Boo!

S as Hermione,


R as a mysterious gypsy,







...and some of our little pumpkins.





A mellow Halloween, all told. R went off with a friend to the infamous "D Street" on the other side of town, where the top-of-the-line decorating and treats happen. S and I hit a couple of blocks, then she had a piece or three of candy, and went happily to bed (having picked up the phrase, "I really scored," from me, I'm afraid). R came back with stories of how much fun she'd had, full of great good feeling for the whole world. She said she only had about five pieces of candy, but whatever they were, they sure made her a believer.


I'm focusing on the novel, now. Two hours until NaNoWriMo. Ready-set-write!

Halloween Eve

Is there anything slimier than the innards of a pumpkin? (If you are a pre-med student or doctor, please note that this is a rhetorical question.) Two of our eight (pumpkins, not doctors) are carved, and the rest will be tomorrow afternoon's project.

Only one more fence post hole for D to dig, and then he can finish putting up the side fence.

Only one more day to prepare for losing myself to the novel.

If I were smart, like my neighbor who has done NaNoWriMo twice now, I would incorporate a Costco trip into my schedule somehow to buy groceries in bulk so dinners will be easier for the next 30 days. But honestly, I find Costco, with its towering rows of Consumer Goods and Night of The Living Dead Zombie Shoppers, about as a appealing as...well, as the innards of a pumpkin, if you must know.

Things some of us don't learn until we are adults

Pickles are made from cucumbers.
Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. (sorry, D, but I had to include this)
The first quarter moon and the second quarter moon are curved on different sides.
Prunes are made from plums.
40 is really quite young.
There's a reason to pay attention to politics.
Childbirth is the easy part.
Dates aren't made from anything but dates.

What "obvious fact" did you learn as an adult that surprised you?

Double-dog Dare

DOUBLE-DOG DARE - verb phrase. Also: dog dare, double-black-dog dare, double-dare, n*gger-dare, niggle dare. Chiefly Southern, Southern Middle. To challenge defiantly. Note: The formulaic phrases build both on alliteration and (usually euphemistic) intensifiers. 1892 Dialectic Notes, 1.229 KY, Dare. Children in quarrelling say, "I dare you." "I dog dare you." "I black dog dare you." "I double dog dare you." "I double black dog dare you." From "Dictionary of American Regional English," Volume II by Frederic G. Cassidy (1991, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England).

(Found here)

Contemplating the Improbable

**warning: another self-centered navel-contemplating post follows. stop now if you've already had enough of that sort of thing from me. **



This is what it would be like, then. Getting the kids to bed, D going to bed, and then in the dark of the night (the only time available, let's be honest), me sitting at a keyboard clicking away to make little black squiggles in the screen appear, one after another, line after line of them, fifty-thousand groups of black squiggles created to tell a story, some story, any story, in a month.

I tried today to write at least a few pages of that ghost tale, hoping somehow to finish it before the writer's group meeting tomorrow - or at least before Halloween, which seems fitting. But once again life got in the way. Work, then a time-consuming hustle to find & secure what looks like the last available place to stay in Avila for Thanksgiving for six people, then getting S & R to gymnastics, getting dinner on the table, & managing the evening routine until 8:15pm, when I tucked S and myself into bed. (I was so naive, thinking that while the S had her gymnastics class, R would do her homework without any coaxing, cajoling, confiscation of reading books, and direct supervision including backrubs. And while on some days, S will entertain herself while R has her gymnastics class, those days do not include any time I have plans to get some of my own work done.)

So the ghost remains with his story untold to my haunted characters, although *I* now understand what happened to make him so desperate that he has stuck around all these decades near the site where he lived and died. It's melodramatic, boy-meet-girl, boy-loses-girl stuff, but my poor characters can't help that. (Imagine Romeo telling Shakespeare, "Don't you think I would have checked better for a pulse, man?! I mean, give me some credit, here...")

So if I can't write 250 words in a day, how will I write 2000 words every day in November? And still work, parent, jog (which saves my sanity), and sleep a full night (which saves my health)? Something will have to give. And it will be sleep. Or maybe the sacrifices can be evenly distributed: I'll lose some sleep, some runs, some quality time with the kids, some of my drive and focus at work. And I'll gain a poor quality but complete draft of a novel before December.

Worth it? Especially if I'm questioning it before I even start? I don't even, quite, have the advantage of denial-based optimism to get me going on this. I have instead the conviction that it will be very difficult and that important aspects of my life will suffer just so I can be part of some funky online movement and so I can gain a deeper respect for myself as a writer and a masochist.

