My life as a pioneer woman.

Two days ago, the unthinkable happened:

I had finally managed to lure the husb down to the sewing room. I often try to get him to come hang out with me while I work, but he doesn't particularly like going downstairs. But on this day, the top story of the house was very warm, and the basement level was nice and cool.

Almost immediately, my sewing machine broke. Something happened where the needle thread gets caught under the little plate where all the secret, magic stuff goes on. I tried repeatedly, but couldn't fix it.

Then, the next morning, as I was sitting at the computer, the husb comes in and says, "I need the computer for a shoot we're doing over the next two days."

I beg your pardon?

But these mythical "shoots" are apparently more importantly than my voting on lolcats over at I Can Has Cheezburger, so I surrendered the machine (with great misgivings and lots of whining to show how serious I was, naturally).

That night, I got home from work to find that the shoot was still ongoing, thereby robbing me of the third of the four essential items in my home (my husband--the fourth is Winston, but he was grouchy). Add this to our chronic lack of groceries and the fact that our DVR is full of high-def episodes of CSI: Miami (don't ask me why, I gave up on David Caruso a loooong time ago), and I was marooned.

I wandered around the silent house, occasionally pausing to look at the empty desk where the computer belonged. Then, clearly driven to madness by the starkness of my situation--

I went downstairs and started... cleaning. On a weeknight.

The big room downstairs has become a bit of a catch-all, especially with the new outdoor-type supplies that have to live inside. I rotated the couch and started organizing and making various little piles and putting things away.

Eventually, I hit a wall and went back upstairs. I found something random to eat and sat down to watch The Stepford Wives, feeling strangely like a Stepford wife myself. That movie is so strange. Especially now that it's so ingrained in pop culture--every time they say, "There's something wrong in Stepford," you want to shout at the screen, "What do you expect? It's STEPFORD! The place with the wives!"

Last night, knowing there was neither sewing machine nor computer nor husb waiting for me at home, I stopped and meandered around the grocery store a little. Then I got home and found that the DVR had made room for America's Next Top Model (which I am starting to have a problem with, as none of the winners actually go on to become, you know, MODELS). I prepped a little food, sat down on the couch, and watched Tyra Banks ham it up.

This morning, like a dream, I woke to find the computer back in its spot. The husb is also in his spot, and Winston is more sleepy than grouchy. The sewing machine has not yet been repaired, but I have a loaner.

Close call with reality, eh?

PS - Bath math:

getting conditioner for hair + looking at face wash = conditioner all over face

PPS - Winston is three years old! His birthday was Tuesday.

"Say SNEEZE!"

There's a piece of Southern California urban wisdom that says, if you had hay fever when you lived on the East coast, you won't have it here. If you were fine back east, invest in tissues because, brother, you're in for it. This correctly assumes that everyone in LA moved here from somewhere else.

Well, I never had seasonal allergies when I lived in Florida, and I guess you can figure out where that leaves me. A few weeks ago, I noticed that Winston seemed to be snoring more emphatically, and it wasn't more than a day or two before I started to completely fall apart. If left unmedicated, I turn into a sneezing, red-eyed, pathetic-voiced mess.

(And my sneezes are exhausting, because they always require an explanation. I sneeze quietly, like a cat, so people have to ask me if I've sneezed or what, and by the time I start to answer, I sneeze approximately eighteen more times in quick succession. At which point the person is so entranced by my alarming display that they forget what they were asking about. It's like the grand finale at the fireworks show. I still surprise my husband, nearly every time, with how many times I can sneeze in a row. He'll say, "Bless you!" the first time and then just sit there, watching, and saying, "Geez," every few sneezes.)

