Category Archives: Home & Family

Wade’s Favorite Ties

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My father, Wade Dickinson, liked to dress very well. When he passed away in 2011, my brothers and I distributed his excellent clothes to family members or charity, depending on the condition. In rearranging our basement to make room for installing the new furnace, I found a bag of six of my father’s favorite neckties, pictured above. It was interesting to see how many of his lifelong areas of study and passion were reflected in these sartorial accessories.  From left to right, top to bottom:

  • Eagle and shield – silver on navy – probably a West Point momento.  My father was graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1949.
  • Bah Humbug – red and navy – reflecting my father’s lifelong Scrooge-like hatred of the waste and expense of Christmas.
  • Pigs – silver on red – in honor of my father’s many years (and many patents) studying how to promote food animal growth through the application of Physics.  His company name for this work was AgroPhysics.
  • Bears and stripes – The Cal Golden Bear mascot, from his many years teaching the University of California at Berkeley class Engineering-110, “Venture Design: The Start-up Company”.
  • Cows – Black and white on blue – in honor of my father’s many years (and many patents) studying how to promote food animal growth through the application of Physics.  His company name for this work was AgroPhysics.
  • Owls – silver on red – the mascot of the Bohemian Club of which my father was a lifelong member.

Here is a 1993 portrait of Wade Dickinson, taken by my mother, Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson:

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Images Copyright 1993-2013 by Katy Dickinson and Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson

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Heating, Cooling, New Ironwork

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Since I returned from my most recent trip to the Middle East, we have installed a replacement home heating and cooling system (furnace and air conditioning units), plus the last pieces of ironwork for our new porch finally arrived.  Our 1930 Willow Glen house upgrade is almost done!

We won a certificate from Valley Heating and Cooling for a new, efficient Lenox furnace in the auction at last year’s VIA charity ball and just got around to having it installed. We needed to balance the house air flow in any case, so we added two more air registers plus cooling and humidifying units at the same time. Given the changing climate patterns (“Seven of the top 10 warmest years on record for the contiguous 48 states have occurred since 1990” according to the US Environmental Protection Agency), it seems wise to plan for hotter summers.

At the same time, Brian’s Welding finished our porch railing, breakfast bar, and handrail. We still need to get the tile installed on the breakfast bar. I am glad that we added the elegant scroll handrail – and am very happy to get this project almost completed – we started work in July 2012!  Now that the railing is in, I can finally replace the mud in my former-lawn with new garden plants.

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinsom

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MentorCloud, Seoul National University, TechWomen

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Busy week… I have been working with MentorCloud on mentoring programs from Ethiopia to Afghanistan to Korea to the USA. A group of three graduate students from Seoul National University, who have been hosted at Global Fluency here in the Silicon Valley, have been discussing their mentoring research with us. Their big presentation on mentoring in Korea compared to the USA was very interesting.

The San Jose city inspector signed off on our new porch construction (hooray!). The iron work railing, breakfast bar, and handrail got fitted by the blacksmith crew – and was carried away for final welding and powder coating. We hope all porch work will be done by the time I get home!

I am leaving today for a two week trip to Jordan and Lebanon with the TechWomen delegation. I already finished and sent off for translation my presentation materials, one is a talk on mentoring and the other a workshop on e-commerce for crafts. My husband drove me to the airport right after MentorCloud held its user experience walk-through with customers, at the Plug and Play Center in Sunnyvale. A long airplane ride sounds restful about now…

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

19 October 2019: Links Updated. For more about MentorCloud business practices, see Collecting a Labor Judgement (15 January 2016).

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Nature abhors the garden

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The minute we stop maintaining our gardens, the ravages of wind, snow, ice, droughts, floods, weeds, pests, and diseases transform them into something we never imagined. Basically, there’s no such thing as a “natural” garden, even one that consists entirely of native species. Much as we might like to deny it, nature abhors the garden.
Peter Del Tredici, “Pacific Horticulture” magazine July-Sep 2001 issue

I spent time on-and-off today watching a Daveytree pruning crew taking two years’ growth off my garden forest. They did a good job and with minimal damage pruned: 2 big Coast Live Oaks, 2 big Modesto Ash trees, 3 Mimosas (silk trees), 2 big Olive trees, and a dozen or so yuccas. They trimmed the small apricot, apple, and white peach trees in our little orchard and covered the ground with chips from today’s pruning. The crew removed a privet (to the extent which that is possible – privets being almost unkillable) to make more space for my baby Coast Live Oak. The arborist also consulted on my poor pear tree which has fire blight but is probably going to live if I keep it clean. I did not have any work done on our dozens of cottonwoods or the 3 pepper trees living in the Guadalupe River (squirrel-central). A vast amount of extra wood and brush came off today.

