Turning Over A New Leaf Briefcase

     A problem with a light-blue collar job like mine is you need all the things: a toolbox (my employer supplies tools, but they're often in use by others and I have more than a few specialized gadgets they don't provide) and a briefcase: a screwdriver and a laptop.  (And boy, have I needed the laptop!  My employer's computers are, sensibly enough, locked down six ways from Sunday: you don't install your own software on them, and you don't connect them to strange network ports.  I often need to do those things to work on their equipment, so I have carried my own aging Surface Pro.  In the last six months, I finally scored a company laptop with admin privileges, first time since the old Kaypro II in the late 1980s.)

     I'm only on my third toolbox; the first one was tackle box sized, a retro oak box I'd originally purchased for a portable ham radio setup.*  It was too heavy and too crowded.  Replaced with a nylon-canvas "doctor's bag," which I outgrew just as it was wearing out.  The larger version I replaced it with has held up well.  The sides are lined with pockets inside and out, and it opens wide, just like the doctor's bags of old, making it easy to find and get to the tools it carries.

     Briefcases are another story.  I've gone through a lot of them -- outgrew, worn out, infested by ants (don't keep sugar in your briefcase, kids).  None have been perfect.  Unlike the toolbox, which usually gets parked in my locker at the main location or in a cabinet at the North Campus depending on where I need it most, my briefcase travels with me every day.  Less than a year before the pandemic, I bought an inexpensive brown canvas messenger bag with lots of  pockets.  I decorated it with sarcastic "merit badges" (invisibility, telepathy with plants, soldering, mind control, coffee consumption, TV color bars in a red circle with a diagonal line across them, the Raspberry Pi logo and so on).  It held the Surface, my Macbook Air, headphones with attached microphone, serial adapter, USB network adapter, pens, pencils, highlighter pens, notebooks, a few tools that I need wherever I go (#3 Phillips screwdriver, 1/8" Allen driver, Euroblock screwdriver, backup flashlight), toothbrush, toothpaste and a change of socks and undies and more.  There was even a pocket for notebooks and manuscripts for whatever fiction I was working on.  It finally started to wear out.  My Surface has gone non-support; at that point it was barely acceptable to my employer as long as I kept the wifi off, and I have an Official Laptop now.  So I pulled a slightly smaller bag from the small collection of ones I have accumulated over years of looking, and loaded it with a reduced set of supplies and widgetry.  Yesterday was its first use.  So far, so good, though I miss the pen loops and merit badges on the old one.  I think I have a solution for the first, and as for the second, I'm working on it.

     I wonder how long this one will last?
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* A Ten-Tec 555 "Scout"  transceiver with plenty of band modules, power supply, tuner, key, headphones, logbook, a spool of just-in-case wire and all the parts of a end-fed windowsill antenna except the telescopic antenna itself.  There wasn't a bit of room left over.  I tested it at the North Campus and it interfered with the fire alarm system, oops.  But, hey, that was a fluke, right?  Got to the hotel (I was traveling to take a class for work) and there, behind the check-in desk, was the panel for the exact same model of fire alarm system!  I did a lot of listening that week.

The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month

     It's Veteran's Day -- and I do thank you for your service.  It was Armistice Day to begin with, the end of a war that left a scar twisting across the face of Europe.  Some of the WW I battlefield is still uninhabitable.

     Someone who was my age when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour in 1918 would have had clear memories of the U. S. Civil war.  That includes some of the soldiers and sailors.  One officer is known to have served during both wars -- and the ones in between.  And the scars from the Civil War remain, too, not as dead or as deadly as France's Red Zones but they're still there, etched across the land, scrawled across history, written on gravestones and in family histories.  War extracts a terrible price and it falls most heavily on the young and strong.  Even in peacetime, most military service consists of long hours of hard work for low pay.

     Those people in uniform are us.  Just like you, your neighbors, the people you work with and the kids you went to school with.  They're a mixed bag -- smart, dumb, short, tall, liberals, conservatives and people who just don't care about politics.  They grew up poor, middle-class and wealthy.  They're every color and all the same color -- green or Navy blue or whatever.  What they have in common is they stepped up.  They are doing -- or they have done -- the job, often far from home, frequently in terrible weather, and, at times, with the understanding there are other people not too far away who intend to kill them.

