This was taken at our final combined birthday party, just before the last round of chemo.Twenty years ago today I had to sign some papers.
Then a couple of nurses turned off the monitors, removed the respirator tubes, and turned off the rest of the machines.
I held Ray’s hand. I said, “Good-bye.”
I’d been crying off and on for hours—days, technically (though I’d only slept a couple hours out of the previous 59-ish, so it seemed like one really long, horrible day).
My last chronologically-in-order memory is taking hold of his hand that one last time. My memories for the next few months are like the shards of a thoroughly shattered stained glass window.
When we had our commitment ceremony several years earlier, he promised me he would stay with me for the rest of his life.
He did.
I consider myself indescribably lucky to have had that kind of love in my life. The fact that after Ray’s death I later met and fell in love with another man does nothing to reduce the sense of loss I feel when I think about Ray.
Ray unpacking after we moved into our second apartment.My friend Kristin sent me this picture saying, “How I like to remember Ray.” This was a trip we all took to the beach. He’s prepping his kite for launch.Signing papers after our commitment ceremony.Ray and I at the Pride Parade sometime in the early 90s.
And so it begins!I was really bad this year and didn’t even start the new Scrivener project file for NaNoWriMo until nearly 11:30. Yes, once again I am participating in National Novel Writing Month. If you aren’t familiar, I’ve written about it a few times, most recently here. If past NaNo’s are any indication, I will be blogging a bit less all month because of all the writing on the novel. If you’ve never done it, there is still time to jump in and give it a try. And if you’re already doing it, feel free to add me as a writing buddy.
“Live is sweet, be not too shy!”I love Halloween a lot, as I’ve mentioned before. I love handing out candy. I love seeing people in costumes. I love all the spooky stuff. My favorite Halloween movies are either the classic black & white universal films or the more comedic ones (Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Hocus Pocus, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Haunted Honeymoon, Young Frankenstein to name a few…).
We have our usual boxes of full size candy bars (my husband’s motto for the season is: “Fun sized isn’t!”). We have picked a couple of movies to watch tonight (Hocus Pocus and Witches of Eastwick). I have some pumpkin spice drinks ready. It will be a night of spooky fun!
I hope yours is a great, spooky All Hallow’s Eve as well!
Donald Duck: Trick Or Treat Folks ☻1952 Halloween Cartoon:
It works better if I stay back from the window and have the camera zoom.After putting up the new bird feeder over a week ago and being really happy when birds actually started using it, a new part of my morning routine has become peeking between the blinds to check on the feeder (since opening the blinds sends the birds scattering, and I’d only just have to close them again before I left). I only caught birds actually at the feeder when I peeked once, but I could notice from day to day the level of seed in the feeder decreasing at a noticeable rate. Which was good news, since the other style of feeder we had up all summer never had the seed level decrease the whole time.
On Friday, a work-from-home day, I had the blinds open all day. The birds flew away when I opened, of course, but soon came back. There were several points in the day Friday when there were between three and four small birds arrayed around the perch of the feeder, and three or four more on the deck under the feeder pecking up seeds. A couple of times a crow would fly up and intentionally chase the other birds away, then it would land on the deck and eat a bunch of the spilled seeds. At one point there were two crows on the deck both amicably eating, put when a third crow landed on the rail, the other two leapt at it, cawing and flapping noisily. Earlier in the summer I had deduced that there was a mated pair of crows with a nest in one of the big evergreens behind us, so I suspect the two that were happy to share the deck are that pair.
The feeder’s package had said it held up to two pounds of seeds. I’d filled it completely full Saturday before last, and by this last Saturday, the feeder was a bit less than half full. So Saturday afternoon I took the big bag of seed out to top off the feeder. There were a couple of birds on the feeder and at least one on the deck when I opened the sliding glass door. They scattered immediately, but landed on the branches nearby and chirped at me rather insistently. I interpreted it as them trying to get me to leave so they could get back to eating.
