Monthly Archives: November 2011

seldom on a black friday

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I don’t shop on Black Friday. The whole acquisitional frenzy thing just bums me out to the point where I have hated Xmas for years. Then last year I decided I would take Xmas on my terms, including the X, since I don’t think the frenzy is very Christ-sanctioned. I would embrace the things I loved, the trees and lights, the cards, the food, and perhaps oddly given my relationship with the X, the carols.

Not just any carols though. It has to be choir carols. Preferrably the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but definitely not anything sung by “the new” country and western set, and not really the old country and western set either. I might make the occasional exception for Burl Ives.

But about Black Friday, I don’t do it. I don’t celebrate Capitalism Day. Not that I think Capitalism is an inherently bad system. Flawed, yes, but not evil. But! NO BLACK FRIDAY. No pushing and shoving among the huge numbers of greedy cretins who think it’s the day when courtesy and good judgment are suspended.

I don’t do NaNoWriMo, either. I tried it twice, and it left me burnt out on a level I can hardly bear to recall, let alone describe. After each NaNo, it was months before I wrote again. Their rate is, if I recall correctly, 1,667 words per day. A more natural rate for me is 600-1000 words per day, with days off to recharge and feed the muse. (Maybe more on this later, if I remember.)

Yesterday I wrote the first section of Seldom. I would say I wrote the first chapter, but chapters are an unnatural concept to me. I won’t know where they should really break until the next pass at the earliest. But the first section, piece, whatever…rough drafted. 1,399 words. A few of those I’d put down longhand while waiting for Zor to get out of school on a Friday, but regardless. Yay, me.

There are always so many things I ought to be doing…and only time for a few of them.

Yesterday I also, with Zor, watched the film Alien. It was Zor’s first time. I was rather jealous of that, in spite of the fact that my first time, I saw it in the theatre. With my father, who pronounces it thee-ATE-er, and my brother who was probably eleven or so. We plan to watch the Alien Quadrilogy, and the entire Harry Potter series before we go back to school in January.

Oh, and also to figure out how to make good homemade macaroni and cheese.

a rough night

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So I have this weenie yet butt-kicking cold, and then my back starts to hurt. It’s one of those sleep-injury pains that you wake up with occasionally once you reach a certain age. Every morning for the last three mornings my back (or maybe it’s my hip) has been a little owier than the day before. Then last night it woke me up at 3 a.m. I got up to pee–middle age sleep deprivation multi-tasking at its finest–and almost fell. Pain shot through my right hip and down my leg, which almost buckled. I was finally able to straighten and hobbled toward the bathroom. Stepping over dogs was suddenly a huge obstacle. When I sat to do do my business the pain flared brighter. When I got up, another bolt. When I returned to bed, lying down brought some relief–for perhaps 40 seconds. Then the pain started to build again. Stabby and shooty.

I gave up sleeping and read a while. After some time I started to doze. Mr Moth’s alarm went off–it sounds like a rooster crowing. Instead of turning it off, he had some kind of convulsion, like a fish dying on the beach. It felt like I might genuinely be in danger of getting bounced out of bed. Finally, finally he turned off the damn alarm…and went back to sleep.

And started to snore.

Never let it be said I have no self control. He’s still alive, right?

I read some more. Finally Mr Moth got up and went to work. I tried to use the extra bed space to find a comfortable position, and each shift brought relief but only temporary. I got up and sat on the toilet for about an hour. The seat pressed on the backs of my thighs and kind of made things worse but also eased the pain. Don’t ask how that’s possible, because I don’t know. The relief was welcome, but not sufficient. Around six a.m. I got up and took four advil. They didn’t help the pain, but maybe they helped knock me out after about another hour.

At eight-thirty some little dog started clawing my arm and whining. Making myself look bad, I harped at her to “Knock it off, dog!” But she didn’t, because she has a teeny weeny bladder, and what can she do?

Transitions are the worst moments, the rising and settling. Then the pain escalates into agony, and it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to use that word. But, dogs. I want her to tell me when she needs out, don’t I? I hauled my agonized carcass off the mattress, stood gripping the edge of the long dresser, waiting for the spasms to ease. When they did, I hobbled to the door. Then came trial by baby gate. When I went to the kitchen for advil earlier, I’d stepped over it. I almost didn’t make it back over, either. Now I bent and grabbled the pressure bar that releases the gate.

