Hurray! I'm started on my NaNoWriMo novel, and it doesn't seem too bad. After a few hours of occasionally painful writing, I have slightly passed my daily word goal of 1750 words, with 1779. Good for me -- I'm off to a good start.

At any time, you can check my profile here. I should be updating my word count daily, and will eventually add an excerpt -- once I write one that seems, you know, exceptable.

Ok, better post this and see if the link works right.

Good luck all. Take care.

Ah, Halloween. The great American holiday, a chance to try on another identity, the perfect celebration for a culture whose biggest celebrities are actors. One day a year, we can all try our hand at the nation's highest profile job. It's a totally brilliant idea.

That may be why we have Halloween instead of the Day of the Dead. Maybe we more need to come to terms with changing identity than with dying. After all, we generally only die once. We may change identity -- geographically and socially mobile as we are -- dozens of times. Practice and enjoy. Get a little sugar high to dissipate the fear of change. Glorious.

Meanwhile, I pulled out Nancy Kress's excellent book _Dynamic Characters_ to begin preparing for NaNoWriMo. I now have more understanding of the woman who will tell my tale. Our story opens with her working as a legal assistant, falling far below the expectations her family had of her and expressed in the name Elja Boadiccea Johanssen. She's listening to a woman foisted on her by the partners, who thinks her husband's death by avatar should be actionable.

I'm looking forward to jumping into this story's roller coaster. Tomorrow the fun begins!

All right, I have a few goals to meet.

First off, $1000 in net poker winnings between October 25th and November 25th. At the moment, I'm $160 toward that goal. Of course, in poker you can go backwards.

Next, 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo in November. I managed this last year. This year I'm raising the bar by selecting a first person narrative. I won't be able to use the strategy of switching characters when I can't think of anything more to say about the current one. That strategy helped me greatly last year.

Next, there are the inevitable Amaranth commitments I intend to fulfill. We're having an initiation, and I have a lot of lines to learn for it, plus a doughnut sale in Portland later.

Then, I'm joining a Creative Process group. It will be meeting every Monday from Nov. 10th through the end of January. Don't really know what that will entail in work outside of class. Maybe we will make it up as we go along.

And, I'm hosting the family Thanksgiving the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

That, and my usual life is enough to pile in one month, don't you think?

By all that's merciful, may I escape November without any further crises.

Spent much too long sorting beads yesterday. I bought two assortment packs to cover the colors I needed to make a twisted gold wire crown I'll be needing for Amaranth. Lesson to remember -- sorted beads are worth much more than mixed beads. Next time -- if ever -- I do something like this, add two hours of my labor to the cost of each assortment and see if they are still a better value than buying individual bead packs.

Still, I also finished the crown. Total cost, under $20. Not counting labor.

Sorting beads reminded me of playing No Mess. Sometimes the easiest way to get the items you want together is to remove the ones you don't want. Also gained sudden insight into the use of a Mancala board -- a long stick with indentations would work very well for sorting grain sized beads.

Now I have a lot of remaining beads. Nothing comes to mind to do with them. Maybe later.

Took our cat Pike in for an overdue dental cleaning Tuesday, and he gave us quite a scare. He has picked up a heart murmur since his annual exam this summer. Took x-rays, and everything looked ok, so they proceeded. He was extremely frightened to go to the vet this time. We're going to try to arrange home care for him in the future.

He seemed fine once I brought him home. A little hoarse from all the high pitched sounds of distress he had been making.

Pike seems to live to love me. I've never known a cat to follow me around, complaining until I sit down, so that he can lay on my lap, until Pike. I find I'm not ready to give him up. Not that you ever are, I suppose.

But all's well for now.

"Isn't it true, you never know what you've got 'til it's gone
They paved over paradise and put up a parking lot"

This morning I grabbed a few minutes to memorize the words to Lovers in a Dangerous, as performed by Bare Naked Ladies. This is something I haven't had a chance to do in a while. It felt good.

A couple times in the past I've gathered a list of all the songs I have memorized at the moment. Both times, it was in the vicinity of 120 complete songs. That's right, I could sing nonstop for about three hours with no lost verses and no repeats. Not that you would necessarily want me to. The consensus seems to be that my voice is mediocre at best. But I enjoy it.

