Rosemary Kirstein

I wrote some words down.

I wrote down, in fact, lots of words.

Many of these words were excellent!

I am pleased.

I want to do it again. Actually, I want to do it every day.

With that in mind, I might just skip the Xmas holidays as I skipped the T-Day holidays, and just pretend that the world consists of me and the Story.

Until then, I’ll do what I can…

In other news: At the DayJob, I now have 2 weeks of work to accomplish in one week. Upside: overtime pay.

And now, I shall go and write, before this joint gets too crowded….

I got a chickadee to take a sunflower seed from my hand.

The feeder was full, but all the Good Stuff had been picked away. So I stood right by the feeder with the Good Stuff in my hand.

Standing near the feeder drives the bigger birds away, as they are slow, and doubt their ability to escape a predator who’s Right There. Chickadees, however, are so damn fast that they know they can’t be caught. They actually like it when I’m near the feeder, since the bigger birds can’t chase them off if the bigger birds aren’t there.

This might have been the same fellow who was checking out my shoelaces the other day. Several chickadees were around, yelling at me in Dee, but only one slowly closed in, came in for a landing, made his selection, and flutt-ed off.

I must say: Chickadee toes. Weird sensation.

Thank you for your enthusiasm, and for the many complements on the cleverness and usefulness of my site! I’m glad it was just what you were looking for!

However, your ability to get past the moderation queue and the spam filter would probably improve if your email address was not “FREEVIA6RA@CANADAPHARMXXX.COM”.

And thank you NASA.

For this:

You want full size. Click.

From Colonel Wheelock’s TwitPic posts.

Seriously. The man is Tweeting from space.

… while I was writing on the porch.

I didn’t notice him at first. I felt this little tickle at the top edge of my right shoe, and I looked down…

Flitt, flutt and off he went.

He had been doing something with my shoelace. (Before you say “He thought it was a worm”, I’ll say that I’m pretty sure that chickadees don’t actually eat worms.)

I suspect it’s the same little guy who regularly comes to the porch, regardless of whether or not there’s anyone out there. As long as you’re not actually wielding a shovel and yelling (a thing I do rarely), and there’s food in the bird-feeder in the garden, he’s likely to show up.

I’ve watched him with a sunflower seed in his beak, testing out cracks in the woodwork. When he finds a good one, he’ll stuff the seed in there, and tap away at it until it opens.

This post in lieu of me telling you about what I’m writing, because I tend not to talk about what I’m writing until I’m done writing it.

Yep. Day three of my time off.

Slept until I was no longer sleepy.

When I got hungry, I ate food that I wanted to eat.

Wrote some. Read some (Axis by Robert Charles Wilson). Wrote some more. Did some laundry (okay, not my favorite use of my time, but hey).

Repaired the garden-edging fence after the Airbender Warriors (condo maintenance guys wielding leaf-blowers) sent it into the bushes.

Finished a little home-improvement project.

Did some music!

Wrote some more.

Up next: Dinner. Then, write some more.

Life is good.

It looks like I’ll probably be staying a bit late at the DayJob today, getting them all prepped for being without my indispensable services for, lord help us, an entire week.

One upside of an hourly-rate day-job: overtime! Yes, bribe me to stay late!

Meanwhile, I invite you to enjoy this gentleman’s perspective on the question:

So say we all….

If you set your word processor background document color to black, and set the letter color to only-slightly-less black, you can read it when you’re close and right in front, but not when you’re further back or to the side.

This also works if your screen is white, and you use very-nearly-but-not-quite white letters.

A useful thing.

At 5PM I shall walk out the door at the DayJob and for 9 days straight shall behave as if there are no things I need to do, only things I want to do.

And then I’ll go do them.

Most of them will be writing.

Some will be music!

Although, not this:

And I’m still trying to figure out this:

But there’s just no substitute for the real thing(s)….

(My thanks to Cort Skinner, who directed me to to the accordion!)

I managed to score the entire Thanksgiving week off from the DayJob, hooray!

The company kindly gives us the Friday after Thanksgiving as a matter of course (since, face it, who would be productive at all on a day between a family feast and a weekend? They’d just be going through the motions); and I had two and one-half paid vacation days left; and my boss okayed taking them that week; and he approved half a day off with no pay to round it out, and — Voila!

My plan: with apologies to my friends and family, I shall ignore the celebrations, stay at home, and act like a full-time writer. My family and friends have been informed of this — it’s not the first time it’s happened.

In previous years I’ve gone away during Thanksgiving, but this year vet bills and car repairs put me enough in the red to make staying home the smart move. Plus: if at 2AM I feel like, say, playing the guitar, not a problem. In a hotel room, on the other hand, not an option.

In other news: Other people at the DayJob have discovered how nice it is in the training room during lunch break. My last hideout for writing over lunch is gone… Stuck at my desk where there is a HUGE WINDOW ON A BUSY CORRIDOR TWO INCHES AWAY FROM MY ELBOW.

Try writing a sex scene under those circumstances. Just try it. Probably get sent to Human Resources for a Talking To.