At 11 PM - snow like bright dust

Tonight snow falls, small as dust, a fall that is steady and windless. On the ground, snow crystals catch the eye like tiny sequins, or sandgrain stars in the road ahead.

In this fresh, almost-not-freezing cold we leave tracks that fill quickly. My black dog in her playful mood and I in my black coat- we slide through the clean streets of pale, a washed-out world, gilded with dust that melts on her back and on my shoulders. The dog snorts in a noseful of it, and the air is moist and alive.

I treasure the night and the snow - this quiet, uncomplicated peace.

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Sleeping nymph in various forms

This began its life as a sculpture I made in a class with Alex Shundi at Wooster Community Art Center. I later painted it, photographed in an arrangement with dried leaves and flowers.

.Then I took a digital photo, pulled it up into Corel Painter 10.5 where I softened the focus  then added the greenery. In higher resolution version it looks like you are looking through water and the greenery is in the foreground or floating at the surface. I also added some long locks. I do like the result enough to use it as desktop once in a while.

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Computing misadventures: Leopard & this geek wannabe

Well I had an adventure with my macbook this week.  While I have had a spate of problems with the new operating system Leopard - Apple has released a lot of updates which appear to have settled it down a bit once you get them installed. Of course releasing a 180 to 340 meg update, when one of the difficulties it corrects is connection problems, is a sure method to user frustration.
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After crashing software update twice - I did get this gigantic monster downloaded and installed.  Then the unthinkable happened --- yes, the dreaded USER STUPIDITY. This stupid user attack occurred this past Saturday afternoon (it's Monday now) as I was blissfully exploring. I highlighted my hard drive icon, and brought up the GET INFO box to check how much free space I had left on the drive.  In this info box, I noted  that I had permission to read and write my drive but was STUNNED to see that EVERYBODY had permission to read it!   I was really indignant - why should everybody have the right to read my hard drive! I changed it to "no access."   No sooner had I closed the box when suddenly everything started hanging up - the rolling beach ball  on every save.(the proper mechamisms to keep other PEOPLE off your drive are the Sharing and the Security preferences panes in system preferences)

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As usual my simple answer to most things is to either relaunch finder or reboot. So I rebooted.  BUT now my machine wouldn't even start up.  The blue screen would appear,  the spinning star like icon would appear, then the screen would flash like finder was about to start  - but instead of the familiar desktop - the blue screen was back, then the spinning star, the flash, then the blue screen again.  It only took six or seven cycles for the "Loop" light bulb to go off in my head.  Looks like it can't find the startup disk I thought. Hmmm.   Could I have done this?  I wondered.  DUHHH.

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I hooked up the machine to my old G5 and started it in Target mode. (I attached the machines together via their firewire ports with the macbook off.  I started the mac while holding down the T key.)  This went very well. I dragged all my dated onto the old G5, anything and everything I might need including the domain.2site file from iWeb which contains all the data on your sites, and the iphoto and itune libraries.  while they are large - things cook along very fast on a firewire.

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I shut everybody down and went to the Apple store at the mall. NO I DID NOT BRING MY MACBOOK. I have to confess that I have not ever consulted with the Genuses at the  Genus bar. I am way too stubborn for that.  What I did when I got there was saunter around reading the boxes of every disk and repair utility they had in stock. I have a copy of TechTool but on before Intel macs.  I read the cover on a new box of Techtool pro.  But it only listed Tiger on the cover.  None of them seemed to address my problem or to cover the latest version of Leopard.  I also thought the disk must be working just fine, since I was able to read it from the G5.

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As I stood in my perplexity - I spied  "Mac OS X - The Missing Manuel, Leopard edition" by David Pogue.   This is the best $30 I have ever spent.  I would kiss the ground this guy walks on - he saved me zillions of bucks and weeks of delay.  In one weekend I have learned so much about my operating system from this book! IF YOU OWN A MAC WITH LEOPARD AND you are not a very excellent geek - you will find this book very helpful.

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First I looked up safe mode in the index. As a converted windows user, I am familiar with this mechanism which loads a stripped down version of the operating system from its last successful boot - so you can get in there and undo what ever you or the latest download did that caused the problem....  Pogue notes that APPLE has one of these modes too - you boot while holding the shift key. Valuable info - but it didn't help me this time.  Next under startup problems, the book reminded me I could start via the Leopard install disk while pressing the C key - and then use Disk Utility.  I did so, and it declared my hard drive to be OK.  BUT then I tried to verify the permissions - and this crashed immediately. I  tried to repair the permissions. This crashed immediately too.
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Hmmmm I thought. It can test at a low level - at the level of ones and zeros perhaps -- but it can't read the files headers or the files themselves...... hmmmmm I was pretty sure at this point the culprit was me....  I thought about all the other users who appear in Activity Monitor - like ROOT....

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I tried throwing away my sys preferences file in target mode but this didn't help either. Finally I was pretty sure a reinstall was my only option. Or at least the only one that wouldn't requirea large a tech support bill and enduring scornful looks and snickers too...

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First I tried the install option which preserves the users and files.  This install attempt crashed. When I read the log  - I could see the judge in his white wig pounding down his gavel _"YOU _ YOU idiot YOU Did this to your machine..." The log repeatedly noted it could not open the hard drive directory -- didn't didn't have authority. SIGH.

