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Can we please, please, please go back to the ghetto?

We went to a garden center in southside today. We used to go to the garden center a lot, back before engineering school took over my life. I had a cute little garden with herb beds filled with the herbs I used for cooking (I used to cook too). Even after school sucked up every bit of free time, the garden didn't look that bad, because I had a selection of well established, drought tolerant plants. Then, in the spring of 2004, it rained every day for months and pretty much capped everything but the groundcover and the rosebush. Oh, and the lemon balm, which could probably withstand a nuclear blast.

The garden center moved in the intervening years, a little bit further out of town, into an old strip mall with a revamped parking lot. Instead of long straight rows of cars, it has short curving rows of SUVs, which makes getting out of your great parking place an exercise in nail-biting terror. When I was backing out, poo-poo-heads in SUVs were whipping around behind me to zip into spaces which had become vacant a half second before. No sense in waiting. After all, someone might get that space before you. Except that the minivan at the other end of the row is waiting for a space and blocking traffic, so no one else can get by to steal "your" space.

We used the word "poo-poo-head" a lot today.

I think our days of going out to the garden center and browsing around are over. We can't hack the suburbs.

For all that, we got three kinds of lavender, two kinds of rosemary, sage, English thyme, sweet basil, Italian parsley, pennyroyal, and an interesting spearmint varietal Oz found, which is ideal for "beverages." I set up the beds in the old arrangement that worked so well. Oz put the mint near the lemon balm of doom so they can do battle. (I'm hoping they don't hybridize and make some invincible herb which tastes like kitchen cleanser.)

He then ran over the lemon balm with the reel mower.

As the shredded lemon balm leaves flew into the air, I said, "You know, everywhere a speck of lemon balm lands, we get a whole new plant."

"That's okay. We'll just keep knocking it down."

I think that's the evolutionary strategy of lemon balm.

Up at dawn

Richmond Dairy, 201 West Marshall Street
Apartments for the lactose-tolerant (not a dairy anymore)

Oz got me up at 6:20 a.m. so we could wander photographically around Broad Street and the fringes of Jackson Ward. Being out that early is good for the light and the lack of traffic. Not so good? Forgetting to reset the image processing option on the camera from how I left it last night. "Sharpness" was set high and the edges of things look a little too edgy for my taste. Even so, I got some good shots, they just also happen to be … sharp.

Now we're a little jet-lagged what with having got a whole day's activity over with before noon. And sleepy. I had things I wanted to write, but I forgot them. Except for this:

We were driving through the Fan the other evening, and as we passed through VCU, I said, "There's the engineering building. This time of the semester it's filled with engineering students. Suffering."

Oz said, "You want to go in there and torture them? You can tell them how we saw one of your fellow grads working retail. And what have you done since graduation? Well, you've got a lot of blog entries under your belt."

"Hey!"

Going postal

For some unexplained reason, my mail is ending up at other people's houses. This mail never makes it to me, except in rare cases. Sometimes my (correctly addressed, but incorrectly delivered) mail gets forwarded back to sender marked "attempted, unknown." Sometimes it disappears altogether.

All the credit card offers make it to my house just fine. It's only the stuff I pay for, or work assignments, that end up lost.

To the neighbor who dropped off my National Geographic last Sunday: Thanks!

To the person who received my (rare and difficult to find in this country) book on the seventeenth century British civil service and didn't put it back in the mail: Huh? You can't possibly want to keep that book!

To the post office: I've been really nice when I've reported these problems to you, despite the fact that by losing a (correctly addressed) package of work, you cost me three weeks of income and inconvenienced my client. Your failure to read addresses and take mail to the address that's written right on it also inconveniences the booksellers from whom I've ordered things. The excuse you offer, that you are using different carriers for my route, is not sufficient. Presumably all these different carriers can read, so what's the problem?

A ghost sign gets ghostlier

Jefferson Avenue and East Clay Street

The old Tru-Ade sign on Nebe's Inn

The better beverage is fading fast. This sign is painted on tin, not brick or wood, and is being eaten alive (Eeek!) by the elements. It's only been two years since I took a picture of the brightest, clearest ghost sign I've ever seen, but you couldn't guess from looking at it today.

I remember being delighted when the outer layer of siding was removed from the building to reveal the sign, unfaded and relatively unblemished. I'd never seen a sign in such good condition. You wonder, what did the city look like back when all the signs were new?

Hardly ever

I had a great translator moment the other day.

