Bethanie's Brain

NaNo starts in 28 minutes. I am trying to be patient about it. I am not very good at patient. So I'm trying to distract myself and happened to notice Google's word of the day today is 'gloaming', one of my all-time favorite words ever. In part, I really like it because it's one of those words with really, really deep English/Germanic roots. No, no Latin-ness here, thank you very much, this one goes straight back to Old English and the time of Beowulf. I also like it because of the images in evokes in the old brain - low clouds mob a purple streak of twilight on the horizon, something in an alley waits, full dark is coming soon.... sort of the same feel as the first scene of this year's NaNo! Oh, great... here we are again... waiting... Aaaah! .

As long time readers will know, I have no religion. I have never met one that could hold me. The Christians, the Buddhists, the pagans - in one way or another, they all espouse the One True Way, a concept that provokes my brain into instant and utter rebellion. (I will NOT be told what to think. I will NOT be told how to see the world. I will NOT be made to believe without question. And this thing you call 'faith' that you want me to drown myself in? You can shove it.) And yet I cannot call myself an atheist either. It's not that I'm waffling or hedging my bets or reserving my right to say 'oh, well, maybe ...' at the last minute. I simply don't think you can know one way or the other (which is why, technically, I'm an agnostic, but whatever). All the same, I have these moments - like when I stumbled across this: Dreaming the Dead . It's a post on Holly Lisle's blog about a dream she had in which someone who died appeared in her dream wit...

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...

So. Boss Lady offered (once again) to pay for me to attend the Great and Wonderful Annual Medical Writers/Editors Conference this year (have I mentioned yet today how much I adore Boss Lady?). Of course, I went, but unlike previous years, this year I went by myself . As in, I left Ms. Six and Ms. Baby and The Husband at home . And so here I am in my hotel room and .... I'm ALONE. There are NO childen climbing on me. I have TWO beds AND a whole bathroom that I don't have to share with ANYONE. I have NO IDEA what to do with myself. OK, I'm exagerating - I have plenty of ideas, believe me. :D But this is the first time since Ms. Six was born that I have left my babies and gone away overnight by myself, and frankly, it's a little eerie. Not that I'm not enjoying myself, mind. But it's mighty odd after six and a half years of somebody demanding something from me every second of every day to revert back to being responsible for ONLY ME. It's a little bit...

The plotting of NaNo 2008 has been plodding at a snail's pace this week due to some sort of creeping crud that has been working its way through the family -- so I'm not nearly as far along as I think I should be. However, everyone finally has a name (Thank You, Viking Answer Lady !) - Mystery Girl very nearly got axed for not ante-ing up (and she's still waffling about the spelling, but whatever). And everyone finally started piping up about what the hell happens in The Middle Of The Story after I threatened to axe everybody and use the outline from 2005, which was completed but never got used because the vampires showed up at the last minute. Interestingly enough, most of the Middle-Of-The-Story progress was made in a frantic, long-hand , 20 minute period sitting backwards in the driver's seat of my car -- NO, not while I was driving, while I was waiting to pick up Ms. Six after school yesterday. I told Bran and Mystery Girl (she doesn't get to use her name un...

This is why I love NaNo and will probably always find an excuse to do it: Guns, Shooting Velociraptors Out Of For real. Go check it out. It's so hysterically off the wall it makes me want to cheer. I don't know why shit like this gives me hope, but it does. I so totally identify with people who look at the crazy, horrible, ridiculous world we live in and say, 'oh, yeah? well, i'll raise you a velociraptor! how do ya like them apples?!' .

The Training Grant Adventure from Hell is over. Fucking finally. I didn't think we were going to make it when I got to work on Friday at 6:30 AM. I didn't think we were going to make it at 12:00 PM when we were still missing 3 biosketches. I didn't think we were going to make it at 4:00 PM when we still didn't have the signature page. I didn't think we were going to make it at 5:00 PM when Boss Lady LEFT to go pick up her son and attend his piano concert. (Nope. She didn't come back.) And I really, really didn't think we were going to make it at 7:15 when we were still making copies and only had 15 minutes to get them assembled and downstairs to the FedEx drop-box. But we did and it's gone: signed, sealed, and will be delivered Monday morning by FedEx. And then I almost had to kill someone. Because after I had run downstairs to the FedEx box and dropped off the boxes with the proposal inside, I came back to my computer - at 7:30 PM, mind you - and fou...

