I apologize. My prose is as cold oatmeal. Easily influenced, but sadly lacking in definition. I fear there is nothing to be done.
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(3)
04:50:58 PM,
Thursday 25 August 2005
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There is a definite correlation between my happiness and how much effort I put in at work. Does this mean that what I really need is a more difficult job?
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(6)
03:52:44 PM,
Thursday 25 August 2005
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On an unrelated note, I may have just blackened my eye while donning the headphones, as a preliminary to buckling down and doing some of this work people keep going on about, but missing the target due to unexpected tension in the cord.
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10:17:54 AM,
Thursday 25 August 2005
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Whenever the department tries to address the abyssmal morale prevading the place, mine plummets. Bad morale is a symptom, but somehow it's the only problem that management ever addresses. Surveys asking how management could best address low morale: gift certificates, pats on the head or free logoed apparel; (I wear these whenever rebellion stirs in my soul. Today I'm wearing the navy golf shirt of insurrection) Queries as to the optimum agenda of the interminable monthly meeting; these fail to reach the underlying troubles facing us in the marketplace.
I suppose that once you reach the point of wanting to stage a cubicle coup, you should leave. Which I did. I'm gone. fwhoosh. Only nominally in MacWhosits feifdom. I should stand aloof, just ignore all these emails, and not let MacWhosit and co. make my back twitch. How do you think twitching assists the cause, back?
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(1)
10:11:47 AM,
Thursday 25 August 2005
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Strunk and White type trimming is all well and good. It is a good starting point; remove the chaff, work out what you are trying to say, boil away the excess water sloshing about. But boiled prose is not the best prose. It is simply better than the bad prose that I emit naturally. Boiling kills the parasitic mannerisms, but nothing more. There must be more subtle techniques, where prose is gently cooked and spiced.
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04:06:24 PM,
Wednesday 24 August 2005
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Hugh Laurie on Wodehouse:
"But the thing that really worried us, that had us saying "crikey" for weeks on end, was this business of The Words. Let me give you an example. Bertie is leaving in a huff: " 'Tinkerty tonk,' I said, and I meant it to sting." I ask you: how is one to do justice of even the roughest sort to a line like that? How can any human actor, with his clumsily attached ears, and his irritating voice, and his completely misguided hair, hope to deliver a line as pure as that? It cannot be done."
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03:37:03 PM,
Tuesday 23 August 2005
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This should be obvious, but I'd never noticed before. An isolated tree like a street tree, viewed from directly underneath, forms a dome of leaves one deep. The middle is empty.
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(1)
03:45:32 PM,
Monday 22 August 2005
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Quebec is swimming with Toyota Echo hatchbacks; particularly noticable because they don't exist here. Also, we saw 3 hitchhikers, one of them twice, the guy passed us. Crossing back into Maine, many more pickups. Is this cultural? The result of our government effectively subsidizing trucks? The gas prices were similar there.
The drive home took us through logging country in canada, which was neat to see. Acadian flags everywhere. Quebec and Acadia have great flags. Very few federal flags.
Animals not photographed:
A beaver on dry land. They're huge, 3' to 4'.
Shrew
chipmunks
Red squirrels. I got pretty good at talking to them.
Black phase gray squirrels in Quebec City
White winged Scoters
Eider
Red-breasted nuthatch
Harlequin ducks, but without their impressive outfits
Bournaparte Gulls (small blackheaded gulls)
Black-legged Kittiwake (like Herring gulls, only they dive like clumsy terns)
Black Bear scat, and marked trees.
Porcupine-eaten trees.
An utter lack of moose
It should be mentioned that the Gannets were collecting seaweed, and not diving. Also that they're big, 6' wingspans, and that they make a sort of grinding clacking noise.
I am of the opinion that vacations need to be 2 weeks long. We never quite settled in, though by the end I was starting to be able to listen in french a tiny bit. Plenty of other english speakers, but very few americans. There was a general feeling of hostility from hospitality workers when they had to speak english; I suspect this is due to French in school being mandatory in Ontario; they thought we were refusing to even try. Or perhaps Francophones always sound hostile when speaking english, an accent thing. I kept reaching into my brain for french and coming out with german instead. About all my St. Johns french let me do was read the interpretive signs.
Quebec is... odd. In the center of the city they have the Plains of Abraham, the battlefield where New France was defeated. It's a beautiful, vast park, up on the giant bluff overlooking the river, next to the citadel and the walled old city. Somehow the battlefield is a piece of national pride, like Appomattox for the South.
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(3)
10:07:25 AM,
Monday 22 August 2005
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The rock is an entirely different material from the cliff opposite.
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(1)
08:12:02 PM,
Sunday 21 August 2005
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The other side.
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08:11:12 PM,
Sunday 21 August 2005
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Only a few of us were daft enough to make it all the way, wet well past the knees. I didn't in fact see the other side of the rainbow, but the camera picked it up.
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08:10:36 PM,
Sunday 21 August 2005
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08:09:21 PM,
Sunday 21 August 2005
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site & script courtesy of Moss
