That’s My Dog

So… Lucy took off out the front door last night.

Somehow she managed to slip a martingale collar AND the cone of shame at the same time and run out the front door and take off down the street. I was not a witness to this, I just heard my daughter shout, “HELP!”

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A Thousand Words Before Breakfast: Why I Participate in NaNoWriMo

I am, by nature, a writer. It is what I am. It is what I do and it is what I love.

When I’m writing, I feel alive. I feel connected with the world around me. It’s my lifeline. I live a very boring existence, I have a family, I have a couple of dogs that do hilarious things, but generally speaking, my life is dull. I’m okay with that, but sometimes, the boredom gets to me. That is when I most need to create. I need to let the creative monster inside me out to play and romp in ways that I can’t allow it to do in my every day life. So, I choose my canvas carefully and I begin to lay down a swatch of color. Whole worlds and sceneries appear before my eyes, usually in my sleep when I’m feeling my worst. What comes out on the other side of it, leaves me feeling better than I did before I went to bed that night.

I do not share the majority of my offerings with the general public. When I write, I feel like I’m opening up a vein and bleeding out all over the floor so the world can see exactly what shade of red the blood is. When I write, what I write is intensely personal to me. It’s difficult to share it with the outside world. There are things that I don’t want people to know about me, things on which I would rather keep the door closed. There are deep scars that make themselves just a little more visible in my prose. It’s hard to open the door on those things. It’s hard to admit to yourself that you have fears, dreams and hopes that you aren’t ever going to reach. At times, it’s even harder to admit that you the person who is holding you back.

NaNoWriMo provides an opportunity for me, as a writer, to get the hell out of my own way. So many people who either refuse, or have never really participated in NaNo just can’t get out of their own way. I’ve seen a lot of evidence of that this year. Every year, there is criticism, but this year in particular, it seems that “professional” writers and publishers are really taking NaNo to task. I have even noticed that some publishers simply do not accept unsolicited manuscripts between the months of November and February and I suspect that has more than a little to do with NaNo participants.

I have seen wonderful articles written by authors I admire that specifically degrade NaNo as a useless endeavor for anyone serious about writing, and I have seen brilliant writers, whom I have never actually read, put a very fine point on why my doing NaNo is none of anyone else’s damned business. So, in response to all of the naysayers, let me just say this and get it out of the way now.

It’s not about you.

The majority of the people that I’ve run into in my day to day life that look at me with skepticism when I mention that I am a NaNo participant and have been for three years running, are also the sort of people who will never actually bother to sit down and write a novel. They would rather read novels than write them, or they have day jobs and more important things to do with their time. They are content in their day to day existence and are not willing to disturb that state of contentment. They are unwilling to rock the boat.

Writers that get published and that have successful careers are not the sort of people who sit very carefully inside neat and tidy little boxes. Writers are an odd bunch. We have our quirks, bad hair cuts that we like to keep in a particular sort of bad are a good example. I have noticed that Neil Gaiman’s twitter photo shows him sporting a shirt that looks rather rumpled and as though he’d just fished it out of a laundry basket that morning.

And let’s face it, have you all seen Stephen King? The guy’s a total nerd. He looks about as terrifying as your average puppy. Somehow, in spite of that completely not scary, puppy factor, the man has this uncanny ability to scare the shit out of you with nothing more than twenty minutes of your time and one of his nightmares.

Are YOU that bold?

If you’re sitting around whining about how NaNo is a waste of time, I suspect that you are not. I suspect that you are the sort of person who will not rock boats, who is content to sit on the sidelines and let life flow right on by without taking any sort of action to get the things that you want out of life. You would rather simply let those things come to you.

I refuse to sit around and wallow in complacency. I can’t. It’s not who I am and doing so makes me miserable. My participation in NaNoWriMo is my own little form of protest. It is how I get myself back to happy, just in time for the holiday season. It is my proverbial middle finger to all of the people who say that the odds are against me and that writing is a waste of my time. It is the one time of the year when I get to be who I am and do what I love and share it with other like-minded individuals.

The only thing that separates me from a professional writer is ambition. What separates me from those of you who are not published professionals that are whining about what I do, is that I have actually done it.

Congrats to all of the Winners from NaNoWriMo 2010!

You have accomplished something much greater than yourself. By simply showing up and stepping up to the plate, you have made other people think about what you are doing and challenged their ideas about how the world works.

Good for you!

Who?

The only decent thing I have written all day… and it turns out to be… a Poem.

You have no idea how not thrilled I am by this… but I do rather like the poem and so, you may find it here.

Who?

How Faces Changed My Life in 20 Minutes.

As I type this, I am in tears.

I have seen photos of my children that I had been trying to find for months. I have found photos of a dear friend who has passed on, that I did not even know I had.

I am in awe at how much of my life I have recorded on “film”, I am so moved by seeing the past three years of my life in pictures in front of my face… that I can’t stop crying and I will likely run us out of kleenex and use up a couple of rolls of TP before I’m done writing this article.

