Writing

So, here's what I have written in the past few years:

• First draft of Love Will Keep Us Together complete, needs significant revisions to plot/character arcs
• First draft of Crash Into Me (not sure about that title) nearly complete, needs revision
• First draft of You Can't Hurry Love about 60% done

These are all contemporary romance novels set in the same world - they are tied together by one or more of the main characters having jobs at a music-related theme park. The first is about an analyst in the marketing department who falls in love with a co-worker. I need to add way more obstacles, and I know what they should be (I think?) but it needs pretty major revision.

The second is about a woman who goes to Las Vegas and gets married on a whim, then has to come home and figure out if she and her new spouse even like each other.

The third is about a woman who gets trapped in her house during a hurricane with the guy she dated in college 20 years earlier.

They are all music focused and, hopefully, a bit funny. I also have a ton of other false starts and miscellaneous unfinished projects that, if nothing else, show years of writing and many lessons learned. Most of them are abandoned for good reason. There's one or two that had a spark of a good idea but would have to be rewritten from scratch. And honestly, when I think about that, I'm not sure the ideas were that good.

I've been working on You Can't Hurry Love since last October, and should be way farther along than only having around 36,000 words. But I've had trouble focusing, and now, with the Stay at Home order and the surrounding stress, the very last thing I want to be doing is writing a novel about a woman trapped in her house with her ex. No, thank you!

Thus my return to this blog. I feel like I need to write, but I don't know what, so here we are.

I know I need to go back and revise the first two novels, but I just can't get motivated to get any work done. I don't know if it's because of pandemic anxiety or depression or what. If I do say so myself, they are worth working on. I really have learned things over the past few years, and while my novels might not be potential Pulitzer winners, they are definitely worth my time. And I kind of miss my characters.

I've also had an idea I'm excited about working on, however I'm having trouble figuring out how it would work. I'm thinking about two characters who work together and waste time in the office by secretly writing fan fiction, using their co-workers as characters. Of course they get caught at some point, and emotions ensue. I weirdly love this idea, even though 1) at least initially it does sound very similar to Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, and 2) I have no idea what kind of fan fiction they could be writing that would not involve massive copyright infringements, and 3) I don't even know where the romance would come in, exactly. Are the two coworkers just friends, or is one of them the love interest? 

The fact that I still love the idea despite these potentially insurmountable problems makes me think I need to spend a little time trying to work it out.  It could just be shiny new thing syndrome, where I'm resisting doing real work on real projects in favor of daydreaming about a project that probably won't even work.

In the meantime, if you haven't, go read Attachments - I love me some Rainbow Rowell, and it's one of her more fun books. Perfect pandemic escapism.

Hello! Raise your hand if you aren't dead.

*raises hand*

I worry more than the typical person, I think. I get it from my mother. I remember people helpfully advising her that worrying did no good and she should stop worrying so much.

Today she might label herself anxious instead. There's no shortage on the internet of self-diagnosed people with anxiety these days. What's the difference between being "a worrier" in the s1970s and 1980s and "having anxiety" in the 2000s and 2010s? Relatable memes?

Undiagnosed as I am, I worry a lot and always have. So this whole global pandemic crisis is really difficult for me, as a worrier/anxious person. Any day when I am walking around and staying upright instead of lying facedown on the floor is a brave day for me. This is definitely facedown on the floor time.

And we are less than a month into this. My birthday was on March 17, and the Saturday prior I had planned to go to Universal with friends. We agonized over whether to go. The theme parks weren't closed yet. Ultimately we decided not to, but even the fact that we nearly did go is just shocking now. My birthday was three weeks ago today. Three weeks. How is that possible?

As of today, Tuesday April 7, I only know a couple of people who have been diagnosed with the Covid virus, and I don't personally know anyone who has died from it. I feel sure that will happen eventually, and I worry terribly about family and friends who are high risk. I also worry about me or my husband. That's what gives me nightmares.

My husband has been laid off, and though I have no doubt they would love to hire him back, who knows what will happen. I'm trying to stay hopeful that his company will survive this economic downturn (they are "essential" and are still open, but they have laid off 30% of employees and all the others have had their hours/salary cut by half) but who knows. I have not been laid off, and I hope I won't be, and I am working from home full time. (Yes, I do worry that I'll be laid off too, even though I really have no concrete reason to think it's likely.)

We are trying to stay in touch with friends through Zoom and FaceTime. I still have meetings and I talk to work people pretty much daily, but I worry about my husband. He's bound to get lonely and sad without having any other human contact besides me, so I'm trying to preemptively set up video chats with friends. We had one last weekend with some friends in Canada that we love and haven't seen for several years.

We've looked at things we can cut out of our budget. We've canceled music services and cut our cable tv service to the minimum (being at home all the time, I just couldn't stand the thought of cutting it out completely) and resisted the temptation to get takeout just out of boredom. Financially we can be okay on just my income if we are careful. And we have savings. Never leaving the house might drive us crazy, but it does save money.

So many of my friends and former co-workers are laid off or furloughed or have had their paychecks reduced. At the place I worked for 16 years, the company that laid me off in 2012, many of my friends just got laid off last week. Permanently. They were told if, in the future, they see job openings posted, they can apply. And at the place I worked most recently, the one I left to move to my current job in 2016, they have furloughed nearly everyone for three months. The ones who weren't furloughed had a pay cut that may or may not be permanent.

Not only do I worry about me and my husband, I worry about all of them, too. I know some of them were living paycheck to paycheck, so what will they do now?

