Happy Freakin' Monday...

Sorry, it's been a while - the month kinda slipped away from me, but then, that's August all over. More on that later.

I found this today on one of my regulars (Ugliest Tattoos: A Gallery of Regrets). This is Rick, aka Zombie Boy. Now, before you get that look on your face... Well, okay, I know you already have that look on your face, but before you open your mouth and say anything, keep in mind, this is a lifestyle choice this guy has made. I wouldn't want my daughter to date him, but there you go, at least he's sincere. In the interview, he states that he's actually a happier person since having this done, because he gets a lot of positive attention. He also advocates NOT doing this to yourself unless it's really in you, echoing my own sentiments about tattoos, which should be spiritual, for any given definition of the word, and not because you saw someone with a ladybug and their name tattooed on their ankle, and now you want the same thing. To quote Rick, "I don’t want kids to go out there and ruin their lives because they think it’s cool – it’s got to be in you. You’ve got to know what you want. I sacrificed my whole future for this." (Taken from an interview in Bizarre Magazine, by Jack Ruby Murray, June 2008)

Which is about as serious and spiritual as you can get. Rock on, Zombie Boy.

Anyway, August. Back to August. I don't think much of August.

In June, sitting in the classroom looking out the windows at the spectacularly fine day, summer stretches ahead with all kinds of glorious promise. The mornings are cool and bright and you wear your shorts and your flip-flops and the whole world holds its breath for that last moment of that last class, when the bell rings like a starting gate and you bolt off out the door. Remember how you felt, in high school, climbing into your car, with everybody streaming out of the parking lot? You turned the key and the radio came on, you rolled down the windows, and took a deep breath...

Have you noticed how that feeling never really quite leaves, even when you're a grown-up? June at work is always a little weird, but happy, good weird. There's more standing around at cubicles laughing and joking about stuff. Things just get more casual. There's more time spent in the kitchen, getting a snack, making tea, talking with your buddies who show up to do the same. Wow. Yah...

Nothing, however, nothing at all magical happens in August, except that the summer dies a slow and nasty-tempered death, making us all suffer with it. With apologies to all those August-Born, August is hot, smoggy, lethargic, and if you're in school in any capacity, full of regrets. That happy June ripe with promise has turned into the gravid, exhausted, heavy-as-lead August. About the only good thing that happens, around here, in August, is that the air takes on a smell of garlic and onions. Okay, that's weird - there's a processing plant somewhere around the Pacheco Pass where they take in garlic and onions, and on cool afternoons in August, you can smell it, actually a lot more pleasant than it sounds, but maybe that's just me, because it reminds me that AUGUST IS ALMOST OVER. September is almost here. Fall is coming.

Okay, that's all. I'm done cappin' on August. Now it's September, and I LOVE September. I love the weather here in California in September - San Jose, Silicon Valley, Santa Clara. It starts to cool down again, and the breeze starts to pick up, so the smog clears out a bit. The light gets all soft and fuzzy and more golden - I can't rightly explain how that happens, but it does - and the wind starts to bring all kinds of brilliant new smells to your nose, the first woodsmoke and the first rain, cool and heady and glorious.

It's beautiful here today, 70's F. Elise has finished her school work, I'm eating a bagel snack, and then getting a shower, after which we're off to my friend Ellen's house just down the road to help her pack. They're renting a house in Los Banos to get out of the bay area proper, and it's going to save them a huge wad o' dough. They hope to be ready to buy in a few years.

Just to leave you with a nice taste in your mouth:


I love light and dark - if my art classes serve, this is called chiaroscuro. This picture is from the Flickr page of Aremac - please check out their other work... Very gorgeous stuff!

Toodles!

A Little Bit O' Friday Night Disparity - 8/07/09

You know what's really weird:

Vintage Advertising a la 40's, 50's, 60's, etc...

and Goth Rock Diva Amy Lee, lead singer for Evanescence, singing Going Under:





Wow. It's kind of non-intuitive, like how can black tea, spices and black pepper EVER work together, but they do, and you get Chai tea, which is really yummy in a subtle, knock-your-skull-against-the-wall kinda way.

