Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 89

Spring Colors in Washington DC

We’re finally starting to get some serious color–and pollen–in Washington, DC. These were taken at Green Springs garden. The purple field are daffodils. The orange and pink flowers are tulips. Those reminded me of Pacific Southwest Airlines, a carrier we always flew on in California before they got bought out. The uniforms were those two colors. Not sure what the last flower was, but I liked the splay of the petals.

Filed under: Thoughts

How This Pantser Does Research

Research came up as a topic on Facebook, one of those things where the writers want to know how you keep your research notes.  I suppose I’m an oddity, because I don’t keep any research notes.

To start with, I don’t plan out my stories at all.  I have no idea what will happen in them, or how they will end.  Consequently, I also wouldn’t know what I needed to research.

I could try, but I would waste a considerable amount of time.  I learned that on one of my book projects.  I researched several subjects to death, dutifully wrote down cool things that caught my interest.  Even went to a college campus, hit their library and looked stuff up, took notes.

Then I made first contact with the story.  Used none of that research.

So what do I do instead?

Most of it is long before I write the story, and it’s not for any specific story.  I go to some place like Old Towne, Alexandria, Virginia and wander around.  Enjoy myself.  Look at stuff.  Smelled the malt of beer being made at a distillery. Be horrified at the cobblestone alleyways—how did people walk on them things? 

Then, when I come with an idea, I do the reverse of what I think a lot of writers do. They get the idea and shape the research around the idea.  If the idea involves a doctor doing surgery, they go out and learn everything about that type of surgery.

On the other hand, I start with the setting, which is where most of my research would be needed, so I can pick some place that I’m well familiar with and intersect other elements, then plop an idea there.  I’m also not going to pick occupations for characters where I have to do research just to do the character.   

As I write, the details filter into the story through my subconscious.  I think that’s because I had fun at these places.  Fun leaves an imprint.

I’m working on a story that started with Old Town as a basis, and I added bits from a fascinating lecture on Civil War maps I attended ten years ago, and  the visit of a three masted sailing ship (isn’t the ship below glorious?).   Oh, and also a Civil War fashion show from a few years back.  Clothes are always interesting.

After that, it’s the writing.  It’s a fantasy, so some of it is made up (magic and swords; no repeating rifles or muzzle loaders). Still some research, but it’s on the spot, as I discover what I need while I’m writing the story.  For the story, that’s been food.  I just look it up and put what I need directly into the story.

On the plate for the future is to visit the masted ship in Baltimore.  I really want to walk on board and see what it was like to live there.  Some of my ancestors came over on sailing ships like that.  And it would be really cool to write a pirate story one day…

Filed under: Thoughts, Writing Tagged: Alexandria, Baltimore, Civil War, Old Town, research

Glorious Tulips in Washington DC

Washington DC always has very pretty tulips!

Filed under: Photos, Thoughts Tagged: Spring, Tulips, Washington DC

Star Wars and Risk Taking

This week, I finally got around to see the latest Star Wars film.  When it came out in December, I was sick with a winter cold that took forever to clear out.  And then I just never got to it.

Took me a while to understand why.

I know this dates me, I saw Star Wars when it was originally released, and it was something new and unexpected that no one had ever seen before.  Up until then, science fiction movies had been about monsters created by atomic radiation (Godzilla, Them), or our astronauts visiting another planet and finding monsters.  They were often lessons warning us that if we didn’t shape up, this would happen.

Star Wars made science fiction fun.

And people lined up to see at the movie theaters.  The news reports showed these lines wrapped around the block.  People bragged that they were on their 17th viewing of the movie.  It was a film that was eminently satisfied and made you feel good when you went home.

Anyone who saw it then remembers that magic.

But all the writers of this new film did was rewrite the first movie.  The writers even used some of the same dialogue, and this made it predictable rather than surprising.  I knew that Han Solo was going to die because the same scene was in the original film with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The result was that it was an okay film.  I liked Rae and was happy to see a woman character getting an action role.  But it wasn’t a film that would make me go back and rewatch it to get immersed in the story all over again. 