I don't think it helps that the giant oaks in our backyard are so pollenated right now that they look fuzzy. Plus, the house is on a hill, so the fuzzy tops of those trees are basically nose-level when you're in the house. And we love leaving the windows open (the better to allow the pollen to infiltrate) and sitting on the balcony. And we walk up the hill and shortcut through our newly be-staired backyard, which means huffing and puffing right underneath the oaks. And I drive home with my windows and sunroof open, because even though I'm not an outdoorsy type, Santa Monica in the late afternoon is just too pleasant to box myself in from. (--"in from which to box myself"?)

So let's be clear: I'm not taking any precautions. I'm just popping allergy pills (the non-drowsy kind) and hoping things get better before I accidentally blow my ears out.

How does this tie into publication? Well, seeing how all the fun stuff is happening with laying out the book and designing the cover and all, I needed to take an author photo for the inside jacketflap. (It goes next to the bio.) So even though I swore up and down a year ago that I'd lose those pesky *cough* few pounds before taking the photo, it was time, and I had to go for it.

If you're still wondering how this ties together, let me simply say: the world will now know me as a girl with one squinty eye and one normal eye. Because for some reason, my allergies settled in my right eye and wouldn't let go yesterday. (My right eye is always slightly squintier (just about everyone has asymmetrical eyes), but not to this extent.)

HOLD THE PRESSES: That's my LEFT eye that's all squinty! My right eye looks normal. I am so confused right now. Apparently I just AM that squinty... which is cool, right? Because perfection is boring and squintishness is awesome. Even though natural selection would condemn me for my asymmetry, my friends will just find it quirky... right? Right? Right?

So that totally negates the whole point of the post. Don't tell anyone who hasn't read this far. Anyhoo, here's the picture we chose:


Photo credit: Mike Clark

Cheerio! Happy sneezing!

The other near-the-end-of-the-first-draft fear.

What on earth am I going to do when I finish this draft? I'm a firm believer that things need at minimum a couple of weeks' cooling off period. Which is exactly how much time I have off from work. Which is bad news bears, because I'm going to make myself crazy feeling like I'm supposed to be writing something.

Now that Bad Girls Don't Die is out of copyedits (as of today! yay! and the notes were really minimal, so we did them over the phone), I don't have rushed revisions of that to work on. I could rush back into AW, the project I dumped to work on Project X. Or I could spend two blissful weeks sewing.

I'm feeling a little lost, to be honest. I guess I'll work it out when I get there. There's always laundry to do.

Open letter to people in LUV.

NOTE: I am not as angry as this post makes me sound. I do not actually want anyone to take an arrow to the calf.

I don't seem to be locked out anymore.  I must have scared Blogger by starting to look at Wordpress settings at my hosting service's website.

Happy Friday, everyone!  I hope you all had a great Valentine's Day yesterday.  Did something romantic or sweet or wolfed down eight pounds of chocolate and chalky candy hearts.

As for me, I would like to address the matter as follows:

Dear Los Angeles Valentiners,

I am confused and hurt by your actions.  

Here's the problem, as I see it: you have a wife or husband or girlfriend or boyfriend whom you see all the time, mostly in saggy pajama pants and stained tee-shirts from 1992.  Your love is what the experts call "comfortable", which means, good for you, you are over the hump and don't have to even try anymore.

So you're sitting at home, watching TV, and a DeBeer's commercial comes on.  Your significant other seems to light up, and you say, "Oh, that's right, St. Valentine's Day is upon us, how romantic," while secretly you're thinking, Crud, she wants a DIAMOND?  I'm saving up for a MacBook Air!  So out loud, you say, "Honey, I just can't support the diamond monopoly.  You know in Russia they have mall-sized vaults full of the things.  They're manipulating the market so they can charge outlandish prices for shiny rocks, which, by the way, were mined by South African fourth-graders in appalling conditions."

Okay, you're safe for now.  Plus, she thinks your concern for South African fourth-graders is soooo cute.  So then you smile  and say, "I know.  Why don't we go out for a nice dinner?  We could try that Greek/sushi/Mexican/raw vegan place we read about."

"Where is that one, exactly?" she asks.

Here is the part where it all falls apart.  You say, "It's in SANTA MONICA."  

