A limit to my creativiti

At work in May I set as a craft, fan-making for June 11. Then I let it go, secure that the internet would teach me how to teach my residents how to make one.

And there were some good ideas but they required too much specific craft stuff or were too childish (Note: my 'resident's are residents of a Long Term Care Home, largely older than I am). I took some ideas and put them together into a pretty good practical creation, I think.

I had planned to use tongue depressors but it turned out at work we only had popsicle sticks, far too small to be useful. I did find a set of painter's plaques, maybe 14 cm by 24 cm, I guess. Wait, in cutting them to useful sizes, I know the short side was 16 cm. Anyway, I measured out 1.5 cm sections and cut them in a guillotine. This worked well. Then I took them plus some nuts and bolts I had bought to the maintenance room. 

There I amazed myself. I have used tools before but this time I picked up all the tools I needed, organized them and used them exactly as planned! Usually, I am trying to make a slot screwdriver work in a philips head. I drilled the plaques four at a time, then threaded the bolt through. I tightened the nut as far as I could then cut the excess with a hacksaw. Then, I smashed the cut end with a hammer, spreading the cut threads and making sure the nut could not come off. Genius, I say!

I found paper of close to the right size and meet my residents so we could make fans. Here is one.

You can see how the paper overlaps which is not ideal, but you can also see the fingers or plaque pieces of the fan.

So far, pretty good stuff. I planned ahead and thought about how things would fit together and I am mostly proud.

But then a resident asked how to add a string so she could hang the fan on her wall. I had given no thought to display at all. I hadn't thought about the fans as art. This was not tragic but it is pretty good example of my relative skill at figuring out the small picture but not the larger picture.

$20 words in Julian May's Nonborn King

I had an idea for a blog post; I would measure the difficulty of the vocabulary of a book I had just reread. I expected in the course of research to find that this book used a lot of difficult words. I appear to be wrong about that. If anyone is interested, there are two websites in the body of the post that can measure how many tough words you have used.

1983 edition of Book 3 of May's saga of Pliocene Exile, softcover.

Image from Goodreads.
I first read this book around thirty years ago and saw it in a used book store recently so I reread it. I was greatly surprised that I didn't know the meanings to all the words - the text is pretty advanced.
I mean, I was able to puzzle enough of the meaning out that could follow, even enjoy, the story but two or three words stopped me in my flow of reading.
It made me wonder how difficult the text is. As an ESL educator, I am aware of a few websites that measure the difficulty of a text.

I used English Profile Text Inspector and started with an excerpt from a Jack Reacher story.

And then had to type an excerpt from the Nonborn King- I could find the text on Google Books but that only had images of the text, dang it! Anyway:

Dang! I figured the May text would have more difficult words than the Child text, but there are quite similar. I didn't think to check the black bar on the graph until after I did the Nonborn King. With it, I know that the software is part of the problem.

Ah, the software didn't double a few words, that is an artifact of how combined screenshots. Anyway, there are some simple contractions - "That's" for example, as well as names that are common (as opposed to common names). It may be that my measuring site is not up to the task.

Let me try another text inspector, this one actually having the name Text Inspector.

I can't say why I chose a Jack Reacher book by Lee Child for comparison purposes. Without any reason for the opinion, I had figured it would be a simpler text. And yet the two are quite similar. Huh. It may be that comparing excerpts of less than 250 words does not create a useful sample size.