Like many exercises in hygiene, the result looks tidy but not impressive. It seems that a tree can be negative (messy, unhealthy, mis-shapen, in the wrong place) but a well-pruned tree just looks normal. As Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen said:

…it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Expected but a little disappointing.

Image Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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New Porch Garden

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I have at last sorted out the garden in front of our new porch. This required 8 hours of finding and removing ten bushel baskets of construction debris mixed in the dirt, including: many nails, two lengths of rusted pipe, concrete and brick chips, a wooden stake, a buried fence post end, tape and other plastic bits, and small rocks. I added five large bags of compost and topsoil and dug it in well. Then, I moved all of the boulders to better locations – many had to be rolled since they were too heavy to lift. A section of former-lawn got incorporated into the new planting bed so all of the grass roots had to be sifted out. During this project, I relocated many earthworms and one large and very irritated Jerusalem Cricket. After preparing the ground, I planted lavender, rosemary, and one elegant blue-grey echeveria as an accent. Stepping stones and bark chips completed the project. I am pleased with the result and hope it all grows well.

Post script: this was my first blog entry entirely written on my Apple iPad 2, including uploading the pictures using a Lightening to SD card adapter (Secure Digital non-volatile memory card reader for iPad). My camera is a Canon PowerShot S95. I will be traveling to the Middle East in a week and am experimenting by not bringing my laptop. I am learning to use the FlickrStackr application to manage my photos on Flickr.

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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How to Write a Blog Entry

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Svitlana, one of the 2012 TechWomen, was kind enough to ask me last year how to write a blog entry. This is finally in reply to her question… Of course, this only represents how I write my blog – every writer must find her own voice.

I have been writing a web log since 2005, at the rate of over three entries a week, for a current total of 1,325.* In putting together a blog entry, I focus on three areas, in this order:

  1. Topic
  2. Images
  3. Writing Composition

I consider a single topic for each blog entry, picking a subject that I find of special interest. Within that general requirement, each entry topic must also be one or more of the following:

My family and friends lovingly inform me that I take too many pictures. My generous and patient husband (our family system administrator) is always trying to stay ahead of my photo storage and sorting requirements. There have been 47,674 images posted in our family Flickr archive since 2008. I take pictures not only to illustrate blog entries but also to make a record (as when taking a picture of a business card, or notes on a whiteboard), or because an image seems beautiful to me. This is an extension of the famous William Morris sentiment:

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

A photo often starts me writing a blog entry – expressing what I found of interest in that image. Starting with a photo makes a more interesting story than an formidable wall of plain text. Once I start composing, I work to ensure that not one word is wasted. One friend told me that he has to rest between reading my paragraphs because the text is so dense. I see it as being respectful of my reader’s time and precious attention to be succinct. I write until I have no more to convey. As Lewis Carroll’s Red King said:

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

I check facts carefully and provide links to references or data sources when available. Even after checking my work, I often have to go back to a published entry to add missing words. Still, I publish as soon as the entry feels complete, in accordance with my motto:

Done is Better then Perfect.

I also go back to much older blog posts and clean them up from time to time – to fix software rot causing broken links and format changes.

7 March 2013 Addition:
Here is some good advice on how to write: Kill Your Darlings: Five Rules for Writers by Rita J. King, EVP Science House, 6 March 2013:

  1. Have Fun
  2. Don’t Have Fun
  3. Kill Your Darlings
  4. Do the Research
  5. Ask Yourself: Why?

29 January 2016 Addition:
On 23 October 2015, I gave a presentation with updated information on this to the TechWomen at Symantec in the Silicon Valley: “How to Blog: Best Practices”.

Image Copyright 2009 by John Plocher
* 2005-2009 on blogs.sun.com/katysblog and 2009-now here at katysblog.wordpress.com. I have also been a guest blogger on other sites.

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Old Billings Wrench

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In looking for paperweight (something long, flat, and heavy to keep a book open for reference), I came across an old steel Billings-brand wrench which works well. This particular 8-1/4″ wrench was probably used by my grandfather, Ben Wade Orr Dickinson, Junior, to fix cars.

In finding out about this, I discovered that old tool collecting is popular: there are even web sites devoted just to wrenches. The Billings stamp style indicates that this wrench was made sometime between 1926-1962. From the silky smoothness of the handle and the old-style screw design, it is probably from the earlier part of that time range. (No – it is not for sale!)

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B.W.O. Dickinson, Junior (my father’s father), was a master machinist. Here he is working on a metal lathe in about 1970 (in Sharon, Pennsylvania):

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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