Filed under: Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, General Musings, Health, Hospice, Predictions, Sleep
Last Friday I dropped a note to the Library Director I’ve mentioned in this post about this big project, basically asking why I had yet to see payment for my work when I’d been told I should see it as early as 10/19. I got the following reply right away:
Thanks so much for letting us know. We turned in the invoice and will go tracing the situation. Again I apologize for this delay. You should not have to ask these things. We are in a transition period with a “temporary” agency helping us out in our business office until we can hire some staff. I’ll ask Mr. R to also help us with this situation and we will write you probably next week with any details.
*Sigh* Beginnings are fragile times, as we learn to dance with someone new. Is this delay a portent of things to come – will I always have to hassle them to pay their bills on time? Or is it just a fluke, an unfortunate glitch which means nothing? I replied this morning:
Thank you – any help you can provide to expedite payment will be greatly appreciated. I’m somewhat distracted by our hospice care-giving for my mother-in-law at this time and don’t have the attention to spare trying to track such things down.
So we’ll see. And I mention this because it does sort of sum-up how I am feeling now, as we enter into the closing weeks of my MIL’s life: distracted, tired. Yes, we’re now getting more sleep, and that helps a great deal – but still, the emotional stress has cranked up along with the demands of routine care giving, as I have tried to outline in all my posts related to this. I do have work to do, as does my wife, and then there is the routine of just getting through the needs of ‘normal’ life. But to a certain extent such concerns fall by the wayside as we turn more of our focus to giving my MIL a good death, as comfortable and pain-free as possible – all the while trying our best to pace ourselves, since we have no way of knowing exactly how much further this marathon has to go.
Jim Downey
*** Update, 10:00AM November 5 ***
Got word back from the client:
Good news. The check was sent out Friday (November 2), so you should receive it within a day or so. As suspected, the turbulence in our business office is to blame for the delay. We apologize again.
So, provided nothing gets ‘lost in the mail’, looks like we’re off to a decent start. With institutional clients, I usually expect them to take upwards of a month to process payment, and this client would not be tardy.
Fingers crossed.
Jim D.
Filed under: Flu, General Musings, Global Warming, Habanero, Migraine, movies, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Umberto Eco, when asked why he wrote The Name of the Rose, famously replied: “I wanted to poison a monk.”
I can sympathize.
There are times when I’m a little grumpy, or have just had a little too much exposure to my fellow monkeys, when I’d like to kill a few people myself. In fact, catch me when I’m feeling more than a bit honest, and I’ll admit that part of the backstory of Communion of Dreams is because I think that the world really would be better off with about 2/3 of the population gone, as traumatic and painful as that might be. No, I am not advocating it – I can just see the benefit of some pandemic flu or plague, in terms of the carrying capacity of the planet.
And of course I see plenty of ways in which we’re well on the road to having this happen, as I write about here upon occasion. Take your pick: war, terrorism, global warming, disease, or even just eating ourselves to death. I just came from the store, where I needed to get some frozen raspberries for a habanero jelly recipe I want to make. There in my neighborhood supermarket were 120 feet of freezers carrying various ice creams and other dessert treats. One aisle over was 60 feet of frozen pizzas. I looked and looked for frozen fruits, and found one narrow little rack, about half the width of one 10′ wide freezer unit, containing a small selection of fruits. Think there’s something wrong there?
*Gah.*
OK, I am a little grumpy. I’m in a cycle of migraines, it seems, having had two in the last week. Still living with the echoes of the one yesterday. But still, sometimes I feel very pessimistic about our future . . . and take a certain perverse pleasure in it.
Well, this is the 200th post. Woo-hoo. I’ll be a little more upbeat later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Feedback, General Musings, movies, Promotion, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I heard back from the person mentioned in this post. What they said:
I’m sorry to report that the person I was hoping would pass along the novel to “hollywood” is too much of an editor and less of a reader. They have been held back by the “roughness” as Kilgore Trout put it. Although they are still hoping/planning to try and read through it I told them that if their heart wasn’t really in it enough to actually finish reading the novel not to pass it along. Networking is only helpful when done with integrity – at least to my mind. I have a couple more “connected” people to try though and will look into them. If you would like I can pass along the editorial comments.
