Cant's Stop Now!

I've less than 20% of Catching Fire to read.  That's book 2 of the Hunger Games Trilogy.  And I just know I'm gonna want to open Mockingjay, the final book, as soon as I finish.

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Not Ready to Hang It Up Yet

My mom has been more productive than I have in the last couple of weeks or more.  She has been crocheting coverings for hangers.  Pictured here are just some of them.  Several have been given away as gifts already and some are already hanging in my sister's closet.  She made rainbow variegated ones for my sister.  These blue ones are for me.  I supplied the yarn and most of the hangers.

This isn't the only thing she has accomplished either. She has been winding my crochet thread off the cardboard tubes into balls for me for over a month now at the rate of one or two per day.  I haven't counted recently but I think I have less than ten more of the cotton thread for her to do.  Which should be about right as my new departure date is tentatively set for a week from Saturday.

It is amazing to see the difference in the space that thread takes up after it is off the tubes versus before.  I will get pictures soon.  But if you've ever seen the pics of the blue chest that held all of my thread you might remember that the cotton size ten thread alone took up 2.5 of the three drawers.  Now with less than ten percent left to do the balls are taking up less than half of one drawer.

This picture explains why as it shows the difference is space two nearly full balls take up before and after winding off the tubes:

These were some of the first that I did in order to make a project portable.  

 Here are some pics of my thread hoard as of approximately a year ago.  I haven't added a whole lot to it since then so it is representative of what I brought here with me this year.  The entire hoard overflows the three drawers and for over a year now I would have them stuffed and have a dozen or or two balls on the hook in portable project bags.

That is a huge help to me.  I had started doing it myself and mom asked if she could help and a few days later I stopped having got busy with other things.  But she kept going.  This will make not only storing the thread in waiting for projects easier but traveling with it and of course the individual projects will be more portable.  Many can be pocket sized even.

Mom also folds the laundry every day.  My sister brings it up from the laundry room and leaves it on the couch for her.  So in spite of her eyesight failing rapidly and constant pain in her hip and back she is not hang it up yet.

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How Fast Do You Read?

Source: Staples eReader Department

Ever since I started reading ebooks last fall, I had the sense that I was reading significantly faster than I had been with tree books using regular sized fonts.  Now I know for sure.

It was hard to judge since the ebooks don't measure by pages and when it says I'm at 20% what is being measured.  Nor when it says 244/556.  When I read 1Q84 this past week the second number was 2343 and I know the book was not 2343 pages so it isn't pages they measure.  I tried counting the words on a screen and then trying to keep track of how many screens I read in a minute or in five minutes but I could not keep the count straight plus trying to keep an eye on the clock did not help my speed.

So I was excited to find this little speed reading test on the Staples site.  It is designed to help you figure out which ereader you would get the most books read on a single battery charge.

The first time I took this test with 12pt font I read less than 300.  I think it was even less than 250--and I still failed the comprehension questions.  All three.  Then I zoomed my browser until the fonts appeared approximate 14 to 16pt and tried again.  And my speed increased to just under 500.  I went from 20% slower than the average adult to 96% faster.

It is still only half the speed I once read but I'll take it and smile.

This drop in reading speed is the fallout from the RP that is taking my eyesight one pixil at a time.

Not only was reading so much slower with tree books but I couldn't read for as long either.  Usually after less than thirty minutes I would need to rest my eyes and so often once I'd put the book down I didn't pick it up again for hours or days.  That was so frustrating.

Last night I started The Hunger Games after midnight and I almost finished it before I had to sleep.  It has been a long time since I came that close to reading a whole book of that length and difficulty level in under 6 hours.  I still haven't finished it as there was so much else going on today.

I can't wait until the next read-a-thon!!!  I might actually be able to list multiple finishes.

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Sunday Serenity #274

LOL

ROFLOL

 Thought it was fitting to post a Sunday Serenity featuring cats since it is March, the month my Grimlyn passed in 2007 on the Sunday after St. Paddy Day and threatened to ruin Sundays for me forever. It was a few weeks after that when I decided to start doing Sunday Serenity posts in order to make Sundays about more than reminding me to grieve.

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Collapsing the Box

This is an awesome demonstration of creative think.  So outside the box you can't see it anymore.

