Conversations with guinea pigs:

Me: <rustles vegetable bag to get out a tomato for a sandwich>

Pigs: Hey! Hey! We hear that! It's a veggie bag! There's something in there for the pigs!

Me: There's nothing here that you want. This is a tomato. You don't like tomato.

Pigs: Sure we do! It's a veggie! Treats for pigs!

Me: No, really. You don't like tomato. Every time I give it to you, you let it get gross in your cage.

Pigs: No way! Come on, give us some! We've never eaten before in our lives! Treats! Treats!

Me: All right, fine. You can have a little piece.

Pigs: Eww! Why would you give this to us? It's tomato!

Every now and then, my kids come up with the most awesome things ever.

My son had a page of math homework. On the bottom was a charting exercise. Here's the data for a fictional guy's weight gain as he grows up. Fill in little blocks to make a bar graph. Answer word problems.

Typically, the graph trended upward. One question asked how they thought it would look if they drew a line to show how the data went. Well, it goes up, since his weight's going up.

The next question asked, "Do you think the line would keep going up forever? Why or why not?" What did my son write?

"I don't think it would keep going up forever because someday, he will die."

I love my kids so much.

Hm. Meant to post this a few days ago, and have forgotten. Bother.

The Windows install deceased itself. It is perished. It is no more. Bereft of life it rests in peace, etc. I gave up and formatted the drive, and installed Ubuntu on it. The old Ubuntu install was on a small drive that had run out of room, so I figured I could get comfortable on the bigger drive until I buy a bigger drive still for yet another run at Windows.

Apparently, I'm a bloody masochist.

I maintain that I'd be sold on Ubuntu as a permanent solution if Open Office weren't so...rudimentary. It lacks certain functions that I consider necessary for an optimal word processing experience. Given that most of what I do involves a word processor, it's pretty important to like the one I have.

I'm running Word in a virtual Windows XP machine right now. A little weird, but whatever works. Sometime in the next couple weeks, I'll buy a new hard drive, and then I can have a Windows box again. Which will make me grouse and snarl, but there it is.

I wish I could code. Open Office is open source. I could fix it. Curse my lack of ability with math, expressions, and logic.

In other news, work has begun on the novel. These books have a specific voice, one I can hear in my head once I've gotten going. I'm discovering that it's harder to find when I just jump into the middle of something pre-written (I'm expanding a short story), as opposed to sitting down and writing something fresh.

Because of this, I'm pondering breaking my own usual process and leaving the already-written parts alone for now. I'm an organic writer, and don't tend to jump scenes or leave things unfinished behind me. But the writing might be better if I skip ahead to where free writing starts again, get the voice in my head, then come back and revise when it's clear.

Also, my short story will be up for review on Critters this week. Once it's gone through there, I'll put it up on the OWW. I'm so behind on my critiquing after my husband's injury. Sorry, folks. I'm getting there.

Assassin's Creed 2 is taunting me from the XBox. My husband will be dominating that at night, so daytime's my only playtime. But I have writing to do, and a strong work ethic. Feh.

My husband managed to get my Windows install functional on Tuesday night. It worked fine yesterday. Today, it took two tries to boot. The whole thing's acting a little odd. If we want to keep it moving, we may have to restore to an earlier date, which will require reinstallation of a couple large programs and other annoying fiddling.

In the process of fixing it, we found that the drive's been throwing errors. Not many, and not often, but enough that we're thinking it's time to replace the drive before it gets worse. I've started making certain that everything is backed up. It'll do fine as a storage drive when I wipe it again, but I think it needs to not have the stress of an OS.

I'd like to wait to see if I can find a Black Friday deal on a hard drive, but I don't know if it'll last that long. Windows, unfortunately, never really repairs. It just gets duct taped together, and eventually, the adhesive wears off.

Better this than a full crash and data loss, though. If it's going to go, I'd prefer this method than the other.

My installation of Windows (Windows XP) is refusing to boot. It gets to the loading screen and hangs for several minutes, until it finally reboots itself. I haven't been able to fix it, so my husband's going to look at it when he gets home. For now, I am on my stable, functional, and beloved Linux install.

