Cantata for Three Chainsaws

And even though I know it's just for today, and it's necessary, I'm worried. Scamp, our backyard rabbit is losing some of his hiding places. The birds are nowhere to be seen, and the squirrels have vamoosed for parts unknown.

It's the angry snarl of contrapuntal chainsaws that rips the air in our back yard this morning. Yes, we knew it was coming – they are clearing underbrush and small trees from the borders of the stream that runs through the area and eventually feeds into the Little Patuxent River and then to the Chesapeake Bay. They have to install some water control system and it will be better for all of us when it's done. Last year they met with homeowners and we walked the area as they explained what would be done and why. It all makes good sense. But oh, the noise!

Inside the house, Kira is hiding beneath my feet, and Pipsqueak has retired to the front of the house away from the noise. The robin parents who have been faithfully flying feeding missions to their nest under our deck are having trouble finding the right rafter to land on. Who knew that sound would disturb their directional system so? But after a few misdirections, they seem to have adapted and their two bobble-headed babies have their squirmy breakfasts.

I can see from my desk that three agile young men are clambering about, and already I have a clearer view of the townhomes behind us. Not that I want it, but there it is. I trust that they know what they are doing and will take only the necessary brush and trees away. But just in case, I'm keeping an eye on two of my favorite trees. And when they leave this afternoon, I'll be looking for Scamp and the squirrels who entertain Kira and me as we work.

The Whole Cat & Caboodle

Do you have previous lives? I mean the kind that many of us who have been around for mumbledy-four years have…where you've had a different career, a different focus, and put your heart and soul into a venture for a while?

For me that was Cat & Caboodle. For once I was ahead of the game, but I should have waited a few years. What I did was start a business to sell handcrafted items for cat lovers. There were no imports, no manufactured pieces – everything was hand made by a skilled American artisan. I found people who made jewelry, pottery, fiber art, and stained glass (that last one was me.) Had I waited for the Internet, I could have set up a site, had great photographs of the pieces, and reached thousands of people.

But it was 1993 and I didn't wait. Instead I created a newsletter/catalog. I wrote the copy, used scissors and rubber cement to paste up a master, trundled to the local print shop, had the issues printed on recycled paper, got a bulk-mailing permit, addressed and bundled each issue, and schlepped them to the post office. Whew! It was fun and exhilarating…and not profitable.

So after a while, Cat & Caboodle wound down. But the dream persisted of going back to it one day. And so when I started collecting domain names (doesn't everyone own several dozen???), I also bought CatAndCaboodle.com and CatNCaboodle.com as well as the .net versions of them both.

And that was it, until…

A few weeks ago I had a phone call from a delightful lady in Washington State. She had a question for me: was I interested in selling the Cat & Caboodle domain names? Hmmm. Had to think about that. I still love cats, still love fine handcrafts. But did I still want to make that a business? Honestly…yes, I would like to make it a business. But was there any chance of that happening? No. Now that I write full time, and have started a publishing company, there is exactly zero chance of me going back into handcrafts.

So yes, I would sell the domain name, and yes, we came to an agreement. In the process, I've met a new friend, and I see a name that I treasure put to good and loving use. Cat & Caboodle lives on as Cat and Caboodle.com, The Cat Lover's Gift Shop. Take a look…if you love cats, she has something you won't be able to resist.

Having Way Too Much Fun by Design

I love to learn. Almost any subject will do, too. For years after I got my college degree I found reasons to take courses in a variety of art subjects. In fact, when I took stained glass I got so hooked on the beauty of colored, textured glass, that I made it into a business for a few years. But that's another story.

A couple of weeks ago I took a basic course on InDesign, Adobe's desktop publishing program. InDesign is part of the Creative Suite that includes Photoshop and other fun stuff. I took the course because of my foray into publishing, and wanting to learn all the nitty gritty details that make a book something to be proud of. When I decided to start publishing, I was determined that any book that comes from The Silloway Press will be well written, and professionally designed, edited, and printed so that it will stand up against anything that Random House or Houghton Mifflin might publish. The hitch, of course, is that there are hundreds of years of knowledge and tradition in printing, and figuring out the most important things to learn is tough when you don't know enough to know what you don't know...y'know?

