Snowbound in Newcastle

Well, gosh, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. Given that I have a big case of cabin fever and given that the latest snowstorm should be here in a couple of hours, it seemed like as good a time as any.

For those who might have heard of our traditional Thanksgiving Skits, my niece and her boyfriend plowed through 4 hours of tapes to come up with the video that you can see here:

Detmer Thanksgiving Talent Shows

Please do not attempt to use this for bribery purposes or for hush money. We're pretty much like this any time we gather, so letting the rest of the world know how we act won't make any difference to us.

Back to the snow: it's been fun watching the birds. We have 4 hummingbird feeders, and they've been aggressively claimed by 4 hummers. Even though there's enough for everybody, they insist on getting all territorial and chasing each other around the house. Today we bought more suet and black oil sunflower seeds for the other critters. If the birds don't love us, we know the squirrels will ...

And I can't believe that I'm going to say this, but I'd love a nice rainy day.

Well How's That Workin' For Ya'?

My last entry was just before taking off for a trip to the Midwest, and in it, I promised to remain wired and blog while I traveled across the prairie.

To quote Dr. Phil: How's that workin' for ya'? Answer: It's not. Or better yet, since I returned over two weeks ago, it didn't.

It was harder than I thought it would be to carve time out from visiting friends and relatives to blog about visiting friends and relatives. The act of visiting and putting almost 2000 miles on rental kept us plenty busy, and time on the computer was relegated to a perfunctory glance at e-mails once or twice a day.

So we're back, and I'm currently working on an article for inclusion in a project that I'll let you know about as soon as I'm published. It should be fun.

Pat

On The Road Again

Tomorrow at oh-dark-thirty we fly off to St. Louis. And then, between landing and leaving on Sept. 24th, here's what we'll be up to:

Paducah, Kentucky overnight

Metropolis, Illinois - Fred family reunion, and back to Paducah for overnight.

Galesburg, Illinois - Dinner the next evening with Fred's high school friends.

Coal Valley, Illinois (outside of the Quad Cities: Moline, Davenport, etc.) - overnight at Pat's girlfriend's house.

Monday, same place, girlfriends from Illinois to come and visit, dine.

Tuesday - across Iowa to see my aunt in Omaha.

Wednesday lunch in Lawrence, Kansas, west of Kansas City with a humor writer I befriended online. And then ...

Across Missouri to Quincy, where we'll stay until the 24th. The rest of the Seattle contingent will arrive on Thursday. And then we shall eat Made-Rites and Pork Tenderloins and shall drink weak beer and weaker coffee. We may also do some cemetery visits to update our Cemetery Visit badges.

Since we're taking the laptop along, I'm going to try to do the Charles Kurault thing and send updates from the road. I also printed out about 10 geocaches, and we'll be searching for them as we go. (Don't know what geocaching is? Check out the link to the right.)

See you on the road!

 

 

So Far, So Good

I officially retired from the paper sales business the 1st of September. Twenty years of sales, sales management, and marketing, and I'm done.

I spent this week cleaning out my office and preparing it for my new career of writing and working with The Quincy Group. File drawers were reclaimed and business supplies were given room to breathe. I made new tabs for my hanging files: Business - General, Business - Book Sales, Copywriting, Event-Planning, Marketing and Self-Promotion, etc. and moved them to an empty credenza drawer. The old Writing drawer became the home for two dictionaries, a Thesaurus, and the latest "Writer's Market Deluxe 2007 Edition," which weighs slightly more than a well-fed toddler.

The best thing of all was reclaiming my car. Only someone who has sold long-term can understand this. For an outside sales rep, a car is one's office, and when you deal with a hard good like paper, your car is full of it: swatch books in the trunk, printed samples on coated paper that slide around under the passenger seat, updated price books in case someone needs one, tchotchkes for giving away to worthy customers, that packet of 8.5x11 samples that you were just sure you'd be able to use to get someone with a Docutech to use your papers ... all of it, out it came.

I'd taken much of this sales rep detritus into Unisource before I left, good Catholic Midwestern waste-not/want-not daughter of a Depression Era child that I am; and I dutifully put them back in the spots where they belonged. But what was left after I was done parsing out the usable stuff went into the recycling bin. Except for the really cool paper. I kept that stuff, finding room for it in the office closet and muttering to myself, "You just never know. I'll use this on something." And I know from experience that I will.

My Sales Warrior vehicle is coming up on 150,000 miles. I plan to drive it until it dies or I do, and I'm hoping it goes first unless it can handle about 500,000 more miles. And because I only now have the time, I'm noticing all the dings. They're new, I'm just sure of it. But maybe they're not.

I just never had time to really look at them before ...

I Love a Project

Two more weekends and we'll be done. We started painting the cabin in mid-May. We figure we should be done at the end of the Labor Day weekend.