I just reinstalled Windows six months ago. I do regular maintenance. I'm not prone to excessive amounts of spyware or virii. That it's even hiccuping at this point makes me froth like a rabid dog and shake my tiny fists in impotent rage. I hate Microsoft for a number of reasons, but the biggest of these is that Windows is a piece of unstable garbage.

Conversely, I'd seriously ponder upgrading to Windows 7 at this point if it didn't cost so bloody much money. Instead, I am once more pondering making Ubuntu my primary operating system.

At least, until I can afford a Mac.

-----

In the continuing online game merry-go-round, I've returned to World of WarCraft. Strangely, this was a hard decision for me. I love the game, but the people who play it tend to make me cringe. With ten million customers and the most popular MMO on the market, you're going to get a profusion of dubious types.

I'm really waiting for Star Wars: The Old Republic to come out. But that's a long way off. I hope that WoW will stick for a while. Especially since it can be played on Linux, which is currently a not insignificant concern.

-----

Yesterday was spent building up reviews for Critters, in hopes of a "jump to the head of the queue" pass. I finished my short story last week, and I'm giving it a couple days for the ink to dry. Then I'll edit it, have a couple friends go through it, and put it up for Critters to dissect. Then it goes to the OWW.

May I note that ten crits in a day makes my eyes bleed?

-----

As soon as my computer issues are settled, it'll be time to start the next novel. I hope I've learned enough to really do this story justice. If I haven't, then it'll be up to me to learn more and try again!

-----

I can only stand to listen to Pandora for about an hour before I'm hostile. It's very strange. However, I've now created a Bollywood station, which means my slide into Hell is almost complete. Layla, I'd beat you, but you'd like it.

-----

Tonight's dinner is an awesome creamy potato and ham soup, with a loaf of fresh-baked dark wheat bread to go with it. The smell of the bread is driving me crazy.

Goodbye, October. I will not miss you.

Not with your two herniated discs in my husband's back. Not with your intense sciatic nerve pain. And as nice as his entire month of work off was, honestly, a tropical vacation would have been better for that. Constant physical therapy appointments, doctor appointments, x-rays, MRIs, and steroid epidurals really are not as nice as days on a beach.

And frankly, if you were going to burn up his entire paid time off pool, you could at least have sent us on an exotic vacation instead of to various hospitals and medical facilities. We won't even mention the stress, distress, and unrest. Or the fact that you didn't bother to take the pain with you when you left.

As for an entire month without the energy or emotional wherewithal to write, critique, or do more than take care of an injured spouse, well, we won't talk about that, either.

Since he has to go back to work so that we can pay bills, and since I'll lose my freaking mind if I don't start writing again, I've got some high hopes for November. But just so that we're clear: November (and hell, December, for that matter), if you even think about bringing the words "back surgery", I'm going after your mothers. Just sayin'.

I keep intending to write a nice, pleasant post about Arizona's first signs of autumn. However, I have a cold, and seem to have misplaced my poetic prose the last time I blew my nose. You get this instead.

We went to Ace Hardware today. A festive holiday display greeted us when we walked through the door: a Christmas tree. Behind it sat shelves of colored lights and other tree decorations. Red, gold, and green snowflakes hung from the ceiling.

It isn't even October yet.

What the hell is with that? Couldn't they sell inflatable pumpkins and orange lights? Glow sticks? Colorfully packaged wood screws and nut/bolt sets for the adorable trick-or-treaters? Little Billy! You make such a cute vampire! Here, have a variety pack of washers! And you, Susie. What a scary witch! Why don't you pick out five wingnuts?

At least wait until after Thanksgiving, people. For pity's sake.

There are some things you don't want to deal with at 7:30 AM.

I had half an hour more to sleep when someone knocked on my bedroom door. Still half conscious, I grabbed my robe and staggered over to get it. What I found was the Girlchild, eyes huge and watery with panic.

It's the same look you might get when you realize the stars have come right, and Great Cthulhu has resurrected himself in your bathtub.

"Mom, there's a murfphle in the kitchen, where I usually put the step stool." I'm not fully awake. She's not speaking clearly. I have no idea what she's just said.

Whatnow? "There's a MURFPHLE in the kitchen! Oh, just come on!"

