Dreaming Crazy

King is still alive. For now.

The past couple of nights have been full of bizarro dreams. Both nights due nights due to storytelling. When I can't sleep, sometimes the little girl in me wants to be read to. It takes me away, and gives my Monkey Mind something to grasp onto so that it doesn't start obsessing over dogs that died twenty years ago. (which is always how I know it's time to simply give up on sleep and get up and vacuum or something because I'm beyond hope)

Sunday night I listened to stories by Neil Gaiman. NOT a good idea at bedtime. Garaunteed to give you H.P. Lovecraft dreams. Last night I went to sleep listening to a murder mystery, which seemed fine when I started, but gradually the story got more and more suspenseful until finally I sat up and shut it off right before they found the second body. It was just too much at bedtime!
I need to listen to Proust or something. In grad school, literary theory was my ticket straight to slumberland. Oh who am I kidding? I never cracked my theory book. Not once. I managed to stay awake through a lot of stuff that might have put others to sleep... had no problem translating Old English, for example. But the 18th century about killed me. Except for Johnson. I have the highest regard for Samuel Johnson.

Tonight, no more books on tape. I have to just go to sleep like normal people.

Grayson is complaining of "feeling like pus" tonight. Not sure exactly what that indicates, but I'm pretty sure it's not good. Lately I'm never sure if I should believe him or not when he says he doesn't feel well. In his favor, he was dozing on the sofa when I got home, which he never does. Against him: he did run around the living room shouting "tickle me! Tickle me!" after dinner. In his favor: he asked for pancakes for dinner ( a special favorite), but then only ate half of one pancake. Against him: he later devoured a bowl of icecream. I just don't know which way to jump.

I reminded him that a day out of school means a full day's worth of schoolwork that will have to be done at home. I'm just hoping he's functional tomorrow.


We got his school pictures back, as you can see. He's never this serious. But in last fall's picture he was wearing this lopsided smirk, and he was determined not to do that again, so I suppose he just opted for the almost-smile instead. He does wear his glasses like this: half sliding down his nose. It drives me nuts: always makes me want to give them a shove into place, but apparently it's how he likes them, because that's where they always are.

He's a handsome boy, isn't he? I mean, aside from the obvious geekiness of being a ten-year-old. I think he will grow up to be handsome. I realize that, as his mother, I may be a bit biased, particularly since people tell me all the time that he looks like me. Lately, though... he just looks more and more like Grayson to me. His Own Self.

Dead in the Water

Still stalled out on the writing. No excuse, just stalled.

Once again I'm resolving to Do something with my life: get off my ass, make something of myself. At least get into shape... and not the shape I'm headed for at present, which is sort of bulbous and squishy. (She heaves a great sigh). So once again I'm off to the gym, which I despise, because otherwise I'm just going to degenerate into a great glob of goo, which won't make me feel very nice about myself, and lord knows I need all the help in that department I can get.

We killed a crab, already. Oh, had I not mentioned the crabs?

I allowed Grayson to adopt two fiddler crabs from his classroom at school. They seemed easy enough to take care of. A little salt water, some banana and dried shrimp... But one of them died within a week. I think it got too hot for them. In typical fashion, as I was trying to do good, I accomplished the exact opposite. I put a warming light on the tank, and it got up to 100 degrees in there... a temperature Mambo probably would have loved, but it was too much for poor Neil, one of the two male fiddlers. Now we are left with only King... who is King of no one now that he doesn't have Neil to push around anymore. Just chalk it up to the long list of creatures I have killed in the name of providing unusual pets for my son, who cried when I told him Neil was no more, and I wanted to kick myself for, once again, breaking his heart.

Gray told me, when I mentioned adopting the crabs, that I don't have a very good history with non-mammalian pets and maybe I should think twice about adopting more. He was right, it seems.

Today King is still alive. I checked. He's boring as all hell. They don't do anything. I never even catch him eating anything. I think they're even more boring than Mambo was.

Today it's windy and I've got nervous dogs to deal with. I don't know what it is about wind that turns Kobi into a neurotic mess, but I've noticed lately that storms, or even just wind, make her very quivery and clingy. It would be sweet if it wasn't so damned annoying. All morning I was shoving her off my lap, or trying to get comfortable with her lying on my chest, panting into my face while I tried to hold a book to read over her shoulder. She's usually such a cheeky little thing, it surprises me to see her come to pieces that way. I finally gave up reading, just to escape her.

Lately, she gets to drive around in the car a lot. She's always out of the yard, and the fastest way to collect her is to simply stop at the side of the road and let her climb into the car and go with you wherever you happen to be going. Consequently, she gets to ride around a lot, but she also spends a certain amount of time cooling her heels in parking lots. The wages of sin, I suppose. I really should fire up the electric wire on the fence again, to keep her in. But it freaks FLower out so much, that I'm reluctant.

