up so floating

it's a cold and foggy morning this morning. this might well be my last post of 2006.

the end of the year typically brings out in me feelings of nostalgia. the thing that initially strikes me this morning is the paul auster bookend of this year. in january 2006 kara and went to see him and his wife siri talk about this and that on a stage up in seattle. and currently i'm reading a not-so-new book of his, the music of chance. i'm only 30 to 40 pages into it now, as i'm also working my way through the current harper's, but thus far i'm liking it. i like his style. i didn't plan on ending the year so like the way i began it, literarily speaking, but i guess these things do happen.

of course 2006 will be remembered as the year we lost rumble to a sudden and unexpected death. that was just at the beginning of this month, and in some respects we're still reeling.

this has also been a year of the dog. max has slowly increased in his general decrepitude but sagan has had an interesting time, with plenty of cuteness, one attack, a discovery of a hip problem, more cuteness, and a finally a diagnosis of what turns out to be a knee problem, which we are still leaving untreated. she's a good dog, though, all in all.

i've been a transcriptionist all year long, which has been nice. i started working from home in august, and that has been a terrific change. kara, on a professional level, had a setback or two this year, but she is ending things in a better position then where she started the year, moving from file room clerk to legal clerk in the health information department of the hospital. her job is of course not without its frustrations, but it is a marked improvement.

and 2007 is nigh. what does this coming year hold in store for us? regular writing for me, an endeavor i failed in 2006. more medical transcription for me. i might even go for certification. and kara might take another stab at getting into school but, like me, she sometimes has trouble deciding just what she wants to be doing. at the moment her job is mostly enjoyable, so i think she's more or less satisfied.

we hope to get to star island in july, but we're still waiting on seeing if i get the vacation time.

we'll be getting a new front door early in january and that'll be a huge improvement for our house. other projects are in the works, and as they come into play i expect i'll be writing about them here.

as i take my leave of this post laden with links, i want to mention a cd kara got me for christmas last week. it's by singer named kris delmhorst, a woman i had never heard of. for this particular album, strange conversations, she put well-known poems to music and sang them. here's a snippet of what she did with a favorite e e cummings poem of mine. i like it a lot.

post-christmas post

christmas was 2 days ago. seems like longer. we had a super good time that day, though. it was relaxing. we sat by the fire and opened presents. the meatloaf was excellent. kara gave me a scanner and when i figure out how to use it i'll be posting all sort of wild images, to be sure. so far, though, i'm confused by that machine. still - watch this space!

we got good news yesterday. our front door is coming! it's going to be installed on january 9, or 2 weeks from yesterday. oh how i'm looking forward to that day! the current front door is so swollen we have to tug and tug and tug to get it open. it's beyond aggravating and i end up cursing violently when i finally am able to yank it open.

and someone is coming to perform a routine maintenance on our furnace in just under 3 weeks, on january 16. i think that's all the service calls we can expect for the time being. that's enough. the furnace is running fine, though the little control panel on the wall is advising us to change the filter. of course we don't know how to access the filter. the thing needs to be serviced anyway, as i say, as a matter of routine.

wait - no. kara also got us tivo as a christmas present (how exciting!), and i think someone's going to come to the house to hook that up. how hopeless am i? i bet kara could manage to do it but we'll probably pay a professional to pay us a visit. so that's 3 imminent visitations. our social life is burgeoning!

yellow misses rumble. it's pretty clear. he's a sad cat these days. and max woke us up at 2:30 this morning to tell us he wanted to go outside. kara got up and let him out and just as soon as he came back in he took a shit on the floor. clever dog, he. he is becoming increasingly demented. he is on tramadol for the pain.

so i work tomorrow, then have 2 days off. i work sunday and am off monday for new year's. i like these splintered workweeks. they go smoothly. these 40-hour workweeks leave me with little energy to do anything else. what a bad idea they are. next week, when the new year does start, i will be writing again. a short story per month in 2007 is the plan. plus i want kara and i to get cracking on the household projects we have in mind. we've been putting such things off for too long and i think it's past time we get off our butts.

pre-christmas post

tomorrow is christmas. i worked today, but my shift is over. lots of thrombocytopenia today in my reports. it's weird how things come in spurts. kara has another hour of her shift, and will be home soon.

the dining table is covered with parcels. boxes have come in the mail from our families. it's been grey and drizzly all day today. tomorrow we'll sleep in a bit. we'll make a fire and open presents. we'll listen to christmas songs sung by dwight yoakam and aimee mann. i'll whip up a meatloaf and kara will whip up some potatoes. that's really all we have planned for tomorrow.

we think it's likely that rumble is possessing yellow to a degree, given that he has recently taken to scratching at our mattress in the mornings as he never has before, and as rumble did all the time.

here's a link to a short errol morris film about movies. it's fun. happy christmas.

max and shoes

it took me a while to get to sleep last night, in part because of this guy here. old man max. he just couldn't get comfortable. he would walk to his bed in our closet and start turning circles to lie down. he moaned with pain as he made his preparations and his moans became growls. it takes him such effort to lie down (or it could be he was paying more attention than i thought when over the weekend i watched boogeyman on cable - and was just scared of his closet). several times he gave up lying down and made his crooked way out of our bedroom and into the living room. at least he wasn't barking, but all the same it was painful to behold. thinking maybe he had to go potty, kara got up and let him out a few times, but he always came back inside quickly. she fixed his bed a bit and helped him onto it. finally, after an hour and a half or so of this, he settled down and was quiet.

still, it was another while before i got to sleep, with thoughts buzzing around my head. did i get enough stuff for kara for christmas, and further, is the stuff i got her any good? i thought about writing my essay about electrocardiographic reports, a source of consternation for many a transcriptionist in our group (myself included), and began formulating that in my mind. i thought about our christmas meal, turkey meatloaf (why not?), and planned that grocery store trip. my friend and colleague kristi is asking me for book recommendations (she gets the credit for the ecg essay idea) and mentally i went through my shelves. iris murdoch, connie willis, carson mccullers, paul auster, nicholson baker, james morrow, penelope lively. margaret atwood? haruki murakami? don delillo? these thoughts and those dodged hither and yon, as well as, where is rumble now? what is left of max's mind?

on the lighter side, yesterday afternoon i had another good walk. i wore these shoes, which i bought over the weekend. reeboks, neighborhood of $50. oh, they're white. they're very, very, very white shoes. i'm not really generally a white-shoe sort of fellow, but exceptions were made. i'll have to muddy them up. truly, they were much more comfortable than the older shoes i was wearing last week. i did, however, experience what could well be shin splints on my walk yesterday. i get them sometimes, shooting pains up each shin each time my foot hits the ground. i'm not sure what they are, but i walked through them. i took the pain. the shoes themselves felt good, though. and the weather yesterday evening was gorgeous. it was 45 to 50 degrees fahrenheit (7 to 10 degrees celsius) and crisp. the sky was huge and thin clouds held still high overhead. i walked for about an hour and it felt good. i hope the weather maintains and i can have a similar experience after work this afternoon.