Yes.  No matter who you are, where you live, which restaurant you read about, and no matter where you read about it, it is located in SANTA MONICA.  Specifically, it is located on MY ROUTE HOME.

Then, on Valentine's Day, you put on your best Z. Cavariccis and climb in the car, all full of hope and romance.  You set off for Santa Monica, LIKE EVERY OTHER HUMAN BEING ON THE PLANET.  By the time you get there, things are starting to look bad.  Traffic doesn't seem to be moving.  Cars waiting at stoplights seem to actually be in "park".  You are never, never going to make your reservation in this traffic.

"Oh, no!" says your wife/girlfriend (let's face it, the gender roles in this story are defined). "Maybe I should have gotten those diamonds after all."

Anything but diamonds!  You decide to start driving like a maniac.  Perhaps this will scare people so much that they all pull over to the side of the road.  And they would, if there were room.  But there isn't, so they sit there in "park" while you cut across, through, on top of, underneath other cars and worm your way through the gridlock.  

"It's okay," you tell your ladyfriend, proving your love to her by swinging across oncoming traffic and exposing her side of the car to the approaching headlights of the approaching cars. "We are SPECIAL.  Because we're in LUV."

Well, guess what.  I am in LUV, too.  Only I am SMORT enough not to let Hallmark tell me that on one freaking night of the year, I must join 800,000 Angelenos who otherwise never leave their homes to go out to an overpriced dinner prepared by chefs who are too harried to make sure your chicken is cooked all the way through.

And to ME, you are not special, just because you are not used to driving in Santa Monica.  In fact, you are a HORRIBLE person, because while you are defying the laws of the city, common decency, AND physics to get to your destination, I am sitting in traffic for two hours, which means that by the time I get home, it will be too late for me to have any sort of Valentine's celebration.

So if you happen to notice that the girl in the black car seems really annoyed at you, don't write her off as a bitter single woman who is jealous of this one passionate night a year in which you choose to show the world and Hallmark that you know what LUV is all about.

Instead, notice how she is glaring at any car that has more than one person in it.  Instead, notice how she has to massage her cramping ankle while sitting in "park" at every successive stoplight.  Notice how she traveled approximately 1 mile between 6:45 pm and 7:45 pm.

You see, I already have an evening commute that edges over the one-hour mark on a regular basis. I already sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic every night. And now I have to deal with you, crawling all over the city streets like a herd of lost baby buffalo just so you can show up late, pay way too much, and be rude to the waiter.

The good news is, after tonight, it will be a whole year before you have to do this again.  By then, of course, there will be more new restaurants in SANTA MONICA.  

I'll see you there, I guess.

In the meantime, I hope Cupid gets you with his arrows.  I hope he gets you right in the calf, or the rear end.

LUV,
Katie

PS - Confidential to angry joggers: darlings, you can't all go jogging at once just because it's Valentine's day.  And you can't dart between cars, because everyone is about ready to run over anything that moves, just for the dark satisfaction of it (not dogs or cats, though--just joggers).  However, I am not mad at you--I could never be mad at you, because you are not clogging up my commute.  You are just turning it into a Frogger-like video game, where I get to be the car.  Now go home and watch Lost.

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

My favorite old joke from many movies and TV shows is the one that goes, "Refusing to admit you're an alcoholic is the first sign you're an alcoholic!" and then the other guy says, "That's also the first sign of NOT being an alcoholic."

The reason this occurs to me is that I'm all listening to and reading food and nutrition books and trying to eat all healthy, and here I am sitting here with stale graham crackers and a tub of cream cheese frosting.

It is SO HARD to spread frosting on stale graham crackers. They're breakaway stale, not soft and mushy stale (I wouldn't eat them if they were mushy).

But... why?

Why?

And why am I sharing this?