Designer Kelly Anderson challenges us to question our assumptions and then proceeds to demonstrate three of her projects in which she questioned the assumptions about the uses and attributes of common everyday paper products and then designed something that startled and awoke wonder inn the recipient.

She didn't just exit the box she collapsed it...Maybe just for a short time from moments to minutes but the ripple effect of that reassessing has incalculable impact on the culture in which it is set loose into.

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Words Matter Week 2012

Leave it to me to discover a week long event on the evening of its last day.  This is a yearly event for bloggers held the first full week of March each year.  Each day M-F a prompt is presented and anyone wishing to write on its theme may and then link back to the hub blog.  There are prizes too.

This year the prompts were:

Monday:  Writers craft words into memorable phrases, stories, poems and plays.  What writers make your heart sing?  Why?

Gabrielle Garcia Marquez because his stories are like waking dreams that seem to arise out of my own dreams or maybe it is truer to say that my dreams rise up to greet his stories as long lost companions.

Maya Angelou because her poems and stories are the fruit cultivated in the soil of pain and despair fertilized with hope and courage.  Her words teach me the meaning of 'overcome'.

Flannery O'Conner because her stories confront me with the damaged aspects of my psyche and their propensity to commit terrible acts of violence against the spirit and body of self and other.  Forewarned is forearmed so many such acts can be avoided but her stories also speak of the power and hope in redemption for those occasions when failure to heed the warning leads to the inevitable gross acts of unkindness towards ones self and those lives interacting with our own.

Tuesday:  What word, said or unsaid, has or could change your life?  How?

Forgive.  Because whether it is I who has offended another or they who have offended me, the word forgive spoken from the heart has the power to mend fractured relationships and strengthen the fabric of family and community.  We all offend in many large and small ways every day and without the ability to forgive others and ourselves and to accept the forgiveness of others the weight of guilt, shame, resentment  and anger would crush out souls and smother our sanity.  Living with the habit of forgiveness makes living in joy and harmony possible.

Wednesday:  Communication breaks down when words are misused.  What is the funniest or worst breakdown you’ve ever observed?

The words were misheard rather than misused but just this evening I thought my mom asked me to turn the light out here in her bedroom and in a bit of a shocked tone I told her the light was already out and was about ask if she really couldn't tell as I wondered if this was what she meant when she complained the last few days that her eyes were going fast.

But before I could voice my jumbled thoughts she spoke again, enunciating carefully with her dentureless mouth through the apnea machine mask, saying that she meant it was OK for me to turn the light back on if I needed to while I cleared off my side of the bed.

That may not be the funniest instance I've ever observed just the most recent.

There have been a number of challenges to communication with my mom in the years since her stroke what with her issues with mild aphasia and both hers and my hearing loss and vision loss.  Some have been as amusing as this one.  Some not so much.

Thursday:  What Person in your life helped you understand the importance of choosing words carefully?  What would you say to them if you met them today?

My great aunt who had been a teacher and a teacher of teachers in her day once caught me with a thesaurus at the tender age of thirteen and she was dismayed.  She said one didn't have the right to use words one found in such lists of synonyms without knowing them already.  She stressed that it wasn't safe to just plug in any word in the entry as there were subtle and not so subtle differences in meaning and it was the writer's responsibility to know those subtleties and select the word best suited to the thought they are trying to convey.

I am totally paraphrasing as her actual words are vague in my memory.  Still vivid tho is her disapproval.  And even though I didn't really get all the subtleties of her points then it primed me for later understanding.  And over the several years she had left to influence my life she took every chance to share her love of words with me.  Playing Scrabble was one such way.  But she also introduced me to crossword puzzles and the stories of individual words in their etymology and history of use.

If she and I could speak today I'd tell her thank you, many thanks, much obliged, so appreciated, I'm so grateful, gramercy, thankee,  thank you kindly, merci, merci beaucoup, danke, danke schon, gracias, grazie, spasibo Auntie Rie.

Friday:  If you had to eliminate one word or phrase from the English language, what would it be?  Why?