what i say when i have nothing to say

i haven't been feeling like blogging much lately. there's no good reason. i just haven't really had anything to say. i don't really have anything interesting to say today either. i gave up on the carol anshaw book i was reading because i was bored with it. sorry carol. i started a kazuo ishiguro book yesterday and i'm not sure i like it yet but i'm still reading it. soon i think i'll read the richard powers book i was going to read toward the end of october, but i wasn't in the mood for it yesterday. the night before last there was an astonishing windstorm. lots of western washingtonians have no power. lots of trees fell. lots of lines went down. we, in our home, have power. we seemed to have lost it for a moment during the night, because some of our clocks were blinking in the morning, but it was really no big deal. i guess we lucked out in a big way. i went to see my doctor yesterday, for followup of my ultrasound last week. i have a fatty liver. it could be a lot worse. i'm to watch my weight and exercise. i also got a tetanus shot, and today my arm doesn't hurt at all. i'll see my doctor again in 3 months. no meds yet. so that's good. it's saturday today. kara's taking a shower and when she's out we're going out, to look for shoes. i had a couple of good walks last week, about which i feel very good, but i don't have good shoes and one of my feet was really hurting. kara loves shopping for running shoes, so we're going to do that. i liked walking last week. i like walking outside better than walking on the treadmill, but i'll probably use the treadmill some, when the weather is bad. yesterday i also mailed off all the christmas presents i'm going to mail off. so that's done, and something of a relief. there's another thing or two i think i want to get for kara yet though, but i won't mention them here because occasionally she reads this blog. yesterday driving around was fun (sarcasm) because many traffic lights were out and too many people don't know what to do when the traffic lights are out. i was behind a good number of those people, it seemed. it's been 2 weeks since we lost rumble. one day last week when i was working i thought i heard her walking toward me and i turned, but it was eliot. not that there's anything wrong with eliot. i love eliot. yellow's been a lot more needy since rumble died. he's always gone through periods of neediness and periods of aloofness, but he's been pretty consistently needy these last 2 weeks. otherwise, other than all of that, things have been fine. work's been fine. no staggeringly interesting reports to report about, but nothing so terrible. this feels kind of lame, but at my annual review last may, my supervisor said she wanted me to "identify a medical topic" and research it and "document my findings." i'm having a heck of a time coming up with something to write about. i'm thinking a 2-page essay, something like that. i don't know. there are lots of interesting medical topics out there, and i'm probably making a bigger deal of this assignment than i need to, but i feel like i want to come up with something good and wow my supervisor. still, i could just write about the anatomy of the knee, for example, or about wolff-parkinson-white syndrome, or about ventriculoperitoneal shunts, or about the intracranial troubles of senator tim johnson and my friend christa, but even the most preliminary research somehow annuls my interest. so if anyone has any ideas about fascinating medical topics, show me the light, huh?

it'd have to be a real big woman

the title of this post is from the movie arthur, in which dudley moore plays a lovable billionaire drunk, and it comes when the woman his father wants him to marry says, "a real woman could stop you from drinking." i always liked his response to that line. apparently dudley moore died in 2002. i don't know if i knew that. anyway. i probably just wasn't paying attention.

the ultrasound tech asked me the other day if i was a heavy drinker and a couple of weeks ago ginsberg asked me the same thing. i didn't know how to answer the question. maybe it's a matter of, if i'm hesitant about the answer, it means i drink too much?

i've cut down on my drinking considerably since i learned my lab results were wonky. during the period immediately before my initial ginsberg visit i was drinking maybe two or three beers in an evening. that was more than usual; usual was one or two in an evening. when kara and i open a bottle of wine, we finish it, and we split it about evenly.

perhaps that's drinking a lot, but i certainly know people who drink more than this.

the other night kara and i went out to dinner and we shared a bottle of wine. in the middle of last week - tuesday i think - yes, the night kara took sagan to the vet and we learned about her knee - we also shared a bottle of wine. aside from that i've had almost no alcohol.

well - i have a bottle of kahlua on the table in the kitchen and i splash a bit into my coffee occasionally and occasionally i have some with milk. but that particular bottle on the table for about two weeks and it's more than half full i think.

(i like girly creamy drinks like white russians and kara likes manly drinks like whisk[e]y, neat. it's just the way it is with us.)

so what's my point? i suppose i don't think i drink top much. of course, with my steatohepatitis, perhaps i shouldn't be consuming alcohol in any form ever again. ugh. i mean, i could handle that, though i would miss it a bit. ginsberg, when i told him i was having two or three beers daily, advised me to cut down, and i certainly did. then the ultrasound tech on friday asked if i was a heavy drinker and i said i didn't feel like i was.

but am i?

liver

i had my abdominal ultrasound today. it was fun. the gel was warm. i was worried it would be cold, but it was warm. the tech guy was nice. he let me watch the monitor while he did his business.

my gallbladder looks good. no stones. my common bile duct looks goood. my kidneys, pancreas, and spleen look good. my liver - not so much. i have a fatty liver. plus it's enlarged, though that could be normal for me.

what does this mean? i don't know. my preliminary research on the internet has revealed vagueness. having a fatty liver is not a good thing but it's not immediately threatening. it wants to get thinned. i see my doctor again next week and we'll talk about these things. i'm guessing it's mostly going to be a diet-and-exercise type deal.

i miss walking. i've been thinking about this. i used to walk all the time. ever since i started to drive, which i did quite late, at age 27, i've been driving places. over the last several years i've abandoned walking. i've got to start walking again.

i work from home, and my office is just a flight of stairs from my bed. so i already walk to work. ha ha. i need to start taking walks after work. i think i'll like that. mostly what gets in the way is the time factor. i'll need to make time to do this after work. just incorporate it into my day.

gimpy bitch

here's our sagan (last week, in the snow that's gone now). poor sagan. kara took her to the vet last evening because ... she's kind of lame.

we thought it was her hip but it turns out it's her cranial cruciate ligament - in her knee! this ligament in her right rear knee is apparently ruptured. the vet launched into an explanation of treatment options. basically treatment involves obtaining radiographs to rule out other problems, and then surgery. the x-rays would run about $400 and the surgery, including internal fixation instrumentation of plates and screws, would be another $1600 to $2000.

we're saying no to this. thank you, no. sorry, sagan, but no. kara didn't say this to the vet last evening but the answer is no.

sagan's cost us enough already. she had a cyst on her paw a couple of years ago - a weird, red, bulbous, nasty thing between her toes - that was quite worrisome and she had surgery there. it was removed, and it came back. then it went away by itself. weird. and last summer there was an issue with the same leg that prompted us to take her to the emergency clinic - nothing was found at that time but it might have been then that this ligament was first torn.

she also went through a period of attacking max - latching her jaws onto his ear and not letting go until kara or i pried those jaws apart. that kind of behavior is unacceptable. there was a period of time during which sagan was one act of aggression away from being returned to the pound.

sometimes she still growls at max but there haven't been any actual attacks in many moons. all the same, she has that history and this makes us less inclined to throw more money at her.

she doesn't appear to be in pain. she's just a little unsteady. she limps. sometimes she walks on just the three legs, tucking the right rear one up near her belly. she's overweight (though not as much as rumble was) and this likely contributed to this injury. she weighs over 70 pounds!

so we're leaving her be. she's a fragile dog, for all her heft.

otherwise she's an excellent dog. she's very smart. she's crazy smart. she was well behaved in the vet office yesterday. she's good with the cats; she shows no aggression toward them whatsoever. she's very good about going into her crate when we go out or when it's bedtime. she likes to tell us when it's her bedtime! i give her hardly any attention and she likes to kiss me.

but no more surgery for sagan. she'll live with the limp. and we'll see what comes next.

bye rumble fish

we lost rumble last night. when i came upstairs this morning to use the computer, she was on the floor, lying by my chair. she was where my feet would be, were i sitting there working. she was dead.

there was no warning; she seemed fine yesterday. she'd always been a fairly subdued cat. she was a big girl, and i'm guessing it was heart failure. something like that. she was about 7.

i had rescued her and yellow from the shelter within a week of moving to seattle in the summer of 1999. at the moment, yellow seems okay. he's not all broken up or anything. i don't know if cats register these kinds of things. these losses.

we took her to the vet to have her cremated. i actually didn't cry until i handed her over, wrapped in a pillowcase, to the tech. the vet said that because rumble was lying in the middle of the floor, and not all curled up or hiding in some corner, it seems that death came suddenly and quickly. that's a good thing.

i was trying to give her a good life. i hope i did. i hope i gave her a good life.

eliot is still here. we had him shaved again yesterday and i think he feels good. max is still here, in defiance of the odds. the vet said that when we called, she'd assumed we were calling about him. and sagan is still here, though she has developed a severe limp. i think her right rear hip is bothering her. arthritis? while at the vet we made an appointment for early in the week. we can't afford another surgery for her but maybe we'll put her on some kind of medication.

but rumble is gone. we called her rumble fish. i named her rumble because she purred real loud, and she gained great girth and took to rumbling around the house; she sounded like a person when she came down the stairs. she still purred, though, when we petted her or when max played with her. she and max got along real well.

at the moment i feel calm about things. it'll probably hit me again tomorrow when she's not sitting on the pillow by the computer here, scratching at my pant leg to give her attention.

bye rumble fish. i love you.