In other news, after a lovely conversation (I came so close to using the word "convo") with Agent M, I am rip-roaring on a new project that has been seeping into my mind grapes. This is temporarily displacing Other New Project, which I had begun before my second round of revisions on BGDD, and which I was starting to ask myself hard questions about. After I decided to move forward with Project X, which is not the title, just a nickname, I was explaining to the husb my issues with Project W, which is not the title of the other book, just a nickname.

My point is that he said, "Why don't you set it in XYZ instead of ABC?" and I was like, "Ohhhhhh."

Sometimes, when the magic of writing isn't enough, we can use the magic of other people's offhand observations.

Will someone please come wrestle these graham crackers out of my hand? Or just, you know, crush them in my palm?

My dog is a grouch and so am I.

Winston and I are in a funk.

You know how you'll be at the store and see something you desperately want, and then you're like, "Oh, but that costs $75 and I don't want to spend that kind of money! I'm saving up for [a rainy day/groceries/gallbladder surgery/a trip to Hawaii]."

And you're all good and feeling great about the money you didn't spend, and then you go home and the plumbing in your kitchen explodes and it costs like $500 to fix it? And you're like, "Dang, I could have afforded that thing at the store after all... of course, I really can't buy it NOW."

That's how I feel on the time management front. I never knew how much free time I had until NOW. I never thought, during all the time I spent sewing skirts and tiny quilts for dogs and even a very low-cut yellow and orange cocktail gown, that at some point that ceaseless supply would dry up, but here we are with a dog show to produce, a manuscript to revise, hundreds of loads of laundry to finish, and thousands upon thousands of special edition holiday calories to consume.

And I have no time to sew. Or to read, really. I get to listen to podcasts in my car, but that's pretty much it. At work, I'm -- how unfair is this?? -- working all day. On the weekends and every morning at 6 am and every evening after I get home, I'm finishing up revisions.

And when I'm not doing all that, I'm obviously whining about it.

Phooey. Winston and I need a week on the beach in Hawaii. With a sewing machine.

The secret comfort of the writer.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon involved in gnashing teeth and tearing hair. A scrub jay (yes, it is blue, and it is a jay, but it is not a blue jay) got my baby birds. My precious little tweets. I was not a happy camper. It was not a good day in my house.

I won't start categorizing events in terms of how tragic they are or aren't. The fact is, a lot of baby birds don't make it to adulthood, and a lot worse things happen in the world. They have even happened to me. Over the past few years, I have lost some optimism about the nature of humanity.

But here is the exquisite and terrible secret of the writer:

That while the mind and heart are overwrought, the keen observer backs away and observes. And it is impossible not to think, at some point, "What can I use this for?"

Which character will inherit this pain? What situation will grow from this betrayal? What shocking moment will be rendered with more truth because I have hurt today?

And like the badbadbad good feeling of giving up and scratching a mosquito bite, there's a squeak of something -- not gladness, but maybe a pessimistic smugness. Maybe it's a kind of hope. Because if you are the type to assign meaning to the things that happen to you, what is a more impertinent reply to pain than to steal from it immediately and use it for your own devices? What better way to tell the universe that you are still standing?

It was only a quartet of nestlings, but something in their sudden absence hit a nerve.

But something burns on, yes?

Ear drops are nothing like eye drops.

(This was brought over from my old MySpace blog.)

Current mood: uncomfortable
Category: Life

I have a new writing blog up: Slightly Savage. Possibly the whiniest one ever.

Why, you ask?

Because of my ear infection, I answer! My horrible, horrifying, horrid ear infection. I hate it. And you know what else I hate?

Ear drops!

Oh, sure, they seem so simple. I mean, it's a little bottle with a dropper nozzle and liquid in it. This isn't rocket science.

No -- it's HARDER than rocket science. Yeah, there, I said it.

Because with eye drops, you can actually SEE whether the dropper is in the right place before you squeeze it. And then you can SEE the drop going into your eye. But with eardrops, you can't SEE the earhole. For heaven's sake! Nobody can see their own earhole. It's all hidden.

