Soaking Up the Weekend

Mood

It’s Saturday, and we’re trying to wake up. Blasting “80’s Alternative Essentials” off Apple Music. I’m grooving on it. Not sure about whether my husband is grooving on it. His choice would have been Celtic; I needed something more wakey than that.

Another bat

Photo by Vijay R on Pexels.com

(Note: we just packed up another bat for Public Health after we caught Chloe trying to eat it. We’re awake now.)

Weekends with my husband

The big difference for me between weekdays and weekends is that on the weekends, I have my husband all day Sunday and some Saturdays. Lately I don’t see him till 9 PM because he’s practicing to perform in a local musical. Now that I have him all day today, what are we going to do?

We’re in our 50’s. We’re probably going to sit in the living room and soak up the cool, listen to music. I’m probably going to edit my latest WIP. We’ll share things we find on the Internet.

When I hang out with my husband, it’s so much better than when I hang out alone. I can bounce things off him, make faces at him, joke with him.

I’m really scattered today

I keep jumping from task to task, and it’s taken me four or five tries to get this blog finished. I guess I’ll stop here.

What’s Up

What’s on my stereo

I’m playing Rock Lobster by the B-52s, which isn’t conducive to writing but is conducive to bewildering my husband at this time of the morning. I’m using it to wake up.

What’s on my mind

I feel like the summer is slipping away from me. I have a month before fall meetings start, and I pretty much have my course sites (the difficult part for me) set up for the Fall. I assume the university will be de-masked, with those students without vaccinations at risk for getting sick, unless we get a variant more daunting than the delta version.

Photo by Karina Zhukovskaya on Pexels.com

I’m going to have to get used to not having to set up a camera and microphone, not having to stand glued in one specific place, and not having to spray the chairs and tables with disinfectant (called “Bearcat Thunder”) between classes. Thank goodness.

What’s in my heart

I’m struggling in my heart. I haven’t fallen in love with anything lately, and love is what fuels me to write. I wrote a poem the other day, though, about one of the things I hate the most: proselytizing. Specifically, the hand extended when someone says “Jesus loves you” only to pull you into a place where Jesus purportedly hates everything you are. (I believe that Jesus loves who we are regardless.) There might have been a crush involved, and an intense disappointment.

My emotions are not strong lately, and I’ve always written out of a place of strong emotions. This is not entirely true — Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Planet was written out of a sense of fun, and I’ve made it to the first edit stage.

What’s on my plate

As I mentioned above, I’m editing Kel and Brother Coyote, which if I haven’t mentioned it, is a serial novella in the space opera genre. I’m hoping to get it on Vella just to see how well Vella works. It will, of course, need edits.

I’m waiting for beta reader responses on both Gaia‘s Hands and Kringle in the Night. These will be self-published on Amazon. Gaia’s Hands is a contemporary fantasy romance, and the first book I wrote, and thus has gone through many, many rewrites. It asks the question: what is hidden from plain sight? Kringle in the Night is the second in the Kringle Chronicles series to come out at Christmas time. Both of them have atypical protagonists — imperfect, ordinary, made extraordinary by what might be called magic.

So I have things to edit, things to re-edit, and hopefully things to publish (self-) various places. I will also keep submitting to agents, but I keep that to every six months or so.

So it’s not like I’m not busy. I’m just not creating right now, and it makes me itchy. I need to submerge me into the editing.

Hello

So jump into my comments and tell me how you’re doing!

This Summer

I’m going to need to find something to do soon.

This summer has been a strange one. I’m largely staying at home as I did during pandemic times, and I’ve spent a lot of time working on projects.

I’m running out of projects.

I’ve prepped my classes for Fall semester, that time of year that comes in a month and a half. I’ll win NaNo today and finish Kel and Brother Coyote in 3 days. Proofing it will take a few more days and then I’ve run out of things to do.

This is even with afternoon naps every day.

Things I could do

I could, I suppose, finish Voyageurs, which is the thing I least want to do. I feel like I’ve lost the plot on that one. Literally lost. the. plot. I don’t feel like the second half goes with the first half. I don’t want the second half to go that long. I don’t — I’m whining.

I could start a new novel. It’s not that I don’t have ideas sitting on the drawing board.

I could concentrate on short stories and poems — I wrote what I think is a solid poem the other day. I might have gotten the knack back.

I could, I suppose, just nap some more.

I do, it turns out, have about three doctors’ appointments in the next two weeks, so maybe I’ll just get the stress cardiogram, the psychiatrist visit, and the setup for my cataract surgeries dealt with.

Or have fun and talk my husband into another writers’ retreat.

The luxury of choice

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I’ve come off as very privileged right now. Think about it — most people have 9-5 jobs and maybe two weeks vacation. My husband works part time and has, at best, four-day weekends. No paid vacation. I have, more or less, a whole summer to do my internship supervision and, it turns out, enjoy free time.