And yet.

This blog post, for example, up until this sentence, represents 494 words on its own. And this year with this blog I have proven that I can, when I want to and even when I don't, write every day. And posts like this are the shovel with which I am digging myself into the commitment. It's pre-accountability. Like telling people I'm thinking of running a half-marathon or thinking of growing out my hair: contracts I make with myself, using other people's knowledge as the witness to the agreement. This is effective, because it means that my pride doesn't allow me to back out at the slightest difficulty. But it's also dangerous, because that same pride doesn't allow me to back out even if the pressure or cost is too great to achieve my self-inflicted goal.

So better to say "I hope to run a half marathon," or "I'm going to try to grow out my hair" or "I'm going to participate in NaNoWriMo and see how it goes," and really allow myself to stop, without any guilt, if I need to.

Yeah. That might work.

Chicken!

S has taken to inserting "CHICKEN!" into her sentences whenever she doesn't want to listen to you or is stalling or just being silly. At least, I think that's what it is. It's either that, or some variety of Poultry Tourette's. Or it might be her way of incorporating the theme of road-crossing jokes into every aspect of her life.

So a conversation might go something like this:

"S, will you eat three beans or four tonight?" (a Hobson's Choice, to be sure)

"CHICKEN!"

or

"S, where does the wet towel go after your bath?"

"In the CHICKEN room on the CHICKEN rack." (pause) "CHICKEN!"

D asked me, "Why are our kids so weird?"

I think the answer lies in the question. Hint: note the possessive pronoun used and consider the speaker and listener.




CHICKEN!

Burning cheeks

From shame? From sunburn? From too much wine?

No.

Just from the last yoga class in the series.

I always leave there feeling completely different from the way I did when I arrived. Maybe I can narrow the lengths of time between being grounded, being focused, until there is something more closely resembling a continuum.

Mme. Best Intentions

...paving the road to h-e-double toothpicks, I'm sure. But the kids are on their way to bed and I am too. Mwah hah hah. My plan could work, yet!

NIMBY

What to do? The last family that lived next door to us was a tough act to follow: demographically our match, children the same age, similar value systems, and they had the added virtue of putting up with us.

(Yeah. Right up until they moved.)

And D and I know it's wrong to feel betrayed by them for selling their house to what appears to be a collective of families who own little furniture, speak little English, and have watched D literally slave away (sweating and panting) for days without saying "hello," let alone introducing themselves or acknowledging that he is single-handedly building a gorgeous and expensive fence between our properties without asking for either help or co-payment from them.

We have been talking about whether we are racist, about what it is that has worked under D's skin in particular about the new folks on the block. But it's hard to pin down without resorting to "there goes the neighborhood" statements. It's horrible. We want to welcome them. We want to break down cultural barriers by being kind and generous. We want to embrace diversity and we want to not care how different they are from us or we are from them. But instead, we're all kinds of bent out of shape and the relationship is not off to a good start.

Why? Here's what I think, frankly: we want it both ways. We want them to be who they are but we also want them to play by our rules. For example, we say sure, they can install their thumping subwolfers in their cars on the weekend, but them damn well better not play loud accordion-and-tuba music to test them. They can have a huge extended family (we don't even know yet who lives there and who doesn't) but we don't want 10 new cars parked on our cul-du-sac every day. We want them to acknowledge the tremendous effort that D is putting into increasing the value of both our yard and theirs with this new fence, and yet we don't want to consider that they might feel insulted by fact that as soon as we caught our first sight of them, we tore down the old fence completely and started building one twice as high. This was a coincidence, but how do they know that? Have we told them? No. Have we made an effort to get to know them? No. We respect that they speak only Spanish, and yet we expect them to be the ones to strike up a conversation with us in a language they don't feel comfortable speaking. We don't know how they could afford the house next door, which sold for about $500,000, without pooling their money (as I know is a practice in some cultures) and yet we expect them to automatically offer to pay for part of the fence.

So what does this mean? It means that in spite of the fact that we own cars and work full time and have children of our own, I think we're still just kids on the playground. And we don't care if they play their games but if it's near our four-square court, they'd better play those games our way.

So.

