Category Archives: Blog

Your general-purpose blogging, consisting of me nattering on about whatever strikes my fancy.

Hiatus, or Dumb Stuff About My Life

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Am I the Lamest Blogger Evah, or what?

The dollhouse project stalled, and might be stalled for a while. It will be Shiny again, and in the meantime, the ferrets are in serious love with the thing. All the furniture and the inhabitants (um, the intended inhabitants) are in the attic out of reach; meanwhile, Meeze (5 months old) is making a soda straw collection in the living room. Shoulda been there when he tried to go in through the door with it held dogbone style. . .

In terms of technology, I have gone one step forward, and one step back: Got a Kindle this Christmas and am much in love with it, but I gave up on my phone’s calendar because it wouldn’t upload to Google, so what’s the sheeping point? Returned to the paper version (Harvard seal on the cover, natch) and am much happier, even than when the old phone uploaded. That was neat, but I’m a note scribbler and a page marker. It occurs to me that if I read the same way, the Kindle might be annoying–but I don’t.

Rewrote the opening of Max and he is now in the paws of my beta team. I will just take tranquilizers or something (not kidding) and get back on the agent trail.

Failed to “win” NaNoWriMo this year (thanks for a last-minute migraine, grr), so now have *two* unfinished stories languishing on my desktop. Am planning to *sob* join a writer’s group, if I can find one. The very thought of mixing “talk to strangers” and “writing” makes my tummy knot.

I am going to Arisia this weekend, which makes the first sf con I’ve gone to for over 15 years. I will probably do what I’ve done at other sorts of cons, namely watch costumes and find some gaming, but again, there may be a writer’s group . . .

Kidney stones have been baa-lambs all year; we’ll see what the CT showed when I see my crew in a couple of weeks. Arthritis still evil, but I had a lot of little pieces of surgery done on my right foot/leg over the holidays which promises to increase my mobility. It bettah–while recuperating from this I’ve put on nearly ten pounds and am wearing classy sweat pants to work.

And that’s where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. I hope the writer’s group will help me figure out why I don’t blog more. So how’s by you?

Itty Bitty Rocks

10 Sunday Aug 2014

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Not to pun, but I’ve been hitting a wall. I just learned I have anemia, which is one of those now-you-tell-me things which explains a lot of little physical weirdnesses, like the fatigue attacks. I’m coming out of one now; had it for most of the week. Wednesday’s gym workout was a labor of–if not love, then determination. But I knew that Thursday was out of the question. I crawled home and went to bed.

Been that way with the house–now I’m starting to appreciate how big a project this is (in a small way, of course), but there’s only one way to go. Le sigh.

Shingling is proceeding slowly. Not only do they ruck up for a while during drying, but the entire roof is curling at the edges like one half of a pagoda:

I'm betting a lot of actual roofs look a lot worse.

I’m betting a lot of actual roofs look a lot worse. (The row nearest the peak was just put on an hour ago.)

Worst come to worst, my daughter thinks that if I untape it when it’s done and put it under a stack of encyclopedias it should straighten out. I’m afraid that some of the shingles will crack off; I’m probably going to decide to live with it.

Started the repainting with the addition:

Yup, I'm working on this instead of finishing dealing with my laundry.

Yup, that’s my laundry basket I knocked over to do this. So sue me.

And then (oh God) decided to go ahead and do it in fieldstone. Just finished roughing in the first layer of stones:

Why, yes, as a matter of fact I *am* crazy, thank you.

Why, yes, as a matter of fact I *am* crazy, thank you.

Next is the detail, for which I need a better brush, so enough for today. I draw and paint fieldstone a lot. I don’t know why, because it drives me nuts. It’ll certainly be a decisive change from the pink.

Anybody out there have any insight into what it means to do teeny little obsessive details? Come to think of it, that describes having a dollhouse to begin with.

Loss and Breakage May Occur

04 Monday Aug 2014

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I had a tooth come apart during dinner. I’m looking at my usual hellweek, but I’ll call BU’s Dental School first thing in the morning. Feh. A dentist once told me that the tongue has a mind of its own, and it’s an inquisitive toddler, forever getting in the way of what they’re trying to do, or exploring anything new in the mouth’s landscape. I want to plug mine into some cartoons or something. Grr.

Meanwhile, I have the kind of tired that means I’m fighting something off, so this will be brief–a looky-looky of what’s been happening to the house:

I'm impressed this many shingles stayed on, actually.