But what I am most worried about, overall, for all of us, is how long this will last. For me, that's one of the most painful things. Not knowing how long this will last is torture. I need an end date to look forward to. When there is nothing to look forward to, it's back to being facedown on the floor.

I see people on social media saying all kinds of things - a couple of weeks, a couple of years. The unpleasant truth is that no one knows. And even once the peak (whenever that might happen) is past us things will not return to normal, I don't think. How could people go out in public and be around other, potentially contagious people? It seems like until we have a vaccine, it will be dangerous.

And how is that going to work, distributing a vaccine to literally every human on the planet? How long would that take?

I heard that in China things are returning to normal now, but everyone is wearing masks and many public places are requiring temperature checks upon entry. Is that how it will be here, in two months or three months or six months...? Theme parks and stores and restaurants will be open but require masks and temperature checks?

I just feel like worrying is valid. This is going to change who we are as a society, here in America, and it's going to change the whole planet to some degree or another.

I've been on a couple of group Zoom chats recently where the leader asks how everyone is doing, and people just nod and say Okay. Part of me thinks we should drop the act and just start screaming.

Writing. Who, me?

All those years of wanting to write and not being able to, at least for sustained periods of time, taught me a few things. 

During the past few years I have spent my unhappy, tortured not-writing time doing research on various aspects of writing. Reading books about writing, listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos. Somehow even amassing a fairly large amount of knowledge about writing didn't actually lead to getting any writing done. Is that surprising? No.

Things started changing for me when I found Chris Fox and his write to market, indie publishing ideas. Wow, that really spoke to me and made the idea of being a writer (and an author) more accessible, and exciting. After spending so much time reading about how to write a query letter and how to tell good agents from scammers, this changed everything in my mind.

The publishing industry has completely changed over the past couple of decades. Everything print related has, really, but book publishing in particular. Like Chris Fox says, it just depends on what kind of writer I want to be. Do I want to be a writer who works with an agent and a publishing house and doesn't make enough money to quit my job sitting in a cubicle and looking at spreadsheets? Or do I want to write full time and make a living as an author?

It's so accessible now. Anyone, literally, can write something and throw it up for sale in the Kindle store on Amazon. Whether or not that person is successful is a different story, but if they spend a little time and money on things like an editor, a cover designer, a website with an email sign up and a newsletter, maybe some advertising, then they can make a living. And it goes beyond Kindle, an author can self-publish on iBooks, Kobo, Nook, and even use print services to get physical books into libraries, bookstores, schools.

I don't need to pay an agent. I don't need to give a publisher control over things like cover design, or including diverse characters, or dark themes. It doesn't need to take so long, often a year, for a finished work to be edited and released.

It's kind of amazing.

The whole "write to market" concept is to figure out what types of books I like to read, find out what types of books are likely to sell, and my target market is at the intersection of those two circles on my imaginary Venn diagram.  In my case, that appears to be contemporary romance, medium heat level, with a "competence porn" aspect.

Competence porn is one of a million romance novel tropes; it doesn't mean porn. It's basically a book that showcases the expertise of the main character at something, usually her job. One example of this is Advanced Physical Chemistry by Susanna Nix, where the main character is a chemical engineer who works for the patent office verifying the validity of scientific patent applications. Ideally the competence porn part is something that is tied into the plot, at least peripherally.

So as of today, I have around 53,000 words written in what the romance novel market tells me should be a 60,000-70,000 word novel.  It's currently a first draft mess, with the last two chapters still to be written, and a bunch of other chapters with chunks still missing.

My plan is to finish the first draft by early to mid-October and then spend a couple of weeks on the outline for the next book.  Outlining this one helped tremendously; next time I want to have an even more detailed and specific outline.

Writing to market in the romance genre also means writing a series, so I'm going for three stand-alone novels that are tied together by workplace and overlapping characters.

For the next book I'm hoping to use NaNoWriMo goals and inspiration to increase my daily word count. I started this one the first week of May, so it's taken me five months to write. I'm simultaneously proud of myself for finally having started and for getting this far while also kind of beating myself up for not writing faster.

In the whole write to market, indie publishing game, it's a widely accepted benchmark to have a backlist of 20 books before an author can make a living from their indie published writing alone. I need to write faster. :)

"I love you too, honey" - Mom

Mom was fine in early February, then she fell, and she wasn't ever fine again. She spent weeks in the hospital, and then more weeks in a nursing home, and then she died. She was fine on Valentine's Day and dead right before Mother's Day.

During those weeks I worried about her all the time. I made the 8-hour drive up there to be with her several times, both with Greg and alone.  I slept in the hospital room overnight, I sat in the nursing home room, for hours and hours. I gave her water, I applied lip balm, I fed her, I bathed her, I told her what time it was, I held her hand, I told her I loved her. She told me that she loved me too. She went from weighing almost 120 pounds to less than 100. She slept most of the time. She was sometimes confused.  She couldn't hear and most of the time didn't want to put her glasses on.

I knew she was suffering. I felt like I was losing my mind. I googled "what is a nervous breakdown". I couldn't sleep and kept having to take Tylenol PM. I would sit at my desk at work, in the uncrowded quiet building, and cry.  If anyone asked me about her I would tear up. I talked to HR about getting FMLA, just to go be near her.

My sister was with her almost every day, decorating her room and putting lotion on her hands and feet and watching out for her and making sure the nursing home employees were taking good care of her. She would send me texts and emails and sometimes photos. I'd get them and cry.

I was so worried about her death. What if she was alone? What if she got scared or was in pain?

