Travel Wishes

Generally I am a homebody.  I like having the comforts and little familiarities that make up a home all around me whenever I want.

But.

Sometimes I am reminded of the things I long to see.  Venice.  Rome.  The Louvre.  The Blarney Stone.  Greece.  The pyramids.  Phantom on the West End.  The Tower of London.  The Taj Mahal.  Art and history, physically present.  I was surprised by the gut reaction I had when I visited the art museum here, and the way I very nearly wept at the sight of a few Monet paintings.  Paintings.  A couple square feet of decorated canvas that travel easily enough, and I almost lost my composure entirely.

In America we have our few hundred years of history, but it doesn’t reach very far back.  Not comparatively.  I want to touch a building that was old when Christ walked the earth.  I want to see where the Tudor family created history as we know it.  I want to stand where Julius Caesar met his end.  Nowhere on this continent can I connect with the history of my ancestors as fully as I can in England, France, Germany, and Italy.

We have so much to see and learn in our lives.  We live in incredible times.  All the wonder of the world at our fingertips.

November Update

As of last night, I was a couple hundred words behind where I was supposed to be.  As of right now, I haven’t written a single NaNo word all day.

This is because I’m sick.  My face feels swollen and sore, and I can’t breathe without the help of Dayquil.  All I want to do is lay around and watch TV.  I really am not pleased with these germs.  Holiday weekend and NaNo crunch time is not the perfect time to get sick.  Not even a little.

Simon is dying for November to be over.  He’s had a really rough rotation, one that is keeping him at work until past six every day.  Monday night he had a huge presentation before an audience of Big-City pathology attendings.  It went really, really well, and he was congratulated on being a great speaker, but the stress of prepping for it plus the long days has been hard.

November is not an easy month this year, and the lack of sun has only emphasized that.  Thursday the first is going be a celebration: Simon’s birthday, and the end of Hematology and NaNoWriMo.  There will be cheesecake.  And presents for Simon.  December is not only going to be an easy rotation of the home-before-five kind, but he also has a week of vacation between Christmas and New Year’s.  2011 is going to go out right.

And a funnier story:

I just talked to a UPS guy, who was checking on the delivery of a package for our upstairs neighbors.  This box is weird-looking, which is why I noticed it.  An 18 inch by 12 inch by 12 inch styrofoam box, sitting by the main door to the building, right under the mailboxes, for about a week.  Apparently the guy has been calling UPS several times a day for the whole week to complain that it hasn’t been delivered.  I had a good laugh with the delivery guy, he ran it upstairs and put it by the guy’s door and called it in.

Just now the delivery man came back and said that his office spoke to the man and he’s refusing the package because it was delivered too late.

Dude.

He left it sitting by the door- where all the packages sit if they’re signed for by another building resident- for a week, and is upset.  I think he lost all those rights a week ago.  When the box actually came, like it was supposed to.

 

What If I Don’t Want A Euphemism?

I’ve run into a problem.  I’m working on a part of the novel right now that involves a rather creepy individual (creepy in that he’s a murderer and assassin, but is capable of being very polite. also he’s a sociopath.) teaching my main character how to shoot a crossbow.  Over the course of the scene he’s said a few things that could be innocent, but coming from him are much more disturbing in a leering sort of way.

I realized I didn’t know anything about old crossbow terminology, so I looked it up.

And this is where the problem enters in.  I keep trying to write this scene, and with correct terminology… it sounds like really bad porn.  Cheesy euphemisms and overly suggestive phrases when nothing of the sort is happening.  I keep sending myself off into giggle fits, because really.  Shakespeare used pretty much all those words in sex jokes.  It’s so painful.  I want the scene to be borderline creepy, not campy.

Why I Hate Errands

I realized upon waking today that the laundry was in dire need of being done if I wanted clean underwear tomorrow.  Then I remembered that I’d used most of my last quarters doing laundry the weekend before Halloween.

“No problem,” thought I, “I’ll take my mail to the post office, stop at the bank for quarters, and have a nice 2-mile walk to begin my day.”

So I bundled all up because it’s Really Cold and my fingers hurt (see: why the mail had not been dropped off in the past week), and walked to the post office.  That was closed.  On a Friday.  With not a sign in sight detailing why.  The more astute of you may know already what I found out when I got to the bank- which is that the bank was also closed.  Because of Veteran’s Day.

So, I’m stuck with a pile of mail, have no quarters, and have wasted a solid 45 minutes that I could have been using to write… because I didn’t realize it was a holiday.

But I still need underwear.  I ransacked the house for quarters (no mean feat when all the quarters that come into the house get dumped into the Hobbit  box*), and am one quarter short of a load of laundry.  Which might also be a euphemism for my mental state right now.

Luckily I have an Aldi quarter in the car, and Simon is under strict instructions to bring it in with him when he gets home.  One load of laundry.  That’s all we get until Monday.  Where I will miss another 45 minutes of writing time to do this all over again.

Proportionate Food

Oh, dear my mother, sometimes I forget that the recipes I got from you are styled for 6-8 extremely hungry people, and not for far fewer than that.

I wanted to make hamburger-corn-noodle casserole today, and didn’t quite recall the proportions I needed of the ingredients (I did, however, remember the cream cheese, which is the part I always forget), so I pulled out the recipe and went…  Huh.  That seems like a lot of canned soup.  Well, let’s give it a go!

