Kachina, Kachina

R is studying the Pueblo Indians, and made this to go with her report:



It loses something in the photo, so you have to trust me - it's enough to make her parents proud of her hard work.









The Artist
Pismo, after Thanksgiving
(Uncle B had spiked her hair)

Quantity vs Quality

If you've seen I Heart Huckabees, you may remember the riff about "quantity" and "quality."

And even though the discipline of blogging daily (which has admittedly fallen apart a lot of late) has been good for me, I'm looking forward to a time where I'm not compelled to write short relatively meaningless things for raw fish.

I'm looking forward to some DEPTH, man. Something with more thought behind it than "had tea with the smiths."

Still not quite the Gory Details, actually

So I've weighed out feeling SHAME for not providing the details I said I would and the NEED to sleep, and guess which won?

I will say that dinner was in a private dining room on the 4th floor of the Farallon restaurant in San Francisco. I just tried to find pics online and couldn't, but let me assure you that the paintings on the wall made me feel like I was in Jules Verne while he was on an acid trip. I will find and post a photo.

And my colleagues were really very well behaved. It was a moderately loud, moderately rowdy crowd - what you might expect from your average company party. Everyone stayed dressed, even.

The Gory Details

Actually, I'm sorry/pleased to report that the company holiday party was really quite tame this year - at least from our point of view.

I will provide more details, however - real or fabricated, in my next post.

Sorry about the tease, but this entry is already late and duty calls...

Decadence

Off to the company holiday party. I really like the company I work for; my coworkers are lively, interesting people. They work hard, and they play hard. Very hard. Company parties provide a history lesson. It's my annual reminder that there was a reason that Rome fell.

But I'm sure we'll manage to have a bit of quieter fun anyway. Will report back in more detail tomorrow, although I may have to hold back a bit, since some colleagues have this url and actually use it.

Step One: Present Flowers to the Principals

Just a quick note to qualify the daily post, and to say that S has completed the first step toward performing in the local Nutcracker - that of tiptoeing onstage at the curtain call, standing in first position and presenting flowers to a principal dancer, then tiptoeing off the stage.

In her case, she presented red roses to the dancer who played the Sugar Plum Fairy, who also happened to be S's "mentor" when the ballet school had a "mentor day" a few months ago.

Next year, she expects to graduate to performing, which represents a significant commitment of time and work, but would be worth it. There may well be a Gingerbread Boy costume with her name on it!

A sense of humor will save you

Ever have one of those moments - or days - when you or your loved ones are just on the brink of a horrific ugly meltdown, and someone says something funny that lightens up the whole situation and dispells the tension?

That happened several times today. One minute, I was sure there was going to be bloodshed, or at the very least raised voices and a scuffle - between R & S, or R and me, or S and me, or the rest of creation and me - and then, one tap-dancing comedic moment later, all was right with the world.

Thank God for the Intervention of Humor, is all I have to say.

Another day in the life

Work (with associated drama and juggling), home, lunch for S, a trip downtown to pick up a surprise Christmas present for R (a ceramic horse her sister painted for her), pick up R from school, to the library, to the gym, stop to get dinner on the way home, dinner, to the local university theater for a rehearsal for S for the Nutcracker (she's not dancing, but she's presenting flowers to the Sugar Plum Fairy at the curtain call), then back home for the bedtime routine, three phone calls re: coordinating Christmas, make cookie dough for a fund raiser tomorrow, and then, somehow, because I stupidly still have energy, watch a movie. While folding laundry.

Boor-ring. I know. But reality. And as such, I guess there's no harm in documenting it.

See what I mean?

You see what I mean about time being funny? How it contracts, hiccups, stretches? It's all relative. As they say.

Time is a funny thing

For example, it may feel like a WHOLE DAY has passed within which you did not blog, and yet, somehow, it HASN'T.

The quietest weekend in December

...at least, that's what I suspect this last weekend will be. The next 10 days, anyway, are looking to be mighty busy. I'm glad that I'm only plugging away at finishing my novel, now, and have a little breathing space within which to take on all the other challenges that present themselves daily.

You may note that I've added Michael's blog to my links. I think he's actually had mine listed on his page for a while, so the reciprocity is belated. (Thanks to Michael for the NaNo kudos and interest in actually reading the novel when it's ready for critiquing.) Check out the count-down on his home page, and the gorgeous photographic work he does. Makes me wish I could get married again just to have him photograph the event. Hmmm...maybe in ten more years, when D & I celebrate our 25th...?

I'm trying to get to bed before 10pm and I do actually want to work for a few more minutes on the novel, so that's all for now, folks.

The things that start with one loose rock

like avalanches,
or your husband taking apart the fireplace:
Howard Carter excavating the livingroom,
finding the dust and concrete trash
that the men who made this place stashed
there, forty-one years ago.

And you know he will put it all back together,
the rocks and bricks and mortar.
And he'll make it even better
with intake fan and register,
so the wood-burning stove will have lungs
to breath out its domestic fire.

But while the bricks and rocks lay
on the carpet, wait to be put back in place,
you think of the one loose rock
that led to this, and the loose rocks that have led
to avalanches, to falling cathedrals and towers,
to tumbling unstoppable ruin.

Look out, Terry

Something marvelous happened to me last week which, in the flurry of novel writing, I was unable to record, but have been thinking about ever since.

I was giving a quote for data recovery--something I do, as I've mentioned, several times at day, five days a week. And the potential customer on the phone was a man who has spent a couple of decades working in Television, whose cousin is an Executive Producer in Hollywood (of the Ellen DeGeneres Show, at the moment). I say this just to explain that he and his family are deeply involved in Show Business.

We'd had a good chat about the service my company offers, and about his situation. And even though he wasn't sure that the data he'd lost warranted the expense of professional recovery, toward the end of the conversation, he said something that stopped me dead.

He said, "You know, you remind me of that woman...she's on WHYY...um..."