I'd turned in a patent—an incoherent patent which had obviously been cut and pasted together from related patents. You can't really blame the IP attorneys, because they've probably had to draft a couple hundred of the things relating to this one technology. (I'm sure if the patent isn't awarded, resulting in lost profits and litigation, that the applicant corporation will have no compunctions about blaming the attorneys, but speaking as a human …)

The multifold challenge of the translation was to figure out what they were trying to say, find vague English terminology to match the vague Japanese terminology, and make sure that the translation made sense without my having to add content. The translation is being used for litigation, so it must say no more and no less than what the original said, and say it in the same types of words, because the patent attorneys are going to sit around and argue about the wording, as opposed to the meaning.

I figured it out, got the job done, and turned it in. This particular client has native Japanese-speaking, bilingual proofreaders who go through the translation and the source text to make sure that the translation is complete and correct. Then they call me if they have questions. I was expecting that the proofreader would have questions about this one.

He sure did, although about half his questions were more comments along the lines of "Damn, but this Japanese makes no sense." He started off saying, "Oh. These claims. Ugh. I didn't even understand them till I read your translation."

Yes! The Japanese was so bad that the Japanese person had to read the English translation!

This never happens.

I guess we could call this "Found in Translation"?

What should I write?

I just finished up my first read through of The Egyptian Building.

And.

It actually didn't suck. However, I read it on screen and mostly after eleven o'clock at night. Who knows how it will stand up to the light of day?

I passed the files on to Oz, who is going to be the long and ever suffering beta reader. (He read Church Hill twice. Twice, people. Is that love or what?) I should probably print out TEB and try reading it myself.

But.

I kind of want to write something else. Like, I should probably get back on the daily blogging bicycle, yes? Except that I have this sort of idea that's been floating around in my head for a few years. Then I read a cyberpunk novel and said, Damn, but I wish cyberpunk novels had plots already. Atmosphere will only get you so far. As I recall, Snow Crash had a plot. But it's the only one I've come across that did. Then Oz said my Rednecks In Space (add your own reverb here) should be cyber-workers, Elron and Jim, who had to jack into a swamp and . But that would be giving things away. Except it would really fit in (surprisingly well) with this other thing.

I still need a plot.

Also, monkey butts:

Yes, I like to check in at the Monkey-cam and see what's up with the monkeys. I'm juvenile enough to be amused by monkey butts. Butts in a row, big pink monkey butts pointed at the camera. You wonder if they understand about the web-cam, but they're monkeys! Of course they don't. Or so I thought until I saw actual monkey sex taking place in front of the camera with the monkeys both looking right into the camera as if to say, Yeah, you hairless primates? Total pervs. Hit refresh again. We know you will.

Where would the monkeys get an idea like that?

Mosha's

North 25th and East Broad Streets

This was the first ghost sign I saw when I moved to Church Hill. Every time I went down Broad I'd see it and think, Mosha's. I wonder who Mosha was. My question was (sort of) answered later that year. This was the first time, and will likely be the only time, that anyone ever popped up at random and told me about a ghost sign.

For the first year I was living back in Richmond, I didn't have a car. When I wanted to visit friends up in DC, I took the Groome shuttle from the Holiday Inn on Staples Mill up to National Airport (and from there, the metro). There was one stop, at a hotel in Fredericksburg, to pick up or drop off a few passengers and let the drivers take a break. Once over the break, one of the drivers started talking to me. He was a white man, probably in his early seventies (and this happened back in 1993). He asked me where I was from and when I told him I lived in Church Hill, he said, "Oh! You know that place on Broad, the building with the sign Mosha's? That used to be a grocery store and the first job I ever had was delivering groceries for them by bicycle."

So that's the Mosha's story. Maybe not so exciting, but it's interesting for me. It used to be when I told people I lived in Church Hill, I'd get the "Oh, that horrible! dangerous! neighborhood!" reaction (usually from people who'd never set foot here), but occasionally someone would have a story to tell me.

Old things, new again

17th and East Main Streets

When I first moved back to Richmond in 1992 and for a long time after, these buildings were all boarded up (except for the buildings at the end of the row, which are no longer there). I didn't have a car, but since I was living in Church Hill, I could walk downtown for errands and what have you. In the summer, this was kind of a long, hot walk, but the south side of Main was shady in the afternoons and these buildings exhaled cool air onto the sidewalk. When I passed by, I would peek through the gaps in the plywood to see what was inside. Which was nothing, basically. They were shells, with the floors fallen in, and contained old junk, fractured joists, and a vast, cool, dark space. The Baldwin & Brown building (with the highest façe and the circular windows) was covered with pink and peeling paint. I don't recall the others looking much better. Before the buildings could fall all the way down, they were converted to apartments up and offices down.

