Annual Review

     Survived another one. 

     I dread Annual Reviews.  Working my way up, the only time anyone had a "review" was when they were not meeting expectations; there was some hope of improvement or the person would have simply been fired, but it was an indicator of a desperate situation.

     Praise and blame were both rare.  If your bosses thought you were doing your job well, they told you so by continuing to employ you.

     The bean-counters stuck us with annual reviews over twenty years ago.  Initially, it was something of a joke, a few minutes with your immediate supervisor going over a year of work that you both knew very well, let's fill out this form and make the second floor happy and no, we're still not handing out merit increases in pay--

      Then we got a supervisor who had, shall we say, a difficult personality.  He'd save up negative things to bring up in your review in closed-door sessions that might take an hour, sometimes more, with doubts expressed as to one's fitness for this sort of work, more in sorrow than in anger, etc. etc., until you left wondering how you'd been managing give him such a perfect impression of a pathetic loser and half-wishing he would have just fired you and got it over with--

     Do a decade and a half of that and the process begins to get a little stressful. 

     Things have changed at work and it's not like that any more.  Oh, the new guys would be quick to push you overboard if you weren't pulling your weight, and my line of work gets leaner and meaner with every passing week, but they're not big on playing games.  If you're out, you're out; they don't save up for a yearly inquisition and nobody's got time to make the toilers squirm just for a show of managerial keenness.

     So I had my review and it wasn't awful.  Here's hoping I can keep them that way. 

School's Out?

     Last night was the last formal class of the writing group, the last gathering of that interesting bunch of people at the offices of the Indiana Writers Center.

     It's not necessarily over.  The group is organized around an e-mail reflector where we have been sharing our manuscripts and critiques, and it's not going away.  Several of us expressed an interest in continuing the process, and so it will.

     It was a big group, ten at the start.  A few dropped out -- "life happens," especially for part-time writers with full-time jobs and even more so for my classmates who have children.  One, the youngest, never really got started, thanks to persistent e-mail problems and a lack of free time to resolve them.  At least that student was able to audit all but the last class, and I hope it was useful.

     One thing I have learned: my glacial writing pace won't cut it.  I need to write a lot more than I do.

     And another lesson: that swollen and painful knuckle serves as a reminder that the clock is ticking.  If I want to write this stuff, now's the time.  It's easier to type it than to speak it and much easier to edit.

Colcannon For Dinner

     This was our treat yesterday:

TAMARA KEEL PHOTO

     Colcannon, mashed potatoes with greens and some kind of smoked pork, seasoned with onion and parsley.

     This version was made with ham and nice curly kale, lightly cooked before adding to the potatoes.  The milk was heated with chopped green onions, salt and pepper, and it's as good -- and as filling -- a meal as you might expect.  To serve, you make a little "well" in it and fill with butter and parsley flakes.

     There were leftovers.  This morning, I added a little more milk, an egg and a small amount of flour, and fried up potato pancakes.  They were delicious!

     If you have been looking at kale with suspicion, you should try it in this.  It's wonderful.

Saturday Morning

      I went to bed early yesterday -- by which I mean that I sat down on the side of the bed about six, laid back and went out, just gone, no dreams no nothing, crosswise on the bed and on top of the covers. Woke up an hour later, sat up and said, "Wow!  Was I ever asleep."

     From down hall, I heard Tamara, "You were snoring."

     "Snoring?"

     "Sort of pre-snoring, anyway."

     So I thought, What the heck? and went to bed.

     We'd had a busy day and spent the afternoon visiting Indy Reads Books, a used bookstore/charity that runs literacy programs, followed by a late lunch or early supper at the Massachusetts Avenue Yats.

     The return had called for a seven-mile drive in rush-hour traffic, which is not one of my strengths.  The preparatory work for the Red Line bus route has College Avenue narrowed to one lane as it enters SoBro and -- of course -- even after weeks of this, it's all a terrific surprise to many drivers and there's a frantic merging right before the enormous, illuminated, blinking arrows that follow a succession of bright-orange "LANE ENDS" warning signs.  So I had some reason to be tired.

