Let’s Talk About Google+

This is the blog post I’ve been avoiding writing.

As a die hard Apple fangirl, I love everything about Apple. However, even I am willing to admit when Apple has gotten something completely wrong. Let’s face it, Apple’s attempt at a social network, Ping, blows chunks. I don’t use it. I want to use it, I think the idea of sharing the music that I love with other people via Ping is awesome, but it doesn’t connect to Facebook and to be brutally honest, it needs that piece of functionality. Ping is tailor made for the Facebook crowd and that’s where it should live, as an app for Facebook, not integrated into iTunes.

I would love to say that Ping has a brilliant user interface that is straight forward and easy to use. I would love to say that Ping has this cool feature or that cool feature that I can’t live without. I would love to point out that so far, the lack of stupid quiz apps and the lack of games that not only want to steal all of my private data, but also are designed to get me addicted to playing them so that I can sink large amounts of cash into them, is a huge bonus.

And while some of those things are true about Ping, mostly the lack of games and stupid quiz apps, the ones that matter, the brilliant user interface and the feature list, are not all that.

Google stepped into that little arena and filled in the gap between what I wanted Ping to be, and what Facebook is when they opened Google+ for public field trials less than a month ago. Google has really surprised me with Ping.

I have been absolutely unimpressed with Android. I don’t see the reason for the hype, I see Android as an also ran. It’s not a bad platform, but it’s not a great platform. I can’t hand an Android phone to a 90 year old grandmother and expect her to be able to make a phone call. I can do that with my iPhone, and in fact, I have run into many an elderly couple looking for cases for their iPhones in the Apple store. I almost never see them at the phone store. If your grandma has to call you for tech support every time she wants to send an email on her smartphone, you’re doing something wrong.

I like user interfaces that just flat out make sense. I do not want something complicated that is different for every single user, or every single device. If someone needs to use my phone to call 911, I want them to be able to do that without having to figure out which screen I put the “Phone” icon on. It should be obvious, and in your face. That’s just good design.

It also seems to me like Google had a plan for Android that isn’t working out for them in the way that they’d hoped and that Amazon is about to take the tool that Google gave them, and blow a great big hole in the side of the tablet market before Samsung can make another iPad knock off that is nowhere near as elegant and more expensive.

I can’t wait to see that fight, because I think Apple is braced for impact, and the Android tablet makers are going to get T-boned.

I feel completely differently about Google+ though.

Google has really put together an elegant product here, something that they could monetize easily by inserting Google ads and I’m not sure that would bother me too much.

What I love, is that I can choose who sees the content I put up on Google+. I maintain control of my material, so if I want my parents to see it, but not every person I know, I can just include the “family” circle in my post and not allow any other circles to see it. I can make new circles too! I don’t have to live with the five they gave me. I have circles for people that I’ve met via the Internet, by the internet forum that I met them on. So I have a MINI circle and a Dog circle and an IRC circle. I can also choose to add people to multiple circles. So if I have someone in the MINI circle that I am closer to than the guy I just met on the forum last week, I can add that person to a “Friends” circle in addition to having them be a part of the MINI circle, so they can see the posts that I make available to a more personal group.

You can get as complicated or as simplistic as you want with the circles. There are no hard and fast rules for how to make one, it’s entirely up to you. Facebook has a similar feature, but it’s hard to maintain if you didn’t start out using it from the get-go.

By contrast, maintaining your circles on G+ is a snap. Say, for example, you end up getting out of a particular hobby. In my case, I just got out of fish keeping. I liked the hobby and it was a lot of fun, but it’s not something that I choose to do. So, I don’t want to read about it every day now. If I had a bunch of people in my circles that did nothing but talk about fish keeping, I could go to the circle for the fish keeping friends, and with two clicks, cut the entire circle loose simply by opening up the circle and choosing “Delete this circle”. Not only does it delete the circle entry itself, but any friends that you have in the circle that you may not want to keep for whatever reason, are also removed from your circles and will no longer be able to see your posts.

It’s just that easy to maintain.

So far, I’m impressed. If an iOS app is approved for the service, I can see myself easily gravitating away from Facebook to using Google+ instead. It’s much more streamlined and more geared around what I want to do with it and how I want to use it, rather than being geared on how the developers think it should be used.

