I don't have much to talk about lately. Everything I have to say seems either trivial¹, interesting only to me ², or both³.

I remember seeing a meme a while ago where the question was something to the effect of "Hey, we sure don't know each other as well as the Internet makes us think we do. If there's anything you've been wondering about me, feel free to ask." I'd been going to post that one, but I can't find it now.

So, hey, we sure don't know each other as well as the Internet makes us think we do. If there's anything you've been wondering about me, feel free to ask.


¹ I get to work twelve hours next week! I'd have got to work fourteen hours this week, but I had to wait around to let some inspectors into the house of a neighbor who had to move back to Mississippi and is trying to sell her house today. I honestly don't mean that in any kind of snide way. I really like my job, I just don't get hours anymore. When some librarians retired this summer, the system replaced them each with two part-time staff. I was stupid and didn't apply because I wasn't sure I'd make enough to cover driving out to Xenia twice as much, and I was pretty sure I was about to get a full-time job out on the east coast. So now they're all covered and only need a sub a day or two a month. My choice this week is to cancel Rhapsody or go to a couple of NaNo write-ins. The Panera near me is hiring and I can't say I'm not tempted.

² I did the math and I'm nineteen thousand words behind schedule for NaNo. Yeah, I'm not recovering that. I can't type quickly on the AlphaSmart--I did 579 words in ten minutes on Write or Die using the desktop downstairs the other night, which is on the slightly high end of what I can do in an hour on the AlphaSmart--and my laptop is out being fixed.

Partly I'm stuck around 12K because I have to do something I really don't want to do to a character and so I'm avoiding it. I borrowed him from from the bad high school writing from which I scavenged my NaNo idea, and he wasn't native even to that story. He goes back to the very first story I wrote for a creative writing class, where his name was Adrian Blackburn and he was a Gary Stu so good-natured and sweet that he'd hurt your teeth. I feel kind of bad abut all the things I'm putting Adrian through, because he is a nice guy, and he's not really in a position to defend or help himself until about halfway through the story. He's one of the characters who keeps hanging around in my head, so I keep using him. This is about the third story in a row where I just kick the crap out of him (fourth, if you count the old free-form RP character I played in the White Wolf-based rooms on AOL). Because I was raised Irish Catholic, I feel guilty about that.

Also I've been giving myself nightmares.

The story I'm working on is a combination of ideas that I scavenged from really bad old stories I wrote when I was in late high school and early college. One of the ideas I kept was of a world populated by characters who were the embodiment of trope characters--the Wise Woman, the Charming Rogue, those sorts of things--and have powers of a sort based on their tropes. So far the most active villain in this story is a beast that's the affable-but-vicious pair of villains like Croup and Vandemar or the "hands of blue" guys from "Firefly." It calls itself the Dyad. I've been playing in the "rate the above poster's excerpt" threads on the boards a lot lately. I haven't planned it, but my last few excerpts have been scenes involving the Dyad (this is the one I'm using now) and generally what people have to say about my excerpt is "oh my God, that thing's horrible! Oh, and also your writing's pretty good for NaNo." I don't remember exactly what I dreamed last night, but I know that the Dyad was there, and it was horrible. I had to get up and put on some lights and futz around on the Internet for a while, it freaked me out that badly.

When I went back to sleep, I had another really vivid dream about my other story that scared me awake. When I stall out on my official NaNo story, I write Charlie and Nicholas fluff, so they are still loud in my head. The story I started for NaNo 2006 and have never been able to write looks like it runs to two books. For a while I was thinking of killing Charlie off near the end of the second one because I just didn't see any way that he'd make it through. Then I decided that the reason in-story wasn't good enough to justify that, it would probably come out as one of those things that make the reader throw the book across the room. I still have no idea how the story actually ends.

I don't remember exactly how this dream began, but it involved Nicholas discovering that his Charlie had been murdered, shot through the back so that his heart and chest were gone. The two of them had been fighting about something and hadn't talked in a few days. Nicholas already had a bad feeling because he couldn't get hold of Charlie, and he was absolutely devastated. Then the frame of the dream switched, and instead of just watching this all from some removed third-person perspective, I was Nicholas in the dream and I think the horror and grief and helplessness he was feeling was what woke me up. Yeah, I had to fool around on the computer a little while after that one too.

Nicholas has always been really close to me. Charlie's dashing and boisterous and charming (even I'm charmed by him), but Nicholas is the one in whom I see a lot of myself. His voice is easier for me to write than Charlie's. I... don't know how I came to be that wired into him, though. What's weirder is that last night wasn't the first time Nicholas has showed up in my subconscious; the first time I saw "The Talented Mr. Ripley," he turned up that night to tell me how much the movie upset him.

And I don't think I'm going to do any better tonight because I just spent about twenty minutes looking up clips from movies like "An American Werewolf in London" and "The Howling" for a post I started to write and decided I ought to do some other time (like when it's light out), then I YouTube-wandered into some parts of "The Shining" and now I'm kind of spooked out.

Also my second order from Adagio came today and I tried all of them, so now I'm all caffeinated to hell and back.


³Jack the cat is my shadow lately. When he thinks I've stayed up too late, he tries to lead me to bed. When I kept getting up last night, he didn't like that at all. There's a step stool sitting next to the computer desk for some reason. Every now and then he'd put his paw on my knee and when I glanced over, there he would be sitting on the stool and glaring at me like a little schoolmarm. And if I didn't get the picture and go back to bed, he would dig his claws in and scold me.

Ha ha.

I just cracked ten eleven thousand words. If I were going to be dishonorable and claim the whole story I'm working on, I'd have made seventeen thousand tonight. And if I were going to be really shifty and claim the Charlie-and-Nicholas bit that I have to retype since I'm editing a draft of it that was on the memory stick I lost, that'd still only put me around 19,700. I'm pretty much not quitting because it feels petulant and I'm sort of curious about how much I can get done. I like this story, but I'm completely unmotivated on it. It's scavenged from the remains of a couple of really bad stories I wrote when I was eighteen or nineteen and wanted to be Neil Gaiman. One was basically "Sandman" fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off and the other was a blatant ripoff of "Neverwhere." The more I write this, the more it looks to be skirting the edge of being a "Sandman"-y ripoff of "Coraline."

Also. I don't know whether it's the remains of Tropical Storm Screwed Up Hormones moving through, but all I'm of a mood to write right now is PWP. Even though I typically get really self-conscious and embarrassed when I'm called on to write smut so that I give up a page or two into it and there's really, really no place for a sex scene where I am in any of the stories I'm working on right now.

The only real +1s of this week are that I found a fantastic little coffee house in the cutest town I've ever seen while I was scoping out options for northern write-ins, and now I can look down without feeling like I'm going to puke and/or pass out any moment.

(two weeks of that good fucking hell)

However, I did write this while I was at the fantastic little coffee house, which I like pretty well for raw NaNo draft.

My laptop is being fixed.

Which means that I'm using the MacBook Mom loaned me.

Nice enough machine, except that I don't have any of my Firefox addons. I never thought that I would miss Killfile so much. I mean, for shit's sake, am I missing something here?

I've been really blah lately.

I don't feel good.

