Susan Wise Bauer's Blog, page 6

The last week of vacation, drawing to an end.

Here’s what I’ve accomplished so far this week.

Home on Saturday, back to real life. More then.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-08-12

In the Outer Banks for 2-week family vacation. Getting ready to embark on LOTR movie marathon with kids, cookies and accompanying beverages. #
Yeah, TNP should maybe have caught this one a wee bit earlier…http://t.co/SaFX11p2 #

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Four children, two parents, time passes

We’re in the Outer Banks for an end-of-summer family vacation. All six of us: we managed to work in two weeks between end of summer jobs, beginning of college classes for my oldest two.

Three or four years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that having all my children within arm’s reach, at the same time, would be such a fleeting, gossamer state.

Just back from dinner. They all walk faster than I do, now.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-08-05

Good idea: 2-week family vacation. Bad idea: Agree to speak at Texas conference the three days immediately before. #headsmack #
Sitting on a plane at RIC, watching a huge thunderstorm sweep down towards us. Think we might not be taking off anytime soon… #
Despite an hour on the RIC runway, watching it hail, I made my connecting flight in Atlanta. So still on my way to Houston. #
Vignette from hour on the runway: Flight attendant, excitedly, to 1st class cabin, "The wind that just shook the cabin was a 60 MPH gust!" #

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Those probably don’t belong to a home school mom

This weekend I’m in Houston, speaking at the Texas Home School Coalition conference. Will try to post some pictures shortly.

As it turns out, the Woodlands conference center is currently hosting both the THSC conference (theme: “Educating For Eternity”) and the Kiss/Motley Crue Tour 2012.

I’m a little afraid that the resulting matter/antimatter explosion might obliterate the universe.

(Concert was last night. That’s the flowerbed outside the hotel, this morning…)

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-07-29

"If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you." http://t.co/rqulDK87 #
Dear Verizon: When you say "Submit repair requests online easily!" and then provide absolutely no path to such requests, my faith wavers. #
Dear Verizon: If I tell you that lightning has sizzled my DLS, please connect me to repair services, not tech support in another country. #
Dear Verizon: When I am into my 11th request-repair-phone-tree and my cell service fails AGAIN, I am not filled with confidence. #
Dear Verizon: Are you a REAL company? I have questions. #
Dear Verizon…oh, never mind. #
House internet fried. On phone to Verizon til midnight, "Unable to schedule repair at this time." But offered to connect me to sales. #
Dominion Power & Gannon Well Service on the job 7 AM to repair lines & water, Verizon still MIA. Like Good vs. Evil, Farm Utilities Version. #

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Water, water

Lightning hit the house this week. The house is fine, although the strike practically knocked my third son off his chair and a flash of blue fire went by the window. Funny thing about a lightning strike, though; you find out exactly what has gotten accidentally unplugged from surge protectors and replugged directly into the wall. That would be…the living room TV, my third son’s computer, the DirecTV box, and the DSL router-modem. Additional victims: the transformer outside the house, and the well pump. So, no power, no Internet connection, and no water.

I spent three hours on the phone with Verizon’s pathetic imitation of a customer service department; still no DSL at the house this morning, so I’ve sent Son #2 off to Radio Shack for a DIY solution. (There might be a tiny rant about this on my Facebook and Twitter feeds.) The TV and computer together are about three dollars short of our home insurance deductible; oh, well, that’s life.

It’s annoying not to have the house Internet, and we’ll have to catch some of the London Olympics on rerun. We have generators, so apart from not being able to use the electric oven, life plodded along as usual. And Dominion Power arrived on cue the next morning to replace the transformer; a lovely sight to see at sunrise.

But without the well pump, there’s no water.

This turned out to be relatively tiny crisis. Gammon Well, who originally dug the well decades ago, sent a repairman out first thing the next morning. He hauled the cover off the pumphouse and said, “Do you have a fuse?” And we were good to go. (Which made me feel stupid, actually, because I know the pump has a fuse; I could have checked it the night before and popped in a new one. But after the blue fireball, my mind went straight to Toasted Pump.)

The amazing thing about this itsy-bitsy crisis is how long it took me to do everything, the night before, without running water. I hauled buckets of water in from the swimming pool to rinse the dishes and flush the toilets. I went to find water for the livestock, who kept slurping it down with total disregard for the fact that it was no longer coming out of the faucets. I scrounged bottled water to cook dinner with, make coffee, wash hands, brush teeth. And there wasn’t much, so I policed it. Funny how thirsty everyone gets when they’re only allowed half a cup of water at a time.

