cake and OS X talk

So far, the switch to OS X hasn't caused me as much grief as I had anticipated. I like the interface (stop grimacing, Michelle) and I like the fact that my machine hasn't crashed even once since the switch. Up to then, I was getting used to daily crashes, sometimes several times a day. During the long reboot, I used grab my guitar and do some songwriting. Happily and sadly, I don't get as much songwriting done that way these days.

I'm still not used to the micro-lag that seems to follow every action, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I've had to drop using some software and need to find OS X upgrades or alternates: eMagic Logic (apparently an upgrade will be available soon), Snak (the IRC client I used to access Filkhaven), some others. I'm sure they're out there, but I just haven't had a chance to go track them down.

I'm also learning to use or adjusting to new (to me) or newer versions of software. BBEdit 7.0 is cooler than my old BBEdit, but I had to rearrange my Glossary files to adjust to the way the new BBEdit handles them; it now allows multiple Glossary sets, but you have to name the folder properly for it to be the default set.

Jeff got my scanner and other graphics applications working under my new system yesterday, yay!

I've switched to using Safari as my default browser instead of Microsoft Explorer, though I'll still be checking my new layouts through Explorer and Netscape to make sure they look all right. Reason for switching: I didn't seem to be able to use Notetaker Services through Explorer, but it works okay in other applications.





re: Notetaker Clipping Service. LOVE this feature, which is going to make my life so much easier. Every day, for example, I go surfing through various publishing and media news sites for tidbits to include in my Market Watch column. I used to cut and paste URLs into a BBEdit file, then edit/format them for uploading into the Market Watch admin interface. Now whenever I find interesting news (or anything else I want to save) while I'm surfing, I can just highlight it and choose "Save to Debbie's Market Watch Clippings File" (and/or other files I set up) under the Services menu.

Later on, I can go to Notetaker and refer to my clippings file, file it somewhere else, look at it in more detail, delete it, use it, whatever. This process also works if I'm using other applications, like a mail program or text editor. It's already come in handy for my article for Country Connections magazine, while I was researching how various organizations teach the "Leave No Trace" ethic to young people. I found relevant Web sites, clipped the URLs for investigating later for possible interviewees. I interviewed outdoor guides and educators by e-mail, clipped relevant quotes and notes. Then in Notetaker, I added my own notes, rearranged everything in outline format, verified URLs by double-clicking them right in my Notetaker document, which automatically opened the relevant page in Safari.

And finally, I cut and pasted the whole thing into BBEdit for final editing and formatting before sending it off to my editor.

I try to imagine how I would have done this in The Old Days before computers and the Internet and shudder at how much more time and frustration would have been involved (phone tag, white-out instead of the delete key, etc.).

Today's Blatherpics:

	Reid and Ruth, at Jeff's birthday dinner last weekend. Reid has his photos online from that evening. Here's the photo Reid was taking while I was taking this one. :-) Lots of great Michelle photos!
	I asked people to take home leftover cake, but the cake was too tall to fit into the restaurant's regular take-out containers. John Swain (a physicist who appears on Discovery Channel) and John Chew (University of Toronto mathematician) put their heads together to help modify the available materials for a container for my sister's cake. Fire was involved. :-)

Feb/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ

movable type

Jeff and I went to see Wingfield On Ice last night, a wonderful one-man play currently running at the Winter Garden Theatre. More on this in an upcoming Blathering, but today I feel compelled to Blather about Movable Type.

For those as fanatic about Movable Type as I am: Version 2.6 is out! Plus there's a commercial version being released this summer. Unless it's brutally expensive, I plan to buy a copy. I downloaded 2.6 this morning and am going to humbly beg your patience as I experiment with it in this entry.

Just one of the cool new features: Text Formatting options. One of the great things about Movable Type is that it's structured so that users are able to (and are encouraged to) develop useful plug-ins that enhance the already sterling useability and usefulness of the software. Up to now, I've had to insert any special formatting by hand with HTML tags. By adding Brad Choate's MT-Textile plug-in, I should be able to now easily add formatting with shortcuts. I've also added the SmartyPants plug-in, which should automatically educate quotes, dashes, and ellipses once I modify the template to turn on the SmartyPants options.