That’s not even the tip of the iceberg here. Those are just the major features that I have used so far. There are also hangouts, which I have not tried to use yet. I also haven’t really talked about Sparks, which is kind of a cool way to aggregate news articles on subjects you’re interested in, because I haven’t delved into how it works too deeply just yet. They’re not that relevant anyway.

The control that Google+ gives the user over their own content is the star of the show.

I still have a few invites to Google+ left. If you’re interested, let me know.

The Internet

I made my first friend on the Internet when I was 14 years old. It was over a service called Quantum Link, which later grew into a little company, that I know you’ve heard of, called AOL. Chris lived on the other side of town from me, and it was odd to actually meet someone from your local area in a chat room. We exchanged phone numbers one night and called each other once a week or so and talked on the phone. We met at the mall downtown a couple of times, mind you this was in the late 80s and early 90s. I don’t think my parents thought there was a chance I would meet a pedophile over q-link. So Chris and I met. He wasn’t a creep. He was everything he said he was and I was nerdier than I said I was, which he already knew and was okay with.

I have nothing but happy memories of my friendship with him. When I think of him, I think of him meeting me at the entrance to the mall with his arms wide open to hug me so hard that I couldn’t breathe. He introduced me to one of my life long loves, alternative music, he’s the reason I know who Tony Hawk is, otherwise, I probably wouldn’t care. When I look back on that friendship, which lasted until I got married and relocated out of state, I smile. Our feelings for each other were completely platonic, but our friendship was very special to me. He was someone who taught me the importance of being myself, of loving what I love and doing what I love. My parents always encouraged that, but Chris showed me why it was important and how something that I thought was optional because other people might judge me this way or that way, was actually not optional at all.

Chris and I never reconnected. It’s been 17 years since the last time I heard his voice. Not even through the internet have we found each other again. We’ve certainly had plenty of avenues opened for us though, IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MySpace or Facebook. Dude, if you’re out there reading this right now, I miss you and would love to hear from you again. I really want to know if I’m right about what you think of Green Day.

Thinking about him this morning came about from a conversation I had on twitter about Google+. Everyone is talking like Google+ is going to be the next Facebook and it’s so amazingly awesomely awesome. That brought up conversations about how Facebook was the new MySpace and I pointed out that I’d never used MySpace because I didn’t understand why it was cool to have a web page that looked like 1997 was calling and wanted its web design back, when the year on the calendar said, “2007”.

That got me thinking about the evolution of the Internet and how this service or that service appeared and changed the game, which got me thinking about larger concerns, because this is where my mind always wanders. “What will they say about Facebook in twenty years?”

This train of thought led me back to us and our place in all of this.
Wait a second and dial that thought back a notch or two. I wasn’t thinking about the whole human race. I’m talking about those of us that are Generation X.

We are living in interesting times! My GOD! The things we have seen!
We have watched the world transition from being primarily dependent on transportation to keep things moving, to being primarily dependent on a computer network to keep things moving. You’ve all seen that episode of the IT Crowd by now, and if you haven’t, here’s what I mean: Jen Introduces The Internet

The panic that ensues here isn’t that wrong! Can you imagine what would happen if the whole of the internet just up and went kaput!

Well, of course we can! Gen Xers know that everything would be just fine because we would go back to 1985 for a few hours and we’d plop down on our butts in front of the television and reminisce about The Transformers and GI Joe, then whatever geek was responsible for cutting that major pipeline would find a work around, and we’d go back to Facebook and Youtube.

I’m not sure that the Millennials, my children, understand a world without the Internet. The internet has been there for as long as they’ve been alive.

And the more I look back on my life and how I got my first computer when I was 13 and I signed up for my first internet service at age 14, the more I realize that I am very much like my children. I am one of the younger members of Gen X, my husband is also a Gen Xer and is 9 years older than me, and he remembers the 70s. I was too little to go see Star Wars in the theater then, so his perspective on this whole scene is even more unique than mine. He actually understands how the technology came to life. He watched as the internet was built, which was something I did not see.

Either way, I think I know what they will say about Generation X when we are old. I suspect it won’t be that different from what was said of my grandparents: “Man did they live in an interesting time in the world.”

