Scattered (UJTU)

1. How do people travel all the time and still manage a normal life? I went on one five day trip from June 27th to July 2nd, and I'm *still* all discombobulated. I'd originally hoped to finish the first draft of Mind Jinx (my current work in progress) by mid-July, but that's out the window. Haven't recovered my usual routines AT ALL. New estimate: end of summer at best. I'd also hoped to write a trip report, but I feel like I'm a bit past the window for that. May yet take a stab at it, however.

2. My garden has grown tremendously. I have strawberries, peas, carrots, lettuce, and am starting to get cherry tomatoes. The big tomatoes and summer squash are right behind, and I have a baby eggplant and baby delicata squash coming along nicely. Now if I can just manage to water faithfully.... Western Washington may have a reputation for rain, but it pretty much all hits in the winter and spring months. Around the 4th of July, a switch is tripped, and it's high desert here. Nice in that you can pretty much plan on weekend outdoor activities without worrying about wet, but it does mean you suddenly go from plants drowning to plants dying of thirst, and you have to develop new habits instantly.

Sweet potato vine, just for fun!

First full sized tomato (a Cascade) is changing color...

Bitty baby bell peppers

Summer squash coming along

Baby delicata squash

Eggplant! First time I've seen these growing....

Mmmm, sugar snap peas....

3. I'm in the middle of a major music muddle: for *years* I've intended to sit down and redo my music library by re-ripping all my old CDs and then re-adding any digital purchases from backup/cloud. I had a lot of gaps and strays and tracks that weren't titled consistently, and it was driving me crazy. I'm thinking about upgrading to a new computer sometime this year, and chances are it won't have a built in CD drive, so now seemed as good a time as any to tackle this project. I'm going to get it all tidied up and then back up to a decent external drive, so I have a clean starting point from here on out.

It's turning out to be even more daunting than I anticipated. I'd forgotten just how much music I've acquired over the years, not to mention Teaching Company courses and the like. But re-ripping has been an interesting walk down memory lane: I still like a lot of the same music I did way back when, but my buying and primary listening habits have fluctuated, and going back through the albums is like excavating layers of the last fifteen or twenty years of my life from sedimentary rock. Early classical period...flatpicking guitar period...folk rock...middle early classical...Irish. Etc. It's all pretty mixed, honestly, but every so often I come across an album that all but defined a given time in my life and which I've not listened to in a long while. Fascinating how a few notes can trigger a flood of half-forgotten memories.

NaNoNoNoNoNoNo Not Ready!

So, let's see...locally, we have about 36 hours to go until the NaNoWriMo madness begins. Where do I stand?

• I did a lot of *claiming* to plan back in September.

• I did some actual *attempted* planning in October.

• I got as far as boldly labeling a pocket notebook "NaNoWriMo 2013" in anticipation of using it for ideas and notes.

• My current plot goes something like this: What if? Then something. And bam, SOMETHING!

In other words, I got nothin'. I am tempted to scrap my vague idea and rewrite an old idea instead.

But hey, NaNoWriMo is all about embracing your inner pantser, right? Right??

NaNoNotebook, plus the rest of my current pocket notebooks: the Field Notes is for NaNo, the Scout Book below it is a logbook of sorts with brief notes on each day, the Moleskine cahier below that is for to-dos, and my brain-dump notebook is on the bottom.

Ancient Family Tradition: World's Laziest Halloween Costume

As I've mentioned a time or two, I'm the oldest of eight kids. That's a lot of Halloween costumes to design, a lot of kids to be high on sugar and excitement. Add to this the fact that I grew up in Vermont, where Halloween costumes often must be compatible with sub-freezing temperatures. Inevitably one kid ended up that night with a costume that fell apart at the last minute, or which proved inadequate for the weather or which lost some crucial component. For these situations, Mom designed...the dog costume.

Now, lots of people dress up like dogs or cats for Halloween, but usually these are fancy schmancy deals involving ears on little headbands and detailed makeup done from kits with step-by-step directions, and maybe even a furry suit. This was not our way. Instead, Mom would scrounge through the dryer and the bin of lost socks and find two more or less black socks that more or less matched, and tuck these into a hat as ears. Then she'd take a wine cork and burn it slightly, and use that to give us a black nose.

That was pretty much it. A few dots on the cheeks, maybe. Black clothes if we had them.

Most years at least the baby went as a dog, and I remember one year (I think Mom was newly pregnant with one of my youngest siblings and really not much feelin' Halloween) we went as an entire PACK of puppies. People loved it. "Aw, so cute! What a great idea!"

