Monday, January 7, 2013

I am moving and need help figuring out how to send my stuff across country AZ to CT.?

Q. I have a queen size matress and a 5 piece bedroom set I would like to take with me. Does anyone know of companies that will ship small amounts or ship multable parties iteams in one truck to save $$? It is okay if it is a company that waits till the truck is full to ship it.
I have a queen size matress and a 5 piece bedroom set I would like to take with me. Does anyone know of companies that will ship small amounts or ship multable parties iteams in one truck to save $$? It is okay if it is a company that waits till the truck is full to ship it. And I have to drive my car so I can't use a U Haul
And I have to drive my car so I can't use a U Haul

A. Have you called the major moving companies? I have a friend who did something like what you're talking about. He moved only part of his furniture from Seattle to Texas. He was allowed to share a moving van with other customers. I think that he had to wait until the truck filled up like you said. He used Mayflower or United Van Lines, I think.


What are some Hawaiian Lullibies?
Q. what are some hawaiian lullabies called? I can't seem to find any on the internet. Please and Thank You!

A. By the way, the name of the song with the refrain "Where I live, there are rainbows" is actually "Hawaiian Lullaby". Oh, that song made me cry when I lived far away from Hawaii.

There is a song called "Slack-Key Lullaby", but you won't find it on the internet. It's on a rare CD that came out of a folklife festival in Seattle several years ago. I believe the performer on that track was Pekelo Cosma, out of Hana. I had a search for that one on e-Bay for months before I finally scored it. But you'll find that any slack-key album from performers like Cindy Combs, Ledward Kaapana, Ray Kane, Sonny Chillingworth, Keola Beamer, and more will have a lullaby-like quality to it.

What makes slack key or "Ki hoalu" fantastic for lulling babies and adults to sleep? There are a number of reasons. For some reason, slack-key was a secret, private art for decades. Some say that it was because the Hawaiians had given so much away and had so much taken away that they wanted to hold onto this one thing for themselves. The ways the guitars were tuned were family secrets. It's also possible the players didn't want to hear someone from another place tell them they tuned their guitars wrong.

So for most of the art's history, it was played by your papa for you at one o'clock in the morning, not in public. It tended to be a gift given to you by a loved one, not something to be performed for people who bought tickets.

Another reason it's good for sleepytime is that the chords don't resolve to mark the end of a phrase. It just kind of floats on forever, like some Celtic music, the compositions of Richard Wagner or Claude Debussy, or the theme to "Gone with the Wind". The way the guitars are tuned tends to set up sympathetic vibrations in neighboring strings, which lends even more of a dreamy feel to the music.

One of my favorite slack-key stories comes from the late Sonny Chillingworth, about a couple of young lovers on Molokai, whose parents didn't like each other. They couldn't date openly, so the young man used to sneak up to his girlfriend's bedroom window when she wasn't there. He'd use a needle to tie one end of a thread to her metal window screen. He would unwind the thread a good distance, and tie the other end to his guitar.

When she came into the room, he would play his guitar, and the sympathetic vibrations would send gentle music into her room through the screen. When he was finished, she would follow the thread to meet him in the paddocks. The two of them were Sonny Chillingworth's grandparents!


Best place to live in Seattle?
Q. I am looking to relocate to Seattle to attend UW as soon as possible. I am looking for a townhouse within my price range (Max. $250,000). I will have a car but would prefer to use mass transit to attend my classes. Also, I am in my late thirties so places near younger noise-makers are a deal-breaker. :-P

Any suggestions would be highly helpful.

Thanks

Rich

A. Townhomes are a newer style of construction here - you won't find many of them in-city, and those you do find are going to be newer (and usually more expensive).

At $250,000, most of what you are going to be finding in that price range will either be a condo (no yard), or will be much further out of town.

For attending the UW, I'd focus on neighborhoods or towns north of Lake Union. It helps you avoid downtown traffic and the bridges.

Neighborhoods to avoid - the immediate U district. Near Broadway on Capitol Hill, Wallingford near 45th.

I suggest doing a search with your pricing parameters at a web site that pulls from the multiple listing service - www.windermere.com and www.johnlscott.com both do and are pretty intuitive to use. Set your maximum budget and your desired amenities (# of bedrooms and bathrooms etc.), and see what comes up.

