I’m told the saying originated in India–only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun. I love it because I’m always wondering at the people who just go about their business despite the heat. How? On Sunday it was a little cooler than it has been around here—the temperature only got up to 100°. It’s the monsoon, though, which means higher-than-usual humidity. That means my swamp cooler, which does a fine job in dryer times, struggled to keep the temp in the house below 90°. When it’s 90° in the house, there’s an awful lot of lying around being lazy going on. Sometimes I poke the cats, just to be sure they’re still with me. We utilize the usual coping strategies—watching movies with lots of snow, sitting on icepacks, keep the fans on high and all papers nailed down. Sometimes I browse realty listings in Alaska.

Continue reading

Remember Dungeons and Dragons? When my big brother discovered it and taught it to me back in school, it was the best game ever. I’d liked rummy until I got too good at making my short-tempered little brother furious. I liked Trivial Pursuit but I could never win—I’d get all the pie pieces, then wander the board trying to get in the middle until someone passed me by to win. Monopoly always ended in my big brother owning EVERYTHING. Hey, if you had my brothers, you’d have a real problem with losing too. But D&D? We all played on the same team, working together to create something awesome—a campaign full of joy and anguish, excitement and satisfaction. It was like writing, only with people!

Continue reading

  I have friends who own a dozen pretty notebooks they’ve never written in because a pretty notebook should be used for something special, but they write like a house on fire in a college-ruled spiral notebook. I know people who can only work on computer. There are people out there who can only write at a typewriter. I know persons of amazing and enviable focus who can write anywhere, on anything, no matter what is happening around them. Unsurprisingly, these persons write a lot more than I do. But I can write in pretty notebooks and leather-bound journals that shout “adventure!” I write in composition books and spiral notebooks and legal pads, on index cards and mirrors and windows… It’s a wonderful eclecticism, but there’s a slight problem. Just a tiny catch–

Continue reading

  My Head is Harder Than Your Wall That’s what I came up with. I was trying to think of something to write about, trying to think at all through the blasting of Lady Gaga two doors away as my kid took a forty-minute shower and I kept yelling at her about the water bill. Remember MySpace? I was a late adopter. By the time I found my way to MySpace (mostly to exchange emails with a friend at work whose work email didn’t like mine), people were starting to move to Facebook. Anyway. My MySpace profile wanted a quote, and that was what I used. “My head is harder than your wall.” Meaning you’re not going to stop me. I’ll just bang on obstacles until I get through.

Continue reading

  So remember when I was househunting? Update–we did not find the perfect house. However, we did find one we really love. The house isn’t what I envisioned when we were looking, at all. It’s a condo, for one, so we share a wall with the neighbors. There’s no dishwasher. The back yard is mostly concrete. It’s on the other side of town from where I’ve lived for the past twenty-some years. (Twenty? Holy smokes!) But it works. We haven’t heard a thing through the shared wall, and no one has complained to us. The kitchen has enough room for a portable dishwasher, and we found a good used one for $125. The back yard has an orange tree, and enough dirt we can plant things. It also has a brick fireplace-type-thing built in. The drive to work is about fifteen minutes unless traffic is bad–that’s enough time to make it worth finding some books on CD.

Continue reading

  Think of a dying swan, all pathos and elegance. Or of a mighty bear, pulled down by a horde of yipping dogs. Or think heroic Boromir, fighting hordes of Orcs, falling at last full of arrows. It was bound to happen.

Continue reading

  I’ve often wished to be a hermit. Have you ever read My Side of the Mountain? It’s about a boy, tired of living in a cramped apartment with too many siblings, who runs away to upstate New York to live on the family land his father has told him stories of. He makes a home inside a huge tree. He raises a hawk and teaches it to hunt. Man, just hook up wifi in that tree and I’m there.

Continue reading

  Ahh, the turning of the year. Tis the season for dissecting the year past, and planning the year ahead. Cynicism, guilt, hope, and optimism make an unlikely mix at this time of year. Everyone is looking back, or looking ahead, or both. Kit Campbell can’t believe 2013 is gone. Erin Zarro has some big dreams for 2014. Siri Paulson is on vacation. Me? Well, I’m living up to Kit’s proclamation that creative types get a little wild in the resolution department. I’m resonating with Erin’s rejection of fear in the new year. Mentally I’m vacationing with Siri. Ahem.

Continue reading

  Househunting is a pain in the backside. Every time I move, I want it to be the last time (until I hit the NYT Bestseller List and/or win the lottery, so I can move without worrying, anyway.) So finding a forever home that I can afford? Not so easy to do. When I moved into the house before my current one with my then-roommate, I loved the house. It had a fenced yard for the kid and the dog! It had a dishwasher! It was all tile, so it would be easy to clean. Managed by a professional company instead of a very nice but not particularly stable man who took in every homeless cat ever but was completely ineffectual about fixing anything.

Continue reading