And then when you squeeze it, you think you dropped a drop, but chances are good that you almost dropped a drop and then suctioned it right back into the bottle. Yeah. We've all done that six or eight times.

And then, when you miraculously do get the drop out of the bottle and into your earhole, does it make like an eyedrop, that model of ocular industry, and spread out to right your otinary (I'm guessing on that word) wrongs?

NO! It just sits there! For, like, hours! And I asked my sister-in-law, who had eardrops a few months ago and clearly held all her heartache inside, the doing of which I am not capable, how to get your eardrops to get in and do their job.

I'm going to paraphrase:

"You just grab the most painful part of your body -- probably your ear, considering it's infected -- and you pinch it and shake it around until you're in so much pain that you pass out, hopefully sideways, in which case it will only be forty or fifty minutes until the eardrops worm their way down into your ears."

So, yeah, I don't want to do that.

But I have to, every four hours, for the rest of my life!!!!

No, just for the rest of today and three more days.

Light a candle for me. Or, better yet, direct a supplication to the attention of Saint Cornelius or Saint Polycarp, who are the patron saints against earache.

Do it. Do it! There are evil drops in my ears!

I'm So Dizzy, My Head Is Spinning...

I made it through my entire childhood without an ear infection, and now I have one.

Let there be no risk of ambiguity on the subject: I HATE EAR INFECTIONS.

First of all, they hurt the inside of your ear, but they also hurt the outside of your ear. The whole ear.

Second of all, you can't hear.

Third of all, it hurts to chew, so all I can eat is ice cream.

Fourth of all, I spent the whole day in bed yesterday, which means zero hours of work got done on TGLL. So now I'm camped out in front of ye olde iMac, hoping to slog through a couple gross (numerically speaking, two dozen dozen) pages and let some pure brillance pop into the narrative. This will take all day, though, especially considering all the breaks I have to take for antibiotic pills (every five hours), anitbiotic eardrops (every four hours), and ice cream (whenever the urge strikes). The beauty is that every twenty hours, the stars align and things come together like poetry. Ha.

And what is today's writing-related thought?

I think it's this: since I finally got over the massive storybump that was giving me metaophorical hives, I sped through the ending (not on purpose, it just worked out that way), and as of today I have started at the top to do a rundown. I would say a final rundown, but I think it puts a lot more pressure on you to think of anything as final. As long as the deadline does not loom with ferocity (and mine doesn't, but I do want to finish early for a number of reasons), there is no harm in leaving both the front and back door of the book open, so to speak. Run through the house, take a lap up through the side yard, and run through the house again.

If I'm talking nonsense, it's because I'm dizzy, hopped up on antibiotics (which I hate, by the way -- I'm part of the problem now, and don't think I don't know it), and can only barely hear out my left ear.

It gets much better if I hold my head sideways at a 90 degree angle. Bonus -- it doesn't even matter which side. But that makes it really hard to type.

Also, that thing where you try to clear your ears -- ? Don't do that. Trust me.

This makes me wonder about my poor characters. They really get the smackdown put on them (I don't write books about sex or drugs or drinking -- just violence). They really are much cooler than I am, because there's no way I could fight an angry spirit with an ear infection, much less, like, a bleeding spleen and a broken wrist.

I can't stop coughing, and my dog is as plump as a polar bear.

I'm in that awful "meaningless coughing" stage of my illness, where you just cough because it's easier than breathing.

Not to dwell on my poor health, but hoooooly cow, I was sicker last week than I've been in ten years, not counting food poisoning, which I achieve yearly. I learned that all of my feel-good Frankie Muniz philosophies have a tendency to minimize when I'm ill, and I'm not above honking at people or asserting my true place in two merging lines or even saying softly, "I feel like I'm going to pass out" to the good people of Bed Bath and Beyond. Happily, the guilt associated with these acts also seems to minimize, and perhaps that is the universe paying me back for all of my excuse making for its children.