My life seems more gracious when I have time to indulge in music. It has been a very hectic couple of months -- one urgent task following another piled on top of my usual schedule. Coming home from helping a friend move Sunday evening, I found myself wishing I could stay home for the next two years.

Definitely time to indulge in some simple pleasures.

So if you find me singing on your street corner, please look on me kindly. I promise not to tarry. It's just an amateur indulging in breath, note, beauty and lyrics, it's not toxic waste.

Take care, all.

I've just been out tweaking the front sprinkler system. We have a few bare patches beginning in the front lawn. So I went out to observe the water patterns and see if I could improve the coverage.

My skirt is wet from mid-thigh down. Fortunately, linen doesn't become too transparent, and the neighbors aren't too active at 6 am. It has been warm enough that I enjoy the cooling as the water evaporates around my legs.

One of the sprinkler heads was covered by foliage. I cleared the leaves away and gathered a good deal of skirt water on that one. Another has a leak, and that I can't repair while the water is running. There seems to be one area that the sprinklers don't quite reach. With luck, when the leak is repaired, there will be just enough additional pressure to send the water farther from the heads and cover that patch as well.

I have been savoring my domestic pleasures recently. Since we added the evaporative cooler, (affectionately called Joey,) our house has become an even more pleasant refuge from the heat and expectations of small town desert life. Doug and I have begun playing Final Fantasy, the original, out of the Origins package, and hope to play FF2, FF4, FF5, FF6, FF7, FF8, and FF9 in order over the next year or two, returning to our beloved FFX with new appreciation of the development of its play, in plenty of time to play FFX2 when it comes out. We may slip in Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger somewhere. Outside entertainment doesn't draw us as strongly. Especially since only The Matrix reloaded, of four films we've seen in the last month, provided a truly outstanding experience. That film well exceeded our expectations. Bruce Almighty was competent fluff, The Hulk interesting visually and psychologically, but somehow slight, and Legally Blonde II really dropped the ball, with dead dialogue from scene 1. The talent of Reese Witherspoon, Sally Field, and especially Bob Newhart salvaged some interest from their scenes, but I still have a bad taste left from that film. A true waste of good characters and good talent. How could the charm of the first one go so wrong, wrong, wrong?

Today, we plan to hit the local tour of homes. Every year, I see the signs, and think "I'd like to do that!" and by the time I free a weekend day to tour, it's over. This year, we are catching the last day of the last weekend. It's progress. Maybe next year, I'll be organized sooner.

And despite my cri de coeur over the dishes a few blogs back, the state of the house is improving. I'm keeping up pretty well on the necessities, and catching some of the occasionally needed tasks up to date -- like vetting the sprinkler system.

So, life is good.

And I hope yours is, too.

All right, what's boring about peace? How much adrenaline do people need, anyway?

Now, I admit to being easily bored. I hate waiting, and spending forty hours a week doing some repetitive, detail-oriented task -- features largely in my vision of hell. I like a challenge, and I don't want to outlive my ability to learn.

AND all the things I like to do can more easily happen in peace. There's more time for art, and good food, and good conversation. There's easier travel to exotic places, and better chances to get to know people from other cultures. Without a large share of our economy draining into a destructive hole, we can build more interesting architecture, and film grander spectacles, and educate more people. Everyone has a better chance to realize their dreams, and make this a richer and more fascinating world, when the economy is good.

Only the unimaginative find war the most exciting possibility. Ask any soldier -- war means long stretches of boredom. Peace, on the other hand -- peace means freedom and choice and art and business. Peace lets us work on justice and freedom, and war distracts from it. In peace, freedom expands, and in war, it contracts.

Oh, war has its moments. Peace is infinitely more interesting.

I'm noticing a much longer lag between the time I give a copy of Embers of Humanity to a reader for commentary and the time I get it back. The Cracked Bell came back more quickly. I hope this is a good sign.