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At this point I knew I was going to have to make yet another clean erase and  install of leopard. but at least I could laugh because I HAD ALL MY DATA.......   I did the install which in Apple land only takes a two hours - and which chugs away without asking for obscure driver CDs like a window's install does.  Once I had completed the install, before reinstalling any programs or moving back any data,  I used Software update repeatedly and did something Mr. Pogue suggested in his book  there is a menu option in software update to download and SAVE the Package. This avoids another gigantic download in the event of further trouble.

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Anyway the lesson for all you tinkerers out there is - don't ever make this particular mistake.... With luck, logic and a book from the Pogue -  I am back though, happily posting this from my macbook which has all its data in place including the iphoto, itunes, and iweb files, documents etc.  Five stars for David Pogue!!!!

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Nose beans and other foolishness

My father's mother spent a lot of time worrying when Dad was a toddler. The house where Dad was born was a sawmill in the early 1800s. It sat right next to a waterfall that thundered over a dam in the springtime. Beneath the falls was a fast stream which ran only about eight feet from the house, right outside of the kitchen door.

Grandma worried a lot about the possibility of my father falling off the dam onto the stones below or about his drowning in the millpond or the stream. I guess she needn't have worried. My father was busy exploring the cupboards and sticking kidney beans up his nose.

Who would've thought it? He was mostly normal in all other respects. My father claimed one particular bean was struck there for a couple weeks. He couldn't get it out and couldn't tell anyone because he was only three and didn't say much in those days.

After a while, his nose began to swell.

"There's a bean up there, Mrs. Walker," the doctor told my Grandmother gravely, "and the things begun to sprout.'' According to family folk tales, Dad was then subjected to an undignified ritual involving fiendishly long and torturous tweezers.

Yuck.

Now why would a boy put a bean up his nose? I asked Dad that very question once. ``Why did they climb Mount Everest?'' he asked indignantly, looking a little insulted that I had asked.

After that he thought it was only fair to raise another question: At the same tender age of three, why had I put all those roofing nails into the toaster while it was toasting, which sent a shower of sparks into the air and blew a fuse?

``DNA,'' I said grinning a suspiciously similar grin.  Other than that, I have no answer to this question.

NOTE: the photograph is Dad, standing in kitchen door of the house on Saw Mill Hill. Quite some time after my grandparents left, it became the summer house of. Author and tv writer Arthur Arent of New York City .  More recently  newscaster Morton Dean owned it.

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getting a head

This is a picture of another sculpture, a self-portrait I made in Shundi's class at Wooster. At the time I originally posted this on my Gallery blog (which I am slowly merging with this one) this head sat on my desk at the Redding Pilot where it reportedly "creeped out" my fellow reporter Maggie Caldwell (who is now the editor of the Easton Courior). She refered to it as my 'death mask.' Hope not

The picture was taken at my old New Milford apartment, on the third floor. The pattern visible above the head, is formed by white lines in the parking lot below. This photo was featured on the splash page of old version of The Metaphoratorium.

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Gould's* Contingency (from Inverse Origami)

Just questions, and like Damocles,
the point is over our heads, spinning
like roulette, wedges of color and number blur,
when the odds favor the house and its hordes.

Dalmatian cubes tumble in twos
Old Snake "I"s writhing-down,
the double helix hissing "There's a world
outside this garden, aren't you curious?"

Clever Snake Integral, the atomic wait
of putty sings in your "I"s.
Give us the rest of the apple and a helmet
before the next twist in the chain.

---

- Feb. 16, 1996 ...
* Stephen Jay Gould, the late evolutionary biologist

Custom digital drawing by the poet, and the poem, appeared on page 8 of Inverse Origami

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

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POEM: Tattoo Me (from Inverse Origami)

Went to the parlor.
Studied steel needles under neon.
Shaved my head
and the burly guy began to make
tiny holes into which he injected
three and a half gallons of windshield washer fluid
so I could see what was already tattooed there.

Look! The internet directory
lawn clippings from Walt Whitman
the TV GUIDE
the golden rule
ma's one hundred thirteen
favorite rules of thumb
the law of the jungle
the Khama Sutra
the Windows help index!
(Boy have I got a headache.)

I expected roses
but here I am in a downpour
waving a torn baggie
which only moments ago
encircled a half-pint of blue fluid and a goldfish.

Suddenly my blond mopís matted, slippery
the world, a fish-eye-hubcap reflection.
And I am only beginning to breath/see/hear.

When I complained about the mess
the burly guy
pointed to a disclaimer on the wall
noting that birth may involve screaming
and that the midwife may NOT cut the curls of self-reflexive cord
which loop back for generations
through thickets of abandoned fishbowls.

This act you must own for yourself.
For this act, you own your self
For stealing fire you get to lay on the mountain
and offer up your liver daily at dawn

Each night in fecund darkness
you grow another.

---

- Mar (Mistryel Walker
pg 12 & 13 Inverse Origami, the art of unfolding 1998, Out-of-the-Mist Press

this poem was also published in the original print version of the CT Poet Newsletter

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

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