So I baked two loaves of banana bread this evening (instead of the one loaf I usually bake to welcome new neighbors), and I'll deliver them tomorrow. (If they're still there then - so far, they've only been here on weekends.) The teenagers may break the little hand-made swing my old neighbor put in the tree for his toddlers. The men may smoke and leave cigarette butts in their driveway. Maybe the pool will go to algae. But the only thing that will truly make the neighborhood ugly is us, bitterly resenting how the village next door doesn't "go well" with the castle we've put up.

Or, to go back to the elementary school analogy: we have no intention of taking our ball and playing somewhere else, and we can't kick them out of the schoolyard. We have two choices: to fume and rage against the circumstances, or to make room on the blacktop of our hearts. Did I write that? "The blacktop of our hearts?" Sheesh. But you know what I mean.


ps - went to bed at 8pm, got up only to post this. back to bed now...

Time alone postponed

Apart from right now, while D is picking up the girls from Parent's Night Out and I am on my way to get some sleep, I have not had the house to myself for days. Our neighbor (a 2-time Nanowrimo participant who is planning on writing her 3rd novel next month) is talking about getting an apartment so she'll have a place alone to write. This is because her husband has retired and her 11 1/2 year old stores more energy than most fully functional nuclear power plants.

Margaret Atwood has written about being able to write in the middle of chaos, of life with it's family noises and demands - kids doing homework while she typed away, etc. But I think the Room of One's Own approach is much more conducive to real quality work for me personally.

And so I find myself thinking of whether I would really consider writing 50,000 words next month, and wondering where? when? how? - and most importantly, what? and about whom? This is ironic. Many writers I know have tons of things they want to say and not enough time to say them.

It's been an interesting exercise wondering what I care enough about to put in a novel. It's a painfully short and unconvincing list. Do I not have any passion in me? If not, where is it, anyway? Have I never had it? Or lost it somewhere?

Musing brought on by a tired mind.

The advantages of sleep

Enough of this nonsense. The renewed goal? Bed by 9pm on "school nights," ie., the nights when I have to be up at 4:15 to get to work on time. This means getting the kids to bed by 8pm, which means bath by 7pm, dinner by 6pm, and blogging, ideally, before that. Let's just see how it goes, shall we? The declaration does have a deju vu quality to it...

But you see, more sleep would enable me to do justice to the story of S. shoplifting today, or of R having another existential mini-crisis. It could even enable me to better cope with the horrible acne *thing* on my chin that is giving me flashbacks to the worst moments of the most painful days of my adolescence.

On va voir.

In the meantime, kudos to Clare for sending out her manuscript!

And for those of you (not necessarily me & don't dare me, please) contemplating it, it's not too late to plan to participate in Nanowrimo this year. All you have to do is write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. Yeah. That's all. And no, "blah blah blah" 50,000 times does NOT count. I already thought of that.

And thanks to Josh for the link to the Yarn quiz ("which yarn are you?")


You are Shetland Wool.
You are a traditional sort who can sometimes be a
little on the harsh side. Though you look
delicate you are tough as nails and prone to
intricacies. Despite your acerbic ways you are
widely respected and even revered.


What kind of yarn are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Home from Orlando

Apart from snoozing on the planes today, I've been up for 20 hours. It's wonderful, as usual, to be home. The girls were happily surprised that I got back early, and the usual routine has resumed around chez nous, with the exception that I'm a little dopey and punchy with sleepiness.

G'night!

Orlando Day 3

Remarkably, we were able to change our flight time for tomorrow so we're leaving Orlando at 5:30am instead of 2:20pm.
Even more remarkably, it's actually 1:15am and we just got back from a trip out *after* the teardown of the booth, which took up the two hours after the Expo closed.

So I expect to get about 2.25 hours of sleep in the hotel, and much more in the plane tomorrow.
Looking forward to sleeping, but even more than that, as much as I love traveling, one of the best parts of traveling is coming home, and I'm looking forward to that even more.

(Of course, I'm not in Amsterdam or Florence, like Suzanne!)

Orlando Day 2

Here I am up past midnight again. Although I did sleep until 8:30 this morning and although theoretically I have a chance to get more than 8 hours of sleep at some point in this trip, it's not looking likely if I also try to fit in jogs.

The trade show stayed constant but not super busy today. It seems like we're making good connections, leading a lot of people our way. I expect there will be a few recoveries out of it, anyway.

Orlando strikes me as a lot like Vegas must be like, although I haven't been to Vegas as an adult, and even when I was there in my pre-adult days, it was only to drive through. There are plenty of amusements here for adults and kids, but that's really all that it's about, apart from the convention center. Without that tourist industry, I highly doubt the city would exist. I could confirm this online somewhere, I'm sure, but for now, it's just based on my Californian observations.

