1. The mystery bug. A’s doing better than he was a week or two ago, but this thing just doesn’t want to quit. The official diagnosis from the doctor was “I’m stumped” – he suggested it may be a 7-10 day virus. Rare, but not unheard of. It’s now been 16. I’m not sure what’s next… More tests maybe, or more time. It would be nice to have a diagnosis, a neatly labeled way to understand what’s going on.
Continue reading “The Monday Review”
Tag: travel
The Monday Review – Short Form
A brought the Montezuma’s Revenge to Mexico, and ended up being ridiculously sick while we were on vacation. We have spent the last week and change in and out of Mexican and American hospitals. He’s finally feeling a little better, but he’s had a rough time of it.
Simultaneously, Z picked up a cold that has knocked me flat for the past few days. That, combined with a general lack of sleep, has wiped my ability to do much more than keep the two of us fed and dressed and entertained. She and I are also tentatively planning to go to OKC for my grandfather’s 90th birthday a little later this week.
My dad flew out to help us keep things together. It really does take a village.
There may be a longer blog post when all this is done. There may not. I make no guarantees about my ability to get blog posts out for the rest of the month. We’re all going to focus on getting better and getting back to normal.
On the positive side, Mexico was lovely.
2015 by the Numbers
I like numbers. Not nearly as much as I like words, mind you. I won’t go so far as to say that numbers don’t lie, because you can manipulate numbers almost as easily as you can manipulate words. When used with the appropriate amount of caution, however, numbers do a pretty good job of telling you where you’re at. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Apply Ass to Chair
This year, I told myself I wanted to write more. That I am a better and happier person when I make that time for myself. Ultimately, though, I didn’t write as much as I had wanted to. We moved, I got out of the habit of waking up at 6, the words didn’t make it onto the page.
| Month | Days | Hours | Words | Blogging | Railroad |
| January | 28 | 21.40 | 9613 | 1 | 26 |
| February | 20 | 13.10 | 0 | – | 20 |
| March | 11 | 8.17 | 0 | – | 11 |
| April | 2 | 1.13 | 0 | – | 2 |
| May | – | – | – | – | – |
| June | – | – | – | – | – |
| July | – | – | – | – | – |
| August | 1 | 0.60 | 0 | – | 2 |
| September | – | – | – | – | – |
| October | – | – | – | – | – |
| November | 15 | 12.80 | 955 | 8 | 7 |
| December | 17 | 14.60 | 3323 | 8 | 9 |
| Totals | 94 | 71.80 | 13891 | 16 | 77 |
| Average | 13 | 10.26 | 1984 | 5 | 11 |
The result? I only wrote 94 out of 365 days this year. That averages out to about 1 in every 4 days. And the months I thought I was doing ok, particularly November and December, were slimmer than I would have liked. I’m also doing about as much blogging as writing, which is a bit surprising. The Monday posts usually take me about three hours to put together, so I need to get better at condensing that time or working on blog posts at night, to gra
b mornings back for novel writing.
Get Moving
I’d planned to go into Cardio Trainer, the app I use to track exercise, and pull out stats on how far I went, how often, and so on. Unfortunately, the app no longer links up with my Google account, and I had to hard reset my phone about a month ago. So it looks like I’m in the market for a new app.
Without data, I can tell you that my exercise numbers are the inverse of the writing numbers – I was out and about way more often in the spring and summer. I picked Z up from school on the bike a bunch of times, we did long walks in the stroller in the space between dinner and bed, and weekends saw us hiking the trails in town.
Reading
According to Goodreads,* I read 34 books this year. Most of those were sci-fi, fantasy, or historical fiction. I read one non-fiction book – The Bully Pulpit by Doris Keans Goodwin – and it took me the whole year to get through it. I have also pretty much entirely switched to reading eBooks. In fact, the only print book I recall reading is God’s War, by Kameron Hurley, and that was because I picked up the first two books of the Bel Dame series at Half-Price. I don’t have precise stats (although I’ll start doing this for next year), but from a scan of authors I read 1 book by a non-US authors, no books by non-white authors, and 22 books by female authors.
