Aging

The first thing I did today was to wake up and again beat my consecutive days breathing streak. I’m not only on a roll breaking the streak, but I’m on a streak of breaking the streak that’s almost as long. Really, today I am the youngest I’ve ever been and the oldest I’ve ever been, so age is just what age is.

Of course I’m still in the “I can’t believe how old the people I graduated high school with” phase. I don’t hit the “age is just a number” phase for a few more weeks. Which is kind of why I’m writing today.

About six months ago, I found two bottles of malt-vitamins in the clearance aisle at Walgreens, so, always on the lookout for a deal, I snatched them up. I have consumed them regularly, too. So much so that I decided it was time to look for more clearance vitamins. To no avail.

After commenting to my better three-fourths about it, Ginger told me it would be fine to pay full price for a new bottle. I resisted (of course) because buying them on clearance also feeds the cheap gene. However, I noticed a marked difference when I missed a day. Reluctantly, I brought myself to the full-priced vitamin aisle and looked around. There were a few empty spots, but all I could find were male, 50+ multi-vitamins. Not having reached that two-and-a-half score mark, there is no way I could purchase those, so I walked out vitamin less.

Today, 21 Aug, I looked and realized that I have exactly 10 pills left.

The Plan

About a month ago this article came to me in an email. It talks about a way of planning to increase productivity. Parts of it are things I already do, so I know those parts work. The rest may be useful too. Of course, a few things jumped out at me while reading.

The first was that the article was written several years ago, and this guy was just recycling it for his email list. A great idea that saves on time. It also shows the effectiveness of the system because if it didn’t work, he wouldn’t be able to reuse it.

The second thing was less important, though it may underscore some points in the article. The Helmut von Moltke the Elder quote is a misquote. He actually said, “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” Rather than the more friendly and quotable “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Von Moltke’s other famous quote (and indeed his revolutionary method of reorganizing military leadership) is also useful as it relates to this article: “Strategy is a system of expedients.”

What the author has done is more of the latter quote. Not only has he made productivity a system of expedients, but he has turned it on itself in recycling the blog post. This makes me think that it’s time for me to recycle a few of mine as well. While there is certainly some drivel in the dusty archives, there are some nuggets, too. I’ll try to find more of those than the former.

For the record, I did pause at von Moltke the Elder's monument near the Victory Column in Berlin (which I also wrote about for Atlas Obscura) . I definitely did not make it to the Invalids Cemetery where von Moltke the Younger is buried, but I tried to get there because that's where the Red Baron was buried the second time. I got to see where the Red Baron was finally interred, but I only mention all of this to show that I get distracted by ribbons a lot.

In the Workshop

Some time back I wrote this short piece and forgot about it. It was an introduction to a short story that I did go further into but haven’t finished.

Digging around for ideas for the next collection of short stories I re-read this and keep thinking it is an interesting introduction.

Tools were scattered across the tabletop like discarded debris. Scraps of paper with scribbled dimensions and sketches of creations lay about as well. Some crumpled, some flattened, some were under tools, others over. One well worn and yellowed sheet was tacked on the board behind the main table. It depicted both a finished product and intermediate steps to complete in a gradual progression. The well-worn page had been revised with erasures and overwrites as well as new scribbles in the margins. 

The main workspace was so cluttered there was only a small space available for work, but that was exactly what was going on. Another toy was being created in the alcoved space for creation. “So you see how easy they are to compile?”

“But Dad, they’re so close to these other ones.” With a wave of his hand the Son indicated the workshop bench to the right. It was just as cluttered but contained stacks of completed toys. They were hunched over and fuzzier than the one just completed as if they could not stand up as straight. 

The Father frowned, “That will confuse them later on, but no, they aren’t the same.”

Picking up the new toy He tested its weight. “They’ll get heavier later on, but for now this is what they need. Did you see the Garden I made for them to hang out in? It’s the best.”

Silently the Son took the toy from his Father’s hands. Hefting it himself he held it up to the light, “They’re perfect.”