50,210!

that's it then. i finished. i won. i'm done. i wrote the last words this morning, after an almost completely sleepless night. i don't know why i couldn't sleep. yes i was thinking about the end of this thing and wondering what i will do to fill the time now that it's over. probably what i will do with the time is sleep, because i've been getting up between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning to write every weekday this month. tomorrow - wow! - i can sleep until 6:30!

yeah. now what?

i'm pleased that i was able to bring the story to a questionably logical conclusion. and of course i left it open for the possibility of a sequel. i actually have plenty of time to write more before the deadline of midnight of november 30. i have three days. there are doubtlessly gaping holes here and there. there was that instance about halfway through when i felt stuck and decided to leap my story forward in time and basically start anew; that could use a smattering of revision. but i'm not proud; i don't feel the need to fix everything or write thousands more words just because i have three more days. i could; don't get me wrong. oh, i could. but i made it to the goal of 50,000 words, the story is complete enough for its purposes, and i am done.

maybe later i'll revise it some. i'm not saying no. but i think at the moment i'm needing a break from it.

anyone wanna read the thing? shout out and we'll talk about it. note, of course, that it isn't pretty. far from it. also note, again, that i'm not proud.

45,298

it looks like a thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, doesn't it? well, it was fine. mine was the blue plate. i just plonked the hen on top of my side dishes.

yes, we had a good day yesterday. we ate from our overflowing plates of food. such absurd bounty. we listened to arlo. we had a fire going in the stove and we sat in front of it and played a spot of monopoly. oh, but kara smoked me good. just like jennifer used to when we were kids. my strategy was to buy every property i landed on, to the point of mortgaging properties to buy new ones. i did acquire some worthy chunks of the real estate but i never quite made it out of the hole i'd dug for myself. alas.

today i wrote 3,488 words (kara was at work.) it's some of the worst writing i've ever done and i was giggling as i wrote it. dreadful stuff. it's fun, though. and i'm thinking it's about time to try and wind things up, storywise. at this point i sort of have a nonspecific plan. so it should be fine. i'll probably finish on monday or so. that leaves me with three days to spare.

39,596

weird dream this morning. it had been a while since i'd had such a doozy. i was in a bus depot or a train station, sitting on a bench. on the bench opposite were two people with a horrific disease. their skin was disappearing. it was so thin as to be transparent. some of their bones and viscera were transparent as well. the process was uneven over their bodies but i could plainly see their internal organs, their pulsing blood vessels, their ribs, their skulls, the matter of their brains. apparently the condition was extremely painful to boot, as they both seemed to be writhing and convulsing with agony, a bit like the demons in this movie. perhaps their virtual skinlessness allowed entry of passing contaminants in the air. (they didn't look like the woman to the left there; i don't know why i added that image.) the knowledge came to me that i too might have this disease, whatever it was. evidently, laboratory tests were pending. i was gripped with the terrible fear that i had contracted this horrific ailment and that my days were numbered. symptoms would be manifesting imminently.

then the dream turned to jack bauer of "24"; he was working in the depot, unpacking magazines from those plastic double-hinged bins (his were orange) and stacking them on the racks at the newsstand. he had been fired again from the counter-terrorism unit in los angeles. it was very sad for me to see him so reduced (i used to have the job he had in this dream, though not at a bus depot), but he did not appear dejected. au contraire. he was enthusiastic about his chances for getting back to his (sometimes) government- sanctioned cruel interrogation techniqes and daredevil rescues made famous by that hailed television program.

anyway. then i woke up. and did a bit of writing. the writing is going all right. just over 10,000 words to go. i'm in pretty good shape. although i sometimes think i'm taking the whole thing a bit too seriously. there is a local message board on the nanowrimo site talking about how to elevate word counts by never using contractions, by elaborate and unnecessarily descriptive passages, by use of the passive voice, etc. i confess i have disdain for these tricks. i am actually trying to write a decent story. i know it's not really a decent story, my story, so perhaps i'm simply foolish, but i like to think it has the potential to be a decent story, some day.

and tomorrow's thanksgiving. how about that? i have a three-day weekend: tomorrow, friday, and saturday. yay. tomorrow it's just me and kara. we'll make a fire in our little wood stove thing. we're eating hens, stuffing, potatoes, and brussel(s) sprouts. we have a couple of bottles of wine. we have apple pie and vanilla ice cream. we'll eat. we'll listen to arlo guthrie's "alice's restaurant" while we do so, and we'll surely sing along with the four-part harmony. we might watch a movie or two. (i'll do some writing in the morning.)

and it's 43 years today since jfk was killed. incidentally. and robert altman died the day before yesterday. those items are probably not actually related. but i'm not particularly happy about either.

32,985

i did some okay writing today, if i do say so myself: 3,975 words. whew. i'm glad to be through the 20,000s, which reportedly can be a barren stretch of pain. i've had the day to write, as kara is at work, and i guess i made the most of it. good boy me. i'm done writing for today, though. i'm tired. i'll be back at it tomorrow before work, though.

this here's frank o'hara, one of my favorite poets. i didn't know frank was going to be in my story, but there he is. today he's watching over me. i referenced two of his poems in my novel today, two of my favorites, "steps" and "poem"; he surely was one for the titles, wasn't he? i like his work.

i went back to see doctor dan yesterday. unfortunately, my fats are still wonky. they're a hair better than they were, after the fish oil and an alteration of diet, but they're still wonky. i'm becoming something of a dab hand at the old phlebotomy, at least the receiving end of same. the blood nipped from my vein yesterday will be checked for iron, copper, and hepatitis. if nothing definitive is found, doctor dan threatens an ultrasound.

i'm not sure how i feel about that. part of me thinks: ooh, fun, an ultrasound! another experience, right? a bigger part of me doesn't at all want to be someone who needs an ultrasound, of course. oh well. we'll see what happens. nothing's scheduled yet. i see doctor dan again in the middle of next month.

oh, and for the past month or so i've been having migraines, so he gave me some drug samplers: zomig and relpax. i haven't tried them yet. he advised taking them at the first signs of a headache, and by the time he gave them to me i already had a headache. i took some ibuprofen this morning and now i feel all right.

is it time for my generation to start falling apart? my friend christa recently had what could be a tia and a colleague of my wife's, who is younger even than i, was just diagnosed with colon cancer. christa, for one, seems to be okay, though it's still not sure what's happening there. maybe it's my turn?

frank o'hara died at age 40 after being hit by, of all things, a beach buggy.

in other, perhaps more hopeful, news, we bought a door yesterday. we don't have the door yet but we don't have the money any more either. someone will come by the monday after thanksgiving and perform what the salesman guy called a "critical measurement." in something like eight weeks, then, a door will arrive along with people to put it in place. i look forward to that day. it will be in early 2007.

