Eight

Eventually, naming posts after the date will wear thin. And by "eventually," I most likely mean tomorrow.

Had the pleasure of meeting with the writer pals, J&S today, and although I actually got little actual writing down, I did re-read some chapters of my "Welsh novel" that I hadn't read in two years, thus reminding me of whole subplots and characters I'd forgotten about completely. It helps me settle back into it, as did watching "Framed" (the BBC film that takes place in North Wales) over the weekend.

Managed to make short trips to the gym both yesterday and today. D. is better, although not yet ready to go back to work. I'm shooting for a week of NOT working 10 hour days. Goals are so important. My goal is to do less. Ironic, isn't it?

Seven retro

Teenagers hanging out in the livingroom until late, watching D. play his video game. It's beyond me how they can spend two hours watching someone else explore a gaming world. So I took a short trip to the gym while they hung out. After a day of office-cleaning and a few errands with S. - by the time the guests left and we settled down to a movie (just the family), I was ready for sleep. And missed, for the first time this year - ha! - the chance to write. But it was a good day. No complaints here.

Six

Cutting it close to midnight once again but this is the force of stubborn habit that builds a body of work. Or at least a body of blog entries. Brutal day, the end of a brutal week. But it really is first world problems. How can I possibly complain when there is more than enough food to drink, a roof over my head, and my family safe and sound? Some more challenging things have happened to family members this week - one threatened with losing a house, another in a bad car accident from which, thank God, he walked away relatively unharmed. D's pneumonia is not much better, and his doctor has prescribed prednisone, which does not make me happy. But apparently it's a short course. We'll see how it goes and hope it will help sooner rather than later...I'm fighting off something tonight myself, and I just hope that a good night's sleep is all it will take to shake it.

Five

The best thing about waking up at midnight with what I think I should call "angry insomnia" is that it can lead to lovely fruitful conversations with the senior night owl of the family. So D. and I talked, and that's a god thing.

Today's interesting news is that a boy that R. has liked, and maybe even more than liked, for two or three years now has mustered the gumption to broach the subject with her. It would seem that the two of them agree that they fail miserably when they try to follow the social conventions, and they are better off forging their own reality of whatever their relationship is supposed to look like. And whatever that means in the long term, for now they are together. And I have to say that I do not recall ever ever seeing R. so happy. Just friggin' beaming.

Four

There are days, and this is one of them, when really there is nothing left of me by the time I finally come home. I left at 7:30am and I got home at nearly 10pm. Driving and work and driving. And more. D is sick but all I know is that he was home again (as he should be), but he has been on a video game since I dropped S. off at nine - three hours ago. And who knows, or cares, how many hours he was on it before that. Dishes undone, laundry undone, I am responsible for dinner and driving the kids home at night after working a 10 hour day. But he has been staring at a screen for hour after hour. I love him. I understand he is sick. But yes, I am bitter. Thanks for listening.

Three

010312 8:33pm

Well, I must say this for the iPad. It's silent. The keyboard in the text app couldn't be any more silent than this. It's just the soft pad of my fingers touching the screen. I can't quite decide if I love or fear the little auto-corrections, too. On the one hand it can allow me to forge on past little errors. On the other hand, this makes me concerned that I might become lazy in my old age.

So this is my second blog entry created on my new toy, and my third blog entry of the year. And yet, none of them have been posted yet. There's a bit of a disconnect because I don't have 10.5 loaded on my iMac (let alone 10.6).

And yes, the office is still cluttered and unorganized, and yes, I still come home at the end of a too-long workday and indulge in too much eating and relaxing in front of a fire, and too little gym or housework or cleaning. But the one half-spoken new years resolution I am keeping is that of writing/blogging/journalist daily.

Two

1/2/12 spells out a pretty little binary date.

Second day of the year, and although I “accomplished” less today than I had yesterday, I did still tackle the priorities: took Sophia to school, went to the gym, pruned the roses, got groceries. I don’t think it helps anything to list what I didn’t get done every day, so I’m not going to do it. Here. This is me, letting tomorrow’s worries be sufficient unto themselves.

And I wrote. Maybe not the four pages of novel I’ve been saying I must write (first a commitment to Suz and then one to S.) but I did get a couple more pages of the story down, and moved it along however little. Trying to let those characters reanimate in my mind. They have histories that help make them who they are. I think sometimes I just have to let them tell their histories so that I know what actions they’ll take in their “present,” which is the now of the story…

Tomorrow it’s back to work, and back to more of the routine that has been lacking the last two and a half weeks while D’s been sick and the girls have been out of school. S. is back. R’s not back yet. It’s a new year, with new challenges and new hope. Re-reading The Wrong Reflection has got Bradshaw’s voice influencing my own, and maybe even her characters influencing my own too. There are worse things…

New

New Year, new toy. Originally, I wrote these first few posts of the year on my new iPad. I'm transcribing them now (on the eighth!) but am honoring the original dates they were written, to reflect my commitment to writing daily - even if it's just a little bit - this year.

010112
Might as well get used to writing it now, this 2012 thing. And get used to typing on the ilPad, which I'm using for this first blog post of the year. R. Is writing her own blogs post at this moment, too. It's something she does far far more often than I do, but I still have hope that writing daily is a New Year's resolution I'll be able to keep, having done it before, and having profited from it, at least insofar as it has feed the creative part of my soul, which is usually gagged and shoved in a back broom closet to stay out of the way of More Important Things. So I write this now, knowing that I won't transfer it until tomorrow, most likely, but deeming it a compromise that is in keeping with another New Year's resolution of finding more balance in my life. And I must say, too, that the auto formatting and auto correcting that seems to come with Notes on the iPad definitely make things easier and will make them quicker too. And now on to some poetic scribbling, too, before I officially become too sleepy to do anything but curl up in front of the fireplace...