Category: Life

There Are Many Like It

John Winkelman

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…but this one is mine.

This is my garden. This is the seventh iteration of my garden. I have tried six other times, and have become exceedingly efficient at it.

In the past I have grown, or tried to grow, all manner of different vegetables and herbs, with varying degrees of success. For most plants, I had my best luck with the green leafy bits of species which otherwise are known for flowers or the underground parts. My radishes would have spectacular foliage but the radish qua radish would be about the size of a jelly bean. Similar luck with broccoli; leaves the size of tablecloths, and the green vegetable bit would be the size of a mouse and suddenly turn into a beautiful bunch of tiny yellow flowers. Giant chard would be nearly indistinguishable from crab grass. Tomato plants would grow to the size of horses and yield a single tomato.

Though I followed advice from Knowledgeable People, things never improved.

There were a few plants, however, which did well. Basil. Hot peppers. Some herbs.

So this year I have scaled back, both in quantity and variety, to just those plants with which I have had success in the past – hot peppers, herbs, and basil. 68 total plants. 34 hot peppers, 14 various herbs, and 20 basil plants. Nothing in pots or hanging on hooks this year, other than the raggedy avocado tree and two Jack Fruit saplings, which were beautiful in their pots inside over the winter, but appear to be not able to handle being outside, even in this surprisingly (compared to the past four years) mild spring.

For all of the other things I have grown in the past, I will rely on the hard work and expertise of the vendors at the Fulton Street Farmer’s Market.

Pre-Ides Doldrums: Or, May I Continue, May?

John Winkelman

Because of a migraine-ish headache I requested the day off from work. The pain is at a low ebb at the moment so I can bear to look at a screen.

The 3288 Review is open for submissions! Tonight is our third official meeting, where we will finalize the few details which still need to be finalized, and lay out a course for the next fifty days. Fifty, being roughly the number of days until the deadline for submissions to issue #1 (to be published in mid-August), seems like a large number at the front end of it, but the whittling down has already begun. June 30 is just over the horizon.

Spring weather is here, finally, and I have laid in most of my garden for the year. My plans are simple – about three dozen hot peppers, a handful of herbs, and some of the easier-to-grow greens, like collards and kale, and maybe some chard. No tomatoes this year; I have seen progressively diminishing returns over the past three years so, for the first time since about 2010, no tomatoes in my garden. That simply means I have more room for cayenne, cherry bomb, habanero, serrano, jalapeno, Thai dragons, Thai birds-eyes, and Hungarian wax peppers. And likely some other varieties, too.

Another change is that I am only growing from seedlings. No sprouting seeds this year. So many other people are so much better at that kind of thing than I am, and I am happy to pay them for their efforts at the Farmer’s Market.

As I get more of a handle on my finances I have started planning for fixes and upgrades to my house and property. Right now I have it narrowed down to “rip out and replace everything that isn’t actually my house or my garage”, which sounds about as expensive as it probably will be.

Hello, April!

John Winkelman

Well, it’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon Grand Rapids, near the shores of Lake Michigan. Spring has sprung with the crocuses running rampant in neighborhood lawns and our first, albeit brief, thunderstorm Thursday morning. Work has been quiet thanks to the one hand being out of synch with the other, though that will likely change very soon. Bench time is a precious commodity and not to be wasted on frivolous pursuits. We will shortly move into our new office space on the fourth floor of 99 Monroe Ave, overlooking, um, Z’s Bar and Restaurant.

Energy level in Master Lee’s classes is still high. The students are practicing hard, and we are giving them a lot to practice. We have two upcoming events – our annual demonstration at the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts on Saturday, June 6; and our Sifu Day celebration on August 8. We seem to have passed a tipping point of some kind and have a lot of students suddenly learning more advanced forms.

Caffeinated Press is going strong! We have at least three novels in the editing pipeline and many stories submitted for Brewed Awakenings II. The 3288 Review is approaching the edge of the precipice where it goes from being an idea to being A Thing. I have a stack of lit journals on my coffee table which is approaching two feet tall. We are homing in on the format we want, and from there on to the amount of content we can have for each issue. Then we need to figure out advertising, distribution, compensation, all that fun stuff.