Dinner at a great sushi restaurant tonight (voted 4th best sushi restaurant in the country by Zagat last year, apparently), followed by chocolate - two candy bar-type treats, in fact. So much for low-carb dieting. But at least it will encourage me to run in the morning. I run to eat and eat to run. The day I truly eat fewer calories and exercise more and drink lots of water and get enough sleep is the day I can expect to drop a dress size. Until then, I can only accept where I am in the process, even if it's at the sputtering pre-enlightenment stage.

R feeding the giraffe two days and several hundred years ago.

Orlando day 1

I was wrong about getting only 4 hours of sleep last night.
I actually got 2 hours of sleep.

I went to bed at 1am and got up at 3:15am.
We left Petaluma a little after 4am, and were in Orlando around 4:30pm local time.

But it's been a good day. I do really enjoy flying, and the flights went very smoothly. The skies were clear and the view beautiful for the most pat. I dozed on both legs of the journey (otherwise, I think I would have vomited by now). The hotel room is wonderful, and the show already has impressed me with the crowd, and tonight was just an opening reception. Tomorrow will be a long day of work, I expect.

What I've seen of Orlando so far:
the airport
the convention center
the hotel
the Crab House restaurant, where we had dinner at around 9:45pm, and where we stayed to shut the place down, finally buying ridiculously silly felt crab hats that we all wore on our walk back to the hotel room. Dinner was the first meal of the day, because I do not count the snacks on the plane.

Things are starting to feel a bit surreal. So I'm going to hit the hay now and try to get up early enough for a run and for the complimentary hotel breakfast. I'm hoping I won't feel as dazed after some sound sleep.

Running with Giraffes

The 5k fun run this morning went well. We all managed to get out the door at half past ridiculous and arrived at the race site on time. The race itself actually started a half hour late, but while we waited, we got to see lemurs, a hornbill, giraffes, gazelle, Scimitar horned oryx, and other wildlife.

D & S walked it and R & I ran. Actually, R sprinted then walked then sprinted then walked while I jogged, and we ended up crossing the finish line at about the same time. During the few hours that I sleep tonight (before leaving at 4am for Orlando), I may have nightmares about the horribly steep rocky hill and the narrow trail that we all scrambled up during the first mile of the race. Or maybe instead I'll have happy dreams about the fact that I got to actually touch a giraffe's nose, after the race, when we were feeding leaves to a baby giraffe. Or maybe (and this is looking frighteningly likely) I will only be in bed for 4 hours and so won't have time to dream at all!

Because we'd gone so long without construction

Worker Ant Husband Starts New Project

D has torn down the fence between us and the new (not-yet-moved-in) neighbors. He's also put in the first of 3 fence posts for the new fence, which will be tall and strong and magnificent.

We're not sure when the other neighbors will move in. Allegedly, the deal might have fallen through because they couldn't get the financing. But this is coming from D who heard it from a neighbor who heard it from the wife of the older brother of the previous neighbor. So it is just a rumor at this point.

At any rate, there's now a pile of old fence in the middle of the backyard waiting to go to the dump, and D is wiped out from digging fence post holes in the adobe. Too bad, too, because in just 10 hours, we'll be doing a 5K (as a family!) through a nearby zoo, Safari West. I'll report back on how we all survive it tomorrow, somewhere in the middle of my preparations for going to Orlando for a few days on business.

Roller skating and music

The girls and I went roller skating after school. I'm not a great skater, but I get by. I like the physical movement of about rolling along, getting lost in the beat and tune of the latest music, even though there's something socially depressing about knowing that the songs I'm hearing, which I've never heard before, are songs the kids all know. Does this mean I need to change the radio stations I listen to, to be able to keep up with the world my kids are growing up in? Or should I stick to NPR and the local "alternative" station with its folk and bluegrass and lesser-known artists, so that I can expand their world? I realize that there's a HUGE world of songs out there available to be downloaded, too, but don't own an iPod. More alarming to some people, I'm sure, is the fact that I wouldn't even know what to put on an iPod if I had one. I just don't listen to that much music that often. I love some songs, and like music on car trips or when cleaning the house or as background in a book store, but I don't have music as a constant in my day.