Indifference.  Because, assuming as Orwell did in his novel 1984 that elimination of the word eliminates that which it references,  then indifference itself would be history.  And it is my belief that indifference is the root of all evil not the love of money.  For indifference is the polar opposite of love and passion.  It is worse than hate in that it cannot be moved and while hate is to be eschewed its presence bespeaks the capacity of its bearer for passion and thus also for compassion.  While indifference stands by as vile acts are perpetrated upon the innocent, weak and vulnerable, making no effort to alleviate distress since the distress of others cannot touch one who can't be stirred to care.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Script Frenzy

Script Frenzy

Less than a month until Script Frenzy starts.  I've been debating with myself whether I would participate this year.  Everything is so topsy-turvey  and if I'm going to write I'd rather write on my stories.  But I think I would eventually feel like I was missing out on something if I don't.  I don't stress Script Frenzy in the same way I do NaNoWriMo.  I've always approached it as an exercise for learning a new aspect of my craft--storytelling.  I have participated the last three years and have yet to accumulate more than twenty odd pages but I came away feeling I had learned a lot each time.

I had expected to be back at home before it was time to start preparing for Script Frenzy.  Each year except my first in 2009 I've spent most of March preparing--choosing the story, studying the formatting rules, practicing with Celtix, reading library books on script writing, reading scripts.  And pretty much that just continued into April.  I learned today that my trip home has been postponed yet again. For possibly two weeks and for sure at least one.  So my vague notion of waiting until I got back home to even start thinking about it no long serves.  I need to decide if I'm going to and if so which story and whether to send for more library books.

My first year in 2009, I didn't start from scratch with a new story but was adapting one of my short stories.  I just might go that same route this year.  Or multiple stories if I finish one and am still under 100 pages.  That would take the least amount of prep work which works better for while I'm still at Mom's and have so many other commitments.

The story I worked with in 2009 was Of Cats and Claws and Curiosities.  So that leaves these four completed stories to choose from:  

How Does Your Garden Grow?  part 1 part 2

Running in Circles   part 1 part 2

Blow Me a Candy Kiss   part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5;

Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes  ~ Part One ~ Part Two ~ Part Three ~Part Four ~ Part Five~ Part Six ~ Part Seven ~ Part Eight ~ Part Nine ~Part Ten ~ Part Eleven

The last one features many of the same characters as Of Cats and Claws and is probably long enough to get me all the way to 100 pages assuming I make it that far.  But it would probably take all three of the others and even then may not be enough.

The links are to the 'snippets' I posted for Friday Snippets several years ago.  The stories are complete though.  You can find the links to Of Cats and the many incomplete stories on the post I've dubbed my Fruits of the Spirit Storyworld Portal

Which of the above stories would you like to see as a film?

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Finding Katie by John J Smith: Book Review

Finding Katie

by John J. Smith

John J Smith has a knack for creating eccentric well rounded characters.   In Delayed Flight there was the waitress at the airport that I was especially fond of But Finding Katie is swarming with them.  I'm charmed by eccentric characters because they always surprise me which gets harder to do as the decades go by.

The protagonist, Preston Meadows, himself is quite eccentric.  In his mid twenties, he works for his wealthy father and lives in the basement of the family home.  He has been so sheltered from the outside world he needs to be prepared for an excursion into it as one who is traveling in a foreign country without knowledge of its language or customs.  He is a genius and an empath which is what makes him so valuable to his father's business.

When his older sister Katie, a professor, is kidnapped he insists on looking for her himself.  And that's when the other characters begin taking the stage.  Some briefly, like the cab driver on the first day who thinks Preston must be the Devil  after he catches him cheating on the fare by using his GPS and the rate posted in the car to figure out what he should have been charged.  The driver gets out of his cab screaming and causes a several car pileup.

Then there is the woman who runs the homeless shelter that takes him in, an ex-addict with a mouth on her to make a sailor blush.  The shelter itself is full of eccentrics. There's the woman who works in the shelter kitchen who sings like an angel.  There are the overweight twenty-something woman and the young transvestite who are always vying over the same potential beaus.  They have knock-down drag-out fights over Preston who of course has no interest in either as he's besotted with an illegal immigrant whose brother is a minion of the same gang leader who has Katie.  There is the member of the rival gang who mistakenly believes that Preston is responsible for an injury he sustained and spends the entire novel trying to get even only to have each attempt backfire and boomerang back onto him.  There are many more.  Too many to list in a short review.