All this is lead-up to our community introduction event at Schuler Books and Music this upcoming Monday, April 6, at 7:00pm. We hope to see a room-full of writers to whom we can offer our services as editors and publishers. Word on the street is that we will have something close to a full house. I am allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic. Regardless, We can expect a significant surge in submissions.

All of which is to say, Spring will be busy, and summer likely moreso. But all in a good way.

Knowing the Words

John Winkelman

As a coda to my recent pilgrimage to Vietnam I now have a pen-pal of sorts, a friend-of-a-friend named Yen who lives in Saigon. We send emails back and forth a couple of times a week, discussing the differences between west Michigan and south Vietnam. Often there are photos, too.

Finding the right words for the conversation can be challenging. She knows some English, but is not fluent. I don’t know any Chinese or Vietnamese at all. We began corresponding back in early November, just before the first major snowstorm of the year. When she saw the photos Yen had a lot of questions. She had never seen snow before, or even been outside of the tropics. Of course she knew what snow was, and winter, and all of those concepts, but there are a hundred small details which go along with winter which I found myself explaining. Like, for instance, why all of the photos were so dark. And where all the people were.

The quick answer was “Because it’s winter.” But that doesn’t explain things to someone who has never seen winter. So then I explained how little daylight we have in the winter, and that the photo with the sun low on the horizon was actually taken in the middle of the day, not 8:00 in the morning. And the trees aren’t all dead; they’re dormant. And that everyone is inside because today the air temperature is -20C. And that the wind chill made things feel even colder. And then I need to explain wind chill.

Yen isn’t unschooled about these things. She has family here in the US, out west and down south. Sometimes it seemed that every other person we encountered in District 5 had been to the United States or Canada at one point. And of course there is the internet. The concepts were not unfamiliar, but the explanations – finding the right words in the right context – are not easy.

Another example. There are more people in Ho Chi Minh City than in all of Michigan. Even the most crowded downtown event will not have as many people as a similarly-sized neighborhood in HCMC on any random day. So no matter where or when I take photos an appropriate response would be “where are all the people”?

Yen thinks the photos of snow are beautiful and hopes to travel here one day to experience winter.  I would like to tell her that some days Michigan is colder than anything in southern Vietnam outside of a cryogenics facility.

And right now the challenge is to find the right words to explain the emotional impact, after five months of gray and brown and white, of seeing the green spears of newly-sprouted crocuses peeking up through the grass.

Late March Update – Corporate Training and Hula Hoops

John Winkelman

I feel a little off-balance this weekend. Most of this previous week was taken up with corporate training in Chicago. The training itself was, to my surprise, interesting, though I will likely have little opportunity to make use of any of it. I’m programmer. They don’t let me talk to clients, which is probably for the best.

I only had a couple of hours free to explore the neighborhood. Monday afternoon I walked around Millennium Park for an hour, and at the end sat and watched a group of beautiful young women dancing with hula hoops. A group of break dancers set up nearby and began popping and locking and experimenting with other styles for which I have no vocabulary. Then the two groups started to interact, which was hypnotic and in the smoother moments looked a lot like tai chi.

Thursday, between the end of the training and my cab ride back to the airport I hit the Chicago Art Institute and wandered around the Impressionists – Monet and Cezanne and Gaugin and Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir and so many others. Again, I don’t have the vocabulary to describe most of what I saw, other than a sustained sense of wonder. Paris Street, Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte, made the strongest impression (heh). The way he created reflections of a cloudy sky in the puddles between cobblestones. The slight haze in the air suggesting warm weather. The glow in the sky that felt like spring.

I missed several classes and with the intense schedule had little time to practice on my own, though I did try to wake up early enough to get in some breathing exercises, and watch the rising sun hit the top of the downtown skyscrapers.

My driver for the cab ride back to the airport was a 70-ish Polish immigrant conspiracy theorist. He had many thoughts about Freemasons and the use of mass media, particularly TV, to manipulate the ignorant masses. I think he was surprised when he found out I knew the lingo and could hold a respectful conversation with him. I didn’t tell him it was because Foucault’s Pendulum was one of my favorite books.

