Wednesday, July 25, 2007

not Eleanor

Yesterday the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. We no longer have a proprietary connection to Clement Hardware. Oh, we have a connection to be sure, and will continue to for some years. In fact, I’m now a director on the Board (rather small board though it is--3, I think,) and we certainly have a vested interest in the business continuing to prosper.

So, all in all I guess I should feel good about getting that ironed out, particularly in light of the fact that the settlements which should wrap up the last of our landlording obligations are just around the corner. Actually, what I felt yesterday--and continue to feel (and, as a matter of fact have felt from the moment we put the houses on the market, and began the divestment from the store process) is a little queasy.

Of course I’m glad, in the sense that I’m glad it has gone reasonably efficiently (though hardly cheaply in terms of legal and professional fees to hammer out the store details,) but Jeff’s passivity is sometimes hard to read, and I’m not sure he could explain it even if he wanted to. It’s part resignation, part a peaceful letting go, and part the usual fog of not being able to sort it all out anyway. My ambivalence stems from realizing that none of this is what he would want, were he in a position to carry out what he would want, were things not what they are. (gads. I sound like Jack Sparrow.)

If I were Eleanor Roosevelt maybe I could have carried the store and real estate jobs out on my own power, and Jeff would not have had to see himself as having to give them up. Ok, so I’m not Eleanor Roosevelt.

Friday, July 20, 2007

96


I now have, as of 3:15 this afternoon, clipped into a blue binder, the 96 page first draft of a manuscript which still--most unfortunately--goes by the working name of Dewey.

Dewey is, by no means, a suitable title for the story. It’s merely the name of a minor, if pivotal, character, and for some reason is how I’ve been filing the work on my Mac all this time. Dewey.cwk in Appleworks, and Dewey.doc in Word.

On a bright note, I can now switch working formats--from trudging through the story on the iBook to trudging through the story in hard copy, scribbling what notes and changes I can fit in the margins. It’s good for people with short attention spans to switch. Helps keep us stoked.

Trudging may be a poor choice of words there. I certainly hope the reading of it would not be as slow a process as the writing, but sometimes it’s hard to get a sense of that at any given point along the creation of a 24,000 word piece. Imagine if I were Leo Tolstoy. No. Let’s not imagine that after all.

Of course, I may have nothing more than another unmarketable white elephant on my hands, but as I’ve mentioned before--these efforts are an offering to the universe. The universe does not, as far as I know, have an editorial staff, and I’m sure will absorb my offering with the appropriate graciousness. Whether or not any editors, or sub-editors, will feel similarly is still an unknown longshot.

And I’ve still got much tweaking to do.

But now, on the eve of the release of Harry Potter 7, I’ve plunked the period at the end of page 96, and I can immerse myself in Harry’s world for a few days without feeling negligent.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

bad bad lights

I’d like to narrow myself down to one grocery store. At the moment I have 3 1/2, which include Giant, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and sometimes Safeway.

Today I went to Giant. We sorely needed cereal. Why, I wondered as I pushed along from cat food to Lactaid, do I always discover, halfway through Giant, that I’m feeling sorry for myself? And, I’ll tell you what, I really hate that feeling. Not so much because--well, who wants to feel that way?--but because I neither admire nor aspire to moods of that sort. It occurred to me that it doesn’t happen in Whole Foods. It doesn’t happen in Trader Joe’s. In fact, I usually leave those venues feeling pretty good about life and how I’m doing with it.

I think it’s the light. I think it’s all the nasty fluorescent lights which gives the place an overly-bright, garish feel.

The Holiday Inn Express we stayed in in Abingdon was fully lit with compact fluorescents. It looked bright. It looked clean. But it still gave me the unsettling sense that I was in a weird place between asleep and awake where images are stark and soap opera characters wielding brightly-colored, cheaply made, carnival prize stuffed animals might charge into the room at any moment just to weird me out. I don’t like that feeling. Animals that rip at the seams after you whack your brother one mere time should not be.

But Giant and its ilk have that affect on me. Icky seasonal yard figurines--bleck. Endcaps of blue and pink cereal--bleck. Circular racks of books with titles like He Has Long Hair and My Blouse is Too Small or Word Search Fun for Christian Wives--bleck.

It may be true that Whole Foods is overpriced and--at least around here--peopled with well-coiffed women Doing the Right Thing for their families. But there are at least enough Earth-mothers to keep it almost in balance. As for Trader Joe’s...Sure, you have to watch those expiration dates. If you buy a pie with a last-sale date of 3 days ago, well caveat emptor, and if you can’t tell that those cherries are past their prime then you probably should stick to frozen. But, when they’re good, they’re good, cheap, interesting, and not horrifically illuminated. But watch out for that place in the frozen aisle where you can so easily get wedged between a structural column and the taquitos. And watch out for the lady who shops in pantyhose, thinking that they’re leggings. And try not to be standing next to the ship’s bell when someone calls for a price check. Otherwise...I think I may be due for a trip there.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

jetsam

In a weird process that kicks in unexpectedly, the few remaining chapters of my current project are begging to be written. I covered more ground today than I probably have in the last 3 months. In fact, I’d be working on it right now, but it’s 9:30 p.m., and I only dare approach the job with a fresh brain.

