Okay, so this is my thought about NaNoWriMo. Finishing the rewrites on Urban Shaman is *way* higher in priority, particularly as I'm not doing NaNoWriMo for the purposes of Writing A Novel. I've done that several times. The purpose of me doing NaNoWriMo is to enter a contest which closes on Dec. 31; if I succeed in that, I'll be delighted. If I don't, I'm not going to be crushed. I'd *like* to, but I've *got* to finish the US rewrites.
So this is my plan: I'm going to work on US on weeknights, and do NaNoWriMo writing on weekends. In order to actually accomplish the 50K words in a month that NaNoWriMo aims for, I'll have to write something on the order of 6K words a day each of the weekend days of November, and that would be . . . stupendous.
If I do this, I will be a gibbering fool in December.
But anyway, that's the idea, at least. I'll manage it or I won't, but I _will_ finish Urban Shaman. _That'll_ only take a _rewrite_ of one chapter a night, which is, okay, still a lot, but it's a whole buggering lot less than writing a five fresh new chapters a day.
Right now, though, I should go work on Kitlings and wait for trick-or-treaters.
I took some pictures of the pumpkin I carved! The only problem is the photos didn't show that the ear made a light-shadow on the wall beyond it, which looks preeeeeetttttty darned cool. Anyway, Happy Halloween!
I've discovered it's a lot more fun to carve pumpkins when it's Mommy or Daddy who do the hard work of scraping all the pumpkin innards out first. :)
And it's off! I put the US ms into the mail this morning! Wish it luck! :)
Chapters edited: 3. Cover letters written: 1. Synopses sweated over: 1.
*fwwssssshhhh*
Now I'm going to *bed*. Will post the envelope to the publisher *tomorrow*.
G*night*.
*tud*
Sarah is going over the first 3 chapters of US with a fine-toothed comb for me, nitpicking sentence structures and spelling errors and doing detail work. She's thus far found some very embarrassing errors (worth instead of worse, in the third sentence, no less) and is generally improving the writing. Sarah is my heeeeeeero!
And now I must meet.
Every time I look at that last entry, I start singing, "They got the mustard out!"
Aaaaand I have sent a two paragraph synopsis of Urban Shaman off to the nice publisher who asked for it. Let there be a great crossing of crossable bits!
The birds are not nearly as entertaining a distraction when Chanti goes leaping off the deck and chases after them for ten minutes and I am not able to catch her. She's locked in her kennel for the rest of her life.
In the meantime, I sent email to a publisher this morning asking a couple of questions. The email bounced, so I sent another email to the info address at the publisher saying I'd tried sending this email and it'd bounced and was there a more appropriate email I could send it to?
I got an answer from the *CEO*/head publisher saying, "Thanks for bringing this to my attention; we need to get this fixed. In the meantime, you can e-mail me directly."
Bwah. :)
So there's a water bottling company up here that proudly claims "Glacier-fed water from Eklutna Lake!" The thing is that Eklutna Lake is Anchorage's primary water source. So basically they're selling tap water.
I think that's funny. :)
There are many many small birds in the trees outside my office window, all fluttering about and sometimes WHOOOOSHING in great numbers. Chantico's going crazy watching them. :) She's sat down and is looking out the window with very big eyes and her head slightly cocked to one side, which is what she does when she's saying, "Hey! What's going on over there?" I'm all for these birds hanging out all winter. It's a great distraction for the dog!
Wow, I'm well-popped. Went to the chiro this morning and sat around for 25 minutes before losing my patience and asking if Dr. Woody knew I was /there/, which resulted in me being seen within about two minutes. He had some patient in for some sort of physical therapy, and according to one of his staff, "it always takes forever," so why didn't somebody call me and ask if I could change my appointment time? Mutter.
However. I complained of the Owie Place in my shoulder (ulnar nerve pinch which affects my entire right arm), which has cropped back up again the last couple of weeks, and he popped the *snot* out of my upper and middle back, then did some perfunctory pops on my lower back (although it did in fact help), then sat me down and put a finger on either side of my spine in my neck and rolled my head and my neck went *pop*!
Then he popped it some more, and said that should help, and told me I didn't have to come back until I felt like I should. Wow! I'm HEALED! For real this time! YAAAAAAY!
Noooooooooo running. Nooooooo sir. Not me. Just some nice easy-going swimming. Noooooo running.
So there I was this afternoon, with a pitcher of hot water and a dishwashing rag, washing the Chantico-induced mud from the walls, thinking, "When I was a little kid, I used to say, "When I'm a grown-up, I won't *care* if I'm living in a dirty house!", and here I am, washing the walls."
