The Great AdventureOne of the great things about my sweetie:
I can ask, “Who’s that actor I can never remember?” and she will tell me.
Posts Tagged ‘life’
Yesterday she turned the big 4-0.
It was my first chance to spend the day with my sweetie on her birthday, and it was a big birthday at that. Yesterday my honey turned forty years old, and I was there to help celebrate. We didn’t whoop it up or anything, just let someone else do the cooking, opened up a nice bottle of wine, and watched a movie. We’ll be having a slightly larger celebration when more family is in town.
In the meantime, happy birthday, sweetie! Let’s do that again lots of times!
Writing Sometimes love feels like a kick in the butt.
“How’s the writing going?” People often ask me. “Not bad,” I answer, “but the selling isn’t going so well.” The problem is that I would much rather spend time writing a new story than trying to get someone to pay for a story I’ve already written. What I needed, I decided, was a way to keep track of where each story had been submitted and where next it should go. I had a partial implementation of that in place, but I thought maybe if there was something available at a glance right up there on the wall I’d do a better job keeping up.
Lo and behold! A precise measure of my slacking.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a story that starts out with several separate threads that converge. Getting the timing right between the different bits has been a challenge, even with software that lets me rearrange bits easily. I thought to do color-coded post-its that I could rearrange, but first I needed to go out and buy the damn sticky notes. My sweetie was also dubious about the glue marks the sticky notes would leave all over the walls. She suggested a bulletin board.
Naturally I did nothing about these ideas, but last week I went to a friend’s house to mix beer and heavy machinery. When I got back the wall over my desk was adorned with two new features, already mounted on the wall and awaiting my pleasure. What a great surprise! The bulletin board is closer to my desk, as is fitting for its more interactive purpose while I write, while I only have to glance up and to my left to see how I’m progressing with submissions for my current short stories.
Act One of Dark War. This will get a lot messier.
As far as the whiteboard goes, the stories listed cover everything from humorous flash horror to non-fiction, but most of the stories will fit at several of the markets listed across the top. Red X’s are rejections. Blue boxes are the markets to submit a story to next. Green dates indicate when I should hear back about a submitted story. As you can see, at this time only two of the eight stories are out there being read, with another awaiting a trip to the post office and another waiting for the reading period at the magazine. That’s two and two halves more than a week ago, so I have to say the system is succeeding so far.
On the bulletin board I have act one of Dark War. The threads are color-coded, and scenes that involve two threads are taped together with the significance to each thread spelled out separately. I will be finishing Dark War up as quickly as possible so I can spend the rest of the time before the World Fantasy Convention getting ready to sell The Monster Within. In the next day or two I’ll be compressing Act One up at the top of the board to make room for Act 2. Considering I’ve already written this damn thing twice, there sure is a lot of work to do.
But however much work there is to do, I have someone at my back who knows the best way to spur me on to greatness is to help me get the tools together to do my job well. That means a lot to me.
Idle Chit-ChatAnd thanks for making me part of it!
I am here on this cruise because my parents thought this would be a great way to celebrate their fifty years of wedded bliss. Last night we had the big celebration at dinner, with all of us as dressed up as we could reasonably get. We got a group portrait taken and we were served a special cake at dinner (after the regular dessert). Good times.
Fifty years they’ve been married. That takes some doing. Earlier in the day I had to smile as we walked down a market street in Kobe; my parents were holding hands.
Congratulations, guys. Here’s to many more years of hand-holding in exotic locations.
Health hurts, sometimes.
A few days back my sweetie and I were at Target on a quest for the propane cartridges that fit our grill. Those are hidden away in the sporting goods section, and while we wandered up and down the aisles looking for them, my better half discovered the exercise gizmo department right next door. Uh, oh. We already work out three days a week, but we wanted to get something to help us on the off days. After some deliberation we decided on the TriCord Total Body Workout Kit. It was inexpensive, and since the TriCord TBWK includes three cords of different resistances, it was a TBWK that the two of us could use at the same time. “I’ll use the low-resistance cord, and you can use the medium,” my sweetie said. Perfect! Home came the TriCord.
