Bethanie's Brain

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...

A thousand words a day sounds like a good idea. In close proximity to NaNo, it even sounds reasonable. And if I didn't have a job, this mommy thing, a house to clean, meals to cook, and Christmas to put on, it might even be reasonable. But reality has set in. As you can see from my self-fabricated ticker, I started off well. And then sleep deprivation, doctor's appointments, work-work, and well, LIFE, happened and 500 words a day started sounding like some pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. I can still hit 1,000 on a good day and usually weekend days I hit 1,000 no problem. However, I have decided to revise my daily goal a bit. The new, unbreakable rule is: I have write SOMETHING every day. Even if it's no more than my current low of 190 words, I still have to write SOMETHING. If I do that every day, it will get me to the end of the novel. It may be painfully slow and I may be arguing with teenagers before that happens, but whatever. It will happen. Then I can start on Ope...

Or Quick and Cheesy, If You Prefer THE BASICS A package of chicken (boneless breasts or boneless thighs are my fav) A can of diced tomatoes ARRANGE the chicken in a PAN. POUR the tomatoes over the chicken. ADD TO THAT A can of diced green chilies, if you want to go Mexican OR Some Italian seasonings, if you want to, er, go Italian TOSS (not literally) into the oven at 350-375 if you have an hour and 15 or an hour and a half or at 425 if you really can't wait that long. ADD some cheese towards the end of cooking time. EAT!!

Yesterday was Helmet Day, here in Exile, and Ms. Baby is now - willing or otherwise - proudly sporting pretty pink head gear. Below, her initial reaction: Yup. I'm a Mean Mama. You see how I torture my young'uns... Seriously, the whole thing appears, thus far, to be a whole lot less traumatic than I was fearing. We'll see what the next few days (weeks, months) hold, but ill effects have been limited to a few funny looks from people we don't know. So far.

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.

1. Finishing in Not-So-Record Time . Every time I write 50,000 words in 30 days it takes me longer. The first time it was 23 days, last year it was 27 days, this year it was 28 days. I vaguely wonder why that is. 2. The End . This NaNo represents the first time I have not reached The End, as in The End of The Story. The other two NaNos were dragged kicking and screaming to their respective ends. In the case of the first NaNo, this meant condensing about six chapters into four sentences. In the case of the second NaNo, this meant rushing through a vampire fight scene that ended up including a muskrat. Yes, really. I'm much happier having blown off that particular No Plot, No Problem advice this time. 3. Hijackers . Normally, my plot hijackers have names that start with L. So this time I deliberately avoided L names for my characters. Not only did that not do me any good - I still ended up with a hijacker named Luther (in chapter 1, no less) - but I also ended up with ...

There always is one, isn't there? Even inside the darkest of clouds. The shiny lining inside the dark cloud of last evening's loss of wordage came in the form of a plot bunny that jumped me during Ms. Baby's 5AM feeding. (Why a plot bunny at 5AM? I don't know. You'd have to ask Dorothy (the muse). That's when she tends to pop in for her little chats.) Where was I... Oh yes, dear Dotty showed up to tell me that I had that scene all wrong, so it didn't much matter that it went up in cyber-smoke, since I would have had to rewrite it all anyway. Which I did. This morning. When I should have been folding laundry. (Which was fine, really, because who the hell wants to fold laundry?) Anyways. I'm back to where I was last night. And I triple-frikkin'-checked that I had the right file this time.

I just spent the better part of two hours writing a thousand words. They are now gone because I am stupid. I FUCKING KNOW BETTER than to click on the Recent Files list in Word. I know better. But I fucking did it anyway. I fucking did it anyway and wrote my thousand fucking words in the fucking backup file that Documents To Go uses to sync the fucking laptop version to my fucking PDA. And then I fucking synced the files. And lost my thousand fucking words. I am so FUCKING PISSED I can't see straight.

This headline was reported the other day by several online news agencies (go ahead, read it, it's short): Ancient astronomical device thrills scholars Synopsis (for those in a real hurry): Basically, somebody has studied an ancient Greek device, reconstructed it and found out that it does amazing and very sophistocated and advanced things. Scientists are astonished that an ancient civilization could produce anything quite so amazing, sophistocated and/or advanced. Stories like this always leave me shaking my head at the scientists. Well, not at the scientists, but at their reaction to how complicated ancient civilizations were. I mean, why is it so amazing that ancient peoples could create complicated things? This shouldn't amaze us. It's not like they were Australopithecus or Homo erectus or something. They were us , Homo sapiens sapiens . We create complicated things all the time. Why shouldn't the ancient Greeks have been able create things just as complicat...