“Not perfect,” said the Father, “but they are to die for.”

It's Here

The world now has Jonathan Byrd in print.

OK, so the print on demand feature is running a little behind, but the ebook is for sale now. If I got the link right.

books2read.com/u/3JR8Ae

8 March Update: I’m not sure why but I’m being told that we can’t use this link for 48 hours because Amazon won’t let us in there. So the link may or may not work for a short while. I’ll update when it works again, but you can email me (or comment here) if you’re trying to find the book and can’t just yet.

9 March Update: It should be fixed now and it should also be on Amazon and Kindle in a few days. It should pop up as one of the options to buy when you click this link that should again work. But if there is a problem reach out to me and I’ll get it fixed for you.

10 March Update: Well, maybe still not cleared with Amazon. It seems that one of us has posted on their website all or a substantial part of a story included in this book and Amazon won’t allow sales of something offered for free somewhere else. While this could be taken as frustrating, I take it to mean that someone has read the stories (albeit it probably just a computer). More news soon, I hope.

11 March Update: Well that was easy. We are now officially on Amazon and Kindle. Next big change will be to get a print version available. No concrete timeline yet but we’re working on it.

The Serious Hobby of Writing

A mark of a serious hobby is one that requires meetings. Or perhaps that’s the sign that your hobby has morphed beyond the stress-relieving activity it once was. Either way you want to call it, my hobby has hit that mark.

For the first time in my life, I truly understand how writing could be a full-time job. The platform building and marketing that border on branding were always aspects that could demand full-time attention, but the distractions of a world that come at the speed of life have an uncanny ability to wrest attention away from the perspicacious details needed to truly make forward progress on a writing topic.

Spoken more plainly, the life of an artist is often interrupted by the art of life, which takes away the moments of brilliant insight necessary to craft the succinct, biting prose that makes the reader put down the written word and contemplate the grander scheme.

Or spoken even more plainly: life gets in the way. 

But this is still several steps shy of requiring a meeting. Meetings can be enjoyable. Mind you, no one is ever going to say on their deathbed they wish they had participated in more, but it is important to note that Rome didn’t conquer their empire by sitting in meetings they went out and killed something. 

My fellow world conquering tribe is a group I met in an online writing community. Our first meeting we gathered and schemed. Then we moved forward with execution. Now the heavy lifting of writing is finished and we’re in the polishing and planning for a launch stage. Work that requires meetings. Though we soon will go try our hands at taming the world.

We are on the verge of publishing an anthology of short stories. The year that was, knocked us all around a bit and we didn’t want to just let it go gently into that sweet goodnight. So we wrote one story with the theme of tolerance. Tolerance of everything but pornography, that subject was and is taboo, but anything else was on the table.

But who would want a book with only 10 stories? So we reached back into the dark recesses of our hard drives and manila folders for a “B” side story. One that was near and dear to us. For mine, I selected an anecdote my father once shared and built it into a story that even he might not recognize. Of course, the harder piece was the main story, and I pulled no punches there.

We will release it in an ebook and a print on demand format. There will be more updates on the book, and as always more stories to tell about the work, the team, and the process. For now though, it’s just an announcement. More to come, and soon. But first another meeting.

I wonder what the Romans could have accomplished if they’d used Zoom.

On Editing

A good number of people approach writing as if it is a simple hobby that one can just pick up and put down as easily as pausing the latest show they’re streaming on Netflix or Hulu. I’ve even seen an ad once for an “aspiring author” who was looking for a getaway cabin, either on a lake or in a forest, so they could work on their novel. But one thing that stands out as you delve into the writing life is that you won’t accidentally stumble onto a career as an author. Working at night or on the weekend simply writing won’t make you the next bestselling writer who ditched his day job and started a lucrative publishing career. There is a great deal more to it than that.

