Thursday 07/30/09 - The Hiatt Family Circus

The beginning of this week, I was writing like gangbusters. Yesterday and today, nothing. I think that's just how I have to do things, but it's depressing nonetheless.

Got up yesterday morning when the neighbor's daughter came knocking on our door to ask if Elise could play. This isn't as bad as it sounds - it was 11am and Elise and I were still sleeping because we went to bed really late.

I get my best writing done after midnight, I think because the whole world is quiet. The last few days, I've kicked ass because I tuned in to a character that I hadn't really talked very much with prior to this. Actually, I tuned in to two different characters: the hero from book #1 and the anti-hero from book #3. In both instances, I had a conversation of sorts with them in my head. In the case of hero #1, I discovered that he was a really quiet, artistic guy who didn't want anything to do with the politics and the BS, he just wanted to get away from his world and live a normal life somewhere in the human world where he wouldn't be hounded by his family. For some reason, his older sister is choosing to hunt him down like a dog. His problem is that he's "insane", ie displaying non-elvish characteristics, having more intense emotions, being more aggressive and a lot less passive, trying harder to escape. Even he acknowledges that it would probably be best to go back to his world and not risk exposing his people to notice, but...

"And this was the worst part of his insanity, that he could not apply reason to control the strength of his need to keep running."

Anti-hero #3 has begun to realize that he's tired of people being unable to meet his eyes when he walks down the hall. Even his own people are somewhat afraid of him, and he's starting to wonder if this was really what his people needed him to become?

His heroin(e) (wow, there's a freudian play on words if ever I heard one - I'm going to have to explore that) says to him, "So you're going to stop being what you think your people need so you can try to be what you think I need??" Interesting line of thinking. Sometimes this kind of "free association" writing brings up important stuff.

Really, the more I write about these guys, the more I'm starting to like #3 better, but don't tell them I said that. I try to be non-judgemental with all my children.

So yesterday and today I'm tapped out, and so I've spent most of the day just reading stuff and messing about on youtube, looking for inspiration.

Found this:



This was a song included in the first Triple X movie with Vin Diesel, hence the movie scenes - by the way, the first movie was the only movie worth owning. Yay for Vin! Anyway, after I found this, I had to explore some more Rammstein afterwards, and I found I quite like a lot of their music. Their lead singer, Till Lindemann, is a huge, euro-thug-looking kinda guy. Not to diss my homey there... I really like his look, but I don't know any American who looks like he does - it's fascinating. I might have to keep him in mind for a character someday.




The problem with listening to Rammstein while I'm trying to write is that now I'm in an aggressive mood, and all I want to write is angry shit. Oh well. It's helped me to realize that heroine #1 is probably a Very Angry Young Woman (read Goth), which is not something I knew about her previous to this, which works to prove that there's no such thing as a wasted afternoon. I really rather like the idea of her as a goth chick... Elf Prince + Goth Chick. Yah, that works...

It's weird, the older I get, the more I gravitate towards an alternative lifestyle. I don't actually take the goth thing all that seriously... I mean, the angst alone would be overwhelmingly wearying after a while, but I like freaking out people who think a 45-year-old woman shouldn't like European Industrial Metal, and specifically the school of German Industrial Metal, Neue Deutsche Härte, (New German Hardness) to which Rammstein subscribes. Sorry, I learned all that on Wikipedia, and just had to use it in a pompous sentence...

Oh well, rock on and all that.

Also in the last few days, the Hiatt family Circus has been extremely circus-like. The neighbor's girl and Elise were playing in our bedroom, watching TV, and, according to Elise, she had to go to the bathroom, which she did. When she came back, the neighbor's girl had decided it would be a lot of fun to climb on top of the extremely inexpensive wardrobe, by way of the even less expensive plastic chest of drawers. The chest of drawers kind of exploded (this girl is by no means a delicate child) and took with it several days worth of clean laundry that I was sorting through to see what I could donate.

Sigh. It's hard to be patient sometimes, especially in the face of behavior like that.

Okay, last bit - Shar has been progressing wonderfully. She's now firmly entrenched as a member of our family, so much so that she feels comfy getting into incredible amounts of trouble. Last night she got the pork roast off the counter and was just poised to start in on it when I caught her. 10 pound pork roast. Dang, I hate to think of the quantity and quality of upset stomach that would have given her! Diarrhea for weeks!!

To be fair, it was my fault - I walked away from the kitchen to go talk to Elise about something, and go wrapped up in the dinosaur video she was watching, until I heard the CLANG of the roasting pan hitting the floor.

I've been taking her for walks at night lately because she's a bit tentative and insecure, and I wanted to build up her confidence a bit. She's really gotten a handle on the prey drive, although it continues to be her most unpredictable character trait. I've gotten her to sit and stay when a bike rider goes past, and motorcycles/scooters don't phase her anymore, but she continues to hold a serious grudge against boys on skateboards. Last night she just about gave some poor kid a heart attack. I had her sitting calmly at my side as the kid went by, and then at the last minute, she lunged and barked. Poor kid.