"Terry Gross??!!!" I asked.

Ok. Maybe not "asked." I kind of yelled.

And he quickly backed off--afraid, it turns out, that he might have offended me somehow.

"Yes," he said timidly. "From Fresh Air..."

"Terry Gross??!!!" I asked again. "You think I sound like Terry Gross?!"

When I assured him that this was a good thing, a really good thing, the best thing that had happened to me all week, he clarified: "Not so much your voice, but just your style of speaking and asking questions."

He'd found me out.

I mean, I'm a Fresh Air fan. I listen to the show whenever I can catch it. My writer group friends and I dream about being on that show. And the funny thing is, about a week or two ago, I'd realized - on my own, very suddenly in the middle of a giving a quote - that I sounded an awful like the interviewer I so admire. Inadvertently, I'd started to question callers like she questions guests. But I'd figured my secret was safe with me.

And this man, in turn, was astounded that someone on the West Coast, at random, would have ever heard of Terry Gross. It's a small world. And a world in which, apparently, we can emulate our heroes. Even if we end up being transparent while we do it.

I just have to be a little careful. I don't want to find myself finishing all my data recovery phone quotes with, "Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today."

Paying off the sleep debt

So I did get myself to work yesterday, but only stayed an hour because it was pretty clear that four-hours of sleep a night that many nights in a row (with no prospect of sleep again until 7pm) had finally taken its toll.

I went home.
I slept nearly 6 hours straight. (Ah! how nice!)
And am still ready to sleep more.

But that's what weekends are for, right? zzzzzzz....

Thanks again to all for your fantastic support of my writerly pursuits.

Well, that takes care of *that*

Kinda says it all, huh?

50,000+ words as of 22:15 PST, but it's taken me an hour to upload a text version to the NaNoWriMo site for word count verification and to make it official.

I'm on Chapter 8 of a 10 Chapter novel.
I'm in love with all my characters, including the horrible ones. Because I created them. (Mwah ha ha.)
And I'm sleep deprived in a newborn-baby-in-the-house way. Which I suppose is appropriate.

Next step? Sleep.
After that? Finish the novel, clean up the novel, have the thing critiqued, and then maybe find a home for it. It's easy to have lofty ambitions when one is giddy with lack of sleep and fulfillment of crazy goals.

Not to mention having faced a double-dog dare with honor.

And speaking of which, please note that whatever twisted mechanism in my psyche it is that has caused me to be so susceptible to dares of this nature has been shut off for the foreseeable future. So nyah nyah to you potential darers out there. Yes, you. You know who you are.

Although I do owe a boatload of thanks to the people who challenged, supported, encouraged and tolerated me and this crazy project for the last 30 days. Thank you SO MUCH. I couldn't have done it without you. Really.

And if you're lucky, I'll never do it with (to) you again.

46,023

...but who's counting?

43,311 words

At this rate, I hope to finish 50,000 words toward the novel by the end of the day Wednesday.

It's all so friggin' melodramatic, this story. I didn't expect it to be. But it is. There's no literary genius here, folks. I guess that'll have to come later ("in my later novels"?? !). This is just practice telling a longer, more involved story that spans several days, two continents, and characters from four countries. It's me praciticing not making it perfect but making it done.

Fun.

Really, just a hair before midnight...

And I'm posting to say that I'm at 39,000+ words. And I'll write the remaining 1000 to reach my 40k goal momentarily, then go to bed until 4am (having slept 8-11pm already). Such strange hours I keep, I know. But it works. Short term.

Back to it...

Home, and happy

Returned from a great weekend with relatives, and am now spending catching up time with Beatrice the rat, who was obviously bored stiff while left alone for a few days.

The writing is coming along. It'll be some crazy push to make 50,000 words happen by midnight Wednesday, but I am still being stubbornly optimistic and hope to get there.

I can see, now, however, that 50,000 words won't be the end of this particular novel at the pace its going - in its "fat draft" incarnation. However, I also know it will be reduced down like a good sauce by about 1/3rd before I'm really finished, so the end product will be closer to 50K when all is said and done.

Ahhh...vacation

A nice, long day. Went for a run, went to downtown Pismo with Mom to get a coffee, watched the kids play in the hotel pool (while I wrote a bit), went down to the beach to make sandcastles, get wet and gritty, and take lots of pics, had lunch out, shopped, and then hung out at my brother's family's home, playing games and writing some more.)

Nearly at 33,000 words but the night is young.

While the girls, exhausted from the day, are sacked out, and D. sleeps too (with earplugs in), I'll stay up and write some more.


The meme that Josh found and Suzanne beat me to:

What Kind of Princess are You?
brought to you by Quizilla



The Traditional Princess

You are generous, graceful, and practical with both
feet planted firmly on the ground. You tend to
be a little on the old-fashioned side. You
value home, hearth, and family life and love to
be of service to others.

Role Models: Snow White, Maid Marian

You are most likely to: Discover a hidden talent
for spinning straw into gold.




Okay. Yeah. That works for me.

Thanks

Among the things for which I am thankful?
Thank. You.


It has been a good day, although there was precious little time to work on the novel until nearly 10pm.
I am starting to think this thing will have to be written in whatever nonsense, non-English form it is I have come up with while sleep-typing, and then translated by a professional gobbledygook-to-English translator later. That's what I think.

31,000+ words .Must stay up sleep-typing until things get more interesting. One of the story's main characters is about to run into a spot of trouble that will galvanize the protagonist and other characters. I should at least try to get that far. At least.

Pismo

The beauty of staying at a nice resort is free wireless access.

So I'm going to have to be trickier with my fake ETD's for trips. We left at 12:30, two hours after the time I'd figured we'd really leave. Spent the afternoon driving, got to Pismo in time for dinner. My mom and sister arrived only a few minutes later (coming the same distance, but from the south instead of the north).