Aaah, how the mighty have fallen. :)
While Ted was carpet cleaning (and after I finished washing the walls) I went out to the garage and started sanding boards for shelves. Mom lent me her belt sander and a smaller sander called The Mouse. The belt sander was kinda fun, but The Mouse *rocks*. I'm not a power-tools kinda girl, but I was still having an awfully good time. BBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTT, sanding corners down and rounding them and smooooooothing stuff out. Lots of fun, until my hands got so tired that I couldn't manage to keep enough pressure to round edges. I got one board finished entirely, 5 more half done, and have 3 which I didn't even touch. My hands are still tired.
This is me, not working on the Kitling story, can you tell? I *have* managed to print out what looks like an excellent scallops recipe from Teresa Nielson-Hayden's blog, as well as located a lemon cake recipe that looks yummy (Ted requested a lemon cake) and a New York cheesecake recipe that also looks good (although comments on it suggest cooking it an extra 30 minutes, and using 7 instead of 5 packages of cream cheese), as Shaun requested a cheesecake.
Who, me? Procrastinating? What gives you that idea?
got up and went shopping and came home and vacuumed all the carpets and Ted cleaned them all (and Chanti has of course just tracked new mud on them) and I sanded several pieces of wood for shelves and my hands are very tired indeed and we went to lunch and went to get Ted an EverQuest upgrade and went to see how my Mom was doing (she broke a tooth, which fortunately doesn't hurt) and then we went to Walmart and got a couple of rugs to put on top of the carpet in front of the back door to keep Chanti from tracking mud all over but well it doesn't entirely work but Ted didn't grab her and clean her feet when she came in, which is one of the Important Steps.
nobel prize today. didn't write at all.
maybe i'll work on the kitling story.
Hey! I went _swimming_! Just 1250 yards, which is a very short swim from my POV, but I was reallyreally trying not to overdo it, because I reallyreally don't want to end up crippled again. I also did 3-5 minutes worth of bicycling action in the water, because that's what the chiro told me to do (along with water jogging, which I didn't do at all). But I went SWIMMING! It was nice! Yaaaay! Except my swimsuit is falling into disrepair and I'm going to have to buy a new one soon. This wouldn't be such a bother, except for my allowance has been reduced to a piddly $20 a week while I pay for my Rogue and Gambit busts, which is going to take like ... until December 6.
Maybe I can have a new swimsuit for Christmas.
I intended to work on the plot for Leader Green while I was swimming, but I forgot until about 90 minutes after I got out of the water. I'll have to try again on Monday or Tuesday, whenever I swim again.
I fear I have accepted my fate, and I'm sort of mentally setting March aside as a 'write another YA novel' month. I also looked through my notes for the other YA stuff I want to write, and maybe /next/ November I'll give one of them a fling.
1700 fairly painless words on MD today, which I'm pretty pleased about. "Cat exploded," to quote Neil Gaiman.
(When writing a novel that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: "House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day." "Got call this morning to say I'd got Nobel Prize for literature. Wrote less than 300 words (285) probably unusable, so lousy day." And so forth.)
I believe I'll start using that as a rule of thumb for good and bad writing days. "Cat exploded", and "Nobel Prize".
I've eaten enough garlic to knock out a dragon. Somebody bring me a dragon, and I'll prove it!
Gnargh. I just accidentally closed my IE window into which I'd typed a big long blog post already. I *hate* that. Now I've lost all my cleverness and it just won't be the *same* to type it out again. :P
None-the-less, damn Sarah's eyes anyway. I am *not* writing a YA historical by April 30, even if I *did* just realize a perfect opening while I was in the shower. I'm not I'm not I'm NOT, that would be INSANE. I have to finish MD by April 15 (there's a different, complete-ms contest that I want to enter it in) and I'm supposed to write Leader Green next month and I am just NOT finishing THREE NOVELS in the next six months.
Although that'd be kind of cool, wouldn't it?
No! No no no! *No*!
I'm finding myself thinking 'But 50K words really isn't *that* many...' I'd like to know at what point in my life 50K words became 'not that many'. I mean ... buh!
*mutter* Damn Sarah's eyes.
Chanti is being very cute tonight. I found her peanutbutterball, which is a heavy rubber ball with ridges on the outside and hollow on the inside so you can put peanutbutter and dog food into it and make a playtoy for the dog, and she is soooooooooo happy, trotting around with the ball. Up the stairs, down the stairs, up the stairs, come see Catie, stand at the top of the stairs with the ball hanging out of the side of her mouth, go halfway down the stairs, chase the ball down the stairs, run halfway back up the stairs, go downstairs... Veeery cute.
