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The Perfect Storm: A Vacation Travelogue (Part 1)

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By the time our Caribbean cruise included a showing of The Perfect Storm in our stateroom, I could have told you it was going to be THAT kind of vacation. We’d gone on a similar cruise a few years earlier, and even though they’d played Titanic during that week, we’d managed to have a lovely time anyway. So why did this week have to be so different? It was literally the same itinerary.

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This time, though, most of the week felt like a comedy of errors. Light on the comedy part, and heavy on the errors. Wayne flew to the port in Tampa from Pittsburgh, but I opted to take the train. I’d earned a boatload of Amtrak Rewards points (yes, a boatload—nobody says “a trainload”) on last year’s cross-country train trip. Might as well use ’em. Plus, I hate flying. Win-win, right? Maybe.

On the way to Philadelphia (where I’d board a sleeper car southward to Tampa), I bought a breakfast sandwich and coffee and nimbly carried them back to my coach seat. Then I noticed I’d spilled coffee all over my jacket as the train lurched while I walked from the café car. Nice going. Nimbly, my ass.

I climbed aboard the Silver Meteor after a short layover in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, with its uncomfortable “mod” furniture in their first-class Club Acela lounge.

20181230_112805(“Captain Kirk, I’m heading for the bridge…”)

As I settled into my comfy roomette and the train pulled away from the station, I couldn’t find my phone. I was sure it had been in my purse when I left the lounge to head to the train, but that pocket on my purse was now uncustomarily unzipped. The sleeping car attendant and I searched for it high and low (mostly low—I’m short and I hadn’t put any luggage on the top bunk).

You’d think it’d be impossible to lose a phone in a room the size of a shoebox. Apparently not. I panicked and realized I must have left it in the lounge. The lounge back in Philly.

Philly, the city we had just left behind us.

The attendant called the Club Acela lounge on his cell phone (since we couldn’t use mine), and I talked to the staff there. There was no sign of my phone where I’d been sitting. And literally no one had accompanied me or touched me or even gotten all up in my personal space as I’d trudged from the lounge onto the train. Now I wondered if I had dropped it onto the tracks in that small gap between the train and the platform.

Mind the gap. Ugh.

I grabbed my Amazon Fire tablet, latched onto the train’s Wi-Fi (which was, to my amazement, working properly), and dashed off an email to Wayne, begging him to suspend my phone’s account so no one could run up data charges. God bless him, he did this immediately.

Now my only worry was whether I’d embedded passwords into any of the apps on the phone. I sat in my roomette for the next hour changing passwords on every account I could think of.

On social media, in the meantime, folks were trying to be helpful, offering suggestions for finding the phone, and the perfect storm began.

1. Have someone call your phone so it’ll ring.
Nice try, but I had turned the sound completely off overnight so random texts or notifications wouldn’t wake me up. I’d had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to catch the train on time, and I needed every second of sleep I could get.

2. Ping your phone from your Google account with “Google, find my phone.”
Another nice try, but I had just untethered my phone from all things Google a week earlier, after reading one too many stories of people realizing their phones were tracking their every movement and then showing them ads for things on Facebook they had discussed with people on their phones. Google is Big Brother, and it must be stopped. So, I stopped it.

3. Use the Find My Phone app on your laptop or tablet.
This works only with iPhones. Guess who owns an LG X-Charge phone? Well, no, guess who used to own an LG X-Charge phone?

I wasn’t sure how stupid I should feel about these things (answer: pretty stupid), but the phrase “perfect storm” kept running through my mind. Little did I know how much that phrase was going to follow me for the rest of that week.

—

Next installment: Be careful what you wish for: Linda finds her phone

This is a Public Service Announcement

If you get new post notifications and emails from me today, I hereby apologize. I’m migrating my website, and that includes moving and reposting some older blog entries from the previous site. Ignore any notifications about new posts for the next day or so.

I’ll come up with a catchy, obvious post title when I’m back to new blog posts.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled internet, already in progress.

Rise, Ye Mighty Tent!

The mighty Author Tent for Beaver County BookFest arises skyward today on Market Street in downtown Beaver, Pa. The greatest book festival in the state kicks off tomorrow night (Sept. 8) at 7 p.m. with an all-female author panel Q&A discussing all aspects of the writing craft and business. It’s a fundraiser for a local school library, so come on out and enjoy food, beverages (adult and otherwise), and fun while helping a great cause.
 
Then, Saturday, Sept. 8, the main event runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. This is a free admission festival, with food vendors, other book-related retail vendors, and, of course, the more than five dozen authors inside the aforementioned big Author Tent.

 

My copies of Train of Thought: Travel Essays from a One-Track Mind showed up on my porch yesterday, and as of today it’s also available on Amazon. So now I can breathe easily. Along with copies of my four other books, I’m now officially ready for BookFest!
 
By Sunday afternoon, I’ll be ready to collapse… much like this tent will do at about the same time. Come see it while it’s still set up!
 
