No snow today (coming tomorrow night, at least for a few hours) but cold and windy here in Carolina. Understand our European friends are having an early winter as well. Hope everyone stays warm!
Of course it is! If you're originally from "up North" (which, to locals, is anywhere outside of the old Confederacy, regardless of the actual geography), this is just a little treat to remind you...just how glad you are that you don't have to live with this @#%& all winter long!
Don't worry, it will be in the 60s again before you know it.
I don't know. We haven't been above freezing for several days now. Temps in the teens to 20s, wind chills single digits to teens, more snow on the way tonight, followed by rain and sleet, with a possibility of 1/4 inch of ice. Some are predicting that the ice will be south of us. I don't remember an early December being this cold for this long. I do, however, remember having snow on the ground for weeks from before Christmas 1976 to February or later. The next year was pretty bad, too. One of my nephews was born at home in Indianapolis, end of January 1977 -- fire department had to bring the doctor in on a snowmobile.
I'm not sure there really is a paradise. Blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, cyclones, floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis -- is there any place free of some form of natural disaster?
Of course it is! If you're originally from "up North" (which, to locals, is anywhere outside of the old Confederacy, regardless of the actual geography), this is just a little treat to remind you...just how glad you are that you don't have to live with this @#%& all winter long!
I'm originally from CA. We only moved from MA. Nonetheless I grew accustomed to some cold in the New England winters, enough that I think that people around here are ridiculously overdressed.
And I was born & raised in MA (Cape Cod--yes, I have 1 or 2 Kennedy stories) and went to CA for a few years (to get away from those godawful winters). Small world, ain't it?
Mommio: the Blue Ridge/Great Smokies. 4 seasons, but none too extreme.
I didn't leave the house yesterday -- too slick out there. We had a little more icy rain this morning -- very fine mist -- and a few flurries this afternoon, and it is still slick. I decided to get the mail about half an hour ago. The box is on the other side of the street. I had a couple of unintentional slides, waving my arms in the air to keep my balance. Thank goodness I didn't fall, but I can tell you, I do NOT need ice skates out there to go flying across the ice.
The word is that we won't get above freezing until possibly Sunday, but it will cool back down that evening. There is a possibility of more snow moving in on Monday. I still haven't mailed my few Christmas cards because i don't want to brave my neighborhood streets to go get stamps. If it isn't necessary or an emergency, I'm not messing with it.
Our snow storm turned to freezing rain & then rain by mid-morning Thursday; by mid afternoon the roads were still slick but not icy. I had the day off anyway; my wife called out. Today was sunny and 45; tomorrow, however, we could have another sight of flurries for a few hours.
I suspect this is what "climate change" will mean, at least in the short term: more extremes, less predictability. It was in the nineties right up through the end of Sept; snow less than ten weeks later.
8" snowfall this morning. Wet, heavy, snow. Lost power for three hours. Much cursing as I hadn't the smarts to get up and make coffee as soon as the lights started to flicker.
Great Xmas present: a CD/DVD burner. Now I can catch up with the last round of eMusic downloads, before the darkness set in...
Thought I'd pipe in with a not-so-alternative report from central/northern Europe.
After the chaos that was my home in the UK under an inch of slushy stuff, I find myself near the Baltic Coast, where they are cheerfully managing several feet of snow. We even have a tunnel to the front door (well, nearly). It's -20 deg C and the countryside here-abouts is looking stunning in the sun, sparkling as if someone had gone mad with glitter. The biggest chore is keeping the woodburners going and refusing yet more offers of food.
I feel for any of you going through those storms I see on the news - hope you are all keeping warm.
@martyna, that sounds perfect. All I want to do is listen to music, read books, and twiddle my servers. Time to rustle up a visa application and convince my family it's the right thing to do. :-D
he he, twiddle?! oh yes, if only I had access to a server.
Seriously though, a fantastic place to spend the winter holidays, all you need to know is the drinking etiquette...
Hmm, maybe I should take my own advice...
So, I'm ready to start trying to sell my third novel (and maybe my second, too). Things have changed quite a bit on the publishing frontier since last I tried this almost fifteen years ago. Apparently it's a wise idea if I up my profile by either starting a blog or creating my own site. Here's what I'd like to be doing on it...
Have most of my novel to read. Be able to take orders for purchases, either download or hard copy. Be able to constantly post short stories and other written mediums to the site so that people have a reason to keep checking in. Hm, other stuff, too, crap, I should've started this post after another couple cups of coffee, I'm all flat right now. Anyways, I think you get the idea.