Nothing to say, today, so I thought I'd talk about Bryant. Okay, talking about him when I had nothing else to talk about was actually his idea, but that's okay. He's got a nice oft-times political weblog that I admire and kind of want to emulate, but instead I mostly just read his.
Ok, that wasn't even very much talking about Bryant, but you take what you can get. Sheesh.
Despite being in a piss-poor mood at 6pm when I finally fricking left work after having to wait around for over an hour so QA could verify that a bug I said wasn't my problem was not in fact my problem, this turned out to be a pretty good evening. We went to Bear Tooth for dinner, because saving my allowance wasn't as important as getting the fuck out of the house, and we happened to run into Tony and Geoff Wright and Craig Fell there, so we sat down and had dinner with them and that *really* cheered me up. Craig's just moved back to Alaska and Tony and Geoff's business is doing well and it was just really nice to socialize with somebody. And Jenny who works at Bear's Tooth got promoted to Assistant Manager and so she was *very* cheerful and giving us a really hard time (we're regulars) and it was just really nice.
Tony tried to feed me the last few bites of his key lime pie, and I said no, I didn't like to eat key lime pie because it made my ears hurt, and then I sort of winced because nobody understands when I say that, but he put his fingers behind his ears over the eustachian tubes and he *understood*! So that made me very happy. *giggle*
They kept quoting commercials. Silly boys.
So I was a lot happier and then we came home and found out that we didn't manage to tape Buffy either this week or last week because the tv had been changed from channel three to something else, and I said the universal remote had been a good idea in theory (we have five remotes. I hate having five remotes, so I bought a universal remote, but you have to pay attention to what you're doing with it, and we don't always) and Ted who doesn't like the universal remote made a very snide mouth but restrained himself from actually saying anything, and since there was no Buffy to watch I wrote about 1200 words or so and finished another MD chapter.
So it turned out to be a pretty decent evening.
I just got called up by the electric company who said they'd sent out an application for our account there to be a joint account (only Ted's name was on it, for reasons that I fail to understand in the first place) and I never got the application and said well could you send another one and he said yes but if you don't send it back we're going to turn your power off.
I'm like ... but Ted still /has/ the account there under his name, why would you change it until you got an application back?
Apparently they change it to a joint account immediately instead of leaving it as a single name account, and if they dn't get the signed application back within 15 days they cancel the account and turn your power off.
wtf.
Sulk. Yesterday I got all my other sites under my mizkit account, which I made a reseller account (if anybody needs a domain, host it through me!), and this morning I had email saying my comments were broken on LAS, which indeed they were, and it's some sort of funky permissions error I have to get 100megs to fix. Sulk.
I have to go let the wet dog in now. Whee. :)
Yay TRIP!!!!
In other news, I've gotten about 2700 words written on MD in the last couple days, and I'm wondering if I'm starting to feel the ravages of the Alaskan Death Flu which will force me to my laptop because I'm too ill to stay upright at the desktop and work.
Probably not, though. I have work to do. :P
Yark. This photo of coTangent's makes me doubt I'd ever be able to hike the PCT. Wah!
Sarah is SO COOL. Somebody's asked her for a rewrite on one of her little 10 minute scripts she wrote. GO SARAH!
I, on the other hand, failed to get out of bed to write this morning. I got a little writing done last night, though. And I made banana bread! That's gotta count for something, right?
Um. Oh, and I found out that I have .5 days of paid leave and .5 days of vacation left, so I'm totally *not* going to be able to go to Nevada to see my new niece/nephew in December, which we couldn't have afforded anyway, but still. Hnf. My company's vacation policy is titchy.
Ok, that's all I can think of to post right now. :)
Apparently it's time to rejoice that winter is finally over. There's a damned *chinook* blowing this morning. It's partly clear and the sun isn't up yet and it's 48 degrees and there's a warm southerly wind blowing. *buh*
In other news, some observations I forgot to make about Era Aviation. First, the Dash-8 that we flew in down to Kenai had a small sign which read, "Close and latch door during taxi, take-off, turbulence and landing."
Does this not suggest that if the weather's fine, one can open the door for a pleasant breeze during the flight?
Also, they hand out cookies during those flights. On the cookies (well, on the wrappers) were stickers which read, "Book your flight online at EraAviation.com and get a free in-flight cookie!"
And I thought, "Wow, this whole flight booked online?"
Then I read the smaller print, which said (You'd get one anyway, but we thought we'd mention it.)
I thought that was pretty funny. :)
On the flight back home, which was fairly turbulent, the landing was *so smooth* we weren't even sure we'd touched down. I was obliged to compliment the pilot. Yes yes.