I would sit next to her in the nursing home watching her sleep, her chest barely moving with her breath. I would hope she would die right then. I could tell everyone how she just went to sleep and didn't wake up, she was peaceful, I was holding her hand, she was fine.

I also knew it could very well happen while I was at work. I started keeping my car keys attached to my swipe card and my phone at work, every time my sister called I would answer while walking out of the building to my car.

And that is how it happened.  At 2pm on a Thursday I answered my phone, already walking to the door, and my sister said "Mother has gone to be with the Lord".

I waited until I got to my car to start crying. My sister had been with her, holding her hand, when she died. She really was fine.

I left work and drove myself home, feeling like the whole world had tilted, but I was okay. Then I got confused when the car key wouldn't open my front door.

And Greg and I drove up to Virginia for the funeral, and our relatives were so kind and sweet and wonderful, and the weather was beautiful, and the scenery was gorgeous, and I felt happy. It was a small funeral in the family funeral home, and then a graveside service in the family cemetery. We went to the church afterwards and ate fried chicken, and pie, and green beans that had come from someone's garden.

It was just exactly what she wanted.

That happiness lasted for a while. I was happy that she was gone, not suffering, not in the nursing home. She believed in heaven and wanted to go be with Dad. I was happy for her.  I was handling it so well.

But now I'm having nightmares. And crying too easily. I guess it was stupid of me to think that I could grieve happily for a few months and that would be it.

I only miss her when something happens, you know? Something good that I want to send her photos of, something bad that I want to tell her about, a holiday to send a card for.

I only miss her all the time.

"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar." ~ Drew Carey

I've been moved at work. A year after my former boss the VP told me he thought I should be in the other building, the small crowded building with the call centers, it finally happened.  I've been dreading it, but nothing I said would make any difference. It's loud in here, there are frequent distractions, and a lot of my job is analyzing, which ideally would require thinking and concentrating.  My job title is Analyst, after all.

And I don't have the same boss anymore. Despite the fact that I work with multiple departments, my former boss the VP has decided that I should report to the director of one of the departments. There is a whole other operations/technical department and they are the obvious fit for my position. I have spoken to the two heads of that department and they agreed and said they would love to have me, but again, my former boss the VP doesn't agree. Coincidentally, that department is in the other, quiet building.

I got the news while sitting in a meeting with the director guy - my former boss the VP came in and said that, if I didn't already know, I wasn't reporting to him anymore, I was reporting to the director. If I didn't already know? How could I have known?

So here I am in the noisy and crowded call center reporting to a person who doesn't understand what my job is, exactly, and whose department is only one part of my job.

I've worked here for a little over three years now, and it's really a good company. The benefits are decent and it's a growing, obscenely profitable company. I'm hoping to possibly get a promotion... and I'm hoping that will mean more money for me.

In the time I've been here I've gotten much better at many aspects of working in an office. I can be aggressive when I need to, taking charge of meetings, standing up for myself, blah blah blah. I am quite a wimp by nature so it has been really good practice for me to be in a situation where I have to take control and make things happen.  (I failed to win the battle of where I would sit and who I would report to, but it wasn't for lack of aggressive trying on my part.)

I've also learned about selling. I am not a natural salesperson, but now I understand the importance of sales techniques in everyday life. Really, in just about every interaction with other people you are trying to sell them on you, to some degree.

My Dad was a great salesperson. He worked in department stores and opened up two women's clothing stores of his own. But then he decided to move back to VA to raise me, and he transitioned into a broker position, where he sold stocks and retirement plans. He worked with a lot of the universities and community colleges in the southwestern VA area.

Looking back on it now, I can see what he was doing - as he got older and closer to retirement, he was smart enough to realize he needed continuing income without having to continue to work for it. After he retired he got commission for years and years from the sales he had made, in addition to his Social Security and his Veteran's benefits.

What a cool guy.  I sure wish I could talk to him about it now, and ask questions.

Social Media Hateration

Some days I congratulate myself on how I have crafted my social media apps, especially Facebook.

I think many people underestimate how completely sites like Facebook and Twitter and tumblr and Instagram are customized by each user. People who say they don't like Facebook and get stressed out by the hate or politics or drama in their feed have set it up to see that.

Perhaps they have set up their life the same way. Most of the people I know who complain about drama are the ones who start the drama.

But my point is that anyone who doesn't like those sites have set them up wrong. Facebook will show you baby pictures, football stats, recipes, gossip, Bible verses or boobs, depending on how you have set it up. The days I congratulate myself are the days when something political is happening and I don't see a bunch of hate spewing in my feed. When gay marriage became legal, every post I saw that day was filled with joy and rainbows, but a few friends complained that they saw posts opposed to gay marriage. I didn't have that, because I don't want it.

I am pretty sure I have Facebook friends who oppose gay marriage because of (in my opinion) misguided religious beliefs, but they aren't the type to be all hatery and yelly on Facebook.  If they were, I wouldn't be friends with them, or at least I would hide them.

(I have exactly 211 friends, and most of the people who complain about arguing in their feeds have three or four times that number. That is part of their problem.)

I have unfriended people for being hateful several times. These were not people I was even very close to, so it was no big deal to cut them loose.

The thing that confuses me is that I often see "polite" discussions (on other people's posts) congratulating themselves about being friends with people who have opposing viewpoints. That's what I love about you, they say, we can be friends and have respectful conversations even when we don't agree.

