The Monster that Ate My Computer

Pardon me if my hands are shaking, but it’s been a week since I’ve been able to use my computer.  Peggy, a friend of mine, said I look like I’m in the throes of the DT’s–internet withdrawal, don’t you know.  When one’s business and hobbies both depend on connectivity, the last thing needed is interference, and last Monday I was cruelly interfered with.

It was a little after noon on Monday, when I was wandering around the Seattle Times website looking for news updates.  Because of a high intensity manhunt in the Seattle area, the Times was prominently featuring readers’ Twitter postings.  The public was playing reporter.  Wow, I thought, real time news, news from the street, news as it happens, and the temptation to be a witness to it drew me in.  I clicked on a Twit, whoops!  Sorry, I mean a tweet, and within seconds it transmogrified into a monster.  Recall the moment from Jurassic Park where the cute little prehistoric bird suddenly snaps the head off an admirer standing unfortunately too close?  It was like that.  In a blink, my computer was gagging for its life.  A screen popped up and asked me if I wanted to upgrade my anti-virus software.  Between the flashing red lights, blaring siren, and rapid fire sales attack (You wanna upgrade?  Hey, you wanna upgrade?  Hey, hey, you should upgrade, and fast, hurry!), I felt like I was facing off with a used car salesman who’d just mainlined a gallon of espresso.  No, you nasty pop-ups, I have anti-virus software–and where the hell is it when I need it?  I punched the miniscule “X” in the top right corner, but to no avail.  Immediately, the box popped up again, and then another popped up, claiming to be my anti-virus software–but it was lying!  My advantage in this case, though, is that when I feel pushed, harassed, hurried or bullied, I use my words.  I say NO!  and STOP!  What I most certainly don’t say, is, “Oh, all right,” or press the pulsing yes button.  So, my persistent refusal to accept the anti-virus upgrade invitation at least staved off the sure ruination of my beloved computer.  My repeated tapping of the “No, I don’t want your faux upgrade,” button forced the demon possessing my Dell to try another tack. 

In the midst of warding off the pushy sales pitch, I didn’t notice that a shield, not unlike those Microsoft update shields, appeared on my task bar in a nice soft gray accented with a swoop of a white banner.  It was a shield that was attempting to look like an English valet–it was there to meet my needs, provide a service, you know.  Be at my disposal.  I wasn’t convinced, however.  At discovering it, I clicked on to learn its true self–was it a shape shifter?  Was it a frog that would become a princess?  (Or a princess that would become a prince–I’m a tolerant, open-minded girl), what was the true nature of the shield?  Aha!  It was a tentacle of the monster.  It claimed to be my upgrade.  All I needed to do to activate its amazing skills, its power, its magic, was to click on the agreement.  With one thrust of my index finder I could unleash the power that would eradicate the forces of evil that held my computer captive, it promised.  JUST CLICK YES!  I reached toward the yes button, and with a flash of recognition, pulled my right hand safely away from the keyboard.  It was the Old woman who offered Snow White the apple–pure evil dressed as kind and generous.  My background in literature saved my computer:  APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING, you know.  Damn the beast!  It had my computer, and I was powerless.

Several sobbing phone calls to my tech savvy father later, followed by five days of dropping off and picking up my computer at a local shop, as the technicians ferreted the malware out of the recesses of my registry, only to have it reappear when I got my computer home again, a $250.00 bill, and the result is I’m writing this blog entry on Tom’s computer.  Mine remains possessed.  When I open explorer, it opens twenty-seven iterations and threatens to keep doing so if I don’t shut down.  When I tried to back up my data, the computer refused to communicate with the external hard drive.  But when I take the computer back up to the shop, as we did twice yesterday, it behaves perfectly normal for the technicians.  A cyber poltergeist is inhabiting my laptop. 

So, my Dad’s suggestion, and Tom’s, and others have nodded their heads in agreement here, is to buy a new computer–my laptop is four years old–and have the damned bedeviled thing wiped clean.  Transfer the data to the new computer, then clear out everything:  operating system, apps, data, and hopefully, gremlins, spyware, ghosts, goblins, and whatever electronic fungi might have spread like a toxin throughout the circuitry of my most treasured tool.  Clean in up, clean it out, and buy something new.  Almost makes me want to rummage up some legal pads, sharpen my pencils, and call it good.  Except my blog would suffer from being updated via the U.S. Postal Service.  So hang with me, dear readers, through the thicket.  I’ll soon be churning out frequent and zippy blog posts on a super-fast new computer.