And we really are. The internet has changed the world and we have been here to watch it evolve. The 20 somethings and Something-teens take it for granted because it’s always been there, but we got to see the thing that made their lives what they are, be born.

How cool is that?

I Test Drove a Countryman (and I Liked It!)

My husband has wondered if I would really enjoy driving one, since he got one as a loaner car when he took my MINI to the dealership in May. He got his answer today. This afternoon, I took a test drive of a Countryman S All 4 and all I can say is “Holy Jesus, I want that car.”

The handling was better than I expected for a vehicle of this size. I expected it to really lean in the curves, like my husband’s SUV, but I was pleasantly surprised by how little it leaned. It is heavier than the base model Cooper that is my current daily driver, but it really seems to compensate for that elegantly. The steering is nice and crisp, the wheel turned exactly as I thought a MINI should.

When I got my MINI originally, I didn’t even bother test driving an S. I really felt at the time that I didn’t “need” the extra zip, but it was so nice to put my foot on the gas going uphill on a 20 degree incline and have the car just go. The Countryman did not whine. It did not complain. It just went. I loved that, and now I’m wondering why I ever thought that the S was more car than I needed or wanted. As far as the Countryman is concerned, that line of thinking is dead wrong. It’s exactly what I want. It’s everything I ever wanted a MINI to be.

I think I might have to have one.

At the Phone Store Last Night…

We were shown an Android phone. My husband considered it briefly for our teenage son and I took one look at him and shook my head and said “No. I don’t want to have to deal with you getting frustrated over supporting the thing.” The salesman stood behind my husband and caught my eye and gave me a knowing smile.

That really said it all for me. I am told that a certain carrier’s Android phones suck, but to be honest, I have said similar things when looking at Blackberries or WebOS devices at other carrier’s stores and gotten a similar reaction. To me, that says that Android isn’t “better” than iOS.

Heck. It’s not even cheaper, most devices we saw were priced well above the 199$ it will cost you to get an iPhone.

I probably won’t understand the appeal of Android, ever. I suspect I will be using an iPhone until someone comes out with these cool wafer thin touch screen phones that fit in your wallet right next to the one dollar bills in the bill slot. It would be the phone that you almost throw out with your old receipts.

Cool, right?

Finer Things

“A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him. A water-logged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.” – John Grogan

Someone I know posted this quote from the final pages of Marley and Me on Facebook this morning. It was written from the heart, out of love for a yellow Lab that was not entirely unlike my Lucy, who is pictured above, with my other best friend, Mugen. They look so serious, because they are begging for cheese. They’re Labs. They take their food very, very seriously.

Just in case the picture above isn’t enough of an indicator of how much I love my dogs, and Labrador Retrievers in particular, I’ll share with you the fact that Marley and Me is one of my favorite books. I remember it now, not only for its wisdom, humor and excellent story telling, but for how it healed me when I was so badly broken. You see, I read Marley and Me for the first time about a week after my first Lab died. John Grogan’s book reminded me of the joys of dog ownership at a time when I was missing them so badly. I do think I cried harder than I would have, if I’d read Marley and Me before then, but the timing was just what it was. I am grateful now, that I read it when I did because, in spite of the fact that I felt every moment so deeply, I remembered similar things that I had done with my own dog, and at the end, when Marley was gone and the family was remembering him with all of the love in their hearts, I felt that too. It gave me closure and the strength to carry on because I knew when it was over, that I had given my old man a great life filled with love.

We loved him so much that even when other people told us to put him down because he’d done this dangerous thing or that dangerous thing, we didn’t. We chose training over death. We chose obedience over abuse. We made a promise to him and we kept that promise. We made choices as a family that kept him with us until the day came when he was ready to go. It wasn’t always easy, but it was always worth it. I will always remember Reilly’s face the moment that he passed away. He looked right into my eyes as I turned around when I heard him fall. The look on his face said to me, “It’s time, but Oh! How I love you! It pains me to leave you behind.”

Every time I think of that look on his face, I cry, not out of regret, or remorse or any particular pain, but because there was something so beautiful in him in that moment, so perfect and pure. His devotion to me never wavered, not even in his final moments. He gave me so much more than I deserved. I gave him my heart, for sure, but he gave me his heart and his life. The enormity of the trust that it took for him to do that still astounds me two years later.

