Harrumph!

I’m at nature a gentle sort, so much so that in the frenzy of the Vietnam-war draft, my beloved grandfather unbidden handed me a conscientious-objector reference letter. While he had sneaked away from the farm to enlist in the WWI American Expeditionary Forces to fight the Hun, he knew that I would never be one to kill another person.

Yet at a much lower level, he and I had teamed for years to slay insect pests. He had long farmed “patches” as he called them. These one-acre farms, one or two every summer were wide, deep expanses of vegetables and fruits, 150 running feet each. He’d plant, and from my elementary school time, I’d weed, water, train to trellis, cull, harvest, and more. Inherent in this was the elimination of bugs.

Many years later in my master-gardener course, I learned nifty terms such as integrated pest management. I already knew that part of the curriculum.

Early on, he used nasty chemicals, like DDT. He’d strap big spraying drums to his shoulder and squirt the toxins. Yet, also early on he somehow ran across the Rodale pub, Organic Gardening and quickly converted. We were out there with the pyrethrum (fundamentally a natural, harmless-to-humans insecticide made from marigolds) and with our eyes and hands. Destructive bugs did not like and died in innocuous baths of soapy water, beer, or water that had soaked the juice from a nickel cigar. I’d knock the hornworms, Japanese beetles, potato beetles and their ilk into my coffee cans of to-them toxins. While time-consuming, it killed them, did not hurt me, and did not poison the veggies and fruits.

With that background, I was a bit amused when my wife called to look at this thing on the back deck plants. Asked, she agreed it might be a bug but she was not sure.

What we had, and what had been ruining my wee, grown-from-seed tomato fruits was a tomato hornworm. What it had was parasites. The white thingummies festooned on its back were the growing offspring of a parasitic moth. It was infested and near death with wasp babies eating it from the inside.

There’s a conflict for the gentle guy.

This dreadful caterpillar has been destroying my tomatoes, fruit and plant. These wasps were gnawing at it en masse. Shortly the hornworm will die, the wasps will grow and fly off to create more parasites.

Who should feel sorry for whom?

Truth be told, as a gardener from childhood and by avocation and certification, I have little use for insects that live to eat my crops. Yet a small part of me empathizes with the reality of being eaten alive from the inside by nasties.

I think we could well do without the hornworm. Some versions of it munch on tobacco, which distresses me far less. I don’t have tobacco salads and sandwiches. I also think we could do well without mosquitoes, even though many bats and birds consume them as main parts of their diets.

My wife is very unhappy at the sight and thought of of the besieged caterpillar. I had no problem clipping the leaf and tossing the mess aside. I know that the wasps will finish their business and thrive. I might even hum The Circle of Life.

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Spurred by Facebook and Twitter truths, several hundred of us queued for Morticia this morning at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo. We came prepared for the sprawling visual glory of the titan arum, a.k.a. corpse flower, and a bit trepid over a promise of dreadful stench in the temporary greenhouse kept at 80-something humidity and temperature.

Visually, she as the staff said, did not disappoint. As for bad smells, you’d do worse with durian fruit or happening across a decomposing mammal in the woods or maybe that camp outhouse. I eavesdropped to hear people apologizing to each other for their “failure” to get disgusting enough smells after all the anticipation and trepidation.

The zoo has a nice profile of botany of Morticia, here. Plus there’s info on the donor, who presented this one and four others to the facility.

They also realized what a winner they had here. Two of these monsters have bloomed in the same year. Fester, also named for a creepy  Addams Family character, recently finished its cycle. As these bloom on their own mysterious schedules only for about two days every five to 15 years, this mini-run was a delight to plant freaks.

The zoo intends to keep all five in a more permanent greenhouse elsewhere on the grounds after Morticia fades. Others in the quintet are in various stages of development. The staff told me they had no idea when the other three might bloom…a year, five, ten?

This time, the zoo really accommodated us curious types. They had pre- and post-zoo hours just for gawking and sniffing, and set up the greenhouse right inside one of the gates. They also did not charge admission for those special times (8 to 9:30 AM and 6 to 8 PM). Zoo members and paying visitors who came at regular hours could also visit the flowers.

