A · Life

To sum up, Scrivener is the best thing ever. It is precisely what I have been missing all this time, it is just what would have saved me in 2003, it is something I have been needing since about 1992, and I am officially asking for a paid license for it for Christmas because I cannot live without it.

So anyway, that's my NaNoWriMo-- I didn't really write much that's new, but I combed through my hard drive and found everything I've ever written on Barbarians_Novel, including the first scribbled notes, and all the abortive drafts since. One document alone is over 190,000 words long, and is utter nonsense, but contains some compelling scenes, which are not usable in any way but may go into another book in another life, and are immensely useful in delineating for me precisely why I no longer participate in NaNoWriMo and similar foolishness.
I might mention there are over 75 documents, ranging in length from about 50 words to the one above. Not many on that low end, either. Most I'd say hover in the 30,000-word range. I'm serious about that, by the way. In 2003 I went through all my writings and tallied them up and counted over a million words, of fiction. Not counting journaling, which I did intensively. Over a million words.
I do not need NaNoWriMo.
I need a fucking editor.
It is fascinating to watch the development of the kernel of a tellable story. It is fascinating to follow the innumerable dead ends. It is a bit heartbreaking to see where sheer disorganization did me in. I have poured so much work into this thing, and at this point the usable, final draft stands at somewhat under 5,000 words.
Five thousand words.
The rest is... well, optimistically I can mine it. But the usable portions don't even constitute a skeleton. But they do have enough points to plot a line, so I at least can scout the direction.
Still not sure if it's a romance. Or what. Lots of sex and violence. The stuff I like. The new draft is going to be a little less conversation and a lot more action. I'm asking myself What Would Martha Wells Do, as she's one who really keeps things moving; I'm also asking myself what Jennie Crusie would do, as she lets her characters chatter like little birds, but makes all the chatter serve something. (I have to say, I love her writing and hate her books. Hate is too strong a word. But I love all the components of it; I love her writing about writing, I love her self-awareness and her wit; I love how she puts a book together. And then I read it and throw it across the room. I feel terrible about that last bit and I just can't figure out why it's true. I've bought several, which is more than I ever do. But I don't love them, and I feel cheated, but I don't blame her one bit for it. Obviously she's got an awesome system and tons of fans, and I don't resent that at all. She's not alone-- there are tons of authors whose blogs I follow ravenously, whose books leave me cold. Weird!)
Anyway.
Things have to happen in this book, and weirdly that's meant adding in more POVs, and cutting down on the chatter from the main ones. Fine by me and I'm enjoying it a lot and Scrivener is making it so easy.

Which was all a long aside.
All of this posting was to say, I have a writing roadblock, and would love to ask you, O Internet, whoever has not deserted me for Facebook, for help.
I have this character.
He is an adorable and sincere and valiant young man. Not the 'hero' but a good guy nonetheless. When the protagonist (female) first encounters him, he says something along the lines of "Where the hell have you been?" to the hero. They are speaking the heroine's language, which is not their native language, because they are polite even in extremity (the hero may be getting stabbed at the time). He speaks it very well, but of course, he learned it from a tutor and not on the street, and so he speaks it sort of, well... he sounds like that guy who spoke in between the beeps in health class. He's got the equivalent of vintage 1962 academic English.
So he doesn't know any actual swear words. So what he actually says is approximately, "Where the dickens have you been?" in the sort of crisis where a really emphatic swear word would be called for.

Buuuut... I don't want to say "the dickens" because a modern English reader is going to say, "Charles Dickens?"
It's important, because he doesn't introduce himself (action scene!), so the POV character, the heroine, a native speaker of the language they're speaking, refers to him as "the dickens boy" in her head for the rest of the scene, and may do so for the rest of the novel. And "the dickens boy" is going to read like "the Dickens boy" and so... you know, a proper name like that is just going to be too jarring.

So I need something like that. Not a rustic thing-- not "Where in tarnation have you been", for example, because him sounding rustic isn't going to work. He has to sound antiquated, out of touch, silly, and harmless. (The harmless part is really important; people are getting stabbed, and his antique quirky accent changes the tone a great deal for the terrified and injured heroine, who hears him before she can see him.)
I'm drawing a blank on non-swear-words that are charmingly retro without being rustic.
Help?

