The Scene of the Crime

For the majority of the last week I was able to entertain myself by working out the details of the murder mystery I have gotten into my head — the suspects and sleuths, the clues and red herrings, and the possible murder weapon — but by the end of the week it was getting a bit unnerving to see my workplace as a crime scene, however imaginary. At one point I thought, I need to put a level on the floor of that room to see if blood would flow across the floor or just pool in place, and then I thought, do I really need to know the answer to that question right now? and I decided that the level could wait for a while.

Campus summers are usually extremely quiet times punctuated at random with sudden, urgent activities. This particular summer shouldn’t be exceptional even though it does have some new elements, including the gradual reintroduction to campus of a large class of employees who’ve been working largely from home for over a year. It’s also a time when I can work on data collection and analysis projects, office moves, and other tasks that are easier to do when almost no one is around (it’s the best time to inventory computers, printers, and phones). This summer we’re also conducting two job searches for academic instructional staff, so there’s that.

Now, with the thought of a fictional murder on the floor, every sound takes on a different meaning. Doors are opened and doors close; lights turn on when someone passes and turn off after a certain interval of inactivity; a phone rings in an office down the hall. If I’m seated at my desk for too long, setting up spreadsheets and crunching numbers, the lights in my own office will go out and I’ll have to pause my work to wave my hands around until the sensors detect my presence and turn the lights back on. “Too long” seems to be fifteen minutes, which doesn’t seem so long to become focused on a task. Nevertheless, every fifteen minutes I have to wave my arms around, every hour I leave my office to take a walk around the building, and every two hours (if I forget to take a walk) my electronically networked wristwatch buzzes to let me know that I’ve been seated for an unacceptable amount of time.

My watch also has an extremely finicky charging system that isn’t compatible with anything else, even other models from the same manufacturer.

The summer is also a popular time for testing emergency systems. You often receive advance warning, but if it’s been a quiet day it’s easy to forget the time and get involved in a project until every desk phone, every cell phone, and every wall-mounted emergency module clicks on and and broadcasts, out of sync with all other devices, “There is a fire in the building!”, “There is a tornado in the area!”, and “Run! Hide! Fight!” for ten minutes. The strobing white lights are an attention-getting bonus. I have tried to update my Excel formulas during an emergency drill; it’s rather difficult. All you can really do during a test is patrol the building and let people know that this is only a test.

But when it’s not loud it’s very, very quiet. So the closing of a door is noticeable, particularly when it isn’t followed by the second closing of a door within a few minutes. And especially so if you don’t know the identity of the person who passed through the door. Why are they here? What business do they have? Are they looking for my office or for someone else’s? Are they going to their own office to work? Did they come to our floor to use our sparkling clean bathrooms or to try their luck at the vending machine? Did everyone who came to the floor also leave? Or is someone lingering in the lounge or down the hall?

Look at the time! Time to get up and take a little walk around, see who’s here….

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Knitwise, there wasn’t a clear consensus on the toddler-hat poll results. Maybe I’ll ask the mother-to-be.

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I kept up on all of my reading schedules, finishing Dante and the Early Astronomer and then choosing a fascinating book to take its place in the lineup. Months ago I was visiting the university library looking for something else, when I spotted this book and checked it out for its title alone: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu.

How could I not want to read this book?

If you like precious manuscripts you are sure to appreciate this book, but it is much more about terror cells in northern Africa, particularly Mali. You also learn a lot about radicalization into extremist Islamic sects. I read six chapters the day I started the book, and finished it two days later. I have no shortage of nonfiction books with which to follow it up, but I haven’t chosen one yet. Stay tuned!

The mystery of writing a mystery

Recently I’ve been sketching out some ideas for a murder mystery. As much as I enjoy reading detective stories and watching mysteries, I’ve never tried to write one before. I sure hope that my enjoyment of the solving process will give me some sort of advantage in the story-creation process.

Because I can’t just work this storyline out as I go along, I have to do much more planning and theorizing. Not only do I have to know who did it, but I’ll also have to figure at least two more people who could plausibly have been the killer. In a way, it will be like writing three stories and grafting them into one. (I wonder if that’s how the scriptwriters for Clue did it?)

