The Zombie Flu

Forget the swine flu...this is the Zombie Flu.

The Scholarly Gentleman and I worked registration at the record-setting Fremont Zombie Walk Friday afternoon and evening. We got home very late, and I attributed SG's comments about a sore throat and fever to all the yelling we'd been doing ("Zombies? Register here! Whoops, let me wipe the blood off that pen.") and standing in the hot sun for several hours. It seemed like something a good night's sleep and rehydration would take care of.

Wrong.

Saturday morning, the SG looked and sounded like a zombie who'd died of bronchitis. He retired to the crypt.

By Sunday morning, he was feeling slightly less ghoulish, but I was flattened with milder but definitely similar symptoms. (The weather is warm -- but not 99.9 degrees, surely?)

All social plans for the weekend were canceled, with many apologies.

We'll be back from the dead. Soon.

Back from Minneapolis

I spent the weekend at a literary conference in Minneapolis. It's a city with a real sense of itself — the sort of identity a place has when it's the cultural center of the state. Beautiful parks, lots of agricultural and industrial history, everyone talking about the arts — and about religion, but not in a conservative sense. And you definitely get the feeling that people appreciate warm weather, which they were having.

It was good to get home — at an appalling hour — Sunday night. It had rained, so the tomatoes were doing well. Monday morning Garibaldi, the orange tom cat, was waiting on the back porch to be fed. He had a cut on his nose — always some new evidence of a fight.

After he ate, he came over and sniffed my hand, which I viewed as real progress. But I haven't seen him since then, and am now pretty sure that something out there (coyotes? a car? another cat?) got him. Or maybe someone captured him and took him to be neutered.

In a hour or so I'm picking up Smokey — my cat who lives with a neighbor seven blocks north — and taking him in for his annual vet visit. Another feline mystery.

Slobs on the web

As you know, I'm among the first to rush to the ramparts to defend web content writers from the accusation that we have lower standards for writing than our print colleagues.

Having spent this past week involved in a print project, I may need to stand down.

I was given the text taken from a non-profit's website and asked to lay out the text into a simple print brochure. (Using Apple's delightful page layout application, Pages.)

I sent the completed layout to the non-profit, expecting some comments back such as "more illustrations," "larger headlines," or "Can you make the columns shorter?" but got instead several dozen corrections to punctuation and capitalization and a number of complete rewrites of paragraphs.

"But," I pointed out to the person serving as the liaison for this work, "All those punctuation and capitalization problems, plus the sloppy writing and incorrect information, are on their website and have been there for the whole world to see for months."

He peered out from around the filing cabinet where he had taken shelter.

"Er, can you just make the changes?" he said.

Happy blogiversary

Friday was the 6th anniversary of The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out.

I celebrated by taking delivery of my new iMac (my third iMac in the past eight or nine years). I still haven't had time to open the box and set the thing up, so that's on the list for tomorrow. Setting it up, of course, takes about 10 minutes. It's deciding which apps to risk bring over with the data and which to reinstall from scratch that's tricky.

I intend to consult Adam Engst's ebook Take Control of Buying a Mac, which covers things like "How should I connecct my old and new Macs so I can transfer files?" and "What should I do about iTunes authorization when moving to a new Mac?"

And now, for my next act...

I've left a few threads loose on this blog in the past month or two, so this an attempt to tie them up.

• Some good news: I got the contract to write humorous essays about home and lifestyle topics for a local consumer newsletter. It's subscriber-only, and I am not able to retain rights to republish, so I can't re-post any of the essays on my blog. And they're not online. But I'm delighted to have an opportunity to do my favorite type of writing.

• I'm pretty much recovered from breaking my nose when I feel over some fencing on the patio while chasing a cat in the middle of the night.

• The orange cat, Mr. Garibaldi, is coming by for two meals a day and has let me touch him twice. Mostly he likes to sunbathe on the deck or sleep at the bottom of the back porch stairs.

Still recovering from Folklife weekend, which was great. I thought the festival was less chaotic than in past years, and more acoustic. Didn't get as much dancing done as I would have liked, but got the chance to catch up with several folks I hadn't seen in ages. High points of the weekend included seeing the Morris dancing mockumentary "A Life with Bells On," shown as a collaboration between SIFF and Folklife, and hearing Mike's band close the Roadhouse Sunday night with the waltz he composed for Nina.

I know exactly what I want for Christmas

Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes film, with Robert Downey as Holmes, opens Christmas Day.

