etc.

If you enjoyed all that non-consumerism yesterday, the one day purge to counter our 364 day binge if you will, then you might consider trying it for the holidays. Or all year.

In site-related news, those of you who have used the search feature on this site recently will have noticed no results where there should have been some. Thing is, these pages haven’t been crawled since June 25th. That’s all been rectified now, I did a manual index yesterday so we’re up to speed, plus I’ve set the search bot to crawl around once a week. So, there you go. Have I said how much I love Atomz recently? The functionality of their free service continues to blow my mind in all sorts of good ways.

Thanks for all the novel-writing encouragement. You’ve got me thinking that maybe I can do this.

I’ve been a good little blogger lately, haven’t I? A good blogger, yes. Posts everyday, and two on one day last week even. Prolific is all I can say, not minutes after I post an entry, I’m frantically typing another. Save it for to-morrow though, readers can’t take so much bloggy goodness all at once, it’s like sugar.

I’ve started a list: Winter — Crazy Little House — Tasks. It’s only the beginning of a list, more items will be added to it as they are discovered and stuff will get crossed off as things get done, this is the nature of a to-do list. I’ve included a few “done” items because every to-do list should have some done items already on it, it cultivates the illusion of accomplishment and accomplishment begets accomplishment friends, don’t you forget it. This from a to-do list aficionado, seriously, I made the cover once.

Also remember not to buy a damn thing to-morrow, you know you don’t need it anyway.

I thought about NaNoWriMo this year. I mean serious, contemplative-type thought. The kind that got all sorts of lofty novel ideas germinating in my head, that kind of thought. Lucky for me, reason prevailed; there is, in fact, no way I could have committed to 50,000 words this month, not with the chapter commitment already firmly in place and all the adventures in the crazy, crazy little house.

So fine, no novel-writing-month for me this month. But that hasn’t stopped the ideas from germinating and one has even taken root and is sprouting structure and characters and plot and themes, yes, themes. Last night I made the mistake of telling the mister about all this and he took the idea and ran with it, bolted in fact, he practically had all 175 pages written in his head by the end of the evening, so now the excitement, and me thinking I can do this, I can write down this novel, yes I can, oh yes. And as I brushed my teeth last night I thought how cool it will be when I meet Margaret Atwood and she tells me she loved my novel and is so pleased to be on the same imprint as me.

I can never be accused of lack of imagination.

I went in search of trash and fluff and I found this instead. I should stop trying to find trashing things to read, inevitably I end up spending hours in the stacks, picking up non-trash, putting each back down, vowing to pick it back up when I’m no longer in search of trash.

There’s a lot of carnie hucksterism in this book, dark and creepy carnie hucksterism that is (is there any other kind?), and pratically no literary convention at all. That made for interesting reading, but since I was in the mood for trash, real, light, mystery-type trash, I wasn’t particularly receptive to the inconclusive back-and-forth of this book. It’s funny though, make no mistake. Back to the trash though, I’m looking for suggestions.

More than a year and a half into this commuting between two towns and it still gets me that I can wake up in my town with a couple of inches of snow, fresh, new snow, covering everything, and the air is still and silent and strong, like it always is after a snowfall, and then I drive 60 kms west to the other town and the sky is bright and blue and the sun is shining in my eyes and my fingertips are numb and my nose is cold and my ears are stinging from the brisk wind. Like two different ecosystems, but not really, because in my town there are squirrels and raccoons and fox on the front yard and in the other town there are deer grazing in the trees behind my car. This is all true.

The chapter has been delivered, albeit a few hours later than I had hoped, and now it’s back in the abundantly capable hands of the editors. By the end of it, I was happy. Very happy, in fact. Those two little changes they suggested were just what it needed to go from being a potentially boring explication on how to use new technologies to serve your constituents better, to being a missive on why your library needs to embrace new technologies to stay relevant, and why staying relevant even matters. Engaging stuff, trust me. I now know why everyone thanks their editors, because editors are good folk, the kind that know what they’re doing. So, thanks editors.