I’m Thankful for You

To anyone who’s ever read this blog:

Thank you more than I can say for being an audience to my writing.  Some people crochet, others paint, and many organize the music on their IPods.  My mode of expression, however, is writing.  It would be very sad if no one ever had anything to say in response to my various bits and pieces.  I have been adding to this blog for nearly a year now, and I have made 73 posts and you, nearly 300 comments!  I love a good conversation!

I wish you much to be thankful for during the holidays and into the new year.  I’m sure thankful for all of you.

 

Susan  

Happy Buy Nothing Day!

What a dilemma!  Thursday, now that’s easy.  Eat too much, no matter what you promised yourself, in the warm company of friends and family.  Give some thanks, too.  Now Friday, that’s another matter.  Many of you in the wake of Thursday’s excesses will think it attractive to hit the malls and other gift-purchasing emporia to whittle down your Christmas lists before December melts into the 25th as fast as I can say Pineapple Express.  And that choice is understandable.  But it’s not radical.  No, before you is another choice, a crazy, live-on-the-edge, rumble-in-Bohemia option for your Friday:  Don’t go shopping; in fact, all day long, buy nothing.  You see, Friday is International Buy Nothing Day.

What a thrill!  To ascribe my unusual reluctance to wade through the tsunami of schlock that hits the stores this time of year (or maybe I notice it more this time of year) to social activism, to doing good for the planet, to participating in an international protest, well that feels awfully good.  It puts a nice, shiny halo on what’s essentially my distaste for dusting.  You know, stuff equals clutter equals dust.  Truthfully, I also don’t get a lot of bang from spending my bucks.  It goes back to when I was a kid and I saved a long while to buy a pair of jeans I believed would transform my social life.  And they might have, except after weeks of babysitting, I plunked down a handful of green in exchange for those light blue, brushed cotton swabbie jeans with the dark blue sailor buttons instead of a zipper, and then promptly dribbled blueberry filling from a Hostess pie down the front of the right leg (Yes, I remember which leg–it’s a scar on my financial psyche).  I don’t care what you say, nothing gets blueberry filling out of light blue brushed cotton…other than bleach, which was successful, but exchanged one disappointment for another.  So you see, early on I learned not to lay up my treasure on earth, where moth and rust and blueberry filling destroy.  No, I believe in burying my scant treasure beneath the earth, more or less.  Buy land and plant plants, otherwise buy nothing, spend nothing, save, save, save.  A value system that will be the downfall of the U.S. economy if NPR pundits are to be believed. 

You see, it turns out that we are called a Nation of Consumers for a reason.  We need to be.  About seventy percent of our national economy is dependent on each of us consuming.  And it’s especially true here at home.  According to the Washington State Department of Revenue, at least fifty percent of our state’s income is from retail taxes.  The less we buy, the bigger the potholes.  Buy Nothing Day suddenly sounds unAmerican, seditious.  The fact that nearly everything available in the stores is made in China–and possibly toxic–seems to be separated from the thrum of financial news people and elected officials chanting:  buy, buy, buy in hypnotic unison.  Give me something to buy that enhances my life (won’t be a communications device), is likely to be durable (won’t be a major appliance), and won’t add to the waste stream in its manufacture or eventual disposal (we’re back to organic gardening), and I’ll spend some money.  Which makes me wonder, what if we began to make things here, in the United States?  Could we have an economy driven by production?  Oh, yeah, we tried that.  We used to make clothes and cars and planes in this country, but unions formed and muscled the wage and benefit levels so high that the price of their handiwork  eclipsed its foreign-made competition.  Americans wanted bargains, so they bought from Mexico, and Indonesia, and China, and American seamstresses and sheet metal workers began to be laid off.  Manufacturing declined and importing increased, and since products made in factories that pay workers in a year what many Americans make in a day end up pretty darn cheap even after being shipped around the globe, we Americans still bought all those bargains.  All those Big Bird cookie jars, and flashing Christmas lights necklaces, and chips and dip trays shaped like a football (we have one if you’re interested).  But the teeter-totter has dropped.  So many Americans are unemployed now that we can’t buy all the stuff we otherwise would that would keep our economy humming.  Work no longer equals economic growth; no, buying equals economic growth, and no work, no buying.  Which is also a bit new and refreshing for us Americans.