Have ink cartridges, need printer

There's often a humorous side to technical glitches, though it's hard to see it when you've just spent close to $300 replacing three ink cartridges and three print heads on an HP Business Inkjet 1200d printer and it still prints faded, blurry pages and will only print the last page of any print job!

The printer refused to believe that the expensive new print heads, purchased from a reputable office supply place, were HP print heads. And the office supply place wouldn't take them back because they had been opened.

Part of my problem is that the HP Business Inkjet was manufactured in 2004 and purchased in 2006, which means it's so obsolete that the repair place I called (which would charge $125 just to look at a printer) warned me they wouldn't be able to get any parts for it, anyway.

So I figured I'd just give the thing away to someone who could use the $180 worth of fresh ink cartridges. I went on Craig's List to put together an ad.

That's when I found the guy who is selling two HP Business Inkjet 1200d printers, both in working condition, for $25 each. (The pair of them are about the same price as one color ink cartridge, BTW.) One of the printers is missing its power cable, but, what do you know, I've got one!

So tomorrow morning I'm driving to Tukwila to pick up two working (if obsolete) printers to go with my pricey ink cartridges. Yes, I know there is something weird about this.

Journalism dreams

I've been bidding on some fascinating projects recently. One would involve writing a humor column. The other is a comprehensive marketing communications program for a group of developers with an aggressive business plan. So: Lots of bids, lots of emails, lots of meetings.

Last night I dreamed I'd been hired to do marketing communications for a non-profit. I wasn't that interested in the work, but needed the money. The non-profit had offices in an old industrial building near Pioneer Square, and while waiting for the elevator there, I got talking to a man who had just come out of a big office that looked like a turn-of-the-century newsroom.

Through the dusty glass windows, I could see that the room was filled with intellectual-looking folks, lounging about and reading — old hippies and bohemians and academics. It turned out that the man on his way out was the managing editor of a magazine; he'd just quit because he was fed up. He asked me if I wanted the job — said the writers were impossible to manage. I asked him how much the editor's job was paying. He quoted quite a respectable amount, and I asked for an additional 10 percent.

"Fine," he said, handing me some keys. "It's all yours."

He disappeared into the elevator and I walked into the magazine office. It was filled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and massive oak desks; all the horizontal surfaces were covered with books and papers. The writers, mostly men, but some women, looked at me with expressions that would have been considered glares if they had been more energetic.

I picked up a phone (it was an old, dial phone) and began calling one of my two favorite editors in town. I was convinced that if I could get those two guys in to work with me, we could whip the place into shape. I remember being rather pleased that I felt so confident.

This has to be the first time I've ever dreamed about running a magazine!

The key to cat sitting

Cat sitting is easy if you've got the key.

If you've lost it — it's just the cat meowing on one side of the door, and you freaking out on the other.

I'm the neighborhood's designated cat sitter. Until yesterday, the panic episode of my pet-sitting career was when the neighbors across the street left town for two weeks, leaving me to care for their cats — and for the mice and fish the husband forgot to tell me about. Fortunately, their six-year-old yelled "Don't forget the fish" as they drove off down the street, and I investigated.

I feed cats, I pill cats, I let cats in and out. I find cats that have been locked overnight in a bedroom when the wind blew the door shut (phew!). I fill water bowls and I scoop litter.

My latest assignment seemed particularly easy because it involved only one cat, a 20-pound feline that lives contentedly indoors. He has an automatic feeding bowl and water dish, so all I needed to do was pet him, give him a few treats, and shovel the litter every few days.

Yesterday I went in, tossed my keys and purse on the coffee table, sat in a chair, and petted the cat for 20 minutes. I gave him two salmon treats, picked up my purse and keys, and realized that while my keys were on the coffee table, the key to the neighbors' house was missing.

"Meow."

I checked the floor, the counters, and the table tops. I checked the cushions of the chair where I'd been sitting. I dumped the contents of my purse on the floor and went though that. I checked the pockets of my jeans.

"Meow."

No key. The phone number for the neighbors' sister was on the information sheet in the kitchen; she was taking over cat care on the weekend, so I knew she had a key and I could, if all else failed, call her.

"Meow."

By now, it was time for me to leave for yoga class, and I decided to latch the front door from the inside, go out the back way, and leave the back door unlocked. Bad idea. This house has a door that automatically locks. I found myself standing on the back porch, locked out, with the sister's phone number on the info sheet in the kitchen.

"Meow," the cat said.