I ate dinner last night. I had tiny shreds of turkey, a teaspoon of sweet potatoes, a teaspoon of green bean casserole, a tablespoonful of stuffing... then I waited a couple of hours, to see if that settled, and ate five pierogis that Z defrosted and fried for me. (He ate the rest of the box.) It took me a long time to get those down, but after a couple more hours, I took a big chunk of Thanksgiving's dessert, a pumpkin cheesecake with apricot and molasses topping. I couldn't finish it, but I spent over an hour enjoying the attempt. (My belly just feels full all the time, which I know it isn't.)
It was somewhat uncomfortable, and I have no appetite, but I felt good for trying. I just feel like my digestion isn't... moving yet, all the way through, so I'm hesitant to keep piling food in there just yet.
The other lingering discomfort is that I seem to have pulled some sort of internal muscle in my rib/chest/shoulder, probably vomiting. It's really uncomfortable. I'm not pleased with it, but if it's just a muscle I suppose it doesn't matter.
But as I was pondering over the last few bites of the cheesecake, Z, who had gone to bed about 40 minutes before, arose and unmistakably came loudly down with the same stomach flu or whatever I'd had before. Ugh! What an unpleasant sound.
He said he didn't actually feel too bad, but I said we'd see how he felt in about six hours after doing this once an hour thenceforth.
He was up most of the night, which meant I didn't sleep-- he kindly betook himself to the guest bedroom, which is closer to the bathroom, but as the house is about ten feet long, I still heard every movement. And of course, Chita was agitated, and has spent the whole night meowing intermittently. I got up at 7 and pitched her bodily out the door, but of course I felt bad, and have let her back in, and she's still meowling everywhere, if a bit more subduedly.

My belly is rumbling something awful, but I hope it's hunger. Poor Z dragged himself out of bed to ask if I'd go get him some Coke to flatten before I went to work-- flat Coke is the only thing that stopped me puking, and it was his childhood remedy, and I got the last can while I was sick. I don't think he's thrown up in a couple of hours, but he can't have had much rest.

I'm just trying to get myself together-- I have to go to work in a few, and have to get to the nearest convenience store and back first, and I just wish I could take a full breath without pain. So annoying.

Chita! Shut up!

I'm making my fourth attempt on the same bowl of plain white rice. I never managed more than three forkfuls before, but I've just taken my fourth this time. I might go a little nuts and add some salt. I'm really not hungry, but I am also quite noticeably weak, so I should probably keep trying. My guts were all rumbly a little bit ago, but whether it was unrest or hunger I couldn't say. I have called in today, though. I had the strength upon rising to comb and rebraid my hair, and take a quick shower (didn't wash my hair-- that takes a ton of effort, and with my body temperature regulation all over the place, the process of air-drying my wet hair was likely to be uncomfortable).
I hate calling in sick. But every single staff member is working today. It would have been fun, actually; there are only six of us, and I like all of my coworkers, and it's fun to see everyone at the same time. Also it's the store manager's birthday, and she has a party tonight which I would have liked to go to.
Ugh. I just feel weak and icky and I don't really want to eat this rice. But at least my body's not actively rejecting the rice.
Seven forkfuls now. Can I stop?
Being ill forces you to pay way too much attention to the mundania of the physical processes that keep you alive. Really, plain white rice and flat Coke?

Oh, I should state for the record: next time you are sick and can't stop throwing up, try flat Coke. Seriously, it was like a miracle. Open a can or bottle of Coke, pour it in a glass, swish it around for a couple of minutes. Wow! I still felt like hell, and my stomach still hurt and I was sick as a dog, but I stopped throwing up. I had been throwing up every hour or so for about nine hours, and plain water, ginger tea, flat ginger ale, all were coming right back up in nearly exactly the same quantities and condition they'd gone down in (gross), but once I started drinking the Coke nothing came back up at all. It was truly bizarre! I think it's the acid and sugar? I don't know. I surely wasn't anywhere near done being horribly ill-- the fever climbed up pretty high in the evening after about six hours of not throwing up-- but I didn't puke anymore, which is an enormous mercy. It is just so uncomfortable and unpleasant to regurgitate. I can't imagine being bulimic. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh.

I could happily be anorexic for a while, though. I just don't want to eat anything. Bleh.
Think I'm done with this rice again. Put it back in the Tupperware and give it another shot in an hour... Eight forkfuls this time. We'll make it nine and then take a hiatus.

I really need to get organized with my writing. At the moment, everything I've written for the last, mm, two years is just loose files on my desktop. Many files have overlapping content, where I moved on to a new draft but did not want to discard the old, and so copied and pasted parts into new documents and moved on, and go back to the old drafts to mine fragments from time to time.
I go through phases in composing. I have been happiest using TextWrangler, which is primarily intended for coders. I used Word for a while-- yes, Microsoft Word. Word 2000 for Macs was actually quite a good program. But it takes too long to open. I hate opening old things written in Word, so I rarely mine the drafts from that vintage. Word always opens with an error, so it hangs while I let it go in the background. Mostly I don't bother with it. I can open Word documents in TextWrangler, though with formatting errors-- fine if I'm just rereading.

Aside: I am REALLY TIRED of getting constant email messages from companies I've shopped with, like, once, offering coupons. This is a bad time of year for distractions like that, I guess. Back to the original rant, or essay as it was pretending to be.

