Tag Archives: moving

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?

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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.

Unmoved

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

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I’m caught at work with nothing to do. Well, comparatively. I could be researching new groups; I could be working on my quilt block; I could even slip back to my office where I can do my tiny data-crunch of the people who visited the center in September. But I can’t concentrate on the first two and the third is awkward: I’m sort of invisibly babysitting a recovery group from the receptionist’s area.

I’m not part of the group officially for two reasons. For the first, it’s 90 minutes long, and that’s too long, even with coloring. (A perk of being a peer specialist is that people understand my need to focus on doing something like abstract artwork during meetings to hold down the wiggles and help me pay attention.) For the second, I’m not the official facilitator, but being Frau Direktor, it can sometimes be funky with group dynamics, and this group is new and a little wobbly.

But I’m here because earlier it looked like a peer would be present who’s been having a hard time recently. Last week, she threw a tantrum during a group–and that one was being run by an honest-to-john psychiatrist–and stormed out. The facilitator made it clear that it needed to be Handled somehow, if at all possible. So when I popped my head into the program to see how it was running and saw her here today mumbling to herself . . . uh-oh. So basically I stayed behind this afternoon in the role of possible official bouncer–but she’s not here after all. Just as well.

You may be thinking that it’s politically incorrect of us to have standards of behavior–after all, we’re all mad here–but I assure you, it’s necessary: People acting out can be frightening and triggering to other peers as well. Getting screamed at was one of the things they left off my job description during the hire (possibly because it was also done by the guy hiring me, who is thankfully no longer with the firm) but it is my job. As is calling security. Sigh. But not today. Today I try not to eavesdrop and sit here blogging to you. (Not a total loss. I’m able to touch base with building maintenance about the rock somebody threw through our window this morning. Sigh again.)

Meanwhile, back at my life: We still haven’t moved–but November 1 is now the ticket. It’s reached a level of unreality by now–the stress coating my soul has coagulated like the cheesy mold that coats a long-forgotten cup of coffee. I know on a purely intellectual level that it will be violently dug into by the cleaning brush of packing in two weeks, because by then I’ll be attending two 40-hour weeks of intensive training. In other words, I’ll be exhausted and cranky. I still haven’t finished the prop paintings I’m doing. Moving then would be a cruel joke, but we know the universe loves to laugh.

I’ve decided to participate in the zaniness of NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, which will force some sort of writing out of my head. I’ll link some bits here. And I haven’t forgotten about Damascus! m’ not dead yet! I’m getting better! I feel happy!

A Quick Catchup and Mumbling About Things Bought Over the Internet

25 Sunday Aug 2013

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Yarrgghhh. Where did that stressball summer go?

Let’s see:

My son is still on the couch and we are still waiting to move. What had been conceptualized as a July 1 move to a three-bedroom apartment has been beaten down by the realities of market demand and people dallying about actually moving when they tell their landlords they are. We are now looking at a damn-near-sure-thing on October 1, which would have thrown us all into hysterics had we known at the outset of this adventure. The new apartment is supposed to be bigger than this (other than just adding a bedroom, smarty-pants) and we are crossing our fingers.

But it almost definitely lacks a ferret room, which is to say a chamber which is far too small to be a bedroom by modern building code standards (else it would be marked as one and we would be charged accordingly). So in preparation, we got a new ferret cage, which has about a 3′ square footprint instead of the 10′ square they’d been in for the past several years. Nobody has come right out and said it, but this has been an epic disaster; an unheralded mustelidean misery which we are now stuck with. I’ll just leave you with the phrase, “Oh come on, they’ll figure the slide out!” and we’ll move on. (We ended up making them little fake staircases out of unloved textbooks.) But it looked GREAT online!

To add to the furry fun, the cats have fleas. So after the flea bath was the usual waste of time, my daughter ordered them flea collars, as for some reason our local pet store is in denial about cats in fact suffering from fleas just like dogs. The picture on Amazon said “flea collar.” What came yesterday was a calming collar, all covered in copious powder smelling like everything but the lavender it claimed it was. I wish they’d invented these back when I had the cat who chewed all of his own fur off because he needed to be an only kitty–but I really wish they’d just sent us the flea collar they charged us for.

