ryokogal

Really there was so much to Michael Jackson. An incredible talent wrapped up in an incomprehensible man.

I'd wondered about him, before. About the dynamo on stage who was so soft-spoken and lived so strangely. About how impossible it was to separate truth from lies, when everyone both for and against him had something to gain. Wondered if the performances were real, and if the personal life the media saw was just an act, because with so much chaos, the stage was the only place he could really be alive.

For the most part, I've been avoiding news stories about his death. They want to dredge back up all the juicy bits to make a good story. I've heard those, thank you, and they weren't that great the first time around. Besides, I'm allergic to sensationalism.

Instead I've been trying to piece together who he actually was. Not that I could claim to know him by any means. But everyone seems to like to look at the "what" without bothering to ask "why?" and I find it irritating. No one seems curious about what 40 years of fame and wealth and being in the public eye might do to someone.

It also made me ponder his friendship with Macaulay Culkin and how, if you think about it, it kind of made sense. Then I found this article and it makes even more sense. For parallels: Michael's interview with Oprah in 1993. Yet he did a lot for people and hopefully found some of the joy that he instilled so easily in others.

In the words of Peter Pan, "To die will be an awfully big adventure." So, on to bigger and better things, Michael.

Slacking off again on the old blog. I spend the past week speed-knitting a project for my cousin's baby shower. It turned out cute, but I did a pattern heart on the bib (by eyeballing it, not working from a pattern) and had to tear it out and redo about six times, so I was thoroughly sick of it by the end. Seemed like a good idea at the time...

Haven't been to the gym in a couple weeks. Think I will head back there this week. I'm feeling it. :P

Doesn't seem like June would be a time to feel blah, but I do feel restless. We may do a weekend trip soon, possibly even camping, so maybe that will help. :) Just need to get out of the house, go do something different.

Lame...just an update post. I've decided not to stress about it; my throat is killing me from allergies and the bourbon isn't helping, and all I want to do is go to bed. Actually, I want to stay up and write, but my throat is too distracting.

Went to a sci-fi/fantasy convention last weekend, Marcon. Went to interesting panels on Vampires in Literature, Shakespeare in Fantasy and Sci-Fi, and something about social media/networking... The high point of amusement of the weekend was when I got hit on by a charismatic Klingon. I may yet join them. :) Geeked out in my Bujold fandom by buying a "Barrayar" T-shirt and a book, "The Vorkosigan Companion", as well as an unrelated deck of Ruroni Kenshin playing cards, and enjoyed both Thai and Indian food which my stomach somehow survived.

Next weekend, I think I shall tackle the garden. If I can build the raised garden bed I've been wanting and replace the drooping supports for the grapevine, the garden will be in good shape. The sproutlings are overgrowing their little plastic trays, so they really need to be planted soon.

Feeling overheated and grouchy. Time for bed.

I sing in my Mom's church choir. As today is Good Friday, the church decided to include in the service a dramatic skit/play. It's based on a book by a religious writer whose name I can't remember, and portrays a modern-day Jesus having dinner with an Average-Joe type of person.

The part of Jesus was played by the pastor's son. The part of the other guy was played by a person I didn't know. Partway through the skit, I realized that the unknown actor sounded, gestured, and even looked a bit like the actor who played Wash on Firefly.

It obviously wasn't him -- this guy was younger, and not off in Hollywood making movies and TV shows. But the good-natured sarcasm, the slight awkwardness, the hand gestures, they were all there. The only thing missing was the Chinese swear words. Um...and the dinosaurs.

I've been feeling very blah for the past week or so. Maybe still fighting sickness that sent me home early on Wednesday (but seemed to have vanished by Thursday.) Next week promises to be horrifically busy. This weekend was nice though -- got a haircut, took cat to vet, started my veggie garden seeds, and went out with hubby for dinner on Saturday, then grilled some Amazing Porkburgers and asparagus for lunch today. First grilling of the season!

A little grill-girl exposition here. I'm proud because I got the fire going first try with natural charcoal and newspaper, WITHOUT my grill chimney (which I threw out a month ago because it was rusted through.) Also I usually don't use enough charcoal, but it was just enough this time (plus I would have used more but it was the last of the bag.) AND I used some smoking wood chips (mesquite?) for the first time EVER. You soak them in water and put them on hot coals and they make everything all smokey. They are made from chopped up casks that they store Jack Daniels in, and they made the burgers delicious. I can't wait to try them with chicken. *hugs her grill*

Okay, back on track. It's spring, so time to look at those old winter goals.

