(very) brief 2011 recap.

2011 was a good year. My wife’s business really took off, I had my first professional fiction sale (“Ink and Blood” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies), did my first public reading (at Readercon). and scribbled a whole lot of words for a whole lot of stories and novels. I didn’t get the publishing contract I’ve been working toward, but that just means I haven’t submitted enough awesome stuff to enough publishers. I’ll aim to fix that in 2012.

All of you imaginary friends out in Intertubes land—may you have a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2012. Collectively speaking, you’re my virtual water cooler here at the Munchkin Wrangler offices, and hanging out with you helps me stay sane and feel connected. Writing is a lonely job, and stay-at-home parent writers are even more isolated than the average nutjob novelist. Thanks for amusing me, reading my stuff, and/or writing stuff I enjoy reading. See you crazy kids on the other side.

christmas 2011 after-action report.

We had a quiet and relaxing Christmas just like last year. With Robin’s family mostly in North Carolina and surrounding states, and my family in Germany, we don’t really have an opportunity to do the Big Family Gathering type Christmas too often. We got together with some local friends for lunch and a social afternoon on Friday, and then stayed home and did the Santa thing on Saturday.

Here’s a picture of the main loot recipients this year. They made out like bandits.

Time flies, doesn’t it? To me it seems like both of them were still in diapers just last week. One morning I’ll get up, make coffee, go to wake up the kids, and find that they’ve left for college.

The kids got the lion’s share of the presents, but Santa also dropped off a telescope and some stargazing books and charts as a family gift. Our friends also thoughtfully gifted us an annual 5-person membership to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord.

The menu for the Christmas weekend included the traditional family Christmas fare–lobsters–and such German staple items as paella and lobster bisque. The lord of the manor also consumed way too many German gingerbread cookies, and the lord & lady together pretty much drank all the eggnog. Also, we seem to be out of Bacardi now. In short, it was a typical all-American Christmas. I hope yours was as good as ours.

because christmas and cocktails both start with “c”.

A festive-looking and also tasty cocktail for the holidays is the Green Vesper. It’s a gin & vodka martini with absinthe instead of vermouth, and without the olive which really wouldn’t go with the licorice taste of the absinthe.

Three measures of gin, one measure of vodka, half a measure of absinthe. Shake in cocktail shaker until ice cold, strain into martini glass. Optional garnish is a peel of lime. Drink until jolliness and gaiety set in, which shouldn’t be long.

dear diary: today we killed a mailbox and had some chili.

We had friends over on Saturday. There was some truly excellent chili, some 15-year-old single malt Scotch, and some ballistic recreation with various devices.

One of those devices was my friend’s Desert Eagle in .50AE. We shot up a sheet metal mailbox, and I’m here to tell you that if you ever get charged by a roving pack of feral mailboxes, the .50 Desert Eagle will do the job just fine. The gun is completely impractical for defense, too expensive to plink with on a regular basis, and good for nothing but handgun hunting and Having A Blast At The Range. (Of course, “because I want one” is a totally legitimate reason for buying one, and all the justification a free adult needs for the purchase of anything.)

At one point, I decided to try it one-handed:

Disclaimer: The Scotch was consumed after the handling of firearms, hearing and eye protection was used at all times, the backstop was completely safe, and the mailbox had it coming. (Unless you’re mikeb3000000n+1, in which case the targets were defenseless minority baby seals held up by frightened first-graders, hearing protection is for Commies and queers, we were completely drunk and wearing Nazi uniforms, and the backstop was a kindergarten playground at recess time.)

Oh yeah, we also had a bonfire with a ten-foot brush pile I had in the backyard waiting for the first snow to cover the ground. Propane torches are big, dirty fun for getting a very hot fire going very quickly.

Propane torches, good food, great company, fine Scotch, and powerful firearms. What better way to spend an afternoon?

the state of the typewriter fleet.

The first step in denying addiction is to proclaim that you don’t have a problem.

I pared the collection down from eleven typewriters in varying conditions to five typewriters in perfect working order. All of them have been serviced and overhauled. The oldest one is 76 years old, the youngest 45 (and at that still older than its current owner.)