Unfortunately, the studios have become extremely risk adverse.  They spend a lot of money on films and want to guarantee success.  So it’s easier to revise an old script or remake an existing project that was successful then it is to come up with a fresh film.

I grew up in the Hollywood area.  A film crew filmed in a house down the street from my house.  I spotted a grocery store we shopped at on Hunter, and another (now a Target) on Scarecrow and Mrs. King.  I saw Martin E. Brooks (Bionic Woman) in a local restaurant.  I’ve been to conventions, where all the fans enjoy the stories that made them excited.

And I want studios to take a risk and be more creative.  Is that too much to ask?

Filed under: Entertainment, Thoughts Tagged: Star Wars

Easy is not always easy

This month, I’ve been taking an online cooking class on how to cook without recipes.  I’ve always hated trying to cook using recipes.

It always seems like the cook-author thinks that I must enjoy cooking like they do.  Not!  And that my kitchen looks like theirs.  Not!

Oh, and that I have a big family and oodles of time to make a huge meal for six.  Seriously not!

Actually, in my travels looking up cooking without recipes, I was surprised to see that a lot of what goes into cookbooks isn’t tested at all.  That goes back to the publishers cutting what they pay the writers.  The writers have to get a book out and aren’t getting paid enough to test it, so recipes go in that may not work according to the way they’re written. 

The result is that I’ve been puzzled when I see recipes claiming, “Easy!” and, well, they aren’t.   Easy is not buying a non-standard pan for a recipe, and one that I will never use again.  Easy is not fifteen ingredients, two of which I have to go to a different store to find.  Easy is not twenty lines of instructions made to look like five.

This was my first meal, which is kale, red bell pepper, carrots, chicken, garlic, and salt and pepper.  (I picked the ingredients for their color, so I was looking for pretty.)

Unlike most of my past meals, it tasted pretty good.

Tomorrow I get to roast an entire chicken.  I’ve never done that before.  So we shall see.

Filed under: Food, Thoughts Tagged: cooking without recipes

Military Accident = More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame

There’s an old saying that everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame. In Washington, DC I imagine that happens if your car stalls out in rush hour and every news station reports on “stalled car blocking the middle lane.” But we had one soldier who got far more than fifteen minutes of it, all over the 6:00 news.

We drove 915 trucks, which are very similar to tractor trailors, except green. The trailer part is a flatbed, so pretty much anything can be put on it. Add sideboards and a tarp and you can carry pallets of mail as we did during Desert Storm. A forklift can add a shipping container, or load poles. Lots of things can go on it.

We also had two main roads that we could take. But had two bridges. The design was strange because the bridges were together, and the road dipped under the first bridge, and then came up. If the drivers had a trailer, they were not supposed to go on that road, becauase there wasn’t enough clearance.

One of the drivers was carrying two 20 foot shipping containers on the trailer. They contained medical supplies. He forgot about the second bridge and went under it with the trailer. Hit it hard enough to knock off one shipping container and damage the other. Medical supplies were scattered all over the street, and the news crews came out to take pictures. Accident! Military truck! Terrible! Shocking!

We had a second accident, which occurred a few years later. The news footage showed the truck—no trailer—sitting on the freeway divider at an angle. They’d flown a helicopter over it. The mutliple car accident had occured in front of the military truck, and the driver went on the embankment to avoid hitting the disabled cars and also to get out of way. But if you listened to the media, it was “Army driver causes accident.”

Sometimes what seems like the truth isn’t.

Filed under: History, Military, Thoughts Tagged: Desert Storm, Fort Lewis, M915A1, Washington State

Drinking water out in the field

Whenever we went out to the field for training, our squad leaders had to bring “potable water.” Potable water is what you can drink and fill your canteens with. The field on Fort Lewis was always way out in the middle of nowhere, so we always had to bring out water and food. There wasn’t anything like water in the MREs, though at the time, they had powdered sweet drinks that could be added to water.

The first way was our own personal canteens. We carried one quart canteen on our equipment belt, and that was supposed to be full before we went to the field. In Desert Storm, we had two 2 quart canteens—it was wearing water balloons stuck to our hips. I hated drinking out of my one quart canteen. They were always used when we got them from central issuing, and the previous owner of mine had added the MRE powdered drink to the water. The taste had leached into the plastic, so when the water warmed up over the day, the water would have this vague flavor of cool aid. Yuck!

