Hoarding

I’m not a hoarder. My husband and I belong to the if-you-haven’t-used-it-in-six-months-give-it-to-Goodwill club. But I’m seriously considering setting aside an area in the basement for incandescent bulbs, which are being phased out by the government. I know compact fluorescent bulbs save lots of energy. But, setting aside the fact that I have mercury concerns, and that CF bulbs are really ugly, I don’t want them because they flicker and flickering lights give me migraines. Even watching a movie on the new TV with their LEDs, which have much less flicker, can give me migraines.

So I investigated CFBs. I’ve read reputable reports—not just scare websites. Some say “Technology has improved. The new CFBs won’t cause migraines.” Though I can’t find any research that supports this claim. But other websites, also reputable, say “danger: CFB may cause migraines.” A WebMD website recommends that people with flicker-induced migraines wear blue-green tinted glasses when they’re around CFB. Right. I can just see myself wearing Jackie O-type glasses with blue-green lenses. Everyone will look like Martians. On the other hand, they might give me the eccentric-writer look. And everyone knows that makes you more successful. And I could write by candlelight. Except...candles flicker too. Time to buy up those incandescent bulbs.

Friday Five

Top Five Ways You Know That Autumn Has Begun

1. The smell of burnt dust is in the air from all the heaters and fireplaces that have been turned on.

2. We’ve shivering and it’s only 60 degrees. (When it’s that temperature in the spring, we wear shorts.)

3. I have mountains of laundry—all the winter clothes that need to be washed and ironed before they can be worn.

4. I sweep multiple times a day. Jezebel’s winter coat is coming in so she’s shedding her summer fur.

5. You don’t need rose-colored glasses. Sunlight reflects off the fallen leaves and gives the world a pink glow.

I Love Autumn.


What about you all? How do you know it's autumn?

Good News

Two blog posts in one day?! That means I have some good news to share. This morning, we caught Walter! (If you've missed the Walter sage, click here and here.) He is even now being released into the wild to carry on his squirrely life.

It's kind of sad now that he's gone--hygienic, but sad. No longer will I hear the patter of his feet in the attic. Unless, of course, Wanda lives there too. I guess we'll find out.

Here are some photos of Walter. Note the intelligent eyes and beautifully bushy tail. Have a good life, Walter!

I'm a Realistic Cynic

I’ve always thought of myself as a positive individual. But Cal says that I’m a glass is half-empty kind of person. So I re-christened myself a “realist.” But with the latest election stuff swamping the newspapers, my response has been to misquote Bertie Wooster, “It all sounds well enough, but it doesn’t actually mean anything.” Which makes me a cynic. And I wondered, “Have I always been a cynic or did it crept up on me slowly?” Then, I remembered elementary school.

When I was in elementary school, the teachers would occasionally have days when they were sick of the kids. On those days, they’d herd us into the big multi-purpose room, plop us on the indoor/outdoor carpet, and turn on an educational movie. Usually, the girls all sat together and braided each other’s hair. I was never big into hair braiding—I’m not sure how the other girls made the braiding take two hours.

Normally, we watched some kind of Mutual of Omaha flick where a cheetah stalked and ate a gazelle—I think they got these movies to keep the boys quiet. After all, they didn’t spend the time braiding each other’s hair. (I found out later these episodes were staged!) But one day, we had something different. A kind of weird cultural oddities movie. My teacher must have been late to the library and they were out of mayhem movies. Anyway, one of the oddities was a house without a roof. I think the house was in Southern Egypt. The voiceover announced that the house was cool because it had no roof. The people who lived in the house didn’t need a roof because it hardly ever rained in this area of the world. This would be believable if people were actually living in the house and it hadn’t been abandoned. But no one lived there (except jackals) and there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. And judging from the sand and dirt, no one had lived there in quite some time. Maybe the reason they weren’t living there...was the lack of roof!?

Even if you lived somewhere without a lot of rain, it seemed to me that you’d still need a roof to protect you from the heat of the desert during the day. Not to mention the wild animals at night. Or the sand storms that plague desert areas. But apparently, those considerations weren’t vital. At least not to the producers of the educational film.

So to answer my own question...yeah, I was born a cynic.

BTW, if you’re interested, I posted on my book blog about the physical tools I use for editing. Click here.

Walter Update

Today my chances of coming up with a creative post on something new and delightful are almost nil because I have post-migraine brain. Late Saturday night (i.e., early Sunday morning) a sort of neighbor called. She was upset about something. She didn’t want comfort or encouragement. She wanted to whine. Now if she were a friend, I’d have listened semi-patiently to her whine (even though it was the middle of the night). But I barely know this woman. If that wasn’t bad enough, she called back a second time to whine. It was the second call that gave me the prickle in my brain, which said, “Migraine.”

Anyway all that to say that today is a Walter update. (Click here if you don’t know/remember who Walter is.)  In the last Walter post, Cal had gotten a humane trap to put up in the attic for Walter. Ariel was very concerned because the trap had been in the attic for several days and she was worried that Walter was starving to death in the trap. Cal reminded her that we could still hear Walter playing in the attic so he wasn’t “caught.” But he went to check.

Getting into our attic is an athletic acheievment. There is no pull down ladder. Instead a wall in the pantry has a small “door in the wall.” You open the door, hoist yourself into opening, which doesn’t have a flat bottom but slopes toward the ceiling. Then you grab the ceiling rafters and pull yourself up. (This becomes important later on.)