Here are the extremes I compare myself to, however. As far as I can remember, my father flat out never listened to music, and in fact I do remember him saying he didn't like music. I mean, in general. At all. Have you ever met anyone else who didn't like music, at all? Hmm. My husband, on the other hand, listens to music all day and owns hundreds of CDs (mostly sound tracks). He suffers from tinnitus, and finds the music a good distraction from that. But besides that, he's very musical. He has a great ear - so my violin practicing is very painful - and he can whistle songs wonderfully when he wants to. So music is very important to him, and wasn't at all important to my father, and is fairly important to me. It will be interesting to see what happens with the girls. So far, their exposure to D's tastes and my own means they can tell John Williams from Danny Elfman, and the theme from Fresh Air from that of Car Talk. But I'm guessing they'll find their own musical way, and it'll be something completely different.

Back up to speed

Well, after more hours than I care to admit, I've resolved the virus issue on my drive. Part of the problem was that the virus (adware junk that the latest Norton didn't protect against and couldn't remove) so degraded system performance by hijacking resources that it took forever to even download and run the fixit tools I needed (thanks HijackThis!) I also installed SpyWare Blaster & Spybot Search & Destroy. The system is now back up to speed & better protected against spyware and adware. And I got to play with command lines to boot.

I miss DOS.
I miss vi editor.
But I also know there's no stopping the GUI march of Progress.

Noisy hard drive?

As I said in my comment reply to Max, "Where have I heard that story before?"

I did the math.

For 5.5 years, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I talked to an average of 40 people a day who needed data recovery. About half of them had hard drives that made unusual noises. (Maybe more than that, but I'll be conservative here.)

I took 3 months off when S was born.
I spent another 3 months working half time.

For the last 3 years in my new role at work, I've spoken to an average of 20 people a day who needed recovery (though this number is ramping up daily), and I'd say more than half of them - probably 15 of 20 - had at least one drive (in a RAID/NAS array/device) that made bad noises.

I've taken about 21 weeks of vacation/personal time apart from maternity leave in the last 8.5 years. Add to that another (on average) 7 days of paid holidays per year.

So if I'm doing this right:
(20 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 12 months a year x 5.5 years) + (15 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 12 months a year x 3 years)

less
(20 people a day x 5 days a week x 21 weeks personal time off) + (20 people a day x 7 days a year x 8.5 years holidays) + (20 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 3 months maternity leave) + (10 people a day x 20 workdays a month x 3 months for the half-time)

Which means I've talked to about 32,110 people who have a story about a noisy drive.

And I'm just one person answering the phone at our company, and we're just one company (the best, true, but just one) that does data recovery, and only the people who know about data recovery as an option or who care enough about their data to look into it call us.

Considering all the hard drives out there, it's not as though they're really failing left and right. But a drive is, as I've said one or two (thousand) times, a "man made object with parts that are microns from one another moving very, very fast." And it's subject to failure just like any machine.


Back up your files.

Before you become another part of my crazy middle-of-the night statistics.


(Apologies to those of you who have already had to go through the horrific experience of data loss. I didn't mean to make you revisit your pain.)

Blessings great and small

While I remove a virus from my PC, I'm grateful to have the Mac to post on. I have to admit that the main reason I use the PC anyway is not a love for Windows. Instead, it's that our iMac (the graphite version, which seemed so cool at the time) is friggin' loud. I'm pretty sure it's just the fan, and am also pretty sure I could fix it. So really, I shouldn't complain. But even the keyboard is especially clunky, and liable to awaken children sleeping one room away.

We're hoping to get a new Mac soon (but *don't* tell our current one, or it's bound to crash). Maybe a sexy G5, if we can afford it. For now, though, what had seemed so snazzy is now old faithful, the reliable workhorse.

I really am asking for it, aren't I?

But enough about the small blessing.

The great blessing is my birth mom whose birthday is today. Having to spend it in the hospital is *so* not okay, but I thank God she's still around to celebrate. Here's to continued recovery!

Ghost story

So, as Halloween approaches, I find myself writing a Ghost story.

One of our family "legends" is that when I was young - perhaps as young as three, and certainly no older than five - my parents went to visit friends or relatives and sent me off to play in another part of the house. The adults hadn't been chatting long before they heard a pattern of banging sounds and short shrieks coming from my general direction.

When my mother went to investigate, she found that I had been stepping into a closet, shutting the door behind me, and standing there until a primal fear of the dark or my hyperactive imagination (or both) had built up enough that I was terrified. I would then scream and slam the door of the closet open again. I was doing this over and over again.

When my mother asked, "What on earth are you doing?" my answer had been, "I'm scaring myself."