I'm doing my own legwork right now investigating the resources out there at my disposal, but if anyone here has any helpful advice on blog vs. paying for my own site, and especially pointing me in the direction of helpful resources that I can investigate on my own, obviously that would great. From what I've read here, there's several of you that have already dabbled in this kind of thing.
In the meantime, it keeps snowing down here, which is totally awesome when you're unemployed and your wife has ordered you to stay inside and write and try to make some money off of it. She is doing the final proof of my latest novel and I expect to be sending out book submissions in a week or two. I just wrote the first chapter of my next novel, and I'm excited by the possibilities inherent in the story and the writing voice that I've always gravitate to. Also, a friend apparently has connections with a small comics press, and she invited me to put something together; I immediately wrote the first chapter and if I don't mind saying so, I loved it.
I keep getting injured or sick. This has been a long month (or more) of bad health, and it's been tough shaking it, but I'm pretty excited with all the writing I've been doing. It's always a happy thing to feel like I'm doing exactly what I most want to do with my life.
As I've been out sick and doing the recluse writer thing, I have no small town southern news to report.
On the music front, my wife is going to be seeing a Guided By Voices reunion show this weekend in Louisville. Her favorite band ever, well, no, maybe that's Tom Petty. Dunno. GBV is up there in the top three, though.
Well, what it sounds like you are looking for is a CMS (content management system). I've some experience setting up and maintaining Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla and all of them have their pros, cons, quirks, and charms. I've done all three of these packages for both personal projects and professional ones and of them Wordpress is my favorite for support, extensibility, and ease of maintenance. Drupal would be next for its flexibility but maintaining it can be a challenge particularly between versions when you have heavily customized it. Joomla, is flexible but can be overwhelming with its granularity.
Hosting is a whole other game, I prefer self-hosting either at a colo or on EC2 (at the moment I'm used shared through 1&1) but I'm the type that prefers to tinker on servers more that blog as evidenced by the paucity of content on my personal site. Plenty of hosting facilities offer turnkey solutions for what is affectionately referred to a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack where ll you need to do is select if you want to use Wordpress or Drupal and the host does all the grunt work. Wordpress.com offers hosting and I believe that the service has solid support to help guide the stock blog platform into something more CMS orientated.
Probably, the best advice I can offer, though, would be whatever you choose make sure you can control your data and export it easily if necessary since your data is your product and livelihood.
Probably, the best advice I can offer, though, would be whatever you choose make sure you can control your data and export it easily if necessary since your data is your product and livelihood.
Important advice, and the only reason I insist on doing everything myself. Oh, who am I kidding, I like making my blog difficult.
I second the WordPress recommendation. I've used it since before it existed (my site originally ran on its predecessor b2/cafelog) and its amazing how simple it has become to set up a blog. Wordpress.com may be your best bet at least to start. Then you can either get your own domain and pay for them to continue hosting (small fee from what I understand) or export everything and strike out on your own. Plenty of us here can help.
Thank you for your responses. Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, but I've been in a writing frenzy that I haven't experienced for years. Not only am I wrapping up the final edit on my third novel, but I've already written the first couple chapters of my next book (and have a firm grasp of the voice). Also, I've been writing more of the comic book/graphic novel, and the also just general twiddling/writing/journaling kind of stuff, too. And not to forget, my powerfully resonant posts both here, AAJ, and emu. It's been great.
I've been looking at Wordpress, and it looks promising. Turns out a buddy of mine is a whiz at this kind of thing, so he's gonna be showing me some options, too.
The edit on my third book is going slower than expected. My wife has been bringing up valuable questions as she goes through it, and now I'm having to consider retooling much of it. This is not surprising, really. The book was about 45,000 words longer than I thought it should be, and some of the questions she is raising are helping me whittle down the story into a tighter focus.
In the meantime, I've been going nuts on my fourth book. As opposed to the epic novel of my third book, the fourth will be something of a novella (50,000 - 60,000 words long), and I'm about twenty five percent of the way there, maybe even a bit more than that. Often when I finish a large project (ie, a novel), in the immediate aftermath, there is almost this springboard effect where I get a hot writing flash and just go nuts writing the next story/book. Usually it flames out pretty quick, like in less than a week. This time, however, I seem to have accumulated sufficient experience to harness this energy, and now I'm off and running. If I can get at least to the half-way point of the book (and I'm thinking I will by end of next week), even if the crazy energy dissipates, I can still finish the book.
