The Last Day of November

I’m back.  From Outer Space.  I finished NaNoWriMo for the fifth time, sliding over 50,000 words on November 24th.  Just in time to jump in the car for an eleven hour drive to Garland, Texas.  Driving at highway speeds, that trip should, by all accounts, take only about seven hours.  That little stretch, though, from Austin to Waco, woohoo, watch out!  That little stretch of road will suck you into a time vortex on the day before Thanksgiving, making you feel like you’re in that episode of Doctor Who where all of the people are stuck in traffic for their entire lives.  And some of them look like cats! 

But I digress.

This NaNo was my most disorganized.  In previous years, I sort of tried to keep things in reasonable order, sticking the cursor where I thought the new words would fit in best.  This year though, whatever I felt like writing about on any particular day began on the next blank page.  This NaNo was also my first foray into Science Fiction.  Only because it was set on a planet far, far away, and has space cruisers.  It also might have aliens in a future revision.  Who knows.  But I had fun, and I’ll do it again next year.  

The rest of November has been lovely.  South Texas is making the transition to cooler weather (finally).  Today, in fact, is quite cold.  But I won’t bore you with weather talk on the blog.  

Thanksgiving was fun.  I met Robert Kennedy.  He was cute too.  He’ll let you call him Bob Stokes if you want, but don’t confuse him with the guy on The Weather Channel.  Whoops.  More weather.  

Since I’m rambling about nothing in particular here, I should ramble about the Sonars too.  X9 talked Grandma into teaching him how to crochet.  I know how to crochet too, but I hold the hook weird and I’m dead slow.  Grandma is the speediest, most graceful crocheter I know.  And now X9 is following in her footsteps, churning out eight feet of crochet chain in the past two days.  He’s not ready to move on to single crochet yet.  He wants to make chains to put on the Christmas tree first.  X4 has a birthday in three weeks and has decided he likes asparagus and playing outside without his siblings.  X6 now has a social calendar, and has found that he very much enjoys birthday parties, especially ones with gymnastics or bowling.  We’re thinking of putting a piano in the living room and making them all learn to play it. 

Spouse’s garden is growing well.  This weekend we canned eight quarts and eight pints of green tomato salsa.  That’s two-and-a-half gallons.  And there are a lot more vegetables out there!  

I’m not ready for the holidays yet, but I’m ready to get ready.  That means I’m itching to bust out the sewing machine for some handmade gifts I have planned.  I have a piece of finished knitting to show you later this week, and I started a Clapotis.  

Now that NaNoWriMo is finished though, I am really looking forward to reading a lot more.  Reading tends to grind to a standstill when I’m trying to squeeze in writing time.  I have started to read at least six books, and I’m ready to finish them and start some others.  Who’s with me?  

So, in the next week or so, you should watch for some scarf pictures, and the long-ago promised comments on The Sheriff of Yrnameer, as well as talk about my holiday craft plans.  What are you up to?  xox

Choose Your Own Rambling

I know there are about five of you out there who occasionally read this blog, and in the interest of giving a vague appearance of audience-awareness, upcoming blog posts may be chosen by you. Here’s a list of things I’ve been doing and thinking about. Let me know if you care to hear more about any of these things, or if you’d like to suggest a topic for rambling.  In the absence of actual votes, I will, as usual, ramble randomly.

1. A pot of chili. For dinner.

2. The Magic Wheel of Chores. In which I could tutorialize the creation of a device to order and maintain offspring chores, and in which I could further pontificate that it may not always get the children to DO the chores, but that it has worked better than I ever expected as an organizational tool.

3. The Pouf of Using Up T-shirts. In which I could talk about the construction of a device for sitting, or napping, or whacking a sibling.

4. String Theory. In which I could tutorialize the almost magical transformation of two lowly (free) string backpacks into one (free) messenger bag. With pockets!

5. Free Parking. In which I could share photos of Partner’s clever (free) solution to the pile of bikes and skateboards in the garage.

6. Upcycled personal portfolios. In which I could tutorialize the transformation of fabric scraps and a sheet of corrugated plastic (found in the neighbor’s trash) into sketch portfolios for our vacation this summer.

