Blue-Footed Musings

I feel like everything’s moving at a snail’s pace these days, but at least it is moving. Slow progress is better than no progress. For some projects, we may even see the light at the end of the tunnel soon.

• My car has been in limbo for months, but we have finally, officially made a decision. Our mechanic has agreed to fix the car at a price that we’re willing to pay, and this morning we told him to go ahead with the repairs. There’s still the chance that the transmission will go bad in the near future, but everything in life is a crapshoot. A replacement car would not come with many guarantees either. It would, however, come with a hefty price tag. So we’re fixing my car, and then we’re going to give it a thorough washing and pretend that it’s new. I realize that I’m in a minority for trying to keep a car that’s over 13 years old, but it’s a good minority 🙂
• My husband and I are in the process of painting our bedroom. It’s long overdue. We’d already be done if we could just find exactly the right shade of color. But we’ve chosen gray, and gray is tricky. The right gray would be sophisticated and restful, and it would make certain accent colors glow. The wrong gray would be gloomy, and we’d feel like we were living in an institution or an underground bunker. We’ve got several paint samples displayed on the wall, and we don’t like any of them. They’re all too blue, or too dark, or too light. We’ll find the right color eventually. In the meantime, we keep looking, and that’s progress of a sort.
• I haven’t been writing lately. I feel terrible about that. But I have been working on my novel. Really, I have! My husband gave me a new program to use. It’s called Scrivener. I think it will help. I’ve imported most of my text files into it, not just for my novel, but for all of my half-finished projects. I don’t expect this program to fix all of my problems, but it certainly does alleviate some of them. And, once I’ve written all the scenes for my novel and decided on an order for them, this program can put them into book form instantaneously. I could go from long-term procrastinator to published e-book author in the blink of an eye. For now, let it be enough that I finished my outline and have a blueprint for moving forward.

My office is a mess, so I’ve been trying to clean it up. Today I piled together a bunch of papers that need to be filed. Then I slapped a sticky note on top and wrote, “Put me away!” But, now that I think about it, that probably wasn’t the best wording choice. I guess I’d better hurry up and file the papers before anyone sees the note and takes it the wrong way! 😉

Marshall was supposed to bring a piece of fruit to school today for a special science class about different types of seeds. When the teacher sent out a sign-up list last week, I signed Marshall up to bring an orange. We always have  oranges around, sometimes even several varieties, so I thought it would be easy.

But last night it occurred to me that most oranges are seedless. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d found a seed. So I was pretty sure that the navel orange he had chosen was going to be a dud.

I ransacked the produce drawer. There were two types of oranges. Both turned out to be seedless. They didn’t even have noticeable vestigial seeds. Argh. I was just about to give up when I found a lemon. I thought, “Why not?” Lemons always seem to have seeds, perhaps because no one has bothered to breed a seedless variety. So I put the lemon in the bag with the orange, just in case.

It only just occurred to me how funny that is—I didn’t want to send my kid to school with a dud, so I gave him a lemon!