In addition to self-appointed alerters, the zoo updated developments and included photos of each change over the past week of pre-blooming. Their FB page had it all and their Twitter handle carried abbreviated versions. Coupled with not charging for a peek, they clearly wanted to plug people into the zoo. Smart marketing, says I.

When I arrived this morning a little before 8, I sank like a butterfly in the rain. The cars in front of me on Blue Hill Avenue were turning maybe a third or more of them into the park. The two semi-circles of parking spaces by the zebra entrance were jammed and backed up. So was the huge lot by the golf course. Cars were parked all along the drive a quarter of a mile down. The auxiliary lot doesn’t open until 9 either. I went ahead and parked in the little lot by the other entrance and across from the golf course, a  lot I generally use in winter when I cross-country ski there.

Ah, but good news, as I returned to the zoo, I heard the loud speakers at the golf course. There was some sort of links tournament there. So not the entire world just had to see Morticia. In fact, as I entered, I estimated I was 150 or so people back in line. A similar number came behind me in the next 20 minutes. If this was Disney World, that line would be nothing for any attraction worth the trouble.

Pix notes: Click on an image for a closer view. These are Creative Commons. You’re welcome to use and abuse them. Just give Mike Ball credit the first go.

As it turns out, these flowers blow it all in preparation and blooming. Once they open up, they let off their smells to attract pollinating bugs and such. They they quickly fold up show. Fester was nearby and showed what happens as the exterior parts fold down back onto the corm. It looks very woody and extremely dormant.

They let us in double groups of 10, so 20 sweating camera bugs at a time would be around the two corpse plants, with the next batch of 10 replenishing as folk exited.  Certainly, they did not want to spend a lot of time inside. The air was hot and wet. You could pretty well see and photograph and smell from various sides in five or 10 minutes at most. By then, your camera lens was likely to fog and your shirt was wet from your own dew.

Yet, I think we were largely disappointed at not being disgusted by the aroma. That may well have been oversold. Perhaps Fester was more fetid?

On the other hand, Morticia was one big honking flower. She was nearly five feet tall at at least four feet across. The colors of the open blossom were splendidly rich and a bit lewd, looking very vulvar both in folds and hues. The outer green cup of the flower was gloriously fluted too. As fond and proud as I was of my giant parrot tulips, I bow before Morticia.

I can’t say I’ll keep close tabs for the next five to 15 years. I have seen and smelled a corpse flower in bloom. On the other hand, if I’m near one at the right time, I’ll make the effort. Who knows what grand colors…and repulsive smells….that one will produce.

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Ah, it’s the annual series of Boston neighborhood coffees. Mayor Tom Menino truly loves these. He knows many in the crowds by both name and face. He gets to hand out pots of flowers to all comers. Dunkin’ provides coffee and Munchkins too.

Each neighborhood has a session in a park. You get the glad hand, a big smile, and this year a pot of salvia from da Mare. Oh, there are handouts about summer activities, his health challenge and such as well. Plus, there’s a chance to ask about things you care about, as I did.

Today’s in his Hyde Park was maybe cozier than some. It’s his Readville area and he knows even more locals than in some spots, calling out many by name even before he gets to the plant-distribution table.

Boston Parks and Rec. Commissioner Antonia Pollack joined him in handing out the pots from the city greenhouses. Last year, they were marigolds or salvia. I used the former to help guard my tomatoes from bugs, but the uxorial unit loves red salvia, so it’s still a win.

There were a bunch of uniformed cops and a detective or two, along with District City Councilor Rob Consalvo. It’s as jolly as any government function in town at 9 AM.

As a cyclist, I’m always asking him about his own biking. He previously told me how much he loved his newish recumbent bike. Then he broke some bones and for the three months as been in a protective boot and limping about.