We had dinner at The Splash Cafe, which looks like a bit of a dive, but served the best clam chowder I've ever had. I'm not surprised by their claim that Gourmet & Bon Appetit have requested their recipe.

Tomorrow, we'll get together with my oldest brother and his family for Thanksgiving. There have been hints that my nephews might teach the girls to surf, and R & S are very excited by the prospect.

Now to write.
(I did manage to scribble a page or two in the car on the trip south today, so I'll have a bit to transcribe as a start.)

Doing the Math

29,500 words.

It looks like I'll need to write between 2800 and 3000 words a day to make the NaNo goal. Well, alrighty then. I guess that's what I'll do.

We're leaving tomorrow for a short Thanksgiving trip (but all evil blog-reading house burglars please note that our home has nothing worth stealing and even if it did, we have vicious attack parakeets guarding the place).

Our goal is to depart at a decent hour. Familiar as I am with our two-hours-late-for-any-vacation pattern, I'm telling myself we'll leave at 8:30 so that there will be a chance that we can leave by 10:30.

Apparently, while I was at a Writer's Group meeting / writing session tonight, D and R had a conversation about our ETD.

R: "Papa, we're leaving at nine tomorrow morning."

D: "Ha. If we leave at nine, I'll do a dance in my underwear on the hood of my truck."

pause

R: "I hope we leave at ten."

Not surprisingly...

I am fighting off a cold. It doesn't quite have me in its grip, yet. But there's this nasal-drip and congestion that made me feel all day as though I'd just had a good cry. Chose an early bedtime (and getting up just to write this) instead of staying up late for the novel (apart from 1 new paragraph).

But I do not feel at all worried, somehow. I feel completely sure that I'll be able to make the goal. Hope springs eternal. Stubborn determination in the face of adversity springs eternal, too. But that doesn't have the same ring to it.

27,216

Pre-Monday

I think that in the same way I try now to start being in Weekend Mode (at least mentally) as early as possible on Friday, the Sunday blues are a way of preparing for Monday.

When coworkers ask me on Monday mornings how my weekend was, it's very common for me to have to really scour my brain to recall what happened the previous two days. Part of this may be because I typically stay up too late Sunday nights (case in point), but I think it's also because of some psychological dividing line I lay down between the weekend and the workweek. Sometime Sunday night, I put the weekend behind me. After that, it's in the Past, as distant and fuzzy as Christmas of 1974 or that trip to Hawaii when I was four.

A three-day weekend, however, is a different matter. Three days or more off work, and I really have a hard time going back. It's as though I want to keep a foot, or at least a toe or two, in the water of the Days Away. And I really enjoy my job, too. If I hated my job, I think a 3-day weekend would be enough to make me never go back. One Monday holiday, and I'd be pouring gasoline on the Bridge of Current Employment and looking for somewhere else to be.

27,050 words.

The night is young

Actually, the morning is almost young, but I still wanted to get quite a bit more written tonight.

The problem is, I keep falling asleep at the keys. That's what I get for dealing with the girls' activities until 2pm and then spending until 7pm helping them reorganize and clean their rooms. My choice, so I can't complain. And on the surface, as far as I can tell, it was not because I had any desire not to write.

Maybe it's that I don't fully believe I can do this, at some level. So the choice I have to make in that case is whether to feel like I deserve to succeed, or give in to the old voices inside saying that if I succeed, someone else will end up paying for it and I'll get a heaping helping of Guilt instead of true Satisfaction. (To explain the history behind *that* pattern would take more time and energy than I have tonight, but maybe I'll spell it out it some day.)

Back to work, though. I'd like to be at 30,000 by Monday. I'm only at 24530. If I can get to 26000 tonight, that would be very good.

You've heard of ghost writing? Well, this is like ghost writing, except that it's sleep writing. In the middle of a perfectly normal narrative sentence, I find I'm writing about something bizarre out of my personal life and/or things that make no sense. You know, sentences like, "The next day, she bought a bicycle. It was an older the laundry is probably dry and I should would work in town to run errands like take out the trash farmer's market bread for R's homework tomorrow in math down the street." That's not an actual set of sentences from the doc, but it might as well have been! And I don't possess the talent that Joyce had to get away with truly bizarre stuff, you know?

"Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pahrce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish." -Finnegans Wake, (4.15-17, quote found here.) Scary, huh?

A NaNo NoWrite day

So, I've had a one day sabbatical from actually writing any part of the novel. This has been a matter of survival, since I was completely on duty with other things and not able to sit down in front of a keyboard or paper until 9:30, and at that time, I just crashed.

It would have been a hard workweek even if it hadn't lasted 6 days. Throw in an event for the school every night Tues-Friday, a sick kid, a Top Secret High Security recovery job for a Hollywood Studio that consumed one of my days at work, a birthday party, and a half-dozen errands and the usual housekeeping and trying to write and job in between the teensy-tiny cracks. Okay. I am SO ready for this weekend. Even though there's a school committee meeting Sat. & a school parent/teacher retreat Sunday, ballet, riding lessons, and company over Sunday. That feels like nothing compared to last week.

I'm even more ready to write this weekend. Somehow. Anyhow.
And next week, when I will work only one full day and two very short days before we are on Thanksgiving vacation - well, next week may well be very good indeed.

23,212 words

..the last 20 of which were written while asleep. It's probably akin to what many great legendary alcoholic or drug-addled authors have done in the past: write while stoned out of their minds and read it over a day or week later, when they are a bit more sober, to see if it's really the brilliant genius work the thought it was when they were wildly composing things influenced by them being under the influence.

Except in this case, I think there might be at most one beautiful or really good line out of the thousands of lines I'll write. And I don't know which one it is. Have no idea. Maybe it's still to come.

Fighting off that I'm-so-tired-I-might-vomit-on-the-keyboard feeling the best way I know how to, now. No - not more coffee! Ha! I fooled you!

