Tuesday, May 29, 2007

My Work: Living on Soilar Power - Part 7

January, 1998

We survived the ice storm. Trees and power lines down everywhere and the military was called in but our private power didn’t skip a beat. Our radio phone was out for two days because the ice was so thick on the antennas that it prevented any transmissions. And the kids were delighted to have four days off school .

I worked happily in my office for my corporate clients. As I looked out the window, it was bright sunshine and we were making power. What weather. It sure was nice to be snuggled up with our cookstove and solar modules. At least we never had to worry about running out of power or heat.

The grid was fragile. There were people in Eastern Ontario who didn’t have power for weeks in the midst of the following cold snap. Livestock fell and froze in the feedlots without food or water, it was really something. I guess we all remember the ice storm of ‘98.

June 1998

Time flies like an arrow and, as Groucho Marx would say, “Fruit flies like a banana.”

Our second spring arrived with the redwing blackbirds and blew in a fresh breeze of plans and projects revolving around livestock.

We cleaned under the electric fence of the pig yard, a job that got easier every year as we gradually gained mastery over the weeds and brush. We bought eight purebred Yorkshires and they ate like pigs. They enjoyed the sun the first two days and got sunburned so Susan penned them up during the brightest part of the day. We were thinking of bathing them in olive oil to get a head start on the marinating. Then we installed a 270-gallon water tank in the second story of the barn and pumped it full from the pond with a gasoline pump so we wouldn’t have to carry water to them so often.

Our 20 laying hens (Barred Plymouth Rock), our 50 meat birds (White Rock) and our Scottish Blackface sheep arrived. The sheep’s owner ran a small magazine and I wrote an article for her on mad cow disease in exchange for the sheep. However, sheep meant that we had to build over a thousand feet of split-rail fence. We started looking for rails.

We set up an anemometer to check the feasibility of a wind turbine, but calculated that solar modules would produce as much power at a lower cost. More modules it is! My neighbor and I welded together a rack to hold six more. It swiveled 360° and tilted so that the modules would always directly face the sun. The kids and I dug a hole six feet square and five feet deep, then we set the base of the rack in the hole and covered it with rocks and 50 bags of mixed cement. Once the modules were bolted to the rack and wired together, we doubled our power production again, now up to 900 watts peak power.

The neighbor (who sold me the truck), his stepson, and a friend and I all went to Ottawa to pick up 5,000 pounds of NiCad batteries for our system. A fellow there was upgrading his batteries and offered to give me his old ones if I would haul them out of his basement. They were four to a crate, and each crate weighed 175 pounds. What a slug. I gave my friend 20 for helping and we now had 100 more batteries for the cost of the rental truck.

We spent the next day hooking those batteries up to the ones we already had, plus we installed 20 of them in the barn so we would have lights, power for the pig fence, and the block heater on the tractor. We built cabinets fronted with old windows for the new bank.

Then we cut a hole in the side of the house and built an insulated cabinet vented to the outside for our new electric fridge that had been sitting on the porch in its box for the last month. We could finally get rid of our old propane fridge and have ice cubes, ice cream, and a freezer door that opened without falling off. An electric fridge may seem like a trivial luxury, but it typically uses half the power in a house. It was a great improvement that we couldn’t hope to have without the additional modules and batteries.

Sunday, May 27, 2007

My Work: Living on Solar Power - Part 6

July, 1997

The birds were chirping, the flies were biting--It felt like home.

Our third round of construction was finished and, although we were on the ropes for a minute there, we survived intact.

The carpenters came back for two weeks and the whole house was sided in inch-thick, 10-inch wide rough-planed white pine board and batten. “The Shrine to Pine”, one of the carpenters called it. 2,200 board feet of it. The sawdust from ripping the battens and cutting the boards to length could have filled five bathtubs. Probably another 50 board feet right there. The cut ends supplie us with kindling for five years.

That week we broke our record - 12 vehicles in the yard. Four were ours: the pick-up, two Toyotas, and the chicken van. Also the pickup and the cube van of the builders putting up our garage; the pick-up of the man installing the garage doors; the van of the plumber replacing the well pump and installing the new propane boiler for our hot water heating system; and a backhoe, bulldozer, dump truck, and trailer to re-grade the land around the garage and upgrade the driveway. Too bad we didn’t have some of those coloured, plastic pennants to string around--maybe we could have made a sale or two.

We now had hot water running through radiators in most of the house and a wood-burning cookstove in the kitchen – enough to make the house cozy in the coldest weather and eliminate early morning trips to feed the basement wood furnace. Our new well pump was a soft-start model, which meant there was no beginning power surge to get it started — much easier on our inverter and our batteries.

