MarsCon 2014 Report

This is going to be long. I mean, long. With links and pictures and all kinds of stuff. You are warned.

I don't even know where to begin. I always enjoy cons, but I don't think I've ever had such a great time at one before.

And I'm an introvert, but I think last night I was feeling just a tingle of the phenomenon that KT (an extrovert's extrovert) has told me about so often, where a big event like this ends and instead of being tired and ready to recover, she's aching for more, more, more.

I think it has to do with the kind of introvert that I am. I do not make friends easily. I'm not shy, per se. I don't have a problem talking to people, usually. But I am really bad at starting conversations. It's much easier for me to be in a social situation if there's someone else present that I know who can help me break the ice. Get the ball rolling, so to speak.

And this year, aside from about an hour early on Friday evening before people really started to arrive, I don't think I went anywhere that I didn't encounter someone I knew. Seriously. Half the time I got on the damn elevator, there was someone in there I knew, let alone any of the panels or performances or activities.

And not just the usual suspects, either. Of course there was what I think of as my "usual" crew of friends that grew out of school friendships -- KT and Kevin, DJ and Ora, Greg, and T. Elizabeth, Jenn and Brian all came to MarsCon for the first time this year, and I'm pretty sure they're hooked -- Brian, at least, is already planning a costume for next year. And I had family there as well -- John and Sam, and my kids, and Matt (who I suppose is no longer technically family, but I still think of him that way by way of his being, y'know, the father of my children). And there was also the usual collection of the friends I used to see more often but now run into mainly at cons and the like -- Elliot and Marcy and John D. and John H.

And this year, thanks in large part to KT's obsession with music and filk, I had "music friends" like Jonah and Mikey and Chuck and Bert. And thanks partly to my participation as a guest last year, I had "author friends" like Amy and Kat and Michael. Also, I made new friends of both sorts, like Danny and Nobilis.

There were also random other folks -- people who I've worked with, for instance, and with whom I am Facebook friends, some of whom I didn't even know were geeks, like John T. and Caren and Erika.

There was even an occasion where a bunch of us were sitting around a table and I was the only one who knew everyone.

So pretty much the only times I felt like I was on my own were times that I was actually alone. Which weren't many, because I was insanely busy!

It. Was. Wonderful.

So. Ready for the blow-by-blow? (Click on pictures to embiggen.)

Friday

I took a half-day from work. Came home, ate a good lunch, finished packing, fed the cat, and drove the whopping four miles to the hotel. I got checked in, picked up my badge, and spent most of the rest of the afternoon kind of lounging in my room, until I started to see Facebook posts indicating that people were beginning to arrive. So I changed into my Femme Fatale Red Riding Hood outfit and headed down to the lobby.

This was my one slow period; I did a tour of the public areas and said hi to a few people, then sat in the "pit" (a slightly sunken lounge area in the hotel lobby) for maybe forty-five minutes or so until I spotted some friends arriving.

Around 6 or so, I got a text from Matt that he and the kids had arrived, so I wandered up to the kids' meet-and-greet party. The kids' activities this year were mostly Harry Potter/Hogwarts themed -- the meet-and-greet started with a decorate-your-own wand activity. Then the kids got to choose their Patronuses and draw them on wooden pendants. They had a game that involved using their new wands to keep balloons in the air, and then they had ice cream sundaes.

I left that to go catch the already-in-progress Friday night show (a medley of entertainers), where I joined a whole bunch of friends and we had enormous fun until I had to slip out a bit early to make my way to my first two events.

The first was a re-imagining of the old game show Match Guest. The MC would read out a sentence or two with a blank in it, and everyone in the room would write down our answers to fill in the blanks. Audience members whose answers more-or-less matched what panelists answered got points; at the end, the member with the most points won, essentially, a MarsCon gift certificate. (There were actually two winners who split the prize, because even after three tie-breaker rounds, they were still tied.) This was the "adult" version, in which we did not even think about using any answers that were not at least R-rated. It was hilarious and fun, and I very much hope I can do it again next year!

Immediately following that, there was "Erotic Fairy Tale Rewrites". Each panelist selected a fairy tale to rewrite, and the audience supplied us with: an extra character, a sexy situation, a location, and an object that had to be included. While we wrote, the audience played MadLibs, and then we each read our resulting stories. I was very pleased with how mine turned out, and I'll post it over on the writing blog on Wednesday, so if you're interested, be on the lookout.

That wrapped up earlier than expected, so I gleefully skipped down the hall to jump into Filk and Cookies. I arrived just in time to catch Sam singing her parody of "My Favorite Things" (sideways video posted by my brother), and a bit later, she also sang her parody of "The Impossible Dream" (video posted by me).

Filk and Cookies was supposed to end at 1am, but Mikey and Jonah kept goading each other (and the other guests who brought instruments along) and then there was the whole Corn Palace incident (you had to be there) and they didn't kick us out of the room until well after 2. Still giggling, I stumbled back to my room and went to bed.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention dinner in there anywhere. Which would be because I didn't have any. I had some ice cream at the kids' meet-and-greet, and KT brought me a clementine to the fairy tale rewrite panel, and I had a cookie and some soda at Filk and Cookies, though, so I guess that counts. Right?

Saturday

You'd think that after all that, I'd sleep in, but no; I woke up at about 7:15. I did lounge around in bed for a bit, and then I took a shower and made myself some coffee and got dressed. I left the room around 8:45 or so and headed downstairs to see the kids get sorted into their Hogwarts houses for the day's kids' activities.

I ran into some friends in the hallway, so I missed seeing Penny draw Slytherin, but Matt told me she handled her disappointment with aplomb. I did arrive just as Jess was also sorted into Slytherin, though (which Matt "helped" happen, because after all the Sorting Hat does take your preferences into consideration), and Penny seemed pretty pleased that she'd at least have her friend with her. And then I sidled up to her and suggested that maybe she could pretend she was actually a Gryffindor who was in Slytherin as a spy, and that notion also cheered her considerably. Alex got into Gryffindor, which I think he was pleased about mostly because Penny told him that was good.

A gajillion kudos to the volunteer team who put the "Hogwarts" kids' activity room together, because it was amazing. Not for the first time, I wished I was a kid so I could participate! (I did get sorted, along with several other adults, when all the kids were done and they had a ton of leftover badges.)

They had a "library" in the center, at which each kid was given a small, hardcover blank book. They made their own bookplates for the front, and there were crayons and markers for them to use to decorate it with. Each corner of the room had a "class" stationed there, and they rotated the kids around the stations in their houses, to keep any one station from being swamped, which was a great idea. They had Runes, History, Magical Creatures, and Potions.

Later in the day, they had a Triwizard Tournament, which I gather was sort of a scavenger hunt thing. I missed that because I was sitting on a panel at the same time. It sounded like fun, though.

Right around noon, I wandered back up to my room to collect my publicity handouts and stuff, and also to call my mom (my dad had been admitted to the hospital on Thursday night with several small blood clots in one lung and in his leg, and while he had improved enough for me to feel okay about going to the con, I still wanted to check in). I was in the room for maybe fifteen minutes, and then I went back down and joined a few friends to listen to some music -- the Blibbering Humdingers, Danny Birt, and Jonah Knight.

Then I set up in with a bunch of other authors for signings, though mostly no one even came over to my end of the room -- the people who came in for signings were pretty much there just for the guests of honor. But it was still an enjoyable hour that I spent talking with Nobilis Reed, and toward the end, Caren came in and pity-bought a book from me and we talked for a while, too, so it was still fun.

After that, I sat on a panel to talk about the Hunger Games series -- both the movies and the books -- and that turned out to be tons of fun, too, with a very smart and thoughtful panel and a lively-but-polite audience.

Then I went upstairs to the Con Suite, because aside from that cup of coffee I'd had in my room that morning and a cupcake during Jonah's concert, I hadn't eaten anything all day, and it was now 4 in the afternoon. Unfortunately, because it was 4 in the afternoon, the Con Suite didn't have out any "real" food, so I had some chips and some Chex mix and a cookie. And I sat down with Amy Moler and KT and eventually a whole bunch of other folks as well, including Jenn and Brian and Kevin and Nobilis and I'm absolutely certain that I'm forgetting someone (Greg, maybe?) but the point is: a bunch of us. And we talked about writing and other things for an hour, until it was time for Amy to go collect her family and get some dinner, and the rest of us headed off to other assorted entertainments. Primarily, the big Saturday night entertainment, starting with Mikey Mason's concert, and then segueing into the costume contest.