I have two other articles in the brewing stage, one for this publication and the other for this one. Neither will be as taxing as this last one has been, both will be more off-the-cuff, chatty-cathy, personal experience/advice type of stuff. Fun. While they brew, I’m working on a list of projects to make the crazy little house more inviting. You’ll want to visit when we’re done, you know you will.

Today, being crunch day, the weather is cooperating. You see, it was supposed to be grim and rainy and dull all weekend, but it turned out to be mild and clear and inviting instead, not good weather for one who is supposed to be desk and computer bound for three days straight. So, given the mild, clear, invitingness of the past two days, we did some outdoor work, as already mentioned. But today, crunch day, the day the chapter is due to the editors in perfectly publishable form, today, finally, grim and rainy and dull weather has alighted upon us and I am desk and computer bound and so happy I don’t need to be outside at all.

The revisions are going well. If I may say so, the first draft was quite good. Even better is having been away from it for weeks. Those sentences I laboured over, the ones I couldn’t find any better words for and just ended up leaving as they were (“it’s only the first draft”, I told myself), three weeks later all it took was one reread and those sentences were whittled into submission with relative ease and flourish, not because I am a better writer now than I was three weeks ago, but because I’ve had three weeks of not living and breathing those 5200 words. It should be one of the basic rules of writing: give yourself time away.

Unrelatedly, here are two new experiments in reflective surfaces.

Lots of good eating for a low-key weekend. Friday night, roast beef and yorkshire pudding as we celebrated Karen’s birthday at the mister’s parents’ house; Saturday night, the mister’s portobello mushroom pasta; this morning, eggs over-easy, crispy bacon, lots of good and buttered baguette, fresh OJ, at Easy, just around the corner from our house. Good food and lots of it, it keeps the brain working.

It also keeps the body working, and this body has been doing a lot more work than it expected to this weekend. We cleaned the eaves troughs this morning, raked the leaves on the front yard (swept them, actually; seemed such a shame to buy a rake for a 10″ x 10″ yard, for use twice a year, so a good straw broom did the trick), cleaned and covered the air conditioner, and the mister is currently working on installing a new exhaust cover for the dryer outlet. Nothing says “been working outside” like the smell of dirt and rotting leaves and blackened fingernails.

In case you’re looking for me over the next three days, you can find me in my study, surrounded by piles of paper, stacks of books, and a copy of the APA at my elbow. It’s revisions weekend, my editors came back to me with a couple of suggested changes on the chapter, changes that I wholeheartedly embrace, bless the editors, and the final draft goes out on Monday.

The mister, on the other hand, will be nowhere near the study, he will instead have his head in the return air vent, repairing ducts with sheet metal and aluminum tape and hoping all the while not to run into anything alive while he’s at it. Amidst the ongoing investigations in the crazy little house, we have discovered that we have no real return air vent, rather we have a wall cavity which someone felt was sufficient enough to act as a return air vent, and it’s clearly not sufficient because there is no draw coming from the upper floors of the house at all. Add to that a hole in the duct that leads to this return air wall and you’ve got yourself a pretty ineffectual circulation system.

I think I might have sounded like I knew what I was talking about there, friends.

Also this weekend I will try to keep my mind clear of all the home-related projects I have in mind for this winter. Something about cold weather makes me want to hunker indoors for weeks at a time, making our surroundings better, more liveable, more ours. After Monday, you can be sure that I will throw myself into this cause with reckless abandon, but until then, revisions, revisions, revisions, focus, focus, focus.

I watched The Acromaniacs perform on campus during lunch. They’re sort of a two-person Cirque du Soleil, all bendy and twisty and intertwined physical contortions. The mind boggles.

The mister and I had a conversation recently about the most memorable record covers of recent times, unrelated to the quality of the music or actual art. Some:

• Abbey Road, The Beatles

• Sgt. Peppers, The Beatles
• Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen
• Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin
• Odelay, Beck
• Ten, Pearl Jam
• Nevermind, Nirvana

Others?