I went off to yoga class, came back late, and put off trying to locate the sister until this morning. After all, the cat had food and water, and was unlikely to die from lack of petting.

Searching old emails, I was able to find an evite from the neighbors, and, looking at the evite RSVPs spotted a name that sounded like it might be the sister's. Fortunately, she has an unusual last name. Using that, I was able to locate her on Linkedin and find out that she works for a small local law firm.

I called the firm. They greeted me in the usual arms-length business style, telling me that the sister was not available. Fortunately, I knew she was out of the office recovering from eye surgery. So I simply told them I was her brother's cat sitter and had locked the keys in the house with the cat. The person on the phone (who turned out to be the head of the firm) cracked up, and a few minutes later the sister called me back, laughing.

Her husband came over this evening to give me their key, and, sure enough, immediately spotted the original key where it had fallen — under the sofa.

"I was sure the cat had eaten it," he said kindly.

Funny is fun

I put The Mysterious Traveler blog to work yesterday providing a few examples of my humor writing. A Seattle area publication is looking for a columnist to write about home and lifestyle topics in a Dave Barry / Erma Bombeck vein, and I couldn't resist tossing my beret into the ring.

When I left Apple three years ago, my first stop was the 2006 Erma Bombeck writing conference where, as fate would have it, Dave Barry was the keynote speaker. This was at the peak of the snarky, ironic style of humor writing (practiced locally by The Stranger and imitated by The Weekly) and it was heartening to hear someone being just plain old mainstream funny.

Publish Post

John Ross (1947-2009)

I'm sad to report that my friend and technology colleague John Ross died earlier this month. Some of you may have known John as the author of books for O'Reilly and other publishers on computer networking. I suspect more of you knew him as one of the indefagitable organizers and the perennial emcee of the Band Scramble at the annual Northwest Folklife Festival.

I don't believe there's been an official obituary for John published yet, but you can follow the discussion of the sad news at the Mudcat Cafe website. (Mudcat's a group of people involved in the preservation and study of recorded music.)

I had the privilege of doing a bit of work with John on wireless networking issues for the Mac when he was expanding a book, originally for PC users, to a cross-platform audience. He also gave me much earnest advice on how to make a living as writer.

John's enthusiasm for folk music and knowledge and homemade cider will be remembered. A Celtic Band Scramble is planned in his memory at this year's Folklife (3:30-4 p.m. Sunday, Northwest Court Stage); I hope there will also be a somewhat less raucous gathering at another point.

Goats, chickens, and cats

This blog post is brought to you at 5 a.m. courtesy of Sheba, the deaf white cat, who went out with the Stripe Sisters a few minutes ago and now refuses to come in. So I'm waiting for her to get bored with the great outdoors so I can go back to sleep.

It's still quite dark out, but the paper's been delivered and the trees are filled with hundreds of twittering birds, reminding me of dinner Thursday evening at Jim and Sharon's. Their enclosed back porch was filled with young chickens that make the most wonderful sounds, a cross between clucking and chittering. Very soothing. There are also two small goats, brought in at night, and some of the chickens roost on top of the goats, which don't seem to mind at all.

I took this photo from their living room, which has a glass door looking into the porch area. The goats were posing.

Jim is building an enormous chicken coop — about twice the size of my garden shed, and far more elaborate — to house the chickens when they are full grown. They got a door for the coop from the ReStore, which reccles building material from houses; the chickens have a blue Tudor style door with leaded glass side panels.

Just what I need

This is the old orange tom cat that would like to live in the cat area under my office. In this photo, he's sleeping on some decking in the backyard; I got the shot with from about 20 feet away, in the house, as he's likely to run off if I open the door.

I should have gotten a shot of the old Lynxpoint Himalayan tom cat that also would like to live in the cat area under my office. In recent months the two of them have worn a path from the side yard to the sheltered area outside the basement where I have a fleece cat bed in a box.

It's gotten so that Kaylee and Zoe and Sheba cast annoyed glances to the left as soon as they walk out onto the back porch; they do not seem to like sharing the yard.

Both tomcats seem well-fed and reasonably healthy. The Himalayan has been around the neighborhood for several years, and has fathered some Lynxpoint kittens, now adult. The orange tom seems to be new to the street. I'm curious to see if I'll be able to tame one or both. I don't dare put out any food for them for fear of attracting raccoons. But I think I'll start putting out a dish of water in the morning when the weather gets warmer.

Any ideas for names?

What weekend?

