Blog For Free!
Archives
Home
2004 July
2004 June
My Links
Starwarsfan74's Blog
Tigerlilly's Blog
Supertoy's Blog
Spirit97's Blog
Gentleblackcat's Blog
Librarianguish's Blog
Ratmagick's Blog
Mabraven's Blog
tBlog
My Profile
Send tMail
My tFriends
My Images
Sponsored
Blog
|
| Good Morning |
| 07.10.04 (9:26 am) [edit] |
A light rain patting the window. Steve was up at 4am to make the early shift; he doesn't do a lot of Saturday work, just to cover for someone who's sick or on vacation. I got up with him because there's no point pretending to sleep.
I don't have much to say for myself this early in the day. Meal plan - minestrone soup for lunch, make a cauliflower/bacon quiche for dinner. In between -- write. I can't even promise better blogging next week; the Sales Ledger dept need some help with their invoice run and I volunteered (the overtime is nice).
Hope things go better for you soon, Ratty.
|
|
|
| |
| Owl, Lark or Robin? |
| 07.09.04 (10:54 am) [edit] |
Reading my April/May/June issue of Mslexia (British magazine for women who write), the article about listening to your body clock. It appears psychologists are finding that we each have 'best' times for doing creative work.
"Larks" do their best writing before 10am
"Owls" after 10pm
"Robins" in short periods roughly corresponding to office hours.
For all the writers out there, which one do you think corresponds to you?
|
|
|
| |
| Now Where Was I? |
| 07.08.04 (11:00 am) [edit] |
I've finished another chapter! I love the ecstasy that accompanies that final click of the "Save" icon. It took six weeks to write. :o Yes, six weeks.
But I think I've found my rhythm. Since I was alone in the apartment I read the chapter aloud. I've tried this before and not liked the sound; this time it worked and the words were just right. All that deleting and rewriting, all that blank-faced staring at my screen, all those trips to the kitchen or the bathroom when I got stuck...they must be part of the process. I was feeling a bit guilty. So much time and so few words produced. But by the time I'm finished with those words they are [i]finished [/i]indeed.
Eat your heart out, Stephen King. Writing can be Zen; it's cool too.
|
|
|
| |
| George Harrison |
| 07.08.04 (10:26 am) [edit] |
I'm playing his Greatest Hits CD when I'm in the car. My favourite track is "My Sweet Lord", the one that got him sued by that girl group (see how famous they were...I can't remember their name).
I may have to cut this blog short and start again because Steve's mom might call in a few minutes. She just got back from a three week holiday with her new man. It's weird to see a seventy-five year old all flushed and excited like a teenager, weird but nice. Anyway, we haven't seen her for ages now so it's just to put a date in her busy social diary (I'm not joking; she doesn't stop that lady)
Yep, there it goes. Must leave you for a short while.
|
|
|
| |
| Where Has the Time Gone? |
| 07.06.04 (11:45 am) [edit] |
Was it really Saturday, my last blog?
It's not like I was busy. Not really, really busy; I try not to get really, really busy because my body turns terrorist on me and tries to bring about the revolution.
Let's see. Sunday we saw sister, brother-in-law, two neices, one nephew and six rats. We meant to go Saturday but my nephew cut his foot falling off his bike and it needed stitches. He was very anxious to show us these :x when we arrived!
I mentioned to Ratty that the two male rats are never let out of their cages together. Maybe Scabbers and Louis won't be that bad because they don't have females around. Apparently that's not the only 'rat rule' in the house. Snowy and Avril cannot be civil to each other and must be kept apart. Snowy is a bully really, the biggest rat of them all but with terrible insecurities. She shares a cage with Bakura because that lady doesn't tolerate any nonsense.
Bakura is pregnant (the result of another rat rule that got forgotten). My sister says she doesn't know what to do about the babies; she's going to put an advert in the Free Pets section of the Buy n' Sell paper and see what happens.
Monday - intended to blog. Didn't because the erratic behaviour of my browser was getting worse. Fewer and fewer graphics were downloading. I cleared out my Temp Internet Files folder and that problem seems solved. But I still have other strange things happening; when I close my internet connection the PC still thinks Internet Explorer is open and tells me this when I try to Shut Down. On bootup my Active Desktop consistently needs to be reactivated.
I think I need a firewall. All you people who already have firewalls are welcome to post "Well, DUH!" comments because I deserve them.
|
|
|
| |
| Cold as Spock |
| 07.03.04 (11:07 am) [edit] |
|
I'm from Ravenclaw!
Hogwart's Sorting Hat Quiz
made by The Genki Gang
You are smart, calm and calculating in a situation or problem you're faced with.
You base your decisions more of logic than a standard of morals.
But be careful, sometimes in your search for knowledge you come across as cold as Spock.
No surprises there, then.
|
|
|
| |
| Hufflepuff |
| 07.03.04 (10:22 am) [edit] |
Hufflepuff House!
Sorting Hat
brought to you by Quizilla
So what does that mean? I chose all the bookish, nerdy, wimpy answers -- that's what!
|
|
|
| |
| Land of Nod |
| 07.03.04 (6:24 am) [edit] |
Never say when you are tired, "I'll just get comfy on the couch and read this book."
You will wake in total darkness to find the book is trying to smother you. Your husband will say he didn't have the heart to disturb you as you looked so adorable (?) and your feet will have frozen solid. One of the cats will have curled up where your legs bend; this is probably what your husband really meant was adorable.
So those of you who received comments from me in the dead of night Pacific time will now understand. I needed to wind down again.