6:45

This morning I opened my eyes, glanced at the clock. It was 6:02 a.m. and Oz was not waking me up. Ha! So I rolled over and went back to sleep until he came in at 6:45. I was not pleased, but I could smell the coffee and, after all my snide remarks yesterday about not getting up for the light, some word-eating was in order.

And we went and took about a hundred pictures down in Shockoe Bottom. Some of them even came out, but I've only put up one so far:

North 19th and East Franklin Streets

Horses! Horses! They also have Mules! [Exclamation points added] The horizontal text above the doors looks to say something like "Richmond Bazaar" but it's been painted over so many times it's hard to tell. Probably a livery stable at one time, now a furniture restoration place. I noticed this sign once, years ago, after walking by many times and not seeing it. I took a picture and forgot about it until yesterday when I was hunting around for a different image. I thought, Cool sign. Damn, but that's a lousy shot. This sign was my primary mission, but we found other neat ghost signs: a hay and feed place across the street from the ex-livery and a sign for a saddlery (near as we can make out) tucked into an alley.

Then we went home and took naps.

And, because I can, here's a picture from Saturday.

North 21st and East Grace Streets
The building formerly known as the Shockoe Bottom Arts Center

Does it not look unreal? Especially if you compare it to the before picture. Yeah, the light is different, but still.

Overexposure

I got a new camera this week. I've been obsessively taking pictures and fiddling with it. Because the pictures should look better, dammit! Direct sunlight is a challenge. Even with the white balance adjusted properly, things are still looking overexposed, so I'm experimenting with the exposure compensation.

Oz says he's going to wake me up tomorrow at 6:00 to take pictures in the good morning light. He said that last night too.

This morning I woke up at eight-thirty and thought, Oh yeah, get me up at six, I knew you were lying. When we were drinking coffee, he told me, "I woke up at 5:30 and it was really dark, so I didn't get you up. And then at six I was asleep."

Yeah.

What are the odds of a six a.m. photo excursion tomorrow?

In other news: Taxes are paid. The problematic neighbors are moving out.

Fuzzy

Gratuitous cat picture

I also have a shot of this one trying to fit his enormous butt into a very small box, but I'll spare you.

Flickr's April Fool's joke was to have their random "interesting" pictures be all cat pictures. Am I the only one who found the cat pictures more interesting than the usual slew of sunsets, pictures of sulky models, and landscapes with falling down barns?

Ah, well, even a whole battalion of falling down barns is more interesting than editing patents. I finished the big one today. Yay! While I was putting on the final touches (e.g. obsessing over the use of the word "restriction" vs. "regulation"), the same client emailed me with another patent. Different subject matter, thank the gods, but not the slackest deadline either. Whine, whine. But. Money. So I accepted it.

In the meantime, my fun editing has been going well. Yesterday I breezed by the halfway mark on editing The Egyptian Building. I've had to mark a few spots which need a little more writing (elaboration here, replace a boring spot with something shorter there), but the editing part has been fun. A couple days ago, though, I found a long stretch of chirpy cute dialogue. The question: How annoying is this? I was wondering whether to delete this and replace it with a couple paragraphs of exposition. Oz said, "Oh, leave it." He's the beta reader; if he's willing to deal with it, I'm willing to delete it later.

Speaking of which, I have more words to delete.

Day of editing

Editing a 12,000 word patent about a technical thingy with a lot of awkward terminology, translated while under the influence of antihistamines. It's as fun as it sounds, really.

Okay, it's not. Which is too bad because I am only half done and have another day left to go. I'm having to go through it line by line, comparing the source text with the translation to make sure that it's right, that I didn't change my terminology partway through. Except I did and so I have to fix it all. I am fortunate to have an electronic copy of the source text, so I can search on all the suspect words and check every incidence to make sure they all match.

I'm looking forward to getting out of the world of this patent, which is a scary, scary place where you can find the position of a location, but a position and a location are not the same.

Not the same at all.

Fold it three ways

A few weeks ago, we were watching a show on TV Japan about bottle rockets. They profiled some grad students in an aerospace engineering program at a university in Hokkaido.

The students were working on a design for fixed wing aircraft but using bottle rockets for propulsion. We got to see them go down a lot of blind alleys in their design, which I can totally relate to, and crash a lot of rockets. At one point, they tried to read a journal article about the physics of airflow over the surface of wings. The article was in Japanese and the students were native Japanese speakers, but they stared at it blankly for a while, then scurried away mumbling.