-Finish first draft of YA novel (to be prodded along by kankusan's January NaNo II challenge!) Erm, maybe 60%. I did make progress! But it's not done.
-Plan and keep to regular exercise program 70%. I was doing well until about two weeks ago when I got sick.
-Clean and organize yellow (spare) room so it's in a state of usefulness 0%. It's only gotten worse. Let us not speak of it.
-Finish knitting legwarmers promised to sister *sigh* 50%. One of 'em is done.
-Work on creating professional blog 50%. I think I'm getting a start. Need to focus
-Update all blogs on regular schedule 30%. If "regular" meant once every couple weeks, I'd be doing better.
-Submit short stories until published 0%. None submitted.

Could be worse. Also, I still have my xmas lights on my house. *sigh* It's just so damn involved, climbing up on the roof. I don't think I'll put them on the upper level next year...at least the wreath is finally out of my front window. If I can hang my fake forsythia garland on the walls before the real forsythia start blooming, I'll be in good shape.

It's spring, and I haven't planted anything yet. I'd wanted to start my vegetable seedlings in March.

I also still have a few lingering Christmas decorations up. Like the wreath in the front window. *facepalm*

Still slogging through writing, and not making nearly as much progress as I want.

I've made it to the gym at least once a week. Sometimes twice. Doesn't quite justify the cost.

I took ten minutes this morning to catch up on phoning in appointments that needed to be made. Still need to schedule a couple doctor appointments and an oil change.

The birthday party gauntlet of March will not be finished until next week. Note to self: plan accordingly so no children are born in March.

I need to do laundry. Again.

I can't find the file for the story I want to work on. I probably have it saved on diskette, which means I have to boot up my PC, transfer from diskette to flash drive, then transfer flash drive to netbook, which I prefer to write on. Which is all entirely too much effort.

All I need is one weekend. One big, bright, empty-calendar-blocked weekend. That's all I ask.

Typical, uneventful, fun. We tend to stay in and avoid the drunken nuts on St. Patrick's Day.

Wore green to work. Read my sister's annual "Top o' th' Marnin" email. Made shepherd's pie and black&tan beers for dinner. Enjoyed the weather with a nice walk, vegged out in front of the TV while interneting and folding laundry.

Now Alfred Hitchcock is trying to sell me real estate on the moon. It must be time to go to bed. :P

Fighting illness. It's been going around at work. It just hit Friday and settled into my upper respiratory, and I've just started coughing and the whole nose thing. Spent half of both Saturday and Sunday sleeping and the other half vegging in front of the TV. My big accomplishment: doing dishes and making homemade chicken and rice soup on Saturday, and banana chocolate chip bread on Sunday. And I have enough of both for comfort food tomorrow.

Since I was feeling a bit under the weather Friday night, I decided to finish the Netflix movie I've been sitting on for a week and a half. Pan's Labyrinth. Yikes. Dark, dreary, depressing. And gory. I don't generally mind most R-rated flicks, but this one was pretty bad, probably because it was so realistic. It was sort of a typical cross-breed of realistic fiction and fantasy, like the book One Hundred Years of Solitude. Neat ideas, but not one I could re-watch. And here I'd been thinking of possibly watching What Dreams May Come again, which I saw in college and found amazing, but left me pretty down. Probably not such a good idea.

Thus, the rest of the weekend's viewing pleasure was COPS, the assorted funny animated shows, As Time Goes By, and a lot of old TV and movies on the new digital Retro TV station, like old Battlestar Galactica and some westerns. And there was much rejoicing.

Now, writing, cough medicine, and bed. Which all sound amazing to me right now.

Almost missed my plane this morning, due to me not being a morning person. :( Terrible.

Made it back home by 1pm, without having had lunch. Cheap-ass airline wanted to charge $3 for a little bag of in-flight potato chips. For real. So all I had was coffee and a half of a danish before the flight, and then more coffee during the flight.

Hubby and I went out for lunch, then I crashed and slept for two hours after we got home. Had pizza and wine for dinner, along with good conversation.

Tomorrow, back to the grind. After work, will work out and focus on writing. I made some good progress on the plane; have to keep up momentum!

Fun day. Woke up, had delicious bagel turkey sandwich, went for horseback riding. Except they called right as we were heading out, and high winds were spooking the horses, so they had to cancel. :(

So we decided to go over to the lake anyway, and took the dog to the beach. No swimming - a bit chilly for that - but we sat in the sun and skipped rocks and ran with the dog in the sand and collected itty bitty shells, and it was fun.