But that seems like such bullshit to me. How can you respect someone's opinion if you disagree with it, really? My friend who admires Caitlyn Jenner having a respectful conversation with her friend who refers to Caitlyn as "it" is confusing me. I don't want to say that they are both full of shit, but they might be. My friend who often posts about how awesome Bernie Sanders is and responds to his friend who still misses George Bush by saying that they will have to agree to disagree and still remain friends may be sincere; maybe the desire to stay connected to this person is more important. But still, I take issue with the word "respect".

How happy was I to find an old friend on Facebook a couple of years ago, a friend who I met in 7th grade in the nearly pointless Gifted program in our rural school system. Despite the fact that she lived several mountains away we made the effort to see each other, and we had so much in common. I had completely lost touch with her after high school.  This is why I love Facebook!

And then a few days ago she posted about President Obama: "yet another bow to kiss the rings (or maybe the behinds) of his Muslim brothers as he sets the U.S. table for them to take over."  And she really, really believes that.  She is a high IQ 50 year old woman who is positive that the president of the United States is a Muslim terrorist. 

I mean, obviously I am aware that Fox news and other similar media outlets spew hateful and obvious lies and that there are plenty of people who believe them. But I don't spend time with those idiots, and somehow seeing it in an old friend is especially upsetting.  And what can I do? Challenge her on it? There is literally nothing real that proves her point in any way, so if she believes it, then she is willfully delusional for whatever emotionally fucked up reason. I can't talk her out of it with reason and facts, because the reason and facts have always been there and she has turned her back on them.

I really want to be kind to people, and people who are living their lives from a place of fear instead of love are the ones who really need some kindness and understanding. Maybe at some point in the far distant future I will be saintly enough to love her in spite of her deliberate ignorance and hate, but it doesn't look like it's going to be anytime today. The closest I can get is Unfollowing her instead of Unfriending her. And even that feels a little hypocritical.

Trendy grief quote

This 4 year old quote about grief from a Reddit poster called GSnow has been rediscovered and shared around the internets lately, and there's good reason. This is the best description of grief I've ever seen. It's comforting for me to read about grief right now, and I love this.

“Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child.

But here’s my two cents.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gorged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything… and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

Too much sad going on

Our beautiful cat Sydney has died.

We adopted her so long ago, it was before Greg and I were married, before we bought our condo. It feels like she's been with us forever.

She was a very vocal, social cat who followed Greg around like a puppy. She was polite, though. She would come up on our bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings, just to check and see if we were awake yet. If we weren't (or we were lying still and pretending) she'd just hop down and check back an hour later.

Often on Sunday mornings we'd have family cuddle time; she'd lie on Greg's chest and I would snuggle up in his shoulder nook.  A couple of times each year she'd have allergy troubles and those Sunday morning snuggles would sometimes include sneezes; a kitty sneeze in the face from just a few inches away is pretty unpleasant. But we always laughed.

She meowed really, really loudly when she wanted something, and not just once or twice, she would keep going until she got it. She purred so loudly you could literally hear her from the next room. I've never heard a cat purr so noisily.  She used to purr while she was eating her crunchy cat food and it was the weirdest, most savage sound. Sometimes you can look at the 12-pound Siamese housecat and see the lion.

She started losing weight, and we took her to the vet, and they did blood tests and didn't help her at all. So we took her to another vet and he did more tests and tried so hard with different types of medication.

Cancer through her digestive system meant that she was eating, but not getting the nutrients she needed to maintain weight. So she'd eat, and lose weight, and seem normal, but still lose weight. And the poor thing always felt hungry. We'd give her cheese and steak and peanut butter and all kinds of ridiculous things, and she enjoyed eating it but got none of the calories and stayed hungry.

So it became a question of how long to wait. I know some people wait until their beloved animal family members are not able to walk, not able to do anything. We didn't want to wait that long.

While she was still able to get around, and meet us at the door every day when we got home from work, and jump up on my lap, and purr a little from time to time, we put her to sleep. She was clearly suffering, but the suffering wasn't constant yet. She weighed less than 4 pounds.

She's gone now. Our house is so quiet.

I swear the saturation isn't bumped up on her eyes,
they really were an amazing color
(~ 4 years ago)

Nothing better than lying on a nice crunchy fresh plastic
bag... except maybe jumping into a nice fresh cardboard box
(~ 5 years ago)

Greg and Sydney on her last morning

Lying in my lap, the expert in
maximizing lap comfort (~3 years ago)

Dark

It's the first day of September.

This year I am not sad about the hours of Florida sunshine getting shorter. I'm not whiny about the dark coming earlier and earlier, or the weather cooling off, or the summer ending.

I haven't even gone to the perfectly good pool that I have access to (and pay for, really, with the monthly homeowner dues) at our condo complex one single time this year.  I did buy a new bathing suit, but I haven't worn it.

If anything, the bright blue skies and hot yellow sunshine is annoying. Shut up, summer.

For the first time I'm looking forward to shorter days, sunset coming earlier, and even the cold(er) weather. I keep seeing visions in my head of chilly nights with a house in the darkness, warm orange light from inside peeking through the windows. I keep thinking of fuzzy throw blankets and pumpkin scented candles and cups of hot tea.

I'm also looking forward to Christmas. It'll be the first Christmas that I don't spend with Mom. (There may be one or two Christmases when I was in my late 20's and had just moved to Florida, and Mom and Dad were still a 12+ hour drive away in Virginia, and I stayed in FL and they stayed in VA and we didn't see each other. But that didn't happen more than once, I think. How can I not remember? I gave it so little thought at the time. I sure didn't know that 20 years later I'd literally be brought to tears by my inability to remember.)