I've used it as a fallback a couple of times even as an adult, most recently at a party this Saturday when it was either that or go uncostumed. I did solicit other ideas, some of which were pretty funny: writing "Error 404: Costume not found" on a t-shirt, for example, or Mike Clemens' mustache-on-a-stick method of playing both yourself and your evil twin, or (horrrrible, but still funny) wearing biking clothes, taping a syringe to my arm, and going as Lance Armstrong. But in the end, I went for the dog.

It ended up pretty slapdash. For one thing, it turned out my only black socks had writing on them, so I turned them inside out so at least they'd say "Dr. Scholls" in blurry backward fuzz instead of as a crisp, clear tattoo. For another, I didn't want to drive up I-5 with a black nose, so I applied it in the bathroom when I got there (burnt cork) while small children banged on the door and whispered theatrically about needing to peeeee. So it came out rather lopsided.

Whatever. Good 'nough. That's the name of the game.

Music 1, NaNoWriMo 0

Musical things I did this week: 
1. Went to two concerts: one jazz/swing, with Paul Anastasio, an excellent fiddler (he played with Asleep at the Wheel, and for Merle Haggard, among others), and also saw Randal Bays, who is a highly decent Irish fiddler and also a great guitarist, both fingerstyle and rhythm (he was the rhythm guitarist on Martin Hayes' first few albums, for those of you who know who Martin Hayes is...)  Both concerts were at a very small local venue, where you could really see what the musicians were doing.  Lots of fun!

2. Went to the local Irish session for the second time.  It's a somewhat humiliating experience in that I don't know the tunes yet, so everyone assumes I'm a rank beginner and treats me with the sort of condescending kindness reserved for beginning musicians in such situations.  They're all very nice--don't get me wrong--but it can be a blow to the ego.  Not that I'm advanced, but...I know I'm better than I seem to be.  I hate that feeling.  The other frustrating aspect is that the mandolin is *so* much quieter than a whole crowd of fiddles and whistles, so I can't hear myself at all.  Even on the tunes I do know, I have to more or less hope my fingers are going where they're supposed to, and I'm very reluctant to experiment with playing along on tunes I don't know well because I can't hear how wrong or right I am.

We shall see how this develops.  I'm determined to go regularly and really work on learning the music, no matter what, but I'm developing fiddle envy.  The concerts didn't help this.

3. Practiced "some whole bunch," as a younger sibling used to say, including visiting a friend so we could practice Emma's Waltz, which we're going to do as a duet at the open mic portion of a monthly jam we both attend.

And I'm working on chords (memorizing plus executing), a bit of theory (modes and scales, mostly), and trying to learn the Irish session tunes, one or two at a time.  It will be a long while before I've got even a fraction of them down well enough to play at full speed. :\  But you have to start somewhere.  I also foolishly picked up a pennywhistle this week, and have been goofing around with that.  Too fun!

NaNoWriMo stuff I did this week:
OK, so maybe it isn't quite a *zero* score.  I have about thirty letter-sized pages written as of this afternoon, which I'm hoping to transcribe over the next few days.  But even though the story is fun and the narrator interesting, I'm really struggling to stay focussed and motivated.  I had some time off this week due to the wisdom teeth yanking on Monday (which went fine, by the way), and hoped to get ahead of the game, but I figure I'm about a day behind instead (hopefully a bit less by later today).  Here's hoping the time change helps give me a boost over the next few days.  I've learned from past NaNoWriMos that morning writing time is the make-it-or-break-it element for me: I simply cannot just make up for it in the evening.  My mind doesn't work well at night.  At all.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I gotta go play "Cup of Tea" about eleventy billion more times.

Revelations

I did accomplish one thing this weekend aside from noisy fiddle repair: I cleaned up my primary desk, and also did a buncha sorting through the various drawers and cups and storage bins where writing supplies and other junk tend to accumulate. Threw out a lot of things, cleaned up others. In the process, I discovered a few things.

For one, I may have the largest private collection of those correction tape dispenser thingies in existence:


Seriously, there are about a dozen! I guess I can stop buying 'em for awhile, now I know where they all are...

Also, after clean up, I'm even more perplexed by my complete and utter inability to ever find a Sharpie on those occasions when I need one. I mean...they were everywhere! More than half a dozen of 'em, spread throughout the house!



They are corralled now. Hopefully they'll stay that way.

Don't make me set up a webcam to keep an eye on you while I'm out and about, Sharpies. I don't want to hurt you, but I will.

Milk crates full of memories...

Faced with housework, I procrastinate in every way possible. This weekend, I organized my journals while putting off vacuuming. After my move this spring, they'd been crammed onto shelves in no particular place or order, so I gathered them from the four corners of the house and arranged by date. (Mostly by date, anyway--for some reason, there are a few journals in 1997 that overlap. Apparently 1997 was the Year of Living Disorganizedly.) They span some twenty-seven years now: that little one all the way on the left was given to me for Christmas when I was six, when I was first learning to write.