There was a noise, like tearing. And a sensation, also like tearing, and also like rippling, across that place that might be the lower back or might qualify as upper hips. And then, pain. Blinding. It’s not just hyperbole. I yelled, and swore, and cried. And somehow, stood up. Since I still had hold of the baby gate, it pulled loose. Two dogs charged around me while I stood there with stupid tears leaking down my face. I saw them dimly through a haze of eyewater and excruciation, capering toward the back door.

I couldn’t put the gate down, because that would have required me to bend over again. Hell, it would have required me to move. I honestly don’t know how I put it down. But I must have, because I see it in it’s daytime storage slot. I followed the cavorting mutts and let them out.

Fabulous, I thought, leaning on the back of a kitchen chair. Now it hurts to stand. At least yesterday I could do that. And today Zor needs transported to her final final exam, and there’s grocery shopping to do among the throngs of people too busy and important to bother being considerate or polite, or heaven forfend, patient.

I made coffee. Instant, with microwaved water, vanilla creamer, and pumpkin pie spice, which I ‘ve been using in everything since long before it became the in thing.

I check to see if dogs have chow, and thank heaven one of their dishes is still full, because feeding dogs without bending over can be done, but I’m sure I’m not up to the challenge. I let them in. I take my empty-stomach pills and start for the office. At least I can walk upright now, I think, with only minor twinges. I remember Zor telling me, “Little victories, ma,” when I was in the hospital and had successfully brushed my hair.

I come in the office, push into the Cessna-like whir of five hamster wheels going all at once, creep to the table where I set drinks (none allowed on the desk with my laptop, nuh uh, Im a klutz and have a cat) and, bracing myself, bend to set the cup down.

It doesn’t hurt.

Praise the cosmos.

I sit, and that doesn’t hurt either. Well, a little. But more on the sitting than the transitioning, and only at manageable levels. I play some Sims Social, and I’m still feeling a little spasmy at the tailbone, but not too bad. I stand up, and that barely hurts either–mostly just achy and throbby, which I’ll take over stabby and shooty any day.

So, anyone want to guess what I’m thankful for today?

nothing important

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All but the last few straggly leaves have departed the tree in our front yard and lie on the ground in soggy unblowable clumps. It is now deer season in Ohio, where the deer cross the roads in herds, dying and dying and dying. Maybe it’s in memory of the fallen that my home state is deer colored now. By January or so we’ll have lost that and gone to plain brownish gray, and I’ll be starving for color of any kind. That’s when I’ll go to the dollar store and buy bunches of cheap fake flowers in primary and vivid secondary colors, and to the Goodwill for stray colored pillowcases.

No need to rush the season though. There’s still two blanking months of Xmas to get through.

I have a cold, but I made it through finals. It’s not even a bad cold, mostly a scratchy throat, mild congestion, and some coughing, yet I feel like crap in a cup. Which might be part of the reason why I’m having trouble figuring out what to do with myself. I went from having zero time to having all the time in the world and not knowing how to allocate it. So I sit on the sofa, undecided, and watch Fatal Attractions. Which is good, but I mean to accomplish more over winter break.

So here’s a condensed version of my to-do list:

Find X number of agents who accept queries in one of the genres godlight might be.
Write X queries.
Send X queries.
Read godlight again for typos. (I’ve created an epub file for this, so I can work on the Nook. We’ll see how it goes.)
Clean out my school bags.
Clean off my desk.
Do something to neaten the hamster pit my office has become.
Choose a writing project. I’m waffling between Seldom and an old NaNo project with the working title of Standing Outside the Fire that’s been haunting me for years.
Write something.
And…this will come as a shock…draw. In charcoal. I have an idea, and quite a lot of supplies left over.
Watch the Alien series with Zor.

nook

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I bought a Nook Color about two or three weeks ago. Now I see they’ve released the next version (the Nook Tablet) for the same price. I didn’t see anything about that in my extensive research, grr!