Busy day, although not as busy as last Sunday. Went and got a (late, ahem) birthday present for Catriona; I need to get a card. Went to Spider-Man again and might've liked it better the second time than the first. It's still flawed, but the three minutes of Spidey rescuing Mary Jane (both times) are so perfectly Spider-Man that it makes me all squirmy and happy. Went food-shopping, during which time the dog chewed up everything she could pull down from the kitchen counter. *crossed eyes*
And now I have BatB music stuck in my head, 'cause I watched it Friday night. (There's something sweet and almost kind / But he was mean and he was coarse and unrefined / And now he's dear and so unsure / I wonder why I didn't see it there before!) I do wish the Beast had had a song of his own in the movie. That was its biggest flaw, I thought (and still think!).
(She glanced this way, I thought I saw / And when we touched she didn't shudder at my paw! / No it can't be, I'll just ignore / But then she's never looked at me that way before.)
In a fit of something, I've rewritten one of the Gryphon Beach Tales and sent it off to Spider Magazine, which is a sister magazine to Cricket, one of my most beloved childhood magazine subscriptions. Spider's for 6-9 year olds, which I think is a better age group for the Tales than the 9-14y/os that Cricket caters to. They've got a 12 week response time, so I won't hear back til next YEAR, but hey, I submitted something. Cool!
Er, unless you're using Netscape 4. If you're using Netscape 4, don't even bother looking at LAS. It's just a disaster.
Ok, there's actually some *content* up at Last Angel Standing, making it rather more worth looking at. I am *exceedingly* smug.
Apparently yesterday when I linked to the ROUS, I accidentally linked to the main PotD rather than the image itself. For people like Janne who got very confused, look again. :)
I have gracefully and happily handed off the HTML Lead position to Barbara, who's in the office, which will make everybody (except possibly Barb, although she seems keen on it) happier, although it gave at least one of my other remote coworkers a moment's panic, because he had the idea maybe this meaned they were phasing us remote people out, so I had to reassure him. He told me that *normally* people voluntarily *promote* themselves, not *demote* themselves.
I figure it's not a change in my paycheck and it'll be easier all around if the lead is in the office. So I'm pleased about this.
Hm. I failed my 'watch Beauty and the Beast' roll last night, 'cause by the time I got downstairs, Shaun was already watching Enterprise, so I watched that instead and then decided not to watch BatB because I didn't want to stay up all night watching special features, aaaaannnnnnd. There was something else I was actually going to say this morning, but I can't think of what it was, so I'm done now!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. Chantico was SO GOOD *ALL DAY* and now she's just peed all over the entire house. AAAAAUUUUUGH!
So Trent told me a story this morning.
Last night his wife Laura said something about wanting to write a story. She then opined the fact that she's not good at writing anything longer than about three or four minutes, spoken.
Trent said, "I told her I could have her talk to someone who writes really well, thinking of you. She said 'I don't think Steve will answer a question like that. I don't think Neil will either. What other famous authors are you on a first-name basis with?'"
So, apparently I'm in the same boat with Messrs. Brust and Gaiman. :)
It's been a weekend of All The Sleep. I got home from the memorial service and slept for 9 hours, woke up on Saturday and went to get my hair cut, came home and tried uploading the photos from the service (stupid gallery's not working from my desktop, apparently I'm going to have to upload pictures from the laptop, which isn't net-connected right now), went back to bed at about 3:15 and woke up around a quarter to seven, watched a movie, went /back/ to bed at midnight, slept til nine again, and finally started feeling like I might be human.
Today we got up and went shopping and came home and went shopping /again/ and bought new reading chairs that were on sale at Fred Meyer's, then uhm. Wwent to the UAA gym to get a membership, which was only 50% accomplished, then went to Habitat to see if we could find a doughnut-cutter, then went and had lunch at Bear's Tooth, then came almost all the way home before we remembered we hadn't gotten a pooper scooper, so we turned around and did that, then Ted put one of the chairs together and we discovered the other one came pre-broken, so we brought it back and got another one and Ted put it together while I made doughnut dough. Oh! And Ted got his hair cut and I wandered around Title Wave a little and I bought Disney's Beauty & the Beast.
And now I'm all irritatingly zingy and chipper and *utterly* blonde. Metaphysically speaking, not really. Although I almost did get bangs cut yesterday. Which has nothing at all to do with being blonde, but nevermind that. O.O
Man, I'm tired.