I felt physical pain throughout my entire body, even when I wasn't moving! It was horrible. And I was so excited, because I knew I was baking with fever but the nerd in me wanted to know how baking, so I bought a fancy thermometer, and then I got home and the battery was dead, dead, dead. So I resorted to self-pitiful crying, which was nice because Winston then came and licked the tears from my face, no doubt thinking, "How delicious are Mother's self-indulgent tears!"

What was my point again? Oh, anyway, I didn't know what it meant for a fever to break until mine broke, and it was terrible. But I'm much better now.

Christmas was nice. Saw the fandamily.

Home again. Winston is still in that crazy "post daycare" state of mind where he seems to be in the process of shaking off the crazies and auditioning for his spot in the household. Licks a lot. Needs tummy rubs. Fat as a fat little monkey and I'll be damned if I know how he keeps getting fatter when he's on a strict daycare diet.

That's all, I guess. I'll keep it short and sweet since I have nothing to say. I just wanted to make my mark on the blogosphere.

Why is it so hard to read lately?

It's probably just me, but for the past two years or so, I've had a real attention span problem with novels. I find myself reading mostly non-fiction or books I know and love. This is a shame, because on my bookshelves are at least 50 books I've never read. I don't know what's keeping me from them. I grew up reading a book a week.

I went through a period where I was kind of making it a point to "power through" fiction, and that may have been part of the problem. I read a few not-so-great-but-what-the-hell novels, which is enough to make any self-respecting person with a short attention span move on to greener pastures.

Mind you, there's some excellent non-fiction out there right now, the standout in my mind being Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation. One of the most fascinating books I've ever read. But I know that at least 10 of my 50 unread books have to be enjoyably good, because of comments I've heard from people I respect, or the subject matter interesting me, or whatever. I just can't seem to physically pick one up and get into it.

Which I think I need to fix, especially if I'm going to be expecting people to pick up my book and read it. Methinks I need to pay off the karma police between now and 2008.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Why I have not updated my dog--er, blog.

You will have to forgive me, because never before in my life have I been so immersed in the world of dog shows. Actually, I'm not sure if that's technically true; show night is pretty intense. Other than that, no. All I can dog about is dogs. If I'm not looking at the image of a dog on the Avid, I am compiling a database of dogs using Microsoft Dog. Or creating graphics featuring dog names.

The irony of all this is that the actual dog in my life is spending the week at daycare, which makes me sad, because I miss him. In the car, I keep thinking I'm hearing him shift around in his little pop-up crate, but it must be... rats? I don't know.

Also, the curious matter of publishing this on my own blog is the result of MyDog's blog control giving me an error dog one too many times. I don't think it will always be like this; on the other dog, if it's not too annoying, maybe it will be.

Either way, I am dog tired and have to go write more about dogs.

Sea Legs and Other Things

Current mood: exhausted

I didn't get motion sick on the cruise at all, but now that I'm home on solid ground, I feel like the house is undulating (3 point word) beneath me. If that were really the case, my rolly chair would be a-rollin' and it's not. So it's all in my head. Among other things.

I don't know how Mormons do it. I skipped my cup of coffee this morning and I feel like I need to sleep for three days. I'm scarfing down chocolate cookies and Diet Coke with a desperation that is both sad and beautiful.

Anyway... writin' about dogs. Dogs dogs dogs. Winston was excited to see me today and Hugo was excited to pee on my suitcase. Then they were both excited to sleep allll day, just to make me jealous. And tonight I need to go shopping and buy some size 438 jeans to wear in Ireland, where it's COLD and RAINY and there are NUNS and ALCOHOL and NO BIKINIS.

PS - I'm moving to Ireland. In my heart.

Gloomy Sunday

It's just one of those days.

Winston is almost a whole year old. The plan is to go to Petco and buy him a new Lamby to replace the one who got lobotomized after the whole washing machine fiasco. Speaking of birthdays, my baby sister turns 18 today. I have to call her. Sometimes it seems so hard to break that 3-hour time difference. It never seems to be the right time to call.