Back in the 1990s day, if I had gotten an idea like this one I would not have sat down sporadically to brainstorm ideas. No way, man! First of all, I would have looked for books that would tell me how to write a murder mystery. Then I would have read all of them. If I made it past that point, I might have gone to the library and looked for any books with the same plot as what I had, however vaguely, in mind. After that I would probably have concluded that not only was there nothing new under the sun, but my idea had been done a thousand times before and by better writers than I. In fact, a very similar story had just been published, so I was already a year behind and why should I even start?

It’s just as well I didn’t have this idea back then; I would have talked myself out of writing anything. Michael, if he’d had the idea, would have taken the completely opposite path by writing a killer (see what I did there?) cover letter, selling the story to an editor with a tight deadline, and blazing ahead to work 24/7 until he had figured it all out by himself. I would have been involved by racing the just-printed manuscript to FedEx by an 8pm pickup time — possibly having to pound on the front door for entry if the staff had already locked up at 7:55 — and having to spend half of the proposed payment on overnight shipping. (The rest of the money would cover two reams of copy paper, a fresh toner cartridge, a bottle of Red Zinfandel, and a pack of clove cigarettes. So it’s just as well that he didn’t get the idea either.)

Somehow we did manage to write and publish the occasional item — but we were also working full-time jobs in different areas of the publishing industry at the time. I was writing and editing all day; he was editing and doing some graphic design. So to give us a break, we didn’t have a lot of energy in our “off” time to crank out piles of creative work. Even if we had, we really wouldn’t have known how to market it or how to govern ourselves into freelance good work habits.

I’m probably having some fun with this story idea right now because I’m only approaching it as a fun thing to play with. I’m not trying to write a best-seller in six weeks so I can make a million dollars and quit my day job. (I like my day job!)

So far I have cast the victim, the amateur detective, the police officer, and the forensic investigator. I know a couple of characters who will be suspects and I have figured out where to place some red herrings. I know the subtle clues that will tip off the detective. I’m just not quite sure who the killer is yet.

I want to have fun with this and figure it out for myself without the pressure of a deadline. Now, finding books that will tell me how to do this work almost feels like cheating. Ironically, until about a year ago I had about half a dozen books that would have helped me tremendously with this work. Several years ago, one of the kids briefly mentioned wanting to know more about police procedural work. Within days I had hopped on Amazon and purchased a bunch of books that could serve as references. So there I was, doing the same old thing and collecting the reference books before doing any of the work. You know what? The kid didn’t touch the books, and probably didn’t even follow through on whatever idea it was that they had. The fact that I can’t even remember which kid it was should tell you something about the trivial nature of their question, to which I definitely over-responded. Anyway, I donated all of these books to a local “Friends of the Library” sale about a year ago.

Now I have an idea and my reaction is, “cool, let’s mess around with it for a while and see if anything comes out it.” So far that’s been a fun process, and that’s good enough for now. If I do develop this idea into a full-length story, it should look different from anyone else’s story.

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I actually did some knitting this week, and I got the toddler hat to the end of the 2×2 ribbing. Now I’m at a point where I need to decide what the rest of the hat will look like. My color choices are to continue in soft pink, to switch to a variegated yarn, or to alternate the soft pink and the multicolored yarn in two-row stripes all the way to the crown. I could also decide to make the top of the hat in either stockinette or mock cables. I must make a decision before I knit the next stitch, so…

Let’s take a poll! I always enjoy reader feedback, but this seems like a particularly good occasion for it.

This polling setup is completely different from the one WordPress used to use, and I can’t remember the last time I took a poll. So hey! This might be a new experience for all of us. I invite everyone reading this post to participate in the poll — even if you’re not a knitter, you still have an opinion on what would make a cute warm hat for a baby girl. You can take a look at the pattern here so you will know how it might look if words like “stockinette,” “plain knitting,” “2×2 ribbing,” and “mock cable” don’t mean anything to you. The pattern is hosted on Ravelry, which [somewhat] recently changed its website design to something that can cause seizures in those who are prone to them. If this might be a problem for you, please take the poll without visiting Ravelry.

And to follow up on last week’s post about the books I’m reading, I am indeed continuing to plug along. I’m currently in the 6th chapter of Tombstone (which could take another day or two to finish) and I’m ready to start chapter 14 of Dante and the Early Astronomer and chapter 13 of Indy Split. When I’m not reading, I am trying to catch up on Torah-related podcasts that I support through Patreon. They are rather fringe, so let me know if you’d like to have a link.