TEXTILE TESTING AREA (please ignore):

h2. This should be in header 2 format.

bq. Ideally, this paragraph will be a blockquote block. This is normally a major pain to do with HTML tags, but with the Textile plug-in (Brad Choate), all I have to do is start the paragraph with a lowercase 'bq', a period, and a space.

Then there are the inline formatting options. _This should be emphasized text_. And *this is strong*. -This is deleted text.- +This is inserted text+. ^This is superscript^ and ~this is subscript~.

Oh wow (I'm reading the docs on Textile as I'm experimenting here), and text linking looks much easier, too. Here's a link for "Inkygirl":www.inkygirl.com. Just put the name of the link in quotes, followed by a colon, followed by the URL.

Hey, I should be able to use unusual characters like angle brackets without having to manually provide equivalent HTML entities: < and > and &. Cool, it works.

Copyright symbol: (c)

I notice some of the features in Textile (the plug-in) don't work yet, like list shortcuts, but the plug-in was only released yesterday and other users have posted bug reports, so I suspect they'll be fixed soon.

Today's Blatherpic:

Old photo from the Jeff Birthday Scrapbook.

Feb/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ

chicken, kasha, stinky foods

(sketch by Tony Halmos, see details at bottom of this page)

Quite unexpectedly, I made a roast chicken yesterday.

Unexpected for two reasons, really: I haven't made roast chicken in quite a few years, and also because I never intended to make it yesterday. When Grocery Gateway made their delivery, however, it arrived with an extra item: a whole, uncooked chicken. I called them to let them know, and they told me to keep it with their compliments; apparently there was an order mix-up somewhere.

Since neither Jeff nor I were going to be home for dinner, I decided to cook the thing and feast on the leftovers for lunches. After consultation with my sister, I stuck it in the oven for an hour. Surely it had to be more complicated than that. Yet lo and behold, it worked! I was amazed, delighted. Hungry.

You types who are bored by cooking talk can probably stop reading here, or skip down to the poll. I've been fascinated by cooking in recent months before I had thought for a long while that I couldn't do it. And while I'm still no expert, I'm finding that it's actually kind of fun. There's something immensely satisfying about going to the market (ok, so I tend to order heavier, canned goods from Grocery Gateway), picking out fresh ingredients, then going home and cooking them for dinner.

I usually try to turn the first bit into part of my workout. Run to the market (St. Lawrence Market or the Dominion's in the same area), brisk walk back with groceries in my backpack and in (ideally) equally weighted shopping bags carried in each hand. Cab drivers idling along Front St. look at me as if I've grown two heads as I walk past laden with my purchases, layered in fleece and Gortex and only my eyes showing, while the snow howls past.

The other day I experimented with kasha (the raw buckwheat kernel stripped of its hard outer shell) with a recipe from my newest Moosewood Cookbook, with onions, mushrooms, soy sauce. Yum. I made it when Jeff wasn't home because I knew he'd hate it. "You've been cooking something stinky!" he announced when he came home that night.

Had a good practice with Allison & Jodi yesterday. We went through more of our Ad Astra concert set, plus did some more work on "Unrequited", my Eowyn song. I added some flute instrumental, Allison added some harmonies and counterpoint, we worked on the arrangement some more. We also talked about our current and upcoming songwriting projects, and Allison & Jodi helped give me an idea for a very silly but fun Lord of the Rings songwriting project, henceforward referred to as Urban Tapestry's Secret LOTR Extravaganza. Ideally, we'll be debuting this at Torcon in August, when we'll also be debuting our new CD. First I have to write it, though. :-)

POLL:

What foods do you dislike? Please rank the depth of your dislike as well. Will you eat it to be polite? Or spit it out if it's forced in your mouth? Foods I don't like but will eat if necessary: sea urchin. Hm. I'm sure there are other foods I dislike but can't think of any. Oh wait! Guinness, I really despise Guinness. Ok, so maybe that's not really a food but I stuck it in anyway to bug my friend Andy.

Links/News:

Remember I ordered the new Harry Potter book a short while back? I got an e-mail from Amazon.ca yesterday informing me that the price had DROPPED to CDN$25.80 (from $27). Yay!

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Today's Blatherpic:

Sketch of Jeff by Tony Halmos (for the scrapbook project), used with permission. Please don't copy this image without the permission of the artist, thanks.

