I had the flu last week, leading into the final project weekend for my classes. One thing I did learn… I can write still when I am feverish and doped up on dayquil/nightquil, so there is no excuse for not doing so when I am just tired or something. Only, I didn’t do the best on one of the papers because I was too wacked out to understand what I was supposed to be writing about (the perils of doing things at the last minute), but still, the writing was goodish, if wrong.

Finally, though, we have started some interesting classes. Environmental science and cultural diversity. It will be a lot more fun now, though I do realize that we had to learn about writing academic papers and all that, but boy is that stuff boring. I am still ambivalent about the online learning system. I think I would prefer a brick and mortar classroom, but that is just not an option for me right now, so this will do. I do like the convenience, too. When it comes time to go for the Bachelor’s in English, though, I may look at the other, well established offline schools who are offering online classes for that.  I’ll have to see how much of my stuff will transfer, though… if I do the BA in English through UoP, it’s just another two years because I am doing the prerequisites now. If it will take longer at a different school, I’ll probably just stick with this one.

I must not jinx things, but maybe…. just maybe… this is the last month of a full house. Throw salt! Knock on wood!

photo via Sanchovi’s flickr 

I am tired, but it seems a shame to waste the silence on sleep. 

[photo from here]

I like rocks. I used to collect them, sort of. Definitely not in any sort of organized way, just here and there as something caught my eye. An unusual shape or color, maybe.

I remember one time a young boy came to my door – he looked sort of like a kid off a Norman Rockwell poster. Anyway, he was holding this cardboard box and when i opened the door he said:

“Do you want to buy some sparkly rocks? They are only 25 cents each!”

And, sure enough, the box was filled to the brim with white, sparkly rocks. The thing is, so was everyone’s backyard, including mine, and some of the front yards, too. White sparkly rocks seemed to be the ground filler of choice in that neighborhood.

What to do? Here is this kid who is either trying to scam me out of my quarter, or one who really believes that, somehow, his sparkly rocks are different from everyone else’s.

Well, he was a cute kid (his smile had a missing tooth) and I was having a crabby day anyway, so I bought a rock. Maybe two.

They were pretty special after all, those rocks… I smiled the rest of the day, every time I looked at them.

So, today I made my first (and, hopefully last) PowerPoint presentation. Painful and annoying. It at least confirmed one thing I’ve always thought over the years of looking at the program and never doing anything with it. If I ever need a PowerPoint presentation for any reason, I’m going to hire it out.

I’ve finished with my first block of classes – finals today, part of the reason for the PowerPoint. The next block should be more interesting – well, at least one of the classes, Critical Thinking. The other, Effective Essay Writing, will be useful at least.

Who dat? I’m not a football fan, but I’m happy the Saints won.

I need new glasses.

photo at the top from here

I thought, maybe, I had found it with OneNote. Endless little notebooks, tagging, the ability to really easily make tables, and all sorts of stuff. I admit, evil though Microsoft may be, I gotta have my OneNote.

Except.

I also have to have my Evernote. It’s far easier to find things in it, with the tagging system and there are fewer clicks when going through all the stuff I’ve gathered because it’s all, truly, in one long note (per notebook). No little tabs or anything. For research – or, really, for compiling the information that I am using for research, that I can access from anywhere, I find Evernote invaluable. Also, it is free.

However.

I feel incomplete when I don’t have the Firefox plugin, Scrapbook. It’s an oldie(ish) but goodie (and old-shoe familiar for me), and simply excellent, in my view, for just clicking quickly, annotating and storing masses of information gathered from various places online. Either the whole page or just a snippet. (There are online services good for that too, but I need my information available offline.)

To be fair, the other two programs do much the same, although I have not been able to get a OneNote clipper to work in Firefox.Evernote does, with no problem. But I can’t really organize on the fly (with Evernote OR OneNote), which I need to do, being far too scatterbrained to go back and do it later, which is where I value Scrapbook.

But.

Scrapbook doesn’t have an online backing up of stuff server (so far as I know). With Evernote, everything I save offline is also saved online when it next syncs with the server. I’ve had soooo many computer crashes over the years that this is a necessity for me, because I’ve just lost too much work.

Like I’ve, apparently, lost a lot of the history research I had been doing and storing in Scrapbook. I thought I had backed up these items to my online storage server (yet another tendril of my organizational web), but when I finally remembered that  and went to check earlier today – well, either I somehow erased the stuff, or I didn’t actually put the items in this particular online storage in the first place,. In which case… where the heck DID I put them?