I like TextWrangler. Why? I can have things open in tabs. Yes! There's a "drawer" off to the side, and it alphabetizes the documents in it. There's no limit on how many I can have open. That's so handy. It means I can have every relevant draft open but not cluttering up my taskbar or desktop. They're neatly filed in a stack under the one I'm working on. It's perfect.
Except when I want to compose side-by-side. If I'm mining a rather clean draft, and so can copy-paste big chunks, but want to intersperse alterations, I like to have two windows open-- the active one, and the one I'm pulling from, so I can read and compose at the same time. I tend not to copy-paste, but to type over, as I'm a fast typist and better at making changes as I go instead of deleting and putting them in later. And really re-engaging with the words like that helps a lot. So I open older drafts in the text editor that came with the operating system.

The downside of TextWrangler is that I can't have italics. Or bold. Or font size changes. They're good things, much of the time. From years now of posting fanfic to the Internet, I'm used to doing all my formatting in HTML, and will actually type the angle brackets around words I want formatted. That's how I compose for LJ-- in the text menu, and if I want something italicized, well then, I'll do it. Angle bracket I close bracket angle bracket slash I close bracket. It's habit now. I do this in Word and get confused when it autocorrects to italics.

But I'm thinking maybe I should upgrade. They make fancy software for writers. Maybe I should use it. I don't know. Does anyone have a preference, or any suggestions? What would help me organize? I woke very early this morning, and have been pondering in considerable frustration all the amassed nearly-finished novels I have. I don't need help writing, I need help straightening out the plots. If only I knew where any of them were going, what they were trying to say, they'd be done already, and out the door. But I just don't know. And I can't get them organized enough to tell me.

I don't think software would help that.

Anyway, all of this is prompted by my trying a couple of free downloads-- one is WriteRoom, and one is Mariner Write. WriteRoom takes over your whole screen and hides everything else. Nope-- I'm too much of a multitasker for that to help. Mariner Write seemed OK-- some basic formatting, nice layout, easy to use-- but then I closed it and opened it again and despite my having selected all my preferences, it reset itself to the default-- Helvetica instead of the Palatino I'd set, 75% zoom (which i can't read) instead of the 150% I'd put it at, did nothing on startup even though i'd told it to open the last documents I'd been using when I closed it. The document I'd composed in it, which I'd really liked, now was so jarringly different visually that my brain decided it was drivel and I immediately lost what tiny budding enthusiasm I'd had for the project.

No thanks. I'll be uninstalling those two programs. Why consider changing from TextWrangler? Before that the thing I was happiest with was BBEdit. I guess I'm a frustrated codemonkey.

I have a standing, written request for Tues and Thurs evenings off from work, "as often as possible" since I know with such a small staff things are bound to come up from time to time. Well... The guy they hired after me likes working the morning shift, so for 3 weeks now the scheduling manager has given him the Tuesday morning shift I used to regularly work, and has put me on the closing shift.
Last week his meant I hurried and hustled and made it to practice juuust in time to get credit for attendance. But this week, there are 2 committee meetings before practice, that Z and I both should attend. And Z has a work meeting at 2, so I have to take the bus. I'll have to miss the meetings, sure, but his attendance at them means he can't pick me up. So in addition to leaving the house at 12:30 to get to work by 2, I'm also going to have to walk half a mile and wait half an hour in the dark to get home after 10 pm, completely missing every single one of my obligations on this evening which I requested off in writing.
I enjoy my job-- I truly, honestly do-- but I cannot do this sort of thing every week. Why are my needs intrinsically less important than those of a man? I have to, have to find another job, as soon as possible.

Last night my team had a scrimmage with another team. ( fun! )
Nobody was badly injured, though there'll be bruises and suchlike galore. I had the odd experience of somehow getting tangled up in the turn and falling in a pileup, and when I got up, there was a searing pain in my forearm, just below my elbow. I looked but couldn't see anything-- the area was completely covered by my elbow pad, which had not slipped down but had done its job... ineffectively, somehow. Weird! I skated off, since it wasn't structural, and the burning eased a bit, but not much. When the jam was over, I peeled my elbow pad back, and there was a faint bruise. I have no possible idea how on earth something would have impacted me sharply right through my elbow pad, but it stung like the dickens all night, and still hurts this morning.
It's not structural, and doesn't seem to affect the muscle or any tendons, or the bone. I can move my arm freely, I just can't put any pressure on the underside of my forearm. So it only hurts in very specific circumstances that happen all the time. Oh well!

