You're Doing It Wrong

Hey look, the 39th Street overpass is finally open. Full Flickr set here. I can’t bring myself to link to the local newspaper article because of the comments. There are too many toxic people with too much time on their hands. The re-opening is probably going to be more of a negative for us in the long run in the form of more neighborhood traffic. But nice the rail bottleneck is opened up.

This is going to be another one of those jumble of stuff posts. You probably haven’t noticed but behind the scenes I’ve been going through my 1800 old posts and tagging or categorizing or whatever TurdPress calls it them and deleting a few. I rarely have a post that covers a single topic. It’s usually something I cooked, something in my garden and something stupid that someone did. I suppose I could invent a category for that but that sounds like a lot of work. The blog stays in the picture.

A few days ago I made what I thought was a reasonable list of things to do for that day. It’s now Sunday night and I have barely crossed off half the stuff. But we had an action packed weekend.

Friday night we went to the annual fundraiser for Native American Youth and Family Center which is always fun. The bidding is too rich for us but the generous free adult beverages make it exciting to watch. And also leads to the annual post NAYA auction sitting on the couch day.

Auction Dancer

I used my recovery time to make progress on The Passage which I finished today. If you read only one 700+ page vampire apocalypse novel this year, it should be The Passage.

Yesterday afternoon I had to drag my butt off the couch so I could go visit BizarroCon. The event lasts all weekend but I usually just go for Saturday. It turned out super fun. I am capable of making small talk with strangers if I put my mind to it. And my Clarion West classmate Carlton Mellick won the Wonderland Book Award for best novel for Warrior Wolf Women Of The Wasteland.

Another milestone this weekend: I finished Gilmore Girls Season 7. That’s 153 episodes since December of last year. I mostly loved it but I’m glad it’s over. Also, I believe it should be a federal crime for a show not to have a full season warning that it’s going to be canceled.

Next up: Six Feet Under which clocks in at a scant 63 episodes. But I’m not going to start until next month because I’m still about 20 shows behind on my DVR for the stuff I’m watching now. How’s a girl supposed to write her 1000 words a day, watch her shows, read her books, hold down a job and keep the house from falling apart? Plus sleep 8 hours a night and exercise on a semi-regular basis and keep a blog? I guess if TV is the department I’m slacking the most I’m not doing that bad.

Here’s a Halloween candy story. I bought one giant bag of candy bars too many. I like candy and I can eat it a controlled manner and it seems stupid to throw candy away if I’m just going to buy more candy later so I put a little bowl on the counter and dumped the rest in a ziplock bag and put it in the freezer. Apparently the freezer isn’t a good enough “hiding place” for certain people who share this household. And there were complaints. So later I took it out of the freezer and hid it someplace else.

The other night I came home and a certain person was sitting in the living room and asked me, “Where did you hide the Halloween candy?”

Me: What Halloween candy?

Other person: That big giant bag. Can I please have some Halloween candy?

So I had to tiptoe to the new hiding place and extract his order: 1 Kitkat, 2 Whoppers and 1 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Nothing I do ever makes my life easier.

Finally: is there anything stupider than yahoo answers? Every time it shows up in one of my search results I’m like: don’t click it, don’t click it. But then my hand can’t help it and it click it and read the answer and then I hit myself over the head because it’s so stupid.

I’m off to dutifully cram in one show before bed.

I’ve had this stupid .jpg sitting on my desktop forever, waiting until I could write a “good post” about my writing organization system. I’m never going to write a good post so we’ll settle for a quickly dashed off one.

My writing organization system is a joke because my system is only partially implemented and includes old systems, side systems and system anomalies. Also it would bore the pants off of you if I explained all the intricacies of my system so, here, I’m just explaining the big chunks.

But this is the gist of the way I organize my stuff. For some reason having the folders display in that order seemed critical at some point. Probably because I didn’t want Abandoned and Awful at the top.

Published is self explanatory. “Otherwise Done” refers to stuff that’s done and has gone out into the world but was later trunked for one reason for another. I distinguish between a story that was finished but trunked and a story that was Abandoned and Awful. If I didn’t allow “Otherwise Done” in this folder it would practically float away it would be so empty.

