While we were in DC, we got a phone call from an old friend whose first words were "do you know who Toby Keith is?" Some of you do and I'm sure some don't but if you like Country Music he is at the top of the field. At any rate Toby was appearing in Tucson last Sunday. We knew it but hadn't done anything about it since we werent getting home until the night befor. Turns out that the young man who is the camara-man ofr the huge picture that appears behind Toby was a relative of our friend and we were given free tickets and a pass to meet Toby. Terry Clark opened the performance and she was so good that we didn't go to "meet and greet". We had a great time - everyone stood through nearly all of the performance. He puts on a great show - Reed said it took his ears some time to recover!
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
MaryAnne's Project
After month's of work, MaryAnne completed the stained glass sidelight for our front door. There are over 500 pieces of cut stained glass in the sidelight. She was very grateful to get it out of her studio, which is also the guest bedroom.
Thursday, November 18, 2004
For PRF:
Dad, check out the GigaPxl Project for amazing ultra high-definition images.
This one is also pretty awesome. .. click on it and zoom in and out.
This one is also pretty awesome. .. click on it and zoom in and out.
Monday, November 15, 2004
Status Update
NaNoWriMo Word Count: 10,000
Days Without Smoking: 25
Cups of Coffee: too many
Outlook: somewhat stormy
I'll surface again in December. My work situation went from nothing to do to crazy and full of travel for a difficult client. I'll NEVER write 50,000 words by the end of the month!
Days Without Smoking: 25
Cups of Coffee: too many
Outlook: somewhat stormy
I'll surface again in December. My work situation went from nothing to do to crazy and full of travel for a difficult client. I'll NEVER write 50,000 words by the end of the month!
Saturday, November 13, 2004
For Ann - NaNoWriMo (?)
Ann-
I saw this article in the Washington Post today and thought you may be interested. Love you!
Speed Writing With One Month to Pen a Novel, a Faster Piece Is Better Than a Masterpiece
By Libby CopelandWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, November 13, 2004; Page C01
Genius is overrated. Art ultimately comes down to discipline, to the doers and the do-nots -- the fevered few who prime their canvases and practice their chords and the rest of us who come home from work tired and fall asleep watching "Desperate Housewives."
If, as some people believe, every single person has a novel inside himself, then a lot of people have been wasting a lot of time doing a lot of things other than writing. Chris Baty, a freelance writer from Oakland, Calif., with novelist aspirations, devotes the month of November every year to helping people get those novels out. He approaches the writing process like a crash diet; his goal is to get people each to write 50,000 words in 30 days. The results may be shockingly bad, and will in all likelihood never be published, but that's not really the point, Baty says.
"Novel writing is actually great fun!" he says.
Baty has come to the District in the past few days to promote his new book, "No Plot? No Problem!," which advocates a pragmatic, populist approach to fiction writing that Baty has culled from six years running a movement he calls National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. He is drinking coffee at a cafe downtown and a keyboard is peeking out from the bag next to his chair. He has 50,000 words to churn out this month, and being on book tour, he feels, is no excuse for falling behind. This month, just like each November, he will write everywhere, in every pocket of free time, and will drink so much coffee that in all likelihood he'll lose weight. He is tall and lanky, with green eyes and red sideburns, and he wears a badge that says "Hello, my novel is . . ." -- underneath which he has scrawled "not bad."
NaNoWriMo started with 21 people and each year it grows bigger. This year there are about 40,000 people across the country and around the world attempting it, Baty says. Participation is free, though people are encouraged to make donations if they can. They register on the Web site, www.nanowrimo.org, and share thoughts and ask questions on the message boards. WriMos, as they're known, share excerpts of their work, which reveal the NaNo approach to writing: enthusiastic and over-caffeinated, and minus the benefit of revising, because the experiment's time constraints don't allow it. They are, at the very least, imaginative:
"Vaamanan would have thought after the twelve years Teira was with him, she would have learned that she couldn't escape or defy him. Yet she continued to dredge up those incessant displays of sporadic backbone."
"With glee he shook, as his tongue lolled out the ending sound of his words in a disgustingly slimy way that made you feel like a old, wet, flea-ridden dog with worms just hearing it."
This may or may not be the future of literature.
