Font names can be very misleading. Say the word ‘gothic’ to most people, and they think of large, imposing old houses with lots of gables, or people dressed all in black with lots of skulls and other symbols of death and horror on their jewelry. And if you search on Gothic Fonts you will be pointed to a lot of fonts that look like this:
I took a break from writing one night and went into the other room to see what my husband was doing. He was watching an animated show I’d never seen before, and I wound up watching the rest of the episode with him. Since the show was more than half over, I didn’t completely follow all the ins and outs of the plot, but it made me laugh a couple of times.
Another night I was channel surfing on my own, and happened across the same show. The episode was more than half over, again, but I enjoyed it. This happened several times; I never saw a complete episode, always catching it midway through. Also, as often happens, though I saw the show seven or eight times, I had only seen parts of maybe three episodes, because I kept happening across re-runs of episodes I’d already seen parts of.
This obviously happened back before I owned a TiVo, because what I would do now when I happen across a show like that is set the TiVo to record some episodes for me so I can watch more and see if I really like the show.
But back then I would have had to remember when the show was broadcast and make an effort to be free when it was one, or manually set a VCR to record it. Which I never did.
For several years after it went off the air, there were no re-runs…
When I set my goals for the year, I said I’d do regular check-ins. We’re nearly two weeks into a new month, so I ought to check in.
I tried to set very concrete steps for achieving my goals. Inspired by a friend’s suggestion, I tried to identify a better habit to replace each bad habit. So how am I doing? Continue reading Goals? What goals?
This year’s hay fever season started out really awful in March and April. So bad that I had been bracing myself for a horrid summer. While I had almost non-stop mild hay fever symptoms for the entirety of May, June, July, and August, I only had moderately bad days every now and then, only really bad once or twice.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were all moderately bad. Then I had trouble sleeping Sunday night/Monday morning. Thank goodness the third time I woke up to get a drink of water (I always wake up thirsty several times in the middle of the night on bad hay fever days… but also when I have a cold), I became conscious enough to take some extra decongestant. Otherwise my sinus headache would be much, much worse than it is.
My husband is on an earlier work schedule for summer, so I’ve tended to get up when he leaves, which is before my second alarm. This morning I barely woke up when he kissed me good-bye. I had trouble getting out of bed to stagger to the alarm clock to turn it off for the second alarm. And similarly had difficulty staggering across the room to turn off the third alarm.
While I was trying to force myself to wake up enough to take a guess as to how many hours it had been since I took the decongestant (so I could know when I could take something else) I looked up the pollen count.
It’s low. Very, very low. And has been for the last couple of days.
And I have a low grade fever.
Damn.
When I was 14 I started writing a mystery novel with perhaps supernatural overtones. I’d been writing stories for as long as I could scribble more-or-less recognizable words on paper, though by 14 I was typing on a big heavy typewriter at a decent clip.
My protagonist was a 12-year-old boy—for plot purposes I felt it was important to begin the story in the summer between his sixth and seventh grades at school. He lived in a small town that was an amalgam of all the small to medium-sized towns I’d lived in thus far.
My habit at the time was to write until I couldn’t think of what happened next (or my folks yelled at me to stop making all that clattering typing noise and go to bed). The next day I would read what I had written so far, and usually I could start typing away, writing the next scene and the next and so on.
So one afternoon, when I had several chapters finished and wasn’t sure what to do next, I re-read what I’d written thus far. It was all going well until I hit the last scene I’d written the night before… Continue reading Literary Crimes
I don’t make coffee at home on days that I go into the office. I’m the only person in the house who drinks coffee, so it doesn’t make much sense to make a pot just so I can have one cup in the morning before I go to work. And making a single cup takes as much prep work as making a whole pot, so I just don’t make coffee at home on those days.
Some weeks ago the “Clean” light on my coffee maker started flashing insistently… Continue reading The appliance that wouldn’t die
So I rousted Michael last night to walk up to my favorite restaurant for dinner. It was a little late at night, but fortunately they’re open until 11 on Saturdays. During the walk back, we noticed that a lot of buildings were completely dark. Then we turned a corner and saw that all the houses and streetlights on our street were dark.
The power outage, according to the power company website, hit about 11,000 customers. Once we got home and grabbed a couple of flashlights, we were mostly concerned with getting our computers (that were all plugged into uninterruptible power supplies) properly shut down. Then making sure that not everything in the house would turn back on at once when the power came on.