I think he was not used to having actual conversations with his fares because he opened up about his life – what it was like to live in and leave Poland, post- WWII, and that his father was an Auschwitz survivor. He had a big axe to grind about Germany and Russia, and the destruction caused by the struggle over the ownership of Poland. Moving borders can act like bulldozers, and when several parties claim the same piece of land there may be nothing left when the dust settles.

So here I am, working on Editing, Operations, and Marketing for Caffeinated Press. Our big Schuler Books and Music event takes place on April 6. Already word is getting out, and we have a steady but increasing flow of queries to manage. Talent and genre run the gamut, and I am happy to report that everything we have seen is better than average. There is a lot of talent out there.

Now off to enjoy this beautiful Spring morning.

Mid-March Update

John Winkelman

It’s been a rough winter for fans (and family) of genre fiction. We lost Leonard Nimoy and Terry Pratchett within fourteen days of each other. I find it entirely logical to say “bugrit”.

Tomorrow I leave for several days of corporate training in Chicago. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it, though I am feeling some cabin fever. Near as I can tell my hotel is on the river the Chicagoans dye green for St Patrick’s Day, so that should be interesting. And this happens during the first week of a new project so I will probably work some late nights after the full days of learning the grammar of the formal language that is corporate-speak.

(and at this point I lost half an hour, engrossed in the Wikipedia articles on Formal Language, Formal Semantics, and Cognitive Semantics)

Three weeks until the Caffeinated Press event at Schuler Books and Music here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Brewed Awakenings sales are better than expected; we may even turn a profit! It was a lot of hard work getting where we are, and I suspect that the “success hangover” is surprise at how well everything went. I wouldn’t say we were over-prepared for setbacks, but there is a specific and subtle paranoia in waiting for a shoe to drop. Also, I am now officially the Chief Operations Officer of Caffeinated Press, which means I’m the one who takes the Official Notes in the meetings.

I’ve managed to set aside some time for reading for pleasure. This is not to suggest that reading query submissions isn’t pleasurable – we have a lot of words from a lot of talented people – but, well, a good book is a good book. The Hermit’s Story, by Rick Bass, for instance. I just finished the second story in the collection, “Swans”, which was masterfully told and brought tears to my eyes and placed me briefly in a conflicted state between “what the hell am I doing with my life?” and “I need to practice until I write like this!”

I never really paid much attention to Twitter until this year. Now I use it daily, both as a tool for promoting Caffeinated Press and as a way to keep up with the current states of the various facets and factions of the publishing industry. To that end, I am currently following the Twitter feeds of 92 literary magazines and journals. And every day a few more pop up in the “who to follow” box. That list will likely pass 100 by the end of the day.

So now I have started ordering individual issues from some of these journals. Only a couple a week; a good lit journal can cost as much as a good book; and indeed the dividing line between a lit mag and an anthology per se can be quite thin. Since CafPress is ramping up our own 3288 Review it is useful to see who else is out there, and how they do it. So much good writing. So little time.

Also, I just passed 100 feeds in the Journal list. Now I feel compelled to make a spreadsheet. Maybe something to work on in the hotel in Chicago next week.

 

Early-Mid March Update 2015

John Winkelman

The first taste of Spring is in the air. The thermometer on my car read “42” briefly yesterday afternoon in the parking lot outside of Pho Soc Trang. Of course the huge bowl of pho contained within my corporeal self could have been throwing off the reading.

Caffeinated Press has hit the ground running! Our first event at the UICA attracted at least 30 people to listen to authors read excerpts and publishers discuss their craft. Our pool of editorial talent continues to grow, and the spring melt is causing our trickle of submissions to grow to a small stream. In addition to book-length manuscripts we are accepting short form submissions for both the Autumn 2015 edition of Brewed Awakenings and the inaugural edition of the 3288 Review literary journal.

Master Lee’s school is still going strong. We just elevated one of our senior students to instructor status. It was well deserved. Congratulations, Tracy! Now the real work begins.

