Saturday, June 21, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
An open letter to late-night callers
To the young woman who has decided to drunk-dial her ex-boyfriend and got me instead, I’m very sorry for your suffering. And if you call me back at, say, 11:00 in the morning, when I could really use a break from my work, I’ll be happy to listen to you weep and tell me what an ass he is.
To the socialites who call looking for Bob or Barbi or a taxi at 3:00 in the morning, I’m very happy for you that your social life is so full. I can tell you’re having a wonderful time at that party. The music sounds great—whoever is in charge of the stereo is doing a fabulous job. But Bob doesn’t live here, nor does Barbi, and there’s no way I’m getting out of my warm bed to come and pick you up so you can throw up in my car.
To those who are calling the Metro Vancouver area code from the other side of the world, please be especially careful with your dialing. I know it’s a lot of numbers and it’s easy to get one wrong, but consider what it’s like for me to fumble in the dark for the phone and to hear you asking over and over again for your intended party in a language I don’t speak. Here’s a handy tip: If the person who answers the phone clearly doesn’t understand you, you’ve probably got the wrong number. Shouting loudly will not help her find the person you want.
If you happen to be a client of mine and are sending me a fax from Europe or calling me from the East Coast, stop for just a minute and remember that I’m in the Pacific time zone. Where you are it may be a perfectly reasonable business hour, but where I am we are all snoring gently in our beds (except for those who are out partying and calling me for a ride). Keep this in mind: I edit much better and more efficiently when I don’t have to prop my eyes open with toothpicks because I’ve been woken up by your call in the wee hours. I’m also much less cranky when I’ve had a full night’s sleep and therefore less likely to write “Did you never learn grammar in school, you moron?” in big red letters on your manuscript.
I know you’re probably thinking I should just turn the phones off at night so that you don’t have to worry your drunken or thoughtless little heads over waking me. But we have elderly relatives and sick relatives and my husband is part of an emergency response team, so that’s not an option. When I hear the phone ring at night, my first thought is that someone has died or there’s been an apartment-building fire and 50 people need help finding food and clothes and a place to stay. And with all that phone-induced adrenalin rushing through my body, it’s really hard for me to make sense of your weeping or drunken slurring or foreign-to-me language or requests for a rush job.
Please, late-night callers, please, think before you dial.
To the socialites who call looking for Bob or Barbi or a taxi at 3:00 in the morning, I’m very happy for you that your social life is so full. I can tell you’re having a wonderful time at that party. The music sounds great—whoever is in charge of the stereo is doing a fabulous job. But Bob doesn’t live here, nor does Barbi, and there’s no way I’m getting out of my warm bed to come and pick you up so you can throw up in my car.
To those who are calling the Metro Vancouver area code from the other side of the world, please be especially careful with your dialing. I know it’s a lot of numbers and it’s easy to get one wrong, but consider what it’s like for me to fumble in the dark for the phone and to hear you asking over and over again for your intended party in a language I don’t speak. Here’s a handy tip: If the person who answers the phone clearly doesn’t understand you, you’ve probably got the wrong number. Shouting loudly will not help her find the person you want.
If you happen to be a client of mine and are sending me a fax from Europe or calling me from the East Coast, stop for just a minute and remember that I’m in the Pacific time zone. Where you are it may be a perfectly reasonable business hour, but where I am we are all snoring gently in our beds (except for those who are out partying and calling me for a ride). Keep this in mind: I edit much better and more efficiently when I don’t have to prop my eyes open with toothpicks because I’ve been woken up by your call in the wee hours. I’m also much less cranky when I’ve had a full night’s sleep and therefore less likely to write “Did you never learn grammar in school, you moron?” in big red letters on your manuscript.
I know you’re probably thinking I should just turn the phones off at night so that you don’t have to worry your drunken or thoughtless little heads over waking me. But we have elderly relatives and sick relatives and my husband is part of an emergency response team, so that’s not an option. When I hear the phone ring at night, my first thought is that someone has died or there’s been an apartment-building fire and 50 people need help finding food and clothes and a place to stay. And with all that phone-induced adrenalin rushing through my body, it’s really hard for me to make sense of your weeping or drunken slurring or foreign-to-me language or requests for a rush job.
Please, late-night callers, please, think before you dial.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Wordless Wednesday #17--Waiting for summer
For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's, see wordlesswednesday.com.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Improg word: Fair
Improgging is improvisational blogging. A word is posted on the Improg blog twice a week. Take that word and blog about it in anyway you’d like: happy, sad, thoughtful, funny, short, long, with pictures, with words—anything goes! To read other people's interpretation of the current word, go here.