Current bathroom reading material includes a “Select Registry” book of Inns and B&B’s bestowed on us by the hosts of the WhiteGate Inn in Asheville. It is easy to want to travel when such delicious looking lodgings are featured for anywhere on the continent. On the other hand, my teardrop travel trailer (well, the one I’m imagining,) is waiting anxiously to take me on a more rustic voyage from town to town and I’m not sure how I’ll resolve the conflict.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

tune in next season

I was set to truck to Georgetown U. for Jeff's MRI in prep for his first dose of V490, aka Merck's new Phase I Alzheimer's vaccine. I was determined to try heading south on Wisconsin Avenue. Downtown D.C., even not at rush hour, is harrying, and there must be a better way.

But it will wait until November. Evidently, a bungled communication between Merck and the testing sites (ours, of course, being GU,) has resulted in there not being a slot for Jeff in the "first dosing." In November though, we will be choosing between "second dosing" of the Merck, and Phase II of a Wyeth vaccine which has already done the rounds in Europe. I am inclined toward the Wyeth. If you don't have to be one of the first 70 humans to serve as test subject, then why be one?

So off we'll go again--in the Fall I guess. Yikes. There'll be the whole school schedule parameter problem. Maybe Gabe will have to take a bike, and ride home from his carpool dropoff point...

road trip

I remember what a fine thing it used to be to either drive (with a navigator riding shotgun,) or navigate (with a driver.) If there’s an advantage to doing both--the current necessity--it’s that I get plenty of photographic memory practice. At any convenient (or at times sketchy) roadway stop, the technique is this: Scan the map and lock the current location, destination, and directional trajectories into visual memory. Then, as we pass the exit for Oopsie Caverns I will be able to reassure myself that Oopsieville is 2/5 of the way from exit 731 to the Tasty-Snooz Inn where (you’ll soon learn) they’ve switched all the room lighting to compact fluorescent, and your eyes will go bonkers accordingly.

Trucking south on highway 81, you pass a sign promoting some Cavern or other every 5 minutes or so. Although I don’t think I’ve succumbed since an official girl scout trip in the late 60’s, I felt it was high time to expose Gabe to the tourist kitsch that surrounds these geologic marvels. “Why do they have so much weird stuff made out of wood,” he asks naively. I am somewhat chagrined to realize that all the parks and playgrounds we stopped at when our children were small deprived them of the sensuous delights of hundreds of cedarwood knickknacks stamped with the words Shenandoah Caverns. Still, he is not tempted, being more interested in the “lab-manufactured” unrealistically-hued polished stones. I buy him a tee-shirt.

We do not try to lose Jeff on the Cavern tour, but I know what happened. It was right at the entrance to the “Short-man’s Revenge Grotto,” when we pass another tourgroup. Gabe and I notice a couple of rooms (caves) later. While I’m fairly certain Jeff will find his way out with the other group, our teenage tourguide, who generally exhibits the enthusiasm of a sedated turtle, is concerned that it will not look good on her resume to lose a person in the cavern, so she and I scamper back a ways to retrieve Jeff while our group waits. And I am glad, when I see his befuddled expression, that we did.

We manage two days in lovely, hippie-chic Asheville without major incident. Gabe allows as how a tour of the Biltmore Estate could be much more fun if it occurred in a post-apocalyptic world and involved periodic battles with zombies.

But we collect Becca from her 6-week counselor stint at Camp Cheerio, and only get vaguely lost in Roanoke looking for dinner.

Of greater importance is that I successfully nab several bottles of Cheerwine at a roadside gas station/grocery store where the proprietress sits in a rocking-chair surrounded by cases of beer, and the young man cashiering addresses me as “mai-yim.” The Cheerwine was requested by Olivia, who got a taste of this North Carolina specialty on last month’s church-youth Habitat for Humanity, house-building trip to Iredell County, N.C. Based on one sip of the stuff I’d say that you could make your own by adding soda-water to cherry cough syrup. As we leave the convenience store I shush Gabe, who I believe is about to say something tactless. Instead, once we seal ourselves into the car, he says “that was the smallest gas station bathroom I’ve ever seen. It was also the cleanest.” And I am surprised. Not by the small part.

Monday, July 02, 2007

I love this



At the moment my mac’s desktop wallpaper features a teardrop travel trailer by Camp-Inn of Necedah, Wisconsin. I want one, you see.

People think I’m a little crazy. “Where’s the bathroom?” they ask. “Where’s the shower?” Jeff says, “does that thing have air conditioning?” (Answer: If you buy a special ac unit for it. Or you can opt for the ceiling fan/vent.)

Now I’m not supposing that just everyone would relish the notion of hitching one of these cuties to the back of her Subaru and hitting the blue highways, but I do. Oh, in case you didn’t know, it has a queen-size bed in the main compartment, built in birch cabinets, and then--around the back--once you pop up the hood, is your traveling kitchen. I’d plan on tossing a couple of pop-up chairs, a shade, and a folding table into the back of the Soobie, and I’d be ready to roll.

The shower, you see, is conveniently located at the campground, so you would want a nice thorough ready reference to good camp parks en route. The other place the shower is located is in the occasional hotel when you’d decided to splurge for the night and stay at the cute historic inn in town.

Many afficionados, as I understand it, get a kit, or directions, and make one of these things themselves. But I do not know that I will ever want to make my own dwelling, of any sort, again. I’ve pretty much gotten that out of my system, so when it’s time for my trip to Necedah, I will be buying my teardrop pre-made and pre-outfitted with all the niceties that I want.

Do not ask when this trip to Necedah will take place. The answer to that question is as nebulous as the answer to this one: When will you sell a book and actually start making money Em? Answer: When the time is right.