Part-time prevaricator
Update: it’s mostly fixed now, though there remain a couple little weirdnesses to sort out. I’ve learned two lessons from this: 1) backups and 2) child themes.
I just updated a bunch of stuff on this site, including my theme. And remembered moments too late that I’ve made some customizations to the theme.
Which are now gone.
Whoops.
(For instance, right now, the Fiction links don’t work. I’ll get them working again soon, though.)
Some of my short fiction — all the stuff I posted on Ficlets (RIP), for instance — is licensed with a rather permissive Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means that when it turns up on a site like Compumatrix, I can’t request that it be taken down.
Not that this bothers me, really. My words are being read, and sometimes in places I’d never expect. Maybe it torques me a little that someone’s “monetized” my works, but I have the feeling that the money involved is pretty small. (I don’t know; maybe “Wilma(logima)” is rolling in long green thanks to me. I doubt I’ll ever know for sure. I also doubt I’ll lose sleep over it.)
Most of the ficlets that I wrote were dashed off in fifteen minutes; sometimes the hardest part was trimming them down to fit the site’s 1024-character maximum. I’m glad people still find them so fascinating.
I’m sure it’s popped up other places, some of which I’ll eventually stumble upon. Like I said, the Ficlets are licensed permissively, and I have no intentions of trying to get any of them taken down. (I’ll do what I can to make sure they’re properly attributed, of course.) I’m just glad people are enjoying my fiction.
Speaking of which: There’s more fiction over here, if you’re interested. (The bulk of which, please note, is not CC-licensed.)
Last night we headed south with some friends to see the play A Nice Family Gathering, presented by the ADLIB drama club as the inaugural play in Boissevain’s brand new theatre. The new theatre is a lovely space for both dramatic presentations and movies.
The play is about a Minnesota family gathering for Thanksgiving dinner — the first such gathering since the death of the father ten months ago. He was a busy man, Dr. Lundeen, so busy that he never managed to tell his wife how much he loved her. Now he’s back, as a ghost at the feast, and he wants to let her know how he felt. There are just a couple problems: only his son, Carl, can hear or see him, and Carl’s not that enthralled with the idea of helping his old man. After all, in life, Carl Sr. was rather a distant man, and not, in Junior’s eyes, much of a father.
The other problem is that Mrs. Lundeen has invited a date to supper.
A Nice Family Gathering is a great story; it’s funny, it’s touching, it delves into the dynamics of family and grief. The acting was uniformly strong; everyone on the stage did a fantastic job. The single set was well-constructed, and evoked a small-town house to perfection.
In short: kudos to everyone involved.
After the play, my friend Cheryl said, “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.” Me, too.
I’ll end on another oft-quoted truism: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A Nice Family Gathering is a story of an unhappy family striving for happiness.
Well, apparently a couple moose wandered onto a school playground and had to be tranquilized. My coworker said there were six police cars there when he went by.
But the real excitement was at our house.
I woke up about 5:50 AM and thought, That sounds like keys in my lock. I threw on some clothes and went downstairs. There was a guy in the porch — apparently I’d left the outside door open last night, whoops — trying to fit his keys into my lock. I got his attention by smacking the wall next to the door, intending to tell him he had the wrong house. As soon as he saw me through the window in the door, though, he started trying to ram his way in with his shoulder.
OK, I thought, if you’re going to be aggressive, you can talk to the police. I grabbed the phone and dialed 911 as I headed upstairs. Meanwhile, he settled down and went back to trying his keys.
While I was on the phone with 911 he started bashing again. About five minutes into the call, the police arrived. K and I watched from the upstairs window as they pulled him out of the porch and out to the squad car. (As K pointed out, it’s oddly reassuring to hear someone yelling “GET DOWN! GET ON THE FUCKING FLOOR NOW!” Well, as long as it’s not you they’re yelling it at, anyways.)
Turns out he’s a dude in a band from Toronto. He was staying a couple doors down, and got crazy drunk — the porch smelled like whiskey when I was talking to the constable — and ended up at the wrong house. The police pointed out that if they pressed charges, it’d be 6 months to a year before it went to trial, and the odds of getting money out of him to repair my door (which got cracked in the middle, but still locks) were next to nil. They suggested that, if he had money to repay it now, we could settle it civilly. I conferred quickly with K, and we said all right. We guesstimated a price for a new door, and the officer came back with the cash. Presumably he got paid for last night’s gig, or something. Then the police drove off with him to let him snooze in the drunk tank (I assume).