Stories Submitted and Pending is self explanatory.

Stories Maybe Potential are first drafts, some very scanty first drafts, of stuff that I think might be worth fixing up into a finished story but I’m not actively working on right now.

Stories Working On are the stories I intend to finish and start submitting. Sometimes I get on a roll and I’ll move a bunch of stuff into this folder thinking that the stories are “so close” and that I’m going to have so much time to accomplish stuff. Then I’ll get in a rut and think writing is stupid and submitting stories stupider and I’m so slow there is no sense piling up all that stuff in this folder. [It only has one thing at the moment, in case you were curious.]

Stories Abandoned and Awful are labeled thusly so my biographers won’t look at them. They are terrible ideas, ideas that I couldn’t get to go anywhere, stupid characters and generally stuff that any normal person would throw away.

Except I tend to move stuff back and forth between Maybe Potential and Abandoned and Awful quite a bit. Every once in awhile I will see a scrap that in a moment of great optimism I think can be salvaged. And other times I will look at my great bit pile of optimism and rap on my skull with a blunt object.

I’ve been thinking about revising my system. I’m starting a novel in 2011 and I think there are scraps and characters filed in all sorts of places (e.g. the side systems) that I might be able to use. But then I think, in the time I waste trying to track down that brilliant scrap I could have written something new that fits better.

I can’t figure it all out right now.

Remember how I was whining that I got the pumpkins in so late I probably wasn’t going to get any?

Look at my great crop. The biggest one was out in the front yard. I’ve never had problems with kids grabbing my pumpkins on Halloween but I thought this one looked too tempting so I brought it in.

The only thing is they didn’t get as orangey as the heirlooms usually do.

These are two that were ready earlier. They’ve already been cleaned off and brought into the house.

I’m going to have to start giving these away. There’s no way we can eat that much pumpkin.

It’s taken me the last two days but I’m caught up on a bunch of stuff. My desk is almost cleaned off. I can see the bottom of my email box. I whacked the hedge and weeded a bit in the front yard. I made a pie (apple). I finished a giant book. We found strawberries at the market this morning. They were pretty and delicious. The secret? Hermiston.

We made eggs when I was in CA. (Relax, the doctor is not worried about my Dad’s cholesterol.) I love how dated the packaging looks.

I had a nice memory of my sister giving these to my Dad when we were kids but Dad said he bought them long after we’d grown up.

I still like my memory.

I had a story published online during the summer: Estelle Makes the Casino Run.

This month Innsmouth Free Press has a poll where you can vote for your favorite story in the issue.

It’s time to vote for your favourite story in our special, Multiethnic fourth fiction issue, which was published June 2010. Read the issue here and then vote for your favourite story.

The writer with the most votes gets $50 CAD and bragging rights. Go here to vote and give an author some extra cash. Voting is open October 6 to November 6, 2010. You can leave comments about the stories, but you must vote using the link above.

Co-worker decided to clean off his desk a couple weeks ago.

Here’s my filing pile. It took me most of yesterday and today but it’s done. For now. Filing is like laundry or weeding. The sense of accomplishment is momentary.

What is that thing in the upper left?

Isn’t this cute? I’m not sure how well it will look in the photo but the paperdoll is named Pam. My Auntie gave this to me a long time ago and I had sitting around forever and then I saw someone on a blog had displayed the same paperdoll just like this.

I don’t have a cutesie bone in my body but I think this is adorable and I smile every time I look at it.

* * *

I don’t want to jinx myself but I have a wide open weekend and I think I can get caught up on all this stuff that’s been stacking up everywhere like emails and bill paying and this stack of stuff on my desk that needs attention. Plus if it stops raining I have yard stuff to do. And I’d love to fix this blog layout so I don’t cringe everytime I look at it.

We’ll see.

When I was a teenager I was obsessed with gymnastics. I subscribed to a magazine and read every issue cover to cover over and over. I watched whatever meager coverage TV had to offer. I took classes and competed in high school.

I was never very good and I was terrible in competition because I got so nervous.

Since those days I’ve followed intermittently. If I saw it was on TV I would watch the Olympics or maybe a World Championship. But I’ve been out of the loop for a very long time.