Okay, enough of that. Today is gym class for Elise, and I need to get back to writing now.

Tired. Hangover-y... Is that a word? Pretty sure it's not.

Dunno what's up today, but I woke up with a headache and no energy. Pounded down a shitload of Advil, took Elise to my sister's house for a playdate, came back and played on the computer for a while, hoping to get some writing done. Nada. Zilch. The Big Butkus. Okay, I don't even know if I spelled that one right, but it sounded cool, and that's what counts.

After about an hour, I gave up and went to take a shower. Finished that, sat back down to write, still nothing, so I gave up altogether and went back to bed. Woke up at 4pm, hustled into the truck to go pick up Elise, got lost... Yah, I'm that good. I can get lost in neighborhoods I've frequented for years.

Worse yet, forgot Trevor. See the picture? That's a Garmin StreetPilot c550. I named mine Trevor. Trevor is The MAN. Trevor takes care of me.

(Trevor is Trevor because I chose the English dude's voice. He has problems with Spanish pronunciation, so words like "CAL-a-VER-as", the name of the main street in Milpitas, become "ca-LAV-eras" in his hands, but that just adds to the flavor. Oh my Trevor-poo.)

If I had had Trevor with with me, I would not have taken 30 minutes longer and a quarter tank more gas to get to my sister's house to pick up Elise. As it was, I saw the back-up on southbound 880, decided to get off at Brokaw Rd (stupid stupid stupid... I ALWAYS get lost when I take Brokaw) and that was all she wrote.

Got home, had a snack and decided I needed to be in bed again. I'm just about at the point of deciding I need to be in bed again, again.

Anyway, on with news of Charlotte, Dog of Destiny: tonight for the first time she put two and two together, and actually whined at the backdoor to go out poddy! What an amazing dog! It took our other dog Sophie months to figure this out. With Shar, we've had a few poddy accidents, but really, she's ahead of the game at 9 months old, and you always have to expect the first year is going to be difficult as the puppy matures enough to handle the whole poddy situation.

She walks calmly at my side under the "heel" command, with or without the prong collar, she stops when I do, and she'll sit if I tell her to. We're practicing getting her to sit automatically every time I stop.

The only time we need the prong collar is when something sets off her prey drive, and she launches herself after it with no thought and no warning. A couple of times now I would have been dragged (and I weigh 240 lbs!!) if the prong collar hadn't stopped her short. As it is, I had the leash wrapped around my right pointer finger, and her lunge after a motor scooter dude probably put a crack in the bone. That was on the 4th of July, and today my finger still hurts just a bit when I squeeze it. Yah, yah, I know... "then don't squeeze it!"

Sophie has proven a bit problematic. She's the screamingly insecure dog in our pack, and bringing Charlotte into the family has disrupted Sophie's perception of her own rank.

By way of example, insecure dogs are always looking to up their position in the pack. One of the ways they do this is by protecting their food. If a higher ranking dog wants food, he takes it from a lower ranking dog, and the lower ranking dog isn't allowed to try to stop him. When a lower ranking dog wants to up their position, they try to protect their food by biting whoever tries to take it.

Twice now, Sophie has done this to Elise. Yes, this sounds horrible, and it was pretty awful, but to be fair, I've told Elise to never take food away from Sophie, and she forgets. Sophie doesn't dare do this to me or Jeff, but she thinks of Elise as a fair target, and I just can't get Elise to act like an Alpha. She keeps wanting to play with Sophie because Sophie is "so cute". Two days ago, Elise was in the kitchen and I was on the front porch talking to our neighbors. I heard Sophie do THAT bark, and then Elise started screaming and yelling. I rushed in to find Elise holding her eyebrow and Sophie cowering on the floor, because she knew she'd blown it. I did the Alpha thing, lots of screaming and yelling and rolling her on her back, and I got Elise to hold her down as well and put her hand on Sophie's throat. Then I put Sophie outside to exile her from the pack for a while, but I'm afraid Sophie will never be entirely trustworthy, and certainly not ever around kids.

Charlotte, bless her heart, is such a different story. She has so much good will and so much common sense. I've never met a dog who was more motivated to work with me when we're trying to learn something new. I'm working on getting her to let me pick up her feet and groom her and mess with her mouth and other stuff of that nature, for her AKC Canine Good Citizen certificate. She's already better than my old man Jake, when it comes to standing still for brushing, and I think she may be ready for her test in a month or two.

