I’m starting to worry less about dings in cyberspace and more about the quality of the things I want to share with you. I still have cyberphobia, but I’m no longer a case for emergency technology services. My tech trainer and I have returned to our twice-a-month schedule, when we’ll have plenty of time to work through dings as they happen. By now I’ve accepted that dings will always happen, regardless of how much you know.
My manic cyber-puttering is over. I didn’t call my trainer when I had difficulty uploading this Weblog to an appealing site, Dogpile Web Search (http://dogpile.com), maybe because the site couldn’t process my change of email address to btrot60@gmail.com from AOL’s.
Dogpile is an interesting site. On ABC News online, womens’ career specialist Tory Johnson recommends it as a comprehensive search engine that may be able to deliver more that a standard one delivers. On its site, Dogpile says that it compiles information from several major sites. Yes, I’d Ilke to be part of that site, but I’m no longer freaked out by every little glitch like this one.
Tory Johnson’s site has a wealth of information vital to career women: http://www.womenforhire.com
Reading Tory Johnson’s article, “Dusting Your Digital Dirt” (the one that mentions Dogpile), I can appreciate my cyber-phobia because it protects me from the kind of scenario she presents. If you are woman looking for work, Johnson advises you to conduct a search of your name on the Internet (via Dogpile) to seek out embarrassing stuff you may have written about yourself, and then get rid of it if possible.
If that isn’t possible, be prepared to handle it head-on during a job interview. Employers conduct searches of job candidates, and vice versa. Anybody can conduct a search of anybody and find more information than you can imagine. Her suggestion for a job seeker might be to write instead about subjects that have to do with work areas that interest her.
As a cyberphobic I’ve had a healthy respect for where you can end up in cyberspace. When I conduct a search of my name, the listings are benign and professional. Now I need to focus on being more interesting. On Amazon.com, I found a book, “Writing and Publishing Personal Essays” by author and creative writing professor Sheila Bender. Using her material, I’m writing my first essay, which I hope to post very soon.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Monday, March 13, 2006
Cyberspace Interrupted
Late at night, mid February, I find myself in the middle of the Arizona desert among friends. I rode down there with a lady who raises, trains, and shows performance horses, along with her three horses and dog. Taking my first steps on Arizona soil, I experience a swaying sensation, like you do after a long trip on an ocean liner.
Other than our three stationary trailer homes, a car, three trucks, and three horse haulers, there is nothing man-made except for distant lights and traffic hum from an unseen highway. Occupants of two of the trailers have been camped here for some time. When we get out, the others throw up a hearty welcome. But before we can do anything else, the horses are watered, fed, and put to bed. Pent up in the back seat of the truck for the two-day drive down from Montana, my driver’s dog runs, frolics, chases, and barks at dog ghosts.
I listen to horror stories of what coyotes do to domestic dogs: invite them to come along, and then rip them to shreds. We would not let the pets out of our sight.
I have lost all connection to cyberspace. I can’t even use my cell phone, even though a rep had sworn that I could call from anywhere to anywhere in the United States. My laptop is stored safely at home. Journal writing will be written by hand, but where did I leave my pens?
My hosts take me down to my very own trailer. Out of the darkness and freezing night, I enter a brightly lit place, already warmed by a propane heater. On the kitchen counter I find a pencil.
That night I dream about the tech trainer who has been helping me through my cyber-journeys. He was hauling horses through New York City, I beside him. We weren’t the only ones driving an enormous truck, large animals in a trailer behind. He pointed to a semi hauling a new species found in Africa, one-ton, snarling, teeth-baring carnivores. The beasts had burst free into what looked like a staging area draped with sheets.
We noticed that the load behind us had lightened dramatically. My tech trainer checked the horses. They were gone. We searched alleys for them, and I couldn’t read the language on neon signs. Although we could find no trace of our horses, my tech trainer was as giddy as a kid about this incredible, fascinating new world.
Here, I’m dead and in bed by nine, so am awake in the wee hours before a hint of daylight. Smoking inside my trailer is forbidden, so outside I go to sit on the stoop, bundled up for winter, with coffee, cigarettes, and my journal. In the darkness, I hear wings flutter.
A red smudge above the shoulders of mountains to the east expands to streaks of bright red-orange, pink, ochre, and finally bright gold, before the blinding crown of the sun appears to start the day. A horse whinnies.
We’re camped in a desert valley, mountains at the horizon on all sides. They look like mounds of clay puckered by erosion. Scrub covers the ground, which is littered with sharp lava and is unevenly corrugated with gullies and ravines, its wild paths forged by flash floods and coyotes.
I hear an intense hum of distant, unseen traffic, beeping, a siren, and then birdsong.
A desert wren adopts me. She appears early every morning, then circles at a hop around my trailer. I try feeding her moths that commit suicide the night before by dive-bombing into the propane heater. Back inside, I see the wren looking at me through the glass door, a moth in her beak.
