Bethanie's Brain

I really have nothing to say, but I haven't been writing-writing much lately, since I'm deep in the thinking part of Think Sideways and/or otherwise occupying the brain with kids, food, laundry (and more laundry!), other people's writing, and various body parts (anatomy & physiology, people! heads out of gutters, please...), so my fingers are itchy and I'm here to scratch them, I guess. Anyway, I spent the entire weekend unplugged. I never even took my laptop out of the backpack I use to haul it to and from work-work. It was kind of nice. I got to sit in different chairs (our wireless router died 2 years ago and we haven't replaced it yet, so being online means being chained to my desk with a little blue cable...). I got to read One for the Money by Janet Evanovitch . Never read anything by her and it was GREAT! Especially as a study in characterization. Seriously. I think it was some part of Joely's Character Clinic that mentioned if you can remove all...

I've been meaning to get another Swiss Army knife, one with a corkscrew, because when I got my first one I thought, "Oh, I'll get the one with the screwdriver - I'd probably never use a corkscrew." Since that time I have, naturally, had many an occasion to regret that decision and this evening was no exception. After the day's workshops and keynote addresses, etc, I ventured out from my hotel to wander the very interesting streets of Louisville and, among other items, found a bottle of my favorite wine. Woo-hoo! I thought and headed back to the hotel, thoroughly pleased with myself. Until I discovered I had no corkscrew. Duh. That should have occurred to me when I bought the wine, but yanno - a day spent contemplating coronary heart disease in women and how to report correlation and regression analyses can fry the thinker somewhat. So I googled "no corkscrew", which turned up this: How To Open a Wine Bottle Without a Corkscrew , which suggested ba...

OK, so Susan at West of Mars started this meme-thingy. Well, sort of. I guess somebody else started it, but I read about it on West of Mars, so that's what counts for me. :) Anyways. It sounded fun, and I'm always up for poking Lars with sticks (he deserves it, believe me). Some background: Lars is one of the original characters from Novel #1, which is a quivering mass of plot spaghetti, which is mostly Lars' fault. Lars is basically a sidekick to one of the main characters. Well, he was supposed to be... ******************************* 1. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence, but Lars is seven and a half feet tall, which is outrageously tall for his world. 2. Lars has outrageously unruly and very long, very red hair . 3. Lars has four outrageously strong-willed older sisters . They made damn sure he knew his place in the world ( well below them), no matter how big he got. 4. Lars is outrageously loyal to Fenn , even when Fenn doesn't deserve it (which is mos...

So I just clicked over to NaNoWriMo to do some research for an upcoming project and when I went into the forums... everything was in German. German! Weird. Unexpected. But kinda cool. 'Cuz I speak German (at least, I used to).

Anybody know anything about Mozy ?? Mozy provides a backup service - i.e., they store all your important documents (for a fee, of course) and has just started offering a discount to faculty, staff and students of Fabulous, Private University if we sign up for a 1 or 2 year contract. I've never heard of them, but it seems like a good deal. I was going to buy an external hard drive and all that jazz, but this seems worlds easier. And cheaper (and cheaper is always good, right?). Worth it? Anyone know? Alternatively, does anyone know how to pronounce it?

Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. ~Sir Edmund Hillary One of the first heros I ever had is gone . I shall miss him.

Because of NaNo I can't have a regular, ol', run-of-the-mill list of New Year's Resolutions. No, no, I have to have a totally dorky list of Big, Fun, Scary, Adventure-y things I'm going to accomplish this year. Whatever. I don't recall ever claiming that I'm not dorky, so what the hell. Let's have at it! Complete and submit one short story. Learn to speak rudimentary but passable Chinese (Mandarin, I guess, even though everyone I work with is from Shanghai). Learn to read/write/vaguely recognize 50 Chinese characters, plus the numbers 1-100. Complete a first revision of either NaNo 2005 (the vampire thing) or NaNo 2006 (the fantasy thing). Teach myself some basic biostatistics (since I can't afford to take a class). At least complete one read-through of the $60 biostats book I bought myself for Christmas (I did mention being dorky, didn't I?). Teach myself some basics about protein structure (since I can't afford to take a class) by reading ...