On August 6th, I've got an appointment at my daughter's gym class, for one of their summercamp days, to take Charlotte to the day camp and talk to the kids about Therapy Dogs, and about taking care of dogs, and stuff like that. I wanted to do this as another opportunity to take Charlotte into a situation where she had to be surrounded by people and kids, to get her used to busy, crowded environments. Here's some info on Registered Therapy Dogs, just for the heck of it. Given how much Shar loves people, especially kids, and how much commonsense and smarts she has, I can't imagine not sharing her with people who really need what she can offer.

Anyway, longer than I wanted, as usual. In a quick note, Jeff has been handling the garden this year, and tonight we had corn and carrots with dinner, that came fresh from our garden. Woo hoo!! Go honey!

Experimenting with New Places to Write

Yet another experiment, and I wanted to add it here for your edification. I wrote this yesterday, 07/10/2009.

Trying the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose. I've left Charlotte at home today for obvious reasons: they're not very welcoming to Gargantupuppies in places like this. Boy, was she unhappy about it, too... I guess she's gotten very used to coming with me everywhere I go, because she stood by the back door and gave me Sad Puppy Eyes the whole time I was getting ready. I felt awful about leaving her behind, but it's tough enough as it is to find someplace to write that meets all my needs, let alone allows Gargantupuppies, so she's going to have to stay behind sometimes.

There's a "Tully's" coffee here at the library, located outside the entrance but included as part of the building. Tully's is a poor man's Starbucks - not too bad, and they've got a nice patio out here - I'll take a video or something, the next time I'm down here, and post it here so you can see - but it's in the shade of the building for most of the day, and not very comfy, except on the hottest of days. Right now I'm freezing, and the chairs aren't quite built right, kind of like the patio chairs at Starbucks on North First - you've either got to be sitting back talking to someone, or reading something, but you can't really write without giving yourself a neck ache.

One more problem with this patio - it's on the corner of Fourth and San Fernando or something - translate that to "smack dab in the middle of the 21st century". San Jose State University backs onto the library, which is kind of shared between the university and the city, so there's a million students coming and going. There are a million cars going past, people walking everywhere, and so much noise that my iPod couldn't drown it all out no matter how loud I set it. This certainly does not qualify as white noise, and I can't write any other time period while I'm sitting here, so I'm packing up to try their study spaces inside...

Okay, the inside study spaces are worse, for different reasons. It's too quiet, and I make a lot of noise shuffling around, typing, talking to myself... I keep freaking out about what people might be hearing, or how I might be disturbing them, which means I can't concentrate at all.



The view is unparralled, of course, and I let myself be blinded by that, but the chairs here are, if anything, worse than the patio chairs - I shall now designate this type of chair a "patio" chair, and henceforth you'll automatically know what I'm talking about.

So I've packed up, climbed back on the lightrail, and come back to my favorite Starbuck. I spent about an hour inside, where, by the way, they keep it freakin' FREEZING, a trick to keep people from camping all day at their tables that I have never respected of any restaurant... I read my email and played around a bit, but then I just couldn't stand it anymore and I came back outside, to go find my favorite picnic benches.

So far, these picnic benches are my favorite spot. They give me the correct posture when I write - ie the desk surface is high enough that I don't have to look down and give myself a neck ache - and I can have Charlotte with me when I write, and I can bring my own goodies, water, food, etc and nobody freaks out, and by and large, I'm left to myself.

The downside: I have to be outside, so this isn't going to work in anything but good weather, which luckily, California does have a lot of. I can't leave Charlotte here, so if I need to go poddy, I have to pack everything up, walk back to the Starbucks, tie her up outside, out on the lawn where she's reasonably far away from everyone, take a chance on leaving her there while I scoot inside, etc etc... Not terribly convenient or easy. I also have to be sure to dress for the weather, which, like being inside the freakin' Starbucks, can be very unaccomodating if I guess wrong.

So the trailer is best so far, and the kitchen table at home, and sometimes I can make the picnic bench work, but everything else so far has been a bust. I'll keep looking, and let you know if I find any other alternatives.

Fourth of July, and the ensuing days...

Been a couple of days, I know - a lot happened. Here's the gist...

Fourth of July - went to a barbecue at the house/place of work of a friend of Jeff's, Gavin and his wonderful family. I had a blast. I've missed a couple of opportunities to go see these guys in the past, and now I'm sorry. Gavin manages a motel in Los Gatos, the Los Gatos Motor Inn. They cooked steaks and corn, there was a great potato salad and some watermelon, and I made chocolate cake, while one other lady brought a really yummy strawberry white cake. Someone brought in a wading pool that kept the kids busy for hours. I don't think Elise got out until after dinner and time for sparklers. I left at that point with Charlotte in the truck and we went down to Morgan Hill for our writing weekend. I'm working on editing a video I took of Charlotte playing with Holly, which I'll add here later.