Clockwise from top left:

• Olympia SM9, 1966. Utterly reliable machine; the Mercedes-Benz of typewriters. If I had to bang out a 100,000-word novel using only a manual, that’s the machine I’d pick for the task.
• Royal KHM, 1935. The platen is hard as a rock, but still grabs paper, and the KHM is still mechanically sound. The biggest and heaviest of my manuals, and the most solid-feeling one of the bunch. This was an old shop find, and a birthday present from my wife for my 37th birthday.
• Royal DeLuxe Portable, 1935. The portable brother to the KHM. I got this one from the estate of a friend who passed away a few years ago, so this one’s more heirloom than workhorse. I still had it serviced and restored to full working condition. This one was used by my friend’s mother when he was young, back in the 1930s, and by my friend when he was in seminary school and college in the 1950s.
• Olympia SF, 1963. The business laptop of its day. Doesn’t give up much to its bigger brother, the SM9. One of the best portables ever made, this SF has a new platen and types like a dream.
• Olivetti Lettera 22, 1960. This was a gift from a reader. I had been pining for a Lettera 32 for a while, and the Lettera 22 isn’t very different at all. This Lettera 22 has an unusual “universal international” keyboard that lets you type the special characters in quite a few languages.

Since reducing the fleet to these five, I’ve stopped actively looking around for new used typewriters. But you never know what still lurks in the dark and dusty corners of thrift stores and antique dealerships. I won’t take on any more fixer-uppers (restoration of these babies is an expensive endeavor), but I won’t say that I wouldn’t rescue some pristine Smith-Corona Skyriter or Hermes Baby sitting on a shelf somewhere.

on libertarianism and house fires.

The South Fulton Fire Department in Obion County, TN is making the news again because yet another non-subscriber in the county had their place burn down with the Fire Department standing by and not putting out the fire.

A lot of people in my Twitter stream–mostly my liberal-leaning writer friends–are linking to that article with comments like “The Libertarian dream”. I know that these folks are smart people, and seeing them boil the issue down to its emotional basis like that ticks me off a little.

Let’s break it down for a moment. There’s a town–South Fulton–with a fire department that is financed by the taxes of the townsfolk. The fire department provides coverage for the people of the town (not “for free”, as the article says, but paid for by their taxes). If you live outside of the town limits, the South Fulton FD does not provide coverage unless you pay an annual fee of $75, to cover the costs of out-of-area service. Gas is expensive, firemen want to get paid, someone needs to keep the lights on in the fire station, and all that. Fair enough, right? The FD is, after all, a resource of the town of South Fulton, paid for by its residents, and can’t be expected to provide services free of charge to people who don’t pay to support the fire department.

The two incidents so far where county residents had their houses burn down without help from the fire department–those were people hedging their bets. They chose to not pay the $75 for annual coverage for whatever reason, and they lost the wager. (Some people will say that these people probably couldn’t afford the coverage, but if you own a house, you can afford $75 a year for what is essentially insurance. I bet I could sift through the ruins of the latest burned-0ut house and find a fair number of items that are both a.) non-essential, and b.) worth more than $75.)

Now, why exactly is that such a horrible thing? What case could you possibly make for the Fire Department to put out the fires for people who chose not to pay the fee that wouldn’t result in a collapse of the system? If they had put the fire out anyway, few county residents would have paid the fee next year, knowing that when push comes to shove, the FD will turn on the hoses and go to work for free anyway. Then the only alternatives for the town of South Fulton are to either subsidize the fire service for the entire county, or cancel the scheme altogether and keep their services strictly for the taxpayers of South Fulton. In an ideal world, city and county could both afford all the fire trucks and manpower they need to service everyone. As things stand, the resources are limited, and they’ve made a reasonable compromise–the current “pay to spray” option. Which is the better alternative for the county folk–optional fire service at $75 a year, or no fire service at all for free?