     I try not to be too glib with, "Thank you for your service."  That service is not something you can nod at acknowledging one day a year and call it good enough.

Good News From Redmond

     My decade-old copy of Word 2010 does install in a Windows 11 machine.  It comes with the same caveats it had grown on the old computer -- you don't get the full panoply of features the latest version provides -- but it did install and run, and it looks like the things I need it for still work.

     All this thanks to Tam's saved-back DVD/CD-ROM drive.  I have one somewhere, but it's stashed in the back of one of several different desk drawers, and when she noticed me digging and asked what for, her drive was ready to hand.

     I hang well to the back of the technology curve.  This desktop computer, like its predecessor, cost a little over a hundred dollars.  Because I don't play computer games,* I don't need extreme speed or the latest graphics; most kinds of software don't need that much horsepower.
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* There's a story there.  I spent a lot of my time in college on a PLATO terminal (and the school's shared-time mainframes, a DEC-10 and a PDP-9), playing games and taking online learning modules that had little to do with my major.  I spent a lot more time at the campus radio station.  Between the two, classwork suffered.  The electronics classes weren't a problem; everything except circuit analysis was essentially review.  And first semester Applied Math For Technology was a delight.  It was when the university decided to save costs and fold that class into Calculus in the second semester that things got dicey -- especially since our working-engineer math professor was replaced by a pure-math guy who had been sent to our extension campus after getting crosswise with his department head.  It would have been a good time to buckle down and really apply myself.  19 year old Bobbi spent even more time on the PLATO terminal instead.  Pity it didn't offer a calculus course....  I did learn how to program in BASIC, which used to be handy.

Left-Handed Mouse

     Setting up a new computer always reaches an awkward phase for me, where the old computer keyboard and mouse are still where they always were, but I'm starting to use the new one.  I'm pretty good at using a mouse left-handed, ring finger doing the primary clicking, but it takes a little extra thought.

     Work required us to change to Windows 11 months ago.  Home has lagged, but my old computer was getting slower and slower, almost certainly a thermal issue compounded by an over-full hard drive.  So it was time.

     Who wants to bet my out-of-date (and non-subscription) version of Word won't install?  I'll probably buy the standalone version, since I don't like software that you never pay off.  Word lets me check my LibreOffice files for compatibility, and it does one thing I can't figure out how to get the open version to do: it lets you edit the normally-hidden formatting commands.

Making A Hash Of It

     Down the hall, Tam is enjoying the first of the Sunday morning political talk shows.  "They will be lit," she told me, which is apparently a good thing.  It's certainly going to give the pundit class something to other than hanging out on Washington, D.C. streetcorners, offering to debate passers-by for small change.

     Me, I'm onto food.  Having come into a little money thanks to a small across-the-board bonus at work,* on Friday I was at a Meijer store, which is sort of what Walmart would be if it was a little nicer, or a super Target with no sense of style and a much better grocery section.  And in that grocery section, they routinely stock corned beef brisket!

     It may not be gourmet fare, but if you bake one in a covered pan with a little water over a slow grill for three and a half hours, adding potatoes, carrots, celery and cabbage for the last half of that, you've got a meal to be reckoned with -- and leftovers!  Supper was fine last night.  We started in on the current season of The Diplomat, which is only a little weird for me: Keri Russell bears a strong resemblance to my older sister at the same age, and watching your own sister as the U.S. Ambassador to the UK is...disconcerting.  Big sis has been doing an okay job of it so far, though.

     This morning, a couple of Yukon Gold potatoes and about the third of the leftover corned beef, diced, made some of the best corned beef hash I've had in a long time.  And I've still got corned beef more in the freezer to do something else with, by and by.  Possibly soup.
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* I'm not entirely sure why, and rather than bite the hand that feeds me with unflattering speculation, I'll assume it's because we all took our unpaid furloughs during the pandemic without much complaint.

Reading

     Over the last week, I reread Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.   I always fret my way through the last part, when Estraven and Genly Ai make a daring escape through a daunting environment; somehow she wrote it in such a way that the outcome still feels in doubt, no matter how many times I read the book.