Anyway, while I was getting the feeder down and such, I managed to spill maybe half to three-quarters of a cup worth of the seeds from the bag in a spot right next to where I was working. I filled up the feeder, hung it back up, resealed the bag and put it away, then came back out with the broom and dustpan. I had already planned to sweep the whole deck. The birds scatter a lot of seeds in the course of eating. And they get everywhere. It’s the only thing worse than pine needles. I swept up everything except the little pile where I had spilled, and once it was altogether I only had one dustpan full. And about half of the volume of what I had was the aforementioned pine needles. So while they knock a lot of the seeds out of the feeder while they’re eating, they also eat a lot of the spilled seeds.
So, they appear to go through about a pound of seed a week.
I took this one during lunch on Friday. On work for home days I like to eat lunch out on the veranda. This little guy was the only one brave enough to come back to the deck and hop around eating while I was there. Several times he was no more then three feet from me.Once I had finished sweeping and put the deck furniture and such back to their usual positions, I then scattered my spilt pile under the feeder. My reasoning being that the seeds on the deck will rot once they get damp, but a lot of the birds like to feed from the deck rather than the feeder (some times I look out and there are none on the feeder, but several on the deck pecking away). I probably won’t intentionally scatter any seeds on the deck in the future (unless I have another spill). But I do have to note that on Sunday afternoon when I went out, it was clear that the birds had eaten most of what I spilled. There were seeds on the deck, but it looked like their initial scatter had after a day last week.
I need to try to get more good pictures and see if I can identify them better. The black-headed chickadees were easy to identify, but none of the others are an exact match of the pictures of any other birds in my Audubon book. I think most of them are sparrows, but I also hear the distinct “chick-a-dee” style trilling when I don’t see any black-headed chickadees out there, so maybe we’ve got some other species of chick-a-dees, too.
Trying not to scare the birds away by taking a picture from the further window.At our old place we only sort of had a yard. Our first two landlords (yes, the property ownership changed hands twice during the 21 years I was there) were quite happy to let us manage the two flower beds near our door, and to grow tomatoes in containers, but the lawn portion of the yard and the bushes had to be left as they were. The original landlord had very specifically said he did not want Ray and I to put up a bird feeder, because in his experience they just attracted rats. When the new owner took possession (after Ray died and after Michael and I had gotten together), she said she had no objection if I wanted to put up a bird feeder. But then the question became where.
I will freely admit that much of the appeal of a bird feeder for me is to actually get to see (and hear) the birds. So I wanted to hang it somewhere that I could see it from a window in the house, right? But at the old place I almost always kept the curtains closed, because most of the windows were very close to either the sidewalk (and there was a lot of foot traffic in the old neighborhood) or the walkway to the neighbors’. So whenever the curtains were open it felt as if I were on a stage rather than in my own home. And because the lot the building was on had a steep slope, and our unit was essentially a split-level, the only window whose curtains were routinely open was in the computer room, where the windowsill was about 10 feet from the ground. So if I had found a location to hang the feeder where I could see it from that window, we would have required a ladder on uneven ground to refill the feeder. The upshot was that there was no place that appealed to me to put a feeder so we never had one.
At the new place our veranda is on the third floor (from that side of the building) with tall tress screening most of the view. There are blinds instead of curtains on all the windows, which give us more options. The blinds of the big living room window and the sliding glass door, for instance, are almost always open.
Shortly after we moved in, we bought a sock-style bird feeder kind of on impulse. A friend had been talking about all the goldfinches he got visiting the sock-style feeder he had on the balcony of his apartment, so when I saw one in the store, I grabbed it. After we hung it up, I got one sparrow, but not eating from the feeder. It was eating the seeds that had spilled on the deck when we first set up the feeder.
The feeder was out there all summer. We moved it a few times, thinking that maybe being too close to the window was a problem. It wasn’t just that we never saw any birds at the feeder, the amount of seeds never changed, and there was no bird poop underneath the feeder (something several people warned us we’d be cleaning a lot of once birds starting using the feeder).
I see and hear birds outside from time to time, but never at the sock. I eventually came to the conclusion that at least some of the seeds had started rotting inside the sock, and that clearly a sock-style feeder wasn’t recognized as a food source by the birds in our neighborhood. But I still wanted to try to get some birds visiting the veranda. So we picked up a different type of feeder and a fresh bag of birdseed. I hung the feeder up Saturday. It was raining most of Saturday, and the only birds I saw flying around were crows.