7. Mama Ray Jack (and her brother Monty). I won’t talk about her yet, except to say that she’s a bit Cheesy, and she might be the subject of my NaNo novel this year. Unless I come up with an actual Real and Serious idea before November.

8. Books books books. In which I could review the books I’ve been reading, starting with the Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray. Or perhaps you’d like to wait and hear aboutThe Strain when I finish it? No? Too scary? Maybe.

9. More pictures of those Sonars and some rambling about the amazing/annoying/cute thing(s) they’ve been doing.

10. The supposed separation of church and state in United States public schools. This one would likely be a rant that wouldn’t be pretty. It might go something like this: I respect everyone’s right to their own religious beliefs and practices, but draw the line when they judge my children and make them feel inferior in the name of that religious ideology, especially if a person is employed by the government and directly or indirectly responsible for my children’s education. On second thought, Let’s not go there.

11. The frog. You want to see the frog? As far as I can tell, she has no religious ideology or educational prerogative. But she does like to eat fish.

Heeeere, fishy fishy.

Run! Write! Make!

Growing up, I was not an athletic kid.  I was a tiny, scrawny, little white girl.  I could not hit a ball, I could not run very far, I never lasted very long in dodgeball.  I played no sports.  My closest brush with athleticism was in high school marching band, where I learned to march backwards while holding crash cymbals steady for a snare drummer to play.  (Don’t laugh.  Those cymbals are heavy and we did it in the New Mexico heat.  In hideous cream and brown polyester uniforms and plastic egg-shell hats.)

I will be 36 later this year and the desire to keep my body fit and healthy presses on me.  Simultaneously, the effort to keep my body fit and healthy seems to rise exponentially.  I’m not interested in joining any sports, and my options are limited there anyway.  I’m not interested in anything that requires an investment of equipment or a membership pressure.  I have found, however, that I really love to run.  I feel good when I run.  Unfortunately, the first thing to go when my schedule gets busy is my daily run.  So I tend to run in fits and starts.  Running regularly for a few weeks or months, and then not at all for months.  Sometimes I’m derailed by the general mayhem of family life.  Once I was knocked off track by the flu.  

A few weeks ago at the library, I found a copy of Haruki Murakami’s memoir-ish book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  I’d not read any of his work before, but was led to him in my quest to read through some magical realism this summer.  I haven’t read any more magical realism since I suffered through Love in the Time of Cholera (I’ll save my ennui with that one for another post perhaps), but Murakami’s personal tale of writing and running gave me a swift kick in the butt on two counts.  

For Murakami, running and writing work together.  He does not write when he runs or even particularly think about ideas.  But it seems that running gives him an absence of thought and an ability to focus that increases his ability to focus on writing.  By training to run (and he is a serious runner of marathons and triathalons) he is a more focused writer when he is writing.

In spite of the particularly harsh and dry summer we are experiencing here in the Coastal Bend of Texas, I have been running five or six days a week for the past two weeks.  Since I haven’t run for months, I’m back to doing interval work to build up my stamina.  I’m up to half-running, half-walking a little more than two miles a day and it feels great.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever build up to a marathon, but if I could continuously run a few miles a day, without being sidetracked for months at a time, I’d feel very proud. 

Running is hard and it is hot and I get sweaty and dirty and funky.  But I’ve been injury-free so far, and working my body just feels so good.  I am more physically tired, but it is a satisfying tired.  Now that I’ve settled into a running rhythm, and my body is getting stronger and I am less worried about injuring myself, my mind is free to wander as I run.  Mostly it wanders into empty spaces.  Thoughts do come to me as I go, worries sometimes plague me.  But in running, I find that I can embrace meditative thought more effectively than I’ve ever been able to in other ways.  The thoughts and worries don’t linger.  They float by me like clouds, and I am able to consider them dispassionately, letting them pass without clinging to them.  At other times my mind wanders to the beat, counting the steps, predicting my tempo, comparing the beat of my heart to the thump of my shoes.  