Today he said he hoped to get it off next week. Then he doesn’t know when they’ll certifie the bones have healed enough for him to saddle up again. I encouraged him with a personal vignette about how I finally got a checkup after my broken leg with a surgeon who biked, and who told me, sure, it may hurt a little, but cycling will only increase the blood circulation and speed the healing. He seemed to like the sound of my version.

He did have to sit several times, apparently to rest the left foot and ankle. He also told staff that “These things are too long,” which I took to refer to how much time he spent on his sore limb.

He endured a different kind of pain, in Munchkin form. There were boxes of them about, including on the plant table. He did not eat a one. However, he was quick to offer the box to the little kids who came with parents or daycare providers. He’d urge them to take another and seemed to enjoy their smiles as much as those of the flower-taking crowd. (By far, the 100-plus crowd were largely grey. They too liked both the Munchkins and the fresh-fruit salad.)

Pollak said Menino was dieting and was enjoying the Munchkins vicariously. Likewise Consalvo had a diet soda in hand and avoided the sugar. They both seem to have taken the Mayor’s challenge seriously to get moving and lose a million collective Boston pounds.

For my concerns, Pollak and I chatted up the replacement process for Nicole Freedman, the bike tzarina. The likely replacement, Kris Carter, still has to go through the open-hiring process, but has a leg or more up. He’s been working on bike programs. Moreover, we all agree that Freedman made amazing process as well as laying out detailed plans. The new person doesn’t have to pioneer, just do the hard work of implementation including finding adequate funding.

Cross-post: This originally appeared at Marry in Massachusetts.

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I’m not huge on magical numbers, good or bad. There are primes I simply like the look of, like 17, but I don’t ascribe power to any set of integers.

That written, a few coincidences have been obvious in my family. There’s the space of 24 for one. My mother’s father was 24 when she was born, as she was 24 when I was born. That certainly came to mind when a women I was living with became pregnant when I was 23. Had she not had an abortion, over my objection, I would have been a dad at 24. I did not even think keeping the series running. Yet in retrospect, I was not mature enough to be a dad then, and maybe barely when my first son was born when I was just short of 31.

Now 54 wasn’t all that remarkable for me, but for both Granddad and Mother, it was intense…24 years apart.

Granddad found agony, tedium and enlightenment. Mother was physically, financially, emotionally and even geographically upended, with some permanent negative effects. For them, 54 was a very big deal.

Backyard satori

At 54, Granddad had forced prolonged meditation. He found enlightenment in the backyard on South Marsham Street in Romney, WV.

He was in a cast from one heel to his waist. Though a railroad yard foreman, he was impatient when his crew could not uncouple a pair of recalcitrant train cars. In the process he fell between them and found his leg and pelvis crunched, broken in three or four places (I forget the detail).

While healing and immobilized, he would hobble on crutches to the yard and read under the gigantic maple tree. He went through the perhaps 100 or more books in the house, all of the Reader’s Digest copies they’d kept for decades, and some public-library books that his wife brought home. He planned his vegetable and flower gardens and enjoyed the small plots in the back. Then he thought.

Years later, I asked him about his calmness confronted with difficult people (often my grandmother, his wife).  As it turns out, he was dying when I brought that up when he was in the VA hospital for a double hernia operation. I had no inkling that the post-operative effects included some floating blood clots that did him in shortly after.

For many reasons, I’m glad we had the conversation. He first smiled the gentle, beatific grin I associated with him — all kindness and humility. He said that his calmness was relatively recent. It turns out that it happened when he was 54 and confined to the yard. After exhausting the reading material and his desire to divert himself through print, he mused. He would think and feel with open or closed eyes. He said those years later that it just came to him one day, both intellectually and emotionally. Somethings mattered and other things did not. If his wife or someone on his crew or another in a story said or did something nasty, it did not affect him, not in anger or spite or sorrow or any other negative way. He said it really wasn’t a mental decision so much as an awareness. Since that moment, he lived that.

So there was my 70-something Granddad saying (in my words) that he had an enlightenment at 54.