Alas, technical difficulties in setting up the stage kept us standing in the hall for almost 40 minutes after the concert was supposed to start, and made the concert run well over its planned time. I had to leave as soon as Mikey finished playing in order to get to my evening panels, where I sat at the head of a table with several other romance and erotica professionals to talk about writing and publishing, and the appeal of fairy tale erotica, and sex in roleplaying, and by the time we got to the panel running from 11-midnight, we were so tired that it turned into us just taking questions from the audience and talking about whatever we all felt like talking about. (I'll probably go into a little more detail about these panels over on the writing blog post later this week. And Nobilis recorded some of it for his podcasts, so eventually he will post that, and I will probably put a link over on the writing blog as well, if you're interested.)

I was so tired when that ended that I went back to my room and went straight to bed, without looking around for other activities or parties.

Yes, I missed dinner again. After also missing breakfast and lunch. But I'd had a cupcake, some snacks around four, and I had a drink -- the hotel bar named a delicious fruity concoction after Mikey Mason, and he spent the whole weekend reminding everyone to "put Mikey Mason in your mouth" and that "I'm delicious!" -- during Mikey's concert.

Sunday

Once again with the not sleeping in. I woke up even earlier, not long after six, though I stayed in bed for a good while again.

Sunday is usually a lot slower, programming-wise, than the other days, so I took my time getting dressed and packing up, and I reminded myself to go to the Con Suite for breakfast (whoo, an actual meal for the first time in nearly 48 hours!) where I ran into KT, so I sat down and chatted with her while I ate my eggs and ham. (MarsCon has the best Con Suite ever; I was just too busy to visit it at mealtimes.)

Eventually, I took all my stuff down to the car and plopped down in the lobby to wait for the panel I was interested in actually being an audience member of, but Nobilis came over and talked to me for a while, and just as he was leaving, Matt and the kids came in, and the kids piled on me, so I sat and played with them for a while instead. Eventually, I walked them back down to where Matt was volunteering in the family-oriented games room, and schlepped back across the hotel (it's a huge, sprawling building) to be on the panel of writers for the PG version of Fairy Tale Rewrites. (That one wasn't quite as good -- possibly because I was sleep-deprived -- but I'll include at the end of this post because I thought it was still fairly clever. Though if there had been judging of any sort, I'm pretty certain that Danny Birt would've taken the prize for his extremely dark and grim version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears -- or more precisely, Goldilocks Gets Her Revenge.)

Then I wandered on over to the main programming hall for the closing concert, featuring the Blibbering Humdingers, Jonah Knight, Mikey Mason, and Danny Birt (yeah, the same Danny who'd just kicked my ass at flashfic; he's a talented guy). Everyone was punchy and tired (except Jonah, who had more energy at this show than he'd exhibited all the rest of the con) but that just added to the fun; they were teasing each other and playing around and being silly and it was brilliant.

I took a video of Mikey's trademark 80s Cartoon Theme Songs that, I think, really captures the essence of the whole concert. (That little "ho" contest? Was sort of instigated by me, because I'd been talking to Mikey about it earlier in the day. And that's Sam -- my sister-in-law -- who won it.)

When the con was over, Elizabeth, Jenn, Brian, and Jenn's cousin Chris (who came in just for the one day) and I all went out for a late lunch/early dinner, and that felt pretty con-like, too, even though we weren't in the hotel anymore.

(And after that, I went down to the hospital to visit my dad, who was doing oodles better, and bored enough to be happy to listen to me babble about the con for an hour.)

I'm already looking forward to next year, and I really feel rejuvenated and re-inspired as a writer.

It was the Best Con Ever.

MarsCon 2014 fairy tale rewrite

Original story (chosen by me): Aladdin
Additional elements (chosen by the audience):
A character: Ninja
A setting: Titanic on a good day
A problem: No light
An object: Picture of Mary Todd Lincoln (a callback joke to the erotic rewrites on Friday night)

The story (written in about 20 minutes -- typos are fixed here, but nothing else):

The ninja lurked in a shadowy corner of the Titanic's empty ballroom, and concentrated on his mission -- the theft of a valuable portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln. The gentleman who owned the portrait kept it with him all the time, except during his nightly promenade of the deck. During that time, the ninja would crawl from the ballroom's vents into the gentleman's stateroom, take the portrait, and stash it in the hiding place he had prepared in the second dining room.

The hour was at hand. The ninja crept from his corner and toward the vent... When suddenly, the lights extinguished, all at once.

The ninja was well-acquainted with darkness, being a ninja, but this sudden loss was a bit surprising. Before he could react, though, a brilliant light appeared in the center of the room, brighter than any electric, billowing smoke began the fill the room, and a booming voice declared, "I claim this room for the palace of my master, Aladdin!"

"Wait!" the ninja cried. "At least let me leave first!"

From the smoke, a face emerged, cruel and cold and as tall as the ninja's entire body. "Why should I grant YOUR wish?" the djinn demanded. "You are not my master." The djinn's eyes narrowed. "In fact, my master will require servants for his palace. You will do nicely."

"But I am not a servant," the ninja protested. "I am a thief, a spy, and a sometime assassin!"

"Who am I to question my master's needs?" the djinn said. "My master commanded me to build him a palace, and to that end I have claimed this ballroom and everything in it, and that includes you."

"But why can you not simply create the palace from the ether?" the ninja asked.

The djinn snorted. "Have YOU ever created something from the ether? It's a LOT easier to just steal what's needed."

Well, that was something the ninja could understand, anyway. This Aladdin who commanded the djinn seemed to be someone the ninja could get along with, and to tell the truth, he was tired of running all over the world to steal boring antiquities. "Maybe I could help you with the rest of the palace," he admitted. "What else do we need to steal?"

"A hundred concubines."

The ninja smiled and stepped into the djinn's smoke, and together, they disappeared, along with the Titanic's beautiful ballroom.

End.

Checking In

So, life. Life continues apace.

The kids continue much as reported in the previous update. Penny's birthday is two weeks from today and she's been doing a countdown for over a week. I don't have any really big exciting presents for her, so I hope she's not too disappointed. Both of them have been taking advantage of summer to stay up late -- I don't make Alex go to bed until after 8:30, and Penny's been staying up until 10. I expect there to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when I make them dial it back for school, even if it's only going to be by half an hour.

Most of my energy has been going to the house lately, quite honestly. The front porch has been repaired, and the fix on the dining room floor was supposed to start today, so I scrambled to get the painting done over the weekend... and two hours after we finished, my contractor emailed to tell me another job had been postponed due to weather and so he wouldn't be able to start my floor until next week. The forecast for this week is fairly reasonable, though, so hopefully that won't push out too much further.

I'm pretty happy with my paint, though! John and Sam came over to help me, for which I am eternally grateful. (It was supposed to be John and Dad, but earlier in the week Dad was helping John repair a broken gutter and his cheap-ass ladder crumpled under him and he fell. He got away with only a broken finger, but it sounded pretty harrowing -- Dad's brains got scrambled enough by the fall that he still doesn't remember anything between standing on the ladder and being in the emergency room a couple of hours later.) Anyway, here's some crappy cell phone pictures of the new paint:

Just those two walls are blue in the dining room; everything else is creamy white, about half a shade lighter than what was in there before. And a lot of the blue will be covered up when I can put the hutch back in the room and hang my pictures back up, so it won't look quite so overwhelming then. I'm VERY pleased with the yellow accent wall in the kitchen, though. I've got a picture to hang on it that's going to make it just sing.

I'm pondering alternate placement of my furniture and other less-intense home improvement projects (e.g., new fixtures, wall stickers) for when this is all done.

It's been just over a year since Matt moved out, so I called my lawyer last week and he's prepping the documents so we can get the ball rolling on the divorce. Not much to say there, really; it feels like a non-event, a bureaucratic ribbon on a package already purchased.

I'm editing a lot and writing a little; check the sidebar for my latest story release. Human Aspect is a little more wide-audience than most of my other stuff, being a coming-of-age fantasy story. And KT/Lynn and I are buffing up the shorts we've been writing all year so we can get them assembled into a collection and submit it. I'm really excited about that one -- it's all over the map, and was oodles of fun to do.