I don't feel good because the same old reproductive disorder (two doctors have told me it's probably Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, but they'll diagnose it and do something about it when I get insurance) that was bothering me all summer and early fall was apparently just gearing up for now. Cramps so bad they make me vomit, make me wonder fleetingly if I maybe have appendicitis, cramps that laugh cynical little cramp laughs when I take a couple of extra-strength Tylenol and then send them right back up. I'm so anemic that I'm tired and dizzy all the time (and I woke up in a panic this morning because I saw my hand while I was still mostly asleep and came to the conclusion that I was going to lose my fingers because there was no blood left in them), but I can't sleep more than an hour or two at night before the cramps wake me up. And that's the least icky part. I've spent pretty much every day since last Thursday in a) a lot of pain and b) a sort of repulsed astonishment at how much actually fits in the horrid little meatbag wot babies come out of (though now that I think about it, duh, you can fit a baby in there). Also my back hurts and my knees hurt and my neck hurts and the fricking palm of my hand hurts. And, for some reason, I am absolutely craving Mexican cocoa.

And I have some kind of sinus infection.

And the Safeway store-brand peppermint and chamomile tea that always helped stuff like this is all gone, with no real chance to get more. I somehow ended up with a box my sister bought when she was going to school in DC. They're an eastern grocery chain; I don't think there's a Safeway within five hundred miles of here. And it isn't even hormone-induced irrationality that makes me want that specific one. I liked that one because it was nothing but peppermint and chamomile, and all the alternatives I've found that I can order or buy closer are peppermint and chamomile and a bunch of other crap I don't want.

None of which is really very good for getting word count done. I mean, I can't really sit down for more than twenty minutes at a time without my back cramping up. We're supposed to be around eleven thousand something by today. I'm a bit over 5500. The story I'm doing is around eleven or twelve thousand words all total right now, and it's really tempting to, ah, forget what I wrote when. Because when I'm so sore and weepy and short-tempered and irrational that I'm pretty much staying off the Internet, it makes being so far behind extra, extra tragic.

Even though I'd pretty much decided this year that I didn't care if I made word count or not, and was all snarlish and dramatic about how much everyone and everything associated with NaNo annoyed me this year. Because woe, we aren't able to do the day-long weekend write-ins at Karen's writing loft like we did last year (because her heat is broken) and I have to write every day instead of doing seven-hour gluts of writing. I've somehow ended up in charge of organizing the write-ins for Miami County, the next county north of Dayton. I think because I'm only about twenty or thirty minutes from Troy, Miami County's big city, instead of forty or fifty. I actually just remembered I was supposed to go look at a coffeehouse in the next town south from Troy today to see if it's any better than Night Sky, the one that's great for writing except at the time I scheduled the write-in (they have a weekend buffet. At 6:00 Friday there's nowhere to park, not a single free seat, and multitudes of shrieking small children). Because when the main reason I haven't dropped out yet is that I really like the people I meet at the get-togethers, that is a sign of a terrible, terrible time.

Even if I weren't feeling like shit, I have way too much to do. There are a couple people about whom I said "ah! For hir birthday I will finish up this thing I've been knitting very slowly/seriously meaning to knit for them since about April! I have plenty of time!" Then it turns out their birthdays are all in like, the next week and a half. I was supposed to go out to Indiana to pick up the yarn I need for one project today, but my happy organs put the kibosh on that. But that's okay, I still have three projects of mine own to finish! Also I've been picking at grad school applications (I've almost worked up the nerve to ask professor friends I haven't seen or talked to in three or four years for letters of recommendation!). While they are all intimidating piles of paper, University of Madison's is even more intimidating than University of Milwaukee's or Simmons College's by virtue of being much less friendly and due on December 15. And I guess I can't really blame my innards for the fact that I'm distracted by Team Fortress 2. I don't play, I don't even like first-person shooter games, but someone linked me to Cuanta Vida and now I'm sort of fascinated by all the fan art and stories surrounding a game that has no plot and minimal character development.

And for being so behind, my story's going great. Anyone in the critique group here will tell you that I never get past chapter two or three of a story before some new story grabs my attention (because I didn't know where the first one went after about chapter four anyway). I'm to chapter six of this one and outlined up to chapter nine or thereabouts. I don't know exactly what happens after that point, but I know how the story ends. My research that I have to do for this story is to read TV Tropes and to go hang around Yellow Springs and inspect a different coffeehouse there. I'd expected that I was going to be padding my word count with Charlie and Nicholas fluff--it counts if I write it in November--but I haven't had any time for them. This thing won't shut up.

But yes. Not going to finish. Barely hanging in. So tragic.

Oh hey, NaNo. I'm supposed to be at the grocery so I can buy stuff to make pasta salad to take to the kickoff party.

So here are things that I obviously didn't write today: First chapter of the story I'm continuing for NaNo (1,208 words), the badly outdated first draft of the second chapter, and the only Charlie/Nicholas fluff I didn't lose with my missing memory stick (2,700 words). Read them or comment on them or ignore them as you like.

So. Cat training with a spray bottle. Is there something more to it than I know about (hide, squirt misbehaving cat), or does it just not work for some of them?

'cos I just squirted Jack for jumping up on the dining room table, and he just turned around and gave me a look that I think must be Cat for "Really? Are you fucking serious?" Now not only is he still on the table, he's still on the table and wet. And sulking.

And given that's he's figured out that he can get a big reaction out of me by pushing the laptop's cord around, I'm not sure spraying him with water when he starts messing with a screwy electrical system would be that great an idea anyway.

+ I was talking to Mom about how between my laptop's failing power coupling and my battery-powered word processor's failing keyboard, I have nothing portable to type on during NaNo. Now she's lending me her MacBook for write-ins. She retired this summer, so now she doesn't really use the thing except for Internet.

So of course this is the sign for poor creaky old Ophelia to start keeping AC power as long as I keep the cord in just the right place on the keyboard and don't jiggle it by doing anything vigorous with the computer, like typing. For days at a time. Last night was the first time since about last Wednesday that it started playing its "halp, critical battery! 99% left! Wait, did I say 99? I meant 4. 4% battery left. Good night" games. I'm almost confident enough to take it to the write-ins, except that it weighs twenty pounds when it's all packed up in its computer backpack and I don't trust it quite that far. But at least now I know the way to get reliable performance out of it is to walk around saying things like "WOW, NETBOOKS ARE GETTING REALLY CHEAP! I COULD PROBABLY GET BY WITH JUST ONE OF THOSE AND MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE!" in a loud voice when I pass near my computer (though shouting "I don't want to connect to someone else's secure wireless that I don't have a key for, you idiot!" at it after it drops our wireless and spends half an hour trying to acquire the network address of some neighbor's secure network, refusing all efforts to make it connect to ours, doesn't do much good, so maybe not).

- My main problem with the Mac (aside from the fact that I don't like Macs; everything in the Apple family I've tried out has been pretty mediocre for all the hype) is that I'd have to save everything to portable media instead of the hard drive since that isn't my computer. Like say, the memory stick that has all my writing for at least the last two years.

Like say, the memory stick that is missing.

I tend to carry it around in my pocket so I can edit photos or writing on computers capable of going more than twenty minutes without going into Emergency Low Power Freakout Mode. It's not in any of my pockets or attached to Mom or Dad's computers. It's not on the shelf where all my pocket junk--my wallet, keys, wads of receipts; stuff that women who don't hate purses carry in their purses--ends up at night. It's not on the bookcase where my pocket junk ends up at night, or on my desk, or on the floor by my desk where it ends up when Jack decides he needs more room to stretch out. I'm pretty sure it's still somewhere in the house, by which I mean I sure hope to hell it's still somewhere in the house. I haven't seen it since at least last Wednesday, but I'm just now to the point where I can write a post about it that consists of more than mostly variations on the word "fuck."