The box contained four things: three colored rubber tubes with handles on the ends, and a DVD. The DVD is where the real value is for things like this, providing a routine that fits in a known time and provides a more-or-less complete workout.
Monday day we got into workout clothes, broke out the rubber bands, and popped the DVD into the player for the first time. The intro told us how great the product we already owned was, then introduced us to the workout. There were three people to lead us, arrayed on mats at the edge of a pond in a beautiful Japanese garden. Charles was a big muscly man, the guy whose name appears on the box, and who narrated the DVD. Advanced users, he said, people of strength and virtue, should follow him and use the high-resistance band. To his left, Eve and her large breasts were going to pursue a more aerobic workout with the medium-resistance band.
Then there’s Jim. To the instructor’s right was a graying gentleman, not tall, obviously not a “fitness professional”, just a regular guy. “For you losers out there,” Charles explained, “you fat and worthless wastes of oxygen, here’s Jim. Jim will use the lowest-resistance band and cheat on every exercise to make them easier. He will shrink from exerting himself while he ponders what TV shows he’s missing. We paid him in donuts.” (I don’t think that’s quite exactly what Charles said, but you get the idea.)
The introduction ended; the time had come to work out. I took in hand the green medium-resistance band, emulating Eve and her large breasts. I stretched the band a few times, experimentally. Feeling good. After a few limbering-up exercises it was time to start pulling rubber. Clumsily I assumed the first position and stretched along with Chuck, Eve’s breasts, and Jim. So far, they were all doing pretty much the same thing. We moved on to the next exercise. Most exercises involved combining a body motion, like a lunge, with the pulling action, so that the routine had aerobic and resistance training at the same time. Most of the real work in this routine seems to concentrate on arms and shoulders, so I’m not sure about the “Total” in Total Body Workout Kit. Still, I was starting to break a sweat, and there was a long way to go yet.
Soon I abandoned following Eve and turned my gaze to Jim, the gray-haired beer-drinking slacking cheater. The guy like me. The thing is, after a while Jim was kicking my ass, too. “Four more,” Chuck said gently while soothing music played. I made one more attempt to pull both arms up and gave up. One thing I’ll say for the TriCord TBWK, it keeps you honest. I discovered just how much weaker my left arm is. It’s easy to cheat on exercise machines. Yet there was Jim, swinging his arms up, elbows straight, a bored expression on his face.
In the end, Jim kicked my ass and didn’t break a sweat doing it. To be fair I was using a higher-resistance band, and I didn’t have some big muscly guy standing between me and the beautiful woman exercising with me, so I did score a couple of points toward a moral victory. Still, Jim kicked my ass.
But not for long, folks! I’m gunning for Jim and his wooden expression, his deceptively-toned muscles, and his stomach flatter than mine. Someday, when he least expects it, I will triumph over him, and with the green rubber band, to boot!
Beating the heat in Santa Cruz.
It was hot in San Jose last Sunday, that uncomfortable sticky sort of hot that saps the will of strong men. My sweetie, fuego and I were feeling lethargic as we made our plans for the day. Two options presented themselves: go to a movie or go over the hill to Santa Cruz. After some muddling around we chose the latter. We loaded up the fnord and made our way south.
Along with half the city who had the same idea. Traffic was heavy; we came to a full stop on the freeway before we even reached highway 17. Once past the summit things loosened up until we reached the outskirts of Santa Cruz itself. Then is was all stop-and-go, inching our way toward the boardwalk. As we crawled along, however, we noted that it was quite a bit cooler on this side, and there was a fresh breeze to keep things reasonable. Finally, finally we paid the fee and parked in one of the big lots. When we parked we were given a bunch of coupons that pretty much offset the cost of parking.
I felt the stress of the traffic lift from my shoulders as I stood in the parking-lot breeze and wondered if I should have brought more clothing. No matter. It was time to have fun. We sauntered onto the boardwalk and took the lay of the land. The first thing one does at those places is pay, and naturally there were enough options for payment that three indecisive people can spend a long time figuring things out. Finally we elected to go with the unlimited ride wristbands, so we could pay once and stop thinking. The deal included tickets that could be redeemed for arcade tokens. It was without a doubt the right choice.