     I woke up around midnight and did some more critiquing for my writing class, neither of them especially easy, though for different reasons. 

     The literary work took until three; I fell asleep again, woke up from a vaguely detective-story nightmare probably influenced by reading Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man and rough novelizations of the next two films.  The general storyline and characters were all very familiar, as if the dream was the latest installment of a long-running series.

     Read a little and drifted off, to wake again much later, from a worse nightmare, one of those "something's gone badly wrong at work" types.  Man, that'll get me out of bed and back into the real world! 

Well, That Was Fun

     Not.  I had forgotten the phlebotomist at the my doctor's office -- an outside contractor, so she works for the lab that does analysis -- is deeply, quietly disappointed in pretty much everyone.  Whoever you are, she's over it.  A smile and "Hello" receives a barely perceptible nod; she's got the art of saying the barest minimum required to get the blood-draw done down flat.

     In a way, it's nice -- you're in and out of the room rapidly and smoothly -- and in a way it's heartbreaking, because the impression she leaves is that she has been let down and kicked by everyone she ever met and she's not giving anyone the least flash of personality ever again.

     I've sat in the two-chair "waiting area," a wide spot in the hallway, and witnessed every patient get the same treatment: not unfriendly, not friendly, efficient, resigned and quick.

     I left as I always do, humbled and amazed that anyone could maintain such armor and hoping there's some spot of sunshine in her life and that it never, ever goes out.  I get the impression she'd drown without a word, annoyed as the waters rose but calmly certain no one would ever throw her a lifeline.

Awake And Phlebotomous

     I'm fasting, slowly.  It's no fun.

     I've got to get all shined up and go get some blood drawn for analysis before I can consume anything more interesting than water.  At least I managed to get a good night's sleep.

Woops!

     Really ought to post something.

     I'm a little sick today.

     To make matters worse, yesterday, I had washed my hands and was flipping excess water off my fingers into the sink, and suddenly something felt terribly wrong at the base knuckle of my left social finger.  It hurt like the very dickens!  It's still hurting, and now swollen and something is rubbing in the joint.  Don't know if I should do something about it or not. I've got some topical stuff that seems to be helping.

Writing History That Never Happened

     After the other writers in my crtique class mentioned "needing more background" about the Hidden Frontier and a little discussion, the consensus was that I needed a "thumbnail history."

     You often find this in series books, in one form or another -- an introduction, a series of historical digressions by a character, a simple "what when on before" synopsis -- and I have known I needed to write one.

     It's no simple task, thanks to the complexity of the Hidden Frontier timeline and the need to deliberately obscure some facts, like the how the Steam Amish ended up where they are and why they're so skittish, makes it a challenge.  The way the "war" is never quite a real war, due to the vast distances involved and the unwillingness of the Edgers to strike directly against Earth and its vast human-friendly biome (at least compared to everywhere else), the internal struggles during and after the war on Trinity, the difficulties after the war on Frothup, Ryall and A-10, the first breaking away to join the Earth-aligned worlds (the Moon, Kansas II and Blizzard) and the latter two, distant and obscure, becoming, briefly, grotty little central-planning economies -- it's a lot, really.

     The trick, of course, is doing as historians have always done: hit the high points.  The Magna Carta, the battle of Trafalgar, Yorktown, the Constitutional Convention, the War of 1812, the Late Civil Unpleasantness Between The States, and so on.  Then, in in given use of the thumbnail, leave out what doesn't apply.

     For example, I have mentioned in a couple of stories that a "Sergeant Snodgrass" was the first man to land on the moon, sometime in 1951.  This (and the other complications of the early top-secret OHAP* and the budget fight that nearly did it in until a key U. S. Senator's sudden death) does not need to be mentioned in every use of the history.  The fact that OHAP did happen, and resulted in the FCS conspiracy, does,  And so on.

     It's not completely done, but I think I can come up with a useful template that can serve as a general introduction or be used to inform a character's comments as needed to get readers up to speed on the timeline.
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* "Outer Hebrides Agronomy Project," cover name for the black-budget program to develop the stardrive and use it to establish a secret missile base on the Moon.