Off to the gym now, armed with a new book on my iphone to hopefully keep me entertained enough to keep me there for the required hour. Sigh.

Reach for That Brass Ring aaaaand.....

I've decided not to feel bad about myself for not being Neil Gaiman. Neil's the Super Genius who wrote Coraline, the Sandman series of Graphic Novels and, one of my favorite books ever: Neverwhere. He's prolific and amazing. Me... less so. But I am plodding along, trying to get the hang of this writing thing.

At present I'm stalled out. I haven't written since Monday because I can't figure out What Happens Next. I am familiar with the overall arch of my story, but I am at a point where I need a bridge from Here to There, and I'm in a quandary. I'm going to need to take a few long, hot showers. Maybe then it will come to me.

Writing is hard. I admire the authors, like Neil Gaiman, for whom it seems to just spin forth... and I also admire those others for whom it is a more laborious process, or seems to be, but they just keep at it. Myself, I'll consider it a wild success if I can just manage to finish this one book... this one story I've been carrying in my head for years. If I can just get it on paper, I'll have won.

I am hoping to get back into it soon because I'm wildly bored otherwise. I have to admit that lately my job bores me beyond words. Oh, I love the museum: I love all the crazy specimens and the crazy curators and the exhibits and the visitors and the wonderful volunteers. But I'm heartily sick of writing the same press releases year in and year out, cranking out the same old tripe. Even the newsletter, which used to be a labor of love, has become a chore. The blog is more interesting, but you can't maintain a PR program on blog entries.

Part of my malaise is seasonal. This is a classically slow time of year. Programming trickles to a standstill by the first week of December. I won't have a new exhibition to write about until the spring, curatorial field work is at nil. Part of my problem is the routine. And part of it is this new fundraising function I've been handed.

I've been tasked with raising the next year's crop of corporate sponsors. Whoops. We're now calling them Corporate Partners. Essentially I need to go in and ask a bunch of businesses and corporations for money. Well... at first that was what I was doing. Now it's been revamped so that I'm essentially selling them advertising via the museum. So instead of asking for money, I'm a salesperson. Either way, I'm uniquely ill-suited for it.

I tried to approach this new role with enthusiasm. I tried to tell myself I just needed to hit that learning curve full force and go for it. But I'm petering out. I can pitch the museum all day to anyone who will listen... and plenty of people who won't. But I don't like asking them for money. This is, I think, the main problem with me and work now. This is the Big Thing I should be working on at this time of year, and I just haven't been able to work up any enthusiasm for it. Every day I futz with it a little bit, worry over it, move papers around. Make a couple of phone calls. But I'm not diving into like I know I should. And it's wearing on my conscience.

Today! I tell myself. Today I'll go after this project like Roxy with an unattended steak dinner. And so this morning once more I'm girding my loins, so to speak, to prepare for another day of figuring out which end of this thing to bite.

There. That was my do-gooder talk for the morning.

Yesterday at noon my student assistant and I went over to the OU Art school for the annual "Chili Bowl" fundraiser. For $15 you get to pick your own hand-turned clay bowl and fill it with all the homemade chili you can manage. There were probably 25 crockpots full of chili! Long tables filled the school's Lightwell gallery, and students, faculty, OU staff from every department, staff from the Norman CVB and the Arts Council, just about everyone in town was there, cheek-by-jowl, comparing their bowls and snarfing chili. It has to be a terrific fundraiser. Nearly zero costs: just for the sodas and supplies to make the bowls. The students do the turning and glazing. The staff and faculty come up with the chili. Genius. And fun, too, to see so many different folks piling in together for comfort food and an earthen dish. I sat between an art history faculty member and a first-year art student who was coming back to school to learn photography after spending several years in the oil business with his electrical engineering degree. Go figure.

Bob popped in only briefly, large social scenes being not his Bag, baby. I think it still sort of scandalizes my assistant that her first-year drawing teacher is dating her boss. His contribution to the chili cook-off is several cans of Hormel, dumped into my crock-pot. Its title is "More Fartsy, Less Artsy."

Not exactly GQ material...

Every so often I need a kid for a museum photo shoot, and naturally I press Grayson into service whenever I can. You'd think a kid as animated and dramatic as him would make a pretty good photo model.

It ain't necessarily so. Oh, he's adorable... if you're his mother. But he tends to get very silly when I point the camera at him.

Lately I needed some shots of kids with toys from the museum store, so I brought him in for an hour and turned him loose with various toys. Here are a few funny ones I got:

Grayson's not much at catch... and it shows in this frame.

It's called a Bilibo. Lots of kids wear them on their heads .

Silly face.

Another silly face.

I might look like that, too, if a miniature T. rex was attacking my face!