25,440

i made it to the halfway point this morning. crossed that line. sheesh. i'm still not off track. i'm enjoying writing this section much, much, much more than i enjoyed the entire second week of writing. perhaps future readers will let me know if one section is preferred to the other. if you want to see a snippet of the thing, the work in progress, such as it is, look no further than ... here. it's from what i wrote yesterday, from part 2.

i totally forgot to write about jury duty last week! well there actually isn't anything to say. it was a bust. my group didn't even get called to the courthouse the entire week. i had to work my regular job the whole time. i'm a little down about that, but it's not such a big deal. i don't know what i missed. and i got my check today from pierce county, compensation for my efforts: $30 for 3 days of showing up. i'll cash it this weekend.

friday kara is off because she works the weekend. i have a doctor's appointment in the morning and a door salesman is visiting our home in the afternoon. with all of this rain this past week our front door is swollen again. it's extremely annoying to have to tug the door open and shove it closed with such force. oh i want a new door! i think we'll go aluminum even though kara's skin is already crawling at the thought. (she loves wood.)

because kara is working the weekend i'll have all day saturday to write. the hope is to have another little explosion of words over those two days, friday (the doctor's appointment isn't until 10:45) and saturday, to give me some leverage for the rest of the week.

and good god, thanksgiving is a week from tomorrow! that's crazy talk. though the three-day weekend will be good for my writing!

23,674

wow, i haven't blogged in a week, or 9,899 words. very sorry about that, though there's perhaps been less even than usual to say. i've been writing, if you can call it that. the story has been stagnating in a terrible sort of way. it took all the fortitude i had this morning to not type "and then he woke up," rendering the prior 60 pages all a dream, and essentially starting the damn thing over.

i did the next worst thing and started a new chapter set a year later than the nonsense that preceded it. it's still an abandonment, but perhaps it will seen artistic in the long run, and not the cop out that it is.

wow - i only wrote 9,899 words in week 2, as opposed to 13,775 words in week 1. that's truly terrible. i've not been keeping up with my daily quotas but trying to play catchup on weekends. this is no way to do this thing. i'm not technically behind, i suppose, because of my initial explosion, but i'm on the verge.

anyway. any news? it's been a stormy week, rainy and windy, and max has relieved himself indoors several times because he doesn't trust me enough to go outside when i'm holding the door open for him.

i have a new writing goal for 2007, involving creating a short story a month. of course i had the same plan more or less for 2006 and that fizzled early, mostly because i decided to rework the thing i wrote during the 2005 nanowrimo. that project fizzled too. oh pathos. i will be better in ought-seven.

how are y'all?

13,775

argh. it seems one day i write well and the next day i struggle. tomorrow, then, i should have a good writing day. this morning i have just been slogging, and writing stuff i would never keep if i weren't pushing for a word count. but i guess that's the point of this exercise.

the courts don't want me today. i'm a little bit hurt. i'll be transcribing instead. oh well. i rather hope they want me tomorrow. just because. my opportunities to get on a jury are dwindling.

kara and i watched a documentary called sir! no sir! yesterday evening and it was riveting. it's about the soldiers in the vietnam era who were against the war. excellent film. it made us good and angry. i think it's important and highly relevant. everyone should see it.

kara and i put our ballots in our mailbox yesterday morning, along with disk 5 of season 4 of "24." voting is important. now, yes, the weather in this part of the country yesterday was torrential, relatively. heavy rain and heavy wind all day. max was afraid to go outside and he peed three times inside, right by the fridge, and pooed once. inside. but that's not what i'm talking about.

the postal carrier picked up kara's ballot and the dvd but left my ballot in the box. it was there under the mail dropped off for us. i was mad, kara was mad. carelessness on the part of the postal service. perhaps the weather could be blamed?

oh. i have to get to work.

9,998

i'm two words shy of ten thousand! i'll reach the 1/5 mark today; of that i have little doubt. i'll write for about two hours and then i'll go to work.

it feels like so long since i've done my job, because of this jury duty business, but it's only been a week. i hope i remember how to do it.

oh, and here's a picture of the gun lynne almost shot willem with on page 4. (ancient history; i'm on page 27 now.) it's a 9-mm makarov. pretty, huh? we'll see that gun later on, one way or another.

i'm a bit ahead of the game, word-wise. i'm doing fine. still, i'm feeling under the gun (if you will; i wouldn't) to get my daily quota in. story-wise, i'm not vouching for it.

i did learn yesterday that in march there'll apparently be a whirlwind month-long editing session for the tripe i'm writing now; that might be worth looking into. for right now, though, i gotta get crackin'.

5,106

boom! the starter pistol rang out at 12 a.m. on the first. i actually slept through the shot but was up and writing about four and a half hours later. writing writing!

i went to the courthouse for 9:30 a.m. and got my name called for a superior court case. whee! however, the defendant evidently got cold feet and pled guilty before i could even step into the courtroom. alas. maybe next time?

i got home early and wrote some more before kara came home and we drove up to seattle to see stephen king be hilariously longwinded on stage.

i tend not to like his books all that much but he was a good one to see as nanowrimo began, simply because his output is massive. hence, inspiring. he did look a little shrunken, after his 1999 pedestrian-versus-automobile incident and a recent bout with pneumonia involving a collapsed lung not unrelated to the aforementioned accident.

he's still vital though, and folksy. he was certainly fun to see. he likes to tell stories, and he did go on and on, but it was enjoyable. apparently he doesn't make appearances like this so often.

we made it home and now we don't have plans to return to seattle again until january, when my sister and edwidge danticat come to town. a bit of a break until then, and i welcome it.

so! words! i broke the 5,100-word mark today and i feel all right about that. i'm actually a little bit ahead of the game, wordwise. the story?

oh who knows? there was an accident on the docks; a man was killed quite thoroughly. meanwhile the main characters, a couple named willem and lynne, are pregnant, and she's having violent nightmares. where will it go from here? where could it possibly go?

hallow's eve

as my concession to hallowe'en, i present this terrifying yeowling cat. (click on it to see it bigger-like.) it's the cat who lives in the driveway of our neighbors (not the neighbors who are friends with the mean man with the truck, the neighbors on our other side). the cat still cries and cries and cries. it tried to get into our house again yesterday. poor little creature. it sure has been cold the last few days and nights.

and ... tomorrow is november. tomorrow the crazed writing starts. i've certainly got the jitters today. i'm doing a bit of internet research this morning prior to my trek back to the courthouse.

antici ... pation

well i spent today in the courthouse.

i sat in a room full of other potential jurors and i read alice munro. for hours and hours. dang but she's terrific, though. i wondered if my name would ever be called, and then, finally, at about 2:30, it was.

i was assigned to a municipal court case, which felt like a bummer. municipal court means small change, traffic malfeasances, etc. not so interesting. i want me a superior court case! that's the juicy stuff. but then, a few minutes later, it was announced that that particular case went away, and i was released for the day.

i go back tomorrow. i'll bring a second book, in case i finish the munro.

man and his truck

there are perhaps things i will never understand about the human animal. i'll share a brief anecdote.

yesterday there was a truck, in addition to ours, parked in front of our house. about two feet of this truck were blocking our driveway and kara wanted to go on an errand. normally this is no big thing, especially since the truck's owner was right there. kara asked him to back his truck up two feet (there was room between his truck and our truck in front of our house for him to do this) so she could pull the mazda out the driveway.

the man appeared exasperated that kara asked this of him, but he got in his truck and pulled away. he didn't merely back the truck up a few feet; he left altogether, and kara pulled out to go on her brief errand. the man and his truck apparently just drove around the block once and then parked in the exact same spot, inexplicably again blocking our driveway by about two feet. kara returned from her errand and had to again ask the man to move his truck a little, so she could pull into our driveway.

again the man appeared inappropriately put out, but he got into his truck and peeled out down the street again. kara pulled into our driveway and, moments later, before she was even in the house, the truck returned and parked, now fully blocking our driveway, despite the fact that there was more than enough room for him to park in front of our house without blocking our driveway even an inch.

how infuriating is this? the man had trapped us in our house. he was apparently trying to make a point of some kind, but what is it?

kara was tempted to call the police and have the truck towed. the man was not someone she wanted to talk with again, as apparently he is some sort of sociopath. plus he appeared to be a guest of our neighbors and we don't want any feuds. we both stalked around our living room a while, thoroughly aggravated and yet impotent.

fortunately, about 20 minutes later the man and his truck were gone. i guess his visit with our neighbors was over. kara rushed out and pulled our hyundai (which was parked up the street a piece) into the space immediately before our house again in case the mean man and his truck returned.

this experience definitely got our dander up and raised questions about the motives behind this individual's actions.