And I'm still crocheting, though I haven't accomplished much in the last month, partly because I've lost time to rearranging stuff and furniture to clear the dining room and kitchen for the repair/renovation, and partly because my initial idea for Yog-Sothoth turned out to be way harder to do than I anticipated, so I had to scrap it and start over:

And that's about it at the moment. I keep telling myself that I should go back to writing here every day, just so I don't lose track of the minutiae, the passing thoughts and the anecdotes. But it may be a while before I feel settled enough to make myself get back into that habit.

EDIT (March 2020): Seven years later, I am STILL getting fairly frequent requests for the patterns for these guys. So I've uploaded my patterns to Google Docs (the Cthulhu pattern was something I found online and since seems to have been taken down, alas) and you can get it RIGHT HERE.

Con Report

You guys. You guys. MarsCon was fantastic. I don't even know where to begin.

I got to dress in costumes and wear snarky t-shirts, and I got lots of compliments on both. On Friday, I was Doctor Who. On Saturday, I wore a shirt that read, "Huge tracts of land," and that night, I put my corset on over that shirt, to emphasize, y'know... my tracts of land. Sunday, I wore my favorite writing shirt, which reads, "You're just jealous that the voices talk to me." And I got to see a lot (a lot) of other really amazing costumes and funny t-shirts and a couple of scarves that were basically works of art.

I got to listen to some great filk and otherwise geek-related music. I may need to start growing my geek-rock library, because despite not having actually heard the song played, I've had Mikey Mason's "Best Game Ever" stuck in my head for three days, and Danny Birt played a song called "Silent Letter Blues" that very nearly made me fall out of my chair entirely from laughing so hard.

I got to sit on three panels about writing and editing and talk with it as if I was a professional or something, and I participated in a writing contest against the amazing Kathryn Lively and did not win but felt pretty good about it anyway. All of which I will write more about on Wednesday, at my writing blog. I handed out a lot of business cards and post cards and bookmarks, and even sold one of my paperbacks that I'd brought with me. And I went to an Allen Wold writing workshop about plot building which spawned a new plot idea and gave me some really excellent tools for helping my plots to gel, which is always a win.

I got to watch my children blooming into nerds and geeks -- especially Penny. She sat in on a Blibbering Humdingers concert and afterwards begged me to buy one of their CDs for her. (I did. She doesn't know that yet, though.) And both of them got their faces painted, and they went with me to a pirate show and sang along and got up to participate.

Alex and Penny learning to be pirates during the
Hysterically Correct Pirate Show.

After that, Alex went with Matt to a birthday party and I got to hang with Penny. We did a craft, making people out of clothespins, and then I took her to an activity called "Playing With Your Food" in which everyone was given a big takeout box full of gummy candy and a plastic knife and encouraged to build monsters out of the candy, and when they had to clear the room we took it back to my hotel room where she continued pretending to be a mad scientist for the better part of an hour, and we had this conversation where I asked her if she wanted some chips and she said, "Not right now, Mom. I'm not done making my robot/clone army."

My girl, the mad scientist.

I got to look at some really amazing art, and I put a bid on one of my brother's ribbon trees and won it in the art auction. (I bid on a few more pieces, but didn't get them.) And I got to rejoice with him that he sold not just the piece I bought, but five of the things he'd brought with him, and we talked about how he should re-do one of the other pieces for next year. (It was a ribbon dragon he'd made like ten years ago, and he's learned a lot since then.)

I flirted a lot, mostly just in fun (but sometimes seriously), and was amused by KT's efforts on my behalf in that direction. I stopped into the gaming room a couple of times to say hi to a guy I've been on a couple of dates with, and significantly boosted his rep with the other gamers by giving him my phone number so we could meet up after the con. (He re-enacted for me later: "Dude. You've been sitting here gaming all weekend and you managed to score digits?") It's possible that I was totally aware of the effect that would have, especially since I was wearing my corset at the time, and deliberately waited until I was in there to write my number on my card for him.

But as always, the best part of the con was the people. I got to visit with old friends and acquaintances, like Elliot and Marcy and John. I got to visit with other friends I don't get to see often enough, like Greg and DJ and Ora. And also my brother and his wife, and some of their friends that I like a lot, like Melissa. I got to hang out with KT for hours and talk about writing and sex and writing about sex in a way that we almost never get to do any more. I got to hear about an engagement. I got to make new friends and chat with several of the writers and editors who were on panels with me (especially the multi-talented and snarky and totally amazing Cynical Woman, aka Helen Madden, who has the most gorgeous business cards ever). I even enjoyed striking up random conversations with strangers in the hallway or on the elevator.

I didn't get to do everything I wanted to do. Hell, I didn't even get to do half of what I'd wanted to do. My back and legs and knee were already killing me by Friday night (and I'd been dumb enough not to bring any painkillers). I went to bed around 2am both nights (and last night was still so keyed up that I couldn't get to sleep until nearly 1) and thanks to my stupid body clock, got up both mornings at 7:30 sharp (6:30, this morning, because my office is not closed for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day). This morning, I'm exhausted and sore and not entirely mentally present, and I fully expect the Con Crud to hit me in the next couple of days... and I already can't wait for next year.

New Year's Resolutions

Here's a funny little take-away I got from, of all places, my day job: You shouldn't have too many serious goals at one time. Our annual performance review process allows for up to – but not exceeding – five major goals for each year, and my last several supervisors (I get a new one each year, thanks to the Major Corporate Machine's constant reorganizing) have stressed that you really should try to have no more than three.

So I've spent the last few weeks thinking about my New Year's resolutions, and pondering what are the priorities I have in my life right now, and what are the few things that I really care about changing. What are the things that I'm willing to put some energy into improving? At the moment, my priority list looks like this:

Effort #1: Stop watching so much freaking TV. I've lost whole days to the tube, lately. I'm trying to get caught up on a bunch of shows, and they're great and fun, but in the meantime, I'm not doing anything productive. This, by the way, also includes watching DVDs and shows on YouTube. Basically, any time spent passively watching a screen. It does not, however, include watching movies with friends or on a date, because those are social activities.

Effort #2: Be more productive. There are a gajillion projects I want or need to do. Writing and editing. Promotion of my writing, which is a whole job unto itself. I have an embarrasingly high stack of books I've been meaning to read. Scrapbooking, a little, at least to finish out the year in which I last left off. Re-organize and redecorate the house (or at least parts of it). Some of these are open-ended tasks, some of them are huge, and some just require me to get off my ass and do them.

Effort #3: Be more social. This falls into three sub-categories:
Effort #3a: Family: I'd like to spend more time with my brother and sister-in-law, who are actually fantastic people and who only live half an hour away, which makes it completely stupid that I only see them a few times a year. I'd also like to make a point of talking to my parents (who likewise live only half an hour away) at least once a week.
Effort #3b: Friends: I'd like to spend more time with various friends. It's come to my attention lately that, due to my proper Southern upbringing, I am intensely uncomfortable with inviting myself along on events or over to friends' houses, while the truth is that most of my friends are not only open but enthusiastic about this sort of thing.
Effort #3c: Dating: I've been separated for the best part of half a year now, and I think I'm ready to look around out there again. It's been entirely too long since I've dated, so it's hard to make resolutions about this, but I want to remember not to simply settle, and not to neglect my friends in the event that someone wonderful does come along.

Effort #4: Be a better parent. I waste far too much of my time with my kids. Penny was unequivocally enthusiastic about the time I had lunch with her at school; I'd like to do that more often. I'd also like to get them excited about things and do things with them that get us all out of the house once in a while.

Note #1: I'm okay with having four goals instead of just three, because accomplishing the less-TV goal will actually make it easier to work on the others: by watching less TV, I will have more time to spend on the projects and people on which my other three goals are focused.

Note #2: I feel like working on my weight should be somewhere on that list – exercising more and/or eating better – it falls pretty low on my list of priorities. It shouldn't, but it just does. It's not like I'm going to completely forget about my health or anything, but I'm going to give myself permission not to stress over it this year. Maybe, as I get wrapped up in projects and people and spend more time doing things instead of staring at a screen and chewing my cud, some health improvement will happen organically. And if not, then that's okay, too, and I can worry about diet and exercise again next year, when all this stuff has gotten wrapped into my personal patterns and habits.