It's sleep. I love sleep. So very much. I want to marry sleep. Sleep and my bed. I want to marry them both. It will be a mixed marriage, but hey! in this day and age, that should be ok, right?

Right.

22,576 words - so many, but too few!

I feel like Captain Kirk, gesturing in high drama with a grimace on my face:

"Must...keep...writing..."

Or McCoy:

"Dammit, Jim! I'm a poet, not a novelist!"


But these are just the weird geeky thoughts of a middle-aged working mom who has stayed up past her bedtime. Now that the soy latte and espresso beans have worn off, I hear the big horizontal piece of furniture calling my name.

Proceeding Apace

21076 words. Interesting how dialog just doesn't fill out the word count as quickly as long, boring, expository babbling. Oh well. My characters need to have conversations.

R was home sick today with a very unhappy stomach, and I worked 5-8 then came home to take care of her; so I had time (in theory) but I wrote for less than an hour or so; busied myself instead with other chores and with napping to make up for the hours of sleep lost (from R's sick stomach).

I think she'll be back in school tomorrow. And I'll be back in work. And the novel writing will proceed apace after that. Apparently, the 20,000's are to be gotten out of as quickly as possible. So I'm going to try to de-quagmire myself as soon as possible, given Life etc.










A view from Aberystwyth, Wales, the town where much of the novel takes place.

sleep wins out

Chose sleep tonight over staying up late to write, but did get some writing done in the afternoon. At around 21,000 words - behind, considering, but not so bad if I really am able to get some extra writing in over the Thanksgiving break. (Plus, I have managed to exercise for at least 35 minutes 3 times in the last 4 days.)

As incentive for the novel, I'm telling myself I can't read anymore of the delicious sci-fi candy Dangerous Notes until I write to the climax of my own story. I'm just prior to that in Gillian Bradshaw's book, and am afraid I'll lose some of my own energy in the wind down of her plot.

But allow me to plug her work while I'm at it.

I realize that yesterday's snippy sassy post was not only tardy, it was rude. I'm officially sending it to the back of the class, and am apologizing for my behavior. I (aHEM) can see that I'm having a hard time owning up to it when I completely and utterly forget to pre-date and post-post.

Tonight, however, (and I find this ironic), it truly was 11:59pm when I started this post. But who would believe that of the wolf-crying blogger?

What are you smoking?

If you think there was no post from Sunday 11/13/05, you must be smoking something.

See?

There's this post! Here it is. See?

I'm at 20,000 by the way.

Motivation

However one can get it.

The novel takes place in Wales, and although I used to say I could never write while listening to music, I've found myself listening to Welsh tunes - from traditional to contemporary rock - and writing whatever scenes in the novel are inspired by them.

I've also been listening to quite a bit of spoken Welsh. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that listening to Welsh can't be all that enjoyable, even if you understand one word in ten, and even if it's not in the same room as an actual Welsh person (which would require a mask for protection against the spit produced when a native speaker says, "Machynlleth" for example).

But admitting that I've been listening to Welsh is like admitting I've been eating two pounds of chocolate at day. I'm owning up to the height of self-indulgence, here. If I'd realized that writing a novel was a good excuse to immerse myself again in Wales and all things Welsh, I would have done this years ago.

And no, I haven't been eating two pounds of chocolate a day. Because of course, writing a novel in a month does not produce enough stress in my life. So I'm also concurrently trying to lose weight before seeing relatives at Thanksgiving - watching the calories and exercising a bit more.


18,000+ words. 32,000 to go. Yikes!

What alarm?

So have you ever gone to sleep earlier than you expected to and slept later than you'd planned?

Me too.

Lightly carried

Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.

The translation is "Have patience and endure; this unhappiness will one day be beneficial," but I like to think that if Ovid were alive today, he'd be saying, "Hang in there, kid. It'll pay off."

This is the kind of pearl of wisdom and encouragement one runs into when researching Welsh proverbs at the World of Quotes site, I guess. When one is really writing a novel and not surfing the net, of course. Or wasting time talking about going to the gym but not really going. You know, when one is busy writing, one just happens to stumble across such quotes. Quickly, and with one click, and not after an hour of browsing the web or any such nonsense. Of course.

(Just shy of 13,500 words.)

Catching up

...on sleep, that is. I've worked only a few minutes on the story tonight, but I've chosen to skip the early evening coffee, and so I'm falling asleep as I type each sentence, and I have to admit that more than 3 nights in a row of fivish hours of sleep is my limit at present. I do not want to push myself too hard and get sick.

Tomorrow I *may* be able to catch up a bit, I hope. Otherwise, I'm starting to think weekends are the best chance I have to write bigger chunks. Too bad I'm working Sunday.

Anyway, I've fallen asleep three times just writing this! So I'm giving myself a break and going to visit that nice friendly big horizontal piece of furniture in the other room for 6 or 7 hours.

12,000 and change

...still chapter 2, though!

pre-writing blog

Just to be different, I'm blogging first then working on The Novel tonight. If I get some super-duper word count before my eyes fall out of my head and start bouncing around between my keyboard and my wrist pad, I'll post it here. Then I'll pick up my eyeballs and go to bed.



(Another shot from after the Run With The Giraffes event last month.)

Just over 10,000

So it feels like I'm finally getting to know my characters better. It's like we've all had a drink or two at the party and are starting to loosen up a bit. A few more Gin & Tonics and the skeletons might start rolling out of the closets. The plot is becoming more solid as well. It gives me hope. No sleep, but hope.

Working on Chapter 2

Of I don't know how many chapters.
The luxury of writing a novel instead of a poem or story is that not only can I let my characters ramble on, but for the sake of this crazy word count, it's to my advantage if it takes pages for not much to happen.

Except, of course, that when I do a new draft, it'll be half the size of whatever this ends up being.

And in spite of that luxury, I'm only at 9,000 words. Ah, well. That's what happens when one is still trying to do other things like go to the gym and then spend 4 hours at children's birthday parties.

