You must be lost

I posted this on Twitter last night, but there are some Ren Faire going friends here that wouldn't have seen it there:

http://chickenonaraft.com/

Doesn't that sound like something you'd hear in the Pub Sing? My longest endurance thus far was something around 20 minutes. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out when it starts over.

When Chris found this last night, we had a short discussion of Zombo.com from back in the day which was sort of in the same vein. I'm sad to see it appears to no longer be up. I get a "bandwidth exceeded" error on their site and I haven't seen one of those in a long freakin' time. Kind of automatically dates the site right there doesn't it? Ah, early 2000s internet, before you were known as internets.

Also, now Jonah has something to add to his internet hilarity repertoire. He already goes around singing "badger badger badger badger, mushroom, snaaaake!" and "peanut butter jelly time." Now he can go around singing, "aye-ya chicken on a raft, aye-ya chicken on a raft, chicken on a raft on a Monday morning, ah, what a terrible sight to see..."

It's been raved about by pretty much everyone I know who has read it, so I thought it was my turn to read it. I took that $10 for $20 Groupon for Barnes & Noble the other day and loaded up my nook with the trilogy.

I started reading on Friday and it just wasn't gripping me. The characters were okay, but I hadn't reached a hook. I covered about 55 pages the first night and still didn't feel invested. I guess that's not saying much, but the typical query is half that, from what I understand and usually there's something to grab you in the first 20 pages. The first 20 pages was the entire first chapter which I felt was rambling and covered too much ground. The present tense bugged the hell out of me, constantly pulling me out of the story. I set it aside for several days to do some other things (namely declutter the office, which is still undone and play outside over the weekend). As I made my list of goals for the rest of the week yesterday, I put at the top of the reading section "Finish The Hunger Games." So last night when I couldn't sleep, I crept downstairs and set up shop on the couch in the den under a couple of down throws and read from about Chapter 6 to the very end, finishing it at around 5:18am (I know because my nook has a clock on it that I can see at all times).

( My impressions. Cut for SPOILERS and longness. You've been warned on both counts! )

I dosed off at about 5:30am after my brain settled into exhaustion enough to sleep, all the while realizing that in less than two hours I was going to have to jump up and make lunch for Chris and Jonah, make Jonah's breakfast and get him dressed and do Valentine's for his party at school today that I forgot about (not entirely) until 10pm last night. And I stayed up all night reading The Hunger Games instead of doing those last night and perhaps getting to bed at a decent hour. Priorities, I haz dem.

I'll probably give the rest of the week to digest and read some other stuff before I start in with book two.

ETA: I'm sorry if a lot of this doesn't make sense, but with less than 2 hours of sleep, mellymel no function coffee well without. Oh I'm drinking coffee, but it's only getting me up to zombie status of brain function right now. Which is also why I wasn't able to edit this down to something more concise.

ETA2: And I meant to mention something about the fact about why I felt compelled to stay up all night and finish the book. It wasn't necessarily that I couldn't put it down. In fact, most of the time, except perhaps for the second section where the majority of the action is, I felt there were breaks where I could easily turn it off and save it for later. But because I was awake anyway and I knew I wanted to finish it this week, I sort of just plowed through as long as my eyes would stay open. That just happened to be through to the end of the book, or at least until there were so few pages left, I rationalized I should just finish it up. I think I started fighting exhaustion with less than 50 pages left.

I've been reading a lot of writer's blogs lately, thanks to YA Highway's Field Trip Fridays. Yesterday, they had an article listed that, at first, I was only mildly intrigued by. But it was in list form and so I guess for me it was a little extra eye-catching. Write It Sideways put out a list of 6 tips for busy people to clear their heads of noise so they can sit down and write in those precious moments they can find in a day to actually sit down. The very first tip threw out a suggestion to dump all those random thoughts that tend to dominate our minds in the mornings and that a great place to do it was 750words.com.