Feb/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ

bassoon

Today's Blatherings entry is my friend Craig's highly amusing contribution to Jeff's Birthday Scrapbook, used with permission. People reading through the scrapbook these days don't often realize that the entire story is fabricated. Craig is the editor of MapArt, not a bassoon player in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, for example. I was never a jamcracker. In fact, I had to ask Craig what a jamcracker is. :-)

Speaking of Craig...only a few more weeks until we go to the Erasure concert, yay!

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Craig's Birthday Scrapbook Story

Jeff is 40: wow. It's sobering to realize that I've now known him for 33 years, for Jeff and I met when he was 7 and I was, like, 2. Okay, 6 and a half. So long ago, so long ago, but so fresh in my mindÖ

The Ridpaths had just moved to town at the end of summer and it was suddenly the first day of classes at Asymptote Junior School in Branson, MO. Prodigies each of us, Jeff and I had both made short shrift of our early educational careers, been skipped ahead 3 years, and now found ourselves together in Mrs. McNally's fifth grade class.

Initially, I was thrilled to have Jeff around. I had been dreading another year of after-school torture at the hands of the Parkinson quads, brothers who were not really born at the same time, but who arrived on this planet in such rapid succession that 3 of the 4 of them were in the same grade. Daily having to outwit the Quad Squad had been exhausting for me, but Jeff's arrival allowed the two of us to divide and conquer the Parkinson threat and I was subsequently able to arrive home for dinner safe and sound on a regular basis thereafter.

Jeff, as fast on his feet as he was a quick learner, fell victim to the fearsome foursome only once. If you haven't seen the scar, take a furtive glance next time you're in the sauna with him.

That said, with our common enemy and our shared predicament in that odd town, one would assume that he and I made fast friends that year, especially considering Jeff's obvious interest in my extensive collection of ViewMaster slide reels. Truth be known, we barely tolerated each other that year, each of us too convinced of our own superiority and far too competitive to let our guard down and just be pals.

Jeff and I lost touch when our families coincidentally moved to different towns in Belgium the following summer, (us Bruges, them Ghent) where I subsequently failed Grade 6 three times and Jeff failed Grade 7, Grade 8, and Grade 9 once each. Four years in, Jeff's kin tired of the hundred-odd recipes for Waterzooi and up and left Belgium for the new world again, leaving their son at a local boarding school, the Belgian Dyspeptic Boys Centre, or the BDBC. That's where he and I renewed our acquaintance.

You see, my parents had recently gone off to Indonesia hoping to revive the now flagging Dutch-East Indies trade, and left me alone in a giant and aging manor house where the wind whistled unceasingly through the windows, and where one was reminded of the interior of the Titanic "on that fateful night" whenever it rained. Mamma und Vati had not left me the financial wherewithal to maintain the place, let alone heat it, so to make ends meet, I was teaching Bassoon three nights a week to the boarders at the BDBC, where inevitably Jeff and I bumped into each other again.

With our parents gone to the ends of the earth, we now shared a feeling of being cast-offs, and discovered we could now look back and laugh at Branson, so friendship came naturally this time. Subsequently during the three long years I worked to keep the manor house from falling to pieces around me, it was Jeff who kept me sane. As he was not one of my pupils, a fact that will not surprise anyone who has heard Jeff's Bassooning, the time that he and I passed together was my only escape from the iron grip of that instrument.

I should insert here, however, that the Bassoon was not without its rewards, for after three years of extraordinary effort the BDBC Bassoon Band won the Belgian Nationals(!), and when my family wasn't there to share with me in the band's triumph, there was Jeff in the audience, beaming back at me. We had become true friends.

This really all came about because the dorms Jeff lived in at the under-funded BDBC were in similar shape to my domicile and were uncomfortable to the point where he had taken to reading through every do-it-yourself reno guide, every structural engineering textbook, and every home decor magazine he could lay his hands on. Soon enough Jeff gained the know-how to effect any necessary structural repairs to the building himself, and within the first few months of each stay in a new dorm room, Jeff would replace 90% of the wood panelling, the framing, the floorboards, the joists, the plumbing and wiring, and even ornate 19th century moldings and the plaster work of the ceiling, then blend it all flawlessly into the existing fabric of the building. I must say Jeff also managed some amazing deals on reproduction period wallpaper which were very impressive.