I got an external hard drive in mid-summer and backed up everything I wanted to keep on it because my computer was already starting to get a bit wacky. It's also about the time I stopped saving data to my computer's hard drive because I couldn't count on being able to get at it again. And I was a bit paranoid about having everything on that one memory stick, so there's a backup of that on the hard drive too. I can't find an update of any of it from later than September 26. So all the Charlie-and-Nicholas stuff I was picking at for pre-NaNo, and the most recent drafts of every single chapter in the story I'm continuing on for NaNo? Buh-bye.

Or, well. I guess it isn't a total loss. I still have the beginnings of about half a dozen story bits on the little word processor and hard copies of most of my older drafts (my writing process goes something like: type five hundred words on the word processor and get sick of whacking away at those stiff little keys, upload keystrokes to MS Word and do some editing, get distracted by the Internet, go to Boston Stoker or Panera with the word processor and editing copies of story in question to get away from the Internet, rinse and repeat). And now that I think of it, I can probably pull down most of the chapters I lost from the writing group's Yahoo! group since I already submitted them for critique. But still, god damn it. I'd actually been meaning to post some of the writings I keep talking about the other day. Yeah, not so much now.

? I went out to the family room last night to see if maybe the memory stick had materialized by the Mac, and I saw something strange. The Mac sits at the end of our galley kitchen's counter, where it comes out into the family room and we call it a desk. There's a narrow little passage between the desk and the counter stuck in the middle of the family room to mark the end of the kitchen expansion. The sunroom is just past that, to the right of the family room. I won't swear that it wasn't just an afterimage from turning on a light in the kitchen or something like that, but I saw something white and misty and cat-shaped cross the family and disappear into the sunroom when I got about halfway through the kitchen. When we first moved here in 1989, I saw something black and sort of cat-shaped (it had a longer, slinkier body and shorter legs) disappear through the wall of the basement bedroom when I went down to look for something. It gave off a feeling of incredible malevolence, and I'm still not comfortable in that room, or even in the basement after dark. This one didn't feel evil like that, and even though it wasn't very clearly defined it looked and moved more like a house cat. It didn't look like Bandit; it was sleek and tall and he was a waddley little porker. And it was there a good five or ten seconds, with the light on. I have no idea what I saw.

+ In trying to find the memory stick I lost, I found my old 256MB one from college. I was working I wrote a post about what this project is that I'm working on with these boys (it's not quite done, but it's here. I initially locked it private, thinking that it'd make more sense to re-date it when I actually had posted some of the finished story on my lost memory stick), but most of my story notes are to the effect of "yeah, I meant this to be a space opera, but know nothing about this world. I really didn't plan it out very well. Apparently I was working on this story a long time before I thought I was, because I have a ton of story notes I don't even remember writing. I don't know what half of them mean, but I have them.

? We have these neighbors across the street. Or had them. I'm not sure. A couple of years ago, a nice enough family with Georgia or Alabama plates on their cars moved into the house across the road. They were here at least one winter. Then all of a sudden one day there were a completely different set of cars in their driveway with Tennessee plates. And a woman and what seemed like a million kids lives there now. They put up a ten-foot wooden fence around their yard,they keep to themselves, and the kids spend a lot of time just standing around in the mouth of the cul-de-sac, but we've never had any real problem with them. It's been a matter of discussion around our house about whether or not that pretty little one-eyed calico belongs to them for almost as long as she's been hanging around.

Last week they said they were moving. I haven't heard their three or four dogs barking at me when I get in or out of my car lately, but I can't tell if they're still there or not. The house doesn't have a for-sale sign in the yard. The trash cans are out, which I don't think they were yesterday. But the house doesn't look very lived-in. The only reason this bothers me is because it was grey and rainy yesterday, but the little calico was sitting in their yard for over an hour that afternoon.

Goodness, I feel so verbose with my last few posts--and I totally just typed "pages," Freudian slip?--all hundreds and thousands of pages long. Nothing much going on, I just want to see if I can still type a post that doesn't need a cut.

1)I've been waking up almost exactly at 5:00 or 5:15 in the morning every night for the last month or more and having trouble getting back to sleep before 8:00. For no obvious reason. Even when I go to bed at three or four. I don't know why that is, but I'm getting really tired. And apparently it's not weird enough, because today I woke up at 5:15 hearing David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" blasting from the other side of the wall, out in the front hall. There's... nothing that plays music in the front hall, and I'm the only one in the family that listens to Bowie. Which makes revelations like "hey, was Jareth in 'Labyrinth' a 'Ziggy Stardust' reference? You know, 'well hung, snow white tan,' played by David Bowie?" kind of disappointing, but anyway. It went away just about as soon as I woke up so it might have just been holding over from something I dreamed, but it was still really weird.

1a)Speaking of "Life on Mars" I've finally got around to watching the original British "Life on Mars." I might write more on this once I watch the American series again, but despite making me miss American LoM, it's really, really good.

2)My poor stupid old laptop is pretty much toast. It won't stay on AC power even when I'm holding the end of the power cord in place. Or, well, it will, after I spend ten or fifteen minutes stabbing the power socket with the plug and screaming things at it that would embarrass a Marine. Until I brush the cord, then it's game over. And either it's lost the ability to tell how much power it has left or it's started discharging its battery, because I see no other way it could drop from 83% battery to 6% percent battery in under two minutes. The thing's only five years old and it mostly runs pretty well aside from its fragile plug. I am more highly irritated than I normally would be because NaNo starts in like a week. Dad's answer when I asked if his friend's son who fixed it the last time could look at it again was "well, Dells are cheap and Christmas is coming." I'm not at all complaining, but Christmas isn't until after NaNo. I have nothing portable on which to type.

2a) Though it doesn't matter that much, I guess, since my whole "I'm going to write Charlie and Nicholas's romance as my pre-NaNo project so I get in the habit of writing every day!" thing, not so much. Did I tell you that? I was planning to write Charlie and Nicholas's romance to get me into the habit of writing every day. But I decided this last week or the week before, in mid October. And I started working on it again Saturday night. I'm not writing, I can dick around on the Internet just as well on Mom or Dad's computer, I don't know how much I actually need a laptop.

2b)Which is itself maybe kind of problematic, because I wandered away from the laptop in the kitchen after reading my mail, leaving the window on a comment notification for my rant about why Breast Cancer Awareness Month annoys me so. Oops. It wasn't so bad as if it had been OKCupid or something, but still, yeah, little awkward.

3) My problem with doing pre-NaNo is also that it means I'd have to stop knitting. I already write fairly slowly, somewhere between five and eight hundred words in an hour. 1,667 words in a day is already a big enough bite out of my time without these other projects I want to work on. I had a red/orange/plum/wheat yarn with black stripes which knits up really dark. It's gorgeous, but I'd been having a devil of a time finding anything to do with it. I found one pattern for a hat that didn't work in it, but I found a different yarn that looks great for that pattern. Okay, not an unreasonable project. I'd probably finish it in a few weeks. But then I found an awesome and enormous new kitty bed to make with my oranges and reds. Six hours' work has me on row four or five. This thing is going to take forever. (Ravelry annoys me just a little in that everything over there is members only, so I can't link everyone over there to look. but if you have an account, I'm mysticpenguin there too. This is my hat and this is my kitty bed. If you're not, here's at least pictures of what I've been up to lately on Flickr.)

4)When my aunt was here in the summer, she thought the house was too hot (in Ohio, after coming up from the Gulf coast of Florida during our coolest summer I've seen in twenty years, with a high of maybe 84 in July). Her solution was to leave all the doors standing open until I went "why the hell is this door open? Is the cat still inside?" and shut them. Only the front door has a screen door.