(fortunately i do appear for jury duty tomorrow and might have the opportunity to put one of these sociopaths away for years! [maniacal laughter])

decay

okay this is gross. my friend mailman sent me this article about these aforementioned dead folks. she left the link in the comment field on the previous post but i think it deserves front-and-center attention. thanks erika.

now i don't know how i feel about this. the bodies were cool. they weren't dripping or otherwise nasty when i saw them. it's a terrific educational device. perhaps they went about it the wrong way, though. dang.

i don't want to negate the good time i had looking at this stuff. it was really excellent. but i readily admit that it was potentially horrible.

we saw dead people

i haven't blogged about this yet. so sorry. and i'm not even in a terrific mood for blogging, what with my headache, nausea, and clogged eustachian tubes. but i'll write a wee something.

on saturday, that is, 3 days ago now, kara and i and our friend kristi cruised to seattle to see this exhibition of human anatomy. thanks to kristi for driving. the bodies on display were genuine human cadavers, preserved, and in various states of repair.

it was fascinating. i think my favorite display was what is pictured to the right, the figure split in half so his viscera were visible. there were signs to help identify organs, vessels, etc.

there's controversy surrounding this exhibition, of which i was not aware at the outset. apparently appropriate permission from the families of these dead folks was not granted. the cadavers are chinese but i don't know if that's important. i can surely see how people might be upset. some folks might not care to see their loved ones treated this way after death. me, i'm all for donating my remains to the body farm, but i realize my wishes aren't everyone's.

anyway. there was one picketer outside when we went in, but by the time we left he was gone. and the displays were amazing. if the exhibition comes to your area (i think it's in seattle through the end of this year), i heartily recommend checking it out.

sorry i'm not doing this topic justice. it was really an astonishingly good show.

nicola

i finished reading this book yesterday afternoon. it is good.

i feel a special affinity toward nicola's work because i sort of kind of know her. i met her when she was doing a reading at the bookstore where i was working at the time. she was promoting stay, which is a sequel to the blue place. (the third book in that series, always, is coming out in april 2007.) we chatted a little bit before her reading and afterwards she invited kara and me to her house for a party.

or maybe we went to dinner first. i don't remember. i know kara and i went to her house in wallingford for a party one evening, and another evening we met her and her partner kelley for dinner at a restaurant in wallingford. i just don't recall which came first.

it was exciting, hanging out with published authors. i was surprised and pleased that nicola spent so much time talking exclusively to me at the party, which was a hey!-my-new-book's-out party. their house was full of people. she gave me her full attention for a long while. she herself is an interesting person, having sung in a rock band and taught self defense. plus she's beautiful and british and has a gorgeous voice. her characters are powerful women, savvy women, impressive women.

it was exciting and, for me, a little unnerving, spending time with nicola and kelley. i felt unequal. i felt they were being generous by sharing their time with us. (this was something of a point of contention between me and kara, who did not feel similarly unworthy.) more likely, however, is that they are quite social, they like people, and they are genuinely interested in other points of view.

i like to think that if kara and i still lived in seattle we would still see nicola and kelley now and again. with more exposure to them i'm sure i would have calmed down considerably. when i started reading slow river i emailed her to let her know. she wrote back quickly and asked how i liked it so far. we had a little exchange.

slow river is set probably some decades in the future. it's about a woman from a profoundly wealthy family who is kidnapped and whose family does not pay her ransom. she escapes her kidnappers and lives underground. it's more than a science fiction story or a thriller (or queer fiction), though it's all of those.

read her books, if you haven't. do it. (i confess i haven't yet read kelley's novel, solitaire. i will, though.)

and yesterday i started reading this as a bit of a change of pace. i don't read a lot of comic novels but i'm intrigued by the quantum physics swirling around in this one. plus i've heard the author on npr. plus it's short and i bet i can get through it before november. so far i'm finding it quite clever.

pick me but don't sequester me

it's 2 weeks from november! i'm 2 weeks away from writing like a crazy person. i'm excited. i'm ready. i think. i have my premise; i'm ready enough. there's a guy and his wife and his wife's friend with a troubled past. it's perfect! let's go!

scanning the profiles of other participants in this endeavor reveals lots of fantasy writers. i sort of wish i could write that sort of stuff, creating an entirely different world. i'm pretty much stuck here, though, as far as the old imagination goes.

i called our human resources department this afternoon and queried regarding compensation during my upcoming potential jury duty. excellent news. minus what the county pays ($10/day?!) my employer will pay my full hourly wage. kick ass! i was leaning against wanting to get selected until this news. now i want to get picked and i want it to be the next trial of the century! (unless that involves my being sequestered. sequestration sounds unfun.)

during the course of my workday today i typed up 3 reports for the same patient. i like that. i typed an admission history and physical examination, an operative report, and an inpatient consultation. at the end of the consultation the patient appeared to be stable, but it was a rocky day in that individual's life. but i like seeing the arc of patient care over even just a brief stretch of time. it's somehow a cozy feeling.

maternal influence

mom said she couldn't see this image in my last post, so here it is. this is what kara and i will look like shortly with continued use of our new weight machine. see? not so terrible.

and mom shared this video with me too and i thought i'd pass it on. can you see it?

anyway.

medicolegal x7

1. eliot's sutures came out yesterday. i didn't do it and he didn't do it; they were taken out professionally. the original appointment for suture removal was on thursday, the day before yesterday, but eliot apparently found out about it and hid under the porch. he was unreachable. yesterday, however, i was able to snag him and i brought him in. his scar looks good, i was told. it certainly looks good to me. he healed fine. good little elly belly. fine boy.
   
2. we bought this book, human anatomy, in seattle last weekend. i love it. it's anatomic drawings through the centuries. i don't know why but i get a kick out of these drawings. they're fantastic. if you're interested, here's the isbn: 0-8109-5545-8.
3. recently i went to a doctor for the first time in a long time, and boy was that ever a mistake. i had to get blood drawn, and i think i've mentioned my feelings regarding needles. when the lab work came back i learned that my fats are all screwy. my good fats, which are supposed to be high, are low, and my bad fats, which are supposed to be low, are high. so it's fish oil pills for me. and in a few weeks i go under the needle again.
4. i just finished working out for the day. it felt good. actually, i overdid it a bit and got a little nauseated, but i feel much better now. i'm not sure if i'll work out again tomorrow but i certainly will on monday. i will establish a routine, i pledge. it's a good machine, our new machine, and with its help soon kara and i will look like this. sweet!
   
5. veering away from medical-slash-health issues, i went and had a coffee this morning and brainstormed about the november thing. i had what appeared at the time to be good ideas. now i have a title, four characters, and a very vague story arc. that's plenty. for the next couple of weeks i'm going to try not to think about it, and we'll see how the act of breakneck writing deviates from these hesitant plans.
6. kara is out right now with a couple of colleagues, shopping at (gad) the mall, because she's been subpoenaed. it's one of the perks of being a legal clerk for the medical records department in a major hospital system. she wants something professional-looking.
7. in other legal news, i have mixed feelings about my upcoming jury duty. i recently learned that although three counties in the great state of washington have increased the monetary compensation for serving on a jury, the county in which i live has not. for serving on a jury i will receive a whopping $10 a day. i'm interested in sitting on the jury and hearing the case and learning the process, but the drastic decrease in financial gain during that time will be stifling.

that's it for now i think. i think i'll go watch a movie or something. maybe i'll read some more nicola.

e o

i do enjoy our seattle jaunts. there's just something about the city that lifts me. we were in the wallingford neighborhood, one of my favorites, last evening. kara and i ate in a pub called murphy's (where we had gone to cap off our first date, as it happens), and i do enjoy an irish pub. when we move next, to seattle or to portland, we will have to speak to our realtor about proximity to an irish pub. i consumed two pints of murphy's (what i used to drink in cork oh those many years ago) along with my turkey club.