There has been much written on the craft of writing. I have at points in my life found and read books, articles, and essays by Clive Cussler, Ben Bova, Arthur C. Clarke​, Douglas Adams, and more. While Bova isn't one of my most influential authors (the other three are part of the Big Five) he is a prolific author with much to say on the subject. Recently I found and read a book by another of my Big Five all-time greatest influential authors, James Michener.

This isn’t the first Michener book about the craft I read. My Lost Mexico was great. Just thinking of it makes me think “And there was Gomez.” Powerful, but I digress. The one I recently stumbled upon was one I didn't know existed. It is called James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook.

In it, Michener goes into some exacting detail about his process. As a typewriter-era author, there is considerable time with scissors and paste. Literally cutting and pasting. He also used carbon paper, so when he finished with each draft he could see where it was and what had changed. There are first, second, third, and final versions of some of his stories that show the evolution and some of that is wildly altering the text. Fascinating to see even now. My only complaint about the book is that it has been too long since I read the original—published—versions of the stories he used for me to see the real differences in what he wrote versus what got published.

Michener originally got started in publishing as an editor and had a team of people who edited while he wrote. A very interesting process to see. There was one bit he wrote about editors that really stood out:

Three years into my writing career I dropped any attempt to differentiate between that and which. As a former teacher of grammar I had once known the rules, but I have now forgotten them and to keep in mind the multiple ramifications and niggling niceties is beyond me. I therefore appreciate the help of copy editors who have strong opinions on the matter and encourage them to enforce their rules. For myself, I am guided mostly by the sound of the sentence, and so are many other writers.

One task I have been finding Herculean about my writing is synopsizing it to a marketable blurb that others find interesting. I have no such writer’s block with a synopsis of this quote. A former grammar teacher and editor turned best-selling author says not to concern yourself overly with the specifics, rather concern yourself with the cadence, the rhythm, and the grace that language allows. The spice must flow, if you will. And if you won’t, they’ll catch it in the rewrites.

Surfing the Second Wave

A week ago my middle daughter came over for some help with Calculus. She’s dangerously walking the line of what I do and don’t remember but if I’m lucky I can brush up on some of it before she gets here and be of assistance. While here she started to run a fever. Ordinarily this is no reason for alarm. But these are no ordinary times.

She works at a retirement home at the front door. One of her responsibilities is to take the temperature of anyone coming in—to make sure they don’t have the dreaded virus*. So now we are all worried she has it. Which in turn means that it was an ineffective way of stopping it but that’s not the point. The next day she got tested. Both the quick and the dead. Wait, that’s the two kinds of bayonet fighters, the two tests were the quick and the 3 day one (or whatever their official names are). When the quick test came back with a positive it also came back with a note that the quick test is 70% inaccurate so wait for the slow test. Sure enough, the other test came back positive, too. Apparently it only has a 37% inaccurate result but I didn’t know that yet.

This meant that the rest of us had to get our medulla oblongata massaged by a q-tip. The whole ordeal was not as bad as it could have been though I swear there was something on that thing they shoved in my nose as the insides burned slightly for several hours.

Truly the worst part of the whole test was that the nurse who did the test told me I couldn’t go to the Chic-Fil-A drive through. We used the app and pulled into the parking lot instead. Next time I’m not asking.

Quarantine, one of the longest four letter words I know. It isn’t as though we weren’t used to isolation, but we were further removed than the removed state we had been in off and on for the last 7 months. While worrying about what would happen. Did we get it? Did we miss it? What was next?

We were told that we could sign up for an online service and possibly get our results on Sunday. They were wrong. It was middle of Monday before we got the word we were negative. A major sigh of relief.

I truly believe that we had it back in January. I also believe that here in the US we rolled our second wave into the first wave because we never stopped having cases reported. I seems that other countries are having their second wave now. Questions still abound. Did we not get it because we had it already? Did we test too early and it just hadn’t shown up? Did the fact that none of us have symptoms mean anything? Did the symptoms that did pop up only because we googled the most googled question of 2020—what are the symptoms? Can I say symptoms one more time in this paragraph? Yes, is that a symptom of something?

