~choke~

No pictures. It got ugly up in here for awhile. Still ain't pretty.

I'm ok now, but jeez Louise, technology will throw you under the bus the first chance it gets as if it were a living breathing enemy and not a mere tool.

I was minding my business, chipping away at the mountain that is Prophets Tango (my book in progress) congratulating myself that I had only EIGHTEEN scenes to run a fine comb through. Something I laughingly called, the Last Pass before I let others have at it.

Colin was scheduled to shut down the power to the whole house to replace an outlet in the kitchen. We were both nervous, but I was underfoot and so left him to it. Deciding to take a break, I closed the laptop. It powered off instead of going to sleep.

When I went back to it I realized that sometime in the not so distant past week to ten days, I decided that *spacebar* was not a great password and changed it. But to what? There was a hint "lunar". Nothing I tried worked. I was locked out. The fan was still failing, causing the machine to overheat. 

All of this to say, I threw in the towel of home-baked remedies and hacking and took it the repair place. After two days, neither problem could be cured and they handed me the contents of my hard drive copied onto a nice external drive and the original drive removed from the dead machine, now living in its own nice little box like a hermit crab.  140$ thank you.

So I sighed, brought drives home and thought I'd be back in business on my old faithful Acer here, just plucking the needed info from the backup. Think again.

After an hour of keyboard gyrations, I was no closer to getting back to work than I was when the lights went out. Scrivener, the app I use with all its wonderful complexity, had failed me on top of everything else.

 I still had a recent copy of the MS and an online place where recent edits still lived so, nothing was really lost except, cash, momentum, and of course, the travel laptop, which had been a gift from my sister.

Since August, for reasons seasonal and hormonal - I have lost about half of my hair. I should shut up about that because I still have more than most people ever will, but it's been depressing. My car interior looks like I own a collie. Now I'm afraid to look close in the mirror because I'm pretty sure the roots are going to be white.

Worse things have happened to writers.

All of this feels frivolous in the face of what hardworking Americans are facing with the ongoing temper tantrum of the Shitweasel squatting in the Oval Office.

off my soapbox

what happens when you clean stuff

This bedspread was my maternal grandmother's, or so the story went. It could be, it's woven rayon which has been around since the 20's. Heavy.

 It was on my mother's bed for all eternity but when the big box stores started selling faux down spreads, she was all over them. This went into a drawer and eventually, to me.

Rarely used, but recently spent some months in a den of iniquity and so I decided a gentle wash was in order.

I didn't notice the damage when it came out of the washer, but after it tumbled in the dryer, I found it had four, large tears. Like the cloth just gave up under its own weight and split. The fringes were hella tangled too.

I'm debating if and whether to repair it. I shall consult the den of iniquity.

mending or dismemberment

I put on the magic invisibility cloak this morning.

Several of the vintage damasks patches are evaporating. No other way to describe it.

I don't know if I'll be correcting this shabby chic-ness. I never wear it out of the house. It draws too much attention and I have no explanation for the time this took. Like maybe I was in prison, or the nuthouse or something??

I repeat

the new year

I'm up in there just to the right of the window, working. Will be at the stroke of midnight. Hopefully, it will be a quiet night. I have opted to work on New Year's Eve for many years. No extra pay, since it's not a federal holiday, but it keeps me busy. Keeps me from brooding.

Jimmy and I almost never went out on the Eve. I'd never been to Times Square for New Year's Eve and he warned me that unless I was up to peeing in an alley in sub-zero weather with ten strangers cheering me on, I wouldn't like it.
The last time we went out on New Years was a toga party in the late 70's before the kids were born. Who gives a party in New York, in January that calls for wearing bedsheets? The company was strange, the drugs too copious, and the next day, we were both just grateful to have arrived in the new year alive.
After that, our celebrations were cozy and private.

My broodiness around the New Year stems from my parent's ongoing war. They always called a truce a week or so before Christmas, but I could be sure that the hostilities would resume on New Year's day or soon thereafter.

Back when they still entertained guests, I could tell the next morning what the day would bring. If the ashtrays were all emptied, glasses collected and washed, kitchen window left open to air the place out, I knew that my mother had been grinding her teeth and seething over the work alone rather than retire. It often seemed that the old man would appear mid-morning, having been elsewhere overnight. 

So, through the years, I busy myself with this pass of hours knowing that the new day will bring business, as usual. 

But these days, changes - new attitudes, new directions, progress of any kind - are entirely up to me.