One of our students from Back In The Day, Han Lin, is in town this weekend. His contribution to the class, both as a martial artist and as a translator for some of the finer points of Master Lee’s instructions, cannot be overstated.

Over the past year we have had a few students return to class after long absences. Hearing them talk about how the class has changed, and how it has stayed the same, reinforces just how long I have been a student. Hearing them ask about other people who have themselves been absent for long periods of time. Seeing how much they remember of old, old lessons. Realizing how much the style has evolved under Master Lee. Being immersed in the system, it is sometimes difficult to get a sense for how influential it is on our lives, and hearing it from people who have left and returned is a valuable lesson.

As for reading, most of mine has been short stories by members of the local writing group. I have managed to get about 75% of the way through The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. I really like it so far! Engaging, interesting, complex story; and the translation by Ken Liu displays a masterful level of precision – as should be expected from a writer like Liu.

As for my own writing, it has slowed considerably as I devote more time to Caffeinated Press. I am concentrating more on revising than writing. Two of my short stories have been through first reads, and two more are still out in the wild. The reader notes have been both encouraging and eye-opening. This is the first time, I think, that more than one or two people have read anything I have written which I intend to publish. The work never ends, but every step is rewarding.

That’s it for the moment. Work will send me to Chicago during the week of St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe I’ll get to see the river dyed green.

Semi-Regular Update Number 1

John Winkelman

This is my first general update post in a very long time. I’m trying to get back in the habit of releasing these things once in a while. Here goes…

Writing

This month is “30 in 30”, a sort of smaller scale, unofficial NaNoWriMo. Our local writing group, WriteOnGR, is participating and people are pounding out the words. Me? Not so much. I have 1,500 words of a short story. I think it has potential, but between all my other pursuits I doubt I’ll have time to get to 30,000 this month. Still, 1,072 words a day for a month is a lot easier than 1,667 a day in November.

For NaNoWriMo 2014 I wrote a dozen short stories, or parts thereof. I think four of them have potential, so I am editing them into first-draft shape, preparatory to sending them out to some first readers. I hope to get at least one more short story completed this month, for a total of six to edit, re-write, re-write again, and begin shopping around for publication.

I also still have the 75% (55,000 words) of a novel I completed back in November 2013. I have maybe 25,000 words to go to reach the end, and it requires some substantial edits to get it ready for publication. That will keep me busy for the rest of the winter and spring, at least.

Publishing

Things are busy at Caffeinated Press. Our first publication, Brewed Awakenings I, hits the shelves in a couple of weeks and we are scrambling to reserve venues for the release events. We are looking at space on the southeast side of town, downtown, and on the lakeshore – likely Holland or Grand Haven. All this will happen in early March.

Martial Arts

The kung fu and tai chi classes are going great! The energy level is high so far this year and everyone is focused and working hard. We have several new students who are enjoying the classes so far.

The second session of the “Chi Kung for Seniors” class just started at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal. We have about half a dozen participants, down significantly from the last session. I expect enrollment will pick up again in Spring.

Our Chinese New Year dinner is coming up in a couple of weeks, at the Blue Ginger Asian Kitchen. We will be celebrating the year of the Sheep. I am looking forward to it; almost everyone I know is over and done with the Year of the Horse.

Reading

I have several stacks of books to plow through. Right now I think I am Subterranean Press‘s #1 customer. I have at least two dozen of their titles I have not read yet. Add to that the pile of books I picked up at ConFusion 2015, and I probably have enough to last me the rest of the year. Will that stop me from buying more books as money and interest coincide? I think not! On top of all that are the books by authors who attended ConFusion, which I picked up to read just to get an idea of Who’s Who in the fantasy and science fiction world. Because of ConFusion most of my reading so far this year has been genre fiction – Mary Robinette Kowal, Saladin Ahmed, Wesley Chu, Karen Lord, et al. I also read Jim Harrison‘s newest book, The Big Seven. It wasn’t his best, but mediocre Harrison is still better than just about anything else out there. I also burned through Dynamics of Faith, by Paul Tillich, for the monthly-ish Thinking About Stuff get-together. Quite remarkable depth of though for such a small book.