Okay, where was I?  Are you a bit dizzy?  Let me make it plain:  Buy Nothing Day challenges our addiction to buying stuff, and buying stuff is the basis of our economy.  What’s wrong with that picture?  I plan to do yoga and throw pottery on Buy Nothing Day.  If you decide to go shopping, then as a citizen of Washington, I extend my appreciation for your contribution.  I’m sure the Chinese do as well.

It’s at the Printers

After more than a year of drafting and several weeks of revising, I put the period behind the final word of my novel then hit the print button.  286 pages later, I hauled the embodiment of my life-long ambition to be a writer up to Kinkos-now-FedEx to be copied into ten bound manuscripts for the readers in my focus group.  As I passed the originals to the copy clerk, I felt a very surprising surge of emotion.  Tom asked me what I was feeling, and I couldn’t quite name it, but it was similar to how I felt when I finished my master’s degree thesis and when I crossed the finish line of my one and only marathon, that feeling of losing something as you complete it.  Yet there was another thread to the moment, because I haven’t finished, and that’s what makes this adventure unique for me.  There are a number of way stations on this journey, and arriving at each has provoked a different sense of accomplishment, awe, and internal conflict.  As weird as it may sound, I’m not relieved to be done, because to be done–to any degree–means I have to risk the next step, another stretch of unknown territory where anything can happen.  Each step forward is a new risk of failure, just as it is another increment of success. 

To cope with the uneasiness today, I am using my Procrastination List as a compass.  It’s directing me to dust the blinds and shred old receipts, even while I’m tempted to succumb to Tom’s flu instead, which would give me permission to whine and wallow, or bake pumpkin bread to fill the house with comforting scents and me with a security blanket of fat and sugar.  The point is, I need something compelling to do so I’ll forget about the bridge I’m crossing today to the next wilderness.  (And yet, what’s obvious to all of us, is that I’m at my computer writing a new entry, processing my disquietude as I do so.  Meta-writing, I think I’ll call it.)  Tom just thanked me for scrubbing the sink–another neglected task.  I wonder if anyone will ever thank me for writing.  At times it seems primarily self-serving, not nearly as generous an act as scrubbing the sink.

Two days ago I nibbled open a fortune cookie and the slip of paper within said, “Keep your eyes open on Thursday for a special opportunity.”  Since I am an ambivalent universalist, willing to believe in the magic and might of the energy of life as much as I am willing to pooh-pooh it, I’m giving the fortune a chance.  My eyes have been tired all day, but open enough to see opportunity in everything–though the word “special” has me stymied.  Being in this in-between place, no longer writing and not yet to the readers, is a special opportunity, I suppose.  I’ll buy it, I guess.  The specialness is that I’ve never before been here.  And the opportunity is to observe and experience this gap, this lacuna (to borrow a word Barbara Kingsolver is currently making popular) with the same attention I would give to the writing and the readers.  While I’ve spent a life time thinking otherwise, perhaps ambiguity is a kind of grace.  If I could just relax here, I might find out.

Note:  Mom and I are going to hear Barbara Kingsolver talk about her new novel.  Cross your fingers that I won’t embarrass myself, Mom or anyone who knows me by asking a dumb question during the presentation or knocking over weaker readers in my rush to have her sign her book for me.  May some of her brilliance land as sparks of inspiration and insight on me.

The Procrastination List

File old business documents, delete emails, recycle copies from old trainings, hem pants…and so it goes, my Procrastination List, the ever-accruing backlog of tasks that individually don’t amount to much, but in aggregate look like days of unending work.  Frame prints and pictures, wash glass in cabinets, wash glass panels in French doors, glaze pottery…a tossed salad of to-do’s, few unpleasant and most down right enjoyable, but none a priority, which keeps them on my lengthening list, unornamented with the slash that shouts, “Done!”  Some of the items on the Procrastination List are time sensitive, however:  plant bulbs, spread compost, build cold frame.  If I don’t do the fall gardening in fall, though, I’ll pick it up again in spring with slight adjustments:  plant seeds, spread compost, build cold frame.  So maybe “time sensitive” is a misnomer.  “Suggested timeframe,” is perhaps, more accurate, and “better late than never” is a good bet–though don’t rule out just plain, “never.”  Really, when I think about it, what at least partially relegates a task to the Procrastination List is that the consequences for not doing it are so, well, inconsequential.

