Sunday, February 24, 2019

Let there be more light!

I went out adulting today. I bought myself a new lamp for my bedroom and some seriously bright light bulbs.

Why is this a big deal? Thereby hangs a tale... 

The story starts about a year ago, when the kids finally convinced me that we needed to move out of the construction zone that was our former apartment. We toured a bunch of apartment communities -- and when I say "a bunch," I mean nine or ten. The list of potential apartments took some serious research and planning, nearly all of it done by Amy. What made it tougher than your typical apartment search was that we were looking for a three-bedroom place -- or at least a two-bedroom with a den -- so each of us could have a real door we could shut. (In the old place, we'd used Japanese screens to make a bedroom for Kitty out of the dining room.) A second bathroom was also on our wish list, as well as access to public transit and a short commute.

After all that work, after touring all those properties and looking at our preferences...we had zero properties that all three of us liked. We reconsidered our criteria and decided to go back to a couple of places that could work if we worked at it. One of them was this place, which was awesome in nearly every way -- except that the den, which someone would have to sleep in, was an interior room with no window. (Which is why they couldn't call it a bedroom, I suspect. Bedrooms have to have two means of ingress and egress in case of fire.) Other than that, it was a great apartment. I mean, the location is stellar and the kitchen is to die for.

So guess who fell on her sword and said she'd take the den?

I didn't think having no natural light in a bedroom would bug me as much as it does. But I recently realized I've been doing a lot of knitting -- way more than I've been writing. And it's partly because the knitting chair is by the big window in the living room, and my desk is in my bedroom. Once I figured that out, I realized Something Needed to Be Done.

I think you'll agree when I show you these. Here's the before picture, a.k.a. The Cave:


And here's the after, a.k.a. Sunshiny Day:


The extra lamp made a difference, but the real key was the type of lightbulb I put in it. I picked up a pack of GE's Refresh LED bulbs, which are billed as providing energetic daylight. "Recommended for home offices," the package said.

"Sounds good to me," I said.

I expect I would be less thrilled with this "energetic daylight" thing in the lamp next to my bed. But at least now I'm looking forward to sitting at my computer. Who knows? Maybe I'll even get some writing done.

***
I'll bore y'all with a knitting post next week.

Oh, one piece of housekeeping: Google Plus is being dismantled, and one of the first casualties is the G+ comment plug-in on blogs like mine. So hearth/myth is back to the native Blogger comment system, which has never worked particularly well. Apologies for that.

*** 
These moments of well-lit blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, February 17, 2019

A distraction-free weekend.

Every Presidents' Day weekend, my daughters attend Katsucon, a massive anime convention across the Potomac River from us in National Harbor, Maryland. (When I say massive, I mean massive. They have 21,000 attendees this year.) Kitty is the assistant head of Video Operations, so my kids get there a day earlier and stay a day longer than the regular attendees.

Which means I've had the apartment to myself since I got home from work Thursday -- or (checks the time) approximately 76 hours. And counting.

Creative Market

Yesterday, Kitty texted me to ask whether I could run something over to her in a few hours, after she got some sleep. Sure, I said. Then she offered to send me a reminder text.

"I think I'll be okay. There's not much here today to distract me," I said.

She LOL'ed and offered to text me earlier, "if you wanna cut the boredom sooner."

And I replied, "I said 'no distractions,' not 'bored'.''

"Same diff," she said.

But it's not the same diff. At work, I sit in a doorless cubicle in a hallway. My phone has twelve active lines. There's always background noise -- conversations, phones ringing. Then to get to work, I take public transit, and there's always background noise there, as well -- announcements over the intercom, other commuters' conversations, trains and buses starting and stopping. It's distracting.

And at home, our schedules are different enough that someone is always coming or going, or listening to music, or sleeping, or having a conversation.

It gets to the point where it's hard to find a minute to think.

This weekend, though, I've had oodles of minutes to think -- and to do other stuff, too. I've made headway on an editing project and spent lots of time knitting. I haven't been bored at all. In fact, it's been very relaxing -- so relaxing that I'm weighing whether to send the girls somewhere for a few more days. If I feel this relaxed after 76 hours, imagine what it would be like to have the place to myself for a whole week...

***
These moments of laid-back blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, February 10, 2019

On blackface.

I cannot tell you how disheartening it has been to be a Virginian this week -- standing by and watching our top elected officials' careers implode.

