Getting paid for writing and other life in Spokane

Dear Friends and Family,

Recently, I’ve experienced a rare honor in a writer’s life: having an article get published for which one is paid:

http://www.inlander.com/inlandway/74737699488100.php

They pay $.10 a word, and it’s for the local artsy weekly paper. It’s actual work. I think it’s the first time I’ve earned actual money for writing something in about six years. This story is about the zookeeper-training program that my wife participates in. All of the people I interviewed are classmates of Miri’s.

The zoo is kind of a cool place. They’ve got 45 tigers and two bears up there, and Miri’s been learning quite a bit about their care. Also, she’s been shoveling an awful lot of snow (we’ve had more than 70 inches this year), giving her muscle tone that’s better than mine, which is a little embarrassing. I have gone up to the zoo a few times to help with the shoveling, on Sunday afternoons. One of the things that makes the shoveling so difficult is that it can’t just be tossed to the side; it has to be put into wheelbarrows and taken to a pile. They now have three snow mountains that are each about eight feet tall.

I got to drive a wheelbarrow around the park last Sunday, and I shoveled snow in front of the exhibit of a lion named Jambo, who doesn’t like me very much. He gives me a death stare and crouches like he’s ready to jump every time I come by.

Jambo is a Barbary Lion, a species extinct in the wild, and he’s about 500 pounds in size. He looks kind of like Scar from “The Lion King.” It’s a little disconcerting having only a chain-link fence (even though it’s 12 feet high) between him and me. The other zookeepers tell me that there’s nothing to worry about; he just doesn’t like tall people.

To get from Jambo’s exhibit to the snow pile, I go past Kalki’s exhibit. Kalki is a leopard, he weighs about 100 pounds, and every time I go past, he makes it very clear that I really ought to be in the three pieces rather than one. He shows his teeth (and he’s got a lot) and he lunges at the fence. No amount of cheerful talking gets him to be nice.

As this article also mentions, the zoo has four Siberian tiger cubs, and they behave like a litter of kittens, except for the fact that they’re 25 pounds each. Miri supervises them on Sundays. They’re very cute, and they are a thundering herd when they’re playing. They’ve batted at my hands and tried to hold them with their large feet. They get cardboard toys to play with and Miri has shot several videos of them demolishing the toys.

I’m hoping to expand my work as a freelance writer to include other stories such as the efforts of a University of Idaho researcher to domesticate the mountain huckleberry. The deal with working for the Inlander is that I’m responsible for coming up with my own ideas, which isn’t easy when you’re new to the area. I’ve been writing to PR people at assorted universities and other agencies asking them for ideas and to put me on their press release list, which, I’m sure is going to get me a whole lot of e-mails telling me what a huge deal it is that they’ve raised $200,000 to build a new center to recognize rich donors. But, it’s a start.


WHERE WE LIVE

Miri and I are living in an apartment on the north side of Spokane, Wash. It’s a spacious two-bedroom apartment, and the rent is very reasonable. In San Francisco, we could have rented a doghouse for this amount, which might’ve made the dog happy; we’ve never had a doghouse. We live next door to our apartment complex’s landlady, and she’s very helpful.

We’d love to have guests. The guest room is cozy and well insulated. It’s also been really fun having our own kitchen, especially with all the cool cookware we got as wedding gifts. I’ve been learning all about cooking pot roast recently, although there’s always leftovers when only two people eat it.

MARRIED LIFE

Being married is neat. Miri is wonderful. I don’t know how to describe it beyond that except to say that I’ve relaxed quite a bit since being a bachelor. I actually go to the library and check out books now! That’s something I never did in San Francisco just because I never felt like I could relax enough to read a book. I’ve been buying the New York Times Book Review on Sundays, and the library has had most of the new books I’ve been interested in:

Some of the books I’ve enjoyed include:

The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex. This is one of the funniest books that I’ve read in the past five years. Several times, Miri came close to throwing me out of bed for laughing too much while she was trying to sleep. It’s a book about an 11-year-old girl and her cat saving the world from invading space aliens. It’s an obvious jab at America’s Indian policies, and a more subtle jab at our Iraq policies. And, it contains a lot of Huckleberry Finn in it as the 11-year-old girl becomes friends with one of the aliens.

A Mirror Garden, by Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian. This is the memoir of an Iranian artist who created a new art with lots of mirrors. As she wanders through this tale of development of her own artistry, she also conveys a great deal of cultural and historical knowledge about Iran. It’s a charming, engaging story, although it is kind of annoying how she mostly exempts herself from public affairs in her home country (that is, until she gets kicked out in the 1979 revolution). The dust cover says that it’s a grace-under-pressure kind of story, and that the author is sort of a Persian Audrey Hepburn. I guess that makes sense, but the only thing I know about Audrey Hepburn is that she makes middle-aged women think about pretty dresses.

The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perotta. This is the story of a New England suburb where a fundamentalist church opens up and starts protesting the sex-ed curriculum in the public schools. The two main characters are the sex-ed teacher and a soccer coach who is a member of this church, and who happens to have the sex-ed teacher’s daughter on his soccer team. I didn’t enjoy the plot because of its moral ambiguity, but the characters are wonderfully written, and are very believable, real people.

God’s Politics: Why the Right is Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, by Jim Wallis. This book is 400 pages of political warmth, if there is such a thing, intended to prove that it is possible to be a Christian and vote for a non-Republican. I liked it, but there was a certain hippie-Jesus element in his religion that unsettled me.

There were several other books that seemed promising, but I never made it past page 50:

Sons and Other Flammable Objects, by Porochista Khakpour. The main characters were just too darn mean.

Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes, a fictional account of the youth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Well-written, but too proper and British to keep my attention.

Arguing the Just War in Islam, by John Kelsay. I just didn’t care.

FUTURE PLANS

Miri and I are looking for zoos where she can work, which is almost certain to be somewhere other than Spokane (there’s only one here, and we know the payscale). Places we’d like to go in Washington state include the Point Defiance Zoo, the Woodland Park Zoo, and Northwest Trek. We’ve also thought about zoos in Oregon, Colorado and a few other places. This means that we’re likely to move again before 2008 is over, which I am looking forward to. Hopefully we’ll land someplace with a more interesting job market.

OTHER STUFF

I joined a bowling league, and I actually scored 147 in a game last week.

I went caucusing last Saturday. It was fun meeting some neighbors. A whole 28 people showed up from our precinct, which was impressive.

I’m working on a book intended to make the Orthodox Church seem less weird to outsiders. Maybe the title should be, “Don’t Overlook Us Just Because Our Hymns Don’t Rhyme.” The book is intended to apply the principles of marketing to our efforts to communicate with multiple audiences (right now I think we only communicate to people like ourselves).

I finished all of the thank-you cards for the gifts from the groom’s guests at the wedding. At least I think I did. If you didn’t get yours and are wondering why this clod doesn’t write you, please let me know. Miri is still working on the thank-you cards for the bride’s guests and is threatening divorce over my being too smug about it.

So, what’s been up with you? Any of it worth a story in the newspaper, you think?

Please keep in touch.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford