Yesterday I picked Marshall up from his final computer boot camp class. I gave him the option of going to day camp for the rest of the day or coming home with me. He wanted to stay with me, but he didn’t want to go home. He suggested we get lunch together. I said, “I don’t know, Marshall. I really ought to get back to work.” He said, “What’s more important, work or spending time with your family?”
The kid made a good point, so we had lunch together 🙂
I’m supposed to sit myself down every morning and write about whatever is on my mind, be it family or work or politics. The purpose of the writing is to clear out the surface thoughts and prepare the mind to face the day. It works wonders. Really, it does. I wholeheartedly recommend the practice.
The only problem, for me, is that I usually forget. If I were to believe the creativity guru from whom I got the idea, then there would be no making up for it. According to her, this writing has to be done first thing in the morning, and it has to be done in a certain amount and written on a certain kind of paper. Her rigid rules seem very much at odds with the point of the exercise, which is to be creative. So I don’t always follow all of the rules. I don’t think I ever could.
This morning, my main surface thought is “I really ought to write on my blog more often, especially given how expensive it is.” So I’m breaking all the rules today. I’m writing later in the morning rather than first thing (gasp!) and on the computer (egads!), and I’m going to post the writing rather than throw it away (horrors!). My other surface thoughts will have to wait, though, as I have run out of time. Good-bye!
Today I hit the 50K mark on my novel. Finally! So I’ve won NaNoWriMo, just a little late (which is to be expected, since I’m hardly ever on time for anything).
It’s true that our summer New England wildlife isn’t as colorful as what they have in some places, such as the tropics. Still, we’ve got a lot of color here. You just have to look a little closer to find it.
Green on Green
I don’t know what kind of fly that is, but wow, it’s green!
Hey, Blue!
Why do dragonflies come in so many colors? I don’t know. But they are all gorgeous.
Wild Yellow
This yellow flower is totally weedy, but also quite striking.
Underappreciated Purple
Poor purple clover doesn’t get the adoration that it deserves. It’s pretty, and insects love it. As a child, I used to pull the purple parts out and suck the nectar from them. Very sweet. It’s still one of my favorite flowers.
An interesting number came up on my odometer this week:
Palindromes are awesome. And given all the trouble I’ve had with my car lately, and how close I came to replacing it, I’m happy to see it reach this high number. I hope to see this odometer hit many more interesting numbers.
Our yard is a mess, and we need to do some landscaping. So I asked myself, what should I think about planting around the edges of the yard? As if in answer, I found these.
Clearly we ought to have black raspberries growing in our yard. These wild plants are nice, but they produce small, seedy fruit on wickedly thorny canes. Perhaps we could find a cultivated variety that would grow just as well here but produce bigger fruit and fewer thorns.
1. My dishwasher has been out of commission for several days. The stack of unwashed dishes keeps growing, and I’m going a little crazy. It’s not that we can’t hand-wash our dishes (obviously I’ve had to wash some of them), but we’re not really set up for it anymore. So we’ve been ordering a lot of takeout and eating off of paper plates. It’s funny to remember how my younger self resisted using a dishwasher and only learned how to because the boyfriend (now husband) was so keen on it. Now I hardly know how to manage without it.
2. Yesterday I got up early, got dressed, drove down to the Dunkin’ Donuts, and bought some donuts and muffins. It felt good to be out and about and wearing real clothes. The kids enjoyed their special breakfast. But the best part of it was breaking my daily routine.
3. I took all the novel-related writing from my tree journal and put it into Scrivener. I now have 44K words, most of which won’t go into the novel. Either I’m cleverly crafting the foundation of the novel by focusing on the characters and the setting, or I’m cleverly avoiding doing any real writing. I’m not sure which it is. Or maybe it’s both? I guess time will tell.
I said the other day that I liked to watch all of the flying insects in my yard. That’s not technically accurate. I do not like mosquitoes, and I particularly dislike them when they come into my home to bite me. They congregate around the house, waiting for us to open the door. The moment we do, they swoop in. It pisses me off. I don’t want to kill them, but they leave me no choice. I do feel a brief thrill of victory when I clap one out of the air, but I don’t get to enjoy it, because it’s immediately followed by the realization that I have mosquito guts on my hands. Ew. Mosquitoes suck in more ways than one.
There is one species of insect that appears to be doing well in my yard this year: green bees. I saw many of them on Sunday while I was outside taking pictures. According to Wikipedia, green bees live in rotten logs, which may explain why their numbers seem to be up. We have an abundance of rotten logs lately.
Green bees look golden in the bright sun.
Green bee digging into a hawkweed flower.
Green bee on common speedwell.
Green bee walking away at the end of the day.
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