Meanwhile, strange scenes and phrases have been drifting into my mind for the current effort, A Game of Christmas. I find myself wanting to open it up, really create an exciting vision of peace... well, you see my problem. A novel calls for a problem for the protagonist to grapple with. Peace is a resolution, not a problem. Hence, no novel. But here I still am, feeling like there's some story just out of reach....

I suffer occasional losses of faith in fiction. Endings -- a piece of fiction has to end, and life does not come in neat delineated packages. Not even birth and death are final bounds, if the community is your focus. And problems -- I manage my own life to avoid drama. To the greatest degree possible, I plan ahead and gather resources and skills, and associate with the kind of people, that will help my life run smoothly, productively, pleasantly -- anything but dramatically. So I have no patience for characters who create problems for themselves. And no will to pile problem upon problem upon my characters, just to make things more dramatic.

So maybe I'm not cut out to write fiction.

But then I have these ideas...

Well, my faith will probably return. When the weather cools, and I feel more energetic, when next I read a stunningly good novel, and see that with all the form's contradictions, there is still beautiful and true work to be done in it, or when my own words start to come easily, and I feel that they are good -- then I'll be drawn in again.

And why should I expect the good stuff to be easy?

It has been a while. A bad cat month, and the dreary, mind-deadening heat of summer. Irony and lack of sleep.

A couple of days ago the words started bubbling up again. I regained the desire to blog, and stray, coupling sentences wound through my mind, seeking to realize themselves as blogs while my fingers twitched far from the keyboard. Stillborn word children, now lost.

Or perhaps not, merely to be rewound and transformed, rising from the archetypical muck where the first ancestors of story combined into self-replicating strands after the momentary illumination of serendipity's lightning.

Remind me, oh muse, of dignity and celebrity, of pet responsibility, headstands, and the way of accepting no, and I shall write again.

Good systems and bad systems.

Our recycling system is working well. When we use a can, we set in near the sink, wash it when doing dishes, then drop it in a box under the sink. Bottles that need washing get the same treatment -- water bottles, for example, don't need washed and go directly into the box.

When the box fills, I take it to the garage, sort the recyclables in it into the appropriate recycling containers -- I have a handled bag hanging from a nail to collect those with deposits, two bins for materials collected at the curb, and another box for aluminum, which I donate to a charity that redeems it and gives the money to diabetes research. These final recycling receptacles are all easy to carry to where their contents leave my control. So all this recycling moves at a steady and easy pace, and is pleasantly out of sight at every step of the way. It's a good system because it lets me recycle easily, gaining some efficiency from batching the materials while keeping them from reaching daunting mountain of labor status.

The dishes system is not working as well. We have all the right tools -- a nice double sink with disposal, a dishwasher, plastic and steel wool scrub pads, plenty of washcloths and dish towels, so we can change them as soon as they are soiled, effective dish soap. The problem is me. I don't like doing dishes. I don't like the feeling of having my hands dirty, and I don't like being exiled to the kitchen in the social hour after dinner, and I swore when I left my last place of employment that I'd never work on my feet again.

Well. I've done some mental diffusion techniques, and the best I've managed to do is soften my reaction to doing dishes from: this is horrible, unfair, nasty, blecherous, disgusting and hateful
to: this is one of those necessary and useful tasks that, while unpleasant, has to be done.

And that's a fair amount of improvement, really. But I still don't want to do them. Especially not right after dinner, when I want to visit, and my feet often already hurt, and I'm tired and don't have the will to push myself to do unpleasant tasks, and I'll have to go to bed feeling dirty.

So, though I know that the best housekeepers keep the dishes done immediately after meals, and the dishes are actually easier to clean when they're fresh, and it's nice to come into a clean kitchen in the morning, I don't do dishes after dinner very often. Clearing off and washing the table and counters and gathering all the dishes by the sink is fine -- that doesn't bother me.

It's better to do the dishes after breakfast. Then I can go take my shower afterwards. My feet don't hurt, my mood is better and everything seems easier. In fact, anything I do in the morning seems easier.

So, I often discover there is some other important task that needs my highest attention and energy level, and so takes the morning work slot away from doing dishes.

So an entire day may pass without doing dishes.

Then, maybe another one.

