The Aerie
Well, Nanowrimo is NOT working out this year. I'm rather frustrated and discouraged by that, but there are only so many hours in each day, and I haven't been able to fit the one or two hours it would take me to write 1667 words per day, nor the six or eight weekend hours it might take to make up for shortages during the week.
On the other hand Nano has gotten me off the dime and writing again. I may end up with only 20,000 words this month, or even less, but at least I'm writing.
Meanwhile my attempts at Nano have curtailed my posting on here, as has every other thing I've needed to do. So what can I post as a quick summary of events since my last post? Criminy, it's been ten days! I had no idea. That in itself ought to give you some idea of how busy I've been.
The first weekend of November was very busy: Saturday the 3rd I went to an "Anthropology of Play" conference presented by my friend Gio's University department, and featuring Dave Arneson, who for a time was a semi-regular at the Professor's game. I used the opportunity to do a bit of writing, but didn't get as much done as I'd hoped.
Sunday the 4th was absurdly warm, temperatures in the 70's, so the family took advantage in order to finish the batten-down-for-winter chores. The brush in the alley had grown unchecked for so long that the back fence looked like an Italian woman's armpit. I got back there with the limb shears and took down a zillion saplings, along the way finding a grapevine. The vine erupted from the tarmac of the driveway, hung a sharp left and crawled under the neighbor's fence.
Shearing off the vine, I picked up the end and pulled. The neighbor's lilac tree waved a greeting. Pull. Wave. So I started hauling. The lilac tree thrashed and writhed like Dick Cheney being subjected to a Gitmo interrogation. And hand over hand I pulled about half a mile of grapevine out from under the neighbor's fence.
This is good. Hopefully the neighbor's small daughter will not grow up confused into thinking that lilac bushes produce grapes. And maybe the bush will even produce some lilacs.
After that I raked the accumulated topsoil from the tarmac, and fetched the children, who were happy to spend the next hour stuffing detrius into garbage bags. That is, if chain-gangs are happy, my kids were happy.
What with the lifting and the raking and the hauling and the beating of the children with the rakes, by Tuesday I was a complete and utter wreck. I'd had a pulled muscle under my right shoulderblade BEFORE I started the chores, and on Monday and Tuesday my back seemed to be breaking down like a snowman under an endless stream of dog urine.
Fortunately my spouse had given me a belated bithday present of a back massage at a spa that opened up near our home, so Tuesday I called from work and was lucky to be able to make a 6:15 p.m. appointment. The masseuse started off intending a general massage - legs, arms, back, torso, etc. - but then she got to my back.
About 15 blissful semiconscious minutes into the backrub she said "So do you mind if I spend the rest of the time on your back?" And that's what she did. I could feel her using all her strength on what seemed to be a tangled collection of jumper cables stored between my shoulderblades. At one point I suggested wrapping a towel around the business end of a jackhammer - an artist, she didn't appreciate the suggestion.
However the results were excellent - I could feel the difference immediately, and for the rest of the week. The only downside was when she asked if I wanted the "icy-hot" menthol treatement. Sure, I figured, why not?
She quickly spread a cool mixture onto my back of battery acid and jalapeno peppers. I have a high tolerance for pain, but this stuff redlined the needle for sure. I think the idea of the stuff was to distract from the pain under the skin with pain on the skin.
Wednesday was my University class. I did again what I've done before - I looked at the syllabus and prepared for the wrong class. I prepared for the class on the 15th. It's not entirely my fault - the way the syllabus is written does not make it clear for a given date whether the work listed for that date is DUE on that date, or will be given out on that date. So I did the work that would be given out for Wednesday's class, and not due until the 15th.
Despite that, the class went fine, mainly because as I figured out earlier in the quarter, the class is entirely useless. But the class did serve to remind me just how far behind I am in getting my degree program finished... so that priority has gotten in the way of Nanowrimo as I attempt to catch up again.
The other kicker has been work, which has been very busy. In part this is because I basically had a boatload of unstructured work thrown at me at the beginning of October, and very shortly thereafter got yelled at for not having it all figured out yet. Friday, five weeks after starting, I had a lucky day. Both meetings for that day cancelled, and was faced with the option of maybe going home a little early.