Cold weather finally has made an entrance here. We had intermittent rain storms, wind and cold all day yesterday. I was home babysitting the workers who were installing the new heating and AC unit in the house. It was a perfect day for sitting at home doing nothing. Cold and gray and rainy. I lay on the sofa under a blanket for most of the day, drinking coffee and reading, with the dogs all around me.

Sadly, the crew was not able to complete the installation of my heater, so this morning dawns clear skied, but COLD. And I've got a bit of a prickle in my throat that may not bode well.

But I'm content. The depression and grim self-loathing I experienced all last week seem to have lifted, and I'm grateful. What's a little cold if you've got your own (mental) sunshine? I feel like I'm on the final stage of recuperation from a long illness or injury.

I've used a little bit of my energy on writing. Still trying to stay in the NaNoWriMo game, though I fell behind this week, and I'm hovering around 15,000 words. The book is giving me some difficulty, sort of twisting under the pen, metaphorically, so I'm not sure exactly where to take up the work next. Things keep changing. I'll be in the shower when suddenly I'll have a realization: "OH! THAT'S what needs to happen next!" Well, but in that case, then I need to go back and add this, or change that, or tuck in another character or change where my characters are or..... I think my brain is always turning over the bits of the story, whatever else I'm doing. Some part of my brain is always working on the book.

It's a good feeling, when it's working. The writing itself is, as all the books say it will be... hard. I resist, I drag my feet. I count words over and over to see if I can be done yet for tonight. I put it off. Amazing that something I've wanted to do all my life can be such a chore. It hurts so good though... I've been going back over and over for more.

Grayson's with his dad this weekend and I'm relishing the quiet. G's not a noisy kid... but he always has to have some sort of background noise going on as accompaniment to whatever he's doing. He may be completely engrossed in making Pokemon creatures on the computer, but he will still have the TV on as well, with Sponge Bob or Zach and Cody or some other dreadful kids show on. I'm sure if I was any kind of mother at all I'd make him turn it off and go outside. But I don't. We all have our little things that help us feel at home. That's his.

His dad and I met with Grayson's teacher last week. I was frankly worried that it would not go well. As I've mentioned, I'm not all that supportive of her classroom discipline technique, and I was afraid that .... I don't know exactly. That I would be driven to tell her so in the meeting. But it went fine. We were all very pleasant and discussed G's shortcomings in a civilized manner. Turns out that she thinks he's a very smart and capable kid, but she's concerned about his level of self-responsibility. i.e: he's forgetful. Also, he rushes through his work so he can spend more time reading.

This last was a bombshell to us. Apparently G reads all day at school. Whenever he has free time to do flashcards or play games, he chooses to read. He does worksheets in under 3 minutes so he can get back to his book, and she says when he's reading he's completely deaf to the rest of the world, utterly absorbed in his book. This is a complete and utter surprise to us. I make G read every evening for half an hour and sometimes it's like pulling teeth. He gets distracted easily, is always wanting to talk about the story with me or read passages aloud. He will ask if it's time to go to bed yet, and suddenly become terribly tired and have to go to bed a few minutes early. This is the kid who can't put his book down at school? Gray and I were bumfoozled. Why is he so different at school? Why doesn't he read at home? It's not like he lives in a non-reader household, for crying out loud. I spend hours and hours every week reading. I'm completely mystified.

I've decided to up our evening reading time to 45 minutes, though. I know now it won't bother him a bit to do so, whatever he may say.

Wild Care

Sunday afternoon, G and I went to the once-a-year open house at the Wildcare facility in Noble, OK. I've mentioned them before, here. They do wildlife rehabilitation, and they're amazing. The woman who runs it, Rondi Large, has essentially given up her life to the constant, year-round, round-the-clock care and feeding of orphaned and injured animals. I admire her hugely.

The weather was gorgeous, and we got to see several animals (all mending well or soon to be grown up enough to be released to the wild, happily). Mainly I was impressed by the extensive facilities and the care and enthusiasm of the volunteers. I'm glad people like this exist. The world needs more of them.

A box of baby opossums!

A bag of bats!

A bobcat. There were some cubs, too. They were not as still, so didn't photograph well in low light.

Grayson took this nice picture of an owl. I can't remember what kind it is.

Sweet squirrel face.

So far so good

I'm pleased to say that my novel-writing experiment is progressing apace. I've crested 11,000 words now, and will start chapter 8 this evening. This is HUGE, considering that this book hovered at 1 chapter for over a year, then lifted off to 5 chapters before being iced for some five years or more. The book has been in my head all this time, getting turned and tumbled and smoothed, but I never had the courage to show up at the page. It's still a hard moment when I open that file and look at the blinking cursor... but I've managed to keep pushing forward. Five days. Just 25 to go.

