Two more days

The Strategy document is in the home stretch, last minute revisions and wordsmithing were being done today by a work group before being passed on to the division chief, he'll do his comments sometime between whenever he gets the document this evening (the work group was still fussing over it when I made my escape for the day) and tomorrow morning when he'll kick it back to me to do the final clean-up. That's when, of course, I plan to undo a bunch of the stuff that's been done by the workgroup, but they don't need to know that. None of them wants to believe that they collectively have the writing skills of a rock.

One of the key editorial skills I do possess is being able to clean up cumbersome prose without the authors realizing it's been cleaned up, a skill that's been sorely tested by the steaming pile of fecal matter that is the Strategy. There's only so much that can be done with an agency is determined to persist in speaking bureaucratese instead of English. There is good stuff in the Strategy, but it's going to take a lot of shoveling to find that particular pony.

Found out at yesterday's staff meeting the division chief has to hand carry copies to various players in DC on Monday (folks at the General Accounting Office, people with the Obama transition team, and assorted other "stakeholders" inside the Beltway) so whatever the document is going to be, it's going to be it by about 3 p.m. Friday afternoon to allow time for running it to Kinko's to have some spiral bound copies burned. After that, I should never have to think about it again.

Thinking about the economy

Vintage clothes and vanity sizing, an update

A few weeks ago I mentioned having some vintage (circa late 1950s, early 1960s) dresses that I've been considering selling through Etsy. They're all labeled with what I'd consider fairly large sizes (14, 15, 16) so the question was what's the modern equivalent.

The Younger Daughter suggested I bring them to Texas at Thanksgiving. She'd try them on, and we'd be able to extrapolate from her size to the dresses' sizes. So I did -- brought half a dozen dresses, and to say a size 16 from from 1960 is not a size 16 in 2008 is an understatement.

Both of these dresses are labeled as 16s. Tammi wears about an 8. The top dress, the pink polka dots, fit fine, although she did have a little trouble figuring out the mysteries of a side placket zipper (she'd never seen one before). (The dress has never been worn -- still has the tags from Gimbels department store -- but I have no idea why.)

This beautiful blue linen dress, on the other hand, although labeled as a 16, is more like a 6. Tammi was able to get into it, but it was obviously small -- among other clues, it flattened her chest into oblivion. Which was a shame, because we agreed it's a gorgeous dress. Fine quality workmanship, wonderful detailing (triple darts on the bodice), and a style that a person could actually wear into work today, if, of course, a person had an office job. Although it looks like a straight skirt, there's actually a deep pleat in the back that provides enough material to make it possible to sit comfortably.

Cane River Creole National Historical Park: Oakland Plantation

It was a rather gray day when we visited the park last month, but here are a few photos from Cane River Creole National Historical Park, starting with a side view of the main house at Oakland Plantation, one of the two plantations that comprise the park. The modern structure to the side of the stairs is an elevator that allows the structure to be accessible to all park visitors. The house is a wonderful example of Creole architecture. There is a ground floor to the building, but it's the equivalent of a basement and was used for primarily for storage, with the exception of living quarters for the cook. There is an attic, but, although there are dormer windows, it also was primarily for storage.

The main house as viewed by visitors from the walkway from the plantation general store to the house. I thought the plastic walkway was a great idea for a wet climate. Water goes right through it, but no one ends up walking in mud. The garden in front of the house is known as The Bottle Garden -- the flowerbeds are outlined with wine bottles embedded neck down. It was kind of a neat effect, and I'm wishing now I'd gotten a better photo of it. The interpretive ranger wasn't able to provide much information (it was only his tenth day on the job so he was still learning the park; however, if we'd been at all curious about Natchez NHP he would have been a fount of information because that was his last duty station) but said he thought the Bottle Garden had been established in the late 19th century. Oakland was owned by the same family, the Prudhommes, for multiple generations, which is one reason it retained remarkable integrity and made it a good candidate for consideration as a historical park. They also drank a lot of wine so had lots of empties to work with.

View from the veranda looking down the live oak allee toward the main road and the historic approach to the house. I'm always fascinated by the resurrection ferns covering the oak limbs.

Outbuildings behind the main house include a laundry shed, chicken coops, and a carpenter's shop. The plantation also included a general store, slave quarters, mule barns, equipment sheds, a smaller house known as the Doctor's House which now houses administrative offices for the park and an overseer's house.

The overseer's house:

Having worked in NPS cultural resources, I still mentally do condition assessment for structures and landscapes when I visit parks. Cane River's had a fair amount of money and work poured into since its establishment in the 1990s. There are before and after photos on display in the store for a number of structures, and there are obvious stabilization and preservation efforts in place. There's plastic netting over the remnant wallpaper in the overseer's house to prevent what's left from being peeled off by vandals, and the exteriors of several buildings have rolled roofing sheathing the walls. According to our guide, the management plan calls for the house to reflect an early 1960s appearance, which struck me as a nicely pragmatic decision: the same family lived there for multiple generations; the 1960s is the last time any major changes were made to the interior (the kitchen was updated); it makes perfect sense to use that as a marker for telling the entire story of the property. In short, no major restoration headaches, just stabilization and routine maintenance.