Wristbands on, we decided it was time to do some rollercoasting. The Santa Cruz Boardwalk (“Voted the best seaside amusement park in the world!”) boasts the venerable Giand Dipper, the sixth-oldest roller coaster in the world (according to them; when I checked on the web it came in 12th). It’s been through a major earthquake that flattened much of downtown Santa Cruz and it’s still going strong.
Despite the fierce traffic to reach the park the lines for the rides were not long. Perhaps we had dithered away so much of the day that many people were wrapping up their visits by the time we got there. In any case it wasn’t long before we were seated in one of the cars.
One of the challenges of roller coaster design is keeping the entire ride interesting. The cars are dragged way up, then go through plunges and gyrations, gradually losing energy. This makes the most intense part of the ride near the beginning. The Giant Dipper does a good job of using the last few feet of drop by using them immediately after you get on the ride, before you go way up. We rolled away from the loading area into a pitch-black tunnel as we twisted and turned. Whoa! I wasn’t expecting that!
Then it was up to the top and over, under, and around. Good fun. Not heart-stopping by modern standards, but a whole lot of fun. We got off the ride and fuego sprang for the photo. Good call, fuego!
fuego, my sweetie and me on the Giant Dipper
Then it was bumper cars, a really lame haunted house, and some arcade fun. The love of my life, it seems, spent some time as an arcade rat. “I hope we can find Addams Family Pinball,” she said. We did. We played. Also we played a lot of head-to-head skeeball and rode some other rides. And more bumper cars. Then there was the Fright Walk, a different haunted house that was way better.
Meanwhile fuego was in touch with our cousin and her husband, who live nearby, about meeting up for drinks and a snack after we were done. “A couple more hours,” he told them once, then three hours later, “it looks like we’re finishing up.” It turned out we weren’t.
Naturally we had to have some of the “food” available. My sweetie had long ago learned that I had never had a deep-fried twinkie, and she was not going to let the opportunity pass. We watched as the guy impaled a twinkie, dipped it in heavy batter, and dropped it in the fryer. Wow. We split a single calorie bomb three ways, and I sampled with strawberry syrup and the traditional chocolate. It was everything I imagined it would be, and then some.
We had finished up with Family Guy pinball and fuego and I were in an air hockey showdown when the announcement came that the park was closing. We had defeated Santa Cruz boardwalk. Hooray us! Tired and happy we made the long trek back to the car, now alone in the vast parking lot, and drove to the brew pub where we were to meet the others. It was closed, but there was a crepe place called “The Crepe Place” that was still open. We sat and had a great time chatting and catching up, then it was time to drive through deserted streets back over the mountains and home.
It was a very good day.
Times of change are times of opportunity.
For a couple of weeks now I’ve been living with my sweetie, an arrangement that takes some getting used to for all concerned. It’s also an opportunity. What I do for the next few weeks will likely form patterns that shape the rest of my life. No pressure or anything.
Generally I’m a pretty agreeable guy, not a bad roommate overall, but I can be lazy. I like having someone take care of me, and the love of my life enjoys doing it. Over fifty years, however, that could get old, so I’ve tried to find a couple of things I can do to make life go more smoothly, like drying and putting away the dishes. That one is fun because we’re in the kitchen together, and it’s something that doesn’t have a lot of “you’re doing it wrong!” potential (at least once I figure out where everything goes).
That and I carry stuff. Hm… maybe I need to find a couple more.
Other new habits I’ve inherited. I now work out three times a week. It still seems a little odd to me to stay indoors walking on a treadmill when it’s a nice day for a walk outside, but the exercise excursion is a group thing, which means I actually do it, rather than idly think about what a nice day it would be to take a walk.