In other news I emailed Singer customer support about my sewing machine. I had trouble that the feed dogs, though they didn't seem broken, didn't seem to work at all. I'd tried putting the lever where it should go and just sewing, and it didn't work, so when they responded that I had to turn the hand wheel while adjusting the lever, that seemed like my attemps to sew (as sewing turns the same mechanism as the handwheel) would've covered that already. But apparently, you have to move the lever and handwheel simultaneously. ... So on the upside, my machine is fixed, apparently (I dashed downstairs and tried it, but didn't try sewing anything yet), but on the downside, apparently I am a moron. But how on earth... I looked at the manual and I took a class on how to use my machine and still didn't grasp that the motion had to be simultaneous. Why does the motion have to be simultaneous? It's so odd! It takes two hands to move the lever sometimes-- it's got a fair bit of resistance to it-- and the hand crank is on the opposite side of the machine, so it's certainly not intuitive that you'd be trying them both at the same time.

Anyway. Sewing machines were designed for women to use, and part of that is keeping women stupid. A man wouldn't put up with such counterintuitive and fiendishly complex difficulty as a normal part of an operating system, but women are culturally indoctrinated to believe they deserve nothing better. That's my working theory, anyway. Before you throw computers at me, stop and think-- is your computer actually more difficult to use than a sewing machine? Really? And if so, what sewing machine? Because I want one of those.

I had to blow the dust off all my makeup. Tonight my roller derby team is getting our photos taken to go on the league website and in our bout programs, and our uniforms arrived precisely a week ago. I tried mine on very quickly and determined that yes, it fits, then put it away and only dug it out again just now to put on for the photos. It is a big change from last year, including being a different color, and I'm relieved to discover that I can still wear the various socks and stockings and so on that I've accumulated over the years, as the logo is still the same colors so they still look all right.
So I've got ridiculous quantities of makeup on, which won't be visible in the final photo. I'm OK with that, that's kind of how I roll. I don't do makeup very well, I just kinda put it on there until everything's covered, and then stop.
Every year we try to come up with a theme. Last year we went to elaborate lengths to do individual photo shoots. It was kind of amazing. This year we'd planned on just adding in the new people as was necessary... but then we changed our uniforms. So, oh well. We're just doing one big shoot all at once.
But I think our theme is pretty witty. You know how that movie came out not long ago? Whip It? It's about roller derby. And the tagline is, "Be your own hero." Aww. Cute.
Our theme, though I actually don't know if it's mocking Whip It or not, is "Be Your Own Superhero". I don't know how that's going to work out. I think it's much funnier if it's in imitation of Whip It, because it's more awesome in the same way that real roller derby is more awesome than the version they play in the movie. (Which I admit I still haven't seen. You know, I haven't seen the roller derby movie with whatsername in it from the 70s either. I don't see much motion pictures.)
But it's awesome anyway. We'll see how it goes. Mostly I'm just happy to dress up. I do it so seldom. I'd be happier if I could find my good garter belt, but it's OK, I guess I'm pleased to have the sort of lifestyle where I have several to choose from. Still, that one is vastly superior. And it's missing. Grump.
I don't get to wear froufrou garter belts when I'm actually skating... And makeup, while I still bother with it since putting my face on kinda helps me get ready mentally, sweats off during the track setup (not even warmup laps), so nobody sees it. I tried checking out bellydancer tutorials on sweat-proof makeup, but ain't nothing sweatproof to the degree of roller derby.

Anyway. Gonna go prance around like a nutjob. It's great. I love picture day. Actually I printed some school pictures today-- it was funny, and kind of neat.
I've got to come up with a Christmas photo.

Oh, Z decided that his beard needed to get pimped for his birthday. He bought moustache wax. Yeah, yeah, I know: pics or stfu. But I don't have a picture yet. I haven't stopped laughing yet.

So busy. It's like I have two jobs. I've never felt quite this overwhelmed by roller derby before... I don't think I have, anyway. It's just taking over my life.
It doesn't help that I am working far more hours at work than I'd like. At first I really wanted to work as many hours as possible, but right now I have so much going on that I'd really prefer to be the part-time I'm supposed to be. I feel like the only days I have off are the ones I've requested so that I can go be somewhere else, so I'm never free to just be at home doing things. Wednesday was my only day off this week (except Sunday, which I spent in Philadelphia, which involved returning home six hours before I had to report to work the next morning), and I spent three full hours of it grocery shopping, which I've needed to do for about three weeks. I spent $260, didn't use a single plastic bag, and when the cashier was done rather athletically ringing me out, she high-fived me. It was pretty intense.
I have food now but I forgot microwave popcorn. D'oh!
The only reason the house isn't a shambles is that Z has sort of taken ownership of the dishes. Every two or three days he just cleans them all. Which is great. In betweentimes I do dishes too, if I'm in the kitchen at all. But I'm so rarely in the kitchen I don't do many at all.
I have kept up on the laundry, except the part where it gets put away. Unfortunately I just wound up dumping it all on the bed in the office, as I tend to, and thence onto the floor so I could sleep in that bed on a couple of nights where my coming so late to bed and getting up early would disrupt Z unneccessarily. So the laundry, while clean, is a disaster and it's my fault. If I had time to fix it, I would, but right now all my "spare" time goes toward sleep.

