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 |  Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket? |
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Fair Warning: I've upped the rating on this blog. It is now set at GC. |
| A bear and a rabbit are taking a shit in the woods. The bear says to the rabbit, "Don't you hate it when the shit sticks to your fur?" The rabbit says "I've never had that problem." So, the bear grabs the rabbit and uses him to wipe. It is an old joke, but I still like it.  It is day three of the three day bear hunting season in Pennsylvania, and it looks as though the bear are doing quite well for themselves. Bear season is supposed to happen late enough in the season that the females and cubs are denned up for the winter. I don’t know if that will work this year. We had one of the warmest Octobers on record, and it seems that might slow the denning up process. The game commission was very optimistic about the bear season because the population has been exploding. PA has a healthy bear population with a high rate of multiple births. We’ve also have a good number of 500 lb and up bears. Hunting them is a challenge though because, like the deer, the bear are developing a tighter coexistence with people. Booming development means that more turf is off limit to hunters, and there is nothing the bear like quite as much as a huge housing development full of wooded lots and a couple garbage cans every acre. We have black bear here in the Poconos. I’m partial to the bear because they are incredibly cagey critters. Naturally shy and elusive, it is always a bit of a shock when you spot one in a tree right on main street, but they like to come into town in the fall to eat the pumpkins off the front porches. When I was a senior in high school I took a course that was called Ecology. Not much of what happened in the class had much to do with ecology, but that is another story. Everyone in the class had to spend a day at the local bear check station. All bear that are shot must go through a bear check station within 24 hours. The bear are weighed, a tooth is extracted to determine age and they did other stuff I don’t recall anymore. I spent my day at a bear check station up on the Pocono Plateau. It was miserably cold that day, and we were in a building made of corrugated aluminum sitting atop a concrete slap. It was my first taste of a Pocono winter as I’d just moved up from Maryland over the summer. Every time they brought a bear in, they opened up the whole side of the building. So, my most vivid memory of the day involved huddling around a small coal burner and shivering until my back ached. Still, there were a couple other notable events of the day. The game wardens were very busy. You are not permitted to bait a bear or to shoot a bear in it’s den, so when a bear is brought in with chocolate under his claws, the wardens ask a lot of questions. There are also the Chinese business men who linger around the bear check station in hopes of purchasing a gall bladder. It is said to have aphrodisiac qualities and is in great demand. Selling the organs is illegal. I also remember the girl who started to cry when she saw her first dead bear. It wasn’t an especially large bear, but it was mature. She burst into tears and started sobbing, “It was just a baby.” The hunters didn’t especially appreciate our presence and it was the last year that the ecology class visited the bear check station.  |
| Well I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning! The school district has a new automated calling system - the type of thing that telemarketers use - that allows them to send messages to the masses. Now, if the system were being used for emergency information, that would be one thing, but so far it has been used to tell me when football games are cancelled, and when report cards have been issued. This morning my phone rang at 4:45 in the morning! It was the automated school call system telling me that parent, teacher conferences would NOT be canceled due to in climate weather. Now I ask you? Do you think I gave a rat's ass at 4:45 in the morning whether my conference schedule for 5:20 in the evening would be canceled? Hell NO!!! So now I need to look at how to get on the no-call list for the damn schools. Ah well, my mood improved when I walked out the door this morning and saw the beautiful mantel of fresh white snow. It was very pretty, and I enjoyed it in spite of having to drive in it. The snow at my house was nothing compared to the snow at my mother's. She lives up above the snow line, and it looked like she got the better part of a foot of snow. I don't remember ever having such a significant accumulation with the first snow of the season. It looked very strange as it settled onto trees that were still holding their leaves. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** I took this picture of a Japanese bell that hangs in my mother's garden. The snow was still falling at the time, and reducing the size of the picture to make it fit really took away, but it is still pretty. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** Alright, my dog is begging to go out, and I've got to work on NaNo, so I'll leave it at this for tonight. Hope you all have a good one. |
| My daughter is at the beach this weekend. She convinced her Grandma to take her and a friend down to Chincoteague Island, VA for a long weekend. The trade off for sending my daughter away is that I am baby sitting my niece tomorrow while her mommy is at work. Usually my Mom babysits on Monday. I'm looking forward to spending a day with the baby. I took a personal day from work so that I could do it, but I wish the day wasn't going to have to start so early! While my daughter is walking the beach, we are shoveling snow. The white stuff fell all day today, but didn't really start sticking until after dark. It is going to continue through the night and for most of tomorrow. Now, normally I love the first snow of the season, but my enthusiasm is dampened knowing I have to be up and out at early o'clock to go watch the baby. Ah well, I crawled back out of the plot hole in my NaNo novel and managed to get some writing in today. I also managed to get in a lot of nonsense to avoid writing. Still, I got in my 2,000 words and called it quits a few hundred words shy of 34K. It is still a slow go, but at least I'm moving again. Now I'm off to bed.  |
| Instead of cranking out 2,000 words today, I settled for seventeen syllables. That's right. I wrote a haiku. What of it? I'm at the 31K mark, and I just didn't feel like writing. Usually that means I'm trying to push my characters in the wrong direction and they are rebelling. Since I have a cushion, I decided to take the day off and come at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. My husband made the mistake of referring to my NaNo novel as my "little book." I found it insulting. He found it ridiculous that I would read anything into the remark. I think my emotions are a little wacky right now. This has never been a good time of year for me. The short days just weigh on me. I went to Target yesterday, and as I was pushing the cart around the store, I just started to feel suddenly very sad and weary. I must have looked a little lost too because at least four "Target Team Members" asked if they could help me find anything. So today I just relaxed at home, and hopefully by tomorrow I'll have shaken this funk off. At least I blogged. |