How a book looks on the inside is, I think, the third most important factor in its success, right after the title and cover design. (Yes, I know good marketing is essential, but I'm talking about the book itself here.) If you pick up a book and open it, your eyes need to feel comfortable with the margins, the font style, the size of the text, how the pages are numbered, and all the other things you don't even notice specifically but that create a positive or negative emotion. And all that designing is one of the many things you can do with InDesign. Even if I don't end up doing the book design, I wanted to understand what's involved.

Well, the course was exactly what I wanted. We had a small group and a terrific teacher - Chrissy Waldron - and the hours of the two days were packed with useful learning. I was exhausted at the end and absolutely couldn't wait to play some more. When the second level course runs later this summer, I'll be there.

Now, of course, my dilemma is that I have a new toy and want to play. But I also want to have hours to bill at the end of the month, so I'm having to control my desire to poke around and try all the cool tools in the program. Designing a marketing postcard for Real Estate the Rome Way was a good excuse to get in there and see how much I remembered.

A couple of days later I designed business cards for the publishing company for more practice...what do you think?

The Predicted Blizzard Arrived

It happens every year. In spring, just as the daffodils are fading and the tulips are nodding toward the sun, the pink blizzard arrives. It was forecast. We knew it would come. It did not disappoint us.
This year has seen particularly deep drifts among the flower beds with accumulations of up to an inch on the sidewalk. The grass is almost covered, and like the winter white stuff, we track it into the house on our shoes. Every morning we clear the walk and by evening it has drifted over. We stamp our feet and drag our shoes across the door mat trying to dislodge the sticky bits, then give up and just walk in leaving tiny pink puddles behind.


Now there's another forecast: high winds and turbulence. That would be the vacuum cleaner picking up those bits of pink. We don't mind at all.

Proud Papa

What happens when your son publishes an important book, has an article in the New York Times Magazine, appears on a top rated nighttime show in Canada, does several important radio interviews, has a review in the Book Review section of the NY Times, will soon be interviewed in Newsweek, and then heads out on a multi-state book tour? Why, you bust your buttons with pride, of course! That's the happy condition of my husband these days. Here he is wearing his Kluge t-shirt, with daughter Julie, in our local Barnes & Noble, holding a copy of the book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, by Gary Marcus.


What's a "Kluge," (rhymes with "huge") you ask? The short definition is, "A clumsy and inelegant solution to a problem." If you've seen the movie, "Apollo 13," the crew used a kluge to make a repair that brought the damaged spacecraft back to earth safely. If you ever watched the old McGyver series, you saw the hero create kluge after kluge with duct tape and whatever he could find to solve the immediate problem. As to how that applies to the human mind, well, you'll just have to read the book!



We think the cover is brilliant, just like the contents. The British edition has a different cover, also terrific. Either way, Kluge is getting great reviews and making the author's father (and stepmother, too!) very proud.

Pink Snow In the Forecast

Outside our front door is a tree that turns fluffy pink each spring. I believe it's a Kwanzan Cherry, but its name doesn't matter. Pink blossoms like mini-roses form a canopy over our miniscule front yard, branches reaching high against Phil's office windows, and low arching into the still bare branches of its neighboring bush.


Standing at the front door and looking out is one of the pleasures of the morning, to see the sun streaming through pink clouds. We rarely trim it back, preferring to let the tree spread protectively even though that means our tiny front yard is not grass covered. It's a fine trade-off for the shade it provides against summer's heat.


Soon the clouds will break and snow down on the ground, covering it with little pink petals. A couple of years ago a toddler came by during this snow and began lifting chubby handfuls and tossing them over his head. Giggling happily, he did it again and again.

Isn't it nice that one tree can give such pleasure?