It's about two childhood friends, now in their early twenties, who share an apartment and a heroin addiction. One of them, near the start of the book, gets "discovered" and becomes a rock star and begins touring. The story is told from the perspective of the friend who gets left behind, and how he goes through the bleak routine of a drug addict while getting updates of how his friend is doing through various media outlets and the occasional postcard.
I'm writing it in the first-person perspective. My first three books were all third-person, but I've written short stories and unfinished stories of various lengths in an attempted first-person, so I've got some experience with it. I'm enjoying how the first-person perspective frees up my style, lets me play the story in a looser style than I have previously. I also like the idea that in a couple months I might have two books to try and sell and become the next Great American Writer (or at least make enough money to pay rent and maybe downpayment on a house one day, give my wife the opportunity to work part-time so she can pursue some of her own creative outlets). We'll see. As I've mentioned many times, I live in hope.
My writing room affords me an excellent view of the dismantling of one of the town's two water towers. It's pretty cool watching them peel a killion-ton steel orange positioned on legs and suspended two hundred feet up in the air. I'll be sad to see it go, however. I rather like water towers.
The snow melted. It's been snowing like mad lately. This whole winter has been great for it.
I don't know if anybody reads comics around here, but I've really been enjoying the title "Unwritten" on the Vertigo label. Excellent story and magical art. Just beautiful.
Hey, has anybody here ever read Raymond Feist's "Magician"? Well, the whole trilogy actually? I was thinking about re-reading it, and noticed it has a new printing that's been labeled the "author's version" or some such. I'm curious if anybody has read both versions. It's a great trilogy. Well, the first two books are excellent, the third not so much. It's the adult version of Harry Potter would be a way to describe it. I think it came out in the eighties. The boy magician story, though, wasn't new even then. Not by a long shot.
So, last weekend, we had to get away for a night, just drive somewhere and get away. We had a unused gift card to the Kentucky State Park system. We headed up to Carrolton, which is in the northern part of the state right on the Ohio River, about halfway between Louisville and Cincinnati (which I still struggle to type correctly on the first try). I don't know how the state park lodges are in other states, but the ones we've stayed at in Kentucky have been pretty nice. We were on the third (top) floor of a lodge building at the end of the building. They look like your standard motel/hotel room, but it does have a private balcony that looks out either at the river or into the woods. Our was woods, and I was kind of glad for that, something more intimate, and besides, on the other side of the river was some sort of corporate park, totally fucking up that portion of the view. So, we did good on the room.
Every other car in the parking lot was pink. Apparently the only guests in the lodge that night were me, my wife, and a Mary Kay Cosmetics convention.
We ate in the restaurant, which had this ridiculously good buffet. I ate an embarrassing amount of baked spaghetti, which normally only a sucker would do when there was decent catfish and prime rib available, but there is no way to describe how wonderful that baked spaghetti was. The strands were cut short and there were several layers of cheese on top which stayed in place even when I scooped it onto the plate. Well, there you go. The restaurant had a nice view of the river, and later, when the full moon came out, there was that, too.
Just above the restaurant, there is a common area part of the lodge, this great room with vaulted ceilings and cathedral windows, everything made of nice wood, fireplaces and one tv on mute in a corner. Lots of sofas and chairs. There were games available. My wife and I played Connect Four. I crushed her, and I felt like a man doing it. I'm not embarrassed to say that. I crushed her.
The drive up to the park was beautiful. We took small country roads that led through small country towns, long stretches of hilly woods broken by long sunny valley of farm land and fields and streams. The sun lit everything up like heaven and it was never in our eyes.
When we arrived, after we acclimated to all the pink cars, we dropped our bags off in our room and went for a hike. Nothing long, maybe three miles, but it felt good, especially after being in the car for over an hour. We enjoy hiking together. I proposed to Katie on a hiking trail.
The next morning, we had coffee and irish cream on the balcony. We went for another hike, much shorter. We drove around the park and enjoyed some of the views. We had a little picnic down by the river. We fed a dog. The ducks, however, didn't seem interested in my bread. Their loss. Birds got the bread instead.
We hit a flea mall in town. Didn't really see anything, but we were both more in a looking than buying mood.
Hit Louisville that night. Ate at an Ethiopian Restaurant called Queen of Sheba (Mommio, it's really good. It's right by the Air Devil Inn and the tiny airport off Taylorsville Rd, what's it called, Bowman Field, I think). Stayed with friends and had a great time.
