Travel - Anticipation and Anxiety

by Karen McCullough

Image in public domain, from Wickimedia Commons

Summer is about to officially begin and that means travel time!

I love traveling.

I hate traveling.

I love going to new and different places, collecting new experiences, and seeing things I’ve long dreamed about visiting.

I hate all the hassles of getting to those places.

I love the excitement of airports, with the anticipation of travel to exotic (or even more mundane, but different) places. I like window-shopping in fancy stores, picking up a few last-minute things, and watching the planes land and take off.

I hate the anxiety of getting to the airport on time, getting through long security lines and pat-downs. I always seem to trigger a pat-down, though I have to be the least threatening looking person in the entire airport. I hate worrying about getting to my gate on time, the crush of people all trying to board as quickly as possible, and settling into a seat area that’s impossibly tight even for someone who is 5’1” and 130 pounds. I hate the inevitable delays and worry about making connections, especially for international flights.

I love relaxing into my seat, getting into a book or movie, having someone bring drinks and food to me.

I hate being confined in a small space for hours on end, having to climb over people to get around, using an airplane lav, the bland tastelessness of most of the food, and my own complete inability to sleep on a plane.

I love landing in a new place, finally getting off the blasted plane and stretching my legs, anticipating the adventure ahead.

I hate lines at passport control, the crush of luggage retrieval, and the search for the taxi stand. Especially in a country where I don’t speak the local language, I worry about communicating with the taxi driver, getting ripped off, and making it to the right hotel or Airbnb. Or if I’m renting a car, I worry about the hassles of that process and then finding my way to my destination, hoping the GPS on my phone works in this place or the maps I’ve studied were correct.

I love settling into new quarters, starting out to explore the new terrain, finding new delights and surprises around every corner. I relish trying new food at local cafes and eateries, making notes about interesting details as research for a possible future story setting, and even watching the people. Soaking in the atmosphere of a new place, talking to local people, shopping for souvenirs, taking in as many interesting sites as possible all feed my soul. Large dramatic sites, like the Colosseum in Rome or Stonehenge (or as I hope this summer, the Acropolis), move me in odd and profound ways. The beauty of small objects in museum also touches me. I feel the history of a place as almost a living thing when in direct visual contact with the creations of people throughout history. They speak to me through the stone or glass or clay. I could spend days in art and archaeology museums, or at least hours – until my brain starts to complain about overload.

I hate that occasionally my stomach rebels at all the new foods and different waters, though it doesn’t happen often, thank goodness, and there are medicines that help. I wish I didn’t have to be careful about what I eat because I’m allergic to nuts and they’re hidden in a lot of things. And I sometimes wish my feet could handle more miles, though I wear good shoes for walking and in fact, can do a lot of it. I’m not good at packing the right things, although that’s mixed because it can give me a good excuse to pick up something I wouldn’t otherwise have bought.

I love the way travel expands my mind and my imagination.

I hate the way it empties my pocketbook and bank account. But I count every penny worth the expense.

The Web at 30

by Karen McCullough

We take it for granted. When we need to know something, we “Google” it. (And when did “Google” become a verb? No idea.) We set up doctors’ appointments on it, make travel plans, manage our finances, do our Christmas (and other) shopping, and increasingly many of us perform our jobs using it. It’s hard to believe it’s only been around for 30 years. The worldwide web is so meshed into our everyday lives, we feel helpless when we don’t have access to it.

It’s hard to believe that some of us are old enough to remember when it didn’t exist, when researching anything meant dipping into your encyclopedia or a trip to the library, when you wrote letters to communicate with people rather than sending emails or texts.



Most people think the worldwide web and the internet are the same thing, but it’s not so. The internet existed well before the worldwide web. The internet originated almost simultaneously in 1969 with the National Physical Laboratory in the UK’s Mark 1 network and the U.S. Defense Department’s ArpaNet. The concept of interlocking networks of networked computers was intriguing enough that universities and scientific research facilities wanted in and eventually the networks spread. Even before the worldwide web, email (which runs on a completely different set of network protocols from the web), bulletin boards, and Usenet libraries were in wide use, especially in universities and among hobbyists.

Then came the bulletin board services intended for public use: CompuServe, Prodigy, and a little later AOL. These pre-dated the web itself but led the way in showing the public how useful a network could be by providing access to huge databases of information and facilitating contact among people with shared interests. Eventually those services turned into on-ramps for the web that made it accessible to everyone.

