2013-10-11; 8:55am, Friday … again!  Partly overcastted (?), cool, but bright!


Diary:  Ambitious spellchecker, cleaning and family history undusted.

~~I accuse my much needed spellchecker of big brother ambitions, report on house cleaning, report a family history interview by my granddaughter and on web gallery album redesign.~~

My spell checker is not unhappy about sidestep with ‘overcastted’, to my surprise.  Now let me try ‘overcasted’ with a single t, that it does not like! I even noticed that at my first attempt the ever vigilant checker actually changed my single t’d attempt by adding one on its own.
	So much for privacy in the computer world, you can’t even make an intended mistake without being observed and corrected.  In the ‘States’  some uncertain Republicans are worried about ‘big government’!  I would say, they should start with the spellcheckers who change our writings whether we want it or not.  This is the leading and creeping - if not creepy and bleeding - edge of big brother - black brother maybe - watching over us ;)!

After this frivolous detour, I need to get on with some serious reporting. Yesterday John phoned at 8:30am to ask when he could come by with Annie for an interview!  She is working on a  school project about her family background, immigrant origins and all.  Well I told Annie, I am a living immigrant, here and now!
	In anticipation of this pm visit I spent part of the morning cleaning, vacuuming and tidying up.  I also vacuumed off some dusty photo files, which had been left undisturbed for years.  
	These files are organised in magazine holders labelled with year and topic in my own and family life, better organised than I expected.  These results date back to the summer of 2000 when I spent about six weeks sorting all kinds of things out.  I have come to realise lately and now too, that I was close to moving to Holland and was preparing to ship my stuff over. 
	That process stopped in the middle of August at the time, as I felt depressed about what I was doing and realised that I was going in the wrong direction.  I had even sold some items, book cases to Adrian, a filing cabinet to a stranger and a hand drill to Marcus, who did not really want it!

When Annie and her Dad came over I had photos galore, complete with maps in attendance showing my origins.  I suggested to Annie that she could start with saying that I was born on this earth, but that was dismissed out of hand by daughter and father.  Too bad, because I have a nice illuminated globe!
	The interview had some inertia to it, because Annie was really more interested in her fad with toy ‘Ponies’, some of which she can draw with great care.  John took some pictures of my pictures and the maps as well and both of us reminisced about some of the family camping shots with our favourite dog “Shaggy” in it.  This took us back to the mid 1980-ties when were camping near Lardeau, in the now ’Davis Creek’ camp ground on West Kootenay lake.

In the evening I made good progress on the redesign of the photo albums on my website. I now have proto type designs for the album and for the catalogue of the albums for the gallery category.  This new design makes use of the new html5 features that I am in the process of incorporating for each of my web site categories.  They are: daily entry, catechism, gallery, talks, topicals (essay), left_hand work and the feedback form, that makes it seven (7) altogether.
	In addition there is the all important home page, which I am slowly reworking to show the new items that are added as I make changes.  I am still learning to put new material at the top, instead of adding it at the bottom, where it lingers in obscurity.  The ‘last in first out must’ from inventory control must be your filing and posting method when working your web postings.

Thanksgiving is coming up and somehow I am not that ready for it this year.  I have much to be thankful for this year such as, trips, visitors, new experiences and people in my life.  In years passed, I always felt a certain peace with thanksgiving, but this year I miss that.  Maybe I am not quite ready for the oncoming winter weather, but I also feel a certain restlessness independent of that.


Writings: About how and what writers write.

~~The occasion of Monroe’s Nobel prize gives rise to formulating my view on fiction writing and its function.~~

Yesterday Alice Monroe became a Nobel laureate of literature for her oeuvre of short stories.  I may have read a few in my literature class at MRC in the late 1990-ties; I do remember Margret Lawrence and Atwood, but not Monroe.  
	My Dutch news site ‘Trouw’, reported that Monroe wrote exclusively about female characters in her stories, which the reviewer considered slightly sexist.  In last night’s CBC rerun of Rex Murphy’s interview with Monroe back a decade at least, a possible reason for this selectivity surfaced.  Monroe referred to having significant issues relating to her mother and her mother’s illness and that this somehow related to her writing.

This fits with an observation I have made over the years, which is that  writers often process personal issues and experiences in their writing.  This is even true for authors of a science fiction author such as Rodenberry, who wrote the Star Trek stories.   Fiction authors often deal with problems in society, which are then projected into the far away settings and solved there, or not, avoiding a polemical here and now treatment of the issues at hand.
	This amounts to a partly conscious way of dealing with the issues as such authors, by their own admission, often do not know how the stories will unfold or what certain characters will do or not do.  Realising the background of these creative processes as you read through that material, can then help you learn from them, more than you would otherwise, entertaining as the authors may be in the spinning of their yarns and the weaving of their projections.

Here I am again composing ‘Writings’ topics under the ‘Diary’ heading!  I am like that fiction writer, who secretly writes about her or his problems under the disguise of a different title!
<10:12am, coffee time.
After coffee 10:12am>
I decided to move the paragraphs starting with Monroe and my subsequent observations to ’Writings’, where they have a more appropriate home. 
<10:36am and 11:32am after lunch and editing~