Well. My bank failed this morning. Not a good way to start Grant Submission Hell-Day. Does not bode well. Not at all, really. Gah! Where IS my coffee and when can I have another one please?!?? .

Tomorrow is Doomsday.... er.... I mean, Grant Submission Day. Yeah... um, same thing. Anyway. I've been at it since 6 AM this morning and now we're approaching 11 PM and, even though I shockingly only had ONE coffee this morning, I am SO AMPED, I can already tell that I'm never going to get to sleep in time to get any kind of rest before the alarm goes off at 5 AM Friday and the race to beat the FedEx guy starts.... I'd use this time to do some fun fiction writing, but I've been typing for, like, 16 hours straight and my damn hands are about to fall off.... I suppose it's not helping matters I'm listening to death metal.... *collapses on floor in fits of giggles* Yeah. It's that fun. Don't you wish you could do this for a living, too? OK, I'm off to bed now. Really. *more giggles* .

So last week, Ms. Six's after school program had a Pirate Party on Friday afternoon. I signed up to make sandwiches, thinking I would surely find something clever and pirate-y online and not have to think too hard about being clever myself . Well, I seached. And I searched. And I searched. And Google failed me. Nothing! I found exactly nothing - nothing pirate ship-ish, nothing really all that pirate-y even. (OK, there was one "pirate sandwich" that involved bologna and olives, which caused it to be immediately vetoed, so it doesn't count.) So there I was - Thursday afternoon and desperate - wandering around the grocery store with NO IDEA what I was going to do. I had turkey in the cart. I had cheese in the cart. I had Ms. Baby in the cart starting to get cranky and very bored with her third trip through the bread aisle. I had just about given up on the whole Clever Idea thing and resigned myself to Wonder Bread (*gags*) --- when I saw them!! A bag of tiny, t...

Yes. I've lost it. In case you were wondering. But the Special Hell known as The Training Grant will soon be over. On Friday, we'll make 6 or 7 copies of all 350+ pages of that fucker and FedEx 5 plus the original off to Washington or Baltimore or wherever-it's-going and It. Will. Be. Over. And I can't wait. But in the meantime, I thought I'd share the pretty chart I made to keep track of all the people we needed to get stuff from and whether on not we'd asked for it, got it, initialized it, modified it, finalized it and obtained the hard copy. See the pretty chart? Ooooo.... Colors.... And yes, they all mean something. Friday has never seemed a sweeter word. .

I don't really want to do NaNo this year. Really, I don't. I have too much going on. Someone will get sick. An unplanned grant is sure to appear out of nowhere and be due in the middle of the month. My family is coming here for Turkey Day. Reasons against abound. But it's NaNo's 10th anniversary. Seems like a shame to miss it. And while I was washing dishes a bit ago, I got this totally wicked idea. A deadline would be a really good thing for it, right? Right? Dammit . .

Gas prices are shooting for the moon. Wall Street is crumbling into the sea. A hurricane has scoured whole towns off the map My freakin' mortgage company appears to be next. It's just rumors at this point, but um... just what are you supposed to DO if the bank holding your mortgage does the dead fish routine?? Do I keep paying them if they've filed for Chapter 11? Am I allowed to get irritated if they get bought out by somebody? Probably not, but it would be - literally - the FIFTH time my mortgage has been handed off to somebody else since we bought the house two years ago. I was just getting used to them! After they held onto to the note for a whole year, I finally broke down and got set up to pay them online. I actually trusted them that much! And they repay me like this ? Great. Fabulous. Figures. .