Oh! I forgot to mention that Youngest got his first shot in his vaccination series last Thursday afternoon. Everyone related to my household should be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by the middle of June. Huzzah!

Alignment in process

It hasn’t been one of those weeks where the the planets (or stars) align, the clouds part, and a beam of light lasers down from the heavens, but some things are coming closer together than they have for a while.

At the moment I’m plugging away on three non-fiction books. Before work I read for fifteen to twenty minutes in a book about China’s Great Famine, which took place roughly between 1958 and 1962. It’s fascinating to read as a study of cultish dictatorships; the details of what happened as millions of people were forced to starve to death — or do the unthinkable in order to try to stay alive — are upsetting and difficult to comprehend. But it’s important to know that this happened, so that we cannot allow it to happen again. I’m reading from what appears to be the incredibly rare hardcover edition, selling on Amazon for anywhere from $197 to $509.46 (plus $3.99 for shipping, of course), depending upon how gullible you are, because I was given a copy by one of the book’s Chinese-to-English translators. If you’re interested in reading Tombstone, I’d recommend the paperback version. I would also recommend reading a few Auschwitz accounts, just to warm up to atrocity.

At lunch I’m reading a lovely little book called Dante and the Early Astronomer. The chapters vary wildly in length, so some chapters take one lunch to read and others take two or three. The “early astronomer” in this case is Mary Evershed, an amateur astronomer and Dante aficionado who read Dante’s works with such attention that she attempted to reconcile his descriptions of the universe with what she was able to see from the Indian observatory where she and her husband lived and worked. (tl;dr: I haven’t finished the book, but I’m pretty sure Dante messed up.)

In the evening I’m reading, two chapters at a time, Indy Split: The Big Money Battle That Nearly Destroyed Indy Racing, by John Oreovicz. I became acquainted with the author through a series of open-wheel racing discussion boards from the 90s and 00s, and now on Facebook. Even though Amazon lists the book as not yet released (until May 30, which may have something to do with USAC?), it also lists it as the #1 title in the Automotive History category. I already have mine because I ordered directly from the publisher, where it’s cheaper and more of the money goes to the author.

I hesitate to predict the future, but so far this is working for me. It’s a joy to be able to read so much again. Let’s not think about quite yet the books that I stalled out on last summer. I’ll resume reading them when I can. I just don’t see the point of abandoning a current book to resume a book that was abandoned earlier.

By the way, here’s a link to Monkey, the novel I mentioned in a prior blog post. It’s kind of an outsider book and it’s not written in a traditional format, but it’s a good read and a story whose twists and turns would be very hard, if not impossible, to anticipate. The author has vowed to keep writing, so I’ll keep reading.

So I’m not finishing books, but I’m still making progress.

This weekend I had the opportunity to work on organizing one corner of one room, and I actually did what I had set out to do. The room as a whole looks greatly improved. I can now access and use my electronic keyboard at a moment’s notice — a form of practice for the free baby grand piano I would like to have in Next House — and I actually donated a box full of DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, and unneeded instruction books for guitar, keyboard, trumpet, and alto saxophone. And I recycled or tossed a pile of shipping materials (AKA “good boxes”) that have been waiting for a year or two to be re-used. Guess what, I don’t need to keep those items for that long. I got rid of a LOT of clutter that was sapping my strength.

So I didn’t make over a whole room, but I re-organized two corners of a room. And I messed around on the keyboard a few times.

But I also did three rather surprising things this week: I did some freewriting, I started a new knitting project, and I dreamed. I really enjoyed the freewriting, which I was able to do because my workspace is now a bit less cluttered. I was able to sit and write speculatively for quite some time; it helped that my Mom-load was lighter this past weekend so I was not interrupted quite so often. I cast on for the new knitting, a toddler hat in pink and pink-purple colors, while I was waiting for Eldest to finish his dental appointment. Lo and behold, by the end of the week I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since the Before Times… who is now 32 weeks pregnant with a little girl. Hmm, wonder who will get that hat?

And last night I dreamed; remembering my dreams is pretty rare for me, so this was a nice one to catch. In my waking life, a close friend is about to step away from my life for an indefinite amount of time. In my dream, they found a way to leave me a card packed with all kinds of personalized clippings and notes. Considering that I don’t do lucid dreaming and I doubt that they do either, that was pretty slick. I woke up so happy and feeling that everything was going to be fine.