My daughter’s laptop is dying and she is now sharing mine pending the probably dim hope that the guy in Dudley Square will fix it, unlike Microcenter, which smugly told us that they were only told to put in the part–diagnostics as to whether they put the part in correctly would have cost extra. (Really. Literally. I am not making that up. Never go there.) I am spending big wisdom points on not going all banshee on they ass.

Stress, stress, stress. On top of everything else, we had a personnel shakeup at work and I ended up being the only person on the team with Web skills. Such as they are. True, I was out carving out niches in HTML back when pappy was a brat, but over the last ten years, we’ve moved to the CSS Internet. So I went out and got a book which spoonfed it to me, and everything was fine, until the site which looked awesome on the Mac was broken on the PC, meaning that once again I had to break out tabling and faking a lot. But in the end my new site looks one hell of a lot better than the old one, which was put together by a committee of mentally ill people–and looked like it. (I’m mentally ill. I can say this stuff. Sort of like the N word.)

I offered to do a similar redesign for somebody else on the team, but communications broke down because I wouldn’t let her hang on the phone with me while she supervised me making her changes live. This woman, known henceforth as The Client because she flashed me back to my early agency days, is unclear on what the big megilla is making PDFs so different from Word documents and was miffy because I couldn’t edit one of her pre-existing PDF bits. (They wouldn’t spring for the $30 CSS book [“We thought you already knew all that!”]; there’s no way they’re getting me Acrobat–I’m just glad that the Mac does basic PDFs natively.)

She also put up a downloadable document in Word. And I used my nice words and everything, but no dice. Webmonkeys are webflunkies, and as soon as she realized she couldn’t micromanage the entire rebuild, she faded off to a corner. This is swell with me, as Clients get charged Real Money, instead of the we’ll-pay-you-for-a-sick-day method we use around here, and I already have *ahem* a job. THAT at least has been going smoothly, which of course now has my paranoia radar blinking.

So there have been days I’ve been holding onto my recovery with all my fingernails, and I won’t deny that there has been crying. (Crying’s OK. It’s when I start walking around randomly singing all the time that it’s time for the men with the net.)

Writing: Well, you’ve already noticed the lack of blogging. But I did *drumroll* finish the epsilon draft of Max, meaning that as soon as the beta team does this one last crawl, it’s time to figure out what to do next. I was planning on sending it out the old-school way, but I have to talk to an expert on disability before I do that–heaven forbid it actually sell for too much money and I end up shot in the foot. I might end up self-publishing after all, who knows?

Meanwhile, I’ve been plodding along on Max Draconum and lazily wondering what to feed you nice people next. I think I might just rewrite the rest of the Damascus thread after all, seeing as I’ve decided to simplify the book it used to live in and focus instead on another of its plots.  We shall see, we shall see.

But for now I wanted to pop on, tell y’all I haven’t gone back to the hospital yet, and now consider myself poked about the blog thang. Peace, y’all!

Trigger Happy

25 Saturday May 2013

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I was once adopted by a stray kitten whom we named Mathom (which as many Tolkien fans knows means “one of those objects you just can’t throw away and pass around,” and as far fewer Old English students know means “treasure”). He was patient, gentle, and brilliant even for a cat, with a large command of understood English; the kind of cat one can talk to. He would listen, and he understood the logical progression of things: One evening, he lounged nearby while we completed a jigsaw puzzle. He watched us admire it–and then his eyes bugged when we began to take it apart once again. We had clearly fallen off the interspecies ledge of mutual understanding–we had taken so much time on it! Had refused his help so politely! I have never seen that expression on a cat’s face again–not even on the Interwebs.