Life

Every month brings me a little closer to paying off my house, and every month brings another improvement or repair which need time and money. Right now the list includes, but is not limited to: replacing all of the storm doors and windows; re-insulate my house; water-proofing the floor and walls of my old, old basement; re-landscaping the front of my property and replacing the retaining wall; finishing the attic to make it a full living space; replacing the garage door and door opener; replace the timber retaining wall in the back yard; re-grade the yard to channel water runoff away from the base of my house. This will be an ongoing project.

Work is work. KPMG is treating me well; the work is satisfactory and my co-workers are amazing. We move into a new office in a few weeks. I will post pictures when we are settled in.

Time Keeps On

John Winkelman

Over four months after my last entry here, I find time for another one.

Life got busy for me right at the beginning of May. Master Lee went on vacation, visiting his students in Vietnam and Australia, so class suddenly became much busier. This continued right up through Memorial Day and into the Festival of the Arts performance. I turned 43 on June 5, and took the next week off from work. Spent a few days exploring Traverse City, then suddenly started a new relationship with a beautiful, amazing woman. This led directly to me being involved in a summer solstice celebration, where I collaborate with some people to project Flash visuals (fire, water, evolving plants, snowflakes) on the side of a barn and silo. Right after that, a big project kicked off at work, and that has kept me pretty busy since then.

The work has been interesting. It is a PhoneGap project, using a lot of HTML5/CSS3/jQuery and associated technologies. We used an in-house MVC platform, which was a first for me (using MVC, that is), so I had to negotiate quite a learning curve. Also learned a tremendous amount about jQuery Deferreds, hardware-accelerated CSS animations, custom event listeners, and how the MVC stack keeps disparate parts of an app in synch. I discovered how frustrating it can be to debug mobile applications. The Dalvik Debug Monitor, as good as it is generally, does tend to crash with irritating frequency. Fortunately, 90% of debugging can be done in a desktop browser. But holy cow, can that last 10% be frustrating.

Okay; enough of this for now. When I have time I will post a list of the specific issues I came across, and how I solved them.

On Walking to Work

John Winkelman

For most of my career as a developer – say, nine of the past twelve years – I have lived within two miles of my workplace. Cybernet, BBK/PeopleDesign and now, Cynergy. On heavy traffic days it is actually faster for me to walk to work than to drive. Even on good days, driving saves me, at best, ten minutes in each direction. When weather permits, I ride my bike.

But I like best to walk. Especially in the morning, when the city is still waking up. The best days are in the cold parts of the year when the sun is just hitting the tops of the highest trees and buildings. Those are also the days when I walk home after dark.

Biking is more efficient, certainly, but – weather aside – I trust the drivers on the road less than during brighter parts of the year. There are fewer bikers from November through March, so drivers are even less aware of them (us) than usual. I can then choose to slalom quickly on the streets, slowly on the sidewalk, or just walk.

Currently I am exactly a mile and a half from work. The walk takes a little less than half an hour each way. Call it a total of fifty minutes a day, for three miles. Fifteen miles a week, and slightly over four hours. Sometimes I will stop for coffee at MadCap or the Grand Central Market. On the way home, I will often swing by the library. Sometimes I will stop back at the Grand Central Market for a sandwich.

The smell of the city changes from block to block and from month to month. In the summer, the city smells green and steamy. In the winter, earth and smoke. Currently, in the morning the scent trail goes something like this: leaves, earth, bread baking, pavement, car exhaust, bus fumes, cigarette smoke, concrete, pancakes, coffee, river, and occasionally hops from one of the local breweries. Each day is unique as a fingerprint.

This is the last work day of the year. Since i started this job on August 22, I have driven to work exactly twice. Call it 18 weeks. Or 17, when holidays are removed. So 17 weeks, five work-days a week, three miles a day. 255 miles. Or in my Subaru, a full tank of gas. Extrapolate it out and it is around 750 miles a year of using alternate transportation.

And the best part is that I feel more connected with Grand Rapids than I have in years. Working in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day, even in an office full of good people, is kind of alienating. Walking brings me back to earth.