Feathered Sunshine and Crimson Chase

It's typical Baltimore spring - a couple days of open-all-the-windows warmth, and then back to temperatures in the 50's. The backyard is alive with color, movement, and sound. The pre-dawn chorus of chirps and trills has grown from a lone cheep-cheep to something that sounds more like an orchestra of flutes and piccolos tuning up. Soon I won't be able to find them as the trees turn from blush to pale green to full leaf.

I was standing at the sink yesterday when a flash of bright yellow caught my eye. Without a thistle feeder we rarely have yellow finches, but there he was - a still mottled but unquestionably bright yellow finch - clinging to the feeder and poking at it for something worth eating. A smaller, drabber version of him alit on the feeder pole, then hopped to the rail. And then they both zipped away.

It must be the connection to New Hampshire that makes me exclaim everytime I see one of these little flying lemons. My grandmother always loved them, calling them "drops of sunshine," as they flitted among the trees at the lake front cottage. They are good memory birds for me.

So of course I'm looking for them today, but instead I'm seeing games of chase in both feathers and fur. Two brilliant cardinals are chasing each other around the yard - is it a game or a dogfight between rivals? I can't tell, but it's delightful to watch. Two squirrels are scrambling from deck to ground to trees. And the robins are everywhere. My neighbor's hydrangea is showing tufts of green on the dried stalks of last year's bush. A rabbit is checking out the suddenly-green lawn.

And it's time for me to get to work, but now with a much improved Monday mind.

The photos, alas, are not mine, but come from stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu)

Amazon's Smiling Logo is a Sneer, and Jeff Bezos is Looking Like Snidely Whiplash

There's a firestorm that's been brewing in publishing over the last week or so, and the flash point is amazon.com. In the matter of a few days, this behemoth of the book world has managed to rile up thousands of authors and small publishers with a greedy monopolistic grab for a few more dollars.

Having purchased a print-on-demand publishing company a couple of years back, and then tried to build a printing business, they were apparently not satisfied with having that piece of the pie. Nope, they wanted it all.

So they sent the sales reps for that company, BookSurge, with orders to contact print-on-demand (POD) publishers. Oh, no! Don't put anything in writing! But call the POD publishers like iUniverse, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, PublishAmerica, and many more. Tell them that if they don't switch all their on-demand printing to BookSurge, Amazon will make it really, really hard for people to buy those books. And gee, if that hurts their customers, the authors who write, pay for, and sell those books, well that's too bad. Oh, and if your contract with those authors promises to get them on Amazon, well we can still make that happen for you. But it will cost more. Of course, you'll have to pay to meet BookSurge's printing specifications which we can just about guarantee are different from whatever printing service you're using now. Too bad.

Sure smells like a protection racket, but then maybe I've seen too many old movies. The deal then was that a shop owner would pay the local thugs to guarantee that nothing unfortunate would happen to his property. Naturally, some refused. They had mysterious accidents that caused damage and, in some cases, put them out of business.

Amazon doesn't have anything to do with unfortunate accidents. They make it clear to publishers. Use our more expensive printing service, the one known in the industry for shoddy quality and lousy service, or discover that the "Buy It Now" or "Add to Cart" button disappears from every Amazon page of every book you publish. And just to drive their point home, they removed those buttons on many books.

There have been hundreds of blog articles and thousands of words written on this that I can't begin to summarize. Angela Hoy's Writer's Weekly is information central – I recommend it highly and am grateful that she and her husband who own BookLocker (a POD publisher) are the standard-bearers in the fight against Amazon's folly. Though Amazon was forced to release a statement that tries to clothe their greed in customer service, Angela points out some inconsistencies that put the lie to the press release. http://www.writersweekly.com/amazon.php

Did Bezos and his crew forget that they are not just selling books and software and cosmetics for heaven's sake? Every time someone goes to their site, every time a box with that smiley swoop arrives at someone's door, they are promoting the Amazon brand. For years they have built a brand that people saw as positive, friend of the consumer, and a good thing. Then they went and threw the equivalent of dung at it. Wash as they may, the stain and stench won't go away soon. Neither will all the authors and publishers who refuse to be cowed by a bully, and who refuse to be silent about the bullying.