Now we have Indianmeal moths and some kind of horrid little beetles that are maybe a couple millimeters long in our pantry and baking-stuff cupboard that we've been trying to get rid of ever since. One of the reasons I don't invite people over (apart from being embarrassed at being thirty and still living with my parents) is that "welcome, enjoy our vermin!" isn't quite how I want to greet people. My sister's boyfriend from New York is coming with her when she comes to stay with us for a friend's wedding in early December. Yyyyeah, good times.

Mom did a nuke-from-orbit cleaning of the baking cupboard over the weekend and I haven't seen any horrid beetles since. I just discovered today where the moths were coming from. Oh, it was gross. I got it in my head that a spray bottle would be good for taking down all the grown ones still hanging around after I threw out the moth mothership, since it was such a deep cabinet and there were so many of them. I am apparently such a dork that my first thought after "we used to have one of those spritzy bottles like for plants, didn't we?" was of "Good Omens."

5)Another thing I'm embarrassed by is how sad I am that Eric Delko is leaving on "CSI: Miami." He's dumb as a post and the show's angst-magnet, but he's about the only character on that show I honestly like.

Huh. Guess I can't after all.

Just spent eighteen hours in Louisville. I thought of posting earlier to say I would be gone, but as often as I’m around it isn’t like it was anything out of the ordinary.

Great Big Sea played at the Kentucky Center last night. There’s not much I can say about it that isn’t just squealing and flailing.

I’m from Louisville. We moved up to Madison when I was about seven and down to Dayton a few months before I turned ten. Even though we’ve been in Dayton twice as long as we were anywhere else, I don’t really acknowledge it. I’m from Louisville. I don’t know anyone but one family down there anymore, but I’d move back in a minute if I could get work there. I only get back down that way once every two or three years--and it’s like Columbus in that I think I know it a lot better than I do and get heinously lost every time I go downtown--but I love Louisville. It’s old and pretty, and cosmopolitan and quirky. Even the drive down is beautiful; I-71 tends to run along the sides of ridges with these breathtaking views over the valleys with little farms in the bottoms, and plunge down into gaps between rainbow striped cuts through hills. In spring, it’s all deep ridges and the trees are pink and white and lime green, it galls me mightily that there’s nowhere safe to stop along the side of the interstate to take pictures. The trees are just starting to turn up here, and I’d swear that they were brighter on the way back up than when we went down yesterday. There’s a weekend later in the fall that Mom and Dad are chasing off to Virginia again, and I’d been sort of melancholy because I always really miss southeastern Ohio in the fall but there’s no way I could even think of affording a trip down there right now. But now I’m sort of thinking that it’d probably be just as good to make a day trip down to the state parks among the little Scots-Irish towns (Sligo, Glencoe) back in the hills between here and Louisville.

Great Big Sea is the band that turns me into a squealing twelve-year-old. I have such a crush on Alan Doyle, but it’s more the type of crush I get on women. Most men I’m never going to meet but still have a serious thing for, it’s pure lechery. I want to see them naked and it pretty much ends there (though Jack Davenport is starting to win me over the more he says things like "If I tell you anything [about FlashForward], small Disney ninja assassins may abseil into the building and kill us"). I would have nothing to say to someone like Simon Baker if I ever chanced to meet them, since "I really like that thing you’re in because god damn, you’re pretty. I’d like it more if you took your shirt off, though" is an awfully rude thing to say to a total stranger. Also my brain seizes up when I’m confronted with a ridiculously attractive person, so what would come out would be more along the lines of “Derp... buh... hi?” I sure wouldn’t kick Alan Doyle out of bed for, well, pretty much anything. But it’s one of those mostly-innocent, half-hero worship crushes where I just think he’s the most awesome person ever and want him to be my best friend when I’m watching him. He used to work for a history museum up in Newfoundland, and he writes one of the most charming blogs I’ve ever seen from a celebrity, and the way he tosses his hair while he’s performing makes me all giddy and swoonful, so clearly we were Meant to Be (note: I do not actually believe we were meant to be. Dude’s got a wife and a kid, and I’ve never even seen him from closer than twenty yards away let alone met him, any one of which takes him off the table).

I think I infected my family with the bug. Not the starry-eyed schmoopy-for-Alan thing, but the interest in Great Big Sea in the first place. I found a couple of their songs on a music-sharing community on LJ and then went out to Indiana to see them with beldar and the_dark_snack. Dad had about three CDs in his truck, all copies of Corries albums I pulled off Napster or something before it was illegal, up until a year or two ago. So I said "here, have some new music" and made him copies of some GBS albums I'd bought. Then my sister happened to be visiting and ask what I was listening to while I was copying all the rest of my Great Big Sea albums for him and I sent her home with a couple of them. I guess Mom just kind of picked it up since it's on all the time in Dad's truck. So when they played out near where my sister lives in Virginia, we went. And since I'd been saying "hey, you know, they're going to be a third of the distance away in like a month and a half," we went there too.

I've been working on this post on and off all day because I keep getting to the part where I start getting embarrassed because all I have to say is along the lines of EEEE WE WERE RIGHT LIKE ABOVE THE STAIRS BEHIND THE FIRST FEW ROWS OF SEATS AND ALAN HAD A BEARD THAT MADE HIM LOOK KIND OF LIKE RUSSELL CROWE AND KIND OF LIKE A STREET PERSON BUT HE WAS JUST SO ADORABLY FLIRTY WITH ALL THE OTHER GUYS AND THEY SANG LIKE EVERY SONG I'D HAVE ASKED FOR IF MY VOICE CARRIED AT ALL AND THEY WERE RIGHT AT THE VERY EDGE OF THE STAGE FOR THE LAST ENCORE AND WHHHHY DIDN'T I HAVE MY CAMERAAAA AND NOW I LOVE SEAN TOO AND OMG OMG OMG OMG ALSO DOWNTOWN LOUISVILLE IS SO DAMN PRETTY AND I SAW A WEE ICKLE BABY MOURNING DOVE, ( which is this one right here )

I’ve been on the fence about NaNo because a) the forums annoy me. Everyone takes it so damn seriously. And the ones who aren’t giving themselves airs are so forcefully wacky and cheerful; it’s like reading a fourteen year old’s fan fic over at ff.net that’s full of authors notes like "I wrote this on a sugar high and it’s all random and crazy LOLOL!" And the Q&A forums do have wonderfully weird questions like "Can you make cheese from dolphin’s milk?," but they’re weighted toward things the author could find out with three minutes on Google, questions other people can’t answer (I have no idea why your character wants to do XYZ, it’s your job to tell us that by writing your story), or perfectly legitimate questions that draw answers from people who don’t know but want to take the opportunity to talk about themselves and what they think the answer is based on what they saw on TV or read. Also I’ll grudgingly admit to being a crabby old bitch at age thirty; I also find the huge influx of teens and tweens this year irritating.

I did like the critique and feedback board. It was great for getting opinions on things that I didn’t want to share with my writing group. For example, even if Nicholas/Charlie wasn’t my guilty pleasure writing exercise, there’s no way I’d show it to anyone as neoconservative as two thirds of my writing group. That isn’t to say they’re not lovely people--they are, they’re fantastic folks--but I don’t think any of us would get much out of me sharing my men kissing stuff. But at the same time I was worried that I was making my boys too feminine, and the critique board on the Nanowrimo forums put that one to bed (at least for the one I posted). I have to admit that I was irked for a few minutes when I found out they’re gone until December.

b) the Dayton NaNo group doesn’t annoy me, but it looks like some changes that I wasn’t happy with last year are still in place. Instead of just plain the Dayton NaNo group, which was awesome, now we have Dayton NaNo (which is basically my regular writing group) and Dayton NaNo Teenagers and Dayton NaNo People Over Fifty Who Apparently Have Such A Horror of People in Their Thirties That They Split off Their Own Group But Will Still Deign to Come to Our Parties. Also no one ever comes to the meetings up where I live and with so few scheduled workdays (one in October, one the end of December, and then I don’t know) I can’t afford to drive twenty/thirty miles out to where everyone else is multiple times a week.

