Category: family

Going analog

You know, these tough economic times call for a bit of tightening on the ol’ belt.

Have to go back to the old ways. The simpler ways. The cheaper ways.

So with that, from here on, all my missives will come across in analog form.

That’s right. Sure, it will be a little tougher to shove those bits through that cable and out onto the interwebs.

But in tighter times, we all have to work a little harder. Make more of an effort to get there. Put a little elbow grease into it.

And I’m up to the challenge.

Maybe a little more arm and finger strain. Sure. But back in the day, they never heard of no stinking carpel tunnel syndrome! Nope, you just played through! And you liked it!

Ok, no, actually, this little beauty is the reason I traversed the Bay Bridge a couple days ago. I found this on Craig’s List and got a pretty sweet deal on a barely used Underwood typewriter. The guy selling it was cleaning out the attic, preparing to move. This belonged to his wife’s family, that’s about all he knew.

From my research, I have found that it dates to the 1940’s and is in really great condition. The coolest feature is that the bottom of the case has these fold out legs. Basically, the whole case turns into a little desk, a work surface for “in the field” work.

It’s such an amazing work of engineering.

Why did I buy this boat anchor, you might ask? Well, I had an idea. And if it all works out, you’ll see it all come together in a few weeks. Hopefully anyway.

For now, I’m enjoying the smell and sound of this fully manual machine. It has a great *ding* bell sounds and *zip* back goes the carriage. Yep, it’s fully functional! Some of the keys stick, so I’m looking for a shop that can tune it up.

The rat-a-tat sounds reminds me of, sure, that typing class I told you about last week. But it also calls to mind the sound of my mom working the keys. She had an old Royal (pretty sure it was a Royal) and back in the day, my mom was a professional secretary (administrative assistant) and that woman could type like crazy. 100 wpm, no mistakes.

Anyhow, stay tuned. You may see more of this little beauty!

A little out of sorts

Got some bad news about a family member today, so I’m a bit subdued.

I’ll just say this: cancer sucks. A lot.

Anyhow, back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Old habits like these are so hard to break*

It was seventh grade. She was Mrs. Olivas. Typing teacher. A rail thin Hispanic woman with long black hair, parted down the middle, a sour face and an even sourer disposition.

(sourer doesn’t sound right, but Word grammar checker told me that “more sour” was incorrect…so let’s roll with it)

Mrs. Olivas taught my brother, well ahead of me in school. She taught my sister.

And then she taught me.

There we all sat, trembling, at the keyboards of electric typewriters distributed about the classroom. Eyes forward. No looking at your fingers!

Mrs. Olivas would wander the room, shouting letters like a drill sergeant. We would type what she shouted. In unison our keys would strike the paper.

My sister had warned me, with her accent, her “v” sounded like “b” and vice versa. And she graded harshly when you got it wrong.

Mrs. Olivas taught us that after every period ending a sentence, you hit that space bar twice.

End a sentence, space twice, start the next sentence.

One space looked too crowded. Too hard to tell where one sentence ended and the next began.

Two spaces.

No questions. Don’t ask. Two spaces.

I follow this great lady, Debbie Ridpath Ohi, on Twitter (her screen name is inkyelbows). She is a writer and creates spot on comics about and for writers.

So imagine the shock and awe in my world when I read the following re-Tweet:

@inkyelbows From literary agent @Ginger_Clark “Authors: stop double spacing after every paragraph. It’s unnecessary.”

What?!? Sputter sputter. What!?!?

I say…..WHAT?!?!

Ok, to be fair, Twitter itself had me changing my typing habit. Why type two spaces when that takes two of the precious 140 characters? So I figured in the Twitter-verse, it was ok.

But in my regular writing? Stories, emails, blog posts. Can I stop?

Period-space-space is in my muscle memory! It lives in my cells!

Seventh grade was almost thirty years ago! If I don’t period-space-space won’t Mrs. Olivas come haunt me in my sleep like the La Llorona of the Smith Corona?

“Peerrrioood-spaaaaace-spaaaaace,” she will howl outside my window!