So why am I all worked up about this? I'm not an uninterested party; later this year I will be publishing the first of what I intend to be a series of niche non-fiction books through The Silloway Press. The reality is that Amazon is the first choice for most people when buying books on line. If Amazon manages to force even micro-publishers like me to use their inferior service, it will affect my reputation and viability as a business.

But mostly, I hate injustice and bullying. So I'm adding my voice to the chorus of protest, and signing my name. I also sign my name to protests against warrantless wire-tapping and the invasive aspects of the so-called "Patriot Act" that allow the government to find out what books I take out of the library. Phooey on them both. Margaret Mead had it right: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Rockin' Robin

Birds flutter nearby for my viewing pleasure most of the day - I plan it that way. My desk sits right in front of a window that is at ground level and below our mini-deck. A bird feeder hangs out from the deck rail above and draws feathered visitors to entertain our indoor cats. When I fill the feeder I make sure that a fair amount of seed falls to the ground below, thereby assuring me of an equal amount of entertainment from the area doves, cardinals, and squirrels. Nope, no exotic types here...and the hummingbirds are still a good month away.

But we have robins again. Boy, do we have robins! And now I think we will have more robins.

A little while ago I noticed unusual fluttering under the deck. Long strings of what looked liked dried grass dangled from the cross beam, waving in the wet breeze of a rainy morning. Another flutter and the architect arrived with more of the same. I'm going to call it "she" because I can't tell the difference (yet.) She added the new materials to the small collection already there. Three or four times she pulled up the dangling ends and poked them toward the center of her creation. Then she did a little dance, wings about half unfurled, and side-stepping across the nest-to-be. More pulling and poking, then more dancing. Apparently satisfied she flew off, only to return a few minutes later and repeat her ritual. (No, that's not her in the photo - my shots are all too dim.)

I'm sure an ornithologist could tell me what's going on in proper scientific terms. But I just like to think of her as our Rockin' Robin.

Far Out!

Dying Star - Cat's Eye Nebula

Today I re-stumbled upon a Web site I saw several years ago and then lost track of. Thanks to the SPAN Connection newsletter (SPAN is the Small Publishers Association of North America), I spent far too many minutes trolling through page after page of literally out of this world photos.

Dying Star - Ant Nebula


Infrared Image of Saturn

Sombrero Galaxy

When it was first sent up, the Hubble Space Telescope got a lot of bad press and bad jokes about lowest bidders on government projects. It had its glitches, but since the engineers worked through the problems and tuned up the Hubble, it's been sending back amazing images of worlds beyond anything we can see with our puny eyes.

Veil Nebula


Orion Nebula (This one looks like some gorgeous
stained glass I used to put into lamps and windows!)

Yes, I know the images are enhanced and that the colors are probably a guess, but who can argue with the majesty, grace, and beauty of worlds dancing for our pleasure light years away? Since I don't expect to see warp drive in my lifetime, these peeks into the lives of nebulae will have to do.

Home of an Intergalactic Wizard, don't you think?

Star A-borning

Any day you need a break from flashing images or too much text, surf to http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album. Then relax and prepare to be awed.

A National Treasure Hidden in Plain Sight

On Friday morning I dragged myself out of bed and trundled down I-95 toward Washington for an 8:00 a.m. networking and information session. This Women in Business group (part of the Baltimore Washington Corridor Chamber) usually doesn't see me because their meetings are always at an hour that does not compute. Being your basic "owl", a.k.a. a night person, my brain does not do well before about 9:30 in the morning. So it is a given that the subject or event has to show a lot of promise for me to not only be there but to have appropriate clothing and a public face on.

This one was absolutely worth the effort. Just off Route 1 in Beltsville sits a 14-story brown block of a building that screams "government architecture." Well off the main road that is otherwise crowded with stores, this chunky edifice seems both distant and foreboding.