So, onward! More books and more knitting and more writing, and I’ll stay busy until my friend is able to return.

New-homing

Even though I don’t plan to move for a few more years, I’m surrounded at the moment by others’ plans for new homes and new beginnings.

Firstborn has his sights set on getting his license, getting a new (used) car, and getting into a new line of mechanical work.

Secondborn has chosen a college, and they’ve made quite the detailed list of the things they’ll need by the end of the summer. (They’re also thoroughly sick of the high school experience and ready to leave all that behind — except for the friends they plan to bring along with them as college roommates.)

MiddleSon left his job so that he could take a break and get rehired to the same job at a higher wage and then accept a promotion (and another raise). He’s looking forward to driving, car-buying, and finding out what will come after high school for him.

Youngest turned 15 today, an excellent Mother’s Day gift for me; sometimes it lines up that way. Today we (MiddleSon and I) gave him the gift of a shopping trip. He usually hates to be dragged along shopping, but since this was all about him he had time to warm to the idea. We had a brief outing to Goodwill for other purposes, then we were off to a local shopping area to visit GameStop and Target, where we came up empty. Then someone proposed going to Half Price Books, and you don’t exactly have to twist my arm to get me to drive there. So I bought lunch for the boys (and a drink for myself) and we headed off to a larger town, a suburb of Milwaukee. HPB has followed by a jaunt to Best Boy, and then to a local CD/DVD/game resale shop, but it was during a trip to Barnes & Noble that we finally made it to the mall.

Youngest picked out two manga volumes and a pack of Pokémon cards at B&N, and I got a book as well, but it felt a bit odd to visit a mall. It looked almost as busy as in non-pandemic times, but we found that some of the stores we wanted to visit were just… gone. Signs in the empty retail spaces directed us toward “replacement” stores that didn’t have anything close to what we wanted. It was a reminder that the pandemic had kept a lot of businesses from moving forward, and I’m starting to become a bit concerned about where I’ll find proper shoes. (Thank goodness that sandals ought to suffice for the summer.)

Another new beginning concerns a car of our that we’ve taken care of since 2011. It slotted nicely into a #2 role in a car lineup that has varied widely over the years, but recently it has developed enough limitations that Eldest and I have come to the conclusion that it’s time for us to let it go and find a more appropriate second car.

Trixie at 12 years and 31,000 miles!

Trixie has been a family car since the day she was purchased by Opa Hall in 1999, and we love her. But we may have identified the perfect new owner — who once owned her identical twin! — and we’re preparing for her transition to a new home.

At work I have friends who are retiring after many years of service to the campus community, and I also have friends who are resigning to take different paths in their lives. Some people are keeping the same job but changing houses; others are adding to their families or to their educations. In many ways, the next academic year will be a difficult one for me and I’m doing my best to prepare for the changes. Busy is good — busy is good.

This week my household also transitioned to a new television, after the old one — which we had had for approximately three years — had quietly died. The new television, ordered sight unseen from Best Buy so that we could receive next-day delivery, turned out to be an Amazon Fire TV, which was not quite what we had anticipated. We eventually managed to hit upon the settings for viewing our cable channels and accessing the files on our DVR, but as of right now we’re still looking at it a bit askance. It may have been the change that finally shoved us out of our emotional comfort zone for the week. The DVR is mostly cleared out again, we’ve been able to play video games on it, and perhaps we’ll eventually try to access our Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts on it. But don’t make us go too quickly!

The dog is changing, too. With Monty’s last birthday and the conversion of his age to the human equivalent, he became the oldest creature in the house. I was still startled when the vet mailed me regarding [what I am calling] their Senior Discount package. It’s not exactly a Golden Buckeye card, but I’m going to sign him up. Monty’s beginning to show signs of changing and — in certain circumstances — slowing down, and it’s a good idea to be aware of the condition of his vision, hearing, and joint flexibility. The goal is to give him a comfortable life after the rough start he had to it, so this should help quite a bit.

Monty, 2015

Monty and ladybug friend, 2021

Some of these changes may look easy, but others are going to be traumatic. I hope that incorporating some positive changes that take the form of self-help will serve to ease my own path to the future. It’s a short life and we just have to do our best.

