America's Best Idea

We are in the beginning of a 11 day trip through four national parks in California - Death Valley, Kings Canyon, Sequoia and Yosemite. The trip is inspired partly by our upcoming US departure, and partly by this PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea.

The six episode series relays the rich history of the parks and the people who helped create them. The park system was created after many fights, and required much effort by park administrators and Washington insiders. Definitely worth watching. You might not want to watch the full series because it is slow at times, but you can watch the coverage on parks that interest you.

Other great resources include the National Park System and the GORP websites.

How to Write Badly Well

A brilliant new blog that tells you how to write well, by writing badly. Very funny, very British.

This "lesson" definitely applies to my writing -

Describe every character in minute detail, taking no account of narrative pacing

Terrence Handley shifted his weight, the weight that had been steadily increasing for the last ten years and showed no sign of diminishing, at least while his wife Marie continued to excel as she did at the design and production of delectable gourmet meat pies, and shuffled his feet restively as he waited. His feet had always been a source of irritation for him, imbued as they were with a mysterious capacity to ache seemingly independently of circumstances. This had been the case since the age of about ten, when he first noticed that his feet had a reluctance to settle in one position (or he supposed, two positions nearby one another) for any length of time before sending signals up the nerves that ran through his legs informing his brain that, if it was all very well, they’d rather not be set in the aforementioned position for too much longer. At last, the door opened.

If you are interested, there is a call-out to submit the worst writing you can muster.

JFK

Some rules in life should not be broken, and flying through JFK is one of them.

Only break the rule i) if you are willing to stand one and half hours in a check-in queue only to be told that you are in the wrong line because Dakar flights have a special check-in counter across the street, and ii) if you want to wait for 2 hours and 45 minutes in the immigration line.

In the last two years, I've spent on average two hours in immigration every time I enter the US. That's because I need to go through secondary screening due to the current stage of my green card process. Its frustrating especially since I've lived here for more than twelve years. That's a long time, almost half my life, but not long enough to legitimize my stay.

Most other passengers who were waiting with me were entering the US for the first time. They were consoled by the immigration officers that next time things would be faster. Unfortunately, they couldn't say the same for me.