Surfing is a weird sport, not that I follow it regularly. It is much more of a sport than poker and more of a sport than corn hole (which had championship games on ESPN this last weekend). Sometimes when watching a surfing event a surfer gets into a pipeline and is swallowed up by a wave that goes over their head. When this happens they almost always wipe out. It’s a real crash and burn scene. But when they manage to shoot out of the end of the pipeline, even if you know nothing about the sport you know that you have witnessed an incredible event.

My family and I surfed the second wave. We shot out of the end of the pipeline and it was a beautiful thing. None of us are back on the beach yet but I pray you either don’t get as close to the breakers as we did or pull off a similar feat.

*Several of my friends and readers have different thoughts on the pandemic. Some of you want me to call it COVID-19. Some want me to call it Wuhan Flu, or even the dreaded Lung Pao Sicken. But I’m not calling it any of those. I’m just going with the Harry Potter he who would not be named. And he is used in the unknown gender sense that English teaches should default to the masculine. And if English teaches differently now I’m not learning any more. Look, I already went to one space after the period, leave me alone with the changes.

Lawn Musings

Wonderful thing about cutting the grass, you can solve all the problems of the world while doing it. The only bad part is that the clarity of you solutions dissipate in inverse proportion to the length of time since the engine has been turned off.* In other words, as quick as summer vacation ends for a 9 year old.

Upon my return from Europe I again had access to my lawn tractor. I’ve always called it a lawn mower but after this story, it can only be a lawn tractor—you don’t do things like this to mowers. It was my first non-borrowed riding mower and I was quite proud of it. Not quite as proud as Lowe’s was of it, but I did get a pretty sweet deal on it. Each time I used it I washed it and put it back in the garage taking good care of it.

It was to my horror to see that the people who rented my house did not take a similar level of care for it. Having been left out in the rain (a lot) and not being washed down means that there are stains, the seat is separating from its support, and there is a small oil leak in the front. The battery no longer seems to hold a charge, which means you can’t get up after you start it unless you want to push it back into the garage.

When I first used it to cut the grass it was very difficult and strange. Now the grass was quite high so I thought that was it but it did some strange things: bogging down when I reversed, strange metallic noises when I turned, and it didn’t seem to be cutting at its full 48 inch capacity. I have never liked to weed eat so when I got done there were clippings all over and spots that needed weed eating which made the yard look almost as bad as it had before I cut it.

Fast forward a few days, maybe a week. My brother-in-law came over and cut (and weed eat) the yard after which it looked fantastic. He has a mulching blade on his mower and I decided it was time for me to change the blades. There were no mulching conversion kits at Lowe’s though. I also had problems with my grill but there are more things people are low or out of. It’s almost like the whole world quit working for a few months.

Finally, the kit arrived in the mail and I went to change the blades. First two went without a problem but then I noticed the third blade was missing. That explained the weird cut. The next day I went to purchase a new bolt, in typical fashion I got the wrong bolt, but when I took one of the others off to use as a reference I found out that I couldn’t bolt it in. Something was wrong with the threads or the spindle or both. So it was back to the internet. Meanwhile, trying to figure out how to take out the spindle I realized that there was a broken bracket holding the deck on. This explained the backing up problems as well as the noises. Mystery solved meant it was time for a solution.

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The bracket as a solution was a pretty good idea but not very restrictive in movement for something so prone to vibration. After all, the deck does contain 3 spinning blades all working in conjunction with one another to eliminate the height of grass while simultaneously allowing a provision for pondering world changing events with a clarity unmatched by any genius or think tank in the known free world. So we added another bracket. But of course, if we only had one to start with we needed to look for what was on hand and use that. This did not turn out to be as big a problem as it could have been because with the arrival of my furniture from Germany came my supply of extra parts, pieces, and dreadfully important things I couldn’t live without. Finding them in the crowded garage would of course be a problem as I hadn’t unpacked most of it yet.

