White Board Wonders

Now I know Mr. Fix-It over in the Kitchen is the King of All Things White Board, but he's not the only one who has one. As Elliott & Nelson started picking up jobs, I bought a nice white board at Staples. Ended up getting a good deal on it and listing our jobs and marketing efforts. It worked OK, but the way I had it organized, I had to erase some of a client's information to enter new information. "Submitted 9/1" would get replaced with "Approved 9/15" for instance. This is dumb.

Then when we were making a marketing call with a prospective client, I saw the way he had his white board set up. Using black art tape, he made rows and columns and his white board looked like a nice, neat spreadsheet. Took me two minutes to decide to steal his idea and two weeks to find the tape. But now I have a 10-column board with labels for each column: Job, client, designer, due, staff, submitted, approved, invoiced, paid, follow-up. There are 12 rows down the board for open jobs.

Eleven of them are filled.

Is Writing a Mental Illness? Or Just a Syndrome?

Maybe this has been simmering since the recent discussions of writing and perfectionism, or maybe it's a reaction to editing (and correcting and scoring) the first assignments in my newswriting class. All I know is this: Writing is a bitch. Doing it will make you crazy and teaching it will make you mean.

It looks so frickin' easy. I've pushed a shovel around constructions sites (in Virginia in summer in 95% humidity) and yeah, sitting at a desk is less damn sweaty. But if you need to dig for a footer 24 inches deep, you dig then measure and know it's right.

Writing ain't like that. Here's a lead I wrote for a story 11 years ago:

On a gray January afternoon in 1970, Stanislaus County sheriff's Detective Billy Joe Dickens was murdered, shot in the back by a bank robber he never saw.

Here's how I still wonder if I should have written it:

On a gray January afternoon in 1970, Stanislaus County sheriff's Detective Billy Joe Dickens was murdered, shot in the back by a bank robber he never even saw.

It's 11 years later and I still don't know if I did it right.
And I still care.

Why I like Sci Fi

When Gina was home recently, she spent the whole time on the couch watching cooking shows. Emeril, Rachael Ray, Iron Chef, cook-off specials, bake-a-cake-shaped-like-a-tree documentaries, you name it.

The other night I was watching something on the Sci Fi Channel and Anonymous Diane pointed out that I wasn't much different. Just better shows. (I don't think that was her word, to be fair.)

I like Sci Fi. Always have.

When I was a kid, I knew the title of every original Star Trek episode. I had a tricorder and communicator. (And I still think a cell phone company should make a phone that looks exactly like an original Trek communicator...) I would read at night after I was supposed to be asleep with the light from a phaser flashlight. So it's not new.

The first screenplay I wrote was sci fi. I saw two movies last year that really worked. On was The Constant Gardener. The other was Serenity. That led me to Firefly, which is the best television show I never saw on TV. This year, new shows (or new season's of old shows) I've watched include the sci-fi comedy Eureka and the sci fi noir Battlestar Galactica. (Which is nothing like the cheesy Galactica of my childhood. The beer-drinking woman in the picture is Starbuck this time around.)

Sci Fi is optimistic, even when the last reminants of the human race are being chased around the galaxy by machines. (A machine race with a monotheistic religion -- there is no God but God -- while the human still worship the ancient Greek deities.) It means we're still around, if nothing else, which I'd like to see. I'd like to think that as a species we're collectively smart enough not to blow ourselves up or completely destroy our planet, but there is precious little evidence to support either of those positions.

And that's what I like about sci fi. It requires optimism that's unsupported by evidence -- like faith in Heaven, the belief that the Cubs will win a World Series one day or the Raiders will ever win another game.

Here's another thing. If I'm out in the forest behind my house and crest a hill, I know what I'm going to see on the other side. But in any sci fi story, that's not true. Crest a hill and you could see an alien army, a Utopian city, a portal to another dimension -- anything you can imagine.

So as a genre, sci fi requires faith and imagination. I think that's not all bad.

Or it's possible I'm just a really big geek.

Silverware Optional

Not sure that it rises to the level of something that makes anybody laugh, but I'm attempting to eat a carton of boysenberry yogurt with an oatmeal-raisin cookie. (No plastic spoons in Stockton today.) Efficient it's not.

In other news, Gina called from a Costa Rican pay phone today after a week in the jungle and saw monkeys! All is right in the world if Gina and Monkeys occur in the same sentence.

Why They Invented Mountain Bikes

So maybe it's not Oregon beautiful, and there is sales tax, but we just got in from a bike ride in the Stanislaus National Forest and it's about as close to heaven as you'll find in California.

The trail cuts off from a forest road behind our house. We got to it today from the actual paved road, but that's not even necessary. I rode it before, years ago, when I just started biking. Diane knew the trail from hiking it and showed me. I'll have to take a camera next time.

Imagine riding in a tunnel of dogwoods. Filtered sunlight. The sweet smells of the forest. Probably 10 to 12 miles the way we did it (I need to replace odometer batteries), and it begins and ends out our back door.

When NSO and them Kitchen people get here, we'll have to do it. (If they want...)

College Game Day

Now that's a sports Saturday worth tuning in for! The Mets mash the Dodgers (and the Yankee's lose -- much cheering by NSO.) UCLA wins, which elicits at least mild pleasure in Koji's Kitchen.

And in This Land, the Bears reign supreme.

We left at 11 a.m. for the 5 p.m. game, despite it being a three-hour drive. Get there, park in our usual spot and start walking the mile or so to campus. Actually we were going to Kip's for a pre-game beer and burger with a Cal-grad former colleague who now works at UC Davis but is still a Bear even if dressed in Aggie overalls... It's kinda funny-looking, actually.

And then we remember the tickets, safely tucked away in Diane's Desk Drawer.

Doh!

Game wasn't yet a sellout, so buying replacement duckets was possible, but we went to Kip's anyway to meet our Bear/Aggie friend, who was with his friends, who happened to have two extra tickets. We quickly bought them beer.

Campus was packed. Small women parted the blue sea of fans, and the band ran through the crowd to play the pre-game rally at Sproul Hall. Lots of cheering and singing along ensued. The nice thing about a successful team is that even I can sing along - and loudly, damnit - but nobody notices.

We march in with the band (as we always do) and watch the Bears put a beating on the Ducks. For highlights, check out the worldwide leader in sports. I don't know what to say about the uniforms, except they worked. The stadium was louder than I've ever heard it, and I discovered that constant yelling to disrupt an opponent can leave you quite light-headed.

Anyway, it was a fine fall day.

Launch

And so it begins. (Bonus point for anyone who can identify the movie reference. Hint: It was said by a cross-dressing dwarf...)

Not sure what this blog will evolve into -- no one ever is, I suspect. I anticipate random, infrequent and innane. But maybe we'll rise above.

I lived in a cloud today. A gray mist envelope that never opened. I stayed at my desk, the door to This Land open, and watched autumn extinguish summer like a wet wool blanket on a dying fire.

I swear, I couldn't script a better life.