But Sunday morning, while I was out on the veranda having a mug of coffee. A chickadee started flitting in the vicinity of the feeder. It kept flying near it, then flitting away and chirping. Probably being scared off by me. So I went inside. As soon as I got the glass door shut and had walked over the the other window the bird was perched on the feeder and eating enthusiastically. And as I watched, a brown sparrow landed on the other side. They chirped at each other and kept eating. I figured if I opened the blinds further to try to take a picture that would scare them off, so I went over to the glass door to get a picture from there. The second bird had flitted away by the time I had the shot lined up. About five minutes later it was back. I sat down in the living room and just watched them through the blinds.
More birds coming to the feeder!Over the course of the day, more birds showed up. Some birds went after the seeds that got scattered onto the deck by the other birds eating at the feeder. It appears that the new feeder is a success. I’m hoping this means that there will be a lot more birdsong audible at our house.
I drink coffee in the mornings and usually switch to tea in the afternoon. At least when I’m in the office. When I’m home (whether it be a work from home day or simply a day off), I’ll make a pot of coffee in the morning, and since I’m the only coffee drinker in the house, that’s usually more than enough for me for the day. Most of the time. If the weather is cold, I’m likely to make a cup of tea or two for myself in the evening. I’ll also opt for tea if I’m feeling under the weather.
The last couple of weeks my husband and I have been fighting off some kind of virus. One or the other of us will get some cold symptoms one day, and the other comes down with the same thing a day or two later. The symptoms never last more than a couple of days, and we seem to get better for several days… until it starts again. But it’s not just us. A number of my friends and several co-workers have been talking of experiencing the same thing.
On my most recent work from home day I woke up with the sinus headache making a comeback, so as I was getting things started, I set up the coffee maker to make a pot of coffee. But there had been just enough left over in the pot to fill my favorite mug, so I also stuck that in the microwave. And because I was feeling as if I were coming down with something again, I also turned on the electric tea kettle, which gets hot enough to make tea before the coffee maker can finish a pot.
I zipped off over to the bathroom to grab my morning meds and came back to the kitchen to find that everything was dark and silent. It took me a moment to realize what had happened. I’d actually tripped the breaker! At our old place we had to be very careful about not having certain appliances running at the same time as others. The place had been built in the 1950s and the wiring just wasn’t really up to a modern set of gadgets. So we had been very careful here, and had tested a few times to see if we had a similar problem. I was delighted that we could have the microwave and the dishwasher running at the same time without a breaker going.
But we had never had the microwave, coffee pot, and electric kettle all going at the same time, along with the under the cabinet lights that are on the same circuit.
I grabbed my coffee mug out of the microwave and sipped warmish coffee while the real coffee maker perked. And when it was done, I turned the kettle back on and made one cup of tea, because now I was craving tea. I know it’s weird, but when I’m not feeling well there is something soothing about tea that coffee just doesn’t deliver.
And because if was nicely raining and foggy outside, and I had a little time before I had to call into my first meeting, I went out on the veranda to drink the mug of tea. It was cool and breezy out there, so if I had lingered over the tea too long it would have gotten cold. As it was, it was barely above tepid by the time I reached the end of the mug and headed inside.
More than one friend had commented on my love of the veranda. I’m sure it seems very odd. There are so many things I liked about living in our old neighborhood, and I’d been happy living in that specific building for over 21 years. But it wasn’t perfect. There were things we didn’t have, such as a nice spot to sit outside if the weather was at all amenable. I mean, yeah, sometimes I would set up one of the camp chairs on the front lawn, but the lawn was just right next to the sidewalk, and we had a relatively busy neighborhood, so there were always people walking by and I always felt as if I was in a public space. It was always a little odd.
But I really like being able to hear the rain and the wind and the birds and the sound of the neighborhood. And opening windows gives you some of that… but also makes your heating bills really high. Having the veranda–being able to be outside but not have others walk by just a few feet away all the time is really nice. So I go out there a lot. Even now that the weather is getting cooler.
I have been using the temperature of the coffee or tea I take out with me to keep track of the time. Which is especially important if I take more writing out there with me, because it’s easy to lose track, and then wonder why my feet are swelling up with pre-gout because they’ve gotten too cold.