The memorial service was a little bizarre but very good, and a lot of people I hadn't seen in fifteen years expressed great surprise that I was all grown up now. They kept saying "You're all grown up!" Except a couple who said, "You got old!" I said, "What does that make you?" Marc Berezin stared at me for a moment when I said that, then said, "You got OLD!" :)
Chris Cook, to whom the words 'force of nature' apply, asked me how my life was, told me, demanded to know why I wasn't answering her, interrupted to /continue/ telling me how my life was; eventually my Mom came by and I said, "Chris and I are having a nice conversation about me. She's doing the talking." It was pretty funny. :)
Chris's son Ian was there. Ian used to be this slight, angelic-looking blond kid. Ian grew up into this oh, he's not that /tall/. 5'8" or 9", burly, stocky, sturdy, construction-worker-looking fellow. He recognized me before I recognized him, and before Chris could give him hell he hugged me, then Chris turned and saw us standing next to each other and started to say, "Ian!" and he was like, "We HUGGED! We HUGGED! It's OKAY! I did my duty! We HUGGED!"
In another conversation with Marc Berezin, who is a terrific human being with the world's shortest memory, he expressed surprise that I was living in Anchorage, then asked what I was doing with myself. I said, "We already had this conversation, Marc," because we did, in June at Deirdre's wedding. He said, "WELL WE'RE HAVING IT AGAIN!"
So I said I was doing web design for this company in San Francisco, and he said, "Wait! We've had this conversation! I'm beginning to remember! We had it in July!" I said, "Well, no, it was June..."
Marcia Beauchamp, who is about 5'2", was dismayed I was taller than she was. I tried telling her that 1. everybody was taller than she was, and 2. I'd been taller than she was /last/ time I saw her, too, and then I was obliged to crouch down so I was no longer taller than she was. She was happy about that.
It was very good to see people. It's horrible that the reason was somebody died. But my father had this idea to begin a Dave Forbes Memorial Roast to be held once a year and for everybody to get together and roast one of the old crowd. A reason to get together that's not *sad*. I hope they pull it off.
Duncan, who is the youngest Forbes kid and whom I hadn't seen in several years, grew up to look a lot more like Liam than I ever imagined he would. He was being pretty stoic. Liam was doing a lot of hail-good-fellow-and-cheer. Laura kept getting all teary.
There was a funny bit when Laura, all teary-eyed, came up and Jean Brockel, who is a singer/voice teacher/theatre person in Kenai, was talking to me, and was all teary, and she and Laura looked at each other and Laura said, "We have to stop meeting like this," and Jean said, "Kept apart by Kleenex!""
I saw Aunt Pam, and ... god. Just so many people I hadn't seen in so amazingly long. Hal Smalley, who was a teacher at my high school, and a swim coach, who's now in politics. He looks like a particularly benevolent sort of short-bearded Santa Claus. Barb and Dave Eagle -- I think I've told the story about Dave's mailbox?
The Eagles live between Kenai and Soldotna but the cities keep the roads clear. They kept, however, bulldozing snow without regard to the mailboxes, and several years running they bulldozed people's mailboxes down along with the snow. And people complained bitterly, and the city said sorry, sorry, and would do it again the next year.
I think it happened three times, and then Eag got fed up with it. Eag does construction kinds of things. Eag went and dug a 10x10 pit, poured concrete into it, and put the mailboxes back up, set in concrete. The next winter, the bulldozer came along, smashed into the concrete-enforced mailboxes and destroyed the blade on the 'dozer."
And for some reason after that the city was able to go *around* the mailboxes instead of just smashing them down.
These are the kinds of people I grew up with. Benevolent Santa Clauses and bulldozer-destroying contractors. I was an astoundingly lucky kid. :)
There wasn't any official speech-making at the service, which was a little strange and in fact not ... they kind of let it go with the flow instead of trying to make it organized in any fashion, which is maybe just as well, because Rene didn't even make it into the main area the place was being held until it was nearly over. She stayed out in the lobby just talking to people out there, and I'm not sure she needed to be .. well. I'm not sure she could have handled anything else.
There were ... hundreds of people there. There must've been two hundred. He taught at the college, so there were some of his students, there were theatre people, there were.. just enormous numbers of people. They had a video with clips of shows Dave'd been in, and there was somebody playing the piano, and the college - it was held at the college -- had put together a food spread, and flowers, and all sorts of stuff. They did a really nice job and the Forbes' were all more than a little overwhelmed."
The very best (and possibly most peculiar) memorial I heard about for David: he loved golfing.