Diet has also changed dramatically. Where I would prepare myself a dish, my best friend makes meals, complete with the healthy parts. Friuts consumption is way up, and also leafy greens. Even… broccoli. A while back my girlfriend said, “if I could change one thing about you, it would be to have you like broccoli.” Considering all my other warts, it was pretty generous of her to put that at the top of the list, so I figured I’d give the nasty things another shot. And you know what? Add broccoli to the list of things that should never be cooked. Whoever first cooked the stuff and then did it again knowing the result is a sick individual. I won’t say that the broc is my favorite veggie or that I go out of my way to get the biggest chunks in the salad bowl, but I’ll eat the stuff and know that it’s making me healthier and my sweetheart happier.
Tonight is steak, with other stuff, and a big bowl of salad that we share after the main meal. The salad part is a new tradition that I really like. It’s healthy and fun! Now we just have to break the bad habit of watching tv late and sleeping too late in the mornings. It’s just so nice hanging out together in the evenings, eating salad or other snacks, and enjoying the company.
So here I am, a dish-towel-totin’, broccoli-eatin’ dude, in charge of opening the wine. Don’t worry, though. I still say ‘hefti’ after I belch.
I'm not in Prague anymore, but the biggest change in my life is not about where I live, or even how I live, but whom I am sharing my life with.
Here I am, in one of the nicer corners of San Jose, California. San Jose would not be my first choice for city of residence, being not so much a city as a large chunk of the continuous sprawl of alternating housing developments, strip malls, and office parks that is Silicon Valley. The city does have one thing going for it, however: That Girl lives here, and now I do too.
This marks a pretty major turning point in my life and therefore this blog as well. Up until now That Girl has been on the periphery of the blog, someone mentioned occasionally in passing but not a major figure. That’s not because she hasn’t been a big part of my life the last year and a half, it’s because I haven’t really figured out how to write about it. Plus, when one is a third of the world apart and communication is intermittent, a poorly-chosen blog word could lead to undue strife that would be resolved in seconds face-to-face.
I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to approach this, but perhaps now it will be easier. We’ll see. Inevitably there will be times when That Girl reads something in my blog that really she should have heard straight from me. There will be times I’ll have to choose between telling a good story and watching out for my sweetie’s feelings (and, well, some of it’s none of your damn business), and often the story will come out on the losing end. That’s just how it’s going to have to be. The other thoughts can go into my fiction.
Having a relationship is not scaling Everest, but in it’s own way the risks and rewards are even greater. It would be foolish for me to attempt Everest in my current condition, and I’m afraid that my good-boyfriend skills are also alarmingly atrophied. Still, I’m really damn excited about this journey, really happy that That Girl found me and spent years pounding against my cluelessness until I got the idea that she might be interested. All credit goes to her for that.
It’s an adventure almost all of us experience at one time or another, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I’m not sure how I’m going to approach writing about it yet, but I’m still the same guy that can be fascinated by the tiny things, and I hope that there will be enough of those to shine a little light on this thing we call love.
So, welcome to the Great Adventure!
StoriesNot sure why today is the day, but it's a story.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was sitting on a floating dock on a particularly cold lake in Arkansas, early in the morning, with Dad. We were fishing. Funny the details I remember. I had a white fishing rod with a black Zebco reel, and I was using a lure called Rebel something-or-other, which was made to go fairly deep, with an enticing wiggly action. The trout were rising at that time of the morning, looking for the morning bugs, which made the choice of lure suspect. Thirty-plus years of retrospect and that’s the only real lesson learned here.
A Boy and his Trout
I was getting better at casting, which isn’t to say good. I’d send the something-or-other out there, and patiently haul it back in, knowing that if I pulled it in too fast it would dive too deep and snag. Still, it was a good morning, me and dad out there. We had some good times, Dad and me, but not so many simple hanging-out times like that. The good ol’ boys were out in their bass boats, and more than once Dad cautioned me that my voice would carry a long way over the water.
I’d fallen into (my memory says was) silence (ha) and just thrown out a good cast when the fish struck — before my lure had time to dive below the dining line. Splish-splash, tension on the line. I spazzed. I lost the fish.