So I need the coffee to wake me, the tea to sooth and focus me, and the rain to inspire me.
Does that make me high maintenance? Or just human?
“Hello Darkness, my old friend.”I’ve seen the opinion expressed more than once that there is nothing more boring than reading about other people’s dreams. But I have also noticed that the people who say that frequently are the sorts whose blogging consists of long cynical (and boring) discourses on how horrible every single person they have ever known is and/or how every book/game/movie/TV series episode they watch is horrible. So, I’m going to ignore them.
Recently I had a weird series of dreams. My husband leaves for work about two hours before I need to get up to get ready for my job. So most weekday mornings I wake up at least partially while he’s getting ready. So I may mumble something to him and roll back over in bed, then wake up a couple of times again before my alarm goes off, each time squinting at the clock and being relieved that I have time to get a little more sleep in. This was one of those mornings. Right after Michael left, I fell back to sleep and seemed to immediately begin dreaming that our friend, Keith, was trying to help me reach an important destination and was driving me in a car belonging to another friend, Mark. We kept getting interrupted by weird things, like a golden box full of Magic: The Gathering Cards being left on the side of the road, or a couple of people who desperately needed directions somewhere, and I was getting increasingly worried we weren’t going to make it to whatever we were trying to get to.
Then someone outside was revving their car motor, and I woke up enough to squint at the clock, note that I had only been asleep, at most, 25 minutes, and fell back again. And I began dreaming not about the weird road trip, but instead about trying to finish laundry. Except the laundry room was inexplicably located inside a hollow tree in a park that was perhaps across the street from my home. It was a little unclear. I kept running back home to work on errands, then back to the park to move the laundry from one machine to another. And there was this guy who kept stopping me in the park to ask questions. I kept thinking he was trying to steal my wallet, and then being relieved that I still had it each time I got away from him.
Something woke me up again, I peered at the clock to see that I still have nearly an hour to go before the alarm went off, and rolled back over to start dreaming about helping a bunch of people I didn’t know restore a six-color web press because we needed to get news out to the world because there had been some horrible disaster, the city was half destroyed, and so forth. I had been drafted to help because I had some familiarity with the process. Some moments the group I was working with included soldiers or government agents of some sort, and other moments we were all just ordinary civilians.
Then I heard another noise outside, pried my eyes open, and saw that my alarm clock was going to go off in less than twenty minutes. And I needed to go to the bathroom, but even though I only had a few minutes left before the alarm went off, I laid back down afterward and closed my eyes. And seemed to immediately dream that I was awakened by a noise outside and I looked to see what time it was and the clock clearly said it was 6:20pm, and I had somehow slept through the entire day or possibly several days and I need to get up right now and start getting ready…
…and I did leap out of bed, because I was convinced I was very late for work, and I grabbed my watch off the charger, strapped it on my wrist, was trying to get my thoughts together… and the watch on my wrist started vibrating because it was exactly 7:30 in the morning and time to wake up. And I stood there, after tapping the snooze button, for a good 40 seconds trying to figure out what was dream and what was reality, because I swear that the watch was flashing in weird colors both a time and a date later in the week just milliseconds before it started vibrating on my wrist, and I was standing there wearing the watch and its face was just changing to 7:31, so the jumping up and grabbing the watch had been real while also being part of the dream.
And while my watch has a lot of customizable faces, none of them look anything like the flashing “OMG, you’re late!” watch face which I could still close my mind and see in memory as if I had just been looking at it.
I don’t understand my brain. I mean, sometimes I am able to tell that a particular dream is just anxiety manifesting because of things going on in real life. And occasionally I recognize individual elements in a dream as probably being inspired by this specific thing that happened to us recently. But mostly they are just weird mishmashes of things that make no sense outside of a dream. So sometimes I think it is a pretty amazing that we manage to communicate and have conversations and such where we seem to understand each other.
Even more amazing that we can read some fiction that someone else has written and get caught up with it to the point that we imagine the events of the story, become invested deeply enough to care about what happens to the imaginary people, and even get into long arguments with other people about whether these imaginary people in an imaginary setting having imaginary adventures were portrayed realistically. Like the time back in high school where one friend angrily asserted, “Come on! A real dragon would never behave that way!” and another starting laughing so hard, he fell off his chair.