It's a lot of stuff to wrap my head around, and it's all but impossible to make rules covering everything here and expect to actually follow them all. I've been turning the whole mess around in my head for a while, as I said, and here's the ideas I've come up with to (hopefully) make it work, along with their explanations and notes:

The List: Because my schedules and deadlines are so ephemeral, there's no way to just assign myself a day-by-day task list. So each day, I will evaluate my situation, and assign myself a reasonable productivity list. That list will include not only big project stuff (e.g., edit 2 stories, spend 2 hours writing, scrapbook 2 months' worth of pictures, etc.) but also the little, routine stuff (e.g., take out the trash, write a blog entry, make lunches, etc.) that has to fit into my schedule. The list will take into account whether I happen to have the kids that day, planned activities, and my general well-being. (As I write this, for example, I've got a sinus infection or a cold or something similar, and so I give myself permission to be a little slack on the productivity front – not to skip it entirely, because I'm not that sick, but to choose tasks that suit my current mental and physical state. I can do some editing right now, for example, but I feel way too mentally blah to want to do anything creative, like writing.) They may include large tasks (e.g., clean out and re-organize the pantry) or small ones (e.g., make an appointment with the eye doctor). There will be no time limit, either minimum or maximum. The goal here is a list of things that I can look at an think, “Yes, that seems like a day that was not wasted.”

TV: Until the day's productivity goals are done, I get no more than 1 hour of TV. (Yes, I'm letting myself have some TV before I do my work. I sometimes want to watch YouTube videos in the morning while the kids are eating breakfast, or unwind with a show while I have dinner by myself.) Once the day's goals are all met, I can watch all the TV I want. (Nyah.)

Parenting: One day in the next week, one of my goals will be to make up a schedule for things to do with the kids. That schedule will include: 1 day each month that I will have lunch with each kid (2 lunches/month, not including summer break), and 1 day each month that we will do an out-of-house activity, along with a list of activity options. Once that schedule is made up, I'll load those dates and activities into my calendars so that I remember to do them. That's not saying I won't need to change some of them, but it takes less inertia to move a date than to create it.

Social Stuff: This one is trickier, because it necessarily involves other people. And unlike my children, I don't have significant control over my friends' and families' schedules. I do want to take at least two solo long-weekend type vacations this year, at least one of which will be to an author's convention (GayRomLit or somesuch, depending on how the schedules fall out) where I can meet some of the Torquere staff in person; the other will either be to visit a friend or see a new place; I'm not sure yet. I want to make a date with KT and Kevin to come down to their house every so often (once a month? Every six weeks? Eight?) during the week, on a night I'm child-free, just to hang out. And ditto for hanging out with Jenn and Brian. And my friends who live in town, too, but those are easier to arrange and don't so much need to be scheduled to remind me to do it. But I need to remind myself that it's okay to say, “Hey, what's going on; can I come over and hang out?” and that if the answer is that they're too busy, it doesn't mean I'm being rude and needy; it means THEY'RE TOO BUSY, and I should try again another time.

So there are my New Year's resolutions. I don't know if I'll stick to it. Sometimes, YouTube is just too compelling, sometimes I go through mental downs where I don't want to be social, and sometimes, my kids are infuriating and don't deserve to be taken out anywhere. Such is life.

But here's the thing about a resolution. It's not an unbreakable vow. It's resolve. You plunge into the fight and sometimes you take a hit, but resolve is squaring your shoulders and going right back in. If these annual goals and targets were easy, they wouldn't be so significant.

I grew up in a house surrounded by art inspired by Don Quixote and Man of La Mancha, after all. It would be a little crazy if I didn't want to reach for unreachable stars once in a while.

Thanks Given

What a very weird Thanksgiving holiday that was. Some parts were fantastic, some incredibly frustrating, and some just plain weird.

There wasn't anything much happening at work on Wednesday, so I took my day off and headed down to Jenn and Brian's around mid-morning. The plan... the plan was that Jenn was going to ride with me, and we'd follow Brian to Blacksburg.

All was ready. The dogs were loaded in the car with Brian to drop off at the kennel, Jenn and I were in my car, and I turned it on...

...and the dashboard lit up with all kinds of lights and warnings. Most notably, the "Check Engine" light, which can occasionally be merely ignored, and the "Engine Hazard" light, which... probably should not be.

Well.

After some discussion, we decided we'd just all ride up together, and Jenn and Brian would head back home a day early so I could keep my schedule. Brian, who is a Car Guy, promised to check out a diagnostic computer from their local auto repair shop when we got back on Friday so that he could read the error codes and decide whether the car was safe to drive home or if we'd need to call AAA to tow it to the local shop and try to find a rental for the weekend.

Despite being a little fretful about the car, we had a good couple of days. Jenn's Aunt Jeanne and Uncle David are great people, and I got to meet her oft-mentioned cousin, Chris. We went for a hike on Thanksgiving morning (apparently a family tradition) that was quite nice, and then came back and had a really great dinner. We broke for a nap and then came back for dessert, and then wrapped up the day with a game of Cards Against Humanity, and inaugurated a homemade question card: "Thanksgiving is incomplete without _____." It would've been perfect if we could've played "Smallpox blankets" as the answer card. I forget, now, what actually won that one, but the game itself was quite fun.

As re-planned, we came home Friday. I have to admit, the drive was much more pleasant with friends in the car to talk to.

When we pulled into Jenn and Brian's again, I figured I should check my car again before Brian headed out to get the diagnostic computer. I started the car up and... the hazard light was gone. Just the check engine light remained. Which rather underscored my suspicion that the car had been pitching a hissy about an electrical hiccup having to do with plugging my phone into the DC power adapter before turning the car on, and made me decide I could risk driving home before taking it to the shop, at least.

So I turned the car back off and went inside to use the bathroom and let them know about my decision. I promised I'd call if I had any more problems, and then went back out... and this time, when I turned the car on, not even the check engine light came on. Nothing. The dashboard stayed dark, innocent as puppy eyes.

Apparently, the gods had just REALLY wanted us to all drive up to Blacksburg together.

So I came home and picked up the kids and life continued apace.

Saturday morning I started putting up our Christmas decorations, exciting the kids to a fever pitch. And that afternoon, we went down to my parents' for my family Thanksgiving, and that was great. Not really anything to report -- it was a pretty standard family gathering. Penny and Alex were pretty fantastic, playing together most of the time so I actually got to talk to my family a bit. Alex hit Maximum Fun Quotient a few times, but being Alex, cheered up again pretty quickly afterward.

Sunday morning at breakfast, a... noise came from the heater vent. A weird, rattle-y, shuddery noise. You know in Doctor Horrible, when the Freeze Ray fails and Dr. Horrible looks around at it and says, "That's... not a good noise"? It was kind of like that. The kids looked at the vent as if it might explode, and then the heater fan stopped working. I poked at things a bit, but eventually had to turn the whole thing off because a sort of burned-plastic smell was leaking from the vents in other parts of the house.

The rest of the day was better -- we got the Christmas tree up, and Penny befriended a couple of cats wandering the neighborhood who had decided to camp on our deck. (They were obviously not actually homeless, as they were well-fed and in excellent health, but she tried to convince me to keep them anyway, as they were very friendly and happy for her to pet them.) We generally had a nice, low-key kind of day, despite the slowly dropping temperature.

I didn't post yesterday because I was at home in the morning, waiting for the repair guy to come and fix the heater. Fortunately, the problem with the fan took him all of about ten minutes to find and fix. Unfortunately, while he was at it, he noticed a pretty nasty leak in the heater's innards that suggested some ugly things, culminating in the news that I need to have an entirely new unit installed. Shouldn't have surprised me too much, really, because this unit is 14 years old, and these things typically have a life span of 10-15 years, so... yeah. He called around and got some estimates, and the price he eventually quoted me is a lot less than I was afraid it would be... but still a pretty big chunk of cash.

So that's scheduled for Thursday. In the meantime, I've only got the emergency heat setting, which works, but draws a lot more power than the usual setting, so I'm trying to keep it set as low as I can tolerate (around 65), and remembering to turn it down to about 60 when I leave for work in the morning, and being grateful that the house's insulation is actually fairly decent, and hoping that the new unit will be more efficient.

Argh. All my stuff is elderly and starting to fail.

Social-ism

My weekend: let me tell you it.

Friday, I left work at noon (god, I love working part-time -- even when it's just one day every two weeks, or a couple of half-days, it's nice to have that flexibility!). I went home and ate lunch and changed clothes, and then I stopped at the storage unit to empty out the last couple of things, and then I went down to my parents' house.

