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Re-entry to Blog Duties

Aug24
mother's gift of birds

Recliner chair with AirDesk and laptop computer (“Mother’s gift of birds” Photo credit: Rusty Clark)

 

It’s been a while since we last posted here.

Regaining our ability to sit at the computer took nearly eight weeks.  Blogging doesn’t go well in 8-minute bursts, and that was what our sore back allowed.  Exploring the world from a semi-supine position in the good Starship Recliner-Chair did not allow computer use.  We were effectively silenced for the duration.

It feels good to return, but there’s not much going on.  Would you like to hear about our exercises?  We didn’t think so…  It’s been an interesting two months, though.

Encounters from the Starship’s bridge:

  • Discovered some EXCELLENT TV dramas and caught up on the back seasons for Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Borgias, and Damages.

Damages, a Glenn Close drama about power and high-stakes litigation, is particularly good and I was crushed to find that the new season, #5, is available only on CurrentTV.  You can’t even purchase the episodes on iTunes!  Yes, CurrentTV will sell a 2-year contract for $59.95 per month so one can watch Damages.  No, we are not going to do business with them, because their service is overpriced and withholding the 5th season of a serial drama is unconscionable.  It will be interesting to see how many new viewers they garner with this tactic.  Prior seasons are available on Imdb.  Why didn’t they just sell season #5 to iTunes?  They could certainly have gotten a premium price for that series!

  • Sampled some other series and chose Sons of Anarchy and Bleak House as the next projects.
  • Our 4-year-old HP All-in-One printer died and was replaced by its newer cousin, an HP Photosmart 7510.  Only installed it this morning, but now we should be able to print wirelessly from our Droid smartphone and our Kindle Fire e-reader tablet.
  • Chloe, our new granddaughter, became an American citizen on her way here from China three weeks ago.  She is 22 months old and has a smile that makes hearts go pitter-pat.  Our son and his wife are embracing the new-parent role,  complete with all-nighters on somebody else’s schedule and not being able to speak Mandarin or English, depending on whether you’re the parent or the kidlet.  Hugs and smiles go a long way, as does mutual respect.
  • Tried to sew Chloe’s fancy Minkey baby blanket, but cannot bend down to the cutting surface yet.  All in due time…
  • Tangled up our WordPress usernames and passwords among our several layouts and managed to get locked out of The Time Is Come (this blog

Word to the wise:  once your blog is hosted outside WordPress.org (see earlier posts about migration out: one really is on one’s own without technical support!  A timid or inexperienced techie can be intimidated by the need to FTP into one’s domain, especially after one has been told, “Stay Out, Stay Alive!”  We regained control of our blog by sneaking in through one of its testbed sisters and selecting it from a drop-down list we had never seen before.

There are rules about how to structure one’s arrays of administrative information.  We did not know about them and so set things up in such a way as to make lock-outs probable.  That has been resolved with a more informed set of choices for the blogs.  The Time Is Come is our only blog that’s published;  the others are test beds.

  • Purchased a great computer work surface for the recliner.  It’s called an AirDesk, and it consists of a vertical steel shaft on a large, flat base.  Steel arms extend horizontally from it to support clear Lexan rectangular table surfaces.  The tables seem to float above the chair.  The engineering genius is in the adjustability of the arms that support the tables.  They are held in place by friction (with tightened fasteners) and can be swung in and out, adjusted in height, and tilted.  It’s really nice to position a keyboard EXACTLY where one wants it, even if pain got in the way of productivity.
  • Watched many hours of Congressional hearings and county Board of Supervisors’ meetings.  Some of those Representatives can be savage and relentless, particularly if the agency in question really messed up.  To get the flavor of it, use CSPAN’s video library to watch the General Services Administration testimony about their overly luxurious conferences. Truly a blood sport!
  • Enjoyed the Olympics, to the extent that NBC’s lackluster programming provided access.  The highlights schedule printed in our daily newspaper was wrong more often than correct.  The information screens accompanying the Guide listings for our Cable service were incomplete, prone to providing snippets of events not mentioned, and  overloaded with interviews of Michael Phelps.

Congratulations to the Olympics Opening and Closing Ceremony Planners in GB!!!!!  The opening and closing ceremonies were almost all elegant, professional, and lots of fun.  (We do wish that all of the vocalists in the closing show paid enough attention to staying in tune.  Some of their music was pretty far off.)

