Author Questionnaires are not fun so I’m consoling myself with fantasy

Today I made the most boring book webpage ever – at present it has nothing but the title, my name, and a picture of me that may or may not be the one I’ll use on the book. (It’s not bad, as pics of me go. Mostly because it’s not very close up.) I won’t even bother linking to the page until there’s more on it.

But I think I should start explaining just what the hell it is I’ve been writing about, and to that end I intend do a few explanatory posts, posted here and on the more public blog. I expect to write three, at least: one on “What is a Business Process, and Why Should I Care?”, one on “Process Systems, or Why Don’t Processes Like to Go It Alone?” and one on “My Point, and I Do Have One: The Main Things I Want to Say in this Book”. Stay tuned!

On a completely and totally different book topic, as you might have noticed yesterday I’ve been rereading The Secret Country books, and I have just this minute concluded that Ellen and Laura are actually Eliza and Ann, from Edward Eager’s Thyme Garden and Knight’s Castle. There’s even a line directly quoted from Eager, if I’m not mistaken. In fact, quite a lot of The Hidden Country can be viewed as a rewrite of Knight’s Castle in which gore is actual gory and painful decisions are actually unpleasant. (I suspect that what really happened is that Pamela Dean wrote the series in tribute to and rethinking of the whole genre of magic-adventure books, and that Eager is just one part of it. But I bet I’m right about Ellen’s line about her horse, “I always meant to get to know mine and develop a wonderful bond with it” being a quote from Eliza!)

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

liking it here

This is not the technical post I promised to write.

I just wanted to say how much I like living in Oregon! Tonight I couldn’t bear to stay home (Ted’s on travel until tomorrow, and the job people not only haven’t gotten back to me but when I checked in the auto-reply from the HR person said she’s on holiday from today through July 8). So I went to the local yarn shop, which was having a spinner’s night. I don’t spin, but figured they wouldn’t mind me taking up a chair knitting. So first I got conversation ranging from spinning technicalities way over my head, to the use of oil from deep-fried turkeys at Thanksgiving for bio-fueled cars, to my process book and how my ideas fit in with Intel culture (the locals say people do actually follow standard processes there). Then I wlked around the corner to pick up Indian take-out, and while I was waiting for that wandered around, dropped into a local wine bar, and picked up a small-batch Champagne (actual, not just methode champenoise) for our 20th anniversary next Thursday (yes, July 4).

I could have done all that walking around in Eindhoven, granted, and I wouldn’t have even had to drive out to that area in the first place (it’s 10 minutes or less from here by car, and there’s plenty of parking, though). On the other hand, most of the discussion would have been in Dutch and though the wine shop would be nearby, it would have been closed at that hour – it was around 8:30 when I got there. And the use of turkey-cooking oil to fuel cars seems very Oregonian. The yarn shop wouldn’t have been open, either, or having multiple gatherings a week.

I dunno. I just like it here. I think it’s the combination of the stuff I liked in the Netherlands (it’s not nearly as walkable here, but the Orenco area is, and plenty of stuff is a short bike ride away, plus there are farmer’s markets and a cool climate) with the things I like about the US (cheaper food, conversations in English (that’s not a criticism of the Dutch, I just didn’t work hard enough), stores open late, good shopping). There’s a liberal culture I haven’t experienced in the US since I left Philadelphia in 1989, and an ecology-minded attitude I haven’t encountered elsewhere in the US at all – the Netherlands comes close in some ways but looks at things a bit differently.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.