Then the kitchen gets smelly and cluttered and congested, and I can't do any cooking without washing dishes first. If I'm working on some project, I find myself at the end of the day, needing to wash dishes just so we can have dinner -- that means the time to make dinner is doubled, and the unpleasantness is at least tripled. And so, instead of me making us excellent and healthy food inexpensively, we end up eating less tasty, less healthy, and more expensive convenience foods, or going out at even greater expense.

And so my dislike for doing dishes has reduced our wealth, our health, and forced us to live with ugly clutter in the kitchen.

Really, the dishes system is in total breakdown.

And all because I don't like doing dishes.

And you thought that was just a minor character flaw! Why, it's practically the downfall of domestic civilization!

Until we have better systems, may you all enjoy the tasks you have to do.

Best wishes, Anna Paradox

This blog from May 23rd appears not to have posted then.

I'm really glad I'm making copies before uploading. A funny thing happened after I disciplined myself to start that process. The lost blog -- the one whose disappearance made me swear I'd never again upload without saving -- suddenly reappeared. Ok, it said, you learned your lesson. Here's a little positive reinforcement. Good girl.

Now, since I am a good girl, I can post the following, written May 23.

Dearie, dearie me. Now the May 23rd blog has reappeared as well. I've deleted the duplication.

What message lurks in the intestines of blogspot? What deep meaning seeks to be known through these technological quirks?

Beats me, I'll just keep saving before upload.

Decadent -- my literal minded old dictionary says this means in a state of decay or decline.

Is that all? Heck, I thought it was something bad. I guess my compost pile is always decadent, and for that matter, so is my driveway. It declines very noticeably -- or, wait, is that inclines?

Seems to me "decadent" comes with a lot more freight than that. When someone declaims that our civilization is decadent, it resonates with impending doom. It conjures pictures of opium addicts languishing and famished on tattered fainting couches. I expect buildings falling into disrepair on every hand and giant cockroaches feeding on the rubble.

No, that's not what's going on. Our cities still grow, our technology continues to rise (have you noticed all the advances in mops recently?), and recent economic wobbles are not long enough to be statistically significant. So what, if anything, is in decay or decline in these our United States?

I suspect most of the people who get excited about our decadence have in mind a decline in morals. And reading yesterday about porn revenues did cause a moment's wonder. But I find any moral decline there vastly outweighed by our great improvements in treating all citizens equally. Tolerance trumps sexual repression in my book.

But here is a decline I worry about. I don't like to see fewer and fewer people voting. And the other day in the coffeeshop, I overheard a discussion about the impossibility of trusting any news source. Since you don't know what's going on, the argument ran, there's no point in voting. You can't know if you're doing any good.

So there we are -- a decline in desire to participate in our government.

Wouldn't it be a shame to let this experiment in democracy decay?

Ah, Las Vegas. A week there goes a long ways towards feeding a hunger for diversity and action, and restores the appeal of a quiet life at home.

It was our longest stay yet. We split a timeshare unit with Doug's parents. We find them very easy to travel with. We had two bedrooms and two bathrooms, conveniently separated by a full kitchen with dining area and living room. We didn't cook, but the fridge was handy for collecting leftovers and holding snacks. That moderated our indulgence in food a little.

We also indulged in alcohol, in gambling, in entertainment, in sightseeing, and oh my yes in shopping.

It's not the price that creates an indulgence -- it's the stepping beyond your normal bounds.

I was thinking out loud about how many cultures have had a time when normal rules are set aside -- a feast or carnival, a fair, a holiday -- we seem to have places to go instead. Lois -- Doug's Mom -- very astutely pointed out that those work best when you have a cohesive community. With Americans moving frequently, and many diverse cultures mingled, it's challenging to agree on a period when the rules change. So instead we go somewhere.

To Las Vegas. For example.

Boldly displayed in a hotel gift shop were t-shirts reading "What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas" -- the logic of carnival captured in a sound bite.

One of the concepts of everyday life that Las Vegas stretches the most is that money is important. When you're there, some things become free and some become more expensive. Money turns into tokens, fast moving and of elastic value. You're enticed to play with money, spend it, tip it, risk it, maybe win it. It's very hard to keep taking it so seriously.