Didn't your mother tell you not to judge by appearances? Here's your object lesson. Inside this unattractive container lives and breathes a remarkable collection to delight any lover of nature and history. This is the National Agricultural Library - bet you didn't even know there was one. Neither did I. Not only is this the world's largest research library focused on agriculture, but it is open and welcoming to the public. You can't wander the stacks - the helpful librarians will bring you whatever you want - but you can borrow through interlibrary loan, and you can also access many resources via the Internet no matter where in the world you happen to be. In fact, they have several computers right there to help you with research.

The size of the collections is staggering, and the breadth is amazing. Special collections include rare books, seed catalogs dating back to 1771, original correspondence from Thomas Jefferson, amazing original watercolors of fruits and nuts, and more. The library subscribes to thousands of periodicals - where else could you find a copy of the "Common 'Tater" or "Spudman" for potato farmers? Were you aware that there is actually a standard color system for identifying flowers, complete with color chips that remind you of a paint store? The Royal Horticultural Society publishes the color set, and the NAL includes that in their collection as well. Need a program for teaching nutrition to kids complete with videos? They can help. Curious about llamas and alpacas? They have what you need to raise and care for these gorgeous creatures.

Our group was fortunate to be there the day after a special reception, and saw some truly valuable items in the Special Collections area. A book published in 1539 in Italy, in Latin. An original folio of Carl Linnaeus. A diary of one of the early plant collectors sent out by the Department of Agriculture to travel the world and bring back specimens. And on and on. There is so much, and everyone we met there was not only welcoming and helpful, but they obviously enjoyed their work immensely.

Now here's the sad part - the Current Occupant of the White House (to use Garrison Keillor's term) has proposed a budget that would cut funding for the NAL by 25% in fiscal 2009. If that goes through it would have a non-recoverable impact on the NAL and its collections: They would not be able to buy any new printed books; all subscriptions to printed materials would be cancelled; NAL would not be able to fill the 29,000 requests they receive yearly for delivery of materials that are available only in print; access to most NAL print materials would be available only on site (so if you are a researcher living in California you are out of luck); and access to the special collections - valuable for work against invasive species and in the discovery of new pharmaceuticals - would end.

My husband is a great writer of letters to editors and his elected representatives. Not me - until we got together I was basically apolitical. But this is too much, even for me. Destroying a resource that has taken almost 150 years to build - (Abraham Lincoln signed the act creating the Department of Agriculture and the NAL in 1862) - that is false economy. We're talking a difference of about $6 million. Sounds like a lot of money, until you realize that the total U.S. budget for 2009 is $3.1 trillion (I cannot wrap my brain around a number that big). $20.2 billion went to the Department of Agriculture in 2008, and $6 million is only 3/100 of 1 percent of the Agriculture budget. Pocket change! If my calculations are correct, and Wikipedia has the right numbers, the Department of Defense burns through almost $55 million dollars every hour of every day of the year, and that does NOT include the billions going to Iraq.

Here's a modest proposal: What say we take six and a half minute's worth of DOD's budget and give it to the NAL where it will be used to build rather than destroy?

Rant ended. Please enjoy the treasures of the NAL. I certainly did, and will again. And I'll probably go back for images from time to time - all these photos were downloaded from the NAL's Image Gallery , with the exception of the Amarylis drawing - that's a beautiful holdiay card available from NAL. The sentiment inside is "Peace and Joy". What more could we ask?

Crocuses (Croci?) and Daffodils

Crocuses are running riot out front on a spring-fever day. Temperatures in the upper 60's, sunshine, and windows open to air out the winter-stuffy house. Yes!

Laptop with Photoshop on it is in for repair so there's no way to get the photos I took from the camera to my blog. Phooey! Remembering the sight brightens my mind. For you, some not-from-my-garden shots that capture the feeling.
No matter what Punsxatawney Phil said, my springtime is here. Robins are holding convocations in the backyard and squirrels are chasing each other up and down trees. Maybe it's wishful looking, but I swear the trees out back are starting to blush. For sure I heard a woodpecker this morning. We're going to make it.

Back in your hole Mr. P. Phil - my season is here!