And I’m learning (or rather reminded), slowly, that I need balance in my life.  Everything feels better when I’m running.  Everything feels better when I’m writing.  Everything feels better when I’m crafting.  But all three of those things have to work together somehow.  When one of those things drops out of my life for a while, the other two tend to disappear as well.  

Besides blogging a little bit more often again, I can’t say that I’m actually writing again.  But I’m getting closer.  I’m working the balance.  The writing notebook is on the desk again.  A few ideas have been scribbled in it, and the more I run, the more the ideas come to me.  The more ideas for writing I get, the more crafty ideas I get and the more enthusiastic I get about running each morning.  

I’m chasing my activities around in a circle.  I just have to keep them all moving in a positive direction, moving with balance in mind. 

Twitter subtracts from the blog

Shh.  I know.  I thought Twitter was stupid too.  But I don’t so much anymore.  It’s become an occasional diversion, and a useful tool for communication and information dissemination.  I like it.  I do.

But when I Twitter, I don’t blog.  

I also don’t blog when I’m doing a marathon writing event, which I was doing last month.  I’m happy to share that I finished my Script Frenzy script last month!  The Benevolent Society of Angry Misanthropes (working title), came in at a little over one-hundred pages, including the extensive dialogue that summarized the entire end in five pages.  

In other news, there has been craft.  Much craft, mostly sewing, with some knitting.  So, if I can’t manage to communicate in more than 140 characters, then perhaps I can at least share some photos.  You can have that to look forward to.  

Oh, and in spite of the stuffy head and mild fever I’ve suffered the last week, we don’t have flu.  Bovine, ovine, or porcine.  And we won’t have to suffer through a flu-cation from school.  Or as the Corpus Christi newspaper called it, Swine Break ‘09.  

Shake it up, Shake it down

I’ve missed sharing several things the past few weeks for general chaos and too-many-directioning.  Some of these items may get their own posts in the coming days and weeks, but I’m going to splash out a bulleted updated here.

—There was a cool Spring Pageant in which one of the Sonars was the star, as well as a science fair.  And coming up we have a Bike Rodeo, two egg hunts, and Easter mayhem.  

—I’ve done some sewing (a cool tote bag and apron for school auction baskets, and a ridiculous quantity of backlogged mending and hemming and finishing).  I’m in the early planning stages for some full-sized quilts for the Sonars.  They’ve gone and outgrown their baby quilts.  

—In knitting there has been some teaching (third graders, including Sonar X8.  Yay!!), frogging (mystery stole), steaming and winding (the wool/silk from the MS), finishing (flame socks), casting on (checkerboard lace scarf), laughing (did you see the merkins at TheAnticraft??), and dreaming (socks? sweater? frisbees?).

—In other craft, I’ve worked up a prototype crocheted frisbee made from reclaimed medical tubing, electrical tape, and some neon-bright nylon twine I found in the garage.  Flies well and is really flexible.  Just not sure how well the innards will hold up to heavy play.  

—April is Script Frenzy month over at the Office of Letters and Light.  I finished my first script ever back in 2007 during the first Script Frenzy.  Last year I tried, but was derailed by the flu.  This year, I’m trying again, but threatening to be derailed by my own lack of focus.  I have 14 pages written, and three weeks to go.  If I can get my head into it, I can get there.  I’ll try to put a counter widget over there in the sidebar.  Anyone want to join?  

—In other writing news, I have been reading more about the publishing industry, following agent and publishing blogs and tweets and generally trying to get a feel for how the industry works and how I need to plan and prepare to throw myself in there (someday).  My first step involves working my way toward a coherent platform, or as we are calling it around here jokingly, my IMI (integrated media identity).  I’ve selected Squarespace as my playground, and soon will lay down a personal domain onto this baby.  

I hope all of my old friends and visitors will hang with me through the transition.  It could be bumpy, but eventually I’ll get it all smoothed out.  I imagine a space that includes the same blogging style I’ve had over at Alert the Pizza on Blogger (in fact, all of that content is already here), but with new features and content thrown in as well.  

Leave some words behind when you visit and help me build!!