And of course, once they were all nicely organized like that, I proceeded to yank them off the shelves (those classy milk-crate shelves...) and look through them. Some are in better shape than others. The colored journals I favored in the nineties fared the worst: the blue fountain pen ink I used in some entries vanished, and at least one journal was the victim of temporary storage in a damp basement. And there are large gaps in the record: I tend to write more when there isn’t as much going on, which means that most of my entries, especially those in the most recent journals, are mundane daily details and rambling. Their value is in the writing of them: they help me process my days and sort out thoughts, and many may never be read again. But other content makes me smile, or laugh out loud, or get a little weepy. Inconsistent though they may be, they contain a lot of memories, these books.

There is evidence of my long standing fascination with office supplies:

Translation: John and Jim got a car. I got crayons.

There are birthday reports:

I recall this as one of my best birthdays *ever*, especially the bird seed, strangely enough!

Book reports:


I’ve waxed poetic:

I was twelve when I wrote this entry, and apparently hadn’t yet learned appropriate apostrophe use in its vs. it’s. I guess I’ll cut my young self some slack....

I’ve attempted artsy:



Sometimes relatively casual entries make me smile, looking back. Stumbled across this comment about a conversation with my brother as I was flipping through...


A wedding and several children later...I’d say it turned out pretty well!

I’ve recorded thoughts on births, deaths, current events, pets, books and music, bemoaned my own bad habits and worries about the present and future. Reading through these, I’m amazed at how much I’ve changed in some ways, and how little in others. It’s kind of fun to revisit once in awhile on a rainy afternoon.

And speaking of revisiting and rainy afternoons, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the day I picked up the gloriously restored Olympia SG-1 from Blue Moon Camera.



Happy rebirthday, big guy!

NaNo Blah Blah #3: In Which I Ramble On and About the Mojo 3000

OK, so I meant to write "the last time I did NaNoWriMo on a typewriter" in there, not "by hand". It's past my bedtime already. Ungh.

At this point, although as I said, the SG-1 is the best I've got--no question--I still have logged far more hours on the Hermes 3000 than any other typewriter. I'm understandably attached to it. It was nice reminiscing a bit today...I'm thinking I'll spend a whole NaNo day on it now and again. If I figure out the words-per-page for it and add that calculation to my spreadsheet, it shouldn't throw me off.

Pages = approaching 37.5. Words = about 12,150.

Psych me up, and other assorted blathering

OK, so this is really just an Update Just to Update (UJTU) in disguise. So sue me.

1. Psych me up.
Fact: for going on three years now, I've been wanting to get down to Blue Moon Camera, preferably with at least one typewriter-needing-help in tow. This is the time of year when I come closest to actually making the venture, but so far I've never quite talked myself into stepping out the door. Fact: statistically, I probably will *not* be instantly squished the second I drive out of Lewis County. Fact: this Saturday, the weather is supposed to be cloudy, but not raining, which is a rare occurance this time of year. I'm also not on call. The chance of both of these items coinciding is going to become less and less probable as time goes on. Fact: the SG-1 has several issues that I cannot fix on my own, but would be an amazing thing indeed if those were fixed.

So...lie to me. Tell me I can do this, and why I should. Tell me there will magically be a HUGE empty parking space with bright shiny arrows to guide me when I arrive at the end. Tell me I can get there in one straight shot without getting lost, despite my miserable sense of direction. I know, I'm not giving you much time to get me riled up, but if I wait too long, I'm afraid I'll lose my nerve again.

2. NaNoWriMo dreaming
We now come to that antsy stage where we have some idea of what we're going to write (even the pantsers like me), and have been conversing with our characters, feeling 'em out. I keep imagining whole scenes, the dialog, the way people are standing and moving and the state of their clothing, and not being able to write them down instantly is killing me. Urgh! I also need to come up with working names for characters. Right now I have names like bassist-who-is-off-visiting-Aunt-Somebody, accidental-children's-writer-who-hates-kids, Thump, and sister-of-Joey. Also, the whole thing revolves around people living in an apartment building, and a lot depends on shared walls/floors/stairwells, and I haven't yet decided on a final map. I need Legos or wooden blocks or something.

3. Computers are evil
On my birthday, my friends introduced me to the Bejeweled game on Facebook, which is, essentially, crack in game form. You have to slide little colored gems into rows in order to make them explode. Sounds so innocent and dull, doesn't it? But oh, it will suck your life away. I spent about an hour last night saying to myself, "Just one more game, and then I'll quit. OK, just *one* more...." I love and loathe it. It is yet another reason I'd be far better off avoiding the computer for most of November.