And that's a good thing. Because most of the time, grave stock commentators and stiff business advisors lead us to take money very seriously indeed. But there are things that are more important, aren't there?

Then, when the party begins to tire instead of free, it's time to go home. Back to a steady and moderate life, which sounds better and better -- comforting and nourishing and worthwhile.

And that is my favorite benefit of a vacation in Las Vegas -- that home gains so much glamor when it's time to return.

Well, my life doesn't seem to be completely eaten. I've found time for a few other activities. Made some more bookmarks, cleaned a little, cooked a little. Caught a cold. Stuff like that.

The cold isn't too bad. I'm just going to confine myself, rest and drink fluids in hope of being over it in time for us to leave on vacation Sunday.

I also made a retail display for the bookmarks. Thinking about it, I decided it wasn't impossibly daunting to ask around and see if any local bookstores would be interested in offering them for sale. I may just give it a try. Though at current expenses and time to make them, if they do sell, I'll only make the equivalent of about $3 an hour for them. Well, it would keep me in paper and stickers.

Long time readers will be aware that I have a serious yen for paper. As collecting manias go, it's mild and inexpensive. At least until I decide to go to Japan and buy direct from the source.

It's nice that I will have time for things other than buying online music. It turns out that 200,000 songs, as currently offered by the Apple Music store, still leaves out a lot of music I would be interested in owning. I expect the inventory will continue to grow. And I'm very interested to see if they begin offering more independent musicians. I'd appreciate more local and unusual choices.

I can only think of two problems with adding more music. One is that it may be harder to search and find what you're looking for. But if Google can search the entire web, searching a music database is certainly a solvable problem. The other is having to write more small checks to send royalties to more small record companies. This looks solvable, too. With electronic payments, the added effort of more and smaller payments should not unduly increase costs.

So, online music still has a good chance of eating my life. It's just not there yet.

Well, that's it for my life. The rest of it will be devoted to listening to samples and buying music from the Apple Music Store.

This is almost like first surfing the web. I've listened to online samples before, but it was always a chore. Now I'm learning odd facts like that I like almost all songs with the word Creek in the title. Hmmm...

I am trying to fill my Hoedown playlist. If you have any suggestions for uptempo acoustic dance music such as Cajun, bluegrass, early acoustic rock, traditional Celtic, etc., by all means email me a pointer so I can listen to a sample of it. The usual address, annaparadox@mac.com, applies.

Good luck and good listening, Anna

So, it seems being a soldier is glamourous again.

I shouldn't be surprised. It is a generous and noble thing to risk your life for your country. And historically, soldiers have been admired nearly all the time.

It is only recently, when war became capable of destroying all life on the planet, that we have had mixed feelings about our own soldiers.

And I think it was a mistake to vilify the veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars. In case of real danger to our country, they were demonstrating the virtues we would need. Better to honor the men and women we need.

But it does seem a little odd, coming off several decades of bad press, to see the military canonized again.

And do we need to proceed to glorifying war? Is it fun and exciting to kill people and destroy property? Are we ready to start counting our enemies as less human than ourselves? Were our efforts towards human rights and tolerance all an illusion?

So, yes, honor the men and women who serve. But war -- war is at best a regrettable necessity.

So... somewhere I had a list of things to blog about. Funny how there are days when I run over with too many ideas to capture, and others when I only run over with silence.

We went into Portland to visit Doug's parents. Two and a half years later, it still feels like going home. I don't have a history of frequent moves and adapting to them.

Always enjoy seeing them. Enjoyed dim sum and Vietnamese beef noodle soup, two cuisines unavailable here, and shopped an Asian market, also unavailable here. I can't remember not being drawn to Asian (or as we said then, Oriental) culture. I once calculated that if reincarnation happened, a significant fraction of everyone must have been Chinese. Of course, maybe those reincarnating souls prefer to stay Chinese.

That's classic me -- calculating the probabilities of a hypothetical premise. Good training for science fiction.