But it hardly matters if this stuff never gets read, says Baty, 31, who is nevertheless editing two of his old NaNo novels in hopes that they may be published. He says he is an advocate of the creative process, of making art in order to unleash the artistic id. The way he sees it, novel-writing can help not only aspiring writers but anyone who wants to tap into her imagination, or create a fictitious time capsule for his grandchildren, or join a competition for competition's sake. He says the 30-day deadline frees people by eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to writing: the internal editor.
"You take this sprawling, daunting, intimidating task and you basically shove it into this absolutely impossibly short timeframe, and I think that that somehow renders it manageable," Baty says. "Your inner editor is just like, 'This can't be done. I'm gonna go someplace else.' Which then leaves this raw, throbbing imagination."
At Baty's encouragement, regional groups of WriMos try to meet often for "write-ins" at coffee shops to turn "novel writing from a matter of private suffering into a matter of public celebration," he says. These events have the air of art installations. Plots fly back and forth. Characters are discussed. Names are invented. At a recent weekday evening write-in at the Dupont Circle Books-A-Million, the organizer, Rise Sheridan-Peters, a four-year WriMo, holds an old chocolate tin she has labeled "Random Plot Elements." Inside are slips of paper meant to energize lazy plots. They say things like "A bouquet of dead roses" or "A voodoo doll of your MC," for Main Character, and Sheridan-Peters hands the tin to each newcomer as they arrive.
A group of about 10 people, mostly women, have set up shop next to Sheridan-Peters and her 14-year-old daughter, who is also writing a 30-day novel. Most people have laptops. A few have pads of paper. One man keys words in slowly on his tiny combination cell phone and PDA. Most of the WriMos are over 30, and though they may harbor faint dreams of being novelists some day, they have real jobs that pay the bills. More than anything, they are devoted readers.
"I'm born to die by stepping in front of an automobile with my nose in a book," says Sheridan-Peters, 43. She says she used to drive to work from her home in Bowie, but became so involved in reading books at red lights that she decided she'd better start taking the Metro.
Sheridan-Peters keeps an online journal, but before her first NaNoWriMo in 2001, she hadn't done much fiction writing since college. Her first NaNo novel was a mystery involving a female researcher, a gang of ginseng thieves, 1920s-era washing machines and "a guy named Buddy with an adenoid problem." Soon after she began writing, she found herself bored with her novel and decided to kick-start her creative juices by unleashing a worst-case-possible fury on her female researcher character who was at the time living in the middle of Shenandoah National Forest. Soon, the character was "burned out of her camp, hiding under a spruce tree with sap in her hair, nose-to-nose with an angry skunk."
And that's when the magic started.
Sheridan-Peters says someday she may go back and edit her 2001 novel. But the process itself -- that one-month experience, and every November that has followed -- is the reward. She says after she finished that first novel, she gave it to a friend to read.
"She handed it back to me and said, 'This does not suck,' " Sheridan-Peters says. "That was all the praise I ever expected to get."
To scan the NaNoWriMo message boards is to peer into a fascinating slice of pop culture. The two most popular categories are those labeled "Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror" and "Romance & Erotic Fiction." Part of that, suggests Baty, has to do with the fact that sci-fi writers have taken to the Web easily. Another element may be the fact that romantic fiction is highly formulaic and therefore easy to write in a month. Because 30 days does not allow much time to research the Regency period, or the physics of space travel, the message boards are filled with all manner of requests for arcane information. There are subject lines that say, "Anyone know about forklifts and licensing?" and "incest . . . how wrong is this?" and "Habitable star systems."
One person posts this question: "Anyone know of a disease, preferably genetic, with no symptoms so long as you're medicated but will kill you within a few days if you go off your meds?"
A woman from the state of Washington writes in with the following query: "Any ideas for traits that might inspire unjustified hatred in the wife toward a blameless, gentle, hardworking man?" This sets off a firestorm of enthusiastic responses from other women, such as: "Snoring! After a while you just want to smother them with a pillow," and "My ex used to grind his teeth at night. . . . Homicidal ideation? You betcha."
Is NaNoWriMo the downfall of literature? Baty says he has often feared that professional writers would regard his experiment as "an insulting mockery of their craft," but he's never heard a professional writer say this. Instead, he says, some professional writers use NaNoWriMo to escape writer's block. After all, they're not doing away with the concept of editing. They're simply putting the editing off for as long as it takes to write rough drafts.
Of the two people who've managed to publish NaNo novels, both substantially edited their drafts after the November frenzy was over, and one was already a professional writer. His name is Jon F. Merz, a writer of supernatural thrillers. His 2001 NaNo novel, "The Destructor," pits his hero, a sort of vampire cop, against a female villain who is part vampire and part werewolf.