The action of the story is one fumbling, bumbling Keystone Coppish episode after another as Preston moves through the days attracting accidents and anger nearly always unscathed as bullets fly, cars explode, fists and Molotov cocktails are thrown, ladders fall, a squirrel steals nuts from Preston's bedside table then leads him on a chase to the roof and a 'vicious' attack dog is persistently distracted by his indiscriminate sex addiction.

The beginning is a bit slow but once Preston has left home the action picks up and there is one laugh-out-loud scene after another.  The young man who was so socially awkward at the beginning he could have been mistaken for someone with Asperger's syndrome has by the end not only made friends, fallen in love and become an integral member of the small community at the shelter, he has found the courage to break out of that family basement living mindset and to defy the father who'd kept him dependent in order to use his son's special talents to enlarge his wealth.

The story was a rollicking good time and I'd like to see sequels with Preston as the accidental detective solving crime with his unique blend of genius, uncanny luck and telepathic abilities.

John J. Smith

Finding Katie Tour Schedule

                                (G)Giveaway?(I)Interview  

Tour Host:      Post,                 Date of review:               (GP)Guest 

Katrina Page Flipperz                       Mar. 2                   None

Crystal My Reading Room Blog        Mar. 6                   G & GP Mar. 8           

Vicki I'd Rather Be At the Beach     Mar. 5                    G

Joy Joy Story                                   Mar. 7                   None

Kari From the TBR Pile                   Mar. 8                   G

Theresa Frugal Experments              Mar. 9                   GP Mar. 9

Pamela Thoughts in Progress           Mar. 11                  G & GP Mar. 7

Patty Books, Thoughts..                   Mar. 12                  G

Jackie Housewife Blues                   Mar. 13                  G  Mar. 18th

Chris Redding, Author                      None                     Excerpt Mar. 14

Donna's Home Blog                         Mar. 14                  I Mar. 15

Fran Vampyre Gurls Book Club         Mar. 15                G & GP Mar. 16

Amy's Book World                            Mar. 19                GP & G Mar. 20

Kathryn Mysteries Etc.                     Mar. 21                 None

Courtney Crunchy Beach Mama        Mar. 22                 G

Lucy Moonlight Gleam's Bookshelf    Mar. 23                 None   

Reviews by Molly                             Mar. 26                  G

Lisa Alive on the Shelves                  None                      I Mar.27

Yvonne Socrates' Book Review         Mar. 27                  G

Brenda WV Stitcher                          Mar. 28                  None

Donna My Life                                 Mar. 29                   G &GP Mar. 30

http://www.virtualauthorbooktours.com/

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So PayPal Wants To Be Our 16th Century PaPa?

What's next?  Pope?

PayPal has notified Smashwords and other online ebook distributors used by indie authors that they will deactivate the accounts of these sites if books with certain content are not taken down and banned.  Granted the content in question elicits a guttural  'eeeeeew!' from me:  errotica featuring bestiality, rape, incest or underage sex.

But that's not the point.  The point is we neither want nor need our credit card company or bank arbitrating what we read, write or buy.

If they can do this to Smashwords how do we little ol bloggers stand against them when they come after us?

Which they already have if you use ad networks to monitize your blog for they are already threatening withdrawal of service to them if they refuse to pull their ads off of offensive websites.

Offensive to who?  Who decides?  Who polices?

So no PayPal, no credit card payment processing, no ad service?  How long can an income generating website stay viable under those conditions?  Not long.  And that's the point of course.

This is a whole new league of censorship as it is not covered by the constitutional protections since PayPal and the credit card companies, banks and other financial institutions whose rules PayPal claims to be adhering to are not government institutions.  So ostensibly, as private companies they have the right to set whatever rules they like.

What this boils down to is yet another instance of Wall Street lording it over those they deem serfs.  It's yet another way they control behavior in the economy by controlling the flow of funds.  So much for their vaunted belief in the free market.

Read more about it:

At EFF: Legal Censorship: PayPal Makes a Habit of Deciding What Users Can Read
At NCAC: NCAC, ABFFE Protest PayPal Ban on Erotic Material
At Smashwords:  Press Release [scroll down to PayPal Censorship]
At Techdirt: Paypal Pressured To Play Morality Cop And Forces Smashwords To Censor Authors
At Change.org  Petition

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The Fog of Words

see more Lolcats and funny pictures,

It was just recently brought to my attention that I have a habit that is fatal for my stories.

It was on Melissa Douthit's blog where she quotes Neil Gaiman about writing:

It's a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk.

