My Other Life

For those of you who are my friends and family, you may be interested in the links I'm providing in this post. I keep my work life separate from my blog, and from everything else personal, but for those of you who have missed me (and may miss my posts again, the next time I get all busy with work), if you want to see more of what I've been "up to," then check out the online field guide of the Missouri Department of Conservation.



When I started working on this project, the MDC folks asked me if I wanted to be identified publicly as a "field guide maven," and I said no. I'm an editor, right? I'm not a "writer"!! (Okay, I guess I am, now, aren't I.) And I certainly don't want my sad-looking mugshot next to anything on this online field guide. It's all about the plants and animals! But my friends, and family--if you ever want to know what I'm "up to," look at this site.


(Muskrat photo by Susan Ferber.)

It's basically 10 field guides in one: aquatic invertebrates, insects, butterflies and moths, fishes, amphibians and reptiles, birds, mammals, mushrooms, wildflowers and nonwoody plants, and trees/shrubs/woody vines. You can search on it via an alphabetical browse menu, or you can do an "advanced search" that allows you to narrow search results using key identifying characteristics (such as color, habitat, etc.).

This summer, I've been particularly busy fulfilling entries on the wildflowers and other nonwoody plants. (It's still going to be a while before I post a bunch of grasses and ferns--surely you can see why those present special problems for writing a guide for nonscientific readers.) Here's a link to the "browse" page for the wildflowers. It's an alphabetical listing; just scroll down, then click on the next page, etc. There's close to 300 species entries for this group, with more a-comin'.

Also, in the browse menus, when a plant or animal strikes your fancy, click on that image to see the complete entry for that species. Here, for example, is a recent entry I did, for Giant Ragweed. You know this plant; you've seen it a million times. But have you really seen it? Part of the satisfaction of creating this field guide is in thinking, really thinking, about some of the most minute aspects of these organisms. What sets it apart from others of its kind? Why should anyone care about it? Why does it possess its unique characteristics?



I love it when I can include information that is particular to Missouri, the Ozarks, the tallgrass prairie. I guess because of my own local pride. Like how the word "cooter" came from Africa and then became a verb in Ozark dialect. And every time I write about a prairie wildflower, I think of how they must have cheered settlers as they headed west into such strange, treeless terrain.

It's especially been fascinating to include "human connections" and "ecosystem connections" for each species. What has amazed me is how nearly every single species in the state, whether it's a weird mushroom, or a nondescript rodent, a ubiquitous roadside wildflower, or even a minnow, a wicked-looking insect that hides under rocks in a stream, or a type of insect that's so damn common you don't give a second thought to it, has an interest on a human level and on the level of its relationship to nature. That's just incredibly cool, I think.



Honestly--sometimes the hardest thing about this project is to keep from writing too much. There's no end to the fascination in the natural world.



Anyway--enough of "tooting my own horn." But I did want to let y'all know that I haven't exactly been absent from the Internets--just from my blog. If you ever miss me (you know who you are!), check out the MDC field guide, where you'll find out what I've been doing in "my other life."

A New Year—2012

Apologies for my absence! My guess, however, is that you, too, have been busy playing “catch-up” with all the activities that got sidelined during the holidays. I’ll bet you haven’t had any more time for reading blogs than I’ve had for writing them.

Anyway, I don’t have much to report. I guess I could tell you about our holiday travels and the icy roads in Indiana, or I could describe the weather we’ve been having (up till yesterday, unseasonably warm; now it’s frigid with snow on the ground) . . . but that stuff’s old news, or boring, or both.

Still, I ought to report to you about something—if only to post a first entry for 2012!

Okay, here’s one thing: I realized this year, as we were taking down our Christmas decorations, that even though I often feel tired of seeing all that holiday stuff, I can’t help but enjoy seeing, and handling, all those pretty things again.




In other words, I never really get tired of them.

However, my body has about had it with the food. Honestly, I didn’t overdo it this year at all, but I did get off my oat bran muffins! At this point, we’re eating really lightly, and it feels great!

The “fun” oranges are back in season—blood oranges, Cara Caras, good grapefruits, and so on—and I’m having a blast with them. Schnucks had a bunch of temple oranges on sale. These, apparently, are a tangerine-orange hybrid. They’re excellent for making juice!




And my frugivory is continuing in other ways: We’ve been eating prunes! Prunes, I tell you! I need to do a post about them—they are an Opulent Opossum food, if ever there was one. Undersung, maligned, and forgotten, yet exquisitely delicious and good for you. What’s not to like? They need a cheerleader.

So, my 2012 is off to a slow start, blogging-wise, but stay tuned. I’ve got a lot of posts rumbling around in my head, and we’re going to do a lot of interesting things this year. I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

Thanksgiving Already

Wow, folks, here it is already. How did it sneak up on me? Oh yeah: I’ve been really busy. But you knew that already, since it’s been so long since I’ve written.

I feel like I owe you an explanation—but that would be really boring. I’ve had some big work deadlines—the kind where you have to stay up late staring at a computer and shuffling through mountains of papers. The kind where the project gets increasingly, nightmarishly complicated and problematic before it can become intelligible and orderly, ready to leave your desk.

To make the past week more difficult, some smaller projects came up out of the blue. To be honest, those were more interesting that the big thing that was seeming old by now, and I enjoyed them—in some respects, just because they represented a change of subject. But it all combined to make for a big work crunch, that ol’ freelancer “feast-or-famine” thing. Hence the long nights.

Up until very recently, I have managed to stay away from the so-called energy drinks, but I’ve been abusing Red Bulls recently. And I’ve found out that although Red Bull “gives you wings,” it also gives you the jitters and heart palpitations! But you know how it is: Sometimes we have to abuse ourselves to meet the all-important deadlines. Right?