But I feel like posting, so here I am. Grant Hell is winding down for this season. Ms Five is off at her grandma's house. Ms Baby is asleep. The Husband is parked in front of the TV. And I'm still chained to my desk, because my bloody wireless LAN is still messed up from when my dad was here is frikkin' April. (Or was it March?) Haven't had time to fix it (been a-granting, doncha know). Oh, I re-upped with Critters finally! Been meaning to for weeks now. I learn a lot from critting that I find useful - believe it or not - in my job. Shouldn't make any sense, I suppose, but clear writing is clear writing, and it doesn't matter whether it's about giants and dragons or genetic variants and diet, the rules are pretty much the same. Use active voice and active verbs. Don't spray and pray with your adverbs. Learn where the commas go dammit. Yeah, that said, I'll be off to my first crit in about a year. Woo-hoo!

OK, I've been wanting to catalog my books for a while. And I did something on the old blog like what you'll see on the right side of the screen if you scroll down - a book, an author and some comments about the book (no fancy pictures, though). So the other day I was happily surfing along, dropped by 101 Reasons to Stop Writing (to see if there were any more reasons - there weren't), and BOOM! There it was: a link to Library Thing . "Interesting," thought I, and surfed along to check it out. Turned out to be interesting enough that I actually signed up even though I was pretty sure that I didn't need one more thing to do and would probably NEVER have time to actually put any books in. 'Course, me being me, I immediately grabbed a stack of books because I had to put SOMETHING in (can't have a naked library, how embarassing) and started firing off ISBN numbers. Next thing I knew - and it wasn't but 30 minutes later or so - I had over 80 books ad...

This was my Google Quote of the Day: When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. - Mark Twain I'm going to post it on the wall of my new cube at work. In very large type.

OK, Sistergirl #2, a.k.a. the Queen, has a really cool post on recent craft endeavors and in the comments I mentioned a quilt block I made a while back. She requested that I post it, so here we are and here is my lovely quilt block: Tres beautiful, non? I'm very proud. I'm also never making another one. The block is called True Lover's Knot and I used the instructions from the Quilts from The Quiltmaker's Gift* book. The fabrics are leftovers from our wedding outfits with a green that reminds me of the sagebrush that grows all over the place Way Out West, including the spot where we got hitched. Sadly, as I said, I will never, ever, ever make this block again - at least, not with these particular fabrics. Why? Well, see the little light-colored squares in the middle of the "knots"? That's the fabric from the bodice of my wedding dress. The very expensive, beaded fabric from the bodice of my wedding dress. Which, it turns out, is just a flat-out...

I'm so very happy. I finally figured out how to outsmart blogger and annotate my links. Hah! Miss Snark : A Literary Goddess in Stilettos. I have learned more about writing from the last Crap-o-meter, than from all the frikkin' writing books I own, combined. Dirt City Paranoia : In-yer-face, go-fuck-yerself political satire. Makes me homesick as all hell. I love it. Bitch Ph.D. : I aspire to this kind of honesty. 'Nuff said. 101 Reasons to Stop Writing : I like this one because the author is so cynically honest. Or brutally honest. Or just mean. Whatever. It's a welcome dose of reality in amongst all the warm, fuzzy, 'you-can-do-it', 'don't-ever-give-up-on-your-dreams' writing advice out there. Street Anatomy : Stumbled across this from a post on the AMWA Editing/Writing listserve and it is COOL . 'Nuff said, people. Check it out.

I have two things to say about the following news report: Breastmilk Likely Saved Girls Lives in Frozen Wilderness, Experts Say Number 1: I hope they find the girls' daddy soon and alive. Number 2: Go, boobs. I'm gonna re-read this story every time I get sick of breastfeeding from now until Ms. Baby decides she's done. No matter how sick of it I get. If she's done at 1 year, fine. If she hangs on and hangs on until she's almost 3 like her big sister, fine.

You'll notice the new layout. Two reasons: 1) I wanted to be able to have a list of my categories ("labels" in blogger-speak) and going to blogger-beta was the only way to do it. 2) I suppose I could have chosen the old layout/template-thingy and done this. But the aging eyes just couldn't take the light-on-dark text anymore. *sighs* Sucks getting old.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. But my brain is now in NaNo mode and won't shut up or shut off --- SO: The Fifth Element is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's great - funny, adventurous, great characters. One of my favorite parts is when they're on the cruise ship and Bruce Willis' character is in some stand-off with the bad-guy aliens and offers to 'negotiate'. He steps out from behind a wall or something, shoots the bad guy dead and says, "Anybody else want to negotiate?" Nobody does. Ba-hah! Kills me. Every time.

Less than 4 hours til NaNo officially starts in my time zone!!! I'm so excited, I can't stand it!!!

OK, I'm experimenting with colors here, trying to make El Blogo easier to read. Didn't like the purple , wasn't an improvement, I don't think. This is some form of yellow whose hex code is FFFF99. Thoughts?