For me, struggling with my own adulthood and not so calm in the presence and actions and words of difficult people, I had a sense of relief as I digested this lawn magic. I had long emulated and admired him, but did not see a path to his equanimity. That was particularly important as he played the father role for me. My parents had divorced and my father and his almost immediate second wife went off to Germany, had a couple of sons, skipped on required support payments (the Army would not enforce the court ruling) and did not contact me for 20 years.

So Granddad was it and he did a fine job…other than being an impossible role model. After our conversation about the backyard awareness, I came to see that he was not only 48 years more mature but that he had also arrived at a place most of us never do. So, I could relax a bit and stumble (with some of my own meditation) along finding my own manhood, husband role, fatherhood and work interactions. Whew.

Far too much to handle

Alas though, my mother Wanda had a 54 harder than broken bones. Among her year were:

• She and a lover were very happy with each other in every sense. Then his ex-wife started a new court action, wanting double alimony and child support. He flipped and fled to someplace like Singapore to wash that wife out of his hair. Wanda was suddenly solo, from joy to loneliness.
• Her pharmaceutical employer sold itself to pharma giant Schering-Plough, which in effect said, “Love your gynecological products, but we have a sales force.”  They gave each rep a bag of money and a bum’s rush. She found herself unemployed, with six months to invest that money or lose much of it to taxes, and in effect forced to activate her eventual plan to move to Santa Fe to retire with her sister (head nurse at the Indian hospital) over a decade before she wanted to do so.
• She found a lump in a breast, which turned out to be malignant and affecting lymph nodes as well. She was likely to die shortly.
• She flew to Santa Fe, where a trusted surgeon friend of her sister Peg did a radical mastectomy/lymphectomy. Then she returned home with half a concave chest and a course of toxic chemo and radiation in the works. She was supposed to die within five years, in the spin-the-wheel medical odds game.
• As medical wisdom (oxymoron) had it at the time, cancer for a middle-aged woman meant stopping all hormones immediately. She had experienced a strong menopause, and as a result other medical wisdom had her taking lots of hormones. The sudden halt brought a personality change, a negative one, in which my ever objective and patient mom became, to hear my chums and coworkers tell it, just like their moms — short-tempered, sharp-tongued, fault-finding, and even politically conservative.
• She (rather we, as my 7-month pregnant wife and I loaded up her physical world in Pittsburgh into a U-Haul truck and led her in her car to Santa Fe, to the house she bought with the money for the two of them) went in great distress to a future seemingly out of her control.
• As she settled in, my sister and her daughter figured this was a great time to leave her bad marriage. She showed up with two young kids. And baby makes five.

Granddad had a much better 54 than Mother did.

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Up front, I’ll never have the acreage and variety of vegetables my grandfather grew (with me as his willing peon), but even in my tiny scale, I am aware of the sensual grandeur of fresh produce. The scent and sneaked taste of our tomatoes are a full flavored antidote to the permanent, rot-before-ripen tomato-like-objects in the groceries.

Sure, there are splendors as grander or grander — the pacific joy of your own baby collapsed in sleep on your chest immediately comes to memory. Yet right up there are the many senses delighted by truly ripe garden goodies gathered moments before preparing and consuming.

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Granddad had a disgusting straw hat, which he usually hung from a 16-penny nail inside his garden shed. It was typical of a thing that would disgust many women, including his wife, my grandmother. With a dark brown ribbon of stain from his perspiration and a similar circle on the crown, it was a how-can-you-wear-that object to some.

Of course, to complete the stereotype, many women are astonished when men continue to wear perfectly good underpants, except for those several growning holes. Even if no body parts fall out, the briefs are fine for the man, but not for the woman who sees them.

Thus, his straw hat was likewise fully functional to keep his bald head from burning and his brain from sunstroke. He had snuck away at 14 to join the AEF illegally fighting the Hun. He returned lesser in having gotten trench mouth causing him to lose his teeth, and in becoming pretty damned bald in his late teens. He somehow attributed losing his hair to the war, although looking at his sons and grandsons, genes seem to be the key players here.