then we were off to the u district, the university temple united methodist church (which is very churchy indeed), to see e o wilson (pictured) and kuow's steve scher have a chat.

e o is an older individual, and we were toward the back of the church, and sometimes it was difficult to hear him. there was a large man, red hair, balding on the crown, 2 pews up, who obstructed my view quite effectively.

e o's new book is called the creation and it seems to attempt to build a bridge between scientists and creationists. he wants to put the current bickering aside and work together to save the planet. sure that sounds fine.

what i suppose i have a bit of a problem with is his desire to save each and every organism on the planet. doesn't this seem to go against the idea of natural selection? more specifically, though e o didn't talk about this per se, kara and i got to talking about the advances in medicine and how folks in this country are living longer lives. (e o himself has got to be pushing 106 by now. no, not really; he was born in 1929.) sure, medicine is good stuff and all but humans aren't generally meant to live longer than 70 or 80 years, are we? it sounds cold but what with overpopulation and ecological footprints and all the other issues that surround our killing the planet, i'm thinking the human race has peaked and is in its decline.

we should be allowed to die. i don't personally want to die, not right away, because i'm enjoying myself, but the whole evolution thing is a process and homo sapiens are hardly the culmination of that process. we are interfering with that process, as we interfere with everything else. it ticks me off. the process needs to take its course and we need to make room for what's next. i guess i just don't want what's next to be robotics and nanoparticles and i don't know what all.

although, for all i know, that is the next natural step. although kara and i did agree that medicine should be more palliative than it is.

it's early in the morning and i probably didn't say well what i wanted to say. sorry. i'm tired. any questions?

so it goes

i feel like we should have done some research for the panel discussion of last evening. janeane garofalo and foolproof talked at town hall in seattle about politics and the media, focussing on newsblogs versus print and television news. i didn't know any of the panel members other than ms garafalo, and the names of local political bloggers were bandied about willynilly so we didn't catch any of them.

still, it was an interesting discussion. everyone on the panel was terribly anti-bush and against staying in iraq, and while i am too, it might have been good to have some opposing viewpoints. there were minor squabbles about this or that but fundamentally everyone agreed with everyone else.

prior to the town hall event kara and i did a little seattling. we went to few bookstores and in the first one we ran into an ex-girlfriend of mine, patti. i hadn't seen patti - who dumped me, by the bye - in about six and a half years and it was a bit of a shock. she was working at the bookstore, a different from the one where we'd worked together those years ago.

it was a friendly encounter, through brief. i wouldn't mind catching up with her, seeing what she's been up to, but i doubt it'll happen. all afternoon i had those "what-if" thoughts, how my life would be different if things had gone another way ... the only way i have to reach her is through the bookstore. we'll see.

we went on, mostly hitting the bookstores in the capitol hill area. we stopped for a drink at one point, we had some supper at another. then we went to town hall, and then we drove home. coming home from seattle is always a bit of downer, just because we'd prefer to live there than here.

so it goes.

now i know about sociopaths

so i finished reading this one. sociopaths. good stuff. there were some portraits of some chilling people. the author, dr stout, says that 4% of the population in this country are sociopaths and makes the point that there are more sociopaths than people with colon cancer in the united states of america. in east asian countries there are significantly fewer sociopaths, and dr stout says it's because the culture and religion there are based on the interconnectedness of all things, and sociopathy is about thorough disconnection.

now, i'm as individualistic as the next guy, but i'm all for human interconnexion (i like the british spelling).

the segment of the book that i think most affected me was the story of romania. i don't know why i didn't know about the romanian orphans. the former president of romania, ceausesco, was a sociopath. he didn't allow birth control or contraception and hence lots of unwanted kids were born.

lots of these kids were put in institutions where they were fed and kept alive but given virtually no attention. children suffer when they are not touched in loving and parental ways. eventually it became a big thing for other countries to adopt these romanian kids. but the kids were frequently hostile to their adoptive parents because they had never been shown affection and had essentially been made sociopathic. soon romania stopped these adoptions because it was making the country look bad.

this is an oversimplification of dr stout's oversimplification, to be sure, but the crux is that the presidential sociopath created tens of thousands of little sociopaths, a large portion of a generation. quite an achievement.

hitler and pol pot are referenced. oblique references are made to the current situation in our country and in iraq. dr stout never outright says that president bush is a sociopath, but such a conclusion is easily inferred.

quite telling are the narratives dr stout write of amalgams of sociopaths (tales gleaned from her patients - she is a psychologist who specializes in posttraumatic recovery) living smaller lives and wreaking smaller-scale havoc.

odds are we all know a sociopath or two (as 1 in 25 people have the disorder, as she repeats a few times) - though probably not me, because i don't even know 25 people. the book is a bit glib in places and sometimes repetitive, but overall i recommend it. she manages to end it on a cheery note. hope for the future. she advises we all move to east asia. no she doesn't.

now then ... what's next, reading-wise?

oh, they're coming

well that's it then. i've done it now. i've signed up to do nanowrimo again. me oh my: 50,000 words in 30 days. i don't want to think about it too much yet; i don't want to overplan. i have 3 characters starting to walk around in my head. one of them is featured in a short thing i started the other day; she will be a relatively minor character (i think) in the november thing. she's an arnp who recently survived a brutal attack and, in the thing i'm writing now, she's about to steal a book. that's all i'm giving away right now.

jury duty starts 2 days before, and while at the moment i'm hoping i am selected, i don't know what the experience will do to my writing. i don't know if it will give me more or less time - well, actually, more time in the mornings because i don't think i'll have to be there before 8:30 and these days i start working at 7. depending on the type of case and perhaps on my co-jurors, the content of the story could be affected. which is, of course, okay.

heck, i might not even get selected. it might be a one-day thing, over before november even starts.

busy times between now and then. this saturday we're going to seattle to hang out a while on our own and then visit with janeane garofalo and friends. a week from today e o wilson is in seattle. in a couple weeks we'll probably head back to seattle to see these dead athletes. toward the end of the month, on the 26th, my sister is coming to town for a conference and i'll spend a night and a day with her, yes, again in seattle. and on 11/1/2006, the first day of nanowrimo and my presumptive third day on the jury, we're going to see stephen king - i'll give you 3 guesses where.

eliot status report

drain's out. eliot and i are just back from the vet. the most proximal and distal sutures were snipped and the drain was pulled free. done and dusted! he looks good: no swelling or drainage is evident.

he's a bit of a bitch to medicate, i don't mind saying. once he knows we're after him he's hard to catch. he's a good fleer. and once he's grabbed up he wriggles and twists and resists the medication. i hold him as still as i can, which isn't very, and kara prys his jaws apart and inserts the syringe. usually we end up with more medication on us than he gets in his mouth.

in spite of all of that, he is doing well. another week and a half and the rest of his stitches come out.

evidence presented

here's yellow, on the left, the prime suspect. i present him to the jury, which consists, essentially, of me. i wear a lot of hats here. at the moment i suppose i'm the attorney for the defense. the suspect is exhibit a. does he look remorseful in the least? i think not. i rest my case.

exhibit b, to the right, is the victim. behold the sutures, the drain, the obvious agony, the proxmity to the toilet bowl. poor eliot. this was taken this morning, just after he received per os a syringe and a half of ampicillin and a syringe of buprenex, a narcotic.

a narcotic?! who still feels sorry for eliot? we made him soar! only one syringe of buprenex remains but i think i might take it myself. oh i'm kidding. we'll force it between eliot's jaws this evening.

drain

it seems that our little elly belly got himself in another scrape. when kara and i got home from seattle the other night, on eliot's neck there was a clump of wet fur. kara daubed it with a tissue and the tissue came away red.

the next day, which was the day before yesterday, i took him to the vet. they clipped away the fur and found a hole, about a centimeter in diameter, on the right side of his neck.

