quite by accident. My husband and I were discussing why things in our town never change. People in the upper classes stay in the upper classes, always running everything, while people in the lower classes stay in the lower classes, unable to get ahead. Anyone who is creative enough to dare to change this status quo is either ignored or tamped down by those in power. One of the ways the upper class keeps the lower class down is to constantly tell the poor how stupid and lazy they are. (A public school teacher in our district once used the term “infested” in reference to poor people when a low-income housing project was being planned for her neighborhood. Others in the school district have said things like, “We have low test scores because so many of our students are on free and reduced lunch.”)

We, of course, vehemently disagree with this assessment for the simple fact that our family income has been at poverty level for many, many years, yet somehow our children have managed to maintain better than average grades and test scores. That, and we like to think we know intelligence when we see it. Poverty does not equate with stupidity, plain and simple.

Of course, wealth does buy people opportunities, but when I consider the cultural opportunities (museum visits, arts events, concerts, walks in the woods, ethnic restaurants, etc.) we and our extended family members have provided for our children, I’d say they’re pretty well off. And because we don’t have a lot of money to spend on these activities, we find inexpensive alternatives, or our extended family members provide them as birthday gifts. We also choose our activities carefully and do without a lot of material stuff.

When I discussed my thoughts on how cultural activities have affected our kids with my husband, who is studying sociology, he said, “There’s a term for that. It’s cultural capital.” Through our own experience with our children, we’ve discovered that you don’t have to have financial capital in order to have cultural capital.

It is my observation that filling people with cultural capital can be just as important, if not more so, than making a lot of financial capital available to them. In fact, it seems that people of other classes can’t guess that we are financially in poverty because we have enough cultural capital built up in order to offset our lack of material capital.** Funny how that works, huh?

If we as a society focused more on cultural capital than on financial capital, might we be better able to overcome our class differences or, perhaps, our long-term class positions?

**(Note: While our income is below the poverty level for a family our size, we’re not so far below that we are in basic survival mode. If we were in that mode, any thought of gaining cultural capital would be moot. We’d just be trying to figure out how to feed ourselves, which takes precedence over everything.)

Time for the Rubber Boots

It’s been raining here in Central Minnesota for the past couple of days. A solid soaking rain. Puddles galore. Threats of flooding. River ice cracking up. Dams gushing.

Young Son #2 has tennis shoes that are breaking apart at the seams. His feet are poking out as though he’s turning into The Incredible Hulk. Part of the reason his tennies are in such bad shape is because he beats the dickens out of them by wandering through puddles and mud and such-like.

I decided that not only does he need new tennis shoes, he also needed rubber boots. We went shoe shopping this evening, but didn’t find any tennies he liked. We did, however, find him some fine black rubber boots. To his delight, they have steel toes. There were several types available without steel toes, but he’d have none of those. He wanted steel toes so in case he ever needs to kick in a door, he can do so without hurting his feet. (He demonstrated his door-kicking maneuver in the store.)

After we were done with boot shopping, we wandered over to the camping gear. I didn’t know he had a thing for this camping business. We did quite a bit of camping when the kids were younger, but have gotten away from it now that they are older. We’ll have to revisit this in order to give Young Son his fix. (He was really eyeing up a hatchet and fire-starters.)

A Hat Kinda Day

I recently blogged about looking for crocheted hat patterns online. After finding a number of patterns for cute, easy hats, I went through my supply of yarn and my crochet hooks to see if I had what I needed. Plenty of scrap yarn, but not the correct hook sizes. Yesterday, Hubby, Daughter and I ran to the store and I picked up the hooks I needed. (I keep wanting to call hooks needles, which shows how indoctrinated I’ve become with knitting and how long it’s been since I’ve crocheted anything.)

With yarn and the proper hook, I picked a pattern and started crocheting while still in bed this morning. After a good start, I got up, did some sewing and ironing, showered and got dressed. Then it was time to take Eldest Son back to school. It’s a long drive, so I took my crocheting with me. While Hubby and I were on the return trip, I finished the hat. I’d show it to you with a photo, but Eldest Son took our digital camera with him in order to work on a stop-motion animation project. Our camera works better for the project than the ones available at school.

Because I don’t have the camera, I’ll try to describe it. Small black crown, purple stripe, thinner navy blue stripe, really thin bright pink stripe, thin navy blue stripe, fat periwinkle stripe, thin navy blue stripe, thin bright pink stripe, thin black stripe.

The hat is larger than I expected it to be. It’s for a man’s head, but even though it’s two rows shy of what the pattern required, it’s still a little too big for Hubby. If I want to use this pattern again, I’ll have to choose a smaller hook or a lighter weight yarn. That’ll learn me.

The Writer’s Idea Workshop

The Writer’s Idea Workshop: How to Make Your Good Ideas Great by Jack Heffron

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I found this book at just the right point in my writing career. I’ve finished self-publishing a book, have several ideas I want to develop, but am out of the habit of writing. This only applies to my fiction. I don’t ever seem to have trouble writing nonfiction. The Writer’s Idea Workshop helps writers to work through stalled work, no matter where in a piece you are stalled. It has general ideas for writer’s block, but it goes further than that, assisting writers in getting needed distance, injecting new ideas, and rekindling enthusiasm for a work in progress.