Regardless, he needed a hat. He’d been wearing one in his gardening for many decades before I worked with him 4, 6 or 8 hours on summer days. His patches as he called them were one or two acre-sized farms, requiring a lot of time in a lot of sun.

His hat started out as an off-white/natural sub-fine straw piece, before its degradation. He carried handkerchiefs and wiped his brow, face and whole head, but the hat showed the effects of prolonged heat.

In fairness, his garden hat was not the floppy, hillbilly style of the patriarch Amos in a TV show of the era, The Real McCoys. An Amos capture is to the left.  On the other hand, it was also not the finely woven Panama of the plantation owner or dandy.

While not a big clothing and furnishings customer, I thought of Granddad’s hat recently. Not only did I track down powerful glasses, but I bought a new straw.

Pretty bald myself, I have hats. I do wear baseball caps, particularly if the sedan’s roof is open. Yet, I’m no more a baseball cap guy than I am a short-sleeve button shirt one.

My other hats are largely felt, beaver and otherwise, and brown. I’d had a natural straw, but did not keep it into its ugly age. Instead, we’d been seeing the splash about the JP hat store, Salmagundi. My wife and I visited and each got a straw hat, she a cloche and I the Stetson mixed-brown Chester.

I walked in fully expecting to replicate my idea of straw hats. I’m not a boater hat guy either. I do tend to think in natural Panama fedora styles. However, the enthusiastic Salmagundi help were all over me.

I remember my childhood growing up with a mother and sister, and often being sure to bring something to read while I sat in the husband chair at a clothing or shoe shop. They’d try on this, that, and the other. I would tend to go into either type of store when I really needed something and leave quickly with exactly what I entered to buy.

Instead this weekend, it must have been a dozen hats of various shades of white/tan/brown, different weaves and densities, and several styles. Much to my surprise, I had to agree with my wife and the main fitter that the Chester was the best of the bunch for me.

It’s likely to be quite awhile before I buy another straw hat. I did leave the store thinking I might have to indulge my ideal of a natural-color Panama. I suppose the occasional attention to fashion won’t turn me into a fop. On the other hand, there are those yellow glasses, which each of the clerks in the hat store praised, as have friends, waitrons and even folk on the street.

Is this fashion stuff addictive?

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Scattering rose petals around the base of the storm abused dogwood in the front yard will surely do nothing for the tree’s health. Yet, we are in low-level mourning.

On the first heavy snow in our series of blizzards and nor’easters, this one lost all substantial limbs on one side overnight. By the time I went out to look for newspapers never delivered due to the weather, and to shake the icy and snow off, two limbs were separated and a third twisted like a kid does to a Popsicle stick.

In a silly flair, we act a little like Andy Goldsworthy. Inspired by his documentary Rivers and Tides, certainly like thousands of others, we scatter flowers, stack rocks and otherwise make small naturalistic and temporary art. In this case, it is one way of feeling a little better about the damaged dogwood.

	The sad front dogwood half destroyed overnight in the first heavy snow.
After two limbs cut, it still needs the third on the same side removed. That one is open and twisted.
	In a nod to Andy Goldsworthy, yellow rose petals offer scant solice.

Oddly, the much older, taller dogwood in the back had the same weight but lost no limbs. They have the same soil acidity and other conditions as well as experienced the same storms. The limbs on the larger one are in general bout the same diameter as well. We assume that the younger, smaller one is not as healthy and may benefit from weep-line fertilizer.

As I come to terms with the negatively transformed tree, I do switch to the pruning I learned in my master-gardener classes. Unfortunately, there is no alternative in an effort to keep the tree than removing nearly all limbs on its south side.

There will be something reminiscent of the thousands year old bristle pines or a bonsai that came in the classic way from a crypt roof.

The trees tortured by winds (as here on moors by the English Channel) have their own ghastly elegance. I have scant hopes that this will display as well.

I confess that it is animistic of me, feeling for an injured tree. Many other gardeners I have known are eager to rip out the injured, for the opportunity to bring in a newer, prettier specimen. That seems like someone trading in spouses to me.