I think I'll have a couple of hours free tomorrow, though.
For now, it's nearly midnight, and I'm turning into a pumpkin...

8058 if you must know

Dear Small But Beloved Reading Audience (all 6 of you!),
For those of you who are asking, I've reach 8,058 words. I hope to be much closer to 13,000 by tomorrow morning, though, so I won't be spending much time blogging.

Get-well-soon wishes to Suzanne's M, and condolences to Suzanne on the demise of her beloved car. (But we're so glad you're all right!)

Can't Blog...sleeping...

...but I'm toasty warm from being under a blanket on the couch and from a blazing fire D made in the wood-burning stove, so it's a very happy kind of sleepy that I'm feeling.

Update on novel when I have something more positive to report. Today was more of a stare-out-the-window-and-figure-out-the-plot kinda day than a pound-it-out-on-the-keyboard kinda day. Also, (not that I'm complaining), I was only home for 30 minutes between 4:45am and 8:30pm, and once I got home, I did nothing more than get the kids to bed and fall asleep on the couch. C'était la vie aujourd'hui.

Another added benefit

Because I have to write this novel during whatever slivers of free time I have in my schedule, I found myself writing for about an hour while the girls had gymnastics lessons today. Imagine working on a novel while in a huge gym full of kids running around and coaches yelling instructions and parents gossiping over coffee. Throw in the siblings of the kids in class, bored and restless and underfoot.

Not conducive. Not exactly a room of one's bloody own.

But I managed to crank out a page or so in between helping with homework (my kid's and that of another random 5th grader there) and supervising my other child (and the other 5th grader's little sister) so that they were somewhere between entertaining each other and setting the place on fire. (It's a fine line, but if you're a parent, you've already had to walk it.)

So what I'm saying is that somehow, I've developed a way to concentrate in the midst of total chaos. Say it with me, now: "Whoo-hoo!"

Lisa suggested I keep a word count of the novel-in-progress on my blog. Not a bad idea. But which word count to use? The one automated by Word itself is probably more generous than an editor would consider. The method I'd learned about 15 years ago is to count words per line and lines per page and work out the average. And then there's the standard "about 250 words per (doublespaced) page." But for the sake of simplicity, I'll go with Word's calculation and then add some extra words (if possible) for insurance.

And drat. I found this note in a NaNoWriMo forum that addresses what one can include and what one can't include towards the final word count: "The only real limits are that it has to be written in November, and not beforehand." So ridiculously long (but new) chapter titles would count, but not the pages I'd written toward another novel and am incorporating into this novel - not, that is, until I have completed the necessary modifications to move them from 1st person to 3rd and from near-past to distant past. That is to say, I'll be re-writing and putting little bits and pieces from previous-year's notes in this new work, but until I actually put them there, I should not count them. This dramatically decreases my count. By like 5,000 words. Blast.


At any rate, kudos (read: are you insane?) to Josh for picking up the same gauntlet he threw down for me. We're on our way!

Day Two Observations

1. Much of writing a novel consists of staring into space thinking about the characters and plot. This is critical for my process, anyway. Driving and showering seem to be great times to hash things out mentally before I waste time wandering around on a page headed in the wrong direction. It means missing Morning Edition and potentially forgetting to use conditioner, but one must make sacrifices.

2. I am only deluding myself if I think I really will go to bed on time but then get up two or three hours later to write for an hour or two. It's a lie! A big fat lie! And also not good for my health--mental or otherwise. I'd learned this lesson earlier with my blogging but apparently seem to think that because I AM WRITING A NOVEL the laws of physics and such go out the window. And float. (Get it? Laws of physics...float? Ha!) Anyway, I can manage the going to bed on time or the staying up to write, but doing both means neither has any quality to it. Note to self: remember One Needed Thing. At a time.

3. Taking the girls to the library while I write is a great idea, and should give me another 2-3 hours a week of production time, but it works even better if I don't spend the time balancing my checkbook.

4. My house is likely to stay much cleaner than usual during NaNoWriMo. True, any time spent not writing is spent not writing, but see #1 above. The fact is, I can and do decide on things like the hair color, eye color, names and history of my characters, as well as plot points, while washing dishes or folding laundry. This cuts down on time spent staring into space while a Word doc is sitting on the screen in front of me, mocking me.

5. The support that friends and spouses show during this time is very helpful. Thanks to all. Um. I mean spouse, of course. Mine, that is. Not that my friends aren't spouses, some of them. But they're not my spouses. Except that one. Of course.

Proof in the Pudding

So the first day of NaNoWriMo is done, and what have I learned?

That I am already too dependent on making this happen through the use of lots of caffeine.

That since I will be single-parenting at night for at least a week while D works a late shift, I'll have to be even more creative and disciplined than I thought I'd have to be.

That if I'm not willing to cut out all social activities for the month to do this (I've talked about my stoopid pride before, haven't I?), I will have to expect to pay the price.

That one of the compromises I make might could be educational videos (like the French language instruction one we currently have from the library) to keep the kids entertained while I write.

But so far, I'm on target. Lots of words written (over 3,000 so far, but that includes a section written 2 years ago that will have to be pared down and re-incorporated correctly).

A fat, horrible, first part of a first chapter of the first draft. An outline. A voice starting to emerge.

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.)












...

SCA

The field across from the girls' school, because it's technically part of the Fairgrounds property, is often the venue for things like dog shoes and smaller circuses that come to town. But yesterday, when I was picking up R from school, and I saw the field of tents that had sprung up like some sort of slap-dash medieval village, I immediately thought, "It must be the SCA."