There was less progress on the phone system. We finally filed a lawsuit for breach of contract against the radio phone manufacturer, distributor, and local installer. We originally ordered a new two-line system but it never worked properly and, after six months of tuning and tinkering, we ended up with a used, one-line system that mostly worked and they wanted to charge us the same price.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Writing for Grammar: Common Semicolon Mistakes

The following examples illustrate two common semicolon mistakes with alternatives to correct the problem by changing the punctuation or by rewriting the sentence to conform to the semicolon rule:

Reviewing the Rules:
  • The semicolon is used to separate major sentence elements of equal grammatical rank by taking the place of conjunctions such as: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, or so (FANBOYS).
  • The other main use for a semicolon is between items in a series that contain internal punctuation so we can keep them all straight.
Example 1

Mistake:
After driving in circles, Peter finally found the restaurant; the Quiche Cuisine.
(grammatically unequal elements - clause ; phrase)

New punctuation:
After driving in circles, Peter finally found the restaurant, the Quiche Cuisine.

Rewriting:
After driving in circles, Peter finally found the restaurant; the Quiche Cuisine was worth it.
(grammatically equal elements – clause ; clause)

Example 2

Mistake:
He scanned the shopping list: eggs; butter, sugar, and flour.

New punctuation:
He scanned the shopping list: eggs, butter, sugar, and flour.

Rewriting:
He scanned the shopping list: eggs, an easy meal; butter, nice on toast; sugar, adds a kick to his coffee; and flour, in case he wanted to make Susan’s birthday cake from scratch.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Writing for Grammar: Using Semicolons

The semicolon is used to separate major sentence elements of equal grammatical rank by taking the place of conjunctions such as: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, or so (FANBOYS).

Option 1: Injustice is relatively easy to bear, but what stings is justice.
Option 2: Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

H.L. Mencken wrote Example 2. It joins and contrasts the elements better than the awkward comma or the conjunction “but”.

Failure to use a semicolon can result in the dreaded comma splice. “Most agencies offer a limited number of services, Global Megabucks Inc. offers the broadest selection in the industry.”

The comma in the above example should be replaced by a semicolon, or the phrase should be broken into two complete sentences.

The other main use for a semicolon is between items in a series that contain internal punctuation so we can keep them all straight. “The farmer fed grain, oyster shell, and kitchen scraps to the chickens; bones and dry food to the dog; hay, grass, and corn to the cattle and sheep.

Next time we will look at some common semicolon mistakes and how to avoid them.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Writing for Fun: Who Puts Those...?

  • Who puts those "Thin Ice" signs out there anyway?
  • Why are they called apartments if they're all stuck together?
  • Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?
  • If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the doors?
  • Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM?
  • Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?
  • Why is it that when you transport something by car, it's called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it's called cargo?
  • Why is there no other word for synonym?
  • Why do they report power outages on TV?
  • Why do people who know the least know it the loudest?
  • If the cops arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?
  • Why is the word abbreviation so long?
  • When companies ship styrofoam, what do they pack it in?
  • When your pet bird sees you reading the newspaper, does he wonder why you're just sitting there, staring at carpeting?
  • Why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, and hammers don't ham?
  • If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth?
  • If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
  • How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same?
  • Why is it that when a house burns up, it burns down?
  • Why do you get in and out of a car, but get on and off a bus.
  • When the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

Monday, May 21, 2007

My Work: Living on Solar Power - Part 5

March, 1997

Four months now without central heating, traffic jams, or pollution.

What we had were skies full of stars, helpful neighbours, home-made haircuts, and sunrise through our bedroom window. After some pretty low times and frustrations over construction, computers, telephones, and electricity (accompanied with occasional second thoughts about the move here), we concluded that the move was a good idea.

We frost-seeded pastures and began to think about fences and how to divide the land into paddocks for the sheep. We built a pig yard so our future porkers could run in about 5,000 square feet (as much as pigs run). I snorted and whuffed myself about high feeding areas, low latrine areas, and providing water from roof run-off, but Susan didn’t pay me a lot of attention unless I started to squeal.

We bought a battered ’81 pick-up with a brand-new Lincoln V-8 engine from our neighbor and I asked him about welding me up a frame with wheels I could use for a chicken coop and move from paddock to paddock behind the sheep.

He said, “I can do better than that. I’ve got an old van out in back I was going to cut the engine out of and make into a chicken coop, why don’t you take it?” It was perfect. Off the ground, critter tight, with lots of doors and windows.