We’ll give our brown and green-to-be flowering friend what attention we can. Perhaps it will have the beauty of asymmetry.

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My mom made even chores fun or at least tolerable. That included grocery shopping.

My sister and I played along, which was to everyone’s benefit. After all, she was raising us solo, with her deadbeat ex-husband skipping out on child support. We never felt deprived and she never resorted to self-pity or male bashing. She was busy, with her work and kids.

I got into the details of shopping. I was a cook from elementary school. We spent summers and holidays with her parents, including my working many long days with my grandfather in his patches, as he called his acre-sized gardens. I knew fresh foods, beetles and worms, how to plant, weed, pick and prepare veggies within a few minutes of harvest.

During the school year, we shopped as a trio. That became regular when I was in third grade in Danville Virginia. I can still picture the wonderful view of the Cat & Fiddle grocery as we turned left off Main Street. It was long before true supermarkets and if it was still around it might seem tiny and shabby, but oh, the sign.

Jutting out above the street was a splendid and huge neon sign. A standing cat worked the bow on his fiddle. No matter which approach you took, you had no doubt where the store was or what it was called.

To the heading here, back then it was about $5 a bag of groceries on average. I was fastidious even then and paid attention to such things, as well as the sizes and costs of what went into the cart. As I do today, she shopped with the newspaper ads. If ham was on sale at 29¢ a pound, ham it was that week. My mother was big on vegetables and fruits, but we tended to get what was on sale. I never was deprived and we always had good stuff in the fridge, on the counter and in the pantry.

Oddly enough, while she was young during the Great Depression, she did not come by her conservation and frugality as an emotional response to it. Granddad was both wise and lucky. He got and maintained a job on the B&O Railroad for his whole career, including the Depression years. He ran a tailor shop and dry cleaners next to the house and often made clothes for his wife and three kids. He sometimes sold cars on weekends (Chevy, although he didn’t care much for them and bought Ford himself). Then there were the gardens. My grandmother pressed the kids into service at the end of the summer in the great canning wars. Sometimes, Granddad would show up with so many bushels of green beans, tomatoes, limas or this and that, the neighbors would join in. For their work, they hauled away and preserved their own shares. Many afternoons under the huge maple in the backyard, we got sore thumbs snapping beans and hulling peas, while a half dozen or more old women laughed and gossiped.

Some prices stick in mind. A box of toothpicks normally was 11¢ but might be 7¢ on sale. A can of tuna was 29¢ or on sale 19¢. Chuck roast was then much cheaper in proportion to other muscle meats, at 49¢ a pound and less on sale. This was in the late 1950s.

Figuring by today’s standards, our groceries can still be reasonable, for those who shop carefully. Tuna today hovers around $1 a can. Given inflation, it is less expensive than we paid for it. Maybe there was a cover charge (bag charge?) for the neon cat.

I tend to average $10 to $11 a bag of groceries now. The bags are a bit smaller than those of yesteryear, and I do shop judiciously. I may go to three stores on the way to get the best deals.

Along the way with my mother, I learned to work the coupons as well as ads. Before requirements for labeling unit prices (like a pound of coffee or ounce of dish detergent), I calculated the best deal by size. Even then, the king-size cereal or such might cost more per unit than a smaller one. I loved that stuff and delighted locating the best deal between brands and by size. That may be a mild sickness, but I pretend it helped make me a good project manager.

My late mother-in-law, in contrast, was one of many who clearly didn’t grow up that way. She found such grocery-shelf comparisons confusing, even though she worked in a bank and dealt with numbers all day long. She had long ago given up on coupons, finding them far too much work to locate the precise item in brand and size to qualify. She seemed astonished that I not only used coupons, but reveled in saving $20 or more a week on things we’d buy regardless.

The few times I have seen parts of The Price is Right, I figured I could have aced the grocery items they use. I pay attention and know for my area what milk, laundry soap and such cost.