NaNoWriMo is "sort of the puke-it-out phase," Merz says. "Perfection -- if it's attainable -- comes later."
The other NaNo success story is Lani Diane Rich, 33, who had always dabbled in writing but never thought she stood a chance of being published before NaNoWriMo 2002. Her creation from that year, a chick-lit book called "Time Off for Good Behavior," took her 25 days, plus six weeks of editing.
"My problem was, I was always going back and editing myself before it was finished, looking for it to be perfect from the beginning," Rich says. "The great thing about WriMo is they're like, 'Write it -- write it badly -- just write it!' "
Baty says only about 17 percent of those who register for his experiment write 50,000 words. They send their finished works in via the Web site, and a computer program verifies their word count and declares them winners. It's all done on the honor system, and Baty says that to pad novels toward their 50,000-word goal, some WriMos cut contractions, replacing "don't" with "do not," and he himself has made characters hard of hearing so that dialogue would need to be repeated. Since there's no prize at the end, aside from getting one's name on the Web site, he figures it doesn't much matter if they cheat. The main point is they're writing.
Back at Books-A-Million, Sheridan-Peters taps at her laptop, then stops.
"Okay, I need the name for a kitschy erotica boutique," she says, sucking on an iced chai latte through a straw.
"Kitty Cat Dreams," suggests one woman.
Sheridan-Peters looks dissatisfied. "I'll figure something out," she says.
Already, in an attempt to jumpstart her plot, Sheridan-Peters has burned her character's Vespa. She's considered burning the character's boat, too, but hasn't done it yet. "I think it may turn out to be a murder mystery," she says. "There may be a body."
Art is so haphazard. Who can predict the wiles of a fertile imagination? Sheridan-Peters recalls how two years ago she wrote a book that came to a natural conclusion at just 42,000 words. She needed 8,000 more to "win," and she went to her husband for help.
"He looked at me and he said, 'So you should kill someone,' " she says. "And I did. I killed the protagonist's husband. And it worked beautifully."
I saw this article in the Washington Post today and thought you may be interested. Love you!
Speed Writing With One Month to Pen a Novel, a Faster Piece Is Better Than a Masterpiece
By Libby CopelandWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, November 13, 2004; Page C01
Genius is overrated. Art ultimately comes down to discipline, to the doers and the do-nots -- the fevered few who prime their canvases and practice their chords and the rest of us who come home from work tired and fall asleep watching "Desperate Housewives."
If, as some people believe, every single person has a novel inside himself, then a lot of people have been wasting a lot of time doing a lot of things other than writing. Chris Baty, a freelance writer from Oakland, Calif., with novelist aspirations, devotes the month of November every year to helping people get those novels out. He approaches the writing process like a crash diet; his goal is to get people each to write 50,000 words in 30 days. The results may be shockingly bad, and will in all likelihood never be published, but that's not really the point, Baty says.
"Novel writing is actually great fun!" he says.
Baty has come to the District in the past few days to promote his new book, "No Plot? No Problem!," which advocates a pragmatic, populist approach to fiction writing that Baty has culled from six years running a movement he calls National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. He is drinking coffee at a cafe downtown and a keyboard is peeking out from the bag next to his chair. He has 50,000 words to churn out this month, and being on book tour, he feels, is no excuse for falling behind. This month, just like each November, he will write everywhere, in every pocket of free time, and will drink so much coffee that in all likelihood he'll lose weight. He is tall and lanky, with green eyes and red sideburns, and he wears a badge that says "Hello, my novel is . . ." -- underneath which he has scrawled "not bad."
NaNoWriMo started with 21 people and each year it grows bigger. This year there are about 40,000 people across the country and around the world attempting it, Baty says. Participation is free, though people are encouraged to make donations if they can. They register on the Web site, www.nanowrimo.org, and share thoughts and ask questions on the message boards. WriMos, as they're known, share excerpts of their work, which reveal the NaNo approach to writing: enthusiastic and over-caffeinated, and minus the benefit of revising, because the experiment's time constraints don't allow it. They are, at the very least, imaginative:
"Vaamanan would have thought after the twelve years Teira was with him, she would have learned that she couldn't escape or defy him. Yet she continued to dredge up those incessant displays of sporadic backbone."
