OUCH!

Back to the dentist today for root canal. Reminded of the old joke 'The operation was a success but... In the case it looks like we saved the tooth but my wallet died. I remember when I was working for Waldenbooks and was for first time responsible for my own bills (as in off my mother's payroll) I would go to the dentist and the bill would be a hundred or two hundred dollars but with my insurance I would pay like 10 or 20. Now the bill is like 750 to 1000 and I am to feel fortunate that my part is only 125 today, 212 when I go back next time to get the "build up" and undoubtedly even more at the appointment after that for a crown. But on my bargain basement wages a couple of hundred sure aint equivalent to what ten bucks was to me back then. All I can say is that I sure as hell hope when the politicians figure out how to fix health care they Include Dental.

the power of blogging

Blogging continues to be quite an experience for me and today was....interesting....

Two longish posts appeared on my blog today. In one, expressed my dislked of the naming of the "____ For Dummies" line of books, expressing irony that a company has a hit based on books which call their customers STOOPID in real big letters on the front. The second discussed my concerns about pricing quality and other issues with blog2print, a new service that lets you put a button on your blog from one can click and purchase a bound book copy of your entire archive of blog posts, ("your blog in a book).

I have in the past so many times expressed just these sorts of complaints about companies publicly online before. And it was always pissin' in the wind which was all I ever expected it to be.

But today an employee of Wiley publishing dropped by the blog comments, threw an arm around Ron's shoulders, chuckled manfully and spoke "Like you said, buddy, we're all dummies about something, and a good guide book can sure help." It was an odd moment for me, being addressed through Ron while I was standing right there....

My review of blog2print was significantly more critical, and I was even more surprised to get a LONG e-mail from one of their staff who took some pains to address the issues I presented. According to Ann Manby of SharedBook, Google may a change to an API that is interferes with their ability to pull posts from all dates and they are working on a software upgrade to fix the problem I encountered. Then she spammed me a bit of legalese from the click through in stressing that her company has no liability whatever for any copyright violations in any material they print, which I'm sure is true. But it's little comfort when their software widget has selected, seeming at random two images from among dozens that appear in the pages they were to publish, put the front cover of one author's book on the front cover of my book and another books front on my back cover. And they were both books I panned.

I also told Ann that I love the concept of what they're trying to do and hoped future updates would address some of these concerns.

What's so remarkable about to me about these exchanges is that they happened. I've been bitching about flaky software and the companies who distribute it and criticizing things publishers do with and to books pretty much since I started reading and since I started using a computer. This was the first time the publisher and the software company talked right back.

Tired

Tired today. I think that I probably have all of the meds right now (I haven't had any more of those horrible dizzy spells) but I slept late and woke up tired and have been just kind of blah all day. I did go to the library and brought home two stacks of books-- one stack of stuff I may blog about this week and another stack of books on blogging.

I'm really thrilled with the outpouring of love and kindness I received in response to yesterday's post. The more that I think about, the surer I am that separating my personal diary from my book review site will enhance both immensely and I am so grateful to Jim for helping me to realize this.

Among my library books was a cookbook for challa bread, which Ron is reading now. Ron makes really great breads and I am hoping he will feel the inspiration to do that someday soon.

Change

Blogging has been quite an experience for me. I basically started out of a nostalgia for a time when my closest friends were actually quite far away but I talked to them on my computer more or less all the time. The magic that was Section 17 for me (in the early days anyway) has never been really duplicated. I have since met many wonderful people online and made other friends, spouses and everything in between online. But I've never again had that wide circle of far away friends whose daily messages make them seem a part of my life when they are not there. And when I realized that the final two people of that great group friendship that I could keep up with, were mainly (sorry, couldn't resist) keep-up-with-able because they now blogged about their daily lives and it was so cool to hear from and talk to them regularly that I decided to just jump in.

I have always been a book person. I've been a voracious reader since the moment I learned How, I've worked 3 1/2 years in the retail book business sucessfully selling books I've read and recommended to customers. I now work in a job where I am constantly exposed to thousands and thousands of books every working day. So I gave my blog a book theme. Thinking that I would just talk about books when the mood struck and mainly give the kinds of personal updates I once would have posted in issues. And so I mostly did.

And then it happened. I started noticing that there were actually people reading my book reviews who weren't just the handful of personal friends I'd been missing but people who just came in to read the review. (Oddly the review I posted of Dishwasher has been read a lot. It appears that because my blog is called The Thin Red Line people searching for GE Thin Dishwasher get my book review on their first page. And a very surprising number of them click through and read it.