First it was Governor Ralph Northam. After he made a statement about an abortion bill that abortion opponents deemed too soft, a conservative website got hold of his 1984 medical school yearbook and found, on his page, a photo of two people, one in blackface and the other in a KKK hood. Immediately, folks on both sides of the aisle began calling for Northam, who's a Democrat, to resign.

First Northam apologized for the photo. Then, in a stunning reversal, he said neither of the people in the photo were him and he didn't know why it was on his page. He did, however, wear blackface to dress up as Michael Jackson in his youth. Moreover, he wasn't going to resign.

Then on Wednesday, attorney general Mark Herring, who's also a Democrat, met with members of the General Assembly's black caucus. When the meeting was over, Herring admitted that he too had worn blackface -- at a party in 1980. In a you-can't-make-this-stuff-up twist, before the announcement of his own transgression, Herring had been among those calling for Northam to resign. Now there were calls for his resignation.

Normally in Virginia, if the governor resigns, the lieutenant governor would step up and become governor. But Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax -- a Democrat and the only actual black man of the three -- is now embroiled in his own mess. Two women have accused him of sexual assault. And of course, there are calls on both sides of the aisle for him to resign.

(It's not lost on anyone that if all three men are ousted from their positions, next in line would be the Speaker of the House -- who's a Republican.)

You would think sex assault charges are the more serious. But this is Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. This is Virginia, where in the late 1950s, under Massive Resistance, the governor ordered public schools in several localities closed rather than submit to court-ordered integration. This is Virginia, where in August 2017 a bunch of white boys brought tiki torches to Charlottesville and one rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one of them.

This is Virginia, where racial prejudice still runs deep.

So this isn't just about blackface. But for the record: blackface is unacceptable.

Library of Congress | Public Domain
The practice of white folks donning makeup to appear black has been occurring for hundreds of years (you can bet Shakespeare's first Othello was a white guy under the paint). It became especially popular in the United States in the 19th century, during the heyday of the touring minstrel show, in which white performers would don blackface with clownish red lips. Wikipedia says, "Stereotyped blackface characters developed: buffoonish, lazy, superstitious, cowardly, and lascivious characters, who stole, lied pathologically, and mangled the English language. Early blackface minstrels were all male, so cross-dressing white men also played black women who were often portrayed as unappealingly and grotesquely mannish, in the matronly mammy mold, or as highly sexually provocative."

The practice continued well into the 20th century, moving from vaudeville to movies (Al Jolson appeared in blackface in the first-ever "talkie," The Jazz Singer) to radio's Amos 'n' Andy.

African-Americans see blackface as demeaning, and they're right. Blackface implies all blacks are like the caricature -- shiftless, lazy, cowardly buffoons -- when of course they are anything but.

In an interview yesterday with the Washington Post, Northam said he believes there's a reason why this has all come out now -- a higher-purpose-type reason. He intends to stay on and finish the rest of his term, and he's adopting as his mission an effort to make Virginia come to terms with racial equality and white privilege. "There are still some very deep wounds in Virginia," he told the Post.

No kidding.

I wish him the best of luck. It would be great to be able to say someday, without embarrassment, that I live in Virginia.

***
These moments of head-spinning blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Sunday, February 3, 2019

Games night.

I hear there's some kind of sportsball thing happening tonight. Which means some of y'all will soon be really happy, some will be angry and/or sad, and some will be too stuffed from the buffet to care.

Then there's the contingent who suffer through the game just to watch the halftime show. From what I'm seeing in my Facebook feed, those folks are already regretting their life choices tonight.

Well, fear not! I have here a thing that everyone can win.

Do you guys like word searches? I loved them as a kid. I was already good at spelling, and it turned out I was also good at spotting letter combinations in word search puzzles. You wouldn't think that would be a useful life skill -- but then I became an editor.

Anyway, below you will find a word search puzzle. The word list consists of the names of some of the deities in the Pipe Woman Chronicles universe, as lifted from the table of contents of A Billion Gods and Goddesses, 2nd Ed.

I used an online word search generator for this puzzle, and I haven't tried it myself yet. The words can go in any direction -- up, down, across, forward and backward, and diagonally. The generator wouldn't take a word that was more than 15 characters, so White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman has been shortened to "goddess," which is what Naomi calls her most of the time anyway.

Also, the graphic is a .png converted from a pdf. I hope it's clear enough. If not, Adobe owes me fifteen bucks.

Enjoy!


***
These moments of bloggy fun and games have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.