I know, I know, whine whine groan bitch etc. I did get started on Christmas presents on Wednesday, sort of assembly-lining the stuff-- cutting out three full items and starting to sew them, in a single hour I had going spare between work and roller derby. And I got through the first sewing step of one of them, and then started the second and... jam. Jam. Jam. Jam. WTF? Ohhh... um, the feed dogs on my machine are not in place. The switch to raise and lower them? Doesn't.
W.
T.
F.
On my brand-new in September sewing machine. The feed dogs. Don't work. WHY?
I am going to bring it into where I bought it today. I'm not screwed--yet-- because I have the lovely refurbished antique sewing machine of my grandmother's that I can still use, and so I can still make progress on these things. But W. T. F!!!!! It's not like I jammed them or did anything to them-- I just put the next item in and it didn't work! I lowered the feed dogs to untangle the fabric, which had become bunched up since it wasn't getting advanced since the feed dogs weren't moving. And then when I tried to raise them again, they wouldn't come up. How do you break feed dogs by sewing?? On a brand-new machine!!! For serious!!!

This had better be covered under the warranty. :(

Every time I write a post about roller derby I get a slew of anonymous (i.e. non-LJ) comments, usually unsigned, from roller derby people.
Someone is linking to me, and I don't know who.
From the tone of many of these comments-- many of whom are singling out a particular passage buried deep within the long rambly post, as I don't write succinct essay-style entries on it anymore, since those only generated controversy-- it is obvious that someone is linking to me with a pull-quote, and it seems apparent, in some instances at least, that the pull-quote is framed in a somewhat hostile fashion.
It's been a very, very, very long time since this happened, as you may notice i've been avoiding discussing roller derby on here in any specific or interesting form. I got on a roll today and decided to kind of go with it to see if anyone was reading, but figured I was being silly. But no, there they are-- even the friendly commenters are evidently focused on setting me straight. I have always had a policy of not reading anonymous comments-- since about 2002, anyway, when I had a whole spate of abusive anonymice who used to drive me nuts-- so I skip to the end and see if they're signed. If so, I read them. If not, I kinda scan. If the word "you" appears a lot, they're probably haranguing me. So I delete. I have way too much shit in my life for any of that.

So someone either reads me regularly, or has some sort of filter set up to alert them if I mention certain keywords. Like what, I don't know.

I'm a bit disturbed, and a bit worried, because, well... I post a lot of shit here. I post unlocked out of very, very long habit (8 years now), because people I care about read me but don't have LJs, because I don't have a whole lot of anything to hide, but also because I don't figure I'm terribly interesting. The vast majority of what's in here is really for me, and that shows, I think. I try occasionally to be entertaining, but it's not exactly riveting material here. I'm pretty much brain-vomiting. But the fact that I've been writing long enough that even my brainvomit generally comes out articulate means that people take my brain-vomit to be a much more purposeful statement than it is. And they start drama over it. People! I'm just talking, over here. It's not addressed to you. If I were addressing it to you, I would do so. In a more direct venue. I don't really do passive-aggressive all that well.

But I'm mostly just baffled. Who out there has had the time to post links to rants months, even years, apart? Who hates me enough to hostilely frame out-of-context pullquotes to draw pre-annoyed people here to snipe at me? What the hell is this about? I'm just a dude, over here, telling stories to myself so I don't have to walk down the street muttering. (I do, anyway, but at least I can tell people I'm practicing for my blog.)

Anyway. Maybe I'm overreacting-- on my way into the house after practice I snagged my skate bag on the water spigot by the driveway and managed to half-fill my skate bag with water. WTF, right? It's been a rough day-- but I don't actually think I'm being paranoid. Who the hell is bothering to read my shit, and why??? If I were that readable, I'd write a book about it and publish it so at least I'd be getting paid to have people yell at me about how I'm wrong about all the opinions I hold. (Opinions.)

Sigh. Nobody ever reads the follow-up posts, where I'm like what the hell, who are all you people, and here's what this is all about and here's the context. They just read the linked-to post, and most just read the section around the pullquote, which is invariably the paragraph I considered the least deeply and went with the easiest wording on instead of making verbal gymnastics happen to try to express myself clearly. It's usually the throwaway part where I'm like Shut up, everyone's an asshole. Which isn't what I mean, I'm just out of patience with figuring out how to say it.

But I'll just be over here muttering to myself, and knowing that the next time I'm unwary, I'll get pull-quoted on, like, fatderbychicksareassholes.com or something.