By the time I was around 10, having suffered plenty of nightmares and anxieties thanks to my imagination, the fear thing had lost most of its glamour, and to this day, I seldom intentionally chose scary movies to watch or books to read (Donnie Darko was an exception).

But I'm enjoying writing this story all the same. We'll see what comes of it. Maybe if it unsettles me, it'll unsettle others. One can only hope.

Time enough to write

But did I write? No. The girls played so well together today, making up games & talking about fairies and generally keeping themselves very entertained. But I did chores - including removing a desk from the office, shifting its contents to a box, then moving a bookshelf and all its contents to the desk's spot. (The desk, which I got when I was 10 but am no longer attached to, was put on the sidewalk with a sign that said "FREE" and disappeared by mid-day.)

I could say that if I'd sat down to work on my story, the spell would have been broken, and the kids would have immediately been asking for me. But that's just based on past history, and is not a known fact.

I did, at least, get a little writing done at the Box with Suzanne. And I have about 20 minutes more tonight that I *could* use to write. So there's hope.

My birth mother is still doing all right, as far as I know. I'm going to try a call again in the morning.

All better with the world

My birth mother is out of ICU and in her own room. Thanks to all for your kind thoughts and well-wishes and prayers - I believe that made a difference! She and I had a great conversation this evening. I was afraid I had worn her out by keeping her on the phone for too long, but my half-sister J. told me that earlier in the day, they'd had her laughing so hard, they were afraid she'd have another brain clot and need another surgery. Actually, the problem was a hematoma that they had to drain. We're so glad she seems to be back on the slow but steady road to recovery. I tell you, I think I come from a line of very tough women, and I'm so glad. Not so much for myself in this case, but for her. So glad.

The difficulty of distance

So my birth mother is in ICU three states away, recovering from surgery. The surgery was for bleeding in her brain she suffered after having been in a car accident on Saturday that she and her husband had thought until a few days ago had left them with only bruises and a totaled SUV. (Thank God they had the new vehicle - it was a semi that hit them.)

And all I can do at this point is pray for her and the family that is there with her, and for the medical staff taking care of her. Half the people who might read this blog (and she is, I think, one of the most constant of my readers) already know all this. My thoughts are with them, with you. Here's a hope that you sleep well tonight and awaken feeling better than you do now. I may not be there in body, but I'm as present as I can be in spirit.

Spider

spider

legs finer than a
newborn's eyelash
you
rap-
pel
on
in-
vis-
ible
silk
backlit by the screen
on which these words appear
your body would fit in a 12-pt Palatino
8
with room to spare
you are gone before I can type my name





August, 2000

Read This!

Inside Job by Connie Willis.

I adore Connie Willis' fiction. I mean, adore it. Her latest book is a quick read novella that is just nothing but completely satisfying. So incredibly fun, especially if you like light but brilliant speculative fiction stories.

In terms of rating, I give it, like, a gazillion hundred million stars.

You may not enjoy it quite as much.

How's your Italian?

I didn't see Life is Beautiful, but I've heard nothing but good things about it.
The same director, Roberto Benigni, has a film coming out next week in Italy. It's La Tigre e la Neve (The Tiger and the Snow).

Why do I care? Not because it's a foreign film from a reputable director and actor who plays a poet in post-war Iraq. It apparently didn't do well in a screening this week, anyway. No, I care, and I'll see this movie, for the same reason I saw Rollerball. Because it also stars Jean Reno. A French actor whose parents were Spanish and who was born in Morocco, here playing an Iraqi poet. In an Italian film.

Why not? I'm pathetic. But at least I admit it.

Blip

Perhaps you missed the fact that I wrote 10/3/2005?

Perhaps your computer has experienced a hiccup or blip of some kind, and just didn't read this post that I posted 10/3/2005? Or...a router was down somewhere and so there was a delay in you seeing an updated setdownthis page.

Yes, that's it.

I'm sure that's all it was.

Amazing what a full night's sleep and a couple of encouraging comments can do for one. Truly amazing.

Why, exactly?

...am I posting every day, when most days I resent or dread doing it?

Strike that.

Make it *every* day I resent or dread doing this.

So either I'm going to change my feelings about this, or intentions, or execution, or *something* - or I'm going to stop doing it, regardless of whether I'm two months away from the pre-determined "one year" goal.

I've whined about this before.

Which is, actually, pretty much my point.

So we'll see what happens.

Old Enough for Hogwarts

R is eleven years old today.
(Kate may recognize the sweater.)












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