What also never fails to amaze is the idea that there are so many dog owners out there, like the ones who owned my dogs before they were rescued from shelters, who are undeserving of that kind of devotion and receive it anyway with no concept of what it is that they are being given. The very idea of living a life with the love of a dog and not appreciating that love for the simple thing that it is seems criminal to me, particularly in light of my current situation.

Lucy will leave us someday soon. I hope that it is not for a very long time. I no longer have the illusion that it will be years and years before cancer takes our sweet yellow dog from us. We are stopping her cancer treatment because the drugs are killing her faster than the disease at this point and I hate feeling like we’re giving up, but at the same time I have always known that her time with me was never going to be long enough for me. I knew that when I decided to adopt her. I hoped and prayed for more. I love her so much that I want to keep her here forever, but I know now that this isn’t possible. Lucy would stay with me forever if her body could keep up with her spirit, but that’s just not how things are going to play out. I have learned though that for Lucy, the time she has had with us has been enough.

She knows that she is loved here, she knows that she is safe here and that her needs have always been a priority. She will always have a place at the table, a warm bed to sleep in and someone to hug her and hold her when she is hurting and someone to rub her belly when she is happy and the world is filled with light and joy. Here, she is never, ever alone. I don’t know that she has ever had the ability to count on another human being the way she has been able to count on our family, and I can see it in her eyes every time she smiles at me, that our love for her matters.

It took the love of so many wonderful people to bring her to us, but that love changed her life. It made her life better. It took a broken and sad creature and made her whole. If Lucy takes one thing with her to the bridge ahead of me, I pray that it is the notion that not all human beings are cruel, that there are those of us who love dogs unconditionally and will always return their love, even if they have an accident in the floor or bark at the neighbors’ golden retriever. There are things in this life that matter so much more than annoyed strangers and carpeting. One of those things, is the love of a dog. Some of us are in on the secret, that there is nothing better and we know that each and every one of us, who is lucky enough to be loved by a dog, is completely unworthy of his or her devotion.

Knowing that you are unworthy of the kind of love and devotion is a great place to begin. The world would truly be a better place if we tried to live up to being the sort of person that our dogs think we are or, at the very least, took a page from our dogs and placed less value on material wealth and took a look at the wealth that we can already claim right inside our own little lives.

So, the next time you find yourself staring at a picture of a fancy car or flipping through a fashion magazine in a doctor’s office, remember that your best friend is at home waiting for you and all he needs is you, and a stick, to make his day complete. Let that thought fill you up inside and make you smile, because that, my friend, is the finest thing in life.

iTunes in the Cloud: What More Do You Need?

I have been desperately trying to put this blog post together for a week or so now. The reality is, there’s just too much about iOS5 that I love. Suffice it to say that we have iOS5 running on my old 3GS so that my husband can figure out how it works, and maybe, someday, finish that iPhone app that I keep telling him he needs to build. In the mean time, I’ve been carrying the thing around and using it where I would normally be using my iPhone 4.

I could tell you all sorts of cool things about iOS5 that Apple did not talk about at WWDC. But that’s not what has me excited as an end user of iOS5. What has me excited, is iTunes in the Cloud. Being able to sync my books, videos and music over the air is just a God send. This all started because of my mother, of course.

I’m reading this series of books that my mother has mentioned to me every time I’ve talked to her for the last several months. I finally picked them up for free off of SmashWords and am reading them with iBooks. They’re not the best I’ve read to be honest, the plot could use some work, it’s predictable, story pieces connect to each other a little too easily to be believable, but the writing is pretty solid and the world is pretty interesting and I really like the characters, so I’m hooked. The other night, I was reading book two of the series in bed and I had my iPad sitting up against my knees and I wanted to roll over and hide under the covers so the light wouldn’t disturb my husband and I thought to myself, “Oh! I’ll just grab my iPhone!” and I realized in the same moment that I didn’t have the book on my iPhone.

This was last weekend, before Apple’s keynote on Monday. I was a little frustrated at myself for forgetting to sync my books on my iPhone. My eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas morning when I heard them announce iTunes in the Cloud. The first thing I did as soon as that feature became available on my iPhone, was turn it on and start using it. I love being able to have my purchases where I want them, when I want them there, as opposed to where I put them when I bought them.

