Tag Archives: jessiedog

Big wind go whoooOOOoooOoooo

Posted on by

Okay, I realize it’s midnight and I only got a little over four hours of sleep last night, so I’m a little more imagination-prone than I might be otherwise, but I was just outside with supermutt, and, well, you know that big wind in My Neighbor Totoro, when Satsuki is out gathering firewood and (though she can’t see him) Totoro goes flying by?

The exact same thing happened while I was outside. Except all my firewood didn’t go flying up a huge mountain by itself.

(By the way, the one I linked to up there I suspect is the dorky new version that Disney redubbed recently. The original is this one, but it’s no longer available.)

Anyway, I’m still up working and my husband’s asleep and my dog is grumbling her way back to sleep, but I think I’ve only got about an hour to go writing this training and then I get to sleep. Yay for progress!

Welcome to 2006!

Posted on by

The thunderstorm earlier waffled around from thunderstorm to thundersnow and thunderslush, but somehow warmed up enough to keep the roads from being overly deadly, a turn of events I’m thankful for. We spent the evening at Mike and Steen’s with my sister and brother and Amber, where we played much Killer Bunnies (with all seven boosters!!) and laughed and had a great time.

The ride home was engulfed in a deep fog which would cause a less exhausted version of me would wax poetic. (The new year enshrouded in an almost comforting mystery appears too metaphoric to ignore; I can’t see what’s ahead, but at least I feel like I’m on the right road to get there.) The fog came from the ice that formed earlier, which had melted enough to give safe footing, and we were greeted at the door by a tiny dog with a cold nose who missed us very much.

I wish to you and yours the gifts of health and safety, peace, and prosperty. May we all walk into the fog knowing the way home.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and days of auld lang syne?
And days of auld lang syne, my dear, and days of auld lang syne
We’ll take a cup of kindness then, for auld lang syne.

Traveling

Posted on by

It’s just after noon on the day after Christmas. The sky’s white, and the wind is cold, and a small dog is sleeping next to me on the sofa, with her nose tucked in under my knee.

I have much to do. The router needs rebooting. There’s work in the second bedroom to be done before January when visitors and snowstorms will both guarantee occupation at some point or another. There’s a kitchen to clean, gifts to put away, and we need to find a place to put the tree until next year.

Instead, I read. Bradbury. Quicker than the Eye. I’m transported from this place to that – a farmhouse in Massachusetts, a library, the old roads below the highway, Dog’s funeral. And my own bookshelf, where books read and unread mingle, and swell in ranks.

We received another bookcase for Christmas – a blessing – and I look forward to tearing all the books off their shelves again and moving the books stacked on the floor next to the shelves and at the foot of the steps to proper places. Usually, my husband rearranges them quite clinically, sorted by type/subject and alphabetized by author, one step short of enforcing the Dewey Decimal System.

If he’s not careful, I’ll beat him to it this year, and rearrange them in a more meaningful manner: Read, Unread, and Not The Type You Read Straight Through. Maybe even make it complicated: He Read, She Read, They Didn’t Read Yet, and Reference.

The house is cool and dark. From the porch it looks deserted, the family inside having gone out to celebrate Boxing day or such. In truth, it is deserted, for I am far away along the Martian canals (having switched books), my feet swishing through their dead skin like dried leaves, wondering about the conflicts of Earth, so far away.

Solitude

Posted on by

I tried about a half dozen times tonight to write a post expressing how incredibly weird it is to be home alone overnight. (Nighthawk is at a sleep study. It’s a good thing.) Tonight marks the first night in almost five and a half years that we weren’t in the same building overnight. (There have been nights that one of us was out late, or busy, and didn’t come to bed until almost morning, but never a night that I didn’t go to sleep knowing that he’d be here when I awoke.)

The dog’s been driving me bonkers. She finally stopped looking for him and whining around eleven thirty.

I talked to my cousin on the phone for quite a while. That and the completion of my first game of Civilization IV (I won the space race! whoo!) kept me busy enough not to go absolutely stir-crazy, but still…

Sometimes you take a person for granted when they’re there with you every day. I try to tell him how much I love him every day, and still on days like today I surprise myself by realizing how much he’s a part of my life. I can’t wait for him to come home.

random babblings of someone who has too many words to write.

Posted on by

11/26/05 random babblings of someone who has too many words to write. (Cut and pasted from a TextEdit file I was making notes in while writing…)

10:28: was going to update my word count and go to bed, but now I’ve lost Internet access. Makes me pissy. Now I’m going to have to concentrate on the novel and not start playing Chuzzle like I’d planned.

10:45: still no internet access. up to at least 3167 words. (there seems to be some debate between my word count and NaNoWriMo’s count, but theirs is in my favor, so I don’t mind the discrepancy.) Want desperately to be distracted so I don’t have to listen to these characters fight in my head anymore, but I’m out of luck.

11:03: Still no ‘net access. If I was really at a breaking point I’d go reboot the router to make sure the problem’s not us, but suddenly I’m on a roll. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the literary figure I want to use as a metaphor. Goddamn it, I want my google back!

11:05: It was Casanova. My husband is snoring so loudly upstairs that I can hear him, and I’m on the sofa in the livingroom on the first floor.

11:15: I just had a character go off on a cursing spree. It’s in character for him, but I’m feeling a little guilty for using the word “shit” six times in succession – it gives the impression that I’m buffering my word count.

11:33: the dog’s now been whining at me for a solid fifteen minutes. But I’ve added another thousand words or so in the last 45 minutes. At this rate it will take me approximately 22 hours of full-on work to hit deadline. I have roughly 72 hours. Maybe this is doable after all.

It’d help if I didn’t start at fuckall late at night each night though.

This dog’s like an oven. But at least when she’s lying next to me on the sofa she’s quiet.

Oh, and I’m pretty sure it’s the router that’s causing the problem, because I can’t connect to it. I’ll investigate that shortly. I need to go to bed by midnight because I have to be up at 9 to go to lunch with a friend at 11.This has been a very social weekend.

12:02: Rebooting the router seems to have done the trick. I’m going to upload this, update my word count, and then go to bed.

(ps: 35,106 words! Whoo! Less than 4 days! Hell!)

October

Posted on by

amc is beating up on me tonight.

It’s partially my own fault. I decided tonight would be a good night for a rum and coke. It’s fair – I haven’t had a drink in a few weeks and sometime a girl’s gotta kick back a bit.

But had I known that they were going to play Field of Dreams followed by The Natural, I’d’ve made sure not to have a second.

Alcohol is a maginifying glass. It takes my love of baseball and magnifies it a hundredfold, making it impossible to keep an dry eye when Ray Kinsella shakes his father’s hand, or Moonlight Graham becomes the Doc, or Roy Hobbes asks Bobby to pick him out a winner. It’s multiplied even further by the White Sox win – a team I’d not care less about if the Phillies had made the playoffs, but since the Sox haven’t won the Series since 1917…

The dog’s snoring a few feet from me. Baseball means nothing to her, football neither. Both (along with hockey) are just a reason that people yell at the TV. She’ll never enjoy the smell of the leather or the spin of the ball. She seems to think that grass is for muching on. She’ll never understand that baseball is the most beautiful thing there is.