Now is it me, or has Photobucket lost its mind? In the last few days I haven't been able to upload a lot of headers and pics, and when I write my blogs I only get a choice of five emoticons. Is it because I'm a cheapskate dial-up account holder? Is it because I don't have Flash? Is it because my great grandmother was Welsh?
This week my box scheme contained:-
18 potatoes
A paper bag of broad beans
A head of lettuce with maroon tipped leaves
Some swiss chard
3 kohl rabi (small ones)
3 globe artichokes
6 onions
2 heads of broccoli
A paper bag of peas in the pod
8 carrots
4 bananas
2 kiwi fruit
6 apples
3 oranges
I haven't bought fresh produce from the grocery store for over a year now. It has made a difference to the amount of fruit and vegetables we eat; because the contents of the box are a mystery until it arrives it forces me to plan my meals around the contents. Before that I would have planned my meals around meat. We now eat more meatless or nearly meatless meals, and a heck of a lot more soup. The vegetables keep much longer too.
I can identify with Librarianguish and her desire to have a homestead. Part of me would like to move out of the apartment and buy a piece of ground where I can plant things. But then I also fear the extra work would eat up all my time and stop me writing. The apartment is just right. I can quick clean it back to front in two hours; if I want to scour the living daylights out it that only takes an afternoon. Someone else does the garden, washes the outside windows and does all the maintenance.
We're going to drop in on my sister this afternoon. Actually, she has rats--six of them. They share four cages in her living room and their names are:-
1. Snowy (yes the white one with pink eyes)
2. Sausage (don't ask)
3. Spike (named by my nephew after that blond guy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though why I don't know because the rat is white with patches of grey)
4. Brad (after Mr. Pitt)
5. Avril (after Ms. Lavigne)
6. Bakura (as in Ryou from Yu-Gi-Oh)
It's strange I hadn't thought to say that earlier. How long have I been blogging? Not quite two months, so maybe that's not so bad.
|
|
|
| |
| The Headers Have Disappeared |
| 07.02.04 (11:23 am) [edit] |
Or at least I can't view them.
The Accounts dinner was on the enjoyable side of tolerable, so I can feel I've done my duty. A lot of sore heads in the office this morning (not me, I might add. I am so prone to headaches and fatigue as it is; God only knows what would happen if I went asking for it).
As I'm very tired I'm going to paste a poem in this space and hope it will suffice. See you tomorrow.
PINK AND GREY
Pink and grey
are adjectives used to describe the decor
behind many corporate Ladies’ Room doors
chosen to divert, not call attention to the function of the place
Replace them
with shades duly deemed to remind the interred
of the colour of issues we witness occur
they would be diverse, not decoration but admission of the facts
Black and puce
would symbolise all the forbidden display
of the bleeding inside and the wiping away
of the honest self, no disruption of production with our pain
Red and green
would picture obsession with body and fat
A mirror adjudicates when we retract
or let loose our life, not claim existence beyond the context of our shape
Baby blue
Agony, joy -- thin walls separate twain
who grasp the same destiny holding their stained
indicator strips, reproduction adding friction to our lives
loved and not
Secrets we share with the fixtures and tiles
would colour translate in a lunatic style
honest but unkind. For consolation in affliction we would choose
pink and grey
|
|
|
| |
| When I Was Twenty-Seven... |
| 07.01.04 (2:57 pm) [edit] |
We'll blog now before we have to go to the Accounts dinner.
Ratty having a birthday got me thinking back...back...through the mists of time to 1991 when I turned twenty-seven. Is there something about that first adult decade of life, or were RatMagick and I the only ones who didn't know what we wanted to do? I'd already been in and out of five different jobs. Friends and relatives, in their concern, thought maybe I was getting broody but I tell you the thought of getting pregnant terrified me more than the jobs. :shock:
And I remember I got this 18 month contract as secretary for a building site manager. He didn't really have enough work for me but his budget allowed for a secretary so he hired one. He said he didn't care what I did as long as I stayed in the cabin, answered the phone, made him coffee and looked busy whenever he had visitors.
Lots of times I'd spend the entire working day alone with nothing to do. Naturally in such circumstances one reads (I didn't have a PC--before civilisation). That was the summer I read "Gone with the Wind" and other fat, intimidating volumes.
And in the autumn the strangest, strangest thing happened; I had never experienced anything like it before or since. The best way to describe it is to say I was taken hostage by a dream. A story started to play out in my head as vivid as a film, except I wasn't in control of the projection. It took a couple of months for the saga to exhaust itself. It spanned several generations of characters, and while it was imposing itself on my consciousness I could hardly sleep and a lot of my days were long, foggy episodes (thank God I wasn't working in air traffic control).
But the most bizarre and scary thing was that when this dream story ended, it went back to the beginning and started to run again. And I thought, 'my God, how will I stop this?' And the notion came to me that my mind was trying to tell me to write down the story. So I wrote it as a screenplay (a very BAD screenplay, but complete) and once that was done my dreamworld reverted to my control.
And that's what started me writing after more than ten years of trying to do all manner of other things. Life is so weird. I probably could have saved myself the schizoid episode by recognising my true calling from the beginning (you always know, don't you? Don't you? I mean I always knew in my heart of hearts but you block that out, you function in denial for so many reasons: other people's expectations, money, fear of rejection, yadda yadda yadda...)
Maybe the twenties is the time for shuffling the deck before you get down to dealing the cards?
|
|
|
| |
|
|