I went to grab a couple of candles in jars from the top of the entertainment center. Sitting on top of the first one I could see was a cute little plushy husky that had been given to me by a friend when he came from Alaska to attend a sci fi convention with us. I took hold of the plushy and tried to lift it out of the way so I could get the candle. But it was hung up on something. I tried to get it loose, and after a few seconds, something came loose and flew over my head, clattered against the wall behind me, then hit the floor. I had the plushy free in my hand, so I set it aside and got the candle down. I started toward the kitchen, where I knew the matches were. Fortunately, I swept the light down on the floor just before I stepped on the big brass spike.
What brass spike, you ask? Why, the one-and-a-half inch long brass spike sticking up out of the little brass pillar candle holder that was apparently wedged between a couple of the candles in jars up on the entertainment center. As best I can figure, since there is no sign on the cute little plushy of any holes or even snags, is that one of its legs was somehow wedged between the candle jar the plushy was atop, and the brass pillar holder. The pillar holder is what flew over my head and made all that clattering noise, and of course landed right where I would have stepped on it, with the spike that is probably more than capable of going right through the soles of my tennis shoes and well into my foot.
I picked up the small brass foot trap and put it on a counter. I retrieved the matches and my little kitchen step ladder(I’m only 5-foot-5-inches tall, I need the ladder to get into cupboards which in most kitchens appear to have been designed for use by NBA players). Once I got the first candle lit, I climbed up on the ladder to get the rest of the candles.
There was a lot more junk up on top of the entertainment center than I remembered. More candles, yes, but also a bunch of other things that I had completely forgotten about.
We got enough candles lit and spread around the apartment that we could move around without carrying flashlights with us. And even though the power company web site (smart phones are a wonderful thing in these situations) had predicted power wouldn’t be restored until 4:30 am, just shortly after I got all the candles set up, the lights came back on.
Of course.
Today I pulled the rest of the stuff down off the entertainment center, dusted, and tried to figure out which things up there we actually need, which should be thrown away, and which just need to be put away somewhere else. One of the things up there was a Magic 8-ball. Yes, the silly toy.
It wasn’t just a little dusty, the dust was adhering to the plastic, so I had to get soap and water to clean it. But it looked all pretty and glossy afterward. I asked it, “Am I going to get the rest of the house cleaning done today?” shook it, and turned it over. The little plastic-dodecahedron inside with the silly answers on it floated up… with the point up. The level of liquid inside has gone down enough that it won’t push the dodecahedron against the little window so you can read one of the answers.
Now, a rational person would toss it into the trash at this point, right? It isn’t worth taking to Goodwill because it doesn’t work. But here’s the problem. This Magic 8-ball is the very first Christmas present I ever opened from Michael. It’s a present he grabbed precisely because it was silly, and he thought that I should have at least one silly toy to open for Christmas. Unlike a couple of other things he gave me that Christmas, it wasn’t something picked up because he thought I wanted it or needed it. It was entirely an impulsive buy.
But it’s the first present I opened from him. So, the moment I even thought about throwing it away, a voice in my head lamented, “What kind of heartless person would throw away the first present your husband ever bought you?” And I could feel the guilt and future regret cranking up in my subconscious.
Michael was out running errands when this happened, so I set it on the table and moved on to other things. When he got home, I showed it to him and his first words were, “You’re pitching it, right? I mean, someone gave it to us as a gag gift, right?”
I told him he had given it to me. “I did? Okay. Well, I can buy you a new one.”
“No! That’s even worse than me holding onto it!”
And I threw it in the trash.
I was 99.9% certain he would tell me to throw it away, but here’s the thing about having been raised by a whole family of packrats: no amount of rational thought on my own can completely silence the guilt-inducing voices in my head. Any time I want to get rid of anything I have to fight a chorus of, “You might need that some day!” and “But so-and-so gave that to you! If you don’t hang onto it, that’s the same as not respecting so-and so!” and so on.
People who aren’t packrats don’t understand this.
And it isn’t enough to have just anyone tell me I can throw it away. I have to either argue with myself for days to muster the determination to toss it, or someone who falls in the “extra-special-trusted-person” category of my irrational side has to tell me it’s all right to get rid of.