SCA, for those of you who don't know it, stands for "The Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc." In case you don't want to go to their web site and therefore be either completely converted and HAVE TO JOIN NOW! or be completely dismayed at how people can get TOTALLY LOST IN A FANTASY WORLD, here's the blurb about SCA from their home page:

"The SCA is an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe. Our "Known World" consists of 18 kingdoms, with over 30,000 members residing in countries around the world. Members, dressed in clothing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, attend events which may feature tournaments, arts exhibits, classes, workshops, dancing, feasts, and more. Our "royalty" hold courts at which they recognize and honor members for their contributions to the group."

The short-hand version of this is that there are over 30,000 people in the world playing dress up who aren't afraid to admit it. These same people are also, many of them, avid history buffs and craftsmen. Some of them couldn't hold down a steady job if their lives depended on it, and others are probably doctors and lawyers and auto mechanics and physicists in their spare time. It's probably not much different from the rest of society as a whole, except for their collective capacity for make-believe.

This is another "road not taken" for me. I could be part of the West Kingdom! I could be participating in the Crown Event this weekend, a tournament to decide the next King and Queen! I'm not being sarcastic. I'm serious, here.

Does this scare you? Or, like me, are you sighing, "Ah! I too, have felt that longing to be fully part of a subculture that lets you talk funny, play a role, sleep outside, and partake of interpersonal melodramas that no one else could possibly understand?"

Yes, I'm completely generalizing and probably missing parts of the big pictures. Still, I wonder how many people work in professions with mysterious work-related vocabulary, or pretend to be what they're not in life, or go camping, or suffer from complicated flawed relationships simply because they're fulfilling the need for Drama in their lives. Ok, maybe not the camping part. But the rest? It could be SCA or it could be life. Or, for 30,000 people at least, it could be both.

A much better day

Today I felt like I was able to work through so much - not only to shake the shame and patch up things at work, even improve the situation there (with only one or two other minor flare ups) - and the rest of the taking-care-of-the-kids afternoon, evening & night has gone fairly smoothly too.

D. is at the girls' school again tonight, finishing the texture on the walls for the Kindergarten classroom's bathrooms. He's worked I don't know how many full days at the machine shop followed by hours and hours at the school, now. Poor broken man. (He also picked the wrong week to stop drinking beer.)

R turns 11 on Saturday & will have a party Sunday. On less than a week's notice, all but two or three of her classmates will be attending her party. Sure, it's a small class, but I told R that I thought that spoke of how well she is liked in the class. I didn't say, "Good for you, you're popular!" but I did point out that they're looking forward to celebrating her special day. Considering she's more than once given the exact same, "I don't have any friends at all, no one likes me," speech that I gave at her age (and maybe still give in a slightly modified form - or live trying to avoid having to give), I figured it wouldn't hurt for her to see that she's not the pariah that on bad days she feels she must be.

And because R loves her teacher ("Miss J"), she invited her as well. And just to encourage the instructress to join in the festivities, R apparently told her, "Miss J, If you don't come to my party, I won't pay attention in class."

As you can imagine, when I heard this story from R (later corroborated by Miss J), startling visions of R's entire future academic career (or lack thereof) flashed before my eyes.

But the flip side is that she not only threatened her teacher, she also bribed her. "Don't worry, Mom," I was told, "I also said, 'If you do go to my party, I'll give you a shoulder massage.'"

So she's got that going for her.

For shame...

Shame defined by Dictionary.com:

A painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace.
Capacity for such a feeling: Have you no shame?
One that brings dishonor, disgrace, or condemnation.
A condition of disgrace or dishonor; ignominy.
A great disappointment.

Even though a few of my co-workers have once or twice read SetDownThis, I'm going to throw caution to the nor' easterly and mention something happened at work today that's had more of an impact on me than I want it to. In a day already peppered with challenges (good for personal growth, sure), I completely inadvertently made a co-worker feel betrayed and put on the spot and accused of something he didn't do. And he took great umbrage to it.

Usually, when someone tells me directly, "I'm really angry," I don't expect him or her to mean, "I'm really angry at you." I think he eventually understood that my comment (a note in a service record) was never meant to cause problems, but he was thorough in expressing his feelings of betrayal.

I can understand where he is coming from, and on the surface of it, there was nothing wrong with what he was saying. In fact, it can be a refreshing change when someone tells you how they feel immediately, rather than complaining behind your back or harboring smoldering resentment or (my own undesirable gig) doing the passive aggressive thing. But even though I never meant any harm, and even though I apologized for my part of the misunderstanding, and even though I now know how to avoid such error in the future with him, I'm still feeling such a sense of *shame*. Unwarranted, unwelcome, and certainly unnecessary. All I can surmise is that it's leftover from some other time - times - in my past when I was made to feel, or allowed myself to feel, that I had let someone down. Had terribly, horribly, acted to reveal them in a position of culpability - false or true, deserved or not. What a worthless emotion shame is! And what purpose does it serve here, except to widen the already significantly yawning pit between my inaccurate, defeating self-image and my truer (dare I say "worthier") self?

Stoopid shame. Ptooey!! This is me spitting it out. Guilt? Not so bad a thing.

Dictionary.com suggests:
Remorseful awareness of having done something wrong.
Self-reproach for supposed inadequacy or wrongdoing.

Okay, give me guilt over shame, then. I think guilt is better, insofar as it can lead to self-reflection, correction, compassion and change. But shame? Blech! Ptooey!!

Sorry if I got your monitor wet.

Warm buzz

I don't mind telling you that this yoga thing is addictive.
I'm so spaced-out sleepy and peaceful after class, I probably am not safe to drive home. I can imagine nothing better than going straight from an hour of conscious breathing, stretching, grounding, centering to sleep. Sleep! Before my mind kicks in and tells me everything that's "wrong" or that I didn't "fix" today. Off to that place where we are completely vulnerable but should be completely free.

All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
Change it to the present tense, and that's Julian of Norwich + Ekhart Tolle, thank you very much. Works for me.