i don't know if it was a fresh wound or an old wound that got infected and formed an abscess that burst. (the prime suspect, of course, is yellow [a sociopath by history], though all the evidence is circumstantial.) either way, this is the second major neck wound for our eliot. i knew the drill.

i left him at the vet overnight. i missed him that night, as he usually sleeps on my foot. i missed seeing him around the house during the day the next day. he's a good little boy.

the next day, which was yesterday, he was put under general endotracheal anesthesia, the wound was debrided and sutured, and a drain was left in place.

he seems all right now. he was skittish when we got home but he warmed up to us after a few hours. we're going to keep him inside for at least a few days, which will be a challenge. he's the outdoorsiest of our cats.

the drain is in until monday. the sutures come out in 2 weeks. we are giving him liquid antibiotics and painkillers. (we tried to snap a photo this morning of the drain while we were giving his meds, but he was too wriggly and none of the shots were salvagable. [the photo above is from our voluminous library of eliot snaps - perhaps it looks familiar?] we'll try again.) yeah, he doesn't much enjoy kara forcing the dropper into his mouth.

lectures/duty

we went to seattle again yesterday, this time to see this chap, david quammen, chat. he seems a very sweet-spirited man. rather low-key, a bit touchy-feely, but still good. he talked about charles darwin and the 2 years between his return from the beagle voyage and stumbling upon the main principles of his theory of natural selection. it was a tumultuous, shattering conclusion for the young chuck d, and he was understandably reluctant to publish. science and religion were interwoven back then.

some of the same people were at this lecture who were at the shermer talk 2 weeks ago. soon we'll be regulars at these things too.

senator barack obama is coming to benaroya hall on 10/26/2006.

bill bryson will be at the elliott bay book company (where i was privileged enough to be employed as a bookseller for a few months in the summer and fall of 1999) the very next day, on 10/27/2006.

it would be swell to attend these events but tickets for each will be sold in advance only at the ebbc, not online and not by phone, and perhaps a special trip just to acquire tickets would have to be made. i'm not saying it couldn't happen; i'm just saying it would require a special trip.

... in other news, i have been summoned to jury duty. yesterday i got the notice in the mail. i am awash with emotions and thoughts about this. mostly i'm excited. it could be interesting. knowing me, i'll also be terribly nervous close to the date. i'm scheduled to appear on 10/30/2006, a monday.

consciencelessness

no actually i think actually i'm going to read this book about sociopaths instead of the sontag. the sontag will wait. i think it's too dense for me at the moment. i'm feeling too flighty for sontag!

i was going to read this richard powers book but i think it would be just too good for right now. too eloquent, too admirable. i do like what mr powers does. i read the first few pages this morning and, yeah, it's going to be good. i think it would distract me from writing and depress me. i will read it after november.

so, yeah, i'm on to sociopaths. i am prompted to read this book in part because of this local news. the crime - triple murder - happened 3/4 of a mile (give or take) from our house, back in february. the shooter pled guilty, showed zero remorse, and will get life in jail.

it's a horrifying crime but i am comforted by the fact that at least one of the victims was known by the perp. that is to say, it was not a random crime. it doesn't make the crime less of a horrorshow but i don't think i personally know anyone at the moment with a predeliction for killing folks. this makes me feel somewhat safer.

i don't know if this sort of personality - the lack of conscience - is at all penetrable from a psychological or sociological standpoint and i certainly would want to keep a considerable distance from such an individual, but on intellectual level i am deeply fascinated and curious.

i'll sit in a plush chair, smoke a pipe, sip brandy, and read this pop-sociologic text. i relish a safe distance!

bye old/hi new

this is the weight machine in our garage. a couple of weeks ago we made the mistake of going to a sporting goods store and kara saw another weight machine, smaller, smoother, and she wanted it. it's there in the box behind the other weight machine. for obvious space reasons we had to say goodbye to the old before effectively saying hello to the new.

yesterday morning i placed an ad on craigslist. it was my first experience selling anything on this site. i'm not kidding; 12 hours later - no, closer to 9 - the machine was gone and kara had the asking price in her pocket. it was thrilling how easy it was to (1) unload the thing and (2) recoup some of our losses.

today, while i'm up here typing up medical reports, she'll be in the garage assembling the new machine. pretty exciting.

leonard to sontag

whew! i finally finished this leonard book. i don't know why it took me so long. it's not that it was bad, though all the sentence fragments did start to wear on me. i get enough sentence fragments at work. the book was fine. i wasn't overly impressed but it was fine. plenty of deadpan action. i heard mr leonard on npr around the time that this book came out in hardcover and it sounded good. it was my first literary leonard, though i've seen a few movies based on his work.

i think i'm going to try susan sontag now. i've never read her and i'm interested. there was a piece i think in the new york times recently that contained some of her journal entries when she was living in paris in the 1950s and 60s.

poke/dad/sam

this is why i'm not an injection drug user: belonephobia. that's reason #1, anyway. it's also why i don't give blood so much. i get the willies! so: heroin? no thanks. not in a syringe anyway. plus i've seen trainspotting and requiem for a dream. is requiem for a dream about heroin? i don't remember.

anyway. new topic. onward and upward:
happy birthday, dad!

oh, and here's samantha morton looking at you. she's in neither of the abovementioned movies, except perhaps in spirit. plus she & i share a birthday!

also i wish it would shut up

this is the next-door neighbor cat this morning. day and night we can hear it meyowling by their side door, wanting in. apparently the neighbors don't want it in.

i don't know if i can fault them for that; some folks don't want cats in the house. plus, i'm only assuming it's their cat; perhaps it chose them and they are antagonized by it.

it's the cat that snuck into our house the other night. i'm tempted to attempt to adopt the poor thing, but i already know yellow's opinion on that subject.

poor little thing. i feel bad for the cat but i don't think there's anything i can do.

home invasion

i had a terrible fear earlier this morning. i think my greatest fear these days is home invasion.

of course it began with nightmares. yesterday afternoon i was watching a show on the discovery channel about flight 175, the second plane to hit the towers. kara came in and said, "you're going to have nightmares." and, lo, i did.

no planes or towers in my dreams, though. in the first dream i was in a crowd of people on a rocky crop. i think i was a young boy and i was with my extended family. we were having a picnic. a sedan pulled up and people with guns came out. they started shooting. i watched several people get hit before starting to climb down the rock. the people with guns came closer with their gunfire and it seemed getting hit was inevitable. i couldn't climb fast enough. i couldn't get far enough away. it was just a sickening feeling.

in the second dream, of course, i was jack bauer and i was hunting nina myers (okay, so we're almost done with disk 4 of season 3 of "24"). we were in a large old house and there were secret passageways and bombs on timers and nina, as per usual, was crafty. when the house finally exploded i was clear and i think nina was still inside, but, of course, i couldn't be sure.

when i woke up from this dream i was terrified. it was about 1:15am. the neighbors were pulling up their driveway in their car and talking loudly. i could hear people, perhaps intoxicated, on 6th avenue (half a block away) shouting back and forth. i was terrified we'd have a home invasion. some people would come into our house with guns or knives and tie us up and cut or shoot us. it was such a palpable fear and i couldn't even move.

the morning before, at about 2:30am, we did have a home invasion. the neighbor's cat entered our home. of course kara heard it before i did, but i woke to sounds of a scuffle upstairs. kara shouted out, asking me for help. she had got yellow off the neighbor cat but needed me to hold onto him while she herded the stranger out. she accomplished this pretty quickly and we went back to bed.

back to this morning. i realize we're probably not your regular targets of home invasions. we're not rich, we're not ostentatious, we don't know a lot of people, we keep to ourselves. i worry about the random attack. the jail is only a few miles away - what if someone broke out and made it this far and needed a place to hide out? there are a several bars just blocks away - what if there's a mean drunk out there who wants to vent a bit on some helpless people?