But!

I have a story this year. One of the reasons I was so into being Queen Crabbypants last year is that I wasn’t really into anything I was writing. I had a scene and an outline from a story that popped into my head when I was at that writing conference in Louisville last spring, but I was never able to flesh it out much past that. Then halfway through the month I gave up on that and started rewriting a story that didn’t work the last three times I tried to write it. It went fairly well; I made it to 30K in the last couple weeks of November. That was what I was working on until my current project jumped me in spring or summer. But I’ve just never known any of the characters well or understood their motivations, or had any idea what happens in the third act. So no, I wasn’t driving thirty or forty minutes every other day for that.

I’ve been working on this story since June or July. I have six or seven thousand words done on it. I’d say it’s urbaan fantasy or a through-the-looking-glass; my initial idea was a hybrid of two awful stories I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen and wanted to be Neil Gaiman. It’s the one I posted about back here. The story I'm working on right now is sort of urban fantasy. My working premise is that there exists an alternate world populated by the origins/embodiments of character archetypes and tropes--the Knight in Shining Armor, the Wise Woman, like that. My protagonist is Fox Meadows, a psychic who owns a New Age bookstore and reads Tarot and various things in the real-life crazy college town-hippie village of Yellow Springs, Ohio. When she draws a couple cards for a slightly odd man who comes into the store one day, she doesn't think much of it until an odder man comes a few days later and insists that she has to come into the city with him to meet with his boss. Turns out that the man she read for is the Knight in Shining Armor, the gentleman friend of the Woman Warrior, one of the major powers in the trope world. He's gone missing. The last place anyone saw him was coming out of the Fox's store. The Warrior Woman doesn't believe that Fox doesn't know anything about it, so now she had better figure out where he's gone, or else.

So I’m not saying I’m in for sure, but the later it gets, the more I have the feeling that my reasons for not doing it are all just so much talk.

Oh for shit's sake.

I'd started to post about NaNo and how I'm not sure I want to do it this year because I'm kind of bored of it and I want to finish something, the rule that you can't add to works in progress because Chris Baty thinks "bringing a half-finished manuscript into NaNoWriMo all but guarantees a miserable month. You'll care about the characters and story too much to write with the gleeful, anything-goes approach that makes NaNoWriMo such a creative rush" is fucking stupid, woe angst swear.

Then my laptop apparently decided that was boring, and lacking the ability to post the "THIS IS A BAD POST" macro by itself, promptly died of low battery and refused to charge even while plugged in.

I got my laptop back from being fixed in May because last August it stopped accepting electricity or giving me warnings that the battery was running down. After a couple of months it entered Very Expensive Paperweight Mode and I snarled and cussed because it had a ton of files on it that I wanted. For the second time in the three or four years I'd had it, this was. My dad knows someone whose son fixes computers, so he said he'd take care of it for me. It took a while for him to get around to it, but beggars can't be choosers. It was nice of him to do that for me at all.

The laptop's name is Ophelia for her tendency to go crazy and die, but she runs pretty well for five or six year old computer. I've taken to using Dad's new Thing That Runs Vista to work on my photography backlog, because I've managed to open twenty-three pictures at once in Paint.net on this machine without affecting the performance at all, and Ophelia freaks out and freezes punch upwards of five minutes if I ask it to open six or eight images. Now it's stopped accepting electricity. Again. It keeps the wall current if I don't move the machine at all, but that completely nullifies the point of having a laptop in that I cannot remove it from my desk. And this time it doesn't do anything to indicate that it's gone to battery. Or that there's no battery left. So I've been in the middle of fixing a draft of a story and suddenly byoooooo, there goes all the work I did in the last hour or two.

So while I'd been stressing a little over asking Mom and Dad to fix my computer again because I can afford it even less now than the last time. They know about the problem, either between Dad asking why I'm always on my computer or hearing me swearing at the computer in Berserker Harpy Mode (there's just something about the condescending little "plug your computer in or you'll lose your work" message that pops up after I spend five minutes fighting the cord to find the magic position that'll take electricity and restart it in the wake of a sudden death that hits my Scream Things That Would Embarrass A Marine switch). He's asked a few times if my computer is doing it again. And he always asks right after it's settled down for a day or two so I go "ha, it's fine now!", which is its signal to stop being fine. And if we have to buy another new power socket, that's still no guarantee it isn't going to do this again next year.

I'd already been thinking about netbooks because the battery-powered word processor a friend lent/gave to me for writing a few years was already old, and now the keys are so stiff and sticky I type at half what I did when I first got it. Those are more than I can afford, and I don't know anything about them. But I started thinking: I have a 150 gig external hard drive. If I ask for a netbook for early Christmas or something and just save work to that drive, I almost don't even need the laptop, I don't think. Or at least it doesn't seem that way. Does anyone have any experience with them to say whether that's as workable as it seems?

Anyway, NaNo, yeah. I'm not sure I'll do it because I'm bored of NaNo and I have no portable typing implements that work well at all. If I do I'm just going to keep going on the story I'm already writing, which I don't remember if I've talked about here.

Ha ha.

There's a little local chain of camera stores around Dayton, Click! Camera. I go to the one down the road every so often to salivate over all the DSLRs and the filters and lenses and things I'm not going to be able to afford until well after I move away from here. I have a Fujifilm S700, which has a reputation in the reviews and discussions I've read as a good semi-pro digital camera. It's not a Big Serious Camera like the ones that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, but it's a closer cousin to those than to the typical everyday camera whose selling features are "here is a camera! It's pink!"

I want a Big Serious Camera so bad, though. I have an old Nikon N65, a film SLR camera, that I never use because I'm too cheap to pay for film and processing, and because I don't actually know that much about photography. From fiddling with the Nikon's buttons and dials I've learned that higher f-stop and lower shutter speed make the picture brighter, and lower shutter speed makes it blurry. But I couldn't explain to you how or why those things are, or what an f-stop is. I use my S700 in manual mode, but I mostly eyeball the little meter at the bottom of the screen to decide which F and shutter settings to use. And I like that camera just fine (its name is Frances, after one of National Geographic's first women photographers), but I want a digital SLR so bad. They just tend to cost everything I have in the bank right now, is the problem.

The past few days, Click! has been advertising a tent sale at one of their stores. They had the Nikon D40 package for $325, which is the cheapest I've ever seen anyone offer it anywhere. Which is cheaper than I could get a new N65, even. I agonized over all weekend because that's not everything in the bank, it's just two thirds of it. And I'm trying to save money so I can get the hell out of here, which is more important than a damn camera. And I only bought the camera I have now a couple of years ago and I really like it. But soooo cheeeeaaap! Waaaaant!

So of course, the day--the. day!--after I decide I'm going to be a responsible adult and let the last day of Click!'s tent sale go by, my camera's stupid LCD screen dies.

I went up to Franklin Park Conservatory and North Market in Columbus instead. Clearly the thing to do when I have my picture backlog down to 511 is go take almost 400 more. Also I hadn't been to Franklin Park or North Market in nearly a year, according to the dates of the pictures I was editing, and I really like them.