My response:
Oh, that’s fine – as you wish. I concur that networking should only be handled with integrity – the quickest way to ‘burn your cred’ (ruin your credibility) for someone like that is to push something you don’t honestly believe in. I’m certainly willing to hear criticism – my skin is plenty thick, and I will use it as I see fit – but I’m not planning on a major rewrite of the thing anytime soon. If there are small glitches (and certainly if there are typos, et cetera), I’m perfectly happy to fix those.
I honestly think that most of the problem that some people have with the book is that they don’t give it a chance – what may seem at first exposure to be a ‘problem’ is usually an intentional technique on my part to engage the reader to be thinking or reacting to something in a specific way, setting up for either an evolution in thought later or just some kind of outright surprise. Now, since this is “just” science fiction, and I am “just” a first-time novelist, some people do not expect any kind of literary sophistication in the book. So they get partway in, see some things which confuse their expectations, and give up. Whereas if they read it all the way through (perhaps more than once), some of the more subtle things going on may become evident.
*sigh* I’m not claiming to be some kind of literary genius. Everything I did with the novel is fairly standard stuff, applied from my education and decades of reading. It’s just that too often people are not expecting anything more than a surface layer from popular fiction. And when you don’t meet their expectations, if they don’t have some faith in you as an ‘established’ or ‘recognized’ author, they give up. If I’ve failed in anything, it is not in catering to these expectations on the part of some readers to help them get past their initial confusion. I just dislike pandering to people. Certainly, that segment of my audience who have completed the book and found themselves pleased with the whole thing is more rewarding to me than those who do not make it more than a couple of chapters in.
Oh, and thanks for providing me material for the blog. 😉
Yeah, I know – makes me sound like I have a pretty inflated opinion of myself and my book. There is an element of that, I will admit. But mostly, it is just a manifestation of my self confidence – a necessary component in dealing with life, and in particular in dealing with being an artist/author. A personal essay I wrote several years ago that touches on this:
Expectations
One birthday, when I was nine or ten, I woke with anticipation of the presents I would receive. Still in my pajamas I rushed into the kitchen where my parents were having coffee, expecting to get the loot which was rightfully mine. My father happily handed over a small, wrapped box. I opened it eagerly, to find a little American flag on a wooden stick. My father said that since my birthday was July 4th, he thought I would appreciate the gift. Horrorstruck first at not getting anything better, then at my own greed, I guiltily told my parents that I thought it was a fine gift. After a moment, of course, my folks brought out my real presents. I can no longer tell you what those presents were, but the lesson in expectations my dad taught me that day always remained with me. My dad had been a Marine, fought in Korea, and was a deeply patriotic cop who was killed while on duty a couple of years after that birthday. I’ve never looked at the American flag without remembering what a fine gift it really is, and have never forgotten not to take some things for granted.
When I was in High School some years later, I learned another lesson in expectations. I had always been a good student (straight A’s, involved in Student Government, various clubs, et cetera), but I was never announced as a member of the National Honor Society. With that earlier lesson about expectations firmly in mind, I watched as my friends were inducted during my Sophomore and Junior years, figuring that there was a reason that I had been passed over, that there was some flaw in my academic record that disqualified me. But I couldn’t figure out what it might be. When, during my Senior year, the NHS list came out and it didn’t have my name on it again, I decided to ask someone about it.
I went to my advisor and asked if he could explain it to me. He had only been my advisor my Senior year, but knew me fairly well, knew my GPA and my involvement level. He looked at me with some surprise and said he thought I was already a member. When I said no, he said he’d look into it. A couple of hours later I was summoned to the Principal’s office. It turned out that my file had been mis-filed years earlier. A purely clerical error. I should have been a member of the Society all along. Everyone was most apologetic, and they retroactively inducted me into the NHS.