One day, I discovered that someone I thought was intelligent couldn't hear hypotheticals. If I said, "if that money comes in, I'll buy that hardcover", he heard "I will buy that hardcover." And similar misunderstandings. That situation would be bound to cause trouble, wouldn't you say?

Meanwhile, running into the news just makes me feel I've wandered into an absurd theater production. There's nothing useful for me to say about it.

So, I'm back to the small tasks of maintaining a life. Had a tire repaired, took Grandma lunch, checked bank balances online, answered mail. Just treading water until everything makes sense again, or until I have the house and all so under control that -- well, that doesn't happen, does it? No, so I'm treading water, maintaining myself, so that when meaning returns, I can act on it.

And that's what's going on when I don't seem to have anything to say.

Here is a historical public service announcement: To do lists are a new development.

There, don't you feel better?

It's true. Universal literacy only has a couple centuries history. Widespread timepieces are no older than the 19th century. Time management only developed in the last half of the last century, and only in the last quarter of it did anyone start thinking everyone should do it. That's what managers were for -- to figure out what the workers should do when.

Before that, humans basicly responded to external signals when deciding what to do. It's warming up? Time to plant. Might check where the shadow of that big rock is hitting for confirmation, or the phase of the moon. Things are ripe? Harvest them. Roof leaks? Fix it. Planning meant doing things in their own time.

Even agriculture is only a few tens of thousands of years old. Before that, it was: hungry? go find food.

Now, millions of people schedule by the hour. They make to do lists and schedule meetings and arrive to the minute. This is what they mean by the accelerating pace of modern life. It's happened over decades, which is slowly enough that it seldom draws our attention. But over decades, in the history of humanity, is astonishly fast. And it's amazing how many people have moved along with it.

Now every man and every woman is an autonomous planning unit. Any single person can look ahead, choose a goal, and begin the step by step process that leads to a new community center, a novel, a new business, a piece of legislation. Smaller goals like creating a garden or redecorating a room or saving for a vacation are almost routine.

Some of us do, some of us don't. And that's fine.

But think how much stronger an economy is when every person can create -- when each point can begin an expansion, and not only the the top.

That is why power to the people, and not only the leaders, is good business. And that is why, over time, the apparent chaos of a democracy outproduces the apparent efficiency of a dictatorship.

And that is why my patriotism applauds diversity.

Today I caught some of my hair in the top of the car door. They lay in a long collection of strands draping from the top of the window. Already separated from my head, they seemed -- useful. I gathered them up, twined them around my finger to make a neat loop, tucked them in my purse. What I'll do with them, I don't know.

In 1993, I had short hair. Somewhere in the following years, I decided to let it grow out. Once in a while, someone asks me how long I plan to let it get. I usually answer "The full Princess Leia" or "Well, I'll see how it goes."

Do you think long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, they had good hair care products? Or did Leia oil her hair like the dynastic Egyptians? Perhaps (since they really must not have been human) they had hair that was livelier and simpler to care for.

There are various landmarks in length of hair. Short seems to mean less than chin length, medium, down to collar, long, shoulder length or below. Then there's waist length and long enough to sit on. The full Princess Leia is ankle length. Long enough to step on could be a problem. Perhaps even those with heroicly well-behaved hair and daily assistance in dressing it draw the line at hair they could step on.

One useful landmark -- not immediately visible -- is hair that is long enough to put up easily. When you have enough hair to twist it around itself and loop it through, you can put it up even in the absence of tools. If it's also short enough, that when you have done this the ends don't stick up, you have reached a length of grace. For a while, your hair will make updoes easy.

A later landmark, of less utility, is when your hair gets long enough to get stuck under your arms. I'm wondering if it outgrows that stage now.

So that's all the hair landmarks I know.

I don't really expect to embroider with my hair. It was done on occasion in the medieval period. It is long enough to usefully thread a needle, but it's been a long time since embroidery held my attention. I like to think that if birds pick it up it will make superior nests. There's enough length to weave around and around, and, as hair diameters go, it's thick and should have the strength to hold well.

So I like to shed outdoors when I can. But the freed hairs largely fall indoors, where, when my housekeeping falls behind, they make superior dust bunnies.

That will have to do, I guess. That will have to do.