New digs (again), a new gig (again), and various and sundry personal stuff will be keeping my pretty busy for a little longer. I'm hoping to get back, soon, to following news events and current issues. Also I'm hoping to get a chance to respond to Tom's comment on 'Fun Home'.
Posting break is over. Oddly enough, I find that I concentrate better during the work day, and sleep better at night, when I know that I've played my part in the global conversation. That means blogging.
So, I'm back. Let's get rolling.
I'm going to go to light-posting mode on the political front for a couple of weeks, probably through the end of November, due to busy life in the family, work, and creative departments.
Meanwhile, I encourage you to visit the friends on my sidebar.
Here on the TypePad site, you can also review my essays and watch the Google Reader box (it's just to the right of the current post, labeled "News1@DiL") for new shared items. I'm always updating my Google Reader even when I'm not actively posting.
Currently, my ongoing creative projects include the Gilkesh Language, the Gilkesh Encyclopedia, and The Queen's Courtesan, a serial story of romance and intrigue set in the Gilkesh universe.
You can read my other writing at the fiction tag. "The Rose of Paradise" is based on the creation story in Genesis, and "The Zero Ring" is loosely based on King Lear.
My greatest inspiration in writing has been my sister Stephanie (1964-1992), who is never far from my thoughts. You can read her writing at Wilderness Vision, Iridescence, and Stephanie Online.
To see some really great work by the artist in my life, go pay a visit to Georgianne Fastaia at BadfishStudios.
That's all for now. See you soon.
Light posting, or none, for a little while, due to exciting developments in my personal life. Back soon.
... for just a little longer. I now have less than 48 hours left in Portland, the city that's been my home for the last seven and a half years. I'm looking forward to meeting up with old friends - and a new love! - in San Francisco, and to spending more time with my son, who's going on eleven and getting ready to start bar mitzvah training. So it's a good thing.
It's been a busy week for me. Last Thursday I met with Michael Totten and Judith Weiss for a long and very pleasant drive to Wheeler County, Oregon. It was a welcome change of pace for all of us. Michael said the landscape reminded him of Kurdistan. (At one point, as we pulled off the road to enjoy the scenery, Michael caught himself starting to tell Judith, "Stay on the pavement, there might be land mines.")
I flew in to San Francisco Tuesday morning and caught up with Judith again on Tuesday night at the 911 Neocons gathering, along with Cinnamon and many others. I'll be in The City through June 29 looking at apartments. The move will probably happen in August.
I've lived in San Francisco twice before. I moved to Portland, Oregon in early 2000 and I'm very fond of Portland. But many of my original reasons for moving no longer apply, and I have a number of old friends - and an eleven-and-a-half-year-old son - here in San Francisco.
The most immediate motivation for me to move back to San Francisco, though, is a lovely and wonderful woman I've known since high school. We got in touch again last Thanksgiving weekend - coincidentally, the same weekend as my 25th high school reunion (South Windsor High School, class of 1981) - and we are now in a relationship. It's really an amazing story and while I can't share all the details here, I can tell you that I am very happy and fortunate to have her in my life.
So, that's the news from here. I'll return to regular posting as soon as I can. Meanwhile, don't forget to check my Google Feeds for news.
A number of recent developments in my personal life will likely have an effect on the shape of Dreams Into Lightning. I'll go into more detail later (don't worry, it's all good stuff) but the bottom line is that I'm going to focus on using my blogging time more effectively and finding innovative ways to enhance the quality of this weblog.
For most of the last three years I've been posting mainly on a Mac in the Safari browser. When Apple came out with Tiger, I started using the built-in RSS feature, and got hooked on RSS. Now I'm trying to broaden my computer proficiency a little bit and I divide my time about equally between my two Macs and two PCs. (A dual-core G5 PowerMac, a G4 PowerBook, a Toshiba Satellite, and a dual-cor HP Compaq.) I'm making the switch over from Safari (and Explorer, which I used occasionally) to Firefox.
Some friends clued me in to the option of online feed aggregators, and I've set up an account with Google Reader, which will probably take the place of Safari's RSS when I read and post. I'm still getting used to composing in Firefox. I have to say I don't like it quite as well as Safari for composing html, but the net advantages will probably come out in Fx's favor. Meanwhile, please bear with me if you see glitches in the formatting of the posts.