Friday night Grayson's best friend, John, spent the night. It's the first time John has stayed here with us in Norman. Generally he and Grayson get together when G is at his dad's place in OKC. Grayson was very excited about having his friend here. The first thing he said to me when he woke up Friday morning was "It's JOHN DAY!!" It made me realize that I probably need to make more of an effort to help him get his friends over here on the weekends.

I'm afriad the boys were up waaaay too late. I didn't mean to let them stay up so late, but I fell asleep myself just before midnight and woke an hour later to discover they were still up watching the Disney Channel in Grayson's room. Oops. Bad mom! I marched in and put them summarily to bed They were up again before 7 a.m. Naturally. If it was a school day I'm sure Grayson would be a rock at that hour.

I myself slept terribly. It got damned cold last night. Don't know if I've mentioned that at present we have no heat in our house. Back in June our airconditioner died and -- since we have no landlord because our rental house is in receivorship -- the property manager opted not to replace the fried AC blower unit, but instead bought and installed three window units. Okay, fine, but now it's five months later and the weather is getting colder and the unit is still fried.

It seems the lawsuit still has no clear end in sight, and, as there's no such thing as window heaters, the receivor is now going to be obliged to replace the unit. We've had two companies in during the last week to make estimates. In the meantime... brrrrr! Last night the temperature got down to 33 degrees! I got up in the wee hours and threw extra blankets over the boys. Then a few minutes later I got up again and put on an extra layer of clothes, and was grateful for three warm dogs to cuddle up to.

Hopefully they'll get the heater replaced before it gets much colder, or we'll have to start sleeping on the floor in the kitchen in front of the oven.

Yesterday, I took the boys to the new Osteology museum in OKC. It's run by Skulls Unlimited, the folks who prepare and provide skulls and skeletons of animals to museums and other scientific institutions all over the world. The showroom isn't huge, but it's chocabloc full of skeletons! They have a giraffe, a humpback whale, a hippo, several two-faced callf skulls, a platypus, ant eaters... hundreds of skeletons. It's a very cool place to take a couple of ten-year-old boys. And we were the first ones in the door, so we had the place to ourselves, the boys just ran around, looking at everything. It was really fascinating.

Challenge Accepted

I've been a poor correspondent lately, but with good cause. After a dry spell so long I don't even want to calculate it, I've been writing again. Really writing. Not journaling or blathering stream-of-consciousness incoherencies into a notebook, actual structural writing.

I was struck with inspiration by an email I received from NaNoWriMo. That's an awkward, geeky way of saying "National Novel Writers Month." Every November, the organization challenges writers everywhere to write a novel over the next 30 days. Specifically: 50,000 words in 30 days. You sign up on the site and commit to the challenge... "Permission to Suck, Granted!" as they say.

My friend and colleague Mary Ann Roe, who runs the store at the museum, first introduced me to NaNoWriMo several years ago, but I never registered. Somehow, this time it just seemed right.

So I'm in. I have taken up the gauntlet.

Two days into it I've produced around 3300 words. Now all I have to do is stick with it.

I write for an hour after I put Grayson to bed each night: from 9:30 to around 10:30. Anne Lamott says that if you're having trouble carving out writing time for yourself, you should write when you would normally be watching the evening news. Because what's a bigger waste of time than local news? I don't watch the news, but I do spend that hour sitting on my butt, reading or watching TV. So I have surrendered that hour to NaNoWriMo. Wish me luck.

One of the entertaining things about taking up the challenge was getting the five chapters of a children's novel I started some 8 years ago or more into a modern format. The first chapter of the thing was written originally on the boxy old Mac I had in the early 90s. The subsequent four chapters were produced on a ten-ton Compaq laptop that I got from G. I guess he acquired it when it was retired from the place where he worked at the time, and I fell in love with the idea of having my own portable writing computer. As I said, it weighs a ton, it also takes forever to boot up because it is still looking for the old network it was hooked up to before I acquired it. It also has this funny old-school trackball mouse built into the frame of the screen. You work the trackball with your thumb, and the mouse buttons are built into the back of the screen - or the top of the computer, however you want to look at it. I've never seen that design before.

Anyway, Of course there's no way to download my writing from that computer to this one. The Compaq has a 3.5 inch floppy drive ) no USB ports. So I had to boot up the file and transcribe it by hand. It was actually a good way to refamiliarize myself with The Story Thus Far and get my mind into the idea of writing again.

Grayson was utterly fascinated with this old dinosaur of a computer... and with the idea of a story written by his mom, which he didn't know I could do. He hovered over my shoulder as I was transcribing, reading as I went and alerting me at each typo. He told me he could help me with a title, which I don't have yet, and with chapter titles as needed. I said I would call on him for help very soon. And I asked him if he wanted to read it for me and tell me what he thought. He said Yeah, it seems interesting. So I mean to print out the first chapters and let him read along. That should provide some incentive to keep going.