Bethanie's Brain

I'm not even sure I can write a proper blog post anymore. It has been so long -- and I am now so used to teensy missives such as will fit into my Facebook status without generating a nastygram -- that I'm not sure I'm actually capable of anything else. So we shall just have to see how long this lasts... Anyway, Anatomy & Physiology is over. I passed. More importantly, I learned a hell of a lot and feel a lot more confident in my ability to NOT introduce mistakes when I edit medical documents (a huge fear). So that is good. However, I have decided NEVER to take another class during the fall. With NaNo and then the holidays, it's just too nuts. I'm sure I'll have to eat that 'never', if I ever do get into grad school, but for now, when I'm just putzing around doing whatever the hell I want -- Fall is For Fun. Spring is for classes. Except for this spring. Because I need a fucking break after that hellacious fall.... heh... I mean, I really SHOULD t...

OK, so it's been a while since I last posted. But we are drowning here. Drowing in more ways than one. Drowning in life due to soccer, school events, and life events (we have a family wedding this weekend, so everyone's in town and wants to visit). Drowing in resposibilities at the Evil Day Job, which is getting perpetually stranger every single day... Oh, yes. And it's raining. It's been raining all week. We're supposed to have "possibly severe thunderstorms" today (so the wedding won't be outside this afternoon; poor sister-in-law-to-be :( And actually, we get a break from drowning in soccer today, since the fields are closed, which is good since because of the wedding we'd have been running around like crazy all day. This way we're only running around like crazy half the day....) I don't even want to talk about school - my school - and the test I have tomorrow and how I haven't even read the chapter yet, let alone done any studyi...

... every time I HAVE time to write, I find a 1001 other things to do instead and ... every time I'm up to my eyeballs in everything else, all I want to do is write? Why is that, huh?

OK, it's been a scandalouly long time since I've posted ANYTHING here... terrible! I have excuses - dozens, in fact - but I'm sick of dealing with them to the point of not wanting to re-hash them here, even if it means missing out on bitching about something. :D Anyway, I've been working on some posts that are scheduled for next weekend for Joely's Character Clinic , and it's been interesting - and educational - picking apart why I like certain characters so much. There are some striking similarities, especially when it comes to male characters, heh-heh... :) When it comes to my OWN characters, however, the brain gets all shy and tongue-tied and won't cough up anything. Weird. I suspect this stems from my rather vast insecurities about my own writing -- it seems presumptuous, at the very least, to expound on what makes my own characters so great and/or what clever tricks I use to add depth to them and make them memorable, when not only have I published no...

I just got back from a little jaunt around the Gorgeous Office Building (GOB) where my little department of FPU is located. I took my little jaunt in the interests of NOT taking part in the general obesity epidemic that appears to be sweeping much of the developed world - i.e., I got off my fat ass and got some exercise - and in the spirit of getting some exercise, I also took the stairs - up and down - instead of the elevator. Well. Lemme tell ya. GOB has some seriously uninspirational stairwells. They're narrow. They're kinda stuffy. Some walls are painted, some are not. There's carpet here, but not over there. There's graffiti in spots. Not the sort of place that makes you want to come back. Not that this is news to me - I take the stairs all the time (well, down, anyway...), so I'm pretty familiar with their uninviting nature. And really, how much can one expect from a stairwell? However, it occurred to me as I was out jaunting around GOB - which is so v...

My Beloved Subaru turns 13 this year and her age is really starting to show. The list of Things That Need Fixin' goes on and on, and so we've slowly, reluctantly come to the conclusion that we will need to replace My Beloved Subaru and probably sooner rather than later. So I started looking at cars. We need something that will get me from the Heart of Suburban Hell to Fabulous Private University 4 days a week without costing us a gazillion dollars in gas. Yanno, like a Prius. We need something that will tote 2 little girls and all their associated crap and still have room for things like breathing. Yanno, like a minivan. Since my commute takes me into the middle of Itty Bitty City and I sometimes get stuck in traffic, The Husband thinks we need something with an automatic transmission. Yanno, like most people drive. We wouldn't mind having something that sits up a bit higher and therefore has a bit more visibility. Yanno, like an SUV. I want none of these things. The...

And you thought we were done with this. Well, so did I. In fact, I thought we were done with this until last Thursday when I went into the office to help Boss Lady pack for the Big Move and Accounting Lady dropped by to say: "Oh, um, they can't fix that weird date problem, so you'll have to Totally Redo the submission package". Totally Redo. As in Start From Scratch. As in Start Over. As in The Dreaded Blue Screen. As in Pardon Me, I Need To Step Outside and Start Screaming. I shall spare everyone the gory details, but GOOD GRIEF. My vacation, which was supposed to start Saturday, starts today, because the Unpacking from the Big Move and Redoing of the blasted submission package took most of Sunday and Monday (Boss Lady being gone on a cruise and all). And now I have to keep checking my email for a couple of days to make sure nothing else goes wrong. Pardon Me, I Need To Step Outside and Start Screaming...