"With glee he shook, as his tongue lolled out the ending sound of his words in a disgustingly slimy way that made you feel like a old, wet, flea-ridden dog with worms just hearing it."
This may or may not be the future of literature.
But it hardly matters if this stuff never gets read, says Baty, 31, who is nevertheless editing two of his old NaNo novels in hopes that they may be published. He says he is an advocate of the creative process, of making art in order to unleash the artistic id. The way he sees it, novel-writing can help not only aspiring writers but anyone who wants to tap into her imagination, or create a fictitious time capsule for his grandchildren, or join a competition for competition's sake. He says the 30-day deadline frees people by eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to writing: the internal editor.
"You take this sprawling, daunting, intimidating task and you basically shove it into this absolutely impossibly short timeframe, and I think that that somehow renders it manageable," Baty says. "Your inner editor is just like, 'This can't be done. I'm gonna go someplace else.' Which then leaves this raw, throbbing imagination."
At Baty's encouragement, regional groups of WriMos try to meet often for "write-ins" at coffee shops to turn "novel writing from a matter of private suffering into a matter of public celebration," he says. These events have the air of art installations. Plots fly back and forth. Characters are discussed. Names are invented. At a recent weekday evening write-in at the Dupont Circle Books-A-Million, the organizer, Rise Sheridan-Peters, a four-year WriMo, holds an old chocolate tin she has labeled "Random Plot Elements." Inside are slips of paper meant to energize lazy plots. They say things like "A bouquet of dead roses" or "A voodoo doll of your MC," for Main Character, and Sheridan-Peters hands the tin to each newcomer as they arrive.
A group of about 10 people, mostly women, have set up shop next to Sheridan-Peters and her 14-year-old daughter, who is also writing a 30-day novel. Most people have laptops. A few have pads of paper. One man keys words in slowly on his tiny combination cell phone and PDA. Most of the WriMos are over 30, and though they may harbor faint dreams of being novelists some day, they have real jobs that pay the bills. More than anything, they are devoted readers.
"I'm born to die by stepping in front of an automobile with my nose in a book," says Sheridan-Peters, 43. She says she used to drive to work from her home in Bowie, but became so involved in reading books at red lights that she decided she'd better start taking the Metro.
Sheridan-Peters keeps an online journal, but before her first NaNoWriMo in 2001, she hadn't done much fiction writing since college. Her first NaNo novel was a mystery involving a female researcher, a gang of ginseng thieves, 1920s-era washing machines and "a guy named Buddy with an adenoid problem." Soon after she began writing, she found herself bored with her novel and decided to kick-start her creative juices by unleashing a worst-case-possible fury on her female researcher character who was at the time living in the middle of Shenandoah National Forest. Soon, the character was "burned out of her camp, hiding under a spruce tree with sap in her hair, nose-to-nose with an angry skunk."
And that's when the magic started.
Sheridan-Peters says someday she may go back and edit her 2001 novel. But the process itself -- that one-month experience, and every November that has followed -- is the reward. She says after she finished that first novel, she gave it to a friend to read.
"She handed it back to me and said, 'This does not suck,' " Sheridan-Peters says. "That was all the praise I ever expected to get."
To scan the NaNoWriMo message boards is to peer into a fascinating slice of pop culture. The two most popular categories are those labeled "Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror" and "Romance & Erotic Fiction." Part of that, suggests Baty, has to do with the fact that sci-fi writers have taken to the Web easily. Another element may be the fact that romantic fiction is highly formulaic and therefore easy to write in a month. Because 30 days does not allow much time to research the Regency period, or the physics of space travel, the message boards are filled with all manner of requests for arcane information. There are subject lines that say, "Anyone know about forklifts and licensing?" and "incest . . . how wrong is this?" and "Habitable star systems."
One person posts this question: "Anyone know of a disease, preferably genetic, with no symptoms so long as you're medicated but will kill you within a few days if you go off your meds?"
A woman from the state of Washington writes in with the following query: "Any ideas for traits that might inspire unjustified hatred in the wife toward a blameless, gentle, hardworking man?" This sets off a firestorm of enthusiastic responses from other women, such as: "Snoring! After a while you just want to smother them with a pillow," and "My ex used to grind his teeth at night. . . . Homicidal ideation? You betcha."
Is NaNoWriMo the downfall of literature? Baty says he has often feared that professional writers would regard his experiment as "an insulting mockery of their craft," but he's never heard a professional writer say this. Instead, he says, some professional writers use NaNoWriMo to escape writer's block. After all, they're not doing away with the concept of editing. They're simply putting the editing off for as long as it takes to write rough drafts.