I swear, I can't remember anything I did Saturday!

Oh, wait: I pruned my cookbook collection and am getting rid of some books on cooking with chocolate, and some old books on coffee and tea. (Everyone's a coffee expert these days, and the only tea I'm passionate about is Assam, aka Irish and English Breakfast.)

The Easter Bunny arrived mid-afternoon, and this year, I caught him hanging the bag of Peeps on the front door! This is, I believe, the 15th year of Easter Bunny visits. He came in and we had tea and caught up.

In the evening I went to visit a friend in the hospital, and then Tom and I had Greek food at Santorini's in Kirkland. The moussaka was just OK but the lamb souvlaki ($3.50 for a long skewer of big, lean chunks of lamb) was delicious. Found out about Santorini's from the excellent website Chef Seattle, which has a list of Cheap Eats for foodies. The list even has a French restaurant! And I wasn't surprised to find Fu Man Dumpling House at in second place on the (ranked) list. To my surprise, the top-ranked eaterie was one I'd never heard of: La Casa Del Mojito, on Lake City Way.

Sunday I visited Nina in Bellingham; we had lunch, went shopping, and came home and looked at Mexican recipes and drank Chai. Listened to Jonathan Edwards CDs on the way up, and Flanders and Swann CDs on the way back. Discover that the new Fit can really move! Its disappointing in-city gas usage is a real contrast to highway performance, which was better than 40 mpg.

Last night watched the Star Trek classic "The City on the Edge of Forever," which, according to the most recent Locus magazine, writer Harlan Ellison is still suing the producers about. At some point I want to read the original Ellison story on which the final script, edited by DC Fontana, is based.

Signs and sounds of spring

Sunday was the first truly warm day of spring; I had yoga class with Susan in Fremont at noon, then caught the end of the Ballard Sunday Market (Turkish bread, Gouda cheese, steampunk fashion). Came home and opened up the French doors and aired out the house. Movie plans in the evening ended up being just hanging out at Hank's with Tom, Bruce, and Margaret, eating Hank's Firehouse Lasagna and watching "The Emperor's New Groove" (2000), a delightful, little-known Disney animation.

I still haven't managed to see "Coraline."

The neighbors across the street got a dog, a very sweet middle-aged chocolate Lab. Their kids are thrilled; their cats look incredulous.

Feline frolics

Got home from yoga tonight and was nearly bowled off the front porch by a cat -- a big orange tom that had been sleeping in the front-porch cat tree. He saw me and exploded out of the cat tree and tore down the steps.

Zoe and Sheba were sitting in the window, watching all this, and they were clearly ready to pursue him into the night — if I'd let them out. Which I didn't.

Now we're all having some French Toast for dinner and cooling down.

Trailer Park Yoga classes April - June

Susan Powter is back in town and her women's yoga classes are starting up again: Monday, Wednesday, Friday evenings and Sunday noon in Fremont. (Contact me for specifics.) Payment is by the individual class (i.e., drop-in). The first class is a free "tryout." Bring a yoga mat, water, and -- if you have them -- a set of light wrist or ankle weights. You can start the program at any point.

I think Susan's classes are great because they are do-able, entertaining, and extremely effective for transforming fat into muscle. Most people lose weight, but everyone who does her classes loses inches. The classes are based on a Vinyasa yoga workout, but the emphasis is on breathing and on developing strength, endurance, and flexibility.

This is by no means a class for skinny Barbie dolls. A good number of the women in the class are obese to the point that it affects their mobility. There are also a number of women (like me) who work around physical injuries. Susan offers modifications that can work for everyone.

But, to be honest with you, this program isn't meant for everybody.

• The program won't yield exciting results if you only exercise twice a week. Not quite sure what the "magic formula" is, but if your only exercise is this class, twice a week, you'll get some initial effect, but then hit a plateau. To get a great fitness effect, you have do three 90-minute classes a week, or do two of these plus one other aerobic/strength workout during the week. (I'll probably be doing two or three of Susan's classes and a belly dance class; we have other folks who play soccer, or run.)

• You have to be able to modify, doing the versions of the poses that are comfortable for you and working up to the more difficult ones. If you insist on doing everything perfectly right away, you'll turn bright red like a lobster and then hate the class. I've learned that there are people who simply can't modify for fear of being criticized (apparently by some nasty gym teacher in their distant past); this program isn't for them.

