Photo by Kay Kauffman
I went out for lunch today and ate at the local Chinese place. This was my fortune. I’ve had one fortune cookie come true already; why not two? I think I’ll post this up at my desk so I can see it every time I sit down to work on something. It will be my mantra.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Merry Christmas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I know I’m a little bit late, but I hope you all had a very merry Christmas! I don’t know where the time’s gone, but I really hadn’t intended to go so long without posting. Then I started cleaning and my computer took a three-day vacation while I spent time with family and friends (and kleenex and cough syrup). I still seem to be under the weather – I don’t know why I can’t shake this bug – but at least I found a little of my Christmas spirit before the big day rolled around. After three days spent celebrating with family, I spent all afternoon yesterday sleeping in a feeble attempt to recover. I desperately needed the rest, but I would have liked to get a few more things done around the house (like the mountain of dishes sitting in my kitchen).
Hopefully the end of the holiday season will mean a return to normal blogging for me, but possibly that will not happen till next week. I’ll be hitting the road Friday with the fabulous Miss Tara for a mutual friend’s wedding festivities in the Great White North, also known as the Land of 1,000 Lakes. Then it’s another family Christmas celebration on Sunday. After all of that, I think I’m gonna need another three-day weekend just to recover! Sadly, I’ll still have to work on Monday. *sigh* Something tells me I won’t be staying up to watch the ball drop this year.
So in case I don’t see you before then, I hope you all have a terrific rest of the week, a wonderful weekend, and a fabulous start to the new year! I’ll see you all in 2013, if not before!
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Well, the Class 3 Kill Storm arrived in the night and is even now shrieking outside my window with a passion even a banshee would envy (or possibly admire). Since I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades of getting to work today, I am snuggled up under my favorite down blanket while the boys play games and Seymour bakes Christmas cookies (I’m still sick – I have no business baking).
I’ve seen worse winter storms, but this one is truly nothing to sniff at. I braved the weather to make a quick trip to the grocery store for chili supplies and go juice with a side trip to the gas station to procure some go juice for the snow blower as well, and it’s fierce out there. I’m glad I decided to stay home today and not brave the weather all the way to work and back. I’m even more glad that Seymour was able to turn around safely and make it back home after the snow plow he was following got stuck. For the record, that was the third one this morning – two others went in the ditch just outside of town early this morning and the accident shut down the highway for a while.
I started this nice little post about this article I read this morning after following a link someone posted on Facebook and it was really very touching, so it made me want to write my very own little post on the same subject but then I got busy at work and didn’t have a chance to get back to it and now I have the time to work on it, but since I have neither the inclination nor the capacity to do so (although I suppose it could be argued that the coherence of this incredibly long run-on sentence means that I very well could write the dang post – I’m just too lazy to make my brain cells actually work), you’ll just have to wait till tomorrow to read it when hopefully the kids will won’t have a snow day and I can get some rest and kick the crap out of this stupid bug that has me in a choke-hold.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
My little Tomcat at the tender age of four
Photo by Kay Kauffman
My, how time flies! Without my even realizing it, this little blog o’ mine has turned five years old. That happened somewhere around the tail end of last month and I forgot all about writing my planned retrospective about my time in the blogging world.
Five years. My, how the years have flown! I started blogging about six months after my divorce was finalized. I wanted to write passionate political spiels of great depth and insight; I wanted to pen fantastic short fiction that was sure to catch the eye of someone important, that elusive one right person who could make all my lifelong literary dreams come true; I wanted to create a wildly successful blog that would spawn book deals and syndicated columns and who knows what else.
In short, I had high hopes. I was young, bright-eyed yet jaded. Possibly I had delusions of grandeur.
‘Tis the season to be
Jolly, joyous, ho ho ho.
But I feel more like
Sorry, friends, but no
No, no – I just don’t think so.
All the fun, all the
Joy, all the very
Merry Christmas cheery bell-
Ringing happy types
Can usually
Count me in their number, but
Not this year, not when
Everything seems to
Stress me out, mess me up, dress
Me down. This year I
Feel anti-Christmas,
Anti-social, anti-fun.
Yep, I’ve got the blues,
The Christmas blues.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Well, today was announcement day for the Pitch Wars competition. Sadly, I was not selected by any of the awesome mentors. But! I did get some fantastic feedback from two of the three mentors I submitted to, which I was totally not expecting. That kinda made my day, actually. Of course, like any author who has sent out a query and had it rejected, I wish the feedback could have been a little more specific and/or had some suggestions for ways to improve, but I know they were all very busy and swamped and I am super grateful for what I got. However, back to the drawing board go I.
I hadn’t really expected to be chosen. And I’ve spent the last week or so kicking myself for submitting so early because I took some advice I received during GUTGAA and used it to hopefully fix up my first page. Whether it would have made a difference or not, I’ll never know, of course, but I really regretted my itchy typing fingers.
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. -Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas (The Burrell Collection, Glasgow) (Photo credit: dalbera)
The Green Dress (1897-1901)
La Jupe Verte
Edgar Degas
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Friday morning, I visited the third graders at Reinbeck Elementary School. The kids were all lovely and quite attentive while I prattled on about poetry and writing, punctuated by the occasional attempt at humor. (My suspicions that I’m not funny were confirmed – not one kid cracked a single smile.)
Mrs. Fleshner introduced me by saying how surprised she was to discover an author in their midst. I imagine it was something of a surprise; I’ve known her a couple years now, as Tadpole had her for third grade last year and nothing was ever said of my writing then. But at conferences this year, we happened to get on the subject of books and how we just don’t have the time to read as much or as often as we would like. I said that my problem was that I wanted to both read books and write them, but I didn’t have the time to do both, and that was how we ended up discussing my writing. She invited me to speak to the class, and I agreed, despite my intense dislike of public speaking.
I surprised her again when I arrived a bit early, laden with visual aids.
I’ll be posting about my talk with the students at Reinbeck Elementary School soon. Yesterday and today have both been pretty long days, though – Cricket just can’t seem to shake this flu bug. In the meantime, posting may be a bit sporadic. I imagine everyone’s schedules are in a bit of flux this month, so I hope you’ll all kindly bear with me. I should be back to normalish soonish.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Suddenly they all died. The end. 