Now that I do the cooking nearly all the time, the other benefit of grocery shopping, and in my case hitting the Haymarket every week, is planning the week’s menu by what’s fresh, what catches my nose and eye, and what’s reasonably priced. By the time I head home, I have a bunch of meals in the works. I also know what’ll be in the fridge and pantry for winging it then or in a month.

Honestly, I enjoy grocery shopping.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Danville, shopping, grocery, Virginia

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Our visiting artist, Savannah, a.k.a. Marion Etheredge, figuratively slapped me upside my head quite a few times this weekend. It was about creating videos, newish to me and new to her.

Like speaking another language while in a foreign town, being made to see through the eyes and in the brain of a real artist is broadening. I flashed on the British cryptic puzzles of which I am so fond and such a habitué. My wife claims they are impossibly illogical, while I contend that one must first shift mental gears to be open to the ambiguity of the clues.

Savannah has recently begun expanding from the still camera in her smart phone to its video. If you don’t make video, that may seem trivial, but I’ve been attending Boston Media Makers for quite awhile and learned that many of the hotshot video makers and vbloggers started with the low-level functionality in inexpensive digital cameras and phones. Longest journeys and first steps, and like that.

She’s been visiting from South Carolina. That included a Sunday session of BMM. She also was deeply curious about the equipment and hardware I’ve been using. She knows that I am doing a series of short videos for a food website that’s about to go live.

So, she sat with me while I combined a group of clips on how to dry fresh herbs from my garden. She wanted to know how I planned it and particularly how I edited the mess into a 3 or so minute clip for the web.

She’s a Mac sort and as it turns out, I recently discovered the marvelous free online video editing site JayCut. That was the right thing to show her, even though I am new to it. JayCut is much more similar to the Apple built-in video software iMovie than the clunkier Microsoft variation MovieMaker.

Not the least advantage in JayCut is conversion from QuickTime. My video camera saves in QT and MovieMaker doesn’t do Apple. I’ve been having to use QT Pro or other conversion utilities before playing with clips in MovieMaker. Then even with my high-powered desktop, MovieMaker grunts and grinds to save edited files. JayCut does its work on its own servers, faster and without complaining about QT files.

On the downside, JayCut is very Apple-like in doing a terrible job in explaining itself. It arrogantly assumes that its icons are so intuitive and simple that it doesn’t need to explain anything. For a couple of examples, consider the cutting process, involving the scissors icon. In many audio and other editing programs, deleting a segment means clicking something like this, dragging it to the end of the section to delete, releasing the mouse button and hitting a delete key. Through trial and several errors, we discovered that this tool in this package takes clicking the scissors, picking a starting point, releasing the button, clicking the icon again, clicking an end point and releasing the button to create a standalone segment. Then clicking the arrow icon and dragging the segment to the upper bar deletes it.

Next to close up the generated space in the file, you can mouse over the arrow embedded at a segment beginning. Popup text tells you go grab the arrow and change the beginning of the segment. In JayCut reality, if you want to close the gap, you need to select the arrow icon above, move the cursor to the middle of the segment and drag and drop it from there. Moving the beginning arrow invariably goofs up the segment, possibly re-inserting deleted material.

The sparse help function shows next to nothing and illustrated neither of these. Having worked in software companies for many years, I’m sure the attitude of developers there is that if customers are too stupid to figure these out, they have no reason to use the program and service. In this case, I did figure the quirks out, and of course, with the free service, I lost no money, just some time and patience. In my Windows world as well, the speed benefits of JayCut, plus the ability to save the result in many different formats made it well worth my while to solve these little puzzles.

So to the artist, she thinks differently about video, like, well, a painter and sculptor. I come in as a journalist, general writer, and technical communicator.

The biggest difference was that aural and visual details were huge to her. To me, content is king, queen and court.

My inclination has gotten lots of reinforcement from the many BMM meetings I’ve attended. I strongly recommend them to anyone in new media. Attendants love nothing more than helping others solve or even better avoid problems with hardware, software, techniques and more.