I’m impressed this many shingles stayed on, actually.

The shingles I ordered aren’t as good quality–the old ones were like sawed-off tongue depressors (are we working on a theme here?) and these are much thinner, with many of them being defective. Hope I have enough. But they do the job:

Patched!

Patched!

I’m going to be painting them, going for a slate effect, so the color difference shouldn’t be a major deal.

Meanwhile, by means of a small miracle, I took the right measurements and managed to hack off a proper piece of foamcore for the main roof, which I attached with duct tape. (It has to hinge for the attic, and I don’t have the proper wee little drill and itty bitty hardware.)

And we're well on our way to middle-class pretensions!

And we’re well on our way to middle-class pretensions!

The instructions that came with the shingles said to hotglue them. I’m not sure we have hotglue. I’m not sure we don’t have hotglue, so I don’t want to go out and buy a whole new set-up. Besides, I am a su-u-per g-ee-n-yus at burning myself with it. So we’re going with Elmer’s. Works fine, except that it sort of rucks up as it dries, so each row has to be really, completely, I-mean-it dry before adding another, which means it takes forever.

Grrrr!!

Grrrr!!

It lies back down when it’s dry. I think I’ll lie back down too. But wait till you see the painting!

Just Whose Rehab Is This?

03 Sunday Aug 2014

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I forget how the dollhouse got to Maryland from Wisconsin when we divorced. I think maybe my ex put it in the truck when he moved the kids in for their placement with me. Or maybe he added it to the several exceedingly heavy boxes he air-shipped. I know that somehow it got there, but I had my hands full having a new life with a job and single parenting. Losing the job made things harder, not easier; so did losing one of the kids. I fell apart. Got really sick. Looking back, my being held together with duct tape was a bad idea–maybe a hospital would have been a Good Thing. Maybe they would have given me an accurate diagnosis. Or maybe I would have just lost the kid I had left. I just kept on applying layers of duct tape and soldiered on.

Speaking of tape, somewhere around there, the dollhouse was taped shut to move it. (Unlike the tin ones we looked at yesterday, mine opens in the front, with its facade on hinges.) On some moves I would remove the tape and wince at the “scars” the glops of adhesive left and vow to fix it. Someday. Once in a while, I would find some miniature furniture at a craft store and sort of toss it in. I had an assortment of small dolls in there; at one point they included She-Ra, Princess of Power, who was being clearanced out at Toys “R” Us. I also had (still do have) Mammy, from Gone With the Wind. She’s a classy little doll, made in Germany with bendable limbs (they sit at the diningtable in Deutschland), complete with rustly red petticoat from Massa Rhett. It was a motley crew, and seeing as my furniture didn’t match either, what the hell?

We had two episodes of being homeless, where we had to put our stuff in storage. And even though the damn thing was falling apart and taking up space (it’s roughly a meter square and half a meter deep) I . . .  just . . . couldn’t . . . let go of it. It got jammed into corners, and I kept waiting for something to bash in its walls. But it held up. Mostly.

sad dollhouse

This is how it looked as of two weeks ago. Half the roof is missing. You can see the tape on the addition.

Things got a lot better for me, but not for the dollhouse. Lack of time, lack of space, lack of . . . moxie, I guess. But it still mattered. I’m not a giver-upper, as a rule.

Last apartment, when my son (now an adult) moved in with us (yay!) was only a two-bedroom (boo!) and although I thought we would move in July, it took til December. It was . . . stressful. I remember breaking down into tears at one point, and what was I sobbing? That I didn’t have space for my sheeping dollhouse. Mind you, even before he moved in it was in the combination storage/ferret room, where the only pleasure it was giving was to the ferrets themselves, who when let out to play could get through the gaping door. I felt like getting that novelty scotch tape that has “crime scene” printed on it. At least the ferrets weren’t doing crack in there, to the best of my knowledge.

So now this hunk of junk is in my room, and . . . for some reason, mainly because it’s close enough to the computer to touch and my debit card was on my desk at the time, I thought, “Hmm,” and checked to see if they had dollhouse shingles on Amazon. They did, with free shipping no less. So . . . what the hey. They were cheap, which was good, because I knew that with this horrible piece of wood’s history, they’d just lay around inducing mild guilt until the end of time.

But then the next day I found myself buying a sheet of foamcore and a sharp knife. Gotta put the shingles on something, right?

