Tada!

Find Your People

It's New Year's Eve and of course I'm spending it at my house. (That's not because of the pandemic. I always spend NYE alone. You think I'm going to a party with a bunch of drunk strangers? Nah.) I just remembered that I need to walk my dog before it gets dark so there will be fewer fireworks during the walk.

(Look, I'm generally a pacifist, and am against the death penalty in principle, but I'd gladly take a broken bottle to the jerks setting off illegal fireworks and scaring dogs.  So... I guess I'm a bad pacifist. It's a work in progress.)

My only goal for next year is to change my Todo List to a Tada List because I think the whole idea is kind of hilarious but also maybe a good brain hack.

In other news, my friend H just made the cake I made earlier and sent me a message asking if mine raised at all. So I had to confess that mine was pretty dense, but part of that was because my oven Just Ain't Right so I had to bake it twice as long and it still wasn't completely done. But then H mentioned that she made it without the vegetable oil or molasses which is exactly the sort of thing I would do, so it makes sense that we are friends.

Anyhow, I hope 2022 brings everyone joy and now it's time to go walk the dog.

Obligatory Dog Picture

He really is ruggedly handsome, isn't he?

Theme

Dead White Dudes

Back in the mists of time (aka, when I was in school), I read a lot of books. I mean, I spent nearly all my time reading, but I also read a lot of novels for school. Times and reading lists have changed, but for the most part we only covered of the "classics" which meant a lot of books by dead white dudes (DWDs).

There were two problems: 1) I was mature for my age, but I was still a teenager, and 2) I was not an old white guy who lived in the 1800s (or whenever). Very, very little from those books resonated with me. I think we covered 5-10 books a year during all four years of high school AP English (yes, I read Lord Jim along with four other snoozers over summer break one year) and I can only think of one (Pride and Prejudice) not written by a DWD.

College was not much better. We had a 5-quarter humanities sequence which skimmed parts of the Old Testament, raced through a few Greek Philosophers, and then spent most of the time on Locke, Rousseau, and their buddies. Yep, 4+ more quarters of DWDs.

(I can only remember one book in all of my first 12 years of school not written by a white person — A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It did not resonate with me in a whole different way. Aside from the racial themes, I knew nothing about urban settings, the time period, or New York in general. I suspect I would appreciate the book more now.)

I think most school reading lists have moved on from this excessive focus on DWDs, at least a little. But part of what happened in my schooling was I sorta learned about theme and symbols and all that stuff, but since the books were just an exercise in tedium, I didn't really see the point. Yes, I could rattle off the green light at the end of the dock was a symbol for hope (because someone had written that in the margin of my used copy of The Great Gatsby), but I memorized what I needed to know and washed my hands of it afterwards.

Fast forward forty years. As part of treating writing as a career, I work on improving. So I was watching one of the conference presentations on craft, and the speaker pointed out that theme is the difference between watching a movie that's okay but forgettable and watching a movie that you remember weeks later.

And something clicked.

So I guess this is a letter to all those English teachers who were really trying their best but got stuck trying to get me to make connections that I was never going to make purely because of the source material.

I think I finally get it now.

Obligatory Pet Picture

Ah, Ginger. She was always so dignified.

Fuyu!

Persimmons

I'd never had a persimmon until a few years ago. I think I got some in my CSA box. They were great!

Then, at some point in the last two years, I realized my neighbors have a gigantic persimmon tree that hangs over the fence into my yard. How did I not notice this in the prior 15 years? I'm not really sure. My dog also discovered persimmons, and now I know it's persimmon season because he wants to go out and look for fruit that has dropped into the ivy.

But today I discovered that not all persimmons are the same. When I went to my sister's house yesterday, I learned she has a persimmon tree. These fruit were were larger and pointier. I brought some home.

I cut one up today and split a slice with my dog. The dog thought it was fine. I thought I had just eaten a slice of baby powder. I'm serious. It sucked all the moisture out of my mouth and left my teeth coated with a powder. Not a great experience. So I decided to google.

Turns out that Fuyu persimmons (like my neighbors have) can be eaten when the fruit is still firm. But you should wait until Hachiya persimmons (such as the ones on my sister's tree) are soft and ripe before eating.

I have done the experiment for you. Follow the internet's advice.