Anyway, Jeff and I would haul the refuse from his "extracurricular jobsite" (as we called the dorm) back to my drafty manor where we'd huddle for warmth by one of the huge fireplaces as the discarded material burned. Once Jeff's dorm renovations were done and my heating fuel source dried up, Jeff would call upon his newfound engineering expertise and advise me as to which structural members we could rip out of the walls of the manor while maintaining the integrity of the ceiling. Of course the place blew down shortly after I left for college three years later, but I didn't blame Jeff. I figured it was all carefully calculated on his part: he had kept me alive and provided friendship in the bleakest of circumstances, and worked the house for all it could give.

Everyone knows of course what followed: I spent 9 years in Antwerp apprenticing in the cutting of diamonds before giving it all up for 2nd Bassoon in the TSO, and Jeff relocated to northern Quebec where he designed the Grande-Baleine 1, 2, and 3 Dams (but not 4) of the James Bay Hydroelectric Project, and met and married Debbie Ohi, a "jamcracker" and waitress at a local logging camp.

And now it's years later, and Jeff still calls when he and Deb leave their beloved blackfly infested north for a getaway weekend in Toronto. We don't tend to reminisce much during the visits, but a couple of years ago when passing by a demolition site Jeff called out "exposed rafters!" and I laughed so hard that I had to pull the car over. Now it's a catch-phrase of ours, along with "Parkinson threat", which if said to Jeff at the right moment causes him to go three quarters apoplectic.

I look forward to our visitsñsoaking up the local scene, doing dinner, catching a showñand I even enjoy Debbie's company, but I catch my breath when I think back to the howling North Sea air, the faint first lick of flame through the middle of the latest Rubens to come down off the walls, the night the east wing dropped 3 inches at one end, and all the time I spent laughing it up with Jeff in that ancient house.

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Today's Blatherpics:

To help illustrate Craig's story, I did a search via Google Image for a bassoon player. Then I Photoshopped in Craig's face (from a picture taken on our Singalong Sound of Music day) to replace the bassoon player's face. Yes, I could have spent more time adjusting the colour and lighting to make it look more real, but I thought it was funnier leaving it as is. I did Photoshop in the hair and beard, though.

This photo was taken when Craig was helping Jeff and I do renovations to our house out in the country. Craig took great pleasure in wielding a crowbar, as you can see.

Feb/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ

writing update

Finished my article for Country Connections yesterday, sent it in. The editor would like some visuals, so I'll be following up with some of the organizations I interviewed for photos as well as coming up with a related cartoon or two of my own. I still haven't had time to pursue the possibility of selling my cartoons to other markets and have added this to my Notetaker To Do list.

I've realized that I've been only mentioning positive writing news in my Blatherings. To keep the freelance writing life in perspective, I thought I'd share a bit of the other side as well.

One is the heartache of editorial changes. You work hard at establishing contacts at a publication, and then they move. I recently wrote to the Chatelaine editor who first gave the go-ahead on my article back in November to ask about the status of my article, for example. Turns out she's no longer at Chatelaine, nor is the editor who was helping to handle the article. :-( I've written to the new editor for an update, with fingers crossed. This majorly sucks, since I basically have to start from scratch again re: building up contacts at Chatelaine. Then again, I now have a contact at Profit magazine.

I've also been following up with some other articles that I haven't heard about in a while. The editor I was working with at Cleveland Plains Dealer seems to have disappeared, no news of the article I sent her. The editor at The Anvil says they are way behind in their publication schedule and says I should probably send my piece elsewhere, that they'll contact me about buying the reprint when they've caught up. I resubmitted the article to another market yesterday.

And meanwhile there are my novels. I have three, all waiting for revision, a chapter book series idea I want to flesh out in proposal form including the first book, and a new middle reader novel idea. Too many books to write, too little time. I'm working on revising Puck's Hollow (tentative title) right now. Right now, my priority is to start FINISHING these novels, but meanwhile I have to play the balancing act between working on writing projects that may not pay for a while (my novel writing) and the projects which are a more reliable source of income (articles, columns).

I wish I didn't have to sleep. As much as I enjoy it (the aftereffects, anyway), there are so many other things I'd rather be doing. Think of all the books I could be reading during those hours, for example!

My current reading: rereading The Two Towers, Primal Fear by William Diehl, Ghost Rider by Neil Peart. Gave up on A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

Today's Blatherpics:

Hello Kitty sausages, of course. Courtesy Ray, from this blog. I want a Kitty-chan toasted sandwich maker.

Feb/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