Of the two people who've managed to publish NaNo novels, both substantially edited their drafts after the November frenzy was over, and one was already a professional writer. His name is Jon F. Merz, a writer of supernatural thrillers. His 2001 NaNo novel, "The Destructor," pits his hero, a sort of vampire cop, against a female villain who is part vampire and part werewolf.
NaNoWriMo is "sort of the puke-it-out phase," Merz says. "Perfection -- if it's attainable -- comes later."
The other NaNo success story is Lani Diane Rich, 33, who had always dabbled in writing but never thought she stood a chance of being published before NaNoWriMo 2002. Her creation from that year, a chick-lit book called "Time Off for Good Behavior," took her 25 days, plus six weeks of editing.
"My problem was, I was always going back and editing myself before it was finished, looking for it to be perfect from the beginning," Rich says. "The great thing about WriMo is they're like, 'Write it -- write it badly -- just write it!' "
Baty says only about 17 percent of those who register for his experiment write 50,000 words. They send their finished works in via the Web site, and a computer program verifies their word count and declares them winners. It's all done on the honor system, and Baty says that to pad novels toward their 50,000-word goal, some WriMos cut contractions, replacing "don't" with "do not," and he himself has made characters hard of hearing so that dialogue would need to be repeated. Since there's no prize at the end, aside from getting one's name on the Web site, he figures it doesn't much matter if they cheat. The main point is they're writing.
Back at Books-A-Million, Sheridan-Peters taps at her laptop, then stops.
"Okay, I need the name for a kitschy erotica boutique," she says, sucking on an iced chai latte through a straw.
"Kitty Cat Dreams," suggests one woman.
Sheridan-Peters looks dissatisfied. "I'll figure something out," she says.
Already, in an attempt to jumpstart her plot, Sheridan-Peters has burned her character's Vespa. She's considered burning the character's boat, too, but hasn't done it yet. "I think it may turn out to be a murder mystery," she says. "There may be a body."
Art is so haphazard. Who can predict the wiles of a fertile imagination? Sheridan-Peters recalls how two years ago she wrote a book that came to a natural conclusion at just 42,000 words. She needed 8,000 more to "win," and she went to her husband for help.
"He looked at me and he said, 'So you should kill someone,' " she says. "And I did. I killed the protagonist's husband. And it worked beautifully."
I enjoyed hearing what Misty is reading so I thought I would share as well. Do any of you remember reading The Lonely Doll when you were kids? Mom is doing this for her reading group so I sent her my copy. Oddly enough, right after that the NY Times ran an article about how controversial the book is for this generation of mothers. There is a newly published book out about the author and what a strange life she led. Pretty fascinating reading if you grew up loving Edith and the bears as I did.
Misty may be tucked in out of the rain, but here we're having snow!! Ugh, it's early for this. I would love to be in watching movies, but it's power yoga (90 minutes @ 100 degrees) and then painting in my freezing cold studio.
Hope everyone is looking happily toward the holidays..wish we could have a big Fisher family reunion some day.......
Misty may be tucked in out of the rain, but here we're having snow!! Ugh, it's early for this. I would love to be in watching movies, but it's power yoga (90 minutes @ 100 degrees) and then painting in my freezing cold studio.
Hope everyone is looking happily toward the holidays..wish we could have a big Fisher family reunion some day.......
Friday, November 12, 2004
rainy day
It's a rainy day and I can think about it getting back home and crawling under a pile of blankets on the couch, digging into some pop corn and losing myself in the new book I've picked up. It's titled, Snow, by Oham Pamuk and it's a fascinating account of man's return to his home country, Turkey, after spending 10 years exiled to Germany. A religious revolution greets him and he struggles with what his beliefs are. Although he's drunk through a majority of the book it's a really interesting account of an atheist's experience in discoverying where his faith lies. I'd be interested in hearing someone else's perspective.
I started a book group here to try and meet people. The hardest thing I've found about moving to new city and joining the "real world" is finding people to share your life with. It's always been a given - new schools where people are going through the same experiences and you have a solid ground to base your friendship off of - you can make the change and adjustment together. It's not like that anymore and I miss the company of a good friend. I'm sure having a serious boyfriend eliminates some opportunities for new people, but i'm working at it. :)
Grandpa wanted to see more blogs on this site, so I hope this suffices. I had a great dinner with them last night! I hope to see you all soon.