This is not a photo of me with my very first iPhone… it isn’t, really, but…I fully admit to being addicted to gadgets. I spend a lot of my time at home writing, reading, and researching on a Macbook Pro, but I also own one of the big Mac Pro Towers with an Apple Cinema Display for a monitor, and I own an Asuratek Ultrabook that runs Windows 7. Plus I have an iPad Pro with the Apple Smart Keyboard, upon which I do a surprising number of tasks that previously required a laptop, plus my iPhone and Apple Watch, and did I mention my Kindle? And that doesn’t even get into the more than half-dozen iPods of various models that I load up with music and rotate through the car. Plus there is a dizzying array of accessories for all of the above. The number of different types of headphones I own (even after purging a whole bunch during the move) is enough to make most people’s heads spin.
Sometimes I try to rationalize this by pointing out the my husband has more computers than I do… and more iPads, and… and… but that’s really deflecting.
Now one thing that I will say in my defense is that many of these things were not paid for at full retail. Most of the iPods, for instance, were picked up used, some of them with more than one previous owner before I got them. And, as I explained in Confessions of a penny pinching packrat, my childhood and early adulthood spent living (barely) paycheck to paycheck taught me to hang on to things. When I buy a new appliance or gadget or whatever the old one is seldom disposed of. Instead it is held onto as a backup in case the new thing breaks. Often older computers and such are passed on to friends and family who need them, and when that isn’t the case, I can frequently find away to sell them or trade them in to get a discount on something else we need.
But, I also love tools that work well, and I especially love tools that work well for particular tasks. The headphones I use for commuting, for instance, need to meet several requirements: they need to be wireless and feel comfortable and not awkward when worn with various hats and scarves and such that I need in various types of weather. They also need to be able to hold up to rain. Because of some issues with my inner ears, they can’t be in-ear. The models that meet those requirements don’t usually have fantastic sound fidelity. But I don’t necessarily want that, because I don’t want headphones to block out traffic noise, and so forth, because since I take a bus, a part of my commute involves walking on sidewalks along busy city streets. So I need to be able to hear what’s going on around me.
That means that the commute headphones aren’t ideal for other listening situations. So I have a pair of wired noise-cancelling headphones that live in my desk drawer at my office, so on those days that I need to block out conversations going on in the cubes and halls around me, I can. And also, if I’m going to listen to music while working, I’d like the quality of the sound to be a bit better than what I’m willing to settle for during my bus ride and walking, right?
Then I have a nice pair of wireless headphones to use at home for listening to music or podcasts while I’m writing or editing. And again, I prefer them to have better music quality than the commute headphones. Unfortunately, it is often the case the wireless headphone with great sound, have inferior microphones. So if I’m trying to have conversations or gaming sessions with friends online, I need a headset that has good sound and a good microphone, which winds up being a wired headset.
And then… well… so the nice bluetooth and wired headsets I mentioned in the above paragraph basically live with my laptop. So there is another set of headphones, wired, that some years ago used to be the primary for listening to music on the laptop, that have been handed-down to the desktop Mac Pro, so that when I use that machine, I can listen to my music without disturbing my husband on the other side of the computer room. And there is a pair of really nice wired noise-cancelling headphones that permanently live in the On The Go computer bag, so that when we’re at cons or whatever, I’ll have a good set on those occasions I need them…
…and then there is a small stash of some older ones that still work well enough in a pinch, and usually one or two pairs of still in box backups for the commute headphones, because when they die, they tend to completely die, and I need a backup right away, right?
It’s a little harder to explain how the primary laptop, iPad, desktop, and Windows-based laptop all fit some of my use cases but aren’t the best tool for some of my other tasks. I mean, I have the Windows laptop because occasionally I need to process a file in software that is only available on Windows. And some of my old backups were done on Windows, since I used that operating system for many years. My new laptop is, in theory, pretty water resistant, but I’m still a bit reluctant to take it outside when rain is likely. And now that we have such a nice veranda, I spend a little bit of pretty much every day out there either writing, reading, or chatting with friends. So the iPad is a better tool for that location, since it is much much much more water resistant than the laptop, right?