But... I had work to do. So I set a goal for myself and told myself that if I achieved it I would go home early. So I sorted my files thusly, and it was only noon. Well, that's too early to go home, so I set another goal, and then another.
Four o'clock rolled around. I had not only sorted my files, I had gone through all my sub-projects and made sure I had gotten each of them organized and started, I had contacted someone from each one and set a meeting for each one, I had also sorted all my e-mail filters so that e-mail arriving would be sorted into project folders. Yeah, I got THAT deep into it.
So by four o'clock I hadn't just gotten something done, I had gotten EVERYTHING done. Given that it was Friday afternoon, I had actually gotten done everything I could reasonably do. I was caught up at work for the first time in maybe ever.
Yesterday was a Day of Household Chores. My spouse wanted me to hang some hooks up in the boy's room, which she assured me were down in the big junk room in the basement.
Diving into the junk room turned into a project that lasted all day. I searched and sorted the junk room, extracted a ten-foot-tall tower of empty cardboard boxes, several baskets of toys that won't be of interest to our children until they have children of their own, and a ton of miscellaneous junk. Then I found the a picture frame, and determined to use its glass to replace a picture that fell off the bathroom wall (when my boys slammed each other against the wall of their adjoining bedroom).
Well the bathroom picture turned out to be adhered to its (broken) glass by some combination of bathroom steam conspiring with photochemicals. So I rigged up a wacky assemblage of wire, clothespins and shoelaces to hold the picture and its glass suspended over the teakettle on the stove, which I then set to emit steam for a very long time. As of this morning the picture is about 75% removed from the glass.
Finally my spouse found the coathooks, stored in the boy's clooset, by which time the basement room was almost completely sorted. Along the way I was forced to stagger back and forth past the new-and-larger cat litter box in the hallway between the dining room and kitchen, and grew thoroughly tired of it. Unfortunately the only way to move the litter box into the basement would be to install a cat flap in the basement door.
I looked on the Internet and spotted a $15 cat flap at Home Depot. I drove over, and heading to the info desk I spotted a promotional table suggesting I buy energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs.
"Hi," I said, "You might sell more of those bulbs if you put the price someplace."
The woman at the desk cocked a wry eyebrow at me. Apparently the retail business is filled with subtleties of price and display which I, as a mere customer, would be best advised not to meddle in.
"Okay," I said, "so where are the cat flap doors?"
"We don't carry those." she said, her voice carrying a tone to match her prior facial expression.
"Yeah you do," I said, "They're listed on your website." Pronouncing the hyperlink was difficult, but I managed it.
She shook her head. "That's a product that's only available on the website."
"Ah. Well, yet another bit of signage that needs to be improved I guess."
Leaving behind someone who was now not my friend, I headed over to the PetSmart which fortunately was located near the Home Depot. Pet door in hand I went home, took down the door that has hung in that place for sixty-five years, hacked a hole in the base with a circular saw, a hand saw, a router and a belt sander, and screwed the cat flap into place.
It didn't fit, so I enlarged the hole. The cat door was so cheap that while the outer frame, containing the flap, mounted to the door with screws, the inner frame was provided with double-backed tape only. Nonetheless I got it into place, and spent an amusing few minutes convincing the cat that it was now possible for it to move through the previously solid door.
Finally I hung the hooks in the boys' room, then I repaired the new exterior light which a neighbor had mounted for my wife earlier in the week.
By now I was exhausted. With the best of intentions I opened the laptop, but ended up merely staring at it. Finally I watched a few minutes of Saturday Night Live, but either it sucked or my exhaustion prevented me from finding anything funny, or both. After dozing off during Weekend Update, I headed up to bed.
This morning was church, where I started blogging again finally. Now I'm done and can turn my attention to my U of MN homework. And when that is finished, then I can start looking at writing my Nanowrimo.
By which time, no doubt, I'll be exhausted.
Posted by Albatross at November 12, 2006 11:34 AM | TrackBack