Saturday, May 31, 2008

Fishy Business

I mentioned I helped some fish move last weekend. Herring have been returning in greater numbers to spawn, particularly at the Upper Mystic Lake. A dam there makes it quite difficult to get from the Lower to Upper Mystic Lake.

The local paper reported efforts by an annual bucket brigade to lift the fish over the dam. Plans are under way to rebuild the dam with a herring ladder. For now a taxi service is necessary. Having read the article to my daughter, she got very excited about helping the fish and wanted to go out last weekend.

This first photo is one of the nets we were using to snag the herring.


There were quite a few people who showed up, in part due to the article in the newspaper.


Unfortunately, as one of the organizers mentioned in the article, predicting when the herring run to spawn is hit or miss. It's not like the fish have Memorial Day Weekend marked on their calendars to remind them to show up. Last year was a big hit with about 19,000 fish lifted. This year, not so much. My daughter and I did net one which made the trip worth while.

After our success, we gave way to others waiting for a turn with the nets. Here is a view from the dam.


Once the fish are caught, they are put in buckets of water. The buckets are hooked to lines and then hauled up by people on the dam who dump the fish into the Upper Mystic Lake on the other side of the dam. You can kind of see the lines hanging down here.


When we left, they had tallied all of 160 or so fish. A fun morning, despite the lack of herring.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Crash And Burn

MyMoEdBo Daze:
Total Pages: 101

Many thanks for the support and comments. They helped keep me motivated.

I am pulling the plug on this experiment. I will continue editing the book (not giving up) but the daily editing goal isn't working. I'm running up against other projects that need more attention. No use putting anyone through more boring posts.

That said, it did work in that I got through 101 pages (a nice prime number), many more than I would have done without the public posting of progress.

Hope you all had a great weekend. Mine included time with family, scraping wallpaper, and helping some fish move. Photos later on the last item.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Bleh

MyMoEdBo Day 18:
Zero pages. Can't get no worse.

Link of the Day:
Fantasy Friday. Blog for a beer, or something.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Not Ready For Prime

MyMoEdBo Day 17:
10 pages. I know, I could have pushed a little harder to get to 11. It was a good stopping point.

Link of the Day:
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Luckier

MyMoEdBo Day 16:
13 pages. From now on I will only edit pages in prime number groups.

Link of the Day:
Vintage Cartoons

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Another Day

MyMoEdBo Day 15:
5 pages. Wasn't there a Peanuts character named 5?

Link of the Day:
World Changing

Monday, May 19, 2008

No No!

MyMoEdBo Days 13 & 14:
3 and 0 pages respectively. Weekends have been a drag.

After two weeks, 70 pages edited, which sounds great! But the goal is 10 pages a day, or 140 pages by now. To catch up, I'll need to average over 14 pages per day for the next 16 days. Enough math.

Link of the Day:
Double link since I missed a post.

Food Not Bombs
Punk Rock Hockey Mom

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Yo Yo!

MyMoEdBo Day 12:
5 pages. Up and down with the page count. Crazy. Diving in head first into the weekend.

Link of the Day:
I can't even remember why I bookmarked this. Besides the excellent writing of course. Articles in Fantasy Magazine by Tempest Bradford.

Friday, May 16, 2008

TGIF

MyMoEdBo Day 11:
9 pages. Back on track.

Link of the Day:
About SF, one of those sites I always mean to read but never get around to. The lessons library looks interesting.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Golden Egg

MyMoEdBo Day 10:
Golden goose egg. Which would be a zero. I feel like I should post an excuse of the day. This time it was the paying day job. On the plus side ...

Link of the Day:
... the new website for the day job client went live this morning. Isn't it shiny?

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Pause

MyMoEdBo Day 9:
Zero pages. Had a house guest so writing productivity was low.

Link of the Day:
My short story did not win the 2008 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Award. Ah well. Didn't look like a fair fight for genre piece anyway.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Cheers

MyMoEdBo Day 8:

11 pages.

Link of the Day:
Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio

Monday, May 12, 2008

Jeers

MyMoEdBo Day 7:
Zero.

Twas a busy day. Total for week #1: 42 pages edited. Which would be 28 short of the goal. Have to play catch up this week.

Link of the Day:
SF Novelists blog.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Famished

MyMoEdBo Day 6:

A mere 2 pages again. I still consider it a victory as the pages were done at 11pm.

A busy day which included seeing the new live-action Speed Racer movie. A review in the local paper compared the movie to eating a huge bag of your favorite candy. I guess it depends on your sugar tolerance; after the movie ended I wanted to sneak around the megaplex so I could watch it again. Thank goodness my daughter talked some sense into me.

Link of the Day:
The blog of Scott Westerfeld.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Lucky

MyMoEdBo Day 5:

13 pages. On to the weekend.

Link of the Day:
Everything you ever wanted to know about Speed Racer.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Future Looks Bright

MyMoEdBo Day 4:

6 pages. Half-day of school put a damper on things. Better day ahead.

Link of the Day:
Remnants of Skystone, scheduled for release in the fall, is a side-scrolling, steampunk, massive-multiplayer-online game. Very strange. One may keep tabs on the progress through its blog.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Feast Or Famine

MyMoEdBo Day 3:

2. As in Two. Two very nice, solid pages. But II.

Catch up time.

Link of the Day:
Weirdness from Larry Niven. Via Daily Kos, which is more than slightly left. Grain of salt and all that.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

On A Roll

11 pages yesterday. Progress!

Link of the Day:
MLB's Beat The Streak Contest. Pick a baseball player who you think will get a hit. Do it successfully for 57 days straight and win $1 million. Simple.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Almost

Only 8 pages yesterday. Better than zero.

Link Of The Day:
Jon Armstrong wrote the excellent book Grey. He has a podcast now called If You're Just Joining Us.

Sunday, May 04, 2008

MyMoEdBo

Last Book Read: Phil Gordon's Little Green Book by Phil Gordon

Bad writer. Bad.

Good wage earner, but bad writer. My promises of refocusing and kick-butt action have been hollow. I've got 20 bad karma days; one more and my Call of Chaucer rating will go into negative numbers. Time to fall back on what has worked in the past.

Daily, public accountability. My Month of Editing the Book (MyMoEdBo - catchy eh?) begins tomorrow. 30 days. 10 pages+ a day. Reported here on the blog, for better or worse.

I realize this won't be the most fascinating reading. I'll add in a link a day from my cluttered browser bookmarks and delete the link from the list, thus killing two birds with one blog.

Ready. Steady. Go.