Haunted Mirror

Though this picture is not from yesterday, I thought I'd share some of the cute animal babies.
[cute animal baby warning! NSFKittyHaters]



This, btw, is angled from the loft where Mama Derry had hidden them. I am not this short unless YOU happen to be 7 feet tall.

Okay, you know how I said we had a baby horse this morning, as well as acquiring a puppy, and having just got a llama Saturday?

The only goat that got bred this year (and late, late) just

Had Twins.

This will go down as one of my odder days ever.

Good Writing-Career News:
Someone asked to see more of my poetry, though the one I sent wasn't quite right.
I think I can deal with that.

Because You Always Wanted to Know:
Brahms' Violin Concerto--Music to Mop By!

My Family Now Has a Llama.
There's really no way to expand on that.

I found out something fascinating and horrifyingly exemplar of the sort of country we have bullied ourselves into having this week. On the lines of "make everyone a criminal, fast!" like Internet

It involves wild horses. I kid you not.

While driving to an Agritourism event, it came up that my boss, legally, can't bury large animals on her property: if you need to bury a sheep (or other large animal) it has to be done more than 100 [ft? yards?] away from any neighboring property, where there is not rain-water runoff, etc. The only other option is to take it to a certain incineration plant, the only one that does large animals, one that's actually got a national monopoly on the trade. (Why?! Why monopolize this? I ask you.)

It's in Oklahoma City, a good 2~3 hours away from here. It costs more gas, time, and heartache to do this than any sheep, no matter how valuable it may have been, is worth when dead. This is irrationally hard work for a farmer who's time and money are at max, and who has enough heartache to live with from the weather, thank you very kindly.

So where do the wild horses come in? They come in because there are horses that would be destroyed because they're not worth their keep (time/money/heartache, again). And if they were euthanized, they'd have to be...

You got it: taken to Oklahoma City. Or whatever your state's monopolizing incineration plant site happens to be.
So, happen it be easier to dump your horse on certain unguarded land... Apparently in Tennessee this is much more prevalent, but there's a known place to do it in this area of OK, too.

Have fun creating that wild apocalyptic novel! Your loss if you can't fit in wild herds of three-legged, one-eyed, angry horses ravaging the land. Too bad for everyone writing as if this wild stuff didn't really happen...

I had one of those awesome days that isn't anything but a string of good incidents which included:

~ sitting in the midafternoon sunshine on a stack of pallets (for scrap wood) with a fluffy cat in my lap and a fun book to write at hand
~ watching a tear-jerker movie in a tiny box and enjoying it
~ getting things done! Like planting spiny poppies.

People need to share more about these kind of days, as a Xanga-keeping friend reminded me.

It's the rants that give people something to comment on, though; noted that in the entries from last April.
So.
Rant for the day...
Why did I hold off on The Game just because it sounded so run-of-the-mill? It's Diana Wynne Jones! She's never doing run-of-the-mill--it's never been one of her faults, and I should have realized it.
This isn't quite the right sort of rant, since I enjoyed it all the better for waiting until it grabbed me off the pile.

Today I decided I ought to take my resolution to garden this year in hand, and also my resolution that mucking a barn must be pleasanter when it's chilly out and you work up warmth otherwise lacking (unlike in the summer).

I didn't end up mucking anything--we have used coffee grounds from Starbucks, and they look just like loamy dirt. I know plenty of people with a prejudice against Starbucks, but the recycling grounds to gardener's move is really quite my style. Especially as I'm planting poppies this year.

And I psyched myself up when it was still 20 degrees out, only to find, when I finally hit the porch, it was getting up to 40! It rocketed up, I tell you. God is good to those who thank him for his gifts under duress--my qualification being so hopeful in the face of a return to winter after that one nice day, which is fairly lame as duress goes. Man it was so nice to be outside.

Coffee grounds in those big bags smell startlingly like ashtrays. And I have dirt under my fingernails (unless it's the superfine grounds). But I'm happy. And I even edited a story's major flaw before ever going out today.

Happy, happy morning.


ETA: Then I was linked to this little wonder of music and doggy dance by sartorias (Sherwood Smith, her comments in this post), who decided I needed a therepeutic laugh/cry session over my burning hot pea soup. I was beginning to half-excuse the watery eyes with the heat of the soup, but then a big fat water bead rolled off my face (when I'm actually weeping and want comfort, that never happens), a crocodile tear. Followed by another.

It really is in the music...

O come, Desire of Nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind:
Bid ev'ry sad division cease
And be Thyself our Prince of Peace.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come for thee, O Israel.

This morning I was [re]given the gift of personal internet access. It is a wondrous thing.

I've been having fun being the posessor of monies to buy people presents. And tickets to Panama. And spending money to enjoy the thought of going.
It's funny to be rich.

But I am. Not in most peoples' perspectives, but to me? I am verra, verra well off.

I can read again. I read The Changeling Sea, which is a book that I feel richer by merit of reading it. I'm working on L'Engle's A Circle of Quiet and fascinated that her Walking on Water is rivaled here. For any YA Readers:


So, I'm feeling quite rich and comfy at the moment. Hobbitishly content, as it were.
I'm not quite done with the Shadow Thieves (Chronus Chronicles 1.) but it is lovely, lovely work.
I love YA novels.