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The second bracket was smaller but no less important than the first. It was what I could find because at that point neither one of us wanted to admit defeat by having to go back to the hardware store. The fact that the store was already closed meant little compared to the fact that what it really meant was that we’d have to go a much further distance to reach The Home Depot or Lowe’s.

The problem is that even with the second bracket the piece still was not going to hold. It was sandwiched in between the remaining pieces of broken weld that it didn’t move, but it still really needed another bracket. One we didn’t have. You may notice the pattern below the deck in the pictures. That’s from Ginger’s car, I put the deck in her vehicle so I could find a welder. And that is the point of the story.

I have found in life that the best situation to be in if you don’t know something is to know someone who does. Next best is to find someone who does. Not being a welder, I found one. One that some might have thought a little sketchy. As I pulled into the dirt road and saw a half-built house, Kubota front end loader, and a fire burning with what looked like construction trash I had every reason to doubt I was in the right place. But this is Alabama where this can also be interpreted as the right place for what I needed.

Once the guy looked at what he did his first response was that he would have to charge me extra because of the repair job we had done. Then he said never to use JB Weld on anything structural. Followed in rapid succession by “Are you an engineer?” In my brief defense I had on a t-shirt from the first Corps of Engineers construction job I worked on so it wasn’t a huge mental leap.

After all that, he cut off the old brackets and welded the thing better than it was when I bought it. Then we proceeded to have one of those long, drawn out Southern conversations which rambled (though it was interesting) and included not once but twice hunkering down to draw a sketch in the dirt with a stick. Classic good ol’ boy conversation. I went back home and reattached the deck and cut the grass. This was two weeks before Hurricane Sally.

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The Saturday before Sally hit I went out to cut my grass. The first unwritten rule of hurricanes is cut your grass the day before it arrives because you don’t know when you’ll be able to cut it afterwards. But the thing wouldn’t start. I tinkered to no avail then asked three different people who all suggested I needed a new battery. I did, but that still didn’t fix it. The storm came and went before I finally figured out it was the main fuse.

I wasn’t able to figure this out until two Saturdays after Sally but finally I was able to cut the grass and with my new mulcher eliminate both the clippings and the nagging storm debris leaves and sticks. When I finished I thought there were more clippings left than I wanted so I decided to go over the front yard again.

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People say that things happen in threes. But people are idiots. If you wait long enough something else will happen. I laughed hard than I should have when this happened.

As I rounded the corner the wheel took off and I wondered which would stop first, the wheel or the lawn tractor. Turns out they both stopped at the same time.

Apparently the wisdom you gain while cutting the grass leaves even faster when the job is cut short due to technical problems. No new revelations about what drives or fixes the world, but a whole lot of drama in getting the job done. Just another day in paradise living in the bubble and loving the mundane.

*The analogy only works with powered lawn mowers (gas, electric, or other) as manually powered lawn mowing devices come with their own requirements for thinking. How am I going to not cut my prize daffodils, how will this push mower handle the holes in the back yard, and why didn’t I spring for a powered mower. There is an entire subset of thoughts that go along with a robotic mower but I came up with them while mowing.

Now with Comosline!

At several points along the journey of this blog I have changed the title. This was representative of what was going on and (most importantly) where I was. All along each little tidbit of prose has been a missive from my mind and counts as a little Byrd Dropping.

When I started the journey it was The Hole on the End of the Bible Belt, representative of my life in, around, and all throughout the place I call home but I moved. I deployed to Afghanistan as a civilian where my “uniform” was a different set of clothing. No business casual and no neckties (I love neckties) so it became A Year Without Wearing a Tie. Traveling the world and especially Afghanistan I had an opportunity to see not only the world but the US from outside. And it was eye-opening. Learning about a completely different corner of the world was incredible. I got to see some incredible sights, meet some wonderful people especially Afghan, and grew a special place in my heart for somewhere I may never get to see again. Eventually that ended and I returned to a new position back home in LA (that’s the original LA, Lower Alabama).