  • Read a half-dozen books:  mostly novels, but a few nonfiction ones.  Look for book reports in following posts, as some of the books were great!

Summary:

Recuperating in the Starship hasn’t been boring, although there have been frustrations.  The pain was foremost, until the exercises and the “tincture of time” (an orthopedic surgeon’s phrase) took care of it.  We have been driving for short trips for over a week.  Getting back into shape after all this lying around is Job One!

 

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Retired Walruses as a Blog Theme

May21

Image of brown walrus in front of a white iceberg on a dark blue sea.

The Walrus, Musing...

Do walruses retire?  If so, might one volunteer to anchor a blog theme?

Our walrus came along for the ride as a symbol for this blog theme; more staid walruses might have chosen not to.

This blog’s theme began with a list of requirements:

  • The theme must cover a broad variety of interests like those we enjoy in retirement.
  • The theme should arouse interest with recognition or curiosity in a casual Web surfer.
  • The theme needed a visual symbol of some sort as a blog brand.
  • The theme must be a good hook for humor.
  • The theme should be unusual, surprising, and maybe even a little weird.
  • The theme needed to tie into a relevant domain name.

The search for a retirement theme began slowly, then jelled fast.

We need enough time to consolidate information before beginning to build the finished product.

Our creativity does not  perform upon demand; too much time pressure kills it off. For example, we took a counterpoint class  in college.  The homework was music, composed subject to strict rules. We had to ask the professor to issue the homework assignments earlier than normal so we had time to get the work  done.

Recent news articles have discussed creativity, in many cases, as enhanced by actions a  person takes.  Our technique is to immerse oneself in information surrounding a topic, perhaps even without knowing what the final product will be. We expect to thrash about somewhat, what with trips down blind alleys and being surprised at ideas that are flat-out wrong.  Then we begin to write snippets of fact and opinion as they occur to us. We once used  3″ by 5″ index cards for research citations  as well as our snippets.  Modern word processing makes things much different, although not necessarily better.  In due time, the snippets lead to becoming documents, which are then re-written again and again until it’s time to publish.

And then: right there, naked and unafraid in the public domain,  was Lewis Carroll‘s poem:  The Walrus and the Carpenter!

Let’s check off the requirements:

  • Broad variety of interests: “Shoes and ships and sealing-wax…” outlines many possibilities, and we don’t limit the blog to nineteenth-century nouns.
  • Recognition or curiosity in the casual Web researcher: Most English-speaking kids know about Alice and her trip Through the Looking Glass.
  • Visual symbol:  Walruses can be portrayed in many ways, from true-to-life  images to appealing cartoons.
  • Humorous:  Walrus appearance lends itself to humor because its apparent clumsiness differs so much from what it can actually do.
  • Surprising, unusual, weird:  Who could have dreamed up a Tooth-Walker on his own?  Those walruses whose long upper canine teeth allowed them to haul out through holes in the ice thrived to have larger families…and here they are!  The walrus’ tooth adaptation rivals the electro-sensitive bill of the Duckbill platypus as an unusual way to handle a needed function!
  • Relevant: The old and the unfit walruses probably get eaten before they get a chance to enjoy retirement.  We just made it fit.   (The “rrr” in rrretired.com could be taken for a walrus growl,  but that is not why we used them.  We needed them to build our unique domain name.)

Trying on the theme:  does it fit well?

In a nutshell, yes.  Folks seem to like the cartoon that brands this blog.  The theme is expansive and forgiving:  We have not yet wanted to write about a topic that did not attach to one or more  theme hooks.

As  to the biology of the food web, ageing mammals, walrus cognition, walrus culture, mammalian adaptation to unique niches, techniques for photographing the walrus, the crushing hazard immature individuals face during stampedes, climate change effects on the walrus, and a myriad of other interesting topics:

I’ll get to them when I can.  Choosing and deferring projects is one of the delights of our retirement!

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Fabric Arts Excursion

May7
Original Description: Fabric merchant. Samarka...
Original Description: Fabric merchant. Samarkand. Merchant’s display includes silk, cotton, and wool fabrics as well as a few carpets. A framed page of the Koran hangs at the top of the stall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The last few weeks have been an intense rush into blogging.  The Guided Transfer package includes two weeks of support to get everything going outside WordPress.com.  That injected time pressure into the project.  We used our two weeks well, and the Happiness Engineer answered many, many questions. Now the time pressure is over.  We still have a way to go before becoming expert in WordPress, and we’re comfortable with that.  So we took a break from the blog with a fabric arts excursion.