(top photo, credit Valentine Brkich, http://valentinebrkich.com/ )

Real Life Encroaches

I’ve been back from my cross-country bucket-list train trip for about a week now. Hard to tell exactly, though, because my brain hasn’t fully adjusted to having a routine again.
That’s probably because I had to make three long car trips up east of the city this first week back:
  • one to pick up the guinea pigs (and apparently guinea pigs do not appreciate being stuffed into a small plastic box and carted 50 miles in a car while “Weird Al” Yankovic music is blaring over the car speakers);
  • one to join my daughters on a house-hunting spree (which included one house where we were counting the bullet holes in the windows and matching up the trajectories of similar holes found in the dining room wall—just like an episode of CSI, yay!);
  • and one to attend a standing-room-only memorial service for the wife of my first RP pastor.
Talk about a week of ups and downs!

At home I’ve been trying to:
  • catch up on freelance work;
  • sort through 1,500 pictures and 20,000 words of notes from the trip;
  • do laundry (apparently people like to wear clean underwear around here—how rude);
  • go grocery shopping (apparently these same people appreciate eating several times per day—every day);
  • and stare at the waving fields of wheat in our backyard. Well, it’s just uncut grass, because the lawn mower Wayne ordered in early April still needs to be picked up in Calcutta—Ohio, not India (though, judging from how long it’s taking him to go get it, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not in India).

No matter what, though, I’m still organizing those trip notes and am now buckling down to turn all this raw data into Train of Thought this summer. Those of you who backed me on Indiegogo (and thank you for that!) will be glad to know that I’ll be contacting you soon about mailing addresses for hard copies of the book and email addresses for the Kindle editions.
Other than all that … I think I need a nap. One in a real bed that doesn’t convert back into a cute little seat on a train once morning hits. Having said that, I do miss someone else cooking all my meals and sometimes serving them to me in my private little room. Those rare steaks were pretty good! Maybe I’ll grill a few ribeyes this weekend … if I can find the grill amid the wheat fields.

But Wait … There’s More!

Thanks to all of you marvelous backers for a successful, fun Indiegogo campaign for Train of Thought! I couldn’t have done it without you! Well, technically, I could  have, but it would have been a pointless waste of time to write up an entire campaign only to donate a thousand bucks to myself and then watch Indiegogo take a cut. I’ve done stupider things, but not lately.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, I was thanking you lovable, wacky knuckleheads…

Thanks!

Thanks to you, now the credit card company will stop throwing panicky fits over that huge charge I made to Amtrak a few weeks ago.

I’ve already made quite a few notes for the book, and I haven’t even left yet. But of course, a strangely introspective trip like this is going to start in my head months ahead of time. That’s the beauty of our overthinking, introvert brains: we never stop asking, “What if?” We are the kings and queens of the Worst-Case Scenario.

The official trip starts in early May, around midnight here in Pittsburgh. Due to my husband’s work schedule at that time, he can’t drive me to the station. So I’ll start off with a cab ride to the train station downtown. And I’m already obsessing over whether the cab will show up on time. (Just ONE time I called a cab in the 1990s and it was late, and I’ll never let myself forget it.)

Once I acclimated to the idea of a cab, though, I realized I might as well start the trip off with an introvert’s worst nightmare: sitting alone late at night in a small vehicle with a stranger who will drop me off in a desolate part of the downtown area. Yay!

And of course it will be smooth sailing from there. Right? Because… what could go wrong?*

——

*rhetorical question, not meant for actual answers

P.S. If any of your friends (or enemies, I’m not picky) still want to get in on this sweet campaign deal at one of my many backer levels, the campaign will continue to run until the trip. Oh sure, anyone will be able to buy the book after it comes out in September, but only backers will get combo deals on my other books, plus exclusive, hand-wringing updates like this one (including some photos and maybe video!) during the actual trip. (If you didn’t feel special before, I bet you’re preening like crazy now.)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/train-of-thought-book-travel/x/7437287#/

Feel free to share this link with anyone. I’m not proud. Plus, that credit card company is still hassling me about the other half of that large Amtrak transaction…

 

But Where Do I Put My Passport?

Don’t get over-excited, but I bought a new wallet for the train trip. What’s wrong with my current wallet? Nothing, really. Except this new one not only holds my credit cards, cash, and travel documents, but also will do my laundry and help me memorize the entire New Testament. At least, that’s what I’m guessing based on the little insert that came with it. I’m reproducing the text exactly as it appears—typos, bad punctuation, and odd capitalization included.
I’m not doing this to mock whatever bad Google translation program they probably utilized to go from Chinese to English. I’m merely asking myself this: Does it seem as if they assume English-speaking folks need to have things repeated many times, with slightly different wording, in order to remember them?
I offer you the following, without commentary, if only because some things need no explanation:
  • This High Density linen/cotton blended fabric All-in-One Passport Holder fits your iphone, Holding Passport, Boarding Card, Credit Cards, Tickets.  Coins, Keys, money, other documents, etc.
  • The Passport Wallet is simple, compact, lightweight, zippered and multifunctional. Portable and Compact case, is easily held in Handbag passport holder. men’s and women’s travel gear case. An ideal travel accessory holder, a nice cover for your passport.
  • Best travel documents holder with smooth Closing Zipper, secure wallet that protects your travel accessories. A zip around travel wallet for your convenience.
  • Durable travel wallet with multiple pockets, perfect for all your needed documents.
  • A slim small wallet for holding and making easy to access your documents while traveling. Fits your hand, your bag, and your jacket pocket.
Doesn’t this make you want to go out and buy twelve of these wallets? Or invest in company stock? Or stab someone?