I had no idea how much of it I’d actually captured until I sat down to play with iPhoto 11 this morning. There were pictures of our road trip to Seattle. Pictures of my husband and I going to buy my MINI Cooper. Pictures of my dog before he passed, snuggling all of my family members, I thought I only had photos of him with my daughter. I found pictures of my son cradling a 6 week old Mugen in his arms that I didn’t know were in my iPhoto library. Times in my life have been hard, but there have been a lot of good days, a lot of them. I had forgotten how good they were.

Apple, I can’t say enough about how moved I am by the power of this tool.

In the past, what I have done with iPhoto is the following:

I plug in my iPhone to sync it to iTunes. I shut iPhoto. I move on with my day. I imported photos into it when I needed a quick, one photo edit job and the rest of it, managing albums and all that crud… well that’s what flickr and facebook were for for me.

Not anymore. With the faces and places features, it’s actually worth it to me to sit down with iPhoto and import all of my photos into it. Rather than having to organize everything by event and time and date, I can click on Susan’s name in the Faces pane and with a paft of magic computer dust, there they are. Every photo in my photo library of Susan. And then I can slap it all into a slideshow that looks something like this:

Slideshows can be exported to mpeg4 format, which both Facebook and Flickr can play without any issues. It’s got some quick and dirty resolution settings for you so you can choose what display size you want the playback to look good in if you choose to save the file in iTunes format. You can further tweak with the MPEG playback settings, but for the sake of my sanity, I went with the defaults. As you can see, the default mp4 video quality looks pretty awful in the Reflections theme and did nothing to show off how neat looking that theme actually is. I’ll have to choose a different theme the next time I decide to use a video that small.

But that’s not the show stopper. For me, the show stopper is the social networking integration. Flickr and Facebook. I was unable to try the Flickr integration today. Flickr seemed to be having some issues and was very bogged down. I suspect it was because a lot of folks were doing exactly what I was trying to do, upload their iPhoto library to Flickr. I’ll update this review in a couple of days when Flickr is less insane.

The Facebook integration, however, is just made of win. It’s SUPER easy. You can select an album, click on the word “Share” and choose how you want to share it, be that via email, or uploading to Facebook. Once you login to Facebook, it starts uploading the album. From there, you can tag, delete, comment… all of it, through iPhoto, without ever having to open your web browser. My family will never complain that I don’t post pictures of my kids again, and this is a complaint they have had with me for over a decade now. I have uploaded over a hundred photos of my kids today and I did it in five minutes flat.

Places is neat, I suppose, if you travel a lot. Since I don’t, and I don’t tend to GPS tag my photos, it’s not all that interesting to me. I have been to like two places in the same state, but it’s nice to be able to find my Seattle Trip Photos based on their GPS tags.

And… that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. I have a lot more playing around to do with iPhoto today, but the fact that I am actually using it and excited about it means it’s a huge step above iPhoto ’08.

If you’re sitting on the fence about upgrading to iLife 11, stop. It’s well worth the price. And realize that I’m just talking about iPhoto. I haven’t even broken open Garage Band yet.

I have been thinking for weeks about how Facebook has changed the world we live in because of all of the people that it connects us with that we never thought we’d see again. But really, the truth is, Faces has done all of that for me and more. Now I can really, truly connect with my family and friends on Facebook in a way that doesn’t require me to spend hours tagging photos with the names of every person in them so that no one feels left out, and then there’s the ability to upload photos to Facebook at a whim.

You’ve done it Apple. You’ve made another product that makes my life with my Mac that much easier.

Thanks.

Oh no! Not… DIRT!!!

So… the fence is in. Hubby and I are very pleased with it. We have to decide what color to stain it so that it doesn’t clash with our neighbor’s lovely chocolate brown fence.

I have been so excited. I should have taken Lucy and Mugen out on lead… but I didn’t. I was too excited. I opened the back door and they took off like shots. Lucy, of course, headed straight to the areas of the yard that she knew would take her out of the yard and none of them worked. She was confused by this… but then she started running around all over the place and had such a huge doggie smile. I wish that I could have found my camera. It was wonderful to see her being a dog.

Mugen did much the same, but he found STUFF in the yard. Stuff that had been lost when my children were very, very small. He found a gun holster that once belonged to my son. It went to some tacky guns that I banished from the house because Reilly growled whenever he saw them. I banned them from our house when my son was 8 years old… that was 9 years ago… how they managed to stay in our yard, I do not know. Where Mugen found it, I do not know. All I know is, he found it… and he hunted it down and took off with it so the people could chase him and grab him and take it before he could swallow it whole.

The yard will be thoroughly cleaned, starting tomorrow. Many dump runs will be made.

The important thing though… is that I have discovered that my dogs have discovered something horrible.

Dirt.

I have lived in this house for 10 years. We adopted Reilly before we moved in. I had forgotten what it is like to have a dog that has free and easy access to stuff like… dirt.

You see Reilly… hated dirt. Reilly did not enjoy going outside in the rain and would hold is bladder if we opened a door on a rain shower. He was such a tidy, neat dog.

And then I looked around my yard and I saw Lucy digging in the dirt.. and Mugen EATING the dirt and I saw them getting dirty and I realized… that my house… is never going to be clean again.