Our son, K., and his wife, E., are adopting a toddler from China.  She’s a beautiful child and we can hardly wait to meet her in person. Everybody mentioned here gets a blogname; hers is C. The kids will go to China to pick her up when the process is ready, probably in a couple of months.

Our tradition is to welcome a child, or children, with nice gifts that are also practical.  It’s hard enough to be a toddler without having a harsh environment on top of it!  C. knows some Chinese words, but she’s coming into an English-speaking family and will have some catching up to do. The gifts will add beautiful things to C.’s new environment, which we hope will take some of the edge off the change.  The family’s enormous love for her will help a lot with her big adapting job.

Our gift will be handmade baby blankets.  We sat with E. at the computer and surfed Minky© fabrics.  Minky© has selections of different pile lengths and many colors and patterns.  Its texture feels very luxurious, soft and cuddly.  E. decided on a fabric that’s deep cranberry pink with pale pink polka dots.

We spent more glorious hours last week exploring sumptuous satin backing fabrics.   E. saw them last night, and she chose a medium watermelon pink satin with abstract white lilies(?) on it.  The combination looks wonderful on the screen and pretty darned good on printouts, given the age of the printer. (We cleaned the print heads and installed fresh cartridges. This helped, but printouts and computer screen images still don’t match perfectly.  Looks like there’s a computer equipment calibration chore ahead.  Sigh…)

We wish we could publish the images, but getting copyright permissions from at least two different stores is too big a hassle.  Please click on the links, above, to see the fabrics.  Our next job is to decide on the blanket binding, but that will wait until the fabrics arrive.  Any leftovers just might turn into a cuddly bear…

Grandma is such a great role when there’s retirement time for hobbies, arts and crafts!

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Relocation Progress Report

Apr19
A graphical depiction of a very simple css doc...
A graphical depiction of a very simple css document (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Time is Come has moved from http://jbrysh.com to http://rrretired.com . It’s still the same blog with the same posts and comments but now we will have more flexibility.

Things have shuddered to an uneasy halt:  it can take up to 72 hours for domain redirection to propagate and send folks to the new domain.  Our sister made her first blog visit today to the old domain and landed on the “parked” page displayed there.  It took over a month for her to actually look for our blog and she found a page of ads.  It’s our fault:  we had not told her when we were moving.

The Time is Come is up and running at http://rrretired.com.  We’ve begun fine-tuning settings, but the whole thing is still unstable.  For example, sometimes the dashboard ignores the edit-post command and won’t accept keystrokes in the text editor.  Positioning an image in the text editor is weird now, although Zemanta images work o.k.  We have a list going and will call support when it’s long enough.

The guided transfer package gives us two weeks of paid support. We cleared the calendar for the entire two weeks.  It’s going to be pretty intense, what with learning enough CSS and XHTML to know what the code means, and with modifying the features that need changing.  Our experienced blogger-friend reassured that our background will suffice to tackle WordPress outside the .com safety zone.  Nonetheless, we have heard that Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread…

Please come visit the new location,  http://rrretired.com, to watch site stability unfold!

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Style and the Editorial We

Apr18
Grammatical Person / Pronouns - "I" ...

Grammatical Person / Pronouns - "I" first person singular (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One blogging problem is awkward: I want to use “I” too much when I write.

  • A way out is to use the passive voice:  “It is a problem when the pronoun “I” is overly used when writing a piece.”
  • Another is to drop the troublesome pronoun from the sentence, leaving the reader to imply that it is there:  “When I write a blog piece, want to use the pronoun “I” too often.”
  • The fallback is to ignore the awkwardness and sprinkle in all the “Is” that pop out, willy-nilly, in the first draft. “When I write a blog piece, I want to use the pronoun “I” too often.

The first person singular feels awfully self-absorbed when it is unsparingly.  It leaves the reader with a grating, “too full of herself” impression of the writer.  It’s almost as if the writer’s musings carry a double whammy:  the writer and the person whose impressions are being communicated are both actors in the same sentence.

We English-speakers have a work-around in the Editorial “We.”  Monarchs and Popes use the Royal “We” as well.  We find that the curse lessens when the editorial we takes the place of “I.”

We are switching over for a while to see if it saves time and effort.  And we welcome your feedback, especially a couple of posts downstream.

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