Then I decided I wanted to revisit George Michael. I used to seriously love George Michael, but we drifted apart after I graduated high school and his pop stardom waned. I caught an episode of Eli Stone and HAD to have Faith again, so I went to buy it this morning. I picked the seven songs I wanted, paid my seven bucks, and immediately the device I have running the iOS5 beta bleeped at me. The notifications window on the lock screen said, “You downloaded a song from your computer. Turn on automatic downloads to receive music on this device without having to sync.”
You can imagine the grin that spread across my face when I read this.

One thing I am learning about iOS 5 is that the intention here is to have your device work with your life, rather than you having to think about your device and wonder if you did this thing or that. I feel like it encourages you to live your digital life effortlessly, and when something important happens, it tells you, rather than you having to constantly tell it. Using the device and getting things done is just so much less of a chore.

It’s what I have wanted all along and never knew I really needed. I was content with tethered life, but now that I have seen a taste of what is on the horizon for Apple users with iCloud, I’m sorely tempted to sell all of my spare iPod cables on Craigslist. I can’t see a reason why you would need to plug your device into your Mac to sync it. It doesn’t matter where I am when I buy music now. I can buy it from my iPad, iPhone or Macbook. It will show up on the other devices before I even think to look for the data on them. What more do I need in this life?

Well, okay, I probably need a million dollars and a contract with a publisher but that’s pipe dreaming here.

WWDC 2011: Back to the Dev

Every year, I watch WWDC with interest. I watch it from a consumer standpoint, and not a developer standpoint. I fully expected Apple to release a hardware product at WWDC this year, but last year, the developers were quite upset that Apple had forgotten about them in all the iPhone 4 hype. Certainly Gizmodo’s checkbook journalism and the sensation that this caused in the media, so huge actually that the story reached CNN, was a show stealer.

This year, was entirely unlike last year. This year, the WWDC keynote delivered by Apple focused on developer tools and developer features in Apple’s upcoming offerings for their devices. Of course, I’m talking about OSX Lion, iCloud and iOS 5.

There is a great article on iCloud by Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago Sun-Times that tells you everything you need to know about iCloud in a way that only Mr. Ihnatko can. You can read the article for yourself, but this quote sums it up nicely, “Apple forcefully made the point that iCloud is meant to do no less than replace the PC in its current role as the hub of the digital experience, and relegate it to the status of Just Another Device that syncs data between itself and everything else”. This says it all.

iCloud is not just some other feature that’s being added to OSX and iOS. iCloud is the future of computing as Apple sees it. It’s the bridge between where we’re going and where we are and it’s going to teach us how to abandon our old ideas about what technology should be, just like iTunes showed us how to walk away from record stores. It will be difficult for those of us that are a bit old school in our computer usage to walk away from the desk or the table and go sit in a park and wirelessly do everything. I have my concerns about having all of my information up in the cloud and I used to argue very hard that cloud computing was not the way to go, even though I knew things would always eventually end up here.

In spite of my dislike of this, and my mistrust, I think that OSX Lion is going to play a huge part in moving me into that future where all of our data is stored in the cloud and we will no longer need to keep massive hard drives on our machines. It is frustrating, however to watch the media compare iCloud to other services, because it is so much more than Amazon Cloud services, or even the OTA sync that Google has in some Android devices. iCloud is not limited to a narrow field of use. iCloud is simply everything.

iCloud will not be available for all of us to play with until July, but we did get a taste of the kind of services that Apple will provide to us with iCloud from iTunes in the Cloud, which is available on your friendly neighborhood Apple device right now. I suggest you play with it and go see what Cloud living will be like in the Apple universe. It’s eye opening to see how easy Apple made this for consumers to use. I hope that iCloud and all of its services will be as uncomplicated for the developers to take advantage of.

One of the things that I do after the WWDC keynote is go out in search of a bunch of news articles from a bunch of sources on the keynote to consider the opinions of other writers before finalizing my own thoughts and ideas. Sometimes it can be eye opening, or there will be a feature that I find to be really cool that I must have missed when I got up to get a drink.