Wind shrieks through frantic trees Windows rattle Wind chime, a constant clangor, slowing, never stopping Leaves scurry, in droves, in circles, in corners There is no place to hide

So I won NaNo, but haven't actually reached the end of the story. Which means now I have a novel to finish. Here's the plan: 1,000 words a day. Until it's done. Which will be anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 more words, if I'm gonna be honest. Hmmmm... maybe they should call it National Novel Starting Month...

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.

I did it! I made it to 50K!! Woot! The story's not done. More to write. Much more. Un-Woot.

Normally, I leave political rants to my betters (please see dirt city paranoia ), but this has me grinding my teeth and it ain't even 8AM yet: Bush: Iraq Violence Part of al-Qaida Plot I mean, COME ON. How fucking stoopid do they think we are ?? Do they really think anybody is going to believe them? Did the results of the last election tell them nothing? This new line of utter bullshit is clearly the work of the Iraq "Study" Group, the latest attempt by King George and his Evil Henchmen to make it look like they give a shit about the clusterfucked quagmire they've created in the Middle East. "Study", my ass. They should just be honest for once and call themselves His Majesty's Spin Doctors and be fucking done with it. Graah! They make me SICK.

It isn't fair. And it shouldn't be this fucking hard. I'm a girl, after all. So you would think that writing girl characters would be easy. Well, easier than writing boys. You would think writing girls would come naturally. You would think trying to imagine life from the inside of a boy brain would be a truly astonishing feat for me, a girl. You would think. And you would, apparently, be wrong. I blame being eight years old, because that's when it started, I think: my first taste of boy envy. See, eight years old is when I discovered that boys can pee standing up. Laugh all you like, but I was insanely jealous. I mean, c'mon, let's face it -- unzipping your fly and whipping out your weiner is a whole lot more a) convenient, b) quicker and c) sanitary than pulling down your drawers, exposing your buns and 'drip-drying'. Anyways, that's where it started. Ever since then, despite a Barbie doll phase and the occasional long-fingernail phase, I...

OK, I'm liking the NaNo widget thingy: I didn't get it at first (I'm slow, what can I say), but I'm finding that getting rid of the red is very motivational. Makes me hit quota since I started using it (note lack of red after a certain point) and thus forces the story forward (whether it feels like cooperating that day or not). Wonder if I could get one for off-season (non-NaNo) use?

Miss Snark posted a joke on her very snarky blog the other day. I've heard it before once upon a time, and as an almost-Unitarian, I felt I had to share: You know why Unitarians are such poor hymn singers? Cause they are always reading ahead to see if they agree with the text. Ba-hah!

Check it out! Do keep in mind that it's still very much a draft... so, yeah, the guys in kilts pretty much show up out of nowhere...

So the other night we're riding in the car. Ms. Baby - for once - is not screaming bloody murder (although I am sitting in the backseat to provide assistance, just in case). Since it is unusually quiet due to the lack of screaming, Ms. Four and I are having A Conversation. "A hexagon ," she says matter-of-factly, "has six sides." "That's right," I chime in, ever ready with the reinforcement. "And an octagon has... how many sides?" she asks. I know she knows the answer, but she doesn't like to guess wrong. "Eight!" I say. "Just like an octopus has eight legs," The Husband adds from the front of the car (where he gets to sit because he's driving). "See 'oct' means 'eight'," I say, resisting the very strong urge to tell her it's Latin. There's a thoughtful pause. "So what does 'puss' mean?" askes Ms. Four. "Well, 'puss' is another word for 'ca...

…you can eat a steak dinner with one hand while standing up, singing lullabies and swaying back and forth. … the sound of a howling infant doesn’t even make you flinch. In fact, you don’t even notice it until somebody else points it out. … the definition of colic, “unexplained crying for three hours a day, three or more days a week”, actually sounds like a vast improvement. … you have never, EVER sat down with your baby awake. … you don’t believe people who say they have. … you have trouble dressing your baby because she/he won’t bend . … you can balance your baby on one hand when it is angry. Kind of like a board. … your baby is sitting and quietly staring into space and you call the pediatrician in a panic thinking something is terribly wrong.