It will also be the first Christmas of my married life with Greg that we don't have to drive 7+ hours to Georgia to visit Mom. I kind of hated that drive and I am looking forward to not doing it this year. I also kind of hated not really spending Christmas at home; not being there on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day made me feel like it wasn't really worth a lot of decorating, or a lot of cooking.

I'm going to get a few really good quality Christmas decorations, and find new ways to display the old decorations to give them places of honor in our home. I have handmade decorations made by several family members, some of whom are dead now. I have ugly styrofoam glitter things that I made in kindergarten and Mom saved and put up every year.

After taking our usual Thanksgiving day trips to Greg's various family members the month before, we can just take a few days off work and create our own brand new Christmas traditions.

I swear I'm looking forward to it.

Sunrise Part 2

One pretty cool aspect of living in Central Florida is that I'm an hour away from seeing the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean and an hour and a half away from seeing the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. 

I should do it more often.

Sunrise

Through my job I got a good price on a nice hotel on the Atlantic ocean in Cocoa Beach for last night. I booked it months ago, it's hard to find an employee discount on a beachfront property for a Friday night.

This morning I woke up early so I got up and put on shorts and an Adam Ant t-shirt and went downstairs barefoot, with my camera.  It felt like an adventure to walk through the hotel barefoot.

I took 300 pics of the sunrise, all of which are beautiful.  I have really missed taking photos, apparently.

Not sure about the cropping on this one, but I like the bird.

Christmas Day

Greg and I are here in Georgia for a short visit with Mom.

We had a hard time getting here. On Tuesday we were 300+ miles into our 500 mile drive when something went wrong with the car. An hour and $100 later we had learned that a sensor was breaking and the part wasn't available quickly.  At some point it would go out completely and then the car would lose all power and that would be it.

Knowing that it could happen any minute or not at all, we turned around. We did make it home, after 12+ hours in the car driving through pouring rain, the last hours filled with tension that the engine could stop at any moment. We went to bed and got up at 6am and tried again in our other car.

Wednesday's trip went just perfectly, and were were here in time to take Mom to Red Lobster for Christmas Eve dinner.  Afterwards we exchanged gifts in her apartment and it was lovely.

We'll spend the day with her today and head home again tomorrow after breakfast.  A very short visit, but meaningful.

Mom is doing well overall but is getting a bit forgetful and a bit vague, and it just seems like she is less and less herself.

I'm trying very hard not to worry too much about taking care of her, and taking care of Greg.  The hours and hours and hours of driving hurt his back, and I probably shouldn't have let him drive back up the next day. Plus this is one of those meal situations that's extremely difficult for vegetarians; at Mom's retirement home there's not many choices, and it turns out the restaurant here in the hotel is closed today.

Tomorrow night we'll be back at home, and we'll have a weekend to try to relax and take care of ourselves before we are back at work on Monday.

Greg got me the perfect Christmas present, it's something that I had been wanting but just could not justify spending the money for something so silly and so expensive. A black cat Spirithood! I can't help it, I love it.

Where have I been?

I have been:

Caught up in a job that drains me. I have very little energy, or drive, or me! to do much else, and what little is left over I give to my husband and my mom. I work long hours, I spend way too much time in transit, and as much as I try to force work thoughts out of my head when I'm home, I end up dreaming about it when I sleep.

Peri-menopausal. Some days are fine, some days are bad. I started taking St. John's wort and that has helped an amazing amount.

Worrying about my mom, who I still speak to on the phone every day, although some days she can barely hear me. She is getting more vague, not necessarily with her memory exclusively but with her whole self.  And she is nearly running out of money.


The bad stuff:
Isn't even very bad. I'm just so stressed at work, and it's not just me - things are so hectic there my co-worker burst a blood vessel in her eye. I'm picking up on others' stress and it's hard to let go of when I'm not there.

Seriously, how can I have hot flashes that only affect my feet? Who needs two periods in one month? How can the thing I thought of as "menopause" be so weird, and come and go so randomly?


The good stuff:
I lost NaNoWriMo. But that is good, because I tried. For the first time in three years I wrote, I created, I did it. Maybe I only wrote 15,000 words instead of 50,000, but they are fucking awesome words and I am loving it so much. SO MUCH.

My sweetie pants and I celebrated the 13th anniversary of our first date this past Saturday. Lucky 13, baby!


I don't have the time or energy or serenity to do much blogging anymore, and I miss it.
:(

Greg is a Vegetarian

But this blog is about me, right?

Why I'm not a vegetarian:

• It's hard.  During times when I'm not in control of the situation, when I'm stuck in an airport or it's late and I want to drive through somewhere fast, or I'm with a big group of people who all want to go to a specific restaurant, it can be difficult to find something without meat.  If the only place open is McDonald's, the vegetarian is forced to choose between a very few options and if they aren't in the mood for those specific things then then they are out of luck.  If I'm with a group who all want to share pepperoni pizzas, I can try to talk a couple of people into getting cheese pizza with me, or go without, or leave.  (This is why most non-vegetarians think vegetarians are annoying.)
• Food is culture. I don't want to go to New Orleans and not get jambalaya with sausage, I don't want to go to London and not get fish and chips. Almost universally, local cuisines are meaty.
• I can do without many kinds of meat, but I really, really love beef and seafood.  I've been a vegetarian before, and I missed it badly, and I never stopped missing it.

I admire Greg for being a vegetarian, and I'm thrilled about eating less meat myself and having basically no meat in our house (we've stopped buying meat but still have a few miscellaneous cans of tuna and chicken noodle soup hiding in the cabinet). 