It's been a long summer of work, both of us hefting our brushes and rollers and putting in a least a couple of hours every day. No trips to the brewery at Port Townsend for lunch (ferry ride of about a half-hour, walk to bar, drink, eat, walk back to ferry, ferry to Keystone, nap) because we didn't want to carve more than two hours out of the day unless it had something to do with stir sticks and blue tape.

And the payoff is near. And we realized something: we love a project.

My mother loved a project, and I think that rubbed off on us all. Barbie is in the process of turning her guest house into a real guest house as opposed to the repository of uneeded stuff that it's been so far. Her project has consumed the summer as well. Step-daughter Lara is taking some online courses. We're contemplating the master bath at home as our next project, a good one for the winter.

And Susie? Well, her whole career is an on-going project, what with changing companies, hiring her daughter, flying to Vegas to Jersey to London and getting to ride back on the company Lear jet so that she wouldn't have to wait in the JFK mess in New York after the latest terror threat.

A couple more hours today on the deck gridwork - tedious, tedious work. There's simply no easy way to paint it - and then painting the deck floor, and then doing a slow walk around the house to touch up missed spots ... and we're done.

What next?

My Retirement Was Announced Today

My retirement from selling fine paper to printers, at least. I'll never conventionally retire. I'll always be working at something.

I've sold and managed people who sell for the last 20 years, and now I'm done. I've been in the print/paper business for a total of 33 years. I like to tell people that I started at 12, but I don't think they're buying it anymore.

And just think. There was a time when I thought that 33 was old. Now it's just the amount of time that I've spent in an industry.

I read an obituary last week about a woman in Maine who was in her late 80s. She'd written a humor column for a newspaper for years, and here was her obituary in a paper on the other side of the continent. I was inspired. She made people happy. She made them laugh at the vagaries of life. I, like her, can write for the rest of my life, and can hopefully make people laugh and think, and can have a career that lasts longer than my paper sales career has. That's exciting.

Now I wonder how long I can keep my 150,000-mile Sales Warrior Vehicle running.

The New House Across the Road

Don't look for the above "Music I'm Listening To:" to load on your I-Pod. That's not a singing group or the name of a song. That's what's making all the noise across the road from our second place on Whidbey Island.

I should explain that we have - for almost 6 years - had an unimpeded view up here, a view that includes Crockett Lake and Fort Casey, the Keystone Ferry dock, and in the distance, Port Townsend, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the northernmost Olympic Mountains. And all that we had between us and that view were 9 vacant lots on a slope covered with low brush and grasses that were perfect for rabbits and quail.

Well, I hope the critters headed for high ground, because our little patch of heaven is being invaded. Six of the lots are being shaved and scraped for - as the owner put it to us yesterday - the "house of our dreams".

She got out of the car as we were painting our deck and looked at the growing hole and the mounds of dirt that had been pushed around and turned to us and said, wide-eyed: "Wow. This is scary. We've never done anything like this before."

I replied: "Wow. This is scary for us, too, but for different reasons." I mentioned that we'd heard that the house would be large. I asked "Large like wide? Or large like tall?"

Unfortunately, "tall" was her answer.

We surveryed the lots last night after the workers had left and tried to surmise just how big, how high, how intrusive this new house would be, and tried to look at the bright side (they had cleared a few more trees, improving the view) but couldn't see to get past the fact that - no matter how kind they were in their house design - our view would be compromised.

And I'm guessing that we have no rules at Admiral's Cove about construction on the weekends, because I can hear them at it again, and when I glance over there and down the hill, I can see the arm and scoop of an end-loader, looking like a giant, orange prehistoric beast as it eats its Saturday breakfast and spits it out for the little bulldozer puttering around beneath it.

Ah, well. There's nothing to be done for this.

Except to go over every night and refill the hole.

Pitched a Book Yesterday

For those of you unfamiliar with "pitching a book," I'll tell you that it does not mean picking one up and heaving it across the room, although it can sometimes leave you feeling like you'd like to pick up a book and heave it across the room.

Book pitches most often occur at writer's conferences, and I attended one this weekend. Generally you get 10 minutes to pitch the book you have either already written (fiction) or plan to write (non-fiction). You sign up for the appropriate agents and editors based upon what you find out about them and who/what they like to represent on their company websites. And then you stand around with a bunch of people who are also pitching books, looking pale and wan and fidgeting, licking their lips, clearing their throats, shuffling paper, etc.

I looked no different. I attempted a nonchalance that I didn't feel, propping my elbow on the pay phone ledge as if it was a bar. And I wish it had been a bar. A quick beer would have been great.