I started a book group here to try and meet people. The hardest thing I've found about moving to new city and joining the "real world" is finding people to share your life with. It's always been a given - new schools where people are going through the same experiences and you have a solid ground to base your friendship off of - you can make the change and adjustment together. It's not like that anymore and I miss the company of a good friend. I'm sure having a serious boyfriend eliminates some opportunities for new people, but i'm working at it. :)
Grandpa wanted to see more blogs on this site, so I hope this suffices. I had a great dinner with them last night! I hope to see you all soon.
Saturday, November 06, 2004
We're Off Again
Hi all -- Tomorrow MA and I are off, again, to the great DC metropolitan area for two weeks. I'll be doing another two week work stint. MA plans to get the Christmas shopping done. Hopefully we'll see Bernie and Kathy and Tom and Larissa while there. Misty and Andi, any chance of having a lunch or dinner with you both together? Love to all.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Ohio Is The New Florida.
And I don't want to talk about it.
I'm leaving the Electoral College score up until the counting is over.
That is all.
I'm leaving the Electoral College score up until the counting is over.
That is all.
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Hello everyone!
I hope everything is going well, especially in the election. I have been listening to NPR almost the whole day and all I hear is how the lines are so big in swing states, how an occasional fight has broken out because Republicans have been asking for ID's which is elligal, and about last minute descisions. Anyways, like Nora said, VOTE VOTE VOTE.
On a different note, the stuyvesant test is a test that 26000 people take total and only 10% (2,600) get into a mix of 6 schools (stuyvesant only accepts around 750 students) Hopefully I will get in, because it is one of the best, or the best school in the nation.
Love sophie.
On a different note, the stuyvesant test is a test that 26000 people take total and only 10% (2,600) get into a mix of 6 schools (stuyvesant only accepts around 750 students) Hopefully I will get in, because it is one of the best, or the best school in the nation.
Love sophie.
Monday, November 01, 2004
greetings
Oh my gosh, I just spent an hour writing on this thing and I lost the entire posting.......ugh, it went something like this...... There is too much to reply to comment on each posting so forgive me for doing a general catch up....
Ann...keep at it, and thanks for your beautiful words. They are a gift.
Dad.......wow, cool pics. of the eclipse. I enjoyed the photo album as well. I also received the word doc you sent. Really fascinating. I have some writings from Roses I will share when I can find them.
Misty.......I love you, remember to vote
Mom...Made the soup, really good..xoxox
John, Jan and Wendi......so good to be able to feel in touch with you even in such a small way.
Sophie, Nora.......miss you, miss you, miss you, stop growing up without me
Ben.....miss you too, come see us
Andi....where are you on this thing? I love you. Vote, vote, vote, Pa. is a swing state.
Mary.......you're one of the missing too, gosh I'd love to see you, love to Meigs and Kate
About me.....OK I've just done this once tonight, so here's the condensed version. I think I can only do this like I grocery shop, fill my cart, get it done, and then forget about it for awhile. My lack of frequency on this is not indicative of my feelings. My hands hold a paint brush all day and I've decided they are meant to grasp and to shove color around, not to punch at little frustrating buttons on a keyboard. Perhaps Dad will help me download some photos at Christmas so there are some visuals of life in NH. It's a good life. I drive by our little airport every day on my way to the studio. I've been fantasizing about getting my pilot's license. How old was Roses? Do you have to see well? I have that middle age thing going on. The studio is a beautiful space to spend time in. I am almost finished cleaning out 100 years of grime. It feels wonderful. OK, I really was a little (only a little) more eloquent in the posting that I somehow lost....This will have to do. Love to this beautiful family.....
Ann...keep at it, and thanks for your beautiful words. They are a gift.
Dad.......wow, cool pics. of the eclipse. I enjoyed the photo album as well. I also received the word doc you sent. Really fascinating. I have some writings from Roses I will share when I can find them.
Misty.......I love you, remember to vote
Mom...Made the soup, really good..xoxox
John, Jan and Wendi......so good to be able to feel in touch with you even in such a small way.
Sophie, Nora.......miss you, miss you, miss you, stop growing up without me
Ben.....miss you too, come see us
Andi....where are you on this thing? I love you. Vote, vote, vote, Pa. is a swing state.