If you are willing to look further out of town, you'll find newer housing including townhomes in towns like Mountlake Terrace or Lynnwood to the north. There will be buses that drop you at 45th and I 5 (about a 10 minute walk to campus) that you can get from the park and rides in either town.


how can i make my sentences sound professional in my story?
Q. i think they sound .... well... bad

A. [EDIT - assuming that you're talking about writing fiction...]

On a per-sentence basis:

1. Show, don't tell - this is the mantra of every writing instructor in existence. Many beginning authors don't tust in their own ability to describe a scene or action, and so they explicitly state things like people's emotions, or the reasons why people are doing things. Don't do this. Instead, trust in both your own ability to richly describe an action, as well as your audience's intelligence in figuring something out.

2. Use concrete and significant detail - this is actually broken up into two parts:

2a. Concrete detail - people don't relate to abstract concepts: for example, I am not "a man". Instead, I am a "32 year-old programmer/writer from Seattle who enjoys martial arts and video games." Similarly, I am not sitting in "a room" - rather, I'm "in my upstairs condo bedroom, typing away on my new HP 8900 QuadCore Pro, the bathroom fan buzzing in the background".

The more specific you are with detail, the more your audience will relate and understand whatever it is you're describing. In reverse, the more abstract you are with details, the less people will relate to them.

Of couse, if you put in too much detial, people will mistake you for a 19th centruy novelist, and quickly get bored and stop reading. That leads us into B, below:

2b. Significant - a significant detail is a detail that does more than one thing at a time: sets the scene, foreshadow, grants characterization, acts as a symbol, etc. There are lots of things that a detial can do: all of yours should be doing at least two, if not three, at any given time. Otherwise, your descriptions will come across as being flat and bland.

3. Have a strong narrative voice - this is related to #2, as a good narrator can characterize themselves whenever they say or think something. Characterization is a significant detail, so if you can work in details in how someone talks as well as what they say WHEN they talk, you've got 2b covered.

A classic example of narrative voice is Huckleberry Finn - you can REALLY tell that he's an uneducated young boy from the South. (That being said, don't follow all of Mark Twain's writing style - his use of colloquialisms, for example, is really hard to read and ends up breaking narrative immersion.)

4. Keep in a single narrative perspective on a per-scene basis - that is, don't skip around to multiple viewpoints in the same scene unless you have a REALLY good reason to do so. Skipping around causes the story to 'jump aound', and prevents the reader from becomming immersed in the narrative. (The most common reason beginning writers do this is #1 - they don't trust their own ability to show emotion, so they skip to a different narrative perspective and explicitly state how someone is feeling.)

5. When writing dialog, use multiple ways to indicate who is speaking. Specifically, here are some things to do and not do.

a. "<character> said" is a fine gammar construct to use - but don't use it every line. It looks repetetive.

b. If the reader can tell who is talking by how or what is being said, you don't need to indicate who is saying it.

c. You can also use a "beat" - that is, a physical action in the same line as the dialog, to indicate who is speaking.

d. Dialogs usually bounce between two people - one person says something, and then another. Thus, your audience will assume this construct unless a 3rd person is involved.

e. If you find you have to use something besides "said", it's OK to (occasionally) use a word that indicates volume: whispered, yelled, muttered, etc. What isn't OK is to use a word such as 'quipped' or 'remarked' or 'laughed'. These words are almost always redundant or gramatically incorrect. (You can't "laugh" a sentence. A laugh is different from speaking.)

6. Use a variation of long and short sentences. As others in this thread have recommended - long sentences are good for long descriptions, while short ones are nice and punchy and get the point across quickly. This is true for dialog, as well as for scene descriptions and actions.

7. Avoid filtering - filtering is the tendencey of writers so explicitly point out the fact that the narrator is percieving the scene. For example "he saw the red car driving down the street" is a filter - as opposed to "the red car drove down the street." There's no reason to explicitly state 'he saw', as it's assumed that any description is from the point of view of the narrator. Saying "he saw" is redundent. Who else would be seeing it?

That's all that I can think of off the top of my head - which can be summarized in two points: Show don't tell, and don't be reduntant.


The book to read for more stuff like this is "Writing Fiction", by Janet Burroway - it's the defacto standard for college-level writing classes for over a decade now. And it's really, really good.





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