A few days ago, motion drew my eye to the window. A bird was hopping around in the butterfly bush. Nothing unusual about that, but this particular bird made me do a double-take:

What was going on? Had I been transported to the Island of Dr. Moreau? Was someone in the neighborhood doing weird experiments on the local bird life? Please tell me that is not really the head of a black finch transplanted onto the body of a cardinal . . . .

A Google search soon informed me I wasn’t the only one who had seen such a sight and wondered about it. The bird in question is definitely a cardinal, but it’s a bald cardinal, with no feathers on its head.

Opinions on what causes cardinals to lose all their head feathers are mixed, but most seem to involve mites and seasonal molting. It is agreed the condition generally takes place after the breeding season, that it isn’t permanent, and that the feathers grow back.

I have to say though, that a cardinal with a head as bald as a vulture’s is a rather disturbing sight.

This is my personal observation on the nutrition/weight-loss wars. To be upfront, I’ve never had much of a problem with weight and I’ve always been fairly physically active, but over time I got to be maybe ten to twelve pounds heavier than I needed to be. No big deal, and I wasn’t emotionally invested in losing the weight, but when I started working out at the gym it seemed logical to think that I would lose some weight— and I did. Maybe three pounds. That was it. And I work out hard. I run the treadmill. I’m the one breathing hard over increasingly heavy weight. Didn’t matter. Two years passed, and I didn’t lose another pound. However, I was only working out two, or at most, three days a week, and continuing to eat as I had for years, which was sort of middle-of-the-road okay.

Then I picked up a terrific book called Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M.D., which can be summarized thus: “Exercise hard one hour a day, six days a week and don’t eat crap.” So together my husband and I cut down on the crap and started working out more, and lo, I dropped a couple more pounds.

Shortly thereafter we embarked on a deliberately low-fat diet, while continuing the exercise regimen, and after a few months I stepped on a scale and laughed, knowing the damn thing was broken. But a second scale concurred exactly with the first. Those twelve pounds I wasn’t worried about losing? They had just gone away.

I credit it to the diet.** Our focus is on low-fat and high fiber/whole grain, and for myself, I think the food is great. I don’t feel like I’m suffering or deprived, but I will concede it’s challenging to eat out and still stick to the rules. Also, meal prep can take longer, but not all that much longer.

It works for me. Just thought I’d share.

** When I say “diet” I mean “what I typically eat” and definitely not “going on a diet.”

Holy crap!

A few weeks ago I picked up a new CD by The Black Keys. I was rather amused to open it and see that the back of the CD was utterly black. I held it up to the light. I looked around the inner rim. Nope. No writing. No song titles. Nothing. Okay, well I guess this is novel, post-modern, whatever.

So I finally popped it into the iMac this morning, imported the songs into iTunes, and popped it out again. To my *shock* the back of the CD was now gray, with all the usual sorts of black writing on it. Oh cool! I thought. First-use reveals the writing!

But as I sit here the CD, warmed up a bit in the drive, is cooling off and the impenetrable black finish is returning, flowing in slowly from the outer perimeter. I’m entertained.

Maybe this is an old trick to you more worldly types. Then again, you more worldly types don’t buy CDs anymore, do you?

Titles can just be seen behind the black finish.

I’ve spent the last few weeks deeply immersed in the website project mentioned in my October 10th post. This is a task that is better finished sooner rather than later, but there’s no deadline, no real pressure to get it done. Nevertheless I’ve been absorbed in it. Pleasantly absorbed.

I can’t point to any one thing that is inherently fascinating about programming a database-driven website. Step-by-step, maybe it’s kind of boring. And it isn’t exactly fun sitting in a chair all day staring at a screen, trying to figure out why stuff isn’t working, and trying to remember all the contingencies that have to be accounted for, and waiting for a page to load, (and listening to the dog sigh and grumble because I have become the most boring companion imaginable). Yet overall it is a deeply satisfying process.