Although the front of the overseer's house is wood siding, the side and rear elevations had apparently been sheathed with faux masonry asphalt siding in the past. That was apparently the last siding put on the house, so I'm kind of wondering if they plan to do a restoration on that.

Oakland's cash crop in the 19th century was cotton so the property at one time included numerous slave cabins. Following the Civil War the owners switched to a share cropping system that included (of course) debt peonage through the Prudhomme-owned general store. Only two cabins remain extant; both had been quite derelict when the park was created in 1994, but have since been stablized. This is one of them.

The exteriors are sheathed with rolled roofing; my assumption is that's a stabilization measure.

The park also includes Magnolia Plantation, but I think I'll do that as a separate post.

Who says there's no good news out there?

In today's AJC: Bill O'Reilly to end syndicated radio show

Welcome to my world

A small sample of what I'm currently attempting to turn into standard English:

"[the document](hereafter The Strategy) takes stock of current capabilities and opportunities to improve to steer a highly distributed nationwide effort that makes better use of our nationwide health information infrastructure to assure health security for all Americans."

It's going to be a long day.

More adventures in bureaucracy

Yesterday was one of those Harlan Ellison days, one long experience in "I have no mouth but I must scream" as I suffered through two really long pointless meetings. The Document is coming down to the wire, the absolute drop dead date for anything substantive to get added was last week, on November 26, but minor comments are still trickling in -- and of course no one has the spine to tell any of these people, look, we gave you a deadline, you missed it. Your comment will be cataloged and considered when the Document is updated next year.

The formatting is still a mess, the pagination is not right, and I've got a project manager who thinks it's useful for me to spend endless hours in teleconferences debating whether or not "member states" should be capitalized when used in the phrase "member states of the European Union." She even had the nerve to put someone else on the computer to do the Live Meeting shared screen as we went through the document and to tell me to just "sit and take notes."

I also got to go back and forth with a scientist who wanted to use the phrase "countries with good public health surveillance capability, e.g., the European community, Canada, and Japan." The man has multiple degrees so must have taken an English composition course at some point in his career. He would have an absolute hissy fit if I were to say something like "infectious diseases, e.g., typhoid, influenza, and asbestosis.*" Didn't he ever watch Sesame Street?? One of these things is not like the others! Finally got him to agree to member states . . . and then we wasted another 15 minutes on capitalization. I finally got pushed into saying "You guys can have all the opinions you want on this issue, but if the Large Nameless Agency style guide says it's wrong, I'm going with the style guide. I won't argue science with you, don't argue grammar and punctuation with me." Jaws kind of dropped -- apparently support staff (and that's how the editors are viewed) aren't supposed to either argue or draw lines in the dirt.

Monday is going to be another day in hell -- nothing but meetings from noon to 5 p.m. -- but that should be it. Then I'll have 4 final days to clean up formatting and also clean out my office . . . Friday afternoon the document (or at least my association with it) is done, and the following week I'll be back in my cozy little cubicle dealing with one lead author at a time instead of committees and work groups.

I quite frankly don't understand why we bothered with the teleconferencing to "vet" comments at all. We received very few, and the ones we did get were extremely minor. One or two people suggested slight changes in phrasing, but nothing that altered the overall content or concept. I have, however, learned since arriving at LNA that the organizational culture here consists of endless second-guessing and fretting about minutiae. And there is a definite addiction to holding meeting after meeting to rehash stuff that's been discussed a zillion times before.

*Update/clarification: the first two illnesses are contagious diseases; asbestosis is a noncontagious condition caused by exposure to asbestos.

The Pulitzer Project begins

I started reading Ernest Poole's His Family last night. It was immediately obvious why I'd never heard of the book, the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize back in 1918. Calling it dated is an understatement. It may have been published in 1917, but it feels very 19th century. It's not actually a bad book -- I've managed to read worse from cover to cover -- but the style feels overly contrived and so far none of the characters are particularly appealing.

The central character, the "him" of His Family, comes across as a self-centered twit, a solidly middle class businessman with nativist leanings (he's appalled by the immigrants who are "ruining" his city), which may be intentional (Poole was a progressive journalist noted for his sympathies toward the labor movement and social reform) but it still makes it hard to get interested in either the primary character or the people around him. I'm already looking forward to 1919 and Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons. I read Tarkington in high school, and have a vague memory of actually liking the book.

Speaking of luck

Update: If this was true, there's a woman in West, Texas, who would now be wealthy beyond her wildest dreams.

Depressing news

Woke up to the depressing news that Senator Shameless managed to get re-elected. There was some unintentional humor in the news report, though, as Channel 2 said "Chambliss will take some time off before returning to Washington in January. . ." As far as I can tell by looking at his voting record, he's been taking some time off since his original election to the U.S. Senate in 2002. He has proposed no note-worthy legislation, and has been a nicely compliant rubber stamp for aWol's misguided policies. There was a strong volunteer effort to get out the vote, but, as usual in run-off elections, participation fell way short of what was needed.

I hate to think that once again Chambliss's incredibly sleazy, low road, name calling politics managed to bamboozle the voters -- but it's obvious they did.