Back outside, getting ready to join the others, two tiny desert finches land on my left forefinger. They are extraordinary, with their yellow faces, white breasts, a spot of red at the tip of each wing, and a body of three shades of gray.
During the day, temperatures reach the low seventies, which is why we’re here. If a hot fudge sundae were air, this would be it. Warm and cold currents flow together. One moment you’re as hot as on a summer day; the next, you need a jacket. At home in Montana temperatures are hovering at zero.
The lady who drove me here leaves for a two-week long hunter jumper show in Tucson, where she and her horses clear every fence and place well in the competitions.
My hosts have a horse for me to ride, a young buckskin paint. His muzzle is a big, wiggly, velvet muscle. His owner describes him as “push button”, which means that instead of kicking him, as in “giddy yap”, you squeeze gently with your lower legs. You ride with loose reins, signaling turns by neck-reining and with leg squeezes, slowing and stopping by sitting back in the saddle, and pulling slightly on the reins, rather than yanking back as in “Whoa, Dobbin.”
We ride into the hills until our camp in the distance looks about the size of an eye’s iris. Horses wear protective pads on their hoofs. We see varieties of cacti, my favorite the cholla, which is made up of glistening, translucent thorns. But you stay away from that one. Its punctures are painful and difficult to extract. They say, “a cholla can reach out and grab ya’.”
Our one stab at hiking lasts fifteen minutes. The path, although too grizzly for walking, is extraordinary, filled as it is with stones that match colors of the sunrise – the reds, oranges, golds, along with an occasional turquoise – and some fragments and rocks glitter and shine in the sunlight. I daydream that some of this is left over from the Big Bang.
Later I ask a neighbor if a three-minute walk from one trailer to another would count as exercise. “You’re darn tootin’,” she replies.
My hosts pick me up for trips to museums and to shop for bargains and oddities. They point to my roof, where a white roadrunner matching my white trailer skitters across. They say these birds don’t fly that high - a very unusual occurrence.
At a museum, I love best the contemporary Navaho blankets, their patterns similar to the old ones, but woven, within the last six years by descendents, with silk along with traditional materials. Flat reds and whites dance against mottled blue-greens that recede like skies.
A recovering hoarder, I buy nothing at the flea markets. I resist striking hand-wrought sculptures at galleries. Instead I take photographs. I try the glassware displayed on long folding tables, of the sun shining through the glass casting transparent shadows on wooden surfaces.
At the end of the day, we walk to one of the two other trailers for supper (not mine, because I’m not fully equipped. Instead, when they allow me to, I treat them to meals in town.) Their dogs bark to warn of approaching visitors. We have show-and-tells: a book of cartoons by a lady about her husband’s dog, drawings and story line professional and very funny.
She pulls out a deck of Medicine Cards, which are very similar to the Tarot. I volunteer. According to the deck’s book of interpretations, the cards I draw have this to say to me: avoid tunnel-vision pursuits. Whatever your project, nurture every part of yourself as you go along. Otherwise, your effort will be fruitless, like that of the musician who tries to play using only three notes.
At night my hosts walk me back to my trailer. I didn’t think to bring a flashlight. Outside, the constellations Big Dipper and Orion look larger and closer. We hear the eerie, high-pitched shriek of a coyote, and then a response from another further away.
As I drift off to sleep, a moth tickles my leg under the bedclothes.
Other than our three stationary trailer homes, a car, three trucks, and three horse haulers, there is nothing man-made except for distant lights and traffic hum from an unseen highway. Occupants of two of the trailers have been camped here for some time. When we get out, the others throw up a hearty welcome. But before we can do anything else, the horses are watered, fed, and put to bed. Pent up in the back seat of the truck for the two-day drive down from Montana, my driver’s dog runs, frolics, chases, and barks at dog ghosts.
I listen to horror stories of what coyotes do to domestic dogs: invite them to come along, and then rip them to shreds. We would not let the pets out of our sight.
I have lost all connection to cyberspace. I can’t even use my cell phone, even though a rep had sworn that I could call from anywhere to anywhere in the United States. My laptop is stored safely at home. Journal writing will be written by hand, but where did I leave my pens?
My hosts take me down to my very own trailer. Out of the darkness and freezing night, I enter a brightly lit place, already warmed by a propane heater. On the kitchen counter I find a pencil.
That night I dream about the tech trainer who has been helping me through my cyber-journeys. He was hauling horses through New York City, I beside him. We weren’t the only ones driving an enormous truck, large animals in a trailer behind. He pointed to a semi hauling a new species found in Africa, one-ton, snarling, teeth-baring carnivores. The beasts had burst free into what looked like a staging area draped with sheets.