As I went to work, I noticed there was a little SUV with Ontario plates in front of the house. At lunch it was gone.
So, to sum up: Drunk guy tried to bust his way into my house. The police that came to my house a) arrived quickly and b) probably were spared moose detail. Everyone’s safe and sound, if a little rattled. (Well, K and I are all right. I don’t care much what Mr. Toronto feels like.) And I get to go door shopping, apparently.
So this happened.
In mid-April , one of the admin assistants from the President’s office caught up with me at coffee time and said, “You’ve been selected as this year’s recipient of the Board of Governors’ community service award.”
I said, “Huh?” I hadn’t even know I was nominated. (I still don’t know who nominated me; it’s a private, confidential deal. But I do thank whoever it might have been.)
I was told I could have up to six guests attend the University’s convocation, if I wanted. Unfortunately, my wife was unavoidably out of town on the date of the ceremony. My mother made the trip from the big city, though, and X, my so-called “judo wife”, came along as well.
Several people asked me if I’d be making a speech; I told them that I hadn’t been informed one way or the other if a speech was expected, so I hadn’t prepared anything. I was ready to ad-lib something short, though, if the need arose. My boss ended up in the seat beside me on the stage, in the second row of the platform party. As the grads were filing across the stage to get their sheepskins, he leaned over and whispered, “So how long is your speech?”
I replied, “I really won’t know till I’m done.” He laughed softly and sat back up.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to say anything; I just stood next to the President, looking pretty, while she read off the bio I’d submitted. Then she handed me the framed certificate, the photographer (a friend of mine, as luck would have it) snapped some photos, the crowd went wild, and I sat down.
After the ceremony was complete, we stuck around for some further photos. X talked me into letting her do the kata-guruma lift for the camera. In our fancy clothes.
(If you don’t know what kata-guruma is, check the video below. Note that X put me back down on my feet, as we didn’t have any mats backstage.)
And that’s how my weekend went. How was yours?
Here’s where I spent my weekend:
The MasterCard Centre in Etobicoke, Ontario, site of the Ontario Open judo tournament. I was there as a freshly-minted National C referee. The judo was fast, the venue was chilly — that concrete holds a deep chill — and the people were great.
My wife asked me if I’d go again. Yes. Yes I would.
I was fiddling with the Evans site this evening — adding a post about donations, etc — and came across this post, which made reference to the wp-Typography plugin. I installed it on the Evans site and had a look. I must say, I’m impressed.
It allows for hyphenation, for one thing; it also handles widows and orphans, something that I vaguely understand. More impressively — at least to me — it also handles “smart” quotes properly. Smartly, in fact.
This is a bugaboo of long standing for me; I find it irritating to see contractions like ’tis starting with an opening single quote rather than a proper apostrophe. This plugin seems to solve it. (If “’tis” is spelled right in this post, it’s thanks to the plugin.)
Pedantic? It sure is. But we all have our pet peeves, & for whatever reason, improper punctuation is one of mine. And I’m glad to have stumbled across a technological solution to the problem.
Update: I see from the notes on the theme I’m using that wp-Typography is in the Recommended Plugins list. I thought sounded vaguely familiar…
I got to use my camera’s CHDK software to snag some photos of lightning. This one was by far the best and the brightest of the images.
Since it didn’t get accepted for the AE Science Fiction micro challenge, I’m revamping my short story “Moving Home”, expanding it a bit, and planning to submit it to some markets when it’s polished.
The “micro” in micro fiction was definitely a challenge; the story had to be less than 200 words, including the title. When I finished the first draft, it was about 300 words, which meant I had to trim it by a third.
If I’d been smart, I’d have saved the original 300-word version, but I just started to hack and slash, removing colour and combining thoughts. It was a good exercise — it forced me to choose my words very wisely — but I think I had a better story before the slicing.
Now, though — now I’m trying to recover what I subtracted, and it’s not there anymore. Well, it is, but it’s not exactly the same. I’m chasing les mots justes and they’re eluding me.
Just one of those things, I guess. At least, without the 200-word limit, I can tell the full story. I’m not sure how long it’ll end up; I guess I’ll know that when I’m done.
For whatever reason, the last couple lines on this lovely poster really stood out for me.