I remember being 10 years old in the kitchen with Mom, my feet swinging a good distance above the floor as I sat on the barstool watching Mom at the sink cutting apart a whole chicken.  The bones cracking, the skin pulling, the blood dripping.  I remember being appalled and horrified and really sad that being an adult meant having to do that.

Luckily when I grew up I discovered skinless, boneless chicken breasts packaged neatly for me at the grocery store.

It's been about three weeks and so far I am really liking eating meat only once or twice a week.  Greg's primary reason for being a vegetarian is to avoid eating a murdered animal, and I completely agree with that.  Our culture is not only meat-based, but thoughtless about it: What's the difference between eating chunks of dead chicken and chunks of dead kitten? And there is no doubt that the animals are treated cruelly.

Maybe eventually I'll go completely vegetarian, again, but for now I'm going to settle for just eating significantly less murdered animal meat.

Planning a vacation

I'm trying to plan my time off for the rest of the year. 

It occurred to me recently that I really do have somewhat of a talent for my job in that I love to plan ahead.  I still hate math and spreadsheets and sitting under fluorescent lights for 8+ hours a day, but there are aspects that come somewhat naturally to me.  I like planning ahead and being organized.  I like it when I can help the agents in the call center with their scheduling problems and conflicts.  I like helping other departments with forecasting their call volume and scheduling their agents. I am getting much better at training the supervisors and team leads on using the workforce management computer programs, and leading meetings with a bunch of people around a conference room table, and it's possible that one day I won't dread having to stand in front of the new hire classes and talk about workforce expectations and answer questions.

Anyway, I want to go visit Mom two more times between now and Christmas, and I want to take a little vacation with my sweetie to celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary the first week of October.  We just went on a vacation to Cleveland to celebrate Greg's 40th birthday in April at the Cinema Wasteland convention, which means two things: One, he's super grateful because, even though I had a great time, he feels like it was his vacation and I think he kinda feels like he owes me one now.  Two, we spent a lot of money (relative to not going on vacation, anyway) and I think we both kinda feel like we shouldn't spend much again so soon.

There are new cheap flights between the Orlando area and Roanoke, which means we could go back to my "home" (it will always seem like home, but since I haven't lived there since 1988 I'll go ahead and add grammatically incorrect quote marks).  I feel guilty that I'm reluctant.  I should go back now while my 100-year old aunt is still around, I should go visit all those relatives I haven't seen in decades, I should go while my Mom is still around for me to tell about where I go and who I see.

That thought really stabs at me.  She would love to hear about me visiting "home", just LOVE it.  I could bring back pictures and stories of people who haven't been so good at staying in touch. Not to mention visiting my father's grave. And this would be a lovely time of year to visit southwestern Virginia, the Appalachian mountains. Not too cold but a little nippy, possibly leaves turning brilliant red and yellow.


It just doesn't seem fun, though, it seems like an obligation, which makes me feel guilty.  I wish I wanted to do this, I feel like I ought to do it, and honestly I feel like I ought to want to do it.

It's also an expensive option.  Even with the cheaper flights it's still a car rental plus gas plus hotel for 3 or 4 nights plus meals. I may be able to get good discount hotel rates through my company, but still.

Or... we could go to Universal and go to the new Wizarding World expansion.  Oh man, it looks SO fun.  We could stay onsite for two nights in the brand new super cute lower-priced Cabana Bay resort and get a Florida Resident discount; staying onsite would get us into the parks an hour before they open to the non-staying-onsite general public.  We could do the new Hogwarts Express train ride between Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, and the Gringott's ride.  It would be less expensive than going to Virginia, even factoring in meals and buying a reasonable amount (!) of Harry Potter crap.

Or we could just say home and spend a bit of money and time on fixing up our house, which has an ever-increasing list of things that need to be repaired or replaced or just fancied up.  That idea has a lot of appeal and would, in many ways, seem to be the most mature and adult option.  Plus a nice staycation would be relaxing.

What would I regret later?  How badly would it hurt me if my mother passed away before I went back to Virginia?  How guilty would I feel if I chose a children's book and an amusement park over an opportunity to delight my mother?

The thought of going back "home" after my mother isn't here to tell about it is just heartbreaking.  There is no one, no one, who shares my memories from my childhood.  I grew up without siblings in the house, and my father is gone, my aunt who lived next door is gone.  I have a few cousins who remember their own slice of childhood that sometimes overlapped with my own, but no one who knows it all like my own sweet Mom.  The neighbors next door who had an outhouse and raised bees, the way the snow drifted in the hilly backyard, the taste of the Silver Queen corn that Dad grew in the garden, the constant breeze from living in between two mountains. 

It's also worth considering that the Wizarding World is going to be crowded; the first week of October is not peak and kids are not out of school, but the new expansion will pack in tourists anyway.  If we waited to go in January we'd have nice (?) cool weather and the smallest crowds of the whole year.

I am sure of one thing, if I hesitate too long to book a Universal trip for October, it'll be too late.  All the media coverage of the Wizarding World will ensure sold-out onsite hotels very quickly.

I suppose I'm lucky, really.  Trying to make a decision between nothing but nice vacation options is a pretty good thing.

Mom's Heart

I went to GA and visited Mom over Memorial Day weekend, and it was, as usual, a very good visit.  Any time I get to hang out with Mom and look at old photos and get Mom hugs is always very good.


