The NaBloPoMo prompt for today:
What is the first thing you see when you walk in your house?
Right now, the first thing anybody sees is Sam’s desk. No, that isn’t precisely right. If you’re looking straight ahead at the wall, you see a collage by Katie, which is much lovelier.
The NaBloPoMo prompt for today:
How do you feel when you return home at the end of the day?
I’m not sure I should have answered this one, as I doubt that my answer will be in sync with the intent of the question. I don’t leave home every day to go to work, or leave home every day, period.
However, when I do leave home, how I feel when I return depends on many factors. How did I feel before leaving? How long was I gone, and how much physical, intellectual, and emotional energy did I have to expend while I was out? Did I have to deal with anything unexpected, good or bad? How many people was I around? Were they strangers or people known to me? Did I encounter them all at once, or in small groups of one or two at a time? Was Sam with me as a buffer? fHow’s my blood sugar? Am I well hydrated? What was the weather like? Did I remember to take my regular medications? What about taking breakthrough pain medication, anxiety medication, or a muscle relaxant before I found myself in a state where they wouldn’t work very well? Did I use my scooter if there was much walking? How noisy was the environment? Was it drafty, or overly hot or cold? Did I have to drive? Was I out to do something I wanted to do, or was I doing something I had to do?
Frequently, I’m so dog-tired that I can barely drag myself in the door. I have actually fallen asleep sitting in the car, in the driver’s seat, more than once. (There are plenty of reasons that I do not drive much any more.) Dealing with the security system seems an intellectual challenge designed for Einstein. I’m easily confused and my memory is beyond poor. Even if I am dehydrated or I need to eat, I’m too tired to be interested in food or even water. If I was out for too long, or if it was a particularly stressful period, I get a fever and my body reacts as if I’m in shock. I feel like I’m freezing, no matter what the actual temperature around me is, and I start shaking badly.
So that’s how I feel most days when I return home at the end of the day, if I’ve had to leave home. I think that should go a long way towards explaining why I’m such a homebody these days! I am fortunate in that I have Sam, Katie, and others in my life, so I am able to have a fulfilling life without being very adventurous.
The NaBloPoMo prompt for today:
What was your favourite part about returning to school?
That’s not an easy question. It wasn’t cool to acknowledge being happy to return to school each year, of course, so while I was glad, I didn’t really acknowledge it to myself. As a result, it is more difficult to access those memories.
Even though I knew there would be endless amounts of review each year, I was always excited about the possibility of learning something new. After we left Gadsden, I was able to look forward to school library access, too. (The elementary school I attended in Alabama didn’t even have a library, and back then, the Gwinnett County Public Library wasn’t the award winning facility that it is now.)
I also had a secret hope that maybe this would be the year when I would meet someone like me. Someone else who didn’t fit in. Someone who preferred books to most people, who either didn’t go to church or was only there because his or her parents forced the issue, who would be willing to discuss the questions brought up by all the contradictions in the Bible and various church’s teachings (and how preachers and other church leaders actually lived). Someone who didn’t think it was bad to be intelligent, maybe even someone who would admit to daydreaming and making up new stories about people they’d read about, or completely new stories of their own. The kind of people you didn’t run into just because your parents bought houses in the same neighborhood, or went to the same church, or worked for the same company.
I did meet someone who became a dear friend in the first week of my Junior year, on the bus, in fact. She even lived in my neighborhood! I continue to be amazed by the fact that I said something to her first, as she’s far more extroverted than I have ever been. Dorothea is a treasure, and I will always be thankful for meeting her.
The NaBloPoMo prompt for today:
How did you feel about the start of the school year growing up?
As far as I remember, I was usually excited—at least after 7th grade or so. School up to that point was so intensely boring that I couldn’t wait to get out of it so I could go back to whatever I was reading or doing in the woods somewhere. I hated second grade so much that I think I spent most of it napping in the school clinic (we had one with several little alcoves and beds. I think I may have been having migraines, honestly).
Up until 7th grade, it seemed that the first half of every year was spent reviewing what was done the previous year because so many people didn’t really learn it or forgot everything during the summer. I kept thinking, “I’m here why? They could just tell the rest of us when the review is over. I’m wasting my life here!” I think it’s telling that I spent much of the 4th and 5th grades acting as an unofficial substitute teacher and didn’t miss a bloody thing by not being in my own class.