And somehow… I am completely okay with that.

Pictures of the fence and the hooligans being hooligans in their new fenced yard will come tomorrow. I ran out of daylight today. I was too busy convincing Mugen that eating dirt was a bad thing.

Confirmed! Squirrels Plot to Destroy Humanity 1 Person At a Time.

I really feel that I owe an explanation to every human being that sees me out in public over the course of the next week or two. I have a horrible bruise on my left arm. It goes around the entire inside of my arm and across the top of it. Right now, it is a yellowing gray… it’s awful. It looks like someone tried to break my arm in half.

That’s because someone did and it was, of course, my dog.

Mugen and I went to a park earlier this week. I sat down at a picnic table to eat some lunch and was using the remains of a hamburger to bait Mugen into ignoring the squirrels and paying attention to me. This worked for a while. We were having a good time, and this was good practice for Mugen since his CGC test is coming up in 3 short weeks.

Things were going pretty good.

Little did I know that the squirrels in that park were plotting my demise.

As I reached for a piece of bacon off of the cheeseburger, a squirrel snuck up behind us and poked his head out from behind a tree. He looked straight at Mugen who’s hackles went up in a fully body mohawk that spread from the back of his neck to the base of his tail. I felt the leash tense and I turned to look at Mugen and adjusted it so that I had a better hold on it. I told Mugen “Leave it.” and he came back to his spot at my left side and sat in a heel at my knee. I praised him with the piece of bacon and then I went to reach into the bag to grab a couple of french fries while simultaneously grabbing my soda with the other hand (and yes, I am a bit ambidextrous).

What happened next, I can only theorize. I didn’t actually witness it, but was merely a victim of it. What I do know is that the squirrel must have taken off from behind the tree where Mugen had seen it originally and headed for the tree that was directly in front of us. He took off very, very fast and must have counted on my leash grip on Mugen to save his annoying little life.

Mugen stood up and bolted for the squirrel with the full force of his 70 pounds of almost entirely muscle… and this caused the leash to slip out of my fingers and down my wrist to the middle of my arm where I swung my arm up and pulled it toward my chest so that Mugen wouldn’t shred a squirrel in a spray of blood and gore in front of the toddlers that were playing in the park in plain sight of us.

It hurt like hell and the pain must have knocked the wind out of me because I had no voice to correct Mugen with.

Mugen continued to strain at the end of the leash and I finally managed to catch my breath and said, “Leave it.” Mugen turned back to look at me and cried. I said “No. Leave it.” and he came back to me again and sat down.

He’s really a good boy. Reilly would have continued to strain at the end of that leash until I bodily drug him out of that park and put him in the car. Mugen walked away from that picnic bench and did not look back after I said the words “Let’s go.”

The Morning Freak Out

I’m not sure why, but my entire family has been missing Reilly very hard this week. Yesterday, I dusted his commemorative dog bowl. His collar had dust on it and when I grabbed the leather lotion and a cloth… I just started crying. When my son came home, he said to me, without me having mentioned a word to him about my feelings, “Mom, I really miss Reilly today for some reason. I’ve been missing him all week.” My husband voiced similar feelings while cooking dinner and fending Mugen off of his pant leg. At one point, he bent down and put an arm around Mugen and said, “I’m used to there being a dog under foot, but you’re supposed to stay on the ground and sniff at the edge of the counter and then sit and wag your tail at me… and then I’m supposed to give you a piece of chicken when Mom’s not looking.”
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Seattle MINI

As many of you may remember, my experiences at Northwest MINI last summer were nothing short of a nightmare. I was in tears when I finally made it home. I couldn’t even complain while I was at the dealership because I was so angry that I was afraid I’d go postal on the staff there. When I got home I emailed a scathing letter to the lovely man who sold Viola to me… and he vowed to make it right and suggested that he would take care of my car personally or that I could go to Seattle MINI when it opened this year.
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Dear Mr. President.

I know you are a very busy man and I’m no one really important in your life. I’m just a voter, a mother of two who has a couple of really great dogs who has lived her life believing in this country and what it stands for. I’m being honest when I say that I didn’t even vote for you. I wanted to believe in you though. I wanted to believe that the change you promised would be good for this country. This country really needs to believe in itself again and I wanted to think that you could do that with your enthusiasm and your passion. The only reason I didn’t vote for you, is because I couldn’t figure out what it was exactly that you wanted to change.

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Parenting Teenagers Sucks.

This morning, hubby again tried to let me sleep in. He’s so sweet and I love him for it… but my daughter when she’s hormonal… I swear I could just explode.

Hubby had her put Lucy out. She didn’t wait for Lucy to go all the way. Both dogs, first thing in the AM have to do 1 and 2. She let Lucy pee but didn’t wait for the second half of the game. So she brought Lucy back in. Lucy, bless her heart, came upstairs to my bedroom and bumped her head on the door and tried to wake me up. I woke up in time to catch her squatting on my carpet as hubby was running up the stairs after her. Poor baby.

So quite obviously, I was awake for the day.

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