This time, I found a complaint that there is no “free music streaming” of any kind associated with iCloud running around in WaPo, PC World and some more mainstream media outlets. It was interesting to see this noted in these articles because these writers seem to have forgotten the same thing that Apple forgot about at last year’s WWDC. WWDC is all about opening the doors for communication between Apple and their third party developers. That is the purpose of the conference. For those who are unaware, WWDC stands for “World Wide Developers Conference”. Notice that the word “developer” is in there. Apple did forget that for the last couple of years, and it was truly a good thing to see them focus on the developers and all of the innovations that they have made to iOS and OSX under the hood. So I’m wondering why it is that WaPo and PC World forgot the most famous slogan associated with Apple products, so pervasive that it’s a running joke in most high schools around the country.

“There’s an app for that.”

Apple ticked off a lot of developers yesterday. iCloud and AirDrop together effectively replaces the DropBox app under OSX and iOS. Camera + has been outmoded by updates to the native Camera app under iOS. They ticked off their cellular partners by not letting them in on their little iMessages gag and let’s not even get started on how they pretty much made Instapaper obsolete by adding Reading List to Safari. In spite of these things, Apple did not forget why they were there.

This keynote was about the developer. This was about the changes they have made to xcode and about the new APIS and getting the SDK for all of their new features into the hands of the developers so that they could take the tools that Apple was giving them and be let loose to see what they could do with it.

It isn’t about the consumer or the end user here. It’s not about more features for you and me. It’s about more features for the developers to play with so that they can make something truly awesome for all the end users so that when Apple comes back in six months or a year and looks at everything their third party developers did, they can say, “See? Look at that! We made that possible!”

And they most certainly have.

My only lament about this keynote is the realization that my three year old 13″ unibody Macbook with a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor is the lowest CPU on the totem pole that will run Lion. That more than likely means no OSXi for me.

Somehow, I suspect that won’t be such a hardship though, even if I don’t upgrade my hardware when OSXi is released.

Osama bin Laden is Dead.

I was going to write a piece about Script Frenzy.

I had planned to sit down this morning and really go through everything that had happened while I was learning how to write a stage play over the last month.
It’s amazing how so few words can change your world and change your direction.

Osama bin Laden is dead.

There are conspiracy theorists who will say that he lives on, that the burial at sea wasn’t good enough for them. To them, I have to say: The CIA has photos. The president has seen the photos. I may not agree with President Obama’s politics, and I do believe he is the kind of man that would lie about something like this to make himself look good, but I do not believe that he is lying. There’s also the little matter of the CIA having a confirmed DNA match to bin Laden’s sister.

So there it is.

Osama bin Laden is dead.

It has been almost ten years since I first heard the man’s name spoken. I had no clue who he was until September 11, 2001. His name came up in a discussion on the events of the day on the news. I had never heard of Al Qaeda before then. I was mystified as to how these people who lived half way around the world, could change my life, could invade my country and murder so many innocents.

I still remember watching people jump out of the World Trade Center on national news. The footage was so brief, CNN only showed it once by accident and I happened to be looking at the television at the exact moment that a man or woman jumped out of a 50th floor window. That is how desperate things were that day.

I remember sitting with my best friend in my living room, watching her cry. I remember her looking away from the television and begging me to turn it off because she couldn’t watch it anymore. I had been so stunned by the images on the TV, that the horror of it all did not sink in until the next day. I remember being afraid for weeks afterwards and not sleeping a few nights later, because there was a rare thunderstorm and I thought that someone was bombing the nearby Air Force Base. I remember sitting on a park bench with a friend as our children played on the swings and both of us stopping cold as a siren went off nearby. It turned out to be from a fire truck, but at the time, we thought we were going to have to find a bomb shelter.

We all made plans for how we would live if it came down to war and our men had to leave us. We all made plans for how the children would be cared for and how we would step in for each other. Those of us that could, donated blood. Those of us that could not, prayed for our nation, for our children and for ourselves.

I had never lived in such fear.

I have carried that fear with me ever since.

In spite of my fear, I believed in our men and women in uniform. I believed that our government would never, ever, let such an atrocity stand. Politics aside, the one thing that encouraged me about Barack Obama as president was that I felt the man would not forget about September 11th. How could anyone who was alive that day, ever forget?

I know that I never will.

Now, our children are nearly grown, but they can step into the wide, wide world and take their first steps on the path to adulthood knowing that the man who killed all of those people, the man responsible for the worst attack on American soil in the history of our nation, is dead.