I’ve always kind of assumed that the term deadline meant that “if you don’t get this done on time, heads will roll.” But I’m beginning to see that isn’t really the case. Seriously: What’s another damn day? No one gets killed when a work deadline is missed. (Well, unless you’re a surgeon, or someone in charge of delivering a vital organ needed ASAP for transplant purposes.) The very worst that could happen is something financial, a loss of funding, a loss of a job.

Instead, I think that the term deadline has more to do with what happens to us, cumulatively, after decades of that kind of stress—abuse, really.

On the first day of my first job in publishing—right out of grad school—I was shown to my new desk, which I had inherited from my predecessor. The desktop was clean except for some dust, a stapler, a tape dispenser, and the phone with all its unnecessary buttons. I opened the desk drawers and found a dish of paperclips, some chewed-up pencils with the erasers worn off, and a bottle of Excedrin with just a few tablets left to rattle around in it. Sliding around next to a dog-eared pad of post-its were some mint-green Tums, dusty from being loose in the drawer.

That all should have been a clue right there. But I was convinced that my graduate-school training would make me different from my predecessor. I had been taught the correct procedures for my job—I had learned not only the substance of book editing (how to copyedit, how to proof—those two things are different, you know—how to index, etc.) but also the procedures. Editors, by nature, are rule- and procedures-oriented. We like checklists. We like workflow elegance, streamlined with an engineer’s precision.

I had been taught the time-honored, standard, logical sequences for bookmaking. When the manuscript arrives, this, this, and this happen, usually simultaneously, first. The editorial department does this, the marketing department does that, and the production department does something else. And so on down the line—first the copyediting, then the author review, and then you enter all the final corrections. Then the manuscript goes to the production department for page layout, and after that, there’s the page proofing. Blah, blah, blah. The details vary, but the process is the same, if you want to be efficient about it.

But then, just a few weeks into my first job, my supervisor was telling me, “well, this manuscript doesn’t need ‘copyediting.’ I think it just needs a light proofing; then it can go straight into production.” I followed his instructions, though I did know better. I told the copyeditor to do only a proofreading, and sure enough, weeks later, the proofreader was informing me that the page proof needed a copyedit.

It soon became clear to me that the bitten pencils, the spent Excedrin bottle, and the miscellaneous Tums were symbols of a companywide dysfunction, to which I was not immune. Within a year, it got to the point where I couldn’t quite tell if my smiles were genuine, or only camouflaged grimaces.

That life was brought back to me with this most recent push, the late-night rubbing of eyes and temples, the concerned e-mails from my client, my reassuring e-mails in response. It would get done on time, and I knew it. Whatever dysfunction or miscommunications had created the distressing situation, it was my job to get it resolved.

So I did the work and got it all off my desk and onto my client’s. It is in a much better and more organized condition than it was when I received it. What a great feeling! Just in time for the holidays.

It’s not that I enjoy the stress and late nights, the anxiety of a thousand questions that each give birth to five more, as the time is ticking down—but completion and cleaning off my desk does give me a little extra something to be grateful for when we offer up our thanks before the sacrificial turkey.

And I hope you have a little extra something to be thankful for, too.

What’s Up?

I’m home, that’s what. And I haven’t been posting like I’ve wanted to. The problem is, I went on a vacation, then came back, and of course the price for all that nice relaxation and stuff was the predictable reckoning when I came home: Work, work, work.

The truly hot Missouri summertime weather finally hit while we were out of town. The yard has transformed into a jungle, complete with mosquitoes and chiggers. Even the grass has been pretty much out of hand, since it’s been raining so often.

To make things even nuttier around here, we’ve had some interior finishing experts at our house to destroy and then rebuild our sunporch ceiling. So all the stuff from the sunporch had to be moved; the second floor is a maze of furniture. You might remember me talking about the sunporch ceiling, and all that mess before . . . it got a lot worse before it got better.




But I’ve been up to some fun things, too, since I’ve been back. I’ve even taken some pictures to share with y’all, but I just haven’t found the time to, you know, simply write about any of it.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with all my snapshots of Florida, but here are a few, so you can get an idea of what the vacation was all about. We stayed on Captiva Island. (No, there was no oil washing up yet when we were there, though all the folks there were getting ready for it.)




Yeah, it was an excellent trip. We had perfect weather, and we spent most of the time on the beach or in restaurants or museums or sight-seeing.




The last two days of the trip, we traveled east to visit the Seminole reservation and then to Everglades National Park.




Alligators, dolphins, manatees were seen. Sea turtles were seen, too, and one night, a sea turtle laid her eggs on the beach not far from where we were staying.




And I had forgotten how, even though you may not move from the same beach location over a period of several days, the ocean gives you new things every day. One day, it’s calm and warm; another, it’s cool and choppy. Or one day, the ocean’s full of weird little jellylike hydromedusae; the next, it’s throwing all kinds of seaweed up on the beach, and another day there’s a large amount of some particular kind of shell being washed up.




And I had forgotten how the ocean reaches out from its depths and hands its objects out onto the beach, and then a few hours later reaches along the slant of the beach and drags it all back.

If you live near a coast, you are truly lucky, and you should visit the beach as much as possible, I mean it. Even if it’s a cold, windy place with a lot of rocks instead of sugar-white sand. Just do it.




Anyway, it was a good vacation, and now I’m back, struggling to retain some of that relaxation, the joy of discovery, the broadened mind, the readjusted notion of what is “important.” Alas, it’s fading fast.




So much to do . . .