Evidently I have a need to engage in long, complex projects. Whether it’s painting the house, landscaping the garden, programming a website or writing a novel . . . there’s a lot of satisfaction in the process, at least when progress is being made.

The promise of progress is one reason programming makes such a great escape from writing: everyday I know I’ve accomplished something. I may spend an hour trying to figure out why something isn’t working, but after a few hours I know I’m closer to the finished product.

Writing doesn’t share that same sense of momentum, of fair reward for time spent. Twenty hours spent trying to compose a chapter might just be twenty wasted hours. In the back of my mind I’m always aware of this, so it’s easy to get distracted.

But now I’ve reached a good pause-point on the website, so tomorrow the plan is to get back to The Wild. Wish me luck. I really need to get this (re)-rewrite done so I can try my hand at something new.

For a number of years I’ve been selling my out-of-print books via my website. I had a large initial stock – at least of the Bantam books – because my former editor moved her office to a different floor, and in the process she discovered several cases of my books in a storeroom and was nice enough to send them to me.

Selling these books is not exactly a lucrative enterprise given the time, trouble and postage it takes to mail them – especially from Hawaii – but I would much rather the books were read than not, and it’s really gratifying that people will seek me out.

I’ve also found that as time goes by more and more of my orders are from Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. This is really flattering, because these buyers are willing to pay additional postage of $22 or more. But the paperwork!

Generally I am not one to bash the US Postal Service. In my experience they almost always do a great job, and generally speaking it’s just as efficient and far cheaper to send something to or from Hawaii by Priority Mail than by one of the delivery services.

But with international packages a customs form needs to be filled out. Recently the USPS decided that this should be done online. If I don’t fill it out online, then the clerk at the post office will have to take my hand-filled form and enter it into the computer there. But the online form requires a phone number, both mine and the recipient’s. Well, mine is an unlisted home number not for distribution, and I may or may not have the recipient’s via PayPal. However, I have to enter something or the form won’t submit, so a string of zeroes has to do. Naturally it turns out the final form says “phone number if available.” Maybe the website and form should get on the same page?

But here is my primary complaint: the form is 4.75 inches high, there are five copies, and each copy prints out on a separate sheet of letter-size paper! Two forms could easily fit on one sheet of paper, but no. Apparently a decision was made to waste resources. So instead of the post office paying to produce a five-sheet form of very thin paper of the correct size, everyone using this form must now waste 2.5 pages of much heavier, letter-size paper.

I will be very interested to hear what our postal clerks have to say about this when I go to mail my package tomorrow.

I don’t watch much television. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I don’t deliberately watch a lot of television. My standard operating procedure is to turn on the tv, proceed through the 75 or so channels, decide that it’s all a wasteland, and turn it off. Showing up at a designated time to watch a particular show is a little more commitment than I can deal with.

But a few days ago I stumbled across an article with a title something like “The Best Series You Didn’t Watch.” (To my frustration and perplexity, I haven’t been able to relocate the article, though I thought it was in the New York Times.) The show was NBC’s Kings. Needing a diversion, I started watching it on Hulu . . . and a handful of days later I’ve watched all of the first and only season. The show has been canceled, and yes, it was really good.

There are enough reviews on the web that I’m not going to say much on what it’s about except that it takes much of the Old Testament story of Saul (herein Silas) and David and recasts it in a fictional modern setting, with lots of extra details not in the original source.

I enjoyed the characters, the story, the intensity, and the questions on ethics and power, and divine favor and approval. I often read interesting books, but it’s been years since I’ve read a book that keeps me up into the wee hours because it’s so gripping I can’t put it down. Well, this was a series that kept me up long past my usual bedtime. I’ll probably pick up the DVD.

In the meantime, I’m reading the Book.

Finally, a subject I feel passionate about that is too long for Twitter alone! What has set me off is a New York Times article Students Get New Assignment: Pick Books You Like. To which I say YES! It’s about time!.