If I weren’t crying so hard with relief right now, I’d be dancing in the street just like the Palestinians did on September 11th.

Now it’s our turn to dance. Our turn to celebrate victory. I will not lie to you and tell you that I grieve for this man, nor do I mourn his loss. I mourn what he took from me, the sense of safety and security that no one had ever launched an attack against us at home. I mourn the peaceful life that I lived without anger directed at a human being that I had never even met. I mourn for the person that I was before September 11th, because that girl died that day.

I was much more of a free spirit. I was much more accepting of others and believed, without a shred of doubt, in the innate kindness of human beings. When those planes flew into the twin towers, those beliefs failed to help me sleep at night. The only comfort that I had, was that our government would hunt that son of a bitch down and ruin every single thing that he ever loved.

The second part was, perhaps a bit idealistic on my part, but the first part, I never doubted. I knew that our government would never stop pursuing him.

Today, as I sit here crying, now in grief at the memory of all who died on September 11th and more than a little bit for the young woman that I was before that day, and can never be again, I know that our government did not fail me in this one thing and that every single American who remembers that day stands with me in solidarity. We are in tears for what we have lost but we have no remorse or regret for the lengths we have had to go to, in order to make it right.

God does bless America, from time to time.

I Am A Scripting Warrior

I’ve hit a place with my script where I am in the doldrums. It’s just barely the beginning of week two of Script Frenzy and I’m bored with my script. My characters seem somehow less sparkly and beautiful. They seem flat and lackluster. Every time I sit down in front of my laptop to write, I have pondered the concept of becoming a Script Frenzy rebel and writing a novel instead because, while dialog seems to flow forth from my fingertips, this is my first script. That means only one thing and there is no doubt about this in my mind.

My script sucks.

Before my first NaNo, I had made a previous attempt at novelling and managed to get to 24,000 words on my own. It was a completed piece. It blew and I knew it, but the first one of anything that I write always sucks at least a little and I’m okay with that. That first novella is sitting in my personal slush pile. I think I have a printed copy of it somewhere, but I had forgotten about it entirely until my husband asked me about it a few days ago. I searched my document archives and I was shocked to find that I still had every single draft stored safely on our server.

What I wrote in the summer of 2001 serves as proof that while I can write stuff that sucks, I have the ambition and the drive to see a project through to its end. The problem is, I haven’t finished a single project since then.

A lot of what kept me moving forward during NaNo, was our wonderful MLs. There was a write in nearly every night. If there wasn’t a write in, there was always someone in the chat room ready to word war to keep me motivated. I was heavily dependent upon that to keep me writing and for the last three years that I participated in NaNo, I have won the challenge, but I have not taken a single one of those novels to completion.

I do believe that Script Frenzy has just taught me why.

When I look back on those ridiculous sentences that I put to paper ten years ago, I remember how I felt when I was writing it. I felt whole and complete. When I researched farm equipment so that I could make magical versions of it, I felt like what I was doing had purpose. I felt like *I* had purpose.

During the last three NaNos, my purpose has been to accomplish a very specific task set before me by someone else. I was able to hammer out word after word and chapter after chapter time and again. Sometimes I would get side tracked, but I would hack my way through it to the other side and manage to carve out some prose that seemed to be related to my novel. It was all stream of consciousness chatter though and often, I would find myself working completely off task on some other scene that was being created in a place where it did not belong. Hell, during my first NaNo, I managed to concoct a medieval Japanese Samurai that asked the girl working the Clinique counter at Macy’s out on a date. Figure that one out for me, please.

Amidst all of that noise, I lost sight of what really mattered. I let the story take control and I wrote for its own sake, which can be a really powerful thing at times but, at some point, you have to take the wheel. You have to stop letting the story drive you and force yourself to become the driving force behind your story.

That’s exactly where I’m at right now. We’re at the start of week 2 and I am frustrated and I am angry because I’m only on page 26 and I wanted to be at page 40 by now. Every little thing is a distraction for me. I mean every little thing, from the dogs barking, to the phone ringing, to the wind blowing through the trees outside. Any single one of those things can derail my train of thought and cause me to stop writing for at least an hour before I can get the train rolling again. I have been working on page 27 for almost a week now and that makes me even more crazy.