I'm On Vacation

     All this week.  I'd forgotten about it until Friday.  I kind of took today off from everything.

Attention, Web Designers

     Don't let robots truncate your headlines to fit the available space:

     Yes, that's the entire image.  Seems like that might hurt.

     The article itself (in Vanity Fair) is a predicable hatchet-piece on a childishly easy target.  Ask anyone who grew up with plenty of money about an employment or poverty-related issue and the odds of getting an answer that is tone-deaf, clueless and/or plain wrong are staggering.  No bread?  Eat cake instead!  Yeah, no.

     I don't think the Green New Deal's "iron rice bowl" plan is even remotely practical, nor do I think it would work any better here than Mao's version did in Red China, but the opinions of a child of third-generation wealth on this subject are not worth much -- not even to rant about in the press.  I'm guessing Bess Levin takes candy from babies, too.

My Car Is Back!

     Hooray, hooray, my car is back!

     The service shop called in the afternoon and I faced a long drive from downtown to far northeast side, outside the I-465 ring freeway that roughly parallels the Marion County line.  Call it a dozen miles, more or less.

     A dozen miles on a Friday afternoon, most of it on a major, divided-lane, non-freeway route out of the city that turns into an interstate highway once it ducks under 465.  A few places, traffic got up to sixty, at which point the Volkswagen uttered a polite bing! and displayed a warning message on the dash:

SNOW TIRES!

60 MPH

MAXIMUM SPEED

     It was good to know, but considering I was locked into bumper-to-bumper traffic, not something I could do much about.

     Things slowed down soon enough.  Most of the last half of the trip was done in "parking lot" mode, as traffic inched through stoplights in fits and starts.

     The cherry on top was the very last bit: the road turns into interstate at the cloverleaf with 465 and I needed to take the very next exit, so close you've got to scramble through two lanes of merging traffic to get to it.  I, um, "dislike" is too weak a word for how little I enjoy this kind of driving.  Traffic was brisk; the VW chided me a few times about going too fast for snow tires, but I got there, put myself in the correct lane, and after a few more turns, navigated the car into the twisty maze of shopping-center and light-industrial streets that wind back to the fancy-car garage with a feeling of great relief.

     Those roads are cratered badly enough to resemble the aftermath of a modern civil war.  The sleek, low-slung VW CC was not the car for them.  I dodged and weaved and finally arrived at the garage.

     My Lexus Opera Assault Vehicle was waiting out front, sparkling-clean.

     I paid with hardly a wince -- buy the fancy car, pay for fancy service -- and climbed in, dreading the return trip.

     Missed my exit to the freeway so I took the next turn and and put myself on a once-familiar north-south arterial.  Took it down to a stoplighted cross street and got back on the divided-lane boulevard to downtown.  There wasn't nearly as much traffic headed into downtown as there was trying to escape; the outbound lanes were solid and slow but traffic in my direction buzzed along at the limit.

     It was good to be back in my own car.

And Another One

     The repair shop put me in a VW CC, a sporty little sedan that somehow has an enormous trunk -- I mean, you could put an MG Midget in there.  I think I would have known I was in a German car once I sat down in the cockpit even without the VW logo on the dash: there are three (3) clocks visible from behind the wheel!

     It's very pretty, sleek and low-slung.  The bucket seats are covered in soft leather, but it's already making my back act up.  Mostly the getting in and out, I think.  Possibly in part the driving a very nice car that isn't mine in traffic without the height and sightlines of the Lexus SUV-in-a-party-dress.

     That said, it corners like a go-kart and putters along with a Jetsons-esque burble at fifty mph more smoothly than most cars I have driven did at thirty-five.  All of the controls fall naturally under your hand and other than the futuristic keyless key (the fob is the key*), there aren't any surprises to be had in operating the car.

     This is an automated posting because I need to get into work early tomorrow.  With any luck, my car will be done and I'll need to drive out to pick it up.  It's a long drive and is likely to take more than my usual lunch break.
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* Although there is, in fact, a key hidden inside the fob for emergencies.  Oh, it won't start the car, that's not how the keyless ignition works, but it will unlock the doors if the battery goes flat.   Oh yeah, German car.