And that's wonderful.

Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.

And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that's magic.

My fatal habit?

When I find myself in the fog of the middle of a story I don't keep driving. And what is even worse, I kill the engine.  Which not only stops all movement forward but douses the lights as well.

And then I wait for the fog to lift.

And wait.  And wait.

Meanwhile tying my mind into a pretzel of twisted hope and fear.

Not only does the fog not lift but the wilderness to either side reclaims the road and a tangle of vines envelopes the car winding around the engine and wending its way inside to wrap my limbs and face, immobilizing and blinding me so that I can see neither the fog nor the vines nor the car.  They are the reflection of the tangle that is the story in my mind.

Once this has happened is it too late for the story?  Do I need to abandon it?

But I could no more abandon it than I could my own child.

So maybe that means forging ahead through the fog on foot with my trusty white cane to feel for the edge of the road and my crochet hook to crochet the vines into an orderly hedge.

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Sunday Serenity #273

 Suzanne Ciani:  Go Gently

Love this.  I think I'll be exploring for more  of Ciani.

Today was the last day of my 2.5 days home alone with Mom while my sister was out of town from before dawn to way past dusk.

Tomorrow I need to start packing.  Though I'm not leaving until Saturday I have my stuff scattered all over this house in living room, laundry room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and office.  A challenging task.

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The Weigh It Is

see more Lolcats and funny pictures,

I learned this week that I've lost 17 pounds during my stay at Mom's.  I barely noticed it happening.  I hardly feel I can take any credit.  My sister shops and menu plans based on the Jorge Cruise Belly Fat Diet.  I eat what's prepared for me except for those days when I'm the preparer.  But in that case I'm still using one of the recipes from Jorge's book.

I'm now at a weight lower than I've been in twenty years.  If you add what I lost last summer and did not gain back, I've lost 32 pounds in 8 months.

I've not made an issue of my weight here before and currently have no plans to make it a regular feature but I just had to tell someone.

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Happy 108th Dr. Seuss.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, 

“My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. 

It's the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. 

You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found 

once you go beyond 'Z' and start poking around!”

To honor Dr. Suess I leave you with the LOLcat, some quotes and some links.  Enjoy.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!”

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”


“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own.
And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go.”


“And will you succeed? Yes indeed, yes indeed! Ninety-eight and three-quarters percent guaranteed!”

“I know up on the top you are seeing great sights, but down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.

“A person's a person, no matter how small.”

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.”


“"I'm sorry to say
so but, sadly it's true
that bang-ups and hang-ups
can happen to you"”


“You're in pretty good shape for the shape you are in.”

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.”

http://www.catinthehat.org/history.htm

http://www.seussville.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss

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Book Review: The Red Church by Scott Nicholson

The Red Church

by Scott Nicholson

Many of the families living in this small town in the southern Appalachia Mountains have lived here for centuries.  They are insular and suspicious of both outsiders and each other and secrets fester in hearts and soil.  Which might have something to do with a violent act of betrayal by several families against one of their own.  With each generation weaned on the stories  they carry a burden of guilt priming them for the sermons of a preacher with a message of salvation through the shedding of blood.  "Sacrifice is the currency of God." he says.

Two intrepid locals, 13 year old Ronnie Day and Sheriff Frank Littlefield each have reasons for wanting to avoid the red church by the river.  But Ronnie must walk past it on his way to and from school each day and Littlefield must drive past it daily in the course of his duties.

Ronnie senses the ominous presence of the Bell Tower Monster, a local legend said to have wings and claws and livers for eyes.  It is bad enough having to walk past it twice a day but now his mother wants him to attend midnight mass with her.

Sheriff Littlefield's memory of the worst day of his life is revived each time he lays eyes on the church--the day his little brother died in a fall off the roof while playing a prank on Frank's high school friends.  A prank Frank had instigated.  A prank that drew its effectiveness from the legend of the thing said to haunt the bell tower.  The thing with wings and claws and livers for eyes.  Frank works hard theses days to not remember the dark shadow he saw rise up behind his brother in the bell tower just before he fell.

Ronnie and his little brother find the first body in the church yard after his brother Tim is attracted by the glint of sun flashing off something in the cemetery as they walk past on their way home from school and darts in to check it out forcing Ronnie to come after him.  More bodies follow.  Each one a descendant of one of the families who had perpetrated the ancient betrayal.  Each one gruesomely mutilated.  Each one missing a different major organ.