So I did. I follow her to the end of the hall, where she comes to an abrupt halt and points. "See? There's a MURFPHLE where I put the step stool!"

I donn't see. I see that there's no fire, no flood, and I can't see a plague of locusts. But then again, that might be because I hadn't grabbed my glasses off the bedside table. For all I know, a swarm of insects is ravening through the dining room.

Okay. Wait just a second. I fetch my glasses. I return to find her, and my son, staring at a brown spot on the wall. The murfphle.

Remember what I said about things you don't want to deal with at 7:30 in the morning? Scorpions rank right up there.

He looked rather like this.

In 36 years as an Arizonan, I have not seen a scorpion. Rattlesnakes? Sure. Tarantulas? Multiple times. I did see the Scorpions in concert, which doesn't count.

It took me a minute to identify what the hell I was looking at. Not awake, in my glasses, staring at a brown lump that slowly resolved into legs, pincers, and a curled tail I could barely see is no way to start a morning.

Internal reaction: AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! KILL IT WITH FIRE KILL IT WITH FIRE! GET THE SHOTGUN! AAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHH!

Moms don't get to do this.

"Oh. Okay. It's a scorpion, that's all." One of the Great Old Ones, chitinous and horrible, in my kitchen. "Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to take a picture of it, and then I'm going to kill it."

The camera batteries had died, of course. In retrospect, it's just as well. With that settled, I grabbed my shoe and tried to squash the critter into next week. I mummified it in a paper towel, threw it away, and everyone tried to resume their morning. After a bit, I had almost convinced myself that I'd seen it wrong, and I'd just killed a cricket.

Alas, the Brawny Man betrayed me. When I opened the garbage can later, the paper towel had unfolded to expose the arachnid in all his revolting glory. The tail had uncurled and extended. It was not a cricket. I could no longer nurture my delusions.

I could, however, locate a bunch of garbage and pile it on top of the damn thing. Eurgh.

Perhaps you've heard of Harry Potter. You may even have heard that there's a movie out about him. And if you're really with it, you might have read the book it loosely referenced.

There's a scene toward the end of both movie and book wherein Mr. Potter must force his mentor, Dumbledore, to drink an unfortunate basin of magical liquid down, so that they may achieve their ends. Dumbledore yells, and begs, and cries for Harry to not make him do it. Faithful Harry ignores it all as best he can, and crams that water down Dumbledore's throat.

This is how edits feel sometimes.

I find these spots where I just don't know what the hell I was thinking. The Bad Writing Fairy and her cousin, the Bad Pacing Fairy, visited me while I wrote and waved their shimmering wands at my manuscript. Lo and behold, crap issued forth into the document. They're hidden like the clumpy bits in nice, smooth cat litter.

And sometimes, I've apparently forgotten to scoop the litter box, because there are more clumpy bits than clean, minty grains. These sections have to be excised and the holes patched, or just rewritten. And they're not always so easy to rework into the whole, even if the stuff in them needs to be there.

I have a love/hate relationship with my writing anyway, like a lot of authors do. So I hit these sections and gnash my teeth, tear at my hair, and wail. I go looking for a sackcloth keyboard cover. I dread working on them. My brain whimpers when I think about them.

Just like Dumbledore, kneeling in a cavern, begging to avoid the poison he knows he has to drink. And my inner Harry Potter, faithful and dutiful, makes me click the icon to open the document and get it done. If you just keep going, it'll be over with. It's not as bad as that. Imagine how much better you'll feel when it's fixed! You don't suck, I promise!

And what's annoying is that my inner Potter is right. Nose to the grindstone. Just get it done. You'll feel better when it's over.

At some point in my life, I swore never to own a Siamese cat.

Also, at a very recent point in my life, I swore never to get another cat, once the ones I had were gone.



You see how those turned out.

A decade and a half ago, my husband and I went to a shelter to look for a cat. An orange and white kitten reached through the bars and grabbed my husband. That was Gunney, and we took him home.

Flash forward. Beloved Manx gone. Two cats recently gone. Vows taken. No more cats. Heck, for a while, no more animals. There was just too much potential for pain.