Monterey

We're members of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and yet we didn't go there at all last year, and didn't make it this year until now. But as though to make up for lost time, we spent all of Sunday taking in as much marine life as we could stand before having a giggly dinner at the surreal Monterey Carrows and heading home.


Actually, R and I snuck away for a bit in the early afternoon, so she could get her feet (read: legs) wet in the Pacific and hunt for seashells. I'd also enjoyed a morning jog down along the beach and to the wharf while the family slept in. It somehow felt exotic to run to the sound of seals barking about their breakfast.

Back Chez Nous & Archive Meme

We just pulled into the driveway about 20 minutes ago, and even though I slept practically the whole way home, I'm not up to staying up to detail the weekend or otherwise write a meaningful blog. Pictures and something of more substance tomorrow, then!

But Wait! There is more tonight, thanks to Julia tagging me with this Meme:

1. Go into your archive.

2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).

3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).

4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.


Here's what I got:

"You don’t have to tell me they were taller once."

This makes little sense out of context, even if I tell you it's a line from a poem. But there it is. Maybe it's a suggestion from the universe that I work on that rewrite, though. Hmmm.

Monterey Bound

We're off for a very short stay in Monterey, and I don't know that I'll have internet access while there, so am posting this brief mid-day post now.

It's beautiful outside, and we're all so looking forward to the getaway. I hope everyone else is also having a very, very pleasant weekend.

Sept. 23, 2005

This title is what happens to you when you run out of titles. The date. This date in history.

I watched Donnie Darko tonight. While alone. At night. After a glass of wine (which always makes me paranoid). After telling myself I wouldn't. And the dog isn't even here (at the kennel while we head out of town for a day).

The film is...unsettling. But also it's a film that makes you think. Mostly, it makes you think that you'd better not watch that kind of thing alone at night after a glass of wine.

But I'm ok now, thanks to the Bach I listened to to take off the edge.

Warning: political in nature

I try to stay away from politics in this blog, if only because I know that the four or so people who might read it have a wide range of political leanings, and I'm not interested in ruffling feathers.

For those of you who have not figured it out yet through knowing me, reading this, or other inference, I did not vote for George Bush. Either time. I respect the office of the President, and I am trying to teach my children to respect our country's leaders. Also, I would like to believe that Mr. Bush sincerely thinks he is doing what is best for this country.

However.

I am angry and bitter and ashamed about where he has lead the U.S., and I do not hold him in high regard. To say the least. He is not invited to Thanksgiving at our house. And I will not be sending him a Christmas card. Praying for him, yes. Sending him a Christmas card, no.

I just got an email that began "Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington" and linked to this article from The Nation. Keep in mind that I don't read The Nation, and don't even know where in the Moveon.org<-->American Enterprise Institute spectrum it falls. However, if I were First Lady Bush, I'd be feeling the sting of Ms. Old's open letter. Especially the last four paragraphs.

Happy First Day of Autumn, Washington D.C. and everyone else.

Giving Blood

Just one of the things I did today was give blood. I imagined myself writing a list of the many other things I did today, but then wondered why? To record only? So that when I read this later I can look back with admiration or regret, pride or dismay? To impress or depress other people?

Let's just say that it's the close of the day, and now:
the girls are asleep, both having had a good solid evening cry for different reasons
D is in the garage, building walls for the Kindergarten bathroom
My left arm is bandaged with a green bandage
the dog is sleeping off vaccines

All is as right with the world as I can, at the moment, make it.

Second Yoga Class and Marine Animals

Just home from the second yoga class. I don't think I was snoring during the last pose ("corpse"), but it's hard to say. Ian said he thinks there was someone snoring, but on the other side of the room from where I was.






So I understand that a giant leatherback turtle was just sighted off the coast of Wales. Very cool - but what's even cooler & more critical is the story I'd missed from last month. Apparently mid-August, a super-pod of dolphins was seen off the coast of Wales. Not a dozen dolphins, not a hundred dolphins, but something like two thousand dolphins, including mothers nursing calves, all headed out somewhere together. I'm not sure whether to be flip and say they're probably saying "So long and thanks for all the fish," or to seriously wonder if they know something we don't. Hmmm...

Itty Bitty Kitty has a home

Hmmm...sounds a bit like "fuzzy wuzzy was a bear"

It could be:

Itty Bitty is a cat
Itty bitty is quite fat
Itty bitty itn't very bitty, itty?

but the kitten we took to her new family today is not fat - although she is faring much better than when we first brought her home. She's probably gained several ounces. And when you weigh 1.3 lbs, every ounce counts.

If we lived in Canada, it might go:

Strayeh had a chez
Strayeh had a place to stay
Strayeh wasn't very stray, eh?

You can all stop groaning and go about your regular business now. This was all I was good for tonight.

Petaluma Poetry Walk

Here's to the 10th year of the Petaluma Poetry Walk!

It only took me 7 or so of those years to get someone to join me on the trip. The PWG (Petaluma Writers Group) gals and I saw a few of the poets:
Maria M. Benet, Claudia Chapline, Gerald Fleming, Dorianne Laux, Sharon Doubiago, and Maria Mazziotti Gillan. We took a break while Diana di Prima and Geri Digiorno, Sonoma County's new Poet Laureate, read. Then the other gals called it a day, but I went home very briefly, said hello to my mother-in-law who was visiting, and turned around and went back out to hear David Bromige and Kate Braverman at Copperfields. (As much as I might honor my mother-in-law's ability to hold forth for extended periods of time, these particular poets were more inspiring.)

Also a treat today was getting a ride from one venue to another in a poet acquaintances' KMZ sidecar, a 1980's Kiev Motor Works vehicle. And yes, it was as fun as it looks.

So now? Now it's nearly 10:30 and I have a mountain of clean laundry on the bed to fold (or, more likely, shift), and a barely-written ghost story with the prospect of little free time tomorrow to write further. Ah well. These things happen, don't they? Yes, they do.