Rain pounds the rocks. They are slick, trecherous. The only moon in the sky this time of night is Hell, and even She and Her Hounds are hiding. A hand appears over the edge of the precipice. Stark white, waterlogged, it scrabbles for a hold on anything at all. Its owner doesn't seem to notice when it is cut to the bone by a bit of rock. Wheezing and panting with fear, a small, wretched form pulls up onto a tiny ledge. No telling whether it is man or woman, it makes for a crack in the cliff that rams into the ledge. There it huddles, gasping, shivering, praying for the storm to pass, the rain to cease, morning to come. This is how I feel right now. Beat to a pulp mentally and physically (even though I was chained here in front of my computer all day and hardly moved). I do not like Training Grants. I do not like them, Sam I Am. Seriously. Somebody just shoot me. Please. .

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...

Yup. Got a bee in my bonnet for homemade pizza. Homemade stuffed crust pizza. The girls had cheese: The Husband had pepperoni and mushroom: I had Everything: Yup. It don't get no better than that. .

And just when I thought things were going so well... I've got a pretty good handle on the grant thing by now. R01's? I can do 'em in my sleep. K series? A few extra details, but no big deal. DOD-BCRP? Details galore, so they're a pain in the ass, but I've done enough of them by now that I know how to head off the worst of their gremlins. And, really, I knew better than to believe Boss Lady when she told me in July that the endometrial cancer grant was the last one for the year. I did. And sure enough, we're submitting TWO this month. ( TWO!! ) But she managed to blindside me anyway. With a monstrous beast known as a Training Grant. It is colossal. It has fangs. It has teeth. It is due on the 29th. This means I will be eating, sleeping, dreaming, breathing Training Grant for the next 3 weeks. Oh, the happiness. Oh, the joy. Oh, the glory of offering myself up as a sacrifice to such beasts. Gah! .

Call me juvenile. Call me an adolescent throwback. Call me having a mid-life crisis. I don't care. I did it anyway. Yes, yes - I went to Manic Panic . I ordered Vampire Red hair dye. I just can't stand it anymore. There are too many rules here. Too much "clean your desk off, we have Important People visiting the office tomorrow". Too much wear the right clothes, wear the right shoes, drive the right car, toe the line, be on time, smile pretty, be polite and helpful and pleasant to everyone, especially the people who deserve it least. I've had enough. I must rebel. I must. .

I almost was one. I was this close: ||. But then I thought I should probably tell them that Ms. Baby is still breastfeeding (yes, she just turned two and yes, she's still breastfeeding and no, I don't plan to wean her until she's good and ready. so there. :D) and as it turns out, breastfeeding women do not make good endometrial tissue sample donors. Bummer. Bigtime, 'cuz they would have paid me $200/sample and I could have donated up to six samples, and that would have covered the launch of my freelance medical editing gig very nicely. With room to spare, probably. OK, I would have earned that $200 every single time, because I don't think endometrial tissue donation is, like, a really pleasant experience, involving as it does a speculum up your wa-zoo and dilation of your cervix... But hey - I survived two labors with no meds, so I think I probably could have hacked it. I mean, really, how long can it take? Not more than 10 minutes, 15 tops. Piece o' cake...

It never fails to amaze me when I'm driving along in the car, minding my own business, Song of the Day cranked up as loud as I can take it, and suddenly BAM! I get fwapped on the head by the huge-est of epiphanies about a story I thought I knew inside out. It happened again this morning. Now just yesterday I had the huge-est of epiphanies that this particular Song of the Day ( Viva La Vida by Cold Play, of all bands...!) is NOT about the character I thought it was, but about someone else entirely and makes so much more sense that way. So I was not expecting another huge epiphany, not so soon after the other one. But there I was, squinting through the pre-dawn dark made even darker by the blessed rain that dear ol' Fay has delivered (it hasn't rained here in a month), Song of the Day cranked up really, really loud - like, loud enough that I could feel the drum bit reverberating in my chest. And as I'm sitting there, squinting and cursing my windshield wipers for not...