Oh, Teresa, I have that same leaf knife. Haven't used it in years. Maybe I'll dig it out of the drawer for my next trip.
And we may get some blushing weather this afternoon, according to NOAA: INSTABILITY IS EXPECTED TO BE VERY WEAK AND INSUFFICIENT FOR MORE THAN A ROUGE THUNDERSTORM ACROSS FAR SOUTHEAST OKLAHOMA.
Juli @275 -- do you have more room for storing canned food than frozen? If you look for recipes that call for a boiling water bath, rather than pressure cooking, a deep stock pot or spaghetti pot is all the special equipment you need. Look for _Putting Food By_, any edition, for recipes and instructions. I used to make a spicy carrot marmalade that also made a good relish with meat, and I've seen onion marmalade recipes too. Or you could try pickling them. Home-canned goods make great Christmas presents, too...
Hunt for Red October, too -- the sub commander was a traitor to Russia. Or at least the faction currently in power.
As long as we're talking dissertations and such -- reminds me of a copyright discussion I had on Facebook the other day. If you go to publish an excerpt as an article, like Madeline Ashby @171, read your journal's publication agreement Very Carefully. Make sure it is SPARC Addendum compliant and that YOU retain the copyright. Some argeements where the journal gets your copyright are so heinous that I'm not sure you could even legally use the same material in your dissertation. I know it's tough trying to get publications early in your career, but you'll only regret it later on if you sign your rights away just to get a publication.
Caroline, I often find a brisk 15 minute walk helps, especially if I use the time to think about exactly what I am going to tackle when I get back. "As soon as I get back, I will sit down with a cup of coffee, read these three relevant articles, mark them up, and transcribe notes into my outline in the appropriate places." Or, when I'm really stuck, I'll do things that are almost but not quite cat-vacuuming -- enter articles into EndNote and put them in labelled file folders, make sure all the books I'm using have bookplates and spine labels, weed or reorganize my study. Just *handling* the materials gets me a more inspired frame of mind for *doing* things with them, and I may run across things I forgot I was going to use.
Open Thready question: Is anyone here familiar with the Editorial Freelancers Association? I'm interested in picking up some freelance work, and when I asked an editors' discussion list I belong to, turns out they are also interested as potential employers of freelancers.
Barry @166, that question came up today in my office. Someone commented that everyone on Mad Men smokes like a chimney. I was trying to remember if everyone in Billy Wilder's movie The Apartment, set in a similar environment but filmed in 1962, featured quite as much smoking, and I don't think it did.
Okay, part of the middle of my post got eaten by the Things that Live in the Ether:
My daughter was born a few months earlier, during the Tienammen Square protests and massacre, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was a ray of hope, that perhaps I hadn't made a mistake after all in bringing another life into the world. I remember writing in her baby book that the Berlin Wall went up the year I was born and came down the year she was born, and I hoped this would be a sign of things to come.
My daughter was born a few months earlier, during the Tienammen Square protests and massacre, and the fall of the Berlin Wall was a ray ofafter all in bringing another life into the world. I remember writing in her baby book that the Berlin Wall went up the year I was born and came down the year she was born, and I hoped this would be a sign of things to come.
Bruce Cohen @59 reminded me of a quote I have tacked up on my wall: "Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television."
Rita Mae Brown
(Well, she may be consigning some damn fine TV to the dustheap, but the point is elegantly made.)
Earl Cooley @496, I liked the early Irene Adler books but the violence and general ickiness just got a little too much in the last couple I read -- Chapel Noir and Castle Rouge. I may have to go back and see if they've gotten back on track for my tastes...
More reading for Michael Roberts -- given that your tastes and mine align pretty well, you might also like to venture into historical-romance-mysteries -- Lindsey Davis's Marcus Didius Falco series and Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody series being my two favorites. If you want some raunchiness mixed in, try George MacDonald Frasier's Flashman series. Oh, and don't forget, Georgette Heyer also wrote some outstanding mysteries.
Got my H1N1 shot today because I'm in the group with chronic pulmonary inflammation -- still waiting for the campus health center to get the regular flu shots.
Wow. Does make you wonder if anyone was in charge anywhere, or just rubber-stamped it because, after all, it was Keegan. Didn't they at least send it to a qualified outside reader first? I've read manuscripts for several smaller publishers and caught errors -- if you can't afford to keep someone in-house, having an outside reader is surely an affordable alternative. I mean, this is Knopf -- surely they can afford a couple of thousand dollars for a referee?
Just general open-threadiness -- I just LOVE getting the dead-tree versions of things I have worked on in the mail! Today I got my copy of The Intersection of Native America and Fantasy, for which I did layout and indexing, AND the Fall 2009 issue of Mythlore, which I edit. Shiny!
Summer Storms @215: Alas, it didn't stop in the 1960s, and is one of the reasons we pulled our daughter out of the public school system and home-schooled. They said she'd learn to read in kindergarten so we shouldn't try to teach it at home, but since her class was late in the rotation they wouldn't get to the computer lab till late spring. They had some wonderful state-of-the-art program that would have them all reading by the end of the year no matter how late they started!
When it was finally her turn, lo and behold, all it turned out to be was a letter recognition program we'd used at home the year before. She already knew her letters quite well, thank you.
We bought some grocery-store learn-to-read books and had her reading by the second week of summer vacation. She hasn't stopped since. (This is the same school that considered her a discipline problem for working ahead in her math book...)
I wonder if the fact that it's retail makes it more complicated to learn to judge the body language and hit that sweet spot between annoying hovering and being there exactly when needed. I've learned to do it as a librarian, but I'm not on commission -- I'm not, at the same time, trying to make a personal cost-benefit decision about whether helping a particular patron will net me a big sale or use up all my time for a pittance. I don't know if the clerks at Home Depot get a sales commission or just a straight wage, or otherwise get judged by how many customers they help; it might make a difference.
Nancy @ 135, I've noticed that too. It's scary going into a spookily empty mall or outlet store and seeing all the staff standing around with hungry looks in their eyes, waiting to pounce. I bought too many things at a Dress Barn recently just because the clerk was soooo pathetically eager to please. (But then can one have too many white shirts? Not really. White shirts that actually fit MUST be purchased when found, or will be forever regretted.)
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