Dust, dust more stuff, deep clean the boys’ bathroom (AKA, guest bathroom), scrub tile grout with a toothbrush…My list has themes, although it’s not written in any order.  I jot down a task when I recognize it needs to be done and I don’t feel like doing it.  The act of writing it on the list is proxy action, substitute progress.  I have accomplished something because I put that chore on the list.  If I were researching my list for the clues it held as to the inner working of my mind, I’d color-code it.  Blue highlighter for household cleaning, green for yard and gardening (rip out Euphorbia and never, ever accept a plant gift again until I’ve cleared it with the experts), pink for home organization and decor, and yellow for things I enjoy but struggle to commit time to (reading the Leaning Tower of Books by my bed, pottery, repotting house plants).    So what would be revealed by the rainbow of colorful and ignored tasks?  Nothing that would surprise anyone who knows me.  What I don’t do is the overflow of what I do do.  I have only so much time for cleaning, and gardening, and house beautiful, and pleasurable pursuits cast as obligations.  Paying work gets the sweet spot of my time, the remaining hours are divvied up among my other values.  A beer with Tom will always win out over an hour of scrubbing the lime ring out of the boy’s toilet.

In a burst of optimism, I told Tom that I plan to work through my Procrastination List during the holiday season, when I will be taking a break from writing.  My focus group will have a draft of my book, and other than posting to this blog a few times a month, the time I spend on writing–three to six hours daily–will be freed up for those lower level priorities: Get dog licenses, buy new shower curtain, organize book shelves.  I tell myself checking off the Procrastination List will be exhilarating, liberating, transforming, even.  Why else would I suddenly make what I’ve successfully put off a priority?  A part of me that won’t be fooled, though, knows that my quality of life might experience a brief bump from reducing the list to a crumpled wad, but that nothing really important will be accomplished.  Rather, it’s the fact that the list exists in the first place that reminds me I’m doing important things instead.  

 

Personal Space

It’s a wind-whipped rainy afternoon in Washington, and I’m trying really hard to stay focused on my writing instead of drifting to the couch with a book and a cookie.  I look over at the canine comedy duo of Ruby and Maggie with curiosity, realizing no one has spit a mucusy chew toy in my lap for a good ten minutes.  Whatever could they be up to?  Ah!  sleeping, something they devote 90 percent of their lives to.  But I notice the sleeping arrangements have been changing a bit lately.  We have dotingly provided two capacious green tartan Cabela dog beds to keep our darlings off the cold tile floor, and more and more, only one’s in use–to the apparent annoyance of Ruby. 

When the dogs come in the house, Ruby’s routine is to bee line to the bed by the leather easy chair.  Why that bed?  I don’t know, except it has a bit more room around it, not crowded by furniture and people, and it’s out of the traffic patterns more so than the other dog bed located near the back door.  Ruby seems to like space around herself.  She’s not a snuggler, either.  For a dog, Ruby has a pretty voluminous personal bubble.  Maggie, on the other hand has the personal space norms of a Siamese twin.  Where Ruby is a tad standoffish, Maggie is entirely standonish.  She tries to climb on my lap, even when I’m not seated.  Maggie is a toucher.  She stops to kiss my hand each morning with an echoing slurp when I let the dogs into the garage for breakfast; Ruby, on the other hand, whirrs by me like a passing comment headed to the big brown food bucket, which she pokes repeatedly with her nose to remind me why we’re all together at such a ridiculous hour.  Tom often finds adoring Maggie at his feet–correction, on his feet, as if she’s hoping for a free ride wherever he’s going.  For whatever reason, our two pups are Felix and Oscar when it comes to body boundaries.