The Neighbors Leave

Our next door neighbors are moving. I pulled up to the driveway today and the moving van was finally there.

They put their house on the market about a month ago, around the same time that they bought the new place. They’ve been working on changing a few things in the new home, such as pulling out all carpeting and installing hard wood floors to help them in their battle against some fairly significant allergies. These changes have taken time, so as weekend after weekend went by and I saw no evidence of packing or pickups, I’d been able to fool myself into thinking that they weren’t really leaving. And so seeing that moving van today, and seeing all their friends and family like worker ants carrying things out of their house hit me really hard. Harder than I thought it would.

In particular, I’ll miss my friend Mary. Mary’s been a good sounding board, someone with whom I can talk about science or religion or politics, someone with whom I can laugh at the struggles inherent in being a mother while trying to be an independent adult as well. She has three children 6 and under. She has a PhD in molecular biology that she finished while she was pregnant with her oldest child. She’s active, fit, slender, and good-natured. And a month ago, just as she & her husband were signing papers for their new house, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

It happened fast. Within a week, she went from having a cyst removed & checked (it was benign) and having a mammogram done, to surgery because of something the mammogram picked up, to the surgeon testing tissue during the procedure and then performing a mastectomy. She has started chemotherapy, and her mother is staying to help her, but she’s going to be fine. She’ll survive this.

What’s amazes me is not just the speed of the diagnosis and sudden thoroughness of the surgery—she said she was not going to mess around, she wanted to take care of it completely—what really amazes me is that it’s really the mammogram that her doctor recommended that has saved her life. Neither she nor her doctor would have found this cancer otherwise. Apparently, the first thing the surgeon did after surgery was ask Mary’s husband for her doctor’s name and call the doctor to say, “Hey, this? This was a good catch. A good one.”

Tomorrow is Mary’s birthday. She’ll be forty.

Next month, I’ve got an appointment for my bi-annual checkup – and even though I’m too young for them to “require” it, I’ll be getting a mammogram. Just, well, you know. Because.

The lights are off in Mary’s house and I think they’re all spending the first night in the new place, a couple of miles away: Mary, her husband, her three children, and her mother. I know I'll still be seeing them around, and we'll probably arrange playdates--and Mary knows that I want to help while she's recovering from treatments, in whatever way I can--but I'll miss having them as neighbors. I hope they’re all sleeping well.

Resolve

Happy Birthday D!!!

If he had a web site, I'd send you there to see it. But he does not.

Okay, I do recall having said that posting this late at night doesn't work for me.
Here's a note for myself for future reference:

POSTING THIS LATE AT NIGHT doesn't do anyone any good.

For example, I have typed the above sentences about 4 times. I keep falling asleep mid-word & typing nonsense each time. I am not making this up. I can't type more than 3 words without literally falling asleep with my fingers poised over the keyboard.

So that's all for tonight.

Thursday as Friday

Since I have tomorrow off, I'm up late. D & I watched I Heart Hucklebees (an existential comedy). A good flick if you're philosophically minded and can stand some irreverence.

That's all. Except to say that the kitten *may* have a home by Monday. We hope.

Calm, calm

Tonight, I went to a lecture at the girls' school about values, Waldorf education in general and our charter school in particular. The speaker is both experienced and insightful, and I've learned a lot from hearing her in the past. She talked about how telling a story in a CALM, SOOTHING way is so much better for small kids than teling it with wild hand gestures and over-the-top yelling or whining. She talked about how there is a link between memory ability in children and limiting media exposure, having good nutrition, and getting lots of sleep. I'll write more about it tomorrow - including the hipocampus stuff! If I remember to. If I get enough sleep.

Kitty is still here, but still only as a foster child, and we're just trying to find a good home for him. Apparently, it's the tail end of kitten season and all the shelters are either full up or have outbreaks of one disease or another. I spoke to one woman on a farm (our best lead so far) who said that she's been helping with strays for 50 years (she started bottle feeding kittens when she was four)and is a third generation animal advocate, and this has been the worst year for deaths from upper respiratory illnesses that she's seen. Swell.

We'll take the kitten to the vet tomorrow, I guess. I'd avoided it because I'd been told by one friend that shelters sometimes cover those expenses. And he's been eating and drinking fine and doesn't act sick. But at this point, since a private "adoption" is looking more likely than a shelter, but isn't in the immediate future, we need to get him officially checked out. The farmer might take him Monday if he is well enough according to the vet.

For those of you who are concerned, we have kept him quarantined in one part of one room away from other pets and have been washing hands thoroughly after every time we handle him. Just in case.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CLARE! I think everyone should visit her blog and wish her a happy birthday.

First night of yoga

Those of you who do not live in California can go ahead and chuckle as I live out the Left Coast stereotype and take a yoga class. I expect, however, that this is going to do me a world of good. Especially since I'm so unaware of my body and my breathing most of the time - too much in my HEAD, too much thinking, figuring, fretting and second guessing. (Take the first sentence of this blog as an example.)

The kitty still does not have a home. But there are a half dozen new shelter names I've been given in the Bay Area, so I can try those. In the meantime, we're all just enjoying his company without becoming *too* attached to him. As a consolation prize (diversion), the girls are switching rooms in the next few days.

And this just in...

For those of you who have been to Wales and are desperately missing the air there, try this. That's right, Wales in a bottle. A breath of air from Cymru proper, sealed for your convenience. The site says you can even specially request the Welsh smell/air that you want to purchase. What will they think of next?!

Finding a Home

Itty-bitty kitty, the kitten that R has dubbed "Yoda" because of its large ears and the shape of its eyes, does not yet have a home. But we're working every angle we can, from vets to shelters to foster homes and rescue programs, and something should pan out by this time tomorrow, I hope. Here's what s/he looks like, for the record.


What's not to love? Unless, like us, "love" is not the issue, but having reached our maximum-amount-of-pets-deemed-reasonable is.

Come on...don't you want a kitten?