There’s some debate about the actual birth date of the worldwide web, but some experts place it in March 1989 when CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the "Mesh" system of hypertext links bringing together any form of multimedia over those (now millions) of networked computers. It didn’t actually create the web, but it provided the underpinning principle of it.

In November, 1990, Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliao published a paper that described a web of hypertext marked up documents (https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html) that could be viewed in a browser and link to other documents. A month later Berners-Lee published the first actual website (http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html) .  It looks pretty crude by today’s standards, but all subsequent developments are elaborations on what he created.

I got my first taste of the internet and its possibilities sometime in the mid-1980s when I signed up for the Prodigy network and then CompuServe. At the time the standard communication device was a 1200-baud modem that used telephone lines to access the boards. It was incredibly slow, with pages loading line by line over several minutes, but even at that it offered an entrance to a much broader world.

I discovered online databases where I could look up information that would otherwise require a trip to the library. I connected with other authors and publishing industry people from all around the world. I got my first personal email address through one of those services. I sold a book to one of the very first publishers selling ebooks, though the Kindle was still years away.

It’s been quite a journey watching those early bulleting board services morph into today’s worldwide web. Along the way it made possible video on demand, providing us with streaming movies and programs at our fingertips, e-reading devices which put whole libraries of books on a device the size of one very thin paperback, working remotely, sharing family photos on Facebook and Shutterfly, personalized maps available in seconds, video tours of houses you’re considering buying, access to music of every imaginable sort, all the apps we can’t live without on our smart phones, and, yes, even cat videos.

I met my first computer back in the early 1960s when IBM did a seminar for the children of employees. I believe it was their 750 model we worked on back then, a machine that would take up most of my current kitchen and was programmed with a block of punched cards. How strange it is to realize that my hand-held smart phone is a far more powerful computer than that room-sized monstrosity. We have come a long way.

Taking Stock and Taking Action

by Karen McCullough

It’s a brand new year!  A fresh start! Everything’s bright, shiny, and new.  Except me, of course.  I’m not new at all. In fact, I’m getting on a bit, like into those years that start with the number six. That means more of my life is behind me than is ahead, though I certainly hope I have many more good years left.

But still a new year is a good time to think about what I want to do with the time remaining. So…priorities. Those haven’t really changed much, though the way they play out maybe has.

My religious faith is at the top of the list, but I prefer to let my actions demonstrate that rather than my words. In other words everything else on this list is informed by my spiritual bent.

Beyond that my family is the most important thing to me and always has been. My children are grown and have children of their own but I still have a role to play in their lives. Two of my three kids live pretty far away, which means travel to visit or bring them here, but those two both have small children and can use whatever help I can give.

Then there are the friends I’ve made over the years, some of whom are as close as family. I need time with them to be whole.

After that, it’s the work, both writing and my web business. Over the last year I’ve been reducing the web business to part time. I continue to work with my long-time clients, but I’m not taking on new ones anymore. I do still enjoy the work so I don’t want to stop completely, but I’ve enjoyed having a bit more time for writing this year and hope to have even more in the coming months.

Given those priorities, what do I hope this year will bring? Lots of time with my kids, grandkids, other extended family and friends, first of all, and plans are already underway to make that happen.

And I have a goal to finish two novels this year, including the long-delayed sequel to Witch’s Journey, tentatively titled, A Failed Prince. And currently in progress is the third in my Market Center Mysteries series, currently titled A Perfect Home for Murder.  I’m also considering a couple of shorter stories that are rolling around in my head. And finally I’m taking one of the finished novels that have been sitting on my hard drive for a while and putting it up serially on Wattpad. More on that in a minute.

Speaking of short stories. Wattpad recently had a contest for a holiday short story.  The parameters were: 1000 words, holiday theme, had to include a jar of pickles, and someone has to say “And where’s the hammock?”

My story is called “Grandpa Henry and the Pickles.”  Here’s a link to it on Wattpad: http://my.w.tt/UiNb/jMF5DZDzHz, but if that doesn’t work, it’s also posted on my website at http://www.kmccullough.com/ST_Grandpa.php

It’s a quick read, so enjoy!

Also on Wattpad, I’m releasing a serialized novel there over the next few weeks.  This is a finished, never-before-published romantic suspense story titled Hunter's Quest that I’ve been sitting on for a while.  It’s time to make it public and I hope it will interest a few readers.  The first couple of chapters are now available.  You should be able to read it here: https://www.wattpad.com/358125675-hunter%27s-quest-chapter-one?utm_source=web&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share_reading