Mom had a health scare a couple of days before I went.  She was on her way to the dining room and felt sick so she stopped in the hallway and sat on her walker seat.  A nurse saw her and brought her back to her apartment, where she lost consciousness for a couple of minutes.  I spoke to a nurse during my visit who used the word "unresponsive" when describing what happened, and that is a terrifying word.  They think it may have been Mom's heart, but Mom doesn't want to go to the hospital for tests, and honestly I don't think I can blame her.  Since then she's felt fine, and she seemed normal to me while I was there.


She was a little reluctant to leave to go out to a restaurant for lunch, so we didn't.  I didn't want to push her, but she never goes out to eat, and I feel like maybe it's good for her to, even if it's only rarely.  She does go out twice a month to have her hair washed and set, but she gets too tired to combine that outing with lunch.


My Mom is so sweet.  I know which of the retirement home employees are good and which ones are, shall I say, less good, by the way they are with Mom.  The ones who have made an effort to speak to her, which can be difficult because of her hearing problems, just love her.  Your mother is the sweetest person, they tell me, the receptionist and the activities director and the manager.  One of the cooks has a whole thing where she and Mom blow kisses to each other.  One of the nurses gives Mom little crosses to carry with her and hugs Mom every day in the dining room, telling her how blessed she is. Mom grasps her hands and looks into her eyes and tells her that she is blessed, too.


The majority of them are like that, and they know Mom's likes and dislikes, and they are clearly fond of her and try to make her happy.  They check on her at random times in her apartment and watch to make sure she eats enough.  (I'm not sure they know that when Mom doesn't like what's for dinner or lunch she'll come back to her apartment and eat an apple, or a sliced up banana with peanut butter on it, or an ice cream sandwich.  My sister keeps her stocked.)


There are a few that seem competent but also seem young and inexperienced, and probably also low-paid, and definitely have less patience for trying to get to know someone who can barely understand them when they speak.  They are okay, just not going out of their way to be nice, and of course since it's my own dear mother I want to smack everyone who doesn't love her. 


It's hard to watch people who are essentially strangers take care of my mother, who is so vulnerable.  I try to look at her sweetness and kind nature as her superpower that does seem to come through (for anyone paying attention) despite her physical weaknesses.  Any retirement home employee would have to be a truly evil person to be mean to her.

Holiday Weekend

In two days I'll drive up to Georgia for a short weekend visit with Mom.  I always get nervous beforehand about the 7+ hour drive and about the possibility of something going wrong, but it's always fine and I'm sure it'll be fine this time too.


This time it'll be just me and Mom, no other relatives going out to lunch with us, so that'll be better.  Mom has such trouble hearing that when we go to a restaurant everyone ends up talking around her and mostly ignoring her, which I hate.  If it's just the two of us, even if we don't speak a lot, it'll at least be to each other.  I'm hoping to take her out to lunch at Red Lobster on Saturday, and then maybe out to breakfast at IHOP on Monday before I leave to drive back.


She's not up to shopping anymore, so while she's taking her afternoon nap I plan to go to a nearby mall and see if I can't find her some new clothes.  If I can do that on Saturday, then Sunday I could return anything that didn't fit.


Unfortunately this retirement home doesn't have a dedicated Guest room like the place where she used to live.  It was a small studio apartment, but it was comfortable with a TV and a mini refrigerator and fresh linens.  It cost $50 but included meals, and it was invaluable to be able to just walk down the hall in my pajamas and slippers to hang out with Mom at night.  This place in the past has let me stay in empty "show" apartments, which was hit or miss with things like fresh linens or TVs, but they let me stay for free.  Now they have a new corporate policy to charge $125 a night, and that doesn't even include a guaranteed TV or linens.  Good grief.  Clearly they don't want people to stay.  So I'll be a mile away at a small hotel that I got at an employee discount rate of $39.  I won't be down the hall from Mom, but I'll at least have wifi.  And I am going to not care about driving a mile in my pj's and slippers.

Wasteland Warriors

Celebrating Greg's birthday in Cleveland was wonderful.  I've been thinking a lot lately about how it makes human beings comfortable to see and be near others who look like themselves.  This clearly must sometimes contribute to racism or homophobia, but I think it's human nature for people to seek out others who feel the same: women hanging out with women, Spanish-speaking people hanging out with others who speak their same language, gay people hanging out with same-sex couples displaying affection openly, elderly people hanging out other elderly, etc.  I suppose it validates your own thoughts and feelings to be with others who have shared experiences, and I think a visual component is an inevitable part of that.

So on the weekend of Greg's 40th birthday we hung out with a whole hotel filled entirely with 30-40 year old white guys with dark hair who were wearing jeans and sneakers and black horror movie/punk band/exploitation movie t-shirts who also had tattoos and, for the most part, were 20 pounds overweight and drinking beer.

Seriously, there were few exceptions to this one guy, the average Cinema Wasteland attendee.  Greg was completely invisible if I walked more than a few feet away from him.

Everybody say Woo!  (You can almost see part of my head way, way, way in the back)

We went a day early and met up with several friends from Canada and Pennsylvania and California that we never get to see, a few we've never met in person before.  Greg got to talk about movies with multiple people, not only other fans but also people in the industry.  One of the highlights for him was sitting on a couch in the lobby talking for more than an hour to a guy who works for one of the distribution companies that send movies to Greg for review on his site.  They talked about the technological aspects of remastering old film footage for re-release, and this guy told the story of how he found the original film of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre that had literally been shoved in paper bags and forgotten in the upper reaches of a storage warehouse.