The house is designed to have one (missing) side of the roof hinge up so you can use the attic for storage. Or something.

The house is designed to have one (missing) side of the roof hinge up so you can use the attic for storage. Of your refrigerator.

Tools of construction. What bodes this?

Tools of construction. What bodes this?

I now have a history of finishing complex projects, so I’m just sort of sitting back and watching myself now. Pretty scary.

Project Afoot!

02 Saturday Aug 2014

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In my last narrative post I talked about adults wanting stuff for Christmas and having to get it later on. This sort of happened to me, and it became one of those intense symbolic-object issues that disturbs me a little.

When I was small, I had a dollhouse. It was made of painted metal and filled with bland plastic furniture, a different color for each room. Inside and out, the details were all filled in–It was a white brick Colonial, and I think it had painted carpeting and pictures on the walls. It had a family of ivory plastic people on stands like toy soldiers. They couldn’t sit on their plastic chairs and they rolled off their plastic beds. It was the most frustrating, creativity-stifling toy imaginable, and deep down inside I hated it without knowing that I hated it.

(You can Google 60s metal dollhouse images here.) Pretty kitschy, eh? Appealing with their bright colors? Trust me, for my literal little Poindexter brain it just didn’t work. People don’t stand around their dinner table, damn it! The usual happened–over the years, pieces got lost, and I think I dented the roof by using it to stand on. Trying to explain that I wanted the sort of dollhouse I read about (Little Plum! Aieee!!) got me nowhere, because I already had one! Ungrateful little churl.

I knew my dad would never in a billion millennia build me a scale model of a real Japanese house (curse you, Rumer Godden), so I sort of buried the desire. It’s a bright shiny world, after all. Then when I was in my early 20s, I went to the Smithsonian and I saw THE Dolls’ House in the National Museum of American History. My heart broke into a trillion pieces.

I vowed that someday I would have a Real Dollhouse. As wishes go, it’s not all that major. There are crazy miniature people coming out of America’s ears. Every decent hobby shop carries some stuff. Except the miniature replicas of Planned Parenthood brochures and the US Constitution. Not all hobby shops have those. So I told my soul to lay in wait. Even simple Real Dollhouses ain’t chump change.

Then one day my in-laws gave me a substantial cash present. I think to celebrate my college graduation/getting into Harvard grad school. Bless them, they probably expected me to get books or some nice Oxford-stripe shirts or similar appropriate prezzie. But no–I hauled my poor husband off to the humungous hobby store somewhere in Worcester or something–and came home with my very own two-story Victorian, with an extension, no less. It was a pre-built display model and on sale.

This is when I discovered that Real Dollhouses take Real Work. I wanted a Painted Lady, and I chose to cover the meek, drab pink it came in with a pink that had personality, staying power, and its own zipcode. This took two whole little bottles of craft paint, and a lot of time. My husband was used to my ah, er, projects, so he wasn’t too mean about the dollhouse–or surprised that I never quite finished painting the trim. (Peach and violet. Yowsah!)

Wooden dollhouses are fragile (especially pre-built display models of ANYTHING, duh), and I think the door was the first thing to break. (We had cats and two toddlers at the time.) Then a section of the porch. The flowers came out of their drilled holes in the windowboxes. And pretty soon, I had a big pink slum that, wherever we moved, took up too much space. Dollhouse furniture (the non-plastic kind) is pricey–and also fragile. So what few pieces I got from time to time also sort of fell apart.

But I was falling apart too, so I didn’t have the bandwidth to notice.

Stupid Publishing. Feh.

02 Sunday Mar 2014

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Sorry, guys.

I’m getting ready to publish my book Max and I’ve now received advice from two separate sources to take down all my fiction from my blog. No more freebies from me. I feel kind of sad about this, especially about my WriMo novella, which I posted as I got it done as an incentive for finishing it. (Which I did.)

If you’re a friend of mine and in the middle of something, PM me and I’ll hook ya up wid a PDF.

Wish me luck!

Living Dolls

17 Friday Jan 2014

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Before my family of origin reached a certain level of no-return disintegration, we had Christmas, and I had birthdays; and I could count on getting presents as naturally as I could yams and can-berry sauce on Thanksgiving. The red bike that Dad had to put together after I was packed off on Christmas Eve. The microscope. The doll (“Beautiful Crissy”) whose hair grew as you yanked it out of her head through a foramen previously unremarked (now in Gray’s as the sulcus crissaeum). The hair was auburn, her eyes were violet, and she succeeded at being almost alive.

