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.