Also hit up a thrift store, the multi-ethnic Asian Buffet (lots of sushi and some good Chinese and Korean dishes) and after it got dark, one of those parking-lot carnivals. We rode the ferris wheel, and it was awesome.

On the way to the lake, though, we drove through rural parts of Texas I hadn't really seen before. And on the way there, we saw bushes of flat round cactus leaves. Some bunches were about 4 feet across, and probably knee-high. Then, on the way back, we had to slow down because of longhorn cattle on either side of the road. They looked at us in bewilderment, as if wondering what on earth cars were doing out in the middle of their grazing land.

Flying back tomorrow. It was a nice weekend, something different, and a few days away from the cold winter weather. :)

Travel to Texas. Bad hotel breakfast. Ten more hours to drive.

On the bright side, the dog did not puke this time.

I need coffee. (Non-hotel coffee.)

Hadn't been to the gym all week, but we made it today. Then I promptly earned back all the calories I'd burned with a big old steak burrito from Chipotle, some tortilla chips, and homemade guacamole. Om nom nom.

Seriously, I think avocados are my new favorite food. They're fairly healthy, in moderate amounts. The good kind of fat, and all that. I just need to find ways to enjoy it that don't involve tortilla chips en masse. Jimmy John's has a turkey sandwich that I love that has avocado spread on it, and so I think I'm going to use that inspiration and make myself a turkey wrap for lunch tomorrow using my leftover guacamole. Yes, I have leftover. (Only because I ran out of chips.) And I only used one of my two avocados. o.O Maybe I'll make sushi rolls this weekend using the other one.

In other news, I need a haircut. I noticed today that I have split ends. The highlights I had have grown out because I'm noticing my gray hairs again, but I'm not sure if I'll get that done or not. I just want a fun haircut. More layers so it's not so flat. That sort of thing.

And maybe highlights. ;P

Ironically...

Writing group meeting in an hour. Spent the last five hours (seriously!) reading and critiquing 40k words because I just can't be bothered to plan ahead. Orororo... @_@

On the other hand, writing group meetings are always good to spike my writer's bug into gear. Current plan: complete YA novel draft by mid-March, so that I can submit chapters 1-2 for review at the beginning of March, get them reviewed at the mid-March meeting (preferably after draft is complete) and then dive right into revision.

I just can't buckle down. So easily distracted by other stories and ideas. Case in point: wrote prologue chapter yesterday for YA novel sequel, because it wouldn't leave me alone. Yes, SEQUEL. There's that damn optimism again, assuming the first book will actually be published, and also be successful enough to demand additional story. Yikes, yikes, and more yikes.

Planning to go sledding tomorrow morning while the snow lasts and I have a day off work. :) Then writing in the afternoon, with you-know-who if she's up for it. *nudge*

Time for the quarterly review of goals.

Autumn Goals:
Continuously submit completed short stories until published - 0%. Didn't submit a single one.
Finish first draft of YA novel - 30%. Made progress, but definitely not finished.
Work on creating a "professional" blog - as in professional/personal - 0%. Not started.
Update said blog (and this LJ, and the cat one) on a regular schedule - 0%. Nada. Zip. Zero. I barely updated this one, which I have come to think of as my "casual" blog.
Plan and keep to a regular exercise program - 0%. I'm just trying not to laugh too hard. So sad.


So, in light of these stunning results, I'll be carrying these goals over to my Winter goals. Reordered for priority, with additions:

-Finish first draft of YA novel (to be prodded along by kankusan's January NaNo II challenge!)
-Plan and keep to regular exercise program
-Clean and organize yellow (spare) room so it's in a state of usefulness
-Finish knitting legwarmers promised to sister
-Work on creating professional blog
-Update all blogs on regular schedule
-Submit short stories until published

Due date: March. Let's say, by my birthday. My 30th birthday. Ye gods.

Goals for 2009:
General planning of career goals (i.e., what is my next step or target?)
General planning of family timeline.
Finish draft and first revision of YA novel. (Optimistic? May I ever remain so.)
Implement one house project: electric/hot tub, or bathroom renovation, or back porch.
Travel somewhere I've never been.

The good news is, after spending much of the spare hours of December playing WoW and lounging around re-reading Bujold's Vorkosigan series, I'm feeling very motivated. I desire to be productive. I want order, and achievement. I want to do things. (Did I mention I read Artie Isaac's recent blog entries today? Motivational even when he's not trying. Or maybe he's just always trying.)

Goals for tonight: Drink wine. Relax. Watch new anime or play Warcraft. The work for 2009 shall begin tomorrow.