I put the rest of the slices into my air fryer and dehydrated them (uh... if you do this at home, an hour is too long) and the resulting chips were quite tasty. So I can either wait until the other four persimmons are ripe, or make them into persimmon chips.

So there you go. Now you are wiser as well.

Obligatory Pet Picture

"Styrofoam? No, I haven't seen a box with a block of Styrofoam. Why do you ask?"

Casting Off

Story of the Day

I met up with my family today and hopefully (fingers crossed!) we did not pass around viruses to each other. I haven't been in the same place with all my siblings for a few years, so it was nice to see everyone even if I did spend 4.5 hours driving today. And I only got on the freeway going the wrong direction once!

Anyhow, of all the catching up stories I heard, the funniest was probably about my youngest nephew. When he was just under a year old, he broke his leg going down a slide and had to have a cast on his leg. They stopped using his high chair during that period because one day his cast got caught on the edge of the tray when they were lifting him out, and the baby came up but the cast fell on the ground. Oops!

(And of course, my family being my family, we all immediately asked if they tried to just... slip it back on. They did. It didn't work. They had to go to urgent care and get another one put on.)

The other high point of the day was showing everyone my finger which I jammed last night and is now a lovely shade of purple. Apparently I will never be too old to try to gross my siblings out with stuff like that.

Obligatory Pet Picture

So serious!

Texting

Sun Tzu Knew Where to Keep Family

I got a text message from an "unknown" number that was just a picture of the "Welcome to Woodland" sign that is at the offramp of the freeway five minutes away from my house.

The number wasn't really unknown — google phone no longer forwards texts to your phone. Instead, the picture was forwarded to my email, but it didn't pick up my phone contacts to give the sender a name. The end result was I got this weird email in the middle of the afternoon from a phone with an unknown area code having just a picture of a nearby landmark attached.

Luckily, my life is pretty threat-free, so I figured out it was from my sister. She flew into the nearby airport with her family, and they were driving to my brother's place to spend a few days. Assuming all goes well, we will all get together tomorrow and hopefully not exchange life-ending viruses.

But there was a fraction of a second there when I thought some weirdo was coming after me...

Obligatory Pet Picture

You would never guess I had food in my hand, would you?

Routines

In The Before Times

I used to have a grocery routine. Every Saturday evening around 9pm, I would either drive or walk the dogs to the store with the cart. One fifteen minute cruise down the aisles later, I'd be done. Boom. It was a regular Saturday evening thing and I knew all the cashiers and we would spend a few minutes talking.

Then COVID-19 hit and suddenly grocery shopping might be a problem. Maybe. Unless it wasn't. Who knows? Luckily, Nugget has had an "everybody will wear a mask" policy for the last 20 months and in all that time I've only seen one person in the store without a mask. But it's still a closed building with a bunch of strangers who may or may not be sick.

For a while I was eating a lot of DoorDash meals, but then I switched to cooking nearly all my meals. I got a CSA box of produce (and certain other stuff I select) delivered every week. With bread and eggs delivered along with my veggies, I don't need stuff at the grocery store.

So now I go to the grocery store once a month, often early in the morning. I don't know any of the cashiers any more (at least not the ones working early morning shifts) and it's not really the social outing it used to be. I keep putting it off. I haven't been since before Thanksgiving.

But I have to make food to take to my sister's house on Tuesday, so I'll be going tomorrow and I'm kind of dreading it. It's amazing how something that was a part of my routine has turned into a chore I've been avoiding for a week.

Obligatory Pet Picture

He's not spoiled at all...

Maybe Nobody Has Any Taste

Test, Test, Test

One of the things marketing experts will say over and over again is that you have to test everything.

So I tested the BookBub ads I made last week. I ran four different ads with the same budget and the same author targets at the same time. The only difference between them was the image I used.

It wasn't the cute one that got the best response. Oh no, it was the objectively ugliest of the four. This one:

That image/color combination looks like it was stolen from a 1970s K-Mart. And yet... that's what got the most clicks.

Having said that, I should point out that this ad still lost money. It just lost less money than the other three. It's going to take some time and effort (and cash) to figure out the best authors to target, i.e., people who like author X might also like this book, before I even break even.

Obligatory Pet Picture

Guido's toe beans wish you a Merry Christmas!