Mary.......you're one of the missing too, gosh I'd love to see you, love to Meigs and Kate
About me.....OK I've just done this once tonight, so here's the condensed version. I think I can only do this like I grocery shop, fill my cart, get it done, and then forget about it for awhile. My lack of frequency on this is not indicative of my feelings. My hands hold a paint brush all day and I've decided they are meant to grasp and to shove color around, not to punch at little frustrating buttons on a keyboard. Perhaps Dad will help me download some photos at Christmas so there are some visuals of life in NH. It's a good life. I drive by our little airport every day on my way to the studio. I've been fantasizing about getting my pilot's license. How old was Roses? Do you have to see well? I have that middle age thing going on. The studio is a beautiful space to spend time in. I am almost finished cleaning out 100 years of grime. It feels wonderful. OK, I really was a little (only a little) more eloquent in the posting that I somehow lost....This will have to do. Love to this beautiful family.....
Day Ten
Two weeks my dear friend Clare died of cigarettes and alcohol. Primarily cigarettes. She was 66. She suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen. Her daughter, a lifelong friend of mine and Ben's godmother, asked me to help out with the inevitable sorting and organizing of Clare's house. As I took the train to Virginia I realized that I absolutely could not smoke while I was there. That to do so would be inconsiderate and thoughtless and just... vile. And so I didn't. I slapped on a patch and I stayed busy. We worked about 14 hours a day sorting through a lifetime of papers and... just stuff. I stayed for five days and then I came back home.
It's been harder here in my routine life. I sit in front of this computer and I want to smoke. I work on my NaNoWriMo stuff and I want to smoke. I count off the firsts. First time I stopped into the corner bodega for coffee and didn't buy a pack of cigarettes. First time I didn't smoke after sex. First time I didn't smoke after a meal with wine. First time I didn't smoke between leaving the office and getting on the subway.
I've reached the bored with not smoking stage now. Feeling proud and strong has worn off and I just feel tired of struggling with it. I'm waiting for that to pass. I'm sure it will.
Every time I find myself pacing around (my body off looking for cigarettes before my mind catches up with it), or rubbing my face and longing to light up, I think about what my friend is going through. I think about how Clare was only 66. How humiliated she must have felt to have gotten lung cancer and how stupid she must have felt. And I think about my kids and my partner and my friends. And I just... don't. I don't go to the corner store. I wait it out.
It's been harder here in my routine life. I sit in front of this computer and I want to smoke. I work on my NaNoWriMo stuff and I want to smoke. I count off the firsts. First time I stopped into the corner bodega for coffee and didn't buy a pack of cigarettes. First time I didn't smoke after sex. First time I didn't smoke after a meal with wine. First time I didn't smoke between leaving the office and getting on the subway.
I've reached the bored with not smoking stage now. Feeling proud and strong has worn off and I just feel tired of struggling with it. I'm waiting for that to pass. I'm sure it will.
Every time I find myself pacing around (my body off looking for cigarettes before my mind catches up with it), or rubbing my face and longing to light up, I think about what my friend is going through. I think about how Clare was only 66. How humiliated she must have felt to have gotten lung cancer and how stupid she must have felt. And I think about my kids and my partner and my friends. And I just... don't. I don't go to the corner store. I wait it out.
checking in
Hi everyone--
checking in to see how you are...how Sophie did on her test and if Anne's still in VA? If so, I'd love to catch up for lunch/dinner/drinks. I'm in Old Town, but am able and willing to drive anywhere to meet up.
We had a fun time last night with the trick-or-treaters and I dressed up like a christmas tree saturday night. Pretty silly but fun nonetheless.
I'm not going to brag to you New Yorkers (some of which probably don't care) about our Red Sox, I'll just say it was really thrilling and a fun, sleepless few weeks!
I'd love to hear your views and visions of what tomorrow may bring.
Love to all. Hope to see you soon.
MLT
checking in to see how you are...how Sophie did on her test and if Anne's still in VA? If so, I'd love to catch up for lunch/dinner/drinks. I'm in Old Town, but am able and willing to drive anywhere to meet up.
We had a fun time last night with the trick-or-treaters and I dressed up like a christmas tree saturday night. Pretty silly but fun nonetheless.
I'm not going to brag to you New Yorkers (some of which probably don't care) about our Red Sox, I'll just say it was really thrilling and a fun, sleepless few weeks!
I'd love to hear your views and visions of what tomorrow may bring.
Love to all. Hope to see you soon.
MLT