Mathom hated the vet. Far beyond the average vet-hating of hiding and swearing and an occasional irritable swat. He would turn into twelve pounds of tabby predator, snarling and screaming and lashing out at demon speed.  It took at least two people (one of them me) to pin him down long enough to give him his shots; one vet announced that he was clearly quite healthy and no exam would be needed! And the head of UW’s vet department looked very, very concerned as he washed off his wounds while looking at my load of two-week-late Annie.

“I’d keep the cat away from the baby. Just to be on the safe side.”

We followed his advice and shut him out of the nursery the first night we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Just in case.

Well, Annie coughed. Or something. Not even a fuss. But I had brand-new-mommy-ears, and off I went. OK, that sounds speedier than it was, considering I was clutching my cesarian staples as I lunged out of bed. The nursery was next door, and I was there easily within twenty seconds at most–

–and there was Mathom, pawing at the door and yowing that I had better get my sorry ass over there and see what was amiss with HIS BABY. We didn’t bother shutting him out after that.

But Annie wasn’t The Vet.

At long last (too long, really), after too many visits of them taking out the Dangerous Feral Cat Equipment (carpeting, gloves, and the stick with the gizmo that traps their heads) we all decided to just shoot him full of la-la while he was still in the carrier and come back the next day. Wayne, the vet who came up with this, even cut us a deal on the overnight–it was the best solution for everybody. (And it gave him bragging rights on what a nice bellyrub our jaguar allowed him in the morning.)

Somewhere along the years I found out that there was a word for this: Triggered. It was just that when Mathom went to the vet, he fought for his life–because when Mathom was at the vet, that was where he fought for his life, vets being the places where fighting for your life tended to happen. And so forth. He was triggered. He was already four or five months old when he found me–and intact–so God knows what vet experience had done it. Then again, I suppose being put into a box and taken out by strangers in scary smells and having a cold glass rod shoved up your butt isn’t a primo day for most of us, so maybe it was just business as usual that he was voting against.

Psychology is a horrible, desentientizing thing, to turn such a noble soul into a frantic killer, at the mercy of a fear that not even I could save him from. The vet trying to kill him was in his head, out of claw and hiss range. Nothing to be done.

What made me think of Mathom was that I’m about to move. I have all reasonable ducks in a row–no real shortage of apartments in our comfortably large area, a sufficient chunk of the ready saved up for the exorbitant expense, a now 24-year-old Annie willing to do the anxiety-provoking things of looking and calling and making arrangements–but I’m terrified. I have a huge life change happening right before then (baby #2, now 22, is coming to live with us) and it’s dwarfed by The Move. Because I’m triggered.

Moves have been places where I’ve fought for my life, albeit behind a cheerful nervous smile and hidden tears. Horrible screaming matches. Not being packed. Friends coming and going grim-faced through teetering walls of one’s crap as if plunging through jungle in 100° heat. Annie needing stitches in her eyebrow when crashing her tricycle onto the ramp of the truck. The humiliation of piles of debris that really, really, really should have been dealt with before other people had to catch you in the midst. The truck being too tall for the overhang. Rain. The inevitable mountain by the trash of didn’t-really-need-it, no-room-for-it–but DAMN IT still my STUFF!!! (Although I will always cling to the snapshot of pulling away from the curb as a happy man stood strumming our second-best guitar, already gone to a new home.)

None of these moves were presided upon by the sheriff, but a couple of them only beat him there by a couple of days–those occurred when I was at my most ill and thus most vulnerable, and so those triggers are the deepest of all. It doesn’t help that my best friend is moving too, and is in the midst of her own eddy of uncertainty about what and who goes where when. As I write this, I can barely look at my own possessions without wondering if I will ever find them after we pack and unpack, or wondering which bits will end up on that pile by the dumpster, of being afraid I’ll cry.

But I make myself remember the last move, when I visualized already being moved into my perfect apartment. (Not this one. Trust me.) And . . . my life was still my life, for good or ill. And that’s how it turned out. Unpacking happens, and there are worse things than driving home with somebody who got a good bellyrub and a clean bill of health and is sharing a loud still-drunken purr.

Got any for me, Dr. Wayne?