When you've always, every day of your life, had pets at large, though, you can't just go cold turkey. There's a huge hole that drops out of your heart. I thought I just wanted a dog, but after some time passed, I realized that I couldn't go without a cat.

The husband was less enthused by the prospect. Not without good reason. He's always been less of a cat person than I was, and he was the one there in Gunney and Tobias's last moments. Cats didn't have the best associations for him anymore.

But I wanted one. And he said, "When we go to the shelter to look at a dog, we can look at the cats, too. Maybe one will reach out and grab me like Gunney did."

See where this is going?

We picked out another cat. He had a lot of potential. And as we headed around one last time, my husband distinctly ignored the Siamese in the cage. So she yelled at him.

No, she didn't meow. She yelled. Told him off. Then she reached through the bars and grabbed him.

Feline habit? None of the other cats did it. Just the sweet, loving torti-point Siamese with the cliched name and the tendency to drool. Somehow, she knew the criteria, and knew that we were the ones to adopt.

Persia's at home now. She had a long day, getting fixed and adopted all at once. The house doesn't feel quite so empty. Neither does my heart.

The last couple weeks have been Hell.

Which is about all I can say about them. Serious problems cropped up, hearts were broken, stress was created, and in general, the dragon won. It happens, and all you can say is, "Well, that sucked" and go right on with your life.

All these things unfortunately conspired to let the lid off my chronic insomnia. I've used Ambien to control it for a couple years now. I really dislike taking sleeping pills, or any pills, for that matter, but sometimes, that's how it goes. I consider it the lesser of evils.

Usually, I have problems falling asleep. My brain just doesn't shut down right. I take my Ambien, I go to sleep, and I have no problems after that. Then Hell broke out, and that stopped. I started waking up between 2:30 and 4 AM, and not being able to go back to sleep. Nights turned long, days turned longer, and I turned into a gibbering vegetable.

Calls were put in to the doctor. We tried temazepam, which just made me high as a kite. We tried Ambien CR, which after about a week without more than two hours of sleep a night finally kept me down for a couple full nights.

Then the old problem kicked in. See, Ambien CR is meant to keep you asleep. It doesn't have a mallet to knock you out with first. It's also very, very clingy. When you haven't slept for days, you don't care, but wanting to claw your eyes out in the morning does get old.

Older still when you can't get to sleep at night in the first place, so you spend a couple hours thrashing before your body catches the hint. That's been the last two nights.

Now we're trying a different combo, and we'll see how that works out. It's safe to say, though, that I know quite a lot about sleep disorder medication. I've been on a good number of them in just the last two weeks.

This all led to a discussion with my doctor about sleep deprivation as an interrogation method. I've done this song and dance with sleep before, and every time it happens, I wonder how some people don't consider sleep deprivation a torture, or figure it's okay to use under the right circumstances.

Sleep deprivation will make you crazy. Plain and simple. Your day isn't broken up right. Your mind doesn't work. Your body stops working. You're a living zombie, trapped in a degrading shell.

After a few days, things that shouldn't make sense do. Worse, after long enough, you start to ponder really dangerous stuff. You stop caring if X drug and Y drug play nice together, and figure heck, you could take them together for a night. Just one night. Just long enough to sleep.

Then you start bargaining with the universe. You'll make any deal, if you could just sleep for a couple more hours. You start pondering if you could call your doctor and offer him sexual favors for the industrial strength sleeping meds you know he has to have access to. Just for a night.

By the end of a week, I might have told an interrogator anything he wanted to hear, whether or not I was telling the truth, if he'd just let me sleep. The doctor said that after two weeks, pretty much anyone will give you anything you want.

Which sounds great, until you realize that they'll make it up for the promise of sleep. Ineffective, inhumane, and pretty much just in-. I know. It's a hobby of mine.

In closing, I leave you with one of my theme songs: "Nessun Dorma", or Nobody Sleeps, from Puccini's "Turandot". I'm quite fond of this song. And not just for obvious reasons.

He came to us just after The Girlchild was born, one of the three cats I took in after a friend died. We loved the others, of course, but of them all, Tobias was our favorite.