     On one level, it's the story of not-quite First Contact with not-quite aliens* on their home planet; on another, it's a tale of intrigue that weaves its way through two governments, one an all-encompassing bureaucratic state akin to the old Soviet Union, gulags and all, and the other a messy European-style monarchy with a strong Parliament and a very loose sense of national unity.  She is not a huge fan of either, though the first clearly comes through as the worst: they're not even good cooks!  On yet another level, it's a story of nearly incredible derring-do against terrible odds by a pair of unlikely allies.  It's also a chance for her to illustrate the remarkable uselessness of having accurate answers to the wrong questions.  And it's recursive; the telling, mostly in the first person by the protagonists, ends with one of them preparing to tell the story again, much as he (and others) have just told it to the reader.

     Le Guin was not the kind of writer who sits down and works out character, background and plot in excruciating detail before writing.  She tended to make it up as she went along, discovering in the first draft who these people were and what they were about.  It worked for her, thanks to a wide-ranging intellect and keen sense for character: she wrote about people, first and foremost, and for all that you can read much of her work as allegory, in her mature work, she never loses sight of the essential humanity of those she writes about.

     Stories are about people, about people to whom things happen and who make things happen.  All the rest of it is just decoration.
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* In the universe where much of her science fiction is set, the original human race is not from Earth.  The Hain have been around far, far longer humans have lived on Earth.  While their present civilization is portrayed as wise, gentle and driven by regret (and sometimes annoyingly superior about it), their starfaring culture has risen and fallen many times.  Some incarnations of it were heartlessly willing to employ genetic modifications on the people established in the colonies they left on planets all over the galaxy.  Now all those varied peoples are finding one another once again and it's not a smooth process.

The Way Forward

     I've been thinking about what to do next.  Four years of catastrophizing whatever comes out of the White House and Congress -- and the U. S. Supreme Court -- doesn't appeal to me.  Anyone who wants that can find it in plenty of places, often from subject-matter experts.  I'm not going to ignore it, either -- but no Commander in Chief is the boss of me.  All Presidents are temporary employees, hired for a term of four years with a possibility of four more, and then they're out.  And for those four years, the only time they're off the clock is when they're unconscious.  People figure Presidents they dislike are living large, but the job is its own punishment, especially if the office-holder works at it.

     In my opinion, the electorate just handed a machine gun to an angry chimp; but he's got it now and there's no pretending otherwise.  Life goes on nevertheless, with a new and worrying hazard.  There are still meals to be cooked, stories to be written, books to be read, carpentry and electronic projects to be built, maybe even a little sewing.*  I've got a retirement to figure out; I'll be poor no matter what, but if I work it right and the economy doesn't go too nuts, I won't go broke until after I'm dead.

     All of that is of more interest to me, and maybe to my readers, than politics.
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* I keep putting that off, I think for fear of being bad at it.  That's a silly reason; part of learning (or in this case, relearning) a skill is accepting that you're not going to be proficient right away.  The other part?  I bought my little Singer Featherweight folding portable sewing machine so I could easily carry it to visit Mom and sew.  That never happened; I was always too busy and all I have left is regret and memories of good advice. (Prices for these little machines have climbed steadily; Singer made around two million of them but they are in great demand from quilters and anyone who wants a small, full-featured sewing machine.)

Three Takes

 Staying Home:
     Despite the credit I have given Mr. Trump for driving up voter turnout, it was down this year.  The final numbers aren't in as I write; Arizona and Nevada are still counting.  But it looks like a little over 139 million people voted Red or Blue in 2024, while 155 million did so in 2020 -- and who stayed home Tuesday was significant: from 74 million Republican votes in 2020 to 72 million in 2024 isn't a big change -- but the Democrats fell from 81 million in 2020 to almost 68 million in 2024.

     Those missing numbers don't show up in the also-ran columns, either.  Apparently, 13 million Democrats looked at the race and said, "Meh," or "A pox on both of 'em."

     Pundits are busy mining and refining faint veins of "why" and partisans are touting it as a mandate, but it looks like blue apathy instead of a red surge to me.

El Camino Real:
     There is a throughline in the American Presidency that I can't quite trace.  It will take a real historian, preferably one with a couple of thousand years of hindsight.  But I have got the broad outline, and it runs from roots in Alexander Hamilton, to Andrew Jackson  and through Abraham Lincoln's wartime Presidency, lingers on Woodrow Wilson's expansion of Presidential powers (and loathing for Congressional vacillation and inefficiency), grows under Franklin D. Roosevelt coping with a global economic depression and global war, on to Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan (especially encouraged by the Federalist Society) and blooms during Donald Trump's first term of office.  The Unitary Executive Theory is alive and well -- and ready to do some kicking.

