Thursday This n That

My world is pretty much pre-moving tasks, poker, and music right now.  (In case you're just coming into the story, I am not moving - a friend is.)

Ate lunch in an actual restaurant yesterday.  Chinese food!  Yay!  I had this chicken dish - I think they called it Hung Su chicken? - that was pretty tasty.  Breaded chunks of chicken in a savory but slightly sweet sauce with veggies.  Very few veggies, but I needed mostly protein so it was good.  And crab ragoon.  Loves me those deep fried pockets of crabby, cheesy awesomeness.  And it was large portions so I brought about half of it home.  Hubs had it for dinner.  He thought it was pretty yummy, too.

I haven't eaten in an actual restaurant in years, so yeah, big deal for me.  

It was the first time I was in a Chinese restaurant that was playing country music.  Weird.  

I've been playing poker in a higher stakes room.  5-10M buy-ins with 100K blinds.  Right now, I have around 200 million in play chips.  About a year and a half of playing took me from 25K to here.  Like I've said before, I wish it were real money.  But it's illegal in the US to play online poker for real money.  Thanks for that, Obama.  Turd.

As for music, I'm enjoying listening to music while I play poker.  This Jango internet radio thing is kinda cool.  Not only does it give me the bands I like, but it gives me the occasional independent artist, too.  Okay, so most of those are pretty bad, but every rare once in a while, I find a gem.  I think what I'm tuned into now is called 'folk rock'?  Lumineers, Phillip Phillips, Of Monsters and Men.  Those have been on the radio, so I was familiar with them.  Another band I'm enjoying is The Head and the Heart.  Oh, and The Strumbellas.  Pretty cool stuff and I haven't heard most of it a million times so it's fresh.  I really need some of this stuff on CD so I can listen to it in the car.

Yesterday, there was nothing on TV, so I tuned in to a biopic about RUSH.  That was pretty cool.  I'm probably the last person to learn that 2112 was dedicated to Ayn Rand.  Gnarly.  Hubs has never been a fan of RUSH, though, so once he came into the room I only made him watch a little before I changed the channel.  He did enjoy some of the folk rock (? alternative country? gothic folk? :shrug:) I played for him.  He likes Phillip Phillips.  And he enjoyed when I played 'Ho Hey' by the Lumineers for him.

Hey, if you've never heard Boyce Avenue, give them a whirl.  They do acoustic covers of a lot of songs.  Here's them doing Dust in the Wind.  Pretty!

Okay, well, I'd better get my buns in gear.  I have to do dishes, what few there are, and then grab a shower before I have to go north for cigarettes and then west to resume my packing duties.  Have a great day.  And leave a comment, if you want.  I'll approve them when I get home.  

Speak the Truth

I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  And I can handle the truth.  If you can't tell me the truth, keep your mouth shut.  If I ask whether my butt looks big in this dress, I actually want to know.  For godsakes, don't let me go out in public looking like I have a big ass.  

The little lies we tell each other.... Sometimes they're okay.  "How are you?" "Fine" when you're anything but fine is okay because not everyone needs to know all of your woes.  

Sometimes the really big lies are okay.  When a Nazi asks if you're hiding Jews in your basement, the answer is always NO whether you have none, one, or a dozen.  If the government shows up to take your guns away, guns you legally possessed until some shithead changed the rules, you have no guns.  Someone points a gun at your head and asks your feelings on a particular subject, you lie your ass off so they don't blow you away.  

But as a general rule, lying is bad.  I shouldn't need to say that.  I think most people would agree with me and mean it.  I think even our government would agree, but they'd be lying.  To some people lies are only bad if you get caught.  And even then there are certain members of our populace who can lie their asses off and get caught at it and still go on about their merry way.  :shrug:

Now, I'm not saying you need to speak the truth all the time.  Sometimes keeping your thoughts and opinions to yourself is the better part of valor.  But if you can't speak the truth, stay silent or change the subject.  Until it's time to speak the truth.

The other day as we were sorting through my friend's clothes, she held up a blouse and asked me what I thought about it.  I asked her if she wanted me to be honest.  She said yes.  And I told her that I'd seen it on her once before at work and it looked horrible on her.  Seriously bad.  She's an attractive lady and that thing not only didn't do anything for her, but it looked awful on her.  I kept my mouth shut then because she didn't need to know what I thought of her clothing.  It would've served no purpose.  I reserved my opinion.  Until she asked.  And she didn't get pissed.  She simply chucked the blouse into the pile to go to the thrift store.  Life's too short for ugly clothes.

Sure, sometimes the truth hurts.  Lies hurt worse in the long run.  

In Limbo and Definitely Not Ranting... Umm...

These days I really only have two things to talk about - my friend moving and the state of the world.  I'm sure you're getting bored with the former and the latter is probably something I should stay away from or I'll be ranting until my fingers fall off.