Of course, our temptation was to try to do everything all at once. Animals, garden, orchard, building, repairing, maintaining, hunting, and fishing competed for hours and days. We had to remind ourselves that this was a long process, with no finish line, and that the pleasure was supposed to come with the doing, not the done. Still, I had a three-page single-spaced list of projects and found myself judging the value of the day by the amount completed.

Friday, May 18, 2007

My Work: Living on Solar Power - Part 4

January 1997

The main bedroom was finally finished. Charlotte raised her hands in the air and cried, “Hooray, my parents are moving out of my room.”

A few days later, the wood furnace couldn’t keep the house warm, neither the radio telephone nor the computer would work, the generator had just shredded its fan belt, bills were still piling up and I had a cold. I said to Susan, “Maybe it was a mistake moving out here.”

Susan replied, “Maybe it was. No one should have to deal with so much.”

My dream was in ruins. The scariest part was that Susan thought so, too. We had to do something. That evening, we both took deep breaths and talked about the day. That helped. The kids and I read stories to each other in bed while I struggled with my cold. That helped. We planned how to rescue our dream. That helped a lot.

We started by upgrading the inverter/charger to a 2500-watt model with a charger that filled the batteries to capacity. Now, 25-amp service may not seem like a lot, but it was more than a four-fold improvement over what we had. Actually, conservation and common sense can go a long way toward reducing power needs. So can energy-efficient compact fluorescents and no power hogs such as air-conditioning. Now we could run the washer, table saw, toaster, or various other power-gulpers without turning on the generator. The new inverter was pure sine wave, which meant no hum on radios and smoother computer compatibility. It had an LCD readout for measuring all states of the power system, seventeen menus ( one just for error messages) and a 141-page owner’s manual. Next was more solar production. We added two more 75-watt solar modules to our array and suddenly increased our power production by 50% to 450 watts peak power on the days we had full sun. That made life a lot easier, too. We saved our lanterns for the barn and gleefully snapped on a light when going upstairs. We added a second, larger water tank to cut down on how often the water pump ran.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

My Work: Living on Solar Power - Part 3

November 1996

Of course, the house needed modifications to graduate from supporting one person to containing our family of two adults and two almost teenagers. And, of course, renovations took twice as long and cost twice as much as we planned. After several weekends driving four hours each way to supervise the work and write cheques, we moved in with eight inches of snow on the ground and a six-foot hole in the south wall covered by plastic.

November. The start of the worst three months of the year for solar power. We ordered a radio telephone after seeing one in operation on the other side of Tamworth and a truckload of logs we could cut up for firewood.

We all slept in one room for the first two months. The four 75-watt solar modules and 600-watt inverter proved to be woefully inadequate. We spent all the equity from selling our suburban house, our computer would only work when the generator was on, and our high-tech radio phone system hardly ever worked. Welcome to the country.

Despite running all day to support the renovator’s power tools, the battery charger in the inverter never pumped up the batteries enough to take us through the night. We shared bathwater, went to bed by lantern light, then were up again at 3:00 am to stoke the basement wood furnace again.

That first Christmas, we froze around the tree huddled in blankets under dim lights unable to call anyone and told each other what fun we were having.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

My Work: Living on Solar Power - Part 2

May 1996

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moore,

“…While I would definitely have been interested in obtaining cheaper phone service, my future plans are now uncertain. We have put our property up for sale this spring, so committing myself to this is not practical for me now.”

Another property for sale? We wrote back and asked for details.

June
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moore,

“Our property is still for sale. It is approximately 80 acres with about 15 acres cleared and the balance bush & beaver ponds. The house is situated on a man-made pond and household water comes from a never-failing spring (via a piston pump). We do not have hydro service but produce our own with solar modules charging industrial-type NiCad batteries and a 6.5 KW propane powered demand-start generator for backup power. A small inverter produces 120VAC from the 12VDC batteries and the house is wired for both voltages.

There is a good small barn (24 X 36) with 2 smaller log barns. In addition, there is a small T hanger for an ultralight airplane beside an 800 ft. runway.

I would be happy to show you around or answer any further questions you may have.”

Bingo. Susan and I agreed to look at it the next weekend. When we first arrived, we parked in the long circular driveway at the top of the hill next to the house. An overgrown backhouse was on our left. On our right, we tried to look past the 10-foot sumac thicket, then a bed of exposed rock, then two huge popular trees to the small-looking house, part log cabin and part wood frame sided with rough-sawn boards and battens.

Inside we found 2-foot thick exposed logs on the walls and ceiling, topped by the wood of the floors above. A large pine harvest table sat in the eating area next to the stairs. Wooden floors throughout and 40 NiCad batteries in the basement. Susan and I loved it but tried not to seen too interested. We asked a million questions. The kids were wonderful, spending most of the time sitting on alcove cushions while Susan and I talked to the owner. In the workshop we went through some of the intricacies of the batteries, inverter, and generator.