My High School days are far behind me, and it has long since ceased to matter to me whether I received any particular recognition or award back then. As I’ve matured, gained life experience, I’ve learned many other lessons about tempering expectations, living with occasional disappointment, accepting that things don’t always work out the way you plan no matter how hard you work or how deserving you are. But those two early lessons in expectations still are the boundaries that I live by: don’t take things for granted, but don’t be afraid to ask why things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. This gives me an appreciation for life, and the strength to really live it, which I think would make both my parents proud.
So yeah, I have some ego. But it comes from realizing that you get nowhere from being afraid to create and assert yourself.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, General Musings, Hospice, Predictions, Psychic abilities
It was a half hour before lunch yesterday. I checked in on my MIL, who was sitting in the front room, reading. Doing this regularly helps her feel less anxious, gives her a chance to ask questions or if she needs something, since she doesn’t always remember that she can just call for me.
“How’re you doing?”
“I’d like to get up and look out that window.”
This is unusual. “Um, why?”
“Because I want to see what’s so interesting out there.”
“???”
“There was a man here a few minutes ago, and he was looking out that window at something.”
No, there wasn’t – we’d been alone since my wife left for her office 90 minutes earlier. “A man?”
“Yes. There was a man there, looking out. He seemed to be very interested in something.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
I was on-call last night. It’s a lot easier to do this now that it’s only a couple times a week. My MIL had been restless early on, so I went to check on her about 11:00.
“You OK?”
“Yes. But I need to get up.”
“Do you need to use the toilet?”
“No. I need to make room for the other people.”
“???”
“All the people who are here. I need to let them use the room.”
“No, it’s OK – this is your room, and they’re happy to let you sleep here.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
At 5:30 this morning, she was stirring. I went downstairs to see what was going on. My MIL was over at the edge of her bed, against the rails, trying to reach the lamp on her bedside table (which we keep out of range of her reach on purpose).
“Whatcha doing?”
“Trying to turn on that light.”
“Why?”
“Well, so I can see the other people.”
“???”
“The ones who are here for dinner. I want to go to dinner with them.”
“It’s 5:30 in the morning.” There’s a bright digital clock on the table, but she usually forgets to look at the indicator for AM/PM.
“Then why are the people here for dinner?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll go ask them. But you can go back to sleep, and we’ll be sure to get you up when it is time for breakfast at 8 o’clock.”
“OK.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
It was a little after 7:00, I was just sitting down with my second cup of coffee and catching up on the news online. I heard my MIL stirring again, went to investigate.
“Do you need something?”
“I’m trying to see if I can get my head through these bars.” She means the bed rails.
“That’s not a good idea. You could get hurt.” She won’t be able to, anyway, but still it’s not a good idea for her to be trying it.
“Oh. OK. Well, I called my family in Boonville, and the oldest boy is going to come and get me.” I think she’s thinking of my wife’s cousin Bob, who died earlier this year.
“Well, I’ll be sure to come wake you when he gets here. But you can go back to sleep until then.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Makes you wonder.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Failure, General Musings, Government, ISS, NASA, NYT, Predictions, Science, Space, tech
Here’s a prediction: more people are going to die in space.
Not exactly newsworthy, is it? When you engage in the sort of dangerous enterprise like spacetravel (or even just getting there), the learning curve is steep and marked with blood. I can’t see any other way around it – as carefully designed and tested as every component is, there are still going to be failures, and some of those failures are going to mean that good men and women die. I know it. You know it. The astronauts certainly know it.
But just as today’s cars and aircraft are *thousands* of times safer than early cars and airplanes were, so will spacecraft become safer through use and experimentation. Via today’s NYT, the opening paragraphs of this article by James Oberg seems to understand how this learning process works:
4 October 2007—Aboard the International Space Station, the three Russian computers that control the station’s orientation have been happily humming away now for several weeks. And that’s proof that the crisis in June that crippled the ISS and bloodied the U.S.-Russian partnership that supports it, has been solved.
But the technological—and diplomatic—lessons of that crisis need to be fully understood and appreciated. Because if the failure had occurred on the way to Mars, say, it probably would have been fatal, and it will likely be the same international partnership that builds the hardware for a future Mars mission.