     There's a rough parallel in Roman history: the accretion of power and authority in their executive positions, both before Caesar and after.  The appeal of "Stroke of the pen, law of the land"* is undeniable; we're wired up to want quick, bold solutions to difficult problems.  But this is a problem in and of itself.  Wilson argued for top-down government modeled on the patriarchal families of Classical antiquity, the basis for everything from Kaiser Wilhelm the Second's Germany to Stalin's Soviet Union: it's got a strong bias toward autocracy.  For all Wilson's impatience with Congress and the separation of powers, those things exist for good reason.

     Most U. S. Presidents have run some version of the American cursus honorum: military service followed by a series of civic offices, both elected and appointed.  Not every President touches every base, but nearly all of them have worked their way up, usually with some kind of legislative experience, some exposure to the give and take governance, some direct contact with what happens when slogans and ideals encounter the art of the possible.  Mr. Trump did not.  Nearly all business enterprises operate with an inherently unitary executive and little or no input from majoritarian assemblies; voting stockholders are hardly legislators.  Business has a strong bias towards autocracy.

     Do you want kings?  Because this is how you get kings.

It Can Go Boom:
     Ukraine's got a lot to lose in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election.  Ukraine is a country that could build a fission bomb over a long weekend and crank out fusion weapons in a matter of weeks.  And if you'd like more worries, with a few hours effort they could produce "dirty" bombs that render a patch of land uninhabitable for months, years or centuries.  Moscow's a target -- but Russian support centers and bases along the border are easier to reach, and a nuclear cordon sanitaire keeping Russian expansionism at bay could grow from there.  It's not a new idea; I cribbed it from Dean Ing, and he got the germ of it from Robert A. Heinlein.

     That's just one of the ways things could go sideways if Ukraine runs out of options.  I remain convinced that Russia's invasion is a festering boil that is more likely than not to erupt into global conflict and those odds are worse under Mr. Trump than they have been under Mr. Biden.  I hope I'm wrong.
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* People start fights over the context of this comment, but there's no denying it stuck.

Well, That's Over

     It wasn't the outcome I expected -- but I wasn't expecting it very strongly.  Hope is for saps, as the Greeks warned us in the story of Pandora.  One side or the other opens up the box every election, and what comes out is rarely never rainbows and unicorns.

     On social media, a few people have written, "This fundamentally changes my understanding of the American people," or similar notions and that's what hope gets you -- it was our response to the pandemic that put a spotlight on the American psyche for me, mostly our reactions to the measures that tried to limit it: a slim majority of us are ignorant idiots, suspicious and resentful of expertise and willing to ride "You ain't the boss of me" all the way to the ground like Slim Pickens on an atomic bomb, even when reason and logic clearly shows that going along leads to the best outcome (and you can kick the would-be bosses to the curb later).

     So Mr. Trump won, both in the Electoral College and (so far) the popular vote.  A majority of us chose anger over joy, rants over laughs, an inarticulate man over an articulate woman, a promise of mass deportation and high tariffs over taxing billionaires and oligarchs while providing paths to citizenship for sincere immigrants, the government (of mostly men) controlling women's bodies instead of minding their own business.  

     As I write, control of the next U. S. Senate will rest in Republican hands by the thinnest of margins; the balance of power in the House is still undecided but it, too, will be on a knife's edge.  That's not a mandate; it's a great big caution flag.  I doubt it will be heeded.

     If Mr. Trump gets his tariffs, look for economic hard times before the middle of his term.  Look for higher prices; tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter, and are passed along to you and me.  Even when tariffs succeed in encouraging domestic production to replace imports, the heavy thumb of government remains on the scales, impeding the workings of the free market: the version made here only needs to be cheaper than the cost of the import plus the tariff.

     And about making that stuff here?  If Mr. Trump gets the mass deportations he and many of his supporters long for, it will rip out the bottom of the labor market.  Those low-wage workers will be gone, and it was never that they "did the jobs Americans won't do," it was that Americans won't do those jobs for such low pay.  Assuming the now-open jobs can be filled, they're not going to be filled as cheaply as they were, and you know where that shows up?  Mr. CEO and his Board of Directors aren't going to take a haircut over it!  You and I will pay more for those goods and services.  Of course, we'll want raises too, and when wages and prices chase one another, you know what you get?  Inflation.