So I’m a bit puzzled by developments on the napping front.  Tom had tried to tell me and had taken pictures to prove it, but I was skeptical.  Well, now I’m a believer.  Our dogs are sleeping together.  Okay, to be more accurate, Maggie is sleeping on top of Ruby, and Ruby is only mildly objecting.  It’s a strange thing.  Since Maggie came to join us, she has been making overtures to be more than Ruby’s play mate, to be her bed mate, too.  Up to now, Ruby would have none of it.  Each time Maggie stepped onto Ruby’s bed, Ruby would pop up like a maiden whose honor was threatened and stalk off to the other bed, recently vacated by Maggie.  But there, today, I observed with my own eyes, Maggie cuddled up close to Ruby (in fact, overlapping Ruby at the back end), and Ruby didn’t move.  Sure, her head was lifted at an awkward angle and she looked at Maggie with what amounted to hauteur.  Ruby’s expression seemed to say, “I will not deign to acknowledge you by moving, but I won’t give in to you by going back to sleep, either!”  I guess it’s the snooze-and-you-lose position for Ruby, but really, the only position Maggie was aware of was prone.

I continued tapping away on this computer for a while longer, keeping the dog drama at the corner of my eye.  After about ten minutes, Ruby finally tired of the showdown and wriggled out from under her kennel mate and then stood by the back door staring into space.  She didn’t go over to the other bed, she didn’t come to me to lodge a complaint, she just stood looking wronged.  And little does she know how much empathy I have for her.  While I really, really like my mate, I am a lot like Ruby, preferring more than an arm’s length of distance between me and most of the world.  Ruby and I find that physical contact can obscure our view of things, can be too noisy, an interference to our mind’s busy work–or so I surmise, where my dog is concerned.  A part of me wants to chase Maggie back to her own bed each time she encroaches on Ruby, but Ruby has never stepped between me and a stranger to protect my space.  Big girls have to figure out what they want on their own, and big girls can change their minds and preferences.  I’ve discovered over the years that hugs aren’t so bad after all–though I still want the right to refuse–and Ruby seems to be warming to the idea of spooning with Maggie, even if “warming” is simply giving up.

A Birthday in the Sun or Girls Gone Mild

Oh, I’m having a great deal of difficulty adjusting to the rain and cold of Washington in late October.  I suppose if I had allowed myself to sink slowly into autumn, you know, note the darkening days, start layering sweaters one by one, and monitor the growing pile of leaves in the yard–and the inversely proportionate number of leaves left on the giant maples–then I might be better prepared for this week.  But instead, when I should have been helping Tom electrify the dog castle (AKA, the Hot Dog Project), I threw myself into the time warp that is Palm Desert and hurtled back to summer last Thursday, along with my birthday-girl big sister and five other women of a certain age.  As a gift for her big 5-0, my sister’s boss gave her, and six of her most fawning fans, five days use of his (and I say this without exaggeration, honestly) chin-dropping sculpture of a home in one of the finest oases in California.  Shelley and her very, very lucky girls traded a five-day deluge in Washington for lounge chairs by the shimmering slate-edged pool.  Ahhhh…

Let me paint you a picture, as they say.  Our five days in Palm Desert went something like…get up, whenever; make an espresso or two, or just pop a beer (I’m not telling who), put on a swim suit and bake in the sun with a good book for an hour or four; then take a swim or a shower or just open another beer; have some cookies or a sandwich–is it happy hour yet?  Our afternoons, though, were bustling by comparison:  some light shopping, have our make-up done at MAC (tip:  you shoulda bought that stock last week), hike–lightly–in Joshua Tree National Park, because who doesn’t love hiking in 95 degree weather in a remarkably rocky, spiny, desert?  And each evening we liked to shake it up a bit:  Mexican Cantina for Margaritas and beer Thursday night, Grill-fest at the ol’ gleaming Hope Diamond of a ranch house and a sampling of the wine cellar for Friday fun, Saturday dressy dinner on the town ala limo, and an exhausted “Can I get Advil with that hamburger” low-low key Sunday night.  Old girls know how to live (Steph excepted; she not old, just precocious).

As with all excursions, there are a few memorable-est moments.  I particularly enjoyed watching Shelley and Pam learn how to use the GPS on the fly–and through the intersections (Sorry, Mister!), and past the police station, and, of course, right to our destination, where we discovered we didn’t have the requisite keys to get in.  No matter, not even two-foot walls were going to keep my sister out of her birthday party; she’d just make a quick cell call to her benefactor.  Oops!  funny how the geography of the Coachella Valley messes up cell phone reception.  Within seconds of arriving at Chez Boss, every woman with a cell (and no, that wasn’t every one of us, believe it or not) had powered it up and was dashing to and fro to find a spot where if she stood on her right foot and kicked out her left leg for balance could lean 45 degrees north/northwest to summon enough bars to let her honey know reception was lousy in paradise.  Praise be, some miracle combination of cell phone service providers allowed enough of a connection to guide Shelley through an entrance exam, so to speak, that got us and our baggage–real and emotional–into the house.  There was that moment when Shelley spied Albert and froze for a split second, because this was to be a no-male party–we wanted to wear our swimsuits off season.  Fortunately for Albert, he’s just an old, stuffed, dummy of a guy–but impeccably dressed, which I cannot say for the other old, stuffed, dummies I know–and Shelley assented to his company.  Luckily she did, since he became the default date of every girl at the party Saturday night.  We have pix to prove it, too.

