From the Quote Box

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion. — Nadia Boulanger

Day 29, NaNoWriMo – What’s That I Hear?

Yes folks it was the NaNoWriMo crew applauding and cheering on my superpowers of writing and telling me I’m their hero because:

I’m ripping open my winner shirt as we speak. I like all of them although my particular favorite is the venn diagram: 50000 words, 30 days, 0 excuses. Words to live by folks. Words to live by.

Anyway, I was just part way through the part that almost crushed me with it’s abyss-ness earlier in the month. I ended up blipping over it and hurtling towards the big wedding. The abyss looks smaller but needs more fill and there’s still one wedding to go before everyone starts their happily ever after.

In the meantime I promised myself some wine and some sleep.

PS the anticipation tonight while I tried to beat the clock at the library was intense!

Maggie and NaNoWriMo Day 28

No not Rod Stewart’s Maggie May but an even older one, set to a new tune. If you like, here’s a live version with an explanation at the beginning.

Not too many more words to go… at least not to win NaNoWriMo but more to the story… ain’t that the story of my life.

PS Went to urgent care yesterday where the nurse and nurse practitioner both made me realize how lucky I am to be as healthy as I am. Which was good but I still felt terrible with this cold/throat/head thing. I got sent home with orders to do more forceful symptomatic relief and to call if no improvement by Thursday. Glad I went even though I might have been the one napping in the waiting room LOL.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here we are in veggie central, but first a look at veggies past:

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. — Fred Rogers a.k.a. Mister Rogers

Or you decide, what the heck, one more vegetable and yes, please, pass the potatoes back here.

Day 22, NaNoWriMo

After yesterday’s big push I wondered if I’d have words today, but I managed to crank out quite a few at lunch and finished solidly in the green tonight. think I’ll do a little paper and pen work (so to speak) amd figure out how to bridge my mushy/marshy spot now that I see a way to resolve the dilemma.

Day 21, NaNoWriMo — Green at Last!

That magic moment when the bar in the bar chart touches the goal line! Woot! Tonight at ten o’clock I crossed over to the green – caught up in NaNoWriMo. Par! I holed up today and wrote and wrote and wrote. Some of it was quite good (let me kvell before you tell me about killing my darlings) and some of it was ok.

Lots and lots of words.

And now I’m tired. And happy. I’ll keep going because you know, November 30 is rushing up.

Things Found By My Mother

and passed along to you.

Classic mid-late 60’s, with some classic advice including:

If you are delayed after school — or on a date — be sure to call home to save the folks worrying.

Not too many names inside, my few girl friends in school and one boy’s name almost completely erased… Most had phone numbers that began with letters. Those were the days.

Day 19 of NaNoWriMo

I was off for a few days this week and then succumbed to the cold that everyone else had last week, hitting me like a brick on Wednesday night and then pushing me into bed with some DayQuil and a box of tissues for a couple days.

In between naps and tea and hurtling kittens, I managed to write. As I reported to the NaNoWriMo folks I was mainly writing by obsessively checking my word count and watching the bar chart go up and the daily words needed to finish go down. That last happens slowly but down it went. Most of this bit of progress happened in two hundred word chunks.

So tonight I watched the counter tip over thirty thousand words and felt really good about it. And I get to blame the DayQuil for all the typos, right?

Then and Now – Gettysburg and Beyond

Looking back,I first posted these words here in 2015 after an incident in Baltimore triggered violence and looting. I reposted them two years later, a month after this president took office and thinking about what it means to be American and what is worth fighting for.

Today is the anniversary of those words being said overlooking the battlefields of Gettysburg. Two minutes that sum up what is worth fighting for and why we must continue to fight for what we believe.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

Tuesday, the 14th of NaNoWriMo

Yesterday, I had things to do – wash to do, trash to get ready, you know – stuff. And last night was a big show on The Voice. I think it was in a short span between doing laundry and getting ready to go write words that I felt a need to sit down and throw paint at paper. (The paper wasn’t too cooperative and I realized later it was because it was the second to last sheet of paper in the block. So it wasn’t really attached to anything. OK, but I still like taping my watercolor paper down more.) This is what came of it.

I was off today. I was off Monday. I am off tomorrow. I am grateful to whatever caused that to happen. This morning I was up bright and early to get three cats to a meeting with destiny, I mean, the vet. That took some pre-planning yesterday and some trickery this morning but we all got there and back and as far as I know, no one got hurt or bitten.

The kittens are now vaccinated and won’t have to go back until probably January when it will be time to deactivate their reproductive systems. They’re in fine shape and didn’t even seem thrown by the two shots today.

Anyway the mission was to get them there and back and then to find some way to get some words written. And that happened too. I got a few hours where I wrote a big scene. Not exactly sure that is how it went down but there’s something and I’m moving on. Yesterday was harder writing because there were five different groups of people who delivered blessings for the newlyweds and those are in poem form. Today I was writing a coronation speech but the Queen is a pretty good inspirational speaker so not as hard. Ended up with more words than this and there might be a few left in me.