And I laughed at them! (Because I am heartless.) Those are the kind of articles I translate, although I handle material more in my area of expertise, like image processing and data analysis algorithms. When you're a translator, you can't stop with the blank staring. No, that is just your starting point. You then have to knuckle down and read it till you understand it. Or until your brain bleeds, whichever comes first.

The students' solution to their problem was more fun than sweating over the article. They consulted a paper airplane expert and ended up with a nice bottle rocket and a beautiful flight.

I wish translation problems could be solved with a little judicious folding.

Good enough to eat

Garages and wisteria at North 26th and East Broad Streets

Ooo. Pretty flowers.

This morning, half asleep, I wrote (in my head) a haiku about wisteria, but I don't remember it now. Something about bees and the scent.

Other stories about wisteria.

In Japanese, wisteria is fuji (藤). Once upon a time I went during Golden Week to a festival in Tokyo at a temple famous for its wisteria. They had their wisteria trained over trellises built out over a pond. By the time Golden Week rolled around, the wisteria were dropping their blooms and the surface of the pond was solid purple. Those were the days of film and I don't have a scanner, so no pictures for you. Like a typical festival in Japan, they had booths of games and little things for sale. At one booth, selling marbles, the proprietress had stepped away and left her West Highland terrier in charge. I have a picture of the dog sitting at attention on the chair behind the array of marbles with wisteria in the background.

The character for fuji is also read tou when it appears at the end of a two-character compound word. My first year studying Japanese, our teaching assistant's surname was Katou (加藤). One day, to kill class time, we asked her to write her name out on the board since we'd never seen the characters before (at that point we were still learning the hiragana). The first character was a snap, but when she started on the tou, and the chalk kept tap-tap-tapping on the board, we were aghast. Then we starting whinging, "But.it's such a simple sound! Can't you write it phonetically?" And that was pretty much the story for the next four years of studying Japanese. You get resigned to it after awhile.

A story about a homonym. Well, a rant about a homonym.

Fuji is wisteria, but fuji as in Mount Fuji is completely different: 富士. You can see the difference? In Japanese, Mount Fuji is called Fuji-san (富士山). Note please: this san (山) is not the -san (さん) used as a status-neutral honorific to follow surnames (such as how we in English might use Mr. or Ms. only not quite). San is the Japanese version of the Han dynasty Chinese pronunciation for the character 山 (mountain), and thus that is one of the pronunciations applied to that character when it was adopted by the Japanese roundabout the sixth century. Got that?

山 and さん are not the same word. Okay? Easy-peasy.

So here's the rant bit: It has happened more than once that I'm reading a book written about Japan by an ignorant non-Japanese, or listening to a news broadcast by an ignorant non-Japanese (Marketplace, hello? I expect better), and they burble along about how Mount Fuji is the symbol of Japan and so the Japanese like Mount Fuji so much they even call Mount Fuji Fuji-san. At which point I screech, "It's not the same san! Not. The. Same."

Oz has heard this rant many times. Now whenever Mount Fuji makes an appearance on TV Japan he says, "Look, it's Mister Fuji!"

Repo Man

First thing this morning, when I was still groping around for my glasses, I heard the sound of a big diesel engine out front. I put my glasses on and took a look.

It was the repo man, come for the neighbors' car. Yes, those neighbors. I guess they haven't been making payments on that Crown Vic either. And the repo man was hooking it up to his truck to tow it away in all its glory, what with the bullet holes in the driver's door and the window smashed out.

I've never seen a repo man before. We actually have a repo yard within spitting distance right over on Marshall with weekly auctions in season, but that's not the same thing as an actual repossession happening right outside. He had a big black tow truck with the name of the company on the side in gold. Also, a skull and crossbones. Twice. Seriously big dude. This was not a friendly towing company: "Skiptracing, Bounty Hunter, Repossession." The reassuring company motto was "Don't Call Us, We'll Call On You."

The neighbors came out to talk with him before he drove away, but I missed it because I was brushing my teeth.

What's next? Maybe Rent-A-Center will come by and repossess their ginormous television. If this keeps up, by the time they get evicted, they won't have any stuff left to move.

Monster mash

Oz walks into the kitchen where I'm peeling potatoes: "Can I help?"

I've only got one potato left: "No, I'm almost done."

"Okay." Oz goes to the freezer, gets ice, and pours some liquor over the ice.

"So feel free to booze it up over there." Bits of potato skin fly around and stick on my shirt.

"Okay."

I finish peeling the potatoes, cut them into chunks and put them in a pot. "When these are done, I shall mash them and then you can stir."

"But I like to mash."