It’s a constant battle. I only win on my own as often as I do by thinking about Hoarders. Because I could so easily turn into one of those people.
It’s scary!
Just a bit over three years ago I was thinking about when I should update my laptop. I was using a three-year-old white MacBook. It was the low end product back then, but it had been a big improvement over my previous machine. At the time I acquired it, my laptop was a secondary machine, used when we traveled and such, but my desktop computer was still my workhorse.
But over the three years I’d had the MacBook, my writing habits had changed a lot. Most of my writing, and a lot of other computer work, was happening on the laptop. Part of it was simply the convenience of being able to write kicked back in the recliner.
Years ago a Catholic co-worker told me this joke: “You want to know the real meaning of Catholicism? Bad things happen to you because you are BAD!” I told her that my Southern Baptist upbringing had instilled the same lesson. Though the more I thought about it, I realized that the archetypical evangelical statement is more along the lines of, ‘Bad things happen to you because you’re bad. Bad things happen to me because god is testing me.’
Neither mindset is content to accept that a lot of bad things just happen.
The truth is, humans aren’t comfortable with that idea, no matter how skeptical and rational we may be. For instance, this morning I got a voice message from my husband informing me that he had been in an accident while he was riding his bicycle to work: he’d been hit by a car.
Never mind that he was well enough to operate the phone to tell me what had happened. Or that he was well enough to push his bike the rest of the way to work and would drop it off at the repair shop. I, of course, freaked out.
And as I was calling him to get more details than were in the voice mail and assure myself he was okay, one part of my brain was busy concocting things we should have done to prevent this. I didn’t, at that point, have any details of the accident, but that didn’t stop that corner of my brain from thinking, ‘Why did I let him ride his bike into work?’
There were other crazy voices in my head, too. He had kissed me good-bye when he left, but as usual I wasn’t really awake yet. I couldn’t remember what I had said to him as he left. Had I said anything at all? Or had I just grunted incoherently, laying there half asleep in bed, hoping I could snooze for a few more minutes before I had to actually get up?
Not that any of those things would have prevented the accident, but you have the thoughts, nonetheless.
And that wasn’t all. Another corner of my brain was mad at me for not hearing the phone ring when he called. Even worse, another piece was upset that I didn’t know, somehow, the moment the actual accident happened that it had. I should have felt something, right? You shouldn’t be able to just lay there, snoozing and listening to news on the clock radio, when the person you love is being hurt.
After talking to him, and being reassured many times that he was okay, the various parts of my brain had to keep arguing. The more rational parts tried to talk me down. If he didn’t ride his bike, he could still get hurt. How many times have I almost been hit by a car just walking to the nearest bus stop, for goodness sake? Just two weeks ago I and a bunch of other pedestrians almost got mowed down in the crosswalk 12 feet from my regular bus stop.
And how many times, while riding the bus or walking home, have I seen the car wrecks where at least one of the drivers or passengers in one of the cars had to be taken away in an ambulance?
And what about that time, years ago, when a whacko on a bus shot the bus driver while the bus was crossing a bridge, and the bus plunged off the bridge just a couple miles from our place?
We can’t make anything 100% safe. The rational part of me knows that. But we don’t want our loved ones to be hurt, so we still wish, and plan, and second guess. And some people pray, and other people make bargains with the universe, and other people refuse to think about it as if not thinking about it will prevent it from happening.
All we can do is take reasonable precautions, be aware, and try not to do things that endanger others. I know this. I understand it. I have to live with it.
But I don’t have to like it.
There have been a number of studies done on ear worms, how they form, why they persist, and means of getting rid of them. For years, thanks to a suggestion from my friend, Juli-sans-e, the way I have gotten rid of annoying ear worms is to think of the Bumblebee Tuna jingle that was used in commercials in the late 60s through mid-70s. I think this only works for those of us of an age to have heard the commercials a zillion times during formative years. I also know that for at least one other friend, while the Bumble Bee song succeeds in driving out the ear worm, it’s just substituting one annoying ear worm for another. I’m lucky in that the Bumble Bee song will only keep going in my head for a short time after I use it to drive out another. For some ear worms, the only way I can get them out is to actually sing the Bumble Bee song aloud a few times, just thinking about it isn’t enough…
Font Folly 