That was a bit of a stressful weekend - there were a bunch of kids there, including Calla Rae, the granddaughter from San Diego, Peggy the tenant's grandkids from Cordelia, and Jordan and Delaney with Laura from Virginia. Doris likes her house to stay her house, and things to go as she feels they should go, and this is a bit hard to maintain with that many kids running around. I felt like I had to run interference for the kids, but I probably caused more problems than I solved.

Jeff brought Elise on Sunday afternoon, and she and I stayed in the trailer for a few nights.

A word about that. When I first started staying in the trailer, it took me a few weeks of tweaking to get comfortable, mostly because I didn't understand the limitations of the electrical system, and the heater kept going out when it was -10 outside, or I didn't have enough blankies so it was impossible to get warm no matter how hard the heater worked. Finally, I figured everything out, and I've been pretty comfy ever since.

This weekend, I had not only Elise, but her new friend Jeannette, one of Peggy's grandkids, who wanted to sleep out in the trailer with me. No one's slept in the bunkbeds since the time I went to Valhalla with Julie and Chris, and I can't remember if Elise was there or not, although I didn't get the trailer until after she was born, so in retrospect she had to be... Anyway, we borrowed an air matress sleeping bag thingy from the nextdoor neighbor McKenna which turned out to have a leak. The first night, Elise had a hard time sleeping because it was a strange new bed, but the second night, the air mattress thingy went flat, so not only did she have problems falling asleep, she also had problems because she was sleeping on bare wood, poor little kid. I got no sleep any night I was there with kids in the trailer because I was worried about them the whole time. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Anyway, I intended to come home Tuesday night to get a change of clothes and some stuff, and wound up leaving Elise because she was so distraught and stressed out. She spent most of the time in Morgan Hill scared to death Grandma Doris was going to yell at her for doing something wrong, and we know how well she deals with that kind of stress from her first grade year at George Mayne. She was sitting in the kitchen, crying her heart out because she wanted to go back to play with her friends, but at the same time, she was too scared to go back.

I went back that night, cleaned up the trailer, made sure everyone knew I had to leave, and wound up coming home around 2pm or thereabouts on Wednesday.

I've felt like I'm recovering from a hangover for the last few days; I had meant to clean on Thursday and Friday, but only got a bit done - mostly laundry, as I've decided to start my decluttering by paring down the clothes, etc, until we have just enough to get by. I don't need 42 t-shirts, Elise doesn't need clothes that haven't fit her in two years, and I don't need to keep every scrap of baby clothes she ever owned. Jeff has keep his stuff decently pared down on his own, but then again he also hasn't bought anything new in a long time.

I've gotten some more clothes packed into bags ready for Goodwill, and we had a dumpster day today at our park - I'm also working on editing THAT video, and it'll go here when it's ready.

We FINALLY got rid of our icky old couch, plus a lot of other crap that was just hanging around being worthless. Day by day it's getting easier to walk through the house, and I have great hopes of being able to get Elise's room entirely cleaned out one of these days soon. Woo hoo!! We can get her bed set up and I can actually sleep in the same room with my husband again! Plus, Elise will be able to have sleepovers now, which she's been waiting to do for awhile.

Here's something I wrote on paper a few days ago, and then I'm done, I promise:

07/09/2009
I'm sitting once again at the Starbuck's near my house. Shar-shar has walked down with me, and we're sitting on the patio, not hte main section but the side that's away from most of the tables.

Shar's been brilliant today, and she continues to be brilliant. We're working on perfecting her heel and her sit-stay. She heels quite well, but she still pulls just a bit, which is tough to deal with when walking her any distance, given she's so big. The goal is a perfect loose leash every time - the biggest barrier right now is that we're a puppy and everything is either exciting or scary. I will say, she's already calmer than she was when I got her, and I can count just a bit more on her own ability to control herself.

Okay, so we just changed seats. I was starting to get both a chill and a neck-ache from the patio seats. Note to self: can only sit there comfortably if I'm willing to sit back in the seat, either talking with someone or reading something.

This is kind of a cool place. I mean, I'm not even slightly into apartment living, but I could ALMOST be convinced by this complex. It's huge, but the buildings are all nicely designed and very old world, so it doesn't really look too much like an apartment complex. Part of the developer's contract with the city of SJ is that they had to put in a public use park, so there's a big open square of grass surrounded by trees and a walking path with water fountains and picnic benches on the outside edge. These benches are great places to sit and write, although it's too bright out to use the laptop, and I'm restricted to paper.

Paper's not so bad, though. There's something to be said for the physical act of writing; it often causes me to slow down and figure things out. Sometimes paper makes a great first draft, as it were. The act of transcribing to the laptop then becomes the second draft.

The other nice thing about Starbuck's is that, if I don't bring Shar-shar, I can move inside when I want, get a sandwich, get a mocha frappucino (and fry my brains with caffeine - woo hoo!), use the poddy.