Hours later we left. The field across the road was covered in fireflies - darting and glowing as if a sky full of shooting stars had come down to earth. After researching the timber and mineral rights, we made an offer conditional on soil and water tests that showed the property was free of any toxic chemicals. The offer was accepted, the tests all came back to our satisfaction, and we bought our farm.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

My Work: Living on Solar Power - Part 1

April 1996

We knew we wanted to live in a solar-powered house in the country. Books like Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits by Meadows had alerted us to the advantages of producing our own food and power rather than relying on others for the basics of life.

In the suburbs, we lived in a five-bedroom house on half an acre in a quiet neighborhood. We grew most of our own food, built a small barn, cared for seventeen fruit trees and harvested our own grapes, blueberries, and strawberries. But we hated the traffic and the lawn pesticide signs and road salt and air pollution, plus our children were nearly teenagers. If we didn’t move soon, we might never get out.

We looked for three years for land somewhere between Belleville, Bancroft, Ottawa, and Kingston and, after visiting several properties in that large area, thought we found one just north of Tamworth. It was an undeveloped 150 acres including a 30-acre lake. We drove out to look at it, and I was excited. Blacktopped road, big lake, house and garage, fish camp by a sandy beach. We took pictures and scouted around for a flat building site. But it required permission from the County (road setbacks), the Township (building permit), Environment Canada, the local Conservation Authority, The Ministry of Natural Resources, the Health Department, and several other agencies we probably didn’t even know about.

The road and lake setbacks squeezed us into one building area within 75 feet of the road. We ran levels, and staked out a possible site. I kept plunging ahead and my wife, Susan, was carried along with my enthusiasm.

Before we could build, the Township required us to either demolish the existing house (that could have fallen down by itself in the first stiff wind) or sever the property (only one house allowed per lot). They didn’t care that the lot was 150 acres. The Conservation authority required a 100-foot setback from the lake, although it would have to rise 30 feet and flood most of Southern Ontario before it got our footings wet.

The phone company was eager to charge us $40,000 to run in lines so they could start sending us a monthly bill. I asked at the post office for names of other people living on up the road, and we wrote to them care of General Delivery to see if anyone wanted to share the cost of a line.

After all that, our offer for the property was not accepted by the owners. But then we received a reply to one of our letters sent up the road.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Writing for Fun: Hyp-Hens

The dreaded but often hilarious hyp-hen has died. With improved technology, today's books, newspapers and magazines rarely break words that used to over-run column width with wrongly-placed hyphens in a way that led to mans-laughter and other typographical leg-ends.

David McKie, of Cambridge, had read that the model Iman was reputed to be 6 ft. 2 in. tall but was in fact "almost half a foot short of her leg-end." His brain underwent tortuous contortions before he realised "what was truly legendum(to be read)."

A round-up of amusing hyp-hens from newspapers and Internet sites have yielded these gems (some of which were genuine errors, others were imaginary):

pronoun-cement
brains-canner
bed-raggled
the-rapist
prose-cute
surge-on
thin-ness
not-ables
cart-ridge
pa-rent an
off-end.

Then there was a slew of age hyp-hens: ad-age, plum-age, mess-age, front-age, and pass-age, culminating in dot-age (short for the dot-com age, or the age when you become a bit dotty). These were closely related to broke-rage and stop-page.

Rampage was a real humdinger - a double hyp-hen. It could become either ram-page or ramp-age. Another double hyp-hen was history, which could divide into hi-story or his-tory.

On the Internet, wordsmith Anu Garg, who sends A Word a Day (AWAD, a wad of words) free to more than 500,000 wordlovers in 210 countries, contributed male-diction with the wry remark "That"s why men curse more often than women." In other words, men-swear. He also coined irre-dentist and stars-truck ("bus for members of a film star"s fan club").

Daniel Austin, then a 20-year-old student from Leamington Spa, England, and webmaster at Fun With Words, dreamed up diver-gent, red-raw, gene-rations, now-here, red-raft, man-aging, past-oral and fat-her. Next day (while in the bath) he thought of seven more: domes-tic, par-king (a good golfer), dorm-ant, mist-rust, reed-it, rest-rain and dip-ole.

Cory Calhoun, then a 23-year-old student studying graphic design and theatre arts at Western Washington University (U.S.), featured a page of hyp-hens on his website. These included yell-ow and wee-knight. And what was his favourite hyp-hen?”