I sat and talked with my folks for a little while, and then Dad and I went up into the attic. The mess he'd recruited me to clean up was way smaller than I'd expected -- really, it took less than half an hour to clean all the spilled insulation up off the floor and put it back in the attic, and half that time was spent climbing up and down the ladder. (Er, I'm using "attic" a couple of different ways, there, aren't I? There's an unfinished room over the garage that gets used for storage; and then over that, there's the space between the ceiling and the roof that's nothing but lumber and insulation. You can probably figure out from context which one I'm referring to at any particular moment, because "room-over-the-garage" is a little too unwieldy.)

I did most of the work, but Dad helped around the edges. Which is fine, because a) like I said, it wasn't that big of a job anyway; and b) I wasn't going to let my nearly 70-year-old father climb a ladder carrying a bucket to dump spilled insulation back into the attic; and c) doing this job was the price Dad had claimed for my storing stuff in their space.

And it turned out that when he'd said "rearrange things to make room", he hadn't meant we were going to actually clean the attic/storage area. He'd just meant that the enormous ex-pingpong table they have up there had been moved away from the window so the workmen could get to the attic, and we had to put it back. Which was also not that big a job; it's just that the table is like ten feet long and it's not so much a table as it is a couple of boards loosely attached to some legs, so it can't just be pushed or it will all come crashing down (along with all the Christmas wrapping and decorations stacked on top of it). So we had to get on either end and pick the whole mess up and scoot it back over to the wall. And then re-align the legs, because they hadn't really wanted to move. Took less than five minutes, but it was not a job a single person could have done, and my mom definitely couldn't have lifted one end of the table with the arthritis in her shoulder.

So I'm glad to have helped, and as a bonus, my Christmas tree and yard reindeer have a dry, relatively spider-free place to live for the ten and a half months of the year they're not decorating my house.

Then I changed back into shorts and a t-shirt and sat talking to my parents until dinnertime, and then they invited me to stick around for pizza, and how was I going to turn that down? So I had pizza with my folks, and headed home not long after that.

***

Saturday: I paid some bills and ran some errands. The only one worth mentioning was when I went into the storage unit office to close it down: the lady behind the counter looked up the unit number, then said, "What's the name?" and I told her Matt's name, because he's the one who set it up. She looked at me and said, "Are you his mother?"

Oh, yes she did.

(To be fair... this is a college town, and school just started back up, and I am, in fact, old enough to have a kid in college who would keep his stuff in a storage unit over the summer. But still!)

We got it worked out, and she said that technically I couldn't close the account because Matt hadn't put my name on it, but the act of cleaning it out and removing the lock was sufficient to do the job anyway, so she'd make a note of it on her evening rounds and it would get closed. Which is all I wanted, really.

***

Saturday afternoon, I had a ticket to go see Jesus Christ Superstar at the community theater that's right by our house. (Really. Less than half a mile. I walked there, even in a skirt.) When I got there, I discovered my friend Caren sitting right next to me! But then we realized she'd read her tickets wrong and was in row G instead of row C. Alas. But the woman who took her place was really nice and friendly anyway, and we chatted a little before the show started. (Lookit me, bein' all social!)

The show was... well, as Caren said when we were talking afterward -- not as bad as we'd feared, not as good as we'd hoped. The guy playing Judas was really good, but their choice for Jesus was... Okay, look. Jesus should be in his 30s, and for this particular show at least, he should be world-weary and tortured. The actor they had playing him was maybe in his 20s. Maybe. And they put sparkly pink lipstick on him. Add to that his short, slightly poofy hairstyle, and he looked more like Justin Bieber than Jesus. He was a pretty decent singer (though he didn't quite bring the pathos to the music) but a mediocre actor, and... honestly, if I'd been directing, I'd have switched the actors for Jesus and Peter.

But all in all, I'm glad I went, and I'll be checking out some other plays as the season runs along. (I do need to remember that the stage is MUCH closer to the seats than the diagram on the website suggests, and to pick something a little further back next time.)

***

Saturday evening, I did something completely and astonishingly out of character for me.

I went to a meetup of board gamers. I voluntarily walked into room full of people that I had never met before. And talked to them. And played games. And joked around, and...

As if it wasn't crazy enough for me to walk into a room of strangers and swallow my fears and be social, I brought my Cards Against Humanity deck. Including the brand-new, still-in-the-cellophane second expansion. And suggested we play a hand or three. With seven strangers. At that point, we'd played a couple of other quick-spin games, but I figured... what better way to break the ice? I mean, either they'd be utterly horrified and I'd know this wasn't the group for me, or they'd love it and I'd feel more comfortable actually being, you know, me. (Or a mix. You know. Everyone's different.)

But it turned out really well! We only played three rounds, because it's a slowish game and there were a million others to try. But no one seemed actively disgusted (well, many people were actively disgusted by individual cards, but in the best kind of "oh, that's so foul it has to be the winner!" way) and everyone had fun with it.

There was a ton of food there -- stew and fruit and cookie and ice cream -- and so I ate (the stew was amazing, once I'd come down from the meeting-new-people nausea) and played... I don't remember, at least five or six different games, over about five hours. We had to vacate the clubhouse at 10, but the sponsoring guy was all about moving the party to his place and continuing. I couldn't quite bring myself to walk into a near-stranger's house at 10 at night, so I went on home at that point, but the whole thing was just amazing.

If you're not an introvert, it's probably not weird for you to just introduce yourself to people. You probably don't dump hours of energy into trying to figure out what to talk about that won't sound self-centered or potentially offensive or horribly inane. You probably don't feel like throwing up as you wonder whether people are only talking to you to be polite while wishing you'd just go away. But that's pretty much my entire social experience. If I haven't known someone for a long time -- I mean, years -- then I am pretty much always wondering if they're just tolerating me. That niggling doubt doesn't disappear until that person actively seeks out my company... and if they don't initiate contact for a while, the doubt comes back.

But my situation now is completely flopped. If I'm going to have a social life, I'm going to have to swallow the social anxiety and the nausea and get out there and meet people.

A bad first experience would have turned me off to the whole idea. So I'm relieved -- intensely relieved -- that this meetup was so good, that these people were so friendly and actively inclusive. That I wasn't an unusual person -- I wasn't the only girl, nor the oldest, nor the youngest, nor even the fattest. I fell into the middle of the group in nearly every possible classification, and that was comforting in and of itself. It not only made for a fun evening, but it will (hopefully) make it easier for me to do something like it again. Or at least, not harder.

*** 

As for Sunday... Sunday I mostly stayed home. Being social and meeting people was good and awesome and fun, but I am still an introvert, and being social is something I need to recover from, even if it's good. So I stayed in. I tried a recipe I'd been meaning to try, I read a ridiculous number of comics, I organized my closet a little, I planned some decor changes for the dining room, I  played doofy computer games, I watched Leverage. I rested and I processed.

And that was good, too.

Rearrange

So the kids are back to school -- I took Alex to daycare this morning, then drove back home and walked Penny to the bus stop this morning and waved at her as it drove away. And tomorrow, I expect, will be much the same. (Next year will be so much easier, because it will not involve a drive up to daycare and back. We can sleep until 7, then get up and get dressed and eat breakfast and even play a while before we all walk down to the bus stop. It'll be a lot easier on my gas bill, too.)

But that's next year. This year... runaroundrunaround. At least it's only half time, right?

And what's in store for the upcoming weekend?

Well, I spent some time last weekend emptying out the storage unit. Matt had collected all his stuff already, so the only things left in there now are the Christmas tree and my reindeer lawn decoration, neither of which will fit comfortably into my closet. I'd thought about keeping them in the storage shed under the deck, but when I went down there to check out the space, I found that not only was it fairly well spider-infested (which I'd expected), but it was also pretty damp. The last thing I need, given everyone's allergies, is to put up a mildewed Christmas tree. My attic is also out, because it's a tiny little access panel that I'm pretty sure neither the tree nor the reindeer will fit through.

So I asked my parents if they'd be willing to store them for me. They have a huge storage area over their garage -- one big open area that was originally intended as a rec-room, and two walk-in "attics". My dad said they'd be willing to store my stuff if I came over and helped him clean up the mess the workmen made when they were sealing a hole that a squirrel had gotten in through (there's insulation everywhere) and then helped him re-organize the space to make room for my things.