At first I thought, "do I really need yet another site to update and/or fail at updating" and thought I might use LJ for my daily brain dump. But, the explanation on the homepage of the site is very convincing that I might rather throw all that stuff there instead of on a blog or social networking site where I might want to remember to lock those posts and that I wouldn't need the same features and stuff that LJ has. I thought I'd give it a try and 15 minutes later, I had reached my 750 words of stream of consciousness bull shit that no one, including me, ever wants to read. I felt a little refreshed and a little less foggy headed like I could get up and carry on with my day without that noise bumping around inside my head distracting me.

They've got a nifty little score card as a mild incentive to continue everyday and they even have monthly challenges you can sign up for with rewards (name on the Wall of Awesomeness) and consequences (name on the Wall of Shame) if you succeed or fail to spit out your 750 words everyday for a month.

But perhaps the coolest feature of the site is the analyzing they do of your entries once you're done. They analyze the time it took you to reach 750, how many times you got distracted (breaks of 3 minutes or more), how many words per minute, how many minutes you were actually typing, etc. Then, they've got stuff that shows the rating of your entry (G, PG, etc.), the weather while you were writing, a whole series of pie charts that analyze the mood of your writing based on words you use and how they're used and a frequently used words list. Even though the site, from a user standpoint, is very stripped down and simple, the tool itself is pretty impressive.

So, I'm using it to try to get all the pointless drivel out of my head that no one wants to read and perhaps get back to posting decent entries here. I've deleted so many half finished, rambling entries in the past couple of months it's not even funny. I'm having a lot of trouble focusing and getting motivated lately, so I'm hoping this will help. Also, I've been working on my fiction again lately and I need every little bit of help I can get to make the most of the moments I can steal away each day to get something decent on the page.

This is a deep, philosophical post that matters and will completely catch you up on the happenings in my life right now...

PSYCH!

Maggie linked this and it's awesome because I'm a total Amazon whore. So, I got one and if three of you want one and you get it through the link below, I'll get something for referring you to it (not that I care much about that, but this is an awesome deal and I thought I'd pass it on).

$10 for a $20 Amazon gift card!

https://livingsocial.com/deals/21336?ref=conf-jp&rpi=4338435

That's four $5 MP3 album downloads for the price of two and this month is one of their 1000 album months! At least those are the terms I'm seeing it in anyway. ;) I only wish I could buy a couple of them.

The catch: You have to sign up for an account with Living Social.

Seriously though, I've got a real post coming soon. I'm just not quite done hiding yet. Almost, but not quite.

I'm finally chipping away at the stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend. Jonah and I got through his toy box downstairs and quite a bit of his room yesterday. Jonah was somewhat resistant and was onto me as soon as I pulled out two boxes and started throwing stuff in them. He walks up and says, "are those toys to take to Goodwill?" Then starts saying, "no! I want to keep that one." He protested even after I presented the prospect of having new toys by the end of the weekend to replace them or if I said something was broken (and broken might mean has dead batteries). I never should have let him watch Toy Story. Eventually he got sidetracked enough with playing fireman that he left the fate of his toys in my hands.

I still need to go through his closet and all of the non-clothing drawers. We're about to get him a new bed and the changing table where we stored toys isn't going to be there anymore. I'm trying to prepare for not only the new toys he's about to get, but also the rearranging of his room once we get the bed.

I'd love to set up stations in his room like they do at school (i.e. all his Lego in one spot, all his Hot Wheels in one spot, all his dress up/pretend stuff in one spot, etc.). The idea is you play with and store the stuff in one area so theoretically things don't get strewn everywhere. Theoretically. He seemed interested yesterday in wanting a place to hang up his fireman hat and jacket "just like a real fire station" and I know he helps put things away at school. So as long as I have labels and he knows where things go, he might participate in cleaning up with a little prodding.

Anyway, It felt good to get a huge chunk of that done, even if I didn't get some of the other cleaning and errands done I wanted to yesterday. Now I want to do it to the rest of the house! This might just be the beginning of me getting pulled out of my funk. Organizing usually helps. I love to organize! I'm a freak like that. I've designated a journal sized spiral notebook to decluttering/organizing. Jonah and I sat down and made a list of containers and storage he would require for his various categories of toys. His Hot Wheels and Lego have outgrown their containers and his Star Wars figures appear to require their own small box now as well.