Anyhow, these pitches were running about a quarter of an hour late, and after a time I was ushered into Waiting Space Number 2. I could see the layout from there, and at least there was some privacy. I'd pitched in a high school classroom with no place to hide, where 5 or 6 other people were pitching at the same time. But this was a large room that had been separated into little curtained spaces with a table behind which the agent/editor sat, and a chair where we would all eventually plop our excited and nervous butts.

As a fallen Catholic, I must say that they looked a little too much like confessionals to me ...

Anyhow, I pitched to a nice agent lady who agreed to take a look at it, and I confessed to her that although I had made my living pitching paper and managing people who sell paper, and marketing, that selling my writing was like starting anew. Listening to me or watching me, you would have never known that I'd spent twenty years of my life negotiating, ingratiating, presenting, placating, apologizing, confirming, justifying, and convincing, all with a big smile on my face. During a book pitch, time stands still. So does my brain. And I must come off about as polished as a sandpaper floor.

Oh, well. Since she said she'd take a look at it, it doesn't matter how bad I was.

Wish me luck!  

 

Roadside Attractions

When I saw the AOL article today - America's Quirkiest Roadside Attractions - I was reminded again of my youth and of our cross-country car camping trips.

Wouldn't I have loved to stop at some of these places! The only spot on this list that my mother deemed worthy was the Royal Gorge bridge. And "stop" is a misnomer, given that we sped right over it.

We couldn't just stop for any old thing. A stop had to have a good and rational reason, i.e.:

>Potty Breaks;

>Gas fill-ups, which would be lumped in with the Potty Break category. And forget stopping for food at a gas station. Gas stations were for gas and for bathrooms and for having a gas station employee clean the entomological gold mine off the windshield. And back in that day, the only food that gas stations sold anyway were small bags of stale peanuts that hung on black wire frames by the till or came from stippled green dispensing machines with big mirrors on them.

>Something historical, which often meant places with "State Park" or "National Park" in the name. Huge timber lodges and mountain roads built by the Civilian Conservation Corp were always stop-worthy because there were lessons to be taught there: What was the CCC? Why did it exist? Who was Roosevelt? 

This Stopping Phylum also included historical markers on the highway - all two-laners back then - that noted some special local occasion, like the brutal massacre of everyone in a wagon train or the massive loss of life in a flash flood or fire, always great things for small children to read and consider before settling down for the night in a flimsy canvas tent.

>Something visually stunning. (See Royal Gorge, above.) This folded in nicely with the State and National Park stop, and included Garden of the Gods and Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. If you were lucky, you could kill both two birds with one stone. Mesa Verde: visually stunning and historical.

But the Wall Drugs and two-headed snakes and mystery houses were not on our stopping list. In my mother's mind(and although she did not usually drive during these trips - my father did - she held the Stop or Go trump cards) these were tourist traps, a waste of time and good money.

Well of course they were! That's what made them so appealing!

So across the countryside we sped, passing UFO landing sites and giant ant farms, wistfully watching their signs recede behind us as we ate our homemade sandwiches and apples (kept you regular on the road, Mother reminded us) and soaking up the perpetual history lessons coming from the front seat.

And to this day, I've yet to see a two-headed snake.

Doing It Yourself

I'm writing this using a laptop at our second home on Whidbey Island. I'm at the table, and I'm looking out the window and over Crockett Lake and Ft. Casey to saltwater and Port Townsend and the Olympic Mountains.

Except we're not spending much time looking at the view. Number one, it's overcast - typical June weather - so the mountains are hidden behind thick clouds. Rumor has it that there will be sun breaks later in the day.

"Sun breaks." Are we the only region in America that understands what a  "sun break" is?

Anyhow, reason number two for not noting the view: The Sainted One and I have been bitten by the self-reliance bug of late, we the people who have other people clean for us and other people garden for us. In fact we have hired so many people to do things for us that there's a joke in our family that if we could just find some decent Butt-Wipers, we'd never have to lift a finger again.

But here we are, painting our home on Whidbey. Ralph Waldo Emerson would be so proud, and we're expecting someone from the Do-It-Yourself network to contact us about a feature.

The Sainted One has been far more aggressive about this than I've been. I haven't let this 6-weekend project keep me from my Saturday and Sunday naps, and this morning, feeling under-motivated, I tried this:

"Honey, you worked so hard yesterday. How about we take a break today?'

No breaks for him, thank you. So paint we shall.

Actually, once I get out there warm up to the project, I'm just fine. It's the first dip of the brush in the bucket and the creak of my bones that's a little hard to take.

Well he's out of the shower and we're off!

(NOTE to the Do-It-Yourself network: If you call, let it ring a long time. We'll be outside.)

 

Okay. It DOES rain all the time.

We went to the Northwest Folklife Festival yesterday afternoon to listen to music. It rained. We went to Kell's for dinner with friends and to listen to music. It rained.