What's going on in Ballard

Male cats. That's what's going on around my house. A big long-haired lynx-point and a wiry short-hair orange cat are prowling the street, circling through my back yard several times a day. Sheba, the deaf white cat, seems indignant. Zoe, the big tabby, is eager to take them on. Kaylee, the little tabby, is manifestly unhappy, and now stays in at night. She takes shelter under the kitchen table and watches with incredulity as Zoe gallumphs down the back steps to check out the action.

I've been working like crazy, and have only recent caught up on the local blogs. Anchor Tattoo is now offering a tattoo design of Edith Macefield's house. She was the woman who refused to sell her house on NW 46th to developers, remaining in the tiny bungalow while a massive commercial building was constructed surrounding her place on three sides and towered over it. According to the My Ballard blog, seven or eight people have selected the design, including a Ballard barista.

Downtown Ballard has been hit by a string of burglaries and police may have caught one of the burglars — with two storage lockers full of loot.

The Tux Shop on Market has moved, and the word is that Buffalo Exchange (clothes for the 20-somethings) and a BECU branch will be moving in. Great timing, that, because I've been thinking of taking my savings out of WAMU-going-to-be-JP-Morgan-Chase and putting it into BECU.

10 reasons why I'm not blogging as much

1. I'm blogging for three clients' sites.
2. I'm dealing with an unusual number of clients.
3. I'm publishing some complex websites for friends using iWeb, while editing a friend's book on iWeb '09.
4. I moved my professional blog to WordPress and am learning the ropes with that software; I'd describe it as powerful but surly.
5. I've taken on a strange project that involves advising on the re-launch of a fairly large commercial website.
6. I'm still trying to figure out what to do about getting out of organizing a Meetup I inherited.
7. I've been going to science fiction and writing conventions on weekends.
8. I've been going out to social activities.
9. I twitter many of the smaller things I used to blog.
10. I use Facebook at bit more often.

How about you? Do you blog as much as you used to?

Divorce, dim sum, and whirling felines

The two tabbies just brought in a moth from the back yard and are now pursuing it through the hallways. A few minutes ago, Sheba, the deaf white cat, stood on the tiptoes of all four paws, and chased her tail -- first clockwise, and then counterclockwise.

I'm tempted to join Sheba. My clients, apparently sensing that I'd like to spend my evenings writing fiction (trying to fix the story that got savaged in the workshop at Potlatch this past weekend) are deluging me with interesting work.

Other aspects of my life have been similarly active.

My mother has decided she wants to go into a continuing care community with her friends in Florida instead of the one she had planned to move into out here in Seattle. It makes sense. If she carries through on this, I'll be flying back East three or four times a year to visit. I realized that having her settle in Florida (rather than out here, near me) would make it easier for me to relocate to a warmer climate, which I'd like to do in a few years.

As some of you know, Zorg and I have been hammering out a separation agreement for the past six months. He signed it last week, and I signed today, realizing as I did that this was, essentially "it." In Washington state, the separation contract is the major legal event, going into great detail about division of property and setting forth various agreements. The dissolution of marriage paperwork, filed subsequently, is comparatively short and straightforward.

We've managed to get through things in a civilized fashion. To our friends, who have been supportive and diplomatic through it all: Thank you!

In the midst of all this, I flew down to the Bay Area last week for the Potlatch 18 science fiction convention. Each convention has its own personality, and Potlatch's is "unstructured." There was only one panel track, with very light programming, but lots of spontaneous get-togethers called Algonquins that get posted a few hours in advance on the bulletin board at registration. I missed the chance to go to the computer museum to see the Babbage machine in action, but got a small group to go to Lunatic Fringe (belly dancing supplies) and took the introductory jewelry-making class taught by Elise Matthiessen. The class was extraordinarily good (earrings and pendant in one hour!) and I discovered the craft is much more my style than knitting or sewing. Bead stores, here I come!

Potlatch is, of course, a literary convention. I was on a panel about Good Reads, talking about books that included Octavia Butler's Fledgling and Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. And I surived my first short-story critique -- discouraging but extremely useful.

The people at Potlatch were fascinating. It was difficult to get to anything scheduled in a timely fashion because I kept getting distracted by introductions and conversations. There were also some wonderful meals at nearby restaurants. Chelokababi's chicken with sour cherries (Albaloo polo) was the best dish of the weekend, though the dim sum at The Mayflower in Milpitas was the most entertaining meal. One member of our party used an iPhone app with pictures of dim sum (Yum Yum Dim Sum) to get us some arcane and amazing dishes.