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Of the happy, apart from feeling really accomplished in Jonah's part of the house:

Jonah and I made dark chocolate peppermint bark yesterday morning. That was a lot of fun and very tasty! Jonah loved smashing the candy canes the best, I think.

I found Giraffie! Jonah's cuddle toy that he sleeps with every night has been missing for a couple of weeks, but I discovered him stuffed under a chair cushion in the living room. He's handled it pretty well, except for one day on the way to school he had a little bit of a breakdown. There weren't big tears, but I could tell he wasn't just whining and was really missing his little friend. I diverted him with the notion that he was only going for a half day and wouldn't have rest time and therefore wouldn't have been taking Giraffie to school anyway. If you could have seen the way this little boy was literally bouncing around when I pulled that little blanket/stuffed animal hybrid out of the chair. He was the very picture of giddiness. I think he hugged him as tightly as he possibly could. It was very sweet.

I installed Swype on my phone and it is FREAKIN' AWESOME! If you have an Android phone and don't already have it, I highly, HIGHLY recommend installing the beta that's available right now! I'm sure it will be even better as I get more comfortable with the keyboard layout (it's slightly different than the one I was used to, in terms of where numbers and punctuation keys are).

In the past two nights, we've seen Robot Chicken Star Wars III and It's A Trap! (Family Guy Return of the Jedi). Both are fantastic! But I think Robot Chicken was a better effort, no matter how much Seth MacFarlane likes to dog on Seth Green in his episodes (which is a funny gag, don't get me wrong, and even better was when all the other voice actors turned it around on him). I could have done without about 2 minutes worth of the nodding scene. I totally realize that going beyond the time limit of the joke was part of the gag. I just find those sort of annoying and lazy, like the 5 minutes of Conway Twitty in the middle of a 20 minute episode or Peter skinning his knee. Thankfully, after sitting through 5 minutes of nodding, the Darth Twitty gag was blessedly short.

And of ultimate happy, I read the new Hyperbole and a Half.

So, yesterday sucked even worse than Saturday and I've tried and tried to come up with something that made me happy that wasn't just completely trivial, but I can't. So, here it is: Chris made gnocchi and scallops for dinner with a yummy sun-dried alfredo sauce. Mmmm, butter and cream.

Oh wait, also, the neighbor kids brought over a little bag of Christmas cookies. That was really sweet and the shining star on an otherwise shit day.

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Today was definitely an improvement over the past three days.

I'm happy that I'm mobile again, though somewhat stiff and still sore. I have to take it easy and not do too much at once (that goes for anything, sitting, standing, typical house stuff, laying down) I have to stick to a regular cycle of work and rest. Rest has to be alternated between sitting and laying down. I can't sit for too long at all. But, I'm not in crippling pain, so YAY! Haven't even taken an ibuprofen today. I feel like I can work the rest of the kinks out with some diligent yoga (which I've been really needing to do anyway).

I'm happy that I got some of Chris' gifts wrapped so he'll stop snooping in the closets trying to find them.

I'm happy that I finally finished putting together amaz0n_princess's CD! It was so hard not to cheat and send two CDs or to bend the rules and burn it as a data disc so I could fit more mp3s on there. But I was good and stuck to the rules and managed to squeeze 21 songs on there. See my halo? ;) Hope you like it! It was really hard to get the songs to flow from one to another since I wanted to cover such diverse musical territory. The cover song was easy to choose and I think she'll get why. The foreign song narrowed itself down fairly easily as well, though I wish I could have included the other two runners up (some other year, perhaps). But I got it down to 24 songs, 15 minutes over the max runtime, and then froze because I didn't want to cut any more. I really deliberated over this thing! Hope there's lots of stuff you don't already have. It'll be on its way to you tomorrow. :)