I read a real gem the other day," he told us. "The suspect was charged with mans-laughter!" Then there’s always:

25% off members-hips (fitness club
hairs-pray (whenever it's humid)
sty-list (handy for pig farmers)
disc-lose (I hate it when that happens!)
gang-lion (do they wear fur coats or leather jackets?)
disc-over (ahhh... quiet)
miss-ed (a case of gender identity disorder?)
overt-axing (this lumberjack ain't shy)
overt-urn (a really brightly painted vessel)
thin-king (the queen should start feeding him more
thins-kinned (a family of slender people)
rump-led (just walk behind me!)

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Writing for Grammar: Hyphens

Two words brought together as a compound may be written separately, written as one word, or connected by hyphens.

For example, three modern dictionaries all have the same listings for the following compounds:

hair stylist
hairsplitter
hair-raiser

Another modern dictionary, however, lists hairstylist, not hair stylist. Compounding is obviously in a state of flux, and authorities do not always agree in all cases, but the uses of the hyphen offered here are generally agreed upon.

1. Use a hyphen to join two or more words serving as a single adjective before a noun:

a one-way street
chocolate-covered peanuts
well-known author

However, when compound modifiers come after a noun, they are not hyphenated:

The peanuts were chocolate covered.
The author was well known.

2. Use a hyphen with compound numbers:

forty-six
sixty-three
Our much-loved teacher was sixty-three years old.

3. Use a hyphen to avoid confusion or an awkward combination of letters:

re-sign a petition (vs. resign from a job)
semi-independent (but semiconscious)
shell-like (but childlike)

4. Use a hyphen with the prefixes ex- (meaning former), self-, all-; with the suffix -elect; between a prefix and a capitalized word; and with figures or letters:

ex-husband
self-assured
mid-September
all-inclusive
mayor-elect
anti-American
T-shirt
pre-Civil War
mid-1980s

5. Use a hyphen to divide words at the end of a line if necessary, and make the break only between syllables:

pref-er-ence
sell-ing
in-di-vid-u-al-ist

6. For line breaks, divide already hyphenated words only at the hyphen:

mass-
produced

self-
conscious

7. For line breaks in words ending in -ing, if a single final consonant in the root word is doubled before the suffix, hyphenate between the consonants; otherwise, hyphenate at the suffix itself:

plan-ning
run-ning
driv-ing
call-ing

8. Never put the first or last letter of a word at the end or beginning of a line, and don't put two-letter suffixes at the beginning of a new line:

lovely (Do not separate to love-ly with ly beginning a new line.)
eval-u-ate (Separate only on either side of the u; do not leave the initial e- at the end of a line.)

Friday, May 11, 2007

My Work: Hayin' Time - Part 2

We don’t do as much haying as Ardis did. Our land is hilly and rocky – good for pasture not hayfields. Our neighbor comes up and helps us cut about eight acres and make old-fashioned square bales. Some days, though, I wish Ardis was here to throw them on the wagon.

I wish my dad was here too. After high school, and the Battle of the Bulge, he settled into farming, worked in a gas station, then finally retired as a postal clerk. But he never lost his taste for farming.

After retirement he cut and baled hay off the local dentist’s land in exchange for any dental work he needed. Mom says that when Dad was young all the farmers around wanted him to do their planting because he could run the straightest furrow in the county. It showed up in his haying, too. Every stage can make the next one harder or easier. First is cutting, making sure that you hit each swath square, so there aren’t any curves at the edges of the field. Then raking nice straight rows makes them easy to bale. Dad always liked to rake two rows together, not quite on top of each other, so they looked like an “M” of hay from the end of the windrow. Then came the baler to gather, compress, knot the twine and throw the bales into the hay wagon.

He was careful, conscientious, and kept the equipment well maintained. He knew every field like the back of his hand and would always stop if he saw a doe because that meant there was a fawn bedded in the grass, too. He would carefully walk back and forth until he located the fawn because he ran over one with the mower one time and that was enough for him.

After we bought this farm, Dad helped me figure out what to do with it - how to renovate the pastures, when to disk and when to cultivate, the best places for the split-rail fences. I called him often to get his advice and wished he lived across the road.

Once when Mom and Dad were visiting, we built a pig feeder with my kids, Conor and Charlotte. Three generations making a tall upright chute that spilled grain into two troughs on either side. When we finished, Dad said, “Well, if you get out of pigs, you can always use this as a giant bird feeder.” And that’s just what it looked like.

We would always visit Mom and Dad at the end of May because he and Charlotte had the same birthday. One time we hit it right for haying season and he asked if I wanted to help. Boy, did I. He cut one field with a brand-new John Deer and a haybine that crushed the stems a little to speed up drying. I raked the field he had already cut with an orange Allis-Chalmers we called “Alice”, of course. I don’t think I had many happier times than those days when I was in a sunny field on one tractor looking at him on another one.