     The darker side of mass deportation is that if it is carried out as described, the result will be a horror that will shame this nation for generations; the scale of the effort and the incarceration required will inevitably produce tragic results. 

     Between people who glory in chaos and violence (and/or grift), like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, between nutjobs like Robert R. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, between "Christian Nationalists" and "Dominionists" who are hoping to ride the multiply-divorced convicted felon to cultural control (look up what they say; the language is Biblical but their intent is clear: he's a means to an end), between men like Vivek Ramaswamy and J. D. Vance who have made themselves willing tools of democracy-skeptical oligarchs, Mr. Trump's second term will be fraught with wild notions, fringe theories, and cliques with interests greatly divergent from those of the country as a whole, if not downright inimical to them.  Elon Musk is brilliant promoter and a good judge of when to get into a line of business, but he couldn't manage or engineer his way out of an oversized boot with the instructions on the heel.

     A majority of my fellow citizens have chosen to run this experiment at full scale.  The party they voted for won the election.  That does not automatically mean it was the right choice.

     Time will tell. I remember how things were four years ago, how things were from 2016 to 2020, beginning with lies and ending in insurrection.  It was not a halcyon time, dripping with milk and honey.  Don't count on any nourishing sweetness this time either, not even if you're pale, hale, well-off and male.

We Didn't Take The Bus

     Tam and I react to stress in typical ways: we get snappish and prone to argue.  But that's not all of it.  I fret over my appearance (oh, the vanity!) and dawdle; she wants things done on the bounce, hup, hup!  She wants to get it o-v-e-r and move on.

     So of course we were running late and as I tried one more time to keep my bangs from looking as if a cat had slept in them (not unlikely), Tamara made a Command Decision: "I'll drive us to the polling place.  The bus will take too long."

     And in short order, thus it was done.  Of course there was nowhere to park in the small lot at the little neighborhood church where we usually vote.*  She dropped me off and went in search of a spot.  I walked over to the end of the line, got there and realized it was just a bend: the line was twice as long as I had thought!

     At the real end of the line, a woman with campaign literature greeted me.  She turned out to be the at-large school board candidate I had decided to vote for, who was very much at large: "This is my second stop and I have plenty more to visit before six this evening!"  Not especially well-funded, she was applying shoe leather to the problem, exactly the kind of initiative my research had led me to expect from her.

     Tam showed up after a few minutes and the line moved along briskly.  We were inside the building and getting our ID checked in less than thirty minutes, and had voted before another fifteen had passed.

     That's done.  Poll workers said turnout had been steady at about that level, with a little bump up during morning rush hour.  They were hearing that other sites were at least as busy and some were much busier.  As divided as opinions are about Mr. Trump, he's been a real boon to voter turnout: people are motivated to vote against him or for him, but they are certainly motivated.

     Now we'll wait for the results.
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* Indianapolis/Marion County took advantage of Indiana's voter ID laws to implement "vote anywhere:" your ID calls up the appropriate ballot for your address and you can go to any polling place.  Most people still vote at their old familiar spot, but even those move around.  While living in and near Broad Ripple, I've voted at a synagogue, a temporarily unused public school building, the gym of a private Catholic elementary/middle school and at least two different churches.  Voting in the United States remains a wonderfully amateur, slapdash affair, despite sophisticated machines and a small core of dedicated professionals: the poll workers are just plain folks, trying to maintain a little order in chaos without a whole lot of direction.  Lines snake around almost at random and you do end up getting what you need when you need it, but it often seems unlikely until it happens.  I trust this process: it hasn't got sufficient organization to enable cheating.

Desk Clearing

     It's not quite like tab clearing, though there are some similarities.  I'm the kind of person whose desk slowly accretes piles of stuff.  At work, it's forms and parts for projects (SP4T PIN-diode RF switch with a relay-diode matrix to go from 24-Volt 1x4 switching to binary at TTL levels?  I've got that, right down to the lunatic SMA connector for the 5 V rail to the PIN-diode switch.  Seriously, who does that?).

