A little zen saying to start off the New Year. I had all sorts of good intentions for my week off — I had freelance projects on deck, and I really really really need to get back to the memoir, which I’ve neglected shamefully in the last couple of months as my “real” job at the Big Company has gotten way better, but also way busier. But as I zoomed through the past couple of months, packing 3 jobs into every day, zinging from deadline to deadline, making them all but driving myself a little crazy in the process I…
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I’ve been working working working … hence the unfortunate but necessary negelct of the blog. But now, now it’s Chrismas! Christmastime in Montana this year is delightful, snowy, and very very cold … supposed to be well below zero tonight. I’ve been so busy and fried that I hadn’t really thought much about Christmas — a couple of weeks ago I got sucked in at the grocery store and bought some of those icicle lights — they twinkle! So tacky but I love them — hung them on the front porch and they’re sort of like having a fire —…
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Dreadful blogger that I am — I didn’t blog my fabulous Thanksgiving — nine adults and two kids and I carved a lovely grotto-like dining room out of the basement — it’s a wonder what you can do with many tablecloths, a couple of sheets to partition off the basement-y stuff, and pine boughs stapled to the bare rafters and intertwined with twinkle lights. “It’s like a restaurant in Prague!” my friend Margie said as we all sat down with plates laden with ham and turkey and all the trimmings. It was very festive and I’m now done entertaining for…
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Home after a week in San Jose for work — it was a good week — I actually got a lot done, and spent two days talking to folks from the other theaters about translation and localization issues, which was nerdy, but interesting. It’s nice to be engaged in my job again — I officially made the transition back to editing a couple of weeks ago, so I’m back to what I do best — strategizing how to document these products, thinking about the pedagogical project that an admin or user guide represents, and then just doing a lot of…
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I had a long talk on the phone last night with my cousin Jennifer. Jennifer’s four years younger than I am, and her mother was my mother’s older sister. Every time there was a crisis in our childhoods, and there were plenty, we were shipped off to our Aunt Lynn’s house, so in a lot of ways Jennifer and I were raised almost more like siblings than like cousins. I have a very clear memory of Patrick and I, having been dropped off one snowy night by someone who had agreed to drive us from where? Our Dad’s house? Our…
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Well, we found the bridge — it’s about 25 yards downstream in some weeds. It’s hard to tell whether some kids pulled it up and cast it aside, or whether it was swept up in the periodic flooding they’ve been doing to flush out the trout habitat. I’d actually been wondering why it seemed as stable as it was. From what I could tell it was a construction truss balanced on two logs, which formed the footings — the whole thing was about 18 inches wide, and probably ten to fifteen feet long. Turns out, there are two parts to…
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Off we went tonight on our fabulous walk — we got to the bluff at the end of Clark Street where we cross over the creek into the dog park, and I let the dogs off their leashes and they went bouncing down the hill and through the creek and I was all set to follow them BUT THERE WAS NO BRIDGE! The little bridge that someone had built out of a construction truss, and had balanced on two hunks of log set into the bank — IT WAS JUST GONE! GONE! I had to call the dogs back —…
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I went off for my annual doctor’s appointment about a month ago, and while all was well, that scale thing had crept up to a truly frightening figure. My clothes were still fitting pretty well, but shall we say, my face was a wee bit more full than I’d like — and of course, just as I was realizing that middle-aged spread was indeed happening to me, work got really busy, the bears got into their annual fall frenzy, the out-of-state hunters with their scary high-power rifles arrived, and somehow we just weren’t getting out for our afternoon walks in…
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For big dead animals. I drove up to Suce Creek this morning to run the dogs, and there were two guys standing looking into the bed of a pickup truck. Once of them was wearing camoflage, always a tip-off. So as the boys ran up the hill in search of grouse, I walked over and took a peek. “What’d you get?” I asked. “A moose,” the one guy said. “That’s not a moose!”I said looking at the big black dead animal, “The antlers are wrong.” It was a very beautiful, dark, almost black elk. He was nestled in the bed…
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So, when I was home in June for my cousin Jason’s wedding, my grandmother bestowed on me Mrs. Baggot’s Ring. Mrs. Baggot’s ring originally belonged to my great-great grandfather, Charles Ambrose Plamondon, who had a gear company in Chicago and who died, along with his wife Mary (they were celebrating their 37th wedding anniversary) on the Lusitania. Apparently, the story goes that Doctor Murphy, who invented a major gastrointestinal surgical procedure, and who I think was some sort of cousin, gave this ring to Charles Ambrose as a gift, probably sometime shortly before the turn of the 20th century. Then,…