Three Times Happy

Posted on 05/13/2018 by chick

I got my car back last Monday. I am thrilled to have my freedom again. I also have two other reasons to be happy about it.

  1. Just days before, our mechanic had informed us that the replacement part didn’t fix the problem. That meant that our two supposed “experts” had both misdiagnosed the problem. Geez. Even worse, someone (presumably one of the two) had done some damage while they were poking around. So, not only was my car still not drivable, but it was no longer worth fixing, and we had just spent hundreds for nothing. But then our luck changed unexpectedly. Since the car wasn’t drivable, we didn’t pick it up right away, and on a slow day the mechanic had nothing better to do than to puzzle over the mystery of why it wasn’t working. He eventually found the cause and was able to fix it. So the bad news was turned to good news, and everyone was happy.
  2. My car tax bill arrived the next day. It was amazingly low! I’m not sure exactly how many hundreds we’re saving by not buying a new car, but it takes some of the sting out of the repair bill. Plus, Rhode Island is in the process of phasing out the car tax. That means we’ll be able to save hundreds more if we can delay buying a new car for a few more years. Fingers crossed!
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Yesterday & Today

Posted on 05/12/2018 by chick
  • Yesterday I was convinced that I would find my first tick of the season, and I did. Maybe I’d had that same thought every day since spring began, but this time I was right. It was a relief, in a way, to finally see one. Now ticks are not scary phantoms but real problems that can be dealt with. Alas for the tick, I couldn’t just let it go, because then it’d bite someone or something else. So I squashed it with a rock on the driveway. I don’t like to kill anything, ticks included, but I have to admit to a certain amount of satisfaction in having made sure that it will never bite again.
  • The kids are excited about the Mother’s Day gifts that they made at school earlier this week. Marshall was hiding his behind other things when he got off the bus yesterday. After he got inside, he hid the gift in his father’s office, and now I’m not allowed to go in there. Livia wanted to give me her gift early. She complained about having to wait, but I held firm—no gifts until Sunday!
  • Last night, I sliced off the very tip of my left middle finger while halving a dinner roll. That’s the downside of having a really sharp bread knife, I guess. Now I’ve got a Band-Aid on the end of my finger. It causes me to hold that finger separate from the rest. I’ve been inadvertently giving my husband and kids the finger all day!
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Ten Things I Hate About Writing

Posted on 05/12/2018 by chick
  1. Having a good idea doesn’t guarantee that a whole story is going to flow steadily from your pen. The idea is the easy part. Figuring out where it goes and then illuminating the path for readers to follow is the hard part.
  2. You can pour your soul onto the page, give it all you’ve got, but that doesn’t guarantee anyone will like it. It doesn’t even guarantee anyone will read it.
  3. Punctuation and grammar are tricky. Even verb tenses become complicated when you get deep into storytelling. And don’t get me started on commas. Commas are always throwing themselves into places they don’t belong and running away from the places they do. The more I write, the more I find little language puzzles that I don’t know how to solve.
  4. The words themselves are tricky. They have extra meanings up their sleeves. Sometimes I write something and think it means one thing. Then I look at it later and realize that it could be taken in a completely different (and sometimes opposite) way.
  5. Mood, too, is tricky. Trying to set a scary or romantic mood, for example—perilous! And you’d better think twice before you publish something “funny,” especially if it’s sarcastic. Sarcasm rarely plays. When you write sarcastically, you think you’re just poking fun but, more often than not, you’re just being a jerk.
  6. Writing is a lonely undertaking. You’re in it alone. No one can help you. You struggle, but no one else seems to understand how difficult it is. You will never get enough sympathy, or credit.
  7. And yet you need other people, because how else can you get feedback? Every piece of writing for which I’ve gotten feedback has been improved by it. It’s unfair that you have to work so hard all by yourself, but then you’re totally dependent on other people.
  8. Nothing I write is ever going to be as good as I wanted it to be.
  9. Writing takes discipline. Discipline is not something I have in great supply.
  10. What I really want is to read my stories, not write them. It’s not that I’m lazy. I’d just prefer to discover the story for the first time in its finished state, rather than having to piece it together myself, word by bloody word.
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SITY: Contrasts

Posted on 05/11/2018 by chick

As I was outside photographing spring flowers, I kept smelling pine. Eventually I realized that it was our old Christmas tree and wreaths, which had been thrown off to the side of the yard to await permanent disposal. That sharp piney smell was in strong contrast to the perfume of spring flowers. The dead pine’s orange color also made an interesting contrast for the bright yellow of a dandelion.