He was quiet and kept most things inside but I could tell he was enjoying himself, too. As we sat in the truck having our lunch, we looked out at tractors that didn’t have to be rested and a baler that even threw the bales into the wagon for us. He said, “When I was a kid, I remember when we got our first hay loader. Until then, we always pitched loose hay on the wagons with forks, but that hay loader just pulled it all up and dumped it on the wagon in a nice pile. All we had to do was pitch it off into the barn. At the time we thought it doesn’t get any better than this.”

Dad’s gone now, but as we sat in the sweet smell of newly mown hay that day, I was thinking, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Thursday, May 10, 2007

My Work: Hayin' Time - Part 1

At haying time Ardis Cronk would put her boys to shame. They were big lads but Ardis would climb into her overalls and march along next to the wagon, throwing up 40-pound bales with either hand. Left, right, left, right. No one wanted to stack on her side, she fired them up there so fast.

She kept 200 head of cattle and knew every one by name. Her husband would try to get her to sell some, but she couldn’t part with her cattle. She had a soft spot for them and kept each one until it died.

One day she showed up with a huge bandage on her nose. It was a magnificent nose, too, stretching out and bending down at the end, big enough to catch the wind in a stiff breeze. It seems she was brooming down her front walk and leaned into her work a little too much. The hook she used for hanging up the broom caught her on the inside of her nostril and gave her a nasty pull.

Another time she was hauling out manure from the barn by wheelbarrow and running it up a plank to the top of the pile. She slipped on a wet spot and fell right in up to her neck. Couldn’t get out by herself, she had to yell until her boys came to pull her free. They did, after standing around and laughing just short of making her mad enough to throw them into the manure, too.

Ardis used to cook up a storm, feeding as many as had to be fed during haying time or barn raisings. But she never sat down to eat herself, just grabbed food on the fly as she served it to all the others. Her cookstove was the pride of the county. Black and gleaming, she must have polished it every day.

Her kitchen window faced west and when she washed the dishes the sun was in her eyes. So she found a pair of old sunglasses and wore them with a straw hat at the sink while she scrubbed her pots clean.

When she died, they found four cloth bags full of coins buried deep in her dresser. Each was labeled with the name of one of her boys and contained egg money she had saved for them over the years. Ardis never had a new dress or went to a movie, but she left her boys something after she was gone.

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Memorable Presentations - Part 2

This information comes from:
Presentation Helper

KISS.
Reduce your presentation to simple concepts and your audience should be able to follow you. If you go beyond their understanding they will switch off.

Don't use PowerPoint sound effects.
It may seem funny to have applause at the end of a slide, or a screeching sound for a new bullet point, but it will turn off your audience.

Check out the room before your presentation.
Make sure the room has everything that you need and make sure the presentation works on the screen. If possible go up the day before - or at least an hour beforehand. This will avoid any nasty surprises during your presentation.

Don't drink the night before - and certainly don't get drunk.
Alcohol recovery or a hangover can destroy your presentation. Alcohol will drain all of the enthusiasm from your voice. And if you've had a drink before you go on, your voice could be slightly slurred. Best avoid it, the time for a drink is after, not before.

Don't lock your knees.
When you get to the lectern, unlock your knees and act as if you were about to catch a ball. It will relax you and make your presentation flow much more smoothly.

Leave handouts.
You have gone to a lot of effort to produce your presentation. Leaving handouts will reinforce your messages and help your audience remember your presentation. Always include your contact details so that audience members can contact you.

Memorize your presentation.
Do not read from your notes, unless you are frozen or not prepared. Reading sounds flat and stilted. If you have learned your speech, it will sound natural and you will even have the chance to ad lib if the opportunity arises.

If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.
People think that they can "wing it" but, in reality, those who appear to be "winging it" are often very well prepared. Give your presentation at least five times to the wall, friends, and neighbors before giving it to your designated audience.

It takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Mark Twain

Off the cuff should mean well planned. You may have heard the tale about the man who accidentally left a dinner wearing the impromptu speaker's coat. In the coat pocket was a small pile of notecards with his speech written on them. The speech started with the words "I never expected to be asked to speak this evening!"

The professionals do it - so why shouldn't you?

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Memorable Presentations - Part 1

This information comes from:
Presentation Helper

Start with a quotation.
You can find lots of quotations on the Internet. One is bound to fit.

Produce an unusual statistic.
This could help build a connection with your audience. How about: 93.7% of statistics are made up on the spot. The web is filled with "strange but almost true" quotations.