Here’s where memory gets a bit vague. As I remember, Dad cast to the point of the hubbub, hit it bang-on, and reeled in the fish. Only vaguely do I recall that the fish hadn’t even bit his hook, but he’d hit the fish on the head. I could be confusing memories there. I was young. It wasn’t a spectacular fish, eleven inches as I recall, measured on the ruler embossed on the lid of my plastic tackle box.
In any case, Dad brought home the breakfast. We agreed, there on the dock, that I would take credit. And I did. With gusto, to the point that I really believed that I’d done most of the work catching the fish — Dad had merely scooped up the opportunity I’d created.
I don’t expect many people remember that fish, but I do. It’s time to set the record straight. Dad caught that fish, plain and simple. That notwithstanding, it was a great morning sitting with Dad on that quiet lake. I’d remember it even without the fish.
Because that's what blogs are for, right?
It’s spring, and so when I left my little sanctuary this morning (for the first time in a few days) I did not check very carefully what the weather might be like outside. I put on my beloved (crumbling) leather jacket, slapped a baseball cap on my head, and ventured forth.
I was greeted outside the door by a wind that seemed to be especially talented at reaching icy fingers through my clothing and even my skin, chilling my very bones. I had gone perhaps fifty strides when the first popcorn snow started to fall. By the time I got to the corner I was in a blizzard, swirling swarms of little snow nuggets dancing in the wind and finding ways to get down my neck. At least I wasn’t pony-tailed today. It makes a big difference.
Standing at the tram stop was pretty much miserable. There is a small shelter there, but it was already full. I stood in the wind wondering why the hell it was taking so long for the tram to get there. Yeah, buddy, welcome to spring.
Bars of the World Tour“I miss you,” I tell That Girl. “I can’t wait to be with you.”
The thing is, I have been waiting. There’s really nothing stopping me from getting on a plane tomorrow, landing in San Jose and wrapping up with That Girl in a gooey ball of love. But here I am. That Girl did not ask what the holdup is, though she wondered. For a while I wasn’t sure myself, but I knew there was something I still had to do here. Over the last few weeks, I figured it out. Today, I met with fuego and we started to hash out how we would make something. It’s important to me that I leave here with something that is concrete, born from my head, and done in collaboration with my brother.
The plan right now is to make a film version of “Moonlight Sonata”. Tomorrow we start scouting locations. Soup Boy is in Australia, but I hope he will be in on the enterprise. I’m calling in everyone. zlato will be with us tomorrow.
This is going to be cool. I plan to chronicle the making in great detail here on these pages. Stay tuned; it should be a good ride.
Politics It's good when it works.
Universal Health Care is a very good thing, an idea rooted in fairness and basic human rights, the idea that people should have access to decent medical care no matter their income or social standing. It’s a fundamental measure of a society, how it takes care of its people. Universal health care in the United States would transform society and possibly generate a large fiscal payback in a short time, as people with small problems see a doctor before they become big problems. I’d like to see that.
I also think it’s impossible. The wealthiest nation on earth is also the one least prepared to have the government play a role in health care. It comes down to a fairly simple chain of reasoning.
- Health care in the United States is far more expensive than anywhere else. Remenber HMO’s? That was an attempt to reduce the overall cost of care, but in the end doctors and patients alike joined in the hate of them.
- As much as insurance companies suck, they are the ONLY force in the United States with an interest in keeping health care costs down. They are regularly castigated and challenged for saying ‘no’. Lawsuits abound. The general public pushes constantly to limit the power of the insurance companies to say no, even to radical treatments that cost an arm and a leg and have little chance of success. Thus we have the most expensive health care in the world. It is also the best, precicely because there’s not cost/benefit analysis.
- So if insurance companies are the only force keeping health care costs down, just imagine if the US government were in the insurance business. Even if they could hold the line on costs, there’d be a thousand lawsuits against the government active at any given moment. People who were told ‘no’ for an expensive treatment with little chance of success — but wait! That was the government saying no! Goddammit, no one in Washington is going to tell me I can’t have that buttock transplant!
Alternately, the government can require private insurance companies to insure everyone who asks for it. Still, Uncle Sam will have to pitch in for people who can’t afford a reasonable premium (I am one of those people). Once again it comes down to saying ‘no’, and insurance companies will pass the bill along rather than rack up legal costs.