I have strong feelings on this subject, but not from my own experience—for years my joking explanation of my vast ignorance of “good literature” was that I grew up in the Hawaii Public School System. Since those long-ago days Hawaii schools have truly improved in many ways, but I had big problems with the way literature was taught when my two children were in high school.

As I recall, middle school (and possibly down through elementary school) had a great system. At the beginning of the school year the students would receive a huge list of hundreds of books. They would simply pick a book off the list, read it, take a little computerized test to show they had read it, and do it all again. There were all kinds of books on the list and it wasn’t a challenge to find something each child could really get into. (Well, except maybe my son, but more on that later.)

But by high school, at least in the advanced classes, there were assigned reading lists. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I made it a habit to read most of the assigned books and discovered some real gems that I would never have picked up on my own. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Chiam Potok’s The Chosen come immediately to mind. The most amusing—not the book itself, but the way it played out—was Snow Falling on Cedar. This one was assigned as summer reading for my daughter’s incoming freshmen class. Neither she nor any of her friends showed any sign of starting in on it until I read it and reviewed it. “Wow, very nice story, but I’m pretty stunned the teacher would assign a book with such graphic sex to a ninth grade class.” Hmm . . . suddenly, the book was being read by lots of soon-to-be freshmen. The second-level punch line is that the teacher who assigned the book wasn’t there when class started. The new teacher read the book later in the semester and was stunned.

So those were the good experiences. The bad experiences were teachers who assigned dreadful “classics” and in too many cases analyzed them to death. Let me say that I have essentially no experience with “analyzing” books. I am not an English major. If English majors want to while away their time looking for themes and hidden meanings, well, have fun. But please let’s not inflict this (it’s tempting to say “perversion”) on high school kids. I have no objection to a good discussion, sharing insight, that sort of thing. But spending days and sometimes weeks tearing a book apart, diagramming it, acting it out, making more or less of it than it really is, does no student any good. I recall a nearly endless wrestling with The Masque of the Red Death that was horrifying to witness as a parent and called into doubt the psychological state of the teacher.

Personally, I felt the best way to go about teaching high school literature was to read a book, talk about it, move on. Even better if people could read books they like.

Okay, back to my son. He has never, from earliest days, had much interest in reading fiction. Gaming manuals, no problem. Non-fiction, that’s fine. Forums, sure. Even choose-your-own-adventures worked pretty well, but beyond that, it was pretty hard to find a book that he felt was worth reading. The astonishing thing about him is he has the vocabulary of someone who has read extensively his whole life. I don’t know how he managed that.

Being a writer, of course this bothered me (and continues to bother me!). I worked very hard to find books he could enjoy. I wasn’t snobby about it. He was very much into Michael Crichton’s Timeline for example. And I even got him to read my own Memory. (“Hey, it’s dedicated to you. You have to read it.”)

As an aside, he would also write the most scathing book reviews I have ever encountered.

But after all that hard work he wound up in an advanced English class in high school with a reading list that wouldn’t exactly make me want to keep running back to the library for more. The worst of the lot—and I know I am about to offend a lot of people who think this is a scintillating, truly wonderful novel—was Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. As I said, I tried to read the books my children were assigned, but I couldn’t get more than a few pages into this one. My son impressed me hugely by reading the whole thing—but except for some Star Wars novels he has probably not read much fiction since. I am not saying I blame his English teacher and Ralph Ellison for this, but I do consider it a contributing factor.

Reading fiction needs to involve some pleasure for the reader. Even if the book breaks your heart or makes you cry, you still get the pleasure of a good story, along with the company of characters you appreciate. And of course not everybody will find this pleasure in the same book. So English teachers! We appreciate you–your bravery and fortitude far exceed mine–but please do not force our impressionable youth to read books they despise. We want to instill a life-long love of reading, not a life-long loathing.

So here is one enthusiastic vote for student choice!