The highlight of the short week was telling the limo driver Saturday night that his passengers for the evening were seven beautiful women, to which Joe replied, “Ah!  I’ve won the lotto!”  And he had, because we looked like a million bucks, let me tell you!  Seven hot dames cruised El Paseo Drive, then hoisted stemware to my sis’s good health and her generosity in sharing her special gift with us.  To mark the occasion, we gave Shelley a sterling silver charm bracelet sporting miniatures of some of her favorite things:  a red stiletto, a sparkling handbag, and a dumbbell, to name a few.  She’s a multifaceted woman, that sis of mine.

The indulgence and merriment were over too soon.  Kim and Steph left Sunday to get home to babies and jobs; Shelley, Sherry, Cindy, Pam and I dawdled ’til Monday, squeezing all we could out of one last morning in the sun, then parting with a couple precious hours to clean the house with the efficiency of high-octane merry maids.  (And this is why I would run away with this group of women again–not just fun and funny, but tidy!)  Thinking back over it all, I welcome the shock of the cold wet air if it’s the price of a few days of summer reprised.  Happy Birthday, Shelley!  I can’t wait for you to turn sixty–maybe your boss will spring for a cruise!

Party Girls' Limo Legs

Remodeling the Dog Castle

A week or so ago we had our first freeze here in the uplands of Puyallup.  We woke up to grass and leaves crisped by a clear, cold night.  When Tom went out to feed the dogs, Maggie and Ruby emerged from the bedroom of the dog castle with hearty appetites as usual, but also looking a degree chilly–at least that was Tom’s highly empathetic assessment.  There was no shivering, no blue noses, but Tom believed he could hear dog teeth chattering, or something like that.  Whatever the prompt, Tom decided that the dogs needed more warmth than they were getting in the current dog castle configuration, so he set about engineering a plan for adding central heating, of sorts.

Now most dog folks would probably just bring their pups in for the winter, have the dogs sleep in the house or the garage so they stay warm.  But our dogs don’t like our house at night.  They don’t even like our garage at night.  The few times we’ve tried a sleepover, one of us has had to camp downstairs with the mutts to keep them from wandering at night and using the living room as a toilet.  The garage, too, has been soundly rejected by the dogs.  They get restless for some reason and chew things, like car tires.  Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating, but we have a lot of valued, if not valuable, things in our garage, and we’ve seen enough demolition talent from Maggie in particular to warn us off leaving her and Ruby on their own with our stuff overnight.  So, Tom’s solution to cold dogs is, essentially, an electric blanket.  (If you’re wincing or rolling your eyes, you can stop; I’ve done that already.)  Ever mindful of the dogs’ propensity for deconstruction, he engineered a bomb-proof smarter-than-a-canine heating solution.  I can’t wait to watch the battle of wits that will ensue.  Tom versus dogs.  Someone/dog is bound to be electrocuted.

Last weekend Tom took the ritual trip to Home Depot prior to beginning his Project.  (Project has a capital “p” to distinguish it from a project with a lower case “p”, which is usually finished in a weekend and under a $100.00.)  Two days of labor later, he was siphoning water out of his utilities trench and threading wire through conduit.  He had turned the power off to the garage–whose circuit includes random outlets in the house, like the ones I like to use–for which I was grateful, since, you might recall, it rained torrents last weekend while he was doing all this.  But to give fair credit, by Sunday we had a hole in the garage wall, a trench in the dog yard Maggie kept falling in, and dead outlets throughout the house.  There was evidence a project was in full swing.