We noticed that the load behind us had lightened dramatically. My tech trainer checked the horses. They were gone. We searched alleys for them, and I couldn’t read the language on neon signs. Although we could find no trace of our horses, my tech trainer was as giddy as a kid about this incredible, fascinating new world.
Here, I’m dead and in bed by nine, so am awake in the wee hours before a hint of daylight. Smoking inside my trailer is forbidden, so outside I go to sit on the stoop, bundled up for winter, with coffee, cigarettes, and my journal. In the darkness, I hear wings flutter.
A red smudge above the shoulders of mountains to the east expands to streaks of bright red-orange, pink, ochre, and finally bright gold, before the blinding crown of the sun appears to start the day. A horse whinnies.
We’re camped in a desert valley, mountains at the horizon on all sides. They look like mounds of clay puckered by erosion. Scrub covers the ground, which is littered with sharp lava and is unevenly corrugated with gullies and ravines, its wild paths forged by flash floods and coyotes.
I hear an intense hum of distant, unseen traffic, beeping, a siren, and then birdsong.
A desert wren adopts me. She appears early every morning, then circles at a hop around my trailer. I try feeding her moths that commit suicide the night before by dive-bombing into the propane heater. Back inside, I see the wren looking at me through the glass door, a moth in her beak.
Back outside, getting ready to join the others, two tiny desert finches land on my left forefinger. They are extraordinary, with their yellow faces, white breasts, a spot of red at the tip of each wing, and a body of three shades of gray.
During the day, temperatures reach the low seventies, which is why we’re here. If a hot fudge sundae were air, this would be it. Warm and cold currents flow together. One moment you’re as hot as on a summer day; the next, you need a jacket. At home in Montana temperatures are hovering at zero.
The lady who drove me here leaves for a two-week long hunter jumper show in Tucson, where she and her horses clear every fence and place well in the competitions.
My hosts have a horse for me to ride, a young buckskin paint. His muzzle is a big, wiggly, velvet muscle. His owner describes him as “push button”, which means that instead of kicking him, as in “giddy yap”, you squeeze gently with your lower legs. You ride with loose reins, signaling turns by neck-reining and with leg squeezes, slowing and stopping by sitting back in the saddle, and pulling slightly on the reins, rather than yanking back as in “Whoa, Dobbin.”
We ride into the hills until our camp in the distance looks about the size of an eye’s iris. Horses wear protective pads on their hoofs. We see varieties of cacti, my favorite the cholla, which is made up of glistening, translucent thorns. But you stay away from that one. Its punctures are painful and difficult to extract. They say, “a cholla can reach out and grab ya’.”
Our one stab at hiking lasts fifteen minutes. The path, although too grizzly for walking, is extraordinary, filled as it is with stones that match colors of the sunrise – the reds, oranges, golds, along with an occasional turquoise – and some fragments and rocks glitter and shine in the sunlight. I daydream that some of this is left over from the Big Bang.
Later I ask a neighbor if a three-minute walk from one trailer to another would count as exercise. “You’re darn tootin’,” she replies.
My hosts pick me up for trips to museums and to shop for bargains and oddities. They point to my roof, where a white roadrunner matching my white trailer skitters across. They say these birds don’t fly that high - a very unusual occurrence.
At a museum, I love best the contemporary Navaho blankets, their patterns similar to the old ones, but woven, within the last six years by descendents, with silk along with traditional materials. Flat reds and whites dance against mottled blue-greens that recede like skies.
A recovering hoarder, I buy nothing at the flea markets. I resist striking hand-wrought sculptures at galleries. Instead I take photographs. I try the glassware displayed on long folding tables, of the sun shining through the glass casting transparent shadows on wooden surfaces.
At the end of the day, we walk to one of the two other trailers for supper (not mine, because I’m not fully equipped. Instead, when they allow me to, I treat them to meals in town.) Their dogs bark to warn of approaching visitors. We have show-and-tells: a book of cartoons by a lady about her husband’s dog, drawings and story line professional and very funny.
She pulls out a deck of Medicine Cards, which are very similar to the Tarot. I volunteer. According to the deck’s book of interpretations, the cards I draw have this to say to me: avoid tunnel-vision pursuits. Whatever your project, nurture every part of yourself as you go along. Otherwise, your effort will be fruitless, like that of the musician who tries to play using only three notes.
At night my hosts walk me back to my trailer. I didn’t think to bring a flashlight. Outside, the constellations Big Dipper and Orion look larger and closer. We hear the eerie, high-pitched shriek of a coyote, and then a response from another further away.
As I drift off to sleep, a moth tickles my leg under the bedclothes.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
I've Been Away
For the past two and a half weeks, I've been camped with friends in the Arizona Desert, a wonderful and amazing experience. While writing a detailed post about it, my computer crashed. The pointer is a spinning beachball, until I can get the problem solved.
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