 

Way-Back Wednesday (Typecasting): Underwood TM-5

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I Can (Literally) Do This in My Sleep

This is how wicked-awesome I am at proofreading and copy editing. I can now say with confidence that I can do it in my sleep.

One of my many job-juggling tasks is editing Web content written by a writing service. The man in charge hires writers to produce the basic content for various Web sites. So, you know, if Joe’s Garage in Kentucky wants to start a Web site, they need someone to write all that initial content. They probably don’t want one of the grease monkeys fiddling with HTML and text on that old computer they use to print out invoices in the office. They hire someone to produce that content.

And then the writing service hires me to edit that content before they send it to Joe’s Garage.

All of this glamour for a whopping $.0025 a word. (Yes, that’s correct. I didn’t add an extra zero there. I get a quarter of a cent per word.)

This is still a good deal for me because I’ve streamlined the work enough that I can make a tidy little sum per hour while sitting in my jammies late at night with my laptop … while watching a marathon of The Walking Dead on AMC.

Often, the guy who hired me will ask if I’m available to edit today, and I’ll write back with an eager, “Yes, please! I want some more!” … not unlike the Dickens orphan Oliver in that sad British musical of the same name.

That doesn’t mean he’ll send over a batch of content right away, though. Yesterday, for instance, he asked at 2 p.m. if I was available, and I immediately said yes. But the batch of content didn’t show up until 8 p.m., due by this morning.

That’s fine. I’m a freelancer. I’ve learned to juggle multiple projects. In fact, I like switching from one task to another throughout the day. It feeds into my Project-A.D.H.D. quite nicely. But, when the content arrived at 8 p.m., I wasn’t quite ready for it. So, I finished what I was doing and then started on the Web content well after 10 p.m.

Sometime after midnight, not even the zombies on the TV could keep me awake. When my attention starts to flag on this job, it helps to read the articles out loud as I’m adding red slash marks with Word’s Track Changes. It gives me a sense of cadence in the writing and helps me catch all sorts of errors.

(Note: This method works in the living room only when I am the only one home. If Wayne is around and trying to watch Duck Dynasty or a Modern Marvels episode on the ten worst submarine accidents, I try not to read articles on the most effective hemorrhoid removal in all of Houston, Texas, out loud. It ruins his concentration.)

Last night, though, not even reading out loud could keep me awake. On nearly a dozen occasions, each about two minutes apart, I found myself nodding suddenly awake—you know, that head-dip thing you do when you nod off sitting up, when your neck hits the bottom of its natural pendulum swing and your body jolts itself awake. I had a vague awareness that I had been speaking out loud and then had just stopped. The cursor on the screen was still in the same spot in the Word document where I had stopped speaking.

So, I continued on. I was determined to get through this batch before going to bed, rather than setting the alarm (!!) to get up and finish it in the morning.

On the very last piece of content, though—for a chimney and air-duct cleaning service somewhere on the East Coast—I not only nodded off multiple times, but I realized as I woke back up that I was still speaking the whole time. Unfortunately, since my eyes had closed and my brain had mostly shut down, I wasn’t reading the actual Web content on the screen. I was saying whatever words were jostling around in my brain trying to get out.

One time I think I was saying “horse and buggy,” though I don’t know why. Another time I caught myself saying “house house house” over and over again. The last time, I was repeating nonsense syllables of some sort: “Nuhhh… huhhh… nuhhh…”

After sitting up straighter and adjusting my laptop screen, I finished the rest of the batch and uploaded it.

But now I’m afraid to go look at what I did to that article in my sleep. I’m afraid I might have suggested that people come on down from their house house house in their horse and buggy to ask about air duct cleaning.

More Proof That Proofreading Isn’t Boring

Well, perhaps I exaggerate. But, here are links to a two-part interview with yours truly about my favorite topic in the whole world (after Gene Wilder and “Weird Al” Yankovic or potential nuclear power plant disasters): proofreading!

Author Dora Machado (my favorite client) interviewed me about my nitpickiness as a career path. Read both parts here (and it’s in two parts because I have way more opinions about this than a normal person has a right to have):

What a Proofreader Can Do for You, and Why OCD Has a Role in the Profession

And, part 2:

Why Texting is a Tool of the Devil and Proofreading Your work Matters . . . A lot!