The county judge just issued an order for all individuals over the age of 6 to wear masks in public. Which I find idiotic and especially trying, because my masks are specialty high-end N95 Vogmasks designed for being worn days on end when the pollen count is too bad for me to breathe unfiltered air. The last thing I want to do is wear them out by continuous use when I can breathe just fine, and not have them when I need them! (See also: they've gone from being easily available to completely sold out everywhere, all the time. And while I only need them a few times a year due to overactive immune system, I really feel for the folks who need them full-time due to medically suppressed immune systems.)
Capitalism to the rescue! Fine Art America now offers facemask option on some of the paintings uploaded, which means I can now wear out Ken Nelson's Alaska paintings. This makes me giggle.
Check this out!
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/sunset-over-the-alaskan-wild-kenneth-nelson.html
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Friday, April 17, 2020
Persistence, take 2
After several years of showing up, and doing the work, despite injury, illness, and several other setbacks, I'm getting there. Just grinding it out, pushing through the soreness and the "don't want to" and the frustration and everything else.
Rack pull 135 pounds
Overhead press 70 pounds
Bench Press 87 pounds
Talking to my father last night, and he was rather boggled by those numbers. Then again, I suspect he still thinks of me as the 5' 5" 95 pound teenaged twig with a bright shock of blonde hair and a book practically glued to my face.
Mind you, dad was grumbling mildly about the difficulty of working on a pipeline where the only way to get access was to do a one-handed plank while swinging the hammer and holding the testing equipment overhead with the other hand. Dad, who has said maybe someday soon he might be getting too old to be the guy who climbs the rope ladder into and out of the tank... in full containment gear, while trailing the hoses for the air supply...
Yeah, I have a long way to go before I'm as tough as my father.
Rack pull 135 pounds
Overhead press 70 pounds
Bench Press 87 pounds
Talking to my father last night, and he was rather boggled by those numbers. Then again, I suspect he still thinks of me as the 5' 5" 95 pound teenaged twig with a bright shock of blonde hair and a book practically glued to my face.
Mind you, dad was grumbling mildly about the difficulty of working on a pipeline where the only way to get access was to do a one-handed plank while swinging the hammer and holding the testing equipment overhead with the other hand. Dad, who has said maybe someday soon he might be getting too old to be the guy who climbs the rope ladder into and out of the tank... in full containment gear, while trailing the hoses for the air supply...
Yeah, I have a long way to go before I'm as tough as my father.
Monday, April 13, 2020
Persistence
This year, I decided I would write every day – and it didn’t matter
if it was 5 words of fiction or 5,000, as long as it was every single
day. No, I didn’t decide this on January 1st; that would have been far
too convenient. I decided to do it on January 18th, right as I was in
the middle of working on the pantry turnover project.
(Every year, I put a sticker on each and every item in the pantry. This way, I not only go through the entire thing, but I also get to see exactly what is still stickered from a year ago, and hasn’t been used yet. It leads to a month+ of interesting one-off meals, using up oddball ingredients, along with much lower grocery bills for the duration, organized pantries, and the sincere but unkept vow not to have so much “Oh! I want to try that!” that I never got to next year.)
This is relevant because this year I got a pack of gold star stickers for the pantry, and ended up with almost 500 excess gold star stickers. Having them right there, I resolved there was no time to start like the present, and put up the gag-gift wall calendar (shirtless men in kilts, with sayings like “Once you go plaid you’ll never be sad”), and started giving myself a gold star every day I managed to write at least 5 words of fiction.
For those of you rolling your eyes or laughing at the mental image, hey, writing may be serious business, but no one said we had to take it seriously!
What I also should have done, if I’d thought about it at the time, was keep a running daily wordcount. Alas and alack, I didn’t think about it until roughly a week ago. And then about four days ago I went “If I tracked morning vs. evening, I could see when I’m more productive…”
Turns out, it’s mornings. Not what I expected!
