Want to see what’s flourishing in the garden this week? In addition to my greens (I filled a gallon-sized bag), here’s what’s thriving in my plot:
Snapdragons
Strawberries (we don’t want them to turn red too fast; otherwise Rudi will miss out)
Peas
Celery
Swiss chard
Potatoes
Today wasn’t the most productive day, but there’s always hope for tomorrow, right?
There are definitely some things I’d like to cross off my mental to-do list this month in addition to the key one, which was to get my second COVID shot. But I’d also like to:
I mean there are definitely others, like spend time with friends, socialize with my volleyball team, and be outside as much as possible. But those are the main five.
Are there things you’re still hoping to do this month?
Rudi and I had a nice final evening before he headed out to Salt Lake City to spend 10 days with his mom and sort some things out there. Despite the cool drizzle, we strolled down to the library and then on to Trader Joe’s. With pizza dough in hand for the night’s supper (along with salads made from greens from our garden topped with delicious Green Goddess dressing from the bakery at the farmers market), we moseyed home. While Rudi was cooking, I put on a livestream of authors Amor Towles and Chris Bohjalian chatting, courtesy of one of our local bookstores, Politics & Prose. It ended in time for us to watch the season finale of Magnum, and then we rounded out the night with Now You See Me 2.
Rudi’s flight leaves from Dulles early, so I anticipate needing to come home for a nap before starting the day for real.
Quite a bit of rain has fallen this week, so I expect there will be a correlative quantity of weeds to pull out of the garden and more twine to put up for growing pea vines sometime this weekend. I don’t mind. I’d much rather Mother Nature take care of watering the garden, although it’s easier this year than ever before, thanks to the faucet installed last year and the Y splitter we added this spring.
There’s a neighborhood arts walk/craft fair across town tomorrow, so I may head over that way in the afternoon. And, of course, I can take in the Saturday night park concert from our local band.
If I have any energy left, I’m putting it toward reading and knitting — and maybe replacing all the batteries of my jar lights. I told Rudi I was going to do some spring cleaning while he’s gone, but I don’t see any reason to tackle it on the day I already have to get up before sunrise.
Three beautiful things from my past week:
1. An extravagant splurge purchase of lilies of the valley from the farmers market fill my kitchen with fragrance — and I don’t regret a single penny.
2. Moving a couple projects along for someone else to do the next part.
3. Fresh strawberries and ice cream (albeit storebought) for dessert.
How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?
One of the projects I supervise at work involves making short informational videos of 90 seconds or less. That amounts to 200 words on a subject. You can say a lot in 200 words, but you have to choose them carefully.
First, you have to know a lot about your subject (or work closely with someone who does). The less you know, the more you’re able to obscure that fact, intentionally or otherwise, by wrapping them in a blanket of clauses and phrases.
Second, it helps to be able to wordsmith on the go. I am here to declare that your experts are never, no matter how many times you emphasize there are constraints, going to give you which tradeoffs you should make when they edit your text for accuracy. They will only ever give you more words they think need to be included.
Third, people have different styles when it comes to removing words. I tend to get there by wielding a scalpel, cutting a word here, a word there. My colleague approached it with a big kitchen knife, taking whole sentences with her as she went. Both techniques can be mighty to behold, when you watch someone remove a fifth of the words without losing the meaning. And, in the end, the goal is to leave your audience without a clue you excised anything.
Fourth, don’t show off. Because we’re aiming our videos at the general public, our rule of thumb is to keep our language at an 8th-grade reading level or less. That means using shorter sentences, but more to this point, fewer long words. The easiest way for experts to keep their word counts down is to use long words with some frequency. If you’re talking to other people in your field, it’s a great hack! That’s why lawyers and accountants and tech experts exist. Laws and tax codes and computer manuals are written for others who already understand the same basics, even if your specialty is different. Keeping your reading level lower means using more words, but it also means widening your audience.
Fifth and most important, you have to use your thesaurus with care. Remember back in middle school, when you first learned what a synonym was, your teacher said that you couldn’t always substitute one for another in any old sentence? You had to consider context. When making educational materials, you have to also consider the baggage your audience is bringing with them. When you say “prove,” you might be intending to convey that research is overwhelmingly in support of what you’re saying. But if your audience doubts your sources, they may hear “prove” as indicating what you’re saying is in need of defense and extrapolate that to mean there’s reason for suspicion. “Make sure” is twice as many words, but causes way fewer red flags in many people’s minds.
Getting rid of those final words to hit your target is painful and takes time. But when someone watches your video and says it was a great introduction to a topic and made them want to learn more, there’s nothing better.
I got my second dose of vaccine yesterday. I felt so fatigued after the first shot, I’d expected to feel terrible this time around. But I didn’t. I felt fine.
So, yay! Now I get to start thinking about seeing my family, about eating outside, about going to movies and to baseball games, about hugging friends. I’m ready to shake this past year off and move on, even if I don’t quite know what the future looks like.
12 more days…