Sold. So after work tomorrow, I'll put on a long-sleeved shirt (whee, itchy insulation!) and find some gloves and pick up my stuff from the storage unit and head down there. Dad thinks it'll take a couple of hours; I'm guessing closer to three or four, but that's okay. Small price to pay for a dry, low-spider-count storage space. And then I'll be able to close out the account on the storage unit.

Saturday afternoon, I have a ticket to see Jesus Christ Superstar at the local playhouse. And by "local", I mean "within walking distance of my house". I hope it's good; I'd like to jump onboard for a lot more theater in the future.

No plans for Sunday yet, aside from the usual errand-running. Maybe I'll get some writing done. I have a story I'd like to write, but I can't quite get the plot to gel.

Long Weekend, Good Weekend

Yay for long weekends! Boo for being back at work! But yay for a short work week with nothing much pressing going on!

I guess that's a net win, right?

So, long weekend. The daycare was closed Friday, so I worked the morning and then picked the kids up from Matt around noon. (But between Friday noon and this morning when I logged in, I'd received only two emails, neither of which required any action on my part, so I feel entirely okay with having missed half a day of work. If I hadn't had a delivery to complete, I probably could've taken the whole day off.)

Friday evening, we met my family at the family favorite restaurant (a hibachi place more or less midpoint between my parents' and brother's houses) to celebrate my mom's and brother's birthdays.

Saturday morning, my dad came over with his pickup truck to help me take the kids shopping for back-to-school clothes and also to get a dresser for Penny's room. She's been using a large-ish nightstand as a dresser since she was four. When she was four, her non-hangable clothes all fit easily in the nightstand. For about the last year, though, it's become a bit of a problem to squeeze everything in. I'd found a dresser I liked the look of, but didn't think I could fit it into my car (and also, it's too heavy for me to lift by myself) -- thus, Dad and the truck. The clothes shopping alone would've been a minor headache without another adult along, but doable.

Dad stuck around to help me assemble the dresser -- which is good, because he figured out one doohickey I was using incorrectly, and also because there were a couple of points of construction that needed a minimum of three hands to get everything lined up correctly. It took us a good two hours to assemble; I shudder to think how long I would've been at it without his help.

(Also, I think it was good for Dad. He and Mom have been sort of flailing since Matt and I separated; I get the impression that they feel like they should be helping, but don't want to intrude on my privacy or insult my independence, and this let Dad feel like he could do something to help me and the kids out without stepping on any toes.)

Saturday afternoon, as a sort of treat for being so good at the store and (mostly) patient while Dad and I put the dresser together, I took the kids out for ice cream. (Also, I had a coupon. Save money by buying things!) And then, it being Saturday and therefore eat-out night, we went to La Tolteca for dinner.

We didn't go anywhere on Sunday, aside from the grocery store, but Jenn came down so I could help her assemble a scrapbook (part of her homework for the adoption process; since they're looking to adopt an older child, they're supposed to make an album to give the prospective adoptee to introduce them to the family and the friends they'll encounter most). I had a lot of fun helping her with the project, and it may have rekindled my desire to start up scrapbooking again, myself. We'll see if it sticks, though. I last left off in the middle of 2010, so there's a long way to go to get caught up.

After dinner on Sunday, Kris brought Emma and Sarah over to have a sleepover with Penny. All three girls were incredibly excited and happy to see each other, and immediately launched into some game that seemed to combine Harry Potter and spies and I don't even know what else. Around 9:30, they rolled out their sleeping bags on the living room floor and picked out a movie (Lady and the Tramp, as a good choice for a not-too-long, not-scary bedtime movie), and I went upstairs to read. When the movie ended (it's not even 80 minutes long) I turned the table lamp down to low and told them they could talk quietly, but that if I could hear them from up in my room, I'd put an end to it. But I never heard a thing (Sarah had already been half-asleep when I turned off the TV). Unfortunately, Penny had a persistent low blood sugar that kept me up until nearly 1am with rechecks and dragging her awake to eat something, so I still didn't get much sleep, but the girls themselves were incredibly well-behaved. They even cleaned up Monday morning when I told them to, with only minimal token whining that I simply ignored.

Alex was really fantastic all weekend -- he played by himself with his toys, or watched Batman videos on YouTube with Penny, or played Sesame Street games by himself. He was good when we went to the stores, and helped me sort through his clothes so I could pack up the ones that don't fit any more (he even put a couple of toys in the box that he doesn't want anymore -- though I waited until he wasn't looking and rescued Hippo for my "baby box"). Through it all, he was generally sunny and easy-going, mostly falling apart only when I cruelly insisted on him cleaning up his messes.

Sunday night, since we were out of his pullups, I asked him if he wanted to go with the transition pullups we'd bought a few months back (but which had turned out to be a bit too big) or if he wanted to try just underwear, since he's woken up dry every morning for the last three weeks. He tried to talk me into nothing at all under his PJ bottoms, but I don't think he's quite ready for that, so he went with underwear, and did great! I think we've finally turned that corner! (Leaving me with two boxes of pullups -- one of which hasn't even been opened -- but I can live with that!)

He did, however, NOT NAP. All four days, I put him down for his nap as usual a little while after lunch. All four days, he popped up within forty-five minutes and told me he wasn't tired. All four days, I made him go back to bed for at least another half-hour, but he never did succumb and go to sleep. Better yet, despite my misgivings, he maintained mostly excellent temper into the evening right up to bedtime. Looks like whatever mental growth spurt made him finally ready to turn the corner on night-time bladder control also made him ready to give up his nap. Unfortunately, the daycare continues to have daily naptime for preschoolers, so I can't just let him give it up entirely without screwing up his sense of routine. I may, however, turn it into "quiet time" instead, and if a nap would make my plans awkward, then it looks like I can skip it with impunity.

After Matt picked the kids up Monday afternoon, I had an hour or two to clean up the lingering clutter and mess, and then Elizabeth and Vicki came over and we all went down to Newport News for a dinner of sushi and then a second-run showing of The Avengers. (I've lost track; was that my fourth viewing, or my fifth?) Doesn't matter; I continued to love it. Can't wait to get my Blu-Ray version later this month and check out all the deleted scenes and special features! (Yup, I'm a dork.)

The kids start back to school today (well, Penny starts back to school; Alex just graduates officially to the pre-K class where he spent about half his time this summer). Matt and I are still working out the delicate details for that, but I expect we'll get it straight eventually.

Spotted

Blog posts are about to get spotty. I'm working two different proposals and dealing with Life.

We had a pretty good weekend, though our Father's Day dinner with my parents got canceled because my mom came down with a case of pinkeye.

But Matt seemed to like the presents I got him, and we had a nice, quiet day at home.

And I got my new computer, and got my files all transferred and worked through some idiot issues and am pretty much up and running!

And now I need to be in a meeting.

Sorry, guys...

23

I think I mentioned that, for Mother's Day, Matt signed me up for a genetic testing service. The results came back recently, and I've been poking around the site in complete fascination ever since. I thought I'd share some of it with you guys.

The analysis is broken down into several sections. The first is Health, in which it describes how your genetics affects your probability of developing certain diseases or reacting to certain drugs.

These are just the top 3 items in each category; the actual listing shows my comparative risk for over 100 diseases and conditions.

You can click on any item to get a page of information. Some of it is very technical and would only make sense to someone who's studied genetic profiling, but the key points are all well-summarized with graphics.

I'm more likely than most to develop arthritis. But then, I knew that already.

It also offers a whole section on what your genetics suggests about how you're put together: your most probable eye color, your hair texture, your probable blood type, whether your muscles are better suited to sprints or endurance, even whether you're genetically disposed to eat more or less.

(Oh well, it's genetic. Guess there's no fighting it. Pass the doughnuts!)

The next section talks about your ancestry. It even provides a nice map that shows you where your ancestors most likely lived, approximately 500 years ago.

This is my maternal ancestry. Lacking a Y chromosome, they can't definitively trace the paternal line.

It even breaks down the location tags by specific chromosome for you.

What we already knew: I am very, very white.

There are pages and pages of stuff you can read about where your ancestors came from and the likelihood of various ethnicities in your background.