This fall, I won’t have choices. I will have a solid semester with no vacation (except a couple three-day weekends and a week at Thanksgiving, so I shouldn’t complain). Semesters are pretty intense, so I will welcome the breaks. But I don’t have the flexibility I have in summer.

Still I have more freedom than most people do, and it makes up for the pretty slim pay. (Almost).

I guess today I will be grateful for my summer schedule and find a time to enjoy just being off work.

It’s the Fourth of July, and I’m wearing orange

Why I’m wearing orange

My mother told me when I was very young, “You can’t take a culture away from someone, because you don’t have anything of value to give in return.”

Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels.com

My grandfather (paternal, mostly white) attended an Indian school, because it was the closest one to where his family lived. He said he watched the Native children get beaten for speaking their own language. This was my first contact with what has been in the news lately, the Native American and First Nations children who were murdered in the residential schools, and the shell-shocked survivors.

Now they’re in the news, with already hundreds of children’s bodies found buried. In solidarity with the Native Nations, I wear orange.

Saturday Morning

As opposed to any other day of the week

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Working at home in the summer (which consists of a lot of waiting around for things to happen and writing) makes every day blur into another. The only thing making sense of my days is my husband’s work schedule. He’s off on Mondays, works Tuesday-Thursday, off on Friday, at work every other Saturday.

Today is a Saturday when he works. Ideally, on a Saturday, I’d get rest. But I’ve been napping nearly every day, so I don’t need a restful Saturday. And I need to write 2k words for NaNo.

Today’s coffee

Today’s coffee is Wet Hull Java, roasted medium roast. We’ve been struggling to get the right grind for this bean — too fine and the extraction is sour; too coarse and it’s bitter. Today, we have it perfect.

There was another bat in the house

My husband can hear bats. This is handy for when we have bats, which is often in the summer. This one was down and behind the fake fireplace in the living room, and the little girl (Chloe, our youngest cat) was trying to smack the living daylights out of it. I’d say she was successful, because the bat crawled out of her reach like a half-drowned wreck survivor. Because Chloe had had extensive contact with a little creature that can bite you without you knowing and carry rabies, the bat will be going to Public Health to be tested for rabies.

I have a phobia of bats, but we’ve had so damned many in here that I only get them tested for rabies if they could reasonably had human or cat contact. And if I have to get rabies shots (something I think is inevitable someday given the number of bats we shepherd outside every summer), so be it.

What to do today

I have to do my NaNo writing today — so far I have written 4000 words or so toward Kel and Brother Coyote Save the World, and I estimate I have 14k or so left to write. I’m writing NaNo style, which is fast and fearlessly, and I dread the amount of editing I am going to have to do on this document. Outside of NaNo events, I write a little more slowly and thoughtfully. But this is Camp NaNo, and the mode is fast.

What are you doing this weekend?

Drop me a comment!

Cataract Surgery

I’m much too young for this

I will get cataract surgery on both my eyes next month. I didn’t think I would get the surgeries this early — I’m 57, and the average age of cataract surgery is somewhere between 65 and 70.

According to my research on the Internet, however, I’ve found out:

  • As the procedure has become safer, opthamologists don’t have to wait for cataracts to “mature” anymore.
  • Baby boomers (of which I am one) have been getting them at earlier ages
  • Some people’s professions necessitate them getting the surgery done sooner. (I’m assuming spending much of one’s day in front of a computer might be an example of this)

What should I expect during surgery?

Not much — I will be out for the surgery. But likely they will make a small incision in my eye to access the lens, break it up using some sort of ultrasound probe, and suck the former lens out. They will insert some sort of lens in my eye, which may or may not correct vision, and stitch me back up.

What will after-surgery look like?

I’ll have to wear a patch, or an eye shield, not sure which. I will probably have to wear these for a few days, especially during sleep. I won’t be able to bend down or lift things for a few days. I will have to use proprietary eye drops that my opthamologist supplies.

In other words, recovery looks a lot like recovery from other minor surgeries.

Why I’m glad to get the surgery

My right eye is cloudy despite correction and my left eye not so much (but beginning to get there.) The sight in the right eye is like someone smeared vaseline on it. My two eyes together yield a strange amalgam of sharp and blurry. It’s almost (but not quite) like seeing double.

The cataracts make it harder to do computer work and increase my eyestrain to the point that i get headaches. I don’t anticipate using my computer less, given that I work as a professor and as an author, and I compose everything on computer.

I’m glad I don’t have to suffer like my mother did, waiting until the cataracts were “ripe”, or mature. She spent years with muted colors, with struggling to do her cross-stitch and embroidery, with cursing her advancing age.

Today’s cataract surgery guidelines are much more humane, and I am thankful.