A Different First Female President

Last evening I was in heady company - the MIT club of Baltimore had a reception for Dr. Susan Hockfield, President of the Institute. As the 16th president in its almost 150 years, Dr. Hockfield broke several barriers including being the first female as well as the first to come from the life sciences. As head of an institution that boasts 72 Nobel Prize winners, you might expect a woman more comfortable in a laboratory than a cocktail party.

In person, though, Dr. Hockfield (or "Susan" as her name tag proclaimed) is both approachable and eloquent. Like many others there, my husband - the MIT alum - and I waited to have a few words with her, and she greeted us as warmly as if we had just pledged several million dollars to the endowment. (We didn't.) Turns out this highly accomplished neuroscientist loves the meet-n-greet part of her job. Later during her remarks she talked about what MIT is doing and where they are focusing research and cooperative efforts with industry. These days there is an increasing emphasis on life sciences and the space where biology meets physics and engineering, as well as energy projects around combating global warming.

One of the most remarkable accomplishments of recent years started before her Presidency - placing every bit of MIT courseware online - free - and available to anyone, anywhere in the world. Not only does OpenCourseWare have lecture videos, notes, exams, and other resources for more than 1,800 courses online, but many are available in languages other than English. No other advanced learning institution has made such a commitment to sharing knowledge.

The reach of MIT's influence touched close to home. We sat with a high school Physics teacher from Columbia, MD who was recognized as an inspirational teacher by MIT. His enthusiasm for his work and his students was contagious.

They say that a tennis player improves competing against a better player. It wasn't competition, but being in the company of all those intelligent and dedicated people gave me the same kind of energy boost that I get from other kinds of creativity. Besides, I just love seeing a woman as the respected and successful leader of one of the finest science and engineering institutes in the world!

Creativity Infusion

I've been silent for a long time here. No crises prevented me from writing other than the usual small ones that come along under the guise of Life and Aging. No crushing deadlines to blame either, though there have been plenty of semi-crushing ones that seemed like looming dragons at the time. Nope, it's just been a case of too much to do and not enough time. I'm still looking for that "Time Turner" that J.K. Rowling used in one of the Harry Potter books – a lovely necklace with a small hourglass on it, as I recall. Turn it once and you get that hour back so you can be somewhere else and doing something else. Oh, boy, do I want one of those! (TimeTurner from http://tinyurl.com/dmswu)

What's brought me back is an infusion of creativity that I enjoyed on Saturday. Every February, several hundred talented craftspeople descend on Baltimore for the American Craft Council show. For the first few days they see only wholesale buyers, but from Friday through Sunday the rest of us can get in at the massive Convention Center.

There are a few craft shows that draw the best of the best, and this is one of them. In the mid-Atlantic area, the others are the Philadelphia Museum show in November and the Smithsonian show in April, and they both have their charms. For sheer size and variety, though, nothing beats ACC in February.

My friend and I do other things now, but we've both been working artists in the past – she in porcelain, and I in stained glass. So we go to shop, of course, but we also go for the sheer enjoyment of filling our eyes and ears and fingertips with the beauty of finely crafted work presented by the people who created and crafted the work themselves. Her blog about the show is well worth a read.

What a treat it is to spend time talking with fine crafts makers! Just as birders flock to the blogs of Julie and Mary for inspiration, we artists soak ourselves in the colors of creative craft. Mentally I spent thousands, and every dollar well worth it. My finger still itches for an exquisite ring of 18K gold set with a brilliant green tourmaline, and just my size. Reality, of course, is another matter, but I did come home with earrings that have my colors (turquoise, gold, and carnelian), and a bookmark of finely inlaid woods. My friend found a necklace of silk cords with a clever magnetic catch, and a sweater/jacket in her browns, plus a couple of gifts.

We both came away with ideas and designs dancing in our heads, and with that warm glow of confirmation that we still recognize and appreciate fine design and craftsmanship. Back home, I polished my prize from last year's show - a Josh Simpson "Inhabited Vase." Had I unlimited funds, I would be a serious collector of Simpson's work, and I thoroughly enjoy the few small pieces I do have. Amazing what he can do with glass!

For me, the surest proof of the benefit of a day out for art is right here – a new blog article after a very long, very dry spell.