I also started working on the one commission I have this year for my brother-in-law's girlfriend. I'm finally doing the pieces of butterfly wings under glass cabochon pendants. I had found a second completely intact Monarch butterfly on my run on the beach in Florida last month (the first one was somewhat less intact). I held it in a loosely cupped hand for probably a mile or more. It's been fun to work on jewelry again and I started pulling out all sorts of other materials I could possibly put in these bezels. I've got silver, copper and bronze to work with. Lots of possibilities! I'm thinking brocade swatches. It's like everything I look at I think, "hmm, wonder what a piece of that would look like under glass".

I got my Christmas dinner menu planned. Not a single dish I've made before! Also, we are free from the shackles of obligatory turkey this year! FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOMMM!! Chris always got a free one at Vandy for Christmas and since all our extra freezer space is full of beer and kept at refrigerator temps, we had to cook it soon after receiving it. I suppose we could have donated it to someone if we really wanted to, but honestly that thought hadn't occurred to me until just now. Anyhoo, we're doing Alton Brown's grilled leg of lamb with pomegranate molasses as well as his green bean casserole, a root gratin, zucchini mushroom crumble, roasted butternut squash with Moroccan spices, and roasted asparagus with balsamic browned butter. Oh, and I lied, I am making something I've made before: cranberry pumpkin yeast rolls.

Tomorrow is the last day for this meme, but life has been beating me down and I know it's only going to get worse after the holidays. So, I might keep it up. We'll see. Even if I could make it a weekly thing, I think I really need to focus on the positive in order to deal with the stuff that makes me want to simultaneously scream and cry.

Yesterday can go to hell! So, it was pretty hard to find something happy.

But, I did get to see Inception, which was pretty good and not nearly as hard to follow as I was expecting. I'm not a huge DiCaprio fan, but I love Ellen Page and she was great!

One problem I had with it was the notion that you can't alter your subconscious. What about lucid dreaming? And isn't that what meditation is all about? And what about therapy, is that totally pointless? If Ariadne's subconscious was building the world and capable of changing it in mid-dream, why couldn't the projections that populated it be controlled and changed as well? Didn't it all come from someone's subconscious?

There were a few other little things like that which sort of felt like holes in the pretense of the story. However, none of that made it unwatchable. It was still very entertaining, which is the whole point of a movie anyway, so it gets a thumbs up from me.

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I'd start with the silversmithing tools and materials I'm still needing.

Then I'd buy all the materials for the next 5-10 costumes on my list.

Then I'd do the hardwood floors we've been wanting since we moved in.

Then I'd build the deck we've been wanting for almost as long.

Then I'd hire someone to come in and replace the last two fixtures in the house (they're both on high ceilings that we can't get to), fix the holes in the foyer and garage ceilings (again, too tall/awkward for us to get to or we'd do it), repair and paint all the high ceilings (since the new roof we have a lot of popped nails, plus a stain in the den where the leak was), and paint all the high walls.

And by then the money would likely be gone, but well spent.

Or, we could just gut and redo the master bathroom along with the hardwoods and painting.

Or, we could blow the whole wad on a new kitchen.

Ten grand goes quickly when you get into renovations.

In an effort to both post more and to be more positive...

Rules: For eight days you have to post something that made you happy that day. Tag eight people to do the same. I'm not tagging anyone, so if you'd like to do it, DO IT!

Despite several viewings of The Empire Strikes Back in his short life, Jonah just today discovered the phrase "laugh it up, fuzzball" and has been sharing it with everyone he encounters and randomly while he's playing with his legos.

Next, I'm expecting to get a report at school that he called some kid a scruffy looking nerfherder.

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Little Wing, because I was a Pearl Jam fan first (but only by a slight margin) and Yellow Ledbetter reminds me of it.  I know, kinda bassackwards, but there it is.  Also, it's just a damn beautiful song!  Love it!

Related side note/piece of Mel trivia: one of our dogs is named after him (we spell it Jimi).