Running water is a brand-new development, historically speaking. My grandmother spent her youth hauling water up a hill from the river; my mother remembers her hanging out urine-soaked diapers to dry and re-use (only the really poopy ones actually got WASHED). But we have a generally reliable well-pump-generator system, so I rarely experience exactly how much time it takes to get water, and how precious it is. I was wearing a pedometer, the day of the lightning strike (my husband and I are trying to improve our everyday fitness, so we try to take 15,000 steps per day in the course of normal life). I was around 11,000 just before dinner. By the time I was done rounding up enough water to finish out the day, I was up to 23,000 steps. And I was kind of grimy and sweaty, too. But I was beat, so I settled for a bottled-water handwash and went to bed “in my muck,” as one of my cousins puts it.

Chapter Two of The History of the Ancient World begins:

Ancient peoples without deep wells, dams, or metropolitan water supplies spent a large part of their lives looking for water, finding water, hauling water, storing water, calculating how much longer they might be able to live if water were not found, and desperately praying for water to fall from the sky or well up from the earth beneath.

I wrote that, but this week, I realized how impossible it is for me to truly understand it.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-07-15

This morning's ride: my neighbor's field.
Breakfast on the farm. Reminds me of what happens when I make cookies.
I would go: A Bid to Save Detroit by Welcoming Zombies

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De-spidering and other post-deadline rituals

The History of the Renaissance World went to my editor a month ago. I’m not finished with it; I am finishing maps and timelines (which depend on the final draft) and waiting for edits, I’ll have to check proofreader marks and copy edits. But right now, everything I still need to do with the book is waiting on someone else’s action.

Today, I de-spidered my office. As you probably know, my office is a restored chicken-shed, so a natural home for all sorts of uninvited visitors. I don’t mind spiders, but webs under my desk do not make me productive and comfortable.

I’d been meaning to de-spider since early spring, but I realized today that de-spidering is actually one of my post-deadline rituals. I don’t tend to haul the vacuum cleaner down, plug it in, and go to the trouble unless I’m in transition.

And then, thinking it through, I realize I have at least five post-project rituals.

1) Vacuum.

A clean office is an office ready for the next project.

2) Return books to the university library. I had around four hundred out at the height of this project; I can’t return them all until my book actually goes to the printer, because up through the last stage of proofreading I find myself needing to check facts and citations. But about half of them are now migrating eastward to Williamsburg.

3) Throw away clutter.

Lack of clutter = space for thought.

I got three big garbage bags out, including two pieces of defunct computer equipment. Felt great.

4) Choose a new notebook to start keeping thoughts for the next project.

This one was a present from my oldest son a couple of years ago. I’ve been saving it. Now I’m tasking it for the next big book I’ve been contemplating.

5) Invent a new task-chart.

I’m a list-maker. A linear-thinking, type-A, left-brain list-maker. When I do something that isn’t on my list, I write it on my list. It makes me feel good. (So there.)

When I’m restarting, I re-list. Think of a new way to keep track of my goals. Figure out a different method for charting my time. I use colored pencils, because they make me feel free and creative.

My new task-chart has places to write down the sub-goals I have for different types of projects, and columns for exercise and for the work I do with the horses.

It’s worked well for the last month. It’ll work well until it starts making me feel guilty; and then I’ll ditch it and make another one with different colors.

Post-project, pre-project. It’s an inevitably temporary, but remarkably fun place to be.

Cover ideas for the History of the Renaissance World

My editor at Norton has just asked me whether I have any suggestions for the cover of the History of the Renaissance World. I suggested the covers for the first two books in the series (that’s Constantine taking Rome “for Christ” on the History of the Ancient World, and Charlemagne’s coronation on the History of the Medieval World) based on what I thought were overarching themes for the books.

So what I think is an overarching theme for this book probably isn’t going to make it onto the cover. It’s death. Yes, I know, “renaissance” is rebirth, but the centuries of the Renaissance were even fuller than usual of plague, revolt, rebellion, crusade, campaign, war, war, and war. So my first suggestion to Norton is to use part of Pieter Brughel’s “The Triumph of Death.”

Here are a couple of details:

I think this would be a fantastic cover, combining those images with the word “renaissance.” I seriously doubt Norton’s going to go for it, though.

So here were my other suggestions–the conquest of Constantinople, either by the Crusaders in 1204 or by the Turks in 1453,

(the 1453 conquest, by Palma il Giovane)

(the 1204 conquest, by Domenico Tintoretto)

one of the illustrations from Renaissance manuscripts of Aristotle teaching Arab scientists, like this one from an early 13th century Saljuq text,

or, for a completely different look, some of the thumbnail scenes from the fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas designed by Abraham Cresques, one of the first world atlases.

The oil-painting conquest scenes have the most continuity with the look of the first two books, but I also think they’re the most predictable (and kind of dull).

Which ones do you like? (I’ll keep you posted about what the cover designers come with.)