When Brie would cry in her crib, Tobias would jump into the room to stare at the crib. Then he'd give us dirty looks when we got on the scene, as if wondering where the heck we'd been. Didn't we know the kid needed something? He took to the kids right off.

He had a tremendous amount of personality and heart. He was brave and loving, and very demanding. If you didn't pet him, he'd nip you to put you back in line, but never hard. Just hard enough.

Every now and then, he'd do his "Crazy Tobie" routine. Suddenly, his hackles would go up, his tail would fluff, and he'd run from one end of the place to the other. Then he'd pause, look around as if wondering if they were coming to get him, sharpen his nonexistent claws on something, then run off again. It was hysterical.

He liked to curl up with me on the beanbag while I played games. He also loved to lay with The Boychild, both of them stretched in the sun on the bed. The boy would pet, the cat would purr, and I'd find them watching the TV, content to be with each other.

Tobias, also known as Sugarbutt to his original owner, was a blessing to our family. He was a good friend. And we're all going to miss him horribly.

I'd figured on whining here about the long, torturous housing search I had to undertake.

Lease here is up at the end of April, and we wanted to upgrade from an apartment to a rented house. For which we had a long list of requirements. I figured it would take at least a month.

Except that we found the place we wanted the first day of the search (a Monday), and had the lease signed by Friday. Oh, the horror. Not.

Thus does the chaos commence. Garbage and unwanted crap out. Books we won't read again to the used store. Stuff we do want into boxes. Which means - the return of the Hernia Watch.

I have a very nasty tendency to overpack boxes, and cram them until they have the density of your average neutron star. My book boxes are the worst. I make grown men cry with those.

So I've taken to writing warnings on the boxes. "Hernia Watch". My husband groans when he sees them, because he knows I'm not kidding. I'm wondering if I ought to make a Watchman-styled logo for them, with a smiley face that's straining.

"Who Herniates the Watchmen?"

Given where he was laying while I did my hair, in relation to the drift of the mist from the spray I use, the cat is now well-protected against heat damage from blow drying and styling.

He was worried, I know. I wonder if it helps protect against sunbeam damage and excessive solar lounging.

I remember now why I infrequently order from Amazon.

Admittedly, I got a terrific deal. I was able to get the books I wanted for cheaper than if I'd had the local bookstore order them. Free shipping, too.

Stuff from Karen Traviss, Karen Miller, Joshua Palmatier jpsorrow and Jim Hines jimhines . This, folks, is a hot box. Granted, my To Be Read pile is still massive, so I wasn't in much of a hurry to get it. Which is good, since it took about a week for them to ship out "in stock" books.

What I'd forgotten is that free shipping is "free" in many ways. Free of price. Free of hurry. Free of basic, logical sense.

The box needs to go to southern Arizona.

According to tracking information, it left the warehouse in Fernley, NV, and promptly went to Richmond, CA. It sat in Richmond over the long weekend and has departed there, to go to...

...Denver, CO.

Apparently, it's going on a tour of all the states touching mine before it arrives here. These are not only awesome books, they're also well-traveled.

And the post office wonders why it's losing money.

Now, it's the cat that made Schrodinger famous. Few people realize that there was a second theory in there: Schrodinger's Story.

I've written a lot of stuff lately. Got a whole novel done. Finished a short story yesterday. More words before that. But I haven't written what I really want to. I've told myself that I'm practicing to get there, a la Neil Gaiman's thoughts on his Graveyard Book. Or it's not "what sells right now". Or any other excuse I could find.

However, it has come to my attention of late that perhaps I'm just one great big pansy.

There's been a story tucked on my hard drive for five years. About 50k words, unfinished. This is my Most Beloved Fantasy Story. This is What I Want to Write.

But so long as it sits there on my hard drive, unfinished, it has potential. If I finish it, the potential evaporates, because it's done. Formed. Ready to get sent out into the cold, cruel world of publishing. And then, if it fails to launch, this idea I've nurtured and loved is no longer the kernel of potential it was.

This is Schrodinger's Story. Alive and dead. Potential, just so long as it has none.

Know what? It's time to open the box.

It's sad to find out that someone you knew and really liked died.

It's sadder to remember that you always meant to get to know them better, and you never did.

Here's a pint to you, Erik.