i kept thinking of the klutters, of in cold blood fame. that attack wasn't random, as apparently the killers thought there was a safe with cash. but the idea of being roused in the night by strangers, tied up, held, and finally shot was at the forefront of my mind when i woke up. terrifying, terrifying, terrifying.

it felt inevitable, someone random coming in. i kept thinking that the odds were against it, but that these things did happen to people. these things do happen. that is not how i want to die. i do not want to be murdered.

after an hour or so i calmed down and slept a few more hours. and when i woke up again i was fine. the fear was gone. i was okay. i have to wonder, though. how irrational is that fear? those kinds of things do happen. of course, being afraid doesn't help. it's no good to live afraid. if something awful is going to happen, then it's going to happen. there are bad people out there. i suppose i'm lucky not to have come across any thus far.

large slug on dirty green field

when i trekked to the end of the driveway at lunchtime today to retrieve our (thankfully emptied) waste and recycling receptacles, i noticed a sizeable slug in our tub for glass. i do not think it had been there, among all those bottles, when i hefted the container in the rain this morning. i took an inordinate number of photographs of this slug. none of them came out so well; these i think are among the best. the thing was 4 inches long and it moved at a pretty good clip. (it must have been moving fast because the rest of the pictures were blurry.)

bone retard no more

it so happens that the ceiling directly of my desk is slanted because of, you know, the roof of our house. i'm going to get these here posters from here and put them there. they are excellent references and i am excited about their arrival. so much information! (click 'em to enlarge! do it!)

i will glance upwards and there they will be. many of my questions (oh, i always have questions) will be answered in a flash.

the most interesting report i typed today was an epiphysiodesis. the epiphysis is the rounded end of a long bone, such as a femur. it's also called the growth plate. and the suffix -desis means to bind or tie together. the patient was a 10-year-old (give or take) boy and one of his legs was 3.5 cm shorter than the other one! who knew these things happened? i suppose my life has been rather sheltered, medically speaking and otherwise.

so the surgery involved a fusion of the epiphysis on this boy's femur, to retard the growth of the bone. it was done on his longer leg, i suppose so the other leg would have the opportunity to catch up. it sounded pretty gritty. and i think the little feller's going to be okay.

curiosity

we drove the mazda to seattle yesterday afternoon. it was the mazda's first time on the highway and it acquitted itself admirably. there are now almost 700 miles on it. it's a good car.

anyway. we went to see michael shermer, phd, chat a bit. that's michael there on the left. he's an energetic speaker, veering from topic to topic, example to example, talking clearly yet rapidly clearly, though the overall picture he created was quite coherent.

essentially he introduced several common arguments for the creationists, the believers in intelligent design. he used to be a creationist; he was born again, but then he discovered the scientific method and things changed for him. he refuted the creationist arguments with darwinian arguments, and although i'm already with him on the evolution thing, his arguments were compelling.

it's hard for me to imagine an illuminated refutation of evolution.

funny things about dr shermer: he laughs the way john stewart mimics george bush laughing, with a little "heh heh heh." he also uses the dubious contraction "all's" regularly, as in "all's i know is ..."

i like going to lectures like this. it feels worthwhile. it was good just sitting in the audience, among people, strangers, of course, who were moved to see an evolution scientist lecture on a tuesday evening. kara and i were taking in the car on the way home about how we don't understand the creationist point of view. i don't care if a person believes in god or not, but it seems that creationists shut themselves off from new knowledge.

i'm sure i don't have the whole creationist picture so maybe i shouldn't talk so much about it. but our conversation turned to people in general who don't go about attempting to learn things, who are content with their current base of knowledge. i'm not very interested in going back to school for further formal education (i'm still thinking about the coding thing), but i do read a lot. i like learning things. i learn things every day at work (even if i rarely retain my new knowledge out of context long enough to share it with kara!).

a main characteristic i saw in dr shermer is curiosity. he wants to know how things work, why things happen. this is what drew him to science. it's the lack of curiosity that creationists appear to affect that i do not understand.

we plan to go to these lectures too:
david quammen on 9/26/2006
e o wilson on 10/11/2006

some 12-1/2 hours later ...

my new chair arrived today. i built it, with minimal instructions, from parts provided.

here it actually is, in living color, in my workspace. oh, yes, i work here.

did i mention that i love working from home? oh but i do. it's the bee's knees.

so far i like the new chair, yeah. it offers significantly better back support. i shall have less pain heretoforth.

awake an hour and a half

i woke up early, thinking of people destroyed in plane crashes and fuel fires, people jumping from the towers. making the decision to jump is hard for me to imagine.

poem, etc.

portraits.

it's still early in the morning. plenty of time to do a little writing before work. we'll see.

dad's ants

dad snapped these ants too. he takes a good picture, doesn't he?

meanwhile, i'm working on the new story, and it's going okay. it's telling me where it's going, which is scarier but better than me telling it where to go.

in a while kara and i will run errands. she wants to get a sort of a raised food stand for max, because he's having trouble staying on his feet. they slide out from under him and he can't get back up without help. damn these hardwood floors!

we're also going to a sporting goods store to get some exercise stuff. another bar or two, some more weights, some grips for the machine. i want to look for a boxing thing, a thing to punch. not a heavy bag or a speed bag, but something else. i'm not sure what it's called.

meanwhile, i'm working on the new story. i hope my chair arrives this week.

it's not adhd

it might just be that i'm not ready to write a novel. my attention span is insufficient.

the writing has been stagnant the last several days and i fear my interest in the story is waning. last night, after watching the movie, i was thinking about the novel but the ideas weren't coming. i kept having to force my thoughts back to it, and i didn't like that. i'm going to take a break from it. an hour ago i started writing a new short story, with a new character.

i'm still thinking about national novel writing month and wanting to write something new for that. it has been pointed out to me that it would be against the rules to work on an existing project for nanowrimo. the point is to write something entirely new, from scratch, soup to nuts, in the 30 days. it's not that this rule in itself would stop me from using the month as i choose, but the current wave of apathy about the foibles and crimes of shannon et al is pushing me away.

so this is the new plan. i'll write a short story this month and one next month, in the neighborhood of 10,000 words each. the month after that is november and i'll do the 50,000-word thing. and that is that.

i feel bad about abandoning the old crew. partially for them and their story not being told and partially because i just feel lame for quitting. quitter. loser. wastrel. ne'er-do-well. will i never finish anything? but it's not as if i'm abandoning writing altogether. au contraire. as i say, i've already started something else. i don't know what it is yet, but i've got words on paper and i don't already hate them.

also, it's not as if i'm deleting the document in which shannon, dallas, and helen live. they'll be there, in suspended animation, waiting for my return. perhaps, one day, many years from now (or sooner), i will return.

this is me being disappointed in myself. and yet, at the same time, not so much.

status post 93

united 93. kara being kara, she wanted to watch it right away. we watched it last night. overall i have to say i was disappointed. the first part was excellent and appropriately terrifying and sad. there was a lot of stuff with the air traffic controllers, and seeing the events of the day unfold from their point of view was very effective. there were shots here and there of the people getting on board flight 93 and finding their seats, and that in itself was difficult to watch, just because of what was in store for them. i'd say the first hour and a half of the 2-hour film was very good.

then the same thing happened as happened in the television version. kara put it better than i could. after a certain point, what actually happened on the plane is, of course, speculation. without the backbone of the documented air traffic controller conversation as they track planes and planes disappear from their screens and the back-and-forth within the military as they try to scramble jets and establish rules of engagement, etc, the scenes on the plane, with the passengers, flight attendants, and hijackers, seemed like those in just another action movie. it could have been snakes on a plane.

does this mean i've seen too many movies? as i say, the first three quarters were very much in a documentary style, cinema verite. very moving, very gripping. but the last twenty minutes or half hour of the movie, despite my knowledge that it's a true story, devolved into a bruce willis (or, better, arnold schwarzenegger) action sequence and my involvement level plummeted. pun, perhaps, intended.