Another reason universal health care works where I am now: doctors don’t drive fancy cars. They make an honest living and do all right, and they don’t (yet) get kickbacks from the pharmaceutical and medical technology corporations.
Just to be clear: I WANT every US citizen to have access to health care, me included. But it’s not going to happen until the core problem is addressed: health care in the United States costs far too much already. Someone has to learn to say no and mean it before care can be extended to everyone. Alas, the United States government really sucks at no.
I've accomplished quite a bit this week, almost none of it what I wanted to accomplish.
I am sitting in our office right now — I am at my desk and That Girl is behind me, working on a project of her own. This is a very satisfying way to be, for a wide variety of reasons.
First, of course, is the very presence here of a place called ‘my desk’, to be found in ‘our office’ in a home that also contains That Girl. The second satisfying thing is the presence of That Girl’s desk in the same office. Third, there is the fact that we are both able to be productive in this arrangement. (Your definition of ‘productive’ might not match mine — for instance I consider writing this blog to be productive.) So that’s all good.
It’s critical that we can get things done in this arrangement, as That Girl was laid off while I was out stomping around in Kansas. If you don’t count the whole “no money, no security” part of the equation, it’s working out pretty well. That Girl has been ramping up her online poetical presence, working to market herself and maybe even get to where she can support herself doing what she loves most.
I’m hoping to get to that place as well, of course. I’ve been spending the last week working on Jer’s Novel Writer. A recent operating system update made a few pieces work oddly. (Yes, that is a euphemism for ‘wrong’.) While I had the hood up I wanted to fix a couple of other issues. The software is nearly ready for release, better than ever, but that hasn’t left a lot of space in my brain for using the software for its intended purpose, which happens also to be my intended purpose.
Once I get this release out, I will be turning back to my writing (and, ideally, blogging). I have a whole bunch of things to work on. At the start of the week I thought, “I’ll get that bug fixed and then get one thing ready for submission per day for the rest of the week. Here it is Friday and there’s not much rest of the week left.
If I sigh really heavily, sometimes That Girl rolls across the office and gives me a hug.
Listening to the voice of change.
Flying out of Las Vegas the plane made a long, slow turn to the east, for Albuquerque. I sat in 2A, a window seat on the left side, and watched as the ground gradually fell away, the works of man changing scale and becoming more abstract, the white lines of dirt roads like geometric scars on the desert surface. Hoover Dam slipped past, the sprawling lake it held back a deep blue against the naked rock that surrounded it.
The Grand Canyon followed, about the time the captain came on the intercom and in the chatty fashion that pilots have these days told us we were at our cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. A long way to go up, just to come down again an hour later. I studied the contours of the canyon, fractally serpentine, and thought of the rocks found at the bottom, a billion years old. A long time, no matter how you figure it. I started to get that feeling. The writer feeling.
It’s a peculiar sort of melancholy, hardly a sadness at all, that comes sometimes as a herald of change, a reminder that the world is in motion and so are we. It’s a feeling everyone knows, perhaps when you close the door and you’re alone in your new apartment for the first time, or when you say goodbye to a friend who’s moving out of town, or when you can’t sleep at night and the sound of the neighborhood turns mysterious, and the wind is whispering secrets of the past and future.
Saturday That Girl and I had a particularly good day, sharing a part of her life in a way neither of us had known before, and here it was Sunday and I was seven miles up, heading away from her at hundreds of miles an hour. Heading toward… heading toward an uncertain future, a future as a writer, a professional, part of a community of writers dedicated to working together to improve our craft. In just a few days I’ll be in Kansas, surrounded by the successful and the un-, talking shop and perhaps making connections and decisions that will affect the rest of my life.
It’s about time, after all.
Poems, everyone! They say it's the most important meal of the day.
Breakfast!
rainy morn, groggy head
ooo! heart-shaped banana bread
big-ass pot of tea
ooo! heart-shaped banana bread
big-ass pot of tea