While I was taking pictures of something at the conservatory poor Frances kind of squeaked, the screen flickered, and suddenly I have this weird shifting white and grey display. It's apparently still light sensitive--the bands of grey move when I tilt the camera, and get darker in low light/lighter in bright light--so I guess maybe it's something to do with how the lens and the display connect. I bought this thing on special in 2006 or 2007 and I work it hard, and I'm not real careful with it. I tend sling the strap over my shoulder when I'm not using it and bonk the camera into stuff. I've forgotten it in the trunk of my car for days at a time when it was hotter or colder than was really good for the camera. So I'm annoyed, but I'm not terribly surprised. And it isn't a total loss. Actually it isn't much of a loss at all. Everything else in the camera works exactly how it's supposed to except for the LCD screen. The only real problem is that squinting through the external viewfinder starts to give me a headache after a couple hours.

I've had this camera long enough that I have no idea where the manual is, but I found something that might be a reset switch in the battery compartment. It's a little buttony thing I can push, I don't know. The problem is that opening the battery hatch makes the batteries pop up and kills the power, so I don't know exactly how a reset switch there would work. Thing has four batteries in an L-shape, and it takes two hands to hold them all down plus another hand to hit the power switch and push the maybe-reset thinger. I've experimented with ways of reaching everything I need without much luck.

The absurd thing about this is that I've been ridiculously petulant and cranky over stupid little things lately. I want the Straw Feminist page at TVTropes to die, and I've been devoting more attention to that whole mess than it really deserves. I don't know if I want to do NaNo this year because everyone on the active forums annoys me and I'm already pouty about how damn far it is from my house to where all the meetings are probably going to be (10 to 25 miles). Ken Burns's national parks documentary made me mad, for god's sake. I was even kind of frustrated with wanting to go to Columbus; when I have to drive forty minutes to even find a bookstore, an hour and change for a day trip is something I don't even think about. So I have a bunch of friends around Cincinnati and Columbus I haven't seen in forever since it seems rude to phone someone up all like "hey, want to go to North Market? I'm just passing Plain City-Georgesville Road on 70, I'll be there in like twenty minutes, half an hour!" I was apparently raised Catholic enough to make me feel bad about going out there without enough notice to get together with anyone.

But this, where something bad (or less than good, anyway) actually happened? The timing sort of has me on the border between chagrined and darkly amused.

I don't watch much TV. I'm not one of those snotty not-watching-TV-makes-me-better-than-everyone-who-does types, I'm just not that interested in it. If I'm not busy when "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report" are on, I'll watch them, and those are two of my very favorite shows. I'll sit for an episode of "Bones" or "NCIS" and like them if I catch them on, but it's only about 1:1 odds that I won't get bored and wander off halfway through. I like "The Mentalist," but I do have to admit that I watch it at least half in hopes that the plot will find some excuse for Simon Baker to take his clothes off ("Quantum Leap"'s formula made a strong impression on me as a preteen. Now it is my firm belief that these things are supposed to go "gorgeous problem-solving guy arrives, takes off shirt, problem is solved". Also when I turned on "Nathan Fillion Is Really, Really Hot and Also Some Kind of Writer" "Castle" to see if it was new the other night, the lady detective was changing clothes behind a car door, with lots of leg and bra strap. Come on, Hollywood, equal time. Or, you know, stop making woman characters who are supposed to be strong, competent women cheesecake first and strong, competent women second. I'll take whichever). And I watch the local news, because it's utterly information-free but the anchors and reporters are so impressed with themselves and awful that they're hilarious.

Whenever I'm watching TV, I can't stop thinking about all the more productive things I could be doing. I don't know if it's an autumn thing or that I have so many stories I need to finish up before NaNo, but right now I just can't not write. I've even started to think of all the other things I could be doing when I'm knitting, and that actually is productive. More than an hour or so sitting in front of the tube--or even less if it's not a really engaging show--and I have a scene running in the back of my head that I need to get down right now or I think or something I was meaning to look up on the Internet earlier, or I just find the story I'm telling myself more interesting than what's on TV. Even cutting down my backlog of photos that need resized and filed where they go--I'm down to 895! I have to finish another couple folders now now now because the Antioch College Revival Fund has asked to use some of my stuff from Yellow Springs in their literature and a Korean travel site wants to link to my pictures from New York City and all the goods ones of those are still on my hard drive!--keeps my attention better than whatever formulaic story the TV is showing me. Even talking about TV makes me want to go do something else. I wrote about two thirds of this post on Tuesday, but I keep telling myself "ech, nobody damn cares what I have to say about 'CSI: Miami', I'm going to go write or punch pictures or something," and I don't even mean that in a self-pitying way. It's not nearly so outdated as most of the media that makes me squee--shall I tell you why the soundtracks to the Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), the "Urinetown" original cast recording (2001), and Mozart's Requiem Mass in D Minor (1791) are the three albums that live in my car?--and I did love this season's premiere. But going OMGOMGOMG over a show that was on two days ago seems like a big waste of time when there are other things I could be doing. (Then I watched the show again on CBS's website and I'm all BEE HEE HEE HA HA HORATIO I LOVE YOU! again. Though I just drank an assload of sugary flavored coffee drink over at Kava House a few hours ago and haven't had anything to eat yet today, so BEE HEE HEE HA HA! is sort of my default state right now). Also my Favorite Shows Ever last season were "Pushing Daisies" and the American version of "Life on Mars" (minus its moronic ending). And "Firefly." I might give "Flash Forward" a shot since Jack Davenport's in it and maybe he'll show some skin, but overall it's not like I have a huge incentive to waste my time.

The only shows I go out of my way to watch are "30 Rock" and "CSI: Miami." I have a huge crush on Tina Fey and the show is actually funny, so sure, that one makes sense. But I'm a little embarrassed by how much I'd been looking forward to the "CSI: Miami" premiere this week. Like on Sunday, I was all like "oh my gosh, tomorrow's Horatio day!" I find very little funnier than terrible drama that takes itself way too seriously. And really, what is "CSI" if it isn't that (and it's Captain Hammer-approved!)? But yeah, even for King Horatio in the Land of the Supersaturated Orange Sun, this was just hilariously weird. And as histrionically overblown as their season premieres usually are--when you have a normal episode where the crime involves people drowning while robbing a bank during a tsunami, you really have to pull out all the stops for the premiere--this was even more epic.

( Spoilers, probably, and also getting long )

Penis Hucko is a real person.

Or, well. Of course he's a real person. I saw him on TV. But I was bored on the Internet and I know who he is now.
For some reason Mom decided she wanted to watch a Lawrence Welk rerun she found on PBS this last weekend. I don't even know how to describe or explain Lawrence Welk to non-Americans. \ He was a band leader who had a
very sweet, gentle demeanor, an odd accent (It's kind of east European, I thought at first he was Polish, but that's not quite right. And it's maybe kind of Italian or a bit German, but those aren't quite it either...), and a music program that ran from 1951 to 1971 and then until 1982 in syndication. His audience, even during the 1960s, was people in their fifties and up.But that doesn't cover how aggressively wholesome and campy and 1960s it was. this is only exceptional compared to what we saw because the production values are a bit higher. It doesn't show in YouTube's image quality, but there was also a bubble machine that was probably going like crazy near the bandstand. We watched the one primarily because it reminded Mom of watching the show with her grandmother and because it was hilarious.

After about half an hour of camera shots that lingered lovingly on the Vulcan-eared man playing the Wurlitzer organ, and some footage of its audience of senior citizens of the 1970s dancing to gentle old standards, an accordion polka or two, an a performance of what appeared to be the Walking on A Freshly Waxed Floor in Socks Rag by the only black man on the show or in the audience, Lawrence introduced a clarinetist with a name that sounded, I swear to God, exactly like "Penis Hucko." Come on, tell me it doesn't.