Never have I ever seen, nor would ever imagine, such rampant stupidity.  So much so that I accidentally invented a new word when trying to describe it.  Hellfuck.  As in 'What the hellfuck is going on?'  It popped out when my brain got so befuddled by stupid news that it couldn't decide whether to say WTH or WTF, so it merged them together into WTHF.  (Not to be confused with my novel WHTF, which stands for Wish Hits The Fan.)  I like it.  It fits with the world right now.

Anyway, I said I wouldn't rant, so I won't.  

I should hear shortly whether it's back to work today or whether I'll have the day off.  There's some sort of kerfluffle with the buyer's loan and the appraisal/home inspection.  Suffice it to say, I am thankful every day they go through this that we didn't have to deal with loans and crap buying this place.  If hell ever freezes over and we sell this place, we will not accept any FHA offers, that's for damn sure.

Ahem, I guess that's a kind of rant, too.  Sorry about that.

Needless to say, I'm in limbo right now.  How are things where you're at?

Sunday Update - Week 36

If you read yesterday's post, you pretty much know what my week looked like.  I spent a lot of time over at a friend's house, helping her get ready to move.  Added up, it amounted to 23 hours.  Which isn't like a full work-week amount of time, but it's more time than I've spent on anything in one week in a long time.  (Well, except for the week before when I spent 29 hours over there.)  

Yesterday, we put the second coat on one deck, then Hubs worked on prepping the other deck for staining while I did more packing.  Since Friday was a long day, we'd intended to make it shorter yesterday.  It ended up longer.  It's good to something productive for people who deserve it.  And physical labor is good for the soul.  But by the time I got home, I couldn't brain good.  And the putting together words into sentences thing was hard.  And I'm up now because sleeping and aching weren't going well together.  This too shall pass.

I have today off.  It rained a lot of tonight so far and it's supposed to rain more.  We all need a day off anyway.  They're tired.  We're tired.  We'll coordinate over the phone and decide about tomorrow when tomorrow morning comes.

No writing.  No editing.  No marketing.  No reading.  By the time I get home, I'm toast.

I did make granola bars one day when I had the day off.  And a huge vat of spaghetti sauce another off day.  And I prepped five zucchinis for shredding.  (I need to shred those today and get them in the freezer.)

On my way out Friday, I discovered some numbnuts had hit and killed a guinea fowl.  Poor bugger.  It's not like they're fast and dart out in front of cars.  They're just too stupid to move out of the road, so you have to be patient.  I called Hubs and told him, so he could give it a proper burial.  The duo of Laurel and Hardy is no more.  Since they looked alike, I can't tell which one died.  I haven't seen the other one.  Since they don't like to be alone, he probably went to where the others are in an enclosure.  Maybe if they hadn't escaped, the one would still be alive.  =o\

The deer are still going fine.  Yay.  Some of the little bucks are starting to show their buttons.  And the fawns' spots are starting to disappear.  

It's Labor Day tomorrow.  Only a communist holiday would celebrate working by not working.  Since I work for myself, I usually work on holidays - even non-made-up, government ones  - so this probably won't be any different.  I just won't have to call the office for the pay-job.  They're off because why be in the office if there's no mail and most of the companies they do business with will be closed, too?  Derp.

Long ago, I worked in a business owned and primarily staffed by Jews.  They took off all the Jewish holidays and all the Gentile holidays, but they were open on the Jewish ones, so we merry few non-Jewish employees had to work.  Kind of unfair, but I got paid by the hour and no paid holidays, so I was happy to get the extra money.  If they'd been open on Christmas and Easter, I would've worked those, too.  You gotta do what you gotta do to make money if you want to live.  :shrug:

Not much else went on this week.  Sorry I'm pretty boring right now.  How are things in your world?

No Reading Wrap-Up Again

Sorry.  No reading wrap-up again this week because I have definitely not been reading.  Feel free to talk about what you're reading in comments.

Yesterday was a physical trial.  I started out the day by peeling and gutting zucchinis, because it had to be done.  Then I went over and helped pack until 11.  At 11, I went home, grabbed a bite to eat, loaded Hubs into the car and went back.  From noon to two, we painted.  From two to five we stained.  Well, he stained for a while and I did some more packing before heading out to help him stain.  

Unfortunately, their home inspection was Thursday, with one garage wall still unpainted and neither deck stained yet.  Hopefully, those things won't screw the pooch for the guy trying to buy their house.  Apparently FHA requires no untreated or raw wood exposed.  But hey, we can only do what we can do, time and weather permitting.  They explained stuff to the inspector and the dude seemed okay with promises to have the work completed before closing, so fingers crossed.  

As much as I'll miss my friend, I totally want this to happen for her.  And if I wasn't there helping her, and this stuff didn't get done, she'd still move.  So I help her.  And now that I've gotten to know her husband, I'm doing it for him, too.  They're good peoples.

I'll call her in a minute to see what the game plan is for today.  It rained a little last night and they're predicting more throughout the day, so painting and staining might be out.  There's still packing to do, but we've got almost 4 weeks to get all of that done.  Might be a day off.  Might not.  We'll see.  

Again, sorry there's no reading today.  I'm just not in a place where I want to read.  Not yet.