But I'll never forget all those pink cars. My wife sure won't. She almost left me and her job to reinvent herself as a Mary Kay consultant, just so she could have one of those pink cars. I have to admit, she would look cute in one.
In the meantime, I've been going nuts on my fourth book. As opposed to the epic novel of my third book, the fourth will be something of a novella (50,000 - 60,000 words long), and I'm about twenty five percent of the way there, maybe even a bit more than that. Often when I finish a large project (ie, a novel), in the immediate aftermath, there is almost this springboard effect where I get a hot writing flash and just go nuts writing the next story/book. Usually it flames out pretty quick, like in less than a week. This time, however, I seem to have accumulated sufficient experience to harness this energy, and now I'm off and running. If I can get at least to the half-way point of the book (and I'm thinking I will by end of next week), even if the crazy energy dissipates, I can still finish the book.
Finished the first draft last night. I've begun editing today. Katie will get her edit copy a week from Friday.
The word count ended up being a few sentences shy of 59,000 words. I don't anticipate any wild swings in the count as a result of my edit.
I wrote the book in approximately seven weeks. I'm so stunned by this it feels like I'm talking about somebody else.
It's Springtime here. Skies still get that wintertime grey, but I can smell the rain in the air so it's not nearly as gloomy a sight.
The house and I were spending the afternoon on the beach, walking down the shoreline, the sun beginning its descent over the horizon. I could tell the house had something on its mind. The gentle hush of waves running up the shore accompanied our silence as we walked.
Though there was no outward change in the house's demeanor, I could sense from the change in the air that it was ready to finally get to the point.
The house, it said to me, "Dad, do you ever get that not-fresh feeling?"
I thought carefully about what the house had just said to me. Then I responded. I said, "Gotcha. I'll get right on those litters."
The house smiled. It said, "Thanks, dad. I don't mean to be pushy or anything, but litter day was two days ago, and, well, y'know how it gets when..."
"I already told you I'd do it," I interrupted testily. "Sorry, okay?"
The house didn't say anything. Neither did I. I had taken out on the house the anger that I should've, instead, directed at myself.
We continued to walk along the shore. The silence between us was fiercer than the waves, which now crashed the shore with a greater intensity.
The house, as usual, found a mature way to resolve our little kerfuffle. "Can't we just blame the cats?" it asked.
I saw no reason why we couldn't. I told the house as much.
We spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying our ocean view.
But when I got home, I did clean those litters. Good thing, too, because they were totally poopy.
Comments
Don't worry, it will be in the 60s again before you know it.
I'm not sure there really is a paradise. Blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, cyclones, floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis -- is there any place free of some form of natural disaster?
Mommio: the Blue Ridge/Great Smokies. 4 seasons, but none too extreme.
Pretty, if you don't have to go out in it. I will, but not 'til later. Humane Society cats need to their nummies.
Please make & release that toilet-training DVD pronto. You have my $20...
The word is that we won't get above freezing until possibly Sunday, but it will cool back down that evening. There is a possibility of more snow moving in on Monday. I still haven't mailed my few Christmas cards because i don't want to brave my neighborhood streets to go get stamps. If it isn't necessary or an emergency, I'm not messing with it.
I suspect this is what "climate change" will mean, at least in the short term: more extremes, less predictability. It was in the nineties right up through the end of Sept; snow less than ten weeks later.
Great Xmas present: a CD/DVD burner. Now I can catch up with the last round of eMusic downloads, before the darkness set in...
After the chaos that was my home in the UK under an inch of slushy stuff, I find myself near the Baltic Coast, where they are cheerfully managing several feet of snow. We even have a tunnel to the front door (well, nearly). It's -20 deg C and the countryside here-abouts is looking stunning in the sun, sparkling as if someone had gone mad with glitter. The biggest chore is keeping the woodburners going and refusing yet more offers of food.
I feel for any of you going through those storms I see on the news - hope you are all keeping warm.
loving it here.
Seriously though, a fantastic place to spend the winter holidays, all you need to know is the drinking etiquette...
Hmm, maybe I should take my own advice...
Have most of my novel to read. Be able to take orders for purchases, either download or hard copy. Be able to constantly post short stories and other written mediums to the site so that people have a reason to keep checking in. Hm, other stuff, too, crap, I should've started this post after another couple cups of coffee, I'm all flat right now. Anyways, I think you get the idea.