So Marc Berezin, he of the faulty memory, was down in Seattle at the beginning of this week, staying with Pat Dixon, whom I know I've told you about; he was my high school photography teacher. Mark Bergner, who was another teacher at my high school and astoundingly good-looking, came down from wherever it is slightly north of Seattle that he apparently lives, and the three of them and David Forbes went out golfing. And Forbes was playing such a great game they had to give him hell the whole time; on the 15th hole, he was 1 under par, the best he'd ever played, and *boy* were they giving him grief. On the 16th and 17th holes, he had to take an extra shot or two, so he ended up 1 over par going into the 18th hole, which was a 500 yard drive and had a 5 par. And man, they had to just keep giving him a hard time, because he was notorious for going out of turn, and he kept going out of turn, and they had to tell him to cut it out, but he made two good shots to set up that 18th hole, and then from 120 yards out, he sank it, and finished the course one under par. The best golf game he'd ever had."
And that was how they memorialized him. They brought him out for the best golf game he'd ever had, a few days after he died.
There'll be photos here if I can get my gallery software to work.
Ok, that was funny. The guy who came over to fix our phones, who said his name was Ross, I think, is a D&D geek. He came in, said, "Who's the X-Men fan?" I said, "We both are, but I'm the collector freak", he fixed the phones, saw Ted's HeroClix, said, "So do you guys game?" and we spent five minutes talking about gaming before he left. :)
Oh, and he's got a BA in Theatre from UAA and knows my sister Deirdre. It's a small, small world. :)
Anyway, so hopefully he'll email me and there will be potential gaming. He looked interested in Ted's 1890s Ravenloft game, at least. :)
The mind, she boggles. Lemon juice: the new old way to prevent conception and protect against AIDS.
I seem to have accidentally signed up for NaNoWriMo. I will not, however, be participating in it unless I get enough of MD done to feel like I can. So I better write a lot of MD over the next few weeks. :)
Site redesign launch delayed until next week. This is good in that something was promised that we don't have the setup to do, and bad in that I've already put in about 40 hours this week, doing bug fixes.
However, it does mean I don't have to panic to get the rest of them done and it does mean I won't be stuck here until oh god hundred tonight, which mean of course that I should write at least several hundred more Kitling words.
The Kitlings story is very, very silly. I don't know if Winifred will like it, but all the Too people certainly will.
Back to bugslaying now. Bugslaying and talking out some problems with MD with Sarah. Maybe it'll help!
Wow, that's pretty.
Sarah was telling me about an editor at Tor who's actively acquiring stuff, and it made me feel sick. Heh. Particularly since apparently Tor takes email submissions, at least for the first 3 and synopsis. But nothing I have is ready to go, and I feel like I've been slacking. Which isn't really true, because I've been working long days at the job that actually *pays* me, and I've actually written somewhere around 5K words in the last week, which really isn't bad at *all*.
But it hasn't been on MD, and that's the project I feel like I should be working on, and ... blah. :(
My site launches today (assuming all goes well, please GOD) and the Kitling story has to be finished this weekend or not at all, so as of Monday there's nothing stopping me from working on MD.. if I work on it til the end of October, well, that's 3 weeks, almost. And if I do NaNoWriMo I can't start til Nov. 2 'cause I wrote the first chapter of what I'd work on earlier /this/ month and that's technically against the rules but ... I don't know, maybe I can retype it or something. :)
Anyway, three weeks, or almost 3 weeks. Even if I manage just 1000 words a day that'd be 21000 words, which should certainly get me through the first third of the book.
Excuse me while I take a moment to boggle about how words pile up that fast. If, y'know. You write them.
Anyway. I'm going to go get the dog and some breakfast and ... try to settle my stomach.
I dreamed about D.W.'s memorial service, this morning. It was being held in the Kenai mall, in my dream, which is a little weird.
Flights to Kenai aren't wildly cheap at this time of year. They can run as little as $30 in the summer, but to go down for David's memorial service on Friday is $150. Ook. And that's the cheap version, via website. Travel agent quoted me $205. Oh, well, that's just how it is.
Ted washed the dog last night. She doesn't smell nearly as bad now. I have the very best husband. He also got her some adult dog food instead of the puppy stuff, and lamb-and-rice based instead of chicken-and-corn based, because apparently corn gives dogs gas. Not that you can buy dog food that doesn't have corn, but at least this stuff doesn't have it as one of the top three ingredients. And it's adult food, which we theorize might be harder to digest and therefore less ... stinky. Or something.
In other news, apparently the doctor I randomly chose out of the phone book to go to to last year when my back became unbearable has killed a couple of people. *That's* exciting. All I can say is he certainly didn't over-medicate *me*. Or Ted, who got migraine medicine from him.
Guess I should find another doctor. Not that I'm in the habit of going to them, but that one hasn't got a license anymore.