And because Mom and I are both secretly twelve years old, we completely lost it and spent the rest of the episode making stupid jokes about how excited--no no, turned on, ha ha!--old Lawrence seemed to be about having Penis and his horn on the show.

But of course the guy wasn't really named Penis. Lawrence Welk would never have him on if it was, seeing as he fired one of his regular musicians for crossing her legs while sitting on a desk (he wasn't having with that kind of "cheesecake"). It turns out that the man's name is actually Peanuts Hucko, and he had quite a career of his own.

I'm strangely disappointed.

I mentioned these pictures a while ago, but I forgot to post them.



A few years ago we put in a counter we intended to be a breakfast bar, but then Jack decided he likes sunning under the table lamp we put in the corner by the wall. Then his little bed ended up under the lamp, because hey, he's fifteen years old so he's got to be comfortable while he's lounging around on the place where people, in theory, eat. Then somehow his food and water ended up up there too and now yeah, it's the cat's counter.

A few months ago a little basket of toy animals appeared at the end of Jack's counter. I don't know where it came from. My mom just retired from teaching and was cleaning out her classroom about that same time, so I guess they must have been hers. But Jack loves them. His favorites are the budgie, the snake and the iguana, which he'll fish out of the basket and bat around. All the rest he pretty much ignores, though he'll give one a slap or a bite if I take it out of the basket and show it to him. And he does not like help playing with them, as evidenced by his "I'll kill you in your sleep" look when I spent fifteen minutes trying to get a picture of him sleeping with his budgie on his head.

( The little ginger cat we just found at the bottom of the basket, though, he's surprisingly tolerant of having me put that one on his head and things. )

It's funny how memories attach themselves to things, isn't it?

It's about a week and a year Bandit died.

I spent the week before last being all weepy and snappish because I missed my kitty so much. Last weekend we went out to dinner with one of Dad's friends and his family. The conversation turned to whether our indestructible cat--he was four months short of twenty when he died--was still around, and Dad told them this story about how the old boy had been curled up peacefully on his cushion in the sun.

Um, no, no he wasn't. He came in and slept with me for a while, which was unusual for him to do when it was so hot out. Then he left sometime in the night, and I came out into the living room in the morning, and there he was stretched out on the floor. I started to lean over to pet him and didn't get that far, because it was pretty damn obvious he wasn't sleeping. He'd been out there long enough he was pretty stiff and didn't look peaceful at all. I was the only one home that weekend, so how would he even know? But I didn't say anything, because it would have been heartless to be all like "that memory you've invented so you can remember the event in a nicer way IS WRONG!", especially in front of his friends.

The Fair at New Boston, a reenactment of a trade fair from around 1790, was this past weekend. All last summer I was totally excited about it ever since someone from the recreation group that runs it asked the library if they could leave some fliers for the fair. At the time I was working on a story whose setting I based mostly on the Dutch Republic and Enlightenment-era England and America (which sadly has gone by the wayside because while I love the characters and the setting, I have no idea what the story is actually about). So a fair that's meant to take place in 1800 would have been fantastic research, or at least a place to get hold of plenty of people who might be helpful. Also I'd be lying if I said that 18th-century men's fashions don't push my buttons in a pleasing manner. For example: Jack Davenport all on his own? Very handsome man. Ridiculously handsome man, even. Jack Davenport in brocade and frothy wig and all in the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie? Reduces me to a wibbling pile of goo.

And though the first day of the fair was a bit of a fiasco--my car wouldn't start (until it did, and started to smell like paint when I let it run a few minutes) and I had to take Mom's, I was late because I had to run around looking for a post office that hadn't closed twenty minutes before the posted time, I had to leave in the middle of the day because of the same problem that kept me from going to the concert in Virginia--and my cat died the second day, I had a really great time last year. My entry from last year, which I'd totally forgotten about. This year, though, I just wasn't feeling it. I actually forgot about it until we were planning to go out to Virginia and I went "wait, is that Labor Day weekend we'd be going? I don't want to miss the Fair!" I kept kind of coming back to the fact that I don't have a lot of spare money right now, and I need to buy more yarn since I ran out in the middle of a project. And I saw everything last year. I knew all that stuff now. And Springfield's kind of far from here. And bleh, whatever. Even when I wasn't unenthused about it, I just couldn't shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen if I went to the Fair. I finally went mostly because last year I bought some yarn from a vendor and wanted some more for whatever I decide to use it for, and because I wanted some more cakes like the ones the dog stole off the table an hour after I brought them home.

It wasn't the history--my concentration in my history major was early 20th century US history, but the Enlightenment era has always been my real close second-favorite. I'm currently all geekcited about the 1880s country fair reenactment at Carriage Hill up in Huber Heights on the 26th and sighing because I can't go to Mount Vernon's 18th Century Craft Fair in October, so it ain't that I don't like living history anymore. And I didn't see everything I saw last time--I saw all the stuff that was scheduled contrariwise to what I did last year. I found most of the people I wanted to talk to again and met some lovely new ones and had a perfectly nice time. I'm sort of glad I went. If things go right, I'm going to be living in Wisconsin or Massachusetts this time next year (my top three choices for grad school are UW Madison, UW Milwaukee, and Simmons College in Boston) and I'm sure not coming back here afterward if I get the choice, so I don't know when I'll have the chance to go again.

What I think happened is that it's lodged in my head that Bandit didn't die on August 31, he died on Labor Day weekend, the day I went to the Fair. And I guess really I can't fault Dad for not remembering exactly what happened when he wasn't even there. Memory does funny things.

God help me, I'm such a dork.

I've been back from Virginia since last Sunday. Aside from Friday (I missed the concert we went out there to see because of a uterine malfunction and posted something because I was disappointed and frustrated and feeling gross, which I deleted the next day because the Internet does not need my angry, incoherent TMI) it was decent. I seem to have turned everyone else in my family on to Great Big Sea, because we listened to them the entire way back from Virginia, and Mom and Dad were talking about the concert all weekend. We're going to see them in Louisville in October. I actually find that a bit sweet (what's weird is Mom asking about the "Urinetown" soundtrack, my other Only Thing I Listen To, which was in my car's CD player when she drove it today). We didn't do much but sit around my sister's apartment and go out to eat. Saturday was stormy and sleepy, and I think the only time we went out was when she and Mom and I walked up to a yarn store a few blocks from her apartment. This is primarily what I did while we were gone.


Apart from sporadic stabs at catching up with my friends list, I haven't had all that much time for doing fun things on the Internet because I'm buried in job and grad school stuff.* The jobs that have made me flail with glee and then drop everything to spend all day making that application exactly perfect:
1) Writing and editing descriptions of books on audio/in Braille for the Library of Congress
2)Library associate--doing pretty much what I do now--for the Cincinnati Museum Center's library
3)Foot-in-the-door library page with Madison Public Libraries in Wisconsin 4)Museum technician for the National Archives (in Abilene, Kansas, so I'm not as nuts about that one as I am about the other two, but I sure wouldn't turn it down)
That's not the dorky part. Well, it is, but it's not what made me sit back and go "holy damn, woman, that's almost kind of sad."

Nor is how dorkily delighted I was by the earlier "30 Rock" on Thursday, the one where they kind of riff on "Amadeus" in the subplot where Tracy Jordan decides to create a porn video game. I've already got more than a bit of a crush on Tina Fey, but I'm also a Mozart nerd. My primary writing music these days? The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields recording of Mozart's Requiem. No matter what I'm working on. Because it is beautiful and dramatic and fast without having English words to distract me. In fact I'm sort of thinking about buying the Viennese Philharmonic recording of the same thing because it has really good reviews on Amazon and a couple of movements this one doesn't. "Amadeus" is my favorite movie I never watch. It's too sad. I'm depressed for the rest of the day when I forget how it bums me out and decide to watch it. But yeah, I got all references and I think I might have maybe been a smidge annoying with all my "ohmygosh did you see what they just did thar? That was brilliant!"