Worth mentioning-- when Z was the webmaster for the local altnewsweekly he discovered that an enormous proportion of the (of course) very liberal paper's web traffic came from conservative forums whose membership seemed to thrive largely on getting whipped into a frenzy of being offended by the altnewsweekly's content. And I had a very conservative coworker who read the altnewsweekly religiously, without fail, the moment it came out, every week, just to get upset at the biased liberal articles. He loved it.
I sort of wasn't going for that kind of traffic with my personal blog about my menstrual cramps and blisters and struggles with finding bras that fit, but, um, OK, I'm really not flattered either. Thanks though?

Z and I zipped down to Philadelphia this past Friday and stayed at his cousin's house, right in Center City, until Sunday. It was awesome: the Convention Center, where WFTDA (Women's Flat Track Derby Association, the governing body that sets the rules my league skates by) held its national championship competition, was a two-mile walk from her house. Everything came together beautifully despite a relative lack of planning.
We drove down Friday morning, and arrived juuuust in time to see the first bout kick off-- it started a little late. And it was an amazing game-- Madison, WI's Dairyland Dolls, the original home team of one of the founders of the league I skate for now, vs. Boston MA's Boston Massacre. It was just a classic bout, with see-sawing lead changes, hard hits, breathtaking speed and just all around great play on both sides. I was a Madison fan before-- I hadn't seen the Dolls, but their non-WFTDA-ranked travel team, Team Unicorn, came to bout Hamilton ON's Hammer City Harlots the summer before last, and I was thoroughly impressed by them then. But now I'm a Boston fan, too. Such heart, and good teamwork.
We watched the rest of the bouts that night-- there are better overviews of them on Derby News Network-- and collapsed exhausted at Z's cousin's place, only to rise and stagger back to the convention ctr. Saturday a.m. We wandered around the Reading Terminal Market for a brief span, arriving too early, but it was a lot to take in.
A full, very long day of derby ensued. I also successfully purchased new wheels and bearings, to my great excitement-- saving myself about 20% off the list price, plus shipping, plus sales tax. So I treated myself to better bearings than I normally buy, but decided to go with the cheaper wheels that are identical to the ones I've been riding for twelve solid months-- the new-style wheels are smaller, narrow-profile, and there's a learning curve to using them. I don't have time for that right now; I should've bought a set in July or August and spent the summer learning how to use them. If I decide to come back for a fifth season of skating, maybe then I'll splurge and make the effort to learn to use the more expensive wheels.

edit: I had written a whole long rambly point-of-view thing on the bouts and the tournament play, basically to the effect of admiring the winning team (Oly) and thinking that the controversial Denver technique boiled down to, well, they're free to do what they do, and I'm free not to like it much, and I've been booed much harder for much less, so whatever.
I'm removing all that because I'm getting linked to from somewhere, by someone hostile it seems, and people are coming in primed to take me waaaaaay more seriously than I ought to be taken. This happened with all that stupid bullshit about me not being allowed to have opinions on our travel team bouts, and it's apparently happening again-- I figured there are plenty of people who hate on things and get things much wronger than I do, and do so much more plainly with intent to be controversial. Me, I'm just writing for me. And I fucking hate when people link to me to make trouble, which is evidently what this is about.

So whatever. I am so disinterested in drama that I'm really over the Oh Noes Censorship thing. I just wish I knew who is so fucking fascinated by me that they have to keep doing shit like this.

Anyway. We stuck around for the final, but didn't stay for the awards ceremony. We booked it out of there, went and had a nice sit-down dinner at a nearby Vietnamese place, then hoofed back to Z's cousin's. "You're crazy," she said. It was 8pm. We packed up hurriedly, went and sprung our car from lockup, and hit the road. We got onto the expressway at 8:15. It's six and a half hours from Philadelphia to Buffalo.
But we made it. Z, champ that he is, drove the whole way. The only incident was that near Scranton, at the intersection where I-81 crosses over a small state rte. 107, there was a traffic backup and a guy, just a guy in jeans and a sweatshirt, was out directing traffic with a flashlight. There was a tractor trailer jackknifed across both lanes of the highway, and as we approached we could see that the front end was heavily damaged as if it had collided with something. I assumed it had lost control and hit the railing. There were no emergency services onsite, just the guy with the flashlight-- in hindsight, he must have been the driver of the wrecked truck. He was guiding traffic to the offramp just before the accident, which by great good fortune was the type that goes down to the intersection, has a stop sign, and then comes right back onto the road.
As we went off the off-ramp, we had to swerve around part of the truck's fender. Then we had to swerve again around a big black thing, which I thought was a tire-- the truck must've had a blowout, I thought, and hit the railing. But no. It was not a tire. It was an animal. Z thought it was a bear, but I caught clear sight of the hind end/tail area and am pretty sure it was a cow or bull. Enormous, black, and very, very thoroughly dead.
Yes. In the dead of night (it was midnight, and moonless, and very slightly foggy), the truck must've hit the bovine, which was a solid matte black with no markings, full on. The whole radiator was totally stove in. If any other vehicle but a semi had hit that enormous animal there would've been human fatalities too-- it was big and tall enough that it certainly would have come through the windshield of our compact car.