I'm doing my own legwork right now investigating the resources out there at my disposal, but if anyone here has any helpful advice on blog vs. paying for my own site, and especially pointing me in the direction of helpful resources that I can investigate on my own, obviously that would great. From what I've read here, there's several of you that have already dabbled in this kind of thing.
In the meantime, it keeps snowing down here, which is totally awesome when you're unemployed and your wife has ordered you to stay inside and write and try to make some money off of it. She is doing the final proof of my latest novel and I expect to be sending out book submissions in a week or two. I just wrote the first chapter of my next novel, and I'm excited by the possibilities inherent in the story and the writing voice that I've always gravitate to. Also, a friend apparently has connections with a small comics press, and she invited me to put something together; I immediately wrote the first chapter and if I don't mind saying so, I loved it.
I keep getting injured or sick. This has been a long month (or more) of bad health, and it's been tough shaking it, but I'm pretty excited with all the writing I've been doing. It's always a happy thing to feel like I'm doing exactly what I most want to do with my life.
As I've been out sick and doing the recluse writer thing, I have no small town southern news to report.
On the music front, my wife is going to be seeing a Guided By Voices reunion show this weekend in Louisville. Her favorite band ever, well, no, maybe that's Tom Petty. Dunno. GBV is up there in the top three, though.
Well, what it sounds like you are looking for is a CMS (content management system). I've some experience setting up and maintaining Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla and all of them have their pros, cons, quirks, and charms. I've done all three of these packages for both personal projects and professional ones and of them Wordpress is my favorite for support, extensibility, and ease of maintenance. Drupal would be next for its flexibility but maintaining it can be a challenge particularly between versions when you have heavily customized it. Joomla, is flexible but can be overwhelming with its granularity.
Hosting is a whole other game, I prefer self-hosting either at a colo or on EC2 (at the moment I'm used shared through 1&1) but I'm the type that prefers to tinker on servers more that blog as evidenced by the paucity of content on my personal site. Plenty of hosting facilities offer turnkey solutions for what is affectionately referred to a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack where ll you need to do is select if you want to use Wordpress or Drupal and the host does all the grunt work. Wordpress.com offers hosting and I believe that the service has solid support to help guide the stock blog platform into something more CMS orientated.
Probably, the best advice I can offer, though, would be whatever you choose make sure you can control your data and export it easily if necessary since your data is your product and livelihood.
I second the WordPress recommendation. I've used it since before it existed (my site originally ran on its predecessor b2/cafelog) and its amazing how simple it has become to set up a blog. Wordpress.com may be your best bet at least to start. Then you can either get your own domain and pay for them to continue hosting (small fee from what I understand) or export everything and strike out on your own. Plenty of us here can help.
I've been looking at Wordpress, and it looks promising. Turns out a buddy of mine is a whiz at this kind of thing, so he's gonna be showing me some options, too.
Thanks.
In the meantime, I've been going nuts on my fourth book. As opposed to the epic novel of my third book, the fourth will be something of a novella (50,000 - 60,000 words long), and I'm about twenty five percent of the way there, maybe even a bit more than that. Often when I finish a large project (ie, a novel), in the immediate aftermath, there is almost this springboard effect where I get a hot writing flash and just go nuts writing the next story/book. Usually it flames out pretty quick, like in less than a week. This time, however, I seem to have accumulated sufficient experience to harness this energy, and now I'm off and running. If I can get at least to the half-way point of the book (and I'm thinking I will by end of next week), even if the crazy energy dissipates, I can still finish the book.
It's about two childhood friends, now in their early twenties, who share an apartment and a heroin addiction. One of them, near the start of the book, gets "discovered" and becomes a rock star and begins touring. The story is told from the perspective of the friend who gets left behind, and how he goes through the bleak routine of a drug addict while getting updates of how his friend is doing through various media outlets and the occasional postcard.
I'm writing it in the first-person perspective. My first three books were all third-person, but I've written short stories and unfinished stories of various lengths in an attempted first-person, so I've got some experience with it. I'm enjoying how the first-person perspective frees up my style, lets me play the story in a looser style than I have previously. I also like the idea that in a couple months I might have two books to try and sell and become the next Great American Writer (or at least make enough money to pay rent and maybe downpayment on a house one day, give my wife the opportunity to work part-time so she can pursue some of her own creative outlets). We'll see. As I've mentioned many times, I live in hope.