For instance, I'd always heard that my grandfather's grandmother was Cherokee -- if you'd seen him, you'd know there was definitely some variety of Native American blood in there... but genetically speaking, I'm probably at least 5 generations away from any Native Americans. So maybe it was Grandad's great-grandmother, instead? Or, given that I'm fair and blue-eyed compared to my parents' and brother's dark hair and brown eyes, it's possible that I just received a combination of chromosomes that simply don't contain those Native American markers. (I'd love to see my brother's results, just for comparison.)

And the final cool thing that the site does is compare you to other people in their database and offer up the possibility that you might be related to some of them, as far out as 5th cousins.

You can fill in your profile with things like family names and locations your family has lived to try to help narrow the search, and the site will forward messages for you if you want to try to contact any of them.

You can fill in surveys to participate in research, too, which is both fun and makes me feel like a good citizen of the scientific community.

Nifty stuff! Cool present, Matt!

Mother'd

So KT and crew moved to their new condo on Saturday -- whoo! It's a really nice place, and I hope they enjoy it a lot. It's got a lot of advantages over the old apartment, even besides the whole "equity" question and the obvious bonus of "more space".

My assorted physical issues make me a poor candidate for schlepping boxes, so my contribution to the effort was to take all the kids for the day. We went to the play area at the mall for an hour or so, then ate lunch there (of course each of the three kids wanted a completely different cuisine for lunch!) After lunch, I took them down the road to Kangaroo Jac's (an inflatable bounce-house place), where they ran insane for three hours or so. By the time we were into the third hour, the mutant worrybrain was in full swing, wondering why the hell no one had broken a limb yet, so I decided it was time for a calmer activity, and I took them to Barnes and Noble, where they seemed pretty happy to settle in to read and play with the toy trains in the kids' section. (I think I read Mo Willems' entire repertoire to Alex while we were there, plus an assortment of other books, including some Berenstain Bears, a couple of Cliffords, The Very Busy Spider, and Goodnight, Gorilla.)

I told Matt later that if I'd really thought about it, what I would have done was take all the kids back home. Alex could've gotten a nap and then gone down the street to play with a friend near his own age, lunch wouldn't have been such a cluster, and I would've had a comfortable place to sit while the kids were doing their thing. (Not to mention the headache I would've been saved from the sheer noise at the mall and Kangaroo Jac's.) But for some reason, when I'd made my original plans, I was thinking the moving would be done by 3 or so, and it didn't make sense to drive all the way back home to only be there for a couple of hours. Instead, we spent at least 2 hours at the mall, 3 and a half at Kangaroo Jac's, and more than 2 hours at Barnes and Noble. Oy.

Mother's Day, the kids woke me up at 8:30 with breakfast in bed (oatmeal, Penny's specialty tri-color toast, and a chocolate-covered strawberry) and presents. Alex gave me a little wooden flower with his picture on it, and Penny gave me a "coupon" book that she made in school. And Matt gave me (in addition to the flowers and chocolate-covered strawberries he'd had delivered to my office on Friday) a genetic testing kit. (This is why my husband is awesome. He comes up with these fantastic, nerdy gifts, completely off the beaten path and yet totally cool.) I sent it off this morning, and I can't wait to see what turns up in the results!

(How I'm going to even come close to matching that level of neat for Father's Day, I have no idea.)

Later, I went to Target and bought myself some Avengers toys. Because I'm just that much of a nerd.

We went to my parents' for dinner -- I made beef stew and brought ice cream and berries and cookies for dessert, and my brother brought the bread and salad. It was nice to sit and talk with my family.

Then we came home, got the kids put to bed, and I spent an hour or so doing the first part of the Avengers LEGO set I'd bought. (I also bought this one, because it's the only way to get Captain America. I'll probably get this one, too, for Thor and Hawkeye and Hulk. I'm on the fence about this one -- I'll already have all the characters, but the little truck is cool and also I'm sometimes a bit of a completist. Also: why do they not have a set with Nick Fury?!)

So it was a busy weekend. But good. Definitely good.

Working Backward

"I want to do something simple for Mother's Day dinner," I told my sister-in-law, "because we're helping friends move the day before. Maybe just a nice beef stew."

Beef stew has to cook for a good long while if you want the beef to be tender instead of tough. And then I'm taking it to my parents', so I want some time for the pot to cool down a bit before I try to transport it. So, working backwards: Need to leave for my parents' around 3:30... so I need to take the pot off the stove by 2:00... so I need to start browning meat and chopping veggies by about 9:30... so I need to do the grocery shopping right at 8:30 as soon as I get up.

Except it's Mother's Day, and there has been mention of a breakfast in bed planned. Scratch that. Do the grocery shopping Saturday night?

Nope, nope, nope. We're helping friends move on Saturday, and given the list of friends coming from out of town, I expect we'll stay late enough that I'm not going to want to do the grocery shopping Saturday night.

Saturday morning? Nope. Heading out by 9:00 Saturday morning, not really going to be time to shop before that.

Friday night? That's our usual night to hang out with the Hedge, and we don't generally get home until quite late.

Friday afternoon? Would've been a candidate, except that the cat has a vet appointment.

So... Grocery shopping on Thursday evening it was, then.

Which is all my way of saying: gonna be a busy weekend. Y'all have a good one, and I'll see you on Monday!

Easter'd

Hooray for days off and friends and family and fun!

As it turned out, at the last possible moment, I got to take Friday off altogether. So I drove Penny down to Chesapeake for a sleepover -- I got to hang out with KT for a couple of hours and chat, and we had lunch together, and I got to see the condo they're about to buy before I came back up -- and in the meantime, Matt and Adin went to Busch Gardens, where they got to ride all the rides. All the roller coasters that Matt's had to walk wistfully past because he's been with me (I hate roller coasters) or Penny (who loves roller coasters but has height restrictions), he got to ride with Adin. They had a fantastic time, despite it being just a touch chilly.

I met them there around 2, by which time they'd pretty much done all the rides. I wanted to do Dark Kastle -- they'd already done it, but I wasn't going to name any rides they hadn't already done -- so we went over and did it. We wound up in a car with a trio of pre-teen (or maybe early teen) girls behind us. The girls started screaming the instant our car moved, and right at first, I thought that was going to be annoying, but it actually turned out to be awesome, in fact, adding an element of verve to the ride. As we dismounted, we joked about just following them to whatever they were doing next.

But by that point, the park was getting stupidly crowded and all the lines were crazy long. We got in line for another ride, but just before we got to it, the ride broke. And we were watching the clock to make sure we weren't late picking up the kids, so we got some snacks and meandered slowly and happily back home. (When it's my turn to spend a full day at the park without the kids, I want to do all the shows.)

Since Penny was off at her sleepover, we were free of our usual carb/dessert restraints for dinner, so we had pizza (real pizza, from Papa John's, which I have missed a lot) and Coldstone, and then we got to hang out with Adin (and Braz, once he got back from his trip) until it was time to go home.

Saturday was very busy: I boiled eggs, did the week's grocery shopping so I wouldn't have to do it on Easter morning, and then made peas with pearl onions for Easter dinner and a lemon chess pie for Easter dessert. While Alex was napping and Matt and Penny were off at the library, I put the kids' Easter baskets together.

After Alex woke up, the kids dyed eggs and had a great time doing it.

When that was done, we took the kids over to the Hedge, ate a quick dinner, and then Matt and I went out for a little date night -- we went to see A Separation at the DoG Street theater. As a note, the descriptions of the movie that we'd seen makes it sound like the movie's pivot/plot points turn on the couple's decision whether to leave the country and/or whether to get divorced; in fact, those decisions are made in the first ten minutes of the film, and the rest of it hinges on what falls out because of it. It was still very good, just not the movie we thought we were getting.

Another note: DEPRESSING. I mean, we knew it was a movie about living in Iran, and that it was going to be depressing. But the only -- and I mean only, entirely free of hyperbole -- happy moment in the movie is a brief scene that exists, I'm fairly certain, solely so it can drop you off the highest possible cliff when the next moment of horror strikes.

When the movie was done, we walked across DoG Street to the Trellis for dessert. Which only made me want to have dessert at the Trellis more often, because they had four or five things I really wanted to try.

Then we went back to the Hedge and cheered ourselves up by hanging with Braz and Adin and playing Cards Against Humanity.

We were up early on Easter, of course, because the kids knew the baskets were waiting... They had fun with them, and didn't even whine too much when I told them they'd have to wait until at least 9 before I'd go hide eggs outside for them. We went over to my parents' more or less immediately after lunch, where they hunted more eggs, and then we had an early dinner.