I want to beat this challenge, but this little story of mine, this little stage play that has been rolling around in my head for years is a lot more important to me than I thought. I realize now, that what I hoped to accomplish here is so much more than to just put down 100 pages worth of dialog, stage direction and scene descriptions. It’s not about sparring with other people or meeting some arbitrary goal, not for me. I could throw out tons of pointless banter about mindless things and get to 100 pages in nothing flat, but I’m not letting my story get away with that this time.

Instead of taking the easy path, I am having to fight this script tooth and nail to keep it on track. I am fighting to save my story. I am arguing with the pointless chatter and carefully sculpting it into something that is not pointless. After all of this battling, I’m still only hoping that I will write something that will have more meaning for me than the napkin I just tossed into the garbage can.

It’s hard, but I’ve done it before. I finished that little novella that I wrote in the summer of 2001, that I thought I had lost completely several computers ago. And yet, somehow, it’s still here. It’s horrible, poorly written, but complete and whole. It’s small and it’s rough, but I fought hard for that story. I had a lot to prove to myself back then, but now things are different.

Now, I know that I can do it again.

So here I go. Page 27… and counting.

That Beginning of the End Place.

Sometime over the weekend (Friday or Saturday, but I am not sure which day exactly because I forgot to log it), I bent down to hold Lucy’s face in my hands and kiss her nose. My fingers are usually on her neck when I do this, with my thumbs on her cheeks. This maneuver serves a dual purpose for me. It holds her head still so I can kiss her and it affords me a low stress opportunity to check her for lumps and bumps. I thought I felt something, but I wasn’t sure. So I compared notes with Mugen and found a lymph node in his cheek in, what I thought, was a similar location. So I let it go.

Sunday night, I was watching TV with hubby and I pulled the same trick on Lucy. I took her head in my hands and went to kiss her nose and the thing was big and felt hard as a rock. There was no denying that I’d found a lump that time and I was sure it wasn’t a lymph node because it was way too large and too far away from where I’d found Mugen’s lymph nodes. I freaked out, I cried a lot and I called the vet.

Dr. Katie saw us on Wednesday and said “I don’t like it.” again when she took the aspirates and did the smears, measured the mass at 2 cm by 3 cm and commented that it was egg shaped and I agreed that that sounded right. She frowned at the thing and told Lucy that she couldn’t make it any more difficult on us if she’d tried.

After the business side of thing was done, she joked that she had considered calling into work because she hates watching us go through this. I love Dr. Katie because she hates to see us. I hate to see her too. I wish I only had to see her twice a year, tops. Instead… the entire staff at the vet’s office knows Lucy and me by name. The other patients there look at us funny when they hear “Hi! How’s Miss Lucy doing?” My God those people have no idea how bad I wish that my Lucy were there for kennel cough or shots. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure that the staff at the vet’s office is even aware that I have another dog and when I do have to bring the poor pupster in, they’re not sure how to pronounce his name. (It’s moo-GEN, not MUH-gin).

I stressed out so bad that I ate Tums like candy yesterday and prayed for a lipoma, even though it’s a really shitty place to have a lipoma, and this morning, I received the cytology report. It’s a mast cell tumor. It’s higher grade, a 2 or possibly a 3. Knowing Lucy’s cancer, it’s a 3. The tumor is sitting on top of her jugular vein. At this point, Lucy’s oncologist has returned an email to let us know that she feels that there is no point in putting Lucy through surgery for this tumor and our best hope, and remaining option, is Palladia or Masitinib (also known as Kinavet).

The real problem comes in here.

These drugs, called TKIs, only work in about 40% of the canine population. There is a test to determine if Lucy is in that 40% so I want to have her tested first. There’s no sense in using Palladia or Masitinib, both of which will make Lucy sick to her stomach, if it won’t even work on her.

Failing that, we love her as hard as we can for as long as we can.

Both of these choices are painful because Palladia is not an option that I’m thrilled with and I refused this drug when we were offered it in December because the agony of holding Lucy while she was sick to her stomach at three am after chemo was very fresh in my mind. This situation is different though, the alternative is Lucy having a stroke, which I am also not particularly thrilled about.

That’s where we’re at. Either way… we’ve hit that beginning of the end place, I know it now… and I hate it very much.