Have a great day out there in the world, wherever you are.

Thursday This n That

Unexpectedly had yesterday off.  I took the opportunity to get some shopping done and then I made a vat of homemade spaghetti sauce - enough for 4 meals.  You see, a neighbor brought us another big bag of tomatoes.  So first I had to parboil and skin those.  I had so many, it just made sense to turn them into sauce.  They also brought us 5 more zucchinis from the plants I gave them.  Not sure how many zukes that is now, but man, my babies produced.  Well, my babies produced as long as someone else was raising them.  He said he's turning over the garden today, so that's the last of them, but I have bags and bags of zucchini in the freezer.  Yay.

Oddly enough, we did not have spaghetti for dinner.  We had hot dogs and french fries.  It was too hot to actually want to eat a big carb-loaded meal.  

Last night, my friend called.  I have today off, too.  I think I'll take care of those zucchinis and make another batch of bread.  Maybe I'll clean my bathroom, too.  Or I'll vegetate and rest up for tomorrow.

I have today off because their pre-sale home inspection got scheduled for today.  Fingers crossed we did enough to satisfy FHA and what we didn't do, but still plan on doing, will get them through to the sale.  We still have one wall of the garage to do and both decks to power wash and stain.  We'll get 'er done.

One of our fawns has visible antler bumps now.  Baby buck!  Yay!

Remember when nobody stuck their nose into anyone else's health business?  Pepperidge Farms remembers.  I think it started with cigarettes.  Maybe it started with eating.  What you do with your body is no one else's business.  You really are not your brother's keeper.  Yeah, yeah, health insurance ties us all together somehow, which is wrong.  

Speaking of which, did you get a health insurance refund?  I looked it up and it seems that insurance companies didn't spend as much as they were allowed to spend versus the amount of premiums they took in last year.  Why?  Because fewer people are seeing doctors for non-essential things now.  One of the things they listed was elective surgery.  I thought elective surgeries were never covered under insurance.  :shrug:  So, it seems like more people are treating medical care like I've treated it for years - don't go to a doctor unless you actually need a doctor/  Huzzah.

What a world.

Anyway, that's about it for me.  How are things with you?  

The Best Advice

 I just read an interesting article on people who target authors telling them that if they don't cough up money, the people will then bomb their books with 1-star reviews.  I've heard it before and it's disconcerting, so the article wasn't really anything new.  At the end of the article, the writer of said article then pimped her own 'how to make money selling books' book.  Not cool, man.  I mean, I felt like she only wrote the post about this disconcerting thing to draw people in so she could pimp her book.  Maybe I wouldn't have felt irritated by it if her book had been about how to defeat these trolls.  But no.  Just another book about making a million writing and selling books by a chick I'd never heard of.  And if I've never heard of her, how many novels has she ever really sold?  

This, of course, followed me reading a FB post by a best-selling author talking about his early years and all the 'how-to-write books' books he'd read in his early years and how many of those were worthless.  He threw out all but two.  His advice basically boiled down to: 'If you've got the knack for writing, you've got it and if you don't, you don't.  If you've got it, hone it and the readers will come.'  Not helpful, per se, but honest.  More honest than 'hey, I've never written a best-selling novel, but buy my book about how to write a best-selling novel'.

Here's a big admission:  I've never read a 'how to write books' book.  Not even the definitive 'On Writing' by King, which apparently every other writer has read.  When I was a teen, I subscribed to Writers' Digest.  Read every issue cover to cover.  And what I learned was... After reading articles on how to write, I was writing exactly like each article said to write and my voice was lost completely.  I was too young then to know about voice, but I knew something was wrong with my writing when I started sounding like someone else.  So I stopped writing.  For years.  

I've been writing and publishing long enough now that my voice is pretty hard to shake, but I still don't read 'how to' articles or books.  I write.  My own way.  If that sells, then awesome.  I've had enough people tell me they like the way I tell my stories to keep doing it the way I've always done it.  The more I write the better I get at it.  

Actually, that's probably the best advice I can give another writer.  Write tons.  

Of course, I'm not writing right now.  I'm busy with non-writing stuffs and it's taking up all of my brain space.  I try to make myself think about writing, and that lasts about 30 seconds before my brain is off thinking about other things again.  This will pass.  And I'll write again.  I can't not write for too awfully long.  

I've got 16 books published now.  If I average their word count out at 75K each, that's 1.2 million words.  Add in the unpublished and unfinished stuff, along with the short stories, etc., and I'm probably at over 2 million.  Just in fiction.  Not counting these blog posts I've been writing since 2006, comments on other people's blogs, FB posts, etc.  

If this writing thing is your dream, keep writing.  I can't guarantee you'll ever become a best-seller, but you'll have some measure of success.  Eventually.  Maybe.  :shrug:  Also, read tons.  Of fiction, not of the 'how to' books.  See how other writers are achieving their dreams by reading what they've written. Maybe what they write will spur you on to your own successes.  

And if this is really your dream, don't quit.