Merry Stinking Christmas
Our conversation this morning...
Bryce: "Hey, will you look in the CD case and see if you can find the Christmas CD that you made me? The one that says 'Merry Stinking Christmas'* and has a steaming pile of poop drawn on it?"
Me: "What? When did I even make you a CD with a steaming pile of poop on it?"
Bryce: "You know, the one you made me last Christmas?"
Me (finding it in the CD case): "That is NOT a steaming pile of poop! That is supposed to be a drawing of Santa Claus!
Apparently this says something about my artistic abilities.
*I named it "Merry Stinking Christmas" because Bryce's nickname at times is "Stinky"
**For those who were with us last year, this post kept making me think of our Schmidtty Christmas of years past. Please to refer to (http://toughroom.blogspot.com/)
This just in:
We are going Mediterranean. I hereby decree.
This decision came about because Bryce and I have made a goal (mostly to help me lose weight and be healthier, but he’s kind enough to add himself to the goal as it helps me to have a challenge). We have designed incentives on a weekly, monthly, and longer basis and set collective as well as competitive objectives. I’ve decided to make this a two-fold mission. One of my aforementioned goals (in one of my previous post about how I’m going to change the world and myself one enormous aspiration at a time) is to learn how to cook. Really cook. Not just throw things into a pot and call it good. So, I’m using our diet as an excuse to learn to cook like a regular Iron Chef. I read somewhere that keeping to a Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest ways to diet without dieting, so that is serving as my inspiration. Fish and feta cheese here we come! You can start referring to me as “Mama Focaccia”—name for my cooking alter ego courtesy of Bryce.
What's in a name?
One of the things I find hardest about writing: names. Character names, names of places, etc. I always have the hardest time with the names. I want them to be perfect, but it seems like they never are. I have only found one name that I really liked for a character in the history of the whole history and that story I'm not even ready to start really writing yet. No good.
“You know what I’m thinkin’? …CHICKEN!”
We have discovered something that Little hates more than green beans. Chicken. Not only does he make faces and growl, he has added to the repertoire; he waits until he gets both cheeks full (I mistook this for actual consumption the first couple of times) and then proceeds to pull it out and drop it on the floor. All with the same look of utter disgust.
If I didn’t get half of it splattered on me I would think it was the most comical thing that he’s ever done. As it is I end up cleaning most of it off of the floor rather than getting it into his system, so I think chicken might be out for a little while.
And as a side note to this, I will add that the other day Bryce was letting my little monster drink from his cup and this particular cup just happens to have an attached straw (I wish I could say that I own it for Little, but I can't). He got a little too excited, which resulted in a minor run in with the straw. He immediately pulled back and gave it a little growl of warning before continuing to drink. There are few times Bryce and I have laughed that hard.
Bryce and I about died laughing at this. Apparently we violated some parking rules.
http://janette-rallison.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-writers-shouldnt-write-warning.html
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... just me.
We survived. It is official. We haven’t moved everything in yet, but that isn’t on a deadline so I’m not as stressed about that. The whole week of frenzied moving extravaganza went something like this:
DAY 1: Find out that we’re moving
Panic
Get to work finding boxes, moving supplies, and figure out how to do it all
Look at all my stuff
Panic
Start taping and boxing like a mad woman (throwing out anything that isn’t absolutely essential to life and/or sentimental and never to be replaced)
DAY 2: Discover Little can now pull himself up to the standing position all on his own. Hooray!
Start where we left off yesterday, blinking back tears and irritation from what I think are just allergies at first, but turn out to be an eye infection
Panic
Emergency call Bryce for medicine to hold it at bay until I can go to see a doctor
Pack, pack, pack
Look at the clock—2:00AM.
PANIC! And then go to sleep (without Bryce who didn’t make it to bed until 3:30AM)
DAY 3: Wake up with the death (and not just the tired death…the sniffly, sneezy, eek death)
Curse the universe for a minute for combining against me
Panic
Pull myself out of bed, pump myself full of whatever medicine I can find (and no, I am not usually so desperate nor so quick in my drug consumption, but extreme measures…), and get to work avoiding my bedroom like the plague because there sits an extremely comfortable bed which is calling to me like a siren attempting to lure me away from the never ending list of what has to be done
Box up stuff
Deal with a few disasters (which are only disasters because I am involved)
Panic
Bryce comes home and says without being bidden, “Whoa Honey! You’ve gotten so much done!”
Panic a little less and realize this might just be doable
DAY 4, 5, and 6 went something like this:
Panic
Pray
Box
Some seeming disaster or another
Panic
Pray
Box… You get the idea…
DAY 7 and 8: Finish boxing, Hallelujah!
Sit back and realize that all my panicking was for naught and be more grateful than I even thought possible that they are not requiring us to clean the apartment due to the fact that they are renovating it anyway.
…NOTE that even though I didn’t add those parts in, I was really taking care of Little amidst all the chaos. Promise!...
By the end of all the madness we decided to have a celebratory “House cooling party” in our box covered abode because everyone always has house warming parties when they get into a new place, but never a house cooling party when they leave. So we said farewell to the squirrels in style (sparkling cider, crappy Chinese takeout, plastic dishware…doesn’t get much better than that).
Thus, we now are officially out of our old place and into the new and are living on Seymour Rd (We may or may not be planning to purchase a carnivorous plant so that we can say, “FEED ME, SEYMOUR!” all the time).
My conclusion to all of this? I am secretly super woman (sans the leotard suit). The End.
NaNoWriMo
I've heard about this NaNoWriMo that comes around every November for a while (for the record their motto is: "Thirty days and nights of literary abandon" which makes them awesome from the get go). They have been doing it since 1999 and essentially it is a challenge in the month of November to write 50,000 words of a novel from scratch. The point is not to write an amazing novel, or even a good one for that matter, the point is to get a bunch of crazy novel aspiring/writing people together, and through the thrill of the challenge, force them to crank out a novel that they might end up throwing away entirely, but forcing the creative juices to get flowing either way. As they put it, "The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly." I love them for this, but I haven't yet worked up the courage to do it. Every year I have the great debate and every year I find one or more marvelous (albeit occasionally far fetched) excuses that prevent me from participating. And of course this year is no different; even though I'm coming a little late the party this year, I haven't made up my mind whether I'm actually going to give it a go or not. I keep running into the fact that, a: I barely have any time as is, and b: I am a big fat chicken. I don't know if I'm ready to pull 50,000 words out of my head at the risk of simply throwing them all away.
I'll let you know by the end of the month if I took the challenge this year or succumbed to my many excuses, but I wanted to share it all the same just in case anyone I know who is a closet writer like me would like to take them up on it.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano
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