Almost.

The sorts of physical things I wanted and did not get were ephemeral child-wishes, unfulfilled because they were just that. I don’t remember any particulars, just that there was a whole layer of the world marked “Baby Stuff,” meaning that they were appropriate enough for my age–but not for Mommy and Daddy’s prodigy, “4 going on 24.” I was taught to scorn and to sneer at other children and their puerile little urges: I was going to Johns Hopkins by way of Barnard, boy howdy!

As might have been predicted, this attitude and the fact that my Stanford-Binet IQ of Far-Too-High might as well have been tattooed on my forehead made me unpopular. So the thing I wanted more than anything else was a sibling, so that I’d have somebody to play with.

But my mother’s uterus was tilted, so none were forthcoming. I grew up alone and lonely–no living dolls to help diaper and love, to boss around, to bring into my complicated universe of talking animals and superheroes.

It worked out in the end, I guess. I had imaginary friends instead, which became the bedrock of my growing up to be a writer. (So much for med school–as it turned out it was Harvard (English) by way of the University of Wisconsin (Art)–I really do wonder if my father, had he lived to be in the audience in Harvard Yard, would have thought the PhD to be as satisfying as an MD. Probably not.)

As a matter of course, my daughter had to have a sibling, so my own far superior uterus plopped forth a little brother for her. And she hated him on sight, and has more or less hated him for the 23 years since. Very little playing together; and her deep mournful desire was to be an only child. I’m told that that’s the way it goes: When dolls become really and truly alive, they bring a world of complications.

As for me, some things never change, and the thing I wanted for Christmas this year was that rubber-band loom I kept seeing in the toy and craft stores. Baby Stuff; I think it’s marketed for the 8-12-year-old market. Instead, I got a superabundance of very nice soap and a beautiful candle holder shaped like a lotus. (My daughter has bad taste in perfectly lovely little boys, but excellent taste in tchachkes.) And thus adulthood–one is very clean and has pretty things, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Especially when one has a little slab of plastic all one’s own, and can (feeling naughty) go to the store and get it for oneself. So there, Mom and Dad.

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In the Hospital: Tiny Blessings

09 Monday Dec 2013

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So there I was, having what might most delicately be called Pee Issues. Cranberry juice didn’t help, and I was starting to feel really run down. I figured the latter to be a) lingering depression over Not Moving, and/or b) fatigue from Finally Moving last weekend, both exacerbated by the stress of having Comcast screw up transferring my Internet service for over a week. But they turned it on at last, and I still felt every bit as crappy, and besides . . . Pee Issues . . . so I did what my urology team told me to do like a good girl and popped into the ER yesterday.

My expectation was to be seen promptly and sent home with a prescription for some Macrobid for a run-of-the-mill bladder infection. One out of two ain’t bad–I have a groovy ER and my butt didn’t even touch a waiting room seat. But part of the grooviness included a conscientious doctor who had recently seen somebody with my exact presentation (urine clean, but a stone is [painlessly] blocking my right kidney somewhat) take a turn for the worse and get very, very sick. And the worst part is that I myself have been very, very sick. Twice. (I’m a kidney stone gravel pit. Had ’em for my entire adult life, although for years they masqueraded as Mysterious Female Problems, as “women don’t get kidney stones” was long the prevailing belief–until only a decade or so ago, in fact.)

Goethe’s wife died of pyelo, I hear, and he had to spend three days in the kitchen listening to her scream. And in my own experience it does count as “no sheep, really sheeping sick.” So I didn’t really want to argue with her, and here I am in the hospital. And although I know the symptoms of pyelo and they would have scared me into making a beeline back here, maybe it’s just as well.

They gave me a bolus of a strong IV antibiotic, and I swear I’m feeling better already, despite a special hospital Night in Hell: At around 11p, they admitted a 97-year-old lady with mild dementia and apparently no bladder control over even more pee than I make. They spent all night changing her bed, trying to get her on the bedpan, and cleaning her up (which made her screech like a parrot). And by all night I mean about hourly.

So this morning I am counting my blessings, which I habitually do in the hospital:

Yeah, I make many little trips, but making them hooked up to an IV pump and fitting it into a bathroom the size of an average stall added to the challenge of the night. I’m currently not hooked up, and going on such a plebian trip solo is a big treat.