Greg handed out business cards and bought hard-to-find DVDs and blu rays and t-shirts.  We went to several of the convention's events in the hotel, including a movie screened by the director and stars, and what was clearly a no-budget but very sincere and fun horror-themed burlesque show.  We drank beer and one of us had a martini.  (I love a martini.)

We took up the front two rows at the burlesque show. 

I briefly had a very informal interview with the guy who runs the event.  He started it a couple of decades ago, and it's truly a labor of love for him and his wife.  They labor greatly, their only hired help being a few people they pay to be on the convention floor selling tickets and admitting attendees, and they love picking the right celebrity guests and vendors to celebrate what they call the "drive-in movie" culture.  I had the thought of writing an article for Greg's website about Cinema Wasteland and how it's so different from other movie conventions.  I do have a bachelor's degree in Journalism, for the love of crap.  But I haven't been able to get started on it.  Because I suck.

I do not celebrate 29 repeatedly and facetiously, I openly declare than I AM 48 YEARS OLD.

Birthdays.

Mine was on Monday March 17th - Greg and I got a hotel (with my employee discount, $29) near downtown St. Pete on Sunday night.  We walked around the waterfront, had lunch at a British pub called Moon Over Water.  They had a St. Patrick's day special: Guinness and steak pie.  It had a thick yummy dark gravy with mushrooms, steak, carrots and onions and it was topped with a giant flaky puff pastry. It makes me hungry right now just to remember it.

On Monday we went to the Dali museum to see the Dali master works and their current Andy Warhol exhibit.  It was wonderful, as experiencing great artwork always is, but the museum was uncomfortably crowded and the galleries are already fairly small.  This is the new Dali museum, the old one was not as architecturally impressive but it had much better spaces to appreciate Dali's paintings from a distance as well as up close.

We also went shopping at used bookstores, vinyl record stores and movie shops, as we are wont to do.  It was a little two day/one night birthday vacation, but it was very nice.

Next week we head out of town to Cleveland for Greg's birthday.  He will be 40 on April 5, and this coincides wonderfully with the best cult/grindhouse/exploitation/horror convention: Cinema Wasteland.  We will be meeting some of Greg's friends and fellow movie experts from all over the country and Canada, all flying in for the convention and for Greg's birthday celebration.

We went to Cinema Wasteland once before.  We booked it months in advance when things were going good, then my father passed away and Greg lost his job and we had no money and were stressed and grieving.  We went anyway, having already paid hundreds for the non-refundable trip, and honestly we had more fun than you'd think.  This trip, however, will be wonderful.

William

From that same Facebook group of old local photos, this one of a couple celebrating their wedding anniversary by having a fancy dinner at the fancy local hotel, and wanting a photo of the occasion with the owner and her "valet".

When I was 18 I got my first job, working in the summer at a resort mountaintop hotel.  The hotel was 100 years old and built by a lake.  It was beautiful up there, although I was a stupid teenager who grew up in similar beauty and was still too immature and inexperienced to appreciate it.

The year after I worked there a major movie company appreciated it enough to set one of the biggest romantic comedies ever filmed there.  This was a small town and many locals were extras, and when the movie was shown in theaters they all crowded in, dressed in formalwear to celebrate the once in a lifetime event, and yelled THERE I AM when they saw themselves onscreen.

That was kind of adorable in retrospect, but I wasn't a part of that.

William was hot.  He was 25, an older man!, and I was the shy teen who had never had a boyfriend and had never been kissed.  He was outgoing and friendly and flirty with everyone.  I didn't know what it was, really, but we had chemistry.  I would leave the front desk to run get a Coke from the machine, see him in the hallway, and end up talking to him for a half hour.

No one ever said anything to me about it, I was honestly surprised when they declined to hire me back the next summer.

He had tan skin and black hair and dimples and a very Southern accent.  He was a local but had been hired by the elderly owner of the hotel.  She was kind of a cranky old woman, and he said his job was to walk around with her holding onto his arm while pretending like she didn't need anyone to help her walk around.

They got along great, though.  She was really something, she got along with no one in the dining room except the the one server whom she referred to as her "red-headed Negress".  It's a mystery why more people didn't find her charming.  But William could see through it, and would joke with her and make her laugh.

She had her own regular spot at the best table in the dining room with a view overlooking the lake, and they had cut a chunk out of the bottom of the table to make room for the throw blanket she'd have over her lap.  She was fairly famous locally as the owner of the hotel, and the daughter of the original owner.

He was a farm boy who had been working as a busboy the year before, and she liked him, so she hired him and that was that.  She put him in three-piece suits, and there was something infinitely hot about this man who had bulging muscles (from clearing rocks from a field by picking them up and throwing them into the back of a Farm Use pickup truck, he was amazed that people would pay to work out in gyms) who would kill time standing in the lobby, lounging around like the redneck that he was, smoking cigarettes and holding them like joints, in those expensive dark suits and pristine white shirts with French cuffs.  I swear his eyes were black.

He was actually very sweet and gentle with me, and even though he was never in love with me and never my 'boyfriend' I am not sorry to say he was my first.  I swear he is the reason I love to cuddle, and also the reason kisses that taste like beer still turn me on.

We actually kept in touch for years, I saw him again a few times after I went away to college, but unfortunately now I've lost track of him.

I kind of love how they are looking at each other in the photo, oblivious to those people having the special occasion and being so impressed by her that they wanted them in their commemorative photo.  I love how his head is bent toward her, and you can see the lit candle on their table.

This Facebook group and its photos from the past are really messing with me now.