(I'll have Easter pictures later; I'm still sorting them.)

You'd think that a holiday devoted to chocolate and candy (well, okay, it is at our house) would be a nightmare for parents of a diabetic kid, and you'd probably be right, except not this time. We let her have a measured amount of candy at every meal (though for two of those meals, she deliberately chose to have less candy than we were allowing, because she's very much in the "but if I eat it, then I won't have it" camp when it comes to chocolate), and while she coasted on the high side of her range for most of the day, she did, in fact, only have one officially high blood sugar, and no lows. Which is a better record than she's had for most of the last month, to be honest, so we were both pleased and astonished. (Not enough to let her have candy more often, though, which I think was her secret wish.)

We got home around 5, and I was just about ready to go to bed right away, except that Jenn and Brian came down to deliver the new shelves/entertainment unit that Brian had built for us. It looks great, though we still need to sand and stain it before we put it in its final resting place. Which means I need to get my hands on a sander (I'm tempted to just buy one), and run to the hardware store for some brushes, a dropcloth, and a tarp to cover it so it can dry overnight without dew forming on it. (There's my project for this coming weekend, I guess.) Anyway, Jenn and Brian stayed until around 10 or so. By the time they left, I was ready to completely fall over from exhaustion, which is why I've still only got egg-dying pictures and not Easter Day pictures posted.

I've been ignoring my camera too much lately, though -- I wound up taking tons of pictures that were either way too light or way too dark because I'd forgotten to check the settings before I started snapping. Sigh. Well, now that the weather is getting nice, maybe I'll remember to grab the camera more often.

(CrA)^z

I'm currently editing three projects for Torquere: two novels and a novelette. One of the novels isn't due out until June and is already in the proofreader's hands and is therefore well underway. The novelette has had its first round of edits and is back in the author's hands. The other novel just hit me over the weekend... and thanks to a communications backfire, its schedule is extra-tight, so I have, essentially, one week to finish my first round of edits.

I also just got sent another novel to proofread (that's easier than editing, but still pretty time-consuming) that's on another tight-ish deadline; I've got about two weeks to get that one done.

My latest release, "Assumption of Desire", will be coming out from Torquere tomorrow. Obviously, that's complete now, but I've got some online publicity/marketing gigs to line up and execute, because that's part of my obligation as the author. (Speaking of which, if you're interested in winning a copy of the story, today is your last day to enter the contest!)

April's calendar is already nearly filled to the brim: Spring Break (including an Art Day for Penny and a day at Busch Gardens for everyone), Easter, a D&D game, Matt's and my anniversary, a kids' birthday party, two doctor's appointments, and a weekend at Diabetes Camp. And at some point after the show finishes I need to drive down to Hampton to pick up the art I bought. Plus several adult friends having birthdays. And KT and Kevin may be moving somewhere in there.

The Day Job's insanity includes a stack of paperwork that's currently twice as tall as the inbox, and an electronic "stack" nearly twice as tall as that, plus several new responsibilities that I need to remember to fold into my routines.

Plus all the usual stuff like making meals and taking the kids to school and trying to keep the house from completely falling into a slimepit. And occasionally trying to get to the gym.

Things are crazy, and are going to stay crazy for the next month, is what I'm saying.CRAY-ZEE.

On the plus side, I'm really going to appreciate the assorted vacations that are lining up for late summer and early fall.

Good News/Bad News

Okay, so I didn't get everything done that I wanted to do. Especially sleep.

Okay, Friday was pretty awesome. I met Adin for lunch, and then the two of us went to a pottery painting place and had fun making a mess of some ceramic. (We'll get our pieces back at the end of this week, I think. I'm looking forward to seeing how awful mine turn out, or if they're actually half-decent.) And then, because the weather was so nice and warm, we had grilled meats for dinner. Yum!

I'd forgotten I had a hair appointment Saturday morning, so even though I actually went to bed more or less on time (thanks to Alex throwing a hissy fit so I took him home rather than put him to bed at the Hegemony), I was up at 8 so I could caffeinate and get over to the salon.

Hair re-colored and trimmed, I considered Penny's plea that we join the Hedge at Busch Gardens' pre-opening preview day for pass holders, and decided it was good. So we left the boys at home (Alex was still in pretty dire need of a nap) and headed out. Naturally, the park was completely packed -- we left home at 11:30. It took us 5 minutes to get to the park grounds, and then another twenty minutes to get through the parking line. And then by the time we'd made it to the back of the park to where the Hedge were having lunch, it took us another hour to get our food. (Note to self: Remember, when at Busch Gardens this summer, not to eat at "normal" mealtimes. Get a snack at noon, and have lunch at 2.)

But we did eventually get to have some fun, though Penny didn't get to do any roller coasters, as she was hoping. (There were pictures, but I haven't had time to upload them to flickr yet.) But after we left Busch Gardens, I went home and collected Alex so Matt could go to his D&D game, and then we met up with the Hedge again for dinner. Some begging had induced me to agree that Sarah could sleep over at our house, so we packed up and came home shortly after dinner, and I got all three kids to bed.

Blam! Saturday gone.

Sunday was the usual chores, mostly. We met up with the Hedge for lunch so we could give Sarah back to her dad, but other than that just lounged around the house. I made a pot roast for dinner that turned out very well, though, and I'm eagerly anticipating the leftovers. (Pot roast is always better as leftovers. I don't know why, but it's true.)

And then Monday -- yesterday -- was supposed to be my day off to really relax. Catch up on sleep, do some writing, maybe run a couple of errands. Matt looked at the calendar Sunday night and noticed a doctor appointment I'd completely forgotten about, so that was good, because otherwise I'd have missed it.

The morning got off slow, though -- I did more chatting with KT than writing (this is why I should register my copy of Freedom) and when that two hours was up, I finally guilted myself into doing our taxes.

That was a weird conglomeration of good news/bad news. Good news: We've paid down quite a chunk of the principle on our mortgage, so in 2011 we paid only half the interest we'd paid in 2010. Bad news: That drop meant that our itemized deduction was actually smaller than the standard deduction. Good news: Using the standard deduction is loads easier and lighter on the paperwork, so next year I can probably skip straight to the standard unless something happens to make me think itemizing would be a good idea again.

Good news: I actually did save the receipts from my Vistaprint orders and when I went to Roanoke Pride in September, so I could claim all that stuff as a business expense (advertising and promotion travel are allowable). Bad news: I made less than $1600 from my writing and editing combined; less than $1400 after factoring in the expenses. I won't be able to give up the Day Job any time soon. Good news: That means I got to use the "EZ" version of the self-employment form. (That would be Schedule C, for my writer friends who haven't done their taxes yet...)

Good news: We owed less than last year. Bad news: We still owed. Good news: We make enough money that we owe taxes.

Bad news: The VA form is still put together by epileptic meth addicts. Good news: The VA form still lets us claim a lot more of our daycare expenses, so we're getting a small refund from the state.

Back and forth like that. I think if I had to write them all down and add them up, the good outweighed the bad... but only just barely. Anyway, I lost a solid three hours to wading through all that paperwork. Which is nothing compared to, say, my brother and sister-in-law, who operate their own business out of their home. (Sam spent over 20 hours just gathering files and organizing things for their CPA.) But it was still three hours out of a day I'd really wanted to spend on less mentally draining efforts. Or at least, more enjoyable ones.

Then I ran some errands and ate lunch and tried to wake up a little. Later in the afternoon, I drove over to the doctor's office and had my annual boobsmashing. (I realize I am now old enough that even if I switched to a different insurance company, they're pretty much guaranteed to agree to pay for annual mammograms. I guess that's... good?)

I thought about going to bed early last night, but instead I thought I should recover some of the writing time I'd meant to have earlier in the day, so I started up Freedom (Twitter is my nemesis in the evenings) and dove into my current project. I didn't do a progressive word count, but I wrote a solid two and a half single-spaced pages, so probably 1500 words, give or take? That felt like pretty good progress. I'm only another maybe four pages from wrapping up the story, so I might make that April 1 submission deadline with it, after all. (And if not -- or if they reject it for the anthology -- I think it's good enough that a little scrub would let it stand alone.)

So that was my long weekend. Not nearly as relaxing and sleep-intensive as I'd hoped, but still (mostly, except for the taxes) pretty good.

Now, I just need a good, long nap... What? Work?

Dammit.