But we arrived in Buffalo at around 2:30 with no further incident. We went straight to bed, and I dragged myself out to get to work on time this morning. Ugh. I'm looking forward to a couple of weekends at home, but we're into the holiday season now, so... No rest for the wicked!

I have middling-bad cramps. Of course my Special Woman Time took me totally by surprise because that handy-dandy iPhone app? The new update of my iPhone's software totally killed it, completely wiping out all the data I'd recorded over three months of use. And leaving me with nothing but a hey, isn't it around the second week of the month, shouldn't I, oh shiny thing, off I go to work in pale-colored trousers, isn't this a great fucking idea? Moron. But I'm far more furious with my goddamn phone, because what the fuck, really?

Anyway.
Cramps, spaciness, though my aphasia isn't as bad as it was over the summer. I'm at about 85% brain capacity, and it hurts to stand, but not cripplingly.
But skating? Oh man I felt awesome tonight. We were doing endurance stuff and I was just flying, we were doing agility stuff and I was like, is that all? And we were even jumping, and I was cool. My Kryptonite remains falling, and I simply didn't do the monkey-rolling because that=instant migraine, and I have waaaaay too much shit to do to get me a second migraine this month. We do not need that, no siree. But apart from that I was feeling really good all night. And I skated the extra happy fun songs at the end since the rink DJ was running practice anyway and didn't care if we stayed late, for once. And I had a great time, and maybe felt a twinge of cramp like twice all night, just to remind me of what I wasn't feeling.

So I cooled down a bit, and stretched, and took my gear off, and got in the car, and started driving, and ohhhhh shit those cramps suck. I think it's once my heartrate fell totally to normal, or maybe my muscles hit a crucial point of coolness. (I'm still in a micro-miniskirt and wet shirt in the 60-degree living room, but I am starting to be a bit chilly...) Anyway, now I'm miserable.

So the conclusion is that I just need to spend the next two or three days rollerskating constantly. Right?
That's totally feasible...

Sigh.

But to those of you who still don't believe me, rollerskating is awesome. I really mean that.

I has a kitty. Chita is not a lap cat, really. She prefers Z to me, when we are sitting-- I admit, I usually sit in awkward positions with things on my lap anyway. He is more sedentary and has more lap, due to no belly and very long legs and a slouchy posture that means everything below his chest is a suitable horizontal surface for a cat. But I collapsed exhausted on the couch just now, and after a moment Chita came over, walked across my belly slowly, and then curled up partially on my thigh and partly on a pillow and mostly on the couch.
Aww.
She has had a lovely day today, because it was 65 and intermittently sunny, so we had all the doors of the house open. The storm windows are all down, but the doors are easily enough propped open.
What's even better, for her, is that I was working outside most of the day, and she looooves that. She was able to follow me around, and it's just so exciting to have someone to watch. For a mostly-indoor cat who has been very bored since it got cold out and she can't come and go as she pleases, this is a great deal of stimulation all at once. I hope she'll sleep well tonight; she's been restless in the mornings and that's annoying.

I have been busy since we got back from Melrose. Sunday I washed and scrubbed all my new dishes, and put them away, and then worked; I've been futzing around nonstop. Today I had off from work unexpectedly, and I seized the opportunity of it not being freezing to run out and tear down the front yard. I used the lawnmower to mulch all the stalks and sticks and plants and leaves I could find, and with that and the compost bucket and the contents of the compost heap from this summer and other odds and ends I'd been saving, I made a new lasagna bed in the front yard. It was over an old bed, which I double-dug and killed myself setting up this spring, only to have it pretty much immediately get overgrown. The soil was so nasty and packed and clayey and dry that it wasn't really suitable for anything, but I thought peppers would do well there. I would've been right, except that it never got warm enough this year for peppers to do much of anything. Bummer! The plants were lush and happy in the poor soil, but the fruits were stunted and rotted before they grew to full size. It was just too cold and wet for them to really set.
I don't know yet what I'll plant there next year, but a lasagna bed will maybe, just maybe, yield less weedy and richer soil, so I can grow something that just doesn't get all weed-choked immediately. I don't know.

I do know I'm sore as hell, and exhausted. Despite how easy lasagna composting is supposed to be, it still involves a lot of heavy lifting. I also did four loads of laundry today and dried them outside, so that might be a factor. I wanted to bake today, but I don't know what. I was going to go work out tonight, but I really, really, really, really don't want to now...

I have to decide what to make for dinner, though, and I was going to bake something, like maybe zucchini bread, so I have to figure that out too... I've got to use all my new dishes!!