I'm still mostly a novice at html, but planning to develop some more proficiency there too. I didn't know what a bold tag was when I started blogging; now I know enough to compose a post, but not much more. So I started a web page - got an account at a free hosting service, downloaded FTP clients (StaffFTP for Windows, Cyberduck for Mac ... with a name like Cyberduck, you know it's going to be for Mac), and started playing around with header fonts and RGB hexcodes. I have Adobe GoLive for editing, too, but I'm probably not going to use it right away.
That's probably more information than you needed to know, but my point (and I do have one) is that I'm always looking for ways to improve the quality and functionality of DiL. And here's one new item I can offer you tonight: selected items from my Google News Reader, which I'm calling News1@DiL. You are cordially invited to bookmark the link.
Posting has been light due to a busy work schedule and personal life. I expect this to be the case for another couple of weeks, but DiL is not going to shut down.
This afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting Neo-Neocon and Gerard Vanderleun for a late lunch at the Blue Moon. The moment was all too brief, but it was a rare treat to see Neo without her apple.
Dreams Into Lightning on TypePad reached the 20,000-visit mark (by SiteMeter's reckoning) with a visit from Freeport City, the Bahamas, on April 7, 2007, at 1:30pm Pacific Time. The intrepid reader at IP 24.244.139.129 clicked on my Morning Report index link, which will take you to almost a year's worth of Morning Reports.
Oh, and did I say a year? DiL at TypePad has indeed been in action almost that long.
Meanwhile, Dreams Into Lightning on Blogger is inching closer to 60,000 hits as it nears three years of operation.
Among the other sites I maintain are two tributes to my sister, Stephanie McLintock (1964-1992), featuring her poetry at Wilderness Vision and her prose at Iridescence. A more recent project - a joint venture with some of Stephanie's friends - is Stephanie Online. The contributions of Stephanie's longtime friend Georgianne Fastaia were especially valuable.
I do a little writing of my own. Two stories, The Rose of Paradise and The Zero Ring, are posted online. In a slightly lighter vein, The Queen's Courtesan is a science-fiction serial which may eventually become (gasp, groan) a novel. Also you can read my essay on The Kabbalah at the link.
For photography and other images, I have pages on Flickr and 23.
Those who dare to venture even deeper into my personal world can visit my LiveJournal (yes, shock and horror, I do keep a LiveJournal) at Translinear Light.
My father's World War II memoirs are posted at Pacific Memories. His writing is at Urban Renewal.
I've created a family history blog called The Town Down the River. (The title is a tribute to my parents' favorite poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson.) And here is a belated thank-you to Bill Ives for linking me on his two very professional-looking genealogy blogs, Sharp family in NC and Ives family history blog.
Posting has been light lately, again due to a busy personal life. But I don't want to let Erev Pesach fall without posting something.
First and foremost, thanks to Cinnamon Stillwell for the link! Welcome, CS and Kesher Talk readers.
Via Neo: "Did I miss the part where it was progressive not to fight medieval religious fascists?" Marc "Armed Liberal" Danziger has some ideas about how you can help stop Congress from abandoning the Iraqi people. Go here to learn more.
Finally, I don't have anything particularly inspired to post about Passover right now, so I'll leave you with these links: A prayer for the captives at Kesher Talk, and ShrinkWrapped's magnificent Passover essay, "We were slaves."
Chag sameach ... happy Passover!
Posting will continue at a slower-than-usual pace due to the demands of my day job. The good news is that I'm officially getting hired on (as opposed to temping through an agency) at the end of this month. The pay is a little less than I'd like (just shy of $10 per hour) but it's steady work and it fits well with the rest of the stuff that's on my résumé, so I'm giving it a go.
I met Michael Totten for drinks the other night, in advance of his upcoming trip to Iraq. With Michael's guidance (and a great deal of luck) I hope to be able to visit Baghdad by the end of this year. Stay tuned.
I indicated in my January 5 Morning Report that I planned to take some time to "broaden and deepen my understanding of the world." I've been doing that, particularly in the form of reading up on US and world history, and it's been a pleasure to rekindle my long-dormant interest in this vast and important subject. I've got one or two posts in the works which should be up shortly.