For most of that time my blog was messed up and I didn’t post but soon enough I got an opportunity to take my family with me to see the US from outside and we jumped in both feet first. Living in Europe was uncomfortable and yet incredible. It was then that Outside the Comfort Bubble became the name. We traveled, we saw, we learned, we experienced. We were uncomfortable but experienced life as other see it. We ate sausage Berliners in Berlin; waffles in Belgium; a hamburger in Hamburg; a frankenfurter in Frankfurt; fries, toast, and bread in france; Nürnbergers in Nürnberg; cheese in Switzerland; and there were sausages in both Vienna and Poland. It wasn’t just about food but we ate schnitzel, escargot, and all measures of food that are common in places other than North America.

We traveled as much as we could. We saw Paris (like New Orleans without the urine smell), we saw the Alps (they take my breath away every time), we saw Switzerland (where their hospitality outshines the extreme hospitality of the South), and we absolutely fell in love with Budapest. But there was more. And there is still more to see. But family needs brought us back.

So we’re back in LA, in the hidden jewel of the State of Alabama and ready to see things with a newly opened set of eyes. No doubt you will roll your eyes as I sound like “that guy” who talks longingly of things done differently in another world. But the observations continue, the opportunities abound, and like the spice, the observations must flow.

Byrd Droppings for all. Now with Cosmoline.

Back in LA

After the longest time I have ever been in one job position and the longest time I have ever had from accepting a job and starting a job we are finally back in LA—Lower Alabama.

There were a lot of memorable things to write about and share but sometimes things happen at the speed of life and this was one of those times. Traveling during the corona time is challenging so we’ll start with that.

The itinerary changed more times than I care to remember, too. My normal München/Atlanta/Mobile flights were not running. There was a choice to fly from Nürnberg to Frankfurt (a flight that begins the descent before it finishes the ascent) to Houston to Mobile. Another option was Frankfurt to Atlanta to Mobile (which later changed to Houston vice Atlanta). Oddly, I would have had to leave earlier to drive the one hour to Nürnberg for the flight than if I were to drive the three hours to Frankfurt for the flight.

There were options to travel through Boston and San Francisco but the oddest option was to travel through Doha. Most of these included an overnight stay and had 30 hour travel times. I avoided all of those though. The best way ended up being to fly into Pensacola rather than Mobile, not because of price but time.

Even still, it was over twenty hours in airports and airplanes. Twenty plus hours in a mask stinks. Doubly so if you chew rather than eschew the chicken curry for the cheese and onion tortellini.

Eventually we arrived and the first thing I discovered is that despite the fact that I had thought it out, my estimate of the time needed to get things set up was off by at least a month. The guy who set up all my flight arrangements thought landing on Tuesday and starting work on Monday was a good idea. And as a point of reference, I’m wearing that guy’s underwear.

But this is where Serendipity rears her head again. The District here is in maximum telework still. But it isn’t mandatory. Maximum non-mandatory. I can say it all day long but I can’t really grasp how that oxymoron works. So day one I went in to fill out some paperwork and get my new mobile phone (my Mobile mobile). After calling to set it up I discovered that I cannot set up my email without getting an email. More oxymorons, right? I can’t get an email at all until I can log into my new laptop. So on to step two.

My new laptop was not ready until Tuesday. So I went in to pick it up, but I cannot log into it until I get a new CAC. That sounds easy, so I went downstairs to the CAC Office where I discovered that I can’t get a new CAC until I have a user ID. Guess how I find out about getting a user ID? Yep, an email.

For those keeping track, I need an email to be able to do some training to get a CAC to be able to log into my laptop to set up email so I can get an email that will allow me to be able to set up my Mobile mobile. After which time I’ll be able to telework.

All of which needs to be done during a time of maximum telework.

But not mandatory.

The saga continues. More to follow soon (I hope).