I'm here at Starbucks, taking a bit of a breather from everything to try and get some writing done. They're going to close soon, I think, so I'll have to pack up and git. Oh well. Starbucks is a terrible place to try and write a medieval Otherworld... way too 21st century.

A quick update on life in general:

#1) Shar had her first public outing yesterday. I took her to a summer day camp session at Elise's Little Gym class, where she got to meet a handful of little kids all aged 5-7 or thereabouts. She was stunning, she was brilliant, she was Miss Manners X a million. What a great dog! I talked about how to take care of dogs, and how to choose a good dog, and how dogs have to be trained... There really isn't too much you can say to kids that age. At one point she rolled over on her back and I invited the kids to come pet her belly, which she loves. At first I had one kid, then two, and then all of them gathered around her, yelling and being kids and petting her, gently of course, and she just ate it all up. One of these days soon, she's going to help bring some love and happiness to people stuck in nursing homes or hospitals...

#2) I've finally settled on the redecorating scheme for the trailer: Laurel Skye, Mosaic Artist.

I'm heading down to the trailer tomorrow, and I'll take some pictures of it, the "before" gallery. The colors you see in the picture above, and the colors Laurel uses overall, her palette, the way she's decorated her house, are all going to be part of my customized gypsy vardo.

Okay, had to pack up and leave Starbucks, as they were closing. I'm home now, sitting at the kitchen table. Jeff is in the living room watching the latest Ghost in the Shell (click HERE for the Wikipedia entry and HERE for the official English website.) By far some of the finest anime you can ever hope to see; my personal all-time favorite is Ghost in the Shell:Innocence. Sorry, couldn't find a link to it. Just do yourself a favor and go watch the real thing.

Behind me, courtesy of Hulu, my daughter is currently perusing the She-Ra: Princess of Power offerings. I am inundated by both these polar opposites of the animated genre.

Let me see if I can draw you a picture of what this is like to live through first hand:

1. Take one of those octupi that change colors to camouflage themselves.
   
2. Pour the poor thing onto an Abbotsford family tartan.
   
   
3. Get a couple of those God-awful teen magazines, shred and throw on top of the octopus.
   
4. Sprinkle some confetti.
5. Using two boom boxes, one placed to either side of the by-now psychically-traumatized octopus, turn on both AC/DC, (I would have embedded the video from YouTube, but AC/DC has apparently requested that embedding be disabled for their videos... go figure) and some vintage Lawrence Welk music.
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. Drop some acid.
7. Use both your hands in a desperate attempt to keep the top of your head from blowing off.

And that's about it. That's as close as I want to take anyone, really.

#3) We're all adjusting to life here in the Hiatt Family Household, as Jeff heads back to work for the first time in many a moon. He's got a really great internship, but the problem is, like almost all internships: a) he's not getting paid, and b) the work environment is a bit crazy-making. He's been coming home a bit tense most nights, and I don't blame him, but heck, he's finally getting to learn the stuff he's wanted to learn (third-party electrical inspections) and that's worth a bit of suffering, right?

It's hard for me because now I'm suddenly a full-time mom. My wonderful daughter is easy enough to deal with, being a phenomenally magnificent kid, but she has a friend who likes to come over, who makes me a bit crazy. I'm not into dissing kids, so 'nuff said. Tonight's foray to Starbucks was my first time kid-free in five days.

Wow, just saying that makes me realize what a weird turnabout I've had. A few months ago I was whining about the fact that I never got to see my daughter. I guess that's just how the universe works.

Ok, that's it, stick a fork in me, I'm done. Now I just have to pop some sleeping pills and pray they can out-arm-wrestle the Venti Mocha Frappacino I had at Starbucks.

Ciao!

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.