| The holidays bring out some of the strangest shit in people. I was listening to one of the gals at work today. She is driving down to Philly to spend Thanksgiving with her parents and she wants to bring a pumpkin pie. So, she was asking for advice from the office at large. Do pumpkin pies freeze well? She wants to make the pie early - Sunday - and freeze it. Well, lots of opinions were thrown around, but she really wasn't inclined to believe us anyway. So she turned to Google. The answer? Pumpkin Pie is a custard type pie, and as a rule, they do not freeze well. Now what? I suggested she buy a pie. I might as well have suggested spitting upon the Thanksgiving Turkey. It was unthinkable! Someone else suggested using a ready made pie crust, and that was almost as bad. Oh heavens NO! She already planned to use cookie cutters to make festive cut outs to decorate her home made pie crust. A couple additional suggested were tossed out as well. "I was just trying to make my life easier." she sighed. Uh - No you weren't. "But I guess I'll just have to get up early Thanksgiving morning and bake the pie before we drive down." I wonder what time her mom will be up to start that Turkey dinner. |
| Along with many others today, I've been thinking about those who have paid the high price for our freedom. My Grandfather did not serve in World War II, but his twin brother Robert was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. He was never able to recover from the experience, and lived out his life in mental hospitals. My Grandfather also had a cousin who served in the war and carried the scars, albeit more quietly. His name was Karl and he coped with the horrors and ghosts of war by retreating into the wildest parts of Idaho. He became a hermit. Karl was granted permission to build a cabin on state lands, and in exchange for living there, he made a twice daily hike to the State Park observation tower. The tower was equipped with a radio and twice a day Karl would climb the tower and radio a report to the park service. He was the lookout person for forest fires. Karl also mined uranium in the mountains of Idaho. He had a Geiger counter that he used to locate deposits of uranium ore. A couple times a year, Karl would come down from the mountain, sell the ore and buy supplies. Eventually Karl had to come off the mountain for good. He had developed bladder cancer - a possible side effect of carrying uranium ore in his pants pockets - and needed medical care. Following successful treatment of his cancer, Karl gave in to the practicalities of his advancing age and agreed to return home to the Nampa Valley area. Karl built himself a new cabin in the least populated corner he could find. This cabin was not as rustic as the old one and included basic plumbing. He drew the line at electricity however. He wanted no part of it. Karl had certainly earned all the peace and freedom he could find in this world and the next. |
| Well folks, I cracked 20K. My current word count is 20,449. Today I killed a man. Now I have a murder to solve. Alright, got to get back to it, but I just wanted to say hi and that I'm thinking of you all. I really appreciate the encouraging comments I've been getting. |
| Well it isn't shaping up to me much of a marathon around here. I've written around 2,000 words today bringing my word count up to 15,113. It's respectable, and I still have the evening to bang out some more words. Though I haven't managed a staggering word count, I've done a lot of important work in terms of setting up the big events of the book. Good stuff. Now for the part that is probably too much information, there are reasons I didn't get through more writing today. Apparently when I told my husband that I was staying home to work on the book without the distraction of kids running around, he heard this. "I'm staying home so we can have lots of sex while the kids are at school." On the bright side, I finally got him to do some work around the house. Okay, I'm gonna go back to writing now.  |
| Hey folks, I'm sorry I haven't been around a lot, but it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm going to put a big push on the NaNo thing in the next couple days. I'm at a 12,137 words according to MS Word. It is respectable progress and I am pleased, but the bottom line is that I'm cheating. Well, maybe cheating isn't the write word, but I haven't been following the spirit of NaNo. I've been reading back through and fluffing it out here and deleting an awkward phrase there. It just ain't right. So, I think the best way to get over it is to push ahead harder and faster so I don't have the time or inclination to be revising. I have a long weekend ahead of me. The Agency is closed on Monday for Veteran's Day, and I opted to take tomorrow as a vacation day. That gives me four days to reach deep inside myself and spew out my ugly, squishy, unedited insides. Can I do it? I have no idea! I've never tried anything like it before, but I've never tried writing a book before either, and here I am doing it. My biggest motivation is that Thanksgiving is coming up fast and I know I'm going to have more "stuff" competing for my time and attention as the month slips away. Okay, y'all behave yourselves while I'm gone. |
| Tonight I took a quick run to Target with Katie. I wanted to pick up a flash-drive that I can use to save my writing on. It will make it easier for me to go back and forth between the laptop and the desk top computers. While I was at target I saw the strangest advertisement. It was for a product called Clear Vision. This claims to seamlessly block the offensive content in programs and movies. They show a short scene from a movie with Clear Vision, and it does seem to flow pretty smoothly. Next the smiling spokeswoman announces, "we'll show you what you were missing." The scene plays again, but soon the picture blurs and "VIOLENCE" is displayed on the screen in large letters, back to normal, the scene plays a little longer and then blurs out again. This time the screen says "GORE." Clearly, anyone in there right mind would prefer the Clear Vision brand of censorship. Still, I think I'll stick to what I've got. Some times the offensive content is the best part. Oh yeah, I left Target empty handed because I suddenly remembered the newly opened Best Buy just down the road. Had to check THAT out. I ended up paying an extra $10 for a flash-drive, but the 16 year old in the Geek Squad shirt assured me that I was getting a better quality product. Whatever. Since they were all out of the pink "breast cancer awareness" version, I bought the purple "Take Action against Alzheimer's" version. What an appropriate cause for a device boasting incredible, high speed memory storage and retrieval. I felt better knowing that $1 of my overpriced purchase would be donated to Alzheimer's research. If there is such a thing as Karma, I hope my charitableness will be rewarded by always remembering where I left my flash-drive. |
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