The other news is that I've got a job, and it starts tomorrow morning. On my first day they're going to cut me some slack and start me at 9am, but my regular workday is going to begin at 7:30. I don't know how this will affect my posting. Morning Report may have to go on leave for a while. On the other hand, I'm an early riser, and the discipline of having to be at work every morning may have a positive effect on my blogging habits, as it did last October when I was working for the County. So we'll have to wait and see.
But for now, we'll get back to the breaking news: Operation Baghdad has started.
Oh, and one more thing ... I got my first royalty check from Newstex this month! So I am now officially a paid writer for the first time in my life.
Many thanks to the good folks at Newstex, to Newstex readers, and of course to everybody who reads this site.
I'm back in Portland from a short visit to San Francisco. I returned Tuesday to find the city buried under some six inches of snow - a blizzard by Portland standards - and what's more, I had a mild case of the flu. So it's probably a lot of rest and indoor time for me for the rest of the week.
By Sunday I expect to be back to regular posting, Morning Report, the works.
Also upcoming: I'll be posting on Rabbi Steven Greenberg's visit to Portland. Rabbi Greenberg, at present the world's only "out" gay Orthodox rabbi, was scheduled to speak at Portland State University on Wednesday night, but the event was postponed on account of, you guessed it, the weather. So we're looking at Tuesday evening, January 23 for the event, and yes, you can bet I'll be posting on it here at Dreams Into Lightning. And if all goes well, I may also be able to attend a private event with Rabbi Greenberg; I'll post updates as I find out more.
Dreams Into Lightning will be going on hiatus for a little while as I turn my energy to other areas of life. I expect to be back before too long; I'll post updates regularly. Meanwhile, I'll leave you with a Morning Report for this Friday morning.
I'm winding up a two-week visit to Connecticut, and I'll be ending my hiatus soon too. Regular posting will resume by Wednesday.
I'm posting from the lovely and cozy Victoria Station Cafe in Putnam, Connecticut (panorama here), now in the second half of my two-week visit to Putnam. You might have heard Putnam mentioned in the news because of the PlayStation shooting a couple of weeks ago, which happened just before I got here. (They've now arrested a couple of suspects.)
But did you hear about the Holiday Dazzle Light Parade?
Putnam, a town of about 9,000, saw an invasion of revelers that reached monumental proportions. The 20,000 in attendance almost matched the number of people who work at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos. The 20,000 is more than a sellout for the UConn basketball team at the Hartford Civic Center. It's more people than the populations of Canterbury, Pomfret, Sterling and Woodstock combined.The enthusiasm didn't end Sunday night. The Winter Dazzle has accounted for dizzying amounts of people visiting the Norwich Bulletin's web site, www.norwichbulletin.com to see dozens of photos of the event. People just loved this parade.
How to explain it? ...
(For the record, I've never driven in Connecticut before, and am completely unfamiliar with this part of the state - but somehow, following Route 44 from Bradley Airport through the backwoods of Connecticut in the dead of night, I managed to "find" Putnam. Go figure.)
Anyway, thanks to the magic of blogging, you can get the good news, not just the bad. I was at the parade, I took photos, and I'll post 'em. (UPDATE: Go to this post for photos.) And no, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the weighty issues facing the world today, but I'm enjoying my hiatus from political blogging and welcoming the chance for a little breathing space.
Regular posting will resume in a week.
Posting has been light due to work pressures and a busy personal life, not to mention the Jewish holidays. I expect to get one or two opinion pieces up tomorrow, and hopefully resume Morning Report on a semi-regular basis.
A new episode of "The Queen's Courtesan" is up. The story to date is here: The Queen's Courtesan. The new episode is The Investigation.
I'm planning a trip to the East Coast around Thanksgiving time.
Light posting for a little longer. I'm back in the job market and currently focusing my energies on job seeking and improving my computer and 10-key skills.
Also I'm at work on a fiction project (it's non-political) and will probably spend a lot of time on that over the weekend. I've made a fair amount of progress so far, and I'm pretty excited about how it's going, so I think I can cover a lot of ground this weekend.
Hopefully, back to regular posting by next week.
I took a longer-than-expected break from posting after my visit to San Francisco. I had a great time visiting with The Next Generation, who turns 11 this December. His math is getting really good, so I'm very pleased.
Also got to spend some time hanging out with my friend B. who's a native of the Mission and now lives in the Geary-Fillmore area. She's an amazing person and always great for exciting conversation.