Because it's going around...


50 ODD things about you! If you read this, FILL IT OUT! Learn 50 things about your friends, and let them learn 50 things about you!
( Behind the Cut )

Waved the white flag on NaNo sometime around Thanksgiving, after reaching 15k words. The problem with NaNo is that it's in November, and I always start out the month strong, but as it gets closer to December I get caught up in other things - holiday things that I like and enjoy and look forward to every year. So when it comes down to writing or putting up my Christmas tree or making a dish to take to Thanksgiving or going shopping for gifts...the writing just doesn't look as attractive.

Maybe my priorities are skewed. Or maybe I just lack self-discipline (no news there.)

Home sick today with a bad headcold. Was thinking about going in for a couple hours this afternoon to get some work done if I felt better, but I think I'll just skip it and crunch tomorrow. My brain still feels foggy, although I do feel a bit better as far as the nose and throat go. Of course, I also slept for about 13 hours, from 10pm last night to noon-thirty today, minus the hour or so I was awake at 4am. Had tomato soup, crackers, and bread with jam for lunch; think I may eat a grapefruit as well. Go, vitamin C, go!

I think, post-grapefruit, I shall try to write. Because why not? Not like there's anything on TV to distract me from feeling brain-dead. *blows nose at daytime TV*

Woot - writing from Texas where I'm visiting my sister. It's nice weather here!! Made a little progress writing on the plane trip, but not a whole lot. The Acer AspireOne is a pretty sweet little netbook; I'm really enjoying it. Fits easily on the tray table on the plane, AND fits in my big travel purse. (Thanks hubby!)

We're going to go to IHOP for brunch, then shopping, then a buffet of some sort that includes sushi. Delicious!

Then we will pack the car and drive Saturday and Sunday across half the country back to Ohio. Ten hours each day. With three cats and a dog. Ha!! I am so insane...it's kind of fun though. Right now, for instance, I'm sitting on the couch typing on the netbook with the dog curled up against my right leg, and a cat draped over my left leg with his paw occasionally resting on my hand as I type. Too cute.

Regarding the car - had the hubby drive it, and we decided it's actually not the car that has bad pickup, it's the way I'm driving it. I've been driving a car with horrible pickup that can't accelerate past 35 without me pumping the gas pedal (or the Check Engine light goes from solid to blinking and the whole car shudders...) It's been getting steadily worse over the past year, and so I'd adjusted my driving style/gas pedaling to compensate for the fact that the car had no pickup so it wouldn't explode or die on the freeway or something horrible. So I really just haven't been giving the Rabbit the leadfoot it needs to go quick.

Also, it has a nifty thing called tiptronic transmission, which allows you to pretend your automatic is a manual and switch gears as you drive. Then if you get tired of it, you just click it back over into automatic/D and it goes merrily on its way. Hubby says it is very fun to drive. It's like all the fun parts of driving stick, without the clutch or the stalling. Once I learn it, I'm sure I will enjoy driving it even more. :)

So, if you ask me, I would in fact recommend it. It has more room inside than it seems like it should, too. Maybe it's got some sort of interdimensional warp bubble where the inside is bigger than the outside. Yeah, I'm sure that's it. Good old VW - always ahead of its time.

In NaNo news, broke 10K words today - wooooooot!! Even though I'm still behind by official NaNo calculations...it's nothing to sneeze at. Amusingly, I feel like I've written a ton but don't feel like I've gotten very far in the plot. Which either means the pacing is way too slow, or I have a boatload left to write. Maybe 50K words isn't going to finish this puppy up after all. o.O Only time - and editing - will tell.

To my fellow NaNites...er, WriMos, whatever the hell we're called...keep on tappin' at those keys! We're coming up on the halfway point of the month - enjoy it through the angst and the brain farts and all, because November only comes once a year! :D

And yes, I'm entirely too chipper for this time of night.

Weekend update:

Bought a car. This car. It is cute and spectacular and has heated seats. Yes, you heard me. One minute into my drive, the car is still cold but my rear end is nice and toasty. Amazing.

I'm still kind of iffy...the pickup isn't as good as I thought it would be and it handles a little slow. I have five days to return it (!) if I so desire, so I'll drive it another day or two and see if I change my mind. But so far it's the first one out of three car shopping trips that I've even been excited about, so I went for it. I really can't afford to keep pushing my poor broken POS that has served me so well for 8 years and 100,000 miles.

But it is cute. The dash display is nice, and it has a great amount of roominess for the gas mileage it gets.

And it does, after all, have heated seats.