I also, whenever possible, I spend my lunch break at the office writing or editing my own fiction, and that happens on the iPad. Which is much tinier and easier to transport along with my lunch and stuff than the laptop.
This is a long way of saying: what works for me, works for me, but may not meet the your needs. Likewise, what works for you may not meet my specific needs at all. And it’s okay if some of us spend more of our time and resources on different things than other people.
“I’ve done a lot of things over the years, but acting normal isn’t one of them.”The first time I experienced mental health therapy was in middle school, after I was injured by a bully severely enough that the school nurse said I needed to be taken to the hospital. Later, in the infinite wisdom of a typical school administrator, I, the perennial victim of bullying, was threatened with expulsion if I didn’t go to counseling and if the counselor did not report I was making progress. They never said progress toward what, but it became clear as the twice-monthly went on through the rest of that school year and the next, that what she was trying to do was teach me to act like a normal boy. I don’t think she ever used the phrase “normal” to my face, but she certainly did when explaining things to my parents.
There were many reasons why I didn’t behave like a “normal” boy. And usually when I have written about this topic before I have focused on how as a queer kid I was gender non-conforming. But that wasn’t the only problem. There are queer kids who did a better job than I ever did of blending in. And there are lots of not-queer kids who were bullied for being different in other ways. I had other strikes against me.
One of my relatives, for instance, described me as “a lost adult trapped in a child’s body” when referring to my childhood. One reason several people perceived me in that way as a child is because my intelligence was several standard deviations above average. That had two very distinct effects on my behavior. One was that I often understood and knew things people didn’t expect a child to know, but the other was that there were very few of the kids my age that I got along with, so I kept forming close relationships with adults. And that increased the gap between myself and most of the kids my age.
Now, the word “normal” derives from the Latin normalis, which means made according to a right-angle or square. But ask most people what normal means and you’ll probably get something close to what Oxford calls sense 3: “Constituting or conforming to a type or standard; regular, usual, typical; ordinary, conventional. Also, physically or mentally sound, healthy.” Interestingly, that usage of the word in English only came about in the early 1800s. When in first came into the language, in the late 1400s, it referred exclusively to a regular verb. Then in the mid 1600s its meaning expanded to refer “Right-angled, standing at right angles; perpendicular.” Which is how it entered the lexicography of mathematics.
I was interested in science for as long as I can remember. We can blame my mom the science fiction fan for that. When I was a baby, she literally read aloud whichever Robert Heinlein or Ray Bradbury or similar book she had checked out from the library. And mathematics is something I fell in love with early in school. We moved around a lot because of my dad’s job in the petroleum industry, but as luck would have it, the school district where I attended first grade and a portion of second was one that won awards for excellence year after year. They gave me a great start.
For instance, the explanation my second grade teacher in Fort Collins had given me of the Distributive Property, was how I got labeled a freak on the first day (three schools later) that I attended school in Cheyenne Wells. It was late spring in Third Grade when we moved to Cheyenne Wells, and they were just getting to things like the Distributive Property of Multiplication. The teacher tried to explain it to class, but her explanation wasn’t very good. And during the period when we were supposed to be going through a worksheet and helping each other with the problems, the teacher overheard me explaining the the kid next to me how it works, so she brought me to the front of the room and made me explain it to the whole class. And then they all knew I was a Math Freak, a Brain, and the Teachers new Pet.
It wasn’t just the first school, of course, it was also the fact that I loved to read so much, that whenever I was given a new set of books at school, I would read them all the way to the end on my own as soon as I could. And half the time that I spent in the library I was tracking down non-fiction books about topics that came up in the science fiction, mystery, and adventure books that I loved. And most of the time throughout grade school and middle school, I would rather sit in a corner and read than run around the playground or do other things the rest of the kids were doing any time we were turned loose.
That always failed to endear me to the other kids.
Despite the fact that at heart I was an introvert, I also loved explaining things to people. Which often came across as me being a show off or know it all.
As an adult, I work in a technology field writing and designing documentation and help systems explaining how systems work. So all of those characteristics eventually became useful, eventually.
But there was no amount of counseling from that therapist—or mentoring from my middle school wrestling coach (and pre-algebra teacher!), or the other attempts by specific teachers who tried to take me under their wing to steer me through the shoals of bullying—that would make a smart, queer, introverted, book- and science-loving, know-it-all pass for normal in a typical primary or secondary school.