Sometime in the near future I expect there to be a heated dog house.  Tom does finish projects, even Projects.  But for now, the dogs better hope for mild weather, because until Tom can pour cement or something like it over the trench to prevent Maggie and Ruby from digging up the conduit–which they’ve attempted already–there can be no electricity switched back on.  For me this means few lamps and little vacuuming and a lot of curiosity about what the hell a circuit is and why the accent lamp in the dining room is complicit with the garage wall.  Of course there’s the whole matter of plugging in an electric dog bed (see Cabelas) to the ceiling drop-down outlet that completes the remodel of the dog castle.  How can we disguise it so the dogs won’t be curious and chomp on it?  Tom hasn’t solved that problem yet, but as a stop-gap measure, literally, he hung a heavy blanket over the door to their sleeping box, and they seem quite content with that.  Before the whole electrification project began, my suggestion was to buy the two of them fleece coats and stuff their box full of old blankets.  I’m an old fashioned gal who was raised on the admonition to “put a sweater on” each time I complained about being cold.  Our dogs will be sleeping in better conditions than I spent my childhood, where I woke up to frost on the inside of my window most winter mornings.

Truth is, I’m getting ahead of things here.  There’s still plenty of opportunity for the dynamic duo to short circuit this Project.  As good as Maggie is at digging, I wouldn’t be surprised if she just buries the dog box in the trench and covers it all up for a geo-thermal approach to solving the winter heating problem.  We would be smart to turn things over to the pups from the very beginning.

Who’s Your Publisher?

Out of the delight of having finished my novel, I find myself blurting to just about anyone, “I finished my book!”  to which the generous, albeit uninformed, reply, “Oh!  Congratulations, who’s your publisher?  Can I find it on Amazon?”   My response to that is a big sigh and bit of embarrassment.  There’s a long, long trek between a pile of papers called a manuscript and a neatly bound book available at Borders for $23.00.  Many writers, in fact, never attempt the journey or fall victim to voracious slush piles along the way.  It’s a fool’s errand to seek publication, truly, when you are a first-time novelist.

Well, never one to avoid being foolish, I’m off on that journey.  I have a plan for contacting several agents who specialize in my genre:  women’s fiction/mystery, which is promising for publication, because that reading demographic goes through books like kleenex.  (I’m sure many of you recognize yourselves in that description)  No, a book that seeks to attain American Novel status, looking to live for generations on the library shelf, that is not my goal.  My goal is for my book to populate the grocery store check-out aisle, for as long as possible, enticing readers with the promise of hours of entertaining distraction–a bit like a Desperate Housewives marathon, but much easier to take to the beach.

Of course, contacting an agent is not the same as contracting with an agent, so there’s a boatload of hope invested in just that step.  If I can get a reputable agent (AKA, successful at selling others’ books) to agree to represent me, then there’s a pretty good chance a publisher will come on board.  But publishers are as varied as cell phone companies.  It could be that the only publisher interested in my book could drop me for no reason at all early in the process.  I am confident, however, that if my book passes muster with an agent who passes muster with me, I can be fairly confident it will be published.  Now, first time authors are rarely able to pay their bills from a first-book contract.  There are exceptions, of course.  That teenage vampire writer hasn’t done so poorly.  But I’m not in it for the money, or I’d really be deluding myself.  A first book published is usually encouragement to write a second and third.  A series writer can develop a reading audience which demands additional books–that’s my hope.  So, for me, success looks like the invitation to keep writing, with the possibility I might be able to keep the electricity on, so I don’t have to convert my laptop to solar.

If, after a couple years, no agent wants to take me on or even with an agent, no publisher is willing to transform my story to print, then I’ll release my novel chapter by chapter here at the blog, and ask you all to use PayPal to keep the virtual presses rolling.  Wouldn’t you love to be a part of the new 21st century publishing revolution?  Me neither.  I wanna go over to the end table, pick up 300 pages of my imagination, and shiver with joy at the thought that I get to produce a half dozen more of those.  So, keep your collective energy in my corner.  Query letters go out in January.

Dodging Drivers, er…I Mean Texters

A crisp, sunny fall morning without appointments means I run.  I pop out the door at a relatively early 8:30 AM (okay, not so early for those of you in spinning class at 5:00–Shelley and Pam), and with sneakers double bowed and cool weather layers of technical fabric bunching under my arms, I trot off down the hill for fifty minutes of huffing, puffing, and sweat, and some precious time for reflection, too.  For example, I get to ponder the mysteries of why we give drivers’ licenses to blind people in this country (my apologies to blind people–I really mean stupid people).  It’s got to the point that running the roads of Puyallup, even the roads with sidewalks and traffic lights, has become a version of Russian Roulette.  Everytime I step off a curb I am gambling, and the increase in distracted, internet-obsessed lunk-heads occupying drivers’ seats means the sidewalk is no longer safe, either.