Scott Nicholson tells a soul shivering story that won't let go.  Not even after you turn the last page.  And he does so with a prose that sings like poetry. I will be reading more Nicholson.  I'm so glad I participated in his recent promo, The Epic Kindle Giveaway, during which I was able to download more than a dozen of his ebooks.

Find out more about Scot Nicholson's stories or his previous website The Haunted Computer

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Rethinking Conventional Wisdom

Front cover

One of the books I currently have checked out on my sister's card is Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing by David Jauss. Published by Writer's Digest.  I am finding Jauss' advice helpful, his perspective upending and reading it enjoyable because even in non-fiction essay's he uses language like a poet.  But this is not a review..  At least not of the content.

You might call it a product review but that doesn't cover the whole of what is on my mind, which is that I was also thoroughly enjoying holding the book in my hands as I read.  Not only was eye-strain minimal even for me with my vision issues but the texture of the pages was pleasing to the touch and the decorative extras were pleasing to the eye and the elegance of the cloth cover exuded luxury.

splash page

I realized I was lusting after owning this book as much for its physical essence as for its content.  Maybe more.  For I could get the content in a variety of formats and still appreciate it--paperback, ebook, audio book--but none of them would give me the same visceral gratification as of a gourmand for an exotic delicacy.

As I mused on this it occurred to me that this reaction was proof that the panic attack the traditional publishing industry is having over digital publishing is a waste of energy and all the words, ink and sweat spilled over the issue useless.  All they need to do is think outside the box.  Not by all that much either.  Just a moderate rethinking of their business model.would remove the specter of irrelevance

table of contents & epigraph

If they could shift from seeing themselves as primarily content purveyors who must have a monopoly over the content and its potential market and must mass produce the cheapest possible vehicle for said content in order to make a profit and realize that they could be creators of works of art themselves they could stop hyperventilating over the impending demise of their industry.

chapter heading

For as long as there are those for whom the handling of an exquisitely made book gives pleasure there will continue to be a demand for them.  And as long as there are parents and grandparents who share their love of handling physical books with the youngsters in their lives there will be new crops of customers.

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Fuzzy Logic

Confused?  Puzzled?  Can't tell which?  Maybe you're confuzzled.

If that's not a word, it should be.  It totally fits the day I just had.

My mind was in a fog from the moment I woke this morning and all the events that followed conspired to turn all potential productivity into false starts and jarring stalls.

First, as I began to get engrossed in a project on my netbook something was causing every move I made to lag.  I thought to check if something was being downloaded--a podcast or update.  While checking on Avast! to see if virus definitions were downloading, I discovered it wasn't even on and had not been since February 14!  I am online nearly 24/7 and had been unprotected for nearly two weeks?!!!

Turned out I needed to re-register my free edition of Avast!  How had I missed the notice on that?  How had I not noticed it hadn't been on?

As soon as I had re-registered I turned on all of the protection.  And then I did a scan.  Which took nearly an hour.  Then while looking at the new status I learned there were more than a week's worth of new virus definitions to download and was about to click the button when I saw below it that there was a new update to the program itself to download which probably would be up to date on the definitions so I clicked that instead.

After the program was updated it required a restart of the computer.  Once back on the desktop I decided I might as well do the Windows updates before I started opening programs again as that would also require a restart.  So I got that download started just before it was time to start dinner.

Fixing dinner was another confuzzle.  One blooper after another.  Just to name a few:  While building my mom's chicken sub sandwich I was trying to sprinkle the lemon pepper seasoning on the chicken and instead of lifting the fliptop I unscrewed the lid.  I dumped at least a teaspoon of the mix into Mom's sandwich.  Then when I opened the Dijon mustard squirt bottle, having first turned it upside down and shaken it's contents towards the lid, it poured into my hand.  Apparently my sister had diluted it because it was so close to gone you couldn't get enough to move off the sides toward the opening.  So while messing with the seasoning and the mustard I left the chicken strips on the grill too long and they got dry.

So then.  Back to the computer.  

As soon as I finished eating my sandwich I headed back to the computer anticipating a quick restart followed by a couple of productive hours before Mom came to bed and limited my activities to what I could do quietly in a small pool of light.