In 7th grade we finally started doing more serious academic work. That’s the first year that I recall any science content that could actually be called science, since we had lab assignments. Before that we had little texts about animals and geology and the planets, but it was all so elementary that it might as well have been a stack of Little Golden Books. The only difference was that we had little vocabulary tests and the occasional find-a-word puzzle related to the content. (Dear elementary teachers: You’re doing it wrong, or you certainly were in the 70’s! I learned a lot more by reading through the public library and messing around with the microscope and lab kits I got for Christmas one year. Although I think maybe the lab kit was meant for my sister and she didn’t want it, so I ended up with it.)
I also had my first truly outstanding teacher that year, Ms. Keifer. I think her first name might have been Karole Ann, but I’m not sure. In any case, she taught English at Lilburn Middle School, and I was in her homeroom. She was wonderful! She gave me a copy of Lord of the Rings, with one caveat: I had to pass them on to someone else when I finished them.
Back then, the Braves gave out free tickets to Atlanta area students who made straight A’s. I won tickets several years in a row, as I recall. I didn’t honestly care to go, but it was a family obligation thing, so I did — with whichever volume of LOTR I was reading at the moment in hand. Daddy had a great laugh when we encountered another family sitting near us whose son had won tickets. Their son had his nose in another volume of LOTR!
It definitely helped that my cousin, Lori Goss, taught me how to put on makeup during a visit back home to Gadsden that year, which boosted my confidence a lot. I don’t remember if her big sister Kim cut my hair into “wings” or how that happened (I do remember the perm Aunt Bet gave me, which was my first).
I’m trying NaBloPoMo again! The theme this month is “Return,” although I’m not at all sure what the heck that’s supposed to mean. I got today’s post in just under the wire, obviously—but I did post! Tomorrow I’ll try to do it much better. And I’ll even include photos of the new kitten! Maybe he’ll have a name by then.
I received the NaBloPoMo newsletter today and learned that this month’s theme is Art. On the one hand, I thought, “I have nothing to say! I’m not an artist. Blah.”
On the other hand, I’m coming to realize that I must have order in my life or I start dying, bit by bit. “Enemy of Entropy” isn’t just a fanciful blog title. Disorder is painful to me. Dull colors, harsh lighting, loud sounds, poor ventilation, and pervasive odors can drag anyone down, but they make me ill very rapidly.
If you find me surrounded by chaos you can be sure that either I haven’t been in that space long enough to impose order, or that something is very, very wrong.
I’m healthiest and happiest when I’m when I find ways to increase the amount of harmony and beauty around me. There is beauty in order, and art, for me, involves order — some kind of order, even if it isn’t always obvious.
I’m never going to be an Artist in any classical sense of the word. I have, however, established peaceful, joyful spaces for my family and friends to live in and visit. I put together fabric and fibers to create unique works of embroidery. When I sing, alone or with others, the result is no less beautiful for its ephemerality.
I’ll be trying to explore my own kind of art this month through blogging, my identity as an artist. And I’ll be working on getting back to blogging regularly, obviously. This is a new sort of blog post for me, more introspective. We’ll see how that goes.
I got through NaBloPoMo, as ridiculous as it was to commit to posting at least once a day for a month. So of course that small success has led me, in a moment of more-than-usual-lunacy, to sign up for Blog365 (otherwise known as “Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire”).
The purpose is fairly clear: to post at least once every day of 2008. February 29 is a “rest day.” Posts may be written on any site, rather than sticking to just one blog, so I’ll try to spread them around on mine/ours. If I can’t get something on the actual site on a particular day due to net connection issues or whatever, I have to write (yes, write! like, cuneiform or something!) a journal entry and transfer it to a blog as that day’s entry.
It would be far simpler to have a system of some sort. Maybe I’ll create a rotation:
Hopefully there will be new podcasts up soon. There will definitely be more music, as we have that lovely concert piano we received via freecycle all repaired and put together. It’s beautiful and sounds great! Not at all bad for one drive to pick it up and less than $200 in repair fees! (Sam wanted to just take it to the nearest authorized repair center rather than doing it ourselves.)
2007 wasn’t a stellar year, but neither was it terrible. Sam has a steady, secure job that he enjoys, in an organization that’s allowing him to advance. , Katie had a lot of health problems, but I’m hoping that we’re on the right path to resolving them. Shelley passed away a little shy of her 18th birthday, but since we’d been told in 1999 that she only had a year (at most) left, we felt that we’d gotten an “extra” 8 years with her anyway. Kioshi has grown into a nice companion, too.