I got back to Portland last week but found I needed some time to rest up and take care of various personal matters. I'm looking at some very good job prospects - which will be nice, my last two job interviews turned out to be with employers who don't hire Republicans. Perfectly legal. But that's another story.
Anyway, I expect to return to regular posting tonight or tomorrow. By the way - and you were probably wondering - B. just called from San Francisco and we had a talk about the crazy SUV driver Omeed Aziz Popal who ran down a bunch of people in B's neighborhood. Bottom line: I'm not convinced it was terrorism. Now, I don't doubt for a minute that there's a bias in the mainstream media to downplay or whitewash islamist terrorism and fascism; but I don't think this case was an example of it. (I think one blog portentously declared that the incident happened in San Francisco's "Jewish neighborhood". Oh, please. San Francisco doesn't have a Jewish neighborhood.) I'll post more when I have more.
I'm in San Francisco on personal business, so posting will be light. (Translation: hotel dial-up.)
Right now, the cease-fire is officially in effect in Israel/Lebanon. Who knows what comes next. I've got a couple of pieces on social issues that I want to finish and post, and I'm going to take advantage of this apparent lull in the fighting to do that. I have a feeling it's going to get real hot real soon.
On the home front, I'm going to be making a trip to California this week for a family visit. It probably won't prevent me from posting, assuming I can get good connections.
So, we'll just take one day at a time.
As you'll have noticed, my posting break is now officially over. Morning Report has had its leave cancelled. And it's not like I haven't got other stuff going on. As I commented in today's Morning Report Stratfor's observation about the difficulty of managing multiple tasks hit home.
Yesterday evening I went on a canvassing trip in the Portland area with Basic Rights Oregon. I'm pleased to report that we had an amazingly successful night, and got lots of support from the people we contacted. I also came out of the closet as a Republican to a couple of the other volunteers, who handled it quite well, and put out feelers about any Log Cabin activity in the area.
Will be making a trip to the Bay Area in the near future, to visit The Next Generation (who's almost 11).
Meanwhile, the blogosphere rolls on. Judith is coordinating a blogburst in honor of Stephen Vincent. I had the honor of meeting Lisa Ramaci-Vincent last year, and there's quite a bit I want to say. I will get a post up by the end of the day.
Please visit Atlas Shrugs and take some time to read her posts (and view the videos) from Israel. I am not sure how soon she'll be posting from Israel again, so please keep Pamela and her family in your thoughts and prayers.
And Tisha b'Av starts tonight - the commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem in ancient times. Something to ponder.
Light posting to follow. I'm finding it necessary to focus on wrapping up a number of loose ends in my personal life - mostly unfinished pet projects and the like - so I will not attempt to post here on a daily basis until, probably, after mid-August. Morning Report will be going on leave.
In addition to those minor pet projects, there's one major project I want to devote some energy to - fiction writing. There's a space-based SF story I've been writing in serial form (meaning I have no idea where it's going) and I want to make some progress on this, and possibly finish it up. With that done, I should then be free to develop some ideas in a more serious way. And then ... ? Maybe try for print publication? Who knows?
Pacific Memories is finished. One project that I worked on sporadically for almost two years, I finally completed in a big burst of energy earlier this week. Pacific Memories is my father's unfinished memoir from World War II, which I've transcribed from his typewritten manuscript and posted on Blogger.
The manuscript was among my father's personal papers, which I retrieved from the basement of the family house at the time of my mother's death in 2003. I don't know when it was written.
I wish I could tell you that it's a tale of non-stop, thrilling combat action, but that's not what my Dad wrote. In fact, it appears he abandoned the project just before the real excitement started: the unwritten sixteenth chapter is titled "Marching Through New Georgia", but that's all he wrote, a title page with nothing after it. (Thanks, Dad! Grrrr.) Perhaps the fighting on New Georgia was so fierce that he trembled at the very thought of setting it down on paper? I'll never know.
But what he did write remains a detailed, down-to-earth, entertaining and witty account of the 37th Infantry Division's progress through the Pacific towards an ever-closer Japanese threat. Read it for the interest of a first-hand account of the Second World War, written by an intelligent and sensitive man who had quite a way with words.