The critical computer systems, it turned out, had been designed, built, and operated incorrectly—and the failure was inevitable. Only being so relatively close to Earth, in range of resupply and support missions, saved the spacecraft from catastrophe.
Oberg gives a nice, complete explanation of what happened and how it was overcome. But the concluding paragraph may come as a bit of a surprise:
It is dismaying that after decades of experience with manned space stations, Russian space engineers still couldn’t keep unwanted condensation at bay. But what’s worse is that they designed circuitry that would allow one spot of corrosion to fell a supposedly triply redundant control computer complex. Another cause for dismay is that when trouble did develop, the Russians’ first instinct was to blame their American partners. Such deficiencies need to be worked out in the years ahead, on the space station, before both the technology and the diplomacy can be thought reliable enough for far-ranging missions that replacement shipments wouldn’t be able to reach.
Why is he so harsh? Because, as his wiki entry explains:
During the 1990s, he was involved in NASA studies of the Soviet space program, with particular emphasis on safety aspects; these had often been covered up or downplayed, and with the advent of the ISS and the Shuttle-Mir programs, NASA was keen to study them as much as possible.
Ah. Got it – he’s professionally aggravated that the Russians *haven’t* been willing to learn the lessons of their mistakes. Because until you ‘fess up to the mistakes you make, you can’t learn from them . . . and more people will die, needlessly.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Flu, Flu Wiki, General Musings, Global Warming, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Science, Society
You’ve probably seen it – the media is filled with reports of the brain-eating amoeba which has killed six. Here’s a sample:
PHOENIX – It sounds like science fiction but it’s true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.
Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it’s killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.
“This is definitely something we need to track,” said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better,” Beach said. “In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.”
Scary, eh? And tying it to climate change makes it even moreso.
But explain to me why this is more frightening than the 8 new cases of Ebola reported in Congo. The Ebola hemorrhagic fever family of viruses have no treatment, no vaccine, a mortality rate up to 90%, and are easily passed from person to person.
Or why six people dying from swimming in lakes is worse than the 65 people who have died already this year from H5N1, according to the FluWiki. This influenza virus (and related variants) is considered to be the most likely cause of the next global pandemic.
Oh, never mind. I know why – because it’s here in the US. And it eats brains. And it is an easy connection to the effects of climate change. And because it is new. Fear sells, as I discussed in comments in this post a couple of weeks back.
But really, either Ebola or H5N1 are a much greater threat, as any public health official or doctor will tell you. They just don’t have the cool name of “Zombie Amoeba.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Failure, General Musings, Government, Iraq, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, Society, Violence
So, three weeks ago I wrote about the initial reports that the Air Force had managed to lose track of some of its nukes, and accidentally transported them across the country.
Well, the story just keeps getting better. From the Washington Post this past Sunday:
Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident.
The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on the plane in Louisiana for nearly nine hours more before being discovered. In total, the warheads slipped from the Air Force’s nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone’s knowledge.
“I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing,” retired Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as U.S. Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, said in an interview.
Yeah, that’s disturbing, all right. But why bring it back up? We knew already that the incident was a colossal fuck-up. What more is there to be said?
Go read the Washington Post follow-up, and you’ll get a sense of why this is a big deal. Here’s another excerpt:
Military officers, nuclear weapons analysts and lawmakers have expressed concern that it was not just a fluke, but a symptom of deeper problems in the handling of nuclear weapons now that Cold War anxieties have abated.
But could there be something else at work?
The Air Force’s inspector general in 2003 found that half of the “nuclear surety” inspections conducted that year resulted in failing grades — the worst performance since inspections of weapons-handling began. Minot’s 5th Bomb Wing was among the units that failed, and the Louisiana-based 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale garnered an unsatisfactory rating in 2005.
Both units passed subsequent nuclear inspections, and Minot was given high marks in a 2006 inspection. The 2003 report on the 5th Bomb Wing attributed its poor performance to the demands of supporting combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wartime stresses had “resulted in a lack of time to focus and practice nuclear operations,” the report stated.