Monday’s posted word was fair. I was thinking about posting about things that are fair and things that aren’t—I could go on forever about this, I bet. But then I started thinking all the fairs I’ve gone to. I grew up going to the county fair and for a dozen years lived in an area that holds a big agricultural fair every summer.
But the best years, fair-wise, were the years we lived in California when our kids were younger. Some people call the area we lived in Wine Country, but to us it was Fair Country. We usually went to five or six fairs every year, starting with the Apple Blossom Fair in April and ending with the Sonoma County Harvest Fair in October. We went to the fair (two, actually) in our first month living there and we went to the fair in our last month living there.
Now I live close to the grounds for the Pacific National Exhibition, known as the PNE. It has a midway and rides (they’re actually there all year), and there are some farm animals, but it’s much bigger and more commercial than the fairs I love. There’s no home ec building where I can see everyone’s strawberry jams or check how many ribbons a friend won for her crafts like I could at other fairs. The vendors are commercial ones. I can’t buy a wall-hanging for my daughter’s room from a member of the quilt guild or a hemp bracelet from a guy with dreadlocks. There are no displays of kids’ science projects or Lego creations. The PNE is fun, but it’s not a community fair.
My stepsister and I liked to go to our county fair during the day when it was quiet, because the guys running the rides would let us stay on as long as we wanted. I still feel bad about the time we were on the Octopus and, thinking we were the only ones, we had the guy keep it going around and around and around, until finally the short kid we hadn’t noticed before threw up.
We were also crazy about roller coasters. Take a lesson from me: Don’t wear a strapless top on a roller coaster, or if you do, don’t put your hands over your head as you go down the big hill. Hello, Santa Cruz!
My kids are not big fans of fair rides and for this I’m kind of grateful. For one thing, as I’ve gotten older, even one round of Ring around the Rosy makes me so dizzy that I have to sit with my head between my knees. I don’t think I could take the Tilt-a-Whirl anymore. For another, we rarely have to stand in line for an hour and a half and pay $5 each to enjoy a 45-second ride.
And once you’ve become a mom, the rides that used to seem so thrilling are downright scary. I was never truly frightened on a roller coaster—not even the time when, with my hands in the air instead of holding onto the bar like a smart person would do, I flew right out of my seat and the guy sitting with me had to haul me back down by the waistband of my jeans—until I took my three-year-old son on the kiddy roller coaster at the Sonoma County Fair. No safety bar seems safe enough when it’s your kid. When were those bolts last tightened? Is that seat belt frayed? As we rode around the Dragon Coaster, a good five or six feet in the air, I had a death grip on his little shoulder.
Soon my son’s class is going on a field trip to the PNE grounds. Having inherited the family pukey gene, he won’t go on the dizzying rides, but he is planning on trying out the very roller coaster that I almost flew out of almost 27 years ago. He’s smaller and skinnier than I was then and if the safety bar is the same, it won’t come anywhere close to his body. But he’s also more sensible than I was (and he’s heard my story), so he’ll probably be holding on. I won’t know for sure, though, because I won’t be able to watch.
Monday’s posted word was fair. I was thinking about posting about things that are fair and things that aren’t—I could go on forever about this, I bet. But then I started thinking all the fairs I’ve gone to. I grew up going to the county fair and for a dozen years lived in an area that holds a big agricultural fair every summer.
But the best years, fair-wise, were the years we lived in California when our kids were younger. Some people call the area we lived in Wine Country, but to us it was Fair Country. We usually went to five or six fairs every year, starting with the Apple Blossom Fair in April and ending with the Sonoma County Harvest Fair in October. We went to the fair (two, actually) in our first month living there and we went to the fair in our last month living there.
Now I live close to the grounds for the Pacific National Exhibition, known as the PNE. It has a midway and rides (they’re actually there all year), and there are some farm animals, but it’s much bigger and more commercial than the fairs I love. There’s no home ec building where I can see everyone’s strawberry jams or check how many ribbons a friend won for her crafts like I could at other fairs. The vendors are commercial ones. I can’t buy a wall-hanging for my daughter’s room from a member of the quilt guild or a hemp bracelet from a guy with dreadlocks. There are no displays of kids’ science projects or Lego creations. The PNE is fun, but it’s not a community fair.
My stepsister and I liked to go to our county fair during the day when it was quiet, because the guys running the rides would let us stay on as long as we wanted. I still feel bad about the time we were on the Octopus and, thinking we were the only ones, we had the guy keep it going around and around and around, until finally the short kid we hadn’t noticed before threw up.
We were also crazy about roller coasters. Take a lesson from me: Don’t wear a strapless top on a roller coaster, or if you do, don’t put your hands over your head as you go down the big hill. Hello, Santa Cruz!