I now have enough casserole for about four meals.

I mean, I like it, but WOW.

Rock The D

It’s November.  Were it not for NaNo, I would probably hole myself up in the bedroom with my electric blanket and computer and not come out until December, when there is at least a little more sun.

I may hate snow and my fear of driving in it may be increasing yearly, but it still reflects the little bit of sunlight we get.

I hate Murphy’s Law.  I typed that sentence and immediately snow began to fall.  Literally.  The minute I typed the last word.

I want sun.  Real sun, not the fake kind from vitamin D capsules.  I mean, I’d forgotten to take any of my vitamins for a month or so, so my D dose is pretty high for the next two weeks… but still.  Sunshine.  And warmth.  Anyone want to send me to Cancun or Jamaica or Australia for the rest of winter?

Side Effects Of Big City Life

I grew up in the country, where everything got extra dusty during planting season and the harvest, and it really was a weekly chore that had to be done or we’d look like we lived in Miss Havisham’s house: the early years.  However, we also rarely cleaned the outside of the windows.  Sure, sometimes they got a bit streaky, but a good rain would clear them right up.  A little cleaning solution and a squeegee were enough to keep the inside of the windows clean, for the most part.

Here in the big, polluted city, rain makes the windows dirtier.  I have no way of cleaning the outside of my windows without a ladder, but rain leaves streaks of dirt down the glass and at the bottom of the window a collection of disgusting blackness collects, which no amount of cleaning can ever totally get rid of, because the next time it rains… it returns.  The worst was after Snowmageddon last winter, when the snow collected between the screen and the glass.  When it melted, you could still see where the snow had been from the filth.

Lesson learned: don’t drink the rain or eat any of the snow in the big city.  Not unless you want to feed yourself dirt.

This Has Seriously Reached Superpower Stage.

As further proof that my coldness is not, in fact, entirely comprised of drawbacks:

Getting the meatloaf/mashed potato concoction out of the oven last night, I lost my grip on the hot pad and instinctively grabbed at the still in the hot oven pan with my bare hands, and somehow ended up holding on to the glass handle of the pan with my fingers knuckle-deep in mashed potato.

It was unpleasant, so I made sure the pan wouldn’t fall, grabbed the hot pad, got it out of the the oven, and rinsed off my hand.

There wasn’t even a red spot.

Today, I can’t even remember which fingers poked into baked mashed potatoes for a solid minute.

(I recall the fun day when, to prove my powers to a teenage co-worker who had just gotten a bad burn, I put my whole palm on the scaldingly hot popper.  Nothing happened.  Nothing at all.  Superpower.)

Delusions Of Cats

With the advent of the era of the laptop and the desire to get a bit more sun while I write, I’ve taken over the dining room table as a writing desk.  The “more sun” bit has been failing, since not only is it actually November, the weather has taken a November-ish turn and gone all overcast, grey, and occasionally damp.  One would think Chicago temporarily migrated to England.

But to continue, I have a bony rear end, and the chairs upstairs are all standard wood dining room chairs.  This means sitting for more than a few minutes at a time leads to sore Ischium, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, though it is considerably annoying and leads to the muscles in my lower back going, “Hey!  This isn’t fair!  You’re contorting us around so your bones don’t ache.  You’re nearly 30, woman… get a grip!  Bones are sore, it’s a thing!”

My lower back muscles then get knotty, which is a frequent result of overusing exclamation points.

So, I’ve taken to folding a few blankets on the seat, and then draping my ever-classy Spider-man blanket over the top of it all, creating a superhero throne of writing glory.  It also makes a cat-sized tent under the chair.  Sophie and Geordi are in kitty heaven (I should really get them one of those cat trees with six bazillion hidey-holes).

Hero, however, is distressed.  This tent means that at any moment Geordi could be lurking inside, waiting to jump out and ruin her life forever again.  (Well, at least she still loves Sophie, but this is no accomplishment.  Everyone loves Sophie.  People who hate cats love Sophie.)  So she sits on my lap while I write, growling at every twitch of the blanket.  Generally this is caused by me shifting around, and not Geordi, but she doesn’t care.

Shipment Tracking Woes

I’ve been really good about my patience as I wait for us to save up enough money for me to get a new computer.  Really good.  I’ve avoided using Simon’s sweet new machine so that I didn’t get spoiled by the speed and grumpy about mine.  I’ve done everything in my power to keep this six-year-old computer soldiering on.

This week, with the frequent random shutdowns, the increasingly loud sounds coming from the case, and the fact that for several months every time I booted it up Windows wouldn’t start- I’d get a weird DOS box that had a flashing, moving prompt and I’d have to crtl-alt-del and manually start Windows… this week I ordered a new computer.  A shiny new purple laptop.  The tracking said that my computer would arrive via FedEx on Saturday.  I woke up today feeling like it’s Christmas.  Seriously, it was like being six years old.  I’d wake up every hour going, “Is it morning yet?  Computer?” and then have to talk myself back to sleep.  Every time I hear a large vehicle go by outside I run for the window to check.

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a song-and-dance number intended to get the delivery truck here faster.

The computer is not here yet.  It’s been a long several hours…