So, you see.

I need an organizer to organize my organizers so I can keep track of just what I am organizing where. And why.

Sigh.

See, I was writing a promised (to me) article on Haiti and it just wasn’t going right. Start, stop. Delete. Start, stop. Delete. Rinse and repeat.

Finally I realized that there was a whole nother way of looking at things hovering at the edge of my mind, that I had been ignoring because… well, my article was written, pretty much (except for the actual writing part) and I really didn’t want to start over. That would be “failing to keep to my plan”!

I decided, though, that that was okay. I won’t say the new article will be much better, or more powerful or anything – but it will be something that seems to want to be written.

It’s funny – when I first clicked over to the post from the rss feed, I thought I’d already read it yesterday, so moved on. Then I realized that, no, those were OTHER lizards I read about yesterday, but it’s so rare that I read about lizards – of any sort – that it just didn’t seem likely they would show up two days in a row.

They did sneak in, though, as lizards are wont to do.

To top that, the lizards of yesterday were written about by Murr Brewster, whose site I was wandering though after following a link to it (she’s pretty funny).

But beyond the coincidence of the lizards, how often do you come across someone named “Murr”? If you’re me… never, until about a month ago. And since then, three! Well, one (also a writer/podcaster) spells it Mur, but still. The third I read about in one of the UK papers because he did something or other, or something happened to him, but I do not believe it had anything to do with writing. I could be wrong.

Sometimes (like this morning!) when visiting someone’s professional site – usually people I don’t know at all – I have to stop myself leaving little suggestions… “If you put this there, and then that over there, and have THIS as your focal point, it’ll be more effective and draw the reader in” or some such thing. For one thing, I’m not in that business anymore – marketing, branding, design, so on – so probably I wouldn’t know what I was talking about anyway. But also, well who wants to hear from perfect strangers.

I’m fairly certain that my color blast here likely will offend the sensibilities (not to mention the eyeballs) of at least a random visitor or two, but oh well! This suits me here. On the other hand Book of Louis, my history/whatever site, is bland as can be. And that suits me there.

So, unless people ask (and why would they?), I refrain. Most times.

Mom is watching a PBS show, some sort of oldies on Ed Sullivan thing. 60′s and 70′s – sounds of my childhood and teens. Good stuff

Of course I have to do the obligatory “They were so young!” exclamation. And also, “wow – most of those people would have been out of luck in the MTV era”.

And “who knew the guy who sang House of the Rising Sun looked like he just left Bible camp??”.

I could go on and on, but why I am really writing is Jim Morrison, of The Doors. Now his face I knew… such a pretty, dangerous looking boy, with those pouty lips and wildly curling hair – the stuff of “bad boy” dreams.

But I’m afraid that I can never see or hear him now without thinking of scjt’s “Night With Jim Morrison“.

Hilarious, but talk about a giant killer!

Reading lately about the underground railroad (great stuff!) and other things dealing with the antebellum South, and I got to wondering…  when enslaved persons ran away, how did people recognize them?

For instance:

advertisement for runaway slave (click to enlarge)

This says, in part- $150 REWARD

Ranaway from the subscriber, on the night of Monday the 11th July, a negro man named TOM, about 30 years of age, heavy in the chest, several of his jaw teeth out; and upon his body are several old marks of the whip, one of them straight down his back. He took with him a quantity of clothing and several hats.

And here’s one for a woman:

advertisement for emily (click to enlarge)

Says, in part:

100 Dollars REWARD!

Ranaway from the subscriber on the 27th of July, my Black Woman named EMILY, seventeen years of age, well grown, black color, has a whining voice. She took with her one dark calico and one blue and white dress, a red corded gingham bonnet, a striped shawl and slippers.

So what I’m wondering is… would you recognize your own mother or father, brother or sister from these descriptions? How in the world did the kidnappers (perfect strangers, mostly)  find black people – sometimes halfway across the country, living in communities with many other black people – from descriptions like this?

I doubt I would. Yet slave holders and kidnappers trusted and depended on advertisements like this (very rarely were there sketches appended, so far as I know) and sometimes people who had been living free for years were kidnapped and returned into bondage because someone recognized them from the descriptions. Or thought they did, at least.

I hope Tom and Emily made it into Canada or somewhere else safe. If they (at their separate times) made it across the Ohio river into Ohio, from Kentucky, at least they had a small chance.