I came in very humble with this group of experienced film and video heads. Starting with founder Steve Garfield, they really know their stuff. As a blogger and podcaster, and not a video person, I was and remain awed by their experience and expertise. I gleaned tips on the right camera to begin with (Kodak Zi8 in my case), and such obvious to them but new to me basics as you need to grab the viewer in the first 15 seconds of a clip and you damned well better have great stuff if you intend to go more than two and one-half minutes.

Wowsers to that, but then it is pretty similar to what I learned in journalism school and practiced for years in newspapers and magazines. There, the short lead paragraph had to be compelling enough or the readers would be on the next article. Likewise,  you had better assume that nearly no one would read the whole piece — hence the inverted pyramid style of writing with the best stuff up front.

Chair to chair, Savannah’s concerns and style were markedly different from mine. For one example, she was appalled to hear the rustle of my feet on dry leaves as I moved for two or so seconds to the perennial herb bed. Likewise, she thought I should enlist my wife or someone else to hold and direct the camera, which I had on a tripod, so that my hands tying the herb stems would be the absolute center of the screen instead of the lower area.

Editing the clips with her, I felt the values were solid and those details OK improvements but nonessential. The audio and visual were clear and understandable. The procedure was accurate. The sound was at a good level. Someone seeing and hearing this little clip would know what to do and how. Content was solid.

I suspect she would be much happier with the output if the production values and appearance were prettier and artsy perfect, even if the message and steps were not quite accurate or were hard to follow. Yet, she is a remarkable artist with a keen eye. I can keep her attitude handy for future shoots. In fact, my wife has agreed to be pressed into service making sure the focal point of a clip appears central in the frame.

In the end of our session, I had debugged the editing steps and she left with confidence that she could follow my procedure from rough storyboarding through shooting a series of clips in the right order to stripping out the unnecessary and distracting (like popping into the scene).

We are crafts folk each in our own way, but she and I learned from the process. That was a fine and useful way to pass a couple of hours. The artist and the geek rubbed elbows and each come away better for it.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, video, Boston Media Makers, JayCut, iMovie, MovieMaker, artist, Savannah, editing

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Small things as place holders and then worse than useless mementos of the beloved dead require decisions. I finally have come to terms with the last of my mother’s Scottish shortbread.

In the new-to-us house as well as the previous one, small sets of artifacts were a comforting hidden altar. I buried my grandfather in the backyard gardens. That is, a set of a photo and trinkets related to him became a nexus. Knowing that symbols were there gave me a focus for thoughts that needed consideration.

He played the father role for me all summers, vacations and on the telephone in my school years. I still want to share the bad and good and puzzling with him…and do.

When the objects are rancid, it’s another matter. My mother’s splendid shortbreads — rich, not too sweet floret cookies — were a primal communication and display of affection. She shipped us her homemade treats before Christmas every year and the tin of shortbread always came with a hand-written label MICHAEL on the top.

Six years on from the last batch, I still have a few of the last batch. What to do with remnants of my mother’s effort?

I can’t pretend that they are actually part of her. Yet, she made them for me and I had decades in college and adulthood getting them every year. It seemed as important to her to show that affection as for me to enjoy it.

The buttery cookies have long gone bad, to the point that I don’t open the tin. They aren’t moldy, but they not inviting even as ritual food.

Yet, I don’t want to place them in the trash. There’s at least that much emotion remaining in the former food.

I’m setting a couple out today to see what the various wild visitors do with them. We have many kinds of birds, including crows that are grossly fond of roadkill, as well as the night shift of rabbits, raccoons and such.If they devour the shortbread, I’ll sacrifice a few at a time until they are gone.

Had you known Wanda (above in early middle age), you would also know she would appreciate the sharing decision. She was a child in the Great Depression. While her father’s full-time job, massive gardening and tailoring protected the family from the stereotypical deprivation, she grew up in the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia, where waste is a sin.

Perhaps our two and four-legged visitors will help me here.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, artifacts, shortbread, mother, grandfather, ancestors

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