Our platoons also brought out water in five gallon containers. Amazingly, it’s for sale on Amazon! This is exactly what they looked like. My squad would fill up some and put them in the back of a CUCV, which was a vehicle we used after the jeep and prior to the hummers. It looks kind of like the suburban, except camouflaged in dull green colors.

When the container was full up, it was a two person job to fill a canteen. One tipped the container while the other held the mouth of the canteen to the mouth of the containers. Water usually managed to spill. The sergeants would also take one and turn it upside down so the spigot was on the bottom, then set it on a table by the latrines so we could wash our hands. During Desert Storm, a lot of times this was one of those ubiquitous bottled waters that were everywhere.

The last way we brought out water was at company level—a lyster bag was set up. I tried using the term in something, but no one knew what the heck one was. It looks like a canvas punching bag dangling from a frame, or a tree branch. It holds 36 gallons of water and was always sweating with ice cold water. A picture is here.

The sergeants were always making sure we drank water. One of the women hated water and just drank coffee. She refused to drink water when we were in Desert Storm and ended up getting it in her record that she had been told she needed to drink water. She did end up dehydrated and on an IV at one point because she didn’t get enough liquids. Even just in a normal field activity, you can sweat off a lot of water, so it was always important to have more water nearby.

Filed under: History, Military, Thoughts Tagged: Fort Lewis, MRE, Washington State

Eating out in the Field

The military is really big about training. But then, the entire mission of the military is war, and the only thing soldiers can do is train until and if a war happens. The purpose is to know everything by rote so when the big scary stuff happens, the soldier doesn’t have to think about what to do because she already knows.

We’d go to training on Fort Lewis once a week. Training wasn’t like what’s in the corporate world, where you go sit in a classroom while the instructor races through PowerPoint slides. We went out to the field, which was the woods. We would have liked the classroom, since Fort Lewis could be cold and rainy, but we rarely did anything indoors. Fort Lewis has a huge expanse of woods—beautiful fir trees that look like telephone poles and smell like pine. Lush green everywhere.

Any time we requested one of the training areas, we got our training schedule back with a list of who we needed to coordinate with. There was a lot of competition for some training areas, and sometimes there was just a company nearby. We’d have to take paperwork around to all these different companies so they could sign off on it. If they didn’t, we’d have to find another place. I ended going to 1st Special Forces and 75th Rangers to get signatures. No women, so I stood out!

The main reason for the coordinations was because some of the companies used artillery to train, and we did not want to be on the business end of that.

Anyway, we’d scheduled training at the Military Operations On Urban Terrain place, or MOUT, as it was known. You can see some pictures of a MOUT site here. It had basic buildings, so we could practice war in a city environment. This particular training site was always popular, and we were sharing it with another company. We were at one end, and they were at the other.

At lunch, the cooks brought food in the back of a CUCV. It’s food straight from the mess hall. They cook it and fill metal insulated containers to keep it hot, then serve it to us. So we get hot food on paper plates and plasticware. We’re tired from the morning’s training and still have the afternoon to go, so we go off and find spots to eat.

And then suddenly our eyes and throats are burning. No! It’s not the food!

The other company used CS gas (otherwise known as tear gas). The wind was blowing it all in our direction.

One soldier sat there and continued to eat—no one was going to interrupt him!—while the rest of us tried to find a better place. Did kind of ruin the meal for us anyway.

Filed under: Food, History, Military, Thoughts Tagged: 1st Special Forces, 75th Rangers, CS gas, Desert Storm, Fort Lewis, MOUT, Washington State

Pizza debuting in the MRE in 2017

Pizza’s the mainstay of the military. When I was stationed at Fort Lewis, Domino’s set up shop just off post, in Tillicum. Tillicum was a run down strip of restaurants, a few cheapie car dealerships, and that kind of thing.

Domino’s would send their drivers over on Friday or Saturday night with boxes of cheese pizzas, and they would walk to through the barracks: “Pizza for five bucks!” Sometimes it would be free. But, of course, taped the box was a set of coupons and the phone number so you would buy more pizzas.