It is finally fucking over. My life has been one, long, apparently-fucking- endless nightmare of Grant Hell for the last ... what, six weeks? eight weeks? Pitiful. I don't even fucking know. Anyways. It's over. Boss Lady's 5-year renewal has been delivered to Fabulous Private University's research office and will presumably be on its way to to the feds very soon. Halle-freakin-lujah. I think I did more work on this one than I have done on any other grant proposal in my life. I did budget stuff. I did subcontact budget stuff. I did biosketches. I did figures. I did tables. I did the bloody references . I edited the science. I edited the abstract. I edited the budget justifications. I re-edited the science. I re-did the bloody references. I did electronic submission package stuff. I re-re-did the bloody references. It was endless. I am exhausted. I am going to go collapse now.

Grant hell took on a new form today: electronic submission. You'd think that would be a good thing, right? Save a few trees, at least. Well, yeah, sure, it saves a few trees. I'm all for that. Except that it's costing me brain cells. I mean, my synapses are Burnt Out . Something I was familiar with is suddenly total foreign. Something I knew how to gauge is suddenly unfathomable. OK, I'm exaggerating. But this is the very first time in my personal grant submission history that we've MISSED THE DEADLINE. And not with just one. I'm not sure yet, but I think we missed it with 2 out of 4. Part of it was just bad luck. One of our PIs had a bunch of Appendices and they were scanned PDFs, and as anyone knows, scanned PDFs are HUGE . So when they attached the scanned PDFs to the "submission package" the package promptly went cross-eyed and crashed all over the computer screen with a resounding SPLAT . OK, I'm exaggerating. But the reconstruction o...

Everyone seems to have them. Everyone but me. I'm just too damn tired for resolutions this year. And it isn't helping to be staggering under mountains of medical debt either. Yeah. Helmet appointment earlier this week: 7:30 AM - Dr. Craniofacial-Specialist examines Ms. Baby's head for a grand total of 45 seconds and scribbles with a magic marker on the outside of Monsieur Helmet. That'll be $280, please. 8:30 AM - Helmet-fabrication-people spend a grand total of 10 minutes following the magic-marker directions and sanding off some of Monsieur Helmet's foam liner. That'll be $100, please. Fuckin'. A. I know, I know. It could be worse. It could be way worse. And it fact, things looked up shortly after we arrived home: 9:30 AM - I check my paystub online. My last paycheck included a $400 Christmas/End-of-Year bonus from Fabulous Private University. Which is great, since it covers the medical bills for this week. And leaves me 20 bucks for expensive c...

So today, to get out of the house before I went bonkers trying to appease Ms. Baby, who has decided - after 6 days - that Monsieur Helmet is not so much fun after all and spent the day whimpering pathetically and making big eyes at me (she's smart for 4 months old, lemmetellya), then refusing to nurse unless I removed Monsieur Helmet from... Where the hell was I? Oh, right. Getting out of the house. So today, to get out of the house, Ms. Baby and I made An Expedition to the nearest bookstore in search of a cookbook. I was fairly certain that this particular cookbook would be easily located, since it's by a popular cookbook author and was published fairly recently. Not only that, but I was headed to a Large, Chain Bookstore, whose selection - I assumed - would far outpace any locally owned bookstore's selection. Guess what. Not. There. As in, they didn't fucking have it. As in, I packed Ms. Baby, Monsieur Helmet et al., into the car with all her paraphernalia in the...

Right, so Ms. Baby slept FOREVER last night - like two, count 'em, TWO four-hour episodes In A Row - so I'm feelin' pretty together this morning. She's down for her morning nap. I decide to make coffee. Furthermore, having slept an Almost Normal Amount, I'm feeling all kinds of ambitious. I decide before making coffee, that I'm going to descale the espresso machine. It's been about a year since the last descaling, so it's about time. So I go out to the garage and get the gallon jug of vinegar that I keep on hand for that purpose (vinegar doesn't go bad, I'm pretty sure). I then search the house for the steam stopper-thingy, eventually find it and run a bunch of vinegar through the espresso half of my wonderful coffee machine. That finished, I prepare to de-vinegar it by running a bunch of water through the espresso half of my wonderful coffee machine. Now. If you've ever seen an espresso machine, you know it's under pressure and the...

So I was reading this thing about increasing your "writing productivity" today and one of the tips is to set yourself daily goals. They can, thankfully, be small goals, but all the same, it apparently helps you to crank out the wordage. I'm thinking about trying it. Partly I want to try it because I'm one of those people who's so annoyingly goal-oriented that I can't function properly without a damn To Do list even when I'm on vacation. I also need SOMETHING to get my ass in gear with this book. I want it finished. I want the fucking thing out of my head so I can move on to something else. I also need something else to think about besides whether or not I should brave changing the baby's diaper (there's always a chance she's not quite done) or how to get Ms. Four to do something else besides chop scrap paper into teensy, tiny pieces (yes, I'm the friggin' idiot who bought her the scissors, and yes, my living room floor looks distin...