As a runner with a writer’s fascination with characters (and no IPod), I spend my runs scouting for material–and material often attempts to drive me right over!  The other day while waiting for the little green man to light up at an intersection, so I could sprint across four lanes of  impatient commuters, one driver of a commercial van showed a cartload of initiative as he took a free right turn, nearly over my dead body.  He was texting and smoking.  Not for a nanosecond did I see the guy look up to check for a pedestrian, let alone a car with the right-of-way.  Of course I could answer the, “Am I driving safe?” question on the back of his van with a single finger, but he didn’t look up to appreciate the feedback.

Besides the threat of winding up road kill, I’m perplexed by many of the other responses my simple act of jogging seems to inspire, like old men in battered pickups who lean out of the driver’s window and leer at me as they judder by at fifteen miles an hour.  Truth is, I really don’t know if they are leering at me–I’m being a bit self-absorbed, perhaps.  Most of those guys are probably just trying to figure out where they are, the spiderweb of cracks in their windshields obscuring any view from within.  Then there’s their counterparts: teenage boys.  Boys have a more varied approach.  If I’m slogging up a hill, you can bet a flock of shaggy-haired skaters will be coming down, slicing back and forth across the width of the very, narrow, sidewalk-less street, leaving me to either shimmy up a power pole or hold still in the middle of the road, fingers crossed that they’ll slalom right past me.  So far, I’ve avoided hanging an unexpected ten on a long board.

Another boy behavior that leaves me scratching my head is the carful of nasty boys trick–the more boys in the car, the less judgment is exercised is my observation.  Note: good mothers don’t let their boys drive in groups.  You see, I’ll just be clip-clopping along, nice pace, doing no one no harm, and a too-fast car will zip by, laden with young, unseasoned testosterone–the worst kind–and a couple boys will yell out some salacious invitation along the lines of, “HEY!  YOU WANNA_____?!!!   While my first reaction to the crudeness is to threaten to suspend them–those vice principal days die hard–a very small, deeply denied part of me is flattered that, from a distance, I might look much younger and much more attractive than I am.  Of course, preening aside, I realize how desperate that might sound; I know full well boys in cars don’t have finely wrought standards.  It’s more like, “Hey, there’s a female, yell sexual stuff at her.”  But the run-induced endorphins get the better of me sometimes.

Of all the oddness I encounter when out for a run, it’s the “coaching” from non-runners I find the most amusing,  Smiles and waves from folks who either want to acknowledge my healthy choice or see me as a chuckle in their day are always welcome.  I really don’t care what they make of me.  But it’s the occasional–so far always male again–person who sees his role to improve my performance.  One memorable incident was from this past summer in Ireland.  The daily bus rides to various sites of interest with my tour companions left me drained at the end of each day, so whenever I could, I’d go for a run to reinvigorate myself and get a different view of the territory.  My tour mates took to asking me if I planned to run that day and would suggest places that looked good to them–for me, of course.  One fiftysomething gentleman on the trip apparently felt I needed more than a route suggestion, and took me aside one day to explain how most people don’t run correctly.  He held forth for about fifteen minutes–cutting into my running time–about how a girl’s pony tail (I don’t have one) should bounce up and down if she is running correctly, not side to side.  After delivering that gem, he talked about foot fall and…oh, I don’t remember, but when he took a breath, I asked him–the very large, pear-shaped him–if he was a runner.  Most certainly, he said.  He ran in high school.  Mmmm.  And today, as I made my way up the hill to my house, completing the last of my five miles, my neighbor, who passed me on his way down, offered some advice–reminded me of a drill sergeant, in fact.  “Pick it up, pick it up!” he hollered, swinging his arm wildly in circles to accentuate.  He’s in my corner, you have to admit. 

There are a lot of things that if done in public ought to draw attention and comment.  Why my simple act of locomotion seems to attract so much weirdness, I do not know.  I’d sure love to hear from you runners out there if I’m having a unique or common experience.  I’d also like to know where I can buy a very light and compact can of mace.