My kids are not big fans of fair rides and for this I’m kind of grateful. For one thing, as I’ve gotten older, even one round of Ring around the Rosy makes me so dizzy that I have to sit with my head between my knees. I don’t think I could take the Tilt-a-Whirl anymore. For another, we rarely have to stand in line for an hour and a half and pay $5 each to enjoy a 45-second ride.
And once you’ve become a mom, the rides that used to seem so thrilling are downright scary. I was never truly frightened on a roller coaster—not even the time when, with my hands in the air instead of holding onto the bar like a smart person would do, I flew right out of my seat and the guy sitting with me had to haul me back down by the waistband of my jeans—until I took my three-year-old son on the kiddy roller coaster at the Sonoma County Fair. No safety bar seems safe enough when it’s your kid. When were those bolts last tightened? Is that seat belt frayed? As we rode around the Dragon Coaster, a good five or six feet in the air, I had a death grip on his little shoulder.
Soon my son’s class is going on a field trip to the PNE grounds. Having inherited the family pukey gene, he won’t go on the dizzying rides, but he is planning on trying out the very roller coaster that I almost flew out of almost 27 years ago. He’s smaller and skinnier than I was then and if the safety bar is the same, it won’t come anywhere close to his body. But he’s also more sensible than I was (and he’s heard my story), so he’ll probably be holding on. I won’t know for sure, though, because I won’t be able to watch.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Green Friday--Think before you print
In my day job (which, unfortunately, sometimes spills over into an evening, night, and weekend job), I’m an editor. My work involves words, words, and more words. It also used to involve paper, paper, and more paper, but over the years I’ve cut way back on how much printing I do.
During the first half or so of my ridiculous number of years at university, I simply could not write directly on the computer (I mean compose. I’m not talking about graffiti here). When I tried, I would sit there, my mind as blank as the screen.
It didn’t help that there’s something weird about my eyes or my brain that makes me able to detect CRT monitors refreshing, so that to me it sometimes looks like the screen is scrolling 60 times a second. Given my tendency to motion sickness, this is not a good thing. I often had to go lie down (or worse) during work sessions. A writer and editor who gets pukey looking at a computer screen? About the only thing worse would be a car salesman who gets sick on test drives.
Anyway, when I wrote my master’s thesis, I actually wrote it. By hand. With a pen. On paper. And then I typed the whole damn thing into the computer, printed it up for editing, wrote some more, typed some more, printed it again—rinse and repeat several times. Over the years, though, I’ve developed the ability to think and look at a computer screen at the same time, which is good news for the forests of the world. And now that I have a flat-screen monitor, I rarely throw up while I work.
These days I work on-screen as much as possible. And recently I’ve been questioning every print job before I send it. Do I really need to print a book’s table of contents so I can compare it to the headings used in the text (what an exciting job I have—can you stand it?) or can I copy the TOC (fancy technical abbreviation) into a separate file and view both documents side by side? Do I really need to print a set of style guidelines or can I keep them open in the background and refer to them when I need to? Do I really need to print a whole email or can I jot down the important information on a piece of scrap paper? Do I really need to print a knitting pattern that I may never get around to making, or can I save it on my hard drive?
Of course, words read differently on the screen than on paper, so there are times that I have to print a job to get an accurate reading of it. Once in a while I have a client who prefers to work on paper. Sometimes I have to measure margins with a ruler (see "exciting job" above). And I still tend to print things I’m scared of losing, because my backing-up habits aren’t as good as they could be (shame on me).
Now that I stop and think instead of automatically hitting the print button, a package of paper lasts me an incredibly long time and I have less paper cluttering my office (not to imply that my office isn't cluttered—it's just not cluttered with printouts).
During the first half or so of my ridiculous number of years at university, I simply could not write directly on the computer (I mean compose. I’m not talking about graffiti here). When I tried, I would sit there, my mind as blank as the screen.
It didn’t help that there’s something weird about my eyes or my brain that makes me able to detect CRT monitors refreshing, so that to me it sometimes looks like the screen is scrolling 60 times a second. Given my tendency to motion sickness, this is not a good thing. I often had to go lie down (or worse) during work sessions. A writer and editor who gets pukey looking at a computer screen? About the only thing worse would be a car salesman who gets sick on test drives.
Anyway, when I wrote my master’s thesis, I actually wrote it. By hand. With a pen. On paper. And then I typed the whole damn thing into the computer, printed it up for editing, wrote some more, typed some more, printed it again—rinse and repeat several times. Over the years, though, I’ve developed the ability to think and look at a computer screen at the same time, which is good news for the forests of the world. And now that I have a flat-screen monitor, I rarely throw up while I work.
