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.