Dandelion on a Dead Pine

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The Soundtrack to My Life

Posted on 05/10/2018 by chick

I often use music to block out distractions as I write, but it has to be the kind of music that won’t itself be a distraction. That means that it can’t have any words. When writing Morning Pages and blog posts, I usually listen to classical music, such as Debussy’s La Mer. When writing for my novel, I favor spacey electronic music. The Interstellar soundtrack is just about perfect.

I tend to stick with what works, so La Mer and Interstellar are what I’ve been listening to for weeks. I don’t mind hearing the same music over and over, as long as it’s good music. The more I listen to it, the less distracting it is.

The only problem is that it tends to get lodged in my brain. Now, no matter what I’m doing, the music is playing in my head. So La Mer and Interstellar have become the soundtrack to my life. I’m always either adrift on the sea or floating into outer space.

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If I Tolle You Once, I Tolle You Twice

Posted on 05/09/2018 by chick

Have you ever noticed that once you discover a new word or concept, suddenly you find it all over the place? It’s as if it’s trying to prove its importance, or to cement itself into your memory, or perhaps even to mock your former ignorance of it. In any event, this sudden commonness of a previously unknown thing has happened time and again, and not just to me. I’ve heard others remark on this phenomenon, too.

It happened to me again just a few weeks ago. In the course of my work, I came across the word TOLLE. I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up. It was a reference to Eckhart Tolle, an author of spiritual self-help books. Tolle seemed to be fairly well known, but not quite a household name. I had no choice but to remove the word, but it took a lot of work. That’s probably why I remember it so well. I might have been a little annoyed with Eckhart Tolle.

A few days later, I was reading a Wikipedia article about a different person. That person turned out to be an adherent of Eckhart Tolle’s philosophies. Later, I was reading an article about meditation in Rhode Island Monthly, and whose name should come up again but Eckhart Tolle’s? Then yesterday I found his name in my very own Inspiration Notebook. I had cut-and-pasted an Eckhart Tolle quote into my book without taking note of the name.

So, for anyone else who had never heard of Eckhart Tolle, he’s the guy who said this:

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now. And that’s a revelation for some people: to realize that your life is only ever now.

I haven’t studied up on him, so I’m certainly not advocating him or his philosophies as a whole. However, the quote above does speak to me. I believe that the Now is all we have. For me, and perhaps also for you, the Now now includes a new name.

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SITY: Violet Sea

Posted on 05/08/2018 by chick

Swimming in Violets

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Mysterious and Slow

Posted on 05/05/2018 by chick

There was an Internet discussion recently about books from the ’80s. Piers Anthony was mentioned. I read many of his books when I was a teenager. He was both popular and prolific (if I remember correctly, he claimed to write 10,000 words per day). He wrote several series, but the one he was best known for was Xanth.

Thinking about the Xanth books reminded me of a particular day, maybe ten years ago. I was just sitting around, thinking about nothing in particular, when suddenly I had a strange epiphany. I said to myself, Xanth is the sound in-between “Piers” and “Anthony”: “Pier-Xanth-ony.”

Whoa! That was so clever of him. And duh! Why did it take me 20 years to figure that out? And why did my brain care enough after 20 years to figure it out at all? I don’t know. Even now, I marvel over the randomness of it. The mind works in mysterious (and sometimes very slow) ways!

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Going or Staying

Posted on 04/29/2018 by chick

As I was writing one of yesterday’s posts, I thought about using either the word “housebound” or the word “homebound” to describe my carless situation. I decided against both, because they imply an inability to leave the house, such as could be the case for someone very old and sick. I am still capable of walking outside and into the sunshine, thank goodness.

But thinking about those words made me realize how tricky the word “bound” is. It has several definitions, some of which are nearly opposite in meaning. Consequently, if you say that you’re “homebound,” it could mean that you’re traveling toward home or that you’re stuck in it.

It’s probably best to avoid “homebound” and use the alternatives “homeward bound” and “housebound” instead. Life is full of little ambiguities, but let’s avoid them where we can. At the very least we should know if we’re going or if we’re staying!

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SITY: Daffodils & Friends

Posted on 04/28/2018 by chick

Not all daffodils are yellow, and vive la différence!

Oh, but daffodil yellow is wonderful against a blue sky.

And what have we here? I’m not sure exactly what these bugs are (perhaps soldier beetles, a.k.a. leatherwings?), but I can tell you that they’re really into daffodils.

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