Today was Monday, November 01 and I began my novel bright and early at the stroke of midnight. It was a promising start, even despite my lack of a whole plot (so far) and some other minor details (motive, etc.) but I don't doubt that I can't finish this novel. Or, as I would say, I do not doubt that I cannot finish this novel.
In five days I will embark on a perilous journey, the likes of which I have seen only once before.
I'm going to write 50,000 words (some might consider that a novel) in thirty days or less. This year I intend moreover to write fifty thousand words of fiction, not three thousand words of fiction, forty thousand complaining about being stuck at three thousand, and seven-odd thousand of fictionalized weirdness just to pad things out to the target.
This time around I have a better idea, a longer story and, if I do it, an outline to follow. I've got five days to make that outline.
Tonight was the first of probably two or three local meetings of the other foolish writers in town. It was everything I expected it to be other than half an hour short, which wasn't that much of a problem for me. I threw in my requisite two or three jokes and tried to be sociable and whatnot with the others, most of whom I will not see until the end celebration.
I think I'm okay with that. Now, to that outline ...
Well, five minutes or five dollars. I found out today that the party we'd been invited to attend tonight was in fact a costume party after all, and we had about an hour to create a costume from scratch.
I spent at least a couple minutes thinking about this quandary. What could I do with my fedora, for example? Then I thought of splashing some paint on some old clothes and going as a painter. Then the idea struck me for a truly easy costume: a lawn and leaf bag.
I could merely take the four-foot tall cardboard bag and poke some arm and leg holes in it.
In the end, I kept my jeans and SETI@Home shirt on and donned an aluminum foil beanie and went as paranoid.
It got a laugh or two.
Arr, ye landlubbers, today I broke out the table saw again and went to work on the ol' planks I've been hoarding in my garage. The plan is to make enough shelving to hold all of my CDs (all bought with booty, not pirated, har har) and to span the starboard side of our couch.
Well, methinks it's the starboard side. I don't know for sure and the last bilge rat who told me which was which ended up looking for the aft end of Davy Jones's locker, if ye know what I mean.
So what I've got to do now is cut sixteen shelves all the same, and then fit everything together. First, though, I needed to build onto my table saw since it's not big enough. Arr.
I'll probably be making a router table too, on my sawhorses, but not for a while. Arr. This was supposed to be talk like a pirate day, not talk like a cabinetmaker.
So Jessica decided that we didn't have enough furniture, I guess, since we now have paid for a jelly cabinet and a 6' corner shelf. The corner shelf the unfinished woood place had in stock had some molding sticking up so we didn't take it... not that the trusty ol' Galant would've been able to handle two pieces of furniture at once anyway.
It works pretty well, just not always. I also needed to buy a pair of ratcheting tie-downs to take home a 4'x4' sheet of plywood from Bargain Outlet. That was something of a spectacle, I'm sure, but for me it was something of a brainteaser.
First I bought the plywood, assuming that a half-sheet would fit fine in my trunk or backseat.
I don't learn.
You see, we'd already measured the openings of my car and none of them edged too far past 36 inches. This fact slipped my memory as I carried the plywoood to the register, and out to my car, and then I lifted it into the trunk.
Or rather, in front of the trunk.
I realized then my folly. I checked with the Bargain Outleteers, and they told me that they didn't do cuts. Mind you I'd just seen one of the employees bust out a DeWalt and slice a shelf in half, but I think that was just for fun, not profit.
So anyway, I picked up some tie downs, and then got about my business of strapping the wood to the roof of my car. It fit just perfectly.
The tiedowns are bright orange. It looked pretty cool actually, and was quite secure.
But back to jelly cabinets. I don't know what it really is... it seems to be a double-door cabinet, shelf inside, with a flat top. I keep calling it a jelly chest, but then I think about the sort of things of which Arnold would make fun. "Jelly chest" sounds just about right.
Today was a project day for the plants out in front of our house. We'd tilled up the dirt some time ago, planted various green things (including some holly and, er, other stuff) and we've grown quite a collection of weeds and miniature maple trees. Pulling every little weed is quite a tedious task, so we knuckled down and got some peat humus to take care of the problem. We're not supposed to use mulch near the house because it attracts bugs, and that's fine with me. Peat humus does not smell, unlike the mulch I've had the bad fortune to encounter.
So we were off to the local Lowe's to buy some bags of the stuff. It comes in forty pound bags, and Jessica threw nine of them onto our cart this morning.
It covered just about half of our dirt. So we needed to make a second trip. This time around I brought my garden gloves, and was much cleaner afterward as a result of that pretty intelligent move. We bought ten bags which made for quite a bit of weight in the trunk of the car. It was obvious that the car was not meant to handle so much weight not in the seats, and the back was sagging quite a bit (well, a couple inches, but to me it was a lot).
I didn't realize how much it sunk the whole car until I got back into it later (with the stuff still in the trunk) and noticed, out loud, "I'm feeling low."
Almost immediately, I launched into "I got the blues. The four hundred pounds of peat humus blues."
Jessica laughed, at least. I thought it was hilarious. You probably had to be there.