And I should eat something.
In further dog news, I went to let her out and she ran off. I tried the walk-back-home thing, because usually it'll make her come, but then another dog appeared and there was no chance she was going to come back home. So I had to run after her. If my back gets fucked up again because of this I'm just going to kill her. I'm icing it and doing my exercises and the dog is in her kennel for the rest of her life.
Stinky puppy. Stinky puppy with the runs, apparently, and I don't know if it's the food she's eating or if she's "cleaning up" her dog run by eating her poop. Stinky digging puppy who is filthy filthy filthy and who tromps dirt from our formerly beautiful back lawn all over the house.
I've managed to smash both my elbows on things today. This has not been a great morning.
I have successfully procrastinated a *lot*! The kitchen's entirely clean, there are two more pieces of artwork up, the laundry's been folded and put away except that which is still being washed, and, er. I've written 500 words. And even now, I procrastinate like mad, writing a blog entry instead of writing a story!
I did fail my make-bread-instead-of-write procrastination roll, because I looked at the make-bread-by-hand receipe and it seemed too late in the day to start all that work, particularly since Ted's going to want to cook dinner in a while here. So now Ted, who has been all heroic and manful and put up a dog run for Chanti, is making bread in the bread machine, because I'm a complete failure and my bread machine loaves keep falling. I've never tried making real bread. If it falls, I'm going to hide in a pit and never come out.
Maybe I should make brownies tonight.
2600 words to the good (and hopefully at least some of them are good words) on the O'Leary's story. Going to bed now; will write more (a whole frelling lot more, I hope) tomorrow.
My mom called this afternoon to tell me that David Forbes died of a heart attack today. This will not mean anything to most of the world, but Mr. Forbes was the man I always figured would be my substitute dad if anything ever happened to my parents. The Forbes' were my parents' best friends down in Kenai, and we lived next door to them for a significant chunk of my life. Liam, the oldest Forbes kid, is fifteen months older than me but I always sort of thought of him as my twin, and he and Laura, who's 15 months younger than me, were my best friends growing up.
If it weren't for David, I very likely wouldn't be here for all of you to know and love. He saved my life when I was four or five; Liam and Laura and I were playing tag, and Dad and Mr. Forbes were in the back yard of our house working on ... the well, I think. I can't remember. Anyway, we weren't supposed to go behind the house, because they'd dug a very deep pit and it was feared that the children would fall in it. Naturally, we forgot about how we weren't supposed to go behind the house, and Liam was It and was chasing me, and I raced around the back of the house and right out over the very deep pit.
This in itself was bad.
What was worse is that there were rusted-out oil barrels with the tops punched out at the bottom of the pit, and sharp horrible spikes of metal pointing upwards to impale little girls who were running like bats out of hell into thin air.
David reached out and grabbed me by the back of the shirt, just one of those lickity-split reactions. I don't so much remember /falling/ as I remember, very vividly, being upside-down, headfirst over the metal shards.
And I remember that it was Mr. Forbes who caught me.
There are tears someplace inside me. I'm not sure when they'll come.
Well, that's better than it *was*. I have been popped. There is still pain, but I can breathe more easily now, so that's better than it *was*. Also, Shaun gave Chantico a couple of ice cubes to chew on and she is the *happiest* puppy. *laugh*
Shaun /also/ brought her a new bone home, so she has a big bone to wrestle around and gnaw on and romp and leap and jump at, so I am a very happy human as well.
My cousin Alanna is in town! She's got a job interview that she's presumably still at even as we speak, and she'll be here all weekend. I hope she gets the job; that would be very nifty! She came over and admired our new house a lot and then we went to lunch aaaand well, and then there were back spasm and you've been here for the rest of it. Or something like that. :)
oh *god* ow. fresh new back spasms, getcher back spasms here! i've taken aspirin, am icing it, and have a chiro appointment in an hour, but ye gods and little freaking _fishies_.
Er, I have nothing to say. I just felt like I ought to post /something/, cause it's morning or something. So, er, hi. :)
I seem to have accidentally had a little writing accident tonight. I had to get up to write down the first sentence of a book idea, something I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, and then it turned into the first three paragraphs, and then I tried going to bed and then I had several more sentences to write and so I got up, somewhat impatiently, and came to the computer and sat down and wrote for, well, a couple of hours, I guess it's been, an hour and a half, anyway, and now I have a chapter of 1500 words written.
And it's not even something I'm *supposed* to be writing on! I have to write my O'Leary's story and at _least_ finish the first third of MD this month! Preferably the first _half_ of MD!