So Cal went to check the trap. When we’d tried the humand trap the first time, we discovered that Walter had bumped the trap enough that the bait dish moved and he could pick it clean from outside the trap. This time, Cal wedged the trap so that Walter couldn’t bump it. (Yes, Walter has a very high IQ. We grow smart squirrels in Tennesssee.) Since Walter couldn’t bump the trap, he ignored it. The trap bait was untouched. So Cal moved the trap closer to Walter’s nest. Maybe the smell would overwhelm his squirrely wisdom.

When Cal was finished, he decided to leave the attic. Except there was a problem. Even though Cal told me that he was going into the attic, I forgot. In the meanwhile, I saw the open “door in the wall,” decided that one of the kids must have left it open (shame on them), and I shut it. And locked it. Fifteen minutes later, Cal was stuck in the netherworld of the attic chute. Eventually, I heard him kicking the door—he couldn’t reach it with his hands. He was very nice about it. He even smiled. But the smile was one of you-see-I’m-right-about-you and added weight to his You-clean-up-before-I-even-start complaint—I’ve been known to put his tools away before he starts a project. I’m very blessed in my choice of spouse. He even talked to crazed, whiney woman the second time she called. He was very nice, but I don’t think she’ll be calling to whine during the middle of the night any time soon.

My Week Of Relaxation

Last Friday I finished the first draft of the sequel to Screwing Up Time. This week was supposed to be my week of relaxation. Week of Relaxation. I may have said those words, but I didn’t really mean them. What I meant was “my week to catch up on all the things that I slacked off on when I was writing.” (See this post.)

So did I get the yard work done? No, I didn’t even get Round-up sprayed. Instead, precious child number three, Jake, had a midterm in Calculus 2 (he’s taking a dual enrollment class—college and high school credits at the same time). Now you’d think that child one, Luke, and child two, Ariel, who are fulltime students at the university would be able to squeeze Jake into their schedule and transport him to review sessions/office hours. You’d be wrong. Luke and Ariel have jobs with weird hours. I drove Jake back and forth, even one time when guess what—the prof wasn’t available. I just love those car trips with no purpose.

Did I get the ironing done? Sort of. I got a pile finished, but not the one I wanted. I wanted to get Cal’s winter dress pants/shirts out of storage, washed, and ironed. (Our old house has miniscule closets.) I didn’t even get the clothes out of the basement. Child four, Matt, was taking the PSAT this week and needed help with the bizarre writing section—I had to explain that “B” was the right answer because the clause was modifying the correct noun even though it broke a grammar rule. I hate defending bad writing.

Did I get the refrigerator cleaned and washed? No. (Though I did throw out the scary food.) Instead, I helped Ariel get information sent off for a summer internship. You’d think that getting a transcript would be easy. At UTC, she just walks into the records office and they print one up. At Chatt State, she had to submit a request form and wait up to TEN days. And they don’t allow you to call and ask if it’s ready. And you actually have to drive down to the campus to find out. Seriously. When it was finally done, we had to fax everything. Except the fax machine was down at the site Ariel had to fax it to. It was finally back up five minutes before Ariel and Jake had to leave for class—Jake had his midterm waiting. He was doing the “I’d better not be late to my midterm.” I was promising, “You won’t be late. You won’t be late.”

So I’m looking forward to next week and getting back to writing. I never get anything done when I’m “relaxing.” 




N.B. If you're interested in discovering which character you're most like in Screwing Up Time, click here.

Lying About Writing

My baby is taking the PSAT today. For those of you who aren’t Americans, PSAT stands for Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test. Of course, he’s not really preliminary yet—that would be next year when he’s a junior. So this is a practice preliminary SAT. Which seems kind of redundant to me. But we take testing very seriously in the US. Though not as seriously as Europe.

Matt’s spent the last two weeks preparing for the PPSAT. (Not to be confused with the SSAT—secondary scholastic aptitude test, which is given to junior high students hoping to get into very academic high schools. Or at least it was when I was young.) Anyway, Matt was preparing by taking a PSAT prep writing quiz. He got an answer wrong and called me over.

Basically, he was supposed to read a sentence and then decide whether the sentence was correct as is, or if one of four other sentences presented the same information but in a better way. I read the sentence. I paused. What?? I re-read the sentence. I paused again. It was a piece of crap sentence with more clauses than Santa. Hmm. At least I knew it wasn’t “correct as is.” Then I read the four other sentences. Whoa. They were worse. Misplaced clauses. Weird verb issues. Parenthetical tripe.

Me: Uh, Matt, the right answer was “correct as is.”

Matt: But it doesn’t even make sense.

Me: It sort of does.

Matt: scowling and thinking “If I wrote that, you’d lecture me and make me rewrite it.”

Me: Okay, you’re right. The sentence is terrible, but it’s better than the other choices.

Matt: These tests are stupid.

Me: Yeah.

Part of me understands why they test the kids on these kinds of sentences. If you’ve ever read a college textbook, you know too. Academic writing isn’t too concerned with clean writing. (I know, I worked in the Academic Press division of Harcourt.) For example, Luke is taking Scientific Writing for Chemists this semester, and all he does is give Powerpoint lectures on really exciting stuff like Acid-Base Theory. I understand that they’re preparing him to be a professor or a researcher because unless he was forced, Luke would never learn to use Powerpoint. But maybe, writing classes should encourage clean writing. Crisp sentences communicate clearly. Stuffy, pedantic writing isn’t smarter. It’s just stuffy.

If they did that, then the PSAT could have examples of good writing. And Matt would be happy. And I wouldn’t have to explain why a terrible sentence was really not terrible. I hate lying.