The husb and his mother are at a hotel in Hollywood or Beverly Hills or someplace, drinking cocktails. I am home with Winston. We might take a walk soon. Just ran a load in the dishwasher. Should wash some clothes, too. Winston found the stash of dirty laundry in the closet (because the baskets are all full). He likes to climb in and sort through it all. I had a dog treat in the pocket of my robe and he tried to get to it through the wrong side of the robe. So now I have a pocket full of dog-treat crumbs and a dog-mouth-shaped hardened saliva spot in my robe.

I hate that dumb robe.

I'm not feeling very cheery today.

How to Be Your Dog's Nemesis.

Things were going pretty well there for a while. Winston was happy and cute, and he would sit, or do a "down", or give you five, or even swat your kiss out of the air if you blew one to him. He barked sometimes, but if we ignored him, he would stop.

But apparently all that was a fraud. Turns out that during that time period, we naively assumed that just because we had a dog who did sort of what we wanted, we had a well-behaved dog. No sir! We had a dog who was taking advantage of our kindness. Just because he sat when we asked him to didn't mean he respected us.

Ugh. Winston and I have just started working with a professional trainer. We will call her Miss C. She tells me that he must go through doggie bootcamp -- three toys a day, earn his food, etc. -- before he will truly understand that he's not the boss of the family. So she puts a leash on him and works on sit-stays. Winston goes berserk. Completely out of his mind. Flips around at the end of the lead and tries to run to me and hide between my legs and the sofa. Because someone asked him to SIT.

Eventually he did sit-stay. But he wouldn't accept a treat from Miss C for having done so. And he managed to wriggle himself around so his sit-stay involved giving her a prime view of his back, which I'm pretty sure is the doggie way of giving a person the finger.

Also, he has "forgotten" what it is to do a Down. This is something he has done since four days after we got him. Since he was an INFANT. And now he stares at you blankly. I'm pretty sure that he feels like, if we're going to play mindgames with him, he's going to play them right back at us.

I must confess, I feel sort of weird about this whole thing. I love my dog. I want him to be well-behaved. But I don't understand why the whole process has to make him so completely miserable. Was he *that* manipulative before? I didn't feel horribly hoodwinked. And now I dread every new development in our day, because it's my chance to show him what a bastard I've suddenly become. He refused a treat from ME this morning. :-( And yet he still felt compelled to bark at the garbage trucks in the alley, to protect me from them.

It's not FAIR, I don't want my dog to hate me. I hate doggie boot camp. I want doggie spoil camp back.

First day off.

Today is my first day home on this lovely break... Started off the day bright and early with a visit to the doctor, to make sure I don't have an ear infection. Apparently I don't, because what I ended up bringing home was nasal spray. This stuff blows. It makes the inside of your nose smell terrible, which is very sad because there's just no getting away from that.

Also, the doctor was a little mean. She was just kind of harsh. In fact, I'm sad that this new (to me) facility is so ridiculously close to home, because the other one is soooo much better. The people who work there are nice, and they're nice TO you, and they're nice to each other, and to other patients... not sure where I'm going with this. I felt a little like I was in a free clinic or something. And the nasal spray...! Oh, the nasal spray...

No plans for the weekend. That will probably change.

501 measly words.

It amazes me that sometimes 2,000 words can come dumping out, and sometimes 500 is like pulling teeth. If I had to explain my opinion about something and was told to keep it to 500 words, it would be agonizing after about eight minutes. But write fiction for a half hour and you're lucky if you can manage to achieve 500 coherent words.

I guess it's like they say -- that quote about writing being easy -- you just stare at the page until drops of blood form on your forehead.

I just have to keep reminding myself that (1) the struggly writing is usually the best, and (2) 500 words is still 500 more than I had yesterday.

Okay, time to get ready for work.