Some things I learned today:

~5 gallons of water is heavy. Almost too heavy for me to carry.
~It it impossible to stay cold carrying that much water, no matter how frozen the hose is.
~I really like dancing...like, to Irish reels. Step-dancing.

I pretty much choreographed an All New! folk dance for my story yesterday: the first time since I was on my choreographing kick at 14ish. I did it on paper, but used Lego blocks to try out the logistics of it, and I think it would work out.
I also think it will probably need to be cut, that scene of dancing. Because it was wicked boring to type up, except for the stuff going on in between.

I was at 46774 words yesterday afternoon.
This morning I wrote half the quota of pages, maybe, and last night I wrote a few extra. I think I'll be done tonight with NaNo, but not with the novel. Almost for both, though!

I have to talk about The Neverending Story soon. And read a few more books.

Yesterday I drove for what I think is the first time in almost a year. For two and a half hours. In Kansas.
    My first time there, though I could hardly believe it. Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri seem much more crazy places to have gone; Kansas is almost a no-brainer. It looks almost exactly the same, of course. Except for the fact that they have Pizza Hut instead of Mazzio's.

Last week a truck's load of a dozen huge "round bales" spontaneously combusted. I didn't know it could do that. But apparently  those good ole barn fires weren't usually human caused: these bales had been put up too wet (a major issue; haying season is full of temperary weather enthusiasts) and their decomposition went on too fast and got a little to hot.
    Kaboom!
The cows along one side of the road are blessed. My brother's imitation of an Okie's 911 call in for the fire was hilarious, too; the deliberate, common-place way of saying a metric ton (approx.) of hay had just exploded all over a major trucking road was just as it had to have been.

Another one of those marvelous truths you could never put in a speculative fiction piece without much heartache. Someday someone is going to gather all those together and create a plot for them, endnote, and publish for thirteen million dollars.
And I'll probably read it, too.

...by the way: those Boston guys in Miracle? Sound Just Like My People.

Today I needed a break from sitting under the screaming metal being drilled in the barn, where the alternative was get Sharpie-high (note: NOT a pleasant altered state).

So I went out to the bench in the remaining pumpkin patch and sat smelling my leather jacket warm in the sun on my back, and piecing the last quarter of my Navigator Star quilt block together. I ate while working, which was good, to have the half-hour just to be quiet.

Multi-faceted things fascinate me. I enjoy being multifaceted. Yesterday I was dancing on tiptoes down the hose to break up the ice inside to water our pony. Then I went to work and did a little graphic design (really mundane stuff, but still; formatting a brochure I put together the information for, too) with the technical prowess my boss somehow appreciates.

Last night I went to the “Dickens on the Boulevard” the city of Claremore does where lots of homeschooling families congregate, many in Victorian costume (some products of a musical my mother put on two years ago there). And a lot of other kinds of people, especially Civil War era belles.

Last night I went as a goth Chimney-sweep J-Pop-Idol.

You'd think I liked Halloween or something. ^_^ But actually, I only added a little kohl to my eyes, a loooong scarf and my brother's top hat to the outfit I wore to work.

And my Union Jack boots.

Only there for a few minutes. But my dad is going to Mexico and taking his camera, so I couldn't even get a shot of the wacky way I allow myself to be seen in public.

Tonight I was just a glamorous chimney sweep.

One thing that's pretty consistent in my life right now, in any spare moment, is obsessing. Obsessing about Dhaeniv and Qahl, the main characters in my NaNo project, because that's what I do now.

I always think about books a lot; mine, others', the theoretical, metaphysical, practical...

But I'd forgotten what it's like to think about a certain story all the time. To get enough story ready in my head to fill the paper I do that—and that's not the best way to write a novel long-term, maybe, or even as a general rule, but man. I know I used to be like this at the beginning of projects.

Maybe it's that it's been a half a year since I let myself really go planning a project. I'm finishing that one up now; the Main Story.

Don't have a word count: not enough time to type it in the last few nights. But I've been writing my five pages. One page not done this morning I have to finish now...so, see ya. I'm sorry about posting this wad after one so recently...but I'm offline tomorrow, and that was a mistake, anyway.

Since I've been working at a Pumpkin Festival on a bonafide farm doing instruction sorts of things how about a random Thanksgiving fact?
Fact being defined losely in terms of Internet reality.

The Native Americans originated strawberry shortcake, as a way to enliven cornmeal. They mashed strawberries in the flour, I think with something to soak the grain in for softening. No doubt, like with salt and popcorn, the European propensity to season improved on the original.
The Japanese aren't the only ones to blatantly steal and make their own.

1812 / 50000 words. 4% done!

The pretty metre thingamabob iss no workk. Well, well, well.
Like the Nano site during after-work hours for the US.
But Zokutou's code ought NOT to be making a bar too big to fit in one line of my journal, or show the progress on the far side of the thermometer. Don't ask me how THAT happened.

The point: I almost reached one day's wordcount in two days. Today I might have reached almost two, in a less-close-almost sort of a way. I should have known this week would be a bit of a dead loss, but I don't like to believe that coffee and extensive [obsessive] preparation don't defeat the laws of physics as correlated to earth-relative time.

Or the inertia of not writing more than a few pages every few days in three weeks.

As of this morning, a warped Words Behind: 4188

Currently: Now I am a jolly 2722 words behind. With a little extra uncounted yet towards the positive side of things.

From now on, I promise you, LJ cuts about NanoNonsense. Today, I subject the masses.