*You might have to friend me to see the link.
Travel
I traveled a lot this year – enough to earn elite status for the first time with an airline. Google maps says I took 26 trips, but when I break that down a lot of it is travel around town. Google also had a bit of a rough time with the move from NY to CA, telling me I took several trips to and around California in the first few months we lived here. My rough estimate is 8 trips, evenly split between business and pleasure. I went to four states, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, and DC, and one country, Poland. The places I went most often in 2015 were my sister-in-law’s house, Z’s daycare, SFO, Target (!), various parks and playgrounds, JFK, and REI.
Final Thoughts
My biggest takeaway from this is that you get out of tracking what you put in. The writing stats don’t really show blog posts or word count from earlier in the year because I didn’t really track those until the last few months. My Goodreads count is a bit lower than it should be, largely because I’m not great at actually adding things to Goodreads. As for Google… well, it thinks I took a ferry ride that cut through El Sobrante and Richmond!
On a more serious note, doing this has helped me start thinking about my goals for 2016. I expect I’ll be putting that post up some time in the next few weeks.
Monday Roundup
1. I’m back on the East Coast next week. I didn’t realize until a few days ago that I’m going to be gone during the week of Hannukah. A and I normally don’t make it much past the first night of menorah lighting, as evidenced by the nearly full box of candles I got him eight years ago when we first started dating. This year, though, I’d been looking forward to lighting candles with Z.
2. Cooking with a toddler is a whole different ball game. Z has gotten to the age where she very much wants to help with everything, and her enthusiasm is far greater than her skill. And I’ve been trying to cook a bit more, especially when A goes into work earlier, to make his life a bit easier. This means that I’m often trying to keep her out of the raw meat with one hand, off the knife with the other, and away from the eggs with the third. At which point I realize I don’t have a third hand and catch her just before she stuffs a piece of raw chicken in her mouth. It’s all worth it when she eats everything on her plate and asks for more. (Days she doesn’t eat anything, I just want to scream.)
3. The closest I ever came to seeing a STP concert was watching Scott Weiland’s ass disappear into the back of a tour bus.. They played a free concert at USF my freshman year of college. I didn’t have a car at that point, so I spent a good chunk of time trying to find someone who did. By the time we got over the bridge and through traffic, it was over.
** Edit: My brother has reminded me that this isn’t true, and we saw STP together back in 2000 at the WBCN River Rave, and that it was a pretty incredible show. He’s right, on both counts.**
4. We had our first adult dinner party since Z was born this weekend. A set of matching dinnerware is still very much on our to get list, 
so I rolled with it, using vintage Coca-Cola glasses instead of pints to keep the “rustic” feel going. Z didn’t want to get out of her PJ’s, so I rolled with that too. It was good to have company that’s not family (although I love having family too!), and proof that there is life beyond the black hole of poop and temper tantrums.
5. I am most definitely stressed out this month. Part of it is the fact that my big report for work, which was supposed to be done before Thanksgiving, has been pushed back again. This means that instead of having the holidays and our vacation in January clear, there’s a chance I might have to work through some or all of it. Then there’s the holiday season itself, and all of that craziness (including the fact that I’m rapidly running out of time to get any kind of holiday cards out the door). Add in a two year old, the daily battles around bedtime, and the complete inability to get anything done with any sort of efficiency while she’s around, and the result is that I’m needing about 5 more hours in each day than I’ve got right now.
Closing Tabs
Z and I made the gingerbread cake from All Cakes Considered this week, and it was fantastic. I’m pretty sure I ate most of it. In my defense, I was following the recipe.
My mom has always said people are inherently good…
The Worldbuilders Stardust ARC is one of those things that restores my faith in humanity. Every year, Pat Rothfuss puts a signed ARC of Stardust into the lottery or auction for his yearly charity. Every year, without fail, the winner donates it back.
…and inherently dumb.
Red mercury is the holy grail of terrorist bomb plots, strong enough to flatten a city the way a nuclear blast would. It is also scientifically impossible. The result? Cons, conspiracies, and long read piece in the Times Sunday magazine.