Live with the fear.
All presenters are nervous before a presentation and if the fear goes away your performance will be flat. It is a combination of adrenaline and testosterone (which affects both men and women). Learn how to harness it like an athlete. Call it "anticipation" or "excitement".

Realize that you will come down.
If you have done well you will have been on a high - sometimes known as that Presentation Sensation. Realize that when this goes, often in the evening - you will feel low or even depressed. This is only temporary.

Clean your shoes.
You will be on display. Your audience will be looking at how well you are turned out, and they will look at your shoes.

The eyes have it.
Maintain good eye contact with the audience. Don't keep contact with only one group of the audience. Spread your attention around the room. No one ever complained of a presentation being too short. Long presentations can turn off the audience. Say what you have to say. Stop, ask for questions, and listen.

A picture is worth ten thousand words.
Use pictures instead of bullet points and your message retention should increase. Research suggests that this could be by a factor of five. Avoid jargon. People really do play buzzword bingo. Whether it the "TLA" - Three Letter Abbreviation or the "Paradigm Shift" you don't want the audience to be scoring points at your expense Involve the audience.

Make the presentation interactive.
If you can.

Monday, May 7, 2007

My Work: Lenny's Girls - Part 2

We had chickens and it was beginning to sound like a real farm.

Every morning I opened the back doors of the van to let them out. Then I’d fill their feeder and waterer and shovel any grain spilled onto the floor of the van out into the yard along with kitchen scraps. The pullets wouldn’t touch the spilled grain inside but would dive after it in the yard. I guess presentation is everything.

Grit went into their feed because chickens don’t have any teeth to grind their grain. They swallow small stones that gather in a small sac called a crop in their digestive system. The grain they eat goes into the crop where it’s ground up against the stones by muscular action.

Our pullets became hens when they began to lay after twenty-five weeks. They continued for a full year before their first molt, when they lost their wing feathers and fell out of production for six weeks or so. After the molt they lay for another year, but never at the level of the first year. Laying hens make their eggshells out of calcium, so I added oyster shell for calcium to their grain. I could tell which hens were laying well because making egg yolks pulls carotene out of their bodies. Their feet and beaks turn grey instead of orange.

We learned about diseases like blackhead, bluecomb, and bumblefoot; feather-pulling; egg eating; winter lights to keep them laying and petroleum jelly to keep their combs from freezing. Like most things, it turned out to be more complicated that I had thought.

One disaster happened when our Labrador pup, Major, got into the yard one day while we were gone. He reminded us that he was a bird dog when he proudly dropped Lenny’s rival rooster at Susan’s feet when we returned. We weren’t nearly as proud as he was, especially when we found six more dead layers in the front yard, wet from dog slobber.

Another time the sheep broke into the grain shed and ate a whole bag of our 100% organic grain. The original idea was for meat chickens to clean up after the sheep and now the sheep were trying to push their way to the head of the line.

It was Charlotte’s job to collect the dozen or so daily eggs. I always liked eggs, but I didn’t really know what a good egg was until I started getting them fresh, not factory-raised and one or two months old. Our eggs had thick shells that took a good whack against the side of the pan to break, then they stood up and stared back at me with their richly deep yolks like big orange eyes.

Lenny grew into a magnificent red-combed strutter twice as big as the hens. You don’t need a rooster to get eggs, but he took care of his girls. He shooed them inside if a hawk flew over and kept a wary eye on Charlotte when she gathered eggs. It was worth keeping a wary eye on him, too. When a friend from Los Angeles visited with her children, ages five and seven, they all wanted to gather eggs. We never turn down help, so I gave them the egg bucket and drove the tractor out to the drive shed to hitch up the mower.

On the way back, I saw our friend standing in the driveway with her head down and spots of blood on the ground. She had bent down to peek into the laying boxes for eggs and Lenny flew at her with his spurs up in the air and nailed her good. It was pandemonium as she fought him off while trying to get her kids out of the van so Lenny wouldn’t nail them, too. We laughed about it later, over omelets, but even a simple task like gathering eggs contains some surprises on the farm.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

My Work: Lenny's Girls - Part 1

The first spring on our farm, I asked Ray about welding me a frame with wheels that I could use for a chicken coop and move from paddock to paddock behind the sheep. My idea was to let meat chickens scratch around and eat any parasites to help keep the pastures clean. Then, when the chickens matured, we could sell the ones we didn’t eat ourselves.

He said, “I can do better than that. I have a van back by the woods. I was going to cut the engine out of it and make into a chicken coop, why don’t you take it?”