"The mashing is the reward for the peeling. I was the peeler, therefore I shall be the masher. You will be the stirrer."

"You stole all the peeling!"

"You were asleep! You snooze, you lose. You can stir. You like to stir!"

"It's not the same."

The potatoes are done. I drain them, mash them up with butter, a generous six tablespoons. I never liked mashed potatoes when I was a kid. Turns out, it was the warm milk taste that disagreed with me (my mom always added milk). As a grownup, I make mashed potatoes with butter alone. When the potatoes are pretty much mashed, I hand the pot to Oz, who's left his drink and come over to watch enviously. "Here, you can finish up the mashing and make sure the butter is evenly mixed in."

Thus assuaged, Oz mashes around with the potatoes. I get the sauté vegetables from the fridge for him to stir in. I don't make this casserole all at once. I do the vegetables on one day, the potatoes and assembly on another day, and the baking on the day it is eaten.

While he is stirring, I spritz olive oil in a baking dish. "When it's all mixed up, put it in here."

"Dump or spoon?"

"Whichever you can do more neatly."

He spoons the mixture into the dish in big starchy glops, each delivered with a satisfying splat.

"Are you living out your childhood dream of being a cafeteria lady?"

Okay, so that doesn't get much of a response. He spreads the potatoes and vegetables evenly into the dish, then builds a fort with them. We have a discussion about the fort.

Me: "No."

Oz: "Look, it's got a moat!"

Me: "That will just provide a place for the cheese to pool in and get all greasy and burned."

Oz: "Yeah!"

Eventually I prevail and we have a moat-free casserole.

It rains and it pours

I am the work toad. I agreed to translate some patents, then I agreed to translate some more, then I realized that the first patents were Twice As Long as I'd estimated. I got an extension, but I want to meet the original deadline.

Now it's all dry cleaning solvents and plasma displays around here. That and being glued to the chair in the office. One of the patents was written in the 1960s and is a translation of an American patent. Patent language has been refined a lot over the last forty years. I got one of the dread page-long sentences. Old school! And the benefits to society of the invention read like they were written by an engineering undergrad: lots of hype, no sense.

I did get a chance to go out for a walk while we were waiting on the pizza. I'm marveling at the wisterias getting ready to pop. For the last three springtimes I've been so busy with school that I barely noticed the flowers. (Like, "Oh, it's spring? Those are flowers. Now, how many bits do I need for this counter?") This year, no school! I have time to smell the flowers, at least when I'm not translating patents.

It's always a wonder how good wisteria smell. Good enough to eat, like flowers and cake. Once upon a time, I had a part time job in the mail order department of an independent bookstore. The store was in an old house in Georgetown, right next door to the Caféa Ruche, down by the canal, and overgrown with wisteria. For one week in spring, with the windows open, it was delicious to be there surrounded by books and breathing perfume.

My flower pictures never come out, so you get semi-derelict buildings instead:

North 27th and East Marshall Streets

Something's happening on this corner. The buildings have been sold and presumably the new owner isn't going to run a laundromat and scary apartment building.

The delete key is my friend

First, because I can, a pretty picture:

Richmond skyline of the past

Second, some writing for you:

(Or the opposite of writing?) I think I'm deleting a hundred words, minimum, from The Egyptian Building every day. Since it was written for NaNoWriMo, I was cranking out the words like crazy. Must. Get. Word. Count. Why use one word when four will do? Now I'm editing and saying, This paragraph? Totally adds nothing to the story. Delete. Whee! All these little words? I only need one medium-sized word.

Even with all the excess verbiage, I'm still finding problems with pacing. Some happenings go by whiplash fast. They need more words. Other things may not need to take so long. I'm not deleting everything that seems excessive. Authors who elide too much bother me and sometimes more story is a good thing.

Some things in the story surprise me. Throwaway stuff, written solely for the word counts, ends up being . okay.

And we shall mourn

For my next sidebar update, I had been planning to add a link to the Daily Monkey. But now, alas, the Daily Monkey is no longer to be either daily or monkey. Dude wants to spend more time with his family or something like that. A sudden spate of whining in the comments has encouraged him to relent somewhat and he has promised occasional monkeys and an RSS feed. Eventually. Maybe.

Go and click on the pictures to work your way back through the monkey annals. My favorite is the Furi-furi Monkey Dance. We have one of these wind-up monkeys from World of Mirth. The appearance of the monkey drinking anisette coincided with Oz's sudden interest in ouzo, and we subsequently purchased a set of coasters featuring that monkey image. Thus have the monkeys become part of our lives.

Good-bye, Daily Monkey.