This guy spent 4,200 of his 10,000 hours working on capturing a single photograph of a diving kingfisher. Anyone can buy a digital camera and Photoshop and pass themselves off as a photographer, but this kind of patience and dedication is what makes you a pro.
Serialbox is attempting to bring back serial novels, doing it TV-style: each “episode” is written by a team and takes about forty minutes to read. I was initially excited about this, then downloaded the sample chapter for Bookburners and decided the writing was crap about two pages in. And that would have been that, except that I’m seeing all kinds of excitement for Tremontaine, a prequel to Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint. (If you’re into fantasy and you haven’t read Swordspoint, you should). So I’m giving Serialbox another try.
How do you handle the holidays and the end of year craziness? Comment here, because I’m still banning myself from Facebook!
Monday Roundup
In an effort to help myself get out of bed early to write, I’m going to try doing a weekly round-up post Monday. This will be a post for quick blurbs about what’s going on with me, various articles I’ve read over the past week, and such.
1. I’m going to be in DC and NY this week for a colleague’s funeral. It’s going to be a super quick trip (DC Tuesday night and Wednesday am; NY Wednesday night and leaving Thursday), but if you’re around and want to meet up, let me know. On a related note, thanks to everyone for all the love and support over the past few days. I never cease to be amazed by how awesome all my friends are.
2. This month is NaNo, but I’m not doing it. I think I would probably go crazy trying to fit in 2,000 words a day, on top of everything else that’s going on. Instead, I’m going to work on actually getting out of bed at 6 am when my alarm goes off instead of rolling over and catching another 30 minutes of sleep. I’m going easy on myself and defining writing loosely – blog posts, short stories, Railroad – anything that involves my ass in a chair and my fingers writing.
3. Speaking of writing, I think I finally know how to finish a story I’ve been working on since high school. I have high hopes for this one, but it is going to involve a ton of work and a complete rewrite. My goal is to finish the rough draft this week, and have it submission ready by the end of the month.
4. We are about 75% moved into the new house. I can’t say often enough how nice it is to finally live somewhere that feels like home. Even the ugly wallpaper doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it ought to. I’m also glad that we haven’t bought much furniture yet, because nearly nothing we own matches with the house. I know, I know, first world problems. But it’s been fun to start looking on Craigslist and at estate sales for pieces that will work. We’re hoping to furnish it mainly with used pieces, things that were built to last (and with any luck built around the same time as the house). And it’s definitely going to be a slow, paycheck to paycheck process.
5. Z turned 2 on Saturday. She’s such a real kid now. Almost overnight, she started using two and three word sentences. She has her own language, which I will miss when she grows out of it. “Ah” is want, “kecks” is socks, and “home” is hand, like give me a hand. When she says “my home” she means “help me out here.” It’s exciting to watch her figure things out, even if she does throw a tantrum approximately every 2.75 minutes.
Closing Tabs
Not much this week, as I do most of my web reading through Facebook and it doesn’t have a good history feature. I’ll open more in browser next week, so I can save them for you. In the meantime, here’s a few from the week.
The Real Reason Germs Spread in Winter: Hint: it’s not because you didn’t blow dry your hair before you went out. Also, after reading this I’m seriously considering donating a humidifier to Z’s daycare.
Brown Butter Banana Bread: This is a super forgiving recipe. I had no measuring cups or spoons, so I winged it using the measuring cup for the rice and one of Z’s baby spoons. It still rose beautifully and smelled great. I can’t tell you how it tasted, though, since I realized after baking that the buttermilk I used expired about 3 weeks ago and threw the whole thing out.
Why Food Allergy Fakers Need to Stop: This was a long read, but worth it. When I was waiting tables, I definitely had customers who would tell me they were allergic to something, then look at the substitute, and say they wanted the original after all. Also, none of the restaurants I worked in had allergy procedures like this (or if they did, the servers weren’t told).
I’m looking forward reading Wake of Vultures. A few of my favorite book reviewers and authors have already put it on the must-read list. Also, if you haven’t yet read Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black books, you should get on that.