(or: Doh!) I hate when I'm struggling with some piece of writing, and I'm hemming and hawing and dilly-dallying, instead of actually writing, because I KNOW something's "wrong" with whatever it is, but I can't quite figure it out so the chapter or story or whatever is going nowhere fast and then suddenly I SEE it and it turns out the answer has been there all along - as in, had I bothered to READ my own writing, I would have seen all the clues to where the chapter or story or whatever was "supposed" to be going and saved myself a butt-load of beating my head against the wall, false-starts, procrastinatory activities and a whole slew of Angry Letters to my characters, muse, and assorted other scapegoats, not to mention TIME. Sheesh. (God, I love run-on sentences.)

1. How much longer do you have? Too long. Whether it's one more hour, one more day, one more week or three more weeks, it's going to be too goddamn long. The only person who can ask me this and not piss me off is the girl at Starbucks and that only because she gave me the "Mommy Discount" and I got my decaf tall mocha for free one day a couple of weeks ago because I was having a bad-mommy morning. The rest of you need to shut up. 2. Do you have a name yet? No. Actually, yes. We have a list. As I've explained nine dozen times, I cannot and will not name someone I have never seen. It just seems wrong. When we see her, we'll name her. Please stop asking. 3. Can I get that for you? This is the hardest one for people to understand. Especially, bless his heart, The Husband. He's only trying to help and make these last few (*cringe*) weeks easier for me. But, really. I can get a glass of water by myself (sort of) and I hate needing help with stuff. Therefore, hav...

Things I’ll miss Playing guess the body part while watching my belly distort itself into configurations that even in my wildest nightmares I could not have thought up. Hiccups. (Hers not mine.) Taking my time crossing the street at the Medical Center where everybody is in a hurry. Everybody but the Pregnant Lady. Nobody dares rush her. The don’t-mess-with-the-Pregnant-Lady-if-you-value-your-life aura I seem to exude. People just do what I tell them. They don’t fuss. They don’t argue. They just do it. The Husband’s occasional participation in kitchen cleaning duties. Without being asked. (Minor miracle, that.) The extra scoop of Spicy Tofu that the ladies in the hospital cafeteria give me after eyeing the belly. The fact that the cafeteria's older cashier gentleman who wears a hairnet and always has a hand-written quotation taped to his register never charges me extra for the extra scoop of Spicy Tofu. Things I won’t miss Waddling and the constant pain that goes with it. G...

*sneaks surrepititiously onto posting page* Just taking a little break from the wonderful world of polymorphisms, abstracts, and SORRY-your-biosketch-cannot-be-longer-than- 4-pages-stop-looking-at-me-like-that-I-don't-make-the-rules- I-just-work-here to check in and ... well, goof off. 'Cuz I need my damn brain back for five minutes so I can remember what else I get to use it for besides hunting for errant commas and missing definite articles. Spent all weekend and all evening editing other people's stuff. Not done yet. Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds as this is a perfectly legitimate excuse that keeps me from having to edit or *gasp, clutch at heart* write my own stuff. Yeah, that chapter still ain't done. Oh crap, there goes my damn email again... What the hell ever gave me the not-so-bright idea that working from home was a good thing anyway?

(WARNING: Contains every word in the book. Feel free to advise me of any I forgot.) People don’t cuss properly in The South. Especially women. Women in The South hardly seem to cuss at all, as a matter of fact, and most of them look at me funny when I do. Which is why I can’t cuss at the office (I work in a hospital, and they sorta frown on that anyway). The husband, on the other hand, gets to swear like a sailor all day. Which isn’t even remotely fair, since most of the guys he works with are pigs and they know some really good ones – in other words, I’m missing out. What it all boils down to is that I have no place to vent my potty-mouth - except here, I guess, which is why I’m just going to let it all out right now and hopefully get it over with. Yeah, so, on to other places I can’t cuss. Having cured myself of road rage (with music and NPR) I don’t cuss when I’m driving much anymore either. I mean, yeah, there’s the occasional jackass trucker who needs me to lay on the horn and ...

So - this here's serving as my personal web site for the time being. I used to be a whiz at HTML - like ten years ago when I was in college - and while HTML hasn't changed much, well, I have. Don't have the time and/or brain space to worry about the details of things like hand coding tables anymore (and every one of those web-page-creator software packages I ever used pissed me off because they stuck in a bunch of messy junk code), so setting up a "real" web site will have to wait until maybe the 3-yr-old is in school. (Ah, the things pregnancy will do to your brain...) Anyway, I have a feeling I will come here to crank out my "thousand words a day" when I just don't have the courage to face a thousand words of fiction. Fiction hurts - sometimes it hurts good, other times: it just hurts. I just feel like rambling today -- I don't want to have a destination for this. I'm tired of destinations. Well, more accurately, I'm tired of trying to ...