These days I work on-screen as much as possible. And recently I’ve been questioning every print job before I send it. Do I really need to print a book’s table of contents so I can compare it to the headings used in the text (what an exciting job I have—can you stand it?) or can I copy the TOC (fancy technical abbreviation) into a separate file and view both documents side by side? Do I really need to print a set of style guidelines or can I keep them open in the background and refer to them when I need to? Do I really need to print a whole email or can I jot down the important information on a piece of scrap paper? Do I really need to print a knitting pattern that I may never get around to making, or can I save it on my hard drive?
Of course, words read differently on the screen than on paper, so there are times that I have to print a job to get an accurate reading of it. Once in a while I have a client who prefers to work on paper. Sometimes I have to measure margins with a ruler (see "exciting job" above). And I still tend to print things I’m scared of losing, because my backing-up habits aren’t as good as they could be (shame on me).
Now that I stop and think instead of automatically hitting the print button, a package of paper lasts me an incredibly long time and I have less paper cluttering my office (not to imply that my office isn't cluttered—it's just not cluttered with printouts).
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Wordless Wednesday #16--A needed reminder
For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's, see wordlesswednesday.com.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Green Friday--Dead batteries come back to haunt us
Batteries contain toxic metals that can leach into landfills and into the environment. In fact, according to the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, 70% of the heavy metals in landfills is due to household batteries. Wow!
In our house we use rechargeable batteries as much as possible. Every time a single-use battery wears out in something, I ask myself (usually out loud, since I’m so desperate for adult conversation) whether it could be replaced with a rechargeable. The answer (also spoken out loud, of course) has, so far, always been yes. I find that it’s actually easier and cheaper to use rechargeables because we buy so many fewer batteries, and (bonus!) there’s less packaging to throw away.
When your rechargeables finally wear out, you can recycle them. If you’re in North America (and two of my four regular readers are), you can check the Call2Recycle site to find a drop-off site. I was surprised to find out that there are 48 drop-offs within five miles of my house (or, since I’m in Canada, 8 kilometres); several of them are in stores I shop at, and many of them also take old cell phones. 48! Who knew?
In some places there aren’t programs in place to recycle single-use batteries, but some stores, companies, and recyclers do take them. Currently a lot of these batteries are taken to hazardous waste landfills, but now that California has banned batteries from landfills and requires battery recycling, better options might become more widely available elsewhere. My husband’s company collects them, so once in a while I send him to work with a plastic baggy full of dead batteries (if that’s not nerdy, I don’t know what is).
One thing that hadn’t occurred to me until I read a handout produced by the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation was the number of batteries that people unknowingly throw away in phones, toys, and all sorts of gadgets. Now before we toss anything that might remotely have a battery in it, we open it up and check first.
I find that many things that are better for the environment actually save money and take little time and effort. Dealing with batteries is one of these things. We drop them off at places we go to anyway. We buy fewer batteries. Once in a while we have to charge the rechargeables or open something up before we throw it away. Not a lot of work to keep heavy metals out the waste stream.
In our house we use rechargeable batteries as much as possible. Every time a single-use battery wears out in something, I ask myself (usually out loud, since I’m so desperate for adult conversation) whether it could be replaced with a rechargeable. The answer (also spoken out loud, of course) has, so far, always been yes. I find that it’s actually easier and cheaper to use rechargeables because we buy so many fewer batteries, and (bonus!) there’s less packaging to throw away.
When your rechargeables finally wear out, you can recycle them. If you’re in North America (and two of my four regular readers are), you can check the Call2Recycle site to find a drop-off site. I was surprised to find out that there are 48 drop-offs within five miles of my house (or, since I’m in Canada, 8 kilometres); several of them are in stores I shop at, and many of them also take old cell phones. 48! Who knew?
In some places there aren’t programs in place to recycle single-use batteries, but some stores, companies, and recyclers do take them. Currently a lot of these batteries are taken to hazardous waste landfills, but now that California has banned batteries from landfills and requires battery recycling, better options might become more widely available elsewhere. My husband’s company collects them, so once in a while I send him to work with a plastic baggy full of dead batteries (if that’s not nerdy, I don’t know what is).
One thing that hadn’t occurred to me until I read a handout produced by the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation was the number of batteries that people unknowingly throw away in phones, toys, and all sorts of gadgets. Now before we toss anything that might remotely have a battery in it, we open it up and check first.
I find that many things that are better for the environment actually save money and take little time and effort. Dealing with batteries is one of these things. We drop them off at places we go to anyway. We buy fewer batteries. Once in a while we have to charge the rechargeables or open something up before we throw it away. Not a lot of work to keep heavy metals out the waste stream.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