I was considering writing this story that I got started tonight /next/ month, for NaNoWriMo, although I think I've technically buggered that because I started it this month (I don't think that's actually going to stop me, if I decide to do it), but *ack*.
And now I've started chapter two. This can't be good. O.O
No, no, *no*. I'm going to bed. It's one in the morning. This story can wait until *next* month. O'Leary's, then Manifest Destiny, dammit!
...
I seem to have written another three hundred words.
Really. I'm going to bed now.
I am.
...
I have created a work of eeeeeeeevil with Last Angel Standing, because it resizes your browser but but but it looks nifty! *spoik*
Actually, it looks ok not resized and probably after several complaints I'll undo the work of eeeeeeeevil, but this is really the horrible thing about web design. If you want to actually achieve something that you, the designer, *want*, it often requires works of eeeeeeeevil.
There isn't, incidentally, anything /at/ LAS yet, but at least it's got an index page now. Now I just have to do that with MaloneClan and ... well, I have to /work/ on 1000 drawings. I don't even have enough to get that started.
So far today I have torn my right thumbnail, stubbed the toes of my left foot, and fallen down the stairs again. The dog has eaten the entirety of the rawhide bone she had, and is bored and thus much less willing to lie around all day while I work. The spasmy place in my back isn't spasming right now, but it's still tight and painful. Overall, I think I'd like to go back to bed.
o, joy. new back pain. upper back spasms under the shoulderblade. same thing happened in june when i was doing better, except it was neck spasms then. get all the lower stuff better adjusted, the upper stuff goes 'oh my GOD' and freaks out. if this is still happening in the morning, i will go visit dr. woody and whimper at him. *OW*.
She called back and said that I'm not an authorized name on the GCI account -- which is a little freaking bewildering, because I think I set /up/ our local service with GCI -- and so she apparently can't do anything. Or something.
:P
I just spoke with Agnes, a very nice woman at the RCA, who said that ACS has two customer queues, one of which is for ACS customers and which has a 24-48 hour turnaround, and the other of which is for GCI and which has a 3-4 week turnaround and a 1600 person waiting list. She said that the Public Utilities Commission is aware of this and that they're investigating to see what the problem is, and that part of the problem is the fact that all the rules and regulations that were set up were set up when the phone company up here had a monopoly, and they don't apply in a competition scenario.
She took my name and number and information, and said she'd register my complaint and she'd call to see where we were in the queue and if anything could be done to speed up the process. She said later this month there are going to be public hearings about it, so I may keep an eye peeled for that announcement in the paper and go. Um. She said she'd call back when she had a little more information for me. So generally she was very helpful but can't really do anything.
So. Well. That's where things stand this afternoon.
Mom suggested I call the FCC. The FCC's phone tree told me to call my state Public Utilities Commission (Harold told me to do that yesterday. Harold was right.). My Public Utilities Commission changed its name to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska, and I'd like to know how the hell I was supposed to know that without the internet? Well, ok, I'd have eventually called the phone directory and /probably/ they'd have it listed under both names although the phone book doesn't, but still. Fnrt.
Anyway, waiting til after lunch to call them.
So the phone company says it's going to take four to six _weeks_ to get our phone transferred over. I called ACS, the big phone company up here. They said if I called GCI and cancelled my account and the switch with them, and called ACS back, that they could have my phone switched on 'probably the same day'.
See, ACS owns all the hard-wired lines. GCI is renting some of them. Because of deregulation, or something, GCI doesn't have to pay ACS for maintenance of the lines or for laying new lines, so they're using this equipment without having to pay for anything but the immediate rental. ACS is pretty pissed about this. So because GCI is renting the lines, they're not actually controlling the switches from one house to another. They have to go through ACS to do this. And ACS can manage to do the switch if it's *theirs* within a day ... but they're deliberately screwing around in order to punish GCI and GCI's customers by taking weeks and weeks and weeks to flip the switches.
The rat, rat, *rat* bastards.
I need to call GCI -- well, I'll wait til after lunch, to see if they respond to my email -- to verify everything I just said up there, although it's what Ted told me yesterday so I assume it's correct. Then I'm going to call a lawyer, or something, because goddamn it, I need my phone line, and this is bullshit.
YAY! It's STOPPED RAINING!
Also, my back doesn't seem to be any worse for the wear, which is a big plus.
Now I have to go clean up the dog food that the bad, bad *bad* cats spilled all over the hallway. *Bad* cats.
Gnork. I just fell down the stairs. I slipped on the edge of a step and slid down. I don't /think/ I hurt myself. I hope not. I'm just not up for another six weeks of back problems. :{