I found this bit of explanation online: ” It is generally accepted that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence is a carryover from the days of typewriters with monospaced typefaces.”

So to do a period-space-space is something of a throwback. It marks me as “old school.” Someone who learned to type on an actual typewriter.

Ok, fine. I’m trying. Every day I’m trying to retrain my obstinate thumb to only tap that space bar once. Just once.

It’s tough! I still have to do a find and replace when I finish any document, including this blog post.

I’m too old to learn new tricks!!!!

Waaaah!

Oh, and:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

*apologies to Hank Williams Jr for bastardizing his lyric.

Coming tomorrow: “Three Grammar rules that are okay to break.” My world is off its axis!

Recycled Conversations

So the conversation goes like this:

“Hey, do we have any WD-40?”

“Yeah, I think so, why?”

“Where would it be? I want to fix the squeak in that [curse word] bathroom door.”

“Oh. Yeah, it’s probably in that same cabinet where we keep the toolbox.”

“Ah, ok.” sounds of digging around “Found it!”

sounds of more cursing, spraying, door swinging back and forth

Yeah, see, this conversation in a similar form took place on more than occasion between my mom and dad.

The ol’ man was hell on squeaks, rattles, and turning off lights when you left a room.

And he was all about the WD-40.

The conversation above? Took place in my home this past weekend.

Only, it was me cursing at the bathroom door, maniacal look on my face as I eliminated the squeak.

So why again is it as you age, you become your parents?

And why again am I becoming my father?

When I start wearing Sears brand jeans and listening to Big Band music, you all have my permission to take me down, Mutual of Omaha-style.

Damn bathroom door is pretty quiet now, though.

The Right Way. The Wrong Way. And my way.

I was raised by rather practical parents. No sissy girls in their house, no. We were up on the roof painting kid of girls. We were change the oil in the car girls. Yes. Self-sufficient, and often creative when it came to fixing troublesome issues.

If you’re country folk, the term “bailing wire and duct tape” is familiar to you. The concept being, with those two items, you can fix anything…MacGyver style.

I’m pretty proud of my redneck ways. Or as my Hispanic friends would call it, rasquache.

I pondered this again this morning as I admired my entomological prevention handiwork.

See, The Good Man and I are convinced our (rental) residence is, essentially, built on an anthill. Not mean like fire ant or anything. No, the annoying little black ants that I talked about in this post. (The Good Man has become a LOT less Zen about them, btw)

Their main port of entry is the kitchen, and since we’re not eager to spread poison around the same place where we prepare food, we’ve been trying a variety of natural remedies (most discovered through research on the interwebs).

So far, the application of soapy water works best. Kills ’em on the spot. But doesn’t really do much to prevent them. For that we try an orange oil product made for ants. It works…for a bit. But they come back, laughing.

Most sites I read said, “you have to find where they are coming in and seal that off.”

Trouble is, we live in an almost seventy year old house placed precariously on a hill in earthquake country, so there are lots of gaps and cracks and crevices those little sonsabitches can exploit.

So in the heat of battle one day, frustrated and exasperated, I reverted to my “duct tape and bailing wire” days and got out the masking tape.

Everywhere it looked like they were coming in was slapped over with tape. TGM kind of laughed at me. He was like “oooookay”.

But you know what? It worked. It didn’t *look* good, but we were without ants for quite sometime. Oh sweet relief!

We left the tape up for a while, then took it back down.

As those ants are wont to do, they found a new port of call in a new area, and began streaming in again. We applied soapy water and orange oil and fought the battle.

While going hand to six-legged combat, TGM said, “I’m going to spray this down with orange oil and then you do your masking tape thing, ok?”

And I did.

And, for the past couple weeks…ant free.

We harbor no illusions that we’re free of them. I’m sure they are just tormenting the neighbor right now (it’s a duplex).

They’ll be back. And we’ll be waiting with a good squirt of orange oil and a fresh roll of masking tape.

“TOP OF THE WORLD, MA!!!” (click if you don’t know the movie reference)