But of course the computer was not done messing with me.

The shutdown process got stuck on the screen that says 'shutting down'.  I waited it out for half an hour.  After ten minutes I'd consulted my nephew who had never heard of such a thing but thought it was probably OK to force a poweroff.  But I had just done a major update and I remembered how the screen would always warn against shutting off the power in the middle of the shutdown so I hesitated.  Finally I decided to call my husband who is at home in Phoenix OR.

But I couldn't find the slip of paper my sister had written my phone number on after having to retrieve it from her cell phone for me three times.  Our number was less than a week old before I left town so I'd not memorized it yet.  I probably should have by now.  I'd also been meaning to record it in my contacts on my computer which is why I'd laid it on the base of the lamp beside my desk.  But it was gone.  So I had to go ask my sister to get it for me again.

Technology was still not done messing with me.

I had to call my house three times in the next fifteen minutes before Ed answered.  Our connection was bad and we spent the first ten minutes saying 'What"  "Hello?"  Calling each other's names and repeating ourselves three to five times.  My sister put the phone I was using on speaker for me and that seemed to solve it for some reason.

Ed too said to power off after I'd explained what was going on.  But he at least sounded confident when he said it.  So I did and then after a minute powered back up and was soon back on my desktop.  Once we had said our good-byes I had thirty minutes left before Mom would be coming to bed.

So much for a productive day.

It was another two hours before the fog started lifting off  my brain and I began to feel more focused and my IQ gained ten points.

So if you had a choice would you rather be puzzled or confused?

Taking into consideration that if one is puzzled one can at least puzzle one's way out of it but if one is confused it would not help one wit to confuse one's way further, I'd choose to be puzzled.

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Book Review: Her Frozen Wild by Kim Antieau

This story was a page turner.  It reads somewhat like a thriller that features ancient artifacts and a bit like a science fiction time travel story and a bit like magic laden fantasy but the predominant feeling throughout is that of a myth being lived out by a 20th century woman.  Which is no surprise coming from Kim Antieau whose every work I've encountered has been permeated with mythic themes.

Ursula is an archaeologist specializing in the tatoo art of the Siberian tribes circa 2500 BC.  Her mother had been an expert on cave art and had disappeared while on a cave exploration in Siberia when Ursula was quite young so she had been raised by her Grandmother who had been born and raised in the same area as those caves and the same area once traversed by the tattooed tribes before immigrating to America after WWII.

Ursula was working at a Pacific Northwest college which had sent an expedition to those same Siberian steppes and when a helicopter crash had injured members of that team trying to transport the tattooed mummy of a woman from 2500 BC which they had unearthed, Ursula was sent to aide the shorthanded team.  Before she left the states though DNA tests performed on the mummy had shown it to have Ursula's DNA.

Upon arriving in Russia she meets a man who woos her and after they become lovers she discovers he has the same tattoos as the mummy.  He hooks her up with a local shaman woman who knows the caves where Ursula's mother disappeared thirty years earlier and who agrees to take Ursula to them.  It is these caves that contain the portals through time which prove also to be the doorway to Ursula's destiny.

I truly loved this story which did not surprise me since I had loved both Jigsaw Woman and Gaia Websters by Kim Antieau that I'd checked out of the library some years back.  Antieau's stories seem to have several common threads: the profound respect for nature and a woman's seeking after the fractured pieces of her own psyche.

I was provided an ebook review copy by the author.

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Sunday Serenity #272 Janacek's Sinfonietta

The Sinfonietta expresses 'contemporary free man,
his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage
and determination to fight for victory.' ~Janáček

Janacek's Sinfonietta is prominently featured in Haruki Murakami's novel, 1Q84, which I'm currently reading.  I got curious after the second time the novel talked about the percussion in the piece and I had to find out if it was real and if so was there a recording I could listen to.

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Just LOLs

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Quotes on Storytelling

Recite after me...

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you. —Maya Angelou

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. —Ursula K. LeGuin

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. —Salman Rushdie

A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first. —Louis L’Amour

Life itself is the most wonderful fairytale of all. —Hans Christian Andersen

I will tell you something about stories, (he said) They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, All we have to fight off illness and death —Leslie Marmon Silko

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes. —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life. —Jean Houston

Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. —Mary Catherine Bateson

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