In 2017, pizza will debuting in the Meals Ready to Eat (MRE): http://taskandpurpose.com/the-pizza-mre-is-finally-coming/

Soldiers always have a love-hate relationship with the MRE. An MRE is a “field ration”–a pouch of that you can stuff into your cargo pocket and eat out in the field. It doesn’t need to be cooked and it provided a hefty dose of calories (abut 1,200 a meal).

It also hasn’t always been good. Before Desert Storm, it seemed like no one thought much about making something soldiers liked. We had twelve meals to a box, and some of them were pretty awful. The frankfurters were known as the “four fingers of death,” and Omelet with Ham and Escalloped Potatoes had me scratching my head and wondering “What were people thinking?”

Desert Storm forced the military to rethink the MREs. I don’t think they thought originally much beyond soldiers having the meals for a week when a company went to the field. In Desert Storm, all of us had an MRE for lunch every day. But there were also places where we had it three meals a day. When I was at Log Base Alpha, the food at the mess hall was so bad that MREs were better. :>

We also were pretty creative with it. There was always a box of unwanted items like cheese or fruit, so we could mix what we wanted it. I always added cheese to everything if I could. I even was able to get hold of some nacho cheese potato chip dip and added that. One of the guys found some MRE bread, so some previously awful pork patty and beef patty hockey pucks became pretty decent sandwiches once rehydrated and heated.

After Desert Storm, the military started revising the MREs. They replaced all of them, and over time have added vegetarian meals and even ethnic ones. You can see here http://www.mreinfo.com/mres/mre-improvements/ some of the changes over time. Scroll to the bottom to see the changes to the ones I had.

Everyone always fought over the Spaghetti with Meatballs. If the pizza one is good, everyone will fight over that.

Since we are talking pizza, what’s your favorite? Mine is Mac and cheese. Yum!

And if you haven’t seen it, I posted some Frequently Asked Questions about my military service, which includes the medals and ribbons.

 

Filed under: Food, History, Military, Thoughts Tagged: Desert Storm, Domino’s, Fort Lewis, MRE, Pizza, Tillicum, Washington State

The grocery store, the meat, and the kids

I watch these cooking shows, and they always have a chef who grew up in a family where everyone revolved around the kitchen. That was never the case in my house. I’m not sure my mother enjoyed cooking, or at least for the entire family. When she said, “I’ll throw something together,” it was often cause for concern. She tried, but I know how hard it is to do something well if you don’t enjoy doing it. I don’t like cooking myself.

So the food was just not good. In fact, when I joined the Army and ate in the mess hall in basic training the first time, I was shocked at how good food could taste.

Right.

My mother always shopped at this one grocery chain. This particular year, they were the victims of a butcher’s strike. None of us realized the implications of that.

She went shopping as usual, and picked up the ground beef that was on sale. She threw a meal together with the meat and served to us for dinner. My father eats so fast that he doesn’t taste anything, so he was already halfway through while my brother, mother, and I discovered the meat was spoiled. Nothing ruins your appetite faster!

The following week she goes back. Buys more meat on sale. Same result.

Third week, she went back. This time when she came back with the meat, she asked all of us to smell it to see if it’s bad.

My father waved it off, telling her that he couldn’t tell anything. So she came to me and my brother, and of course, the meat was bad again. None of us wanted anything to do with the meat after that because it was obviously spoiled. Smell is one of the senses that brings back instant memories, and there are some no one wants, like spoiled meat.

The following week, she went to the store again. For some reason there was a huge disconnect here with my parents. It was a two person job to go shopping since my father was the driver, and no one thought about going to a different grocery store. For some reason, my mother either couldn’t tell the meat was bad or didn’t have the confidence to make the call. The latter was possible; she’d grown up in an era where women were taught that they weren’t supposed to have opinions. But the result was the same. She couldn’t tell if the meat was spoiled, my father said he didn’t know, so the kids got the job of checking.

We refused.

After that, the next shopping trip was at a different grocery store. Finally!

Grocery Store – 0; Hamburger – 0; Kids – 1.

 

Filed under: Food, Humor Tagged: Cooking, grocery shopping