One thing I really really really really really need, though, and was disappointed not to find among Gram's effects, is a potato masher. My well-meaning uncle gave me a fancy Good Grips one several Christmases ago, but the thing is utterly bloody useless. It just presses the potatoes flat, instead of actually mashing them (which involves some, you know, churning and mashing and changing of state?), and the plastic it's made from is so flimsy that the supports for the "mashing" surface bend when you press hard.
I discovered this for a good reason, though-- in clearing out that one bed, I discovered that my turnip crop did NOT fail, but rather yielded numerous enormous roots. I gathered a huge armload of them, and processed the damaged ones into mashed turnips with sausage for lunch. Tasty! But lumpy, since I had to mash them with a fork! Turnips are harder to mash than potatoes, it turns out.

Somehow 15 min. early for practice despite leaving late. I suspect a math error. Inexplicable, but so is much of my reality if examined too closely. Been thinky today, ranting to myself in the car as I do when alone. Pondering on the inherent power of objects, the nature of "home", the complete meaninglessness of
marriage in our society-- prompted both by the ridiculous fuckery of "marriage equality", because asking the majority to vote in favor of civil rights for the minority isn't at all ridiculous, natch-- and by attending a divorce party last night. Poor guy married his high school sweetheart, who waited 3 years before developing her adult personality, which turned out to be "crazy"-- and took him for everything he had. What a dumb situation. I don't have the thumb strength to go on, but think about it. The 20th century notion of marriage we're clinging to was obsolete when it began. But anyway.
Can you tell that was my most recent rant? Freshest in my mind.
But most of the day I was pondering how we give souls to objects by our use of them as keystones for memory. There was more to that, but I got internally sidetracked thinking of beliefs and how I deal with contradictions thereof. I thought about gears or transmissions, how there's a certain amount of slippage built in to allow two unsynchronized gears to mesh and engage-- I need to look up how that's done, so I can better analogize how I manage to believe so many things at once.
I'm rambling as I wait for the rink parking lot to empty. I might see if I can get in now...

I had from Wednesday until yesterday off, and spent it at my parents' house in Melrose. It was awesome. There was nothing scheduled. I went on two or three big big long walks all over the back forty, I embroidered two small pieces just while sitting by the woodstove talking and drinking, I visited with my grandmother, and I pawed through her belongings that were removed from her apartment when she went into the nursing home, and crammed my tiny car completely full of things to make the trip back to Buffalo.
I realized I don't really care about whether things I get are new or used. I am happier to get many of these items of Gram's, none particularly valuable but all useful, than I would have been had someone given me an enormous gift card to Target or somesuch. Some of it, like the tool for cutting butter into flour to make pastry, and the smaller-than-now-standard bread pans, I have been searching for for years unsuccessfully in stores, and have concluded they just don't make in that form-factor anymore. Some of it, like the thin iron stand she had to hold her morning paper, I only took because I respond so deeply to early memories of looking at it / playing with it. (I will probably use it to hold instructions as I sew or bake, since I do not take a newspaper.) Much of it I took because the kitchen stuff I've cobbled together from gifts, purchases, and the stuff people left behind in other apartments where I lived is actually pretty gross and fragmentary. I now have Revere ware copper-bottomed pans, including a braising pan and a Dutch oven-type saucepan-- and this means I can dispose of several frying pans and pots that are either dented aluminum, or non-stick with the coating coming off. The copper bottoms are tarnished, but they aren't dented; one saucepan has a slightly misshapen rim, but the lid still fits. A nested set of metal mixing bowls means I can dispose of several stained and mismatched plastic bowls I acquired in college.
It does mean I have to reorganize.
But I would rather have these things, some of them sixty years old, than a brand-new set in whatever style is trendy. I want simple pans, and I am so happy to have some that I recognize from when I was a child. Us kids, our first-ever Night Away From Home was traditionally at Grandma's, and we would do them periodically, individually. It was one of the few early times I was treated as an individual. And it was my first inkling that not everyone lived the same way I did. Grandma drank different juice in the mornings, and cooked her eggs differently, and naturally thought of different topics of conversation, and read her paper propped up in a holder instead of spread out on the table, and kept her house warmer and had very old pictures and objects and knew about different things and just didn't care about some things that Mom cared a lot about.
I haven't lost my Grandma yet. She is very different-- much smaller, much quieter, and much less ready to laugh or respond to things or have an opinion or stand up for herself. She can walk, they insist, but she doesn't think so. She went through a very bad phase of confusion when she first came to the nursing home, since she was so suddenly whisked away from her former life and surroundings, and so most of the staff believes her demented, though she is not. She may last another decade, but she only vaguely now resembles the woman who mixed orange juice and cranberry juice for me, and who told me when I went to Europe ten years ago to be careful, if I couldn't be good.

But perhaps someday I will make my nephew eggs in that same pan, while he sits in the chair my great-grandfather used at his postmaster's desk in Niskayuna, and put juice in that same green glass, and give him advice his mother wouldn't.