When we woke up this morning, it was raining. It's pretty much rained the whole weekend so far, and the only good thing I can say about that is that the plants and flowers that we bought on Saturday should be easy to plant. We won't need a shovel. We'll need a siphon. But at least the ground will be soft.

Hopefully tomorrow we'll have some break in this weather, some sunny window of opportunity that will make us feel like getting outside to garden and get some exercise.

As we've said all weekend: "Ah. Welcome to Summer in Seattle." And we've also repeated the oft-told joke:

"What do you do in Seattle during the summer?"

"If it falls on a weekend, we go on a picnic."

Massage Night

Don't hate us, but my husband and I have had a masseuse come to our house every other week for the last 8 years.

Something about it must work. We're rarely sick. And we're certainly never sick on massage night.

Years ago we had a chair massage at a business function, and my husband asked that masseuse to come to the print shop that he owned with her massage chair every two weeks so that employees could have a nice perk. One thing led to another, and the masseuse started coming to our house with her massage bed and a boom box for music.

After a while, hating to see her have to pack and struggle with the stuff, we bought our own bed that we keep in the closet in the extra bedroom. She sets the bed up here in the office when she comes. I also figured out how to use Windows Media and started playing massagey CDs (see above "Forest Rain") on this very PC. So now all she has to do is get out of the car, warm her very strong fingers, and have at it.

I'd advise it for everyone. It's not really that expensive, and a wonderful treat. And I do believe that it's part of the reason why we're never sick.

Of course you do have to get over the fact that she's massaging your wrinkled old body with its dimply old fat, but once you get past that, it's pretty doggone cool.

Must light the candles. Ciao!

I'm on Amazon.com!

I checked a few minutes ago, and my self-published book - Riding Herd on My Middle Age Spread - is now listed when you put my name in the Amazon search engine. Now I need to get a picture of the book jacket on there. The page looks pretty naked.

My intention is to push everything - website, newspaper ads, book-signing, e-mail blast to fan base, announcing this blog, putting articles contained in the book on various websites, losing 15 pounds, whitening my teeth, etc. etc. - to a July 1st roll-out.

Piece of cake! I just won't sleep!

 

Lightening! Cameras! Seattle!

If you don't live in Seattle, you probably know that it rains here. But don't believe what you see in the movies. It movies set in Seattle (except for that World's Fair movie with Elvis Presley) it rains sideways and the windows rattle with thunder and lightening splits the skies.

We moved here in June of 1972 and were surprised and pleased with the weather. We expected rain because the rumors of excessive wetness had preceded our move. Even Bill Cosby did a bit about it, citing the fact that natives saw the sun so rarely and were so frightened of it that they made offerings and sacrificed animals when it came out, crying "Is our city bad?" 

But we'd moved from Illinois where the same amount of rain that Seattle gets in a month could drop in about two hours. Now there were some serious rainstorms: towering, dangerous-looking clouds, gray-green skies, anxious moments crouched in the southwest corner of the basement ...

But anyway, the summer of '72 was great in Seattle, and then the lid cloud came down and covered everything from the Cascade Mountains west, and it dripped, dripped, dripped until ... oh ... until around the 5th of July, which is usually the first guaranteed nice day of summer.

But anyway, back to the lightening and thunder. Thirty years ago, it rarely thundered here. Now it seems to be a regular occurance. It's been rumbling all evening.

Or is that my husband ...

Look Ma! I'm Blogging!

Well, the experts in the writing business say that one must blog. So blog I must and blog I shall.

Since I've been in magazines and newspapers, I'm used to deadlines and word limitations. It says below that I have "25,000 characters". I have no idea how many words that is. Hell, during menopause, I was 25,000 characters.

My husband (known as "The Sainted One" in my articles) and I are spending the weekend at our second place on Whidbey Island. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Whidbey is north of Seattle, and tonight we'll watch 3 passenger ships sail past our place and head to Victoria or Vancouver B.C. The weather sucks this evening. It's drippy - as it often is in Seattle - but tomorrow is supposed to be nicer.

My sister drove up from Bainbridge Island (which is across the Sound from Seattle) and spent the day with us. My sister's husband is the creator of the Talking Beer Openers that were mentioned in a Dave Barry column and are sold in stores everywhere. It's truly amazing that money can be made doing something like that. And he's made a lot at it. He's always given me his beta testing products, so I tested the first Talking Beer Opener that allowed you to record your own voice on it. When you play ours - which is triggered when it touches the bottlecap - my voice comes out, cold and imperious: "Just how many is that now?"

While Barbie was here, we had one too many beers and laughed too hard. That's the way it always is when we get together: Exhausting. In the very best way.

Well, The Sainted One just said that there's a ship going out and one coming in. Must go. Let's see if this sucker is 25,000 characters ...