Wilderness Vision. Another posthumous collection I've posted to the web is Wilderness Vision, a collection of my sister's poetry. (Stephanie died in 1992, at the age of 28.) If you haven't yet, pay a visit. She was extraordinarily gifted. The site represents nearly all of her extant poetry - over 50 poems - and includes pieces written when she was as young as 12. The poems are not arranged in any particular order. Some of these works earned her prizes in the Scholastic competitions from 1977 to 1981. I'm in possession of a box full of her manuscripts and letters, which I'm continuing to organize with an eye to producing a coherent narrative of her life and work - agan, maybe for print publication some day. But I don't plan any further updates to the website.
You can read her fiction at the site Iridescence. Some of the works are unfinished or fragmentary. Also, my father's creative writing is posted at Urban Renewal.
One more important site. This hasn't been my favorite site to work on, but I consider it one of the most important: The Iraqi Holocaust. I am no longer actively updating this, although I may add new material at a later date, perhaps in connection with the trial of Saddam Hussein. If you know somebody who believes that "the Iraq war war wrong", please consider sending them a link to The Iraqi Holocaust. Thanks.
Finally, one thing I've been feeling the need to do is to take some time off to just read and study about the Middle East - and about history and culture in general. Lately I've been feeling as if I'm just scratching the surface - there's so much going on, and I'm struggling to keep up with it, but I'd like to be able to write with a little more depth. I've got several books lined up on the shelf, plus I may set aside some time to read through the old Iraq the Model archives. Hopefully cutting back on quantity will allow me to improve the quality.
So, stay tuned. Posting will continue here, but at a more deliberate pace until I feel like I'm caught up on other stuff. Don't go away.
(Besides, where else could you read an epic-length post explaining why posting is going to be light?)
I've got a date with the Westboro Baptist thugs tomorrow. The Phelps gang is planning to protest at the funerals of two Oregon soldiers, and I will be present at one of these. Should be interesting. Watch Plus + Ultra for more.
I've just returned from a week in San Francisco visiting with The Next Generation, who lives in SF with his mom. He's ten and a half years old, and tons of fun. Oh, and he now has his own page! I helped him get set up with his own site on Blogspot, letting him pick his own site title, username, and template. Then I took dictation while he narrated a story about space pirates.
Here is the link to TNG's new site: Atomic Movie.
Along with having a great time with TNG, I got to have lunch with the lovely and delightful Cinnamon Stillwell. Be sure to check out her latest column:
What’s at work here goes way back to medieval times. It’s called a blood libel and although originally used against Jews, its now being used to target Israeli, American and Coalition troops. These destructive lies spread like wildfire with the help of the 24-hour media and even when corrected, the initial falsehoods often remain in circulation for years to come. It seems that if you repeat it enough times, fiction becomes fact.
Only through the investigative work of the blogosphere and media watchdog websites have such frauds been brought to light.
I'm taking the rest of the day off, hopefully I'll get back to regular posting tomorrow.
I'm taking the day off from serious blogging because, well, because I feel like it. But I've taken some of my important old posts from the Blogger site and re-posted them in the April 2006 archives in order to take advantage of TypePad's Categories feature.
Also, I've added a "Fiction" category, so you'll be able to get to my creative writing if you are interested. I have a new story in progress (not yet posted here, but appearing soon) which is now over 8,000 words and will probably run a lot longer. It's a departure from my earlier approach in that I've been writing/publishing it in serial form, one episode at a time, and quite literally making it up as I go along. So it will not have the polished quality that I like to imagine is present in my other stories, but I hope it will be fun to read.
Finished the temp gig for the week; am taking today to rest up and get some last-minute odds and ends done. Next Thursday I leave for a week in San Francisco to visit The Next Generation ... that'll be nice.
Light posting this week - I'm on a full-time temp assignment and have numerous personal obligations. Also I'll be leaving for San Francisco next week to visit The Next Generation. Hopefully I'll be able to work in a few posts between now and then.
So, I'm going to try to curb the binge-purge syndrome in my blogging life by setting some goals/limits for myself. The goal is at least one news roundup (Morning Report, Afternoon Roundup, or Night Flashes) and one topical post per day. The limit is not more than two of each per day. Hopefully this will (a) help me avoid getting into these cycles where I blog obsessively for hours on end and then get burned out; and (b) allow me to meet my self-imposed blogging goals while enjoying a life outside of blogging.
(Yes, I do have a life outside of blogging.)