My writing room affords me an excellent view of the dismantling of one of the town's two water towers. It's pretty cool watching them peel a killion-ton steel orange positioned on legs and suspended two hundred feet up in the air. I'll be sad to see it go, however. I rather like water towers.
The snow melted. It's been snowing like mad lately. This whole winter has been great for it.
I don't know if anybody reads comics around here, but I've really been enjoying the title "Unwritten" on the Vertigo label. Excellent story and magical art. Just beautiful.
Hey, has anybody here ever read Raymond Feist's "Magician"? Well, the whole trilogy actually? I was thinking about re-reading it, and noticed it has a new printing that's been labeled the "author's version" or some such. I'm curious if anybody has read both versions. It's a great trilogy. Well, the first two books are excellent, the third not so much. It's the adult version of Harry Potter would be a way to describe it. I think it came out in the eighties. The boy magician story, though, wasn't new even then. Not by a long shot.
Consider that trademarked and shit.
Every other car in the parking lot was pink. Apparently the only guests in the lodge that night were me, my wife, and a Mary Kay Cosmetics convention.
We ate in the restaurant, which had this ridiculously good buffet. I ate an embarrassing amount of baked spaghetti, which normally only a sucker would do when there was decent catfish and prime rib available, but there is no way to describe how wonderful that baked spaghetti was. The strands were cut short and there were several layers of cheese on top which stayed in place even when I scooped it onto the plate. Well, there you go. The restaurant had a nice view of the river, and later, when the full moon came out, there was that, too.
Just above the restaurant, there is a common area part of the lodge, this great room with vaulted ceilings and cathedral windows, everything made of nice wood, fireplaces and one tv on mute in a corner. Lots of sofas and chairs. There were games available. My wife and I played Connect Four. I crushed her, and I felt like a man doing it. I'm not embarrassed to say that. I crushed her.
The drive up to the park was beautiful. We took small country roads that led through small country towns, long stretches of hilly woods broken by long sunny valley of farm land and fields and streams. The sun lit everything up like heaven and it was never in our eyes.
When we arrived, after we acclimated to all the pink cars, we dropped our bags off in our room and went for a hike. Nothing long, maybe three miles, but it felt good, especially after being in the car for over an hour. We enjoy hiking together. I proposed to Katie on a hiking trail.
The next morning, we had coffee and irish cream on the balcony. We went for another hike, much shorter. We drove around the park and enjoyed some of the views. We had a little picnic down by the river. We fed a dog. The ducks, however, didn't seem interested in my bread. Their loss. Birds got the bread instead.
We hit a flea mall in town. Didn't really see anything, but we were both more in a looking than buying mood.
Hit Louisville that night. Ate at an Ethiopian Restaurant called Queen of Sheba (Mommio, it's really good. It's right by the Air Devil Inn and the tiny airport off Taylorsville Rd, what's it called, Bowman Field, I think). Stayed with friends and had a great time.
But I'll never forget all those pink cars. My wife sure won't. She almost left me and her job to reinvent herself as a Mary Kay consultant, just so she could have one of those pink cars. I have to admit, she would look cute in one.
Finished the first draft last night. I've begun editing today. Katie will get her edit copy a week from Friday.
The word count ended up being a few sentences shy of 59,000 words. I don't anticipate any wild swings in the count as a result of my edit.
I wrote the book in approximately seven weeks. I'm so stunned by this it feels like I'm talking about somebody else.
It's Springtime here. Skies still get that wintertime grey, but I can smell the rain in the air so it's not nearly as gloomy a sight.
Cheers.
Though there was no outward change in the house's demeanor, I could sense from the change in the air that it was ready to finally get to the point.
The house, it said to me, "Dad, do you ever get that not-fresh feeling?"
I thought carefully about what the house had just said to me. Then I responded. I said, "Gotcha. I'll get right on those litters."
The house smiled. It said, "Thanks, dad. I don't mean to be pushy or anything, but litter day was two days ago, and, well, y'know how it gets when..."
"I already told you I'd do it," I interrupted testily. "Sorry, okay?"
The house didn't say anything. Neither did I. I had taken out on the house the anger that I should've, instead, directed at myself.
We continued to walk along the shore. The silence between us was fiercer than the waves, which now crashed the shore with a greater intensity.
The house, as usual, found a mature way to resolve our little kerfuffle. "Can't we just blame the cats?" it asked.
I saw no reason why we couldn't. I told the house as much.
We spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying our ocean view.
But when I got home, I did clean those litters. Good thing, too, because they were totally poopy.