Ah, there ya go. The stresses of the ongoing debacle in Iraq is now playing havoc with the security of our nuclear forces. That’s not a terribly comforting thought, is it? I mean, letting nukes sit unsecured out on an air force base for more than 24 hours means that any number of really bad things could have happened, up to and including the possible theft of one (or more) of the weapons. Gee, now think . . . who might want to have access to such a weapon? Even if you didn’t have the capability of using it as a nuclear bomb, you could still crack open the thing and get access to the highly toxic and extremely radioactive fissionable material. That’d make a swell terror weapon if used on American soil.
And, unfortunately, I am no longer willing to dismiss entirely the possibility that our own government (or parts thereof) might be willing to see such a thing happen for their own reasons. Yeah, I know, tin-foil beanie stuff. But can you honestly say that you would put the idea 100% out of mind?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Babylon 5, Ballistics, General Musings, Guns, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
“All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation.”
-G’Kar, Z’ha’dum
Yesterday a buddy of mine and I got out to do some shooting. It may seem odd to someone who isn’t into shooting sports, but this can actually be one of the most relaxing things you can do, at least for me at this time. Why? Because, when I’m shooting, I have to be completely attentive to what I am doing – I can’t be thinking about what is going on at home, whether my MIL is stirring and needs attention, et cetera. As I have mentioned previously, one of the most exhausting aspects of being a care-giver for someone with Alzheimer’s/dementia is that I always, always, have part of my attention diverted to keeping track of what is going on with my MIL. You try doing that with part of your brain while accomplishing anything else, and you’ll quickly understand the problem.
Anyway, it was a good time, doing some informal shooting out on private land. We shot some pistols, a little 9mm carbine of mine which is just a lot of fun, and then my friend got out one of his black powder rifles: a Peabody .43 Spanish made in 1863. My friend is something of an authority on 19th century guns, and has been educating me about them. We shot several rounds, the large 400 grain bullets punching paper at 40 yards, the gun giving a slow but very solid shove back into your shoulder. That’s typical with black-powder: it’s not the sharp crack you get from modern weapons, with their higher pressures from faster-burning powder. After each shot, we’d pull down the trigger guard, rolling the receiver down and ejecting the cartridge, then insert another cartridge by hand and set it before closing the rolling block to prepare the weapon to fire again.
After all the shooting was done, our equipment packed up and put away, we headed back into town and got some lunch. As we talked over lunch, I asked my friend about how long it was before the Peabody we had been shooting evolved into the later repeating rifles which proved so reliable and popular. Because, as I saw it, all the elements were there: a dependable brass cartridge, a mechanism to extract and eject the spent shell, the moving receiver. All that was needed was a way to hold more rounds and feed them.
As we finished up our meal he gave me the brief run-down of the history or the repeating rifle development (which is basically what you’ll find in this Wikipedia article, particularly the sub-headings of ‘predecessors’ and ‘development’), and the conversation moved on to a more general discussion. I started to explain that one of the things I find so interesting, one of the unifying themes in all the things I have done is an interest in . . .
“Transitions,” my friend said.
I stopped. I was going to say “innovations,” but he was right.
“It shows in your novel.” (He’d recently read Communion.)
“Actually, I was thinking more of ‘innovations’ – those instances when people bring together different and diffuse elements to achieve something new, whether it is a mechanism, or a procedure, or just a way of looking at the world.”
We paid the bill, headed out to the car.
“Yeah, but it’s like the way that the people involved in your book – the characters – are all struggling to understand this new thing, this new artifact, this unexpected visitor. And I like the way that they don’t just figure it out instantly – the way each one of them tries to fit it into their own expectations about the world, and what it means. They struggle with it, they have to keep learning and investigating and working at it, before they finally come to an understanding.” He looked at me as we got back in the car. “Transitions.”
Transitions, indeed. Moments of transition, moments of revelation. Because that is all we have, when you come right down to it.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 