No. Here's what gave even me pause: the carrot at the end of my stick on the whole job application and trying to find the MLS with an archives certificate programs I thought I remembered seeing a lot of the last time I looked, and all that? When I finished, I could write boyfluff.

Never mind that I spent all Saturday at a friend's house writing with short breaks for being entertained by the cat (she had one of those conehead collars and didn't quite seem to get that she could pummel her toys with all the feet she wanted, but she just wasn't getting the mousy in her mouth. And when she got annoyed, she would hiss and sort of remind me of that little frill-headed dinosaur from "Jurassic Park."), that was writing work because I was supposed to working on the novel my critique group knows about. As soon as I hit "submit" on these forms, I could pack up and be at Boston Stoker in about five minutes, and spend all night working on the half-finished scene in Nicholas and Charlie's story that's been sitting on my computer for a week now. The deadline was not "what time is this application due?" it's "when does the coffeehouse close? I can get a few hundred words in if it isn't too late!"

*( Something I'd been meaning to post about on its own, which got a little long stuck to the end of this )

This blog: OMG YES.

My favorites:
Phunology

I Want to Be A Librarian!

Vans: the Personality Vehicles

I'm working on a story where the main character is a psychic who co-owns a New Age bookshop in Yellow Springs, the little hippie town east of Dayton. The store is based on a specific one on Dayton Street that charmed me. I went out there to look at it again a week or to ago, since it had been a little while since I actually went in. It turns out that the bookshop has been replaced by a Rastafarian coffeehouse (and after having gone inside to see the space, I think the memory I was working from was at least half of a bookstore on Bardstown Road in Louisville) But while I was walking around, I passed a shop called House of Ravenwood. I'd seen it for years and was never sure exactly what it was--something gothy, to guess by the Old English-y font their sign is in. The sign in the window said that they had a psychic and did Tarot readings.

I've always been a little shy about asking people for help with research. I had a really bad experience with the last time I said to someone "hey, I write fantasy and I have a strange hypothetical for you, will you help?" But Yellow Springs is friendly and odd, and the place that sells crystals and readings would probably not be unused to fantasy fiction or people with weird questions. I met one of the psychics briefly, but he had a reading to do. The staff were quite nice, so I asked the woman at the counter hey, I'm working on this story, would it be possible for me to set something up with him sometime just so I could pick his brain? She wasn't sure, but told me to call back any day but Monday or Tuesday.

This would have been, oh, last Saturday or Sunday.

I thought I had a chapter due for critique on that Thursday, so I wrote pretty much all day Wednesday.

I worked all Thursday and Saturday.

Friday Mom decided we were going to have my birthday, which we sort of skipped. Apparently for my birthday I wanted to go up to Troy with her to buy stuff for her garden, then watch her plant stuff, cringing when she got too near the wasps' nest in the bird feeder ( It's a squirrel-proof feeder, so it's hard for them to get in and out the little holes. And they're the most mellow wasps in the world; you can stand a yard away from the nest and they don't care. But I'm ridiculously wasp phobic, so she'd be digging a hole four feet from the feeder and they'd be kind of mellowly futzing around inside it and I'd be on the porch going OMG BEEZ JESUS CHRIST WATCH OUT THEY'RE GOING TO STING YOU!) and then go see "Julie and Julia."

Tuesday I found out that a friend of the family who moved up to Minneapolis was visiting her sister in Indianapolis and we were going to go see them Wednesday. So I went tearing back out to Troy to buy yarn. Because yeah, we go right through Richmond, which has a yarn store I like better, on the way to Indy, but I needed a new project right this very second. And it turned out there wasn't any time to stop on Wednesday anyway because we got out an hour late. We went to the zoo and the butterfly garden and had Egyptian food for supper.

Thursday we went to a yarn store in a neighborhood in south Indianapolis I would love to visit with my camera. It was really pretty in a sort of refurbished, old way, but I'd never be able to find it again and I'm not so sure of how safe it actually is. We left in time to get home two hours before I was supposed to be at a friend's dinner party, which lasted until 11:30.

I worked all day Friday.

Sunday I said "oh, I will have a snack and get some writing done at Panera!" Got there at 4:00. Left at 8:30. Went to the local coffeehouse down the road from me and stayed until they closed at 10.

And now apparently we're leaving again Thursday through Monday because Great Big Sea is playing Friday night near where my sister lives in Virgina. So all this week has been rushing around to get the wash done and the dog kenneled and all.

Even when I'm actually here, I have no free time. I keep opening the Internet, wondering "wait, what was that really interesting thing I was just reading?" and realizing that no, actually it was something I'm writing. So now between LJ and Dreamwidth and the NaNo boards, I have like twelve tabs of comments I need to answer and posts I need to comment to and feedback I need to leave sitting open in Firefox. It's mostly boyfluff--I can no longer say I don't write romance, because about three pieces of Charlie and Nicholas's story sitting around on my computer in various stages of half-done, and another couple forming in the back of my mind--but I’m already further along on a story I did with no specific deadline or challenge than I have been in ages. I think the last time I ever saw chapter six of anything I did outside of NaNo was, oh, maybe the epic stupid fantasy I wrote in my first couple years of high school. Everything else I keep perfectionisting to death. I always get stuck with seven drafts of the first two to four chapters of a story and then no idea what happens after that.

I'd been planning to just keep going on this story for NaNo. I know I can write 50K in a month. The challenge for me is to see if I can ever actually finish some damn thing. But the rate I'm going, it's going to be November by the time I manage to find time to phone them on a day that is not Monday or Tuesday.

Remember that Barenaked Ladies song "If I Had $1,000,000"? Where every other line was "If I had-a milll-yon dolll-ars..." and the chorus went "If I had a millon dollars/ I'd buy your looooove!" and it would stay in your head for days and days after you heard it? And in the verses they'd say cute things about what they'd do with their fabulous wealth ("I'd buy you some Art/ a Picasso or a Garfunkel!") and kind of banter in between?

There's the one verse that goes "...I'd build a tree fort in our yard!/ If I had a million dollars/You could help, it wouldn't be that hard./ If I had a million dollars/Maybe we could put a little tiny fridge in there somewhere!" Then the two guys start talking about their awesome tree fort:

"You know what? We could just go up there and, and hang out--"
"And open the fridge and stuff, and there would be food just laid out for us, like little pre-wrapped sausages and things."
"Mmm!"
"They have pre-wrapped sausages, but they don't have pre-wrapped bacon..."
"Well, can you blame them?"
"Uh, yeah!"

The other night Mom decided she was going to make Chinese chicken salad for dinner, which is just salad with Chinese-foody vegetables in and chicken and bacon on top. We got started kind of late, so she just picked up pre-cooked bacon to heat up.

I was bored-hungry earlier, so I went to the fridge looking for something to munch on and I happened to find the package of bacon we didn't use. The box said something like "great for wraps/salads/sandwiches/meals/snacks!" and I was sort of bemused by the idea of someone being like "know what I want for a snack? Cold, plain, thin strips of pre-cooked bacon!" before I realized that wait, that was just what I was doing. But as I was cutting the package inside the box open, it struck me. Not as thunderstruck as the OMG I had about Twilight and Phantom of the Opera, but OMG never the less.

PEOPLE, I ASK YOU. WHAT DID WE BUY?

Barenaked Ladies predicted our food.