View all my reviews.

Inspired to Crochet a Hat

I read an article in the Brainerd Dispatch recently about Brainerd High School boys who had learned to crochet hats so they could wear them snowboarding. They got so good at making hats that they’ve started a business making hats for others. For every sale they make, a donation goes to the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. The guys can whip out a hat in 20 to 30 minutes. Pretty impressive. What’s especially cool is that these guys don’t see this as a “girl thing.” In fact, according to the article, the boys said, “said their girlfriends aren’t into crocheting,” and “It’s definitely a guy thing.”

Girl thing, guy thing, makes no nevermind to me. I took one look at the picture of the guys wearing their hats and thought, What adorable hats! I have to make one. So now I’m online looking for cute crocheted hat patterns. Finding quite a few, which makes choosing difficult. I may be giving my printer a workout in a few minutes.

Do You Have a Will for Your Online Presence?

For many of us, our online presence is just as important as our offline presence. We make friends here, we do business, we inform, we play, and most of what we do involves user names and passwords. We are counseled to create new passwords for each account we have online so that we can keep our information secure. Very good advice, but what happens if we die suddenly or become incapacitated and no one close to us has access to our passwords, or knows which online activities we engage in regularly?

This is the sort of thing I continually worry about at work, not because I might die or become incapacitated (although I’m not immortal, so it could happen), but because I sometimes get sick or take vacation and something, whether online or off, may come up that has to be dealt with immediately. In most places of employment, there are typically manuals that can walk people through the policies and procedures they need to know in order to get the work done. Somewhere within the written procedures of an organization should be the method of retrieving user names and passwords (and if your organization doesn’t have such, it should get going on this immediately).

When it comes to our personal lives, we tend not to be this organized. We write passwords on scraps of paper or commit them to memory. We’re happily doing our thing online, getting ready for a mission on World of Warcraft and suddenly we die, leaving our guild in the lurch. Our guild members have no idea what has happened.

If your loved ones don’t have the necessary user names and passwords for your Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, World of Warcraft, email, LinkedIn, GoodReads, CafePress, Flickr, etc., etc., accounts, there is no way for them to contact your friends and followers to inform them of your untimely passing. And, if you’ve read the article I linked to above, there may be no way for your loved ones to retrieve those user names and passwords from the websites themselves because of privacy reasons.

Think of the inconvenience! You’ve already up and died on your loved ones and now they can’t use the speed of the internet to inform everyone. Nor can they memorialize you in the very places you hung out. Nor can they get a sense of the fullness of your history online, which might be of great comfort to them in this, their time of grief. Nor can they take down the lewd or embarrassing pictures you left behind, thus digitally immortalizing you at your worst.*

Now that I’ve thoroughly shamed you, perhaps you’re ready for a piece of advice. Make a will for your online presence. Decide who will have access to your account user names and passwords and where they can find them, whether they are kept on a flash drive or CD in a secret place, written in list form on paper (also in a secure place), or on your computer using a password application such as KeePass. Make sure to give your designee the password to KeePass and/or your computer. As with a regular will, you’ll also want to name a backup or two in case the first person on your list is unable to fulfill his/her duties.

In addition to assigning a trusted person access to your online presence after your death, there might be other instructions you’ll want to provide in regards to how they should handle your accounts. If there is an account that you would like to have continued after your death, such as your CafePress store because it will bring in needed income for your family, arrange for its future operation. If you have a website and domain name, consider whether you want them renewed into the future.

Do you want your designee to notify a particular guild member in World of Warcraft? Give him/her the guild member’s name and the easiest way to contact him. Is there a blog post you’ve written “from beyond the grave” that you want published? Tell your designee where to find it. A few witty last words for Twitter? A photo of you in your casket that you want displayed on MySpace or Picasa? A video of you reading your Last Will & Testament to be uploaded to YouTube? You get the picture. Prepare your online presence to go out in a Blitzkrieg of unadulturated glory, but leave detailed instructions so your designee can properly carry out your wishes.

*Now, about those lewd photos ….  If you are intent upon embarrassing your friends and family once you’re gone, keep your user names and passwords to yourself.

[Addendum: March 21, 2009 - Hubby called me yesterday morning to tell me he was listening to Future Tense with Jon Gordon on Minnesota Public Radio. The topic? What to do with your online persona after you die. Jon discussed an online application called Deathswitch with its inventor David Eagleman. When you sign up with Deathswitch, it will send you regularly scheduled messages to which you have to respond with a password. If you don't respond, it sends out more messages. If you still don't respond, the application figures your are dead or incapacitated and sends the messages you have written to the people you want notified. An online solution to taking care of your online presence after you're gone.]

Does Sock Fuzz Prevent Ingrown Toenails?

Obviously I’m talking about the sock fuzz that wedges its way underneath the edges of toenails.

Just wondering ….