So I started tying to actively promote my blog. I joined two syndication services. In return for displaying headlines (blog post titles) from other bloggers on my blog, my headlines are in turn displayed on other blogs with similar topic areas. I also began the long, tedious process of registering my blog with all of the blog directories (you'd be surprised how many there are).

I recently got an extremely helpful review from James Bashkin on Blog Catalog, who basically told me that my book reviews were quite good but that the personal was so Very personal as to be a off-putting.

After some thought I have decided to migrate my personal day to day shit postings exclusively to my Purely Personal blog, to migrate Joel's fabulous pictures to my Joel's Pix blog and focus The Thin Red Line on regularly posting about three interesting books, aiming to provide readers with an introduction to books they many not be familiar with, rather than anything approaching the detailed critique of a full review. My goal at this point is simply to gain readership. I love to write and I want people to read it.

Henceforth please check in here at http://outofit-personal.blogspot.com for what's up with me. The Thin Red Line will soon be more tightly focused on presenting books.

from The Thin Red Line : Dizzy, so dizzy my head is spinning

This is the original post as published at TRL. The book review portion of the post has been re-titled. Friday....must mean jambalaya





One of my new meds seems to have a bad side effect of
making me very dizzy. I first took the two new meds around lunch time yesterday, then just before I was ready to leave to work my 3--9pm shift I had about five minutes of feeling extremely dizzy and nauseous. It passed, thankfully, and I went on to work, and had a routine shift. Around 8:30pm I took my final break and went outside, sat down on a bench and smoked a cigarette. When I got up to go back in side it hit again and I could only barely manage to waive my wallet at the security thingie and stagger in to a chair. It again passed after a few minutes. Today I worked 8a--3:30p and just as I was fixing to leave I had another terrible dizzy spell, though I managed to get to the car and after a few minutes it passed and I was able to drive home okay. Ron thinks it is the statin that is causing the side effect so I will not take that one and see if the problem recurs. Guess we will have to call the doctor on Monday.

Ron teased me that the only reason I picked up The Naked Soldier was in hopes there would be pictures of naked soldiers inside, which is as good a theory as any. (Honestly I don't know why I decided to read it.) Tony Sloane was a lower class 18 year old from rural England who decided on a whim to join the French Foreign Legion. This book is a memoir of his 5 years of service in that famous army. To be honest, I found his story appalling. The early chapters relate the intense abuse that new recruits to the Legion are systematically subjected to, while the later chapters relate how the recruits become "cold blooded killers" who routinely subject not only new recruits but also the general population of various African countries to unimaginably horrific treatment. Unless you are interested in reading about lawless, reckless and unspeakably cruel young men, this one is NOT recommended.

I was shelving in the 910's this afternoon and came across a post-Katrina travel guide for New Orleans (first one I've seen) and picked up. I was mostly interested in finding out what things are still there and still recommended. It was somewhat disappointing in that as of the November 2006 publication date so much was still up in the air. I was very pleased to learn that The Fairmont Hotel (the subject of Arthur Hailey's novel Hotel, site of my high school senior luncheon and where Joel and I stayed on a visit some years back) is being repaired and will re-open. (Previously Ron and I had heard that there were no plans to re-open so this was good news.) They also say that The Camelia Grill is expected to re-open, though as of the press date it had not.

Reading about New Orleans, the restaurants and the food put in the mood to make jambalaya for dinner. I have chopped onions and celery, sliced smoked sausage, peeled a pound of frozen shrimp and boiled the shrimp shells to make a broth. Now I just have to put it together. This is not exactly on my diet, but I have been pretty good about South Beaching it for the past week or so and my blood sugar has been in the low 100's every morning so I feel entitled to indulge. Bon Appetit!

from The Thin Red Line :Tokyo Cancelled Practically Perfect Hep-Cats

Note this is the original post from TRL. A post with the title remains on TRL with more personal informaiton edited out.

Sunset falls as ferry crosses Eliot Bay

undated photograph by Joel Farmer

Today's pic is for Ron, who admired the ferry pic I previously posted. Yesterday I finally saw dr. shrink, who sez I am not depressed and who prescribed Xanax for my anxiety, which my huzband greatly approves of. Meanwhile, my tooth ache is back, though thankfully off again/on again rather than constant. Unfortunately, no relief will be forthcoming until my root canal on the 25th (the dental office flatly refused to refill my pain pill and I am reminded again that we live in a society that prefers to punish people for hurting rather than ease their pain). Sigh.

I confess that today's books have all three been on my couch in varying stages of being read for a couple of weeks now and were not in my mind connected until Blog Rush advised that I could improve my click through rate with catchier headlines. My apologies to anyone who clicked through expecting a sensational story about a local government summarily executing exceptional jazz singers.

