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Photos from home and of the snowstorm are uploaded at flickr, but it's not cooperating in letting me organize them, so that may be the best I can do as far as a link goes. New kitten pictures in there! Mom and Dad have taken to calling her "Ghost".
Oct. 22nd, 2006
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Oct. 22nd, 2006 12:31 pmhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/276084014/ is my favorite photo from the previous batch, by the way-- I did want to link to that and take more time, but I had to dive out the door to get to rollergirls practice.
Which was brutal today, by the way. The second-to-last drill involved sprinting around the rink as fast as we could for a pre-set number of laps, and by the end of it I was crying out in pain with every stroke of my right foot and shouting "I won't get lapped! I won't get lapped!"-- I was determined that I would not go so slowly that the fastest girls came around and lapped me. During the longest stretch-- seven laps full-out-- I could hear Mia, the fastest girl in our group, coming up behind me, but the exercise ended just in time so that she didn't pass me. Of course she didn't know, but I knew that if she passed me I'd be upset.
I'm far from the slowest but I'm far from the fastest as well.
My skates are much better. But we're working so hard, it's still not easy. Ah well. I feel like I just did three hours with a Thighmaster, but my form is much better-- no backaches, so I'm not twisting as badly as I was before.
I just uploaded one last photo-- emailed by Mom, of Kitten "chilling with the boys", in Dad's words.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/276292009/in/photostream/
They took her to the vet, btw, and confirmed that she's female, heavily infested with roundworms which have left her malnourished and undersized so that she looks three months old but is nearly seven months, but otherwise healthy, negative for lukemia or any other serious disease. She is likely to recover fully, and her fur will probably grow in to be medium-long. She has strange double-fang canines because her adult teeth are already grown in but her baby teeth haven't fallen out. Mom and Dad are calling her Ghost because she vanishes like one. But she's been a little better, venturing out and investigating things. They think she'll come around to not be feral after all, especially given how much she loves belly rubs and likes to follow the other cats around.
I found out that I am indeed eligible for a week of vacation after my hire date but before the end of the year-- which is kind of annoying, as that leaves precisely four weeks available, of which three have already been taken by people with more seniority. So I have no choice, but have the week of Dec 11th-17th off. Which actually totally rules: either I'll go down to Georgia with Ann and Katy, or I'll spend it at home catching up on things, so, you know, whatever. I sorely needed that week last year.
I realized today in the shower that I need to cut Barbarians_Novel in half. I know where to make the cut, too. But it will be a messy one, and I'll have to do a lot of rewriting. It feels like defeat, to look at it that way: to lose nearly 100,000 words, and have to rewrite much of what's left. But it also feels like victory: the result would be something I know I can sell.
I feel stupid: I am such a fast writer. How has it taken me almost four years to write this one stupid book? But, as y'all know, it's not the writing: it's writing a book to sell, rather than writing a book for the pleasure of writing it. That's been an extremely hard transition for me to make, and it's meant that I've had to write probably 900,000 words on this one project alone. (When I'm done I'll do a count.) So writing this one novel has meant writing six novels or more, for me. I do think I'll do something else for NaNoWriMo: my goal, like in 2004, will be to write a discrete project, start to finish, with as few false steps as possible, with an eye to producing something tight and complete that will need only minor revisions to sell. I know wordcount is a pointless goal for me-- I've already proven that I can spew out garbage in greater quantities than most at ridiculous speeds, and there's really no point going back over that. I'm going to try to write something tight this time. We'll see how that works: it wants to be a semi-contemporary adventure/romance fantasy, but I'm having trouble nailing down anything more than one of the characters and a few of the general themes. This is kind of problematic, but inevitable.
I feel good, but also frustrated at how long everything takes. Ack. I want to be a bout-ready roller derby skater; I want to be a novelist with a submittably-complete novel; I want to be at at least one of my goals by now, but if I've learned nothing else from having survived this long in the world, it's that I really can't get there by wishing, and getting there by working takes time.
Which was brutal today, by the way. The second-to-last drill involved sprinting around the rink as fast as we could for a pre-set number of laps, and by the end of it I was crying out in pain with every stroke of my right foot and shouting "I won't get lapped! I won't get lapped!"-- I was determined that I would not go so slowly that the fastest girls came around and lapped me. During the longest stretch-- seven laps full-out-- I could hear Mia, the fastest girl in our group, coming up behind me, but the exercise ended just in time so that she didn't pass me. Of course she didn't know, but I knew that if she passed me I'd be upset.
I'm far from the slowest but I'm far from the fastest as well.
My skates are much better. But we're working so hard, it's still not easy. Ah well. I feel like I just did three hours with a Thighmaster, but my form is much better-- no backaches, so I'm not twisting as badly as I was before.
I just uploaded one last photo-- emailed by Mom, of Kitten "chilling with the boys", in Dad's words.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/276292009/in/photostream/
They took her to the vet, btw, and confirmed that she's female, heavily infested with roundworms which have left her malnourished and undersized so that she looks three months old but is nearly seven months, but otherwise healthy, negative for lukemia or any other serious disease. She is likely to recover fully, and her fur will probably grow in to be medium-long. She has strange double-fang canines because her adult teeth are already grown in but her baby teeth haven't fallen out. Mom and Dad are calling her Ghost because she vanishes like one. But she's been a little better, venturing out and investigating things. They think she'll come around to not be feral after all, especially given how much she loves belly rubs and likes to follow the other cats around.
I found out that I am indeed eligible for a week of vacation after my hire date but before the end of the year-- which is kind of annoying, as that leaves precisely four weeks available, of which three have already been taken by people with more seniority. So I have no choice, but have the week of Dec 11th-17th off. Which actually totally rules: either I'll go down to Georgia with Ann and Katy, or I'll spend it at home catching up on things, so, you know, whatever. I sorely needed that week last year.
I realized today in the shower that I need to cut Barbarians_Novel in half. I know where to make the cut, too. But it will be a messy one, and I'll have to do a lot of rewriting. It feels like defeat, to look at it that way: to lose nearly 100,000 words, and have to rewrite much of what's left. But it also feels like victory: the result would be something I know I can sell.
I feel stupid: I am such a fast writer. How has it taken me almost four years to write this one stupid book? But, as y'all know, it's not the writing: it's writing a book to sell, rather than writing a book for the pleasure of writing it. That's been an extremely hard transition for me to make, and it's meant that I've had to write probably 900,000 words on this one project alone. (When I'm done I'll do a count.) So writing this one novel has meant writing six novels or more, for me. I do think I'll do something else for NaNoWriMo: my goal, like in 2004, will be to write a discrete project, start to finish, with as few false steps as possible, with an eye to producing something tight and complete that will need only minor revisions to sell. I know wordcount is a pointless goal for me-- I've already proven that I can spew out garbage in greater quantities than most at ridiculous speeds, and there's really no point going back over that. I'm going to try to write something tight this time. We'll see how that works: it wants to be a semi-contemporary adventure/romance fantasy, but I'm having trouble nailing down anything more than one of the characters and a few of the general themes. This is kind of problematic, but inevitable.
I feel good, but also frustrated at how long everything takes. Ack. I want to be a bout-ready roller derby skater; I want to be a novelist with a submittably-complete novel; I want to be at at least one of my goals by now, but if I've learned nothing else from having survived this long in the world, it's that I really can't get there by wishing, and getting there by working takes time.