It’s really easy to look at this purely from the emotional angle and say stuff like “Libertarian dream” with a sarcastic inflection. Yes, it’s bad that those people lost their house, but they rolled their dice and took their chances. Shield everyone from the consequences of bad decisions–and make no mistake, forgoing fire coverage over the price of a tank of gas is a monumentally bad one–and you take away the incentives to make good decisions. If you roll your eyes at anyone in that scenario for being “Libertarian”, it should be the homeowners, who acted in the most libertarian way of all–they were presented with a voluntary contract option, they chose to keep their money and reject the contract, and they got to live with the consequences of their decision, without the community having to shoulder the financial burden of their selfishness.

psst! wanna buy a metal grate?

When your vocational activities include driving around in a box van and stealing city storm grates to sell for scrap metal, it’s probably safe to say that your educational choices in life were somewhat less than optimal. But they’re lucky to have plied their trade in Massachusetts, where the chance of them doing any prison time is slim.

Here’s a quick political quiz: You read a story about some scruffy small-caliber criminals stealing public storm grates for scrap.

If you talk about punishment and complain about the lenient criminal justice system, you’re a Conservative.

If you talk about bad vocational opportunities and rehabilitation, you’re a Liberal.

If you talk about the evils of capitalism that force people to steal metal for scrap, you’re a Socialist.

If you say “PUBLIC storm grates?”, you’re a Libertarian.

viking neck knife.

Because the sheath covers more than half the handle and locks the knife via simple friction, the little Mora makes a dandy neck knife. The blade is skinny and lacks a handguard, and the overall profile of the knife is very slim, so despite its 4” blade, the Mora tucks away under most any cover garment.

A neck knife makes a lot of sense in cold climates, where it’s easier to reach down your cover garment than to dig through multiple layers of clothing to get to your belt knife. It’s also fully ambidextrous—you can reach the knife equally well with either hand. Lastly, it’s fast to deploy even with gloves—you don’t need to undo snaps or work a mechanism to get the blade ready for use.

Take a $15 Mora, some Gorilla tape, and a length of paracord with a knot on either end, and you have an inexpensive, tough, versatile, sharp and easy to maintain fixed blade utility knife that’s a breeze to carry.

go ahead, write on the wall.

The drywall on the side of the chimney/kitchen island was getting a little dingy, so I repainted it. Instead of using boring Standard Flat White, however, I used chalkboard paint. A few coats of that stuff, and the kids have a 4×3 blackboard and a sanctioned scribbling and doodling wall for their art and schoolwork.

totally ergo.

My one problem with the standing desk was the height of the keyboard. If I put a keyboard on the lower part of the desk, it’s too low for comfort, because the desk surface is about three inches below my elbow, and I have to bend my wrists up to type. Placing the keyboard on the higher part of the desk where the monitor sits is better for the wrists, but I have nothing to rest my hands on as I type. I tried putting a riser under my regular keyboard, but the angle was still all wrong.

Then I saw this thing at BestBuy and took it for a little test drive. It’s a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Say what you want about Microsoft, but on occasion they come up with some decent hardware. (Their Optical Trackball, now discontinued, was the best trackball on the market, and used models fetch crazy-high prices on fleaBay whenever they surface.)

At first I hated it. Not the feel, mind you—this is one comfortable keyboard. It has a padded faux leather palmrest, and the size and shape are just right. What I couldn’t get used to at first was the split design. I’m not a touch-typist, and the split layouts are pretty awkward when your fingers routinely cross the center line of the keyboard. But I loved the feel, and Newegg had them on sale for $24.99 with free shipping, so I decided to give one fair shakes for a few days. I put a standard keyboard in front of the monitor as frustration insurance, and gave my hands and fingers some time to readjust to the new keyboard.

On Day Two, I put the other keyboard back in the parts bin, because I was constantly reaching for the split type instead.

The split design works very well (it keeps your hands at their natural alignment angle instead of forcing them to bend to conform to a straight line board), but the killer feature for me is the negative tilt. It comes with a detachable riser piece at the front of the keyboard that tilts the whole affair downward at a reverse slope angle:

That’s the ideal angle for this particular keyboard shelf on this desk for someone my height.

It’s not perfect—I prefer mechanical keyswitches, and I could do without all the extra buttons at the top that make an already large keyboard about the size of a park bench, but the damn thing is so comfy and works so well that I can forgive its shortcomings. Now I can run around in Skyrim dominate noobs in BF3 compose epic prose in total wrist-and-hand comfort.