Compared to Chaucer's Cantebury Tales, Tokyo Cancelled is a novel about delayed travelers entertaining each other by telling stories. A flight to Tokyo is diverted by weather and lands unexpectedly in an un-named city (presumably Delhi, India) where they find that an economic conference and the protests it has drawn have created a shortage of hotel rooms. Eventually all but thirteen of the planes passengers are dispatched to various accommodations when the remainder are told there are no more rooms to be had and settle in for a night in an airport lounge and begin telling each other stories to pass the time. The group of travelers proves to be from all over the world and each tells a very different story. The framework of this novel allows the author, Rana Dasgupta, to explore an unusually diverse range of ideas and settings, which he masterfully does, while never losing the believability of the 'stuck at the airport' framework. A thanks to Cromley whose review first brought this one to my attention. Recommended.


I have never been a big fan of "self-help". While I firmly believe that each and every one of us must solve his own problems (if for no other reason than that nobody else is going to do it for you), I have rarely been a fan or a consumer of the mega industry of self-proclaimed experts with a sure fire scheme for resolving some problem or another they are convinced I have. Neither apparently has Jennifer Niesslein, whose Practically Perfect gently skewers a wide range of self-help gurus and movements. It reminded me a bit of Aunt Erma's Cope Book, though in a very conversational tone that is evocative of a diary or journal rather than Bombeck's laugh out loud wit. The book did not persuade me to try Real Simple or any of the other self help philosophies mentioned, but I am confident Niesslein never intended it to. Recommended.

Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams passed under my check-in scanner a couple of Sundays ago and caught my eye. I brought it home and read the introduction, which has a very "Drug War" tone and left me feeling the book would be more of the usual propaganda and set it aside, unread. Ron then picked it up and read it and liked it very much. He said that contrary to the impression I got from the introduction, this very readable history of prohibition in America clearly shows the lunacy and un-intended consequences that have flowed from our tragically flawed drug policies. He liked it very much and it is now back on my 'to read' pile. Jury still out on this one.

Post Moved From Thin Red Line

Mount Rainer seen from Seattle's Magnuson Park

Undated photo by Joel Farmer

I have been thrilled to see that this blog has been attracting a few new readers, and it occurs to me that in many posts I have addressed myself mainly to a handful of very old friends who know all the backstory. What follows is for everyone else.

From June 1997 until his death on June 24, 2005 Joel Farmer was my partner in life. When we met I was new in town and working at hot ISP called Sprynet where I seemed to get a promotion and a raise every other month and Joel was working in gas station. My star continued to rise for awhile at Earthlink while Joel moved on to increasingly responsible positions in the rag trade, first at Eddie Bauer and then at London Fog.

A couple of weeks after 9/11, I got laid off by Earthlink, the mega-ginormous and very tone deaf ISP that merged with Mindspring, which had acquired Sprynet from AOL, which had acquired it when it bought Compu$erve, which had been my own very first online experience way back in the mid-late 80's. (And the dear friends I mentioned are people from those long ago days.) At any rate I had at one point or another been on the payroll of every one of those big companies, had a huge stack of outdated business cards (before they axed me I had gotten my Earthlink business cards printed up with the job title Numbers And Letters Guru; it was a wild time in Seattle those daze) and had received packages and bonuses and incentives during each and every one of those changes of ownership (it was a great time in Seattle in those daze) so with me laid off and flush and Joel soon after on disability from London Fog we were able to spend the last years of his life traveling extensively.

We went to Hawaii, numerous trips to El Lay and N'awlins (I am a native of New Orleans), plus countless car trips all over the Northwest, particularly to the Oregon Coast and Boise, where Joel had lived for many years and to Mt. Rainier. And to damn near everyplace else. And wherever we went Joel took lots and lots of pics. Joel proved to be an excellent photographer and became extremely adept with Photoshop. In the birthday photo above, the crown on his head was Photoshopped in later. When you know this, you can tell but it is very well done and fooled many.

I am seriously considering making a second blog dedicated exclusively to Joel's photos, but I am painfully aware of just how much Photoshop and Blogger timer it would require so I am not jumping into it with both feet. In the meantime I am sharing a few of Joel's best photographs each day. Please regard all images on this site as (c) 2007 Alan Jobe.

Since Joel's death, I have a new life partner, Ron, whom I often refer to in passing. I also have a dear, dear friend from those old, old days on Compu$erve who is named Ron. In determining which I am referring to it is helpful to know that my friend Ron has a blog, Joyzeeboy, and my huzband Ron does not blog. So that's who these people are that I keep talking about and who's photos I keep posting.

And now, back to our regular books report.

A barn in Pierce, County Washington
Undated photo by Joel Farmer