However, I really like this gizmo. I can finally read all the e-books that have accumulated on my hard drives over the lifetimes of three computers. Well, ok. I probably still won’t read them all; in light of all the free giveaways on various sites, I’ll never be caught up, not even if I never get past the third page of most of the freebies. All the old Bobbsey Twins books? Free. Five Little Peppers, too.

Of course, there are still plenty of hard copies to be read also. You still can’t go to Goodwill and play blind travel among the midlist on an e-reader.

However. The reason I decided to get an e-reader in the first place was because of all the time I spent out on the deck last summer, avoiding the oven that our house had become until T-Moth got the AC fixed. A lot of that time was in the dark. I played a lot of Harvest Moon on the old Nintendo DS, enough to burn myself out on it. And I thought a lot to myself, I wish I was reading. I considered taking my laptop out there, but a laptop battery only has so many charge cycles in its lifetime, and I didn’t want to use it up reading in the dark. Also, it was hot, and hot isn’t good for laptops either.

Then, in one of those bolts from the blue, a friend said, “I’ve been thinking of getting an e-reader, maybe I’d read more, but I wonder if I’d have time to use it at all.” Whereupon I thought to myself of my long hours in the dark on the deck with the dogs, and thought, “I would!”

It was the first time I’d ever seriously considered owning an e-reader, since I never saw any way one would serve a function that couldn’t be served as well or better by an actual book, and with paper books you don’t have to kill yourself if you lose it or it gets stolen. A little research quickly proved that a regular Nook (or Kindle) with an e-ink screen isn’t backlit anyway, so if you want to read in the dark, you have to buy a clip-on light like for a paper book, and hey…I could just buy one of those, right? Read paper books in the dark, no problem.

Then I started school and had zero time for sitting on the deck, never mind reading anything much besides Contemporary American Business, and a few pages before I passed out at night (usually around 9:30, am I old or what?)

Then two thoughts collided in my head. One, that someone told me you could get really cheap textbooks for the Nook. And two, that it would be a lot lighter to lug around than books and a laptop. So I bought a Nook Color.

And learned you can get cheap textbooks for Nook, but you have to read them on your PC?!

But I really like it. I can surf a little internet,or check my e-mail, and read a little too, in those slivers of time otherwise spent staring off into space. I can read on the couch with the lights off while Mr Moth watches Burn Notice. (Although lately I’ve been paying more attention to that show.) And once, on a warmish night, I was headed for bed when it suddenly occurred to me I could sit on the deck and read. So I took the dogs out…and did.

It was all I’d hoped…tablet be damned.

in which I come out looking bad

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I’ve never liked pancakes much. Oh, they’re not nasty or anything. I spent one memorable February snowed in with a toddler and when the bread ran out I made pancakes for those all-important peanut butter sandwiches. So it’s not that I hate pancakes. They’re too sweet and not filling. I’d rather have whatever goes with the pancakes, the sausage or eggs.

Mr Moth loves pancakes. Especially blueberry ones. Sometimes I buy–have bought, in the days before diabetes–him blueberry pancake mix, so he can make himself some pancakes of a Sunday morning.

Then came diabetes and the black hole of pancakes. Because suddenly, now that I couldn’t have any pancakes, everytime he makes pancakes, I hate him. Loathe. Despise. Resent.

I know this is unreasonable. I’m not angry when he eats ice cream, and I like ice cream. There are other things he has that I shouldn’t, and I’m not angry at him for those things.

(If I find out he had some pecan pie though, his days are numbered. Just saying.)

No, it’s not fair that he can’t have those things because I’m diabetic. You know what else isn’t fair? That I’m diabetic.

Anyhow. He ran out of syrup, and on the topic of purchasing more…well, we had a blow up. Over syrup. Yes we did. It was entirely my fault and I was completely unreasonable. Afterwards I was sorry–but still seething with resentment as black as charcoal and as cold as January on a doorknob. I tried to rise above it. We went to the store to get more syrup. And found sugar-free syrup.

Now I don’t want pancakes. I know I don’t like them. Maybe I could put a little of the syrup on oatmeal…but to be honest, I’m not sure where I put it.