So is finally being put in the johnnies (one front, one back) meant for BIG people,  so I don’t feel strait-jacketed. I guess I’m fatter than I look or something; don’t know why they didn’t start me in ’em. But I yowled a bit about it when made to take the hospital’s extremely hot shower, and now I am steam-cleaned with full shoulder movement. Bliss!

My hospital has wifi, and my very nice daughter schlepped in my laptop so I can blog to you, watch Netflix, and maybe even work a little.

And blessing the greatest: They’re letting me go home today (albeit with prescriptions and the usual command to drink tons of water) And I have a home to go to. This has been made particularly meaningful after yesterday in the ER, watching an endless stream of street people being carried in with hypothermia. We have adequate emergency shelter in Cambridge/Boston, so most of these folks are the hardcore who are on the street by choice. Chronics make me sad–I spend much of my life invested in my own mental health and that of others; I have to believe that they can recover too, but they have to make the choice themselves.

I chose. Blessing!

 

And That’s a Wrap!

29 Friday Nov 2013

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I hope you’ve enjoyed Eureka as much as I have. I didn’t want it to be over! Thanks for each like and follow–every one has made me go “Oh goody!” (Comments, though. Those would also make me happy. Just a hint, if you have the time.)

I am a NaNoWriMo 2013 WINNER!!! 51,743 is their count. I wasn’t at all sure I could do it, but I took a writing weekend in New Hampshire, where there was a hot tub (no, we didn’t bathe in it) and lots of quiet and a writing friend to nag. This made up for a work week during which I did next to nothing. I know it’s probably silly, but I have a real sense of accomplishment.

This taught me a lot about the writing process: First, of course, is that I could have theoretically written Max‘s 100K first draft in two months, instead of oh, a year and a halfish! Ouch! And Dark Crimson Corners could have been pounded out in six months instead of five years–and I really had a sense that I was writing hard for that one. (That said, both of those were almost entirely first-drafted in longhand, instead of Eureka, which was almost entirely composed at the keyboard.) Second, that I write a bit over a thousand words an hour. Thus, if I make myself actually sit down and write for a measly hour in the morning, instead of, say, just faffing around playing World of Warcraft, I can get an amazing amount of stuff done. I guess the trick is remembering that I’m a writer first.

But I’m a lot of things second and one of them is being the webmaster! I am being paid this week to revamp the site and do a brochure. And a lot of things have gotten in the way of that. Ouch! again. I’m way behind.

The biggest thing getting in the way is that we are moving this week, God help us. Still haven’t signed up the actual muscle, so wish me well.

After move and work are caught up, I’ll go through and give a lightning second draft to Eureka, with the goal of having her put up as an .epub on Amazon by Christmas. Just to see what happens. Thoughts?

NaNoWriMo Progress

23 Saturday Nov 2013

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Glad some of you are enjoying Eureka! I am, more than I expected to. Anybody got any plot requests?

The NaNoWriMo schtick of churning it out continually against a ticking clock is proving to be more effective than I would have thought. I’m behind, but I’m away on what I like to think of as a writing retreat, so I should catch up. Gonna win this thing!

“Win,” for those who don’t know, just means that I’ll get my 50k done by November 30. There are various little prizes–mainly discounts on writing software and self-publishing packages. Since I’m happy enough with good ol’ Pages and intend to self-publish with Calibre, these don’t hold a lot of temptation–but I am once again getting a strange pleasure from doing the thing itself. And that’s never a bad thing.

What’s been invaluable about this project is that it’s distracted me from a horrible piece of life stress: we may be moving this coming weekend. Or we may not be. It all depends on whether or not the person holding our Section 8 lives in her hands decides to draw up our lease next week. My son is living on the couch, and has been doing so since his arrival in June, so we’re all trying not to go mad. This is the 5th month in a row where we’ve been all geared up to move. Wish us luck–I have become so pessimistic that I am envisioning my son sleeping right under the Christmas tree as a possible good thing–guarding it from the kitten and all. Ah, First Christmases . . .

My center will be closed for the holiday week (and again for Christmas/New Year’s) but this will give me time to catch up as the new webmaster/print media person. (Always learn HTML; always put it on your resume. Trust me.) So between that, packing, and Eureka, it’s as well that I’ve fled to New Hampshire for the weekend, staying with a writer friend and her hot tub.

Yeah, you. You know you’re jealous.