     At home, it's bills, printed-out manuscripts and medical stuff* -- doctor bills, mostly.  The bills are marked "PAID" (because they are) and put there awaiting being filed away, which does happen sometimes, but not nearly often enough.  Oh, that's not all: a three-year-old note, thanking me for taking care of the neighbor's cats during her first long time away; a rough floor plan for the Operational areas of the starship Lupine; a rough plan and elevation for a backyard writing shed that comes in just under the city's 10' x 12' limit for not needing a permit; a reminder that Indiana tech writer John T. Frye's "Carl and Jerry" stories from the 1950s and 60s -- about teenaged electronics hobbyists who get up to all manner of instructive hijinks -- were available again (and now they're again mostly not, but a web search will turn up a few); a 3-ounce bottle of teal ink that I barely remember buying; and my Western Electric 300-series desk phone, a gift from the Data Viking many years ago.  And so on.  It's a lot of stuff to sort through, right down to the exact order number for a style of jeans I liked and Carhartt no longer makes.

     Somehow, it's an effective distraction from election worries.  We're well up the first rise of the roller-coaster ride now, click-click-click, and we'll all be yelling and waving our hands in the air soon enough, one way or another.  There's no emergency exit from this ride.

     Tam and I will be taking the bus to vote in an hour or so, and then it's just the waiting.
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* Between bad knees, high blood pressure, chronic migraines, a history of rheumatic fever and a tendency to fall, I'm probably less sturdy than I care to admit.  I certainly interact with medical personnel more than I would prefer.

Match Cuts

     Tamara and I have been enjoying the current season of The Lincoln Lawyer.  (The TV series; I have yet to see the film, with a different cast.)  Taken from the novels starring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller by mystery writer Michael Connelly, not only are the stories first-rate, they're brilliantly shot and edited.  One of the best parts is the use of "match cuts," in which scene-to-scene transitions go from one similar thing to another.

     The simplest is a sky shot: characters are conversing, the camera tilts up to the sky, there's a quick dissolve to another image of the sky and the camera tilts back down on a new scene.  A little trickier is the not-quite-match: famously, in Lawrence of Arabia, the camera goes in close on a lit match (a literal match, and there's your double pun) and as Lawrence blows out the flame, the film cuts to sunrise on the desert horizon.  It's easy to overdo,* but the best match cuts are as smooth as silk.  In an example from the TV series, a group of attorneys around a conference table in their office discussing trial strategy cuts to them at the Defense table in court, using those strategies -- a leap that covers days if not weeks, and keeps the story moving.

     Scenes in the series are carefully composed and lit, and often lushly shot, moving to a more documentary style when the action happens in a prison or low-rent lawyer's office.  The visual style is as deft and inevitable-seeming as a dancer's movements.

     One of the most interesting things to me is that while Connelly's plots are intriguingly twisty and his storytelling is more than adequate, he's not a bowl-you-over prose stylist.  He was a newspaper reporter and he writes like a reporter, without fuss or flourish.  The TV series is very much on their own hook with the cinematography and editing; trying to show Mickey Haller's world, they have picked up a visual style that suits their protagonist and his Los Angeles like a well-tailored suit.
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* There's a version in which dialog carries across the cut, one character's sentence finished or answered by another, often to dramatic effect.  Occasionally, a film or TV show will cut back and forth between two parallel scenes multiple times to build tension, but it's difficult to pull off without being too obvious.  The animated spy comedy Archer frequently plays carried dialog for laughs.

Important Logical Principle

     Remember, a thing does not have to exist for no one to have seen it.

So, Yeah

     Yesterday, I managed to get moved out of my old desk at work, took the darned thing apart (because I'm in the Engineering Department, and we do that), picked the parts for a "new" desk (adjustable-height, because apparently that is now what we do), moved the parts of the old desk out of the way, moved the new one in, added a power strip (not standard because, I don't know, it's 1890 and we don't have any electronic gadgets on our desks?) and moved all of my stuff back into and onto it, with the remainder relegated to a couple of large plastic bins.

     This had to get done because the boss needs half the space of the (under-occupied) shared tech desk area to set up a big project, and I'm off all next week when that project begins.

     Today, I completed a story, which came in at a bloated 8200 words, and trimmed it to 7230 before sending it out to get looked over.  This is still too long but it's as much as I could manage today.

     I even got some laundry done, just like a grown-up.

Break A...Finger?

      I'm working on a short story for a competition.  It's taken me right down to a deadline to get the plot worked out (or mostly worked out, anyway), so today's post is just this.