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Knitwise, there’s been no knitting. I think about the “square” shawl I was working on, and remember anew that I should search to see if I have more yarn in the stash to finish it properly. Then I look at the other things I need to do, and I defer that task yet again. Most often I notice my dining room table, which has become too cluttered with various unfinished projects to allow any of us a place to actually dine. (Or breakfast, or lunch.) It has become a source of frustration for everyone, and this coming week I’ll try to get it cleared off. The week’s unseasonably cool temperatures should keep me inside, so I might as well make the most of the chance to make my living space more useful and less stressful.

Keep calm and walk on

Last week I decided to make a change to my habits, in favor of my long-term health. Starting on Monday, I limited my lunch to 30 minutes and followed my lunch with a walk around the perimeter of the campus. I put on my special sneakers and had flashbacks to my temping days in the early ’90s, when the downtown lunch crowd of professional women wore sneakers with their suits and got their steps in at lunchtime — decades before anyone was trying to “get their steps.”

Walking around the campus takes me almost exactly 3,000 steps and 30 minutes. That walk combined with my usual daily amount of walking, plus a couple of other trips across and off campus, for over 13,000 steps. On Monday night I took a precautionary hot soaking bath with mineral salts, to help increase the odds of my being able to move on Tuesday. Tuesday’s walk wasn’t easy, but Wednesday’s was better. By the end of the week, my feet and legs had mostly adjusted to the new demands I was placing upon them. On Friday I started thinking, if I cut across campus and back I’d get a different workout from going over the drumlins….

But maybe that’s something I can do in the summer. Right now, as the spring term is coming to an end, consistency will be a comfort. I’d also like to avoid increasing the degree of difficulty to the point where I have to back off for a while before starting over.

On rainy days, I can switch to light strength training as I rearrange the department’s stash of novels and textbooks that have been left behind by retired instructors over the last several years. Lately I’ve been organizing the books into themed mini-libraries — one for first-year composition, one for literature and creative writing, and another for linguistics and second language acquisition. If nothing else, it allows us to see what resources we have as a department. And I get stronger by carrying books around or pushing shelves of them back and forth on carts; textbooks are rarely light reading (or carrying). Between library setup sessions I can take the stairs up and down for leg work.

The rest of the time, my work has me sitting in front of a computer most of the day and using my mind to remember procedures, learn new software, locate forms, answer student questions, research departmental data, and maintain my living campus network of Who Might Know The Answer To This. If I don’t get out of my seat for the occasional walkaround, I might get sucked, Tron-like, into the computer. I don’t think the games we’d play in the context of an enrollment database would be as thrilling as racing light cycles, but you never know.

I’ve also been trying to make some small dietary changes — basically drinking more water, and drinking and eating half my usual amount of everything else. So far, the results have been good; I think this is one of the efforts that will be easier to do, the longer I just do it and keep doing it. If I don’t make it too hard for myself, that is.

I don’t have to make EVERYTHING harder.

Another positive thing that I’ve been doing for myself is reading every day. I have some shorter daily readings, and I’ve acquired a pair of compilations of themed detective fiction, but I’ve also started on a rather long, dense, serious book that was edited and translated by one of the instructors in my department. After a week of reading, I have just finished the first part of the first chapter. The only way I got that far was to allow myself read as much as I could during my pre-work reading time without worrying about getting to the end of a section. Sometimes that’s only ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the length of the other passage I read in the morning. The book itself is a compelling story of a piece of history about which I know almost nothing — China’s Great Famine — and the subject matter is utterly heartbreaking. I have not calculated how long it might take me to finish the book, but the point is really to read and reflect on it. So I think that, for a change, I won’t calculate it at all. I’ll get there when I get there, and after that point I will be able to read a second book (on the Cultural Revolution) by the same author. I’m glad to be learning more history and also getting to appreciate more of the talents of my department members.

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Knitwise I’m essentially in the same spot. I made a few rows of progress on the at-work project while watching a couple of training videos last week, but until I exhaust the first skein of yarn it won’t really look as if I’ve gotten anywhere with it. On the other hand — it’s a scarf. I won’t be done with it until the weather requires scarves again. Today’s high was 82 degrees and we’re looking forward to an overnight thunderstorm, so no one is crying because I haven’t finished this scarf yet. I’ll get there when I get there — I don’t need to create stress for myself by worrying about my knitting projects. The knitting will always be there to help me stay grounded and feel secure when so many other things are in transition. Writing will do that for me, too; stay tuned.