Which isn’t a slam on the other kids, but rather the way we herd children together by age and leave them to their own devices to work out social dynamics. The theory is that we learn to get along with diverse people that way, but the system creates an artificial social environment that encourages some of our worst behaviors.
I survived. I not only came out of the system free of bitterness and resentment, I often find myself in the position of defending public schools from the distorted statistics some people wave around trying to prove other options are better (spoiler alert: the statistics are on traditional public school’s favor). And when it comes to bullying, private schools and charter schools don’t handle those situations one iota better. In fact, for marginalized kids, they are much, much worse, statistically.
But I digress.
Learning to get along is a worthwhile goal. Conformity and trying to pretend you’re something you’re not, are toxic and destructive. I wish we were better at teaching the former, rather than enforcing the latter.
This is how I feel, even though the trees outside our windows are all evergreen.I got to spend some quality time each day of the weekend sitting out on the veranda with a mug of either coffee or tea, and it was glorious. On Saturday afternoon I was out there with the laptop and a pile of marked up pages an got some good editing time in. The sky suddenly got dark as the clouds thickened, and I decided to take the paper and laptop inside before it started raining. And I barely made it. It started raining as I was carrying things through the door. And then, I grabbed a new mug of hot tea and the iPad and went back out to do some other writing while the rain splattered on the edge of the deck. There is an eave over the deck. If the rain is light, only the edge of the deck where my flowers in pots are gets wet. But if it’s raining hard, a bit more water splatters a further in.
Anyway, I love the rain. I love autumn. I love the trees changing color. I really like being able to go out on the veranda.
I haven’t posted a goal update since the first of August, for a couple of reasons. One, I was still reassessing some of the goals, as the move was such a big disruption. Another reason was related to the move, and I’ve felt both frustrated and embarrassed about it. Several things went missing during the move.
Some of the missing things were trivial: a silly hat that often call my writing hat, a couple of books purchased just before we started the move, and a set of old stories and art discovered during the packing that I thought would make a fun submission to one of the APAzines I participate in. But other things weren’t: the galley proof of my novel with all my copy editor’s comments, a notebook with all of my notes for one of the roleplaying games I run, another notebook with notes of the other roleplaying game I run, a pile of editing comments on new scenes I had written for the novel in galley proof, and the file with my notes on places to submit short stories.
While we were still unpacking boxes, we just assumed they were in a box we hadn’t gotten to. The fact that I thought I had put most of those things in the same box and one of the boxes I marked as needing to be unpacked early made me a little extra crazy, because we had opened all the boxes with that sort of marking. After we got the last box unpacked, both my husband and I searched through closets and so forth, but no luck.
Then last weekend, literally a few minutes before midnight on my birthday, I pulled a plastic file box off a shelf to file a new insurance policy (that had been sitting on the coffee table since I opened the mail a week or so before). And when I opened this plastic box which I thought was full of legal documents and such, I found all the missing things: my silly fez, the edits, the gaming notebooks, the old art and stories, the books, the other files… it was all there. All the legal documents that I thought were in the plastic box were in a banker’s box on the next shelf over.
The embarrassing part is that during all of my searching for the missing things, I kept not opening the plastic file box because I was sure it was full of legal documents. And the fact that when I looked in the banker’s box and saw that it was full of file folders full of various documents never made me twig to the possibility that there weren’t legal documents in the plastic box is where the embarrassment comes in.
Anyway, since two of my big goals for the year required me finding a couple of those missing things, it was hampering my progress. Now that the missing things have been found, I’ve been busy all week working on edits. There’s a lot still to go, but I’m in a much better position, now.
I’m still reassessing the goals, particularly as I work on a new, um, project that I hope will help me finish more of the writing related tasks faster. But I’m not ready to talk about that other than to a few others just yet.
So, I am still working on my goals for the year. I’ve mentioned before how much I love autumn. I’ve also mentioned that autumn often feels more like a new year to me than New Year’s Day. So maybe it’s a good thing I’m still reassessing. New season means new beginnings.
“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!” —Humbert Wolfe
Font Folly 