It was perfect – an old ambulance high enough inside to stand in, off the ground, critter tight, with lots of doors and windows. We removed the engine and all the useful parts and added a tongue for hauling it away. Then I drove my tractor down to his place and towed the chicken van home.

But, after reading a book or two on chickens, we decided on laying hens first instead of meat birds. In May, Susan and I fashioned an insulated enclosure in the basement with a 100-watt light bulb to keep the temperature at the 30˚ C that chicks need until they feather out. We covered the floor of the pen with wood shavings and peat moss, then we bought a gravity chick waterer that was basically a big white plastic jar topped by a red screw-on water tray. We filled the jar with fresh water, screwed the round tray onto the top, then turned the jar over so the water ran out a small hole in the jar and into the tray. We added an old metal chick feeder we found in one of the barns and our chick hotel was ready for our first guests.

We ordered day-old Barred Plymouth Rocks from the feed mill - twenty females and two males, all black balls of fluff with a white spot on their foreheads. They came in a cardboard box with holes punched in the top. I couldn’t believe the noise they made on the way back to our farm. Their high-pitched cheeping both thrilled me about our new venture and set my teeth on edge. I had heard of people raising chicks in their kitchen next to the wood stove for warmth. I was glad ours would be in the basement.

We found out why “bird-brain” is a insult. We had to dip the chick’s beaks in the water to make sure they knew where it was. They discovered their food all right, but we were constantly rescuing them from being stuck facing into corners like misbehaved schoolboys.

After four weeks, the chicks began to mature into the old-fashioned pullets with grey and white striped feathers that used to be found on every nineteenth century farm. When they started escaping from their enclosure, we figured they were ready for the van.

Susan, Conor, Charlotte and I built a yard out of chicken wire, nesting boxes and roosts but stopped short of promising to tow them to the lake in the summer for a dip. We carried the pullets out in plastic buckets. Conor named the largest and best-crowing rooster Lenny. We had chickens and it was beginning to sound like a real farm.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Writing for Style: Be Concrete

Concrete begins as careless, slovenly, and entirely feckless. It is promiscuous, doing what anyone wants if the person is strong enough to hold it--until it is committed, when it becomes fanatically adamant.

A concrete noun names something you can experience with one of your five senses. Something you can see (clouds), touch (silk), smell (a rose), hear (laughter), or taste (vinegar).

An abstract noun does not exist as a physical object in the world. It might name an emotion(such as anger and joy), an idea (such as justice and freedom), or a quality (such as generosity and determination). When we use abstract nouns in our writing, we can never be sure that our reader will know exactly what you mean because different abstract words mean different things to different people. Love may mean romance and fun or self-sacrifice and dedication. A reader cannot know what you mean when you use a word like love unless you follow it up with an explanation or bring it to life using concrete nouns.

Abstract: The storm was a thing of beauty.
For whom: the observer, the people hired to clean up, the architect testing her new design?
Concrete: The storm was a thing of beauty. The thundering waves rolled toward the shore. The wind bent the palm trees like huge fish caught on strong lines, and clouds raced each other across the sky. (Waves, palm trees, clouds, and sky are all concrete nouns that create a picture of the storm.

Abstract: You’ve given me love like I never had before.
What do you mean by love? Gifts of flowers and candy? Favours like scrubbing the bathroom floor or taking my nauseous Labrador puppy to the vet? Physical abuse if I look at another man/woman? Your bank account and PIN number?

Recent studies also show that lack of specificity and concreteness is a sign of an intention to deceive. Daniel Oppenheimer has just gone and proved that your English teacher and Strunk and White in The Elements of Style knew what they were talking about when they told you to lay off the five-dollar words.

More than style is at stake, says Oppenheimer, at Princeton University. People don't trust you when you load up on fancy words. Or, it turns out, when you choose fancy or italic fonts for your writing. In a series of five experiments, he found that people tended to rate the intelligence of authors who wrote essays in simpler language, using an easy to read font (Times New Roman), as higher than those who used bigger words and non-standard fonts.

The experiment involved sitting students down in front of a variety of written works - some translated bits of Descartes, grant applications, abstracts of dissertations, and other scientific stuff. They all tended to pick the straightforward writing.

Oppenheimer's resulting article, "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly" is published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology. In the psychology business, the bar for humour isn't set very high.

But is this discovery really new? Here's the Canadian Press Stylebook, a guide for Canadian reporters and editors, on the same point (from the section simply called "Writing"):

"Tighten sentences to clarify, inject life and save space. Be ruthless in cutting wordiness and secondary detail. "Replace cumbersome words with short, everyday words that convey the same meaning." That way, people may actually want to read the piece.

Be specific and concrete. You will have more credibility and your readers will thank you.