But thanks to the super-time-suck qualities of the Internet I got back into it this year. You can find ancient gymnastics all over youtube. Remember Natalia Shaposhnikova? I got sucked into both collegiate and elite. No one is more surprised than I am.

Back in the day you had to get most of your gymnastics on the Wide World of Sports and it was greatly sanitized and usually you had to sit through boxing or something before it came on. It usually only captured the three gymnasts who made the podium who were almost always from Communist countries and maybe the best American gymnast or if there was a spectacular wipeout.

I just watched most of the World Championships on cable and it’s not quite so formal with the commentators including both crazy enthusiasm and some catty comments. But it was really fun, too. In both men’s and women’s there were competitors in the event finals from countries you never used to see: Greece, Israel, Italy, Brazil. And the event finals were super fun with lots of spectacular performances. I can’t remember when I had so much fun watching gymnastics.

I hardly ever do this but I’m going to link to a clip. Seriously, watch this. It’s just over a minute. The World Championships were in Rotterdam and this is the hometown boy on high bar. He’s adorable and in orange. Even Bob watched the high bar finals and said, “I can’t believe you got me watching gymnastics.”

I’ve seen this at least 5 times and it peels my face off every time: Epke Zonderland event final on high bar.

If you squint when you look at this photo, can you see that business called Skinnidip?

Until very recently that was a Swatch store.

Swatch? Remember? Those trendy watches that were huge about 100 years ago when I was in college? Yeah, they are still around. And they have actual stores. Or at least they had a store in Downtown Portland. If you put it in a search engine the Portland store will still come up.

Every single time I walked by that store I made some sort of mocking remark about “Seriously, Swatch?” “Can you believe there’s still a Swatch store?” and “Who has a Swatch?”

Then, seemingly overnight, it was replaced by some sort of trendy frozen yogurt place with long lines out the door.

I reacted as you might guess. “OMG! What happened to the Swatch store? Where will we get our Swatches now?”

I really miss that store.

I can’t get a break.

Remember several years ago when my digestive system turned on me? (If you really want to recall the story start on April 10 and work your way backward).

I guess my digestive system decided after all the running around hither and yon and then the ginormous pile of things I had to do in order to just keep up, it would do a junior version of that again. It melted down on Thursday while I was having my huge busy day. It commenced with the churning and roiling. I lost all interest in getting food into me until about Saturday night.

After Thursday, I spent my time on the couch. On the plus side I got my DVR from 48% to 12% plus I watched gymnastics which will probably be a future post.

I ate lunch and dinner today and I did a bit of writing so let’s all agree that I’m moving forward now and all setbacks are history.

Here’s what you’ve been waiting for: the little pies baked into cupcakes post. Starring Kira the superstar baker.

Find a mini-cupcake tin for the pies. Make pie crust or use something pre-made. Whichever is easier.

Make tiny little pies and fill them with a spoonful of cherries. (Or whatever sounds good to you.) Put a top on them and seal. Vent them.

Bake them in the oven with the dog watching.

Line a regular cupcake tin with liners. Put a little cupcake batter in the cups and then drop the baked mini-pie in it.

Cover with batter. Don’t get carried away because as it bakes it will cover it.

Bake and enjoy.

Flowers in the backyard.

I generally don’t approve of waving around family drama on the Internet however I realize there are folks that know me that have only seen bits and pieces of this story here or on Facebook and would probably appreciate a few more details.

My Dad had a heart attack last week. It was scary for a little bit but he got a stent and went home a couple days later. I spent some time in Orleans hanging out with him and helping around the place. He is doing fantastic and other than maybe a little low on stamina he is his regular self.

Other than the reason for being there, it was a great week with gorgeous weather. We went for walks and made lunch and puttered around. I worked outside. Whenever I wanted a snack I stood under the fig tree and ate figs.

And now I’m home. So at the end of last month I had my Mom for a visit and a few days after she left I went to Atlanta and a few days after that I rushed off to California.

There a bunch of people expecting things from me like love notes, information I promised to pass along and photos I promised to print and send. I owe crits and have neglected to follow up on getting together with some folks like I said I would.

I’m getting to it.