Though, after 11 week of typing everyday, I have discovered the flaw in my plan, the canker in the musk-rose bud… carpal tunnel syndrome. I now have braces for both wrists, better ergonomic setups at all workstations, (though some tweaking needed), and the sense that I really need to modify this plan to take days off. G-d may have told workaholics to remember the Sabbath not for him, but to force us to take time off and do that rest and heal thing we’re so terrible at. I am at least calling most evenings off… mostly…
But one other random, strange and unexpected thing happened… the scattered bits of scenes that I wrote every day started accreting into a story. And yes, I had to stop and figure out how things were linked, and go back and change things, and some characters didn’t actually have a name other than a placeholder until 20K in, but…
Almost in reverse, a plot started to emerge. And characters started to gain voices, and go haring off in directions I didn’t plot, didn’t plan, and didn’t see coming – but in written retrospect made perfect sense. And it’s turning into another, as a friend teasingly calls my books, “tactically correct romance.” (Not that I set out to write romance, but I do set out to write tactically correct and competent people. The romance happens, whether I want the characters to do so or not. Thankfully, fellow authors understand when I yell at the manuscript, “No! Unlike The Princess Bride, you are not a kissing story!” At least, they offer sympathy and liquor instead of a jacket with sleeves that tie in the back when I whine about the characters blowing raspberries at me and doing what they want, so I think they understand…)
Given this book didn’t start with a plot and a plan, it’s going to take more editing. I can’t complain too hard; I wasn’t expecting to recover the writing well enough, and learn coping mechanisms for the medication side effects fast enough, to get a story finished this year.
Next up: figuring out how to pull off this trick a second time!
(Every year, I put a sticker on each and every item in the pantry. This way, I not only go through the entire thing, but I also get to see exactly what is still stickered from a year ago, and hasn’t been used yet. It leads to a month+ of interesting one-off meals, using up oddball ingredients, along with much lower grocery bills for the duration, organized pantries, and the sincere but unkept vow not to have so much “Oh! I want to try that!” that I never got to next year.)
This is relevant because this year I got a pack of gold star stickers for the pantry, and ended up with almost 500 excess gold star stickers. Having them right there, I resolved there was no time to start like the present, and put up the gag-gift wall calendar (shirtless men in kilts, with sayings like “Once you go plaid you’ll never be sad”), and started giving myself a gold star every day I managed to write at least 5 words of fiction.
For those of you rolling your eyes or laughing at the mental image, hey, writing may be serious business, but no one said we had to take it seriously!
What I also should have done, if I’d thought about it at the time, was keep a running daily wordcount. Alas and alack, I didn’t think about it until roughly a week ago. And then about four days ago I went “If I tracked morning vs. evening, I could see when I’m more productive…”
Turns out, it’s mornings. Not what I expected!
Though, after 11 week of typing everyday, I have discovered the flaw in my plan, the canker in the musk-rose bud… carpal tunnel syndrome. I now have braces for both wrists, better ergonomic setups at all workstations, (though some tweaking needed), and the sense that I really need to modify this plan to take days off. G-d may have told workaholics to remember the Sabbath not for him, but to force us to take time off and do that rest and heal thing we’re so terrible at. I am at least calling most evenings off… mostly…
But one other random, strange and unexpected thing happened… the scattered bits of scenes that I wrote every day started accreting into a story. And yes, I had to stop and figure out how things were linked, and go back and change things, and some characters didn’t actually have a name other than a placeholder until 20K in, but…
Almost in reverse, a plot started to emerge. And characters started to gain voices, and go haring off in directions I didn’t plot, didn’t plan, and didn’t see coming – but in written retrospect made perfect sense. And it’s turning into another, as a friend teasingly calls my books, “tactically correct romance.” (Not that I set out to write romance, but I do set out to write tactically correct and competent people. The romance happens, whether I want the characters to do so or not. Thankfully, fellow authors understand when I yell at the manuscript, “No! Unlike The Princess Bride, you are not a kissing story!” At least, they offer sympathy and liquor instead of a jacket with sleeves that tie in the back when I whine about the characters blowing raspberries at me and doing what they want, so I think they understand…)
Given this book didn’t start with a plot and a plan, it’s going to take more editing. I can’t complain too hard; I wasn’t expecting to recover the writing well enough, and learn coping mechanisms for the medication side effects fast enough, to get a story finished this year.
Next up: figuring out how to pull off this trick a second time!