We really kept to ourselves a lot through the past two years. When you’ve been betrayed and hurt as deeply as we were by our former housemate’s sudden craziness in 2006, there’s a lot of healing to be done. I don’t know if I’ll ever approach Thanksgiving without trepidation again, but we had a good one anyway. The stress did contribute to the deterioration of my health, and that does make it harder to get out. We’re working on it, though. We certainly learned who our true friends were, and we’ll never forget that.
So on to 2008, which we hope to be full of more time with friends, better health, much more music, Katie spent last night and almost all day today with friends from the school she was attending as well as her new beau. Sam and I spent the day gaming, upgrading some web sites, eating good food and watching movies. If it’s true that whatever you do on January 1 indicates how your year will go, we should be just fine.
If you look way, way down the sidebar to see the calendar thingie, there’s at least one post on every single day of November!
I think I want a National Novel Reading Month. I could do a novel a day (as long as I chose the right novels, of course). I’m behind on writing reviews, but I’m wallowing unabashedly in the number of good reads available to me right now. I’ve tweaked the Now Reading widget to show up to ten current books instead of just five.
I totally flubbed NaNoWriMo. No, I don’t wanna talk word count. Ugh. I have, however, managed to keep up with NaBloPoMo. so far, and there’s only one day to go! Database problems have given me some trouble with getting the posts to the public at some points, but I’ve written an entry every single day, and I think all of them are even showing up now. (The autoposted Tweets for the day don’t count, of course.)
TodayOn Thursday, Katie and I drove all over the place, as she had an orthdontic appointment and I foolishly chose to combine that with other errands. Driving = can’t take usual pain meds. I came home and collapsed with a fever. Now it’s the normal time to sleep, and I’m in too much pain to go lay down. (Actually, I was so foggy that I forgot to hit the “Publish” button last night!)
But, thanks to a freecycler, we now own a Korg 88-key electric piano. The catch: It’s taken apart. Completely. I’ve never seen the innards of such a thing before!
Why did the previous owners take it apart, then give it away? Their toddler spilled paint on the keys. The donor couldn’t remember if it was fabric paint or acrylic paint, but it isn’t water-soluble, in any case. Fortunately, the paint did not get into the electronics! Unfortunately, it did stick a few keys together. So the man of the house took it apart, intending to clean it up—then stuck it in the garage, where it has languished for two years. In a cleaning fit this week, he decided to toss it out and just get a new one. Happily for me, his wife persuaded him to give her a week to offer it on freecycle instead, and now it’s ours!
I’m encouraged by the fact that everything worked before it was taken apart (other than the stuck keys). I’m excited about having a piano. Now I have to figure out what to use to gently clean said keys, then figure out how to reassemble the whole thing. I considered just taking it to the nearest authorized repair center, but I want to see if we can do it first, as their quoted labor rate of $70/hour would add up very quickly. This is a $1,000 instrument, so it’s worth putting some money into making it work. Having the money, as usual, is the problem.
It came with its nice stand, which is integral to the piano, as it has the pedals on it. I’ll still need a bench, but I’ll deal with that after I have it working.
A repair manual would be very useful. The instrument manual can be downloaded from the Korg web site, but since these things aren’t considered user serviceable, it doesn’t show how to take the piano apart and put it back together. If I can get it cleaned up, though, I can probably ask Daddy for assembly help. My Daddy can fix anything.1 He’s much better with things than with people.
I’m totally open to suggestions for gentle solvents.2 I’m figuring non-acetone nail polish remover might do it, but will it damage the keys?
Of course, if any of you fine folks happen to have experience with taking electric pianos apart and reassembling them, by all means, please speak up! (Hey, a girl can hope, can’t she?)
Utter insanity. All of it. My fall classes just started. I’m in a flare (when am I not? but seriously, I am).
But hey! I hate my birthday, and three insane new things for the month should, at least, be distracting!
So, yes, this would be my second NaBloPoMo post. I’m having a little technical trouble actually posting the NaPodPoMo part, but I’m doing them. And fine, might as well top it off with NaNoWriMo.
It’s Hope’s fault. And Sam’s. And, um, right. Kioshi’s. All of you. Dreadful.
Don’t mind me. By the end of November, at least, I won’t have any hair left, so I won’t be spending any more time worrying over whether or not to get it cut, or color it, or whatever!